Yes. mid-40s, no kids, and I work from home.

Wife and I play RPGs on the weekends (currently enjoying Last Epoch and waiting for the next Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader DLC), and during the week I usually play single player games (right now in the middle of Lies of P and Fire Emblem: Awakening).

If you haven’t already, check out Upgrade, by Blake Crouch. Good book, similar premise.

Hell if I know. I suppose that’s one of the multitude of possibilities of “what’s coming.”

All I know is I’m fine with getting out of the way while they get it. Preferably far away, where I won’t have to hear the bitching and blaming later when they find out what they asked for, what they voted for, and what they actually wanted don’t align.

Get out of the way and let us get what we have coming

Say no more fam.

Props for the Hiromi recommendation, though I’d personally choose Seeker from the Alive album.

Nah, no need to be a shitheel. I’m cool with paying for books, authors gotta eat. I wouldn’t refund a book I’ve read.

MOBI has been deprecated for a long time. Standard formats now are AZW3 (KF8) and KFX. They’re a bit more advanced than MOBI, and thank goodness, since it was a terrible format. AZW3 is essentially a MOBI/EPUB container, and I believe KFX is equivalent to EPUB2, possibly with some EPUB3 features.

Takes a small effort to set up (install Calibre, install NoDRM plugin, apply Kindle serial to plugin), but once it’s done, the rest is literally drag and drop, it removes DRM from your books automagically.

Like hell I don’t. Calibre plus NoDRM says otherwise.

You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.

For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.

Pretty great. Had a small (1050 sq/ft) house built in a semi-rural area and live comfortably. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, was only ~$210k. Bought about $6k in points to get the interest rate at 2.25%. My mortgage is less than I was paying in rent for a ratty old single bed/bath 640 sq/ft townhome.

Plus I got out of the city. It’s quiet. Night sky is beautiful out here. Just stars as far as the eye can see. I got mountain views, deer chilling outside my house. I’ve got one neighbor across the street and my next closest neighbor is like a quarter mile up the road. It’s lovely.

Also, I don’t plan on selling, but apparently the place is already worth something like 30% more than the purchase price.