I stayed out late last night, drank alcohol, and then woke up at 7am for no reason. I’m pooped. My plan this morning was to knock out the rest of this and then take a nap, but I hit a wall and had to nap first. Oof. Taking a nap within an hour of eating breakfast, while I’m still on my first(?) mug of coffee, always feels both wrong and delightfully decadent. The world is still weird tho; no nap is able to fix that (yet).

Surely it’s not just me? This feeling that everything is getting… very weird? Like, extra weird, like we’re circling a black hole and matter is collapsing as time and space compress.

I saw businesses start to talk about Black Friday sales in October. Now I’m seeing people talking about doing End of Year reviews and it’s not even December yet? Christmas music started playing October 30th. Trump has a total crush on Zohran Mamdani (Don’t we all!) and MTG (the politician not the game) resigned? Truly, what is going on?! I do not get it. It’s still very rough out there and we’re still fighting what feels like an uphill battle, but I’m also seeing more good news than I did at the start of the year, so that is encouraging.

As the dark months have settled in, things inside are moving more slowly; perhaps that is what’s making the world outside feel so fast. I’m settling into a new pace of work, not quite having new systems in place to support it all but the progress feels steady. I think this is maybe the most normal I’ve felt about my life since January 2020. Not that my life has ever been “normal”… perhaps I should say instead that things are feeling… familiar once again.

This week’s issue has a bunch of my Black Friday finds, the return of Vibe Check (I missed the last one due to travel) and, idk, a smattering of various other things, per the usual.

☑️ Done and Done - (Based on thos photos my week was apparently very orange!) Continued nursing Irma back to normal after she had a weird reaction to her post-dental pain meds, had my own dentist appt wherein I confirmed that I truly am resistant to most anesthesia options. Did a bunch of file organization of my content archives, edited a video, and filed my BOI report for Hustle to Hire as well as renewed my registered agent. Had dinner with the bestie at the end of a long day of moving (the new spot is so cute and I’m a little jelly!). Did some streaming but got disrupted by the Cloudflare outage, switched to chatting instead. Ended the week out with a friend having cocktails and attending a darkwave-themed burlesque night at a vegan punk bar, like you do.

📋 Coming up - I have a very reasonable week ahead, fingers crossed: Another dentist appointment for me and a post-dental follow-up for Irma. Might go out on Wednesday night, as it’s typically a big local goth night (no work the next day for all the corporate goths lol). Lazy Tday meals with friends & family on Thursday and Friday. Beyond that, just the usual! Some streaming, some chatting, some social posting, maybe some editing if I can keep my head together long enough.

Well it’s Black Friday uhhhh Week, as we near the end of what’s felt like a Black Friday Month. At first I was sore about how early businesses started their sales and promos, all still marketed as a “Black Friday sale!” even though we were weeks away from the day of. But I finally realized that it is, in all likelyhood, both a tariffs* issue and a postal system issue. Now, when I say *tariffs, I’m using it as a catch-all phrase to mean the ways that the tariffs have impacted international business transactions, including delays with shipping. But even stateside, the postal system has been moving slow; I placed an order on Oct. 5 and didn’t receive it until Nov. 5, from a company that in the past had taken 3 weeks maximum. So if we were all waiting until Black Friday proper to start shopping… Christmas would indeed be ruined. I’m not quite as sore about the timing of all this marketing now, but, I’m still exhausted by it.

Still, it’s an ideal time to be on the lookout for some deals, and I spent most of last week planning and preview shopping. I am a big fan of the whole Black Friday experience, partly because, well, I’m really good at shopping and spending money. 👸🛍️ But I also have fond memories of the “holiday;” my mom and I would pay the extra cost for the extra big Sunday newspaper preceding Thanksgiving and would spend the week scouring the inserts and plotting our route. Literally, planning the order we’d visit different stores, based on their incentives—free gift for first 50 people in the door, free coffee and donuts, etc.—as well as the strength of their sales. This was the early days of Black Friday being A Thing, before people were getting trampled or even shot over deeply discounted big screen TVs. But, we did wake up at 5am (or earlier) and go wait in line, bundled up against the cold dark morning, so we could get the best deals at our starting store of choice.

ANYWAY. Sorry to give you a whole nostalgia storytime before actually serving up the recipe you came in for. 😅 Even though we’re still a week out from The Day, I wanted to offer up some of the premium sales and offers I’ve found, some of which I’ve already taken advantage of. If you have questions on any of the below, or your own crazy good BFCM deal you’d like to recommend, you know where to find me! Thusly:

🎙️ When I started camming again, I quickly identified that my audio was a weak point. I have a solid Yeti Blue microphone I picked up used for a podcast project a decade ago, and since then it has served me well as a desktop mic for Twitch, Zoom, etc. But, the sound isn’t great, especially when I’m not sitting directly at my desk, and the unit itself has started to have some hardware issues. I wanted to move to a wireless lavalier mic system, but most of them focus on being used with smartphones and I needed a desktop option for streaming with OBS software. Enter: the Hollyland Lark M2 and M2S Lavalier Microphone kits. The M2 costs less than the M2S but their sound is comparable; I think most people would be plenty happy with the M2. This audio comparison on YouTube helped me weigh my options. In the end, I went with the M2S Combo kit, which includes both the USB-C receiver for using with a smartphone/tablet as well as an additional receiver and mic cord that allows these to be used with any device with a microphone jack. So I can use these with my iPhone, my iPad, my mirrorless camera, or my PC! I just got mine and haven’t used it to stream yet, but setup was a breeze. Hollyland distributes through Amazon, which has the Hollyland Lark M2S Combo for $91 (list price varies between $114-156 in the month I’ve been researching these), and the Lark M2 Combo kit for $80 (list price $100). If you don’t need the Combo kit with the additional receiver unit, the mic units are even cheaper. My only critique is that I wish the charging case had room for at least one of the attachment cables in the lid section.

💿 I don’t buy a ton of physical media these days, but there’s always a handful of movies I want to have in my collection, just in case. I saw a random link on Bluesky and ended up compiling a nice little shopping cart on Gruv, which has a ton of ~$10 Blurays and 3/$20 bundles. Really a great option for filling some gaps in your own collection as well as gifting for friends and family. My tactic was to just “add to cart” if I was interested in a movie, and then whittle it down to a more reasonable total spend. I’ll share a pic of my haul when it comes in! Fwiw, Gruv is owned by Universal Entertainment.

🖥️ If you’re in need of webhosting services, my host is having a killer sale: WPMU DEV is offering 11 months for free for new members! In all my years, this is one of the best webhosts I’ve ever used. The support staff is great and have gone out of their way for me multiple times to make sure I was happy with their service, and I love the integrated suite of plugins. WPMU is tailored toward WordPress hosting, especially if you’re the enterprising type who might want to extend hosting services to your design clients.

💁‍♀️ If you’re a baddie who’s hair colour is “other,” Overtone has their annual 25% discount on their full product line, plus a free gift with purchase for orders $65 or more. I’ve been using Overtone as my primary hair dye for almost a decade now, and any time I’ve gone back and used a traditional semi-/demi-permanent dye, I’ve been disappointed. I also use their bleach kits, which are plenty effective at achieving adequate lift for my boring-ass natural brown hair (if you have naturally black/ethnic hair I highly, highly recommend you go to a pro for at least that part). As a content creator and somewhat vain individual who prefers to be camera ready at a moment’s notice, and as someone who has basically built brand recognition as a purple-haired goth girl, Overtone is a key part of my arsenal of beauty products so I stock up for a full year of colour maintenance during their BF sale. Keep in mind that the free gift with purchase rotates every ~24 hours.

⏲️ Maybe a month ago, I talked about the “game”/productivity companion Spirit City: Lofi Sessions. Style your avatar or body double friend, design the room they hang out in, set up a Pomodoro timer and a task list and get to work while you use the integrated Lofi music radio to sooth you into a flow state of getting shit done! The base game is typically $12 but right now on Steam, you can download the basic Spirit City game for $7.19, through December 1. There’s also some DLCs available to expand available locations and cosmetics, which are also slightly discounted but not drastically so.

What I’m waiting on:

It happens to all entrepreneurial types, I think. Anyone who lives even a portion of their lives with severe independence, whether intentionally or not. You spend your days in a vacuum of personal accountability, and it gets lonely. Sex work is its own kind of isolating, too, especially when you’re a digital worker/creator. You're both a contractor and your own boss, and you can just… make up the rules for what your job is. Is there such a thing as too much freedom? I can craft a structure for my day, schedule out my time in advance, but no one is going to say hey, did you finish those performance reports? Do you have any ideas for next months promotional calendar? It’s fully autonomous, self-guided work, but just like a self-driving car, sometimes it just… doesn’t work so good. Someone ought to be driving this thing!

And I know this sounds a bit like entry level burnout, but it’s not. It’s standard. Whether you’re a sex worker or a small biz founder or a graphic designer or whatever, this is what it is. A lot of us go into these lines of work because there is something about a standard job that just doesn’t align. But there is also a part of me that misses having Someone Else to talk to about this specific work I am doing, someone to report in to or to have assign tasks for me to do with a specific goal in mind. I’ve considered hiring a virtual assistant; I don’t have a crazy workload (she says while managing 6 platforms, considering a 7th, and at least 5 social media accounts) but I think it would be nice to have someone checking in with me about the work I say I’m going to do, the work I need to do, and maybe providing a modicum of support or feedback to make sure something, anything gets done.

“Be your own boss! Work whenever you want! From wherever you want!” Okay but I work from home every day and nobody in my day-to-day interactions understands my job let alone asks me how work is going, how’s that project coming along, did you edit those photos you took last week? It’s a grind, to be sure, and not always the sexy kind.

I am, have always been, thankful for my ability to earn income in this line of work. Thankful for my ability to manage my life and keep my bed made and cook my own dinners every night. I know that’s not possible for everyone. But I think it’s okay to both be thankful and to acknowledge what I feel is lacking; it’s only through that acknowledging such that I can consider how to navigate it, to build around it and fill the gaps that remain.

🎬 Movie #1 - Once I finally forced myself to step away from the PC and let my brain turn off for a minute, I knew I needed to watch a dumb action movie, and for that Statham always fits the bill. But I wasn’t expecting A Working Man (2025) to having the pacing and scene design of an increasingly ridiculous quest chain in Cyberpunk 2077. The action was tight, the characters were caricatures, and the dialogue was cutting. Overall, exactly what I needed.

🎬 Movie #2 - I don’t know what compelled me to watch Disturbing Behaviour (1998). I had two hours to kill and some loading screen was like, here it is! So I thought what the heck and hit play. I don’t think I’ve seen this since the year it was released? It’s kind of Stepford Wives meets The Faculty (which is a better movie imo). I don’t think I’d realized how many of the high school-based movies back then were hard science fiction.

🎵 Listening - Digging through the dozens of new releases I’d amassed in my listening queue, a few stood out as solid wishlistable albums. I really enjoyed Evilnox’s Forgotten Scrolls compilation for being some very classic dungeon synth. And Dreams of the Cosmic Tower by Chainsaw x Shoggoth really grabbed me as soon as that first heavy riff dropped in. The vocals remind me of both Ozzy Osborne and Author & Punisher. And Pauldron’s Curse of the Niloticus is a delightful exploration of another world, with the story told through musical themes and track titles.

☕ Drinking - I finished off this tin of loose leaf Heirloom Bartlett Pear white tea. Would I recommend it? Eh. It was something I received in a gift set a year ago and I’ve enjoyed it but I’m not sure if I’ll replace it. But if you want a nice mellow white tea for the colder months, it’s a good option.

🕹️ Someone asked me recently if parents know how absolute shite and damaging Roblox gaming platform is for children. “No, they have no idea,” I replied. And if the Roblox cofounder and CEO knows, he doesn’t care, and is intending to make Roblox even worse for kids.

🦃 I’m planning a lazy AF Thanksgiving day this year and will not be doing excessive cooking nor ordering a pre-made T-day meal like I have in the past, but were it possible I’d buy all the limited edition Thanksgiving promo crossover foods. They’re dumb and questionable and YOLO, you know? Sadly, most of this stuff has sold out, or just isn’t available where I am.

📺 Max Headroom is on Tubi. Both seasons! It’s definitely a product of its era and could only have existed in that era. If you’ve never seen it and you consider yourself “weird” in any capacity, do yourself a favor and dig in; it’s the anarchist anti-capitalist entertainment Anonymous wishes it could be. If you have already seen it, and you consider yourself “weird”, it’s probably at least partially because you watched Max Headroom (I peeped the wiki and what do you mean the Christmas special was written by George R.R. Martin??). See also: Eminem’s Rap God music video.

I don’t know if I’m ready to start with the “happy holidays!” just yet. So, have a good week, may it be full of loved ones and things that make you happy.

xox,