Been busy, and been a little while since I've done a journal/blog, so suppose I should fill you in on what's been up.
Oops. Just realized I've been cross-posting art and stories here, but not journals.

To recap:

Had health issues December through March. Turned 30 in January, so officially a grey-muzzle. :P

Go check out this amazing gift art from my wonderful friend June

Go check out some group pieces where my characters make an appearance! Lus "losing" at TF poker, Gwendolyn as a paladin-toy for a very pampered manticore, and my favorite of the bunch; Lus enjoying some 'squeaky shots' down at the local bar and turning into a lovely rubber lovedoll bou.

CURRENT STUFF:

Health issues reared their ugly head again around the middle of June. Wasn't as bad as December-through-March, but even if I could still push through work and household tasks it still did take the wind out of my sails, and left me short a few spoons until only about a week ago. Got it looked into a bit further than last time, and after a couple of tests I don't really have an answer... but they didn't find any underlying issues to be concerned about either. Yay?

Made my way to AnthroCon this year! My second furry convention ever, after a spur-of-the-moment trip to AnthrOhio earlier this year, and the first con of any type where I've had to book a hotel instead of either doing a day-trip or having local family/friends. Health and heat and humidity and wildfire smoke and stress had me feeling a little less than 100%, but it was still an absolute blast! So nice to finally see some folks in person, attend some great panels, see some great costumes, splurge on some pins in the vendor hall, and just... get away for a weekend. Also... took the opportunity to dress fem in public for the first time. Where I live isn't quite as accepting as a furry convention, and I'm very much a ball of nerves and anxiety who is worried about not passing well enough and being confronted, or being recognized by someone I'm not out to, so I haven't really gotten to just... go for it. It was wonderful.

On the day job front... After something like two months of what felt like mostly busy work and "Why am I even coming in?", the project I'm on that was trapped in a holding pattern started moving again... and I immediately flipped from not having enough work to having too much. I'd asked some people up the chain to take care of certain things that would let me know if there was a problem while we still had plenty of time to address it, and they just decided to not do that. And there ended up being a problem. Then someone of equal rank but more seniority who was supposed to provide temporary extra manpower just... ran out the clock and phoned it in on what they did do. And this is on top of earlier news I got that our company wants to send most of the engineering and manufacturing currently done in the US to low-cost Asian countries and have the US-based engineers only do customer meetings, high-level planning, and manage outsourcing. They even floated the idea of changing the job titles of the group I'm in, with the implication we might lose the "engineer" part... but they didn't know to what. And this news all came from our own management who pitched this to us as a good thing because we'd all get to do project management work, which they saw as a step up from the work we do now (no additional money was promised).

Also dealing with some family things. Not going to get into details here, but had a 400-mi day trip in June, and just got back from a >1100mi 3-day weekend that was... kinda bittersweet.

Anyway; COMPUTER STUFF:

If you follow me on Twitter or Mastodon, you'd know that I have a fascination with weird (PCIe-era) graphics cards.

Some of them are fairly well known chipsets, but an interesting physical card. Like the sandwich-PCB dual-GPU GTX 295, a PCIe-x1 GT 710, a reference/OEM 9800GT, and the Apple GT120.

Some of them are less well known but fairly common chipsets, like the OEM-only GTX 645, GTX 745, and GTX 760 1.5gb, and an Intel DG1-4G.

...and then there's the really weird stuff. An R5 M435 turned into a no-output desktop card, more Matrox M-series cards than one bou needs, an S3 Chrome 5400EW, a Barco Aura/Coronis PCIe that only outputs greyscale, and a datacenter Radeon Pro that doesn't officially exist.

I have a thread on Twitter with pics of most of my collection.

But what's new is that now I've uploaded Lus' Big Table of Benchmarks to a Google Sheet, so any one else who's the same type of nerd can actually see how these things compare when all running (or attempting to run) the same thing in the same PC.