u/ryanyork92

I work as an academic and had a strange interaction the other day. I still refer to the platform as "twitter" because "X" sounds silly, and a colleague of mine said I was being disrespectful to the people working at the company, which I found fascistic so I ignored it. Then again, I noticed then that many around me have started calling it "X" like nothing happened.

What about you? Do you still call it "Twitter"? If not, what do you think of people who do continue to use that name?

I grew up as a Mac kid in the 90s, mostly because my father used Macs for work and passed his old ones down to me. Apart from school computers and the odd work PC here and there, I barely used Windows at all.

The downside was gaming. My parents never bought me a proper console, so I ended up doing a lot of cursed gaming on old Macs. I managed to make Halo 1 work on a Mac G4, less than 30 fps, but I still had a lot of fun. When I was 16, I finally saved up enough money from part-time jobs to buy myself an Xbox 360, and ended up having the time of my life.

But I still always wanted a proper Windows gaming computer. That was what I always aspired to. Access to a wider variety of games, better performance, MODS (!), all the stuff I was never able to fully enjoy.

Fast forward to my early 30s, and I finally could afford a decent gaming laptop. I bought myself an HP Omen with an Nvidia GPU, literally the first Windows computer I had ever owned myself. For the first couple of months, it felt amazing. I was finally playing games I'd only dreamed of playing before, especially with mods.

Then the honeymoon faded gradually as I started running into issue after issue, and somehow Windows didn't just ruin the laptop for me. It actually started ruining gaming itself.

• The basic setup was annoying from the start. Since I use my Mac for literally everything else, I keep both my MacBook and my Windows laptop on a cramped desk, usually on a stand. The Windows laptop is basically just there for gaming. With my Mac, I can plug in a monitor while the laptop is closed and it just works. With the HP Omen, however, I had to mess around with settings so the laptop wouldn't go to sleep every time I closed it. Since I don't feel comfortable leaving the laptop running when I'm not using it, this meant that I had to take the laptop out, open it up, wake it up, plug it into the monitor, and then hope everything actually worked properly. All of this just for a hobby.
• The updates. The fucking updates. Why are they so frequent? It felt like every other time I opened the laptop, Windows had decided that this was actually its time now. The computer would restart, install something, ask me to restart again, or sit there doing whatever mysterious background ritual it needed to perform before I was allowed to use the machine.
• The touchpad, when I needed to use it for non-gaming activities, is genuinely awful. This was probably the thing that upset me the most. It is jittery, unreliable, and the left click just doesn't work half the time. I had to get used to using tap-to-click, which I never use on my Mac, because the physical click was so unreliable. Scrolling and gestures sometimes just fail for no obvious reason. How does HP cheap out on something this basic?
• And then there are drivers. What the fuck are 'drivers'? I mean, obviously, I know what drivers are (that was a rhetorical question). The point is, I never had to think about them until I bought this laptop, and I still don't understand why this is apparently my problem now. I just wanted a seamless gaming experience, not to have to become a maintenance babysitter for my laptop.
• Settings are scattered everywhere. On Mac, most things are in System Settings. On Windows, you change one thing in Settings, another thing in the Control Panel, another thing in an HP app, another in GeForce Experience, another in some ancient-looking menu from the 2000s. It's a fucking maze. Maybe power users like having five different places to manage things, but to me it just feels like the machine has no single brain.
• File Explorer is useless. I never know what files are where, and the search function for specific files rarely seems to work the way I expect it to. Maybe this is partly because I'm used to Mac, but on Windows I constantly feel like my own files are hidden somewhere inside a filing cabinet designed by a bureaucratic committee.
• After a while, I realised that the laptop was also basically an aggressive marketing device for a variety of programmes I never asked for. The system keeps telling me to subscribe to paid OneDrive, Game Pass, the premium version of Office, antivirus software, etc. I paid all that money for this laptop, and it still wants to leech off my wallet. And before you say 'just uninstall them!', I shouldn't have to spend time removing garbage from a machine I already paid for.

To be clear, I'm not saying every single one of these problems is caused by Microsoft alone. Some of it is Windows, some of it is HP, some of it is Nvidia, some of it is the general PC gaming ecosystem. But as a normal, non-tech-savvy user, I experience all of it as a Windows laptop gaming experience.

I've begun to associate gaming with annoyance, so much so that I've actually grown to dislike the hobby. I now spend my free time watching TV or reading books, which is nice, but it's a shame to have this whole library sitting on my Steam account unplayed. Perhaps it was my mistake for not just buying a normal console like a PlayStation or an Xbox for my TV, which, to be fair, is a much more seamless experience.

Anyways, rant over. Fuck Windows. Fuck Microsoft. Fuck HP.

I grew up as a Mac kid in the 90s, mostly because my father used Macs for work and passed his old ones down to me. Apart from school computers and the odd work PC here and there, I barely used Windows at all.

The downside was gaming. My parents never bought me a proper console, so I ended up doing a lot of my blursed gaming on old Macs. I managed to make Halo 1 work on a Mac G4, less than 30 fps but I still had a lot of fun. When I was 16, I finally saved up enough money from part-time jobs to buy myself an Xbox 360, and ended up having the time of my life. 

But I still always wanted a proper Windows gaming computer. That was what I always aspired to. Access to a wide variety of games, superior performance, MODS (!), all the stuff I was never able to fully enjoy.

Fast forward to my early 30s, and I finally could afford a decent gaming laptop. I bought myself an HP Omen with an Nvidia GPU, literally the first Windows computer I had ever owned myself. For the first couple of months, it felt amazing, as I was finally playing games I'd only dreamed of playing before, especially with mods.

Then the honeymoon faded gradually as I started running into issue after issue, and somehow Windows didn't just ruin the laptop for me. It actually started ruining gaming itself.

• The basic setup was annoying from the start. Since I use my Mac for literally everything else, I keep both my MacBook and my Windows laptop on a cramped desk, usually on a stand. The Windows laptop is basically just there for my gaming habits. With my Mac, I can just plug in a monitor while the laptop is closed and it works perfect. With the HP Omen, however, I had to mess around with settings so the laptop wouldn't go to sleep every time I closed it. Since I don't feel comfortable with my laptop running when I'm not using it, this meant that I had to take the laptop out, open it up, wake it up, plug it into the monitor, and then hope everything actually work properly. All of this just for a hobby.
• The updates. The fucking updates. Why are they so frequent? It felt like every other time I opened the laptop, Windows had decided that this was actually its time now. The computer would restart, install something, ask me to restart again, or sit there doing whatever mysterious background ritual it needed to perform before I was allowed to use the machine.
• The touchpad is genuinely awful. This was probably the thing that upset me the most. It is jittery, unreliable, and the left click just doesn't work half the time. I had to get used to using tap-to-click, which I never use on my Mac, because the physical click was so unreliable. Scrolling and gestures sometimes just fail for no obvious reason. How does HP cheap out on something this basic on a gaming laptop?
• And then there are drivers. What the fuck are 'drivers'? I mean, obviously, I know what drivers are (that was a rhetorical question). The point is, I never had to think about them until I bought this laptop, and I still don't understand why this is apparently my problem now. I just wanted a seamless gaming experience, not to have to become a maintenance babysitter for my laptop.
• Settings are scattered everywhere. On Mac, most things are in System Settings. On Windows, you change one thing in Settings, another thing in the Control Panel, another thing in an HP app, another in GeForce Experience, another in some ancient looking menu from the 2000s. It's a fucking maze.
• The Windows version of Finder is useless. I never know what files are where, and the search function for specific files rarely seems to work. Maybe this is partly because I'm used to Mac, but on Windows I constantly feel like my own files are hidden somewhere inside a filing cabinet designed by a bureaucratic committee.
• After a while, I realised that the laptop was basically an aggressive marketing device for a variety of programmes I never asked for. The system keeps telling me to subscribe to paid OneDrive, Game Pass, the premium version of Office, antivirus software, etc. I paid all that money for this laptop, and it still wants to leech off my wallet.

All of this means that I've begun to associate gaming with annoyance, so much so that I've actually grown to dislike the hobby. I now spend my free time watching TV or reading books, which is nice, but it's a shame to have this whole library sitting on my Steam account unplayed. Perhaps it was my mistake for not just buying a normal console like a PlayStation or an Xbox for my TV, which, to be fair, is a much more seamless experience.

Anyways, rant over. Fuck Windows. Fuck Microsoft. Fuck HP.

The last time I spent a significant amount of time in the US was in 2011 and I don't remember hearing a lot of people saying 'bruuuh'. Maybe 'bro' or 'dude' was more common back then. When did it seem like 'bruuuh' completely took over? Is 'dude' still common too? What triggered the shift?

Overheard two unversity students on a train, supposedly talking about how they might feel embarassed to open a book in a public space because it's 'too performative'.

As an academic in the humanities (history specifically), I've been told that mine is the sort of discipline in which your knowledge and skills generally increase the more you build your experience, which directly affects how much respect you get later in life. Younger scholars are often discouraged from taking on projects that cover a lot of ground or make grand claims until they have deepened their understanding of the field over several decades of research.

Now, mathematics is a discipline about which I have, perhaps more than with literally any other academic endeavour, the least knowledge or aptitude. All throughout my compulsory education, I literally either failed or nearly failed all my maths classes, and consciously chose a university admissions path that let me avoid maths and science entirely, focusing only on languages and the humanities subjects. So this is a field in which I have zero experience, and I understand that this might be a very dumb question, even coming from a novice like me.

Ages ago, I met a mathematician who, over a drink, told me that maths is often said to be a 'young man’s game'. I asked her what she meant, and she said that the discipline requires a certain amount of 'stamina' (though maybe that’s not the exact word she used) that degrades as you age. The problem is that, at the time, I had no clue what she was talking about, so I didn't pursue it further. Here I am now, regretting that.

Is this actually true? If so, what skills are involved in being a 'good' academic mathematician, and what makes those skills 'degrade' over time in a way that they might not in other academic disciplines?

What I suspect is that maths involves impromptu logical thinking skills, something that cannot be sorted out merely by jotting down all your thoughts and processing them adequately. I'd really like your thoughts on this.

I'm using Microsoft Word for Mac Version 16.109, with a Microsoft 365 subscription.

It seems that click-and-drag text selection has stopped working in Word. I cannot highlight a custom range of text by dragging the cursor across it.

Other selection methods still work. I can select text using Shift-click, double-click, triple-click, and keyboard shortcuts. The document is editable, and this is not a protected-view issue.

I have already restarted Word and macOS, checked Word’s editing preferences, and confirmed that the document is in editing mode. The problem appears to be limited to drag-selection in Word.

Is this a known issue in Word for Mac 16.109? Are there recommended fixes? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I come across a lot of naysayers on YouTube and in the comment sections of highly watched videos, as well as highly upvoted comments from people expressing their profound disappointment with Wind and Truth. Even though I've tried to not let it affect me, I have to admit that, since I’ve read all his books up to this point, I’m starting to worry about how I might end up seeing the series and the wider Cosmere. There’s a lot of “I’m done with Sanderson”, “I’m no longer reading the Cosmere”, and “Sanderson is no longer for me and has turned into a YA author” sort of thing.

This may be a shot in the dark (and please, no spoilers beyond Rhythm of War) but to what degree are these voices justified? Do you share a similar opinion?

I usually like to listen to the podcast when I'm at the gym. The two belong to a certain subcultural niche that fits perfectly with mine and I can listen to Brandon and especially Dan talk forever, whatever the topic.

I have, unfortunately, depleted all the episodes and am craving for other options that I can listen to in addition to the weekly updates by Brandon and Dan. Doesn't have to be the exact same sort of topics and themes (fantasy, films, games, nerd culture).

Any suggestions?