Alan Stivell does some incredible fusion of rock and Celtic folk. i usually avoid the term "Celtic" for music because some people find it dismissive to lump multiple musical traditions together like that, but he very deliberately draws from most (all?) of the musical traditions that would fall under that umbrella. i highly recommend the E Dulenn and Á L'Olympia live albums
i'm kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i'd wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it's just "i'm gonna skip this last encounter because we're already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow" or even just "wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace" but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that's part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i'm ok with them using fudging when they feel it's warranted so long as they're not abusing it to the point where there's no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we're all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they're doing, and if we're not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue
if i had a nickel for every time Spock faced off against a unique species of cat-like predator from Vulcan, i'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice
many retro systems have implementations of a language called BASIC, which is about as easy as it sounds. it has some quirks that aren't transferable to newer languages and you won't be able to make anything nearly as sophisticated as retail games for the same hardware but if you find modern engines intimidating, it can be a good place to start
that said, +1 for godot if you want to learn a more modern tool. it's way simpler than it may seem at first and there is a huge wealth of beginner-friendly tutorials available online
assuming reasonable definitions of "new" and "old," i'd wager there's been more good old music than good new music for most of human history. it all comes down to numbers- there's simply more old music than new music! there are factors that i do genuinely think make pop music not as good today as it could be (see: streaming companies), but that's a rounding error compared to the sheer scale of music history, plus all the bedroom artists making up for anything lacking in today's pop music.
that said, if you spend any time focused on a specific period or specific periods, it will not take long to find stinkers, if only because everyone has different taste and you're bound to find something you just don't jive with eventually. i've been in spaces where people who love classic rock for example review classic rock albums and their analyses are sometimes so brutal you wonder if there's anything they DO like
