[Current Mood | sleepy ]

[Listening To | morning news, cat things ]

Hello, world. It’s almost Friday… but not quite. Although the sun is making a token effort to be seen, there’s really nothing but gray skies out there today. I had an abysmal sleep last night, which isn’t all that unusual, but it was shit right from the start, which is. It took longer than usual to fall asleep, then I was suddenly AWAKE. I reset what I had playing, and managed to go back to sleep. I feel like my body fought me the entire night, and I gave up the fight around 5:30am.

My Wednesday was pretty slow. I logged into Chaturbate and stuck around for a full “shift”. I used my cell data for the first half, took a break, then used the ethernet for the rest of the night. I’m still messing with my OBS settings to give me ok quality, but not blow through the 50-100gb of data we get per cycle. I sucked up about 5gb in a bit over two hours last night. Not the best…. but it was better than my first stream, which used at least double that. The second half of the stream was used the ethernet. Regardless of the connection, it’s still pretty boring until I’ve been sitting there for at least 90 minutes.

Still basking in the nostalgia of my new LiveJournal-based theme, I was juuuuust high enough during last night’s stream to consider making the video feed look exactly like my old webcams did. I’m talking text bars on the top and bottom with timestamps, URLs, and witty bullshit better fit for our AIM away status. I could really lean into the retro-net vibe with the sputtering stream.

I expect today will be another day. Shawshank went out and picked up my Temu package, so I have a new light to mess with on stream, and a screen protector to install on my phone.

[Current Mood | nostalgic ]

[Listening To | something on Winamp ]

Good morning, world, and happy Hump Day to y’all. Shit’s looking mid out there today. The skies are grey, and Podrick has been up to Podrick things this morning.

Yesterday, I was so lazy that I can’t think of a single thing I did. My Temu order didn’t make it in, but we went to the secondhand shop and Shawshank found a small box with a stash of embroidery thread.

Shawshank made himself a new header image for his page. He wanted a dark theme, so I handed him the Chromebook, showed him how to tweak his blog’s theme, and grabbed the Dell to look at the theme respository for my own inspiration. I looked at WordPress themes that I might be able to bend to my will, and decided I hate all of them. Everything is so bloated now. I miss the simple shit, just header, content, footer with a witty copyright notice. A sidebar if you had some webrings to link to. A visitor counter. I fired up the Wayback Machine, and found the earliest version of my blog I could: Livejournal.

Instead of fighting an existing theme, I went back to the basics and did it in a text editor, like the good Lord intended. There’s still some kinks to work out; single post pages are borked for the moment, but I’ll figure that out this morning.

Shawshank suggested taking the vibe past LJ and all the way back to Geocities, and adding an uncontrollable, automatically playing MIDI to it.

“It needs to be Meat Loaf’s I’ll Do Anything For Love“, I replied. “And I also need the page to have an alert pop up that says I AM VERY VERY WEIRD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED”

I need to take shit FULL LJ and add the current mood/current music for each post.

Good morning, world. Happy Tuesday. You wanna know why it’s happy? It didn’t fucking snow overnight. I was up a little earlier, but dozed for a bit. I mostly laid there semi-awake, eventually checking out Reddit, until I decided Podrick’s good behavior wouldn’t last forever and I should feed him.

We had a nice Monday. We watched some news in the morning, and Shawshank made brunch for us. I made some perfect French toast. I was just starting to get tired of listening to background news when they broke in to talk about yet another mass shooting, so we had new news to watch.

Eventually, we put on some cowboy shit. I grabbed my needlework and worked on that for the rest of the day. I’d put it at about 40% complete right now. I’m trying very hard to keep it with all one “style” of stitching, but my technique improves and my stitches get better. The stuff from the beginning looks bad (to me) in comparison to what I’ve been doing.

Shawshank has today off- a rare, double-barrel day off. I have a Temu order coming in, and we’re going out to the secondhand shop to find treasures. The cats will sit in the window and enjoy the sunshine.

Morning. The blackout curtains have paid for themselves at this point, with two long dozes this week. While I may not be in a deep, nourishing sleep, Podrick isn’t as interested in the windows, and I’m not fighting to keep him off the screen. Unfortunately, it’s another morning of snow.

I got online for a whole 40 minutes yesterday. I wasn’t feeling it at all, and I had to convince myself to get through the setup and start the stream. Just half an hour, I told myself. Instead, I pushed myself to sit there for 40 minutes. Traffic was dead, and my mood wasn’t helping keep my room’s vibe inviting. I put the room back and played some “Civ” until that bored me.¹

Shawshank made us delicious burgers for dinner. We spent the rest of the evening watching “ER” and “Grey’s Anatomy“.

He has the next two days off. Today is the chore day, there’s laundry already in the washer. How much more of this needlework can I do in two days?

1. Everyone started buying my iron, but no one wanted my delegations. I figured they were plotting against me. ↩︎

It’s snowing. You know it’s not good when you’re laying in bed, stretching, hearing the sound of the curtains being opened, immediately followed by “oh what the fuck“. Podrick thinks this is all very interesting. Pippin is screaming in the kitchen. I drink more coffee.

We had a nice Saturday. Shawshank opened the store, and I assumed a human form. A car and motorcycle pulled up in front of the house while I was putting on my makeup, answering any questions about when we might get new neighbors.

We haven’t met anyone yet. I’m pretty damned sure that I saw two women driving/riding and unloading that trunk into the apartment. Shawshank saw a dude with a beard and his arm in a sling– he might’ve come along later but he was not in one of the group who first showed up. They parked the bike on their patio, but no one stayed the night.

Shawshank came and picked me up after work, and we drove out to Slightly BiggerTown. The snow was long gone by that point, and the roads were pretty empty. We saw the usual cows, one pasture full of horses, and a young moose crossing the road. The grocery store was crowded, but we also don’t normally shop in the afternoons. As usual, the last stop was for sandwiches, then we headed home to eat.

When we finally crashed on the couch, I played a little bit of Civ. I like messing with the settings, creating new games with the different map types. I hate the World Congress bullshit, so I tried to play without the expansion packs. Unfortunately, doing so disabled a lot of the other stuff I actually do like to take advantage of, like the governors. I just wanna build a city, y’all. I don’t need to go to war.

Shawshank is working today. I’m going to assume my human form and go online for a couple of hours. This will be the first time streaming with the blackout curtains in play, and I expect I’ll have to fuck around with my lighting.