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!

Hey there people. Long time lurker here. I decided to start writing because it's late at night, my mind is running wild and I'm trying to piece together the situation myself here. This will probably turn out to be a wall of text. Apologies to anyone who might see it as spam or bothersome - my bad.

Context:
in the second half of my 20s. Working in Germany. Healthy and slim. Working as a field technician for a company installing machines for industrial kitchens. Since this whole pandemic started I have always worked (and traveled around the city). I had offered myself for AZ when people were refusing it, got my second as Pfizer and 3rd with Moderna after 6 months from my second shot. Always followed guidelines regarding masks, vaccines and the whole shabang.

These past 6 months the whole 'global pandemic thing' kinda started becoming 'old news' so-to-say for me. Yes, some people I know got it recently, yet most had little to no symptoms and all recovered without a problem. In my mind I have been thinking 'come on, in 2 years working in closed environments with no ventilation and all sorts of people I have never caught it - I am surely one of those fully immune or asymptomatic ones, right?'.

On top of that I have started to indulge actually going out: drinking with friends, dining with people, casual socialising... I still believe that there is no way going forward without it. I know I cannot stomach another Christmas, Easter, birthday or whatever by myself. And still here I am freaking out after actually getting COVID.

Being brutally honest I was actually quite chill up until about an hour ago. I had been watching the last episodes of a certain very lighthearted anime comedy series that's coming out while lightly coughing, cleaning my nose pretty often and drinking as much water as I could. At some point I came to realise that something was not right. Initially I couldn't put my finger on it, I was just feeling uncomfortable.

Then it hit me: I couldn't smell anything. Not the laundry I did today, not the soap I had used to shower myself with, nothing. Up until this point it had been nothing more than some cough, sore throat and phlegm. Now it felt real - or rather unreal, it still feels like a nightmare.

Thinking logically it doesn't even make sense to me - I mean, come on, it's just smell right? - still losing the sense of smell is the first thing that has truly scared me since testing positive 2 days ago.
I have been going around the apartment for 20 minutes trying (to no avail) to smell stuff:

• old spice deodorant stick
• mouthwash
• toothpaste
• perfume
• isopropyl alcohol
• chlorine (super concentrated mildew killer spray)
  I just feel like i have ice up my nose. It's a very weird and unpleasant sensation (or lack thereof).

I have now just decided for no particular reason to do a mouthwash, and since then I can faintly distinguish smells. What the fuck.
I am now in between putting paper imbued with mouthwash in my nose and drinking a glass of the heaviest edible alcohol I have in my apartment. This is just insane.

Noone I know has lost smell or taste since the original variant, 2 years ago. I am worried and scared. Be brutally honest with me people, should I be or am I just being unreasonable and overly emotional?

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.

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!

Hello everyone,

This will be a long post because I want to give my post the proper context. I apologize in advance for taking your time.

About five months ago, with the help of relatively high ceiling of Windows 11's system requirements, I finally pushed myself to use Linux exclusively on my desktop. It was a decision between using Windows LTSC or Linux and I went with the better long term option.

I am not a programmer but I'm also not unfamiliar with the Linux world. I believe I've used one distro or another on a spare computer for shorts period of time since at least 2008. But those use cases have always been to satisfy the curious side of my brain as I am always interested in technology. So after installing distros ranging from Ubuntu to Arch, my curiosity waned enough to never look deeper into how these systems work. They were, after all, a hobby project on a spare computer that was often gathering dust.

When I decided to switch exclusively to Linux, the next decision I had to make was to pick a distro. Naturally, I looked for the established players first. Ubuntu was the obvious choice because it has long been the distro for newbies and there are a lot of guides on the internet if I ever needed help, which was inevitable. But then I read about snaps and thought that was a deal breaker. I was moving to Linux specifically because I don't want things shoved down my throat. I had no intention to relive that¹.

So Ubuntu was a no go, but I was certain I wanted a Debian based distro as their support and software availability was unmatched, maybe save for Arch². At this point, why not Debian right? It's known for being rock solid and it's Debian itself, not some derivation. Well, because I had various issues with Debian before. These issues were always fundamental and not very specific too, so I didn't want to risk wasting a lot of time fixing things I didn't understand, only for them to break again after a couple of days. Then I came across Pop!_OS, which seemed like a perfect fit. It was Ubuntu without its worst parts, came with Nvidia drivers and it had a company behind it that seemed to be committed to Linux. I installed it and everything just worked. I had zero issues.

But then I started getting that FOMO itch again. GNOME 42 was out and it looked great, but Pop!_OS was two versions behind. I also found out that they're working on their own DE, which might end up being great (it looked nice) but I didn't want to leave an established player like GNOME behind, including all the benefits you get from its wonderful extensions. I started looking for other distos again and Fedora caught my eye. I was obviously aware of Fedora, I even used it once back when YUM was still a thing, but it didn't leave a lasting impression on me. The fact that it wasn't a Debian based distro was also a disadvantage because that meant something different and at this stage of dipping my toes into Linux, I didn't think different might be the best way to go for me. Still, despite my best judgment, I installed Fedora on a USB and used it live. When my gut feeling was confirmed by my research about how Fedora leaves things as stock as possible and is ahead of the curve in terms of upcoming technology (btrfs, PulseAudio, Wayland et al.³) without sacrificing on stability, I was hooked.

After renewing my Timeshift backup, I formatted my Pop!_OS system and installed Fedora. The installation process could use a facelift, but it handled everything perfectly. I didn't even have some of the issues I had with Pop!_OS right after installation. It was literally problem free. I'm now on day #3 of using Fedora and the experience remains the same. The only issue I had to deal with was trying to get Timeshift to work (apparently it doesn't play nice with btrfs on Fedora), but instead of wasting my time with that, I just installed Déjà Dup and I'm good to go again. Barring any drastic issues, I don't plan on changing my distro again.

Now, onto my plea for guidance.

I'm looking for comprehensive resources that will teach me how Linux works under the hood. Considering my non-programming background, I'd appreciate it if the language is approachable. The reason why I want this, for one thing, is to learn more about the system I'm planning to use probably for the rest of my life (in tandem with macOS) but also, I want to do some cool stuff Linux allows users to do.

Just to give a quick example. Yesterday, I installed Rofi, which is, besides many other things, an app launcher. I got it to work just fine, I even got a configuration of my own with a theme of my choosing, but when it comes to using some scripts, I just couldn't do it. Every video I watched on YouTube told me how easy it is to use scripts with it as if it's a self-explanatory thing, but I was simply clueless. There was a lot of lingo thrown around like environment variables, setting up $PATH, making the scripts executable with chmod etc. I have very little knowledge of these things. I want to learn what they are, why they exist, and how they all tie together. I want to learn how /etc/ is different than /usr/ and the difference between X11 and some DE (or if they're even in the same category of things). Now, at the risk of sounding impatient and maybe even worse, I also don't want to go way too deep into these things. I am not, after all, trying to become a kernel developer. I just want to be better informed.

There are a lot of information on the internet but most of this information is scattered and out of context. If I try to learn more about one thing, I'm bombarded about other things that I don't know, so in the end I learn nothing. In short, I'm looking for a comprehensive, entry level video series or a book about Linux written in an easy to understand language that assumes no prior knowledge.

Additionally, I'd appreciate any website, YouTube channel and what have you to keep up with recent developments in Linux. I already found a couple as there are plenty of them, but I'd like to learn more about how people here keep up with this fast changing environment.

Thank you for reading and sorry for being so verbose! 😊

^{1: I know you can remove snaps, but I didn't want to deal with the hassle of any possible issues deleting a core system functionally might bring about.
2: Despite finding its approach fascinating, I had no intention to get into Arch because it's a rolling distro and I didn't want an advanced system that can break at any moment in the hands of a novice like myself.
3: To be clear, I don't know how most of these technologies are better than alternatives, but the Linux community at large seems to think they're drastically better than alternatives and are the future.}

I'm using Firefox on Arch with ublock origin, umatrix, decentraleyes, darkreader, bypass paywalls, old reddit redirect.
None of these should affect Tildes in any way. but still, Firefox seems not to be able to keep me logged in, and everytime i open Tildes in a new tab, I'm logged out. Sometimes it remembers the theme (solarized dark) sometimes it does not and only remembers it after a refresh, and sometimes it just dont.
I dont even know where to look for a solution, especially as this seems to be Tildes specific as no other website seems to have this problems. an I'm pretty shure it has something to do with my Firefox, as it is that way on both of my computers.

edit: solution was to delete all tildes.net cookies

I'll start this post off by summarizing my hair loss experience.

When I was 18, a few months shy of 19, I went to the barber and there was a miscommunication and the barber ended up buzzing my hair off. This is the first time that I was able to see my hairline in a while and I saw that it was higher than I remembered. I was scared at first, I couldn't believe that my hairline was receding. But then I read a few things figures maybe it was just maturing, and then I eventually forgot. Actually a few months later I was back thinking to whether I was losing my hair or not. I talked to a cousin of mine and he said something about a pill that he was taking but that it had a possible side effect of erectile dysfunction. I wasn't going to take a chance on that when I wasn't even sure if I was actually balding.

The next year and a half, I stop thinking about hair loss. It's like I had my memory wiped of that moment, probably due to stress from school. The only thing that happened is that I thought to myself was "man my hair is kind of weird right now." And also I had developed a scalp issue, which I later found out was psoriasis also due to stress.

So, right before the pandemic hits in February 2020, me and my dad go have lunch at this restaurant. I take a shower and go out. My hair is still wet by the time we go to the restaurant. My dad looks up at my hair and asks "are you losing your hair?" And that's when I realized that I was indeed going bald. For the next three months, I was going through all the stages of grief. I was wildly depressed and anxious. I did some research into possible treatments. It took me a while to learn (or re-learn) about the pill known as finasteride. I then find out about a website where you can buy prescription meds without a prescription shipped over from India so I buy finasteride from there and I started treatment on May 1st 2020. I was 20 years old. I then go to the dermatologist two months later and they prescribe me Dutasteride which I have been on ever since.

My initial side effect on the drug was watery semen, which cleared up a few weeks after starting the drug. My hair has re-grown a lot. It's back to it's original thickness, and my hairline has made a rather substantial comeback. It's not all back, but enough to the point where the average person wouldn't know I'm balding anymore.

Let me know if you have any questions. I would love to post pictures, but I rather not if that's okay with everyone.

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!

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 weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? 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 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!

Choose one album
that you love
that you think deserves more love

Tell us what it is, and why.

Additional Details

I did a fresh install of Foobar2000 [1] for the first time since it came out. I'm rebuilding playlists and figured I'd do some digging for some new ones. My old list had a bunch from somafm, Luxuria, the BBC ones, and a few others. Here's a list of some ones I dug up tonight. If you have any other good ones that are indie, hip hop, jazz, exotica, or really well-curated EDM, list 'em up! Bonus points for direct links to the stream.

• 90.9fm WDCB
• Luxuria Music Radio
• BBC6
• BBC3
• WWOZ
• KEXP
• BBC1XTRA
• Pigpen Radio (Internet-Radio.com)
• The Current
• Arctic Outpost

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 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 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!

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!

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.

By "not too specific to the UK", I mean something that can be enjoyed and understood (on a cultural level, not the language - subtitles take care of that) by someone who is not part of that culture. For reference, I really enjoyed The IT Crowd and Peep Show. Thanks!

I'm making a video game, which is sort of a mixture of a puzzle game and interactive fiction. I'm a little uncertain about some name and pronoun choices that I currently offer to the player and I thought that you guys might be able to help me.

The game is in English. At the beginning of the game, the player chooses the main character's name and pronoun. This is presented through two screens that offer the choices through textual narrative. It goes something like this, with [brackets] marking the options that the player can currently choose between.

This is the story of...
[...Alice Aster.]
[...Alan Aster.]
[...Al Aster.]

It is...
[...her story.]
[...his story.]
[...their story.]

Detached from the wider narrative context, this method may seem clunky, but I believe it works within the game itself. Mechanically, that is. I'm less sure about the options that I'm offering.

The player can choose any of the three options in the first screen and again any in the second, regardless of what they chose in the first. This affects the player character's name and pronouns used throughout the game.

Now, there clearly are also many other pronouns that people identify with in English, just like there are many other names. However, for technical and design reasons, it would be challenging for me to have the player freely type in their preferred name or pronouns, and neither can I really present a long list of options. At the same time, by condensing all non-binary choices into the most common (?) "their" and by assuming that "her" also equates to "she" and so on, I wonder if I end up coming across as someone who thinks they are on top of things, but clearly has only a very superficial understanding of the topic. Which, to be honest, might not be that far from the truth.

Similarly, of the three names offered, "Al" is intended as a more gender-neutral or non-binary option than the other two. Does that make sense? Would there be a better way to handle this? Are there names that better signal non-binary or gender-neutral identity?

Or am I simply approaching this wrong?

The game itself does not deal with gender identity. As you can see, I'm not the right person to write about the topic. The choice of gender in fact has relatively little effect on the story itself. The player also has no choice over other matters of identity, including their character's cultural background or family structure. The character is not intended to be the player, but someone whose story the player follows. But it still feels important for me and for the story to offer a choice about the name and the pronoun. And I wouldn't be comfortable with it being just a "traditional" choice between male and female, as it would quite explicitly imply and reinforce assumptions about the world that I think we should move away from as a society.

Not that my game is of course going to change the world in any meaningful way. But having worked on it for about six years now, it has been one long personal learning experience for me. And this feels like another opportunity to understand something better.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts and advice.

Hi folks! I am, unfortunately, probably going to have to build a new PC soon; my beloved Thelio-r1 is slowly failing, and while my original plan was to buy a Ryzen 7 5800X and keep riding this PC for another three to five years, I don't know that I'll actually be able to make that work.

I like the NXT H510 I used for my boyfriend's gaming build, but the thermal performance isn't amazing and, most importantly, I hate tempered glass!

Yes, I understand that people want to show off their (ridiculously!) expensive components. I understand that lots of things have RGB. However, metal is cheaper, easier to work with, doesn't shatter, and I can modify it if I need to.

So, does anyone know of a good mid-tower PC case with decent airflow, up-to-date features (no 5 inch bays, good cable management hardpoints, a cable hiding bay, etc.), and no tempered glass or, preferably, acrylic?

Thank you!

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!

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 just wanted a pretext to share my first successful Expert+ song on 150% speed + Ghost Notes :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HQIvNCF9RA (two-part video, first half on Ghost Arrows, second half on Ghost Notes)

I got back into Beat Saber a week ago after a 2 months hiatus. I like the new OST and mechanics and I love the new Fall Out Boy DLC. Highly recommend it!

Has anyone else been playing it lately?

I'm working on opening a VR arcade in Brussels and thinking of promoting Beat Saber quite a bit there :)

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.

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 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 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!

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 notice this primarily with the YouTube videos. I've started to notice that the videos I see posted in here I have already had recommended to me by YouTube. And I realize it must be because when I watch a video here, the YouTube algorithm decides I'm interested in that kind of thing. So, functionally, by posting and interacting with content in Tildes we are tuning the various algorithmic recommendation feeds that we interact with to view us all similarly.

It's just an interesting side effect I noticed and some food for thought about the effectiveness of a link aggregator or discussion forum at surfacing novel, interesting content we might not find otherwise. In part, this could just be an effect of Tildes being kind of small and having lots of self-selection biases for its user population. Perhaps if it was more diverse we'd be exposed to more things that break the mold and recommendation algorithms won't be able to pin it all down as easily. In fact, we may be able to use this effect as a way to test the breadth and diversity of content and types of people a site is attracting.

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.