Changed my network settings from dhcp to static IP in a normal everyday /etc/network/interfaces edit...
and you guessed it...
IT BLEW UP X
Wait, what?
Yasssss it fucking blew up X. So I booted to another partition, changed back to dhcp and the fucking thing booted normally, X all good
Are you fucking kidding me that in debian land a simple edit to /etc/network/interface can kill X?