The fact that Qifrey and the kids and the fandom and the hecking narration and really even Olly himself all bully Olruggio for drinking excessively but the only time we ever actually see him "overindulge" is in the does-this-count-as-canon kitchen spinoff and there he's half-asleep and refusing refills three drinks in while Qifrey's pouting about how he was just getting started. Slander and libel on Olly's good name. That man is an occasional social drinker who got slightly tipsy at a fancy arts patronage fundraiser one year and no one ever let him live it down. and Qifrey is a functional alcoholic wine mom.
nasa is using a 3D world graphic for the solar eclipse thingy today where germany is still devided in east and west adjfglkafdhgadfg. buddies, it's been almost 40 years.
So I showed this to a physicist and they were like "Oh! Yes! It's a figure from Fred Espenak's very old paper where he did a bunch of eclipse graphics! I've been looking at these my entire internet life, basically, for every solar eclipse! They called him Mr. Eclipse. He just passed away recently 🥺"
Anyway apparently Mr. Eclipse made 5000 years' worth of solar eclipse graphics, which you can find the simpler versions of here
So now instead of laughing at NASA for their outdated graphics I'm emotional about Mr. Eclipse and his hard work
Not to be a bitch but sometimes people engage with fiction in the most boring way possible, and nowhere is this clearer than in videogames. Like what you mean you hate a character just because they were kind of abrasive when speaking to the player character? "They were mean to me" and it didn't occur to you to wonder why? Like, what might their attitude toward you reveal about the world? About the social dynamics within it? About their own perspectives and backgrounds and personalities? Does it even occur you to ask? Would you only have liked them if they bowed to your presence and talked about how great you are? Like I'm sorry but you're so boring. How boring fiction would be if it cathered to you
"Does Rocky hate Stratt" I think it's more complicated than that. On the one hand, Eva Stratt did what she had to do to keep Earth safe, there was hardly any time for her to sit and think and do things more ethically. She did what was necessary and Rocky can respect that. On the second hand, he doesn't think saying a lot of if not outright mean then definitely psychologically damaging things to Grace and putting him in the Eridian torment nexus was really the best way to go about it, she could've been more humane about euthanizing him. Now he has to deal with a traumatized leaky space horse who thinks no one loves him and needs so many medical procedures and can't do any of them without having a panic attack and also if he dies from any of the five million things he could die from, including the aforementioned "not thinking anyone loves him" thing, then Rocky is going to fall into an endless pit of despair so that was. Rude of her. On the third hand, if she hadn't strapped Grace to a rocket and chucked him into space, he would've never met Grace, so really, how much can he complain about it? On the fourth hand, the only reason that even happened was because Stratt is at least 54% liable in a major engineering disaster, so now he has beef with her from a professional standpoint and he can't just let go of that until she faces the Eridian justice system which isn't happening. On the fifth hand, Stratt is human, and that means she's every bit of a leaky space blob that Grace is and really, how mad can you actually stay at a gooey alien care bear thing, long-term, and how much energy is Rocky willing to put into finding out when Grace doesn't seem to be all that mad at her, just really sad about the whole thing?
My scorching hot take on Christopher Nolan Presents Homer's The Odyssey is Tom Holland having his mind blown while filming this, then going back to Marvel to and being all "Why did no one tell me that you can, like, have a finished script before you start filming and a cinematographer who has all the shots planned before filming instead of figuring it out in post, has anyone else heard about this?" is pretty funny
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.
You can get and use windows 11 without logging in with a microsoft account, as of five days ago. I am a local user on my computer. Don't ask me how to do it, because my computer repair guy did it when he reinstalled windows, but there are tutorials out there. Refuse to connect to internet until you're set up and can use the computer freely.
Refusing to connect to the internet doesn't help. You have to open a Command Prompt (Shift+F10) and typing start ms-cxh:localonly (and pressing enter) during installation when you get to the sign in/create stupid ms account screen
For comprehensive deets, tomshardware explains
Maintain only a local account on your Windows 11 PC.
Unless there's really really specific reasons to subject yourself to windows, please consider installing linux mint instead.
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.
You can get and use windows 11 (and every prior windows iteration) without logging in with a microsoft account, as of five days ago. I am a local user on my computer. Don't ask me how to do it, because my computer repair guy did it when he reinstalled windows, but there are tutorials out there. Refuse to connect to internet until you're set up and can use the computer freely.
