Don Edwards

How comfortable are you with opening the case? I'd be inclined to take the network card out, clean the contacts, and reinstall it. (There are sure to be pics online of the inside of your model of laptop, with the network card identified.)

Nope.

Several, actually. Also a lot of lesser government officials. And media sources.

Moving the planned adventure from where you expected it to occur, to where the PCs go, is a very common DM trick. In a long-running campaign, though, the DM may have to keep notes - once some geography is established, it shouldn't be rearranged. Which is why many long-running campaigns involve a lot of travel: the established geography is left behind, and the DM can resume moving things to match what the PCs do.

The guy who owns the RV park we're in, tried to do a bit of construction surfing a couple weeks ago. He's getting surgery to install a new shoulder on the 4th. I told him that the next time he wants to go surfing, he should find some water.

Which reminds me: While posting one of my works on a certain site, I had the option of attaching "tags" - keywords for their search engine - to it. One of the suggested tags was "multiverses". Plural. I still haven't figured out why anyone would need to tag something with a plural of THAT word.

That's perfectly normal for cats and children, and only mildly unusual for dogs.

Most of the country just was, is being, or soon will be hit with this. Phoenix, and places south and west of it, not so much. Our ceiling fan is running and in an hour or so I'll probably open a window.

There are times when I suspect the same thing of my own fiction.

Overthinking. When you're a D&D player, it's what you do.

The elementary school our kids went to, had three buildings with leaky roofs - so they got funding to put a roof over a few parking spaces and make them a covered playground. Right next to the gym.

If you stay away from Chromebooks and stuff obviously packaged for little kids, I think it would be difficult to buy a new laptop that is not at least adequate for those needs. The difference between adequate and excellent will probably be in two parts: fan noise, and the display's color quality.

I thought that was what cats are for - to make things fall off.

I heard a different version of that. Takes a certain font though... imagine all the letters in "TEAM" - all caps - being very blocky and made out of balloons. Then make the background of the letters - not the whole page, just the letters - a different color. And you'll find a lower-case "i", right there in the a-hole.

Well I said it was not unheard-OF. It was definitely unheard (by humans).

But not unheard-of rodent behavior either.

Did the mayor look for his chicken on the other side of the road?

Access offers (depending on your version) a choice of database backends. All of them are real databases. Some of them are actual database servers. The problem with Access is that its default front end violates Einstein's dictim: that you should make things as simple as possible but no simpler. (It tries too hard to look like a spreadsheet, and to hide some of the complexity inherent in databases.) In spite of which, it's the best development environment I've seen for a single programmer to develop a single-user application that doesn't specifically need to be in a spreadsheet or word processor. (Not so good if you have multiple programmers on the project, and I haven't tried multi-user systems on a database server with an Access front-end.)

I think you can put GRUB on any drive you want, but not 100% certain. (The installer for Linux Mint will let you put it anywhere, but whether it'll actually work if not on the #1 drive, I haven't tested.) When I installed a second drive in my laptop (a very few models have suitable space with a connector - HP Elitebooks among them), the ROM software thought it was the first drive. Slid the Windows drive over to second with no problem. I think that's a function of the hardware. And GRUB (the most common boot-loader for Linux) is able to pass booting off to the Windows boot-loader on the rare occasion when I want Windows. I've always preferred to leave the Windows install alone unless I was wiping it out completely. I have MS Office 2007 Pro, and some portions of it work fine under Linux using PlayOnLinux. Specifically, Word, Excel, and VBA (the macro language) are the portions I care about that work. Supposedly Powerpoint (and Exchange, I think) also works, but I don't want it. I have a link saved to a page on how to install Access so it works, but it's more complex than just telling PlayOnLinux to install it and I haven't done it yet so can't say whether it actually works. For most people, LibreOffice is an acceptable substitute for MS Office. The database component is quite a bit different from Access, and I am negatively impressed with it. It comes with support for two macro languages, neither of which is compatible with VBA, and neither of which are currently suitable IMHO for heavy-duty use.

I would be unsurprised if George has in mind a way that this derailing could be dead-ended, and is doing things to make that route easier for the DM - without trying to force it.

If you're thinking of dual-booting Windows and Linux, I strongly recommend having two separate drives. Leave the Windows install alone, and install Linux on the second drive. Then if you need to reinstall Windows, disconnect the Linux drive. Don't trust the Windows install process to keep its hands off.

In one instance, a character took over someone else's story.

Heck, I have that happen when I'm writing fiction all by myself!

You did check to make sure the installers didn't leave someone alive inside it, didn't you?

Heh. In one of my stories, a weredog (Great Pyrenees) helped a woman through a PTSD attack by jumping onto her lap and snuggling her, then after he climbed down he observed that "Charles Schulz got at least one thing right." The comment went unexplained.