You have just sent a nudge.
- Posted by mariteaux on June 17th, 2020 filed in Updates
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Wow, we’re halfway through the month and I’ve only posted two blog entries? Yeah, so I’ve been kinda hovering in the drink for a hot minute. Not doing too badly, but like I said, no new big projects, so no new big rambles. Of what I have been up to, here’s a quick rundown:
Old, slow, slick snails
So I’ve been spending a bunch of my time on Escargot (the reborn MSN Messenger servers) rather than Discord, because Discord keeps pissing me off harder and harder. How times change. Anyway, it’s fucking sweet, crazy impressive how much of MSN Messenger it’s managed to resurrect. According to mon and dcb, it’s way more fully featured than back when they last tried it. They’ve even got games now!
If you wanna chat, I’m mariteaux@somnolescent.net. If you get the angry janitor Yurble, you have the right guy. This is panning out to be a much better solution than IRC was, given the actually functional file transfers, custom emotes, typing indicators, and VIOLENT FUCKING SHAKING you can inflict on unsuspecting people whenever you’d like. Hopefully once persistent groups come in the WLM2009 update, we’ll have an actual Discord substitute on our hands.
An exciting new look
Cammy just never has much luck with these old machines, does he? The old eMachines I got from borb needed a bit more love thanks to my own careless doing. See, Escargot surprisingly doesn’t work on XP, and I figured updating XP from SP2 might help with that. While I was installing service packs, I remembered the unofficial SP4 being a thing and decided to try it out.
About a half hour later, I discovered a grave injustice had been done to me. It updated to Windows Media Player 11, and I lost some visualizations.
Never again.
Unfortunately, the uninstaller for SP4 just doesn’t seem to work, giving “file not found” errors shortly before telling you to fuck yourself. Worse yet, you can’t uninstall only certain hotfixes from a service pack, meaning I had to do a full reinstall of XP to get it back to how I like it. This entailed hunting down drivers (eMachines’ own site was no help, so I used SDIO to grab everything, and quite successfully), a quick burn of an SP3 disc (Professional, because I wasn’t thinking and didn’t realize Home Edition was also available), two damn reinstalls after Windows took the D: drive because of an existing recovery partition I can’t even use without another disc, and tracking down some more ISOs for software purposes (hoard your ISOs, kids, the Internet Archive might not be long for the world).
Needless to say, I do not recommend SP4.
Anyway, it’s about back to what I had on it before. Bootup and shutdown are even faster too. One thing I’ve discovered makes me feel supremely satisfied is getting period-appropriate utilities on here, stuff like old CCleaner and now Just BASIC, which was my preferred BASIC back in middle school. (Still a lovely dialect too.) Even if they’re not strictly necessary, they still make it feel a little more complete.
Yes I’ve been writing again
Nothing too concrete, but I have been trying to get more into the habit of doodling with words. It’s one of my mindset things I’ve had to get over, I always feel the need to write for something specific and make it perfect on the first shot.
Sophius splashed through a small, chilly puddle of mineral water and jittered. “A-and you’re sure there’s an exit nearby?” he whimpered.
“A mile or two east of here,” Hademar deadpanned.
“And where will it take us?”
“A sea cave off the coast of Mistpoint or…thereabouts.”
“…And you’re sure?”
Hademar growled. “I live down here.”
Sensing that his input was less than desired, Sophius returned to studying his surroundings. The more he stared, the more he imagined the walls as scraped flesh, a bloody, chalky red that seemed to breathe and flex at the edges of the light. Radiant yellow sulphur deposits blurred to turquoise at the edges of the cloudy blue pools of stale cave water. The wide-open ceiling branched upwards, fading as Hademar’s light failed to reach its peaks.
Sophius hesitated. “And you—live down here?”
“Yes, it’s quite the home, I know. Any more questions?”
Anyway, here’s some of what I was working on earlier. I’ll explain what it is when I finish it, it’s another bit of Calelira formerly unsettled. Very fantasy furry mood lately.
New Jersey is still a shithole
Oh, and out of nowhere, I ended up at the damn Jersey shore the other day. That was strange. My older sister wanted to go grab dinner or something, and next thing I knew, we were across state lines, going to visit the Quick Stop where they filmed Clerks. That was fun, and the shore was lovely. No one was social distancing, so I’m glad freedom still exists at least.
There’s some more I could mention, but they’re all a bit on the down low for the moment. I have Open Live Writer to try next time, I forgot to use it for this post. Oh well.
