Same. Mullvad #1.

Unless you need port forwarding, then Proton for those activities.

Deadpool?

If it went that far, we’d be back to offline communication and small communities, because the AI would be programmed to tattle on us. :)

It’s a fascinating question actually how far technology could be used against us, and how long the “underground” could continue to use it before we’d have to continuously invent something completely new just to communicate, until we just loop back around to word of mouth or smuggled paper missives. A lot of people think that the cat is out of the bag on mass communication, that we can never be silenced again but I’m never quite so sure…

Honestly, it is my expectancy that if the US goes down that worst possible outcome, and they start passing laws that make you worry about your communications, then the “US Cyber Defense Platform(Great Firewall)” will also be quick to pass, argued to protect the children from porn, rights holders from piracy, and of course will quickly expand to any service that doesn’t agree to an encryption back door so they can look for “terrorists”.

In that case, Proton and any non-surveillance allied service is out. Email as we know it is pretty unsafe, and if you want to use email privately you will have to learn to provide your own encryption via PGP and the like, most likely through your own server even, and you will stress to ensure proper configuration.

Or get to another method(like Matrix configured for E2E) before they get pulled from your App Store for not complying with the Patriot Act 2.0, and be ready to learn the safest way to sideload updates, and how to dodge around the Bigly Firewall to connect with international users.

How long until you start questioning if it will work and invite doubt? Or will you assume defeat if the vampire fills the gap with, “why, thank you my good sir”?

My understanding of the idea with many interpretations of magic is they are all just ways of focusing your will on the world.

Ergo, the words aren’t themselves the source of power, your expectation that the words will result in a certain outcome is.

Therefore, if your intention is to deny entry is strong, there could be a fairly good gap.

But on the other hand, playing around to try and see could create doubt and uncertainty, weakening the effect.

The good ol’ Red Scare.

Second this route.

Since OP wants to replace the “cloud”, which is a loose term but I take in this case to mean one of the Drive or Dropbox services, this would be the most direct replacement.

You’ll still want a NAS or otherwise storage focused server to host it, so you can get or build a NAS first. Use basic protocols like CIFS/SMB,NFS, and/or SFTP at first, and if that doesn’t meet your needs (say if there’s a mobile phone involved) you can go down the path of installing Nextcloud on it for that Dropbox like experience.

That said, this will move responsibility for two important things onto yourself. Failure tolerance and security. The corpus can afford automatic redundancy and failover, and backups going back further than they would like to admit to you. They can still lose your things to some mistake or another, but a dead hard drive generally isn’t one.

For backups, however much storage you want, plan to have extra drives for backups, and have a backup plan in place. If the data is important to you, you will want to be able to survive a hard drive inevitably failing, or a virus or even just a garden variety mistake. It can also be useful to ensure an (encrypted) copy is somewhere else, like a parent’s house or a locking cabinet at an office job. Having two copies at home won’t save you from thieves or a fire, after all.

And security. Don’t expose a NAS to the internet. Just don’t. It sounds convenient until some bug lets a botnet ransomware all your memories and you’ve got to scrub everything and restore the backup, losing anything since the last backup. Instead prepare to learn about setting up a VPN, and granting yourself an encrypted and well secured tunnel for your devices abroad.

All in all, it can be a worthy endeavor, but one that must be taken with care. Files can be important, and I would hate to be the one that offhandedly sent you down a path of losing your data. Learn, plan, and implement with confidence and a backup plan.

It’s not that there is superior heat output, it’s that there is superior heat collection and observation.

Not familiar with the meme directly, taking your attached picture example I can guess why they think it’s better:

It’s trapped closer to them.

Heat, that you recognize exists but usually rises out of reach of an uncapped candle, to the ceiling, is now trapped near the observation area. The pot is trapping it and radiating it much closer to the person thinking they’ve just solved the universe.

It’s observable. Like people who don’t understand the need for vaccines because they’ve never personally seen the disease the vaccine helped beat down, a majority of people struggle to grasp theory, and direct observation is all they understand.