2021 in review, 2022 goals fluffy rambles

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Here’s some stats and thoughts maybe. I dunno.

Stats

Things posted to this website: 196 (171 public)

Things posted elsewhere:

  • Bandcamp: 4
    • 2 albums
    • 1 single
    • 1 game OST
  • YouTube videos:
    • Music channel: 20 videos, mostly music videos, holy hell how did I actually do that
    • Personal channel: 8 (mostly shitposts and cat reminiscence)
  • Social media posts: E_TOOMANY

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Hopefully the last time I beg for coffee grinding footage fluffy rambles

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Remember that silly project of mine? I’m still inching ever closer to being done.

I have space for two more random grinders in the video for The Grind, and I could still use a lot more Comandante C40 footage, which I am really surprised has been so hard to get more of because that’s a very popular grinder.

Historically, I’ve gotten a lot of people promising footage which never appeared. Early on in the project I got plenty, quickly, which is how I was able to produce the vast majority of the videos on the same day as the song, or soon after. But these last two tracks have taken so very long to fill out.

So I mean, if you’re interested, now is the time to do it, and don’t let the belief that it’s already covered or that you’ll be beaten to it stop you from recording things. And if I do somehow end up getting more than I need, I’ll still find a use for whatever comes in!

Anyway. I was really hoping to have this done by the end of December; heck, I was hoping to have it done by the end of November. But, y'know. Life happens, and especially right now a lot of folks are traveling for the holidays. So I’ll take what I can get.

I just really want to have this silly hour-plus-long music video finished soon. It’s the most ambitious video project I’ve ever done and I really like how it’s turned out, and I just have these fairly small sections where it’s just a black screen, waiting for some coffee to be ground.

Also I don’t remember where I’ve mentioned it, but everyone who contributes footage gets a download code for the album and a credits screen on the full video.

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Things I learned today fluffy rambles

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  • White Center streets don’t get plowed, at least not this early into a blizzard
  • My Mazda3 doesn’t have nearly enough traction to drive on unplowed streets
  • The streets I live on are hillier than I realized
  • I do not have it in me to walk a mile to Target just to find out if they have snow chains in stock
  • I also do not have it in me to walk a mile to get groceries
  • I can absolutely make do with whatever food I have on-hand

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How to restore a SOMA Connect without having to re-pair everything fluffy rambles

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In my bedroom I have some SOMA smart shades and a SOMA Connect to control them from HomeKit. This setup works pretty well, except every now and then the SOMA Connect will stop working entirely; being a Raspberry Pi it’s easy enough to hook up to a monitor and see that it’s kernel panicking on startup.

I suspect there’s an automatic update mechanism that simply doesn’t work right.

Anyway, when this happens, the fix is to just reflash the MicroSD card… but this also wipes out all your settings, and in HomeKit that means having to set everything up again, including scenes and automations. Very annoying.

But, if you have a Linux machine (or a Linux VM) it’s possible to save the setting files for later.

  1. Mount the MicroSD on a Linux machine
  2. Open the rootfs partition
  3. Copy the contents of var/soma-connect/ somewhere safe; there should be three JSON files (at least, that’s what was on mine)
  4. Reflash the MicroSD normally
  5. Remount the MicroSD and copy those JSON files back into the now-empty rootfs/var/soma-connect/ directory (you might have to do this as an administrator)

If all goes well, the device should come back online and HomeKit should see them as the exact same bridge and accessories as before.

Deeply-weird privacy people update fluffy rambles

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So folks finally figured out what was behind that weird series of privacy emails I got: it turns out it was a privacy study being run at Princeton. It is not being run very well.

Here’s a pretty good Twitter thread about it and with more links to read:

Also something to make clear:

  1. This is a research study being presented as a legal inquiry and not a research study
  2. The preamble of the email is an active lie
  3. There are many better ways that they could have run this study

I do not appreciate having my time wasted by this nonsense.

On the origins of Sad Crab fluffy rambles

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Every now and then I come across the Sad Crab (aka “This Kills The Crab”) meme, or a reference to it. Like most memes there’s a Know Your Meme page. Their history on the page has changed a few times, but the history is incomplete, at best.

The first link that took it from Gourmet Magazine to the Internet was, well, me.

My mother had given me a gift subscription to Gourmet Magazine, and while reading their article on how to prepare crabs, I thought this one panel was hilariously awful, so of course I posted a scan of it (entitled “sad crab”) to the POE News (an offshoot of Portal of Evil) forums on March 11, 2010. It was hosted at http://beesbuzz.biz/crap/sadcrab.jpg and it became a minor meme there, and from there it got hotlinked to a bunch of other places, including the Spaceghetto image board, and then eventually it got copied and rehosted elsewhere.

It’s also possible that other people found the source image and scanned their own copies, although pretty much every image I’ve seen online has the same printing defects and paper wrinkles from my scan, which seem incredibly unlikely given the way physics works.

Anyway, I had no idea it was a meme until several years later; I was on a forum that was comprised mostly of other Portal of Evil refugees, and we had a reminiscing thread, and I posted the Sad Crab which was still sitting in my /crap/ directory. Someone who wasn’t there in the PoE days said, “Oh, I remember that meme.”

“What meme?”

“This Kills The Crab!”

Somehow I had completely missed my stupid post’s spread as a meme for years. Gourmet Magazine even noticed and tried to cash in on it themselves (to be fair, it was their image to begin with), and what few things had any sort of attribution for it didn’t actually know about the poe-news origin.

The lesson to take from this is that “authoritative” sources on the Internet often have a very short, limited memory of the actual history behind things, and establishing provenance1 is really difficult, and probably not worthwhile anyway.

So, Hired is pretty good, y'all fluffy rambles

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When I got the job with Hover it was via Hired, which made the actual recruiting and interviewing process way better than any other job search site I’ve ever seen.

LinkedIn used to be pretty okay but the whole process there has gotten overwhelming and awful, and they’ve tried to turn into yet another Social Media Experience™ but don’t have any actual tools for managing the interview process itself. Hired just focuses on everything about the recruiting and interview experience: you put your information on your profile (and can include things like “I never want to hear from these companies” or criteria for the sorts of companies you’d like to work for), and you can manage your availability for interview slots and be in control of all the contact and timing and so on.

I found the experience to be pretty darn great, and way less stressful than any other job search engine I’ve ever used.

Anyway, if you use my referral link and get a job with Hired, I also get a kickback, so obviously I’m biased in espousing the benefits of Hired. But I do sincerely believe that it’s been by far the best candidate experience I’ve ever had, and led me to jobs I’d not have known about otherwise (and, in particular, the two I interviewed for and the one I accepted).

Deeply-weird privacy people fluffy rambles

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Every now and then I get what feels like a bad-faith form letter from someone who I’ve never heard of before, has probably never even come to this website, and is probably a privacy lawyer out to make a quick buck.

UPDATE: The mystery has been solved.

Here’s the most recent one:

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is [REDACTED], and I am a resident of Norfolk, Virginia. I have a few questions about your process for responding to California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) data access requests:

Would you process a CCPA data access request from me even though I am not a resident of California? Do you process CCPA data access requests via email, a website, or telephone? If via a website, what is the URL I should go to? What personal information do I have to submit for you to verify and process a CCPA data access request? What information do you provide in response to a CCPA data access request? To be clear, I am not submitting a data access request at this time. My questions are about your process for when I do submit a request.

Thank you in advance for your answers to these questions. If there is a better contact for processing CCPA requests regarding beesbuzz.biz, I kindly ask that you forward my request to them.

I look forward to your reply without undue delay and at most within 45 days of this email, as required by Section 1798.130 of the California Civil Code.

Sincerely,

[REDACTED]

My response is to just direct them to the privacy policy for this website which is a weird thing for me to even need for, y'know, a personal blog.

Maybe I should just not respond and see if they try to sue me for data that I don’t have and have no reason to keep, though.

Incidentally the letter is always exactly the same except for the name and the cited law; they’re always from Roanoke, Virginia, and the wording is otherwise identical each time. They also always come from the same email domain.

So I mean it’s probably a bot, but… to what end? Other folks have been receiving these as well, and the prevailing theory is that it’s people trying to sell GDPR/CCPA compliance packages, but my responses have gone unanswered. So strange.

Bathroom: Not perfect, but Good Enough™ fluffy rambles

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Today the work on the bathroom finished up. All that’s left is some minor cleanup stuff, and a few things I need to do (like installing the towel bar and hanging more of my art back up).

It isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough for now, and the stuff that needs fixing can wait, I think.

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Osteopathy fluffy rambles

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Today I had an appointment with an osteopath, which is basically a chiropractor but with a basis in actual medicine instead of weird quackery. It was an… interesting experience. An overall positive one, though.

She mostly worked on my neck and shoulders, which are feeling somewhat better, and also popped a couple of my vertebrae, which was a strange experience, but a good one. I’m not sure if it’s placebo or what but I definitely feel a lot better now than I did this morning, at least.

She encouraged me to keep seeing my current massage therapist (who I’ve found very helpful) and to wait a few days to see how I feel before scheduling another appointment with her. Unfortunately she (like most medical practitioners) is ridiculously overbooked and the next available appointment isn’t until February (I’d actually booked this one around two months ago, incidentally) but right now I’m at least feeling very encouraged.

It definitely hasn’t cured my pain but it at least feels way more manageable now.

Back in White Center fluffy rambles

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Yesterday the contractor insisted that the shower would be usable by Wednesday, so today I moved back to White Center. As usual it was the worst possible thing to happen that my cats had to endure the car for a whole 20 minutes, but now they’re back home and back to their usual shenanigans. They’re definitely happier here than in the barren condo with no view.

The bathroom is indeed coming along quite nicely. I’m skeptical that it’ll be shower-ready tomorrow, but it’s definitely getting close. The shower is almost done being tiled, and then after that it just needs grouting and hardware installation, and it seems like Thursday is a more realistic target.

Supposedly the toilet will get reinstalled today, too, so maybe I won’t have to use the outhouse anymore? We’ll see.

My house is very much a disaster area right now but at least it’s a comfortable disaster area. And it was nice to get a proper shot of espresso again. (I mean, okay, it’s not like that would have been hard to come by in freaking Capitol Hill, but it’s nice to get espresso from my own setup.)

Meanwhile, the replacement kitchen faucet arrived, and it seems in the past few months they changed the design of the sprayer head a little bit, hopefully in a way which will prevent future clogs from happening. Thankfully it’s still compatible with the old faucet, so it was just a simple swap out, and now I have a working kitchen sink with good water pressure once again.

Still seeking grinder footage! fluffy rambles

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So hey my lo-fi beats to grind coffee to project is still going, but I’m very short on usable grinder footage to move forward. One of the big reasons why I haven’t ended up doing a song every day this year is because I wasn’t sure if I’d even be able to make videos for all of them, and not having a source of inspiration for specific grinders hasn’t been helpful for my forward velocity either. (Of course, being displaced from my home didn’t help any either.)

Any grinder footage that people can offer would be incredibly helpful.

There’s also a few specific grinders I’d particularly like footage of:

  • Comandante C40 (I got some footage for it but my video idea would benefit from having as many people using one as possible)
  • Fellow Ode (I’d especially like some footage that involves pressing the button and spinning the adjustment dial in addition to the rest of the filling/grinding/brewing process) Done, thanks Emma!
  • Turin DF64

but any and all grinders are welcome; if I get enough footage for a specific one I’ll try to give it its own video, or otherwise it can go into the final “The Grind” track where I cover everything miscellaneous and sundry.

This includes blade/mill grinders, too! And whatever weird random grinders you have hanging around. I just want a nice wide variety.

Thanks!

💬 Re: Building a Feed Reader to Follow Blogs and Websites: Part 1 Notes

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In reply to: Re: Building a Feed Reader to Follow Blogs and Websites: Part 1

Out of curiosity, have you put any thought into adding TicketAuth/bearer token support so that folks can get private subscription content as well? There’s a bunch of security aspects to consider with that but it’s a thing I’d love to see come into a reader.

There’s also a few UX things implied by microsub which I’m not a fan of, personally, and when I get around to finally building Subl (which I’ve only been talking about for as long as I’ve been talking about Publ) I was planning on building it as a standalone thing which could maybe optionally support microsub readers later, but the UX I want to build isn’t cleanly supported by the data model implied by microsub.

(Basically I want to build Feed on Feeds except in Python and with TicketAuth support.)

Settled in Seattle fluffy rambles

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Today I got some last few things taken care of down in White Center and moved my cats back to Seattle. Fiona was very grumpy to be back in the condo without the outdoors. Tyler was pretty weirded out by the change. But now they’re both sleeping peacefully next to me on the couch.

The plumbing in my house is all working, at least, and everything can finally move forward. The contractor believes the project will be done by next Friday. We’ll see.

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Back in Capitol Hill for now fluffy rambles

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Today I decided to call it per yesterday’s rantle and moved (minimally) back to my Capitol Hill condo, since it hadn’t sold yet anyway and there was only like 1.5 weeks left on the listing time. (I have also requested cancellation of the listing, of course, not that there were likely to be any scheduled showings this or next week due to Thanksgiving.)

I loaded up my car with basic necessities for the next week — clothing (namely my last two weeks' worth of dirty laundry), work and personal laptop, a very minimal recording setup, my Apple TV, and my Nintendo Switch, as well as my old cable modem and router. Also an air mattress and sheets and pillows for it. I refilled the cats' water and food dispensers and bade them adieu for another day.

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Current situation fluffy rambles

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So, the bathroom remodel keeps on hitting some pretty bad roadblocks. And I’m not entirely sure what to do next.

Basically, the plumber started a week ago, and has been trying to get the house plumbing working again. But something keeps going wrong, but I have no idea what, because the plumber only speaks Vietnamese. But the short version is that even after over a week and multiple complete re-dos of the plumbing, I still have no running water, and all that the plumber can tell me is that it doesn’t work, but can’t specify what he means by “it” or “work.”

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Headspace fluffy rambles

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I am so tired, y'all.

Driving back and forth between SeaTac and White Center is kind of dismal. Especially when it’s raining heavily. Especially when half an hour after I finish the drive through heavy rain where I’m worried about getting in an accident because I can’t even see the lane markers and everyone else around me is driving like a NASCAR driver with something to prove, the rain completely stops and I feel silly for my lousy timing.

The hotel is very fancy and quite uncomfortable. All of the tables and chairs are at just the wrong height. I can’t get my head into the right space to work on music at all. Nothing feels right.

When I’m at home to go to meetings or to work on house stuff my cats are very clingy and affectionate and they very much miss me and I also miss them.

I’m already sick of eating takeout in SeaTac.

So many people here aren’t wearing masks even though we still have a mask mandate. At the breakfast buffet this morning a young woman and her kid were unmasked and the kid was coughing without covering her mouth, and I worry about whether they coughed on the food I ate.

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Fancypants fluffy rambles

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The insurance company put me up at the SeaTac Marriott, which is way fancier than anything in SeaTac has any right to be. Swanky as heck. Also the room’s decaf is surprisingly good!

I brought my work and studio laptop here so I could maybe get work done without having to reverse-commute if possible, although there’s definitely things I need to go back to the house for (hugging the cats, mostly, and also meeting the contractor, and so on), and of course I’d much rather work on my music in my actual studio with huge screen and proper 88-key keyboard instead of on my tiny portable keyboard and tiny laptop screen. But there’s worse situations to be in right now, I guess.

The insurance company also sprung for the pet fee in case I want to bring my cats here, but that seems like it’d be a disaster. They’re finally getting along with each other and after I left them home alone overnight on Monday they got a lot closer, and it’s also good for Tyler to NOT have me available 24/7. He gets pretty bad separation anxiety even when I go downstairs to the studio or if I sleep with the door closed, and he needs to learn that it’s okay to not have me there sometimes.

Anyway I have up to 9 days here but hopefully I won’t need all of them. If all goes well I’ll have running water again on Monday, and the bathroom should be done soon after. Given the original scope of work was a near-complete gutting of the bathroom, and now the scope is an actually-complete gutting, I can’t imagine what else would possibly go wrong that wouldn’t involve me, like, moving back to the condo for a while.

Remodel mess update fluffy rambles

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Insurance inspector came out today to look at the damage. He said the situation is a bit complicated because part of the damage was due to an ongoing maintenance issue and part of it was due to an emergent issue, and insurance only covers the emergent issue. He thinks that he can at least get me coverage for replacing the sink cabinet and all of the water mitigation, at least, and also since my house is without running water, the insurance company is putting me in a fancy hotel for a week. I’ll still probably be driving back to my house to work, though (as well as making sure my cats are okay), and fortunately I have a port-a-potty and a portable foot-pumped sink for that stuff.

Also, post-leak-dryup it became pretty obvious that the fiberglass in the ceiling wasn’t put there by a previous owner to mark/plug the leak, but was actually pulled down over time by the ongoing leak. So that must have been going for much longer than I realized.

The housing person said I could also take my cats to the hotel with me if I want but that seems like it’d cause more problems than it’d solve.

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Got the disaster out of the way fluffy rambles

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So, my bathroom renovation got delayed a few days (due to supply issues), and then started today.

You know how every home renovation project always has some major disaster, usually towards the end? This time we at least got it out of the way right away: while they were removing the sink cabinet, a pipe burst.

Fortunately nothing got badly soaked, and what got wet has dried off pretty quickly. I don’t think there’s any specific water damage to anything (although that was an extremely close call for my entire recording studio), although only time will tell. The main issue of concern is that my guitars and some of my acoustic treatments were directly below the water blast. The guitars have dried out easily, and the acoustic treatment is easy to replace if it gets moldy (it’s just cheap acoustic foam which I have plenty of).

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Attention all coffee friends! fluffy rambles

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Do you have a coffee grinder? One which could actually be identified by name? Do you have the ability to record video? Want to be featured in an upcoming Sockpuppet video?

For this year’s Novembeat album I’m doing songs inspired by different coffee grinders and their respective techniques, and as part of this I’m also making silly videos of each grinder. But I only have a handful of grinders myself, and good process-forward footage is difficult to come by. So that’s where you possibly come in.

Updates: I’ve been making edits to this post as various questions come in. I should really be tracking them specifically.

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Studio hardware stuff, part 2349872984 fluffy rambles

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My ongoing anxiety regarding recording studio computer stuff has continued. Yesterday while doing day 1 of Novembeat I found that my 2016 MacBook pro is still just like… way too slow to make music on (especially if I stream at the same time). And then I saw that there’s a bunch of deals on 2020 MacBooks happening right now.

I was about to buy a 2020 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD, but then found out that Apple had a deal on refurbished 2020 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD for only a little bit more, and the refurb price is less than the equivalently-equipped MacBook Air’s price. So that’s what I ended up ordering.

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More thoughts on recording studio hardware fluffy rambles

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Now that the new M1 Pro/Max MacBooks are out and are getting real-world reviews, I have a bit more information about what I should consider in terms of computer upgrades.

This particular video is pretty helpful:

In pretty much all of the side-by-side tests, the M1 Pro is only negligibly faster, aside from encoding H.265 video from RED or ProRes sources — none of which I ever do.

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macOS 12 SSD issue update fluffy rambles

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Going through a few rounds of troubleshooting with folks on the macOS community forum as well as Apple tech support regarding the SSD overheat issue has helped me determine the following things:

  • Whatever this problem is, it’s uncommon; nobody else seems to have experienced it
  • The enclosure itself isn’t to blame; it happens on both my Plugable USB 3.1gen2 and on my Sabrent dual-slot Thunderbolt enclosure
  • The overheating is only happening on the Crucial 2TB NVMe stick (that normally lives in the USB enclosure); having just the PNY stick (which lives in the Thunderbolt enclosure) doesn’t overheat, moving the PNY stick to the USB enclosure doesn’t overheat, and the Thunderbolt enclosure only overheats if I have both the PNY and the Crucial stick in it
  • The overheating stops if I unmount the drive but leave it electrically-connected
  • Mounting the drive even under macOS Recovery causes the overheat to occur just as quickly

For now I’ve moved my most critical files from the Crucial stick to my older SATA drive (which isn’t having trouble) so I can continue to work on the things that I normally do on my desktop, and my studio laptop seems to be okay with the PNY+Thunderbolt combination so I don’t think Novembeat is at risk because of that, at least.

This does mean I won’t be able to work on music from my desktop computer in the meantime, and video editing will have to be direct to NAS, which is doable, just not ideal.

Hopefully this all gets sorted out in a macOS update.

Warning about macOS 12.0 Monterey fluffy rambles

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I’m running into a pretty severe problem with my external USB 3.1-connected NVMe drive on macOS 12.0 on my M1 mac; something in the system is causing the drive to get extremely hot (to the point of disconnecting within a few minutes) when there’s no recorded activity going to it, and also while it is connected, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test reports that it’s only capable of around 150MB/sec, which is significantly less than what it usually gets. Which tells me that something in the OS is causing the drive to go under significant load.

I tried disabling Spotlight, both from the GUI and using sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/storage, which made no difference.

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Some thoughts on comments and interaction fluffy rambles

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Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the differences between self-hosted vs. silo spaces. One thing that really stood out to me is that in self-hosted spaces, the tendency is to allow complete control over which comments are visible, and silos almost never allow that, or if they do it’s at best an in-retrospect thing.

For example, most self-hosted blogging systems give you the ability to moderate all comments (as I do), or give easy access to deleting comments which got posted, or any number of mechanisms for curating the community.

But most silo systems don’t give you that access; you might be able to block recurring trolls, or flag a comment for third-party review (usually to no effect), but all posts are set to allow anyone (with access to the post) the ability to post anything at any time, and by default everything gets floated to everyone else.

This came especially to mind today because of this unfortunate video:

I’ve seen so many creators get burned out on what they like doing, because even if 99% of the comments are positive, that 1% really gets under their skin, and they stop creating.

I’ve seen so many creators get burned out on their communities, because even if 99% of it is positive, that 1% really gets under their skin, and they stop interacting with the community, turning it into a toxic cesspool.

I’ve seen so many creators decide to capitulate to the communities and set up a personal SubReddit that they designate other people to moderate, just to keep it contained somewhere else.

I know so many creators who are on the verge of burnout and getting really tired of the dark side of having an audience.

I’m not sure if giving people the ability to require commentary to be opt-in rather than opt-out would solve these problems, but I do know anecdotally that the random snipe-type responses I get from Twitter or Mastodon are way more annoying to me than the comments I opt not to post when submitted to my site. They’re out there and visible and I have to take extra steps to get rid of them, and it’s taken out of my hands as to whether I even can get rid of them.

I don’t think I like how webmention works.

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Studio stasis fluffy rambles

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For now I’m just going to stick with my 2016 MacBook Pro, and I bought a 27" 4K monitor for it to alleviate the display-size issue.

It’s a little slow and a little janky but a lot of my music stuff still doesn’t work right on M1 anyway, and in particular Native Instruments is taking their sweet time to update everything to be M1-compatible. Also, I could theoretically use my PreSonus FireStudio with the hacked driver, although it looks like that’ll probably stop working in macOS 12 and I can’t use it with my ADAT preamp anyway, so the only advantage to it is I could put my Scarlett 18i8 back in my office, which is a pretty low priority now.

(I suppose I could also make an aggregate interface of the FireStudio with the 18i8+ADAT, but I already have 14 functional inputs as it is and I barely ever use more than 5 of them at a time. 22 is definitely overkill.)

If I get desperate for an upgrade I suppose I could get a current 27" iMac but that doesn’t feel particularly necessary right now (and it also feels like a waste since Apple will stop supporting it sooner rather than later; I went through the exact same thing with the PowerMac G5 that I bought literally two weeks before they announced the Intel transition).

I also need to give both Reaper and Bitwig another shot because both of them seem like they’d be able to mostly replace Logic for me at this point, and I’m sick of being wedded to macOS. (But right now is not the time for me to learn a new DAW. Or maybe it’s the perfect time. I dunno.)

Or maybe I should see what the pre-trashcan Mac Pros are going for. The 12-core model would still be a pretty decent upgrade from the 2016 MacBook pro, and also has the advantage of having upgradeable SATA storage, plus PCIe slots that could theoretically take an NVMe adapter. On the minus side, no Thunderbolt 3 (not that I’d need it) and I’d also be stuck on macOS 10.14 without some sketchy patching. But it looks like they’re going for under $400 (shipping included), all the same.

Or there’s always Hackintosh.

But nah I’ll wait, the old MacBook Pro is fine for now.

The unfortunate reality of Apple’s product focus fluffy rambles

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Today’s Apple announcement brought forth the usual advancements that I was looking forward to: faster processors, better GPUs, and so on.

But Apple has this hyperfocus on making The Best Laptops Possible, which is a little puzzling when the entire focus of today’s update was on creative studio uses, especially on music.

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Authl update → login reset fluffy rambles

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I made a change to Authl which more or less necessitated resetting everyone’s login.

I mean, it only really necessitated resetting the logins of folks who sign in via Twitter, but the way Publ authentication works (or at least the way I have it set up on my site) means I can’t reset just an individual session.

Also it didn’t really require a full login reset but it would have been confusing for some folks for some amount of time, so I figured better safe than sorry. “Oops I need to log in again” is a lot less difficult to deal with than “it says I’m logged in, did fluffy remove me from their friends list or something? what did i do wrong :( :( :(”

This also means that all bearer tokens have been reset, so if you were doing something with those you’ll need to generate a new one (either from your profile or via TicketAuth). Of course you automatically get a TicketAuth grant when you sign in anyway, so if you’re using TicketAuth I guess there’s nothing extra you need to do to begin with.

Update: haha I forgot to actually push this entry until like 4 days later oops. well okay have an explanation if you were wondering

Bitforte: A masterclass in scamming fluffy rambles

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Earlier today I got an obvious scam email:

Return-Path: <no-reply@[redacted]>
Subject: Bitcoin Payment
To: Recipients <no-reply@[redacted]>
From: "Mr. Neves N" <no-reply@[redacted]>
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2021 19:10:52 +0900

Hi Rob Hoffman, As requested, we have now deposited 30 BTC which amount to
($1,692,796.80 USD) into your bitcoin portfolio at bitforte.net/signin
 Customer Id: [redacted]
Customer Password: [redacted]

I was curious to see how this scam worked, so I fired up my favorite anonymizing VPN and private browser session and went to town.

UPDATE, March 31, 2022: It looks like these folks have changed their name to tatcoin.net. Same folks, same website, different name. Sorry, but that 30BTC payout sent to you by mistake is not real.

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10-year Anniversary fluffy rambles

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It’s now been 10 years since Chris died. I have now spent 5x as long grieving him, being messed up about him, than I spent with him, and that has also now covered approximately 25% of my life in total.

But he left that much of an impression on me.

Actions matter.

Creative Commons, summarized General Articles

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The Creative Commons initiative has been incredibly transformative for how people make things, and has been a huge boon to content creators the world around.

Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of confusion around what their licenses are and how they work. I see some very common mistakes with using them, both from creators and from users, especially in the game development and YouTube communities.

My hope is to help clear some of these misunderstandings up.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I’m just a content creator who has found it necessary to know more about copyright law. This is also not an exhaustive guide by any means.

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Garbage opinions fluffy rambles

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Today I got a market research survey from the garbage company which wanted to know my opinions about how valued I feel as a customer. One of the questions was a 1-10 scale of whether I’m “disappointed” or “delighted” with the service, and a text form where they wanted details for why I gave the rating I did. I had a lot to say, and I’m posting it here just so that it actually gets read by someone.

Never mind that the only reason I use you is that you have a local monopoly on waste management services, I am continually frustrated by how your workers will often skip my home, or will knock over the trash can and then not pick it back up or empty it out. Also, it would be great if you could institute a system where it’s paid by weight rather than container size; my garbage output varies widely from week to week and my bins are usually just half-full, but with just enough trash that going to the lower tier size wouldn’t be sufficient. Having it be based on actual weight of pickup would be a lot more fair.

It’d also be great if you’d partner with Styro Recycle to offer styrofoam recycling; right now my choices are either to drive to Kent (which is wasteful) or to put styrofoam in the trash (which is wasteful). In a perfect world things wouldn’t be packaged in styrofoam to begin with but that’s not something I, as a consumer, have control over.

My (current) coffee station Coffee Talk

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IMG_3534.jpeg

For the last few months (since mid-July) I’ve been going through a lot of upgrades and troubleshooting on my coffee setup, especially as far as espresso is involved. I’m finally at the point where I’m happy with both the equipment and technique I have… or at least I think I am.

Here are the products I currently use, and the techniques I’ve found to get the most out of them. As usual, I have affiliate links for many of the products on display, but feel free to search for the best deal or the vendors you prefer.

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ESE pod review: Caffe Pompeii Circe 100% Arabica Coffee Talk

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The Caffe Pompeii Circe (which is labeled as “Gusto” on the pod envelope) is one of the pods that Podhead sent me as a sample. Being fully-caffeinated I was hesitant to drink it (as caffeine hecks me up something fierce), so for the sake of this review I only did a single 16g shot.

This time I used my standard portafilter, so I don’t know whether there was channeling. However, the resulting coffee tasted smooth and well-balanced, and I definitely recommend this one wholeheartedly if you want an ESE pod to brew and don’t have any reason to avoid caffeine.

An hour later I had jitters and a panic attack, as expected. Oh well.

Gusto Decaf Polifemo Coffee Talk

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When I ordered a bunch of ESE pods for this ongoing ESE pod experiment, PODhead sent me a few samples of a few other pods. This is one of them. Oddly, I couldn’t find this particular one anywhere on their website, although a websearch turned it up, so it’s probably just something weird about their site navigation.

Also, given some of the extraneous slug text on the link, I worry about whether the links will remain active in the long term as their stock changes. If anyone from PODhead wants to let me know about what’s going on with that, it’d be greatly appreciated!

Anyway, they only gave me two pods, so I can only do a two-shot evaluation. For my first shot I went with a lungo, which I managed to get exactly 21g out. Yay me! The shot pulled cleanly and there was no channeling. Some slight bitter notes, maybe a little bit burned, but nothing unpleasant. Good texture. Left behind some sweet notes on my palate.

For my second shot I opted to go with a standard shot, and got 15g out. Just like with the Cremissimo arabica decaf I paradoxically got something more bitter and overextracted. So, this stuff definitely wants a shot on the longer side. It was still decently drinkable though.

This seems like a decent starter espresso for someone who just wants something simple and no-nonsense, and is somewhat forgiving to overextraction. Someone who doesn’t care about the fiddly details of espresso, or extraction ratios or channeling or texture, someone who has never heard of WDT or calibrated tamping or puck prep or any of the debates about 3 bar vs. 9 bar vs. 15 bar.

I used to be like that.

Sometimes I miss those days.

This coffee is fine.

Cremissimo arabica decaf Coffee Talk

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The fourth ESE pod up for review is the decaf arabica espresso by Cremissimo.

Upon opening, the pod smells like… pretty standard coffee, really. The puck is good and firm, and feels well-compacted. Pods are 7g.

For the first shot I did 24g out (3.4:1, for a longer-than-usual lungo). The resulting coffee was pretty smooth, with a slightly bitter finish and some sweet notes. There wasn’t anything about the flavor which particularly grabbed me; it tasted like a pretty ordinary espresso shot. Which, if we’re being honest, is a good thing. As usual I used the bottomless portafilter, and I didn’t see any channeling take place.

Shot 2 I only took to 14 grams, and paradoxically this was much more bitter than the first one. It tasted like the sort of espresso you’d get at a major coffee chain, or one of those mall kiosks.

And, finally, I did a 125g/4.4oz “shotover,” which took over 2 minutes to pull. It tasted like gas station coffee.

So, overall I would not recommend it. It seems to be good for lungo shots and nothing else, and even then, I’ve had better.

Procrastursive Neologism

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Being resursively procrastinatory; for example, being distracted from work by tidying up the basement, from which one is distracted by chatting online, from which one is distracted by writing up a definition for “procrastursive”

An open letter to the .us domain registrar fluffy rambles

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I attempted to send this message to the .us registrar’s contact form but they kept on throwing up unreasonable, hidden barriers; it required a full first name that’s at least four letters long (sucks to have a name like “Jay” I guess) and “must only contain alphabets” (i.e. no punctuation or spaces, sucks for anyone with apostrophes) and the text input must be under 500 characters, with no indication of how many characters you’ve written.

So, I’ve submitted a very edited-down version, but am reproducing my letter in full here:

Hi, I have a number of domain names registered under several different TLDs. Most of them allow anonymous proxy registrations, with the sole exception of .us.

The lack of proxy registration causes me to get quite a lot of unsolicited calls, violations to my privacy, and attempted scams from bad actors who are all making use of the WHOIS database.

When will .us allow anonymous/proxy registrations, as is standard for pretty much every other TLD?

The current policy is especially problematic for marginalized people who are subject to protracted abuse, harassment, and threats of violence, and this makes .us unsafe for use for all but the most privileged of people.

I absolutely implore you to revisit this regressive, unfair, and downright dangerous policy that does nothing to actually improve the supposed security of the .us registration database.

ESE pod review: Bristot decaffeinato Coffee Talk

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The next ESE pod on my agenda is Bristot decaffeinato.

Opening the packet released a pleasantly fruity aroma.

For my first shot, I opted to use the factory portafilter (which meant not being able to directly measure the shot output), and my resulting shot was around 20g. The shot pulled quite slowly and I was worried that it would be bitter and overextracted, but the flavor was actually rich and well-rounded, and a bit nutty and sweet. Really nice crema on it as well.

To get a better comparison against the other pods so far, I pulled a second shot using the bottomless portafilter, and measured it to a 20.5g extraction, for a ratio of just under 3:1. From this I saw a little bit of channeling, a little more than the Illy pod, way less than the Arabica Express. This time the shot tasted just a little bit more bitter.

I think the main practicality problem with ESE pods is that they’re all 7-8g, so if you want a standard 2:1 ratio you’re getting only a tiny amount of espresso out. This is especially troublesome when drinking decaf, which is all about the flavor, and regardless it’s much more satisfying to have a larger shot, but even a 3:1 lungo is ridiculously small. Maybe this is a mismatch between my American sensibilities and what Italians want out of their coffee.

Or maybe I should be a bit more daring and try brewing at a higher ratio to see what comes out.

So that’s what I did:

Espresso cup sitting on a scale showing a weight of 35.6g

I was pretty worried about how this might taste. The shot looked pretty darn watery towards the end, and the shot continued to pull quite slowly.

I don’t know if it’s just that my taste buds are no good because this was my third shot tasted in a row, but… it’s fine. Tastes almost just like the first two. The texture is a little thinner, there’s a little bit more bitterness, and a bit less sweetness, but… it’s fine.

Maybe this stuff is more forgiving than I thought.

Maybe it’s just coffee and I shouldn’t get so worked up about it.

ESE pod reviews: Illy decaf, Arabica Express Coffee Talk

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Recently I’ve been infatuated with espresso-type brewing, and have been on a quixotic quest to get the perfect decaf shot. In doing so, I bought a bottomless portafilter for my Gaggia Classic Pro, which very quickly revealed that the biggest problem in my brewing is that my Baratza Encore simply isn’t up to the task, even with the modifications I made to it; all of my shots were channeling and making a mess, regardless of grind size or tamp pressure. The only fix was to grind ultra-fine and tamp ultra-hard, and this led to an overly-slow, over-extracted shot.

As part of my process that led to this decision, I bought some ESE pods in order to have a baseline brewing experience. While ESE pods aren’t ideal for my taste in espresso (I prefer longer shots from a large dose, on the order of 20 in, 40 out) and also don’t satisfy my whole “espresso is an experiment in tweaking and fussiness” impulses, the experience was good enough that I decided to see if ESE Pods on their own were worthwhile.

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9/11+20 fluffy rambles

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You know what I miss about the pre-9/11 days?

People being able to go to the gate to greet the traveler as they arrived.

It was always so nice to welcome people, or be welcomed. After 9/11 that little ritual went away, because now only travelers themselves were allowed beyond the security checkpoint, and nobody wanted to wait for their loved ones outside of the security checkpoint, so that very quickly made way to people waiting in the loading zone, which then turned into waiting in the cellphone lot, trying to make the whole greet-and-pick-up process as soullessly efficient as possible.

There’s a bunch of other stuff that changed so much that people are talking about, but this is a thing that I haven’t seen anyone else mention. Just this little bit of humanity that was part of the travel experience.

Then again, everything we’ve lost comes down to little bits of humanity, in the end.

Studio and cat updates fluffy rambles

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Studio

My basement studio setup is coming along slowly but surely. I ended up buying a used ADAT preamp to expand my existing audio interface (rather than buying a new interface/patchbay/etc.) and it mostly works great, although I’m going to see if I can hack an S/PDIF decoder into a word clock source for it so that the 18i8 can be master (which makes a couple of things easier to deal with).

For now I’m using my old MacBook as the recording computer. It only has a 500GB drive, though, and I couldn’t find the power adapter for my external HDD enclosure, so I decided to try just running Native Instruments off of my NAS over gigabit Ethernet. Nearly every install failed with a nonsensical “malformed XML document” error, which turns out to be a known issue with attempting to install to a NAS. Oh well. Hopefully that PSU turns up soon. I’m sure it’s in the bottom of whichever box I end up unpacking last.

(The PSU isn’t anything particularly exotic in principle, just a 12V 2A center-positive wallwart, but for some reason all the 12V center-positive wallwarts I can find can’t accommodate its extra-thick center pin.)

But anyway, today I finally got to the point where I could hook up my piano, and so I played piano for the first time since April, which felt nice. I can’t believe I let it be this long. I guess I really thought the backyard shed studio would go a lot more quickly!

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Indieweb vs. Fediverse fluffy rambles

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Indieweb

You get someone’s profile URL, example.com/bob. You put that URL into a browser, and it shows you a human-readable profile which also contains machine-parseable data. You add the URL to your feed reader, and it subscribes to their posts with full attribution. The content is presented in your feed reader in a freeform way which allows a high degree of expressiveness, and it’s easy to go to the original post in case there’s some missing nuance or visual context.

All subsequent interactions are either directly between you and the person in question, or are webmentions which only get seen by your direct subscribers if you put them in your public feed.

Fediverse

You get someone’s address, @bob@example.com. You put that into your web browser, and you get a warning that says, “You are about to log in to the site ‘example.com’ with the username ‘%40bob’, but the website does not require authentication. This may be an attempt to trick you. Is ‘example.com’ the site you want to visit?” You back out of the error message and try to manually reformat the address. example.com/bob? 404. Maybe it’s example.com/@bob? That doesn’t work either. You read a tutorial on Webfinger addresses and learn that you can load their “resource profile” by going to example.com/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:bob@example.com. So you put that into your web browser, which then downloads a blob of JSON text. Buried in it is the URL example.com/user/bob. Finally, progress.

Now to follow them. You try putting the user address into your feed reader. Error. You try putting the profile URL into your feed reader. Error. You see a “Follow bob” button. It brings up a “remote follow” page which requires you to put in your own Fediverse username. You think you have a Mastodon account, so you try putting that in. It starts to initiate a weird three-way handshake, but fails.

You go back to your Mastodon instance and try searching on @bob@example.com. Nothing comes up. You try to figure out why. No users from example.com appear. You search through both your instance’s and example.com’s blocklists, which are hidden deep in their respective “about this instance” pages. It turns out that five years ago one admin on one server said something mean to an admin on a completely different server and that led to a widespread level of discourse that resulted in a bunch of instances blocking each other, and others joining in solidarity.

Finally you dig up an Atom feed for the user via finding a HOWTO that someone wrote seven years ago. The feed shows no posts, because the instance admin decided to disable Atom because it allowed blocked people to still follow the person who blocked them and they don’t understand Internet privacy. But it turns out it wouldn’t have mattered because this particular instance is set up so that the only way that posts appear on other peoples' timelines is by push notification.

You give up and get an account on their instance so that you can participate in the conversation. Now you have another instance to check all the time. 90% of your notifications are random spambots following you. The other 10% are you either getting tagged into random conversations by mistake, or some random person on another instance replying to something you said totally out of context and attacking you for their interpretation of a thing that had nothing to do with anything you were talking about. They get downright abusive, so you report the user. It turns out that the abusive user is also one of the admins of that instance so the report just goes to them anyway. They start posting anime memes about you. Your blocklist grows exponentially.

Finally you find some thoughtful long-form content. All of the posts are displayed in the form of a block of unformatted text followed by up to four badly-cropped images; no images can be inline, and even basic text options like bold and italics are unavailable, and web links either only appear as bare URLs, or aren’t obviously links because your instance’s stylesheet removes all formatting from them. You try to see a post in its original context, and it takes you to your instance’s view of their profile, which looks the same. You finally figure out that you can click on the date and that shows you the post on their public timeline. It looks the same, except now there’s no widget to let you automatically unfurl every CWed post in the thread for some reason like there was on your instance’s local view. But the instance’s local view is missing the first half of the thread because it happened before you subscribed to them.

One month later your timeline gets flooded with random unordered posts from 3 years ago because some forgotten instance’s Sidekiq queue suddenly got unjammed.

Finally setting up a recording space fluffy rambles

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I’ve been trying to make music in my small second bedroom/office, but it’s ridiculously constraining in here, and kind of frustrating. My long-term plan is to build a separate studio building in the back yard, but that’s slow-going and there’s a lot of barriers to it, and in the meantime, ever since I upgraded my house’s furnace to a ductless minisplit system, my basement actually seems to have enough space for my recording setup, so I’ve been looking into moving it down there.

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Setting up Postfix + Mailgun for multiple outgoing domains fluffy rambles

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For quite some time I’ve been having trouble with Gmail categorically classifying most of my outgoing mail as spam purely on the basis of my SMTP host being on a Linode VPS. No matter how much care and feeding went into my SPF+DKIM configuration, the Almighty Google would just arbitrarily decide that no, my email is not to be trusted after all. (This is pretty much the biggest reason why email is bad.)

After a brief kvetch about this with David, he pointed me at Mailgun, an enterprise-level SMTP relay (among other things). I’d looked at SMTP relays in the past but most of them are ridiculously expensive, but Mailgun has one very compelling feature:

It costs 80 cents per 1000 outgoing emails.

I send about 50 emails per month, so that means Mailgun will cost me a whopping… 4 cents per month.

I think I can afford that.

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Songs of Substance preorders live fluffy rambles

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Every few years I’ve tried to do an album of my Song Fight! back catalog stuff. In 2009 I released foodsexsleep, in 2011 it was Love and Monsters, and in 2014 was Radio Ready. And then… nothing, for a while.

Many of my albums since then have had one or two Song Fight! songs on it (for example, 2015’s Refactor had two Song Fight! songs on it and one Circle of Titles, and a couple of Novembeat albums picked up some Song Fight! songs that I did as part of Novembeat), but due to a combination of not doing as much for Song Fight! anymore and rethinking a lot about how I made music, I kept on putting off another Song Fight!-heavy album.

Anyway, lately I’ve been getting the itch again, and my most recent entry finally sparked me enough to work on releasing an album while the fire is hot. Plus, I’d been meaning to properly release my covers of “Space Cadet” by Brother Machine and “A Problem of Perspective” by King Arthur for ages, and Charles (of King Arthur) had a recent health scare, so I wanted to release this while he still had a chance to appreciate it!

Ever since Good Luck Charm I’ve known that this album was going to be called Songs of Substance. Preorders are open now, and I hope to have the album ready for purchase by October 1.

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Song Fight! Live fight fluffy rambles

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Hey folks, the Song Fight! Live livefight is happening tonight (just 3 hours after this entry goes live) and I’m going to have a song and video in it. I would greatly appreciate if folks would watch the live stream and vote for the songs they like, in real time! (And hopefully my song will be one of them. As usual I entered as Sockpuppet.)

UPDATE: The livestream link got janked, see the new one above!

Deactivated my Nextdoor again fluffy rambles

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My second experiment with trying out Nextdoor has come to an end, after I gave it an even fairer shot than last time.

I won’t go into the details of what happened because I really don’t want to even think about it, but here’s my “suggestions for improving the site” on my deactivation form:

This place sucks and every time I try it again, it turns out to be irredeemable. Any technical fix I can think of is minor compared to the deep-seated social issues which come about from everything about both the site structure and the moderation model, and it doesn’t help that once you become the focus of toxicity there is no way to escape it.

At the very least, hiding notifications about a post should also hide notifications about people replying to your comments on that post or the like.

All I was doing was letting folks know that a racist word is racist, and I’ve had an unending barrage of people spewing hatred and ire at me for it. I muted the worst offenders but there’s just so, so many.

This feeds into my greater disdain for modern social networking, and every time something like this happens (as well as an ongoing situation on Mastodon that is, again, something I don’t want to really get into right now) all I can say is: I miss blogs, and if you want to follow me, the best way is with a feed reader.

Song Fight! Apart and Together 2021 fluffy rambles

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In a few hours will be the first night of Song Fight!’s annual live show (done not-quite-live again this year, thanks delta variant). Please give it a watch!

My individual set will be posted to the music section after the show. But watch everyone’s stuff and also join in on the chat. It’s a good time.

Dangit Fiona fluffy rambles

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When I adopted Fiona, Werner was grumpy about it but Fiona was so optimistic that she won Werner over pretty quickly.

Now that I’ve adopted Tyler, Fiona is being grumpy and hostile, while Tyler is trying to be optimistic about making friends. It’s such a weird change in attitude from a cat who previously seemed to be friendly and happy about others.

I mean I know I’m being overly-optimistic here. She’s mostly only seen a single other cat for the last 9 years, and her best friend died 5 days ago. Change is hard. She might miss Werner, and I definitely miss Werner. I can’t help but feel like this was a mistake to readopt so quickly, but on the other hand, Fiona was definitely feeling lonely being the only cat around (and she’s been getting frustrated with how Werner hasn’t wanted to play for the last year or so anyway), and it’s not like she’d be likely to get any friendlier to new cats as time passed with her being the only cat around.

I’m definitely sticking with this decision, even if I’m feeling kind of awful about making it. But I also felt awful about putting Werner through stress when I adopted Fiona (right after the stress of moving to Seattle!), and I also felt awful about “replacing Chris” so quickly and impulsively when I adopted Werner.

Tyler hasn’t even been here for 12 hours yet, and it always takes time for anyone to adjust to change. I’m optimistic that they’ll be friends soon, even if not right away.

I remember it took a month or two for Toby to warm up to Shooby, and then they were the best of friends. Every cat pair has a different dynamic which emerges on its own timeline.

I just want Fiona to be happy, even if that means she’s very upset for the next little while.

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Hello, Tyler! fluffy rambles

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It hasn’t even been a week since Werner died, but Fiona was clearly in need of another friend, and I figured that I should get her one while she still had a chance of retaining her mothering instinct which made her get along so well with Werner.

So, I went to the Burien animal shelter and asked to see a couple of cats, Tyler and Wasabi, and explained the situation. The person there said Tyler would almost certainly be a perfect choice while Wasabi would have posed some problems. I met them both, and Tyler immediately got extremely affectionate and friendly to me, while Wasabi was a bit more murdery.

Anyway, right now Fiona is upset that there’s another cat in the house, but not so upset as to actually fight him. She’s hissing at him a bunch and occasionally growling, while Tyler is behaving the same to her as she did to Werner. It’s an interesting dynamic. (And, of course, Tyler is the same age that Fiona was, and Fiona’s the same age that Werner was.)

I expect it’ll be a few days before things settle down, but hopefully they will without too much bloodshed. And hey, they’re already hanging out under the bed together. Ish.

Meanwhile, I need to remind myself that I’m not replacing Werner, I’m just continuing the chain of affection.

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Planet Planet fluffy rambles

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On IndieWeb chat, a question recently came up, namely the origin of the term “planet” when it comes to a news-aggregating site. I was a little sad to see that nobody else in the chat remembered!

Back in the day, there was a website, Planet Quake, which was a hand-curated collection of all the news about the game Quake. This led to a bunch of other gaming-related “planet” sites (such as Planet Dreamcast), and then the company behind it, CriticalMass Communications, eventually got into other areas of reporting. Eventually they sold to GameSpy, which in turn eventually got bought out by IGN1.

At some point, a couple of other sites emerged with the name “planet” as what I believe was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the “planet” gaming sites. Planet Debian is the first one I remember seeing but I have no idea if it was the first to exist. Many of these sites were built using auto-aggregation from the then-new RSS protocol. This joke ended up spreading pretty far and wide and at one point there was even a “planet planet” to keep track of all the planets2 (although it seems to have gone down sometime in 2017).

A fun side note, Something Awful was originally a spinoff of Planet Quake; at the time Lowtax claimed it was because of a “falling out” but that may have been an attempt at satire. In retrospect, he might have named it “Planet Awful!”

Another day fluffy rambles

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People keep on reaching out to me about Werner, which I greatly appreciate. I feel like I had gotten most of my grieving out of my system during the two months leading up to his death, though. Ever since I buried him yesterday I’ve felt, for the most part, fine. A certain clarity, a fog has lifted, and all that. I think my worry about Werner had been weighing me down greatly and now that he’s resting forever and at peace, everything is fine. Or at least better.

I’m still sad about his absence, and when I think about his final moments or look at any of the mementos I tear up a bit. But they’re mostly tears of joy, I think.

Fiona’s also gotten a lot happier too. I think she was spending a lot of time worrying about him and trying to take care of him, and it was wearing on her. Today she was extremely cuddly and affectionate with me for the first time since… well, since Werner got sick, I think. And she had a lot more energy for playing than in recent memory, too.

Today I stopped by his little grave and said some words to him, and Fiona came over too and sniffed a bit and rolled around. I think she can maybe smell him in there. Of course I’m going to visit him every day or so in order to water the hydrangeas, and I’ll probably be saying hi to him each time for a while, but as with all things that’ll probably fade. But I had put a Werner pin on the fence behind him, just a little reminder of him to see each time, at least until a raccoon steals it for being too shiny.

(Okay, thinking about visiting him makes me cry too.)

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Werner, 2021/08/06 fluffy rambles

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It’s been a few days:

  • Hurt: 5; he doesn’t seem to be in pain, but his belly’s gotten extremely distended making it hard for him to find a comfortable position, and his breathing’s a bit shallow
  • Hunger: 8; still a hungry little man, still excited to steal my food in particular
  • Hydration: 6; he doesn’t seem to be drinking as much now, and his eyes are constantly watery
  • Hygiene: 3; his poop has turned reddish/coppery and smells awful, he doesn’t bother to clean himself and doesn’t let Fiona clean him either
  • Happiness: 2; he’s still interested in food, he still purrs when petted, but he’s basically checked out
  • Mobility: 3; stumbling, he’s still peeing in the box but just poops wherever
  • More good days than bad: 3; he tires out quickly and just falls over where he stands, and he’s had a couple of minor seizures
  • Total: 30; according to this, it’s time.

I’m not ready to let him go.

And more importantly, I don’t want to drive him to the vet. I don’t want to put him through that.

He still is passionate about eating and he seems to get a lot of pleasure from it. Is that worth keeping him around for though?

I’m hoping he dies peacefully in his sleep. I hope he isn’t in pain. I hope it comes quickly for him.

The in-home euthanasia services cost $400. Maybe it’s worth it.

Health updates, mine and cat’s fluffy rambles

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fluffy’s health

My new doctor has already proven himself to be way, way better than my last doctor. He’s really diving into my records and gathering insight to confirm my suspicion of hEDS. Meanwhile he’s put me on muscle relaxants “as needed” and I was taking them a couple hours before bed for a few days and started to feel a lot better. But I haven’t been taking them for the past few days, and I’m feeling worse. Go figure. So, muscle tension is definitely a factor, which I think goes along with hEDS? Like, reducing my muscle tension gives my shitty connective tissue a better chance to actually heal.

I also finally got an appointment with a new dentist. It’s towards the end of September (I really should have gotten on this sooner, as I’m due for a cleaning in, like, a week) but I’m really optimistic about the new dentist; her intake form is incredibly inclusive regarding gender stuff (with an open-ended selection for pronouns, and gender checkboxes that include non-binary!) and neurodivergent things (questions about a whole bunch of dentist-specific anxiety triggers to avoid, whether a blanket or weighted vest helps, whether it’s okay to be lectured about dental health, etc.). Also, she’s a PoC. I’ve never had a dentist who wasn’t a white dude before, and maybe that explains why it’s always felt like dentists don’t care about privilege or diversity or, y'know, taking care to make people feel comfortable.

Werner’s health

Little dude is definitely slipping away more and more each day. By the rubric he’s probably past the point where I should consider euthanasia, but he doesn’t seem to be in pain and he’s enjoying pets/skritches/sitting with me/eating (especially stealing my food) so for now I’m going to just let it ride.

If he starts expressing pain I’ll have to make a tough choice, but for now he’s basically just getting progressively drunker and sleepier all the time (except when food’s involved). I really hope he just drifts off one time and never wakes up (although every time I check up on him he ends up waking up and gets excited about the prospect of food).

He’s having trouble staying steady while standing or walking, and Fiona’s started to interpret this as him being a lost kitten. She tries to pick him up by the scruff, even though he’s nearly as big as her, and he has none of it. So Fiona gets pretty confused by this.

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A measure of Werner fluffy rambles

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It’s that time again:

  • Hurt: 4; when he’s lying down his breathing is pretty shallow. He still isn’t expressing pain but he’s definitely disliking being picked up anymore. I’ve been managing his pain with CBD oil.
  • Hunger: 6; he’s not quite so voracious right now. But that could also be because of how warm it is. Also the CBD oil.
  • Hydration: 8; he’s still an incredibly thirsty boy.
  • Hygiene: 7; he’s actuall pooping? in the box?? on his own???
  • Happiness: 3; he seems pretty down in the dumps most of the time.
  • Mobility: 3; still stumbling and seems off-balance. But he’s still able to jump up on the couch or bed when he wants skritches.
  • More good days than bad: 6; he’s still trucking along.
  • Total: 37; this is, um. Really close to the rubric’s cutoff.

Night Court has a transphobia problem fluffy rambles

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I have fond memories of the show Night Court growing up. In particular, I have a fondness for the episode “Best of Friends”, which I’d remembered being a surprisingly progressive episode about trans issues.

I have been rewatching the entire series from the beginning, for the first time since the series ended in 1992, and “Best of Friends” was in fact surprisingly progressive for the era. It still had problems, though; it put the burden on the trans woman for having hurt Dan’s feelings, rather than on anyone else for not respecting her, and her new husband was seen as some sort of freak for daring to support her. But in the end, Dan more or less comes around and realizes that Charlene has done what’s right for her.

But oof, there is so much unnecessary, downright mean transphobia in the rest of the show. For example, in the episode “Hurricane,” there’s a few jokes about a baby being “transsexual” due to a miscommunication (which also involved Brent Spiner’s bumpkin character), there’s a common undercurrent of perpetrators wearing dresses for the sake of man-in-a-dress jokes, there’s some ridiculous gender-essentialism on display in “Bull Gets A Kid,” and in the episode “Rabid,” there’s a gag in which two Swedish women (of course) turn out that they “used to be men,” which they feel compelled to disclose in response to Dan saying he might have rabies — and them being transsexual is treated as far, far worse than said disease.

As a kid I remember a bunch of later-episode jokes about big burly men wailing that they are a “woman trapped in a man’s body” but I’d always chalked that up to 1990s edgelord humor, during a decade when every other episode of a sitcom would involve some joke about a woman being “really a man” or just generally being shitty. But no, this show ended up having it all the way throughout its entire run.

Sometimes I wish I could get the ear of the writers and producers of TV in this era and see how they feel about how they treated gender-diverse people.

And of course it’s not just the transphobia. In the first couple of seasons, this show is generally pretty gentle, and optimistic, and treats quirky people as the wonderful diversity of life in New York, but as time goes on, the humor just gets meaner and meaner. And even Harry Stone, perpetual boyscout and optimistic truth-and-beauty-seeker, joins in on the punching-down.

I’m about halfway done with the show, but I’m not sure if I want to finish it.

And just as I was writing this, the episode “Caught Red Handed,” which I was already not looking forward to due to some well-remembered blatant hypocrisy regarding sexual harassment, is making fun of feminism, with Christine going on a feminist rant, and then she gets pulled out of it — by a trans woman agreeing with her.

Some recollections of working in the games industry fluffy rambles

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From 2004 to 2005 I worked at a new Ubisoft studio. Technically it was “Guillemot Entertainment” at the time (before it was renamed to Longtail Studios, and then later moved to Halifax and became Ubisoft Halifax), but it was basically Ubisoft; we used Ubisoft corporate letterhead, our QA and publishing went through Ubisoft, our paychecks came from Ubisoft, and so on. And, most importantly, our studio head was Gérard Guillemot, one of the Guillemot brothers. Notably, Yves runs Ubisoft as a whole, and Michel ran Gameloft, which was (at the time) Ubisoft’s foray into mobile gaming.

Because it’s relevant to the current discussion around the games industry and its rampant toxicity, I have a few stories to share.

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Werner status for 7/27 fluffy rambles

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Again with the PetMD quality of life scale:

  • Hurt: 4; breathing is still a bit shallow, and he’s getting pretty uncomfortable with just lying down on things without propping his front half up.
  • Hunger: 10; holy heck this dude is a hungry little dude.
  • Hydration: 7; still drinking plenty of water, but feeling a bit dehydrated.
  • Hygiene: 5; he’s randomized where he decides to dump his load, but otherwise unchanged.
  • Happiness: 3; he seems pretty checked-out lately, but he still wants to spend time with me and purrs when being petted.
  • Mobility: 3; he’s slowed down further and stumbles a lot more. I think he’s mostly really off-balance because of his swollen liver.
  • More good days than bad: 7; he still seems to be doing okay overall.
  • Total: 39

Guess I should start making preparations.

A decaf coffee rant Coffee Talk

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Why do so many roasters seem to think that decaf coffee isn’t worth doing a good job on? The whole reason people drink decaf is because they like the flavor of coffee, but don’t want (or can’t have) the caffeine. So you’d think that there’d be a lot more care taken on making decaf that tastes good!

Of all the roasters in Seattle I’ve only seen two that give a crap about making decaf at all good: Vivace and Zoka. And even then, both of them provide a wide variety of caffeinated roasts, and only a handful of decaf roasts. Portland’s Stumptown used to be a good choice, but their decaf quality has gone way downhill ever since Peet’s bought them out.

I suppose I should give Vita another try now that they’re under new ownership, but I’m not terribly optimistic about that.

But anyway. There’s this weird notion that to truly appreciate espresso you need to also be Very Into Caffeine. Seems like a bunch of shitty machismo to me.

Werner status for 9/22 fluffy rambles

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As usual, rated on the PetMD quality of life scale:

  • Hurt: 5; he seems to be breathing somewhat shallowly, and he seems to have trouble finding a comfortable position to lie in, probably due to enlarged liver.
  • Hunger: 9; He’s still eating a lot and happy to enjoy food.
  • Hydration: 8; Still drinking plenty of water throughout the day.
  • Hygiene: 5; still peeing in the box, still pooping on the floor (now in my bedroom).
  • Happiness: 4; loves to spend time with me, enjoys being pet, but has no interest in toys or catnip.
  • Mobility: 4; he’s moving slowly, and stumbles while doing it. But he has no trouble getting on or off the couch or bed. And as stated, he’s still able to get into the litter box just fine.
  • More good days than bad: 7; he’s been pretty affectionate for the last few days.
  • Total: 42

Various updates fluffy rambles

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fluffy health

So, I had a very bad experience with my doctor with this latest chronic pain flare (and the short-term disability leave situation), and with encouragement from my therapist I am switching to a different doctor. The doctor I’m switching to specializes in LGBT healthcare (and apparently 10% of his patients are trans) and also has a specific interest in treating chronic conditions, which is what I need.

I’ve also gone back to my self-determined physical therapy regimen. You know, the one that my GP and the pain doc and physical therapist she referred me to all think will cause more injury, even though it’s always helped me in the past. So far it feels like I’m actually making progress on recovery.

Said regimen:

  • Frequent powerball sessions
  • Upper-body stretching and partial chin-ups using a chin-up bar
  • Playing DDR (okay I haven’t resumed that yet but I’ll probably be starting that again soon, and I’ll be streaming it when I do)

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Current goings-on fluffy rambles

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Still on disability leave, and still in considerable pain. I’m trying not to work too hard on things, but it’s hard not to do things.

For example, I worked on a song with my friends Ken and Huan-Hua for this week’s Song Fight!; we entered the “We Did Everything We Could” fight under the band name Richard Donner Party. It was a fun song to make. Fortunately I didn’t have to even so much as look at a guitar. Most of my work was vocals, light keyboard work, and editing.

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I am not having a great day fluffy rambles

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I got woken up at 7 AM by an onslaught of opportunistic vulture realtors trying to get my attention because my condo listing had expired, and it only went downhill from there.

There’s this hideous practice where if a housing listing expires or is pulled from the market, realtors go out of their way to try to get in touch with the owner with the hopes that they will be the person that the owner switches to. and they’re relentless and fucking entitled and have all sorts of clueless feedback for why my listing isn’t doing well and why I should dump my realtor and go with them, and they don’t care about my explanations about the actual problems and respond even more shittily if you ask them to stop or tell them why calling me at SEVEN IN THE MORNING is not appropriate (but of course they have so many reasons why it’s totally okay and even expected and why it’s justified or even my fault why they’re even contacting me?!), and at one point some of them were even calling my mom with the hopes that she’d be able to help out, somehow.

I don’t even know how they got her number, probably looking her up in the phone book by last name or something. She’s in New Mexico, and has nothing to do with my property.

So my mom’s (rightfully) freaking out to me about all the calls she’s getting too, and I tell her it’s totally fine to just tell them to fuck off, and then apparently some of them started calling my sister too? Which makes even less sense, she doesn’t even have the same last name as me anymore.

In the meantime, my realtor’s working on trying to get the listing back up and that takes way too long because the MLS is slow to respond and meanwhile I’m still having this gigantic fibro flare which the stress is NOT HELPING WITH, go figure. But she gets the listing updated and the calls stop. Whew.

After all that settled down I took a nap because this is already too much for me and I can’t even.

Then half an hour ago I woke up to find that Werner pooped in the bedroom, because he’s senile and has forgotten how the litter box works. Fine. I work on cleaning it up. Just after I’m finishing with that, he goes back into the bedroom and poops again, this time diarrhea. So I start cleaning that up. Then as I’m getting my carpet cleaner ready he goes into the living room and DIARRHEA POOPS AGAIN.

so yeah I’m not having a great day

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Short-term disability leave fluffy rambles

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Over the past couple weeks my pain has been flaring up again, driven especially by work stress. A few days ago I hit a breaking point and realized that this is something I need to actually take short-term disability leave for.

Fortunately, Moz has an extremely generous disability leave program, and management would much rather someone take it if necessary. So, for now I’m off from work until August, and we’ll see where things go from there.

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Werner update fluffy rambles

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After he’d finished his course of antibiotics and antacid, he was doing pretty well. But today he’s started having bile vomit again, and he seems to be losing weight again as well. I think I also caught him drooling a little. It’s all very mild right now, but during the last scare it also started out pretty mild until it suddenly wasn’t.

He doesn’t seem to be in pain, at least, but he might be on the way out after all.

One funny thing is that he’s got no interest in dry cat food at all anymore (he’s probably finding it too hard to chew what with his horrible teeth) but he’s become extremely interested in everything I’m eating… salads, macaroni and cheese, sandwiches, pretzels, that sort of thing. I’ll give him little tidbits of the stuff he’s curious about, which at least makes him really happy, even if it’s probably not very good for him. But it brings him some amount of joy and that’s what’s important.

4th of July barbecue? fluffy rambles

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So hey, even though my birthday party got rained out, a bunch of people came and it was a good time. I suspect that an even better time will be had when it’s sunny. Anyone in (or able to get to) the Seattle area interested in having a barbecue at my place on the 4th?

Let me know in the comments!

Private, friends-only, IndieWeb stuff fluffy rambles

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Yesterday I participated in the IndieWeb sensitive data pop-up, or at least the first half of it (I had to disappear for my refrigerator delivery). It was really great to have some further discussion about what people want out of this stuff and how we’re all going to agree to get it.

Authentication stuff

One of the biggest pain points that keeps on coming up is there being no support for people to be able to get private posts without having to log in or be notified about them in side channels. Lots of people are doing things like making pages with unguessable URLs and then doing side-channel notification, but that’s unwieldy; fewer folks are doing things with actual login mechanisms.

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High temperature alert fluffy rambles

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It’s pretty hot in Seattle.

First, advice from someone who grew up in the desert:

  • Drink lots of liquids, but don’t drink just plain water because sweat loses electrolytes
  • A good way to cool down reasonably quickly is to hold ice against a major artery or vein, such as your wrist or armpit, or against your sternum (but be careful about overdoing it in that case)
  • A breeze can help but at a certain point you’re only blowing hot air around and heating it up even more
  • Avoid caffeinated or alcoholic beverages

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Impossible Burger: a brief impression fluffy rambles

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I finally had Impossible Burger alt-meat in a burger tonight. My impressions of it:

  • The raw “meat” has a weird uncanny-valley look to it, and also a rather… smell. A bit offputting, but only in comparison to beef.
  • When cooked up, it does look just like beef, but it tastes and smells of, well, pretty much nothing.
  • The mouthfeel is just like beef. Really good texture on it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve eaten Impossible Burger itself; I first tried it when Poquitos had it in taco form, back when it was still a brand-new “coming soon” thing that was only available to restaurants. Back then I felt like the flavor was really good (although being in tacos it was so heavily-spiced that it’s more that it didn’t have a flavor that overpowered the cumin and chili and so on), and I felt like the mouthfeel was a bit mushy.

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Basic communication Writing

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“Ah, yes, the universal translator seems to now be attuned to both of our languages. Now we may begin our cultural exchange.”

“Absolutely! So, let’s start with the basics. How do you represent numbers?”

“Most cultures on our planet use a system where we write our numbers out in a string of digits, where the most-significant digit comes first, and the number itself is the sum of each digit multiplied by the base to the power of its position from the right.”

“Ah, interesting. Our common notation is quite similar. And how many digits do you have in your number system?”

“10.”

“Oh, what a coincidence! We use a 10-digit system as well.”

“Curious. How did you arrive at that number of digits?”

“Well, we each have 10 phalanges on our distal manipulators, so it was a fairly convenient means for our number system to develop.”

“Ah, the same for us. … Except, ah, you only seem to have 8 phalanges.”

“What’s 8?”

“The number after 7?”

“Oh, strange. You see, we call that number ‘10.’”

Werner updates fluffy rambles

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Werner was unable to keep his liquid antibiotics down so yesterday I got him pills instead, at least for one of them (unfortunately the other one was liquid-only). He’s of course been lethargic but generally happy most of the time, and during my birthday party yesterday he mostly just hung out in my bedroom, but occasionally said hi to people — very uncharacteristic for him, and towards the end I even took him around to everyone to get pettings.

Anyway, today he’s been feeling a bit better, and I had a cheeseburger for lunch, which he got really interested in and wanted some of. So I decided that he can, in fact, haz cheezburger, and he’s enjoying it quite a lot, and eating way more than I’ve seen him eat lately. Really going to town on it. (I tried taking a picture for the meme™ but he was way more interested in snarfing it down than waiting for me to manage to get any shots in. Oh well.)

He’s such a good little guy.

Testing assumptions fluffy rambles

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There’s still a lot of MSG discourse happening in certain pockets of the Internet; right now it’s mostly on food YouTube, where folks are primarily saying that people who claim an MSG sensitivity are racist and/or relying on bad pseudoscience. And, as usual, using the same two strawmen of

  1. Lots of foods have glutamate in it
  2. Did you know that American junk food has MSG in it too?

For 1, yes, lots of foods have glutamate in it, but not bound to sodium.

For 2, yes, that’s why it was eating junk food in college (Doritos and the chili-flavored Fritos, specifically) that led me to realize what was causing my near-daily sensory overload migraines.

Anyway, recently I bought some “country style” bulk sausage at a local butcher which ended up having MSG in it, and rather than throw it out or try to return it, I figured I’d use it to perform an (admittedly extremely unscientific) experiment. Namely, a couple days ago I fried up a small amount and ate it, and while I felt a bit of the classic MSG effects it seemed like it might have been psychosomatic. So today I made a full patty of it and ate it for breakfast… and holy hell that was a bad time. I’m still recovering from it a couple hours later.

So, yeah, I’m still pretty sure MSG causes me problems, and I’m still gonna keep avoiding it.

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Resin printer updates fluffy rambles

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I’ve finally gotten a handle on my resin printer and have gotten some successful prints! Here’s some of what I did to get it to a good state:

  • Replaced the stock FEP sheet with an nFEP sheet (although that’s mostly because the stock one was leaking a little)
  • Added some PTFE lubricant to the LCD screen (to aid with cleanup in particular)
  • Increased the exposure times; first layers went from 30s to 45, and subsequent layers went from 2.5s to 4
  • Started using Chitubox on Linux because it performs way better than the Mac version (not really anything to do with the printer itself, but, y'know)
  • Ground down the build plate some more
  • Figured out a better way of angling prints

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The sorts of spam I attract fluffy rambles

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Lately I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments from people (really, probably just one person) trying to pedal Kratom, an herbal hallucinogen which has extremely bad side effects.

I hope that it’s obvious that I am not, in fact, going to allow my site to be used as a vehicle for advertising this shit, so stop trying to post comments on every mental-health-related article about it, thanks.

My smart house addiction continues fluffy rambles

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Today my Switchbot curtain robots arrived. They work pretty well, but getting them to the point of working well was a bit tricky. Here’s some notes, in case they help others:

  • The instructions for how tightly to clamp the robot to the rail are frustratingly vague. My recommendation is that if you have a telescoping rail, gently attach the robot to the thinner part of the rail, then while calibrating, increase the tension by one click at a time until it can move freely.
  • The telescoping rail shim works a LOT better if you make sure that the seam is on the back of the rail, rather than on the top or bottom (where it sometimes interferes with the motion of the wheels); at least this is the case with my grommet curtains. (This also happens to reduce the drag from the grommet ring to the shim, which is also quite important.)
  • The instructions and app don’t make it AT ALL clear about how to group two curtain units together! The answer is to set the curtain’s open direction to “open from the middle;” if you’ve already set them up as individual units, you can go into one curtain’s settings and change the opening direction.
  • Grouping curtains has pluses and minuses; on the plus side, it makes managing scenes easier, and it also fixes the asymmetrical delay issue that Techmoan ran into. On the minus side, it means that there’s no way to control them individually in HomeKit, if that’s a thing you want to do.
  • On that note, to get them to work with HomeKit (rather than using the “Siri shortcuts,” which suck), you need to enable the “cloud service” mode on the curtain(s), and run something like Homebridge and the homebridge-switchbot-openapi plugin to get HomeKit to see the device. And yes, you need a Switchbot Hub and a bridge to do this, and annoyingly enough, this all goes through Switchbot’s cloud servers, meaning if they ever go out of business, the dang things will probably stop working entirely. Why the hub can’t just talk locally is beyond me.

Anyway, having this set up was a lot of fun when my neighbor came by to help me finish hanging up my new TV; he suggested closing the curtains before verifying the TV tilt angle, so I said, “Hey Siri, close living room curtains,” and he said “No way!!!” and then the curtains closed.

And now I have a bunch of automations, like:

  • If I say “Hey Siri, game time,” the curtains close and all the living room lights turn on and the air purifier turns off
  • If I say “Hey Siri, movie time,” the curtains close, and the lights and air purifier turn off
  • In the morning, the curtains automatically open

I also have a few other automated lighting changes throughout the day, and the awesome one will be when my bedroom shades finally arrive — I’ll be able to automatically close them at midnight and open them at 8 AM, and maybe I’ll stop getting woken up at 6 AM by the sun shining on my face!

Save the date! fluffy rambles

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Hey folks! That time of year is coming up… it’s my birthday in June! And what’s more, I have a new house to celebrate it at!

My plan this year is to have an outdoor cookout in my lovely new yard in White Center (a small town nestled in between Seattle and Burien) the afternoon/evening of June 13, 2021. I’m trying to get a headcount to see who’s going to be able to attend. Please register your interest by emailing me or posting a comment or RSVP webmention or whatever, and I’ll try to get a more formal invite when details start to coalesce better (ideally in a better format than a public blog post, obvs).

The format will probably be potluck-esque; I’ll definitely be providing a bunch of meat and veggies for grilling and some sides and drinks but it’d be great if other folks could bring stuff to grill and serve too! Also, due to COVID still being a thing I’d ask that people still maintain social distance and masking, and for non-vaccinated folks to limit their time indoors.

Regarding transport to my place, there’s a decent (but not unlimited) amount of street and on-property parking, and there are technically buses nearby but they aren’t the most convenient thing for folks coming from anywhere other than West Seattle or Burien or whatever.

But anyway it’d be lovely if folks could come! I’ve missed seeing everyone, and what better way to try to fix that?

Resin printing adventure fluffy rambles

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So far I haven’t gotten a fully-successful resin print, but I’m inching closer and closer.

The current issue I keep running into is that it’s very difficult to separate a print from the bed, and I think I need to give up on having a good clean bed-adhered surface. It’s better to give all prints lift and support, probably, even if that means having more tiny surface defects on the side facing the build plate (which is better than having an entire shattered print when I inevitably resort to a hammer to separate it).

I also ran into a problem where somehow a bit of resin got underneath my FEP film (hopefully due to my own carelessness and not due to a leak I haven’t found on my vat!) and some resin got caked to the LCD. Fortunately, Phrozen’s suggestion of soaking it in 91% IPA and then using the plastic scraper to get it off worked just fine.

Anyway. For now I’m still stuck trying to sun-cure my prints, but hopefully I can figure out a decent cheap curing station setup. I’m thinking of building a curing box using UV LED strips but it’s so hard to find reliable parts for that sort of thing. I also ordered a cheap curing station off Amazon but I’m not expecting great results from it.

In the meantime, my FDM printer is working again, and now that I have a decent supply of isopropyl alcohol I can actually get prints to stick to the build plate!

I might have a problem fluffy rambles

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I haven’t even put printer #3 through its paces yet, and I’ve just bought printer #4. Fortunately it’ll be a while before it gets here, and also I’ve been wanting a ceramic printer for even longer than I’ve been wanting a resin printer.

But, jeeze.

Anyway I both bought the printer and an extra bed, and also an extra extruder assembly with the notion of possibly converting a larger-format printer into ceramic printing. Or food printing, which this is apparently usable for too!

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More updates! fluffy rambles

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  • My resin printer arrived today. It was a bit obnoxious to get a working print and holy heck it’s a messy process even when it does work, but this’ll be fun to mess with. (Yes, I now have three 3D printers. Only the resin one is actually operable right now, but the Artillery Genius has some repair parts on th eway, at least.)
  • I accepted an offer on my condo. It’s a lot less than I was hoping for but it’s still plenty of money. When that sells I can start working on building out the studio, which is the linchpin for getting a bunch of my other house ambitions underway.
  • I’m having one heck of a fibro flare and this makes it very hard for me to actually focus on work. But also there’s a stress factor involved. Hopefully that all sorts itself out soon.
  • Because of the aforementioned flare I’m also not making much progress on getting my living room or kitchen in any sort of order. But I’m still slowly chipping away at that glacier.
  • Cannabis isn’t really helping with the fibro right now, either.

So far so good fluffy rambles

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Aside from a few hours of severe soreness last night and this morning, I haven’t had any major issues with the vaccination. Yay!

Also with my hecked-up shoulder/neck, the set of stretches I’ve been trying has been doing a good job of clearing up that pain too. If only I’d found those stretches last year instead of going through a month and a half of agony and condescention from healthcare professionals!

Also today I finally found my Wacom tablet and started poking at comics again. I also made a bunch of progress on my living room situation, and got Stepmania moved to my gaming PC (and also have my z-i-v mirroring thing running directly there, although wow Python is kind of a pain to deal with on Windows these days). I still haven’t actually hooked up my dance pad, though, but hopefully soon I’ll have the clutter mitigated to the point that I can do that.

Incidentally, I’m pretty underwhelmed by the TV stand I got. I’m not too surprised by the fairly low quality of the materials (especially given the price) but what I cannot get behind is its complete lack of internal cable management. Each of the 6 bays has a too-small hole out the back, and there’s no way to run cables internally, nor is there anywhere to reasonably stash a power strip. Ugh. I think I need to take up a furniture-making hobby so that I can eventually get to the point of making a TV cabinet that works the way I want it to. Because that’s what I need, more hobbies!

So I mean I ordered a circular saw, some saw horses, and a bunch of clamps, and most of it’s arrived already. And I’ve been watching at lot of 3x3Custom Tamar and Frank Howarth for inspiration. What I want to build actually seems pretty doable! (For that matter, Tamar did something very similar to what I want to make.)

Vaccine cache fluffy rambles

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Today I got my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Whew. I’m expecting the next few days to really suck with side-effects so I stocked up on a bunch of easy-to-make food. My dining room is still a bit of a disaster though, and right now it’s even worse because I took delivery of my new TV console today and the box is like… in the dining room. And a bunch of other boxes and stuff are on the table. Oops.

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Shoulder, unpacking, gardening, etc. fluffy rambles

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Wellp, I managed to screw up my shoulder again. Last time was probably from me using my cane on a fairly long walk, and this time was probably due to me overdoing it with my weed puller (which requires a snapping motion that does similar things to my cane). Bleah. At least this time I know stretches and things that might help, and I found a bunch more which feel like they’re helping. Hopefully I’ll still feel well enough to get my second shot of vaccine tomorrow. (Which will probably have me feeling pretty much immobile for a few days anyway.)

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Progress continues fluffy rambles

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I am pretty much done unpacking my kitchen. I’m now trying to figure out where the heck my Sodastream goes, because it doesn’t quite fit under the upper cabinets. On the plus side I finally have my coffee stuff including my Flair, and my kitchen’s been complete enough for me to start cooking again. Last night I made a rather nice steak, and tonight I’m making chili.

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A lot to unpack fluffy rambles

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Every day I put another progressively larger dent into the big pile of boxes. My bedroom is actually in pretty good shape now, my kitchen is getting somewhere reasonable (although I’m having trouble figuring out where to put my hand towels and such), and my living room and basement are… well, still disasters. I’m also still unable to find a bunch of stuff that seems like it should have been in some of the boxes I’ve opened. I really wish movers were better at packing things in a systematic way, or at least making sure that multiple parts of a thing stay together.

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Some notes on settling in fluffy rambles

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My move went pretty well. There were some random frustrations with the movers and some continuing stress with some of their particular packing decisions, and of course lots of stuff with selling my condo that I wish I didn’t have to think about, but things are feeling really good overall right now.

My neighbors are really awesome people. They gave me a bunch of eggs from their chickens and a jar of amazing raspberry jelly (from raspberries they grew themselves). They also asked me my pronouns and talked a lot about how they have several trans friends and are happy to have a trans neighbor. I’ve also met the fellow in the house behind mine, who grew up in my house, and he also seems pretty nice too. He has a gruff exterior but I can tell he’s a real softie deep down.

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Moved in! fluffy rambles

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Oh gosh the last few days have been a thing.

But hey, I’m moved in. I don’t have (proper) Internet yet, but that’s coming in tomorrow.

In the meantime, I needed to set up my new Roomba, and it can only do its full setup1 via a phone app, which requires an Internet connection and local wifi to work. Fortunately, I found my router, and I have my desktop computer set up, and macOS makes it easy to share an Internet connection from one interface to another…

… so I enabled my phone’s hotspot, connected my desktop’s wifi to the phone, shared my desktop’s wifi to ethernet, plugged the ethernet into the uplink port on my router, and then connected my phone back to the router.

Somehow it all works! It’s going through like three layers of NAT and the phone ends up doing double-duty in the most roundabout stop-hitting-yourself way, but now my Roomba is set to wake everyone up at 9 AM, probably scaring the crap out of my cats who have never seen a Roomba in their lives.

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woogh fluffy rambles

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today is hopefully thr last day of the move

this is hopefully the last time i ever move, holy cow

just gotta remember that some momentary acute stress is worth it if it improves my life in the long term (and hopefully it DOES improve my life)

also let’s stop catastrophizing about everything that might go wrong, especially with the cats, okay? thanks

The kitchen remodel curse fluffy rambles

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Seattle, 2007: Redid my kitchen, ended up getting a job in San Francisco a month later

San Francisco, 2012: Redid my kitchen, ended up getting a job back in Seattle a month later

Seattle, 2020: got a kitchen remodel mostly done, last little project kept on getting pushed back for a year, and finally got scheduled… for the day before my move to White Center

At least I was able to enjoy (most of) my new kitchen for a whole year this time.

Given the state of the kitchen in my new place I think that will be one of the first things I do once my condo sells, just so that I can possibly experience a whole new form of my life being upended as soon as it’s completed.

Lazy Sunday fluffy rambles

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Yesterday I spent some time at the new house, trying to install Ethernet, but I discovered that my drill doesn’t have nearly enough torque to successfully drill a sufficiently-large hole in the subfloor, as it turns out. Investigating some other things made me realize that I need to get a bunch more power outlets installed in the basement anyway, so I hired an electrician (the same one who did the work on my kitchen) and he said that he can also run the ethernet cabling while he’s there.

I was also feeling pretty cruddy from allergies, so I didn’t finish the other big thing I wanted to do (namely assembling my new standing desk), and instead I went home and took a nap before my vaccination appointment, which went off without a hitch.

So far I’m not experiencing any major side effects, just a sore left arm and some vague headachey feelings, but that said I have no interest in working on house stuff today.

Tuesday I’m going to be busy all day with preparing my condo for the movers on Wednesday, and part of that means taking all my computers offline. So my access will be limited until Friday, when Centurylink comes to install the fiber.

Annoyingly I’m probably going to have to go to the house at some point on Tuesday, because a package which was going to arrive over the weekend got “helpfully” bumped up to Tuesday and I’d really rather not have it sit unattended on my porch for longer than necessary. I mean, the neighborhood seems pretty safe, but package thieves are everywhere now. But it’s being shipped USPS so maybe they’ll just hold it at the post office anyway? Who knows.

Anyway, wow, I’m feeling so overwhelmed by all the stuff I need to do, even with paying lots of money for movers to do all the things. But in a few days I’ll be moved in! And then hopefully my condo sells quickly and then I can get started on all the projects I want to do in the new house. That list is long.

Taking possession fluffy rambles

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Today I took possession of the house! The seller still has some belongings to move out (which she’ll do tomorrow) but today I went down and started to get ready for my move-in. In particular I delivered my new standing desk, installed some smoke detectors (for some reason there weren’t any in the dwelling, just one in the basement), and planned where I’d install my Ethernet jacks. I also explored some of the facets which I had some questions about.

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Thin Mints vs. Grasshoppers Food

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It’s Girl Scouts Cookies season again! Nationwide, the Girl Scouts outsource their cookie production to two different companies, Little Brownie Bakers (LBB) and ABC Bakers.

I live in an LBB region, and LBB is a subsidiary of Keebler; ostensibly, Girl Scouts licenses their recipes to Keebler via LBB for their actual cookie production. Two of their cookies, Thin Mints and Samoas, have supposedly-identical equivalents available from Keebler, namely Grasshoppers and Coconut Dreams, respectively.

Whenever the Girl Scouts aren’t selling cookies, or whenever joyless grownups want to enjoy their cookies without actually funding the Girl Scouts, common knowledge is that you can satisfy your cravings by buying the Keebler equivalents. But is that true?

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Vaccination fluffy rambles

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It’s been nearly 13 months since COVID-19 made its way to Seattle, but I’m finally getting vaccinated on Saturday! And so many people I know are vaccinated now!

I didn’t have a lot of choice on the vaccination day, but at least I was able to choose a time in the afternoon. My plan for Saturday is to spend a bunch of time at the new house to install the Ethernet, and then to get my first vaccination dose, and then hopefully any side effects I end up with wear off by Tuesday which is when I need to spend all day preparing for the movers.

It’s pretty interesting to go back to March 2020 and revisit how things felt back then. Also the beginnings of the BLM protests. Holy crap, it sure has been a year, huh?

Charity backlog fluffy rambles

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Today I finally got rid of a giant accumulation of charity shop donations that date back to… well, at least when I lived in San Francisco, perhaps longer.

My bedroom finally has a usable walk-in closet, a week before I move out. Oh well!

I donated four large bags of unwanted (either guy-mode or too-small-and-not-worth-returning girl-mode) clothing, a pair of basically-new shoes, and an older LCD TV (which came with my condo) to Lifelong, three large bags of older, worn-in (but still usable and/or recyclable) shoes to Redeeming Soles, and a big pile of boring white socks to WeCount (the charity itself seems to be defunct but their give a pair/take a pair drop boxes are still around Seattle and still work, what with being literally just a free newspaper box but with different branding).

Anyway now Fiona has a new space to explore, and I actually found a bunch of stuff I’d been missing since it was, y'know, buried in back. Whee!

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Adjustments fluffy rambles

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I think the biggest thing I’m going to have to get used to in the new house is having to make actual grocery shopping trips again.

There’s a small mom-and-pop grocery store just down the street from my new place, but it’s more of a convenience store than a place to get groceries at. Fortunately, there’s actual grocery stores not too far away, but the nature of White Center is that it doesn’t seem very walkable, and even riding my bike there seems a bit risky.

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Melatonin isn’t the answer fluffy rambles

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I’m finding that taking melatonin every night isn’t actually helping me sleep better, although it does make me tired at a reasonable time. But I’m still waking up in the middle of the night and generally being pretty restless. And it hasn’t helped me with my focus or my pain at all, but the working theory was that sleeping better would be what would help with that, and melatonin hasn’t done that.

I think having used it to adjust my sleep schedule was fine, though, and I’ll keep using it for that purpose in the future.

On the plus side, the daylight saving change didn’t mess with me any more than my sleep schedule was already hecked up.

Radix sort revisited Code

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Around a year and a half ago I wrote an article on the perils of relying on big-O notation, and in it I focused on a comparison between comparison-based sorting (via std::sort) and radix sort, based on the common bucketing approach.

Recently I came across a video on radix sort which presents an alternate counting-based implementation at the end, and claims that the tradeoff point between radix and comparison sort comes much sooner. My intuition said that even counting-based radix sort would still be slower than a comparison sort for any meaningful input size, but it’s always good to test one’s intuitions.

So, hey, it turns out I was wrong about something. (But my greater point still stands.)

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Melatonin experiment fluffy rambles

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Night 1 I had a lot of weird dreams and I was also awake or at least on the edge of consciousness for much of the night. Throughout the day I felt fatigued and crappy. My smart bed concurred, giving me a sleep score of 62 and a “time asleep” of 5:36 (which is an overestimate). I also had many very intense dreams of varying levels of surreality.

But night 2 went much better; I slept through the whole night, I only had one vivid dream (and it was pretty much grounded in reality, albeit about Kafka-esque Internet installation and support issues… so, grounded in reality) and I got a sleep score of 83 with a sleep time of 8:07.

It’s probably not entirely the melatonin to credit with that; last night I also did my longest DDR workout ever, and of course I had a lot of fatigue to catch up on as well. But today I’m feeling pretty good.

Tomorrow will be a bit of a test thanks to daylight saving kicking in (perhaps permanently, much to my chagrin — IMO it should be abolished, as well as making society not so reliant on time-of-day for “productivity” in the first place) so I’m not expecting tomorrow’s anecdata point to be that useful. Unless I’m feeling really good, in which case it’s extra-useful.

Anyway hopefully this week I’ll actually be able to focus on work more than usual, at least for the next two weeks; March 26 is when my house purchase closes, and then the next couple of weeks after that are going to be ridiculously chaotic, both with moving to my new place and selling my old place! Which is of course all the more reason that focus will be important.

House imminent! fluffy rambles

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The house is all coming along nicely. My loan financing is almost complete, the transaction loses in around two weeks, and then soon after that I’ll have a lovely house to move into.

I was really excited to be within walking distance of the beach, but it turns out that the beach in question is private. Boo. But there’s a very nice park that at least has a view of it and a lovely nature park. And there’s other beaches nearby (although not quite in walking distance).

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Melatonin experiments fluffy rambles

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Last night I came across a pop-science video about the link between ADHD and sleep disruptions, and it raised an interesting point: many of the ADHD symptoms are also symptoms of sleep deprivation, and the sleep disruption aspects of ADHD might actually be the underlying cause of many of them.

I’ve always had great difficulty with sleep, with trouble falling asleep at night but then being incredibly fatigued during the day. And I can’t help but wonder how many of my other issues are just plain due to crappy sleep. Maybe my chronic pain isn’t because of an underlying neurological cause, but is because I’m not properly sleeping and healing at night?

I’ve had three sleep studies at this point. The first in-home study vaguely diagnosed me with obstructive apnea, and is why I got a CPAP machine. The CPAP machine didn’t help at all, so a second study to rule out narcolepsy happened. Then the third one verified that CPAP doesn’t actually make a difference for me.

Anyway, one of the things mentioned in the video is that there’s been some success with treating some forms of childhood ADHD with time-release melatonin. So starting tonight I’m going to try taking time-release melatonin and see if that helps me any.

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[excitement intensifies] fluffy rambles

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The previous owner of the house — the daughter-in-law of the previous occupant — reached out to me on Facebook, and we got to chatting about the neighborhood, the house, and a bunch of other stuff. She was incredibly welcoming, and it turns out that she also lives in the neighborhood. She seems really friendly, and she’s looking forward to seeing what I do with the place. And so am I!

My brain just won’t let me not keep on planning what I’m going to do in terms of the move. I’ve already scheduled a move consultation to see how much it’ll cost to get a full-service pack-and-move, and I’m beginning to triage my possessions and plan for where they’re going to go in the house (or, if not, whether to sell them on eBay or Craigslist, or simply donate them). I’m also hyper-fixating, as usual, on how I’m going to set up my recording studio, my network, and a bunch of other things.

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toxicity update fluffy rambles

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Unsurprisingly yet unfortunately, the podcast which triggered this recollection about one of its consultants ended up just having its own reckoning about internal systemic bias and workplace toxicity, brought about when they did a series about another toxic, systemically-biased workplace.

It’s almost like this stuff is rampant, or something…

The joys of house hunting fluffy rambles

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Wow, I’m really glad I recently switched from pay-by-the-mile insurance back to traditional monthly insurance. My car’s been getting a lot more activity in the last few weeks (and the monthly rate on my insurance is lower than the base rate on the by-the-mile anyway).

Which is to say I’ve been driving around a lot to look at quite a few places. Some of them have been pretty interesting. Others have been… “interesting.”

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Balance fluffy rambles

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Stuff I want to work on:

Stuff I need to work on:

  • The day job
  • Finding a better housing situation than my current condo

Stuff I have the energy to work on:

  •  

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ugh meds, ugh work fluffy rambles

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I’ve been on guanfacine for about a month now, and I still haven’t stopped feeling drowsy and tired all day, to the point that I’ll often just fall asleep in the middle of things. Even when I’m doing things like grocery shopping I’ll suddenly feel really tired and need to take a couple moments to brace myself. It’s almost like it’s causing narcolepsy or something.

Last week I talked about this with my psychiatrist and we decided to try combination therapy with strattera, a stimulant-based med, since my ADHD responded well to the Adderall (aside from my blood pressure spiking badly).

So far, it hasn’t been helping at all. I’m getting the panic and anxiety from stimulants, while also being drowsy all day. What’s even worse is I’m also getting frequent muscle spasms, which is apparently a common reaction to some ADHD meds. And ironically, the treatment for that? Guanfacine.

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💬 Re: Micropublish channel support Notes

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In reply to: Re: Micropublish channel support

Oh, cool, I didn’t know channel support was a thing. That just might be what gets me to finally work on Micropub support for Publ, since I couldn’t really wrap my head around how I was going to support posting to arbitrary sections of my site with the current UX on any of the Micropub clients I knew about.

Time to finally brush up on the protocol to see what other excuses I have for not supporting it. 😉

PSA regarding quotes in isso fluffy rambles

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After my recent isso updates, I found that double-quotes had disappeared from most peoples' comments, and it was really weird and I couldn’t figure out why.

Anyway, long story short, it turns out that something changed to cause the EXT_QUOTE support to start converting "s into <q>s, and isso’s HTML sanitizer (which runs after Markdown conversion) isn’t configured to allow that as an HTML element. (Or maybe this was happening all along and I just didn’t notice until now! Nothing in Misaka has changed in that time so I probably just never noticed.)

The fix is to either remove quote from options or add q to allowed-elements in the [markup] section of the isso config file. For example, here’s that section of mine:

beesbuzz.biz.cfg
[markup]
options=strikethrough, autolink, fenced-code, no-intra-emphasis, superscript, highlight, quote, tables
allowed-elements=mark, sup, sub, q

On a related note, don’t enable EXT_QUOTE on Publ if you want quotes to be able to appear in auto-generated entry summaries and the like. (I suppose I should change Publ to always override the Markdown extension configuration where it makes sense…)

webmention.js 0.4.0 fluffy rambles

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I’ve just released v0.4.0 of webmention.js, which adds the ability to coalesce comment-type responses into the “reactions” section. I’d been considering it for a while but finally got the impetus to add it during today’s Respectful Responses IndieWeb session.

This change shouldn’t break current users of webmention.js, as it’s an opt-in configuration value.

As an aside, I really need to get around to making an actual site for PlaidWeb, so I have somewhere to put non-Publ discussion and release announcements.

Guanfacine and naltrexone updates fluffy rambles

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I’ve been on low-dose naltrexone for a whole month now, and I don’t think it’s really helping with my pain.

And I’ve been on guanfacine for two weeks, and while I’ve noticed a slight improvement in my focus (and a general lowering of my blood pressure, which is of course to be expected), holy cow am I drowsy all the time. Like, to the point of nodding off while sitting still or whatever. I hear that this effect goes away after a couple weeks, and I really hope it does soon, because even though I’m generally getting a full night’s sleep every night I still wake up exhausted and end up taking little mini-naps throughout the day. Heck, even while going grocery shopping I occasionally feel like I’m going to fall over.

On the plus side, caffeine doesn’t give me as big of a panic attack now (although I still feel a bit of one) so that’s at least filling in the gaps while I try to stay awake at work.

Bonus thing: yesterday I tried coating my glasses with soapy water (based on seeing an article in Glamour) and it actually works pretty well! The article suggests thoroughly cleaning them, but I just mixed a little bit of liquid hand soap with a glass of water and dunked my glasses in them and let them drain. It’d probably also work pretty well to dilute some dish soap and swap it on with a cotton swab or something.

Nearly 20 years on fluffy rambles

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Some recent conversations around Internet toxicity have been reminding me about some deeply traumatic, formative experiences I had nearly 20 years ago, with being doxed, harassed, stalked, and threatened online.

What makes things even worse was that this was directly facilitated by someone who is now a self-proclaimed expert in Internet toxicity, and who was recently given “special thanks” in a podcast I listen to, on an episode about these problems that he very directly contributed to.

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Isso comment privacy update fluffy rambles

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So the reason for my recent mini-rantle was that I found a hidden API in isso that would have made it pretty easy for folks to trivially scrape every comment on my website, including ones on private entries.

Fortunately the fix was really simple and it’s what I have deployed on my site right now.

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SpinDizzy MUCK wants YOU! fluffy rambles

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Are you interested in whimsical, fun, weird, sometimes downright brain-ending roleplay? Tired of all RP spaces turning into public sex-a-thons?

SpinDizzy MUCK might be a place to check out!

Folks there are friendly and fun and creative and imaginative, and you can be whatever you want as long as you can find the words and/or ASCII art for it.

All you need is a web browser and the wherewithal to take a detour from your ontological nightmare that is real life.

Come check it out. We won’t bite. Well, some of us will. But it’ll be cute. And only has a 35% chance of turning you into a were-whatever-bit-you.

Distributed toxicity and the IndieWeb fluffy rambles

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This tweet has been making the rounds in IndieWeb spaces, and reflects a thing I’ve been thinking about on and off lately for obvious reasons:

I’ve seen several other related sentiments lately; with a certain prominent politician being deplatformed from all of the mainstream social media platforms, and all of the platforms that accept him being in turn shut down or otherwise made ineffective, people have been (quite reasonably!) wondering what happens if he ends up starting up his own IndieWeb site, and causes a resurgence in self-hosted or otherwise privately-run, single-author blogs.

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Miscellaneous goings-on fluffy rambles

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I’ve been on guanfacine for a few days and so far I’m not noticing that my focus has changed any, but on the plus side my blood pressure is great now. So, that’s good.

I don’t know if it’s from the naltrexone or the guanfacine but my dreams have been pretty vivid and weird, but usually in a good way. Unlike when I was on the Wellbutrin and my dreams were vivid and stressful.

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Mac mini updates fluffy rambles

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First off, I am a dummy and completely failed to notice that there are in fact two USB-A ports on the Mini itself. The dock was completely unncessary for my initial setup. Oops!

Also, I just played some test content in HDR and holy heck it looks pretty amazing. Conveniently enough, Safari supports HDR in YouTube while Firefox doesn’t, so I was able to play some videos side-by-side to see the difference, and it was pretty immense, especially in the extremes. Which is, of course, the whole point to HDR.

I’ll probably keep using Firefox for usual video stuff, though, because I’m not a fan of not having a decent ad blocker. Hopefully Firefox adds HDR support soon!

EDIT: Oh yeah, I ended up force-quitting the NI installer so that I could finish installing some system updates and the Wacom driver and so on. What’s really cool is that even though the Wacom driver is still x86, Rosetta still emulates it. Holy cow. Also the Silicon Macs use a new driver signing thing that’s a little onerous but also exposes a nicer way of going into the startup disk selector (now you just hold down the power button while booting, no need to remember an awkward keyboard combination that doesn’t always map right to whatever weird keyboard you’re using at the time).

Also, I had meant to do some disk speed tests as well. See below!

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New Mac mini fluffy rambles

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Today I wasn’t expecting to get a lot of work done due to my brain still feeling like it’s been through a juicer, and also because my new Mac mini arrived today. So I got to go through the drudgery of reinstalling everything while also seeing the news of the world exploding around me! Hooray!

Anyway, just some random setup notes.

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So much for Wellbutrin fluffy rambles

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Yesterday I was feeling pretty off, in a “wow I think my blood pressure is spiking again” way. And I happened to have an appointment at the pain clinic, and they measured my blood pressure at 160/90, which is, you know, Pretty High. At the time I chalked it up to having walked over there in a hurry, but throughout the afternoon and evening I kept measuring it and it remained that high.

And then all night long I had a hell of a time sleeping. I only got around 3 hours of sleep total; most of the time I was just lying awake, blood pounding in my ears, feeling like I was going to die. At 3 AM I also checked my blood pressure again and it was 160/100. Yikes.

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So, comments were broken fluffy rambles

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So hey, I thought it was weird that nobody had been posting comments on my blog in a while. Turns out comments were just, like, broken, and nobody told me, for some reason.

The problem turned out to be that Isso currently doesn’t work on Python 3.8 (or at least, the current released version, which is ridiculously outdated, doesn’t), and it was easy to roll it back to Python 3.7, thanks to poetry’s pyenv integration. So, score another one for poetry.

But why don’t people actually tell me when they’re having problems with my site? Do people just assume that if something’s broken it’s broken on purpose? Because I mean… no?

Anyway, comments are fixed now.

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2021 goals fluffy rambles

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Let’s not call them resolutions.

One year ago I set out some goals for the next decade. They’re all pretty good goals. But here’s some specific things I’d like to accomplish over the next year:

  • Get my voice to a spot where people don’t misgender me quite so much
  • Get my fibromyalgia and ADHD meds dialed in (so far so good)
  • Actually finish my next non-Novembeat album1
  • PlaidWeb things, such as:
    • An online post editor
    • A self-hosted notification engine (for webmention, activitypub, websub, etc.)
    • Maybe actually write some actual code for Subl?
    • Also maybe actually put a dang site together for PlaidWeb
  • Rebuild my broken social life
  • Get my home clean, and keep it clean
  • Start drawing comics regularly again
  • And the ever-present goal of losing, say, 15 pounds

Kind of ambitious, I know, but it’s better to aim for the stars and hit the moon than to never even leave the ground.