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 — and I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online 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.
Right now, though, I’m on a more extended social media (and adjacent) break, through the start of January 2026. (This is my next to last weekend before I get back on that horse.) Which raises the question: when I’m on such a hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since this Saturday habit is, by definition, a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week? Apparently it’s random notes I make to myself that I would have posted online, plus bits I’ve sent to friends via email and other means. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. Anyhow, here’s this past week’s roundup:
▰ As the year was coming to a close, I cleared out my RSS reader, setting back to zero thousands of unread posts that had accumulated. I didn’t erase the ones I marked to read later.
▰ The substation near our home is still not functioning, so there are tons of temporary generators a few blocks away, and they run on diesel. This means that my home computer is currently diesel-powered. Which I kinda like the idea of.
▰ I’ve been posting a lot of short field recordings at freesound.org/people/disquiet. Another participant there expressed concern to me that I was applying geolocation data to what was, in fact, indoor audio. I feel there is some meaning encoded in whether a bathroom fan is recorded in, say, the Mission in San Francisco or Ginza in Tokyo, but I didn’t want to argue the point, so I removed the data — at least for now.
▰ Another year in which Criterion celebrates room tone … by playing music over the room tone.
▰ Been playing a lot of board games (notably Botany) and card games (e.g., Compile, A Gentle Rain, Big Sur, Point City, Exploding Kittens) over the holiday break. I need to understand what it means to have several games with similar underlying mechanics, like the very fun Point City and Big Sur (and I’m considering getting Air, Land & Sea, which reportedly is a strong precursor to the truly excellent Compile). I imagine it’s a lot like with book genres: I only need to read one zombie novel a year, and one high fantasy novel every few years, and one “literary novel featuring overeducated people falling out of love” as infrequently as possible, but I can mainline certain realms of science fiction, and manage reams of spy novels and experimental fiction.
▰ I have a feeling that Jiwoon Park’s Oxford Soju Club — a flashback-rich, cross-cultural spy thriller, with a hefty serving of Korean recipes — is the last novel, my 27th, I will finish reading in 2025. Late December is deep family time, leaving limited opportunity for reading. Also, the books I’m in the midst of are pretty lengthy. We’ll see.
