Red states wondering where all the entwives went…

Archive.org and cross your fingers?

Inners amirte?

If you liked Scalzi, I highly recommend Old Man’s War if you haven’t read it. I’ve only read first one, so I can’t speak to the rest of the series, but I really enjoyed the kind of gritty starship troopers-esq vibe laced with humor and realistic characters.

Depends, can you see the future?

Agreed! I had a math professor once say that epiphanies usually happen in one of the three B’s: Bed, Bathroom, and Bus. There really is something magical about stepping away to let your brain chew on a problem.

Man, it sounds like you’d be an awesome addition to the community! Definitely approach it on your own terms, 3d printing can be as cheap or expensive a hobby as you make it (speaking as the owner of a Thessian Enser 3).

It’s incredibly powerful (and satisfying) to be able to fix the plastic bit of something and give it a new life rather than just throwing it away.

Kinda depends, if it’s a popular something, there’s usually a model online that someone else has been kind enough to share (generally on Printables and/ or Thingiverse). My most recent experience with that was the shift knob on my mixer cracked and fell off, a quick download, a few grams of filament, 20 minutes, a few persuading taps with a mallet, and everything was good to go.

Beyond that, it’s a bit of personal preference and a bit of you’re trying to do, something like a dial cluster in a car is going to be far more complex that something like a mounting bracket. The stuff I tend to fix/ replace tends to be fairly small, so personally, it’s a matter of sitting down with a pair of calipers to measure the object and replicate it in CAD (Autodesk got me young, so I’m on the Fusion 360 train at the moment). One of the most amazing things about 3d printers is that you can go from design to prototype extremely rapidly, which allows you to iterate the design and make it better each pass. Got a hole doesn’t quite line up, a wall that’s too long, an arm that doesn’t quite reach, etc? tweak it and try again. It’s a little bit of trial and error, but with experience it becomes more of a controlled process as you figure out what works and what doesn’t.

I don’t know about the original, but I rocked a Droid 4 for the longest time. It’s probably my all time favorite phone. I really miss how quickly I could type and the extra screen space I got from not needing the software keyboard.

Enh, I’m not so sure about that, one of the most unique parts of RimWorld is that the primary goal is to tell a story. Even the best stories need a bit breathing room for the action-y bits to have weigh. RimWorld is filled with stories about colonies that ran out of food in the dead of winter, lone survivor types that either bleed out or later died of infection after a freak hunting mishap, or trying to hide from the flames and wait out the raiders/ murder machines. It may be waiting, but I find that more often than not (especially in the early game), it’s either a welcome break after a hectic day or an edge-of-your-seat fight-for-survival kind of waiting.

Everyone plays a bit different, personally I’d recommend playing the vanilla game for a bit and using mods to flesh things out or iron out any rough edges in how you experience the game. The modding scene for the game is absolutely phenomenal, if at any point you’re going “gee, there’s got to be a better way to do X, deal with Y, or add more Z”, there’s probably a mod that does it, for example I like designing my colony fairly early on (so I have something to build towards), but since the existing mono-color plan gets confusing pretty fast (what was wall and what was workbench, tool cabinet, light, etc), I find More Planning to be a bit of a must have. As a blanket statement, the Vanilla Expanded mods are very well done and integrate neatly into the game (that said, they aren’t necessary meant to all be run at once, so you can pick and choose what you want and go from there).

I have a pretty decent list going, but if we’re just talking a short list of personal favorites, I really love Megafauna, Frozen Snow Fox’s Bionics, and Cyber Fauna. (Oh and a shameless self-plug for my own mods)

I’m 1800hrs in (with probably another couple hundred making mods), Rimworld is pure crack in all the best ways possible. Hands down the best $30 I’ve ever spent on a game.

Seconding the overwhelming urge to spreadsheet trade routes in No Man’s Sky.

Have you looked into HALCYON 6? Not quite buying and selling goods, but it might be a good spot to get your feet wet before diving into something super complicated. You do have space station and fleet and need manage resources (and upgrades) while scouting/ developing/ defending a broader galaxy. The end game can get a little repetitive, but overall it’s a pretty solid indy game with colorful characters, fun pixel art, and Star Trek vibes (plus it’s a little older, so goes on sale pretty regularly).

I don’t know about making no sense, but photography, especially fim, has some fun phrases: subjects are lit up and shot. Afterwards, you go into a dark room and blow them up, burn them (if you don’t dodge), and stick them in an acid bath.

In reality, it’s lighting and taking a picture, projecting it onto photo paper, basic edits (darkening/ lightening specific areas), and processing the photo paper.

I don’t think duckduckgo has a cached view (since the results tend to be a mix of the in house crawler and other sources, like bing), but I like cachedview.com for accessing Google’s cache (or the archived instance if Google doesn’t happen to have it).

Final Space deserves to be mentioned here. I know there’s a wrap up graphic novel slated and I’m super excited to see where Olan goes with Godspeed. But having the whole ip basically wiped off the face of the earth as a tax write off has to be one of the most messed up ways to cancel a show…

When I first found Dark Matter I told my siblings that it filled the Firefly shaped hole in my heart… Now I have two holes in my heart.