Skyrim has some mods that go really deep on magic and combat strats.

We're social creatures. The laugh track makes us feel like we're in a social situation. I think different shows use this more or less cynically.

Tangential fun fact:

Snake oil is a real thing, that actually helps with the some very specific problems. But it has to be made a specific way from a specific snake. We associate the term with scams because of the large number of scammers that advertised fake snake oils, or advertised it being useful for tons if things it wasn't.

My point is, many of the most effective scams rely on something that has a kernel of truth.

Amateur advice. Don't own your own device. ask your friends to look up things for you on their devices, then print them out and mail them to your PO Box. Untraceable.

Good news but damn is this clickbait. Not a single specific noun until you're in the story.

Me playing OpenTTD on my gaming rig.

The correlation between weight and health is a lot murkier than media in general, and these shows in particular, represent. It's much more reliable to measure blood and vitals, such as cholesterol and blood pressure, to establish wellbeing and risk.

Rapid changes in weight tho, in either direction, are well established for having permanent harmful effects. It also tends to make it more difficult to maintain weight loss, and more likely someone actually increases in weight over time.

These shows make it seem like losing weight at any cost is desirable, and don't put focus on the actually accurate metrics of wellbeing, while ignoring the negative long term impacts of rapid weight loss. It's a very warped view of health that focuses on an aesthetic feature.

I strongly recommend giving this podcast a try if you want more analysis: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-biggest-loser/id1535408667?i=1000505824482

I like how gaps make things feel a little less cluttered, and show off the colors of my wallpaper. Same reason I use i3 with gaps on. It feels like everything is nicely organized instead of shoved together. In the end it's just an aesthetic preference.

The main issue nowadays is anticheat. If you play esports (league of legends,apex legend, fortnite), you will have trouble. Pretty much everything else will be good to go.

This made me feel a longing and sadness I can't quite pin down.

Besides all the discussion of nonprofits and donations, fedi server hosts have way less overhead. They're not generally trying to profit, so they only need to break even (or run a deficit small enough to deal with out of pocket). A corporation is trying to give 6 or 7 digit salaries to CEOs and/or shareholders. So they need to extract more than the cost of hosting.

They'll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don't have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It's the same thing google did to email.