I mentioned offhand in our introduction thread that I've never dated -- I wanted to hear people's experiences, since chatter online is very dominated by the male experience of mostly looking for casual hookups and struggling to get matches. I particularly want to hear from people who did not go in wanting a casual relationship

Some additional discussion questions: Did it go well or poorly? Did you run into mismatches in expectations? Did you end up in an unsafe situtation? How many people did you explore before you found someone long term?

Age for context would also be helpful, since I know many of you skew older.

I've been keeping a finger on the pulse of analytics & contract valuation in the NFL for the last few years (as a fan, not related to my profession). Anyone else who has been of fan of this is probably aware that we hit a pretty serious breaking point yesterday, as a handful of top-end RBs failed to reach deals with their respective teams resulting in them being franchise tagged. I was wondering what others thought about this whole fiasco.

My thoughts:

In one sense, this is simply effective roster management: RBs add little win probability by themselves (i.e., their production is largely a result of the offensive line and passing game), their age curve is poor (i.e., they're typically out of highly productive years by the end of their rookie deals), and they're easily replaced by rookie talent.

On the other hand, these guys take a beating to produce a product we all love. They spend some of their best years in the college system, where they do seem to add a lot of win probability, being totally uncompensated. They get to the NFL only to have their potential earnings suppressed by the rookie wage scale, then get franchise tagged guaranteeing they'll be SOL with respect to a deal with big fully-guaranteed cash.

What's the solution here? Assuming the draft is an efficient(-ish) market, adjusting the rookie pay scale for them will just cause teams to adjust their drafting behavior. Letting RBs arrive to the NFL sooner than everyone is something that the NCAA almost certainly won't allow without a vicious fight. Is there any hope for these guys?

edit: typos

I'm sure there are multiple comic artists and writers on Tildes, so let's talk process for designing and planning pages! Hopefully this fits here, but if not feel free to move it.

I've only drawn a few comics myself, and I like to make a script first for longer projects. It can be detailed and break it down by panels, or just give an overall summary of the page. For shorter comics though where I can clearly envision it (e.g. 4 pages), I like to kind of wing it. Someone else I know likes to go right into roughs, and then figure out what to cut as he goes along.

How about everyone else? What are your preferred methods and steps?

I was inspired to write this after reading this reddit post. It ranted about people who attempt to disuade people from commiting suicide by telling them that they are selfish because of the impact it will have on other people (I do think it is explained better in the post if you are interested).
However I have also been thinking about how suicide prevention is handled by most governments. I am not sure of exactly what process happens in other countries, but in America if you fail a suicide attempt you can be involuntarily put into a mental health asylum for a temporary period of time, and from reading many accounts of what people have experienced in these asylums and from my ongoing experience with suicidal idealation I very much feel i would be 10x more likely to commit suicide if I was put into such a facility once i got out.
But I also wanted to talk about other ways individuals may try to disuade people from suicide which i find problematic. Before i continue, i do want to say that I am not blaming these people, they have very good intentions. But something that has bugged me for a while has been that whenever people discuss suicide/mental health problems the first thing that is done is just recommending suicide hotlines/telling the person in question to seek a therapist/psychologist. While these options can be good for many people, i want to mention that

1. Suicide hotlines (mainly 811) are known for reporting people to police and having them put in mental health asylums (often times unnecisarlly). And staff at these suicide hotlines are often uneducated or rude to callers, or will just not answer or even hang up.
2. Many people in these circumstances do not have access to trained proffesionals. Even if you live in a country with public healthcare, you may be in a situations (mainly abuse) where you cant get access to one either way.

Anyways sorry for the rambling, my brain is tired and i just wanted to get this out there. But based off of the above points, do you think that suicide prevention in society is flawed, and what could be better? While i do agree that it is flawed and there are ideas related to government on how to handle suicide prevention, i do not know what could be done on the individual level. To me one of my only resources apart from seeing other people experiences online is music (mainly Elliot Smith, Linkin park, Soundgarden and Nirvana) which I deeply relate to. But anhedonia can prevent enjoyment of such things.

The first episode of the new season is out! What do you think of it?

I thought it was pretty okay. It was too self - referential for me. It kept making too many "we're back" jokes but they kind of did that the last time they were cancelled and brought back. They eased off those kind of jokes eventually the last time it happened.

I was worried about how they would handle references to more modern things as "Attack of the killer App" was really painful to watch. But it seems like they handled it pretty decently.

I'm slow, but it took me a while to realise that Scary Mirror as a replacement for Scary Door was a jab at Black Mirror.

I didn't think the episode was very funny, but it wasn't bad either. What was good about it shows promise, so I'm hopeful.

So, a friend of mine wants to become a Twitch streamer, commenting over movies. I never used Twitch. He showed me some channels over there that made me confused. There are dozens of channels entirely dedicated to people providing minimal commentary to entire movies, animes, and TV shows which are displayed in full, although not on full screen. And they seem to be monetized, otherwise why would anyone stream 5 to 10 hours a day? They have ads.

I have a few questions.

First, how is that legal? Why aren't copyright holders taking these channels down? Do people really care about a streamer that mumbles a single uninteresting word every few minutes, or it's all just an excuse to watch movies for free? Why the same content that will get your video taken down on YouTube is apparently okay on Twitch?

I just finished it today and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what parts I enjoyed.

The rest of the book felt very preachy and a lot of it felt unnecessary. I don't think I liked a single character in the book. They all felt like caricatures and not how people would genuinely act or respond to the events happening in the book. Almost every single action taken by every single character felt forced to fit a narrative.

I cannot fathom why this won a Hugo award other than the fact that it was the first piece of science fiction originally written by a Chinese author in the Chinese language to win. [edit: In terms of novelty. The fact that it was originally written in Chinese has absolutely no bearing on my opinion other than possibly due to the translation the characters seemed to have no depth.]

I listened to the audio book, as I was told the names can be confusing and the audio book helped with it. I kept waiting for it to go somewhere, and when it was over I thought to myself, "that's it?"

Maybe someone can give a different perspective on it, because right now I'm just frustrated I spent money on it.

Curious to hear what the people of tildes think.

As we close in on 3 years of use with these newer consoles, what are every one’s thoughts? Has “next gen” been what you thought it’d really be or are you kinda just feeling whelmed?

I have a PS5 and I use it every now and then for pretty much the first party games. PC is my main platform but as I think back, I’ve been pretty happy with my PS5 and the games to come so far. I also really enjoy the UI (although custom backgrounds would be great).

I don’t know how the Xbox side is so I’d love to hear your thoughts to!

Thanks for taking the time to read.

Edit: I love the films too, but I'm really looking for examples in the text, even if the adaptation does the scene justice, I'm interested in how Tolkien himself wrote it.

I'm on a bit of a JRR Tolkien kick recently and revisiting some of my favorite bits from the books. One thing I really appreciate about Tolkien's writing is the outright poetry of some of the paragraphs and lines. I think the only "wordsmith" who appeals this much to me is Cormac McCarthy (and to some extent GRR Martin) -- but for very different reasons. Anyways, I'll share my favorite section from the Legendarium.

Théoden's charge at Minas Tirith - The Return of the King

To set the stage, the Rohirrim have navigated to Minas Tirith and are greeted by a dying besieged city steeped in darkess and fire. Upon seeing this, we get this line about Théoden:

But the king sat upon Snowmane, motionless, gazing upon the agony of Minas Tirith, as if stricken suddenly by anguish, or by dread. He seemed to shrink down, cowed by age.

Merry utterly loses hope at seeing the city and the reaction of the king. Then as all hope seems lost, we get one of the best sections in the whole trilogy:

At that sound the bent shape of the king sprang suddenly erect. Tall and proud he seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before:

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

With that he seized a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains.

Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken. Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.

This might be my favorite bit in all of LOTR because we see good king Théoden shed all his fears and doubts and actualize into the man he was meant to be. And to be compared to the Valar Oromë to boot! Wow. I am also a total sucker for any moment in the trilogy when a deed or character gets compared to events or characters of the First Age. Anytime that happens, you know it's a big deal since the First Age was so much "larger than life" than the events of the Third Age. Tolkien does a similar thing when Sam faces off Shelob noting that not even Túrin or Beren with any craft of the elves could have injured her -- yet Sam stood his ground, nonetheless.

I am not a Tolkien scholar, but I know Tolkien was incredibly steeped in medieval and ancient literature (I mean, he was a Professor of English literature) so I know his heart was really in old mythologies in Germanic or Norse traditions (for example Túrin Turambar's story is directly inspired by the Finnish tale of Kullervo, or how almost word-for-word bits of The Wanderer poem end up in Rohan's culture and song). Because of his Christian faith though, I suspect he had qualms with the often-brutal mortality of those tales and the cultures which produced them. This section with Théoden charging bravely against hopelessness and despair I think represents the "merger" of all the positive qualities he found in heroes like Beowulf with his more temperate worldview. It's an idealization of the heroic good-pagan Germanic king.

I saw a post on reddit about a guy asking about why his wife changes hobbies so much. He went on to detail her getting super fixated on a hobby, investing a lot of money and learning a lot, and then dropping it. A lot of people were mentioning possibly being adhd.

I remember that being the first thing that clued me in as an adult who was not diagnosed until later in life.

Anyone else care to share?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases arriving at our doorsteps today (and until next week!). Feel free to comment albums that have caught your eye and interest.

Discussion Points

What are you looking forward to listen to?
Have you listened to any of these releases?
What are your thoughts?
What have you enjoyed from these artists in the past?
Why Friday?

Most (but not all) new LPs release on a Friday, as labels want to give the release a full week of sales before entering the charts.

~~ Feedback on the format welcome!

About 3 or 4 times a year I will get pretty powerful manic episodes. Usually for a few days I'll stay at the office until late at night, I'm in an amazing mood, I'm always excited and have trouble sleeping. My focus is so powerful, If I could be this version of me all of the time I genuinely believe I could do anything.

It's like a totally different person from my usual self who is easily fatigued, slow to start, and generally lethargic.

Knowing this side of me exists is exciting but also kind of depressing given my awareness of its fleeting nature. How have you dealt with this? Any reading you could recomend?

topics about the strike are becoming one of the most common things in ~movies. for example, compare:

https://tildes.net/~movies?order=new

https://tildes.net/~movies?tag=strikes&order=new

as we do with other frequent topics, a megathread helps consolidate the discussion, making it easier for people interested in the topic to talk about it, and easier to discuss small or minor updates that may not warrant a full topic of their own.

(it also makes it easier for people not interested in the topic to ignore it - because they only need to ignore a single post, rather than a topic tag)

It's one of those highly praised series that I've been waiting to read for years. When I finally did (I bought the full set of used and slightly wearied paper books), I bounced off quick. I tried reading it in 2019, so my memory of that book ("The Shadow of the Torturer") is foggy, but I wrote down some notes at the time.

I dropped the book somewhere around the Botanical Gardens, mostly because of very annoying female characters, all of whom were the protagonists so-called love interests. It seemed like every attractive woman he met would fall for him and it was so unnatural. I don't even have a problem with the idea per se, for example I'm buying into how macho-men are getting women in Wilbur Smith's adventure books because it feels organic, in Wolfe's book it was like a teenage boy fantasy.

I don't actually remember it well, but here's an excerpt from what I noted at the time:

I don't understand Severian's actions - he is challenged to a duel using the flower of vengeance - neither he nor the reader knows what's going on. At the same time, he is tasked with reaching Thrax and assuming the position of local executioner there. He interrupts his journey and decides to take up the challenge, of course, with a girl he has just met in some inn. He is convicted and instead of serving his sentence, he engages in some foolishness. I wanted the girl to disappear from the pages of the novel. Then a second woman appears and I feel that there will also be something between her and Severian.

The Polish edition which I read is 326 pages long, I dropped off at page 245, I just couldn't bear it anymore. I occasionally see those books, either on my shelf (I have not given them away) or in stores and keep thinking that maybe I misunderstood it or didn't see their greatness and wondering if it would click if I tried again.

Maybe it is just me?

I played the original PS3 version of the Last of Us, but I have never tried Factions. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, but at this point, I’m going to wait to try out the new multiplayer when it releases.

I’ve seen a few details floating around online: it’ll be set in San Francisco, have a new cast of characters, and have it’s own story.

I want to know, what kind of mechanics and story elements do you want to see make it into the multiplayer? If you played Factions, are there any stand out features that you want to see return? Do you care if it’s live service? Do you want it to have “seasons” that build on the story over time?

How do you begin? Do you have rituals or specific places you work? How do you decide it’s done?

I’m interested in hearing from creatives of any kind! Maybe we can draw inspiration and wisdom from someone who isn’t in our creative sphere.

So in the last 12 months I've been to Japan, Reykjavik, Paris, and London by myself, and a couple of more countries with a friend (Brussels, Madrid, Seville, Paris^2, London^2, Reykjavik^2) and I just wanted to jot down some thoughts, tips, and maybe try to answer any questions that people might have about solo traveling.

A full disclaimer, I'm an Asian guy who's relatively tall and broad in stature. The only reason I want to mention this is because I understand that non-masculine presenting people might have different experiences in general, especially when it comes to safety and perception. I'm not saying everywhere is dangerous nor that you should be afraid wherever you go, but I've never had to worry too much about walking alone at night nor being alone in a bar with only a couple of people. My other point of privilege is that I have a job that gives me a lot of PTO and requires me to take vacation even, which makes it easier for me to arrange these things.

I started solo traveling this year, at the advice of my therapist. The one thing he mentioned a couple of times was that he noticed that his patients with anxiety seemed to make a lot of good progress while abroad by themselves, so I took his advice. My first "solo trip" was actually only 24 hours, in London. It was after a week-ish long trip that I last minute joined with a friend who was going to Spain on a work trip.

My first kinda tip/observation comes here. If you're looking to try and spend some time solo tripping, a quick way to do it is that if you already have a trip planned with friends or family, you can always build in a "long layover" to somewhere along the way at the beginning or end of a group trip. I know that Iceland Air does this on their site for you, and Reykjavik is an amazing place with amazing people. I find myself sometimes sorting for 20+ hour layovers just for this.

In London, I learned the biggest thing about traveling by myself that I really loved - that I could do anything, go anywhere, and not have to worry about the needs and wants of other people. Not that my travel companions are bad or not fun, but there's always something in the back of your mind of, "are these people enjoying it?" whereas by yourself you only need to worry about "am I enjoying it?" and that is a major relief.
I find that I've been able to discover more about myself, the things I want to do and see. I didn't feel beholden to hit all the major tourist traps. In fact, I actually ended up in the Fashion and Textile museum. I've always loved fashion and thought that it would be more about that aspect of things, but when I went it was during an exhibit on quilting. The ticket seller looked at me funny and asked if I was sure I wanted to go into the exhibit, and I soon realized why, I was the youngest person there by a couple of decades, sticking out like a sore thumb. But honestly, it looked pretty interesting so I went through.

I learned another thing that day, if you are interested and polite, people are generally very receptive to that. I walked through the exhibits, and it felt like at every quilt I stopped at, a British grandma would come up to me and ask me what my interest in quilting is, what I knew about it, and what I thought about the quilt. I knew absolutely 0 things about anything I was looking at, and they were all super happy to explain to me things about patterns, specific designs on each piece, why each piece was special, and so on. I learned a lot that day, and got to talk to a lot of grandmas and hear their stories and their interests. One was an engineer, who told me that the best engineers loved both arts and engineering, which still sticks with me now.

My next trip was a couple of months later to Reykjavik and Paris. I booked a trip very last minute, within two weeks of the actual flight, iirc. But I figured if I was spending New Year's by myself at home, I might as well... not. I learned about the Iceland Air thing here, btw, effectively giving me two vacations in one. I spent New Years with a group of people I met on the plane, who graciously invited me to party with them, which was amazing.

The thing I learned about my New Year in Iceland is that even though I was there for myself, doing the things that I wanted to do, it was okay to say yes sometimes to things that make you uncomfortable. I'm an introvert in general, with a lot of anxiety about pleasing people and making sure other people are happy. I'm sure others can relate. But being able to spend New Years with a group of people that I have met that same day was incredible because I realized that, yes, these people liked me, and yes, these people I probably will never see again, which lets me truly, honestly be myself without putting up a front because at the end of the day, if they knew who I was and they didn't like me, it's not like I'll ever have to deal with them again. Luckily, I'm still in contact with a couple of them and would love to visit them in the future, but your mileage may vary haha.

In Paris, I learned that it was okay to cancel plans and lay in your hotel room even though there are things you wanted to do. I got a bit sick from partying too hard in Iceland, so I ended up staying in for a night and then some, missing a tour I booked at the Paris Catacombs (which I still haven't gone to even after going back to Paris a second time later in the year), but honestly it was very relaxing. As someone who likes to plan a bit before I leave, missing out on reservations made me learn that I didn't have to stick to the script all the time, it was okay and I'll still be okay. It wasn't the end of the world, though I was out a couple of dollars (I recognize this privilege though, so if you're tight on money please don't listen to me here), but I was getting healthy and happy and didn't need to push myself to do everything, something that I had to unlearn from my prior experiences with travel.

That brings me to Japan, which I just came back from yesterday. I spent 10 days there and chatted and drank with locals, spent time by myself in an onsen (completely naked with a bunch of strangers btw), and got a new tattoo! I'm not sure if I learned anything too specific just yet, though I'll probably need to sit and think about it for a bit. But maybe the lesson might be that I don't have to take a lesson from everywhere I went.

With alllll that being said, I'd love to answer any questions people might have, encourage people who might want to go solo traveling at least once, and give a place for other people to share their experience as well!

There was a post here the other day asking women about their preferences in a partner's emotional attachment style (not the exact wording, but about as close as I can remember). The responses were overwhelmingly critical of the framing of the question and how it mischaracterized the qualities of a healthy relationship. Upon looking at life.women a day or two later, it seems to have been removed.

While I agree that the post showed problematic thinking and was kind of a nuisance post rather than one which fostered healthy discussion, I'm not sure I agree with removing it entirely. The original poster did not seem to have any malicious intent, but instead displayed a flawed internal view of healthy relationships. Though the feedback was likely not what they were hoping for, I think it could be instructional not only for that original poster but also for any other site visitors who may have a similar way of thinking. If someone were to read the post and not recognize anything wrong with it, only to then read the criticism in the comments, it's possible they may discover that their own thinking is flawed in a similar way to OP and seek to change the way they view the topic. If we hide every problematic question, people with similar thinking won't ever see that 1) other people have similar problematic views and 2) those views are problematic for reasons X, Y, and Z.

More simply, if people come here and ask questions that we find distasteful, instead of deleting them should we leave them up with the relevant feedback so that other people learn from that interaction and develop a better idea of where the poster went wrong? It feels like there are a lot of folks out there that might be simply ignorant about social and relationship norms and could learn by example. If these people never see a post where someone is getting called out for their misguided thinking, how do we expect them to learn what's acceptable and what isn't?

I'm curious to hear your opinions. Should we tolerate entertaining some troublesome questions in order to better educate others, or is it not our job to teach them proper social skills/those posts don't belong here at all?

(To be clear, I do not support leaving up anything overtly abusive or malicious/hateful, those should obviously be removed ASAP).

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.

So, quite a few people don't like/watch video content, and don't like seeing the homepage filled with videos. Let's try something new, see if it sticks.

What are the best videos you have watched this past week/fortnight?

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.

"Generational" might not be the correct word. What I mean is that pop¹ music from the 20th century transitioned from one style to another in a way where decades could have pretty distinctive sounds. 50s music was different than 60s was different than 70s was different than 80s. What I'm wondering: what is your perspective on pop music style change from 2000s to 2010s to today?² Has it changed or does it sound the same as it did 10-20 years ago?

The reason I ask is that I listened to a pop station recently and it seems barely different than when I was in high school pre-2010. Taylor Swift is still incredibly popular, and listening casually to other songs, I had no guess on what year they were actually produced. It could have been 2012 or it could have been last year. I don't know if I'm just getting old and I've lost my ability to keep up on the nuance of current trends or if it's that pop music has stagnated the same way Hollywood movies have - art that is analyzed and meticulously designed to appeal to the widest audience possible.

[1] - I'm defining "pop" as Billboard Top 40 or equivalent.

[2] - I think this only applies to "pop" songs. I haven't noticed the same trend in sub genres such as country, rap, latin, or metal. I am also sure the extent of style variation over time depends on the country.

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?

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.

Was recently discussing this with someone after we saw Dial of Destiny: lots of movies the past few years have been much longer than they need to be. DoD was 2 and a half hours, Spiderverse 2 made the jump from under 2 hours to almost 2 and a half hours. Is there some incentive for studios to make movies longer that we're not seeing?

My friend and I embarked upon a journey over the past few months to create a tabletop board game. The interesting part is that we were motivated by the emergence of generative AI and the capabilities it had in rapid prototyping concepts. On a whim we said, let's see how far we can push making a board game. We pushed Midjourney, ChatGPT, and a variety of creative tools to help build the foundation for our game. We both have design chops and are into diy, creative design, and 3d printing, and technology to help get this thing past the finish line.

We are now at the point were after many iterative sessions, we have a functional and fun to play game! Our intention is to give it away as a free downloadable that folks can 3d print and paper print all the parts so they can play too! Huzzah! We are balancing the rules and creating the instructions which is not something we are relying on AI aside sticking to the theme. We are in search of inspirato on what makes gameplay fun for folks today.

Question What are the most fun, exciting, or challenging aspects of any tabletop or board games you play? What keeps you engaged?

EDIT
I didn't give many specifics on the game itself, and figured it might help. Remember we used AI to come up with this storyline. The prompt was to write a story for a "Sci-fi Christmas Horror" board game...

The basic premise is that you are attending a party at the North pole celebrating the research of Dr. Frost on ancient Christmas magic. Predictably things go bad, and you have to find your way out before it's too late and you are killed by a troop of Christmas themed monsters.

The games objective is to work together to escape the facility by collecting sleigh parts, fighting monsters, navigating a maze in dark hallways, and visiting special rooms to solve puzzles. It's all kinds of ridiculous but fun it its own way.

There's a couple of other words that describe what I'm talking about - neoliberalism, lassez-faire capitalism, and in a more general sense, the Chicago school of economics - but I chose market fundamentalism because it seemed to best describe precisely what I'm talking about. I mean the belief that the market is capable of self-regulation and that governmental intervention will cause damage to the economy.

I'm asking this because there's still a lot about economics that I don't know about and so I was hoping someone with a background in the subject who would be able to better answer the question. But I realize it's probably also a political question. I wonder if it's more of an issue of our politicians pressing these views than economists and academics.

Personally, with my life's experience, it seems almost obviously wrong. I've lived through several market downturns and even a crash, and looking through history it seems like every market crash can be attributed to the market failing to correct itself.

How did you guys feel about this one? There were some funny moments, like T'Pring's dad being shot down by the mom whenever he was enjoying himself. Not a fan of all the teen romance movie stuff that's in the newer Trek shows though.

OK, so I have a very nerdy, mildly ADHD 9 year old boy who has been fascinated with WW2 for ages. All this started with him getting obsessed with the Titanic when he was about 4, which then led us to look at some old Nat Geo magazines about Robert Ballard's oceanographic expeditions which then led him to get fascinated with the German battleship Bismarck and Operation Rheinubung. The drama of big gun battleships got him in the feels and in the five years since then he has been deeply into naval stuff, particularly WW2 naval combat ever since. Musically this got him into Sabaton and their WW1/2 related metal songs. He actually sat down and watched the 1960s black and white Sink the Bismarck on YouTube, along with stuff like Midway (the version from a few years back). He thinks aircraft carriers are cool and ate up both Top Gun movies and is now getting into submarines (loved The Hunt for Red October) but wistfully repeatedly tries to reason me into agreeing that navies should have stuck with big gun battleships.

However, this has manifested as a deep fascination with Germany in general- he knows the basics about fascism, the Holocaust and Wehrmacht atrocities (but still can't quite get why it happened) but to a small boy I understand the OMG WUNDERWAFFEN attraction. Coincidentally his best friend is an ethnically German girl which further gets him a bit confused because he can't quite grok the difference between "my friend is German, I think German engineering is cool" and "but we still condemn fascism".
To be clear- he understands why racism and prejudice are wrong. As an ethnic minority in our country I suspect he'll come into contact with racial prejudice sooner rather than later so hopefully life experience will lead him away from the alt-right bits of history nerdery.

We're in Singapore, which means there's very little consciousness of the Holocaust in public education- our history syllabus (fairly enough) deals with the Pacific War and its effects on postwar decolonisation when it touches on WW2 whereas the European theatre is just vague background.

I don't know where I'm going with this, really- I like that my son is a history buff, and I don't want to cut him off from intellectual interests he's passionate about but on the other hand I'm wondering how I can let him enjoy this while contextualising it from a progressive perspective.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I used to absolutely love DayZ when it was still a mod. Even over a decade later I've yet to find a game with the sheer level of adrenaline that it could induce. I fell off the genre when it started moving towards crafting and base building since the systems just ended up feeling like busywork and detracted from the intensity of the core gameplay.

Is there anything newer that captures that experience from early DayZ, or is the Rust/Ark style gameplay loop completely ubiquitous now? I'd love something with good gunplay, a focused set of systems, and a punishing difficulty curve.

Had an interesting conversation with my colleagues this morning. We were pretty split whether phones listen to us for advertising or not.

On one hand, we anecdotally see Google news and ad suggestions based on what we say. We know our mics are on at all times for voice assistant and music detection. But we also read online talking about how there is no evidence about the phones recording us. It's hard to trust anything nowadays.

I read an article today that referred to Foundation as "prestige television," and my first reaction was, "idk man, I didn't think it was all that great." This got me thinking, though, and I'm going down two separate paths here.

First, prestige television is a category that gets thrown about more as a marker of social context than of the quality of the show. Today, at least, these shows are typically big budget, highly marketed (specifically marketed as high quality), and likened to each other. Foundation was really hyped up in the runup to its release. There was a whole slew of articles calling it Apple TV's sci-fi Game of Thrones. More or less the same thing happened with The Rings of Power. Basically, "prestige television" feels like a term that was coopted by television studios in a landscape that has trended towards putting all their eggs into one basket. This only covers the studios' use of the term, though.

Second is the audience's use of the term. There remains the obvious question of if we're going to ward off the tv studios' coopting of the term, how are we going to use it? It really came out of a specific era of television, and regardless of anyone's assessment of relative quality, shows like that aren't really getting made anymore.

Personally, though? I wonder if we even need the term. My sort of emotional reaction to the conversation about prestige television is that it reminds me of the debate around "literature." It's not a debate I want to get into, but it's another label that has unclear boundaries and a tendency towards the old. In practice, it just gets used to snub certain books (e.g. "Dune is good, but it's not literature"). With television, I'm not saying we need to do away with the concept of prestige television, but if we do want to keep using it (and again, studios will even if we don't),
a) What should it mean?
b) How should we use it (i.e. for good, not for snobbery)?

Through the years I have struggled with perfectionism, low self worth, and an overwhelming need to make everyone else happy at my own expense. Recently I've begun wondering if this is related more to my own personal upbringing (my mom and sister share a lot of these traits) or if it's a wider experience of being a woman in modern society.

Growing up in a world where women had successfully entered the job market, there was still an unspoken urging that I had to be better than my male peers to earn my place in the world. There still felt like there were expectations that women would follow all the rules, keep the peace, and maintain the home/workspace. Is this an off base interpretation of societal pressures, or do any of you find yourselves still struggling with some of these messages?

ETA: Also, what are some positive ways being raised as a woman has impacted you?

I was playing Motorstorm: Arctic Edge emulated on my Vita and realized I have literally never seen it brought up or discussed online.

Motorstorm is a dead franchise, but the console games I occasionally see talk of but never the psp version. I think it did a great job of capturing the feel of the game on the go and has a banger soundtrack too. I played it a ton back in high school on my psp and still boot it up from time to time for a quick hit of adrenaline fueled racing.

I'm sure others have similar games, maybe it's a "bad" game that you love or just an oldie lost to time.

Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases arriving at our doorsteps today (and until next week!). Feel free to comment albums that have caught your eye and interest.

Bit of a sleepy week this week, hopefully there's some gems in the smaller names.

Discussion Points

What are you looking forward to listen to?
Have you listened to any of these releases?
What are your thoughts?
What have you enjoyed from these artists in the past?

Why Friday?

Most (but not all) new LPs release on a Friday, as labels want to give the release a full week of sales before entering the charts.

~~ Feedback on the format welcome!

So from earliest childhood, I have experienced that from time to time the electrical grid becomes unavailable for use and it can take days or even weeks to restore service. I'm having trouble comprehending the scope, scale and plausibility of what changes would need to be made to increase the electrification of everything in the way that is being pushed by policy advisors.

Everyone is pushing electric cars. I think it's a great idea, but I have questions about how the grid can support it.

People tell me that the next big advancement in the workplace is going to be the incorporation of artificial intelligence. Doesn't AI require servers on a massive scale? How plausible is it for AI to reach all corners of society and economy on our existing grid or reasonable expectations for plausible improvement of the grid?

The banks seem to be lobbying for the substitution of electronic accounts for cash. Again, electric power is not always available. Also some people who need to use money don't have homes and can't reliably charge electronics. If I remember correctly the payment system went down in Canada a while ago and people without cash were out of luck.

What insight can you share with me?

Is anyone here playing/finished with the System Shock remake? I’d love to hear your thoughts whether you’re brand new to the series, played the original, or played System Shock 2.

• What are your thoughts on the game? What’s good and bad about it?
• How well did they pull off the remake?
• Does the game still appeal to modern sensibilities?
• Did you lose faith the game would even come out between now and when it was crowdfunded seven years ago?
• What other thoughts do you have?

Please mark any spoilers, either by warning in advance or by putting them inside of a details dropdown:

Edit: I originally miscalled it a remaster. It’s a definitely a remake.

This is a follow up to this discussion from the other day where I was getting ready to DM my first session of 5e. tl;dr from that is that I was chosen to be the DM by my group and we're playing through the Essentials Kit campaign, albeit with certain elements tweaked to give it more flavor.

Our first game was last night and I think I crushed it. Typical of our group we got a later start than intended, so we only made it through most of a single quest. But man it was so much fun. I was expecting the group to go routes I hadn't expected, but I really didn't account for them splitting the group...whoops.

Basically the first quest was to retrieve an elderly woman from a windmill. When they arrive, the windmill is under attack by a manticore. In my head the solutions were A) fight it there, B) distract it and save the woman, or C) go hunt with it for food.

The group ultimately chose all 3. One character started telling the Manticore riddles while another snuck around behind the windmill to try to get the woman out of the house. But conveniently the window was too small. It culminated in the Manticore going hunting with a Harengon alone, the rest of the group realizing what a bad idea that was and then shadowing them. And then ultimately the group jumped the Manticore and we had our first encounter. Thankfully I had nerfed the Manticore's health about 40%, so it was a pretty easy fight.

The weakest part was definitely the combat. I was never any good at that as a player, so me running it was a little rocky. But nobody died, everyone got to participate, and they defeated the Manticore at about the right speed to keep it interesting. The best was just the roleplaying. I got to play as 3 distinct characters (the starting zone guide character, the Manticore, and the old lady) and had a blast. The old lady's voice slowly slipped into a Terry Jones inspired cockney woman's voice, which is just so much fun to do.

Long story short, everything went really, really well. I know what did and didn't work, so I'll be adjusting accordingly for next session. Although very little didn't work. I was really pleased. And since we didn't even entirely finish the first quest (the turn-in part at least), I still have a quest/dungeon written up that I can use for next week.

I am interested in hearing people's thoughts about where women have made great strides in progress of women rights/equality/equity vs where we've been stuck on progress.

I've been torn on how I've felt about when RBG said the Supreme Court would be equal once it had 9 women on it. Source because I do kind of understand the perspective of in history we've been "fine" with it being all male, so why cant the opposite be fine?

However at the same rate isn't that why we've been working hard on getting a seat at the table because we werent truly fine with it.

In some ways I've seen so much progress in my personal life and then I'll look at the statistics and see that only 10% of CEOs are women and 28% congress is women source

Yet we're about half if not slightly more than half the population. I feel like some progress has been rolled back as well, over the past couple years with the rise of extreme right wing ideology, and I feel like roe vs wade was a roll back in progress and we've stalled on increasing power. Then again nearly 50% women supported rolling it back, and I don't want to dimiss that perspective even though I adamantly disagree with it because for them it was progress.

I personally have been excited to see some local progress as the Wisconsin Bucks got their first female assistant coach. As well as glad to be part of one of the companies with a female CEO.

I'd really like to see a women president in the USA in my lifetime. That's I think the next big ceiling.

So what's some progress you've been glad to see?Anything local? and where do you worry we've stalled? What do you want to see as the next "glass ceiling broken"?

I'm a big fan of nuclear fusion as a concept and hope to shift toward doing active research in the field at some point.

I'd like to open this discussion to talk about topics regarding nuclear fusion as a future energy source. To start, I'll lost a couple of ongoing fusion efforts I'm familiar with.

ITER:Of course the biggest fusion project is ITER, the massive multinational collaboration which is building a massive tokamak reactor in France. Unfortunately ITER will never produce power for average people, as it's purely a test reactor with no plans to be connected to the grid. The following effort to build a functional grid connected reactor, DEMO, isn't set to be built until at least 2050. This has resulted in a considerable number of private ventures trying iut experimental alternative approaches.

HELION:At the time of writing this, there's quite a bit of buzz surrounding Helion energy, both because of the ambitious timeline theyve recently proposed as well as the investment of Sam Altman of OpenAI fame. Helion uses an FRC topology, which I personally think is a really cool idea. Basically it's a tokamak without the physical shell around it, and is kept sustained by the internal plasma physics. Helion also has another interesting quirk, they are not pursuing the typical DT fuel strategy, but are instead planning to use DD fusion to breed He3 and use DHe3 fusion as the primary energy source. I think this is a good idea because DHe3 fusion is "aneutronic", whereas DT fusion produces high energy neutrons that are somewhat of an unsolved problem to deal with. I wonder though, how they intend to deal with the inevitable tritium pollution that DD fusion creates, and how they will separate that out before Iit creates neutrons anyway.

TRIALPHA:In addition, another major company TriAlpha Energy, also pursued FRCs, hoping to use an alternative proton-boron11 mix to achieve aneutronic operation. I think they've sort of pivoted toward being more a neutron source than working toward breakeven.

HB11: A recent proposed approach is HB11, which is also going for proton-boron fusion. Now with Tri Alpha this seemed really dubious, because hydrogen boron has a much lower cross section for fusion than other options, even the DHe3 that Helion is doing. In addition, boron has way more electrons than hydrogen, so a proton boron plasma has more electrons with causes more bremsstrahlung loss. HB11, however, thinks they can overcome this through high energy laser acceleration. They want to use a high power laser to shoot a fuel pellet into a target. This supposedly will work much better than heating the stuff, because the laser will impart a specific impulse and thus the thermal spectrum of the impact will have a much higher Q factor centered around the cross sectional peak. I'm not really convinced on this, just because I feel like that thermal spectrum would only last for the first few atomic layers of impact before it doesn't really matter amymore.

CFS: The next option I would consider to be one if the most popular fusion startups is Commonwealth Fusion Systems. They have what I'd consider the most conservative approach, they are attempting to build a Tokamak design like ITER, but hope to reduce the size considerably by taking advantage of advances in superconductor technology with REBCO tapes.

W7X:The next reactor type I'll mention was in the news a lot a few years back, the Wendelstein-7X in Germany. This is a stellarator design, the crazy twisted car wreck of a thing you may have seen before. The stellarator is shaped that way so that it doesn't require an induced current like the tokamak to have magnetic helicity, because the shape does that automatically.

ZAP:Another well liked dark horse is Zap Energy. They're not as flashy as the other reactors but seem to be working off solid physics that have been proven out over many years. They're trying to do sheared flow z-pinches, which is basically creating a lightning bolt that's perfectly straightened out and super dense.

DPF:One more somewhat obscure option is Eric Lerner's Dense Plasma Focus approach. I'm a little puzzled by this option because it seems to be the exact opposite of Zap, where they make an incredibly twisty lightning bolt instead of a straight one.

FUSOR/POLYWELL:There are a couple reactor types that get mentioned often but are more or less obsolete are the Fusor and the Polywell. A Fusor is a neat device that can be built to fit on a desktop and still produce actual fusion reactions, but has a fundamental design flaw of a physical electrode inside the plasma that introduces too much conductive heat loss. The Polywell is a more advanced concept thay tries to create a "virtual" cathode with orthogonal magnetic mirrors, but I think after many years of experimentation researchers were unable to validate the formation of such a virtual cathode.

NIF:One option that is sort of tangential is the NIF, which you might have heard technically produced more energy than it produced. I dont think its necessarily going to go anywhere, mostly because it's more a weapons program than an energy program, but I think the chirped pulse amplification technology they use is really cool.

GENERAL-FUSION:And finally I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the very highly funded and publicized General Fusion. I definitely give them points for pure childlike wonder. The original pitch was they were going to take a giant swirling tornado of molten metal, fire a ball of plasma into the eye of the storm, then smash the whole thing from all sides with a hundred giant hammers. To be honest is such a wild concept that I don't really know if it really makes any sense or if it's a fever dream. It's undergone a few revisions after finding out that certain parts of its concept just weren't going to work. This doesn't inspire a ton of confidence, but also shows flexibility in their thinking.

There's definitely lots of other companies with other variations, but this gives a general idea of the huge range of ideas and approaches being pursued. I think it's a really cool field to explore and I'd love to hear all your thoughts about it.