2026-07-16 03:41:00
I have a Shark Navigator vacuum & I'm very happy with it. (was a handmedown from bestie)
But it wasn't shmovin' very well, and I looked, and the roller is wrapped to hell in hair. This is normal. This is frequent. Removing this hair is a regular aspect of vacuum maintenance.
Well it's really hard to do that removal while the roller is in the vacuum. So I decided to remove the roller - something that should be pretty quick & easy - something that is quick & easy in my 30 year old vacuum (which needs a new bag and is much heavier, so its not my goto vacuum).
Well. removing the plate required removing 8 screws. That alone is slightly a nuisance, but not a big deal. Could be better, but not worth complaining about on its own.
But the screws are a torx (star) bit ... EXCEPT they have a pin in the middle. Torx bits are fine - they're superior to phillips, and they're commonplace nowadays. But the ones with the pin require you to have special drivers - which I do have - which adds an extra barrier to both routine maintenance and certain repairs.
Also, there's two tiny little wheels on the the front bottom of the roller-cover. You have to pop those wheels out to access screws underneath them. This was extremely unintuitive and unnecessary, and I was lucky to have a tool (tweezers from my electronics repair kit) that was able to get under them and get the necessary leverage to pop them out. I couldn't get underneath with a screwdriver.
So, like ... that's all manageable ... but it required me to look stuff up (I don't want to go just popping wheels out if I don't have to) & have some non-standard tools in my possession.
Getting the roller out was pretty easy after that. Fiddling with the bottom-plate (which has electronics and a motor attached to it) was kinda frustrating. There was a wire that got in the way when I was trying to put the top & bottom covers back together. I find this pretty forgiveable, but it was annoying. It could have been designed better, but it felt more like a ME issue than an IT issue. But better design can solve that and make this more approachable for people of even lower skill levels than me.
The trickiest part of putting it back together was just snapping the top & bottom roller-covers back together. Neither piece snaps into place on the bottom knob of the vacuum. So you've gotta hold the vacuum precariously with your legs, and hold both pieces precariously, and fit them together, and not let the wires get in the way in the process. It was just super finicky & it didn't need to be.
And that's the point. My skill level is ... probably above-average. I'm pretty comfortable taking things apart & putting them back together. I'm not necessarily quick at it. But most routine maintenance and repairs should be manageable by somebody with a single screwdriver (phillips or regular torx is fine), near-zero skill level, and no manual.
Now - there should be manuals.
But if a manual is required for basic & routine stuff, then the product's repairabality design is insufficient.
It should have been no more than 5 minutes taking apart & putting back together, but it was about 30-45. Next time it will be like 10, I'm sure. And ... hopefully ... next time, I remove the hair before it gets as bad as it was, in which case I might not need to take the roller out.
I will add - the roller had some grooves on it, which made space for my scissors to get in & under the hair. This was a very nice feature. It could have been implemented much better. But it was still a very nice feature. Also, all the screws were the same length & bit-size. Also, the big wheels, which do not need to be removed for the roller repair use a different-sized bit - this was actually a great design to prevent unnecessary removal.
So there were some wins.
P.S. I would support a government department that assesses mass-produced products like these and gives them a repairability score, and increases taxes for lower repairability scores, and requires the score to be communicated conspicuously on containers. Taxes would go toward environmental management, as low repairability would increase waste production.
2026-07-07 23:44:00
In holding out hope, I complained about my Trackmania map getting a bunch of downvotes and my frustration with some of the feedback I got. I was really upset.
WELL. I still think the downvotes were stupid. BUT. The feedback was mostly good. As cranky as I was, I did take the feedback and implement some changes.
I do think a map is sometimes overall better when there is less visual information, when learning the map is required. But I've added things to make the map more intuitive to drive on your first attempt at it, before you've really learned it. These changes don't really make the map overall better. IMO they make it slightly worse, in terms of overall vibe.
(Adding green & red arrows is a typical approach. I use scenery & colored light bars instead of arrows.)
BUT, they do make it better for the competitive Cup Of The Day (COTD) format where you only get 15 minutes to learn the map, and people of all skill levels play.
Still, there are so many maps that make it through withOUT these quality of life features, and I don't understand.
My frustrations with the Map Review process stand. But my intensity does not. And my frustrations with the feedback, well, ... I might still feel them a little, even though I think the feedback was genuinely good.
I also received some additional feedback after my changes ... and then today I made another round of changes. This second round of feedback was regarding the actual driving, and ... well again I was frustrated with the feedback, thinking "You only think it's 'press-forward' (uneventful, easy) because you aren't trying to reduce air time/optimize". Well my thought was ... a little right and a little wrong. They were right that adding more features to the one section in question made it better.
I also made some additional quality-of-life changes. The new QoL changes were based not on feedback but on watching more people play the map, and ... well just seeing that they keep trying to go the wrong way.
The map is a straight line with no real turns ... so I didn't think going the wrong way would really be a problem. Ah well.
Again, I think the map is not necessarily overall better with these QoL changes, but makes it a better fit for the competitive format.
(In one spot, I added a bears as scenery to help direct you toward the right path. More bears is always better, so this I love actually.)
2026-07-07 02:52:00
July 4th (America's Independence Day) is a stupid fucking holiday.
The positive side of it is - some people get time off work, we hang out with friends & family, we eat good food1. A lot of people also enjoy the fireworks - I do too. But also some people are traumatized by fireworks & so are some pets.
But the thing that made me really hate this holiday was seeing a post from my white supremacist congresswoman who said something about how in 1776 we got "liberty".
And like, ... no "we" didn't. Wealthy land owning white men got liberty. Black people weren't legally considered real people. Women couldn't vote. Etc Etc.
It's just hard to celebrate a country that was founded on exclusion, a country that gaslights us into believing it's built on inclusion, a country that commits endless war crimes, a country that calls others terrorists while calling its own terrorists "soldiers" and "presidents" ... Not a fan.
2026-07-06 08:41:00
Trackmania is one of my favorite games ever. I like to sometimes play Cup of the Day, and there are a couple community events that I attend most weeks - a backward driving event & an ice map event.
One of my favorite things to do in Trackmania has been to build my own maps. A lot of them are fun little stupid things I threw together. Some are reasonably high quality maps that I'm hoping for others to play. I've sent a few maps to streamers as challenges before. And I've made a few Trial maps - extremely difficult maps that shouldn't be fun for anybody, but they're really fun bc Trackmania is full of masochists.
Well once in awhile, I make a really high quality map, that I want to try and get into Cup of the Day. One map is picked for each day, then at noon, 8pm, and 4am (u.s. central) there is a tournament where people play. There's a 15 minute qualifier to determine your division (each division has 64 players), and then people compete within their division, with some players getting knocked out each round for having the slowest times.
2,000 or so people play COTD almost every day. A lot of streamers play it regularly. And I have, for a very long time, wanted to get a map into COTD.
WELL. Historically, COTD has allowed a very limited set of maps. They're almost all created by the community, but there are a few basic styles that are generally accepted. It is rare that we would get anything remotely interesting or unique for COTD. After playing for a year or so, I started getting ridiculously bored with it because every single map started to feel like something I had already played 100 times before.
Well Nadeo added a Sunday Funday recently where we get more unique & interesting maps once per week. This has been amazing and has reignited my love for the game (i just lost The Game (if you know, you know)). Since returning to more regular play, I've also learned of the two previously mentioned community events which I'm now playing most weeks.
And since I've been playing again, I've been mapping again.
So I started this map called Bear's Valley. The entire map is one block wide (a single piece of track is 1 block X 1 block in size), which is ... unique. There have been quite a few "straight line" maps before, and I'm probably not the first person to make a one-block-wide map. The initial idea was inspired by a straight line map.
I've probably worked on it for 60 hours. I've crafted extremely beautiful & thoughtful scenery (you're in a valley, surrounded by mountainous walls). And I've put a great deal of effort into crafting a really nice track, that's really fun to drive.
But it is unique. I only make unique tracks. It is also somewhat difficult.
Now, we do get difficult maps in COTD sometimes. We get maps that are way harder than this one actually. And we do get unique maps sometimes. And I don't remotely understand how.
The one-block-wide feature isn't really what makes it unique though. It's more that ... well there are jumps and flips. It is what we call an "RPG" map. We get RPG maps from time to time & they are almost always my favorite maps. Because they're almost always unique & interesting & difficult & require you to actually learn something.
To get your map into COTD, it has to go through Map Review. You upload your map. Other players play it for up to 3 minutes at a time, then rate it 1 to 5 stars.
For maps to get COTD they generally have to have more than 4 stars, and they have to have a lot of votes (50+, i've heard). If they get high enough ratings & enough votes, then Nadeo staff review them and may select your track for COTD. If they don't, they select some tags to inform you as to why they rejected your map. But there's no descriptive communication.
I've submitted maps to Weekly Shorts before (5 new tracks each week), hit these goals, and literally never had a single map reviewed by Nadeo. It pisses me off, and it is discouraging.
But then back to Bear's Valley.
It is a really nice map. I submitted it to Map Review yesterday. I spent about an hour and a half sharing the map over & over as new players joined the Map Review server. All of MAYBE 12 people were on Map Review in that entire time. I think i got 5 votes. One 5 star. Two 3 stars. One 2 star. And one 1 star.
Watching people play the map ... well there is definitely a learning curve. 3 minutes isn't really enough time to learn it. And I feel like a lot of bad impressions come from not learning the map.
One person gave me actual feedback (which I'm extremely grateful for) and ... i don't know. It made me sad. Some of the feedback was to block off some of the scenery I built because it looks like it might be where you drive. And yeah, I get that - on your first 2 or 3 runs maybe. But then you LEARN THE MAP. This is a reality with a lot of COTD maps where the route takes a couple passes to literally know where you need to go.
Another piece of feedback was about how you gear up & gear down throughout the track - basically that you're not going roughly the same speed throughout the entire track. I don't even know what to say about that.
Look. I'm not mad at the person who gave me feedback. I do genuinely appreciate their feedback.
What I'm mad about is that Map Review is brutal, and the process for getting Nadeo to review a map is horrible. Not only do you have to spend tens of hours building your map, but then you have to spend many hours sitting in map review submitting your map over & over & over again until enough people have played it.
And then it only takes a handful of people giving it one or two stars to kill your chances of ever making it through.
And I feel like those downvotes almost exclusively come from taste. From the idea that COTD needs to be this very specific set of very standard style of maps.
As a reader, you're probably inclined to believe that my maps genuinely just aren't very good & people are downvoting them because they're bad maps.
Maybe. But I don't think that's it. I really do think it's a matter of taste.
And I didn't start this post to be pissed off, but as I talk through it I get pissed off.
I was trying to say ...
just that its really upsetting. I work so hard on my maps. They definitely are unique & nonstandard. But I put so much effort into making them fun to drive, into making them forgiving if you're not as skilled of a player as me, into making them beautiful.
And then I see someone comment on a YouTube video saying that they're upset people called their COTD map "low effort". This particular commenter said they spent 3-4 hours building their map. I've spent 50+. And a lot of the maps that make it into COTD do appear to be 50+ hour maps.
Some maps I play and there are just ... fundamental quality of life problems. Yet somehow they make it through map review & nadeo approves them. Or maps have that almost no scenery at all, maps that are little more than just track pieces & green/red arrows.
Then sometimes we get a map that is actually unique. And I don't understand how these maps ever make it through the map review process.
I'm discouraged. I'm sad. I'm irritated. I think their system for reviewing and approving maps genuinely sucks.
But the whole point of this post was actually to say that I'm trying to hold out hope. That I'm going to hold out hope.
I've made some changes to my map. I was receptive to the feedback. I added a "safe" route in one of the spots the feedback-giver had complained about (they complained that the section forces you to brake and lose all your momentum ... but they just hadn't figured out how to drive it yet, and it required no braking.) I added light-up borders on roads so it's a bit more obvious that you just need to drive forward. I added a wall in one section so that ... again people go forward ...
After making my updates, I sent it to map review and ... guess what? Nobody was there. So I'll have to try again later. It will take another hour or two of sitting in map review to see how people play it, to get a sense of what people struggle with.
My biggest frustration is that a lot of people seem to equate "map requires learning" with "map is bad". My second biggest frustration is that people seem to equate "map is non-standard" with "map is bad."
But anyway. I'll keep throwing it into map review. I'll see how people play it. I'll ask for and listen to feedback. I'll make changes. I will not compromise the vision of the map. I will not fundamentally change the map. But I will accommodate what I can, within reason.
And I'm going to hold out hope. I'm going to get discouraged when people are giving it bad ratings ... but then I'm going to hold out hope and keep trying. I don't want to be so easily defeated.
2026-07-01 00:43:00
For most websites, the cookie popops give you an option to "Accept All" or "Accept Necessary" cookies and the "necessary" component is utterly stupid.
Now. When you're signing into a website, cookies are necessary - there's a little identifier your browser needs to send to the website so the website knows you're signed in.
But I landed on the AP News website earlier to read an individual article. I didn't sign in. And it had an "accept necessary" option, not a "reject all" option.
it is SO stupid.
Honestly, I think this practice of constant cookie popups should be made illegal, and the idea of "necessary" cookies when there's nothing necessary about them should definitely be made illegal.
The default for the web should be NO COOKIES and NO TRACKING. And then, yeah, use cookies when they're actually needed - for logins, for interactive websites that keep track of your session for actual utility purposes ... ugh.
I hate the modern web for so many reasons.
P.S. My state's website to read legislation was updated in the last year or so, and it now has a cookie popup with an "accept necessary" option. It's so dumb.
2026-06-30 00:44:00
It's a bad book. I'm super not a fan. I actually stopped reading after Chapter 24 (Page 220!) because it's just not good.
I've heard this book is quite popular and a lot of people really love it. First I'll bash the failures of the fantasy, then the failures of the romance. I'll spoil some major plot points in the first 100ish pages but it really doesn't matter because this book doesn't care about its plot.
If you are a fan of this book or series, you may not want to finish this post. I respect that people have different tastes, and I don't want to ruin it for you if you've already enjoyed it. I'm not very nice with my criticism. I also will preface this by saying that, despite my heavy criticism, I don't want to discourage anybody from being creative. You do you. And I hope Sarah J Maas keeps writing if she enjoys it.
It starts off really strong. She's hunting in the woods. The fantasy components are strong, the old timey bow-hunting era setting is strongly built, and the story feels extremely compelling. She kills a wolf that was hunting the deer she was after. We found out soon after that this wolf definitely was a faerie (or fae, i'm not sure the difference) when a High Fae shows up at her cabin (where she lives with her two sisters and her dad) and says, basically, "come with me to Pyrythian (fairy realm to the North) or die." She goes to Pyrithian.
Everything up to here is really strong, and I was very excited for this book.
One of the first scenes in Pyrythian, she's sitting with that High Fae (Tomlin) and his lackey (Lucien) and the conversation quickly turns to her human love-interest Isaac. Tomlin is basically like "You really prefer human men over us fae who are so much hotter?" And she's like "Yeah bro".
It's stupid and shallow and uninteresting. And I don't really mean its shallow in the "objectification" kind of sense, but that it's shallow in terms of character development, and an immortal man with hundreds of years on him thinking his hotness is the most important thing for a woman he just kidnapped ... is just insecure baby teen shit. It's shallow in the sense that he's not mature, and does not feel like a realistic person.
So that scene annoyed me, but I still had hope, because the fantasy components had been so strong thus far.
The story continues, we learn more about the lands of the Fae - dangerous faeries abound, there is a "Blight" spreading across Pyrithian. Tomlin is doing his best to take care of it and reassuring Feyre (fay-ruh) to "not worry" and basically just sit tight..
We get a couple good action scenes over the next hundred or so pages. But the majority of the chapters are fairly benign conversations between Feyre & Tomlin or Feyre & Lucien. She's finding herself attracted to him and wondering what he's thinking and ...
Romance isn't really my genre, I don't think. So that's definitely a vote against this book for me personally.
But my issue isn't so much with the fact that it is a romance. It is that the romance is utterly ... not compelling. There is no real tension, no real conflict. The characters are also not remotely compelling. They lack depth of character, and the romance lacks depth of intimacy. It's basically just ... Feyre is stuck in this magical land ... it was once perfect and beautiful, and she gets a taste of that ... and if she sticks close to Tomlin, she'll be safe. He's her savior (even though he's her captor). And the whole thing just feels bland and inevitable.
It's really hard to communicate what is so poor about the romance, and I feel like my words aren't doing its badness justice.
And then my biggest issue. I could deal with a bland romance, and some badly written characters (they are all badly written) ... if the book seemed to actually care about the world it built and the fantasy plot it established.
We do continue to see issues come up from this Blight that is spreading. And throughout the story, we're uncovering more and more details about it. We progressively learn more about Tomlin's magic, and other faerie magic. The book ... I guess it gives nods to this larger plot, but it just doesn't seem invested in it. I don't know how to explain it so that it makes sense ... but it's like the book only really cares about the romance, and all the faerie-human politics, and conflicts between faerie factions, and the Blight ... it's just a background for the romance.
I would completely respect this book if it ... if it were better. I could read the romance and get interested in it. I like sexy scenes. But the characters lack depth. The romance lacks true intimacy. The connection between Feyre and Tomlin feels extremely superficial. The fantasy components were really strong at first, and there is a taste of a meaningful fantasy plot.
But the romance doesn't feel like it is happening within the confines of the fantasy plot. It's not like the world is progressing toward this badness, and our characters are facing it together & bonding meaningfully within it. It feels like the characters are bonding superficially while the world goes on in the background.
I'm just so not a fan.
And if you made it this far, let me recommend to you my FAVORITE author N.K. Jemesin. My favorite series starts with The Fifth Season. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms starts another favorite. And Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse is another amazing fantasy book (series).
