With the announcement of Tildes maintenance mode, it's finally official. Tildes has an expiration date. We don't know when it'll be, but we'll surely know when it's passed. I... I don't want to go. I love this place. I love the people on it.

I got here after Rexit, like many of my peers, because reddit was my home online. I participated in discussions. I spent so much time there. I met my husband. It was my little corner of the internet, because it had exactly what I wanted and nothing else.

All that's gone now. When Apollo shut down, I deleted my account out of protest. I regret that now. People pointed me here, to Tildes, and for a moment, just a moment I could smell the musty carpet of the first websites I was ever on. This was it. This was it. A tiny forum with just enough modern convenience to tolerate using it, full of people who were interesting, discussions that were respectful, little to no drama, and a minor legend of the former web at the top, generally content with ruling as a benevolent dictator.

I posted. I participated in discussions. I had such a grand time talking to people, Season One of the Minecraft server will forever be in my heart as the "golden days" of it all, if I had to look back. I check this place religiously. It's in my favourites bar. I still post. I still comment. I still like the people. It's small enough that I can go "hey, there they are!" when I see Creesch or Bauke or Tea. For the first time in a long time I could call a communal web space my... home. It's cheesy. I know.

And now I hear that it's supposed to end? That the experiment has run its course, that sooner or later, but probably sooner than I'd like, it'll all be gone? That I have to pack up all my shit again and find a new place, a new community? What a sick joke, I say, with metaphorical tears in my eyes, because getting mad is at least something. Getting mad is more than removing the stupid bookmark and forgetting about this place like I forgot about LiveJournal, about MySpace, about Blogger, about fucking Ello.

I don't want to go. And I know nobody's asking me to go. But everyone expects everyone else to go at some point. And even though none of you actually know me, truly know me, I still feel like we're familiar. We have tiny, tenuous, brittle relationships that could snap at any point, be it from hostility or apathy. I know that none of this is real, but god damn it, I liked it.

Now you'll say, oh god, Delphi, shut up, this is a forum, it's not that deep, and you're right, so damn right, I couldn't agree more, none of you should mean anything to me, I have friends, I have a life, I have people who love me out there, for real, I shouldn't care about this, but then tell me, why do I have tears in my eyes?

What's the point of this post? Catharsis? Maybe? I didn't expect to feel this way about a little corner of the internet that's sometimes a little snobbish, sometimes a little too high on its own farts, sometimes a little too elitist, but that's where I'm at.

I don't want to let this place go. But I also know that I won't be the last one here.

So if this is the last time I see some of you, I don't blame you. Just know you were part of my life, and that I quite liked that part.

—-

A little edit after crying it out: You’re all right. I hope that Tildes won’t change. I certainly won’t, I’ll stay here, and I hope we’ll have many more years together. This entire thing just dredged up memories of losing online spaces before, and… well, you can imagine the rest. Love y’all.

We all know the big-name ones: Dune, 1984, The Martian Chronicles, etc.

What are some sci-fi books that you loved that you never hear about or that won't be making those top-of-all-time lists?

Why do they stand out to you?
What do they do well?
Why do you think they didn't get wider appreciation?

I love Tildes. I am not the most active member here, but I do make an effort to contribute. This site fills a hole for me not even close to be filled by other sites. It has that small local pub feel. All names are familiar, even if I haven't interacted with people directly and there is a general sense of people being aligned with wanting to be part of a 'better' community.

I know there has been a lot of discussion about missing features here and that ultimately leading to some users wanting to leave, because they can't block the content they don't want to see.

With Deimos's announcement that the site is being sunset, it immediately made we ask: Can we build a successor?

That has to be immediately followed with acknowledgment that it would be extremely hard (both in building the software and building the community) and very unlikely to succeed.

With that out of the way, is there any interest?

If there is, I'd like to here from you in this topic with your thoughts on how it should be run, must have features missing from Tildes, any features of Tildes not needed in an MVP (minimum viable product) and really any thoughts you have on the subject. What would be a deal-breaker?

I am especially interested to hear on thoughts of how it should be administrated. Do we like the benevolent dictator model? Would a committee be better? Are there other examples of systems that work well?

Tildes isn't going anywhere for a long while by the sounds of it, which I'm really grateful of. Please don't read this as any kind of descent, mutiny or call to leave. I mostly just want to make sure that if there's desire for this community to NOT be sunset, there's at least an option.

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.

My phone is a Samsung A55. Fully updated.

I have ADHD and autism, which is to say that I have a very obsessive personality. I have used various blockers over the years to prevent me from wasting time on apps and websites.

Lock me Out has helped me for many years to curb my smartphone usage. Unfortunately, it stopped working, as it became easy to circumvent by either forcing the program to stop or uninstalling it. I have been in contact with the developer, but they weren't able to find a solution and eventually stopped responding to my emails.

So I need an app that prevents me from disabling blocks at all.

While I can pay for an app even if it is a little expensive, I cannot justify an expensive subscription priced in US dollars (although I might do so if there's no other alternative).

Any suggestions that could help me out? I'm using my phone 24/7, I can't stand it anymore. And I cannot simply turn it off because I have a toddler, and I must be accessible to my wife for emergencies when she leaves the home with him.

There are also many ways to use a smartphone that are actually useful, positive, and non-addictive. And I'd rather be able to access these functionalities.

Thanks!

Just wanted to say goodbye to everyone. Sorry if I upset anyone, and thanks for all the fun little interactions. I didn't really get to know anyone too to well I suppose, but there are some people I'll miss interacting with. The way things have gone over the past week, I've definitely outstayed my welcome. Or the welcome has outstayed me, I don't know.

ta-ra, hope everyone can live their best lives.

I'm not strictly talking about adherent vegan or vegetarian lifestyles, though those certainly do count towards this discussion.

I feel like there's an absolute plethora of good, different reasons to reduce animal based proteins. The big one for most people right now is obviously cost. Simple meals like meatloaf or stroganoff simply aren't worth it (to me) to make with beef when beef is $8/lb for 70/30. But lots of other reasons like the environment, animal welfare, and health consciousness exist.

As far as a lifestyle goes, it definitely feels like the winds have shifted considerably. While IRL here in the southeastern US you do still have those "I'll eat 1 steak for every vegan who cries about it" types, online, that type of talk is extremely cringe in most contexts and circles. Now I just feel like when people say they are vegan, there isn't an instant visceral reaction from everyone like there used to be. I recall not too long ago, everyone's favorite joke was "how do you know someone is vegan? Because they'll tell you!" when all that person did was decline a burger. In fact, quite the opposite seems to happen today. There's a lot of "good for you/I wish I could do that" type comments. Just seems like things are shifting culturally.

I'm not personally vegan or vegetarian, but I have drastically reduced my animal products. I make black bean burgers instead of regular burgers. I make my fried rice without any meat. I make a lot of curry that just happens to be vegan. I just bought groceries for the next 2 weeks and the total amount of animal products is 1 pound of ground pork, 1 pound of scallops, and 8oz of mozzarella cheese. That's it. Years ago I would eat animal products pretty much for every meal.

Is it just me? Or have most people reduced their consumption too? It's hard to tell because everything at the grocery store is "protein protein protein" and there's a lot of social media content of body builders eating a dozen eggs and 3 rotisserie chickens for dinner and that type of content, but I'm not sure how much of that actually exists in real life. Seems too expensive for the average person.

A while back I had an idea for some D&D magic items that were, in a shop keep's words, "Greatly discounted due to minor defects". The general idea was that these items would be a gamble to use each time, sometimes offering great benefits, sometimes offering catastrophic backfires, but all at a greatly discounted price any adventurer could afford. With my most recent addition (the Potion of Prior Authorization), it occurred to me that it could be fun to share my list here, for feedback and other potential additions to it. My hope is that the next time it's my turn to run a campaign, I can offer these items to my players.

Weapons and Armor

Wands, Rings & Cloaks

Footwear & Accessories

Consumables & Scrolls

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

Server host: tildes.nore.gg (Running Java 26.2)
Verification site: https://tildes.nore.gg
BlueMap: https://tildes.nore.gg/map/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TildesMC

The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.

We recommend you install our mod web-chat so that you can chat while in your web browser. It turns the server into an old-school chat room.

<- Previous Thread

I'm using the phrase 'internet discussion site' pretty informally, so I hope my meaning will become clearer as you continue reading.

I got rid of Snapchat around 4 years ago now. At some point in 2023 I noticed a sharp downtick in discussion quality on Twitter, and got rid of it as well. About two years ago, frustrated with the lack of human interaction and the vying for attention, I deleted Instagram. Near the end of 2025, I stopped using Discord. The final nail in the coffin has now arrived, since I'm unfortunately coming to the conclusion that Reddit is no longer worth visiting, leaving me almost entirely cordoned off from internet communication at a time when more humans are using it than ever before.
I won't bother repeating my personal reasons for this exodus since I feel confident that most people on this website have feelings on the matter that at least approximate my own.
Realistically this is a sign that it's time to prioritize interaction in the real world, and that's certainly a worthwhile thing to pursue. But bluntly society has restructured around the internet in a pretty substantial way, and I don't think it's an unreasonable ask to find various forms of forums on which more meaningful discussions can take place.
Here is my personal survey of the current landscape:

• tildes.net: Basically good. I really enjoy this website and I think in a lot of ways the 'bar/pub/cafe' model for a forum, where you can peer through the window but require permission to gain admission, is the only viable model for future online discussion places as the internet becomes ever more saturated with bots and bad actors.
• lobste.rs: Also basically good, for the same reasons as tildes. In some aspects, limited by the fact that it has a particular focus. In other ways, that's a really good thing. Maybe in a perfect world there would be a lobste.rs equivalent for every hobby, and we would return to an early internet forum world.
• Hacker News: Also basically good but perhaps a bit less so than the above two. I think most of the things posted on there are interesting, but a lot of the discussion has lately felt less insightful than it used to. I think a different tildes post noted this as well, but it's very caught up in the AI news cycle, often to an unfortunate degree.
• Rateyourmusic: The core site is enjoyable, and the forums are usually fun to check in on every now and then. Certainly a worthwhile place to visit if you enjoy music.
• Stackexchange networks: This is cheating since this is obviously many sites. I'm a mathematics student and I've found MSE and MathOverflow to be really wonderful places to learn and converse, albeit with some very arcane and strict rules for posting. The philosophy SE seems also generally of a high quality, and there are many other SE sites that I occasionally stumble into and am pleasantly surprised by. Unfortunately I expect its time is finite, since the UX has slowly but surely been degrading and the site traffic dropping.
• Fediverse networks: These sites clearly have potential, but for whatever reason it's still just not there. I drop into lemmy and Mastodon occasionally, but the posts are rarely of high quality. In many ways they just feel like "Reddit/Twitter but with a different name".

Surely these can't be all, right? It's a little soul-crushing to think how many people are online at any given time and how hard it is to find a place not drowning in noise. Maybe this is just my lament.

I have often wondered if I over prepare - if I have a tendency to carry too many things with me “just in case”. I aspire to minimalism, but I definitely fail to achieve it in practice. Indeed, it’s not rare for me to go on holiday and pack several items of clothes for situations which do not materialise, or simply to realise that I’ve been carrying some item in my backpack every day for several months while never using it.

Well, today I was very happy to have a random item in my backpack that had been sitting there unused for god-knows how long.

European Tilderinos are likely also looking forward to the imminent near-total solar eclipse. I‘ve been really looking forward to it, and my partner and I had made plans to rendezvous at a park in our city after to work view it. But as I go to leave work, I realise: (minor) disaster! I am an optically-impaired person (I need glasses), but since I did not put on my contact lenses this morning, I will have to wear my eclipse-goggles over my spectacles! What a fool I will appear to everyone else at the park!

…and then I remembered: I almost always make sure to have a spare pair of contact lenses in my most-used bags (I wear dailies, so it’s cheap to set a small handful of pairs aside for this purpose) such that if I have a contact lens emergency while I’m out, I can safely remove the problematic pair and replace them with a fresh pair. Of course I also usually carry around my glasses if I’m wearing my lenses, but this isn’t always practical, or it may be important for me to be able to resume wearing lenses (if I am to playing sports, for example).

Now you might wonder why this fact slipped my mind initially, that would be because I’ve been wearing contact lenses for well over a decade, and in the last five or so years I don’t think I’ve had a single incident. But I remain hopefully that a past version of myself may still have been practicing over-preparedness…

So, I go a-rummaging in my backpack and, lo and behold, I do indeed have a set of emergency contacts! Now I will be able to stare directly at the sun mildly more conveniently! Thanks, past me!

(Perhaps you can tell that this situation made my extremely happy, hence why I felt the need to share.)

Have a lovely solar eclipse day (to all who celebrate)!

I hope this doesn't come off as glib, or sarcastic, or any of several other negative things that I tend to be in real life, but I truly like and enjoy this community. I love that it's full of people (and that could be the whole sentence right there!) who love it enough to want it not to change, and people who love it enough to want to see it improve. I love our conversations and our characters. I love the quirks.

Anyway, given the recent announcement, I've had a vibe that kinda feels like when you're at a family gathering where several members are ill-at-ease with each other and sometimes awkward, with simmering resentments over wounds old and new, but then someone shares news with the family that brings everyone together in a moment of almost-stunned silence. And after that moment, after some heartfelt words are shared and hugs are given, people kind of relax. They laugh together. They don't exactly forget their problems, but they aren't really thinking about them for just a night. They drink and reminisce.

Anyway, if that feeling describes at all how you're feeling, too, then this is a place for unabashed, unironic, caveat-free positivity about this place we sometimes call home. There are plenty of other things to discuss, of course. This isn't a "love it or leave" thread. Just a place to set aside negativity for a moment and just... commune with each other over our shared care for this space.

I love you all (yes, even you) and appreciate what we're building here every day.

Ok bye, back to lurking for me I couldn't resist, guess I'll lurk later

I have a group of work friends where we were playing D&D 5e (pretty infrequently) for a year and a half. We've been on a long hiatus from TTRPGs since last year after a couple problems with the game came to surface that some of them didn't like. One of which is the 5e gameplay. Out of the 3 players, none had any hands on play experience with any TTRPG. I had extensive experience with 5e so naturally I was the GM and it was the simplest way to jump in a play with my solid grasp of the rules. One player in particular did not have experience with games (table top or video games) beyond a few simple card games and classic games like chess and was more there to be happy to socialize and have fun with a story. She had a lot of trouble grasping the rules and feeling comfortable with polyhedral dice sets. The other issue was mainly the infrequency of playing and the players remembering the story and previous sessions, so that isn't really related to the system.

Having said all of that, several months later that less familiar with games player came to me and said one of her main issues was she would get stressed when told to roll, then blanking on which dice is which and what she is rolling for. She thinks a big fix to this is playing a game "like" D&D 5e with story and socializing (a TTRPG), but with "normal" dice (D6's). Until then I had given up on the idea of a TTRPG with them but that reinvigorated me. I wanted to find a game that is D6's only, with simple enough rules for those inexperienced, but preferably with some numbers, crunch, and customizable characters to satisfy those with more gaming experience. Do any come to mind as favorites of yours that you'd suggest?

TL;DR suggest your favorite D6 only games. Preferably simple on the surface for the inexperienced, but enough numbers and customizable characters underneath to satisfy more experienced gamers.

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 finished reading Flowers for Algernon recently. I genuinely enjoyed it but as I progressed I felt it was closer to a human drama than a sci-fi book. I was surprised since it has been recognized as a sci-fi book for so long and won the Hugo and Nebula awards. I was wondering what others thought about it. I will add my rationale below (spoilers).

(Spoilers). The first thing is how shallow the science is, there is only one moment when is commented with ant type of depth and that moment has more big words than science backup, in my opinion. I know it is a book of its time, but I especially missed Charlie doing physical experimentation, taking tissue samples or applying the science that was explicitly mentioned in the book as the source of his intelligence when doing his own research.

The second thing is that the experiment feels like a device to trigger Charlie's specific human drama and to walk us through his childhood trauma. It is an amazing mechanism for that, but I expect sci-fi to hace societal impact and deeper world building. It is a bit reminiscent of the movie Awakenings, that uses specific medical procedures to give someone a window to experience life.

I also feel that the lack of stakes when Charlie escapes and takes Algernon with him are underwhelming, the research lab just let it happen and they don't engage the authorities to bring him back or, at the very least, to retrieve the most valuable mouse lab in the world. It felt as another mechanism to advance the human drama.

Lastly, and this is a common pattern for this theme, there is no time for Charlie to learn all he learns, even with super intellect, he needs to go through the regular knowledge absorption methods of reading and studying, and in a few months, there is just no time for that. He can be a genius, but a genius won't be a neurosurgeon without taking the time to learn.

All in all, I feel that as the tragic story of Charlie the book works exceedingly well. It is cleverly written and Charlie's progress (or lack thereof) felt earned. I would have liked Charlie to be less of a jerk when he became intelligent, but that is of course a creative choice. It does brings a very clear separation between emotional and intellectual intelligence that it is undeniable in the real world, so I can believe it.

I am glad I read it and would recommend it, just not as sci-fi, not sure what others think.

My two cents