#was very frustrating

[pangur-and-grim]

it is very frustrating that last year I discovered weightlifting and got into the best shape of my life, and thennn broke my leg and lost all my muscle again. I am so impatient to heal and get back to where I was.

[isagrimorie]

One of the missed moments in Picard season 2, is after Seven gets re-assimilated they try to stop Soong's drones and it always felt like such a cop-out that once again the writers forget that Seven of Nine has engineering skills and can actually hack into things.

The bad thing about knowing a lot about a character in a crossover show is that -- you know the skills of the character.

It's like when Sam Carter moved to Stargate Atlantis and most of the problems that arose during her time in Command -- I can't help but think... but Carter can solve this, we've seen her do this a hundred times in SG-1.

It's the same thing during Seven's time in Picard season 2.

This part -- I appreciate what Raffi's doing but it's just out of character that Seven wouldn't suggest this too. I get that this could be a primitive system Seven's used to-- maybe but its still wires and computers.

But the director didn't even direct Seven to do anything to help Seven's just standing there

And just... Ordering Raffi to go faster and not helping with the electronics or the hacking???

In her younger days, Seven would be mixing it up and helping Raffi. Even Rios was useful in piloting a rogue drone to destroy another.

And Seven is just standing there as moral support and telling them to move faster.

It's so out of character. Every time I get to this part in the rewatch of season 2 of Picard... I just can't reconcile it. More than the part where Seven becomes a badass who kills in cold blood-- it is the part where Picard seasons 1 and 2 disregard that Seven is a scientist and an engineer. At least in season 3 Picard gestures towards that direction with how she helps with the nacelle dismantling, and how Titan is said to be a well-oiled and maintained ship, something a ship's XO has a direct hand in.

Seven of Nine is not just a badass action hero, she is canonically one of the smartest beings in the Trekverse. It's not an opinion, it's a statement of fact. Seven helped create the Astrometrics lab.

And helped develop the Quantum slipstream drive together with B'Elanna Torres that's now being used in Star Trek Prodigy's USS Dauntless.

But sure, Seven is just standing there.

This Seven:

Who was working in engineering despite being critically ill, and who would rather do something than nothing.

Is just standing there. Not helping.

Especially at this point in Picard season 2 when she's been re-assimilated. I wish Jurati!Borg Queen had placed Seven's implants in this version differently. It's not like the body Seven's has pathways for the implants. This isn't her body, this is President Annika Hansen's body.

We've seen that Seven can interface with computers with her assimilation tubules.

I make it work by rationalizing that despite looking similar to her old implants, the newly installed implants don't work the same as the ones she's had all her life.

And another way I try to work around it is that the computer systems are too primitive for her to hack even though the thing about Borg is how Borg can adapt to any system.

One other thing -- I wish again Seven had the space to really articulate how different it is for her to have a purely organic body. How, much she loves it-- the appreciation of color because her eyes and brain process visuals through a green filter. The sensation of everything.

It would also have been great, as I've mentioned in different posts if Seven also realized there were things about her Borg physiology she missed too: Eidetic memory, enhanced senses, enhanced strength. As well as the downsides of having Borg physiology: Susceptibility to the vagaries of technology, and how her joints sometimes misalign. Her different center of gravity without all the weight of the Borg implants and enhanced skeletal system.

Also, I wonder if Seven had any thoughts that they're trying to disable robot drones to stop an attack on Renee Picard when Seven used to be a drone herself.

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[catmask]

the 'all marriage is gay as far as im concerned' except its me watching a man and woman character in a show i like and accidentally saying 'theyre so gay' because i literally forget thats not the word for romance because to me all romance is gay

[ilions-end]

i've noticed just how often achilles' dragging of hector's corpse is framed mostly as an act of extreme disrespect, or only some brutal show of triumph. personally i think that's underselling both achilles' intention and what the trojans must be thinking as they watch it happen.

hector's corpse is divinely protected so it can't be damaged by the greeks after death; all that effectively happens in the iliad is that his body gets dirty. but under normal circumstances (and i'm not gonna impose realism on mythology, but the iliad is famously detailed when it comes to bodily trauma), the physical reality of dragging a corpse along stony ground for miles would be severe disfigurement and dismemberment. first the skin would wear off, then soft tissues, then extremities would start to detach. i think the iliad's original audience would be aware of that as an intended outcome.

achilles (who doesn't yet know that hector's body has been granted divine stasis) doesn't just want to parade his enemy's corpse around, he wants to tear it apart ("i only wish that this fury inside my heart would drive me to carve you to pieces and eat your flesh raw..."), he wants it to not resemble a human anymore. he wants hector's blood and flesh to circle the city of troy. he wants to make it impossible for hector's family to gather the pieces of him to cremate and that way hector's spirit won't find passage into the underworld. that's what the gods are preventing from happening, they're not just keeping the corpse pretty for priam to pick up later.

[followthebluebell]

i think furniture legs should be carved into little animal feet again.  i think that would solve a lot of problems. 

[leveragehunters]

CoPilot in MS Word

I opened Word yesterday to discover that it now contains CoPilot. It follows you as you type and if you have a personal Microsoft 365 account, you can't turn it off. You will be given 60 AI credits per month and you can't opt out of it.

The only way to banish it is to revert to an earlier version of Office. There is lot of conflicting information and overly complex guides out there, so I thought I'd share the simplest way I found.

How to revert back to an old version of Office that does not have CoPilot

This is fairly simple, thankfully, presuming everything is in the default locations. If not you'll need to adjust the below for where you have things saved.

Click the Windows Button and S to bring up the search box, then type cmd. It will bring up the command prompt as an option. Run it as an administrator.

Paste this into the box at the cursor: cd "\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun"

Hit Enter

Then paste this into the box at the cursor: officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.17726.20160

Hit enter and wait while it downloads and installs.

VERY IMPORTANT. Once it's done, open Word, go to File, Account (bottom left), and you'll see a box on the right that says Microsoft 365 updates. Click the box and change the drop down to Disable Updates.

This will roll you back to build 17726.20160, from July 2024, which does not have CoPilot, and prevent it from being installed.

If you want a different build, you can see them all listed here. You will need to change the 17726.20160 at step 4 to whatever build number you want.

This is not a perfect fix, because while it removes CoPilot, it also stops you receiving security updates and bug fixes.

Switching from Office to LibreOffice

At this point, I'm giving up on Microsoft Office/Word. After trying a few different options, I've switched to LibreOffice.

You can download it here for free: https://www.libreoffice.org/

If you like the look of Word, these tutorials show you how to get that look:

www.howtogeek.com/788591/how-to-make-libreoffice-look-like-microsoft-office/

www.debugpoint.com/libreoffice-like-microsoft-office/

If you've been using Word for awhile, chances are you have a significant custom dictionary. You can add it to LibreOffice following these steps.

First, get your dictionary from Microsoft

Go to Manage your Microsoft 365 account: account.microsoft.com.

One you're logged in, scroll down to Privacy, click it and go to the Privacy dashboard.

Scroll down to Spelling and Text. Click into it and scroll past all the words to download your custom dictionary. It will save it as a CSV file.

Open the file you just downloaded and copy the words.

Open Notepad and paste in the words. Save it as a text file and give it a meaningful name (I went with FromWord).

Next, add it to LibreOffice

Open LibreOffice.

Go to Tools in the menu bar, then Options. It will open a new window.

Find Languages and Locales in the left menu, click it, then click on Writing aids.

You'll see User-defined dictionaries. Click New to the right of the box and give it a meaningful name (mine is FromWord).

Hit Apply, then Okay, then exit LibreOffice.

Open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user\wordbook and you will see the new dictionary you created. (If you can't see the AppData folder, you will need to show hidden files by ticking the box in the View menu.)

Open it in Notepad by right clicking and choosing 'open with', then pick Notepad from the options.

Open the text file you created at step 5 in 'get your dictionary from Microsoft', copy the words and paste them into your new custom dictionary UNDER the dotted line.

Save and close.

Reopen LibreOffice. Go to Tools, Options, Languages and Locales, Writing aids and make sure the box next to the new dictionary is ticked.

If you use LIbreOffice on multiple machines, you'll need to do this for each machine.

Please note: this worked for me. If it doesn't work for you, check you've followed each step correctly, and try restarting your computer. If it still doesn't work, I can't provide tech support (sorry).

[danlous]

I feel like many people have a fundamental misconception of what unreliable narrator means. It's simply a narrative vehicle not a character flaw or a sign that the character is a bad person. There are also many different types of unreliable narrators in fiction. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean that the character is 'wrong', it definitely doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything even if some aspects in their story are inaccurate, and only some unreliable narrators actively and consciously lie. Stories that have unreliable narrators also tend to deal with perception and memory and they often don't even have one objective truth, just different versions. It reflects real life where we know human memory is highly unreliable and vague and people can interpret same events very differently

[qoldenskies]

i think its so funny when people take the way donnie acts at face value even though its a horrible lie because he's a horrible liar, while understanding leo is bullshitting very well despite him actually being GOOD at bullshitting. many such cases

[silversoulsociety]

Gojo Satoru ✰青のすみか

[hinamie]

picked up an old pen

[gotchibam]

Shiny Masquerain & Shiny Aggron ko-fi doodle for cyrus!

[valtsv]

sure your book is a new york times bestseller with a diverse and unique cast of characters, positive reviews from multiple well known authors and agencies, "ideal for fans of [popular published work] and [other popular published work]" and rated 4.99999999/5 stars on goodreads but does it have, like, a plot

[stompandhollar]

reminding everyone that the in-universe problem with The Doctor and The Master isn’t “ooo horrible nasty enemies who hate each other and don’t get along and fight all the time but are also in love”

the problem is that they get along. the problem is that they can’t stop themselves from falling naturally into a rhythm of riffing off one another and enjoying the other’s company. THAT is the problem. the problem is that it works and that’s the thing that caused all their issues. they like one another. they just click.

[romijuli]

It’s not that I don’t LIKE the Fandom Popular Pairings, it’s that I find the assumption that everyone ships them and the general all-consuming nature of said pairings to be kinda exhausting,

[ankles-be-bitten]

idk, i just feel like if your primary argument against transandrophobia/antitransmasculinity theory is that you think it's transmisogynistic you're not being intellectually honest. who does it hurt when trans men and mascs coin a term to describe the intersection of transphobia and sexism as it most frequently affects them? because it does hurt trans men when they're told that they're not entitled to speak on the discrimination they themselves face.

what I'm hearing from people who oppose the antitransmasculinity movement is that transmisogyny is when trans men talk about their problems 👍, but obviously that's not true. i know that's not true. you know that's not true. so then what is the issue? genuinely, enlighten me. you want trans men to shut up and listen? I'm listening.