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!

I was just diagnosed with osteoporosis which doesn't come as any surprise given that I've lived with severe arthritis all my life.
I have some treatments in process including an infusion (reclast?)
I am 65 and have a history of some significant accidents including being hit by a car as a small child which likely accelerated the condition.
I've also been on opioid pain meds for many years. I have been in the process of stopping these in an effort to see how much pain I can handle. My life is a lot less active in the last 15 years so it seems quite doable at this stage. My entire family died around 2008 and I don't have near the responsibilities that I had in the past.
I have read that these drugs can also accelerate the condition.
But they were necessary and I have no regrets.
It's just depressing and just wanted to share.

Hi all. As the title says, I'm looking for recommendations on books about African American history. I'm Irish and I know the basics about the civil rights movement and some other bits through documentaries like 13th . Outside of that I've realized that my understanding of what African Americans have been though over the last couple of hundred years is pretty piss poor. I'd really like to educate myself a bit more, so any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

I've been thinking about the arguments that are increasingly common when dealing with tech: "it's too complicated" and "I just want something that works".

My father gifted a used computer to me and my brother when we were kids. Ours to use, ours to take care. He would pay for the eventual screw up, but we had to walk several blocks carrying the tower to get assistance.

I messed up a lot over the years, mostly because I wanted to explore the little that I knew and learn more. I had some magazines that expected everything to go well if instructions were followed and no access to internet forums to ask for help. I was limited to just one language as well. I had to find a way out. Nowadays things are much more simple and really just work, until they don't and I can't really fix them.

In this world, what people can do is complain. Or offer a report of how things went wrong and wait patiently. It's not even that common for people in general to just go back to the version that worked. There's no version, only the app we use or can't use and it's not our responsibility any kind of maintenance.

I have to confess I was going in another direction when I started, but things are really limited from a consumer's point of view. In part, it's our fault for not wanting to deal with the burden of knowledge, it inevitably takes the control away from us, but big tech really approves and incentives this behavior.

As with so many problems I see in the world, education is the solution. And educating ourselves might be the only dependable option.

I've recently become interested in exploring history. However, though I am usually quick to read and process large amounts of information in other genres, I find myself struggling with the dates in history books. For example, here's a excerpt from the book I'm currently reading [1]:

During this period, tsarist policy was contradictory along its Western borders. In Finland, a Parliament was convened in 1863 for the first time in fifty-four years. In 1860, its own currency, the Finnish markka, was introduced, initially tied to the Russion rouble before being tied to the value of silver from 1865, which enabled the Duchy to trade more easily with the West. By 1906, Parliament had passed 400 separate pieces of legislation, and by 1883, Finnish had equal status as a language to Russian.

It takes me surprisingly long to process this; my mind struggles to put together the timeline and most relevant facts. This style is used throughout the whole book and others like it, where multiple dates (and names or facts) are mentioned in a short piece of text, often in seemingly random order. This makes it difficult for me to truly get something out the book -- either I don't remember the information well afterwards or I can't relax while reading because I'm constantly puzzling it together.

For people more familiar with historical works: are there any tricks to this? Does it perhaps get easier in time, when you become more familiar with the genre (similar to keeping track of the characters in fantasy books like Game of Thrones)? Or do some people have a natural affinity for dates, same as others have a mind for numbers or for languages? Looking forward to hearing your opinions and experiences.

[1] N. Taylor, "Estonia, A Modern History", 2nd edition, C. Hurst & Co, 2020.

Update: This was my first post here, and I’m loving the thoughtful replies. Here’s a summary of the tips so far:

• Combining specific dates into a higher level time periods, e.g. start/middle/late century.
• Using historical dates with a personal meaning as anchors to keep an overview of the time period.
• Paying special attention to the first line of each paragraph, the first section of each chapter, and the first chapter of each book, which should be a summary of the following paragraph, chapter, and book, respectively.
• Writing or drawing your own timeline of events, outside of the book.
• Adding context information to your own timeline, based on understanding why each event occurred in that time and that way.

I thought I could get away from "what [general topic or icebreaker that 99.9% of people have an opinion on]?" questions by filtering out ask.survey, but that seems not to be the case. There are still quite a few that are being considered just "Ask" questions, and not "surveys". Are these not being categorized very strictly, or is my notion of an ask.survey question mismatching that of the moderators of Tildes? Or is the ask/ask.survey distinction up to the poster, and not moderators?

I come to Tildes for articles on specific subjects, not ocean-wide-open questions that generate maximum participation froth. I might have to start filtering out ask as well (as ask.survey), but I'd rather not have to do that. If people ask "what [specific problem or specific topic]" questions, I'd be interested to read them.

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

I have two that I will highly recommend:

Vimium has completely changed the way that I use my browsers. They have extensions for firefox and safari as well, but the link I provided is for chrome. If you are used to vim keybindings, it makes websites almost completely navigable using only your keyboard! Here's a video demonstration of it in case you're interested.

My other is SponsorBlock for youtube. This one makes using youtube a little more bearable by automatically skipping the baked-in sponsorships and advertisements. It has literally cut down my viewing times of some channels by like 20%.

Are there any other extensions that you absolutely love?

I like a bit of M.C. Escher art, and I was looking for some Escher images when I stumbled across this old blog post by someone who designed and made his own Escher-inspired floor tiles. Fascinating stuff!

Here's the main page, showing a photo of the finished floor: https://danceswithferrets.org/geekblog/?page_id=911

Then there's 8 blog entries, showing the steps he went through from initial idea to finished product.

As a bonus, here's a simple guide I found, which explains how Escher designed & made his tiles: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5754f47fcf80a16bffa02c45/t/57c6b680f7e0abc8f6ac6993/1472640669212/Escher-tiling-instructions.pdf

It's so simple when you know how! But there's obviously still some artistry involved in deciding what shapes to cut & paste.

ABC news article: Voice to Parliament referendum pamphlets for Yes and No camps published by AEC

On the Australian Electoral Commission's website:

• The case for voting Yes

• The case for voting No

The Sydney Morning Herald / The Age newspapers have provided annotated versions of each pamphlet:

• The Yes pamphlet annotated: 14 things you should know

• 17 things you need to know about the No pamphlet

As has been observed in those annotation pages, there is no legal requirement for either of these pamphlets to be truthful or factual, and there is no obligation for the AEC to fact-check them (in fact, the AEC is legally restrained from commenting on those pamphlets in any way - its role is restricted to disseminating those pamphlets, because it must stay neutral).

My band are releasing a new single on the 5th August, another later in the year, and a third early next year. We've released a few tracks already, but we never seem to get much traction when trying to promote them. The band has agreed that a different approach is probably needed, and so we're open to a bit of experimentation. So, musos of Tildes: how do you go about promoting the music you release?

Some of my favorite books are nonfiction, so I'm looking for more. These could be from your field of expertise, but could also just be books you have enjoyed. They just need to be comprehensible to a moderately intelligent reader with little to no background in the subject matter.

Here a few I have enjoyed.
A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr,
Being Wrong Adventures on the Margin of Error,
Cadillac Desert,
Facing the Mountain by Daniel Brown,
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah,
The Day the World Came to Town,
Travels With Charley by Steinbeck

Edit, a couple more,
Flow the Psychology of Optimal Experience,
Bowling Alone by Putnam,
Because Internet by McCulloch

Hi,

I'm asking here in the hopes that someone remembers a music magazine of yore. "Launch" magazine was mailed to subscribers on a CD in the mid-90s. It was like... Pitchfork, edgy but with broader appeal. I honestly don't remember much of the music that was on there. It had these sort of Dilbert-esqe comics about being a programmer in a start up. Back then, I had no idea, really, what they were talking about, but I thought the comics were hilarious.

Anyway, I can't find it anymore. The name is really generic and nothing I find in searches seems to resemble what I remember. It might be the kind of thing that someone like a Tildes user who browses the music group might remember. Does anyone have a memory of this? Seeing those little comics again would be nostalgia gold.

Three devs just made one of the best selling games this year. A throwback to when games were more about actual gameplay than story or graphics. I think it's pretty cool.

What do you think so far? What are your favorite classes/loadouts? Any sneaky/funny shenanigans you feel like sharing?

Did you know the PP19 quick mag is horribly bugged and so the gun has the lowest recoil in the game? It isn't the best weapon, but it is pretty much a laser.

This is a thread for everyone to share their personal story. But I'll start with mine.

I was never an obese child. I was always borderline overweight, but I was never at risk for being unhealthy. At 15 I even managed to lose some weight when I did go into the overweight category. And then I graduated high school. I ended up gaining thirty pounds before starting college, and the weight just kept on piling up. Ending with me gaining over 120 pounds, and being over 300 pounds. I was 17 during this time period. I ended up losing quite a bit of weight, down to 218 during the summer following my first year. But I ended up gaining it back and could not go back down.

By the time I graduated college I was back up almost to my original weight. Unfortunately for me, I graduated in Spring of 2020. Right when the pandemic started. This just caused my weight to climb up even more. Even worse, I finally looked in the mirror and realized that my hair was thinning. This was an easier fix: Dutasteride. Got on that pill and that started growing my hair. You can read more about my struggle with that here. My eating was another ball game.

In late 2021, after being diagnosed with pre-diabetes, I decided to lose some weight. I did Keto, not because I felt like that was the only way to lose weight, but because I had read that was the best diet to reverse pre-diabetes. I did that for three months and it did indeed crushed my A1C number, and I lost a fair amount of weight. The problem was that when I got off the diet I gained a lot of weight back. Not all of it, but enough to make a difference. Keto was not a sustainable diet, but on top of that my thought process was "when this ends I'm gonna eat this I'm gonna eat that."

One day I take a pretty hardcore edible. Weed has an anxious effect on me and constantly makes me reflect on my own life and how unhappy I am with it. But this one time it made me realize how much of what was wrong with my life, or how much of what I did not like about my life was connected to my weight. And how many insecurities me being obese gave me. And how it was holding me back from doing what I wanted to do. It also made me realize why I used food as a coping mechanism, and it made me come to terms with the fact that on some level I had an addiction to food.

So that was actually very helpful, and I was able to move on, and actually commit. It helped me to recognize the signs of overeating, and made me pause whenever I would grab something to eat. I would eventually also start lifting weights and focusing on eating a lot of protein. And that helped me lose fat more than Keto ever did. Just the consistency of that was a lot better and honestly easier than the incredibly restrictive diet Keto is. I still struggle with food. I can't really eat chips, or popcorn, because I will finish the whole bag whether I want to or not. But it's gotten slightly easier, at the very least I've gotten better at trying to avoid things like that.

It's completely altered the way that I look. I just recently saw some family that hadn't seen me in a while, and they did not recognize me. My face is much more visible now. When I would get high I would look in the mirror and not recognize myself but now I do. Part of that problem is that I hadn't actually seen myself properly in a mirror since high school until this recent weight loss. So I was just completely delusional, by choice, about what I looked like. I look at old pictures and go "damn that's how I really was huh."

Now that I'm close to being the same weight I was back in high school, I feel more like me. I feel like I look more like how I perceived myself. I'm not scared to look in the mirror anymore. I'm not scared to take pictures anymore. I'm not scared to try on clothes anymore.

What's really been a trip is the fact that people find me attractive again. I don't want to sound conceited, but I am in fact not ugly. But my face was hidden under the weight. So for years nobody really found me attractive, and that's fair now that I've seen pictures of myself from that time (on top of me having no confidence back then). But now they do again. And it's going to take a little bit of getting used to, but damn it feels good. It feels good to finally date, to have the confidence to go out. It feels good for people to think that I'm 19 instead of thinking that I'm 30.

And I feel so much younger. I'm still in my early 20s, but before now I felt old. Like I felt like my body was falling apart. With how much my hips hurt, with how much my knees hurt, how slow I was. I remember when I was 20 my ankle hurt so much. There was like so much pressure on it and it would not pop. And then when I finally did pop it I had to continually pop it to feel relief. That's gone now. My joints pop a normal amount now rather than the excessive amount. I can crouch, I can get up from the floor, I can walk longer easily. Stuff that I should have been doing this entire time that felt almost impossible to do.

It's like I've been rejuvenated. Like I've been given a second chance to enjoy my youth.

And I really really don't want to mess it up again.