I personally have been getting really into anime the last two years and Akira is by far one of the greatest movies I've seen!
Edit: Thanks for sharing all these great films! I've got a lot of good movies I gotta look into now :)

The post about group CSS got me thinking, if the identity of groups are allowed to develop enough it could become like reddit were you can't expect a consistent experience across the site, you'll have to know the etiquette of each group you visit, do they allow jokes here, only links or only text, not going off topic etc.

How far should/will it go?

Has anyone here used NixOS for any significant amount of time as their daily driver? I've been considering using it since I learned about it, I really like the idea of how it manages packages, but I'm a bit hesitant, particularly about the availability of packages, and how the whole folder structure changes from the usual Linux. I'm also worried since I haven't seen any guide about how to use python other than the usual advice to get a virtualenv for everything.

I consider myself a fairly advanced Linux user, I have used Arch as my daily driver for 4 years, and Linux for like 10 years, as a side note, so I'm not really that afraid of troubleshooting.

Just re-reading some of my posts, and I would like to thank everyone for not nick-picking them apart for all the grammar and spelling mistakes I have. Coming over from Reddit, it's really nice not to go over a quick post more times than when submitting a resume.

Oddly all off a sudden, while I was watching a video, my phone started to play the same sound as my PC speakers. It was kinda of cool, like my phone was a second speaker. But it did it automatically. Anyone else see this? I have access to YouTube music now so maybe that's a new feature or something?

edit: My device is Windows 10 PC using regular Chrome and Google Pixel XL (Android P)

I've been using Solus for years now as my main driver, but I think I may be switching to Arch soon. Or at least, start using Arch on my laptop, and keep Solus on my desktop. The main reason I wanna give Arch a try is because of how minimal it can be. I don't need a lot of applications, and I like to have the least amount of software installed on my machine as I can. Plus, distro-hopping is a disease, and it's time I try something new, haha.

So, I was just curious what DE people are using with Arch. Ideally I want something very minimal, but not too ugly. I liked using Budgie with Solus, so I may very well just use Budgie with my Arch install, but I thought I would see if anyone has any recommendations first! Thanks!

I haven't logged in for a week or so (~tildes admin can tell me when I last lurked ;p) and it's looking better and better!

Reddits, especially worldnews, are looking more and more stagnant and Hacker News is getting stale too. Whereas tildes is looking nicer and nicer. Keep up the awesome work :D

What video games that are coming out soon do you have your eye on?

There's a co-op game for the Switch coming out next year called Rite of Ilk that I think would be fun. I don't have a Switch yet but I'll probably be getting one in a couple months.

Also, still waiting patiently for Miegakure like it was Godot.

A well known issue of reddit (and most of the internet these days) is gifs as a fundamentally more popular way to consume videos. There are good reasons for this in the current makeup of the internet with mobile browsers dominating the online space. Voters are likely to be using mobile browsers and mobile browsers are likely to be the dominant browser. Gifs have no sound which is preferable out-and-about, they also tend to load better than videos, especially if a user doesn't want to switch to a dedicated mobile app that will load that video or popup a "open in" notification. Even many PC users simply don't like the extra time it takes to load videos over a gifv.

This is however not preferable for a high-quality site. It results in content creators not getting views for their work. It results in sources of content not being posted at all on many occasions, even in comments. Many of the game subreddits have people that create gif clips of a video just because it will be more popular, then post the source video that it's from in the comments. It's not ideal.

How can this be solved?

I encourage everyone to answer this question using the wildest of fantasies, even if you think the idea might be unfeasible at a technology level. Let the people working with the code decide if its feasible or not, put forth your wildest idea to solve it.

I'll start: Perform processing of video to gif as a function of the site. Provide users with the ability to choose a preference of gif vs video. Give people the section of the video as a gif clip but also provide the content source with a view of the clipped section (somehow) so the source actually does get a view of that video in that section for its clipped part.

This potentially unfeasible suggestion provides the best of both worlds, providing the user with the type of clip they want (gif/video) which will be better for their browser while also providing the source creator with a view on their video even if the user views the gif. At the same time this also ensures that a majority of gif content (at least for videogames/twitch/youtube, the majority) actually does have the source because it used the site's own clipping tool to set the gif. No need to use anything else if it is site integrated.

Other ideas and thoughts on this topic? Programmable ways to solve it? Preferences? Moderation?

Some games were just magical to play and yet have never really had something come out which rivaled them or even recreated that experience to some extent. Which games would you say provide that for the following, if any?

• Black & White / Populous (Good God games are hard to find, and Godus was just disappointing)
• Xwing vs. Tie Fighter (Nothing so satisfying as capital ship destruction!)
• Master of Orion 2 (All around fun dynamics)
• Star Control 2 - (Tons of Humor, interesting back stories)

What do you wish had a modern day equivalent, and does it?

What are everyone's favorite "Guilty Pleasures" when it comes to film? You know, those movies that you love, but if someone asks you which movies you're into, the ones you don't necessarily admit to until you trust or really like the person. Here are a few of mine:

• The Fast and the Furious franchise, especially Tokyo Drift.
• Titanic
• Mean Girls. I don't know if I can count this one since it seems to waiver between guilty pleasure and cult classic depending on whom you ask.

The ending of a movie ultimately makes it or breaks it for me.

I'm old. I've seen thousands of movies. I've read thousands of stories. It's hard for me to be legitimately surprised by an ending.

The ending of Upgrade blew my mind.

If you love an unusual ending, if you love sci fi, and if you don't mind a little bit of the old ultra-violence, I fully recommend.

Obviously this assumes you agree that humans have a soul, but even if no one agrees on what the soul is – if you agree that people have them at all, then when did they start having them within the historical context of human evolution?

There are a few ways this question could be approached depending on which frame of reference you choose to use, so I'm curious to know which frames you guys find useful and most relevant.

song.link

Not sure how many Rezz or even electronic music fans there are here, so I'm interested to see the response.

Rezz released this single from her upcoming album yesterday.

I'm a huge Rezz fan, and this song is awesome, but I kind of hope that the full album will have some more variation. I like the song, but it came on autoplay earlier today and for a second I questioned whether it was from Mass Manipulation. It seems like Rezz is rehashing the same formula just a bit too much. Sure, every artist has their sound, but I kind of expected something a bit different.

A new, relatively unknown artist that I think has been incredible so far is 1788-L. He sounds like a mix between Porter Robinson and Rezz. I hope Rezz can add some more variation to her distinct sound to make it a bit different, similar to 1788. Maybe the upcoming deadmau5 collab will be promising in this regard?

What do you guys think? Again, overall, great song.

                                             How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu's debut novel, How to Life Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, could be described as a story about contemporary family life disguised as science fiction. It concerns a young man who has spent most of the past decade in a small time machine in his job as a time machine repairman. He makes calls on people who have rented time machines for recreational purposes but have become stuck in time and must be rescued by him. As the novel progresses, it is revealed that this man's name is the same as that of the author, Charles Yu. The protagonist is a lonely and rather sad fellow, who spends much of his non-working hours drifting along in his capsule, thinking about his past and his parents, especially his father who disappeared long ago. Accompanied only by his dog and a computer that has the pixilated face of a female and a cartoon-like voice, Charles hopes to one day locate his father in some alternate universe to which he apparently has traveled in a time machine. Charles's parents, a few clients, and several street performers are the only other humans that he encounters during the course of the story. He makes one trip to a city in Minor Universe 31, a residential and entertainment world made mostly from a science fiction "substrate," where the company for which he works is headquartered. His objective is to have maintenance work done on his time machine and when he goes to pick it up, he encounters his future self. Panicking, he draws his service revolver and shoots his future self in the stomach, just as his future self is attempting to tell him that the key is the book. He has no idea what this means as he stumbles into his time machine and races away. On the capsule's console, he finds a manual-type book that has the same title as the novel.

With the help of his computer, he realizes that he must read the book and make amendments and additions to it as he goes along. At some point in the future, he must give the completed book to his past self, who then will shoot him and begin the rewriting process again in an endless cycle. Charles realizes he has become stuck in a time loop. By the rules of time travel, if he changes anything that happens during this loop, he risks entering an alternate universe from which he might not emerge. Under the circumstances, escaping the time loop appears to be extremely difficult. He may be doomed to spend the rest of his life in the time machine, writing the book, giving it to himself, shooting himself, and starting the cycle again. The book is a manual about time travel, but it also offers advice on how such a traveler should live within or use time wisely. The main use of Charles's time is in thinking about his father and mother, but he begins visiting periods in his past in his time machine, watching his younger self interact with his parents. Eventually, he discovers that the book given to him by his future self is literally the key, because it holds a key that unlocks a box that his mother gave him, inside of which his father left clues to where he went in time. This inspires Charles to realize that he can break out of his time loop through the power of his mind and memory. He does so and rescues his father from the past time in which he is stuck. As the novel ends, it looks as if the family has a chance to regain normalcy and move forward with a better understanding of how to cope with the difficulties of life by facing the problems of the past with courage and honesty.

                       Praise

“Glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction. . . . Like [Douglas] Adams, Yu is very funny, usually proportional to the wildness of his inventions, but Yu’s sound and fury conceal (and construct) this novel’s dense, tragic, all-too-human heart. . . . Yu is a superhero of rendering human consciousness and emotion in the language of engineering and science. . . . A complex, brainy, genre-hopping joyride of a story, far more than the sum of its component parts, and smart and tragic enough to engage all regions of the brain and body.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Compulsively rereadable. . . . Hilarious. . . . Yu has a crisp, intermittently lyrical prose style, one that’s comfortable with both math and sadness, moving seamlessly from delirious metafiction to the straight-faced prose of instruction-manual entries. . . . [The book itself] is like Steve Jobs’ ultimate hardware fetish, a dreamlike amalgam of functionality and predetermination.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Douglas Adams and Philip K. Dick are touchstones, but Yu’s sense of humor and narrative splashes of color–especially when dealing with a pretty solitary life and the bittersweet search for his father, a time travel pioneer who disappeared–set him apart within the narrative spaces of his own horizontal design. . . . A clever little story that will be looped in your head for days. No doubt it will be made into a movie, but let’s hope that doesn’t take away the heart.”
—Austin Chronicle

“If How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe contented itself with exploring that classic chestnut of speculative fiction, the time paradox, it would likely make for an enjoyable sci-fi yarn. But Yu’s novel is a good deal more ambitious, and ultimately more satisfying, than that. It’s about time travel and cosmology, yes, but it’s also about language and narrative — the more we learn about Minor Universe 31, the more it resembles the story space of the novel we’re reading, which is full of diagrams, footnotes, pages left intentionally (and meaningfully) blank and brief chapters from the owner’s manual of our narrator’s time machine. . . . . Yu grafts the laws of theoretical physics onto the yearnings of the human heart so thoroughly and deftly that the book’s technical language and mathematical proofs take on a sense of urgency.”
—NPR

“How to Live Safely is a book likely to generate a lot of discussion, within science fiction and outside, infuriating some readers while delighting many others.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“An extraordinary work. . . . I read the entire book in one gulp.”
—Chris Wallace, GQ

“A great Calvino-esque thrill ride of a book.”
—The Stranger

“Science and metaphor get nice and cozy in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. The novel joins the likes of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Jillian Weise’s The Colony, fiction that borrows the tropes of sci-fi to tell high-tech self-actualization narratives.”
—Portland Mercury

“A brainy reverie of sexbots, rayguns, time travel and Buddhist zombie mothers. . . . Packed with deft emotional insight.”
—The Economist

“A funny, funny book, and it’s a good thing, too; because at its heart it’s a book about loneliness, regret, and the all-too-human desire to change the past.”
—Tor.com

“A keenly perceptive satire. . . . Yu’s novel is also a meditation on the essentials of human life at its innermost point.. . . Campy allusions to the original Star Wars trilogy, a cityscape worthy of the director’s cut of Blade Runner and a semi-coherent vocabulary of techno-jargon cement these disparate elements into a brilliant send-up of science fiction. . . . Perhaps it would be better to think of the instructional units of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe in terms of the chapters of social commentary which John Steinbeck placed into the plot structure of The Grapes of Wrath.”
—California Literary Review

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the rare book I pick up to read the first several pages, then decide to drop everything and finish at once. Emotionally resonant, funny, and as clever as any book I have read all year, this debut novel heralds the arrival of a talented young writer unafraid to take chances.”
—largehearted boy

“A wild and inventive first novel . . . has been compared to the novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Jonathan Lethem, and the fact that such comparisons are not out of line says everything necessary about Yu’s talent and future.”
—Portland Oregonian

“Bends the rules of time and literary convention.”
—Seattle Weekly

“Getting stuck with Yu in his time loop is like watching an episode of Doctor Who as written by the young Philip Roth. Even when recalling his most painful childhood moments, Yu makes fun of himself or pulls you into a silly description of fake physics experiments. In this way, he delivers one of the most clear-eyed descriptions of consciousness I’ve seen in literature: It’s full of self-mockery and self-deception, and yet somehow manages to keep its hands on the wheel, driving us forward into an unknowable future. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is intellectually demanding, but also emotionally rich and funny. . . . It’s clearly the work of a scifi geek who knows how to twist pop culture tropes into melancholy meditations on the nature of consciousness.”
—io9

“Funny [and] moving. . . . Charles Yu’s first novel is getting ready for lift-off, and it more than surpasses expectations which couldn’t be any higher after he was given the 5 Under 35 Award . . . How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe is one of the trippiest and most thoughtful novels I’ve read all year, one that begs for a single sit-down experience even if you’re left with a major head rush after the fact for having gulped down so many ideas in a solitary swoop. . . . Yu’s literary pyrotechnics come in a marvelously entertaining and accessible package, featuring a reluctant, time machine-operating hero on a continual quest to discover what really happened to his missing father, a mysterious book possibly answering all, and a computer with the most idiosyncratic personality since HAL or Deep Thought. . . . Like the work of Richard Powers . . . How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe fuses the scientific and the emotional in ways that bring about something new.”
—Sarah Weinman, The Daily Beast

“One of the best novels of 2010. . . . It is a wonderfully stunning, brilliant work of science fiction that goes to the heart of self-realization, happiness and connections. . . . Yu has accomplished something remarkable in this book, blending science fiction universes with his own, alternative self’s life, in a way, breaking past the bonds of the page and bringing the reader right into the action. . . . Simply, this is one of the absolute best time travel stories . . . even compared to works such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells or the Doctor Who television series.”
—SF Signal

“Within a few pages I was hooked. . . . There are times when he starts off a paragraph about chronodiegetics that just sounds like pseudo-scientific gibberish meant to fill in some space. And then you realize that what he’s saying actually makes sense, that he’s actually figured out something really fascinating about the way time works, about the way fiction works, and the “Aha!” switch in your brain gets flipped. That happened more than once for me. There are so many sections here and there that I found myself wanting to share with somebody: Here—read this paragraph! Look at this sentence! Ok, now check this out!”
—GeekDad, Wired.com

“In this debut novel, Charles Yu continues his ambitious exploration of the fantastic with a whimsical yet sincere tribute to old-school science fiction and quantum physics. . . . A fascinating, philosophical and disorienting thriller about life and the context that gives it meaning.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“With Star Wars allusions, glimpses of a future world, and journeys to the past, as well as hilarious and poignant explanations of “chronodiegetics,” or the “theory of the nature and function of time within a narrative space,” Yu, winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 Award, constructs a clever, fluently metaphorical tale. A funny, brain-teasing, and wise take on archetypal father-and-son issues, the mysteries of time and memory, emotional inertia, and one sweet but bumbling misfit’s attempts to escape a legacy of sadness and isolation.”
—Booklist

“This book is cool as hell. If I could go back in time and read it earlier, I would.”
—Colson Whitehead, author of Sag Harbor

“Charles Yu is a tremendously clever writer, and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is marvelously written, sweetly geeky, good clean time-bending fun.”
—Audrey Niffenegger, author of Her Fearful Symmetry and The Time Traveler’s Wife

“Funny, touching, and weirdly beautiful. This book is awesome.”
—Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is that rare thing—a truly original novel. Charles Yu has built a strange, beautiful, intricate machine, with a pulse that carries as much blood as it does electricity.”
—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The View from the Seventh Layer and The Brief History of the Dead

“Poignant, hilarious, and electrically original. Bends time, mind, and genre.”
—David Eagleman, author of Sum

So there's this new HBO show called Succession. I just watched the first episode and thought I might write down some thoughts and see what others think.

It's the story of a rich family that controls a big media conglomerate. The father and head of the company is planning to retire soon and the children want to know what's in it for them.

It is definitely up to HBO standards, beautifully shot and nice score. I really liked the zoom bursts.

There's a lot of shade, bottled up anger and potential double crossing. In a superficially calm ocean of relationships there's constant tension between the characters. It's a family feud about power grabbing and power abusing, touching on privilege and values, with some awkwardness mixed. Characters don't leave you indifferent and after just one episode you already have a pretty good idea of what kind of persons they are, and whether you like them or not.

I'd give the pilot a 8/10 and I'll definitely keep watching. Recommended.

Anyone else watched it? Impressions?

On Reddit it's easy -- Redditors. Ending in a vowel, Tildes makes that a bit less straightforward. This obviously is not a super high priority question, but I had the thought a few minutes ago. Are we Tilders? Tilds? ~rs? Anyone have any ideas that are a bit more creative and easier to say?

The one good thing, imo, that iOS does is its continuity and handoff with other devices. What are the best ways you've found to emulate this on your devices? Like if I'm actively working on a document or on web pages how can I seamlessly continue using them on my tablet/phone without having to re-open all the tabs or docs again?

Has anyone found a better way?

At the moment I get around this a couple ways:
-Google drive is my primary basic filesystem on all my main computer (desktop/documents/downloads/pictures/videos folders)
-Google Photos on all devices
-PulseSMS for the texting
-Google Chrome which offers a somewhat fix to webbrowsing

But the actual feature of my devices popping up and letting me "carry on" with what I was doing exactly where I was doing it with the click of the button isn't there. Also, the Google Chrome "continuity" is simply the ability to let me go see recent tabs open on my devices and click to reopen them. If anyone knows a way to sync tabs across all my devices (desktop/laptop/phone/tablet) and make them open/close altogether that would be great.

I think it's cool to see who invited a user on their profile page, but who have I invited? Is there a page I'm missing? I think it'd be cool to just see that stuff.

Some sort of public user tree would be pretty neat too.

Side question- after public release, will the invited by section on old profiles continue to stay? I think that'd be a pretty cool way to show alpha testers imo.

Greeting everyone!

I think this is the best category to ask that kind of question. I am looking for website/blog/author which provides information regarding new restriction on the internet. For example in China, Iran, Russia and etc...

Any good sources to get fresh information (In English).

When something big happens, there are often a lot of different posts, which results in the conversation being scattered all over the place. Is there any policies on users creating megathreads for these big events, or if there will be some kind of megathread system build into ~ in the future?