Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
Having an in-person, actually-live show was such a great thing for my psyche.
I came to Denver wondering what the hell I was doing, like I was coming out of obligation rather than for something I actually wanted to do. But having had two nights of great performances and camaraderie, which was much needed and sorely missing from the last few years' worth of online-only shows, has made me feel so much better.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
The latest version of Logic released today, with some much-vaunted features. It’s also finally gone to version 11, after being stuck on 10.x for over a decade, even though 10.x minor version updates were often larger than the differences between major versions (and those major version updates cost a lot of money!).
I just played around with it for about an hour and put its major new features through its paces, and here’s some of my thoughts on it.
It’s been a little while again! I think I like these collected updates rather than doing daily micro-dumps, and it’s also nice posting it here instead of on Mastodon or whatever. Timeline-based social media kinda bums me out these days.
But yeah today I’m feeling pretty accomplished!
I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get my music copyrights properly enforced on YouTube.
The problem is that I’ve released pretty much all of my music under CC by-nc-sa, which means that people are free to use it as long as they credit me, use it noncommercially, and also put their content under the CC by-nc-sa license.
However! People never fucking do. It’ll never be credited, is often used in a literal fucking advertisement (EDIT: I got the advertisement taken down without challenge, but it was just someone using my song “Come Out” to advertise disposable placemats for some reason), and is also absolutely never put under the same license.
So, you’d think this would be a perfect use case for YouTube’s copyright enforcement tools, right?
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.
