#squirrel's diary

well, it took a hot minute, but we finally got one that's pretty much all chipper?

i don't know if it's from quitting smoking, and if it is if it's actually, like, the chemistry changes from that, or if it's just the "wow, i'm doing a thing i've wanted to for a long time that's really hard, but it feels like i'll be successful this go" feeling of accomplishment, but i have been in a really good mood these past few weeks. Which is tempered by poor sleep, and a work sitch that isn't very good, but is still very much a good mood. It's weird. Good weird, not bad weird, but still definitely weird.

i am going to have to start wiv electrolysis for the face. whatever magick the lasers worked seems to have passed now; i'm not hairy-hairy, but it's definitely "oh, this is a noticeable amount of stubble that's not getting sorted by the electric shaver, and dang it's making me uncomfortable" hours. which, like, we had that first session in what? October? feels like the effects should have lasted more than five, six months, but what do i know i guess?

i was going to go to Tokyo Pride House, on recommendation from my doc, to see if maybe they have some advice on getting more gainful employ. i think doc imagines my being trans as the primary driver of my being stuck in dead-end minimum-wage retail. While i don't discount that it has at least a finger on the scale, there are far more likely factors of low language skill, lacking documented employment-worthy experience, almost nil social skills, and looking, if not like an actual freak, freak-adjacent enough for the tastes of people who give job interviews. The deck is stacked against me, and being trans is just the one card in it.

i've been to TPH a number of times, tho' not in the last couple of years, and it has been thoroughly unhelpful each time, but it's not like i have any better ideas. Also, i do recognize some of that is on me. i go for advice, and get nothing or unhelpful advice, and i just bounce. i should, probably, stay for a bit, chitchat, establish myself in their mind as someone who is here, in community, and longterm. So on one of these occasions they'll maybe drop something conversationally i can use. i think? That's how networking is supposed to work? It feels weird and semi-manipulative, but <shrug>, clearly the answer to "what do i know?" is "not fucking much, really."

Anyways. Was going to go, but of course they're closed today, so that nixes that. i mean, at least for now. There's always Monday, maybe.

i think i might go down to Adachi, 'cause i see people talk about it like it's the worst place in Tokyo. They call it the Nishinari of Tokyo, which, Nishinari is just day labourers and poor folx. i've been both, and don't have problems wiv either. But it'd be nice to confirm my suspicion this is just people looking down their noses and being arseholes.

Was talking wiv doc about surgeries, looking into an orchi, since that'd be the one in my range money-wise. He did confirm that i can't apply insurance to transfemme-side surgeries (also, 'cause i'd wondered, while insurance can be applied to breast reduction surgery, you can only do that if you're not on T. It'd been a thing i'd heard, i'd wanted to ask after).

He told me, in the course of this convo, "you know, you don't have to get any surgeries. There's lots of trans folx in America and Europe who don't." Which is a statement wiv so many boxes to unpack that i mostly just worked to keep a mix of rage and incredulity off my face. i settled for reassuring him that, that was whatever (totally not whatever), but i wanted them, you know, for me. He was like, "sure, sure, I get it. I just don't want you starving yourself to save money." And, i didn't have the heart to tell him that there hasn't been a time since i came out that i was reliably getting three actual meal-meals in a day. The best i've generally been able to manage is something snacky for breakfast and lunch, and then a fairly hearty bowl of curry over pasta for dinner. i mean, i did have the heart to tell him that, but i didn't feel like letting go of the chokehold i'd had on my anger.

well, here we are again, i guess

this was just about a two hour render. i don't know if that's to be expected as an average for a single chroma'd video in DaVinci, or if it'd go up if i had, like, two screens going. it feels not entirely beyond what ShotCut was doing, but still a touch too long to be able to do a re-render if i've buggered the audio balance.

like i have here.

it always feels better to shoot too soft than too loud, since at least wiv too soft the video doesn't become unwatchable, but it irks me that i just can't seem to get it right. like, when i was listening to it during edit, i fiddled until both my voice and the music were audible, and then listening to it post-render, and some of the tracks i just can't hear at all. i dunno. whatever.

excited to be able to get the LittleBite-sizedArchive up and running again. i said i wanted it in September, but looking at the calendar and that's just two weeks off. mid-September, maybe?

trying to think of what a good upload schedule would be so i'm not just dumping a firehose of videos on my channel on the daily. maybe just drop a chunk of 5~10 once or twice a month like @soupum was doing wiv their community level library.

also very lightly toying wiv the idea of siloing off all the LBsA stuff onto its own channel, but i don't know. beyond the fact that it'd be a bit of a pain in the butt, wiv YouTube being what it is, and the internet being what it is, and the world being what it is, who knows how long any of this keeps up. i don't. but, still, an idea to kick around a bit i guess.

still saving. it still sucks. if anyone tells you cutting your life down to the bone to escape poverty is the answer, kick 'em in the shins, 'cause that's bullshite. 10months for 200k yen, and no one's digging their way out of poverty wiv that.

honestly, it shouldn't run a body 200k to get her balls lopped off. that just ain't right. and worse, it ain't crickets. the bugs crickets, which are awesome, not the game cricket, which i don't know well enough to make a comparative metaphor out of .

it's real weird to think i've done a year's worth of these; i think i've earned a bit of a break.

everything's been a whole kind of mess the last few weeks. mentioned a bit back that Davinci shat the bed, except it turns out it was some other key component. took about a week, almost every night, on call wiv @soupum trying to diagnose and de-fuck whatever was wrong. the best we could come up wiv was at least the laptop itself, hardware-wise, isn't fucked, but Davinci's off the board for now. which sucks; i'd gotten pretty used to it, and it had a really nice thing where you could isolate an area for chroma key that i haven't figured out wiv my new editor ('s why the colours on the trans clock are all fucked up). on the other hand, the render times on this one are whippet-quick, so if i /do/ figure out a good method for chroma, this is probably going to be my baby.

i need to emphasize and re-iterate, Soup's efforts have been herculean, and his generosity monumental here. i really don't know how i lucked out to have someone so deeply kind and giving in my life, and i very much want to have a care not to abuse that kindness.

life is weird. like i say in the video, i've kind of transitioned? like as a past tense concept? at least in the sense that i've accomplished everything i set my heart on as far as goals that was actually something i could do wiv the means to my disposal. so now, here i am finally at the starting line of the rest of my life as myself, and there's a lot there i'd like to unpack, and the world i expect will give me little time to do so.

that's pretty much everything, at least aside from a hearty "fuck the US and everything it stands for," but i feel like i've made my feelings there pretty clear in the past. i suppose if nothing else, all of this (one hopes, but i thought the same during the 2020 George Floyd protests) should expose ourselves to ourselves. To make manifest just what we have been doing not only domestically, but internationally. All this shite is just bringing what we've done abroad back to our own doorsteps. i don't know. i try to be hopeful that this will be a real reckoning. i guess we'll just see.

anyhoot, i made up some channel info bumpers for stream. did the whole screentear effect by hand in LBP, and i think it turned out pretty nice. so have that as a bonus or something.

i get these ideas. they're seldom good ideas, but i do get them, and they must be acted on.

the dual chroma insert was a cute idea, and when they actually sync up the way they're supposed to, it's kind of neat, but gosh and how it was a whole pain in the butt to set up. like, not even getting into the actual "how much strain is this putting on my laptop to render, should it be smoking like that?" i don't think i could really use this as an information-conveying device. the details are just a bit too small to really work for it. can you even tell that the album art on the music player changes, let alone what the actual art is?

aside from the whole "sleep? haha. lol" thing, things have been... good? recently? like it's hard to say definitively good, 'cause even if every little thing were sorted on my end, the world would still be the world. but wivin a very narrow definition, yeah, things aren't bad. don't know why every godsdamned movie has to be coming out right now, but, at least they're getting theatre runs.

still not my baby Final Destination, but i super didn't expect Sinners to get here, and it did, so there's still hope.

Sinners was *really* good, not that you should need me to tell you that. but it was really good.

Oh! Right. i should toss in a link to Eguro Genki's art. it's really good. even if he is a lad and not a lassie.

https://www.instagram.com/genksrb/?hl=en

it's been more than a week, maybe two, since i've gotten actual factual legit sleep. i wake up at 1.30ish in the am, and then can't really get more than a muzzy sorta-sleep after that. i thought last night might do the trick, just through sheer exhaustion. then some lady came by and spent an hour or so screaming close enough to my window to sound like she was right outside it. so, yeah.

she's not, like, a novelty, or a tragedy (at least as far as i know. not a tragedy in the sense that she's not screaming in response to any immediate injury, which i'd thought the first time this happened, maybe last year or so?)

--------------------

my ps4 controller has finally become so busted we had to cancel the stream last night.

mind you, this is not "so busted as to be unusable," which would have been a blessing, so much as "so busted that using it makes you unreasonably and obviously angry." so i spent the night previous and yesterday on and off fighting the damned thing to get anything done wiv it.

the upshot is, at least, i've got all the bits together for the Ruiner video, and they just need to be assembled and edited, but that's all (well 99%) things i can do on the laptop.

the laptop is slow, but it doesn't, you know, actively infuriate me

---------------------

the part of the day i didn't spend fucking around wiv video work, was rearranging/cleaning my apartment. which was a lot of work; way more than you might expect given how small it is. also one of my bookshelf-y-but-not-actually things disintegrated, so that made everything that much more, you know? but it looks a little better now, and there's a touch more floorspace, and that's nice.

---------------------

Looking northeast (real northeast that is; they flipped the map purely to piss me off, i'm sure) off nampabashi, and just thinking "15minutes that way, and i'd be home."

i got new glasses! they're cute! but more importantly they work, and i can see better now.

i'm not sure how old it's normal to start needing bifocals, but i do know i didn't expect to make it that long, so it was nice to be proven wrong on that point. the flip-side is i was only able to get them because i had money left over from the surgery savings and what my folks had sent me, and that's kind of fucked up. like i knew a new pair of glasses was becoming a necessity last summer, but i never had that kind of cash on hand. i mean, i know the world at large doesn't care much for affordable disability aids, and glasses are so normalized most people don't see them as disability aids, but, like, i don't know. feels like they shouldn't be priced like luxuries either?

the surgery damage is, at least as far as i can tell wivout x-ray vision, all or most-all healed up. there's a bit of deep-in itching, which combined wiv hair-growing-back itching is not supremely fun, but that's been better by the day. the pain/swelling/soreness, that's all passed, so... yeah! yatta!

didn't mention in the video (there are always so many things i either don't have time for, or just slip my mind wiv these), but we're getting a new boss at work, and that's a little anxiety-inducing. there's always the worry of "what if this one's weird about me? is he going to make this job even more miserable than it is as a base-level?" so... excitement there.

that's pretty much everything aside from global-level stuff, which is really beyond my 6-in-the-morning brainmeats to talk on coherently. things are well, i'm not dead, my mood is... up-and-down, but more often in the mid-to-up range than the down, so yeah.

y'all have yourselves a great day, and stay safe out there, 'kay?