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.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I wasn't sure if this should go in ~tech or ~tv. Feel free to move if it's more appropriate over there.

I am planning to cut the cord soon and get rid of cable TV. I have an older TiVo Premiere that's rarely over 5% full. I'd like to get an indoor HDTV antenna to connect it to for those rare occasions when we want to watch something live, or record something off broadcast TV. I know next to nothing about HDTV antennas, though. I see that BestBuy carries them for prices from ~$20 to ~$120. I'd like one that works well and can be kept out of sight. (I've read some can even be painted over!) Does anyone have any recommendations or any things I should be aware of in getting one?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I'm in a bit of a personal musical renaissance at the moment and am actively seeking out new music after having listened to the same albums for years, effectively playing them out.

One of the areas I'm interested in exploring is LGBT artists out there making good music, especially because it seems like so many have entered the scene in recent years. Let me know if you have any recommendations! I'm open to any genre.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! 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 pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Are you an “old timer” in the computer industry? I’m writing a story about the things programmers (and QA people) had to do to test their software. It’s meant to be a nostalgic piece that’ll remind people about old methods — for good or ill.

For example, there was a point where the only way to insert a breakpoint in the code was to insert “printfs” that said “I got to this place in the code!” And all testing was manual testing. Nothing was automated. If you wanted a bug tracking system, you built your own.

So tell me your stories. Tell me what you had to do to test software, way back when, and compare it to today. What tools did you use -- or build? Is there anything you miss? Anything that makes you especially glad that the past is past?

C’mon, you know you wanted a “remember when”!

for those still committed to monogamous relationships: if you've been in a situation where you're talking with a few people that could be romantic interests, how do you let them know it's not gonna happen once you've found the (current) one ?

Somewhat inspired by this post, I wondered what (non-personal) blogs/online jounrals you read? Here are some of mine in no particular order.

• opensource.com for open source devlopment

• Glimmer for tech culture as a whole

• lwn.net for linux kernel articles etc..

• WeDistribute for content on federated networks/the fediverse

• PrivacyTools Blog, The Privacy Issue and decentralize.today for privacy articles*

*I'm a team member at PrivacyTools.io

Is there any psychological thing behind it. if you are a changer why do you change your picture so often ? and what do you think about people who don't change it at all ?, and if you are constant why ? and what do you think about people who change it ?

it's not that important I know, but it has been in my head for long time not. why people change their prof pic, computer/phone background so often than others ?

That's a requirement for a test I'm going to take. I tend to learn better with well designed, reasonably comprehensive books that don't treat me like a dumbass (not as a genius either!).

Please notice that I'm not asking for websites, interactive platforms, videos, or whatever, but about books, preferably ones that I can study on my Kindle (so PDFs are not ideal). I know all the major websites but I just can't follow them.

I can pay very small amounts but I'm pretty much unemployed in a third world country so free is always better.

If there are requirements to understand such books, kindly inform!

I finished school more than 20 years ago and I was not a good student. But I'm kind of a decent learner now that I have a diagnostics (ADHD).

Thanks a bunch!

EDIT: guys, I am actually a beginner in the sense that I literally know little to nothing about the subject! I'm also not a math wizard. Advanced suggestions are appreciated but also entirely useless. This is also for a test, so, beyond a very brief introduction, general understandings on the Neil DeGrasse Tyson level is also of little use for me. I don't need to understand the beauty of the cosmos, I need to pass a test. Thanks!

Admittedly the game probably has to have a devlog of some form, otherwise this question is synonymous with "what games are you waiting for?", which is far too generic a question.

The game I'm most interested in is Songs of the Eons (itch.io, most active), which wants to be like Dwarf Fortress but a grand strategy game (main post, for context). Obviously they've noted that such a project will have Dwarf Fortress esque development, so waiting is very much in order.

There's also Hyperbolica (trailer) which I've posted about here somewhat.

There's also Hytale, Creeper World 4 and to an extent KSP 2, which I like but don't follow that regularly, for not much reason TBH.

I'd probably also follow Deltarune but Toby doesn't seem to really do dev updates too often.

So are there any games that you're following as they're developed?

Hi! I've heard tilderinos talking about the gemini-verse on some other posts; I tried it out this evening and it honestly felt strange browsing in terminal and even stranger navigating the web without search engines. I was wondering if anyone had a gentler introduction than the official site? I feel like I've got a ship, but no map to this new verse.

As life slowly returns to normal in the UK, I've felt the need to look after my fitness more. I lacked discipline throughout lockdown to workout at home and keep my fitness. As a result I've got a nice COVID-gut, and my endurance and strength are shot. I swam regularly before quarantine hit, at least 4 times a week, and I'm keen to get back into that. But I'm also looking at picking up a martial art, for a more intense workout and fitness, as well as just to pick up a new skill. However I have no idea where to begin with martial arts, so I figured I'd start a thread for some inspiration, and go from there.

So are any tilderen martial artists? If so, tell me about it!
What do you practice?
How long have you done it?
How does it benefit you?
Do you attend classes or practice solo?
Would you recommend your martial art to a beginner?

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Suppose I am trying to iteratively produce a completed image from some subset using a combination of convolutional/DNN methods. What Image norm is best?

The natural (for me) norm to ascribe to an image is to take the bitmap as a vector with L₂. If the input image is anime or something else, the uniform coloring makes this very likely to be a good fit in a low dimension - that is: no overfitting.

However: pictures of fur. Given a small square, the AI, set to extrapolate more fur from that single image, should be expected to get that stuff right next to the given subimage right, but further away, i want it to get the texture right, not the exact representation. So, if the AI shifts the fur far away from the image left by just the right amount, it could get an incredibly poor score.

If I were to use the naive L₂ norm directly, I would be guaranteed to overfit, and you can see this with some of the demo algorithms for image generation around the web. Now, the answer to this is probably to use a fourier or a wavelet transform and then take the L_N norm over the transformed space instead (correct me if I'm wrong.)

However, we get to the most complex class: images with different textures in them. In this case, I have a problem. Wavelet-type transforms don't behave well with discrete boundaries, while pixel-by-pixel methods don't do well with the textured parts of images. Is there a good method of determining image similarity for these cases?

More philosophically, what is the mathematical notion of similarity that our eye picks out? Any pointers or suggestions are appreciated. This is the last of two issues I have with a design I built for a Sparse NN.

Edit: For those interested, here is an example, notice how the predictions tend to blur details

Hey, all. I'm back four weeks to the day after you guys gave me a lot of great advice about potentially making a 2D RPG out of my tabletop RPG. I decided to try both Godot and Unity given what people told me and I completed two tutorials for each over the last few weeks. After completing these two tutorials, I have some questions that I hope maybe some of you can answer to help me choose between the two.

TL;DR at the bottom. This is a long post.

For context, here's the tutorials I did:

Godot - https://www.davidepesce.com/godot-tutorials/
Unity - https://learn.unity.com/project/ruby-s-2d-rpg

To be frank, the Unity tutorial wasn't really an RPG. There were no stats, no quests, XP. It was much more of an adventure game. That's fine, it still gave me a lot of time inside the engine to learn a lot of basics.

So, working with each one had it's own up and downs.

Unity's use of an external scripting program seemed to hurt me quite a bit, from simple things such as forgetting to save before going back to Unity (I did this way too much) to having to declare public variables in the script and then filling them in the Unity GUI rather than just doing it all by script. The editor itself also seems to be kind of heavy, I was get the spiral beach ball for a second or two every time I went between the script editor and Unity and I have a machine that can edit 8K video without proxies. These general load times and stuff like that seemed to come up regularly. Tilemapping in the tutorial didn't include autotiling, I assume Unity has this somewhere built in? Or do you need to purchase an asset to get this functionality?

On the plus side, Unity overall seemed easier to use for a non-programmer. A lot of things are done through the GUI. Animations seem easier to handle for sure. The Unity tutorial was also more written for someone that hasn't coded much as it explained what specifically the code was doing (so I assume more resources for Unity will be helpful in that way that perhaps Godot will not).

For Godot, GScript was easier to use than C#, but I do feel like it was easier to get my head around prefabs in Unity than the Node system in Godot. The Godot tutorial took almost twice as long as the Unity one, but I don't know if that's because Godot is more difficult or the combination of the Godot tutorial being more thorough (I feel like I mad an actual, if very uncomplicated game, plus I did Godot first, which probably helped me just learn more about scripting and thinking like a programmer that I took into Unity). The node/scene system seemed more difficult to get my head around than game objects and prefabs. That said, my Godot program felt very tight. There weren't things happening that I was having a tough time explaining or figuring out why they weren't working quite right, at least at the graphical level (this might have more to do with the Godot tutorial using 8-bit graphics and Unity using a more modern sprite look). Having the scripts in the editor meant I never ran into a case like in Unity where I couldn't attach code to a game object because it was failing to compile, but it was failing to compile because it wasn't attached to a game object (that headache took at least a half an hour to sort out).

Overall, I was able to finish both tutorials mostly understanding what the code I was given was doing and was able to edit it to get some different affects and kind of just play around. So, on that level, I'd say they're about equal.

One big thing I want for sure out of the engine we use is to be able to handle a lot of conversations and variables there from. We're hoping to make a "choices matter" (TM) game, and very story/dialog heavy. Ink seems like a good plug-in to do this in Unity, but implementation doesn't seem easy (though I did find a pretty good looking tutorial that may help de-mystify). Godot seems to have some assets available for handling dialog trees, but i haven't had a chance to really dig in to them yet. So, that could definitely be a decider for me: which engine has assets that make a dialog/choice heavy game easier to make.

While I had originally thought about making a tactics RPG for this project, looking around at both the Godot and Unity scenes, it seems like few people are making these types of projects that are giving out free advice on how to make them work in those engines. After talking with my team (I have a team!, see my post from a while back), it seemed like a good idea both to keep the game within the scope of a novice, but still tell the story we wanted, to do a skill role system instead. Since this came from a tabletop session anyway, seemed to make the most sense to do skill rolls rather than develop a whole combat system.

TL;DR - Looking for advice on which engine, between Godot and Unity, would be handle a 2D RPG that relies on a lot of dialog and choices along with skill rolls for the gameplay. Thanks in advance!

The final results would look something like this.

Ours here wouldn't be tailored to obscure music like that though, just the best albums of the year with no other qualifications. There hasn't been one on reddit since 2017, you can find the 2011-2017 sets in the archive. The first one was just me putting up 15 albums. I believe the highest number we ever hit was 287 albums. It's heartening when the artists show up to thank you for shining a light on their little corner of the music world, too. A good list is good press for Tildes, it'll make the rounds.

Frankly, the people who were instrumental in those roundups are here on Tildes now, so hitting past 300 isn't outside the realm of possibility, not that we need to get that extreme (it's just fun). There are several new type two listeners here too, so potentially we've already got more music lovers and more help here than we've had doing the previous set. General input from tens of thousands of people like you see on reddit isn't as important to this process as the hardcore music lovers, we'd get like 3 solid recs out of 1000 comments, and small/forgotten /r/letstalkmusic always kicked everyone else's ass when it came to album picks.

These things can be rather a lot of work, which is why they are hard to do. It's not the playlists that eat up the time, though - it's collecting all of the albums and getting enough ears on them to give them the stamp of approval for the final list. The way to make that easier is to get started on it early and spread the work out over several months. That way come November you're looking for late releases and overlooked gems rather than panicking and trying to do it all in a single week. Been there, that's the worst.

The way we'd do it before, we'd run roundup threads on reddit periodically (in several different subs) then sift the comments for album recommendations, listen to them to see if they passed muster. That's hardly necessary on Tildes, especially with the long-lived threads here that bump with activity and never truly lock. We also used a google docs spreadsheet so we could tally everyone's votes up, but that was a major pain in the ass I'd like to skip. Tildes' own votes should be more than enough, and exemplary tags can highlight the must-listen set that goes at the top.

I think the best way to do it is put up a collection thread that everyone who is interested can then bookmark or ignore, and then drop albums in the comments between now and mid-November. No, not in this thread, I'll post a thread for it during the first week of October. We just let that roll and keep dumping new albums into it, listening, and leaving comments there. Come late November I can whip that into a set of playlists in a weekend, that's the easy part.

I enjoy doing this because it's been my experience that most music publications would rather argue about what numerical order the same 50 albums should be in than round up all of the best and let the listeners decide for themselves. They also have an incentive to pimp bands that are industry darlings or that they are being paid to boost in the recommendations. We don't.

So, are you folks interested in getting the ball rolling on this in October? Leave a comment if you are interested in contributing (even if it's just a single album) so we can get a sense of how many people are down for this before we get started. If there isn't enough interest we can try again next year. I'd also like to invite the folks who have done this before to share their experiences, you know who you are. ;)

So if there are any sailors or prespective sailors on here some questions. What region do you sail in? Captain or crew (I guess also own or crew)? What kind of boat? What level do you sail at?

This is a lot of questions I know, but I've gotten into sailing more and more over the last few years and I've found it's one of the main things that's kept me sane throughout the pandemic.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! 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 pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

For a class I have to compose soundtracks and music, and I have no experience whatsoever.
Okay, I played classical guitar for a decade but I never was good at music theory and can barely read notes.

My issue is that I come up with a tune, and I need to dump that information to a recording medium as soon as possible. Translating that tune into a short term memory and playing it out on my guitar doesn't work, as I'll end up forgetting it nearly instantly. The one instrument that I can play is whistling, but that's kinda hard to do for long.

I'm looking for a more intuitive way to input notes into a computer.
I was thinking of some kind of pitch slider that continuously plays a note (limited to notes, no microtones) that I can control with an external input device like a knob or potmeter / by moving my mouse up and down, and then hit a button to input that sound, moving on to the next note. No delays inbetween, just immediately starts playing a new note.

Like the computer whistling a note for me, and me adjusting the pitch and length.

I can move my mouse quite precisely & can adjust pitch pretty easily when whistling, it's just that translating music from head to an instrument will never be as intuitive as something like whistling.

It's not supposed to be perfect, on-point music, just enough to record the vague idea and process it later. It also should be super minimalistic, I'd preferably only have the slider, the play/pause button, the confirm note button and a "save to file" button.

I'm not sure where I can even start finding something remotely related to this. I've looked around and tried a bunch of music software, but it's all either complicated or unintuitive.

Anyone know something like this?

Edit: As this website puts it;

Intuitive music composition requires that you hear the musicality of the music as you are composing it. Which means that you have no choice but to compose by playing.

and

You cannot intuitively compose music by entering note data into a software application.

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.

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

As it is only possible to know what it is like to be yourself, it could be that you perceive the world in a completely different way than is typical and have no idea that that is the case. Hence the existence of invisible disabilities such as face blindness or double vision, conditions such as synesthesia and aphantasia, etc. I am curious if anyone here experiences any such mental/perceptual phenomenon that could possibly be unique to you/atypical. Or if you experience one of the above it would be very interesting to hear about as well!

Some examples of what I'm going for:

• a YouTuber/blogger I follow claims their internal monologue takes the form of a humming or buzzing following the cadence and intonation, but not the sounds, of speech.
• my personal inner monologue is usually more of a "dialogue", as in a discussion between me and 1+ imaginary participants (usually someone I know IRL or a character from a book). Although I don't perceive "them" as a separate entity I can't really predict what "they" will say. (feel free to comment if you experience this as well! I only suspect this is weird because mental vocalization is typically referred to as monologue but maybe this is totally normal?)
• I'm pretty sure I experience emotions at a much shallower level than most. When I was very young I actually considered the possibility that I was a robot constructed by my parents, based on some Twilight Zone episode. I would say 95% of the time I don't really feel any emotion and when I do, it feels much less intense than it seems to be for most people judging by their behavior.
• When I'm reading particularly dense text or have spent some time memorizing things, there is sometimes a certain sensation in my head, which, while I wouldn't really call it tiredness or exhaustion, does compel me to stop studying or whatever I'm doing. It's almost analogous to muscle soreness?

Last Thursday, at my workplace, we rolled out a software upgrade across the company. The server side was upgraded overnight to ensure there was minimal downtime, and we had instructions for users posted on our Intranet (pinned to the top for the next 4 days), on exactly what they needed to do to run the upgrade on their PCs and ensure everything was working correctly.

The instructions were written with the help of my 4-year-old to ensure it was clear enough for anyone to read and follow along.

I still received at least 40 messages and emails from people complaining the upgrade didn't work or that certain Outlook plugins are now missing (which was covered in the instructions).

My question is, has anyone found a good way to ensure people follow instructions, or the best way to ensure that your instructions are easy to understand and follow along with?

It is very frustrating to take the time to ensure things go smoothly and write what even my 4-year-old thought was clear instruction, and still have a third of the company not be able to figure it out?

This is not meant to be mean hearted in any way, I genuinely would like some advice or tips on how I can improve on this the next time around.

Thanks.

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

In school we teach kids that good stories have conflict and have them fill out plot diagrams, analyzing the different parts relative to the conflict of the story.

Every time this comes up, I always wonder about its universality. As it's taught to kids, this is "how stories are" and conflict itself is considered essential to storytelling. The conventional wisdom goes that a story without conflict is "boring".

Is this the case, though? It's always felt to me like a very limited way of looking at stories -- fine for children but something that doesn't necessarily scale up past the early stages of literary analysis -- but I don't have anything to back that up. I don't have enough in my repertoire/expertise to really go beyond it, and I'm left with just a sort of empty suspicion that may or may not be justified.

• Is conflict essential to storytelling?
• Are there examples of good stories without conflict?
• Is teaching narrative in this way effective, or limiting?

I read the Wikipedia article about "gaslighting" and know it comes from a 1944 film of the same name in which an abusive husband gradually dims the gaslights at home – while denying doing so – to drive his wife mad.

Yet whenever I see the term used (which happens a lot, lately) I can't make the connection. It seems people use it for the simple act of lying or denying something, which to me is mostly just... lying, not "gaslighting". Any kind of stupid, misguided act is getting the sinister "gaslighting" stamp as if it some 5d chess move when it simply looks like incompetence. The core principle of it seems to revolve around having a plan to psychologically manipulate someone but I mostly don't see the plan nor the actual goal. If anything untruthful you say about an important topic is "gaslighting", then the term doesn't seem to have a lot of value on its own. Wikipedia actually mentions "unconscious" gaslighting which seems to contradict its purpose of actually wanting to manipulate someone.

So, given its popularity, I'm curious if there might be a (succinct) definition of the term that helps me understand it properly? Do you think it's just a trendy term to throw at politicians doing shit you don't like? Am I missing an important detail?

I'm not looking to gain any practical skills from these recommendations (ex: not "Clean Code", "The Pragmatic Programmer"). Last year I read through the two books in Fabien Sanglard's Game Engine Black Book series and would love to get my hands on more books like them. Books that focus on history, arcane details and secrets once thought lost to time. Sadly it appears I've already worked through Sanglard's entire bibliography. But I'm sure there's more stuff out there like it.

We are almost in a new generation of consoles and was just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on each offering. Some questions to prompt (but feel free to just share what's at the top of your mind):

Have you preordered a system?

Which system do you think looks best to you and why?

How will these systems impact gaming on PC?

Would you get the digital or disc version?

Will these consoles affect Nintendo's plans?

Has Microsoft re-claimed any of their lost momentum from the Xbox One launch?

What features are most important to you?

If you aren't planning on buying at launch, is there something you are waiting for?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Based on replies to this comment there seems to be a decent amount of interest around the topic of reworking voting, so I thought I would start a thread to get some more input. We already had similar discussions about a year ago but it looks like some people's opinions may have shifted somewhat? and as was noted in the comment thread, 1 week wasn't really enough to accurately assess the value of something like making vote counts invisible.

Things to consider:

• Do you think how voting works changes your/other's behavior on this site? and if it does, is this change positive or negative?
• Would you support reworking/modifying voting? If so, how?
• How long should we test said modifications if they are made?
• anything else you consider relevant

I love bicycles. I really love the aesthetic of vintage bicycles and the easy-ish to repair nature of them. They are mostly standard off-the-shelf parts, nuts, bolts and washers etc.

Look for opportunities to give old things new life, a quote that inspired me from a YouTube channel titled Old Shovel. He repairs old tools and recently bicycles.

Since then, I have been restoring a 1974 Canadian Tire branded Japanese Bridgestone Youngway.

Any advice for a newbie hobby vintage bicycle restorer?

^{Admittedly this would be better under the panel setting of Kfwyre here but alas, I'm asking this question because I don't know about what happens to people under racism and organizing a discussion for people grouped by a plight you don't know about and have never experienced is probably a bad idea. Also IIRC "race" isn't really scientific. And please, correct me if needed. I know nothing about this.}

Either way, this is a pretty open-ended thread, the only 2 requirements I can imagine are the one in the title and that you state what 'race'/ethnicity you are and where you are (i.e black, US or Black, South Africa or Roma, most European countries and especially Balkan ones).

I'm interested in anything that's basically non-fiction television that isn't news or news commentary. They don't have to be documentaries but certainly can be, and I'm open to stuff available on any streaming service.

Introduction

Gender and sexuality are complex, personal topics, and asking questions about them can often feel invasive or even offensive. Discussions about them can be tough to navigate, especially online, where people's guards are often up and hostility and harassment are common.

In order to help clear the air and provide a safe space for honest and genuine dialogue, we have assembled a cross-section of Tildes' LGBT community to whom you can ask questions. These volunteers have agreed to open up about their experiences, identities, and knowledge.

In this thread, you will be able to ask our panelists questions regarding anything you've ever wanted to know about being LGBT. Our goal is to provide you with meaningful answers, not judge you for your questions! For the purposes of this thread, LGBT refers to the umbrella term under which all minority gender and sexual identities fall.

Guidelines for Participation

Panelists

Here are the users who will be answering your questions:

@Algernon_Asimov
@CALICO
@Cleb
@emdash
@Gaywallet
@kfwyre
@patience_limited
@reifyresonance
@ShilohMizook
@Silbern
@tindall
@Whom

You can get more information on each in their bios below:

The door is open. Ask away!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

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.

Devs make things they feel like making, or things they think the world needs.

What kind of an app (web, desktop, or mobile) would you want to see? What is something you wanted or needed for a long time that simply isn't there, or there but so bad with X that you can't use it?

Alternatively, what is a common problem that could be solved with software but hasn't been yet, or at least not effectively?

Leaving this vague on purpose, to let Tilderinos express themselves.

This post is born from another discussion we have currently on tildes about the benefits of LineageOS. Please, check it out if you wanna discuss about the benefits of the custom ROM scene.
Here, instead, I ask primarily about hardware, not about software. Although, as always, they later intersect.

My question comes from my search for a new phone, I have been rocking a Moto G5 Plus since 2018 (it was released in 2017 and I bought it second-hand) and my experience has been great overall. I knew that I could root this phone so that I did in September 2018 and from there I haven't gone back to stock ever since. Mistakes aside, the experience has been great overall and has nourish my interest in computing. But, this phone is 3 and a half years old and I definitely notice it. One, due to the wear and second the 2GB of RAM my model had (XT1680). I'm in no hurry in a change though, I think I could use it for some more years and I can say that thanks to an amazing community that still supports this phone. (Seriously, I am using Android 10 with the latest patch, unthinkable!).

Nevertheless, as a thought experiment, or as a backup plan, or useful for anyone interested in being part of custom ROMs, I would like to ask you guys which do you think are the most dev-friendly phone in the market right now?

The criteria would be:

• It has a unlockable bootloader.
• The kernel has been released and is available.
• Has a community that constantly supports it.
• It doesn't have 2GB of RAM

Please, write any phone you have the idea that has a modding scene. I'm afraid that some will not be available in my country, but I want to make it as international possible so I insist, write any phone that has that criteria. And feedback for the english will also be appreciated.

I’m pretty sure every dog owner thinks their dog is the best most unique dog in the world, and the same is true about cat owners, snake owners, etc!

So make your best case: why is your animal companion the coolest in the whole world?

I beat Final Fantasy VII Remake last week. Those last chapters were exhausting, and amazing, and now that I've gotten some rest I'm thinking about going back and doing some postgame content and Hard mode.

Any tips on where to begin? I tried picking Chapter 9 to go to the Colosseum and get a couple upgrades I missed for Aerith, but quickly died to some easy mobs within the first 15 minutes of the chapter.

So I'm thinking I need to do some grinding first, probably on Normal, before attempting Hard? My characters are around Level 40.

How did you go about the postgame content? Did you replay the chapters in chronological order, or prioritize specific goals? What worked well for you (read: made the postgame enjoyable and not frustrating), and what would you have done differently?

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! 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 pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!