Scratch Pad: Rain, Plex, Browser
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ A ringtone went off that I’ve never heard before and now I am, apparently, living in a very boring movie scored by Vangelis
▰ I’d record the rain but mostly you’d hear the cars
▰ Listening to the album The Gamble by Nonkeen in the rain which is redundant since The Gamble always makes me feel like it’s raining. (Nonkeen is the trio of Frederic Gmeiner, Nils Frahm, and Sepp Singwald.)
▰ I’ve seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve seen a star explode and send out the building blocks of the universe. But I’ve never — until today — seen a web account security feature that directed me to wait an hour and to then log back in from the same browser on the same computer.
▰ Perhaps for the best, YouTube doesn’t tell me the combined playing time of the currently 2,008 videos in my “watch later” playlist
▰ The irony of receiving 75 advance notices about upcoming albums and not hearing back with audio for the one you’ve taken the time to prioritize and reach out about
▰ I’m loving Plex as a personal cloud jukebox, but I still can’t sort out why sometimes it takes 10 minutes for it to recognize an album I’ve added to the hard drive, and other times it can take an hour. I think I have all the scanning settings correct, but that remains the case.
▰ Wishlist: I do wish Plex had iOS widgets. Are there third-party Plex players with additional features that I should know about? Thanks.
▰ Somewhere out there is the sound designer who worked on the episode from the 7th season of The West Wing in which Alan Alda’s character, having shaken too many campaign-trail hands, eases his pain in cold water from a bathroom sink, and the depressing room tone of the tile-lined lavatory is perfect
▰ There will eventually be an entire field of science dedicated to how a Nintendo DS can hold its charge for so long when just sitting in a drawer untouched
▰ January 2024 closes with new albums from both Abdullah Ibrahim (age 89) and Philip Glass (age 87), both pianists. So inspiring.
▰ In addition to my paper notebooks, I keep a single text file (.md, actually) open on the left side of my laptop screen, into which I drop stray thoughts. It can reach upward of 30K words before I break it into segments and store/utilize them as intended. Today I’ve got it down to just under 4,000. (Whew. Got through all of it. Have a good evening.)
▰ Your favorite web browser if you’re on a MacBook and own an iPhone and find Safari has gotten sluggish? Been trying Brave, Edge, Arc, and Firefox, currently leaning toward Brave. Thanks.
▰ Talking about Macs on their 40th anniversary: I got my first Mac freshman year of college. I had a TRS-80 before it, all of high school. First thing I did on my Mac was to recreate in MacPaint the inner sleeve of King Crimson’s album Starless and Bible Black. I had the Mac for another five years.
▰ I remember the first person to show and explain an MP3 player to me, and I remember the first person to rip and burn a CD (a mixtape, not a one-to-one duplicate) in my presence
▰ I think sometimes I could ditch social media with a subdomain (on disquiet.com) or a new site. It’d be something slim and static, like blot.im. You could follow me via RSS and respond via commento.io, or on your own site, which I could follow via RSS. That’d be a nice simple social media, or NSS. (And, per correspondence on Mastodon, maybe maybe webmention.io for webmentions?)
▰ My inbox was several times more full than usual this morning, meaning it’s Bandcamp Friday. And that doesn’t count the folder I have most Bandcamp email automatically sent to, bypassing the inbox. And the folders I have most publicity email sent to, also bypassing the inbox.
▰ I’m fairly certain a new USB will hit the market in the next month, since I just replaced what I’m pretty sure is the last cable I had that required a dongle
▰ In the process of switching the Disquiet Junto project email announcement newsletter over to Buttondown, because TinyLetter is being shut down. On a positive note, I’ll be able to send out emails more often. On a negative, it does cost something. But so be it.
▰ On the one hand, this album I’m listening to is totally relaxing. On the other, I may be overdosing on tremolo.
▰ I finished reading one novel this week, my fourth of the year: Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica. In some ways, Aesthetica is as harrowing as Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, in part because it was more realistic, in part because it focused almost entirely on one person (with others as collateral damage), and in part because of its aligning need with numbness. I’d heard of the author’s prior book, and read this debut novel after seeing it on Steven Soderbergh’s list of what he’d read in 2023. I stopped 15% of the way through, took a breather, and returned to it.
▰ Finished reading three graphic novels this week: Greg Rucka and Mike Henderson’s The Forged, Volume 1: Not my favorite Rucka, but aspects of the art kept my attention. Among the best parts, visually, was the depiction of communications and monitoring, the sort of data visible on the head-up displays of the mecha characters appearing, in turn, within the comics panels. Volume 7 of Katsuhisa Minami’s manga The Fable. And the initial collected edition of Tom King and Elsa Charretier’s Love Everlasing, which turns the eternal promise of romance comics into a curse. The first volume doesn’t particularly come together, but there’s more meta where this came from, so I’ll be reading volume two for sure.
