![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
hallo
Hey it's been awhile! So much for my resolution to post here every week. (Also so much for my resolution to exercise Shelly every day, she is getting more sedentary by the week, but then now that winter's coming so am I.)
There was some work stress for awhile but I think that has resolved in the direction of less stress for everybody going forward, which is nice, but there's still just enough chance the rug will be pulled out that I'm still kind of glancing over my shoulder a lot.
Other than that, I've been wasting a lot of time with Minecraft and Minecraft fandom; Hermitcraft fandom has gone kind of wild in the last three weeks because one of them has built an extremely elaborate roguelike adventure game *inside* the game using only normal game mechanics and all the streamers are playing that 24-7. I've also joined the MCYT tag wrangling team, which is my first large tag wrangling fandom in awhile, and I've been enjoying having wrangling work again mostly but it's definitely illustrating for me again a lot of the problems with how volunteer work is managed in the org. (Don't get me wrong, my fellow volunteers are great, and so are the supervisors! It's just everything around how the work is structured at scale that isn't.)
In terms of playing I had to sort of quit my two main worlds because the lag was getting really bad (I need a new laptop if I'm going to keep doing this) but then I realized that most of the lag came when I was exploring, so instead I have started a world where my only goal is to dig the spawn chunk down to bedrock using only things I have found in the hole, and that's had no lag issues at all! (I need a new laptop/computer but I don't want one. Anyone want to help me decide what to get?)
I'm also still making zines for FAPA every three months and enjoying the apa experience immensely, and I think doing fandom meta the slow way and for a severely limited audience has been really good for me, I'm back to reading actual books & feeling more connected to SF fandom than I have in awhile. Of course that means that a lot of things I might have posted here are getting saved for FAPA instead, so it's not helping with keeping up with posting on the internet. (Also, though I'm doing pretty good at getting it written slowly over the course of three month production period, I still haven't managed to ever finish the typing up until right before the deadline.)
If anyone is interested in joining the oldest continuous SF-Fantasy fandom social media community in continuous existence, now is a great time to join FAPA! There's even information about how to join on the internet now! If you want to know more about what's involved or what the apazines are like, feel free to hit me up.
Partly because of FAPA, I decided to go to my first post-pandemic meatspace con and will be at Capclave this weekend (masked. And hopefully recruiting for FAPA; I will have my binder of FAPA mailings along to show people.) (It's interesting how at least our local small fan-run cons seem to have self-sorted into "we are still taking Covid seriously" and "we tried to reopen in 2021 and therefore we went broke.")
If work stress stays down, I'm also hoping to actually do NaNo this year, although with nonfiction rather than fiction; we'll see if I get my outline done in time or if I just keep digging holes in Minecraft instead.
And I actually got Yuletide noms in this year! I nommed Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier, and three childhood favorites that I have recently been thinking about how much they shaped me: Goblins the the Castle by Bruce Coville, Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink, and the picture book series Sweet Pickles.
Anyway, between FAPA and becoming more active on Discord, I'm afraid I've been hitting my "enough talking about stuff" limits before I get to DW, so I am going to try to work on DW before Discord, and on being more willing to do short silly DW posts (more cat pics!!!) No promises though.
There was some work stress for awhile but I think that has resolved in the direction of less stress for everybody going forward, which is nice, but there's still just enough chance the rug will be pulled out that I'm still kind of glancing over my shoulder a lot.
Other than that, I've been wasting a lot of time with Minecraft and Minecraft fandom; Hermitcraft fandom has gone kind of wild in the last three weeks because one of them has built an extremely elaborate roguelike adventure game *inside* the game using only normal game mechanics and all the streamers are playing that 24-7. I've also joined the MCYT tag wrangling team, which is my first large tag wrangling fandom in awhile, and I've been enjoying having wrangling work again mostly but it's definitely illustrating for me again a lot of the problems with how volunteer work is managed in the org. (Don't get me wrong, my fellow volunteers are great, and so are the supervisors! It's just everything around how the work is structured at scale that isn't.)
In terms of playing I had to sort of quit my two main worlds because the lag was getting really bad (I need a new laptop if I'm going to keep doing this) but then I realized that most of the lag came when I was exploring, so instead I have started a world where my only goal is to dig the spawn chunk down to bedrock using only things I have found in the hole, and that's had no lag issues at all! (I need a new laptop/computer but I don't want one. Anyone want to help me decide what to get?)
I'm also still making zines for FAPA every three months and enjoying the apa experience immensely, and I think doing fandom meta the slow way and for a severely limited audience has been really good for me, I'm back to reading actual books & feeling more connected to SF fandom than I have in awhile. Of course that means that a lot of things I might have posted here are getting saved for FAPA instead, so it's not helping with keeping up with posting on the internet. (Also, though I'm doing pretty good at getting it written slowly over the course of three month production period, I still haven't managed to ever finish the typing up until right before the deadline.)
If anyone is interested in joining the oldest continuous SF-Fantasy fandom social media community in continuous existence, now is a great time to join FAPA! There's even information about how to join on the internet now! If you want to know more about what's involved or what the apazines are like, feel free to hit me up.
Partly because of FAPA, I decided to go to my first post-pandemic meatspace con and will be at Capclave this weekend (masked. And hopefully recruiting for FAPA; I will have my binder of FAPA mailings along to show people.) (It's interesting how at least our local small fan-run cons seem to have self-sorted into "we are still taking Covid seriously" and "we tried to reopen in 2021 and therefore we went broke.")
If work stress stays down, I'm also hoping to actually do NaNo this year, although with nonfiction rather than fiction; we'll see if I get my outline done in time or if I just keep digging holes in Minecraft instead.
And I actually got Yuletide noms in this year! I nommed Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier, and three childhood favorites that I have recently been thinking about how much they shaped me: Goblins the the Castle by Bruce Coville, Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink, and the picture book series Sweet Pickles.
Anyway, between FAPA and becoming more active on Discord, I'm afraid I've been hitting my "enough talking about stuff" limits before I get to DW, so I am going to try to work on DW before Discord, and on being more willing to do short silly DW posts (more cat pics!!!) No promises though.
no subject
I do lots of fandom stuff and it is subject to change at zero notice! :D Mostly Minecraft at the moment though lbr
no subject
no subject
I want to be able to play solo Minecraft, and maybe also assorted indie games, without worrying to much about lag or overheating, even if I'm also i.e. on a video call or something at the same time. It would be cool to maybe think about using it for video editing and/or streaming but I don't know if I ever actually would. I'd like lots of ports, including several USB, HDMI, standard audio, and DisplayPort would also be cool. Good battery life - and a battery that will go a long time without losing battery life, or at least be cheap and easy to replace. Drop tolerant. Maybe a number pad? A DVD drive would be great but I realize that's probably a pipe dream for a laptop at this point. Not super concerned about size unless the battery actually lasts because I always end up tethered to a cord within a few months anyway because laptop batteries all suck. Nice size solid state hard drive would be good. Uh. Nice keyboard? Still comes with Windows 10 (but also could maybe think about running a Linux dual boot, except it's been a very long time since I did that, do people still do dual boots?) Possible to open it up to swap parts out relatively easily. IDK. Things.
It's been a very long time since I've thought about performance when buying a computer, to be honest, because it's been even longer since I've been doing anything that would need it.
no subject
You'll likely want 16 or 32 GB of ram. How confident are you at installing RAM and drives?
no subject
I am OK with assembling things myself as long as I don't have to solder anything! I think I have swapped out every bit of a laptop except processors at this point, but soldering boards scares me (and did not go well the one time I tried.) I would rather not have to buy and install Windows myself, though, that feels like just adding injury to insult.
I would prefer not to deal with port hubs in that I own several right now and it never seems worth the trouble to mess with them as opposed to just dealing with not being able to plug stuff in. Also right now two of the three USB ports in my laptop are a bit unreliable, which always seems like one of the first bits to fail, so I am a bit dubious of trying to run everything through one or two ports as opposed to actually having some redundancy built in. (I'm fine with daisy-chaining adapters if I *have* to, but if I'm outlining my perfect laptop I'd rather not *have* to.)
no subject
So, you'll want unsoldered RAM. It's easy to get a laptop with Windows on it. If you have lots of tabs, you want lots of RAM (I know my fav web browsing tool has 4 GB, and could use 3x, maybe 4x that, but that's an example of "do what I suggest, not what I do", because it's a Chromebook and is pretty slow).
Do you use Ray Tracing? That takes a decent GPU. What FPS?
Do you just rely on integrated graphics on your CPU? Can you take a screenshot of task manager (without your IP/MAC addresses, like stick to the CPU screen)?