Got some wonderful things from my family for Christmas, but… a new desktop computer was not among those wonderful things. xD;

Luckily someone offered to give me one of their old computers, so I’m going to be getting that.

Only catch is that it needed an operating system… so I ordered one over the weekend, and I just got the shipping notice this morning.

As soon as that’s delivered, I’ll set up the “new” used computer, transfer over my files… and then I’ll be able to resume Joyride. :DDD I just hope the OS comes soon. :C

Alright, the hard drive’s life has been restored!

At least, I managed to squeeze enough life out of it in order to back up all of my files to an external USB drive (which took over 24 solid hours…). So everything is safe now!

Thus far, I haven’t bumped into any corrupted data, so I would like to say that no files were actually lost in this whole fiasco.

Unfortunately the drive is not actually fixed. Since the bug that caused it to lock up in the first place manifests during boot up, the only way to keep the exact same problem from happening again is to not turn off my computer. Ever. @_@

Therefore. I haven’t turned it off since I restored the hard drive. It’s getting rather hot in the last few days, so I’m praying it will hold on just a liiiiiiiiiittle longer.

Problem is the poor machine leaks memory and thrashes terribly when I leave it turned on without a rest. ESPECIALLY when I try to work on hi rez, large art files, such as Joyride pages. :C So it’s reeeeally slugging along, and just barely surviving.

Besides which, I can’t update Joyride anyway because the internet isn’t working on that computer (I’m updating this from my laptop again). Not sure why — I’d have to do some cable rearranging and rebooting to diagnose that, but… yeah, I can’t. D:

So TLDR; what I’m trying to say is: I recovered all my data (yay) but I still can’t update Joyride until I get some new hardware and internet back (boo).

I guess there’s simply a limit to how far you can push failing hardware, and that machine has hit it.

I apologize for the break in updates, but, well, I guess a computer is never really going to chose a convenient time to have a total meltdown…

As of now you can consider Joyride as being on Christmas break. It should return around 2010!

Since last week, I was planning to make an announcement to you guys on Monday, today.

The announcement was going to be that there would be probably 1 more page of Joyride, and after that,  I was putting Joyride on something of a Christmas break.

The reason is because my computer has been slowly dying for almost a year now, and RAPIDLY dying for the last few months. So I asked for a new machine for Christmas. Meanwhile I was trying to squeeze the last bits of life out of my poor dying computer, just hoping and praying that it would hang on until Christmas.

I didn’t.

I’m typing this from my laptop because the hard drive on that system seems to have failed. When I turned it on this morning, it wouldn’t boot.

So, all day I’ve been trying to recover the data. No luck thus far, but I’ll keep working and we’ll see how it goes.

Worst case scenario is that all the data is corrupted and I lost… well, pretty much EVERYTHING. Which is a scenario that I do not wish to contemplate.

Best case, maybe only the table is corrupted and I’m able to recover the data from the drive somehow.

But either way, I feel the computer as a whole has breathed its last.  I don’t believe it will be possible for me to post any new pages before Christmas.

This whole situation is rather devastating to me. I’m just praying I can recover my crucial data, Joyride pages, and art.

I’ll keep you updated on what happens.

It’s hardly important, but you may have noticed that the most recent pages have had four place digits instead of three — IE, it went from “020″ to “0021.”

Originally I kept it to 3 places because I knew I’d never make it past a page 999, and I did not wish to look ridiculously ambitious… but then I started to think, hey, what if I DO get that far? Okay, okay, acording to my calculations, at my current pace, it would take me over 15 years… BUT STILL. IT’S POSSIBLE, MAN. And I certainly would not want to be the one who has to rename 999 pages just to insert a leading “0,” after page 1000 arrives!

_{…As for why, exactly, all of the titles have to have the same number of digits, I couldn’t tell you. I’m OCD, and it’s just a THING with me. When the digits don’t align, my eye starts twitching.}

Anyway, this is just to let you know that I will also be updating all of the older pages to have 4 digit places as well. Which actually involves editing the actual comic files, and thus may cause False Alarms on some people’s readers; making them think I’ve actually changed something worthwhile. But I have not! So if you get reader update spam, sorry about that.

Rafeal noms on a candy bar while I play unfitting music

Hey, did you know Act 1 is almost over!? It’s gone by pretty fast right? (you’re like “uh no, I’ve been waiting forever, hurry up D:<”) I can’t wait to show you guys Act 2!

Man. I had just an awful day. To make it better, page 18 was still giving me problems(I still don’t know why. It just WAS.), and I was struggling to finish it. When I finally did, I came to this site to upload it, only to be told by the system that I didn’t have permissions to upload anymore.

It seems upgrading broke something after all.

I’m just not sure why the problem decided to manifest now. But anyway.

Luckily I managed to fix it (well yeah, you definitely wouldn’t be seeing the newest page otherwise), but unluckily part of the fix involved deleting every comic page related image, then restoring, and generally smashing my head against things. Which resulted in about an hour downtime. I just hope that everyone who came to the page while it was busted will come back again — this comic is about more than a little red X standing around, srsly guys!

If  any images are still broken, please let me know.

Well, I’m going to go rejoice that this FAILday is finally over and get some sleep :DDD