Scratch Pad: Reuse, Unicode, VLC
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.
▰ Lunchtime trio for space heater, microwave, and passing bus
▰ I do write liner notes. I only write them for records I really like a lot. Not just like, but like a lot. I try to be as polite as possible — and to do so as concisely as possible — when I express disinterest in requests to write liner notes for records I don’t, myself, appreciate sufficiently.
▰ Oh very cool. A musician friend asked awhile back to use one of my field recordings on an upcoming release, and I just got an advance listen. It sounds great. I’ll share when it’s up.
▰ I must be being punished for something, because I found out about the new DJ Krush album (再生 – Saisei) just before I have to go into a long meeting. Getting a quick listen in the few minutes I have.
▰ The Duet Display app has retina mode, making my cheap Android tablet a fantastic portable second screen for my MacBook
▰ You know it’s gonna be a banger when the name of the ZIP archive includes the phrase “Unicode Encoding Conflict”
▰ My CPU use case for a laptop is pretty simple: how long does it take to launch VLC when I click an album’s worth of ALAC (or WAV or FLAC) files?
▰ Among the most popular Disquiet Junto music projects each year is the “trio” sequence. One week after another, musicians around the world collaborate to record trios. Folks are uploading the first third of future trios right now.
▰ This seems to have elevated quickly
▰ I finished reading two graphic novels this week: Julia Wertz’s Impossible People, a somehow quite funny exploration of her battle with alcoholism (tears of a clown), as well as a collection of short pieces, The Swamp, by Yoshiharo Tsuge (b. 1937), a mix of fatalistic ninja, detective, and other comics, with an informative introduction by Mitsuhiro Asakawa. One thing that the Tsuge translation did for me was reinforce my sense that maybe sound effects shouldn’t be translated. I’m still on the fence about such an editorial decision, but the elegance and “fit” of the originals rarely seems equaled by the translations. I spent many years working in manga, at Viz Media, but not on comics like these.
▰ I finished reading one of the two long novels I’ve been deep into, my first David Mitchell book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the story of a Dutch East India port in Japan, starting at the very end of 1799. I’m not sure what makes it, per the cover blurb, a “masterpiece,” but it’s a well-written yarn. I vote that next time Neal Stephenson co-writes something, it’s with Mitchell (an idea suggested both by the historical fiction detail, and an instance when a character says something about how “science itself is in the early stages of becoming sentient,” despite this all taking place at the very dawn of the 19th century).
