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!

Important Upcoming Dates

Thursday, October 29 - Final Update Topic
Thursday, November 5 - Timasomo Showcase Topic

November 1-4 are for putting the "finishing touches" on your project and readying it for the showcase.

While November 1 is technically the creative deadline, remember that there are no Timasomo Police, so if you need to keep working into November, go for it! We've had people submit to the showcase days and even weeks later.

Time for another update on your progress:

• What did/didn't you get done this week?

• Anything go according to plan?

• Anything go off the rails?

• Any successes or struggles to share?

• Do you need feedback or help on anything?

This is your topic to share anything and everything you want about what you’ve made so far.

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.

Dear Tildesterites: my trusty PC has led a dutiful life of eleven years and, along with my keyboard, has finally met its earthly doom (total organ failure). I wish it luck across the ultraviolet lithographic bridge, at the other side of which we'll someday reunite to play Skyrim together again.

In the meantime, I would like another PC on which to play various modern AAA games except for The Elder Scrolls VI. I'd intended to replace my machine ~4 years ago when it was in fairer health, but other efforts took priority. Since then, the product market has inflated in price and all the SKUs have changed, so I'm back to being mostly clueless about the state of the industry.

I put together a parts list from some basic research and would like a gut check. I'm coming from an i5-4460, GTX 970, and 16 GB RAM at 1080p 144hz, which may as well be neolithic. I only really need this PC to play video games smoothly and to do standard workstation tasks (nothing remarkable).

PCPartPicker Part List

Rationale and notes:

• 60hz to 144hz was the greatest upgrade I ever made and now it seems like 180hz or 240hz is the new 144hz. I've also wanted to move to 1440p for years. I reviewed the Gamers Nexus GPU benchmarks and it seems like 120fps+ is broadly possible at this resolution.
• Nvidia's cards seem unreasonably priced. A friend of mine offered me his RTX 3070 for free, which I would be happy to accept as a stand-in to keep the initial cost down, and in a year I might come back to get a newer card like the 9070 XT or whatever replaces it?
• I'd like an M.2 to keep cable management to a minimum.
• I will not overclock or undervolt the CPU. I'd just like it to run.
• I'd love for the thing to be quiet.

My questions are:

1. Does the build feel balanced? Are there any egregious oversights?
2. How much RAM is prudent, at what speed/latency? Do we expect prices to drop anytime soon?
3. M.2 PCIe 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0 x4? Does this matter for games? Is a dedicated OS drive still best practice?
4. IPS or OLED? WOLED or QD-OLED? Is Freesync Premium sufficient? (@AugustusFerdinand we spoke about this some time ago; has your opinion changed?)

I thank you in advance for your insights. I'm not going to buy this immediately (this summer at the earliest), but I'd like to know how close to reasonable I'm being.

I share some posts from my blog here, and almost all of them have a meta-discussion regarding “self-promotion”. The latest prompted me to bring up a proper meta-discussion on the subject.

Tildes' Code of Conduct says:

If you have your own site/project/channel/etc. that you'd like to share on Tildes, that's generally fine (in moderation), but it shouldn't be the primary reason that you post on the site. Tildes is a community, not a free advertising platform. Sharing your own content is welcome as long as you're involved in the community, but don't just treat Tildes as a source of an audience.

I guess we need to address what constitutes “moderation” and sharing one's own stuff as “primary reason”. Am I abusing this rule? If so, why? If not, what am I doing to avoid abusing it? (Using myself as a “control group” for the discussion; feel free to bring made up examples.)

As I said elsewhere, I like the discussions that happens here, try to engage in topics other than mine, and I share my blog posts candidly.

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 am a hobby programmer and spend most of my evenings coding. My monitor has a built-in backlight, but I've always found that just a bit too weak for my liking. Turning on the lamp in the room is too bright and produces glare, using a table lamp is directional and imbalanced. Using an LED strip on the underside of the table does not illuminate my desk at all, so it's not particularly useful.

Recently, I stumbled across monitor lights again, and for some reason impulse-bought one. A super simple ~45cm wide, dimmable straight one with warm white colour. Let me tell you this thing is incredible. It provides exactly enough light without producing glare. The light comes from the centre and my hands cast an unobtrusive shadow. I've only used it for a couple of hours at this point, but the difference is remarkable. My eyes feel way less strained.

For context I'm using a 32:9 UW monitor with 1800R curvature, so this doesn't cover more than ~40% of the screen, yet there is absolutely no visible glare at all! The monitor looks completely unaffected.

Do you use one as well? What's your experience with it?

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.

You start at max level with everything unlocked. As you play the game, you slowly level down, choosing which attributes to reduce and which skills to forget.

Obviously, it will have to be tied to the story - maybe you are poisoned/cursed in a fantasy game, or an implant is malfunctioning in a sci-fi game. I'm sure a good writer can come up with something really cool to justify it narratively.

It will solve many problems modern RPGs have:

1. Solves "the world-saving heroes are a bunch of murder hobos" issue. If killing levels you down, players will avoid killing as much as possible. Like, you know, actual heroes would.

2. Fits the actual player skill level. When you start a new game, you are bad at it. Makes sense to compensate by giving you powerful abilities. Late game you know how to play well, you know the enemy weaknesses, you know how everything works. You can successfully kill the enemy with a much weaker character.

3. Allows you try out stuff. You can try the abilities before you forget them, see what you like to keep. In current RPGs you don't know which are the cool (or needed) abilities so you might spec into something you dislike. The current "fix" is to allow players to respec later, but that always felt like a bandaid solution. And a bad one at that, as it removes the weight of making choices, as you know you can always undo it. And respeccing rarely makes sense narratively.

4. Fixes pacing. Current RPGs start strong with the story, but then people put it on hold to do lots of side content. 80 hours of chasing question marks and 117 games of gwent later, people barely remember what the story was about and kinda speed through it just to finish it, because they are already kinda done with the game. But if you had leveling down, people would be naturally incentivized to move on and not level down too much in the same area.

5. Creates urgency. I hate the ludonarrative dissonance in RPGs where the world is supposedly about to be destroyed, but the heroes are busy solving every rando's basement rats problem. It's ridiculous.

6. Gives side-quests weight. Do you wanna help that orphan and level down, even though they won't give you anything? Or help the rich asshole who'll give you a powerful weapon you'll need late game? Or maybe you help both and spend hours on the next battle because you were underleveled, making you think twice before helping everyone in the next village?

7. Solves item hoarding. People love to keep potions and scrolls for later "just in case". But that "case" never comes because you only get more powerful later on. But if you were to get weaker, those items are actually needed late game. A lot more uses for that stamina potion if your stamina actually is shit.

8. Creates replayability. Instead of doing one run of a 200 hour bloated game, where you kinda got tired of it a while ago... you could have a regular 40 hour run and only do small part of the side-quests. Then you play something else. Then you come back to it and do another run, do a different set of quests, maybe this time spend more time in a different area.

Obviously I doubt any major studio will do something like that. I'm asking them to punish the player for playing the game. But maybe as the tools to create good-looking games become more accessible/cheaper, some smaller team can make something like this, I do think it has a lot of potential. I wouldn't be surprised if it already exists as a passion project in RPG Maker or something, but I kinda want to play something with actual graphics.

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!