After leaving everything for around a month to do absolutely nothing, I magically ended up with a raspberry pi that I actually didn't magically end up with. In other words, I bought a raspberry pi for myself and turned it into my very own server. Dubbing it RoriCandy, I made a nice little cardboard box case for it based off of a tutorial on the interwebs somewhere...mostly because I was too cheap to buy some nicer looking supplies.
After putting everything in a nice casing, buying an unneeded hdmi to dvi converter, I connected to my rPi via ssh and played around with it for a little. Unfortunately the raspberry pi isn't exactly the strongest of powerhouses, so there is a rather low limit in terms of what can be done.
With that said, my raspberry pi was set up with archlinux to do the basic sort of things that I could want. It serves my files over nfs to both my laptop and desktop, streams music via mpd, downloads torrents to my external hard drive, and eventually I'll add finding the actually .torrent files as well (flexget/sickbeard/etc). Streaming files from the rPi works well enough that playing anime and music from the rPi is a bearable experience, though most of the actual work is being done on my desktop/laptop rather than the rPi.
The only issues that I have yet to resolve consist of getting flexget to work (thanks to Arch with always up-to-date packages that end up breaking flexget due to being "too new") and coming up with things that could be better done on the raspberry pi rather than a regular computer. It's a convenient way to share files between my laptop and desktop...but if I didn't have one or the other, it's worth would be no different from placing everything on my computer.
In conclusion, my raspberry pi pretty much ended up being a toy I can just leave on forever and for the most part, I know it is working in a relatively static way. I planned on using it as a server, and it happens to work rather well as a server. Maybe I should post a generic post about setting it up...since it can be found everywhere on the internet and most consist of "write image to sd and boot" which is completely helpful in setting up everything I could ever want...no it isn't, I don't understand what idiot would think that is a tutorial to setting up a rPi, but anyways...I should probably be thinking of better things to post.
