The Steins;Gate game has a very opaque choice system. The ending you get has to do with how you use the character’s phone in the game, not really how you interact with people. I suggest playing with a guide.
It’s really good, though.

Catholitic?

I would prefer to have GPUs for under $600 if possible

Unfortunately not possible for a new nvidia card (you want CUDA) with 16GB VRAM. You can get them for ~$750 if you’re patient. This deal was available for awhile earlier today:
https://us-store.msi.com/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-GPU/GeForce-RTX-50-Series/GeForce-RTX-5070-Ti-16G-SHADOW-3X-OC
Or you could try to find a 16GB 4070Ti Super like I got. It runs Deepseek 14B and stuff like Stable Diffusion no problem.

Can’t figure out why you would use Plex over jellyfin

Probably the biggest reason is that it makes it so easy to securely share across the internet. With JF you’re on your own and you can really fuck things up. If you’re just running it on your LAN the JF is the obvious choice.

So who’s actually developing it? If it was Valve they would have said…
I already own HL2, but presumably I would have to buy this anew.

I’ll second the Diablo recommendation if you can drive down to the hardware store and pick one up off the shelf. Home Depot has them in my area.
If you’re ordering online you have all the choices and I can’t help you there.
I prefer a coarser 24-tooth blade for speed, and especially if you’re going to be ripping stock thicker than 3/4". The finish it leaves it leaves is perfectly fine, and if you need it any smoother you can give it one pass with a plane. High-tooth-count blades are slow and it takes more effort to push the stock through.

I’m guessing the Jointmaker Pro
https://bridgecitytools.com/products/jmpv2-jointmaker-pro
which is faintly ridiculous.

Everything I hear about Nextcloud scares me away from messing with it.

I’m just running into this now. It also won’t let me log into the web interface. I’m glad I experimented with a second install before upgrading my primary pihole.

I tried Kopia but it was unstable and janky, so now it’s whenever I remember to manually run a bunch of rsync. I backup my desktop to cold storage on the first of the month, so I should get in the habit of backing up my server to the NAS then also.

Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 (can’t remember which) controlled through the TV with the remote. It’s running LibreElec (Kodi) with the Jellyfin plugin. Discoverability isn’t great through Kodi, but I can always use a computer or phone to find the media and cast if I need to.

Jesus christ, what is that name.

GrapheneOS basically matches Google’s support window

Oh, interesting. I was going to try Graphene once Google stop updating for my current hardware, but I guess it’ll be Lineage instead.

Since I don’t play intensive games on my phone I’m sure either would be fine. They should both be plenty responsive for non-gaming stuff. Maybe some AI features would suffer, but I haven’t found a use for those yet.

I believe the issue is only with Tailscale Funnels. With Funnels, the data runs through TS’s infrastructure so it’s subject to whatever kind of bandwidth limitation they feel like enacting.

As others have said, you don’t need to know how to code, but you do need to be comfortable editing structured documents, so knowing a little programming does help.
Unfortunately, Nextcloud and email are two of the most difficult things to self-host. This is by reputation, I haven’t tried myself. Email is supposed to be particularly difficult and the usual advice is to not bother.
Jellyfin is pretty straight-forward as long as you don’t have a weird hardware decoding setup and as long as you don’t want remote access. If you do want remote access you need to use third party tools to do it securely. If it’s just for your own use then Tailscale makes it really easy. If you want to share with non-technical users it gets messy.

I went with Debian and I use Docker for containers. I considered Proxmox, but I didn’t end up trying it. PiHole is a good application for the Pi Zero (I have an early generation Pi dedicated to running PiHole), but you could also run it on the Beelink.

I strongly recommend you download Obsidian and keep hyperlinked notes on everything you do and links to every tutorial/resource you end up using.
Have a place to keep all the passwords your services will end up needing. A password manager is the best option. Make the password on your admin account on Debian (or whatever) easy to remember and enter, since you’ll need to sudo a lot.
If the Beelink comes with a copy of Windows installed, you can recover the key from within Linux with the following command:
sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
Then you have a spare Windows key should you ever need one.

Sears & Roebuck

AWS

According to my Synology:

Where are you finding this data? It’s not Info Center -> Storage…