Hello there!

A friend of mine has their birthday coming up, me being me, I actually don't care for birthdays much (especially mine) and gifts, in fact, I don't remember the last time I bought anything for anyone, myself included.

But lately, I have the desire to change that. I made a friend through a game and we're really close. I'd like to do something for them. Although my choices are limited and I want it to be a surprise, meaning, I don't want to give them hints that I'm doing anything, like asking for their address. This got me thinking of creating this thread here, if that's alright.

So far, here's what I have in mind:

• Hiring a digital artist to create an artwork about them
• Naming a star after them
• Curating a playlist for them
• Coding a temporary celebratory website they can visit with cheesy stuff that reminds me of them

With that said... Have you ever done this type of thing before? What would you do for a friend you've met online, knowing your choices are virtual and limited? Have you ever received gifts from online friends? What were they?

I haven’t read many books that explore unreliable narrators. I would love some recommendations.

Let's Talk Worldbuilding!

I really enjoyed doing this on the other site, so I'm bringing it here: Let's discuss the fictional worlds you've created! Share the worlds you've built in your notes, writing, art, or wherever you develop your ideas.

What is Worldbuilding?

For those new to the concept, worldbuilding is the art of constructing a fictional world. This involves creating people, places, concepts, magic systems, technologies, creatures, histories – anything you can imagine. You then assemble these elements into a cohesive whole that can serve as a setting for stories, art, games, or any other creative project.

If you already have a world, please introduce it in the comments! Ask questions about other users' worlds in the replies. This allows everyone to share their creations and potentially even get new ideas through discussion. You might even get a question you haven't considered before, which can actively help you develop your world further!

If you're interested in worldbuilding but haven't started, feel free to participate in the discussion! Maybe you'll be inspired to create your own world. You can create anything you like, incorporating elements you find compelling, interesting, cool, or even funny – it's entirely up to you!

If you have artwork related to your world, please share it! We'd love to see it.

Or, let’s be honest, firstly as a novelty. I don't know anyone else personally who has bought, or would buy, a copy. I figured it would be interesting to see what it was like.

My wife and I stopped on Valentine’s day to buy a copy, and I think we were both surprised by the print. I knew Playboy magazines produced some notable interviews in the past, but a dozen important conversations over several decades isn’t exactly going to outweigh the sea of photographs they’re known for. The new edition was a surprising $20 in-person. It felt like a bit of a gamble, but I think it was worth it.

By the numbers, it’s ~125 pages long and features 3 pictorial photoshoots. Beyond a few pages of photos, the rest is basically all writing. There are a few ads, but nothing like the volume of ads in other magazines I’ve read recently. I figured the magazine would be full of risqué photos, but it’s more of a tasteful inclusion alongside other, more substantial discussion. It is essentially all writing, and it’s good writing.

From the outset, the Editor’s Letter (Mike Guy) sets the tone of the new printing:

Five years have passed since an issue of Playboy rolled off a printing press, and they have been strange years indeed. We’ve passed through the wreckage of a pandemic, sat on a violent political see-saw, and watched as discourse shrinks to tiny digital moments that explode into divisive range at precisely the time we need reason. Just as Playboy was frustrated with the conservative norms of the ‘50s, we want to challenge them now, too. This can mean just showing up, listening; it can mean choosing connecting and pleasure over sensation and isolation. It means rejecting poisonous, meme-driven narratives, as writer Magdalene Taylor urges in “The Rise of the Beta Male” …, her disturbing report from the front lines of our emerging dystopia about young men who have given up on sex. … The internet - OnlyFans, TikTok, and the rest - has stolen sexuality and fed it into the meat grinder of the attention economy. We’re doing our part to steal it back. As the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “The greatest poverty is not to live in the physical world.”

I didn’t anticipate an article detailing a first-person investigation into the rise of anti-semitism, or an article about a far-out apocalyptic billionaire party, nor did I expect a humorous memoir about the rise of Nashville as the bachelorette party destination. But, these were funny, interesting pieces that spurred much discussion in my house. My wife and I have taken turns reading these long-form articles aloud each night. The article on an ultra-exclusive sex party in LA fell inline with the sort of topics I expected, but the writing and description of a beautiful spectacle made us pause and say, “that actually sounds like a fun time.”

It turns out you really can read Playboy for the articles, and more importantly resonate on the value of re-engaging human connection, disarming hate, building up our communities, and challenging our preconceived notions.

For as long as I can remember, I've been unnerved by passive infrared motion detectors. You know the ones, those that have a milky-white lens and on occasion blink red when they detect motion. They're absolutely terrifying to me and I don't know why.

I got a few other strangely specific phobias as well - I hate bathroom extractor fans, specifically in bathrooms with high ceilings (which are very common here in Europe), I can't bear to be near industrial light signals even if they're off, and when I recently went to the US, the absolute ubiquity of emergency battery backup light fixtures paralysed me in more than one building. My worst irrational fear is that of horn-style speakers, especially in public spaces or industrial settings, and in those, especially those that fire downwards. (Incidentally, sirens on emergency vehicles, even when they suddenly go off, never triggered this phobia)

So apart from my weird damage, I have to wonder - what are some of your weird uncommon phobias? I don't mean stuff like a fear of needles or spiders, those are quite common and well documented, but something truly odd you can't make sense of and you kind of know should not be able to scare or disgust you.

My phone, Samsung Galaxy S20, has finally started having some screen issues and made me start looking seriously at a new phone. I felt like I got great use out of this phone after 5 years, and I anticipate trying to get a similar or (hopefully) longer life span from my next phone.

Ideally I'd like to keep this phone going for another year, currently the screen issue is more annoying than actually preventing me from using the phone. The OLED can no longer properly display black colors and when the screen goes to sub 10% brightness it adds a yellow tinge to the screen, and using my blue light filter only makes it worse. This has led me to use my phone less at night or when it's dark, since it's like having a dim flashlight shining in my eyes.

A bit of a startling realization, was that I've been putting off building a new computer since I moved over here due to the expense, but I'd happily drop more than I'd be willing to spend on that new computer on a new phone since I use it everyday throughout the day.

This made me wonder how often others replace their phones.

Are there any criteria you look for when picking new phones?
Are you a brand loyalist, or do you shop around?
Do you do camera comparisons between phones/models?
Or simply, how do you choose your phone?

Hi! I was hoping for some movie recommendations for someone that enjoys movies such as Interstellar, Inception, Everything Everywhere All At Once and The Matrix?

The responses are much appreciated, thank you!

(Information Superhighway, for you youngin's, was a term that was thrown around quite a bit in the early days of the internet. See also: "world wide web" and "cyberspace")

I'm writing this post to say thanks to the developers, admins, and moderators of Tildes. This is one of the few corners of the internet that hasn't been completely taken over by bots, trolls, shills, or astroturfers. This is a tight-knit community of folks who are good at disagreeing with each other respectfully. It's the way the world should be.

I'm thankful that I can come here and talk about things that I'm uncomfortable discussing elsewhere on the internet or even in the real world.

I came from the great Reddit exodus of 2023. For a while, when I was actively watching the Tildes User Growth chart, I started to worry when it looked like user registrations were stagnating. I even created a post asking the community if it was time to accelerate growth. Thankfully, there was pushback from Tildes veterans who understood that bigger is not necessarily better. I now agree with that sentiment.

Be human, everybody!

Next week we will be discussing the City We Became. Our next book discussion after that will be at the end of January.

I've organized this schedule so that longer books are followed by shorter ones. I look forward to reading with you.

Last week in January : Kim Stanley Robinson Ministry for the Future,

Last week in February: Trevor Noah Born a Crime,

Last week in March: Dan Simmons Hyperion,

Last week in April: Adrian Tchaikovsky Elder Race,

Last week in May: Victor LaValle a People's Future of the United States,

Last week in June: T Kingfisher A House with Good Bones,

Last week in July: James McBride the Heaven and Earth grocery Store,

Last week in August: Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Last week in September: Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life and Others

The recent topic on grammar errors that actually matter got me interested in all of your opinions about style. Working in academia, I have developed a surprising number of strong opinions about style and formatting over the years. I'm curious to hear what you all care about. I am also curious to see if I can be persuaded to cool down some of my own hot takes based on your responses. I'll share a few to get us started.

1. For the love of all that is holy, do not put a footnote in a title or in an abstract.
2. Similarly, do not put a citation in a title or an abstract!
3. An abstract should be... an abstract, not your life story or even a summary of the paper. It most certainly should not develop and defend arguments.
4. Does a published manuscript really need to be double spaced?
5. I'm in the punctuation-inside-quotations camp, but I am open to the alternative. I am somewhat of a weirdo in believing that individual authors should be free to use either style (so long as they remain consistent in their usage).
6. Bibliographies should prioritize the language of the original source; meaning, it is ridiculous to transliterate the titles of non-Latin works in a bibliography. What are you going to do with that information? If you don't know that language, then it is utterly meaningless, and even more so because you can't even do anything with that transliterated text. Plus, good luck getting a standard transliteration out of anyone. All this does is just obscure the fact that these sources were cited, at least as far as indexers are concerned. It would make more sense to just include translated titles next to the original, but eliminating the non-Latin text altogether is so absurd (looking at you APA).
7. On a similar note, foreign words should not be italicized or emphasized any other way just because they appear in a text. All this does is fill up the text with needless emphasis that distracts from the things you do mean to emphasize.

Okay, I will stop here before I cross the threshold where I won't be able to get anymore work done today! :b

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.