These could be active skills or techniques you've found helpful, things you've built or bought that have changed an area of your life, or just something that brings you more joy than you had before.

A few subject areas that could spark ideas (but please share things outside of these if you have them!):

• Work / Professional Life / Networking
• Cooking / Baking / Food Prep
• Cleaning
• DIY
• Crafts / Hobbies
• Home Automation / Security
• Beauty / Grooming / Personal Hygiene
• Travel
• Planning / Scheduling / Memory Aids
• Fitness
• Relaxation
• Mental Health

Important: This will be a noisy topic. If you do not wish to see it in your feed, please use the Ignore feature to hide it!

Tip: If the large number of comments are cluttering up the topic and you just want to see the main giveaway posts, click Collapse Replies at the top of the comments.

🎵 It's the most wonderful time of the year 🎵

This is our annual holiday game giveaway topic. Spread some goodwill and holiday cheer with others!

Before you participate, please make sure you read the rules below.

Rules

-Gifters

Post your available games, the platform and method of delivery, rules for your giveaways (e.g. first-come first-serve, random draw, etc.), and any additional info or requirements. Feel free to get creative!

-Giftees

Request giveaways. Please make sure you follow the gifter's posted guidelines.

-Guidelines

Anyone can choose to be a gifter, giftee, or both! Giveaway rules are set by individual gifters, but there are handful of guidelines everyone should follow:

1. No grey market keys! Only give away games from reputable sources. If you're not sure what this means, please ask.
2. Requests for games should be done in this topic, but if the gift is a key, those should be delivered by PMs only. Please don't post keys publicly in this topic, even obfuscated ones.

If you're new to these, check out previous giveaway threads to see how these usually go.

Food highlights for the year?
Favorite meals?
New baking breakthroughs?
Hilarious cooking disasters?
New restaurants in your area?
Delicious snacking?

Let us know how all about your food for 2025 and what eating/cooking/baking/snacking was like for you.

I wanted to hit the gym all my life, but I never really made it until this year. Granted, I do have a sports background and have been active most of my life, but going to the gym was never really for me, until I decided to really do it this year. After years of shoulder and knee problems, I thought adding some muscle to my frame was definitely needed if I didn't want to be in pain all my life.

Since I had thought about going to the gym for years now, I feel like I gathered a good bit of information that REALLY helped me to go now. Here they are:

• The routine is more important than the results; regardless of any information I give you about macros, weights, sets, proteins, whatever all that, going to the gym one more time is going to be better than not going. Results take a LONG time. You will not see progress after a month. You may not see progress after 2 months. You may start to see some progress after 3 months. Real progress takes many months, years. That's why your number one priority should simply be to go to the gym, even if your workout is the worst ever and you use two machines in 30 minutes. Going to the gym 4 times a week is better than 3, going 3 times a week is better than 2 and so on. It takes about 3 months to a year to have the routine set in your life. After that and during that, you'll have all the time in the world to think about how to optimize your training, but just going and sticking to the routine of going is more important than anything else.

• Choose the easiest, most accessible gym option; the goal is to go. You should make this the easiest for you. Choose a gym that is easily accessible, before or after work. The closer, the better. Heck, your gym can even be your own home! Make some place for you to workout if you want to. You can easily do very good home workouts with maybe 100-150$ worth of equipment.

• Stick to a simple workout plan; There are some easy plans: target 2 muscle groups per workout, or alternate upper lower body; try to hit the muscles two times a week (2x biceps, 2x triceps, etc.). 3-5 exercises per workout is fine. 1-2min rest, take more if you feel like it, take less if you feel like it.

• Listen to your body for reps/weight; Going for 5 reps or going for 15 reps, it doesn't matter that much at the start, as long as you can do 2-3 series of that. Try to aim for anything from 6 to 12 reps, if you feel you can do more, do it, if you feel like you cannot, then don't. Some times I do 6, sometimes I do 12, but I try to aim for 8. The routine is more important than the results, all you need to do is go to the gym, the perfect workout can come in later.

• The movement is more important than the weight; building muscle is simply your muscles tearing and healing. As long as your muscles tear, you've done a good job. But that tear must come from a movement done well, or else you'll tear something that was not supposed to. Go for slower reps if needed, less explosion in your movements. Watch a video on how to do specific exercises if needed, some are mandatory to make sure you don't injure yourself (squats, deadlifts).

• Don't overdo it, progressive overload is the key; getting injured is EASY, the goal is to go to the gym, not be hurt. Go lower on the weights at first, it's not a competition. I started my dumbell press with like 10 pounds, shaking like crazy, it's normal. We've all been there. Don't ego lift. The routine is more important than the results. The big weights will take a while to reach, but it'll happen progressively.

• Have some kind of goal that is not tied to a number; I guess this one is more personal, but I feel like it's way easier to stick to the routine when you don't "care" about the results as much. The true goal is to be fit or to be lean or to be muscular or to be healthy, no? I feel like those are achievable long term and are guaranteed to come from the routine. I think if you're a beginner and set some kind of arbitrary number, you're not an expert to know if that goal is realistic or not and it makes the whole working out thing to be dependent on a result that you don't have the slightest idea how difficult it is or how long it takes to reach it. I think goals with a number should come after the routine is set in, not before going to the gym, but hey, that's just my two cents.

• Eat enough, drink water, get more protein; protein shakes are easy and not that costly, just having a protein shake is fine. Not having it is fine too. If you want to build muscle, you should aim for 100-150g of protein per day. Make sure you eat enough and well, but in the end, the routine is more important. Remember, getting fit happens at the gym, getting lean happens in the kitchen. Weight loss and weight gains both happen in the kitchen. Realistically, a normal genetic male will gain AT BEST 10-12 pounds of muscle the first year of working out (assuming optimal results), so you can aim for that, but just know that your weight gains might not be muscle.

• Use ChatGPT to help if needed; When I started going at the gym, I followed all these tips, but I didn't really know that to do. So I asked ChatGPT to make me a 4 days a week workout plan, 5 exercises: pull, push, legs, full body. I tried what it gave me for about a month, but I used that month to just replace exercises I didn't like and I slowly started making my own program to fit what I wanted. But I was super happy that I at least had a starting program. I realize that's what's stopping a lot of people and you can use AI to help you out with that, especially if you don't have money to buy a program or pay a trainer to make one for you.

• Be disciplined, but be kind to yourself; There will be days when you will not be able to workout. There will be days when you will not want to workout. There will be days when you will feel bad about working out. It's ok to miss a day, it's ok to miss a week. Remember, the routine is more important. Just make sure to go back to your routine as soon as possible. Missing one workout after going 20 times in a row feels a lot less bad than missing 2-3 every week.

Finally, if you have any questions about starting the gym, feel free to ask. I'll gladly help.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I'm planning to launch Tildes Minecraft season 3 some time mid November. What mods should we add or remove? Any other recommendations or requests?

Edit: As per the majority of the feedback, season 3 will be delayed until the beginning of January.

Edit 2: Server goes online January 3rd, 2026 at 11am Pacific time.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I know Steam Replay isn’t out yet, but I figure it’s still a good enough time to get the ball rolling.

This is your place to share any and all thoughts on your gaming for 2025.

Games you talk about do NOT have to be limited to this year’s releases.

Feel free to share:

• Favorites
• Disappointments
• Surprises
• Memorable moments
• Self-reflections
• Anything else!

Let us know how your gaming for 2025 went.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known or overlooked Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam Sale topic.

Optional: Feel free to categorize your recommendations by number of reviews (as a proxy for popularity)

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like the game awards.2025, devices.smart and gift cards. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was out of the loop.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Welcome back to another edition of the good news thread. Where I challenge folks to find and post good news. Don't just link to a source of good news, pick one out and share it. Personal good news stories are also welcome!

Even if it's good in the face of bad, even if it's the sort of good that can also remind you that shit's fucked up. For this thread, we focus on the good and we don't let the fact there's still also bad in the world drag us down.

Hello, Tildes

Allow me to introduce myself.

I came over to Tildes fairly recently after Twitterriffic died and Apollo announced it would shut down.

As a relative youngster, I tend to mostly browse on mobile.

While I do appreciate Tildes' philosophy of having a simple website that works well on desktop and mobile, I've always preferred mobile apps. I'm a strong believer that a well-built native application will always provide a richer experience than a website.

But enough talking.. showing is way more fun - here's a lil' something I've been messing around with:

Introducing Surfboard for Tildes

The goal is simple: to be the best way to interact with Tildes on mobile.

Features

Surfboard is still extremely early, and is missing many features.

With that said, here is what it currently supports:

• Login to Tildes (supports 2FA)
• Browse topics
• Filters & sorting
• Browse comments
• Advanced rendering is still in early stages..
• Supports comment collapsing behavior from the web version
• Reply/vote/bookmark/ignore on topics, comments, & notifications (requires login)
• Search topics
• Global search
• Search within groups
• Option for in-line images
• Clean browsing interface
• In-line markdown preview when composing replies
• Share topics & comments
• Notifications
• View read & unread notifications
• Reply, vote, bookmark, mark as read...
• Customizable
• Toggle settings, set custom gesture actions, etc.
• Free, as in beer

The design draws some inspiration from Apollo for Reddit, an app that I loved & am very sad will be discontinued.

Try it yourself

I would love to get some feedback from other Tildes users on the app. If you are interested in trying it for yourself, you can get it here via TestFlight

Surfboard is built for iPhone, and requires iOS 16.0 or higher.

Inside the app is a 'roadmap' of sorts which is basically a list of things I know are missing, but if there's something you want that isn't listed there, I'm all ears.

Formatting is a little rough at the moment, although I made enormous improvements on the parsing & rendering there over the last day.

It should support just about anything you throw at it other than a <details>

(I'll get around to them, I swear..)

If you run into issues viewing a post/comment, you can easily open them in an in-app safari window from the menu.

As mentioned above, it's very early, but it's already becoming my favorite way to browse Tildes. I hope that others will enjoy it as well. Consider it my gift to the Tildes community.

Cheers !

Edit:

The best way to submit feature requests & bug reports is to add it to the issue tracker and/or leave a comment on this thread and I’ll get around to adding it myself.

Thanks !