Curses!

Technology is suddenly not my friend anymore. The computer decided a couple weeks ago to slow down to snail's speed so I decided maybe it's high time for a reformat, considering all the superfluous crap I tend to cram on my hard drive. I bought new disks and decided I'd do the dirty deed right after I'd finished playing Arcanum. Last week I got as far as level 48 before I broke the left mouse button. I actually broke a mouse playing a PC game. My nice scrolling mouse, dang it all. So now I'm using a vile, dirty little fingerprinted old one I hauled out of my spare parts box. That'll be the one without the zippy little scrolling wheel.

Please kill me.

Of course, when I was dragging all this stuff over to my CD burner for backup I remembered all those stupid little things like my browser bookmarks, ugly fonts I've downloaded, the textures and patterns I made and downloaded for NeoPaint, all those retarded photos of the cat, and my still woefully unfinished (for several years actually) but newly edited parody fanfic Harry Potter and the Mound of Random Items which may one day have an ending.

I got backups of everything but... (wait for it) ...my saved game data for Arcanum. Curses! All the way up to level 48. More curses! I'd nearly gotten to the Vendigroth Device and was on the way to either resurrect Virgil's dead ass or loot his body of all the cool stuff of mine that he'd been carting around when he ran off, like those Siamese twins' skulls I could've used a couple of levels back. I decided that maybe two days of 10-12 straight hours of game playing was a bit much, even for a self-confessed geek so I shut everything down and went to bed. The next morning I discovered that the mouse was now crippled and completely freakin' useless unless I needed something to throw at the cat.

Don't ask me how the holy hell I could have missed saving my game data. Please place here the word "fuck" in large, capital letters in an especially expressive and angry font of your choosing, ending in several quite unnecessary exclamation points. Or use a nice little flowery Edwardian script and make it all fancy.

The crowning turd in the punchbowl, on top of having to replay 48 levels of Arcanum, is that my reformat came out all wonky so my computer says I have a working modem but there's no dial tone and that I have a perfectly working sound card but no audio devices connected so not only can I not connect to the internet I can't listen to music or watch any movies. I dragged home my old Sportster external modem from work to post this long whine and will probably have to use it a few more times until I get the drive wiped and reloaded but that doesn't help my sound problem at all.

Pissed off? That doesn't accurately describe it. Ready to rain down hot death upon the heads of random strangers out in the street is more likely. So now you know that my weekend activities will likely involve mutilating people I don't know and reformatting my hard drive, not necessarily in that order. I might throw in a little shrieking and cursing, just to round things out.

Oh, the beastly cat wants everyone to know that he'll be sixteen years old next week. He'll more than likely throw a party while I'm at work and I'll find tipsy kitties passed out in the hall and catnip and hairballs all over when I come home. I'll probably be flinging wasted cats out the door for hours.