Impressive dedication to avoiding standard fun!

Locally, yes. Solar (and wind) energy isn’t uniform in timing or location, so when there’s too much of it relative to consumption, there needs to be a profitable way to use it rather than just dumping it into resistive heating or letting the panels wear out faster at open circuit. Desalination is a pretty good idea since places with high solar resources also tend to be poorer in water resources. The challenge is the capital costs of desalination plants and competition with existing water sources - water rights are a giant ratfuck by themselves. I think it’ll make sense to build desalination plants that can absorb excess energy generation, but if there’s even political will for it, they’ll take a lot of time to build up

I thought that too, but saw this:

As a PC player, I’m glad our hardware cousins get to play 1.6 - it’s a good update and ConcernedApe again going above and beyond. What I’m most excited for though is that this may mean Haunted Chocolatier gets back into development. Fields of Mistria did a good job scratching the itch before I ran out of Early Access content, but I’m really looking forward to seeing what Barrone comes up with in his next game

I’m no help here, but I have been thinking strongly of converting an old windows box to Linux gaming with steam, so I’m hoping someone can help OP and I can pretroubleshoot my own transition. Steam has their own debian-based OS, right? I was planning on falling back to that if proton didn’t work

I’m a bit torn on this one. I love Colville’e running the game series and a lot of his perspectives on what makes a game fun and was going to back the project but in the Q&A sessions, they were really focused on spending the stretch money on their own VTT. I don’t really trust them to spend that money efficiently as it’s way outside of their exhibited skill set. Maybe they’ll be able to quarantine the VTT development/resources so that it doesn’t affect quality of the core product, but since they’re fully backed, I decided to hold off for now. I backed strongholds and followers as well as kingdoms and warfare and both suffered from "cool idea that was a little too convoluted to be worth it_

On the other hand, the Arcadia content that they contracted others to produce was fantastic. I’m excited to see what they come up with but won’t be backing at this point since it’ll just be throwing cash at their VTT

Home Depot rents out gas-less mig welders surprisingly cheap. You could spend a fun 3-4 hours noodling around trying simple welding of angle iron pieces!

Fireflies. I could sit on a porch watching fireflies every night of my life

I recently picked up Cobalt Core and am enjoying the take on slay the spire with additional crew/ship interactions. So far it seems to be missing StS’s fully broken synergies that you could achieve with e.g. thin deck infinites, armor stacking, etc - which was a fun aspect for me. But the writing is fun and the challenges are varied. I only have about half of the unlocks so hopefully it’ll open up more soon

I have small kids whose sleep schedule is delicate and last change took us a week to recover from. It’s a needless, counterproductive, inherited tradition. I didn’t mind the change when it was just me, but it’s a lot of needless stress now. Also apparently, it causes accidents