OK, I'll admit it. I didn't think Las Vegas was going to be that exciting. I was proven wrong. What a race!

But F1 still owes me money for the Thursday night FP1/FP2 debacle!!

Anyway, the final race of the season is at Abu Dhabi, Nov. 24-26. Which is already next weekend! Didn't even realize we had a double-header.

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.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like baptism, macos and population.declining. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was inquisitive.

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!

This is the third movie we discuss of Academy Award Winners. Kim Basinger won for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and it won for Best Adapted Screenplay. It was nominated for Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, Best Score, Best Sound and Best Director.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Did the movie deserve its nominations and awards? Did the screenplay and Kim Basingers performance in particular stand out? Feel free to add any thoughts, opinions, reflections, analysis or whatever comments related to this film.

The rest of the schedule is:

• 20th of November: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• 27th of November: West Side Story

This is Album of the Week #9 ~ This week's album is The KLF - Chill Out

Year of Release: 1990
Genre(s): Ambient, Sound Collage
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 44 minutes
Listen! (YouTube) This album isn't available on streaming services.

Excerpt from Pitchfork:

The interwoven pieces play out like a radio broadcast heard while half asleep, tapping into the same surreal aesthetic that David Lynch would explore in Twin Peaks’ debut just a few months later. Call it the American uncanny, in which familiar tropes are turned strange, and tantalizing snippets suggest hidden narratives—root systems of stories burrowing deep underground. Like the Swiss heritage of photographer Robert Frank, another eagle-eyed traveler of America’s backroads, the KLF’s foreignness gave them special purchase on American myths. It was all a product of the duo’s imagination; Drummond had never even been to the places they were evoking, and they only settled on the titles after recording. “We thought that it had the feeling of that sort of trip,” Drummond told X Magazine in 1991. “I love maps and atlases and I love place names, and I just sat down with the atlas and picked, you know, and saw the journey that it was and it all seemed to fit.”

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

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.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like qanon, omegle and shinzo abe. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was perturbed.

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!

Every nonprofit organization I have ever worked with does some form of publicity/public relations to support their mission. Many have speakers bureaus of volunteers who give talks about what the organization is doing. Many work to get articles written about their mission and efforts.

I think more could be done to remind people and inform people of a few things about nonprofit and small scale internet sites. For example that the early internet was centered around universities not corporations and marketing, that news organizations such as NPR and the BBC provide a valuable counter perspective to corporate news organizations, that nonprofit sites including Lemmy and Kbin and Mastadon and Tildes exist, to remind people that you can add forum or blog to a search to find small scale content and more. The point would be to make the case publicly that nonprofit and small scale internet sites 1. are still possible and viable, 2. already exist (insert several examples) 3. and and should form part of a strategy to resist corporate monopolies/dominance and create more diverse conversations and communities online.

What are your thoughts? I'm curious about timing, (will there be a better future time?) about possible methods and strategies and about whether this is something some members here want to think about.

Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases that have arrived on our doorstep this week. Feel free to share albums and EPs 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

Just as a preface, I am not making this post because I oppose immigration or want to turn away imigrants, much less those who can't live safely in their home countries, I just notice immigration and misery seem to be intimately related, and it honestly makes me wonder if a world without misery is also a world without immigration, at least in the form of mass migrations of a specific people group or type of person. I also recognize that more immigration and cultural diversity does have a wide variety of benefits, regardless of it's causes or motives, and that leaving your home for some faraway country looking for some high-end job not present where you live is definitely not the fault or problem of the person migrating.

I've been thinking about immigration recently and it kind of astounds me just how much of immigration happens because of misery, Colonialism or oppression. Here's a pretty broad and varied list of mass immigration phenomena and (as I understand them) their causes:

• The USA has a southern border crisis (to some extent because Republicans like to exaggerate it to justify their xenophobia and so on) because Mexico and Latin America as a whole are much poorer than the USA (something the USA itself shares a good deal of blame for) and thus want to come to the USA, with illegal immigrants often doing so by any means necessary.

• Europe (and Turkey kinda) has an Arab migrant crisis because of the (mostly) failed Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War destabilizing the region or plunging it into war, forcing million to flee to Europe, which is in large part responsible for this crisis seing as (West) Europeans colonized the whole region and set much of the stage for conflicts.

• A large share of white people from a variety of different ethnic groups in the USA were fleeing oppression or misery in Europe (and the ones that were not came here to colonize and oppress the natives):

  • Quakers fleeing to the USA due to British persecution

  • Irish-Americans coming to the USA in largest amounts following the Potato Famine

  • The height of German-American migration to the USA followed the 1848 revolution's failure to make a more liberal and united Germany

  • Meanwhile, Black Americans, after being forcibly migrated out of the African continent to be enslaved, fled the US South in the millions starting around the 1920s as this was the nadir of race relations and the heights of the Jim Crow age. White flight to the suburbs (another large migration) was one of the main northern responses to this influx of black people.

• In early 20th century Brazil, the government encouraged immigration from European countries and Japan to them in large part due to a need for cheap labor still unmet a few decades after the end of slavery and as a way to make the country more white. Many of the European migrants were poor workers looking to make a better life for themselves.

• Zionism arguably owes it's existence and success to centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe and it's culmination in the Holocaust, alongside a sympathetic British Empire and UN being able to simply lease most of the Levant that they had colonized to a new Jewish state. This is layered on top of the fact that the reason Jewish people even left the Levant in the first place was oppression by several different foreign empires for centuries since antiquity. The modern state of Israel also owes the largest share of it's Jews from neighboring middle-eastern countries which also expelled them due to their own anti-Semitism.

• In the middle of the 20th century in Brazil, millions of Brazilian northeasterners migrated to the Southeast in search of economic opportunity they lacked (and to some extent still do) at home, as well as fleeing drought in more rural zones. Notably, in the 2010s we have seen many of these people return to the Northeast following Lula massively helping the Northeast develop over his first presidency in the 2000s. For a personal anecdote, both of my mother's parents did this, and brought my mother to where I live in São Paulo, and then they also went back to the northeast in the mid 2010s.

• Virtually the entirety of the Global South and also Eastern Europe suffers from Brain Drain, where their most educated people leave in search of better opportunity and higher incomes in developed countries and the multinationals they possess. Much of the USA's legal immigration and economic power in spite of it's numerous flaws is owed to this.

• Somewhat similarly, most Western European countries have one or more large communities of people who originate from a country they had colonized as an empire. (The USA also owes much of their Filipino American community to owning them despite it not being the same colonialism as practiced by the British on the USA or by Spain.)

Looking at this fairly long list of examples, I have to wonder if there are mass migrations that happened because of more positive reasons or if any of these already existing mass migrations can be explained by more positive reasons?

This is Album of the Week #8 ~ This week's album is Tame Impala - The Slow Rush

Year of Release: 2020
Genre(s): Psychedelic Pop
Country: United States
Length: 57 minutes
Listen! (Album.Link)

Excerpt from NPR:

As a producer, Parker has more moving parts to balance this time, but he arrives at a deft auteur-pop synergy in which every last decision, down to the assorted cathedral-like reverb effects that lend his voice an otherworldly aura, become as intrinsic to the music as the melodies or the words. Though there's a lot going on in the latticework of the music — springy analog synthesizer arpeggios, guitars doing unguitarlike things, layers upon layers of pastel lushness — the post-psychedelic swirl of The Slow Rush registers as an organic blend, with the songs never feeling cluttered or too tightly scripted.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

This is the second movie we discuss of Academy Award Winners. It also won for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Feel free to add any thoughts, opinions, reflections, analysis or whatever comments related to this film.

The rest of the schedule is:

• 13th of November: L.A. Confidential
• 20th of November: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• 27th of November: West Side Story

Interlagos delivers again! Great weekend.

Two weeks until Las Vegas, Nov. 16-19. Which I'll be at -- Well, at least FP1!

Remember, this is an unusual one since it's a Saturday night race.

Results for both the GP and the Sprint Race from yesterday below.

Enjoy the break!

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

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 that have arrived on our doorstep this week. Feel free to share albums and EPs 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

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!

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.

Artificer school is rough. You have to learn so many ways to manipulate magic forces and try to shove it all into small items. Sometimes it doesn't work as well as hoped. Even if every student gives it their best effort, someone has to be the worst passing student in the class.

In my campaigns, I try to explore this concept by adding niche items or items of student project quality. Often times these items end up adding quite a bit of fun to the lower levels before access to "real" magic items is available.

I would love to throw this idea out to the world and maybe get a bigger collection of these items for all of the Tildes DMs to use in their campaigns if they fit in the setting.

This is the first movie we discuss of Academy Award Winners. Day for Night won for Best Foreign Language Film

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

I found this little intro from TCM by Steven Spielberg

Is it a worthy award winner? Have you seen other films by Truffaut? How does it compare to other films about filmmaking?

Feel free to add any thoughts, opinions, reflections, analysis or whatever comments related to this film.

The rest of the schedule is:

• 6th of November: Drive My Car
• 13th of November: L.A. Confidential
• 20th of November: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• 27th of November: West Side Story

I can't get enough of that mariachi F1 theme, no joke.

Next weekend (Nov. 3-5), we head to the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace PACE in Sao Paulo, Brazil to finish up the triple header. Only 3 more grands prix left!

EDIT: Results updated to account for BOT post-race penalty.

Yo everyone, I'm fresh from the first good night's sleep I've gotten in awhile. I'm ecstatic to finally be finished (I took a longer road than most) and just felt like chatting with you fine folks.

Getting that dissertation done was a real challenge and while I'm happy I finished before George R. R. Martin finished the next ASOIAF book, I have a lot more sympathy now for him or anyone who has to write something lengthy.

Anyone else in a graduate program or recently finished? To those who have gone through the process, what'd you do immediately afterwards? I'm in the middle of a job interview process so I can't quite take a vacation, but I am planning to stick at least a full week somewhere where I travel and do nothing.

Tonight, I'm going to relax and watch The Magic Flute opera with friends which I've not done before.

This is Album of the Week #7 ~ This week's album is Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else

Year of Release: 2014
Genre(s): Post-Hardcore, Indie Rock
Country: United States
Length: 31 minutes
Listen! (Album.Link)

Excerpt from The Quietus:

And damn, the boy Baldi can write a hook. While Here And Nowhere Else is a noisy onslaught that rattles along at a cracking pace, there's a real sense of fun and catchy melodies that Billie Joe Armstrong would be proud of (especially album closer 'I'm Not Part Of Me'), which will probably see the album appropriated by beer-guzzling frat boys, despite lyrically being about life on the fringes – alienation, despair, heartache. More parallels with Cobain there, perhaps. Baldi told the A. V. Club around the release of Attack On Memory that he hadn't really listened to Nirvana, pinning any similarity in their sound to a mutual love of The Wipers. However, fans of Bleach and In Utero (and anyone yearning for what might have been as the circumstances surrounding Cobain's suicide are picked apart in ghoulish detail) should lap this shit up like milk-starved pussy cats.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

This is Album of the Week #6 ~ This week's album is Moby - Play

Year of Release: 1999
Genre(s): Downtempo
Country: United States
Length: 63 minutes
Album.Link

Excerpt from The Quietus:

Abandoned by a fickle and uncaring industry, Play was conceived as Moby’s swansong, a final gesture of creative surrender before sinking back into obscurity. And yet it’s precisely that sense of abandon which helped it eventually shift 12 million copies. Listening to the album through that personal lens, it becomes clear that this is not mere chill-out fodder, but a wistful and valedictory piece of work, a eulogy to opportunities squandered and a life (or one chapter of it) about to end.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases that have arrived on our doorstep this week. Feel free to share albums and EPs 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

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.

My RSS reader has turned up a lot of pessimistic articles about the state of EVs in the last few days, for example:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/gm-is-stalling-ev-production-because-demand-is-falling-off

https://www.thedrive.com/news/gm-delays-expanded-silverado-ev-production-orion-assembly-by-year

https://www.thedrive.com/news/mercedes-dealers-struggling-to-sell-evs-complain-eqs-isnt-aspirational-enough

https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/17/gm-delays-4b-ev-truck-factory-plan-by-another-year/

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-10-vietnam-vinfast-struggles-electric-cars.html

https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2023-10-18/europe-is-looking-to-fight-the-flood-of-chinese-electric-vehicles-but-europeans-love-them.html

Caught this YouTube video also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZlsZwcIgpc

Because of the car industry's obsession with XXL vehicles, Australia is thinking about increasing the size of the standard parking space

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/15/australia-may-increase-standard-car-parking-spaces-as-huge-vehicles-dominate-the-streets

meanwhile, given a choice, consumers are snapping up the reasonably sized and highly efficient (40mpg!) Ford Maverick

https://www.thedrive.com/news/the-ford-maverick-is-outselling-every-midsize-truck-but-the-toyota-tacoma

maybe those American consumers might desire a bigger truck but they can afford that one.

When I read between the lines I'm inclined to think that there isn't any shortage of interest in EVs, but there is a shortage of interest in $80,000 EVs because very few people can afford them. What are you seeing in your neck of the woods? What intervention can you imagine that would help get the industry come to its senses?

I just finished this show, having waited for it all to come out before getting into it -- other Disney+ Star Wars series taught me the lesson that they are much better binged than watched week to week and I was not wrong.

Spoilers below

The endless references to a children's animated show that I have less than zero interest in viewing really drags it down, which is why my main take away as per the title is that it doesn't really work. Most of the premise of the show is finding Thrawn and Ezra -- two characters you have no way of knowing about unless you watched that cartoon. Yet these two characters are constantly referenced and for some reason important, but you're never really sure why.

It kind of works with Thrawn because there's a mysterious villain type of thing going on. But Ezra? Why do we miss him? Who is he? What did he do? Almost none of my questions are ever answered, even after we find him! Aside from simply being told by other characters that he is important, I am never told how or why. Nothing they say or do makes me care about him. They don't show me anything that makes me want to get emotionally invested in him. And no, I am not watching hundreds of hours of cartoons to understand the context. That is simply too much.

This show is in a very strange place between obviously trying to cater to a large audience (it is a Disney property after all, so $$$), but it simultaneously can only be fully understood by extremely hardcore Star Wars fans. I consider myself a fan. I have watched all live action movies and shows, even the laughably bad stuff like the Boba Fett and Kenobi shows. That they intentionally mix together animated and live action storylines though -- especially with any context lacking -- is a major misstep.

I like the Star Wars universe a lot. And while a lot of it is entertaining, it feels very bad to feel left out. It would be different if it was a small cameo or name drop once in a while. But the main storyline gets impacted by this, and it just kind of leaves a sour taste after finishing it.

I was decently entertained and it had some very good moments, particularly the Baylan and Shin duo was intriguing -- which is ironic as I understand that they are among the only original characters in this show. Regurgitating old canon is not the way.

7/10. Entertaining but unsatisfying.

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 just got my Spider-Man 2 Platinum trophy and was looking through my trophy list, I wonder how many people will also obsessively chase the 100% or Platinum trophy and under what conditions.

My personal favorite 100% achievements recently and why:
Slay the Spire - I dumped almost 500 hours in this game and finally got Eternal One last year, it was an incredible journey and I definitely feel myself getting better as I play
God of War Ragnorak - I'm a lifelong God of War fan since the originals and getting through this game was definitely a journey. Finishing the final final boss was incredibly satisfying
Resident Evil 4 Remake - Another one of my personal favorite games of all time, I grinded a week for 50 hours to grab this over about 4 or 5 playthroughs
Spider-Man 2 - My fastest platinum, not too difficult but very satisfying (I do love Spider-man though lol)

I don't know about you all, but I thought that was a great race. The tire strategies featured very prominently again, though for typical degradation reasons instead of Qatar's safety reasons. Some surprising moves made it an exciting race all the way to the end.

EDIT: Updated the results due to the news of post-race DQs for HAM and LEC. (Thanks @deknalis)

F1 heads "South of the Border" to Mexico City next weekend (Nov. 3-5).

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

With some inspiration from the Album of the Week over in ~music I was thinking of having something similar for movies. A weekly discussion on a specific movie - we just need to find a selection format that works. We already have a fine weekly thread with free for all discussion, but I was thinking more like a movieclub type thing.

I was thinking a format where every Monday a new topic is created for a specific movie, and the first Monday of the month it will also include the titles for the rest of the month.

The big problem is how to select the movies and what considerations to availability on various streaming services should be done. Which is not easy since the catalog isn't even the same across countries for the same service. I would like there is some element of random discovery, but with some intent of finding quality titles.

I personally enjoy older classics and film festival type movies such as what is on The Criterion Channel and to an extent Mubi. They also have the benefit of being curated services with monthly selections we could simply piggyback on. But maybe that is a bit too niche. There are of course tons of various "best movies of all time"-lists to use and the 1001 movies you must see before you die would be a good candidate to get a mix of all time classics and some titles that aren't mainstream.

We could also do various thematic selections based on decade, genre, director or actors, but I really just want to get started and see how the traction is.

Feel free to chime in if you are interested and have suggestions on how we could choose the movies to watch, and hopefully I can get this thing started Monday the 30th of October.

Asking because I have been having such vivid dreams lately and sometimes they touch me so much to the point that half a day, sometimes even the entire day, will be negatively affected - although that might also be my poor mental health (decided against posting this in ~health.mental as I wasn't sure it had that much to do with it).

I definitely have more bad dreams when I'm in a bad place or going through things, like if I feel lonely I will dream about relationships. If I've been really into something, like a game or watching a lot of the same genre of tv or film, I will dream about things towards that genre. If I'm having interpersonal issues, I will dream about those and even have conflicts and fights in my dreams very much related to that person - I have so many nightmares about my father for example.

I'm not into astrology, tarot cards, witchy stuff, etc., beyond it being just for fun. And I feel like dreams are more along those lines although I don't know. I just know they can really affect me.

What's your take?

Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases that have arrived on our doorstep this week. Feel free to share albums and EPs 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!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like adhd, digital distribution and antitrust. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was bemused.

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!

Let me start by saying I really enjoyed playing the Mass Effect games. They are awesome.

I found the plot, though, incoherent. Especially in ME3. I don't mind small conveniences like "good thing this random teleporter beam designed to suck up corpses has easy entrée to the reaper's command center," because it's a game.

But how on earth did Cerberus amass seemingly billions of elite special operations forces with nobody noticing? What do you mean the secret weapon against the reapers has been improved each cycle by people who didn't know what it was supposed to do? How could that possibly result in a functional device?

It's clear, I think, that this wasn't necessarily the direction the first game was going. Cerberus was the subject of a side quest, but nothing more. The authors of the lore seemed to be taking great pains to ensure everything was logical, based on the in-universe rules they had established.

...and then ME2 kicks off and the series is almost as much about Cerberus, from this point on, as it is about the reapers.

What did you think about how the plot unrolled?

(You may also wish to read this series of essays. It's about 18 billion words long, though - fair warning. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792)

Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases that have arrived on our doorstep this week. Feel free to share albums and EPs 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!

A lot of people argue that we should try to protect "minority languages" and support "linguistic diversity", but I struggle to understand why having more languages is actually a good thing.

I would be very interested to hear about concrete benefits in the present to linguistic diversity.

Lots of random musings I had on this

A lot of people say things like "it helps you to think differently" which I have not really understood at all (I speak multiple languages, for context, some quite different), but my sample size is really just me in saying that. They also say things like "protect minority culture" which I think is quite harmful. For example my great-grandmother immigrated to an English-speaking country in the west from Africa (she was Indian-African), and she could not speak a word of English which put her at a massive disadvantage, but also gave other family members a lot more power in their relationship because they could all speak English. [Edit: I think there's a gender aspect where women are expected to maintain the traditional language and the burden is not put on men in the same way]. I get the whole assimilation versus integration, but I think there's a very strong case for trying to assimilate (into the dominant group).

I have yet to see a case arguing why it is better to have more languages (and thus necessarily less mutual comprehension and a more segregated world) rather than a single one (e.g. if everyone spoke English). My issue is not really with high-level philosophy about what would be better in an ideal world, but multilingualism as a practical concern. For example, Tildes does not really seem to 'believe' in multilingualism because it only allows English (which personally I think is better than if we had people arguing backwards and forwards in many different languages, but I am also a native English speaker so that might prejudice my perspective).

Most of the arguments about this that I see are from (usually) French speakers bemoaning the decline of their language (and it's kind of ironic to see France becoming a flag-bearer for linguistic diversity given that they exterminated a lot of languages to force French upon the world).

This is Album of the Week #5 ~ This week's album is Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP

Year of Release: 2000
Genre(s): Hip Hop
Country: United States
Length: 72 minutes
Album.Link

Excerpt from Pitchfork:

But the anger and trauma he conjured from his childhood of abuse and bullying felt uncomfortably real in all his performances. On The Marshall Mathers LP, he suits the action to the word and the word to the action. He picks the right tone for the right mood, the horrorcore of “Remember Me?,” the beleaguered artist on “The Way I Am,” the impish malevolence of “Criminal,” or the tortured, regretful, loving, deranged, murderous everything-all-at-once feeling of “Kim.” We don’t really believe it, but we believe Eminem really believes it.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

(Still trying to figure out what to post on this site; sorry if this is a bit abstract.)

I'm not sure what to call this culture, but it's the culture that dictates everything must be 4-5 stars or its nothing. There is a "best" dropship identical item on Amazon. There is a "best" hole in the wall restaurant. There is a "best" takeout place near you. There is a "best" way to do things.

It's not about "laying flat." Laying flat, as far as I understand it, is purely about not caring about the "best" professional life. What I think about is about how algorithms of "best" dictate what we watch, do, and consume, yet they are tied to false perceptions of what "best" can bring us and sometimes plainly false reviews. For example, you can have the "best" meal, but your actual best meal is the ramen place you went to when it was raining and the original restaurant you tried to go to was packed. It's completely unplanned and not thoroughly algorithm'd (though not calculation-free); it is the organic best that found us. Something about the sense of discovery can really just blow you away and surprise you.

I remember reading an article years ago about the joy and randomness of someone curating a collection of CDs, the way you could thumb through and look at the covers, and the whole "discovery" of it.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like cuisine.american, grammar and incels. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was bamboozled.

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!

I've really been enjoying Tildes since I joined. The community are friendly, I've posted similar to how I would post in other unnamed social sites with top/OP being serious and long form, and lower replies being more jovial or jokey. With the higher responses, I also try to keep it more formal and factual, or add a valid opinion/discussion point.

One thing I have noticed recently is that there is a constant hit of people just posting blog or news articles with little or no engagement. It's almost like they just curate news and slap it all over which has me scratching my head and stroking the old grey beard. Why? Short question but expecting long answers here. It's like looking at a RSS feed.

I come to Tildes to ask advice and post items that I believe may be of interest to others. I engage in those topics for the most part as well. Rarely does someone post an article from X blog site and I exclaim out loud and tap away a response to it. If I wanted that, I'd just comment on the blog discussion board for the article, not the linked Tildes post.

Is it just me?

This is Album of the Week #4 ~ This week's album is The Notorious B.I.G. - Life After Death

Year of Release: 1997
Genre(s): Hip Hop, Gangsta Rap
Country: United States
Length: 109 minutes
Album.Link

Excerpt from Stereogum:

Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of Life After Death, the second and final album from the Notorious B.I.G., was that Biggie’s death somehow didn’t overshadow it. By all rights, that’s exactly what should’ve happened. Here, we had the single greatest talent of his generation cut down in his prime — or maybe, since he was only 24, before he’d even had a chance to reach his prime. It was sudden and shocking and violent, and the murder remains unsolved. Life After Death came out barely two weeks later. It is called Life After Death, which is, in retrospect, even weirder than Hole recording an album called Live Through This before Kurt Cobain’s suicide and then releasing it almost immediately afterward. It ends with a song called “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Kills You” — and in Biggie’s case, that turned out to be vaguely true. (Biggie was a star before his death, but he became a genre-transcending superstar afterward.) All these morbid, poetic coincidences should dominate the album’s narrative. And yet Life After Death took on a life of its own. It became a document of celebration, not sadness. It wrote its own narrative.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

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.

So I rarely take rideshare, but sometimes it's important. Today, my driver was friendly, chatty, personable, driving a brand new Ford electric vehicle. He mentioned that he had spent more than a decade selling for an auto dealership before starting to drive. He bragged about the car, the price, the fact that it's built like a tank and safe in a crash. He talked down Tesla and Elon Musk for faults and failings I'm sure most of us can imagine without effort. He had an answer for every anecdote I told about my car experiences that brought the conversation back around to the advantages of this make and model of car, including the fact that cars are significantly cheaper than a couple of years ago.

It wasn't a terrible experience but I feel bemused, puzzled, a little annoyed, a little bit impressed. It's creative if this is in fact a strategy not a coincidence.

Can anyone relate to this experience? What are your thoughts?