As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I've had a lot of extra time on my hands lately, so I decided to take a crack at some highly acclaimed games I never got around to.

I love a big RPG and some of my favorite gaming experiences were playing Skyrim and FNV on the settings were things like eating, sleeping, and staying warm were an important part of the game. KCD seemed like a good fit, so I bought it on sale and have put in about 30 hours so far.

I want to like it. I want to enjoy fucking around in a medieval setting and appreciate the many details in this game. The story has me sucked in so far, and like I said, I love the prospect of a gigantic RPG. But wtf is this gameplay? I get that it's not supposed to be easy, and I can look past the weird puppet feeling when I try to fight, but I feel trapped. I'm a broke idiot with no charisma and I get my ass kicked everywhere I go. I thought the whole point of video games was to escape real life. I decided to take a break from the main story, so I tried to go hit up the Miller's daughter to see what my options were. Next thing I know, I'm hunting down flower petals and linen with her like she's Big Boss on a total stealth mission.

Does it get better? And by better, I mean manageable. I'm worried I stumbled into something that's out of my league as an older, unskilled, semi-casual video game player. I'm not a masochistic Souls-like player that needs punishment in order to feel something. Should I stick with this game, or am I better off learning how to swordfight and pick locks in real life?

Edit: I'M GOING BACK IN FOR SOME MORE TIME WITH BERNARD! Thank you all for your feedback.

This is the twelfth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Our next book will be Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky at the end of April.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself. Also, this month will be slightly different. I have been exceptionally busy and didn't finish the book this time. I am hoping that you all who did read it will come up with interesting questions in addition to your comments/ reviews.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the prevalence of echo chambers in basically every corner of the internet, and how they manipulate our opinions of things in both obvious and incredibly subtle ways.

Having spent a lot of time on Reddit, it's really easy after a while to see all the different echo chambers that different folks live in. Obviously the big conservative subs just have a completely different news cycle compared to the liberal ones, but even the liberal ones all form obvious biases and fairly large blind spots. All sides have the problem of just reading the headline and coming to a conclusion, regardless of the content of the article or who the authors are; the number of times I've seen the Irish Star, well known in Ireland as being a complete fucking rag notable only for celebrity gossip and nude photos on page 3, being posted to big subreddits as if it's real news, is absurd.

And when you pay attention you can easily spot when the propaganda machines start to accelerate, especially during and after election season. I'll always remember before the 2020 US election primaries when all of Reddit was supportive of Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, while deriding Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren as being centrist career politician dinosaurs, and the second that Biden was chosen as the Democratic nominee the entire site opinion shifted to "Biden is the best candidate and we all support him 100%". And then the moment the election finishes and all the botnets go back into hibernation, it's right back to "should have been Bernie". And that was just the first time I noticed it. Once you notice it happening in your own circles, it's impossible to miss afterward because it happens for every single political discussion. It was the exact same thing in the 2024 election too with Harris. I'm sure some of it is just people showing solidarity when it matters, but so much of it is clearly artificial too, and I don't like that.

The thing that worries me the most is all the propaganda and manipulation I don't see, the stuff that's subtle enough to fly under my radar and successfully manipulate me as a result. I'd be an idiot to pretend like I'm 100% capable of spotting it all.

Anyways, with all that stated, I wanted to see where the users of Tildes get their news from. It's really difficult to find unbiased news, that much is a given, so I'd rather not rely on any one source.

Personally I try to get my news from the Associated Press as much as I can. Don't think much needs to be said about AP that hasn't already been said, it's kinda just the gold standard for journalism.

The Guardian is a reputable news site in the UK (and fairly popular outside of the UK too from what I've seen online), though one that has a definite left-wing bias. All news is biased news of course, and there is an argument to be made that reality itself has a left-wing bias, so I think it's fine overall for my use case. But I do worry that I'm only making that call because I myself am somewhat left-wing, and having news that reinforces my existing opinions is comforting and rewarding. And I don't think that's at all how we should be choosing which news to read and believe.

Have been considering a subscription to the New York Times as well, more for the cooking, puzzles, and classical music discussion than the news itself honestly. But I've seen a fair amount of discourse around the NYT; how much of that is reactionary Redditors reacting I am not certain of however. Their Wikipedia list of controversies is pretty long whatever the case. Plus there's that whole Boycott USA, buy EU movement going on that I should probably consider as a European (sorry yanks I know you guys are cool but you know how it is). I don't know honestly, anyone more media-literate than I am is welcome to weigh in.

There are probably loads of smaller, independent, and less Anglosphere-centric options I should be considering also, but I'm no expert in this stuff. If anyone has suggestions I'd very much appreciate them.

Generally I try to not read too much news since so much of it amounts to "everything is fucked and your life is going to get worse and worse forever because of things outside of your control good luck", which is generally not good for, y'know, trying to be happy. But I also think it's the duty of a citizen in a democratic society to not just have opinions of things, but to have informed opinions. Who am I to vote for X politician because they're pro-Palestine if I have never done my own research on the Israel-Palestine conflict outside of things I've seen on Instagram, and have hardly even researched the politician in the first place? I think far too many people are comfortable forming opinions based on vibes and news they find comfortable that already conforms to their pre-existing opinions.

Anyways, that's my big wall of text for the day. If anyone has recommendations for places to find news and/or sites worthy of my subscription money, or just general tips on how to stay properly informed in the disinformation world, please post them below.

EDIT: Just stumbled upon this post by DefinitelyNotAFae a few hours ago asking a very similar question as what I'm asking here, so sorry if there's some repetition!

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

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

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

The blog is daviramos.com

It is more like a 2000s blog than whatever blog means today. Just things I wanna write sometimes. It is not commercial, no ads. I like fast things. Images are heavily optimized, not mandatory, and always inside posts.

Bearblog is reliable and minimal without being barebones. I wrote about it before, so there's no need to go over it again here.

I really want to know if the way I’ve organized my blog makes any sense. Please keep in mind that I’m not a developer, programmer, or anything like that. I chose Bearblog partly because I already liked the default theme and didn’t need to change much. I appreciate minimalism, understand Markdown, a little HTML, and can "decode" simple CSS using a mix of intuition, Google, and ChatGPT. I only changed stuff that was not very deep and would not be hard to maintain.

:root {
    --width: 720px;
    --font-main: Verdana, sans-serif;
    --font-secondary: Verdana, sans-serif;
    --font-scale: 1em;
    --background-color: #fff;
    --heading-color: #222;
    --text-color: #444;
    --link-color: #3273dc;
    --visited-color:  #8b6fcb;
    --code-background-color: #f2f2f2;
    --code-color: #222;
    --blockquote-color: #222;
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    :root {
        --background-color: #01242e;
        --heading-color: #eee;
        --text-color: #ddd;
        --link-color: #8cc2dd;
        --visited-color:  #8b6fcb;
        --code-background-color: #000;
        --code-color: #ddd;
        --blockquote-color: #ccc;
    }
}

body {
    font-family: var(--font-secondary);
    font-size: var(--font-scale);
    margin: auto;
    padding: 20px;
    max-width: var(--width);
    text-align: left;
    background-color: var(--background-color);
    word-wrap: break-word;
    overflow-wrap: break-word;
    line-height: 1.5;
    color: var(--text-color);
}

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
    font-family: var(--font-main);
    color: var(--heading-color);
}

a {
    color: var(--link-color);
    cursor: pointer;
    text-decoration: none;
}

a:hover {
    text-decoration: underline;
}

nav a {
    margin-right: 8px;
}

strong, b {
    color: var(--heading-color);
}

button {
    margin: 0;
    cursor: pointer;
}

time {
    font-family: monospace;
    font-style: normal;
    font-size: 15px;
}

main {
    line-height: 1.6;
}

table {
    width: 100%;
}

hr {
    border: 0;
    border-top: 1px dashed;
}

img {
    max-width: 100%;
}

code {
    font-family: monospace;
    padding: 2px;
    background-color: var(--code-background-color);
    color: var(--code-color);
    border-radius: 3px;
}

blockquote {
    border-left: 1px solid #999;
    color: var(--code-color);
    padding-left: 20px;
    font-style: italic;
}

footer {
    padding: 25px 0;
    text-align: center;
}

.title:hover {
    text-decoration: none;
}

.title h1 {
    font-size: 1.5em;
}

.inline {
    width: auto !important;
}

.highlight, .code {
    padding: 1px 15px;
    background-color: var(--code-background-color);
    color: var(--code-color);
    border-radius: 3px;
    margin-block-start: 1em;
    margin-block-end: 1em;
    overflow-x: auto;
}

/* blog post list */
ul.blog-posts {
    list-style-type: none;
    padding: unset;
}

ul.blog-posts li {
    display: flex;
}

ul.blog-posts li span {
    flex: 0 0 130px;
}

ul.blog-posts li a:visited {
    color: var(--visited-color);
}

/* MY CHANGES */

/* That is an entirely new class for text */
/* that goes below an image as a subtitle */
.subtitle {
    text-align: center;
    font-style: italic;
    font-size: small;
    font-weight: bold;
}

.upvote-button {
    display: none !important; /* Hides button, overrides other settings */ 
        pointer-events: none; /* Disable mouseif it visible */
}

.title h1 {
    font-size: 1.2em;
}

nav a {
    font-size: 0.95em;
}

footer {
	font-size: 0.95em;  
}

.spaced-line {
	margin: 100px 0;
	text-align: center;
}

/* Keep images centered */
img {
    display: block;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
}

For comparison, see Herman's blog to see something closer to the default. He’s the creator of Bearblog.

Here’s what I’ve changed: the font size for the blog’s name, the navbar, and the footer that says Powered by Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ is slightly smaller (0.95em instead of 1em). I added a guestbook and links to the English and Portuguese pages in the navbar. I also changed the favicon and the site's meta-image to different-sized images of Humphrey Bogart.

The English and Portuguese pages are in their respective languages and only list posts in those languages. I don’t know if it’s possible to customize the navbar further. EDIT: bearblog has a builtin voting feature which I removed with CSS. All pages and posts are configured with their appropriate language via Bearblog, which I assume browsers and search engines can detect. Does it make sense to make my blog bilingual this way?

Maybe this is a new feature, but Bearblog lets you organize posts into subfolders/subdomains. So I placed all Brazilian Portuguese posts under /br/, which feels logical and predictable. I haven’t shared them anywhere yet, so there’s no risk of broken links. On the other hand, I already have several English posts that have been shared elsewhere. If I move all English posts under /en/, I’d love to find a way to let the older links keep working gracefully. Is that possible somehow? Maybe that’s a question for Herman, but I have a follow-up: Other than my obsession with tiny details, is there any value in separating my posts under either /br/ or /en/? Titles and URLs are unlikely to conflict between languages, and if they do, I can always add a -pt or -en suffix like in example-post-pt.

Other than that, I’d welcome any advice on how to improve my blog—whether in big ways or subtle ones.

Thanks!

I think the answer is probably yes, but I wanted to double check. Does anyone here have experience with them? For clarity, this is the home modems that you can buy for stationary 5g internet. This is not those pocket, battery powered personal hotspots.

I just moved into a new studio in France. Despite literally every other building on the street having fiber, my studio does not have it. So I am stuck with DSL, since France doesn’t use cable for internet service. My dsl gets 2-10 Mbps down and 0.25-1 up. This is abysmal, especially the upload.

The other problem is the building is such a good shield against radio waves. With Orange, supposedly the best mobile carrier in France, I get exactly zero service, even sticking my phone out the window.

There is a carrier called Free, that does offer a 5g home internet box. To test it out, I got a Free (but not free) SIM card for my phone. Sticking it out the window, I get about the same speeds as my DSL box provides.

So there is the impetuous for my question. Should I expect their 5g home internet box to be about the same speeds as my iPhone, or can I expect them to be faster and more reliable, since it isn’t battery powered and can me larger?

Sometimes my girlfriend commandeers my desktop to play games like Fallout 4 (which she discovered after the Fallout TV series last year) and sometimes I’ll go on my laptop while she does that. I usually like to program when I’m on my laptop then but I’m looking for suggestions for games to play that don’t need a mouse or much graphical power. Is Dwarf Fortress something I should try?

Its a heavy show but three episodes in, I'm loving the single shot approach that they took.

Without cuts, it's all about the pace of the drama, the honesty of each beat and the quality of the performance. That, and I haven't seen a show tackle toxic masculinity in quite this way and I'm super here for it.

Has anybody else seen it? What did you think?

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.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

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?

I want to give some context before I get to the meat and potatoes. I (M28) have IRL friends that I communicate and spend time with regularly. However, I do not engage in conversations with them daily. I'm not a texter, or a phone call person. If one of them has a question, or wants to share a meme, I'll respond, but I don't have digital conversations that stretch for hours. I prefer in person communication, and in person I don't shut the fuck up.

Additionally, I do not have any 'Online' friends. All of my friendships are with people I know in real life. I have talked with others on Discord, but again, I don't engage in casual chatter. I'll respond when prompted, but that's about it.

Now that that's out of the way, both of these things kind of got turned on their head in the beginning of November, when I met Alice (F28) through a Roleplaying Discord server. We had kind of eyed each other for a Roleplay session, and it went well. What I wasn't really prepared for, was her poking me in DMs afterwards just to chat. Not really my thing, buuuut, long story short we have now talked every day since then. We wish each other a good morning and good night. Sometimes we talk all day, sometimes we just get a few messages if we're busy. She's the first new friend I've made since high school, and that is a title I don't use lightly. The fact is, I just have zero interest in interacting freely with most people. Typically they end up annoying me in some way.

I'm not shy at all, not particularly introverted, I just really don't like talking to people.

And yet, somehow, I find myself trying to talk to Alice all day. I feel myself growing antsy when I go just a few hours without talking to her. Here's where the imbalance part comes from: Alice isn't like me. She has a group of people she talks with regularly, I'm just one of them. Whereas she is the only person I talk to daily. I completely acknowledge that this is 100% a me problem; I don't want this to come across as me being jealous of her friends. She struggles to balance time between her girlfriend, me, and her other friends, and most of the time I just feel kind of bad for her, like I'm a dog begging for table scraps, and she's trying to appease everybody.

On the other hand, I can also pretty confidently look at our older conversations, and note that we don't talk as much as we used to. Our conversations used to be long and while we still sometimes have longer chats, it's really only when I get her on a tangent involving a particular interest of hers. I don't want to dig too deep into why that is, it could be the 'met someone new' energy has worn off and I'm just not as much of a priority anymore, maybe I became annoying at some point and remain blissfully unaware of it, I dunno.

My question is, how do you handle wanting to spend more time with someone who just cannot spend that time with you?

TL;DR: Made a new friend online, and she doesn't have nearly as much time for me as I have for her.

It looks like there are a ton of options out there to get physical prints of digital photos - I’m seeing super cheap high volume websites, supermarket co-branded ones that look like a throwback to the old film development days, high price boutique services aimed at fine art photographers, and indie print shops attached to exhibition spaces. Problem is, I have no idea how to even begin differentiating between them!

I’m putting together an album of photos as a gift for someone, and right now everything’s digital (either originally or from scanned negatives). I need about 200 prints, so the price differences between the various options I’m seeing add up pretty quickly - I don’t mind spending on quality, but in my experience that doesn’t necessarily correlate to price anyway.

So, what hallmarks or hidden tells should I be looking out for that’ll help me find somewhere decent? Specific recommendations would also be great if anyone has suggestions that are in/ship to the UK!