British Summer Time GMT+1

week 19 of 2024

  • 🌄 sunrise 5:12 a.m. British Summer Time
  • 🌇 sunset 8:41 p.m. British Summer Time
  • partly sunny 21℃ and Mostly Cloudy

so sleepy !!!

the package arrived from bartlett it was the magazine offal. i really enjoyed the pieces i read and look forward to reading more.

Apple Shortcuts is my favourite programming language. it's so there, and really is Actual Thing Oriented, objects that are real stuff you can feel and understand and hold touch rather than data efficient memory layouts. It has triggers now on the iPhone so you can launch a Shortcut when you come home, or get a text from a certain person, or at certain times. really fun.

a lot of the time you can change how you think.

i did something fun for work last week, and i'll be finishing it up tomorrow. i know being fulfilled by your job is for protestants and capitalists, but today is the first sunday in a while i've not been dreading tomorrow and that's nice.

last sunday when zoozer came over we started a week of keto. on monday we went to a whiskey tasting at buffalo trace. later i made some creamy cajun chicken that i will make again. animal of the day: the humble fanaloka.

in the morning it was eggs with chorizo and fresh mozarella and parsley. i had had enough that day of straight gays, data "journalism" and concision. later there was salmon fish and tahinia salad.

we deleted our amazon accounts, zoozoo signed up for fastmail, we read books on our ereaders. i've read john dolar's erdogan pizza (5⭐) john wyndham's the chrysalids (3.7⭐). if you are on thestorygraph and want to be my friend on there you can add me my username is cheee.

i had preördered fadi kattan's new recipe book bethlehem a few months ago. it's out next week. i'd preördered it on amazon so when i deleted my account i re-preördered it on bookshop.org. it's out may 16th so i selected next day delivery so i'd get it on may 17th, but they sent it out actually next day so i got it on may 9th! support your local bookshop.

using the todo list application is actually helping me. i fixed the light under the cooker hood finally. and lots of other stuff. i have an apple shortcut that adds a todo item to import stuff i've written on paper into the todo system when i arrive home from being outside. and it's been good fun learning an application together. things can be cloying and true at once.

went to see the new garfield movie with zoozoo today. the movie was not very good but it was fun to sit in the cinema with z. we should go to the cinema to see a good movie some time. i enjoyed when jon was adding parmesan and said "say when" and garfield the cat said "never".

life is good.

i'm so dehydrated i wish there was something that could be done about it.

nothing much more to report.

hope you have a nice week. e-mail me.

British Summer Time GMT+1

week 18 of 2024

  • 🌄 sunrise 5:24 a.m. British Summer Time
  • 🌇 sunset 8:30 p.m. British Summer Time
  • partly sunny 19℃ and Mostly Cloudy

A few of us are hanging out a Fozzie's tonight. Do you wanna come?


The lucky are the people who know what they like, and know what they're good at, and know how to do those two together as soon as asap.


I think last week when we left off I was waiting for a washing machine. It was raining on sunday. They called before it came and I let them know the only entrance is a metal staircase on the outside of the building. They told me, dismissively "yes yes" and hung up. They arrived and decided not to fit the machine. They explained that outside my house there is a metal staircase and that because it's been raining it will be difficult to get a washing machine into the building.

Later in the day it turned out to be beautiful, sunniest day this year or that might have been my mood as I walked through Bow ready to pack and help. The bus journey to Bow, though, was one of the low points of my life. Everyone felt the Summer in the air, and the Spring too. Our bus route goes through Millenium Park, which homes the only IKEA in town. There was a lot of furniture, a lot of families, not a lot of space. The strongest memory of it i have, however, is narrowing my eyes to see the curves of Poseiden's butt in a photo of a painting in a museum in Portugal included in the book i was reading. And then dropping an Elvis juice which span across the bus floor like a top.

Staying drunk for days and then sober for weeks gives you a very different perspective on the world vs drinking at nights.

I arrived at Lucky's, made some emergency mexican-lebanese food of canned refried beans with chickpeas and cumin and fried beef mince with cinnamon and onions.


Monday

Monday i worked from home and wondered if i even want to do this. I bade farewell to Zoozoo who zoomed off to airport to meet Mimi for a week. I ate poorly because i'm alone. Is it normal to need someone to take care of in order to be bothered to care for yourself?

I fell asleep in the middle of the day.

tuesday

And woke up at midnight on Tuesday very confused. I added /themes to my blog. There are also some secret themes based on some of my favourite colleagues' blogs.

expand to see the secret themes

you know when you're too tired to do anything but too tired to sleep? good to have a few dumb ideas sitting around just for then.

Zizard came over for a bit to collect a charger, i sent her away with an iced latte.

In the evening I watched RRR. It’s a movie about two cute boys being best friends and dancing and how the English must be wiped off the face of the earth. and about how there is nothing more evil than a class traitor other than the system that makes them think being a class traitor is their only hope. and, obviously, the English. And how there is no more important bonding experience for two men than killing as many Englishmen as possible. And about how the only way to increase the value of a bullet it to put it through an English heart. And how the only thing that can save us is a song (and intense military training and guns) and friendship and religion.

Let not the result be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.

That movie was 3 hours long and i could honestly watch another 6 hours of it. great dances.

wednesday

Wedensday I waited for machines. Try #2 for the washing machine. Also my OP-1F finally home from repairs in Sweden. UPS just left that one on my doorstep and walked away. The washing machine man said there was nothing wrong with my old washing machine, and it was the pipes that are fucked. But he's wrong. New washing machine is working well.

A programme I wrote for other people stopped working because the web platform silently changed underneath me like it's 2011. If you've been cloning declarative shadow root templates kept inside templates (i think the only sensible way to use this feature if you're trying to use the web as an operating system rather than as an instruction set) then you'll now have to add shadowrootclonable=true to your inner template element. A fundamental breaking change that the browsers didn't even mention in their release notes (except Safari Technology Preview, unexpectedly).

Alice Bartlett said she's going to mail me something that reminds her of my writing. I'm excited! The Royal Mail!

THu

watched Killers of the Flower Moon. a movie about power and evil and how white people need to be wiped off the face of the earth and how nothing will save us except love and the FBI.

Zoozoo had her schengen appointment!!! It went well!!! We may be in the sunny world of European Spain in a little over a month!!!!!!!!!!!

If not, there's always Macedonia, Turkey and Lebanon.

I bought a homeless guy a pack of cigarettes and walked away swaggering like I'm Auda Abu Tayi "i'm a river to my people!"⸻i took a note to make fun of myself about that later.

Went out for a drink and learned several times in a row that I no longer know how to talk to centrists. The centre between "eradicate a people" and "don't eradicate a people" is what exactly? Eradicate a few hundred thousand more?

I don't need your vibes-based analysis of the situation that is made of 40 tweets and 1 wikipedia article on the issue, and if you're going to be wrong and uninformed and confident and lecturing all at once I may well be angry and I may well be patronizing and I may well be impatient and I am not going to feel sorry about it and I am not going to shake your hand because there is no "debate" to be had when your side is genocide.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday

It's been chill. I picked up Zoozoo's new ebook reader (a kobo clara colour) and filled it with some books she is reading or interested in reading. She'll be over soon once she's left Mimi at the airport.

blurry photograph of zaina standing by a lighthouse in plymouth

cool picture of zoozoo at a lighthouse in plymouth

hehe

going to a whiskey tasting at the buffalo trace distillery tomorrow.

enjoy your lengthy weekend.

British Summer Time GMT+1

choose a theme

British Summer Time GMT+1

week 17 of 2024

Word of the day is threnody, stressed with the rhythm of melody, a poem or song of mourning or lamenting.

let's

We've started using Things 3 to keep track of our To-Do lists. It's fun using a pretty app. it's really good just having a single place to put things instead of having decision paralysis every time i think of something.

blood soaked horses

a number of horses were on the loose in central london. there was a white one and he was drenched in blood. here's how the headline on the live post by the independent changed over time:

  • 'Number of horses' on the loose in central London - as one appears to be covered in blood
  • Blood-soaked runaway cavalry horses charge through London as soldier injured
  • Blood-soaked Household Cavalry horses loose in central London injuring people and hitting cars
  • Three soldiers among those injured as blood-soaked cavalry horses rampage through city
  • Runaway horses in serious condition ‘but still alive’ minister says
  • London horses – live: Runaway horse Quaker’s condition ‘not looking good’ as Vida returns to stables

now, ignoring the transition to a somewhat accusatory tone directed at the horses, it is true that that one white horse was called Quaker as in tremble at the word of god which evokes Revelation "and behold a white horse, clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word Of God". the only thing john the revelator got wrong is that Christ was not upon the horse, Christ was the horse and he trampled on some soldiers. There were 3 soldiers and one non-soldier taken to hospital for horse injuries. Their names have not been released so until we know for sure it's best to operate with the assumption their names are Conquest, War, Famine, and the non-soldier Death.

sparkle brindisa sparkle

we went out for a wonderful spanish meal at Brindisa, LB to celebrate the schengen appointment and eat chorizo. great dinner. the beer hit a little too hard. i had a small chat with some irish people who were pretending not to be irish. i noticed my old vape shop has been replaced by an independent french patisserie which seems like the wrong way round for how these homecomings go and is quite pleasing. we met luke blaney, one of our planet's strangest people, for a little empanada at porteña.

rooftop cinema

went to the rooftop cinema with dani to watch clueless. dani was a little late so i got our blankets and found some seats. dani is recovering from whooping cough because dani is a chimney sweep and/or news boy from victorian london and/or four year old child.

tell you what Peckham is wild these days. i moved out of there a few years ago and i thought i knew what direction it was going. lot of people who would’ve moved to shoreditch if the rent wasn’t high moving in. so i thought oh i know where this is going, but i’ll tell you what i was wrong. that place has the highest freak density in london, and i mean that in a good way. all kinds of wild people going around. now there’s bouncers at every bar because more students are drinking there, but there’s also man in the street making barbecue in an overturned barrel listening to reggae. in need of further analysis.

On the train home was a guy trying to get to “the next big town” after Lewisham. "Woolwich!" When I was reading out the steps when I’d got out of the bathroom and I read him the steps “Woolwich! Does this stop there?” And I checked and it does. He had a djembe and a few other drums and bells and he stank of piss and had bright clothes and he looked me right in the eyes with his icy blues and said thankyou and he bumped my fist. That kind of older red-sknned white man with close white hair covering his whole head but thin and spare and not dense. Once you’ve given someone time who everyone else is trying to ignore those other people won’t meet your gaze any more. Did I taint myself or do they just not know how to act? I’ve never known.

You cast a very interesting silhouette. that's OK fox, I'm not here for you. trying the crackled path leading out from the cathedral to my home

While i was on the toilet zaina slapped me in the face with £500 cash and knocked my glasses off.

night mare

this night i had one of the strangest and most persistent nightmares of my life. we were all in a war and we could all cast these magic spells to attack and harm and maim our opponents and there was a crowd going around who'd figured out how to make us cast all our known spells on ourselves and they were much more powerful than us. i kept realizing it was a nightmare and waking up and being like "phew!" but then i'd fall back to sleep and be back in the same nightmare as though it was not a dream but just another reality that was running alongside the one in my waking life.

saturday after payday

a long day but a lot of fun. started out with a grand perigrination across the island of england from lewisham, south greenwich to a business park in north to eat an incredible lebanese breakfast at beit el zaytoun. house of olives. a sort of fairuz theme restaurant on the canal. i'd never been before but when we stepped down by the canal i realized i'd been right next to it a bunch of times as it sits on the Grand Union facing the Grand Junction Arms, a place i am by accident several times a year next to the mcvities biscuit factory. with the bakerloo line closure and Harlesden closed we may have picked the worst day of the year to make that journey, but a 2 hour morning constitutional (walk, not poop) puts you in the right frame of mind for a breakfast for two that could feed a family of five. heart

we walked to north acton, got some documents printed by the guy who owns anakin skywalker in star wars episode 1, and took a choochoo train to TCR where we visited the graveyard of the british invasion and got some stationery and saw a girl being carried around on a ladder ladder by several gay men and 1 straight man in a kilt and bought some undergarments and ate mexican food at the first mexican restaurent in the UK and drank beer and ate koshari and drank beer and ate nuggets and pork buns and drank beer and went to zoozoo's with big dreams of packing up some little boxes for her move and getting a 2am Bolt (cheaper and fast) but maybe we'll just lie down for a little bit cozy for a few minutes before we get started and oh we're waking up and oh it's 7am and i have to rush off to get a washing machine and none of the packing has happened.

now, this looks delicious:

selotape in a navy bag with a tear strip that makes it look like a bag of
crisps or candy

you know those weird pubs that don't know who they are? house music and pub grub... pickled eggs and 909 hats shouldn't be in close proximity, it is unhygienic

sunday machine

and now i'm at home waiting for that washing machine that hasn't been delivered yet. made a breakfast of humous and a corn tortilla with cheese and za'atar and now i'm drinking beer and waiting for the new washing machine.

i can't wait to have a washing machine with a countdown clock on it and one that doesn't leave a strange smell! i am less enthuastic about the bluetooth icon i've seen on the washing machine in the pictures, but we'll see. maybe it'll be fun and i'll be able to link it with Shortcuts.app (my favourite programming language) to have a certain song play when the wash is done and automatically add a reminder to empty the machine!

i've got a thing now where every time i come home my phone automatically adds a reminder to type up all my paper notes into my digital notes.

click here to join my secret society The Meeting of the Blood-Soaked Horses.

British Summer Time GMT+1
now i saw heaven opened, and behold: blood soaked horses running through the streets of london KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS the end of days is upon us