I guess it depends on what you consider passable.

It’s loud enough on 25% to disturb my neighbors, it’s clear and defined enough for me to watch normally and hear everything at 7%. There’s no observable delay, and the installation is clean enough to make my wife happy. It wasn’t cheap, but I wouldn’t consider it expensive.

Some films are meant to be watched in large formats with insane audio that just can’t be replicated at home. The Dune movies and Oppenheimer are a few recent examples I can think of that looked incredible in 70mm IMAX. I live in a major metro area and there are only 3 screens within 50 miles capable of showing 70mm properly. I choose to go out of my way to these theaters once or twice a year, if a great film is showing.

Short of films shot and shown in a true large format there’s no way you’ll find me in a theater.

I’ll watch content on small screens if I’m on a plane. Otherwise it’s my 80" living room TV with passable surround sound.

Maybe this question should also request the responder’s general location, because I imagine the situations vary substantially.

I’ve lived in California for most of my life, and we go on frequent drives between LA and SF, usually a few times a year.

In the 80’s and 90’s bugs would cover the front of our vehicles and the windshield would be difficult to see through even with wipers and washer fluid. We’d actually have to stop to manually scrape them off.

In the 00’s and 10’s we noticed that we’d get basically zero bugs on a long drive, and that sparked many conversations about California environmental law.

I just got back from a drive up the coast and I can happily say that we’re back to insane numbers of bug strikes on the highway. Just north of Ventura I drove through a cloud of large bugs that hit like rocks and instantly covered almost my entire windshield. This situation has been noticably turning around since COVID, which I think is a good thing

It’s a mixed bag.

Growing up was made difficult because school is so slow that I’d rather be getting into trouble than sitting in class. By the start of middle school I’d already read the entire high school honors reading list, I had to walk to the high school from my middle school in 7th grade to take math classes. I rarely had regular school work in high school, nearly all of my academic teachers designed a different curriculum for me, which was nice but probably mostly to keep me from acting up in class. I never studied or did a shred of homework, but got good grades.

Social interactions were tough, I’m not much of an empath, not that I don’t experience empathy but emotions just aren’t intuitive, actually they often are the opposite of what you’d expect to be helpful, especially among young people. I had to concentrate to read people’s faces and mannerisms to understand the emotional and social subtexts of most interactions. I self medicated with alcohol a lot in high school.

All of my academic classes in high school were honors, and my final 2 years were all AP, while lettering in 3 varsity sports (4 total, but you can only play 3 each academic year). It wasn’t until my second year in uni that I ran into a class for which I actually had to study (nuclear chemistry), and boy was that an awful surprise. A handful of classes were like this for me, most I just showed up 3 times and got a good grade: the first day of class so I wouldn’t get dropped, the midterm, and the final.

I read quickly, think systematically, and information just sticks in my head. It was very difficult to understand why this wasn’t how most people were. Everything I do I analyze for improvement, and remember to do it better the next time. My wife calls me a skill collector because people seem to think I’m super good at everything, but to me it’s just logical that if you’re going to take time do something you might as well do it as well as possible.

After uni things started getting easier. Being forced to closely analyze social interactions and systematically give the “right” reactions is extremely useful in professional life. I wear this mask in all my interactions with all but my closest friends. It’s a bit psychopathic, but I don’t do it to anyone’s detriment, it’s mostly to get along and fit in.

I’ve self selected for highly intelligent friends, and I’m exhilarated to meet new people who can communicate with the kind of bandwidth that our brains run at, if that makes sense. I’m still close with most of my friends from high school, who have had varying levels of success, but I still have to be guarded when it comes to activities or conversation to make sure I don’t stick out too much.

In general I have a very pessimistic view of people and the world. The average person isn’t very sharp, and half of all people are dumber than that. However many smart people do evil things, most of the time for no reason at all. It’s exhausting to keep up with it all, so I just focus on my path and my family, and do what I can to directly improve my community.

It would be nice to fit in a little easier, but I wouldn’t trade my experience for anything else.

I was influenced greatly by Robert Axelrod’s short essay about the Prisoner’s Dilemma titled “The Prisoner’s Dilemma Computer Tournaments and the Evolution of Cooperation” (link PDF warning)

tl;dr The essay explores an iterative game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, and demonstrates how cooperation can emerge from a group of self interested participants. It has implications for the statistical emergence of morality, and even remarks on politics.

Morning: Work out, shower, coffee, protein shake, make breakfast for my wife, hop on the laptop.

Night: Cook dinner, kiss my wife when she gets home. Hit a few golf balls on the simulator. Watch an episode from an anime series if there’s something new. Maybe have a cocktail with the neighbor.

Shower, scroll for about 30 minutes, sleep.

I feel very lucky, and try not to take each day for granted.

it is the unluckiest day of the year

Today is the day that my local area shut down for COVID in 2020. I live near the ocean, the beach was closed, the golf courses were closed, the stores had cops out front stopping looting. It was wild.

I’m guessing that search would turn up results for any instance LW is federated with? If not that would be disappointing!

There will be a detracted argument

Probably meant protracted

Great Bush recession

I’ve literally never heard it called that, is this a non-US term? I’ve heard “great financial crisis”, “great recession”, or “housing crash” before.

That’s even more bizarre; how does one hide a gun in their shoe??

Ankle holster probably.

Also, almost no pistol designed in the last 60 years will discharge when simply dropped on the ground (Sig P320 may be the exception here). I’m pretty sure this guy shot himself, and blamed it on an AD. What a moron.

My #1 is Mauviel, made in France, but they are very costly.

DeBuyer comes in as a very close second, especially considering their price point relative to Mauviel.

The third one is definitely rooted in coastal Southern California, but has tinges of other accents. As you pointed out, this accent could be from anywhere in the US as the sound has propogated via popular media.

As a native Los Angelino it sounds to me like a guy in Northern California or maybe PNW who spent a lot of time on the east coast.

It’s different enough from the beachy LA or Orange County sound for me to pick out that there’s some other influence there.

I’m following for responses here, great questions!

I don’t know much about the security of running those services relative to each other, but I have some practical experience.

I ran sshd for decades, and pushed a local socks tunnel through it to emulate VPN. I initially chose this route because it worked on all desktop OS and Android without needing to figure out all of the client VPN software, and I already had SSH everywhere.

In the last couple of years Wireguard became natively available on my network equipment (UniFi Ubiquiti) so I moved all of my client devices over and closed down the external SSH port. I connect to it using IP, but use Syncthing to keep my host IP updated in case it changes, which has happened exactly once in the last 7 years (I used this mechanism when I was running ssh as well). I’ve been very happy.

Performance relative to socks over SSH is better. Client resource usage is lower (mainly looking at battery life), so much so that all my client devices (even mobile phones) run Wireguard always turned on. Fewer networks block Wireguard than SSH (I used to have to run ssh over DNS ports with other trickery to get around hotel and airplane wifi restrictions).

I now carry a small wifi router in my travel kit that bridges/clones connections to public wifi and runs Wireguard natively so every device I care about can just jump on that while I’m traveling. I only have to connect it to public wifi and no longer have to mess with the rest of my devices. I can even run Chromecast and stream media from my home while connected to a hotel TV. It’s all very seamless.

You shouldn’t have to, I totally agree there. “Papers please” sounds very facist, in the real non-exaggerated sense.

Coincidentally, I do carry my US passport card with me everywhere. It’s only good for overland travel to Mexico and Canada (you still need the full passport for international flights) but it’s a “Real ID” and proves my citizenship.

In no particular order:

• being fit
• physically tired
• no booze or cannabis on nights I actually have to sleep well
• a completely dark room, no little lights on electronic devices, blackout curtains, etc…
• a bed (I won’t mention the brand unless asked) that adjusts to my sleep patterns. It measures my breath rate, heart rate, how often I move, if I’m snoring (rare), etc… It then knows how well I’m sleeping and can soften or firm up, and tilt my upper body up or down. Depending on how my vitals change it learns how best to accommodate my sleep.

If I have trouble due to stress or the neighbors are making noise I’ll throw on an eye mask and ear plugs.

I’m basically comatose 15 minutes after hitting the pillow and wake up before my alarm.

A falling knife machete has no handle.

I hear you, it’s definitely a zen state.

I live walking distance from the ocean, so it’s nice to set a pellet up and monitor it from the beach. Run back when it’s time to wrap/spray/etc, and then hang on the sand until the internal temps remind me it’s time to head home and rest everything in a cooler.

All of my sausage, fish, and jerky goes in the vertical smoker. I have to manually tend the fire on that, but the temp swings and fuel consumption are much more stable, so it’s generally quite a bit easier than minding my normal offset.

Chilling in the yard to tend fire and empty a 30 rack with the neighbor is fun for sure, and my stick burner develops better bark than the pellet, even if I use wood in it. So when I want to go all in on a competition, or I’m doing like 8 briskets at a time for a huge event I’ll run the stick burner. Otherwise it’s something in the pellet smoker.

I generally agree with this order, but my journey took me in a different order. After having propane forever I moved to a Weber and the snake method, but then I went with an offset with a real fire box.

After getting really good results but not always having enough time to stoke the fire for 12+ hours I bought a very high end pellet smoker that I converted to also use charcoal and wood.

My stick burner gets used maybe once a year now. I’ll go pellet at least once a week, and charcoal or wood in the converted pellet at least once a month. I also can build a makeshift konro inside my pellet smoker, and I use that all the time.

Oh right, I also have an offset vertical smoker, and hunt a lot of my own protein, so yeah, it’s a deep hole I’ve dug into.

In most areas of the US that take BBQ seriously, grilling != BBQ.

Grilling means direct heat, BBQ in those areas refers to indirect heat, usually with some smoke component.