The news itself is good - publicity as it were. IM coming back is good too.

I still wish Killing and I could've worked out a deal but that was blocked by some of the powers that be that have since faded into the sunset :/

The main reason more games weren't casted in general is because we were short folks to do camera all season and honestly pretty short on casters too relative to some (recent) past seasons - but camera/streamers were the major limiting factor.

I'll second Marmaduke's suggestion, if you're still young and living at home expectations are likely nil and even less if you're not working. Try and make something if nothing else - there are plenty of DIY projects that you'll likely fuck up a bunch of times and learn something useful, but could result in neat stuff.

Double elimination brackets are fairly popular in high school (and younger) Basketball here (Indiana) - most tournaments are either double elimination brackets or round-robin. Let me tell you if you lost your first game you would play 5-6 games in a day unless you lost your second one lol, and the LB team had to beat the WB team twice - because the WB is rewarded for having won through by not having to play nearly as much, giving them a decided advantage as a reward for being as of yet undefeated.

For tf2, in our 26 seasons, we've had all 3 possible outcomes: WB team just wins through, WB team loses first series and wins second series, LB team wins both sets. The only real downside to the format is it takes a long time - but when it was a LAN that wasn't as much of a concern; now we're starting at 10:30 PM and playing no-sleep Olympics if the LB team wins.

The biggest problem with eating healthy is that people tend to buy too much produce at once, and then you end up wasting a bunch of it. So, you either make more frequent trips to your grocer, or you cheat, and turn it into a soup once it starts to go bad. Fruit obviously not so much, but vegetables generally go ezpz into a soup, and if you end up needing to make a bunch, it freezes fairly well (with some exceptions). If you use store-bought stock make sure it's the low sodium version though, if nothing else than to have more control over how much salt goes into said soup. This is how I've functioned pretty much since college, in that I'll have a soup for lunch with some bread basically every day, and said soups are frozen in meal sized containers which is nice for portion control and taking to work.

For fruit, once it starts to go, you can cut the yucky bits off, and then place it in a ziplock bag with a little sugar added and freeze it for a pretty nice dessert type item. If you're a real beast you can make fruit pies or fruit-added confections of various sorts (baking is a good skill).

I go to a butcher and get 2-3 meal sized meats per week and make sure one of them has some bones so I can generate my own stock. As far as types, it just depends on what he's got that particular day.

Living in a rural area I also have my acre + 1/2 garden so freezing and canning are pretty essential to waste as little as possible - but I realize that's out of reach for lots of people (though basil grows well indoors and can be added to just about anything).

Also, tomato is delicious but make sure you're not eating tons of it because it will eventually erode the lining of your stomach and give you sad times. I ran into that here because I tend to put down 8 tomato plants per season and I ended up having tomato for just about every meal and was not the better for it lol.

Also, beans, lentils, and other dry beans are handy because they cost like 1$ a pound and they keep forever.

As far as recipes there are TONS of cooking shows on youtube that will walk you through just about anything you could want. There are even historical cooking shows lol.

Drink and work same as any other time.

I should also recommend the Arcanum soundtrack, one of the neatest game OSTs, meant for string quartet, but the sheet music is also available for free online and there are plenty of students who play them:

https://youtu.be/ZDS7HZkeqZg or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtf1fmWRhM8 for example. The fellow who wrote the music for this game now teaches Music at Berkley IIRC lol.

I've always been partial to Shostakovitch for all my music needs - but I like a more down tempo version than how yoyo ma plays it there because it allows for more sweeping stuff later :D

You can build a very respectable PC for 700-800 (depends on how part prices change) so if you've already got 500$ you may as well just wait and add another 200$ on top and have something that'll last you for 5+ years. If not, Zenity's build there doesn't look too bad, you could even shave a few dollars here and there, but again when you build your own PC there are some financials to consider:

Shipping costs - unless you have some kind of membership deal like amazon prime etc, shipping is probably going to run you an extra 30-40$ or more depending on where you live

Sales Tax: You may end up having to pay sales tax which could add an additional 25-30$ depending on your state (you can check if you'll have to pay in advance by seeing if your on-line vendor has a presence in your state).

Windows: 100$ for new windows - there are ways around this, including just reusing an older windows key if you've still got uses on it, or piracy, but that comes with its own problems.

So all told that's 160ish$ of your 500 that's going to not hardware, and at that point if you have a hard limit of 500$ it's basically not worth it because you're actually trying to build a 300$ PC.

What sort of skills do you have with which you can be helpful.

check your gain setting in mumble. When your gain is too high you'll end up with a very loud hissing noise in the background that will only go away if you're basically screaming and not a lot of other sound will make it through. That'd be my guess.

I'd doubt it's the PSU if it's turning on and all of your components are turning on - I'd get a nice bright flashlight and look over the board and see if you see anything that looks like it popped or fried, especially anything around your PCIe slots. It could also be an HDD/SSD issue and I imagine you've probably run a chckdsk already - but if you've not at least that's something more to try. If you've still got the manual you may be able to find the full mapping of the board and that could alert you to spots to look in for broken components.

But from the sounds of things it's either some electrical component that routes out of or to your PCIe slots or it's your storage device. I'd give your SATA and etc ports a good look over with a flash light.

Another thing to check is to go through your BIOS pretty extensively - because some boards have brown-out protection that will fiddle with default settings to make sure your computer doesn't kill itself when it receives too little power to run components correctly and perhaps something is being throttled by your BIOS not having come out of brownout protection.

Sometimes with fried components it's hard to really see them if they just popped and didn't fully burn up so using a magnifying glass if you've got one would be a good idea because sometimes the holes in say, something like a capacitor, can be EXTREMELY small with no real sign that anything is wrong externally. On the bright side most electrical components cost less than 10$ - then all you need to know is how to solder things - or know somebody who does. (A 3 Wire Receptacle Tester only costs like 8-10$ and should last you years and years and it will tell you if you're protected or not when used on a power strip - a cheap multimeter is usually around 20-30$ especially if you wait on sales and you can use it for all sorts of fun projects, but the 8-10$ three tester will be more than enough for most people).

I should also point out that although some surge protectors are really cheap (you can pick some up on amazon for 5-6$) typically those extra cheapo surge protectors only survive *one* surge and then their surge protecting capability is gone and you're essentially just using an extension cord. If you invest a lot in your PC it's a good idea to either test your surge protector after every power surge or outage, or buy a fancy one that specifically states it will survive multiple surges (but still test it anyways) - those tend to range in the 40-60$ range, but they tend to have 12+ outlets and all kinds of wacky stuff going on, which is really nice as long as your house can manage having that much crap plugged in at once lol.

My uncle built himself a house out in the middle of nowhere atop one of the few hills out here. Said hill ended up being man-made, constructed by the Mound Builder culture - but that was only discovered after the house was more or less fully built. It was a heavily wooded area on a floodplain, so often times the whole area around would flood, except for his house. He had 3 kids which were all basically my best friends growing up - and we'd go over there all the time.

But one summer day we decided to be particularly rambunctious and go deep into the forest to find the river (responsible for the flood plain) to see what a relatively untouched portion of the river would look like and have a swim. We ended up finding a whole crazy assortment of trees, animal dens, and the remnants of a few pre-1900s homes (foundations, water pumps). But ultimately decided to stop poking around those areas for fear of finding a well or cistern and dying. We ended up finding a few pine trees - pine trees are not native to Indiana - and they were absolutely massive. So we climbed to the top, being as unkempt evergreens are super easy to climb, and got an excellent view of the wilderness, the river, etc.

They've sold the house now and moved away, and my cousins all live far away too - but I sometimes fantasize about tracking down who owns it now and asking if I could snap some photos from the evergreens on their land because the view was just that special lol.

Ok so here are some things.

Besides you doing something wacky, like spilling water directly onto the earbuds or the cord itself (not all cords are water resistant - they will TELL YOU SO on the cord itself usually by the plug - an important thing when shopping for any electrical appliance) or running your earbuds through some kind of amplifier that blows out the speakers.

Now, wiring - a short in the wiring somewhere is what is going to cause an ear to stop functioning - the reason why is that the wiring itself is made of copper. Copper has a special thing about it in that it work-hardens. That means, the more times you flex that cord, the copper is going to get harder and harder each time you flex it. That *sounds* good but eventually after you flex the cord enough times the copper is going to get so hard that it becomes brittle and ultimately breaks or frays. This is why *most* consumer electronics short out at or near any kind of joint. So the junction where the 2 earbud wires split off or where the cord meets the bud itself, where your xbox controller wires meet the big rubber bit that plugs into the board, or where the extension connector is, or headphones at the volume control, because you have copper wiring held rigidly inside of a container of some sort, with loose copper wiring just outside that will flex a bunch and eventually become so hard that it snaps. You can see the effects of hardening on mouse cords and extension cords - you've likely seen cords where the wire simply won't be straight anymore - it's because that particular segment of wire has flexed so many times that it's now way harder than the other wiring above and below it on the cord.

So general things you can do is try to stiffen up the outside of your chords as much as possible - plenty of ways to do it from additional electrical tape to just general maintenance stuff like not wadding the wiring up, wrapping it super tight around things, or stuffing it into small containers, or stretching the cord a bunch.

But since you've acquired a large stash of broken earbuds, your best bet would be to try to fix them at this point. A nice protip is never to throw away broken electronics because they can almost always be fixed with relative ease.

You should be able to find TONS of videos on youtube on how to strip, cut, splice, and solder earbud wires back together. It's not at all difficult, and the equipment you need to do it costs less than 20$ and will generally last you years and years. In fact I *regularly* look for broken electronics and tend to take them from friends so I can fix and resell; because it's seriously a 15 minute procedure that can net me a decent return on ebay lol.

All my Christmas stuff will be done early - so I can just chill and enjoy and not have to worry about traveling or going outside.