AliasVortex

If it helps, DCC is supposed to be over the top and kind of cringe. The tag line "the apocalypse will be televised" isn't for nothing, the whole premise of the book is basically Alien Wipeout meets The Hunger Games. Or Twitch chat runs The Most Dangerous Game might also be apt. The dungeon is meant to be the biggest train wreck that the audience can't look away from.

Taking the five pages thing at face value, you would have quit before any of the litrpg elements, so it's kind of hard to recommend any "tricks". Especially not knowing what turned you off the book/ genre beyond just "cringe". I'm not trying to gatekeep, but if you put the book down within the first chapter, then it's probably not the book/ series for you (and that's okay!), as it goes on it just gets more... more off the rails absurd/ gratuitously violent/ chaotic. The point is spectacle; it's YouTube taken beyond its most logical extreme; Tolkien or Herbert it is not (and that's also okay).

That said, if you are looking to take another shot at the series, I might recommend the DCC audiobooks, if listening to books is your thing. The narrator (Jeff Hays) is phenomenal and the production is masterfully well done.

If OP is trying to avoid corporate biases, Ground News may not be quite what they're looking for. Eric Rosenfield has an excellent pair of videos (one, two) doing a long form deep dive on the company. It's an excellent bit of citizen journalism and well worth the watch. That said, it's not a short watch, so the tldr is that by presenting both sides as having equal weight and relevance it normalizes the bat shit insane stuff presented by one of the sides. The second video digs into the Ground News owners/ board members and partner organizations used for assigning biases. All of which are overwhelmingly corporate and very far removed from the ideals of journalism.

404 Media? I'm not much one to follow news, so I can't speak to accuracy or biases, but I've heard them recommend as an independent source. Especially since, they should be less beholden to corporate interests since they're a journalist cooperative.

Woah! Running .net apps on Android is crazy, makes me wonder if it'd be possible to pull the same trick with RimWorld. I can't imagine it'd be too happy with a massive mod list, but the UI/ interface would probably translate pretty well.

Roasted beets and chickpea wraps seem to be a common Mediterranean style dish*, but if you serve with a side of M&Ms you can call yourself a Wrap God.

*I can't attest to how good the recipe is (or if a human has ever made it), but maybe something like this or this?

I have a soft spot for the Old Republic (since I feel like there's lots of room to tell stories without getting too tangled up in the canon), but realistically, I'd mostly be curious to put Larian and Dave Filoni in a room together and see what comes out.

Given that Star Wars seems to be exploring the space between the fall of the empire and the sequel trilogy, a motley crew of nobodies explores wild space could be super interesting. New civilizations, lost CIS/ Republic/ Imperial detachments, stranded smugglers, non-jedi force users, weird new aliens (or diverging evolutions of existing ones); it'd pretty much all be fair game.

I'd have Larian make a Star Wars RPG.

But it's really guessing, just like we all are.

Beyond the moralistic objections I have to LLMs, I have serious issues with being fed confidently incorrect answers. I've had my share of configuration hell and I'm not above throwing code at the wall to see what sticks, but at least I have the good sense to drop a comment or mention in my commit that "hey, there's a chance this isn't right and could cause problems".

Damn, those are really impressive results (especially off an ender)! I've got beefier machines and I've always been afraid to chase Lego tolerances with FDM prints.

Twofold answer, if I learned one thing in my high school culinary classes it's that you're more likely to get food poisoning from the produce on your plate than the protein. Generally it's pretty easy to tell if your burger is cold in the center, but it's much harder to know that the lettuce and tomatoes have been washed and stored properly. (I may also be slightly traumatized from the assignment where we had to pull the heath inspection records for local restaurants).

I don't necessarily mind trying something once or twice, but the part where I get really picky that there are certain foods that I just can't do the texture of. Tomatoes are probably the biggest one, something about the wet squishy crunch; I just can't (plus the acid tends not to sit so well with my stomach). Lettuce is the other, similar wet crunch to tomatoes, but with the added bonus that chewing/ swallowing a wad of wet plant mass sets off a gag reflex. Plus, it's my belief that lettuce as a vegetable is kind of pointless, I'd much rather sub in any other greens that pack more flavor/ nutrients, like spinach or arugula (still can't take a massive bite of just leaf, but decently proportioned it's fine).

Echoing that the best place to start is to get a handle on programming as a concept. Not because we're trying to gatekeep the good stuff behind the scary programmer voodoo, but because otherwise you're basically attempting to edit a book in a language you don't speak (and the reader is very picky about grammar).

That said, you can absolutely teach yourself to code! Hell, if you figured out self hosting I'm willing to bet you've probably already got a handful of transferable skills.

In the interest of disclosure, I learned programming as part of my degree (took a Java class as a resume booster my first semester and ended realizing that I preferred coding to calculus and switched my major), so I'm not exactly a wealth of knowledge in the self study department. However I would recommend a course that has labs/ challenges/ projects to practice what your learning. Everyone learns differently, but I've personally found that I picked up programming concepts better when I got hands-on and applied them in my assignments.

The programmer's open secret is that generally once you know one programming language, it's pretty easy to pick up another. For example, Java and Python might write them in different ways, but at the end of the day a loop is a loop and as long as you know you need to repeat some code until some condition is met, it's perfectly acceptable to Google "loop in Python" or "[Java concept] in Python". In other words, it doesn't super matter which language you start with; just pick something and stick with it (bonus points if you can turn around and tinker with an OSS app with what you're learning).