If you're on mobile, for some reason pressing the link or searching for my art tag results in my art being out of order so I suggest pressing on the link then clicking on the tag "Sage Draws" to have everything in order
♥ BlueSky / DA / Twitter / Instagram ♥
I post a lot about things I like. If you need something tagged let me know!
It was a lot of work to put my art gallery together and get it working, but because I didn’t see literally anything on creating such a gallery (other than ready-made templates) I decided to write up a tutorial hoping it will help others who want to code a more robust art gallery that goes beyond just using a simple slideshow/lightbox. Each image is its own post, like how deviantArt works.
This is a draft of the page where I copied my existing posts just to fill up the gallery and see how it fits:
As more and more people are being forced to switch to Windows 11, Microsoft’s most AI-malware-ridden OS yet, I’ve been putting together articles and links for how to undo the damage and save your battery, your RAM, your disk space, your privacy, and your sanity from this bullshit.
FIRST:
The easiest way to get rid of the majority of the bullshit that Windows is forcing on us, as of October 2025, is this one-stop-one-click debloat solution from a modern day hero:
It’s very easy, even if you’re not tech savvy or get scared of pop up windows saying “ARE YOU SURE?” Yes, you are sure, I promise. This program takes maybe two minutes and will save you SO MUCH pain, time, and money (and exploitation).
Now that you’ve done that, here’s the cleanup, to catch the little shit that the debloat might have missed (most of this will already be done by debloat, but hey, it’s good to double check).
Even just reading about some of these features makes me angry. Fucking Copilot and “Discover” AI scrapers are in Notepad. NOTEPAD. And then there’s this uncanny valley garbage:
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No uncanny valley video calls for me, thanks! (Also, what else is it doing while it scans your face and listens to your calls? What else, microsoft? Because there was a lot of memory being assigned to this program for a simple “smooths your skin” add on).
This thing has been out of print for like, 26 years and some of us want to make chubby classic pikachu so uh… I figure it’s okay to share bc it’s kinda hard to get your hands on the remaining physical copies.
Bonus points: Aelith made some embroidery/applique files for it too
A varying assortment of wool and silk and cotton and even some leather, use coupon code
spring2020
for 50% off your full order, worked yesterday when I bought some stuff there; https://metrotextilesnyc.com/
I don’t know a lot about sewing, but I want to make or have my mom make some linen pants & shirts for when I’m watering, because it gets to 105 here and we have mosquitos so I need to be covered. What type of linen do I buy? Also, linen pajama shorts, yes/no?
(I’ve been wearing my renfaire pants which are a linen mix, I think. But the frikking mosquitos that hide in the tomatoes get my arms)
Mood doesn’t specialize in natural fabrics but they do have basically every fabric ever made so
For wools, I cannot recommend Woolsome enough! They’re a bit more expensive then the above links, but they have a spectacular range of colours and weights, as well as diamond pattern and herringbone weaves. They also have a range of linens, though not as extensive.
has 100% linen at $17 / metre Canadian. Hard to beat! I made a lovely dress out of some and it breathes wonderfully. So I bought more to make another dress 😁
hello fellow artists. google has fallen. pinterest/duckduckgo AI filters don’t work. do not despair; here is a list i made of places to find reference images without having to sift through piles of worthless garbage. (for future editing convenience i am just linking my blog post on dreamwidth.)
Back from my birthday hiatus, and um, wow… was not expecting this kind of overwhelmingly positive reaction to a simple QRT about how we used Dissolve Mode in our BG paintings on Carol and the End of the World (see last image) - since people seemed to have enjoyed that so much, I thought I’d put all the pages of the Carol and the End of the World BG Paint style guide I drafted in one post! TBH I’d been meaning to do this for awhile but kept forgetting since I have it in a different folder than the BG paintings themselves… I believe all the paintings are mine and all the designs are by Alex Myung unless otherwise noted. I wrote this pretty early on pre-vis, so some of these guidelines got a little massaged during production, but the broad strokes are definitely still there! This wasn’t the only style guide on the show BTW! A couple of our other leads Alex Myung and Kal Athannassov also put together a BG and Character Design style guide that are super cool - unfortunately I don’t have the files myself (nor would I feel comfortable posting work that’s not mine) nor do I think they’ve posted them yet, so if you two were looking for a sign to do so, this is it!! Now you have everything you need to paint like a Caroler - thanks for looking!! Showrunner: @dan-guterman Art direction: @ellemichalka
You too can get the satisfaction of maiming or killing a spy embedded in your organization.
HELL YEAH DESHITTIFICATION!
For everything we do here, please be sure to be careful with what you edit, and restart your computer to lock things in.
If you don’t have access to the Group editor, (likely to happen if you’re on base windows) you can do this as well by opening your Registry Editor app, then inputting this after your ‘computer’ or whatever the initial segment is. (Mine is computer. If I just try and paste the below string it gets SO mad at me)
Navigate to your “DisableSearchBoxSuggestions” bit, if you don’t see it, you can make it by right clicking and creating a new registry D-Word key of that exact name. Edit the key, set it to 1. It’ll look like this if you do it right!
To get rid of Windows Spotlight, (The thing where it pulls up ten billion pages on windows start page, shoving ads in your face and cluttering everything) we go to
And set “Enabled State” To 0. If you do it right, it’ll look like this!
Disabling edge on startup will also help a fair deal with processing speed and the like. This you can do in all sorts of ways, the easiest being turning it off entirely on startup through settings in the like.
If you want to kill it *entirely*, though? :)
In regedit, run along to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft
Navigate to your MicrosoftEdge key subcategory. If you don’t see it, you can make one! Note, this is a KEY, not a d-word. *inside* that subcategory, we want to either make or find the D-Word key of PreventLaunchEdge and set that to 1 in the same way as all the others. It’ll look like this.
Aaaand while we’re here, I’d HIGHLY recommend shanking Killer Networking Services. It’s just bloatware. (Ostensibly it’s supposed to monitor your network bandwidth and even things out, but that really means it’s constantly monitoring and pinging things, which eats up the bandwidth you DO get, and also chunks your computer’s processing power.) Getting rid of it entirely is borderline impossible, since it’s set to redownload on regular updates and intel is very pushy with its updates.
This you can do by opening your Services.msc, which basically shows you all the background stuff that Windows does. Find Anything with Killer in the name, right click it, go to properties, and disable startup. It should look like this, if done successfully. It will probably reenable itself in time/in later updates for windows, but it’s a quick fix. I’d also check your TaskScheduler app to make sure that nothing’s scheduled to open up there, either.
If you CAN completely kill Killer services through uninstalling and the like, I would warn that at very least for my computer, the only ethernet/lan support applications that are available ARE Killer’s. When you download updates, you really do have to do it manually and ONLY download the ethernet services, or just be cool with not having Lan functionality.
(Note- This isn’t the string copy paste from the reddit thread, this is mine that does the same thing. If my string doesn’t work for you, check the reddit thread string. If that doesn’t work either, you can follow the path and find it pretty easily. Probably has like, one letter of difference somewhere. The bits all start the same, though, so it’s easy to find.)
and go to “attributes”. Set the value from 1 to 2, and now in your advanced Power Plan settings in control panel, you’ll be able to *see* turbo boost and turn it off.
It’ll look like this, and in power options, a successful disabling of boost should look like this.
Turning off quick startup’s also a good call, since that basically stops your restarts from actually shutting things down properly.
GOOD LUCK OUT THERE YALL. MAKE SURE TO CLEAN YOUR PC!
I would like to once again recommend to you all Winero Tweaker, a free program that lets you adjust a bunch of windows settings with a single click instead of digging through 30 different setting screens and registry entries.
There’s well over a hundred settings, here’s just a few of them:
(sorry the classic taskbar option no longer works with current windows 11 version)
Fair warning: This is a powerful tool which means it can also do some damage if you don’t know what you’re doing, but every setting comes with an extensive explanation, as you can see in the Ads and unwanted apps screenshot.
This tool will even turn windows 11 from a bloated mess into a (more or less, this tool isn’t magic) usable operating system.
Some tech advice for you all from my personal blog. I figured the more people see this the better, and I got a lot more followers on this blog.
This is great especially for women in the workplace who have learned kinda self-demeaning patterns of behavior in order to not be seen as a bitch. I started communicating this way in my VERY male dominated field and people definitely started taking me at least slightly more seriously. If that makes sense
Even in my heavily female-dominated industry (and office), using this kind of phrasing sees me taken more seriously by management, HR, and clients. I also find that for things like requesting PTO or schedule flexibility, I’m more likely to get uncomplicated agreement from the company if I phrase it as a statement of intention rather than a request for permission. This also goes for asking for accommodations; “X is not going to work, I need Y and Z” is a lot more effective than “I would like Y and Z, if it’s not too much trouble.”
I highly recommend these phrases for any individual. When utilized with good context that avoids adding passive aggressiveness, these phrases convey confidence, assurance, and capability. Those qualities are admirable so people respect you more if they believe you have them, even if you’ve made an error because you’re also taking accountability and proceeding without groveling or getting defensive.
If you speak like you know what you’re doing, people are going to give you a good faith take that you are correct. Likewise, if you apologize frequently for yourself for insufficient reasons or act insecure in your desires or proposals, people presume you have reason to be insecure or apologize.
Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.
Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:
If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.
Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that’s rolling out.
if you want to turn off as much ai crap in firefox as possible, from this post on mozilla’s connect forum, you should also set all these to false using about:config:
browser.ml.enable
extensions.ml.enabled
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
to get rid of the revamped sidebar, which is also trying to incorporate ai:
sidebar.revamp
unrelated anyone got browser recommendations for when we have to jump ship from firefox
and now keep in mind that all the other browsers are doing this shit, too, but you can’t reconfigure them as with Firefox
on A for Effort’s last point, is there any browser that offers users even half as much control as Firefox? if so, I’d like to try it as a backup
i saw someone say nobody needs to know what a .txt file is anymore. what the fuck is the world coming to
unironically i think we need to bring back computer labs because APPARENTLY some people WERENT taught basic computer literacy and internet safety in school
things about computers/the internet i think kids should be formally taught in schools because theyre important to know and the amount of soon to be grown adults i know who know NOTHING about any of these is quite frankly almost all of them (and resources to learn if you dont know these things, because its never to late to get better with computers)
some very basics on how to use “"developer tools”“ on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)
internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl
as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on
vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)
ok one last addition! if you want to take it one level higher, i think learning the very basics of at least one programming language is good for people. it makes computers less scary and it makes you feel very cool, and a lot of people get discouraged about it because it seems overly complicated and hard to learn outside a formal classroom setting, so heres some resources for learning the very basics of python (because i consider it the easiest language to learn and knowing one language will make it easier to learn others)
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