busybee

There are so many things I’d like to be doing with my time, except every time I start on any of them I get a major pain flareup. And that makes it really hard to get into what I’m doing, and then the moment I have any minor setback (such as a problem with the tool I’m using) that just makes the pain explode even further and then all I can focus on is how much I’m hurting.

I’d love to be making 3D models for VRChat or drawing comics or making music, but all of those things just feel so inaccessible to me right now. And even playing games hurts, and even hanging out in VRChat can be pretty painful too because even standing up for an hour at a time is awful (and doing VRChat while sitting down has its own share of issues).

I’m grateful that I don’t have to worry about money so much, but gosh, there’s more to being productive than making a living. Quality of life is important and that feels just so lacking right now.

I just feel like so much stuff is locked inside my head and screaming to get out, and I sure wish I could just like. Not be like that.

Previously I’d posted about an update to Native Instruments' Komplete Kontrol plugin wrapper that made it no longer work with Intel plugins on Apple Silicon machines. After I’d posted that, Jeremy from Native Instruments posted a link to download Komplete Kontrol 2.7.2 which can be used as a temporary workaround to fix the issue, with a warning that it’d be better to update KK and then run Logic under Rosetta instead.

I failed to notice this update from them since NI’s forum never manages to actually send me notification emails for some reason, but in any case, this is a nice solution to keep things working until Reaktor and Battery get updated for M1 (hopefully in just a month or two).

Anyway, hopefully this is helpful for folks who need it.

I continue to not be a fan of Patreon but it’s, unfortunately, the easiest way to try to get recurring support from folks for the things I do. So, if you’re interested in throwing a few bucks my way every month, here you go. $1/month gives you access to the subscriber-only section of my Discord, and $3/month gives you downloads of all the things I release digitally (albums, comic collections, etc.) going forward. I’ll also probably backfill my existing releases there at some point.

I also of course have a ko-fi. It currently doesn’t support the exclusive-access downloads thing (because ko-fi charges $6/month for that ability) but I’ll definitely enable that if I have a few people sign up there. I’d definitely prefer folks to support me via Ko-Fi rather than Patreon, if they can; it’s a much nicer company.

But regardless, I appreciate whatever support people feel like sending my way, and any suggestions people have for what I should be doing with my time (within my abilities and interests, of course).

I just learned that OpenAI, the company behind GPT-3, is founded and funded by Elon Musk. I mostly feel foolish for having not looked into the company at all, especially given that this isn’t exactly a hidden fact or anything. Very much my bad for not doing even the remote bit of due diligence when it comes to a piece of tech that seems to be completely changing how people think about… well, everything.

I’ve mostly been using it for shitposts, but I’ve also been playing with it for iterating on song lyrics. All that now feels tainted.

I have taken down my GPT-3 posts from this site, and I will be discontinuing my use of it going forward. The one song I’ve finished that had any GPT-3 involvement will stay in my catalogue (as it’s a somewhat personal song to me and GPT-3 only helped with a couple of lines in the end) but as interested as I was in experimenting with new tech (knowing fully well the ethical concerns with how its training set was generated) this has brought into perspective how I was participating in something I don’t want to encourage.

I apologize for playing any part in normalizing this.

On the subject of the cabinet door, Oliver says that there is one, he just keeps forgetting to bring it but it will arrive sometime soon.

On the subject of the button on my faucet, he had no idea about it and had no idea where it could have gone, and said it was probably lost forever. Then he noticed a little black round thing on the floor by the door and picked it up, and wouldn’t you know… it was the button! Phew.

Jewish applicants are frequently passed over by hiring managers. In fact, 26% of hiring managers say they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants.

[…]

When asked how they come to believe that an applicant is Jewish, 56% say it’s because it was directly stated by the applicant. However, many also make assumptions based on the applicant’s educational background (35%), last name (33%), past or current experiences with Jewish organizations (28%), and even their appearance (26%).

[…]

When asked why they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants, the top reasons include Jews have too much power and control (38%), claim to be the ‘chosen people’ (38%), and have too much wealth (35%).

A game done for the Seattle Indies Slow Jam 2022.

I was responsible for the majority of the music and sound.

A game done for the Seattle Indies Slow Jam 2022. Play an adventurer who gets tricked into cooking for cats!

I was responsible for music, sound, some of the game design, and various puns (sorry).

Well, okay, my MSG tolerance is higher than it used to be but I still have a limit, as it turns out.

At least this reaction isn’t nearly as bad as they used to be. But yeah I’m not gonna start monching down on Doritos habitually or anything.

So, in the past, the “Simply Cheetos” brand of Cheetos didn’t use monosodium glutamate in it, so it was a safe thing for me to eat.

Today when buying lunch at the grocery store, I saw that they had the Flamin' Hot Simply Cheetos, so I bought a bag, and did a cursory glance of the ingredients list and didn’t see MSG on them. Then I had a bunch with dinner, and noticed a rather strong umami flavor (but not the same one that I normally associate with MSG), and paid it no mind.

Later in the evening I started having a really bad bowel reaction to something and started looking at the ingredients listings of everything I ate today to see what it could be, and that’s when I noticed MSG on the Cheetos label.

However, I don’t think it was the Cheetos' MSG that did this! In fact I think I might actually no longer be MSG-sensitive. And looking back, I don’t think I’ve had an MSG reaction ever since I did the ketamine treatments in March (even though I’ve knowingly had MSG a few times since then). There have been a whole lot of unexpected neurological changes that did happen from the ketamine infusions; in particular, ever since those treatments, caffeine doesn’t give me a massive panic attack when I have as little as half of an espresso (I can now tolerate a large Mountain Dew with just a slightly elevated heart rate!), and sucralose doesn’t give me a headache anymore either, and alcohol doesn’t make my pain flare up either.

All of those food sensitivities are highly co-occurrent with people with fibromyalgia, which was the main thing I was trying to treat with ketamine. While the chronic pain and fatigue symptoms haven’t gone away (and those were the main things I was trying to treat!) it’s possible that ketamine at least did have some beneficial effect.

I’m still not going to rush out and like. Consume all the MSG, just as I don’t rush out and consume all the sucralose/Stevia/etc. either and still prefer decaffeinated beverages for a bunch of reasons (although it’s nice being able to self-medicate my ADHD again!) and still limit my alcohol consumption, but maybe I don’t need to worry about those causing unexpected problems anymore.

Anyway. All this is to say that I still absolutely believe that MSG sensitivity is a thing (based on my prior experiences) but also it might be possible to get away from it! I’m not sure undergoing expensive ketamine treatments is worth it for this effect alone, but it might be a nice side-effect for folks who are seeking it for other reasons.

9 months ago I posted my then-current espresso process. As this is a constant experiment and processes change over time, I figure it’s time for an update:

1. I have returned to single-dosing, and have 3D printed a single-dose hopper for that purpose. This makes it less convenient for me to rest/outgas my beans but it’s easy enough to just, y'know, open the bag while it waits in the refrigerator. Oh also I grind into the dosing cup, not direct into the portafilter, and I give the dosing cup a little shakey-shake before pouring it into the portafilter (with a dosing funnel).

2. My dose is now 18g, and since I’m single-dosing there’s no time calibration necessary. Also, I give the beans a quick spritz with water (aka “RDT” in coffee nerd circles) to cut down on static and clumping.

3. My leveling process is now to do a vertical tap, and then WDT, with no additional leveling. Also, for the WDT I ended up settling on a bit of cat6 Ethernet cable which I stripped down to the wires which I then straightened, forming a sort of whisk. It’s probably not food-safe, but it works.

4. I still tamp as before, although as part of my tamping I also turn the tamper around a couple of times to ensure that the puck is flat and releases.

5. I extract either a 1:2 ratio (i.e. 18g in, 36g out) or 30 seconds, whichever comes first, and use that as a guide for dialing in my grind.

So, I’m not sure where I picked up the term “context collapse,” but the way I’ve been using it is extremely different than how it’s defined in academic circles:

Context collapse “generally occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another” with that new audience’s reaction being uncharitable and highly negative for failing to understand the original context.

This is… sort of how I use it, but not entirely; Wikipedia goes on to provide examples which all involve text being meant for one audience and read by another for whom it wasn’t intended.

The way I’m using it would be better defined as: using terminology in ways which make sense in one context, but when taken out of context can mean something very different, often with the opposite of its intention.

Or, in broader terms, using information that makes sense in one context in an inappropriate manner for another context, often by chasing through a chain of linked contexts without adapting the underlying information based on its new context.

So, is there a better, more established term out there that captures the phenomenon I talked about yesterday? Because it would be incredibly ironic if I ended up causing even more confusion by using a term that means vastly different things in different contexts, when talking about that very same phenomenon.

Why use ActivityPub when RSS still exists, and when IndieWeb adds social functionality to traditional, non-ActivityPub blogging?

Even at its best, ActivityPub is a very difficult standard to implement, with a lot of really hairy edge conditions and an at-best-mediocre experience for things that don’t fit neatly into its model, and Mastodon’s particular implementation of ActivityPub isn’t, y'know, great. (And I’ve written a bunch more about my thoughts on this as well.)

Basically I’d love to see more people support IndieWeb, using RSS/Atom and ideally also h-feed as the syndication formats, and to that end, I’d say that micro.blog is a better choice of “new Google Reader.”

asyncio generally requires that you provide a “session”/“client” object that contains the run loop for the async operations. I think that when you refactor a library to support asyncio, you provide a non-async wrapper around it which spins up the execution loop for each operation, although there might be a better pattern for it these days.

An antipattern I’ve seen a lot is people wrapping a non-async library in a threadpool and then have the async wrapper block on the future, but that completely misses the point to asyncio and makes everything perform way worse.

asyncio is kind of wonky to wrap your head around at first but it’s well worth it for the major performance gains you get. It can be a huge pill to swallow though, and given that most Python web apps are still running in a thread-per-connection context (because wsgi is designed around it) it can feel like a chicken-egg scenario at times. But doing the work of moving to asyncio (and providing a non-async wrapper around it) makes it easier for more things to move to asyncio and getting the performance benefits as a result, so it’s a net good IMO, even if it isn’t heavily used right away.

Indieweb Utils looks pretty neat and there’s a few projects I’ve had on the backburner which would benefit from this.

I’d also be pretty tempted to look into moving Pushl over to it, just to cut down on my own code maintenance requirements, except it looks like it doesn’t have any support for asyncio, which is less-than-optimal for an I/O-bound tool which sends a bunch of bulk updates. Is there any interest in adding asyncio support?

Song Fight! Live 2022 is a go, happening October 8 at 6 PM Pacific/9 PM Eastern on YouTube:

Some time later, my set alone will be available on my YouTube channel. Don’t forget to subscribe to my channel to keep the algorithm from eating your soul.

Yay, the big financial albatross is no longer around my neck. Now I can feel a lot more free to move forward with all of the projects I’ve been wanting to do, and not have to worry about, y'know, finances for a while.

I already feel a million pounds lighter.¹

So anyway, time to start looking at redoing my kitchen.

Back when the VRChat debacle took place, I’d rambled quite a lot about the idea of a standards-based truly-distributed VR system. I probably mentioned how back in the day I was designing something like that, and was intending to use XMPP as the actual transport mechanism; in my more recent reevaluation of the idea I was thinking that using WebRTC to stream the actual realtime data (voice, character animation, etc.) would be the way forward.

Well, the Matrix folks just announced Third Room, which is the same basic concept, running on Matrix and WebRTC! They’ve also made a bunch of other great technology choices along the way.

This is pretty exciting and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. At least from a 20,000-foot view it hits all of the right notes for me. For example, using glTF for all object interchange, focusing on in-world editing, and allowing for (apparently optional) world persistence.

Hopefully this can disrupt the stranglehold VRChat has on social VR and will also be a fun, compelling experience in its own right.

It would probably make a lot more sense to just do all of the color schemes as indirect lookups on a “swatch” texture. The math is a lot simpler, it would allow other things like baking gradients in easily, and would also give a lot more flexibility when it comes to various interactions; for example, I’d be able to encode arbitrarily many skin colors into things, which would allow for argyle and such as well. Plus it would give me even more color slots to work with, so I could also have separate colors for the lips, tongue, nose, and inside of the mouth (which are currently stuck using the same color).

Also, doing that would only require two of the channels in the pigment map, which would free up the other two channels for the occlusion and subsurface maps, which would make everything way more efficient overall.

Yeah, I like this idea.

• These lists are intended to be exhaustive
• Every item on the list applies to every situation
• Every item on the list must be taken to heart and considered at all times
• Every item based in historical fact is worth worrying about for all future implementations
• Every item deserves explanation
• An assumption you made that shows up on the list is a personal attack on your programming abilities
• These lists are intended as guides for how to do things (or, conversely, guides for things not to do)

I like Ko-Fi. They started out as a nice, friendly tip jar system, and they’ve only gotten better over time. They’ve done exactly what I keep saying companies should do: build a useful, sustainable business that makes a good income for all concerned parties. They haven’t gotten on a VC-backed treadmill of unsustainable growth, they haven’t made moves to “maximize engagement” or check off all the boxes for dystopian hyper-capitalism, and they haven’t gotten into a vicious cycle of worker exploitation.

Ko-Fi just started out as a tip jar, but then they added monthly memberships (á la Patreon) and asset/object sales (like Gumroad and Etsy). And now they’ve added their answer to Fiverr and Upwork: commissions.

So anyway my commissions are open. I’m just focusing on music for now but I might add more things over time.

While cooking dinner tonight I got a surprising electrical shock off of the handle of one of my pots, which was sitting on a burner which was on but was weirdly not getting hot. So, there’s clearly some awful short circuit in my stove. So it’s time to replace that.

As usual I’ve been wanting an induction stove anyway, but I was hoping to hold off until I could properly redo my kitchen. I sort of had the idea that I’d be reconfiguring it to have a built-in oven and a smaller cooktop in order to have more prep space, since my kitchen is pretty tiny. But I guess it isn’t the worst thing to upgrade the stove before everything else, right?

More importantly, I was hoping to hold off until my condo sold and I had, y'know, plenty of money for this. All the induction ranges I’m interested in cost considerably more than I feel comfortable paying right now. Although there’s one Samsung model that I like and is fairly affordable, but also it has about a 6-week wait right now.

It seems like it’s only one burner that’s shorting out, but that’s one too many for my comfort.

I’m sure I could tear the stove down and find where the electrical fault is, but, jeeze, I’m not all that interested in messing with 240V stuff.

Update: Home Depot had the Samsung in stock and ready for delivery/installation August 10, so I just went ahead and ordered it. Ugh.

Update 2: Oh right August 10 is a busy day for me, I should see if I can reschedule it to the 11th

Update 3: It is rescheduled, yay. Home Depot works, sometimes.

Have you heard the latest craze? it’s Muppet Speed Dating! Here’s how it works.

First, your soul is transferred into a muppet. Then you sit at a grid position, and you face one of your neighbors. The devil tells you to RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE, and then you stand up, and you and your neighbor get two prompts, one for each hand. Try your best to do both prompts at each other!

The prompts might be an action like “wave,” “have sex,” or “uchi wa-wa.” It’s up to you to figure out what that means!

You have three seconds, and you will be judged.

Remember to keep track of your achievements and failures. Send us a screenshot to get a free commemorative button.

Do this for as long as you like, but don’t overdo it. We don’t want you to become addicted and oversaturated. After all, the devil wants to see as many different souls as he can.

Just remember to mix it up, and always uchi wa-wa as best you can.

A conversation of sorts about how modern social media helps to amplify some of the worst aspects of toxic discourse. Possibly educational for straight allies, too.

A bit before I got sick I finally upgraded my home theater receiver, to a Denon AVR-S760H, mostly to finally get HDMI 2 support so that I could finally get 4K video from my connected devices (especially my Playstation 4).

As an obvious bonus, this means I can also run my connected Windows PC at 4K. Its GPU (a 1050Ti) isn’t quite up to snuff for that for gaming, though, although having desktop and web browsing at 4K is quite nice.

Stepmania defaults to running in a borderless window instead of proper fullscreen, though, and so even though it only internally renders at 1080p, it then tries to upscale to 4K, and gets very laggy as a result. Running at native 4K isn’t really any slower, at least, but it’s stil laggy and unplayable.

However, I discovered that if I set the fullscreen mode to exclusive, then setting the resolution to 1080p unlocks much higher framerates, up to 120Hz, because my TV supports VRR and 120Hz. (Ostensibly it supports this on 4K as well, although Stepmania didn’t offer this configuration, likely due to my GPU.)

So anyway, Stepmania at 120Hz is ridiculously smooth — almost uncanny in its smoothness. It also makes steps register with much greater precision, and I’m actually surprised at how much more responsive the game as a whole feels now.

It still does nothing to help me with my cough or fatigue, though. But it was still nice to play for a little bit.

It’s now been one week since the respiratory symptoms started on what I’m still about 98% certain is COVID-19, despite the lack of a positive test.

The worst of the respiratory symptoms only lasted a few days, with the cough having mostly cleared up by Wednesday. I’m still coughing somewhat, though, and I continue to be fatigued much more than usual for me.

Being vaxxed and boosted certainly helped a lot, but it wasn’t a complete preventative. Also given my fatigue levels I can’t help but worry about long COVID on top of my already deep-seated chronic issues.

I did feel well enough to go out for a little bit today, as I had a package which I had to bring to the post office to refuse (long story which will get its own blog entry eventually, maybe). I was only in the post office for maybe 30 seconds and I double-masked, of course. Afterwards I also popped into the grocery store (still double-masked) to get a snack.

Given my negative test results and my triple-vaccination status I’m apparently at very low risk of spreading it to anyone else, but given how “low risk” it was for me to get it in the first place I’m still being cautious. And of course I’m not exactly feeling up to being around people anyway. I might still make a regular grocery trip this weekend, though. As nice as getting them delivered was, I need to do things outside of the house just for my own sanity. Maybe I could do the curbside pickup thing. I dunno.

This weekend I plan on finally setting up my new drum kit, although that will also require a lot more organizing of my basement and that feels like maybe more than I can handle right now. I also want to play DDR again but that also feels impossible.

Maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow.

Dish Dragon is an interesting site where you tell it one or more ingredients that you have available and it recommends recipes to make with it. Pretty handy if, like me, you tend to accumulate a lot of ingredients with good intention but then never know what to actually cook for dinner. Great for meal planning and so on.

Today I got a PCR test. It came back negative.

I’m still sick with something, though, and the symptoms are to the letter COVID symptoms. I wonder how trustworthy PCR tests are these days.

I seem to be sick again. I’m not quite sure what it is, but I was exposed to COVID quite a lot two weeks ago (confirmed exposure at the office, probable unreported exposure at the hotel, not to mention all the other places where people have gone totally lax with distancing and face covering because I guess everyone’s given up on everything now) and a two-week incubation time is still not unheard of. Tests come back negative but apparently the current variants have a huge false-negative rate on the at-home tests.

Basically I’ve had a persistent headache and extreme fatigue (like, way more than usual for me, which is saying a lot) for the last week or so, and now I have a painful cough and it hurts to breathe sometimes. Robitussin and albuterol are helping, and I have a stash of promethazine if it comes down to it.

(Gosh I wish the war on opioids didn’t make promethazine so hard to come by…)

Even if what I have isn’t COVID-19, so many people around me are still getting it. This pandemic is far from over and I wish people would keep taking it seriously, and I wish people had been taking it seriously to begin with. Maybe if everyone had done their part to stamp it out, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

It sure would also be nice if Pfizer et al had actually kept their mRNA up to date like they said they would, and if the rapid tests were updated to cover new variants as they emerge. And if fucking Bill Gates hadn’t convinced the US government and WHO to not require vaccine stockpiles to be shared globally, so that maybe the breeding grounds for new variants might have not been quite so effective.

This was not a time for half measures.

jamesg asks:

How much coffee do you drink in a day?

I usually drink 1-2 shots of espresso per day, so “1 cup” feels like the closest match.

Most of it is decaf, though.

@jamesg:

I am intrigued by the IndieWeb’s approach to plurality and building technologies that don’t serve the creation of monocultures or single ways of thinking about things. IndieWeb technologies help build plug-and-play social bridges. The technologies are your pipes. You get to decide how they connect and what you make with those pipes. This idea excites me to a great degree.

Could you explain what you mean by “plurality?” In the circles I run in it almost certainly means something different than what you mean by it, and the definition I’m familiar with is likely to be the more common one on the Internet in 2020 2022.

From context it seems like you’re talking about building a (distributed) voting/polling system, which is definitely an interesting topic to think about, and the first-cut approach would probably be to do something using fragmentions or otherwise having a u-vote-for (or similar) link either to an anchor on the page or to the resource being voted on (e.g. the image itself).

Oh yeah, a lot of places in San Francisco are cash-only. So, the other day I tried taking out some money at the ATM, and thus took out my debit card for the first time since the pandemic started.

It was declined, with an error that the card had been blocked.

I tried to figure out what was going on through my bank’s website and it only gave very evasive information. Reading up online it seems that most banks end up blocking debit cards which haven’t been used in a while, as a security precaution.

So just now I finally got around to calling them on the phone, and it turns out that’s exactly what happened, and unsurprisingly the bank is handling a lot of calls like this lately, because of how many people haven’t needed cash since March, 2020 until now.

It’d have been nice if my bank had, like, warned me about this rather than leaving me in the lurch while traveling, but much like the Y2K+20 problem it’s probably not anything that anyone had really thought about until it was too late.

I took a week break from dextroamphetamine, and tried taking it again with the idea that I’d just take it every other day. And all day I’ve had headaches, and what focus I’ve had has been difficult to direct towars the stuff I’m trying to focus on.

I don’t think that going to immediate-release would help with this either.

I’d like to just get my pain under control and go back to self-medicating with caffeine. And not be in a situation where everything depends on focus in the first place.

Meh.

With the current state of the world, everyone is on edge and quick to anger. Approach situations from a perspective of kindness. You never know what someone else is going through at the time, and responding with a default of anger to what seems like a personal slight is only going to make things worse.

Lots of people around you are struggling with mental health, anxiety, loss, grief, and more. If someone does something thoughtless, it’s best to just let it go. If it’s egregious enough to require correction, start out by asking them if they understand what they were supposed to do (in a kind way) rather than assuming that they were purposefully being malicious. They almost certainly weren’t doing it on purpose, and even if they were, is it really worth getting into a fight over it?

It’s also worth remembering that other people aren’t necessarily in a space for the same reason as you, and they might be inexperienced with the use of that space. Something that seems obvious and straightforward to you might be a confusing mess to other people.

And the inverse also applies; if you’re the one who has caused other people to blow up at you, regardless of intention, you don’t know what they’ve been going through either, or how many microaggressions may have led to them boiling over.

tl;dr: Assume good faith in others.

well I just had a lousy experience that has me depressed and frustrated and withdrawn and just hating everyone around me

My therapist was trying to convince me to come out to an art gallery opening on Vashon Island and I wasn’t feeling up to it but I decided I was wallowing and I should get out and do something nice.

So I start driving to the ferry, and I follow the GPS instructions for getting there, and there’s a long line of cars so I go a few blocks up to try to not cut into the line, and I guess I didn’t go far up enough because when I got in line, the person who pulled up behind me ran up to my window and started yelling at me for cutting in line, and acted like I was being a jerk on purpose. And then when I didn’t immediately get out of the line (which runs parallel to a busy street and it’s difficult to tell when it’s safe to pull out) she ran up to the person in front of me and told him what I’d done and then he started yelling at me too.

This was too much for me and I had a meltdown and had to head home.

And now I just want to wallow some more.

From her point of view it probably did seem that I’d cut in line and I understand her being upset but I didn’t know, and if I’d been told nicely that “hey the line starts up at such-and-such street” and not gotten other people mad at me too, things would have gone very differently. But now I just like. never want to take the ferry every again because now I"m worried I’ll get people mad at me again.

It sure would be great if people didn’t assume malicious intent. I absolutely wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, I was just confused about where to go while having a bad mental health day already. Being yelled at and berated for an honest mistake, by multiple people who immediately assumed I was out to be a jerk, is not what I’d call a good time.

The worst part of this is that the people who yelled at me probably feel like victorious defenders of justice, and they’ll never know the actual end result of their actions.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Dextroamphetamine was working pretty well for me for a few days. Then last night I had some pretty bad insomnia accompanied with a major panic attack. So I think I’m going to hold off on it again and only using it 1-2 times a week, and not on adjacent days.

Why is my metabolism like this?

Probably for the best though; while on it I was getting super-productive again, and having pain flareups as a result. I need to find a good balancing point.

Dextroamphetamine on its own has been working pretty well for me for the last few days, and my blood pressure has been only slightly elevated (not to the point that I could feel it).

Today I decided to try using a small amount of cannabis as well, and within half an hour I felt my blood pressure spike. It’s “only” 140/90, which is pretty elevated and enough for me to feel it, but not enough to worry about.

Anyway, I looked it up and there have indeed been a couple studies that have found that THC and dextroamphetamine interact to cause a blood pressure spike. Oops.

I don’t remember which particular strain I had loaded up in my vaporizer; it’s either Harlequin (which is 95% CBD) or Lemon Smac (which is 100% THC). So I’ll need to try a more careful experiment in the future to make sure I’m even using the right strain to begin with, but I don’t think I’ll be doing that any time soon. I’ll also probably want to try it with something that’s nearly 100% CBD just to be relatively-safe.

Fenofibrate is affecting me the same awful way that Lipitor did, back in the day. If triglycerides are the problem underlying my pain, this medication doesn’t seem to be the answer.

Maybe I should try just eating nothing but salad for a month.

I took my little 10mg capsule when I woke up at 8 AM, and I felt it kick in during my shower. It’s led to a feeling of clarity and less chaos in my brain. I did a few put-off chores before work, and at work I’m not feeling totally overwhelmed by stuff. I’m still not focusing on what I mean to be working on, though.

Blood pressure is 131/89, heart rate is 65. Slightly elevated from my baseline but definitely nothing to be worried about. My hands are also slightly shakier than usual but not, like, alarmingly so.

This shows some promise and I’ll be working to adjust the dosage and timing accordingly. I might try supplementing with a caffeine microdose later today.

Also, last night was my first dose of fenofibrate, which hasn’t solved all my pain issues overnight but I’d expect that to take a week or so to be effective.

Two weeks since my last ketamine infusion and my anxiety is… present, again, and my chronic pain never went away at all but now I’m feeling a lot more aware of it.

I went back and tried Adderall again and it didn’t mess me up, although it also didn’t help me like it did the last time I tried it. But neither Adderall nor caffeine are messing with my blood pressure or increasing my anxiety, so I’ve reopened the conversation with my doctor regarding other meds for ADHD. In particular, I asked about Dexedrine and Desoxyn. Both of them seem promising at the dosages I’m looking at, although my insurance won’t cover Desoxyn (which is unsurprising, there was a TV series about it) so we’re trying Dexedrine first.

Regarding chronic pain, my doctor went over my chart and he noticed that we never really did anything about my high triglycerides, and then he had a thought: what if my high triglycerides are contributing to my fibro symptoms? Doing some cursory literature search found that it’s plausible, at least, so I’m also going to start on Fenofibrate to lower my triglycerides and hopefully get my body in some sort of balance there. He’s also ordered some more labwork to see if I have any gaping vitamin deficiencies.

Have I mentioned how much I cherish this doctor? Of all the doctors I’ve seen, this is the only one where I feel like he actually listens to me, doesn’t talk down to me, understands that I know my body and have done my reserach, and is willing to try things to attempt to treat these complex, deep-seated issues that have caused me problems for the past 25-odd years. It’s a lot easier to be patient as a patient when the healthcare provider treats me with respect like this.

He’s definitely a rare breed.

Once again I’m finding myself wishing I had time to work on Publ. I really need to get around to writing a MicroPub endpoint for it! (And all the related stuff necessary to make it actually work…)

On the plus side, my focus is way higher, and my anxiety is the lowest it’s been in a decade.

On the minus side, my chronic pain still sucks a lot, and this is still making it very hard for me to do my job.

It’s still been a huge net benefit for me though. And supposedly it takes a little while for ketamine treatments to have an effect on chronic pain. I’ll get there eventually.

My album crowdfunding project was going a bit more slowly than I’d hoped, but thanks to the Qrates support team we were able to come up with better pricing, and now it’s only $29.50 a copy.

Unfortunately, Qrates is unable to simply lower the price of an album, they had to cancel all of the existing preorders, so if you were hoping to buy a copy, you'l need to redo your preorder… but on the plus side now the price is much, much lower, for the same great double-length album!

I hope this makes it easier for folks to join me on this lo-fi coffee journey.

Thanks!

Oh yeah, another thing I keep forgetting to mention is that when I feel the ketamine really kick in, it feels like the death part of a death poop from hell. Like, everything is just… ending, and I feel it first in my hands and feet and then it’s a wave that just washes over me.

It also reminds me a lot of a time back in 2005 when I got severely dehydrated and passed out on the sidewalk and got a mild concussion, like I felt like I was dead and that’s okay, everything was calm and peaceful and quiet.

The transition from waking/conscious to ego-death is a bit jarring but once you get there it’s quite lovely. The return to reality can be pretty rough though.

Had my second infusion today. Higher dose, but it was a lot more cozy. Felt like everything is temporary and that I was a tiny speck in an infinite universe, and the universe is okay and I’m glad to be in it.

While things were starting out I realized I’d forgotten to put my phone into do not disturb mode and I was able to direct the meat puppet to ask the nurse to set it, and that worked well. The meat puppet was also able to take the shoes off when they were feeling uncomfortable.

Playlist was Ambienteer - Arrival followed by some Bonobo which started up just as the trip was ending.

This definitely gives me a different relationship with my body.

Anyway the euphoria has worn off and my pain is back. Oh well.

I had my first (of six) ketamine infusions yesterday. It was at a lower dose, mostly to see how I respond to it.

The actual experience was very interesting. Because of the combination of sensory deprivation and the ketamine itself, my sensory experience was limited to what I could directly feel around me, which mostly meant feeling the inside of my mouth with my tongue, and to a much lesser extent feeling the chair I was pressed into. So I sort of felt like my “universe” was the inside of my body, but also a void of nothingness.

I felt like my body was dissolving away and was everything and nothing at the same time, and that my self in the “real world” had ceased to be and that was also okay.

The music I chose had a very strange effect. Many of the sounds were very vocal-adjacent and I felt like they were literally speaking to me, with words I couldn’t understand. For my next session I’m going to use something more abstract and ambient, probably Ambienteer’s work.

During the experience I felt like the universe was infinite and infinitesimal at the same time, like everything is nothing and vice-versa. I kept bringing back my litany to stay grounded and intentional: “I am here to reduce pain, reduce agony, and increase comfort.”

Much of it reminded me of one of my early experiences with cannabis.

At the time I felt like I experienced something extremely profound, and that it would give me plenty to think about. But my cynicism has set in and I’m not feeling like it was life-altering, just that it’s the random nerve firings that happen when a big chunk of the brain is shut off. Ketamine treatments are supposed to work by “helping to create new neural pathways” and I’m still optimistic that repeated treatments and increased dosages will maybe have a beneficial effect.

When I woke up today I had the lowest level of pain I’d had in decades. But as soon as I started working, the flare came right back.

But the lowest level of pain in decades is nothing to sneeze at, and maybe it’s a preview of things to come.

I just hope it’ll all be worth it. This is taking both a lot of time and money, and so far feels like it’s just an excuse to trip balls while calling it “medicine.”

But if this doesn’t work I have no idea what the fuck I’m gonna do.

I made it back home today. My cats were briefly happy to see me, then insistent that what they really missed was going outside. Okay, then.

A thing occurred to me the other day: driving in a Nissan Leaf, especially on the highway, feels less like driving and more like piloting. It’s a very different feeling for me. And I like it.

Also ProPILOT made the whole thing way less stressful and I never want a car without at least level 2 self-driving ever again.

Today the weather in Port Angeles was absolutely beautiful and I couldn’t enjoy any of it because I was stuck inside with a migraine all day.

Several years ago I tried using Qrates to do a pressing of Refactor. Unfortunately it didn’t hit the minimum preorder size, so the project was canceled.

Recently someone at Qrates reached out to me and was enthusiastic about the idea of me giving it another try, and since Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To has somewhat broader appeal, I decided to give it another shot.

So, if you would be so kind as to visit the Qrates crowdfunding page and maybe even consider buying a copy or two or ten, it would be greatly appreciated.

So, within a day of the Bandcamp announcement, several folks had already started building their own tools for escaping from Bandcamp. Of particular note (and brought to my attention many times) is one called blamscamp, which is a web-based GUI that builds a web player bundle for itch.io.

This tool definitely has a lot of merit, but in the near term it only handles one specific use case, namely taking a collection of already-encoded-for-the-web mp3s and turning it into an itch previewer. The player itself is nicely-written, but this isn’t the sort of tool which works well for me.

So, I adapted the player engine into my own version, which is a CLI tool. Feed it a JSON spec, audio files, and ancillary data (album art and lyrics and such), and it automatically encodes and tags the album for MP3 preview, high-quality MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC, and builds a web player (based on the original blamscamp’s although it’s diverged quite a lot now). And, if you install butler, it can also automatically upload these bundles to your itch page!

Here is the first public demo of it.

With all that said, I do still intend to keep using Bandcamp as my primary music distribution platform; it’s been very good to me over the years, and just because they’re being bought out by a questionable company doesn’t mean it’ll actually go downhill. But diversifying my offerings is always a good thing, and by posting my music in both places, I get even more of a potential audience. Plus, the satisfaction of owning (a big part of) my own delivery pipeline.

The pyBlamscamp pipeline can also be adapted to anything that takes a bundle of files; it could also be used, for example, to simplify the process of posting albums on Gumroad.

At present the main difficulties of it are that it’s a Python application and that it relies on external encoders. One of my potential change sin the future is to have it self-host the encoder libraries which would make a lot of things easier, and would also make it more feasible to provide a stand-alone application.

It’d also be really handy to have tools that make it easier to create and edit the .json file. That’s definitely a rough edge that’s not suitable for general end users.

There’s also a heck of a lot of things that still need to be done even for my own uses. But for now, this tool is at least ready to get started with.

EDIT: god damnit I should have called it “bandcamp” aejrklajrlajlajla i’m not gonna rename this twice in one day

Maybe I should have been checking my blood pressure more frequently. I didn’t check it at all yesterday like I should have and just assumed it was fine, because I just woke up at 4:40 AM feeling a bit off and on a hunch I checked my blood pressure… which is now 169/86.

Wellp, so much for my last chance at being medicated.

Wellp, now there’s water that leaks out from around the base of my toilet when I flush it.

I am guessing that the plumber didn’t replace the wax ring.

Sigh.

So I’ve been on Vyvanse for many days now. Four total, one last Friday and three this week.

So far it isn’t really helping me, but it also isn’t hurting me. This is also just like the lowest possible dose for trial purposes, though.

It makes me feel awake and a bit alert. I also feel like I’m a bit more prone to irritation and feeling stressed, but that might just be other situational things happening right now. It hasn’t really helped with focus at all.

My heart rate and blood pressure are slightly higher than usual but not alramingly so.

I think it’ll be worth trying the next dosage up at some point. I have a followup with my doctor next week to discuss that. It’s promising.

Today I drove for the first time while on it and boy howdy did that feel weird. I’ll probably want to go without it during my trip in a few weeks.

We’ll see how I feel this weekend.

A large chunk of the company I work for is Ukraine-based. Today, one of my coworkers (who lives in the US, but still has family back in Ukraine) posted this message, which I am sharing with his permission (he asked not to be named, for the safety of himself and his family):

Please read this carefully. This is a most realistic analysis from me since I’m thinking about it for last 40 hours non stop.

The World has changed. This is the biggest act of aggression since the WW II.

Guys I wanted to emphasize this again. US media might not represent it well, but Putin’s idea is to take down the whole Ukraine, because he can’t stand the idea that some of what he thinks satellites has chosen the democracy… After he taken down Ukraine, he will heal his wounds… And since he has nothing to lose he will take over Eastern Europe and maybe claim Alaska as a “historical” russian land. He has no moral identity — they are shelling our schools, hospitals, blood donation centers, kindergardens.

More than that China is watching this brutal act of aggression and making some conclusions of the Western world weakness.

And trust me if Ukraine falls — here in the US, everything will be very bad. It’s not even about our business it’s all about global economy and possible global militarization. Next elections will win Trump — guaranteed with the help of russian funding if they succeed today. So the only way to save our World as is and DEMOCRACY — right now is to help Ukrainian military. They are fighting versus second world larges army and winning.

WHAT CAN WE DO NOW?

The only weakness point is lack of airdefence systems since russia is attacking from everywhere — from the Black sea, from it’s border, from Belarussia and pre-Dniester Moldavian republic. We have to ask NATO to shield the airspace over Ukraine. Trust me the rest of russian troops will be taken care by Ukrainian army.

SO we have to attend rallies, to ask US government (your congresmen) to block Russia from SWIFT system and to close the airspace over Ukraine and start lend lease with tanks and stuff.

Please donate to Ukrainian army - they are the last frontier of the democratic world as is. This the truth. Spread the word about this, please. US folks should now what at stakes. 

For those who would like to contribute financially, there is information from the National Bank of Ukraine and a charitable fund based in Ukraine, which you can specify as going to the Ukranian Army or to a general fund.

Now the real celebration can happen, as we put Twosday to bed.

See you in 198 years.

It is 2:22:22 on 2/22/2022, which happens to also be a Twosday.

This is not the only Twosday which will ever happen on the Gregorian calendar; 2/22/2220 is also on a Twosday. If anyone else is still around in 198 years, they can also have a celebration of numerical assonance.

2/22/2222 is, unfortunately, on a Friday. Pope Gregory XIII clearly failed to think ahead.

Anyway, the real celebration will be in 20 hours, when it’s 22:22:22.

“Open Pod Building Management, how may I help you?”

“Yes, I just arrived at my new apartment, and it’s definitely not in a livable condition and I’d like to terminate my lease.”

“Ah, could you tell me what’s wrong with it?”

“Oh, gosh, I’m not sure where to begin… well, for starters, it’s on fire.”

“Ah, I’m sorry to hear that. But could you tell us all of the problems with it? We need to know in order to evaluate whether there is something we should do to fix it.”

“Hm, more than it being on fire? Well, I suppose that while I was in there I noticed a lot of problems, like the tiles being cracked and the faucet having a leak.”

“Oh, well, I’ll definitely need more information about that. Which specific tiles were cracked, and how did you determine that?”

“Um… I’m not sure, just like. A bunch of them?”

“That’s not enough for us to take action on. Also, you mentioned a leaky faucet, are you certain that it’s leaky and not that you simply don’t know how to shut it off?”

“Don’t know how to… shut it off? I’ve used plenty of faucets before. I’m pretty sure I know how to turn this one off.”

“Oh, don’t use your other faucet experience as a judge of whether you can turn these off. They are made for very advanced users, and they are much more flexible than normal faucets, so of course someone who isn’t experienced with them may see them as having a leak.”

“Um… okay, well, regardless, I can’t really use the faucets anyway. On account of the, you know. Fire.”

“Well, that’s just typical, a new resident showing up out of nowhere and thinking they know what’s better for things, but not even being willing to give it a proper time to see if it works for them.”

“I mean, I’d love to, like ideologically I agree with what you’re trying to achieve, it’s just… you know. The fire makes it somewhat difficult to live here, but even without that, I mean. The fact the toilet is in the middle of the kitchen is a bit alarming, as well.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, but someday you’ll come to appreciate what we’re building. But in the meantime, I highly suggest that whenever you talk about the burning apartment, it does everyone a favor if you could actually go into detail about all of your issues and be clear about when and how you experienced them, so that others don’t get the wrong impression of whether this is a current issue or not.”

Just a followup, I ended up staying awake for over 25 hours, finally fell asleep for a bit today at 10, woke up again at 11, and mostly I’m feeling like I have a gigantic hangover.

Apparently armodafinil’s mechanism of action is identical to cocaine’s, so it actually IS stimulant-based and not just “a wakefulness agent” and I wish i’d known that before embarking on this. I don’t know why my research failed me this badly this time. Probably me being desperate for something that works.

I’m definitely not interested in continuing with armodafinil, in any case. Advice for dealing with this massive pounding headache would be appreciated.

i feel like crap and i;m wide awake and i want to sleep but i can;t sleep

i;ve been having electric pains through my nerves all night and i feel like i drank three pots of coffee and i am not sleepy at all but i am very very tired

on the plus side i’m having no apnea symptoms tonight but that’s because i’m not getting into a state of relaxation which allows it to occur in the first place

why is my body so awful at processing medications

Just to keep track of stuff here for onlookers

There is an open call for commentary on some pendidng legislation. Here is what I submitted:

As an independent musician, I often run into many problems with automated copyright enforcement online. Quite often I’ll upload a music video to YouTube containing only my own original work, but then I get a copyright strike because the drum beat or some incidental noise happened to match something on a major label track. The recourse for this is to appeal the copyright strike, and YouTube almost always finds in favor of the record label, as they have huge amounts of money and I do not.

Similar issues are faced by individual photographers who take photographs of well-known landmarks, being issued takedown notices because their photograph happened to closely match a similar photo owned by Getty Images or the like. For that matter, Getty Images often assumes they own photos that independent journalists put on their articles, when those photographs were taken specifically for the article.

There are also many content creators who create videos which include thorough academic analyses of copyrighted work, completely within the bounds of fair use, but algorithmic copyright detection filters do not understand any nuance when it comes to the difference between analysis and outright copying. In one particularly ironic case, Adam Neely made a video in defense of Warner Media regarding a copyright dispute over a song, and then Warner Media flagged that video – for the part of it which wasn’t even owned by Warner!

The copyright system is also often abused to prevent discussion of important issues, and copyright reporting mechanisms are often used as an end-run around anti-SLAPP measures.

Algorithmic copyright matching needs to come with extreme human oversight. While an algorithmic match can and should be used to inform people about potential infringement, it should never be used as an automated means of preventing access to a work, legal or otherwise.

If you care at all about the garbage clusterfuck that is the US copyright system, please share your comments in advance of the public consultation by February 8, 2022.

When my Leaf arrived, the front camera wasn’t working, meaning the self-driving functionality was nonfunctional. Today I took it to the nearest Nissan dealership to get it looked at, and fortunately it was just that the camera had gotten disconnected somehow. 5 hours and $280 later (most of which will be reimbursed by Carvana) I have a car with level 2 self driving.

And holy moly, level 2 self-driving is weird, in a good way. It can’t handle all driving even in its limited situation (nor should it) but it does an amazing job of maintaining speed and safe following distance and position within the lane. And it always errs on the side of caution; if it doesn’t have a clear view of the lane markers, it turns off (and lets you know!), and goes into lane-keep alert mode instead.

There’s a bunch of road on the way home which has had construction going on for as long as I’ve lived here, and the lanes are all weird. When driving there, the lane-keep alert made sure I was aware I was drifting between lanes, but used a perfect level of tactile notification, which made perfect sense. And when lane keeping became available again, it was so surreal (but cool) to feel the steering wheel automatically turn for me.

It’s a really cool experience, and I feel like it’s implemented in a safe way that’s not likely to have the Tesla problem of just like, you know, randomly swerving into trucks/medians/oncoming traffic.

It handles all of the parts of driving that make me anxious.

Also having the full wraparound camera makes parking much easier.

So anyway. Yeah. I like it.

Tomorrow at 2:30 PM Pacific Standard Time I’ll be finally premiering the hour-long music video for my Novembeat 2021 album. If you head to the YouTube page you can set up a reminder/notification for when it starts, and during the premiere we’ll all be able to chat live!

This is by far the largest, most ambitious video project I’ve ever done and I’m really excited to share it with the world. I hope y'all will join me!