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 tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts serves, I’ve found, as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. Some items show up on disquiet.com before this post, in which case I don’t repeat them. 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.
▰ I got the new China Miéville novel, The Rouse, in hardback. I’m wondering how the ebook distinguishes between the alternating color backgrounds of the pages, and the occasional typographical treatments. The audiobook appears to have two if not three narrators. (It’s also almost 1,250 pages long.)
▰ Sentence I found myself writing this morning: “I didn’t buy much, just six books in an ongoing series.”
▰ This is the dinkus that divides sections of chapters in the new China Miéville novel, The Rouse. Also, the paper is bible-thin:
▰ I accidentally moved my phone when taking a picture across the bay from the hills of Sausalito last night, and it was the right move:
A couple friends, Ethan Hein and Rupert Lally, joked it looked like an album cover, and someone posted a rough draft in reply. (Someone else posted their own unintended landscape. I could swear someone mentioned it looked like an ECM cover but I can’t find the post after the fact, such being the WWW — that is, the wild and wooly web. [Update: The quite observant ECM comment was from on Facebook.])
▰ That little bird-like beeping noise at the corner when the street light changes used to mean “it’s safe to walk” but now it means “you can put down your phone because now you can walk.” People don’t look at the lights. They look at their phones and wait for the bird to tell them the coast is clear. (I posted this earlier, but then wanted to mention a bit of chatter on Mastodon as a result. Someone said: “I work on a college campus and the students don’t put their phones down to cross. They blindly listen to the chirps and walk while on their phone. It’s truly astounding.” Someone else: “You can thank blind people for that one!”)
