Current health status

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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.

Discharged and at home

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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.

covid update

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

Covid III

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so I’ve gotten COVID for a third time, an this time it’s hitting me way harder and for the first time I’m having a Very Strong Positive test result. I thought I was just having really bad allergies (and antihistamines were working) but today when I got home from the choir show I started to feel really off, and out of an abundance of caution I took a test. The reaction was pretty much immediate.

Fortunately my parents happen to be in town for the choir shows and they want to help me out while they’re still here, and my insurance provider has a virtual doctor that can prescribe paxlovid, so hopefully things will work out okay.

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Birthday plans 2024

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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.

Furality Umbra: a brief review

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Furality is the largest virtual furry convention, which takes place annually in VRChat. This past year (Umbra) was also the most highly-attended furry convention of any kind ever, with a whopping 21,000 attendees!

I’m just a nobody when it comes to furry stuff, especially cons, but I figured I’d share some of my observations, good and bad, especially in comparison to the other two Furality events I attended (Luma Festival and Sylva).

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Some income would be nice

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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.

💬 Re: Zoom CEO Eric Yuan wants AI clones in meetings Notes

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In reply to: Re: Zoom CEO Eric Yuan wants AI clones in meetings

Instead of building better business cultures and reinventing our work rhythms to adapt to information overload and an abundance of busywork, the vision here is to let the busywork happen between AI. It’s an office full of ghosts, speaking to each other on our behalf, going to standup meetings with each other just because.

The current fixation on genAI tools means that we basically have AIs talking to AIs for no benefit to the people anymore. We have AI resume builders optimized for AI recruiters who use AI to determine which AI is the best match for the AI-generated position at the AI-dominated company. AI tools for writing a lot of useless scaffolding around our business emails which then get fed through an AI to extract the salient points, when the emails could have just been written with only the salient points to begin with.

It’s so maddening.

As a kid I remember a scene from The Smurfs where one of the Smurfs created a machine as an artistic statement that did nothing but scoop up dirt to fill in a hole that was created by the same machine. At the time it was very much meant as an anti-capitalist metaphor, but today it feels like it’s specifically about AI tools.

At least the Zoom thing highlights the absurdity of meeting-heavy business culture.

Upcoming engagements

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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.

Finally have my car back

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So, I went to the Kia dealership, and it took them an hour to figure out where my car’s keys were. Also they had trouble finding my customer record, because it turned out the service advisor misspelled my name, and they don’t have a good way to search their system. Disorganized clown-shoes operation.

But, whatever. I finally have my car back. And the click sound was gone at first but it came back halfway home. And according to the tech notes, guess what they did during the month they had my car:

absolutely NOTHING.

They decided that the sound was “normal EV motor noise.”

Why did they need my car for a WHOLE MONTH to tell me that?

The tech notes said (all misspellings theirs):

No abnormal noises were heard fro vehicle. Test drove vehicle and found no abnormal noises heard. Referenced TSB ELE234 and found the noises heard from the vehicle to be constant with the Note: Be careful to not mistake the abnormal noises for the normal noise of the EV motor in the vehicle

Did they also read the part of the tech note that says that the TSB’s clicking noise is intermittent and only occurs at slower speeds? Probably not!

And, I repeat, it took them A GODDAMN MONTH.

But at least I have my car back and a paper trail for what happens when the bearing fails.

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Per-capita EV registrations by state

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A question that keeps on coming up in my conversations is: where exactly is the electric vehicle adoption the highest?

There’s plenty of information about it on a per-country basis but I couldn’t find anything that breaks it down by US state. So I did a little number-crunching, and figured I’d post it here so that other people can benefit from it.

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Finally getting my car back, hopefully

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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.

Some Logic Pro 11 updates

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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.

Please stop using open captions

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There is a really pervasive trend in video these days where people will use (usually auto-generated) open captions (sometimes called “burned captions” or “hard subs”), where the text for the narration or the like is baked into the image of the video. This is sometimes accompanied by some attention-grabbing effects, like making the currently-spoken word jump up in size, often with a very goofy animation.

Please stop doing this.

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💬 New-new Reddit Notes

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In reply to: New-new Reddit

I have no idea about the CPU usage but the new post/comment editor is also abysmal. I just want to write Markdown, dangit! But even when it’s in Markdown mode it tries to apply some fancy formatting to things, and gets it wrong.

I really hate how every website now “needs” to be an “app.”

Logic 11: a quick play-around

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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.

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Well, at least I have a car again

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Okay so. Originally they were going to lend me a Kia Forte, which is a tiny economy car, but that was returned in unsafe condition.

Then they were going to lend me a Sorento, which would have been great (overkill, really), but that one still hasn’t been returned by the previous user.

This morning I got a notification from Kia that “the Niro is ready to be picked up. Will you need a ride here?” I thought, huh, so they’re done repairing my car? Great!

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OMG, another car update? How shocking

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Today, right around when I was about to leave for the Matrix test drive, I got a call from the dealership: the loaner was available, but it wasn’t in a totally safe state due to a huge crack on the windshield. They asked if I still wanted it and I said I’d rather not.

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Hyperfixation: Car comparison Notes

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All dimensions are in Imperial units.

Specification 2005 Matrix XR 2004 Matrix XRS 2019 Niro EV
Fuel efficiency (combined) 29 MPG 24 MPG 112 MPGe1
Range (combined)2 380 316 230
Horsepower 130 173 201
Length 171.3 171.3 172.2
Width 69.9 69.9 71.1
Height 60.6 60.6 61.8
Wheelbase 102.4 102.4 106.3
Cargo, seats up 21.8 21.8 18.5
Cargo, seats down 53.2 53.2 53.0
Spare tire Temporary Temporary A can of fix-a-flat
120V power outlet 400W 400W No, and there isn’t even a 12V adapter to plug an inverter into
Purse holder No No Yes
Acceleration time, 0-60 9.0 7.8 6.2
Stick shift Yes Heck yes No :(

Another car update

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The Kia service person finally got back to me several hours later, and I have learned:

  1. The parts for the repair have been ordered and are on their way
  2. Which implies that they actually did diagnose it, phew
  3. Also they might have a loaner available for me tomorrow, but they’re “uncertain”
  4. Also they still haven’t told me how much these repairs are gonna cost or if the warranties are going to cover them, bla bla bla, not looking forward to a surprise bill

Meanwhile, I’m scheduled to test drive the Matrix XRS Thursday afternoon, and my brain is currently in a state which has me overcommitting to just buying it, without having seen it in person yet. Maybe let’s think this through, and make sure I’m not just doing my usual self-convincing/rationalizing of something stupid.

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More car

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Today I finally got in touch with Kia’s corporate customer service after filing a complaint yesterday, and they said that they also haven’t been able to get in touch with the dealership.

I asked them how I can go about getting a loaner, and they said that it’s up to the dealership to do so. If the dealership doesn’t have a loaner available, then they have a rental reimbursement program.

I asked about that, and the answer was that from the time the car is diagnosed, if there’s a long-term repair that needs to take place, then they will reimburse the rental fees. However, they will only do so after the car has been diagnosed, and as far as I can tell, it has not. I asked them why the policy was based on diagnosis time rather than dropoff time, and their response was that it is Kia’s policy to be that way.

I said that for me the issue is that I’m without a car, and that it shouldn’t matter when the car is actually diagnosed, what should matter is when I am without a car. It seems to me that the service center has absolutely no incentive to actually move forward on things based on this policy, because it means they can just hold on to my car for months without any forward progress and any compensation to me.

The CSR said that she would file a complaint on my behalf about this policy, but that for now, Kia’s policy is that the reimbursement period only begins when there’s a diagnosis. And she will try to find out if there’s been a diagnosis, but the dealership hasn’t been responsive to Kia Corporate either.

So, yeah. Kia has great cars but their customer service is FUCKING AWFUL and based on this series of interactions (and lack thereof) I can no longer recommend Kia vehicles. Which is sad, as of all the current EV manufacturers available in North America, they have the best value proposition (and some of the best EVs available in general).

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💬 (no title) Notes

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In reply to: (no title given)

I’ve been getting a lot of spammy substack subscriptions that I never asked for, yeah, and it’s super annoying. Substack doesn’t seem to give me any opportunity to flag them as spam, either. It seems like Substack might have some “import followers” functionality that they never actually bothered to secure against spamming.

Update-dumping

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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!

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YouTube ContentID is still broken and dumb

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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?

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Benaroya debut!

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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.

Moving away from Bandcamp

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For quite some time I’ve had my music site hosted by Bandcamp, since it was a pretty low-friction way to get my discography up and online, albeit with some annoying limitations. Previously I had the main domain host a “micro-site” for whatever my most recent release was and then used a subdomain for the actual Bandcamp page, but updating that got to be obnoxious and nobody really cared about the microsite thing anyway.

There’s a bunch of reasons, though, why I’m going to go back to running my own site, and hopefully downplaying Bandcamp as My Main Music Presence online. Here’s some of the reasons.

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Possibly a false alarm?

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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.

Ugh, sick again

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So, there was a COVID outbreak at my choir. At first it seemed like it was isolated to folks who participated in one extracurricular thing after the last rehearsal, but it turns out that it’s been affecting a lot of folks. We were going to have a talent show and fundraising auction this Friday but that’s been postponed until May. So it goes.

Anyway this morning I woke up coughing, and while that cleared up quickly I’ve been feeling pretty under the weather all day, with occasional respiratory stuff and general fatigue/malaise.

As usual, home rapid tests are turning up negative, but for whatever reason I’ve never had a positive rapid test even when I very clearly had COVID, so I don’t know what’s up with that.

I’m hoping that this is a fluke and I’m not actually coming down with COVID for a third goddamn time, and that I’ll be well enough for our big Benaroya Hall concert next Friday, but I’m not terribly optimistic about that right now given how things like this always go. In the meantime I am, of course, isolating. Fortunately I’m pretty well-stocked on groceries right now so I don’t think I’ll need to get anything delivered (although I did order a bunch of cough drops just in case).

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“Instrumental” album release party

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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!)

DaVinci Resolve: a beginner’s (exceedingly grumpy) review

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I’ve recently joined the video editing team at Trans Academy, and that team has standardized on DaVinci Resolve for all editing. Since I’ve been coming up on the limitations of Final Cut Pro for quite some time I figured I’d finally give it a try, and since I’m working on finishing up an album I figured I’d use it for making the YouTube assembled version.

So, I have some thoughts about it so far, speaking as someone who’s mostly used Premiere and Final Cut and am used to their UIs and quirks. I’m just evaluating the free version for now, although I’ll eventually be getting access to the paid version as part of my Trans Academy duties.

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Song Fight! #1000

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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.

Acoustic panels

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I’ve been building some simple acoustic panels to improve the acoustics and aesthetics in my recording studio. Mostly the aesthetics, really, but still.

I have a pretty good process for something that’s easy and cheap to build. And it doesn’t hurt the sound, at least.

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Today’s accomplishments

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I managed to actually get a lot of stuff done today, and I’m feeling quite tired, but in a good way.

  • Assembled three of my acoustic panels for the studio (and then ran out of adhesive, oops)
  • Assembled my new fire pit ring (still need the brick surrounds and probably some gravel for the bottom)
  • Set up a photo shoot for album cover art (pending the completion of the acoustic panels and some general tidying up of the studio space)
  • Got caught up on a week’s worth of dirty dishes (oops)
  • Made some more tiny tweaks to the album track ordering, and got a couple folks signed up for the listening beta (but I could still use more!)
  • Glazed my two pots
  • Also somehow managed to get some piano practice in, too???

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Album almost done — test listeners needed!

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Several years ago I started an album called “Instrumental,” which was meant to be a showcase of my game and video music production skills, and a place for all of the little leftovers from canceled projects and one-off tunes to live. I’d been considering this to be “on the backburner” for years, but a few days ago a thing made me realize that I actually had a lot of music ready to go for it, and a reason to finally get it completed.

So, that lit a fire under my ass and I’ve been working hard for the last few days on finishing up the songs that needed finishing, and pulling in a bunch more music that’s suitable for inclusion too.

Anyway, I’m looking for a few test listeners to give it a once-over to get feedback.

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Initial slipcast success!

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

IMG_6843.jpeg

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.

💬 (no title) Notes

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In reply to: (no title given)

Does anyone know of/use an HTTP caching proxy, which can read/write cached responses to disk? Trying to reduce the overhead on an external service (during CI/CD) and allowing caching between runs

Squid! It’s good enough for Amazon’s image CDN fleet so it should be good enough for you too.

Diagnostic dilemma

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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.

Today’s wins and frustrations

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The work on my bathroom is nearly complete. The wall is patched, the tile is fixed (and it went surprisingly well with no additional damage from the broken tile’s removal), and all that’s left is replacing the baseboard and painting. I don’t even need to be without a shower while anything cures, as it turns out.

Then I had a massage appointment out in Tukwila (across the street from the hotel I was staying at during the original bathroom remodel from hell, coincidentally enough). I felt the start of a panic attack when I was close to the end of the drive, but made it there fine.

The massage therapist’s office was upstairs, in a building with no elevator, and his office was locked and the instructions said to wait out in the hallway if that’s the case. My knees were acting up much more than usual today, so of course I got to sit out in the hallway while I heard the massage therapist just chatting with his previous client for 20 minutes about fishing. And then when they finally decided to end the yammering and he saw that I was out there he said I should have just knocked on the door to be let in. Oy.

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The return of panic

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Wellp, I had another big panic attack while driving today. Worst one I’ve had in around a year, and my usual grounding and mindfulness things didn’t help. I had a vertigo attack while entering the tunnel to the I-90 bridge, and this very quickly cascaded to a full-on panic shutdown.

I managed to make my way to Mercer Island and stopped at a Starbucks to collect myself, and then was able to get back across the bridge to make my way to Rainier Ave to drive home via surface streets, and had a good cry when I got home.

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To-do list recommendations

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Hey y'all, I’m looking for a better way of managing my to-do list for managing commissions and such. I’ve been using iCloud Reminders since it has good integration into macOS and iOS, but it has a few shortcomings, such as being a little annoying to manage nested tasks, and not having a good way to share things publicly.

I am looking for some combination of the following:

  • The ability to have nested tasks/subtasks with tight coupling between things
  • A public view where I can ideally also mark some items as private (showing as a placeholder just without any details)
  • A tagging system
  • Rough progress indication
  • Time tracking and estimation

I am NOT looking for the following:

  • A kanban board
  • Full-on project management

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Bigscreen Beyond day 2

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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.

⭐️ Meet Feedle a New RSS Feed Search Engine Notes

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Bookmarked: Meet Feedle a New RSS Feed Search Engine

This search engine seems pretty cool. So far the catalog appears to only have human-submitted feeds, though. I’ve already submitted a couple of mine, and hopefully more folks get on board with it.

(via IndieWeb News)

EDS & Why We Misunderstand Disability Notes

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I find this video incredibly relatable. I’ve not been formally diagnosed with any version of EDS but I definitely have some sort of hypermobility disorder, and it’s definitely related to my fibromyalgia diagnosis. Everything she shares in her story is super relatable. Including the specific experiences with physiotherapists and being doubted by every doctor, and everyone blaming me being “out of shape” or having a “weak core.”

CarMax is great

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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.

Bandcamp Friday, February 2024 edition

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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:

Followup

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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.

Bye LEAF, Hello Niro

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Today the Niro became available for test drive and purchase, and I got the next available appointment. CarMax was super busy and they weren’t able to see me until nearly an hour after I arrived (ugh) but the process went pretty well.

I gave the car a test-drive and found that I really like it, and the OBD check showed no battery degradation whatsoever, so I decided to go through with the purchase. So now I have the nicest car I’ve ever owned (after giving the LEAF a little pat and telling it I appreciated our time together).

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Car updates

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Today I had an appointment at the Nissan dealership for them to appraise my car as part of a potential used-sale deal. They offered me $5500, or $6000 if I was willing to part with it same-day, and were giving me some pretty hard-sale tactics for an immediate agreement, but I told them that my replacement car hasn’t arrived yet and I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be actually buying the replacement.

They made me an offer of the full $6000 if I sold it to them now and just continued to borrow the car for the next week, but I again said no, as I’m not positive I’ll be buying the Niro.

This was also after they tried to FUD at me about the Niro, like they said that the Niro is “uninsurable” because of the break-in problems (which don’t affect the Niro, and the models which do have the problem haven’t had significant insurance difficulties either), and tried to bargain me into upgrading to a Leaf SV Plus, which is both outside of my budget and also doesn’t actually address the two critical issues I have with the Leaf (namely, CHAdeMO charging and a lack of thermal management on the battery).

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Transformative Meditations to return?!?!

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For some reason Spotify occasionally rebroadcasts the old episodes of my podcast and whenever they do a notification goes out to all RSS feeds (including the one that gets autoposted to my Mastodon feed). I don’t know why they do this, but it certainly has the effect of reminding me that I need to make more episodes. And hey, it’s nice how it gives more visibility to the original 6 episodes.

Anyway, that said, I’ve gotten a few prompts for episodes to make and also I’ve revisited my prompt list and I’m getting some amount of inspiration. No promises, but hopefully I’ll get to making these again soon. I miss doing it a lot.

I am of course always open to receive prompts from others! Especially if they want to do a commissioned episode.

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Car update

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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.

Ugh, Nissan Leaf

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So, today I took a rather small trip down to Tacoma, and stopped at a friend’s place in Puyallup on the way back. I very quickly discovered that in the current cold weather, my Leaf consistently had an actual range of around half of what it predicted, and if I’d relied on its range estimate I would have probably been stranded around 5 miles from home.

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Hobbes OS/2 Archive: An end of an era

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Today I found out that the Hobbes OS/2 archive is shutting down.

I ran this archive back in the 90s, when I was a student at NMSU. It was, for reasons not worth getting into, one of my ancillary duties when I worked part-time for the IT department.

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Rabbit R1

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The tech world is abuzz with the announcement of the Rabbit R1, a little handheld AI assistant thing that has an interesting goal.

The tl;dr is that it’s a ChatGPT model that will run little AI agents (called “rabbits”) on your behalf to make complex API requests for you. I actually think it’s a pretty cool idea and one of the few things that I don’t hate about the modern AI push (ethics of ChatGPT aside, of course).

At $200 for the hardware it’s obvious that the LLM is running in the cloud somewhere, and it’s not like the other stuff wouldn’t also require cloud to operate anyway, though, and that raises the one big question I have about it: who foots the bill for the actual backend services? Because at $200 it’s probably being sold at-cost or for a small profit, and operating the necessary cloud services ain’t free.

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Fursona origins

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A random conversation tonight awakened a memory in me, namely, back in the 90s, we didn’t refer to fursonas as fursonas, but as “personal furries,” and I had it in my mind that the term “fursona” actually started out as derisive and came from an anti-furry space. Which led me on a bit of a quest.

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💬 Re: How do you represent a JSON field in Go that could be absent, null or have a value? Notes

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In reply to: Re: How do you represent a JSON field in Go that could be absent, null or have a value?

I have nothing helpful to add here except to say, Javascript’s undefined/null duality continues to be a mistake.

(But also, anything that relies on that duality has also made a mistake.)

Closer in history

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>>> import datetime
>>> apollo = datetime.datetime(1969,7,20,20,17)
>>> delta = datetime.datetime.now() - apollo
>>> apollo + delta / 2
datetime.datetime(1996, 10, 13, 20, 57, 7, 893840)

Anything that happened on or before October 13, 1996 is now closer in history to the Apollo 11 moon landing than it is to today.

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Taking another Mastodon break

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It’s way too easy to get heated while in the thick of things and for bad-faith interpretations to take over from the point anyone’s trying to make, and that is absolutely a two-way street.1

For now I’ve removed Toot! from my phone and DNS-blocked plush.city from my home network, so hopefully any posts I make to Mastodon are just from my automatic crossposter (like this one). I’ll still (eventually) see replies to my blog posts that come in as Webmentions, but hopefully not being Always So Online will be better for my mental health, which hasn’t been great as of late and I’m definitely lashing out at others much more than I would like.

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