Scratch Pad: Questions, URLs, Milestone
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.
▰ I’m on many Discords related to sound/music, too many to track closely. I pay attention to 12k and Linear Night Market. I just signed up for Wildfire Laboratories. I peek Earth Modular, Decibels Sonification, Omri Cohen, and DivKid. Any strong recommendations (more related to sound than music)?
▰ Reeder / Feedly / iCloud question: if you use Reeder, do you (still) use Feedly, or is iCloud sync sufficient? Seems like iCloud would be. Thanks.
▰ Do itch.io sites not natively have RSS feeds?
▰ Nice. My sound studies newsletter, This Week in Sound, has passed the 4,000-subscriber milestone.
▰ Looks like threads on Threads are broken or at least malfunctioning, maybe worse than on Bluesky. I added two posts to a thread of graphic novels I’ve read in 2024, and neither of those posts shows either under Threads or Replies if you go to my /@dsqt page on Threads. They’re only visible in the original thread. On Mastodon lengthy threading works fine.
▰ I now understand that tote bags are bumper stickers for pedestrians
▰ I’m enjoying Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual but the lists do get to be a little much after awhile
▰ It didn’t occur to me to check usage of the acronym (actually initialism) “TWiS” when I began using it to abbreviate This Week in Sound. Fortunately there are few (six on Acronym Finder), none NSFW. Oddly, one’s from KDVS, where I did a radio show in the early ’90s.
▰ Speaking of newsletters, the weekly Disquiet Junto project announcement has fully moved to Buttondown (from TinyLetter), at juntoletter.disquiet.com, and the automated send worked well. I can now set the project post on disquiet.com and newsletter to go live while I’m asleep, right at the start of each Thursday (Pacific time).
▰ I’m routinely receiving email newsletters where the subject line has nothing to do with the specific material in the newsletter, from authors speaking at bookstores to news items amid current headlines. I can’t tell if this is a database error, a UX hitch, or a bizarre “engagement strategy.”
▰ I was in the middle of two novels. Now I’m in the middle of three. Well, I’m well into three.
▰ I finished reading four graphic novels this week: Léa Murawiec’s The Great Beyond, a fable about social media and pursuing fame, echoing fabulists like Dash Shaw, Winsor McCay, and Bryan Lee O’Malley. A simple story told in complex way. Throughout I thought, “Please don’t end [that way].” It did. Still, breathtaking at times — comics as parkour. Volume 1 of Jeff Lemire’s horror series Gideon Falls, art by Andrea Sorrentino. The individual issue covers may be my favorite part. And volume 2 of Gideon Falls, in which past and present — near and far, trauma and fate — all connect. This is a horror comic, so not exactly a big surprise. Volume 11 of The Fable, a manga about a hitman ordered to take a year off killing: It’s clear the plan wasn’t good, as too many factors make it impossible for him to be anonymous, and he ends up turning into something akin to a superhero (the action in the film adaptations is quite something at times). Like a lot of thrillers, it has a bit of a stacked deck thing happening.
