Scratch Pad: Rain, Search, Dryer
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.
▰ Happiness is when internet friends send you the sounds of siren tests from where they live, halfway around the world
▰ You’re looking at the weather on your laptop and seeing clear skies currently and ahead, and while you scroll further through the day-to-come, you start to hear this weird sound that you can’t identify because while it’s clearly rain your brain has just been told that it’s not raining
▰ I left New Orleans 21 years ago this summer, and judging by my reaction to the ongoing storm, it’s safe to say that I still have hurricane PTSD. I also miss New Orleans. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.
▰ I’ve tried a paid search engine. An interesting aspect of my behavior I observed: since I was aware of a limit on the number of searches, I didn’t uniformly search blindly, but often opted to go to instead to topic/service-specific websites (Discogs, ModularGrid, Wikipedia, NY Times, YouTube).
It’s not a bad habit to be in in the first place, though you end up locking yourself into specific pools of responses. I’m not stoked about paid search, which makes me think of the Miasma of Neal Stephenson’s The Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, and the need for paid filters to maintain a grip on reality.
I’m also not clear how beneficial paid search is for privacy, since so much of the web is overrun with tracking in the first place. Anyhow, been interesting to try it out.
▰ Mojo Nixon is everywhere
Mojo Nixon is everything
Mojo Nixon is everybody
Mojo Nixon is still the king
▰ Friday morning status report
▰ Current guitar practice status (shoe for scale). This is me after practicing various C major scale modes and what I think are the pentatonics thereof, but I could be totally mistaken.
▰ I finished reading one novel this week, my fifth of the year: my first Nick Harkaway novel, Titanium Noir. I figured out much of the mystery as it unfolded, including the final reveal — excepting one particular whopper that impressed me. Figuring out such a mystery is to the writer’s credit, because it means the answers aren’t random. (I’m reading two long-ish ones currently — nearly 500 and 600 pages, respectively — so I doubt I’ll finish either in the coming week, but we’ll see.)
▰ I finished reading five graphic novels this week, my favorite being Social Fiction, a collection of three novellas from the 1970s by Chantal Montellier, whom I’ve never read much by before, having not read much Heavy Metal back in the day and, of course, being a monolingual American. I absolutely loved this collection of bleak dystopian stories. Also finished Night Fever: The “fever” in the title may be a fever dream, as it’s unclear what’s real and what isn’t in this midlife-crisis noir from the excellent team of writer Ed Brubaker and illustrator Sean Phillips. And I read three more volume of the manga called The Fable by Katsuhisa Minami. In volume 8, the antihero (increasingly simply the hero) wanders into the woods. Violence and philosophy ensue, and the civilized world gets even less civilized. In volume 9, the antihero emerges from his forest bath to walk right into a revealing flashback, and there’s a some solid action, even if the story gets a bit icky. And, whew, a lot happens in volume 10, including a heap of internecine backstory, more coincidences than you can throw a tankobon at, and some intense blackmailing. Whew, indeed.
▰ Just a note that between Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, and Facebook, only Threads and Mastodon are good at long, ongoing threads. Bluesky loses track of where you left off, and Facebook doesn’t seem remotely concerned with keeping track of where you are. I’m noting this in relation to my ongoing threads of books I’ve read. I don’t keep track on Instagram, though I know #bookstagram is a thing. I’d likely only track books about music on Instagram, and even then: Instagram doesn’t really have threads, though I suppose you could use Stories to such an end.
