busybee fluffy rambles

Disability stuff

I am finally scheduled to have a disability medical evaluation. It is at ass o'clock in the morning on a Saturday, in downtown Seattle. It’s also listed as a “mental status exam, adult” which sounds like they’re going to be focusing on my ADHD and possibly expecting me to be, like, mentally disabled, not physically. But they’ve requested that I bring all my meds and mobility aids, so I just need to remember to bring my cane, wrist braces, and knee braces, and of course my many, many meds.

Music stuff

Choir-wise, the TDOR concert went amazingly well, and the next performance I’m participating in is at fucking Benaroya Hall, oh my god

I keep being super inspired to work on music but then stupid stuff gets in the way of actually doing it. Also I ended up ordering that simpler piano keyboard I’d had my eye on (without actually getting around to trying it out in person) since it was on sale and I know from history that the Casio Privia keybed is just plain amazing, or at least is a really good fit for my keyboard preferences.

I also learned that it actually supports continuous sustain (or at least half-pedaling), which is something I was worrying I’d have to do without, although the plug for it only accepts Casio’s own overpriced three-pedal unit. Fortunately, the plug has been reverse-engineered so if I can find a PS/2 male plug (which is surprisingly difficult) I might be able to wire up an adapter for my existing sustain pedal. Or maybe I can try my hand at making custom PCBs or something. It’s also possible (although unlikely) that the ¼" damper pedal input also supports continuous sustain so this might not even be something I have to worry about (I have absolutely no use for the una corda and sostenuto pedals).

Obviously I’ll be selling my Komplete Kontrol S88 mk1. It’s a much more capable keyboard but I just don’t like how the keys feel, and being unable to use its accessibility software recently has made me realize that I don’t really care that much about the accessibility features.

On a related note, I’ve been pretty disappointed with the Osmose and I might end up selling that too, and repairing that old Akai MPK47 that Jeremy gave me to use for the extended MIDI controls that aren’t on the Privia.

I also got sucked into taking advantage of Black Friday sales to upgrade Komplete Kontrol (mostly for its updated guitar accompaniment instruments but there’s a bunch of other synth stuff I want to mess with) and also finally bought Pigments, which has been fun to play with so far.

I sure am spending a lot of money on music stuff right now, though.

Oh also I don’t think I ever mentioned it here but I’m now a staff musician for VRC Trans Academy. So far that’s just consisted of me making my existing music available for upcoming videos but in the future I’ll hopefully be composing original works for the world, its events, and promotional videos.

TV stuff

I’ve been rewatching all of Adventure Time from the beginning, mostly because I loved the heck out of Fionna and Cake and wanted a refresher on all of the deep lore behind that show.

Originally I watched the show when it first aired but hadn’t really revisited it ever since. I remember kind of disliking the direction it took starting in late season 5, and felt like it had lost its footing and never recovered. But this second time around it actually feels a lot better overall. There’s still a bit of a slump towards the end of season 5 and most of season 6, but it definitely recovers much better than I remembered, and some of the late-series episodes have an amazing emotional impact.

It definitely gets a different tone after the lull (which is also when Pen Ward stepped down as showrunner and Adam Muto took over), and it pivots hard from being whimsical random adventures to an extremely serious story with a laser focus on continuity, but there’s some really good moments and some incredible storytelling on it.

I think the fact that now I can recognize a lot of the foreshadowing in retrospect helps a lot.

“Ketchup” was a gigantic emotional suckerpunch, holy cow.

Anyway after I’m done with Adventure Time (which will be really soon, I only have season 10 left and that one’s pretty short) I’ll be watching the new Scott Pilgrim anime, which everyone says great things about.

I guess I also have a bunch of other queued-up shows and movies. My Plex and HBO Max backlogs are gigantic.

Cat stuff

Fiona’s been especially grumpy as of late. I wonder if she’s developing arthritis or something? She’s around 12 years old and I remember that’s when Werner started to decline as well. She still loves to play but the kinds of play she’s interested in has become a lot more limited, and when she wants to jump up on a high shelf she’s definitely weighing the pluses and minuses.

She had a recent vet appointment and the vet said that it sounds like she might have a heart murmur. Getting it properly diagnosed would cost huge amounts of money and I’m not sure what I’d be able to do with the information that I’d glean from it. I tend to take a standpoint of acute/palliative care only.

Pain stuff

On that note, I’ve definitely been developing arthritis for a while. It’s primarily been in my left hand, but now I’m getting it in my right hand too. So, that’s fun. Sigh.

I’ve always had some amount of hypermobility in some of my joints (even as a little kid I remember having issues with my kneecaps wanting to fall out of alignment and needing to pop them back into place) but it’s way worse these days.

I finally have an appointment with my new primary care doctor in a week, at least. She happens to be an osteopath so maybe that’ll be helpful too.

Eye stuff

I got the non-prism-adjusted glasses from Zenni and the new prescription is pretty great. Hopefully I can work with my eye doctor to get better prism adjustments on the expensive ones, because I think that’ll help me a lot when I drive.

Art stuff

I’ve been cranking out sea urchin planter pots for a pop-up art sale next week, for the First Thursday at Seattle CoCA. I’ll also be selling comics and enamel pins while I’m there. It’ll be December 7 from 5—9 PM, at 114 Third Ave S. Seattle, WA 98104 (in the Pioneer Square neighborhood). Please stop by and buy some little cruelty-free sea urchin friends.

The more I use my Bambu X1C the happier I am with my decision to upgrade to it, and the more I need to figure out some way of monetizing it. I don’t really have the capacity to do a proper print farm but maybe I could be a bit more aggressive about selling stuff on etsy/ko-fi/gumroad/etc.?

Also right now I’m kind of glad I never got around to selling my Artillery Genius or my Palette, as I’ve had ancillary uses for them while cranking stuff out on the Bambu. I also ended up buying a filament dryer since it was on sale and is a lot more convenient (and efficient) than using my oven’s dehydrator mode, and works way better than using the Bambu’s filament-drying mode (which of course also ties the Bambu up for several hours at a time).

I should sell my Phrozen though. I absolutely hate working with resin, and it’s just taking up space. (I also should figure out what to do with the Cerambot, which was also supremely disappointing.)

Comics stuff

It’s been a year and a half since I’ve worked on any comics at all and two and a half years since I’ve worked on any of my series. I really want to get back to them but doing so would, I think, require having someone else do the art. Which is super frustrating because I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m relying on someone volunteering their time and energy, but I sure as hell can’t afford to pay someone as well. If someone were interested in doing them as a team effort, please let me know.

IndieWeb stuff

There’s some more attention happening to Ticket Auth and this has made me realize I still need to update Publ and Authl to the latest IndieAuth spec.

Also, around a year ago I switched all the images on this website to render in WebP mostly to prove a point about improving the state of tool support for it (it’s not as if my site has enough bandwidth utilization for it to make any real difference), but right now I’m pissed off enough at Google and the Chromium browser monopoly/hegemony that I’ve changed back to using jpeg+png for everything, because fuck Google. I do think it’s funny that I have gotten a total of zero complaints about the use of WebP over the last year, though.