ChronosCat

Oh, I forgot another thing about Windows 11 that annoys me: The "Settings" app at first glance seems to offer access to all the settings for Windows, though exploring it, it quickly becomes apparent it's fairly limited. It turns out there's plenty of other settings that you have to go looking for (many of them are still accessed from the old "Control Panel", but that's fairly well hidden now). I wish they had either actually consolidated all the settings in one place, or made it more clear that Settings only has the basics. It looks interesting, but usually if I have enough files on my desktop to need organizing, I figure that's too many and find somewhere else to move them to.

Early impressions of Windows 11: I don't know if I'm less flexible these days or the differences are really greater, but it felt much more jarring going from Windows 8.1 to 11 than it did a decade ago going from Mac OSX to Windows 8. That said, after a couple days working with it (mostly setting it up and playing around with settings) I'm starting to get used to it, and it seems decent enough. (On the other hand, most of the other software the laptop came with is disappointing at best, and outright junk in many cases.) I have two problems with it. One is a bug that might be a problem with drivers or a conflict with the included software rather than Windows itself: when I leave it sleeping for more than a few minutes, when it wakes up all my programs have closed (which rather defeats the purpose of sleep mode). Thankfully this doesn't happen if I tell it to hibernate instead, so until I find a solution I can use that as a workaround. The other is that I miss how in 8.1's Start Menu you could group pinned items to better organize them. It looks like Start11 adds that functionality back in (thanks for the suggestion, @ProfessorTomoe), so I'll have to check that out.

Well, only if it was enough money to make redoing his plans worth it. Dan is a perfectionist who likes to plan ahead; changing major story details is no trivial thing for a writer like that. Also (dropping the question of money), Dan likes to lay out enough clues in advance of story revelations so that people can correctly guess the "twist", and has stated before he wouldn't change the story direction because someone guessed it correctly.

The forums are so quiet these days that I doubt an occasional necro would be an issue. I've actually played a lot of games this past year, I just rarely think to post about it. Of course, with one exception, they range from "a few years old" to "a few decades old". This summer, I beat the original Tomb Raider for the first time. The controls were awkward, and I'm not a fan of the combat in it, but when it was focused on puzzle solving and exploration in ancient ruins, it was incredible. I almost immediately started in on Tomb Raider 2, and was soon quite disappointed. There's a more heavy focus on combat (despite the combat system not having been improved from the first game), and the second stage wasn't even an ancient ruin. I haven't given up on it yet, but (as happened to me many times trying to get through the first game), I got distracted by other games and haven't gotten back to it. Over the past decade or so I've been slowly playing/replaying through the Castlevania series in story order. This fall, I replayed Dracula X and Rondo of Blood, and played Symphony of the Night for the first time. All of them were fun, but I was a bit disappointed by Symphony - so much of what it did became standard for Metroidvanias that it winds up feeling almost generic. A couple years ago I started playing through the Mario games (including spin-offs) in as close to "story order" as I could determine. (I was surprised to realize when I first looked into it that the Mario timeline is extremely complicated, with a great deal of disagreement between fans as to the order of the games. And unlike the Zelda timeline, Nintendo has never stepped in to clarify things.) I started by playing the Yoshi games as they're prequels (my favorite of them was Yoshi's Woolly World; the original Yoshi's Island and Yoshi's Crafted World were also quite good). I then played the old arcade Donkey Kong series & Mario Bros. (via the "Arcade Archives" on the Switch), then the Super Mario Bros. "trilogy" (including the original Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 via the WiiU virtual console), Super Mario World, Super Mario Land 1 & 2, and now I'm playing Super Mario RPG. (The preceding was just a summary of my play-through; there were a bunch of games I didn't bother to mention - a full list would be quite long.) I don't have a lot to say about them, other than it's impressive how such a huge series has managed to have so many great games in it and so few bad games in it. I started playing Breath of the Wild for the first time early last year, and finished around September of this year, I believe. It was quite an experience. I know there have been games since that imitated its formula, but I've never played them, so I was able to appreciate it for everything new it brought to the table. I loved how much there was to explore, and that you were pretty much free to do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted. I also loved climbing all over everything. (I wasn't so fond of how easily most of the weapons and shields broke, though. I think it would have been better if most of the proper non-rusty weapons & shields held up longer, and there was a way to repair them. I also think if they wanted lots of weapons in the game, there should have been proper weapon shops.) This spring I started playing the Kirby series (starting from the beginning, because I always like to go through series in story order, and as far as I can tell story order and release order are the same for the Kirby series, barring remakes). The first Kirby's Dreamland was fun, but too short. I had a hard time getting into Kirby's Adventure (or it's GBA remake) and Kirby's Dreamland 2, but their final boss battles were really cool. I absolutely loved Kirby Super Star Ultra (which I played instead of the original Kirby Super Star); it's my favorite game in the series so far. This past October & November I played through all the TMNT Cowabunga Collection. Most were really fun, though the first game gets unfairly difficult at time (particularly near the end) and I didn't like the Genesis Tournament Fighters. Of course, the games were all rather average for their era, and probably hardly anyone would remember them if they weren't based on TMNT. Once finishing all the old Turtles games, I started in on Shredder's Revenge. It lives up to all the hype I heard; it manages to capture all the fun of the old TMNT beat-em-ups while adding in a ton of additional content, depth, and replay value. It's actually in the running for the title of my favorite TMNT game. So far, my favorite part was playing as Splinter; I've always liked him as a character so it was nice to play as him for once. So that summarizes the games I've played recently; perhaps I'll talk more about the games I play in the future.

Of course! If you don't plan, you miss out on the fun of watching those plans fail! For even more fun, when your plans fail, you can come up with new ones on the fly, which probably won't work either. Also, when everything's over, be sure to make one last plan that incorporates everything that happened, so you can say everything went according to plan.

So, the laptop is ordered. I went with Windows 11; if after getting the hang of that I'm not satisfied with it or I feel adventurous, I'll try out Linux with the goal of eventually setting up the laptop to dual-boot. (Alternately, if I can get my old laptop running again or otherwise can get my hands on an old-but-functional laptop, I might just set up the older laptop with Linux. But that's a decision for later.)

I can't recall ever finding a joke less funny because of repetition (though the rare joke to actually make me laugh generally only can manage it a few times). On the other hand, plenty of songs get old if you listen to them too often.

I used a Mac a decade ago. Right now I'm borrowing my parents' laptop; it's an HP running Windows 8.1 (I have a suspicion I'm going to have to figure out how they can keep using it relatively safely after Microsoft stops supporting Windows 8.1 next month, as it's too old to run Windows 10 and they don't seem to be in a rush to get a new computer). My being able to see the panel transition probably has to do with the screen and settings. (Also, I leaned in close and squinted...)

I'm a firm believer that almost nothing is certain*. If I was a DM, I wonder how long it would take for the players to catch on to the fact that it's quite rare for me to make statements of fact without hedges. * Pure math and the existence of at least one conscious mind ("I think, therefore somebody is.") being the only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head.

I'm trying to figure up what's with the background in panel one. Is that a wall in the middle of the room? It actually looks like we're seeing one of the vague backgrounds Dan likes to use when a detailed background isn't necessary, only from the wrong angle - like it was part of a stage set. Presumably the reason the third panel might not count is because all it has is a starburst and Diane's name. The fourth panel is even more questionable because all it has in it is the words "D-don't worry! I've got you" and no border, and both it and the previous panel are so washed out it's hard to see that they are separate (I had to look very closely to see the transition, and wouldn't have noticed if Dan hadn't brought up the possibility of a fourth panel).

For me it was audio cassettes, and I believe the mix was a bit more heavily towards 20-40 year old songs. Also, I believe that for some reason they were through the hardware store (at any rate, they have the "TrueValue" logo on them). I think those tapes are a big part of the reason why to this day I have a fondness for mid-20th century Christmas music.

Well, that's a new background! It's nice to see some variety, but it's not entirely clear to me what that background is supposed to mean. Anyway, yay for random boxes background in panel four!

Yay for fancy lines background in panel three! (As usual I won't be cheering for the starburst in panel five, as in my opinion Dan overuses them.) If they're attacking, can they really be called "friendly"?

I might be more inclined to use the command prompt if I had ever been properly taught how to use it. However my experience with it on Windows and Mac has been entirely "type in these exact characters to do this one thing", and those things have always been things I hardly ever need to do. (On the other hand, once upon a time I had memorized how to access a list of files on a floppy disc and run a program on the Commodore 64, though that was about all I could do.)

Interesting. I'll have to look into that later (the help base article I found didn't want to open more than the first few steps, perhaps because I'm not on Windows 11). At any rate a quick search online reveals several different ways of delaying or blocking updates. The simplest one will probably be sufficient for me: "pause updates for X weeks" in settings. I see it's also possible to set connections to "metered" and set Windows to not download updates over a metered connection; I figure I'll do that too for good measure. Honestly, even before looking it up I knew it could be done; it's just the fact that Microsoft has made it more complicated than it used to be that bugs me. Yeah, I hardly ever use the command prompt. Pretty much the only times I do are when there's no other way to accomplish what I want, and I've only encountered such a situation a handful of times over the years.

I was planning on getting a laptop (I need the portability), so having multiple drives could be difficult. Certainly none of the laptops I've looked at so far had that option. How likely is it that I'd need to re-install Windows? In the two decades I've been using computers regularly, I've never had to reinstall an OS before. My home internet is limited (I pay by the GB and can only afford so much per month), so I need to be able to choose when large downloads happen (preferably when I'm somewhere I don't have to pay for data, like the library). Also, I've heard of people having Windows 10 reboot on them without warning to install updates when they were in the middle of something; I'd like to avoid that sort of situation. Still, most of what you said makes me hopeful I'll be able to put up with Windows 11. (Who knows, I might even grow to like it. I did with Windows 8.1, much to my surprise.) As someone who has never used Linux and is still in the process of researching it, I'm afraid I have to ask: What is the advantage of that?

Keep in mind that Ellen's experience as a GM is extremely limited - just memories of Elliot playing with Tedd and Sarah. While I'm sure those two presented their challenges (based on the pre-2002 comics shown in those early sketchbooks, just getting the two of them to get along was a challenge), it's entirely possible neither of them was in the habit of creating elaborate theories with little relation to the planned quest.

Yay for fancy lines background in panel one!

Fun fact: Rudolf started out as the title character in a children's book, ten years before the song was written. I think the fact that Rudolf was created by a known individual (Robert L. May) who published his work recently enough for it to still be in copyright may be part of the reason Rudolph's legend is relatively limited. If/when Rudolph becomes public domain, if he's still popular, we'll probably see him fully integrated into the Santa Claus mythology.

Ashley's look here does nothing for me, but I love Liz's outfit.

I'd say the Rankin-Bass special helps too (I don't know how popular it is these days, but they do still play it on TV, and I'm sure there are plenty of parents who grew up with it who show it to their kids). Though on the other hand the song is in the special, so you can't really play the special without playing the song...

I'm not quite sure what to call the background in panel two. Light from on high? And what we see in panel three I would normally call "speed lines" but they don't actually represent speed here... Let's just go with "Yay for fancy line backgrounds in panels two and three!". So there has been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks about Diane being out of character. Perhaps you're right, but it wouldn't have occurred to me without you and Darth Fluffy pointing it out, and I'm still not entirely sure I see it. Sure, this is nothing like how she acted back when she was introduced or even around the time Grace started attending south, but this seems to me to be more or less in keeping with how she's been portrayed since Sister 3. In fact, her current erratic and occasionally over-the-top moods/actions are likely largely a result of Sister 3; I think the stress and pain over what happened (and what she learned) in that story have broken through her previous cool-and-collected exterior.

That one is actually really familiar to me. In fact I recognize a lot of those old strips. Apparently, one of the books I got as a kid didn't just have early strips, it had the very first ones.

As a kid I received several second-hand books containing fairly early strips (I think the books were published in the 60s but had strips from the 50s). I don't remember Charlie looking younger or them talking like toddlers, but I do remember Shermy, Violet, and Patty. I also remember toddler-Linus, and that when Schroeder was introduced he couldn't talk yet but was already a master pianist. I also seem to recall that Linus was already drawn like the rest of the "older" kids when then-a-toddler Sally developed her crush on him.

I know that some of the Peanuts cast (like Linus and Sally) started out significantly younger than Charlie Brown, Lucy, etc., then grew up to almost the same age as the "older" characters. But was there actually any indication of Charlie Brown himself and those who started his age getting older?