Primarily I use spotify premium since I am a student and get the sweet sweet $5 discount. I also tend to by vinyl records of albums that I have been listening to a lot so that I can help the musician/band. It's pretty nice because most vinyl comes with a digital download, so I can have a pretty high quality version on my computer. What clients do you use to stream music? Do you buy music? What do you think is the best way of obtaining music that is not pirating?

So since we no doubt have many rpg gamers amongst us, I thought I'd start a weekly or bi monthly thread to post about looking for groups, looking for members and the like. So if you want to, why not come and make a post.

I myself happen to be looking for people who'd be up to play a spot of Shadowrun or preferably Cryptomancer.

It's been a while since the last one of these, so whether you're providing an update or a brand new story: What's been going on in your game? What excitement has transpired in your life-on-paper?

-LTADnD

I would have to say Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond. It's got a spacey presence in the beginning and the solos hit, which are so wonderfully crafted. The vocals come in and the chorus sounds magnificent and epic in nature. What are your thoughts?

Mine is Epica - The Divine Conspiracy, been listening to it every day for the past week as I fall asleep. You might not think metal works as sleep-music, but it does for me haha :)

Here's a song off of the album https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRR-eLW1lXw

I'm curious if we have any game devs on Tildes, either professional or amateur. If so, share your games, experiences, or advice for any aspiring developers.

I briefly dabbled with game development in the past, which amounted to a goofy helicopter combat game made from the Ogre framework. I've been trying to get it running again, and it's inspiring me to get back into hobbyist game development.

(First post on Tildes, feel free to blast me if I screwed something up posting this.)

So, as the title says, I'd love to hear about how your game is going. Also, if there's a lot of D&D discussion, we might talk the admins into going ahead and making us a ~games.dnd (wink, wink).

Disclaimer: If anything cool happened, I may or may not steal the idea. =]

By lightweight, I mean sites that are compact, that load quickly, that aren’t loaded with tons of scripts.

Personally, I’m a fan of lite.cnn.io. No ads, very minimalistic.

Edit: Oh, look, I found a list.

One of my favorite things over at Reddit is /r/fitness's Gym Story Saturdays and Rant Wednesdays (and also /r/WeightRoom's daily threads). I don't know if we have enough gym goers people on Tildes yet for a weekly thread on your adventures in fitness, but I figured I'd put one up and see what happens.

This week I did week 2 of Pervertor for 5/3/1 and it has Boring But Big sets as supplemental work. The squat day was hell. This is probably because instead of doing typical BBB, five sets of ten at 50% of your train max, Pervertor does this at 65% of your TM. For me, this meant 5x10 squats at 235 lbs after doing the 5/3/1 sets. I just had to sit down after it was done, couldn't immediately move on to my assistance work. My lower back was especially feeling it, but quads were on fire too. Luckily, was ready to go in a few minutes, but I've never had to just sit there and take a break before workouts like that in my near three years of program lifting.

But no one ever starting lifting weights because they wanted it to be easy.

Anyway, I'm sure y'all probably have better stories than "it was hard to things." Let's hear them.

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!

Feel free to give recs or dicuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

On reddit I post the occasional AAR (after action report) for Victoria 2 on the ParadoxPlaza sub. I was just wondering if there was any interest in me posting those here as well, since vic2 is a little obscure and it's entirely possible I'm the only player here out of our active users.

during the 90s and early 00s we had an overwhelmingly south american supply of tv soaps, their themes most commonly center around money, intrigue, poor vs rich and the evil characters are cartoonishly evil and good characters are the pariahs of pariahs. Today we have Korean​ tv soaps where the theme mostly center on romcom and incredibly lighthearted and often humourous compared to the south american ones. the evil guys are not truly evil, their just the enemy because of the circumstance and the goog characters are not pariahs. my country is the Philippines by the way.

Which games had really well thought out and engaging leveling system?

Skyrim was a good baseline I believe, not perfect but engaging and not too punishing. Path of Exile seems convoluted to me, to many skills the dont make any real impact. Fable was effective but very simple. Oblivion tried hard for a deep leveling system but was basically broken. Witcher 3 was pretty run of the mill (I thought, despite the praise the game gets).

I'm trying to find something where there are several viable different playstyles. And it's always good when combat isn't the only way to proceed.

This question stemmed from a friendly argument my S.O. and I had involving The Sims. She thought it was the weirdest thing ever to try and create myself within the game. I understand the idea of truly creating a new character, but my first impulse is always to create myself and then behave how I normally would in whatever game I'm playing. I don't know if this is laziness on my part, or some sort of subconscious effort to maximize immersion.

Disclaimer: I do often create characters that don't just emulate myself, but it's almost always after I've finished my first play-through. I'm not averse to role-play AT ALL.

I noticed it spans further than character creation too. Like, if there's a pool of characters to pick from, I almost always pick one that looks the most like me, or one that I relate the most with. My S.O. will pick whichever one she's feeling at that time (usually the cutest). I've also noticed that I'm more apt to consistently pick that same character, while she is more likely to switch it up every so often.

One last observation I made that I think ties closely to this topic: When I'm playing a game, my mentality is always "I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do this. Did you see what I just did?!" etc. I see it from a first-person perspective, even if I happened to create a character that does not emulate myself. When she plays, it's always "Look what he's doing, oh man my guy did this" and verbalizes the game from a third-person perspective.

What's your take on this? What's your mentality when you game? Do you think there is a fundamental mental split among players? Is it because I game drastically more than her or started gaming sooner in my life? I'd love to hear some other perspectives on this.

I played the older 2017 demo with 2 characters and really liked the gameplay and visuals. Great old-school feel, yet very polished to feel somehow modern and unique, with novel mechanics like the character-specific skills or "paths" when interacting with NPCs.

I also tried the new June 2018 demo for a few minutes as Tressa. It was fun but jarring with few interactable NPCs and very little in the way of introductory story or cutscenes, fewer than I remembered from the old demo. I wasn't sure if this was because it was still just another demo, so I've decided to hold off and start from scratch in the full game. (The save file carries over from the June demo to the full game.)

I would normally have preordered, except for my extended backlog from the Steam summer sale.

There's a review roundup on Reddit in /r/JRPG: https://old.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/8ybg3i/octopath_traveller_review_megathread/ -- looks like a lot of 8's and 9's with a meta score around 84/100.

SSS is finally over and those sweet (although not as sweet as they used to be) deals are gone. What games have you gotten your hands on?

I didn't get too many games this time around. I actually found a bunch of games in my library that I didn't know I had, so I felt like I had enough to play for a while.

Games I bought:

• Stick Fight
• For the King
• Cuphead

From speakers to earphones, how do y’all enjoy your music? I wanna find out what kind of sick rigs that we have on here but also wanna know how many of us aren’t into audio equipment but are super into music.

MIYNT- Baby One More Time
This is is a strange one because it completely changes the mood and not even in an unexpected way. Well, it is unexpected. But given the lyrics (unaltered), it feels much more tone appropriate.

Side note- Max Martin Wrote and co-produced this song and many of britneys stuff, and taylor swift, and many other #1/top10 spots. Mad.

All About That [upright]bass
Who doesn't love upright base?

Redbone | Childish Gambino
I actually heard this one before the orig so this might be a bias for me. But when I finally got around to listening to the orig, it felt empty. Turns out i love those trailing high notes and it wasn't entirely the same feeling without it

That's all I've got for now but I bet a one or two sprung to mind for you

We've been having a smattering of art, poetry, and photo participation posts, such as this, and this, and this, and this.

We seem to have enough ~tilders to have a schedule of sorts, but not enough to have each activity every week. How about we rotate weekly activities for a while and see how it goes? I'm thinking we have enough interest for a series of visual/craft based threads and a series of writing based threads. For example:

July 3-9th Photography (subject exploration or technique)
July 10-16th What are you making now?/Speedart
July 17-23rd Photography (topic or equipment)
July 24-30th What are you making now?/Media challenge

July 3-9th Freestyle Writing (up to a thousand words)
July 10-16th Themed Drabbles
July 17-23rd Poetry format challenge
July 24-30th It was a dark and stormy night

Please note that these are suggestions and not an arbitrary bid to codify content or become TEH LEADER. I just think it would be fun to have an activity to look forward to every week. We could even just sign up for hosting a week's topic, and whoever is in charge of the week picks the activity.

What does everyone think?

I try (and fail) to play regularly on lichess under the username dear_sirs. I also have an account under the same name on chess.com.

Feel free to drop usernames in the comments below, or send me a challenge for a correspondence game--I would love to play you!

I'm only a beginner down the rabbithole known as mech-keebs, but I thought I'd source some thoughts here. Apologies if this has been expanded on in other ~hobbies threads.

Those of you who have been in the mech game longer, what switches have you tried? What do you find are your personal preferences on switches and why do you think that is? Have you ventured away from the very popular Cherry MX switches?

What about keycaps? What are your favourite profiles or colourway designs? Preferred material? I am currently rocking a DSA set of keycaps from one of my favourite designers, MiTo: https://mitormk.com/legacy-dsa/ I got the blue/black Tron-inspired set. I gotta admit, I was a little skeptical of ABS caps, but they're really nicely textured in a way that's reminiscent of PBT, but without that powdery grippiness.

Tell me about some of your favourite layouts too! I hear some pretty aggressive proponents of tenkeyless layouts, but I just really like my numpad for lots of numeric input. If it were just a gaming keyboard, I probably would be pretty happy with TKL though.

Are you working on any new projects right now?

Looking forward to all the responses!

One of my biggest hobbies is collecting flashlights. I guess I don't really "collect" them as much buy ones I want and sell ones I stop using.

Is anyone here also a flashlight aficionado, or would like to be?

Happy Friday everyone! I thought that a solid discussion could be spawned out of us talking about weekly health goals and how we've achieved them, so I invite y'all to tell us all about them. Have you recently hit a new personal record in weight-lifting? Run your first mile in ten years? Or have you just been maintaining a good, consistent routine?

Hello to all!

Since I first read a Saramago novel (All the Names), I've grown to love Portuguese literature. Later I read Gonçalo Tavares and Pessoa, and I have some names to discover from their classics (illustrious ones like Gil Vicente or Eça de Queiroz), but because I don't know Portuguese yet, I have to make do with translations, which impedes me from following the current, less famous authors. So, I wonder if you could tell me about some of these ones. Which are your favourites, which ones would you suggest? Does not matter if translated or not, I can read in a couple other languages and will learn Portuguese soon too. Thanks in advance!

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!

Feel free to give recs or dicuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Just wanted to start talking about anime in general see what people like, share some of our favourite titles and such. I propose we link to MAL or AniList since Tildes doesn't necessarily have a bot that would do that automatically. I'll start!

• Shaman King was probably one of the first anime I watched alongside Pokemon back before I knew what anime was. It's a very nostalgic show for me and the english opening still gives me shivers.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is something I've gotten to appreciate much more since I watched it later down the line when rediscovering anime for myself and starting to really get into it. It's one of the highest rated shows on MAL and it definitely deserves every bit of praise it gets.
• Spirited Away and The Wind Rises. If we are talking movies, these two would probably be my picks. The former brings forward very nostalgic memories and the latter I happened to see in the theaters and I loved every second of it. I feel like most of Miyazaki's works are going to end up on a lot of people's favourites lists.

I'd love to discuss each one deeper if people are into it but I want everyone to feel free and share as much as they'd like, including personal stories and anecdotes.

edit: Amazed to see so many people sharing their favourite shows in detail, and also glad that there are so many people on tildes who share one of my favourite pastimes. :)

I'm primarily a non-programmer these days, but have a fairly extensive background in statistical analysis - seeking recommendations for best/cheapest/easiest-to-learn data visualization tools. I have access to PowerBI and Tableau through work, but any other recommendations are welcome. You can take the SQL-family relational database query skills for granted, but not necessarily noSQL, Hadoop or the other popular big data sources.

Most spaces flying the flag of science are often unfortunately exclusive in their focus on STEM sciences. In order to combat such a monopoly and until such time as Tildes opens up groups for the social sciences and humanities, I'd like to open this place up to discussion around some of the disciplines which have always personally interested me more than, say, astronomy or biology. Is anyone else here interested in sociology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics..? Has anyone pursued work in those fields? Any interesting perspectives to offer or news of recent breakthroughs in any of those areas? All discussion is welcome.

As for myself, I'm particularly interested in sociocultural anthropology and archaeology--in the latter case, specifically as relates to the Neolithic and Bronze Age Near East. I'll soon be pursuing a degree in anthropology with an archaeological orientation at the University of Buenos Aires and hope to be working in the field soon after the end of my studies. I'm also incidentally interested in sociology, philosophy, and literature studies, but don't have any plans at the moment to pursue academic study thereof. Any questions? Feel free to ask.

As the title says, I am looking for your go-to recipes for when you are not in the mood to cook. They should be fast and simple to make and be preferably not too expensive.

Let me start this: Tortelloni with tarragon-cream-sauce (3-6€/2servings, depending on the tortelloni)
*500g Tortelloni, 250ml (sweet) cream, 2 tomatos, tarragon/salt/pepper;

1. Water with salt in one pot, cream with tarragon and 4 short splashes of water in another;
2. Cut the tomatos into pieces and add the to the cream when it boils slightly
3. When the tomatos are added, stir the cream (it should get slightly red from the tomato juice
4. add salt and pepper
5. at this point the water should be boiling, add the Tortelloni
   5.1 I usually buy the Tortelloni from the fridge, they only need to be boiled for 2 min, adjust the timing when you heat up the cream according to needed time to boil the pasta
6. When everything is finished put everything together and enjoy

Hello Tilderinos!

Do any of you crochet or would like to learn to?

I've been crocheting for about two years. It's a fun pastime that gets you addicted to yarn (you can never have enough). I learned primarily through a book and lots of YouTube videos. It took a while to learn the lingo, but now that I have a hang for it I've started to delve into pattern making for stuffed toys. That alone is an entirely different beast!

The new expansion for World of Warcraft is supposed to drop in about a month. Thought I'd see if any of you Tilderoos play WoW and what you think of it. I have been playing on and off since I was a kid and I've been having tons of fun with the introduction of the Mythic+ system in Legion. I'd love to hear about people's WoW stories and experiences with the game!