I like thinking about alternative history. There are people like Harry Turtledove who write extensive alternative histories based on whether the South's main general's war plans got to the Northern armies' general in time for the Battle of Antietam. For me there's something appealing about thinking back through complex events in world history and finding critical moments and critical decisions that might have gone another way. I'm also quite taken with the idea that some historical events end up in hindsight looking like perfect storms, where a number of complex variables make the world we now know, but where any one of those variables would have produced a massively different result.

But I'm less interested in thinking about waving a magic wand to change the weather of some day or to change facts on the ground or morale or something like that. What I'm most interested in are situations where someone's individual decision might have dramatically altered the world. Can you identify one decision that happened in the past that you would have that person making it change? How might that set us up in a different reality?

A small note on housekeeping before I let you go. I know this might be a type of topic that walks the fence between something designed for ~talk and something best suited in ~humanities. I think of this as kind of an experiment to see how best to handle topics that straddle two different tildes.

I'm interested in all responses, but if the answer is "well" or better and the following are factors that contributed to that sense of well-being, could you divulge your job industry, if applicable, and/or the Canadian city where you currently reside? (If privacy-minded or jealously guarding a secret utopia, province would suffice. Thank you.)

About me: besides the current political and lazy-to-anti-intellectual climate of the US, I'm pressingly concerned about global warming; after a dozen years of living in and around refreshing Seattle (compared to southern California), I had to give in and buy an air conditioner this summer. Anecdotally, it seems to be a trend.

Something that I believe others would find to be a negative trait or personality is a person with a sense of dark and morbid humour. I tend to use dark humour a lot more than I should and sometimes have to be pretty careful around who I say it. Having friends who can take in jest with the things I say without any repercussions is great, otherwise they wouldn't last that long as friends!

What do you consider a negative trait, quality, factor, and that you find attractive?

After seeing the "what OS do you use?" thread earlier, I was wondering what everyone here on ~comp would think of a sort of group demographics survey. I think that it would be super interesting to see the data on things like preferred OS, main programming language, preferred text editor/IDE, device OEM, etc.

There are two big unrelated things giving gaming a lot of exposure right now. One is people broadcasting gaming sessions (e.g. Critical Role). The other is that a lot of shows are doing an RPG episode (e.g. Community).

How much of this is a good thing? What happens to the community when the vast majority of fans don't actually play the game? And is anything being done to transition people from audience to participants?

For those unaware the Librem 5 is an upcoming Linux smartphone developped by Purism that seems to be doing everything right. Frankly I think this might be humanity's last chance to have a Libre mobile option before the Google/Apple duopoly gets too far ahead.

I really, really want to back the thing but after going through the exchange rate, duties and customs I think it works out to nearly 900CAD which I just can't afford right now, though I might end up pulling the trigger anyway. Call it 400$ for a phone and 400$ to support a worthy cause, eh?

On June 18th 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico show from their new album set for release later in 2018. These are the only two announced tour dates for them for 2018.

They haven't toured North America since 2012, other than the odd spot at festivals, and usually only do special shows in Europe at this point. I've seen them once before, and it was the best concert I've ever been to. But in order to see them I'd have to spend money on a ticket, plane ticket, and resort hotel so I'm extreeeemely torn on it. On the one hand, I don't know how many chances I have left to see them. On the other hand, it'll cost a lot of money.

What's the most you'd pay to see your alltime favourite band?

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?