There's a lot of stories of people getting off caffeine and documenting the changes and benefits they experienced. But I'm wondering if anyone has gotten on caffeine as an adult and could share what benefits, if any, they gained. For reference, I've never consumed much caffeine and have been debating doing so. In terms of actual work and school, I've never found the need. But, I'm generally a bit lethargic/slow paced by nature (have trouble getting up in the morning, inefficient with my time especially when I don't have much going on) and maybe a light jolt and ritual in the morning would be worthwhile.

Welcome to the voting topic for CGA!

Anyone can participate. CGA does not require membership and is always open to all.

Ballot Formatting

• Ballot entries are NAME (VOTES) e.g. Pong (3)
• Copy and paste the game titles from the list so they match exactly.
• The ballots will be tallied using this script from u/Spore_Prince.
• Any improper ballots will not be counted (but you will get a polite message from me or someone else asking you to fix them beforehand).

Topic Rules

• All top-level comments must be ballots and ballots only.
• Child comments can be anything -- feel free to talk about why you chose what you did.

Voting Process

• Each person has 20 votes to distribute among games as they see fit.
• Each person can allocate a maximum of 5 points per Single Game/Arcade Special.
• Arcade Specials count as one block (do not vote for each game in them individually).
• Voting closes 96 hours (4 days) from the posting of this topic.

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (5)
Portal 3 (5)
Half-Life 3 (3)
Team Fortress 3 (2)
Night Trap (2)
Xexyz (1)
Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon (1)
Left 4 Dead 3 (1)

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (10)
Protal 3 (7)
Wand of Gamelon (5)

Voting Outcomes

• The top 6 games/Arcade Specials will become the next 6 months of CGA (or more in case of a tie).
• Of the remaining games, the bottom 50% will be cut from the list.
• The remaining 50% will stay on the list and will enter the next voting round starting at their current point totals instead of 0.

Game List

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like liberation, archive today and spaces.third. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was at a loss.

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!

Hi friends,

Given the current state of AI and other technologies, do you consider higher education to still be worth pursuing? For those of you with children, will you be advising them to go to college?

I’m asking because I am enrolled in a masters program for statistics and have ~2 years left. I’m concerned that by the time I’m finished, the degree won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on. Like many of you, I work in software. Some days I think I should be learning an entirely different skill set in a non tech related field to diversify my value instead of doubling down on a potentially dying field.

I am not really interested in “you should pursue education for the sake of education”. While this is probably true, at the end of the day I need a way to make money to survive and education is the historical way of increasing one’s value in the job market. Furthermore, I can educate myself for far cheaper if education from a university is no longer considered valuable.

Anyone else in the same boat? Am I being dramatic? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Basically, where do you go online or on your phone when you just need a distraction and don't have the energy or mental bandwidth to read something in-depth? Games and apps are okay, too.

I appreciate the community and the quality of discussions that are had here on Tildes, but sometimes, I just want to veg. I basically want to scroll through a large supply of pictures, memes, short-form videos, but without the toxicity and manipulation that comes with the main social media platforms. I don't think I need to create a whole list, I think we all know what the main social media sites are to avoid.

And I also want to distinguish this topic from other "where do you get your news from" or "what are some interesting feeds you're subscribed to" topics. I'm looking for easily digestible and mostly positive/happy/funny things to consume. Where do you regularly turn to when you just want a distraction?

I recently finished The Crippled God and loved the book and the entire series. I'm already looking forward to a reread through the series to notice new things and see how events play out from the perspective gained after finishing the series.

I'm still trying to get my thoughts in order for this whole series, but I had some questions that I thought would be interesting to hear from people here after talking about it a bit with my coworker.

What were some of your favorite characters?
Favorite moments?
What did you not see coming?
How did you feel about the perspective shift on the Crippled God as the series progressed?
Have you reread the series, and did you enjoy it more during an additional read?
Anything else fun you'd like to talk about for these books

Please note, this is a discussion of the 10 Malazan Book of the Fallen novels. I've yet to delve in to the rest of the Malazan series, and I am taking a break before I start on the Novels of the Malazan Empire series.

For me, the biggest is definitely Modern Baseball.

To set the scene, it's 2016, I was in high school, and a girl I was friends with told me about this band Modern Baseball. I liked them a lot, but I wasn't quite at my peak emo phase (that would come about a year later during my freshman year in college lol), so I didn't get super into them or anything. Anyways, a few months after that, MoBo came through our city on tour and that girl and one of our other friends literally offered to pay for my ticket to the concert if I DDed for them... and I said no.

Fast forward like 7 months and Modern Baseball goes on hiatus in early 2017, a hiatus that continues to this day, though they played a few one-off shows throughout 2017. Anyways, fall 2017 comes around and I listened to Modern Baseball more and realized I really liked them... but they're on hiatus and I missed my chance to see them!

Anyways, I mostly made this thread because the fact that I turned down going to that concert is something I still think about from time-to-time and I wish I went, but I'd love to hear if anyone else has similar stories or just stories of bands you wish you could have seen.

On Monday I was in my local mall and there was one of those gem / crystal shops. I have no idea how these people make rent and salaries, so I figured I'd take a little look around.

I ask the dude for a stone to make me happy and he gives me a few options then suggests this other luck / wealth one; $3! Well, me, being a genius, bought both and immediately bought a lottery ticket.

Wednesday rolls around and I just checked the numbers. After nearly 20 years of never winning anything more than a buck or a free ticket, I won $108 (4 8 15 16 23 42 oh my!)

If we ever do a meet up, I'm gonna be 30lbs heavier with all the rocks in my pocket. I really need a stone for tagging this nonsense post...

I was never a wordle fanatic, but I am hooked on this Alphable game now https://geoffpevlin.com/games/alphable/. I also play https://cluesbysam.com/.

Do people know of other web-based (hopefully free) logic puzzles like these? I like the daily format, but wouldn't limit myself to that if there are others that are also interesting.

I've done all of the https://www.rustylake.com/ games too, which I quite enjoyed, but these types of puzzles require a little bit more time investment that I don't really have right now. (I also hated that some of the "logic" in those games did not seem to make sense to me, and I'd have to google the answer to continue with the game.)

I also like https://timeguessr.com/ but don't return to that one as frequently because I can't play it on my phone.

I really like in-person escape games but they are expensive and vary drastically in quality, so was very happy to find these types of games scratch that same itch.

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.

Decided I wanted to try vibe-coding some stuff. It's been a very long time since I coded anything, and it was all very amateurish, but as the tooling has become better I wanted to give a shot at some silly ideas. Got tired of writing about random teaching and AI related stuff, decided I wanted to build some more stuff to get more acquainted with agentic tooling.

I have gathered some sparse links here and there, but I was hoping the community here may know of some more "definitive" guides. My plan is to use Claude Code, but if people want to share guides for other coding agents (Codex, etc.) please feel free.

Very interested in iOS app development if that helps, but I feel that best practices can likely look very similar across platforms and tools.

Do you have any obscure books that you really enjoyed that you haven't had a place to recommend or feel like more people should read/know about?
Feel free to share them here, hopefully with a brief description of the book and why you enjoyed it.

I'm not putting a limit on number of reviews or that these have to be "hidden gems", but ideally lesser known works that have stuck with you, or you felt were great and feel like others might enjoy them as well.

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.

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!

Welcome to the lobbying topic for CGA!

This is your chance to try to sway people's votes by endorsing certain titles. Let people know why a certain game is awesome, or how a particular entry is of historical value, or why others really need to play this gem of yesteryear.

Lobbying is not limited in any way, so you can endorse/support as many entries as you like.

Negative lobbying is also allowed, but please try to do it as fairly as possible. The point isn't to rag on someone else's choices, but it might be acceptable in cases such as "The camera controls unfortunately can be very frustrating" or "It's quite hard to get up and running." Basically: try to keep it to valuable information that people would want to know before playing, but not for the purposes of hating on a game in particular.

Anyone can participate. CGA does not require membership and is always open to all.

Importantly, this is NOT the final voting topic. This topic will remain up for 48 hours, after which we will hold the voting in a separate topic.

A reminder on the voting mechanics

Just so people remember how the voting will go and can plan accordingly:

• Each person will have 20 votes to distribute among games they see fit.
• Each person will be able to allocate a maximum of 5 points per Single Game/Arcade Special.

A reminder on the culling mechanics

And again, so people can plan for what happens to the list once voting is completed:

• The top 6 games will be chosen to be played (or more in the event of a tie).
• The top 50% will advance to the next round. They will start the next round with a base score of 70% of their vote totals.
• The bottom 50% will be removed from the list.

Game List

All nominations and boosts have been added, so this is the final list of games and their vote totals that we will be deciding on.

TLDR; I'm looking for a free way to improve bookmark management without increasing cognitive load.

I find that with the constant stream of information online, paired with my ADHD, I tend to know nothing in detail. So I bookmark so that I can return to the same articles regularly instead so that I can 1) stay informed with more depth rather than breadth and 2) contribute to online discourse when I see a gap.

I'm using bookmark folders (by topic) for articles I want to refer back to regularly, and the built in "reading list" for things I do want to come back to but don't plan to keep a record of.

But my bookmarks are overflowing because of all the other stuff I have folders for (admin logins, shopping, local services, social sites, online office stuff, literature and languages, fun stuff, etc).

I also bookmark folders for these:

• Politics (local/national)
• Environment
• Human rights issue #1
• Human rights issue (n) ...

These basically have 1) compelling facts in support of the issue or 2) important memorable counter statements to common misinformation.

But I get easily lost among clutter, and I contend with brain fog. I've seen stuff about "second brain" online, but to be honest they're way too complicated for me (raindrop.io synced with this and that...). Is the folder system I'm using as good as it gets for people like me who need to avoid complexity?

I'm currently on macOS & iOS but plan to return to linux when I next upgrade in a few years.

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?

How is it possible that in the year of our Lord 2026 my devices STILL use my physical location to determine everything?

As I'm writing this, I'm still reeling from the emotional rage I experienced during the past days. A little context: I got a fitness band (smart band? health watch? smart watch?) as a Christmas gift from a family member. It's a Huawei fitness band that was quite cheap, and I was going to connect it to my (Samsung) android phone. It's the end of February now, and what put me off from configuring it for this long was the fact that I was quite concerned with the privacy side of things; How can I know that my health data isn't indexed by some foreign corporation, sold, and subsequently used against me by my insurance company in 20 years? (further context: I live in Finland)

After doing some research I decided to at least try it out to see how the band works, and only then decide whether I want to keep using it or not. I connect it to my phone, begrudgingly set up yet another account for a service I will use only for a single purpose, sign over my soul and am finally able to establish a connection between the phone and the band. The band asks me to choose the language, and I choose English. I have all of my devices in English even though it's not my native language, mainly for two reasons:

1. the translations I've found to be quite clumsy/unintelligible at times, even (read: especially) on Windows
2. 99.9% of all tutorials, guides and manuals exist in English, therefore it's easier to troubleshoot/fix problems if I don't have to translate stuff all of the time

After choosing the language and finally getting the damn vampire to work, I notice it's displaying the weather in Fahrenheit. This is odd, because my phone as well as the health app on it are both configured to display units in Celsius, and no matter what I do, I can't get it to change. This shouldn't be a big problem because I don't care what weather/temperature it displays; I already get that information elsewhere.

Now, I'm definitely not an expert on electronic devices or computers in any capacity, but I do dual-boot Linux and Windows on my PC with my main usage being on Linux Mint, and I've also tinkered with some Raspberry Pi and for example Lua coding during the past years, just because learning is fun. Really, the only reason I use Windows at all anymore is because I never got my favorite game, Horizon: Zero Dawn, to work on my Linux distro. I've chosen English (and only English; there is no secondary language) both as the Windows language as well as for Steam, Firefox etc.

Nevertheless, every time I start up Windows, approximately a third of all notifications, error messages and buttons are in my country's most spoken language. Why? Because I'm located in my country. The same is true for my browser, about half of all software and so on. The system detects that I'm located in Finland (or perhaps that the OS was obtained here), and therefore it desperately tries to adjust to that fact, among other things by assuming what language I really speak. Some things in Windows just seem to adjust automatically depending on where it detects I am, and for many problems the only solution seems to be to change my time zone, the unacceptability of which should go without saying.

I understand Windows has been going downhill for quite a while, pushing content and services that the end user didn't ask for and doesn't want/need while removing functionality to bar the user from tinkering with their product too much. That being said, I can't for the life of me understand in what world this particular decision benefits anybody. Why not make separate settings for the time zone, the display language and the displayed units and then respect those settings? It's annoying for the user and it doesn't make anything on my device easier to do, and every time I want to configure Windows, my Android phone or for example my smart band, I feel like a child that gets babied by all the adults and never taken seriously. The child's name? Not Albert Einstein, at least as far as Microsoft is concerned, because of course I am a stupid and lazy average person who speaks the majority language in my country, who wants to do the same things everyone else does, and who understands the error message in English perfectly until the word "OK", which needs to be translated to my country's majority language for some reason.

Back to the smart band problem: After scrounging the internet for a while, I noticed quite a few Europeans have had the same issue with not being able to change the displayed units on their smart band. The solution?

Change the language to UK English.

Now, I understand that this problem had a relatively easy "solution", and in any other scenario I would have jumped to solve the problem and get on with using the device, but this was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. When configuring a device, the user cannot be required to play 5D-chess against the manufacturer's cultural ignorance in order to get basic things to work. In trying to make their product as foolproof as possible, they've made all the end users fools in the process. And this goes for computers, phones, smart bands, smart TVs, gaming consoles and even toasters that nowadays all require AI+remote control completely set up in order to function. Why not let the user first decide what they want, let the user ignore the settings they don't know about, and then have this state-of-the-art technology adjust to that?

I have no interest in wearing this kind of "smart" device on me because it makes me feel stupid.

Steam Next Fest is currently underway, lasting until March 2nd. Coincidentally, I had just been thinking a little while ago that I kinda miss game demos. About a month ago I came across a little twin-stick shooter called Minishoot' Adventures and ended up paying it more attention than any other random game I see that looks kinda cool, because they had a demo available. I installed it, played it for a couple hours, and instantly bought the full game once I was done. It's quite a good game, but they got my money primarily because the demo was able to hook me into making an impulse purchase, totally defeating my usual standard of decision-making about buying games.

For Next Fest, Steam is recommending me a deluge of indie 2D platformers and metroidvanias, and I'm not sure if that's because those are the games in development that tend to have demos or if Steam thinks that's all I'm interested in (spoiler - I'm not). So, have you discovered any truly noteworthy upcoming games in this year's Next Fest? Also, what was the last demo to win you over?