I’d be cool with a community along the “arcane and esoteric” lines, which for me is more of a vibe than anything else? eg. The Mysterious Files of Ms Basil E Frankweiler and other mysterious-fantasy-or-sorta-spy novels, letterboxing (similar-to-but-not-exactly geocaching), Cicada 3301 and other unsolved puzzles, video games that fit the vibe, tarot card art, etc.

but that’s probably different from paranormal stuff

Building your own musical instrument sounds like a daunting project at the beginning but one with very satisfying results. :)

Not knowing much about marimbas or woodworking, I’m super curious about the actual hand-tuning process! Is it carefully trimming the boards down? And how much do the tubes (?) at the bottom affect the tuning vs the wood pieces on top?

170 plants?! and here I am feeling super overwhelmed with 7 of them, hah!

on a slightly joking but also sort of serious note: do you have spreadsheets to keep track of them all? is there a lot of variance in watering schedules, or do you have some auto watering…?

One of my biggest side projects this spring was setting up my first NAS (Synology, since I’m a beginner) and all the *Arr apps funneling to Plex, with Overseer to manage actually adding movies and tv to the queue.

There’s a lot of ductwork involved up front (set up x many docker containers, get them all to talk to each other, make sure you’ve got auto-updating set up, what about a VPN, and so forth) but I’ve been super pleased with the end result’s ease of use.

There’s a lot more in the self-hosted space I want to explore too, now that I’ve dipped my toes in – mostly around music and photos. I’ve a pretty manually organized music library and would like to be able to store on my NAS and access in a nice way from every device.

We also have a small collection of Blu-ray movies and TV, but 95% of those are my partner’s – much more into physical media than me. It has a precise organization on the shelves that I don’t touch! 😂

Oh neat, I’ve been keeping notes on options for self-hosted image tools, and hadn’t run into Hydrus before. Definitely adding to my list to check out!

I think there’s something really fun about going into this type of shrine, quietly freaking out about getting hit, killing your first construct, then getting great satisfaction from the immediate boost in DPS by fusing their horn with your weapon.

I’ve also enjoyed them as a nice way to re-experience “powering up”, since I’m close to endgame.

Oof, I remember that lightroot…

I have a similar story of stubbornness, where I hopped back and forth between two floating blocks, slowly ultrahanding them forward and up until I got to a sky island I wanted to explore. Now that I have way more battery, I’ll never do that again! But it was extremely satisfying that the game allowed me to inch my way through the sky like that.

Infinite repeating patterns are nifty. A looong time ago I read a book on MC Escher and iirc a lot of his art was focused on tessellation and they inspired his other geometric eye-twisters. This page has examples of his sketches, though is mostly focused on how to create your own.

Amazing, thank you for the detailed reply! I’ll definitely check out Planta - right now I just have scheduled reminders on my phone but they’re not really helping so far. Thankfully I think most of my plants are ok with a leetle neglect, and I’m… letting my Rufibarba go because we’re just not a good fit. 😅

I appreciate that they at least put the word “brain” in quotes in the title – just last night a friend and I were arguing over whether or not pop science articles should really be saying octopuses have 9 brains because of their extensive quantity of neurons-in-arm-nerve-cords.