Alien, he/him/his, trans dude content creator, your personal alien boyfriend from the planet cupid. I like walks on the beach, media analysis, and fandom nonsense.
if anyone’s interested, i have been streaming on twitch every tuesday (art streams), wednesday (ongoing ace attorney playthrough), and thursday (various multiplayer games; usually rotates between guild wars 2, destiny 2, and among us). i like to play with my buds on call and we have a lot of fun with it, i just reached affiliate, so if that kind of stuff’s your bag check me out!
one of my favorite stupid things to do in fanfic is to throw two characters together who literally never interact. and then give them an entire, fleshed-out relationship dynamic that exists nowhere but my own head. yes they’ve literally never spoken. yes their relationship is important to me. hope this helps.
so this one has breached containment a bit but like, in a fun way. i love reading the tags and having no idea who you’re talking about but reveling in our shared experience of silly fanfics. or, sometimes, KNOWING who you’re talking about and going “dang that is niche love that”. please continue to tag this with every fictional character dynamic that never happened that you’ve gotten invested in I love them. also please continue calling out your friends I love that too
So, Microsoft is terrible. Yes yes, the oldest claim in the world.
But specifically… I just hate how Windows 10 tries to conflate and confuse web searches with things on one’s own computer. The start menu should never do anything related to web-searching, especially if it purports to try to give examples of things that are on my hard drive!
This will make old, computer-illiterate people more malware-vulnerable. You have to maintain a strong distinction between “things that are on this computer (and maybe even included in Windows)” (safe, one hopes, or you already got pwned by it, probably), and “things on the web” (scary, dangerous, not to be trusted at all).
Eroding that barrier in the UI is awful. It just FEELS like a violation every time I start typing into the start bar, and it tries to show me ANYTHING web-related. My computer is NOT just an internet-portal! It has tons of stuff on it, and when I’m interacting with the OS, I ONLY want to see things that are already on here!
If I wanted to see something online, I would go to my browser! All the online stuff should be segregated into the browser!
Specific programs can access the internet; that’s fine. But my OS’s functions and interface should JUST be about the things that are already on my computer.
i haven’t used this myself but i’ll be looking into it
Literally spent multiple hours lobotomizing my Windows reinstall when I upgraded recently, the amount of awful shit they had in nowadays makes me long for the age of win98, when software was merely bad, rather than actively harmful.
the exact setting in shutup10 for this issue is “Disable extension of Windows 10 search with Bing” it’s at the very bottom under misc.
There are 2 programs that will turn Windows 10 from an advertising riddled, bloated mess into a useful tool.
With one click, this will remove ALL THE BLOATWARE Windows comes with. Seriously, you need NONE OF THESE apps, and if you do, you can just uninstall all the ones you don’t need individually.
This program will give you almost complete control over Windows 10’s behavior. Disabling the web search in the start menu, op rightfully complained about, is just one of the many things this thing can do
For example, with a single setting you can turn off any ads from microsoft, system-wide
It is a powerful tool, but it can be a bit overwhelming. Luckily every single setting comes with an explanation about what it actually does, and most settings can be easily reversed.
Tech tip from my personal blog
reblogged in the hope that i’ll eventually both remember AND have the executive function (AT THE SAME TIME) to actually sit down and deal with this. win10 really is terrible.
Also, if you’re like me and utterly unable to handle the weird tile-style menu and just want to go back to the days of lists that make sense, check out OpenShell https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
It’s a very simple program, and it turns the tile menu on win10 into something much more logical like this
Which i will never be able to live without, so it goes on every win10 machine I have to use regularly.
I think that the website “carrd” is supposed to be a convenient way to display information about yourself online, and I find it kind of hilarious that so many people on this site have turned their about pages into unreadable vortexes of glitter fonts and flashing gifs. Imagine if someone handed you a business card that had tiny strobe lights wired into it.
A lot of people in the replies to this seemingly have no idea what “class” is.
It’s not a set of values or something you automatically earn after college or like some mysterious inherent quality your parents pass down to you.
(Like, maybe your parents have enough money/assets where they can sustain you through economic insecurity, but let’s be honest…that’s not most people’s situation.)
If you are struggling with bills, if you don’t have savings, if you constantly question even small purchases, if spending a few thousand dollars on a vacation seems like a distant dream…you are not middle class.
And most importantly, saying you are not middle class is not an attack on your character.
Instead it’s a reminder to fight for your own economic interests, and not to let companies, your boss, or politicians trick you into working against yourself by believing you’re part of the “mythical middle.”
Damn
What’s more, if your first response to “you’re not middle class!” is to treat it like an attack on your character?
Then you really need to stop and examine what you think about lower-class people.
Americans like to quote Kurt Vonnegut, that ‘socialism never took root in America because Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’
What that politely obscures is why Americans see themselves as future rich people: they despise the poor, even if they themselves are poor, and so would rather see themselves as “middle class” rather than ever see themselves as “poor.”
I would also like to add on this that if you are paying a mortgage on a home, but it’s a 30 year mortgage…you’re NOT middle class. Sorry!
“But by these definitions, almost NOBODY I know in the USA qualifies as middle class?!?!”
Yep. Correct. Turns out the result of several decades of a “disappearing middle class” is almost everybody is poor.
Just wanted to add a little update because I’ve seen some comments and tags: this map is very much user generated, and it’s been running for a fairly long time!
Sometimes areas get developed or trees get removed or circumstances change which is super disappointing, but please don’t hesitate the map to reflect that so other people know that it’s no longer a viable site! Additionally, if you know of sites that aren’t on the map, adding them is a great way help out other people in your region who come across it.
As well as foragable materials, there’s also the option to add other resources as well such a seed libraries, community gardens, bike pumps, free stores/pantries, food banks, compost sites, guerilla gardens, water fountains, and other community resources.
Projects like this are amazing, but don’t forget that they work best when everyone collaborates!
Maybe it’s just because I’m Jewish but I do truly believe that life gets ten times better when you learn to complain cheerfully
I think a part of it is that it lets you acknowledge that something sucks, which is actually really good in a culture that wants us to pretend that everything is fine and we’re soldiering through all the time. Like, no, my grocery bag breaking and spilling all over the floor is not fine. I’ve had a long day and I’m really upset and on the verge of tears because I can’t handle one more thing and pretending like it’s fine only means breaking down later.
But if you let yourself complain, if you let yourself swear terribly and creatively, and you stare down at the bruised vegetables like they’ve personally disappointed you, and you make yourself smile because this is really just so, so stupid, you feel a little better. There’s a power to acknowledging that something sucks and making yourself feel better anyways. There’s a power to going “and THEN my bag broke, and it’s like—seriously? my day was bad enough” and doing it with a smile.
You shouldn’t have to pretend things are fine when they aren’t. You shouldn’t have to force yourself to smile through things that make you feel terrible. But if you can make yourself laugh by staring down at some strawberries that have decided to revolt, and give them a lecture on why they’re just terrible, really, and that makes you smile—then maybe that’s a good thing.
This is why we cannot have nice things. I am so tired.
I’m lost…what’s wrong with verification to make sure that people, esp children aren’t being exploited? Who cares if it’s hard? Both PH and OF made right decisions even if they were pushed into it by credit card companies.
To my understanding, the issue is that OF got popular and rich off the work of sex workers, and now they don’t want to employ someone (because it will cost the money) to do the work of verification, to make sure consenting sex workers can stay on the platform that they sensationalized. They are just banning it all. And also the larger issue is that none of these groups are doing the work in tandem to make sure there are safe avenues for consensual sex work to happen, because they don’t actually care that it be a viable work option for people, they just don’t want anybody doing anything sexual— and using the pretense of lowering cases of child pornography and trafficking, even if it’s not been that effective.
