When the laptop's gone and you can't go on, it's TRAGEDY!

*cough*

Er. Yes. Well, it's fair to say the bum buscuits really hit the rotating coolant device. My laptop committed sepuku about a month ago - no warnings, just a sad little fzzzt sound and that was that, the mainboard and HD were instantly fried. Something went bad (and I run on surge protectors so I know it wasn't a blowout), and I paid the price. Pretty much everything I'd been working on over summer and up to the moment of death disappeared in a flash, lost to the ether. Sent laptop off to Sony for repairs (still under warrenty, thank the gods) and when it was returned, my worst fears were realised - the HD had been entirely replaced (and they wanted to charge me a whopping £340/$600 to return the dead one! They run on some sort of mad 'one for one' policy and returning something entirely useless to them is obviously something of monumental difficulty - frankly, I don't have that kind of cash to 'buy' something I might not even be able to recover anything from, so it's all moot anyway) and I've essentially lost thousands of hours of data. Not just the hours of work and ideas that were lost in terms of my own artwork but all the texture libraries I've compiled, all my reference pictures (yes, even those ones!) 100s of hours of game saves ranging from the Half-life series to Oblivion to Spore, more mp3s than I could possibly tally, all my web links, all my documents (essays, dissertations, important information, chatlogs etc). It goes on.

Worst part? It's pretty much my own fault. Not the laptop dying, I mean, but the mass data loss. I have an external harddrive. I have no excuse for not plugging the bloody thing in and backing my stuff up more regularly. The worst part is there's some stuff I would have sworn blind that I'd backed up but has utterly gone - Findergarten is one of the big losses - there was a lot of love and character design invested into that picture, and now I only have the version on here left. I'm going to attempt to redo all the fish kids, but it's going to be hell as I'll be 10x harder on myself to do it right second time round. Also lost the final mockups of the Jack Kerouac pieces that I put up recently, and A Very Strange Cat is now a species of one, surviving all alone in the zoo we call DA.

My computer is an integral part of my day to day life. More so than I actually like or would care to admit. I do everything through it - work, play, communicate. I make loving eyes at a 17" laptop monitor for at least 8 hours a day. The last month has been hell - I just haven't known what to do with myself most of the time - the loss of so much did not do wonders for my general state of depression, you might say. On the other hand, I did force myself to sketch, pencil to paper, and some good things are coming out of it that when I get all my programs back (can you imagine life without Photoshop?!) on board, will make their way to my gallery soon.

In the end, I'm saddened but determined to not let this all undermine my newfound confidence in art - I've taken the loss on the chin, though it felt more like I'd been bent over the table at the time. I've certainly learned the value of spending five minutes before bedtime every night to back up the day's doings and findings. And hey, after a protracted period of being without my laptop, it's finally back after a second repair outing (the replacement mainboard was faulty causing the GPU to freeze and the OS/Bios was corrupted - took them a fortnight to sort that one out...)
and it seems to be running all hunky dory now. So there's some rays of sunshine bursting through the clouds at last!

--yv

Tragically hip...