busybee fluffy rambles

The last time, I had to take a bus downtown to a part of town where things are excruciatingly hilly (and had to literally hike to the office in question), only to be put in a waiting area with no seats and no indication of when the practitioner was going to arrive (he was half an hour late), and to be given screening questions that were reflective of an extremely surface-level understanding of ADHD, and were just super basic sequence-memorization/repeat stuff. Nothing that has anything to do with attention (or lack thereof), difficulties with focusing for multiple hours a day especially through excruciating pain, nothing with the anxiety, or brain fog, no actual qualitative questions asked, it was just like “repeat the following numbers: 5, 8, 23, 17, 6,” that kind of shit.

My disability application only even includes ADHD because fibromyalgia on its own is not enough to get a disability determination and the SSDI people told me that they want to know about everything because they supposedly understand that it’s not just about single things but about how everything interacts together.

And I mean, believe me, I’d much rather be working! but nobody wants to hire me for the amount I’m able to do, and for the things I’m able to do with that time. There’s no such thing as a part-time software engineer who doesn’t write code the whole time. There’s no such thing as a video editor who only works 1-2 hours a day. And nobody wants to hire me for music at all, either, and it’s not for lack of trying on my part! Even when I am working on my own stuff with great passion it’s only, like, 10 hours a week, because that’s all I can handle. Believe me, I wish I could spend more time on it. Or on comics, or on my software projects, or any of the other things I’d like to be doing.

And, as always, I am disappointed in the reaction to my album so far. Maybe things will be different on the next Bandcamp Friday but so far I’ve only sold a few copies of Transitions. Maybe it’ll get a bunch of streaming traffic, who knows, but folks seem to be much more interested in telling me how much they’re looking forward to it when they hear me perform things live than they are in actually partaking of it in a way that brings me any benefit.

I know a lot of people are holding out until Bandcamp Friday to purchase it though, so hopefully December 6 will feel a lot better.

Incidentally, December 6 is when this fucking psychological function evaluation is happening.

Things sure seem to rhyme a lot lately.

Also I guess the previous disability assessment was almost exactly a year earlier, and a lot of the stuff that I wrote about on that entry is still true? Like I still have not been playing any games (even though I have both the Thousand Year Door remake and the not-all-that-new Zelda to play) aside from daily logic puzzles, and I’ve been kind of in a cooking rut again (although at least my rut now involves more beans and rice), and I still haven’t started up the nostalgia-gaming Twitch stream I’ve been talking about for well over a year now.

Power outage

Oh yeah, the other day a bomb cyclone hit Seattle and I was without power for 19 hours. Fortunately I was able to stay warm enough thanks to my fireplace, and my refrigerator is new enough that it stayed cold the whole time so I didn’t lose any food due to spoilage.

The last time there was a big outage I swore I was going to get some sort of reasonable battery backup device (even my big server UPSes don’t really function for longer than necessary to get stuff shut down) and so I finally bought an EcoFlow Delta 2, since those get really good reviews on YouTube and also Amazon was offering a “lightning deal,” although now it has a Black Friday deal for even less, so uh, fuck you Amazon.

I’d also been meaning to get an emergency butane stove, which is less important now that I have the big propane grill (but still super helpful because if I get snowed in I can’t actually reach the grill, plus I’d rather cook indoors if possible). I always have the butane canisters on hand for my culinary blowtorch so that’s a nice extra backup as well. At the very least it makes it easier to heat up soup and make tea and coffee. I don’t expect to give it much use but it’s one of those things that’s better to have and not need, than to need and not have.

It looks like there’s going to be another giant wind storm tomorrow but that’s only likely to affect the East side, and anyway the Ecoflow won’t get here until Sunday. Which is also when I was planing on doing my big release party in VRChat. Hopefully my back is feeling better by then, and I also have power.

Also fuck you HBO

HBO has doubled down on supporting transphobia and calling it “personal views.” As you may be aware, I worked at HBO from 2014-2017, and it’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. It’s also where I finally felt comfortable enough to transition socially. But even back then I was always frustrated at the ongoing support of Bill Maher, and now they’re explicitly throwing in with J. K. Rowling, so I’ve finally canceled my subscription. I was hardly watching it anymore anyway, and it’s not like my sound design is active on the app anymore (nor is any of the code I wrote as far as I can tell), so I don’t really have a personal connection to it anymore. That company has been undergoing a Ship of Theseus transformation ever since AT&T bought them out and it is clearly now complete.

HBO was the last streaming platform I was paying for¹, and after dropping it I had a bunch of folks recommend Dropout to replace it, so I’ve subscribed to that now. So far it’s definitely worth the $4/month, and I hope they expand to have ongoing shows that aren’t just long-form improv. Some of their current shows are a lot of fun (especially Game Changer and its spinoff Make Some Noise), but I like scripted content, too. They do have some scripted shows (like WTF 101 which appears to be Magic School Bus for adults) but mostly it just seems to be panel gameshows. And then there’s Cartoon Hell which is just a slightly-more-animated version of Drawfee which I hardly ever watch anymore because I got tired of the format.

Maybe they could make Furry Force into an actual series or something.

Some little music administrativa

As mentioned earlier, I have two more release events for Transitions: a YouTube premiere tomorrow at 1 PM Pacific, and a VRChat+streamed live show scheduled for Sunday at 3 PM Pacific. I hope folks will be able to make it to one or both of those!

My plan for the VRChat show is to have a pre-show where I project the YouTube video in-world, followed by me performing the entire album live, followed by some other songs as my wrists/energy permit. Or I might just go straight to the live performance bit because I am getting very tired of hearing this album and am now stuck in a headspace of just noticing all of the little flaws I didn’t fix before I decided to let it finally be Done.

I do definitely want everyone at the show to have heard the studio version before they hear my live renditions of it, though, especially since a lot of them are very different when I perform them live. And some of them I’ve never performed live at all and that might be, let’s say interesting, as I figure it out as I go along. (I love doing things in hard mode.)

Anyway after all that is done it’ll be nice to not have to think about this album ever again, except for when it comes up on my own shuffle play, at which point I can remind mysel that, wow, I made that!

Which is always a very nice feeling.