A lot of decent ones have been mentioned so I’ll add a few I didn’t see:

• Keep your hands off Eizouken: I can’t express my love for this one enough; it’s beautiful, touching, funny, and just one of the most lovely things I’ve ever seen.
• Bocchi the Rock: very funny, and extremely uncomfortable for introverts but in a good way
• Delicious in Dungeon: extraordinarily good adaptation of the manga; this one isn’t done yet so who knows but it’s wonderful so far, and Studio Trigger’s animation won’t disappoint
• BNA: another Studio Trigger, lovely animation. I love how this one almost makes a point several times and then just glances off of it; it’s a bizarre one

thank you for the reminder to rewatch north by northwest

they make bad products that are media darlings because it’s fashion more than anything. they’re treated like consumer advocates but they are one of the absolute worst companies for vendor lock-in, and are absolutely anti-consumer, but will have innumerable articles written about how they’re “the best” for any given measure. it drives me nuts how the public perception of them is the complete opposite of what they actually are, and i don’t get it.

also their software is bad. all due credit their hardware impressed but it doesn’t matter if the software is crap.

and they aren’t private: they’ve got all your data but have somehow convinced everyone that it’s fine that they have it because they’re somehow better than every other large tech company.

you were cool the whole time

yes, things like Midwest emo are seeing a resurgence, see Origami Angel or Arcadia Grey for instance; or things that blend hyperpop with more pop/punk sensibilities like Dynastic. there’s a lot of it out there, it’s just not what’s mainstream.

yep. I use backblaze B2 with rclone, and just don’t worry since it’s encrypted (including the file names) before it leaves my server.

find a hobby and join up with folks that do the same locally. join a gym. go to a local pub and watch some sports. I find this far better than social media, however I also live in a (small) city; i don’t know how people manage in rural areas.

jq, or if I need to do something wacky a one-off python script.

The OS on the Steam Deck is Arch based, just like Manjaro, so I imagine it’ll do games.

I’m a fullstack developer as well, and use Arch as my daily driver, and have for the past 9 years. While I can’t speak for Manjaro directly, just the upstream, I have some coworkers that use it without issue. I think it’d be fine for your needs, at least worth trying out. I hear a lot of bleeding edge horror stories thrown around but in that 9 years 95% of problems were of my own doing, and the 5% were easily fixed with a rollback of a package. Out of that, my downtime isn’t worth mentioning it’s so negligible. I feel my coworkers on macos have more issues with major version upgrades by far.

On Arch-based distros, pkgbuild is a great way to handle custom packages when needed, and the AUR is gives me almost everything I need that isn’t in the official repos. It’s a great developer environment.

I’m very interested in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as well, was thinking of trying it out as my next distro on a personal machine to try out something new since I’ve been on a single distro for so long, but not because I need anything new, just sounds like fun.

I have left arch installs un-updated for months and had them be fine. I did leave one for a year once and the update hosed it, but it was still recoverable and runs fine to this day.

so, I wouldn’t worry much about the “update every week” thing. even on my daily driver I forget for a month sometimes.

I feel like this is the answer. if you’ve ever had to maintain a build pipeline or repository for .deb or .rpm, it’s not exactly pleasant (it is extremely robust, however). arch packaging is very simple by comparison, and I really doubt they’d need much more.

https://phixel.bandcamp.com/track/lemonade-2 or https://dynastic.bandcamp.com/track/caldecott

neither of these were in a genre I’d usually consider, but they got me into it. still when I listen to either, they’re in my head all day.

like most things, some of it is very good but the vast majority of it is extremely poor. I wouldn’t say I like or dislike it as a rule but I’d say on average I dislike it by far, and when it’s bad it has a way of being very intolerably bad.

not an issue if you live in a city centre where you won’t need to drive, or on the outskirts of somewhere that has good public transit. hard to say what your requirements are though; if you’re planning to have to commute or otherwise.

humanscale makes lovely stuff. I have some of their monitor arms and cable management and they’re top notch.

lol, that’s a huge bummer though. when I picked up this chair I lived in a fairly major city, and it was during the “we’re not doing return-to-office” times so I might’ve gotten lucky with what was being liquidated.

I have a sit/stand desk and so I spend about half the day in my chair. I use a Steelcase Think; I like how it’s relatively simple but still has a lot of articulation in its armrests, which makes it easy to get decent arm support where you need it. It’s very sturdy and of nice quality. my only complaint is that I wish its back didn’t have an inch of give before it hits the lock point at the furthest forward point, but this is really very minor.

if you live somewhere that you can go to an office surplus store, I’d super recommend doing that. I picked out this chair after trying a bunch out, and it was much cheaper than MSRP since it was used. they had like 20 different models and perhaps 5 of this one, and I picked out the nicest of the bunch.

I walk into my home office, as my company like many went fully remote during COVID and stayed that way. However prior to that I had two options:

I could bike, it was about 5.5 miles with bike lanes the whole way (until downtown, where the roads were shared but marked for bike traffic). I think it took me about 20 or 30 minutes, but honestly I don’t remember anymore. Going home took longer as it was uphill compared to the way in.

The other option was I could take public transit; there were both buses and a light rail and I greatly preferred the latter. When I did that, it was a 5 minute walk to the light rail, about a 20 minute ride, and then a 10 minute walk to the office.

At the time I lived in a decent sized US city, but since going remote I’ve moved somewhere smaller. However I really loved having good public transit, and if I ever had to go into an office again either being able to bike or public transit in is a big requirement for me; I can’t stand car commuting: it’s stressful and wasteful, and has a very negative impact on cities for those that live there.

smoking: I decided it was disgusting. it was like a switch flipped and I had no desire to do it anymore.

and it helps that it actually is super nasty (I can only imagine how I used to smell), and ruins everything; I just had to realize it.

Jet Set Radio, Chu Chu Rocket