2024

1 April, 2024. 696 words.

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 03/25

11:50 # Whew. Back from getting the car inspected. Sitting in a waiting room for an hour and half while they did some extra maintenance. Always an enlightening slice of real life, nothing at all like the Internet life that you see on any social media. Very exhausting, but a reminder that not everybody out there is yearning for some kind of content creation side hustle.

08:56 # These Humble software bundles with tons of royalty-free music and sound effects and stuff are an incredible deal if you do anything in an audio or video editor but man they sure are a pain to actually get into your computer. The process of getting thousands of sound files from a remote vendor on the Internet to a directory on your computer is an extremely arduous one.
18:30 # Well this is annoying. My recording PC audio interface seems to have died between this afternoon and now. Just doesn’t power on anymore. Didn’t realize I was so dependent on this single point of failure.

09:51 # I found a very cool app called Sound Show that I think might (finally) meet my needs as a tool for playing sound samples live. I’ve been looking for any application like this for so, so many years. Spent a bunch of time playing with it last night, experimenting with live performing complete soundscapes with music and sound effects to a previously-recorded video. I think it will end up being a LOT faster than dragging and dropping samples into a video editor for hours on end. If I ever start DMing any games, this will be the must-have mandatory tool for ambience and music.
10:51 # I’ve been the victim of D&D capitalism.. I have enough dice now that it’s a chore to dig through the big pile of them to find the one I want, so I bought an expensive dice organizing box to show off my wealthy status, instead of one of the super cheap plastic screw organizer boxes that have been around for decades.
19:39 # Why yes, I did unplug all the audio cables from my dead audio interface before making any notes of where the cables went and why they went there, then started to plug them into the new audio interface, and now I’m truly baffled about why I seemingly had one extra set of cables plugged in for no reason whatsoever, except I know for sure I had them there for a reason, but I can’t for the life of me remember why.

18:53 # Oh hey I found something kind of like what I was doing with Phandelver and Below (playing the adventure without any actual players), except different, and more YouTubery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWfCAqRh6To&list=PLK0lxTuLLNxvWM5kM5207pgHk3Qp2M_nR
- 18:53 # There’s really quite a lot of D&D-related content on YouTube, it turns out.

17:15 # Fire Tablet: “Save your WiFi password to Amazon cloud?” Oh gee let me think about that. And of course what they’re really saying is: “We’re probably going to save your password whether you want to or not because how would you even know, what, do you have an Ethernet packet sniffer hooked up to your tablet right now, come you and I both know nobody has that, besides the traffic is encrypted anyway.”
17:20 # In other news I finally figured out how to save a text preset in Davinci Resolve. Guess what? It’s not intuitive. The intuitive thing would be a menu somewhere in the Rich Text panel that says “save this so you can use it in other projects.” What you actually have to do is drag and drop a text clip from your timeline to your media library and then to something called a Power Bin, which is a pretty non-descript name for a bin.

15:16 # YouTube now makes me check a box to say if my video contains “Altered content” i.e. AI-generated content. It seems to be an indicator of things that are supposed to look like real photographs and not things that are supposed to look like art so I’m not checking it.