what exciting things happened this week? letās see.
ā¬ whiteboards
i got some new whiteboard markers as recommended by nils m holm in the usesthis that jake linked me to. theyāre very good! i didnāt know whiteboard markers could be good.
t3x.org (nilsāsās web site) is an excellent example of a Web Site.
itās nice to have whiteboards around the house if youāre working on lots of projects at the same time. when you have an idea you can go and place that idea in the physical location that project lives. oh i get it now. does anyone know where i can get an extremely powerful projector, laser and camera?
š„ļø pixels
the little pixel drawing canvas i added to last weekās post stores all its history, and you can watch it all the play back on this playback page. warning this page is:
EXTREMELY YELLOW
in other news that page is server-side rendered solid-js which hydrates on the client side, magically compiled as part of my blogās build process thanks to a plugin by this extremely cute developer.
bento
iām working on making https://bento.party collaborative. the first draft of it went out on a branch yesterday, code is a mess but i was able to sync a track between my phone and my computer
šļø events
i wasnāt as broke as i expected after finishing planning my trip to LA. but then i realized iād forgotten to purchase the Ā£800š· conference tickets and that made things make more sense. but it will be worth it to hear Richard P. Gabriel perform his famous A.I. Winter with American rock band OneRepublic.
of course i will try to visit lodge 49 in long beach too.
šļø other
well maybe that means nothing exciting happened. itās still september magic time so itās all just tidying and drinking water and writing code and cleaning up type tasks at the moment. i bought seven extremely noticable jumpsuits. looking at my bank balance now that might be the last purchase i ever make.
iāll go for a little walk and then weāll see about bento. itāll be fun, wonāt it? to make something together, i mean.
this post, like some others, has some fun little javascript bits in it thatāll only work if you open it in a javascript-powered browser
thereās an episode of Colombo where Colombo calls Jaws (1975) āthe fish pictureā. last week after posting my post i went to a CeX in Woolwich and picked up a pair of headphones. walking home to get my bearings i checked the name of a bus stop and it laughed at me.
the lucy & yak jumpsuit fits well so iāll be getting a few more of them for my trip next month. jumpsuits are a great outfit for travel because you always look pretty put together and neat even if youāre not. though theyāre a bad outfit for travel because once youāve put it on you will never be able to pee again. remind me not to wear a short sleeve on the aeroplane because there is no way iāll be able to get a hold of that in that tiny bathroom.
zeezy is in canada. hi zeezy.
on tuesday i ordered some chinese food. after iād eaten half of it i started feeling really sick so i made myself throw up and then i ate the rest of it. that was a low point of the week.
on thursday night i had a video call with a stranger on the instruction of a robot on a Slack. it was good, really interesting, lots of exciting ideas.
getting a lot of resistance from my me trying to enforce an autumnal time shift, but weāll get there.
iāve collected together all the 68 books and papers on the https://dynamicland.org bookshelf into a single folder. this took several days. itās about a gigabyte zipped. lmk if you want it.
im putting together a presentation about bento atm, thereās a lot to say and i donāt yet know how long itās meant to be. just a big page of tasks right now. anyone know any good outlining software?
you can draw here (a square at a time)
iāve been falling asleeping listen to detective books this week. iām in simile land. itās good to fall asleep to because itās not too interesting. a lot of action but without anything really happening. actions, but not action, i suppose. she picked up her glasses and placed the stem against her lip, then she reached towards her cup but she didnāt touch it, and she shot me a look like a bathroom attendant being left without a tip. very nice to drift off to.
i updated the spiral from a few days ago so that when @prefers-reduced-motion it is a slideshow showing some of the states instead of a spinny guy. also, the animated gifs only show the first frame when @prefers-reduced-motion. a lot of them arenāt very motiony, but better to err on the side of stillness.
if it loaded, theoretically the little box for drawing in up there is shared with everyone who visits the page. remind me next week to get all my chores done before i start adding little silly javascript things to my blog, because my todo list appears to be the same length now as it was when there was sunlight 8 hours ago.
Here is some music to listen. Sure, itās crunchy. The end is very nice.
Listening to that Lady Gaga song with Bruno Mars in it, amd Iām not sure if thereās anyone Iād want to be next to when the world was ending. A great thing to start doing in 2025 is tell people to āsay cheese!ā when you take a photo. The opening line of every chapter of my autobiography will be āI had a perfect life, but I wanted moreā. And then you feel them letting go from miles away. They say that we donāt know why the volcanos that spat diamonds turned themselves off a million years ago, I read about it in a magazine. A few weeks ago I stayed at a hotel where the tv remote had a TikTok button. That was the day I stepped in dog shit, and I washed my boots in the bathroom sink. How about Conwayās game of life except instead of dying single cells go off in search of community.
The person who unmasked _why the lucky stiff was a bastard.
Iām going to Los Angeles next month.
Click here
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There arenāt three minutes worth of lines to write here about my week. Itās lots of little small things and I havenāt been taking notes. And itās harder to write about nothing sober. Iām reading The Art of Doing Science and Engineering and writing a lot of little experiments. Today Iām going to try to play a video game. But first, eggs.
Itās been so long since Iāve been in the United States. A decade since Iāve been in California, where infinite westward expansion finally banged into the reality of the Pacific and the only remaining territories were out to space and inside our minds and souls and bodies.
If youāre going to seduce my daughter please have the decency to close the door to my dressing room.
iām really tired.
things i did this week include writing a cool little app and going to bletchley park computer museum (where i bumped into anna shipman!). it was great seeing all the old computers and the computers that are my age. i wonder if the sega megadrive finds that when it turns its head to the left there is a loud click. there was a little trouble after the meal but apart from that a perfect lovely day. the trains going north of london were all so canceled and declayed because an overhead item fell on the rail.
i have been sober as per usual when September Magic rolls around. and iāve been watching every episode of Colombo. i need to be bathed in warm jelly and oil and then left in a heap by the side of the road. itās time for bedtime to be time.
today i am writing from the house where alan turing was born. itās a hotel now but when he was born it wasnāt a hotel it was a house and he was born here.
a hard time getting home through carnival on monday ended in a early night. ive been so sleeply lately. and need to pee a lot. i have all these bruises that arenāt healing and my bones and muscles are sore all the time. my neck is so crunchy now when i turn it, sometimes when i turn to the left it clicks so sharply.
tuesday and wednesday were mopey sleepy, but the september magic is in the air now and things are picking up. hung out at my exās house on thursday. on friday i did a bunch of cleaning + tidying & dressed up in my orange jumpsuit that seems to be getting harder and harder to take off and i attended an algorave. i tried to make conversation but was way too tired. iād turned up 7 minutes late for the workshops which meant i was suddenly 3.5 hours early for the event. i rode around on the DLR getting slightly drunk and then sobering up repeatedly, which has a way of wearing you out like stretching and releasing an elasticated cuff. it was really good, though, the event. iām brimming with ideas.
went to my exās house afterwards and we drank some water. on sunday we wandered around maida vale, little venice, my old haunt. had some brunch, some tasty south asian dinner, booked a hotel, walked by the water.
lost another day taking Linux back off my Macbook because I opened my laptop on the way home yesterday and it had run out of battery while it was in my backpack. rest in peace asahi
so letās say the post is late and itās all linuxās fault though really all my fault. rest in peace me
i have a sore noggin. i donāt seem to have any notes from during the week. didnāt anything happen? at the weekend i went for lunch with my ex and it was very nice.
i read a lot, talked to some nice new people. excited seeing a good number of local-first talks coming out at the moment. im sleepy.
I allowed myself to sober up for 36 hours, and learned after a couple nights good sleep that I am quite sad and lonely! So, I wonāt be making that mistake again. Though tequila is quite expensive and not available on the NHS for some reason.
This week I had a few bad phonecalls, and wrote some okay code, watched some TV, and chatted to some interesting new people. On Friday night I went out for a walk, down a street Iāve walked down many times, but it led to a street Iāve never seen with new shops and parties. Iām not sure where I was but eventually I found the fox and firkin from an angle Iāve not come at it from before.
I was wrong, Megan, Iād never actually listened to that Bjƶrk album and honestly itās crazy that that is your favourite but I listened to it on the way home and it was extremely upsetting, but I enjoyed it and I understand.
The writing in these entries has been lacking lately, thatās a shame. sorry to anyone reading. I cannot imagine improving that, or making music or doing anything that requires a working mind. , how would it come about? Iāve purchased a whiteboard and itās full of text and plans for a piece of software I may or may not ever write. The challenge , because without constant distraction my thoughts quickly wonder into the kind of territory that is an anxiety and (s|m)adness machine and with enough distraction then they arenāt there at all. A day was wasted installing Linux on my macbook for no good reason. A classic activity in times like these.
Letās pause here for a moment, and remember the truths of alchemy and the magickal practice of Silence. Thatās when you want to talk about it so much, that itās nearly bursting through your skin electric light through every pore. That holding onto it focuses not only you (who cannot speak until it is complete), but God or Fate or the collective unconscious. Thy will be done.
sleeping nearly upside down one palm against the center eating very bad
maybe i can beat it. what if i say that i must make a pot of chili and a piece of music by midnight, and post both here?
can i be driven by that? is that enough? itās 7.m. now. iāve been writing for a few hours, without much to show for it. but iāve made it all the way into the kitchen now and even emptied the dishwasher. i can imagine a world where i even take the clean sheet out of this washing machine and change the bed. ok. i will do it.
time goes byā¦
it appears somehow the beef mince i bought today has already expired. a horrid, deeply unsettling smell the evokes a reaction that must be ancestral. i didnāt notice until i already started cooking it, because what is blood supposed to smell like? the red onionsā¦ and their friendsā¦ itās okay. i can try again. i will have a smaller goal, iāll simply get all these vegetables and empty bags and boxes off my bed instead.
you broke my heart. again. and you didnāt seem to think there was any problem with it. and if i am sadā¦ if somebody canāt talk right now it doesnāt always mean theyāre mad, youāre not the only thing happening in anybodyās life.
and thatās good not bad.
theyāre meant to separate, thatās the problem. that keeps being the problem! treating two separate processes that need to be done one after another, in different frames of mind, like itās one thing. you must write, then edit. you must do the science (exploration) then the engineering (implementation).
itās been a while since i cried. gets caught in my throat. then iām holding on to it.
so itās 10 now. chili is absolutely off the menu. tomorrow i will cook an omelette for breakfast. and make coffee. then we will see about how to put humpty back together again.
i met becky down by the shore of the thames. it was a beautiful evening sitting on the sand by the oxo building and trying to put the future together. sheās going to be playing a large egg in a pantomime.
