hmpf

Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I do.

I'm thirty today. Got a shiny new flatscreen monitor for my birthday present, since my old (seven year old) monitor died last week. So much more space on my desk!

It's also my friend Kiki's birthday. She may be reading this, so: Happy Birthday to you, too! :-)

1.) On Monday, my computer died. I panicked, called a friend who knows more about these things than I do, described the symptoms, and he said the hard drive was probably dead for good. I did try to restart the computer a number of times, but it always crashed before Windows finished starting up. So I went and ordered a new hard drive, a 300 GB internal Seagate Barracuda. Then, later that night, I tried to restart the computer again... and it worked, without a hitch. Clearly, it was a conspiracy to make me buy a new drive.

2.) Got my new hard drive today, so now I have 400 GB. *squeeee*! I can finally start to consider vidding Farscape! (Shame my CPU, graphics card and RAM are a bit old&small&slow, but I suppose that in time I can replace those, too. Just not all at once. Don't have *that* much money.)

3.) Thanks to the computer trouble and a busy week in other respects, I'm quite a bit behind on my LJ reading again. I managed to catch up with about half of my 200+ entries backlog tonight, but have to stop now, and may not get back to it before Sunday or Monday, by which time there will be, of course, a new Doctor Who reviews deluge. Ugh.

4.) This should make dunkle_feuer happy: I've started watching Ultraviolet, and so far I'm finding it quite enjoyable.

5.) My Shadowrun character (who is also a Farscape fan, because of course Farscape fandom will survive until the year 2063!) has decided to go retro and start a blog: http://alwaysapoint.livejournal.com. So far, I intend for it to be an experiment in hiding one story in another story, but as the term at uni looks very busy indeed I may find it difficult to keep updating. It certainly has the lowest priority of all my creative and fannish endeavours at the moment.

6.) Of which there are, in terms of relative priority:

1. Vidding
2. Translating
3. Writing
4. Giving feedback to authors and vidders, and updating my HL recs page
5. Discussing Life On Mars in lifein1973 and tunedinto1973
6. Producing some of that HL meta I promised months ago, as well as a con report or sorts for Leeds
7. Shadowrun meets Farscape fanfic experimental blog

7.) I went and demonstrated against the new university fees today. I mostly went out of a sense of duty, not out of any real hope of stopping the government from what they want to do - and because I happened to be going that way, anyway, to pick up my new hard drive. Yes, I know... there's something deeply ironic in going to a vaguely anti-capitalist demonstration because you need to go that way to shop... I did join up with them again after I'd done my geek shopping, though, and stayed for almost four hours. There were around 4000 students, a lot of police in riot gear, and some people throwing stuff. A lot of chanting of fairly stupid slogans, and vaguely tropical drumming. (I didn't chant. Not much one for chanting slogans. I'll be a face and a pair of feet in a crowd if you need me, but I won't be a voice chanting stupid stuff.) It's oddly fun to be walking slowly in a crowd on the tram rails and streets, stopping all traffic... but overall, the whole excercise mostly made me feel like I wanted to cry with some weird, mild-but-all-pervasive existential despair, because I can't see this turning into any kind of meaningful 'movement' or anything, and nobody seemed to have much of an idea beyond "paying money for 'being allowed' to go to uni to help the government balance their budget = bad", and a more general feeling of "we're unhappy with the general state of affairs". It's sad sad sad, yet I don't know what to do, either. Sometimes it just feels as if simply *everything* is wrong, and how do you go about changing *that*? (tiniago, we've had that conversation... *g*)