busybee fluffy rambles

Overwork, underpaid

For the last few weeks I’ve had a pretty big surge of energy for working on stuff, and was able to put my pain up on a shelf. Did some work for one of Ray’s long-term clients, and some other work for random people, but also I’ve been working obsessively on Bandcrash, in particular doing the usual smattering of progressive UI improvements plus completely replacing the player engine with one I wrote from scratch, because I got tired of trying to fiddle with Blamscamp, and there were a lot of things I didn’t like about Scritch.

I feel like Camptown on its own is a really good player, which practically nobody is going to use because it doesn’t have an easy-to-use web interface like Blamscamp and Scritch do. But hopefully enough people will start to use it via Bandcrash instead.

Or I suppose it wouldn’t be too hard to backport Camptown’s templates to the Blamscamp editor, for the ultimate in history eating its own tail.

But anyway my surge of productivity is coming to an end, as my pain is starting to flare up again. Good thing Bandcrash is at a good pause point right now. There’s a lot of stuff I want to fix in the UI (since it’s in a sort of halfway state on a bunch of things, plus there’s some fiddly Qt crash behavior happening that I’d like to track down and fix — I suspect it has to do with how QProgressDialog works) but right now it’s at least usable and producing very nice output.

Music stuff

Choir: I got selected as a soloist during our upcoming TDOR shows! Yay!

Novembeat: Oh god I feel so tired right now and staring down a month of doing daily music shit is just like. Agonizing right now. For a while my plan has been to use Novembeat as an excuse to finish up a couple of backburnered albums instead. Not sure I even feel up to that.

Pain stuff

I was starting to think that maybe I could work full-time again, like I’m magically not disabled, but, no, my body is telling me otherwise.

Perfect timing, too, since my disability application is finally moving forward. I spoke with someone from Social Security this morning; she had a couple of questions to ask about my application (mostly trying to get some medical record stuff in order, and also to get a better understanding of what exactly I’m claiming). It sounds like it’ll still take a couple more months to get a determination, though, and they might need me to have an appointment with one of their in-house medical examiners.

I’m not fully confident that I’ll get benefits on the first try, but I have plenty of runway before I have to start worrying, and anyway I am now just very painfully reminded (literally) that I need this.

TV

I am loving the fuck out of Scavengers Reign. It is so good. Like, seriously.

Also I’ve been rewatching all of Adventure Time. It really holds up. I recently got to “I Remember You,” which still makes me cry, because holy hell that’s a powerful episode.

Music

I’ve been remiss in sharing my music listening but I’ve also mostly just been listening to music when I drive (which I’ve been doing a lot of because of choir) and not so much while working or walking.

Today during my walk I came across Resist by Dead Indian (which somehow doesn’t have an audio preview online anywhere that I can find). For me it really answers the question: what does English-language hard rock sound like to someone who doesn’t understand English? It’s like an album-length modern rock version of Prisencolinensinainciusol.

Oh wait, I did find one of the tracks on YouTube:

Anyway yeah uh

I’m tired, y'all