busybee fluffy rambles

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.