Gabriel is stocking up for an increasingly elaborate Stream Excursion, having recently found the serrated edge where streaming from the same box you're playing on ceases to be an authentic option. What's more, he'd been using the Very Small Stream Deck from El Gato, which I think they officially call the Stream Deck Mini, and determined that once he was trying to run a stream with multiple overlays designed to incorporate the whole family Six Buttons was perilously close to No Buttons. I suggested that perhaps the Stream Deck Mobile app might give him some breathing room, creating a kind of virtual configurable deck, but I knew deep down that this rhetoric was not a good time investment. Eric Benson, brewmaster for Acquisitions Intoxicated, put forward that you can make nested menus on the Deck itself, virtually extending its payload, but I have spent enough time with Gruber to know that only a larger deck with more buttons would be acceptable. He currently has the one with fifteen buttons. I'll let you know if he jumps to the thirty-two.

The last thing I heard was that he was trying to utilize "virtual audio cables," which I think is like hearing that someone is looking for a beast called "El Cuchillo," and then they walk out the cabin door into a blizzard, never to be seen again.

Part of the upgrade was the construction of a box whose only job is to digest streams from all over the house, a task that was undertaken last weekend, and whose fruits we should see this morning during the Mommy And Daddy Time stream he does with Kara. They should still be in there, if you're reading this from 10-12am PDT on Wednesday. If not, you know… this isn't actionable info. Do keep it in mind for future dates. I understand that Gabriel the Younger acquitted himself quite well in the task, and it sounds like he's received substantial Python knowledge from our engineer's Monday Morning streams, which will delight our Technomancer to no end.

Technology does hate Gabriel though, and it also hates my wife Brenna, to the point where I'm not a person who goes in for much Woo Woo but I've seen things happen around these two that fucking defies belief and I've had to warp my orderly cosmology just to allow for occasional projections into our universe from the Demon Realm in their proximity. Things have gone very well for Gabriel, though, since he switched to an iPad Pro - a raft of what you might call Real Applications has begun to roost there, and iOS 13 has support for Mice, which has caused me to invest psychologically in a fantasy.

I endeavored to use an iPad and a Bluetoof keyboard as a laptop replacement for trips, but it wasn't really fit for purpose. I'm not the kind of typist where all the stuff just goes from the brain to the hands to the screen in a coherent beam. Typing is more like throwing clay for me. I put it out there and I shape it and adjust it and then I fuck a ghost. A mouse-free environment is generally considered a plus, like… in the home, but reaching up to touch the screen all the time with the right amount of precision and pressure to accomplish the task but not so much that it tips the iPad over is the sort of thing that makes me sweat preemptively. It's always needed a mouse in my opinion, all I'm looking for is the experience you get from the SDK mapped onto production devices, using a mouse. And they heard me I guess! As soon as iOS 13 finds its way into the world in an official capacity, I'll see if it's something that might have a broad application at home; something perhaps more resistant to her rays.

(CW)TB out.