Wow, I'm really not keeping up with FA these days. For years I used to come by every Wednesday, prowl around my fave artists' postings, saving probably too much of their art & stuff as I did so, posting a few comments here & there and leaving a number of drawings on my own area for others to look at. Then in pretty rapid succession the HDs on three of my main computers went tits up, though to be exact only two of them actually went bad.

Fit the First: An old Dell Optiplex running Win98, which I used for nearly all of my main work - writing, art clean up, printing, etc - started acting up, so that attempts to access files on first the second HD and then the main one became tricky. Finally I lost all access, though not before I managed to get most of my important stuff off (and a lot more was rescued, thanks to a local computer shop, EPO in Webster TX). OTOH I lost, probably for good, several years' worth of downloads from FA. I had been intending to back everything up on DVDs but found that I was unable to do so with whatever software I had available, and so ... pfft. I have since replaced the HD with another, reloaded Win98 and all the other various software I need, and it seems to be working pretty well ... but I no longer quite trust the Optiplex, so I keep copies of my work on an external drive. Just in case.

Fit the Second: My internet machine, a much more up-to-date box running Ubuntu Studio 16.04, suddenly started acting up, and presently its HD also went phooey, again with my being able to rescue my bookmarks, emails and other stuff. Needing to get back online quickly, I stopped by EPO above mentioned to see if they had any of their refurb Win7 machines on hand ($149), which they did. Taking it home, I at first attempted to install US 16, but failed. Thereafter, I decided to give Win7 a whirl and found it to be an interesting experience, which is to say I was faced with a different set of annoying problems from the sort of annoying problems I had from Linux. After being importuned to upgrade to Win10 for free, I did so, and found even more things to be annoyed with, such as having to restart the machine every week or sometimes oftener. OTOH, I find myself now able to do certain things such as listen to online music and watch videos, something the good folks behind Linux decided that I did not have to be able to do. "When one door closes, another door opens" or something like that.

Fit the Third: The third victim here was another Ubuntu Studio machine (13.04) that I use mainly for scanning things, listening to music and watching downloaded videos, though this last was somewhat qualified by the fact that the machine's video card has only 32Mb memory, which is way too little these days for such things. After the two above events occurred, I got my wind up about the situation with this machine - a main HD that was used mainly for OS and programs, and two secondary HDs, both almost totally full, to store things on (a 250MB for graphics and text, and a 120Mb for music files). The latter HD was successfully completely backed up to DVDs, and I got nearly all of the former as well, but there remained three rather enormous graphics and video directories, two 50Gb and one 12Gb in size, that were still to be done. I decided to remove the two secondaries and access them on another machine (another Win7 box from the same place as the other, which I use chiefly for scanning the enormous quantities of family photos) as external drives. The 250Gb HD had been set as a slave drive, so I reset it (or so I thought) as a master drive, but as I did so I found that for some odd reason the manufacturer had an extra option - to cut the size down to 32GB, that being the size limit for Win98 systems. WHY WOULD ANYONE BUY A 250GB DRIVE IN ORDER TO TURN IT INTO SUCH A SMALLER SIZED ONE? Can anyone guess what happened? 250 does not go easily into 32, so the system deleted ~218Gb of files, quite a lot of which I had already backed up, but even more of which were not. Luckily I had some DVD backups from around 2012-13, so I was able to do some repairs, but still ... yikes ... someone once said computers enable us to make more and bigger mistakes than all the whiskey and shotguns together can manage. Meanwhile the main HD (40Gb) is still buzzing along.

All of these drives are ATA/IDE drives, BTW, and I am preparing to making a teetering lunatic step into more recent hardware as soon as I have enough money and fewer emergencies to spend it on.

For more fun & games, about a month ago I wound up taking a ride in an ambulance, my first since I destroyed my left knee at John Wayne Airport in LA on my way back from ConFurence 20 years ago. Heat exhaustion as the final verdict, though other things (stroke, heart attack and other amusements) were considered. I wound up spending several hours watching one Spongebob Squarepants cartoon after another, with the sound off thank goodness. The day wasn't even all that hot, or so I thought when I went out to cut up a tree branch that had come down in the front yard earlier, preventing me from cutting the grass (which i did manage to do a couple of days later). The bills are coming in now, and when I look at them and recall that a 12-pack of Gatorade is only $4 and change ...