Scratch Pad: Semi-Offline Edition

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media. In fact, currently I’m off social media entirely (and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc.), and that will remain the case until the first week or so of January. So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one — from the past week:

▰ I was glad to see there’s now a Wikipedia page for “th1 [evnslower],” one of the “new” tracks on the “expanded edition” of Aphex Twin’s classic Selected Ambient Works Volume II. The track was online for nearly a decade before the collection came out, and yet when the expanded edition was announced, the track was routinely and repeatedly referred to as if it was new — not necessarily new in the sense of newly recorded, but new as in newly available, which wasn’t actually the case.

▰ We put on some random YouTube extended mixtape of swing music in the background while cooking, and a guest noticed that the accompanying images — which were clearly AI-generated: all burn-victim hands, glitching limbs, unusable objects — featured domestic settings that oddly matched the words of the songs. So, I Shazam’d a song, and it didn’t appear to exist. I Shazam’d the next, and the one after that. They didn’t appear to exist, either. I came to recognize that these weren’t songs, per se. They were weird repetitions of snatches of verbiage and riffs that gave the sense of songs. This was all fake swing jazz accompanied by fake nostalgic images. It was the opposite of ambient music, in that the more you paid attention, the less rewarding it got.

▰ Saturday marks the anniversary of Fernando Pessoa’s death on November 30, 1935, at the age of 47. Pessoa was born on June 13, 1888. I was 30 years of age when I purchased the URL disquiet.com, which I selected as an homage to his classic work, The Book of Disquiet (in the original Portuguese: Livro do Desassossego). I’m now 11 years older than Pessoa was when he died. In two weeks, on December 13, 2024, it will be the 28th anniversary of my obtaining the URL disquiet.com. (As someone who has been writing a lot of fiction, I sometimes wonder about Desassossego less as a purposeful collection of fragments and more the work of a fledgling novelist who couldn’t sort out how the accumulated parts might fit together. Which is to say, in this reading of Pessoa’s legacy, he has for me gone from observational role model to imagined cautionary tale.)

▰ There’s an interesting new slow social tool spun out by the folks behind llllllll.co, the latter of which is the primary music-related BBS I participate in (llllllll.co, which goes by Lines, is simply a Discourse instance). This new tool is named izzzzi.net, and it’s a pretty fascinating concept. Each day you can see, just for that day, the single post made by anyone whom you follow and who follows you (that’s a narrow Venn diagram overlap, and it gets narrower when you consider the mechanics of the inherent interaction). Ironically, I’m off social media until the first week of January, so while I gave it a one-day test-drive, I won’t dive in until early 2025. If you’re intrigued by izzzzi.net, there are some details at the personal website of one of its developers, also a founder of llllllll.co, Brian Crabtree: nnnnnnnn.co. One tidbit: “we live in an age where it is very difficult to imagine joining yet another thing. and it is really difficult to explain how something might be fundamentally different.” Another: “it’s become a sort of collaborative daily newspaper written by friends. on the surface the parameters feel antithetical: it’s ephemeral, it only changes daily, hardly anyone sees it. this is precisely what makes it interesting.”

▰ And speaking of Lines, someone there proposed a dedicated recommendations page for blogs, and located in the concept a parallel to the “now” page, which I have read about on occasion but never implemented. I replied, in part, about this /recommendations concept:

It’s sort of the inverse of a linktr.ee — that is, it’s a bunch of links or subjects, but ones that aren’t actually your own work or about you (the links go out rather than in; it’s “that, that, that” instead of “me, me, me”).

I don’t, per se, have a /recommendations page on disquiet.com. What I do have is a list of “Current Favorite Listens” in the upper right corner of the site’s main page template, and I usually list 3 items there, and I update the list occasionally. That list appears on, essentially, every page of the website as a result of the template. I will think about a more dedicated /recommendations page, along the lines of what you describe.

Also, I’ve never introduced a /now page, myself, but I have thought on occasion of doing so. I think before I did a dedicated /now page, I’d likely append a list of current activities to my /about page, which is currently just a professional bio. That may suffice for me.

▰ I finished reading two books this week, both non-fiction, both best-sellers, both by friends, and both — I was touched to realize at the end of each — listing me in the thanks sections: MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by the trio of Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards, and Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, by Rob Sheffield. I attended college with both Gavin and Rob. The books tell somewhat similar stories, as it turns out, albeit in different ways (the MCU one being a detailed journalistic timeline, the Swift book being very much the individual author’s ecstatic point of view). Both books are about global pop cultural phenomena that try to strike a balance between rabid fans who are deep in the lore and then the casual fans (the latter being what Rob humorously calls “normal people”) who dip in occasionally. The whole “Taylor’s Version” thing, in which Swift rerecorded her earlier albums, even has a taste of Marvel’s multiverse and What If? stories to it.