Hi all. I'm interested on hearing about recipes you've come up with yourself, whether completely from scratch or variation on an existing one. Maybe you were lacking an ingredient one day, and subbed one that changed the recipe in a good way. Maybe you tried a dish at a restaurant that you love and attempted to recreate it at home. Maybe you had a bunch of leftover ingredients you didn't know what to do with, so decided to throw them all together and pray for the best. Or maybe inspiration struck suddenly one day for a perfect dish, and you gave it a shot. Would love to hear the backstory of the recipe if you have it. I'll start.

Cincinnati style daal. The family chili recipe growing up was cincinatti/skyline style chili. I've thus always preferred my chili without beans, and I love the depth of flavor cincinnati style chili has. My family even likes to use ground turkey meat because we think it absorbs the flavors of the spices better than beef does. When I moved to the UK, I suddenly had access to excellent Indian food, daals now being one of my favorites. One thing that immediately struck me about daals was the depth of flavor in them. The lentils serve to add texture and some creaminess, but the spices in it are the highlight of the dish. In fact, this kinda reminded me of my family chili. I began wondering, could I make a daal but with the spices from my family chili? This would be pretty nice, as turkey is kinda hard to find outside of christmas time here and lentils are a good low-cost protein. Well, it turns out the cooking process for daal and my family's chili are pretty similar, so I took a black daal recipe from dishoom and tried subbing the cincinatti chili spices for the spices in the daal. Many of the other ingredients between the two recipes are similar. And it's come out pretty good! I'm still refining it, it lacks some umami without the meat, but I think the next batch will be great. Serving it with naan and cilantro, instead of spaghetti. Always with shredded cheese and chopped onions of course.

Filipino Dip. One of my favorite recipes to make is chicken adobo, so easy to make and it's delicious. I usually have some chicken and sauce left after making a batch, and one day it occurred to me that there was enough sauce left I could dip a sandwich in it. Huh, that's kinda similar to a french dip. So I shredded up the remaining chicken, toasted a baguette, and sauteed a bunch of onions to add to the sandwich. It was absolutely delicious, and what I will be doing with my leftover chicken adobo from now on.

St Patrick's Day Ramen. So, this year I decided to make my family's St Patrick's Day meal. Kinda hard to do in the UK, as corned beef is really not a big thing. (Yes, I know they have the tinned version, no, it's nothing like the real deal). But I corned my own beef, and then braised it in red wine, and invited friends over to share. Afterwards, with all the corned beef gone, a friend and I were looking at the braising liquid. There was a ton of it left, and it tasted frankly delicious. My friend pointed out that it reminded him of a ramen broth, and so an idea was born. I bought some thinly sliced beef from the local asian grocery store, and assembled the ramen with it, the noodles, cabbage, thinly sliced green apples (I know it seems weird, but it's used in the family cabbage recipe), and pickled garlic/cucumbers made from the leftover corned beef brine. It came out delicious, and will definitely be doing it next year.

Oven roasted brussel sprouts and carrots. This came from a restaurant near me that unfortunately closed. They would make the most amazing, crispy, roast brussel sprouts and carrots served with a tangy, smokey dressing. After it closed, I would dream of these brussel sprouts, and I tried googling recipes to find something similar with no luck. I knew only a couple of things: that the head chef was Peruvian and said on the menu it had inspired this dish; there was mezcal in the dressing, likely providing the smokey component. So after researching Peruvian recipes, I've come up with a vinaigrette that's as close as I can remember: bragg's cider vinegar, juice from one lime, olive oil, salt and black pepper, and a splash of mezcal. If available, add a touch of aji amarillo paste. May need to add a little sugar for a hint of sweetness. It took some time to figure out a crispy brussel sprout too, as home ovens can't get as hot as a commercial kitchen, but also finally found an oven roasting recipe I was happy with.

Looking forward to hearing everyone elses recipes!

Another year, another Le Mans race

Anyone staying up for the full 24 hours?

Hyperpole:
Thursday, 11 June 2026 - 20:00 CET (18:00 UTC)

Race Start:
Saturday, 13 June 2026 - 16:00 CET (14:00 UTC)

If any therapists are reading this, feel free to skip this post or at least know that I do not intend to offend you or your profession.

I happened upon that phrase while scrolling somewhere. I thought that it is a harsh thing to say and while it is not something I entirely agree with, I also do not entirely disagree with it. It was real provocative too, so it really got me thinking.

As someone that has done hundreds of hours of therapy with little to show for it, I feel like it is an understandable thing to say because on a deep fundamental level, I truly get it.

If you are talking to a friend or loved one (who is not being paid to talk to you) about mental health, if you bring up some personal issue, raise a life problem, anything deeper than surface level interpersonal stuff, there is a high likelihood that the conversation will steer towards a version of this question: have you tried therapy?

That is - probably unintentionally and unbeknownst to them - the signal to me that the conversation is now over. They do not have the mental capacity to talk about it at the moment, maybe they feel they are out of their depth with such a heavy subject matter, or perhaps they do not have the life experience to relate to it. Maybe all of the above. It is all fair enough. So they bring up their best bet for a solution that in their mind might help. It gets very old but I remind myself to appreciate their good faith and good intentions.

The answer to that question is that yes I have indeed tried therapy. I have tried so much therapy, in fact, that whole teams of therapists have concluded that therapy cannot help me. I would be remiss if I was not open about that bias, and it is probably the reason I have found the incentive to spend so many hours writing this post in the first place.

The way we behave and interact with each other is unrecognizable compared to just one or two centuries ago before industrialization. It used to be that whatever troubles you were dealing with, you probably had a community around you. Even if you did not talk about what troubled you directly, the people were there to make you feel safe. You didn't have to talk about diagnostic criteria and therapeutic methods and psychiatric theories and mindfulness and self-help resources... you had people to talk to. The simple fact that people were around you all day every day meant that you got on with it and coped with things. You had a neighborhood or village or whatever in which friends and family lived and worked closely together every day. People to talk to all day. That is therapeutic in itself.

Nowadays, work-life balance is such an enforced thing that connections seem to be in rigid boxes. Not that people are not friends with their coworkers, but it is my impression that it is kind of rare to truly befriend a coworker. So you have a box that is called work, and you have a box that is called life. And you do not much mix them together - you certainly do not talk about heavy life things at work. Big no-no, even though it is the former that takes up a majority of most people's time awake during the week. Not to go on a tangent about capitalism, but the way our entire system is built up around individualism is not something that can be ignored here either. Through urbanization, we seem to have lost our sense of one another. I of course cannot speak to other societies than my own, but I do see these sentiments from people that live in other countries of the western world too.

I do not think that it is controversial to conclude that individualism can be extremely harmful. The we-society of the past pretty quickly transformed into our current me-society. So much so that "self-help" is a huge industry. A lot of people are getting by just fine of course, but for those of us who are not fitting into boxes, this societal obsession with individualism only worsens our states of mind. Off to school, off to university, off to work, start a family, get married, build a house, mow the lawn, rinse and repeat for the next generation. That is what the majority is doing and they have little to no problems doing it. Some of them think it is so normal and easy, even, that it becomes repetitive so they find themselves calling it the hamster wheel and start writing articles about how boring it is to be married and have children and own property.

But if you do not fit into those boxes, are not capable of these things, do not have a supportive environment, well good luck to you, there will be no networking, no meaningful connections, there will be major hardship ahead if you have not somehow managed to figure it all out on your own. Due to being even slightly socially inept, behind your peers in any way, or if you chose a different path in life, chances are that you are sooner or later going to run into this so-called platonic prostitution of the therapeutic industry.

On your own, family might be there but they are not truly supportive, might have a friend or two but they are not really close friends that can be relied upon for important stuff. Try to talk to them about things and they end up distancing themselves because it is either not that kind of relationship or they do not actually care or you are simply too much to handle for them. Therapy becomes the answer when you bring up the tough subjects and the things that happened as a child, be it bullying or emotional neglect or some kind of violence against you that the adults should have been there to protect you from or at least have seen the signs afterwards but never did. You are far enough outside of what is considered the normal problems, or you are already far enough into a long spiral of mental health issues, or far enough into the depths of psychiatric diagnoses that in order for someone to talk to you, to help you, they have to be paid to do it. How humiliating. But you are told therapy is the only way to help you.

Unfortunately all you can get is one session every two weeks. And the therapist does not even have time for all your problems despite being paid a hefty hourly rate by you or by the system. Come back next time and hope they remember their notes because otherwise you will spend half of their precious scheduled time reiterating your issues and reminding your therapist of your history. But you tell yourself that it is fair enough that they forgot some minor details like the death of your loved one. They are paid to be there, but they are only human after all, you tell yourself it is not fair to expect them to perfectly remember everything. Never mind all the other problems that arose in the time since the previous meeting, but there is not enough time to talk about that. But this is therapy, this will help and things will get better now!

I would usually spend the rest of the day after a therapy session thinking about what I forgot to bring up. The next day I would try to write a few things down, but once the next session comes around, those things are already out-dated and they do not seem to be relevant anymore. It does not matter anyway because there might have been a new cut on my arm because of things brought up in therapy that there was not enough time to process, and I did not care to hide it, and so now the entire new session is spent treating this tiny symptom of illness instead of the years of trauma that is the reason for it. That is how it has to be because the therapist has rules to follow, a system designed in such a way that something like self-harm must immediately be brought front and center. Forget your traumas for now. Forget your life circumstances. Let us do some breathing exercises! Let us do some grounding techniques! We should engage in some mindfulness!

Anyone would probably become mentally unwell and fulfill diagnostic criteria for something or other if their living situation became bad enough. Top of your class, job interviews, get romantically involved and move in to a great apartment together, get accepted to university, probably not going to be a whole lot of symptoms there when things are going great and breezing by. Lose it all though and you are suddenly a textbook example of multiple mental illnesses. Have you tried therapy?

But it will not cure loneliness, unemployment, financial ruin, bad environments, abusive homes. Probably not a lot of therapists would claim that it does, but those unfamiliar certainly do tout it as the cure-all, because they simply do not know better, because individualism is taught as the way of life from the moment you exit the womb. And it is so harmful. The things that therapy claims to solve is to stand on your own two feet and be self-sufficient, self-reliant, stable, need minimal help from the outside. It has even gone so far that a concept of co-dependency has been invented to be a criteria for diagnoses because god forbid you are actually a human being who relies on others like the pack animals we are. Even if you do not rely on others, if you truly desire to do it all on your own, it takes months and months and years and years to get there because of the time between each appointment you can get. It is not even in any way a holistic approach. It is one piece in a huge puzzle, the rest of which you probably cannot even find professional help with.

Let us say that the solutions to all sorts of problems in life are contained in a big toolbox. All those tools will be needed in one way or another, at one point in time or another, throughout life. Therapists are, for some reason, said to know the entire toolbox. Again, they do not claim this themselves. It is society that vaguely thinks so. But the therapist really only knows how to use a small set of the tools needed to repair you. Hopefully the therapist you find is competent, but you might get unlucky and not even know it before it is too late and damage has been done by the wrong treatment being used. They specialize in specific methods but end up applying the wrong one to you. Laymen put them on a pedestal as a mythical force that can solve all manner of serious and complex issues with just a few words of wisdom here and there, or they have hidden gems of mind blowing advice.

But as I have come to see it, the cure to most things that therapists try to solve is simply the formation of a bond. Yet when they undergo their training, it is specifically instilled in them that they should not ever form a bond with their clients because they should not get emotionally invested in them on account of it would cause burn-out to take on so much suffering from people every day. So they create a wall between themselves and the client, a distance they proclaim to be healthy for themselves but what most people would think was worryingly cold if it were any other meetings between two humans. But because one part is paying the other, it is fine, and it is also not a real bond with another person anyway because money was exchanged and services provided. It is robotic.

A bond and a community is what would solve the problems a lot of people who are in therapy have. But we are on average way too individualistic for that. Therapy would not exist to the extent it does if it wasn't so difficult to find solid friends and relationships in modern society. If we all had a tight knit circle that we could lean on, there would not be anywhere near the current demand for therapists and psychologists and psychiatrists and social workers and mentors and advisors and teachers and whatever other mental health professionals I could list.

The key is that the client-therapist relationship is inherently transactional. And so it can never be the nurturing environment that it needs to be to get better and to improve and to become a functioning individual. Even terms like emotional labour have been invented only to become a commodity through which an entire industry is built. People selling their time to help the less fortunate because they sure as hell will not do it to such an extent for free. Maybe some of them also volunteer their services, but I have a hunch that they are few and far between. They are good people for trying to help, but at the same time, they really are only even talking to me because they are getting paid to. That simple fact ruins any and all feeling of sincerity right away.

Why is a therapy-like session not something the average person simply just does for their next of kin? A favour to be returned when the time comes. Some people require more, some people require less, and that ought to be fine. But instead we have this whole industry of people that can sell themselves as the solution to oftentimes unsolvable problems. And those that never even tried it will also help sell it because their social media regurgitates fancy terms that sound smart on their feed, making it sound like a miracle.

But because of our individualistic way of life, or because what we struggle with is outside the norm, or because we did not grow up in a supportive environment, or we experienced things when we were very young, or we do not fit into exact boxes... Whatever it is. It is now entirely socially acceptable for everyone and anyone to say that they cannot deal with this, it is too much, you should get professional help. You do not need a friend, you need therapy.

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For this post I was thinking of games more along the lines of an early access title that was abandoned or had a 1.0 release announced when it was not feature complete or still had bugs/issues that were never addressed. If you feel like a live service/MMO game that has shut down should have kept going, feel free to share it as well.

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!

Greetings everyone. I'm currently in the process of getting a Computer Science degree for two primary reasons. 1.) Because I want to get a stable development job where I'm currently employed, but most importantly to me 2) Because I want to make video games and have the educational credentials to confidently do so.

I know I know, you don't need a computer science degree to create video games, and my program doesn't even teach game development. So I have a long journey ahead learning game dev alongside my program in my own time. Also I have no intentions of working at an actual game company.

So my question today is,

What is a game that you are dying to play, that nobody has made yet?

I'm trying to get some inspiration. It's hard to think about something that truly doesn't exist, because there's so many amazing games already. I'm genuinely curious.

If you're struggling like I am, feel free to list a game that's been made exactly once but no ones been able to reproduce it's genius.

I'll start,

I am DYING to play a factory builder game, but with ARPG gameplay. So Factorio / Dyson Sphere Program meets Diablo 4 & Path Of Exile. I just think this would create such a dopamine addicting game that would be impossible to pull away from if done right. My idea would be to have the factory be the loot crafting mechanic for progressively better armos, while the ARPG is what you use to get the materials needed to craft truly insane gear. Idk, if done right I think this could have legs.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I have a friend that is lucky enough to have retired at 40. A year ago he was adamant he'd never work again, having been burnt out from his time at big tech. Back then he was also an absolute AI hater and wouldn't listen to anyone who claimed LLMs were useful for programming.

He finally tried LLMs when Claude Opus 4.6 released and immediately changed his mind in the face of the overwhelming evidence that LLMs can in fact program pretty well. And now with the release of Fable 5 he's giddily creating all sorts of things that would have taken far too long to make prior to AI-accelerated software development. He actually plans to try and found his own business now. He's a very smart guy, so I hope he can make something interesting that people want.

There are a lot of AI doomers and haters. In person I mostly see people doing the same thing they've always done, but now saving time on various tasks. But this is the first time I've seen someone go from grumpy and checked out to giddy and optimistic thanks to LLMs.

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?

Submit your response here!

• Direct link: https://survey.tildes.community/-/what-is-your-favorite-video-game-8/
• This survey closes on June 14, 2026 at 10:00 UTC
• The results will be published on June 14 shortly after the survey has closed. I'll edit this topic and post a comment about it!

The current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:

I was initially thinking of doing something like kfwyre suggested where you could submit a top 5 or so, but then I thought it would be more fun if I made you decide on a definitive answer. Like how with the pineapple pizza survey there was only Yes and No as answers, you have to make a choice!

So that's what I've decided to do! Pick your ultimate favorite video game. And feel free to discuss your honorable mentions in the comments, of course. ;)

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!

Basically, the title question.

I'm rethinking my entire data backup routine, considering using Git to start tracking much/most (all?) of my assorted projects' histories. In most cases, it makes sense; but with my Calibre library, I'm not sure.

Has anyone tried this?

More particularly, if I do it ... what-all should be included in the .ignore file? Should I try to maintain a version history of the metadata.db file (an SQLite db file)? What about the ".calnotes" and ".caltrash" folders?

Thanks.

I'm using the phrase 'internet discussion site' pretty informally, so I hope my meaning will become clearer as you continue reading.

I got rid of Snapchat around 4 years ago now. At some point in 2023 I noticed a sharp downtick in discussion quality on Twitter, and got rid of it as well. About two years ago, frustrated with the lack of human interaction and the vying for attention, I deleted Instagram. Near the end of 2025, I stopped using Discord. The final nail in the coffin has now arrived, since I'm unfortunately coming to the conclusion that Reddit is no longer worth visiting, leaving me almost entirely cordoned off from internet communication at a time when more humans are using it than ever before.
I won't bother repeating my personal reasons for this exodus since I feel confident that most people on this website have feelings on the matter that at least approximate my own.
Realistically this is a sign that it's time to prioritize interaction in the real world, and that's certainly a worthwhile thing to pursue. But bluntly society has restructured around the internet in a pretty substantial way, and I don't think it's an unreasonable ask to find various forms of forums on which more meaningful discussions can take place.
Here is my personal survey of the current landscape:

• tildes.net: Basically good. I really enjoy this website and I think in a lot of ways the 'bar/pub/cafe' model for a forum, where you can peer through the window but require permission to gain admission, is the only viable model for future online discussion places as the internet becomes ever more saturated with bots and bad actors.
• lobste.rs: Also basically good, for the same reasons as tildes. In some aspects, limited by the fact that it has a particular focus. In other ways, that's a really good thing. Maybe in a perfect world there would be a lobste.rs equivalent for every hobby, and we would return to an early internet forum world.
• Hacker News: Also basically good but perhaps a bit less so than the above two. I think most of the things posted on there are interesting, but a lot of the discussion has lately felt less insightful than it used to. I think a different tildes post noted this as well, but it's very caught up in the AI news cycle, often to an unfortunate degree.
• Rateyourmusic: The core site is enjoyable, and the forums are usually fun to check in on every now and then. Certainly a worthwhile place to visit if you enjoy music.
• Stackexchange networks: This is cheating since this is obviously many sites. I'm a mathematics student and I've found MSE and MathOverflow to be really wonderful places to learn and converse, albeit with some very arcane and strict rules for posting. The philosophy SE seems also generally of a high quality, and there are many other SE sites that I occasionally stumble into and am pleasantly surprised by. Unfortunately I expect its time is finite, since the UX has slowly but surely been degrading and the site traffic dropping.
• Fediverse networks: These sites clearly have potential, but for whatever reason it's still just not there. I drop into lemmy and Mastodon occasionally, but the posts are rarely of high quality. In many ways they just feel like "Reddit/Twitter but with a different name".

Surely these can't be all, right? It's a little soul-crushing to think how many people are online at any given time and how hard it is to find a place not drowning in noise. Maybe this is just my lament.

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

I've wondered before what it means to be anti-racist. I recall once asking online and got a not so helpful response of "well maybe you should think about that". But today my friend exemplified the idea.

He was sitting in a bus in San Francisco when an older white man started yelling racist shit at someone else on the bus. My friend is a model citizen. The kind of guy to call in issues to 311 as he's walking home. A frequent volunteer as well. So when he saw this altercation he stood up and got in front of the yelling man. That was enough to interrupt him. But more action was needed. Justice was needed.

He just so happened to have a need to relieve some gas. And so he aimed... and fired right onto the guy. When he walked off he turned to the racist and said "To be clear, I farted on you intentionally because of what you said". I'm told the face he got in response was exactly the same as Hide the Pain Harold's.

We should all strive for this level of bravery. And maybe, one fart at a time, we can end racism.