Last of this triple header!

Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
Jeddah Corniche Circuit
April 18-20, 2025

Qualification Session:
Saturday, April 19, 2025 - 17:00 UTC / 1:00p US EDT

Grand Prix:
Sunday, April 20 2025 - 17:00 UTC / 1:00p US EDT

See your local time here

Next race:

Miami Grand Prix
Miami International Autodrome
Sunday, May 4, 2025
Sprint Race Weekend

Hello all, are there any other rockhounders/collectors, whatever you want to call yourselves, out there?

I'm looking to hear about others' experiences, specifically in mining or surveying(not sure if that wording is correct), but really, generally, hearing of diverse experiences. Some of the coolest places you've been, where you want to go, favorite finds, rocks you lust after, equipment, etc.

Okay, I’ve been grinding through the process of replacing Windows 10 in my Twitch streaming setup with Pop!_OS. I’ve got OBS dialed in, my old NVIDIA card is holding it together surprisingly well, and video performance is right where I need it.

But the audio. Is. Destroying. Me.

It’s this horrible crunchy, crushed mess when I stream from Linux. Same exact hardware, same OBS scene setup. On Windows 10 it’s crystal clear. I’m pulling audio from my mixer and theres no “Line In” I can see. Something in the Linux chain is mangling it.

Here’s a side-by-side if you want to hear the pain:

Pop!_OS (crushed audio): https://youtu.be/wQUVlufAQs8?si=RlGH8Z90dK0X9KhA

Windows 10 (clean audio): https://youtu.be/hbJzIHzg_ek?si=ThiZpbBgTk89qL2p

Sample rates seem to match, nothing obvious is clipping. I’m out of ideas and running on pure stubbornness at this point.

Would love to hear from anyone who’s made Linux work in a similar setup. Tips, gotchas, weird fixes. Whatever you've got. I'm so close to fully escaping Windows here. Grrr.

For reference, here’s how I got my Pop!_OS setup working so far (OBS + NVIDIA NVENC + GTX 960):
https://doubledropdown.com/abdoanmes/2025/ditching-windows-setting-up-obs-with-nvidia-nvenc-on-linux-pop_os-gtx-960/

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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.

Hey all - after a couple threads discussing randomizers and Archipelago, we should try to get a multiworld game going here! I'm thinking this would start the night of May 8th depending on availability and interest. If you are interested, just shoot a reply in here and let us know your planned game! I'll tag a post about a week out asking for YAML files, and I'll likely make a Discord server for the event itself so we can stream and share info.

This is a bit far into the future and I wanted to make sure the date would work for people interested, so no need to send YAMLs or anything yet. But do let me know if you'd like to join - no matter your skill level, we'd be happy to have you!

(edit: hid that bigass faq thingy)

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've set up a very small soapbox here. It's cute.

You can step up on it to rant, but it only supports small rants. Tiny ones. Cute ones. Rants about low-stakes, inconsequential stuff.

It can hold up the weight of approximately one oxford comma, so please don't get too heavy and crush it.

Anyone want to step on it and give us your 0.02 cents?

I like modern tech, but I'm slowly coming to hate the internet.

I read Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism late last year and found it preaching to the choir, but noticed that most of the negative effects of technology use were actually from internet use. The attention economy, privacy violations, enshittification, etc. are all mostly byproducts of the internet being so tightly integrated into our lives. When I heard about CVE potentially losing its funding (I know very litte about CS or anything related to software, so I'm unsure of how big a threat this really is to an end-user), the thought popped into my head... "is it time to get offline?".

I am 20 years old, so my entire life has been spent in a world where devices are connected to the internet far more often than not, and I wonder if it's time to switch to an "offline first" mentality? I already embrace this philosophy when it comes to music, downloading the songs I want to my computer and syncing them to my phone through iTunes, but this would take that one step further: turn on my computer's wi-fi to check emails, read through the new posts here, check some other sites, etc. and then turn it off until I explicitly need to do something online.

I'm lucky enough that most of the (important) things I do on my computer can be done 90% offline, but I wonder if it's even worth doing? I'm curious to hear thoughts on this from the people of Tildes, or any methods that you have implemented in your life.

EDIT: I should clarify: I already have basically no social media, I use beeper to see my instagram DMs (I can't really get rid of this without abandoning any age-adjacent social life) and that's it. You could call Discord and Tildes social medias, but that's maybe pushing it. I'm more talking about the recent resurgence of physical media and reframing the internet as something that is accessed rather than omnipresent in my usage habits.

Today is the final day to file taxes in the US, and once again I find myself needing to finish up submitting everything instead of having this submitted early (next year will be different!).

I've also been needing to register my youngest son for his US citizenship, as he is born abroad. They recently released a secure way to e-file this, which means my previous "reasons" for putting it off are not relevant (they wanted me to email sensitive information to them, or deliver it in person/via courier)

It made me wonder if there is anything big or small that people wanted to share that they've been putting off? Hopefully talking about it helps you take some action on getting that thing done!

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.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I am genuinely sick of seeing all the US political news on Tildes, especially because of the sheer volume of it being submitted lately and how depressing it all is. The creation of ~society was a decent compromise since at least it keeps all the politics topics contained in one group, but it's still not ideal, IMO.

I don't want to totally unsubscribe from ~society since, for the most part, I do actually enjoy reading about societal level events/issues around the world. I don't want to have to click 'Ignore' on every single topic about US politics, since there are a lot of them being submitted. And I don't want to filter out absolutely all 'politics' from my front page either though, which is currently my only other option since we can't yet filter tags by multiple criteria (e.g. filtering topics that only contain 'politics' AND 'usa').

So I propose that we start using a 'politics.usa' tag, even though it's a bit redundant, so that US politics can be specifically filtered out by people like myself that want to avoid seeing such topics. Thoughts?

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!

Recently, my COVID-era friend circle has drifted apart. It was a lot of little things that changed our priorities. We had / lost partners, went sober, got in-person jobs, got stressful jobs, made more / less money, etc. It was also the continual theme of realizing that after 3+ years, we hadn't necessarily broken the surface on our friendships with everyone in the groups.

I tend to feel relationships are generally a little ephemeral, especially in our age group (late 20s / 30s -- which is to say, anything can happen). You drift apart, and sometimes back again, and sometimes apart again, and it's just life. I feel pretty okay about it, although it's a bit sad. Given that we're at the five year mark, I thought it might be an interesting prompt.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like 4chan, buttholes and tags. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was mortified.

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 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!

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.

I've been on a really big Geese kick lately and the video for Cowboy Nudes made me chuckle. It made me want to watch some of my old favorites, but there is still plenty of itch left to scratch. So what are your favorite music videos, and why do you like them so much?

If anyone is curious, my two favorites are:

Typical by Mutemath. They learned how to play the song backwards, which seems impressive and is very Ok Go-esque.

Sleep Now in the Fire by Rage Against the Machine. The Who Wants to be a Millionaire spoof featuring not fun facts that have become less fun over time is good. The directing/editing is great. The bass player jamming out while the cops push him back is amazing. I'd like to say I'd never charge the NYSE floor for a music video, but I can't guarantee what I might do while under the influence of a sweet Tom Morello riff.

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 am going to be in Minneapolis soon and I have 1 free day which I want to spend going to local bookstores. Does anyone have a favorite local store in the city? I particularly like going to bookstores with good SFF sections, and also lots of book club/staff picks; and also to used bookstores with good SFF fictions. It's my first time in Minneapolis so every local bookstore there will be new to me!

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.

Howdy hey folks, I've recently been trying out ProWritingAid (for the unfamiliar: a grammar/spell checker tool) specifically the premium version with the expanded tool set. And now I want to step onto the internet soapbox and talk about it. It's been.

Okay.

To preface, I've been writing (casually) for 'bout a decade, mainly short creative fiction. (And a few novel attempts. All of which are incomplete but I'm glad I did them) Throughout my time I've gone through a few tools, text editors and what-have-you-nots. With my ever so gleaming credentials established, let's get into the ramble.

Right out of the gate, automated grammar checkers and creative writing have a rather fun relationship. Half the suggestions are useful and the other half are useless. (This ratio can also tip forward and backward). They'll catch syntax errors, spelling mistakes, missing words or punctuation, all good things to fix.

It'll also flag intentional word choice, sentence structure and other creative decisions. Sometimes this can help but more often than not it'll be sucking the You out of your own words.

ProWritingAid (PWA) tries to sidestep this particular pitfall with Style Guides where it'll be more or less rigorous depending on the selected 'genre'. It's a mixed success. This flaw I don't think will ever be truly fixable given the inherent separation between Author and Tool. So we'll have to make do with clicking "ignore."

Now PWA does a bit more than just grammar check. During my time with it, I've currently used two versions. PWA Everywhere, and PWA Desktop. Everywhere is meant to integrate with your text editing software while Desktop is a contained application. They have similar feature-sets, but not identical. Specifically, Desktop has the Word Explorer feature: a tool that if you highlight a word it'll show some synonyms or you can dig deeper with alliteration, cliches, anagrams, rhymes, reverse dictionary and more. Pretty nifty. PWA Everywhere best to my knowledge and searching does not have this feature- which is disappointing.

Especially since everything else Desktop does, Everywhere does better. The UI alone is far more functional, without clipping or cramping. There's the convenience of direct integration. Some features like Single Chapter Critique (which I'll get into later, trust me) also blank screened in Desktop while working fine in Everywhere. Grand.

Besides the Word Explorer, PWA also gives you AI "Sparks" and Rephrases. I'll be entirely honest, I have these turned off (Which I am glad I was able to do). I don't have much to say here besides I like getting into the creative word weeds myself.

Alrighty, that then leaves me with two more things to discuss: Writing Reports and the Critique features.

Okay. The writing reports are useful. Able to be granular or extensive. They scan every selected element in the text and format the results into a nifty report (or in some modes, direct text highlighting) Having all that data visualized with tables, graphs and bars oh my, (with the occasional cross-work comparison) is a great look-at. Grammar-wise it'll run into the problems mentioned above, but otherwise, this has been the feature I've liked the most.

Finally I can get into the whole thing that inspired me to write this post. The Critique suite. Ohohoho, I have some thoughts about these. Human proofreaders are irreplaceable, just want to toss that out there (PWA also keeps that disclaimer in its header). My friends will never be escaping the random PDFs sent for their lovely review. I am ultimately writing for a human audience afterall. That in mind, I have run into a hilarious problem with the Single Chapter Critique.

Apparently I write too good to get use from it. Truly I am suffering here. In complete honesty, the actual point I'm trying to make is the AI is a kiss-ass sycophant. I fed five of my short stories from across the years into it, just to see what it'd say. It cannot be negative. In each and every one I was praised about various element of the stories. Glowing and gushing, could say no ill.

This is pretty useless. Sure it has the "Potential Improvements" section but it's... eh. In the name of curious study, I am having my non-writer friend compose a piece for me to feed to the machine spirit later. (I also only get three uses a day, compared to the unlimited reports with their nitty gritty)

Now, could this simulated praise be a sign I'm a genuinely good writer? Well I don't need the AI for that- I have friends zip-tied to chairs to feed my ego. (I forever cherish one of my close writing friends telling me: "You have a voice of a fantasy writer from the 70s with a thick series full of wondererous imagination written by a twice divorce middle aged man who is disgruntled with reality. It was never exactly reprinted as it was unknown, but the aging, withered pages hold such a gorgeous narrative that it sticks with you for the rest of your life.")

Back to the AI: Their shining critique falls apart when I look at the story myself and can point to several areas for improvement/refinement with a cursory reading. (Thank you creator's curse, you're my true reliable critic.)

Woe to me, I cannot escape personal proofreading. (Real talk: the hope was have it be able to do the cursory stuff so I could focus on the creative viscera. That's half the fun after all—)

There is two other Critique features, Full Manuscript Analysis and Virtual Beta Reader. I have used neither of these as I do not have any large manuscripts to toss into the jaws. To ensure jolly feelings, it's also a credit based system. So let's talk money.

Scrivener, a writing workhorse that even after years of using I still find new features and has long cemented itself as my text editor of choice, was $45 for a lifetime license. Fantastic software, it has earned its reputation.

ProWritingAid, a grammar and spellchecker was $115 (discounted price) for a year subscription. (Can I mention how idiosyncratic their tier system is? Free, Premium, Premium Pro? Why??? Just name it Free, Pro, Premium. Don't stack luxury words.) For $115, I get several features I don't even use, or aren't very useful. Oh, a discount for the aforementioned analysis credits. ($25 for 1, $70 for 3, $175 for 10. Full priced it's $50, $150, $500 respectively. Spend this money on an actual person please)

Now what's worst off is I wasn't even the one to spend the $115. That was someone else wanting to support me and my writing; an act I am quite grateful for and the meaning behind it. I feel bad complaining. I have hopes for PWA. Something that can act as a quick look proofreader would be wonderful. But perhaps I'm just asking for too much from what is again, a grammar and spellchecker.

So far, I don't know yet. I don't know if I'd call it good or bad. As I started with: it's okay?

Maybe I'll do a retrospective after a while once I've utilized it longer. Maybe features will be better fine tuned in the future.

And that leads me here. What have been y'all's experience with it, if any? Searching online has been miserable; I'd like to hear from other people.

[As a footnote, PWA was not used when writing this. Kinda forgot that I never set it up for browser. Tallyho]

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like accessibility, protests and rant. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was astute.

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!

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!

Not firsthand heartbreak that happened to you directly, but secondhand heartbreak: it happened to someone else, but the impact hit your heart too.

Could be their break-up, rejection, missed opportunity, loss, layoff, etc.

What happened to them?

And why did your heart break for them?

"Challenging" is up to your own interpretation: length, word choice, writing style, subject matter, etc.

Whatever the challenge, you had to put in more effort than normal to read the book, but you came out on the other side feeling like it was worth it.

What's that book?

What makes it challenging?

And why do you feel it's worth it?

I wanted to practice my stagnant drawing skills and something I always liked is pixel art, but I don't know any program for that (beside Paint and Photoshop) so I would like for recommendations here, the only big feature I need is multi layers management and that preferably runs in multiple platforms (You know, like Gimp and Inkscape).

Anything that runs on Linux/Windows/Android is welcomed. I guess there should be open source apps for that, and since it's only for practice I would to waste money on paid apps.

My current mouse is a Logitech Lightspeed G502, it works fine and aside from double click issue which I brought to a store to fix, no issues with it but it was my friend's prior mouse before he upgraded to a newer model.
As for why I want an ambidextrous mouse, on the rare occasions I want to use my left hand to navigate instead of right.
I used to use a chinese MMO mouse that honestly was not bad but its software was fairly garbage(Rebranded Red Dragon mouse iirc) so I don't mind Chinese mice as clearly being a brand name mouse doesn't mean much, just want something that is good and lasts a while, since I'm not that big on mice.

I want these qualities in a mouse.

• Works wired and with a 2.4GHz dongle
• Either rechargeable batteries or replaceable works
• High DPI
• Not a "lightweight" mouse
• Has a few programmable buttons
• On chip storage for programmed buttons/DPI/etc
• Available worldwide

Bluetooth as a 3rd option would be neat but not something I'm looking for in particular.

Rechargeable batteries are supposed to provide better longevity afaik, but the buttons or the mouse itself will probably die before the battery.

I use 8200 DPI on my current mouse pretty much in both games and in desktop... with mouse acceleration,

I only lower it on the rare occasions I use something like GIMP.

Not a fan of these perforated light mice or super light mice, I used to put weights in my previous wired Chinese mouse but I'm using the G502 without weights currently. I am willing to compromise on this if there are no options however.

On the G502 I only use 2 buttons regularly, and they are to switch to the left or right virtual desktop, the rest of the buttons have a function but they get rarely used (Except Windows+Tab to show all virtual desktops).

On chip storage is good when I switch platforms (e.g. PC/Windows, SteamDeck or Linux, Mac) and in case I want to completely drop Windows and not worry about needing software for the programmable buttons to work.

Worldwide availability because I don't live in the US or most parts of Europe.

Not aware if Logitech has a mouse that does all what I need, the free scrolling wheel is cool and gets used, but they got a history of switches that die too fast.

I used to use the Waking Up app for daily 20 minute guided meditations, and I want to get back into it, but these days I don't use a smartphone most of the time so I'm looking for something similar that I could load up onto the (offline) hardware music player that I use for music and audiobooks. Ideally a number of different similar-length guided meditations (where I could either loop through them in order, or pick one at random for each session). I'm still fairly new to meditation, so I'm probably not aware of all the forms/formats that this kind of thing can take, but the ones I'd been using are 20-30 minutes of mostly silence (but I'm not opposed to the idea of some kind of background white noise) with a guide providing verbal instructions around breathing and relaxation at the beginning, then providing occasional visualization exersizes or affirmations to focus on at occasional intervals.

A few searches shows no shortage of options for this kind of thing (both free and paid), but I'm wondering if anyone has any specific recommendations of something like this that they use or have used and would vouch for the quality. It seems like the kind of category where it would be easy to churn out a bunch of low-effort AI generated slop and disguise it as something else, which I would like to avoid.

So I've been playing a lot of WoW lately and that includes a ton of raids, always with voice chat on discord. Just now I found out that someone is a streamer and broadcast a full raid + the voice chat.

I was not part of this particular raid thankfully. And as far as I can tell he doesn't have a lot if any viewers. But it still made me uncomfortable that someone has been streaming my voice without my consent, without my knowledge even. I do not feel that it is unreasonable of me to expect someone to ask for permission before doing this, but maybe I am just completely out of the loop about streaming?

Is it naive to expect privacy in this regard? Is this what one should expect from online gaming nowadays?

I guess I'll start because I don't have much, but I cherish them:

• I'm proud I got out of poverty "alone". I used to never get anything as a child as my family was very poor. I only had thrift store clothes until I was maybe 12 or 13. I left my father's home at 17 and today, I have a good career, a car (!), stable finances, and I can buy anything I want and save money! I did all that with pretty much zero support, nor help from my parents or friends (no money, no gifts, no car, no services...).

• I'm proud of achieving top 100 NA in WoW PvE multiple times, top 200 world on some bosses, as a guild. With my class as a DPS, I got multiple top 10 parses world on multiple bosses. I rode the high of seeing an orange parse on WoL many times.

• I'm proud to have "beaten" depression and to have a positive outlook in life. Everyone says I'm always happy and the truth is...I am, because I don't care about so many things you're not supposed to care about.

• I'm proud to have a healthy group of friends on my thirties. I still talk with many people and I always have people I can see or talk to. They do the same with me!

Hi everyone, I just came back from a trip - here are some interesting takeways I thought would be useful to share. Happy to hear from anyone about any other interesting ways to make your life better on the road.

• Power: Bring a British power adapter head for airplane / train usage - often the North American style NEMA pins are very loose and this is a handy way of overcoming that problem. A very good solution is one of those power adapters for multiple countries with USBC and USBA ports in addition to being able to plug in. It was amazing on the flight to charge multiple devices at the same time.
• Power: Modern power banks can deliver 100W and hold around 28K mAH (weird power unit, I know...) - even with a laptop you can last all day
• Trusted Traveller Programs: Everyone knows about Global Entry, but a lesser known one is ABTC for Asia - saved me hours of waiting in line. I'm curious if there are any other good ones.
• Networking: A little mini travel router is really useful to auto-connect all of your devices and allows you to use smart home devices. A little finicky in terms of setup so it requires some level of networking knowledge (e.g., MAC cloning). You can bring your own casting devices and take over the TV. You can also use it to share wifi on an airplane but I found it too clunky to want to do this often when flying economy.
• Networking: Bring an ethernet cable and if your laptop doesn't have one, a dongle. Some hotels will have a more reliable eth connection.
• TVs: Some TVs are set in a "hospitality mode" and have HDMI ports disabled.
• Organization: Numbering all of your interal compartments with little tags so that you can make sure you have everything by just running through the numbers - this time, I left behind one bag by accident.
• Finances: A Wise prepaid credit card is very convenient re: paying in local currency.
• Transportation: Consider getting a transponder for whatever local toll system is in place. In the US my research indicates that the best one is the UNI from Central Florida Expressway.
• Transportation: Always have an international driver's permit (IDP) - I forgot to get one ready and couldn't rent a car.
• Passport: Lots of places surprisingly required the physical passport for things like tax free rebates, etc. Important to carry on person in a secure pocket.
• Laundry: Surprisingly, many budget hotels come with either coin laundry or laundry machines, and many AirBnbs have ensuite laundry. It's good to book one in the middle of the trip on purpose to wash your clothes. The fancy hotels had very expensive laundry service $5 per piece of underwear...
• Hotels: Travelling in Asia, I became a fan of the local hotel chains (especially Dormy Inn). Booking cancellable reservations also gave me flexibility to modify my travel plans.

Hey there musical types! I'm on the hunt for something I can use to create music that doesn't require a PhD in comp.sci and music theory. I downloaded LMMS and found myself immediately in the weeds, so I'm hoping someone out there can point me in a more elementary direction. The end goal is to create a theme track for my YouTube channel that has a good old fashioned 80s metal feel, if such an animal exists...

Thanks in advance!

I'm looking for recommendations actually, personally my favorites are Björk's Homogenic and Blue Bell Knoll by Cocteau Twins, but I also enjoy some orchestral music like Tchaikovsky's ballet suits and Ravel's Bolero.

I'm looking for full albums, preferably slow paced and that don't sound too "dark" (so no stoner metal).

Curious to know what museums people have visited that really left them thinking, "this was worth it" (time, money, whatever "worth it" means to you).

I will start.

Minneapolis, MN
Mill City Museum

This museum really shocked me with its breadth and depth! The location and setting are really cool as well. It has parts of the ruins of the historical building, integrated with some beautiful architecture of the new building.

The museum aims to explain how the grain industry was established and blew up in the Midwest, and what special role it had in shaping Minnesota. It goes all the way back to discussing WWII up to the advent of convenience foods like Betty Crocker and Pillsbury. There is even a Betty Crocker test kitchen in museum, complete with all the smells pumped into the air.

The displays are cool and I think are kid friendly, while also not boring the shit out of adults. My favorite part of the museum is the elevator, I truly believe it's one of the coolest displays(?) I've seen in a museum before, but I don't want to give away anymore, lest I make anyone's expectations too high and spoil it lol.

As requested last week, I'm doing something different for this race. This will be a discussion post for both Qualification and the Grand Prix itself. Or anything else concerning this weekend: Free Practices, Formula 2, Formula 3, whatever. There's also a Formula E in Miami race this weekend and an INDYCAR race in Long Beach on Sunday. Plus MotoGP in Qatar and IMSA also in Long Beach.

I'll post Quali results here. Plus, as usual, the race results. Maybe one of our cool, seemingly never sleeping, Tildes mods can rename the post after everything is finished!

Qualification Session:
Saturday, April 12, 2025 - 16:00 UTC / 12:00p US EDT

Bahrain Grand Prix:
Sunday, April 13, 2025 - 15:00 UTC / 11:00a US EDT

See your local time here

Next race:

Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
Jeddah Corniche Circuit
Sunday, April 20, 2025

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!

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.

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!

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?