I just finished Breaking Bad, second run-through. I had first started watching it when Season 4 had just started; binging seasons 1-3 and followed it episode-by-episode after.

I was surprised to notice that the content I binged stayed with me much better than the seasons I watched one-episode-at-a-time.
Also… Holy shit. Breaking Bad gets dark towards the end (Jesse getting imprisoned and forced to cook for months; his ex-girlfriend getting shot). I had forgotten all about that. I had forgotten almost everything about the last … 4-5 episodes.

The scenes that had stayed with me the most from my first watch: Box Cutter's throat-slicing scene, the Prison Shankings, Hank vs. the Cousins, Hank's death scene, Gus's death scene.

But, seriously, rewatching it reminded me how good of a series Breaking Bad is. I couldn't help but binge the entire rewatch marathon. It's an incredibly intense experience.

In the context of what happened to Game of Thrones I'm also very happy to see the consistent quality and execution in Breaking Bad's storytelling. It's a series that set out to tell a story. The story makes sense from beginning to end, and gets resolved nice and tidy.

I'm a little disappointed we don't get to see more of what happens to the family while Walt is gone. The trial etc, that all seems like potentially interesting stuff.

On rewatch, I noticed my sympathies changing. I have a lot less sympathy towards Walt, even very early on. Knowing some things in advanced completely changed my view on him; whereas on first watch I rooted for him quite a bit.

My sympathy towards Skyler also flipped. On my first watch, I disliked her a lot at first, but grew to like her when she "went dark". On this rewatch, I disliked her less and sympathized more with her, though her behaviour beyond season 4 became incomprehensible to me.
I like Marie a lot more this time around as well. She's still pretty unbearable when it comes to shoplifting and generally the way she talks to people; but I hadn't realized just how much she loves Hank. How much she supports him through his PT (despite how atrocious Hank is specifically to her). Knowing Hank's death was coming, my heart broke into pieces when I heard their last phone call end in "I love you. // I love you too.". Hearing her say "He isn't picking up, probably because he's in the thick of it".

I don't think I even noticed anyone's grief the first time around, most likely because I was dealing with my own. Hank's death was a shock then. This time, I knew it was coming, and I had a lot more time to process how people felt about Hank before and their reactions to the news.

Just a bunch of random thoughts about that series. I usually only rewatch "comfort series" such as comedies, animated series, etc; I very rarely rewatch epics (except that I used to re-marathon GoT before a new season). But I don't regret giving Breaking Bad a full rerun. It is such an intense experience; during Seasons 3&4 I yelled in my pillows a few times on credit roll, just from the adrenaline.

You too should give it a shot.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is out on Netflix. I'm thinking to use this topic as the megathread to discuss the (re-)watch, to avoid flooding the Tildes Activity feed with one topic per episode.

To borrow a past Tildo's approach, I ask that any top-level comments contain ONLY the episode number, such as "Episode 13" and no other text.

Press the Collapse replies button, find the top-level comment for the episode you care about, and reply under that top-level comment. If there's not yet a top-level comment with that episode number, create it.

Hey there,

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Someone suggested I add this here, hope you enjoy my collection of music. Been collecting/doing write ups about my favourite tracks since 2013 (~4.5k posts) and last year I started re-thinking how to organize music + putting together playlists on the major streaming platforms.

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Chill Beats | lofi hip hop, chillhop & jazzhop

Spotify | Apple Music | SoundCloud | YouTube

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Groovy Beats | instrumental hip hop, soul, funk & bossa nova

Spotify | Apple Music | SoundCloud | YouTube

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Funky Flavors | electro funk, break beats, hip hop & electro soul

Spotify | Apple Music | SoundCloud

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Soulful Hip Hop | hip hop, neo soul, jazz & r&b

Spotify | Apple Music | SoundCloud

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Acoustic Escape | indie, acoustic, folk & folktronica

Spotify | Apple Music | SoundCloud

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Dance Vibes | nu disco, electro, funky house, indie dance, french house

Spotify | Apple Music | SoundCloud

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Ambient Space | downtempo, chillstep & trip hop beats

Spotify | Apple Music | SoundCloud

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Bass Waves | future beats, future bass, electronic dance and trap

Spotify | Apple Music | SoundCloud

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Lush Vibes | r&b, soul & future beats

Spotify | Apple Music | SoundCloud

Given a movie with ambiguous story, you have multiple options to base your interpretation upon: you have the movie itself, the screenplay if available, what the author said in interviews or books, etc... Now, if we take a video game, you also have additional tools: the source code, the installed file names, unused resources, etc. There are of course a few games that expect the player to check these files but that isn't what I want to focus on.

Would you say that all these files have the same authority as the game itself when it comes to interpretations?

I'd like to take an example with SPOILERS FOR LIFE IS STRANGE 1, as this is the game that sparked this topic for me:

The blue butterfly has a special place in this game, it is what starts the whole journey when Max takes a picture of it and Chloe gets shot. It also shown again in the 'Sacrifice Chloe' ending during that same scene. And later during Chloe's burial that butterfly is shown to land on the coffin in front of Max and fly away. There are some scenes that imply that spirit animals are a thing in the in-game universe. After finishing the game my interpretation was that the blue butterfly was Chloe's spirit animal. Now what a surprise to see in the game wiki that the texture file for that butterfly is named 'Spirit_animal_Chloe' !

Is there any room left for interpretation when the source makes it explicit text? Or can the source be reasonably be pushed aside?

I'm not sure how many people here are into board games, but I figured I'd make a post about it. I'm going to be at dice tower con this week. I'm hoping to get a game of Blood on the Clocktower going. If you see a guy trying to gather people for a game of botc, that'll be me. Come say hi.

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.

@cadadr's 4 word poetry challenge is one of my favorite Tildes threads to read through on account of the many clever and thoughtful responses, so I figured I'd try to kick off another one. This one is a little more conceptually involved, but I think it still has the potential to be a good time like the last one.

Rather than going with a strict word or line count, instead I am creating a restriction based around personification:

Challenge:
Your poem must:

• Be written from the point of view of an inanimate object
• Give the object personality/emotion
• NOT name the object, so that people have to infer it from what you've written

An example might be an automatic door that is bored to tears from opening and closing ad nauseum. Or maybe a watering can that is excited to tend to its garden.

In trying to come up with a model I decided to channel a resentful milk carton:

It's fine
I get it
You don't have to justify yourself
Lots of better things have come around
Since you first chose me

Just know that I'm still here
If you need me
Waiting for that blissful moment
Where you light up my world
And take me in your hand
And make me feel like I'm flying
Before you lower me down
In a lover's embrace

It's fine
I get it
Until then I'll sit here
In the cold, cold dark
Trying not to go sour
Next to the slowly molding cheese
And forgotten grapes

It's far from perfect but hopefully it gives you an idea of what the assignment can look like. While I saved my "reveal" to the end, don't feel obligated to use that tactic unless you want to. You don't have to hide the identity of your object, just don't name the object outright in the poem.

Feel free to make your poem as long or short as you wish. Feel free to make it as meaningful or silly as you want. Above all else, have fun!

If you need help with ideas or just want the challenge of writing to a randomly selected specification, you can use this noun generator for objects and this adjective generator for sentiments.

I am working on an app called Percent Done that is a combination of goal setting, time tracking and habit tracking.

I like setting time-based goals for myself every day, such as “write for an hour” or “work on Percent Done for four hours.”

I also like Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” method. For example, Apple Watch shows you how many days you have completed your exercise circle and tells you that you have been keeping at it for x days.

Percent Done is a marriage of these two concepts. It allows you to set goals and track the time you spend on them, as well as how many days in a row you have consistently completed them. For example, you can add a goal that says “write for an hour every day,” and Percent Done will notify you every day to write for an hour. You will be able to tap on this goal and Percent Done will start counting back from one hour. You will also be able to see how many days in a row you have written for an hour.

Here is a demo GIF.

You can also add one-time goals to Percent Done with or without time tracking, so it is a task management tool as well.

You can play with the design prototype here: Percent Done design prototype

I would really love to get your feedback on this. If you are interested in being a beta tester, feel free to reply to this topic or e-mail me at "hi at evrim dot io."

By the way, this is almost completely a self-promotion post. If it is against the rules, I'd be happy to remove this.

Update! After a few hours of struggling I managed to set up Read the docs for Tildee, it should help using the library significantly.

After getting some inspiration from TAPS I thought that maybe I try to work on something vaguely similar on my own. And after… some? hours of coding today I came up with this: tildee.py (source)
It's a wrapper for the Tildes Public/Web API that is already used by the site internally to make it work. The obvious problem with that is that it will at one point break when this unstable API is changed. It can do basically all things a normal user can do with the notable exception of applying comment labels (because I haven't gotten around to that yet).

Example of usage for a DM reply bot (result):

import sys
from tildee import TildesClient
import time

# Initialize client and log in, 2FA isn't supported yet and will probably break in horrible ways
t = TildesClient("username", "password", base_url="https://localhost:4443", verify_ssl=False)

while True:
    # Retrieve the "unread messages" page and get a list of the conversations there
    unread_message_ids = t.fetch_unread_message_ids()
    for mid in unread_message_ids:
        # Access the conversation history page; this also clears the "unread" flag 
        conversation = t.fetch_conversation(mid)
        # Get the text of the last message
        text = conversation.entries[-1].content_html
        # Abort if it's from the current user (I don't think this could actually happen)
        if conversation.entries[-1].author == t.username:
            break
        print(f"Found a message by {conversation.entries[-1].author}")
        # If the message contains a reference, reply in kind
        if "hello there" in text.lower():
            print("Replying…")
            t.create_message(mid, f"General {conversation.entries[-1].author}! You are a bold one.")
        # Delay before processing next unread message
        time.sleep(3)
    # Delay before next unread check
    time.sleep(60)

This has a lot of potential. Haven't yet figured out potential for what, but I'll take what I can get.
I'd be really grateful if someone with a little more experience than me (that's not exactly a high bar :P) could give me some pointers on the project's structure and the "API design", hence the ask tag. Other creative ideas for what to use this for are appreciated, too.