How are we feeling about it?

Week 4 has begun!

Post your current bingo cards.
Continue updating us on your games!

If you did not participate in Week 1 but want to start this week, that's fine!
Reminder: playing bingo is OPTIONAL.

Quick links:

• Backlog Bingo Site
• Week 3 Discussion
• Week 2 Discussion
• Week 1 Discussion

Week 3 Recap

11 participants played 10 bingo cards and moved 37 games out of their backlogs!

There was one bingo win. Congratulations to u/ShroudedScribe! 🎉

Team mmmeeeelllllllooooowwwwwww

• u/CannibalisticApple
• u/CompChris
• u/dannydotcafe
• u/Durinthal
• u/JCPhoenix
• u/Wes

Team MO! - TI! - VA! - TED!

• u/1338
• u/BailerAppleby
• u/kfwyre
• u/ShroudedScribe
• u/SingedFrostLantern

Game list:

• Analogue: A Hate Story
• Blast Rush LS
• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
• Breakneck
• Broken Age
• Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective
• Camera Obscura
• co-open
• Death's Door
• Delver
• Doki Doki Literature Club
• Dokimon: Quest
• Elephant in the Room
• Fields of Fortune
• Forgotten 23
• Gamedec
• Generation Zero
• Guild of Darksteel
• Infectionator 3: Apocalypse
• Kaamos
• Layers of Fear
• Legend of Grimrock 2
• A Little to the Left
• Lost Nova
• Mr Rescue
• Nex Machina
• Oxenfree
• Poly Bridge 2
• Pseudoregalia
• pureya
• Sunblaze
• Touhou Mystia's Izakaya
• Tunnet
• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
• *Wanderlust: Rebirth
• Woten
• You Suck at Parking

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!

Submit your response here!

• Direct link: https://survey.tildes.community/form/pineapple-on-pizza-5
• This survey closes on May 24, 2026 at 10:00 UTC
• The results will be published on May 24 shortly after the survey has closed. I'll edit this topic and post a comment about it!

The current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:

You may notice a change to the schedule from last week! I have an idea I'd like to work out to make the surveys more customizable and easier to set up but that will take some time, that's why I'm deciding to have a fun in-between survey and next week we'll have the vote on the next surveys coming up. :)

Please submit your ideas for questions here! Even if they've been submitted already by someone else. All input is valuable! You can view all submitted questions on this dashboard.

Thank you all for participating!

I recently realized that many of my favorite gadgets are basically "new" versions of old technology.

• I use Sony Xperia 1VII, with a headphone jack, side mounted fingerprint, no screen cutout, stock Android. It's running the latest Snapdragon chip, however, and the camera hardware is better than the current iPhone (doesn't mean the software is better)
• My favorite smartwatch is Pebble Time. My rePebble Time 2 is on the way. I'm currently using a Garmin, but I'm not exactly happy with it.
• My keyboard is a Niz EC84. The default keycap looks like my keyboard in middle school and it is just perfect right out of the box (except I should've got the 45g one). As a Topre clone, it bounces with rubber domes. I don't like mechanical as the tactile point is not right at the very top of the curve. It also supports hardware mouse key and Bluetooth which is useful when you're working with multiple machines. (Sadly no QMK in this layout)
• When I was buying my PC I couldn't find a single good modern case (i.e. with USB C ports in the front panel) that doesn't have any glass like old school PC. Luckily, Fractal North was just released back then and I immediately preordered.
• I suppose the ThinkPad line may fit into this aesthetically, but it's not exactly the same as it was in IBM era. I heard that the Chinese are making new board for the old ThinkPad chassis though.

I feel like this is an underserved market - why can't they just give me the same phone/computer I have but with the latest technological advancements. Sure, it'd be niche and many people will complain at the price, but at least there is a choice.

Does anyone have other favorite new old school tech they wanted to recommend?

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.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like plex.pass, graffiti and novels. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was bemused.

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!

Exactly as the title says. What film becomes better if someone suddenly gets hit by a bus?

Could be at the very end for an unexpected laugh at the sheer suddenness and absurdity. Could be some karma against a much-hated antagonist. Could happen earlier in a film, and abruptly cut off an otherwise bad movie by just ending it then and there. Or maybe even change the film's trajectory by changing focus to the recovery and aftermath.

Can be played for laughs, can be played for drama. Could be fatal, could careen the story (and sequels) in a totally different direction. There are infinite possibilities, and this seems like a fun question to explore. I can think of so many slasher films that could be hilariously cut off at an early point by a bus just appearing out of no where to hit the killer.

And while I want to restrict this to settings with buses, I think I'll open the floor to other settings. Buses don't really exist in the Star Wars universe to my knowledge, but it's fun to think about the changes to the franchise from a bus hitting Jar Jar Binks in the first film (or not hitting him and revealing the Darth Jar Jar theory to be true in the process), along with the investigation into what the bus was and how it spawned on an underwater planet.

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?

Maybe beating a certain dungeon or winning a particular game, or something deeply emotionnal for you.

What is yours?

I have two and they are both in WoW because I played for 10 years.

1. Amber Shaper Un'sok. I decided to join a hardcore guild before MoP because I had ambition and wanted to know what it felt like to raid with capable people. It was an awesome 4 years journey that I will never forget.

When you raid in WoW, it's very rare that the kill relies mostly on 1-2 people, it's always a group effort. That boss was different because there was a mechanic that allowed one random person every ~1min to get transformed and you had specific duties to do and dealt A LOT more damage.

We kept wiping and wiping because people kept fucking up when they got transformed and I kept thinking "if only it could get back to me, I know what to do, just transform me!" Lo and behold, we got an attempt where I got transformed first and last (before the phase switch).

We killed that boss on that attempt. It felt so good to "carry" the group!

2. Last one is with my brother, doing a duo run of MC back in WotLK. It was super easy to do as a raid, but doing it with 1-2 people was definitely still hard.

See, I almost never played with my brother, ever. But WoW was the first game we played together for real. It was an awesome time.

Anyways, we had decided to start a guild together, just to have the guild bank lol so one day we decided to run MC to try to get some old stuff that maybe we could sell. We had an absolute blast that night, wiping, having fun, just playing together.

...it was 15 years ago and I still haven't had a moment with my brother like that. He ended up quitting WoW a couple months after and I just kept playing. We grew apart and that was that. I still think about that MC run with him from time to time.

Hi everyone,

On one hand, I'm very lucky: last year my partner and I purchased our first house! It feels great to hop off the renter hamster wheel.

On the other hand, we had to make some compromises when we bought the house: I wanted to limit our search to houses that already had central air (heating and cooling), because we both work from home and I really want our house to be comfortable year-round. Unfortunately, in Northern New England, that eliminates around 90% of houses. So we compromised and bought a place that has a furnace with ductwork, hoping to eventually add cooling using the same ductwork. Last year, I reached out to a couple of contractors to get a vague sense of how possible that might be. Consensus? Potentially expensive, but feasible.

My situation:

• our house is small, ~1100 square feet in the finished upstairs
• half of the upstairs has shit insulation, other half is decent after renovation
• we currently have a 100k BTU oil furnace that absolutely keeps up. In fact, as far as I can tell, it's massively oversized -- even on the coldest nights (around -20 or so most winters, including this one), it only kicks on ~50% of the time
• we used around 500 gallons of heating oil from September-May (the heating season)
• our furnace is awkwardly tucked between the outlet chimney and three walls, which makes accessing it a pain (and complicates installing a coil on top; I'm not sure if there's enough room).
• thanks to a nearby massive hydroelectric dam, our electric rates are about half the average New England electric price (and come from a pretty environmentally-friendly source!). So the more heating and cooling I can do with electric, the better IMO. I'd rather pay a bit extra to heat with clean electric than save on propane/oil if fossil prices come down (big if).

With the warm season upon us, I'm feeling the heat during my work-from-home days and trying to get cooling installed before the temperature really starts cooking. And, despite having a furnace with existing ductwork that covers every room in the house (90% of which is directly accessible through unfinished basement ceilings), every. goddamn. contractor. has. recommended. minisplits.

But I don't want minisplits. I know it's easier for them. I know it's cheaper. I know most contractors in the area have installed hundreds of minisplits but very few central systems (let alone a combined heating/cooling setup where you have to worry about balancing summer dehumidifying with extreme cold efficiency). I know I'll have to clean out and insulate my ducts. Minisplits would surely work OK, but I really don't want to install one in each of our three bedrooms, plus one (or more) in our open-layout kitchen/living/dining space, and then still deal with no direct cooling in the bathrooms. Aesthetically, my partner and I both find minisplits ugly, and our house is small enough that most minisplit designs would make the tiny bedrooms feel even more cramped.

Ideally, I'd rip out our existing furnace (and oil tank!), install a cold weather heat pump in its place, insulate the ducts, and call it a day. But every contractor also advises that I "keep the old furnace around" in case the heat pump breaks (seriously?) or in case the heat pump can't keep up on the coldest days (fair enough). And then we take a look at the existing furnace, conclude it would be hard to add cooling on top of it, and they tell me to think about minisplits again.

So I guess after all of this, I'd really appreciate some advice from tilderinos with more home improvement experience than myself. Should I think about this differently? How on earth do I find a contractor who knows what they're doing with central heat pumps who doesn't push me aggressively towards minisplits or keeping my dirty, noisy, expensive furnace around? Should I just roll over, give up on my central cooling dreams, and install some minisplits?

Got invited to Tildes tangentially through a server hosting project but realized this space might be outside the standard tech echo-chambers (techo-chambers?). Am I the only XCP-ng/Xen user in a sea of Proxmox/KVM? Any odd homelab setups to share?

I don't usually write things like this, but I'm having difficulty and think I need to get it out. I had to put down my dog Willow on Monday (two days ago, as of writing), and I am not okay.

This is not the first pet I've lost. Several childhood pets, but those weren't really mine, they were my parents', and so I didn't have the same level of responsibility over the animal as I did with Willow.

Even of my pets, this is not the first loss. In 2022, I adopted a retired working dog Yukon and an elderly cat Gomez. We lost Yukon in May 2024 (aspiration pneumonia due to megaesophagus) and Gomez in May 2025 (renal failure). The renal failure was a prolonged decline, and so while we tried to manage the disease we had some time to come to terms with things. The pneumonia was very fast decline and more of a shock. I loved them both, but this now feels much worse. I guess because I only really knew them 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 years respectively. I feel guilty about that, like it shouldn't matter and I should have grieved for them the same, but I don't.

This was the first pet that was mine, in the sense that my wife and I have had full responsibility for her the entire 10 years we've had her. She was the best behaved dog I've ever had. Always by my side at home. Especially when I worked from home during/after Covid lockdowns I took her with me wherever I could. Loyal. I just killed her.

Well, I didn't do it, we took her to a vet and they did typical euthanasia. It doesn't feel like the difference matters.

Willow also had renal failure, which we learned about at stage 3 (already severe) in January. The past few months have brought back a lot of pain about Gomez since it was the same disease. Realistically, the fact she made it all the way to May still walking on her own is remarkable. Meals have been challenging for the past month or so. Since late last week she refused to eat, and her condition deteriorated quickly over the weekend. We knew this was coming, but childishly it somehow felt like she'd just keep going forever because she'd been doing so well. Of course that's not how it works, but I guess it's easier to imagine that things are normal.

I think we gave her the best final day we could. We took her to the same pet stores, park, restaurants we used to take her to when she was in her prime. I got her some drive-thru chicken nuggets, her favorite, and she actually ate all of them! She must have been hungry. I want to believe I could have kept feeding her fast food for a few more days or weeks or months, but I know it's simply not true. She moved slow, but still walked on her own at the park and pet store. By the time we arrived at the vet she seemed satisfied, tired, and ready for a nap.

I don't know.

As I say, I've done this before and I roughly know the "usual" advice about grief and how it seems to work for me. My wife and I support each other. We still have other pets, and it helps a little to hold them. Enduring a death the same month three years in a row is taking its toll. All our other pets seem healthy and relatively young, and I'm not superstitious, but some deep emotional part of me can't help but fear May 2027. I think I'm just tired.

Our cat Pinto, still a 9-month old kitten, we've had since she was newborn and abandoned by her mother. We think she was abandoned because she couldn't latch properly to nurse, so we fed her on bottle day and night. Given how much it hurt about Yukon and Gomez after just a couple years, already old when we adopted them, and how much it hurts now about Willow after 11 years, who was a young adult when we adopted her, I am terrified of losing Pinto. I know it'll happen. I don't know what I'll do.

The quality of the pain doesn't really feel new, but the quantity is so much worse than I expected. Feeling guilty about that is new. The fear is new. Not really sure how to process it. You're not supposed to have favorites but I guess you do anyway.

I don't really know what I'm trying to get out of posting this. Pity? Not really. I guess I just need to get it out of my head. I'll probably look back at this thread in a few days to see what people have said but I think I just need to get this out and step away from it for a while and process.

https://i.imgur.com/U1Nq7X8.jpeg

Hello,

I'm into self-hosting and when my daughter (elementary school) started writing her own recipe book, I kinda went "She is young, she shouldn't be doing this in paper form" and I started looking around for a solution for kinda non-existing problem.

I stumbled upon Mealie, which is server that can be used in docker and is self-hosted recipe book/website. It seems like you can come in and say like "I have these ingrediants, what can I do?", it also seems to be able to generate shopping lists based on your selected recipe, you can use checkboxes when bringing all the ingredients on the kitchen board/table/top (non-English native speaker here) and so on.

It seems like the right software for me, but before I delve into it, I wanted to ask if someone else possibly runs such service for themselves at their home. Is there somebody who is using something like this? It doesn't have to be Mealie, specifically. But it should be server-side service, not some smartphone app. I know there are other such services, which are also open-source, but I forgot the names, sorry.

Thanks for any relevant answers!

I love writing, it's one of the most human things about humanity. It's communication, art and sharing all at once. It's been fundamental to culture and progress for 1000's of years.

LLMs are, in a way, really good at writing. They have the larger part of human creative output distilled into their weights. So it was inevitable that more and more people would start publishing articles and blog posts written (all or in part) by AI agents.

I don't like it but I accept it, there really isn't anything I can do about it. What I was hoping, though, is that high signal to noise ratio places on the internet (Tildes among them) would reject it and we could go on consuming 100% organic prose, at least for a while.

And for while that's exactly what happened. In techy places like Hacker News, AI posts were quickly flagged and downvoted into oblivion. At Tildes they mostly didn't show up at all, or if they did I missed them.

That seems to be ending though. Now I see agent written pieces on the front page of HN with 100's of comments. There's always a highly upvoted comment pointing out that the piece is slop, but you have to scroll to find it.

The reason I use HN as an example is that it's full of people with extensive experience using AI agents who are in a position to tell if something is slop. And it looks like the larger part of readers (or at least commenters) can't tell the difference anymore. If that's true at HN, it's going to be true everywhere.

It is getting harder to tell when something is slop, people are post editing, handwriting intros and getting better at prompting to remove obvious LLM tells. But if you have any practical experience with these tools, it's still pretty easy to tell. Somewhere during post training certain patterns end up getting heavily favored. Interestingly, many of them happen across all of the frontier models. Em-dashes are the most famous but there are so many more. Most are rhetorical tricks or formatting patterns rather than punctuation.

Reading LLM prose, many of the tropes don't stand out at first, instead they land as strong writing. But after you see them repeat enough times they start to become obvious. Even putting the tropes aside, the hallmark of a lot of LLM writing is that it's more rhetoric than substance. Low signal, lots of noise.

I don't have a solution, it's starting to look like many (maybe most) people aren't going to be able to tell when they're consuming something that required minimal thought by the "author" who prompted the AI. Which is sad because, up until now, we could assume that, when we read something, someone cared enough to put time and mental bandwidth into creating it. That's become increasingly less true.

I suppose this post is me feeling wistful for the internet we used to have, written exclusively by humans. I continue to hope that people will reject slop at places like Tildes, but in order for them to do that they have to be able to identify it. Maybe people will get better at that, there is definitely a point where you've consumed enough slop that you can smell it from a mile away. But of course the slop is going to keep getting harder to detect.

I don't want to go as far as to say that slop will take over the internet, I think (hope) that people will keep wanting to read organic, human, writing. And that as a result we'll come up with strategies and solutions to support that.

It's a weird time. Right now every LLM blog post and article that goes viral is signalling to the prompter, and anyone watching who can tell what's happening, that there is demand for slop. And of course with demand comes profit. I think we're at the beginning of a steep curve.

Week 3 has begun!

Post your current bingo cards.
Continue updating us on your games!

If you did not participate in Week 1 but want to start this week, that's fine!
Reminder: playing bingo is OPTIONAL.

Quick links:

• Backlog Bingo Site
• Week 2 Discussion
• Week 1 Discussion

Week 2 Recap

11 participants played 9 bingo cards and moved 28 games out of their backlogs!

Team Mellow

• u/BailerAppleby
• u/Bullmaestro
• u/CannibalisticApple
• u/dannydotcafe
• u/Durinthal
• u/JCPhoenix
• u/Wes

Team Motivated

• u/1338
• u/kfwyre
• u/ShroudedScribe
• u/SingedFrostLantern

All but one are listed above.

u/Wes

Is he still Mellow? Or did he join the Motivateds?

He played three different games, which seems very motivated...

...but mellow is also a state of mind, a pace, a vibe that he rolls with.

So the question lingers: with whom will he stand?

Answer: u/Wes remains on Team Mellow

Game list:

• 911 Operator
• Agent Intercept
• Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles
• Bendy and the Ink Machine
• Berserk Boy
• Cards and Towers
• Curious Expedition
• Doki Doki Literature Club
• Dorfromantik
• Heeey! Park-Boy
• Hue
• The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy
• Knights of Pen and Paper
• Library of Ruina
• Lucid
• Machinika: Museum
• Node Farm
• Ocean's Heart
• Pokemon Trading Card Game 2
• Programming Factory
• Pyre
• Say No! More
• Subserial Network
• Tametsi
• THOR.N
• Transistor
• Understand
• Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

Could be something about you, your thoughts, priorities, health, etc.

Could be something about the world, the way things work, etc.

Could be anything really.

What has changed, and how do you feel about it?

You've just been convicted by the UN security council for being a Tildes user, and have been sentenced to 7 years in a penal colony, but you get a choice. Do you choose either:

1: Mars - 7 years without ever being able to go outside without a suit on, but afterwards you could travel back to Earth, if you desired.

2: New Mongolia: An Earth-like planet, almost as if Earth was new again. But it's a one way trip.

(Asking for a friend)

I was pretty disappointed by the entire fifth season. The show has been floundering after season 3, when it was clear that the natural climax of the story was post-poned because they couldn't handle a show without Homelander.

There's a number of issues that I have with S5, starting with the pacing. The episodes are paced incredibly weirdly. We spend a lot of time on things that, given the show is in its last season, really shouldn't be the focus. New B-side superheroes are introduced and take a lot of focus away from the core protagonists who's stories we are supposed to be finishing up. There's a whole haunted house bottle episode. There's a 5 min sequence of two new villains sniffing each other's asses because they're animal themed in the penultimate episode. The consequence of this is that the actual climax is incredibly rushed and dealt with in all of 30 minutes. There's a whole storyline that's introduced with a stronger superhero drug that makes you immune to the virus the Boys are cooking up to kill Homelander, and he takes it and then within 2 episodes they just find a new dumb way to kill him. It reeks of upping the stakes without a good reason.

Another issue is how cheap everything felt. There's a distinct lack of set-up shots and extras. Most of the time, it's named characters sitting in a closed room, talking at each other. If there's action, it's just a fist fight with maybe some dry-wall punches. The entire climax of the show is confided to a single room's decor getting torn to shreds and that's while evil superman is getting killed. There's a chase sequence in ep 2 which made me laugh out loud because of how stupid it looked. In this high stakes situation it's just people jogging down roads.

I do feel for the show because for something written pre 2024, they got outpaced by reality on the satire. But that doesn't absolve you from dogshit dialogue that cannot stay away from crass words and sex jokes. All the time. S1 was raunchy and gory at times, but it was timed well and balanced out by genuine, normal conversation. The word fuck loses all it's fucking meaning if you fucking put it in fucking front of every fucking other word. Ignoring even that, the writing still sucks from start to finish.

I'm happy it's over and that I can let this franchise rest. I stuck with it because S1 was really good. I'm sad that a show which had such a clear through line from S1 onwards with the Boys killing their way up the Seven was turned into, well, whatever happened in seasons 4 and 5.