I haven't done anything worth posting gamedev-wise in a little while. All bugfixing and portfolio site work. Even so, I've been recording things as I work, if for no other reason than to look back on things in the future.

Today, though, I noticed that my SSD was getting a bit full - likely not helped by my habit of keeping tons of uncut footage lying around. Not a big issue - I just got out my 2 TB USB drive, and started moving files off the SSD. Easy. I went back to confirm that space had been freed up, and...

Hey. That's a CD Drive. In retrospect, that icon has been there for a while, alongside the other 3 mainstays. That's fairly normal. Or would be, were it not for the fact that I'm on my current laptop.

Which doesn't have a CD Drive.

I'm just old enough to have spent childhood using CDs on a daily basis, and had drives on my first couple laptops. I literally ripped open a broken CD drive to get out a disk at work a few hours ago. So I guess I still think of them as so ubiquitous that I've just never stopped to question why this is here, despite me not having one.

I think the last time I plugged in a CD Drive to this computer was about two years ago. I plugged in a USB one for 10 minutes to watch ghostbusters. And then didn't end up watching ghostbusters. So... maybe this is just an outdated visual. Usually when a drive is disconnected and you click on it, it just updates to register that the drive isn't-

Oh. Okay. It's "still here". Cool, cool. What the hell?

So, I go to the Device Manager, and... yep. There it is.

Wait does that say Samsung???

Around the end of 2021/start of 2022, my laptop's built in camera lens got damaged. I think I scratched something trying to wipe it off, but I'm still not sure. But after looking at a bunch of webcams, I decided I'm slightly too cheap for that shit, and rigged up an old phone as a camera.

...A Samsung Galaxy Phone.

I unplugged my sad excuse for a camera, and sure enough, the non-existent CD-Drive disappeared. So that's that - but not really, because... Windows 10 knows what a phone is. I've fiddled with it a lot before, and depending on the settings sometimes it comes up as generic USB storage, but it never asks to insert a CD into the touchscreen. What gives?

So I do what I maybe should have done in the first place, and open up the properties of my disk drive.

Remember when I said I plugged in a CD Drive once for Ghostbusters?

It thinks my powered-off phone is the same device type as the Toshiba player. I know nowhere near enough to understand exactly how that happens outside of driver fuckery, but... there it is. Weird shit.