I gotta say, salty licorice is amazing and you're really missing out if you don't try it. It takes a couple pieces to acquire the taste, the first one you try is nasty but only the first. Once you've acquired the taste there's nothing else like it.

Now more things for you to rank:

the BitTorrent protocol

Kierkegaard

King Leopold

ontology

The War on Drugs (the band)

a hypothetical box which has a 97% chance to be filled with cuddly kittens, but a 3% of being filled with hundreds of dead rats

yourself

Alright:

birthdays

vitamin C supplements

file compression

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I'm late to the party, but I was so sick of hearing about it in 2013 that I didn't want to read it then. Ordered a used copy online recently and found Donna Tartt's signature in it.

I started last Friday and I'm already 300 pages in, which is really fast for me. It's a real page-turner, which I don't understand because the events are not particularly exciting. Donna Tartt has a way of making mundane stuff interesting.

You are a: Communist Pro-Government Interventionist Bleeding-Heart Libertine 

Collectivism score: 100%
Authoritarianism score: 17%
Internationalism score: 17%
Tribalism score: -100%
Liberalism score: 83%

The second and third descriptors are really inaccurate for me. I think the test is working with certain assumptions that don’t hold up under alternative government systems.

Suddenly got the urge for hot sauce, even though I’ve hardly eaten anything spicy in my life. So I walked out to the dollar store and picked up some Frank’s Red Hot. I love the heat but I’m not a fan of the flavor.

Any recommendations on what to pick up next? Is Sriracha good?

I'm either really boring or really minimalistic. You decide.

https://i.imgur.com/OToorj8.png

I think the only 2014 movie I saw was the third Hobbit movie. It was okay, maybe 6/10. I wasn't horribly bored by the action scenes like in the second movie.

I use Chrome on my crappy laptop because they do a good job making it "feel" light, even though it's probably the heaviest browser.

If you're looking purely for actual lightness, Firefox can be configured quite a bit. There are also a bunch of super minimalistic browsers like Midori, but most of them (including Midori) are not stable yet and can have trouble with things.

I finally started Crime and Punishment recently. It's probably the most complex novel I've ever read, but it's still easier to follow than I expected. I'm surprised at how little is happening, considering the size of the book. I read about 1/10 of the books the other day, and it was all a conversation in one room. Dostoevsky somehow makes it feel like things are moving along though.

For the record, I'm reading the Constance Garnett translation with revisions (the nature of which I'm not sure of ). I would hold off for the more expensive Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, but I've read excerpts online and it just isn't as readable to me.

I'm not a law expert but I remember reading in a few places that legal disclaimers like that are completely pointless.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IDoNotOwn

Extraversion: 2

Your score on Extraversion is low, indicating you are introverted, reserved, and quiet. You enjoy solitude and solitary activities. Your socializing tends to be restricted to a few close friends.

Agreeableness: 99

Your high level of Agreeableness indicates a strong interest in others' needs and well-being. You are pleasant, sympathetic, and cooperative.

Conscientiousness: 43

Your score on Conscientiousness is average. This means you are reasonably reliable, organized, and self-controlled.

Neuroticism: 99

Your score on Neuroticism is high, indicating that you are easily upset, even by what most people consider the normal demands of living. People consider you to be sensitive and emotional.

Openness to Experience: 88

Your score on Openness to Experience is high, indicating you enjoy novelty, variety, and change. You are curious, imaginative, and creative.

Not sure about the neuroticism one but the rest of the results seem pretty accurate to me.

I bought a fancy book of Bradbury's short stories from Amazon a couple months ago. I've been picking at it between books.

The introduction was interesting. He never had a driver's license. He hated ebooks, the internet, and for the most part computers. He said in an interview about the internet, "Who do you want to talk to? All those morons who are living across the world somewhere? You don't even want to talk to them at home." He seemed really stuck in his own time. Still, he's one of my favorite writers.

I was looking this up for a little bit earlier but I didn't find anything too detailed on it. Do you take the entire base of the laptop off and then clean everything out, or just turn it over and try to spray through the vents? I'm not a computer guy, so I don't want to take it off and have everything fall apart on me. Also, how often do you clean it out?

I just spray the air into my laptop's vents without disassembling anything. It shakes the dust around and most of it ends up coming out. I'm not sure if my method is entirely safe, but I've been doing it with this laptop for three years without a problem. I spray every 1-2 months.

Try spraying the vents with a can of compressed air if you haven't. I came close to buying a cooling pad but I learned about that, and now my laptop never overheats.

I picked up a 1909 copy of the Aeneid. It's an old translation (the one Project Gutenberg has) but it's more readable than most things that old. So far it's like the Lord of the Rings and a super hero movie mashed into one.

Just did a Back to the Future marathon today. First time seeing 2 and 3. I'm glad I went with my friend's suggestion of a marathon because there were a lot of subtle things carried between movies that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't just seen the previous movie.

GOG has been moving away from the "Good Old Games"-only thing. They have a lot of recent games like the Avadon games, Kingdom Rush, Gone Home, etc.

Right now the Geneforge series, Avernum 1-6, and Avadon 1-2 are on GOG. Avernum: Escape from the Pit and Nethergate aren't. Is there a reason for this? Will future Spiderweb games be available there?

Butterfly at Carter Caves State Park

Huge moth in Pennsylvania

The creek behind my grandparents' house (taken when I thought "moar contrast=kewl")

I really wonder how many people are just lurking instead of posting. I, for one, post far less than I used to, in part because I'm not really playing the games anymore. I still lurk several times a day, though.

I'm new here and I when I joined I was kind of surprised at how few subforums there are. I've been joining a bunch of indie developers' forums (finding internet homes after leaving Reddit) and most of them have several different off topic forums for things like debates, other games, etc. Those subforums keep the community alive between releases or when people aren't currently playing the developer's games. Maybe something like that would be good here. Then again, maybe that would cause this forum to lose focus and make the community bad.

1. I'm 17 years old.

2. I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, and I've lived in the Cincinnati area my whole life.

3. My native language is English. I can speak a little bit of all the popular languages (French, Spanish, etc) but not enough to actually use. I took two years of Spanish in school but one year was with a bad teacher and on eyear was through a bad online course. So I didn't learn much.

4. My ancestry is mostly Scottish. I'm also a little bit English, Irish, and Cherokee.

5. I'm a straight male.

6. I consider my current religious beliefs to be closest to agnosticism, but my friend insists that I'm gnostic so .

7. I'm single and I don't have any children.

8. I'm probably lower middle class, maybe upper lower class. When I was younger we had a lot more money but my parents weren't smart with it. I had a lot of issues being the poor kid in school, even though I wasn't even poor at the time.

9. I've never served in the military and I couldn't if I wanted to.

10. I haven't had a job yet but I'm getting one in the next few months if all goes as planned. In the future I plan to go into audio engineering. For a while I wanted to be a stock broker but I lost interest in it after using a mock trading site for several months. I'm going into my senior year of high school.

I think Paint.NET (http://www.getpaint.net/) might be exactly what you're looking for. It's a lot like MS Paint but with more stuff, including changing hues and blurs. I'm not sure about the removing background part though, you might need GIMP for that.

Edit: Actually Paint.NET can remove backgrounds too, with a tool similar to GIMP's: http://www.isimonbrown.co.uk/cutting-out-images/

I typed up most of it, but I realized a lot has changed between Windows 7 and 8 and there's a lot I'm not really sure about. You can probably find guides for individual parts of what you want to do on Google. Basically, you need to make a new partition, copy/paste your files to it, put in the Windows 8.1 install disk, and install WIndow 8.1 over your Windows partition. Once the new version of WIndows is set up, you can copy your files back over, delete the partition you created, and extend your WIndows partition back over it. Then you'll have a clean install of Windows 8.1 with all the data you wanted to keep.

I kept my incomplete instructions here because I didn't want to just delete all that, but you'd probably be better off Googling.

This thread is super relevant to me right now, because I just started watching movies, pretty much for the first time in my life. Right now I'm working my way through some top 10 lists. I've watched The Matrix, Akira, Apocalypse Now, The Expendables 3, and Postal.

The Matrix: Good movie, but the first half where Morpheus explained the matrix over and over dragged a bit.

Akira: After watching it I feel like I know less about it than I did before watching it. I can't really decide if I liked it. I probably won't watch it again though.

Apocalypse Now: I found it incredibly boring and didn't understand the hype at all. Later I found out I'd watched the redux version, which adds a bunch of scenes that were cut from the original. A lot of people say the scenes ruin the movie and were better left out. So I guess I'll watch the original cinematic release at some point.

The Expendables 3: Kind of disappointing. I watched it because everyone on the internet said it was non-stop mindless action, but there actually wasn't much. I'm not going to do a detailed comparison but I think this movie had less action than any of the other movies on this list. That's pretty bad for a movie that's supposed to be all about action. I wouldn't mind if there was a good plot, but its plot is a standard dull action movie plot.

Postal: It's not for everyone but I loved it. It carries a lot over from the games and has the same nutty feel Postal 2 (the game) has.

As for TV, I just started season 2 of Justified. I'm a bit put off by how dark the show suddenly got, but I'll keep watching because I think Raylan Givens is an awesome character.

(Sorry if this is considered a necro post, it's giving me a warning but this thread is still on page one of the general forum.)

I'll type up some instructions tomorrow, right now it's 1:23 am and I'm laying in bed.

I'm not completely sure it'll work though, because I don't know if Windows Backup supports backing up to a partition on the same drive. It's worth a shot though.