Welcome to the Rice

My desktop is augmented

Clean it off, babe

There's something about a desktop that tells you everything you need to know about a man (as women don't use computers), and maybe it has to do with having all of your shit on there for anybody to look at with a callous disregard for human life. It also has to do with your wallpaper depicting a porn star draped over an unnecessarily large car, your taskbar having twenty different icons on it, and your start menu still having Candy Crush Saga and Minecraft advertisements. So perhaps it isn't some mystical "something" that exists to explain things, but instead easily and rationally defined elements that reveal the world around us as we learn more about them. What a perfect allegory for God.

Today we're learning how to clean all the shit out and stop being judged for your incredibly poor ability to manage your workspace. It will be hard, as are most things in our lives (more so if you're a pervert), but it will lead you to be a more respectable man, and one who owns his workplace (shout out to my English teacher who complained I use gendered pronouns in year seven. language control is thought control, cunt), and not having it own him through natural chaos. Just kidding, it's actually pretty easy.

Today we will define a desktop as everything you see when you press "Windows key + D" (note: don't press shortcuts made by randies online unless you know what they do). We'll talk about the desktop, the taskbar, and the start menu (God help you if you're on Windows 7). There will be no pictures, as this poses a security risk, and is a part of the NSA's secret plot to make desktop threads and gather the workspace habits of millions of users around the world. If you thought I was serious, there's something wrong with our society, but the fact that it's possible means there's something wrong with the WORLD, man!

I realise this isn't security in a strict sense, though keep in mind that your computer is what you access every day. Making it presentable should be a priority for any respectable user, even if you're the only one who uses it. Having discipline in keeping your workspace clean allows you to have discipline when researching and implementing anonymity into your daily life, as a single mistake can upend all of the effort you put into it. Focusing on the little, seemingly inconsequential details helps you prevent these silly mistakes, though only to a certain extent, so don't get crazy over the unimportant things.

Remove your desktop files

There should be no reason for you to use your desktop as a place to store files beyond the most temporary and easy-to-access space for a draft of ideas or something. We have the File Explorer to sort our documents and folders, and we have the Start Menu to sort our program shortcuts. Everything else is extraneous, and is a very disorganised way to store your stuff, no matter how cute you get with the ordering and the wallpaper you use.

Let's talk about beauty for a moment, without getting into some of that Plato kush. One of the easiest ways to make any operating system look good (well, except OS X) is to remove all of the desktop icons from it and slap on a decently-compressed wallpaper. It basically makes it look clean, and in a world where everybody is obsessed with "ricing" (which is adding unnecessary crap onto your desktop for the sake of impressing other weeaboos), having less stuff on your desktop makes you stand out. Not that anybody would care, practically, though it does add some consistency to other people's impressions of you as a well-made man.

So place all your folders, documents, and other junk in the appropriate section under "This PC" in the File Explorer (Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Videos make up 99% of all content you will ever store), and place the shortcuts to programs in the Start Menu by right-clicking it and selecting "Pin to start". If it's REALLY important, like you might want to do with the File Explorer (learn to use it, it's cheap and easy), you can right-click on it and select "pin to taskbar" so that it'll be right there for you to use, which you should, because it's the secret to having an actually organised PC.

Choose your wallpaper

The wallpaper is the window to the soul. It tells somebody everything they need to know about you. That said, nobody needs to know the stuff that would only damage your fine reputation (lmao) in the eyes of the world. So avoid these subjects for your wallpaper needs:

Note: you can download multiple wallpapers and set Windows to shuffle through them every few hours. While this theoretically increases the fingerprinting of your computer if you upload your collection online, if a cop ever gets access to your desktop, you've lost the security game. You also also do this for your Lock Screen, which means that everybody who touches your computer will get an eyeful of something cool, even though it would be theoretically best to use the default and save the custom stuff for the password-protected account, to avoid a cop making connections between you and some recommendations you've made online. At the same time, wallpapers are some of the most innocuous things you can have on a PC, and so isn't worth the drab aesthetics, unless you're Snowden or something.

Not recommended:

Anime (oh shit bringing out the big guns!). Unless you're a NEET who's given up on adjusting to society and have devoted a lifetime of hedonistic pleasure in your mom's basement (cheap shots!), avoid having pictures of your waifus (I can't believe it's not porn! but it is a porn site, so don't be a dumbass) adorned on your screen. Exceptions exist if you're a millionaire or a godlike figure and can do whatever the fuck you want with your life and not have anybody think less of you for it.

Sexy girls. You might as well replace it with the words "I am a douchebag". Have you ever met somebody with a girl in a bikini on their computer and thought, "yes, this seems like a very smart individual"? Linus Torvalds couldn't get away with that, and you sure as shit can't. This also includes furries and other fictional characters. Exceptions exist if you're living NEET life or are a teenage boy.

Pictures of your family / cats / house / whatever. This also applies to pictures that you took. It represents a security hazard by more easily profiling your computing activity, plus I have serious doubts that your family is important enough to look at all the time, every single day, not that anybody gives a shit about them. Exceptions exist if you're using somebody else's family / cats / whatever, like the Death Grips debut album cover, as a form of misdirection.

Political slogans / inspiration quotes / propaganda. Yes, you're very smart for having opinions. But a real man doesn't need to express those opinions to whoever happens to be gawking at your computer screen. The "never forget" slogans are tacky, the decontextualised quotes become meaningless the twentieth time you look at them, and having the Pirate Bay logo on your computer is a surefire way to get on a watchlist, paranoid fuckers. Exceptions exist if you belong to the Pirate Party of Iceland, and only Iceland, as decreed by the Cosmos God Yogshigooroth.

Poorly compressed wallpapers. This includes wallpapers that look like they've been through twelve Instagram filters, pictures that don't even fill up your entire monitor (and have those ugly black bars around them), and wallpapers that are so poorly composed that it looked like crap before it got hit with real nigga hours. The solution is to download from high-quality galleries, and to play around in the "personalise" menu by right-clicking on your desktop until you get a decent fit. There are no exceptions to this. If you do this "ironically", please stop reading my website.

Good wallpaper sites:

Anything that lets you download "minimal" wallpapers. This is one of the easiest and safest types of wallpapers to have. They're non-communicative, fit current cultural trends, and imply that you're a hip individual, one who is "with it" without being cringe-inducing. Good sites: Minimal Desktops, Simple Desktops, and Kitsune Noir.

4chan and 8chan's wallpaper boards, NSFW because it be like that sometimes. They upload high-quality and varied wallpapers, sort content by threads for easy categorisation, and you can visit them once a week to see what new wallpapers have come up since then. But whatever you do, don't fall for the anime meme, which is almost as bad as the Nazism meme.

Any DuckDuckGo search for "wallpapers" that doesn't turn up a sketchy website that tells you to install a separate program. A good site will let you download full-resolution pictures without an account, and won't fill it's site up with a ton of advertisements (use Ublock Origin to stop advertising tracking). It'll also have a tagging system to make it easier for you to get to the content you want - but I insist, never give them any of your personal information, as this prevents rogue companies from leaking it.

Alright, that's enough yiffy kitties . You have already wiped your desktop and chosen a beautiful, high-quality wallpaper. Now it's time to move on from the basic stuff and deal with the more advanced topics of dragging your mouse a third of the way across your monitor.

Taskbar etiquette

The taskbar is the little thing at the bottom of your screen that has a bunch of shortcuts for programs on it. If you don't have it at the bottom, congratulations! You're a power user! Please take your celebratory grape-flavoured juicebox and yearbook filled with people you will never care about again. As for the rest of you, let's slide through this lesson like Skooks through a chimney (that reference goes out to my YouTube Poop fans. peace!).

Remember when I said you'd have to slightly move your mouse? Let's do that. Right-click on taskbar and make sure "Lock the taskbar" is unchecked (or unchequed). Then click and drag on the taskbar to either the left, right, or bottom of the screen (if you prefer the top, please tell me when you were diagnosed), and then leave it there according to preference. Apparently this was a feature missing from Ubuntu that was requested six years ago and was rejected because it was against their design philosophy. Yeah, conforming to a twenty-year-old standard sure is bad design. The best part is that you have to open up the console to move the taskbar, which sums up everything wrong with Linux in one sentence.

Now that you've slid the taskbar into place like your (noun) between (pronoun) and (pet name)'s (body part, plural), and their children, too, you'll have to shave it clean like whatever godawful imagery you put into those (brand of word game, plural). You must now decide which programs to keep on the taskbar, and which to remove, though if you decide to remove a program you technically can't become a Sikh. Here's a hot tip: the taskbar is for things you use on a constant, if not hourly, basis. The Start Menu is for things that you might use daily. Everything else can be safely stowed away in the "all programs" section or in your File Explorer. To send a shortcut to either of these places, right-click on the .exe and select "Pin to" whatever.

Things you might want to consider for the taskbar might be a web browser (Tor, Firefox), a media player (VLC, the closed - source yet extraordinary Foobar2000), the File Explorer, a messaging app (Jitsi, not Skype pour les sakes des fucks), and whatever sort of crap you find yourself using all the time. If you need examples, just go onto 4chans /g/ and bum around until you see a desktop thread (warning, thar be pedophiles).

Five is the maximum amount of shortcuts you can have and still look good. Three is ideal, and if you're struggling to remove stuff, think about whether or not it's so important you can't press the Windows key and then click on the shortcut. I bet it isn't, eh? There are probably only two programs I have that are so important that I need to have them open all the time, and one of them I keep on the Start Menu. If in doubt, get rid of it like a straw in a toilet.

Now that you've removed horror and have made your taskbar look presentable, it's time to get into advanced right-clicking. If you right-click on the taskbar and select "properties", you have a whole lot more options to make the bar look good even without live girls in bikinis. Hiding the taskbar gives you true fullscreen, and gives your monitor its whole size. Small taskbar buttons look tacky and out-of-place when juxtaposed with the size of the other UI elements. And generally you should combine the taskbar buttons, unless you want flashbacks from the Vistanam War.

Customising the notification area gives you a menu where you can decide what you want cluttering up your taskbar, though the only things you really need are the clock, network settings, and volume (unless you want to protest our antiquated and arbitrary form of timekeeping, you absolute maniac), as everything else starts to look ugly. You can shove them aside into where the arrow points to, and you can just click on it later. You can also turn notifications off, which is handy for staving off the inevitable computer addiction.

Once you are done, you may lock the taskbar (but only with its permission) and then promptly forget about it, as it should require no maintenance if you have done everything right the first time. If you haven't, well, that's why we mistakes. So that we may learn from them and do better next time. Please don't feel bad - as I have felt bad many times, and know what that's like. You will be strong, my child, my darling. And before strength comes, you have humility. Stay humble, and be brave.

A useful startup

The start menu is pretty easy to deal with. There's not much to it, so long as you've uninstalled all the programs you'll never use and replace them with the programs you do, as well as dragging it downwards to make it bigger. You can, however, make some fun shapes out of the squares, those as to what shapes you make are up to you. I understand this is tough. Before I came along, you were ignorant, and with ignorance comes bliss. What type of stranger enters your life and then tells you that you can make shapes out of squares? A cynical one, that's who. Imagination? It's dangerous. It leads to dissent. But that's why we make shapes out of squares on the Start Menu - because a gilded cage is still a cage, and making shapes out of squares on the Start Menu on the Microsoft Windows brand Operating System Software as a Service is how we break free. Stay thirsty, my friends.

Also your start menu has your avatar on it, and you should totally make one for yourself. Even if you have the drawing skills of my friend who got accepted into art college with a $100,000 scholarship (don't believe the hype), I still believe that everybody should have an avatar that is 100% representative of them. If you can't draw, so what? You can try. And trying puts you leagues ahead everybody who kept their head down and was ignorant of the true potential of their skills.

What do you like, and who are you? Is there a way you might express how you feel without speaking? What drives you to wake up and exist? Is it apathy? The courage to move forward? A real affection for the world? You don't ask yourselves these questions often, but if you do, you will know more about yourself than most people ever would. In a connected world, self-awareness is one of the most valuable skills you can have. Think - who trusts a man who cannot trust themself? Who would speak to somebody with no confidence, and who would let them lead? Why would you bother existing if you are so uncertain in your own existence that you have to live through the lives of others? There is nothing I stand for less than a waste of human potential, and if you are it, then you must find the rut you are in, and crawl yourself out of it.

I will stop smoking this Plato kush, but I expect you to smoke the Anacharsis bud.

Conclusions

The desktop is the Windows to the soul. Sorry, that pun was bad. I'll just leave.

The master of design: Froghand.

Today's page was updated on June 1, 2016!

Oh, when I saw her... in a pram they pushed her by.