Update

The good news: I have wireless again.

I've actually had a new wifi router sitting around taking up way too much space (why do they always make boxes so much larger than they need to be?) in my living room for ages.  It came with the new modem that I never installed.

I figured that since they went together I should swap out modem and router both.  This was a mistake.  Don't know why, but the combination that works is "New Router; Old Modem".

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The bad news: I am so fucked up right now.

It's difficult to say precisely what's wrong.  Tentative guess is that it's a combination of several things which is why it doesn't feel like any one thing I'm familiar with.

This has been building up for a while, I think.  I don' have a plan beyond the usual.  The usual being "Eat, drink, sleep; in proper quantities."  That might be enough.  If I deal with the problem by sleeping in its general direction, hydrating the ever-loving fuck out of it, and putting in sufficient calories, it might go away.

If it doesn't, then . . . I've got nothing.  Outside help will be necessary.

Either way, the fact that Eat/Drink/Sleep even could be the solution points to a deeper problem: I'm in a place where I'm not staying on top of those three, possibly to the point it's become debilitating.

That's never a good place to be.

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The neutral news: Primary computer did not magically repair itself since yesterday.

This was completely expected and is in no way surprising.

For one thing, it's in two pieces connected only by cords that are never supposed to see the light of day.  (Primary computer is a laptop, the monitor has broken off.)

Problems like that produce strange reactions in people.  Even people who should know better.  People take a look at a laptop broken into two pieces and--

Ok.  I just had a minor revelation.  People are applying their considerably broken and unhelpful paradigms for mental illness vs. physical injury to tech support.

If the problem were just that the primary computer broke in two, and I didn't have an active warranty (which I don't want to void), I could fix that no problem.  I've done it before.  (I've also done transplants.)

It's a mechanical problem with a relatively simple solution.  It just looks grotesquely bad.

The problems that I can't fix, the computery problems, generally don't look like much of anything.  If you're not the one using it, a borked computer looks exactly the same as a fully functional one.

And so if I go into the store with a computer that works perfectly well as a computer in every way, but happens to have physical damage, it will instantly be taken seriously as a case that needs actual treatment, while if I go into the store with a computer that utterly fails to function properly as a computer, but doesn't have any outward signs of damage, I'll instead have to sit stand through them, essentially, trying to prove that it isn't really busted.

Visible injury gets taken seriously.  Invisible injury is dismissed as user error unless proven otherwise.

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I'd never thought of computers repair in that framework before.  (Or, if I have, I've forgotten.)

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The entirely unrelated news: I've voted.  You should too.

If you're from the US, as I am, then you know what it's like to feel completely powerless as everything goes to Hell around you.

One of the dangers of feeling powerless is that you can stop believing in whatever power you do have, however small.  Since you don't believe that power is real, you don't use it, and through that choice you strip yourself of what little was left after outside forces took the rest.

If you can vote, that's a power that hasn't been taken from you yet.  Use it.

You know the reason that certain people are trying so hard to take that right away from so many?  Because it still matters.