What's everyone up to right now?

[Cod]

Just got back home from two days away in Lancashire, I was out clubbing last night so a bit tired and hungover.

[Rev. Rye]

On what I think will be my first go-around of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. So far, I'm at my third/fourth choice (fourth/fifth if you count the "do you understand how this works" choice at the prelude), and it looks like they want you to refuse the offer to develop Bandersnatch in-house because it will fail. I suppose this will be an interesting Anglotopia column, but I think I'll need quite a bit of time (and preferably a flowchart of all the choices and a reasonable amount of information on all the potential endings) before I go write it. Also, there's at least one choice where there's only one option.

[Rev. Rye]

Going through Bandersnatch, it looks like there's a lot of potential endings (given that there were allegedly over a trillion possibilities, and they all have two choices, it looks like there's forty potential choices), and it won't leave well enough alone; I got to an ending where

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Stefan chops up his Dad and it leads to him creating the game, which is a masterpiece that gets pulled as soon as it turns out he's killed his dad. Thirty years later, someone decides to reboot it...

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But then it goes to another choice much earlier.

[Jackalope]

Going through Bandersnatch, it looks like there's a lot of potential endings (given that there were allegedly over a trillion possibilities, and they all have two choices, it looks like there's forty potential choices), and it won't leave well enough alone; I got to an ending where

---

Stefan chops up his Dad and it leads to him creating the game, which is a masterpiece that gets pulled as soon as it turns out he's killed his dad. Thirty years later, someone decides to reboot it...

---

But then it goes to another choice much earlier.

This is that interactive game on Netflix?

[Rev. Rye]

Going through Bandersnatch, it looks like there's a lot of potential endings (given that there were allegedly over a trillion possibilities, and they all have two choices, it looks like there's forty potential choices), and it won't leave well enough alone; I got to an ending where

---

Stefan chops up his Dad and it leads to him creating the game, which is a masterpiece that gets pulled as soon as it turns out he's killed his dad. Thirty years later, someone decides to reboot it...

---

But then it goes to another choice much earlier.

This is that interactive game on Netflix?

Yep, it’s the interactive Black Mirror episode. I managed to get through five of the endings before the Netflix app crashed. And I managed to get the what, if the flowcharts I’ve seen are correct, is the closest thing to a happy ending on the second (first if we don’t count the first one where I tried to develop the game in house and it immediately becomes an abysmal failure.
So far, I’ve also got the endings where it turns out to be an actor, one where the company fails, and another one where he dies in his psychiatrist’s chair.

[Rev. Rye]

I managed to discover that there's a simple way of getting as much out of Bandersnatch as possible, and I'll let Jared Leto Jr explain it:





In more concrete terms, you have a ten-second window in which you can make each choice. If you don't make a choice, Netflix makes a default choice. If you don't make a single choice, it'll keep going through a pathway wherein you see as much of the footage filmed as possible. Note: if you've already started to watch it and want to start over, you'll need to force the credits to play all the way through. Writing that Anglotopia column about it will be a lot easier than I thought.

[Jackalope]

Investigating the various rules regarding non-spousal inheritance of retirement accounts and discovering for the first time in my life, I need a professional tax advisor.

[Nakara]

So today I was "dying" again. This time I went to the ER, thankfully still symptomatic ("dying") so I was actually able to get an answer while being able to calm down in a safe place. Turns out, I learned that my occasional "dying" episodes involve ectopic heartbeats. After all this gorram time I finally have a name to those annoying and scary heart-skips that had me convinced my heart was failing. And they're harmless!

While I'm still, of course, panicky, at least I know that they're nothing more than annoying now.

I'm just dreading the bill that'll come in a few weeks...

[The Grand Nudger]

Nursing my shoulders, and a beer...I did alot of screwing tonight. Sawdust everywhere.

[Angrboda]

Trying to figure out why my 3 TB external hard disk isn't showing up in Explorer on my desktop.  I just hooked it up to my netbook, and it installed one of the two drivers it apparently needs to function, but is simply displaying the "processing" icon while trying to install the second.  That doesn't sound particularly good.  I don't have any great need for the storage, as I have other options, and while it's filled with a lot of stuff, I haven't missed that stuff for a long time, so it will be no great loss.  Still, that 3 TB would be useful.  I need a permanent place to store ripped DVDs, and those take up a lot of space.  I had also considered pairing it with another 3 TB drive, to make an external, mirrored  file store.  However if it's kaput, then there's nothing more to be done.  Hopefully it's a technical issue that I can resolve instead of an unrecoverable loss.  I do have an option to free up about 1 TB of internal fault tolerant storage though, so it won't be a disaster.

ETA:  My netbook is really, really slow.  I have a bigger memory stick and SSD that I need to install in it, which would help, but I think the battery's dead.  Since they want $25 for a new battery, and I haven't been using the netbook, I've been reluctant to make the actual upgrades as there isn't much point if I'm not going to buy a new battery and use the thing.

ETA2:  The device driver finally installed, but it looks like the hard drive is dead.  *sigh*  Not good news, but these things happen.  Thankfully it wasn't something critical.  Oh, I just had a thought.  I might be able to take the disk itself out of the external case and use it that way.  It all depends on what exactly is wrong with it.  If it's the electronics in the case, and not the electronics or disk of the hard drive inside it, I can probably reuse the disk.

ETA3:  Apparently, from looking up a video of how to remove the hard drive from its case, you practically need a hammer and chisel to do so.  Unfortunate, but hardly anything that's going to deter me from making the attempt.

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Well, I succeeded in extracting the hard drive from its external case, and it wasn't as difficult as I had anticipated it to be. Thankfully, watching the videos, I learned that you only have to remove one specific side, so I didn't have to actually do the same thing twice. Still, it was somewhat tricky, as it did involve hammering a screwdriver into a gap in the case, and lacking all but one finger, I had to hold the screwdriver with my one good hand, and hammer it in using the hand with no fingers, which was very clumsy. However, once started, prying off the cover was pretty easy. I dinged my hand once in the process, but that's all a part of the process. Unfortunately, once I hooked the bare drive up to the computer, while the drive is usable, it's capacity has dropped from 3 TB down to 750 GB. I have basically no use for such a small hard disk, so my efforts turned out to be a waste of time. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. That's one less question mark in my life.