Upcoming talent show!

Hey friends, I forget if I’ve mentioned it here but on Friday my choir is having a talent show and a silent auction! If you’re in Seattle it’d be great if you could attend in person, and we’ll also be streaming the show on YouTube and you can get a ticket for access to that stream as well. And the silent auction has a lot of amazing goods and services available and will be run online.

Please consider getting a ticket to the show (or making a donation to the choir) and registering for the silent auction.

Panic attacks

I used to get bad panic attacks while driving, and the trigger and underlying cause was pretty obvious. But they faded over time and I felt that I was panic-free for a few years.

Until fucking TWO WEEKS AGO when I had a small one while carpooling to choir practice, and then a big fucking one the next week when driving to the doctor’s office for routine lab work! And now I don’t feel safe driving at all! And I have to do a lot of driving this week! WHAT AMAZING TIMING!

Does anyone have any good quick fixes for driving panic? I honestly do not know if I did anything to help it go away or if it just faded on its own. I suspect the actual common thread behind them is Fear Of Mortality and I’ve had plenty of things driving that fear lately, and like, okay it’s great that my brain is in full-on self-preservation mode but maybe causing me to nearly pass out and lose control of a two thousand pound machine wrapped around a 50kWh lithium battery isn’t the best way to go about that?

I mean okay, fair, you’re preventing me from entering the machine in the first place, so, good job

Super burnout

So, yesterday I had a major panic attack while driving, for the first time in several years, and the worst one I’d had in over a decade. So, that was fun.

Right now I’m in this weird split mindset, where on the one hand I feel like I need a day job to be motivated, but on the other hand, every time I find out about a job that I’d be qualified for, I have no interest whatsoever in doing it, like at all.

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Full-text search on beesbuzz.biz

I finally got around to enabling search, as an experimental feature. Publ’s full-text search functionality is kinda janky right now and I really want to rework it. But people were asking, so here you go.

Also god damn my templates are getting hard to maintain.

There’s also so much stuff I really want to rewite in Publ, while I’m feeling grumpy.

EDIT: Oh right, also what started me down this path was also fixing Authl’s login flow for email links on email providers which generate link previews, e.g. Outlook and Hotmail. So I mean folks who were getting “invalid token” errors while signing in by email should have a better time now.

On therianthropy and plurality

This entry was originally posted on Cohost, and has been migrated here in light of their shutdown.

When I was a lot younger, I was trying to figure out my identity.

Growing up in the 80s and being a teenager in the 90s was an awful time to be trans, and even though I definitely had gender feels going back early in my childhood (like, recently I remembered thinking about it when I was 7, and really into The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle), the environment simply wasn’t supportive back then. I got bullied for being a “sissy” and a “girl” a lot.

I was also very much into transformation-related fiction (uh, like The Last Unicorn) and along the way I decided that it would actually be easier to be an animal. This of course led directly to my later descent into furry trash.

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Things, present and future

A real smorgasbord of things to ramble about/catch up on.

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Ship Full of Jerks

My friend Mark has also started a podcast with his friend Ryan, and which I did the music for. It’s called Ship Full of Jerks, their first episode is a review and commentary on the start of season 3 of Star Trek: Picard.

Transformative Meditations

I decided to start an experimental meditation podcast after thinking about the concept for the past few weeks. I have a few episodes planned already and am working on a topic/prompt generator that will hopefully give me unlimited possibilities for where to take it. It’s still an experiment, though.

Hopefully it’s something I can keep going, because I love the idea, at least.

Hopefully I can also get it listed on the various podcast directories and apps. Right now the big one that’s missing is Apple, because their podcast directory account signup thing is broken EDIT: it’s working now, and I’m just waiting for them to process the submission, yay EDIT2: it’s available on Apple now. But it should already be on Amazon/Audible, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Stitcher, and I can see about adding it to other directories if people want them.

Also, eventually the public podcast will be monetized, but I’ll always have ad-free versions over on my Patreon, and I hope to get a few more episodes done by the end of February, in which case they’ll be over on the itch.io page that exists for Reasons.