“Host” fucked me up and is the reason I don’t watch horror movies anymore. I’m a huge baby though.

I love finding similarities like these, and the one you mentioned about teletype is a new but really cool interpretation to me. Though I tend to view things more mechanically than naturally; I love playing factory games like Factorio and Satisfactory. I guess the natural metaphor I use most is the human body, which is a really complex system with lots of interacting subsystems. I forgot the name of the book & author but a medical doctor wrote a book on complex systems and said that any sufficiently complex system, like the human body, is always dealing with some degree of failure, so any artificial system needs to be fault-tolerant at many levels to continue functioning properly.

I’ve had a great experience with the TrueNAS Mini-X system I bought. ZFS has great raid options, and TrueNAS makes managing a system really easy. You can get a box built & configured by them, with 16 GB ECC RAM and five (empty) drive bays, for about $1150 at the most affordable end. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

One thing to be careful about: you can’t add drives to a ZFS vdev once it’s been created, but you can add new vdevs to an existing pool. So, you can start with two mirrored drives, then add another two mirrored drives to that pool later.

(A vdev is a sub-unit of a ZFS storage pool, and you have to choose your RAID topology for each vdev and then compose those into a storage pool)

The common wisdom about backups is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which recommends:

• 3 total copies of your data, including your original or “production” data
• 2 different forms of media
• 1 off-site copy

Proton Drive can be a decent off-site backup, but it would be a good idea to make a separate backup of your data on a different form of media like an external hard drive, just in case Proton Drive goes down, or the data there gets corrupted and you need to restore a known good version.

What worked for me is learning some better letterforms from some free images from the Write Now book (by Getty-Dubay) on italic cursive. It’s a different kind of cursive from the awkward one I was taught in school, and it’s a lot easier to write and read.

I think the biggest improvement in my handwriting was just finding letterforms in that book that are both easy to write but that are also more clearly distinguishable when you write quickly. For example, just putting a little curl at the bottom of my lowercase T’s, I’s, and L’s made them a lot more aesthetically pleasing but also more clearly distinct from other letters.

Once you find some letterforms like that, it just takes a little practice to rewrite your muscle memory.

Homebrew is so fun, and I love how you can make it as complex as you want. Like, you can just mix some honey and some water (in the right ratio) and let it sit, and you’ve got mead! Or you can add flavors. Or experiment with yeasts. Or brew beer and experiment with hops and grains. It’s a hobby that really meets you where you want it to.

I recently got into video game development, and I’ve had so much fun, and it’s given me some much-needed meaning. I’ve solved problems unique to my game using programming skills as well as game design skills, and it feels meaningful because i can send it to my friends and they can enjoy it without needing to appreciate any of the technical aspects. I get to be creative about how people I care about can have more fun. It could also involve your music composition hobby, since every good game needs some music and sound design! I’m a programmer for my day job so most things I do there are only meaningful to other programmers, and the problems I solve there are incredibly boring ones.

Edit: I saw your comment about being burnt out on programming, and I totally understand that. That happens to me frequently. I enjoy programming as a hobby when I’m not burnt out so we’re kinda in different boats there. There are lots of skills involved in making games and the variety has really refreshed me, though I’ve still gotten sick of sitting at a computer while working on it.

I’m lucky enough that a couple of my friends are willing to use Matrix to message me, but most communities I’m a part of are on Discord.

There are lots of really cool voting systems that don’t have the same weaknesses that first-past-the-post does. Check out https://ncase.me/ballot/ if you want a fun interactive explanation of several.

I’ll share my perspective as a trans woman cuz I got to see both sides. In professional settings, handshakes are still good, but I’ve gotten way fewer handshakes since I transitioned. Also cuz of corona. I just say hi and wave these days. My ex-father-in-law handled my transition pretty well: he used to shake my hand but switched to hugs. But that’s obviously a move for more familiar settings.

Space Engineers but not a buggy mess with player scripting that isn’t in C# of all things.

ixSystems sells pre-built machines running TrueNAS. They’re a little pricier than building on from scratch of course, but they have ECC ram and have everything set up out of the box. Funds also support the development of TrueNAS. I got one earlier this year and I love it. Fussing around in the web UI requires some technical know-how, but if you get it set up for them, I expect it to run like a dream.

Other posters have described what Radar and Sonarr do, I just want to say having all the apps set up along with Overseerr is a game-changer, even if your setup is only for your own consumption and you’re not sharing your plex library with anyone. Overseerr lets you log in with Plex and request content, and it’ll add the content to *arr, which will automatically search torrent sites (I use Prowlarr for that), download the content, then move them to your media library and update Plex.

If you do share your plex library with friends, and can put Overseerr somewhere they can access it, then your friends can request to add content to your library, and you just have to click “Approve” to start the search & download process.

It takes a little time to set up, but once it’s up and running, it’s lovely.

Element supports video calling and it has been working great for me.

1. I moved to Lemmy during the Reddit API debacle, and it’s been great. I’ve even started interacting with posts which I almost never did on Reddit.
2. I moved from xitter to Mastodon, but I don’t really use either anymore; it’s just not a form of social media that brings me joy.
3. I asked several of my friends to try out Matrix, and they tolerate it and message me there instead of Discord. I do a lot of video calls with my girlfriend through Matrix (via Element) and that’s been perfectly reliable. Matrix has actually worked better than Discord for me, since I use Linux (Arch btw) and my webcam frequently has green flashes in Discord but not on Matrix. I had that issue on Fedora as well so I think it’s a Discord for Linux problem.
4. YouTube is the last great hurdle….

I’ve been using Matrix for the last few months, via Element which supports some newer feature like video and voice calls, and it’s been great. My only complaint is that their Video Rooms feature is kinda flaky with video, which is weird given that one-on-one video calls are rock-solid. Voice-only in a Video Room is reliable tho. Video Rooms are still an experimental feature that you have to enable in your settings.

I’ve seen a couple of Discord servers that use a Matrix Bridge to sync up Discord chats with Matrix Spaces. The only downside to that is that bridges and bots don’t support E2EE, which if you’re bridging to Discord, isn’t much of a downside anyway.

Okay I’m actually really hyped about this