busybee fluffy rambles

When I adopted Tyler, his tail had a couple of kinks in it, apparent signs of dislocations or other injuries. The vet said that they’re just a normal thing that happens to some cats, and that it’s generally not harmful to them and there isn’t really anything that can be done.

Unfortunately, Tyler how has a third kink in his tail, and this one’s pretty close to his spine, and he’s clearly in pain from it. He’s been unable to clean his hindquarters anymore (which he was never great at to begin with) and whenever I try brushing him or even gently petting him there he’s clearly in a lot of distress. Even just lying in place he’s having a lot of trouble getting comfortable.

So, I’m going to take him to the vet, and I expect that whatever they find it’s going to be pretty expensive to take care of. Sigh.

From what I’m finding online, most likely the vet will want to do some x-rays, and depending on what they find they might either need to set the joints and splint his tail for a while or, unfortunately, they may need to amputate.

But he’s clearly in a lot of pain and I want him not to be!

Hi, I am once again writing to request a reconsideration of the state-wide Electric Vehicle Transportation Fee, the additional $75 line-item added to electric vehicles' car registrations in the state of Washington.

The purpose of this fee is supposed to be to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles, but it does exactly the opposite. This $75/year fee represents more than I pay for energy on my electric vehicle in any given year, and I, like most EV owners, charge my vehicle at home on equipment I paid hundreds of dollars for.

This is on top of the already ridiculously-high $150/year fee that is meant to offset the missing fuel tax, which already is for more than the total amount of fuel I would have bought in any given year.

I only drive around 1000 miles per year. I am disabled and on a limited income. I bought an older, used electric vehicle somewhat to reduce my already-low transportation costs but mostly to be better to the environment based on how little I drive to begin with, as the environmental impact of the oil changes that I no longer need was pretty significant, especially compared to how little I was driving.

This $225 total in fees means I am paying vastly more than my fair share compared to drivers of internal-combustion vehicles, and am being actively punished for making the right choice in terms of harm reduction on the environment.

I am also already paying more for the infrastructure offsets actually taken by my (again, seldom-driven) electric vehicle in the form of the two “additional vehicle weight” fees, which total $35 (split up into $10 and $25 for some reason).

A much more equitable approach would be to assess a much smaller fee across drivers of all vehicles, regardless of fuel type, which would actually encourage EV adoption, and would also generate more revenue for the state.

I urge you to please re-evaluate these regressive fees and to consider a more equitable means of offsetting infrastructure costs.

The vet just got back to me with the results of yesterday’s tests.

Her white blood count is elevated (indicating inflammation or an infection), and the radiologist says that the concerning bits on her lungs are just her asthma being especially bad right now.

So, we’re giving her a short course of Prednisone and hopefully that clears things up.

It’s unclear what caused the weight loss but given how enthusiastic she’s been about wet food and how meh she’s been about dry food, I think she’s just going to get a lot more wet food going forward. That’ll make it easier to give her the meds anyway.

The most important takeaway is that she is almost certainly not dying any time soon. Yay!

After having eaten a bunch of wet food last night and having had three doses of antibiotics, Fiona’s getting back to her usual cuddly/climby self. She isn’t sneezing anymore, and while she’s still a bit congested she snuggled up with me in bed this morning, and right now she’s being super snuggly and affectionate. She’s also purring super loudly, which she hasn’t done in a while.

I still haven’t heard from the vet about her bloodwork or x-rays but I feel like there’s a lot less to worry about now.

I finally got a bunch of stuff working on the new Sockpuppet website, including the music browser. Now people will have the ability to actually find something in my vast sea of content!

I still need to finish tagging a bunch of stuff to make it useful but having the functionality in place gives me motivation to do so.

I’ve also improved the “buy box” and added way more streaming providers to the sources (which of course requires more content to be filled out, too), and there’s a bunch of other functionality like being able to browse lyrics and song notes and such from album pages.

The really neat thing is that most of this stuff, even the dynamic stuff, is done using pure CSS! There’s a little bit of Javascript for a couple of things but I have some ideas about how I can remove that stuff, and it’s not like the javascript is particularly heavyweight anyway.

At some point I should release the templates as Publ samples, so that others can use this as a basis for building their own music sites too. Or something. I’m doing a lot of stuff that’s really taking advantage of Publ functionality under the hood.

Anyway, for those who follow me via a feed reader but haven’t added that site yet, it’s definitely ready to be added at this point, and I’ll be posting most of my music-related blogging over there from now on.

Over the past few days I’ve been pushing myself to finally get a usable new music site and it’s finally at the point where I’m ready to have the tires kicked. There’s a bunch of stuff that needs to still be done on it but that can come later. For now it at least has vague parity with my Bandcamp page, and my wrists need a rest.

I watch a lot of Living Big in a Tiny House, and I have very mixed feelings about it. But there’s definitely a bunch of trends I’ve noticed with it (and also with other tiny house channels on YouTube).

• “We aren’t actually living in it yet”
• “My things were controlling me”
• Moved in just one month ago, “loving it forever”
• “We just got married”
• Outdoor bathroom
• “We found a great parking space”
• “Our family had this land available”
• “It’s a lot bigger than you’d think!”
• Slide-out bed
• Closet bed (especially for children)
• Ultra-dense bunking for their five children
• Kids saying: “We used to have our own separate rooms but now we get to play together a lot more”
• Have to completely reconfigure your room every time you want to do something different
• No kitchen space
• “My smoke detector keeps going off” (or, alternately, no smoke detectors at all)
• Super narrow, steep, tall stairs
• Lack of accessibility in general
• “It’s a bit tricky to do [thing that will become harder as they get older] but it’s not a problem”
• “I don’t even miss having stuff”
• Composting toilet (or no toilet)
• Instruction sign on the wall for visitors to use the toilet
• “Do you like this [composting/incinerating] toilet?” Heavy sigh followed by, “Yeah it’s pretty great once you get used to it”
• “You totally get used to the smell”
• Have to climb a ladder to get into bed
• Changing bed sheets is also… interesting
• “Close yourself off, retreat from the world”
• Owner makes their living as an influencer
• Owner got the inspiration from whatever YouTuber is interviewing them
• Owner intends to start their own tiny house channel for an income source
• “Everything I could possibly need I have right here”
• Added storage by putting things on some sort of complicated hoisting system that totally would never fail
• Owner lifestyle that’s one step removed from tradwifery
• Peak Instagram decor (fake ivy vines everywhere, “Live Laugh Love”-type signs, no actual artwork anywhere)
• General Wiccan vibes
• Weird religious overtones to the story (got inspiration from God, prayed for a spouse, “all my prayers were answered”)
• And of course the kids are homeschooled
• Spare chairs as wall decor
• Random appropriation of native culture
• “I don’t need a TV with this amazing view!”
• Is this actually being filmed in an Ikea model home showroom?
• “This is really private” (usually in respect to the, again, outdoor bathroom)
• Super water- and energy-efficient tiny house next to a gigantic swimming pool
• Tiny house in the back yard of a gigantic house that the owners actually live in
• Tiny house situated on a 5-acre lot otherwise used only for a fucking lawn
• “I’m saving [tiny amount of money] on rent!”
• Ignoring long-term maintenance costs especially for off-grid systems (batteries, septic, etc.)

Last night’s show went really well! There were a bunch of technical hitches and I made a bunch of mistakes and so on but it was a good time and it was great to get a lot more people hearing my music. Hopefully I’ll be able to do more of these things.

Anyway. I have a few listening parties scheduled for the album release:

• Bandcamp on November 18, 2024 at 7 PM PST (with text chat)
• YouTube on November 22, 2024 at 1 PM PST (with text chat)
• VRChat/live stream on November 24, 2024 at 3 PM PST

For the VRChat one, my plan is to perform some of the songs from the album live before we listen to the full studio version, but we’ll mostly play it by ear.

And, of course, I have my TDOR choir show in a few hours (and another one next Wednesday evening), both of which will hopefully be livestreamed.

There’s been a schedule change with Aga’s Toys for Tots event, and I will now be going on at 2 PM Pacific. Also it seems that I’ll be performing from an instance where I can invite a small audience to join me, so I hope to see folks there! The instance will be owned by my VRChat group. I was misinformed about this! Please join Corbelle’s group.

Transitions is (finally) almost done. There’s just a couple of little tweaks left to do (like, super duper minor things, decibel-level adjustments and slight timing tweaks and a little bit of vocal tuning). It’ll be really nice to finally have this album done after all this time. The oldest song on this was first recorded in 2001! And my first attempt at making an album of this stuff was back in 2003! This album is legally old enough to drink in the United States.

I’ll probably stick to my original preorder release date of November 20, 2024, as that’s Trans Day of Remembrance. Deadnames has also been done and ready to release for a while, and it will also be coming out on whatever day Transitions comes out.

These are the release dates for Bandcamp/itch/mirlo; streaming will come later, as a proper streaming release has a two-week lead time. So it’ll probably be November 29 for those platforms. (Streaming users can wait, anyway. Anyone who’s following me closely knows to buy my music, right? Right.)

I’ve also written some fun visualizer code which will be used to put a full-album video on my YouTube channel. Audio visualizers are super annoying and awkward on every code platform I know of these days, so I just went to Get It Done by modifying Wavemaker, a tool built by my friend John. Someday I want to build a better framework for this stuff but Good Enough is good enough.

Hey everyone! On Friday, November 15, at 2:30 PM PST I will be performing a live set in VRChat for a charity fundraiser, benefitting Toys for Tots.

The show will be hosted by Corbelle’s music events group, so join that VRChat group if you’d like to see me in-world. Otherwise, you can watch it being streamed on twitch. I hope you’ll be able to come!

Okay my gut feeling was at least agreed to by a bunch of other people: Material Change will not be going onto Transitions, and instead the chamber pop version will be something I do for a later album, named “Misfits,” which I already have so many ideas for.

Any attempt at forcing Material Change to fit into Transitions would not serve the album, at least not in the modern landscape of how music is distributed and listened to, and as always, I make up my own rules for how I do my music.

It’s funny how much more important and urgent things feel at 1 AM.

So, today Apple unveiled the new M4 Mac mini, which seems like a perfect upgrade for me! Except… they did something really asinine:

They put the power button underneath.

This means that you have to physically pick up the machine to turn it on, or to force-reboot it. Those are rare occurrences, but they’re enough of one that this becomes a problem.

Why’s this a problem? Well, part of it is that the mini’s maximum storage configuration is pretty small, and upgrading the storage is stupid expensive, so pretty much everyone who’s using these for doing, say, audio and video work is going to need an external drive enclosure. And external drive enclosures tend to have very short, fixed Thunderbolt cables, and managing those cables can become very tricky even when you don’t need to move your device around.

This will also be a big problem for people who want to rackmount or monitor-mount their devices; as far as I can tell from various photos, there isn’t really much of a gap/lip under which you can place a finger. Maybe people will start making custom button-pressing tools or something, I dunno. I guess that wouldn’t be too hard.

But still, it’s annoying that Apple would make this change.

(Hopefully they at least put it under the front corner, which would at least be livable! None of the photos I’m finding show which corner it’s under though.)

Another annoying thing is that while there are now five USB-C ports (three of which are Thunderbolt), there are no longer USB-A ports, so at least for my setup I’d need to run everything through a Thunderbolt dock, and finding one of those that’s both reliable and provides the ports I need is troublesome at best. Also, in my experience, you really want a dedicated port (rather than a docking station) for an external monitor, a storage enclosure, and an audio interface… and that’s all three Thunderbolt ports right there. So then my keyboard and mouse would have to plug into one of the USB-C ports in front, and that gets really messy really fast.

So anyway, power-wise the M4 mini would be a huge upgrade for me, but for the physical and connectivity requirements of my recording studio, it doesn’t seem like a good fit.

Maybe I’ll get an M4 mini for my home office and then move my M1 Max Mac studio into the recording studio. Or maybe I’m fine with the hardware I have already.

When I was a kid I was really into Infocom text adventures, and the game Beyond Zork had some very strong tabletop RPG elements, much moreso than other Infocom games. One of the things about it is that when you started the game you had to roll a character, and you could choose the gender of the player character.

The gender of the player character had literally no effect on the gameplay.

I always chose “female” for some reason.

But there were no signs.

I also used to be really into fighting games (Street Fighter et al), until I had to stop due to RSI issues.

I always chose the female fighters for some reason.

But there were no signs.

When I was 7 I was really into The Last Unicorn.

My parents thought I identified with Schmendrick the magician.

I identified with the unicorn.

But there were no signs.

When I was 10 and Super Mario Bros 2 came out I was infatuated with the game. Especially because the manual described Birdo as “thinking he was a girl.”

I wanted to hug her so bad, and say, “me too.”

But there were no signs.

Every time I wrote a story that had a self-insert character, it always just felt natural for that character to be a girl.

But there were no signs.

Okay it turns out that while the mobile version of PlexAmp works exactly how I want it to, the desktop version kind of sucks? Like, if you’re doing “album radio” (which is the shuffle-by-album thing I love so much) it is super easy to get out of the actual player view, and as far as I can tell there’s no way to get back into it except by restarting “album radio,” which then interrupts whatever it is you’re listening to.

Update: Turns out all you have to do is click on the mini-player, oops. Dunno why I didn’t try that before, it seems so obvious in retrospect.

Also its AirTunes “support” is just that it doesn’t prevent you from setting your system audio to AirTunes. That is… not useful.

So, okay, I think I’m sticking with iTunes on desktop, and still using my album shuffle playlist hack (which also lets me curate my upcoming listening and also, y'know, pause and resume).

But on mobile, PlexAmp seems to be the way to go.

No idea if they’ll even respond to this. They probably won’t. But it’s more paper trail for me and the credit card company, at least.

Hi, I am still waiting for contact information for your attorney. I cannot find any public records that indicates that he works with your firm and I would greatly appreciate any evidence to the contrary. The public records indicate that he works with Skyworks Solutions, a semiconductor manufacturer in Irvine, California.

Additionally, in the USPTO filing it appears that a registration was only performed for class 41, when I was told that it would also be registered on additional classes (namely 9 and 35), which would justify the amount I was charged. Could I please get an itemized bill of what the $999 went to?

I also still am concerned about the need for this registration having been done in the first place. Looking at the USPTO database, the only recent/pending registrations I’ve found for “Sockpuppet” or “sock puppet” are for the baseball team as previously mentioned (and they are indeed in class 41), and also there is still the issue of common law trademark regarding band names; for example:

• Gerben Law: An Overview of Common Law Trademark Rights
• LegalZoom: How to Establish a Common Law Trademark
• Stan Soocher: Big Legal Battles Over Rights in Bands' Names

• Secure Your Trademark: Trademarking a band name

  The legal advice is in; the mega pop star can’t force you to drop your band name because, technically, you arrived on the music scene several years before she did. But from now on, when you mention the name of your band, people are probably going to start humming “All About That Bass.” Here, the degree of trademark protection you missed out on becomes evident.

  […]

  Key Takeaway: When two or more non-trademarked bands share the same or a similar name, the one with the highest seniority usually wins and ends up with trademark protection.

• USPTO: I Received a Letter/Email…, particularly this excerpt:

  Federal registration is not required to establish trademark rights. Even if a trademark registration expires or is cancelled, the trademark owner may continue to have “common law” rights in the mark. Common law rights arise from actual use of a mark for particular goods or services and may allow the common law user to successfully challenge another party’s use in court.

Furthermore, my records show that I requested a cancellation of this process early on Friday, and I was told that I would receive a call “as soon as possible.” I never received that call, and then on Monday I was told that it was too late for a refund as the paperwork had already been submitted.

In addition, both California and Washington are two-party consent states, and I’d like to note that I was only informed that the initial call was being recorded quite a ways into it (when I asked for more information about the competing mark), and was never asked for my consent to be recorded. However, the existence of the recording was later used to threaten me when I mentioned the possibility of issuing a chargeback.

Given that the paperwork does seem to have been filed as promised, I am willing to only take a partial refund based on the services actually rendered, but I am still not exactly thrilled with how this entire process has been handled, nor with the timbre of your communications to me.

I am sure that any disputes along these lines can be cleared up with a simple conversation with your attorney, so I would greatly appreciate being able to have such a converation.

Thank you.

Hey y'all, it is Bandcamp Friday, a good time to buy independent music while Bandcamp opts to release their share of the purchase price.

As always, I have my latest released album, and the share also applies to preorders of Transitions. Or you might consider checking out some of my other many albums that you might not already be familiar with, such as:

• Alt-rock songs about cats and feelings and mental health
• Electropop songs about feelings and cats and mental health
• EDM songs about feelings and mental health (no cats on this one sorry)
• A variety show in which Radiohead takes turns with comedy showtunes
• Chill lo-fi music inspired by various coffee grinders
• An audio diary from the month when I almost died of a pulmonary embolism

But also this isn’t just me shamelessly self-promoting. I’m shamelessly other-promoting, too! Here’s a list of some of the albums I’ll be buying myself:

• Beatober ‘23, You Know, and Preserves '23 - Vol I by err:rawr
• A New Beat by Ulysses Owens Jr.
• Demo by Comfort Object
• City Slicker by Ginger Root
• Constellation of Souls and Turning the Tables by lowercase t
• … on reflection and September 23 by William Basinski

And, on the last one I preordered when air collapsed within by our dear friend, the medic, which was also released very recently.

Anyway. Support independent musicians by buying their music! It’s good for you, and even better for them.

If all went well, my concert is now underway. In theory, here is the VRChat instance (but if nobody’s there check the VRC group). And in theory, the stream should be live.

In practice, I am probably currently scrambling to get everything working at this very moment.

I’ll be performing in VRChat tonight at 9 PM PDT. Join my VRChat music group for the instance link.

If you can’t join via VRChat, I’ll also be streaming on my Owncast instance, and I’ll try to engage with the stream chat although historically that hasn’t worked out so well.

And if the time doesn’t work, the stream recording will eventually go on my YouTube channel.

For this concert I’ll be trying out a new performance setup for improved sound, hand tracking, and audience engagement, and also a different venue than last time for better environmental factors.

I’m having a bad pain flareup and as much as I’d like to push through it and do the concert anyway, from experience I know that’ll just make things worse and I’m trying to get better at self-care and showing myself the same understanding I show others.

So, tentatively I’m planning on my next VR concert being on September 29, at 9 PM Pacific time, hosted on my VRChat group. And of course it’ll be streamed over on my Owncast. Here’s a Discord event link.

The great thing about performing virtually is that I don’t have to worry about venue booking. I can make my own rules for this and I don’t have to feel bad about the reality of my health.

💜

Hey y'all, it’s been a little while since I’ve done a VRChat music performance, and I have a hankering to try out my new performing gear. Please vote in this poll so I can figure out what the best time is for a show!

(Don’t worry about the name you put in, and I’ve also set it to hide responses from each other. Strawpoll doesn’t have any “allow anonymous responses” option for time polls, unfortunately.)

Well, this is silly: I just discovered that Bandcrash doesn’t properly escape HTML entities in the web preview player. Or rather, it didn’t. It does now, as of v0.7.9.

I have two upcoming VRChat performances happening.

1. On Wednesday, August 28, at 7 PM PDT, I will be performing a song off my upcoming album Transitions at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit Academy” concert series. Join the Trans Academy group for access to the instance.
2. On Friday, August 30, at 3 PM PDT, I will be playing a full set of my songs in-world. This will also be streamed to my owncast instance for folks who are unable to join in VR (and I’ll hopefully record it for YouTube as well), but for the best experience, join my VRChat group for the easiest instance access.

UPDATE: I have made a separate VRChat group for my music stuff, MUSIC.1138. Please join that one for my VRChat concerts!

I hope to see you there!

Today something fucked up with my mail server and I’m sick of dealing with it, so I migrated my mail to Purely Mail, which is great, and there’s still a bunch of shit broken on my site as a result of things fucking up but whatever, at least now I can receive mail again and I don’t have to spend frantic hours to receive email when I’m already in the middle of a fucking crisis

it’s like $10/year and works great, and I’ll probably also drop mailgun for my outgoing because it handles that just fine too

I haven’t posted here in a while so I figured I should do that, just to keep folks informed of my continued existence.

I’m still experiencing substantial post-COVID symptoms. This cough is persisting, and it’s made my vertigo way worse, to the point that I am having trouble driving anywhere. I also have a new fun symptom where every time I cough I get a flash headache on the right side of my head and sometimes that includes dizziness! Fun times. I hope this doesn’t presage an aneurysm or something.

Anyway in a couple days I’ll be flying to Denver for Song Fight! Live, the first time we’ve done it in person since 2019. I’ve missed doing this so much. Unfortunately my vertigo situation means I will not be renting a car and will relying heavily on Lyft and mass transit.

For folks in the area, my performances (Sockpuppet and Octothorpe) will be Friday the 19th at Buntport Theater, with the show starting at 5 PM. I will also be accompanying some folks on Saturday the 20th on drums, and of course that day is also the “live fight” when we all debut a song written in a hurry for a title that’s given sometime this week.

I mean, assuming I’m not about to die of some major brain hemmorhage or something.

Meanwhile I’m also trying to get more VRChat performance opportunities. Stuff is slowly fermenting in that space and hopefully it leads somewhere good. Unfortunately most scheduled VRChat performance stuff all happens in clumps where I already have other stuff going on too. Maybe I should just start making my own concerts and see what happens.

I’m over COVID, and just have a little lingering bronchitis. Also some of the worst brain fog I’ve ever had. I feel like my brain’s been through a blender. Spatial relationships make very little sense, my reaction times are super slow, I am definitely not safe driving right now, and so on.

My standard state of affairs is best described as “dazed and confused” right now. I feel like my mental acuity has pretty much gone away. I’m also making a lot of ridiculous spelling mistakes when I write, and I’m having trouble stringing together basic procedures for things.

Basically I feel like I’ve taken massive brain damage and this has me all sorts of fucked up.

At least I’m not alone in this but that’s cold comfort. If I can’t recover from this, what future do I have? My brain is pretty much the only thing I had going for me and now I don’t even have that.

Last night I started feeling significant pain whenever I inhaled too deeply, telling me there was either pleurisy or another embolism happening. I gave it several hours to try to resolve on its own, and it just got worse and worse, so this morning, I headed to the ER.

And there I waited, and waited, and waited, and then after around four hours of nothing happening while just sitting in the waiting room in agony, the pain had resolved itself, and I could breathe normally again.

So I asked about being discharged early, and was told to wait, and wait, and wait, and it was another hour or so before I was able to leave.

Anyway I’m back home now, and hopefully this is the last of the COVID drama in my life for a little while.

I hate how every time I get sick, be it with COVID or anything else, I spend so much time feeling worthless and like I’m in limbo and like everything is passing me by.

I’ve got stuff to do but I’m feeling way too tired to do any of it and I’m full of depression right now. Post-COVID everything just feels so pointless, and I also feel so alone.

I’m supposed to be getting my set together for Song Fight! Live, but I’m just full of negative self-talk and a feeling that nobody gives a shit about me or my music. I hustle so much trying to find anyone who wants to work with me on anything and the best I can find is endless unpaid work for exposure which never amounts to anything.

I forced myself to take a walk today and it was nice to get out of the house but I still just felt so alone with my thoughts, and those thoughts weren’t great to listen to.

Sometimes it sucks to live alone.

I seem to have made it through the worst of the COVID. My fever’s mostly gone, and my cough is way less severe (which is good because oh my god does it hurt to cough anymore). I’ve lost five pounds since Friday but also I’m finally getting my appetite back so hopefully I can cushion some of that.

Because of the current surge, the antivirals are all super out of stock, including Molnupiravir which I’d gotten a prescription for (unfortunately Paxlovid isn’t safe for me to take due to my blood thinners). I had a followup with my GP yesterday and we decided that based on my progress I don’t really need it anyway. (She also doesn’t think the nodules they found on Sunday need a followup.)

As usual I seem to have a secondary bacterial infection in my lungs, judging by the phlegm I’ve been coughing up, but hopefully that’ll clear up in a few days and I won’t need antibiotics for it. For now I’m just taking pseudoephedrine and guaifenisin which is my usual “sit it out” protocol, since I’m allergic to most antibiotics and am super worried about antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains (and anyway Washington State guidance is to wait a week if possible before prescribing antibiotics for lung and sinus infections).

Usually when I get COVID I use QFC’s overpriced grocery delivery service (which is really just Kroger-branded Instacart), but lately I’ve been shopping at Safeway more so I figured I’d try theirs out instead, and wow, it was way cheaper, just $4 + tip for my whole order. We’ll see if the ice cream survives.

I am super fatigued right now and that’s making it even less feasible for me to work right now. It hasn’t even been a week since I was exposed, much less the onset of symptoms, so I have to remind myself that it’s totally normal to feel this way after an illness, especially COVID which usually wipes me out for months afterwards. I’m just hoping that given how quickly the disease progressed this time, so will the post-infection fatigue.

I feel super guilty about this but I’ve started up a gofundme to help defray some of my ongoing financial issues. I’m hoping I can ramp up on freelance stuff soon (not that I’d been having much luck with it before this, anyway) but at this point I’m mostly just hoping to carry things forward until I can finally get on disability. I do want to genuinely thank everyone who’s contributed so far, even though I feel really weird about accepting the money. I’d rather be getting it from random rich people and not, like, people I know, who I feel could probably use the money more than me? If that makes any sense? Gah.

This outbreak has been pretty devastating to the choir; at least 15% of us are sick, probably more. A lot of us are disabled or immunocompromised. I hope we’re going to see a return to our old masking+testing policies; they’d been relaxed this season in keeping with King County infection statistics, and we were caught totally off-guard by this surge. It’s a very hard lesson learned for the future.

In some positive news, my parents (who were visiting for the choir show) are not testing positive, and I’m glad they were here when I needed them most.

I’m back at home. They did a CT scan but there wasn’t anything too concerning, it just seems that I was coughing hard enough that I had a minor bleed in my lungs, exacerbated by the blood thinners I take due to my clotting disorder. The prognosis is to just not take my blood thinners for a few days and to do the usual hydration/plenty of rest/etc.

The CT scan did find a couple of probably-unrelated nodules on my lungs which are probably nothing but will need a followup.

Anwyay tomorrow my prescription for molnupiravir should finally come through. It’d have been nice if I could have started on it yesterday when it was prescribed but supplies are limited right now. But it should at least help me to recover much more quickly.

i’m in the ER because I started coughing up blood this morning. so much for releasing my new avatar today…

Hey y'all! My birthday is tomorrow, June 14! I will be turning 0x2E. Or 0b101110 if that’s your preference.

Anyway. Normally I’d use that as a reason to have a huge karaoke blowout on VRChat Friday evening, but I have a big choral show on Saturday and some of the pieces need my full vocal range, so I’m not going to risk fucking up my voice for Saturday.

So instead I’ll have birthday karaoke in VRChat Saturday evening! I’m thinking it’ll start at, say, 7 PM Pacific Time. You can join off me if you have me friended or I’ll be posting an instance link on my discord.

Also, to help with the celebrations, I’ve thrown together a party hat.

It’s really unfortunate how I’m stuck in the hinterland between being too disabled to work but being too abled to get on disability (at least not easily). Dealing with Social Security has been super frustrating and I’m not expecting to get a full hearing or determination any time soon, so in the meantime I could really use some sort of part-time income. Not to mention having things to do that other people care about.

I am way too burned out on software engineering to do that anymore (I barely even want to write code for my own projects), but I would be super willing to do things like:

• Music
• Sound design
• Video editing
• Character design
• 2D and 3D art
• Game design

Anyway, here’s my resume.

I’m willing and able to work part-time in Seattle (remote-focused hybrid preferred) or remotely.

I have a whole bunch of stuff going on right now and most of it involves things that people can come see me at!

With Seattle Center on Contemporary Art I am one of eight artists in a show featuring transgender artists, entitled Taking Up Space. Its opening reception is this Thursday from 5-9 PM at the CoCA gallery (114 Third Ave S, Seattle, WA 98104).

Sunday afternoon I am performing in the Trans Academy Trans Pride VR talent show, which is from 12:30 - 3 PM (Pacific Daylight Time) in VRChat. See the announcement video for more information, and of course there’s plenty on the community Discord and on X.

Next Saturday (June 15, 2024) I’ll be performing with STANCE at the Museum of Flight for Sally Ride Day, at around 12 PM.

The Friday and Saturday after (June 21 and 22, 2024) I’ll be again performing with STANCE for our Pride concert series, at 7:30 PM on the 21st at Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church and 3 PM on the 22nd at Seattle First Baptist.

Some Wednesday evening in July I’ll be performing a full set of my own music at Trans Academy’s concert series, Moonlit Academy. More information as it becomes available.

And then on July 19 and 20th I’ll be performing with Song Fight! Live at the Buntport Theater in Denver, Colorado, actual show times yet to be determined.

I am, as always, a busy bee.

I finally got in touch with someone at the Kia dealership who said that my car will be ready to pick up tomorrow, after “only” a month being stuck there. Ugh.

They said that they were not authorized to do the full TSB repair and that they could only do the first-level sound mitigation, claiming that it was “just normal EV noise” (it fucking wasn’t) and that they can only actually replace the bearing when it actually fails. Given how much I drive that’ll probably end up happening both well after the warranty expires and in the most inconvenient situation imaginable.

OH WELL. At least I’ll finally have my car back, and can stop putting up with this piece of shit loaner that’s frustrating to drive and gets 22MPG and has basically no cargo space.

But knowing how the dipshits at this service center operate, I’m not holding my breath for my car to actually be ready to pick up at my appointment time.

In my last post about Logic I saw a lot of potential in the chord track but found that the UX was pretty lacking. Since then I’ve seen a few Logic-related videos that have found some better ways of interacting with it:

1. You can type in the chord name textually (which I already figured out but didn’t think to mention in the post)
2. By pressing Tab while editing a chord, it’ll advance the playhead and add a new chord to the progression
3. Once you turn on “Listen” mode it’ll stay that way, so you can sorta record from your keyboard using that

I’m still not totally thrilled with it and wish there were a live recording option, but it’s actually pretty workable as it is.

This video was particularly helpful (and also has a really nice defense of the AI creation tools in it, including several points which I have always agreed with):

The UX could definitely be better-documented, though, and I wonder how many other little things are there which just aren’t explained anywhere.

Also there’s a few other UX papercuts which still exist, like keyboard focus is weird while on the chord track. But things will improve over time, as I said before.

I’m not sure if I remembered to post this here and I apologize for the last-minuteness if this is my first post but!!!!!

Tonight I will be performing on the Benaroya Hall stage with the choir! It’s kind of a big deal for me! I’d love to see people come if they can! The concert is from 7:30 to 9:30 PM. Get your tickets here, oh my gosh.

Last night I took some cough suppressant before I went to bed and remembered to run my humidifier, and when I woke up this morning I was feeling fine. So maybe this was a false alarm as far as COVID re-infection goes. OR maybe my immune system finally knows how to take care of it quickly. Either way, I’m glad to not be in the throes of respiratory distress.

I’m still feeling like crap in other ways though. I bought a promising piece of exercise equipment based on reading how this sort of thing can help a lot with fibromyalgia, and I did three sessions with it today and oh wow am I feeling it.

Hey y'all, since I have the album coming out on Monday, I figure Sunday night would be a good time to actually try out Bandcamp’s “listening party” biz. It’s Sunday, March 31 at 5:30 PM PDT (GMT-0700).

Also I’ll be attending a music listening party on VRChat tomorrow night (March 30) at 6:30 PM PDT (GMT-0700) and hopefully my album will be one of the things that gets played there too! The easiest way to join that would be to send me an invite request; here’s my VRChat profile if we aren’t friends already. (Unfortunately searching for my username from within VRChat is pretty difficult but you could try pasting this: fluffy — note the funky unicode!)

Song Fight! has been going for a long-ass time, and we’re hitting a big milestone, our 1000th title¹. The due date for “A Grand Parade” is in a few days and I’d love to see a bunch more people submitting songs for it. Help us celebrate this event!

So far I’ve submitted three tracks, all from unused older alter-egos of mine, and I’m also thinking of a couple more songs. But the more the merrier! Especially if you’ve ever participated in Song Fight! in the past, or have thought about it but never got around to doing it.

Today my first two slip-cast pots were unloaded from the kiln and I picked ‘em up. They came out great!

My mold positives are 60mm across, and the bisqueware measures just under 54mm after firing, which tells me exactly what I need to know going forward. Basically anything I model needs to be 1.11x the intended final size. Easy enough to remember.

I’ll be glazing these, of course, although I’m not quite sure what to use them for. I’d only intended them for calibrating my shrink factor and they’re not really a useful size for anything. Maybe they’ll become the world’s worst cortado cups.

Okay, so, I’ve been having a lot more frustrating issues as of late:

• Whatever my connective tissue issue is, it’s getting way worse
• My kneecaps love to dislocate while I walk, and after 1.5 miles or so my knees start to give out under me
• My toes also love to either dislocate or weirdly cramp at random, which is quite painful, and getting them back in place is challenging
• My other joints (wrists, shoulders, TMJ, and sometimes elbows and ankles) are also in pain a lot of the time, and are possibly getting inflamed
• I’ve been having frequent bouts of vertigo (which are especially troubling when I’m driving)
• My tinnitus has gotten a lot worse recently
• Also my GERD is back, and my usual dietary measures to keep it at bay aren’t working
• I’m also getting occasional unexplained itchy rashes that flare up and subside after a few days
• And I am fatigued all. the damn. time.

Yesterday I had a doctor appointment to try to figure stuff out, and while the appointment itself was pretty unproductive due to the usual crap with modern healthcare practices, the doctor did at least run a lot of labwork for me, including checking autoimmune and inflammation factors and the most common connective tissue disorder markers. It all came back negative.

She did at least refer me to a rheumatologist, but I suspect the rheumatologist is just going to look at the labwork and say there’s nothing they can do for me. Most likely the answer is going to be the usual “diet and exercise,” when my diet is already pretty decent and I have difficulty doing exercise because of the very problems I’m complaning about.

The only thing that was even slightly out of the ordinary on the bloodwork was a borderline c-reactive protein, which indicates either systemic inflammation or coronary artery disease, and given that I’m a bit overweight I can guess which of the two the doctors are going to assume it is (especially without any other markers indicating underlying causes for inflammatory disease).

There’s got to be something causing all this but the state of the medical industry means that it’s unlikely that anyone I talk to in the medical field is going to come up with ideas on their own, they’re just going to tell me “diet and exercise” and to do BPPV exercises. During the Epley maneuver the vertigo does get way worse, but completing the maneuver doesn’t resolve it.

And of course none of this even comes close to addressing my joints not moving the way they’re supposed to. I love walking but I sure don’t like the feeling of my knee bending backwards when I do so. Nowadays I need knee braces and a cane whenever I go out, if I want to have any chance of making it home without being in agony. And never mind playing DDR.

It’s just, gosh. I wish someone out there also has these problems but also knows what the cause is so that I can find some hope of understanding what I can do to make things better. There is so much more I’d rather be doing than what I’m currently capable of.

I wasn’t planning on getting into VR tonight but I ended up doing it anyway.

The Bigscreen folks suggested washing the facial interface gasket with soapy water, and that seems to have fixed the skin irritation. So there must have just been some residue left over.

I also printed a Vive DAS adapter so now I have a much easier time putting the headset on and setting up the audio and so on. It ends up not sitting on my head quite right, though, and adjusting the fit to my eyes is a little more fiddly. Unfortunately the design of the BSB doesn’t make it easy to put on a top support strap (the DAS adapter has a little dealybop for the DAS’s top strap but I couldn’t get it to stay attached with double-sided tape and I’m not yet willing to use permanent adhesive) so my choices are either off-axis lenses or having it so tight it gives me a headache.

I also ended up removing the lens inserts for now, and I’ll wait for the QC-passing ones to arrive.

Everything is just so sharp now. I like it.

I feel like I need to sing the praise of CarMax, the dealership I bought the Niro at.

First of all: They had amazing prices on things, and a no-nonsense no-haggle policy. You pick out your car online, make an appointment to test drive it, and get some time with it.

They also did an amazing job of getting it ready for me. They performed all necessary service, including replacing the tires, and did a thorough inspection.

The inspection on mine missed two points: It was missing its emergency trickle charger, and there was a small but concerning crack on the windshield. When I pointed these things out, they immediately bought me a new, official trickle charger ($300) and paid for the entire windshield to be replaced ($700) — no questions asked, no proof required.

And with both issues, I’d called their service number outside of their business hours, and their answering service forwarded my concerns along and I got immediate contact, direct from the sales representative I worked with, as soon as they opened!

They also gave me the best offer on my old car by far, and worked really hard to get me every possible tax credit on the vehicle (the best one being the sales tax credit from the trade-in to begin with), and gave me a clear and concise explanation for why the ones I couldn’t get weren’t available. Not that it matters — the original price on the Niro was already ridiculously low, and the fact they’ve paid an additional $1000 to fix the issues mentioned above is a nice bonus on top.

This is 100% my own opinion, unsolicited, and I earn no commission or affiliate fee for saying this.

I honestly feel that CarMax is how all car dealerships should be.

The only thing I disliked about the whole experience is that they still aren’t quite equipped for EV sales, and don’t list things like range specs or show the battery condition on the inspection report. (For battery condition you really should bring an OBD-II scanner and an appropriate app, anyway. My Niro was still at 100%.) This is such an incredibly minor concern that I feel like it almost isn’t even worth mentioning, and as EVs get more popular this issue will definitely go away anyway.

So, yeah. CarMax is such a good experience. They are absolutely the way that car sales should be.

I don’t have any new releases on my bandcamp but if you’re interested in a wide variety of music, it is there for the buying, and during Bandcamp Friday none of the money from that goes to Songtradr/Bandcamp.

This weekend, you can also buy anything in my discography, including my entire discography, for 50% off using discount code TOOMUCHMUSIC.

And as usual I’m also trying to hype up others. This month I’m planning on buying:

• A ska tribute to They Might Be Giants
• Patricia Taxxon’s latest
• Some weird abstract electronic stuff
• All of the music of Aran P. Ink

I contacted CarMax about the missing EVSE, and they pointed me to a hidden compartment for service equipment, thinking it might have been hiding in there. The EVSE wasn’t in there either, but there was the “tire mobility kit,” so it’s good that I have the official one too!

Anyway CarMax is going to order me a replacement EVSE as well. Nice.

I suspect they saw the NACS adapter and confused it for an EVSE, which is easy to do — I’d made the same mistake during my test drive and walkaround!

But yeah so far I am very happy with the CarMax experience.

I ended up paying the $700 to get the Niro EV shipped to my local dealership and reserve it for my purchase. All of the reviews of this particular model are quite stellar, and this specific car is an incredible deal (as far as I can tell it’s deeply discounted since it was a former lease vehicle but it’s still in immaculate condition). I should be able to give it a test drive in a week or so.

This isn’t my dream car but it’s a hell of a lot better than my current car in every way that matters. Plus, all of the reviews that touch upon winter driving say that it actually has really good traction control and only experiences minimal range loss. And it still has a much bigger (2.5x) range to begin with.

It’s annoying to be spending this money right now but I’m fortunate that I can swing it and don’t have to go into debt as a result.