I use k8s at work and have built a k8s cluster in my homelab… but I did not like it. I tore it down, and currently using podman, and don’t think I would go back to k8s (though I would definitely use docker as an alternative to podman and would probably even recommend it over podman for beginners even though I’ve settled on podman for myself).

1. K8s itself is quite resource-consuming, especially on ram. My homelab is built on old/junk hardware from retired workstations. I don’t want the kubelet itself sucking up half my ram. Things like k3s help with this considerably, but that’s not quite precisely k8s either. If I’m going to start trimming off the parts of k8s I don’t need, I end up going all the way to single-node podman/docker… not the halfway point that is k3s.
2. If you don’t use hostNetworking, the k8s model of traffic routes only with the cluster except for egress is all pure overhead. It’s totally necessary with you have a thousand engineers slinging services around your cluster, but there’s no benefit to this level fo rigor in service management in a homelab. Here again, the networking in podman/docker is more straightforward and maps better to the stuff I want to do in my homelab.
3. Podman accepts a subset of k8s resource-yaml as a docker-compose-like config interface. This lets me use my familiarity with k8s configs iny podman setup.

Overall, the simplicity and lightweight resource consumption of podman/docker are are what I value at home. The extra layers of abstraction and constraints k8s employs are valuable at work, where we have a lot of machines and alot of people that must coordinate effectively… but I don’t have those problems at home and the overhead (compute overhead, conceptual overhead, and config-overhesd) of k8s’ solutions to them is annoying there.

This is a great approach, but I find myself not trusting Jellyfin’s preauth security posture. I’m just too concerned about a remote unauthenticated exploit that 2fa does nothing to prevent.

As a result, I’m much happier having Jellyfin access gated behind tailscale or something similar, at which point brute force attacks against Jellyfin directly become impossible in normal operation and I don’t sweat 2fa much anymore. This is also 100% client compatible as tailscale is transparent to the client, and also protects against brute force vs Jellyfin as direct network communication with Jellyfin isn’t possible. And of course, Tailscale has a very tightly controlled preauth attack surface… essentially none of you use the free/commercial tailscale and even self-hosting headscale I’m much more inclined to trust their code as being security-concscious than Jellyfin’s.

I think a couple things are in play:

• Very few people consumed these comics as we are… reading each one in sequence. You’d more likely sporadically encounter them in the funnies section of a physical newspaper. Which was a pretty hit/miss proposition to begin with. No one expected every one to be a winner, and people would routinely skip over stuff that didn’t interest them without thinking about it too hard. You’re operating under the assumption that Far Side is a classic, but at the time people would just cruise by and think “that comic is stupid, just like 60% of the other stupid comics on this page”. And folks were pretty happy to have 40% of comics be a bit funny.
• What made Far Side a classic was not its consistency. Rather, there were a few strips that became cultural phenomena. Basically a handful of hits that were breakout memes of the 80s and 90s. Colleges used to sell t-shirts of the school for the gifted strip with the kid pushing on the door that says pull, which is pretty accessible and one of those breakout hits.
• Because of those breakout hit strips, some folks got into Larson’s style of humor enough that fewer of his strips were inscrutable to them and he had a lasting market.
• Other comments point about topical references and those are also a big deal. If someone sees a beans meme with no context 30y from now, it ain’t gonna be funny. But a few weeks ago on lemmy, it was part of a contextual zeitgeist that was more or less about “these idiots will upvote anything, I’m one of the idiots… I’ll upvote this!” and it kind of captured the exuberant excitement of not knowing what lemmy was but wanting it to be something. Similarly, these strips often weren’t intended to last multiple generations. They assumed you were reading the newspaper RIGHT NOW… and so could reference current events very obliquely and still be accessible.

TLDR: Like a stupid meme, many Larson comics require shared transient context we’re missing now. Some are also just fukin weird, like cow tools. But some were very accessible and became hugely popular. These mega-star strips cemented Far Side’s popularity, and which gave Larson the autonomy to stay weird when he chose. Now we waste time trying to figure out what they meant.