@xy yes, I broke the update twice, once by manually upgrading pacman but forgetting about glibc and once by not mounting the boot partition so when the kernel was updated, the initram images didn't correspond to the new version. Both times I used a live install image from the USB stick to mount the existing partitions and operate on them with the binaries from the live image.

Now I have to sync Music, Pictures, Books, and projects between the machines.

But in an ironic turn of events, the screen of the laptop (which was what was broken yesterday) has miraculously recovered over night.

:D