This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Could someone please recommend a text messaging app for Android that is reasonably secure?

Verizon is discontinuing their native texting (SMS) app. They recommend switching to Google Messages, but I would not like Google to have access to my entire text messaging history. I tried Signal, but my old messages don't transfer over (minor problem), and almost none of my family are willing to switch to Signal (big problem). When I search for advice, I get a bunch of AI slop articles and advertisements. So I figured I might have better luck asking here: Is there any text messaging app for Android that works well and isn't going to hoover up all my data?

I'm looking for something new to read, so I'm just selfishly posting this in the hopes that it works.

Doesn't have to be your all-time favourite I guess, if you can't decide. Feel free to do multiple books too, or maybe just whichever is on your mind a lot recently.

Australia’s proposed social media ban is deeply concerning and authoritarian. It's disturbing to see how much of the general public supports this measure.

Prominent organizations, including Amnesty International, the Australian Human Rights Commission, and Electronic Frontiers Australia, have voiced significant concerns about this legislation:

Amnesty International's Explanation of the Social Media Ban
Australian Human Rights Commission on the Proposed Social Media Ban for Under-16s
EFA's Critique of the Social Media Age Ban

Australia has a troubling history with internet legislation. Noteworthy examples include the Australian Internet Firewall under Stephen Conroy and Malcolm Turnbull's infamous statement, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia," regarding encryption backdoors.

While I recognize the issues with social media, "don't feed the trolls," along with maintaining online anonymity and implementing parental controls ( no phones with unfettered internet access ), should work. This law indiscriminately punishes all Australians for the missteps of a few, potentially leading to increased identity theft through phone and email scams and causing older family who are not tech literate to lose connections with their families due to the complexities of government-issued tokens.

Adults will be the ones who are going to be most impacted by this legislation.

The scope of this law is extensive. The Online Safety website suggests that this is merely the beginning, with plans to cover the entire web, including games, adult content, and more. The consequences are profound: the erosion of true anonymity and increased risk to government whistle-blowers and journalistic sources.

Requiring individuals to provide their identity to a third party to access the internet, which many have used freely for decades, is alarming. It threatens to sanitize search results and revoke access to purchased games if users refuse additional identity verification measures. There are no grandfathered exceptions, highlighting the law's intent to de-anonymize the internet.

Although Australia lacks a constitutionally protected right to free speech, this law poses significant risks to whistleblowers and marginalized youth in remote communities. Instead of banning access and creating allure through prohibition, we should address the root causes of why younger people are drawn to such content.

Once entrenched in law, any opposition will be met with accusations of perversion or indifference to child safety, compounded by the spread of misinformation. We must critically assess and address these laws to protect our freedoms and privacy.

There wouldn't be speculation if they defined how they intend the law to work. Instead of a "don't worry about it we will work it out", give people something to say that's not so bad and I can live with it

December 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight nine(!) 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?

So, earlier today i read about Bagels (https://github.com/EnhancedJax/Bagels), which describes itself as "Powerful expense tracker that lives in your terminal". Not only is it really cool looking, but seems quite useful! I'm really loving the increased TUI-centric command line apps that are becoming more popular; well, it seems like they've become more popular, but i admit to not having any hard data/stats to back up my impression. However...As much as i love the command line/terminal/CLI....my daily workflows simply do not necessitate being in/using the terminal. (I only need such terminal apps on a rare basis, or i simply use old school unix/linux cli tools.) I mean, especially while on my mobile, there's not that much that i need to do from the command line. (Yes, i know there are mobile app terminal emulators, i'm simply saying that i have very little use for my daily needs.)

So, besides the expense tracking that Bagel cites, I'm very curious to learn what other common, daily sorts of use-cases and workflows do people here have that could benefit from leveraging terminal/command line apps? Please share!

My previous phone was a pixel. My tech life generally is a weird mix of things that are bad for privacy that I accept for convenience but also in other ways I choose to sacrifice things to protect privacy.

Does not registering the phone with Samsung actually cost me any functionality as a user?

There's a million of these adaptations, both direct adaptations of Scrooge himself, and parodies featuring various other characters. Which one did you grow up seeing the most? Which one do you find yourself coming back to? I just rewatched the Patrick Stewart one myself, which is the one I've seen the most.

I am wondering what people are listening to this holiday season and hoping to build a playlist BEFORE Christmas Day. I have no particular allegiance to Christmas or any other specific holiday, but it’s fun to have a certain category of songs I only really listen to for one month of a year.

To start, I’m a big fan of the band BROS and they have a few small Christmas albums. Their artist page on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bros/1151563604

Their actual website: https://dinealonerecords.com/artists/bros/

Recently I've been watching the show Jet Lag on Nebula. It's an entertaining little reality show where people compete in contests which require a lot of travel, especially in commercial aircraft.

I've noticed that they are really really traveling a lot for a frivolous reason and having a huge carbon footprint. (Yes I understand that the flights they go on are booked anyway and would fly if they weren't on them, sort of).

During the show they sometimes use a graphic to show the travel distance and then also mention that they are using Gold Standard carbon offsets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Standard_(carbon_offset_standard)

I've read a bit about carbon credits and carbon offsets before. I think it seems like a bit of a boondoggle to let people with money greenwash their activities. Has anyone here researched this and come up with a different conclusion?

I think maybe this is a very newbie question to ask on this Tildes group.

The November 2024 Backlog Burner event is officially over!

Over the course of the month of November, 17 participants moved 136 games out of their backlogs.

There were 9 bingo wins from:

• u/aphoenix
• u/AugustusFerdinand
• u/CannibalisticApple
• u/CrazyProfessor02
• u/Eidolon
• u/Evie
• u/kfwyre
• u/SingedFrostLantern
• u/Wes

Also, a big thank you to ALL who participated in the event, whether that was by playing games or joining in conversations.

It has been an absolute blast doing this with everyone. Thank you all for participating.

Use this topic to post your final bingo cards, give recaps of your games, and share any thoughts you have on the event itself.

See you again for the next Backlog Burner in May 2025!

Statistics

• We averaged 8.0 games per person and 31.7 games per week.
• There were 245 comments posted across 5 different topics.
• Two games were played twice: Hades and Monster Hunter Wilds
• We played games that started with every letter of the alphabet except Q.

Highlights

The following highlights were aggregated from participants. Thank you to those of you who wrote in! I'm sharing these as written, though I did make some minor edits to maintain anonymity.

• u/Wes made a great bingo site that works really well for this event.

• It's touching that u/Wes took the time to respond to nearly everyone. He really made this feel like a community.

• A special mention for @Wes, who seems to have read and thoughtfully replied to every single writeup this month, which was very kind (and I really liked their writeup of Praey for the Gods).

• I love the evolution of the Bingo card over the past several events, and I really liked this form.

• There were so many great entries that I enjoyed reading this time around, actually, and I really wanted to keep trying games that other people tried.

• @SingedFrostLantern for their hole-in-one golf

• The highlight for the whole event to me was @SingedFrostLantern's hole-in-one and the wonderful writeup that went with the game.

• My favourite writeup had to be @SingedFrostLantern with their Keylocker Hole in One, a fun little exercise that put me onto a new game that (regrettably) went straight back into the backlog.

• @JCPhoenix for creating full video reviews for many of his entries

• @Eidolon's Neverwinter Nights for bringing the classics back

• @kfwyre for Journey to the Savage Planet, and finally getting to be the dog

• u/kfwyre completely missing the joke

• @Evie, with basically every write-up she did. Dead Space, Prey, and Outer Wilds were all very good.

• @CannibalisticApple with Lost in Blue, finally tackling the game cartridge lost somewhere in a closet

• @J-Chiptunator with four unique console selections

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows 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.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!