I know that tildes is still a small community (sub 9k) but I find the number of groups too restrictive. I am mainly a redditor so I am used to subscribing to many subs, most of which are not "main" subs.

For example, shouldn't there be a group for "countries", so one could post in countries.germany or countries.finland in the future? Also, how come there is no videos? I can understand the reasoning that a video is (almost) always about a given subject but where should I post, for example, a video of "ASMR"? Should it go to health? Should chess posts go to "games" or "sports"?

I find this idea of groups a bit too comfusing, perhaps because I am used to subreddits..

Maybe it is not a bad idea to create some kind of map, with an handy link in the site, so one knows in which group one should post a certain something.

There seems to be a trend lately of people switching over to BSD operating systems. Having read some blog posts on the matter and now given the recent system-d controversy, I'm genuinely curious to give FreeBSD or OpenBSD a go as my main OS.

For those who have switched over to BSD, what are some problems you've encountered and/or what are some things you miss?

Hi, so my SO and I are looking for a third person to play Apex with. We're pretty casual and not the best skill wise but just playing it for fun. Having a third person to talk to would be cool. We typically play around 9pm EST for about an hour or two. If you're down you can add us on xbox and shoot us a message at Rocket Man and Bubblegum KMA

Hi, I just joined an hour ago or so.
So far so good, site seems a welcome change as opposed to other certain content aggregators.

I'm just wondering what the userbase is like: what's your age group(not too specific if you want), occupation(again, vague is okay), continent of origin and gender? What draws you to this website as opposed to other social media? Do you expect Tildes to gain traction and grow to become a worthy Reddit(or other aggregator) competitor/successor?
Just to get a taste of the crowd and what kind of people we'll find here.

I'm in my 20's, currently studying engineering and living in western Europe. Applied to this website following a comment I saw that described the Tildes system compared to Reddit; seemed like a nice change on the clickbaity and sometimes not as fun-content on that website. Hoping this ends up a good place for discussion / quality content / fun chats, and also hope it can help me detox from social media by purposefully using a less active site(for now, of course).

_{Small note: while the site is closed right now, it might be opened up later, which means this post might be visible to the internet whole. Please keep your personal info in mind and only share what you want others(including crawlers/scrapers) to know.}

emotionally abusive ex-girlfriend tried to reach out.

blocked her number.

started looking for therapists.

i started following through FreeCodeCamp (more tech talk (MERN) at the bottom - i gots questions)

i started flossing two weeks ago.

i've been consistent this past week with learning japanese

and right now i got one of my comfy outfits on, chilling at the house, and i just made a french press with some beans from a roaster i used to always buy from back when i lived downtown.

i'm feelin' alright today. it's gonna be a few more months until i get where i want, but for now, i'm good.

how bout you - how you doin?

(if you stuck around for the tech stuff - here's that)

1. what's a good book to follow up EloquentJS? i'm reading through that now, and i really want to get a good feel for the language itself. i know how to get something built, but i don't know how my tools work - and that's an issue for me.

2. on a similar note - what are the best books on React? i've got a 2017 copy of Fullstack React, but someone told me that's outdated by this point, and i can't exactly afford the 2018 copy right now. anything else i should keep an eye out/save up for?

3. and lastly, best reading on CSS3? i know (again) a good enough amount of Bootstrap to be able to get something up and running, but i want to get better at vanillaCSS, css animations, and making sure that my site is responsive and supported across across all browsers.

I’ve been using Letterboxd for a few years to track what I watch.

But I’ve got a large collection of physical media and sometimes it’s tough to remember exactly what I have when looking for something to watch. Plus the eternal “Did I lend that to a friend?” question.

If anyone has any ideas on how to keep track of this stuff, I’d love some suggestions.

The concept sounds a bit lazy or unintelligent, but for me personally, I struggle with so much anxiety and other mental health problems that I have to filter out political posts, on here, reddit, and elsewhere, or else the weight affects me so badly that I'm put in a bad mood/mindset very easily. If anyone else feels the same way, I ask you this: Does anyone else feel similarly, and if so, how do you defend against the tidal wave of awful things happening seemingly daily?

Forgot to post the thread yesterday.

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 Anilist, MAL, or any other anime/manga database you use!

I used to watch TotalBiscuit's videos to learn about PC ports of games, to see if they were any good. Obviously I can't do that anymore, and the best replacement I've found so far is looking at PCGamingWiki. If a game has a long page with a lot of issues and workarounds, it is probably a bad port.

But that doesn't really help if I want to know if a game has improved a lot since launch. Does anyone do a good "state of game x a few years later" series?

I don't think Tildes have or should have an official position on that, but I'd like to know what other Tilda Swintons™ think about the subject. Do you think the use of profanity cusswords is in accordance with the implicit behaviors we've established so far? Is there any advantage in trying to "keep it clean" site-wide?

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.

I buy a bunch of books each year, but it seems less than half of them get read.

Sometimes I'm just satisfied by the notion that I will eventually read the book and never get around to it.
However, I do actually go back to some of these books. For instance I bought Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer/Sword of the Lictor back in 2015 but recently finished it back in summer of 2018.

Some have sat on the shelf for much longer.

Orson Scott Card's Xenocide comes to mind. I read Ender's Game back in 2013, read the sequel some time in 2014, and told myself I'd get around to the third book (Xenocide) but I never have.

Another one I picked up last year that I've been meaning to read is The Confessions of Saint Augustine.

So, what are some books you've been neglecting? Write them down here to put them to rest, or even better, to motivate yourself to actually read them!!

I thought it'd be fun to have a casual conversation about what we like to drink. If that's not appropriate for some reason please let me know.

I've switched from beer and whiskey to Tangeray and (diet) tonic and really feel less hangover when I drink (for whatever reason). What is your current go to on a Friday night?

Independent, investigative journalism in the public interest is becoming harder and harder to find. This is a shame because an informed public is critical for democracy to function effectively.

What news sources do you recommend for people trying to avoid the distraction of biased, sensationalist outlets like Fox News or CNN?

Recently, Ian Lance Taylor, one of the most productive contributors to Go and, IIRC, the original author of gccgo, has written a very interesting comment on his view of the language:

(…) Go intentionally has a weak type system, and there are many restrictions that can be expressed in other languages but cannot be expressed in Go. Go in general encourages programming by writing code rather than programming by writing types. (…)

I found this distinction, writing code vs. writing types, very insightful. In my experience, in a language like Rust or (modern fancy) C++ the programmer is constantly forced to think about types, while when I program in Go or C, I almost never think about them. Types are, in fact, almost always obvious. It is also interesting that languages like Haskell and Idris explicitly expect the programmer to program with types.

What do you think?

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.

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9 · Week #10

I'd say something here about thinking a monthly thread for this is better or something, but that would be a lie and the truth is that I was busy during Christmas and subsequently forgot to post this thread for about three weeks running. Sorry about that.

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 Anilist, MAL, or any other anime/manga database you use!

Personally, I strongly dislike it. Every aspect of every film is way overblown there.

If there's a funny scene in a movie, they LITERALLY die laughing and wake their whole neighbourhood up.

If there's a scene that is in the slightest bit sad, they're going to cry their eyes out for months.

If there's a movie that's decently good, then it's an absolute masterpiece and the best movie of the decade.

And so on... Everything is always really exaggerated.

On top of that, there's always the circlejerk hivemind aspect. Threads are closed after 6 months, so the whole discussion about the film is divided between many threads, but because every thread is small and new, you often get the same fluff comments.

For more popular flims, it is the absolute worst. With half the thread being just funny quotes from the movie with no additional commentary or anything valuable, yet having thousands upon thousands of upvotes. It's kind of sad.

I used to go to IMDb boards, –which, admittedly, had their own issues– but they were still pretty useful for discussion. And shutting people up wasn't as easy as it is on Reddit, so the opinions there were much more varied. However, since they shut them down, Reddit is the closest thing I've found. Moviechat.org is supposed to be a replacement to the IMDb boards, but it's pretty inactive.

So, even though I kind of despise r/movies, I'm sort of forced to use them. But reading it makes me somewhat bitter.

What about you?

What's your favorite movie that features average-looking people? We all know the industry selects for youth and attractiveness mostly, but have any good movies risked casting only normal-looking people?

Edit: TV show suggestions are also welcome!

Every year we try to put together a 'best of' list that is devoid of the same 200 albums that make up all of the other music lists on the internet. We do this by intentionally excluding popular/mainstream artists from our submission pool. Our cutoff is generally no more than three tracks with a million plays on spotify, though we do fudge it a bit especially for artists that only have regional success or put out something really great. The popularity limits are more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule.

I used last year's results as a test post on tildes, if you want to see what the final results will look like. Once we finish voting on the albums we generate the playlists on spotify and use automated tools to replicate them to other streaming services. We have a google spreadsheet that helps us manage the process. There's a submission form that will drop recommendations right into the spreadsheet where we can work on them.

We're not trying to find albums that are 'better' than the mainstream. We're just trying to include more of the great music that gets released every year, particularly the good stuff from new and overlooked artists that gets lost by the wayside while all the major music publications argue about the right order of the year's press darlings. Consider AlbumOfTheYear's List as the 'official' record of what's popular in the music press.

We do this by asking people for their favorites - in listentothis, in letstalkmusic, and today here on Tildes. I'd like to invite everyone on Tildes to submit their picks for the best overlooked music they've heard this year.

How do you know if an album you like is good enough? Everyone has their own way of listening, but generally, if you've had the record on repeat at all, that's the sign that it's worthy of attention. If you've got one you can't stop spinning and can't get out of your head, that's 'must listen' territory which goes at the top of the list. Make sure to leave a note in your comment when you submit, if you think it's that good. ;)

You can submit albums right here using this form. Please put a ~ in front of your username when you submit, so we know it came from a tildes user rather than a reddit user.

This spotify playlist contains the 175 albums from 2018 we've gathered so far. That's what's in our spreadsheet right now, at the start of the process. We haven't vetted/voted on these yet, just made sure they come in near the popularity cutoff. If any of the albums in this list really knock your socks off, let us know in the comments below. The first 1/3 of the list is mostly from random redditors, quality may be a bit dicey. The last 2/3 is the fruit of the l2t crew's cratedigging all year, submissions from our 30+ moderators. Every genre you can imagine (and some you can't) is in this list, they aren't sorted by style yet - this is one big bucket that goes all over the map.

I will update this playlist as new albums come in, though not exactly in real time - expect a day or two delay. If you want to keep up with it, just follow that list on spotify.

We're taking until the end of Feb. to finish the 2018 set, so roughly 6-8 weeks to listen to all of this stuff before we push the finished set out the door. If you want to help us listen, bookmark this thread here on Tildes, and leave a comment here when one of the albums grabs you. Feel free to submit new albums to that spreadsheet right up until the deadline at the end of Feb.

Happy listening. :)

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.

Anyone else play visual novels? If you don't know what they are, it's like an interactive story with pictures and sometimes player choice. People called Bandersnatch a kind of visual novel!

I got into them by playing Katawa Shoujo, which is astonishingly well-written and empathetic and funny. Recently I played Don't Forget Our Esports Dream, about two Starcraft pro gamers trying to chase their dreams while facing the realities of their lives. I love how it talks about the soul of esports, and if you ever played Starcraft, this game will bring back all the memories. What visual novels do other people recommend?

Of all video games out there where a good guy beats a bad guy, which bad guy do you personally feel got the shittiest end of the stick? I recently beat Mother 3 and SPOILER Porky's fate seemed kinda fucked, what with him being permanently sealed away, unable to die, for all eternity in the Absolutely Safe Capsule.

I bought a starter pack in 2015, played a few dog fights and races at 25fps, and then forgot about it. I reinstalled it today and was amazed at all the progress. There's some really cool stuff, like having your own expressions mapped onto your characters face with a webcam, or how you can get on your ship, jump to another planet, descend through the atmosphere and land at a camp, get out of your ship, and go inside, all seamlessly with no load screens.

The game looks fantastic, and runs a lot better too (I did upgrade, my pc, but not that much. I have a ryzen 5 2600 and a radeon 570)

Do any of you play? What do you think about the game?

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.

I've seen every episode of The Good Place up to this point and still can't decide if I like it or not. It's a very strange situation. The premise, while novel, doesn't work well (in my opinion) on a TV show budget or schedule and I find myself wondering why I'm watching it.

Reviews of the show are generally very positive, but it feels like the writers are constantly scrambling for new ideas when the concept just doesn't lend itself to that much TV.

I love Michael Schur's work generally and like Kristen Bell as an actress, but I still can't decide if I like this or not. Thoughts?

I wouldn't really consider it a hobby, but couldn't think of where else to try and have this discussion.

How many of you have ever heard of, or even considered the idea of alternative keyboard layouts!? As unanimous as it is, why are the letters of the alphabet even placed that way on our keyboards anyway? Alternative keyboard layouts attempt to optimize the layout by placing letters in such a way as to make typing more ergonomic. Often ideas include focusing on the home row, rolling fingers, alternating hands, high frequency letters on index and middle etc.

Some examples to look into if you've never heard of the concept:

• Dvorak, the most well known alternative keyboard layout. Prioritizes alternating hands by separating vowels and consonants by hand.

• Colemak. As opposed to Dvorak, prioritizes rolling the fingers rather than alternating hands and attempts to limit same-finger bigrams.

• BÉPO, a layout optimized for the French language!

• Others include Carpalx, Workman, MTGAP, Norman and many, many more. Creating rather than using layouts has sort of become a hobby for some...

So what do you think? Supposed ergonomics vs standardization. Would you ever consider switching or do you think it's a bunch of hocus pocus? Perhaps you have switched or tried to switch and would like to share your experience.

I am currently trying to learn how to fix things myself by learning how to solder and fix things like that. I also want to DIY some things for quite some time.

My current project is working through the book Make:Electronics , I bought it at humblebundle some years ago. Yesterday I powered a led via a power outlet for the first time, by connecting it to a cut off USB cable. I'll share a picture of the abomination later.

So: what have you built at home? What are you building? What are you planning to build?

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9

In the rare chance you haven't heard of Flutter, here's the link: https://flutter.io

Flutter just officially left beta with v1.0 December 4, last year. The code is written in Dart, and deploys on Android, and iOS (and will run natively on the rumored Fuchsia OS).

So for those of you that have used Flutter or are currently using Flutter.

• What are you working on?
• Why'd you choose Flutter?
• What do you like about Flutter?
• And what do you dislike about Flutter?

I'll start:

I'm working on a niche art app. I myself do not do that type of art, but knowing people that do, I wanted to create a tool to fill in the lackluckster market for Chromebooks and Android.
I chose Flutter because:

• I wanted to try something new, and what newer than something that was (at the time) in beta?
• Custom Views in Android are a hassle.
• I will be able to release on both Android and iOS (semi-)natively without having to code it twice.

Here's what I like about Flutter:

• Layouts are really simple.
  (though you can easily let it get clustered if you don't think too much about it.)
• Design isn't an afterthought.
  Animations are built in (and simple), themes aren't hard-coded, and Material Components get more attention here. (Still waiting for Shapes on Android)
• It's fast by design.
  Flutter uses its own custom rendering engine (Skia). I've never experienced any stutter with the built-in components, and when I caused lag (with heavy I/O) Flutter/Dart had tools in place for me to narrow down exactly what was causing it.

What I don't like about Flutter:

• It has poor mouse/trackpad support.
  Right clicks, not a thing. I can workaround this with a double-click/long-click, but for a desktop OS, this isn't optimal. Scrolling, that's panning, this should be differentiated. There's a difference between using a scrollwheel and moving finger around on the screen. According to Flutter there is not. There's also currently no support for mouse hovers which I have needed very much.
  There is a pull-request for adding support for all of these, but the developer hasn't done anything since code review.
• Keyboard support, while there, is lackluster.
  Ctrl, Shift, Alt. These have to be gotten with the meta code. There's no built-in function for checking those. Text fields don't support the tab key to navigate. And text formatting (bold, italic, etc.) isn't possible with text fields without the use of a library (or making it yourself).

I was trying to think of a third dislike, but I can't. My complaints are on missing APIs for Chromebooks. That's it. I really like Flutter, I plan on using it more, and if they won't add support for mouse/keyboard, maybe I'll have to contribute.

I'd love to hear what your thoughts about it is.

Whether you will start it on January 1st or already doing it, what is it that is going to make you a better person?

For me, I decided to limit my two biggest timesinks, namely, Youtube and Reddit. I started several days ago and won't wisit them at all before I pass all the exams. Before, they were often an excuse for me to spend time basically doing nothing. Time to change that. (And yet, I'm doing the dame thing right now with ~, but oh well, it doesn't have content anyway)

I'm rather curious - for me, about a fiver. It's all I need to be able to smash an egg at someone - legally. It'd probably be pretty fun - probably not 'life changing', though.

~£40 is probably the least for something more 'life changing'. I could buy a Pi, storage, and a charger. Then I can set up a pi-hole, and never have to worry about ads. It'd also make browsing on my weak laptop that liittle bit better.

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.

Just how? I fail to stick to the right side of the line between productively using internet, and losing time procrastinating and impulsively browsing and/or commenting in places like Reddit, HN, Tildes. The best I can do is to leave home to study outside, but becasue I don't work ATM, that's too costly. I sometimes even consider stopping using a computer. But I'm also a very technical, power user, so IDK if I can comfortably confine myself to use a phone (where I don't have this issue).

What is your way of dealing with this?

I know this is a relatively stereotypical new years post, but I'm interested in seeing what everyone here on Tildes wants to do to improve themselves for this coming year. Personally, I want to devote more time into language learning, which would include spending more time watching foreign TV, studying vocab, etc.

What upcoming game are you looking forward to so much that they're already on your Steam wishlist?

Mine are:

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
Away: The Survival Series
Children of Morta
Morning Star
Noita
Space Haven
What The Golf?

Over 10 years ago the world of mobile gaming was totally different from today's. Still many (if not most) phones could run installable and built in games. Which were your favorite ones?

Let's say the mobile game is retro if released before 2009.

When it comes to news, it can be hard to separate the big drops in the bucket from the small. In thinking back through all the news of the year, what stories do you think are the most important? In other words, which are the stories that people will look back years from now and remember when thinking about 2018?

Let's fantasise Tilderinoes! You can just write what comes to your mind or answer any of the questions below to get your thoughts flowing.

• What bothers you in the current blogging platforms, like Blogger, Tumblr, or Wordpress?

• Is it “free” and with ads, commercial with no ads, or free and non-commercial and struggling? If it's commercial, how much does it cost?

• Does it have comments? How are they moderated? Who can comment? Are there PMs?

• Does it have tags? Categories? A tree structure?

• Does it provide file storage (images, audio, video)? How much?

• How extensible is your blog page? Can you control all of the CSS? Can you add scripting?

• Does it allow adult content? Political content? Hateful content? Who decides?

• Does the country of origin matter? Does it block content based on your country's laws (e.g. copyright, political stuff, etc.)?

• What are the privacy features? Does it require an email address? A card number (if commercial)?

Hi, I'm covering this week at Whom's request again.

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.

I mostly like action and comedy anime, but I've been trying to branch my tastes out and get into some more genres. What do you like outside of comedy and action (especially SOL, but I'm really looking for any good suggestions)?