I committed an embarrassing gaffe today. I had ordered a keyboard online from a store from the Tyneside of north-eastern England: an area with a regional accent and dialect often referred to as ‘Geordie’. I habitually speak in a ‘home counties’ accent, which is sometimes regarded as a contemporary variety of received pronunciation (RP), though it sounds quite different to historical and conservative varieties of that accent. A salesman called me earlier to inform me that the keyboard I wanted was out of stock, but that they would be happy to refund me if I didn’t want to wait for new inventory. Seemingly between the accent difference and the poor audio quality inherent to phone calls I misinterpreted ‘keyboard’ as ‘cable’, insisting with increasing urgency that I have USB-C cables in plenty and that they needn’t worry about supplying one with the order. We both went about in circles for a few minutes until it dawned on me what I was doing, at which point intense embarrassment flushed over me. Oops!

Accent diversity in Britain is rich and regional. It's not hard to place where someone grew up based on their accent. Would you consider your country to be diverse in accents? Even so, are there instances of accent discrimination?

Hi all, loving the site so far - big ‘old forums’ vibes here which is amazing!

I was telling a friend about tildes last night and I said ‘yeah this tildeee’s……tildas, til-dess?? Place is cool!’

I’m guessing it’s Till-dsss? Cheers 🫡

edit: Nice - came up from a coffee and morning chores and 5 posts, great to be here. No automatic auto-mod in sight. :P

I've lost weight, and regained, and lost, and regained more. Every method, I tried it, succeeding for months until not succeeding anymore and quitting (and regaining). Finally, starting in 2014 at the age of 51, I lost weight and I've kept it off.

In total, I've lost 125 pounds since July 9th of 2014, down from 298 pounds (135 kg) pounds to 171 pounds (78 kg). I'm male, 5'11 (179cm). I had a semi-desk semi-field job during most of this time, working as a jack-of-all-trades "IT guy" for a hospitality company with spas and restaurants and hotels in my region.

Today in The Daily Stoic book, I read from Epictetus, “In this way you must understand how laughable it is to say, ‘Tell me what to do!’ What advice could I possibly give? No, a far better request is, ‘Train my mind to adapt to any circumstance’….In this way, if circumstances take you off script…you won’t be desperate for a new prompting.”

In weight loss, I think it's a given that the most important step is to start. But after that gets going, to stay started and to adapt as you learn more and figure things out. Don't quit, even after caving in to a big eating day or weekend. Shake off the mistake and keep going. Don't quit in a plateau. Don't quit thinking you don't need to diet anymore or that your diet is too weird or untenable or that your body just won't ever lose weight. Instead adapt and continue.

Ultimately, Epictetus is right that this becomes not a diet with weird rules and tight restrictions, but a way to gain the training about how and how much to eat as ourselves. Not following a script but gaining the skills and second nature habits of living a healthy lifestyle. Ultimately, we have to keep off the weight we lose and still be eating the foods we grew up with, the foods our family and friends share, what was and will likely still be our long-term forever diet -- but tuned and tweaked so that we keep off the weight. If we start on keto or IF or cabbage soup, at some point transition to your regular and normal foods and figure those out. Those foods and food situations are in our future, so that's the puzzle we truly need to solve.

Even if we calorie count (and I do), the calories are just our data -- they're helpful to see the way but calorie counting itself is not the way -- the things we do, perhaps measured by calories, is what causes weight loss/gain to happen. A focus must be on shaping the internal long-term habits -- Train my mind to adapt to any circumstance -- so that the natural thing to do when life gets rough and distracting is going to keep us from gaining weight. We don't just eat healthy and light out of intention but also out of thoughtless, automatic "in the zone" or "flow" habit.

I've had a bunch of different bits of conversation about TotK across the site, but it's mostly been in passing in other topics. Since I know there's a lot of (entirely justified) enthusiasm for the game, let's talk about it! What's your favorite thing to fuse to a shield? (Ice breath) Have you developed any particularly clever machines you want to share? (I made a massively overcomplicated fish-shocker and scoop, like this, but worse.) What's your favorite (Air) and least favorite (Water) temples?

Here are my views on this:

• Windows: The Windows attitude towards privacy isn't good with their telemetry and other data collection increasing gradually from 8 to 10 to 11. In fact, most geeks across the support forums think that 7 is probably the safest and most privacy friendly Windows version but MS is doing everything it can to ensure that newer software doesn't support 7 and it just goes into obsolescence.

  The "default" state in which a W10/11 laptop comes today is so privacy unfriendly that it sends all kinds of data like contacts, location, etc. to Microsoft and their "trusted partners". You can't turn off this data unless you've visited power user forums and know exactly where to find those settings, and basic telemetry still won't be disabled of course.

  As ironic and unintuitive as it sounds, Microsoft Windows was probably much better in privacy department during the bad old days of Gates and Ballmer compared to the good "open source and geek friendly" days of Satya Nadella!

• Mac: Apple systems should ideally be privacy friendly considering the amount of premium they charge to their products and services. But how well does that work in practice? I've never used an Apple product but those who use them seem to have the impression that they're no good in this department compared to others.
  Logic tells me that a more capitalist devil should be no different than the less capitalist one, they're probably all the same when it comes to throwing user's privacy in the bin!

• Linux: Linux used to be the holy grail of users who cared about privacy many years ago but does that still hold good today? Ubuntu was also in some data collection controversy or other many times in past, but how are the state of things today? And what about the derivative distros, are they good too?

Make sure to back up your save files if you're on the experimental branch!

Edit: The path to the save file in Linux isn't correct:

/home/[LocalUserName]/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/526870/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/FactoryGame/Saved/SaveGames/76561198144444658 [#this number might be different.]

Should see the save file with the title of your save there, just copy it to somewhere else.

This is where I found it on Ubuntu 20.04, with proton.

Just wanting to see if tildes has any TES fans, and if it’s worth making a few lore dumps to spark discussion. I’m not using reddit anymore but I miss r/teslore (and r/truestl, though it has no place on tildes lmao).

So, if any of you are well versed in your lore, I want to know: What is your favourite bit of lore?

I’m a big fan of the book from ESO detailing different dishes in argonain cuisine, and generally love the more “mundane” elements of the world, rather than the super deep lore. I’m also a big jarthhead if anyone has read all the books ;).

The internet is a very diverse place but sometimes with the "default" north american skew, it may not seem like it.

If your culture or people or faith group or spiritual practice is celebrating something today or soon, would you care to share?

Many of us used to have smaller groups on another site to celebrate things together or hold rememberances, and perhaps tildes being a together kind of community can celebrate and learn together instead of segregating into silos.

Some suggestions:

• today's date please
• what cultures and groups celebrate or commemorate this day or period?
• what is the celebration's origins and purpose?
• how does one celebrate?
• how has it changed over the years or stayed the same?
• is it reoccurring and on what calendar system?

Looking forward to learning more from other traditions and groups!

Long time Phish phan here, first show was Oswego 1999(got burned on tickets for New Haven Coliseum tickets the previous fall).

A couple of my favorite shows are 3/22/1993, 3/13/1992, 8/17/1992, 9/30/2000, 2/28/2003, 6/19/2004, 12/31/2010, 1/1/2011, and 7/23/2022

What are your favorite shows?

Hello Tildes geocachers! Found any good caches lately? Going in any good trips? Going to the Greater Bay Area Mega at the end of the month? I would love to know, and meet you online! I’d love to learn more about any interesting caches you’ve found lately and maybe we can discuss puzzles and challenges here.

Let's share our favourite mono fonts and maybe we can find some new favourites. I used to use whatever was inbuilt with Visual Studio and JetBrains' IDEs, but since JetBrains released their JetBrains Mono, I've started using it everywhere. I override the monospace font on every website with it. Never was a huge fan of Fira Code, Consolas, or the other popular ones. Personal taste. But somethings about JB Mono just speaks to me!

Are you a ligatures person? Personally, I love them :)

Disclaimer: This is just an observation of changing dynamics on Tildes! I don't mean to suggest any sort of way that Tildes should or shouldn't be.

I've noticed over the past few days that the Tildes front page has become filled with Ask posts. My best guess as to why is that these posts are the easiest to create and respond to? They're an easy way to spark discussion, generating lots of bumps back to the front page.

Now, I love seeing folks connect over all these niche topics and experiences. It feels like folks here are finding their people after losing the tight knit communities they had on Reddit, and that's lovely! In fact, it almost feels like these niche ask posts are acting as an impromptu replacement for the niche groups that Tildes currently lacks.

But, one consequence of this is that link posts get quickly pushed off the front page. I had noticed that link posts often struggled to generate discussion, even before the influx of new users. Longread articles and video essays take time to digest, and time to formulate opinions on. But now, I think this effect is compounded by the popularity of Ask threads, with fewer eyes dedicated to these links after they've left the front page.

Some closing questions:

• Have other users noticed this? How do you feel about this shift?
• Is there any merit to having a group dedicated to ask posts? Sort of like /r/AskReddit, but for Tildes? (That way, the posts can be easily filtered if a user wants to only see link posts.) EDIT: Filtering is possible already by filtering out the 'self post' tag, as suggested by @streblo.
• Should the visibility of link posts and ask posts on the front page be artificially balanced in some way?

It's pretty clear that those times are over, but I'm sure many of us remember the heydays of VC funded tech extravagance. These are the ones that come to my mind, hoping to hear others experience.

• At one point, uberpool was cheaper than the cost of public transport in the city.
• No sales tax on Amazon!
• So many promotions and code to get you to join in on their platform. This was also before they try to get you to subscribe to their monthly plans.

I am mostly a TTRPG player, but lately I have been becoming a bit curious on wargaming.

I usually play TTRPGs because it allows a lot more freedom when compared to video games. However, I can't really see that much in wargaming that you can't get in video games. Is the appeal primarily a social one?

I am not bashing wargaming or saying that it's a bad hobby. I am just curious as to what the main draw is.
Thank you for any answers :)

I found myself wishing the website had a sticky navbar on desktop, so I made a Tampermonkey script to do just that. Sharing this in case anyone else was looking for something similar.

To use, just open this link with Tampermonkey installed, and you should be prompted to install it.
https://ewp.fyi/tilde-tweaks/sticky-navbar.user.js