And it's especially difficult to compete with the entrenched giant when that giant actually doesn't suck while some of the storefronts going up against it absolutely do, both in features and as toxic companies.
I used to be very much into My Little Pony when that whole thing was big, and there was a tremendous amount of very dark fan theorisation and spinoff material.
I think what you say is correct in part, that it can make things less shameful, but I also think there's a simpler explanation - it's fun.
It's exactly because kids shows are so happy and non-threatening that these dark fan theories are so entertaining, because of the stark contrast between the theory and the source material. And so the darker it is, the better.
I mostly don't think people "believe" the dark theories are true, or in any way actually intended as subtext by the showrunners. People aren't "reading between the lines" so much as they are purely "making it up" - in ways that were never intended but feel somehow plausible. It's just a bit of fun.
MLP itself was a strange case, though, and got quite bizarre in the end. As the show went on, the writers and animators became increasingly aware they had unexpectedly developed a huge adult following, and some of the plot points that began purely as fan theories later became canon... but that's a whole different story....
Sounds like you've got quite the esoteric setup, hehe :)
My personal solution isn't exactly small as I have two identical four-disk NAS servers which operate with one as primary and the other as a read-only mirror of the primary. For off-site I don't have an automated solution but just backup onto external every so often and leave it with a family member.
A good solution could be as simple as a raspberry pi with an external SSD at a friend or family's place, and then make that accessible via VPN to your home network.
SSDs at the end of their lifespan do tend to fail more gracefully than HDDs, as even when they become fully worn and unable to take new writes, they will often still allow reads.
But, that depends on the specific type of failure.
I had an SSD fail in the same way as yours, where the controller chip or something along the path there died, and it went from fully working to toast in an instant.
Some drives are more reliable, some drives are less reliable, but the only rule is that any drive can break, at any time, old or new.
I also work from home, and while I generally cook all my own meals and do meal prep at werkends, sometimes I have a bad/stressful week where I cave and get fast food like three lunches in a row.
I keep a grocery bag in the car and put the fast food in there to hide my shame.
Turned out that scratches can easily be avoided if you are careful, and - more importantly - a few scratches won't prevent the disc being read, thanks to the error correction.
Back in the day I remember using one of those AOL internet sign-up junk discs as a drinks coaster, for several years. As you'd expect from grinding around on my desk it was filthy and scratched to total hell, never mind the thermal stress of hundreds of hot tea mugs being sat on it. I'd never seen a CD looking so bad.
One day out of curiosity I decided to wipe it off and put it in the PC to see what would happen. I was genuinely surprised when the AOL splash popped up (and also a little disgusted because I had no love for AOL and was hoping I'd killed it)
I'd argue that tiered licensing wasn't really enshittified as it was still just a one time thing where you bought a license and got a product. Not enshittified but simply unnecessarily confusing. And they somehow made that even worse with Vista.
In a similar manner I'd suggest online activation isn't enshittified either, as that's a pretty reasonable behaviour even for an ethical product as it helps prevent piracy. And a key again is that it's a one-time thing, not something constantly bothering you or interrupting your experience over and over.
A lot of people hated XP because of it's 'childish' visual design, but that's not what enshittification is about.
Enshittificstion is when a service becomes progressively user-hostile by implementing patterns that exploit the user and their data for profit.
I used XP plenty, and I certainly don't remember it pushing ads in the start menu, or trying to force me to register a Microsoft account, or constantly harassing me to sign up for paid subscriptions.
You may have personally thought it "was shit", but it certainly wasn't "enshittified"
I agree, 11 definitely was shitty from the beginning.
With 11 Microsoft are not even attempting to "sell" the operating system anymore, but instead are dragging people to it kicking and screaming, while they desperately try to cling to Windows 10.
Tells you everything you need to know about whether it's the consumer or Microsoft who are on the winning side of that "upgrade".
Back when Windows 95 was a new thing it blew everything else out of the water. Suddenly there was an operating system that even regular people were paying attention to and getting excited about, and it actually deserved the hype.
Windows was a product at that time, where Microsoft made their money by people purchasing the operating system. And so the incentive was to make a great product that people wanted to buy and use.
This was true all the way through the Windows XP and 7 days, and only with the release of 8 and especially 10 did we start to see things change.
Microsoft - who used to put so much effort into trying to prevent people installing cracked Windows - suddenly didn't seem to care so much anymore about enforcing that. They'd realised that the true exploitable value was in the online ecosystem and the data, not the product, and that was the turning point for everything.
The console hardware is cheaper to produce vs other consoles, so it's not like they are losing on the hardware and aiming to make the money back later - they designed the hardware to meet a specific price point, and to capture a certain market.
Having captured that market though (kid owns a switch and now the kid wants games) they can pretty much set the price of games high and keep them high.
As a gamer buying for yourself, with every purchase you are weighing up the cost of the game against how much you personally want to play it. If the price is too much you will choose something else, or wait for a sale.
As a parent buying for a child, however, if the child says "I really want the new Zelda game for my birthday please!" then they get bought the new Zelda game, no matter how much it costs.
Nintendo are very much aware what their business model is on this one, and who they are targeting.
For a lot of consumers, especially those who are lower income, the single most important factor is how much money you need to spend at once.
This is especially true because a key market for the switch is children, who have no direct purchasing power themselves, and depend instead on adults to buy it for Christmas and birthdays. So initial cost of entry is critical.
Simply put, 'parents' who are buying a console for their kids and expect to buy new games only rarely, have quite different needs to 'gamers' who are buying for themselves, and want new games often.
He definitely will