Brothers of Metal!
Hellblade in VR with good headphones is possibly the best gaming experience I've ever had...
Wowza! So you ended up just bussing all the points that used to touch the ground plane together with wires?
I dont see any reason exclude modding, I think the scope should include any kind of console hardware electronics work, be it troubleshooting, repair, modding etc. I like your take on destructive vs non destructive mods, that feels like a good distinction to make. As far as discord goes, I don't really use it, and I feel like it's not the right platform for a lot of the use cases it gets shoehorned into... but I think affiliating with them in some way would be a good thing, the more the merrier!
The hakko desolder gun changed my life... I had NO idea what I was missing before. Actual good solder wick is another QoL upgrade I wish I'd made sooner, the MG Chem wick works so much better than the generic copper braid I'd been using that I still can't believe it.
I had a bottle of that stuff too, worked great but it was so awful to clean up I ended up tossing it... atomically thin coat of rosin is spot on what I always ended up with. Evil brown devil juice.
Favorite flux?
I recently picked up a syringe of Chipquik SMD291 tack flux to play around with, I'm just getting into doing smd stuff... and I find myself using it for just about everything because it's so easy to use, works a treat, and is fairly easy to clean up. What flux do you like to use? Do you have different ones for different uses, or do you tend to just use one for everything?