Hey Tildes, with the renewed interest in the site, it got me thinking that we should hold a fundraiser for the not-for-profit company—which currently consists of just one person—that runs Tildes. It's overdue.

Disclaimer: These are my words as a member of the community. I haven't run this message by the admin before posting. I may have gotten some details wrong.

Where to donate

• GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos
• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tildes

History

A bit of history: The site admin, @Deimos ran the first three years of the site working full-time on it, paid only by donations, plus a $5000 GitHub sponsor match one year, which I'm not even sure was fully achieved, or only just barely.

For that time period 2018-2020, a lowball salary as a software engineer with his experience would have been $100,000 USD per year not including benefits.

If he received $5000 in donations per year (almost certainly an overestimate for more recent years) plus the $5000 GitHub match for the first year—for the 5 years of Tildes' life, that's about $30,000.

The remaining opportunity cost of $270,000 was essentially paid out of pocket by himself, as a donation to the community. Plus remember there are server expenses, legal incorporation expenses, etc. And, y'know, rent.

In recent years he had to take a full-time job because the situation was, of course, unsustainable.

App?

I announced in April that a mobile app is under development. Originally, I was planning to take my time and release a first alpha by the end of 2023.

How about if we struck a deal: get the donation numbers up and I will devote more time to the app, as opposed to splitting my time between it and contract work and other projects.

What's the deal?

• 150 active donors combined on GitHub Sponsors and Patreon—I'll release an alpha by November.
  GOAL REACHED
• 300 active donors—I'll release an alpha by October.
  GOAL REACHED
• 500 active donors—I'll release an alpha by September.

The dollar amounts don't matter.

As of writing, we are at 46 active donors.

What's in it for you, though?

Feeling like I did a good deed, I guess? I'm not looking for a "slice of the pie," to be clear. In some sense I'd be matching your donations with my time, aka opportunity cost.

If I donate, can I bother the admin to work more on the site?

No.

Again, I haven't run this fundraiser by the admin. He will certainly keep his full-time employment for the foreseeable future, and will not magically have more hours in the day to devote to Tildes.

With a sustainable budget, though, a lot can happen in the future. Contracting out work to others, for example.

But the point of this fundraiser is more to make a small dent in the past debt we owe the admin, not making any promises whatsoever on the future of the site and how it's run.

Let's go, my fellow Tilderinos!

• GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos
• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tildes

My university friends and I (and everyone's significant others, so about ~15 people) are planning a big catch-up trip, which will also be the first time to the country where I live for all of them. Planning has been a little higher friction than I expected, because we want to coordinate travel times to specific cities ("let's spend 4 days in City A, then all go to City B" etc), but people also have specific activities only they want to do (scuba, theme parks, etc) within each city. However, there's way too much to choose from and there's no way we'll do everything that everyone wants to do.

So right now to gauge interest in specific cities and attractions within them, we are just using a private Facebook group where people just make an idea as a post and people vote by liking it, and people can discuss the place in the comments. Things that we have fully decided are just placed on a spreadsheet. This process works but it doesn't feel great.

I've also explored Wanderlog, and I really like the fact that you can easily search for stuff and then place it on a map, but unfortunately its UI doesn't really support "branching" trips where some people will do different things on a given day.

What tools/processes have you had success with when trying to coordinate a big group trip?

I've seen discussions on here about nostalgia or nostalgic moments. It seems not only in this site, but others find themselves reminiscing about a time long passed. I've seen it popping up more and more. Some brush it aside as people being nostalgic about a time when they didn't have to work, but I find myself thinking that the increased rise of people reminiscing about the past is because the quality of life and/or the world itself feels so much worse than it did in the past. I've done this as well, too many times.

What're your thoughts on this?

Zombies, aliens, kaiju, regular humans (like ghostface), super humans (like Freddie or Jason) demons, vampires, ghosts, or something else I haven't mentioned. What's your favorite type of villian for horror movies?

I've always been partial to zombies, as I think they're the perfect mix of horrifying and unstoppable yet benign enough to not make the main characters feel hopelessly unable to do anything. I guess I find the idea that given the right choices I can make it out alive more interesting than the idea of a ghost/demon where you're just entirely at the mercy of magical powers that you can't do anything against.

But maybe that feeling of complete powerlessness is what some people are looking for in a horror movie.

Books that make you want to side eye the author, because why....would you come up with that?

For example, Frank Herbert, you know, the guy that came up with a beloved series that examines philosophy, religion, human nature, and the dangers of power, also wrote The Whipping Star - a book about a noirish, twice-divorced space detective who has to free a star from being contractually obligated to be whipped to death by a notorious, billionare dominatrix.

I'm looking for books where the premise is played straight, like the author doesn't know what a little weirdo they're being.

I wish there was a more concise way to phrase that question. I've asked it a couple times and always get some interesting answers.

This is inspired by all the "isekai" stories in anime and manga where a hero is summoned to help fight the demon king, along with the LitRPG genre. They use game-like interfaces to track stats and skills. Not just the typical combat ones like magic or weapons, but mundane skills like cooking, cleaning, walking, resting, drawing, lying, etc. Naturally, higher level skills tend to surpass basic physical limitations found on Earth. You could run faster than a train if your speed is high enough, or sculpt an exact replica of Michaelangelo's David in just a few days with a sculpting skill.

So imagine you got summoned to such a world and went through the whole "defeat the demon king" quest, and could choose one skill to take back to Earth. This includes anything from some specific magic ability like weather control and invisibility, to trained skills like archery and blacksmithing, to even basic stats like strength and stealth. Anything is fair game, but you can pick only one.

So, what skill would you choose and why?

First, forgive me for I am a first time DOSbox user. My O/S is Windows 10 home 64-bit

I went to old games and grabbed Doom & Doom II. I use to play these quite a bit and remember them fondly. I did the easy setup which added DOSbox 0.74 and the game. It loads up and runs just like I remember with the keyboard, just no mouse.

I did searching online, but the only solutions seem to be making sure autolock=true in the config file, and using cntl-F10 to capture the mouse. Toggling cntl-F10 does seem to grab the mouse in that the cursor disappears, but the mouse still will not function in either full screen or windowed mode.

I seem to be missing something obvious, but for the life of me I just don't see it. I'm reasonably computer savvy, but feeling stupid at the moment.

Any advice would be appreciated. TIA

Edit: Forked over the 5 bucks and went with the Steam version. Works perfectly.
Thank you everyone for your advice.

To preface, I'm trying to find horror movies that may be considered more on the mild side, something that's more accessible to someone not familiar or comfortable with horror or thriller movies.
Happy Death Day and it's sequel are already on my list, especially since there doesn't appear to be overt nudity / sex and the language is mild.
I suppose it could be described as PG-13 horror, but even the Scream series is actually kinda mild on the gore/violence side of you really break it down, as they have a whodunit plot more than a "let's douse the protags in blood" vibe.

Oh and of course Tremors is always on every list of all time great movies.

Welcome back to the third weekly game jam thread.

Whats a game jam you may ask. Well imagine if you locked a group of game developers in a box for box for some quantity of time ranging from a few days to a few weeks and told them to compete with each other by building something around a theme and then judging whatever each other came up with, that's a game jam.

Longtime viewers AKA the 5 people to who looked at the 2 previous threads will have no doubt noticed I missed last week. During an unusually normie weekend I was busy awkwardly standing in a corner at not 1 but 2 different parties and was super tired when I got back I did not want to write this up. I hope you can forgive me. To ensure that this does not happen again I am moving this thread to Sundays which should give me more time flexibility and something to look forward to instead of sitting around dreading the upcoming work week.

Also as a bit of compensation for your troubles today I am linking 2 top quality longer games that you can really sink your teeth into this week. I am 100% cool with someone discussing games from any week in future threads so don’t sweat the time commitment and don’t feel you have to finish the whole game before returning to discuss it. Quality video games shouldn’t have an expiration date.

With that said lets get into the this weeks games

Infinimall: Dream Job!

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android
Authors: Pandora
Genres: Visual Novel

Coming to you with love from the the folks in the the proverbial vaporwave-dreamworld-liminal-mall-urbex complex, Infinimall: Dream Job! Is a dating sim visual novel set inside a surreal mall and originally written for the NaNoRenNo 2023 Jam. Featuring the Doomer Girl like bisexual disaster Mia(I wonder if its the same Mia as Heart Beat) as she navigates a dead end job and tries to get her dead end life back on track.

According to my calculations the game has about 100 book pages worth of dialogue over all its branches which should be a breeze for the text-only titans that walk the halls of this site.

Hypnagogia

Platforms Windows
Authors: sodaraptor
Genres: Adventure

Our second game is also taking us to the dreamworld but this time its inspired by late 90s PSX aesthetics, in particular, the cult classic game LSD: Dream Emulator which is fitting given it comes from LSD Jam 2020. It centers on a gameplay loop of exploring diverse dream worlds inspired by dreams from the developers own dream diary. I think the game is best thought as a sort of drug trip or spiritual experience in the same way as something like Superliminal. Go in with an open mind and I think most people can get something from the experience. This goes double for the games sequel Hypnagogia 無限の夢 Boundless Dreams which is available without DRM on itch.io or with DRM on Steam if you are into that sort of thing.

However long it takes after you awaken from your strange dream let me know what you are thinking. Its okay I won’t die if you don’t like the same games I do though I will be sad. Its lonely walking the path of niche games but you can’t make friends if you never share.

PREVIOUS WEEK

I'm a supporter and believer in the small web and minimalist websites (i.e. NOT "minimal design" websites, which are not minimalist more often than not).
Some examples:

• Tildes.
• Sourcehut.
• HackerNews.
• To a limited degree, the different motherfucking websites (as they are, in essence, websites with no purpose).
• Members of the 512kb club (also see https://10kbclub.com/).
• Tools like Miniflux and Kanboard.
• Pinboard.in.
• And many others.

What is your experience, if any, with the small web?
Which steps have you taken (if at all) to ensure your website is not bloated?
What do you think can be done better both individually as well as globally to make the web a nicer, faster place?

Edit: So I don’t look like I don’t practice what I preach, this is my blog. I try and follow the minimalist principles.

I appreciate Goodreads for its pretty extensive catalogue of books, the ability to see reviews from other readers, and the social aspect of following what my friends are reading. However, I find both the website and the app very slow and not very well designed. Plus, I liked to minimize my interactions with Amazon. Has anyone used or built any alternatives? While the features I listed above are nice, the only ones I would really want are:

• The ability to quickly look up and add a book to my "want to read", and to keep track of books I have read
• The ability to leave notes or reviews on books (not necessarily visible to others).

I've started to keep a reading log in Notion which satisfies the second point above, but there's no easy way to search through a data base of books and add a book to one of my lists. It would be nice to be able to do so on the fly as I browse books at the store. So Tildeños, what solutions have you all come up with to track your reading?

I am 20 and I was going to move to a different country to pursuit my bachelors. I was going to make my parents proud! But, 2 days ago, I had a severe panic attack in the middle of a night and a terrible nightmare which preceded the attack. I started seeing weird things when I closed my eyes and I couldn’t manage a day without crying and continuously kept having tremors so I sought professional help.

Now, I have been diagnosed with severe depression and moderate anxiety and I have deferred my plans to pursuit my higher education.

I was once ahead of my peers and enthusiastic about life but now I just feel stuck in life, I feel worthless, undeserving and a piece of shit. I haven’t accomplished anything in the past 4 years which could work as a groundwork for my motivation and I only seem to fall deeper into despair. 

I feel as if I won’t be able to accomplish my goals or achieve anything in my life.

I haven't thought of harming myself but I think the fear of not being able to achieve anything might just make me suicidal.

I have found the tildes community to be observant and kind, I was a lurker before and asked someone for an invite just to post this here. I don't know if I am looking for advice or comfort or anything else but I sure wanted to put this out here.

Currently on book 3 of the Red Rising series. I've been trying to get back into reading for years but I've felt like "quicker" forms of entertainment (video games, etc.) have broken my ability to sit down and focus on a book. Case in point - I've had Red Rising book 1 downloaded to my kindle for years after a friend of mine gave it a overwhelmingly positive recommendation. I tried reading it a few times but my lack of attention span made me fail after just a few pages.

Well all that changed recently when I finally sat down again and gave the book a proper chance by reading more then 3 pages I feel like I'm 14 years old again just crushing books in a few days. Several times I have not been able to put the book down and read until 2AM.

Since the end of June I've finished the first 2 books and am around 1/3rd through the 3rd one.

Wondering if this group has recommendations on some of the best rewards or other savy ways to spend for traveling that are not credit card based?

Particular hotel chain, gas station, fast food based. My husband and I do a trip once annually plus to go back to our hometown typically via car and we already get decent credit card rewards for travel but wondering if there are other rewards we might be missing out on?

Next trip were definitely looking at what museum memberships might exist to do or get discounts on several locations during the trip. We do have a local zoo membership that gets us reciprocity when we travel.