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).

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.

Oldskool FPS. There. That’s the correct term. Now, who’s up for some DM-Morpheus with instagib mutator?🤘

Too soon:
The Expanse
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
Babylon 5: Crusade

Best system for calculators IMO. Especially if you need to add many numbers together (eg doing price calculations)—just enter all the numbers to the register, double-check for errors, then add together. Way less error prone than traditional calculators.

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€

Then there’s this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/766056.High_Speed_Digital_Design

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

Check out Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon. It’s a satirical horror comedy that takes the common horror tropes, deconstructs them and turns them inside out, upside down in a hysterical way.

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.

Maybe I’ll give it a retry at some point in the future. If I can recall my forgotten Epic login credentials, that is. Too busy with the thargoid war for the next few years, though.

Control. Liked it despite being in 3rd person view up until the mezzanine fight an hour or two in, then realized that the enemies are just dumb high DPS bullet sponges, the PC is a low DPS squishy and fighting from a cover or any other tactical approach I’m used to doesn’t work.

EDIT: There was also a spellcrafting mod for Skyrim where the endboss was immunebto all magic and would teleport away as soon as you got too close while summoning a bazillion powerful minions. At level 50…60 it was litwrally impossible to figjt the bastard. After many tries I just console killed the bugger and was done with it.

Yes, because vast majority of orgs both in private and public sectors suck at securing their systems. Either:
-The admins lack the knowledge and skills to properly configure their stuff.
-The admins are not given the resources they need to update and secure the systems.
-The in-house parts of the system rely on some deprecated functionality of an old version of some underlying service. Updating in-house parts to make it work with new versions is not made possible because “Phil knew how but Phil was laid off 10 years ago” or “the company who made it is out of business” or “we don’t have the money to do it” or “it works now, so why bother?”
-The servers are fine, up-to-date and secure, but the in-house service itself has glaring security issues that go unfixed due to above reasons.

And thus came along little Bobby Tables and was able to completely incapacitate his school district…

Generally a Linux installation is very good at keeping itself up-to-date and installing security patches automagically. Updating Docker containers is somewhat more involved, but can be easily automated with Watchtower.

Most of the services you use every day run on Linux servers. Even Microsoft uses Linux on their servers. And these services, not an average laptop, are the main targets of malicious actors.

The vast majority of behind-the-scenes infra that the end user never sees are open-source, even if the end-user part is proprietary. Eg. Facebook and Xwitter are proprietary, but run on open-source infrastructure like Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx etc.

Proprietary OS-s are workstation/office/home PC land. They have way more security issues due to crap coding whereas security problems with open-source server stuff are as a rule the fault of the admins misconfiguring services and not keeping their software up to date.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

—Robert A. Heinlein

family is everything, child need them

My favourite part is when the conservatives start talking about all children absolutely needing mother and father. Not just parents, not a parent, not a family; mother and father specifically. Yeah, sure, now what about the millions of single parents? Shall we start forcefully assigning a new spouse of opposite sex to them the day after their current spouse dies, divorces (if we keep that as an option, that is), runs away or whatever? All pregnant people who are not in a relationship are immediately married off to a random person of opposite sex? No opt-out. Because think of the children!

Navidrome just seems to be faster and more responsive. But the main reason of using both is that I just like to try things out and tinker. I also use Foobar2000, Kodi, MPC-HD, AIMP and other media players.

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.