Disquiet

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, 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.

I took an extended social media (and adjacent) break, from mid-November through the start of January 2026. I’m now back.

Or perhaps back-ish. This past week felt a little off. I didn’t post much, not on social media, that is, and less so than usual in discussion groups I’m on. I posted a little bit more than elsewhere on Facebook, which is purposefully a bit of a wall of garden, but even then not much. I did, as was true to varying degrees through my hiatus, have the instinct to continue to “post” things in my scratch pad, things I hadn’t on social media. Which is good. It’s a way to still capture things and share them publicly on a weekly basis, just not in the social media mode, which is more in-the-moment. I won’t here dissect my thinking, but I am reflecting on it. And to be clear, I take heaps of notes over a given week on a variety of topics. This scratch pad mode is just its own loosely defined narrow subset.

▰ Siri is set on my iPhone to the female South African voice, which to my ear is the available female voice in the lowest register. At some point recently, this voice’s tone appears to have changed. It is less oddly playful, and the change is perfectly fine by me. The way it used to say “okay,” which it does frequently, used to be like it was saying “Okay, cheeky monkey.” Now it says “okay” more matter-of-factly, like “Okay, I’ll continue adding amino acids to this peptide.”

▰ When I speak to machines over the course of a given day:

• MacWhisper on laptop to transcribe stray thoughts
• MacWhisper on laptop to get rough transcripts of conversations
• Whisper Notes on iPhone to transcribe stray thoughts
• built-in Apple MacBook, iPhone, or CarPlay speech-to-text, the latter requiring Siri

▰ A particular highlight of the holiday break was playing a bunch of new-to-me games, notably the card game Compile, which I am just loving. Anyone else out there playing it? Metal is my go-to protocol, and Gravity and Death are great, too. Been exploring the two three-protocol expansions, as well.

▰ Apparently you can, in Buttondown, schedule way far in advance, because for a moment I had the next #DisquietJunto project set to go out on January 8, 22,026. Fortunately I caught the error.

▰ Is it too late to start this year over?

▰ Finished the first book I’ve read in full this year, Flesh by David Szalay. It’s a novel, a rags-to-riches story, in which the majority of people, when asked how they are or how something is, reply “Okay.” This word can be read as a signal both of how they’re not entirely sure, and of how they don’t really have much vocabulary, or much in the way of awareness, to form a response. Occasionally, if things are going well, they may say “Nice.” They may choose between things and state one is a favorite; in search of conversation, they may ask one another which is their favorite. Apparently this book was the favorite of the Booker Prize committee this past year. The novel is taut and, in terms of literary sensibility, often monotone, which makes sense in the context of the main character, who is quite damaged, but the tone remains pretty much the same even when the story oddly ditches him to portray moments between other characters that the (anti-hero-ish) protagonist doesn’t observe. He is almost absurdly magnetic to women, up there with James Bond and Neil Diamond, and if this book becomes a movie with, say, Michael Fassbender or Alexander Skarsgård as the lead, when he sleeps with the next-to-last person with whom he does in the book, the audience may, unless serious directorial precautions are taken, laugh out loud. In the New York Times, Dwight Garner says “It’s a very complicated plot.” I have no idea what he’s talking about. The best thing, and the closest thing to complication, about the storytelling is how Szalay introduces gaps: time jumps ahead, and you have to sort out how much time has passed, not that Szalay keeps any such period secret for long. So, how is the book? It’s okay.