My PC is Still Dead, and I’ve Made the Difficult Decision to Not Become a Necromancer
This probably isn’t what a “closet full of skeletons” means. For one thing, my closet hides a singular skeleton. For another, does a dead PC I forgot about count as a skeleton? It’s not spooky, it’s not scary, and it’s not about to start playing its ribs like a xylophone anytime soon. Still, it is strange to hold on to a broken device, say you’re going to fix it, yet never do. Most people want to get something like a PC repaired as soon as possible. It’s critical hardware, and being without one for an extended period of time can lead to all kinds of bad stuff. Rotten cheese. Broken shins. Gingivitis. Yet here I am, dragging my feet and my rotting teeth along with them.
I’ve already documented the PC’s Three Stooges-esque pratfall into disrepair. A quick recap: it broke. A less quick recap: I switched to Linux last year, and my Nvidia graphics card took that personally. I bought an AMD card to replace it, and that fixed the problem in the same sense that starting a larger fire puts out a smaller one. The card, which I purchased secondhand, turned out to be old enough to witness the death of the dinosaurs and the dawn of mankind. It kicked the bucket after three weeks, and thanks to computer chicanery I don’t understand, it took the rest of the PC down with it.
The fix should have been easy. Save money, hope I have enough to pay for the myriad bills that late-stage capitalism forces me to pay, and buy a new card with whatever is left over. An actual new card, not another one from some guy on eBay promising it didn’t spend its short life bitcoin mining, trust me bro. Yet it proved to be timing that hindered me, not money. Well, timing and money.
First some fat bastard came ho-ho-hoing down my chimney. Then Santa showed up. Unable to communicate my love verbally, I had to out-gift my friends and family to let them know how I feel. Then our new AI overlords got hungry, real hungry, gobbling up RAM and raising the cost of every computer component to record highs. The beansprout on top came last month when I suffered one of the worst episodes of depression I’ve ever dealt with. All the while, prices continue to rise on everything, being poor in America is becoming such a serious crime that I’m on the most wanted list, and I didn’t want the computer anymore anyway. Wait, what?
Without the PC, I couldn’t make videos or play video games anymore, which was the whole point of the thing. Now I spend most of my free time writing. In fact, I forgot about the computer until a few days ago, cleaning out my closet and stumbling on a box with a blue sheet thrown over it. What’s that? I asked myself. Oh yeah, that used to be my livelihood. The driving force behind my beloved* YouTube channel. Retired YouTube channel, after ending it late last year. It required a powerful GPU to run the games I covered, and a lot of RAM and CPU power to make the video editing software work. Without that YouTube channel, I don’t need a powerful GPU, truckloads of RAM, or a beefy brain running the thing. Broke or working perfectly, it’d be equally relevant to me now.
My laptop has no trouble handling my current computing needs. I put some Minty fresh Linux on it, and you can barely tell its almost as old as that AMD card. I even hooked it up to my monitor, speakers, keyboard, and mouse, making it a real desktop in its own way, wooden nose and all. That’s how I’ve written all my short stories and blogs. Kicking back, tippity-tapping on my $100 Das Keyboard, blasting Chinese music until my back gives out, which given my age and posture is about five minutes.
Despite that, there’s still that annoying voice in the back of my head. Am I making the right call? Shouldn’t I get it fixed anyway? When I realized fixing it wasn’t in the cards, I thought about selling its remaining parts for easy cash. But I can’t bring myself to do it. What if I change my mind and want to make videos and play games on my PC again? What if a serial killer breaks into my house, goes to my closet before slicing my face off, sees the dead PC and says “if that worked I would have let you live, but now I’m going to have to cut your feet off and wear them as earmuffs instead”? Then I’d feel a bit silly.
I think I’m going to keep it, let it take up whatever space it needs, and see what happens. It’ll probably be outdated by the time I fix it, but Linux is great for that. I don't have any plans on making videos again, but I'm so decisively indecisive I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now I'm churning out five videos a week and wondering why I'm so stressed out. And, sure, I don't play modern video games because they're all AI slop, re-re-releases of remade remakes, or generic online shooters, but I've still got a bunch of old games I'd like to play and simply can't right now.
I started this blog thinking it’d be a funny anecdote about my indecisiveness. The more I think on it, the more I see how much this situation changed me. Sure, I quit my YouTube channel before the PC died, but I planned on running a vlog channel on Peertube. Unable to do that, I threw myself into my fiction writing, and since then I’ve written multiple short stories and a novella, and am planning my first novel. Not having much free time, I wouldn’t have been able to do most of that if I kept making videos. Now it’s been so long since I made videos, I have more vivid memories of fifth grade math class than I do recording voice over and editing clips together.
It’s as if without the PC, I’m able to move on from that part of my life. The part of me that obsessed over YouTube, views, and chasing trends. When I put it like that, maybe I am better off selling off its parts, to be sure this monster can’t come back to life.
I fear some kind of moral lesson forcing itself into the narrative here. Sentences like “life takes you in unexpected directions sometimes, and you have to make the best of it” and “let the waters of life take you where they may, rather than bending the river to your will” are in danger of breaching containment. That feels like a gross overestimation of the impact a graphics card has had on my life, but if we are swimming in the pool of cliché, then I’m pretty sure there’s one about a pebble and a landslide that might be relevant.
Thing of the Whenever
With my blogs cut back to one or two a month, I thought it’d be fun to end them by sharing my latest brainworms. Like whether or not ‘brainworms’ is one word or two. Something that’s caught my fancy that week/fortnight/month/year, like a book/movie/song. I know, it’s a revolutionary idea, please stick with me and we’ll see if it catches on.
I mentioned some succulent Chinese music, so let’s take a gander at the first Chinese band I ever heard, FloruitShow.
I don’t know how I discovered them, I think this song came up in a YouTube Music playlist. I fell in love as soon as I heard it. They’re three sisters from China, which is about all the western internet can tell me. The song above is the first of theirs I’ve heard, 福禄寿, roughly translating to “fortune.” My favorite is the last song on the album, 心静自然凉, which means something like “a calm mind brings peace.” Their album, ‘What Can I Hold You With’ (meaning “我该用什么来拥抱你”) is their first and only.
I’m no music critic, but I’d describe their style as a mix of traditional Chinese instruments and folk songs with modern instruments and techniques. There’s an emotional depth to their songs, especially in the vocals and the string instruments that grab hold of you and don’t let go until the song is over. They’ve got an almost eerie calmness to them that both reassures me and pushes me forward. Their music compels me enough that if I ever saw them in person I’d stammer about how nice they sound and scamper away before they could respond.
This album came out in 2020, though, which might as well be six decades these days. Afraid they had broken up, I did some rough and dirty translating with DeepL and found some information on the Chinese web. You ever heard that saying about curiosity and the cat? Anyway, Chinese police arrested one of the sisters in 2022 for smuggling and consuming LSD. They jailed her for a year, though for us creatives the worse punishment was banning her from publicly performing music. Forever. The other two sisters later reformed the band into DOUDOU, which is... good? Their new stuff lacks the emotional depth of their FloruitShow days, and I can’t help but wonder if the three of them came out of this okay.
These highlights were supposed to be positive. And quick. I guess I’m incapable of either of those things. Contemplate what that says about me and I’ll see you in the next blog!
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