I've started seeing lots of stories or posts elsewhere on the internet about people managing to schedule appointments for their COVID vaccinations even if they're not in the current phase and I'm curious what people's thoughts are about it.

To be clear, I am specifically not asking about people who are able to snag leftover or "thawed" doses that would otherwise have to be tossed at the end of the day.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

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?

(Topics like this need people to have more sympathy for the other because we're talking about real people's sexualities and discrimination these people often face every day and have deep feeling abouts, so be nice.)

If I had to (uneducatedly) guess, some of them would be:

• Your sexuality (and the word allosexual) being as good as unknown by most people.

• Asexuality being a big umbrella (hence the title being demisexual/demiromantic/asexual/aromantic rather than just asexual)

• Allosexual and aromantic people being confused for "people who only want sex"

• People not believing you when you say that.

• Being perceived as an anomaly or lying, along with people promising that you will realize the truth one day.

• Overly religious people seeing your sexuality as a virtuous rejection of degenerate lust/sin and as an unnatural anomaly simultaneously.

• People seeing your sexuality as being "free" from dating or porn consumption or above identifying yourself by how un-sexed you are. (True, but obviously very reductive and usually contingent on the insecurities of the people seeing you that way.) (This is admittedly something I struggle with.)

(This thread is a rehash of this thread, with the difference that you can give advice to any non-public figure you want from 10 years ago too, regardless of how old they are.)

(Also assuming they take you seriously, interpret it correctly, don't forget it immediately, don't cause a butterfly effect for doing so, etc...)

Advice for any generic 5-year old:

• If you don't know already, learn to write.

• If you don't know already, learn to read. (Neither of these are likely in most places but whatever.)

• If your parents tell you to not talk to strangers, what they mean by that is "don't talk to adults, unknown people who offer you things (which rarely happens anyway, lol) or people minding their own business." Most importantly, none of these apply to you current, or future classmates. Talk to them about things you might share in common.

(I would also include something about how watching children's cartoons are a utter waste of time but I have no replacement for those and I suspect only their parents would.)

Advice for me, 10 years ago:

• Pay attention to your future school material to make sure you don't lose it and call your teacher and interrupt class for everyone else.

• Some people will be very rude to you. You should probably tell your mom about it when you're home so she can tell the school staff about it. (You won't have time to tell your school staff unless you want to say that in fron of the people who will be rude to you. Also I have no clue if the staff will do anything about it.)

• Crying will often attract those people to you and give them satisfaction, it's better to do it at home to your parents. (Also, those people shouldn't dictate the morality of crying.)

• If you hear a word you don't know about from your classmates, it might refer to someone's genitals, particularly If it starts with X. (like a 5-year old would know what genitals are but anyway)

Some people will tell you or pressure you to do dumb things. ('Dumb' being needlessly harmful to others or humiliating to you.) Don't listen to them. (I have no clue how they will react to this however.)

To my mother, 10 years ago:

• In the future, it will be unanimous consensus that you should track everything your child does on the internet until they're a teenager and not have them spend more than like, 2 hours there. I'm not kidding about this.

• This is the ideal time to introduce your child to chores apparently.

• Telling your child to not talk to strangers will be a mistake, because your child will also assume 'strangers' to be his classmates, which is bad for obvious reasons. By 'strangers' you mean "adults, unknown people who offer you things (Have you ever seem this happen? Serious question.) or people minding their own business."

• Your child being autistic will mean your child will need more elaborate explanations for following social norms than most people.

• Children can often have their mouths not grow enough, and lack room for teeth to organize themselves properly. This will happen to your child, and if you wait too long, your child will have terrible teeth and need to use braces and palatal expanders to fix it, like your husband.

(I would probably also include something about my grandma dying of cancer, but my mom has never had problems with spending time with her parents so it's not really advice.)

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?

The US emigration thread brought back a lot of thoughts I've had about leaving the UK, and I imagine a decent number of us have at least idly wondered about a serious move - especially after a year like we've just had.

For me, the difficulty has always been figuring out where to go: politics/climate/healthcare/lifestyle/language are a delicate balancing act, and I don't think anywhere's a slam dunk. Everyone's going to have their own take on what perfect looks like, and what compromises to make mapping that to the real world!

So let's assume you're packed and ready to go, nothing holding you back. You've still got to navigate inbound immigration, handle the language, find a job, all that good stuff - but the world is your oyster. Where would you choose to go?

Compliments are, technically, to be tagged as 'noise' and often also 'offtopic' for usually being only loosely related to the commment or post they're replying to. But the warm fuzzies empathy is pretty important in a community, and I don't remember seeing an unnecessary compliment anywhere so, unsurprisingly, people don't noise compliments. But they still might clutter space for a potential reply giving advice. So do you think the current arrangement is fine? I personally would probably make a label for compliments which would either be neutral or slightly positive, and maybe publically visible so everyone can (but don't have to) see the compliments of the receiver but I haven't thought about this too deeply.

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!

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!

We're lucky when we share mutual interests with friends, but often there's that category of things for which there isn't much overlap. Though it speaks to us, we're seemingly alone in appreciating it, yet long for someone to connect with it over.

What's that thing for you?

I'm a 23 year old male originally from Southern California, and like the title says I'm curious to see if anyone else near my demographic has seriously looked into emmigrating in light of the past year and a half.

What factors motivate you to move?
What would be an ideal location for you?
What timeline would are you looking at?

One of the main motivators I seek to emmigrate is climate change. As the world continues to progress and evolve I do not think the United States will be able to equitabbly address the changing landscape and ways of life. As for when I would want to move, I'm not sure; currently it seems like a far off probability, but I know it's a choice I will have to make in my own lifetime.

Adam Savage once said we don't have "favourite" things, but rather things that are important to us, for different reasons. I would love to hear your top series and what put them there. Not just because they're good: Maybe you have a sentimental connection to it, or a particular episode. Maybe it taught you something. Let's hear 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.

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!

There's been quite a bit of discussion lately about people don't want to see, but not that much about what sort of content we do want to see. What would you like to see more of?

For the official stance, I'll repost the instructions that most of us are probably skipping over by now.

Tildes prioritizes high-quality content and discussion
Please post topics that are interesting, informative, or have the potential to start a good discussion.
Please avoid posting topics that are primarily for entertainment or that don't have discussion value.

This seems vague, and we probably have different ideas of what's high-quality and what counts as good discussion?

I'm also wondering if we should be here more for the links or for the discussion. When I arrived, I was just happy to find a quiet place where I could post links to articles that I found elsewhere and were particularly interesting to me. (But I think I had gotten into a rut for a while after getting obsessed with the pandemic and politics.) Maybe we should try posting more links?

For the purposes of the question, I want to ignore official remasters/rereleases since those are essentially separate, newer full releases. I'm interested in old, original games. Titles that you can "manually remaster" yourself with mods are fine, since you're still playing the "original" game to some extent.

Also, "regularly" in the title doesn't have to mean daily/weekly and can instead be "once every couple of years".

• What keeps you coming back to them?
• Is your love for the games strictly nostalgia-based, or could an unacquainted newcomer still find similar value in them?
• If there are any modern games that try to scratch the same itch, do they succeed or fail?
• Would you want an official remaster of the game (if one isn't already available)?

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!

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?

Let me preface that I'm well aware that if given the choice between frequent, untargeted ads or fewer targeted ads, the average Tilderino's response would be "Neither."

However, given that social media at scale has yet to establish a sustainable business model that doesn't rely on advertising (people like free content, after all), it seems advertising has become a necessary evil (and has pervaded nearly all forms of media for the past century regardless).

With that in mind, I think coming up with creative solutions to deliver relevant advertising while preserving user privacy and avoiding destructive feedback loops (i.e. where the search for ad revenue compromises the user base and content generation) is an interesting thought exercise. This is one of social media's largest problems, imho, but it might be easier to analyze just Reddit as a platform due to its similarities (and notable differences) to Tildes.

A couple thoughts of my own:

• Whitelist "safe" subreddits - A massive problem for Reddit is identifying content that brands want to avoid association with (e.g. porn, violence, drugs). While new subreddits crop up every day, the large ones do not change so fast and could be classified as safe content spaces (e.g. /r/aww)
• User subreddit subscriptions - Rather than target ads based on the subreddit currently being viewed, why not use the subs people have voluntarily indicated they are interested in?
• Allow users to tag content - While people can report content to the mods today, there is no ability to tag content (like Tildes has) from a user level. Content that's inappropriate for advertising may not necessarily be a reportable offense. By allowing users to classify content, better models for determining "good" content vs. "bad" could be developed using ML.
• Use Mods to determine content appropriateness - User supplied data may introduce too much noise into any given dataset, and perhaps mods are a better subjective filter to rely on. Certain subreddits can have biased mods for sure, but without trying to overhaul content moderation entirely, could mod bans/flair be used to indicate suitable content for ads?
• Use computer vision to classify content - While this wouldn't work at scale, an up-and-coming post could have a nebulous title and difficult-to-decipher sarcastic comments. The post itself could be an image macro or annotated video that could be used to determine the subject matter much more effectively.

To be clear, the spirit of my initial prompt isn't "how can Reddit make more money?" per se, but how can it find a sustainable business model without destroying itself/impacting society at large. Facebook and Twitter seem to have optimized for "engagement" metrics which leads to prioritization of outrage porn and political divisiveness. Snapchat and Instagram seem to have succumb to being mostly an ad delivery engine with some overly-filtered content of "real life" influencers (read: marketers) strewn in between. None of these seem like a net-good for society.

What are all your thoughts? Perhaps Big Tech social media is irredeemable at this point, but I'm trying not to take such a defeatist attitude and instead explore any positive solutions.

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.

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!

Tell us about an album that means a lot to you, and, most importantly, why it means so much.

What makes it resonant? Why do you connect with it so strongly?

To be clear, it doesn’t have to be literally applicable to your life. It could be, for example, an album that you listened to at a certain point in your life and thus connect it with that. I’m asking this question more to get at the stories than the music itself. Tell me yours!

Anything goes -- all answers are fair game, no matter how big or small! All that matters is that something amazing isn't getting its due.

Also, it probably goes without saying, but let us know why (you think) it's amazing and why (you think) people take it for granted.

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?

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!

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!

I'm mostly just curious what types of in-depth projects you all get up to. The weekly "what are you working on threads" are always full of cool things, so I am curious what people's self-rated most difficult or complex projects have been.

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!

A few years ago I watched a movie -- can't even remember what it was -- that heavily involved pagers. One character got mad at another for not returning their call, and there was a dramatic scene where they yelled something like "I PAGED you like an HOUR ago!" At the time of its release it probably made perfect sense, but from a modern perspective it had some unintentional comedy to it -- not to mention that younger audiences might not even understand what was going on given that pagers have likely fallen out of common understanding at this point.

I'm curious as to other things that haven't aged well, whether that's due to technological changes, shifts of the social or moral landscape, or even things that are fine in isolation but are hard to divorce from a larger context (e.g. They Might Be Giants released a song in late 2011 that jokes about Whitney Houston being the drummer for the band, but Houston died unexpectedly in early 2012).

Really anything is fair game: what hasn't aged well, and why not?

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?

I hate watching reflections on my screens. My old laptop had a super reflective screen. So does my tablet and smartphone, but I was successful in applying anti-glare on them. Reflective screens are annoying in any condition besides total darkness. Anti-glare is such an improvement! Yes, I lose a small amount of brightness, but I need a lot less brightness when my screen is not a freaking mirror!

Hence the question, "Why don't more screens come with anti-reflective coating?"

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.

So there is this game called Valheim that recently released. You may or may not have recently read the article where they claim to have sold over a million copies around a week after release.

I bought it to give it the 2-hour smell test and it seems pretty darn good. However, this game seems best played with others and I doubt my friend group will end up playing this. Renting a server seems pretty cheap so I was wondering how interested you would be in a Tildes community server? I would be down for paying for a month and seeing where it goes from there.

It looks like min slots for a server would be 10 slots but I would imagine that's okay since we all wouldn't be in the same time zone. I can scale this up if the demand is there.

Thoughts?

Other Info:

What is Valheim, the Viking game blowing up on Steam?

Server is set up!

Game is password protected but if you click me, you will find what you need.

Following up on @kfwyre's post asking "What's Something That Hasn't Aged Well", I'm curious what's something that's improved with age?

I always hear the phrase "it gets better with age" in reference to wine, and sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not. Or at least, there's often a limit on how long it improves before it starts to decline again.

One odd thing that got better with age is the terrible Sandra Bullock movie "The Network." When it came out, almost none of the things in the movie were actually possible because not very many of us had much information about ourselves on computers that were actually accessible to the internet at large. Now everything about us is online whether we put it there or not.

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!

A political example might be the fact that according to gallup, people have supported a popular vote for the US presidency for more than 75 years (this article is 20 years old, but the numbers still stand), albeit the partisan difference in opinion seems to be more recent and it's not clear if people knew what to replace it, or if they knew about all the other faults in the US political system.

Other more cultural examples might be things like romans drawing dicks on Hadrian's wall, eating fast food and their timeless graffiti, surrealism being 100 years old as opposed to 'Zoomer humor', etc.

So, what are your examples?

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!