Image created from a photo by Diana Light, via Unsplash+. This is in the style of my current “The Four Generals” solo game over on DougAlone, using the same G’MIC filters. Just for funsies.
This morning I made two sizeable purchases. One via a Belgian storefront for stuff like an automated cat feeder, some kitchen supplies, another air filter since allergies are whooping us, and some cat treats. The other purchase was from the US Amazon storefront and represents something like three+ months of stored-up shopping cart. Possibly the biggest Amazon order I’ve ever made but maybe not [not four digits big, just a lot of stuff at once, then with shipping and international handling fees and currency conversions and whatnot].
To explain the latter, when we moved I lost a decades-long history of streaming movies. Upwards of 200 movies. Most likely upwards of 300 movies. Stuff I’ve watched a lot. Genre classics. A fairly joyously curated list. And stuff from streaming services like Shudder which is not available here.
Something I started doing was picking up, through various methods — largely online — was high quality physical replacements of my favorite bits of that lost digital media. Some US versions but also UK, Belgian, French, German, Australian, Japanese, and so forth releases. I am finally at the effective end of that and today’s order was more or less wrapping it up.
Only, as soon as I clicked order I got kind of a icky feeling.
Not for what I ordered. Not for my at least momentary rampant consumerism. While this is something like twenty movies and that’s a fair lot, it does represent a fairly curated list and mostly definitive editions of everything on the list.
It’s just… I hit this moment where I’m kind of tired of buying things. Combined with stuff like pre-ordering the next year’s worth of Big Finish audios and some collector’s edition books — though of the “a lot cheaper” variety than my old indie book collecting days — it does represent a fair amount of money spent in the past two weeks.
Consuming media can be a black hole. Stuff where you spend more and more and then always look to a horizon. I am 100% opposed to the “clutter free” lifestyle that tends to prioritize streaming and the dissolution of ownership. I am also aware of my tendency to packrat and curate past the obvious choices. Stocking up on just-in-cases.
Anyhow, while I will no doubt enjoy and rewatch everything I ordered today multiple times, I think this vibe is a sign for me to call it quits right there. There are some pre-orders and outstanding crowd-funding. I have enough stuff to spend a good couple of months just enjoying.
Thus, from now until my birthday (30 May), I am going on a spending holiday. Taking a break from being a consumer whore, as it was.
While I promote ownership as a concept, especially curated ownership, you do really want to prioritize the stuff you will use and love.
A couple of weeks ago, maybe, I took a screenshot from the top of a Reddit thread because I figured I’d get around to answering it:
“What’s something you’re pretty sure only you do?”
Now, here are two answers and one answer has two parts because I’m me.
FIRST ANSWER: We Do A Lot of Unique Things
Just a shout out to all us Space Pilgrims: when we look at specifics a lot of what we do is actually fairly unique. Absolutely no one else is in that cafe at that table and eating that donut but you. In cafes? Sure. At tables? Sure. Eating donuts? Sure.
And I suspect, but have no idea what kind of chaos computing super mainframe would be required to know, that it only takes a few facets of our activities before a significant number of everything we do is unique.
A lot of people might grow roses. A much smaller amount by specialize in a particular type of roses. Arranging them into patterns based on, I don’t know, famous Shakespeare plays?
I am deeply suspicious of a growing trend that tries to paint uniqueness as being cringe while also judging folks for being basic.
That being said, this is about me…
SECOND ANSWER: My “Unique” Stuff
To keep this lighter, let me say there are two things that come to mind.
“No Digs for Satan”
Not truly unique since both Kaz and I say this on a regular basis, and I think I got this from somewhere, but the phrase “No digs for Satan” shows up a lot in our household.
What does it mean? We generally use it to mean, “This topic is so off-the-table we won’t even consider it.” 0-stars is a review. “Did not like,” is an opinion. This is something below consideration.
As always when I think this hard about it, I try looking it up to see if there is any other references to it and got this from the “helpful” AI summary:
heh.
At any rate, I updated that older post today to point out it might have been, “No ribbits for Satan” but at any rate, I’m sticking to my own thing.
The Alabama Weird // GLOW // etc
Here’s one I’m more sure is definitely unique to me. Over on The Doug Alone, I play out multiple long-term solo RPGs set in alternate history Alabamas including a long running history of characters and locations cribbed from dozens of sources.
There are newspaper articles, fiction book series within the series, and multiple timelines that diverge depending on the campaign.
Some of those characters, like Amy Patel and Eustace Delmont, show up in different time lines as slightly different but interlinked characters. When stuff happens in a “future” timeline, it might get referenced and added to the lore to a “past” timeline, etc.
Eustace, by the way, is effectively a way for me to play a parody of myself and while in the cyberpunk-infused “The GLOW” version he is much more an angry, muscular guy, in the more “normal” Alabama Weird version, I simply just use my one photos modified in whatever style of art that fits that particular campaign arc:
He’s sort of like me if self-doubt was replaced with the simple bravado to fight all the strange things going on down in the swamps and small streets of lower Alabama.
A whole industry of data brokers buys up vast quantities of electronic information from cell phone apps and web browsers and sells it to advertisers who use that data to target ads. The same industry also sells that data, including bulk cell phone location data, to police departments and federal government agencies in ways that can reveal intimate details about Americans without a warrant.
Now, privacy advocates say that the best chance for Congress to close the well-known loophole around the Fourth Amendment that allows for that sort of governmental snooping is coming up in just a few weeks.
That’s when Congress is expected to take up reauthorization of what is known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to expire on April 20.
After a 2015 change to the law, federal agencies are not supposed to collect data on U.S. citizens in bulk. But some found a workaround to requesting warrants by simply buying the data instead.
I’m actually neither shocked nor awed. Pikachu face can stay in the desk drawer. There are funnier uses for the meme. This is why I get so frustrated by conspiracy theorists. The real world changing conspiracies tend to happen in the open but are discredited by the same media and enterprises complicit in their existence [but not, you know, actually hidden].
Best bit is that AI-companies owned by the Algorithm Class is the real clear winner, here. They get paid to digest the human experience en masse to better train their LLMs by selling the data to entities that treat this data as different from protected data despite being the same data.
I have no precise takeaway here or anything to add besides to say that if our data is worth billions to someone, it should be worth [collectively] billions to us. The same way that if information wins war then information should be considered protected by the second amendment.
We’ve entered into a strange new horizon where companies revel in increasing the cost of doing business with them by, with very little choice, forcing a lot of us to give up vital aspects of our own liberty [namely the ownership of our own identity].
“If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,” is dead, long live:
“You are now never the ONLY customer.“
The Algorithm Class demands a Commodity Class, and we be it.
started life as a photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash. I assume, based on date, that this is an anti-vax/anti-COVID-mandate thing. I don’t know, I just needed a clear sign that was a bit vague out of context.
Definitions and the weight of definitions are wild and easily manipulated. For instance, conspiracies by definition 100% exist and are 100% exposed — often to surprisingly little actual impact unless murder is involved somewhere and maybe not even then — on a regular basis. Let’s call these conspiracies — definite participants with definite consequences — “Tier One.”
Tier One Conspiracies: Business as Almost Usual
Company A teams up with Place B to snatch Resource C from the inhabitants. Some rich someone has an area [or company] declared low value before buying it up. Smaller scale ones where groups of people plan out crimes. Large scale ones where countries devalue a target to take over trade routes.
This is before you get to stuff like MKUltra and other exposed government plots/programs to do stuff outside of standard channels of morality/expectation. These are probably getting close to what I consider “Tier Two,” which will come up in a bit.
Let’s call this extreme “Tier Three.” In principle, there is a indefinite amount of agents involved and the goal seems something almost ineffable (insomuch as “Total Control” is ineffable). Like the agents behind Tier Three conspiracies are attempting godhood. Thinking about that, I’m going to propose “The Fourth Element” and discuss it in brief, down below.
There are varying lists of elements involved on this other extreme (see the European Commission’s page about COVID conspiracies to see a specific flavor), to which I would point out three (from my experience) as being deeply related to the fourth:
Manichean divide between GOOD and BAD and I don’t mean just simply “naughty people” but a sense that these people are akin to Biblical portions of BAD
Importantly: A keyhole where people who know can look through the door but said keyhole is not so obvious that it is just “clear as day” to your average person
The (often) lack of clearly defined morality, the (often) singular- or few-facet structure, and the fact that real Tier One conspiracies (usually) get spoiled violate these tenets. There’s a game to be played with conspiracy theories by my Tier Three definition where True Believers can see a bit further into the darkness and plainness.
Which brings us to the fourth element, the one I consider the key, the actual test of this tier three definition:
A conspiracy theory of the third tier is essentially indistinguishable from a religion requiring faith, an inner circle, ritual language, and a reshaping of worldviews and stems from the same part of our brain that processes religious conceptualization
THE OTHER is mostly conceptualized outwardly from THE SELF, so that different adherents will believe in variations based on their own personal history; though adherents will subscribe to the belief they are are using their faith and secret language to expose objective truth
There are GOOD OTHERS and BAD OTHERS talked about in dehumanizing terms, each, with the important that some OTHER AGENTs are on the side of goodness — generally the “side” of the conspiratorial belief holder themselves — and some are against it
Believing that billionaires will manipulate the market to improve their own profit margins is not, by the Tier Three definition, a conspiracy. It is plain. It involves known actors doing a possible-to-actually-know thing. You could give evidence clearly that all adherents can appreciate.
You would need to believe they are doing it to bring about an ineffable end, some great ritual, some mystic passing. In this, people who are part of the shadowy world will be both fighting for and fighting against the common person. Some billionaires will be the good ones. Some government agents will be exposing the truth behind UFOs. There will be codes and secret signs left behind.
However, I am left with the sense that there are broad movements and there are general shifts by powerful players but not codified in quite the same way. What if snack companies push less-filling, brightly colored snacks not because they are working for Satan (to ape a chain letter of many years ago) but because they want you to get fat and feel like a loser for not choosing one product from one of their subsidiaries over another of their subsidiaries?
Towards a Tier Two Definition
Which is making me wonder if there’s not space for a Tier Two definition:
TIER ONE: DEFINITE agents for a DEFINITE purpose.
TIER TWO: (largely) DEFINITE agents for a perhaps DEFINITE purpose but through INDEFINITE instability.
TIER THREE: (largely) INDEFINITE agents for an INDEFINITE or DEFINITE purpose (but usually the DEFINITE purpose is a facet of a much larger INDEFINITE one).
Look, it’s a broad musing and a work in process. I know this is fallible. I’m chewing on it. This is the part of the canvas where I have to throw paint all over the room just to figure out which colors match. Much like the algorithms that push various problematic memes to see which one stick and be manipulated into generational trauma…
*wink*
What I’m wondering, though, is if you could have a group of people — maybe not precisely known at present but in principle definitely knowable with clearly defined lines — who interfere with things, perhaps in definite ways, usually with a definite goal, but with indefinite consequences.
Which is wrong. Throwing paint, like I said. It’s more like…
Generating indefinite instability in order to generate certain types of behavior in the short or long term with the assumption that some classes of people are more immune to large and small scale instabilities.
One odd aspect of this “Tier Two” is that…
It’s not necessary for every agent group to be actively working together, just that they are participating in trends towards instability
A Tier One conspiracy would be like, say, a tobacco company or conglomerate of said companies making cigarettes more addictive. A Tier Three would be tobacco companies making cigarettes more addictive so that people absorb more chemicals and become conditioned towards government mind control backed up by a shady group of academic elites.
This type of Tier Two I am talking about would be various companies following trends of marketing and science to general make their product more addicting but then also paying for advertisement and education against addiction to harm competitors but also to increase distrust in science and regulation amongst their addicted regulars. Either they win by creating tribal-like brand dependency or by having people eventually thinking that “both sides” are problematic.
Oil companies making broad statements against renewable energies while also co-opting and sometimes controlling green initiatives for instance. Where wind power’s actual impact on local ecosystems can be treated as just-as-bad-as the extinction level event that fossil fuels can represent.
Promote veg*nism and a move from factory farms? That’s racist.
Algorithms pushing coverage for relatively minor infractions by environmentalists vs an over-emphasis on largely meaningless gestures. People being bullied for personal responsibility over the environment catastrophe vs people being portrayed as powerless against effective change (aka “the paper straw” strawman bullshit).
Co-opting “freedom of speech” as a way to attack personal freedoms. Or changing the meaning of “fake news.”
AI discussions where complaints or praises of it mean nothing because your average user cannot do a goddamned thing either way. Right up to complaining about the em-dash and oxford commas and all the other ways anti-AI sentiment is being used to dissolve standards of human communication. And yes, I filled this post with hand-coded — just to be pissy. I had to click extra for that shit.
Where Gen X was sold both anti-establishment and pro-establishment media. Anti-intellectual and pro-intellectual media. Told to trust the scientists we were told to mock as eggheads. Told to trust the government we were told to hate. Told to eat the food we were told to hate.
Where the only consistent thing was that we were told to consume.
To choose sides. To choose no sides. To engage. To be enraged. To qualify things that should be quantifiable. To quantify things of indefinite qualities. Where even the “generational system” of organization — Gen X, Millennials, etc — is nothing but bullshit pseudo-science to make us feel like we are striving for a horizon that has never existed. And if you complain about the labels? There’s a label for that, too.
“Here’s a box, get inside, please. Oh, don’t like the box? Me too! I hate boxes, subscribe to my newsletter!”
Because in the end that’s all that matters. Not the stance that we take. Not that we take a stance. There’s no stance we can take. As long as internalize it, though, as long as we think the stance or lack of stance is a thing, we consume. Just to show them.
That’s what I’m talking about. Where it’s not just about the doubt vs belief, identity vs the unknown, embracing conflict vs finding compromise: it’s about how we internalize these things and keep clicking more links. Thinking we have to fight but never quite knowing what it is we are fighting (plot twist: we are fighting our wallets to sign up for more online services, quite often). Thinking we are doomed but we might as well be playing on the Titanic and then getting fucking furious at people for playing on the Titanic while not thinking they are doomed in the exact same way.
We end up terribly judging who are just as intellectually complex and emotional extant as ourselves because the goddamned algorithm needed there to be an A and B or what the hell is A-B testing for?
I have to go chew on this and make more sense on approach two, assuming I get around to it.
Just a few days ago I was going through a multi-hour process to disentangle from OneDrive and now, for reasons, I’m doing the same thing for Feedly. Some of it is similar. A recurring cost that offers little real value compared to what I can do myself. A company that considers its AI-arm to be its true innovation. Features and elements I like being de-prioritized over a different type of client than I am.
And while Feedly is different in several ways…
OneDrive is more integrated into the default Windows experience
Feedly genuinely is one of the best feed readers out there, while OneDrive is not necessarily one of the best cloud-based storage systems
Feedly is a lot more “optional” than proper file management, even if very helpful
I would say that Feedly is actually innovative in its interface, even if I don’t need most of it
…it still hit an irk in me this morning.
I went to search for something. The above picture shows me searching for “dice1.” That’s not what I searched, initially, [it was “daylight savings time” which glitched it out] but it will do for a demo.
I had to click several things to tell it “just my feeds, please” instead of “Feeds & All Web” and then to unclick the defaults of “Business & Strategy” and “Tech Blogs” as well.
After which, I got the worst search results since Bing was initially launched.
I could only see, nearly fully, the “top result” but not click on it. Every other result is faded out and hidden. In fact, they are not search results at all. They are dummy results slapped behind a “disabled-entries” flag.
I can’t even tell if this is just some sort of hiccup in the system or if they really expect me to upgrade to Pro+ just to be able to search by classifying “search” as “follow” which are two different sorts of tasks.
It for sure has encapsulated what should be a fairly simple task as a “Feedly AI” worthy one. If you go all the way back up to the top, you’ll see the “Feedly AI” tweaked my search options to generate more results…none of which were usable by me. Outside of that, if I search for something in my feeds and there are no results, I want there to be no results. I’m not just idly passing time. I’m trying to use information.
Keep in mind, there used to be a fairly user friendly, intuitive search feature just a little over a year ago. One I am pretty sure wasn’t locked behind the Pro/Pro+ features. I was Pro, then. In fact, I joined Feedly in August (?) 2016 and joined Pro around a month later. And kept it, at the actual ridiculous fee of around $7us/month for a decade.
I should have bolted when they started going more in on Enterprise level tasks rather than just serving a product that worked.
At any rate, spent around an hour researching private and self-hosted type feed readers and began migrating stuff over (including finding a fun glitch where CloudFlare keeps killing some OpenRSS feeds).
Will probably delete my entire Feedly account soon. They can have MBAs using AI models to track awful crypto blogs be their customer base if they want that crowd so badly.
Going Back to Check…it is designed worse than I thought
So I went back before clicking post because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing some obvious checkmark. I might still be missing some check mark, but, I am pretty confident that I am not missing an obvious one.
Some things I learned.
Feedly still brands its search as “Across Your Favorite Sources” on the home screen…
heh, “easily.” “Just fifteen clicks to not get any results! easy!”
…then changes up the language once you get to the search page.
Note that most of those are AI searches rather than just a simple search across data.
Technically you can see THREE of your results, you just have to check them all and save them to a board
Note, you have to believe that the checkbox exist and just mouse over it. The fun thing about “3 articles selected” (and with some testing, it seems to always be three articles returned for a search) is that it means there is always a completely hidden-in-fog article down below for absolutely NO reason since it’s just white, no-display space. They are literally wasting server and browser processing time to show you something that isn’t there. It’s probably something to do with needing extra space to get the proper fade on the gradient. Or just plain madness.
“Yesterday on the stairs, I met a Feedly search result that wasn’t there…”
That’s…just awful. That’s some serious tomfoolery.
Yeah, deleting that account very shortly.
NOTE: I have not tested the app and right now don’t care to test the app. I’d rather just delete than waste any more time on this. Maybe it works as expected, there, but none of these things suggest good things about the future of this product.
I don’t know which is worse, the fact that it assumed I was searching for “DICE” the company and tagged it as a company search OR the fact that it absolutely did not matter since it just did a keyword search anyhow across my feeds. Terrible. ↩︎
Back in the States I consumed a lot of TVP from Betta Foods, Inc. I miss Betta Foods. Chances are, I could do something to ship over here but I also need to find some local replacements for multiple reasons.
Doing some shop arounds, one of the first local-to-EU brands of “soy chunks” to come to my attention was KoRo’s Bio grove sojastukjes, grof [aka, soy chunks, the biggish ones].
At €13.95/kg, the price was reasonable1, but it was hard to tell how big it was at a glance online. You want chunks to be chunky, no? I decided to just order and put them through various tests and recipes.
First, the size test [versus a €.20 coin (I looked but didn’t have a Euro on hand and was already committed to the bit)]:
I did crank up the contrast and played with the brightness a little to try and make the texture pop out. Makes a couple look like they are floating in space [and thanks, phone, for focusing much harder on the coin than the product I’m showing and which is closer to you]. As you can see, average size is fair. Not as chunky as TRS Soya Chunks, which you can find in some local-to-Brussels Asian markets. A bit smaller than I like, but not terribly so.
The specks you see are from the “dust” in the bag. I’ve never minded a few random flakes of extra soya protein, but if you figure you might for whatever reason, just maybe toss them gently in a sieve or some such.
In order to give them a fair test across a few different cooking techniques. Each started with the basic prep: soaking them in water for 30 minutes prior to draining and squeezing out a bit but not too aggressively, then letting sit for a few minutes to reform and settle. I used some MSG, mushroom powder, and other seasonings but mix-and-matched that. And no, none of these have photos because you see how crappy I am taking food photos, above, at least with my cantankerous phone camera.
The four variations were:
A…um, what’s wet-stir-fry called? Like a stir fry but with sauce? That. With some rice vermicelli, veggies, and brussels sprouts in a mushroom sauce.
Deep fry after tossing them in a “Nashville Hot” blend of spices and a small amount of flour/starch on the outside.
A “cream of mushroom” soup with some flat wheat noodles and maybe a too heavy helping of the chunks. The next day the noodles and chunks had absorbed enough of the left over liquid that it was effectively “TVP and Dumplings.”
A soft- and hard-bake version (200C for 35 minutes and 50 minutes).
In all cases, the Taste was Very Fine. If you eat a lot of TVP [textured vegetable protein] and related protein products, you get a bit used to that shelf-stable soya flavor. Some brands embrace it. Some try to cover it up. With KoRo chunks, it is there but softer. These are very receptive to the flavors you add.
I would go so far as to say that if you are sensitive to that dried soya product flavor, these are the ones I’d put in your hands.
In the first three cases, the Texture was Lacking (a bit). This is not to say they had a bad texture, there just wasn’t much there. More akin to a thick noodle or tight dumpling than some of the other soy chunks. The bite was soft and missing that sense of internal fiber that I like by a hair. Compared to Plant Basics Soy Chunks, they have pretty much spot-on identical protein but PB’s has a tad more fiber. I think it might just be the processing.
With the fourth style, baking it it out, the soft-bake had a similar texture to the wet-prep and fried versions. The hard bake, getting them almost corn-nut-like in texture, is where I finally got the feel of the internal workings of the product.
As for Ease of Prep, I’d say they are Just Fine. No more or less harder than other similar sized soy/soya TVP. Well, maybe a little easier. A few, like the TRS mentioned above, are a lot stronger in flavor so you might need to soak those a bit longer than these from KoRo depending on the recipe. Since the KoRo ones respond more to added flavor, you don’t have to over-season to get the full effect.
To conclude, while I would like a slightly bigger “chunk” and a chunkier mouth-feel, these are Quite Good and might hit the spot for folks who have been a little reluctant to try such soy food options because of the flavor or preparation.
If you don’t know the rough size of 1kg of TVP, it’s a pretty big amount. You can make a fairly chunky soup with just 100g of the stuff. Even with dishes completely centered on just soy chunks, you are looking at around 30-50 servings per bag. ↩︎
One of my promises to myself for 2026 — which admittedly feels a bit “puny” with everything going on — was to redraw from most cloud-based storage. Part of the broad “clean up!” phase of my mid-life crisis…
Leave social media
Leave [most] third party cloud-based storage [Google Drive is something of an exception, for now, and I have other specialty storage to handle certain accounts and servers]
Reduce streaming subscriptions to a minimum
Generally stop paying for services I can do myself with some sweat/tears
…which, when written like that, does sound a bit like I’m turning into a paranoid old codger. I am, that. But also, it gives me a challenge. Something to chew upon.
Today was OneDrive. I had some variation of the Office 365 subscription— which is now something like Office 365 Copilot — where I had apps, storage space, improvements to email, and upgrades to “freemium” MS stuff like Copilot++ Extreme Teams Plus™ or whatever branding makes the shareholders happy. I don’t know. The fact that I never knew what kind of value I could possible be getting from most of it is part of my problem.
Which is part of your problem, MS people.
Any Microsoft folks seeing this, that’s my feedback. Help me to feel like I am getting much more than $100 out of such a thing if you want me to keep it. Make it feel like you are giving me the sweetest deal ever. You ain’t a charity. You ain’t a college student just working your way up through the world. Impress me.
I got said annual subscription a few years back when I got this computer and continued, like a good little puppet, to pay the $100ish annual fee for all these many months. As we were prepping a move to the EU, I cut out most of my annual/recurring payments to stuff that wasn’t absolutely necessary, keeping only a few with some of those few on the eventual chopping block. This included my Office 365 [insert other branding terms, here] subscription though I figured I’d keep it if I wanted it after all.
If and only if I felt I was getting my value.
In the interim time, I set up more of my own storage, switched most/all documents to LibreOffice [etc], and started handling my email largely “in house.” In short, I absolutely did not need to pay a trillion dollar company $100 to do those things for me. Which left a problem.
There were roughly 500gig of files on my computer tied to OneDrive. Not paying meant my OneDrive was stuffed full to the brim — 9000% over the limit, the warnings said — and stuff was throwing errors. I logged in and started to delete out my files from the online side and then went…
…because while I doubted it, there was a non-zero chance that I was about to trigger Microsoft deleting half a terabytes of files off my PC. Good files. Stuff like my pdf copies of Outgunned and my Two Steps from Hell music. That would have made me sad having to redownload all that.
I stopped, looked into it, and figured out that I had to go through OneDrive’s settings and then stop syncing each of the major folders. One at a time. Which takes…time. It moves the folders around and changes the links and stuff. A few folders with only a gig or two worth of files might be quick but my main Documents folder which had 300gig alone took the better part of an hour. Then sit there in fear that it was simply going to delete those files outright [Ron Howard voice: it did not].
That’s before I had to go through and update some bookmarks, rebuild a music library in Foobar2000, and related things. Piece by piece.
Doug’s Note: There are walkthroughs already written for this process. I should have taken screenshots on the way down but didn’t think about it until later.
After I did all that, and dealt with all the errors, I then “resynced” and that deleted the files off my online account. I then deleted out a few more bits and then unlinked my account from OneDrive and then exited OneDrive.
Which has twice tried re-opening and which prompted Windows Defender to lecture me about the importance of having online backup, etc.
My primary annoyance since then is that the Default Library Folders — Documents, Pictures, Downloads, Videos, Desktop — are now put into kind of janky library containers in the “Libraries” tree at the bottom of the left-hand panel and there doesn’t seem to be a way to build a more functional version of that towards the top to match the older style.
In other words, paying for OneDrive put all those files into a convenient place in the panel which doesn’t seem possible, without possibly editing the registry, to replicate. That’s…madness, right? That’s purposely nerfing their own operating system to sell a side product.
Hey, looking for a book to read? Let me just suggest something. Probably totally unrelated to this whole experience:
I ended up just making “Quick Access” links to those folders, a few others, though it seems like Windows 11 keeps wanting to trim those out.
All this has made me really miss Linux all the more.
BUT, sometimes those foggy mornings have a way of trapping the smells and scents of absolutely everything at around head height. The fumes from the airplanes, the smell of pollen, the decay of grass.
This morning, I woke up, was getting out of bed, started to smell something…awful. For a few seconds, I got really angry at the cats for whatever the hell they had just did…and then decided to investigate.
Opened the front door and that’s what I realized just how well insulated our house is in general. It was worse outside. And there was that sound. Not unlike the scene in Dumb & Dumber where Jeff Daniels’ character tries to take a not quite stealth poo. If you don’t know the scene, just look at this GIF and imagine the sound:
Like a hundred tubes of cottage cheese being forcibly evacuated. Just a long phhlllbbttlllttt sound that would definitely be followed by a green fog in a 90s cartoon. It was rank.
There was a tractor in the field around 30m from our front door spraying a very organic fertilizer on the field.
The end result was a smell not unlike a port-a-potty left in the summer sun near the kind of race track where they serve egregious amounts of cheese and red meat.
I absolutely adore farmers and have no real issue with the process, but the mix of that being sprayed on a day when all smells are locked as tight as a 16-year-old girl’s diary…
It was a rough couple of hours until it dissipated.
While I play around on several games on NYTimes, the game that I most enjoy remains Connections. And today, Connections hit the milestone of 1000 Puzzles [of which I seem to have played 587].
I was curious how they were going to celebrate, and we got a cute little message and a unique object:
Didn’t have too much trouble beating and getting the Reverse Rainbow [Purple, Blue, Green, Yellow in that order]: solving from hardest to easy category. To be honest, though, I just went for a category with the cute little Connections icon. It just happened to be, well, I guess already spoiled it: Purple.
All in all, the growing bloat and badges and all that are starting to detract from me enjoying even the regular rotation of NYT Games, but’s been fun playing this for the past year or two.
Even if I don’t make it to 2000 [or 1300, at this rate], just wanted to swing by and say “congrats” to the team behind it.
A friend on a certain Discord server shared with me a mod that puts Kamen Rider into Skyrim, and so I realized if I wanted to have a “You Had Me At HENSHIN!” gif I was going to have to make it myself, so I did:
Now I’m sharing it for everyone in the world to use, meaning me.
“What’s the mod?,” you might be rightly asking. I have no idea. I don’t play Skyrim…but I do adore some Kamen Rider.
