y’all didn’t even add a tutorial of how to do this so imma put one right here
1. type in cmd.exe into your windows search and right click on Command Promt search result and select “Run as Administator”. 2. Type/Copypase in
net.exe stop “Windows Search” and make sure Windows Search is in quotations. It should then respond saying “The Windows Search service is stopping” and then tell you it’s stopped.
This is only a temp fix though, if you want it switched off permanently then do THIS:
1. Press the Windows key + R at the same time and type in services.msc.
2. Scroll until you find Windows Search and double click it to enter its Properties window.
3. Change the Startup type to Disabled. Apply this change and you can exit out.
For people who wanna make an aesthetic set/mood board but don’t know where to start. Fill in with either a. your character’s favorite or b. what describes your character best.
hey so protip if you have abusive parents and need to get around the house as quietly as possible, stay close to furniture and other heavy stuff because the floor is settled there and it’s less likely to creak
socks are quieter than bare feet on tile/wood and for the love of god don’t wear slippers/shoes if you can help it
climbing ON the furniture will disrupt the pattern of your footsteps and make it harder to hear where you are in the house
crawling will do the same and if you get caught crawling you can pretend you fell
the floor near the wall can be really loud if the floorboards/carpet is old and not completely flush to the wall
do NOT attempt to use a rolling chair to travel without footsteps. they are extremely loud and hard to steer
Also. Breath with your mouth and not your nose. Your nose will whistle. Trust me. If you need to get into your fridge, jab your finger into the rubber part that seals the door closed and create a tiny airway. This will prevent the suction noise when you open the door. When drinking liquids (juice mostly), pour out your glass (or chug from the jug) and replace what you drank with water. If it was full enough in the beginning, no one will notice. DO NOT STEAL ALCOHOL. THEY WILL NOTICE IF IT’S WATERED DOWN. Bring a pillowcase for dried foods like cereal and granola. It helps to muffle the sound it makes when it pours.
If your house has snack packs (like gummy bears or crackers or chips), count them every day until you know the rhythm that they get consumed. (This took me a week and a half with my twin brother and sister). Then join the rhythm when you make your nightly visits. It will be that much harder to figure out it was you.
KEEP A TRASH BAG UNDER YOUR BED FOR WRAPPERS AND STUFF BUT DONT FORGET TO THROW IT OUT WHENEVER YOU CAN. BUGS YKNOW. Hope this helped.
I might have some useful info to add.
-a jar of peanut butter is long lasting and easy to hide under a bed or in a dresser drawer. I lived off of jars of peanut butter and boxes of saltine crackers I would buy on grocery trips with my mom.
-two words: Slipper Socks. These are the socks that have rubber designs on the bottom for grip. They make no noise, and also keep you steady on slicker surfaces like tile and wood. You can find them cheap at Walmart. They also keep your feet more protected if you’re outside.
-if you’re secure enough in your room to have a small food stash, make sure you’re not too obvious about it (duh) but also move its location every few days. I kept mine in a shoebox under my bed, then switched it to a backpack in my closet, then wedged between my bookshelf and wall, and I would cycle locations until i moved it permanently to a false-bottomed drawer I installed in my dresser when my father was gone for a weekend. I would NEVER put food directly into my stash after taking it. I would keep it in pockets of my clothes and between books until everyone went to sleep, then I’d stock and stow my stash for the next few days.
-get a water bottle with a filter in it. I used to be able to reach my bathroom from my bedroom door down the hall using a huge step or minor jump/leap. If I was afraid of being caught at night, I’d fill up the humidifier tank we kept under our sink while I took a short shower, and would refill my water that way. It might not be the best option, but I kept a small stockade of water under my bed for emergencies.
-if you can, smuggle your garbage out in your backpack or purse. Dispose of it at work/school. I got caught twice by carelessly throwing away packaging.
-if someone knows the situation you’re going through (close friend/partner/etc) see if there’s a way for them to get food or other supplies to you at school or work or what private time you may get. A hidden first aid kit literally saved parts of my body before and I owe it to a close friend.
-try learning the building’s natural rhythm. The house I grew up in would creak and settle heavily every night for 3-5 minutes. That was my shot, and I had to be QUICK. I still got caught a few times, but learning the patterns in our floors and walls, when they creaked, WHERE they creaked, kept me going. Eventually I was sprinting in slipper socks to the kitchen and back in less than 90 seconds.
-if you have stairs, or live upstairs. Sit as you go down them one at a time, or climb up them like an animal. It keeps you low/out of lots of motion sight, and also can reduce noise and creaking by distributing weight over more than 1-2 steps.
-You can use common hand sanitizer to remove the stains certain snack foods leave behind (coughs cheeto fingers) and a dry toothbrush can help scrub the color off your tongue. If you can get powdered toothpaste or toothpaste tabs to keep on hand, it makes a huge difference in sneakiness.
-I don’t recommend going for dried foods like granola or cereal unless you can sneak it to a secure place to get it. It’s too loud, it’s a gamble every time for something with less caloric intake than it’s worth if you get caught. Of course, there are times when that’s the only option!!
-if you’re taking milk, add water, but be SURE to shake/agitate the bottle to distribute the dairy fat with the water. I got into the habit of shaking milk jugs when I started sneaking it, and explained the habit as something I read in an old comic strip my father showed me. (Back when whole milk had a lot more cream fats and they’d separate, so shaking it would redistribute the cream.) I still shake milk jugs to this day.
-if your windows open or don’t have screens, eat leaning out an open window. Any food mess will be lost in the dirt. I was lucky I had bushes and birds outside that would catch my granola bar crumbs before anyone could notice.
-canned goods are tempting, but not worth it. It requires too many tools (can opener/strained sometimes/utensils/some need heat) stick to thinks like various nut butters (sunflower/peanut/almond), crackers, dried fruit, and easy to conceal food bars (nature valley/nutrigrain/etc.) dried ramen packets are good uncooked if you can stand the texture. Apple sauce and pudding cups are also easier to sneak and stash than one might think, and can be eaten with your fingers. The only canned foods I recommend are condensed soups and precooked pasta (spaghetti-o’s). You can easily mix them with a little bit of hot water from the tap and get something more sustaining than a handful of captain Crunch. The cans are cheap, sometimes recyclable, and drinking soup takes way less time than chewing solid food.
-if you menstruate, attempt to stash pads/tampons in a safe location. Sometimes shit happens. Pads can work as bandages in emergency situations. Sometimes shark week comes unexpectedly. If you can sneak a roll of toilet paper or paper towels, these are also life savers.
-plastic utensils from takeout containers can be hidden inside socks and will be worth their weight in gold when you least expect it. I bought myself a tiny plastic bowl from the dollar store and kept cheap trinkets in it on my desk so it didn’t seem like a bowl I was eating out of. You could try this with something like a mason jar, which is also useful for drinking out of or storing water.
-if you’re eating a crunchy or solid food, try soaking it in water. Mushy food can be repulsive in texture, but I could clock the sound of someone eating a nature valley oat bar from like 6 miles away. Dunking it in water (or using a secret bowl+water) can reduce noise, and also eating time since you don’t have to chew as much.
-keep a laundry bar or tide pen on you. Laundry bars are super useful, a little hard to find though. I washed a lot of stains out of my clothes with laundry bars in my bathroom sink as a kid. Not proud if it, but it kept me flying under the radar at school.
-clear rubber bands, plain twine or string, paper clips, and thumb tacks. Indescribably useful. I once rigged a system to open tricky cabinets and get objects from inside using two paper clips and a foot of plain string like a mock lasso system.
-if you’re pulling objects from tall cabinets, use your chest or stomach to cushion them. Let them fall into your torso and then into your hands cradled underneath. Not as loud, not as much grabbing, if someone sees it they can mistake it for it falling on you by the body language.
-get a bandana. Or four. Napkins, bandages, tool, and accessory all in one.
-get a tiny sewing kit. I’m talking 3 needles and a spool of thread tiny. Scissors if you can sneak it. See things into your clothes. Make hidden pockets or compartments. Threadbanger on YouTube did a video a few years ago about sneaking things into music festivals using tiny clothing mods, but they may be useful in sneaking money or medicine.
-on the topic of sneaking money. don’t take bills, take change. If your abusers don’t meticulously count their nickels and pennies, they’re an easy(ish) way to build up a tiny savings pool. I found nickels the least noticed coin I took, even more than pennies, and taking two every few nights from where they’d be tossed on our countertop soon built up to a semi-reliable fund I passed off to someone to get me food for my stash without having to sneak it from the kitchen. As soon as I became “independent” in my food storage, I was subjected to much less scrutiny. I managed to build up a solid 1-2 week ration supply after hoarding change.
-you can tape SD cards to the inside of book dust covers(the part that folds inside the actual cover of the book), if you have a sewing kit or zipper on it inside the stuffing of your pillow (trim a corner, stuff it inside, stitch it closed) or (this is final resort) VERY CAREFULLY remove the covering from your outlet and tape it to the wall stud before replacing the casing. I kept mine inside part of my wooden bed frame that I hollowed out using, you guessed it, take out silverware knives and 4 nights without sleep.
-THE FLOOR IS LAVA WAS KEY TRAINING FOR ME AS A CHILD. I learned to take pillows with me, climb on furniture to disrupt my flow of movement, toss a pillow down, and use that to cushion any rattle our living room could give off as I crept to the kitchen from the side entrance so my mom’s dog wouldn’t bark or alert anyone. I highly suggest crawling around on all fours like some sort of beast to stay out of sight.
-can you run your house blindfolded?? If you can’t. Maybe you should try to learn. I suffered some heavy eye traumas growing up and had a collective 3-4 months just IN THE DARK. Eyes bandaged, left alone. It was terrible, but damn if I couldn’t navigate the whole place silently, without any visual cues. This helps a lot with the whole moving around in the dark thing, too. Listening is obviously key.
-if your parents start getting suspicious, or you’re suspicious they’re getting suspicious, watch out for traps. String on the ground that gets shifted when you walk on it. Baby powder or flour left to track footprints or doors opening/closing. My dad was partial to wrapping a bungee cord around my doorknob and attaching it to the closet across the hallway. I wouldn’t be able to open my door enough to get out, or if I did, I risked ruining the structural integrity of the wrappings he did, and he would notice.
-learn to tie some knots. Strong ones. They’ll come in handy at one point or another.
-remember that you’re not totally alone. There’s people out there for you. Wanting to make everything better. You don’t deserve what’s happening, it isn’t normal, and you will eventually find help. But staying safe is important, and you are important.
It upsets me that people might need to know these but I know it could really help someone by reblogging
All right, as you should all know by now, I’m a Brosca lover down to my bones. Unfortunately for me, though, and for Brosca (or Aeducan) lovers everywhere, there really aren’t that many of us in the grand scheme of things—which means I’ve rarely if ever seen any sort of in-depth hypothesizing on dwarven culture. Well, if Bioware isn’t going to give me the content I desire, fine, I’ll just be over here, piecing together elaborate headcanons from scraps. I figure the least I can do is share that with everyone else.
So. Casteless tattooing. Discussion of fictional classism, state violence, and dehumanization herein (that’s a terrible word to be stuck with when we’re talking about dwarves, but there’s no good fantasy equivalent, so I make do for the sake of content warnings).
Now, according to lore, all casteless children are marked with a tattoo shortly after their birth. All right, fair enough—we never see a casteless dwarf without the brand. But there are a couple of problems with this.
One is logistics: how do they catch everyone, especially given the long-established fact that the Shaperate doesn’t track casteless lineage? The other is to do with the mechanics of tattooing—the simple fact is that any mark placed on a baby’s face would be faded and stretched long before they reached adulthood. And yet all the casteless we see have the same mark—clear, geometric, and distinctive. So what’s going on there?
Let’s set aside that it’s probably just a case of the game devs not fully thinking the little details through (they had a lot of details to manage, worldbuilding is a tough job, it happens). We’re dealing with a culture that brands an entire subset of its children at birth, a brand that also has to be clear in adulthood—just to make sure everyone knows that its bearer isn’t a real person. There has to be a way to manage that.
Sure is!
Start by giving the parents incentive to volunteer their children—negative incentives, of course, but hey, whatever works. Any child without the brand can be accused of impersonating an upper caste, and punished at will; a parent who enabled that, obviously, would face the same punishment—or worse. Go a step further: send units of the guard in at random to sweep Dust Town and make sure nothing untoward is going on (this would also go a long way to discourage people of other castes from so much as entering Dust Town, further isolating the casteless). Offer a reward, perhaps, for anyone who turns in their neighbours. Encourage the spread of stories that paint branding the babies as “for their own good” (at least an infant won’t remember the pain, after all).
That takes care of the logistical side of things. But what about the tattooing mechanics?
Here’s my theory: whatever mark they give to infants isn’t the same one that all the casteless adults have. It’s something simple, a basic shape that isn’t going to get too distorted by a child’s growing face, something geometric that they can turn into the basics of the distinctive adult marking. Just a solid rectangle, maybe—that’s still plenty obvious. The adult mark doesn’t get placed until later: in the mid to late teens, most likely, after the kids are mostly done growing.
There are a couple of ways that could happen. The first is simple policing: any casteless teenager who’s causing a bit of trouble can get taken in with impunity and have their brand updated. Given the absurd amount of prejudice the casteless face from literally everyone else in Orzammar, it’s entirely reasonable that they could be picked up just for being in the wrong area. That would likely cover a lot of them—but it wouldn’t get them all. How do they get the rest of them?
Remember what I said earlier, about guard units doing random sweeps? Like that, only bigger.
Say, every year, or every two years—a full-blown roundup, digging up everyone in Dust Town, singling out all the teenagers of an appropriate age to forcibly brand them. It would be a production of a full day, maybe more, and the guards would be sent in in force to thoroughly search every house—it would be a good time to make sure no babies or toddlers had slipped through the cracks, too. Hey, you’ve got everyone down here to do the tattooing anyway.
Something like that would have a major effect on casteless culture. It might even come to be seen as a rite of passage. And it ties in with some of my thoughts on another aspect of the casteless brands—the issue of reclaiming. There’s an implication that some factions of casteless society (particularly the Carta, or other criminal elements) have made an effort to reclaim their tattoos: adding decoration, more details, colour. Consider the Shaper who gives you the Thief in the House of Learning quest in Origins—he describes the casteless who stole the tome as having tattoos all over his face, “as if he’s proud of it” (side note: this is a particular punch in the gut if you, like me, are playing as a Brosca with extra facial tattoos).
So picture this: one day without warning all the casteless are woken up and forced out into the square by the city guard—none too gentle and treating them more like animals than people, roughing them up, ransacking their homes in search of anyone hidden. All the older teenagers who don’t yet have an adult brand are corralled; everyone else is dismissed. They get forcibly tattooed, and any who fight are beaten, restrained, and tattooed anyway. At the end of the day, the guard packs up and leaves.
Then the Carta people come out. They’re gentle—they’ve been through it themselves, after all, and they know a soft touch is going to go a lot further than mimicking the guards’ brutality would. “You can accept it,” they say, “and maybe that’ll make your life easier in the long run—or you can change it, make it your own.” They get out their own inks and offer touch-ups, or additions, or different colours. They hand around a healing ointment, to stave off infection. They make promises.
How many furious and humiliated kids would take them up on it? Probably a lot.
Some further considerations—the dwarven association of facial tattooing with the casteless and especially the Carta casts an interesting light on the Legion of the Dead traditions. The Legion seems to have a practice of full face tattooing, and their tattoos appear to be a visible representation of their ritual death—the majority of them seem to imitate the heraldry of the Legion, which is representative of a dwarven skull. I like the idea of their tattooing being part of their initiation, a private ritual for the Legionnaires alone that takes place after the funeral has concluded and the mourners have left. It would certainly be a good way to form a bond with your new martial unit.
But for all that dwarves can win honour by entering the Legion, there’s still a strong criminal association there—it’s rare for anyone to join up except as atonement for a crime. It makes me wonder whether the Carta tattooing traditions developed independently, or if they were derived from the Legionnaires’ traditions. One certainly imagines a substantial segment of the Legion of the Dead is made up of former casteless, and as far as we know the casteless have always been branded.
Either way, what with tattoos so firmly a mark of criminality in dwarven culture, you really have to wonder how a dwarven Warden would react to seeing vallaslin for the first time.
This is very cool and I don’t want to dispute it, but I just wanted to add:
Can you imagine the effect that a Brosca Warden would have on the Casteless? Similar to the effect of a Tabris or a Mahariel on the elves, but much more so IMHO: the elves have their own culture, but the casteless are submerged in a culture that enforces their own worthlessness at every turn. And one of theirs rose up to be a hero. To save the world. To defeat a Blight. To become a Paragon.
Every damn Casteless kid born after 9:31 Dragon is going to have Brosca’s tattoo. (Probably her name, too.) Unless the authorities in Orzammar forbid it, striking it from the iconography allowed to Casteless? That sounds like a recipe for a riot to me.
Delicious Fish 