The Internet has made it rain

A lot of groceries have been landing on my porch lately. Still, actually. 

My roommates are a little confused, and asked me why the internet is mailing me sixteen jars of marinated artichoke hearts? And I had to explain that it's because Amazon is not really set up to let the internet mail me one or two jars of marinated artichoke hearts. They won't drop normal human quantities of perishables from Amazon Fresh on your porch without giving you a delivery window, and they can't book you a delivery window without ruining the "surprise" of getting things off a Wish List, so you can only order off Amazon Pantry, where people shop in bulk when they can't get a ride to Costco. 

Ergo, sixteen jars of marinated artichokes. Which I will eventually eat, because I've also taken custody of sixteen boxes of pasta, a dozen cans of chunked tomatoes, and some amount of canned mushrooms and roasted bell peppers. I am generally a tired/lazy cook, and that's about the level of effort I'll go to for dinner.

They also half-seriously jumped to the conclusion that I was doing sex work. Which was not a bad guess; I do figure modeling, so I've spent a fair amount of my life being naked for money. I would happily be selling used shoes and underwear to people who would pay to appreciate them, but I'm not willing to put my real name or physical address on those packages, and PO Boxes are expensive as fuck in all the nearby ZIP codes. Most perverts are perfectly ordinary people who just have a very niche hobby, but you can't really tell when you have one of the bad apples from a few slobbery emails. Reading between the lines, at least one of my roommates has had a bad experience with an ex who wouldn't go away, so that's another reason not to risk it.

Getting back to the groceries, the Wish List says there's still some stuff that hasn't shown up yet, so I was not all that surprised to see more boxes piled up on my porch last week. I was having kind of a bad time, because our shower wall had fallen in and I was the only one home to let the contractors in at 8 in the morning, so I was not exactly firing on all cylinders. I just saw the boxes and went, 'oh yay, someone sent the half-dozen jars of spaghetti sauce, that's dinner taken care of' and stacked them in the corner for a bit, because pasta sauce will keep until I've had a nap.

Reader, it was not pasta sauce.

I have a few Wish Lists in addition to the main one, and the one that had all the groceries on it. One was called Media Production. I don't remember if I've ever posted that one, and I definitely didn't remember it was public, but that one was actually a running tally of stuff I intended to buy in the unlikely event that I ever got grant money. And everything on it eventually fetched up on my front stairs, save one duplicate item. I have no idea if one person sent it all, or if a bunch of you ganged up on me; it arrived in a few boxes, on a couple different days, and Amazon seems to include a separate 'send a thank you' slip for each item, so there's no telling what orders actually went to the warehouse. So far only one of the anony-mice has picked a unique pseudonym, and all of those things came a while ago in another collection of boxes. 

But, uh, there's a whole bunch of it, is the point. Rather unexpectedly. Thank you!

Self-Portrait (Logitech BRIO, pixels on panel, 2023).

For the record, the collection was basically a starter kit for content creators. None of it is super pricey, it was just stuff I couldn't justify spending the money on without knowing (rather than hoping) I could get some sort of return on it. The standing mic with a pop filter is a desk model with cardioid pickup, and there's a lapel mic clipped to the bendy arm. Bluetooth earbuds are for monitoring, the SSD is 1TB of storage. I've been toying with the idea of turning blog entries into a podcast, a la Mark Crislip -- it would actually be easy, inasmuch as I generally write them by sitting alone in my room and talking to myself for hours on end until I get something that sounds good, then banging it out on a keyboard before I forget it. I have a gaming headset that cost me about $20 and works fine on Zoom, but does not produce audio of a quality I'd put out for people to feed into their ears for an hour at a time. 

The white thing is a digital projector that was intended for a specific project that I'll still probably do at some point, but secretly is also assistive technology. I don't get as much done as I'd like because working on a computer requires me to sit up, and a lot of days, sitting up sucks. Being able to throw the second monitor onto a wall or even the ceiling means I can drag a wireless keyboard over and work from a pile of pillows. That plus the wireless controller means I can pick up streaming or recording let's-plays, which I've been wanting to do for a while, but haven't because sitting in one spot for hours murders my back. 

The Logitech BRIO taking the moody mirror selfie is a 4K webcam, and it's on a basic telescoping tripod that I can use for anything that takes a standard 1/4" screw mount. I've been trying to get clips of rehearsals, performances, new props, toying around in the studio, etc., but the quality is generally not great. Laptop cameras are made for office lighting and close-range subjects, and cell phone cameras are pretty good but unfortunately attached to phones, which are both expensive and also the device off of which I am generally playing the music. I've gotten away with the 1K cam for my one dance film so far, mainly because it was intentionally lo-fi -- as in, if the camera I had was too clear, I would have added grain and noise in post-production -- but outside of that people generally enjoy seeing what tf is going on when they watch a clip of someone dancing. 

[Side note: The rat cage is just out of shot to the right. Casper has the bottom suite. He had no idea what the hell I was doing shuffling doohickeys around on the floor and balancing a mirror on my knee with one hand and poking a computer with the other. I gave him a chocolate chip for his patience when I was done]

It is all generally portable. The webcam even came with its own bag. The stuff I have to hold is mostly wireless. The clip mic does have a cord; I can either plug it into a smartphone and then re-sync the audio in post, or I can plug it into a small Bluetooth transceiver and cast it to the laptop I'm using to record. It's almost, but not quite, equivalent to having a proper lav/beltpack set up. The receiver for a beltpack carries raw audio and can be plugged into anything, whereas the Bluetooth method needs at least one end of the connection to be smart in a way that a laptop is and most soundboards aren't. "Content creation"-style production is all piped through a computer whether it's edited or live, so it makes little difference to me. And frankly, all the wireless microphone systems I've ever tried to use with a computer are dodgy AF, mostly because the transmitter/WiFi/5G frequencies all smash into each other and come out a patchy mess.

So you can all look forward to more media, I guess? It'll take a bit to ramp up, I didn't expect to be doing any of this so soon, so I need to work on scripts and figure out where and when to record.