Fandoms often contain people who are genuinely fanatical and the structure of social media platforms like TikTok fosters a lack of reasoned debate with people of different opinions. So you get the so-called "echo chamber" effect. And mental illness causes particularly strong feelings for a variety of reasons, many of them very valid. So, if you combine those things you have a recipe for toxic elements to magnify their worst traits exponentially. Especially when it comes to people with a dissenting view.

I've struggled with moderate to severe mental illness for over 20 years and more than once I've had to catch myself from falling into that automatically defensive stance whenever someone disagrees. And I didn't get into social media until my mid-20s. Like you said, people who are constantly online from a young age can easily find aggressive defensiveness being their default/only coping mechanism. Even people suggesting a more moderate response to disagreements can get torn to pieces for supposedly implying they're "making light" of the severity of people's lived experiences. Social media is amazing, but we're still very much in our infancy as an "online species" and it really fucking shows whenever you toss a little dissenting chum in the waters!

Engineering mindset + creativity = lots of weird useless shit that paves the way for slightly less weird but actually useful shit.

With extra frosting.

Kindred, by Octavia Butler

Goodreads description:

>The first science fiction written by a black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of black American literature. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she’s been given...

ETA: Wow, I've read 36 of those (and given up on a few others). It's a really good list, but some are much longer/more dense than others. Funny seeing The Second Sex and The Old Man And The Sea on the same list. One you could finish on a long train journey, the other... you can't. Unless the train is taking you to Siberia.

The Switch store is always overpriced, but that's a bundle. Just looked it up and it contains three games. So you're actually paying $27 for a game.

A few consoles have had minor expansions that can be added. N64, Sega 32X, etc. But that's usually just more memory or a new media to allow for more game content (but not actually "upgraded"). Actually changing the graphics capabilities would be more difficult to implement and you'd just end up with a multi-tiered systems of games and hardware that would essentially remove the main selling points of consoles. Adding those kind of features would lose more customers to PC gaming than it would gain through added features.

It's difficult to say without knowing more about the setup, but HDMI carries audio. So an HDMI switch should be all you need. But you could also get a headphone splitter. Or just use the headphone output of the monitor and plug that into the speakers. That way, whatever audio is being send via the HDMI will be going to the speakers.