busybee fluffy rambles

Money

After selling my condo, Charles Schwab assigned me a financial advisor since I was now firmly over their “person worth talking to” threshold (I’d been slightly over it for a while but doubling that must have triggered an “important person” alarm). It is very interesting having an actual, like, account executive looking over my finances and giving me advice.

I feel like I’m in a really weird spot right now because even after paying for all of the big projects I’ve been putting off I’ll have over 10 years' worth of savings, plus whatever interest income I make on those next 10 years, but I still worry about the looming horizon of “well, then what?” because I doubt I’ll be wanting (or able) to get a full-time job when the money is starting to run out. But a big part of my self-discovery process right now is trying to give myself room to figure out what’s next, right? And there’s always doing short-term contracts or freelancing or whatever.

And, of course, ko-fi, in case anyone wants to show financial appreciation for the things I do for whatever reason (even though all of the stuff I’m doing right now is very self-centered).

Music

I haven’t been working on my own music very much, aside from the Song Fight! Live set. Most of my musical attention has been taken up with the choir, or at least that’s what i like to think is going on, although I’m having a hard time working up the energy to practice my parts but then for some reason keep on feeling like I’m falling behind at rehearsal.

Because of how the live set went I definitely want my next Song Fight! backfill album (working title: “Transitions”) to be done in the style of the set; I thought it had a great sound and a great feel, and most of the songs I have planned for the album would work really well in that instrument style.

But it wouldn’t be a Sockpuppet album without massive genre whiplash and there’s at least one song I want to do which needs to be punk rock. So I’m not sure if I’ll be doing an A-side B-side sort of thing, or if it’ll all be string-quartet-with-vocals except one punk rock song just wham, out of the blue, then back to string quartet like nothing happened. I kind of like that idea just for the inherent comedy.

Another thing is that a lot of my songs have a whole bunch of different ways that they work and sometimes I think I should release alternate versions as singles or something. Sometimes I’ll do alternate versions as hidden/bonus tracks on albums (especially on Novembeat) but it’s not a thing I want to make a major habit of in general for various reasons. I think I was planning on doing that for some of the songs on Songs of Substance but ended up not doing it for some reason (and I’m not sure which songs it would have been because all of the songs on that album were pretty much the same as their original/demo versions, just cleaned up a bit).

Speaking of Novembeat, that starts in about two weeks, and I do not feel ready for doing it this year. I think if I do participate I’ll be keeping it simpler than usual; the last few years I’ve been, like, escalating things to a ludicrous extreme, and afterwards I just feel burned out. But it’s all supposed to just be for fun.

Also, I ended up ordering a Mac studio for the office, meaning my M1 mini moves into the studio when that arrives, and I also ordered a better audio interface for the studio so the 18i8 moves to the office when that arrives. I was also gifted an Akai MPK49 by a local friend who is moving a few towns away and wanted to unload a bunch of his studio gear first, so that should be fun to mess with.

I’m still looking forward to my Osmose arriving someday. They’re saying they’ll finally be shipping in December, but I’m not holding my breath.

VRChat

I’m at a point right now where I don’t feel a pressing need to do more things on my avatar, but I don’t feel like going back to modeling my gallery, and I don’t feel like starting up any new avatar projects, and I don’t want to list my critter on Gumroad/Ko-Fi/whatever, not that I’d expect anyone to want to buy said avatar either.

I kind of feel like maybe buying some base meshes and recoloring them and selling the retextures on Gumroad/Ko-Fi/whatever, or maybe opening up commissions of some sort? Just for something to do. I worry that it’ll be a big source of pain and frustration though.

I’m looking forward to my SlimeVR arriving someday. They’re saying they’ll finally be shipping in January, but I’m not holding my breath.

IndieWeb

I haven’t touched Publ in… a while. Looks like my last code change was back in July. I have a giant list of things I’d like to do someday but nothing’s felt so pressing as to have me actually, y'know, do it. And as far as I can tell nobody else is using Publ either.

I also still want to finally getting around to writing my darn feed reader to replace Feed-on-Feeds, but FoF has been working Good Enough for me.

Social networking in general

I’ve not been feeling all that keen on social networking. Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, Reddit, it’s all just obnoxious to me right now. Blogging is kind of obnoxious too. I’m feeling overwhelmed by all the things, and most of my social activity has been on Discord these days.

On that note, my Discord is still open to new folks to show up, and is pretty chill.

Health stuff

I’ve been having some pretty bad IBS again lately, although I think a big part of it is that I was baking daily bread using a levain which I think has gone bad. I’ve avoided eating my bread for the last couple days and, lo and behold, my gut issues have… well, not stopped, but certainly gotten better. But that could also just be regression to the mean and the natural progression of whatever was going on.

I’ve also been trying a different set of natural self-medication things. THC+CBD continues to be my best first-line therapy for pain and anxiety, but psilocybin microdosing is seeming pretty promising. I’ve also resumed my caffeine microdosing for ADHD and that’s been helpful as well (and so far I’ve managed to avoid giving myself a major panic attack with caffeine, although I’ve had a few close calls).

The last week or so I’ve been feeling pretty meh in general, but mostly because of the state of the everything. Especially how awful the air is outside, so I’m spending a lot of time just wallowing indoors. I’m also feeling pretty frustrated by how it’s the middle of October but the weather still feels like a typical July, and this year’s July felt like July in Texas. I can’t help but feel like this planet is utterly fucked right now, and it’s hard to feel like it’s worth doing anything under those circumstances. But I keep on plugging on anyway.

At least I have my survival needs met for a while, and I have two lovely kitties who love me a lot and I love them right back, and even though I feel like the days pass quickly and I don’t have anything to show for it, I’m still doing things and keeping myself entertained enough as time goes on. I feel like I could be doing a lot more with my time but I also feel like it’s important that I not burn myself out. I have the time and space to relax and I should allow myself to do so.

I’m definitely not getting enough exercise, though. When the air clears up I need to start my daily walks back up. Fitness gaming has gotten stale for me and I need to touch grass.

Cooking

I’m in an odd spot where my Crowd Cow backlog is mostly sirloin and tenderloin steaks, because I save those for “special occasions” but aside from celebrating my condo selling I haven’t actually been cooking them. So I have a lot of steak. And of course none of the recipes out there for steak are for anything other than fancy steak dinners.

It seems really weird to want to use a filet mignon as anything other than a fancy steak dinner, though. But I should experiment with alternate preparations of them. Like I guess I could try to make a mini-Wellington or something?

I also finally got tired of the bulkiness and general awkwardness of my old sous vide circulator, so I ordered an Anova Nano (specifically the bundle with the hard case because for some reason I couldn’t find just the circulator, but the bundle was only $10 more anyway so whatever) which should make it less of an ordeal to cook fancy steak dinners in the first place. Also there’s a bunch of other stuff I want to do with sous vide where hauling out my gigantic old circulator just didn’t feel worthwhile. And having a second circulator means that if I ever host dinner again it means I can cook multiple things at different temperatures now; for example, custards and vegetables want to go to around 180°F while meats generally go to around 135°F, so I can sorta justify having multiple circulators in that way.

Oh also I’m finally looking into getting my kitchen remodeled. I have a couple of pending estimates. The actual renovation process will probably take a month and I’ll almost certainly be setting up a small temporary kitchen/pantry situation in my laundry room or something. Or just eating out, like, a lot. It sounds like this won’t happen until January at the earliest, though.

3D printing

I guess I forgot to mention it here but I preordered the Bambu Lab X1C printer on Kickstarter. It arrived a couple of weeks ago and it’s fantastic. It’s done an amazing job of printing with every filament I’ve thrown at it so far, and having built-in multimaterial printing is a nice bonus (although so far I’ve just been using the AMS as a fancy dry box, which is frankly also really nice given that my printer lives in a humid basement). It’s made 3D printing fun again.

On that note, I need to sell my Artillery Genius and Mosaic Palette 2S which I’m no longer using. They both work fine (and the Artillery Genius recently got a new extruder, and will come with a crapton of extra nozzles and various spare parts). If anyone in the Seattle area or otherwise able to come pick them up is interested in buying either thing from me, please let me know. They’re both really good devices for what they do, they just weren’t quite meeting my own needs for 3D printing and I will happily talk your ear off about the pluses and minuses of them compared to other printing setups as well.

I’ll probably end up listing them on Facebook Marketplace and/or Craigslist at some point, though. And I’d rather not ship them; they’re big, heavy, and awkward (like me).

I also still have my ancient Replicator Dual, although that’s only really usable for parts at this point (unless you really want to print basic PLA with a shitty proprietary slicer that’s hard to find anymore and use painter’s tape as your print surface). I’ll probably just be gutting it for the stepper motors to build other projects with.

Cats

At around the same time that I ordered the Bambu X1C I also made another Kickstarter purchase, the Popur X5 robotic litter box (note that their site is still just soft-launched and they aren’t fully ready to take orders for a couple more weeks). Fiona took to it right away. Tyler was really scared of it for a week or so but now he’s taken a liking to it too, and when it does its thing he loves to watch it. It’s definitely helped my own mental health in that it’s nice to not have to remember to scoop the box all the time, and so far it’s been working ridiculously well.

Also with the app I can see exactly what times of day my cats are taking a shit, at least when they’re indoors. Technology!!!

Supposedly in the future the litter box will also be able to track my cats' weights (which is useful for health tracking purposes) although I don’t know if that’ll require an extra addon or what. Fiona’s getting to that age where I start to worry about her health and how much she’s eating, so it’ll be nice for the peace of mind if that feature is actually coming.

Anyway. Fiona and Tyler are both doing really well, although Fiona’s been grumpier than usual lately. Maybe she knows she’s due for a vet appointment.