I journal sporadically, and have sometimes wanted to record a thought as a poem. I like idea of using constraints to further my grasp on the thought I'm trying to express, and it'd leave me with something I'd feel proud to come back to.

But I don't really know where to start? I'm hoping to find a form of poetry can be short enough to not feel daunting to start, but still forces enough structure to make the exercise worthwhile.

I imagine this effort means I'll also need to read more poetry and find stuff I like. My only real experience with the medium is from school, and thinking back to that time only reminds me of how confused I was while guessing if a foot was stressed or unstressed. I do remember liking Arthur Rimbaud's Le dormeur du val though. If anyone has any recommendations for poems they like, I'd take those too

Custom games/game modes/rulesets give gamers the ability to enjoy some games nearly infinitely. Gary's Mod, Rust, Minecraft, Robolox, Fortnite, and many others keep people coming back as people create new ways to play.
When I was younger I played a ton of Warcraft 3 custom games. I remember there being a solid ~2 years when that was almost entirely what I would play whenever I was able to use the computer and then another 3-4 years after where I would play at least a couple of times a week.

I remember loving custom games like:

• Defense of the Ancients (DotA)
• Island Troll Tribes (also Jungle Troll Tribes to a lesser extent)
• Risk (and it's many versions)
• Wintermaul and Wintermaul wars (along with all the other tower defense and tower defense wars)
• Vamperism
• Pest Control
• Many others as this list would drag on

I remember chatting with a lot of interesting people, though I didn't have any friendships I made move past Warcraft 3 in to other games.

I know there are many other games with custom games or customer game modes that the community developed, with DotA 2 coming full circle from being the sequel to a custom game to having custom games of its own.

To get the conversation going:

• What games had your favorite custom games?
• What custom games were your favorite?
• Did you make or contribute to any custom games?
• Any favorite memories?

I'm curious about things in your life (things you do, objects owned, rituals observed) that may seem silly to outside observers (or even to you) but have objectively practical purposes or an internal logic that just needs a bit of explaining?

I was thinking about my Batman t-shirt that I'm wearing today, and my other graphic logo t-shirts that I know a man in his mid-40's isn't supposed to wear because it's childish. Now, granted I only wear these around the house and if I'm going out to run errands, and I'm sure I look a little foolish to most folks, but I've found that the graphic tees serve far more purpose than I ever imagined when I originally purchased them.

When I bought them, it was because:

1. I knew I'd be wearing them under a jacket all day as the office I worked in at the time kept the HVAC set in the high 60's (Farenheit) and they'd go unnoticed.
2. They cost a little less than high quality individual plain shirts as I happened to catch them all on a clearance in my size; extremely rare since I'm a tall dude who's half torso.
3. I had always wanted to wear super hero logos and stuff as a kid, but even into my 20's I could never justify the price even when working full time.

I've got around 10 shirts that I rotate through, along with a bunch of plain ones because when you buy them in packs of 6 they're still way cheaper. And I've found a few odd benefits I wasn't expecting.

• I often dress in dim light, without my glasses on. Having a logo means I rarely turn my graphic t-shirts inside out and I never put them on backwards.
• I'm a big dude, tall and broad and I take up a lot of space. I believe that people treat me as less imposing when I'm wearing a funny little t-shirt.
• They're surprisingly comfortable and well-made, and they've lasted me a decade at this point and will likely last longer than that.

So back to the main topic at hand: is there anything you have or do that's silly to yourself or others that actually has practical benefit or a logical reason that lets you suspend embarrassment?

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We recommend you install our mod web-chat so that you can chat while in your web browser. It turns the server into an old-school chat room.

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I want to donate my kidney (not to anyone in particular, which would make the process far more straightforward), but I need help navigating the bureaucracy. Here are things I have seen about living kidney donation online:

• You can select five people to get priority access to kidneys if they need it (e.g., parents, spouse, kids)
• They will fly you to where you need to go for screening
• They will cover lost wages during recovery

Now I don't know who "they" is, or how to go about getting answers to these questions. Since I'm not tethered to a particular recipient, I can choose wherever to sign up, and I want to make the optimal choice both for myself and the recipient.

If you are a donor, especially an anonymous donor who's navigated this stuff, please reach out.

Hey all,

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

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

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

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?

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.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

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?

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.

Title says most of it. Something has clicked for me in the past new months and I've unlocked a level of enjoyment cycling I never had before. I've always ridden by bike since I was young, but only recently have I started doing it for health and fitness, and pure enjoyment. I'm addicted to seeing just how far (and how high) I'm able to go! What really did it for me was my first ride with decent elevation. I've always driven past cyclists chugging their way up in the hills and never understood how they did it, and never thought I'd be able to. Well, all it took was trying it one day to realize that while difficult, it was totally attainable, and since then I've been hooked. This has prompted me to also start following pro cycling, which I've done on and off before, but this year I'm very much looking forward to the Tour de France.

Anyone else into this as a hobby (either doing or watching)? Anyone training for big upcoming rides, and if so what? I mostly just want to chat about what people's weekly rides look like!

I'm running a nixos linux machine with Hyperland as my window manager and a few month back (likely after an update) I noticed that firefox started showing a emoji picker when I pressed ctrl+.. This was a bit annoying since the firefox extension for my password manager is activated by that key shortcut. I figured this was some update for firefox, but now that I dug into it to fix it it turns out that it is a gtk thing that apparently each app has to opt out of! I could disable it by flipping widget.gtk.native-emoji-dialog in about:config, but this seems like a really bad choice by gtk. Two gripes with this:

1. Them adding a global keyboard shortcut for all gtk apps that is ON by default (for a kind of niche usecase).
2. Overriding shortcuts on a desktop wide basis with no meaningful (afaict) way to disable it.

Anyone knows if this is intentional? Maybe it's already been reverted upstream and I just need to update... anyway end rant!

I was musing about this recently with the recent models becoming more capable. The core of gen AI is the model, which is trained on a massive dataset. To date, gen AI has improved because the models have become larger, more efficient, the data they are trained on has become better and the software/harnesses around them has improved to help query them.

As I see it, surely the bottleneck will soon become the data they are trained on? If we imagine a scenario where a models could consume an infinite amount of training data, and there is no limit to the training time or quality. The sum of human skill/knowledge is the limiting factor. Gen AI should (in theory) never be able to out preform or push the boundary of the sum of humanity at time of training.

Or, counterpoint, is there enough randomness and speed to iterate that gen AI can actually step change and improve if training times/cost were less prohibitive? Most companies/models today will save good output and feed it back into the next iteration, but right now that's taking months. What if that took minutes?

What do you think?

Is gen AI going to take us to general intelligence?
Will gen AI get to a place where it's "intelligence" and reasoning is actually better than the sum of Humanity?

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!

Something that generally works for most people, but you were an exception.

Something you were expecting to help, but it didn’t.

Something that promised a lot but failed to deliver.

Something that fell through.

Something you couldn’t get used to.

Could be an item, a piece of advice, a plan, a path, a relationship, etc.

Whatever it was, it didn’t work and that was significant.

What was it? Why do you think it didn’t work? How do you feel about it?

This topic is for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app.

I'll summarize the major updates at the start of each similar topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

Recently:

[Android] Version 1.6.4 (Jun 18, 2026): Indicate when replying to a deleted comment, fixed minor UI bugs in topics feed, fixed networking bugs, fixed rare crashes, support Android 17

[iOS] Version 1.6.2 (Jun 14, 2026): Fixed comment scroll bugs, fixed networking bugs

[iOS] Version 1.6.1 (May 21, 2026): Improves on the Find in Comments feature. Fixes some UI bugs related to the Find Comment bar, and with potentially stale votes showing in the UI. Also adds the iPad pane toggle on iPadOS 18 and earlier, to bring the behavior closer to iPadOS 26, and fixes some iPad animation bugs.

[Android] Version 1.6.3 (May 20, 2026): Added "Find in comments" to "..." menu. Fixed first search position in comments. Fixed tapping links in collapsed details summary. Fixed stale vote rendering.

Version 1.6.0 (May 13, 2026):

• Added Find in comments
• Improved markdown tables rendering performance
• [Android] Fixed drafts not loading in some cases
• [iOS] Fixed keyboard bugs on iOS 26
• [iOS] Fixed iOS 12 support

On iOS, currently TestFlight only for the next week or so.

Following version 1.5's addition of searching for posts, Three Cheers 1.6 adds a bar to find text in comments. It changes the comment bar a bit which took some work, and it was pretty tricky handling the edge cases with highlighting the matched text. Might have some leftover bugs, or configurations I forgot to consider, so please report those here.

There was an Android bug with drafts not loading in some cases, reported last time. Should be fixed now.

Also I'm happy to report that I was able to fix some long-standing iOS bugs, some keyboard bugs specific to iOS 26 that have been reported on TestFlight intermittently for quite a while, and an iPad rare crash that likely went even further back. So this version should be pretty stable on iOS.

Previous topic: March 2026

Where to get it

Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

Or sideloadable APK at https://www.talklittle.com/three-cheers/

iOS version on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/three-cheers-for-tildes/id6470950557

Join TestFlight for iOS beta testing: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

There's something small that you've been meaning to do but, for whatever reason, you haven't done it. Rather than just forgetting about it, however, your brain has decided to make it take up a minor amount of space in your awareness -- not enough to make it an immediate concern or something you plan to act on, but still just enough to be annoying.

Well, this is your call to address the issue head on! Pull that mental splinter out and get rid of it for good!

Maybe you need to...

• change an air filter
• tighten your showerhead
• go through that stack of mail
• box up a return
• put more air in your bike tires
• rearrange a bookshelf
• throw out some expired cans
• vacuum behind the couch
• clean the dust out of your computer fan
• etc.

Whatever it is, this topic is your call to GO DO THE THING.

And then, come back here and tell us what you did.

One minor annoyance solved for only one person? Not a big deal.

LOTS of minor annoyances solved for LOTS of different people? GIGANTIC DEAL!

This topic is our space to communally revel in the glorious shared feeling of being slightly more annoyance-free, together.

IMPORTANT: Clearing up multiple annoyances is explicitly allowed!

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.

Submit your response here!

• Direct link: https://survey.tildes.community/-/how-optimistic-are-you-about-the-future-9/
• This survey closes on June 21, 2026 at 10:00 UTC
• The results will be published on June 21 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:

Keeping it very simple this time around with some Likert scales! (TIL the name of these)

The person that originally submitted this question also mentioned doing this periodically (like every six months) so I figured for this first one I'd ask both how you feel about the future now and how you have felt in the past six months.

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!

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.