I use bottles to run games and works amazing too.
Am I dullard for just using Lutris? Like literally any time I want to install a program or game I will use Lutris' GUI to select the installer, select a prefix directory, and so on. Once it's done installing, then I switch the target EXE to the actual program I want. It isn't exactly convenient but it has been reliable. So I haven't tried any other approach.
IMO there are two reasons why the 9/11 attacks resonated. The first one is crucial for the second.
The first is that it was spectacle, literally. It is impossible to deny that the image of a large passenger aircraft flying straight into a building and exploding is simultaneously nauseating, enthralling, and "better than fiction" in the emotional response it can get out of anybody. The second reason is that once cable news had that spectacle to get their viewers, it was like 
for them. Just play it back. Replay it. Play it again. Run that another time. Get the second angle. Get the third angle. Play it again. Play it another time. The ad money coming in at that time must've been tremendous. It was really time for the fourth estate to shine. Judith Miller can tell you all about that.
COVID deaths? No spectacle. It doesn't matter that well over a million Americans died from it, as well as millions more globally (and we still are dying, too). It's undeniable that COVID had media coverage, but it wasn't like CNN was sending in camera crews into hospitals to catch people's last gasps of air before they perished. Abstract reasoning is too hard. We need to see the explosion and the building collapse, not reason about a number.
It is extremely worth saying that Ares has very high system requirements, partly due to the fact that it emulates systems with extremely high accuracy. And, if I understand its roots correctly, because it wasn't written specifically to be clever and fast, but to be more documentary in its code style. So while it is a great choice, here are some options that won't slam your CPU as hard:
NES: FCEUX SNES: SNES9X Genesis: Kega Fusion is decent. I haven't tried BlastEm
"DAMN! I ran the red light. But actually it wasn't my fault, the light switched to yellow just as I was checking my rear mirror, I had no time to react by the time I glanced forward again. Oh well. It's fine."
-- Maybe me.
Yours shows up as a normal inline image. Ours looks like an embedded emoji, as if it were a native feature of the website. Which I guess it pretty much is.
Depending on what I'm encoding, I am trying as much as possible to do AV1 + Opus.
x264 kind of stands on its own. It is a legendary encoder with excellent encode times, but h264 is an ancient codec and it really shows if you don't give it a bitrate that's, frankly, too high. I use it most frequently these days for sharing short, low res clips of videos on Discord or through iMessage or something.
So that leaves us with with our modern choices: hevc, vp9, and AV1.
Off the bat I would say VP9 is irrelevant just because it's way too slow to encode, and is effectively superseded by AV1. To whatever extent possible I try to use AV1, reencode into AV1, download AV1, and so forth. When done correctly it will shrink files even smaller than hevc can, it can encode relatively quickly with SVT-AV1 and is patent unencumbered so it's actually supported in web browsers. If the video is an AV1 .webm it will play in Firefox. If I need subtitles, I can put them in a .mkv.
HEVC (with x265) is a pretty strong choice. I will not avoid downloading torrents in this format but I will avoid encoding into it. It maybe has better compatibility in certain cases, like if you have a "smart" TV (ugh) that can natively decode it. In which case that might override any decision you will make: you just want the best compatibility with your existing hardware.
As for audio, that's Opus. Every time. It absolutely whips. For stereo audio I can do Opus at 96 or 112kbps and it is transparent. Another source with more going on (maybe loud explosions and effects and all that) could possibly benefit from 128. It's great.
The final thing to mention about encoding is no matter which codec you use you will have to learn a bit about how to use it. You can one and done the encoders with default choices, but at minimum you do need to factor in what happens when you do things like change preset speeds. From there you can consider things like what about changing the keyframe interval (for shorter vids I will do more frequent keyframes to make seeking tolerable. For something like a full movie a keyframe every 10 seconds is probably fine. But what about scene detection? What about bit depth?). Potentially much to consider.
Many times that's true, too. One of the saddest things in torrents is seeing two torrents with identical contents that were created separately, or one just recreated so someone can add their website to it or something, thereby dividing the pool of possible peers.
I think one of the most interesting ideas in BitTorrent v2 is that hash trees are formed per-file, not per-torrent. So two torrents with identical contents could, if I understand this right, basically be considered one and the same. It would be cool to see more wide adoption and promotion of BT v2 https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
So by chance I was in university and invited into what by my roommate. I literally bought more internet bandwidth from my uni to handle an early freeleech event where I got to mega game the system (By accident! I didn't really know what I was doing. And good thing it was a private tracker because I was on a bare connection. I didn't know what A VPN was at that time, much less how to hide my identity online).
I thought my ratio was totally unfair so I never really abused it, but that's kinda the problem. Only by chance I had like a 500 ratio, whereas someone like you had no chance ever to catch up to the earlier established players. Even though I wasn't a victim of the ratio, the concept of your story is just another reason why I dislike private trackers.
That said, the best thing about what.cd was just how well organized and categorized it was. Library of Alexandria style shit, now lost to us. Plus the forums with some real music-heads were great, too, and you could really expand your music horizons by talking with those people. I liked that it was NOT a Reddit-style forum, so when something new dropped everyone had a say. Upvotes didn't influence that kind of conversation. At any rate, I stopped pirating music so much maybe beginning in 2013 or 2014, but every time I look now the uploads are either 320kbps (overkill bitrate, garbage ancient codec) or FLAC (nice for archiving, but not what I want). So I end up DLing FLACs and then converting them into 128kbps Opus. It works, but my music horizons aren't broadened without that what community. I guess all I mean is I don't miss the private nature of what, but I do miss the community.
zstd
Just btw, while zstd's compression ratio might be stronger, it will not be as fast as something like lzo-rle. When it comes to RAM you will definitely want to prefer speed unless you have a strict space usage requirement.
I prefer public trackers and torrents just because I don't like gatekeeping piracy. I want those bits to be distributed as far and wide as possible. So anything I get and/or seed will be public.
Even if there are bad peers that don't give back (which there are many), plenty enough times it's just people with shitty under served Internet connections. I'm fortunate enough to have a good enough connection where that doesn't bother me.
I use Btrfs on my secondary drives as well, just for the checksumming capabilities. If there is data errors, I would like to know about it (even if I cannot do anything about it, because I do not have redundancy set up). I have my fstab set up so that it mounts with
noatime,compress-force=zstd:1Performance-wise, Btrfs has been improving a lot even in just the past few years. I think if I were using a very weak computer (like raspberry pi 1 strength) I would not use Btrfs or a CoW fs.