Am I Miserable [Enough]?

Well, here we are again, this time on a Monday. And I would like to report that things are Bad. The Dell technician came today to work on Eileen-III, and after replacing the motherboard, the display is still borked. So it means that there is something else that is broken, possibly the LCD assembly itself.

Which means that I need to take another day away from work to deal with this.

The good news is that before the technician's arrival, I had hooked up Eileen-III to the monitor via HDMI, and Praise the LORD it worked. That gave me some precious time to yoink out my save games for Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, among other hard-to-re-get things like things that I was torrenting, and some artefacts from AFE-JB/KFC.

``But wait MT, if Eileen-III is still borked, with her motherboard changed, just how are you writing this entry?''

Funny enough, on Eileen-II. I pulled her out of stasis, booted up her Windows 10 ass, updated everything like crazy, and managed to bring her up to the point where I could basically continue whatever I was working on since the last time I booted her up back in 2023-06 or so. She still works, and is good enough for me to do whatever I want, including playing me some Grim Dawn: Fangs of Asterkarn, though technically I'm literally replaying the base game all over again to build up a new character with the Berserker mastery instead of jumping into the new content, this time with a controller. I also managed to watch me some SGDQ 2026 VODs, since I didn't want to hook up the external monitor to watch some of the VTuber stuff in the background while working on other things. Eileen-II is running an old RTX2070-MaxQ (why I keep thinking this as an RTX2080 is something that I cannot fathom), and realistically, I really didn't want to overstress this long out of warranty machine that I resurrected from stasis just to tide through this period. It did take a couple of reboots to literally iron out the kinks in the dusty-ass circuits before Eileen-II would work correctly, and knowing just how good my luck is, I didn't want to push it too hard.

And so I'm here.

There are other bad things that have been happening to the people around me, and since they involve not-me, I don't feel comfortable talking about them. Nevertheless, I definitely want to comment that hearing what has been happening to people has made me a little sad, and for some particular things that I had been hearing, I'm actually pretty broken that such a thing could happen like that---I just never thought that it was possible for that kind of thing to occur like that. Maybe I'm just an idealist, or maybe I'm naive, or maybe I'm ``religious''---it just felt so... wrong. Like, I would honestly hear of such fuck ups in stories, but not to people I know?

(sigh)

Life do be like that. Looking out for myself is hard enough; looking out for the unfortunate is just hard mode. And looking out for folks whom you think ought to be good at looking out for themselves is just... what am I doing with my life.

If everyone vents and confides in me, to whom do I vent and confide in then? God always listens and hears, and naturally He acts in His own mysterious ways, but I'm not as Christ-like as I ought to be to take things in that ``large'' way that He does---I'm just not good enough. But when presented with someone who might be interested to listen and to help, I find myself in the strange situation where I don't know how to ask for the said help, and more importantly, what kind of help it is that I am seeking.

Such a stupid situation eh. And people come to me for advice. Fear for their sanity as you fear for mine, gentle reader.

In other news, I started back cycling, though not at the time that I was intending to---it was a Friday afternoon at stupid hot o'clock, and I think I'm paying the price for that with general headaches for the past two days. Oh, and I think I can definitively say that I can no longer eat raw seafood safely---ran an experiment of eating raw oysters on Thursday for dinner, and on Friday evening, I started to have diarrhoea again, and it is still going on today. I've drained all the carbon pills that I bought in preparation to my trip to Astana, and all I seemed to have succeeded at is to make the really stinky and really clay-ey stool gray due to the activated carbon mix.

Blechh.

In theory, I was suppose to cycle this morning. But yeah, fuck that---didn't happen. Not going to do tomorrow morning either because I need to get into office early to do some rather ``inspired'' work (write down the runbooks before I totally forget what is going on). I'm currently targetting Wednesday stupid o'clock in the morning for the next cycle, a 14.5 mi-ish affair, which is basically the north-east riverine loop with a bounce along the park connector that ends at the Tampines Road junction.

There's also a good chance (maybe!) that Wednesday is when the replacement LCD assembly is available, and so I will need to take that day off to finally sort out what is hopefully the last possible issue of Eileen-III.

Here's to a more peaceful week than whatever nonsense I have been facing. Till the next update.