The longer version is this...

I was goofing off playing "Will this mod still work" in Cyberpunk on like Tuesday and I got up to get my usual Tuesday night chores done. I come back later and my system shut the monitors off like normal. I wiggle the mouse to get the image back and wake things up... nothing shows up on my larger monitor. I run a dual screen setup so I had a backup. It was live. My main? Nothing but the power button.

The rest of that night and the next day were spent trying to locate cables and troubleshoot this issue. In my mind, it could only be three things: The Cables (cheap easy fix), The Monitor (expensive fix I'd like to avoid) and The Graphics Card (Worst Case Scenario). Lucky me, it was the Monitor - something I'd been looking into replacing since it had developed a nasty line of busted pixels over a year ago. Still wasn't an expense I was down for dealing with. -.-

$150+ later and I'm now the proud owner of an AOC C24G1A 24" Curved Frameless Gaming Monitor. I reality, the curve is nice and not terribly distracting and the "Gaming" part of it amounts to a couple of built in tweaks and an AMD FreeSync compatibility dealie. The reason I got it: It still has a VGA port alongside the usual HDMIs and DisplayPort. I can use it for troubleshooting older systems. = )

That's not where all this pain ends, though. Oh no. I'm not getting out of it That easy. No...

It took another $75 or so of longer cables, ties and a VESA adapter plate to get things back to what I can consider "Good". At the time of writing this, I'm still waiting on the plate but I'm going to start re-setting up my Main desk in an effort to uncover my poor Art desk and the work buried beneath.

Now for the whole "Social Media" stuff:

- I'm liking Bluesky. It's slowly getting better but it's getting to that level of usefulness faster than Threads.

- Masto is still solid but quiet. Not a lot of folks I normally follow hanging out there. They're either still stuck on Twitter or just cutting back on their social media activity in general.

- Threads is... there.

- Hive isn't much better.

All in all, I still miss old school Twitter. BSky is the closest as it's literally built by the folks behind old school Twitter. That and Masto are the only places that still feel like viable solutions for both hanging out and doing all that business stuff I dislike talking about like "Marketing" and "Networking".

I think that's enough of an update for now. It's October and, although I never technically finished last year's Drawlloween, I still plan on doing a new one for this year. A nice relaxing one... with no forced story stuff like last time.

Time for me to eat, stretch and finish cleaning. I Think I still have a "desk" underneath all the junk currently on my Art Desk. They say that, during the full moon, you can still hear the click clack of a keyboard and the scrubbing of an eraser. o.o

Remember: Stay Safe. Wear a Mask if you need to. Get vaccinated if you can. Get a booster if you're already good on all that. And remember to keep your head up.

'Till next time! = )