British Summer Time GMT+1

Week the 41st 2023

hello everyone!!!

i hope it's good.

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:

apple.com but every dom element is the apple pay icon, which is the apple icon followed by the word "Pay"

i'm working on a cool thing, it's this:

a screenshot of my sampler sequencer

https://bento.party/

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.

sorry thanks

British Summer Time GMT+1

Week 40 of Year 2023

Quiet week. Since the masa harina incident I've learned some important lessons:

  1. all black dots are flies

  2. 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

  1. 3 eggs, spinach and boursin. Served sprinkled with sesame seeds. ↩︎

British Summer Time GMT+1
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.
British Summer Time GMT+1

~ 2023 ~ week_39 :||._triakontenneaphagia||:

hello little monkeys.

feeling like a gooey chocolate chip cookie.

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 4:30a.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

gabi and chee bathed in green light

gabi and chee ready to fight

British Summer Time GMT+1

web pages for quiet party albums

i made a cool web page for each of the last 3 quiet party releases.

each of them is fun in its own way

field disturbances

the field disturbances page includes an ascii-art interpretation of the field disturbances album art in a <pre> tag, and uses a linear-gradient and background-clip: text to create the kind of patchy colours that are used on the real album art (which is a heart rate history graph from an apple watch lol). The sound of field disturbances is an exploration into how to introduce more humanity into the sound of quiet party. But lb says her favourite track on it is the one that's least about that, so maybe i should give up.

big waterfall

it's very difficult to make an ascii art waterfall. i tried for a while:

an ascii art waterfall made of emojis

i had chatgpt try too. its efforts nearly had me spit water over my whole computer and desk.

me: "generate ascii art for a waterfall" chatgpt: "Ah, chee rabbits, ASCIl art, you say? A picture's worth a thousand words, even when it's made of nothin' but characters. Here ya go:"

a laughable attempt at an ascii art waterfall. a triangle of hash signs at the top, and then one long line of pipe symbols below after, the text says "Now ain't that a waterfall to feast your eyes upon?"

NOTE: I've configured ChatGPT to respond to me in character as Boyd Crowder from the tv show Justified.

So I gave up on ascii waterfalls and made it look like a polaroid picture. The image is a photo of the actual waterfall on the day big waterfall came to me all at once, gift wrapped and whole.

We were walking in the cascadas paraíso in Honey, Puebla. We didn't have much time left. The nice ladies let us know that we could see a lot of little waterfalls or one big waterfall. We chose the big waterfall on the basis that it's better to have one huge intense experience than a bunch of little ok ones. Then, like a bolt of lightning: a mash-up of the t-shirt sofia was wearing with the big waterfall we were looking at, water-blue on white, line drawing of a waterfall with the text "big waterfall". And the sound: a tb-303 and a tr-727 together to make a kind of acid latin trip hop sound, and that's big waterfall. I said "we should get big waterfall t-shirts" and we learned we'd had the same vision, a line drawing of a waterfall in blue on white. She said she'd draw it, but never did. so i used clip art

CORN

On the CORN site, only the dog is an image and the rest of it is all css boxes and borders and background colours. The album cover for CORN was a collage of old public domain adverts. i made that one a few months before starting to work on CORN.

On CORN I was trying to find new sounds, each track was very different and made using a different set of instruments and tools. It was hard work, and I was very proud of it. But everyone always tells me they love big waterfall which i made in like 2 weeks in Mexico, so maybe i should stop trying.