Luc

I met my best friend in an online open-source game that was pretty popular at the time (so far as foss games go). We were both into making games of our own and got talking because of that

He taught me the bits of programming I found particularly challenging, and we generally just chatted a lot and shared and played what we were making or came across online. He’s now a full-time game developer at a tiny company (so he does everything from coding to sysadmin to customer support) and I’m doing IT security consultancy where customer contact and an understanding of how networks and systems run is also core to the job. Kind of surprising how close they are, but also different enough that I’m sometimes surprised what he doesn’t know about security (not things he should have known necessarily, but still) and conversely I find the insights about game development still very interesting. Multiplayer lag hiding, as a random example. We’re a super good match. He lives about a day driving away so we see each other every few winter/summer holiday seasons since I was ~17, at which time we met up for the first time at the only LAN party ever organised for this game (where I had the honor of making the website and meeting all these friends I hitherto only chatted with, still probably the best weekend of my life). He lives in like the most beautiful mountainous region that never gets old to this flatlander. I’m so lucky to have a friend like this, never judging, always available, understands me exactly

Alright I see — and happy to hear it!

“space” to save anyone a click

Why not one of the northerly neighbors? Seems more attractive to me as someone from the Netherlands

There ought to be nonfictional countries that fit that bill lol

I tested it and there’ll be months where I do 400 queries and months where there’s maybe 200. Since it doesn’t carry over, I’ll simply have to use alternatives on a regular basis. Especially across all devices (all my work is on a computer, most of the time with unfamiliar technologies as the customer has a new project for us to pentest), I’ll be out of queries most months. My employer is too scrooge to pay for our primary internal communication tool (we pay for various crap where it’s mandatory, even if we barely need it, but not for a donation-run hosted service that we heavily use). They’re never going to subsidise the searches I do during work time so long as competitors are “free”. So I’ll be stuck with other engines regardless, or have to pay as much as for a streaming service. It just seems like a lot, especially when part of it goes to Russia and burn-the-world AI bros