August 2023 archive

I saw both of these things in real time.

Although I don’t consider myself part of fandom now, I was part of it at both of the times that this meme references and… no lies detected. If anything, this is just one of many reasons why I’m glad my kids’ access to the Internet is as limited as it is. Them getting into things like… this, like this, at the ages some of the more impressionable members of fandom were when they were either their loudest or most impressionable is not something I think I’ll be dealing with, and I am exceedingly thankful for that. (At the most, they watch television on the actual thing, or videos via YouTube or YouTube Kids, which I’m alright with and thankful for!)

I shouldn’t have been surprised at the start…

At some point, I’ll be needing to change the page on this blog that reflects what ancestors I’m thought to have had and what ethnicities have or share. Although 23andMe and Ancestry have introduced me to great relatives, and answered some of the questions that I had going into testing — as well as caused even more questions to form — the ethnicities that it thought me to have were a bust in that both sites wildly guessed that I had a lot of English, northwestern heritage… and left it at that, not telling me anything else. As both… what do you call them?… continued to update over the years, none of these questions were answered. Not too long ago, I decided to feed my Ancestry test results into more specific sites, like MyHeritage (which was surprisingly more helpful) and, eventually, Genomelink. Not only did that answer the remainder of my questions, I felt the most confident in the results based on what I already knew. All of this is fascinating.

There are also some other things that I’ve found out by way of Ancestry tree (thanks, friend!) and Gemnoelink, which bounce off of eaxh other confirming what the other one says. It’s wild. 2023 is wild.

Look at these hard drives just dying in these streets.

One of the external hard drives supporting Bub’s gaming computer, and one of the things that makes him happiest in the world, seems to have… for lack of a better way to put it, “died of old age”. I’m currently having someone I know look at it to see if anything can be done to repair the mechanism by which it consumes power — I do science, not technology. It’s an old 1TB HDD from like… 2011 or 2012, I want to say, so it can’t just be dropped into new, functional hard drive casing. Best case, with the games that (are? were?) being shuffled onto our newest and largest hard drive, I’ve made room for some more games for Bub… and anything else that I might want — or need — to put somewhere! Everyone wins, but especially my wallet.

Being wired has its advantages, because re=downloading these games is not taking that long!

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