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.
▰ Gonna start a noise band called Din DeLillo.
(I got some fun responses to this, most mentioning White Noise. My favorite suggested a producer: Thomas Punch-in.)
▰ I managed to crash the dictionary on my MacBook. That’s a first.
(I was searching for whether we spell it “labeled” or “labelled” in the U.S., and it’s the former.)
▰ Three men sitting silently in a barbershop while Rod Stewart sings “Hot Legs” on the stereo
▰ I had a dream, before Bill Viola died, that he’d film an Earth music video focused just on drummer Adrienne Davies
▰ Ah, summer in San Francisco.
In case it’s unclear, the temperature is 60º Fahrenheit. And it felt a lot colder.
▰ I now recognize my best use of a large second screen (that is, when I’m at my desk) is not as a larger version of my laptop screen, but as a digital cork board for various smaller windows: notes, audio player, messages apps, browser windows, etc. I just keep working on my laptop as usual, and the large screen plays a supporting role.
▰ Either a funny choice or a modern absurdity, this is a captcha I had to do when trying to fill out some forms on the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) website to renew my driver’s license:
▰ It occurs to me there isn’t a day of the week I don’t spend with the Disquiet Junto. From Thursday to Monday there are new tracks arriving. Tuesday is for listening to the final tracks that appeared overnight. Wednesday is prepping the next project. And then it begins all over again.
▰ I finished reading one novel this week, Sandro Veronesi’s The Hummingbird. I enjoyed how it jumped around in time and employed lots of different formats, including email and letters. I posted, earlier this week, a list of the dozen novels I finished reading during the first half of 2025.
▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Woshibai, based in Shanghai, China, is one of my favorite comics artists working today. Check out this piece, posted on Threads, about tinnitus. You can easily translate the brief captions using Google Translate or a similar service. I’d reproduce the rough English translations here, but I’d say part of the pleasure for me of reading Woshibai’s comics is the time that it takes for me to copy and paste. In an age of constant and immediate media, I’ve come to appreciate the pace required to select an individual caption at a time, paste it into a browser window, and wait to see what is revealed. Much of Woshibai’s work feels fractured and elliptical. This one, titled “Tinnitus” (“耳鸣”), is especially tight, and it closes expertly. ▰ Mode Exchange is new to me. It’s a venue (or maybe a promoter?) of sound work in Tokyo. The aesthetic and line-up are aces. Check it at instagram.com/mode.exchange. ▰ I love how a local used record store, Noise, one of two that are walking distance from where I live, fills its Instagram with photos of people and the vinyl albums they’ve purchased. This occurs on Instagram. Here’s a recent set of 10 such images.
