After getting a comment from the creator of kanata (an awesome piece of software by the way) that he found my story amusing, I figured that I'd also post it here, partly as fun, partly as a cautionary tale. Also, I'd appreciate any tips as to what to check for in my system, it's a weird feeling to know that some stuff might have been messed up under the hood.
I've had instances of stuff happening without my input (never malicious, just a messed up input device or some weird stuff getting buffered) and power cycling has always been my first instinct. Power down, remove all peripherals and network connections, power back up, start diagnosing.
So yay me, I guess?
Sometimes Windows (on laptop) decides to drop a key release, meaning I have to figure out how to restart while (e.g.) Esc is being held down.
I find yanking power cables tends to pretty reliably power cycle a device.
I mean, yeah, it can also make your storage a bit upset, but rarely in a major way and if you are not in control of your machine that's still the lesser evil, potentially. Especially if you back up your data.
Laptop, so it's a bit harder to pull the power cable. The default power button behavior is to hibernate, which usually finishes shutting down before a hard shutdown can trigger and doesn't fix that.
Fair enough. In my mind I was all "pull the battery", and then I remembered I'm old and it's not 15 years ago. I guess at that point you're stuck holding the button for however long it takes to force a hard shutdown in your system.