Willenator Unscripted

Because Normal Is Overrated

Blog

  • Printer Troubles

    It always fascinates me how people online tend to write things in a “worst case scenario” way when there are clearly other options or even changes that can be made to improve the experience. I’m sure most of it is done for content engagement purposes especially on X where someone with a blue check mark can make money off of a post that gets a lot of engagement.

    This post is on Twitter is a perfect example of this type of content. I understand this individuals frustration with printers especially if they wish to purchase one that is more privacy focused. Sadly, many printers on the market today are not for the reasons identified if you read the whole post.

    I will point out that the writer goes after HP and their Instant Ink subscription service, which in my opinion is widely misunderstood by most people. However, I question why someone with privacy in mind would even purchase an HP printer or sign up for Instant Ink on top of that. I realize HP is a very well known printer brand and might still be the biggest printer brand on the market. It was for awhile there if it isn’t anymore. So, I can understand why HP might have been the printer of choice.

    There are workarounds for most of the complaints brought up. First, make sure you purchase an HP printer that is an optional HP+ printer. This will allow you to choose not to participate in that. HP+ requires that you only print using HP ink, so by not signing up, you can use off-brand ink.

    Also, avoid purchasing the cheap HP printers. The cheap ones usually don’t have a USB port to plug the printer into a computer. Get one that does. HP will put a sticker over it because they want you to connect to wi-fi. You don’t have to.

    Next, plug your printer in to your computer. You will need to purchase a USB-A to USB-B cable to hook it up. You probably have one in your house already if you’ve owned a printer you had connected to a computer since the printer cable hasn’t changed in as long as I can remember.

    Goto HP’s website and download the software for your printer or just turn the printer on and allow the operating system to recognize it and install a basic driver for the printer. And there you go. You should be in business to start printing the way the writer on X wants to.

    But I will say it would be nice to see a company step up and just make a basic printer again and not bombard us with all this extra stuff.

  • Wrestlemania 42

    This past weekend was Wrestlemania 42. I would have loved to watch it, but I had to work. I also don’t have the ESPN app with the subscription to watch it because I can’t afford another $29.99/month subscription, so I followed most of the event via Twitter and YouTube watching clips and reading reactions.

    The event looks like it had one really bad night and one really good night. I find that fascinating. Sad that I couldn’t watch the whole thing, but it is what it is.

    I will say this, I saw a clip of Brock Lesner taking off his gear and looking like he is done. I actually got emotional watching it. If he really is done, I am happy to have been a fan during his run off and on with WWE. Brock was always fun to watch, and he was amazing at what he did.

  • Next Spider-Verse Movie Next Year

    I’ve been waiting for the third Spider-Verse movie to come out, and I keep hoping we will see it soon. Well, it was announced today that it will release in theaters next year on June 18th! Heck yeah!

    Now that I think about it, they may have announced the release date earlier, but I may have missed it. Discussion around the movie has picked up some because a part of the movie was shown at CinemaCon today.

    Either way, I’m happy that we are just over a year away. The first two Spider-Verse movies were amazing, and I’m sure this one will be too!

  • The WOW Feels

    I mentioned two posts ago that I was feeling a bit left out with the current expansion of World of Warcraft (WOW), or maybe more that I was getting that itch to play again.

    Today, I’m just randomly going through some YouTube Shorts, and this video pops up:

    Short, sweet, and to the point. However, I started playing WOW when I was 25, so I definitely wasn’t a kid at the time, but this short got me a little emotional because it is right. I can’t go back to the first time I played WOW and the feeling I got of this massive world and me running around in it. I remember being super amazed at everything and feeling like it looked so good.

    I was introduced to WOW by a co-worker. At the time, I was working the graveyard shifts at convenience store in a town in Southeastern Idaho. I worked with two other people on a rotation. There were always two of us at night, and we would rotate on who would be there. Two nights on and one night off.

    The one that introduced me to the game was a guy named Tim. He loved video games. I hadn’t played a video game since high school. I had gone away from playing them and primarily did coding stuff because at the time, I liked tinkering with writing small scripts or programs to that could make a computer do stuff, and it fascianted me.

    Tim started talking about the game one night and how much work he put into it. I found it weird that you could get so much out of a game. I wasn’t a big fan of Warcraft because I remember a high school friend of mine would play Warcraft, and it never looked fun. So, I was thinking it was still the top-down looking style game, and when Tim said I should give World of Warcraft a try, I said that I wasn’t interested.

    A few months later, he invites me over to his how, and he shows me the game. I was blown away seeing him run around and basically doing whatever he wanted. That idea blew my mind. I decided to take him up on his offer. He purchased a copy of the game for me and gave me money to pay for my first month of gameplay.

    I was hooked pretty quick. He invited me into his guild. Introduced me to a bunch of people, and we played whenever we could since both of us worked at the same place, it was very common that we didn’t have a ton of time together. I moved on to another location within the company, but he and I kept in touch and we kept playing for a few more years as guildmates before I moved on to playing more with my brothers and cousins.

    I kept in Touch with Tim after that, and he would always reach out and see if I was going to play the next expansion that was coming out. Sadly, he passed away from a heart attack about 8 years ago. Losing one of my WOW buddies really hit me hard especially since he was my original WOW buddy. Every so often I will see something WOW related, and it will bring back those memories of playing with him again.

    That YouTube Short did just that. I know I’ll never be able to jump into the game again with him and run around doing silly stuff. It still hurts sometimes, but I am happy for the memories we created. WOW is a part of who I am even if I don’t play anymore. That doesn’t mean I won’t. I’ll probably jump back in when the newest expansion goes on sale because I always love the stories it tells, and I’ve invested a lot of time over the years to be a part of those stories.

    I wasn’t expecting to have the WOW feels today, but I did, and I wanted to share.

  • The Artemis II Mission

    A high‑resolution photograph shows the Moon’s cratered surface in the foreground, lit sharply by sunlight that highlights its rough texture. Above the lunar horizon, Earth appears as a bright blue‑and‑white sphere rising against the blackness of space. Text on the image reads “Photo captured by crew of Artemis II | NASA.”

    I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, and I remember learning about all the Apollo missions and astronauts going to the moon, and it always made me sad that it stopped being a thing well before I was born.

    Fast forward to the Artemis II Mission where four astronauts are traveling around the moon and further out than humans have ever gone is so fascinating to me. I remember my parents telling me how exciting it was to follow the Apollo missions. I always wondering what that would be like. Now, I get a chance to experience it in my own way while I’m checking out the pictures coming back and the wonder of it all.

    Hank Green on YouTube created a video that I think perfectly encapsulates the feelings I have been having about this mission.

    I really hope we get to see more missions like this, and I would love to see NASA aim to put people on the moon again. Space is so much fun and always creates a childish wonder for me.

  • The World of Warcraft Addiction

    A World of Warcraft screenshot shows a player character named Lyrun standing on cracked, dry earth in the Barrens, accompanied by a small pet named Sparkles. The landscape is a warm orange savanna with sparse trees and distant hills under a sunset‑colored sky. The game interface displays Lyrun’s and Sparkles’ health bars in the top left, a minimap labeled “The Barrens” in the top right, and an active quest titled “The Demon Seed” marked as completed. The bottom of the screen shows action bar abilities, while the chat box contains a single message referencing “chuck norris.”

    I started playing World of Warcraft in late 2006. I was introduced to the game by a friend I made at work. He actually purchased the game for me and my first month of game time. I think I played almost daily for a few years and loved it. Found out I had family that played as well and ended up spending a lot of time in the game.

    I remember playing through the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. After that one, I think I’ve played off and on since. A lot of my family stopped playing, and some of the guilds I was a part of over the years disappeared leaving me to mainly play solo now, so I don’t really jump in like I used too. However, I still feel that pull to jump back in and see how the current story is playing out.

    World of Warcraft just came out with another expansion called Midnight. I am experiencing a bit of FOMO right now. I really want to play, but I am much busier now than I was 20 years ago, and I don’t know if I can justify a monthly subscription for it only to play occasionally. But I really want to play again. It’s amazing to me how addicting a game can be.

  • More AI Slop

    I’ve been going through my old posts and fixing the posts that were imported over from Tumblr recently, and I came across a post from 2022 where I tried to have the Dall-E image generator create me an image of Penn and Teller performing a magic trick with Donald Duck. The result was a little disturbing:

    An image showing two guys on stage with a photo-realistic looking cartoon duck on the table. The faces of the two guys are distorted. Their hands are shaped weirdly. The duck that is supposed to resemble Donald Duck has a top hat. There are starts on the wall in the background that look weird.

    I got to wondering how well the image generators would do now with a similar prompt, so I hopped onto Copilot and ChatGPT and tried to get them to create the image. No luck. Donald Duck is trademarked, and both didn’t want to create something with famous people in them.

    Copilot even suggested that I create something with magicians inspired by Penn & Teller and a cartoon duck, so I tried that. It still rejected the prompt because the magicians it was thinking of creating would resemble Penn & Teller. That amused me, so I said “how about you just create an image of two magicians on a Vegas stage performing a trick with a duck.” It still rejected it because it would be too close to Penn & Teller and responded with “you can tell me to make fully original magicians.” So I did.

    It looks like the system blocked that attempt because the request was still interpreted as involving real, identifiable people, even though we shifted to original characters.

    I can’t generate this image under those constraints.

    This is probably due to the fact that the conversation I was in with Copilot had me talking about Penn & Teller, so it was stuck on Penn & Teller even though I tried to move away from it. I’ve seen other people talk about this challenge that if you tell an AI to create an image of animals but no elephants, the AI will always add an elephant.

    I did try to create a the image using a new chat thread, and this was the result:

    An image of two magicians (one male and one female) performing a magic trick with a cartoon duck. The two people are on a stage with bright lights above. There are a few audience members seen at the bottom. There is a magicians hat floating in the middle with the duck coming out of it and the guy is holding another magicians hat as well. The lady is holding a wand.

    Meanwhile, I decided to hop on X and see what Grok would do since that AI doesn’t have many guide rails like the others do, and this was the result:

    Two men in suits stand indoors beside a person dressed in a full Donald Duck costume. One man smiles while holding a conductor’s baton, and the other stands just behind the character, also smiling. Donald Duck wears his classic blue sailor outfit, black bow tie, and blue hat. The scene appears to be at an event or gathering, with all three posing for the photo.

    I don’t know who the magicians are, but that is definitely Donald Duck.

    The funny thing about this post was I wanted to comment on how much image generation has improved over the last four years, and I ended up going down a different AI rabbit hole of fighting with the AI because of the restrictions that are now in place.

    This amused me and helped me waste 30 minutes of my day.

  • Changing the Host

    I’ve decided to go back to hosting my own blog again instead of using a site like Tumblr. I made the move a few years back to simply the process and just post random stuff, but I find that sometimes I want to share something that doesn’t quite work with Tumblr or show up the way I want it to, so I’m moving back to hosting my blog on its own web server. This should allow me to have a little more creativity with the content I share.

    I decided to update the blog name to highlight more of what the blog is about: random stuff. Whatever I want to write about, so that is why I’m going with Willenator Unscripted. No primary focus or purpose just my thoughts on whatever I feel like writing about.

    The posts older than this one may not show up properly as the import was a bit weird and primarily pulled text, but none of the embedded links to YouTube videos or music, so I’ll have to fix the older posts that don’t display properly when I have some free time.

    You may notice that comments are turned off. This is intentional as I’m not big into blog comments. You are more than welcome to send me feedback via Twitter if you would like, or you can write about one of my posts on your own blog. I have those fun pingback stuff turned on, so I should see it if you link back to something I’ve written. That’s always fun.

    Either way, I plan to enjoy myself and just open up for the world to read or ignore!

  • Bones For The Crows

    First time I heard this new Nickelback song, I wasn’t sure about it. Now that I’ve listened to it a few times, I’ve added it to my latest song rotation.

  • Possible Backrooms Sadness

    Just found out the Backrooms movie is going to be rated R. I’m not sure how I feel about that because I think it means they are going to add in some things that I probably won’t like. I was really looking forward to some pure psychological stuff like in the YouTube videos by Kane Pixels. I know there are some monsters that do appear, but I worry they may push it into a gore area that is just unnecessary for something like the Backrooms. I hope I’m wrong, but I am worried.