Man, it’s just one thing after another. You know?

I don’t know what happened with Microsoft OneDrive. I don’t use it, I don’t like it, I don’t trust it. I dislike having to store anything on Google Drive as it is: I would bet you any sum of money those corporate behemoths are scanning everything we post there, in order to understand more about us and target ads more surgically than ever before. Which is bad enough on its own, nudging people toward making purchases closer to their interests but which they wouldn’t have done of their own free will. But it’s even worse, when you consider China’s weaponizing TikTok to begin influencing American minds, again, gently nudging people in a desired direction—we saw a clumsier version of this when Russian sock puppets and hacker teams tried to steer the 2016 election.

Anyway. One day last week I realized it had been a long time since I’d backed anything up on my external HD, so I thought I’d run backups. However, I’m also running Windows 11, and apparently requesting a “backup” doesn’t do what it used to. It forces you to back everything up to OneDrive; what I wanted was File History, and that enabled me to run passive, persistent backups to the HD as long as it’s plugged in.

Well, I had deleted Twitter and moved to Mastodon (@Aborigen@mas.to, but hopefully that’ll change soon), and I wanted to upload a picture but I couldn’t seem to find it anywhere. In fact, my computer didn’t seem to have a Pictures folder at all. Or Videos. Or Documents. With this revelation I didn’t get cold blood or trembly hands: I simply went into action and searched around. Sure enough, some of my most important folders on my machine were wiped clean, and unfortunately, the external HD mirrored this condition and wiped out my backups.

I looked into OneDrive and I saw the problem: it had tried to run a backup of my computer, without my permission, and I’d interrupted it in the middle. So you know what it did?

It dumped everything in the trash. A spiteful spoilsport move. If it couldn’t have my files, nobody could.

Except they were waiting for me in OneDrive’s Trash folder. Not all of them: a great many were deleted in the transfer, but some ended up in Trash and I was able to restore them. The next few days were dedicated to downloading all these fucking files and hiding them on my computer, not under the deceitful Pictures/Documents/Videos folders that were actually OneDrive folders. I discovered that “feature” by accident.

None of my music was touched. I think I got most of the videos back. My most important Size Fantasy documents are catalogued on Google Drive and not this machine. Unfortunately, everything I was doing in Daz Studio is missing. I have some folders of salvaged renders (JPG and PNG), but not the DUF files to make the renders. Those are completely wiped out. I might as well have thrown my computer out the window and started with a new machine.

Diligent readers will recall this is the second time this has happened. It’s very discouraging!

But what can I do? OneDrive doesn’t have these files in its backup history, because before it forced the backups, it had absolutely nothing in its library. My external HD just replicates what my computer looks like, and it would be missing hundreds of renders because I didn’t back it up frequently enough. Windows makes it harder and harder to protect your material from their possession. Fuck, they’re almost as bad as Apple.

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In other news, I haven’t written anything at all (except an article about North Korea’s missile program, no one here would be interested in that). You may entertain yourself with this preview of a Norwegian video game in which you play a very tiny shrunken boy, navigating the landscape with friendly and hostile mythological creatures.

And, bonus, here’s a clip some of us may find interesting. It comes from the podcast Threedom, hosted by Scott Aukermann, Lauren Lapkus, and Paul F. Tompkins. They’ve touched on some Size stuff before, on this podcast and on Comedy Bang Bang!, where PFT played a tiny man who was mayor of the people who live in the walls of the studio. In fact, tiny and gigantic people have come up so much in PFT’s improv that one has to wonder whether he’s into it himself or it just popped up on his radar and (morbidly) captivated his imagination, and he cannot help but return to this well for comedy copper.

In this clip, Scott talks about a strange book with questionable advice for blushing brides on how to mitigate the psychological trauma of fellatio. It’s episode 120, “Minnie Is a Size Queen,” from April 6, 2022. Scroll 20 minutes and 17 seconds into the episode (free on Chartable) and listen to Scott describe the instructions, which PFT cannot help but riff on. And with a woman in the room!