The Hotdog Laserhouse

Can 2012 be over now?

The following is a whiny, focus-on-the-bad account of 2012 and why I’m pretty much sick of it.

My Mom went to the emergency room over something minor, but in the process, they thought they found a tumor. She went in for surgery and it was removed apparently without issue (it’s not showing up on scans anymore, anyway), but it’s still costing money with medical bills.

A five year old HDD failed. In retrospect, it should’ve been something I saw coming given the age of the drive, but at least I was able to offload a lot of my important stuff before it completely kicked the bucket.

Got a new HDD from a friend on the cheap that he wasn’t using. Put the HDD in, re-install Windows, and almost immediately it starts complaining about data corruption. Diagnostic tools don’t correctly identify the problem for more than 4 months, and it turns out that HDD is also hosed. So now I’m stuck on this six year old laptop that can’t even run Minecraft. Great. This would be less of a problem if HDD prices would come down, but it’s still $70 for the entry level, which is too rich for my blood right now. That’s because…

Directly following, my Mom is involved in a car accident. Our old car of 9 years (Dodge Neon) is totaled. We just barely make it out of that financial quagmire with a “new” car that is actually older than our old car (Chevy Cavalier Rally Sport).

New car, as it turns out, is most likely what they used to call a “lemon”. It’s got faulty brakes, the door latches ice up when it snows (making them impossible to close), and it’s got both an oil leak and a antifreeze leak, among a dozen other little problems (non-functional interior lights, a busted radio antenna, and a constant rattle that could either be a loose muffler or bad struts). Unfortunately, it’s all we could afford, and most of the more serious problems didn’t turn up until literally two days after the 30 day return policy expired at the dealership.

Now the dog is sick. Has slowly been eating less and less over the last two weeks to the point where it’s not eating anything at all right now. Things got really bad last night, as he started trying to vomit bile. What little money we’ve been saving for Christmas presents are now going to take him in to the vet on Monday. He’s seven or eight years old at this point, so not exactly a spring chicken, but as you can imagine after everything that’s been happening, I’d rather not close out the year with my dog dying.

But that’s not all! Feeling creatively stripped, I decided to start working on a simple game project seeing as many of my old game projects don’t run very well on this decrepit laptop. But, no. That would be too easy.

Multimedia Fusion 2 (a program similar to Game Maker that I’ve been using for more than a decade) has decided as of two days ago that it doesn’t want to work properly anymore. It’s a version I borrowed from a friend, so I’m assuming it’s something related to that. Rolling back to a previous version of MMF2 breaks a lot of stuff in basically every game project I currently have, so that’s out of the question. Going “legit” with MMF2 was something that was always in the cards when I got far enough out of the woods, but now it appears I am being forced to. While this version still kind of works, 80% of the most useful third-party (and even some first-party) plugins no longer load. That means until further notice, most if not all of my game projects are hereby canceled, including this one (my first non-fangame project ever), assuming $120 doesn’t just magically fall in to my lap so I can buy my own copy of the software.

I am a broken man before you, sitting here with what almost feels like nothing. All of my creative outlets are gone. A major and primary outlet of entertainment is gone. My dog may very well be on his death bed for all I know. And at any moment, the car could fall apart.

When it rains, it pours, and right now it’s monsoon season. Fuck you, 2012. You’re the worst year.