Open Bar: Curbside Pickup Only

[Scribbly]

Things are slowly getting better.

I am continuing to wrestle with my insurance to get towards a point where I can cut down the cost of my treatment considerably. It has been an agonisingly slow process and I'm still nowhere near the end of it, but I do now have the bit of paper that says I am Officially Trans.

Work continues to be very difficult but it has been for years at this point. It is also necessary that I stick with it until the insurance has sorted everything at a bare minimum. Nowhere else offers this level of coverage in the UK, so I'm locked in with this company for the foreseeable. Which is fine. I've started taking steps to make myself more secure here, and if this is what I wind up doing for the next 5 years or so as I milk this policy for everything it is worth ... I can live with that.

It helps that work have also given us a generous two year pay deal and an extra £500 to cover Christmas. Financially, things should ease up for me a lot next year, especially if the insurance works out.

Holiday season is going to be a nuisance. Housemate's partner is coming to stay from the 5th Dec - 5th Jan and we do not have the room to comfortably sustain that. They are also really pushing hard on the 'I want to socialise and do tons of things all the time' angle. Which would be fine under normal circumstances. But I am very tired, I mostly want to hermit and get through the season. I may have to try and explain this diplomatically.

I haven't made any progress on writing or reading projects. But I am still here. I have a plan. I'm going to stick to it. Things will get better.

[altered]

Good to hear things aren't all awful, Scribbly.

I also have issues with work, though it's finding work in my case.

[Saint K1000]

An Error Has Occurred!
The attachments upload directory is not writable. Your attachment or avatar cannot be saved.

Is the upload of avatars prevented to disable the influence of (an)eristic avatars into the forum? Is it a way to reject our Goddess?

[Faust]

No it's a broken chmod permission, I'll take a look this week

[Doktor Howl]

An Error Has Occurred!
The attachments upload directory is not writable. Your attachment or avatar cannot be saved.

Is the upload of avatars prevented to disable the influence of (an)eristic avatars into the forum? Is it a way to reject our Goddess?

[altered]

Been busy dealing with shitty life things (like actually running out of food, like for real) but I found the time to do mix feedback for the past two days. It was for the Memorrhage LP2 coming out some time in 2024.

Garry released the first track on LP2 as a single recently, and it's a decent example of what to expect. Really aggressive, unafraid to experiment, maximalist as fuck.

https://memorrhage.bandcamp.com/track/downstone-2

I did vocals on two tracks and synths on another, so expect to hear more.

Taking a moment to just talk shop: I heard one  "hey what the fuck" moment in the entire thing, during my test listen through laptop speakers (I test through a variety of devices to ensure I pick up the biggest balance of listening environments), and it was on something that was kinda strange to begin with. Everything else, my feedback was nitpicking single hairs in a dog kennel. I couldn't even manage that for the headphones listen, that shit sounded magical.

And I don't think a big-bucks, big-name industry-titan producer could have done anything but wreck the fucking thing. All the trends in metal these days are hide the cymbals in a narrow, character-free frequency band, bury the bass guitar in the low end of the regular guitar -- even, especially if the bass is doing its own thing, pump the mids on the guitar track even after the band spends so much time scooping them on their amp settings, compress the drums until the toms sound like kicks and the kicks sound like a training bag in a boxing gym and the snares sound like bursts of white noise, never use reverb for a GOD DAMN THING, I hate it, I hate it all, and this shit is a breath of fresh air.

Musicians, learn to produce your own stuff! It's mostly vibes, it's not hard, and you will do a better job showcasing your stuff than some man who copy-pastes the EQ settings from his last big project for a paycheck.

[Bruno]

"Officially Youtube Verified US Immigration" channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@USImmigration/featured

255k subscribers

Feels like they're trying to pass themselves off as an official us government youtube channel, but I can't tell if they are up to something nefarious, or just trying to make passive income from some AI generated content.

[Chelagoras The Boulder]

hey yall, still alive somehow. Spent pretty much this entire year living in a bad Mexican soap opera. I'll probably go into more detail when i have more spoons.

Good to see you.

But it's worth mentioning this board is a misery fest at the moment, so you are once more in a Mexican soap opera.

Altered is having a rough go, my mother just went into hospice care, and Scribbly (previously known as Demosquid) is also not dancing any fandangos. CNO seems to be doing alright.

And aside from one or two pinealists, that's all that's left.  Everyone else drifted away (by which I mean "ran") when wossername's ring wasn't properly kissed.

Damn, I'm sorry to hear everyone is going through it. Sincerely, I hope the best for you all

As for me, well in a nutshell, my dad allegedly raped my mom at the end of 2022 and my family has been slowly falling apart for a year and change now. This is made worse by the fact that my mom is a narcissist and is pushing everyone away even as she relies on us to help maintain her health. My dad has fucked off to Arizona to live with my sister and leave the rest of us to clean us their collective mess. This might be slightly more than a nutshell, but I'm also leaving out a lot of WILD shit, including my mother trying to sell my other sister's wedding gown, and also insisting on driving despite an expired license and cataracts. I might make a thread about it, idk.

[QuestionsTheSoil]

My life is really going nowhere.
Fuck me

[Doktor Howl]

My life is really going nowhere.
Fuck me

It's not you.  It's the entire world.

[Cain]

Mine's felt like it's been going nowhere since late 2019 (aka the long 2020).

I'm just vibing now and enjoying my creative projects, like my DMing.

[The Wizard Joseph]

I have been gone from here for a long time, but I am here now. I have some things to say here in the twilight, I guess. I don't know that there's time left before this escahton gets rolling, but it's time to start saying things again.

[altered]

I recently found out that not only did I get scurvy a second time, breaking a promise I made to my recently-dead partner, but I also had CRIPPLING copper, Omega-3 and vitamin B-complex deficiencies. There's bound to be even more dire deficiencies we don't know about.

Coincidentally, a couple weeks before this, my live-in partner and I had received in our regularly fruitless trips to the food bank a bag of nondescript Powdery Stuff. It called itself Ka'Chava and claimed to be a superfood.

We can't afford all the supplements I need to survive. We get me Omega-3 and Vitamin C for now, and start working on figuring out how to feed someone so sick they can barely move. We come across The Stuff in the cupboard. It's nondescript powder and claims to be a superfood, we have some yogurt and I can just about swallow a thick paste, but chewing is at the edge. Fuck it, go for it. What the hell else can we do?

Oh. It's delicious. THAT'S weird.

Oh. It has enough of what I need that I'm covered for all but the vitamin C, actually. Even if there are other, secret deficiencies. That's ... exactly what I need.

It's been some days now. I have a scoop of this stuff in a small pile of yogurt every day, and I am rapidly recovering. It's been MONTHS since I've been able to stand up and do dishes on my own. Hell, I can rarely prepare my own food. Two days in a row, I've been able to do some dishes and cook my own food. Stand up without vertigo. Feel my fingers at all times. Insane. So, tonight, just before I tab over here, I decide to look up how much this stuff costs, because there's a lot left still but I kind of want to make sure I have it in stock. I have a fondness for it, given that it literally probably saved my life, and I'd very much love to get more.

80 dollars a bag. It's bougie celebrity health food protein shake bullshit. I cannot get more. But we got it from a food bank. A fucking food bank. For free. No money.

Whoever donated that to the food bank is, bizarrely, a fucking saint. Bougie health food is normally poison to a truly poor person. But this? This is shelf-stable nutritionally-dense supplement that tastes actually good. Could not have gone to a better home, actually, because I otherwise might be bedridden now.

Just. Wild shit.

[altered]

Update. Been sitting on this for about one week, because it sucks.

The COVID I got because Wal-Mart infected my live-in partner (well. more on that soon) demolished my health. I have long COVID. I went from "mildly disabled" to "most days, drinking water or rinsing a dish is too hard".

My live-in partner is now my ex. We are dying of poverty, and we will both be homeless if I don't leave in May. I don't want her to be on the streets, so I will in fact go.

I have no next steps left. Everyone has run out of the ability to help, and they can't even hope I could potentially contribute or become self-sufficient now, because I'm too broken. It's the last stop: some place in Wisconsin.

I have until May, plus change for however long I manage to scrabble out survival before COVID, cops or starvation catch up with me.

I forget if I owed anyone here anything. If I did, let me know. I can't promise I'll get to it, but I can promise I'll try.

[altered]

I've sent a ton of my personal projects to my friend Shelly. It's over in about two weeks, it looks like. If I get very lucky, it might go until June or July, but I'd need a thousand dollars for rent. That's... just unrealistic.

Yeah. That's it.