Yeah there’s absolutely a rating to look for and N95 is part of that, stateside, you have niosh ratings, you’ll see these wrt industrial ppe, but there are ratings for use with CN and CS gas. My experience with them is the chemical cartridges usually have a p100 filter combined with them for particulate too. Organic Vapour & Acids are easy to get a hold of (Used these when i worked in O&G), I don’t know how well they’d work against teargas unfortunately.

I will 100% recommend north full face, a half mask is probably better than nothing but the full face gives you eye protection too. I didn’t personally like the 3m style masks, but it’s all down to personal preference, just make sure it fits correctly.

The “I Heart Vanilla” pack is supposed to be good for that, I run with Just Good Morrowind, plays extremely well on the steamdeck too.

It’s still by far my favourite of the series.

Track everything you eat, even when you’re in a good place, keep tracking. I have ADHD so I’ve found it best to treat it like I do financial tracking, it becomes habit very quickly and apps like waistline make it super easy to enter, especially if you’re in the habit of weighing everything.

I have to minimise the smacks kept in the house, and what we do keep tends to be “better” or at least less calorie dense. I don’t deny myself cravings, but I’ll follow servings and budget for it in calories. Waistline averages out calories over a configurable period so I don’t sweat going over one day, all balances out over the long term.

Therapy helped a lot, if only to help me have a healthier relationship with food, my therapist has a lot of experience with addiction & substance abuse and food can absolutely be a drug (which is not acknowledged enough imo). Between that and getting treatment for ADHD I’ve managed to get back down to one of the lowest weights I’ve been as an adult. I’ve tried to make it a lifestyle change which I credit heavily to success as well. My partner having a health scare that forced them to review their diet also helped tbf, but we were already on that path, was just some extra push.

What you eat can help too, fibre being a big one. Make friends with legumes, add them into your cooking. I like chickpeas and lentils, will add them into a lot of dishes I cook. Use seeds too, ground flax tastes great and adds a lot of good fats, sunflower and pumpkin seeds go well in salads. I like to do meals that can serve leftovers, stuff like soups & stews are great because they don’t have a lot of active cooking (you throw stuff into a pot and let it simmer for a while). Higher quality calories are helpful, tell you that personally I’ll feel fuller longer eating some porridge with flax and fruit in the morning than the occasions I’ll grab a McMuffin or something.

I have an LCD one, got my partner an OLED one last year. It’s noticeably better looking with a sightly larger screen and the battery life is decidedly better. I got the LCD when it was steeply discounted and don’t regret it, but the oled one is a nicer device. Thumbsticks are broader and it’s also a bit lighter.

Do you care about having decent enough devices to enjoy it or do you just buy the cheapest pair of earbuds to silence the world around you?

I have some nice headphones and a decent enough dac/amp (subjective obviously, I tend to go for good cost/performance), to me there’s a floor I’ll want to use, cheap Sony buds were mine. If it doesn’t absolutely destroy the music (tinny, compressed, etc. Crap devices can really make things unpleasant, there are cheap buds that aren’t crap).

Do you have favorite albums or do you just hit play on a random playlist and zone out?

It’s all mood dependent, I do absolutely have favourite albums, but I often listen to a playlist of albums either my partner or I have found.

Do you ever listen to music just to enjoy it and nothing else?
Yes, definitely.

Do you talk with passion about your favorite songs/albums/artists?
All the time, my partner is also really into music so we talk about it all the time. I totally share albums and stuff to colleagues and friends, I tend to listen to a lot of different genres so have a bunch to chose from. I tend to have more favourites in terms of recent listens, some exceptions though.

Do you spend time searching for music?
Yeah, all the time. Some weekends I’ll just browse bandcamp and find albums that sound interesting to me. Totally a couple’s activity for my partner and I, very regularly share finds with each other or things that we might think the other would like. Sometimes also do playlists up of stuff we think might expand the other’s listening, different genres or styles we might have missed or glazed over.

Music is art to me, I love looking at the evolution of genres, hearing influence between genres (some genres have similar roots and cross over, but also really interesting to hear totally unique takes). I like collecting records if only for the large format, some albums have amazing art on them. I do also use music as a coping mechanism, was something I used to help handle undiagnosed ADHD for years, would always have music on to drown out surroundings.

I also really liked Heaven’s Vault, really recommend that as well. Tunic is probably one of my favourite recent games, genre wise very different but still in that translation category.

Chants was probably in my top I played last year, absolutely loved the soundtrack too.

The only real issue is hdr in my experience, runs fine through gamescope usually but I’ve found the proton only option (expose Wayland and the like through proton_ge) technically work but the colours are washed out (and yeah, I have all the dxvk hdr stuff there). Dlss and frame gen work perfectly fine, HDR through gamescope does work as well for most games, bl4 has weird dlss artifacts in linux for some reason but that’s the notable standout to me. Been running a 4070ti for the last year for reference, I do intend to go amd at some point but nvidia works fine.

Thank you, I’ll have a look after work!

That’s actually amazing, can you choose the bots you’re filling the raid/party slots with? I’ve got wicked nostalgia for wotlk and my partner was interested in wow when classic came out but they’ve had bad experiences with pug raids in other games (heck, even issues with guilds). Would you mind posting a link to some of the guides you used?

The New Colossus has you covered there.

I did it for the hell of it, I think it had 60-80 fpm after the opening cutscene, literal slideshow experience.

There’s people on proton db claiming higher frames, but like 18-22 fps, def far from playable

FiiO has some that aren’t super pricey (they run a range, their entry level stuff is usually really affordable), their amps and DACs are pretty solid in my experience so I’d totally look into one, second hand would definitely be an option there too.

It was one course (had a you fail the course if you got a sub 40% on the final) and I was able to rewrite the exam in the summer, loss of structure killed me coming from hs. Was definitely a wake up for me as well, had study groups and roommates in subsequent years which helped me (and unhealthy quantities of caffeine)

Got diagnosed with ADHD around a decade after graduating, which explained pretty much everything looking back.

Yeah, was like just over a year later, they still are the independent & small label place imo, I don’t have faith that’ll last forever unfortunately. They still are my go to place for discovery and exploration, bandcamp daily still has some interesting finds, I just make sure I download my purchases.

They sold it to Songtradr in 2023, there were “layoffs”, a lot of the employees involved with unionisation while Epic controlled the company were fired (in the wiki page toward the end of the history section).

I’ve come to really like WW over the years, that and TP may be my favourite of the console Zelda games, the graphics of WW aged pretty well imo, art style still looks great some 23 years later.

Never did like pro level (and never had aspirations to do so), but way back in the day, the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) had an amateur league fittingly called the Cyberathelete Amateur League (CAL), we had a small team for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars that we competed in, didn’t do stellar but it was a blast, met people from other teams we’d often practice with or just do pub games.

It was total beer league type stuff, if you can find a group like that imo it’s worth it, would love to have that type of experience again, end the day stakes were low and we played for fun, people took it serious but not too serious if that makes sense, it’s really easy to kill the enjoyment if someone takes it too far though.

Stardew Valley as well

Same vein, the Canadian/Laurentian Shield has areas dating back as far as 4.2 billion years, recall a geo prof in uni suggesting it would have been extremely tall, Wikipedia suggests 12km.

Stuff gets unreal to me at geological timescales.

It’d be coated, but it’s from processing, cold rolling metal generates a lot of heat, especially going that thin (thinnest I was around often was ~0.2mm), we’d often temper the material after processing, mainly for surface finish, mill rolls would be sprayed with lubricating coolant really close to what you’d see in use on a milling machine. This was with steel but same principle applies, pretty sure the lubricant we used is also labeled for use on aluminum mills, but you’d use food safe stuff for kitchen foil.