I was using my laptop, and more specifically a virtual machine, for browsing. I found a nice picture and downloaded it, and after that, the other pictures on the folder lost their thumbnails. Then the desktop lost its picture and went to black, then I went to shut down the virtual machine, and the host (Solus) now has every tray item a default icon. I couldn’t open any folders or anything. I had a bad feeling about it. I shut down the computer using the power button since accessing the terminal was impossible. On startup i got whats in the picture. I did some research and obviously this is some sort of corruption on the hard drive. But, i think theres a good chance i can fix it. The hard drive is less than 3 years old, a PNY SSD.
I ran fsck.ext4 -n /dev/sda2 | more and got the other output there, and i have left it there. I know it’s precarious to do too much with bad hard drives from what I’ve been reading.
EDIT: i can remove the hard drive and i tried plugging it into another computer with an adapter to see if i could recover it that way and it refused to mount.
I have been lucky not to encounter something like this before, but as such, i would greatly appreciate things being explained to me like I’m 5, and not having any term undefined. Hand holding will be required lol. Thank you. 
