Tag: fooferall

First World Problems

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

This is not a post about my stupid YouTube channel, although I’m not gonna lie: it’s related. Part of the reason I started the channel with Little Nightmares II specifically is that LNII is a game that isn’t especially challenging on either my PS5 or my computer. I wanted to start off with Sekiro, but I couldn’t get the Elgato and the computer to play nice with each other, and any time I tried to stream or record anything complicated it came off really blurry and ugly with tons of frame drops and stuff like that. Little Nightmares II recorded very smoothly, so I figured I’d start with that, and then I embarked upon this ridiculous stream of minor and major upgrades to my system to get everything working the way I wanted. New HDMI cables were the first move– I have learned so much about cables in the last two weeks that it’s flat-out absurd. I had already been looking for an excuse to upgrade my desktop’s memory, since it shipped with only 8gb, so I fixed that next, upgrading to 40gb. When that didn’t make any difference, I spent last night researching the USB standard.

And … Christ.

Long story short: there are a mess of overlapping standards for USB, both the ports and the cables, and then there’s Apple’s own answer to USB, which is the Thunderbolt standard, and even that has a couple of different versions out there. As it works out, my computer has a spare Thunderbolt port available, which supposedly can push 40gb a second? That’s … a lot, so I decided to upgrade the USB cable today.

And I don’t think the story’s funny enough to recount in full, but doing that required the following steps:

  • Ordering a proper 6′ cable from Target to pick up in-store, then getting an email an hour later that they didn’t have the cable after all, sorry about that;
  • Ordering the same cable in 3′ length from Target to pick up in-store, then getting an email an hour later that they didn’t have the cable after all, sorry about that;
  • Ordering a 6′ cable from Staples to pick up in-store, then buying it and noticing in the parking lot that it was clearly not the right cable, as it advertised “up to” 500mb per second, and I don’t know how much you know about computer measurements but 40gb is literally eighty times faster than that;
  • Deciding I did not have the willpower to return the cable today (I’ll do it tomorrow) and checking Target again to see if they had a specifically Thunderbolt cable, as I realized that that was going to be something completely different;
  • Getting a yes, according to their website;
  • Going to Target and discovering that 1) they did have the cable I wanted; 2) the cable I wanted wasn’t the cable I wanted, as Apple sells both a USB-C male-male cable that isn’t rated for Thunderbolt speeds and one that is, and that one of those is called a USB-C cable and the other is called a Thunderbolt (USB-C) cable;
  • Ordering one from the Apple store on the other side of town for pick up in-store, then realizing they want appointments for in-store pick up and calling the store to 1) make sure they had the cable before driving across town and 2) making sure that I can actually come get the damn thing before my appointment, because I was doing all this while the boy was at camp and the earliest available appointment was right when I’d have to be picking him up;
  • Driving to the mall and picking up my cable, and then getting home and having just enough time to make sure it worked and did what I wanted it to before having to go pick the boy up. I’m quite happy to report that it looks like I’m going to be able to stream and/or record basically anything I want now, although there’s still some weird color issues with Sekiro that I haven’t figured out yet.

Slightly separate issue: the Apple store also has curbside pick-up, and in fact has designated parking spots in the mall parking lot for same, but the Apple store itself is deep enough inside the mall that getting to it from (I think) the closest available external door(*) is a 5-minute walk. Not a lot in the long term, but I wouldn’t want to be the employee who got tasked with spending all fucking day lugging shit from the store to those two parking spots. Not without, like, a Segway or something like that. It’s not remotely as hot here as it is in a lot of the country (particularly the West Coast) right now, but it’s about as humid as I’ve ever experienced, and that would be an “I quit” moment real quick for me, particularly since you know those curbside pick-up people are going to be impatient as hell.

(*) I mean, it would have to be, right? That’s where the parking spaces were. Surely they wouldn’t put their designated curbside spots next to the second closest door, although that might be giving mall management too much credit.

Friday fooferall

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work, Writing2 Comments

tumblr_np8s6k7CdK1sgfpjwo1_500.jpgOkay, that was the last day-of-the-week themed post title, I promise.  The young lady in the picture is the first result when you GIS “fooferall,” I have no idea who she is or why she appears when you do an image search on that word.

Anyway.

A bit of history on this blog: when I initially started this round of blogging I called the place Infinitefreetime because the joke was I had absolutely no free time at all and therefore it was an insanely dumb idea for me to start blogging again.  This was back on Xanga before Xanga killed itself.  Then, a month later, of all the people I knew who had started or committed to blogs during whatever month it was, I was just about the only one left standing.  Despite the last several months of my life, where I have been unemployed and generally able to do whatever the hell I wanted with my days, the title of the blog was meant to be ironic.

After I get back from OtherJob tomorrow night, I will have gone to work six times in the past six days, for the first time in months.  Understand that six-day work weeks have been par for the course for virtually my entire life.  This represents a return to normal, not an exception to the rule.  This is how my life is supposed to work.

My only real problem, at the moment, is that the 9-5 M-F thing is only going to last about another week.  I’m still not entirely sure exactly how much detail I want to reveal about the job, but some bits are going to be unavoidable and “high-end retail” is probably close enough for now.  My schedule is about to get a lot more complicated, as the way things work at this place everybody has at least a couple of days where they are there all goddamn day.  It’s going to affect my blogging schedule one way or another.  I’ve been able to post every day for well over a year by now– I haven’t missed a day since December of 2014.  I will be amazed if that record survives for another three weeks.  I am categorically not planning on abandoning the blog– it’s too important to my plans for the next several years of my life if not longer than that– but it’s likely that my posting frequency will be changing somewhat or, at the very least, I’m going to have to start pre-scheduling a lot of posts.

Bookwise, I have secured a cover artist for Tales of the Benevolence Archives.  I will likely only have one new release this year after initially hoping for two, but I should have that out this fall.  I should have a couple of days each week where I’m home and the boy is at school or day care, so I’ll be able to keep working on those days this week.  But that’s something else to look forward to.  I’m hugely excited about seeing what this artist comes up with.  The main reason?

Brazel, Grond and Rhundi will be on the cover of this one.

Booyah.