#keyboard borked

[slug-gore-bug]

neck of noodle, body of forty'-yr'-old man

[ruckis--rookie]

I may not know how to play a guitar on a professional level or really at all but I'm an aspiring musician I know enough about guitar to confidently say half of the guitar playing vids on TikTok are horseshit. Even the ones that pretend to make it look real and convincing don't get it right. They just yank songs from actual talented people and play it up for views (and sadly, it works)

[pinetreespants]

Dissenting usually ends in death

(my keyboard borked so enjoy my nasty ass writing.)

[ageless-aislynn]

Annnnd also, very important update on Aislynn's Borked Up Computer...

Still borked up but Georgette (the computer) and I are working out a system:

Turn computer on

Pray it does not blow up

Thank God when it does not blow up

Check to make sure that all of the drivers are still correct and haven't been "helpfully" rolled back by Windows, Dell, the demon who apparently infected a bunch of Dells at the factory level, etc.

Try not to stare at the Nvidia light every time it comes on

Remind self it's okay for the Nvidia light to be on because it's, you know, the graphics card and does have legit things to do

Check Windows Reliability Monitor

Check the health and temperature of the C drive

Check the time

Those last two are important because in about an hour to 2 hours, Georgette will begin to just feel off in some way. Go back and check health and temp. Completely shut down computer if temp has raised (which, to be fair, I think the temp going up, like, 1 degree is normal with use but it's just something I can look at and makes me feel more like I have some sort of control).

If we make it to 2 hours up time without a problem, shut down anyway.

Leave off for a while. Switch to Fire tablet with its awesome, new $9 Bluetooth keyboard \o/ 🥳🤷‍♀️😉and spend some time writing the next chapter of whatever fic I'm working on (currently "15 Minutes" chapter 9) in a Tumblr draft.

Eventually come back to computer and turn it on again. Weirdly now, it should feel a little steadier than the first "session" and can run as long as 10 hours without feeling like it's about to fall over, explode, or all of the above. I do not understand why this is but... it is. 🤷‍♀️

Try not to keep looking at the Nvidia light every time it comes on but, for Pete's sake, that looked so cool when I first got Georgette, like she was some Fancy Gaming PC™️ and now it just gives me anxiety.

Eventually shut down and feel like it was a Good Computer Day if we made it through without a blue screen event.

I'd ideally like to get an entire week with no blue screening, then please, Dear Lord, a whole month, then I want to try installing Steam again. This may end very badly because I know the computer is NOT stable but she's more stable than before. I just want to play Halo again, friends. I miss it so, so much.

I also want this computer, which has so much potential to be a genuinely amazing gaming/vidding rig, to live up to that, one day. 64GBs of RAM should not go into vapors and die because I'm watching a video on Youtube while checking my email. That's just wrong. 😭I know Georgette can be a great PC, can make up for this incredibly rough first 7 weeks of her life. We just need to get this dang BIOS/OS/driver/whatever Incompatibility Demon out of her.

Hope you're all doing well. Love you, frens. 🤗💖

[wordsandrobots]

I have of late been thinking about my dislike for the idea that Optimus Prime and Megatron were friends prior to the whole 'thousands of years of unending war' thing.

You see, there is this new Transformers animated film that's just been released, Transformers One, predicated on this very concept. Semi-relatedly, the most recent cartoon to be released under the Transformers umbrella proposes a world where the Autobots and Decepticons settled their differences and Megatron now acts broadly on the side of Good, to the extent of having human friends. I don't like that either.

And to a very large degree, my opinion is completely irrelevant. These are stories aimed at children, to sell toys, and I am closer to 40 than I am to 30. I'm not the intended audience. To a large degree, I've never managed to actually be the intended audience for Transformers media, having fallen awkwardly into the gap between the original 'Generation 1' merchandising push and the 90s iteration in Beast Wars. I have always been a fan of Transformers in an eclectic, slightly disconnected sense, gathering bits and pieces together as and when I've come across them.

My idea of what Optimus Prime and Megatron are like comes from Ladybird Books, half the very first Marvel Comics miniseries, and The Transformers: The Movie. I hold Side Burn from Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2001) up as a favourite piece of design. My first proper official Transformers toy was Air Hammer (who is awesome). Yes, I've been terribly invested in different parts of the fiction and I have my preferences, but my nostalgia buttons for this are permanently, delightfully borked.

Why would modern Transformers fiction cater to me? Why should it? Hell, no, let me say outright it shouldn't. That would be ridiculous. Thus, while I can certainly sit down and explain my feelings on this particular subject -- that Optimus and Megatron originate as characters defined entirely by enmity and oppositional philosophies, that I am deeply uncomfortable with ejecting the political content from fictional conflicts in order to make them more conventionally 'tragic' or 'complex', that I think James Roberts inadvertently did permanent damage to the franchise's central concepts when he made Megatron a conflation of Marx and Stalin in the course of trying to rescue the character from a hilariously botched 'Origin' mini-series, that telling the 'they were once friends' story with a white man voicing Optimus and a black man voicing Megatron looks *fucking awful* -- is there any point doing so?

Never forget that you are arguing about a children's toy was the maxim on the Transformers forums I frequented in the 2000s and early 2010s. I took that advice to heart. I try only to have long involved discussions about the nuances of the franchise with level-headed friends who can separate their preferences from the material realities and thus moderate their reactions with perspective. I also try not take up my keyboard to bash out angry tirades that I am not being catered to by cartoons.

But there's the rub. There's the thing that sticks in my head and leads me to type this post out. In spite of the idiosyncratic reality, I *am* being catered to by this stuff in theory. For the past decade, Transformers as a franchise has been locked into a constant reiteration of previous versions of itself. Transformers One is predicated on fixing the origin of The Transformers around Optimus, Megatron and Bumblebee (and Elita, because you gotta have a singular girl tagging along). The recognisable faces of the brand since 1984 (and Elita). The same characters that have been re-released, reduxed, redone and rewritten since the first update with 1992's Generation 2 (and Elita).

It's branding. It's market-tested iconography. It's commodification working as it always does. It's also absolutely nuts when you step back and realise the underlying strategy of Transformers has gone from "we will sell you all the toys by inventing All The Characters and giving every single one backstories and plot-lines that ensure Sprocket is somehow somebody's favourite" to "we will sell you fifteen versions of the same four characters over and over again."

I assume that calculation makes sense somewhere in the structure of Hasbro's corporate edifice. That it's cost-effective and feeds their goals of endless growth. As James Stephanie Sterling (arch excoriater of the games industry and thank God for them) has been pointing out quite a lot this recently, the concept of perpetually greater profits year on year is a dangerous, stupid delusion that destroys industries from all sides. But I am sure the people who buy into it think they know what they're doing and that their logic does indeed result in squeezing more money from same old cash-cow.

Part of that is the calculated targetting of nostalgia. Transformers One is positioned as a prequel, not to any other story in particular, but to an 'evergreen' version of the Transformers franchise. It's at once its own, unique thing and the prequel to that cartoon 'you' remember and loved from the 80s. Why not bring the whole family to relive 'your' childhood? Or hoover up the collectables that have been shipped to ranks of Transformers YouTubers so they can excitedly get fellow enthusiasts to spend more money on plastic models nobody has room for?

[They are selling non-transforming model kits for this movie, because the designs are so streamlined as to prevent easy realisation as transforming toys. The part of me that hates Action Masters with every fibre of my being doesn't know whether to laugh or weep that big name collectors are embracing these damn things. The whole flipping point of this toy-line is meant to be 'thing turns into other thing'! Primus wept, what is wrong with you people?!]

[Ahem.]

The assumption, fundamental to this and the other big toy franchises that have persisted from the 80s and 90s, is that because 'you' like X, you will continue to buy N different variations of X ad-infinitum. That's why it's still Generation 1 Optimus, Megatron and Bumblebee (and Elita) forty years later and following dozens of attempts to diversify the roster. Nostalgia sells, regardless of how well it actually accords with the thing that 'you' liked while in the original demographic for children's toys.

As a slight aside, I have also been unreasonably vexed this week by discovering Hasbro has produced a box-set of collectable action figures based on Star Wars novel The Last Command which features dark Jedi clone Joruus C'baoth wielding a red lightsaber. Not only does he not at any time pick up a lightsaber in the book, it would be completely contra to his personality for it to be one associated with the evil Sith. Joruus suffers under the delusion he is rebuilding the good and noble Jedi Order right to the very end, despite falling headlong into the Dark Side of the Force. That's the entire *point*. And that point is entirely irrelevant to the people making the box-set, even as they supposedly target people who like The Last Command, because commodified nostalgia rarely concerns itself with the specifics of the object being evoked. A hazy outline is enough.

Elizabeth Sandifer wrote in a recent essay regarding particular forms of bad Doctor Who and bad Doctor Who spin-offs that they "use my unequivocal love of this stupid fucking show against me." She identifies a distinction between instalments in the series that are crap through the normal reasons things are crap -- bad concept, bad script, bad production -- and those that are produced purely on the grounds that they are 'more Doctor Who'. I think that zeroes in on the problem here. 'More Transformers', 'More Star Wars', 'More Marvel', 'More sci-fi or fantasy intellectual property from which can be squeezed a seemingly endless deluge of products' has become the dominant mode of these long-running franchises. And written into this mode at a fundamental level is this idea that 'you', the hypothetical fan who cares deeply about something that struck a chord with them as children, will simply keep buying the same thing over and over again.

Lego have jut released an 'Ultimate Collector' set depicting Jabba the Hutt's sail barge from Return of the Jedi. It retails for £429.99. I have no earthly idea how anyone can make that kind of outlay on a toy, and I say this as someone who probably could afford to, if I prioritised buying a toy over financing house repairs and, you know, food. I *own* thousands of pounds worth of Lego, because I have been hoarding it piece by piece since I was *six*, one set and one charity shop at a time. If I wanted to build Jabba the Hutt's sail barge, I would consider it an interesting challenge. But to simply buy it, to put down half a grand on this huge set just because it comes from my second favourite Star Wars film?

It offends me an already massively-profitable corporation thinks I would do that. Because in theory, I am in the target demographic here. I am the 'you' in my examples above, I am the right age, more or less, with the right interests and the right level of disposable income. I am the mark all this is aimed at.

I am the person who is supposed to be thrilled by the idea of the 'untold story' of where the Decepticons and Autobots came from, of the secret history of Megatron and Optimus Prime.

Never mind that story was told in the first couple of pages of the original Marvel comics, as a fascistic uprising from within Cybertron society resisted by a peace-desiring majority. Never mind the 1984 cartoon created its own history of sectarian strife between sentient robots built for different purposes by sinister corporate overlords. Never mind that it's just forcing another set of familiar signifiers through the same origin story mill that has given us a long litany of unloved prequels off the back of George Lucas getting too big and too rich for any editor to constrain.

I don't imagine what I have said so far to be a novel observation. It's just capitalism doing what it does, squandering potential in the pursuit of ever-greater profit. Nor do I deny the reciprocal part fandom plays in creative impoverishment. The hysterical backlash from certain quarters to The Last Jedi -- a film that goes out of its way to say Star Wars is still alive with new possibilities and that the returning heroes are strong in all the ways they were at the end of the original trilogy -- stands testament to what ossified taste does to a person's sense of proportion, just as Rise of Skywalker stands testament to what happens when you indulge such people.

Above all, I am not claiming to be immune to the forces behind the nostalgia glut. I'm writing this looking at my display cabinets which have shelves devoted to Transformers, Bionicle (specifically these models), Batman, Doctor Who, Star Wars and Fullmetal Alchemist, and Transformers again. I bought Missing Link Convoy entirely to have a version of Optimus Prime I could hold in my hand that evoked the books aimed at primary school children from which I first learned who this character was (resulting emotions: mixed). My fandom has *always* involved collecting physical objects and as much as I'd stand by the claim hunting down decades-old toys to curate a collection informed by your personal experiences and taste is superior to gorging on an endless stream of new products, it's still chasing commodities. As someone who has also always prioritised creative fandom (fan-art, fan-fiction, building, modelling, speculating, imagining), I'm not seriously going to place one version of Having The Thing over the other on an ethical level. Equally, I see no particular mark of dishonour in taking joy from holding an object that has some meaning to you, however trivial or mass-marketed it may be.

No, what I resent is seeing marketing for a 'brand new' iteration of Transformers that is on some level still aimed at people like me, people my age, people who still find joy in the things they did as children. The calculated insult in multiple-hundred-pound Lego sets designed exclusively for 'adult collectors'. The mendacious indifference inherent to 'exclusive' toys that purport to be physical realisations of dearly-held fictions while being demonstrably ignorant of the source. The endless 'Easter eggs' and 'love letters' that we are expected to clap along to like performing seals.

The idea I should uncritically enjoy the same things I did when I was ten, in the same way, and that this should be a skeleton key to my bank account.

One of the very first things I learned about Generation 1 Optimus and Megatron, beyond the fact that they had always been mortal enemies, was that they died. Their story came to an end and new characters took their places. Ultra Magnus and Galvatron. Rodimus Prime. Fortress Maximus and Scorponok. Optimus Primal and an ersatz new 'Megatron'. Successors. Legacies. The full-throated boast that there are futures past the original tale.

And sure, the original characters have been refracted through different relaunches, alternate universes and reincarnations. It is unreasonable to claim there has ever been a version of Transformers that truly lacked Optimus and Megatron. But there is a difference between reinvented iconography and collapsing every version into 'evergreen' amalgamations, all development sheered off so they will continue to appeal to an old market alongside new generations of kids. Actually, putting it that way is giving Hasbro too much credit when the truth is they have expended massively more effort in courting middle-aged fans with toys aiming to recreate the exact look a character had in the 1984 cartoon (impossible) and bastardised versions of post-G1 toys (look what they did to my boy). They are very much doing the thing I said they shouldn't be.

So yes. I really don't like the idea Optimus and Megatron started out as friends before the war. But the more I think about it, the more I realise that is less to do with them being crammed into a thoughtless 'Professor X and Magneto' template than it is with the fact it is still Optimus and Megatron, forty years on from their debut -- and I'm expected to be happy about that.

[intertexts]

also my bt keyboard borked it & my sister left for however long & my laptop is still half gutted w lil containers of screws & the problem is much more annoying to fix and requires much more fiddling around in the guts than i'd hoped (many many more points of error!!) so Effectively im fucked. btw.

[dracolunae]

Huh, phone has unborked itself in the sense that it no longer has a bar of unreactiveness through the whole screen where m and k are on the keyboard but it is continuing to be borked in the sense that the entire screen will at random become 95% unreactive, which is even less workable than before

[cosmic-ships]

Me trying to type anything with a "W" in it without aggressively smashing the W Key hard:

hat (What)

ithout (Without)

here (Where)

hen (When)

hatever (Whatever)

My W key is borked on my keyboard :') so if you see anything that is missing a W now you know why and you'll be able to tell if I'm on desktop or mobile LOL

[labelleizzy]

Tumblr GIF search is borked but at least I can upload gifs again from my mobile keyboard (and find what I want)

[drag-oon23]

On one hand: mouse and keyboard finally work completely with my new code.

On the other hand: controllers are bork.

[slug-gore-bug]

My keyboard, my laptop in g5eneral, really, h6as some h6ow or way become borked to th6e point random ass numbers and symbols (commas, dash6es, etc) pop up next to certain letters after being5 typed. I h6ave no idea h6ow to fix it (it'-s not numlock, i'-ve tried th6at), and it'-s super annoying5, but at th6e same time'-'- i'-ve been delving5 back into th6e cesspit th6at is h6omestuck recently, and it feels like my own personal speech6 quirk, so th6at'-s cool.

[this-is-not-a-slow-burn]

so it turns out this gd controller is somewhat broken.

my desktop does not have wifi or bluetooth (I use ethernet) so I have to plug the controller in, even though it's wireless. it's been acting weird, and apparently it's because the stupid plug port is borked :|

I cannot game with keyboard and mouse bc nerve and muscle damage so I'm stuck.

IN THE MIDDLE OF COMBAT

Guess I just get to eat it on this one until I can get a USB 2-in-1 Wifi Bluetooth dongle.

[cesium-sheep]

got my fucking wifi adapter working again 👍 apparently it was a bad driver and I just had to uninstall and let it auto-reinstall on restart. irritating.

edit: jk it only fixed it for a couple minutes, shit's just borked. I was gonna start importing my bookmarks to ao3 today too, which I can still do but I have to manually type the work numbers from my offline bookmarks to my ipad. good thing I got that keyboard.

[ageless-aislynn]

Dear friends, I believe it's time to send a computer exorcist to my humble dwelling place. The reason I've been gone (if you've noticed I've been gone) for the past few days? 5 more blue screens of death and one refusal to completely shut down.

The utter heartbreak of these things? This is a new computer. My dad got it for me for Christmas.

I've been in charge of a computer for at least 20 years now. I've dealt with many problems, I've caused my fair share of problems through just ignorance at the start, through not checking things out thoroughly enough before installing them or whatever (again, at the start). I've dealt with viruses, malware, just weird borked up problems that develop over time as a computer ages. But I've never had multiple computers act like this at the same time.

It's got to be me. But I don't know how or why. This issue started with my poor Mass Effect: Andromeda again. I installed Steam and then Halo and everything ran perfectly (this girl has more RAM so the graphics are GORGEOUS). I installed MEA and when I tried to launch it, I got thrown into a loop of blue screen-reboot-blue screen-reboot 4 times. I finally got it out of that and started researching the problem. Turns out my graphics card driver, which was supposed to support DirectX 12, had a big ol' blank where it came to DirectX. Updated the driver, MEA could launch without dying.

That night, I shut the computer down, everything looked normal, the monitor went off, the keyboard and mouse shut down, but the pc itself stayed powered on. Dead but humming away, utterly unable to be reached by mouse or keyboard. 😐 Had to hard shut it down, then this morning, discovered that it was an known issue with a Windows update. 😑 At least you can uninstall updates.

Then while I was sitting here just looking at my email... blue screen. Oh, didn't you know that that wasn't the right Network adapter driver? Silly girl! Updated it.

Now I'm just staring at it, waiting for the next disaster. I legit feel cursed right about now. I don't see how I could've anticipated any of the above but yet... I'm sure it's somehow my fault. Just like whatever else goes wrong. It'll be my fault for wanting a working computer, I guess. I feel SO BAD for my dad. He wanted to do something so nice and awesome for me (and he DID) and I didn't want to tell him about all of these issues but he came through during one of the blue screen moments so there was no hiding it.

Otherwise, it's an amazing computer, has so much power and if I can just get it past these weird driver issues (everything is updated now, done directly, not using the Windows update thing), I think she'll be a great, awesome pc friend.

I just wish I didn't feel so cursed right now. This is such a wonderful gift and I feel terrified to be happy about it because then something else goes wrong.

Also, apropos of nothing but I truly dislike Windows 11 emojis. Where are my cute emojis? Now they all look as borked up as I feel! 😱😱😱 (Depending on your device, they probably look exactly the same as they did before, of course. 😉But to me? They looked CURSED. 😨)

The ones on the left are the ones I'm used to. The ones on the right are trying to look 3D, I guess? But at a small size, they just look weird and unclear or something to me. Not a big deal, I'll adapt, but I'm an emoji girl, y'all know that if you've been around me long enough, and this makes me feel like I'm suddenly speaking with an unfamiliar accent or something.

Ending with the minor issue. I'll hopefully catch back up with everything I've missed ASAP if my new girl can outrun the out-of-the-box driver issues she's been plagued with. Poor, sweet girl. I know she's good, they just gave her a terrible start. 🤗

THAT'S NOT THE RIGHT HUG EMOJI. 😭OH MAN THIS ONE IS EVEN WORSE.

*sigh* Goodbye for now, frens. Love you. 💖

[talysalankil]

is something borked with xkit rewritten? suddenly some of my keyboard shortcuts and the hide my own post settings are broken

[perpetual-fool]

Musings 1

(01/01/23, 1.1k) Thoughts on various subjects I've been thinking about. (cooking, Linux, language, music, religion)

I may have figured out a way to cook that works with my executive dysfunction. (I think that's what it is: difficulty starting or switching tasks.) First, it's easier for me to do tasks in bulk. Prepping an entire bag of onions or something is just as much work as prepping a single meal. So I should do the former, having ingredients ready to assemble into a meal. But secondly, even just assembly may be too much. Often I really want to just shove something in my mouth. Microwaving is manageable, but most things don't reheat all that well and the dish tends to get hot before the food does. Tangent: glass dishes are a lot better than ceramic for the microwave, but it doesn't eliminate the problem. I've made a couple foods that fit that need for me. One was a weird food bar thing, basically nutraloaf? but made to actually taste good. Though making food dry enough to handle generally requires starches, and I eat fairly low-carb. The other thing was soup, blended smooth enough to just drink. For whatever reason it's less effort to deal with 'generic food drink' than anything with recognizable bits. It doesn't look like much but it tastes like whatever went into it. The texture is a bit better now that I have a more powerful blender. And it makes for a great base if I feel like turning it into regular soup.

Diacritics on Linux seem to be borked. At least on this version of Mint. Specifically I can't seem to get "c^" to work. It's available on the international layout, but that's for an ISO keyboard and mine is ANSI (European vs American). There is a special option specifically for Esperanto characters but I can't find an explanation on how to use it. One post seemed to suggest you could set up a 'third layer' key and that would let you type the special characters but that didn't work. Knowing Linux, it's likely the feature might just be broken. Hypothetically I could make a custom keyboard layout, or change how the 'compose' key works. But that would entail hours of digging through incomprehensibly named directories looking for the incantations I'm supposed to use, and it still might not work for no clear reason. The only good solution here seems to be a programmable keyboard, assuming its software isn't borked too. Okay so it's just working now, stulta maŝino.

I'd like to hear what Klingon metal might sound like. Thematically something like Sabaton would be appropriate, but with Klingon's consonant clusters it might have to sound more like Rammstein. Are there conlang bands in general? or do the kind of people who learn languages for fun not generally overlap with musicians? Apparently there's Stovokor, either they're not very good or it's not my thing. I like the concept but with that style of vocals I can't make out what they're saying, largely defeating the purpose. And there's Kosmic Horrör, they're pretty decent. Although the bIHnuchpu' haven't fully committed to Klingon. The spoken stuff would sound better that way, I think.

Maybe I've never liked "screaming" because I've never heard it done well. The problem seems to be that the pitch is mostly gone, losing the melody, as are the lyrics, since it's incomprehensible. I feel that's a compromise too far. But then I heard Pisces, which is almost intelligible. Playing with the technique myself, there's no reason you couldn't enunciate the consonants more. You might need to add syllables to make it work, but it's workable. And the pitch issue sounds similar to tuning drums. Supposedly, they put out such a wide range of frequencies that it really isn't meaningful to tune them to any specific note. So possibly, "screaming" should be used like percussion, focusing on rhythm.

I shouldn't be surprised by this, I'm having the same sort of trouble learning vocal techniques as I was with cooking or sharpening. Broadly, any isolated explanation I found was generally either wrong or incomplete, and I had to look up a bunch of different versions to find something that worked. Sometimes they were all wrong and I had to figure it out myself. Specifically, I'm trying to learn 'growl': vocal distortion created with the false vocal folds (supposedly). One technique said it was like coughing (but polite, high in your throat) and that was wrong. A better technique, for 'blues growl', was to close off the back of your throat with your tongue (the Meatwad voice) and sigh through that. And you should feel the vibrations at the back of your tongue. I'm not sure if that's effective yet, but it doesn't hurt.

I'm considering alternate tunings for my bass. Switching doesn't matter at this point since I haven't built any substantial muscle memory. Why I might want to: intervals that are closer together are easier to play, but if they're further apart the instrument as a whole has a greater range. Sympathetic resonance and chord fingerings would also be a consideration but don't apply to my circumstances. Thirds tuning (each string is tuned four 'half-steps' apart) seems pretty great. It puts the chromatic scale (every possible note) straight horizontally across the neck, no shifting at all (sort of). I also tried tritone tuning (6 notes apart, the most dissonant interval in the system) thinking maybe that would cut down on the rumbling you get on strings you're not playing. But it didn't help, sympathetic resonance clearly isn't the problem. I need to map out the different tunings to get a better idea of what's going on.

And I found out that Mormons have their own version of the bible. I wondered if they omitted the curse at the end of Revelation regarding not adding or removing from the book. Apparently no, and the justification for changing things is insipid and boring. "I'm not changing it, I'm restoring it to its original intent!" And the argument for why that's acceptable is.. I don't have a word for it. There's just no actual position there. "I believe _" isn't an argument. But that's generally how religious people are, I should've expected that.