The internet is a very diverse place but sometimes with the "default" north american skew, it may not seem like it.

If your culture or people or faith group or spiritual practice is celebrating something today or soon, would you care to share?

Many of us used to have smaller groups on another site to celebrate things together or hold rememberances, and perhaps tildes being a together kind of community can celebrate and learn together instead of segregating into silos.

Some suggestions:

• today's date please
• what cultures and groups celebrate or commemorate this day or period?
• what is the celebration's origins and purpose?
• how does one celebrate?
• how has it changed over the years or stayed the same?
• is it reoccurring and on what calendar system?

Looking forward to learning more from other traditions and groups!

Long time Phish phan here, first show was Oswego 1999(got burned on tickets for New Haven Coliseum tickets the previous fall).

A couple of my favorite shows are 3/22/1993, 3/13/1992, 8/17/1992, 9/30/2000, 2/28/2003, 6/19/2004, 12/31/2010, 1/1/2011, and 7/23/2022

What are your favorite shows?

Hello Tildes geocachers! Found any good caches lately? Going in any good trips? Going to the Greater Bay Area Mega at the end of the month? I would love to know, and meet you online! I’d love to learn more about any interesting caches you’ve found lately and maybe we can discuss puzzles and challenges here.

Let's share our favourite mono fonts and maybe we can find some new favourites. I used to use whatever was inbuilt with Visual Studio and JetBrains' IDEs, but since JetBrains released their JetBrains Mono, I've started using it everywhere. I override the monospace font on every website with it. Never was a huge fan of Fira Code, Consolas, or the other popular ones. Personal taste. But somethings about JB Mono just speaks to me!

Are you a ligatures person? Personally, I love them :)

Disclaimer: This is just an observation of changing dynamics on Tildes! I don't mean to suggest any sort of way that Tildes should or shouldn't be.

I've noticed over the past few days that the Tildes front page has become filled with Ask posts. My best guess as to why is that these posts are the easiest to create and respond to? They're an easy way to spark discussion, generating lots of bumps back to the front page.

Now, I love seeing folks connect over all these niche topics and experiences. It feels like folks here are finding their people after losing the tight knit communities they had on Reddit, and that's lovely! In fact, it almost feels like these niche ask posts are acting as an impromptu replacement for the niche groups that Tildes currently lacks.

But, one consequence of this is that link posts get quickly pushed off the front page. I had noticed that link posts often struggled to generate discussion, even before the influx of new users. Longread articles and video essays take time to digest, and time to formulate opinions on. But now, I think this effect is compounded by the popularity of Ask threads, with fewer eyes dedicated to these links after they've left the front page.

Some closing questions:

• Have other users noticed this? How do you feel about this shift?
• Is there any merit to having a group dedicated to ask posts? Sort of like /r/AskReddit, but for Tildes? (That way, the posts can be easily filtered if a user wants to only see link posts.) EDIT: Filtering is possible already by filtering out the 'self post' tag, as suggested by @streblo.
• Should the visibility of link posts and ask posts on the front page be artificially balanced in some way?

It's pretty clear that those times are over, but I'm sure many of us remember the heydays of VC funded tech extravagance. These are the ones that come to my mind, hoping to hear others experience.

• At one point, uberpool was cheaper than the cost of public transport in the city.
• No sales tax on Amazon!
• So many promotions and code to get you to join in on their platform. This was also before they try to get you to subscribe to their monthly plans.

I am mostly a TTRPG player, but lately I have been becoming a bit curious on wargaming.

I usually play TTRPGs because it allows a lot more freedom when compared to video games. However, I can't really see that much in wargaming that you can't get in video games. Is the appeal primarily a social one?

I am not bashing wargaming or saying that it's a bad hobby. I am just curious as to what the main draw is.
Thank you for any answers :)

The 24 hours of Le Mans is about 6 hours in! Anyone watching? Thoughts?

Besides the hour-long safety car during the rain, it's been a lot of fun so far. It's my first year watching after getting into F1 and Indycar in the past few years and I'm having a blast.

Hey everyone!

I love a good horror/thriller type movie and tend to binge on them every few months. I am however behind on releases over the last year or so :<

I'd love to get some recommendations from the wider community to add to my list of must sees!

Thank you in advance!!

It feels like in the last few years so many companies are becoming incredibly greedy in a chance to try and raise profits and please the shareholders, companies hoping that people will comply as they have no choice and give away more of their money to allow these companies to make record levels of profits.

It seems like people are getting less and less and what they have left the companies just want more and more from everyone. I'm not referencing any specific company here but I have seen these trends in the last couple of years get a lot worse.

Customer Impact

• Raising prices there is some valid reasons to raise prices, but sometimes prices are raised just as a way to make more money quickly.
• Quality reduction it feels like companies are asking more money for less quality goods more than ever.
• Excessive manipulative marketing especially on social media and other playes which can misleed people.
• Data explotation companies mis-using peoples data just so they can make some quick money.

Employee Impact

• Wage stagnation Despite the soaring profits many companies refusing to increase wages, leading to financial insecurity.
• Unfair labor practices Companies expecting more from their employees for less money basically.
• Job insecurity replacing workers with automation and outsourcing to cut costs.
• Mental health high pressure enviroments to force profit-driven companies causing record levels of mental health issues.

Society and Enviromental Impact

• Polluting Companies prioritising profits over the enviroment leading to pollution, waste etc
• Economic Inequality Coporate greed leading to income disparities, undermining social coheison.
• Unfair influence on policy Companies using their power and wealth to influence policy making

My question is, when is enough is enough? At what stage should something be done? Anything? to stop corporate greed from runing society?

So I got a 1.20m, 30kg punching bag, and hung it on the upper floor. I don't have boxing gloves yet but my friend suggested I just use cloth bandages on my hands. I'm looking for a boxing gym near me. I'm open to any striking art but I've done taekwondo before and I'd really like to concentrate on boxing now. I can throw basic punches. I've been watching some videos on boxing basics and I think it's awesome. Anything I could start working on for myself?

I'm already confident in self-defense. I don't have any specific reason to do it other than boxing looks fun. It's something I've been meaning to get into for years.

I'm not in shape at all.

Tips are welcome!

I'm a newly retired 60-year-old, with a 76-year-old spouse. This is really hard sometimes!

I'm trying to stay active in my non-profit, non-commercial endeavors, but I'm finding myself with more time on my hands than I know what to do with.

How you doing?

Any fans of this series over here? I was planning a series reread before book 5 comes out. It was going to be hosted on the bobiverse subreddit, but... well, ya know.

If enough people want to do one here I'd be happy to host it, probably starting in about 4 weeks and doing one book every 2 weeks.

Notable album releases from today, or after June 3.

Squid - O Monolith

(Rock, Art Punk)
Bandcamp

King Krule - Space Heavy

(Art Rock, Neo-Psychedelia)
Bandcamp

Janelle Monae - The Age of Pleasure

(R&B, Pop)
Spotify

Boldy James & ChanHays - Prisoner of Circumstance

(Hip Hop, Boom Bap)
YouTube Music

Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit - Weathervanes

(Country, Americana)
Bandcamp

Feel free to share more releases below.

Any feedback on the format is welcome!

First and foremost: I'm not certain whether this belongs in ~hobbies or ~comp. As I consider this a hobby, this seemed like the more appropriate spot, but I'm more than happy to move/repost in ~comp.

So for the past few years, I've really been hit by the computer nostalgia bug. It originally started as me just wanting to dive back into MUDs, and the whole retrocomputing fascination probably came from me wanting to recreate the "good ole' days" where I would pull up the Windows 98 terminal app and connect to my favorite MUD.

Now I've got a room in my house dedicated to this old, esoteric hobby that happens to take up a lot of space. Admittedly, I don't know a TON about hardware but I've been having a blast tinkering around on old machines. It's even more fun to see how I can push the limits of the computers given a few modern tweaks here and there.

Here's what I've currently got sitting up in the Upstairs Museum of Retrocomputing:

• A Compaq Prolinea 5/75 Pentium - this was given to me by a friend who had it sitting in the basement. To my surprise, everything was still in working order and it fired right up (Windows NT 4.0!) on the first try. Of course, I ripped out the old barrel clock battery and put in something safer. I'd say I tinker with this one the most on the software side, while still trying to keep the hardware as close to original as possible.
• A Compaq Prolinea 3/25s 386 - I just picked this bad boy up and am working on getting an OS installed. It had some damage from a leaky clock battery but I don't believe anything was irreversible. I'm not too confident in the whopping 4 MB of memory, but I'm planning on installing Windows 3.11 on this one.
• A Tandy TRS-80 CoCo 2 - It works, but I haven't spent a ton of time with it because I don't have an old TV or monitor with a coax connection. I'd love to figure out how to create my own cartridge with a homebrew version of Zork or Adventure.
• A Power Mac G5 - It's not ancient, but I think it's still worthy of being in the museum. I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet because I don't have the right video cable. I'll get around to it eventually.
• A Generic Pentium 4 - I actually found this one at a Goodwill store. This one fired right up and had a copy of Windows 2000 installed, including all of the old work files that the person left intact. This one has been the easiest to mod because it's somewhat closer to modern and uses a common form factor. So I've plugged in a new OS, new ethernet, etc. At some point the technology starts to blur and you start questioning why you aren't just using a modern computer.

What's next on my list? I'd like to start playing around with computers/OSes that I'm unfamiliar with. I grew up in a DOS/Mac OS 7-10/Windows world, so I'd love to get my hands on a NeXt, BeOS, etc. or even an Apple II.

But first I need to get the damn 386 running again.

Having finished out the Amazon Prime series "The Expanse" I'm now working my way through the novels and I keep coming up against a problem with with railguns. Specifically, the way that railguns are used in The Expanse doesn't mesh well with the way they're portrayed.

First, some background. Ships in The Expanse are generally unarmored. There are a bunch of reasons for this but the short version is "most things that can hit you in space will kill you anyway" and armor adds mass which makes every manuver more expensive in terms of reaction mass. So no one has armor. This is important because it means that ships in the Expanse can get ripped up by something as mundane as a stray bullet from a Point Defense Cannon (PDC). PDCs are... well, they're guns. Regular guns which are flinging around much less mass and at much lower velocities than railguns.

Thus, ships in the Expanse are equipped to handle impacts but nothing much bigger than a sand-grain moving at a few km/s.

When we're introduced to rail-guns in the series we're given to understand that they use magnetic acceleration to chuck a 5kg chunk of tungsten and/or uranium at a target at an "appreciable percentage of C." That's much faster than a bullet or any micrometeors ships are likely to encounter. Even 1% of C is ~3,000 km/s.

5 kg of Tungsten is less than you think. Some back of the envelope math suggests that's about cube about 2.6 inches on a side... which is not big. That works out to an incredible energy density which would make a lot of sense if railguns were routinely being fired at planets or asteroids but, since they seem to mainly target ships, the vast, vast majority of the energy that goes into flinging that slug at its target is going to carry through to the other side of the ship.

All total we're talking about 488.5 million Newtons of force for 1% of the speed of light. Helpfully, this scales roughly lineraly so long as we don't get too close to C and induce relativistic mass issues, so 10% of C is 4.8 billion Newtons and so on. So, that railgun slug is carrying a lot of energy. At 1% of C it represents 22.5 trillion joules of kinetic energy. Written out long-ways so we can appreciate all those zeros it's 22,500,000,000,000 J. At 10%, we're talking 2.25 quadrillion joules. To give some sense of scale, that means that, at 1% of C, three rail-gun slugs are delivering about as much energy as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. At 10% of C one round carries about 537 kilotons, or about the yield of a modern, city-busting hydrogen bomb.

Those are absolutely titanic amounts of energy but, realistically, they'll never deliver that much power to a target. After all, a railgun round can only push on its target as hard as the target can push back on it. If the round just punches through the entire ship like it's made of paper, most of the energy stays in the railgun slug as it exits the other side of the ship and you get a neat hole rather than a gigantic flash as trillions of joules of kinetic energy turn into heat.

And obviously, if we're trying to kill things, we want the latter. The solution to this problem is fairly obvious: you need fragmentation. While it's great to have a tungsten cube all tightly packed together as you accelerate it, if you're shooting at a ship, you want a fairly diffuse impact, especially if we're talking about a 10% of C railgun slug. There aren't a lot of things out there in the solar system which can take 500 kilotons of hate and come out the other side in one piece. Moreover, at the distances at which a rail-gun fight happens, that spread would help ensure that you hit your target. Like a shotgun loaded with birdshot, a fragmenting railgun round would provide a cone of impact rather than a line, making dodges less effective.

And, as I mentioned earlier, you don't need a ton of mass to make this work. If a PDC round can go straight through a military craft then we can safely assume that a chunk of tungsten with the same kinetic energy will do the same thing. PDCs look rather a lot like the close in weapons systems in use on many naval ships today so we'll use those as a guide. The 20mm cannon on a Phallanx CWIS tosses out rounds at about 1,035 m/s. Those rounds weigh about 100 g (0.1 kg) which gives them a kinetic energy at the muzzle of 53,422 J.

So, if we could predictably shatter our 1% C railgun round into 421,136 pieces, each would have about the same kinetic energy as a PDC round and be able to hole the ship. At 10% C we could go even smaller and do the same thing with upwards of 40 million shards. 1% is plenty though. Each hull-penetrating piece of our original 5 kg bullet needs only weigh about 1/100th of a gram, which works out to being about 1/100th of the size of a grain of sand.

Put another way, if the fragmentation of a rail round could be precisely controlled, a target ship would experience hundreds of thousands of individual hull breaches with the mean distance between them determined only by the geometry of the ship and the angle of the attack. The result of this would be either the delivery of a titanic amount of energy to the ship itself as the armor attempts to absorb the impact or, if no armor is present (as seems to be the case in the Expanse) the rapid conversion of the interior of the ship to a thin soup.

This, however, seems never to happen in the series and what leaves me scratching my head. As a book and TV series, The Expanse does an otherwise bang-up job with hard science fiction. Most things in universe make sense. This, however, does not. We have take as a given that the materials science technology exists to allow the mounting and firing of a railgun on a ship -- there are a lot of challenges there -- but the straight-line-of-fire use of them is a rare problem with the world-building.

Any fans have any suggestions to help me square this circle?

I went through a phase where we seemed to have board games nights with friends a couple of times a month but with the whole pandemic thing that has dried up.

Tonight, I finally got around to trying Lanterns with my wife and we really enjoyed it. It's sort of similar to sushi go with more steps. You play lake tiles which contain lanterns and collect lantern cards based on how you place the lake tiles, then you dedicate those lanterns in different sets to gain honour (points) and at the end, who has the most honour wins.

I'm looking for the simplest possible marinade recipe. Something with very few ingredients that will work on any cut of meat.

My plan is to use that as a base and learn to modify it based on the meat, dish, and flavor profile I'm going for.

We're at 59 days until Gencon and its one of my favorite events of the year. Wondering if anyone else is going and what you're excited for.

It seems like Lorcana is set to the be the buzz of the con this year around. While I'm interested in getting my hands on a deck or two to give it a go, I'm more looking forward to when BGG posts their games that will be releasing to sift through and try to find a hidden gem or two.

I’d really appreciate suggestions for any action-packed anime series you might be able to share.

I “play” Zwift indoors for exercise when I don’t have time to ride my bicycle outside. While Zwift is a huge improvement over nothing, I still find myself watching the clock more than the screen. To help keep my mind busy and pass the time, I’ve been watching anime while riding indoors for the last several years. The more intense the anime, the better!

I think the early Attack on Titan seasons are the most emblematic of what I’m looking for, though I’ve been enraptured by other less likely shows, such as Psycho-Pass and Dr. Stone.

Chainsaw Man, Blue Lock, Shield Hero, Sword Art Online, Parasyte , the first season of Vinland Saga, Shokugeki, and many others have helped me get through countless hours of riding in the past, and I could really use a few new series going forward.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: cleaned up some phrasing

Edit 2: It's really hard to come up with an exhaustive list, but as folks jog my memory (or when my own addled brain decides to be useful) I'll add other series I've seen so far as well.

• Yowamushi Pedal
  • Because: of course
• Lastman
  • A rare French anime, and I really enjoyed it
• Fireforce
• Neon Genesis Evangelion
• One Punch Man
• Kill La Kill
• Gurren Lagann
• Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
  • Watched a few episodes but struggled to get into it
• Eighty-Six
• My Hero Academia
• Demon Slayer
  • Watched through the train movie and discontinued when they turned said movie into the next season
• Mob Psycho 100
  • Watched a few episodes but struggled to get into it
• Hunter X Hunter
• Cowboy Bebop
• RWBY
  • Struggling with the current season
• Tokyo Ghoul
  • Struggling with season 3
• Sabikoi Bisco
  • Made it to episode 10 and fell out of it, can't remember why
• Ranking of Kings
  • Made it to episode 8 but never got into it
• Welcome to Demon School Iruma-kun
  • Made it to episode 11 before dropping it
• To Your Eternity
  • Made it a handful of episodes in but never got into it
• Berserk
  • Watched the first season, need to get back to the second
• Black Clover
  • Amusing enough, managed to watch 143 episodes lol
• MEGALOBOX
• FLCL
• Naruto
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
• Tower of God
• Aoashi
• Black Summoner
• DNA2
• Death Parade
• Erased
  • This one hit me in the feels
• Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works
• Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood
• The Greatest Demon Lord is reborn as a Typical Nobody
• Gundam Build Divers
• Kaiji
• Noblesse
• Over Drive
• Overlord
• The Promised Neverland
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica
• Shinobi no Ittoki
• So I'm a Spider, So What?
• The World's Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated in Another World as an Aristocrat
• takt op.Destiny
• RE:Zero

I've been playing ARPGs since Diablo 1 and have over a thousand hours in PoE, was wondering what everyone thought of D4?

I think the slower gameplay is a fun change of pace and that the legendary affix system is an elegant solution to always making drops interesting.

Surprisingly, as much as I didn't really care for D3, it's game feel was excellent. D4 has taken an odd step back in that regard. In D3 when you bashed an enemy to death with a barbarian they flew across the stage, or melted into a pile of goo if from poison. D4 everything feels kinda bland visually during combat.

Excited to see what end game is like, still only level 35 so we'll see how this so scales later on.

Thoughts?

I recently decided to start using RSS to curate interesting news as I feel I am being overloaded with Clickbait from all directions when I am looking for the latest news or updates on Google. I'm looking for some good sources for Tech or Programming Articles or news that aren’t just clickbait and have good informative content.

I currently have BBC News, Krebs On Security and Ars Technica, does anyone have any other website suggestions which are worth subscribing to?

Ars Technica Information Technology - https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/technology-lab
Ars Technica - Gaming & Entertainment - https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/gaming
BBC Tech - http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/technology/rss.xml
Krebs On Security - https://krebsonsecurity.com/feed/

This is probably bad form but here goes.

I have just posted about the Man vs Horse race that happens in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales on an annual basis and it got me to thinking, is it a UK idiosyncrasy to have silly sports or is it World wide?

Apart from Cheese rolling at Cooper's Hill (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdKRx30s6sk) and Shin Kicking (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rajJJaiEdPE) what other silly sports are there?

I'm interested in buying one of the new PC gaming handhelds, and I'm torn. If I went for the Steam Deck I'd be buying the 512GB version, so the price difference between it and the ASUS is only about £50/£100 more. The ASUS seems to do a lot better in benchmarks, has a nicer screen, and comes with Windows 11. I love Linux but there's several games I'd want to play on it that the anti cheat just won't work with Linux. I know you can dual boot the Steam Deck, so that could also be an option. The main thing that is making the decision more difficult is that the Steam Deck has touchpads, and the ASUS apparantly has inferior thumbsticks and D-pad. But then again the ASUS is sleeker and lighter, so potentially more portable? Sorry for the ramble, I just wanted to express my thoughts so far, and hear what you all think. Help me decide!

So, quite a few people don't like/watch video content, and don't like seeing the homepage filled with videos. Let's try something new, see if it sticks.

What are the best videos you have watched this past week/fortnight?

I've recently gotten into Too Many Bones.
I've been into tabletop for years and painted many minis, but now I find myself floored by hoplomachus and too many bones...and there's no minis to paint. But the gameplay is so so good I'm in love.
I'm waiting on unbreakable to come in. All I've played is undertow but man is there a lot going on in such a small box.
What's the best gearloc?

What have you been watching and reading this month? 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 kind of setup/equipment do you have? Preferred roasts? Maybe you don't have equipment, but a favorite drink or place?

My setup isn't anything special, but it works for me. I have an Expobar Office Lever that I bought in 2017. Daily use and a bit of minor maintenance along the way, and it's been a solid machine. Paired with a Quamar M80E grinder.

Also have a second, more entry-level machine at our cabin - Gaggia Classic Pro (which is having some issues right now) and a DF64P grinder.

For beans, I've been using a subscription from Bottomless for the last 1.5 years and have been super happy with it. I enjoy trying different roasters from all over the country and the service has been super reliable and not all that expensive for the fact that you get just-in-time freshly roasted beans at your doorstep.

Anyway, what are you guys drinking?

I was a huge fan since 2000 listening Tiesto, Paul Van Dyk, Ferry Corsten, AvB, ATB and many more.

I was lucky I went to few night events with my favorite DJs and producers. Right now I only listen Aly & Fila and Solarstone.

In a few weeks, I'll be making a short trip (3 days) to Palo Alto, working in the Stanford Medical Center area.

I'm hoping for some local or experienced insight into "don't miss" destinations for food, culture, history, and sight-seeing. It's likely I'll only have Sunday afternoon and weekday evenings free, so the personal tour may have to be more focused than local guides might otherwise suggest.

My home area has great food, but I'm really starving for Eastern cuisines. I'm willing to go beyond what a corporate travel budget permits if there's truly extraordinary, "can't get anywhere else" dining available.

Your insights are greatly appreciated!

Hey everyone. I’m a Computer Science major who feels very behind. I don’t have any substantial projects to put on my resume. I look at basic open source stuff and can’t understand it.

I’m currently attending WGU online, but also work full time so I don’t have a ton of free time to learn or work on side projects.

Anyone have advice for a guy in my scenario? I ended up dropping out of college a couple times during COVID and now I’m just trying to get back on the right path.

The language I know best is Java, but I’ve been trying to learn C++ and web development as well. Applied for internships but no luck so far, I think I need to make some better projects.

Curious to see and talk with others about using AI to dynamically write personal novels as a hobby, a form of choose-your-own-adventure where you can offload part of the creativity and majority of the grunt-work involved with writing onto the AI.

I started around half a year ago with Novel AI, yet when my stories would reach around the 15,000 word count the context management required due to the 2k token limit caused for a a net negative experience. A few months ago I experimented with ChatGPT at its 4k token limit, but the major cons of the limited ability to edit the content combined with the "always happy" bias hard-wired in made it short lived. That is until I discovered the variant site, Open AI Playground in Chat mode. It isn't free, but the first $5 are free as a trial. (And technically they mention it isn't for entertainment purposes and to use it responsibly)

Using the Playground I've written a 41,000, 23,000, and 21,000 (in-progress, plan is to hit 6 digits) word count personal stories/novels/adventures thus far. Using the co-DM system of bouncing with the AI to suggest creative alternatives (e.g. "List 10 twists that could occur next in the story"), adding creative embellishments (e.g. "Describe the city in detail, using epic high-fantasy influence"), and many other tips it's kept me hooked on some wild adventures across my favorite genre(s), tailored to me.

Edit:
OpenAI just released a GPT 3.5 Turbo 16k model for the Playground, lol. Absolutely obliterating NovelAI's 2k and the previous 4k limits. You could fit a significant portion of an entire novel and it'd take into account every sentence said. It'd probably take a pretty penny to use even half the context window, but could be useful for more critical moments of my novels.

The long-awaited Starfield Direct is streaming in about 30 minutes.

I'm a life-long science fiction junky, and space sims have always been my great escape. Naturally I'm very excited to learn more about Starfield and I'm wondering who else is tuning in today.

What are you looking forward to? Personally, I'm hoping that the 'Skyrim in Space' description is spot-on. I've gotten years of entertainment out of Skyrim, so if Starfield is as anywhere near as expandable and long-lived as Skyrim, I'll be a very happy person. I'm definitely looking forward to losing myself in another universe.

Link to Livestream, 1PM ET

I'm big on audiobooks and trying to move away from the Audible monopoly starting with the book "Chokepoint Capitalism" (which is about monopolies like that).

Unfortunately, the smaller library is hampered even more by the dodgy search (I just finished two books in a trilogy, why are you showing me the spanish translations of the author's other books?) and I'm struggling to fill my wishlist which has never been a problem on Audible.

So far I'm really liking Chokepoint Capitalism but looking for any suggestions once that's done. I've read a decent amount of mainstream fantasy (Stormlight archive, Wheel of Time, Robin Hobb, Tolkien), some popular scifi (Aasimov, w40k stuff, recently enjoyed "Armor" by Steakly), a lot of light nonfiction about finance, history and pop psychology ("The Big Short" or anything by Michael Lewis, "Debt: The first 5000 years", "Girt", "The man who mistook his wife for a hat") and have recently been on a big Ken Follett kick (historical fantasy?)

Any good listens that I should give a go?

PS. sorry for sounding like a shill post for audiobooks.com. I swear I'm not trying to drive clicks that's just the name of the company and recent Brandon Sanderson drama has made me aware of how much power Amazon has over the only way I consume literature nowadays

Maybe it was a small gesture; maybe it was a throwaway comment; maybe it was something you noticed out of the corner of your eye.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t meant to be a thing, but for some reason it stuck with you and became a thing, for good or for bad.

What was it? How did it stick with you? What do you think about it now? Tell us the story.

I'm really excited for the release of the Apple Vision Pro since this seems like a major shift in how we might be interacting with computers in the future.

On the mundane things, I'd like to be able to browse the web and read articles and books while walking my dog, without craning my neck down or being oblivious to my surroundings.

However, I've had a couple ideas where the tech might go or unexpected use-cases.

1. HUD and computer interface while driving with an emphasis on voice control and navigation. This would be far superior to touchscreen center consoles. If apple ever launches a car, I would expect the Vision to be the primary interface.
2. Changing the "time of day" of the environment, like a sunrise alarm clock on steroids for helping those on night shift with nonstandard circadian rhythm.
3. Altering your appearance perceived by others. Could be as subtle as wardrobe changes, presenting as a different gender, or a persona that's not human (like a fursona).

What other cool use cases can you think of, in a world where you can seamlessly manipulate the visual and auditory world around you?

Personally, I would recommend Pixlriffs. A few days ago, he has started a new season of his Minecraft Survival Guide series coinciding with the release of Minecraft 1.20. The series goes over each step, including the basic ones, to get yourself started and beyond on a Minecraft world. Here is a direct link to the start of season 3 inside a playlist. If you are a new or returning player to the game, I think it's a very nice resource to get the hang of it.

The channel has been going for quite a few years now so there's a lot of content to watch, including a separate channel that he handles the writing and narration for dedicated to recapping the event of the Hermitcraft multiplayer server. The Hermitcraft players are themselves content creators I'd recommend checking out.

I'm an amateur fish keeper who is looking at buying a new 4ft tank setup.

While on the hunt for a nice looking cabinet and tank combination, I've noticed that most freshwater setups are designed for a canister/ hang on back / in tank filter, whereas saltwater is almost always designed as a sump configuration despite the same physical tank size and capacity.

Is there a reason freshwater tank setups are less likely to be sold in a sump configuration? Does salt benefit more from an overflow style of filtration then freshwater does? Should freshwater be pulling water for filtration from lower in the tank because there's likely slower water movement and therefore debris will settle on the substrate?

As a quick example, AquaOne have a "freshwater" range, and a "marine" range. They are available in comparable physical sizes, but the freshwater tanks are not drilled for sumps whereas the marine are. No matter how fancy / big you go in the freshwater configuration, you never have the option of a sump.

Freshwater list: https://aquaone.com.au/2015-04-16-04-47-04/2015-04-16-06-00-17/coldwater-tropical

Marine list: https://www.aquaone.com.au/2015-04-16-04-47-04/2015-04-16-06-00-17/marine-aquariums