Always assume your data is in N-1 places at all times.

Any drive can and will fail at any time, no matter how well it was working yesterday.

I’ve had people in with their entire PhD and years of research on one single drive, with no backup - just gone.

If your data is only in one place, it will be in zero places soon enough.

Disposable or replaceable data - which honestly is going to be 90% of your stuff - meh.

But anything that you need and couldn’t replace, that shit needs backing up to AT LEAST one other place.

As for the rest - drives can fail slowly, or they can fail fast. When they fail slowly, you start getting a couple of disk errors here and there, and you may just be able to order one in time to replace it.

When they fail fast, they just drop like a heart attack.

There’s no way to know in advance. If your data is safe, then you’ll either be out a few days while a replacement arrives, or you’ll be just about able to copy stuff across. At that age, I wouldn’t trust it farther than I could spit it. It could work fine for years more, but the moment you rely on it for something important, it’ll give out on you.

Pretty much all kinks work the same way, and only differ in their mode of expression.

Think rollercoasters, think extreme sports, think lighting cigars with a $100 bill.

You can’t even get out of bed without your nagging, nannying hindbrain chaperoning you everywhere you go. Don’t do that, it might hurt. Don’t do that, it’s not safe. Don’t do that, you won’t be in control. Don’t do that, you won’t be in charge. Don’t do that, you might lose prestige. Don’t do that, you’ll go without.

Some people get a kick out of telling it to go fuck itself, and deliberately doing all the bad and scary things just to troll it into a conniption so they can laugh at it.

And in doing so, they also gain this huge dumbo’s-magic-feather rush, realising they never needed all those safeguards; the essential security and confidence is something that comes from within. And so rather than feeling oppressed by it, it becomes something they can revel in.

And when you mix up any strong sensation or emotion with sex, both things are going to amplify each other.

It isn’t fun.

Yeah, all the stereotypes of the wacky ADHD guy squirrel lol, but it’s not like that on the inside.

We are lost in the goddamn fog, chasing phantoms and mirages that disappear when you look at them too long. We are constantly running to catch up and flailing for context. What looks capricious and funny is mostly just desperation. We aren’t bursting with unlimited energy, it’s as exhausting as it looks. Taking five attempts to actually get a task done because you just forget halfway through. Forgetting where you put the thing, every time. Feeling your working memory slip away like waking from a dream. Fucking up all the time, then having to work twice as hard to fix it, and feeling like shit because you can’t get anything right.

It gets old, man.