Shurimal

Elder Scroll series. Skyrim for the modding and eyecandy potential, Oblivion for the madness that is spellcrafting (also Shivering Isles is the best ES DLC), Morrowind for the true alien fantasy.

Thief II is the quintessential first-person sneaker.
Independence War II still has one of the best flight models and a great story.

X3: Terran Conflict is the best first-person strategy game.

Half-Life 1 and 2.

Il-2: Great Battles is the best WWII combat flight sim.
DCS is the best jet combat sim.

Elite: Dangerous is the only space sim with actual 1:1 scale galaxy, including many real-life stars and is the best life-in-space simulator with flight model as good as I-War 2 and decent enough on-foot parts (even though there is some jank and glitches).

Since I mostly listen by dropping a whole genre into an ephemeral playlist, there is zero overlap. I rarely even hear a piece more than a few times a year, and sometimes the whole playlist takes more than a year to play from 0 to Z at an average of 1 hour play every day (eg I have pretty much the complete catalogue of Ektoplazm, including 575 goa trance and 377 downtempo albums).

Even if I have a few static playlists of random pieces, they’re also thematic (eg a bluegrass playlist as background music for dogfighting) and with zero overlap between them.

Come to think, of it, I only have two static, saved playlists—one for dogfighting and one with pieces that have subbass and ULF content down to and below 20 Hz. Playlists for me are wholly ephemeral, the default one that gets cleared and refilled as I go, acting more as a playback queue, and temporary ones that get deleted when I’m done with them.

Velcro, or maybe Van Der Waals force, or maybe whatever the hell makes gauge blocks stick to each other.

StarWars Anarchists: Fuck 'em all! Power to the people!✊🏴

Pretty much any Batman movie. It’s subtle, because it’s not chaotic evil, but lawful evil—the status quo, established hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that plague the city remain in place. In fact, enforcing and protecting status quo is the whole raison d’entre of Batman, who is an extremely priviledged rich individual benefitting and profiting from the status quo. And thus has no desire to enact real societal change, unlike eg Baine.

I’d argue James Bond is also the same. Yes, Bond villains are evil—irrationally and comically so—but like Batman, Bond represents, enforces and protects the same hierarchic power structures and systemic injustices that give rise to these villains.

Then there is Star Wars and all this light vs dark side. But if you stop and think about it, Sith and Jedi are just two sides of the same medal. Jedi mind trick that coerces someone to do something against their will is extremely evil by its very concept. Especially in how trivialized its use is in the movies. Also, there is nothing civilized about lightsabers. These are horribly dangerous to the wielder and their opponent alike, will easily cut through hull plating by accident (a bad thing when a cm of material is all that’s standing between you and hard vacuum). And would in reality not make a clean cauterized cut, but explosively flash boil the target with the end result like being blown from a cannon.

Lawful, systemic evil is the most devilish kind of evil; it’s so subtle it goes unnoticed and is even celebrated as good, no doubt in no small part due to the vast propaganda machine lawful evil loves to build up around itself.

Anything that’s at least 50% cocoa.

I cut up pizza mozzarella so that each disk of mozzarella remains uncut. Sometimes it means extremely chaotic cuts. But the rationale is that cutting through molten cheese is extremely messy, so I avoid it if I can.

Also, Brussel sprouts are the best green vegetables.

Five minute stroll to the bus stop, 3 minute chillout there, hop on the bus, 10 minute ride to the destination and a five minute stroll to the office.

any company releasing a VR product with this price tag is obviously going to fail…

Varjo is doing very well and offers probably the best VR sets. Prices start at around 3000€

O7

On my server:
OpenMediaVault (NAS OS based on Debian)
Syncthing
Home Assistant
Zigbee2MQTT
Docker
Portainer
Radicale
Navidrome

On my phone:
Syncthing
Tailscale
Feeder
DAVx⁵
OSS Document Scanner
RPNcalc
DSub
EDSY

On my PC:
Odyssey Material Helper
EDDiscovery
EDSY
ObservatoryCore
Paint.net and GIMP
OpenRGB
Tailscale

Another audio professional here. For line level analog audio (it’s different for guitar pickups and turntable cartridges) it doesn’t matter much at all unless we’re talking long cable runs (several tens of meters and more) or some badly designed equipment that can’t handle high capacitance cables (eg I’ve had crappy amps going into oscillations with certain speaker cables). What matters is shielding (in noisy EM environments) and reliable connectors.

Digital audio is a different kettle of fish, but it’s amazing what you can get away with when runs are a few meters or less. Consumer-grade equipment almost never has 75 ohm connectors for coax S/PDIF and no consumer S/PDIF cable is really 75 ohms. RCA connectors cannot be 75 ohms due to their geometry and BNC is a rare beast (I really had to go out of my way to set up proper 75 ohm cabling for digital audio in my home, and still am not sure the BNC connectors I use are actually 75 ohms).

I should also mention to all non-audio pros that you can’t measure a cable’s or a connector’s characteristic impedance with a simple multimeter. 50, 75 and 110 ohm cables/connectors will all show milliohms on a multimeter and are all fine for audio frequencies. Characteristic impedance only plays role at high frequencies—MHz, not kHz range and when we need to impedance match the whole transmission line to avoid signal reflections.

I would be more worried about channel crosstalk when using a multi-core cable where conductors are not individually shielded as is the case with USB cables, but even 30 dB separation is probably fine for casual music listening.

Independence War and Independence War 2 remake by Aerovery Labs, or maybe Eagle Dynamics would be dapper.

The Mist.

Not movies, but Rifters series, Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts; and Killing Star by Zebrowski and Pellegrino. These will never become movies or TV, they’re just too nihilistic and have some extremely heavy themes. Watts especially does not shy away from describing and closely analyzing the psyche of some truly horrible characters in Rifters series.

Alien. It’s the pinnacle of horror movies. And what makes it so good is the believability of it all. There is no supernatural, no ghosts, no masked mass murderers, no silly “monsters” that defy all the laws of biology and physics.

Very niche, but if you ever need to decode a simple oldschool encrypted/encoded text (caesar cipher, reverse alphabet, substitution cipher, morse code etc) for an AR game or whatever, Canonn Decryptor is amazing, being able to decode most cryptograms virtually automatically.

Zero. Because it’s turned off when I’m away from home for more than a few hours or sleeping. It never gets more than 24 hours of uptime, ever.

Even if my home server is turned on 24/7 it still runs a chron job to do a weekly reboot on sunday nights to keep things tidy.

Forever War delved into the problems with super strength. The power armor took a humongous amount of training to be used finely enough in everyday tasks and not break something or someone. A simple handshake between someone in power armor and someone without could result in crushed bones or a ripped off arm. A great show of skill in using the power armor was the main character sitting down in office and writing a letter with pen and paper while wearing the armor!

Another great example of how dangerous superstrength is when dealing with non-superstrength people was in anime Beastars where one big carnivore accidentally ripped off the arm of his smaller non-carnivore friend. In-lore was said to be a very common thing to the extent that limb reattachment is a common medical procedure.

Winter:
-10°C outside, sometimes colder; comfy +22°C inside. Sun sets at 1600, but that’s what tea, candles and mood lighting is for. Everything is nice and quiet outside, with an occasional noise of snowplows after it snows.

Summer:
30°C outside, 30°C inside (aircon is not common here in older houses). Hotter in the sun in the middle of the sea of asphalt and concrete that is called “city”. Sun sets at 2200 and rises at 0400.

When the sun rises it’s like fucking Jurassic Park outside when all the birds wake up and start making noises. And by “birds” I mean not lovely songbirds like blackbirds and skylarks but pidgeons, crows and seagulls (and no, I don’t live by the sea; I live pretty much as far from the sea as one can in my country. The city is overrun with seagulls.). They seemingly love to scream right into the ventilation shafts of apartment buildings.

When the sun sets in summer all the inebriated revellers come out and start making noises including loud and off-note singing, loud laughing and loud inarticulate screaming. Add loud boomboxes to the mix and it’s one hell of a racket.

Also, mosquitos. Lots of mosquitos.

I actually bought just one new 6TB HDD and repurposed an older 3TB one as a redundancy drive for mirroring most critical data using a simple rsync cron job (no need for realtime mirroring of media files that are write-once), plus another old 1 TB drive just because. I haven’t run out of storage yet and I have automated download/sharing for OpenStreetMap and some Linux distros which takes up half a TB or so, but I plan on expanding the array using MergerFS and SnapRAID when the need arises.

The rest is just SMB shares, Navidrome, Jellyfin, DLNA and FTP. Remote access from outside my local network is done via Tailscale VPN.