busybee fluffy rambles

For the last few days I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in VRChat. I’ve also been making stuff:

Not that anyone would ever want to be in chronic pain or anything, but holy fuck am I tired of being in it.

I’ve been streaming on twitch again lately, but right now it’s kind of unstructured. A thing I’ve noticed a lot of folks I follow do is they set up a regular streaming schedule, where they allocate specific hours of the day to stream, and specific days of the week for specific games. It seems to work really well for them.

I’m wondering if I should do that sort of thing, especially since I’m having trouble staying focused on the specific games I’m playing, and I’d also like to build up things like having vtuber activities and the like.

I also feel like this sort of thing would make it easier for me to give my day structure, and maybe I could also use it as a means to get myself in the groove of always working on music/games/etc. at certain times as well.

Because of the cryptocurrency market crash, GPUs have really come down in price. They probably have a further ways to go but I decided that I’d waited long enough to finally upgrade my GTX 1050Ti, and picked up a supposedly-barely-used refurbished eVGA RTX 2080Ti Black Edition off eBay. The seller claimed it was bought from eVGA’s refurb department and used for only two weeks in a gaming rig. I’m not sure sure I believe that, but I figured it was a worthwhile risk to take. The total cost was $550 after tax and shipping, which happened to be almost exactly what I’d earned by participating in the itch.io queer games bundle, so that worked out nicely.

Normally I rely entirely on The Stranger’s endorsements, because they do a thorough job of discussing all of the candidates and making a case for them. But their endorsement of Patty Murray rang a bit hollow, because they just talked about how much worse the Republican frontronner is, rather than talking about why the other left-wing candidates weren’t a choice worth considering.

So, I took it upon myself to read all of the other democrat/socalist/independent candidates to see if there’s anything they missed.

Being unemployed is pretty great. I’m getting way more stuff done now than when I was being paid to do things.

It’s amazing how not having an 8-hour soul-sucking void every day leaves me with plenty of energy to do stuff that I enjoy doing.

For example, I’m having great time gardening (well, cultivating a meadow, really), doing pottery, and generally enjoying my life. This has had other great effects, like my kitchen is the cleanest it’s been since filming Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To, and I’m having the energy to work on music and open source stuff again (including Publ).

On Sunday I finally broke down and bought a Meta Quest 2. I’m not thrilled with having a Facebook-controlled device strapped to my face, but it’s a pretty decent bit of hardware and is an all-in-one setup that is way cheaper than most headsets, and doesn’t require me to upgrade my PC GPU (which is still a bit too expensive). And on the plus side it can also be used as a tethered headset, when I’m ready to finally upgrade my GPU.

Anyway, with all that out of the way, I’m having a lot of fun. VRChat is a fun experience, at least if you ignore most of the awful people in public spaces. (I’m fluffycritter there if anyone wants to friend me and hang out in non-public spaces.) And I’m thoroughly enjoying Beat Saber as well. It’s a heck of a fun workout, and even though I’ve only been playing for a couple days I’m already holding my own in online play. But then again, I’ve always had an affinity for rhythm games.

It’s time I sling the baskets off this overburdened horse
Sink my toes into the ground and set a different course
Cause if I were here and you were there
I’d meet you in between
And not until my dying day, confess what I have seen.

— Phish, The Horse

I’m finally doing something I should have done at least a decade ago: I am no longer going to try to be a software engineer professionally. I’m not sure what’s coming next, but hopefully it’ll be a much better life for me.

Today I had my pottery lesson at Rain City Clay, namely their “sip and spin” crash-course to wheel throwing.

A while ago I’d bought a cheap learner’s wheel and while I’d had some fun trying to self-teach on it, I couldn’t quite figure out a few basic things, particularly centering, which is, y'know, pretty important. And it turns out there’s a lot of other basic stuff that I didn’t learn by watching a lot of The Great Pottery Throw Down either! Like how to test the bottom thickness, among other things.