2020-11-11, Decentering Computers Whether I Like

Hey folks, sorry for the delay in sending out an email. First, my laptop’s harddrive died, then the operating system I installed on the replacement drive was very very hard to use (laggy, glitchy,) and it’s only yesterday I got that replaced (with Debian 10, for the curious, and Fedora 33 was laggy and glitchy. Running KDE Plasma and first Gnome then LXDE on Fedora.)

Since I had a few days without a computer around, I actually have written up the next couple letters I plan to send y’all by hand - expect them probably over the course of the day.

Last night I finally got back around to the Internet and my Fediverse instance was still down, so I got straight to restoring my system. I was preparing to move my backed-up data off the external harddrive I keep it on, and had just begun the process… when I heard a sound I’d just heard last week: the spinning clicks of a harddrive head failing to read its drum. Oh.

My external harddrive has died, and it was the sole back-up location of most of my portfolio - about 14,000,000 words, thousands of photos, days of audio recordings. (Judge me if you want for only having one backup, but in my defense I went from 3 copies to 1 in a couple days and was in the process of creating a duplicate when the 1 crashed.)

I went to bed not too long after the drive crashed, and I don’t think I’ve quite reckoned with just how much got deleted, so my opinion and perspective is sure to change as I come to terms with the situation, but for now, I’m trying to construct it as an opportunity: I now have the perfect excuse to de-center the Web even further, since I’ve lost my draft Website.

I’m going to mull it over through the day, but I’m more-and-more inclined to set up Ko-Fi as my primary website, and beside it just handle my email account. Ideally this would mean moving of Substack too (as nice as the platform is, I don’t trust them not to monetize in ways I’m uncomfortable with later), but I know my email host wouldn’t want me sending out a newsletter, even to ~50 people, from their service.

I think my next computer step then is… finding some hard-drives to keep backups on, and then I might work to convert one of the raspberry pis I got back from a local closed business into an email server.

If I can use the Internet by interacting with my email and managing my Ko-fi profile, I think that’d be really useful in decentering computers without giving up too much capability.

In other news, my boss is working to replace me, and my compensation for my labour is reduced rent on this tiny studio apartment, so sometime in the next month or so I’ll be moving, which will be stressful and I’ll either send out way too many newsletters or not any at all, as I cope with that. (At the moment, that rent-reduction and y’all’s contributions are the income for my household, so finding a new place to live and the new income to secure it are both going to be difficult, given my lack of magic kyriarchist scrolls and the speed at which my partner and I have to find a solution.)

Anyway, just a quick update, mostly for folk who are wondering why I’ve been so quiet the past few days: my laptop was laggy, my Fediverse instance is down, and then my computer crashed and I haven’t gotten logged back in and checked all the various notifications on the seemingly thousand accounts I’ve got scattered around. On top of that, I’m having to look for new housing and work.

For y’all, the most apparent consequence of this will probably be that I won’t send out emails every couple days, but send out several emails in a row as I transcribe them from paper. And - I’d be remiss if I didn’t specify - if anyone has any recommendations for housing around Chapel Hill or Durham, in North Carolina, or any remote work you’d like to hire me for, please reach out. I, uh, don’t have a resume or portfolio to provide at the moment, I’ll probably get to that tomorrow, sigh.