My external harddrive, a Western Digital MyBook, just crapped out. So later today it, along with the new Seagate drive, go off to ESS to hopefully snag some data from it.

To put it simply just how critical the drive was: My PowerBook is... five years old? Maybe more? Anyway, it's powering along, but it is slowly dying. The harddrive doesn't spin up as fast or as well anymore, and will probably soon die. The fan does not work; I have to use an external cooling thingy to keep the laptop from overheating. The keyboard doesn't work; I use a little BlueTooth keyboard to, you know, type.

The WD external ran everything but the OS. And now it's dead. My art, my music, my writing, my saved RPs, my... everything. And now I'm hoping that the platters weren't scarred by the failure, or that the data wasn't completely corrupted.

I'm looking at just under a thousand dollars to get the data restored, providing some miracle doesn't occur to make it cheaper. This sucks, really. I have been setting aside cash to get a few commissions of my Transformers OCs done at some point, and that's just not gonna happen now.

The absolute worst part, though, is that this cash eats straight through the money that was being set aside to replace my laptop. This isn't an easy position to be in, and I know I need to recover the data, but I know I also need to invest in a new workhorse.

So I guess, basically, what I'm getting around to is this: If you see something in my gallery you want a print of, let me know. I need the cash and I'm willing to work with you on pricing. If a piece specifies that it was actually drawn up on paper and you want the original, ask me about it. Some of them already belong to someone else, but I'll let you know if you shoot me a message here.

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I support