misssuperfandom

not surprised by any of this but holy hypocritical racism batman.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-25/hollywood-screenwriters-reach-tentative-deal-to-end-strike#xj4y7vzkg

I am electing to "borrow" and repost something I saw posted last year as it is so poignant. I hope you take a few moments in the next few hours to reflect.

On this day, 22 years ago (9/10/2001):

🔹️246 people went to sleep in preparation for their morning flights

🔹️2,606 people went to sleep in preparation for work in the morning

🔹️343 firefighters went to sleep in preparation for their morning shift.

🔹️60 police officers went to sleep in preparation for morning patrol

🔹️8 paramedics went to sleep in preparation for the morning shift

None of them saw past 10:00am on Sept 11, 2001.

In one single moment, life may never be the same.

I had--have, thank God--a cousin who was working in lower Manhattan on 9/11. He was four months out of college for industrial design. He likes blending aesthetics and efficiency; when his first design (a soap dispenser) was produced, he gave one of the first production models to our grandmother because he was so proud. I inherited it when she died, and I still have it because even though it's yellow and orange and I don't like those colors, it's a damn good soap dispenser, made of durable parts that will probably outlive me like they did her. That soap dispenser is the best possible description of my cousin: sturdy, practical, cares about other people in small, useful ways. He's a giant nerd about the kinds of things that almost no one cares about but someone SHOULD, like a soap dispenser that doesn't gum up. He's the opposite of enshittification in human form.

I still don't know exactly which building he was in, only that it was "to the left of the shot that's on all the news channels". (The shot on all the news channels was FIRE.) He was in his little entry-level design-apprentice cubicle that day, and he saw the planes hit the towers next door. One thing that doesn’t get mentioned a lot in the history lessons was that a lot of infrastructure in NYC broke down on 9/11. Rickety-ass 2001 cell networks were not up to the task of thousands of people trying to call their loved ones over and over. Some public transit just stopped running. There were apocalyptic photos of ash-frosted people hiking over the bridges because the trains couldn't take them out of the city.

My cousin was one of those people. He didn't have a cell phone, and nobody around him had one that worked, so for about 24 hours, nobody in the family knew what had happened to him. He walked out over one of the bridges and just kept going until he reached a functioning rail line that could get him close to his mom's house in New Jersey. She didn't know he was alive until he walked in her door. (Of course he had a key. Who wouldn't give him one? The worst he'd do was make her toaster work better when she wasn't looking.)

I'm not going to defend the American reaction to 9/11 because I'm neither a fool nor a torture apologist. But I would bet cash money that there were a lot of people like my cousin who worked one building over from him and didn't go home that day. And saying that he deserved to die on 9/11 rather than fall in love a year later, get married, move to Minnesota, give his mom the world's cutest grandkids and go on designing damn good soap dispensers is, at best, horribly misguided.

The people who didn't make it home that day weren't inherently better or worse than the ones who did. Believing someone deserved to die because of where they were on a particular morning is, well, pretty much the exact attitude that sent those planes into those towers. It's also the same mentality that drone-bombs wedding processions.

9/11 was big and loud and historically significant and deeply fucked up and it was also full of people--good, bad, and every shade in between. My cousin's not a perfect human being; he's just some dude who likes to make good soap dispensers. He doesn't deserve to be boom-murdered any more or any less than anyone else.

I am reminded of the Terry Pratchett quote about sin.

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.

So!