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 reïnventing 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 (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.
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.
~ chee
3 eggs, spinach and boursin. Served sprinkled with sesame seeds. ↩︎
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.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
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 twosomeone drops a bomb on youyou won't feel it on the scenethink 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 —
two-em ⸺
threeem ⸻
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 — 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 AFolks I'm just a man from New OrleansBb FCrazy 'bout them greasy greensA Bb FIf 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 wayF [1^2 on g] [1^3 on b] [1 on e*]Them greensF F7all 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 greensWay down south where I was bornThey raised them good old green cornSweet potatoes & Black eyed peasGreen tomatoes and pecan treesBut them greens all I want my greensSoft and easy good and greasyCrazy 'bout them greasy greensMama you can cook your lima beanyou can cook somethin I ain't never seenBut Honey when you fix ya table for meAh don't fix nothin but:Them greens all I want my greensSoft and easy good and greasyCrazy bout them greasy greensThat meat you use must be fatCook them greens so greasy like thatIf you don't use nothin but naturalineYou can't cook no good greasy greensThem greens all I want my greensSoft and easy good and greasyCrazy 'bout them greasy greensI don't care what your mama don't allowBring them greens here anyhowSoon as I get 'em, honey, I'll be goneYour mama won't know that you put them onThem greens all I want my greensSoft and easy good and greasyall about them greasy greensI see greens upon your shelfYou must be saving them for someone elseI hear hissing in your potHoney, how much greasy greens you got??and them greens. all I want my greens.soft and easy good and greasywild about them greasy greens
