After several years, my current pair of shoes has finally fallen apart. I don't need to look cool, or any other bells and whistles. I am looking for a simple pair of men's shoes. I want something that preferably doesn't use sweat shops.

Any suggestions?

Many years ago I used to record a variety of music on an old Macbook and a dodgy copy of Logic Pro with various Native Instruments VSTs.

I had so much fun playing the drums badly on my midi pads, tightening them up in Logic, and then doing random stuff with the beat editor (changing velocity curves for specific notes like hi-hats, adding in random hits) to make it sound less rigid. Then maybe I'd record my acoustic guitar with my crappy mic, throw some reverb on it, add some vocals. Man, it was a blast!

It's been over a decade since I did that, and now I'd like to get back into that world again and produce some of my own backing music for my YouTube and TikTok videos, but I honestly don't know where to start.

I guess the big difference now is that I'm on Windows, and there is no Logic Pro here. The Ableton and Maschine layouts don't really make sense to me (I think these are more loop driven?). Reaper seems quite spartan compared to how I remember Logic (I know this is probably not actually the case, but the discoverability is not great imo).

If anyone has any suggestions about where I should start - I'm mostly looking for something that has the same layout as Logic did 10+ years ago (or at least, something that would feel similar and intuitive)- a big timeline where I can drag stuff around and try different arrangements, a piano editor I can break out at the bottom, a drum editor I can break out, set the note length and just drag my left-clicked mouse across to have a million hi-hat hits and then play around with deleting different hits until I get the right vibe, the draw the velocity across all of them easily.

The gear I have right now:

• Maschine MK3
• Some M-Audio super mini midi keyboard
• An old-school Metric Halo ULN-2 (this thing STILL costs a thousand bucks?!)
• A few Shure mics and a Wave 3 USB mic

Thanks in advance!

AI Virtual Assistants are on the rise, and logically it seems like I could use one to support productivity, small business, neurodivergent accomodations, etc., BUT, when reviewing what's out there they don't seem super useful.

Otter seems the most useful because it can attend web meetings and record, contextualize screenshares, and sift the transcripts into action items, but it cant go to all webinar services and I'm not sure I can log into this in a corporate platform. Others seem to be able to check a calendar or make a reminder, but nothing I would pay for.

Some use cases might be gathering basic info from clients, scheduling meetings (calendly can handle this), blocking time for my task lists, writing basic email drafts, adding up expenses each month, sending reminders for customers, etc.

All of this could happen with various tools, but seem like good territory for an AI Virtual Assistant.

So, have you found any AI VAs that would be worth paying for? Anything that saves time or makes life easier?

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

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

I was just in the thread about if stores should stop accepting cash, and to my horror there was many people advocating to getrid of small change

So are there any coin roll hunters here that would be mega bummed out if we got rid of small change?

Here in canada, there's still some neat coins you can find in circulation

with nickels you can still find old laureate crown portraits and even older king George the 6th, and if your super lucky to hit a collection dump, king George the 5th nickels

With dimes there was still many silver dimes you can find in circulation, I recently hit 4 rolls of silver dimes on a hunt, awesome collection dump, thats $370 worth of silver for $20, I rode that high for days

Quarters still have some old silver coins in circulation, but not as many as dimes

And Canada has something bad the americans dont have ARP, alloy recycling program, you see in canada all modern coins are made of steel on this inside, with plating of other metals,like nickel plated steel or bronze plated steel

So dimes and quarter pre 2000 are 100% nickel, and ARP takes them out of circulation

Nickels pre2000 are same alloy American nickels and pre 1982 are 100% nickel, ARP takes both these out of circulation

So in canada us coin roll hunters are scrambling to get the coins we want before ARP does

If there are no coin roll hunters to speak up on tildes, AMA about coin roll hunting

Some of you may have noticed that the threads under some topics include a comment which consists only of some paragraphs quoted from the article posted in the topic, posted by the same user who posted the topic. (I’m choosing not to link to any examples, because I don’t want to single anyone out for special attention, in case they feel persecuted by this.)

@cfabbro and I were discussing this in a quiet corner of an old thread, and we came to the conclusion that this was a topic which should be discussed by more than just us two, in the hope of finding a Tildes-wide consensus about a consistent way to treat those quote-only orphan comments.

The Context

These quote-only comments are a side-effect of a deliberate feature of Tildes. When you create a topic there are three fields to be completed. The combination of fields you complete determine the type of topic you’re making.

• Title All topics must have a title. This is compulsory.

• Link A field for a URL linking to an article or video or other off-site content. This is optional.

• Text A field for adding text to your post. This is optional.

If you complete:

• Link but not Text - this creates a simple link topic: the topic consists only of an off-site link.

• Text but not Link - this creates a simple text topic: the topic consists only of user-provided text.

• Link and Text - this produces a complex link topic: the topic consists of an off-site link plus user-provided text. However, the user-provided text is not incorporated into the actual topic, but is split off into a stand-alone comment.

Some people who post links also like to include a relevant quote to summarise the article they’re posting, to let readers know what the article is about before they click the off-site link. But, as above, this quote gets split off as a stand-alone comment. It is no longer part of the post. It becomes an orphaned comment consisting only of the quote.

The Question

Given that these quote-only orphan comments exist, the question arises: how should we treat them?

It has been observed that there are two diametrically opposed approaches to this:

• Some people vote on them, seeing them as useful summaries of the posted article, providing some context for the discussion.

• Some people label them as ‘Noise’, seeing them as pointless extracts from the article, cluttering up the discussion thread.

In one recent extreme case, a quote-only orphan comment had both 16 votes and was collapsed due to ‘Noise’ labels.

This is creating some confusion among newcomers to Tildes (as well as some of the old-timers). How are they supposed to vote/label these comments? Well, there’s no clear precedent for them to follow.

@cfabbro and I decided to put it to all of you. Maybe by discussing this, we can come up with a consistent treatment for these comments.

So what do you think about these quote-only orphan comments? Are they useful context or noisy clutter? Should we be giving them votes or labelling them as noise?

While browsing over the past little while I have noticed that I starting to see "text reposts".
I did a quick search and saw that link reposts have been discussed in the past, but I didn't come across something in relation to text posts.

To make it a bit more clear what I mean, a recent example:

• In my feed today: https://tildes.net/~tech/16nj/second_brain_software_of_choice
• A very similar thread last week: https://tildes.net/~creative/1639/what_do_you_use_for_note_taking_writing

Generally speaking I don't mind reposts, certainly with "ask" topics new insights can be gained over time and different people might give different answers. At the same time I do think that the landscape around note taking software hasn't drastically changed in a week.

To be clear, I am not saying that the OP of the most recent topic did anything wrong either. Even if you remember to check if a question has been asked before (I ironically almost forgot myself in this case) you might not find it.

But I am wondering if more could be done to surface previous discussions. Not to specifically prevent these sorts of reposts but also to surface potentially valuable information of previous discussions.

Something that does come to mind is having a mechanism that uses the title someone is typing as (part of) a search query in the same space. Matching topics could then be shown before submission.

Or if we care more about making previous discussions accessible give the OP after submission the option to also link to previous topics around the subject. Interlinked topics is something that would be interesting to explore, basically borrowing from the "other discussions" tab idea but make it "similar discussions".

I'm curious to see what others think about it.

I have some kind of flu and can’t sleep, so I’m just laying in bed with old stream VODs on in the background. It made me curious what others do in this situation, and asking might give me some ideas to take my mind off of how I’m feeling.

I will be participating in a panel discussion about the intersection of art and Artificial intelligence next week, and I am curious how fellow creatives feel about Artificial intelligence.

Have you used AI before in the creative process? If so, what services have you used/prefer?

What do you think the role of AI is in the creative process?

Does AI enhance creativity or limit originality?

What are the ethical implications of using AI to create art?

Hello Tildes board gamers!

I got a 3D printer last year, and over the last few months, I've started printing organizers other people have designed from Printables and Thingiverse, especially for games with poor provided organization or lots of tokens and cards... however there are a number of games I have where people haven't designed a good organizer, or the ones which exist are lacking in some way (don't fit my boxes, missing boxes for expansions, only support all the expansions, etc)

Does anyone have tips on getting started with designing my own? I've got some very basic 3D modeling knowledge, but my primary strengths are as a programmer, so leveraging something like OpenSCAD would be ideal. I saw the boardgame insert toolkit, but it seems relatively basic - there are lots of convenience features I'd love to add as well (like curved walls for token holders to make it easier to get tokens out). Is that a good place to start, or should I look elsewhere?

Even just some ideas about tolerances and/or tips for how to size sections for cards would be super helpful.

I'll start, Sony A7C, w/ Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 as my main lens. Have a Sony 28-60mm f/4 as well, though its more for where I need a really compact setup.

Looking to get a Tamron 20-40mm f/2.8 for a little extra fov when indoors, while still having some reach. Planning on getting the A7CII when it comes out supposedly later this year according to sonyalpharumors.

We have a language learner in our household and I am tired of listening to J-pop at random on road trips. Do any of you music lovers have japanese language songs or even better artists or bands you really like?

Thank you very much

What areas of human activity are currently experiencing a time of great advancement or a remarkable surge in quality?

This is a call for positivity, if possible please refrain from irony or backhanded pessimism such as "We are in the golden age of assholes" or something.

Thanks ;)

I saw some topics on note-taking programs and apps, so I felt a topic on note-taking strategies would be a nice complementary one. When I was still a student, I experimented with various note types (mind map, Cornell, bullet points,...) but ever since I started working, I've sort of stopped experimenting. Hence my question: how do you take meeting notes?

My parents are great. That being said, every time my 2.5 year-old comes home it is bananas. They are so over stimulated, who knows what they have eaten. Usually screaming and in just in a state of complete deregulation. I can’t tell if I just need to deal with it as part of grandparent time. We don’t correct my parents, we do offer suggestions and give them food and snacks etc but inevitably what is eaten is some sugary cereal and junk.

Do any of you deal with this? Do I need to chill out? I am writing this as my child falls asleep after screaming for 2 hrs. So I am a still a little frustrated.

I was always familiar with tornadoes living close to or in Oklahoma for a vast majority of my life. However, with the odd weather patterns we’re seeing this year producing severe weather, I’ve gone way down the rabbit hole. Watching weather livestreams, subscribing to chasers, the works. Has anyone else been on the bandwagon?

It seems that Obsidian is a very popular note-taking software within the community here, so I would like to know what plugins you use for your daily workflow in Obsidian. I will start:

• Advanced Tables: Very useful for adding and managing markdown tables using simple intuitive keyboard strokes.

• Callout Manager: I tend to abuse the callout function (in my academic vault, I organize any kind of information inside a callout with the source of the info as the title), so it is good to have control of the colors for different kinds of callouts.

• Minimal Theme Settings: Nothing much to talk about. Just some eye candy to make my notes easier on the eyes. Plus, the focus mode is very good for study sessions.

• Obsidian Matrix: Allows me to organize some mathematical LaTeX code properly.

• Reading Time: Useful to grasp the length of a longer note at a quick glance.

• Recent Files: Helps me set myself around my files.

• Style Settings: Complement of "Minimal Theme Settings" to achieve maximum eye candy.

• List Callouts: I use it only in my personal projects vault. It helps me give particular emphasis to specific topics within my lists.

• Table of Contents: Useful for longer, heavily-structured notes.

Aside from that, I also have four CSS snippets:

1. Align: Aligns my linked figures to the center of the page.
2. Callout: Specifies the size of callouts (useful, as I mainly structure my notes inside callouts).
3. Hide: Hides my "resources" folder from the Obsidian explorer (this folder contains files such as figures and PDFs that I link into my notes).
4. Justify: Justifies all the text in read-mode.

Reject modernity, return to analog

Let's talk retro tech, or anything of the sort! What projects or hobbies are you currently working on? Are you leaning towards a crisp hi-fi sound for your turn-table (yo), or just browsing eBay for old broken tech you know you don't need? Is this submission just a cry for help, because I've found myself browsing old Bose Wave systems from days gone by?

I have a box full of old Gameboy motherboards I need to do something with (the current plan is to gift my close friends their own modded Gameboy, because seriously why can't I hold all these Gameboy motherboards). Then there's my AIWA Walkman that needs a new belt, but I've never cracked one of those open before, so we'll see. Then there's this Gameboy Camera mod that is keeping me up at night.

What about you fine folks? I thought about posting this to ~tech, but I thought ~hobbies was just as relevant, since this isn't exactly leading edge stuff (though it may be in the retro tech space!)

Extending a warm Happy Father's Day to all fathers, grandfathers, adoptive fathers, step fathers, god fathers, spiritual fathers, father in law's, soon to be fathers, those who would have been fathers, our departed fathers, and others that I have missed.

May your day be beautiful and wonderful.

Celebrate!

Edit: Okay it's Monday now : ) How'd it go? For fathers with very young children did you guys get home made cards from the mom plus stickers contributed by your child(ren)? Where are you going to store these cards, or do they go straight in the recycling, you monster?

For context: I'm going from southern California to Salt Lake City, Utah, and I'm moving for work. I've never lived alone for an extended period of time before. I figure I've got a handle on it, but there's always something that I forget or don't know, so I'd like to ask you all for advice.

Good morning. This is a thread to discuss new album releases arriving at our doorsteps today. I'll start with some big names

Sigur Ros - ÁTTA

(Ambient, Modern Classical)
Spotify

A surprise release! I believe this is the first album with all three Sigur Ros members since Valtari in 2012. Initial reponse seems positive but mixed, should be worth checking out for fans

Queens of the Stone Age - In Times New Roman...

(Alt Rock, Hard Rock)
Bandcamp

Been a short while since the last QOTSA release. Initial reponse to this one seems very positive.

King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation

(Metal, Prog Metal)
Bandcamp / Tildes Discusson

King Gizzard on a roll and don't seem to be stopping. Looks like this one is a move to a more metal sound. Could be the album of the week.

Killer Mike - MICHAEL

(Hip Hop, Concscious Hip Hop)
Bandcamp

First album away from Run The Jewels since 'R.A.P. Music' in 2012. Mike is a hip hop heavyweight at this point. Initital impressions look mixed.

Gunna - A Gift & a Curse

(Hip Hop, Trap)
Spotify

The first post Young Thug RICO trial from Gunna. First impressions seem mixed.

Feel free to share more releases below.

Discussion Points

Have you listened to any of these releases?
What are your thoughts?
What are you looking forward to listen to?
What have you enjoyed from these artists in the past?

Why Friday?

Most (but not all) new music releases on a Friday, as labels want to give the the release a full week of sales before entering the charts.

~~ Any feedback on the format welcome!

I'm on day 4 of a 4 day weekend (lucky me!) here in zone 7b, so I've been spending a lot of time out in the garden. The bunnies and deer have been keeping me busy chasing them out, and have entirely beheaded my tomatoes and peppers, but haven't touched the flowers and herbs at all.

We're on week 4 of very little rain (we got about 5 minutes of thunderstorm two days ago, but that didn't do much more than make the grass wet). I set up an automated irrigation system in my garden bed so it is extremely well watered and lush, and everything else is dry, the grass is yellow and the trees are starting to look wilty. I think that's part of what is attracting the herbivores to my garden, it's like a little oasis, so I can't be too mad about it. Luckily it looks like it's supposed to rain every day next week!

My peas are done for the year, so I pulled them out, and I have lots of tiny green peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers, but nothing much else. I'm thinking to plant beans where the peas were. Do you have a favorite crop that is harvested in June that can fill this gap? What sorts of things do you plant in June in your zone?

I've been struggling with herbivory indoors too - the stupider cat decided for the first time that transcendentia zebrina was the best thing ever, and took several leaves off. Luckily it's not very toxic, she didn't actually consume much, and she doesn't seem to be showing any symptoms of poisoning, but now I'm trying to figure out how to keep this plant in the same window but out of her reach. Any recommendations for shelves or hanging baskets that would work in front of a window in a bedroom/office?

I also gave my extremely leggy silver ann pothos a haircut, so it looks much better. I cut the trimmings into 3-4 node sections and they are all now in very damp soil to hopefully root - I got 36 sections so I'm sure I'll have at least some successes, although I'm hoping they aren't ALL successful or I will be drowning in pothos!

I'm very on board with the concept of permaculture, and while I understand the concepts I don't have a good intuition for which plants fix which nutrients. For example suppose I grow basil in my herb garden.

How do I figure out which nutrients it will eventually deplete? How do I figure out a good buddy crop(s) to replenish those nutrients?

Any permaculturists out there that can point me in the right direction?

This is sort of a "does anyone else?" type question, but I think it can create some interesting discussion.

We have become accustomed to having many things for free online. Search, social media, news, videos, games etc. The price of course is ads and our personal data. But spending money on these kinds of services that exists for free sometimes feels like a hurdle to overcome. I recently gave the paid search engine Kagi a try, and I spent way too much time pondering whether it was worth the $5. Yet I can spend ten times as much on random physical purchases or a round drinks with only a few seconds of decision making.

Even though we have lived with digital products for decades now, having something tangible and physical between your fingers still feels better. With some exceptions, because most people are paying for streaming services but renting movies in the video store have always cost money, so we are used to that - unlike stuff like search and email which many of us have gotten used to being available for free.

Can this ever change outside very tech-minded people? Because services that rely on subscriptions rather than dataharvesting and ads do exist, but with the exceptions of maybe the big streaming services, few get wider appeal and the masses flock to the so-called free services instead. I find it almost depressing that we have all these brilliant and innovative tech companies around the world doing amazing things, but a good deal of it all ends up with the goal of showing more ads. It is hard to compete with free, but is it possible to challenge the current most successful business model of "paying" with ads and data?

Akin to this: https://tildes.net/~tech/1670/redditors_of_tildes_which_subreddits_are_you_missing_the_most_during_the_blackout

What can we leave behind?
What should we leave behind?

For me, the one BIG thing is the stupid puns.
Threads full and full and full of puns, one after the other.

Case in point:
https://tildes.net/~movies/16bf/chasing_horse_faces_sex_assault_charges

I can so live without that side of reddit.

edit: Yeah, that "thread" is two comments long, but I just got reddit flashbacks just seeing those.

My Lenovo laptop and Dell desktop have subpar specs on them, so playing a AAA game from the last decade is out of the question. They struggle to run Team Fortress 2, BioShock, and Minecraft at 30 FPS, but 1990's boomer shooters and some indie titles play fairly smoothly. Here are some of the games that they can run:

• Doom (1993 to Final)
• Quake (1-3)
• Deus Ex (2000)
• Max Payne 2
• Half-Life 2 and its episodes
• Portal series
• Batman: Arkham City
• Celeste
• Hue
• The Stanley Parable
• Borderlands 2

Any suggested games would be greatly appreciated.

Hey ~food! I'm relatively new here, but I would love to share my love of cookbooks with you all and discover some new ones to add to my collection.

While Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and The Food Lab are certainly some of my favorites. I have discovered others that I have repeatedly gone back to that aren't as decorated with rewards.

One of my favorite authors as of late, Olia Hercules, has a couple of cookbooks that I absolutely adore! She specializes in Ukrainian dishes and her recipes have helped dispel the myth of potatoes and cabbage being the only slavic ingredients. Mamushka is her first cook book with several great recipes, including a chicken marinade that is impossible for me to get away from. Summer Kitchens is another lovely cook book by her that reads like a love letter for documenting Ukrainian cuisine and has so many great vegetable recipes.

I'm curious to hear about other people's recommendations! Please give me a another reason for needing a devoted bookshelf for my collection.

Consider

• A game system with a random success rate of 1% (a) (like a loot drop in an mmo)
• A game system with a random success rate of 1%, pity=100 (b) (pity in this context means the probability of success is changed on your 100th successive failure to 100%)

How long would it take a player to earn an their success given 1 attempt/minute?

The answer for (a) is "infinity" which the community rarely accepts. It is possible (though unlikely) for someone to fail forever, they can. The answer for (b) at most 100 attempts (100 minutes).

Developers can describe (a) as the average player will succeed after a little over an hour (~69 attempts). However the 99th precentile takes about 7.5 hours... and the unlucky 1%? Longer. 1 hour and 7.5 hours aren't in the same ballpark.

Anyone have a solution to cut through the mathplexity? Decisions in their own game design or what they've seen others do? I simply have pities when the odds are worse than 1 in 5 or relegate (a) style probabilities to combat systems (non-reward).

I used to like Command & Conquer and similar games, but these days I find it stressful and too fast paced.

I want some recommendations of turn based games that does not have a steep learning curve like Hearts of Iron but it's not too simple like Advanced Wars.

It needs to be for PC and run on a Ryzen 3200G laptop.

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

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

I was just thinking about it. Tildes' current icon looks like a /r/wallstreetbets graph, haha. I think we could use a nice mascot that's based on a cute animal of some sort. :)

Would love to hear our community's thoughts on this, thank you! :)

I’m getting ready to plunk down cash on a Gibson Les Paul. I’ve wanted one of these things since i was a 14 year old kid watching Jimmy Page “The Song Remains The Same”

Anybody here gone through buying and bringing home their cherished axe?

Hoping we can get some discussion on self hosting setups throughout the community and help anyone who may be interested with common setups and finding interesting software.

Hardware
Currently running everything on a Dell 7050 SFF (intel i5-7500 and 16GB RAM) which suits my needs perfectly. Had used an older SFF before (i forget which) and a cheap older model mac mini (2012 I think) for self hosting before, but those were not the right choice as I didn't properly understand what hardware encoding was at the time. The i5-7500 handles all the media I have when transcoding is needed. Only thing it can't do is AV1, but my setup avoids those anyway.

Operating System
Distro Hopping habits are hard to break and that "itch" unfortunately carry over to the server. Currently running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for a few months now, but feeling like a change is needed soon. I've used Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora for servers before and they each have their own little problems that make me eventually switch. I am considering maybe doing a Proxmox setup so I can spin up a VM whenever that itch comes, but not sure if they added complexity is worth it in the long run.

Software
Yay, the best part! My self hosting stack has changed a ton over the years. Everything in my stack is in a docker container through a set of badly written compose files (planning on redoing things, cleaning things up, making things consistent, etc.). I'll just do a rundown of everything with a brief description of what it is:

• Plex Gives me a Netflix like streaming experience at home. Currently working on shifting things over to JellyFin as Plex is starting to grow increasingly buggy for me.
• Sonarr Automatically tracks and downloads all my shows. I have two instances of this running, one for normal tv shows and another for anime
• Radarr Automatically tracks and downloads all my movies.
• Prowlarr Sowers the high seas for what Sonarr and Radarr are looking for and gives them the "linux iso".
• rdt-client Probably different to most peoples setups. I use a debrid service (not sure why people call them that), to download my "linux iso's" for me and I do a direct download from them. Much quicker and no torrenting traffic on my end. Also it's also cheaper than paying for a VPN usually.
• File Browser A good web ui for managing files
• Nginx Proxy Manager Is a reverse proxy for all of my services and gives me HTTPS for everything. Gets rid of the annoying browser warnings.
• Tailscale The most recent addition to my setup. Allows me to access my network anywhere. Similar to a VPN (I know it uses wireguard under the hood), but does a lot of magic for you and just makes everything work and connect together, its really cool.
• Adguard Home Gives me a local DNS server that does DNS level ad blocking. Never given me problems and it works well, but I am thinking of reducing the complexity of my setup and removing it. There tons of DNS servers out there that can do the same thing and I don't mind trusting a few of them (like quad9 or mullvad dns).
• Watchtower It monitors all my docker containers and keeps them up-to-date. If a new version is out, it will automatically download the latest version and restart the container and delete the old container version. I know its not the best idea, but its only cause a break 1 time with 1 container in the couple years I've run this setup.
• Homepage Literally the homepage for all my services. I've tried a lot of different ones and Homepage is easily the best. Simple, but powerful to configure.

Keen eyes may have noticed the lack of backup software. I'll get around to that, eventually.

With all the new people running around, thought it be a good time to ask what everyone uses for gaming...

Are you a console convert?
A portable gaming pro?
Desktop diehard?
Lifelong laptop leaderboard-er?
Teak-tabletop-till-you-die?
Archive level retro-gaming repository?
Custom collectible card game covers?
Tired of my poor attempts at alliteration?

People often propose the question of if you were trapped in a video game world which would be best, but which one would be the absolute worst possible one. Really think about it too cause like being in like a zombie apocalypse or under a brutal dictatorship would be bad, but it could definitely get worse.

Mine is a Facebook group called ALDI Aisle of Shame. I don't know if it's okay to link to it, so I'll just let you all google it if you want to check it out!

Not too long ago on /r/femalefashionadvice, someone mentioned a product in a comment section and I went to look for it online. This lead me to said group and the place was so unexpectedly incredibly wholesome..! It is the silliest thing. There are more than one and a half million members all praising the quality of ALDI products, and posting pictures of their hauls.

Recently, a trend was to post pictures of your dog and even a pony in hats gotten from ALDI and it is just so much fun! Even women doing the Spiderman meme in real life as they spot each other with the same outfit from ALDI.

PS: I am aware Tildes is text-focused so please let me know if this many images in a post is against the spirit of Tildes! Wasn't sure if it's ok to include images in a text post like this.

I am always interested in how creative people express themselves. There is something very I find very relaxing about creating large scale ephemeral art. Every summer I create temporary beach art / typography with seaweed collected from the shoreline.

Couple of examples:
https://imgur.com/gallery/m7xZIvy
https://imgur.com/gallery/vBrlpBz
https://imgur.com/gallery/zYCpDuo
https://imgur.com/gallery/Mw5NIr2

Generally the process involves sketching out the design in the sand, then collecting 3-5, 39 gallon yard bags worth of seaweed. I then slowly trace the design and weave the seaweed into itself and the sand. These projects take about 4 - 8 hours depending on the scarcity of the seaweed and the size of the design. They disappear with in just a few days due to weather and human and animal activity.

So tell me, artists of tildes, what weird stuff do you create?

Edit: words

I'm relocating soon and trying to find the right spot for me. I don't want this to be an individual recommendation thread though. Instead, just tell me about your favorite urban neighborhoods — what you love about them, what isn't so great, and what makes them stand out from the rest.