Bartimaeus

Lies, stupidity, and ignorance are the central axes by which Trump and his administration function, and this web of chaos infects virtually every function of government, including even these health exams. Trump is absolutely dumb enough to think that taking and passing the MoCA is a great feat - if he's the one doing it, anyways. But do we even know for sure if he actually took it, much less passed it, or are we just relying on his word? Under Biden, the full Walter Reed health reports were published on the White House .gov site, but as far as I can tell, Trump makes the whole damned staff there sign NDAs and diddly squat is ever officially published. The other times he's apparently taken the MoCA were not even at the behest of Walter Reed, but rather just the White House Physician, and we all know how 'respectable' that position has been under Trump, so that could be a bunch of crap too. Frankly, I'm surprised something like MoCA would even be a part of any serious testing of the president - isn't it a whole team of a dozen doctors and physicians? You'd think they'd be a little more involved than using just your standard single page assessment, and Walter Reed hasn't apparently ever administered or asked to administer the test to any president before. I really don't know: it's possible he's the one insisting on taking them because he's done them before and he's a giant manbaby showing off his kindergarten art drawings, it's possible the medical team think he's mad as a hatter and wanted him to, and it's possible that it literally wasn't even a part of the health exam at all. He could even just be getting confused because he apparently took one back in April with the White House Physician again (if that's even true). It's 1984 with this administration and he's a lying nutjob, so how do you not question literally every last thing that came out of his mouth? Until at least a single respectable and trustworthy source attests to Trump actually taking the test and passing it, you might as well just assume the whole thing is a big bag of lies and throw it all out, because right now all I'm seeing are liars flying off the handle as per usual and the actual decent people with their mouths firmly gagged.

I confess that I didn't put much stock in Trump taking the test again: it's at least the third time he's taken it and bragged about it after the fact for reasons only understandable to the uniquely stupid person known as Donald J. Trump. Every time it's been administered, there's been the same sort of "the fact that a doctor forced(?) him to take it implies bad things about his mental state" media reaction to it, but like most "surely he's doomed now" headlines concerning Trump*, that unfortunately really just doesn't matter to anyone who didn't already care the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth times they read it. The amusement I got out of it was the irony of Trump conflating a cognition test with an IQ test, but it's not like we didn't already know the guy was dumb. *Everyone should know all too well by now that the only headline that will convince anyone of Trump's certain doom is the one that announces his actual literal death. Until then or maybe until the economy really explodes and we've got tens of millions of people demonstrating in the streets weekly, I'm afraid that he will unfortunately continue to get away with just about everything. Not that we should ignore everything in the interim, but we've clearly decided as a nation where we're going with this until we reach a real boiling point that actually gets through to the average news-disconnected moron in our great country of proud ignorance and inequality.

https://people.com/donald-trump-mistakes-dementia-screening-for-iq-test-11837935 Canadian neurologist Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, who created the MoCA test in 1996, told NBC News that the screening should not be used to measure intelligence. "There are no studies showing that this test is correlated to IQ tests," Nasreddine said. "The purpose of it was not to determine persons who have a low IQ level. So we cannot say that this test reflects somebody's IQ.” I always like it when news stories bother to add these "expert opinions" to stories like this, bonus points that it's literally the creator of the MoCA* this time - as if this is a serious story where we really need context to fully understand what all of this means, when actually...yeah, we know the guy is just a dumbass. *

There are a few things you're supposed to be able to eat at this stage...applesauce, soft overripe bananas, warm milk, jello, yogurt...but I have a condition called reactive hypoglycemia that means I really can't eat sugars unless I can balance it out with solid protein. Essentially, the more sugar you eat, the more your blood sugar decreases due to having overactive insulin that corrects too hard for it - ergo, fasting is actually better for me than trying to eat most of the stuff they recommend that you eat after removing your wisdom teeth, though it does mean I'm feeling a bit woozy and don't have a lot of energy right now. As a child, I used to show all the normal symptoms of low blood sugar, so adults would keep trying to make me eat more carbs/sugar, e.g. a cookie, and I'd argue and refuse to eat anything of the sort due to having learned the hard way that it just makes me worse. They'd get really mad at me, but lo and behold, I learn that it's a real thing as an adult. Nope, to fix low my blood sugar, I have to...not eat any sugar and instead eat eggs, beans, or meat. Even stuff like milk and peanut butter has too much sugar compared to their protein for it to balance out for me (also, I became strongly lactose-intolerant out of the blue last year anyways). I'll be better off once my gums stop bleeding and swelling and I can have something like soft scrambled eggs or refried beans. Thanks for the well wishes - I haven't been too bothered by the pain yet, day 3 tomorrow, just taking an ibuprofen and tylenol here and there so far. Honestly, I have way worse chronic pain from my busted-ass neck, which has bothered me more - especially as I'm supposed to keep my head elevated while sleeping, which as someone who mostly sleeps on their chest, is not something I really do very much.

I'm a couple of years past the suggested/recommended age range myself, mainly because they've never bothered me and I'd never had a dentist tell me I should get them pulled until recently. I'm unsure if that played into why the roots were deeper than normal. The bottom ones in particular were pushing my teeth together a little too tight, which would make cavities likely in the future...at some point. Better now than later, my dentist said. Despite them having to cut up my gums and sew them back together, the bleeding is close to stopping and the pain really isn't too bad yet, so it'll just be a matter of dealing with the swelling and avoiding dry socket/infections, I think. And being hungry for the rest of this week, since I'm not supposed to eat anything.

I got my wisdom teeth pulled yesterday. My dentist and the surgeon thought they would be simple pulls because they'd all surfaced fully and without any major impacting, but they ended up having to cut into my gums and drill them apart because they had gnarly deep roots and refused to be pulled. 20-30m procedure turned into 3x that. Fun. The worst part so far was the anxiety leading up to it (I decided I'd be IV sedated...and that was almost certainly the right choice), but we'll see over the next few days.

Steam announced ending support for Windows 7 (and Windows 8, extra characters here because "8" and ")" right next to each automatically turns into an emoticon I can't disable) on March 28th of 2023, effective January 1st of 2024. 12 days before that announcement, Steam's own hardware survey said that 1.58% of users were on Windows 7 and .36% on Windows 8 - by early December, it had dropped to a combined 0.96%. Microsoft dropped non-security support for Windows 7 in January of 2015, extended support in 2020, and paid-only enterprise support in January of 2023. Right now, Windows 10 is still at 33.74% on Steam...in other words, you can expect a few more years at the very least. The big issue with ending support for Windows 10 is that there's literal hundreds of millions of devices out that that can't easily upgrade to Windows 11, so I think there's a good chance Windows 10 will be supported by most stuff, including Steam, for just as long as Windows 7 was. It will take time for people to upgrade their PCs to even be able to install Windows 11, especially given current PC tech prices.

I probably went a bit farther than you, as I use Windows 10 LTSC (a special cut-down Enterprise-ish version of Windows 10 more meant for critical infrastructure systems that has many annoying features disabled by default - it never receives feature updates with the last release of it being 21H2, but you can still receive security updates, and unlike the consumer versions, support will last until 2032!!!), which doesn't come with any of the stuff that Windows10Debloater aims on removing/disabling in the first place. I also use Shutup10 and Winaero Tweaker which unbury and coalesce a number of hidden settings to better disable crap (including ads and telemetry) but also for reverting a number of basic functionalities that I missed from Windows 7, and I use simplewall, a firewall that kinda overlays Windows Firewall while allowing you way better and direct control of your firewall settings, which also allows you to further lobotomize Windows from connecting to Microsoft in any manner unless you give it your explicit approval. This setup has been serving me well for a number of years, though I did need to manually upgrade to the last version of LTSC that they released for Windows 10 a couple of years back when a game didn't work because my Windows feature version was too out of date...but that's fine, I prefer manually doing it over Windows just bulldozing me with its automatic feature updates. As long as I'm the one deciding to do it at the time and place of my desire, that works for me. Windows LTSC (for either 10 or 11) is not available to license to the general public, i.e. you cannot buy it. You can obtain official installation .isos from the Internet Archive rather easily though (among many other sources), and literally any version of Windows 10 or 11 takes about 60 seconds to permanently license with just a simple PowerShell script that you can find rather easily on a well-maintained GitHub project that's been around for many years now. And if I'm remembering correctly, the LTSC installers of at least 10 do not even try to force you to immediately register with an online account like the consumer versions of Windows do, so how about that? Look into some of the software I mentioned above - if it weren't for the fact that I have to deal with it at work, I'd have completely forgotten some of the worst Windows garbage like OneDrive even exists for the past 10 years.

The irony of something like the first two Baldur's Gate games is that they were obviously a product of many, many compromises that the developers probably would've rather not have made if they didn't have to...but some of those compromises were the exact thing that I now realize I want out of a video game. Textual density and voice-acting is just exactly one such thing: the ability to be selective about what is voice-acted versus what is not, making it so that text is generally tight but you can have longer passages when the situation calls for it...and you didn't make the player constantly listen to or make the decision to skip past voice-acting because it's taking way too long when it's really not that good or for anything very important, but contrarily you can have entire conversations voice-acted if it is actually an important story moment or particularly silly or for any other reason you'd like...and it's not like the Baldur's Gate games did any of this perfectly either, there was a lot of room for improvement in many areas that didn't mean either going full book mode OR making every last bit of dialogue voice-acted. I don't want games that are endlessly text-dense (unless it's actually REALLY well-written or intriguing, but the rate of games successfully sinking their claws into you so much that you genuinely want to explore every last nook and cranny, listen to every last character dialogue, go through the full lore descriptions of each item just for the joy of the writing is really low), but I don't want games to be total basic garbage, either. There's a balance to be struck with these things, and it seems like a lot of games really struggle to find that balance and meaningfully carve out their identities within it.

For me, it's a matter of mental energy and choosing when I want to engage with something. Notifications, updates, ads...but also new videos from people I like, if a webcomic I'm following updates, game launchers/wrappers telling me a friend is playing a game or whatever, et cetera. I generally want as little as possible that's not actually important imposing itself on me, and stuff that is always online has a way of doing just that...constantly, every day, and while some people are fine with that, maybe even thrive on being constantly connected to everything, I find too much stimuli or too much asking something from me to be an unnecessary drain of my energy. My Windows 10 format is "disconnected": all the built-in ads are disabled, Windows does not push any notifications to me, it does not even automatically update, nothing about it ever changes unless I personally effect that change. I can to tell it to update, which I do every once in a while...and that's the key thing: when I tell it to. I'm prepared for it when I decide to do that and I want pretty much everything else to be the same: if I choose to open up YouTube, I do so with the knowledge (perhaps even desire!) that there might be new videos from the people I'm subscribed to...the same for checking my email, the same for how I pretty much always have my phone set on silence except for a very few people, the same for when I choose to visit the Obsidian forums. I have a need for controlling when I choose to engage with stuff, and I utterly loathe it when that control is taken away from me. I accept not having that control when it comes to family, pets, and some close friends, but not a lot else...certainly not my operating system or any of my devices: thus, I want most everything to be disconnected and manual activation only, and the whole always online paradigm and everything wanting to be connected to you and have all these different avenues of annoying you in some way is really anathema to that.

I've heard from a few people whose opinions I mildly trust that it's good to great, but I've also heard from a few other people whose opinions I trust at least a little more that it's pretty bad. I can only assume it's one of those things where if it clicks, it clicks, and if it doesn't, into the trash it goes.

I came across this lady that plays some of the weirdest, most random old garbage a few weeks back, and I've been slowly going through her YouTube videos. She has this...um, interesting icon for her YouTube/Twitch avatar, which I'd been wondering about ever since I saw it. Today, I discovered what it was from... It's possibly the best character creator of all time (timestamped): This video was from eleven months ago. I admire that she's kept it for so long.

...Is that a Matilda "Get Sticky With Mickey" reference? If so, you've earned my utmost respect.

I'm very glad to hear that, though personally I don't like to be slathered from head to toe in honey, but that might just be a me problem.

Dear Obsidian Moderation Team, Are you okay? Love, Bartimaeus