Before I go into the actual blog entry, I wanted to let you know that there is a new vote incentive up at TWC. It’s a fairly detailed sketch for one of my art classes and I will be following that sometime next week with a drawing I did as part of the same series. I will try and let you know when I post the new image. Both images will go up on deviantart once they are done serving as vote incentives.
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I got my laptop back today. It’s weird having it back. It feels almost like a new computer entirely. It took me through the whole mac Welcome! process, something I assumed I would only see once and have now seen three times. That first viewing I was amazed at how incredibly awesome it all was, and I tried to recall that feeling tonight, but it came half heartedly. In some ways this feels as if I have an entirely new computer, which is awesome in some respects, but tragic in others.
The hard drive is what failed, what stopped the whole thing functioning. They put in a new one, bigger and better than before, and sent me the old one back.
Two years of my memories are wrapped up in foil on my desk like a poptart. Two years of my thoughts and concerns and struggles and laughter and joys. I am a person who processes largely through text, and all of that text is effectively gone.
Little bits of plastic and silicon and I’m not even sure what else hold two years of my writing life locked away in a code I cannot begin to break. There are places that I could conceivably send the failed hard drive in and have them retrieve things, but research thus far is suggesting that that will likely be much more expensive than replacing the drive was. How much are two years of textual memories worth? Even for someone like me, to whom writing is almost next to breathing in importance? How much would you pay to regain detailed memories of the first two years of college?
What I know for sure is that I will be purchasing an external hard drive in the near future, and I will come up with some kind of system to start backing up the files that I know are important to me. This is not an experience that I have any desire to repeat.