a pale slim ghost

i guess i write weeknotes on wednesdays now

we're on holiday this week

we stayed two nights in this frickin, hotel:

i have nothing of substance to say about the war in Ukraine

other than "fuck Putin".

chee puts it best:

it fucken WIMDY

Storm Eunice hit two days ago and it was actually kind of scary to be told by the Meteorological Office "hazard to life from flying debris". we shut the cat in, charged our battery packs, made sure we had enough candles and butane and didn't go outside.

around the corner a row of houses' garden walls fell down and are blocking the pavement. the vent on the boiler flue is still going ham rattling as i type.

i went bouldering

first time in six months; second time since march, twenty-twenty.

everything hurts.

new case who dis

(sorry, this bit's pretty nerdy, skip on if you don't care)

a year or so ago, when i still had a therapist, we worked out that i often lose habits because i felt guilty about not having done them, and that guilt transferred to the thought of starting back up again, and she gave me permission to not do that

i have a studio space

on trafalgar road, in greenwich, there's an iceland. above the iceland is this 70's pebbledash concrete box. i don't know what it used to be, it's a very odd building inside. now it is twenty-two small spaces, full of artists, makeup artists, florists, and me.

i'm feeling a lot better. here's another web page that makes pretty sounds:

it's a mesh of evenly-spaced random dots (poisson-disc sampled). they're connected by very loose springs in a Delaunay triangulation. a handful of dots are picked to each play one note of a stacked A minor 11th chord.

i'm sick and when i'm sick i always try making web art and this time i made something i'm proud of and want to show people:

it's a simulation of lots of little planets doing gravity at each other, and when they collide they say "blong" in a C minor pentatonic scale. that's it! it looks like this:

1. oops where did three months go

holidays always throw my habits entirely out of the window. i also managed to gate posting my next weeknotes on having edited my photos from camping, which was a terrible thing to do to my brain.

2. whistlestop tour

and it's all Rowan's and chee's fault

last week i made some cold brew. two litres of it in a big Kilner jar. an entire bag of peruvian coffee from a three month coffee subscription my parents bought me for christmas.

today i poured some and it smelt kinda bleachy and there were floating white things. an entire litre down the sink.

1.hello from the surrey hills

• we are camping and it is raining, a lot
• i just barbecued some smoked mackerel fillets and oh my god. then they got rained on and we ate them in the car
• last time we came here apple maps navigated us to a dead end seven miles away and then said “you have arrived”, very clearly nowhere near the pin on the map
  • imagine being gaslit by apple maps
  • this time we got it to give directions to the pub in the village
• we put a kettle on and almost immediately ran out of butane. and then it got rained on
• i love it here

2. i sold a lens to a friend of a friend

content warning: wild animal injury

1. been watching the Fast & Furious films with friends

• once a week, on a sunday afternoon
• we sync up the films, hit play, and pretend we're mst3k via Slack
• they're actually pretty good, even the bad ones
• also i'm spotting how much of an influence they had on the Need For Speed franchise in the early 00s
• speaking of which:

1. i went to the office, and it was normal

• i went to the office, and it was normal?
• i've gotten weirdly good at self-administering a lateral flow test
  • Kara Brightwell: skilled at scraping her own tonsils, and inserting things too far up her nostrils
  • imagine showing that my to myself eighteen months ago
  • she'd probably go "oh okay so, uh, 'Kara', i see, that's a thing we did, okay. wanna make out"
• i had a desk assigned to me, and it was by a window, and it was in a building that isn't my flat, and i got to go there and not be in the same 46m² forever
• i saw like. twenty people. in an office that has capacity for like fifteen hundred.
• i had a burger, a real burger made out of cow, from a fast food restaurant, with cheesy fries
• it was so normal!
• this is genuinely the best thing i've been able to do for my mental health during the entire panettone
• i'm going back like. twice a week now, fuck it

2. trying not to burn out

1. WOW I HAVEN'T BLOGGED IN A WHILE

• hahaha funny ironic meta blogging joke

2. okay so i'm the Tech Lead of the FT.com Platforms Team now, what's up with that

hi Alice! hi Rowan

see the thing with writing a blog yourself in rails is you have to maintain it and stuff

i upgraded to Ruby 3.0 because fast but it turns out major versions have breaking changes? weird

apparently URI.decode isn't a thing and also hashes don't become keyword args any more and i can't be waiting for gems i use to fix their shit so back to 2.7 it is

using ActiveStorage it's kind of not even a thing? i drag a file on to the browser and send a form and it just goes into the database? like this frog on a unicycle:

that's stored in Postgres as a Large Object, isn't that neat

so now you can yeet posts

built on rails, who even does that

see, last time i tried rebuilding my blog i started writing my own static site generator because, you know

this isn't some countercultural reverse bandwagon hipster thing, it's the anthropic principle