A problem I have every summer is either going to sleep cool and waking up in the middle of the night hot or going to sleep warm and waking up in the middle of the night cold. I used to have a similar problem in the winter, but I was able to solve that by getting a down comforter. Any recommendations for a good summer blanket for midwestern summers?

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.

Last year, I took a promotion at work which meant I would be managing a few people and also involved with/overseeing a number of long term projects. As I've learned how to manage people, I've also learned that my previous methods for note taking are insufficient for what I'm doing and I'm losing track of things in my paper notebooks.

My employer has offered to buy me a new laptop but I'm actually pretty satisfied with my current laptop, so I've been doing some research into e-ink tablets which I think will help me stay more organized while also allowing me to take notes by hand (my preference) rather than typing things into a Google doc as I've been doing for my one on one meetings.

I don't have any experience with this technology and no way that I can get any hands on experience before buying something, so I'd love to hear from anyone who has used something like this, and especially if there's anything I need to consider that I haven't thought of.

My use cases:

• note taking / digital organization
• online reading (I run literary magazines and our submissions come in through an online system, and there's no convenient way to download them as pdfs to read offline, so having access to a web browser is important)
• access to Google Drive ideally so I can get to my notes from my desktop or laptop
• it'll be used at my desk or on my couch in full light, so no backlight or front light is not an issue

One of my coworkers has a remarkable tablet but he told me it's been less useful for him than he thought. In my research, this seems to be too limited for my uses.

The Onyx Boox Go 10.3 seems to be what would work best for me but I've also read a lot of warnings about their poor customer service so I'm a bit hesitant.

Hey, Im trying to share a post from マリウス.com, but clicking the submit button just returns an error that the link is not a valid URL. Ive also tried percent encoding to %E3%83%9E%E3%83%AA%E3%82%A6%E3%82%B9.com, with the same results. I assume this is not intentional @Deimos?

EDIT: It looks like punycoding it to xn--gckvb8fzb.com works.

Edit: Just bought NSO + Expansion Pack. 39.99 EUR/year to celebrate the console’s first anniversary. 💸

Edit 2: The Direct is scheduled to 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET. Here’s the YouTube link.

It’s a me, your resident die-hard, hopeless, Nintendo fanboy normie.

In this post, we’ll discuss four tangentially-related topics:

1. What are your predictions and wishes for the upcoming Nintendo Direct? What are you hoping for? Make a list and then edit it after the fact to see what you got right.
2. What is a Nintendo franchise that you think is in dire need of a change, and what would that look like for you?
3. How would you rate the Nintendo Switch 2’s first year, and what Nintendo games did you enjoy playing the most?
4. Give us your thoughts on the Direct after you’ve watched it.

What are your predictions and wishes for the upcoming Nintendo Direct?

I’ll say right up front that my experience with Nintendo Directs over the years has been that whatever I want the most is always what I don’t get.

This time around, that’s news on the Zelda movie and the Ocarina of Time remake. In fact, I’m fairly certainly they’ll reveal more on those in September instead.

I’m leaning on that certainty for three reasons:

(1) If I’m wrong, then I’ll be pleasantly surprised, and if I’m right, then I won’t be sorely disappointed.

(2) I only really care about these two because I do know a little bit about them. Whatever else I don’t know about, doesn’t bother me. So, other announcements, even very big ones that might positively shock me, aren’t really what I’m worried about. This is also the reason why I’d much prefer it if no information ever leaked at all. I want to be surprised. I can’t isolate myself from leaks if I “surf on the web” at all. It’s impossible. So, Nintendo’s ninjas need to step up their game and silence the leakers.

(3) It seems to me that Nintendo is working hard to move away from the “big Direct” model of making announcements. It might be difficult for them because at least once a year they need to communicate through that medium in order to give investors and shareholders a heads-up (who would otherwise not know about anything because they don’t care about the industry and don’t follow it closely). However, for us, the customers, they’d much rather operate with more flexibility, showcasing games and products individually, spacing out announcements to keep the Nintendo brand fresh in people’s minds, and reveal new titles close to launch to create as much buzz around them as possible. That’s my guess. I could be wrong.

As for my list, I’ll put all the items in a single one. Some of them I think are more plausible than others. Some are entirely wishful thinking.

• Ocarina of Time remake gets a teaser... ⭕️
  • ...and a release date in November... ❌
  • ...on the same day as GTA VI (would be fun for me). ❌
• Zelda movie gets a trailer. ❌
• Zelda 40th anniversary is kicked off. ❌
• We get Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD bundles together and sold separately like they did for the Super Mario Galaxies. ❌
• Some more announcements for Star Fox. ⭕️
• Some more announcements for Splatoon Raiders. ⭕️
• Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave gets a release date... ⭕️
  • ...in August. ❌
• Two new first-party titles to fill out September and October are announced... [I got October right ⭕️]
  • ...one of which could be a Switch 2 edition game... ❌
  • ...or a game for all Switch systems... ❌
  • ...or an entirely new Switch 2 exclusive... ⭕️
    • ...from one of their bigger IPs... ⭕️
      • ...potentially a 2D Mario... ❌
    • ...or an entirely new IP. ❌
• A Switch 2 edition game could be...
  • Pikmin 4, ❌
  • Luigi’s Mansion 3 ❌
    • (for October),
  • but not my beloved Pokémon Legends: Arceus. 💔
• An entirely new Switch 2 exclusive from one of their bigger IPs could be...
  • ...a new Paper Mario... ❌
  • ...or Mario Maker 3. ❌
• One new Switch 2 exclusive announced for 2027, which could be...
  • ...based on a big Nintendo IP... ⭕️
    • ...potentially a 3D Mario. ❌
  • ...or be an entirely new IP. ❌
• New DLC for...
  • ...Mario Kart World (leaning on this one)... ❌
  • ...or Pokémon Pokopia. ⭕️
• Two more GCN games for NSO... ❌
  • ...one of them being Twilight Princess... ❌
  • ...I wish it was the Viewtiful Joe series though.
• There might be absolutely zero Pokémon news. [I’m not sure if I count Pokopia, because I meant everything but that, so maybe ⭕️]
• Wii or NDS announced for NSO... ❌
  • ...with Wii remote being sold again... ❌
  • ...or an accessory to hold the Switch 2 sideways, so it stands vertically and you can see both DS screens. ❌
• New Amiibo. ❌
• One completely wacky new game or product that people will find weird. ❌
• One very divisive announcement... ❌
  • ...which could be the Ocarina of Time remake... ❌
  • ...or the Zelda movie, if they do them wrong. ❌

What is a Nintendo franchise that you think is in dire need of a change, and what would that look like for you?

(1) The Legend of Zelda

My hope is that the Ocarina of Time remake is not just a recreation with better graphics. The 3DS version already did that. I hope that it is a reimagening. As big as Hyrule felt in 1998, it feels small enough today that I could see it being the perfect size for Nintendo to add to. They could make it half as big as Breath of the Wild, and it would still feel pretty sizeable, for me at least (I never even gave 100%ind Breath of the Wild a try for how big it was).

The point of the remake for Nintendo, I think, is two-fold:

(A) Introduce a larger, fresh audience to the franchise, by giving them the gold-standard of what it has to offer, while wasting minimal resources developing it (so, kind of what they’re doing with Star Fox) and in time for the big release of the movie next year, so the two products can cross-promote each other. We’ve seen them do this with the two Mario movies.

(B) Flex those “linear Zelda” muscles a bit, which have become extremely atrophied during the long “era of the wild”, so that the next major title, becomes something that is more of a compromise, something that has that large open world for one group of players to sink hundreds of hours into, but also that highly curated puzzle-solving experience with a meaningful story that the group of players that I am in personally love the series for. The last two major titles were a feast for people who like checklists. For me, they were frustrating. I still loved them. I loved the gameplay. I loved the breadth (of the wild). I didn’t like the “dungeons”, and I absolutely hated the stories. The latter of these had me fuming. They had zero substance for me. They even “soft-rebooted” the series if you think about it. They just placed the games in an entirely new “era”, completely detached from the rest of the franchise. I honestly hope we never return to this era, unless it adds something meaningful to the story. I wanna go back to the wacky timeline from the previous era and make it wackier.

(2) Animal Crossing

Zelda and Animal Crossing were my favorite video game franchises of all time. In fact, I played every mainline Animal Crossing title extensively. I say “were” though, because Pokopium, as I endearingly like to refer to it, has dethroned Animal Crossing. New Horizons was such a disappointment for me. The series became a decorating sim. My favorite is still the GCN entry, if you can believe it. It’s the one game I love returning to.

It seems that Tomodachi Life is Nintendo’s answer to people like me. Nintendo has heard us. I haven’t played the most recent entry in that series because it released on the Switch 1, and I have this weird (I know) rule that I only buy Switch 2 exclusives so as to not overwhelm myself with my options. Pokopium also happened to release shortly before and to say that I got very busy with it would be an understatement (cough cough 160+ hours in and counting). If they release a Switch 2 edition of that though, then I’ll jump in. I am in dire need of that proper, funky social sim, where the characters say and do weird stuff.

This is to say that I don’t know what Nintendo could do to make me want to return to this series. If the next entry is just more of the same, more decoration, even if it’s a “bigger world”, then... it might be time to say goodbye to this franchise. I really don’t know what they could do though. I have heard people suggest an MMO take, where there is one big world and everyone is playing in it simultaneously... yeah. Except that Nintendo would never do that.

Tomodachi Life allows you to do some really out there stuff with your characters, and guess what? It has no online multiplayer of any kind (at least that I’m aware of). That’s how Nintendo “worked around” having to monitor player interactions 24/7. Nintendo is never doing an MMO. They know that degenerates would immediately flood it. Even so, that wouldn’t be enough for me. I just don’t like decoration sims, MMOs or otherwise.

Tell you what, Nintendo: The people deserve their decoration sim. That’s fair. If you want my money though, release a new Tomodachi Life or a Switch 2 edition of the current one, and I’ll buy that. I think that’s also fair, right?

(3) Super Smash Bros.

I had so much fun with the N64 entry, Melee, and Brawl. The first two I played a ton with friends, locally. I actually had that experience. Crazy, am I right? Every time I think about it, it feels like a bygone era. I actually had friends over (and many at that), and also visited friends, and we all played Smash with each other, and it was a lot of fun. I had enough online friends to play Brawl with as well, but far less so.

These days I just don’t care about multiplayer games at all. There are two reasons for that:

(A) I don’t have the time. I could make time to play with other people between 7 PM and 9 PM on most days, but I live in one of the least convenient time zones: UTC+2. Most of the Nintendo world is either asleep or waking up at that time.

(B) I’d just simply rather... experience great single player games? I don’t know. My taste has changed. I’ve also come to hate competitive games more and more. I can’t imagine dedicating myself to one game to become good enough at it so that I don’t get rounded up while playing online and actually get some enjoyment out of the experience. The time that I would waste to git gud, I could be experiencing an epic adventure with instead.

Super Smash Bros. could still bring me back if (and that’s a big if) they included a revamped single-player experience (“Subspace Emissary” was kind of fun for me), and also significantly changed up the formula. I get that it’s a platform fighter, but it’s starting to get ridiculous. Are there seriously any significant gameplay experiences between Brawl and Ultimate? Real ones? Major ones? I played Ultimate, and my mains, Peach and Zelda, felt like they hadn’t changed at all.

I know that if they do something other than a 2D platform fighter, there will be riots, but they’re also going to get a lot of complaints from people saying that it’s just “more of the same”.

Also, I think that 20 to 30 characters is a good sweet spot. You can reduce the Fire Emblem characters to Ike and Marth as well, and while we’re at it, maybe invite some Western characters to the roster? I know that Japan has a lot to offer, but Lara Croft and the Master Chief, for example, make 100% sense in Smash Bros.. If Duck Hunt and Game & Watch can be on the roster, so can Lara and John. Heck, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon should be in the roster. Don’t give me any excuses. If you’re going to get characters from non-Nintendo IPs into the game at all, then I don’t know what’s holding you back from getting more of the ones that everyone wants.

(4) Everything else

Whatever new 3D Super Mario, Paper Mario, Zelda, Metroid, or Metroid Prime they release in the future though, I’m fairly confident that it’ll be good, and that I’ll buy it even if its more of the same.

How would you rate the Nintendo Switch 2’s first year, and what Nintendo games did you enjoy playing the most?

I think I’d give it an B+.

I’m a Nintendo fanboy, so it would be difficult for me to give them a lower score, but I think that the case can be made that this first year was actually quite good.

The releases may have seemed slow in the first half, but there was a brand new Mario Kart World (for those who liked it, not me) from the start, as well as Donkey Kong Bananza not long after that, which I loved so much, I 100%ed it in 50+ hours.

Pokémon fans got that Z-A title that I skipped on, mostly because it just looked boring and gray (though I heard good things about the gameplay).

Kirby Air Riders turned out to be an amazing game that I didn’t play, and very few other people did. It’s just too niche.

Metroid Prime 4 I loved to bits, but most people hated it, because of the desert, the characters, the pacing, and how similar to Prime 1 it was. I didn’t like how the story ended, and I didn’t like that it was a Prime title that didn’t include, well... Metroid Prime/Dark Samus. I guess the point of them being called “Prime” now is that they’re first-person adventure games. It’s whatever. Just make another one and forget about the open world thing. Make a Metroid game, you know? Not a Halo-inspired game featuring Samus Aran.

I also had a ton of fun with Hyrule Warriors, which was the story-driven Zelda I didn’t know I longed for. Excited for more Warriors spinoffs in general, and not just in the Zelda franchise...

Third parties eventually picked up, and they gave us a ton of games that somehow run amazing on this little boy. I’m thinking Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata (the latter of which I played and loved), though there were others, some of which were Switch 2 ports, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. There were many others, but these four seemed to have dominated the Switch 2 third-party discussion, at least this half of the year. I should add that Capcom is hitting it out of the park. Now please go and give me some news about that Okami sequel, will you?

It may have felt like there were some lulls, but it was actually a packed year, and that’s not to mention all the NSO stuff and the Switch 1 games that run the Switch 2.

As I have told you all a million times before though, my absolute darling, without which I would have given this year a C+, was Pokopium.

Animal Crossing + Minecraft + Pokémon made by the guys behind Dragon Quest Builders. Who would’ve thought that this could be worse than opium? I’ll tell you what: I did! Right from the moment the game was announced in September, everyone I talked to about this told me that they weren’t sure or even seemed disinterested. I felt very vindicated when the game released to such an acclaim, that it became the highest rated Pokémon title ever, and it isn’t even a mainline one!

To the people who worked on Pokopium, thank you very much for your hard work. It paid off. Now please go and make a sequel or DLC so I can give you more money.

To Nintendo: Outstanding work on the Switch 2’s first year. Some bumps along the ride, but in general, you did well. You delivered is the goods. Now go and give us this generation’s heavy hitters. Also, stop being so secretive, and clog up the leaks!

Give us your thoughts on the Direct after you’ve watched it.

First of all, this was an absolutely wild ride of a rollercoaster. It had many extremely slow moments, punctuated by announcements that had me literally clapping in my studio apartment.

My highlights were as follows (in the order that they appeared during the Direct):

• Pokémon Pokopia update and paid DLC
• Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave (Sep 17)
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1, 2, and 3, Switch 2 editions
  • 1 - Out today!
  • 2 - Jul 30
  • 3 - Dec 3
• Xenoblade Genesis (2027)
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (2026)

I would have given the direct a B if it wasn’t for Ocarina of Time. It was a real slog at times, even though the Pokopium DLC and the insane drop of all three Xenoblade entries had me going nuts.

I feel as though Nintendo felt forced to tease Ocarina of Time because the entire planet was asking for it. They showed us so little though because, as I have explained before, they want to say a lot more about it at a later point, when they are also ready to show us the first teaser/trailer of the movie, alongside the kickoff for the 40th anniversary. If I had to bet, I’d say that we’ll hear more in September at worst, late August at best.

I think that the art direction for the game will be divisive. It will retain some of its charming fantasy features, but will be realistic in tone. I was divided in my head between that and an adaptation of the art work for the original game. I’m glad they went with this. It feels cinematic to the nth degree. I think that I will love it. I’m not sure that everyone will though.

“““Little””” details I noticed: Voice acting. The Triforce of courage appears on Links’ hand before he pulls the Master Sword. The Triforce glows on his LEFT hand.

So, my game plan for the rest of this year is:

1. I want to finish Tales of Arise in time for Adventures of Elliot on the 18th this month.
2. On July 23rd I’ll get Splatoon Raiders.
3. In August I’ll be fully immersed (pun intended) in the Pokopium DLC.
4. I’ll get Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave on September 17.
5. Nothing of interest to me seems to be releasing in October, so that’s the month for the first Xenoblade, so I can finally get into that. I’ve been waiting years for this moment.
6. If I had to guess, Ocarina of Time releases in late November.

Monaco Grand Prix
Circuit de Monaco
June 5-7, 2026

Next race:
Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix
Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya
June 12-14, 2026

Hi and welcome to this post

I was just wondering if anyone else (besides me) is currently interested in the indie web and also in extension 88x31 Buttons.

I have a small (and very much in-progress) website that I mostly coded myself. I started sometimes 2 years ago, so in 2024. And through that time it has gone through so many iterations. My site only consists of HTML and CSS and some minimal JavaScript. So I was just wondering if anyone also has an interest in the indie web and more importantly also has some buttons?

The idea or goal with this post was to just find some more people to add as neighbors because I find it somewhat scary to just ask people out of the blue or email them.

I also made my own if anyone wants to link it to their site please let me know.

This is my button:
https://postimg.cc/xqYQ8dJr

<a href="https://luna-uwu.nekoweb.org"><img src="https://luna-uwu.nekoweb.org/button-luna.png" alt="Luna's Button"/></a>

I guess the link to the site is this:
https://luna-uwu.nekoweb.org/ (I think i posted it before)

I guess that's about it. I hope you have a nice time of day wherever you are.

My current headphones (Philips TAH8506) are pretty worn out from daily use and recently a bit of plastic on the side cracked, so I figured it'd be a good time to get new ones. Since I know very little about literally any audio hardware it seems a good idea to ask here. Things I'm generally looking for:

• must be over-ear
• decent sound quality; I'm not going to pretend I'm an audiophile, the ones I have now are sufficient so anything as good will do
• connectivity: this is where things get tricky. My current usage is being connected through a jack when using pc and bluetooth when using my phone. These 2 connection modes are a must for me. However, I'd also really like if I was able to connect to pc over 2.4gz with a dongle because bluetooth latency is, frankly, awful. It's mostly why I use a wired connection to pc.
• microphone is not needed (in fact I'd prefer if they don't have one)
• ideally not more than $200
• available in Europe without oversea shipping
• nice to have, but not required:
  • a way to control playback (pause/volume etc) from the headphones. The ones I have now have a touch panel on the right and I occasionally use it (but probably wouldn't miss it)
  • ANC
  • cat-resistant cables (probably no such thing exists)

I'd also appreciate general pointers regarding which brands provide good quality at a decent price to make searching easier. Thanks in advance for any answers!

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

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.

The survey has been closed and the results are in!

Thank you to all the 213 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results!

I'd like to thank @TaylorSwiftsPickles and @DefinitelyNotAFae once again for helping out with this survey! <3

• ZIP download of the data

Thank you all again for participating! Hope to see you in the next survey! :)

As a kid and young teen I used to be the kind of smartass aspiring nerd that I assume some of you were as well and many of you encountered at some point: smart, interested in technology, cool music, and anything non-mainstream, but with less than stellar social skills, lacking the knowledge and wisdom that you get by actually doing things instead of talking about them, and with not many friends, because few people around me shared my interests.

I did have some friends in the offline world who were quite similar, but they each lived in a different town and we only saw each other a couple times per year. The upside of that was that we valued every meeting all the more, where we talked, listened to newly discovered music (this was pre-Spotify but also pre-Youtube), played video games either in splits-creen or just by taking turns in an interesting singleplayer game, rode bikes around and did lots of more or less dumb shit.

Most of us grew out of this phase and became... well, we became nerds, but ones who were more or less well-adjusted and social, with our own friend groups, girlfriends, interests and hobbies that we actually participated in and not just talked about.

Nick was less lucky. He was perhaps the most stereotypical of us all, both in the type and depth of his interests and in his inability to meaningfully participate in them or to participate in society in general, really. Looking back, many things about him make much more sense if I think of him as autistic - not something you grow out of. Perhaps a diagnosis would help him accept this and adapt, but he had a dislike of any kind of institutions and doctors specifically.

I didn't mind though. He understood some of the things I liked, much more than the average person, especially a person my age. I used to hate electronic music, and Nick was the guy who gave me a CD with some early jungle and drum'n'bass, which was my entry drug.

Of course, the file called something like "jungle <date> <author>.mp3" was actually terrible early drum'n'bass, and the file called "drum and bass mix.mp3" was actually a brilliant jungle set - I'm quite sure it was Kemistry & Storm, sounded something like this, only without the MC and even junglier.

He also introduced me to some instrumental hip-hop like DJ Krush, whose music I sometimes listen to to this day, and Art of Noise, which I'm frankly not a huge fan of these days, but it served as a great counter-argument in the early-to-mid days of online nerdom when many otherwise smart people thought that all electronic music is stupid.

Of course I gave him music that I discovered as well. And we also exchanged videogames, old DOS games, new releases, but also some great shareware and freeware games often meant for hot-seat multiplayer, with up to four kids sitting around one keyboard, which was amazing fun for many hours. Being twelve years old buys with access to a CD burner, we natually exchanged other things as well.

The interesting thing is that despite his in retrospect likely autism, he seemed quite socially resilient. When he was I think 8 years old, his parents travelled from a poor, only briefly free and democratic Czechia, to a large city in Texas for a year, where his mother was to teach at an inner city high school through an exchange programme.

That year brought a ton of interesting stories, it was a shock for all of them, but that's a different topic. He returned with drastically improved English skills, prejudice against obese people and mild racism towards black people. Hey, don't look at me, I'm just telling it how it is.

The interesting thing is that racism was very much alive and present in Czechia at that time, but not against black people. Our history is completely different in that regard, so it was very common for people to say "I hate Gypsies, but I have nothing against Black people, Black people are cool." This changed later as we basically imported American racism as a side effect of importing more and more American media, though we still neither commonly practice nor truly understand (likely applies to me as well) this kind of racism.

As we grew up and stopped meeting twice a year, for new year's eve and during summer vacation, we lost touch. The last good thing I did for him was sending him an invite to my favorite local discussion board, which is to this day the only general purpose discussion board I know of that is much better than Tildes.

I think I hadn't seen him for at least a decade when a friend of our parents', whom we also knew well, unexpectedly died. We all met at a memorial party some time after the funeral, talked and played board games. Nick was invited to play table football, but couldn't join because for some reason he was losing the ability to grip things firmly and accurately.

It was quite new, so he nervously joked about it. Some of the other people present tried to get him to a good neurologist early through their connections (and failed). It took I think about a year until he got his diagnosis: not a rare, aggressive type of multiple sclerosis, but ALS, the thing with the ice bucket challenge, the thing Stephen Hawking had. He was 32 years old.

To this day I have no idea if there's any medication that can at least slow it down, because his personality and "social resilience" meant that he rejected all institutional help. This made it quite hard for his aging parents too. He hated having his hair touched but also later couldn't really wash it or brush it himself. He hated getting help in general, so he dressed himself for as long as he could, even when it took him two hours to put on a t-shirt.

This is all irrational and stupid. It was also all granted to him untill the very end, and so untill the very end he was allowed to keep his dignity in that way.

The sad part is that I only know all of this from second-hand information. I can't say I was indifferent, but when he was diagnosed we hadn't been in any contact for a decade, we weren't friends anymore. And through all that time I have been battling a chronic illness of my own that is unlikely to kill me, but that limits my life a lot, and when it doesn't, I have so many things I want or need to do when I suddenly can. I also live on the opposite side of the country, however small it is.

That said, of course I could have messaged or visited him if I truly wanted to. By the time I thought about it, he was barely able to speak and at that point I frankly didn't have the balls to do it. Of course, he normally refused to see anyone, he did not want to be seen like that, but he did sometimes accept people he knew from childhood.

A few months ago, he started having breathing problems. It may not have been the ALS progression yet but an infection, so despite his hate of doctors and hospitals, his parents managed to convince him to get hospitalized. He was just barely able to swallow tiny bits of food at that point, so he still had something like a breakfast with his parents, very underweight but without a feeding tube.

During the night he died, aged 38. If you know about ALS, you know there is some mercy in this. Dying at home with your family is always preferable, but with ALS that commonly means gradually losing the ability to breathe and slowly suffocating.

The saddest thing about Nick is that his life was marked by unfulfilled potential. He was not very socially competent and very impractical, but also quite intelligent and undoubtedly capable... of something. But he never managed to find the something. Worked a basic tech job for which he was not overqualified exactly, but certainly sharper than the job required (though I'm not entirely sure how he felt about it). Didn't really build anything for himself. As far as I know he never was with a woman despite almost certainly wanting to. I don't think he was particularly happy with his life either. And he never got the chance to change that.

Seeing myself in the slideshow of photos from his life during the funeral only made it more apparent how important our group of friends was in his life. The funeral took place in a neighboring town because the town where he lived only has a church next to the graveyard, not a secular ceremonial building, and he wouldn't want to have his funeral in a church. We all came, his family came, and so did his work colleagues, some of whom cried as well.

After the funeral we talked and ate and drank in his parents' flat. One that they will be forced to leave soon after probably nearly 30 years, moving into a smaller one and getting rid of some of their stuff. Through a slit in the door I saw a glimpse of what I assume was furniture and/or machines designed to make care easier, obtained despite his hardheadedness.

Okay, wipe your tears.

When I was a kid, Pornhub didn't exist. At some point we got Shoutcast, online radios and TVs thanks to which you could literally watch porn in Winamp, but before that me and my classmates sometimes watched a porn VHS one of us found in their parents' bedroom, and we also swapped CDs with porn. Those were hard to come by (no, don't say it), so each was precious, and during breaks in school we would talk about who's hotter, whether Amanda or Natascha. We were probably 12 years old when this started and I think we all turned out fine despite that.

Well, the one thing I got from Nick and never returned is a CD with his handwriting saying "P.vids .mpg open". When the three videos he burned on the CD didn't fill it entirely, he didn't finalize the burning process so that more could be added later, he was practical like that.

After remembering that something like this probably exists, I went through a box of my old stuff at my parents' house and actually found it. I still own an old laptop with an optical drive, so I put the CD in, but it failed to read. I tried cleaning the laser lens with a q-tip just in case because it looked dusty, and it really worked. VLC, one of the best free applications ever, naturally came (no!!) through as well.

The "last modified" date on each of the three files said December 19th, 2003. Obviously I looked at the videos, and it turns out that we were completely normal heterosexual boys with completely normal tastes. Not surprising, but nice to have a confirmation. One of the girls had Garfield socks, something that I remembered and laughed when I saw it so many years later.

This CD truly is the only physical thing that I ever got from him, as far as I know. I mean, there may have been some small things we exchanged as kids, but those were lost to time, whereas the CD rested among CDs of 70s French avantgarde and old Manowar albums.

I really don't need to explain how sad the whole situation was. But this one stupid CD gave it a funny and honestly kind of cool twist, which also made it easier to share this whole situation with various friends of mine who never met him, and who very much appreciated the absurdity, wholesome and morbid at the same time.

So now you can too.

I've done some basic research, bought a guide book, read travel blogs. Still this will be a first time visit to a massive metropolis. If anyone is willing to share, I'm looking for advice.

What should I know re transportation? Does anyone have advice for reasonably priced delicious food? I've heard Oaxacan cuisine is good. I'll be traveling with a pescatarian. I know we're going to the Anthropology Museum and setting up a tour to the floating farms. That still leaves a couple of days. What are your don't miss experiences? What have you really enjoyed? Are there good websites for finding concert tickets? What about safety?

I still think it is effectively the best possible version of a mainstream game platform that can realistically exist under current conditions and I think it is better that it exists than if it didn't. In particular their desire to not be reliant on Windows means the Linux gaming is in significantly better place than it would have been otherwise. They simply constantly remind me how low absolute bar the best possible version of the worst possible kind of game store platform is.

My non exhaustive list of problems in no particular order is

• Inability to filter by addtional EULA/DRM/account needed. Steam is already about all of what I am willing to tolerate. Not letting me hide these products is only wasting my time.
• Review system heavily biases towards positive and kills nuance.
• Inability to turn off game updates. For me personally this is the single biggest problem I have with the platform
• Related is inability to go back to previous game version.
• Refund window is a bad joke. For some kinds of games it is fine, for others it does not even allow to get out of tutorial. Sadly it is still better than a lot of other platforms
• I'm seeing more helpful recommendation features that are not possible to turn off - Calendar
• The wishlist/sale feature is extremely effective in enticing impulse purchases. Features that would limit this are of course not implemented. For example setting wishlist alerts only for below a certain price

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?

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!

Hey, so I've used an XBone controller for... God knows how long. I've been playing Mina the Hollower and realized that it's causing some pain along the muscles going from the top of my left middle and ring finger past my wrist; I've got piano fingers and kinda grip the analog pretty hard, so my fingers are going past 90° holding the thing and I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be doing this anymore.

I think if I had a bigger controller I'd be fine? I'm trying my arcade stick, but it's not great for fine motion like the analog. Does anyone have any experience with having to move out of their usual controller due to pain, and what did you do?

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.

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 was talking with a friend about recent events that seemed eerily suspicious to me, and was wondering if all of you might have any similar experiences.

(Preemptively tagging this as politics. If anything in this thread is deemed malicious or inflammatory, let me know and I'll delete the thread)

Hello,

So, it is more and more evident that I need to do something about burning my head and squinting when facing in the general direction of the sun during summer.

Ideally I would wear something like a straw hat but I don't think I can, there is something about them that are intolerable to me.

The things I imagine I'd like with straw hats is that they protect face, eyes, scalp and neck (if appropriately sized) while still being fairly cool (as in temperature, not style!).

So, that's the requirements: some kind of garment that would protect my head from the sun, while not overheating my head, ideally giving some shade to the eyes, and not being a straw hat!

I don't care much for social norms but if you recommend something it would be nice to let me know if it is supposed to be worn by specific groups in specific circumstances (for example men attending sporting events) and what breaking those norms could result in.

I understand I could get sunscreen and a pair of sunglasses but sunglasses are in the same category as straw hats and sunscreen has to be replenished (both as in the buying more bottles and applying it on myself).

I'm up for different kinds of hats, hat-ish and fabrics, I just don't really know anything about them, yet!

Do you think it is ethical?
Should robots be remotely controlled at all times or should they be automated?
Who do you think should be held responsible if a robot accidentally commits a war crime?
Do you think war would be more frequent if there were no humans fighting?
Also a more general question: what do you think is the future of robots?

With Google search going AI-first, I'm really interested in trying it out. But I don't know anyone IRL who's used it.

Kagites of Tildes, what do you think of the search subscription product? Do you find the privacy satisfactory? And for bonus points, how do you find the anti-AI ("slop-stop") features?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like social media, trackers and hats.tinfoil. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was keen-eyed.

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 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?

"Different" can be interpreted in any way, in any context, for any magnitude.

When did you realize you were different?
What prompted it?
How did you feel about it then?
Has the difference changed over time?
Have your feelings changed over time?

groggy waving @ reader's screen in similish distressed moodlet

Hi uh, a recent bing update corrupted my passwords from a while back recovery options seem obscene. I swear I had the right email but didn't get anything back.

I do currently have access to the email (however have multiple mails so not sure which one) but think I did the gmail + thing & forgot the suffix.

thx!

This is the fifth Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twenty-fifth overall. We are discussing Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. For June we will discuss How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Wexler.

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.

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.

Similarly to the few years old thread I made for webserials I would like to recommend and introduce some quests and fanfictions. Quests are a collaborative(ideally) stories that usually live in forums. The usual format is that the writer/s enable the readers an input in how the story is written which is usually done by voting. I found that fanfictions vary in quality wildly but any sufficiently popular work will have some that are very good.

For the tyrants fear your might - https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/for-the-tyrants-fear-your-might-a-quest-of-interstellar-rebellion.83706/ - (quest) - a story of a an entertainment planet in a hypercapitalistic society rebelling. Does not have a single protagonist

The Practice War - https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/the-practice-war-complete.31698/ - (quest, Practice Effect) - humanity creates space faring dragons but is defeated by an advanced and enigmatic race.

Divided Loyalties - https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/warhammer-fantasy-divided-loyalties-an-advisors-quest.44838/ - (quest, Warhammer fantasy) - a Grey wizard becomes the advisor to the Elector Count of Sylvania and later continuing on in her adventures elsewhere. Very long with several distinct arcs

RHUNRIKKI STROLLAR - https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/rhunrikki-strollar-warhammer-fantasy-golden-age-dwarf-runelord-quest.63581/ - (quest, Warhammer fantasy) - a life of dwarven golden age runemaster among the coming troubles

The Burbank Situation - https://archiveofourown.org/works/19189534 - (Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Chuck) - Chuck has some unusual hobbies, such as LARPing as a vampire hunter. First part of a series

My Name Is Beautiful - https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/155302 - (Unordinary) - reincarnation story. A side character from original story runs a rebellion built on lies and manipulation against the Authorities. Probably the darkest story on this list

To The Stars - https://archiveofourown.org/works/777002 - (Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika) - story set in a ai run world that tries its best among a brutal war with advanced aliens. And of a magical girl whose wish was to be extraordinary

Birds of a Feather - https://archiveofourown.org/works/15996890 - (Harry Potter) - this is both a solid character exploration and a depiction of WW2 Britain

A Song of Ice and Fires That Weren't All My fault - https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/a-song-of-ice-and-fires-that-werent-all-my-fault-asoiaf-dresden-files.336499/ - (Game of Thrones/Dresden Files) - Dresden makes a living in Braavos finding things. The merging of these two different settings is very good

The Maretian - https://www.fimfiction.net/story/396744/ - (The Martian/My Little Pony) - Mark Watney is joined on Mars by the crew of an alien race. More fantastical than Martian but still features engineering challenges. MLP fandom needs a lot of getting used to but has some good stories

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!

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.

Hello Tildes.

I feel like i have movie fatigue, i don’t feel like i manage to get hyped for new movies.
Do anyone of you have any recommendations for older movies, lets say 2010 and older. It can be any genre.
Can go really old as well, i really enjoyed 12 Angry Men.

Thank you very much in advance!

About every six weeks, I go on a "stock the pantry" shopping trip to buy long-keeping items and non-perishables in quantity - cat food and litter, Costco, etc. After two hours of shopping yesterday, I was a little shocked to realize I'd spent half of my take-home pay on a trip that previously was about 25% less expensive. No one item had drastically increased in price - everything had just gone up that much.

[I'm also smarting because my primary care physician announced she was switching to a concierge care model, and I just made the first quarterly payment. U.S. healthcare sucks so badly that I can't take a chance on the two-year waitlists for in-network primary care M.D.s who provide 10-minute "annual exam" visits in my area.]

I'm dropping subscription services, buying cheaper conventional food instead of organic, getting generic personal care products instead of brand names and using less of them, cooking even more at home, thinking about making my own cat food, skipping buying pretty flowers for outdoors this year... and still feeling like the budget isn't going to keep stretching.

I know a great many aspects of Western lifestyles aren't sustainable, and I've tried to do my part to minimize material consumption. But there are so many expectations that you'll pay for perhaps excessive shelter (we didn't need a house the size we have, but it was what was available and affordable), have a car for work, be able to pay for services for things you don't have time, skill, or physical capacity to do yourself, and other monetary drains. I'm losing some sleep.

What are you doing to cope with exorbitant rents/mortgages, skyrocketing utility and grocery bills, extravagant medical costs, unaffordable childcare and services?

Do you feel like your quality of life has declined, due to missing luxuries, anxiety, fewer opportunities to connect with friends and family, or anything else?

Open rant here.

A little less than a year ago, I asked for your recommendations on bread maker tips, tricks, and recipes, and thought I’d give a small update.

The bread maker I bought is functionally the Breville Custom Loaf, rebranded for the local market (“Tramontina by Breville”). I paid R$3069 for it. It was on sale: the same machine now sells for anywhere between R$2991 to R$3690. (These equate to about 565USD then and 594USD to 732USD now, considering contemporaneous exchange rates.)

My +/- weekly recipe eventually settled upon via much trial and many errors comes from an amalgamation of various sources, by now mostly lost. In the summer, I have to halve the recipe and make bread twice as often, or the maresia / damp sea air makes it mould before we can eat the whole thing!

I have also not tried to make anything but this exact bread since I started. My dreams of raisin buns are as of yet unrealised. Next year for the end of the year, I plan to make panettone in it, as we don’t plan to travel.

My unhalved recipe is:

• 450ml water (filtered, cool)
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 4 cups 100% whole wheat / integral flour
• >1 tsp demerara sugar
• <1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp (freezer stored, instant dry) yeast
• ~3/4 cup walnuts, in pieces, raw, unsalted, to fill the “automatic” dispenser on the machine (sometimes the bulk goods shop by me is out of nuts. the bread is better with nuts, but fine without.)

Cost wise, this breaks down to:

• 500mL olive oil : R$25 (0,75/loaf)
• 1kg flour : R$7 (3,17/loaf)
• 1kg sugar : R$10 (0,05/loaf)
• 1kg salt : R$4 (0,02/loaf)
• 100g walnuts : R$10 (12,50/loaf)

I didn’t include the yeast in the breakdown because I have yet to buy any. The 1kg package of yeast I purchased four years ago to make pizza and kept in the freezer since is still going strong. At present, a kilo of yeast costs ~R$23.

Without nuts, my cost per loaf is R$3,99, while with nuts, it’s R$16,49. My local supermarket sells a (frankly inferior) and much smaller (350g) “100% whole wheat” loaf for R$25.

Having kept incomplete records, I believe for most of the year we have made a loaf about every five days: let’s pretend means over the past year, I’ve made 70 loaves at about a 50/50 split of nuts or no-nuts, so let’s put my total cost of making bread as R$716,80. If we buy bread, it’s an every-other-day occurance, so R$4562,50 spent on bread in a year. Adding the cost of the bread maker to the mix, if these were real figures, we would have saved R$776,70 so far, just in this year alone.

And it has served us well, with some slight oddities!

The first is based on the machine: never once in the usage of the machine has the “automatic” dispenser of nuts automatically added the nuts at the proper stage. I have read the documentation, and I can find no explanation. At present, if I want nuts added, I have to remain at home when the maker is going, as it screams something awful (buzzer) when it’s “going to” add the nuts, and then I run along and poke open the dispenser door with my finger until the latch opens and the nuts dispense into the awaiting dough. If I know I won’t be home, I don’t add nuts, because otherwise, I will come home to a nice loaf of bread and a small dispenser of lightly warmed nuts. (Heh.)

The second is that my recipe is not as good when I have to halve it! In the damp season, I had to throw away a few half-loaves, as mold loves my poor little bread, and the bread does not survive well in the fridge. But splitting the recipe (and altering the settings on the bread maker to reflect, which is itself an imprecise science) has yet to lead to a smaller version of my usual recipe: what comes out is a biscotti-shaped, flat, dense, but still edible loaf. I’m still figuring it out!

All in all, thanks to everyone who encouraged me in the previous thread, and let this be encouragement to anyone else on the fence to try out a breadmaker!

The survey has been closed and the results are in!

Thank you to all the 115 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results! And the next four surveys we will do are:

1. In first place with 26 votes: What is your gender identity?
2. Second place with 25 votes: What's your favorite video game?
3. Third place 24 with votes: How optimistic are you about the future?
4. And fourth with 23 votes: How often do you visit/read Tildes?

• ZIP download of the data

Thank you all again for participating! Hope to see you in the next survey! :)

Question for those interested, what would be a good way to pose the next question "What is your gender identity?"

I have some ideas but I'd like to hear other people's thoughts too since I think historically this has been one of the more debated questions in the demographics surveys. And I think this one's an important one not to mess up. Let me know!

I am looking for a Buy-It-For-Life pen. I've had the Parker Jotters for years and love them, but I am in need of something with a little longer life expectancy on the barrel.

My first thought was James Brand The Burwell, however I am just now really diving into the BIFL Pen world and curious on what you guys suggestion / use.

Assume the money cap of $100 for now, unless you have some out of this world amazing option over that cap.

I've made an effort to read some more poems this year and always enjoy finding out any more when I can. In the UK you can find anthologies of "The Nation's Favourite Poems" and "The Nation's Favourite Comic Poems" et alia by the BBC, which is where I've learnt most of my new ones this year. It'd be great to see what poems have left an impression on you this year.

For brevity, I'll put a short one here and then two longer ones I discovered this year down in the comments.

Two Cures for Love - Wendy Cope

Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter.
The easy way: get to know him better.

Hey all!

I'm currently cleaning out the basement and rearranging some things after my brother in law has moved out. He spent the better part of every afternoon down here working out and (I'm assuming) sweating (figuratively) gallons. I pulled the mats up to move em around and was hit with a deep earthy smell which made me IMMEDIATELY panic. There was only one super dark spot which was immediately washed off with warm soapy water and steel wool. There are other places that don't look too bad, but I am seeing markings on the floor elsewhere that match the pattern of the interlocking mat.

I'd like to keep working out down here, but I'd also like to not cause mold problems in my own house. Can anyone think of a way to essentially insulate the mat from the cement floor without creating a different problem where the plastic bottom ALSO creates an environment for the mold to grow? It's also possible that I'm WAY blowing this out of proportion...

I'll include pics on a follow up post

Most social media sites have options for muting and blocking people. As we know, muting is one-way (they see me, I don't see them) and blocking is two-way (neither see each other).

Recently, while having too much caffeine in my system way too late, I had the thought that "blocking" is a far more negative term than what it should be. Sometimes it's done in spite, absolutely. You wanna slap somebody for being how they are.

But sometimes you just recognize that there's someone who you have nothing against, whom you might even like if you met them in real life, but in this context of limited human connect, you understand that the only possible communication between you and them would be toxic. That your opinions, your way of speaking, perhaps your whole existence offends them. Or vice versa.

So you protect them from yourself by blocking them, in lieu of a better word. I think there should be a better word but I haven't figured out what it should be yet. "Spare"?

(P.S. I think tildes should perhaps have such a functionality)