A parrot eating a croissant while standing on the top of the sign.

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Thought for the Day:  Blessed are the Gun Makers.

A tour group

English added by me :)

this fifty-foot sculpture is in South Dakota,It’s called ‘Dignity’ & was done by artist Dale Lamphere to honor the women of the Sioux Nation.

So, Microsoft is terrible. Yes yes, the oldest claim in the world.

But specifically... I just hate how Windows 10 tries to conflate and confuse web searches with things on one's own computer. The start menu should never do anything related to web-searching, especially if it purports to try to give examples of things that are on my hard drive!

This will make old, computer-illiterate people more malware-vulnerable. You have to maintain a strong distinction between "things that are on this computer (and maybe even included in Windows)" (safe, one hopes, or you already got pwned by it, probably), and "things on the web" (scary, dangerous, not to be trusted at all).

Eroding that barrier in the UI is awful. It just FEELS like a violation every time I start typing into the start bar, and it tries to show me ANYTHING web-related. My computer is NOT just an internet-portal! It has tons of stuff on it, and when I'm interacting with the OS, I ONLY want to see things that are already on here!

If I wanted to see something online, I would go to my browser! All the online stuff should be segregated into the browser!

Specific programs can access the internet; that's fine. But my OS's functions and interface should JUST be about the things that are already on my computer.

#someone in the notes mentioned shut up windows 10.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 

i haven’t used this myself but i’ll be looking into it

Literally spent multiple hours lobotomizing my Windows reinstall when I upgraded recently, the amount of awful shit they had in nowadays makes me long for the age of win98, when software was merely bad, rather than actively harmful.

the exact setting in shutup10 for this issue is "Disable extension of Windows 10 search with Bing" it's at the very bottom under misc.

There are 2 programs that will turn Windows 10 from an advertising riddled, bloated mess into a useful tool.

10AppsManager

With one click, this will remove ALL THE BLOATWARE Windows comes with. Seriously, you need NONE OF THESE apps, and if you do, you can just uninstall all the ones you don't need individually.

Winaero Tweaker

This program will give you almost complete control over Windows 10's behavior. Disabling the web search in the start menu, op rightfully complained about, is just one of the many things this thing can do

For example, with a single setting you can turn off any ads from microsoft, system-wide

It is a powerful tool, but it can be a bit overwhelming. Luckily every single setting comes with an explanation about what it actually does, and most settings can be easily reversed.

Tech tip from my personal blog

They did it, they fucking did it.

holyfducjk

HISTORY

holy shit!

can someone explain this to me

Thirty years ago a legendary ET game came to fruition, so awful that as the tale told, all unsold copies of it were buried in a pit in New Mexico. A documentary film crew has just unearthed the stash, proving the legend true.

I don’t think people fully grasp just how awful it was. This one game, by the sheer merit of its unmatched shittiness, destroyed the video game and console market so thoroughly that the at home video game nearly went the way of the 8-track player.

It was literally so awful that it nearly changed the entire course of technology.

how can a video game possibly be that bad

People don’t really understand why it was terrible though, and the reasons why are extremely important and relevant especially today.

The game itself is bad, yes. It was built up to be an exciting hit for kids to play at Christmas in 1982. So much in fact, that retailers bought WAY more stock then could every be sold based on the hype.

However, people at the time liked the game. It looks bad now, but the game itself was pretty on par with the times. It wound up selling 1.5 million copies. Which would be great, except Atari was expecting to sell 4-5 million.

While initial reception was positive, critics started panning the game as critics do. While it was no worse than most other games at the time, it was stil frustrating and hard to play. It could not live up to the hype that had been built and negative press built up quickly.

But what was ALSO happening was a flood of cheap imitations on the market. ET is a licensed game, and like all licenses comes at a higher markup. So if you wanted to buy a game for yourself or your kid, would you buy 1 game, or 2 for the same price?

Atari was also screwing around with how they handled their distributors. Just before the game went to public, but AFTER the game had been bought and shipped, Atari announced that they were cancelling every existing contract with distributors and signing with only a select few.

So distributors, now pissed off and with an abundance of games that were NOT selling and with prices slashed horribly to sell games that people were quickly losing interest in, retailers put their claims to return a collective 2.5-3.5 million copies back to Atari. Atari, unable to recycle the cartridges or resell them in any way, wound up burying them in the Nevada desert.

This caused the Video Game Crash of the early 80s that put a dark mark on video games until Nintendo (and in some small part other game companies) to revive later. 

 It was the perfect storm. An over-hyped overpriced game sold to an increasingly frustrated and over-saturated market with retailers scrambling to make a dime while Game Devs blame the market for poor sales.

Some say the proverbial planets are aligning again, with way too many consoles putting way too samey games on the market at way too high a cost with a strong dependence on Pre-orders and pre-order exclusives.

Wanna give the game a shot?  Internet Archives actually has a copy of it at this link:

https://archive.org/details/E.T._The_Extra-Terrestrial_1982_Atari_NTSC

this is like the dutch tulip bubble of our times

It’s worth noting that this game was a symptom, not a cause. Like, one game didn’t crash the market. This was just the snowflake that tipped the avalanche. But it became famous because it is VERY funny.

On this day, 30 March 1915, Francesc Sabaté Llopart, anti-fascist resistance fighter, and the most tenacious of the anti-Franco guerrillas, was born in Hospitalet de Llobregat, Catalonia. With the outbreak of the civil war in 1936, Sabaté joined the anarchist Young Eagles column and fought against General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists on the Aragon front. After the defeat of the Republic, Sabaté was interned in a concentration camp in France, and later joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation. Following the end of World War II he re-entered Spain and joined the growing underground resistance the regime. Amongst his many legendary exploits he freed other imprisoned activists, robbed banks, assassinated fascist leaders and cheated death on many occasions. After robbing the home of a wealthy Franco supporter, Manuel Garriga, Sabaté left a note which read: “We are not robbers, we are libertarian resistance fighters. What we have just taken will help in a small way to feed the orphaned and starving children of those anti-fascists who you and your kind have shot. We are people who have never and will never beg for what is ours. So long as we have the strength to do so we shall fight for the freedom of the Spanish working class. As for you, Garriga, although you are a murderer and a thief, we have spared you, because we as libertarians appreciate the value of human life, something which you never have, nor are likely to, understand.” Sabaté outlived nearly all of the other active resistance fighters, only eventually succumbing to the bullets of the Civil Guard in 1960. * We are working on a podcast about the underground resistance to Franco. Subscribe to our podcast today to make sure you don’t miss it! You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, like Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, or go to our website: https://workingclasshistory.com https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1953458321505975/?type=3

“Häxan” (1922) directed by Benjamin Christensen, also known as “Witchcraft through the ages”.

Legacy (2006) #28 Cover Art by Travis Charest

Techno-Dystopian Art inspired by warhhamer 40k.

First Captain Ingo Pech

by Ilya Gurenko

Yakuza: Like A Dragon (2007)

Majima peering around the corner with the eye he can’t see out of is actually the most in-character Majima thing I’ve ever seen in my life

Edition Office, Napier Street, Melbourne, 2021

www.edition-office.com/

little pingus

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the oscars: