There are dozens of us!

I’ve had the exact same reaction - “whatever it is, as long as it stays out of the bedroom I’ll deal with it tomorrow”.

My favorite incident here, as a tangent, is when my wife came to me for help while I was doing something in the garden. A large crow was sitting on the kitchen counter. My initial thought was “well there goes my day” as birds tend to be the worst to get out. However, everyone keep saying how smart those birds are so I figured I’d do what I do when half-ferral cats stumble in.

So I walked in, see the crow, the crow sees me, and we kind of just stare at each other. I slowly backed up, went around the house and entered again through the backdoor. I grabbed his attention again before going out once more, and in again through the main door. We stared at each other some more, and then he just lightly jumped across the floor and went out the back door. No frantical flying and crapping everywhere. 10/10 experience as far as birds stuck in the house goes.

It’s probably in my imagination, but we shared a moment there. What’s not in my imagination though is that afterwards a bunch of crows started hanging around the house. So I started giving them some snacks every once in a while, because why not. Long story long, we have a small murder of crows watching over the property.

I don’t know if this qualifies as “b-tier”, but I’d really would like a superpower where when hearing a sound I knew exactly what made it.

I live in an old house, in the middle of a forest. Lots of weird noises both inside and outside. Being able to know if a sound I just heard requires my attention (i.e. “is that some animal messing around in my walls, or just the old wood squeaking”) would be gold. The amount of times I’ve gotten out of bed in the middle of the night to investigate something is too damn high. After countless mice, vasps nests, birds, and various mammals deciding to move in with us, my paranoia levels have skyrocketed.

Would also sort out the “is that my kid crying, or just the draft through the vents”-question, as well as “is that normal wood settling noises, or is there more rot I’ve yet to find and the whole house is collapsing”.

Clubs are a good place to meet people for sure. :)

That whole local vs not is kind of crazy though. I know of a guy who’s been here for 40 years, huge part of the local community, everyone knows him - and everyone still referes to him as “the guy from the north”. I find it equal parts hilarious/sad-ish. I dread to think what it would feel like to be a foreigner here, and not just some guy who moved in from a city a few hours down the road. I get it though on some level, historically it’s been a very isolated community, and even now getting here (or getting away) can be difficult, practically speaking, in the winter months.

I spent a few years in the US, coming from Scandinavia. It took several months before I was able to navigate the whole “strike up a conversation with anyone”-thing. The issue wasn’t so much being “forced” into conversations (which I got used to fairly quickly) as it was knowing when these interactions were considered over by the other party. I’d often, unintentionally, overstay my welcome. The general vibe and attitude were also quite different.

The biggest shock was however moving back home. I’m originally from one of the larger cities in my home country, but ended up in a tiny village through a series of coincidences. Going from a multi-million US city to a tiny Scandinavian mountain village was rough. Went from a place filled with outgoing people to a place where the cashier in the local store still took me for a tourist after having lived there for a year. An almost impenetrable society. I’ve been here for a decade now, and have long since realized that I will always be “that guy from XYZ”. On the plus side, it’s nice not having to deal with people beyond my own family an coworkers. On the negative side I have almost no sense of belonging here outside of my wife’s family who are all local.

I’ve been using gandi.net since forever, it’s alright. The main selling point these days is the availability of pretty much all TLDs I guess. They have a strong privacy and consumer rights legacy, but that’s been kind of fading as they’ve grown over the years.

I don’t think one is necessarily better than another, though there are some sketchy actors out there with some real shady business practises.

If you go with any of the ones you mention in your OP you’ll be fine though.

I’ve been using i3 for the past 8 years or so, and can wholeheartedly recommend it (or it’s cousin Sway if you’re in Wayland-land) if you’re into tiling window managers (there are dozens of us!). I find them invaluable for their keyboard-centric operation, and also massively sweet on ultrawide monitors. Light on resources and minimalistic too.

As far as distributions go, I’ve been on Arch for the past several years. I think there are some (unofficial) spins for most Linux flavours with i3 out-of-the-box.

I used XFCE for a long long time before I went to tiles, which is a decent more traditional Window Manager, with a more lean focus than some of the others. Fairly customizable. I still use some of the system apps from there from old habit.

I wouldn’t get too tied up into what window manager is default in any given distribution. At least for me, part of the joy is finding a combination of software (including the desktop environment/Window Manager) that works for you specifically. And there are plenty of live CDs (or usb images now I guess) with various WMs that can be used to take things out for a spin without commiting to installing it. :) Here are various Ubuntu flavors for instance.