So there’s a thing happening this morning, some big to-do, and that’s why I’m up early. It’s EARLY WITH A PURPOSE. Yes, yes, let’s all get up early and watch an old man get awarded a ceremonial hat.
Yesterday, in terms of crafting, I rode the strugglebus all day. I was determined to make a pair of pants. I laid the sheet out on the floor and cut a big square.
Unfortunately, I didn’t need a square. After an hour of trying to figure out why I couldn’t fold it into the shape I needed it to be, I went back and read the directions again. And oh yes, I needed a rectangle. I trimmed the fabric, and tried again. More struggling to get the fold right, and another round of cutting. Two hours after Shawshank left the house, I texted him to brag I’d finally finished pinning shit. I celebrated with a bubble bath.
I spent literally 15 minutes trying to figure out how to change the stitch pattern on the machine. He came home for lunch while I was sewing the leg seams. I had only figured out the stitch about 5 minutes before he came through the door, but gleefully showed him how pretty the stitch was. The elastic went in after dinner, and now I have new genie pants.
Shawshank joked I could eventually replace all my pants with genie pants.
By the time I stopped fucking around with the fabric, it was mid-afternoon. At that point, I was in do-something mode. I changed clothes, fucked around with the tripod, and eventually loaded up TikTok for a live stream. Lately, my streams have suuuuucked. I have no idea why, but viewer numbers over the last week or so have been at most a third of what they had been. Things were a lot better yesterday. I actually had about 1.2k viewers when I shut things down last night.
I have two theories. First, I put on more clothes. That sounds worse than it is. I’d wager I’m dressed as much as the average cheerleader.
There’s an idea.
Normally, I start a stream with a cropped sweatshirt over my tank top, and once I’m warmed up and warm, I take it off. However, the last week has been very warm, and I didn’t need the sweatshirt from the start. Yesterday, the wind was up and the temp was down, and I had long sleeves when I started my stream. I know that TikTok’s system might not outright kill a stream if things are above a PG-13 rating, they just won’t push it to the masses on the main timeline.
Second, I have a playlist I usually spin to. It’s about ~700 songs ranging from the 50’s to current hits, across all sorts of music genres. Some songs definitely get a better response than others. I made a pared down version of the flow playlist in the hope I wouldn’t have to skip as many songs. I guess something was missing from it, because I wasn’t feeling it. Not only that, but I felt like I skipped more songs. I went back to the original playlist. Skipped songs were down, and the viewer numbers were back up.
Shawshank has work today. I’m going to do some crafting. Since I finished the pants, I can go back to working on the technicolor dreamcoat. After work, we’re going out to the local greenhouse to see what they might have.
