disastrous weekend where i did not show up for several people who are important to me
i don’t have room in my mind right now for anything but math and sound and pain and war. no exaggeration i really just cannot think about anything else, i’ve had to take several days off work
i hope you enjoy the new features. more are coming, i have a big todo list and a notebook filled with drawings of screens. rn i’m being slowed down by the database stuff
plenty of regret tonight, hopefullyity it will all be worth it. battery about to die
recording with the microphone now shows a helpful informative screen!
it has an svg tape animation i drew myself in inkscape! i sat with a cassette and a sanyo tape recorder and drew out the best representation i could and then animated it with css!!
you can select a region to play back per-step!
it shows your step’s selected region right there in the square!!!
you can drag and drop a square onto another one to copy it!
you can drag and drop an audio file onto the screen (waveform screen) to load it! this even works on the iphone! you can drag a file from the Files app into the screen on bento.party!
if you you’re in safari on your phone you can click the share icon and then Add To Homescreen and it will appear as a standalone app and it looks lovely
if you’re on latest macos in Safari you can do File>Add to Dock… to add it to your dock and it looks even LOVELIER
most of this week i just worked on that! so far it’s quite popular! everybody loves bento! it’s the coolest thing i’ve ever done! it’s really fun!!!!!!omg
there’s also a beta up at https://beta.bento.party which implements local saving (you click the 3 dots and select “save my bento for later” then when you refresh it’ll load it back up). i have a branch where i’m adding a screen for selecting pan+volume per-step. you can also reverse samples per-step but i haven’t added UI for that yet, so it’s kind of a easter egg
didn’t do anything else. took 2 days off work to work on it. have to go to bed now because andrew w.k. will start singing at 5am whether i’m asleep or not.
everything in the world is awful and sad and infuriating and devastating except for kind people and bento.
let’s see… let’s see… let’s seee… i went into the office on tuesday… i’m 10kg lighter now than i was on 9/11 (the most recent 9/11 just before 12/9 this year)… didn’t go outside apart from that… had to skip pixie’s birthday getaway because i am not able to control my sleep, food and money if i don’t come home every night… also skipped gabi’s early hallowe’en because i hurt my foot and i’m a loser… what else what else what else…
safari has its own valid css value for the appearance rule: -apple-pay-button:
it’s a little musical instrument for the telephone. it’s a sampler + sequencer, and it’s really good!
features:
it keeps perfect time!
4 separate single-voice channels, each with their own waveform
record new audio from your microphone
per-step sample trimming
set the bpm
per-channel bpm divider (¼×, ½×, 1×, 2×, 4× the main bpm)
it’s fun! it works on phones!
i have always been thrilled with the idea of making little music programs for cheap, readily available hardware ever since i made prettychips for the nintendo ds when i was a teenager. especially focused at people who don’t have any other way to make music. i don’t know why it took so long for me to realize the obvious fact that the cheapest most readily available hardware is the one you already own.
look forward to/be wary of a future longer post about how it works (it’s very fancy futuristic computer stuff, v cool v cool). but that will have to wait until after v1. so after this todo list:
per-step pitch control (¹²√₂)
per-step AR envelope
per-step volume control
per-step reverse
select multiple steps at once for combined operation
drag and drop one step to another
per-channel base sample speed (fine tune between 50% + 200%)
upload sample from disk
load sample from URL
drag and drop sample onto page
saving
sharing
desktop keybindings for quick ops
sync
swing
plus some other optimizations on the computer side of it.
umm yeah this post is really computery, sorry. i havent really done any non-computery things this week other than drink water and eat tofu.
Quiet week. Since the masa harina incident I’ve learned some important lessons:
all black dots are flies
all white lumps are maggots
I tried to kill several pin holes in my kitchen wall this week. Other than that I’ve been making music, doing weird stuff with Nintendos, dancing, cooking the same omelette over + over[1] and continuing the endless job of tidying my apartment after a long spell of mental incapacity.
My murphy bed, whose legs are broken, is being held in place at night by Common Lisp: 2nd Edition, The Flavour Thesaurus, Duquette’s Thoth Tarot and a Lulu print-on-demand copy of On Lisp. This is a major improvement on cans of nixtamalized corn and coconut milk which lose their structural integrity over time until you are awoken in the night by a sudden screech, thump and squelch to find yourself sliding off of the bed and onto the floor and into what appears to be ectoplasm.
cherries and the untitled supernatural e.p. are starting to form shape. They each have 1 finished track so far. Thinking about lithium, thinking about smoked almonds, thinking about World War 3. Thinking about the Mexican government kidnapping communists and throwing them out of a plane into the ocean to die.
It’s been a year now since yellow sofas were invented.
~ chee
3 eggs, spinach and boursin. Served sprinkled with sesame seeds. ↩︎
boy oh boy it’s getting a wee bit nippy out isn’t it?
“wild world wide web” is hard to say.
and what if my name were Bonnie Rabbits?
have a good day today.
I’ve been getting up at 5am this week. When you’re trying to make healthier choices, people always tell you to make small reasonable adjustments. Because that’s what works. For most people. Normal people. i.e., freaks. Me, i need chaos. i need brightly glowing extreme shifts and changes that can be serve as a kind of hobby, as a project. So it can’t be “going to bed a little earlier”, it needs to be “i get up at 5am now”. That same impulse to always go all the way with everything can be turned and pointed in the other direction. healthy chaos. it’s not “cutting down on drinking” it’s 0 drugs, 0 alcohol. Anyway this is working so far this month. Maybe i’m a fool.
Met ZZ at the office for Teahorse Tuesdays on Thursday at the Fortnum & Mason at the Royal Exchange. Lovely time. Had a lovely week, honestly. In bed by 9pm most nights. Leave work between 1 and 2p.m. and go outside. Have lunch, get the train, lie on the heath listening to music. Got a little goofy towards the end of the week, even got the goofs in fact. They’re gone now.
There was a space-themed warehouse party on Friday evening. Wonderful. So good to see everyone, beautiful people. So many so beautiful people. The community shares a problem that all open spaces do, how do you deal with bad and malevolent actors in a society founded on the principal that everyone should be able to be themselves and do what they like? How to deal with takers in a community based on giving freely. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law can’t subsist unless everyone involved is working on their magnum opus.
The place looked great, the music was great, everybody was dressed to the 9s. I finally had an opportunity to wear my cyberpunk glasses and my IKEA space suit. Around 4.m. i headed home. Sober partying is pretty good, I’m all charged up with party energy and there’s no noticeable downside. There were long stretches during which I’d normally drink something or take a drug and instead i just stood still, not knowing what to do. There were also a couple times when otherwise deeply sweet people were telling me some long meandering tale that even they weren’t paying attention to. As though they’d fallen asleep and started dreaming at me. During these moments I became so intensely bored that I thought that I might just burst into flames. But they passed.
As a consequence of egodeath you might recall I lost almost all of my pictures of the festival. I had two disposable cameras, one of them was in the bag with my phone when it was taken by the night. The other was developed, and I gave some people printed paper photos of themselves at the party on Saturday. They are especially precious little pictures because they are the only ones i have. They were received very warmly.
The love I have for so many of the people in that place is so intense sometimes i feel that i might shatter into pieces if i’m touched. it feels difficult to contain, like if i open my mouth there will be light coming out and then through all my pores and then i burst and shatter.
🎉🥳 happy birthday lb 🥳🎉
note to self: i should add custom emojis to my blog
