Figured I'd give a bit of an update. I've been avoiding Twitter (among other places), haven't made myself available online for a long time, and just been kinda... not really "hermiting", but appreciating the limited bursts of time I get to myself.

So, I've been using laptops as my daily driver systems for a while. A 2009 white Macbook, an Acer Aspire 5, a Dell Latitude E6430... The last one is sitting off to the side at the moment. But the couple of desktops I own were...old. A Dell XPS 410 that supersilverdraco gave me (Core2Quad, 8GB DDR2, GeForce GTS 540 4GB), and a 2006 Mac Pro (2x Intel Xeons, 32GB DDR2 FB-ECC, ATi Radeon 5770 1GB). That changed fairly recently, though.

My parents (grandfather and uncle) knew I'd been lamenting that I couldn't play much in the way of games. So, they bought me a rig that I can easily upgrade over time. Core i5-9400F, 8GB DDR4, GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6GB, SSDs for both Windows and Linux, an HDD for data and games. And yes, I threw Linux on it, because I'm not going to torture myself by trying to work in Windows 10 when I don't like it. I mostly use terminal (command line) apps to help me focus, and it feels great to be doing that again. Oh! And it has RGB, which made dragon-architect jealous. Just need to get an RGB memory kit to complete the look. XD

(Aside: The only thing I'm unhappy with is the lack of an optical drive, but I can get a USB one later.)

That said, I really haven't been in much of a writing mood, but I've been trying to slowly work off a bit of rust. I've also been trying to teach myself a bit of programming, starting with Perl and moving on when I feel comfortable to do so. I've had people tell me to start with JavaScript and Python, but given the lack of good books for the latter ("Learn Python the Hard Way" by Zed Shaw being the only one I've found worth my time), and my distaste for the former, Perl has been nice to me. Plus, "Learning Perl" from O'Reilly Books has been absolutely amazing in its writing, so I'm enjoying the learning process as well.

And that's pretty much been what I've been up to. Not much else.

I hope I can get back into writing soon. I miss being able to do so without feeling like I'm about to have an anxiety attack. Staying off Twitter will probably help with that as well, given how toxic that place has become.

Till next time.