busybee fluffy rambles

In yet another conversation about AI art on Discord, someone mentioned that most sites have the #NoAI hashtag to indicate that something should be off-limits to an AI art bot.

So, I installed a stable diffusion GUI and decided to see what the various AI models would generate for a prompt of just “NoAI.”

I have a lot of project stuff that goes on in my basement. Unfortunately, my basement is extremely cluttered and disorganized, and I kind of hate being down there, which makes it so that I have a hard time actually doing anything creative down there either.

When I moved into my house two and a half years ago, I didn’t really have a plan for how to lay stuff out, and I just put stuff where it made sense as I unpacked it. Which means that there’s no real flow to things, and stuff tends to accumulate in piles, and things are just really badly disorganized.

So, yesterday I had my 6-month followup with the cardiologist regarding the heart-related stuff and got the usual litany of obnoxious hand-wringing around my labs (evne though they were now very out-of-date) and yet another lecture about lipids and triglycerides, which, yes, this is why I am seeing you. Meh.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that he did order new labs for me (which I have no issue with, of course, just with how he talked about ordering them), and this morning I figured I’d go get them done. And before doing them I figured I’d use my OTC blood glucose meter to get an idea of what to expect with the blood sugar results.

It came back with 296 mg/dL.

That is… high.

I’m still having some pretty bad anxiety while driving, but the choir has started up rehearsals again which gives me a reason to drive at least once a week. Last night I felt anxious on my way there but totally fine on the way back.

Anyway, today I finally made my way out to the Renton Uwajimaya, which I’d been wanting to go to for a while, mostly as a driving acclimation thing but also to get some ingredients that I haven’t found at any of the Asian groceries in White Center. Most of the drive, as it turns out, is the same as the drive to the church the choir’s rehearsals are at, which makes sense since Renton is just a bit further down Rainier Ave. And I was anxious but I made it just fine, and on my drive back I was anxious in a few spots but I made it just fine.

I think if I keep doing this stuff I’ll feel fine faster.

I got stuff done today! For example:

• Uploaded a new release of the VRChat critter avatar (which is still on sale for $10) which fixes a long-standing bug in an Easter egg that people keep on complaining about about 5 seconds after they learn about the Easter egg
• Finally replaced the AI cover art on my Novembeat 2022 album, on both Bandcamp and itch.io (sadly it’s a huge pain to replace it on Spotify/iTunes/etc. and totally not worth it)
• Uploaded a full album video of Novembeat 2022, mostly to make it easier to share on VRChat (I will probably do the same for other albums as well)
• Wrote a couple of long-winded posts on Cohost, namely:
  • Answering a question about my computing setup
  • Answering a question about VR stuff
• Also finally set up automatic crossposting from Cohost to Mastodon

Oh yeah also I’m getting fairly active on Cohost and my asks are open. It’s fun. Way nicer than Tumblr, anyway.

Back when Publ was brand-new I was using a fairly common ORM for managing my database. It was okay but I had some issues with how the project was being run, particularly in how the core maintainer treated bug reporters who were reporting things that he didn’t personally agree with.

So I switched to Pony ORM, which has a much nicer, more-Pythonic API, and whose maintainers are friendly and helpful. It’s missing a few important functions such as migrations but for Publ it doesn’t matter so much and they were always claiming that migrations were coming “real soon now” for a while.

Unfortunately, some changes in Python 3.11 broke Pony completely, and progress on getting it working again has been, well, slow.

Back when I switched to Pony I mused about just dropping SQL entirely and moving to a more primitive indexed data store, such as lmdb. But I really do not have it in me to completely redo all that stuff in Publ again, especially with all of the weird regressions that always occur due to subtle differences in locking behavior and so on.

Sometimes I think how now that I actually know how Publ should work I should rewrite it with better testability and a more actively-developed Markdown processor (because misaka has also been abandoned and is in permafreeze status), and if I’m going to do that, maybe I should use it as an excuse to finally learn Rust because honestly the Python ecosystem is kind of a mess right now.

I’ve put so much work into Publ but keeping the project going just feels so… difficult.

Or I mean I could switch to any number of existing site generators out there but then I’d be giving up all of the things that makes Publ unique (friends-only/access-controlled entries, variadic templates, top-notch template-driven image renditions, etc.).

This is one of those things where the decision would be a lot easier to make if people were actually helping to fund Publ development or if it had any actual, y'know, users.

Ah yes, lots of frustrating stuff happening all at once, so much so that I’ve wrapped around to not caring about any of it.