Sugar, How You Get So Fly

This is a lovely thing for them to do <3

Free streaming services are awesome :D

Also for older kids and adults alike may I recommend Tubi?

We've all seen this cartoon a thousand times and I'm always struck by how relevant and accurate it is.

Lemme share my own Quartz moment.

My degrees are in organic chemistry. When I was doing my undergraduate research project, my mom asked me what it was about. My mother is a smart woman but has zero science education.

I thought, okay, start simple. So I drew this:

I opened my mouth to start talking about the project and she stopped me and said:

"What do those lines mean?"

I just sat there mute, utterly wrong-footed. This is a totally reasonable question, but to me, it was like I'd written a word and she'd asked me what the letters meant. This notation (standard molecular drawing notation) is so second nature to me that it's every bit as natural as writing English.

I had not fully appreciated how far I'd need to downshift to explain this. A friend of mine on the same project was asked to give a talk to a group of non-science folks about what we were doing and she made slides with overlays to let them know what the notation means.

The above notation is shorthand for this:

The lines are bonds. The single line is a single bond, the double line is a double bond (well...in benzene technically each bond is 1.5 bonds but this is the usual way it's drawn even though it's not really accurate). Each corner is a carbon atom. We don't draw the carbon atoms unless we're calling attention to them, and we leave off the hydrogens entirely unless they're significant for some reason, they're just understood to be there.

None of this would be obvious to someone who's never taken chemistry. But I had to remind myself of this, and my mom's question knocked me for a loop for a second.

We got it sorted out.

This really becomes an issue when there are news events having to do with science. Vaccines come to mind. People have HEARD of DNA, but they've barely heard of RNA, and even if they have, most don't understand it, or what it does or what it means. There was a lot of effort put into making analogies and cartoons and other tools to help explain how an mRNA vaccine works, but too many people still hear it and think SCARY.

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.

As a bonus, run Chris Titus Tech's debloat tool on it.

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."

Happy Pride Month from Hanashima!

Clover, Hanako, and Lucas want you to have a happy pride month and know that you're both valued and valid regardless of your identity! (and so do I <33)