Some bad news (which has now been fixed!)

Posted by Elpie 9 months ago

 

Don't worry, this isn't anything actually critical--I'm not quitting the site or going into dangerous surgery or anything. Part of why I'm here is that I just want a place to vent, but it's also to say something that I would've saved for the end of July otherwise. As you may expect, I do all my typing on a computer even if I still use pen and paper fairly frequently, (that's usually just for notes when it would be inconvenient to use my smartphone but especially for ones related to what I post here since I try to keep my two online personas--one for here and one for everywhere else, which is "one and the same" with my IRL self--separate from each other) and have gone through several over the years. The one that I currently use and am posting this blog entry from seems to be just about at the end of its useable life: it's had problems for a while, particularly the screen (it's flickering a little around the edges as I type this) and having trouble updating because it was too full of files.

I've been able to put up with those issues, but this morning it shut down out of nowhere. That's happened before, usually in my experience seeming to be that it's just trying to force me to install an update, but it was more annoyingly since for once I'd voluntarily done that just yesterday. But then just a little bit ago it randomly shut down again, and while I was in the middle of editing a video for a separate project, too! That says to me that it's time for a new laptop. What that really means for here is that my progress on an upcoming chapter--which I'd also just gotten over some writer's block for--will probably be delayed a bit more than it otherwise would have. (To refresh your memory, it's a body-swapping story.) I'll still be trying to develop ideas for it and maybe even writing a bit by hand, but I don't realistically expect that I'll be typing much more in it for a while; even after I get a new computer, I imagine I'll be spending alot of my earliest days with it just trying to get everything else back in order. I'd been developing a desire to reformat alot of what I otherwise have on both this fanfic and my many other projects, anyway, to try to de-clutter it. (That's not even getting into wanting to physically de-clutter.)

As for what I'd otherwise been holding off on posting: I'm not gonna be doing anything special for this upcoming Vore Day. Even if I finish the new chapter before then, (knowing me, not likely) I'll be out of town to attend a cousin's wedding, which will include August 8th. I mostly unplug when I'm on vacations and my only online activities during that are to read various pages or watch videos without really doing stuff otherwise, so I wouldn't be waiting up to share it then anyway. If I do somehow manage to finish it before I leave on the trip, it'll go up immediately, and I'm otherwise not going to wait for a special occasion to do so. (Unless it ends up really close to Christmas or New Year's, I guess. LOL.)

EDIT: And five days later I'm making an addendum here from my new laptop! It's a bit of an adjustment since this is a physically wider one than I'm used to--I hadn't realized that it included a number pad until I'd gotten it set up and started trying to get my browser more up to spec. Haven't had one of those on my personal-use computer for ages! Everything's shifted a little over to the left, when I'm used to Enter and Backspace and such being at the right edge of the keyboard. Depending, that may well end up being a deal-breaker and I might return this one in favor of a smaller model if it turns out to be too much of an issue for my typing, but even the hiccups that I've been having so far are already starting to become less of a problem. I have two weeks to really decide, anyway, if I want to take it back hassle-free.

As far as my writing for here goes, I still need to get Microsoft Word properly working again, but after that I intend to get back to the new chapter soon. ;)