busybee fluffy rambles

And now it’s time for my traditional annual wrap-up post, and my hopes for next year.

Time for another proverbial cheese sandwich post¹. Thinking about the end of the year and what’s coming up for me.

This isn’t my annual aspiration wrap-up post; that’ll come later.

1. Thou shalt prioritize belief in that which can be demonstrated empirically
2. Thou shalt not worship anyone, regardless of their social influence
3. Thou shalt strive to improve the situation for everyone, including yourself
4. Thou shalt allow yourself rest and hydration
5. Thou shalt leave yourself open to possibilities
6. Thou shalt not bring direct harm to others, and choose options which minimize indirect harm
7. Thou shalt respect the consent of others
8. Thou shalt not intentionally mislead
9. Thou shalt not treat the success of others as thine own failure
10. Thou shalt question everything, including these commandments

I got my lab results back regarding my hormone levels.

Normal estradiol levels are 100-200 pg/mL.

Mine were 31.

So anyway, I’m doubling up on my patches for now, and hopefully my doctor can get me a prescription for higher-strength patches (and proper regular monitoring of my levels) going forward. Fortunately, my new doctor is also a lot easier to get to, as he’s actually in my town and not two towns over, which means I’ll also be able to get there easily by ebike!

Also my new ebike should be arriving Saturday, much earlier than expected. Yay!

Carvana hauled away the Niro today and I am now about $13K richer.

Well, I was, until I then spent $1500 on an extremely well-regarded ebike. Currently it’s on Black Friday sale for $1300 with an incredibly generous bundle of accessories (all things I wanted to get anyway), and I upgraded the seat. Then tax brought it to $1480 all-in.

The specs on this Lectric XPress 750 are amazing, and I haven’t found a single bad thing said about it on the various eBike reddits (and a lot of glowing praise). And then if I want to fit more cargo, it works with a trailer as well.

Depending on how things go I’ll still probably want to consider the e-Rickshaw at some point as a dedicated cargo vehicle, but that’s still based on some extreme hypotheticals. Having just a bike is enough for now.

Carvana’s scheduled to pick up the Niro today. Hopefully that goes well.

I’ve listed my comma3x on eBay, in case someone is interested in buying it. (I genuinely liked this device and I wish I could have used it more than I did!)

I hyperfixated on a bunch of ebikes and conversion kits and so on and then ended up just going with my gut and ordered a cheap one on Aliexpress which actually gets pretty decent reviews in general, and with the Black Friday sale it was under $300 even after shipping, so, cool UPDATE: I came to my senses regarding cheap Chinese bicycles and house fires, and have requested a cancellation of the order. Other recommendations for ebikes that won’t explode while charging would be appreciated.

I have some longer-term bloopibloops under the cut.

I have two pending offers on my car: $13,200 from Carvana for a straight sale, and $14,372 from a local dealership for a tradein. Here’s some of my thought processes about which one to take.

In 2022 I traded in my Mazda3 for a Nissan LEAF, which cost me about $1000 all-in. The LEAF was a pretty great car that I liked a lot, but it had a couple of critical features, namely that the lack of active battery thermal management meant that its range got super low in the winter and the battery was degrading quite quickly, and being stuck on CHAdeMO made it very stressful to find a quick charge the rare times when I needed one (which happened just often enough that I was getting worried).

Amazingly enough, Valve have finally at least made an announcement breaking the “curse of three,” and their third¹ VR headset is actually materializing soon™.

Anyway. Aside from the lack of pricing I’m super optimistic about the Steam Frame. It doesn’t yet hit quite all the marks for me but it’s super close and actually does a lot of stuff that I’d been wanting to see in a headset.

When I was a kid, my mom always insisted on “cleaning” out my ear canals with cotton swabs, usually right after I bathed, and this ended up establishing a bad habit of using cotton swabs on my ears every morning after I shower. I am well aware of the many problems this can cause but I never feel like I’m quite done getting clean until I’ve swabbed my ears out. I’ve tried breaking that habit many times but it’s always come back.

I’ve also found it very difficult to establish a daily habit of flossing my teeth, even though that’s super important to dental hygiene, and arguably even moreso than brushing. I’ve tried things like keeping a bag of daily flossers/floss picks by my computer, which has helped somewhat, but it’s still not gotten to the point where I feel comfortable telling my dentist, “Yeah, I floss!”

So, for the last couple weeks I’ve been trying something: I put a bag of floss picks on top of my box of cotton swabs, and now after I shower, when I reach for the cotton swab, instead I am reminded that I should floss my teeth, not my ears, and so I floss my teeth instead.

As a result I haven’t swabbed out my ears in a while (they still feel “dirty” all morning, unfortunately), and better yet, my teeth have remained consistently flossed. Of course it would be better if I could get myself to floss at bedtime (rather than having dinner stuck between my teeth all night) but any daily flossing is better than no daily flossing, and so this is still a huge improvement.

Remember that idea I came up with a couple months ago and then rambled about a bunch and then stopped talking about it?

I finally had the spoons to write a draft of what I hope will eventually become a specification, which I am (for now) calling Canimus, after the Latin word for “we sing.” It also has a few other meanings, such as “we play an instrument,” “we prophesize,” and “we hoot.”

Or, more broadly, “we make music.”

I’d been with CenturyLink Fiber since I moved into this house in early 2021, and was mostly happy with it. I never had any major outages aside from occasional drops due to their crappy provided router, which I replaced with a Linux SBC running OpenWRT. The only real complaints I had was that they used PPPoE + VLAN tagging (which was annoying to set up) and that for IPv6 they only provided 6rd which is a bit of a half-measure. But I was able to host services to my heart’s content, and they were pretty hands-off with a lot of things.

Unfortunately, a month ago I was switched over to Quantum Fiber, which is sort of a rebrand but sort of a separate company, and I’d heard nothing but horror stories about Quantum, and unfortunately, I experienced two of them myself:

1. When I first switched, my Internet went out for a few days early on, when CenturyLink shut down the old account; apparently this caused a misconfiguration on their end which led to my network being shut off, and it took a few days (and several tech support calls) for them to figure it out.

2. I ended up getting a DMCA notice for some activities on my network, and while normally it’s just a thing you can click through to acknowledge that you received the notice (after which time your service gets immediately restored), this time the notice kept on coming back every 10 minutes (killing all my web connections each time, although thankfully VPN and ssh sessions were mostly unaffected), and it was coming from CenturyLink, not Quantum.

   I spent hours on the phone with both companies' support, each one blaming the other company for the issue, and it took days before my connection was stable again. I had a bodge in place that made it mostly reliable (it was super easy to run a script that would check for the notification and then click the button) but it still made things kind of unreliable, and both companies' tech support was bafflingly awful in ways I can only describe as “Kafka-esque.”

The second issue finally cleared up after about four days, but by that time I decided it was time to try another ISP, and the only other broadband options where I live are Comcast XFinity, who are awful and expensive, and T-Mobile 5G, which costs about the same as Quantum but have other tech concerns to worry about. But I’ve had plenty of experience with T-Mobile as a company and I figured I’d give them a try for this, especially with how many people I know who sing their praises.

The access point arrived today and I’ve been putting the service through its paces. My opinion is… mixed, but generally positive.

got another rejection for disability

this time it came with a 20-odd page document explaining in great detail where this decision came from, and while I didn’t have the spoons to read the whole thing, the parts I did read boiled down to:

• We didn’t see anything in your medical record that says the things you said about your inability to work
• Because your medical records don’t say that we believe that you can do work that requires standing 6 hours a day
• You are totally qualified to do menial, repetitive tasks all day long and so surely you could do that for a career

And then there was a bizarre tangent about my HRT that I had no idea how it connected to my claim but felt vaguely transphobic, and also an insistence that I’d “rejected treatment” for my conditions, which is complete bullcrap; I tried so many different treatments but their side effects were much worse. I wanted them to work, it’s not like I chose for them to make my blood pressure skyrocket to 180/120 or give me days-long insomnia or give me fucking seizures.

As always the thing that upsets me the most is people asking me questions then either not believing or completely misinterpreting my response.

Oh and on top of that they used the fact that I’m able to manage my finances well enough to get by as proof that I’m not really disabled, either.

I’m so tired of this nonsense.

Since my last post about this I have obtained a Leap Motion 1 and have experimented with it a whole bunch, and unfortunately, it’s just not quite there for what I need out of it.

Hey! How’s it going? I think things are fairly okay on my end.

Now that I’m doing even more performing in VRChat and also making use of occasional backing tracks (instead of just doing everything totally live), it’s time for me to improve my audio setup. But Windows audio is super tricky and annoying, so it took me a bunch of iteration to figure out how I want to make it work now.

Hey, stuff’s happening and it’s generally feeling okay. Hopefully posting about positivity won’t jinx it.

I’ve been playing around with some protocol ideas and I have some more thoughts.

You can always tell when I’ve been deep into a project when my feed reader stats go off-kilter:

Anyway yeah I’m working on the radio thing!

Over on my music site I wrote a bit about the current state of streaming providers, specifically to encourage people to go back to buying their music and listening on local devices.

The problem with this line of thinking is that people really want the convenience of being able to listen to all the music, all the time, anywhere.

A thought’s been pinging around in my brain for a while about how this could be done differently, without falling into the trap of having a single service for people to have to subscribe to and put their trust in: what if we could make an IndieWeb-style streaming platform?

I’ve not been doing super great lately. I’m trying to get better, but I don’t know how.

One of the main things I do in VRChat is live performances, mostly doing guitar and vocals. One spot where this has been lacking is that I don’t have a satisfying way of tracking my hands while I play guitar, though. Here’s some things I’ve tried and things I’ve yet to try. At some point I’ll make a YouTube video about these different things.

The other day I received what I think will be my last Crowd Cow box. There’s a few reasons for this:

1. I want to cut down on my meat consumption
2. Crowd Cow has gotten a lot more expensive, especially compared to supermarket prices

The most recent box was particularly expensive. Here’s a cost breakdown, similar to last time.

Updating this thing I guess

Just keeping track of stuff with my old and new VR PC.

Here’s some things going on these days, since it’s been a little while since I’ve posted here.

Things seem to be moving forward, except for where they aren’t.

Just some stuff to get done

I finally found the song I was looking for: it was “Lolita” by Moneyshot off the album Bliss.

Which I CANNOT FIND ANYWHERE ONLINE. Spotify doesn’t have it, iTunes Music doesn’t have it, Musicbrainz doesn’t have it, even Discogs doesn’t have it. CDDB probably has it (given that I’m sure someone submitted it when they ripped the CD back in the day) but they don’t make it easy to search. And FreeDB doesn’t.

But anyway, mystery solved.

Y'all probably know that my views on AI are somewhat nuanced. I’m not 100% “AI BAD!!!” but I’m also hesitant to rely on AI for a lot of things, and generally do not care for generative AI or any situation where you need AI to “reason” on things.

But, recently I’ve wanted to remember the name of a song that I listened to a lot, and where the lyrics I can remember don’t come up in any of the major lyrics databases. I listen to a lot of obscure indie music that tends to get lost by the major platforms, and I’ve been packratting music for decades now.

Further, it’s only fairly recently that music started to get lyrics embedded into the id3 tags (thanks to bandcamp really pushing for that) and even the streaming platforms have taken forever to pick it up. So a lot of the music I listen to has never had its lyrics entered in any sort of machine-searchable way.

But, hey, there are plenty of AI models for vocal extraction and text transcription… so why not actually use them?

I (not so) recently¹ finished Echoes of Wisdom and after a ramble about the Zelda games I’ve played and enjoyed, Star implied that I should do a tier list.

So, here we go, way too much effort put into telling the Internet my opinions on things: how I feel about every main series Zelda game so far².

I’m 47 now.

Or rather, I’ve been 47 for the past two days. I didn’t really want to post about it on my actual birthday, partially because I was super busy that day with two VRChat gigs (following immediately after the previous day’s choir show), but partially because I spent the first half of the day super depressed, particularly over the state of the world, but also over a bunch of interpersonal conflicts I’ve been having which seem to rhyme with one another, and also learning that a good friend of mine is in a really bad situation right now.

And how so many people I feel close to are hurting.

And how of course I share a birthday with a fucking tyrant who was using his birthday as an excuse for a jingoistic military parade, and how completely reasonable it would be that most of my friends would be out protesting that, rather than coming to see me perform silly songs about mental health in VRChat.

I’m simultaneously doing great and not-great.

I only just learned from eladnarra’s blog that May is ME/CFS awareness month, which I guess is fitting given that throughout all of May I’ve been getting painfully aware that I may have been developing it on top of everything else.

Basically, ever since I got COVID last June I’ve been especially prone to fatigue, vertigo, brain fog, shortness of breath, a persistent cough, and a whole bunch of other long COVID signs. The worst of it comes and goes, but this month has been particularly bad, especially on the fatigue front. And ME/CFS is a very common part of long COVID.

Hey y'all, the Furality dealer’s den is open early this year, and this year it’s also free to the public. It’s a pretty incredible world and I’m glad to be a part of it!

If you visit the dealer’s den a all, please be sure to come by booth 816 at some point. During the show itself (June 5-8) there’s a chance you might find a certain critter playing piano nearby, as well.

I got very little done this week and I’m feeling pretty bad about it.

About a week ago I bought a Comma 3X from comma.ai, based on seeing a bunch of quite glowing reviews of it (and other FSD systems) from a number of car and tech reviewers I trust. In particular, since Kate of Transport Evolved has one and also has the exact same car as mine (2019 Kia Niro EV EX Premium in Galaxy Blue) and speaks highly of it, I decided that this might be a useful thing for handling my ongoing driving anxiety and vertigo issues.

Luckily enough it happened to be during a flash sale, where they included the harness for free ($99 off from usual), so my total cost was $999 (shipping was included and there was no sales tax either).

It arrived last Wednesday, and I installed and calibrated it soon after. I didn’t really get a chance to try it out until Sunday, but so far I’m very impressed with it.

Whoops, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted here. Well, okay, here’s some of the stuff that’s going on.

Back in 2016, when Trump was first elected, so many people around me were despondent and telling me that they should just kill themselves before the rest of the world did it for them. Why should they bother going on, in a world that just wanted them dead anyway?

This is why I wrote Strategies to Live, especially the final verse:

In the long run everything will be fine
It will just be a matter of time, in
Twelve billion years this will all be gone

In the meantime, please¹ try to survive
The world is better with you alive
Outliving him is a reason to go on

It took me unti 2021 to finally release it on an album, and I perhaps didn’t do as good a job of it as I could have since I felt like it was no longer relevant. Now that it’s relevant again I end every set that I can with it.

I’ve been going to physical therapy for vestibular rehabilitation for a few weeks, and right now I have good days and I have bad days when it comes to vertigo. Today was a bad day.

On the plus side, even on my bad days I seem to be able to drive, at least within town, without having a vertigo-induced panic attack. Maybe I’ll be able to start driving to choir again soon. And also finally go to Costco in person instead of paying for delivery for everything.

Okay so here’s what was being replaced:

The wall tile was way too thick (and was poorly-installed at that), there was no bullnose around the edges, it didn’t line up with the edges of the tub, and it led to a perfect little storm of condensation trickling down and saturating the drywall in that weird little gap between the tile and the tub.

Wellp, the latest bathroom situation is something that could have been a lot less expensive, if I’d been a bit more willing to get some proper diagnosing this time around. I still think it’s a good thing that this work is getting done, but gosh, things didn’t have to go this way.

This video about cutting down on phone dependency has been making the rounds:

I have some thoughts about it.

I’ve been accepted into Furality’s Dealer’s Den as a musician! I have a month to get my booth together and I’ve already got it like 90% done. It’s actually in an acceptable state already but there’s some more little things I want to do with the background video, and I’m learning so much DaVinci Resolve stuff to do it.

I also have a show on Sunday, at around 4:30 PM PDT. I hope folks can make it!

Okay, it turns out that there was a lot of hidden magic on the SOMA Connect image that was infeasible to try to migrate/clone over myself, both due to dependencies on how the old-ass Raspbian image is setup in terms of networking, and a whole bunch of random/hidden scripts that do who-knows-what. So I decided to take a different approach, and modify the SOMA Connect image instead.

Last time I had a sorta-working shairport-sync configuration on my Raspberry Pi, but I didn’t have the SOMA Connect hardware actually working, and I had to make a bunch of compromises in order to get things to even try to start up without reimaging to the 32-bit Raspbian operating system.

Well, somehow the filesystem got corrupted and the device was refusing to boot, so I figure this is as good a time as any to document how I got things working in a much nicer way.

I’ve got stuff going on, figured I’d ramble a bit for those who care.

I just watched this video about energy dependence and it got me thinking about some stuff.

In particular, it struck me how one of the quoted figures is that even LED lighting is only about 30% efficient in its conversion from final energy to usable light. My experience with LED lighting has been that 120V AC lamps do indeed generate a lot of heat, and I guess 30% sounds about right, but so much of that heat is just from the power circuitry: namely from having to convert AC to DC and step the voltage down.

But does it have to be that way?

Some folks wanted an update and didn’t see the webmention-based updates on the last entry. I discontinued the Effexor and the concerning symptoms subsided throughout the day, and I only had minimal withdrawal symptoms (basically just a few hours of extreme nausea and some really intense dreams for a couple nights).

I’m annoyed that this didn’t end up being a workable solution but I’m still holding out hope for the vestibular rehabilitation, as well as some other things I’m trying, and whatever happens I’m determined to survive and thrive, regardless.

The only theory that anyone’s come up with for my vertigo issues that holds any weight is that they’re possibly vestibular migraines, so my neurologist put me on Effexor, which can help treat vestibular migraines.

It can also treat anxiety, fibromyalgia, and ADHD (which makes sense, as they’re all fundamentally dopamine dysregulation problems, and Effexor works primarily by regulating dopamine), so maybe this will be the magic bullet that helps me with everything. Several of my friends turn out to be taking it for their fibromyalgia and/or anxiety and they say it helps them somewhat, so, we’ll see.

Okay so a couple months ago I finally rearranged my bedroom, having spent four years here and finally realizing that the layout could be a lot better. It was a one-day project where I was just rearranging stuff and it’s made a huge difference to my quality of life, but it didn’t require any cash outlay, just a lot of energy and such.

While considering that stuff I also started to consider a rearrangement of my living room (for the same reasons), and Sunday I started to enact that plan, only to quickly discover that the particular furniture I have wasn’t a good fit for things and that my idea would make a bunch of aspects of my living room way worse.

My pain flareup is finally subsiding today, and also I had a followup appointment with my ENT and another CT scan on my sinuses, which found that I do not currently have sinus polyps, although I do have a mild deviated septum. The ENT thinks it’s not necessary to get surgery and that I can just continue to manage the occasional sinus infections as they come up, and that my usual ongoing management strategies are the way to go (which I assume means saline rinses and Sudafed, although we didn’t actually discuss those at all).

Here’s some stuff about stuff.

The last few days I’ve been having yet another awful chronic pain flareup. So it’s been one of those time periods when I kind of wish I didn’t have a body, or at least didn’t have to exist so much.

This time I don’t even know what brought it on, it just kind of came out of the blue, after a whole week of being too fatigued to do anything substantial.

I’m trying to finish up my remaining commitments for strawberry jam although everyone waiting for music from me is understanding and not in a huge rush. There’s one piece I want to get done today because the team is trying to wrap up development today but they also waited until the last minute to give me a specification for what they wanted so I’m not feeling too bad if I can’t get anything done for them, I guess.

For now I’m just going with Notion. Some aspects of its UI really piss me off and I especially wish I could turn off the AI bullshit and get it to stop trying to guess what I mean when I’m trying to FUCKING TELL IT WHAT I MEAN (especially since it always gets it wrong, but its guess overrides what I’m trying to write in the first place, please software developers stop doing this shit!!!) but it at least gives me the project/task nesting I need and its workflow is flexible enough that I can add the columns that I need.

The various responses I’ve gotten to yesterday’s post tell me that I need to be a bit more specific about what I mean by a “project,” because how it relates to my work is very different than how the various project-tracking tools do it.

Project-tracking tools think of a project as being a distinct set of work items, often shared by an entire team, going for a single end-goal deliverable. The tasks for a single project live on the project’s own board, and they do not intermingle.

However, in my situation, I am making music for a whole bunch of separate projects (external to me and my own planning), but which I want to all have visible in a single place. Some of these projects might only need one track. Some of them might need a dozen or so.

Hey! As I’m trying to get more serious about my music contracting stuff, I’m looking for a better way of managing my projects and requests and so on.

Here’s the criteria I’m going for:

• Self-hostable (and ideally free)

  I do not want to be beholden to someone company’s capricious whims about the future of their exponential growth platform.

• Public vs. private vs. shareable items

  It would be super useful for me to be able to link to a page which tells people how much work I have pending and also maybe be able to designate items as whether the public can see the specifics.

  Having a means of letting people also see progress on their specific items would be great, but not a requirement.

  I definitely need to be able to make some specifics or even the project/task names hidden to the public, but I still want people to be able to see that there is something going on even if they don’t know what.

• Nested items and/or project groupings

  When working on music, I want to be able to see what work needs to be done on a per-project basis, but also be able to see what work needs to be done in general. Ideally this would be a “containment” concept (i.e. sub-tasks of a larger task) and not a “relation” concept. Which is to say, there needs to be actual hierarchy.

• Freeform text entry for projects and tasks

  Usually client requests come with a whole bunch of information that needs to be browseable, and keeping it associated with the request itself would be stellar.

• Kanban view

  Being able to see the tasks in terms of a pending/in progress/delivered/complete view where I can move stuff from left to right as it progresses would be super helpful.

  Ideally things in the “complete” column would automatically age out.

• Priorities and due dates

  Sometimes a task has to get done by a certain time. Sometimes a task is a “nice to have.” Sometimes a task is just a placeholder for what work might eventually need to happen.

Hey y'all, just a reminder that I have an upcoming show happening on Friday at around 2:30 PM Pacfic time (5:30 Eastern, 22:30 UTC, etc.).

Hey y'all! February is here! Oh gosh!

My big thing this month will be making as much music as I can for Strawberry Jam. February and November are my two big music-making months (November being when I do Novembeat normally, although this year it was taken up with other things).

I’m also hoping to do a second season of Transformative Meditations, also for Strawberry Jam.

I also have a couple of concerts lined up, one tomorrow and one next Friday.

As I mentioned on Mastodon and Bluesky, my gaming PC got infected by malware/ransomware, particularly Azov and Expiro. I’m not sure how my computer got infected but this was the push I needed to switch it over to Linux, now that VRChat and SteamVR run pretty well on Linux anyway.

I’ve reorganized my bedroom and as part of it I decided to finally address the ongoing issues with my audio setup in there. I have an old AirPort Express which I was using as an AirPlay receiver so that I could play music and podcasts and such on the (rather nice) hi-fi speakers, but it’s been super unreliable as of late, and even when it does remain connected, it generates random popping noises on the speakers — not great when I’m trying to sleep!

So anyway I was looking up various aftermarket AirPlay receivers, and most of them are pretty expensive, but then I realized that there’s probably a way of receiving AirPlay on a Raspberry Pi, and yes, there is, and then just as I was about to look for used Raspberry Pis to install this on, I remembered I already have a Raspberry Pi, in my bedroom, in the very same nightstand I would be putting a new one in: because I have SOMA’s older smart shades which use a rebadged Raspberry Pi as their Bluetooth-to-HomeKit bridge.

And the SOMA Connect image is just running Linux (specifically Rasbian 10) and some proprietary software.

The reports we received had enough information to evaluate your condition.

You said you were unable to work as of 05/15/2022 because of fibromyalgia, chronic pain, arthritis of hands and knees, vertigo, hypermobility spectrum disorder, depression, panic disorder, anxiety, and ADHD.

The evidence shows you have received treatment and assessment for these conditions.

We do not have sufficient vocational information to determine whether you can perform any of your past relevant work. However, based on the evidence in file, we have determined that you can adjust to other work. Because you can still perform some type of work, you are not considered disabled. Therefore, a period of disability cannot be established.

If your condition gets worse and keeps you from working, please contact any Social Security office about filing another application.

Given how many times I had to file a vocational report (at great length, in longhand, which FUCKING HURTS) I’m guessing they just never fucking received it. And of course, I’d love to work, but nobody wants to hire me for the number of hours I can work doing what I’m able to do, and commuting is also quite difficult for me.

I’m still waiting to hear back from my disability attorney but she hasn’t responded to any of my messages over the past couple weeks. Guess I need to send her a text on Monday.

In the meantime I’ve applied for all of the state-level things I can find, and it turns out that they do not require me to be declared disabled federally to be a possibility. Washington Connection is super helpful.