Greenwich Mean Time GMT

week 43

listening to radio shows about war

plenty of new bento features

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

British Summer Time GMT+1

week 42

I SHOULD BE IN BED RIGHT NOW!!!!

i'm up late finish a bit of work on bento.

bento is the new name for the sampler and sequencer i mentioned last week.

it lives here now:

https://bento.party

it has all sorts of exciting new features!

  • 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.

don't go crazy, i need you later

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.