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To make a lake of

2024-08-12

3 minute read

I've been feeling like I need to write an entry lately. As usual, the feeling has passed by the time I get here and sit down.

Work has been good lately. I've been lazy, it's relaxing. I feel twangs of guilt, but they pass. A pipe burst over the weekend in the office, flooding the whole way down. Today I learnt the portuguese word "Alagar", which means "to flood" but comes from the word for lake. "To make a lake of".

I think I'm going to add a step to this blog deployment where I update one file with the entire text content in markdown. A simple "search" function, in that I can do a keyword search on the whole page. Another thought I had is to rewrite the site generator for this blog - "bloug" - in bash (inspired by this article) and then add a poetry markdown extension. I'll use cmark to do the majority of the markdown conversion, but I think I'll find it easier to add the poetry extension in bash. Maybe not? It's a project for later anyway.

a project for now

I'm both nearly finished bloom and miles away. It's feature complete, but a mess and can break in browser crashing ways. I've fantasised about redoing it in a lisp dialect, but that would be a silly use of time for now. I can refactor it and pretend it's lisp, JS has first class functions. I tried to write a REPL GUI for exploring it and designing plants, but fell a little short of what I had in mind. It was good to attempt it, and it's still kind of useful, but I think I can just do it with hot reloading for now.

a line drawing of a geometric tree structure, surrounded by inputs with different elements of an L-System and renderer written in them

I need to surface the interpretation process, so I can see a little where it's getting stuck, and put in some rudimentary error handling. Most of all I need to do something beautiful with it all.

what else

I heard back from the portuguese embassy, they didn't tell me if the allocation was exhausted but they gave me clear instructions on applying for the visa so that was cool.

I want to try leaving my phone in the lounge at night while I sleep. I want to get my attention back. It's an on going challenge.

I'm back at the gym now, that's going well.

what more can I say? My brain feels like a dried up grape. But only recently I spent an afternoon in the sun reading about contemporary media and the spectacle of politics in populism. Surely I must have more to say!

I've been thinking about suffering in creativity, prompted by an observation from a friend about how I don't seem to enjoy making bloom. It's worth thinking about because I think it's easy to equate the suffering with progress, but that's untrue. On the other hand, good things are hard to do and doing hard things isn't always fun. So probably one for the questions at the end of this entry.

I bought a couple of caps in the weekend. Finally I've got hat options again. I had just one, and it was my sweaty gym one. Now I have a second hand light blue "SuperDry" cap, and a white vistaprint cap with the text "even light was ages ago" embroidered onto it, designed by Sam George.

I got my mouth scanned for making a nightime grind guard. It was funny to see a high def photogrammetry model of my teeth.

listening to

just (after song of songs) - David Lang and Trio Mediaeval

questions