Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
Day 209: The joys of remote work: on the one hand, I don’t have to take time off when the car needs to be serviced. On the other hand, I don’t get to take time off work when the car needs to be serviced. On the gripping hand, blogging about this means I’m not really working at the moment…. (Don’t worry. I’ll go back to being responsible after this is posted.)
Day 208: It’s quite chilly outside, but I’m quite cozy in front of the fire, working on correcting OCR scans of old Norwescon program books to upload to the convention archives while my wife dozes in the chair next to me. Not a bad way to spend the final day of this Thanksgiving break.
Day 207: In a few months I’ll again be DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon 46, so to make sure I’m not entirely rusty when I set up that evening, it’s time for me to start practicing again. Whenever I do this, I broadcast to Twitch, and so this is what I look like when I’m streaming. Obviously, it’s very serious business.
I’m actually rather proud of the look I came up with some time ago, after a few rounds of tweaking and playing with ideas.
The “turntables” to either side of my head display the art for whatever track is playing (and they rotate as if they were physical turntables), and the audio waveforms behind my head are the waveforms of the playing tracks; deck A (the left side) on the top, and deck B below. Those elements are all pulled from the UI of DJay Pro, the DJ software I use.
The sci-fi cityscape behind me is actually a video clip. I have a small library of interesting looping video backgrounds that I can choose from.
The text in the bottom third is pulled from a text file that I keep open on my screen; as I’m mixing, I take a quick moment to update the text file with the name of whatever track I’m playing at the moment. I think there are ways to automatically pull that info from DJay, but I’ve never quite liked the look of the ones I’ve seen, and this works for me.
The caricature of me on the lower right was drawn for me a number of years ago by Sharii Chankhamma. In the original, I’m wearing an “NSFW” t-shirt; for streaming, I’ve created a small library of shirt designs that randomly update every 15 seconds.
Today’s mix is now available on my Mixcloud page if you’d like to give it a listen, along with many, many hours of other mixes I’ve uploaded in the past. And more will come — I may not do this every week, but I will need to make sure to get some more practice in over the coming months, so I’ll be popping up from time to time.
Day 206: We spent much of the day taking down fall decorations and putting up our Christmas decorations (colored lights out front instead of the orange lights we’ve had for the past month, swapping out the fall gnomes by the front door for Santa, a snowman, and Christmas gnomes, and putting up the Christmas tree inside). We also wrapped a bunch of presents for a family for the annual giving tree program at work, something we enjoy doing every year.
Day 205: Happy Thanksgiving, or Friendsgiving, or stuff-your-face-giving, or if nothing else, happy Thursday! We had a nice day of cooking all the usual goodies, and now we’re stuffed full of food and it’s time to spend the rest of the evening moving as little as possible.
65/2023 – ⭐️⭐️
Possibly could have been an interesting take on the Preservers, or a fun TNG-crew-in-a-medieval-society romp, but was marred by bad character decisions (we must stay undercover in a medieval human society, so Geordi and Worf obviously can’t come, but sure, bring the Bajoran Ro and the android Data, that totally makes sense) and overly unfortunately stereotypical plotting decisions (Ro, of course, is nearly immediately stripped naked and placed in jeopardy of sexual assault, and Troi is later threatened with the same, because what other peril would women face?). Even the titular dragons barely make an appearance. Any interesting bits are far overshadowed by the rest.
Day 204: Every week we pick up a little bit of food from Highline’s food pantry to make available for our students in Access Services. Our student employee who usually makes the run was out for the holiday weekend, so today was my turn.
Day 203: When one or the other of the two elevators is regularly out of service, and this latest outage has gone on for close to two weeks now, you really start to consider taking the stairs more often. At the same time, I haven’t gotten stuck in one of the elevators (yet…I hear it’s something of a rite of passage while working in this building), and I have gotten stuck in the stairwell (the other rite of passage), so…either way, it’s a risk I have to take.
Day 202: We’ve had the fall-themed gnomes out front since just after Halloween, but this weekend they were joined by a new figurine — a new gnome who is a little more excited about the next major holiday following Thanksgiving.
Day 201: As with many Sundays, an uneventful day at home, so here’s a fuller view of the wall of my home office that often appears behind me in photos. From left to right, the bookcases are: comics, graphic novels, nonfiction and non-genre fiction; two cases of Star Trek (with my Star Trek video collection stored on top); and two cases of non-Trek science fiction and fantasy. The skeleton is a Halloween decoration that will eventually get tucked away, but for now sits in that chair and startles me every time I walk into the room.