This was a terrible week. It started off just fine; my Playdate arrived, and I was looking forward to unboxing and playing around with it over the weekend. But then, Thursday night, my Late 2015 27″ Retina iMac died. I tried what I could—I’m a certified computer support technician, after all—but to no avail. Hard disk, RAM, power supply are all fine. It’s the board. Now, that iMac’s certainly gotten a little long in the tooth lately, but Apple ditched the 27″ iMac line after switching to Apple Silicon. Thus, I wasn’t able to upgrade to a new one. Then, on Saturday at the Apple Store, I found out that fixing the USB-C port on my late 2018 iPad Pro would set me back 600 euros. Yikes. No way. Thus, I can’t just switch wholesale to my iPad—it only charges on USB-A-to-USB-C; I can’t use periphery devices; and I can’t use it for presentations and lectures, neither on location nor online via QuickTime. (On September 28, I will probably then present from my iPhone. Great.) And while I got my mothballed Late 2009 Mac Mini running again, I can’t do a lot with it—my workflow-critical apps don’t run on 10.11 El Capitan, and browsers that are old enough to work declare every web certificate fraudulent. And, of course, buying anything new right now would be extremely not smart, with new devices appearing later this year. What am I going to do? Improvise. Or call for help. Maybe my university’s IT department has a more recent model (10.15+) they can lend me for a few months, so I don’t get too much into trouble with my various deadlines.

Yes, that was my week. Before everything crumbled, I published a post at my Voidpunk blog about Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House,” and uploaded a few images to my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse. That’s it. Might be a while before I become more productive again.

For your enjoyment, please watch these otters having fun in their “washing machine” whirlpool.
 
J.