[Current Mood | creative ]

[Listening To | entertainment news ]

IT’S WEDNESDAY, EVERYONE. We’re up, and the sun is out. The cats are enjoying their time basking in the sunshine coming in through the back door. Let them have it while it lasts.

Yesterday was another busy day for us (mainly Shawshank). His mom walked over to our place around lunchtime, and we drove out to BiggerTown. Shawshank and his mom dealt with some banking stuff, and I walked down the street to visit the secondhand shop. I snagged an original “Fame” bodysuit. After trying it on, I’m pretty sure it’s part of a Halloween costume. It looks positively ridiculous, but it’s also perfectly shaped to use as a pattern for something else. I also snagged some embroidery floss, and a deck of cards labelled TABOO SHOW, but were just regular, non-taboo cards. When he was done at the bank, Shawshank came and got me. We met up with his mom in the dollar store, went to lunch, then drove home. We also visited the secondhand shop here in TinyTown, and left empty handed.

Since it was a really nice afternoon, I spent a lot of time in the backyard, playing with the diabolo Shawshank bought me. Anyone who went to school in the 80’s and 90’s had a yo-yo guy assembly at some point. When I was about 14, we had some yo-yo/juggling dude visit one of my music classes. I’m pretty sure this was my last yo-yo guy, but he was the only one who had devil sticks and a diabolo, both of which absolutely fascinated me. A few years later, I randomly found a diabolo in a toy shop, and had a blast with it (for about a year or so). It took a while to get back into the groove of it, but I managed to get to a point where I can consistently get it moving in the string.

The two of us are back to work today. I took another hour last night to re-work the control panel, so now I have two free buttons. Shawshank has suggested mapping one as a dedicated fart noise, but they’ll stay empty for a little while. Let me memorize where the three important buttons are before I add sound effects.

[Current Mood | okay ]

Hey, you up? It’s Tuesday morning, and we’re having coffee. The cats are stationed at their posts, monitoring the bird situation.

Yesterday was good, if busy. Shawshank worked in the morning, texted when he left work, and picked me up at the house. We put the sun at our backs and headed out to the bustling metropolis of Slightly BiggerTown. We visited the pharmacy – I HAVE RED DYE AGAIN! – then crossed the street to look in the thrift shop. Halloween costumes were on sale, and I snagged a Raggedy Ann dress that I’ll probably use as a generic clown dress. We were adults and bought groceries, weed, and lunch, then headed home. After a quick stop at Shawshank‘s work to drop off a toolbox and pick up a package, we were back at the house. We ate a very late lunch/early dinner, and relaxed.

Shawshank played Tropico for a bit. I spent an hour or so setting up a gift he’d gotten me: a li’l macro keyboard to assist me during streams. I have a number of graphics I throw up on screen at various times, depending on what’s happening in my stream. When the time is right, I hit a programmed hotkey, and OBS adds a graphic. It’s absolutely amazing. Before this, I only had three fancy hotkeys set up, one for each graphic. I added three more to the mix: one to switch to my BRB screen, one to switch to my regular screen, and an EMERGENCY MUTE macro to kill my mic when I’m having a coughing fit. I might tweak the hotkey bindings and the lights a little bit before tomorrow’s stream, but they’re working just fine.

Today is going to be busy as well. We’re going out to BiggerTown with Shawshank‘s mom to deal with some banking things. I’m going to pay a visit to another town’s thrift shop.

[Current Mood | okay ]

[Listening To | tv ]

Good morning, world. The new week has started, and I’m up and on the couch once again. I heard/felt Shawshank get out of bed before the sun was up, went back to sleep, then felt him climb up to kiss me goodbye before he left for work. Podrick made sure to check on me several times after Shawshank was gone. Even Pippin got into it, and cuddled with me for a couple of minutes.

We worked our butts off yesterday. Shawshank made lunch for us, then we headed across town to Shady Acres to clear some shit out. We made a lot of progress in the basement. His parents have the same problem I had when I was cleaning the house in Rhode Island: forgotten totes that were packed in one city, moved, and never unpacked. In a lot of cases, it’s unclear which city things were originally packed in. Every time we find something – another piece of tech, another collectible jacket – his mother gets angrier. We were already in the basement when she got over yesterday.

“We’re downstairs! We found more knives!” Shawshank yelled up to her.

“Oh, what the fuck“, she replied, exasperated.

Some of the knives were from Shawshank‘s younger mallninja days. He took a couple that were meaningful to him. I grabbed two tins of playing cards and a hockey jersey. Later, one of my father-in-law’s friends met up with Shawshank in the Shady Acres garage, to get first dibs on tools and a truck (also full of tools). He poked through things, made Shawshank an offer on some stuff, promised to think about the truck, and shook on things. He took some stuff right then, and will have an answer about the truck when he pays and gets the rest a little later.

Shawshank is working this morning, and we’re going out to Slightly BiggerTown for groceries when he is off. I’m desperate for hair dye that’s not blue.

[Current Mood | unbothered era ]

[Listening To | Shawshank playing Tropico 6 ]

Hello, world. It’s another morning, and we’re up. Podrick did things that woke up Shawshank. It wasn’t a bad night, otherwise. I woke up a few times, but that’s normal. I’m not dying overnight, so I’ll accept the random moments of consciousness, or a cat paw to the neck.

Last night’s Chaturbate stream went ok, better than the rest of the week, to be honest. For the most part, my chat wasn’t completely dead. I had a couple of good tippers in my room, and made a little money.

A year ago, if you asked what I was doing thinking I could stream, I might’ve said “I’m just another bored milf in her bedroom”. Mommy domming was definitely not something on my 2026 bingo card. Or any bingo card, for that matter. I’m having a fucking blast. Lately, it seems like I have about one person a week who will say, you’re really enjoying this, aren’t you? Dude, you have no idea.

We’re going over to Shady Acres today to do some sorting, then dinner at the wee flat later tonight. Most of the big house has been emptied at this point, Shawshank‘s mom has moved almost all of her things over to the new place by now. Today we’re dealing with his dad’s clothes and maybe some tools.

[Current Mood | accomplished ]

The front yard is full of sparrows, and Podrick is watching them with great interest. We also woke up to sunshine again, and the forecast says today should be very nice. I let Shawshank sleep.

Last night’s shift wasn’t awful, but definitely could’ve been better. I’ve gotten used to my new setup, with my slightly repositioned “desk”. In an effort to focus more on looking into the camera more, I added one more little tweak to things: rearranging the program windows. Usually, the screen is split between the Chaturbate chat (left) and OBS (right), and my cell is hovering a bit over the top of the screen (upper left). Yesterday, I swapped the windows so OBS is right under the camera because I’ve realized that it looks a little more natural to flick my eyes down to look at OBS rather than over to the side. I’m still adjusting to it, but it’s only been a day. I’m going to tweak the position of the cam itself today, and see if I can get it to look good. If I ever start making enough, I want to upgrade to an OBSBot cam, which will have some zoom options (on top of being a better overall camera)¹.

When I logged out, I did the one last thing I wanted to do with this new spreadsheet tracker, which was to deal with generating the graphs. With the info the API-slurpers are sucking in, I can generate a timeline of events in chat (follows/unfollows, room title changes, tips, etc). Last night, I added graphs that plot viewers and rank over the course of my stream. In its current form, I can click on any point on the graph and see a list of events that happened “around” that point, from 15 minutes before to 5 minutes after that point. Even though I only have about four days of “full” info, I was able to see two hashtags that definitely weren’t doing me any favors. Every time the graph plummeted, I could see exactly what hashtags were being used in my room’s title. I took two of them out, and we’ll see whether my graphs start to smooth out a bit.

Today is the last shift of the week for both of us, then we get a day off. I have the curlers heating up, and I’ll get on the bean in the afternoon, after I’ve smoked up a personality.

1. Or, hear me out, I could just flip the phone around and use the back camera. ↩︎