The PluckyNinja

My thoughs and prayers to the people of Boston. My own state was brought to its knees by a domestic terrorist in December, but I pray that the people of Boston will have the strength Connecticut did not, and that whoever is responsible will be brought to justice.

As most of you are likely aware, yesterday, in my home state of Connecticut only a few miles from where I live, there was a horrible atrocity which took the lives of 27 people, most of whom were small children. While it may be tempting for us to spend our every waking hour meditating on our anger, or make wild speculations as to how such a tragedy might have been prevented, I don’t want to go there. The monster who did this wanted only one thing: to spread his misery and terror as far as he could, so as to break the spirits of as many people as possible.

The murderer was too cowardly to face justice and chose to end his own life, and now he must face God’s courtroom. While he may no longer be a physical danger, he managed to sow the seeds of agony, sorrow, and fear, with the perverse desire for us to cultivate them until they grow into weeds that will destroy us all. The victims deserve better than for us to give the man who stole their lives and happiness the very thing that he wanted. The battle is not over, and we cannot let the forces of evil prevail.

I implore of you all to do something kind for someone else this weekend, no matter how big or small the deed may be. It can be anything, and I will leave it up to you to decide what you feel fits you. Most importantly of all, pray for the grieving families.

Also, if this week’s entry of the Spitfire tumblr seems a little more somber than usual, please note that it is entirely coincidental, as it was drawn several days ago. I felt like I should post it anyway, so I hope you will still enjoy reading it.

Well, my hard drive decided to go and quit on me for reasons unknown, which means that until I get Windows 7 reinstalled I am stuck using my macbook. To make matters worse, my data appears to be beyond my ability to recover, which means that several high-res art pieced of mine, as well as an unreleased entry of Sexy Spitfire and a WIP page of Return of Prince Blueblood are gone unless I can find a professional who knows how to deal with hard drives suffering physical damage (and isn’t going to charge me hundreds of $$$ to recover my data). I also lost a few hours’ worth of work in Maya on my culminating animation project for school which I had not backed up. It does not look like I will be able to get anything off of the hard drive in the foreseeable future, so for now I don’t really have any choice but to shelve the thing.

I haven’t had to deal with real anger for quite a while, so you can consider my jimmies were sufficiently rustled. Now that I’ve had a chance to calm down, at least the unfinished page of my Blueblood comic still exists in an earlier state on my macbook, and although that’s still a fair bit of work I will have to do it’s better than starting from scratch. I suppose the silver lining to all this mess, if there is one, is learned a valuable lesson today: back up your data regularly, because it only takes a few minutes for a seemingly healthy hard drive to turn into one that is unusable.

I’m not sure if this was just a hardware failure or if it was a virus, but I be looking into buying a SSD for my Windows install in the near future since I hear they are more stable, as well as putting in more HDDs and setting up a real backup system. I’m just lucky that most of my drawings and documents were also on my laptop, so I didn’t lose everything (even though my recent projects are on the broken HDD). It’s going to take me quite a while to reinstall my programs and copy all my data again, but I guess that should be my motivation not to let this happen to me again.