My two goals this semester were to draw as much concept art as my professors would let me, and to get better with perspective. It was a lot of work (and honestly pretty nerve wracking), but I'm honestly pretty happy with the results!
Te lo has buscado Flunfis
this is, fundamentally, what a greek tragedy is
The best part of this is that the other string is clearly re-tied after breaking, so this furry nitwit didn't learn a single thing from his previous attempt.
PROPAGANDA UNDER THE CUT: [SPOILERS AND POSSIBLE TRIGGERS AHEAD]
they should invent a way to read in bed that's comfortable
its rude to reblog things from people you arent mutuals with fyi. :/
💀 my brother in christopher
Congrats to anon for being this astoundingly wrong.
L O L
PSA if some people think this is how tumblr dot com works, it ain't.
Please reblog everything, the things that bring you joy, the things that make you cry, the things that are so cringe that you NEED 10+ other people to also receive psychic damage from witnessing it
Reblog your interests, reblog your own posts, reblog posts from your mutuals and strangers you will never meet again. That's the romance of tumblr! that's the romatic dawn! Reblog! Reblog! REBLOG!
If we all only reblogged from mutuals this site would die
Following you is so funny because I basically agree with a lot of your political stances, but then you say things like "under communism you won't have meat or fruit or family" like that's going to be a compelling pitch and not a US cartoon version of life under communism
i personally think 'you will have less bananas and hamburgers but you will never be in danger of eviction and homelessness or have to pay medical bills and will be able to spend less time working and have more control over the work that you do' is a pretty compelling pitch for most people. Banana Product is simply not the most pressing concern in most people's lives
AJSJJDKSJD THE QUILTING SHOW MY GMA WANTS TO GO TO HAS A “FREE TICKET FOR UNDER 30s” IM!!!!! that’s SO funny ?? They wanna encourage young ppl SO much to get into quilting
what i imagine the quilting convention back room looks like
this is happening tmrw im soooo excited!!! my gma is bringing her walking stick for age related reasons but also so she can quote “knock those old ladies OUT of my way”
y’all it was so much fun, there were so many Incredible quilts there, i had an awesome time. here are some photos i took of the quilts, forgive me for how crooked most of them are, i took them v quickly bc my gma was getting tired
i wanna shout out this last one—ITS ALL THREAD PAINTING. THE WHOLE THING. it’s. i should have got a close up of it but it’s all thread painted it’s so so cool
& yet MORE quilts…
i wanna shout out the top picture — the skull quilt was so cool first of all & it’s ALSO the artists FIRST QUILT??? it was so incredibly cool & detailed I rly loved it. i also wanna point out the last quilt here, all of these flowers are applique & i had so much trouble keeping from TOUCHING it (which ur not allowed to do ofc). it was so gorgeous. the close up square above it is from the same quilt. just wow!
Newly released footage from Gaza has shown a two man team infiltrating an armored column via tunnel and employing locally produced "tandem 85" rockets with "Yasin" launchers (a local hybrid of RPG-2/RPG-7 launchers) against what appears to be a "Namer" APC, only 120 of which have entered service so far so every destruction or disabling means another unit forced to fall back on the extrmely outdated M113
One thing to note is the Namir has a very sophisticated active defense system known as "Trophy", which detects an incoming projectile and launches a countermeasure to destroy the incoming warhead before it can impact the tank.
This has proven vulnerable to the completely unforseen Palestinian tactic of "Bring two RPGs."
Do you think they're saying it was an ATGM so their guys won't get scared that "the best protected APC in the world" is vulnerable to attack by rockets made from scrap metal?
No one should die because they can't afford to go to the hospital. Medicare for All
Hey there! As social media becomes more and more inhospitible for the local user, I wanted to post some useful/fun links to just about anything I can think of! Enjoy! Also, if you'd like an invite to the P!rated Games discord, lmk! ^_^
I AM CURRENTLY STILL UPDATING THIS POST AND I WILL REBLOG IT WHEN I ADD TO IT! Feel free to comment things I've missed, I'm sure there's way more than this came from!
EDIT 1: Here's the link to the google doc! Link it on your webrings and sites! Share on twitter! <3 be free my little links!
CURLIE: THE COLLECTOR OF URLs (Curlie strives to be the largest human-edited directory of the Web. You can save sites and create your own mini webring!)
Internet Archive (A collection of over 818 Billion websites, books, movies, music, and more. Hosts the Wayback Machine, which can be used to access a multitude of sites, given they were indexed in time.)
Wiby (Human submission search engine for older webrings, as well as a how-to guide on how to develop your own search engine)
Unicode Text Converter (Easy way to make your text illegible to Google but be warned, it will make screen readers malfuction)
Embed Responsively (Easily convert links and embeds to work responsively within your site - perfect for neocities!)
Generator Land (Generate a list or prompt for just about anything!)
GifCities (Part of the Internet Archive, a special project done as part of the 20th anniversary in an effort to save data from GeoCities. Find a gif for just about anything!)
Animated Images (Another gif repository, though this one is easier to search and includes small animations.)
Gifs-Paradise (Another gif repository. I swear I collect these. Searchable and categorized.)
ASCII Art Archive (Database of ASCII Art, also known as text art)
Christopher Johnson's ASCII Art Collection (Another, arguably larger, ASCII Art database)
MelonLand (A web project and online arts community that celebrates homepages, virtual worlds, the world-wide-web and the digital lives that all netizins share, here at the dawn of the digital age. See their thoughts and the WEB REVIVAL they're starting.)
Sadgrl Webrings (Webrings brought to us by Sadgrl.Online - 60+ different ones to be exact) and Sadgrl Links (70+ links just like the ones in this post)
Districts at Neocities (Remember neighborhoods on Geocities? Imagine that but for Neocities!)
Neocities Banners (Banners from all across neocities. Blinkies, banners and more leading all over the web. Mostly 88x31, though there are bigger ones too. Technically counts as a webring.)
Blinkies.cafe (Site for blinkies where you can even make your own! I get most of my blinkies here and off DeviantArt.)
88x31 Collection (Possibly the largest collection I've seen for 88x31 buttons)
90's Cursor Effects (Want a funky cursor for your blog or website? Wanna be able to realtime preview what cursors would look like? Come get some code!)
The Malware Museum (Interact with malware and viruses from the 80s and 90s through emulation! No nasty virus interactions needed :D )
Library Genesis - LIBGEN (Scientific journals - dedicated to archiving every science journal and their articles in existence.)
Information Mesh (A web platform celebrating the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web that explores social, technical, cultural and legal facts throughout different interactive timelines.)
Web Design Museum (Over 2,000 sorted websites showing web design trends from '96 to '06.)
The History of the Web (A twice monthly newsletter about web history, and the incredible people that built it. Goes from 1989 to present.)
Field Guide to Web Accessibility (Principles and applications to every day web scenarios in order to make the web a more friendly place!)
CARI - Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (an online community and collective association of researchers and designers dedicated to carrying on the important work of categorizing "consumer aesthetics" from the late midcentury, when work on the subject somewhat trailed off, through today.)
The Eye (Archive consisting of 140TB of books, websites, games, software, or anything else you can really think of.)
The Uncensored Library (A project from Reporters without Borders, where they use a loophole using Minecraft to distribute information.)
National Gallery of Art Public Domain (The National Gallery of Art has an open access policy for images of works of art in their permanent collection which the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are available for download free of charge for any use, whether commercial or non-commercial.)
Library of Congress Public Domain (Features items from the Library's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use.)
Public Domain Review (an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.)
New York Public Library Public Domain (Our digitized collections are available as machine-readable data: over one million records for you to search, crawl and compute.)
Official articles from NASA (PubSpace is NASA's designated public access repository. It is a collection of NASA-funded scholarly publications within the STI Repository, aiming to increase access to federally funded research in accordance with NASA Public Access Policy.)
Universal Hint System (Wanna get some vague help for an older video game without getting spoiled? Check out these awesome hints!)
Smithsonian Open Access (Download, share, and reuse millions of 2D and 3D digital items from their 21 museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.)
Instructables (Wanna know how to make just about anything? Check here!)
QZAP Zine Archive (Archive of LGBT+ Zines, began in 2003 with zines dating back all the way to the 1970s. NSFW AT TIMES, BROWSE AT YOUR OWN RISK.)
P!racy Masterpost (Tumblr-based masterpost of game piracy, last updated 2021. A bit old but some of the stuff there is still good. If this link breaks, please contact me.)
P!rated Games Megathread (masterpost created by r/P!ratedGames includes required components as well as anything else you need. NOTE: PLEASE HAVE SOME SORT OF PROTECTION WHEN NAVIGATING THIS SITE)
Geocities Gallery (A website hosting a working archive for many abandoned Geocities Sites.)
Snipplr (Code Snippet repository. Great for coding issues.)
GeoCities (Archived) (Great for searching ancient webrings for gifs and website ideas. Not so great for downloads.)
Freeware Guide (Archived) (The Freeware-Guide died sometime in 2021 [we think March] but it's still full of VERY valuable information. Links are broken pretty much all the way through, but the names of software as well as what they do can be useful in finding them elsewhere thru some google searching)
Peelopaalu (Where I got a good handful of these links - AND THERE'S MORE!!!)
The Simple Site (More links to so much more cool stuff!)
Untitled - Paint (An in-browser version of classic Microsoft Paint!)
KidPix (In-browser version of classic KidPix for the public domain!)
Pixel Logic - A Guide to Pixel Art (Comprehensive guide to making cool art for $10 USD, updated semi-frequently and you get all new versions for free)
SAI - Bootlegged (A version of SAI with a multitude of brushes and textures pre-installed. Quite literally the only thing I use to draw aside from Clip Studio Paint.)
Stripe Generator (Need some easy stripes for an art piece? Can't be bothered to try and space stripes evenly? This is for you!)
Photopea (Free online photo editor supporting files for Adobe Photoshop, XCF, Sketch App, Adobe XD, and CorelDRAW, as well as many more!)
blender (A FOREVER free and Open Source software for 3D Modeling, full of tutorials and assets. I feel like most people don't know it's completely free to play with)
Vertex Meadow (A web-browser tool that renders 2D images as explorable 3D terrain. With it you can create detailed and unusual 3D environments to explore using a 2D paint-program-like interface.)
OpenGameArt (Need art for your game but you're not an artist? Consider checking here first [or just hire a real artist looking for work on here!])
BandLab (Social music platform that enables creators to make music and share their creative process with musicians and fans. Completely free with an option to set up stripe where you get 100% OF PROFITS. Available for apple/android/desktop)
JummBox (Free online beat-maker with a very simple interface that runs on your browser)
Mydora (Mydora is a continuous streaming player that gives you a deep dive into the lost archives of Myspace Music, based on some recovered data called the Dragon Hoard, with some additional metadata (most notably the locations and genres) from a different scan of Myspace conducted back in 2009. Contains 490,000+ songs, only a fraction of what was wiped out.)
Radiooooo (A place where people are able to play hit songs from the decade of their choosing from whatever country they wish.)
WFMU (Independent freeform radio broadcasting. Currently ongoing.)
Gnoosic (A sort-of music search engine that finds you songs/bands based off of your music taste.)
Khinsider (3.1 TB worth of video game soundtracks)
Radio.garden (Listen to thousands of radio stations all around the world.)
FrogLand (The purpose of Frogland is to show that the Internet can indeed provide a wealth of useful information and still be fun. Mainly, this site is dedicated to the many teachers out there who are finding new uses for the Internet as a tool for educating youngsters. Hopefully, it will inspire some young minds to find new interest in herpetology, biology, and environmental issues...not to mention providing some inspiration for young future computer "wizzes"! No longer active but still useful.)
Windows 98 icon Viewer (Want clear jpgs of all the Windows 98 symbols and icons? They're all here!)
GifyPet (Create your own embeded pet that people can play with and feed when they visit your page! See my version HERE [only works on desktop tho])
Ultimate Mushroom (Like the idea of picking mushrooms in your area but no idea what to look for? Check out this info hub!)
Gif Gallery (Another gif repositiory, only sorted by being numbered 1-100,000. Fun and silly, not so much useful unless you're looking for random gifs. Part of the MelonLand Webring)
Interesting DOS Programs (A host of DOS programming, guides and links.)
Internet Archive: MS-DOS Games (8,000 games right in your web browser! Your browser can play DOOM!)
Tiled Backgrounds (Need some small jpegs for easy website bg tiling? Browse this collection sorted by color.)
cOOl & EMO tEXt cOnVERTer xXX (Flashing warning. Wanna type like you're in the 2000s? Need a funny Green Day lyric as a caption? This is probably the best place for you.)
0x40 (Flashing Warning. Anime images synced with music. Fun for parties, lol)
WebGL Fluid Simulation (In browser fluid simulator, great for art backgrounds and desktop wallpapers.)
Flashpoint (The biggest collection of preserved Flash Games and Animations)
NCase (Free games and open source projects from Nicky [THESE ARE REALLY COOL AND FUN, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND])
Your World of Text (A huge interactive text doc that anyone can add to anonymously.)
Text To Speech (TTS in more than 30 languages and over 180 voices.)
ASCII Art Generator (Make ASCII Art from any image.)
Petit Tube (Random Youtube videos with less than 10 views)
Noclip Website (Noclip around various video game maps in your browser!)
Monster Mash (Create and animate some monsters in browser! You can also download their files.)
i think so much of that knee-jerk intellectual need to rationalize what's going on, to bring it down to quantifiable "ok so like what am i supposed to do about it? are you saying i, progressive liberal, am responsible for this? are you saying i, really sweet zionist who donates to UNICEF, am complicit in genocide? are you saying i, american, am a colonizer deserving of death?" is just a complete shutdown at the thought of sitting with guilt and sadness, a fear of recognizing what's happening to palestinians as something that is happening to real humans like you or me, because it is not something easy to sit with
the truth is personally, as an egyptian, i feel complicit in the genocide in gaza. as a bystander, i feel complicit. i feel a deep grief i will not be able to unseat for the rest of my life. it's okay to feel a degree of shame to be alive in a world that allows this to happen. i don't understand how it's possible not to and i feel impatient with the need to be defensive. i am not defensive of this feeling. i feel like we are letting an entire population down, beyond my nationality, beyond the palestinians i know and love in my personal life, beyond anything else, as a human being i feel this because people are dying right in front of us in the most systemic, bureaucratic and barbaric method imaginable and we are helpless to stop it. so why would i be defensive? just accept the feeling and move on. there's a genocide happening.
Hey, Tumblr. You like non-stereotypical depictions of autism? What about ✨ neurodivergent protagonists ✨ ? Yes? What about asexual neurodivergent protagonists that go on chapters-long rants about their special interests? You want gay characters that are important to the plot too? Then I've got the book for you! The author is gay!!! American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, is
“No adult should be telling children that they’re safe, it is creepy as hell.”
Transphobes act like they’re “protecting kids” and then say shit like this completely unprompted and unironically.
Tennant?
TENNANT?
She's coming for David Tennant??
OK BUT REBLOGGING BECAUSE OF THIS:
The pin reads "You are safe with me."
So if anyone out there STILL wants to hang on to that H@rry-P*tter-adjacent username
Why did she change her name from Kellie-Jay Keen to Posie Parker? Is she trying to confuse people into thinking she's actress Parker Posey?
Anyone who supports ether kellie-jay keen otherwise know as poise Parker and JK Rowling needs to get off my dash and stop fallowing me.
It doesn't even refer to children in any way! It's from the Gayprideshop.co.uk and it looks like this.
What a stupid fucking maneuver. Graham Lineham lost his agent, his marriage, and his career after making the same accusations against Tennant for wearing a "Leave Trans Kids Alone" t-shirt and this random transphobe thinks she can make a swing based on literally nothing at all? Good fucking luck.
i would like to also point out that this is exactly why people are being told to stop supporting jk rowling financially, and to stop supporting her work entirely. jk rowling has some actual powerful influence, both politically and monetarily. if she can pay for legal fees of other people when they get sued for libel for claiming LGBT+ allies are all pedophiles*, then this is an example of how she can be a very real threat to LGBT+ and trans people especially.
*not saying this is what actually happened as i don't know what those legal fees they mentioned she paid were actually for, but it still demonstrates her financial power.
People occasionally suggest separating art from artist, but that really only applies if the author doesn't profit off their works anymore. Like, Lovecraft was a racist bastard, but he's dead and so can't use the money from his books to further a racist agenda. Rowling is alive and uses her money for shit like this. And so I think the solution is simple. People can be Harry Potter fans again when Rowling is dead.
Hi.
This is literally my job.
Lots of people are buying computers for school right now or are replacing computers as their five-year-old college laptop craps out so here's the standard specs you should be looking for in a (windows) computer purchase in August 2023.
PROCESSOR
You can get away with a Ryzen 5 but an intel i3 should be an absolute last resort. You want at least an intel i5 or a Ryzen 7 processor. The current generation of intel processors is 13, but anything 10 or newer is perfectly fine. DO NOT get a higher performance line with an older generation; a 13th gen i5 is better than an 8th gen i7. (Unfortunately I don't know enough about ryzens to tell you which generation is the earliest you should get, but staying within 3 generations is a good rule of thumb)
RAM
If you don't have at least 8GB RAM on a modern computer it's going to be very, very slow. Ideally you want a computer with at least 16GB, and it's a good idea to get a computer that will let you add or swap RAM down the line (nearly all desktops will let you do this, for laptops you need to check the specs for Memory and see how many slots there are and how many slots are available; laptops with soldered RAM cannot have the memory upgraded - this is common in very slim laptops)
STORAGE
Computers mostly come with SSDs these days; SSDs are faster than HDDs but typically have lower storage for the same price. That being said: SSDs are coming down in price and if you're installing your own drive you can easily upgrade the size for a low cost. Unfortunately that doesn't do anything for you for the initial purchase.
A lot of cheaper laptops will have a 128GB SSD and, because a lot of stuff is stored in the cloud these days, that can be functional. I still recommend getting a bit more storage than that because it's nice if you can store your music and documents and photos on your device instead of on the cloud. You want to be able to access your files even if you don't have internet access.
But don't get a computer with a big HDD instead of getting a computer with a small SSD. The difference in speed is noticeable.
SCREEN (laptop specific)
Personally I find that touchscreens have a negative impact on battery life and are easier to fuck up than standard screens. They are also harder to replace if they get broken. I do not recommend getting a touch screen unless you absolutely have to.
A lot of college students especially tend to look for the biggest laptop screen possible; don't do that. It's a pain in the ass to carry a 17" laptop around campus and with the way that everything is so thin these days it's easier to damage a 17" screen than a 14" screen.
On the other end of that: laptops with 13" screens tend to be very slim devices that are glued shut and impossible to work on or upgrade.
Your best bet (for both functionality and price) is either a 14" or a 15.6" screen. If you absolutely positively need to have a 10-key keyboard on your laptop, get the 15.6". If you need something portable more than you need 10-key, get a 14"
FORM FACTOR (desktop specific)
If you purchase an all-in-one desktop computer I will begin manifesting in your house physically. All-in-ones take away every advantage desktops have in terms of upgradeability and maintenance; they are expensive and difficult to repair and usually not worth the cost of disassembling to upgrade.
There are about four standard sizes of desktop PC: All-in-One (the size of a monitor with no other footprint), Tower (Big! probably at least two feet long in two directions), Small Form Factor Tower (Very moderate - about the size of a large shoebox), and Mini/Micro/Tiny (Small! about the size of a small hardcover book).
If you are concerned about space you are much better off getting a MicroPC and a bracket to put it on your monitor than you are getting an all-in-one. This will be about a million percent easier to work on than an all-in-one and this way if your monitor dies your computer is still functional.
Small form factor towers and towers are the easiest to work on and upgrade; if you need a burly graphics card you need to get a full size tower, but for everything else a small form factor tower will be fine. Most of our business sales are SFF towers and MicroPCs, the only time we get something larger is if we have to put a $700 graphics card in it. SFF towers will accept small graphics cards and can handle upgrades to the power supply; MicroPCs can only have the RAM and SSD upgraded and don't have room for any other components or their own internal power supply.
WARRANTY
Most desktops come with either a 1 or 3 year warranty; either of these is fine and if you want to upgrade a 1 year to a 3 year that is also fine. I've generally found that if something is going to do a warranty failure on desktop it's going to do it the first year, so you don't get a hell of a lot of added mileage out of an extended warranty but it doesn't hurt and sometimes pays off to do a 3-year.
Laptops are a different story. Laptops mostly come with a 1-year warranty and what I recommend everyone does for every laptop that will allow it is to upgrade that to the longest warranty you can get with added drop/damage protection. The most common question our customers have about laptops is if we can replace a screen and the answer is usually "yes, but it's going to be expensive." If you're purchasing a low-end laptop, the parts and labor for replacing a screen can easily cost more than half the price of a new laptop. HOWEVER, the way that most screens get broken is by getting dropped. So if you have a warranty with drop protection, you just send that sucker back to the factory and they fix it for you.
So, if it is at all possible, check if the manufacturer of a laptop you're looking at has a warranty option with drop protection. Then, within 30 days (though ideally on the first day you get it) of owning your laptop, go to the manufacturer site, register your serial number, and upgrade the warranty. If you can't afford a 3-year upgrade at once set a reminder for yourself to annually renew. But get that drop protection, especially if you are a college student or if you've got kids.
And never, ever put pens or pencils on your laptop keyboard. I've seen people ruin thousand dollar, brand-new laptops that they can't afford to fix because they closed the screen on a ten cent pencil. Keep liquids away from them too.
LIFESPAN
There's a reasonable chance that any computer you buy today will still be able to turn on and run a program or two in ten years. That does not mean that it is "functional."
At my office we estimate that the functional lifespan of desktops is 5-7 years and the functional lifespan of laptops is 3-5 years. Laptops get more wear and tear than desktops and desktops are easier to upgrade to keep them running. At 5 years for desktops and 3 years for laptops you should look at upgrading the RAM in the device and possibly consider replacing the SSD with a new (possibly larger) model, because SSDs and HDDs don't last forever.
COST
This means that you should think of your computers as an annual investment rather than as a one-time purchase. It is more worthwhile to pay $700 for a laptop that will work well for five years than it is to pay $300 for a laptop that will be outdated and slow in one year (which is what will happen if you get an 8th gen i3 with 8GB RAM). If you are going to get a $300 laptop try to get specs as close as possible to the minimums I've laid out here.
If you have to compromise on these specs, the one that is least fixable is the processor. If you get a laptop with an i3 processor you aren't going to be able to upgrade it even if you can add more RAM or a bigger SSD. If you have to get lower specs in order to afford the device put your money into the processor and make sure that the computer has available slots for upgrade and that neither the RAM nor the SSD is soldered to the motherboard. (one easy way to check this is to search "[computer model] RAM upgrade" on youtube and see if anyone has made a video showing what the inside of the laptop looks like and how much effort it takes to replace parts)
Computers are expensive right now. This is frustrating, because historically consumer computer prices have been on a downward trend but since 2020 that trend has been all over the place. Desktop computers are quite expensive at the moment (August 2023) and decent laptops are extremely variably priced.
If you are looking for a decent, upgradeable laptop that will last you a few years, here are a couple of options that you can purchase in August 2023 that have good prices for their specs:
If you are looking for a decent, affordable desktop that will last you a few years, here are a couple of options that you can purchase in August 2023 that have good prices for their specs:
If I were going to buy any of these I'd probably get the HP laptop or the Dell Tower. The HP Laptop is actually a really good price for what it is.
Anyway happy computering.
Great reference! I’d only add that Dells are hot garbage and should be a last resort! They use the cheapest (and in my experience crappiest) parts they can get their hands on! This goes for Alienware too since they got bought out by Dell.
I’ve had a Dell and an Alienware. The Dell had a massive design flaw with the hard drive being placed directly under the keyboard and just getting constantly destroyed from dust and other junk falling through the keyboard. We had to replace the hard drive like 3-4 times before it got mislabeled and lost on its last repair job. And the Alienware fucking NEVER worked right! It had problems with overheating and lag from day 1 despite being bought brand new!
So, great post, but if you buy a Dell as anything other than a last resort, I will physically manifest in your house and bite you :)
There is someone saying this about pretty much every brand of computer in the notes.
Failure rates across the big three brands (Dell, HP, and Lenovo) have consistently been at around 5% during the warranty period (typically one year for laptops and three years for desktops) since I started buying a few thousand computers a year in 2011.
If you are considering buying a laptop and you aren't certain if it's crap or not, check for reviews/product comparisons on PCWorld, PCMag, and Tom's Hardware.
There are people in the notes saying "how could you recommend dell when they have proprietary hardware?" or "how could you recommend HP when they come loaded with bloatware?"
You know how I said at the beginning that this is literally my job?
Yeah I have bad news for you about literally every brand of computer. They all come with some kind of bloatware these days. They all come with hardware bullshit, though some hardware bullshit is worse than others and some hardware bullshit impacts some populations more than others (for example: gamers and heavy users care a lot about Dell's processor throttling with third-party chargers. People who just use the browser and an office suite don't care because the don't notice. We sell third party chargers to dell users all the fucking time and none of them have noticed because as it turns out most people use their computers for email and watching cat videos and those don't actually require a shitload of processing power).
Fuck. As to bloatware, Windows 10 installed like eight candy crush games on my last laptop as well as a new disney game I had to uninstall with every major update. That's not a manufacturer problem, that's a "the entire ecosystem is fucked and the only way to fix it is linux" problem but this is a post for people who want to spend < $500 on a laptop and who don't know what RAM is so this is not the post where I'm making actual suggestions for how to fix things (keep every computer you own for as long as possible, upgrading the hardware yourself every 3-5 years, and install linux on every machine that doesn't 100% have to be windows for software/professional/etc. reasons)
But yeah. With every single computer you get there's going to be about a 1-in-20 chance *at least* that it's going to fail in the first year. This is because computers are complicated machines assembled by other complicated machines out of components that want to explode at the slightest provocation and hate humidity almost as much as they hate power fluctuations and almost as much as they love randomly springing bugs that take dozens of hours to chase down. For as cheap and as complicated as computers are, these are actually pretty good numbers.
But also it's not terribly unusual for your laptop to have the keyboard directly over the drive if for no reason other than the fact that the keyboard is a huge part of the footprint of your laptop. Often drives are along the sides of the touchpad, but not always, and if there's room for a secondary drive it will likely be under the keyboard. But also nothing should have been able to fall through the bottom of the keyboard into any other components because the keyboard on laptops looks like this from underneath (outlined in yellow):
there's an impenetrable membrane of metal where all the wires and sensors and junk are so that the keyboard will actually read the key presses. (The pink outline is the drive in this computer but in newer laptops that's MUCH more likely to be where you'd find the battery because most laptops don't have external batteries anymore, they're totally enclosed within the case)
So I'm not sure who diagnosed your drive errors, but also hard drives inside computers look like this:
There's nowhere for dust to fall *into* either. These things are pretty well sealed specifically because dust can fuck with them, which is why it's not a big deal to shove them just any old where inside a computer case as long as you protect them from drop damage.
However a lot of laptops do have issues with dust and stuff clogging them up inside. The primary causes of this tend to be: eating with your computer in your lap, using your computer on soft surfaces (i know they're called laptops but your computer is going to operate MUCH MUCH better if you only use it on hard surfaces), owning pets, and smoking around your computer. This often manifests as overheating and is pretty simple to resolve by just opening the case and blowing out the dust.
If I was looking at a computer that had had 4 drive failures after replacing the drive I'd be looking at either the OS (windows 10 had a lot of massive write error issues that could be persistent and difficult to resolve) or a motherboard problem (wiring is funky for some reason and you just have to write it off), but I'm not sure what kind of drive failures you were having and obviously I can't diagnose this after the fact, I'm just saying that it probably wasn't a design flaw that let dust fall through the keyboard into the drive that was causing your problem.
(the laggy-from-the-start alienware, well, I'd want to know what specs you got the device with and what you were trying to run on it - avoiding lagginess from the start for basic users is the point of this post but those standards are different when you start talking about gaming machines, which are NOT my wheelhouse).
(also everybody uses the cheapest hardware they can get, dell just does that and then sticks their own logo on it - it's all the same guts, which is pretty easy to tell because there are a vanishingly small number of plants that make the components; you open up 80% of computers with an HDD in the last ten years and you're going to find a SeaGate or a Western Digital drive no matter whose name is on the case)
Like. I just want to go through the notes and take everyone's hand and look deeply into their eyes and tell them the truth: ALL COMPUTERS ARE BAD. (POSSIBLY and RECENTLY excepting FrameWork).
Everyone buys shit parts. The assembly is all done in the cheapest way possible. Everyone cares about volume over quality. None of these companies care about you or customer service and all of them want to do whatever they can to bump up sales numbers or upsell people on upgrades. The fact that you were able to send the computer into the manufacturer for repairs four times and get it back three times with some work ostensibly done indicates that you had an unusually good service plan and were getting unusually good service (a lot of manufacturers will do like two repairs to the same part and then just swap out the motherboard as a 'nuke it from orbit' solution so the fact that you still had anyone troubleshooting with you on round 4 was remarkable). (Though I do hope they paid you out in some way for your mislabeled computer and if anyone wants tips on how to yell about support cases let me know, that is ALSO literally my job).
Anyway. Yeah. Computers bad. The reason I named the big three is because they're the ones who usually have decent service plans available and have more easily findable parts because they make so fucking many of them. I can find you a bezel for a 3-year-old Dell XPS. If you ask me to find a bezel for a 3-year-old acer there's a decent chance that I'll have to buy a whole actual computer on Ebay to salvage the bezel. (a common problem that we have with the acer/asus computers is that they tend to be made of shittier plastic and the hinges break and then people come in thinking that it's a hinge, how much can it be michael, ten dollars? and then find out that in order to fix their shitty hinge we have to buy an entire second laptop used for $200 and hope that the hinges on that hunk of shit don't have similar wear, which they almost certainly do, which is why I'm fucking begging people to buy the $500 piece of junk with the aluminum case instead of the $300 heap of shit in the plastic case)
ANYWAY. YEAH. COMPUTERS BAD (sorry i just finished a final project and am avoiding my final exam and I am TIRED).
Generally speaking, computers bad.
But the only computer that has shit hardware that's not worth the cost 100% of the time and that is actively and intentionally hostile to user repairs in a way that Dell and HP could only dream of is Apple.
Daily memedump
English added by me :)
You might have heard of Adania Shibli, the Palestinian author who was meant to receive a prestigious award from the Frankfurt Book Fair but who's award was pulled in the wake of everything happening in Palestine.
Her novel, Minor Detail, is based on a true story - in 1949, Israeli soldiers captured, raped and murdered a young Palestinian woman. It's a brilliant, important book, and its currently free on Amazon, Apple and Kobo.
Yuri's bisexual crisis continues
[translation of tags: "but they don't buy yuris????? ffs the sexism in france is unbelievable"]
