2: Keeping Things for Safekeeping [Mar 25, 2024]

I've been busy with a couple of things this month that I'd like to write down. First of course is starting HRT! After getting a diagnosis for Gender Dysphoria I was able to start patches this month. However I'm not entirely done with the process yet. I was given very small dosed patches. It's a quarter of what is usually prescribed. I assume it's for starting out to see if my body can handle it. But I was only given a month's supply even though my next appointment is the start of May so I had to order a refill that I'm currently waiting for the doctor's approval.

Even at such a low dose I can feel something is different. I feel more productive which is why I'm busy juggling several things. I wake up at a very early time even with little sleep. The sleep is my fault because I play games or browse the internet before I sleep. It's me basically trying to cram as much as I can in a single day even when I should be sleeping. I guess that's the benefits of having so much "Estronergy". This all could be the placebo effect but it gives me hope that I'm on the right track. :) Can't even imagine what the higher doses will do.

All that aside, I have started a new goal; to start archiving all my data with TAPES!!! You see, I have a lot of data stored up throughout all the years. Biggest being Games and Music, I have an entire External drive dedicated to Game ROMS, CHDs, etc. that I believe is over 2TB now.. Hard-drive space is slowly but surely disappearing. I have a few ways to backup stuff, buying more HDD's and SSD's is one, but they don't last forever and don't really count as "archival". The best way (I thought) would be buying Blu-Ray M-Discs. They are advertised as lasting over 100 years as they use something more special than regular discs. I thought this would be the future and perfect way to archive... in like 2016. The problem though... they didn't really take off, are barely produced, and have gotten EVEN MORE expensive than they were back in the day. The limit is 100GB for a disc, which is a lot normally, but when you can barely afford them it becomes infeasible to rely on it. I don't want to cause it a loss cause, it still is a great idea that could work IF more people manufactured it and cared about preserving data. But companies have brainwashed the Average Joes into not giving a shit. They made it so you have to rely on Cloud servers to store data like Google Drive, Microsoft Onespace, etc. This is not viable AT ALL. All my pirated crap, no bueno. Exceed the starting limit you'll then have to pay a subscription, a subscription prone to inflating, we all know how these companies work. Once you run out of money it's either pay up or get your stuff deleted within a year. Will never use this for actual archival, I only use it for quick transfers between devices.

The situation became bleak, how will I store all my stuff long term without worrying about it's death? I desperately searched if USB's or MicroSD cards could work, the answer was no. So there was no other option for me.... except for one option I looked into long ago, LTO Tapes. LTO Tapes is what the big wigs use in companies. One tape can store over a TERABYTE for starters. It depends on what generation you have. Back in 2016 the data you could store was still impressive, even by modern standards it still beats out literally anything. These tapes, they are worth like chump change, $20 for 1.5TB. Comparing that to M-Disc and it's no competition. Only problem though... The drives to write to tapes are THOUSANDS of dollars no matter what gen you choose. They do not go down in price, it's the same price as it was when I first learned about it.

But this was in the 2010's. We have come a long way, I have become smarter, and the LTO Tape evolution still has a long road ahead. It's only upped 3 generations within the past decade, but apparently the demand is getting higher, so they have planned out a long line of generations to come. The drives themselves only writes to the tapes in it's own gen, it can read and copy old ones though. So every generation these companies have to upgrade, which leaves the old ones to be... Resold ;3

It felt like an impossibility to ever acquire these things. Poor people like do not have the right to purchase these new. But old hand me downs? It's not like they need them anymore, and as luck would have it I found a LTO-5 Tape Drive that I actually could buy realistically, the same one I looked up back in the day. So I watched and read a lot about it and I decided to take the plunge. I have now acquired a Quantom LTO-5 Tape Drive, SAS port for my PC,Two tapes one from Quantom and IBM respectively, and a cable for SAS... The cable I got was the WRONG CABLE. So even though I got the goods I can't test it until next month when I have the money to buy the actual cable I need because all my money went into getting the other stuff. I hope my Tape Drive works, It would absolutely suck if it didn't. But I'm hoping for good news so I can finally start actually archiving my things for the long run. If it does work I can go even further by archiving as much stuff from the internet as I can. I don't trust things on the net to last forever, not in this capitalistic hellscape.

While I wait for that I have been organizing my files, mostly music I downloaded that I haven't sorted. I have been working on it for 4 days straight now lol. I've also been cataloging my games back to Memento from my Infinite Backlog profile. I have been swapping from things like Backloggery, Joplin, Another website I forgot the name to, and Infinite Backlog. I hope now that I have my own site I can finally put my foot down and lock into one program. I choose Memento because you can customize it a lot, at least the Android version. When I can get a new laptop I'll install Linux om it so I can natively use MEMDATABASE on it because the Windows version sucks and makes you use a subscription for some reason. How will I run Android apps on Linux? I'll find out when I get to it. Problem for another day.

Because you can customize it and export it to a .csv I want to learn how to automatically get my site to read it and display it seamlessly. That's also gonna take a lot of learning. A big problem with me is I get in over my head, this is no different lmao. But with my life changes and wiring my brain slowly to have a different outlook in life I hope I won't abandon everything, cry, call myself a failure and give up. I hope to do this long term and stick with it. Only time will tell. If Neocities goes kaput I'll be able to transfer my site to like a real site from GoDaddy or something (Do they still exist?)

I have long grown tired of modern internet, it sucks, rich people ruined it, who would've known. That's why I gave up pretending to fit in and decided to do stuff like create on lesser known sites, Feminize, make a website, archive stuff, etc. Things like Twitter and Youtube were fun while it lasted but the people in power have disenfranchised an entire generation. People supposedly keeping things in order are very, very, very, very bad at their job. It's up to us to keep the things we love and not take them for granted. Whether it be Neocities, Newgrounds, Wikis, whatever. We as a community do a better job than anyone. If these big sites left us alone and stopped preying on us we wouldn't be in this mess. But oh well, theres work to do. I hope to interact with more people in the future instead of being a sad loner for decades. I'm kind of over that now, well, that's the plan anyway. Will work more on my site sooooon.

(That new Stardew Valley update is really good I want to play 90 hours of it)

That's all for now, ttyl