Warrior Spirit

Warriors come in all forms

I have to admit... it was absolutely killing me to not cap for the past week.  Ideas would come and go with really no outlet.  They weren't enough for me to write out, but they could be a jumping point used to create a good cap.  So when I got one of these ideas last night I figured I could quickly hammer out a cute fun cap for the Haven Quarterly and then make this idea up.  The only reason I didn't save this aside for the Haven Quarterly was that it just felt more like a quicky.  The idea was simply a guy tasked with using a transfomative stone like his ancestors, but having a 'bad' name for it.

But before I could get to this I wanted to get a fun cap out for the Quarterly.   It shouldn't take me long as I wanted it to be limited to 140 characters.  But as I got to work on it, Photoshop Crashed.  I rebooted and got back into it only to have it crash again.  And again.

I then remembered that before my foot kept me away from the computer that I had been dealing with a reoccurring crash.  It seemed to involve graphics.  Photoshop would crash it as well as youtube videos, and even iTunes.  So instead of capping last night I spent hours just looking around for a solution.

I couldn't find anything that matched my circumstances, but still found a lot of things to try using just software (I wanted to limit hardware diagnostics as bending down to get my computer free from all it's cables is problematic with my foot).  None of them worked.  After a crash I booted up into windows safe mode to try and see if it would crash there.... and surprisingly it didn't.  I did take the time to test out some things, but most programs just don't run or even stretch the video card.  I ended up stopping Evernote, iSyncr, and Google's Calendar Sync from auto starting then rebooted into normal windows.  The first thing I did was send a YIM message to Jennifer explaining why I was popping in and out so often and to say good night as I honestly expected the system to crash again.

But while I was typing the message up the system was running SLOOOOOWWWWW, but not crashing.  I typed out most of the message to Jennifer before any of it appeared on the screen, and when it did start to come up it was coming up letter by letter (as in one per second).  I waited a bit to see if it went out and prepared myself for it to just crash again.

But it didn't!

The 'slowness' eventually went away, and to be honest I can explain that way as simply having my YIM client do something while the system was still booting.  It did crash once though... the screen turned black, iTunes forze up (playing the same note unending) and nothing worked, but after 5 seconds it 'came back' and said that the graphic card driver had failed but reloaded itself.  So I spent the rest of the night 'testing' my fix.  I played in photoshop, but not on a cap (I didn't want to lose work that I intended on keeping), I watched youtube videos (especially this video that Jennifer sent to me), and I messed around with iTunes.

It ran fine for an hour.  At that time I was tired so I just called it a night.

So far today there has been no issues, so who knows... maybe one of those programs was crashing my system.

So while the warrior idea was still in my head I quickly finished off the Haven Quarterly cap (titled "Titter") and then went searching for an image.  My only criteria was an image of a fantasy woman.  It could be anywhere from G to XXX as the story could easily be modified to match it.  And when I came across this set, I knew I had exactly what I wanted.  The look on her face isn't one of anger or humiliation, but rather resigned determination.  The story wrote out quickly enough and I now have a cap for the blog.