I posted on here a long time ago about a bizarre health situation I'd been facing for a long time -- severe bouts of hypoglycemia, ever 3-4 hours, around the clock -- despite not having diabetes or taking insulin. This consumed my life. My last bloodwork was 34 mg/dl after a simple 10 hour fast. Life was hell... After 4 years of no answers, I accepted I was going to die (would eventually pass out in my sleep). I sold my stuff. I made a will. I set up for a full body donation. Then finally, a PET-CT identified a neuroendocrine tumor on my pancreas. I couldn't believe it. No one had suspected this because my insulin levels were not chronically high on bloodwork, and I had elevated ketones. But so it was. I had surgery this January. It was rough. The tumor was on the head of my pancreas. I was already quite underweight. It took a week before I could walk without a walker. I couldn't eat for 5 days, and barely bits for the following month. But finally my life is back in my hands. No more hypoglycemia. No more going to sleep at night hoping I won't die, but accepting that I might not wake up. Now I have no stuff because I sold it. I am slowly going bankrupt. I have lost all the illusions of life that I once held. But holy shit my pancreas works, and I am alive. The gratitude I feel for my physicians, particularly my last two endocrinologists (who both found the tumor and then proved it was functional via insulin staining) and my surgeon and his incredible team of residents (who narrowly avoided a Whipple, after finding the tumor by palpation).

I don't really know why I'm sharing this. I just feel so happy to be alive right now, able to type, not sinking beneath the crushing weight of neuroglycopenia and hoping for an end to my suffering. Just the ability to think. I feel so sad now when I see people hating on doctors and the medical community. There are such incredible folks working in this broken system, who live to heal others. They gave me my life back.

My hypoglycemia issues are not related to diabetes fwiw. That said, I tend to get hypoglycemia a few times a day. If I catch it quick enough and treat, it's usually not a big deal, but if I get too low (maybe once I get into the 50s mg/dl), then after treating (usually about 15 minutes later), I get so. freaking. tired. Like, barely able to stand up exhausted. Currently dealing with this as we speak, and it's very frustrating. My endocrinologist told me it's normal to get tired like this while recovering. I'm curious if anyone else deals with this? If so, do you have any advice for dealing with the fatigue?

Tildes might be too small of a platform for this. If no one deals with hypoglycemia here, please feel free to remove it. I thought with the prevalence of diabetes, it would be likely there are folks who encounter this.

It's almost time...

...for another Backlog Burner -- the event where you try out games you've always wanted to play (but haven't yet -- for whatever reason).

The Backlog Burner for May 2026 will officially begin in two days on May 1st.

If you're new to the Backlog Burner, check out our previous events to get an idea of what's going on:

• 2025 - November
• 2025 - May
• 2024 - November
• 2024 - May
• 2023
• 2022
• 2020

Backlog Bingo returns yet again!

• Backlog Bingo

You might notice that the already beautiful Backlog Bingo site has gotten even more beautifuller. That's because our intrepid u/Wes has been hard at work once again adding polish to the site, changing things on the backend to make them smoother and more elegant, and even sprucing up the category lists.

Backlog Bingo has literally never been better! Or more beautifuller!

If you participated last time, clear your old card and start fresh with a new one.

If you're new to the event, click the link above to generate your card (but only if you want to -- playing a bingo card is NOT required to participate).

Notification List

If you are interested in participating in the Backlog Burner, please comment in this topic. Anyone commenting/replying here will automatically be added to a notification list for the Backlog Burner, unless you specify otherwise.

Start Planning (or Playing)

Technically the event starts in two days, so you have time to roll your cards (if you're playing Bingo) and plan out what you'd like to play for the month. That said, if you're eager to jump right in, and start early, I certainly won't stop you!

Let's get ready to burn through these backlogs!

Backlog Burner FAQ

Backlog Bingo FAQ

Important: All data for your Backlog Bingo card is stored on your device, not the server. Clearing your browser data will delete your card. You can use the export feature to make backups or move your card between devices.

I'm in my mid 20s and have had a pretty lonely life. I had a very lonely childhood, a less lonely but still fairly lonely adolescence, and again a very lonely time in college (in that case, because of a mix of mental hangups, the pandemic, personal circumstance that was a major drain on my time, and not managing all those things as optimally as I could have). At this point in my life, I essentially only have one friend, who I met a couple years ago and has since moved across the country.

I have more time on my hands now, am probably more socially adept than I used to be, but I find myself having lost or losing the drive to make friends. I guess I've gone so long without friends that I've lost sense at an emotional level of what the point even is. It's also friggin hard to meet people in the adult world and it seems like you have to put twice the energy to meet people that you vibe with half as much as when you were younger. I want to want to make friends, but it feels like I'd be setting myself up for more pain and disappointment by putting myself in that headspace. It also doesn't help that I'm pretty socially picky (not in a judgmental way, but I'd prefer a small circle of people I'm really close with over a large group that I'm not) and that I have a strong need to feel like the friends I make aren't "arbitrary", that they are the ones I am "meant" to be around. Has anyone experienced something similar or have any advice?

Many of us were dinosaur kids (I assume), but I know that our understanding of dinos has changed a lot from my childhood: more feathers, warm-blooded, and the brontosaurus survived its deletion attempt! Land Before Time, Dinotopia, We're Back! a Dinosaur's Story, Dinosaurs, and Jurassic Park have been supplemented by Jurassic World, Velocipastor, and many dinosaur "documentaries".

So Tildarianitearinis, what is your favorite dinosaur?

(For purposes of this question dinosaurs will be inclusive of prehistoric archosaurs without pedantry. Aka pterosaurs count. )

Breathe Deep Seek Peace Ψ

I recently visited Albuquerque and spent almost a full day at their botanical gardens. It was awesome and made realize how much I love bioparks.
Of all the attractions a city may have, they always delight and never leave me conflicted like I feel at zoos and aquariums.

So I ask the people of Tides: where are the best bio parks and what makes them great?

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

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?

Hey, tildes - cqns here.

I know tildes ain't never do me no wrong (apologies for the heavy colloquialism), but I've been working off and on with a worldbuilding project for the past decade and a half. Some four years ago, I finally hunkered down and created a world map completely from scratch. Due to my extraordinarily high standards, I couldn't help but slowly figure out that there was a lot of things wrong with it after I went through the effort of making it, so I ended up redoing it several times over with additions and subtractions, still feeling like there was something missing.

Turns out, my hunch was correct. Long story short, I found a website called World Orogen that procedurally generates a planet within a certain degree of "realism". Tweaking some settings, I came across a design that was good enough for working on outside of the website, in which I was beset on another issue that quickly spiraled out of control, and I found myself completely out of my depth - map projections, which is a rabbit hole all on its own, and I could only understand the bare minimum basics, such as lat/lon, but that's pretty much the extent of my knowledge. Seriously.

Undertaking this next phase of the project would eventually (and I do say "eventually" because I haven't even gotten around to it yet) lead me to making individual isolated continent maps like how one would find in an atlas. I have asked the Orange Alien Website for tips on r/mapmaking, and while I did get some nudges in the right direction, I'm still attempting to wrap my head around the programs they had suggested. QGIS and G.Projector being the areas of my focus. It's hard enough for me trying to fathom the extensive features of QGIS in general, and as for G.Projector, it comes with its own kind of clunkiness that I'm slowly getting used to. My ultimate question here is...how would I go about finding a map projection to ensure size and area accuracy (because both are apparently different) of all of my continents?

For reference, I have included the map in question so that if anyone wants to give it a go and offer up a solution.

Catbox Link

Server host: tildes.nore.gg (Running Java 1.21.11)
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

With all of the identity verification laws in the pipeline, data breaches, and government overreach (mandated monitoring in new cars in the US), what steps can the average person take to secure their anonymity and data and device privacy?

I’m a tech-savvy person but nowhere near the level of a great many. It seems like in the face of overwhelming odds, making small changes is only a drop in the bucket. I have all the data encryption settings enabled on my phone, but I use services like Dropbox and rely on it heavily. I’ve always thought that if the product is free, you’re the product…but I pay for Dropbox, so they shouldn’t use my data for training AI (but they likely are). Setting up a personal cloud seems like a daunting task, as is getting involved in any of the small projects that people have going (decentralized networks, mesh…things, P2P, etc). I’ve focused more on securing my home networks recently so my Ubiquiti devices are restricted in what they can access, but I haven’t actually pen-tested my network yet. I have PopOS! installed on my home desktop because I got tired of Windows’ invasive…everything, but ultimately I don’t know what I’m doing.

There’s probably a great many people out there that feel like it’s hopeless to try to do anything because it won’t matter as there’s such a heavy push to invade, restrict, and monetize our digital lives. What can the average person do to take control of our devices and data?

I had been having pain in my "upper butt" when sitting for a few weeks, so I went to an orthopedic practice that has urgent care walk in hours. He diagnosed it as sacroiliac inflammation and gave me an anti-inflammatory (meloxicam) and a PT script. The PT did not have an opening until week after next, but the medicine has has really helped with the pain.

Them took xrays during my visit, and the side-looking one shows spondylolisthesis (one of my lumbar vertebrae has slipped forward). He pointed it out (casually) and didn't say much about it other than he thought it wasn't the cause of my pain. Maybe he thought I already knew about it?

I have been having lower back pain off and on for a long time. I went to my doctor one time, and he diagnosed it as a bulging disc. He had given me some meloxicam and strengthening exercises to do at home. Since then, I would have pain in my lower back intermittently as well as occasional numbness in my leg, but I had just assumed it was a disc and tried to keep strengthening my core.

I am overweight (280lb) and not very active (software engineer). I started a new job that is in office this year, so I'm a lot less sedentary than I was working from home. I have a fantastic yoga teacher, and I do that every week. My practice in between classes has been intermittent at best, but I am trying to make it more regular.

Right now, I'm waiting for the PT to start, and I have a followup appointment with the spine specialist at the ortho in a fee weeks.

My biggest problem is that whenever I think about the xray, and seeing that disc so misaligned, my anxiety really spikes to 11. I get the "heebie jeebies", the same creepy shivering feeling I get if a bug unexpectedly crawls on me. It's happening most days. I feel kind of betrayed by my body.

I have talked to my therapist about the anxiety, and we are working on it. But in the mean time it is very stressful and distracting.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I am not sure what I'm really asking for. There's plenty of information online about the treatments. I guess I am wondering if other people went through it, how did it affect your mobility, quality of life, etc? Are there things you wish you had known?

Honestly, I think I could just use a (virtual) hug.

Preface: I know not what I talk about.

INSTANCE: A Unifi network with multiple VLANs, each with their own subnet. A Linux client that is assigned to a single VLAN, connected to the network via Wi-Fi, and running a full-tunnel Wireguard config which tunnels data to the provider's endpoints.

QUESTION: While running full-tunnel VPN configurations supplied by a commercial VPN provider, how might the client device talk with other devices on the same (local!) LAN as it is, including devices that are on a different (local!) VLAN, and thus a different subnet?

Let's say, for instance, that I have the following network architecture:

Name        Subnet          Gateway     Mask
Internal    10.0.0.0/24     10.0.0.1    255.255.255.0
Hosted      10.5.0.0/24     10.5.0.1    255.255.255.0
Private     10.5.1.0/24     10.5.1.1    255.255.255.0
Guests      10.5.2.0/24     10.5.2.1    255.255.255.0

I have a device that is connected to the network via Wi-Fi, and is contained within the "Private" VLAN. It can also talk to devices that are in the "Internal" VLAN (by necessity), and devices in the "Hosted" VLAN.

Once I spin the VPN up, using a configuration gained from OVPN / PIA / NordVPN / whatever, the client can still communicate with devices on the same VLAN as it- for example, if the client is 10.5.1.132, it can still communicate with 10.5.1.42, but it cannot communicate with, say, 10.5.0.11. One would assume that is because the DHCP server has told it that it can access devices within a specific range through the correct gateway- and in-fact, this shows in the IP routing table:

Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
default         unifi.localdoma 0.0.0.0         UG    1024   0        0 eth0
10.5.1.0        0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     1024   0        0 eth0
unifi.localdoma 0.0.0.0         255.255.255.255 UH    1024   0        0 eth0

There are, as far as I can tell, a number of solutions for this problem. The first is to not use a full-tunnel VPN, and instead build a set of AllowedIPs which carve out the LAN ranges which you do not want tunneled. This, I think, is known as a split-tunnel VPN. If one wants to carve out all of the possible LAN IP ranges, as specified in RFC1918, it starts to become somewhat cumbersome:

AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/5, 8.0.0.0/7, 11.0.0.0/8, 12.0.0.0/6, 16.0.0.0/4, 32.0.0.0/3, 64.0.0.0/2, 128.0.0.0/3, 160.0.0.0/5, 168.0.0.0/6, 172.0.0.0/12, 172.32.0.0/11, 172.64.0.0/10, 172.128.0.0/9, 173.0.0.0/8, 174.0.0.0/7, 176.0.0.0/4, 192.0.0.0/9, 192.128.0.0/11, 192.160.0.0/13, 192.169.0.0/16, 192.170.0.0/15, 192.172.0.0/14, 192.176.0.0/12, 192.192.0.0/10, 193.0.0.0/8, 194.0.0.0/7, 196.0.0.0/6, 200.0.0.0/5, 208.0.0.0/4, 224.0.0.0/3

This might be the only solution that currently works on an Android device running the basic Wireguard APK, as found on Github.

An alternative solution is to carve out the LAN ranges you want to avoid routing through the tunnel using the PostUp/PostDown entries. For example:

PostUp = ip route add 10.5.0.0/16 via 10.5.1.1 [dev IFNAME?] [metric INT?]
PostDown = ip route del 10.5.0.0/16 via 10.5.1.1

This would work, on your local LAN, as long as you stay on the same VLAN and can connect to the correct gateway. Unfortunately, Android Wireguard cannot handle PostUp/PostDown entries, AFAICT. Small bother.

One final solution that I have heard mutterings about is known as "Classless Static Routes", or DHCP Option 121/249. This uses "CIDR" notation, and I'll be honest- here I am a little bit lost. I like the sound of this solution, as it means that I can configure the networking infrastructure itself to provide the required information for valid routing, and not have to faff about with the many, many Wireguard configurations on my devices.

Does anybody have any experience with this problem? Am I approaching this problem in an entirely stupid way? Is there a better way (insert infomercial here)?

I’ve bought enough digital comic bundles now that they’re starting to take up a decent chunk of storage space.

What I’d love to do, if possible, is losslessly compress them all down to their minimum sizes, in the same way that FLAC does with music. Is this a thing? And if so, what’s the best way to do it?

If lossless compression isn’t possible, is there a lossy compression that’s effectively lossless in that I won’t be able to tell the difference anyway? Lossless compression gives me good piece of mind, but the storage savings from an invisible lossy one are honestly quite appealing too.

Hello tilderinos,

I'd like to launch my tab manager soon and to ensure a smooth launch, I'm looking for early users who would be willing to try my app as part of the private beta.

For those who would actually need this product, I'm happy to offer one year free (or more!), but even if you don't need it, I'd really appreciate the help.

I don't really need anything fancy, I'd just like to have some people install the app and try it to know if it works properly for them or if any unexpected issues come up, especially major ones. I'd like to make sure that the actual launch will be smooth, especially considering that I've been working on this project for four years now. It'd be a shame if it all went to waste.

Thanks a lot in advance!

PS - I wasn't sure in which group to post

Apparently my private health insurance covers pharmacogenetics testing to find the best ADHD medication. What is it, is it legit? What's the company going to do with my cheek swabs? How do doctors feel about me going up to them and say hey internet pharma bro tells me I should be taking this instead of what your years of medical school thinks.

What I can't figure out is how my insurance company benefits from this. I'm not paying extra for this service so I must be the product right? Here's part of the marketing FAQ info from my insurance provider:

Personalized Medicine uses advanced pharmacogenetic testing and pharmacist assistance to find the most effective medication for you.

If you’re starting a new medication for a mental health condition (such as anxiety or depression), chronic pain, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or neurological conditions – or taking a medication for one of these conditions and it’s not working or causing side effects – Personalized Medicine could help. It’s offered through your extended health care benefits plan, so the cost of the test may be covered. To see the list of drugs tested, click here.

It involves a pharmacogenetic test. This is a type of test that identifies how you may respond to medications. Your test results are only for you and anyone you give consent to share them with, such as your doctor. The test is run by Personalized Prescribing Inc., a Canadian company. Manulife

(Forgot to mention this is for a Canadian employment extended health insurance.)

Hello there, space rogue! It's time to dock with the mothership, put a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip, and report to us about your adventures.

Did you play Space Rogue? Did you uncover the mysteries of the universe? Did you conquer Hive? Did you forget to fill in the friendship book? Tell us about your experiences! Or if you didn't play, tell us why this title didn't pique your interest.

In a couple of days, we will leave behind the life of a pirate, trader and bounty hunter, disembark from the Jolly Roger and hoist the Jolly Roger for a life of a pirate, trader and bounty hunter, this time in Sid Meier's Pirates!, a game so brilliant that it deserves an exclamation mark.

See you on the salty seas! ^{Or not, if my lookout spots your vessel before yours spots mine, and my master gunner is on top of their game. Arrrr.}