They kept jacking up the prices and making the streaming services worse so I finally pulled the plug and went offline. It’s a pain in the ass, to be honest, but once it’s all set up it’s really quite nice. The only long term issue is discoverability. I feel a bit like I’m stuck with the music I have now and discovering new music and listening to it is such a hassle that I just don’t do it. That said, I no longer pay for streaming, and I like what I have, so I’m not complaining.

I can strongly recommend Plexamp, which integrates well into an existing Plex setup.

Lidarr is a great complement to an existing Arr stack. And if you’re going to host your own music, you might as well look at Sonarr and Radarr, which are so great.

I agree. Games feel like they’re designed by committee now (very much likes movies, in fact). I recall SkillUp’s criticism of Veilguard’s writing as, “every interaction feels like HR is in the room.” This nails so many design choices today. Safe and vanilla is boring. There are of course people who believe that nothing should ever be remotely challenging or offensive to anyone ever, but I just don’t think they represent the majority of gamers. Attempting to please them at the expense of the much larger player-base is clearly not working.

Howard has reportedly been championing procedurally generated content for years or perhaps decades. We saw echoes of this in Starfield. The result is quite expected: boring and vanilla. Especially when contrasted with Bethesda’s previously great storytelling with intricate characters and hand-crafted experiences. We see once again with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 how important that is. Yes, it’s time consuming and expensive, but it’s clearly loved by customers and critics.

Compounding this was Starfield’s mediocre writing. It took a clear and obvious dive from previous games. It felt incredibly safe. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it was AI generated.