Just finished The Wise Man's Fear, and I'm blown away by the massive amounts of world building interspersed by hella awkward sex scenes. Anyone else eagerly awaiting the next Kingkiller Chronicle addition?

Following on the spirit of the book recommendation topic we can just log here what we are reading recently. I'm guilty of reading many books in parallel and oftentimes not finishing them nevertheless, here is my current list:

• Andy Weir: Artemis
• Sapiens
• Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose
• David Graeber: Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years
• Michael Booth: The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
• Cullen Roche: Pragmatic Capitalism

It's been about a month since my last post kicking off some freelancing discussion, I figured it would be a good time to do another if anyone is interested. Chosen topic today: productivity tools.

Let's just start by saying that there are a whole lot of them. Project management tools, accounting tools, time tracking, communication, storage and organization, all sorts of categories. I am pretty sure part of the reason so many of these web-based tools have popped up is simply because web developers are a pretty large contingent of the freelancing world these days, so they end up building tools for themselves and then spin up a product and start-up company out of it.

The first part of the questions I pose is simply: do you think we all spend too much time worrying about and investing ourselves in to productivity tools? Certainly there are some tools that require very minimal onboarding and are helpful at increasing your productive time, but it is also certain that is not the case for all of them. And determining which tools will be beneficial can be a time sink of its own; parsing through the long lists of options, reviewing features and walkthroughs, signing up for free trials (and then unsubscribing from all the marketing email lists), all of that is time spent not focused on your actual work.

I'll drop in a few of my own toolset to give you an idea where I'm coming from: Google Apps, Trello, Freshbooks, Slack. I honestly try to keep it pretty simple, though perhaps I overly rely on spreadsheets and text documents as a result. To be honest, I probably spend more time looking at API documentation for all of these kinds of tools than I look at it from a user perspective, because I end up with tons of clients who want integrations with all of these tools.

So what tools are the most important to you in getting things done and getting yourself back to the work at hand? Do you have any complaints on a particular product, or the overall ecosystem of productivity tools as a whole? Do you think we are too focused on such tools? Or not invested enough in them?

To me, they're another case of something nice ruined by the quick adoption of a casual majority. Finding rare wholesome content was nice and it felt genuine. With the rise of the wholesome network, suddenly it started to feel fake and devoid of the original genuiness. Plus, being so common, it's rather annoying, instead of a nice find. It's yet another thing ruined by the masses.

What do you think? What would you like its place to be on Tildes?

I own a hobonichi, which is really just a hipster day-planner. The key feature for me is the river paper, which allows water colouring.

I try to water colour everyday. Started that way at the beginning of the year, and after a few months, now pretty much use it as a day-planner. Of course, I would love to get back to it, and will make an effort to at least catch up over the weekends.

Would love to hear how you journal and any habits that work for you.

Hello ~games!

Like most of us, I spend way too much time gaming. Lately i've been playing Islands of the Nyne because PUBG hasn't been fun the past few patches. I normally play one genre at a time such as RTS, BR, MMO etc until i move onto a whole new genre of games.

What games or genre's have you been playing lately? Anything to recommend?

Any of you guys ever watch it? It had its 20th anniversary two months ago and I was surprised to find out how many people hadn't heard of it, even in my group of weebish friends. It's definitely strange, but it's also really exciting to try and figure things out or anticipate what happens next when you're watching. It has a weird mix of mystery and philosophy that's paced slowly but keeps you invested. It's pretty hard to explain in a meaningful way.

Maybe some of you haven't been exposed to it yet, or haven't given it a shot. If you have the time, check it out--even if you're not a huge anime fan. Given how diverse the front page of Tildes is, you may be just that until you get hooked on Lain.

grüße - i bins.

it's bishop.

its german.

enjoy.

i blut
jo i blut
seit i hab was
vermutet
sie hat mi
verlassen
nach wi teilten
like two years
zusammen
i rauch ja
fach um zu
verbringen
die zeit so
dass ich wer-
de ni mi
zerstören

vleicht kreig
i ein paare
face tats
oder bath bombs
weil i kan ni
mehr lebn
ohne dich
nebn meiner seit
i will einfach
kiffen bis
meiner lunge
sterben
seit du bis
ni mehr hier
i kampfe
to find purpose

im not worth it.

so viele leude
habn ihr probleme,
auf deiner sorg'
im not worth it
i wunsch nach'm
tag wrauf
i sterb i'm
in a hurry

i hofe

i hofe.

i hofe
die tagen
komn gleich und
du zruckkomst
die rinnerung'n
leben noch ja
in mei'm kopf von
when i knew you
i höft dass
du würdst ni
vegessen
alles we been through
aber i hab's
gefunden
's machst di
keine sorgn nach
what i go through.

nowadays it all me
no you

im not worth it

im not worth it.

Could we have RSS or Atom feeds that correspond to a given view?

There could be two kinds of feeds, one that links to the comments page, and one that follows the link itself. The comments feed for ~comp could be https://tildes.net/~comp?rss=comments, and the link feed could be https://tildes.net/~comp?rss=link, or something like that. Ideally this could apply to tags as well, so if I just wanted to see posts in ~comp tagged web, I could view https://tildes.net/~comp?tag=web&rss=comments.

Several similar sites have this ability, so it's nice to be able to browse them all in one place. (On Reddit you can put .rss at the end of a subreddit for a feed, and on Hacker News and Lobsters it's just /rss).

What do you think?

Most of you are probably used to reading short, decisive posts that provide instant gratification--I know I am. Websites like (but not limited to) Facebook, Reddit and Twitter have a focus on making content easily consumable so that they don't lose your attention. A consequence of this is that we sacrifice a lot of details to compress a bigger picture; it's easy to lose the plot when you only see half the story.

Personally, I've recently noticed that I have serious trouble internalizing more involved articles or textbooks and I'm hoping to get out of this academic funk. Reading was a huge passion of mine for years, but after I hit a rough spot in my life medically I stopped entirely. Now I have to make a conscious effort to remember key details. Bought the hard cover of Persepolis and its sequel and I've burned through the first pretty quickly, but picking it back up every day can be a struggle when YouTube is also an option.

Do you have a poor attention span? Do you know why, or have any ideas for fighting it?