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.
▰ Fortunately, my brain was long ago trained to interpret the ongoing nearby construction as abstract minimal techno
▰ Overheard at restaurant this week: “Human connection is going to be outdated in five years.” Someone in the group also said, “Human connection is overrated.”
▰ I have a choice between the drummer near the office and construction near home
▰ Nice: my (successful) attempt to have Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) run on a modern portable gaming console made it to Jason Kottke’s blog and Austin Kleon’s newsletter.
▰ I finished reading two books, both novels, this week: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and the second in Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, The Black Ice. That brings me to the average I’m going for, two novels a month, a dozen so far this year — and with a few days in June to spare. I’ve paused Middlemarch at about a quarter of the way through, and I am currently reading Moby Dick, Blood Meridian, and a few others.
▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: John Kelly shared, on Threads, some Justin Green comic drafts from the 1990s, some of which I edited for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. ▰ John Kannenberg, whose Museum of Portable Sound has an admirably broad scope, reminded his followers of a 1981 assassination attempt involving a tape recorder. ▰ A post on Instagram from Music Thing Modular introduced me to the Shortwave Collective, “An international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.”
