Notes from therapy yesterday
I felt shame for choosing Magpies as my most annoying sound.
I was doing the thing where I was speaking, I was trying to get a laugh or a response. I wasn’t talking to express myself.
I felt disconnected from the group when I was asked, “are you a caregiver?” and my response was no. I don’t think anybody else in the group could say the same.
What I do to deal with my problems list A
- Meditation
- Try to find a solution
- write
- walk
- exercise
- spend time in nature
- gratitude (as part of journal)
What I do to deal with my problems list B
- Think about the issue a lot
- talk to self over and over
eat too much(deprecated!stop eating(deprecated!)- isolate self
- focus on what is not going right
- suppress thoughts & feelings
- Hit something (my keyboard) (rare)
- store tension in my body
- stop sleeping
- ignore the problem
- other (fap)
Homework
Explore meditation and mindfulness. Meditate using the guided meditation audio at self-compassion.org. Find something to use which is my own meditation style. (I already got this on lock!)
Research– What are the three pillars of compassion?
Journal
I’m downloading the windows version of Endless Space 2 via steamcmd on linux.
#!/bin/bash
steamcmd \
+@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType windows \
+login 1997crispydj39 \
+force_install_dir "/media/chris/storage/Steam Library" \
+app_update 392110 validate \
+quitA big pain point for me is downloading games via steam on windows, because I live in Linux, not windows. In the past, I have tried to come up with a way of booting my windows partition as a virtual machine guest on Linux. I’ve had some success with this, but apparently windows 10 detects this sort of thing, and boots a dummy instance of windows which doesn’t load the same way as if I were booting the windows installation directly. It’s like a sandbox, and the changes I make to it do not persist into the actual windows installation once I’m ready to game and I reboot into windows.
The steamcmd download is just a way for me to get the game onto disk while I’m going throughout my regular day, working in Linux. Later on, I can boot into windows, and the game should be ready to go. I’m unsure of whether or not I’ll need to use the backup/restore feature in Steam on windows to get the app to show up on Steam on Windows, or whether Steam will recognize that the game is in the Steam folder as it should be, and everything will just be ready to go.
BTW, the force_install_dir is an SSD which both my Windows and Linux installations have access to. I think it’s formatted as NTFS which means that either OS can read/write to it.
I invited my brother D. to play Northgard. He said he didn’t have it installed but he will get it installed so we can play this evening.
Super stoked about tomorrow’s halloween party! I have some work to do on my costume still. Paint the paper mask, and make a cloth face mask. My mom is visiting my grandma in southern Idaho and won’t be back till tomorrow. That means that I’m on my own for putting it all together!
The hardest part is going to be the fabric face mask– I lack patience in creating such things. I just want to apt -y install black-fabric-facemask but that’s totally not a thing!
The closest thing to that would be shopping online, but the load time is terribly long! I need it today!
I’m hungy. I have a bowl of oatmeal on my countertop ready to eat, but I got 15 minutes of this writing session left.
Re-encoding video on a $10 VPS is a bad idea. If only I had more internet bandwidth, I could solve so many problems!
Ok so the problem I have is that Ironmouse and ProjektMelody do live streams, and I’m either a) busy with work, or b) ready for sleep.
So my solution is to create tivomouse, a youtube-dl wrapper script which will record the live stream so I can watch it later.
Now, this would be fine and good if I had fast internet, because I could just record the highest quality stream, and watch it later. But I can’t. I can’t stream the highest quality stream because I have like 5Mbps download on a good day.
So that’s where I use my VPS. Im literally using the same ubuntu instance that is hosting my blog to do this, because I can’t afford to spin up a VPS and do this. I’m a broke boii for the time being, and will be until I can figure out a way to rake in more money on a regular basis.
So I run tivomouse on my VPS, and it records the HD video just fine. I have done this twice so far, the first time being on wednesday(?) for ProjektMelody’s Chaturbate live stream.
Ok so now I have a 7GB ProjektMelody video sitting on my VPS. That would take like 5 hours to transfer from the VPS to my computer, and I’d have to figure out a way to resume the download in case of network instability, which is likely.
At this point, hindsight being 20/20, I would have been over this hurdle already had I just downloaded the file overnight. But I didn’t. So the problem remains of how can I get this 7GB file to my local computer without getting kicked off of LTE because I’m always downloading 7GB files and AT&T considers me to be abusing my unlimited data plan?
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention my internet plan. I pay $50 or $60 a month for this unlimited data. My phone is basically my modem for my laptop.
Ok so in the future, I think I just solved my problem. I will simply download the file overnight.
What I came up with yesterday was to use ffmpeg on the VPS to re-encode the video into a smaller filesize, which I could then transfer to my local computer.
The encode has been going since last night. It’s been around 10 hours so far. By my estimate, that process is going to take a total of 22 hours.
The encode is taking time, it’s taking processor power. That use of CPU is adding to the load times for visitors to the blog. It’s taking a shit ton of time and resulting in a lower quality video. I could have just started a file transfer, it would have taken much less time, and I would retain the full HD video!
It’s silly, really. If I am to re-encode the video to a smaller size, I might as well not record the highest quality video to begin with!
I’m glad I wrote about this, because now I see the silliness of what I’m doing. From now on, I’m going to bite the bullet, tax the network and download the complete HD file overnight!
It’s not like 7GB is a huge amount. Team Fortress 2 is around 32GB, and I’d download that if I really wanted to play again. It would probably take me several nights to get that game.
I’m at 48.38% of my download of Endless Space 2. It’s been going for… about an hour. I think it’s a 3GB game? I can’t remember.
Food time!
The order I mentioned yesterday was from a customer who seems to be brand spankin’ new to eBay. They wanted to save on shipping by ordering several items and doing combined shipping. They proceeded to order one item and ask for a combined shipping invoice. LOL.
I sent them an invoice but then they said I didn’t send an invoice for all the items they ordered.
I replied and said I didn’t get a purchase for any other items.
They also said that they can’t buy the other items without paying immediately.
I checked my payment business policies and it looks like none of my items require immediate payment. So I think the customer might have been incorrectly assuming that the other products they were interested in were from my eBay store.
So we’ll see how this goes.
This is what I like to see! Each of those items sells for at least $5. I have an ongoing promotion which gives 30% off 3 or more items, so I’m thinking the customer is taking advantage of that sale. Very good, very good! If every sale grosses $20, that’s exactly where I want to be!
I’m sorta half in, half out right now. Journalling, I mean. I’m half solving eBay issues, half writing in my journal. Doing both at once means that I end up being mediocre at both!
I wish there was a way to make mock purchases on eBay. I want to be able to use eBay as a customer, make purchases at my eBay store, and preview the experience that a customer would have. I basically want to audit my shipping policies, because I keep getting messages about international combined shipping.
I think my international shipping policy is configured to be a flat $13 base charge, followed by an additional $0 for every item after that. But I don’t know if that’s actually what is getting shown to my customers because there’s absofuckinglootly no way to see what an international customer would see!
I guess the way to solve this problem would be to visit eBay through an international Virtual Private Network (VPN). I don’t have a VPN service right now, though.
In the past I’ve used Ironsocket and that worked really well. The only problem is cost. I can’t spend $$ for a VPN subscription right now!
Oh hey, I can set up my own international VPN via Vultr. Then I can just destroy the VPN when I’m done testing. That’ll cost like a dollar at most, if I keep the VPS livetime short.
I’ma do that now! I want to figure this out so I’m not completely clueless as to what my customers are seeing!!!
Currently listening to fefe radio. I can’t believe that she makes $$$ just by streaming music. Ok no, let me rephrase. I’m surprised that she makes money this way. She’s made $300 in the past few days. It’s obvious she works hard on this and I’m in no way saying that she doesn’t deserve the money. I’m just surprised! It’s not like she made the music she streams. She could have made some of it, but that’s not why people are donating. They’re donating because there’s a community based around the music.
Closing
Affirmations
76. Today, I forgive myself.
77. My body knows how to get better; I will listen to it and rest when needed.
78. I am stronger than my worries.
Gratitude
I’m grateful for magic-wormhole which lets me quickly and easily transfer files between my servers and my laptop.
I’m grateful for gedit which is a nice place to copy-paste and make quick notes.
I’m grateful for the patient drivers who didn’t honk and didn’t speed past me when I shared the road with them today.
I’m grateful for for ipfs and filecoin which bring me excitement for future possibilities for file sharing and content distribution. I’m grateful for Vultr which is a quality VPS provider which empowers me with cost effective computing power in well-connected datacenters worldwide.
