Actually not the Worst

A blog with random stuff. Nice to meet ya! 30

[eilooxara]

Oat milk was discovered much more recently than you may have known. Like many now-familiar technologies, it was found by accident during the Apollo program when NASA learned what a zero-g environment does to goat milk.

[depsidase]

[hopeymchope]

PlayStation Bad

In just the past two months, Sony has:

Said the PS6 will be more than $1000 at launch

Announced the end of all physical PS game releases

While simultaneously announcing the end of two of their console game stores — ensuring multiple games will die forever

Declared that they are wholly dedicated to (A) leveraging A.I. when making games and (B) creating live-service games above all other game types

Announced that if you bought any movies through their PlayStation Store, over 550 of them will soon be deleted from all users' libraries — with no restitution offered of any kind

Gamers, it is time — to paraphrase Robert Vann — to turn Sony's picture to the wall. Any one of these insults would be bad, and taken alone? Maybe it could be swallowed. But this is an ongoing campaign of disdain towards customers, with each declaration worse than the last.

PlayStation does not deserve your patronage any longer. The PS6 must fail. Leave them behind.

[sunderwight]

Genuinely, if they're not even going to sell physical games, and their console costs a thousand bucks, what's the point of buying the console and paying for games (that they could delete off your library any time they want to anyway) rather than getting a gaming PC, pirating their shit, and never paying for a single one of their games again?

Even what passes for moral arguments against piracy are going to run aground against the obvious fact that Sony isn't a moral company. Nobody loses sleep over "robbing" the robber baron, and nobody worries about your company dying from a lack of sales when it's evil. Die faster, actually.

[despazito]

I could function in a society that had an actual nightlife that isn't synonymous with just clubbing. Where are the night markets what if I want to go to the library at midnight

[kosmogrl]

[gmailconstruct]

primordial soup

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

"Just because I'm right, doesn't mean I'm being helpful" is a vastly underrated thought process that I strongly encourage others to get comfortable with

[vixvigil]

it’s never a normal temperature anymore it’s always some fucking bullshit

[shithowdy]

i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.

so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.

[shithowdy]

hey this is apparently helping a lot of people! adding that on top of this you can also go to settings > personalization > colors and turn off transparency to also boost performance. this wasn't the Big Fix for me but might as well do that too if you're trying to optimize.

[shithowdy]

past a certain note threshold on tumblr posts you unlock a bloodborne-esque insight and the strange lives of this site's users become visible to you

[flipocrite]

(x)

[theothin]

we fucking found them?

[prof-grace-aspen]

Ok I know we joke about this but I just went to the settings and first clicked "adjust for best performance" and then re-checked only 1 box:

"Smooth edges of screen fonts"

My computer was running hot before I turned everything off; the office I'm in is very warm, I could feel the heat of my CPU through the keyboard. The fans were going, not as loud as they usually get, but they were still blasting.

Y'all.

I can barely feel the warmth through the keyboard now. It's been like 2 minutes. The fan is nearly silent.

Click the Windows key and start typing "System settings", and "View Advanced system settings" will pop up. Then click "Settings" under Performance:

Then you'll see this:

TURN IT ALL OFF.

I turned "Show window contents while dragging" and then turned that off again. It's up to you.

[khashanakalashtar]

My computer is so quiet and reasonably-temperatured now and I barely notice a difference in utility, why is windows like this

maybe I can even play computer games again

[paintpencilink]

The second best thing you can do for a Win10 computer is turn off whatever unnecessary services it's decided it needs to run in the background always. Some services it does need, but others are useless. Here's an article that goes into step by steps.

10AppsManager lets you uninstall bloatware. Winaero Tweaker lets you disable crap like Cortana/Copilot, ads, telemetry, internet search results when you search from the taskbar, and all kinds of other stuff, plus it gives you lots of other little options that are just nice to have (like, it can restore the old MS Paint program in place of Paint 3D). Both are totally free.

Oh, and check your startup programs in the Task Manager tab to make sure your computer isn't automatically starting eight million programs every time it boots. But I think people mostly know about that. (Unless this is me going "they only know one or two feldspars... and quartz of course.")

The first best thing you can do for a Windows computer is install Linux Mint. But some of us do need a few pesky Windows-specific programs. Bleh. Still, if you're up for a project, you can have both (and it's awesome). Here's an article about setting up a dual boot Windows/Mint system.

[novella-november]

If you are on a Windows 11 computer, pause everything you are doing for one minute and:

Open computer settings

Click on Accessibility on the left-hand menu

Scroll down the Accessibility menu and click on the Keyboard Option

Under the "related settings" tab, click "Typing" which should have a description of "spellcheck, autocorrect, text suggestions."

Turn off the AI "correct misspelled words"

and most importantly: turn off Typing Insights.

[ID: a screenshot of the above mentioned Windows 11 settings, showing that Typing Insights is now turned off, with the following description from Microsoft: "Windows is using artificial intelligence to help you type To help you save time and type efficiently, Windows can learn to suggest words, autocorrect spelling mistakes, and interpret swiped typing. Take a look at the insights below to see up-to-the-minute stats on how Windows has learned to improve typing for you. These stats are stored only on this device and Microsoft does not collect the typing insights data." End ID]

"But Mx. November, it says right there Microsoft doesn't collect the typing insights data!"

I mean, yeah, it says that..... for *now.*

It also only specifies that Microsoft themselves don't collect it, and they wouldn't have made this something that I was automatically, secretly opted in for without my knowledge if they didn't have something to be gained by me not knowing it exists!

I only found this because a cat walked on the keyboard and turned on Filter Keys and while trying to figure out why my keyboard was just making chirping noises instead of typing, I happened to click on "typing insights" by accident.

Generative AI, and especially AI that is used to "personalize" and track your activity across the web and on your computer are never going to be in your best interest, it is always going to serve these companies in whatever way will line their pockets the most, and all it takes is updating their terms of service once, and then all of that data they promised they weren't collecting suddenly all belongs to them.

[gummybearattacktheworldofdespair]

[runcibility]

[elon-musty-ass]

[ozempicofficial]

[urfavhatesterfs]

this is so sweet 🥺🥺🥺

This is the cutest thing ever. Godzilla says trans rights.

[kitt-the-werefox]

GODZILLA OFFICIAL???

[sciencebees]

[depsidase]

[oeing-oeing-clay]

wow dude jts so awesome that your car is loud as fuck and smells worse when it drives past. thags fucking epic man. i really like how it hurts to listen to you drive past and it scares people. thats awesome man. i really like your car that makes a loud as fuck fart sound. fucking epic dude

[butyoutoldmeiwasfunny]

[mikkeneko]

[Image ID: Screencap from unspecified website in dark mode. Text reads:

"After that that stupid thing from Bezos and Musk about how a trillion humans would mean a thousand Mozarts, it got me thinking.

We clearly must have Mozarts today, and at least a couple of them probably got the same upbringing he did to nurture their skill and talent, and we would therefore have:

a musician of significant talent, dedication and skill,

who can write music across a bunch of different contemporary genres,

who explicitly draws from the work of other musicians to build their style, and

who is willing to do the musical equivalent of shitposting and wear fancy outfits while doing it.

I can only conclude that the modern-day Mozart is Weird Al Yankovic.

I will not be taking questions."

Followed by: a portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a photograph of Weird Al Yankovic, in similar 3/4 poses with similar eyebrow-raised and smiling expressions. End ID.]

[the-real-seebs]

i think a lot of people who have never done music do not understand how absolutely implausible weird al's skill level is. you can say "so many musicians can do at least one of his songs, obviously", and yes, they can, but they couldn't do all of them. you have people who studied ten or twenty years to be able to do something genuinely incredible, and they've specialized and focused and developed the ability to produce a particular kind of thing, and they do it really well, and then this guy comes along and says "welp, time for a new album", picks ten of them, and duplicates their shtick well enough to be clearly recognizable.

this man produced a piece of music which an experienced listener can hear and say "oh, that's Frank Zappa". how? not even Frank Zappa sounds like Frank Zappa!

[loki-zen]

Is weird Al doing different shit now? Bc if he was writing pastiches this would be true, but all I'm really familiar with is the stuff where he just rewrites the lyrics to an existing song, or does a polka cover of it.

[duran-duran-less-official]

Weird Al's "style parodies", or original compositions explicitly in the style of a particular artist or band, are approximately as numerous as his actual song parodies. Generally the Regular Parodies get all the attention, they're the big money spinners, but his style parodies are both numerous and legendary.

Dare to Be Stupid, the title track off the album of the same name, is probably the big one that people would know - a more Devo song than actual Devo, and that's according to Devo themselves.

An incomplete list of other ones that rule, actually, are:

Germs (Nine Inch Nails)

I'll Sue Ya (Rage Against The Machine)

Pancreas (The Beach Boys)

Craiglist (The Doors)

My Own Eyes (Foo Fighters)

Bob (Bob Dylan)

Everything You Know Is Wrong (They Might Be Giants)

Trigger Happy (The Beach Boys again but from a different era)

[elfwreck]

This lists all Weird Al's known style parodies. There are a LOT.