Life in 2020...
So it goes something like this.
me, end of last year: I’ll try to write more this year.
2020: has a global pandemic
me: has a hard drive failure that causes frustrating data loss of my most backed up drive and makes getting a replacement drive far more difficult than it should be
me: … oh come on!
Whew.
Basically, I didn’t have one of my mass storage drives backed up because «everything on it is in cloud storage» – which it turns out isn’t a strategy that works when you forget to commit a post or two to your repo, don’t actually have all of your game saves sync’d to cloud storage, and a few other frustrating corner cases. End result, I’ve finally taken the plunge and made a Backblaze account since their terms seem to be the most favorable for what I need, the cost is reasonable, and thanks to symmetric gigabit internet, backup times weren’t absolutely horrible on more than 3 TB of data. My replacement drive is 8TB, and it’ll get mirrored eventually, but until then, I’m at 13TB usable in my main machine compared to the prior 8TB total.
Needing to upgrade my desktop is a topic of its own, I’m finally starting to feel the limitations of that i5-3550 that’s in this thing.
I’ll probably do a all-in-one post of my media for last year to make up for the incredibly late posting of them, though I suppose that’s only particularly important to me. I like keeping track of what I’m consuming, though admittedly if you were to look at the 2020 lists so far, they’re very sparse. I have upcoming medical procedures (hopefully) that are going to result in far too much free time, which means I’m trying to save any show or book binge for recovery. The tracking in general mostly makes me feel better about knowing what was influencing me on a given year, even if it’s a bit abstract since I don’t include music listens, Twitter follows, etc.
Some other things I’m working on:
- A home ebooks server to go alongside having a local Plex server. It’s hard to have everything I want to watch or read shared appropriately.
- Updating my Dwarf Fortress mods to 47.x compat, which apparently needs to include posting «Clay Dirt» on here for the first time. It’s the most cheat-y of them, I’ll admit, but it makes playing so much easier.
- My actual job, which has some cool things going on right now and I should see what I can end up writing about of them.
- A few Magic the Gathering decks, such as Urza and Feather.
- Putting links to my Deckbox or other similar deckbuilding site here
- Writing some technical literacy posts to help friends – mostly things around privacy.
- Writing more in general, I’ve been journaling again. It helps, I think.
- Writing another update on what tools I use, since as mentioned, there’s been a few changes
- Maintaining my Duolingo streak, which crossed both 1000 and 1100 days this year. I’m mostly focused on Esperanto, but I’ve been doing Esperanto->Spanish as well to work on my fluency in both. Currently on a mild hiatus from that since I was starting to hit vocabulary I didn’t know in either language, which was amusing.
- Working on a houserules section of this site. We have a few games here that we play with house rules, such as (oddly enough) Candy Land. The kids noticed the game didn’t really have anything other than luck to it, so they wanted to work on something that would mean a bit more skill and involvement. I’m pretty proud of what they ended up with, honestly.
The other side effect of this pandemic is that I’ve been suddenly put more into the role of full-time parent than I’m used to as a step-mom. It’s great, but it’s been a huge source of stress on its own. I don’t think children are going to be ruined by not getting formal school at this point, so we’re being a bit «lax» in that we’re more focused on maintaining skills than pretending that any real long-term skill gain can happen for children anyone right now thanks to societal trauma. Some daily math, reading, and writing alongside encouraging play outside and perhaps sneakily introducing the kids to RPGs so that they get more reading in than they’d expect. They’ll be fine.