[Current Mood | drained ]

Good morning, y’all. The sunshine is gone, and TinyTown is covered in clouds once again. Pippin quietly popped up onto the bed, walking across me before curling up between me and the edge of my pillow nest. She dozed while I watched TikToks, and we stayed like that for about 45 minutes. Podrick jumped onto the bed, and I braced for a kerfluffle. In a 180° change from his normal behavior, he completely ignored Pippin, and stomped right onto my chest for his morning cuddle.

We spent some of the day moving Shawshank‘s mom from Shady Acres to the new place across the street. The new place is about 25% of the space of Shady Acres. She’s in that stage of packing/moving where she still wants to keep as much as she can. It won’t physically fit in the apartment without it looking like a packed storage unit. Shawshank and I were talking about the prospect of moving his dad’s recliner – down the stairs, down the drive, into the back of a pickup, then reversing the process on the other side of town. He gently suggested to his mom that maybe we move that chair last, let’s get her things in the house and set up first. A little while later, she made a comment to the same effect: she’ll leave some space in the new living room for it, but isn’t worried about moving the chair yet. We left her to set up her bedroom and came home at lunchtime. Shawshank took a hot shower and played Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 for the rest of the afternoon. I took a hot bath after dinner, then we relaxed on the couch for a movie.

We have today off as well, but we’re going to Slightly BiggerTown for supplies. It’ll be a relaxing day.

[Current Mood | okay ]

[Listening To | hostile acts, oh no! ]

Mornin’, y’all. It’s Thursday and it’s sunny. Shawshank is on coffee and crow duty, keeping our mugs full and the birds fed. Podrick is watching for the crow army’s arrival. Pippin has been in the bedroom, enjoying the silence and a solo breakfast.

The last shift of our “week” went fine. I logged the heated mattress pad out of the closet and put it on the bean, then covered it all with the regular “bean blanket”. It wasn’t a bad shift, with a lot of freeloading regulars who talk enough for me to keep the room going. I took a break in the middle to make myself some lunch.

Broke Man #292901293:  do you like reading erotica?

“Yes”, I replied, using the same sweet voice I use all night. “I exclusively read erotic WWE fanfic.”

This man is in my room to goon nightly, y’all. Nightly. He is desperate for me to read his writings.

Today is the start of our weekend. We’re going to start moving Shawshank‘s mom into the new place today. We’ve lucked out, and all the crappy weather we’ve had this week has moved on. I’m going to have to wear real pants.

[Current Mood | creative ]

[Listening To | not Ed Sheeran, that's for sure ]

Good morning, world. Yesterday’s sun is gone and it’s another gray morning. Shawshank took down the blackout curtains and the window screen, eliminating Podrick‘s bedroom hyperfixation, so we had a relatively tame/quiet morning. Our crows are out in the yard, cawwing and pecking at their wheatypuffs and whatever kitty-kibble they didn’t eat up yesterday.

With the blackout shades removed and the window open to the light, I’m back to streaming in the glorious natural light of the bedroom. I was somewhat worried I would need to do a lot of fucking about with my lighting before I was happy, but things worked out fabulously. I actually stumbled on some old stream highlights just the other day, from just before we put up the blackout curtains in May. Some were from before I had my curtain backdrop, some were from after, but they all looked great. While I absolutely love my RGB sunset/aurora combo, I’m being honest when I say that they do give my stream a very “studio” look, and I’ve wondered more than once if that was hurting my ranking.

It’s too soon to draw any conclusions, so I won’t. Yesterday was just one day. Traffic was good, I dare say better than normal, and I made enough for a Wendy’s combo meal, but I won’t be out there proclaiming “NATURAL LIGHT IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS!” just yet. I was actually annoyed I didn’t stay online longer. I logged out for dinner, ate, then tried to fix my false lashes before I logged back in, which promptly fucked up everything. Annoyed and looking like a tweaker, I cleared up my set, and dealt with some Fansly stuff.

I’ve been ignoring the Fansly for a year now. Camming gives me more money for less effort. I’ve been meaning to raise my subscription prices for a while now, and decided now was the time to do it, while I only have 1 subscriber. Considering how much content I have uploaded – not including Chaturbate highlights – subcribers were getting a fan-fucking-tastic deal on my top level “all access” tier. I added a new subscription tier for the highlights, which will be the new entry level tier, and jacked up the prices on everything else. I’m still not convinced I’m charging enough for my top level tier.

One more night of work, and then we’re off for a couple of days. Tomorrow, we’re helping Shawshank‘s mom start to move house; his parents are downsizing and Shady Acres is moving– directly across the street from us.

[Current Mood | perimenopausal ]

[Listening To | Senate judiciary committee bullshit ]

It’s fucking Tuesday, y’all. And it’s raining. It’s another ✨lovely✨ day and I’m filled with ✨gratitude✨.

My Monday shift wasn’t bad at all, and I managed to comfortably go 4+ hours. I took a little break after an hour, then a longer one an hour and a half later. I made myself some mac and cheese for dinner, enjoying it on the couch while I caught up on Reddit and Discord. Thirty minutes later, I was back online albeit on a slightly weaker connection, for another hour and change.

I had a lot of traffic, and my room’s ranking wasn’t awful the entire night. I didn’t make a lot, but I had a good go at things. I’m trying to make an effort to stay on longer, which will be especially helpful because I won’t be able to work much next week. I had a bunch of repeat visitors last night, which I find crazy. I’m not super-interesting, but these guys love me and my voice. I figured out the base of my mic unscrews, meaning I can buy an adjustable arm for it rather than a whole new mic setup. That will probably my next upgrade.

I put the bedroom back together, then uploaded highlights to Fansly. My Fansly account has become simply a respository of 59s clips of me telling people to stroke for me. I’m not really uploading pics or any other content lately. The work I was willing to put into things was not worth the money I was making for it, mostly boiling down to hating the nonstop grind to promote myself. My next big project will be revamping my tier structure. I have nearly 4 years of content, and it would be incredibly time consuming to edit all of that content to reflect new permissions for everything. However, I can set member limits on the tiers. I’ll probably set up one of two new tires – at higher prices this time. Then I’ll edit the older tiers so people can’t sign up for them, but the content from those tiers will be available in the newer tiers.

Back to the grind today. We have two more shifts before we have a couple of days off.

[Current Mood | frustrated ]

Good morning, world. It’s a chilly and wet morning outside in TinyTown, and I heard the heat kick on this morning.

It wasn’t a great morning. I don’t know exactly what happened, or what time it all went down, but I woke up to a scraping noise and Shawshank shouting. From what I can put together, the scraping noise was my phone sliding between the wall and the bed, which startled Podrick. Pod flew up and came down on Shawshank‘s ribs. Unable to find my phone in bed, unwilling to get up and look for it in the dark, I laid in bed and hoped I could sleep. I didn’t. I rawdogged the morning.

This morning is just the latest bullshit to come out of a ✨wonderful✨ 24 hours. I streamed on TikTok, which wasn’t bad, then I set up the bedroom for Chaturbate. Ready and dressed, I booted up the Dell, then OBS. Immediately, the entire laptop ground to a halt. The video preview was lagging and choppy, and OBS looked to be hogging about 25% of the CPU. I closed and restarted OBS, with the same result. I knew the next step was rebooting the system, noticed that Windows wanted an update as well, and decided to kill two birds with one stone. The update was awful, ominously warning me not to shut off the system while sitting at about 7% for a scarily long time. Then it shut off (on its own). Then it turned back on, continued the update from 7%, only to hang up at 30% for a while. After 45 minutes, the update was finished, but shit was still fucky, even after a couple of extra reboots. Something is hogging everything, OBS is jacked, and on top of that, Windows stepped up its vendetta against Chrome, wiping all of my logins and settings.

Pissed off, holding back angry tears, I pulled off my fake lashes and put my pants back on, resigned to the fact I wouldn’t be working because I needed to figure this shit out. I coiled the cables and started putting away my stuff, giving the Dell one last reboot for good measure.

That son of a bitch booted up and was completely normal, like nothing happened at all.¹

I finished putting everything away and went out into the living room to angrily play “Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance” until just before Shawshank came home.

Today will be better.

1. except, of course, having to fix everything in Chrome, which is ongoing. ↩︎