New PC and Stuff

Hey everyone! It's me. Again. Do I post too much here? I don't know.

For better or worse, I have a new PC. My old one was 7-8 years old, with a couple parts cannibalized from the computer before that, so yeah, the whole thing was pretty ancient by PC standards. I was hoping to ride that one out til at least the summer. And if my income and patron support remained fairly steady by then, I was planning to look into a new one.

Well, I started having more and more problems the last few weeks, which required reboots to fix. It was happening on average once a day. Today, it happened three times before noon, and I kinda had a nervous breakdown.

After talking with my partner, we decided I should go get a new one ready-to-go today. We're all aware of the state of the world. Businesses are having to suspend or shut down service left and right, shipping times are moderately less reliable than normal, and suddenly my PC seemed like it could breathe its last at any moment.

So, the good news is I have a new PC! It's brand new. I may post pics on Twitter or Instagram later. It's shiny, colorful, the case is smaller but the hardware is stronger than my last machine. It has a modern graphics card (that was one of the cannibalized parts on my old PC), USB 3.0 ports, and it's brand new so everything runs quite smoothly.

The less good news is the lingering anxiety over having to dive pretty deep into my emergency fund. I know that's why I had the fund built up, but it still feels a bit weird having to drop this much money in one go. But with it, I hope I can produce some more content. I've been planning to start tutorial videos and art recordings. Might even try to do some gaming streams sometimes.

The other less good news is the new PC only has one HDMI port. Fortunately it has two Displayports. Unfortunately, nobody in town sells Displayport-to-HDMI adapters and the only way I could get one shipped to me before next week was to pay extra for shipping. It has been a very expensive day.

What this means is my Cintiq is out of commission for a couple days. Both it and my monitor need an HDMI port to work so there's an obvious problem there. Once the adapter gets here, everything will be back to normal.

So there might be a slow-down of content this week as I'll need to catch up on commissions and other work I'll miss during this surprise break. I'll keep you all posted.

Thank you for all your support. It really means a lot. It's in large part thanks to you all that I was able to have this emergency fund in the first place. I'm really glad to have you all here, and I can't thank you enough for helping to keep me going, especially in these kinds of situations.

- Micah