Shurimal

Water only gets stuck in your ear if you have wax built up in your ear canal. Regular washing of your ear with warm water (and nothing else!) keeps the wax build-up under control and water will just pour out of your ear canal as soon as you level your head.

For scissors, however, nothing is more expensive and delicate than a decent set of haircutting shears

I have a very cheap pair of haircutting scissors. I've used them to cut thin aluminium sheet. Still work OK for trimming my beard. I'm an absolute monster🙃

As for knives, some 10 years ago I bought a cheap (I think 2 or 3 €) Swedish-made fixed blade with nylon grip—the kind contractors and builders use. Thing is pretty much indestructible, cutting open tin cans and splitting of splinters from logs for firestarter like it's nothing. Has a nice carbon steel blade and used to have very nice hollow ground that has been long been downgraded to flat ground due to many, many sharpenings.

Probably it doesn't quite count as a gadget, but repurposing my old PC as a home server. Firstly it makes a great mass storage solution making all my media accessible from any device, no matter what architecture it is and what apps it can run. I also self-host Home Assistant, Syncthing, Radicale, Navidrome, Jellyfin and UrBackup. The ten years old 2 core Pentium with 8GB of RAM can do it all, it's much cheaper to run than half a dozen subscription services and I have total control over my data and privacy.

Now this is what pistols in sci-fi games should look like (also, Laugo Alien). I'm sick of the silly trend of futuristic sci-fi pistols putting the magazine in front of the trigger and leaving no room for the chamber, not to mention zero possible barrel length and having horrible balance.

You're right, of course, but my point is that it's not only metal, punk and other "angry" music, or more precisely, music that is aesthetically an acquired taste. There's a lot of mellow, danceable and catchy music that has themes other than "Ooh, baby, baby, yeah, aha". That this sort of music is not played on radio is a completely different problem.

Take a listen to eg VNV Nation's Tomorrow Never Comes and tell me it couldn't be a nr. 1 hit on radio and in clubs. It has all the making of a good catchy pop song, yet has some very thoughtful and contemplative lyrics.

But that nobody outside “angry” genres seems to be doing it is what saddens me.

There's a lot of "non-angry" (ie no thick distorted guitars and screamed vocals) music that has strong political themes and social commentary going on. A lot of folk, blues, EBM, EDM, reagge, dub is about the struggles of the working class, people of color etc, has anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation message.

Leslie fish
Asian Dub Foundation
Later VNV Nation (early works are stylistically more "angry", but thematically similar)
Covenant
Chip Taylor
Shamen
And many more

On its tail, duh. Kangaroos can do that, why shouldn't eagles? Tigers can even bounce around on their tails!

Vivaldi with uBlock Origin works just as well as it's always been, I don't even need to do regular manual filter upgrades. Only two tweaks I did was disabling Vivaldi's built-in adblocker for YT (triggered the player blocking while logged in) and installing the pop-up blocker script for TamperMonkey.

So, business as usual. Google can go'an'fuck 'emselves.

Digging their own grave, it seems, and it's so deep they can smell the Earth's core in there.

object space is a complete mess

Starfield has, what, 1000 planets, and each time you land the engine basically auto-generates a new approx. Skyrim-sized worldspace. The reference system has to have departed significantly from previous games for it to work. Even Skyrim was gently pushing the limits of how many objects can be referenced with the 8-digit refID (roughly 16 billion entries per .esp for all world objects, NPC-s, weapons, armor, outfits, consumables, spells, magic effects, markers, helpers etc etc since absolutely everything has to have a refID).

Of course Starfield is a mess coming from the simple refID scheme of the older games. The reference system in SF must be some sort of convoluted hierarchical system to be able to place probably hundreds of billions of objects over 1000 planets and retain persistency. It won't be easy to reverse engineer.

start using alternatives like lbry and/or peertube

Sure. But actively using YT without paying for Premium and blocking all the ads will affect them more, and if enough people do it, might actually catalyze it to go Twixxer levels of enshittification, which would be just as beneficial for growing the userbase of those alternatives with the side benefit of getting rid of one of the gatekeepers. Fediverse saw a huge growth in popularity following the recent enshittification of Reddit, after all. "Build it and they will come" has a corollary that goes "Destroy it and they'll go elsewhere" :)

Dude just watch the ads so people get paid…

I don't care. Hypothetical incomes of other people are not my problem or obligation. Next you'll be saying I must eat at restaurants at least three days a week and attend all concerts and drama plays in my town because otherwise people don't get paid.

You’re not automatically entitled to free content

Correct. First I need to manually set up my tools, and then these tools get me free content automatically. But I don't care about entitlement; it's a spook. It's all down to risk-benefit. The risk of blocking youtube ads is basically nil, but I benefit by wasting less time and not having loud, imbecile and completely irrelevant audio-visual crap annoying me. I also pirate all my music, movies and shows. Because I don't care. I like free stuff. Copyright is a spook, anyway.