#20. August: Losing 40 Hours of Video to a Hurricane

In which I suck at data management.

Mupdate

Mupdate = a portmanteau of “me” and “update.” Mupdates!

Ah… my weakness has been revealed.

I’ve lived in Florida all my life. I’ve had two TVs and a DVD player fried during hurricanes. And yet I still didn’t learn my lesson!

Well. The universe decided to remind me that I need to manage my tech better. Because yet another thing got fried when hurricane Debby washed over us. One of my storage hard drives, a mechanical HDD, for my desktop PC :(

It was a power surge. I originally had a surge protector on my PC, but when I upgraded the power supply, the small surge protector I had wasn’t able to keep my PC working. So, like a dummy, I just did away with it. I meant to get a new one that would be able to handle my 800 watt power supply but I kept pushing it off.

The power surged and flickered as the hurricane went by. It didn’t even go out. But it was enough to fry my hard drive.

I’m lucky to still have most of my files thanks to my absolutely bonkers disorganized way of file management. I had 5 storage drives in my PC. 1 PCIe NVMe and 1 SSD, 3 mechanical HDDs. The surge also reset my drives so my PC wouldn’t start. Now I have 4 storage drives. Sigh.

I have a great friend who works in cybersecurity and was able to get me back up and running in like, 5 hours. Sans my largest HDD, the 2 terabyte one.

What I was most worried about was losing my project files for my vTuber avatar. When I saw that those files had been spared, I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t until I went to open up some in-progress video files did I realize that they were gone. Along with about 40 hours of 4k video footage of me painting from last year.

So… yeah. Bummer.

I’ve decided to take a small break from my projects after the loss. It’s a setback. And it’s made me sad. Not devastated, but like… sigh. It’s a loss. Of time and money.

I’ve taken steps to fix it. My friend set me up with a fresh install of Windows. He’s going to help me create a redundant backup system so I won’t have this problem again. He also recommended a brand of battery backup/surge protector that I bought immediately. It’s currently set up with my PC attached and has already protected against at least 1 power surge.

Now I have to rethink how I manage my video files so that this doesn’t happen again. I have to redo the videos I was working on for my vTuber YouTube channel. The good thing is that I still have all the pieces to put the videos together. Just… have to edit the videos again.

Ah well.

I’ve taken the last couple weeks to just watch videos and listen to audiobooks. Work has also been a huge mental drain. But it is what it is. I have been feeling a bit more energized by the books and things I’m reading though.

Focus Time!

Apsu’s Children Novella

No progress. But I did make a lot of notes from my reading over the last two weeks. It inspired me to come up with some ideas for my revision.

vTubing

Big setback. Lost video project files, and 40 hours of footage for a video I was hoping to make. I still have another 40 hours I can work with, but I had previously chopped it down from 40 hours to 20 minutes. So, I’ll have to redo that.

Sigh. Fun times!

Fundamentals of Lighting Schoolism Class

A small win here! I did finish my final assignment. And that file wasn’t lost! I also turned it into an animated loop for my vTubing stuff.

Here’s how that came out:

I like how it came out but it still felt a little messy to me. I asked for some feedback online and someone suggested that the soft lighting made it seem nostalgic. I also have too bright a light in the windows, and those objects need not be so washed out.

I’m planning to do Sam Nielson’s other course on Schoolism, Lighting for Story and Concept Art. I learned so much in his first class. A lot more than I expected.

So yes. Next class to start soon!

Preoccupations

So… Been thinking about quite a few things this month. And got two ‘ah ha!’ moments. Score!

So the first “ah ha” moment came about when I connected fiction writing to philosophy. And the second, which was informed by my new understanding of philosophy, helped me understand spirituality a little better.

For a long time philosophy kept going over my head. I knew it was important, but I couldn’t really grasp it. Then something clicked. I think it’s because I finally understood the idea of “argument.”

I realized that Lajos Egri, in his book “The Art of Dramatic Writing” says a fictional story ought to start with a premise. And a premise, in philosophy, is part of an argument. Essentially, says Egri, fiction should state a premise as an active conclusive statement (such as “Love conquers all”), and then the story sets out to prove that statement to be true.

Well, kinda. That’s very simplified. But that’s the gist.

So… is a novel a philosophical argument? Using storytelling and character and worldbuilding to dress things up?

Maybe! Connecting philosophy with its arguments to writing and its structure finally made sense to me.

Is that why fiction is considered art? Because it is a manifestation of a philosophical argument? In my literature degree, a lot of what we call “canon” in literature, like Dickens, Conrad, Joyce, Poe, etc, (essentially stuff considered the best of the best) are part of the canon because they have some “kernal of universal human truth” to them.

I struggle with that a bit because the Western canon of literature is very… uhhhh coughChristiancough but there is definitely something moving about certain works of fiction.

So, finally understanding philosophy’s connection to writing was one thing that came out of my depression reading. Yay!

And the second thing was connecting philosophy to ideas found in Paganism and Shamanism. And I guess all religions, in a way? Because philosophy and religion were very connected for a long time.

In my reading some books on Paganism and Shamanism, I wondered to myself “So these are ‘disorganized’ practices.” Meaning, there isn’t really an organized establishment or singular doctrine that people follow. It’s really a mishmash of all sorts of things. And according to these practices, there is an idea that “business should exist to nurture and sustain life.”

What would the world be like if businesses operated on that idea?

I like the thought. I hope I can model my business practices on that.

Anyway. I won’t go into it much more here, because I’m toeing into territory I don’t really want to talk about publicly. But yeah. Lots of thinking this month!

Faretheewell

My newsletter now has an archive! Yaaay! Like a little blog. So, if you liked any past issues, you can go back and check them out again.

And thus we come to the end of yet another scribbling.

See you end of September! We’re almost at Spooky season!