I have no idea what I'm doing

Wow, I really disappeared there, didn't I? Whoops.

I'm up to my ears in commissions and other projects on a deadline right now, which has been eating up all of my time lately. But that's one of those "good problems to have" sort of deals. My husband's new job pays less, and he's not quite full time yet, so I'm trying to pick up as much slack as possible. I've been fiddling with my commission stuff lately, making it a little easier to understand, but it's tough when what I offer is a bit different from the rest. I feel like I should get back into deviantART, but that site is so big that traction is nigh impossible. And my work takes so damn long to complete that having regular output beyond endless WIP shots is very impossible. I didn't even have a WIP post last week, because the only work I got done can't be shown publicly.

I got a weird promo to my YouTube channel yesterday, and I'm still not entirely sure where it came from. Some people were speculating a Tumblr blog, or Reddit, but when I checked both places, I couldn't see anything that suggested it would be sending traffic directly to a specific video. I'll be able to see referrals in a couple of days, once Google's had a chance to process everything, but it's WEIRD not knowing.

I think I can finish off at least one page of the project I'm working on today. I've defaulted certain items to 28ct, which is a beast to work on, but it saves so many materials, and lets me do tent stitch, so it goes super quickly. And at that size, you can't really tell. And now I'm looking at my pattern, and it's doing something I don't understand, so I have no idea what's going on anymore. I'm just gonna wait for my PO Box to text me so I can go for a walk.

Whoops, I forgot to post a chapter yesterday. I forgot to do it in the morning because I was busy putting a video together to go out by noon, and as soon as that went up, we went out to go do some shopping and other running around. And by the time we got home from that, I was in so much pain that I just went to bed. I'll post a chapter in a little bit.

Right now, I'm taking a break from spending an hour cutting apart about eight pounds of beef. I finally got better racks for the oven, so now there's four pounds (minus whatever fat got trimmed off) becoming jerky, and the other four pounds (same caveat) marinading in some teriyaki to become jerky tomorrow. I love these new racks so much. Last time I made jerky, I got so fed up with the ones that came with the oven that I tried to perforate tin foil and put that over the racks. All we wound up with was some very overcooked steak strips that way. Before, I had to do a single roast in two batches, because the racks are just standard oven racks with about an inch between the wires. Whole roast, all stripped up, fits in there all at once now. Before, it would have taken me four days to do what I'm doing in two. So yay! And while that's going, I've got all the fat trimmings on the stove, rendering down to go into the fryer.

Also, regarding Midgard Legends: I haven't been streaming much lately because I've been focusing on finishing up commissions. There are a lot to do, and I really want to get this done. The thing is, my outline says I have five chapters to go. But in writing a scene out, I realised that four of those chapters are absolutely pointless, because they went against some of Loki's motives. So there's only one left! It will probably be an extra long chapter, but with what I'm cutting out, it really only leaves two more plot points. They just happen to be a fairly small one, and a very large one, and I don't think I'll be able to split them apart without having a 2k chapter, and then a chapter that's still abnormally large.

Starting next week hopefully, I'll be able to get on a good Twitch schedule. I just want to make my YouTube schedule sink in better. I might do Twitch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, since those are the days I don't stream on YouTube.

I've also been having fun over at fan_flashworks for Who Killed Markiplier fic. It's been really interesting to explore a completely different interpretation of the canon than what I'm used to. I play a few characters from this series in my RP, and take a very different approach to it, because when I started playing, WKM wasn't a thing yet, and my main was just in a bunch of loosely-related sketches. My choices were to retcon about two years of work, or just go AU. Going AU was the easier choice. So playing in a more serious, surreal environment has been a lot of fun. I don't think there's going to be much bleed between the two, both because the AU I've established is so far removed from canon, and because a lot of what I headcanon would get me modcalled by some pearl-clutcher every three days. So, nope. Not going there. I'll keep it confined to AO3.

I woke up at 11am, thinking how great it is that I don't have to do a livestream today.

Then I look at the clock and it's 12:10 and I was supposed to have a video up ten minutes ago. Damnit damnit damnit

Things I need to do today:

- Finish packaging up Patreon rewards and send them off
- Package up my occlupanid specimen and send it off
- Edit today's video
- Work on commissions
- Maybe do a livestream
- Possibly finish this fic I started last night

I'm so far behind on Patreon stuff right now. Being ill for as long as I was toward the end of March and in April hit me with the biggest wall of depression and I haven't wanted to do anything for a while. So last night I began assembling some of the rewards for the last two months, and finished that about 10 minutes ago. Now I just need to get into Patreon and figure out what needs to go where. In doing so last night out of laziness, I found an easier way to put together the floss, so I think one of these days I'm going to just do nothing but get that process started so everything is ready when I need it. I think there's only one person right now who even gets floss, so that's easy.

I also found a new occlupanid species the other night, and will be sending it into HORG for their catalogue. I need to document it a bit, which should only take a couple of minutes. But I need to do that and package up Patreon stuff by 1pm, which wouldn't be difficult, except my video needs to go live at noon. So I've only got four hours to do all of that.

And I went ahead today and bought some paid time for this account. Normally I only pay up one of my RP accounts, but I've been getting involved in some anon memes lately, and it's really irritating to have that stuff going into my RP folder. Now it won't. Maybe I should take advantage of that and load up on icons.

Apps should apparently be processed soon. Yay! One of the mods is getting a PhD or something, and has been MIA for about two months because of it. The others just aren't present anymore. So I guess that's what's going on there.

I haven't been sleeping fricking all month, because my husband has been looking for a new job after quitting his current one. I haven't been sleeping because I use CBD to put my ass out every night, and even though we're in a legal state, he's in an industry with federal oversight, so he needs to be clean. More and more places even in that position have quit testing anyway, but we didn't want to risk him applying at the one place in town that still did.

There's a place right across the street from our apartment where he applied. He walked in to talk to someone a few weeks ago, they chatted for about ten minutes, and then told him he'd hear back once his background check came through. So, we gave it about a week and they still hadn't called. He'd call every day, and was told the relevant person would call him back. He went in a few times, but she was never there. I'm thinking, great, he's being ghosted. Please put in applications at other buildings.

Yesterday, he walked over there earlier in the morning, rather than waiting until after lunch. He was gone about 10 minutes before he came back. Apparently he's had the job since the first time he went in, but the person in charge has just been in a position where the building is so understaffed, she's been too busy helping doing what needs to be done to be able to deal with the understaffing problem. No interview, no application. Background check as a formality.

And the place doesn't test. So yay! I slept last night! Now I'm just looking at my email and waiting for 1pm to roll around, because we're going out for lunch with somebody.

Apps have still not been processed, and I'm dying. I want to EP so badly wahhh

I wound up yesterday not getting a whole lot of anything done. Not only was it Game of Thrones day, but Markiplier dropped a new video in his scripted series, whatever the hell it's called. So I spent a good amount of time yesterday just engaging in the meta for both over on Tumblr. Well, about half of yesterday. The other half was spent staring at the wall because the internet went out again, like it's done every day since Thursday. That's been super unfun, and the main reason I haven't been livestreaming. I just don't even want to try until I know that whatever issue there is, it's been fixed. I did finally get some better headphones for it though, since the ones I have squeeze my brain. So with those, I'll be able to get back into crafty streams as well as writing ones.

I've set up a new page where I'm going to be posting stuff I don't want to put on AO3. Mostly it will be early chapters until a fic gets finished enough to maintain a posting schedule, but there's also some more iddy stuff I've been working on that I don't want to put out there because 1, the fandom is so damn twee, and 2, I know for a fact the creators are on AO3. So fuuuuck that. Give a follow over on drawerfic if you want to see what I'm doing. Nothing's up there yet, but I think it'll start happening soon.

Also, jesus. I've been off LJ for ten years at this point, and I still can't figure out the DW-specific code for anything. All of my code on these posts still uses LJ parsing, because that's all I can remember.