if you really think so then you should start HRT and claim some femininity for yourself. Or just become a femboy. Or both.

“Host” fucked me up and is the reason I don’t watch horror movies anymore. I’m a huge baby though.

I love finding similarities like these, and the one you mentioned about teletype is a new but really cool interpretation to me. Though I tend to view things more mechanically than naturally; I love playing factory games like Factorio and Satisfactory. I guess the natural metaphor I use most is the human body, which is a really complex system with lots of interacting subsystems. I forgot the name of the book & author but a medical doctor wrote a book on complex systems and said that any sufficiently complex system, like the human body, is always dealing with some degree of failure, so any artificial system needs to be fault-tolerant at many levels to continue functioning properly.

I’ve had a great experience with the TrueNAS Mini-X system I bought. ZFS has great raid options, and TrueNAS makes managing a system really easy. You can get a box built & configured by them, with 16 GB ECC RAM and five (empty) drive bays, for about $1150 at the most affordable end. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

One thing to be careful about: you can’t add drives to a ZFS vdev once it’s been created, but you can add new vdevs to an existing pool. So, you can start with two mirrored drives, then add another two mirrored drives to that pool later.

(A vdev is a sub-unit of a ZFS storage pool, and you have to choose your RAID topology for each vdev and then compose those into a storage pool)

The common wisdom about backups is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which recommends:

• 3 total copies of your data, including your original or “production” data
• 2 different forms of media
• 1 off-site copy

Proton Drive can be a decent off-site backup, but it would be a good idea to make a separate backup of your data on a different form of media like an external hard drive, just in case Proton Drive goes down, or the data there gets corrupted and you need to restore a known good version.

What worked for me is learning some better letterforms from some free images from the Write Now book (by Getty-Dubay) on italic cursive. It’s a different kind of cursive from the awkward one I was taught in school, and it’s a lot easier to write and read.

I think the biggest improvement in my handwriting was just finding letterforms in that book that are both easy to write but that are also more clearly distinguishable when you write quickly. For example, just putting a little curl at the bottom of my lowercase T’s, I’s, and L’s made them a lot more aesthetically pleasing but also more clearly distinct from other letters.

Once you find some letterforms like that, it just takes a little practice to rewrite your muscle memory.

Homebrew is so fun, and I love how you can make it as complex as you want. Like, you can just mix some honey and some water (in the right ratio) and let it sit, and you’ve got mead! Or you can add flavors. Or experiment with yeasts. Or brew beer and experiment with hops and grains. It’s a hobby that really meets you where you want it to.

I recently got into video game development, and I’ve had so much fun, and it’s given me some much-needed meaning. I’ve solved problems unique to my game using programming skills as well as game design skills, and it feels meaningful because i can send it to my friends and they can enjoy it without needing to appreciate any of the technical aspects. I get to be creative about how people I care about can have more fun. It could also involve your music composition hobby, since every good game needs some music and sound design! I’m a programmer for my day job so most things I do there are only meaningful to other programmers, and the problems I solve there are incredibly boring ones.

Edit: I saw your comment about being burnt out on programming, and I totally understand that. That happens to me frequently. I enjoy programming as a hobby when I’m not burnt out so we’re kinda in different boats there. There are lots of skills involved in making games and the variety has really refreshed me, though I’ve still gotten sick of sitting at a computer while working on it.

I’m lucky enough that a couple of my friends are willing to use Matrix to message me, but most communities I’m a part of are on Discord.

Fair

It’s kind of amazing how relevant this still is, 28 years later.

Learning new programming languages is an awesome way to expand your programming brain. If you want to stay in the same scientific computation niche, you can check out Julia or Mathematica. If you’re just looking to broaden your horizons, the world is your oyster. For me, learning Clojure really cooked my noodle but made me a much better programmer since it taught me functional programming.

Also, just read other peoples code! You can learn the conventions that way. Though for you it would best to find other products within your niche, because I’m not sure if general web dev code would be super helpful.

There are techniques that are broader than any single language’s conventions, and I think learning those are how you can improve. That’s hard to teach, though, and it comes from experience with a few different languages, in my opinion.

And honestly, I can totally respect the “conventions be damned” attitude, because at the end of the day, you’re trying to make something that works, and if nobody else is reading that code, you’ve made the right trade-off.

I’ll suggest Elixir. It’s a language that runs on the same virtual machine as Erlang, which has proven to be great for ultra-reliable and excellent at managing many, MANY concurrent processes.

Elixir itself builds upon this great foundation with a syntax similar to Ruby, but entirely functional. It’s a delightful language to read and write.

One of the all-time classics! I think all devs should read this.

I watched the Evangelion rebuild movies, and having a positive ending to a depressing story like that was cathartic.

If you’re interested in setting up another program, you can use Overseerr to feed requests to Sonarr. Other people who have access your plex library can also use it to request stuff from you, but even if you’re a solo user, it’s a nice interface to search and add content with.

Oh you’re so right, I never use those so I completely forgot :X

In Elixir & Erlang, they don’t even have a for-loop construct. You have to use recursion. And I think that’s beautiful. I also think tail-call optimization is beautiful.

I’ll share my perspective as a trans woman cuz I got to see both sides. In professional settings, handshakes are still good, but I’ve gotten way fewer handshakes since I transitioned. Also cuz of corona. I just say hi and wave these days. My ex-father-in-law handled my transition pretty well: he used to shake my hand but switched to hugs. But that’s obviously a move for more familiar settings.

Dead Space, my favorite game of all time. All HUD elements are holographic projections from your suit and weapons, integrated into the game world and moving with the camera. Your health meter is a series of light segments going up your spine, and the meter for one of your abilities is a pie-chart style light on the back of your right shoulder. Even the objective markers are a trail of light projected from your hand when you press down on the control stick.