STANCE was a huge success

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Oh man I am so overjoyed with how our choir shows went! Holy fuck, joining this choir was probably the best decision I’ve made in a long time. Every show we’ve done has been wonderful and the people are so great and I love spending time with everyone. It’s great being surrounded by fellow ADHD transgender/nonbinary weirdos who all have music in common but so many disparate experiences and ideas and just like, oh god so much talent from everyone.

We’re between seasons now and it’ll feel weird not having rehearsals every Wednesday evening for the next couple months, but there’s a lot of talk about doing plenty of social gatherings in the interim and I’m very much looking forward to that.

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“In this new era of AI”

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There’s been a lot of discussion about a puff piece by Marc Andreessen (formerly of Netscape fame, now of being-yet-another-also-ran-tech-billionaire-who-is-into-the-self-aggrandizing-fad-of-the-moment fame) talking about how AI will save the world.

I am not going to link to it (it’s easy enough to find anyway) but I just bothered to read it and oh my god the privilege and blinders are so obvious.

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The new Apple AR goggles

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My impressions on the hardware, for what it’s worth:

  • Really cool tech
  • Kind of a solution in search of a problem
  • I look forward to seeing what people do with it
  • I look forward to it becoming affordable and usable for a lot more than just running fancy versions of iOS apps
  • I will be way more interested if they let you apply filters to the external screen; why show a video feed of your boring human eyes when you can be your fursona or a protogen?

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An undirected ramble about Furality Sylva

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This past weekend was Furality, which was a pretty darn good time in general. I found it pretty enjoyable and I’ll definitely be doing it again. I figure I’ll share some random undirected thoughts about it.

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An open letter to the Washington State Employment Security Department

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Back in June of 2022 I was let go from a job in a way where I was eligible for unemployment benefits. I immediately filed an unemployment claim, but the response that it was “pending adjudication” due to a wrinkle in how I was let go. I was told that I needed to continue to submit claims weekly if I was to receive any benefits.

However, I was unable to submit those claims. The website would not allow me to submit a claim because it was “pending adjudication,” and all contacts to the ESD resulted in a message that I should call a phone number. I called that number, and I’d be put on hold for two hours, told that nobody was available to help me, and that I should use the website for my unemployment claims needs.

One week ago the adjudication finally found in my favor, but at this point my benefit period has almost ended and I will still be unable to receive my unemployment benefits. And I am told that I should have been submitting my claims every week during this whole period — which I was unable to do, for the reasons stated.

How is any of this fair? This is a frustrating bureaucratic nightmare that needs to be completely overhauled. Sometimes it feels like the cruelty is the point, and that this system is not in place to benefit the people who need it.

Thank you for your consideration.

(Also sent to my state representatives Emily Alvarado and Joe Fitzgibbon, and senator Joe Nguyen.)

A fresh coat of paint

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I’d been getting really annoyed with my kinda-fragile website templates and some of the accumulated cruft, as well as a bunch of things that were difficult, UX-wise, so I redesigned my site. How do you like it?

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The cycle

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For the last few months I’ve been feeling restless to be doing not-much throughout the day, so I’ve been actively looking for a job. No bites have been occurring. So instead I’ve been working hard on new projects, like the VRChat avatar stuff and also redesigning my website (which I’m close to being able to roll out, incidentally).

But then it turns out that doing work makes my chronic pain flare up again, and now I’m in agony again.

So, I guess I need to find something that makes me feel satisfied with my day (and ideally brings in some amount of income) without being something that my body just absolutely rejects. But what could that possibly be? The stuff I’m good at and the stuff I enjoy doing is stuff that physically hurts to do.

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Become critter!

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So whatever happened to my VRChat avatar project?

Well, it went really well, so well that I decided to make it a purchasable base model. You can get it for as low as $25 (with a suggested minimum of $30). It also comes with extensive documentation about how to add more materials and I feel like my setup for material swapping is really well-designed and makes things much easier than I’ve seen on other avatars. So it’s probably worth buying just for that alone!

At some point I’ll probably start putting some VRChat documentation onto this site (including the material-swap guide and an explanation of how I set my system up since it’s pretty easy to apply to other avatars and makes life much, much easier). But I kind of want to do some site layout refreshing first. And I need to figure out which section of the site is best suited for it. So, quick poll, what makes the most sense?