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Cysero - Friday, January 29, 2016

Dage Murdered Artix's Laptop

Honestly, Artix should probably be writing this Design Notes post, but... well, Dage murdered his laptop. I'm just lucky I got to see it happen.

I should start at the beginning.

Slifsgaard, one of our two $5000 Kickstarter backers, arrived yesterday to hang out with us and plan his area. All day long, Artix, Dage and Thyton and I were sitting around a table asking Slifsgaard questions about exactly what he wants his area to be and tossing around ideas about his Shaman character and the spirit quests he will send you on.



It was a fun day, and Slifsgaard is a great guy who is fun to work with, but it was also a long day and we were all pretty brain drained. While Artix and Slifsgaard went to another area of the lab to take photos and make dinner plans Dage and I returned to the AQ3D room.

Dage started playing with a wire while mentally chewing over the day. In his defense, he wasn't paying too much attention to what his hands were doing. Suddenly...



I heard a SNAP and Dage jumped back. I looked up and saw a puff of smoke drifting up from one of the power strips.



"Are you OK? What the %^&$ was that?" I asked.

Dage started laughing, "I wasn't expecting that!". He explained that he accidentally touched the end of the wire he was playing with to one of the outlets and POW, he let the smoke out of the magic box. The wire didn't survive the ordeal.



We both laughed for a few seconds then a horrible thought occurred to me.

"What was that wire attached to?" I numbly asked.

Dage SHOT out of his seat and ran around the table to find that the other end of the wire he's just stuffed into the power outlet was attached to Artix's very nice MSI laptop. The color dropped out of his face.



If jolt of electricity had gone through the power strip, the surge protector would have caught it or it might have just blown out his laptop's power brick, but since Dage has just accidentally pushed about 120V of current through this USB cable, it hit the hardware directly.

With his heart in his throat, Dage hit the power button on the computer...



... Nothing. Not even a pitiful cry of agony. Artix's laptop was now a very expensive door stop.

"This is the dumbest thing that I have ever done." Dage said. He quickly went through the 7 Stages of Grief

1. Shock or Disbelief "What? WHAT?"

2. Denial "Let's try your power supply, maybe it's just the power supply,"

3. Anger "I'M SO STUPID! If Artix's computer is dead I'm gonna hurt myself,"

4. Bargaining "God, if you're listening, PLEASE let Artix's computer not be dead please,"

5. Guilt "Oh.... no. I can't believe that I just did that,"

6. Depression *Are Dage's eyes a little misty? I believe they are.*

7. Acceptance "Whelp... I gotta go tell him. Nothing else for it,"

This was all in the space of about 15 minutes. It's pretty impressive how fast he was able to get through them all.



So... being a real man, Dage brings Artix back to the AQ3D room and explains what has happened. Artix first tries to go through all the steps that Dage and I (and eventually Faith and Stryche) went through to bring it back to life. Then... being a real friend, Artix let Dage know that everything is OK.

"Don't worry. Everything is either in the cloud or on the external drives and those weren't hooked up so they are fine," Artix said "But it IS pretty funny that I gamed my home computer to death this weekend and now my work laptop is dead too."

So Artix will be working from his iPhone for a while. He assures me that he's got a low powered laptop that he got on his last trip to Japan but he has no idea how to read the keyboard. Dage is STILL beating himself up about what he did and we are not making it any easier for him (we're teasing him mercilessly), but Artix handled this like a champ.

At the end of the day, we all got a pretty good laugh out of this.