Scratch Pad: Defrost Mode

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, I’ve been off social media entirely since the Friday before (American) Thanksgiving, and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc. That will remain the case until early next week, and I may phase in my emergence from Deep Freeze Mode rather than do whatever the opposite of cold turkey is. Defrost Mode should be enacted with caution. (And it hasn’t really been a deep freeze, because I wrote and read a heap ton, but mostly the past month-plus was family time.)

So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one — from the past week:

▰ Started a re-read of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, just a tad past its 25th anniversary. Somehow I had entirely forgotten the extended opening section on sound, music, and the mechanics of the pipe organ. And this is the fourth time I’ve read the book — though the previous times were all more than a decade and a half ago.

▰ From early on in Cryptonomicon: “The fish are silver and leaf-shaped. Each one strikes the water with a metallic click, and the clicks merge into a crisp ripping noise.”

▰ It’s the year of Option Command H.

▰ First earworm of 2025: “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals

▰ Sad to learn of the death of artist Pete Doolittle (here’s a touching memorial from my friend Marke B), whose painted window panes have been a constant visual presence in San Francisco for a very long time. I got this one in 2005 in the Lower Haight, a couple years after we moved back from New Orleans. He did great robots, lemme tell ya: sad, broken, helpful.

I’ve only been in touch with Doolittle digitally for many years now, and knowing he’s dead feels a lot like when Steve Silberman died: a star in the digital firmament has gone dark, silent. There’s a moment in Dennis E. Taylor’s science fiction novel We Are Legion (We Are Bob) when a character dies, and all his colleagues learn this simultaneously because his signal goes out quite suddenly and unexpectedly. That book is a work of fiction that takes place mostly many start systems away and a century-plus in the future, but the experience is all too familiar, and it has really hit home with Doolittle’s death.

▰ Why does it say music “plays” in the captions to TV shows and movies? Isn’t “[suspenseful music]” sufficient? Does “[suspenseful music plays]” add or clarify anything? I mean I get “[fades out]” but “[plays]” is redundant.

▰ Second earworm of 2025: the song from Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors. This barely counts as an earworm, in that it’s not remotely annoying to me. It’s only annoying to everyone around me as I sing it all day long.

▰ The Mary Cassatt exhibit at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco is so great, and it ends on January 26, so if you’re in the area and haven’t gone, get your tickets. It is the perfect parallel to my ongoing read of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. And yes, I’m reading two 900-page books at the same time, so forgive me for not having finished anything by this first Saturday of the new year. Though I am almost done reading a graphic novel and a non-fiction book I’ve snuck in.

▰ Also at the Legion of Honor, Dress Rehearsal: The Art of Theatrical Design, in one of my favorite small exhibit spaces in San Francisco. This piece is a 1919 illustrated panel by the British painter David Bomberg (1890 – 1957), from a work titled Russian Ballet. I’m not certain what it means, but I’m reading it as that even back in 1919 someone found a standing ovation (or the equivalent) to be unearned. Also, best em-dash ever.

▰ I was in the ER for a family emergency shortly after New Year’s Eve, which after about six hours in the middle of the night came to a relieving conclusion. I mention this because the ER is a cacophony of beeps and moans in a way that has amazed me on the few occasions when I’ve been unfortunate enough to visit one. There is no underestimating how inured the professionals there become to the audio alerts, and how not conducive those alarms and buzzers are to the recuperation of the patients. There has got to be a better way.