busybee fluffy rambles

Music

I need to work on Transitions more. I haven’t worked on it in a couple weeks because I got sidetracked by Notions and then by another push at rebuilding sockpuppet.us as a self-hosted thing that’s better than the Bandcamp site it currently forwards to.

But I keep getting distracted by other things and then pain sets in and then I’m not in any state to work on music.

Cohost

Cohost, if you haven’t heard, is shutting down. (Going back another step, Cohost is, and soon will be was, a social media site that was basically “Tumblr but anti-capitalist.”)

There are a lot of efforts from people to encourage folks into making their own websites, and then a bunch of parallel efforts to set up webrings/aggregators/etc.

Not knowing about some of the parallel efforts, I went ahead and set up a Jekyll-based webring+aggregator which nobody else has signed up for, but a lot of folks said they intend to, and also it didn’t get a lot of visibility throughout Cohost so I’ve had to do the work of promoting it rather than hoping it spreads by word-of-mouth.

Jekyll also really fucking pisses me off, but this was the quickest way to get started.

At some point I want to rebuild this using Publ or a plain Flask app or something (Publ’s probably overkill frankly), and then that also reminds me of some of my other IndieWeb-related projects.

The big idea

One of the problems of getting into IndieWeb is having to set up a bunch of puzzle pieces of your own.

My idea, that I’ve had ever since I started doing IndieWeb things, is to provide basically an “IndieWeb hub” where you can sign up and then immediately get at least basic building blocks for IndieWeb things, like IndieAuth, micropub, microsub, webmention, and a basic profile/feed page, all of which can be swapped out. You’d be able to use your own domain or just use one provided for you, and it’d provide webhooks and a pull API for micropub and webmention, so that you can integrate its stuff into your own site without having to speak the protocol itself (which can get kind of tricky).

I’ve tried bringing this up as an idea in IndieWeb spaces but the pushbacks I usually get are one of:

• People should own their own site and make their own tech decisions

  but this is all about them owning their own site? and it’s a tech decision they can make things easier with?

• micro.blog already exists

  but it’s an end-to-end all-in-one thing that also doesn’t support a lot of features that people I know really want? plus $5/month is justified given how much it does but a lot of folks don’t want all those things

• Something so important to IndieWeb shouldn’t be centralized or community-funded

  Yeah because we aren’t all using brid.gy and webmention.io already

Anyway I have so many tech ideas about how to implement it and some basic ideas about how to make it sustainable but this isn’t something I can do in isolation and everyone I know is either an IndieWeb dev with their own notions of how things should be done, or people who don’t see the point to IndieWeb and are just ready to give up on social media entirely

Stress

My cats seem to love to pile onto the stress when I’m already feeling pissed about things. Tyler, especially, will get into this state where he wants attention and just starts meowing constantly and it escalates to where I yell at him and then he meows in response to my yelling and then I’m just feeling done and then I go over to him to pick him up and then I give him a tight squeeze and I feel a lot better, so maybe this is his way of telling me I need to hug him for a bit.

I’m also in a when-it-rains-it-pours state with both STANCE (sudden reminders of the concert footage I’ve been meaning to edit and post) and Trans Academy (sudden reminders of larger videos I’m committed to working on, plus we had the big birthday event this past weekend which ended up being a lot, which is leading to some cool things for me but it’s still a lot).

Chronic pain in general

All the shit above makes me flare up badly.

I’m also giving my Ploopy another shot and it’s still triggering me in various ways, but all my input devices are, even my keyboardio m100, and I’m feeling like it’s getting harder and harder to even just use the computer at a basic level

Other projects

I’ve also been working on refurbishing the grill which has been at least somewhat relaxing, but the more I work on it the more I realize how bad of a state it’s in, and I’ve had to order a bunch more repair parts, including a new burner ring, and that won’t arrive until November.

Which I guess is fine because it’s not really grilling season anymore, but still, I’d like to be able to use this thing!

It’s nice having a project that doesn’t hurt to do, though, and where there’s no pressure to get it done.

All told I’ve spent around $120 on repair parts, so adding that to $150 for the grill itself (not counting the tank cost) and it’s a total of $270, and the grill I’ll have in the end will be way better than any given $300 grill.

Anyway, a word of wisdom to people who like to grill things: CLEAN YOUR FUCKING GRILL. Food residue is acidic! Acid corrodes metal! Grills are made of metal!

All of the issues I’m having are because the previous owner basically never cleaned it, and so the diffuser got rusty and disintegrated, the burner got rusty and clogged, and the burner can’t be cleaned because the screws that hold it in also got rusty and disintegrated. (Given that the burner needs to be unscrewed to be cleaned properly it’d have been nice if Fuego designed it with a quick-connect instead of a screw mount, that said.)

So anyway

That’s what’s up, I am angry and stressed and in pain and I have a short fuse right now. Please understand that I am very easy to set off and if I’m upset at something, it’s not helpful to invalidate my feelings or to tell me I’m doing things wrong, or to engage in whataboutisms.

I need help with things, not even more shit piled on top of them.

And when it comes to additional work, please keep in mind that I’ve been unemployed for over two years and am disabled and already stretched way too thin while also being worried about my long-term future, and if there’s things I do that help you out, remember I have Patreon, Ko-fi, and music that I put a lot of work and love into.

And word of mouth is super helpful, especially for music! Having more people listen to my music would be worth the most to me at the moment! Or if people want to use the tools I work so hard to build, especially Publ and Bandcrash!

But even just like. Basic fucking acknowledgment that the things I do matter to someone else would be nice. They matter to me but that’s not enough to keep me going.