beige flannel

Replacing a HDD with an SSD

Adding RAM

Graphics cards if you're nasty

Uninstalling resource hogs like Norton or McAfee (if you're using Windows then the built-in Windows Security is perfectly fine; if you're using a mac consider bitdefender as a free antivirus or eset as a less resource intensive paid option)

Customizing what runs on startup for your computer

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Installing firefox and setting it up with ublock origin

adding the Auto Tab Discard extension to firefox to sleep unused tabs so that they aren't constantly reloading

Closing some fucking tabs bud I'm sorry I know it hurts I'm guilty of this too

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Running malwarebytes and shutting down any malicious programs it finds.

Correcting disk utilization errors

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Clearing cache and cookies on your browser

Restarting the computer

Changing your screen resolution

Uninstalling unused browser extensions

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

Deleting files

Registry cleaners

Defragging your drive

Passively wishing that your computer was faster instead of actually just adding more fucking RAM.

Meaningfully Faster

HDD means "hard disk drive" SSD means "solid state drive." An HDD has a spinning platter and a mechanical arm that has to wiggle back and forth very quickly to read the information written on the platter, while an SSD is a silicon chip that has the information "flashed" into it (basically it takes a snapshot of bits with electricity - it's unimportant how it works, just that it doesn't require mechanical movement to access data, and is therefore MUCH faster).

Installing an SSD does *not* require an M.2 slot and does *not* require a ton of expertise on most computers. There are many SATA SSDs available and if you want to replace your HDD all that you need to do is clone your hard drive and look up how to install your new SSD on ifixit (link in a bit).

Your storage drive (SSD or HDD) is the drive that stores the files and programs on your computer. People often confuse long-term drive storage with "memory" and when they get low-memory warnings they think they need to delete stored files. This is inaccurate because:

RAM is Random Access Memory - if is basically the "working memory" of your computer, it keeps track of all the things that your computer does/is doing. For example: if you are working in your browser, the browser is not saving everything that you're doing to your desktop so everything that is going on in your browser is using RAM to remember what pages you've got open and what images are on them, etc. Same if you're working in any other program: if you're writing a word doc and you haven't saved it in a while, all the changes are being tracked by the RAM but are not yet saved on your storage drive. "Low Memory" doesn't mean you're out of room for your computer to hold onto files, it means your computer is low on memory to think about stuff. Because programs are written to use more and more memory as time passes (which is a good thing, for the most part, but causes frustrating problems for people with older devices) older computers will struggle to run modern programs with the amount of RAM the older computers have in them.

RAM comes in different speeds, and the speed of your RAM does matter but if you get RAM that matches the speed of your installed RAM you should experience better speeds from your computer. Some computers have the RAM directly soldiered to the motherboard and cannot have RAM added (this is pretty much true of all macs. I do not recommend buying macs.) but if your computer DOES allow you to add RAM it is generally an easy process - check IFixIt.Com for instructions: just search the model number of your computer and look at the replacement guide for RAM and you will be able to see if you can replace your RAM and see the steps to follow along if you want to do that. There are a large number of tools to look up what RAM will work in your computer. Personally I like the Crucial RAM Configurator tool. Just look up your computer and it will recommend compatible RAM. You don't have to buy the Crucial RAM, you can use the Crucial RAM configurator to get the specs you need and then search for yourself by Size, Memory Technology, Speed, Format, and number of Pins.

Graphics cards are for graphics processing and they're "if you're nasty" because adding a dedicated graphics card is kind of a big hurdle these days: computers are smaller inside than they used to be and graphics cards are big and they are also very expensive right now. Unless you are using a gaming laptop you likely cannot add a graphics card to your laptop, and unless you have at least a couple hundred dollars to spare you can't add a graphics card to your desktop either. But also they will only speed up a very specific subset of applications; if you don't do anything that requires a GPU to get shit done (video rendering, really complicated math, etc) then it isn't going to make your computer faster.

Norton and McAfee run in the background of your computer at all times and can suck up a lot of valuable memory, especially if they decide to randomly start a scan or check back in with the mothership to make sure you've paid for another seven years. They are annoying and they can slow everything else down - McAfee in particular is notorious for this. Modern Windows Operating systems (10 and 11) have a lot of security features built in at baseline and Windows Defender is a perfectly functional whole-device antivirus for almost all users. It was never true that macs couldn't have software infections or couldn't be infected with malware, it's just that *people used to write fewer malicious softwares for mac( and NOW there are a lot more infections written for OSX *and* mac users often think they don't need antivirus. Buds. You do need antivirus. Since Bitdefender only has a free virus scanner for Mac, not antivirus, and Sophos Free is only good for a month, and Avast has recently sold customer data, try Avira.

If you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and click on "task manager" you will find a list of applications that run on startup. Programs that run on startup are turned on and active every time you start your computer, regardless of whether you use the program or not. So, for instance, let's say you have an HP printer and there are drivers for the printer on your computer but you only print things maybe twice a year. If your HP Printer Print Utility is set to run on startup that means that every time you start your computer it wakes up and turns on this program, which slows down your startup time and takes processing power in the background. So just disable it on startup and only start the program when you need it. The only difference here is that it'll take a few seconds to start the utility when it's time to print. Things that I've got disabled on startup include: Microsoft Edge, Adobe, and Cortana.

Faster Browsing

You should be using Firefox anyway because Firefox rules and in literally hundreds of tests performs as well or better than chrome. If someone says that firefox is ridiculously slow it is because they've either set up a really weird configuration, have had the install go wrong, or just don't understand what they're doing. But ASIDE from that you should use Firefox with Ublock Origin because Ublock Origin is an *amazing* adblocker that doesn't whitelist ads and lets you do things like manage cookies and block annoying popups and a bunch of other stuff. And as of 2023 it will be impossible to install Ublock Origin on Chrome so you may as well switch to Firefox now and live that ad-free life. Ad-blocked browsing speeds up your browser because your computer isn't spending extra energy on loading ads and less shit loading means less RAM utilization means faster computing.

Auto Tab Discard is an extension that allows you to set tabs to sleep after an amount of time that you determine. You can customize your experience so that it doesn't sleep tabs with partially filled forms, or doesn't sleep tabs with media playing in them, or doesn't sleep a specific tab for a session, or doesn't ever sleep tabs from a specific website. Many people use OneTab, which basically turns your tabs into a bookmark list that opens the page when you click in OneTab, but I personally prefer Auto Tab Discard - neither of those are "better" than the other, it's just a question of what works for you.

Faster if you are having an actual problem

Open tabs eat RAM. Your computer is expending memory thinking about what's on all of those pages and even if most of them are slept you probably have more awake tabs than you need.

Malwarebytes has a free virus/malware scanning and removal tool that you can download and run to identify and remove malware or viruses that may be stealing your information and running background programs that are fucking up your speeds. If you think your computer might be slow because you might have a virus, go to malwarebytes, download the free version, run a scan, and follow the instructions that it gives you.

Disk utilization errors happen for a number of reasons and they will all slow down your computer. Here are some of the reasons they happen and some ways to fix them. If you hare having a persistent disk usage error issue *DO NOT* replace your HDD with an SSD until it is resolved because these errors can destroy an SSD.

Superficially Faster

Your browser cache and cookies are the things that your browser remembers between sessions: it might be logins for various sites or the logos of your homepage or a bunch of other stuff. If your browser is running super slow because you haven't cleared cache/cookies for a long time, doing this can help because it will basically make your browser forget about the cookies it has been carrying around for five years for a site you haven't logged into since four years and seven months ago. These are tiny pieces of data but they can add up over time which is why they will make your browsing experience faster if you haven't done it in years but won't make a difference if you clear your cookies and cache monthly. Doing this will log you out of all the sites you're logged into (which shouldn't be a huge deal, but you do need to be ready to log in a bunch, so you should HAVE A PASSWORD MANAGER TO MAKE THAT EASIER). This will make your browser run a bit faster, but if your computer is slow for non-browser reasons or if your cache/cookies have been cleared recently it will have no impact on your computer speeds.

Restarting your computer will speed your computer up for a bit because it will shut down all the programs you had running and clear your computer's RAM of all the stuff it was remembering for as long as you had those programs open. This is, again, a superficial improvement, and if you have, say, restarted your computer three times today it is unlikely that restarting again will do anything for you. But yeah if it's been a couple weeks, friend, restart your computer it is tired and it wants to run patches and it needs to forget the twenty docs you're editing for a minute so it can get its head on straight.

Reducing your screen resolution can make your computer run a bit faster if you're doing graphics-heavy stuff and have really shit built-in graphics support, but realistically all it is likely to do is make your computer look weird.

Your browser extensions run on startup and cause your browser to use more RAM at baseline; you should be installing minimal browser extensions and uninstalling any that you don't need. If it's been a while since you checked your extensions go uninstall the unused ones right now and restart the browser and you may speed up a bit. But the majority of people in the world run pretty minimal extensions so this is unlikely to fix most people's problems.

Will not make your computer faster

Unless your storage drive is within 10% of its maximum capacity it is in no way fucking up your speed. If it is within 10% of capacity go delete whatever's in your downloads folder, clear out your temp files, and empty your recycle bin. If that doesn't take care of it, use a backup drive or a thumb drive and copy off the photos, videos, and music you don't use very often, and only keep what you're using on your computer. If you've got an SSD having too little storage available can fuck with the lifespan, so aim to keep at least 10% free.

Registry cleaners are supposed to clean your computer's registry; basically they're supposed to look at the index of all the stuff your computer knows and delete redundant or outdated entries on the index. However it has been literal decades since a registry cleaner would be able to meaningfully improve performance while they can still absolutely fuck your computer up bad enough that it needs a reinstall and a lot of them are just straight up malware, some of them are actual for-realsies ransomware, a bunch of them sell your data, and you don't need ANY of them. If you don't know enough to fuck around with your registry by hand you shouldn't trust some random ass software that has a history of data breaches and virus infections associated with it. Fuck all registry cleaners.

The vast majority of people these days use computers primarily for web browsing and occasionally use an office suite. Most people don't even store their music or photos on their computers these days. If your computer is basically an internet machine that you don't use for anything other than browsing and basic word processing/spreadsheets, then there is no reason not to switch to Linux.

I would recommend installing Linux Lite, which is a well-supported, widely-used distro that most computers built within the last twenty years should be able to run. It's called "Lite" because it is an operating system that requires minimal processing, storage, and memory to run.

To do this you will need:

A 4GB USB stick or a blank DVD to create installation media

An internet connection to download the software

Another computer or phone that you can use to follow the instructions, or a printed/written copy of the installation guide

A computer on which to install Linux. Installing Linux as the sole operating system on this computer (which is my recommendation here) will mean that everything else on the computer is deleted. Save all of your files/movies/music/etc. to a backup drive or another computer before you install Linux, because installing a new OS will delete literally everything on the computer and make it impossible to get back.

Here is where you can download Linux Lite.

Here is the Linux Lite help manual, I've linked you directly to the step-by-step installation guide. If you get to a step that you don't understand, search the terms that you're unfamiliar with phrased as questions like "why do I need an ISO to install linux?" or "how do I enter UEFI BIOS on my version of Windows?"

Follow the instructions for installing Linux Lite, and then you can install software on your new OS. Linux Lite comes bundled with Libre Office, which is a free office suite like Microsoft Office that has programs similar to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. It installs with Chrome, so I would recommend installing Firefox and uninstalling Chrome as soon as you're able to get on the internet.

After that you can pick and choose from a wide variety of linux-compatible software and you can use your computer as a regular computer. I'd say that it's probably a good idea to be picky about what software you install, and to try to keep your computer as lean as possible if you're trying to get a longer life out of an old device.

There are a lot of people in the notes who are saying "my computer can't even load four tabs" or "my computer can't even open the software I need to do this" and if that is your computer I think you've pretty much got nothing to lose from installing Linux. If your computer is essentially unusable in Windows then it's probably not going to be *less* functional in Linux, unless you're keeping the computer the way that it is for some very specific software you're using.

A lot of people think that they can't uses Linux because it's entirely in the command line or doesn't have a graphic interface or something, but most linux distros only look about as different to users as windows does to mac or vice versa.

This is what the Linux Lite default desktop looks like:

It's got a start menu and a task bar and folders on the desktop, same as any other computer. It's very easy to use and has the help manual installed right there as soon as you're up and running so that you can troubleshoot your way through any issues.

The page is a little more in-depth and technical and has a bit more info on troubleshooting and diagnostics.

1. The author’s kinks

2. The author’s power fantasy

3. The author’s political agenda

The Intellectuals and the Masses was the most lucid and intelligent statement yet of an English conservative anti-Modernism familiar to readers of the Sunday Times and the Spectator. Carey’s cousins in populism sometimes include Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, A.N. Wilson and the late Auberon Waugh. An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterminate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said horrible things about the plebeian Joyce, and about the girls who worked at Woolworths; James Kelman acted like a barbarian at the Booker dinner, and so on.

Most of these commentators imagine themselves to be writing a form of intellectual history when they are only pouring gossip into fancy goblets at London book parties. They experience apparently no squeamishness, indeed no awareness of any difficulty, in moving between these troublesome lives and the troublesome work that was produced by them: the one naturally follows the other, as the overnight cell follows the police blotter. Robert Lowell was a rather unsavoury fellow; therefore we should not be surprised by the ‘irresponsible obscurity’ (Carey’s phrase) of his verse. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, Carey moves swiftly from quoting unpleasant and fascistic comments about the masses by Yeats, Eliot, Woolf, Hamsun, Lawrence and others – most of those comments appearing in diaries, letters and journalism – to the conclusion that ‘the early 20th century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture. In England this movement has become known as Modernism … Realism of the sort it was assumed the masses appreciated was abandoned. So was logical coherence. Irrationality and obscurity were cultivated.’

That art demands a scandalous selfishness, and a selfishness which paradoxically isolates the writer from the much less selfish world that is his or her subject, that most serious artists do not live orderly lives, do not merely chew the cud of convention, and are given to not very nice statements, seems to be a surprise only to these commentators. Even the beloved Chekhov, we now know, talked occasionally about ‘Yids’, and serially trifled with the affections of female admirers. Carey was indeed defeated even on his own terms a few months after the publication of The Intellectuals and the Masses in 1992. He ended his assault on the nasty Modernists by applauding the fact that in contemporary poetry ‘obscurity is no longer the rule … The leading poets writing English in the second half of the 20th century, Larkin, Hughes and Heaney, have all written poems that … can be readily appreciated by schoolchildren.’ That was July: in the autumn came the revelation of Larkin’s letters, containing heaped unpleasantnesses beyond anything in Woolf’s diaries or Lawrence’s letters, and the link between vile private statement and lovable public work became suddenly problematic – at least, to those for whom the problem was sudden.

—James Wood, “Cold-Shouldered”

What’s the lie your character says most often?

How loosely or strictly do they use the word ‘friend’?

How often do they show their genuine emotions to others versus just the audience knowing?

What’s a hobby they used to have that they miss?

Can they cry on command? If so, what do they think about to make it happen?

What’s their favorite [insert anything] that they’ve never recommended to anyone before?

What would you (mun) yell in the middle of a crowd to find them? What would their best friend and/or romantic partner yell?

How loose is their use of the phrase ‘I love you’?

Do they give tough love or gentle love most often? Which do they prefer to receive?

What fact do they excitedly tell everyone about at every opportunity?

If someone was impersonating them, what would friends / family ask or do to tell the difference?

What’s something that makes them laugh every single time? Be specific!

When do they fake a smile? How often?

How do they put out a candle?

What’s the most obvious difference between their behavior at home, at work, at school, with friends, and when they’re alone?

What kinds of people do they have arguments with in their head?

What do they notice first in the mirror versus what most people first notice looking at them?

Who do they love truly, 100% unconditionally (if anyone)?

What would they do if stuck in a room with the person they’ve been avoiding?

Who do they like as a person but hate their work? Vice versa, whose work do they like but don’t like the person?

What common etiquette do they disagree with? Do they still follow it?

What simple activity that most people do / can do scares your character?

What do they feel guilty for that the other person(s) doesn’t / don’t even remember?

Did they take a cookie from the cookie jar? What kind of cookie was it?

What subject / topic do they know a lot about that’s completely useless to the direct plot?

How would they respond to being fired by a good boss?

What’s the worst gift they ever received? How did they respond?

What do they tell people they want? What do they actually want?

How do they respond when someone doesn’t believe them?

When they make a mistake and feel bad, does the guilt differ when it’s personal versus when it’s professional?

When do they feel the most guilt? How do they respond to it?

If they committed one petty crime / misdemeanor, what would it be? Why?

How do they greet someone they dislike / hate?

How do they greet someone they like / love?

What is the smallest, morally questionable choice they’ve made?

Who do they keep in their life for professional gain? Is it for malicious intent?

What’s a secret they haven’t told serious romantic partners and don’t plan to tell?

What hobby are they good at in private, but bad at in front of others? Why?

Would they rather be invited to an event to feel included or be excluded from an event if they were not genuinely wanted there?

How do they respond to a loose handshake? What goes through their head?

What phrases, pronunciations, or mannerisms did they pick up from someone / somewhere else?

If invited to a TED Talk, what topic would they present on? What would the title of their presentation be?

What do they commonly misinterpret because of their own upbringing / environment / biases? How do they respond when realizing the misunderstanding?

What language would be easiest for them to learn? Why?

What’s something unimportant / frivolous that they hate passionately?

Are they a listener or a talker? If they’re a listener, what makes them talk? If they’re a talker, what makes them listen?

Who have they forgotten about that remembers them very well?

Who would they say ‘yes’ to if invited to do something they abhorred / strongly didn’t want to do?

Would they eat something they find gross to be polite?

What belief / moral / personality trait do they stand by that you (mun) personally don’t agree with?

What’s a phrase they say a lot?

Do they act on their immediate emotions, or do they wait for the facts before acting?

Who would / do they believe without question?

What’s their instinct in a fight / flight / freeze / fawn situation?

What’s something they’re expected to enjoy based on their hobbies / profession that they actually dislike / hate?

If they’re scared, who do they want comfort from? Does this answer change depending on the type of fear?

What’s a simple daily activity / motion that they mess up often?

Even his father was like *looking at an eight year old* “I see my nagging wife in you”

THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING

his parents really took a glance at that toddler and decided to project the most unhinged gender possible on him. JC, assigned neglected wife at birth.

JC performs it so conscientiously too! It's so so so important to how he is with WWX and how he views himself. 9yo JC after he's known WWX: "there he is. the cad that will break my heart." and can't ever everrrrrr stop loving WWX or break away from the utter grip WWX has on him. JC has known since before WWX came into his life that he was made to be neglected/scorned, by the person supposed to stand by his side and to whom he's supposed to be loyal.

Also lmao at the left with a child thing. It's totally that, except JC WISHES he was a widow!!! He's not even granted that dignity by society! But nah he's the ruined woman who was seduced and abandoned by someone who promised her marriage and then went off and died after making her look for a fool, while she was making excuses for him, and everyone knows what a chump JC was for it! Was WWX lying all along? Was is ever even real ?

okay, here's how this is going to go: i'm going to present a bunch of primary sources, and then i'm going to tell you what i think about them. obvs you're under no obligation to agree with me, and i hope you'll find the clips, etc useful regardless.