Life is incredibly positive right now. Not perfect by any means, there remain challenges even beyond trying to pay for my existence, but I’m working at a speed and level of quality that I haven’t touched in years, and I’m super excited about it. Things I’ve struggled with mentally for a long time because of ongoing stress and anxiety about the stability of my living situation or other pressures related thereto, I’m finally breaking through on and getting settled in properly the way I’ve been fighting to in some ways for most of my life.
This newsletter is one small example of that, and I think I’ve discussed enough others that there’s no need to re-enumerate them here. I’m more organized, more focused, more productive with my work time, generally in a better mood. I’ve even lost about a tenth of my body weight in the last couple of months, which is a good thing – it’s because my diet isn’t mostly pasta, sugar, and salt anymore. I have more energy when I’m awake, and I feel more stable than I have since I was working at Musician’s Friend…more so, because I’m not relying on my ability to not piss off some yuppie.
I’m probably in the best space mentally and intellectually that I’ve been in…at least a decade, maybe two, maybe ever if I take everything into account. By no means does that means life is easy, obviously I’m still scrambling for forward momentum and financial stability, or steady income of any sort that I can count on beyond the $105/month in pledges that goes through Patreon right now for that matter – but boyohboy does that $105 – or really about 97 after fees – make a difference!
If I just had 18 more people pitching in $50 a month, that would be $1k/m. That’s easily survival money in my present situation. That plus an occasional large contribution or a whole lot of other small ones, and I can start doing things like replacing this computer, which has now officially aged out of useful life for my purposes as a primary machine because it’s so old it can’t run Windows 11 and MS has announced they’re not issuing any more updates for Windows 10 beyond critical security patches.
That means that OS is at end of life and it’s the most modern one I can run and still use any of my tools to speak of. That also means my tools are evolving beyond my current hardware’s ability to even upgrade to with the same motherboard and cpu architecture (i7-3700 I think, so i7 yay but third gen; it’s twelfth-gen now plus they’re up to i10 or so. It’ll make a great file server for years to come but as a production box its breathing its last.). I think I’m going to work up some kind of targeted fundraiser specifically for that, maybe two thousand dollars. From what I can see that’s about where the current “sweet spot” is between paying too much for the most modern tech and getting tech that will age out too fast to be worth what they’re asking for it.
Plus the market is so screwy right now you’ll still pay two grand for a box that has 4.5K worth of components in it if you tried to build it yourself, largely because of the price of video cards and how much cheaper they are for fabricators buying them to put in computers than for tech bros buying them to mine crypto. Some of that’s changing and shifting now that crypto has basically fallen apart, but I don’t expect to go back to the days of building it cheaper than you can buy it, except at the very high end of the price ranges, for at least another five, maybe ten years, if at all.
My last guess has lasted me ten years with nothing but video upgrades, so yeah. I’ll be all right, just need the funding. Should make for a step up in video quality too, especially when I also upgrade my webcam and ultimately invest in a solid 4K or (better) 8K portable.
I note that it’s about noon-thirty my time right now, which means in theory I should’ve had this out half an hour ago. I’m gonna shut up for now and get back on the rest of my work. Hopefully as things including my mental health progress, I’ll get to the point where I’ve got this newsletter done by Monday night, and I can just schedule it to drop regularly at noon on Tuesdays for the “Advance” edition at the same time the “Public” edition from the prior week goes public. That said, I also don’t want them to drop on top of each other, so I’ll probably aim for a little earlier, say 9am, on Tuesdays for the Advance and then noon for the Public.
Edition 1.1 will be public at noon eastern, this Friday.
Let me get back on it, there’s still about a day’s work I want to get wrapped on this gaming subsection, then get at least one and probably two bits of “serious” writing and content done, then I get to start doing the same thing I’m doing now with gaming, but with music which is a whooooooole different game. In spite of appearances, I remain first and foremost a musician, and I’m getting awfully long in the tooth to keep all that knowledge to myself too. Plus…yeah. Let me get on or I’ll stay here talking until I starve to death.
Love y’all, see ya soon!
-jh
