Bruh, it’s been a lot of days since I last wrote in my journal. I think it’s safe to say that my daily journalling is no longer a habit. I feel a little disappointed about that, because I get a lot out of writing.

I can’t commit to writing every day right now. I dunno why. I guess I’m in a bit of a slump and my gut reaction is to work harder in order to get out of the slump. That’s probably the wrong way to actually get out of the slump, though.

Anyway, I’m just going to write today, and I’m going to be in the moment and write what I’m feeling and what’s going on in my life.

Here’s a cool website for background noise. I really like how it’s laid out and how it’s got a minimal design.

http://imissmybar.com/

Mars Perseverance rover landed successfully a few days ago. I’m casually keeping an eye on it’s progress through the NASA Perseverance newsletter, and Tim Dodd’s tweets.

I found this Mars Photo Booth via Hacker News today. I updated my photo on my about page with the photo I created using the photo booth.

Yesterday morning, I did a soft launch of Futureporn by posting a response to ProjektMelody’s tweet which informed her followers that PornHub permanently blocked her from making uploads.

Futureporn is running well enough to where I felt okay with a soft launch. There are still a bunch of things that it needs in order to look nice. Thumbnail generation is broken, at the moment, but I think the ripper and the builder are working correctly to where a new ProjektMelody Chaturbate stream will trigger the rip and the subsequent website update.

I haven’t actually tested this, end to end. I mean, it’s been running for weeks and weeks, but so far, there is always a bug which prevents the system from automatically publishing a new video. It’s been a semi-automatic process so far, but I’ve been making iterative updates to the system and I think the next time Melody streams, futureporn will automatically publish the new video.

I’m thinking of making an end to end test in my test suite which will compare the release rate between futureporn and Onlyfans. If I release new chaturbate VODs faster than Melody’s staff does at Onlyfans, I’m doing good.

I failed to mention that Melody switched to Onlyfans. Her videos are free there, but it requires a credit card. Having to enter a credit card is a barrier for some people, which only strengthens my position that now is a good time to release Futureporn.

I have some reservations about Futureporn at the moment. The most pressing issue is that the videos are served slowly. I actually added a section to the about page of Futureporn which explains to people why the videos might be served slowly. I listed two possibilities. The first is that the IPFS public gateway is overloaded. The second is that there are not enough pins.

I’m serving 1 pin of every file as a public service. I’m not serving it from my home, because my internet is a mobile 4G connection and IPFS wrecks my bandwidth. I think my phone provider actually disconnect me temporarily, when I run IPFS for long enough.

I’m going through Pinata.cloud at the moment. They provide an API for me to automatically upload files to using Futureporn’s backend. The files become acessible via IPFS, and it’s $0.15 per gigabyte stored there. For now, I can do this because I don’t have too many VODs. Eventually, I’m going to transition to self-hosting an IPFS gateway. I’m waiting until I get Starlink, for that.

Speaking of Starlink… I’m now a Starlink customer! I got an e-mail this morning which let me pre-order a terminal. It cost $99 up front, and it’ll cost another $400 when it ships. I paid the $99 using a credit card this morning. I’m excited!

Ok let’s talk finances. I’ve been thinking that I’ve been in debt for too long, and 2021 is a great time to do something about it.

So I am making it official right now. By December 31, 2021, my goal is to be out of debt.

Right now, I have 3 credit cards. Two are nearly maxed out at their limit of $1000 and $1500. The third has a balance of around $200, of a $1000 limit.

This is very doable. I actually paid off that third one I just mentioned earlier this year, but then I decided that I wanted a bunch of stuff and I had a bit of a shopping spree. I definitely got carried away once I got some money from the economic stimulus package, and my sisters K &A for K & E’s wedding.

I think mentioning specific sisters is a little confusing so I’ll clarify. It’s K & E’s wedding, and A. is helping plan K&E’s wedding.

I think I have most of what I need for the wedding livestream. There are of the rental cameras that I don’t have. I won’t get those until a few days before the wedding date.

I’m just looking at my notes for the wedding livestream. The remaining things I need are..

• A raspberry Pi with Speedify (network appliance)
• Speedify app subscription
• A volunteer’s phone acting as a 4G hotspot
• An Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) for the RPi, and wifi access point

I have a UPS. It’s battery is toast, though. I figure it’ll cost about $30 to get a new battery for it. I’m going to wait a bit before I buy those, because I’ve really overextended lately. I want to wait and be sure that I can afford rent at the end of February.

As it stands, I have about $1K in cryptocurrency, and $700 in stocks. I can always tap into those, which I did a bit this week in order to keep my checking account above my $100 minimum.

I still have a bunch of cards waiting at Buyee. It’s going to cost $300 to get the one shipped to me. I’m excited to get that one, because it’s got about 8000 cards in it. That will keep me busy for a long while.

I still have about… 500 or so cards which I have yet to photograph or list. I’m holding off on those because they smell like cigarette smoke. Or mildew? Or mold? I’m not really sure, but it definitely bothers my nose. I need some paper towels and some Febreeze to see if I can deodorize those cards before I work with them.

Sales are going alright. No really big orders this week, but I did get a couple $30 orders which was a welcome event. I have a stack of about 20 Sakura Cardcaptor Prememo cards which have been photographed and are queued to be listed. Heck, I think I’ll list those today. It’ll probably take a single pomodoro session to list all those. When the cards in my queue are all from the same set, I can list very quickly.

I finished my SBTP tweetbot! Previously, I would queue promotional tweets a week in advance using TweetDeck. Now, it’s 100% automated, and I won’t have to think about it anymore.

The tweetbot accesses the eBay and Twitter APIs to achieve the following.

1. Get a random eBay listing of mine with the keyword, “card”
2. Get the listing’s metadata– title, image, and rover URL.
3. Post a tweet with the metadata.

I deployed the node app to my Caprover instance. I used node-schedule to run the tweetbot as often as I want, with the schedule definition set in an environment variable. Right now I’m having the bot post every day at 1PM, which is the same schedule that I used when I queued tweets via TweetDeck.

I’m very proud of myself for bringing the tweetbot project together!

Oh shit, I must add this project to my about page! I’m doing that right now.

There is one thing I want to improve on, and that is image quality. I’m just grabbing an image from the eBay listing, which has visible JPEG artifacts. Those artifacts are introduced by eBay, which makes sense from eBay’s perspective because they’re a huge platform and they need to restrict their bandwidth and disk space usage. I think there is probably a higher resolution returned by the API call that my tweetbot is making that I could make use of.

It’s kinda low priority, though. It’s working good, it’s making tweets, and that’s the most important thing.

Oh! I forgot to mention. In case you don’t know, the rover URLs are eBay’s way of tracking clicks. Thanks to the eBay API endpoing I’m using, the rover URL generates automatically and I don’t have to think much about it. I just have to configure my eBay partner network ID and that’s about it. If someone clicks the link contained in a tweet from my tweetbot, then makes a purchase, I get a commission. I think it removes the regular eBay fee for that sale.

Last month, I brought in $13 some dollars because of my tweetbot and those rover links. Pretty nice! Now that posting tweets is completely automated, that’s VERY nice! If I think about it in in terms of money made per hour, previously it was negligible because I spent at least 25 minutes a week queing up the tweets. But now.. It’s almost free money!

I know it’s not free money at all. I still have to pay the server hosting fees on which the tweetbot runs.. I still have all the dozens of hours that I poured into making the bot… I still have all the overhead of making listings…

But this is progress! This is really good progress, because it’s one repetitive and simple task that I no longer have to spend time on or even think about. A robot is great at doing it for me!

Ok that’s it for today. I’ll wrap this up with gratitude and affirmations.

Freestyle! because I think this end-of-the-post process of gratitude and affirmations is one thing that is keeping me from wanting to write in the first place.

I’m grateful for discovering a great meal that is cheap and easy to make

• 4.3 cups water — 4 cups for the soup, 4 Tbsp (0.3 cups) for the rice
• 1/4 cup dried green lentils
• 1/4 cup dried red lentils
• 1/4 cup dried split peas
• 1/4 cup barley
• 2 Tbsp brown rice
• 1 Tbsp onion powder
• 2 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 pinch cumin

Cooked in my instant pot on the “mixed grains” setting for 1 hour. I was very satisfied with this meal and I will eat it again tomorrow!

I’m a kickass person and I deserve all the happiness in the world.

Excelsior!