the looming darkness, repelled only by the blue glow consuming my very soul

a cautionary tale

what a month! I'm ready to play catch up on all my posts after another month of hyperfocusing on finishing ozark tales 6 and between that and housework I haven't had time for a damn thing. but first let me tell you a cautionary tale about the chaos that has unfolded in my life very recently! for once, instead of being a grateful consumer of ✨drama✨ I get to be at the center of it, so please enjoy the tea.

not even a whole week ago, I had the scare of a lifetime. I was watching a video on my computer while getting ready for my nightly work when out of nowhere the audio stopped and I was suddenly looking at a blue screen. "aww, did the ram get full?" I said while forcing a shut down and restarting, thinking nothing of it. so I wait for my poor overworked laptop to boot... and I wait... and wait... the little wheel isn't spinning so I quickly gathered that it froze during startup. so I do what any responsible adult would do and, without shedding a tear, I hop on Jack's computer to google my problem. troubleshooting the whole time, I go on to spend hours going through every single hack, fix and workaround the internet will give up for me. from starting in safe mode to startup repair to restoring factory settings, the result is always the same. frozen after seconds of booting or diagnosis. after so many failed attempts at booting, dell had conducted its own hardware check, showing nothing wrong with the hardware, my ears ringing from the unexpectedly loud beep it let out to conclude diagnostics. and just when I was hit with a fleeting burst of hope, seeing something other than an idle wheel, the blue light illuminates my bewildered face as I turn to spy not another blue screen, but bitlocker asking for a security key. for those who aren't familiar, bitlocker is a windows encryption software that comes with your computer, but you probably don't know it. its purpose is to encrypt your data to protect it from hacking attempts, and when you set up your computer with your microsoft account, it lets you generate a security key in case your computer is ever compromised. except my computer literacy peaked in the late 00's so every time I have to reinstall windows, I scowl and cry "why the fuck do I have to make a microsoft account?! skip..." and so it came to be that my laptop was never registered with my account, which I had realized when I logged in with every email I had ever used, aswell as Jack's, to find my device not listed in any of them, and no security keys tied to either account. not just no security keys for this device, none had ever been generated by either of us. without shedding a tear, I begin my journey to find a workaround. over the next several hours I have turned into, by my standards, a cyberpunk hacker determined to find the slightest crack in the system I could exploit. I've tried every command prompt to diagnose and fix anything to do with the drive or bitlocker, all with the same outcome. "can't edit because disk is copywritten" (by bitlocker), "can't disable because disk is copywritten", "can't restore because disk is copywritten". after hours of failed prompts, I could no longer run from the looming darkness, repelled only by the blue glow consuming my very soul. the only option left to try, because I didn't have $4000 for an FBI decryption software, was to wipe my drive and reinstall windows. all my progress working on ozark tales - gone. all my footage for future videos - gone. all the projects I had been painstakingly working towards, building them from the ground up, creating beauty from nothing, like a sand castle but where every grain of sand has to be stacked on top of another with bare hands... I had to come to terms with the idea that I had to give up all of it. months, no, years of work lost. my mind jumped to all the clips I didn't have backups of because I had to make room on my SD cards, clips I had collected over the course of a year for various future videos... how long it would take to reshoot them... whether I could finish ozark tales at all... but it was no use. if it was the only way to be able to do any work going forward, as I don't have $2000 for a new computer, I had to give it my best shot.

my saving grace was that I knew this was a moment of profound change - a change that I had been subconsciously anticipating and that would be needed to lay the groundwork for the future of my craft. I had been in a strained, tired and somewhat toxic relationship with technology. for as long as I can remember, I had been lamenting the fact that computers no longer do what you want them to, things that should be simple are somehow hard and multiple step processes that I didn't have the time or resolve to learn, nothing is reliable anymore, programs break if you look at them funny, you're the only user but somehow not an admin, I refuse to so much as buy a smartphone because all the novelty and coolness points in the world can't make up for the loss of autonomy and all the work required to reinstate it. I dream of having a phone that does what I want and only what I want, instead what I get is one that reinstalls the same shitty bloatware, songs and wallpapers it came with every time it's restarted. nothing ruins your vibe quite like your playlist suddenly jumping to a song you didn't want to hear and had deleted 10 times. and computers are hardly any better these days. if I had $5 for every time an "automatic update" and "restart during inactive hours" (that it determined by presumably throwing a dart at a timetable?) occurred in the middle of a long render cycle and corrupted my project (a software actively working is apparently "inactive"), I could buy the bottle of fine whiskey I need to start over a project I had already spent months on. all in all, I have the least amount of tolerance for the infringement on autonomy and the least amount of patience for things that should just work, yet somehow don't work. which I think fairly sums up computers post 2010. but in that moment, when I was staring into the void, and the void stared back into me, I knew that it was up to me to mend this broken relationship and go on to work with technology, not against it. and this bullshit freak accident that got me in this very predicament was my trial by fire.

I felt the tears clouding my vision, grieving the loss of everything I had built. but I had exhausted my options. I had become something more than I ever thought I could be, and I got this far, but it was not enough. as I let my cursor hover for just a few seconds over "restore factory settings - delete files" I closed my eyes in the face of the sheer cruelty of this situation and finally... nothing. after a brief flash on my screen, I was looking at the same repair options I had already depleted. no "restoring factory settings", no "installing windows", no nothing. this was it. the end of my capabilities, and it got me no further than the startup repair screen.

once Jack woke up at 3-something in the morning, I asked him for a flash drive to reinstall windows, while walking him through every single thing I had already tried. after briefly accusing me of downloading a virus (I did not), he spent the next few hours trying to regain access to my drive. I was rather emotional at this point - while I can handle emergencies like the adhd superhero I am, I cannot handle Jack getting upset, and this was an extremely upsetting situation no matter how you look at it. because while I was grieving the loss of years of hard work, he was grieving all that and the loss of money we don't have to replace this laptop that had been bricked by windows' very own "feature".
I don't know what he did or how he did it, but it involved an ethernet cable and a lot of frantic typing, until we were finally looking at an actual christmas miracle in april in the form of a user password screen. the same software malfunction that damn near killed my ssd, saved all my files. because bitlocker had locked the drive, it wouldn't let me make any changes to it, including wipe it. it was essentially holding my computer hostage, from a threat that didn't exist, but was falsely flagged by an internal miscommunication triggered by the blue screen. if you don't want this to happen to you, you should go into your settings right now, go to update and security, down to device encryption and turn it off. if you have any decent antivirus installed on your computer, chances are you don't need this feature and it can cause major problems like the one I have just suffered through. when I tell you... I have never been so happy to be able to get back to editing. it's not a right, it's a privilege. editing is still the bane of my existence and my #1 dopamine annihilator, but at least I am finally rendering the series finale of ozark tales, and am free to continue working on any of the other 5 videos I'm sitting on once it's done. the first thing I did after successfully logging into my computer was to back up my whole computer. all 1.5 tb of it! and I think I will be obsessively saving and backing up everything I do from now on, just as protocol. this experience has scarred me, no doubt, but these scars will heal and I am smarter, savvier and wiser for it.

thank you for reading my story, I hope it was as gripping for you as it was for me living through it! let your takeaway be to make backups of backups, because in the information age, truly, nothing can fully be relied upon. 🍸