I don’t work in IT/Tech at all, but I’ve been an enthusiast since I was young, at first piggybacking off of my dad, then developing my own interests as I got into high school and college. I started self-hosting because I found it interesting and as time progressed I saw the benefits of operating things locally. I only host things within my own network though, because I’m not yet comfortable with how to safely set up external access.

While I know you’re being funny, for those unaware, the snakes being referred to with St Patrick were a euphemism for the non-Christian beliefs in Ireland.

Teacher here; this is the first thing I do on day one with new students! You want to build a classroom community of mutual respect; failure to do so makes for a hostile classroom and a wasted year.

Let me pop in as a high school teacher in the US. I make decent pay, but it took me over a decade climbing the pay ladder to reach this point. It’s only been in the last five years that I’ve made enough to afford the mortgage on a house (well, prior to all of the rate hikes, but that’s another issue entirely). But there’s another problem: You’re expected to put in 10% of the value (even with first-time buyer incentives) as a down payment (I last looked with any seriousness in '22). I have yet to be able to put away 5% of the average costs in my region, much less 10%. Every time I start building back up, other costs drain most or all of that within a year or two. Unless the housing market bursts big time, I’m not likely to be able to afford a home anytime soon. Note: I would rather keep renting than take a variable-rate mortgage; the last three years have seen previously affordable mortgages with variable rates go sky-high.

On the hardware from the early '00s in my collection I’ve had good results from AntiX and Q4OS.

It took about 25 systems of searching to find my first one; I also found the updated ice world foliage in that same system, pretty cool stuff!

When our best friends were getting married and we met at the rehearsal dinner. Her best friend had been trying to get us to meet for years (our work schedules and lives in general always kept us from meeting). Within two months we were dating and have been together ever since.

High school teacher (Latin)

My first was SUSE followed shortly thereafter by the initial release of Fedora Core. Lots of distro hopping and tinkering later, I run LMDE these days as my daily driver and I distro hop on the other computers in my collection.

It’s my daily driver; the benefits of mint with the stability of a Debian base.

Interesting, my ear cushions are still in decent shape (I’ve only had them about a year now). I bought a replacement set early on just to have in storage, but I’ve yet to need them.

I’ve used it on Pop!_OS and Mint Debian Edition and had to do no setup, the system recognized it as a sound device out of the box. My only issue was in Pop!, where the microphone would output garbage unless I switched audio devices back and forth when I connected to a discord voice room. I’m not entirely sure that was an issue with the device or with discord on that distro, but on Mint I’ve yet to have issues. The software from Steelseries doesn’t have a Linux version, so maybe I’m missing out on some fine tuning, but for my purposes it works great.

If you don’t mind spending the extra money, I can recommend the Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless. I went with these because they can do high quality audio over 2.4GHz wireless, which was a must for me in a wireless headset.

Ah, what a shame, he had some good stuff.

I’m assuming you’re talking about the YouTuber; It’s been since before the pandemic that I’ve watched AvE, what did he do?

For me it was during the development of Diablo 3 when Blizzard acted like a bunch of children over community comments/concerns about the art style/direction of the game. I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on much, honestly.

(I grew up Catholic) All throughout my Sunday schooling the inconsistencies kept popping up; when I was young I would chalk them up to ‘I’ll understand later’ or ‘as I learn more I’ll figure it out’, but it never happened. By the time I was in my teens I was there just to keep the family happy; I became more aware of the underlying bigotry and hate, and my disagreements with the church as an organization piled up. I distinctly remember while on the way home after confirmation that I didn’t feel any different for having gone through it, and when I said it aloud, my father couldn’t provide any useful guidance, I sometimes think he doubts, but won’t or can’t bring himself to leave. As soon as I graduated I stopped going to mass regularly, sure that I didn’t want to be considered Catholic anymore, but still unsure of what I believed. In college I was a Classics major (these days I teach Latin), which is what finally killed any last vestige of faith I had. I spent a lot of time working with documents ranging in age from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the works of St. Augustine, and at every turn I saw just how deluded, how derivative, it all was. There was a sentiment throughout the classics department that went something like this: Studying these topics will either strengthen your faith and make it unbreakable, or destroy it utterly. Obviously, this applied most to Christian students, but seeing the way the religious sausage is made so-to-speak would have been enough, for me at least, to turn away from any faith. I never understood how anyone could learn all about this and still have faith, the cognitive dissonance just seemed so massive, yet I saw it happen with some of my fellow students. These days, except for weddings and funerals, I avoid going near churches.

That’s Vampire Survivors for me, I’ve already made utterly broken characters with golden eggs, but I still keep coming back because of the fun gameplay loop.

While I’m not sure the “walking sim” games are what you’re looking for, I’d add Lifeless Planet and maybe Dear Esther. Once you know what’s going on/what happened, there’s not much point in replaying.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/ towards the end he covers this sort of scenario in the form of a diamond sphere.