busybee fluffy rambles

Album progress

For Transitions, I am done recording 5 of a planned 12-14 songs. I still need to make artwork for it. I also need to build some simple functionality for Bandcrash to extract the liner notes into a document that can then be turned into a PDF or whatever.

I have also finished the music/mastering portion of its companion album, Deadnames, which I will be releasing simultaneously with Transitions. I still need to make artwork and liner notes for it.

Progress is a bit stymied by chronic pain right now.

Choir stuff

I ended up taking on the Singer Liaison role which has ended up being a bunch of work. But hopefully that’s settling down soon.

We’re also performing at Bumbershoot next week! Super exciting. I also will be getting a couple free weekend passes (one for me, one for a +1) which is pretty cool. Unfortunately I won’t really be able to attend much of it myself, and two of the three bands I want to see are going on at the exact same time as us, and the third is going on right after, so it’ll be difficult for me to go see them too.

SIX is also on the same day as our performance, so if I’m going to go to that I’ll have to be careful with my scheduling as well. Oy, why is everything always all at once?

Chronic pain

Usual shit (wrists, shoulders, back, knees) being amplified by the weather and stress and overwork. Ugh. Why is everything always all at once?

Streaming

I’ve been working on improving my streaming setup so that I can do better streams. I ended up migrating my Owncast server to my old Intel NUC which I’m hosting on my home network, so I can offer more stream quality levels. I kind of want to run OBS on it as well but I need to figure out how to get hardware encoding to work if I’m going to do that, and also will require a lot of rejiggering of my hardware setup.

I think it’ll also reduce the number of simultaneous viewers I can do right now (since there’s an extra layer of proxying happening to make all the plumbing work; the https termination is still happening on my Linode VPS) but if that becomes a problem it’s easy enough to set Owncast to use Backblaze B2 as its HLS segment CDN, although that’ll make it more expensive to run. Fortunately I don’t stream often.

Also my back-of-the-envelope calculation says I can support around 200 simultaneous viewers and given that my all-time maximum viewer count is 11, that’s still in “that’d be a nice problem to have” territory. In all likelihood I’d probably just end up switching back to YouTube Live or twitch or something before that becomes an issue.

I also want to work out a better setup for doing performances from within VRChat. I have an idea about how to set that up but I haven’t gotten around to actually doing it. It’ll also require having even more clutter in my already-cluttered living room, or possibly using my Quest from the recording studio instead and figuring out some way of actually piping the audio in (but I’d also rather not do that for a bunch of logistical reasons).

On that note, I’m thinking of doing a VRChat+owncast concert next Friday at 3 PM Pacific Time, as a means of proving things out.

Text editors

I’ve switched back to Sublime Text 3. zed just wasn’t doing it for me.

Cats

Fiona’s been extra grumpy as of late. She’s really showing her age (14!), and I’m letting her get away with a lot more as a result.

Tyler’s doing fine though.