I’m fairly certain the RAM is soldered and capped, but it has 16gb, so more than I could reasonably touch anyway. It has a 500gb soldered SSD, but I know there’s a slot for another. The only reason I wanna ‘start’ by getting a rack and hard drives is because I watched my friend lose his mind one weekend while he migrated multiple terabytes of data and he has since repeatedly recommended keeping the storage separate and plug and play, haha.

I’m 100% down to give all this a shot, though. As soon as I upgrade, this laptop is immediately getting recycled into the first step server (and very probably the final step unless something drastic changes in my life).

Best camera ever: has deeply flawed memory system. Sometimes makes things up during processing.

Wow, I really loved this analysis. It’s so coherent and clear on reflection, I really have trouble believing any other interpretation is as accurate.

The unfortunate reality is ‘what I’ve got’ is a 6 year old laptop that represents 60% of my net worth. 😅 Hopefully soon that will change, but for now, I’m taking the free/borrowed friend’s setup.

My game plan in the future is just to turn this laptop and a couple hard drives, though. I think comments like yours and a couple others have convinced me I really don’t need to invest all that much to get started, or really finished with the setup.nif you’re running all that on 8gb of RAM, I think the only thing I’m missing is the storage.

Don’t ask a MAGA voter to reconcile any two of their conspiracy beliefs and expect anything more than blank staring and excuses, honestly.

My friend shook me of any notion that I needed all that much, haha. I made a joke about getting a room set up for this and he shamed me by showing my resource use versus his. 🤣

Realistically, I think the only thing I’d ever end up needing is a ton of hard drives. That’s like… the biggest physical thing I need and as someone else in the thread pointed out there are some pretty solid smaller racks for that. My “starter” setup is going to be my current laptop when I upgrade in a year or so.

Edit: Whoa, that sounds like an incredible setup! All that is running fine on 16gb of RAM? Man, I really just need to do more reading about this so I can get a better sense of how all this works.

Hahaha, my friend said the exact same thing. He was debating downsizing and then moved into a house. Once he got situated, he was like, “Fuck it. This is the server room now.” It worked out because it heats that side of the house during winter. 🤣

Ooh, thanks for the tip and the link, I’ll join that community as well! As far as I can tell, just based on what my friend has taught and what I’ve read, these smaller racks are basically all I’d ever need. I’m just a weeb who likes to read… and maybe host a PDS. Possibly a Lemmy instance. And you know, it would be nice to handle my own password manager… (I promise I’ll stop).

I built one myself a year ago. I have a small pcengine APU Box for OpnSense firewall, two Lenovo tiny boxes as Proxmox hosts that run as a high available cluster, and a Mini PC with a JBOD as NAS.

I understand some of these things now! :D (Also, that is such a cool setup. That’s exactly what I wanna end up with!)

His use-case also went up over time, too. I’m in no way qualified to explain, but he trains neural nets for his PhD and does some remote work stuff for some people on his team. As insane as that thing sounds, he’s one of the most frugal people I know and this is like the one thing he really splurges on, and as far as I can tell, he’s not quite using all of it but it’s close.

I definitely don’t see myself ever getting quite that crazy with it, but I definitely want a slice of that capability for myself. If just to host all my tentacle porn. 😔

The full idiom of “speak of the devil and he doth appear” seems like it would be chaotic and bizarre.

ADDAB 😔

When I lived in Florida, I used to teleport to Waffle House all the time, too. Usually it happened shortly after someone decided we should switch from weed and beer to weed and whiskey.

PEETS

I can’t speak to SRS because I’m slightly leaning away from it myself, but ultimately undecided.

That said, I can give a bit of insight into a similar experience with HRT. When I started HRT, I had quite a few issues with ED and I just thought that’s how it was supposed to be. Eventually, I started taking Tadalafil to help with the issue and that was an okay bandaid for a while (honestly, it wasn’t such a big deal, I just kept a little in my sleep over bag and in my bathroom medicine cabinet).

When I swapped doctors, we did a little meetup to talk about how things were going and I brought up the ED situation. My doctor recommended we try changing up the HRT prescription (a very slightly lower dose of Finasteride, a slightly higher dose of Estrogen, and starting Progesterone) and the ED issue basically went away completely.

If you haven’t yet, definitely check with the doctor about seeing if modifying your HRT dosages may help!

Edit: as an after thought, my bloodwork was showing I already had a relatively low testosterone level before HRT, so I was WAY overdoing the blockers (even below the range of CIS women) and similarly, I had an average to slightly below average estrogen levels (as compared to CIS women).

I’m not saying don’t use others, I was just offering ones that I’ve been told to use. :3 If they work for you, go for it!

I think steward comes across slightly more like a ‘head servant’ type rather than a title of someone you (as a sub) are giving yourself to. You could maybe have fun with some roleplay elements in that, but for me SFF books have ruined the title as one which I would ‘worship’.

I think I’m too much of a control freak to ever make this a reality. I’d need like, exactly the right group, also I would need to be friends with them, and I’d need them to know exactly how to treat me.

Maybe one day, though. :3

I hare them so much I can’t even type right

I’ve quit it for all except my reading and writing communities at this point, and only because I haven’t found anything comparably sizable. If and when I can, I will be trying to help build up alternatives for those, though. Fuck reddit.

People will attribute masculine and feminine gender to ‘master’ and ‘mistress’ respectively, but I think master would be the ‘neutral’ pick here.

Or you can shuck the dynamic with: owner, divine, ruler, royal, liege, or any number of ranks with which you attribute subservience! :3