Thunderstorms again. Fun. Might mean more power outages. And there's a larger chance for more storms this coming Thursday too. Gah.

Power is out. Lovely.

I have doscovered "Lop & Ochō". Holy crap. Geno Studios put a lot of effort into incorporating a number of SW elements into that short. Hints of it in the music too; the trumpets and trombones and drums for one scene, then later in another scene I heard a few notes of the lietmotif of the Force...

Been seeing a few short-lived disconnects from the internet lately. The most recent one was confusing. The modem still showed as connected in its WebGUI and the physical status lights corroborated this, but my PC and tablet insisted there was no internet connection for about 4 minutes.

My tablet doesn't have a mobile carrier thingy, so whenever the power goes out, my tablet becomes a glorified offline e-reader.

More storms. Severe thunderstorm warning issued. Hail possible, low chances for a tornado. Wind gusts. Scattered power outages likely. Nature is not yet done being mean. Already hearing distant thunder. Making sure my tablet is charged just in case.

Day 2 of the rains. Now with loud thunderclaps. This weather system is still doing a number on the area.

So... A few days of rain ahead. Today is going to be a whole day of it, sometines heavy. No thunderstorm though, but still enough rain for flood watches to be in effect. The rain is already messing with the power a bit. So people are going to be bracing for that here.

Its been a fairly nice day so far. Quiet, but nice. I should probably try to write more, but Oblivion Remastered calls to me. When will they remove those funky bears from female Khajiit? Looks seriously out of place on them. o_o

We have storms today. However I have snacks and some youtube while it lasts. My version of "netflix and chill" is "youtube and snacks". :p

I spent most of the day passed out in bed. 💤 However, my phone/internet provider id show up today and they repaired the busted cable in the ditch across the street right quick. The break in the cable was shorter than they thought. Had to re-splice a lot of things though.

This is why our phone and internet service died. Some idiot cut the underground cable while making preparations to lay out more underground cables. My service provider is probably going to be "having words" with whatever company did this.

I'll be brief. I don't use this much. I am working on building more of a presence. However I hit a snag. At 11:07 AM on the 15th, my landline phone service cut oút. No dial tone. No DSL either. Status: waiting for technician to diagnose the problem.

Power looks like its back on at home according to the electric company's outage map. Already on the road and heading home. In the rain. Supposed to be on alert for potential flooding in some areas west of the Blue Ridge Parkway. I'm not on that side of it, so I should be fine.

So... Power came back briefly, according to the neighbors. It didn't last. It went down again at 7:23 PM and now, as I look at the outsge report, it just says "assessing condition" for its repair time estimate. Fricking wonderful. Thanks, nature, I hate it. Power please. A cold, dark house sucks.

I've shacked up at a motel to try to wait this out. We'll see what things are like tomorrow.

So 1120 people in my immediate area lost power at 7:23 AM today, myself included. Since then, that number dropped to 417. That's promising. But this winter storm isn't done with us yet. Some of us may not get power restored until 11 PM on Friday the 14th. Stay safe out there, and warm.

So it begins. Another winter storm. Or rather a set of winter storms. Under a winter weather warning until tomorrow at midday at the earliest. Chances of power outages in my viewing area is moderately high considering the other storms are going to bring sleet and freezing rain.

Still think this is a crappy start to 2025. :p

2 weeks ago I had something of an internet outage. The cause was the ISP's equipment stopped issuing customers any IP addresses so we could go online. Same thing happened again this morning at around 7:15 AM. Was much faster to fix this time, inside of 30 minutes. This is going to be monitored.

So I just had an internet outage that lasted for almost 2 days. TL;DR: equipment failure at the provider's local office serving my area. They conducted repairs and people were getting their internet back. Me? They forgot to reset the IP addresses list; my modem was asking for but not getting them.

Also on the list is getting the water pipes thawed. No power > well water pump is off > water freezes in the pipes > no water

Made it home. Getting cozy. Putting "get all those fallen tree branches off the yard" on the to-do list. Can't forget about the other storm still on its way this Friday either.

Well, the moni vacay at the motel is over. Heading home now.

But another winter storm is coming by Friday. Kind of jittery about that one. ... I fricking hate winter.

So that winter storm passed through overnight between the 5th and the 6th. It knocked out power for 735 people in my area and thousands across the state. I shacked up at a motel so I could recharge my tablet and also to avoid freezing. Will be heading home tomorrow morning since power was fixed.

Happy January 1st, 2025. Let's see what this year brings!

Over here on the East Coast USA, its 10:22 PM. 2025 is a little over an hour and a half away for us. So have an early-ish Happy New Year!

Spent most of yesterday playing catch up. Emails, Discord stuff, Clearing notifications off my tablet and some websites. See, I was offline all day the other day due to a failure in my service provider's equipment at an "office". They had to replace some electronics. No phone, no DSL. All. Day.

Going to need a new set of headphones now. A certain grey-furred feline decided the cable was a chew to and now its only putting out sound on the right-channel. Supposedly cats chew on wires for their taste or some diet deficiency. Or who knows what reason. But I'm pissed; I don't have speakers!

Today was...interesting. It was pretty windy all day. So there I am minding my toils when the front door opens. I turn to look, nobody's there, then I shut the door. But the door won't stay shut. Not because of the wind, but because the weather warped the door frame. Had to use the deadbolt.

So FurAffinity's custom thumbnail feature for submissions only works properly if the submission is a text document of some sort or a PDF file. Supposedly it used to work for image submissions, but that part hasn't worked for at least *ten years*. SMH.

No context today. Just a lot of incredulous "what the actual fudge" over recent news today. Just... glkhldksfsdfsadsf -*Headdesk*-

I just thought I'd share something I got back in 2010 when I was at Anthrocon that year. Art is by @tailsrulz.bsky.social If they want me to take this post down, I will. But it shows just how far their style and art has evolved over those 14 years. :)

I wonder how many people jumped of the boat that is X/Twitter since they announced that TOS change that artists (and their commissioners) hate so much. That was a douche move on X/Twitter's part. >_>

Me and RNG don't always get along. Bu I still like a good art raffle from time to time. :)

X/Twitter shot itself in the foot yet again by updating their TOS to allow them to use *anything* a user posts on their platform to train their machine learning and AI models. And there's no way to opt-out unless you're in the EU. So to those who joined Bluesky because of this, welcome!

So I managed to survive "Post-Tropical Cyclone Helene". It passed through on the 27th and it knocked out the power for nearly 10 hours straight. But I'm still kicking. :)

Other news. Caught a bunch of stinkbugs that decided to cling to the east living room window. Man that was a good dozen or so. Old house is old. Hard to find and seal all the crannies they are using to sneak in unnoticed.

After what feels like thre daya of rain, some of it being a hard rain, I may be able to find out if our well is just low on water or not. If the water pressure omproves and it doesn't cut out, then the water table was low. Otherwise, it's something with the pump itself. Just gotta wait and see.

Mom is home from the hospital now. So that's good. In the meantime I'm still trying to salvage data from the HDD of her old PC so it can be migrated to an external SSD for her new one.

Yeah, I've had this account for almost a year. :p Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #1,731,503!

Another week has started. ... Okay, fine. It really started yesterday. So today my mom is supposed to have a procedure done. I don't know what kind, though I didn't ask. She's still okay. From what I am told, she'll possibly be able to come home by this Wednesday if things go well. 🤞

Not much has changed in the last couple of days. Still, going to think of the positives. Got some thoughts of what art to color next, which ones I should probably post (to FA or elsewhere), and some rough guides to shading that might help. Onward one day at a time~

Today's dose of cutenand positive: a purring kitten! Dunno if its purrs will be audible though. Well, enjoy!

So Mom won't be coming home this weekend, but that was an optimistic "at the earliest" estimate anyway. They decided against the stint because of something about her blood. But they will be going in with a camera to find out if she has a blockage and if so, where.

Man, I haven't touched BL3 in ages. But its nice to know how far into the game I've gotten before I took an extended break from it.

So newest update from mom is that she may be staying at the hospital until this Saturday at the earliest. But she's still fine and she subjected my dad to the hospital's idea of iced tea. That stuff that is unsweetened and not even sugar will make it taste better. Heh.

Okay, that's a cute one.

So today I put some energy into setting up my mom's new computer while she's at the hospital. I was expecting some 40 pound clunker like most desktop PC's, but this thing is apparently a budget business desktop and a slim one at that. Had no trouble unpacking it and hooking it up.