Hey everyone! I thought since the community has grown quite substantially since I last asked this question^[1] it would be nice to bring it back up again. Without getting into whether or not the specific idea that "strong opinions, weakly held" may or may not have merit, I think having flexibility in your thinking and not holding on to opinions out of loyalty or inertia is a valuable skill to have. So, small or big, what is something that you changed your mind about this year?

[1] https://tildes.net/~talk/11mw/what_is_something_you_have_changed_your_mind_about_in_the_last_year

Today when I opened Messenger Lite there was a message from Meta saying " your chats will be moving to Messenger" and that Messenger Lite will stop working on September 18. I actively switched from Messenger to Messenger Lite several years ago because the regular Messenger app was draining my battery. Are there any alternatives to Messenger Lite on Android? Perhaps even FOSS?Or will my only option be to move to the old Messenger app if I want to use Facebook messenger? I have some work related groups on Messenger that would be tough to move to another platform, so Please don't just say "use Signal" or something similar.

Sorry for the delay in posting this month.

December's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games:

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/6

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/5

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

Hey folks, I have been following The Trevor Project's survey for a few years now and their 2023 one is just presented in a fantastic, easy to read and understand way so I think it's a great resource and worth sharing

The Trevor Project 2023 Survey on Mental Health in LGBTQ young people

BUT, I'm also looking for similar reports focusing on other minoritized populations in particular, or (whether in part or in full) focusing on the age ranges covering college students. I'm struggling to find something nearly so comprehensive, but I'm also not sure I'm looking in the right way. The Steve Fund seems to be a great resource for mental health for students of color, for example, but doesn't have obviously available data like this

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/EPs 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

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

Greetings Folks, I apologize if this is the wrong spot for this but I'd like to cast a net to see if I can get any additional thoughts or help.

I recently started a new job as NGS Library Prep Tech - sadly I had only begun training on this briefly at my last position but only got an introduction to Speed/Mag Bead clean up. I was hired because the lab is growing quickly and has had issues with organizational stuff in the past and that is my strong suit (my last position I did a lot of clonal DNA / miniprep stuff as far as the wet work went).

The person I was replacing at my new job was only there for two days and didn't really help a whole lot other than hand me a haphazardly written protocol and said "practice by cleaning ladders at different bead concentrations and running them on a gel."

Did that and was told they look good.

Fast forward to using actual samples: There were a set that needed to be redone because the final pool was lost. When I did my first qubit quants after the post PCR speed bead clean up I noticed that the quant concentrations were ~80% less than what they had been previously.

Today I have some remaining sample that I can push through PCR, my plan is to quant 8 out of the 53 samples of the pre / post PCR plate and then again after I do clean up.

As far as clean up goes I had been trying to do the whole plate at once, but I'm going to go back to just completing a column at a time to ensure my timing is better.

Are there particular spots in the Speed / Mag Bead clean up process that I should be aware that I could be washing away / losing DNA?

Do people have any tips on how to be more 'sure footed' in this process?

Ways that I can better practice and say "yup, I've got this!"?

Thanks for the help, and if this should be posted somewhere else please let me know, but as this is 'science' related I thought it fit best here.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like plagiarism, greedflation and grand theft auto.6. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was half interested.

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!

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.

Well, a few minutes ago I finally pushed the button, the game is released. So I wanted to write a short write up of some things that I had to do to release the game. I won't really talk about making the game itself too much, more about the part of actually releasing the game, if you are interested in more of that you can see my posts from Timasomo (1, 2, 3, 4, showcase).

Steam

I have already created many games in the past, I've been making games for more than 5 years, but always as a hobbyist. So I never experienced releasing a game on a platform like Steam. I have to say working with Steam and Steamworks is very pleasant and streamlined, but it is still much more complex than for example releasing a game on itch.io, which is what I did before for all my other games. I'll try to summarize how the process looks like.

First, before you can even get on Steam, you have to register, fill out a ton of paperwork, wait some time for it to be manually approved. Afterwards, you have to pay the 100 dollars for Steam Direct. At this point you finally get a Steam app id, which you can use to start integrating Steam features into your game. For example, having achievements, Steam cloud integration (so the saves get synced between devices), leaderboards and potentially more, especially if you are making a multiplayer game. To make my game I am using Godot, and I found a C# library called Facepunch.Steamworks which made this all quite easy, I'd definitely recommend it if you are using Unity or Godot with C# and want to release your game on Steam.

Before releasing a game on Steam you also have to finish everything on a gigantic checklist, including things like: uploading 10 various header, capsule and other images which are used on the store page and Steam library. An icon for the game. What are the minimum requirements required to run the game, whether the game has adult content, whether it supports controllers, how much the game will cost, screenshots, a trailer, there are just so many things to do! And when you complete parts of this checklist you have to have your game go through manual reviews. Each review could take about 3 days to get done. I failed one review first so I had to resubmit it too and wait again. Let me tell you, if you plan to release a game on Steam, reserve at least a month to do it, and start going through the reviews as soon as possible -- actually I think there even is a minimum of a month before you can release the game from the day you get an app id.

Trailer

Creating a good trailer is super hard. I am not a video creator/editor at all, but luckily I at least own a solid program for creating videos -- Vegas 14 pro, that I got for super cheap in some Humble bundle about 8 or something years ago, so I at least had a good start there. I ended up with not that complex of a project and Vegas still kept crashing when rendering, so I am not sure if I'd recommend it though.

The hardest thing for a trailer is deciding what to put in it for me. I know that a trailer should be super short, should showcase how the gameplay looks, what are the features and so on, but when I got to actually making it, it was still super hard to decide what to put there. How do I even start? I watched a ton of other indie game trailers to get some inspiration and that also didn't help that much. There are some trailers which are really just gameplay, some trailers which are actually just incredible with editing I could never do as a pleb... So I started with something that I know a bit more. I created a very short music track, and decided that I will just edit the trailer to fit the music.

The music track basically splits the trailer into 4/5 very short sections:

• Basic gameplay, how the game looks when you start playing it
• Explaining the roguelite part of the game, selecting spells and items
• More complex gameplay, how some combinations of spells and items can look later in a run
• List of features
• Special bonus ending section showing a "Legendary" spell, which should show how insane spells can get, followed by the logo of the game

I think the trailer ended up being not too bad, but I still had some feedback that it isn't flashy enough. And it's true, but I am not really sure how to improve it easily. When watching the Vampire Survivors trailer for example I can see that they did a much better job: it's so much more dynamic, the music really pumps you up, it's overall better edited, it has cool transitions, camera movement and so on.

End

Releasing a game on Steam was a great experience. I learned so much! I basically made this game over weekends and evenings, since I also have a job. To try maintain my productivity I tried to do at least some work on the game every single day. I have to say that towards the end I started losing some steam (haha), some days scrambling to do at least something late in the evening before I went to sleep. But, if at least someone plays the game I think I want to keep updating it more, I still do really like the game!

Thanks for reading! Feel free to ask me anything about the game, or the game dev process, or about anything basically haha.

Here's the Steam store page, the game costs 5 dollars, I'd love it if you checked it out. If you want to play the game but can't afford it PM me and I'll send you a key for the game (at least once I get the keys I requested -- did you know that Steam has to approve the creation of keys manually? Edit: the keys are now ready)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2682910/The_Spellswapper/

Hi all,

There is a tar.gz whose contents I would like to access. The file itself is quite old, last being updated ~20 years ago if I had to guess (I am not sure if this is relevant). The file contains legacy scientific code that I would like for archival purposes and can be found via the "code site" link here. However:

• When I download the file and run tar -xvzf radpack.tar.gz I get an error: tar: Error opening archive: Unrecognized archive format.
• Likewise, if I try to gunzip it I get gunzip: radpack.tar.gz: not in gzip format.
• Running file radpack.tar.gz only yields radpack.tar.gx: data, indicating file cannot find anything out about it.
• head radpack.tar.gz outputs a string of unintelligible unicode.

These are the different solutions I have come across after searching this problem, and to me is good evidence that the file has been corrupted in some way and that may very well be the case. However, for archival and historical purposes it would be great if I could access the contents, so I am compelled to search out other solutions. Are there other options I can try here? Is there some way to confirm that the file is in fact corrupted beyond recovery? Any help on this point would be greatly appreciated. I posted this on stack exchange as well but figured maybe the smart folks here might know.

EDIT:

Just to be clear this has been solved — a functioning copy of the archive was found.