It’s an absolute long-shot, but are there any careers that feel like the research part of grad school, but without the stuff that’s miserable about it (the coursework and bureaucracy)?

There’s no getting away from the bureaucracy, but it is possible to get career positions in academia – and I don’t mean as a professor, either. Check your university’s job site. If they’re big, they almost certainly have one. Get to know your professors too, and make sure they’re aware of the things you’re good at (even beyond your immediate subject area if you have additional hobbies/interests/skills) so they can help you find a landing place if things don’t work out where you are. If you’re willing to do programming – even if you don’t like it – there is a hell of a lot of stuff that needs to be done in academia, and some of it pays enough to live on. It’s possible to carve out a niche and evolve a role into a mix of stuff that you’re good (enough) at but dislike, and stuff that you like but which doesn’t necessarily always have funding if there’s some overlap…

Coatrack

Congrats on finishing!

Sometimes years.

The oldest project I haven’t actually given up on entirely has been rattling around in my head for somewhere around ~15 years, I think, with occasional bursts of progress.

(I also have an anxiety disorder… 🙃️)

I’m not sure what the average length would be though.

I just download the offline installers from GOG and keep those on my NAS organized into folders per game until I want to install them. Not fancy, but it works fine for me.

You might consider using Google Takeout to export the emails to an mbox file, and then importing that into your new mail server.

Magnitude 6.7 earthquake. Woke up to it shaking my bed violently in my dorm room. (Boarding school) Thankfully, I didn’t have anything above me that could fall, but some of the other students kept books in the shelves above their beds. Suffice it to say they got an even ruder awakening than I did…

There was a big aftershock a few minutes later – just after I’d gotten the hell out of the building, basically – and smaller aftershocks for days afterwards.

It put a big crack in the floor of my dorm and everyone who lived there had to stay outside all day until the administration declared it safe for us to re-enter.

That was coincidentally the same day as a school festival and I’d spent the evening before working with my classmates converting the art room into a haunted house. I never got to see the mess, but whatever happened in there was so bad the room was unusable for months. Most of the rest of the festival (e.g. outdoor stalls and such) was still able to be run though, so they carried on with the parts they could. It was surreal.

The rabbit hole goes deeper than I realized!

Most of the posts here are webcomics made by pmjv, the poster of this thread – though other people can and sometimes do post their own art. pmjv makes a surrealist webcomic (see Analogue Nowhere) that incorporates various themes and imagery related to Unix-derived and Unix-adjacent operating systems.

Note that the imagery drawn from is not just things associated with Linux (which famously has a penguin mascot), but also OpenBSD (started by Theo de Raadt and which has a pufferfish mascot), Plan 9 (which has a bunny mascot called Glenda), etc.

There are elements from other fandoms (e.g. Cirno, who appears in some comics, is from Touhou and is associated with ⑨ because of an old joke – which seems to have become entangled with Plan 9 in pmjv’s mind), influences from tech politics, and whatever other crazy things are bouncing around in pmjv’s head.

It’s good surrealist fun, generally.