So You Need To Buy A Computer But You Don't Know What Specs Are Good These Days

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.

HUGE DASHBOARD UNFUCKER UPDATE!!!

I'll spare you the boring details, but up until now, the script has reverted the vertical nav update by essentially waiting for the page to load most of the way, and then quickly moving everything back to where it should be. This works decently fine of course, but of course there are issues with feature parity when it comes to things that Tumblr removes outright. And every time Tumblr removes another feature, I have to manually spend anywhere from minutes to hours trying to replace it.

HOWEVER, update 3.0 does away with all of that by simply disabling the flag that marks your account as part of the vertical nav beta test before the page loads. This reverts your dashboard to the proper layout without shuffling anything around after the page loads and effectively disables the vertical navigation layout and all future updates to it.

I owe a massive thanks to @twilight-sparkle-irl for knowing how to deobfusticate Tumblr's hidden settings! I couldn't have done this without your work!!!

DASHBOARD UNFUCKER V1.0

as 90% of desktop users have probably found out, today @staff released an update that for some insane reason COMPLETELY remodels the dashboard to replicate twitter's. this is of course in the wake of numerous other thoroughly hated changes and a continued refusal to fix any of the site's actual problems, half of which stem directly from site management.

HOWEVER, thanks to the power of jQuery, i was able to throw together a userscript that remodels the dashboard back to its original look almost perfectly.

here is my dashboard right now, with the script active:

and here is the old dashboard in separate tab container that hasn't received the update:

it's hardly perfect; i had trouble making it force reload to the fixed layout when switching between other pages and the dashboard, and it currently only fixes just the dashboard. it's also completely untested on browsers other than firefox, and chances are it looks a bit screwy on ultrawide monitors. but for now at least, it's a good fix.

the unfucker is a tampermonkey userscript. all you have to do to use it is install the tampermonkey extension, hit "create new script", and replace the default code on the page with the script (link here) and save it.

Hey kids! When this happens, which it does a LOT, you call your states insurance commissioner's office and file a formal complaint! Make sure you get a reference number for EVERY. SINGLE. CALL. you make, save every form of correspondence (email and mail) AND retain a copy of all your responses. If they stonewall you (That's not a covered service, we're not allowed to disclose that, etc) request a copy of your benefits, insurance is a CONTRACT and is legally binding.

Download a call recording app if you can, even if you can't share the recordings at first they can be useful for your reference and can be presented if you need to go to court.

I work with insurance companies all day everyday and have so for almost a decade. I trust them as much as I trust my dog to watch the Thanksgiving turkey. Approach each interaction with them *like* it's going to go to court.

if someone ever publicly shares ur nudes (even if they're fabricated/deepfakes), u can go on https://stopncii.org/ to have them removed from the internet. this service is available for ppl all over the world. the image never leaves ur device (only a hash of it does) so no one will be able to see the nudes u uploaded to their site. stay safe.

Katsushika Hokusai, 神奈川沖浪裏  The Great Wave off Kanagawa, 1830-1832

from the series  Thirty-six Views of Mt.Fuji 

An extremely rare strike that has not been sun-damaged to the  extent that most of the surviving prints have been. What’s exceptional here is that it shows the original pink sky,less faded,  not seen in almost any other versions. This is the way that Hokusai intended it to look and it brings a lovely cast, helping to complete our vision of an already iconic image.

The entire series can be seen Here  and  Here and Here and Here

I kind of obsess how the pink sky here makes this so beautiful and almost no prints of it show it at all

I’ve seen the “get thee to a nunnery” scene done where hamlet has no idea he’s being spied on and just goes off on ophelia because he’s hangry. I’ve seen the “get thee to a nunnery” scene done where hamlet knows he’s being watched from the start and the whole thing’s an act. I’ve seen the “get thee to a nunnery” scene done where hamlet figures out he’s being watched half way through and gets super mad at ophelia for betraying him. now I want to see the “get thee to a nunnery” scene done where ophelia covertly nods at where polonius and claudius are hiding, hamlet gets the idea, and they’re both in on the performance the whole time. I want classically trained shakespearean actors to give us their best best show of bad acting. I want ophelia to mouth some of the most cutting lines to hamlet before he says them. I want hamlet to frown exaggeratedly at her and for her to take this as a cue to start crying. I want hamlet to go grab her by the wrist, her to wince, and him to automatically loosen his grip. I want them to stage hamlet dragging her around by the ear using classic stage-fight techniques. I want them to be aggressively in cahoots with one another because they know each of their bastard father-figures are watching. 

I want this for the lols of seeing them trying to fake-fight on the spot, to give ophelia more to do than just be the victim, and so it never crosses ophelia’s mind that hamlet’s actually losing it a little bit.

that is, until she hears how her father died.

@hefnerama #see this is why shakespeare is so vital and enduring#because you can DO this!#shakespeare

@aegipan-omnicorn

Ophelia was the sharpest needle in the sewing kit.

And part of my #justice for Ophelia campaign is also to bring more attention to how Shakespeare wrote Father/Daughter relationships (I feel like Shakespearean Academia™ has an unhealthy obsession with the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet)

south asian lesbian literature

I. autobiography

II. fiction

IIb. fiction - dubious depiction of lesbian relationships by non-lesbians (there are more of course, and you can read about some of them in Same-Sex love in India: Readings from Literature and History, eds. Vanita and Kidwai)

III. poetry

IV. non-fiction and mixed anthologies

*lesbian is used both as an adjective and noun in this list. works are included that deal with lesbian relationships. 

**south asian lesbian cinema for south asian lesbian films and documentaries (the original post is updated whenever more are found)

***south asian lesbian visual art: chitra ganesh, parminder sekhon, samra habib, mumtaz karimjee, sunil gupta, amruta patil, debi ray-chaudhuri, theresa thadani, sharon fernandez etc… not going to attempt to make a full list but check them out.

Declutter Tumblr

The new layout it a whole mess. Thankfully Xkit can already help with a bunch of this! I'm sure it'll give more options soon.

Vanilla Tumblr: (I have marked in red what can be removed. The tabs can be set not to stick, so you will really only see them at the top of your dash. Empty box on the left for hidden notifications and shop sparkle, i just didn't have any. I'm EU so no Live for me).

Xkit Rewritten Tumblr:

The settings I use:

instead of watching Oppenheimer, you should instead watch:

instead of watching Barbie, you should instead watch:

Instead of sharing posts about how to grow your own food we should post about how to steal from supermarkets

Source: I'm poor, my kids father was a security guard for many years, and my ex got arrested for shoplifting because they didn't follow this advice

one of my “special interests” in the past couple of years has been exploring fast fashion vs. slow fashion. it has been a long journey trying to find clothes that actually 1) fit me 2) look good 3) are made from material that is not actively shoving plastic in the ecosystem 4) involve ethical labor, fair trade, fairly compensated, etc

before i did this research, i really had no clue about fabrics or fashion brands. i used to think i had zero interest in fashion, in fact.

i grew up wearing walmart and thrift store clothes, and when i went to college i bought clothes from target and asos. something started to shift a little bit when i found vintage resellers on etsy and ebay… those clothes were so unique. but a lot of the vintage clothes were polyester blends, stiff, and would fall apart as easily as my asos clothes. i would leave them hanging in my closet and never wear them. i would wear the same old t shirts and jeggings every day. i felt like it was impossible to ever wear comfortable clothes, or ever feel good in clothes, so why bother?

it started with linen. linen is very comfortable and pretty sustainable. i was amazed that i didn’t feel the urge to rip my clothes off when i wore linen. lightbulb number one.

a friend let me borrow a nooworks dress, and i went to the store and got some overalls. wow. overalls. lightbulb number two. holy shit, you can wear overalls. you know how people say “not binary or non-binary but a secret third thing.” that’s overalls.

i realized i loved the bonkers prints that nooworks had, and all of it was soft, and made ethically. it was a higher price point than i was used to, which gave me pause. but then you realize: we’re not supposed to be buying dumb clothes every other weekend. and isn’t a slightly higher price point for soft clothes that you won’t want to tear off your body worth it?

so i started my research. i made a spreadsheet. the prices can be all over the place across brands, so i made a column for prices. sizes can be all over the place too – people always ask me “where is the plus size slow fashion?” it’s there. just look at the size column. people say “isn’t it better to buy secondhand?” yeah, it is. i have many links to secondhand sources.

if you have any suggestions or additions please let me know, it is a living document.

want to spread a resource: https://www.darkpattern.games/

dark pattern has articles on gameplay patterns that are used to manipulate how you play a game and/or how much money you spend on it.

there are also lists for games breaking down what patterns they feature/dont feature

check it out, make sure your friends arent falling into a pit of gambling and despair.

https://www.darkpattern.games/

i am once again asking you to watch the 2019 shakespeare in the park production of much ado about nothing

#signor bene D I C K

oh shit that is glorious

Oh fabulous. I was unaware of it and now I need to find out if there’s a recording I can watch.

YES! The camera work in the clip above made me wonder if it was from a professionally filmed performance and in fact there’s a Great Performances version up on archive.org:

ALL HAIL ARCHIVE.ORG

resources for staying safe online

always important, but i feel like especially recently. particularly stuff that’s a bit more than just the usual “don’t post personal info”

feel free to share this post on twitter or anywhere else, staying safe is important

note: very slightly updated, reblog this version instead

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

https://libgen.li/ scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines you may otherwise lack access to

https://sci-hub.ru/ research papers and books you may otherwise lack access to

https://archive.org/ a very large collection of all sorts of media, notably out of print books. by using the wayback machine you can also access new articles which may be locked behind a paywall

all of these sources are free means of access, though some may be blocked by certain ISPs

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/

I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful

if you're not from the us american south, there's some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can't really describe all of them, because i've lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.

but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

christ, he's good.

the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.

Get this man a starring role as Marc Antony in a southern adaptation of this show PLEASE.

This man is fantastic. 💕

The thing that just destroys me about this, though -- we think of Shakespearean language as being high-cultured, and intellectual, and somewhat inaccessible. And I know people think of Southerners as being ill-educated (which...let's be fair, most are, but not the way it's said). But that whole speech, unaltered, is so authentically Southern. And the thing is: Leaning into that language really amps the mood, in metalanguage. I'm not really sure how to explain it except... like... "Thrice" is not a word you hear in common speech...unless you're in the South and someone is trying to Make A Fucking Point.

Anyway. This was amazing and I want a revival of Shakespeare As Southern Gothic.

One of the lovely things about this, and one of the reasons it works so well, is that from what we can piece together of how Shakespeare was originally pronounced, it leans more towards an American southern accent than it does towards a modern British RP.

In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.

One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.

I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.

This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:

First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.

Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.

TLDR: Shakespeare is my job and this is 100% a good take on this speech.

definitely one of the challenges I have with reading Shakespeare is that it sounds so weird to me. “The good is oft interr’d with their bones”?? Who talks like that?

Well,,, rednecks. Despite being Elizabethan English, none of this is really out of character for a man with that accent; southern american English has retained not only (I am told) the accent of Shakespeare, and the “Oh!” speech patterns, but also so many of the little linguistic patterns: parenthetic repetition (“so are they all - all honorable men”), speaking formally when deeply emotional, getting more and more sarcastic and passive-aggressive as time goes on, etc.

Someone sent this to me a while ago and I dropped it in my drafts because I wanted to comment on how RIGHT this sounded but I couldn't express why it sounded right, so I'm glad other people have picked it up

There's a theory that Appalachian English in particular retains a lot of the qualities present in Shakespearean english that are now gone elsewhere. Thinking of my Mamaw, who says "twice't" instead of twice and other things like that...