Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
I’ve been completely redoing my avatar from scratch and this time around it’s turned out great!
Anyway now that I’ve learned more about Blender and VRChat in general I have a bunch more stuff to share since last time. (And some of this will apply to Unity in general too! Sort of, anyway.)
For the next 23.5 hours, Bandcamp is waiving their cut of music purchases made on their platform, which makes it an amazing time to buy independent music there.
As always, I have plenty of stuff you can get there (including a recently-released 80-minute meditation album and an hour-long musical journey inspired by a variety of coffee grinders), and you can get a pretty decent discount on my music if you just buy it all at once as a discography.
I also like to keep a checklist of albums to buy on this day, and this month the two albums I bought are a recent release by my friend Sam and the discography of ratwyfe mostly because I heard someone do a cover of his song cryptid and I knew right away that I’d totally dig all of his music.
Anyway. Support independent musicians, both by buying the music that you like, but also spreading the word of mouth of the music that you like, too. You might not think you have much of a voice but every little bit helps way more than you think; every flood begins with a handful of raindrops.
I don’t know why my brain keeps on fixating on EVs. I already have my Leaf SL, and I’m really happy with it all in all. I try to be excited about future tech and this usually manifests in me starting to think about what car I’d buy next, which then starts to feel like me planning to buy another car, even though I really don’t need to.
Anyway, a lot of my thoughts about the current cars worth mention have changed since that last article, and here’s my current thoughts on things.
So it turns out I didn’t have anything to worrry about. The angiogram showed no blockage whatsoever and hopefully this means I’ll stop having heart-concern panic attacks. No angioplasty, no stent, etc.
The most annoying thing right now is I’m not allowed to use my right hand until Sunday, and also cannot shower until then, since that could potentially cause a hematoma or arterial rupture in my right wrist artery (which is where they inserted the probe). So I’ll be stinky tomorrow, and also I can’t do any of my fun activities. At least I have a lot of prepared foods available.
The whole experience wasn’t too bad. The entire team felt supportive and friendly, and we joked around a lot during the whole thing. During the procedure I was given a small dose of midazolam, which helped me to relax, but wasn’t enough to get an amnesiac effect, so I remember the whole thing. The only really painful bit was at the very end when my forearm started to spasm while the probe was still inserted.
Also I asked for souvenir pictures but I think they thought I was joking. Maybe I’ll get them on MyChart? I dunno. It’ll go nicely next to my esophogeal endoscopy photo from when I was having stomach problems a decade ago.
They seemed to be really surprised that I understood most of the medical terminology and that they didn’t need to coddle me or the like. One of the consent forms asked me to write, in my own words, what I thought was going to happen and I wrote “angiogram w/ potential angioplasty” and this was really surprising to them.
Anyway afterwards I got hospital food for lunch. I ordered the salmon. It was pretty okay. Hard to eat one-handed though.
Last night I had to drive to choir practice myself, and I had a panic attack on the way. I managed to push through it and felt fine when I got there. So of course I had another panic attack on the way home, because my brain decided that no, proof of being able to drive safely is NOT enough anymore to sustain a lack of anxiety when driving.
Tomorrow I am going in for an angiogram and potential angioplasty (depending on what it turns up). The procedure itself is pretty straightforward and primarily preventative; non-invasive imaging was inconclusive as to how much arterial blockage I have (if any), and I seem to have an arterial abnormality that makes imaging difficult. So it is out of an abundance of caution that I am getting the angiogram, and if any blockage is found it will be mitigated, and perhaps a stent will be installed as well (although my dad also has an arterial abnormality which made a stent installation impossible for him when he went through a similar thing, in a much more emergent situation).
“Are you frontend, backend, or full-stack?”
I really hate this question, for so many reasons.
First of all, it presupposes that there’s only two sorts of things that are done in software anymore: either you’re making websites (frontend) or services called by them (backend), or you’re someone who does both, but still using the frontend/backend dichotomy.
There are so many other kinds of software out there. Not all the world is Building Websites. Just off the top of my head there’s the extremely broad categories of graphics, platform, audio, gameplay, automation, embedded, infrastructure, distributed systems, and so much more.
Even in today’s dystopian push towards blockchain and machine learning, what kinds of engineer works on the underlying systems there? It’s neither backend nor frontend.
So, a little while ago I did an extremely unscientific poll on login methods via Authl on this website. The results of that (measured by folks who accessed my site for any authenticated reason, not just folks visiting the login method poll):
Not a single one signed in via Twitter.
Quoted: So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish
Ryan writes:
Right now, Bridgy uses a free tier of Twitter’s API, equivalent to what many other major social networks offer. By April 29th, this free tier will disappear. If I want to read tweets, my options will be a $100/mo plan with a quota of 10k tweets/mo, roughly .1% of what Bridgy currently uses, or an enterprise plan with unknown quota that reportedly starts at $42k/mo.
It isn’t clear whether the new tiers also apply to the SSO API (it seems that posting to Twitter is still available in the free tier which implies that SSO will still function). But needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), if this breaks SSO, I am not going to pay money to fix it on my sites.
I’d highly recommend to folks who are still using Twitter to log in to this site or to Novembeat to find an alternate identity provider, such as a Mastodon instance or running an IndieAuth provider on your own heckin' website.
(Someday I’ll get around to adding OpenID to Authl so people can also use things like Livejournal, Dreamwidth, or Ubuntu Launchpad to sign in, but I’ve been lazy.)
EDIT: Looks like SSO is remaining free, per the announcement. Still, y'all should move away from Twitter just on general principle.
I haven’t felt like blogging lately, but here’s some updates.
