esmeiolanthe - Tumblr blog

[esmeiolanthe]

Fellow Windows 11 users: how to disable newly-installed Microsoft AI!

Folks, with the new updates that've come down recently, Microsoft has installed its "Copilot" AI app on your machine. It cannot be removed.

But it can be disabled. Here's how (courtesy of the excellent Pihko Misit, aka @smokepaw.bsky.social over at Bluesky). I've just done this to my own desktop machine, and all's well with it now.

Here's what to do:

(1) You need to have Admin rights for the machine and be logged in to the administrator account.

Now, right-click on the Start menu (Windows logo on the Taskbar.) A menu pops up; about half way down it you'll see Terminal and Terminal (Admin). Click on the Terminal (Admin) option.

(2) A DoS-like box will open. (For those of you who've never interacted with a Windows terminal window before, it looks like this:)

On the command line (i.e. the first empty line), copy and paste this:

reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot /v TurnOffWindowsCopilot /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Then hit Enter.

If successful, you'll see a line pop up saying so. Congratulations! But you're not quite finished.

Now you need to close all programs and fully shut down the machine. A restart isn't enough, it needs to be fully powered down and started back up.

"And now," Pihko says, "ou have a NSA-like AI spy dormant on your machine. Stay vigilant, odds are it'll turn back on with future updates! Big Corporate wants you to be compliant. Don't be!"

[esmeiolanthe]

my English prof teaching abt cover letters today and me trying not to bring up the luke skywalker cover letter post:

[esmeiolanthe]

[esmeiolanthe]

I am callde Fae

And I cavort

With man and beaste

Of evry sorte

I play goode triks

Like pulling tales

And steeling coin

And ringin bells

But wen I want

To cos reel fuss

I do not goe

I send walruus

[esmeiolanthe]

A Vulcan named Stork works at the Terran adoption agency. Parents always request that he be the one to deliver their child to them.

[esmeiolanthe]

Instead we have names like “King Thunder Lizard,” “Different Lizard,” and “Deep Chest Arm Lizard.” I bet Heckin Chonkasaurus sounds good in Latin.

[esmeiolanthe]

vampire oc who enjoys roleplaying as his vampire oc in forums online

[esmeiolanthe]

I don't know that the canonical Bertie Wooster could be called "progressive" (or "politically engaged" or "aware of anything that's going on outside of his immediate sphere of acquaintances with funny nicknames") but you can't argue he wouldn't support gay marriage. Bertie Wooster neither likes nor understands straight marriage, but he fights for his friends who inexplicably want to do that.

[esmeiolanthe]

one thing i need to start living by is “become the thing that you want” if i want friends who throw themed parties maybe i should start throwing those parties. if i want someone who writes me love letters maybe i should start writing letters for the people i love. if i want to hang out at museums and pretty cafes maybe i should invite my friends to these places. and maybe even then i won’t find the kind of people i want to be around. but then i would have become the exact person i want to be around. and maybe that’s good enough.

[esmeiolanthe]

I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.

[esmeiolanthe]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[esmeiolanthe]

A mark on your forehead identifies the god you must worship to stay alive, usually by joining its local church or temple. Your mark is unknown, meaning an old, forgotten god sponsored you. To survive, you must either find an old temple to worship at, or do the arduous task of building a new one

[esmeiolanthe]

Reposting this because I need to materialize it somewhere.

[esmeiolanthe]

Sims 2 on Windows 11

Alright, the new computer with Windows 11 is up and running and Sims 2 has been installed. These are the steps I took to get it running and looking pretty:

Installed the game through EA App

I installed "George" so I won't need to start the game up through EA App and let it waste resources and spy on me.

I ran the 4GB patch on the Sims2EP9.exe and TS2BodyShop.exe

I ran Graphics Rules Maker and tweaked things through that enabling it to use my full texture memory etc

I installed the EmptyStandbyList since without it I got pink flashing very quickly

????

Profit.

If this helped somebody else out, you're welcome! :)

(long, pretty messy and image heavy version of this process written as I did it is behind the cut. I mean it, it's very long!)

added my graphics card in the video cards file manually

did the common graphics rules tweaks (these) manually

applied 4gb patch to bodyshop and game exes

tested bodyshop, it started up but has no smooth edges, otherwise textures are good and new projects export and import as supposed. 4GB patch works as supposed. It'll likely require tweaking it through nvidia control panel so leaving that for later.

Started up game, after turning the edge smoothing on it looks this good (no mods thus the boxy shadows):

6. However my log is reporting only 1gb of RAM for the game to use, will have to reapply the 4gb patch and try again. But it's using all 12 gb for texture memory so that's cool, I probably won't need to worry too much about pink flashing but I'm going to stress test it a little.

View distance maximized:

Shaders work:

"I probably won't need to worry too much about pink flashing" I said earlier and then left the lot and:

:'D But looking at task manager I see my standby memory has filled up the remaining RAM already so this is actually working as expected, I just forgot one step.

7. installed the EmptyStandbyList.

8. This is where I closed game, applied the standby memory fix, rechecked my exe and remembered that you weren't supposed to run it in compatibility mode so I turned that off but just in case I also reapplied 4gb patch and restarted the game. Now it's correctly showing me 4GB of RAM to use for the game so that should be handled.

Side note: Mr. Humble spawned, I haven't seen him for years as I have mod to stop him from appearing. Was this sim always so ugly? It looks like his face is melting.

No pink flashing after leaving the lot this time:

But it crashed when I clicked on the sims icon.

New try, game restarted and this time we'll go straight to CAS and... *immediately gets distracted* There are this many bin families by default?

I've used clean templates for years so this was an unpleasant surprise. I don't like them, you're all getting nuked soon once I've made sure the game runs as supposed and can go ahead installing clean templates. So then to the CAS, it loads and I click to create a sim and....

Oh. Okay then. :| Guess I'm missing some tweak still. Let's try graphics rules maker instead, it should also easily fix my resolution etc since I forgot to do that manually.

One restart later, are you fucking kidding me?

but hey, nice crisp textures. Too bad it's so tiny I can't see shit. (I realized this was my error after a moment, I thought graphics rules maker said minimum resolution in the spot I didn't change but it actually says maximum, so I fixed that and all is good) But I'm gonna ignore that now and try loading CAS again, pls work.

.... Hell yeah, at least that finally loaded up as supposed.

She is beauty, she is grace, maxis defaults really ruin her face.

After the final restart with screen size etc fixed I went back and forth to different lots trying to make it flash pink and it never did so I'm going to say this was success.

So to recap:

Installed the game through EA App

I installed "George" so I won't need to start the game up through EA App.

I ran the 4GB patch on the Sims2EP9.exe and TS2BodyShop.exe

I ran Graphics Rules Maker and tweaked things through that enabling it to use my full texture memory etc

I installed the EmptyStandbyList since without it I got pink flashing very quickly

????

Profit.

And seriously, that's all, even if this post ended up this long.

I still need to get smooth edges in bodyshop but that will likely be done with nvidia control panel rather than texture settings. Here's one more random maxis sims image to end this with a pretty picture instead of just huge wall of text.

[esmeiolanthe]

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

[esmeiolanthe]

Well, I sounded completely confident, but I apparently was almost completely wrong about pretty well everything except the character names (unless Arthur is really named Reginald or something and I missed that part).

Whether Lucy had a bad reaction to the blood transfusion or simply wore out because of vampire stuff is a matter of interpretation, and I am still choosing to interpret it as a bad reaction to the transfusion, because that’s how I like to read it.

@trapezoidoxide​ helpfully pointed out that while O- is the universal donor, AB+ is the universal recipient. @atagotiak​ pointed out that the chances of getting three negative donors in a row is pretty darn low and provided a very interesting link to information about blood type distribution.

So, armed with this new information, I am going to draw some different conclusions and state them completely confidently. They will probably also be wrong, but hey -- working that out is what makes these discussions fun, right?

Lucy had two donors from the UK, one from the US, and one from the Netherlands.

The most common blood types in the UK are O+ (35%) and A+ (30%), per the link above. The most common blood types in the Netherlands are O+ (38.2%) and A+ (36.6%). Chances are that Lucy received at least one dose of one of these two blood types in the first three transfusions. Therefore, Lucy cannot have had an Rh negative blood type, or we would have seen a bad reaction sooner.

Now, math and statistics are not my strong suit, but I’m reasonably sure that Lucy’s best chance of successful transfusions at random would have been if she was A+. An A person would not react badly to O blood, but an O person would react badly to A blood.

Assuming that Lucy is A+, Quincy would then have to be a B or AB (positive or negative doesn’t matter) for her to have a bad reaction to his blood. These aren’t common blood types in the US: B+ at 8.5%, B- at 1.5%, AB+ at 3.4%, and AB- at 0.6%. But if my math is correct, that’s about a 13% chance overall.

So there’s my new conclusions: Lucy is likely A+ and Quincy is either B or AB.

Still completely useless, though.

Lucy must have had blood type O-, since she had no reaction to blood from Seward, Van Helsing, and Arthur. Without blood typing, that’s the second blood type most likely to not have a bad reaction. However, given that she had a bad reaction to Quincy’s blood, she can’t have been O+, because O+ is the universal recipient. Therefore, Quincy is probably Rh positive, and the other three are probably Rh negative.

This is a) completely useless and b) based on layman’s understanding of blood types. But there it is. :)

[esmeiolanthe]

Lucy must have had blood type O-, since she had no reaction to blood from Seward, Van Helsing, and Arthur. Without blood typing, that’s the second blood type most likely to not have a bad reaction. However, given that she had a bad reaction to Quincy’s blood, she can’t have been O+, because O+ is the universal recipient. Therefore, Quincy is probably Rh positive, and the other three are probably Rh negative.

This is a) completely useless and b) based on layman’s understanding of blood types. But there it is. :)