New Computer achieved! Kind of!
Yes, before we saw ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stellar_dust back to Chicago, she dragged me to the computer store, and I bought a new laptop, because my old one had started randomly freaking out on me just the night before.
Of course, after we got back from dropping her off at the airport, I popped the case on the old one and it was exactly what I thought - she'd sabotaged one of my RAM sticks. :P You could see right where it had been damaged! (It must have been sabotage, the timing was just too coincidental to her deciding I needed to buy a new one.) So the old one got new (and twice as large!) memory from the Magic Sack o' RAM, and now she's working better than ever!
I've never bought a new computer while the old one was still mostly functional. It's strange. I am enjoying playing with the shiny new one, but have absolutely zero temptation to move to using her as my primary machine. She is a Lenovo that was on sale for $400 including tax, which the saleperson recommended after I showed him the condition my old one was in and he laughed at me a lot. Her name is Eluned, following my standard naming convention.
Of course, it doesn't help that the new one has Windows 8. It's not as bad as I'd been led to expect - I don't mind a Start screen instead of a Start menu, and I will (probably) get used to the more sophisticated use of the touchpad. It seems to basically be Windows 7 with brightly-covered baby bumpers over some of the sharp pointy bits. (Not all of them, though. The tendency for it to drop you automatically to the old-fashioned window manager whenever you try to do anything halfway complicated is pretty telling when it comes to any claims of radical new architecture.) It would be nice to be able to take the baby bumpers off if I wanted to, though, right now it just feels like it's been deliberately made less flexible.
Also all of the "shiny" app! functionality that comes with it wants you to a) be constantly logged into an X-box account (hahahaha no, at some point we will be finding an independent app source, precious) and b) be constantly online, which would work better if its wireless didn't lose signal for long periods of time while sitting on my desk two rooms away from the wireless router. (By contrast, the old one will stream youtube while I'm sitting twenty feet up the maple tree half a hundred feet into the backyard....)
Also if I can't figure out how to get my four-year-old Wacom tablet to work properly with it, I'm going to be mad, being able to do lots of big graphics work was the main thing I was looking forward to.
ANYWAY! I'm going to keep playing with it until the warranty runs out, and then see how long it takes for me to say "screw it" and either install Linux or a pirate copy of XP. :P
(In the meantime I have declared amnesty on even attempting to read even the limited amount of yuletide that was written for/by people on my friendslist. Just too much! Now I will have wonderful gems of stories in small fandoms that I've never read before, waiting for me to stumble on them all year.)
Also also! The Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia fest is back. Hooray! I was hoping it would be! Now I just have to decide whether to finish something I started for last year, or do something completely new and even more cracked (proposition: write A/B/O verse + psychic wolves where the wolves are completely confused by this weird sexual dominance hierarchy thing the humans think is so important.)
stellar_dust back to Chicago, she dragged me to the computer store, and I bought a new laptop, because my old one had started randomly freaking out on me just the night before.Of course, after we got back from dropping her off at the airport, I popped the case on the old one and it was exactly what I thought - she'd sabotaged one of my RAM sticks. :P You could see right where it had been damaged! (It must have been sabotage, the timing was just too coincidental to her deciding I needed to buy a new one.) So the old one got new (and twice as large!) memory from the Magic Sack o' RAM, and now she's working better than ever!
I've never bought a new computer while the old one was still mostly functional. It's strange. I am enjoying playing with the shiny new one, but have absolutely zero temptation to move to using her as my primary machine. She is a Lenovo that was on sale for $400 including tax, which the saleperson recommended after I showed him the condition my old one was in and he laughed at me a lot. Her name is Eluned, following my standard naming convention.
Of course, it doesn't help that the new one has Windows 8. It's not as bad as I'd been led to expect - I don't mind a Start screen instead of a Start menu, and I will (probably) get used to the more sophisticated use of the touchpad. It seems to basically be Windows 7 with brightly-covered baby bumpers over some of the sharp pointy bits. (Not all of them, though. The tendency for it to drop you automatically to the old-fashioned window manager whenever you try to do anything halfway complicated is pretty telling when it comes to any claims of radical new architecture.) It would be nice to be able to take the baby bumpers off if I wanted to, though, right now it just feels like it's been deliberately made less flexible.
Also all of the "shiny" app! functionality that comes with it wants you to a) be constantly logged into an X-box account (hahahaha no, at some point we will be finding an independent app source, precious) and b) be constantly online, which would work better if its wireless didn't lose signal for long periods of time while sitting on my desk two rooms away from the wireless router. (By contrast, the old one will stream youtube while I'm sitting twenty feet up the maple tree half a hundred feet into the backyard....)
Also if I can't figure out how to get my four-year-old Wacom tablet to work properly with it, I'm going to be mad, being able to do lots of big graphics work was the main thing I was looking forward to.
ANYWAY! I'm going to keep playing with it until the warranty runs out, and then see how long it takes for me to say "screw it" and either install Linux or a pirate copy of XP. :P
(In the meantime I have declared amnesty on even attempting to read even the limited amount of yuletide that was written for/by people on my friendslist. Just too much! Now I will have wonderful gems of stories in small fandoms that I've never read before, waiting for me to stumble on them all year.)
Also also! The Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia fest is back. Hooray! I was hoping it would be! Now I just have to decide whether to finish something I started for last year, or do something completely new and even more cracked (proposition: write A/B/O verse + psychic wolves where the wolves are completely confused by this weird sexual dominance hierarchy thing the humans think is so important.)
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I would read this. Or, you know, more Sherlock Holmes.
Man, now I have to figure out what I want to enwolfen for this year. Hmm.
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...I'm just gonna note here, then, for the record, that one of the main characters in Tale of the Five is a telepathic shapeshifting magical horse who spends much time going 'lol' at weird human sex behaviors.
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There are definitely parallels, and a few things that the plot turns on: dead king, son falls apart, something rotten in the state of Pridelands, etc. But the transformed text, be it Lions-in-film or Wolves-in-fanfiction, is different and complete enough that one needn't read the original to write based on the transformation.
The hereditary narrative problem is peculiarly relevant in the case of wolves as the first wolf book is itself a transformation of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight, and I would not recommend that to anyone without content notes the length of my arm.
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I DESPERATELY NEED THIS :D :D :D
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BUT TODAY IS PROBABLY NOT THAT DAY
(augh but what fandom though)
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(don't worry, from what I can tell,
(in the meantime, I am writing something for this fest that is turning into dark, only-just-barely-cracky political commentary with mostly original characters? I don't even know.)
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(AT LEAST I DON'T FEEL SO ALOOOONE AND I'M NOT ACTUALLY WATCHING DOCUMENTARIES OF WOLF SEX ON YOUTUBE)
(oooooooooh!!!!)
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I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY.
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Yessss! heh.
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maybe I'll just wait till I can scrape together the time to learn Linux well enough to word-process, search and do music files with it.
How is the Bear/Monette series? I tried one of Monette's solo novels (Do Not Like) but I looooooved her "Kyle Murchison Booth" necromantic mysteries (collected in The Bone Key which I would love to loan to you if you haven't read it) utterly to death.
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Or Linux! Linux is cool, will probably significantly speed up your old computer, and with the modern pre-built distros, takes almost no time for an experienced Windows user to figure out the basics (and even less time if you're used to Macs.)
...and I haven't read the Bear/Monette series, I've just read the fic. The fic is amazing, though. :P