My Life

[fluffy]

Guess I haven't posted an update on this thread in a while, so, let's see.

My chronic pain issues were improving somewhat, but then I started my new job and then they took a nosedive right away. Mostly due to stress, more from personal life things than from the new job, but the job itself is a bit frustrating all the same.

One of the things which I felt had to give was my administrative duties at Song Fight!. I've never made much of a big deal about it but I've done a lot of stuff behind the scenes over the years, both with administering the forum and also finding/fixing bugs on the site itself. That combined with overworking myself during Song Fight! Live made me realize that I've just been doing way too much stuff and that I need to cut back. So, I'm cutting back, so I can focus more on doing the things I want to do (like, actually making music, and comics, and so on). That's also related to why I'm no longer on the Slack or the Discord. (To everyone who's reached out to make sure I'm okay, thank you so much, I really do appreciate it.)

In a week I'm taking my first real vacation in a long time, driving out to Port Angeles and just like... being somewhere small and quiet for a week. I'll be bringing some of my recording gear so I can keep working on Novembeat and CoverFight, but hopefully I'll be spending most of my time either wandering around town or wandering around the Olympic national forest. It'll be nice just taking a trip by myself where it's not either a mad rush to get ready to perform for a show or being expected to be "on" all the time for my family or whatever. I'm already looking forward to trying out a bunch of restaurants in what is ostensibly downtown.

For about 8 years of my life I lived in a fairly small town (Las Cruces, NM) and it'll be nice to have a reminder of what it feels like. Maybe I'm going to also see if it's a place where I can retire when I've finally burned out on Seattle and need to drop out of the software industry that's been slowly killing me. Or at least somewhere I can go to decompress more often.

[Pigfarmer Jr]

Getting away can work wonders. Thanks for all you do around these parts. We appreciate it. You can tell by how much time we spend with songfight. Which can be quite a bit. Take a break. Do what you can. Be healthy... or at least as healthy as you can be and still work and play.

[Lunkhead]

Thanks for your help, fluffy, I hope it doesn't seem like I take it for granted, because I don't. I appreciate it.

Erin and I bought a house! We're moving to Bend, OR in a couple weeks. I'm looking around in terror at the vast quantity of stuff I've accumulated in the 13 years we've lived in this apartment in Berkeley. Oops!

[fluffy]

Oh dang, Bend is one of the other cities I was thinking of fucking off to, except the climate is way too much like where I grew up. Good luck with the move! It's such a pain in the ass.

[crumpart]

Update: our parents have their photo books and they look good. Only saw one muck-up I made when we did a flip through over FaceTime just now, where I obviously had a small overtired brain flip and labelled the Giant’s Causeway the “Giant’s Footsteps”. Lol. I think that’s forgivable.

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[sleepysilverdoor]

Update: our parents have their photo books and they look good. Only saw one muck-up I made when we did a flip through over FaceTime just now, where I obviously had a small overtired brain flip and labelled the Giant’s Causeway the “Giant’s Footsteps”. Lol. I think that’s forgivable.


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I don't know very many Irish landmarks offhand, but that's one I've always wanted to see. It's just so cool from both a geologic and aesthetic standpoint!

[crumpart]

It's so weird and cool. We didn't go into the Visitor's Centre because we had the dog with us, but we did do a walking tour of the whole general area with a local guide and it was really interesting.

[Lunkhead]

Oh man, I want to see Giant's Causeway so bad. That's awesome!

[vowlvom]

You have been on songfight.net for too long when:

You see "Giant's Causeway" out of the corner of your eye and read it as "Glenn's Caseway"

[crumpart]

That could be the title of his autobiography. The Glenn Case Way.

[sleepysilverdoor]

I learned about it when it was brought up as a possible inspiration for the title of Boards of Canada's "Jacquard Causeway". Which is indirect but possible true because they're Scottish (obviously different, but close by) and obsessed with hexagons.

[crumpart]

The other side of it is in Scotland, apparently. Wikipedia says "Across the sea, there are identical basalt columns (a part of the same ancient lava flow) at Fingal's Cave on the Scottish isle of Staffa".

The myth is that Fionn mac Cumhaill was challenged to a fight by the Scottish giant Benandonner, and Fionn accepted and built the causeway so they could meet. There are a few different versions of it. One where they fight and Fionn wins, one where Fionn hides and one where Fionn and his wife trick Benandonner so they can avoid fighting.

[Caravan Ray]

It's so weird and cool. We didn't go into the Visitor's Centre because we had the dog with us, but we did do a walking tour of the whole general area with a local guide and it was really interesting.

I’ve been to the visitors centre. You didn’t miss much.

[sleepysilverdoor]

I bought a raspberry PI 4. It's so tiny! I set it up as a file server so I can share files between all the house laptops and phones and such.

For storage I used an old terabyte harddrive that I've had lying around since 2008 or 2009. Found a folder buried on there containing backups from my old Windows XP desktop I used for most of the 2000s, and there's a folder in there filled with old SongFight songs I downloaded way back when.

Of course it was like 5 WreckdoM songs, one Emergency Pizza Party song, "Awkward! At the porn store!", and Swilington's "That's What She said".

Also apparently my original artist name for my first entry was "Brfxxccxxmnpcccc- lllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116" which was rejected by FightMaster.

[ujnhunter]

Also apparently my original artist name for my first entry was "Brfxxccxxmnpcccc- lllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116" which was rejected by FightMaster.

So we can all thank the FightMaster (of the time) for the Beef?

[sleepysilverdoor]

Also apparently my original artist name for my first entry was "Brfxxccxxmnpcccc- lllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116" which was rejected by FightMaster.

So we can all thank the FightMaster (of the time) for the Beef?

No but we can thank them for the ö which got rejected as well and turned into "?" Until I got that one fixed haha.

[fluffy]

I mean for that you can also thank the abysmal way that every step in the process handles non-7-bit characters. PHP still defaults to the local character set, incidentally, and it took a lot of finagling to get it to be Unicode everywhere. Even then I'm sure there's still ways of breaking things.

Like, I'm not saying emoji names aren't supported, just... y'know.

[Märk]

I'm pretty sure Kanye lost the election because he wears skinny jeans. Bunch of gay fish haters in the US, yo.

[sleepysilverdoor]

I officially have Alpha-Gal Syndrome. So much for porkchops.

[owl]

Oh nooooo, how severe is it? What can and can’t you eat? Did you get bitten by a tick recently?

[sleepysilverdoor]

Very small amounts of mammal meat don't seem to bother me. I ate a large bowl of bulgogi before going trick or treating and wound up walking around with hives and lower GI cramps. I can still handle dairy apparently? Waffle house's beef gravy gave me pronounced facial flushing a few weeks ago.

What's weird is that while I have gotten a lone star tick bite, the only one I remember was two years ago. Then again -- I've had *dog ticks* on me this year, just not lone star ticks. Unless one managed to get me without noticing.

There's a part of me that feels like alpha gal is like "the revenge of the woods" for deforestation. Cause beef farming is a major cause of deforestation, and now going into the woods around here can result in you not being able to tolerate mammal meat. "Yeah, that's right, take that humans, we'll grow back because screw your love of meat". Or maybe that's just what I tell myself cause I used to be vegetarian for precisely that reason. Which is why it's more of an "inconvenient shrug" of a diagnosis than anything else.

I miss pork chops.

[Pigfarmer Jr]

Very small amounts of mammal meat don't seem to bother me. I ate a large bowl of bulgogi before going trick or treating and wound up walking around with hives and lower GI cramps.

Wait. You went trick or treating? I thought that was only something done back in the olden days.

Sorry to hear of your problems. I'm glad the solution doesn't seem as radical to you as it would be to me. Still seems like a shitty deal, though.