hello pretty thing

s. pellegrino, san pellegrino, sparkling pellegrino, sobriety pellegrino, salty pengüino.

the week was gentle, medium octane, chitter-chatter, yap yap.

my neck is sore!

sunday night, last sunday night, was a very nice night. i ate some limequats. there was more to it than that. more to the night. limequats are very nice.

i made a venison ragu for the 14th. prepared it on the 13th. cooked low for several hours. best ragu i ever made. cooked for hours and hours. then into the fridge and out to the $br-wn corner for to prepare for the m-rning.

+ in the morning we walked to imad’s syrian kitchen for breakfast, which was very wonderful and flavoursome and gentle and there was nobody else around. later there was lunch at the yellow bittern which was like dinner at grandma kitty’s house. i’d like to make a big pie for everyone, too. the mashed potato was butter yellow. if i go again i’ll ask where is the champ.

+ at night we set the projector up to point at the whiteboard and watched lady + the tramp (live action) and cried. it turns out two restaurants in 3 hours is too much. we threw up skipped the ragu. but it made a great breakfast (the ragu) with lots of pecorino.

+ then in the morning it was the airport. went off without a hitch (thanks for the help, abdullahi). i got home and went to bed for the rest of the weekend.

wish i had a dog

i’m the sort of person who wants a snack, and opens up the search website and types “seeds”. two of my teachers really hated me. mrs arbuthnot and mrs ross. the one in between was nice, she gave me a book about birds. mrs brown, she was a good lad. mrs arbuthnot threw a shoe at me. it missed me and hit the girl behind me and her nose started bleeding. then there was the “bethlehem” incident. or, i suppose, The Incident of the Second Bethlehem. i got stuck next door for that one, and they said “see? you can do the work once you’re in trouble”. they said that in p6 as well. though in p6 it was because i got moved into the corner on a table by myself in another room and there was silence.

a little nod of deference to someone because they didn’t kill me. crossing the road during a traffic jam. it’s late and i’m sleepy. quite late, quite sleepy. the week gentle. quite gentle. things with important things are better than they’ve ever been. pointplace/littlebook work carries on merrily, it’s very powerful now. zoo came round tonight and we worked and went about the place. i’m so tired now. good luck to the eagles.

Merry February to all those who celebrate!

My new glasses came in, Ace & Tate Lilys. They have sunglass frames with metal legs that seem like they’ll be more resillient to my lifestyle (of falling asleep wearing glasses). You can put a regular ol’ clear glass prescription in there, so i got a pair with clear glass and a dark pair with prescription shades in.

Did a lot of work on my automerge-repo-solid-primitives library. There’s a new beta out with a better API and a lot more tests. It works really well now, I encourage any fans of building apps to try building an app with it. pnpm add automerge-repo-solid-primitives@next. It’s in beta right now until Automerge Repo 2 is out of alpha (any day now).

Work also continues on pointplace/littlebook, which now has strange and wonderful powers. An editor can be created inside the app, and sharing a file will also share the editor used to create the file. If I share a file with you, you don’t just get the file. You also get the program to open the file, and the program to make new files like it. And you also get the source code, so you can change how it makes files too.

Tickets came out for J On The Beach and Local-First Conf. I’ll see you there.

Very nice days and nights with birdie. We went to an IKEA in Grays on Saturday, which was, in many respects, a day. Sunday market, mixed grill at the shisha spot. birdie made us tasty crunchy dinners and sometimes we went to the market on Sunday, mixed grill at the shisha spot, or rambling around all over the town.

Well done to everyone for making it out of January, I didn’t know if all of us would make it this year. Days are growing longer, and nights are coming later, and the weather’s easing up, and everything is sitting right there in the light.

Valentine’s Day’s all planned. Breakfast at The Syrian Rabbit, lunch at Hugh’s Belfast Kitchen and then home for a movie and to feast on wild fauna and spaghetti.

Some silly things happened at my job, but that’s not really the sort of thing that goes on the chee.party website where we are now.

I’ll finish up now, have to put the cardboard on the outside steps for the vegetable man, and I have to put this yoghurt in the fridge. Just a little cup of tea and a glass of water and then we’ll give this next week a shake and see what it does.

Have another little think about biggly winks.

on Monday everybody made a nice bowl of chili, and everybody had a good time. people always tell you to drain and rinse the beans but i like the bean juice, i mix it half and half with boiling water and make the stock in it. thnick. and a little television. and i made a guestbook, feel free to sign it. didn’t get to sleep so good, and i was sick,

but the day was good. the cops came to my door at one point and told me somebody called the cops, i told them nope. went out to town for a brief girlfriend and handed over the chickpeas. surprisingly good sandwiches in W.H. Smiths meal deal. didn’t know the Strood train passes by home. Z brought gift of lentil soup. it was delicious. i coughed some more,

and then on Wednesday with the feta and cucumber and a telephone. very sleepy.

but Thursday with its sweet people at work and its visit from the angel, strange dreams. and also at work, sometimes even when they tell you “it will never be the number 4” it will be the number 4. and the angel and the pork meatball stir fry and the gift of ginger and the little chaos by Orla Gartland.

good long day friday. the other parts have meaning now, or purpose.

and saturday i got my left nose pierced, and Z got the pink ears, and we stopped by to Ace & Tate and i placed an order for two new faces, and we took bus over to egyptian restaurant and we had the order so big they moved us to a new table, and the macarona beschamel and the stuffed pigeon and the soup. is it even a falafel if it isn’t made with broadbeans?

and then sunday, cried in the everyman at a real pain. and the future is warm and bright like candle light. so sleepy now, finally home. oh i meant to do a progress update on littlebook but i’m too sleepy, but there is exciting progress. and you put behind you behind you and you carry on.

hello, world!

this week zippers came over and stayed a lil while, an exceptionally good time. i cooked a sort of lebanese sort of chili. it was nice and with lamb and green lentils. we went to work and ate it at the yellow sofa. we tried to go to an exhibition but we wandered around barbican instead and it was very nice. on the way home i got coughed and spluttered on by strangers. the next day i started to feel a little under the weather so went home early and worked from there.

it feels so nice to surprise somebody by taking work off their plate.

the convalescence continues, i’m still a little sicky now, haven’t been out much this weekend except meal deal shopping at the local ✨Meal Deal Merchant✨.

you may have noticed notice i’ve rewritten the code that runs my blog. sorry to alice if i’ve broken my rss feed again. i probably have. i’ve put a silly amount of work into making it that old posts are rendered using the old css and javascript, so they look the same and keep working. it’s great. especially how they still work when they’re in a list.

i’ve also written my own pagination function so that the past is previous to the future. it surprised me that it’s not the default for chronological content, i looked around to see if anyone else has ever thought much about it. i found a post from a decade ago by chris coyier.

he points out another cool detail:

The benefits of this is that creating new content doesn’t shift the entire pagination structure. Next week after five more articles are published, the “Older Posts” button just goes to “321” instead of “320”. That means that all incoming links and bookmarks are preserved, and search engines will find the same content at the same URLs forever.

so now my page does that, too. because that’s cool!

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it’s nice when you throw something together with stuff you have in the fridge and it just turns out to be so fancy. today some leftovers meant a greek yoghurt omelette with parsley, muchroom, smoked salmon and cream cheese.

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it’s fun to have fun.

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i’ve also made this new https://quietparty.net/ website. and i have started working on a littlebook-adjacent app. it’s lookin good. collaborative, docks, filetypes. all the same thing but from scratch with my solid lib. getting further faster this time.

okay i’m hungry now for dinner, so let’s have dinner. hope i’m well enough tomorrow to work

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was hoping to make a little music for this post because i want to show off my new button, but i am not feeling particularly musical today and keep making complete trash. instead i’ve included my least popular (c/o spotify) track off my most popular (and only!) release of last year.

what's up? hey! what's going on?

i hope you had a merry weekend.

• finished up a couple more songs, wrote a couple more
• continued to fail to make the electronics work
• shopped for backpacks, chose one
• started building out a new quiet party website
  • zimper says i need to start a newsletter, so i'm working on putting that together
  • and maybe a patreon and other things like that
  • and some more behind-the-scenes and making of information
• let's all put our music on our own websites for free as a podcast feed
  • so it can be streamed for free with any podcast app
  • weird that there is no common open protocol app-type for ebooks or music streaming apps
    • but podcasts will work
• went to see Z for a few days
  • had some tasty food
  • what a very nice time
  • went to a music for palestine event at cafe palestina
    • what a lovely time!
    • that man plays a mean fiddle
    • got home so late
• got home so late tonight too
• sorry it's just a big list this week
• might switch from eleventy back to wordpress for my blog, since i've learned a lot about writing wordpress block themes while building the new quiet party site. and i miss being able to post blog posts from my phone and upload media easily

you know what they say about a cup of tea: it'll wake ye up when yer tired, put ye ta bed at at night, cool you down when you're too hot and warm you up when you're coul.

i'm a little dehydrated. new years eve was quite, quite lovely. up there at the top if new years eves were to be ranked. watched the fireworx through a little window, they weren't expected but then it was midnight and the streets were hooting and yelling with fervour and there was the sky with its colourful sudden spiders exploding and crawling and receding into the black.

and there it was, a little spinning chair (MILLBERGET in murum beige), and smiles and happy new year and, though the zombies weren't playing, still therein lay the sentiment.

and the next day, a first day of the year walk. it turned out wetter than expected. the parks were all stormshut and we were dripping ice cold wet frozen squelchers for feet. "it'll all be worth it when we get to the restaurant" which was closed, by the way. it turned out that way, we found out when we were eye to eye with the door. it was a most wonderful day, though so wet and cold my bones have changed density and no muscle of me has been the same since.

yes. yes yes yes.

little piggies on the doornail tell me the month is full. i've been doing electronics projects at night. next up is a little preämp.

a grade ii listed zebra crossing. is the one at abbey road the only grade ii listed zebra crossing? i think so.

silly me one time, but then a lovely weekend of diaspora blood and tears, maybe more understanding of how it's for the other. and what wonderful shawarma, a slap-up meal.

there'll be new quiet party soon, i think. a few good songs are coming together. and hopefully i will write some more next weekend. there's singing on them. currently the singing is a little out of tune so i might fix that. but maybe i won't fix it because that way you know it was made by a person and not a computer. and wouldn't that be nice?

wouldn't it be nice

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ps i ran into some trouble there with gnu date. i use gnu date as part of the template for these weekly posts. it turns out that gnu date believes there is such a thing as week 0 of the year. i have been informed now by computer, that week 0 is an american fact. it's unsettling, though, to have eaten so far into my paycheck and only on week 0 of the year. i've now asked gnu date to give me a normal week number which it calls "%V". we must choose between sometimes having week 0s, and sometimes week 53s. neither option feels okay. maybe when these extra days happen they should be holidays that nobody has to think about. 32nd, 33rd and 34th December.