[Goodreads | Storygraph]
3.5 / 5 stars
( More under the cut )
TestDisk did not work. The drive is now in Dad’s hands; hopefully Linux will work. I have no idea how he’s getting the data to us if it does work, but we’ll figure it out. I have a plan C to rebuild our music library, at least, if this fails. It will cost us $50 we don’t have, but we’ll manage it somehow, even if it takes a few weeks.
My 2023 NaNoWriMo t-shirt has been found. We’re going to get a display box for it and hang it up somewhere. Where, I don’t know, but now that it’s a collector’s item, I want to keep it fresh. I’m so mad at them for what they did to their organization. They had a good thing, and then they had to go and get greedy, not only accepting sponsorships from AI companies (which I do believe very fer people would’ve actually cared about, money is money) but writing puff pieces extolling the virtues of generative AI… and then when they got pushback, doubling down and calling us ableist and classist.
Also, “difficult to maintain a community.” My friends, you shut down the forums because you couldn’t be assed to vet your moderators, then ran around the internet telling NaNoWriMo groups they couldn’t use the name. You destroyed the community. No one did that but you.
Despite all this, I’m glad I got to participate and win before they folded. It was an experience I value.
1) I’m trying to recover data myself
2) asking if I should just assume the drive is cooked
I got a single reply, very rudely telling me to take it to a professional.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been friendly and gotten a nasty reply out of the gate, and I’m now convinced that Reddit users are mostly troglodytes who probably were never taught manners and likely have the reading comprehension of third graders. Anyway, I think I can safely discard Reddit as a social networking site I want to use.
I gave up on the recovery program I was using, and I’m trying Test Disk now. It’s moving much faster… and kicking out read errors in every sector. Yeah, the drive is cooked. I’m going to ask Dad to see if he can do anything with it, but I’m going to be organizing to rerip everything. It’s gonna suck, but it is what it is.
I should've taken the time to get *everything* off the drive, not just the stuff I wanted on the new one. I knew it was very old. I knew it was having trouble. I just thought I could squeeze another year out of it.
A drive recovery program is running right now, and it sees the drive as "Lost Partition" so I have hope. Not much, but I do. If I recover my music library I'll be happy. It's taken almost 24 hours so far and it's about maybe 5% done, by my calculations. I'm really bad at math, though, so I'm hoping it's a little farther along than that.
Went to Sprouts yesterday. Fresh veggies, frozen veggies, veggie burgers. Some other stuff I don't remember, but it was all needed. We didn't have a single goddamn vegetable in the house before that trip. I had to dip into money I was trying to save for upcoming bills, but it was worth it.
I hope.
I had an ~adventure~ yesterday. Went to B&N and wrote for a while, then went to shoprite and did grocery shopping. Then I came home, tried to reconcile the disability account, and the math wasn’t mathing. Here it turned out that the guy we got gas from, someone we go to constantly, did a pre-auth for $75. I was PISSED. The man knows us, knows our car, and knows that it’s never needed more than $35 to fill. It was $28 this time. The money is back in the account today, but we wanted to finish up shopping last night and that fucking pre-auth left us with $15.
I am 100% positive he did it because the debit card is branded as being from the NJ Department of Labor, so naturally, I was trying to steal gas from him. Fucking loser. I’m not going to be paying him for gas anymore. Dad likes him but if he wants to get gas from him, he can pay for it.
Anyway, I got Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma yesterday, and it is PRETTY. I’m still just starting RF3, so it’ll be a while before I play GOA, but still. I love the box. So pretty.
I’m quite irate at the state. I’ve been without income for almost a month, and they gave me a single week’s pay this week. Even taking the waiting week into account, they owe me two. I’m going to be so pissed if I never get that missing week.
In terms of video games, there were indeed cheats for Breath of Fire 3. The only problem? A bug in which if I use the front character’s field action, that character freezes. Not the game. Not the emulator. The CHARACTER. I can fix it by turning off the cheats and pressing the direction button rapidly, but man, that’s annoying.
Anyway, gonna play some BoF3, speaking of it
It’s really fucking annoying that the disability website will let you go through all of the login steps before saying “lol no, it’s too early for this.” Fuckers, tell me that before I put in my password and whatnot. Just make the site inaccessible until it’s time. Fuck.
I got a bit of writing done last night, as well as a little bit of Breath of Fire 3. I got too annoyed with the vinegar well mini game and just put in a code for all items + infinite items. That’ll show this damn game. I hate that mini game, it’s nearly impossible.
Coming up, though, is the shallows mini game, and I’m not sure I can cheat my way through that. We’ll see in just a few seconds, because I want to play before anything else.
I”m not feeling well today. I think it’s going to be a take-it-easy day. I tried to go back to sleep just now but my head hurts and I was BORED, so that’s a good sign that I don’t need more sleep. The boredom part, not the head hurting part. But I can’t get comfortable. Might go for a quick walk once the medicine kicks in.
Apparently there was a thunder storm last night that I slept through. Unusual for me.
I’m gonna go see if I can have some of Dad’s Tums. I don’t have much to say now, anyway.
I think there's also an element of defensiveness for going to black-flattening to try and ward off criticism of being "too soft" on characters ahead of time by painting them as much worse than they are. I'm not one of those dumb fans who ignores their faults! I'm OBJECTIVE!
Anyway as you can probably guess this is about Spamton, who I've mostly seen on the demonized side lately (seen him called the most irredeemable, vicious, evil, unspeakably cruel character in the entire game) particularly given what happened in Chapter 3 of Deltarune. Someone posted a list of his crimes from the Villain Wiki as a kind of "gotcha" about what a bad person he is and half of these aren't accurate or don't even apply to him. >:| If you want to accuse him of crimes at least accuse him of ones he actually did! It bothers me so much I'm just going to go through them here because doing it on Twitter would just start pointless arguing that'd be an even bigger waste of time.
( Overstatement is the name of the game )
The way people talk about Snowgrave lately you'd think Spamton shows up right when you get Noelle, puts a gun in her hands, and tells you to start blasting. :/
lj post
Tomorrow will be July 1, and I still don’t have my debit card from the state. I have the option to call or email, and maybe this is a mistake, but I’m going to wait until I haven’t gotten it in the mail tomorrow to do so. Hopefully I get it in the next two days.
I showered last night and (gently) scrubbed down this time. I feel better having done that; I was just getting in, splashing a bit int he water, and then getting out (and washing my hair when it was time). That works in a pinch but it was nice to soap up. My hands DID NOT like it, though, so I ended up using my aquaphor, too.
I need a haircut.
Anyway, I’m most of the way through Breath of Fire 3, and now the question will be: will I actually play through BoF 4 and 5? I’m sure going to try.
And I still haven’t gotten my debit card from the state. I feel sick. Hopefully I get that today.
I’ve come up with a plan to repair the files damaged in the bug on 4tw. I’ve got a repair project, and a repair log file where I’m listing the files that I’ve rewritten the ending. I’ll do one per day, and then write normally for the rest of my writing. Hopefully this gets me out of this rut I’m in.
So Cal has, I think he said, 54 hours last week, and we’re starting this week with 2 hours of overtime. All because this organization does absolutely no maintenance on their heat/cool systems between seasons. That has to be it, because this happens EVERY TIME the weather changes. I’m not complaining much, as we desperately need the money, but I’d like for Cal to be able to not spend his weekend working once in a while.
In other, work related news, when Orlando laid me off, he told me to hold onto the computer equipment in case he decides to hire me as a contract worker sometime down the line. That was 2 years ago, and communication from him has been minimal. I texted him asking if I can just buy the equipment off him. No answer, and I’m wondering when I can consider this stuff abandoned. I’ll probably give it a week and then ask Dad about using Linux to crack the admin password because I’m tired of it taking up space when I have plenty of things I can use it for.
Last night I asked Cal if he thinks we chased the mice away, because no one had seen or heard one in like a week. The moment the question was out of my mouth, we heard utterly *desperate* scrabbling from the recycle container. Cal put another bin in it to contain them; didn’t crush them, because there was stuff in it, of course. He took it out to his work and let them go this morning.
I’m either going to go back to sleep now, or play Breath of Fire 3 a bit. I’m edging to more sleep, but I don’t really want to do that. I’m just so tired…
I feel icky in general today, but the heat’s finally broken, so I’m hoping to be able to enjoy some time outside.
I texted an older friend I haven’t heard from in a while; I know him through his wife, we used to work together. She had a stroke a couple years ago; he said that she’s improving every day, and that he’s preparing for retirement! Happy for them. I’m a little jealous that Mom’s stroke lead to her death; not that I want Ellyn to have died, absolutely not, but why couldn’t Mom have recovered, too?
I feel like a horrible human being for this.
We’re going to be going to see them sometime in July, hopefully. It’s been a long, long while, and I miss chatting with Ellyn. I might text Orlando, too, if for no other reason than to ask him if I can buy the computer off him. It’s been, gosh, three years? Four? I think it’s time.
Anyway, going to go to the grocery store in 8 minutes, so I better get going.
This would be disappointing enough. However, he told me later (like, 20 minutes ago) that he pulled up to his boss with, “Sorry, can’t do OT, I have to take [Joshua] to a doctor’s appointment.” And, like…? Am I being too terribly unreasonable for not wanting him to do that? Show up for me or stop using me as a get out of work free card. I don’t exist for your convenience! I only seem to exist to this guy when it’s convenient for him!
Anyway… I apparently have a unicorn diagnosis! The adenomyosis wasn’t a surprise to me (which leads me to question why it was a surprise to my surgeons, but I digress) but adenomyomas was, and my surgeons had never seen a case of it before in the wild. Educational for us all!
The surgeon who I saw today seemed very relieved that the pathology report was 100% benign, which… I already knew logically because I’m not dead yet? It’s been damn near 2 years since the problem was noticed. If there had been cancer, it would’ve killed me by now, I imagine. But her reaction to it kind of makes me wonder if they were spooked by the adenomyomas and didn’t immediately know what they were.
Okay. It’s 4 PM. Let’s go see how much writing I can get done before I give up.
But I’m gonna drink it, because I don’t like being nauseous.
I got virtually nothing done yesterday. I was depressed and feeling sorry for myself, really, with our financial situation being what it is. My insurance company pulled a foul one on us. For those of you who weren’t around, one of our vehicles gave up the ghost in March. It was expected, and we were trying to save for a new one, but we hadn’t quite gotten to the point where we could even save yet. A semi-wealthy friend loaned us the money for a down payment on a new one, and we put it on the insurance immediately. Of course we did. Can’t drive in NJ without insurance.
Except we weren’t BILLED for it. So I called them in April like, what what what. And they assured me it would be on the next bill.
Except we weren’t billed for it in May. I called them like, what what what. And I was promised that it did in fact include the new vehicle.
I argued. The bill was $128. There’s no fucking WAY two vehicles and life insurance was less than $130. Nope nope nope. I was wrong, it was on the bill.
Okay. Fine. It wasn’t on June’s bill, either.
Yesterday I got an email from my agent like, ”Hey, it wasn’t on April May or June, so we’re adding a bit to July August September to make it up.”
MOTHERFUCKER, THE PAYMENT IS NOW GOING TO BE $450. I am PISSED. I’m on fucking disability, which pays 80% of my base pay! It would’ve been hard to make that payment when I was working, it’s impossible right now!
Fortunately someone saw my plea for help on Tumblr and sent me $200, which doesn’t cover everything but gets us through July and helps with August. But I don’t understand why it’s so hard to get an insurance company that doesn’t act like this. We used to have Progressive and it took almost TEN CALLS to fix, “Hey, you have me down as a licensed driver and I’m not, I have a learner’s permit.” I don’t know. Is this just what to expect now? I get mistakes happen, but ten calls? Blatantly refusing to do any research on my issue to see that yeah, I’m being undercharged? Isn’t that their job?
Anyway, yeah. That was in the evening, so I can’t blame my low mood on that. But I’m going to try to actually get some stuff accomplished today.
So yesterday I had to deal with two collections accounts, one of which was mine, although I’ve never gotten a bill (I know the testing was done, they just. Didn’t give me a bill, and I can’t pay what I don’t have a bill for).
The other was not, and I’m getting really pissed with the guy who had this phone number before me not paying his bills.
In other news, Cal put his phone on snooze RIGHT BY MY EAR this morning, which wasn’t fun.
Yeah. I’m going back to sleep.