[Current Mood | okay ]

[Listening To | weekend TV and ads ]

Good morning, it’s the weekend, and it’s fucking windy out there today. The recent warm temps we enjoyed over the last two or three days are gone, replaced with wind warnings and thunderstorms last night. It made for a nice sleep, I think I crashed before my brain even registered what was playing in my headset.

I had a rough Friday. I didn’t work on Thursday, so I wanted/needed to work last night. Shawshank warned me he was probably going to be home early. My brain did that thing where it calculates how much time I have, then feeds me all the reasons why that’s not enough time to do things. Oh, you have five hours? Well, you’ll only have four by the time you finish setting up, less after you factor in resetting the room before he gets home. And it’s not like you’ll make any money in the first couple of hours, leaving only about an hour of money making. At that point, why bother logging in at all?

I logged in anyway. I might’ve earned a Happy Meal last night. Even if it’s not making good money, it’s some money. Not only that, but it’s more data in my vibe coded stat-sucker/analyzer. And that data is really interesting to see plotted out over time. If everything is working against me on CB – stream speed/quality, my niche content vs. the free porn – I really need to be using the hashtags that get me the most eyes. One of my earlier projects was a simple HTML file I could load up on one phone, with a bunch of buttons, each labeled with a hashtag I used. Tapping the buttons let me tally up the number of times I saw someone enter my stream via a hashtag search. It was good, but relied on me seeing and tapping.

My current system logs everything automagically. It slurps up info, then generates a graph of viewers and my room rank. Clicking on any point of the graph shows me anything happening in my room around that point, from 15 minutes before to 5 minutes after. One of my CB apps rotates my hashtags every 10 minutes, using three “permanent” tags and rotating in two from another list. Now, it’s stupidly easy for me to look at a massive dip or spike in the graph and see what hashtags my room was listed under at that point. Since I started looking at things this week, I’ve taken out three tags.

I can tell when I have someone tipping because the ranking graph will flatten out. When someone tips, another app updates my room title slightly, resetting the hashtags to five that are usually pretty consistent. Over the next few weeks, I want to use the spikes to figure out which tags I should be using in that second app. If my graph is going to flatten when they tip, then I want it to flatten out at a higher ranking.

Today’s the last shift though, then we have a couple of days off. We’re having Shawshank‘s mom over for dinner tomorrow. Tonight, I’m gonna be a hoe.

[Current Mood | overstimulated ]

[Listening To | the shower ]

Hello, world. I woke up thinking it was Saturday, but I’ve been told it’s Friday. Part of my brain registered it was Friday when I saw the weekly Deku Deals email, but I immediately forgot. Podrick came up to snuggle a few times.

I took yesterday off. My plan was to enjoy the niceness of the afternoon, soak up some sunshine, play with the diabolo outside, and maybe stream after dinner. Things are getting smoother, and I’m getting a little more comfortable with maneuvering it along the string. At one point, I landed an actual trick (that I wasn’t trying to do in the first place), then stood there, diabolo spinning, wondering, what next? I think the biggest issue is generating enough spin on the diabolo. I know what I need to do, and I know how, but I’m terrified of breaking something. Anything. Could be the diabolo itself, my nose, my sunglasses, a cat, a window, the TV, the diabolo’s string. It doesn’t matter what that something is, really, but I’m gonna break it, and be sad, mad, or broke about it. So I play with that shadow of “something’s gonna break” every time I pick it – and any of my flow props – up to play with them.

After I’d tuckered myself out in the sun, I went inside. I threw some diabolo tutorials from YouTube up on the TV, figuring I should learn about the what next? part of the move. I had to stop watching; no good comes from watching intermediate and advanced moves when I can’t reliably get it in motion in the first place. It was still too early for dinner, so I went into the bedroom with the idea that I might clean up some shit before work. I thought if I tidied, I might come up with a new bedroom arrangement that would give me a better workspace.

Hours later, I had a trash bag full of shit I’d taken out of my dresser, the bed was covered in work “clothes”, and I was pulling 75% of the shit out of the closet. I had stuff all over the floor. While organizing my work stuff, I lost a glove from a Halloween costume. I had it when I started “tidying”. It was somewhere in the bedroom. I ended up tearing apart everything I’d just sorted and organized, dumping the bag of clothes I wanted to toss to go through all of those as well. In my head, I questioned whether I had one glove or two when I started sorting, because I couldn’t be this fucking stupid to lose a glove in the 10ft² of space that I literally haven’t moved from in an hour. I texted Shawshank that I was overwhelmed, and he promised to help pick up anything I wanted to leave. Eventually, the errant glove turned up, hidden behind a slab of wood, wedged behind some chairs. Unfortunately, by that point, I’d already exhausted all my spoons. Whatever spoons I added with outdoor fun were wiped out, along with my remaining daily spoon allotment.

I didn’t stream, I just cleaned what I could, ate a bagel, and I didn’t do anything else. I existed in the quiet house. Half an hour before Shawshank came home, I started working on Fansly stuff, but just couldn’t focus on it. I fucked around with an OBS overlay instead.

Hopefully, today is better.

[Current Mood | sleepy ]

[Listening To | corruption! scandal! ]

Good morning, world. We’re enjoying a sunny Thursday morning with the cats. Podrick is watching the front window, where the sun hasn’t quite hit the bird feeder yet. Pippin is in the back doorway, probably shaped into a perfect loaf. While the morning is nice, we both had shitty sleeps. Neither of us could fall asleep easily.

Shawshank came home with a bag of tech after saving me from being awkwardly interrupted in the middle of my stream. They moved his dad out of the long term care in Slightly BiggerTown and he’s back in TinyTown‘s nursing home now, and his mom brought all of his electronics back. He no longer has the hand mobility/dexterity to endlessly scroll Facebook or play his tropical island resort game.

Unfortunately, his appearance has changed so much that the face id locked down his iPad. We were able to restore it to factory settings, but we haven’t been able to do much else with it. If anyone has suggestions, let Shawshank know. We were able to get into one of his older phones as well, but we couldn’t get into his Apple account or email. Shawshank is hoping that if we can get into his current iPhone, it will still be logged into his email so we reset the Apple account password.

I’m hoping to turn the old iPad into a dedicated music screen. All it needs to do is connect to my Bluetooth speaker and Youtube music. I joked about turning an old phone into a dedicated toe cam.

It’s another night of work for the two of us. It’s supposed to be nice today.

[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.