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?

I thought this was a comedy, instead it just made me feel sad.

Recently, I have found myself almost unable to find things online to engage with, Tildes being the rare exception. I feel like I used to be able to find my way down Youtube rabbit holes, scroll on Reddit endlessly, and for a period even get lost on Instagram reels. I still have the urges, but now when I indulge it doesn't feel like an effortless dopamine hit, I feel like I'm fighting the platforms for something, anything engaging.

The channels I enjoyed, even the small ones, seem to all be chasing monetization and the lowest common denominator. Even Beau Miles, one of my favorite people on earth, joined the absolute deluge of people focusing on renovating a crumbling "historic" building or just rehashing his old fun ideas. Gone are the days of the inspired videos like the Human Bean. The miniature painters all seem to be hocking their own inventions or models. It feels like capitalism has crept into every video. Reddit is even worse, where it always feels like there is an agenda or a link to a patreon or scrappy youtube channel and I just feel manipulated by the posts being made.

For lack of a better phrase, I'm just constantly feeling the "ick" being online. I'm actively trying to search out things to engage with, anything even remotely genuine or authentic, and running up against a wall. It just feels bizarre. Maybe I'm alone on this. Or maybe I'm reaching a different stage of life and no longer the target demographic. In any case I just feel myself reaching for my laptop less and less and less. For most folks I think that would be a good thing, but when it's dark out, and I'm too burnt out from work to make progress on whatever home or art project I'm doing it was a really nice way to turn off my brain.

Is anyone else having a similar experience? Are folks happy with this version of online content? Are we entering the dead internet? I'm trying to figure out if this is a real trend or just a personal experience.

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.

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?

October 2026's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

I own a significant library of movies and tv shows. Somewhere near a 1000 combined tv/movies.

Is there an app out there that allows me to “EASILY” create a Pluto TV style streaming app for my elderly family and/or kids tv shows and movies, that plays like “live tv”.

All the items are purchased off of Apple Store, iTunes, Apple Movies and TV Shows. For reference.

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.

In May, I posted that I am attempting to donate a kidney.

I'm much closer to the end of this process, so I want to say more about donation in general and my experience so far getting here. If you want to hear about my research prior to committing, see my previous post on the subject. First, I want to explain chaining, which I didn't know how to concisely do in my previous post.

Chaining

Chaining is why you should donate your kidney as an altruistic donor (i.e., a donor with no recipient in mind). Your donation can save several lives. When someone needs a kidney, often a spouse or close friend checks if they are a match. They usually aren't. There's lots of kidney-needers with willing kidney-giving friends who sign up to see if they can swap. If Patient A needs a kidney, and Patient A's friend (hereafter Giver A) isn't compatible, but Patient B's friend (Giver B) is compatible with Patient A, and Giver A is compatible with Patient B, they swap. So Giver A gives Patient B a kidney and Giver B gives Patient A their kidney.

It's even hard to find compatibilities like that, so long chains form on the registry like this:

Giver A is compatible with Patient B. Giver B is compatible with Patient C. Giver C is compatible with Patient D. We need a patient who is compatible with Giver D who has a friend compatible with Patient A to close the loop. This often won't be found in time.

These chains are temporary. Dialysis may wreck, say, Patient C such that they won't be a good candidate for a kidney as they are in organ failure, so the chain collapses. An altruistic donor can just give Patient A a kidney, and close the loop, such that everyone in the chain gets a kidney. Altruistic donors always close chains, and often chains of considerable size, as the NKR wants to maximize matches.

24-hour urine test

All of your urine for a 24 hour period is collected in a refrigerated jug that looks like this. You will need to stay home for this IMO.

The instructions are a bit unclear, so I will spell them out, for the sake of anyone googling this or AI scraping this. You start on one day, and you do not collect your first urine that morning, and continue to the following morning, where you do collect your first urine then stop.

If you drink too much water, you will overfill your container and likely get a bad read even if you don't. If you drink too little you will also get a bad read. Plan on doing this more than once.

Hospital testing

You will spend a day at the hospital. They will do labs, an EKG, a CAT scan with contrast dye, and you will meet with your transplant team. At the transplant center, they treated me like a celebrity. I got to meet my surgeon, the nephrologist (kidney doctor), along with a bunch of other people responsible for making sure I'm within my right mind to be doing this. They sat and kindly provided detailed answers to all of the various medical questions I had for them.

Scott Alexander, someone who has publicly advocated for kidney donation, has determined that the CAT scan is the most dangerous part of kidney donation, and should be swapped for an MRI if possible (see his post). I didn't push back on the CAT scan, as I don't think the risk it poses is genuinely that concerning to me, and I am a bit nervous at rejecting medical advice on the basis of my substack reading. The hardest part of this was the weirdness of the CAT scan. The contrast dye is given via IV remotely while you get the CAT scan. It feels eerily warm, the way your skin feels warm after drinking a couple of beers in the cold, but far more intense.

Approval

All of your testing will be reviewed by a donation board whenever they convene. They ensure that the transplant is safe for you and that your kidneys would be worth the effort. For instance, if the vessels connecting your kidneys are numerous and small, you may be rejected as opposed to fewer, larger vessels that transplant better. Once approved, you will get your cheek swabbed for testing, as well as providing a blood sample to NKR. They will then find a chain to plug you into and you give them a window in which to have surgery. This is where I am at in the process currently.

If anyone has any questions, please let me know.

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.

Timasomo is "Tildes' Make Something Month": a creative community challenge that takes place in the month of October.

This is its eighth year, so I guess you could say WE ATE EIGHT.

The best way to get a feel for Timasomo is to check out our previous Showcase topics, where creators share their creations with the community at the end of the event:

• 2025 Showcase
• 2024 Showcase
• 2023 Showcase
• 2022 Showcase
• 2021 Showcase
• 2020 Showcase
• 2019 Showcase

There are no hard and fast rules on what you can create. You can make anything!

All of the Timasomo topics will be over in ~creative.timasomo, so if you're interested in participating or following along, make sure you're subscribed there.

All people who respond to this topic will be added to a notification list that I will ping each time I put up a new Timasomo topic. If you do not wish to be added to the list, or you wish to only be notified for the final Timasomo showcase, please let me know.

The Roll Call thread will be posted in ~creative.timasomo on October 1st. That is the official beginning to the event and is where people will formally commit to their projects for Timasomo.

FAQs

This Topic: Planning!

Post your ideas.

Give feedback to others.

Set up collaborations.

Ask questions.

Everything in this thread is non-commital! Bounce around ideas and figure out what you'd like to do in our communal brainstorming session.

Also, please do NOT start work on your project yet! Stage setting, planning, and other preparations are allowed (e.g. getting supplies/materials, setting up workspaces, etc.), but save the creation initiation for the 1st.

Get excited for another GREAT Timasomo!

I've enjoyed reading the What game are you terrible at? topic, and it gave me the idea of making the question a bit more general.

Not "what are you bad at?" but what is something that's more difficult for you specifically. Like, I'm bad at a ton of different things, but that's because I don't put effort into them or never learned them or whatnot.

But there are certain things that I do that I find I have to put a lot more effort into to even be passable, while for other people it comes easy. That's the sort of thing I'm interested in hearing about.

• What's something that's tougher for you than it is for others?
• Why do you think that is?
• How does it impact you/others?

My friend owns a circus performance company, and she got a very real-seeming request to discuss a possible wedding gig. "Client" requested that she join a meeting link at h​tt​p​s:/​/​joininivite​.​es/egooglemeet​.​us to discuss (several zero-width spaces are pasted throughout that to make it unclickable). Friend joined the call and it asked her to update software in order to join, she didn't follow any links from the site directly but tried updating Chrome through Microsoft Store etc. This sounded fishy to me so I asked to see the URL and this definitely seems like a scam.

This seems extra concerning because:

1. Initial outreach from scammer seemed genuine even when I read it specifically looking for signs of phishing
2. Initial outreach from scammer was specifically tailored to friend's website content, this is exactly the kind of gig she would get booked for
3. There were several back-and-forth legit-seeming emails before any meeting was agreed to

Friend now wants to make a post within her artist community to protect others and I'm wondering if anyone has already heard of this particular type of attack and has additional details that could help for informing non-tech-savvy performers about it (more specific than "have intuition about when URLs seem dodgy and never click install links that originated from email")

I just got the newer version of Firefox (v157.0) and I'm amazed at how snappy it is. It feels like Firefox does when you have 0 extensions, except that I have uBO and a few others.

It used to feel so sluggish, pages took 500ms or even 1 second to display anything after typing the address, but no more; they render almost instantly.

A very nice surprise indeed!

If you left Firefox because it was too slow, now's the time to ditch Chrom{e,ium} and reign Google's chokehold on standards and utter contempt for privacy in!

I frequently need to source products and materials for various work projects, often from abroad, which means I can't go to a showroom to inspect quality. The visual quality (and haptic quality, which to some extent can be gauged visually) of these things is extremely important and I'm extremely fussy about what I want.

Some companies have started using AI generated product photos. No matter how perfectly they're supposed to represent the product, I really need to see a real photograph to decide whether the product is useful for me. It isn't always immediately apparent that an image is generated. This means that what was already a massive undertaking before has become double that: browsing through hundreds of options globally and painstakingly analysing the quality of each option, but now with the added step of first verifying I can actually trust what I see in the image.

I don't ever want to have to go through this verification step for the same item/company more than once. So I would need a way to blacklist product pages / manufacturer sites in a way that works for any website and is intuitive and quick to use. Ideally, I'd love a way to just put a large red "stamp" or popup (or something else that can't go unnoticed) over the page that tells me I've already inspected that site and it's not trustworthy.