these landscapes are great bc you see these chinese paintings showing what you think are very stylized landforms, but then you see photographs of the actual mountains in south china and it’s like, no, that’s actually just what they look like
iirc these kinds of insanely dramatic peaks are characteristic of karst topography, since soft limestone is easily eroded and can create some pretty wild shapes in the process. some of the really insane ones include the stone forest (also in southern china) and tsingy de bemaraha in madagascar.
needless to say you often also get incredible caves in karst regions, even ones which don’t have nearly as dramatic surface features as these
I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence
Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.
Switch to linux, it’s free and it’s good.
u r absolutely right I have SO many complaints about Windows omg.
For anyone who’d like to follow along, I’m gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they’re more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I’ll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.
For the Device Setup
“OOBE” stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that’ll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don’t have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here’s how you get to it:
Hold Shift+ F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.
Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO
I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f
Now when you’re brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don’t have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.
Group Policies
You don’t have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can’t do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.
I’m gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this
It’ll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c
Start Recommendations
In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the “Turn off” ones bumped to the top.
Here’s what you should set:
Turn off user tracking: enabled
Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled
Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled
Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled
Do not search Internet: enabled
Windows Spotlight
Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content
Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled
Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled
Cortana
In the side menu, this one’s back at the top under Computer Configuration. You’re gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search
Allow Cortana: disabled
Don’t search the web or display web results in Search: enabled
News and Interests
In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.
Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled
Microsoft Account Login Nudges
When you don’t use a Microsoft account they’ll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can “get the most out of your experience” *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let’s just open up the regular settings.
Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ﾉ u are done.
Group policies are kind of a rabbit hole so while there is a lot more you could change or read into, for your own sanity’s sake I would advise against it and say call it a day lol
This is all extremely good information, thank you very much for the addition!
i posted about shing yin khor’s a mending and people indicated they would like to know more!
a mending is a game where you pick two points on a map, your home and a friend’s home, and draw or embroider a route between them. as you pass from one square of the map to the next, you draw cards. cards may be a random encounter or they may invite you to more deeply consider your relationship with your friend. you are supposed to mark events with beads, buttons, or stitches if playing on a fabric map, and it is suggested you journal as you go.
i did not journal or extensively embellish on my playthough because i had been putting off playing this for years for fear of its preciousness—a quick playthrough made me want to play again, slower, and luckily the fabric map will only look better with multiple paths.
the fabric version can be purchased at the link above. i also liked this article about it that expands out to include more crafting games.
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Adding my playthrough with its embarassing hoop wrankle. At one point I was prompted to sew in a lock of my own hair and I wussed out. Near the end of the journey I was joined by a dog
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