This is a monthly thread for those who need it. Vent, share your experiences, ask for advice, talk about how you are doing. Let's make this a compassionate space for all who may need one.
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 current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:
| Question | Survey opens | Survey closes |
|---|---|---|
| Vote for the next 4 surveys | ||
| What is your gender identity? | 2026-05-31 18:00 UTC | 2026-06-07 10:00 UTC |
| What's your favorite video game? | 2026-06-07 18:00 UTC | 2026-06-14 10:00 UTC |
| How optimistic are you about the future? | 2026-06-14 18:00 UTC | 2026-06-21 10:00 UTC |
| How often do you visit/read Tildes? | 2026-06-21 18:00 UTC | 2026-06-28 10:00 UTC |
Another week, another survey! Now that the next four weeks have been voted on and we know what's on the docket, we start off with the top voted question: What is your gender identity?
Special thanks to @TaylorSwiftsPickles and @DefinitelyNotAFae for helping with figuring out the survey! I could not have done it without them! <3
Please submit your ideas for questions here! Even if they've been submitted already by someone else. All input is valuable! You can view all submitted questions on this dashboard.
Thank you all for participating!
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
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
This is the fourth Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twenty-fourth overall. We are discussing The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See. For May, we will discuss Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov.
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.
Over the month of May, 14 participants moved 176 games out of their backlogs.
Congratulations to the following Bingo winners:
Special congratulations:
To everyone who played games, shared their thoughts, or even just read through the comments for the event:
This event is amazing because y'all all make it amazing. Thank you for playing.
Use this topic to post your final bingo cards, give recaps of your games, and share any thoughts you have on the event itself.
The question on everyone's mind.
The feud between the Motivateds and the Mellows was a (possibly one-sided?) rivalry for the ages.
Who came out on top?
Well, I'm happy to report that the final numbers are in, and the Grand Winners are:
We are all one team! There's no actual rivalry. We've actually been gaming together as one wonderful little group this whole time! (Now everybody saw "AWWWWWW" and get all sappy)
Also, the jury has returned a verdict in u/Wes's trial:
He has been found guilty of being awesome. His sentence is that he is required to feel immensely proud of his community service in making the amazing Backlog Bingo site and responding thoughtfully to everyone all month long.
S accounted for a full 12% of what we played.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:
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.
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!
This is the place for casual discussion about our pets. Photos are welcome, show us your pet(s) and tell us about them!
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 playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
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?
Hi tilderinos! We all love a good relationship drama thread, so I wanted to add my own. I'm posting from my main account because all this dirty laundry is already open and out between both my partner and all my friends and family. Thank you for any advice or support you can offer <3
I had to use ChatGPT to help with this, so that's why it reads a little different and ended up a bit like a reddit post. What I initially wrote was a stream of consciousness and it was really difficult for someone to read and give any good advice. So I kindly asked Mr Altman to help me format my thoughts and remove any particular one sided emotions or weighting to make it a little more objective and I'm more happy with what it's come out with.
My partner and I are going through a very difficult point in our relationship, and I would really appreciate some outside perspectives.
The short version is: my partner of nearly four years recently told me that our relationship has always felt suffocating to her. She said she has tried to look for positives from the last few years and cannot find any. At the same time, she cried heavily while saying this, has booked herself into therapy, and says she does want a partner eventually. She just does not know whether that partner is me, or whether she can be in this relationship as it currently exists.
I love her deeply, but I also feel ignored, pushed away, and emotionally starved. I am trying to decide whether I should stay and give her space, leave, or take a formal break by moving out for a few months.
For context, I have had three serious long-term relationships before this one, and I think I have become much more emotionally mature through them, though I’m sure I still have plenty to learn. This is my partner’s first serious relationship. She has not dated much before, and in my opinion, she has also not had many deep, emotionally close friendships. She is also strongly suspected to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, though she has never been officially diagnosed.
We met online and were extremely into each other. When we met in person, the chemistry was great, and afterwards we missed each other constantly. After almost a year, I started asking how we could make the relationship work long-term. She said it felt like a big jump, but we talked about it a lot and she eventually seemed fine with the idea.
Not long after, I moved in with her, which also meant moving country. To her credit, she was extremely helpful and considerate during that process.
Just before I moved in, she broke her leg badly and spent over a week in hospital. I helped as much as I could, but it was a very stressful start. I was moving country, taking on more chores, and trying to care for her at the same time. I did it because I love her, and I knew she would physically recover eventually.
What we did not expect was how much the recovery would affect her mentally. She became quite depressed, which is understandable, and it really took the wind out of the first year and a half of us living together. She had very little energy for me or the relationship, and intimacy was limited. I was not getting my needs met either, but we talked a lot and I felt like I understood what she was going through.
Around a year ago, things started to improve. Her mood was better more often, she seemed more present, and when we were intimate, she seemed to put in more effort. I was still the one initiating anything physical, which bothered me, but I hoped that would improve over time. Dates, time together, and our general friendship also seemed to be getting better. I felt like she was slowly trusting me more and letting me in.
Our living situation probably has not helped. I work from home all day, every day, in a room next to the living room. It is a very public space, and I think neither of us has really felt alone. Sometimes I would also play video games after work in that same area, which meant I was still in her space.
One of the hardest parts is that my partner has extreme difficulty understanding her own emotions. She talks openly about this. She often says she bottles everything up and does not really understand what she feels or why. She has also said she used to feel a lot more when she was younger, but at some point her difficult relationship with her parents caused her to start repressing things.
She often cannot answer direct questions about what she wants. Most of the time, her answer is “I don’t know.”
Sometimes, if we sit down and talk through it slowly, I can help her get to a clearer answer. But it takes a long time, and it is obviously hard work for her. I am also worried that this dynamic can become almost like therapy, where I am trying to guide her into understanding herself. I do not think that is healthy for either of us.
Another thing that scares me is that she seems unable to hold onto positive emotional experiences. We have had romantic dates and close moments where I know she felt something. I could see love, warmth, energy, and joy in her. But if I ask her about those moments a day, week, or month later, it is like the feeling is gone. She will just say, “It was fine.”
That makes the situation very confusing. When she lets her guard down, the relationship can feel genuinely loving and connected. That is part of why I am struggling to walk away. But she often makes an effort to avoid these moments.
I also have a strong suspicion that I might be the first supportive relationship with anyone she's had in her life before. Her family and her close friends (the same friends all the way from high school) do not offer any kind of emotional support or affection. They are the kind of people who don't say "well done!" but "...You could have done this better." There's been lots of instances during the relationship where she's reacted with confusion or surprise at what I would consider basic levels of kindness and support.
This past winter, her mood dropped again. She became increasingly cold and shut me out. We went a long time with no physical contact, not even cuddling. She did not seem interested in anything I had to say, whether it was important or not, and she had very little to share with me either.
After a few weeks, I sat her down and asked what was going on.
That is when she told me the relationship was too much for her, and that it always had been. She said it felt suffocating and that she did not know how to “come up for air.” She said she had tried to find positive things in the relationship but could not find any, not even one, from the last three years.
At the same time, she was looking me in the eyes and crying extremely hard. We talked for hours, and I think she got a lot of catharsis from finally saying it.
After that conversation, she immediately booked herself into therapy because she said she needed someone to help her understand herself. I think that is a good step. But it also feels very much like an “I need help now” decision, rather than her having any clear long-term idea of what she wants.
She has admitted, through tears, that she thinks she would be lonely and unhappy alone. She does want a partner. She just does not know if that partner is me, or if she can be with me in the version of the relationship we have had so far. Honestly, I agree that the relationship as it has been is not sustainable.
Since that conversation, we have drifted apart. I am sad about it and I miss my girlfriend, but right now it feels like we are two separate people living in the same building.
The first practical thing I did was move my office outside the house, because I thought that would give us both more breathing room. I think that was a good step, but it has not fixed the deeper issue.
She has also become completely glued to her phone in a way I have never seen before. She still uses her usual apps, but she also downloaded a random stranger-chat app, similar to Omegle, where she talks to people about their lives. She seems fascinated by it, almost like it is a real-life sitcom.
I was obviously concerned by that. I challenged her on whether it was appropriate to be using an app like that while our relationship was in such a bad place, especially when those apps can easily become sexual. She said she deletes anyone who gets sexual and that she just wants to talk to people, but does not know how to do that any other way.
She offered me her phone, and from what I saw, the conversations were shallow and non-sexual. I do not think she is cheating on me. What it looks like to me is that she is seeking low-pressure connection with strangers while avoiding the pressure and emotional weight of our actual relationship.
She does not seem able to tell me what she wants from me or the relationship. When I ask whether she wants to stay together, move apart, take a break, reduce contact, stop physical affection completely, or work on things, the answer is usually “I don’t know.”
For my part, I want to support her, but she is not really accepting support from me. In fact, I think my care may sometimes make her feel more pressured, upset, or resentful. I have stopped being romantic and I am not initiating physical touch. I am trying to give her as much space as possible. But even small thoughtful gestures, like making her a cup of tea, can be met with coldness or irritation. I understand why she might feel overwhelmed, but it still hurts.
The practical side is not a major barrier. I have a good financial buffer, my job is secure and remote, and I could rent an apartment or potentially move in with someone we know. I have options, and moving out would be reasonably low-risk for me.
So I think my options are:
This might give therapy a chance to help. But it could also leave me waiting indefinitely for someone who may never be ready, or who may eventually decide I am not her person.
This would hurt both of us, and she would lose a major source of support. But it might also be the cleanest option if she genuinely cannot be in the relationship and I am only prolonging the pain.
This feels like a possible middle ground. It would give her space to understand herself without the daily pressure of living with me, and it would give me some emotional distance too. The idea would be to check in after a set period and keep only light contact in the meantime.
What would you do in my position?
More specifically:
I love her, and when things are good between us, the connection feels rare and real. But those moments are not happening enough, and I am struggling with how cold and uncertain things have become.
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!