any1th3r3

This one is on IzzyOnDroid and has been working great for me

It's my only PC, so I've used it quite a bit, although not as much as I thought I would?
I got it day one and played it a fair bit last year (about as much as my PS5), but recently I've been playing on PS5 (and Series X, to a lesser extent) a lot more. It hasn't been collecting dust too much, as I'm still using it as a regular old PC, but certainly not daily.

This would depend on the search engines enabled and/or the default language/country set (if any) for that particular instance, you can find those in the settings of the instance itself (and enable/disable whichever you're most interested in, as well as a few other relevant settings).

Exactly, I've noticed this over the past few months, actual relevant results are being pushed much further down the stack.

If you want to explore alternatives, I've been using SearXNG, a so-called "metasearch engine", where you can get a combination of various search engine results, based on your preferences. It's pretty good, when it works (it tends to get rate-limited fairly often... or at least some of its results / search engines do, which can get annoying).

Well, Spotify Duo is going up by $2, so that's not exactly it.

There's tons of indie games everywhere nowadays, PS5 included, and some of them even launch(ed) day one on PS Plus Extra (Stray, Tchia, to name a few). There's a great digital selection (you might as well check it out now, since it's the PSN Summer Sale), and if you'd rather own (physical), then LRG and other limited print companies have been releasing a number of those indie games on PS4/PS5.

If you'd rather play on a smaller screen then you might be better off with a Switch or a Steam Deck (and you might even get a few more indie games on the latter, but that's debatable), otherwise I don't really see any reason to trade in your PS5 - but to each their own!

I'm part of the club! Although tbf I haven't touched it much since getting it about a year ago (I just haven't played that much retro stuff these days or most of it has been with my Super Nt).
One great addition I got recently was a 3D printed grip case, it made long play sessions sooo much more comfortable (obligatory "not affiliated" and I'm not the one making these, but I really like the quality which is why I'm linking it here).

As far as what I've been playing on it recently... really just pick up and play, SoR 2 or Turtles in Time, but I completed Metroid Fusion (first time) a few months ago on the Pocket (that's what made me get a grip case, it really wasn't too great wrt shoulder buttons comfort).

Cheers for that. I've cut the cord from Google Photos without a solid replacement and it's been... pretty miserable tbh.
I'll look into setting up a Synology NAS, as it seems to be a relatively inexpensive solution moving forward (Proton is nowhere near what I'm looking for feature-wise and other self-hosted foss solutions aren't really there yet afaict).

For most games, I'm like you - It's been a gradual shift for me, as I used to play very sandboxy type games before (although I could never get into Minecraft), but have been heavily focused on story-heavy / experience-based games for the last 3+ years.
I will say that I really liked BotW though, and am looking forward to playing TotK eventually (in the next 2/3 years or so) and Starfield has got me really intrigued, so we'll see.

Then there's the "intrinsic me", I guess, I don't mind playing some games for the sake of it, with no goals in mind - Forza Horizon just going from one end of the map to the other, or the same loop of various arcade games whenever I don't feel like doing anything else - sure there's some sort of objective, but ultimately when you've seen and done it that many times, it's not far off from it not being there at all imo, and I still enjoy it just as much.

I don't know that it really qualifies as a VN (because there's some RTS - and I guess Adventure - aspects to it), but 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

i've been car-free for 6+yrs now, and it has honestly not been an issue because i've always lived in (fairly) large urban centres with decent public transit or okay to good cycling infrastructure. if and when i need a car, i'm lucky enough to have carsharing programs available here (Lower Mainland BC)