Ugh

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I had actually been having a pretty good Sunday until a few minutes ago, when the exact same settings that I’ve been using for months to create videos for my YouTube site suddenly decided to shit the bed and produce a 31-gigabyte un-openable monstrosity, and now not only do I not have my videos for tomorrow ready but I get to spend time researching how to repair damaged .mp4 files, which I don’t think is actually a thing that can be done. I’m pretty sure it’s all scams and “Okay, this will work, but send us $70 first” types of things.

Shit.

Anyway, if there’s no 4:00 video tomorrow (there won’t be) that’s why.

Well, crap

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I have recorded, as of ten minutes ago, twenty-five episodes of my Elden Ring series. I discovered before doing tonight’s recordings that episode 22 has just … disappeared. The audio files are there, and the folder is there, but the recording itself? Gone. Anybody out there wanna recommend some good Mac file recovery programs? I can’t imagine how the hell I might have deleted just the .mp4 file out of that folder and kept everything else; that doesn’t adhere to anything about how I manage game files, but it appears to have happened, unless what actually happened is I made the file invisible somehow, and showing invisible files on a Mac is literally just a button-press and it’s not happening. So I need to see if I can find it.

It’s actually been a decent couple of days at work; I can proudly report that I have been to school three whole days in a row, and am planning, like a grown-up, to attend tomorrow as well! And if I pull that off all I have to do is go to work on Friday and then I’ll have shown up a whole week in a row!

It’s madness, I know.

In which you aren’t supposed to suck

Luther M. Siler

I am a fanboy, I admit it: I am typing this post on the most advanced iMac that was available when I bought it; my last several phones have been iPhones, my watch is an Apple Watch, there are at least two if not three iPads in the house (I’ve lost track of one, and we may have recycled it) along with at least two Apple TVs and, if I had brought my work laptop home, which I never do, there would be two MacBooks in the house as well, even though my non-work one needs replacing.

I am so stuck in Apple’s ecosystem that it would require wholesale overhauling of a number of significant aspects of my life in order to properly escape from it. And I mostly don’t want to. But, y’all … this weekend my people got in my damn nerves, and I haven’t quite escaped from Minor Inconvenience Tech Hell just yet and I’m still peeved about it.

To start (and I mean “minor inconvenience” when I say it) Apple Maps decided that it was going to choose a different route to get to my brother’s house than the one I picked. He lives in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and your options are basically “through the city” or “not through the city,” both of which take about the same amount of time because one is long but fast and the other is shorter but, well, takes you through the city, which means you’re guaranteed to encounter some bumper-to-bumper bullshit on 90/94 somewhere. I haven’t lived in Chicago for going on fifteen years, and there are still some things about living in the city (which I loved, and still do) that I miss damn near every day.

Traffic is not one of them.

Anyway, I realized too late that not only was my phone trying to direct me through the city but it was trying to send me to Lakeshore Drive for some reason, which if you know the city will cause you to raise an eyebrow and if you don’t, well, that’s wrong no matter what route you’re trying to get north with, trust me. At that point I decided that, fuck it, I was going to go rogue, only it turned out that 1) my memory of the city’s highways wasn’t as great as I thought it was and 2) even if I wasn’t heading to LSD just yet I was beyond the point of no return to stay on the Dan Ryan, which meant we got a fun little detour through Chinatown.

I mean, it cost 15-20 minutes, maybe, while I got back on the highway I wanted to be on, so again: minor inconvenience, but I didn’t want to be driving through the West Loop yesterday one way or another, and if my phone had taken me though the route I chose rather than the route it thought was a good idea, this wouldn’t have happened.

The second thing was an ongoing sync issue with Apple Music and iTunes, and if you’ve ever had to deal with that particular slice of bullshit you can probably understand the vast aggravation and high dudgeon I’ve spent most of the last two days in whenever I had a moment where fuck with my phone became a possibility; ie, any time I was not covered in flour or sleeping. I think I’ve solved that problem finally as of about 20 minutes ago, but we’ll see if it shows up again tomorrow where the only tracks I can listen to from this album are the three preorder tracks. (This happens every time I preorder an album, which I’m done doing. It’s digital files. You can’t run out. No more preordering.)

Anyway.

There’s some more Elden Ring live-streaming coming tonight, from 10:00 until 1:00 AM or until I have the sense to go the fuck to bed, whichever comes first, with a full post of my thoughts coming probably tomorrow. The short version: Don’t expect to talk to me in March. I have shit to do.

A #Scrivener help beg

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The internet isn’t cooperating.  I love the hell out of Scrivener’s Compile feature, especially the way it builds the Table of Contents for me without me having to carefully hyperlink everything.  But:

Screen Shot 2015-08-30 at 6.42.09 PM

Does anyone know how to prevent it from actually adding the “Chapter Seventy” part in front of the chapter title?  Because it’s doing that throughout and I’d prefer that it not do that.  I’ve been fiddling and haven’t figured out what the problem is yet.

(EDIT: Figured it out, naturally.  Leaving the post up so you can get a gander at some chapter titles.)

In which arrrrrrrghhhhhhhh

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WHEEEEEEEI’m bad at Sunday.  It’s consistently– say, nine weeks out of ten– the only day of the week where I don’t have to go to work without calling in sick first, so you would think that I would treasure them as the one day where I Get To Relax.  No.  What Sunday actually represents is The One Day I Have to Get Every Single Fucking Thing in My Life Done, Including All the School Stuff I’ve Put Off, Since God Forbid There’s a Single Day a Week where I Don’t Work for School; Also, Get to Work, You’re Wasting Time you Lazy Bastard.

I have a verb for it.  I call it Sundaying.  It’s where I’m so stressed out and paralyzed by all the shit I didn’t do all week because I was fucking exhausted that I do nothing all day Sunday but obsess about the fact that I’m wasting my Sunday and that tomorrow I have to go back to work.  Low-level stress, constantly, that occasionally pirouettes into brief bursts of high-level stress.

I’m going to go to a movie today (Thor, of course) and then have dinner in a restaurant without my son and with my wife.  I’ve gotten a couple of things done this morning– most notably, managed to be out of bed, showered, and breakfasted before ten and finally, finally gotten both of the car seats readjusted so that we’re not pinching the boy’s shoulders every time we put him in the car.  When we get home, I have two computers to fix (fun fact: my wife and my father-in-law both have basically the exact same computer, bought around the same time.  They both shit out this week, for what appear to be different reasons, although both of them appear mechanical and not software-related in nature) and all the weekend’s grading to do and some PAT team stuff to do and lesson plans to write (oh, hey! I got that done at OtherJob!) and and and and and and and. Hopefully I’ll get time to read a couple volumes of Sandman and maybe, just maybe, watch the episodes of S.H.I.E.L.D. and American Horror Story: Coven that we haven’t gotten to this week.

Maybe.

We’ll see.

Or maybe I’ll spend the whole movie obsessing about the fact that I’m not at home doing those several things and be stressed out and ruin it.  That might happen too!

Sigh.

Also:  Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers came out twenty fucking years ago this weekend, and jesus god am I old.