I’ve made several friends on IRC and gotten acquainted with a lot of people with whom I want to remain in contact. There’s no point in moving to another platform, especially since, as u/luap@apollo.town pointed out, it “just works” and there’s a client for it on every platform you can think of. I have my own IRC bouncer (ZNC) set up on a server of mine. I have it tailored to my preferences, set it up to log all the conversations I care about across multiple servers, and I can connect to it from any device I own now or might own in the future - same exact experience on all of them.
Correct me if I’m wrong (I’ve never left a Steam review before), but isn’t the way Steam reviews work is that you either leave a thumbs up or a thumbs down? There doesn’t seem to be any rating scale. The “score” displayed on this page is presumably based on the ratio between positive and negative reviews, and the only thing it tells you is that about 90% of players aren’t convinced that whatever the game has to offer earnes it a recommendation, not that they all thought it deserved a 1 out of 10.
I would never expose it outside my network. The password used for authentication is too easy to brute force. If you really want to access it from anywhere, set it up for access within your network and then maybe use a VPN tunnel for devices outside the network. But anyway, setting up local access is problematic because it binds to localhost and gives you no option to change the binding address. There are several ways around this:
- Set it up behind a reverse proxy (I didn’t want to bother with this)
- Build the bridge from source after changing the binding address in the source code see https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge/pull/270 (seemed like the best option, but then I decided option 3 was better)
- Easiest option in my opinion: Set up local port forwarding with a redirection tool like rinetd, bind it to 0.0.0.0, only allow local IPs (you’d need port forwarding to access from outside anyway, but…), and redirect traffic from a particular port to the IMAP/SMTP server ports, for example:
0.0.0.0 1142 127.0.0.1 1143(bindaddress bindport connectaddress connectport); last step was to set it up as a systemd service.
I went with the third option and it seemed like so much hassle for such a simple requirement, honestly. If you decide you want to do this, feel free to ask for my configuration files.
This one stuck with me and resurfaces in my mind every now and then, particularly nowadays:
“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.” ~ Carl Sagan
Disco Elysium was full of such moments for me. Here’s one:
You spend a lot of time in the game basically talking to yourself and your inner voices, and one of these voices is volition. If you put enough points into it, it’ll chime in when you’re having an identity crisis or struggling to keep yourself together and it’ll try to cheer you up and keep you going. At the end of Day 1 in the game you, an amnesiac cop, stand on a balcony in an impoverished district reflecting on the day’s events and trying to make sense of the reality you’ve woken up into with barely any of your memories intact. If you pass a volition check, it’ll say the following line:
“No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it’s still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You’re still alive.”
This line in combination with the somewhat retro Euro setting, the faint lighting, and the sombre-yet-somewhat-upbeat music was very powerful. The image it painted was quite relatable for me. I just sat there for a minute staring at the scene and soaking it all in. Even though this is a predominantly text-based game with barely any cinematics/animations, I felt a level of immersion I had rarely, if ever, experienced before.
Oh, look at that. Someone actually made a volition compilation. 😀 This video will give you a better idea of what I’m describing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0 Minor spoilers alert!