busybee

Notes to self:

• 6 minutes of kick time seems like a lot until you suddenly have to patch your mold because you’ve noticed there’s leaks in it
• Adding more water after it starts to kick does not slow it down, it just makes it fail entirely
• 1mm is not enough thickness on your outer shell, either
• Starting with a 100mm square pot was probably a bit ambitious
• It’s probably easier to mix the plaster in multiple small batches instead of trying to make it all go at once

Oh well, it was a good learning experience, as long as I actually learned from it.

Everyone else is doing one so I’d might as well too.

Just collecting some notes for myself. This will probably get more stuff on it as time goes on. Feel free to use this as a reference for yourself too.

Turns out it’s kind of hard to do???¹

The fireplace work has finished, and conveniently today my firewood storage rack also arrived. The fellow recommended that I wait another 24 hours before lighting it up, though, as the cement needs time to cure.

I’m wondering what to do with the decorative logs that were left in the fireplace all this time. They were just like. Cutesy logs that were used as part of the home staging and got left behind.

I think these are them and the description says:

This is a natural product with zero chemical treatments or additives. This is a decorative product and not intended for burning, which could expose user to soot and carbon monoxide.

so I’m getting mixed messages here.

Usual regular infodump about activities and such.

The fireplace work didn’t start today due to the rain. They originally rescheduled it for tomorrow but then the person scheduled for tomorrow got sick, so it’ll be Monday at the earliest. … And I just realized that means they scheduled it for Christmas, which seems weird. I’m guessing they’re going to start on Tuesday instead. Which is the same day the plumbers were planning to start on my bathroom. Oy.

Anyway, my big blue couch is finally gone, and so is my resin printer. Now I just need to do some more decluttering of my living room (and find a home for the crap that I was keeping on the surviving couch), and also figure out where the heck I’m going to keep my folding treadmill because it’s a little too tall to go under the red couch. I suppose I could prop it up by a couple inches with some riser feet or something but that feels iffy to me.

I had briefly thought I was going to maybe set up a gym space downstairs (for the treadmill and my DDR setup) but there just isn’t room for it down there either. The treadmill hasn’t really been all that enjoyable to use anyway, though, so maybe I’ll just sell it in January when everyone’s suddenly interested in getting exercise. For now it’s stashed awkwardly behind my couch, and preventing me from setting up my cozy fireplace area the way I want to.

Lots of stuff happening all at once.

Another thing I’d been putting off way too long on this house was getting my fireplace evaluated, with a bunch of stuff that had been called out on the home inspection report.

Today I finally had a chimney inspector come out and he said that it’s in mostly good shape, but that the chimney cap would need to be replaced with a more modern crown, the flashing needs to be replaced, and of course the whole thing needs to be swept out. The estimate for all that came to be not a huge amount of money so I went ahead and scheduled that work too.

Just a few random updates about the stuff going on right now.

As much as I appreciated my Sette 270, there were a few things I didn’t like about it:

• The fine adjustment mechanism is weird and unpredictable (due to the dual-ring thing)
• It is incredibly loud
• Grinding for espresso usually took 3-4 cycles due to popcorning
• The dang felt pretty huge (relative to my tiny kitchen)
• It’s built for keeping stuff in the hopper rather than single-dosing

I was considering a number of other grinders (most notably the Option-O Lagom Mini) but then in April, Timemore announced the Timemore Sculptor series, in a number of sizes and grind profiles. And the requisite Kickstarter had it on a pretty deep discount.

So anyway, I backed the 064s (64mm stepless variant) and expected to wait.

And wait I did! But the lovely new grinder arrived today.

So the new keyboard arrived today and I swapped it into my setup, along with the Akai MPK49 (which I also finally restored to working condition). Here’s some vague unstructured thoughts about it.

So, at the beginning of this year I got a solar panel system installed on my house. After a year of collecting data I think we can do the math about how well it works out, financially.

Today is Bandcamp Friday. That makes it a very good time to support independent musicians.

Right now I could use a bit of cash, as I’ve been hit with some unexpected expenses and I don’t have much of a safety net regarding money I can access right now. So, if you have any interest in my music, right now is a very good time to buy some of it. Or my whole discography, even. I have around two dozen releases each in a wide variety of genres, almost all written by me.

Just the current haps, yo.

Here’s the story I recited at the One More Light TDOR concerts with STANCE. Specifically this is the version I performed tonight (which is slightly different than Saturday’s rendition).

I figure it’s been a little while since my last random-updates update thing, so here’s what’s going on in my life. Because I guess some folks like knowing this stuff? Weird. Anyway.

My new roof is finally getting installed. It sure is loud and poundy. Supposedly this is a two-day project so theoretically they are around halfway done. Unlike most home renovation stuff I can’t easily take photos showing the progress. Oh well.

Also after trying to work on some music in my newly-rearranged basement I was finding that having the computer desk in the center of the back “wall” with keyboard way off to the left looked cool but it made actually working on music a major drag, since I couldn’t just turn and start recording, I’d have to get up and take a few steps over, and that made my workflow really frustrating. So since I couldn’t work on music today anyway (because noise) I reoriented stuff to be a bit more like how it used to be, with the desk on the left and the keyboard to the right of it, and now it’s way more comfortable to work on things.

Just testing using Backblaze’s raw object storage as a means of serving up a Bandcrash player for cheap. I’ll be documenting the upload process soon, if actual playback performance is sufficient.

After years of constantly lowering my prices, trying to get a vanishingly-small amount of sales on things I care about, I’ve decided to raise everything and make it uniform, across all of my music storefronts, namely:

• Bandcamp
• itch
• Gumroad
• Ko-Fi

Here’s my pricing strategy and rationale.

I love the flavor of coffee, but don’t really care much for caffeine. Unfortunately, finding good roasters that treat decaffeinated coffee with respect is difficult, and the ones which are out there tend to either default to a dark roast, or cost enormous amounts.

But with a $20 popcorn air popper you can roast your own coffee at home, and save a lot of money doing it!

I’ve been doing it.

Has it really only been three days since my last random updates post? It feels like longer.

Well, here’s some more random unstructured updates.

I feel like I need to come up for air, after some protracted busy-ness (not to be confused with business, which I have none of at the moment).

Just a random undirected ramble.

I keep on seeing this come up where people want to support someone on Patreon but not be on the patron Discord. They’ll leave the Discord and then get automatically readded and it becomes incredibly frustrating. For years there was nothing you could do about this except either stop being a patron or ask the Discord in question to ban you (which could have other awful side effects, and make it much more difficult to rejoin if you actually want to).

A while back, though, Patreon quietly added the option to leave individual servers! It’s extremely well-hidden, but here’s how you can voluntarily leave a Discord without quitting the creator’s Patreon:

1. Go to your Patreon member settings
2. Under “More” select connected apps
3. Click on Discord
4. Now you have a list of all the servers you can leave and join!

As far as I know there’s no way to prevent joining a Discord when you first pledge to a creator, but this at least lets you stop being forcibly re-added after you leave.

Remember how two years ago I got my bathroom remodeled and it turned into a ridiculous ordeal that lasted well over a month of me living in a hotel and, later, a temporary apartment due to the repeated incompetence of the workers involved? And then it eventually finished up and it was good enough? Aside from some later issues which were easily fixed by myself?

So, about that…

I’ve made a bunch of progress on the GUI for bandcrash! After a bunch of false starts trying to figure out the “easy” and/or “right” way of doing things, I ended up just doing things the kinda-boneheaded way, using Qt and way too much stateful boilerplate. I figure that Working is better than Nonexistent, and someone who’s better at GUI shit than me could probably come along and improve things later.

Do people ever read these things? Or do people just like knowing that I’m still alive? Either way here’s a “I’m still alive” post.

Caught up on my collections of:

• Posy
• Nicky Flowers

Added the discographies of:

• James Hastings
• our dear friend, the medic

Because of the recent shenanigans I’ve been working on pyBlamscamp again.

For now I’ve just been working on refactoring it to make a GUI possible, and improving performance by actually parallelizing execution wherever possible. And it’s a lot faster now! On my Mac studio (with the files hosted on my NAS), it now takes only 13 seconds to do the full encode of Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To, down from the previous 105. That’s 8 times as fast! (Presumably it’s mostly I/O bound, what with retrieving the .wav files over gigabit Ethernet, and it would be much faster if the source files were on my local volume.)

So, anyway. My next step will, of course, be to make an actual GUI. Because it’s pretty clear that such a thing would be useful.

Also I should probably rename it. It’s caused quite a lot of confusion, and people don’t seem to understand that pyBlamscamp does way more than the original Blamscamp, but isn’t (yet) as user-friendly. It’s also very much diverged at this point.

So, hey, Bandcamp is a great service that a lot of musicians and fans rely upon for fair distribution and sales of music. It is a really great thing.

Unfortunately, Bandcamp’s owners decided that having a sustainably profitable business wasn’t Enough for them and sold it to Epic Games a year ago, with the idea that it’d become a money-printing factory that does All The Licensing.

And that didn’t pan out, so a week ago Epic re-sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, which is basically an A&R pay-for-play scam with the trappings of respectability. Here’s a video Benn Jordan did on the topic (focusing on a site called Taxi but Songtradr is the same basic thing):

Now Songtradr is blocking the Bandcamp union from actually being, y'know, a union. They aren’t honoring the union terms, have locked workers out of critical systems, are completely ignoring the collective bargaining power of Bandcamp as a company and are doing all sorts of heinous shit.

However! This is not a time to boycott Bandcamp! All that does is make Bandcamp less valuable and gives Songtradr more sway over them, while disproportionately impacting the musicians who rely on it. Please look to see what the union is requesting in terms of support and solidarity. There’s a lot you can do to show your support.

Independent musicians thank you.

I have two major comic series that I’d like to get back to:

• Unity (no relation to the game engine): a long-form science fiction thing about an interstellar colony ship that’s lost its history, with the initial story being that of one of its scientists who has lost their history
• Lewi: a young dragon is finding herself caught between the worlds of science and spirituality (and there’s also something much bigger going on in the background)

So, these two series are very dear to my heart and both of them have been on hiatus for a while. I would like them to not be on hiatus.

Today I went to Bartell’s to pick up a prescription there for the last time. Because Rite-Aid bought them out a while ago, and after making things there worse and worse, they’ve decided to just shut down all the Bartell’s locations that are near Rite-Aids, which is most of them, and I suspect their next plan is to convert whichever ones remain into Rite-Aids as well.

Whenever I walk to a store here I just see all the boarded-up storefronts, half of them from places going out of business, half of them shut down because of crime. Lots of shops have been hit by repeat burglaries, or arson, or who knows what else.

A question keeps on coming up on Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general), namely trying to figure out what the overall age distribution of the userbase is.

However, every single poll that comes about ends up becoming quite contentious in ways that lead to a lot of conflict and drama, primarily due to the nature of how Mastodon polls work. The most common problem is that due to the limited number of options in polls, it is very difficult to make a poll that gives both range and precision. Commonly, the person attempting to run the poll will end up being attacked by people in an age bracket that feel disenfranchised by the specific poll splits, and there’s this… tunnel-vision hyperfocus that a lot of people get into where if they see an “other” or “X or [older|younger]” category, even if there’s a whole thread of polls that dig into splitting up those larger buckets, you get deluged with responses from those who are very angry about the lack of representation.

Attempting to run the poll on a more suitable polling platform (Surveymonkey, Google Forms, Straw Poll, etc.) always ends up with similar concerns, such as worries about privacy or an unwillingness to use the survey platform of choice for whatever technological hill people want to die on. And, again, users who feel put off by this make it their mission to let the perceived offender (and everyone around them) know.

I started out riffing on this with a couple of threads that were not meant to be taken seriously, and which I thought were obvious jokes, but, you know how the Internet can be. Anyway, my third poll (doing it as a median-seeking binary search) was also meant as a joke (which I intended to just be a one-off), but people actually responded to it fairly well. When I posted a followup in which I explained that it was a joke but asked if people wanted me to follow through with it, the overwhelming response was a resounding “yes.”

Clearly there is enough interest in trying to figure out some sort of statistical distribution for the age of Mastodon users (otherwise this wouldn’t keep on happening!), so, #MastoAge was born, for better or worse.

Got some things done today, figured I’d talk about them.

Last night I was having a massive pain flareup so I smoked huge amounts of cannabis. That made me feel somewhat better (if a bit silly) but it also meant I was extremely hung-over today and ended up having to cancel meeting up with Spud for a thing.

But, I got some basement reorganization done and hit a major milestone, and also listened to some great music while doing it.

I took some time off after my first big progress day to regroup, since I was having a bit of soreness and a pain flareup, and also didn’t really know what steps to take next. I did do a little bit in the interim but it wasn’t worth documenting.

Anyway I finally figured out which steps to take next, and I got a lot done today!

The air was clear enough™ today (AQI in the upper 80s, which is still no fun for me to be outside but that’s good enough for being in the basement) and I got goaded along by some folks on the Song Fight! discord to “just do it,” so I decided to start the process of reorganizing stuff.

In yet another conversation about AI art on Discord, someone mentioned that most sites have the #NoAI hashtag to indicate that something should be off-limits to an AI art bot.

So, I installed a stable diffusion GUI and decided to see what the various AI models would generate for a prompt of just “NoAI.”

I have a lot of project stuff that goes on in my basement. Unfortunately, my basement is extremely cluttered and disorganized, and I kind of hate being down there, which makes it so that I have a hard time actually doing anything creative down there either.

When I moved into my house two and a half years ago, I didn’t really have a plan for how to lay stuff out, and I just put stuff where it made sense as I unpacked it. Which means that there’s no real flow to things, and stuff tends to accumulate in piles, and things are just really badly disorganized.

So, yesterday I had my 6-month followup with the cardiologist regarding the heart-related stuff and got the usual litany of obnoxious hand-wringing around my labs (evne though they were now very out-of-date) and yet another lecture about lipids and triglycerides, which, yes, this is why I am seeing you. Meh.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that he did order new labs for me (which I have no issue with, of course, just with how he talked about ordering them), and this morning I figured I’d go get them done. And before doing them I figured I’d use my OTC blood glucose meter to get an idea of what to expect with the blood sugar results.

It came back with 296 mg/dL.

That is… high.

I’m still having some pretty bad anxiety while driving, but the choir has started up rehearsals again which gives me a reason to drive at least once a week. Last night I felt anxious on my way there but totally fine on the way back.

Anyway, today I finally made my way out to the Renton Uwajimaya, which I’d been wanting to go to for a while, mostly as a driving acclimation thing but also to get some ingredients that I haven’t found at any of the Asian groceries in White Center. Most of the drive, as it turns out, is the same as the drive to the church the choir’s rehearsals are at, which makes sense since Renton is just a bit further down Rainier Ave. And I was anxious but I made it just fine, and on my drive back I was anxious in a few spots but I made it just fine.

I think if I keep doing this stuff I’ll feel fine faster.

I got stuff done today! For example:

• Uploaded a new release of the VRChat critter avatar (which is still on sale for $10) which fixes a long-standing bug in an Easter egg that people keep on complaining about about 5 seconds after they learn about the Easter egg
• Finally replaced the AI cover art on my Novembeat 2022 album, on both Bandcamp and itch.io (sadly it’s a huge pain to replace it on Spotify/iTunes/etc. and totally not worth it)
• Uploaded a full album video of Novembeat 2022, mostly to make it easier to share on VRChat (I will probably do the same for other albums as well)
• Wrote a couple of long-winded posts on Cohost, namely:
  • Answering a question about my computing setup
  • Answering a question about VR stuff
• Also finally set up automatic crossposting from Cohost to Mastodon

Oh yeah also I’m getting fairly active on Cohost and my asks are open. It’s fun. Way nicer than Tumblr, anyway.

Back when Publ was brand-new I was using a fairly common ORM for managing my database. It was okay but I had some issues with how the project was being run, particularly in how the core maintainer treated bug reporters who were reporting things that he didn’t personally agree with.

So I switched to Pony ORM, which has a much nicer, more-Pythonic API, and whose maintainers are friendly and helpful. It’s missing a few important functions such as migrations but for Publ it doesn’t matter so much and they were always claiming that migrations were coming “real soon now” for a while.

Unfortunately, some changes in Python 3.11 broke Pony completely, and progress on getting it working again has been, well, slow.

Back when I switched to Pony I mused about just dropping SQL entirely and moving to a more primitive indexed data store, such as lmdb. But I really do not have it in me to completely redo all that stuff in Publ again, especially with all of the weird regressions that always occur due to subtle differences in locking behavior and so on.

Sometimes I think how now that I actually know how Publ should work I should rewrite it with better testability and a more actively-developed Markdown processor (because misaka has also been abandoned and is in permafreeze status), and if I’m going to do that, maybe I should use it as an excuse to finally learn Rust because honestly the Python ecosystem is kind of a mess right now.

I’ve put so much work into Publ but keeping the project going just feels so… difficult.

Or I mean I could switch to any number of existing site generators out there but then I’d be giving up all of the things that makes Publ unique (friends-only/access-controlled entries, variadic templates, top-notch template-driven image renditions, etc.).

This is one of those things where the decision would be a lot easier to make if people were actually helping to fund Publ development or if it had any actual, y'know, users.

Sometimes you need to be able to build and test an avatar from a different machine than what’s running VRChat. This can be a bit tricky. I finally figured out how to make the process less-awful.

Here are some of my collected notes on things that I’ve found helpful when it comes to building avatars for VRChat.

The intention is that this will be a living document that I add to as I learn more. This document is also currently a complete mess and will probably be split up into separate things at some point.

Ah yes, lots of frustrating stuff happening all at once, so much so that I’ve wrapped around to not caring about any of it.

I feel like I’m trapped in a gravity well and am having difficulty motivating myself to do anything at all. I’ve been sleeping way too much, and it isn’t actually helping with anything. I have a severe case of anhedonia when it comes to actually doing things I care about. I’m pretty much just hanging out at home with my cats and occasionally getting on VRChat and plinking away at the same trivial things I usually do, and I’m having trouble keeping up with my chores or my gardening. I’m barely getting out of the house except to go grocery shopping.

It sucks and I hate it.

I didn’t listen to much music over the last few days for a variety of reasons (and didn’t accumulate enough notes that felt worth posting) but today I am happy to report that I’m back on my shit. Not that the actual date/order of listening matters but as always you can corroborate the times on my last.fm profile if you really want.

Notables:

• “General Ed’s Naked Circus” by Helter Skipper and the Gilligan Mansons. It isn’t a particularly great album but it’s fun and I have it because I used to be friends with one of the members of the band, who I vibed with pretty well. Hearing the album again made me realize I hadn’t talked with him in ages, and I decided to track him down. I just hit a bunch of dead ends. If anyone happens to know what happened to a squirrel named “Fractal” from FurryMUCK, please let me know. I remember us sharing regrets that we never got together the first time that I lived in Seattle, and since then I’ve moved back to Seattle and I’ve been here for over a decade this time around and, oops, I really should have reconnected at some point.

  I did find a SoundCloud playlist from one of the members which lists the other members. I’m not sure which one is the real-life name of my online friend, although there’s two likely candidates. Unfortunately I can’t find current contact information for either of them (just a bunch of dead Facebook pages). Although the more likely of the two seems to still be active there. I should reach out.

• I don’t listen to Song Fight! as much as I should but this fight came up in my playlist and while most of the entries were pretty darn good, these entries stood out in particular:

  • Lily Plus Martin
  • Slither

  I mean there’s a bunch of consistently-great musicians who submitted for that one and the fight as a whole was pretty great! I’d have had a hard time narrowing down my votes on it if I’d actually listened at the time. But these entries were from folks I’m not so familiar with and they surprised me for various reasons.

• The album Here Be Dragons by Blue Nagoon wasn’t in my playlist but it was in a long-open browser tab (based on a recommendation from the person who runs Radio Free Fedi). I finally decided to consume it and, yeah, it’s pretty great! I’ve added the album to my Bandcamp Friday purchase queue.

• One of the first punk bands I got really into was Arrogant Sons of Bitches, when they were touring and happened to play a show in my town the same night a friend decided she needed to get me out of the house. Years later, the core members founded a new band, Bomb the Music Industry!, and when I learned about this I got all of their albums.

  Anyway, one of them finally came up in the playlist, and it was well worth the wait (and the download). It has all the same old ASOB energy while also being a nice scathing criticism of the modern music industry (especially performative counterculture) and also bringing in a variety of acoustic elements like synths that I don’t recall ASOB ever using.

  There’s also a great self-aware line in the second track, “I’ve been writing the same song […] over and over and over again,” in a song which sounds… pretty much exactly like half of the ASOB songs, frankly. It works.

• Alternative Facts by KXNG Crooked is a great missive on the political landscape of 2017, which still applies today. Somehow this track doesn’t seem to be on their Bandcamp as far as I can tell. Looks like it was actually released by a major label? Good for them.

• Tes Lacets sont des Fees by Dionysos is a fun little ditty. I don’t understand a word of it.

• “The Legend” by 5-3 Federation is a classic that is kinda uh. Maybe problematic? Also I think this was one of Lowtax’s musical projects? I’m finding no information about it. I am pretty sure I got it from Something Awful’s front page back in the day, but if there is a link between Lowtax and this track, literally nobody on the Internet has made that connection so it probably isn’t him.

• Vektroid is always great. I think this is the first time I heard Telnet Erotika, which apparently has been expanded and rereleased as Telnet Complete. Do I need to update my collection? Looks like yes. Another (potentially expensive) addition to the Bandcamp Friday queue. Man, I’m starting to see why people just subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music these days.

• Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds has a track called “The History of French Cuisine” which also doesn’t seem to be on bandcamp but it’s a great Frank Zappa-esque jammy thing.

• Whale Legs by Guts Club, from the Moderate Fildelity microlabel

Okay I think that’s enough for right now. Having a mental health shit at the moment

I got a late start on listening to music today since this morning I was having some stomach issues and didn’t want the extra sensory input, and then I had to take Tyler to the vet for his annual wellness exam and butthole grooming.

But after I got home from that I started listening to music again. Here’s things that are tickled my ears today:

• Ouch Those Monkeys was a really weird musician who posted a lot of music to somesongs back in the day, and then disappeared just as suddenly. I collected most of his(?) music at the time. I wish there were more information about him. As far as I can tell it’s completely disappeared from the Internet.
• Magic Arm - Move Out is great. No idea how I ended up with it. Anyway I bought way too much music yesterday so this band is going into my Bandcamp Friday queue.
• Wow I have a lot of crap in my library. The downside to being a packrat.
• Also I’m not sure how to feel about songs that make use of the N-word (as a reclaimed thing, sung/spoken by Black artists). Part of me is like “this music isn’t for me and I shouldn’t listen to it” but another part of me is like “why is this particular racial barrier a line I draw and not others?” I of course would never sing along to it, but I also don’t generally sing along to music in the first place. I’m definitely a lot quicker to skip songs based on the use of that word and I think that deserves some introspection.
• So that said, Die Later is a pretty good jam.
• Okay I probably should draw the line at white rappers using the N-word though.
• The only Gorillaz albums I have are “Gorillaz” and “Plastic Beach.” I should complete my collection. I definitely don’t want to fall down the Deep Lore rabbit hole though.
• Jeremy Blake’s Heartsing is pretty great and it’s also surprising that my deep-dive listening pulled up something so recently-released. I guess that’s just how probability works.
• Artemis' Gravity is just plain amazing. It gives me pretty strong Portishead mixed with Imogen Heap vibes.
• A couple of good Remixfight songs came up. I miss Remixfight. It was a short-lived spinoff of Song Fight!, where folks would all do a different remix of the same song that week. Most of the folks who were active there eventually moved over to ccMixter but I never really found that the ccMixter remix output was even remotely as high-quality, for a number of reasons. Unfortunately I can’t figure out the actual artist behind this song, or the original song, and neither thing is findable online, and remixfight is long gone, and the archive.org archive of it is weirdly broken in ways I’ve never seen happen on archive.org, but it seems to be entitled “Blue Ocean” originally by Colin Mutchler. The specific remix I liked was by Milo; for some reason the tags on the fight were also messed up so I only heard that one in isolation, whee. But anyway uh. Remixfight was great.
• Brain Fog by Nicky Flowers is also pretty great. It also has a video as it turns out.

I used to be a voracious consumer of music. I would listen to as much music as I could, in as many different genres, from as many different bands, as I could handle, for nearly every waking moment of every day. My music collection has over 53,000 songs with a total duration of over 130 days. My choices in listening devices and methodologies have always been informed by how I can enable myself to listen to as much variety as I could, without needing to actually choose what to listen to at any given time.

Music also helped me to focus what I was working on, and was possibly a big part of my self-medication regime for my ADHD and executive dysfunction. Having music playing made it so much easier for me to focus on what I was doing.

I also developed a peculiar habit: every time I came across a song I really liked, I’d buy the entire discography of the artist as a “surprise gift for my future self.” It’s a big part of why my music library is so big, and it’s given me a lot of delight from always having something new to listen to.

But yet, over the last few years I have barely listened to any music at all, aside from the stuff I’ve been working on myself. Most of my day has been full of silence, pretty much only listening to music when I drive — and I hardly ever drive. And the silence has been overwhelming, maddening, and is possibly a big part of why my brain’s been in vice grips as of late.

How did this happen?

One of the reasons that people buy an electric vehicle is to reduce their carbon footprint. Even if you live in an area where electricity is primarily generated by fossil fuel, the amount of emissions that come from generating electricity to power a vehicle is much lower than the equivalent emissions than you get from an internal combustion engine, due to things like carbon capture and the overall economy of scale that comes with power generation. And, of course, many areas are moving away from fossil fuels for power generation to begin with; electricity is fungible and with the increase in renewable sources such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric, electric vehicles' overall environmental footprint will improve along with the electrical grid.

So, of course, one of the more maddening trends in environmental policy of late is the purchasing of “carbon offsets” or “carbon credits,” where polluters spend money on things that will supposedly make up for their pollution. Many of these offsets are a total scam, where the offset is just buying into not making the environment worse (for example, by not bulldozing a forest that was already protected to begin with).

The intersection of these two things is that many of the electric vehicle companies (both manufacturers and charging networks) are selling carbon offsets — against the very same customers who are paying good money to do their part to reduce emissions in the first place. This negates the environmental benefit of electric vehicles, and most EV owners would probably like to know which companies are double-dipping in this way.

I’m still recombobulating my brain after the last few days of oxygen deprivation and extreme fatigue. Today was especially difficult for me. And a thing that really bothers me about it is that CHI Franciscan/Virginia Mason has posters everywhere proclaiming their philosophy of “humankindness.”

I don’t feel like “humankindness” was on display when they kept on shuffling me around between waiting rooms and when they were dismissive about every issue I was having. Or when they were trying to just blame it all on my asthma and ignore the acute, severe respiratory distress I was in. And I was having difficulty speaking because of the severe pain in my throat and lungs and the constant need to cough which I couldn’t do, and that just made people get frustrated at me for not speaking loudly or clearly.

And when they did finally give me a COVID test, after hours of waiting, and they just unceremoniously shoved it up my nose and got angry at me when I had discomfort from this, and at that point I had an emotional breakdown and just started crying, and there was absolutely no sympathy or comfort shown to me.

I was treated like a burden, not like a patient or a human being.

So on the plus side, I don’t have COVID. On the minus side I’ll be getting a rather large medical bill for an extremely unhelpful hospital visit.

Recordings from last weekend’s Pride concert!

Oh man I am so overjoyed with how our choir shows went! Holy fuck, joining this choir was probably the best decision I’ve made in a long time. Every show we’ve done has been wonderful and the people are so great and I love spending time with everyone. It’s great being surrounded by fellow ADHD transgender/nonbinary weirdos who all have music in common but so many disparate experiences and ideas and just like, oh god so much talent from everyone.

We’re between seasons now and it’ll feel weird not having rehearsals every Wednesday evening for the next couple months, but there’s a lot of talk about doing plenty of social gatherings in the interim and I’m very much looking forward to that.

I’m still alive, I guess.

There’s been a lot of discussion about a puff piece by Marc Andreessen (formerly of Netscape fame, now of being-yet-another-also-ran-tech-billionaire-who-is-into-the-self-aggrandizing-fad-of-the-moment fame) talking about how AI will save the world.

I am not going to link to it (it’s easy enough to find anyway) but I just bothered to read it and oh my god the privilege and blinders are so obvious.

My impressions on the hardware, for what it’s worth:

• Really cool tech
• Kind of a solution in search of a problem
• I look forward to seeing what people do with it
• I look forward to it becoming affordable and usable for a lot more than just running fancy versions of iOS apps
• I will be way more interested if they let you apply filters to the external screen; why show a video feed of your boring human eyes when you can be your fursona or a protogen?

This past weekend was Furality, which was a pretty darn good time in general. I found it pretty enjoyable and I’ll definitely be doing it again. I figure I’ll share some random undirected thoughts about it.

A commonly-desired feature for a VRChat avatar is the ability to switch materials, so as to change color schemes and the like. This requires a nontrivial amount of setup, and with the standard approach it is difficult to maintain cross-platform compatibility. As a result, creators will usually only set it up on PC, leaving Quest users unable to see these customizations.

Here is my approach to setting up material switching in a way that’s easier to support on multiple platforms simultaneously. This particular method is what I developed for my critter avatar.

I’d been getting really annoyed with my kinda-fragile website templates and some of the accumulated cruft, as well as a bunch of things that were difficult, UX-wise, so I redesigned my site. How do you like it?

For the last few months I’ve been feeling restless to be doing not-much throughout the day, so I’ve been actively looking for a job. No bites have been occurring. So instead I’ve been working hard on new projects, like the VRChat avatar stuff and also redesigning my website (which I’m close to being able to roll out, incidentally).

But then it turns out that doing work makes my chronic pain flare up again, and now I’m in agony again.

So, I guess I need to find something that makes me feel satisfied with my day (and ideally brings in some amount of income) without being something that my body just absolutely rejects. But what could that possibly be? The stuff I’m good at and the stuff I enjoy doing is stuff that physically hurts to do.

This is a very simple guide to using Blender to work on the critter base mesh. It’s not a tutorial for using Blender itself. For more general references on using Blender and modeling, please see my avatar creator resources.

So you’ve adopted and/or become a critter and want to fulfill the obligation of being as many colors and patterns and materials as you can imagine. You have made an excellent choice! Here is how I do that stuff, myself. There might be better ways of doing it (there’s definitely a lot of things which feel like they could be automated, at the very least). If you find any improvements to this semi-annoying process, please let me know!

Please consult this document if you would like to set up a Unity project for uploading your own instance of the critter avatar.

Every time I get hyperfixated on a thing, I end up doing it at the expense of all else. Right now my hyperfocus is on working on making a sellable version of my VRChat avatar (which is almost ready!)

But I needed a break, so I checked my feed reader, and realized, oh wow, I haven’t checked my feed reader in a few days. Oops.

So anyway, I did what any good nerd would do, and gave myself some alerting and monitoring to track my feed stats.

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.)

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.

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):

• 8 signed in via Fediverse (Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.)
• 4 signed in via IndieAuth
• 7 signed in via email

Not a single one signed in via Twitter.

So here’s what’s going on with my heart stuff.

I haven’t felt like blogging lately, but here’s some updates.

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.

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

Over the last week I’ve been getting a solar generation system installed on my roof. Today it finally became operational.

The system itself was designed and installed by Sun Path Electric, which were amazing to work with. I’d gone through the bid process with a few companies (including a fairly shady one that was advertising on YouTube) and Sun Path definitely gave me the best configuration and price, as well as the highest confidence in their ability to execute correctly.

I am in chronic pain. I have always been in some amount of pain. It’s become increasingly unbearable over the past 25 years. It’s not just all in my head.

I have always been overweight. I have always had high cholesterol. I have always had high triglycerides. No amount of chiding me about “diet” and “exercise” will change that. I am not lying to you about my dietary habits. I am not constantly shoveling down huge quantities of fast food. I exercise when I can, as much as I can. I mostly cook for myself, and I cook healthy foods.

The thing I eat the most of is salad!

There is probably a link between high triglycerides and fibromyalgia. There is a lot of evidence supporting that. But correlation is not causation. Given my lifestyle and dietary habits it seems unlikely that it’s the triglycerides causing the fibromyalgia. It’s probably the other way around, or there’s a common cause to both that has not yet been identified.

Treating me like a FUCKING CHILD WHO DOESN’T KNOW MY OWN BODY isn’t how to get me to feel better. Instead of just assuming that I don’t understand nutrition and don’t understand exercise and that I’m eating too much and drinking and smoking all the time, maybe. FUCKING. just FUCKING. LISTEN to me.

I promise that I am not lying about these things. I want to get better. It’s why I’m fucking coming to you.

While we’re at it, yes, I have sleep apnea of some sort, but three sleep studies have had conflicting results and either way, CPAP wasn’t helpful, and my most recent sleep study did not support the ongoing use of it. It wasn’t my choice to stop using it, it was AN ACTUAL FUCKING SLEEP DOCTOR who told me to stop using it and who stopped authorizing the refresh of the equipment. Which, you know. Requires a prescription. From a doctor. And I monitor my oxygen and heart rate most nights, and the metrics show that any breathing pauses are brief. And no I don’t want to be having them either! But chiding me for not using a CPAP that I’m not authorized to have isn’t. FUCKING. Helpful.

(And even if I did have obstructive apnea, most signs point to obstructive apnea causing weight gain, not the other way around.)

I am well aware that my lab results are troublesome. I am doing what I can. Don’t infantilize me and assume that I don’t understand that High Numbers Are Bad.

And yes I’ve tried statins and they just make me unable to move at all because of excruciating pain, and the same thing happened with fenofibrate. I’d be taking them if I could! I actually do want to get better! I am not making excuses! I am not being stubborn! It’s not like I have some sort of secret hatred of being on medication. Some people have a weird sense of pride about not taking meds, about seeing them as a failure. I don’t.

Today I had a followup appointment with the cardiologist following the incident. He said that most of the lab results from the ER were good, but there’s a slight concern from my EKG, and of course he’s concerned about my high cholesterol and triglycerides (as well as borderline A1C), as well as with my family history.

For diagnostics, he’s having me do a treadmill stress test in a couple weeks, and also get an echocardiogram to measure the thing the EKG indicated as a potential issue.

For cholesterol and triglycerides, I told him about my history with statins and fenofibrate causing massive systemic pain problems and muscle failure symptoms, so he’s putting me on Repatha, which is a rather interesting treatment option that involves a biweekly injection of monoclonal antibodies, and which shouldn’t have any bad health effects.

When I first started on my home espresso journey, I had an ancient hand-me-down Krups¹, but it made awful coffee². I donated that to a charity shop, as I thought my Aeropress³ and its “espresso-style coffee” was sufficient. Then I added a Fellow Prismo to the mix to add a bit more pressure (and cleanliness), but this still wasn’t espresso. Then my eye got caught by the Flair Classic, which was much better at making espresso but also much fussier. So I started investigating a bunch of home espresso machines, and I decided I wanted the Breville Bambino Plus… but it was pretty much impossible to buy.

After trying to buy it from a few different places, and trying to order a few other machines, I eventually settled on the Gaggia Classic Pro, which I used fairly happily for about a year and a half.

But there were still a bunch of things I didn’t like about it, such as the lack of preinfusion, a difficult-to-use steam wand, and a water tank design that made it way too easy for fruit flies to reenact Hotel California⁴. So, last November, when the Bambino went on a pretty deep (20%) discount for Black Friday (and when I was already spending large amounts of money getting my kitchen remodeled anyway), I decided to take the plunge and get the machine I’d wanted in the first place.

Right now I seem to be in a situation where my brain is fired up about a whole bunch of different things, and I’m trying to figure out how to get myself actually working on any of it in a nontrivial capacity.

First, I was inspired to rewrite/flesh out the next little chunk of Lewi, and I’d like to get to drawing it.

Second, yesterday I had a great idea for a pair of VRChat avatars, which I have a lot of fun ideas for how to do them (especially with how the facial animation systems are going to work).

A while ago I rambled about an idea, and yesterday Jeremy Blake posted a video that tangentially rekindled my need to ramble about it.

Once upon a time I used to be hyperproductive. I’d spend 8 or more hours a day writing code, then I’d go home and draw comics for hours, and then on the weekends I’d write and record music. I’d have pain symptoms as part of it but that just felt like a badge of honor, and that it’d all be worth it someday.

Now I can’t hold down a job at all, I can barely focus on any of those things, and even holding a pencil to start drawing just feels like too much. I have so many ideas in my head and so much shit I want to be doing with my time, but every time I start to work on anything it just hurts too much.

Anyway, I figured I’d talk about a bunch of the stuff I wish I could be working on right now.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Discourse, especially on Tumblr and Cohost, about how awful webp is and how nobody should ever, ever use it.

You know what other file format I’ve seen this about?

PNG.

Yes, PNG, the beloved format that everyone can’t live without now and which is a constant “standard.” Which only came into existence after the web was a thing, and getting web stuff to support it was hard.

I’m a pretty unabashed fan of battery electric vehicles.

Well, I am slightly abashed in the fact that I feel like it’d be much better if mass transit were more accessible in more places, and even the most efficient BEV still has some pretty severe ecological issues associated with them (lithium refinement, impact of manufacturing the vehicle itself, parking space, road space, externalities of power production, etc.), but as a form of harm reduction in the society that we are stuck in within the vast majority of the continental US, they’re still way better than internal combustion engine cars, for those whose lifestyles require a car and can accommodate the (vanishing) limitations of a BEV. Even in areas where most electricity is generated by fossil fuels, the environmental impact of charging a BEV (with emissions generated in a centralized location) is much lower than the impact of carrying a little inefficient fossil fuel combustion source everywhere you go.

So, BEVs are an improvement. The thing is, the state of BEVs is pretty abysmal in general, at least in North America. In other parts of the world there’s some pretty compelling vehicles available (such as the MG4) but the US auto market is currently emphasizing large “crossover SUVs” and pickup trucks, and combined with the fascination of maximizing the car’s range, most BEVs coming out here are forced into a situation of having a gigantic battery, raising the overall vehicle price, and therefore meaning that every electric vehicle ends up being some ultra high-end luxury car.

Update (1/16/2023): Added some stuff about the Hyundai/Kia duality that I’d missed previously. Also a change of opinion on the EV6.

Update (3/31/2023): Chevrolet is making a very bad decision

For the last few days I’ve been feeling anxious and having an elevated heart rate. That’s not just subjective, that’s what my heckin' Apple Watch has recorded. I keep on waking up in the middle of the night with a pounding heart, too. It’s hard to tell if it’s anxiety raising my heart rate or the other way around, but either way, something’s got to change.

The last few months I’ve been particularly sedentary due to a bunch of things (mostly chronic pain but also generally just feeling Meh and not wanting to do anything) and time has been slipping away from me very quickly.