#cadence

weeknotes 25: b12

weeknotes boardgames factorio eurorack cadence unihiker b12 sick algorhythms
Post by @apaleslimghost@cathode.church
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completely out of commission almost all week. definitely some kind of flu-like thing. absolutely horrible. played a lot of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and a lot of Factorio. tried implementing Codemirror support in Cadence. tried designing some kind of handheld computer shell thing for a Unihiker M10. no focus for any of the above. slept at lot. read False Value (2020) and Amongst Our Weapons (2022). i missed Algorhythms. 😕

thursday i drank one (1) can of Relentless and felt mostly normal afterwards. there's a lot of overlap between the list of flu symptoms and the list of vitamin B12 deficiency symptoms. my working theory is something mild and sinusy made worse by not drinking enough energy drinks while sick. no really. i should probably be taking supplements.


went to the office on friday, helped the team to a cool 49.8k on the daily Timeguessr, our best yet. saturday i went to the studio to build a Vostok Atlas and noodle on the Big Eurorack. it's getting there.

we've been looking for a Nice Beer Garden for a while. the Angel Oak is alright but feels a bit barren. we'd never even heard of The Herne Tavern which is just the other side of Peckham Rye but it's got good vibes and a trans bartender. food's only alright though.


saturday would have been the regular King's Dilemma but not everyone could make it. we played Oath which is pretty cool. it's legacy-ish but not really; similar engine-building and territory control vibes to Scythe. the first time you play it, the deck is set up in a specific order and it runs you through everybody's choices for the entire first round. it's a really cool way to teach a game, i'm surprised i haven't seen it before.

we'd kind of messed up packing it away last time so we couldn't do the legacy setup properly. we spent a good hour tediously resetting the deck to the out-of-the-box state and running the first game again.

the game itself was fun, although we'd misinterpreted the rules about when warbands are killed, which meant the relic i'd burnt all my secrets on recovering wasn't working at all, and i had absolutely no economy left and couldn't do anything at all for the whole last three rounds and i left grumpy and kind of soured on it. next time though.

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weeknotes 23: birthday parade

weeknotes live coding music wedding cornwall pride cadence

we're in the southwest for Phil & Sharay's wedding, a three-day affair in a manor farm turned holiday cottage complex on the Tamar. we camped in the field which was surprisingly okay even with Adorable Three-Year-Old Nephew in the next tent over.

pizza and poker on the first night (chips only; won my first hand with a straight and then gradually lost everything).

day two was the ceremony, outdoors. Phil's vows were just straight up Sonnet 18. there was a string quartet, but they didn't play Hey Nonny Nonny. canapés and Pimm's in the garden, pâté and roast lamb for dinner. Phil's 17-year-old did a shot then read her speech. i cried a lot.

day three, lazy morning, barbecue lunch, pool party. me and Sophie sat by the pool and did cryptic crosswords. we made our excuses, said our goodbyes and congratulations and drove to the inlaws in Cornwall that afternoon. absolutely bagel signal when setting off so i did the whole journey by signposts and vibes which was fun. i know the A30 and A39 pretty well at least.


yesterday was my birthday. Sophie made french toast with bacon and maple syrup, then we went to Truro where they'd put on a whole parade just for me!

okay fine it was Truro pride. i've weirdly actually never been to a pride before. it was extremely wholesome. mother-in-law gave me a tshirt that said "sounds gay, i'm in" and a big pride progress plus intersex flag that i respectively wore and flew for the parade.

then Adorable Three-Year-Old Nephew had enough of the crowd so we dropped into Waterstones and bribed him with picture books.


ever done live coding? whenever i talk to people about it nobody knows what it is. "wait so like you're writing code in front of an audience? to do what?" "uh, make music, generate visuals" "wait how?" "you write code that generates sound and run the code" "what how does that work?" "i have no idea on what level you're not understanding this, i just explained it"

there's an incredible growing scene in London at the moment, events happening basically every week. i've been to a couple of the meetups and an AlgoRhythms (open mic night kinda format). hugely fun, incredibly welcoming. lots of people (but let's be honest, mostly Lu and Daniel) have put a lot of work into making the scene that way. i love you all.

i've been working on a... it's weird. it's a spreadsheet? with an embedded lisp-like language. and a standard library for WebAudio. see i'm a very visual and spatial thinker, and for live coding text always felt very rigid and limiting to me.

i suppose Nudel has the multiple panes which does let you split things up and organise things spatially. in a spreadsheet the space isn't just where you put things, it's part of the execution environment, it's inherently live and malleable.

with a spreadsheet the expectation is that you the user are part of the program that's running, moving things around, tweaking and crafting things as they're executing. Excel is the world's most popular live coding environment. it just doesn't do music.

here's Cadence:

copy this and paste this into A1:

(trans 120)	dest	"; ↓ note sequence"
"; ↓ saw reverb pluck"		'c4
(seq '4n (: 'C2 'C7))		'(eb4 f4)
($> A3 (play A5 '8n))		'a#4
(synth '(oscillator (type sawtooth)))	"; ↓ kick drum"	'g4
(-> A5 A7 dest)	(sample "https://pages.ghost.computer/garden/garden_bd/kick01.wav")	'bb3
(reverb '(decay 40) '(wet 1))	(seq '4n '(c0 c0 c0 c0))	'(d5 f5)
	($> B7 (play B6 '8n))	
"; ↓ square bass"	(->> B6)	
(synth '(oscillator (type square)))		
(seq '2m (: 'C2 'C7))		
($> A11 (∘ (- 24) (play A10 '2m)))		
(->> A10)		

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