I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

u r absolutely right I have SO many complaints about Windows omg.

For anyone who'd like to follow along, I'm gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they're more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I'll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.

For the Device Setup

"OOBE" stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that'll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don't have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here's how you get to it:

Now when you're brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don't have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.

Group Policies

You don't have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can't do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.

I'm gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this

It'll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c

Start Recommendations

In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the "Turn off" ones bumped to the top.

Here's what you should set:

Windows Spotlight

Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content

Cortana

In the side menu, this one's back at the top under Computer Configuration. You're gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search

News and Interests

In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.

Microsoft Account Login Nudges

When you don't use a Microsoft account they'll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can "get the most out of your experience" *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let's just open up the regular settings.

Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ﾉ u are done.

Group policies are kind of a rabbit hole so while there is a lot more you could change or read into, for your own sanity's sake I would advise against it and say call it a day lol

This is all extremely good information, thank you very much for the addition!

I endorse this as an IT technician. I do this to every new Win11 device I set up.

As a bonus, run Chris Titus Tech's debloat tool on it.

It allows you to add tools, remove/disable shitty parts of windows, and easily change some settings. My default is running the preset for a desktop/laptop and applying security update settings, but there are so many options to customize. I used it on my personal laptop.

TIL that the Audubon Society has released official statements on the difference between a "bird", a "birb", and a "borb", featuring such gems as:

Ink Artwork by Endre Penovác

If I was slightly better at archery and slightly less afraid of intestinal parasites, Charlie would have been a really excellent hunting dog.

He's a Mdium-sized Rez Dog which is to say he's mostly sighthound and pointer but he's a perfectly classically shaped hunting dog. He looks like he modeled the dogs on grecian pottery or hopped out of one of those 1700's paintings of stags at bay that would hang in the smoking rooms of the guys that funded the pillaging of the Americas but I digress. Sometimes I feel bad that I can't indulge him in what he was bred to do, because he loves scent-tracking and flushing geese and he damn near got me arrested in Grand Teton National park after he chewed through his leash and went haring off after a pronghorn antelope for half a mile at roughly mach fuck before the damn thing finally crossed a river and I was able to grab Charlie because he doesn't like getting his feetsies wet.

But today, we were on a walk in the local open space on a moderately muddy trail with fresh horse tracks in it. As in, we parked next to the horse trailer. The horse itself is actually perfecty visible about half a mile ahead of us.

But Charlie saw the tracks and went "I'm gonna scent-track this shit. I'm gonna hunt this motherfucking ungulate down by smell alone. I am truly the Nimrod of Dogs."

Full Instinct takeover happens. Head down, nose to the ground, pulling on his martingale hard enough that I could have hooked him up to a sled, stopping and dramatically pointing at road apples and bits of nibbled grass until I acknowledge that he has Identified An Article. He is having a GREAT time doing this, so I'm just there, looking at the horse that we are slowly catching up to and going. "Yeah! You got it! Good Job!"

But I'm also walking Herschel, who is a Corgi and he loves Activities, so he sees his big brother doing this and goes "OH BOY! AN ACTIVITY!!" and is trying his darndest to copy what Charlie's doing. Except he doesn't have a damn clue what is happening so he's slapping his livestock-bullying instincts on these horse tracks as hard as he can and just. Barking at horse shit to alert me to it's existence. Stalk-posing at the gras Charlie is pointing at, in case it jumps up and tries to run off. I think he thought perhaps they were herding an Invisible Cow and BY GOD it wasn't gonna run lose on his watch. Wherever it was.

Eventually, we get to about 100 feet behind the horse, which is an older Pinto out for a nice stroll and some fresh air and at this distance, Charlie decides that we're probably close enough for my dumb, relatively sensorily deprived human ass to see the horse, but just to make sure, he POINTS.

He's so fucking good at pointing. Perfectly still. Perfectly straight back and tail. Head up and ears forward. Front paw up and at the ready. Little diamond shape of back hackles up in excitement. Determined, unblinking lazer-eyed stare at the target. He looks like a very carnivorous hood ornament, the distilled essence of Hunting Dog, in a perfect scuptural pose. It's downright artistic. Inspiring even

Herschel is DELIGHTED, because he might not understand scent-tracking but he DID learn how to Point from Charlie and copies his pose exactly.

It has almost exactly the opposite emotional effect.

A Pointing Corgi is the most canine clownshoes nonsense possible. Herschel's pose is flawless of course, he learned from the Master, but the perfectly straight back looks funny as hell with a perfectly straight nub of a tail. His head is up and his gaze is locked but instead of predatory intent his face is EXTREMELY excited about this new Giant Friend and thier giant ankles he can barely wait to launch himself at and his face is about 80% Big Dumb Corgi Grin. Instead of Charlie's minute, even delicate hackles, Herschel has a full-body length doggy mowhawk, which is a good three inches long at the peaks over his shoulders and hips, ruining the sleek image and making him look like he just came out of the dryer and is still full of static electricity.

And, of course.

The Paw.

The Front Paw is up and at the ready- he and Charlie are both right-pawed apparently- and on his little stubby Corgi legs it looks like a toddler trying to use a smartphone. He thinks he's doing exactly what the Big Dogs do, but he only has these tiny feets.

Anyway, that's how they made a Jogger laugh so hard she ran into a garbage can.

@inkytrinket-irii @devious-deeds-indeed OH MY GOD THIS IS HILARIOUS

YOU CANT JUST SAY THIS SHIT AND THEN NOT PROVIDE PHOTOS

See the tricky part is that I have to walk two dogs at the same time, and have only the two hands with which to hold the leashes, which makes live photography difficult, but perhaps you can enjoy this artistic rendering of the situation:

This is just how it was. …Though Neil seems to have had more mastodons on his case than I had.

…I remember having had to hand-knap a meme or two before they finally automated that. (Took them forever, and previously you had to be running the right version of PHP…)

your desire to write the same trope over and over again

my desire to read the same trope over and over again

Captain America’s Ultimate pick up line.

Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.

It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.

To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.

This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.

Join me below, if you would.

“Don’t wait until the last minute to do your assignments!”

listen. I don’t. But I am always trapped in a vicious cycle.

And the only thing that breaks this cycle is the dread of an imminent deadline

Very ADHD

To The Person Who Walked Past The Window - Jordan Bolton

My first book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ is now available to pre-order! Get it here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky

Other classics from American computer jargon include “Error ID ten-plus” (ID10+) and “PEBCAK error” (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard)

screaming out loud saturday

There's a viral video circulating from the Fort Worth Zoo, of two keepers who ended up in a habitat at the same time as a silverback gorilla. Spoiler for good news: neither the humans nor the gorilla got hurt. It's a bad situation that ended extremely well, and that's why I want to talk about it.

The audio for this video is mostly someone praying loudly, so if you need to turn the audio off to watch it, you won't miss anything relevant. If you don't want to watch it, here's the summary: it starts with a keeper running around the corner into the main exhibit, pursued by a large male gorilla. She is quickly able to get into a doorway at the back of the exhibit, but does not completely close the door because the gorilla is standing across from her, watching. He eventually moves off to the right hand side of the exhibit, where we can see a keeper is trapped in the corner at the front. She was trying to move towards the exit as he moved to the right, and she stops, standing very still behind a tree, while he stays along the far right wall. They stay like that for a minute, and then the gorilla runs to the front right corner, and the keeper is able to run to the door in the back of the exhibit and get to safety.

Let's start with basic information. Even though it's just going viral now, this video is from October of 2023. It was taken not by a guest, but by the zoo security officer responding to the situation. Hmmm, seems like he maybe should have been doing something else during that situation, instead of than taking a phone video. It's going viral now because the guy (who is no longer employed at the zoo) decided to post it on TikTok for his five minutes of fame. This guy immediately started giving all sorts of media interviews, answering questions like "why no tranquilizers" inappropriately, making memes out of his own video, generally distasteful shit.

Zoo spokesperson Avery Elander gave a public statement that "thankfully, there was no physical contact between keepers and gorilla, and all staff and animals are safe." A comment from the zoo has also indicated that the incident was due to keeper error. (As opposed to, for instance, something in the fencing breaking.) According to the guy who posted the video, a lock was left unsecured and the gorilla was able to open the door to the habitat. I don't know if I buy it, and again, this just... is probably why he doesn't have a job anymore. By sharing that detail - real or not - he places a ton of public scrutiny and blame on that keeper team. (If that's what happened, I can promise you it will have been dealt with internally.) He also was nice enough to say he wouldn't name the women in the video... but verified they're still staffers at the zoo... which means they're eminently identifiable! Excuse me while I ragequit for a second.

So there's two reasons I wanted to talk about this. The first is to make sure it is well known that this guy is purposefully and intentionally exploiting the worst day of someone's life for media attention. Their lives were in danger, and he's using it for fame. His name is in the media articles - I'm not going to share it because he doesn't deserve that attention. The second reason, though, is because this video is a masterclass on how to survive if you end up sharing space with a gorilla. Every zoo person I've spoken to or seen comment on the video is so, so impressed with how the keepers handled themselves.

The gorilla in this video is 34-year-old Elmo. All apes in AZA zoos are managed in protected contact, so keepers are supposed to be separated from them by a barrier at all times. The zookeepers were in the habitat putting out a mid-day meal when he got out. Watching the video, you can see he's not actively being aggressive towards them - he's not making threat displays or trying to approach them. Mostly, Elmo seems like he doesn't know what is going on and he's kinda freaked out about it. (This is confirmed in the zoo's press statement, too). The staff stayed calm, and importantly, watched and waited to see how he'd move and act.

The zoo did say one thing, though, that's a bit misleading. In one article, their press person I quote as saying “In general, gorillas are considered the “gentle giants” of the great ape species.” Just because this may be true in comparison to other great ape species doesn't meant gorilla aren't still incredibly dangerous. This type of messaging always worries me, because I think it leads people to misunderstand the risks of being close to megafauna. Gorilla are extremely strong animals, and their social norms/behaviors are very different from that of humans. That's why it's such a big deal any time people end up in gorilla habitats, and why sometimes in those circumstances lethal measures have to be taken to protect human life.

These keepers are incredibly lucky to be unharmed. These women stayed safe specifically because they're trained professionals who knew how to act around gorilla, they knew this particular animal well, and they'd learned the escapes from the exhibit just in case this ever happened. We should applaud them for their cool heads and quick thinking.

As for the guy who posted the video? As a colleague put it, may he always step on a Lego.

The keepers did everything right- they must have a really good sense of the big guy's body language, because it looks like they were taking really good care not to excite him any more than he already is. This could have been an extremely bad situation, and the fact that the security guy just stood there and filmed it and then put it on TikTok...

well, I think he deserves harsher than stepping on a Lego. Blacklisted from the industry seems appropriate because even if he wasn't going to use tranqs, the fact that he pulled out his phone and started filming means that he was willing to be distracted in an extremely risky situation. By filming instead of giving his undivided attention and being ready to react, he made a dangerous situation worse!

What the security guy should have been doing: keeping the public calm, getting them out of there. Commotion from people at viewing windows absolutely could have upset Elmo and exacerbated the danger of the situation. (This is actually what happened with Harambe - witnesses noted that the screams of the people watching spooked him.) He also should have been keeping an eye on the situation and reporting back to management as needed - for instance, on if the situation devolved and they might have needed to call up the dart/gun team.

The responding security officer would not have been the person using tranquilizers. Zoos have specifically trained DART teams (dangerous animal response teams) that respond to situations like this. There's a lot of complicated factors to using tranquilizers: they don't knock an animal down immediately, and they can be come more dangerous when aggravated by being hit with a dart before it takes effect; tranquilizers have to be dosed for the animal's body weight and must be prepared by vet staff; tranquilizers and dart guns and also actual guns are always stored safely and require some time to access (e.g. in safes). The first person on the scene, even if they were part of the dart team, needs to stay and monitor what's happening.

There's always safety protocols for all of this stuff. Zoos put a ton of time into contingency planning and doing drills for possible adverse events. This dude did not follow any of it.

I'm gonna reblog with some videos of people speaking various American Indian/indigenous American languages, because I think most people don't even know what they sound like. Not to be judgement of that—just, you know, I think people who want to be informed should know what they sound like!

Former president of the Navajo Nation, Joe Shirley, giving an address in Navajo.

Nora Marks Dauenhauer telling a story, "Raven and Deer", in Tlingit.

Albert White Hat, a well known Lakota teacher, translator, and activist, speaking Lakota.

This YouTube user, Grahm Wiley-Camacho, has uploaded a bunch of videos in Colville Okanagan Salish, but I'm not sure who all the speakers are.

Multiple people speaking Cherokee and talking about revitalization of the language.

This guy speaking Yucatec Maya (guest starring: adorable small child).

There's a ton of material in Greenlandic on YouTube, but it's hard for me to find, because the titles and other metadata are also in Greenlandic! Of course, this represents a huge win for the language, since this is a biproduct of being in vibrant use by a community of speakers. Greenlandic has been an official language of the territory of Greenland since 1979, and the sole official language since 2009.

Here are some proceedings of the Greenlandic parliament, the Inatsisartut, which are conducted in Greenlandic.

Here is a radio show in Greenlandic, from Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa.

And here is a video of Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam, Greenlandic MP in the Danish parliament (Folketing), causing some upset by speaking in Greenlandic instead of Danish.

Conversation between Loran Thompson and Francis Boots in Mohawk.

Interview with Yup'ik elder Raphael Jimmy about qaneryaraq "words of wisdom/right living".

holy shit is this gorgeous.

I've reblogged a movable type Douyin originally by the same user, too, so I'm just going to use that post as a template. It looked so familiar that this time, I just went to his Douyin, user 山白 (Douyin username @\shanbai2023), and found it:

2.33 xfO:/ T@Y.mq 10/01 象棋起源于中国，是一种古老的棋类游戏# 新农人计划2024 # 乡村守护人 # 谁不播咱湖南好 https://v.douyin.com/iYPxuD5d/ 复制此链接，打开Dou音搜索，直接观看视频！

The above is the full text that the share button yields that I'm yet again too lazy to clean up. Ignore the last sentence—pasting the URL into the browser works just as well.