I’d start by deciding what your goals are, so you know what to work towards in terms of hardware, software, and processes. Once you’ve got some sort of an idea, explore ways to accomplish it and post your questions in this community. It can be super overwhelming to get started, but the research and problem-solving is half the fun.

I start to get weak and fussy if it’s 12:30 pm and I haven’t had lunch. Assuming I get lost in the woods after breakfast that means I have a good 3-4 hours to find a settlement before I drop dead of being a little bitch.

Classic Lemmy user, bringing not one but two laptops to a live show.

I love this, but also found it hilarious - especially the towel as a helicopter blade trick and your description of it being “very undesirable for the fly.” I’m picturing your partner or housemate sighing and being like, “there they go again, herding flies.” I can definitely see it working though.

Yup! We live in a basement and have this deal with the spiders that they’ll be left alone as long as they stay off the furniture. For some reason we basically only see them in the bathroom but the occasional time they’ve been bad, they get exiled to the laundry room.Usually there are 3-5 out that we can see at any given time. Most are very tiny ones that chill in webs, but a few are hunters that are much more mobile. Those that stick around or do something notable get named after a while. Other than Hex there’s been …

Peeping Tom who lived in a web in front of the toilet and just watched you. Sometimes, usually after someone showered and there was condensation in the room, he’d take a little jaunt around his “porch”. He disappeared one day under mysterious circumstances. While hoping for his safe return I took the opportunity to clean around his home and accidentally sucked it up with a hand vacuum.

Marina, who was originally named Mario as I rescued her from the sink - the name was changed when I suspected her to be a girl due to her looking like a bigger version of a species we sometimes see. She was my fave as she was always up to something and was very active. We think she was huffing caulking as after we redid it she loved to sit on the new caulk, leading us to childishly say she was “addicted to caulk.” We were genuinely concerned about her addiction though as it seemed unhealthy. I once saw her awkwardly chase down a pill millipede. You wouldn’t think it possible for something a few mm across to look embarrassed, but I swear she did after she bit it in the ass and it ran off unphased. I think she was too tiny to pierce its exoskeleton. She’s recently disappeared and I’m legit sad and hoping she’s just off on one of her adventures.

I then recycled the name Mario for one who I had to quickly scoop out of the sink when I was running the water and hadn’t noticed because he was so tiny. I was proud of myself as, despite what you may think I’m slightly arachnophobic. (I was very arachnophobic before we started keeping them as free-range pets / housemates.)

Big Bertha, who lived in parts unknown but would often show up in the bathroom at night. She had a habit of temporarily stealing the webs of the resident spiders for a few hours before departing. Usually the other spider would fuck off and watch from a distance, but once I saw her in there just staring down the owner. To my knowledge, she never hurt them though.

It’s possible that Hex is actually Big Bertha, as he/she/it (I’m sure I’m misgendering the hell out of them all) has a similar personality.

Can you possibly tell that we cannot currently get pets due to our living situation? We’re making do with what the basement provides for companionship.

Better yet, how do we get this person screened for psychopathy?

It’s not quite the same, but … I swear, literally this morning while doing my business one of my bathroom spiders snuck under my slightly raised heel just to chill. If I’d put my foot down that’d be the end of that creature, but by luck I moved my foot instead to find a quarter-sized spider just hanging out where my bare foot had just been.

Side-note: This particular spider is called Hex because it’s missing two legs. I believe I found those legs right by the toilet a few weeks before I met my new pooping pal. I’ve always wondered how it lost them.

I absolutely know how you feel. I’ll typically go 6 to 12 months at a time without playing because of that. I then strategically find a window between patches where most of my favorite mods are all up to date. It typically takes a solid 4 hours of work to fix up my modlist, and I then play obsessively for several weeks. Despite these huge breaks, I’m at almost 3500 hours in the game, though I’ve been playing since release.

My second fave game is Rimworld, and I follow a similar pattern there, though modding for that game seems much more resilient in the face of certain updates. Plus, Ludeon isn’t DLC-crazy like Paradox.

Something I sometimes do for a more relaxed game is lower the number of empires from default for map size, and bump up the number of pre-FTL so some of them will later turn into empires. I usually also turn up the number of advanced empires.

You end up with a few superpowers, a few insignificant empires who are pawns in their games, and a little more early-game breathing room.

To be honest, I also generally peak at the map in observe mode to ensure I have a fun/interesting start position. I play with like 200 mods, usually create several of my own rival empires, and generally play it as a story generator rather than a game to “win.”

I guess I have to say Stellaris because it’s my favorite game in general. It also runs as good or better under the native Linux version than it ever did on Windows, so points there.

Yeah, I’m sure I’ll eventually get over my disappointment at what the showrunners did to the original and will be in the right headspace to watch other GoT content, but not yet. I still can’t believe what they did to that formerly-beloved show. 😉

Anyway, I just saw your other comment. I’ll subscribe right away and will start the new season this week a so as to contribute to the discussion. Thanks for doing that!

Well if you do start one for The Boys I’ll prioritize watching the new season asap so I can contribute to the discussions. It looks like it’s already started last week, actually.

As for HotD, I can’t help ya there. After the last couple seasons of GoT I lost interest in that world. A shame, as I loved it while they still had books to follow.

It’s really not possible unless Lemmy gets a much larger community, but the thing I miss most about Reddit are episode discussions for TV shows. For almost any show, I could be pretty confident that I’d be able to find a post-watch episode discussion. Those are great for seeing how people felt about the episode or to learn things I may have overlooked.

My reaction when I saw file explorer:

Yeah, for me (an elder millenial), I use them in the middle of a sentence in the form of a dramatic pause, or sometimes at the start of a sentence in specific cases. I’m not saying any of this is necessarily grammatically correct (or that the boomers are wrong for how they use them), but this is just what feels closest to regular speech to me.

Well, I’m old-adjacent and I literally don’t think either of my grandpas so much as touched a cell phone or computer in their lives, but I get your point.

Yes! This is what I always associate with older folks texting or emailing. I use ellipses a fair bit for (my attempts at) comedic effect. Some older folks are using them on a whole different level, having this weird habit of ending sentences with them where most people would use a period or exclamation point. It can come off sounding very ominous.

“Bill is coming over.”

Okay, cool. Have fun with Bill.

“Bill is coming over …”

Grandpa, are you in trouble? What’s Bill going to do???

Yup! Where possible I try to get everything in x265 for this reason. It takes a little more processing power to transpose, but the difference in file size is worth it.

I’ve heard you’ll take a quality hit to re-encode something from x264 to x265, however. If you care about that, it’s better to just find a new source recorded with x265 or AV1 (if all your devices can run it).

I’m not very knowledgeable in that end of things, though, so I could be wrong.

Edit: Fixed AVC where I had meant AV1

Even more dramatic is that if a repair service provider discovers a third-party spare part that was installed in a Galaxy device as part of a previous repair, they must immediately disassemble the smartphone, tablet or notebook into its individual parts and inform Samsung of the details of the respective incident.

Well this feels illegal (or certainly should be). Imagine taking your car in for a repair only to find out the shop functionally scrapped it and told on you to Ford, all because they noticed you had changed a tire.

Yup! But in my experience that accuracy made them sound better. I’ve been out of the game for over a decade, but sometimes I dream of buying a decent set just for this sort of passive listening.