Visual snow syndrome

A few days ago I happened upon this video about visual snow syndrome and I watched it even thinking that it was kinda clickbaity, since I always figured that visual snow syndrome is something that a lot of people have and it’s not a big deal. But it actually made me realize that there’s a lot of stuff that’s possibly interconnected in my brain. Because one of the things the presenter mentioned is that it’s also linked to tinnitus and heightened pareidolia, which are both things I’ve always had. As well as migraines. And I wonder how much of my other brain shit is also explained by this? So for example, fibromyalgia generally manifests as having a bit of pain that just leads to massive overwhelm for me. And then the MSG sensitivity I have seems to be caused by overexposure to the flavor of MSG lingering in my mouth. And the vertigo I have is triggered by being hyper-attuned to motion around me. And my migraine triggers are being overloaded by sensory input (usually smells or sound or flashes of light). And I have always had a tendency to photophobia as well. My anxiety also feels like it’s a sort of feedback cycle that happens. And maybe it’s even the source of my mirror-touch synaesthesia? This doesn’t explain _all_ of my problems (like my connective tissue issues which are also at the root of my most intense pain flareups) but I wonder if this is an avenue worth exploring. And how I would even go about exploring it. But also given that my creativity is all rooted in the random nerve firings that make connections where they aren’t obvious… maybe this isn’t something to fix. Just something to better understand. It’d be nice if I could figure out a way of keeping the good parts without being so badly affected by the bad parts. (As with so many other things in life, I suppose.)

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Showrunners Tease How Series Ends for Non-Canon Characters - Reactor

“We want to show you the thing that you don’t know”

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Liveness check

Man, I am so tired of being tired. On the plus side I’m finally working on music again. Hopefully I can keep up a more sustainable momentum this time around, because I really do want to finish Misfits sometime this year. But I also don’t want to do my usual multi-month crunch that leaves me even more drained when I’m done with an album. I’ve also been working on the next version of the-protocol-formerly-called-Canimus. At present the tentative rebrand name is “Chorus” although I’m not totally sold on it (but my various collaborators like it). Anyway, for now folks can look at the WIP draft branch and maybe comment on it? I’ve gotten some really good feedback from some folks but more eyes would be better, I think. I’ve also been doing voice training again, this time with a practitioner who knows what the hell she’s doing. It’s going okay. I only really have energy enough to do a few hours' worth of activity on any given day, and last weekend I made the mistake of going overboard with the exercise, which wiped me out for a good chunk of this week. Post-exertional malaise has such a hair trigger. I miss being able to walk 5 miles a day without even thinking about it. I also miss being able to play DDR/Stepmania, but it was too hard on my knees, and I was also starting to worry about how much my floor shakes during more intense stuff. Maybe I should try setting it up in the basement, if I can figure out a good place to put it. On the plus side, my VRChat fanbase is slowly growing. I’ve had some pretty good experiences lately where people actually come to see me perform, and they actually want to talk to me about the music afterward! People also keep on requesting the Furality song, which I can’t accommodate during my sets because my backing track is fixed ahead of time, but maybe I’ll make a backing track for my next show. I dunno. But anyway. I guess things are fairly okay, or at least holding steady for now. Wish I could figure out a fix for the fatigue though. It’s been such an impediment to all the things I would rather be doing.

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SFP

strongfemaleprotagonist.com

junk.sockpuppet.band

A Common Sense Message from Thomas Paine for America's 250th Birthday

YouTube video by Steve Shives

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Things that have me tired

These past 6 weeks have been quite tiring to me, and I have so many reasons to be so very tired of things right now. I’m doing what I can to enjoy the things I’m able to do, but, oh _god_ do things suck right now, for so many people that I know. ### Induced gender dysphoria I am so tired of getting misgendered, constantly. I’m finally starting voice training with an actual, accredited vocal coach who specializes in gender-affirming stuff, at least. Hopefully that’ll help. The last one I saw was a big waste of time and money, and she was just making stuff up as she went along and not even doing much to help me anyway. But this one is an actual doctor at an actual clinic who takes my insurance and so on, and a friend of mine had very good results with her as well. Hopefully that’ll take the edge off of some stuff. Like how the fucking federal government has a mandate to misgender me. I had to renew my passport (as it’s my only valid travel document, since my Washington driver’s license hasn’t been upgraded with RealID, because I had a valid passport so they were like “nah you don’t need to do this”). When I last renewed it in 2016 it was with the thought that this would be my last chance to update the gender marker for a while, and getting it taken care of before Trump took office made it urgent. I never would have suspected that the change would be reverted, but, here we go. Also, social security denied my disability claim, and a big part of the ruling was based on me having undergone hormone replacement therapy. So of course I made that a part of the reason for my appeal. So today I just got a denial for the appeal, saying that they do not agree that the HRT aspect shows discrimination, and they see no other evidence of procedural problems with the denial, even though my lawyer wrote a pretty comprehensive thing about all of the procedural issues. But it’s not just the government. People in my social circles don’t respect my gender anymore. Even in VRChat, where I have a femmy avatar and a permanent “they/she” pronoun thing, people have started thinking I’m a dude. Even though so many people I know insist they had no idea I wasn’t a cis woman! It’s so baffling. Even people who have known me for a while have started introducing my performance sets with a he/him misgendering. What, entirely, the fuck?! And I’ve been hiring a cleaning and organization consultant (something that _should_ have been covered by disability, if I were able to fucking get it) and while she’s been suepr helpful, she also keeps misgendering me, and at this point I’m just too fucking tired to try correcting anyone. ### Music stuff I’m hoping that in July I can spend more time in the studio and actually working on music. I’ve been performing a lot and that wears me out. I have so many pieces of music I want to actually get recorded. I want to finish at least one of the three albums I’ve been actively working on. I’m just feeling too fucking tired to do it though. I’m also tired because of the endless shit with Spotify and Bandcamp and all the other things, and how now there’s endless purity tests where people are starting to hate the musicians who are trying to sell stuff where it sells, instead of the platforms that make things bad for those very same musicians. And I’ve been trying to work more on Canimus, and I am so very tired by how people keep trying to undermine it by diverting the conversation over to the very same protocols that weren’t a good match for what it’s trying to do to begin with. And now now that there are things putting it into production there are a bunch of things I’d love to be different about it. But hopefully now that it’s starting to gain traction there can be a more principled discussion about doing it better, and there aren’t so many people using it yet that it’s an intractable problem, at least. I’m also so tired with the constant expectation that I’m constantly producing _and_ performing _and_ interacting _and_ being super nice and friendly through all of it. And that I’m not doing enough (“you should market yourself more!” “you should do collaborations!” “you should do more videos!” and on and on), when I’m already doing more than I can. ### Art stuff I really want to work on my pottery again too. But that’s been hard for me to overcome the gravity well on. I also ended up needing to do some last-minute art for CoCA’s annual member show, which I didn’t realize I was even being selected for. And then getting the artwork delivered to the gallery was annoying, because I’m still not driving (nor do I expect that to change anytime soon), and, of course, this is the sort of thing that disability services would be able to help me with, if I were to qualify for it, but apparently I cannot. Apparently the show opened today. I’m too tired to care right now. ### Peoples' reactions to disability and gender shit I am so tired of people telling me that things just aren’t right (yeah no shit), or that I should work with a disability lawyer (I fucking have been), or that I should flee the country (as if other countries would want to take a disabled, unemployable trans person). Also, for all of the problems with the United States, I like my home, I like my town, I just wish there were better transit access and alternate paths to getting support that didn’t rely on the fucking federal government. And meanwhile, I get people telling me that it’s trans peoples' fault for caring so much about their pronouns that it’s turned the world against us. No, fuck that. Fuck anyone who says that shit. And I’m too tired to explain why. If you still don’t get it, do your own fucking research, because I’m also tired of sealions. ### I’m tired of being tired Chronic conditions fucking suck and I want to get better but I don’t see any path for that to even happen. I still refuse to let entropy win but sometimes I wish it would anyway.

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Fun things!

Oh yeah so a lot has been going on, this past week especially has been _bonkers_ , and I’m super happy about things right now. ### Furality Furality went great! I had a lot of fun seeing folks I hadn’t seen in a while, a _heck_ of a lot of people checked out my booth, I gained a lot of new fans, and I contributed some of my homemade espresso cups and home-roasted espresso to the charity auction and it helped raise another $1010 for Resilient Hearts! The con as a whole raised $115,000! Furries are _amazing_. One fun highlight of the weekend was when I was doing an impromptu set in the Dealer’s Den spawn area, and I got a pretty good audience, including some folks who were enraptured by my booth video. Folks made requests that I play the jingle from it, which I did, and the crowd went wild! And then one person told me that this song had been their new vocal stim all weekend and then they shared a dubstep remix that they did of it, which was hilarious. I failed to remember their name, unfortunately, but if whoever it is would like to say hi, please do so! Another fun thing happened where I was in the “greymuzzles meetup” (I’m old lol) and suddenly I heard “OMG it’s Sockpuppet!” and suddenly I was being mobbed by like four people who all wanted to say hi to me, much to the confusion of the other folks I was with. I also got to meet Hiyu and Ashtalon, who do the sound and music for Furality, and expressed interest in working with them in the future. They said they don’t really have any need for additional sound/music people but who knows what’ll happen over the next year. Anyway, the response to my espresso cups was pretty amazing. Obviously they wouldn’t normally go for $1010 outside of a charity auction but there were a lot of nice comments on them and people saying they’d love to have ones like them, and that’s gotten me back in the mood for working on ceramics again. ### House stuff Seattle City Light has a home weatherization thing that they do for low-income homeowners, which has got to be a very tiny sliver of a Venn diagram in these parts but I happen to be within it, so I got an energy audit many months ago. Anyway the audit found a bunch of stuff that needed improving in my house, and this Monday the construction crew came through and fixed it. In particular, they redid the insulation in my attic (I had actually paid quite a lot of money for it a few years ago but they did an incomplete job and couldn’t get to the whole house for some reason, but when I got a new roof last year I think that opened up some crevices), sealed the sill plate, properly weather-stripped my basement door, and fixed a bunch of other little things. They also upgraded my bathroom exhaust fan and dryer vent. Good stuff. I also hired a home organization consultant for a 5-hour session, which was a bit more than I could handle all at once but it was her minimum session time, and we got _so_ much done. My kitchen and dining room aren’t a cluttered mess. My office is much tidier. My basement/studio doesn’t feel like a disaster area! I don’t dread going down there anymore, so maybe I can start working on music again. And of course now that my basement is much better-organized I can consider working on ceramics again, so maybe I’ll get back to doing more espresso cups (and other things). This also got things to a state where I could finally take care of a project I’ve been meaning to do for _years_ ; the concrete pad where my old furnace was is a jagged mess that’s just wasted space, and I’d been planning for quit esome time to fill in the voids with sand and then do a layer of concrete on top, so that I could use it as a space to keep a small refrigerator to keep drinks in. A friend very kindly gave me a spare dorm fridge a few months ago but it’s just been sitting around doing nothing, and so today I finally got some bags of sand and concrete delivered and got it… _mostly_ done. I underestimated how much concrete I needed so I’ll need to get another bag to finish the job, but soon I should be able to have nice beverages at the ready. ### Music On the note of music, I am still very inspired to record more of my next album, Misfits, but I’ve been _super_ busy, between Furality and all of the shows I’m doing. I’ve also been given a last-minute short set at TPVR, which should be fun. ### A moment of Zen I’m giving Zen Browser another try. It’s working a lot better than it did the last time I tried it. The UI is still very _strange_ compared to other current browsers but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. On a related note, I’m still using gram despite its foibles. Emacs didn’t stick for me this time around. But there’s still some things Sublime Text does better and I might just switch back to it. Intel apps on macOS have been given a stay of execution for another year (as macOS 27 will continue to include Rosetta) so I could stay on version 3 for now, but I’ll probably just bite the bullet and pay for 4. ### Also BIRTHDAY I already posted about it but holy shit I’m turning 48 on Sunday, where did the time go When I was a kid I never thought I’d make it to 30, and now 50 is just a blink away. And all in all I’ve never felt happier with my life, and is it weird to actually feel optimistic for the future? Sure, there’s a lot of stuff that’s bad _now_ , but _now_ will eventually end. We all just gotta keep fighting for the future, because soon the future will be now.

beesbuzz.biz

2026 birthday plans

Hey y'all! My birthday is coming up this Sunday. I have the following things going on: * I’ll be spending some time in VR for the Trans Academy Trans Pride festival, and in particular will be speaking on the music production panel which is at 10:45 AM, Pacific time * I’m going to be seeing The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act at AMC Pacific Place at 7 PM, and it’d be super fun if I had a bunch of friends with me! Right now the theater is completely empty except for me and it’d be nice to not be alone ~~like Kinger lol~~ * And I guess if we aren’t too emotionally destroyed afterwards (or maybe especially if we are!) we could get drinks and snacks somewhere in the dying mall? It’d be thematically-appropriate, at least * is the Pacific Place food court even open that late anymore (8:30)? probably not * looks like the hot pot place is, at least * how is midnight cookie in any way deserving of that name, wtf * help i’m trapped in a neverending `<ul>`

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