@zacanger yep, the lamp overpowered the power source on the computer and made it lose just enough power to halt most stuff, but it kinda kept running for a bit
anyway, yeah, I tried sddm, same deal returning to it, I checked home and .Xauthority were owned and deleted them, reinstalled like everything, purged drivers and lightdm, idk
and the only way I can run a session is from one of the other ttys that doesn't have the greeter, thankfully the greeter is on tty7, so I have at least 6 more