Friday Update #9: A Serial Port of Unfortunate Events (Patreon)

This isn't the Friday Update I had planned to write which I alluded to earlier, but that one will need a bit more time to materialize (spoiler: it's Zoey's sprites being in a game-ready state).

As those of you who are in our Discord server know, this past week has been a wild ride with my PC. What started out as a project to reduce noise from my computer's fans spiraled out of control into a week-long rebuild and repair ordeal that saw such highlights as:

• A family member losing or damaging important parts I was cleaning as she transferred them from one sink to another, which required a lengthy scavenger hunt or scratch building to fix.
• Me redoing the rivets on my case twice because the vibration-dampening rubber rivets I ordered were far weaker than advertised and would cause the case to fall apart under its own weight (my solution was to make my own vibration-dampening rivets from aluminum 3/16" rivets with rubberizing paint applied to the shank and underside of the head).
• A GPU AIO cooler bracket not being compatible with my GPU despite being listed as compatible, which required me to do a ton of cutting and grinding to the sheet metal bracket and the cast aluminum frame of the $1,400 GPU, thereby destroying any chance of reselling it someday and giving my hands plenty of cuts, scrapes, and bruises.
• The enamel spray paint I applied to the metal parts eating away at itself to look like the ground at the Bonneville Salt Flats as I applied a second coat, which led to me having to strip the paint with a paint stripper so powerful that it dissolved my nitrile gloves and gave me chemical burns on my hands (I specifically tested a pair of gloves against the thinner but my test was only for 30 seconds when it took 2 minutes for the gloves I was wearing to dissolve). The reason my hands aren't just bone right now is because I heavily diluted the paint stripper with M.E.K. beforehand and very quickly rinsed my hands with water and diluted vinegar (shoutouts to Fight Club for teaching me how to deal with caustic chemical burns!)

The desktop looks very pretty now, has great temps even when overclocked to obscene levels (140% for the CPU and 110% for the GPU), and is eerily silent when running, but I really should have just bought a new case instead of doing this.

All in all, my hands are in a lot of pain at the moment (I'm typing this with only my right hand, which is the more intact one). I took some very powerful painkillers and am sort of ignoring the pain, but between this and my primary monitor inexplicably dying right as I reconnected everything and got the PC working, working is going to be next to impossible, even after I rushed to Best Buy to buy a duplicate of my secondary monitor as a replacement.

As such, the update that was supposed to be out today is going to be delayed for a week.

I'm simply not in the right headspace (or handspace) after this nightmare repair/rebuild and the crunch of 0.6.0, and I didn't plan for the project taking an entire week, which was especially disastrous as this dev cycle was only 10 days because 0.6.0 took 4 extra days to release. The releases are still being incremented like usual, but Sustainers are going to have to wait a week to get new content.