The Arms of the Oak

i see, i see.

and when you think of Japanese food, do you think of any of the following:

lime Jell-O

cream cheese

interesting...

so are you saying your enjoyment of Japanese cuisine would NOT, in fact, automatically compel you to consume this then

just so we’re clear, you are not, in fact, tempted by this very special 1950s recipe that includes cold canned crab, cream cheese, sour cream, lime gelatin, food coloring, and onion juice?

For everything we do here, please be sure to be careful with what you edit, and restart your computer to lock things in. If you don't have access to the Group editor, (likely to happen if you're on base windows) you can do this as well by opening your Registry Editor app, then inputting this after your 'computer' or whatever the initial segment is. (Mine is computer. If I just try and paste the below string it gets SO mad at me)

\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot

Navigating to your "turnoffwindowscopilot", hit modify, and set the value data to 1.

If done correctly, it'll look like this.

While we're at it, you can also get rid of the integrated search, (or that thing where it searches the web when you search anything, whether or not you want it to) and such through regedit as well.

Integrated search will have you going to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

Navigate to your "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions" bit, if you don't see it, you can make it by right clicking and creating a new registry D-Word key of that exact name. Edit the key, set it to 1. It'll look like this if you do it right!

To get rid of Windows Spotlight, (The thing where it pulls up ten billion pages on windows start page, shoving ads in your face and cluttering everything) we go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DesktopSpotlight\Settings

And set "Enabled State" To 0. If you do it right, it'll look like this!

Disabling edge on startup will also help a fair deal with processing speed and the like. This you can do in all sorts of ways, the easiest being turning it off entirely on startup through settings in the like.

If you want to kill it *entirely*, though? :)

In regedit, run along to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft

Navigate to your MicrosoftEdge key subcategory. If you don't see it, you can make one! Note, this is a KEY, not a d-word. *inside* that subcategory, we want to either make or find the D-Word key of PreventLaunchEdge and set that to 1 in the same way as all the others. It'll look like this.

Aaaand while we're here, I'd HIGHLY recommend shanking Killer Networking Services. It's just bloatware. (Ostensibly it's supposed to monitor your network bandwidth and even things out, but that really means it's constantly monitoring and pinging things, which eats up the bandwidth you DO get, and also chunks your computer's processing power.) Getting rid of it entirely is borderline impossible, since it's set to redownload on regular updates and intel is very pushy with its updates.

This you can do by opening your Services.msc, which basically shows you all the background stuff that Windows does. Find Anything with Killer in the name, right click it, go to properties, and disable startup. It should look like this, if done successfully. It will probably reenable itself in time/in later updates for windows, but it's a quick fix. I'd also check your TaskScheduler app to make sure that nothing's scheduled to open up there, either.

If you CAN completely kill Killer services through uninstalling and the like, I would warn that at very least for my computer, the only ethernet/lan support applications that are available ARE Killer's. When you download updates, you really do have to do it manually and ONLY download the ethernet services, or just be cool with not having Lan functionality.

One last thing, not a shit application but is a shit service. If your computer's constantly overheating or just warm, you likely have Turboboost enabled. (Default setting that you can't change) If you want to be able to turn it off and drop your temps by like 40 degrees, in Regedit go to

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\be337238-0d82-4146-a960-4f3749d470c7

(Note- This isn't the string copy paste from the reddit thread, this is mine that does the same thing. If my string doesn't work for you, check the reddit thread string. If that doesn't work either, you can follow the path and find it pretty easily. Probably has like, one letter of difference somewhere. The bits all start the same, though, so it's easy to find.)

and go to "attributes". Set the value from 1 to 2, and now in your advanced Power Plan settings in control panel, you'll be able to *see* turbo boost and turn it off.

It'll look like this, and in power options, a successful disabling of boost should look like this.

Turning off quick startup's also a good call, since that basically stops your restarts from actually shutting things down properly.

There's well over a hundred settings, here's just a few of them:

(sorry the classic taskbar option no longer works with current windows 11 version)

Fair warning: This is a powerful tool which means it can also do some damage if you don't know what you're doing, but every setting comes with an extensive explanation, as you can see in the Ads and unwanted apps screenshot.

But also! Red Meat is "Well Done" at 160F/72C (white meat is 165F/75C). Bread actually doesn't even toast until 255F/123C!!

So, if you make the full size patties in a frying pan on a low-medium heat, or an oven set to 300F/150C, it will take about 20 minutes to cook instead of only 3 minutes, but it will DEFINITELY not burn the bread, and the meat will be VERY well done.

Here is the oven based recipe I suggested elsewhere on the post

Good worldbuilding rewards you for asking questions about it, and it makes you want to keep reading just to see the answers to those questions. This means that there are SUPPOSED to be loose ends. You have to give the reader part of the picture and make them curious about the rest.

For example:

"Well, there are thirteen provinces," said Elbdil Leaf-dangle the elf wizard, pointing to a map, "two in the far south, Pheegia and Zepher, three to the west..."

This is a lot of information, but it's not really memorable or interesting. Provinces? We have those in real life.

"Well, Demonic Kudzu Blast is a spell completely outlawed by the Wizard Council," said Elbdil Leaf-dangle the elf wizard, "one of only 42 horticulture spells in that category. That should give you an idea of how dangerous it is. Even Eldritch Corn, the spell responsible for the Corn Maze Event of 769, is only in the Highly Restricted category."

Players have to buy-in to the story otherwise it won't work

And by this I don't mean be railroaded by the DM I mean like,

When one of my players switches characters and I introduce them to the party by them just happening to be nearby, I know my players will find a reason to talk to the new PC cause it's important. If there's a noise outside they'll investigate (albeit cautiously) cause that's the point of the noise outside

The amount of people turning this post into "yes but the DM also has to..."

That's not the point! It's not the point of this post - how many discussions do we already have about what DMs should do.

Players also have to take some responsibility for making the table, story, and game work. You also participate in the game and shape the story.

CC is for having a good time with your friends and occasionally fighting over a princess.

Magicka is for subjecting your friends to their own stupidity and seeing how long it can go on for.

He remembers our venerable house.

Opulent and Imperial.

Nine new Sword Interval pages. Start reading the new update here.

I once found corn tortillas in a Sainsbury’s. Oho, you may think, that’s a lovely find! But no, my friend. These were flour tortillas… with cooked corn rolled into them. Individual kernels. Like one may find blueberries in a pancake.

Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money

TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)

WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it

Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me