This is cursed, and every added detail is more cursed. Holy moly.

Usually if I throw whey protein into something and it comes out chalky the problem is not enough liquid, you may have just reduced it too far. I’d probably try adding… chicken broth? Man that feels gross to suggest, but I imagine adding milk to Chinese food would be worse.

God speed on that diet, my man, you need it.

I agree with all of this. Except I would probably buy all the stupid shit I want because I have no concept of how all the stupid shit I want could amount to more than a rounding error.

Unironically my two favorite sauces for fries. I attribute a not insignificant portion of my weight gain pre-COVID on slathering cafeteria fries with too much mayo.

I wouldn’t call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don’t even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won’t vote Conservative, Conservative voters won’t vote NDP.

This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.

Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn’t call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.

Ranked choice is one of the simplest ways to get a more representative, but to the question in the title it does tend to favour centrist parties. Progressives will vote for a centrist over a conservative, and a conservative will vote for a centrist over a progressive, so the centrist party will win almost every time.

It’s still an improvement over the disaster of FPTP because it will at least elect parties that the majority can tolerate, but there is still a bias present.

This is basically it, yes, but sometimes I’m drunk-ordering 40 nuggets and a milkshake and adding the mint myself is enough effort to make me reconsider my reckless disregard for my wellbeing.

Hmm, thats a bit different than what the other guy said but by and large is in line with my original concerns. Definitely wasn’t going to use any batteries in this, I’m very familiar with batteries dying in the cold, I have plenty of outdoor plugs.

Thanks for the advice, this gives me a pretty good idea of the problems and possible solutions.

Cool, I’ll make sure I check the spec sheet of whatever I end up buying but this alleviates most of my concerns. Thanks a lot!

And what about if I want the power and controller outside? I know they’ll need to be protected from moisture and such, but I’d prefer if the only thing I need to get through a wall is a wireless signal.

I’ve been using Obsidian lately. Proprietary with an open plugin ecosystem. Works well, makes it easy for me to integrate with other notes and such, but I haven’t figured out a good workflow for exporting work for submission. That said, it’s all markdown and there are lots of plugins for stuff like that, so it’s probably mostly just that I haven’t tried very hard.

In the past I’ve used Google Docs (proprietary), Scrivener (proprietary), Manuskript (open), Zim (open), and probably a few I’m forgetting. Really it just comes down to what you’re looking for out of the software, there are lots of options.

The biggest thing to keep in mind from a self-hosting perspective is local storage and easy backups under your own control. I use syncthing to keep my whole Obsidian vault synced across a few devices; for some software that’s easier or harder due to file formats and accessibility.

I’m surprised there aren’t more people listing game servers here. A good chunk of my networking knowledge just comes from hosting game servers and fighting routers in my teens and early adulthood.