An important decision was made(Good/Bad News) (Patreon)

Let me just start this off by saying nothing bad has happened, at least on the scale that it normally would. Just a creeping tech issue. Long story short, I'm making a new computer because I keep getting blue screens on my main one and I can't figure out why and I'm using my stimulus check to pay for it. It hurt my soul to come to that decision considering our financial situation. The blue screen has happened about 6 times by now.

Because of it, there's no stream today but I am recording a kind of mega compilation for the anatomy stuff in 1 hour bits and I don't want to keep using a device when it's clearly starting to malfunction and get worse. Mostly because I'm worried about the blue screens and partially because of potential progress lost if it occurs again.. I'll also be assembling most of the computer as it arrives over the next week or two and that will be keeping me slightly busy. The tower just showed up today. Lucky(the small one), and Jax(the derpy boxer) are there for scale. The case is smaller than the box, but still kinda chunky.

So for those of you outside the United States, most Americans whose yearly income is under a certain threshold are receiving stimulus checks from the government this month. I don't want to get into it but so far the job search has still been turning out really poorly, we're relying on the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance to get by. That was a big issue at the beginning of the year but it slowly sorted itself out to some degree. It's a band aid fix to a larger issue that's still looming overhead. The job search still continues.

My point is any income right now is great and the stimulus check is a huge amount of money. Like huge. We've managed to stay on top by limiting what we spend, even some things that some people consider normal commodities. So back to the stimulus check, for married couples who fly under that threshold for income will receive almost three thousand dollars. To a guy like me, a meal over $8 is expensive so this is a sizable chunk of money to suddenly just have. So the original plan was to just stow it away and hoard it, because that's a lot of money. I'm going to keep saying that because it's true and I'm still kinda worrying about this.

Hoarding it was the original plan. We've been skirting by and this year is already a lot better than last year. Unfortunately, there has been an issue that's slowly been creeping up that I've been trying to hold off on. My computer. It's blue screened me a few times these past few weeks. Nothing major just very concerning because the check on the history log doesn't give me any real cause for why it's crashing. I have backups more regularly now. The parts inside are from 2018 and earlier on, not too old, so it shouldn't entirely be the hardware but you never know. I dust the fans and inside pretty regularly. I am running on Windows 7, so a little bit of an outdated OS. I just liked Windows 7 better than 10 but it's looking like I may not get a choice moving forward. I've had to restart my computer more and more often. I haven't added new software to this thing since Genshin Impact came out and that was sometime late last year.(Klee mains, where you at?)

Anyway, I spend a lot of time on the computer, probably about 10-12 hours a day, maybe more... which means it might just be wear and tear on the lifespan of the computer itself. At a minimum, that's over 10k hours of operation since January of 2018. After me and SweetPotatoPie talked it over, we came to a decision. I'm going to be building a new computer with Windows 10 as the OS and the stimulus check money will be funding that entirely. 

So it's basically as if we never got the money but got a new computer instead. Good timing/bad timing, ya know? This build was great for digital drawing, basic gaming, and streaming. But now I want to touch down on 3d modeling, editing videos, and maybe more. If I can get that all going on one device instead of scattered across multiple devices like I'm doing now, that'd be great. Right now Sweets is editing videos off of her school laptop and then we pass it back via external hard drive because you can't put mp4 files on a usb drive but then her laptop gets really hot even with the fans and the fan kit we got for it. She has the videos edited, she just can't export them from the software because her laptop will start cooking itself. So yeah, just a big financial decision I thought I would share with you all. 

I didn't mention it because, it gets pretty exhausting to just always be talking about the bad things that just keep popping up. So they keep popping up, I just don't say anything. This way the issue is resolving and we can keep moving forward. But damn, it's a lot of money..