Emergency Blog Update

Emergency Blog Update

Okay so you might wonder uh where all these promised 2011 posts are. Or you might be less wondering and more fully confident that you know just how lazy I can get and have never really expected them.

Well, that's not the case! They were coming, honest! And they're still coming. But there's been a minor setback. And by minor I mean like extremely major. One of my harddrives crapped out! Argh yeah! Major data massacre! This was my solid state drive that I boot off of and keep things like random documents and such on. Also because I felt the solid state drive was invincible (this turned out to be the opposite of accurate) I never thought to back up much of that stuff, even though it would have been really easy. Yeah so I'm pretty dumb in regards to that and I'm still kicking myself over it. Every time I have a drive die I say NEVER AGAIN and vow to have a religious system of redundancy that lasts all of a week. If I could afford a Drobo or some other sort of autobackup big storage array I think I could keep up with it 'cause I wouldn't actually have to do anything but since that isn't the case I sort of just spitefully refuse to back things up and pine over thousand-dollar raid arrays etc.

Anyways yeah:

Brief retrospective on failed hard drives

1. 320GB external drive (Name forgotten, prolly something lame like 320)

This was from the era that my home connection was on dialup but a few people I knew had high speed, so if I was ever at their house I'd bring my laptop and this drive and get as much stuff as I could. I think maybe all the jostling around ruined it, maybe it was the sketchy enclosure, I don't know. I replaced it with the 500GB one “Victory Road” that I still use now.

Losses:

-A bunch of music probably in like 192kbps

-Some TV shows, I think mostly random adult swim comedies, maybe some sitcoms

-Some anime

-My 4chan pictures folder from that era, this thing was massive, lasted from like 2005-2007. Probably what I miss most even though it would just be stupid demotivationals and such from /b/ that I'd only laugh at today 'cause of nostalgia.

2. 2TB internal drive “New World”

This was a WD Green drive I got on some massive sale online. It was doing well until one day I had some computer problem that stopped Windows from booting, some graphics driver corruption or something, that made me have to reinstall Windows. Now, at the time, I thought something was screwing up with my SSD but unlike what happened when my SSD actually screwed up yesterday I was able to get at the files on it through command line somewhere, can't really remember how all this went down. Anyways I decided to back up everything from the SSD to this new drive and I used the command line copy function “robocopy” which is pretty dang powerful and extremely fast and I remember watching it copy over stuff to this drive and hearing it, like, squeal in pain, and feeling just absolutely sick and sure enough the drive crapped out entirely a few days later. I didn't really lose all that much 'cause it was new and WD replaced it with another one I still have now.

Losses:

-A bunch of FLAC music, I was going for a second “best of” type music collection with only FLAC, only albums I really really liked, etc. Not sure why really.

-A bunch of TV shows, can't really remember what so I guess I don't miss them that much. I think I had copies of Seinfeld and NewsRadio and The Simpsons there but my dad has those so if I want to watch them I can get them from him.

-Some movies, again, can't remember which ones. I think a lot from the Criterion Collection freeleech on PTP.

3. 160GB hard drive “Pallet Town”

This thing was a real trooper, I had it for ages when it finally crapped out after a long period of going slower and slower. I had already copied everything I wanted off of it so when it bit the dust I didn't really feel all to bad, it had done its job.

Losses:
-Old programs I never use anymore

4. 80GB SSD “Raftel”

Okay so this was the recent one and dang this is an annoying loss. Not sure what went wrong with it, it just wouldn't boot one morning and nothing could get anything to recognize it. I guess this is pretty consistent with how SSDs fail, which is a thing that happens with disturbing frequency. WELL LESSON LEARNED, but the damage, as they say, is irreversable.

Losses:

-Programs/program settings. ARGH. That's all my Opera custom searches, speed dial, etc, etc. NOT TO MENTION UTORRENT, OH NO. I think I have the torrent files themselves somewhere else but losing the state means I'd have to readd and repoint all ~5000 of them manually, NO THANKS. So now I'm not seeding anything anywhere and I barely remember the url of some trackers I'm on. Not good.

-Stats.ods. I dunno if I've ever mentioned this on the blog 'cause it's one of the weirder things I do but everyone I know seems to know about it anyways. Basically every night I keep track of various statistics about the day in a big spreadsheet. Stuff like how much money I spent and how much sleep I got and such. Also stuff like best scores in games I'm playing or progress towards tasks. Pretty useful? Not really but pretty interesting I think at least. I've been doing this for two years and I never backed it up... nah I backed it up pretty often but the newest one I can find elsewhere is months old. That's a huge data whole ahhh!

-Writing. Luckily most of the stuff I was actively working on was also on the netbook, including these stupid 2011 posts (although I really don't feel like working on them if I can't get on my desktop and thus at my music etc) and the stuff that I wasn't active enough with to think to do that I probably wasn't going to finish anyways, so oh well. Still, I dunno... it kinda sucks.

Lessons learned:

Possessions are fleeting, and digital possessions doubly so, unless you back them up enough places. Then they're pretty much good indefinitely.

Being a digital materialist is just as empty as being a regular materialist but less tangible, unless you back stuff up.

If you create something you should share it somehow even if you're not proud of it. It's very hard to judge whatever progress you might have made if you can't have it judged or at least put it in a place where you can think of it in an objective judgmental perspective. No one wants to read your crappy writing, yeah, but if you eventually produce good writing you won't know unless you're giving someone the option to want to read it anyways. Hiding stuff away gets you nothing. So basically you should post stuff everywhere. And this also keeps stuff backed up.

Back up your documents. Do it now, and do it often, and do it every time you think to.

Seriously, back them up.

Other stuff since I'm already making a blog post

And since we're taking a break from 2011 stuff I guess.

Lone Wolf & Cub

So I've been reading this, I'm about halfway through now and I'm really really enjoying it. Art beautiful! Enthralling combat! And the storytelling, oh man, never have I got a sense of “media res” the way I get it here. You know the joke about like, the opening of House episodes where you're just waiting to see who will collapse? Well, I mean, formulaic is one thing, but it's actually pretty cool when you're challenging the reader/viewer to come up with the plot from the given scenario just using the familiarity with well-established characters. That's really cool! So you see some dispute and then that baby carriage rolling in and it's like, you do the math. And you always end up sort of right and yet there's a twist or two and it's so exciting. Not that it's all formulaic. Sometimes you start with Diagoro wandering about, sometimes with a nice history of some element of life in the period, who knows. The only thing you're sure of is that by the end of the chapter there's gonna be some sweet sweet samurai action. Oh and I wasn't aware that the sample at the start of the legendary “4^th Chamber”, you know, the choose the ball/sword business, I didn't realize that it had come from the American dub of the movie inspired by this manga, not sure how I'd managed to never figure that out, so when I got to that scene in the manga I was like woah woah woah hey this is familiar, this is almost TOO COOL. But yeah this series rules. I guess my only beef is that sometimes the scope of the overall plot gets a bit screwy. Like we're getting into this arc with the Yagyu letter, that's pretty cool, but you have a really suspenseful chapter where he gets really close to the truth, or squares right off with them or something, and it's huge and climactic but then the next chapter they're like, helping out with some magician or something and I dunno. I think the craziest is when he has to kill the religious leader but he can't bring himself to at first, so he goes into the woods and meditates until he reaches an inner mu. You know, “if you meet your family, kill your family; if you meet the buddha, kill the buddha”, that shtick. It was a really really cool chapter but it happened all in one chapter when this is typically the sort of story that requires an entire series to tell. Just seems sort of weird. Anyways yeah looking forward to the second half of the series.

TloZ OoT MST TAS

Okay so SwordlessLink has apparently finished his tool-assisted speedrun of getting all Medallions, Stones and completing all of Ganon's trials, and defeating Ganon, for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I found out he'd finished it like two weeks ago but the encoding process for these sorts of videos is not at all even remotely what I thought it was. So I have no idea when it's coming out but I keep checking the site every five seconds because it could be out RIGHT NOW!!!!

Oh but it's not dang okay moving on.

Kindred

Okay so Burial has a new thing coming out which is usually a cause for some hype and such, guy's a ridiculously solid musician, not a bad track etc. I don't usually expect everything he does to be on his god tier, though, 'cause his god tier is pretty lofty, I mean like, “Moth”... “Archangel”... “In McDonald's”... these are songs that don't come along too often.

Well. I was pretty bummed out about this whole computer failure business and unable to get at my music collection. And I'm sitting on my netbook wondering what I should listen to when a friend of mine tells me that there's these 45 second samples of Burial's new EP/album/whatever it is. And I'm like nah okay I can wait for the whole thing but he makes it imperative that this something that must be heard now. And he was correct. To say this is on Burial's god tier music is an insult. This completely redefines his scale. This is the sort of thing that you feel lucky came along even once when you're alive. This feels so far from the future of music that it scarcely feels real. It's so good! Oh man. Early call as AotY, unless Boards of Canada or Animal Collective put out something. Oh man oh wow.

Wonderfest

So like the MST run and the Burial album I'm writing about something that hasn't happened yet for some reason. Winter Wonderfest! Probably the biggest figure convention in Japan and single greatest threat to my ability to buy food. Why is it that I have become near addicted to collecting Nendoroids? I don't know. I can give a bunch of half-explanations that are almost good enough to convince me but the bottom line is that I can't explain it and I can't stop it.

But yeah not sure what to say about it since it hasn't started but maybe when it's done I'll do an overview of the stuff I want.

Waka Flocka Flame

Okay here's something else that hasn't happened yet and I can't really come up with anything to say about but NEXT FRIDAY, I am seeing WAKA FLOCKA FLAME (BRICKSQUAAAAAAAAAD!!!!!!) in LIVE CONCERT. He will be preforming hits like “Hard in da Paint” and “Olay Dooooo It (Druuug deelan mooosik!!)” and “No Haaands” and hopefully “Karma (I TELL MY LAYYA T'GET MY BACK FOR ALL THE CRAZY SHIT I DID” and hopefully not “Round of Applause” because I HATE DRAKE. It should be INSANE, oh man, the fantasies of hanging out with Waka after the concert or something just won't stop, I cannot tell my brain to turn them off.

I guess that's it

I feel like there was more but I can't remember what it was oh well.

Maybe there will be more blog posts shortly because things are actually happening.

But I don't know exactly what they'd be so maybe they'll just suck too.