week 44 2023; praying to whatever god will have me
i had a bath today.
i would like to be everybody's diary.
made some bread out of almonds. got per-step playback speed working on bento (not live yet). i am so bad at math. sorry to everyone who has texted me and to whom i haven't responded. bento has lots of new features (check out grid selector at the bottom), and i've just figured out the math and UI for the next bunch. i think once this next set of features is done (which will probably take about 1 or 2 weeks) i'll pause work on it for a little while, make some music, write a little. i keep reΓ―nventing flight.js.
i've had to learn so much. i've never worked so hard on anything.
zeezy is in cairo. hi zeezy.
i have no regrets this week. i ate cheese in the bath. the almond butter bread was a real highlight honestly. 80g almond butter, an egg, baking soda, a pinch of grated mozzarella, pinch of salt, all blended up and throw it in the oven until clean prong. delicious. with avo and evoo and za'atar. very good.
i'm awake too late again. time for sleepy rabbit sleeping tiem
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 (ΒΌΓ, Β½Γ, 1Γ, 2Γ, 4Γ 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 (ΒΉΒ²ββ)
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.
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.
ππ₯³ happy birthday lb π₯³π
note to self: i should add custom emojis to my blog
Why worry? Just exist!
If you're feeling low we can do the twist!
there were more strange motorbicycle scenes outside at 2am on monday night. lots
of people rumbling around on motorbicycles out there in the street. some kind of
motorbicycle drag racing event. and i am an old lady peering out at them from
between the blinds.
this week:
yoghurt meditation
coffee with and without eggs in it
dancing
you think i'm never lonely because i'm so cute and popular?
i released an e.p. this week called field
disturbances, it's available
everywhere. it has a whole philosophical component to it that i haven't written
down anywhere and i'm not going to start now.
there's not much going on other than that. i just work and make music.
in some ways this regularly blogging on a Sunday has backfired. i started it
because i wanted to write on the blog more often. but if i look back a few years
i used to write all kinds of different posts and now i save everything up for
Sunday. eh, whatever.
even if in a year or two
someone drops a bomb on you
you won't feel it on the scene
think of the fun we can have in between!
did you know there is a 3emdash and a 2emdash in unicode? look how long they
are:
em β
two-em βΈΊ
threeem βΈ»
going to go to bed at 9p.m. and get up at 5a.m. tonight, to see what that's
like.
in closing, here are the lyrics and chords to the song Greasy Greens by Pink
Anderson:
Greasy Greens β Pink Anderson
============================
F (open a, ab, g) [open dgb] [233 on dgb] [3233 on adgb]
F (open a, ab, g) [open dgb] [233 on dgb] [3233 on adgb]
F F6 F A
Folks I'm just a man from New Orleans
Bb F
Crazy 'bout them greasy greens
A Bb F
If I don't get 'em three times a day
[3 on d] [3 on d] [3 on a] [3 on a] [4~ on e] [4~ on e] [1 on e]
I'll get mad and walk a way
F [1^2 on g] [1^3 on b] [1 on e*]
Them greens
F F7
all I want my greens (they won't stop for the red light)
A Bb [2 3 on a] F
Soft and easy good and greasy
[3->8 on a] [4~ on e] [4~ on e] [1 on e]
Crazy 'bout them grea sy greens
Way down south where I was born
They raised them good old green corn
Sweet potatoes & Black eyed peas
Green tomatoes and pecan trees
But them greens all I want my greens
Soft and easy good and greasy
Crazy 'bout them greasy greens
Mama you can cook your lima bean
you can cook somethin I ain't never seen
But Honey when you fix ya table for me
Ah don't fix nothin but:
Them greens all I want my greens
Soft and easy good and greasy
Crazy bout them greasy greens
That meat you use must be fat
Cook them greens so greasy like that
If you don't use nothin but naturaline
You can't cook no good greasy greens
Them greens all I want my greens
Soft and easy good and greasy
Crazy 'bout them greasy greens
I don't care what your mama don't allow
Bring them greens here anyhow
Soon as I get 'em, honey, I'll be gone
Your mama won't know that you put them on
Them greens all I want my greens
Soft and easy good and greasy
all about them greasy greens
I see greens upon your shelf
You must be saving them for someone else
I hear hissing in your pot
Honey, how much greasy greens you got??
and them greens. all I want my greens.
soft and easy good and greasy
wild about them greasy greens
