Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
A week ago I bought some wood-filled PLA, and I’ve been experimenting with it a bit to see how to make it actually look like wood.
The first thing I printed (a Pocket Operator case) just looked like it was printed with boring beige filament, even after being sanded:
Do I post too much about my personal life? Oh wait that’s why I have a blog.
Flood update: Today I checked on my stuff in storage and was happy to find that there is apparently no damage inside any of my instrument cases; they just got a little bit of dirt on the outside. Yay!
Mac update: Even after having done all the stuff to make it stable, it continues to be unstable. Ugh. So I decided to just go ahead and buy an M1 Mac mini (512GB storage, 16GB RAM), monitor, external NVMe m.2 enclosure, and a 2TB drive for it. I won’t have the new computer until January 15. Normally I wouldn’t be so eager to do a first-gen new-architecture Mac but the reviews of it have been great and meanwhile this 2017 iMac has always given me a lot of trouble with stability and reliability and mysterious problems; Big Sur made it worse, but it was never a particularly great computer to begin with.1
Two fun things happened yesterday:
I’ve been on Wellbutrin for a couple of weeks now and the effect has been interesting. I’m definitely finding it easier to focus on things like chores (and heck, my kitchen is the cleanest it’s been since the remodel got finished, and my dining room is well on its way to not being a disaster), but on the other hand it’s disrupting my sleep a lot and I end up feeling tired throughout the day. My dreams have also been way more intense.
Right now I’m feeling sick with my usual winter sinus crap, so I’m a bit wobbly and a lot nauseous.
Between the Wellbutrin and playing DDR my pain levels are a bit lower but still not amazing, and I’m still finding it easy to hit a fibro wall™. Tomorrow I have a followup with my pain doctor to try to finally get on low-dose naltrexone. I also have the next two weeks off from work and hopefully I won’t end up just working too hard on personal projects instead. (That said, I have a couple of creative output gift swaps with deadlines coming up that I really should start on at some point.)
Anwyay I guess I don’t have a lot else to say. Oh well.
The box o' meat progresses nicely.
Since the last update I’ve completed all of the meats that were underway, and have finished 1 of the pounds of ground beef (which made very good burgers) and the chili relleno pork sausage. So what remains:
So, this turned out to not be an entirely excessive amount of meat. And Crowd Cow does seem to be a pretty good deal in general.
Yesterday I finally got ArrowVortex working; originally I was running it under WINE on my Intel NUC over xrdp to my Mac, which was kind of janky but functional, but after that stopped working (and was too obnoxious with latency) I just tried out Crossover WINE again and it worked like a charm.
Incidentally, Crossover’s gotten way better in the 10 years since I last used it and I might end up paying for it again!
Anyway, you can see the results of this: I have a very much work-in-progress song pack that you can check out if you’re so inclined. Beta feedback is appreciated as well. I’ll be adding artwork eventually but right now my effort is primarily on getting more songs and charts in.
If there’s any songs of mine you think would be a good DDR track, let me know!
My L-Tek dance pad arrived just before lunchtime today, so of course I had to unbox it:
Had an appointment with my psychiatrist today. Turns out I was supposed to get a drug screen some time ago, oops. But I’m not that interested in stimulant-based meds anyway. For now we’re going to try Wellbutrin, which is I think what we were talking about last time anyway and it doesn’t need a drug screening. So that starts tomorrow morning.
DDR pad arrives sometime tomorrow as well. Just in time, too, the pad I’m borrowing from Spud has decided that the down button doesn’t really need to work right.
I hope all this stuff helps me to get motivated at work, because holy crap I am having a hard time finding the energy to actually, y'know, work.
Today my copies of DDR for PS2 arrived. Also Spud mentioned that he still had some soft pads from back when my enthusiasm for the game got him into it as well and offered to lend one to me, so I picked that up from him.
Before I started playing I felt tired, depressed, and dismal.
Then I played for half an hour and already felt so much better.
The pad I’m borrowing isn’t anything special, and the button response isn’t great and it slips around a bit much, but even bad DDR is pretty good. And I think this is a habit I’ll be able to keep up, and which I’ll feel really good about.
I can’t wait for the L-Tek pad to arrive in (probably) a week or two, but in the meantime it’s really nice being able to play the game again.
