I try, toward the end of each year, to pause a significant amount of my digital connection activity — social media in particular — and that'll kick in at the end of Friday, November 14. I'll be back at it around the start of January.

A very San Francisco combination of speech-to-text and autocorrect: say "onigiri"; receive "on Geary"

New Disquiet Junto music community project this week: The year’s almost over; do the thing you’ve been meaning to do. Full details at disquiet.com/0724. Tracks due Monday, November 17, at 11:59pm (your local time).

Today in dual Oblique Strategies cards: “Distorting time” “The inconsistency principle”

A new #DisquietJunto music community project will appear at 12:10am Pacific tomorrow (November 13, 2025) at disquiet.com/0724, and go out at the same time to the email list (juntoletter.disquiet.com). The theme explores waning time.

When the cover of the ancient paperback you're reading begins to flake apart, you can make a bookmark of the piece that fell off

Based on recent personal experience, I would not recommend putting your AirPods case next to your Tic Tacs

Truly thought, as I approached this awning, that it said “no” — only to eventually recognize it was the address, “110”

I love when you Shazam the music in a movie and it tells you the name of the cue in the score

This is the third or fourth time I've done the n+1 reading list questionnaire, and for the first time I received in my "personalized booklist" a book I've already read (in fact: two)

Put different text-to-speech apps on your phone, laptop, and tablet to see how they handle the same spoken words. Go for a walk with earbuds on "transparency" and listen for what's amplified. Play the last song on several favorite albums. And have a good weekend. See you Monday, or maybe Tuesday.

When you figure it out- please write a blog post about it, Marc. Please. My distributed digital music library has been like a cluttered attic for about 15 years. I can no longer find the shit that I’m looking for.

I had a very @disquiet.bsky.social moment the other day; I was listening to one of the Clicks & Cuts IDM compilations, and thought the current song sounded very disjointed, even by genre standards. It turned out to be the "album teaser: 20 seconds of each track".

I may, for the first time in a long time, have my MP3 scenario set. By typing these words, I’ll probably cause my Mac mini, which serves as my server, to go wonky.

One of my first jobs, while in high school, was working a slide projector at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. I’d been warned of James Watson’s temper but, frankly, putting a slide in upside down was entirely my fault.

On the airplane home, I was using headphones with noise cancellation, so I was confused when I could suddenly hear the sounds of the airplane, including the voices of flight attendants. Then I recognized it was from the TV series I was watching.

Disquiet Junto Project 0723: Do the Collapse The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly. Deadline: Monday, November 10, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are. Details: disquiet.com/0723 #DisquietJunto

A new #DisquietJunto music community project will appear at 12:10am Pacific tomorrow (Nov. 6, 2025) at disquiet.com/0723, and go out at the same time to the email list (juntoletter.disquiet.com). The theme explores collapse. Deadline for tracks will be Nov. 10, 2025, 11:59pm wherever you are.

Overheard on the street in Manhattan this week: “The bank really wants to know where the money is.” “Before the solution you were spending more, and now you are spending less.”

AI as reply guy: when you’re just searching for references to a given Oblique Strategies card.

There is a unique quality to the siren of an emergency vehicle stuck in dense traffic two blocks away, just the same ongoing volume as the light changes over and over, without movement. I’m used to sirens passing, fading, not at a sustained level of loudness for minutes at a time.

soundcloud.com/playing-in-t... For once I got mine done fast, instead of agonizing until five minutes before the deadline. Not 100% proud of the solo, but that's the kind of thing that I decided to not obsess over. Colophon: llllllll.co/t/disquiet-j...

When I'm back in New York, I always listen for whose music I'll hear first: Billy Joel's, Bruce Springsteen's, or Bon Jovi's. After a week and a half on Long Island free of all of them, I stepped off the LIRR and into Penn Station, only to be greeted by a busker playing "Uptown Girl" on Melodica.

Disquiet Junto Project 0722: Spook Street The Assignment: Make music for a haunted spy film. Deadline: Monday, November 3, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are. Details: disquiet.com/0722

A new #DisquietJunto music community project will appear at 12:10am Pacific tomorrow (Oct 30, 2025) at disquiet.com/0722, and go out at the same time to the email list (juntoletter.disquiet.com). The theme explores Halloween, naturally, but with a specificity to the creative constraint.

One of the best things comma I think comma about voice-to-text is overhearing people speaking punctuation out loud comma as if they’re standing at a blackboard in grade school period Also comma you can easily weed out people who don’t use serial commas period

The excellent You Are Listening To website got a relaunch/reskin/reboot: youarelistening.to

An Oblique Strategies hack. Choose two, and contemplate how they play together and what tension surfaces between them: phone: “Cut a vital connection” laptop: “Destroy nothing; Destroy the most important thing”

The quartet is foundational to my sense of how music functions; a double quartet is especially interesting to me — lots of pairings and echos and ambiguities and tensions. That's what Sō Percussion and Bergamot Quartet are up to here. The composition is by a Sō member. disquiet.com/2025/10/27/s...

Sidewalks can end in more ways than one

Protocols, not platforms!

IMAP is still magic

"Rows and rows of disused milk floats / Stand dying in the dairy yard / And a hundred lonely housewives / Clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts" The Jam's "Town Called Malice" could be re-titled "Town Called Ballard," as in JG, and you wouldn't have to change another word.

I believe you’ve discovered the Shel Silverstein Memorial Sidewalk Termination.

A sidewalk can, apparently, simply end

Have a good weekend. Hum along with your refrigerator's drone. Meditate to your HVAC system's whir. Dance to the rumble of a clothes dryer. See you Monday — or maybe Tuesday.

Very excited the second book, The Faith of Beasts, in James S. A. Corey’s The Captive’s War series will come out … in mid-April 2026. Very excited this new Cyberpunk card game, Cyberpunk Legends: Into the Night, will come out … in late July 2026.

So this new YouTube system converted all my channel subscriptions to "personalized" and I need to go through hundred of the channels and manually switch to "all"? This seems ... odd.

Me: My 11” iPad is old and slow and can’t hold a charge for as long as it once did. Maybe I’ll get the 13” one when I upgrade [Someone walks by with a massive 13” iPad] Me: Uh, I think I’m good.

Main thing I like about the new iOS upgrade is the massive time displayed on the lock screen. Every time I glance at it, I feel like the movie that my life is has begun some momentous, title-card-deserving new phase. It's 4:18!

Let me just say, Marc Weidenbaum has been coming up with a creative composition prompt per week for the last 721 consecutive weeks, and he has not remotely run out of ideas. This one is a banger. disquiet.com?p=72990/

Now, I am not in the market for a fog machine, but this Craigslist ad certainly makes a compelling case newyork.craigslist.org/lgi/msg/d/ea...

Subset of iPhone users who still have U2's Songs of Innocence on their phones

Disquiet Junto Project 0721: Well Weathered The Assignment: Play along with a storm Deadline: Monday, October 27, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are. Details: disquiet.com/0721 #DisquietJunto

A new #DisquietJunto music community project will appear at 12:10am Pacific tomorrow (October 23, 2025) at disquiet.com/0721, and go out at the same time to the email list (juntoletter.disquiet.com). The theme explores inclement weather.

Morning trio for pages being turned, passing jet plane, sprinkler

I’m not sure I know what a “horn whooping” sounds like, but I promise I’ll get the hell outta here if I hear a loud alarm of any sort. Cc: @disquiet.bsky.social

On a positive note, whatever bizarre (seemingly) Cloudflare-related issues I had been having on Disquiet.com seem to be not happening during Monday's AWS outage. Here's to 21st-century snow days. :)

I drafted a list of favorite records of the year, almost entirely ambient and/or abstract. There are a few hip-hop albums, too, by Earl Sweatshirt; Tyler, the Creator (aka Tyler who makes you use semicolons in lists like this); Little Simz; Aesop Rock. Any recommendations along those lines? Thanks.