Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

A Discord server I've been hanging out on has, in addition to chat on various topics and animal pictures, a variety of low-key events, which I have been listening to in little bits.

Yesterday Anthony invited me to be a guest for "scintillation maritime noon," in which a host interviews three people on anything they want to talk about: last night it was apples (me), spoon-making, and interactive fiction. I am told that this is based on an actual CBC radio program, which is similarly open-ended.

I talked about apples, Mike and Zarf talked about spoons and interactive fiction, and then we answered questions and the discussion continued among every who was on at the time. I was nervous about doing this, because my first reaction was "what will I talk about?" Once cattitude suggested apples, I got Anthony to help trouble-shoot my computer audio problems.

I had fun doing this, and was feeling generally better afterwards--it had been weeks since I participated in a conversation of more than two people, even online, and the ones before that were Zoom gatherings of either quility's friends, for gaming, or Cattitude's relatives.

The limiting factor for me in doing more of this, or similar things, is still going to be the audio: the earphones+microphone headset works as well for me as any such, meaning it starts to get uncomfortable after about 20 minutes. They're earbuds, which means I can stretch the time by removing one earphone at a time. [please don't try to problem-solve the technical end of this.]