Discord is OK for real-time chat or VC, but is awful for forum-like discussions. Comment-specific context is lost in the single-threaded noise and search is borderline useless. The true forum-designed format of Lemmy, Reddit, and predecessors is far and away better. In my opinion Twitter - the legacy, ubiquity and tech - would be a better forum than Discord. That was hard to type and I need to quickly bleach my fingers.

I’m going to suggest possibly irresponsible advice, but step 1 - you need to solve your depression and porn addiction, and ASAP. For that you could try therapy, and/or psilocybin or DMT… Not a heroic dose, but enough to get introspective from an altered POV. Therapy is the obvious long-term recommendation, but the psychedelic route may get you there faster, and you might learn a few things, such as your social obstructions or root causes.

Second, you need a close friend, at least one, preferably one who is also your desired romantic demographic. Maybe not someone who you’d normally “go for”, but who you’d be happy spending time with - platonically, romantically, whatever it does not matter. The goal is to ground yourself with empathy for that person, and they for you too.

Thanks for the reply. Do you have stats on how many watt hours you collect from the 100w panel in the Dec/Jan (assuming you’re in the northern hemisphere), and how those stats vary on overcast days vs sunny? I’m around 37°n and relatively sunny in the winter, except for a gloomy week here or there - an adequate battery buffer will be needed for those days, and the capacity can be shifted to ventilation fans in the summer.

While it does freeze here (occasionally down to 0° F) the battery will be inside the chicken coop where the temp has always remained above freezing. Initially my concern with lead acid was the risk of gassing into the birds’ airspace, which is why I’m drawn to the LiFePO4 chemistry. Victron does seem great for heavier(medium)-duty scenarios like sheds or RVs.

The pi is a zero, which pulls about 25-33% the current of a 3b, and I’ve been able to run it off a 10,000 mah battery bank for over 24 hours. It is beneficial to have it running continuously during daylight hours only, aside from logging weather lows, but I can’t think of a practical method to shut it down & bring it online automatically - at that point it’d probably make more sense to switch to an ESP32 device feeding data to a primary server inside the house.