J❀y

none shall stay his sinful hand

holy fucking shit!!!!!!!!!!

I've had this in my drafts to finish writing up for a few weeks but today I made another discovery that has pushed me to finally write it up lol.

My PC had a few hiccups over the past couple of years. Nothing so serious that I was truly concerned (at first) but, annoyances, to be sure. ("PC? Weren't you talking about a TV??" you might be thinking to yourself. Yes. I'll get there. Oh, will I ever get there.)

For a long time, the most serious hiccup with my PC was being unable to open Display Settings on my PC. I had to use Nvidia control panel to make adjustments. Whatever. Didn't affect my ability to work or anything. I had just updated to Windows 11 so I thought maybe something went wrong in the update. So I did another install (which meant I had to re-install a ton of music plugin stuff on my computer which takes ages given all the stuff I use.)

The fresh install still didn't fix it. So I simply ignored it for the better part of 2 years.

Over time, so slowly I didn't really clock them as being related, other things started to fail.

I have a Komplete Kontrol S88 midi Keyboard that interfaces with Kontakt and Komplete Kontrol in my DAW. I can use the keyboard to adjust settings or select instruments without having to look at my computer screen. At some point last year this stopped working. I could still use it to input midi, and I was afraid I'd have to do a fresh install of all the Native Instruments stuff I use, so I kept putting off trying to fix it until I had less going on with work. It worked, just not as well as it should!

Then, Task manager started to hang in weird ways. It wouldn't close unless I forced it closed with ProcExp. Whatever! Computers are weird!

I had trouble getting video capture cards to connect when I considered streaming Splatoon. Whatever! I'm not a streamer, I should probably use that energy on something else.

But then, in March, I had some things fail that, turns out, are pretty necessary to using the computer.

I was trying to get remote desktop to work on my tablet so I could work in the living room closer to my cat, Grendel, who was still very much in mourning for his best friend (<3 Guts). Grendel is at his happiest when he's napping on the couch next to a human. So I thought, hey, I could do some stuff in remote desktop mode! It wasn't something I used very often because it doesn't play super nice with audio, it'd been probably over a year since I last used it, but I knew it had worked and had been easy to set up.

Well. It refused to connect despite appearing as an option on my tablet. And as I was trying to troubleshoot this problem...

My task bars on my PC disappeared! If I moused over the spot they should have been I got the loading circle. And my monitors would jitter!

System settings were nowhere to be found. To navigate I had to open Task Manager (which if you recall was already acting strange and sluggish for the past year) in order to open the command panel, which I'd then use to launch programs. Or, attempt to. If I tried to open the system settings, my PC spat out "Uhhh what's "Settings"? We ain't got settings" (in command I got "C:\Windows\System32>start ms-settings: Access is denied." despite being in admin mode)

SO I started to panic a wee bit. It's not a great time for me to possibly need a new PC! Plus, it works great when it works.

I manually backed up everything important from my main PC drive (as I could not access the windows backup program because it lived in settings!!!!!!!!) and downloaded the Windows 11 installer to a drive in case I needed to completely wipe my computer and start fresh.

In a last ditch effort, I tried updating my Nvidia GeForce graphics driver and restarted.

Lo and behold, my taskbars came back and I could access settings again! Huzzah!

This lasted for 6 days. And then the taskbars disappeared AGAIN along with Settings.

At least by now I'd become somewhat comfortable using command to get around, so I was less panicked than I was in round 1. I at least knew the computer wouldn't crash and delete all my shit suddenly (plus I had my backups that were up-to-date).

I asked my friends if they'd ever heard of anything like this, and Cohost's own @vogon helped me poke around some additional graphics driver stuff in case updating to the new Nvidia program that's in beta would solve my issue. This felt super promising when I went into safe mode and saw taskbars. So, I did the update, and, as before, when I updated, the taskbars came back! But there were gone again almost immediately. My screen literally started flickering and they vanished. It was so fucking bizarre.

I turned to google once more, hoping that somehow, as useless as google is these days, maybe I'd find what I needed to fix my damn computer!

Somehow, against all odds, I found it. I happened to use the exact right string in my search to pull up some reddit threads. The first one didn't have anything useful, but a few results down I spotted "no taskbar and task manager freezes" holy moly!!!

At first glance however, there wasn't anything useful. But then I spotted some collapsed comments at the bottom of the thread. I knew more than likely they just had comments like "sucks bro" or "this is why i use linux :/" But I expanded them and inside was a link to a Microsoft forum post. I kept my expectations in check and clicked on the link. What I saw had my nearly vibrating in my seat.

This was the solution.

Narayan B
Nov 16, 2023, 12:20 AM

So I finally solved it!

Source of the problem: an Android TV (HiSense model) connected to my network. Yes. A TV caused this issue.

HISENSE? LIKE THE SAME BRAND OF TV I HAVE HAD SINCE 2020???

I followed the instructions. I deleted keys generated by our TV for 5 straight minutes. 5 Minutes of like 200BPM clicking. I restarted. Everything worked again. I laughed so hard I cried. I felt like I'd solved a murder. The main suspect was the PC but the culprit was the TV in the other room. And he almost got away with it!!! If I had spent a few days carrying out a clean install and re-installing all my work stuff, my problem would have come back. If I had taken the PC out back and shot it and replaced it with a fancy new computer, the problem would have come back.

Because the problem was never the PC. The Problem was my Hisense TV in the next room.

Once I carried this out, I was able to open display settings for the first time (outside of safe mode) in 2 years. When I deleted the keys, my Task Manager started behaving normally again. I turned around and saw that my keyboard was once again displaying the VST controls on its screen. The fancy midi keyboard was back at full functionality. I was able to connect my CRT as a display again using the HDMI -> RCA converters I'd assumed had stopped working (nope! they still worked, they always worked!)

Which brings me to today. Almost a month later everything still works. So, I decided to see if remote desktop would magically work again. The answer is: Yes. Yes, in fact, my TV was the reason my remote desktop connection had failed the month before.

So here I am, sitting on my couch with my tablet and bluetooth keeb and mouse, writing this post in remote desktop mode so I could attach screenshots of this saga to my post without sitting at my PC. Grendel is snoring beside me as I write.

As a treat for reading this far, please enjoy two screenshots of my friends reacting to the solution of my great mystery.

adding: the TV in question, in case you're curious: Hisense 50Q8G- 50" Smart 4K ULED™ Android TV with Quantum Dot Technology (Canada Model)

The sex binary is socially constructed, similar to the gender binary. Now, dimorphic sex characteristics are real, some people have testes and some have ovaries and putting them together is how you make babies. But the sex binary—the idea that along with testes comes an entire set of secondary characteristics which are mutually exclusive with another set of characteristics associated with ovaries—is socially constructed.

I recently had a consultation for electrolysis for permanent facial hair removal. My facial hair is too light for lasers. The technician was an intersex trans woman. She told me this herself. She does laser and electrolysis for most trans women in Philadelphia, she said. After remarking on how little facial hair I have, how slowly it grows in, and how light it is... she then proceeded to tell me that electrolysis would cost $100/hr and take about 50 hours spread out however long. So $5000 for my whole face. I would also have to change my skin care routine to stop doing anything that makes my face softer and more supple because that would increase the risk of damage... and 4 days before any appointment I'd need to stop shaving. So even at a very quick pace I'd be going through a lot more dysphoria for an entire year to permanently remove my facial hair and I'd be $5000 lighter in the bank. I've been weighing the pros and cons since and haven't really made a decision either way.

At the end of the day at work, all the workers loiter by the entrance of the library until all the patrons are gone and we can turn on the alarm and leave. It's a library, so the gender of the workers skews hard towards women. The only men at my library are the guard and the manager.

I was standing in a small circle with a group of my cis female coworkers, of a few different ethnicities and heritages mingle together. While idly chatting I mentioned I was getting my brows waxed after work. Just a routine waxing. A coworker mentions she got her eyebrows threaded recently for a wedding and it was painful, but not as bad as getting her lip waxed. I said I shave my lip. Another coworker said she plucks her lip and shaves her entire face from time to time. "I tell you I'd have a full beard if I didn't." Every single person in the conversation did some kind of regular and often intense facial hair removal in order to create the appearance of not being someone who grows facial hair at all, and also did things to make their brows less bushy. "I look enough like a man already I don't need a beard too."

The sex binary tells us that facial hair is an inherently masculine thing. That only men/'males' grow facial hair. Testosterone as a hormone does make everyone grow facial hair, and the more of it you've been exposed to in your life the more facial hair you'll grow. But everyone has some testosterone. It's a social fabrication that women do not grow facial hair and the vast majority of women put a lot of effort into maintaining this illusion. They feel bad when they fail to maintain it. I feel dysphoric when I can feel facial hair growing in, something which it takes about four days without shaving to even be visible. It's probably not much more than my cis female coworker. We both feel horrible when it happens. I can't say if I feel worse about it than she does. Though she is not considering spending $5000 to permanently halt the process via electrocuting the hair follicles at their root.

As Judith Butler writes, this binary is something that we perform. We do it. We bring it into existence by behaving in ways which accentuate and exaggerate the natural and unnatural differences between 'males' and 'females' and between 'men' and 'women.'

And that's all without even getting into the experiences of the intersex trans woman making big money helping other trans women ease their dysphoria.

It's hard to say how much of gender dysphoria is biological or sociopsychological. It's something I feel a strong need to alleviate and relief from treating either way. Hormones made something feel Right in me that's hard to attribute entirely to society. But the facial hair? It's hard to differentiate my dislike of it from every other woman i work with, undergoing painful frequent procedures to make it appear as though women do not grow facial hair, as a natural fact.