The Grouch's Trash Pile [Baldur's Gate 3]

I've got some employment agency worries but there's nothing to be done about that but wait and see at this point. :(

 

And here's something frustrating but goofy enough all I can do is laugh at myself--

So I need a new phone because mine is physically falling apart, right? And have for some weeks now, but I've been unable to decide and moaning and groaning to myself about it because Money and iPhones are good but Very Expensive even for the SE, and the cheaper Samsungs are okay but muuuuuh

But then I realized what the real problem is...

I can't get the nerdy ffxiv-themed phone case I want for anything that costs less than 400€.

All I want is a Tomestone of Poetics phonecase and Redbubble doesn't offer anything that fits the Samsung Galaxy A series. T____________T

 

Good news -- the spots on the ceiling are not water damage. \o/

 

I was stuck on mobile the past couple of days because our modem died (because... of course it did) but we had to rule out other stuff first and good gods I don't know how anyone can mostly use the internet on mobile and stand it. Everything is SO INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING to use! The text is too small! Typing is a huge pain in the ass!

 

Well, we might have internet back, but it's still unusually slow. I'll see about fiddling with our modem's settings tomorrow, assuming nothing comes up, which it might -- James cat had to go to the vet today, since we noticed he groomed all the fur off of his belly (and wondered how we didn't notice it sooner), and the verdict is that he might have something wrong with his kidneys or his bladder, but it's something so early on it's hard to tell. The vet is doing a cell culture and will call us with the results tomorrow, and we may need to bring in more of a urine sample than they were able to get with a needle.

Poor little buddy. He was an absolute trooper about it despite us having to walk him there and back in a carrier and him having to be manhandled, and he's cheery enough now, but damn. I have some trauma re: taking cats to the vet so it's always draining for me. Also, I know that at almost 13 he's borderline elderly for a cat, but he absolutely doesn't act like it or look it, so his health starting to show his age is really rattling me. As is the vet bill.

Piled up with my other concerns, well. I sat down after we got back home and almost burst into tears.

 

Aww poor kitty! Get well soon kitty!

---
A few things, none of which I'll be even remotely disappointed about if it's too much bother to answer.

The first, most annoying ones are power and cables: Have you tried turning it off and on again, as in completely unplugging the power and leaving it for five to ten minutes before plugging it back in? Are all the cables firmly seated in the correct ports, nothing coming loose at all?

The workaround: Do you happen to know if any devices you would rather use are capable of tethering to your phone? You've probably already thought of this, but might as well ask I suppose.

Questions that would be prerequisite to network troubleshooting because syntax varies: What general type of OS do you use with your usual machine, as in Mac, PC, *nix?

Oddly enough, possibly the least important one to anyone but the ISP: What kind of modem is it?

 

We replaced the entire modem and it's giving us the same slowdown issues as the old one. We're still using the old RJ-45 cable and plug, though, so that's next up for replacement, as well as checking its settings, and, failing that, trying the port in the bedroom (and cursing up a storm if that one works as expected, as there's precious little room in the bedroom and his cable won't reach his computer anymore). My ethernet cable is brand new, while J's is old, I'm on Win 7 and he's on Win 10, but we've got the same problem. The modem is an Inteno of... some sort. It's secondhand from a friend, but only.... 3 years old? I'm too tired to get up and look at it, tbh.

We tried tethering to our phones when we were waiting on the replacement, but J only has a cheap charging cable and mine just... refused to actually work. I set it up correctly, the computer showed it was tethered, but I couldn't actually do anything. My phone is literally falling apart though (no, still haven't replaced it) so I didn't care to bother with it further to see if it was just super slow or what.

 

My new monitor is a joy and a blessing, though. I'm not getting anywhere near the eyestrain problems I was starting to have with the old one (even after turning everything to *sigh* light mode), and even though it's the same resolution the extra 3" of screen real estate has made a real difference in FFXIV. I also don't have a line of stuck pixels down the right side of the screen anymore :')

 

Well, it wasn't the RJ-45 cable or the wall adapter. *sighs* I am genuinely too tired to swap the physical locations around right now so it'll have to remain a mystery for tonight.

The upload speed is suddenly more reasonable, though, even after swapping back to the old one. Ping is 10ms higher than before because ???

God, I hate this. I've always hated dealing with networking.

 

Second vaccine acquired! Once again impressed by how quick and efficient it is, and how kind the nurses are.

Arm sore and feeling a little out of it already, but I haven't slept more than 7 hours a night for... some time, and took a 2 mile walk after the vaccination so I won't be stiff and in pain later, when I may be too exhausted to exercise at all, so that's got to be a part of it. Oh well. I planned to be knocked flat for a few days -- I was already smart and stocked up on frozen dinners and easy nibbles for the next few days, and even though it's a pinch on the old wallet, ordering in is always an option. Hell, I could get delivery bubble tea if I really wanted to.

 

So it hit me pretty hard by late afternoon but eased up some by late night, enough so that a lot of the exhaustion brainfog had cleared. I'm very much still sore but only somewhat brainfoggy this morning, and I'm going to endeavor not to exert myself, so hopefully I won't feel worse later.

This time my upper arm hurts like a mofo, though, and is pretty stiff. Last time it went away REALLY fast. It's annoying more than anything, but I'm not particularly annoyed, it's just interesting.

 

Yeah that's about my same experience with it as well. All the same, I've still had tetanus shots that hurt worse so I did not question it lmao

 

Yeah for me it's mostly been annoyance when I lean on that arm when I'm sat down (as I often do, my posture is a mess) or I roll to my left side in bed and then ow. Arm still hurts. It's SIGNIFICANTLY better today, though, although I'm only somewhat better otherwise -- I'm starting to feel really stiff so I did some walking in place and some stretching and some very very very light jogging in place -- and mind you, this all took about four minutes and wasn't enough to work up even the mildest of sweats -- and oof. I'm absolutely flattened and my lungs hurt.

In other news, the internet connection bullshit continues, this time with VINDICATION -- the new modem has not helped our speeds. Changing out cables didn't help, trying the other jack in the house didn't help. So J called up the company again, and this time the tech said, huh, that's weird, on my end it shows you've only been getting ADSL speeds for about two weeks now.

It turns out that whatever equipment they have us connected to has this weird quirk where the speed starts degrading over a long period of time and needs to be reset. Like, say... every second August, like it's needed for about six years running. :V Why the hell they don't have a maintenance schedule to do whatever needs to be done to it on a regular basis is beyond me. Tech dude said they're supposed to get it upgraded someday, but I know with the current semiconductor shortage we'll probably have to bug them about this exact same problem in 2023.

(I can't remember anything more exact because J talked to them and told me about it but my brain is hamburger.)

Anyway, if it isn't better soon we'll need to factory reset the modem (which is whatever, other than that this damn thing takes forever to start up), and if THAT doesn't help J will have to respond to the text message they sent him. IDK what the next steps are if that doesn't work... he may have said and I just forgot them :D;

 

Well, a factory reset later and while our up speed seems to be fixed, our down speed is still ADSL levels (14Mbps, where it's SUPPOSED to be 100Mbps). It fixed the agonizingly slow booting problem, though!

 

So the tech that called this morning was basically like "Oh the problem is on your end, if you can't use the VDSL plug maaaybe you can change something in the modem's settings? But we sell modems for 200€!"

If it's on our end then why the fuck was it working fine until two fucking weeks ago, chuckles??

I can't access the hand-me-down modem's settings at all; the connection always times out, no matter what I try, and J was like NO IT'LL MESS UP WORSE about another factory reset.

Of course Elisa doesn't offer any modems cheaper than 200€. Of course they don't. Why not rip your customers off.

 

For added fuckery, the websites of the three shops I know of off the top of my head really want me to only find routers. Not router/modem combos like I need, just routers. I do not give a shit about the hot new mesh wireless bullshit they're trying to sell me! My apartment is 52 square meters of which a surprising amount is the bathroom and sauna! It's a roomy shoebox, stop trying to sell me solutions to a problem I do not have!

J is going to, at some point, call Elisa back and bully them about it because this is beyond ridiculous. The tech we got last night was helpful but I am incredibly unimpressed by how this other guy went 'welp, not our problem, buy a new modem' at us. They did this the last time this happened, too, and then whoopsie doodle it was their problem alllll along! (We made them take the modem they sold us that we didn't need back.)

 

If you read my Twitter you've probably already seen that I came across some Nazi stickers today. Mostly that softball 'White lives matter' type of bullshit, but a couple nastier ones as well. J actually spotted one first, pasted kinda high up a lamppost, so we kept an eye out and spotted a few others. We were on our way to a store, so I bought a nice, chunky black marker there, and on our way back we defaced those pieces of shit. Nothing complicated (even though I wanted to write NAZIS FUCK OFF J thought it'd take more time than it's worth), just crossing out the text with thick black lines.

I'm fucking pissed off, of course, and even though it's been hours I still have adrenaline jitters. I was ready to charge around the park looking for more, but J gently reminded me that it was dinner time and we needed to eat. Imagine, though, a dumpy middle-aged dude looking cripple charging around like a bat out of hell, wildly waving around a permanent marker! I don't look like a vandal, I look like someone's weird uncle, which is probably for the better.

A lot of non-white immigrants and Romany people live around here, so, y'know, that makes it extra fucked.

Gonna go back to the park (it's only a short walk away) tomorrow and see if there are any other shitty stickers that need defacing. During the daytime of course, I'm not stupid -- even if I felt like 200lbs of angry feral cat in the moment, I know I'm ultimately kind of fragile and, well, a cripple.

 

Well, so far I'm 2/2 for acquaintences who have recently said they will totally play FFXIV with me and then started ignoring me.

~This is why I have trust issues~

 

And no, I wasn't bothering them about it, they invited me.