So…I’m in a weird situation financially, want input from friends here.

I am starting my MSW this August with the goal of becoming a licensed clinical social worker (i.e. to work as a licensed therapist), and I have a scholarship that will cover all tuition and fees. The catch is, I can’t take out any student loans to pay for housing or food since California now, for some odd reason, requires you to apply any student loans to tuition first and reduces the scholarship amount so you can’t have a stipend.

Thing is, I also have to do an 18-hour a week internship (basically a part time job) and am lucky to receive a $300 a month stipend from them. But full time masters and part time internship leaves me almost no time or spoons left to do any sort of reliable job, and I’ve been rejected from piles of part time jobs I’ve applied to in the last year anyway. And my family is stretched crazy thin right now financially, since my metamor lost his job earlier this year (he’s working part time but also has applied all over and been unable to get a full time job) and we are locked in by my school and my wife’s job to be located in one of the most unaffordable cities in the US. Our savings are probably running out this fall.

Basically: if I put up a fundraiser ask to help fund at least a bit of my housing and food costs each month, even if I can’t publish writing reliably, how many of you would be willing to help donate each month? Would anyone be able to help me in some other way to bring in money or reduce expenses?

The trip is over.
The cutie have left.
The reckoning is nigh.

opens the spreadsheet and starts adding up the expenses

Not doing water cooling ever again. Nope, nope, never. Not a chance.

Ordered an air cooler for the GPU.

It arrived, time to part with the water block once and for all.

...i got scammed, it is the wrong air cooler. No signs of alternative offers either.

Putting the water block back on, while grumbling about destroying a perfectly good set of thermal pads for nothing.

Ok, how about selling this one and buying a new one. Surely someone in this country would want a water cooled 3090.

Hm, similar ones don't sell for all that much. Oh well, it would be better than nothing.

NEW GPUS COST HOW FUCKING MUCH ?!?!

Ok, let's do water cooling again. It's not like i'll be moving any time soon...

It is Day 15 of Pride.

I want you to imagine a small, intimate version of the future you want - not some grandiose thing, but a personal moment. Maybe it's a moment with friends; maybe it's with family; maybe it's alone. Maybe it's with a world of chaos around you; maybe it's in quiet seclusion. But I want it to be your endgame of sorts, your vision of the world once this horror show has passed. Whatever that future is, imagine it in the most exquisite detail. Think about how it smells; think about the sensations of touch; if taste is a part of it, how does it taste? Every detail, if at all possible. Write it down; it'll help you remember it.

When things are at their darkest, remember that future. It might be the one thing that gets you through. Because that future... that's what you're ultimately fighting for.

:QueerCatHeart_Trans:

#pride #lgbt

Slowly, steadily, one driver at a time, this starts to feel like a real, usable phone.
Still can't get the sound to work and a couple of cameras need some dependencies fixed, but almost everything else is working.

It's a MIPI. Curses in, pixels out.
#nocontext

Shot day today, and it went badly.
It started ok, inserted, aspirated, nothing. Injected, pulled out, and blood gushed out. It only lasted for a second, but enough came out to drip down to my panties and leave a square inch of them wet. Which is way more blood than i ever seen in my two years of injecting.
There is a knot of blood under the skin, but so far i feel fine and nothing hurts.
Fun.

I have a request to make of my fellow Animorphs nerds: I know some people have written about the potential science behind morphing technology, and I'd like to read more about that.

Does anyone have recommendations?

Boost appreciated. Thanks, friends!

#Animorphs

Going through the SH-4 instruction set.

DIV0U ;prepare for unsigned division
DIV0S Rm,Rn ;prepare for signed division Rn÷Rm
DIV1 Rm,Rn ;generate 1 bit of the quotient Rn÷Rm

head scratch
Guess i don't get to have a "divide these two integers, please" instruction.

Note to self: killall5 is not the same as killall.
*waits for the server to reboot*

Question for #Blind and maybe also #LowVision folks: are there any #VideoGames or #mobile #games that are particularly good? Is there a blind game design scene?

I know there are tactile dice and things for some tabletop RPGs and things. While I’m especially curious about digital or video games, I’d also love to hear about more analog examples that are great!
#askFedi #BoostsAppreciated

...And i got a failure right after i wrote this. 🤣

So i bought a 25 pack of CDRs, expecting a bunch of them to fail again and to end up with a nice empty spindle to put them back on.

...7 discs later, i'm yet to have a single failure.
Sigh. Guess i'll have to house them together with the blanks now.

At some point i got the sound working (RCA cables are also rare these days!), and just started playing a game.
Sonic Adventure 2.
Used to be my favourite at some point.
By Dreamcast days i was already past my sonic speedrunning days, but still i used to have almost everything unlocked in that game.
I used to be good at it.

...I was trash at it.
The controls feel weird, i couldn't follow the track or do any tricks.
Gotta be rusty, right?
Well, i was a little bit too rusty, which got me suspicious.
And then it hit me.

Latency.

This is a highly dynamic game where you often got a frame or two to react to get things right.
And my chain of two adapters and a capture card were adding some non-trivial latency.
Not enough to notice immediately, but enough to throw everything off.

I tried to skip the capture card at least and plug directly into the monitor, and it made a huge difference.
I was still kinda bad at it, but it felt a lot more natural and i could actually do some things.
The muscle memory was waking up and felt in sync.

Going back to the usual setup, the latency was now blatantly obvious.
It's only several frames worth, something i always discarded as irrelevant.
Well, now i know why it matters.

And some rummaging later here we have a USB-C to phone line voltage converter.

No more glitching.
Still need to find a speaker, however.
I forgot that phone lines require high impedance speakers, and these are kind of unobtanium these days.

Well, more unobtanium that the rest of this stuff.
I thought CD-Rs, phone wires and jacks, stuff like that, would be your regular electronics store filler.
But nope, not any more!
I found CD-Rs in a random book store, and so far it was the only store i found them in.
Phone wires and sockets are still findable, but they are definitely not filler any more.

I'm getting old... Familiar tech is getting extinct...

Next step - i want to get the dreamcast to connect to the internet, or what's left of it.
Connecting the modems directly did nothing. While there are ways around that when connecting two PCs, the console browser does not really let you run custom AT commands.
So i had to cobble together a line voltage injector, confirming in the process that i have a PAL version of the sega modem which needs at least 18V.
With that it did manage to connect, but was too glitchy to establish an actual link.
Now that the concept is proven, it's time to clean it up a bit.
And maybe add a line speaker.

Anyway, several chained adapters later, it's alive!
Don't have the wire for the sound yet, but there is a picture.

The CMOS battery is well and truly dead, poor thing have no idea it's not 1998 any more.

The GD-ROM is fully functional!
Given how readily these are going, having a 25 year old one still kicking might be a small miracle.

Oh, and after all the CD-R shenanigans, i got three working discs out of my box of 10 blanks.

Digging through cdrecord's code, ripping out some annoying failsafes.

A Dreamcast CD needs two sessions to be valid - an audio session and a data session.
A blank audio session on CDs of that era takes 298 sectors.
Whomever wrote cdrecord decided that an audio track can not be shorter than 4 seconds, which is 300 sectors.
There is no override.
There is an option to pad, but that wrecks the addressing in the data section.
You can in theory recompile the image, but that's a hassle.
So ripping the failsafes out is the way to go.

Well, i decided to take the burner apart on a whim.
It's a bit dusty, but for a 20 year old piece of kit it looks pretty nice inside.
Still gotta clean it, tho.