Not sure if this is the right section for this post, might be better off somewhere else.

But a sentiment I've seen more and more frequently online is the idea that there's a pretty simple "razor" (like Occum's razor, or Halon's) that if a billionaire or huge corporation is telling me something is bad or will hurt people, it's usually a sign that the opposite is true. Or if a billionaire goes on the news and says that this new law is good for the poors and people should support it, it's a good sign to go out and vote against it.

Do we have a catchy name for it yet? I was thinking maybe "The Bezo's inversion" or something similar.

Edit: Shout out to /u/Rosco for expressing my intentions from this post better than I could have. The discussion in this thread didn't really go the direction I was expecting and that's probably on me for how I structured the original post.

I read this as more of a fun catharsis. We're in a society that is getting disproportionately out of whack. Wealth inequality is at a pretty untenable level, the average person is having a hard time getting by, and those with extreme wealth are actively trying to change our media, regulatory, labor, political landscapes to their benefit. I think a big of off gassing is warranted and this seems like a fun to way to engage with it. Obviously it's not actually going to function as a law, like I agree with Tom Steyer's stance on the Environment. But, on the flip side I came across the voter guide in the Palo Alto Daily in 2020 and it was literally the exact opposite - on every single proposition - than what I was planning to vote for. So it also kind of works? Regardless, it's harmless fun.

How are we feeling about it?

I was pretty disappointed by the entire fifth season. The show has been floundering after season 3, when it was clear that the natural climax of the story was post-poned because they couldn't handle a show without Homelander.

There's a number of issues that I have with S5, starting with the pacing. The episodes are paced incredibly weirdly. We spend a lot of time on things that, given the show is in its last season, really shouldn't be the focus. New B-side superheroes are introduced and take a lot of focus away from the core protagonists who's stories we are supposed to be finishing up. There's a whole haunted house bottle episode. There's a 5 min sequence of two new villains sniffing each other's asses because they're animal themed in the penultimate episode. The consequence of this is that the actual climax is incredibly rushed and dealt with in all of 30 minutes. There's a whole storyline that's introduced with a stronger superhero drug that makes you immune to the virus the Boys are cooking up to kill Homelander, and he takes it and then within 2 episodes they just find a new dumb way to kill him. It reeks of upping the stakes without a good reason.

Another issue is how cheap everything felt. There's a distinct lack of set-up shots and extras. Most of the time, it's named characters sitting in a closed room, talking at each other. If there's action, it's just a fist fight with maybe some dry-wall punches. The entire climax of the show is confided to a single room's decor getting torn to shreds and that's while evil superman is getting killed. There's a chase sequence in ep 2 which made me laugh out loud because of how stupid it looked. In this high stakes situation it's just people jogging down roads.

I do feel for the show because for something written pre 2024, they got outpaced by reality on the satire. But that doesn't absolve you from dogshit dialogue that cannot stay away from crass words and sex jokes. All the time. S1 was raunchy and gory at times, but it was timed well and balanced out by genuine, normal conversation. The word fuck loses all it's fucking meaning if you fucking put it in fucking front of every fucking other word. Ignoring even that, the writing still sucks from start to finish.

I'm happy it's over and that I can let this franchise rest. I stuck with it because S1 was really good. I'm sad that a show which had such a clear through line from S1 onwards with the Boys killing their way up the Seven was turned into, well, whatever happened in seasons 4 and 5.

Art is an escape, an outlet for creativity. I tend to also view it becoming a burden as barriers to creation arise. Even moreso should the business and networking aspects of it be involved, however necessary an evil it may be.

I'm curious what the process is to enter your artwork into a local gallery or museum. Do you mingle during art gallery events? Perhaps you encountered a formal application, wait-list, maybe an interview?

For context, I wanted to submit a 15 minute surreal Dadaist recorded performance about modern technology and the current climate of refusing to engage in active listening.

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.

Hey all,

My family and I are leaving for a vacation tomorrow, and I won't be back until Jun 11th. I likely won't have very consistent internet access while gone since we're going on a cruise which only has rather expensive and slow satellite internet, so I just wanted to leave a message here on Tildes somewhere so nobody worries about my absence. :P

I removed the latest /r/tildes invite thread but will make a new one when I get back. And I also likely won't be able to post the remainder of the Taskmaster episodes as they are released, so if someone wants to take over posting those while I'm gone I would appreciate it. Thanks and see you all again in a few weeks. :)

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.

Hello,

I'm into self-hosting and when my daughter (elementary school) started writing her own recipe book, I kinda went "She is young, she shouldn't be doing this in paper form" and I started looking around for a solution for kinda non-existing problem.

I stumbled upon Mealie, which is server that can be used in docker and is self-hosted recipe book/website. It seems like you can come in and say like "I have these ingrediants, what can I do?", it also seems to be able to generate shopping lists based on your selected recipe, you can use checkboxes when bringing all the ingredients on the kitchen board/table/top (non-English native speaker here) and so on.

It seems like the right software for me, but before I delve into it, I wanted to ask if someone else possibly runs such service for themselves at their home. Is there somebody who is using something like this? It doesn't have to be Mealie, specifically. But it should be server-side service, not some smartphone app. I know there are other such services, which are also open-source, but I forgot the names, sorry.

Thanks for any relevant answers!

I don't usually write things like this, but I'm having difficulty and think I need to get it out. I had to put down my dog Willow on Monday (two days ago, as of writing), and I am not okay.

This is not the first pet I've lost. Several childhood pets, but those weren't really mine, they were my parents', and so I didn't have the same level of responsibility over the animal as I did with Willow.

Even of my pets, this is not the first loss. In 2022, I adopted a retired working dog Yukon and an elderly cat Gomez. We lost Yukon in May 2024 (aspiration pneumonia due to megaesophagus) and Gomez in May 2025 (renal failure). The renal failure was a prolonged decline, and so while we tried to manage the disease we had some time to come to terms with things. The pneumonia was very fast decline and more of a shock. I loved them both, but this now feels much worse. I guess because I only really knew them 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 years respectively. I feel guilty about that, like it shouldn't matter and I should have grieved for them the same, but I don't.

This was the first pet that was mine, in the sense that my wife and I have had full responsibility for her the entire 10 years we've had her. She was the best behaved dog I've ever had. Always by my side at home. Especially when I worked from home during/after Covid lockdowns I took her with me wherever I could. Loyal. I just killed her.

Well, I didn't do it, we took her to a vet and they did typical euthanasia. It doesn't feel like the difference matters.

Willow also had renal failure, which we learned about at stage 3 (already severe) in January. The past few months have brought back a lot of pain about Gomez since it was the same disease. Realistically, the fact she made it all the way to May still walking on her own is remarkable. Meals have been challenging for the past month or so. Since late last week she refused to eat, and her condition deteriorated quickly over the weekend. We knew this was coming, but childishly it somehow felt like she'd just keep going forever because she'd been doing so well. Of course that's not how it works, but I guess it's easier to imagine that things are normal.

I think we gave her the best final day we could. We took her to the same pet stores, park, restaurants we used to take her to when she was in her prime. I got her some drive-thru chicken nuggets, her favorite, and she actually ate all of them! She must have been hungry. I want to believe I could have kept feeding her fast food for a few more days or weeks or months, but I know it's simply not true. She moved slow, but still walked on her own at the park and pet store. By the time we arrived at the vet she seemed satisfied, tired, and ready for a nap.

I don't know.

As I say, I've done this before and I roughly know the "usual" advice about grief and how it seems to work for me. My wife and I support each other. We still have other pets, and it helps a little to hold them. Enduring a death the same month three years in a row is taking its toll. All our other pets seem healthy and relatively young, and I'm not superstitious, but some deep emotional part of me can't help but fear May 2027. I think I'm just tired.

Our cat Pinto, still a 9-month old kitten, we've had since she was newborn and abandoned by her mother. We think she was abandoned because she couldn't latch properly to nurse, so we fed her on bottle day and night. Given how much it hurt about Yukon and Gomez after just a couple years, already old when we adopted them, and how much it hurts now about Willow after 11 years, who was a young adult when we adopted her, I am terrified of losing Pinto. I know it'll happen. I don't know what I'll do.

The quality of the pain doesn't really feel new, but the quantity is so much worse than I expected. Feeling guilty about that is new. The fear is new. Not really sure how to process it. You're not supposed to have favorites but I guess you do anyway.

I don't really know what I'm trying to get out of posting this. Pity? Not really. I guess I just need to get it out of my head. I'll probably look back at this thread in a few days to see what people have said but I think I just need to get this out and step away from it for a while and process.

https://i.imgur.com/U1Nq7X8.jpeg

Exactly as the title says. What film becomes better if someone suddenly gets hit by a bus?

Could be at the very end for an unexpected laugh at the sheer suddenness and absurdity. Could be some karma against a much-hated antagonist. Could happen earlier in a film, and abruptly cut off an otherwise bad movie by just ending it then and there. Or maybe even change the film's trajectory by changing focus to the recovery and aftermath.

Can be played for laughs, can be played for drama. Could be fatal, could careen the story (and sequels) in a totally different direction. There are infinite possibilities, and this seems like a fun question to explore. I can think of so many slasher films that could be hilariously cut off at an early point by a bus just appearing out of no where to hit the killer.

And while I want to restrict this to settings with buses, I think I'll open the floor to other settings. Buses don't really exist in the Star Wars universe to my knowledge, but it's fun to think about the changes to the franchise from a bus hitting Jar Jar Binks in the first film (or not hitting him and revealing the Darth Jar Jar theory to be true in the process), along with the investigation into what the bus was and how it spawned on an underwater planet.

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!

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?

Hi everyone,

On one hand, I'm very lucky: last year my partner and I purchased our first house! It feels great to hop off the renter hamster wheel.

On the other hand, we had to make some compromises when we bought the house: I wanted to limit our search to houses that already had central air (heating and cooling), because we both work from home and I really want our house to be comfortable year-round. Unfortunately, in Northern New England, that eliminates around 90% of houses. So we compromised and bought a place that has a furnace with ductwork, hoping to eventually add cooling using the same ductwork. Last year, I reached out to a couple of contractors to get a vague sense of how possible that might be. Consensus? Potentially expensive, but feasible.

My situation:

• our house is small, ~1100 square feet in the finished upstairs
• half of the upstairs has shit insulation, other half is decent after renovation
• we currently have a 100k BTU oil furnace that absolutely keeps up. In fact, as far as I can tell, it's massively oversized -- even on the coldest nights (around -20 or so most winters, including this one), it only kicks on ~50% of the time
• we used around 500 gallons of heating oil from September-May (the heating season)
• our furnace is awkwardly tucked between the outlet chimney and three walls, which makes accessing it a pain (and complicates installing a coil on top; I'm not sure if there's enough room).
• thanks to a nearby massive hydroelectric dam, our electric rates are about half the average New England electric price (and come from a pretty environmentally-friendly source!). So the more heating and cooling I can do with electric, the better IMO. I'd rather pay a bit extra to heat with clean electric than save on propane/oil if fossil prices come down (big if).

With the warm season upon us, I'm feeling the heat during my work-from-home days and trying to get cooling installed before the temperature really starts cooking. And, despite having a furnace with existing ductwork that covers every room in the house (90% of which is directly accessible through unfinished basement ceilings), every. goddamn. contractor. has. recommended. minisplits.

But I don't want minisplits. I know it's easier for them. I know it's cheaper. I know most contractors in the area have installed hundreds of minisplits but very few central systems (let alone a combined heating/cooling setup where you have to worry about balancing summer dehumidifying with extreme cold efficiency). I know I'll have to clean out and insulate my ducts. Minisplits would surely work OK, but I really don't want to install one in each of our three bedrooms, plus one (or more) in our open-layout kitchen/living/dining space, and then still deal with no direct cooling in the bathrooms. Aesthetically, my partner and I both find minisplits ugly, and our house is small enough that most minisplit designs would make the tiny bedrooms feel even more cramped.

Ideally, I'd rip out our existing furnace (and oil tank!), install a cold weather heat pump in its place, insulate the ducts, and call it a day. But every contractor also advises that I "keep the old furnace around" in case the heat pump breaks (seriously?) or in case the heat pump can't keep up on the coldest days (fair enough). And then we take a look at the existing furnace, conclude it would be hard to add cooling on top of it, and they tell me to think about minisplits again.

So I guess after all of this, I'd really appreciate some advice from tilderinos with more home improvement experience than myself. Should I think about this differently? How on earth do I find a contractor who knows what they're doing with central heat pumps who doesn't push me aggressively towards minisplits or keeping my dirty, noisy, expensive furnace around? Should I just roll over, give up on my central cooling dreams, and install some minisplits?

Got invited to Tildes tangentially through a server hosting project but realized this space might be outside the standard tech echo-chambers (techo-chambers?). Am I the only XCP-ng/Xen user in a sea of Proxmox/KVM? Any odd homelab setups to share?