Damn, this thread is awesome. I never really enjoyed reading until the end of last year and now I can't stop.

If you love these two books I can definitely recommend Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro as well, for me it was at least as good as the other two books you mentioned. His ability to create really meaningful and unique connections between characters is also present in this book.

Warbreaker is a fun standalone (for now) book for other Mistborn/Stormlight Archives readers in this thread. It is a little less action-packed, but if you also like the political aspects in other Sanderson books it is a great read (and it has some small connections to Words of Radiance).

The Pianist is a beautiful WWII-related non-fiction book about the experience of a Jewish pianist living through the German occupation of Poland.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a great book if you like magical realism. I enjoyed it so much I ended up reading it in one sitting.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is a story about a boy on a mystical journey learning many lessons about life. This book definitely provides some different perspectives on life in general and it is also just a fun story to get sucked into.

It's always good to ask questions and be critical about everything you read.

This is a tough dilemma. On the one hand you should be able to question everything and be able to believe what you want to believe. On the other hand, people not following the rules because they choose to believe the pandemic is a hoax have been forming a big problem in tackling the pandemic because they spread the virus much more easily and in that way also negatively affect everyone who is following the rules. That's a reason to try to avoid discussions as much as possible.

Vaccines do reduce the chance of transmitting the virus (see Domo's post). And besides that, the chances of you getting sick yourself are significantly reduced.

Besides reasons considering group immunity, I think you're downplaying the effect that infection with the virus can have on young adults. I personally know three people in their 20s who have had trouble with breathing after any slight form of physical activity, in addition to feeling tired for months after getting infected. Additionally, we don't know what the long-term effects of infection can be. This can be said for the vaccines as well, but I personally would rather gamble on a vaccine designed to help my immune system rather than a virus that can damage your lungs.

In the Netherlands, our ICUs were overwhelmed multiple times and we had to move some patients to German hospitals to deal with that. Many non-urgent operations had to be postponed for months. In Italy and some parts of the US, the situation was much worse even. And keep in mind: a lot of measures were already in place at that time, so it could have been 10x worse than it already was if that hadn't been the case.

Although there are plenty of reasons to be worried about a dystopian world (look at China for example), I don't think this pandemic is a start to it. Measures taken by the government are slowly disappearing, so unless you believe that the vaccine contains a micro-chip, things are slowly returning back to normal (ignoring any ridiculous mutations that could form, but that's for another discussion).

I understand that some of these answers are things being said by government and/or scientists which you can either believe or not believe. Again it's good to be critical, but this counts for all different theories you can find online. Just because a dystopian future is quite likely to come eventually, that doesn't mean that the entire pandemic is likely to be related to it.

I don't know you, but I understand that your current unhappiness makes you feel like life is not worth it. However, if you were to close your eyes for 5 minutes and think about the elements of a life that would make you happy, do you really think that all those elements are unobtainable for you? You are no lesser person than any of the billions of people that have found happiness. Despite your username suggests, your agoraphobia does not actually define who you are. Even if you have been unable to overcome it, that doesn't mean you cannot have control over how much it (or any other problems you might have) affects your happiness.

If you want to take control over your happiness you have to take a small leap of faith outside the comfortable escape which the internet and the tf2 grind provide, and accept your current situation. It only takes a few minutes of acceptance to schedule your first (online) appointment with a professional, it only takes a few minutes of acceptance and vulnerability to open up to the people who care about you and tell them about the real problems making you unhappy and holding you back. You will be faced with the full reality of your current situation, but at the same time you will have taken a big step towards a happier life and will now have the support of other people to help you get there.

Hang on man, there is so much purpose you can give to your life.

Honestly I think a new UI installer would help which automatically moves the user files to the right directory on the first installation, and allows for customization at three levels: preset > module selection > individual setting selection. You already have existing documentation for each of these customization levels which you can add to help users make the right choices for themselves. In this way, users can customize their config up to the level that they feel comfortable with while still allowing them to tweak little details if they have the need to do so.
Edit: I'm already a user though and I personally have no problems with the way it works now.

He means that you're supposed to run CoreTemp while playing tf2, and then check the max temperatures.

Comanglia's config is outdated, you should definitely try to use mastercomfig. Follow the installation instructions (including how to clean up your tf2) so you can make sure that your tf2 settings/config are not causing any issues.

I checked this and it seems to have been the problem. I had the same OC for a long time but with the recent temperatures inside my house my CPU couldn't handle it anymore so I had to turn it down a little. Thanks!

Lately I've had a weird issue with fps slowly decreasing while playing. It's most obvious on jump servers because I usually have a stable 300 fps there. After 5-10 minutes my fps slowly starts decreasing (keeping a variance of around 5 fps) and at some point I have like 70 fps. I can reset this with hud_reloadscheme which will give me 300 fps until it starts dropping again. When I remove my custom HUD the same thing happens so it's not related to my HUD. My config data: https://pastebin.com/21tWLbm9
RAM/CPU usage is pretty much constant according to task manager. Any ideas why this is happening?

Even though you put in alot of effort into the config and you definitely deserve donations for your work so far, I have my doubts about whether or not machine learning is the way to go. Quite alot of people use your config so you can get quite some data, but your config contains hundreds of commands and there are tens/hundreds of different hardware setups. Do you have any current data about how many people use your config installer, and do you think you will get enough data to actually find significant links between optimised commands and hardware specs? Obviously you're in a way better position to know if it's possible, I'm just wondering about the possible results.

Again, in theory it's a nice way to improve your config and I really do think you deserve the donations, but if you're gonna promise some extra small performance improvements for donators in this way and pay for servers yourself, it would be nice to have some certainty about the actual results from using machine learning.

Thank god 10 years ago people decided to call them speedshots and not speedbugs.

Most of this sounds pretty good and winlimit 5 can definitely work for this, but I think a short round timer is definitely not the right way to fix stalemates because it allows the team that is not in control of mid to simply stalemate into a new round where they can have another midfight.

Alot of powerline adapters overheat really easily. When you have internet problems, you should feel the powerline adapter connected to your pc and see if it's really hot.

Not gonna draw any conclusions from the lobby I just played with you, since that was very chaotic. Also my viewpoints might be debatable but I wanted to give you feedback since no one else did.

Looking at the map, I think it has potential, but it has big problems with pushes.

http://i.imgur.com/l7XuX5W.png

Starting with mid: a decent team can easily lock down all the entrances in a 6v6 even ubers situation.
The middle entrances are really small and can be locked down with stickies and spam. The only way to break through is with an ubercharge, or with the fast rollout that you have demonstrated. Both these tactics are not very useful because the defending team has an enormous height advantages. A pocket scout can easily deny any jumpers, and the incoming uber can be spotted very early on by a flank scout looking at left flank, allowing the combo to even retreat to their own sheds which are not spammable by the enemy team, and then repush.

Looking at the right flank: it has a huge sightline with alot of height advantage on the right wall. Only a sniper can counter that sightline, any other classes have no business running to this flank.
Meanwhile the flank scout has a huge sightline looking through the left flank (not visible on this screenshot), being able to see everything besides the right flank. He can spot the enemy combo pushing up and any jumpers doing the fast rollout.

Suggestions: rework the middle entrances so they are more accessible, lower the sheds (and make them more horizontal) to decrease the height advantage, block the sightline from left door into main, and remove the wall on the right flank.

http://i.imgur.com/PGvkEFC.jpg

Besides holding middle, basically any forward hold is also very powerful. I think the main area before mid is way too small for team fights. There's a height advantage for the team holding mid, and they can also get behind cover and retreat to mid if the enemy team somehow manages to do more damage.

Suggestions: widen the entire main area before mid, remove the wall on the right side of the screenshot.

http://i.imgur.com/er5gOUy.jpg

As if wiping on mid isn't bad enough, it's even worse if the other team decides to push forward and spawn camp. There's only two spawn doors really close to each other which can easily be stickied by the enemy demo, who can stand on the walkway in the back of the screenshot, and easily get healed by his medic inside the room. Again, if the spawncamping team gets outdamaged they can easily retreat without getting punished because the other team has to push through a small entrance or through a really tiny chokepoint.

Suggestions: maybe make the area wider so the spawn doors can be further apart, give the spawners a small height advantage.

These are just a few basic suggestions, I think more things should be fixed but these are the issues that should be focused on first. I do like the space on mid and the fast rollouts, so try to preserve that.

Do you happen to have "mat_antialias 0" in your config? If so remove that, and add "mat_antialias 1" to your config. Also try running with "-default" as launch option.

This file is probably used by tf2 to run the default settings for your PC (if you scroll down you can see additional settings for different GPUs). If you don't like the way graphics configs look this might be a good method to balance performance and graphics, but this trick is not gonna give you more fps than configs like Comanglia's config.