Two things. First, how the hell is it already December!? Second, how the hell is it already the end of 2025!?!? Granted, the last 11 months have felt like a couple of years at this point, and while I would like a break from nearly daily embarrassments in the form of the entire Trump administration, I guess the one upside is: one down, three to go? I dunno. If I recapped every shit thing that the administration has done these last 11 months, we would have 11 long paragraphs before even getting to our usual discussion about video games. Let's just say there'd be a lot to cover, and that's just one aspect of the current presidency.
In other news, I replaced my laptop as the one I had was just over five years old and started showing significant signs of wear. Such as the charger not reliably connecting to the laptop, as in I could plug it in, but it required a bit of finagling to get it to actually begin to charge. I also ran into an issue where the hard drive was experiencing errors, not related to its paltry size of 256 GB being at 95% capacity. Then, in a moment of coincidental frustration, while in the process of transferring data (blog files, video clips from the last 5 years on the Switch, and the Steam Deck, 20+ years of music, PDFs of D&D modules and sourcebooks, and countless other documents/files I've had backed up) my external hard drive (which was also five years old) decided to wig out in ways that have caused me grief.
I first noticed the external hard drive issue when iTunes was having problems pulling music from my two primary music folders, both located on the external hard drive (see above, the 256 GB storage on my previous laptop). Essentially, something bad is happening with the external hard drive: both the prior and current laptops are having difficulty or are unable to read it. Recently, my new computer semi-froze while trying to read the old external drive, and when it does connect (shows up in my File Explorer window, I will either not be able to see any of the folders, or I can see the folders, but I get an error when I try to open any folders or click on the parent folders. Or what's been happening the last two days, is that the computer just doesn't recognize that there's another external drive connected, even though the light on it's flashing and receiving power.
I think the biggest gut punch is losing access to music that I've downloaded over the last five years, as I was able to pull music off my first external hard drive that I'd kept from when I first bought it 12 years ago. That one's still working fine for the time being. Thankfully, I still have access to (most) of the albums I've bought on Bandcamp over the years (the ones that didn't magically disappear when an artist released a new version of the album and the original album up and disappeared) and (most) of the albums I've bought through Amazon. But a lot of it is a matter of remembering what I no longer have access to that's still on the prior external hard drive; I think a lot of the potentially lost music are video game soundtracks, but at least I still have all of the Draconian demo albums and the "Kefka's Domain" album. Phew!
Oh, and to a significantly lesser degree, I also replaced my old Pixel 7A phone because, despite it having a USB-C charging port, I'm only able to use certain USB-C plugs because the port is beyond finicky. I didn't have any of the same issues with file transfer when I booted up and connected the new phone (the economic Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge if you're wondering).
So that's kind of where my head is at the beginning of this new month, at the end of the year.
But hey! I did finish a couple of video games last month, Final Fantasy II, and Mouthole so I don't feel too bad. I've also made some progress in Fire Emblem: Awakening and in Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song Re-Mastered on the Switch, for which I'll have an article out, likely a First Impressions late in the month, or possibly in early January.
We'll return in January with my now annual List of Games from the previous year, because we all love lists, right?
Right?
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I'll Keep Them Still
P.S. My Downloads folder currently looks atrocious, clogged with zipped folders, but it's what I do to keep my brain just a little bit more sane. And the music helps to keep the tinnitus at bay just a little bit.
P.P.S. Oh, and I purchased a Mechanism gaming pillow because I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let a debilitating long-term wrist problem affect my ability to work or play video games. Except I am getting medical treatment, so no worries on that front. Bouldering is still a bit painful, though, which we recently got back into, so it's Bs, 0s, 1s, and 2s for me for now. Slopers suck extra hard now.
P.P.P.S. I guess I should be thankful that I still have a good chunk of my music already backed up and that I, surprisingly enough, didn't buy any physical music from going to shows when I got my prior external hard drive in September 2020, because not a lot of people weren't going to shows in late 2020.
P.P.P.P.S. I guess this article was also to let y'all know that if any of our high-class graphics and images change in the coming weeks, it's because I wasn't able to fully recover My Documents folder off of the external hard drive.
