Your gateway to endless inspiration
My email got hacked. Now sorting through over 8,000 mail delivery system responses to the crap that got sent out via my hacked account. Looks like it was mainly “Singles in your area” posts going out and maybe some free movie or whatever spam. Did have one good response- a definitely manual unsubscribe post, in caps, very angry. I would have responded manually about the hacked account, but I decided not to, just out of security fears. So Andrew H, sorry I got my email hacked (and I hope he gets a better spam filter). Anyway, ran all existing scans, updated, restarted, ran the scans again, added a new malware scanner, ran that. Ran the other scanners again, then talked to what I call “in-house tech support” and had my password changed. Hopefully that ends my other laptop’s career as a bot-net member.
Okay, tv show.... opening scene is some muscular guy with slicked-back teal hair standing outside of building getting admiring looks. That building is apparently the front exit of a spaceport (that’s right in the middle of the city in an area with lots of foot traffic) and he is an alien.
Okay, now alien and military guy are sitting in the audience of a sporting event we never see. Military guy is telling alien dude (who is some sort of ... goodwill ambassadorliaison from the aliens?) is being told he wil**l not **be going to the far-off space battlefront, he’s too valuable to risk or some-such and instead must stay here and be forced to compete in the Olympics.
Alien guy (what happened to the teal hair btw, why does he now have a big brown afro?) protests, he’s from a warrior people/been trained as a warrior etc etc,. Military guy is “this is from higher up, no fighting it.” Alien guy is not happy with this.
Next scene, alien is ... visiting with a random family. Oh? Family of some human friend he has, who’s off fighting somewhere. Wait,... what? Why? And why is his hair now the horrible afro only with bits shaved out of it?
Anyway, he’s catching up with them -never-mind how the hell he’s supposed to know them- when they’re interrupted by the tv - some sort of emergency (attack? robbers? fire? brain, you wanna put in some details? No? Okay)
So some sort of emergency, presumably with Bad Guys...huh alien guy is having some sort of fit... annd now he’s turned into a sort of gold-coloured lion-styled superhero. (I like the mask.... is that supposed to be a mask? It’s his face? Okay) Now he’s put his hands together and is firing some sort of energy at the woman who turn into something similar. The guy with them them who is ...not part of the family, but some sort of military liaison//minder for alien guy has freaked out and pulled a gun. Woman protests that’s she’s fine, let him him do his thing dude. And the gun goes away and guy is energy beamed into some sort of blue cat styled superhero.
Before they depart to kick ass, they need to know more. Alien lion now has a sword and.... is this Thundercats but meddled with so much by tv execs who know nothing about it so that’s not even related to the original anymore? I think it is, because he’s doing the eye of Thundara bit, only without the speech, the sword is horizontal and he’s looking into some sort of glowing eyepiece.on it.
Dream ends before they can head out. That’s REM cycles for you. Overall, a very 90′s low-budget tv series feel to it, and sort of a ‘re-imagined’ Thundercats thing meddled with by execs, marketing, sales, producers and so forth who all know nothing about Thundercats and/or never knew about that bit in the first place that it’s been turned into classic 90′s generic superhero dreck.
Brain:”But would you watch it?” Well, I do love that crap, so I’d probably give it a few eps at the least to see where it goes.
So, back in…. May. The 17th or 18th thereof. The laptop I was using hit the loading screen singularity. It booted to an error message. I could restart, and get the same error message, or I could try to run recovery, watch it fail, then restart.
So geared up in my informal hazmat-lite disposable attire, I stepped out of the front door of my little Fortress of Crazitude, and went inside the house, where the functional human beings live, to use a laptop there.
Searching for something I liked was going to take a while. In that strange Before Time, when people went outside without being masked, Dad zipped out and kindly got for me the cheapest laptop he could find.
Now I could begin my search in earnest.
Starting with the gaming rigs. Hideous, hideous, awkard design (that was hideous). The closest to what I was looking for was an Alienware model… that was hideous, and came with something called Tobii eye-tracking. I don’t want my computer staring at me. Plus, this was a gimmick, I don’t play the kind of intense shooters where every picosecond counts.
I kept looking.
I found a laptop marketed as a ‘desktop replacement’. Just the sort of thing I wanted. Something with the power of a desktop, but without needing me to do a major cleaning job to find space for it, and/or rig up something to hold a monitor where I wanted it? Perfect.
So I looked around, a place in the US, it had them in stock, and they would even customize it. Great, a bigger hard-drive! Okay the thing needed two power-bricks to work, which would be a hassle, but I could live with that.
In the meantime, the budget laptop could just about run an older version of Minecraft… as long it was on the server my bff’s hurricane child had dragged me onto, I could make do.
I made my order. ……….
3 weeks passed. I heard nothing from them. Okay, the world is in chaos, I expected some delays. Still, I wanted at least some idea for how much longer I would be making ersatz icepacks to keep my new little laptop from overheating from the overworking I was currently giving it, even as I did my best to cut down on my usual habits to lessen strain on it’s CPU.
I sent in a request for an update. “Oh yeah, turns out we didn’t actually have one in stock”. So how long till they could get one? “Oh they’re discontinued. How about one of these?”
All the ‘these’ were ones I’d looked at and already discounted. Wait, here’s one on eBay, how I about I send it to you, and you upgrade that one? I’ll pay the extra shipping fees.
“Oh no, we wouldn’t be able to honor a warranty on that.”
My domain is the black hole of electronics. Once it’s in here, it won’t leave again. My OCD means I cant have something sent out to be repaired and have it sent back. Once it’s here, it’s here. I tried to explain this, and said I would waive any rights to a warranty. It would be the most expensive idiot tax I’d ever paid, but I was willing to pay it.
June passed and I heard nothing.
Time to look again. I had toyed with the idea of a custom rig from another place in the US, but, oh, the price tag. And the wait time. …Mainly the price tag. Okay, major purchase for me, and I was going to crack open my savings. But still, I’m on a pension.
Okay, another look, see if I can find anywhere in Australia. More cash could be spent on the laptop itself and not the insane international shipping tool.
I found a place. Custom configurations, in a shell that isn’t painful to look at.
Could it be?
I checked some reviews. Chunky…. I like a bit of heft to a device. Besides, it wasn’t going to be doing a lot of moving anyway. 1-2 metres on average at best. Fans can get loud…. that means they’re working. I can get a headset if I need it.
Ooh, and they have a sale on too. I consult with in-house tech support. I’m told I can get the hard-drives cheaper elsewhere, and another M2 memory stick, then put them in myself.
Sweet, more cash to spend on the graphics card and CPU. Not quite top-tier, but heck, I hadn’t been running any of my games on the old laptop at full graphics settings anyway. No dvd drive though, but every other maker seems to have dispensed with those as well. Oh well, it’s not like I used those much anyway, and I can always get an external one.
And it only needs the one power brick.!
Better specs than the discontinued model, I can max out on hard-drive space and have a second M2 drive just for my games, with plenty of room!
Before the end of June, I make my order.
I find a big hard-drive, a good sized M2 stick, and even an external usb enclosure for the hard drive I pulled out of the blue-screened purgatory.
July, that place in the US actually mails me back. Since I was willing to waive a warranty, they might be able to source a model off eBay. Ship has sailed, I’ve found me something nicer, and I’ve picked out the extra drives for it.
A few days later, the new place emails me. They’re having delays, but we have a new range out which will be coming in sooner, here are the stats, we can switch you over to one of those?
I forward the stats to tech support. Nope, the hard drive you got in anticipation won’t fit. New place “hmm, that’s true, we’ll do our best to keep you updated”.
They do, and and my order’s been put in priority for assemblage.
As August gets into gear, my new workhorse arrives, and the poor beleaguered budget laptop can retire to light browsing duty.
Only the big hard drive I got? Turns out it’s fat ass can’t fit in the drive bay. Oops. But with the help of tech support, I found an external enclosure that will fit it, so I have a roomy and easy to use backup device.
And then I stripped the head on the screw holding in the M2 memory. And the other slot, that requires a lot more work to get to. But I’m already wiped from the ordeal, the files on the now external drives run fine, and I still have plenty of room on the drive. I can wait for the sales, and pick up some (carefully dimension-checked) drives then. (This beast will hold 2 standard hard drives!) and get around to putting in the second M2 stick.
And that concludes this chapter of Crazy Shut-in Searches for Their Dream Laptop.