Numerous Curse Words (Patreon)

-Sigh-

So...apparently the universe likes kicking me while I'm down. You know that caveat I always put in my progress reports about 'unless something unfortunate happens.' Yeaaahhh...my laptop's SSD died. First time I've ever had an SSD die. But it went kaput. Took most of a day to track down what was wrong, finally had to take the laptop apart and put the dead SSD in an external M.2 enclosure (thank God I had one on hand). Doing that let me discover that the SSD was what went bad. I don't think anything else is wrong. The laptop was essentially just stuck in a restart loop going straight to BIOS. And the Boot Drive being bad would do that. Given that the drive does appear to be toast, it's hopefully all that was wrong. The SSD was under heavy load at the time. So it makes sense, sort of.

So...that sucks. I rush ordered a new m.2 drive which will hopefully be compatible (always dicey with laptops), with same day shipping (Ouch, RIP $200 I didn't really have). With any luck it will get here today and thankfully I'm fairly paranoid about backups. I don't think I lost anything too major. Unfortunately the one thing I know I lost, for sure, is all the progress I'd made on the next Cara Loft entry. I was only five renders in, thankfully. Not like, almost done (though I would have backed it up if that were the case -_-). But it still means I'm essentially out two days of work on that. Plus most of yesterday/today which was spent trying to troubleshoot the laptop.

All of which means that my nice fuzzy feeling of being right on track with everything so far this month has gone up in smoke. I am, at minimum, now three days behind the planned schedule. And there's not really a damn thing I could have done about it. I even had the relevant files on auto-backup. But, for some reason, they didn't actually do their backup for the Cara Loft Files/Renders since I started on them. Not entirely sure why on that, unless it was simply because they were open in Daz? I'll also likely to lose at least another day to day-and-half trying to restore my development environment on the new drive. Installing windows, a ton of usually-hard-to-find-laptop-drivers (since the recovery partition was also on the dead drive -_-), downloading 600gb+ of Daz3d assets. Manually recovering the adult content assets from a 3rd party and installing them. So on and so on.

Frankly, I don't know what this means yet, as far as how this is going to effect the month. I will say that essentially nothing was lost for Left Hand Magic, though. Either past or ongoing-development content. While I do post-processing and programming on the laptop, all renders for Left Hand Magic are done on my much heavier duty desktop. Likewise, I'm super paranoid about the development files for the game. I have current backups on two different drives, aside from the one that failed. At worst, I might have lost the android development key for the game. Though I think I may actually have a backup of that tucked away on one of my drives. And, honestly, it wouldn't affect much. Those keys are really only important if you are updating versions post launch via an appstore. Which, obviously, I'm not there yet.

I'll update you all in a proper progress report, once I have a better handle on things. Current worst case is a slightly smaller Left Hand Magic build again, and a possible delay of the Poll Short Story. I'm fairly confident I can recover from the loss of the Cara Loft Renders fairly quickly once I get everything restored. But it will cut into time I should have been working on Starship Promise.

Of course, with how the last two months have been going...something else could still go wrong. Let's hope for my sanity that it doesn't...