I am experiencing technical difficulties. Most of you aren't here for my life story, so I'll leave out the details here (but have included them below anyway for anyone even remotely interested), but the upshot is: I may have to take an involuntary hiatus from anywhere for a few days (nobody will notice except me, but I'll miss my One Year on Scratch anniversary) to over a month. Reason: my laptop may need servicing, meaning I'll have to use the communal family laptop or the ones at school. I can't access Scratch from either; the former because, er, funny story about the degree to which my parents are aware of this account, and the latter because we're only allowed to use those laptops for actual school work. Sorry! Hopefully this is a false alarm, but no harm in letting people know in advance just in case it turns out to take a while before I'm back online. For those interested in the technical details: When I got home from school today, my laptop didn't immediately light up and display my lock screen as usual. I turned it off and on again via the power button, and it worked as normal for all of seven or so minutes before all the content being displayed on the screen pixelated, was compressed into the top eighth or so of the screen, went through a red colour shift, and started dimming. I restarted my laptop, then started copy-pasting my MS Sticky Notes into a WordPad document, anticipating that I may have to evacuate all my stuff to a USB if this was going to be a recurring problem. Halfway through doing this, my screen stopped responding, as did my trackpad and keyboard, so I restarted again and came back in an hour. For the next thirty minutes I frantically copy-pasted everything I wanted to keep onto a USB. Everything seemed fine for another few hours, and I concluded with a sigh of relief that the problem had resolved itself as soon as I no longer had files at stake. ...and, after a few minutes of actually using my laptop instead of trying to rescue stuff from it, the pixelating extreme letterbox red screen problem returned. It's OK now, of course, or I couldn't be typing this, but that's only because I restarted my laptop and it could be back any minute. I have no idea why it did any of this; my laptop has a history of a similar problem, but that was a one-off rather than a recurring problem like here (and I don't know what caused that one either). I think it's a hardware problem, but I can't say for sure. If anyone has had similar problems and knows how to fix them without calling in a tech specialist, that would be very welcome information.
