Crime&Cricket

the one I was looking for originally also has a summer variant. (artist is Frederick Charles Herrick: 'it is warmer below' is from 1927, 'it is cooler below' is 1926)

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

Our moon is number 5. It is smaller in direct comparison to the above moons. The diameter of the moon is 3475 km. That is a full 27% of the diameter of the Earth. More than a quarter. That's ridiculous. It's unheard of. The universe is large enough that the word unique probably doesn't mean a lot, but this might be about as close as you get.

This has had a huge impact on our planet. Other things aliens might not have are significant tides. One of Mars's dumpy little potatoes wouldn't be able to move oceans the way our moon does.

Our moon has also stabilized our axis to a massive degree. Without her up there our axis would wobble all over the place and our climate would be far more chaotic. Aliens might not be quite so lucky.

Space is big, empty, and loud. Sunspots can cause enough interference to affect global communications. We’re not even loud enough to talk over our own sun. On our own planet. We can barely communicate with Voyager, and we know exactly where it is and what its signal sounds like.

Also the further you move toward the poles the more pronounced the difference between the length of day and night is. Worst part of a far-north (or south) heatwave is it doesn’t get dark long enough for meaningful cooling.

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.

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:

Hold Shift + F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.

Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO

I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f

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:

Turn off user tracking: enabled

Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled

Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled

Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled

Do not search Internet: enabled

Windows Spotlight

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

Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled

Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled

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

Allow Cortana: disabled

Don't search the web or display web results in Search: enabled

News and Interests

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

Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled

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.

The Patrician Grill in Toronto - filming location for some pivotal scenes in the 90s TV series Forever Knight and due South - closed on May 9, after the owners announced in April that they sold the restaurant so they could finally retire. It has been in the same family since 1967, serving local patrons (and as a filming location for the Canadian film industry in Toronto).

Tom Melissis (who played Dewey in S3(/S4) dS) shared photos of the iconic Patrician Grill sign being taken down on the Due South By South East Facebook group.

1. Is this the image of the axolotl plushie with the fire behind it?

NO! that is a different, more well known axolotl image that does not delete your blog.

2. Can I see the image?

for obvious reasons i'm not reblogging it to this post. however, since so many people asked, i put it safely in a google doc for you. go nuts.

3. hey, i remember this! it was over a year ago. does this still delete your blog?

someone in my askbox has informed me, under certain circumstances, yes. and that image is live, so be careful with it.

4. have you figured out what causes it?

same person in my askbox said this

which was my first theory before i went down the source code rabbit hole, although there must be a certain threshold for editing it since in the past people have posted censored versions where it still deletes your blog.

5. can i use it as my icon/can i send it to someone in dms/can i upload it if it's not in a post/can i post an edited version of the picture?

back when this first happened if you did any of the above it deleted your blog, unless it was pretty heavily edited (someone in my discord put him behind bars - you know like he was caged - and i think when we uploaded that it didn't delete the person's blog? i could be wrong though). see the above ask for the most recent information. someone in the notes earlier (don't remember who, sorry) also said that you can upload the original via mobile and it kills your blog, but if you try to post it on desktop it blocks it from being uploaded, so that's also another route you could go if you want to experiment.

6. why have i never heard about this before?

spnblr is more complex and layered than you can possibly imagine it's not my fault you can't see it for the majesty it is.

7. this still sounds fake.

hey man, weird thing to lie about. but the picture and all the information you need to test it out is right here. post it to your blog. go on. prove me wrong. 🙂

8. didn't people try to remotely delete neil gaiman's blog by submitting that image to him?