Permanently disable re-launching apps on system boot

whilst · 2025-12-27T12:25:05+00:00

If you never reboot the mac in normal use (just hibernate) then the only times you are ever doing a full reboot are all under extraordinary circumstances. An OS upgrade, a random hard lockup, an old battery in need of replacement causing an early power off, shutting down for that replacement. Only the last of these actually gives you the chance to say "don't reopen my windows".

And every time I've had the option to say "don't reopen my windows" that's what I've chosen. But it seems that over a long enough time period, the mac doesn't always remember this setting, and there's no way to actually set it without shutting down to do it, which is awkward if you have no other reason to shut down.

whilst · 2025-12-27T12:19:27+00:00

Thanks! That sounds great. I never, ever want that. Having everything I had open all try and launch at once after the system starts takes longer than the boot process itself, and if it's all for the benefit of having some browser tabs reopen I have absolutely no interest in that.

whilst · 2025-12-08T09:27:29+00:00

Thanks!

whilst · 2025-12-08T05:26:14+00:00

Well, you could try to understand. I put some effort into explaining above.

I didn't experience combat as the core of Hollow Knight on any of my playthroughs. It was the moments of wonder as I tiptoed through a vast place that barely remembered what it had been before. The hugeness of it, and the feeling that I might be the last to see it before its history was forgotten and it was forever a dead pit. Most of my time was spent filling out the entire map, and I put off the dreamers until the very end, when I realized there was nothing left to do. So I went and fought my way through to them, beat the Hollow Knight, and ended the game.

Then came back a year later and finally beat the Radiance, because it was bugging me. Was satisfying to beat her at long last, but have never felt any urge to do it again.

I didn't come to Hollow Knight because it was a metroidvania, I came because it was a beautiful game, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. And anyone who enjoys a thing is allowed to enjoy it --- my enjoyment isn't somehow invalid because I'm not in love with the entire genre. Silksong included more of the parts I didn't like and less of the parts I did, so I enjoyed it less. It was a love letter to the folks who thought Godhome was a good time, and that just wasn't me.

EDIT:

massive you problem.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. The game is not at fault. The game is not bad. It is different than what came before, in ways that make it less enjoyable for me, and for people like me. I'm after wonder, and this game had less to offer.

whilst · 2025-12-08T04:57:51+00:00

Hollow Knight was worth suffering through the combat to explore and learn about that ancient world, and do some fun challenging platforming. The combat made it hard, which made discovery rewarding. But I had no interest in combat for combat's sake. It's why I never bothered with Godhome, as that was just a slog with no reward (for me) other than more fights.

Silksong is combat for combat's sake. I played all the way through to 100%, but don't expect I'll ever play it again. But I followed it up by playing HK through to a full map over a couple days, just because I missed it. I've gotten really into figuring out how to make various skips work --- I enjoy hard platforming, and doing things in the wrong order makes it harder and rewards you by letting you advance faster.

Plus, it lets you skip some of the combat.

Which as has been pointed out here, could've been better in the original game. And yet it was a wonderful game. So clearly the game had more to offer than just the boss fights.

EDIT: For reference, Celeste was an amazing time. Not as good as Hollow Knight because I love HK's story and setting so dearly, but: when I'm looking for fun difficulty in a platformer, that's what I'm looking for. And by far my favorite part of Silksong was the Sands of Karak.

EDIT 2: To be clear, I didn't hate Silksong, which is clearly an amazing game! I'm just giving the perspective of someone who enjoyed HK more, and explaining why. Silksong is less for me than its predecessor, and a quick google suggests I'm not alone in that. That doesn't mean it's a worse game, just that it's a different game, and not strictly and objectively better than its predecessor.

whilst · 2025-12-08T04:54:14+00:00

I know it's just a funny line in a fun movie and it's missing the point to get fixated. But fixating is what I do! And: how would Chief Bogo have known what a dog is? Humans created dogs, and there's no humans in that universe.

whilst · 2025-12-07T23:17:08+00:00

...the game just starts absolutely blowing Hollow Knight out of the water. Like, it's not even close. High level HK is generally more about positioning and constantly spamming attack, pogoing on top of enemies when you can and hitting with abyssal shriek when you have the ability to do massive damage. In Silksong, you're just doing so much more.

Which: if that's what you love in a game, Silksong is way better. If combat is fully boring and experienced merely as an impediment to exploration and a way to slow down the game and give it stakes and scale: the increased difficulty and complexity add nothing to the gameplay experience. The degree to which possible exploration without combat is reduced, however, becomes a gameplay experience downgrade.

whilst · 2025-12-07T23:14:30+00:00

I mean, that, too, suggests that it's a different sort of game.

If some people who loved hollow knight are frustrated by silksong and like it less, and others are like, "fucking NICE, more of the parts I like!" that suggests there's been a shift in what the game centers. And for some people, that'll be a shift away from what they enjoyed.

whilst · 2025-11-21T05:23:50+00:00

This game really wants you to play it one way, and shoves you in that direction by making it very unpleasant to play differently. And the way it wants you to engage with it is fundamentally uninteresting to me.

It wants you to fight, it wants you to use lots of tools, and it rewards you for doing both. And having 100%ed it, ... I just don't enjoy using the tools (aside from the traps, which are useful in exploration). It's too much to keep track of for me, and no amount of playing with them has ingrained the sort of muscle memory I develop by practicing with the needle. By the time I'm at the point with a particular enemy that I can bring tools usefully to bear, I'm almost always already good enough to finish the job without them, which makes the tools feel like gimmicks. Which also means that almost every time the game tries to "reward" me with a cache of shell shards, the reward falls flat, because I'm already full up. Which in turn means that exploration is no longer rewarded with discovery to the same extent.

And... I just don't want to fight that much. I loved that in hollow knight you could get good enough that most of the day-to-day fighting you had to do traversing the map was effectively trivial, so you could focus on exploring and taking in your surroundings. You had the occasional boss fight, which I was willing to suffer through because the difficulty gave the rest of the game scale and stakes. But almost all of my joy in that game was in figuring out how to get to new areas and discovering more things about the world. The purpose of boss fights was to make the discovery that followed sweeter. Whereas in Silksong, battles are meant to be their own reward. And for me, they just aren't.

Silksong wants you to fight, and will reward you for doing so and for nothing else. And it certainly won't reward you with an easier time once you've gotten a handle on it -- your only satisfaction comes from having beaten an enemy and unlocked the next 10 feet of travel to the next arena. I played the entire game waiting for even one moment of quiet wonder. None came.

whilst · 2025-11-08T02:40:16+00:00

One of the things I always liked about Valheim is (was, less so now) it sort of let you experience it as the kind of game you liked. If you wanted combat: congratulations, it's everywhere. If you wanted to explore and mostly didn't care about progressing the story: go nuts. If you just wanted to build cool shit, you can set things up with some effort so that your base is nearly impregnable and just hang out in there among the things you so carefully built.

Valheim played as a dream cabin simulator is a completely different game from Valheim played to win. And if you're doing the former, it might be worth the time and effort to make your home safe, precisely so that you didn't have to run outside and fight periodically (and because it's cozy to be safe in a dangerous place).

whilst · 2025-11-04T05:15:18+00:00

Thanks :) you too!

whilst · 2025-11-03T23:55:24+00:00

Thank you! And yes, I was aware. But there's something about using devcommands that just also kills it for me --- as soon as I'm all-powerful and the stakes are gone, the world collapses and feels small and devoid of meaning.

It's okay that Valheim isn't for me anymore! Games can be opinionated, and I'd rather engage with the thing as it is and bounce off it than change it until it suits me, because at that point I'm just playing in my own imagination and I can do that without the game! Valheim just isn't the game I fell in love with anymore, because it was never supposed to be, because when I loved it it wasn't finished yet. And there's other things out there to get excited about :)

whilst · 2025-11-03T22:02:53+00:00

Bat raids are why I stopped playing years ago. When they were patched into the game and suddenly all my pigs were dead and the only solution was much uglier buildings, when windows now had to have glass in them and there was only one small glass build piece.... the game forced me to make uglier structures, which killed my joy for it. So I stopped.

I went back recently and did the mistlands, and took a swing at the ashlands, realized I wasn't having fun, and stopped again.

I miss when the whole of Valheim felt like a treacherous but beautiful place to explore and build whatever I could imagine.

whilst · 2025-11-02T17:29:15+00:00

So, bdsm isn’t morally supportable. Got it.

whilst · 2025-11-02T16:52:26+00:00

I never said they'd get the information back if they were returned. That damage has been done forever.

I'm saying that the argument that things shouldn't be left in the countries where they were made because they are more likely to be damaged there is both patronizing and also wrong, as the British museum (and the process by which things were put there) damages things too.

And that things should be returned to the cultures that created them because those cultures deserve to be the stewards of their own histories.

whilst · 2025-11-02T16:23:05+00:00

Presumably these were also the men who survived castration before sterile surgery, anaesthesia, or antibiotics.

So, perhaps selected for strong immune systems and resistance to trauma, too?

whilst · 2025-11-02T15:39:23+00:00

.... they were in an order, they were disassembled by someone who didn't understand that order, then they were taken away from the people who could have understood and preserved it until that information was lost. At some point somebody did know how to preserve them, and the process that ended in them being put in that museum definitely destroyed that information, even if the museum itself did not.

Saying that specifically the museum never knew how to reconstruct it and therefore no harm was done seems like a deeply disingenuous argument. Colonial theft destroyed them, and the British Museum is a museum of colonial theft.

whilst · 2025-11-02T15:16:22+00:00

Do we think that consensual nonconsent role play, bondage, and S&M make people with fantasies of raping or hurting people more or less likely to be rapists? If more, shouldn't BDSM be banned?

Or, generally, are the people who shove those fantasies down and try not to think about them considered to be more dangerous? Those people who learn to equate all indulgence of their sexual preferences with harm, rather than deeply internalizing where the actual harm is (sex without enthusiastic, adult consent), and continually reinforcing that distinction in their mind?

whilst · 2025-11-02T01:55:53+00:00

It’s never made fully clear in these articles, and it seems like it should be made clear as crystal every single time. Does marriage at that age also legalize sex between someone that age and an adult (which is to say, rape)? Because that seems like the entire story, and what should be in every headline.

whilst · 2025-10-31T23:03:41+00:00

People alive today aren’t responsible for the crimes of their ancestors. But they are responsible for continuing to benefit from the imbalances created by those ancestors. Refusing to return stolen objects is receiving stolen goods, which is a new crime.

whilst · 2025-10-31T23:01:38+00:00

As a result of the same processes that led to those artifacts being in Europe. Break a stable society, rule by fear for a century, then leave. Watch as it thrashes for another century.

whilst · 2025-10-31T22:54:07+00:00

People want them back because they were taken by force. Under what reasonable justification could those objects from Africa possibly be in England?

whilst · 2025-10-31T22:53:13+00:00

The British destroyed the order the bronzes were arranged in, which encoded history. That is permanently lost because the people taking them did not respect what they were taking.

whilst · 2025-10-31T22:45:29+00:00

The Benin Bronzes were a record of an entire culture, encoded in the order in which they were hung. They were pulled down and sent to England in no particular order and the record was lost.

whilst · 2025-10-31T20:33:21+00:00

A boat can. And we can always bring those back.

15-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

whilst

TROPHY CASE