omg the only free option for restoring the Windows 10 start menu is called ExplorerPatcher and it has a lot of scary warnings about how it can leave your system in an unusable state

so uhh… I guess I’m stuck with the shitty new Windows 11 start menu for now

Cannot express how grateful I am to be living in a time where an app like @notesnook and AnyType exists...

God they're both so good. #Notesnook is brilliant to puke all my deepest and darkest thoughts into my digital diary without worrying about who sees it and who doesn't. It has SO many great security features.

And for AnyType? Its lovely knowing my project brainstorming data is being kept away from AI, and kept local to my machine, encrypted and safe from prying eyes.

Hell yeah!

Windows 11 doesn’t actually seem that bad so far? they fixed a lot of UI annoyances that I’ve had since Windows 7, the UI feels more consistent overall, and the UI noises are soft and nice now instead of harsh and grating. also the start menu search is way, way more responsive and so much better in general

so far I only have a few problems with it:

• the new start menu sucks (I’ll eventually install a replacement for it)
• the animation for switching between desktops is way too slow and you can’t turn it off without turning off all animations across the whole system
• you can’t have a vertical taskbar :(

phew - okay I made the switch to Windows 11 okay and most stuff is set up now. only took me like 2 hours lol

The GOG website is overloading intermittently, but they're having a free ADULT game bundle in response to the payment processor censor-shit:

https://www.gog.com/redeem/freedomtobuygames

https://mastodon.social/@rootcompute/114954904755806394

These are the games:
- Leap of Love
- Being a DIK - Season 1
- Leap of Faith + Official Walkthrough
- House Party
- HuniePop
- Lust Theory - Season 1
- Treasure of Nadia
- Summer's Gone - Season 1
- Fetish Locator Week One
- Helping the Hotties
- Agony + Agony UNRATED
- Sapphire Safari
- POSTAL 2

I'm the guy whose gonna play Agony and Postal LOL...

@tempest hehehe omg - sounds like very good advice. thankfully I take daily backups of my user dir and I’m making one right now. unfortunately it’s looking like I might just have to install Windows 11 from scratch, which is probably going to take me several hours to get everything set up again :/ but we’ll see what happens

@foone I don’t know much about game dev but that actually seems like a pretty cool way to define the initial state of the game. like instead of having a whole new binary format that defines what the initial state should be, just use the existing save/load system

@ghostlyash I can’t tell if this is a kinky type of post or a Tired About Life type of post but either way I extremely relate

do you think you could think for me so i don’t have to anymore

@febog oohh omg I didn’t even know that optional updates were a thing! I’m not seeing this particular update but I think that’s because I’m on IoT LTSC. I’m hopefully going to be able to switch back to GAC in the next few days and hopefully I’ll find the update there!

okay I might be able to upgrade like this:

Windows 10 LTSC -> Windows 10 GAC
Windows 10 GAC -> Windows 11 GAC

but I feel like there are even more things that could go wrong if I try to go this route

nooo omgg it looks like I might have to do another complete reinstall to Windows 11 because I’m using Windows 10 LTSC instead of regular Windows 10. I just got done doing that with Windows 10 T_T

I was really really hoping that I’d just be able to keep all of my files and do the upgrade in-place

@febog oh what’s in 25H2? maybe it’d be worthwhile for me to wait too. although I’m so annoyed by how they broke the emoji picker in Windows 10 :/ and I’m currently on the LTSC version so my security is not great at the moment

this might be a hot take but the squash and stretch in Overwatch’s animations is so cursed. the game is not nearly stylized enough to have melee weapons bending and rippling like they’re giant gummies. and it’s not just a problem if you frame-by-frame it - it stands out to me even watching it at normal speed