Today I bring two things. First I bring a bit of a distraction in the form of a bit of music from the Dungeon Synth series. That is music that made to invoke a fantasy setting usually something along a Dungeons & Dragons vibe. This album of Vikorra Doom instead goes for an 80's movie vibe more like Conan the Barbarian.

In much more serious news here's a post from the new Infectious Information DK group which aims to keep track of news of the spread of disease. It used to be we had government agencies to do that work but now that we live in the age of "break government to prove that government can never do anything to help anyone" it falls to ordinary folk on the internet to do the job.

Still livin' in those interesting times, eh?

As long-time readers might know I have a Google account. I have a YouTube channel and a Google Drive repository that I use to share files. What they don't know is that I also back up things to that Google Drive storage, namely files being used in NaNoWriMo. I run Google Drive every two or three days during November to sync the files so that if something catastrophic happens locally I have a back-up copy.

I also back-up locally. This will become very relevant soon.

So the problems with Google Drive began when the program began ignoring its own "start Google Drive" on boot-up setting. I have it turned off because having sync enabled all the time creates its own list of headaches. An update in the last few months created a situation where the box is UNchecked in options in Google Drive but the Windows registry entries to enable it are set so the program runs on start-up. Thus I have to launch AutoRuns and disable it there... and repeat that every time Google Drive updates because not only is that option reset but the update also creates new registry entries, each program version having its own folder with associated drivers that are then registered.

Thanks, Google.

Today however I went to run it and got an error message saying I needed to download an update from Google's main site. I did so and found the program has been changed so that the local files folder has a new name. This led to it redownloading everything from the server and duping all my files. You think deleting all the extra stuff was easy? No! Of course not! I used the browser tools to try to do just that and it chucked everything into Trash, except it didn't do that and only a tiny fraction of the files were there to be flushed by the Empty Trash button.

Except even that didn't actually work and I had to click on Storage then clear up space then Trash then delete and... it still didn't delete everything in there. It said it did but while trying to deal with all the stuff that didn't get sent to Trash I cycled around to the Trash folder in drive again and wouldn't you know it but the system said there were a bunch of files in there that didn't get deleted. So I hit delete all and it said it deleted that stuff but it didn't. I went back to Storage and clean up and yadda yadda yadda where I found out two things:

The 'Delete All' button will bring up a pop-up that has an accurate number of all the files in that category and asks you if you're sure if you want to delete them because it's permanent. If you check the box that says you understand then click delete (yes, two clicks) you get a pop-up saying hurray they're deleted and you saved X amount of space. That pop-up is a lie because ONLY the files that were visibly listed on screen when you hit 'Delete All' are actually deleted. The second thing I learned is that you can check the 'Showing' box to select all files currently displayed and then hit Delete and it will remove those. This function however has a hard limit of 100 files at a time.

It displays 32 when you first load it. Scrolling to the bottom and clicking 'show more' loads another 32. There is no way to get exactly 100 files listed at a time. You can only get up to 96. I'd just like to mention that at this point (that is when I've got this mostly sorted out) my Drive folder is sitting at over 6k files. Duped it would be 12k files but some files I noticed were in quadruplicate. Let's see, I'll be generous and assume half the files were tossed by this point so only 6k. Divide that by 96 and... I've only got to go through the multi-click deletion process a minimum of 62 times if I go that route.

Oh and stuff in Trash (or whatever that nebulous region that is the state of not being accessible in the Drive but not being seen by Drive's Trash folder could be called) is counted against your Storage cap. I have never been anywhere near that but given recent shenanigans over file count limits I don't exactly trust Google's managing of the service. On a related note the service recently had a problem where it lost a bunch of user data. Can't say I am the least bit surprised. Google Drive is now set in Streaming Files mode by default so yay TWO things I have to check every time I run the program to make sure it hasn't switched itself to settings I don't want. Here I thought Windows had cornered the market on being as annoying as possible by resetting things on update.

And this stuff is why change for the sake of change, whether it be Drive or YouTube ends up being a huge pain in the ass for users on top of creating an environment doomed to devolve into spaghetti code. I do not envy the engineers/programmers who have to unclog that muck.

I passed the 50k mark last night despite not being home most of the day (and being extremely tired from lack of sleep) but having finished the day before at the 49,750 word mark it did not take much to cross the finish line. I will coast the rest of the month just as I did last year fleshing out errant thoughts a bit without worrying about the end count.

I reached the halfway point last night: 25,000 words. That puts me well ahead of schedule regarding the month-long duration but I'm definitely feeling things slowing down. It's the usual thing where you've exhausted the ideas and/or prompts you had going in and now either have to dig some out or come up with new ones. Oh well I've done this before and I'll do it again.

I am sitting at 5,965 words total, 465 of those being today's ongoing total, so I am well ahead of the expected average. Still this has not been easy. I got a flu shot on the first of the month that has my right arm nice and sore plus has me feeling tired. I also still can't type. All hail Lord Typoes, master of transposed letters! Spellcheck catches that stuff but not when I leave out whole words. That's always frustrating because those left out words don't count towards the total. Darn you forgotten words!

October 1st has rolled around again so that means it is time for the ghosts and goblins and spooky things to ride once more. That also means I actually have to start getting ready for this year's NaNoWriMo.

Boo? Yay? I don't even know any more.

Oh and I noticed on TCRF that there's now a version of the debug mode code for Beyond the Beyond. I tested it briefly and it does work. Just a couple of quick things of note: 1) there is a map devoted entirely to starting the ending sequence which starts up automatically when said map loads and 2) the battleship map actually has two extra copies of the battleship on it for reasons that elude me. It's not like the battleship itself is animated. The map does contain the cannon graphics and their firing animation tiles.

I never know what to write in these "I'm not dead yet" type posts but I guess what I just wrote gets the point across. Anyway I'll be doing some editing to some older posts. Fixing typos and forgetful omissions on my part - that sort of thing.

With the change in website for NaNoWriMo came changes in how and when goals are set by participants. Namely you can set your own writing challenge whenever you want. You can also make it a goal for an existing project. That second one is great as I've done Camp projects that are just editing something already existing on the projects list. I'd love to be able to consolidate these old entries but since the site doesn't allow backdating new goals to that time period (also it doesn't allow anything other than word counts right now, kinda also a problem for my purposes) I've left them alone.

I did try out the new goal setting function and it works alright. It defaulted to 50k words and I couldn't decide on a different number so I left it as-is. Updating the count each day has been easy - no different than it was during November. There's a day-to-day tracker with a couple of graphs to tickle one's fancy. It also automatically updates one's daily average which it uses to estimate when the goal will be reached. This estimate is a little fiddly though. I did hit 50k last night, which is when the site predicted I would, but I actually wrote significantly above my average because I knew I was so close. If I had stayed on average (2,000 words per day) I would have run one day over estimate. All in all it has worked fine. I just wish I could get to the graphs from the front page. Instead I have to go to the project page, click on goals, then the goal I'm working on. Not long or difficult but a little tedious.

Camp rapidly approaches. I haven't decided if I'll participate in the April edition as I am a bit spent from the spring I just finished. Maybe, maybe not.

So it is December 2nd as I write this meaning November is over and with it National Novel Writing Month for another year. I reached 70,000 words so I did meet the word goal. Actually I made the word goal on November 21st but kept going because there was a lot more narrative to plow through and I couldn't let my average word count per day drop, now could I?

This is not to say that there weren't problems. A completely new site was implemented for this year's race and it had a lot of technical issues. There were problems with badges not updating, word counts being desynced which gave incorrect words remaining and total word counts among some other issues, and the word count validator couldn't be implemented into the new site which sparked a sometimes-nasty thread on the issue and other threads where people got angry and flounced off in a huff. There are still other persistent issues such as people getting stuck in log-out loops. Then again no website ever seems to work 100% on every possible system configuration so the fact that there are continuing problems should surprise no one.

I find that last one (the validator) to be not a problem at all and just shake my head at those who got all worked about not getting to copy-paste text into a box so that it could be counted. First of all since the routine by which words are defined (and thus counted) differs between software this meant you could reach 50k by local count, plug it into the validator, and then find it counts you at a lower number. I've never had a win denied because of that (I always wrote several hundred words beyond 50k just as "padding" to make sure I avoided that) but I totally understand someone getting rather cross on day thirty because of it. Then there's of course the problem that if you can't get the validator to work you might be in for a lot of jumping hoops with no guarantee of success. If you wrote 50k words in November you've reached the goal. Clicking send on a validator doesn't change that.

Then there are those who ardently argued that the validator prevents cheating.

Prevents cheating?  HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA!!

Oh sorry, I just can't help but laugh at how naive that is. All the validator has ever done is count words. That's it. You could copy-paste my laugh track in there over and over to get to 50k and it would never know the difference. I think some people saw the label "validator" and assumed far, FAR too much about it. As for those who flounced off I have precisely zero sympathy. I understand they're frustrated... and still zero sympathy.