In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

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WingSounds
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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby WingSounds » Tue Oct 23, 2018 8:00 am

Windows 7 or bust. I live in terror of the day it becomes undone... At least my mint partition will surely save me?..

That being said, these two dreams in tandem feel like a beautiful and incomplete story.
It also makes the dream of my little sprouting mango tree lovingly throttling my neck (to death, breh!) somewhat less interesting. Wah...
Oh, well. We can never have too much chocolate.

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Mongrel
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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby Mongrel » Tue Oct 23, 2018 12:08 pm

For me Windows 7 is like XP in that I know I'm going to hang on to it as desperately long as possible, hoping desperately that something less odious than Win10 comes out before Win7's time is completely up.
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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby Thad » Tue Oct 23, 2018 9:44 pm

I'd definitely second Wings's recommendation for Mint as the Linux distro to use if you don't want to fuck around with all the stuff people don't like about Linux.

I've had my grandpa on Mint for the last year and a half. His only complaint so far was having to switch from MS Office 2003 to LibreOffice. And I imagine switching to a current version of MS Office would have been a much bigger pain for him.

You can always just download an image, stick it on a USB stick, and boot from that to see what you think.

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby WingSounds » Wed Oct 24, 2018 12:02 pm

So, Thad, what you're saying is... Perhaps I'm your grandfather?!
Ahaha, hahah - it really is a gentle & fun distro. I'm no power-user, either. I think the only other distro I used (at work, and quite some time ago was) SUSE, which I remember being okay, but - not much more than that. (Also, everyone should use Libre/OpenOffice. Everyone.)

All that being said...

Mongrel wrote:For me Windows 7 is like XP in that I know I'm going to hang on to it as desperately long as possible, hoping desperately that something less odious than Win10 comes out before Win7's time is completely up.


Same. It's the first Windows since, uh......... one of the past OS that I really grew fond of. It'd be less awful if 10 weren't just vile in every conceivable way, like it was devised in some darkened laboratory populated only by stygian marketing automatons whose fell intent was to add exactly 1.8 extra clicks to every interaction.

But this isn't a wonderful dream! It's a nightmare. So:

... Yesterday, I had the recurring dream where I was a Medusa (not the Medusa, nor a Gorgon, nor her sisters; literally a Gorgon named Medusa who was not that Medusa) farming potatoes and carrots in a beautiful snowy wilderness. Then it became night, and I knew something/someone wanted to kill me. I was very afraid, but also ready to fight - but the snow just kept piling up, and nothing appeared before I woke up...

I've had this dream since I was like five, and the only excuse I can give for it is that you should never let children be raised on the classics.

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby Mongrel » Wed Oct 24, 2018 1:09 pm

I mean, Windows 10 is fixable to a usable state with several days worth of effort and research. So if I absolutely *have to* switch at some point, then grumble grumble fine.

But that's a topic for another thread.
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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby Silversong » Thu Oct 25, 2018 11:06 am

I had a dream last night where in addition to whatever else was happening, Mister Rogers was there. Just being really nice and understanding to everyone.

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby WingSounds » Thu Oct 25, 2018 11:23 am

Can I import your dream?
Into reality..?
... Please...

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby atog » Thu Oct 25, 2018 1:27 pm

seconded. dream brontokon east coast with Mr Rogers >>> all
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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby Maximillian » Thu Oct 25, 2018 4:12 pm

I'm already scared of the puppet kingdom in this crossover. I mean KING FRIDAY.

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby WingSounds » Sat Oct 27, 2018 12:06 pm

Puppets are fun and cute, though? I like marionettes. But they're very time-consuming to make, you know...

Someone kept on trying to bean me with a thrown ham sandwich. I don't know why I was running from it, but I kept getting angrier and angrier, until I lost it and ran (very slowly) towards the shadowy figure doing the beaning. Their unlimited supply of ham sandwiches aside, they were ethereal and vanished into mist. Suddenly, I felt very lonely, and the ham sandwiches had become bones.
Like - very stereotypical cartoony bones...

No clue. It was weird.

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby Blossom » Sat Oct 27, 2018 10:10 pm

Mongrel wrote:I mean, Windows 10 is fixable to a usable state with several days worth of effort and research. So if I absolutely *have to* switch at some point, then grumble grumble fine.

But that's a topic for another thread.


Yyyyeah when I got a new computer I put Windows 10 on it and it took a few minutes to have it in fine working order. There's a couple annoyances, but most of the usability is way better than 7's.

Definitely get Classic Shell though.
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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby Mongrel » Sat Oct 27, 2018 11:17 pm

The main thing, IIRC from the last time I looked, is to kill Cortana and to make sure EVERYTHING that phones home (and it's a lot of stuff) gets told to knock that shit off. The details have probably changed since I last read about it, but I'm not going to bother looking up guides again until I have to.

Actually that reminds me of something funny. We had a pernicious periodic lag issue here for weeks and couldn't figure out what was causing it. We'd narrowed it down to Buge's computer uploading something, but couldn't figure out what (Buge has Win 10 now, but had set it up properly and killed all the phone home stuff, etc.).

Luckily we all use NetWorx, so finally we figured out that the damn onboard graphics card on Buge's new motherboard was sending usage reports out several dozen times a day. Mine was doing it too (we both have AMD cards, and I had updated drivers recently), though not as much or as often, for some reason.

Anyway, once we shut that shit off, everything was fine.

Fucking EVERYTHING phones home these days. JFC.
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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby WingSounds » Sun Oct 28, 2018 1:14 pm

That's intense. Multiple times, huh...
Do data patterns change so regularly for most end-users that a graphics card needs to be reporting back regularly?
What practical purpose would that serve? Giving the manufacturer information for stress testing?

Anyway, dreams.

... I had the most lovely dream and I hated waking up from it. I think I had designed a really well-put together tbs/rts strategy hybrid. You had a strategic view, ala some of the civs and total war, with two kinds of action points. Diplomatic points, with diplomatic actions/mercantile actions generally consuming one, and your range starting at two with a few chances to improve up to four, I think?

And province actions. You could select a province you had access to, and then the map would zoom in from the pretty hand-drawn cartography to a more lush system. A bit similar to knights of honour, if anyone ever played that? Each province had an exploration rating, telling you how much you'd done/fixed up in the province, and when you went into the micro-map, you had a small period of time (thirty minutes?) to investigate areas, go on sub-quests, fight battles...

There was also a VN aspect to it for diplomacy! Cute, flustered princess and brave knights! Everything was pastel and pretty! WAR ELEPHANTS! A sad little princeling who needs your help!.. Naturally, I wrote all the details down when I woke up, but I doubt it'll be one to pursue. There were a lot of details, though, and it was a pleasantly long-lasting dream!..

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby Thad » Sun Oct 28, 2018 2:23 pm

Mongrel wrote:The main thing, IIRC from the last time I looked, is to kill Cortana and to make sure EVERYTHING that phones home (and it's a lot of stuff) gets told to knock that shit off. The details have probably changed since I last read about it, but I'm not going to bother looking up guides again until I have to.


I hear they've gotten better about stuff like forced reboots in the middle of watching a goddamn video, but they still bundle nonsense like Candy Crush (which at least is removable, though some of the bundled MS apps aren't), and stick ads in Windows Explorer and shit.

Is there a way to make it prompt you before installing updates on a reboot? Because my experience with Windows 10 has largely been one of waiting half an hour for updates when all I wanted to do was reboot the damn computer.

Actually that reminds me of something funny. We had a pernicious periodic lag issue here for weeks and couldn't figure out what was causing it. We'd narrowed it down to Buge's computer uploading something, but couldn't figure out what (Buge has Win 10 now, but had set it up properly and killed all the phone home stuff, etc.).

Luckily we all use NetWorx, so finally we figured out that the damn onboard graphics card on Buge's new motherboard was sending usage reports out several dozen times a day. Mine was doing it too (we both have AMD cards, and I had updated drivers recently), though not as much or as often, for some reason.

Anyway, once we shut that shit off, everything was fine.

Fucking EVERYTHING phones home these days. JFC.


Well, that's kinda what I'm trying to point out here: no, not everything phones home. That this behavior is considered normal is part of the problem.

If you've got an AMD graphics card under Linux, your distro will take care of installing drivers and keeping them updated. The only "phoning home" involved is periodically checking the update server. There are some distros that bundle additional analytics, but AFAIK it's opt-in in every major distro. (Ubuntu did some nonsense with Amazon advertising for awhile there, but that's disabled by default now.)

I mean, if you don't want to try Mint when it comes time for your next upgrade, okay, it's no skin off my nuts. But these "Windows 10 is fine so long as you do this and this and this and maybe occasionally this, and then don't mind when it does this" defenses feel an awful lot like fifteen years ago when everybody was telling me how dumb I was for suggesting that IE6 was not a very good browser and maybe they'd be better off trying something else.

My experience with Win10 is that it's got a good, if inconsistent, UI, and is pretty good on resource consumption, but that it's got a slew of little annoyances that need to be turned off, and some that can't be. It'd be a perfectly good OS if Microsoft would get out of its own way and quit trying to force shit on me that I don't want.

I get keeping Windows around if you need Photoshop, or the best performance on AAA games, or whatever; I still have one Windows machine that's just for running Comic Collector Pro. But I'd sure like to see the "Linux needs too much configuration" meme die. Mint 19 takes a lot less post-install configuration than Windows 10 does, and it's not any harder to install from scratch than Windows 10 is.

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby Mongrel » Sun Oct 28, 2018 3:17 pm

That's the thing. I know there's trouble-free distros of Linux these days, but I need Win for a variety of programs (yes, including AAA games and Photoshop) which are Linux unfriendly, all of which I use fairly frequently.
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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby Thad » Mon Oct 29, 2018 12:24 am

Yeah, I'm not gonna pretend Gimp is an acceptable substitute for Photoshop. It's good enough for my purposes, but I'm pretty entry-level as far as graphic design and photo editing go.

(I've never tried Photoshop under WINE, but according to the appdb CS5 is rated "Platinum" -- ie runs perfectly -- and CS6 is rated "Silver" -- ie runs somewhat less than perfectly.)

AAA games...well, they're getting there; Steam Play is a game changer. You might have better results running a DX12 game on Linux than on Win7 at this point.

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby WingSounds » Mon Oct 29, 2018 10:06 pm

I want to steer these conversations back towards dreaming, but, you know...
Paint.net is pretty good. Of course, my editing consists solely of throwing multiple Dantes into a stygian mess, so, uh...
Maybe my benchmark for 'good' is not so good.

But it has a clone of sorts in Pinta, so, for all your digital editing needs where Gimp is too much, Photoshop is untenable, and you need something else - uh, I'm helping?

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby atog » Tue Oct 30, 2018 5:36 pm

I've run PS and Illustrator under a virtual desktop thingmabob as part of a Solaris install but that was lit decades ago. It worked fine

Dreams oh lemme see...a friend in dreamland hooked up with a creepy old sugar daddy who later changed the game rules and held her as a surrogate brood mare for his heir, claiming his wife was rightly too old to carry a child to term...later on she said she found out (using "science") that he's shooting blanks and I said she should get out before 'Enry decides to 'ave 'er 'ead. And then something not unlike Fury Road except with a lot more shopping trolleys and mobility scooters.

Creepy tycoon looked a lot like Stephen Harper and Anne Boleyn played herself. The dissipate grandnephew she was sleeping with instead, was played expertly by Chad Kroeger of Nickelback XD
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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby WingSounds » Tue Oct 30, 2018 6:36 pm

Mobility scooter Fury Road is probably my dream movie. Given that I wish they'd just stayed in the old lady marsh for the entire film. (I still loved it lots, but the ending where they just let all the water waste aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa)

Plot-wise, though, it sounds a lot like some of the more interesting turn-of-the-century fiction. Or attempts to recreate the same.
Did you ever read, mmn, just a second... Anchorhead?
Alas, no Chad Kroeger, but I do think you get to look at a photograph, at some point!

Dreamt of a doctor, visiting three patients who weren't ill in a horribly depressing world. More than our own, for reference.
It ended with one of them trying to kill him, but stopping because even if they wanted to, it was more depressing to live.
Then they sat back, and watched the clouds.

Edit'd; IF is kind of a hit/miss. The parser in Anchorhead is pretty good for IF, but, if it's not your cup of tea, no worries. I just used to devour this sort of thing ravenously, ahaha...

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Re: In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

Postby mharr » Tue Oct 30, 2018 7:12 pm

There's gotta already be a thread for ways to bail out of cyberpunk dystopian operating systems?

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