Welcome To Hell

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

That's okay, it's long, I mess it up a few times. But eventually I take it slower. More deliberately. Making absolutely sure I get every single letter and symbol correct. Doesn't work. I do it again. Doesn't work. There's this desperate panic. I was watching malware videos before this happened, and had recently downloaded a lot of game mods I really didn't know much about. I put in security questions for my windows installation, but they weren't coming up when I requested to reset my password. Just a strange pop up asking to insert a password reset usb.

Then, I realize. The name displayed for the windows profile is different. It's… Older. I made the name of my new windows installation "Grace" just for convenience with recording for ChainmailChasers, but my old laptop drive installation was named Ebola. Uncertainty clouds my mind. Nervously, I type in my old password. Due to faded memories, my first attempt is the wrong password. But the second… Works.

It buffers just a little too long, just like the previous failed password attempts did, pausing as if the computer itself wasn't sure if the password was correct or not. But the desktop loads. My old desktop. It's so laggy from the drivers being incompatible that most of my mouse clicks aren't registering. My other drives showed up out of order in the file explorer, meaning they weren't wiped, but were blocked from access by windows. I didn't have authorization.

Google searches only pull up Blue Screen of Death results. No one is talking about my issue. I hit control alt delete and I only have two options: Shut Down and Restart. I shut down. It refuses to. I have to hold the power button. I load the bios, and wander around until I find the boot priority. Something so simple but specific that it felt deliberate. The crash had somehow swapped the boot priority from my SSD to my old laptop drive which is connected by SATA to USB. I swap it. It works.