Me and a relative jointly host and manage a server. Over the years we’ve slowly allowed in a handful of trusted friends and family. By now we probably have 20ish connected. Most use it as a supplement to their main streaming services, primarily used for exclusive content like the star wars shows. Some, like those of us hosting, have cancelled every streaming service and use it exclusively.
Mullvad VPN. $5 a month for 5 concurrent high speed connections. No fake sales, no BS.
Music streaming services are close. As I understand it the artists don’t get a great deal, but as a consumer ~$12/m is on the high end of reasonable for unlimited access to high quality music. And unlike with television streaming services there’s very little exclusivity bullshit. You can listen to most anything most anywhere.
Not universally. I live in Alabama and the privately owned power company is very corrupt. We have some of the highest power bills in the US, with the biggest difference being not cost but profit margins. Water in my county is fairly priced IMO, but I’ve heard other counties aren’t so lucky.
I live in the south. We don’t get much snow at all. I think I was thirteen when I saw my first (and so far last) white Christmas. It was only the second my parents had seen in their life. That was pretty cool.
A) A new phone comes out with a feature I’m dying to have, and I happen to have some fun money tucked away
B) My old phone is degraded to the point of noticeably affecting my experience
C (most common)) A little of A, a little of B, and I get a great trade in or upgrade deal
Usually on a 2-3 year cycle, finances allowing
+1 for audiobookshelf, after using tools like Plex for a long time I was honestly shocked by how much more user friendly it felt. And it’s a one man team! The only significant demerit is that the IOS app is stuck in test flight limbo, so you have to find another player. Though most do that already I think.
Headphones vs speakers is way less significant than listening volume. The big thing to be careful of is listening with just one earbud in. When we do this we almost always end up turning the volume in that one too high, because you need on average 6db more volume to compensate for the audio input of the other ear.
Where I live there’s this crazy new obsession with car washes. Like, 3 brand new ones being built on the same street. I get that they became way more profitable when they figured out the subscription model thing, but I feel like so many is unsustainable.