I think you’ve skipped a bunch of troubleshooting steps into the realm of paranoia.

You need to take a step back, take some deep breaths. As another commenter said, ensure that you are taking care of your own health, because you’re not wrong, this sounds batshit.

After that, you can start troubleshooting one thing at a time, starting with the most basic, ignoring any assumptions and focusing on only what you know as fact. Your description is so flooded with extraneous detail that it’s hard to follow, but what I got out of it is this:

• You’re incredibly concerned about privacy, but not particularly knowledgeable (using TOR for all web browsing, using random VPN without actually looking into it, instead of taking some time to study before you jump in feet first).
• This means you are likely to be using some combinations of software and settings that are non-standard, that you may not fully understand. I don’t mean this as an insult, we’ve all been there, but we need to stop focusing on what you assume. The type of people asking for help on asklemmy of all places are not the same people being targeted by state actors or “super hackers”, unless there’s a lot of shit you left out.
• This is on top of your admittance of doing vibe-coding with all the supply chain risks that you are thankfully somewhat aware of.
• You recently changed VPN providers. This is not placed at any point in the overall timeline, so we cannot begin to guess at any relation to further events, such as shady VPN software installs before or after certain listed issues.
• You recently torrented some FLAC files and used VLC to play them, which is the last thing you recall doing before you started having your most recent issues, which appear to be your router requiring a firmware reflash, and the keyboard input issues.
• “Around that time” of the FLAC album download, but not specifically before or after, your router stopped working and required a full firmware reflash. You do not say where you obtained this firmware, if it is the official manufacturer firmware or something custom/third party like OpenWRT. This was a few days ago.
• After fixing the router and cleaning, you begin having keyboard input issues. No word on of the cleaning involved any spraying or wiping of the keyboard before you noticed issues, so no idea on hardware damage or accidentally triggered keyboard shortcuts.
• Keyboard issues noted: One row non functional, some keys entering multiple times on single press, issues with capslock/shift
• You moved the HDD to another machine, played the FLAC(s) again, and the keyboard issue started again.

I’ll be real, your immediate jump to thinking this is some sort of targeted active attack is silly. You need to isolate if the problem is with the keyboard, settings on the installed OS (specific to the drive), or after you play the FLAC file. Test one thing at a time, offline. Don’t introduce additional variables. You’ll also want to ensure VLC is fully updated, as a number of updates to it are security related. Embedding malware in media files isn’t common, but it’s much more likely than being the target of an intentional attack, or of picking up malware capable of jumping across multiple firmwares.

If they don’t love you, they aren’t the love of your life, just someone you were infatuated with.

I’ve had no trouble with setting it up in the exceptions list in the Rethink DNS filtering and VPN app.

I really don’t get how people with this take… exist long enough to express it (it’s an awkward idea to word). At that point it would seem to me that the next “logical” goal would be to take yourself and as many others out as you could. Unless you count yourself securely among the monsters and don’t care about your own monstrosity, which begs the question why you would feel strongly enough about it to label yourself this way or care that others are monstrous.

It just feels from the outside like a circular logic trap with only two “outs”: either everybody sucks except for you (elitist as all hell), or what I said earlier.

I’m still frustrated by that shit. There were actual instances of bad shit happening in gaming news media that got drowned the fuck out by all the culture war grifters and rampant fucking incels.

• Random “ok but not GOTY” indie games getting GOTY level reviews, then people finding that the dev and the journalist(s) had a history of bar crawl pictures on twitter together.
• Leaked industry email lists where journalists openly were asking other journalists to take it easy on their dev roommate’s first release.
• A few big names in games journalism getting shit canned for writing honest reviews about how mediocre some AAA game was, when that game bought an ad on their site to the tune of a full site retheming around the game.
• Undisclosed referral links.
• Undisclosed sponsorship of good reviews.
• Some games trying to use the fact they had LGBTQIA+ representation to paint valid critiques as the same thing as bigoted harassment, when some of the critique was even coming from LGBTQIA+ folx.
• A few no name indie devs caught faking harassment and hate DMs.

It was a few big issues, a scatter of medium issues, a few minor things only noticable to obsessives, and then a massive clusterfuck of actual stalker/*phobe bullshit slopped on top.

I’m happy that shit like responsible disclosure started happening in the end, but what a fucking mess.

Not sure about skin rendering in L4D, but way back when Half Life 2 was new, one of the ways it pushed things forward was with the facial rigs and animations.

At least as far as I remember from gaming news at the time.

I remember reading that it was a big leap in terms of matching real facial muscles to the 3D rig face “muscles”, and in using those little dot things to capture actual facial movement of some of the line reads. I think Valve’s discovery and/or usage of the fact that real eye iris angles are offset by about 2 degrees was also something that was noted as a big move forward past the uncanny valley.

Hooray, a headline that doesn’t oversell it!

Some articles were heavily clickbaiting about HL2 ep3, and while there is like one early/experimental weapon model from it in this leak, it’s something fans have already known about and seen in some previously leaked testing footage.

As far as I understand it, most of this is just some additional data on things already known, and different builds of things we’ve already seen. Still awesome, but not “omg HL3 leak!”

Plot like they’re all out to get you

Come on, you gotta at least use some primer first. Kilz that shit so you seal in all the mold. Then it’s forced to become structural, and in a few years you can use your well trained mold to grow extensions to your units!

Awesome, but why did we need the other lady’s intro and outro? Fucking “influencers”.

Your ISP will be able to see the usage, and will almost certainly be able to tell that it is VPN usage. They won’t be able to tell what you’re doing or where you’re truly connecting to, just that you transferred whatever quantity of encrypted data with the VPN company at whatever time.

!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is the main piracy community on Lemmy and links to a community wiki in the stickied post.

I use Soulseek (program, not site) for music. Archive.org for old console/handheld games (search NoIntro or ReDump). Fitgirl repacks for “modern” PC games.

Thanks! Corrected now

Always have been: !surrealmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Run by the OG mothposter.

It was probably the “gold standard” modern port of the OG DooM/DooM II/Hexen etc games. There are some other source ports made for multiplayer, some made for cranking the graphics up to 11, some made to ensure exact match to original engine behavior for speed running purposes, but GZDoom was kind of the standard the community had settled on that did enough of all of that to be good.

There are full “boomer shooter” style indie games built off of it and the expanded features it offers, like 3D model support and greatly improved lighting. Then the lead dev went a little bonkers (I don’t know the specifics) and people forked it into this and have kept improving it.

Book good

No, but you should talk to a doctor about these feelings. There may be other options for you. Different medicine or psychological treatments that may have better outcomes for you.

There’s no single “happy pill” that works for everyone, and sometimes something that works for one person can make symptoms worse in other people.

Paid to states over ten years.

Oh boy yes, but mostly early internet memes, when 4chan was the bleeding edge of internet “culture”. Shit like advice animals were spammed to hell and back until they got enough natural momentum.

Do you really not understand that this is meant to be an easy tool to disable them, so that someone could do anything (or nothing) else to them safely?