Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

An interesting animated musical film that could probably be posted in ~music but I thought the animation was the standout aspect of this short video. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re into experimental or psychedelic animation, this short is a standout from the 80s. Definitely worth a watch if you’re in the mood for something unusual and a little disorienting.

In some games like Terraria or Horizon Forbidden West, you can have a "fake" set of armor on top of your "real" set of armor. The "fake" set defines how your character looks, while the "real" set determines your stats. This isn't a common thing in a lot of games, but in basically any game with different outfits with stats, I hear this being a requested feature. Whenever someone mentions this feature in a comment, people will chime in that it's cool and they wish [insert game here] would add it. The Horizon devs being one example of a studio who heard about this from the community of their first game, Zero Dawn, and added it to the sequel.

I really don't like this, even having it available as an option for single player games. Let me explain...

I think it really ruins the whole point of stat changing equipment in games. A big part of video games with customizable equipment and builds is designing a build and a character appearance that you like. Do you want to be slow with powerful attacks? Do you want to be fast with weak attacks? Do you want balance?

I'd argue that making a set that looks good while balancing the stats is another one of these things that adds to meaningful character creation decisions. Do you take the insane armor, or the really decent armor with worse stats that looks cool? Find a cool hat the character you're roleplaying as totally would wear? Oh, it has worse stats than the helmet you were using... But it weighs less! Maybe you can use a heavier chest plate to compensate for the stats you lost?

This also makes armor that both looks cool and has great stats into very valuable items that players want to get.

Of course for PvP games, having the type of armor that a player has on instantly give away their power level is important. On a Minecraft server, if you see two hostile players, one has leather armor, and the other has full netherite, you know the netherite guy is going to have better gear.

You might think this only matters for PvP games, but not allowing this mechanic in mostly single player games also adds a lot to the game, since you'll likely either see friends play the game or watch videos of other people playing the game. Each armor being intrinsically linked to certain stats creates a link between what you know that armor does and what kind of player would use that armor. In Elden Ring (which also has PvP, but bear with me), if you see someone wearing Bull Goat (the heaviest armor with the best stats), or wearing nothing but a jar on their head (to get worse defense but faster dodge rolls and some buffs to consumable throwing items), that tells you a lot about their play style just looking at their character's appearance. If both of these people could wear whatever armor they wanted and make the functional armor invisible, I would have no idea what build they had.

Using armor that looks good but has bad stats can be a fun flex to show you're good at the game, and choosing to have terrible fashion in exchange for stats is hilarious, as per this ProZD skit. That concept is a fun part of gaming culture I wouldn't want to see destroyed.

Overview

When I swapped the motherboard on my computer, I lost my Windows license and Microsoft support was useless. So I am switching my desktop over to Linux. I am planning on setting up dual boot, so that I still have Windows 10 with the watermark for certain use cases, but hoping I can run primarily Linux.

Previous Linux Experience

I have swapped an old laptop to Linux (elementaryOS) before and was able to have it do the simple tasks I required of that computer. I also have an old desktop running proxmox, with various VMs, primarily a NAS running openmediavault. Also, I took a college class on Linux system admin, which focused on various tasks on ubuntu. So overall, I am pretty familiar with Debian-based Linux and doing stuff in the terminal, but I would prefer to not have to use the terminal often.

Workload

So I use my computer for fairly normal use cases that should not be too problematic for Linux. Things I plan to do are:

• Non-competitive gaming (Minecraft, Civilization V and VI, occassionally single player FPS games)
• Video editing via DaVinci Resolve
• General web browsing
• Libre Office is what I plan to switch to from MS Office

Plans for testing

I am going to setup a VM on my hypervisor to try out the basic interface of each distro, and try basic tasks. Testing will probably not involve running the heavier applications such as DaVinci Resolve or games. However, I will look into the install process of some of these. For games, I am just going to rely on the work Steam has done for Linux gaming recently.

Things I am looking for in a distro

The things I want in a distro are:

• Debian based preferable, but am considering others
• Simple tasks can be done graphically, instead of via terminal
• Upgrade in place is preferable (I believe similar to how ubuntu now allows for upgrades to the next LTS does not require a reinstall)
• Similar UI to Windows 10 is preferable

Planned distros to test

Distros I wanted to try before posting

• popOS
• Mint

Distros I am considering testing after being recommended them:

• Arch
• Fedora (I am strongly leaning towards this one, but want to do more testing)