What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
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 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 about 20 days I'll be taking a cruise and will effectively have no internet access. It's going to be a long trip with many sea days, so I'm looking for something that I can pick up on moments when I just want a bit more stimulation. The last time I took a trip like this I ended up playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
I do have a preference for action-based titles since they tend to be easy to pick up and stop, but I also like games that require a bit of thought.
I was considering subscribing to Apple Arcade again since it would let me access a number of games I would enjoy, but I'm not sure how often it would need to contact Apple to confirm the status of my subscription. Data will be extremely expensive on this trip, especially when out at sea.
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 week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
Maybe it's because I only interact with the side of the Internet that uses English.
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!
Good morning/evening tildes. What are you procrastinating on today?
What's the thing you keep meaning to do but can't find the time to because, let's be real, you'd rather do something else and it's not important anyway?
No Time To Die recently had it's world premiere. This concludes the Daniel Craig saga. I have liked the majority of these films. I have never read any of the Bond books, and I kind of want to read some of them. Which ones are your favorites?
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 playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
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 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 monthly thread for those who need it. Vent, share your experiences, ask for advice, talk about how you are doing. Let's make this a compassionate space for all who may need one.
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? 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!
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?
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
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?
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!
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.
Does anyone else here have a smart home setup?
I've been building mine over the 7 or 8 years now in fits and starts. At first, it was smart lights in an apartment and then grew to include smart door locks. I bought a house and it now remotes, motion/door sensors, light switches, and more.
After trying all of the platforms you can think of (Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Homekit, Homekit + Homebridge, Home Assistant, and more), I settled on Home Assistant earlier this year. As I've bought stuff over the years, I've tried to get things that support more than just one platform to avoid being too locked in to one ecosystem. Apple's Home platform is nice, but I can't use it if I want to switch to an Android phone.
Like many of us, I've had some free time during the pandemic, so I put some work into getting Home Assistant up and running. It's definitely not for the average consumer. It requires quite a bit of manual editing of code to get it working perfectly but I've spent the past few months learning how to customize it and get things working just how I want them.
I've also been working toward replacing the few components that rely on cloud services with equivalents that can work locally, so I'm not beholden to a cloud service that could disappear eventually.
I also started automating more and more things:
I'd love to hear what other people have been doing.
I've recently experienced something multiple times and wanted to see if others are seeing this. I'm seeing various news articles where the first few paragraphs basically say the exact some information over and over again 3 or 4 times in slightly different ways. My most recent experience was this article about some hackers selling information on billions of Facebook users.
The article starts off with the title "Personal Information of More Than 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum". Straightforward and to the point. Next we get this paragraph in bold:
The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally.
Next is a bullet list of the highlights of the incident:
Highlights:
- Data scrapers are selling sensitive personal data on 1.5 billion Facebook users.
- Data contains users’: name, email, phone number, location, gender, and user ID.
- Data appears to be authentic.
- Personal data obtained through web scraping.
- Data can be utilized for phishing and account takeover attacks.
- Sold data claimed to be new from 2021.
This rehashes the number (1.5 billion) and place (Facebook), but does contain new information like what was leaked, and some unsubstantiated claims about whether it's authentic and how it was obtained.
The next paragraph repeats the 1.5 billion number a fourth time, and repeats that the data is available on a hacker forum. Two paragraphs later, we get another list of bullet points which are identical to the 2nd bullet point above; namely that the info contains:
According to the forum poster, the data provided contains the following personal information of Facebook users:
- Name
- Location
- Gender
- Phone number
- User ID
At this point I stop reading because I mistakenly think that I'm re-reading the same paragraph over and over again. It's an incredibly unpleasant experience.
Is anyone else seeing this? I've been seeing this not just on smaller sites like the one linked here, but on major news sites like CNBC and CNN, too. I know that news sites are having their budgets slashed, etc., but I literally can't read articles like this. I mean my brain just won't let me complete them because it thinks it's caught in a loop or something. It's hard to describe.
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!
My two roommates and I just finally got over some kind of weird cold-like illness, took us 11-12 days to recover. Not Covid (based on 1 negative PCR test for one of us; I'm assuming we all had the same thing). Presumably, just your random cold/flu-type bug. A remote co-worker (400 km away, both of us in EU) has been experiencing a similar illness for over a week now, still not over it.
It took the three of us almost 2 weeks to get over it. The symptoms kept changing every 1-2 days (sore throat, then harsh cough, then chest/lung pain, then gas and intestinal issues, then headache, then back to coughing); had a false "I'm all better now" moment halfway thru, then Phase 2 kicked in. On top of which, I don't get sick much, and when I do, it's usually very mild and I'm over it very quickly.
So, I have a hypothesis. Thanks to all of the social distancing, OCD hand-washing, masking, etc for the past 18 months, "regular" colds/flus/germs have probably been going through some pretty extreme evolutionary stresses, just like Covid ... and are probably mutating/evolving a lot, just like Covid. Except all the researchers and specialists are pretty much completely preoccupied with Covid research/work, so no one has been paying much attention to all the other day-to-day respiratory illnesses.
I've seen a fair bit of news about how colds/flus have been much less common of late, due to the Covid-precautionary measures, but I have not seen any research or discussion about how those measures might be impacting other non-Covid illnesses.
Thoughts?
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!
Thanks to all who posted to or read last month's trial run of this topic. Let's try another month!
This thread is for when you're done with a game and you want to give your finalized overview of it. Did you enjoy it? What did it do well? What were some of its frustrations? Would you recommend it to others? That sort of thing.
For ease of readability, please bold the title for the game you're reviewing.
Also, please mark all spoilers as well using the following formatting:
<details>
<summary>Spoilers</summary>
Spoiler text goes here.
</details>
What's something you've changed your mind about recently? What prompted the change?
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?
What's your favorite memory from a birthday (yours or someone else's)? This could be a favorite experience, gift, interaction, cake, anything! It can be more than one!
I'll go first.
My favorite memory of my own birthday was in high school when my friends surprised me with a grocery bag filled with my favorite treats (various sour candies! XD!). For some reason, it made me feel seen.
A funny memory of my birthday was when my family treated me to IHOP for breakfast and later on that day my friends surprised me and took me to IHOP... the same one!
My favorite birthday memory in general was my significant other's. I got us tickets to a comedy show in Madison Square Garden/a weekend in NY (we were living in the west coast at the time). NYC in December: walking in Central Park, bars, donuts & pizza, good public transportation, making a little snow man, walking.
Oh, and you could also state if you had a horrible birthday experience.
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!
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
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 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?
I'd been accumulating modular gear over the course of the pandemic, but over the last month or so I sold the majority of my modular, including swapping my 6U 89HP case for a much smaller model, without anything in it as of yet. Instead, I'm using a lot more standalone gear.
I'm using (shock, horror!) a laptop, as well as the Elektron Digitakt drum computer and Digitone polyphonic FM synthesizer. I also went from one Monome Norns Shield DIY with no input devices to two Norns Shields with a Grid and a 16n. Observe, if you want! (As an aside, I absolutely love the Monome aesthetic of raw aluminum and I've also gotten a set of faceplates and acrylic windows made for my Norns'. I kept the first two of the run, when I hadn't quite perfected the technique, so there are some blemishes; the rest went to friends.)
Interestingly, where my process tended to run up against the limitations of my gear in the past, it now seems much more constrained just by the time I am able to spend playing music each day, as I work a full time job and do most of the chores in my household.
I'd love to know how gear and process interacts for you folks, and what you do to make sure you're having fun and making music, despite the many demands on all our time.
Sometimes I'd like to post comments more frequently than a single comment anywhere on the site once every two hours.
But I can't, because I get the error "Rate limit exceeded".
Is it possible to remove or at least significantly increase the limit site-wide for established users?
The things a bear has to do..
If there is a more appropriate place for this, I would appreciate having it moved there, or a link to the more appropriate area. Thanks!
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
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 food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
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!
I’m trying to find movies where Rock and Roll is a character, not movies about the music.
Examples I can think of include:
Heavy Metal
Xanadu
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Rock and Rule
Maybe
Streets of Fire
The Hunger
Grease (technically a musical i guess)
Guardians of the Galaxy
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!
I get very confused and urgent and it can be many minutes before I understand that I'm arguing from nothing but internal stress. It's a maddening habit that everyone around me finds repulsive. I have thought that it would be possible to make friends who could help to intervene when I am losing polite perspective, but I am not sure if this expectation has ever really functioned. I don't want to disavow any responsibility in telling my friends they have to jump in on my frequent malfunctions, that sounds unfair. But I'm not making much progress on getting over myself by myself. What to do.