Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like careers, ad blocking and subaru. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was fascinated.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

November 1st is here! Technically, the creative time period for Timasomo has ended but if you need more time to keep working, go for it!

We have a few more days before the Showcase goes live, so I wanted to run through some guidelines:

Examples: The best way to get a feel for the Showcase thread and its expectations is to take a look at the previous showcases: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

Time: I will be posting the showcase when it’s approximately 8:00 AM, Sunday morning, in Auckland, New Zealand. You can use that link to see when the topic will go live for your local time (which for much of the world will still be Saturday).

Do not feel obligated to post immediately unless you’re ready to! Take the time you need — the Showcase topic will be there when you are ready for it.

Requirements: The only requirements for the showcase are a title for your project, as well as the sharing of your project (or parts/info about your project — see Privacy below) in whatever way is best for you (could be pictures, videos, download links, etc.)

Recommendations: While your project will speak for itself, the story of its creation as well as your own thoughts and feelings are also valuable and help personalize your work for people. Feel free to add any “creator’s statements” you want in addition to your work to convey that. Many of you have been posting AMAZING stuff in the weekly discussion threads, but a lot of people who view the Showcase won’t necessarily have followed that.

Think about what you want people to know about you and your project and share it alongside your work!

Unfinished Projects: It is PERFECTLY FINE to share projects that are in an unfinished state. It is also PERFECTLY FINE to wait until you’re done to share them. Go with what works best for you.

Privacy: Tildes is a privacy-respecting site, and that extends to you and your work. If you created something for Timasomo but do not wish to fully share it publicly, that’s fine. Feel free to share a limited glimpse into your work rather than the whole thing.

Alternately, you don’t have to share anything! You could simply describe what you did for your Showcase entry without sharing the product itself. It is entirely up to you how much you share and how it gets presented.

Promotion: Timasomo is an incentive to create, but it is not the roof under which your work has to live. Your work is your work, and it’s yours to share elsewhere as well. Feel free to post it on X/Mastodon/Tumblr/reddit/your blog/etc. Also, feel free to share your work outside of ~creative.timasomo on Tildes if it fits into, say, ~games or ~tech or ~life (tag it with user content). This will help your project reach a broader audience here (since not everyone is subscribed to this group).

The Tildes Code of Conduct says the following about self-promotion:

Sharing your own content is welcome as long as you're involved in the community, but don't just treat Tildes as a source of an audience.

Anyone who is actively participating in Timasomo is, by definition, involved in the community. Your work for Timasomo is absolutely welcome on the site!

Hosting: If you are looking for a good place to host images that isn’t Imgur, postimages.org is a good alternative.

If you have greater or different hosting needs and no easy way to make that happen, ask in the comments here. Tildes has a lot of wonderfully helpful people who are super knowledgeable with tech and will likely be able to point you in the right direction.

Questions: If there’s anything I missed, ask below!

Hype: I am SO excited for the Showcase y’all don’t even KNOW! It has been a joy and a legitimate inspiration to follow your projects over the last month. I am thrilled that the whole community will get to see them as well as all of you, standing tall and proud beside them (metaphorically), in just a few days’ time.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

It is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the game/games are worthwhile.

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

So, I used to think I hated all love songs.
I disliked them because, in the ones that id heard were the type that found on the FM radio stations, and those tend to fall into a couple broad categories:

• I just met you, and I want to marry/stalk you
• You broke up with me, and I will do anything to get you back
• Your with someone else, and Im trying to win you over

My view on them changed when I found I'll Take Lonely Tonight, A song about the temptation of cheating in an established relationship.
While not a song I can exactly relate to, it still struck me, because its, well, respectful.
Its respectful towards the woman offering the one night stand, but still describes a deep, enduring love between Tim and his wife,
that he would rather spend the night on his own then break their trust.
(I guess it probably helps that I already like tim minchin, especially his newer, more subdued works.)

Since then, Ive only discovered one other song that scratches that same itch: Like my Father, a song about how the artist's parents relationship set the standard she strives for in her own relationship (My parents relationship was very much a role model for my marriage today, so this one hits me in the feels)

Im actively looking for other similar songs, and would appreciate any other suggestions.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Spotify recently increased their price, making it the same price as Apple's service. I've had Spotify since 2016 (started with the free version), and got premium in 2018 when they had the college student deal where you would get that and Hulu for only five bucks a month. I've been an off and on Premium subscriber since 2019. Only re-subscribing to it when Spotify would send me offers to sign up for three months for the price of one. This is actually the first year that I've consistently had Spotify all year since I was in college.

But now that they're the same price I was wondering if I should switch over. I don't want to get into the whole quality thing and lossless (I don't even know what that is) but I haven't been happy with Spotify's algorithm for a while. Streaming services have always been how I discovered new music, going back to me using Pandora while I was in high school. But now Spotify keeps suggesting the same songs whenever it's on smart shuffle. For example, if I play a song from the late 60s or early 70s, I know the next song Spotify plays is going to be Ain't No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Whenever I play an indie pop song, like a Lana Del Rey song or something, I know that the next song is going to be Borderline by Tame Impala.

I'm kind of sick of it at this point, and I feel like it's limiting the scope of what I'm listening to. I'm not sure what Apple Music's algorithm is like, I've heard mixed things with some saying it's better than Spotify and others saying it's worse.

I'm also happy taking recommendations on other things to do or try with Spotify to correct this.

Choose one series
that you love
that you think deserves more love

Tell us what it is, and why.

Previous posts in the series

Additional Details

For the first time in my adult life I actually have some real discretionary money, and the one personal purchase I've wanted to make for a long time is a VR rig. I was hoping for input I can be pretty sure isn't tainted by capitalism/ads.

Cost-vs-value will matter a lot, but the actual cost isn't too big a concern anymore. Budget up to maybe $3-4K if it's really worth the money.

And to note, I already have a pretty gnarly personal computer that is more than capable of running VR games (Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core / RTX 3090 / 32GB DDR4) -- I just need the rig.

Rangers and Diamonbacks fans may be few and far between on Tildes, but I figured it's worth a shot!

Let's use this post to discuss the battle of the underdogs.

As for myself, I'm a lifelong Rangers fan, which is to say I'm used to misery. It's a bit surreal to be back in the WS after such a crazy end to the regular season AND postseason.

Just saw this other thread about the FNaF movie actually doing quite well at the box office, which apperently is much newsworthy and something I should care about. This here thing is popular, this and that is trending, read all about it. Yay. Well sure, it's quite nice they made their money back, but I felt it looked a bit overproduced and cookie-cutter like. Okay, haven't actually seen the blessed movie, but I've decided to hate it, so there!

I know about David Lynch, I know about Cronenberg, I know about J-horror, all that old stuff, but are there any contemporary horror movies which will screw me over? Something a bit more art-house and crazy? I've been a bit away from movie for the last decades, but I'm unsure if I'm out of the loop, or if there is anything to be out of the loop about.

Upcoming Dates:

• Timasomo Showcase Thread -- Sunday, November 5 (one week away!)

Technically all work should be finished before November 1st (but if you're running up on time, that's never really been a hard deadline 😉).

November 1-4 are for putting finishing touches on the project to ready it for the showcase.

If you need an idea of what the Showcase thread will look like, here's last year's.

Update us on your progress so far!

• What did/didn't you get done this week?

• Anything go according to plan?

• Anything go off the rails?

• Any successes or struggles to share?

• Do you need feedback or help on anything?

This is your topic to share anything and everything you want about what you’ve made so far.

The release of the Meta Quest 3 seems to have been slowplayed but my take is that Zuckerberg is still going full force ahead with MR but doesn't want to have a fiasco like the last round of publicity about "the metaverse” when people were mentioning it in the same sentence as blockchains and NFTs.

I read a lot of very positive reviews about the hardware

https://www.theverge.com/23906313/meta-quest-3-review-vr-mixed-reality-headset

https://www.reddit.com/r/QuestPro/comments/17631ja/24_hours_in_my_quest_3_review/

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/meta-quest-3

so I got one and I am really impressed. It comes with a very convincing demo where cracks appear in the ceiling and walls of your room opening views onto another planet and then aliens come into your room that you have to shoot with the controllers to stuff them into a tube. I am showing this demo to people on the hopes I can sell some kind of MR exhibit to a local museum.

Karl Guttag could show that the MR quality is "awful" from an eye chart perspective but the motion-to-photon is really excellent, you can throw and catch a ball just fine wearing it, and it is totally practical to walk around the house, interact with people, read (large) text to copy, use a touchscreen, etc.

I get the feeling too that they are doing many of the right things to market it, for instance, it comes with a license for a major game that comes out in two months which will might give people who don't click with it right away a chance to re-engage. There is intensive notification based marketing with discounts and stuff which is totally textbook for a new app store and that I like at the moment but it is possible it just won't connect if the product isn't up to snuff.

I tried Horizon Worlds and ran into the problem of not being able to succeed at the fishing minigame (in real life I've only been able to catch sunfish and smelt, but you really can fill up your freezer with zero skill with the later) and also the way it is weirdly empty. I have some content that I think could be put in there which I think is often a good idea on a new platform that is heavily promoted (e.g. easy to get free publicity and other benefits from the platform) but that emptiness might mean they don't feel pressure to get content. VRChat was more fun but showed me the challenge of onboarding people to that sort of thing, I got into an entrance room where I met one person who was actually attentive and trying to communicate and I think a lot of kids who were "doing their own thing", I figured out some of how to interact in that space but the problem of "getting gud" while sharing the space with other people who might be annoyed seems tough.

My take is that the software is not up to the hardware right now but as a software developer I think that’s a great problem to have.

If you're excited about Apple Vision I think you should be excited by this. Any thoughts? Anyone tried the MQ3? Anyone developing content for it?