Stack updates

Just some random musings about the direction I’m going in for my various things

Text editing

For a while I’ve been using Gram, which is a pretty nice code-oriented text editor that tries to make everything Good, Actually™, and is basically an anti-AI fork of Zed. It’s pretty nice in that it’s fast and has good UX, but there’s a bunch of stuff that really bugs me, the more I use it.

• The language server stuff, while nice, is super inflexible
• Some of the built-in formatting rules (which come from the language servers, I think?) are kinda crappy but the configuration options to fix them don’t work
• It tries really hard to integrate well with Python virtual environments but seems to always get it wrong
• I’m constantly getting nagged with popups regarding “the project workspace” being unable to load, pointing me to a log file that’s constantly growing and tells me a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with project load issues

The main reason I switched to it is because Sublime Text 3 is Intel-only and is not going to be supported on macOS for much longer, but Sublime Text 4 made a bunch of changes I don’t like and also is Quite Expensive now.

I think for now I’ll stick with Gram and just disable the language server stuff, but I’d really like something that works, y'know, better. Maybe I’ll give Sublime Text 4 another try and consider sending them some cash again, or something. I dunno. $100 is a lot for a text editor.

Unfortunately all the other popular code editors these days are even worse in terms of being, like, completely overloaded with useless crap and full of AI garbage, and are also usually built inside of Electron or similar things which make them feel slow and annoying.

Maybe I’ll give Emacs another try. It’s been a whie.

Online commerce stuff

I used to sell things on Etsy, but it became a quite frustrating (and expensive) experience. Very much not worth it.

I also used to sell things on Gumroad, but meh to that.

I tried selling stuff on Artisans Cooperative but that site is an absolute mess that is built with very good intentions but not a lot of technical acumen. I have one product listing there and all I receive from it is attempted phishing scams, and whenever I report the phishing scams as directed, if I get a response at all it’s usually a guilt trip about how under-resourced they are.

Anyway, recently I remembered that Ko-Fi has a storefront and I’ve been working on rebuilding that shop. So far I’m just focusing on putting my music there and fixing my listings for my digital comic collections, and also fixing the very neglected shop page on this site to update the links as appropriate. I’ll probably also list my physical goods on Ko-Fi, but I don’t know how they handle things like variations and shipping rates (the two things that every site makes really frustrating).

Music sales

I wrote a bit about this on the Blogpuppet, but it’s getting really annoying to manage my music sales channels. Right now when I release something I post it on my own site and then also prepare it for sale on Bandcamp, Mirlo, itch.io, Subvert, and Ko-Fi. I also have to upload it to Symphonic and KVRR for the various exposure opportunities those afford. It’s a nightmare.

Bandcrash makes a lot of this a lot easier, though. I have scripts to take a Bandcrash album and populate my website, and with the generated .zip files it’s absolutely trivial to post the actual downloads on Ko-Fi and Mirlo; Mirlo’s is also nice in that it’ll automatically extract the relevant metadata. (And KVRR is simple in that I just send some .flac files to the dude who runs it via Discord or whatever.)

The other sales channels are really annoying, though:

• Setting up an album on itch.io is a rather cumbersome process (but itch.io isn’t really built for music, to be fair)
• Bandcamp only lets you upload a single audio file at a time unless you pay for Bandcamp Pro, and you have to manually enter the metadata through a rather cumbersome interface
• Subvert at least lets you batch-upload the files but you still have to manually enter the metadata, and its overall UX flow is super obnoxious and somehow worse than Bandcamp’s
• Symphonic’s uploader and metadata editor is a massive ergonomics nightmare that literally hurts me to use

If I had my druthers I’d just upload to Ko-Fi and maybe Mirlo (since that makes individual track sales possible), but that’s not where my actual sales happen. Most people think of Bandcamp as the gold standard for indie music sales, even though they take a pretty bad cut and can’t even really justify it anymore since it’s not like their editorial or discovery channels are worth a damn at this point. (Plus, they’re owned by Songtradr, and fuck Songtradr.)

I am really hoping for a future where I only have to post my music to my own website and then provide paid access to the full-quality downloads in some ideally-tightly-integrated way. Canimus will hopefully be a part of that future, although any federated protocol would be better than the current state of things.

I have high hopes for Fairplayer.

But with all that said, right now I’m making very little money on music. The only sales channel which gets anything right now is Bandcamp and I made all of $4.50 over the last month there. My lunch today cost $5.85.

Residence

I like my house, and mostly like my town. But my country is very quickly turning into a fascistic hellhole, and it’s becoming quite dangerous to be trans. Even in Seattle I am constantly hearing about people being accosted simply for being trans. There was a very high-profile murder of a trans student at the university, who was committing the grievous sin of doing her laundry. I’ve had friends have the cops be called on them for using the “wrong” bathroom or changing room at the gym (including very-masc-presenting transmasc folks).

In Seattle.

This isn’t supposed to happen here.

Lately I’ve been thinking about exit strategies. I really like Victoria, BC, because it’s nearby, housing is reasonably affordable (at least compared to Seattle), and it has amazing bicycle infrastructure (which is one of the few things that’s sorely lacking in my current town).

But immigrating into Canada is quite tricky, especially as a disabled, living-off-investment-income, neurodivergent trans person with no Canadian heritage.

The Netherlands also seem nice, particularly Amsterdam, which has amazing bike infrastructure (heck, anyone who watches urbanist YouTube gets plenty of videos from one particularly notorious channel that will just not shut up about it), and by all accounts it’s super trans-friendly there, and it’s apparently quite open to Americans both culturally and in terms of immigration policy. In particular, the poorly-named (or is it?) DAFT visa looks like a very good option, as it allows American ex-pats to register a freelance business there and give themselves a work visa.

But, gosh, that sure requires a pretty strong commitment, and I’m not ready to uproot just yet. (But I worry that if things get worse, the DAFT program will go away…)

In the meantime I do at least need to renew my passport, which expires in 7 months. I’m not looking forward to the gender marker reset.

Also one of the things I like about my current living situation is having a nice private, isolated recording studio in my home, which is necessary for playing instruments (especially drums). I’d still be able to do that in Victoria pretty easily. I don’t think that’s nearly as accessible in Amsterdam.

I guess after the midterms I will have a clearer picture of where things are going.

HRT

That’s going well, although today I think I injected myself with a couple of rubber particles from the stopper. Oops.