6:30 PM. I woke up from an 8 hour slumber a few minutes ago. Upon checking my e-mail, I saw that the buyer of the $200+ order I received a few days ago has initiated a return.

The buyer says that I sent them the wrong item. They say instead of receiving cards, they received 100 dragonshield sleeves. They photographed the packaging and the dragonshield sleeve box. The thing is, I did send them a dragonshield box, but that was just as protective packaging. The cards are inside the dragonshield box. I hope this is just a misunderstanding, and that we can resolve the issue. I hope it’s as simple as the customer seeing my message, opening the box, and closing the return process.

There is a possibility that the customer is scamming me. They could have opened the box and seen the cards already. They could be intending to return me an empty dragonshield box.

The Dragonshield box had a Sakura Blossom trading post sticker on it, as well as clear packing tape. The customer did not photograph either of those nuances.

I thought it might be too good to be true. I’m not too worried about it either way. I was anticipating a possible scam, so I won’t be let down if it ends up that that’s what it was. I’ll recover and I’ll move forward regardless of the outcome.

I’m happy that my reaction to this potential return is as it is. I’m not descending into a dark place and self ridiculing or using coping mechanisms that reduce my self esteem. I’m accepting the possibility that this is a lousy situation. I’m accepting the possibility that I won’t be able to make rent without dipping into the last of my savings. I’m accepting this mad world we live in where people think it’s okay to rip off a stranger….

But again, I don’t know if that’s the case, yet. It’ll take a few hours or a day until I see how the customer proceeds. There is a chance that this is just a big misunderstanding and that we can resolve this. The customer can get their cards, I can get my money, ebay gets their fee, everybody can be happy.

Today is a good day.

Projektmelody streamed on Chaturbate today at around 3PM. I missed the live stream, but futureporn came in clutch and recorded it for me. futureporn.neocities.com for the win!

There are a few improvements that I need to make to the futureporn website. The first is /ipfs/<hash> links in addition to ipfs://<hash> links. I feel like I talked about this already. Oh well.

The second improvement is that the videos list displays the latest video at the bottom. I want that list to be reversed, so newest videos show on top.

There’s another issue, and that is video buffering. On my shitty connection, the highest quality video buffers like mad. I can work around this by either using a better video player that will buffer for as long as it needs in order to deliver buffer-free playback, but on it’s own, I think that’s not the right solution. I think the right solution is to download multiple stream qualities as the original livestream is played, OR to transcode the highest quality video into lower quality copies that the video player can choose from based on network bandwidth.

All those problems are solvable by me, but there’s something that is hindering the rate at which I can develop and deploy.

Right now, I develop the webpage locally on my laptop. I run tests and make sure everything looks good, then I git push got the main branch on github. Next, I SSH into my VPS, and git pull the project. Next, I have to restart the systemd service which handles execution of the app.

That’s too many steps! Modern workflows are more like, git push production main which sends the main branch to the production remote server. Then some logic on the remote server would automatically handle putting the code where it needs to be, and restarting services.

IDK if there’s a pre-made solution that does that, without having to introduce Docker as a dependency. My little $20/month VPS would struggle to run Docker and wordpress and voddo and futureporn, so I don’t want to go down that route. FuturePorn has already exhausted all memory during it’s execution, but I later found that that was due to axios being a bad boy and having a memory leak. I switched to node-fetch after that instance.

I’m having second thoughts

I’m feeling like I’m getting scammed. I’m just getting a bad feeling from this customer. Ahhhhg! And after I did all that reasoning, the negative thoughts are coming back.

Ok let’s proceed like we are getting scammed. Remember when I made the initial sale, and I was thinking that this could happen? Well let’s just proceed like it has happened. So if I later confirm that yes, we are getting scammed, then there is no let-down. If I later confirm that no, we are not getting scammed, then we are going to be lifted up and relieved.

I wasn’t getting scammed.

Fuck yes! I can pay my rent this month!

The buyer responded with an apology. They were afraid to open the Dragon Shield box because they were afraid that they wouldn’t be able to return it if they did.

They closed the return process. Mission success!

Well I feel… relieved? This still seems too good to be true. The customer spent $200+ dollars on the order… Amazing! A true otaku!

Well I think that in the future, I want to avoid this sort of confusion. I think that if I use Dragon Shield card sleeve boxes, I will put more SBTP stickers on the box, and cover up the Dragon Shield logos.

I remember a thing that Kenwood would do with their boxes should the reuse them. They would slap on several neon green sticker that said, “REPACK” to clearly communicate to inventory people on the receiving end that any outside box labels are likely not accurate.

I’ll take this as a learning experience. I didn’t do anything wrong. I correctly fulfilled the order and packaged it with care. However, there is something I can improve on and that is my packaging material. The Dragonshield sleeve boxes are great for protection cards in a bulk card sale, but as we witnessed today, the styled box with it’s retail appeal can be confusing for customers.

More stickers! or a “REPACK” sticker. Or heck, maybe a custom box would be kickass. Same dimensions as Dragonshield box… No wait, smaller! Half sized would be the best, since I rarely send a large enough quantity of cards to fill a Dragon Shield box. I’d make it a matte pink box with a white cherry blossom.

I wonder how much that would cost? I bet there would be some super large minimum… Like 15,000 pieces. Too expensive for my budget!

I wonder if I could make some? I have a CNC cutting machine… I’d likely have to use a different blade, or at least get a new, sharp one. Then I’d just need to find the right material, and Elmer’s white glue would probably do the trick to hold it together.

Hmm… That’s something to think about. It would be super cool to be able to make boxes myself. I bet there are youtube videos on this exact topic!

There are some really interesting videos on bookbinding and board game making. If I can improve on Grid vs. Gaia to the point where I want to make it a permanent game, I would like to make a foldable board that fits in a nice box. Oh yeah, there are tutorials for board game boxes on youtube! I could use a video like that, and just scale down the box size to fit cards! That is, if I can’t find a more relevant card box tutorial.

CoDA & Shit

I have been putting off my work on CoDA. “Two weeks until therapy when homework is due!” I think. Honestly I can’t even remember what the homework was at this point. I think I wanna move on from having therapy homework. I think my homework should be, socialize, and that’s it.

I can’t find my homework. The search in the admin control panel of WordPress isn’t great. I used to have a plugin that did a better search, but I didn’t like how it’s search box was just slapped on the top bar of WordPress.

I looked through the posts I made on the days that I likely would have transferred paper notes to my blog. I take paper notes during therapy. I’m not seeing anything.

I think I remember throwing paper notes away last week without having transferred them. They’re definitely lost.

Oh well! Dog ate my homework.

Well it would be beneficial for me to do something related to mental health, so I can have something to talk about come therapy next week.

Am I outgrowing therapy? Not a bad thing, LOL.

Yeah, I probably am. I’ve been going regularly for a year and two months. I’ve absorbed a good deal of the curriculum.

Excelsior!

I’m wrappin’ it up. Gonna go poop and then watch Ironmouse & ProjektMelody vs. Nuxtaku on Bust or Bust. LOL Nuxtaku is so going to lose.

Affy

31. I determine the quality of my day and today is going to be fucking amazing!

60. I will stay calm, it will get better.
59. I can control my breathing.

Gratty

I am grateful for my customers. I am especially grateful today for my honest customer who apologized for the confusion…

Wait a minute. I never apologized in that confusion. The customer apologized but I didn’t. I just thanked them. Ok so I might have work to to do there. I might have owed an apology.

I’m definitely struggling with customer service. The other day, a customer wanted to place orders via phone and I said that I cannot offer that at this time. I then went on to say, “you don’t need to send me a message every time you place an offer. I can see your name and I’ll know to give you a discount.”

The customer then went silent for a day. They did not place any more offers, and I think it was because I came off as rude. It was fine for me to say no to the phone call, but it was not okay for me to say, “you don’t have to send me messages for every offer”

I’m grateful to have this moment where I realized my weakpoints in customer service. I am grateful to have these learning experiences so I can do better in the future.

I’m grateful for my persistence. It was persistence that got me through video-website (FuturePorn) in only 4 days. It’s persistence that will get me through sbtp.xyz and all the other ongoing projects I have.