Rosebriars and ink

Unfortunately, because I do not remotely have the money to make any serious pursuit of it.

I decided to buy some bottom of the barrel and used components and build a desktop to use as a media server--this seemed like a more practical plan than buying a prebuilt machine of any kind because I can just load it up with drives we already own and save a *ton* on storage. And I could focus resources on where I felt would be most useful. So it has the approximate processing power of a potato (used ancient CPU that cost like $9, so if it's not enough for my purposes it'll be no great loss to get a better one, and if it is enough I've saved money!), and a very cheap old graphics card several generations behind, a single 4gb stick of RAM, and a used motherboard, and a case that's new but from a company so hilariously cheap that the only documentation is a single sheet of paper with a heavy pixelated photo of the case with a few labeled arrows.

I only got to finally build it yesterday, because it took that long for the motherboard to arrive, and I still can't actually turn it on and see if it boots because the SATA cables haven't come yet, and the used motherboard came with nothing but itself (including no IO shield, which I remember making a mental note about when I bought it but then I absolutely forgot to order one and only realized while building, so I'm going to have to install that later. I'm bidding on a broken used for-parts-only copy of the same motherboard, because it's 95 cents and $9 shipping and ships from the US, and the alternative is like $8 for just the IO shield, with free shipping, from china that will take like two months to get here). The motherboard is ASUS, though, and there's extensive documentation online, so I don't mind at all not having a manual or anything. And I managed to work out where everything went in the case just fine.

Other parts include:

• an optical drive with bluray capability, because we don't have a single thing in the house that can play blurays but we own a bunch of blurays (ones that come with digital copies of the movies, which are how we've watched them, but it'll be nice to be able to actually use our physical copies, and also most importantly the making-of documentary in our dvd-bluray limited edition boxset of 3 From Hell is not available in the digital copy and only the first quarter of it fit on the DVD so we haven't been able to watch it THIS ENTIRE TIME IT'S BEEN MONTHS) [arrived, installed]
• a $12 used 500gb 3.5" hdd, because it seemed sensible to have *something* that wasn't scavenged out of a laptop [arrived, installed]
• an actually new but quite cheap power supply [arrived, installed]
• a PCIE card that goes in the smallest PCIE port that I'm sure not using for anything else and that I can mount two card-style M.2 SSDs on [ordered, not here]
• a CPU cooler so cheap it doesn't even have a brand name [arrived, installed]
• actually very good thermal paste because I bought it to replace the thermal paste on my laptop because the internet indicates that this brand's stock thermal paste is bad and that may be why my laptop is so bad at cooling and of course I'm also using it on the desktop, it's not like I'm in any danger of running out [arrived, installed]
• a bracket to install 2.5" drives in a 3.5" bay [ordered, not here]
• ordered a roll of cable tie velcro after building it and realizing that cable management might actually be important [ordered, not here]

Full parts list with prices, and some pictures of the in-progress build, on my neocities, which is having some hilarious interaction between the imgur embed code and my transparent boxes over the background to make the text more readable (I know it's a nightmare I was being retro to amuse myself and I haven't gotten around to making it less busy) has rendered the embedded photos semitransparent. But you can see them well enough to be getting on with!


I keep browsing components on newegg and ebay. I deeply enjoyed putting it together. I want to do more. I've taken everything useful out of three old laptops because I wanted to keep tinkering with something and I might need to buy more antistatic bags to keep the scavenged components safe. This is terrible.

(Belatedly.)

I was given a fair pile of presents, mostly snacks and candy, but very touching to have so much to open. The presents I gave went over well. I got a nightgown, which I knew I was going to because I'd suggested it as an alternative to pajama pants when I was told those were a traditional gift and asked for a size, because I don't wear pants, but I hadn't realized that getting a nightgown for Christmas would remind me of when I was little and my grandma got me and my cousin matching nightgowns for Christmas morning photos every year.

It continues to be really disconcerting how nice and welcoming my friend's parents are being, and how so many unspoken rules I'm used to from my family don't apply. They keep assuring me that I'm welcome and encouraged to eat any food in the house, and it's just so weird compared to being faced with a fridge full of food and no idea which items will get me yelled at if I touch them. My aunt chewed me out for like twenty minutes once because I ate some of the wrong cheese on a family vacation. And no one got annoyed at me for being antisocial when I spent a couple days locked in the guest room recharging my ability to interact with other people? Which is even more of a standout, since my dad explicitly said the reason I wasn't welcome in his home was because I spent too much time in the bedroom on my computer.

I called my grandma on Christmas Eve, which was uh actually the first time I'd managed to get ahold of her since the phone call during which I texted my dad and then decided I wasn't going to Arizona, so she didn't know I was in Georgia and had had a Christmas floral arrangement sent to my house, as discovered by the catsitter. Whoops. (I also then had a panic attack on hearing about this from said catsitter until I got confirmation that it had been locked in my bedroom with the hibiscus, because what if it had lilies or poinsettias, Koschei is an idiot and would get into it (as he did with the hibiscus, he ate half a leaf and then barfed everywhere, but lilies or poinsettias are more toxic), and it's been a year since Tabby and Bluebell died and I got him and it all kind of came crashing down on my head.)

But anyway. Other of my friend's relatives came over on Christmas day itself for dinner, and I did an excellent job being gracious and gregarious and glossing over the part where I'm unemployed because I'm super mentally ill, and apparently they liked me. Even though I was in the dregs of a really brutal cold, which thankfully I am mostly over now, my throat's just slightly off and my nose is just slightly stuffed. Which is greatly preferable to not being able to breathe through my nose, or at one point even talk.

It has also, of course, been really nice hanging out with my friend. She is a lovely person and it's great to finally be able to spend significant time together.

I'm in Georgia for another week before I go home.

I think my bed is broken.

I have been having persistent horrible back pain.

These facts may be related.

Not sure what to do about them, though, because I certainly can't afford a new mattress (I believe part of the springs inside broke) and while I might be able to afford a new bedframe of the same style I have now, I'm not sure what good it would do, if living my life broke this one. (I think the middle leg against the wall has bent and that part of the bed is caved in, but my bed is boxed in by difficult to move furniture and I'm not sure how to access it to try and fix it, if that's even possible. I've been vaguely considering lying on the floor with a flashlight and just sort of... shoving it with my cane and seeing if I can do anything about it like that. I certainly can't fit under the bed.)

In other news, I stuck my hand in our mailbox and there was AN ALIVE BIRD IN IT THAT HAD APPARENTLY BUILT A NEST THERE, AND I PUT MY HAND ON IT, AND IT FLEW OUT AND INTO MY HEAD, AND IT WAS PROBABLY THE MOST TERRIFYING THING THAT'S HAPPENED TO ME IN THE LAST YEAR AT LEAST. Like, oh my god, I'm sure it was a completely harmless sparrow or whatever, but I was not expecting that and it scared the everloving shit out of me. I was shaky for at least an hour afterward from the adrenaline. I didn't scream (which is probably good because it was like 10:30pm) but I made some kind of horrible strangled noise while stumbling backwards and flailing my hands around my head. I'm sure that was a sight.

Anyone know how to convince a bird to not have a nest where it has a nest? My mom's suggestion was to wait until it leaves and use tongs to take the nest materials out and then sterilize the tongs, and that I shouldn't leave it and end up like her, because she had to turn her pool pump off and stop treating the water because a family of ducks moved in with their eight babies and they're trashing her backyard but she doesn't want to hurt them.

(Also, I should probably try and remember to keep the mailbox closed when it's empty, but I'm not actually sure that would help with not having birds' nests in it, because there's a round hole in the front as large as if not larger than the holes on birdhouses.) (It's a letterbox attached to my house, not a street mailbox.) (I have no idea why it has a hole in it. Not sure what I could cover it with, either. Packing tape, I guess, if I could find some.)

I guess this explains why there are always pine needles in the damn thing even though it's under the carport and there is no perceptible way for them to fall in.

Alex bought me a hibiscus plant a week and a half or so ago--I'd admired them previously but they were more than we could afford, and he later caught one on clearance--and it's got a giant flower already! I'm very impressed. I guess it liked being repotted. My ludicrously leggy potted rose I've had for a couple of years has also popped up with another flower. I think I should probably prune it this (winter? do you prune roses in winter? I need to look that up) and see if I can get it to grow out a bit rather than just up and up and more up and then sort of tilting over because it's not next to any support and it's like six feet tall. I assume you can use pruned bits as cuttings to make new rosebushes, so I could continue my evil plan to have an army of rosebushes that I completely neglect unless they look like they're about to drop dead. (Which has only happened once--I potted the rose in the soil we had, which was the cheapest available and turned out to be this horrible stuff that was basically just chipped bark, and it compressed into a tiny horrible rock at the bottom of the pot and din't hold water and all the leaves on the rose died, and I dumped in some regular dirt from the yard and a bunch of used teabags and watered the shit out of it and it recovered with a vengeance.) (I am not a good gardener, I only have alive plants because I moved to a climate where they pretty well take care of themselves. Anything that doesn't take care of itself dies and I carry on with the ones that can handle the fact that I absolutely will not remember to do anything for them at any point.)

I may have added the section about plants just so I could have a third thing to put in the post title.

I've got what seems to be a pinched nerve in my right wrist, and holding my phone or using my mouse aggravate it and send vicious spikes of pain into my hand. This is not great. Presumably the ideal treatment would be to rest it and give it a chance to heal, but what on earth can I do that doesn't involve using my hand to fill that time?! (I will probably try and figure out a way to prop up my phone to read on it without holding it and scroll with my other hand. Might borrow Alex's wrist brace to remind me to leave it be. Though really, the ideal would be that after I've slept and not used it in that time it goes back to normal. I'm not holding my breath, though :P )

Alex and I went to the weekly adult board game night at the local game store on Saturday night with two people from the GSA, and we played Superfight (fun! I got a 'select any comic book character' card and picked Lobo and thought I was unbeatable but then G got a blank card and picked Deadpool and got the attribute card 'three of them' so we ended up at a stalemate because neither of them can actually die, not just because of healing factors but because both of them are banned from the afterlife in different ways, and it went to a tiebreaker and my Demon beat his Street Fighter), and Say Anything (kinda boring and also the markers were super dead), and Moral Dilemmas (just absolutely terrible, a good concept if it hadn't been designed by someone who thought Cards Against Humanity was high art, like half the questions were basically 'do you exploit a disabled person for sex' and it was just so banal and boring and shitty, the only interesting question we found was about whether, only being able to choose one, you'd stop the assassination of JFK or of Kennedy), and then we opened a game called Raise Your Goblets and decided it was way too complicated and also B and Alex were both hitting sensory overload and were kind of Done with being in the loud back area of the game store, so Alex and I ran home and grabbed dice and Alex's laptop and printed some character sheets and met B and G back at B's house and we played D&D 5e in a goofy monsters-only campaign until like 1:30am. (Which did not get us very far into the campaign, but my bugbear with a crown of poison mushrooms was elected to stick her arm into a hole and fish out a magic skull because she has the longest arms and thus became the chosen disciple of Nal'khir the magic skull. B was a bee-themed kobold who wanted to fight everything and G was a rather sullen kenku.)

Anyway, I think the last time I played D&D in person might actually have been 3.5 when I was fifteen and was introduced to D&D by the anime club at my high school (and the ones who introduced me were seniors and then graduated, so there was only one year of it).

In theory the homebrew Bronze Age Crete apocalypse world-based game I'm in is starting back up and will be in early evenings on Saturdays, but it hasn't done so yet. We all kinda got unworkably busy over the holidays and now we're like ??? what was actually happening other than a tsunami hitting the city

First a friend of ours who owed us took us out to a chinese buffet for dinner, and then he decided to take us to a movie too so we saw Into The Spider-Verse again (still great, ship Liv/May even more), and then we dropped the friend off and came home...

And when we got out of the car, a cat ran up to us. He had a collar on, so we picked him up and checked, and the tag had an address... in another town 40 minutes away. At this point it was well past 11pm, so I left a message and a text for the owner at the phone number on the tag and we took him inside and put him in the spare room for the night.

I have no idea how he would have gotten down here?? Poor dude. He came STRAIGHT over to us when he saw us get out of the car and is super sweet and friendly (and also fat). He does not seem like an outside cat. He's shedding like mad like he's very stressed.

He's scratching at the door of the spare room and wailing sadly and I feel so bad but I don't think I should have you wandering around the house with the tiny dog and the other cat, dude, sorry.

His name is Algernon, and his owner's name is also on the tag so Alex looked him up on facebook and he definitely lives in [town 40 minutes away] (and also is friends with a dude we met through a girl I met via okcupid when we lived in [that town], so that's vaguely disconcerting and/or fascinating).

I'm hoping he wasn't dumped down here, I just... how tf did you get clear down here, buddy. That's so far.

(I'm also mildly terrified the dude is going to be like, mad at me for kidnapping his cat who is supposed to be here and outside for some reason? But I would sell my fucking soul for someone to have grabbed Bluebell and called me when she got out (and almost certainly froze to death) so like. I couldn't possibly leave him out there and live with myself.)