Coming soon:
Fortran code from 1969 that has been vibe coded since.

Literally the plot of Back To The Future

Honestly, the job closest to being actual Santa is delivery people, except without the sketchy omnipresent surveillance putting-people-in-lists part.

Honestly, it’s really not my place to encourage you to do or not do anything (or her).
I’m just saying this kind of connection is special and something to be cherished, to hold on to it, to nurture it, to enjoy its bliss.

Whichever way works for you both is fine, really.
You can choose to try and make what you want out of this connection. By all means, spend time with her, let it develop into what it may.

In our case, both of us already being happy in our own long-term non-poly couples, that’s quite a bit different.
And so we focus on maintaining the privilege to be part of each other’s lives first and foremost without blowing each other’s lives up.

I imagine some/most go on their whole lives without ever meeting this person for them and I feel blessed.

I’m not a religious, spiritual or otherwise superstitious person.
I don’t even know how to say this without sounding crazy, even to myself.

Soul friends are a thing.
I don’t even know what exactly, and a soul doesn’t have to be some weird metaphysical spiritual soul or whatever, but like whatever makes our innermost selves… us?

I don’t think I can fully explain it to someone who hasn’t lived through this, but it feels like this person has always been part of my “self”, so much that I don’t even always see her as separated from me.
Not in a co-dependant way, it just is.
It’s almost like having one brain in two bodies.
A new feeling of wholeness that I can’t begin to describe, and honestly probably don’t need to, at least not to her, she gets it, I get it, whatever.
It doesn’t even need to be romantic, though it could be.
Certainly, none of it fits in a nicely labeled societal box.
And yet, this person is far from perfect and doesn’t need to be. Around each other, our flaws don’t matter anymore, they don’t need to be hidden, we don’t need to play some role or worry about optics or whatever… it’s… her… we accept each other as we are, raw. It’s enough, we’re enough.
We feel safe around each other, sharing stuff we’d never even approach with anyone else.
Without always realizing it, we heal each other of our past, we understand each other and ourselves better just by having each other. We’re brutally honest, yet no judgmental and genuinely caring.

And yet, despite all this, we honestly may not be a good fit as a couple.
I mean there certainly could be worse matches, but we’re best friends first and foremost, although the friends label really doesn’t do justice.

I realized I don’t know why I’m saying all this.
I guess I get excited whenever I see people connecting to each other.
Cherish it for what it is, raw human connection, it’s fine even if you don’t what “it” is.
Peace

I’m just saving Planescape: Torment 5 times.

Well damn

Darkest Dungeon (the first)
It’s fun, but particularly punishing now that most available missions are at the hardest difficulty.
Not too sure how long I’ll keep banging my head on certain bosses though.

Dave the Diver
It was interesting, refreshing even, but I don’t see myself playing too much past the the main story.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon
I’m playing on my phone, an everlasting classic in my rotation.
I do have it on Steam, but I mostly play on my phone, I’m just used to using the Wacom pen (Samsung Note) for this game.
A mouse would be fine too, but I usually play this on the couch and not at my desk.

Phones sometimes will ignore your local DNS (if any) and still use whatever the vendor hardcoded.

Try to reach the website from the phones, both with its FQDN and its IP.

Yea, I was referring to the OSI model.

So much baiting, the chat bot never had a chance.

A single misconfigured thing can suck real bad as you’ve seen.
Selfhosting involves lots of things that can be misconfigured or go bad.

That’s not to scare you out of it out anything, merely to congratulate you in seeking knowledge first.

Disclaimer: I’m biased towards networks because I’m a network engineer, opinions may differ.

I would say… having at least a vague grasp of layers 1-4 of the traditional network model is a decent start.
You don’t need to understand everything, but knowing a minimum will help a lot imho.

It’s hard to point you in the right direction without knowing what you already know or not.

I’ve not had good luck finding something that gives me the confidence to go about it

Now’s a good time to make sure you have good backups.
Knowing you can fallback to your backups helps a lot with confidence.

One this that’s really hard to replace is DDoS protection.

I use this one:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.orrs.deliveries

It can usually get the status of most courriers unless they’re actively hostile against API/scraping.
Worst case you can still track status manually, or open the webpage.
It doesn’t track payment, but I don’t usually have a tracking number before paying.
I think you could technically add your own custom status entry.
I keep them as active until shipped and verified after which I mark them as completed.

Works well enough for my needs.

You can use an adapter just fine.
Or use a 5.5" drive caddy, that’s just a little drawer that slides in and out.
Real question is it you have enough SATA connectors available.

Paintable caulk

chown -R nobody:nobody /usr/lib

Warrantied drives still fail, they just happen to ship you a replacement.

Commercial drive trashing solutions are basically a smaller, fancier version of the mechanism in a log splitter.
You could probably rig a sketchy drive wedge/bending thing with a pump jack rather easily.
Wear PPE.

The odds of someone taking a failed drive and transplanting the platters to a working drive is pretty low to begin with.

Me? I don’t have tons of drives to destroy, so I just unscrew the thing, get the platters out and smash those.

I can’t wrap my head around a service being so much shit but people still forking some cash to them.
I know for a company, $1000 is change but still.
$1000 for a glorified support ticket that gets auto-closed by some AI is fucking bullshit.