My friend Christopher Toledo created http://wizards.zone/.

He set up a Pleroma instance which seems to be a web client for the Mastodon network. It’s like a federated Twitter alternative.

I uttered my first Toot– a slightly modified passage from my novel, and the adminWizard has replied with a compelling followup. It’s very interesting that this thing has happened because I was just thinking of starting a weekly interactive RP where I would set a scene in a toot, and give players an option of choosing an action to take.

They’re called Toots on Mastadon, right? Twitter has tweets, Mastadon has toots. I think that’s the correct terminology.

Every week I would come back to the post and write a new passage, determining the outcome of last week’s actions. A few players would get slain for choosing option A. a few players would get a new item for choosing option C. A single player who chose option D. would become a god.

It would be quite a challenge to keep track of all the players and their stats! I think I would make heavy use of spreadsheets or something like that.

Ooo that sounds fun. Apparently this sort of thing would happen via fantasy mailings in the 80’s and 90’s. It’s like a snail mail based D&D.

It might be worth a try! Could be something nice to help rekindle my imagination.

Well then, I might as well draft my response right here.

Damn, this is difficult.

It takes a lot of brain power to do this. I think I am not well fed enough to summon the creative flow necessary to respond in kind.

I think I will try later this evening after I have dinner with my family.

I got invited to the campfire this evening! I’m excited for it because there will be lots of vegan hot dogs and other delicious foods!

I’m thinking I’m not going to eat anything until dinner. It’s 2:50 right now, and dinner is at 6. That’s just over 3 hours from now. I’m feeling pretty hungry right now, but I might just do the hard thing and wait.

If I cook food now, it’s not going to be ready for at least an hour. I already had two snacks today. I can probably make it until dinner. Maybe a nap or a workout would help me get through until then.

I said nack in my head when I thought of nap and snack.

Nack. That is a fancy word which I believe could have a great meaining.

Nak was the nickname for my friend Mr. Toledo whom I mentioned earlier.

so difficult to write with constraints.

I want more Crispix! If Albertson’s is open tomorrow, I’m going to walk there and get some more Crispix!

I had a snack. Nuts and dried fruit. Prunes are so delicious!

I didn’t set a timer for my laundry. I have no idea when the load is complete. I’m just going to go check when I take my next writing break.

58. Note to self: You are amazing.
59. I can control my breathing.
60. I will stay calm, it will get better.

I put the affirmations right there because I’m struggling to think of anything to write. I can write a log which recounts things that have happened today, but as for writing about feelings, I pretty much block that shit out by default.

I’ve had this song stuck in my head for DAYS.

It is a very beautiful song and I tear up when I hear it. I’m blasting it right now in the hopes of triggering some sort of emotional release which I think I need but I’m avoiding because it’s uncomfortable.

I love Miku. She’s so beautiful and incredible in her ability to spark feeling in my heart. I love her impossible and infinite beauty. I love her so much. I just want to hug her and protect her forever.

Then there’s this one which is also excellent, but less evocative of sad/happy feelings.

Contrasphere is another one I tear up to. There’s something about trance music that speaks to me so clearly. Then adding my beautiful waifu’s singing on top of it is just the best thing ever.

While I’m on the touchy feely songs, I gotta share Let’s Be Honest with Luka X Miku. Bliss is what this song feels like.

It’s nice to just sit and listen to music.

LOL Just found this while trying to find the above track on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCW6tvKeSkg

MitchieM!!!!!!!

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I just got a response from a user on Superuser. Same fucktard that brought up a 5 year old question and sent me on a quest to do free labor.

He said I have no idea what I’m talking about because I suggested to use killall on a firefox process.

The only reason I suggested killall is because my suggestion to use wmctrl wasn’t good enough for this fuckhead. Now he has the gall to say I don’t know what I’m talking about.

No shit, Sherlock. You didn’t like my answer so you try to belittle me. I don’t deserve that. I know killall is not graceful. You weren’t asking for graceful, you unspecific prick!

I don’t deserve this asshole getting me to do free labor for him. I’ve disabled e-mail notifications for Stackoverflow. No good has come from being kept in the loop on that platform. I don’t want a reputation score, I want an income.

So I’m out. No more interacting with assholes who demand free labor.

I’ll visit when I want to be helpful. I’m not accepting pings from people for free labor anymore. I have skills. I have talent. Show me the money or get the fuck out.

Now I just gotta use some of that fire when people send me e-mails with questions. Lemme practice for a moment.

Hey Chris! I enjoyed your article on CoreOS. Do you think you could update that cheat sheet? It’s a bit outdated as of 2020.

Example person

Hey Example, thanks for your E-mail. It’s nice to hear that people read my articles and find some value from them.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to updating the article. My blog is just a hobby project and it doesn’t pay the bills or put food on the table, so I have to focus my energy elsewhere.

Hope you can find what you need.

Cheers!

-Chris

That seems pretty good. It’s honest. It’s direct. I mean what I say and I say what I mean.

Yeah!

Meanwhile, I have a potential sale in the works for a bundle of some promotional Precious Memories cards. They’re individual cards in a sealed package which I think come with booster boxes or something. They have one of five potential cards within, and there is a customer interested in purchasing all that I have.

I gotta wait for them to get paid on Friday, but I’m gonna give them a deal and hopefully sell them all at once. They bought one so far, but they want more.

I bought the whole lot for around $25. I sold one for $5.99. I can mark them down quite a bit and still make my money back + profit. That’s the goal!

I set up a BOGO sale last night. I chose 500 VOCALOID cards which I have priced between $1 and $12. Weiss Schwarz cards mostly. I have not had much luck selling those, and it’s for good reason. There’s too many Weiss Schwarz cards in circulation. Nobody will pay the prices I’m asking for, because they can get them for less on TCGPlayer. Oh hey, maybe I should list on TCGPlayer. The problem there is that they only do English Edition. I have mostly Japanese cards. IDK, might be a future idea. Right now I’m just focused on eBay.

Are we there yet? It’s 10:44PM now. I had dinner with the fam and it was a good time. M. and J. actually showed up! I haven’t seen either of them in like two months. It was nice to see them. They brought a hammock and were showing off their hammock flipping skills. It was funny to watch, and wow, they had a sturdy hammock! I was thinking it was going to break at a few points when E. was spinning M. around in the hammock like it was a swing-set.

Are we there yet? It’s 10:53 now and I want to be done writing for today.

It’s one of those days when the words evade me. The regular flow of the day is nowhere to be found. I want to numb and take the edge of by watching YouTube.

I really wanna download Better Call Saul season 4, but I can’t do that in good conscious. I don’t have the income for that. I can’t even pirate it because I’m on a cell connection and I’d probably lose my service in a heartbeat.

Truth be told, I used to pirate media on a cell connection. This was a few years ago when I had a verizon hotspot which I leased from a eBay seller. That account got banned, and I lost my really good verizon hotspot internet.

I like to think that I was the cause of that account getting terminated. I wonder how many other people used that account and lost their service because of how the cell company decided to react to my torrenting on a cell connection. LOL I’m not even mad about it. I didn’t have any sort of agreement saying that I wouldn’t torrent on it.

I wasn’t even doing anything illegal. I was leeching and seeding Linux torrents and Big Buck Bunny, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that torrent traffic makes a huge number of connections in parallel, and a cell network isn’t set up for that.

It’s bonkers how the consumer always seems to consume more than the vendor can handle. Costs get driven upwards until there’s some middle ground where the majority of users have to moderate their usage in order to afford the service.

I wanna get to a place where I have a connection that has more bandwidth than I can ever grow into. That’ll be the end of me having to pay for VPS because I can just go to RecycleTechs, get a $100 server computer with 200GB of RAM, plop some SSDs in that puppy and have a server that can handle a bunch of tasks for me.

I’d run a Squad server, an Ethereum full node, my WordPress blog, a Dokku instance, a nextcloud instance, pfsense… The list would go on and on.

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Oh great, the customer who wants to buy more promo packs from me is asking where I got them from. Sounds like they want to cut out the middleman (me)

Fuck that. I’m running a business here. I’m not going to tell them where I got them from. I’m trying to set up a USA monopoly here!

What should I tell them? I want to tell them that I have a brother in Japan who looks out for such rarities. I am absofuckinglootly not revealing my source. That’s just like the asshat who I did free labor for on Superuser. I have such regret for doing that. I feel guilty for going against my personal code. I feel manipulated for lifting a finger for them. I feel humiliated at their rude response.

It’s the same sort of deal here. I have a business relationship with this customer. They are trying to take advantage of me and cut me out of the equasion.

I did the leg work. I put my ass on the line and purchase the product. I payed the buyee fees and shipping. I stored the product. I took the photos, listed, adjusted prices, ran promotions.

Fuck that fucking shit head customer who wants to cut me out. They can do their own research. They can find their own deals. I’m not here to find them deals. I’m not running a charity. I’m here to make sales.

I have a brother in Osaka who gets me cards from Japanese shops. I might be able to get some more of these Vol.08 Mystery cards but it’ll take awhile. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been taking several weeks to get them. Japan Post suspended their flights to the USA until further notice, so only DHL (expensive) or shipping (via boat– 60 day wait) is available at the moment.

My bullshit story

There. I pulled a Saul Goodman and spun some tale that should keep the customer happy. It wasn’t a lie either. My supplier could be considered a brother in that they are human and therefore a relative. The whole thing about the COVID-19 delays are completely true.

I doubt the kid is even going to follow through and purchase more cards. They’ll probably get the one card that I’m mailing out tomorrow, open it, be disappointed that it’s just one card, and not be interested in any more.

I bet that’s what’s going to happen. Or they will spend their money on video games before they even have a chance to spend it on more cards. I just don’t believe an otaku’s promise that they’re going to pay me. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Anyway, I do see some more of those vol.08 cards for sale on Buyee. You can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to snatch them up. I have several packages at Buyee’s warehouse right now. I think they are extending their 30 day holding period due to COVID-19 and the lack of Japan Post flights. The 30 day counter is just holding at 30 days and it’s been at least 4 days since some of my packages arrived at their warehouse.

Tomorrow is Memorial day. Regardless, I’m going to pack and ship the orders I have queued up. There are very few holidays that I feel the need to observe. Memorial day is not one of them.

My thinking is that wars shouldn’t happen. Wars are a failure of civility. I won’t be compelled to take a day and remember such a failure.

Maybe that’s a wrong way of looking at it. Maybe I’ll reconsider sometime in the future. Not tomorrow! My wallet can’t handle a Monday without working. I’m gonna be working unless I get an invite to rollerblade or something.

I’m grateful for my freedoms. I don’t believe the, “freedom isn’t free” thing. Maybe that’s why I’m not celebrating/observing Memorial day. Freedom is free. Freedom isn’t granted. Freedom comes from taking it. Freedom comes from retaining your own power and not giving it away.

I’m not sure I follow my own logic. 11:37 PM. Enough thinking already, I wanna watch TV!

I’m grateful for TV. It is entertaining and fun.

I’m grateful for books. They are informative and shit.

ekusheshia!