Voting has closed for this week's topic.

The prompt is...

The Road Trip

Some questions to help you get started:

Who is the traveler?
Why are they traveling?
Where are they going? Are they going anywhere?

The questions are only meant to help you get started. Make it happy or sad, adventure or horror, romance or tragedy. Go where your imagination takes you. Don't feel constrained by what may seem to be the obvious response to the prompt.

Please keep your submissions between 1000-2000 words (for reference, this topic section is about 200 words), make sure to properly format to Tildes when submitting to the submission thread.

Submission thread will be created on Wednesday, Aug 29, EST.

Please feel free to use this thread to brainstorm or share ideas or post any other comments you have about the writing prompt group.

Have fun everyone! I can't want to see what you create!

Things I may change:

I may do away with topic voting if/until the group gets big enough, and I'll just post a weekly prompt.

Depending on the number of submissions, I may increase the max length.

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 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.

One of my favorite topics in Psychology is personality and there happens to be a very good Five Factor test that is free to the public domain with all 3,000+ items available for download. Some notes about the IPIP NEO-PI:

Purpose of this On-Line Inventory

• The primary purpose of this on line inventory is to educate the public about the five factor model of personality.
• More specifically, the report explains the likely consequences of one's standing on five broad personality domains.
• These broad domains cover normal differences in personality that should be obvious to people who know you well.
• Secondarily, this inventory estimates your standing on the 5 broad domains and 30 subdomains of personality.
• The inventory does not reveal hidden, secret information about you nor does it assess serious psychological disorders.
• The report is designed to be objective, not pleasing or flattering.
• Measurement error, misunderstandings, carelessness, and mischievous responding can invalidate the report.
• If knowledgeable acquaintances disagree with the test results, then the results are wrong.

Link to the questionnaire:
https://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/

More about the International Personality Item Pool:

https://ipip.ori.org/

It's often the case that in academic and self-teaching environments, you don't really have the opportunity to grasp and fully understand situations in which a problem has multiple valid solutions and what the implications are in choosing among them. Among those considerations are two in particular: runtime efficiency and maintainability. When these subjects are discussed, the example solutions are often comical at best, or the problems themselves too complex to fully grasp the situation at hand. Sometimes the problems are also so simple as to be completely worthless, e.g. comparing bubble sort to bogo sort.

As such, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss practical but conceptually simple problems and the implications of the different solutions that are available. Conceptual simplicity is an absolute requirement because we want these problems to be accessible to a wider variety of readers. Problems don't necessarily need to be code-related (you could e.g. discuss something related to server administration). Bonus points for problems that include solutions with an efficiency/maintainability trade-off!

Previous episode | Index thread | Next episode

Black Mirror Season 2 Episode 3 - The Waldo Moment

A failed comedian who voices a popular cartoon bear named Waldo finds himself mixing in politics when TV executives want Waldo to run for office.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

Sorry (again) for being a bit late with this thread!

They don't have to be significant in any way; just threads you personally enjoyed.

The ones that immediately come to mind for me are:

Chasing the American dream has got me jaded - started by @dodger.

https://tildes.net/~talk/29a/chasing_the_american_dream_has_got_me_jaded

and

grab some tea baby, it's midnight. this is today's slam thread. - led by the fantastic @earlgreytea.

https://tildes.net/~creative/3gt/grab_some_tea_baby_its_midnight_this_is_todays_slam_thread

Neither of them had hundreds of comments, and neither of them were particularly active; I just find myself particularly fond of them for whatever reason.

We've had a what're you listening to?, a what are you doing, etc...
I am interested in what you're drinking this week.
I've discovered a fascination for Whiskey. I've been drinking an odd collection of Whiskey drinks, a couple of Scotch's (Glenfiddich, Monkey Shoulder) and some cheap Bourbon (Evan Williams, Ezra Brooks). I tried Irish (Jameson, Tulamore dew) too, but I can't get into it.
Not all this week, obviously.
This week it's been pretty much just Ezra Brooks. It's pretty good for a cheap Bourbon. Pretty heavy Oak flavor that I quite enjoy, not much complexity, but you know. It was 20 bucks.

Are there any fellow Alcohol hobbyists? What're you into this week?

When I was in high school I went to China through an education program. On the plane there I was seated next to an elderly Chinese woman on my left and a mother and daughter to my right.

While talking with the daughter and mother at some point the elderly woman became involved. She spoke cantonese and my mandarin was limited so the mother helped to translate.

The elderly woman took out paper and pen from her bag and began to have me write me characters. Some time after, she put her hands on my face and began to massage it in circular motions. It was strange but pleasant because clearly her intentions were good. I looked over to the man who was leading my fellow students, and got a thumbs up as he mouthed "just go with it".

I'd never experienced such caring from a complete stranger. It was a lovely introduction into their culture and genuine happiness to share it.

Hello, I am fairly new to the gaming world and I am looking for just some fun and relaxing games to play by myself. I play almost exclusively FPS and action games and I want to branch out. Although, I found Civ V which is super addicting and I love it.

Anyways, thank you!