busybee fluffy rambles

Art

A week ago I was contacted about helping Xavier out with some 3D printing for an art show, with a need to do some large-format prints at pretty much the last minute. I managed to print three fairly large statuettes over the next few days. It was a bit of a crunch but the pieces came out pretty great, and will be at Seattle CoCA until November.

This is the first time I’d used Bambu Studio’s print splitting function (which it inherited from Prusa Slicer), and it was pretty easy to work with.

Big note to self: for larger prints it’s super important to get the support Z distance accurate, especially when printing PETG. 0.25mm seems to work pretty well.

Music

Work progresses on the new album. I’ve now recorded 7 of the 12 tracks, and while there’s still a bunch of polish to be done on all of them, I feel like I’m in a good spot for finishing all the recording by November, assuming things hold out.

Also, back in 2021 I attempted to register a trademark on “Sockpuppet,” but this was denied due to a name conflict, and I allowed the application to expire (because I didn’t want to spend more money after something that felt unnecessary). As a result of that I’ve been hounded by trademark attorneys for the last few years. But that had stopped.

Until a few days ago, when I started getting hounded by one firm in particular, claiming that there was someone attempting to register the trademark and wanted to verify that the trademark has been abandoned. These messages were increasingly urgent, and today I actually answered one, and it turns out that the application is for something music-related (they couldn’t disclose what, exactly) and apparently now releasing music under a name prior to someone else’s registration doesn’t protect someone from litigation for trademark infringement.

So, now I’m working with this lawyer to renew the trademark application and hopefully get it granted properly. And hopefully this isn’t just the lawyer being predatory and scamming me out of a bunch of money. I’m super pessimistic about this. But I don’t want to risk losing my band name; it’s been hard enough to get it as established as it is, and I’m trying to make this an actual line of business, so. I kind of need it for my peace of mind.

But yeah. I hope I’m not being scammed.

EDIT: After doing more research they are definitely scamming me. Now I have to do extra shit to protect myself from that, too. Fuck.

In more positive news, I’m working on developing a product for VRChat performance purposes with a company that specializes in things like this. Hopefully this will be something that people can eventually buy.

I still need to get sockpuppet.us into a launchable state but I haven’t had the energy to work on it at all.

Also I need to finish making sheet music for Repair My Heart since I’m hoping to get an ensemble together to play it at the next choir talent show on November 2.

I probably won’t be doing Novembeat this year. I’m also feeling a bit bummed that it feels like other song-a-day things have gotten way more traction, seemingly out of the blue. Oh well.

Disability

Social Security is still a very hurry-up-and-wait thing, where it’ll be total silence for months, then suddenly Peak Urgency with them burying everyone involved with paperwork that has to be filled out and returned yesterday. And there’s another iteration of that happening now.

It’s super annoying when something in my life is the subject of a Last Week Tonight segment.

And this stuff just has me so very tired.

Relatedly I’ve been participating in a long COVID study, and everything about the process has been super frustrating and draining. I wish researchers would, like, think through the implications of the things they’re studying on the people being studied. Best to not go into details though.

Cooking

The new-to-me grill is fun. I’ve only used it a couple times but it’s been super great now that I have it working well enough.

I keep meaning to write up a proper section article about my new favorite meat marinade/glaze which I’ve used a few times. Briefly it’s basically just equal parts of:

• soy sauce
• yuzu vinegar (or lemon juice)
• tsuyu (or dashi + fish sauce)
• mirin (or rice wine vinegar)
• maple syrup (or brown sugar)
• whiskey

and a pinch or three of ginger powder and red chili flake (both optional). So far I’ve used it on steak and fish, and tomorrow I’m planning on using it on some grilled pork chops.

Also, as part of investigating the slight swelling I get in my mouth when I eat highly-allergenic foods (such as peanuts, tree nuts, and shellfish), I did an IgE food allergy test with Everlywell. All it told me was that I don’t have IgE factors for common allergens, but then also said that doesn’t rule out a food allergy, so, I guess I need to see an allergist. I probably wasted my money.

Health in general

I’ve been in pain a lot lately, and am only really able to work a few hours a day and it feels like I have more than a few hours of day of stuff to do all the time, and pretty much none of it is paid work.

I’m stretched super thin, and in the meantime I’m having trouble falling and staying asleep. Which isn’t helping matters.

I’m also having frequent anxiety attacks, and still having issues with vertigo.

It’d sure be nice if I knew that all the stuff I’m stressing out over will be worthwhile.

Coding projects

I recently made a huge performance improvement to Publ. I ended up opening a feature request in PonyORM to try to make the code a bit cleaner but this just underscores my desire to eventually rewrite the database code to use SQLAlchemy, or perhaps move away from SQL entirely.

I’m also improving Bandcrash fairly regularly. Now there’s a proper album art popup! You can see it by clicking on Catacomb Deer on Refactor.

Both of these projects have been made kind of annoying by a surprising amount of stuff breaking in Python 3.12.

Anyway

I’m so tired. Now that the nights are getting longer maybe I’ll be able to sleep better.