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Had a surprise visit from my friend. We got tacos (because Trump Always Chickens Out) and played Bloodbowl and for once my half long circus team (plus two treemen and a squirrel) killed two lizards and actually won. Which never happens.
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Hey authors… do you have a discord for your readers?
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I have been reading (well listening while I go to sleep) to a lot of older children’s books. wizard of Oz, Alice in wonderland, many others by L Frank Baum. And the best part is… there isn’t a physical description of the main characters. Just imagine a little girl and go with that. Simple
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If you want me to grate cheese you need to be real specific on the amount or I will grate all the cheese. Consider yourself warned.
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You have some nerve
I am in a little bit of a rough place at the moment. My entire life I have done things that require manual dexterity (juggling, balloon twisting, slight of hand, building and painting models, playing banjo/ukulele, crochet, making puppets). There are probably more than I am remembering, but here is the problem.
My right hand (aka my good hand) has some sort of weird nerve thing happening on the pointer and middle finger. This basically means that most of the time it is fine but can hurt if I move it in a certain way. But if I am feeling lucky it will randomly feel like someone is smashing my fingers with a hammer. My doc has me wearing a wrist brace during the day (since it doesn’t seem to happen at night) which limits my range of movement and makes my hobbies hard to do.
And since that can’t just solve the problem, I have started getting pain when I attempt to do the basics of all of my hobbies. They don’t think it is carpel tunnel because none of the other markers are there for it. Basically I get to have a super fun nerve test in a couple of months. Until then I can write, which I have been doing, and play video games. But I feel like I am going crazy because I want to do all the things I love to do.
I tried a little bit of mini painting yesterday and have angry fingers today. I am thinking about trying to paint left handed but I think that might just make me more frustrated.
Anyone have any good hobbies that only need your non-dominant hand that you can do while watching movies?
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Whenever I start writing more I wonder why I ever stopped. Which means I am just on the edge of writing myself into a corner. What is this outlining thing people are always going on about?
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I hate the healthcare industry
I would like to pretend that this is a new feeling, but it is not. For the longest time my hate of the healtcare industry was based on how they treated people close to me or from my time working in healthcare. Now that I have been diagnosed with a chronic illness my hatred is a lot more personal. Like a lot more personal.
My personal chronic illness is truly minor in the grand scheme of all chronic illnesses. But it still sucks. I get to see a rheumatologist(I want everyone to know that I spelled that correctly out spell check) all the time and she has been wonderful, their office staff is great, and they have been every helpful. It is just everything else involved in my care that makes me twitch.
For instance I need to get a Nerve Conduction Study done on my right arm because I have been getting random pinging pain my my right pointer and middle finger. Probably some sort of nerve problem, hence the Nerve Conduction Study. The referral was sent, by fax of course, last Thursday (or maybe Wednesday) and even though faxes are pretty instantaneous I received no call about it. So I called. Thrice I called. One my first call today they had finally received my referral. I thought, “Yay now I can get this test and hopefully figure out what the hell is causing my pain.”
I thought wrong.
The person I talked to told me that they couldn’t schedule my appointment. Like, at all. Not in a week or a month or a year. I had to go on to a waitlist and they would call me when an appointment opened up. WTF. When I asked why they didn’t have any appointments and that I was fine being put way out just to get the appointment on the schedule. She was very clear that there was nothing she could do and they would call me about an appointment. I figured that would be about as good as them calling me when they got my referral.
Needless to say I was pissed and I let it ruin my day. That was all I could think about.
Then I rage checked my email (becasue I was rage doing everything today) and I had a message from local hospital system saying " We just got your referral and you can call to schedule your appointment." What. So I called.
This person was much better and much more helpful at scheduling my appointment for Oct 3rd. Which means I get to live with nerve pain in my dominant hand until then. I asked if I could be put on the cancellation list so I could possible get in sooner. Apparently, unlike every other procedure from this system, they are unable to do that. Like what? Are they trying to make sick people sicker by making everything hard?
All of this to say that anyone who doesn’t think that the healthcare system in America is fucked has never been in need of actual healthcare and is probably an idiot. And anyone who thinks that cutting public health budgets is good for anyone is also a fucking idiot.
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I need to go clean my office… tell me to clean my office
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Starting this new story and I need some help. The story I am writing involves North American Cryptids. So I am wondering: What is your favorite Cryptid in North America? I love them all and love all of the stories about them. So tell me what your favorite is so I can add it to the research list.
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I have started writing again!! YAY!!!
Like always I write like lighting when an idea hits and then I just have to remember how to keep momentum. I am also supplimenting my writing by reading books about writing in an attempt to learn how to keep my writing practice going. Currently me and my story are in the honey moon phase where I write like the dickens in an attempt to get as much of it out of my brain as possible. It is super fun.
The story is about a person who study folklore and biology and is trying to discover the existence of at least on cryptid in north America. She is in North Carolina trying to use trail cams to get a picture of a Wampus Cat when she gets an email that there are weird goings on in Vermont (yay Champy). So she goes to investigate. And because I am writing it she has an awesome VW bus that she travels in and who knows where it is headed.
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Thinking more about writing. I miss writing. Which is funny because I have more time in my life (kind of) than I have ever had before. I have been reading my old manuscripts and I really enjoy the ideas, I just need to figure out the whole revising thing. So… here we go.
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It is about Clown Time
One of the places I find my mind drifting during this horrible chapter in the United States is clowning. Which might seem a little weird but hear me out. Clowns has been around forever in one form or another and they try to use humor to shine light on society. Emmett Kelly’s Weary Willy was a great example of using a clown to highlight the hobo lifestyle. It was a formally successful business man who lost everything and was trying to make his way in a new world. The hobo clown was about seeing the world in a new and different light. Or that is how I always viewed it.
For me, my favorite clowns are the Auguste clowns. These clowns are not as prim and proper as a whiteface clown nor are they as down on their luck as a tramp clown. Auguste clowns are the person trying to succeed and failing but never giving up. Eventually they succeed in what they are trying to do, usually at the expense of the more proper whiteface clown.
To me the Auguste clown is what we should all strive to be. Never give up, always try new things, and approach the world with a childlike wonder. My clown is an Auguste clown and I miss seeing the world through those eyes. Which means it is time to start trying to see the world as a clown rather then a middle aged dude who is scared of what is happening in the world. It won’t make the world less terrible but it will allow me to choose how I view the world and what my reaction will be.
One of the many parts of clowning that drew me to it when I was 16 is the ability to play. I (thanks in part to my ADHD) love having fun and trying out new things. I have tried to not grow out of this playfulness but life is hard and being an adult sucks. But it is time to find time to play. Time to get out the juggling equipment and balloons and start playing. Not sure if I am going to go back into clowning but am going to try and add it back into my life.
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What are you doing?
Why dylan what were you doing during the collapse of the american goverment? Well that is an oddly personal question… but since you asked here we go.
I spent a majority of the last 4+ months building a python script that will animate characters talking. This is for “work” though it has morphed into so much more. I have finally been able to build my joke-a-tron bot. This all started with jokesareawesome a now defunct website that @harper made that was just a collection of jokes. I loved it. I used it. It was great.
For a while I would do a day of jokes on Twitter (which I will never ever call X) where I would post a joke every 5, 10 or 15 minutes. During this time harper provided me with a spreadsheet of all the jokes are awesome jokes. It was great but it was a ton of work. I thought about automating a bot to do it but that was well out of my wheelhouse of skills.
UNTIL AI!!!
Say what you will about artificial intelligence but it is super duper fun. I know that the way it has been trained has been not great because it has been stealing stuff and all that, but as someone with ADHD it fits well with my hyperfocus. Like super well. And I have learned a ton both from the AI and from general research on things that fascinate me.
You may not know this about me but I love cartoons and animation (and drawing, and making stuff and all that). The problem is that my lack of focus has led me to pursue all of the things and I lose interest just as fast. So by combining all of the things I love into one project I was able to actually create things.
In case you want… here are all of the github repos I made to create this project.
toon-in speech-aligner 2d-voice-sync
There are couple of them that I am still working on. The reason for so many is I am really good at overwhelming myself with features I want. And I am bad at managing my repos so when I get frustrated I take what works and start over. I am going to keep working on making the joke-a-tron work and then I will start posting jokes here.
When I first started I tried to find other projects that did similar things but most of them were outdated or used libraries that were outdated. I also tried out using different AIs for the coding help and found that they all are good at different things and I find my self using Claude the most. It seems to be the most consistent and I have rarely ran into the limits when working.
I also started playing with Eleven labs to create voices and to do the actual voice work for the jokes. Combining my script with some assets that I paid someone to make on fivrrrrrr has really brought it all together. Now I just need to keep refining and then it will be awesome.
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Life is Hard
Which I am sure you know and understand. I think the part of it that disturbs me the most is that there are people making decisions that they have no business making without listening to experts in the field. For instance a certain non-doctor has decided that he will be able to cure autism with wishful thinking and that we are over medicating our children.
That’s cool.
As someone who is medicated for various mental and physical ailments it makes me absolutely sick. I am so worried that I won’t be able to get my meds and not only will I be a squirrel bouncing from place to place, unable to focus on anything, but I will also have horrible pain. I really appreciate that there is nothing I can do to stop this.
If you are a person who can help with this, please do. Because myself and others who are trying to survive this dictatorship are scared.
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Hey!!!
Here is out tv schedule for the year. Watching a lot of shows. Feel free to watch along.
I’ll keep updating as time goes by
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I have been thinking about things and honestly everything is terrible. I am wondering how much I can continue to hide behind hobbies to save my mental health. Of course I am.
Take care of yourselves and do what you enjoy.
And here is a cartoon bear reading the constitution.
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Cats be crazy
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Painting some kill teams and watching Jurassic park movies. So I guess you could say I am escaping into fantasy worlds or something.
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Writing is hard!!!
I think we can all agree that writing is hard. And when I say it is hard I mean that consistently writing is hard. I love writing I just wish I did it more. I recently stumbled upon my collection of notebooks from when I was writing my first full novel. Reading through them showed me that I have a lot of fun ideas I just need to get them out of my head and on to some pages.
I am currently trying to transfer all those notebooks into my remarkable 2 tablet. I am sure I could scan them in and save them as pdfs, but it has been a lot of fun reading and copying over the notes. The only problem is that I don’t write by hand very much anymore so my hand is getting so tired. It also doesn’t help that my remarkable marker pro broke so it doesn’t work great anymore.
I have a new pen thing coming so I can continue to transfer to the remarkable. And then I need to rewrite that first novel with all of my new knowledge and time.
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This is the puppet I have made that gets the most use.
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All I am saying is that if you are not watching Hallmark (tm) movies this Christmas you are a fool. I recommend Hot Frosty
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Presentable
I am a person who loves looking fancy. I love wearing ties, both bow and otherwise, nice slacks, a jacket. But I don’t want to be boring, so there has to be bright colors and amazing patterns. My dream is to own multiple three piece tweed suits. Or, I guess, that was my dream.
For the five years prior to the pandemic I wore slacks, a button up shirt, and a tie every day I worked. It started when I was doing admissions at a long term care facility and continued through a hospice marketing job and into my activities director position. But when the pandemic happened I started slipping. I stopped wearing ties, jeans became part of my routine, and sometimes I would wear a sweater with just a t-shirt underneath gasp.
Once I left healthcare I started working from home exclusively. Athliesure became my wardrobe. I wear sweatpants and a sweatshirt everyday. Fancy is gone from my wardrobe. And I miss it.
But how do I bring it back? I sit at a computer 90% of my day and I only see people virtually. So do I wear a button up and tie and sweatpants? Since I run my own company I don’t really have a dress code. And the way I look is less important than the expertise I bring to my field.
Granted I have never really cared what other people think about how I dress/look. I have always dressed fancy for me. I wonder if this is the last bit of my recovery from my mental breakdown, this interest in dressing fancy because it makes me happy. I hope so.
That has been the hardest part of dealing with my anxiety: not knowing if I am doing something because my brain is an asshole or if it is just me. And it is all me, just different parts of me.
Hopefully this is me continuing to move forward with my mental wellbeing.
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OMG NFTs WTF
For the last couple years I have lived in the world of web3… which for the longest time I (and most people) referred to as NFTs. It is entirely possible that you have not heard of NFTs but it is much more likely that what you have heard has been overwhelmingly negative. Which is a bummer because the technology that makes these magic jpegs go is fascinating. Let’s talk about it.
Non Fungible Tokens, that is what NFT stands for, are unique tokens that exist on the blockchain. To break that down further, an NFT is a work of art that lives on a giant worldwide computer with a public record of ownership. To make it simpler, imagine purchasing a physical work of art from an artist you love and the purchasing of that art work is noted in public record. If you sell that artwork to someone else, that transfer gets recorded and the new owner is noted.
I am not sure that makes any more sense. I have spent the last 18 months explaining NFTs to individuals and fortune 500 companies… and I am still not sure it always makes sense. We will come back to understanding in a bit, but first lets talk about why NFTs are amazing.
When I was first introduced to NFTs the part of them that really grabbed my attention was the way they were built to protect artists. It is really hard to make money as an artist and once your art is sold you receive no more monetary benefit from that work of art. So if you sell it for $50 and the person who buys it sells it for $10,000, you still only have $50. NFTs change that.
As the creator of an NFT you can choose the amount of royalties that you want to receive for subsequent sales of your art work. This can be from 0-10%. And these rules live forever. That means as your work becomes more popular (or you become more famous) you can continue to make money off our your work. Which, to me, seems only fair.
One of the, I hesitate to say, bad sides of NFTs are flippers. People who want to buy and sell NFTs in order to make money. These people are not interested in the art work, the artist, the community, or anything other than making money. They have told themselves that they “deserve” to get paid for purchasing art and will do everything in their power to pump the value of an NFT so they can dump what they purchased.
This is not an artists first attitude and goes against what I believe the power of NFTs to be. There are flippers who don’t think that they should have to pay artist’s royalties and have built marketplaces that do not honor the royalties for creators. This is not great, but led to some interesting community discussions around artist royalties and what artists deserve/ are owed.
I have headed off on a tangent about artist royalties… that is a discussion for another day.
NFTs are a wonderful tool for artists to connect with their fans in a new way. It is also a way for artists to continue to get paid for their work long after it has passed from their hands. And that is why they are important.
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Hobbies on Hobbies on Hobbies
As I have stated numerous times on this blog I have a lot of hobbies. This is a problem that a lot of people with ADHD have because we get super excited about something, buy the stuff to do it, get started, and then the next awesome hobby comes along. It is a constant cycle that I have finally learned to just ride instead of trying to stop.
What this means is that I don’t get rid of hobby supplies when I stop being interested in the hobby… because it will come back around and I will regret getting rid of it. This also helps with the ADHD tax of spending money on a thing only to get bored and get rid of them.
By allowing the cycle of hobbies to guide me I don’t feel the immense guilt I used to feel when I would stop doing a hobby. I am able to put the hobby supplies away and start the next hobby with a clear mind. This also gives me a great depth of options when I start to get bored with a hobby.
My current menu of hobbies is:
- making puppets
- sewing
- painting miniatures
- playing the uke
- learning the banjo
- writing
- drawing
- synths
I am guessing that there are more hobbies in my cycle that I am forgetting. The handiest thing about the cycle is that I don’t limit when I can jump hobbies. I can spend a couple days painting minis, then pick up my uke for a mini jam session, and then go right back to painting minis.
As will most things in my life I am a jack of all trades and a master of none. Which sometimes bothers me. I know people who are experts in their fields and it is impressive to watch them work. I always dream of being an expert in something, but as I have gotten older I have realized the strengths that my multiple hobbies have given me when I need to learn something new.
I hope this helps people like me, with ADHD and too many hobbies, come to grips with how they can manage the cycle of hobbies without feeling shame that your interests are changing again.
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It has been two years since I posted
This post has been a long time coming. At the beginning of 2021 I was working in healthcare in the middle of a global pandemic. It was super fun, as you might imagine. I have generally been a positive person, but it was taking its toll and I went to a dark place. With the support of my awesome partner I took FMLA for a month, I got help (and medication). When I went back, I was in a better place but the work was no longer for me. So I needed something else.
My brother has been trying to get me to work in tech forever. He loves and thinks that everyone else should love it. As a younger sibling of a tech genius I never felt like I belonged. I know that comparison is the thief of joy, but with a brother like Harper the comparison is strong. Prior to losing my mind, he told me about NFTs and I made a few (really dumb) NFTs on opensea. Once I left my job permanently he told me I should jump into NFTs as it was relatively new tech and it could be fun.
So I jumped.
Almost two years have passed since I had a mental breakdown and thought about ending it all and I still work with NFTs. I have been lucky to work on some amazing projects with my company, nervous, as well as work with amazing people on amazing projects during my time at V3. The whirlwind of the last two years is still spinning as I wake up everyday and feel incredibly blessed. It hasn’t been perfect, but it has been interesting.
Working in an emerging tech field has been wild. Web3/NFTs have all the problems of a new technology and peoples money. There are scams and hacks that turn people away, the market crashed and scared a bunch of people away, but the people who are building this new future are still here and they are building cool stuff.
I am just happy to be a part of it.
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