What are your initial impressions of the game?

What do you like about it?

What are your criticisms?

How does it compare to previous Diablo games?

What are your hopes for future patches, content, or adjustments?

Since the minimum and recommended specs for Starfield have come out, I've been budgeting to do a big upgrade on my PC with an AMD 6800 xt and a fancy new 1 TB SSD (which is the first game I've ever seen that requires an SSD) just so I can run the game in all it's space epicness.

What was the game that you were so excited for that you made the jump to upgrade your PC to the next gen of hardware? New or old!

I have taken supplements, but they are not very effective. Honestly, I don't want to rely on medication when our bodies are perfectly suitable with enough sunlight exposure.

I've been researching this for a while and can't find sources that show the difference according to latitude. I stupidly didn't bookmark what I read so what I say is based on what I've read but can't link to any of it :(.

• I gather there is research that around noon time sun exposure (e.g. 11am-3pm) results in greater production. The skin's processes are optimised for that time.
• I am very aware of the risks of skin cancer.
• I read in the UK about 13 minutes for 3 days a week, just between April and September is adequate for vitamin D levels year round.
• I live on the tropic of cancer so I'm expecting perhaps 7-10 minutes. Anything specific to that sub-tropical latitude would be greatly appreciated.

All advice is welcome, but links that I can read, compare and digest myself especially for different latitudes round the world would be perfect.

I’m a big fan of simple incremental/idle games to burn a few minutes on the bus, but most of the games for mobile are pretty low quality.

My all time favorite is easily Idle Apocalypse, but there are bound to be other good ones as well.

Hi, I was wondering if the current duration before voting gets locked on a post is still 30 days? I tried to find the answer in the docs but didn’t see it (apologies if I missed it) and all I turned up in a search of the site was a topic from 3 years ago mentioning the 30 days, so I wanted to see if that’s still accurate.

Thanks !

Something that has been bothering me for a long time is that the majority of voters in the US are parents. It seems paid parental leave is something that most people can empathize with needing, and that would benefit most people’s lives. So I have such a hard time understanding why it isn’t proposed more often or prioritized as a voting issue. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I was shocked to hear that my own mother had to decide between going back to her job 3 weeks post partum or losing her job. I can’t believe that things have not really improved (in terms of protections for all parents, not just by industry/state/company)

I read an interesting NPR article about how the AARP solidified the aging population into a powerful voting block that has skewed lawmakers to addressing their needs. Because this organization has clear priorities and influences many voters, lawmakers have incentive to pass laws the AARP supports. This article suggested that if parents could join together and create a similar political group, it would be the biggest and most powerful voting block.

So I’m interested in what your opinions are. Do you see parental leave as important? If so, why don’t we have a national leave policy? How do we get there?

Hoping this is the right group?

Inspired by coffee/cocktail threads, here’s one for my favorite consumable, cigars!

Here’re some potential questions to maybe inspire some discussion.

• What have you smoked recently that has surprised or impressed you?

• What’s a favorite cigar memory?

• What’re your stogie rituals?

• What’re some recent acquisitions and why did you purchase them?

• What’s your #1 cigar rec of all time? What’s your top rec from something new to you in the last year?

• How did you get into cigars and how long have you been smoking?

And anything else!

I’ve discussed cigars extensively in various online spaces and I’m very optimistic about the idea of tildes’ text-only and highly discoursive environment to provide some cool cigar content and a bit more than just photos of half smoked sticks (which I love too but get a lot of!).

I’ll hit on a few of my icebreaker questions at once. My most recent smoke was a Plasecnia Alma del Fuego Eduardo I which was absolutely fantastic. A lot of pepperiness throughout, with a lot of earthiness and meatiness. Quite full bodied, phenomenal smoke production and a very easy draw.

This stick was new to me but I am no stranger to Plasencia. I’ve been closely following their growth the last few years and the Alma Fuerte Salomon was my top stick of 2022.

As my 2010 Wrangler goes under the knife to replace a shredded rear main seal today, I find myself wringing my hands like a nervous father, waiting for the operation to be over and my wallet to be lightened to the tune of a grand. If only I had had the presence of mind to grab a tranny jack all those months ago when I could afford it, but alas...

Anyhoo... Tell me about your heep 😁

I am planning on going into the peace corps after I finish up my degree. My first priority is an education position, but if I can't get that, I'm open to other options. I would love to hear about the experiences anyone had while in the program.

With the increase in activity, it's now more difficult to read every topic and every bit of discussion. As well, there are some topics that I wouldn't click into naturally, but I would very much click into if I knew there was a high-quality comment hidden within.

So, it would nice to have a page that specifically highlights comments that have received an Exemplary label. That way, it would be possible to jump straight to the most insightful/thoughtful/interesting discussions that Tildes has to offer, regardless of the topic.

I'm imagining that the page would be somewhat off to the side, so that it doesn't incentivize misuse of the label. Something like how Hacker News hides the pool/invited/best/bestcomments pages under the lists page in the footer of the site.

What do you think?

NOTE: This does have slight self-promotion which I'm aware is against what Tildes is. While it is to drive attention to my band and although originally so, music promotion is NOT the sole reason for this post. It is here for context. It does benefit me, but I make music for this type of discussion. Grief and mourning are important things to me, and art helps me open up and process those feelings. Music is art.

Want to do more of these posts, as I have found my niche in ~music to be this. Nevertheless, I want to balance these to be fair and to make these special. Please leave feedback about what you think, and whether or not I should continue these posts. DO NOT VOTE if you think it does not fairly contribute to ~music or Tildes as a whole. All I ask is you read this entire post before reacting or commenting.

I've been going back and forth on this but I decided to do so. I want to keep things as anonymous as possible, so please respect my wishes.

I am part of a band called LUCY. Over this fortnight, I've been grinding hard trying to promote the discography in order to get as many eyes as possible. I wanted to make this post to highlight "Film" — which I strongly believe is the best released song thus far. But I didn't want to use my account just for promotion. I love Tildes, even with its quirks, and I wanna do quality, meaningful posts. Then I heard from a friend or an acquaintance that a good friend of theirs died.

Suicide, no less. I was......

There's no word or phrase or idiom. There's nothing that can describe the feeling and realisation when someone is gone. It reminded me of why I wrote "Film" in the first place — to grieve and remember a friend who killed herself. I don't think a number of grief songs or popular anti-suicide songs really talk about grief. That one Logic song was bleh but cool, but that remix that goes "WHO CAN RELATE" was insulting.

You may not even have a loved one who killed themselves. You may have one who just died, or disappeared. Or the worst:

The relationship you once had with a person you loved lots. One of your most prized people in the world. That one day, breaks and bo matter what. It will never happen. They're gone from your life

Forever.

And they're not coming back. You have to move on. Even tho you don't want to and sometimes, you yearn for the connection. To be near. Bittersweet nostalgia, to fall back into place. Y
In the end, it is what it is. Yeah..

Grief is hard. Mourning is hard. Moving on is hard. It's messy and there's no right way to do it. Life is unfair and one day, it will end. Songs and albums help. Music is that language and that lexicon that knows just how you feel. "Film" was what I wanted to do, to bring attention to that process. Nowadays, it's an occasional comfort song that's best played when it's overcast and blue. And you'll know when if you know.

So my question for y'all is... what songs or albums have you listened to that reminds you of someone you've lost? What are some lyrics that don't stick out like a sore thumb, they hit you like anaesthesia? What are your stories? What are your regrets? What are you afraid of? Hell, if youre a musician, what songs have you done that address this? And no matter what, please don't feel like it's too much. To the extent of the code of conduct and what is appropriate, there is nothing pathetic about grief. Esp if you're hanging on and can unravel at any moment.

Ask me anything about my list of songs for grief too (won't include my band's songs heh). I have another song in the works that I'd love to just talk about. I'm an open book as far as grief, fear and such. I write songs for catharsis anyway.

Hope you are all having a wonderful day or night. Forgive me if I can't reply or listen to all the songs, I really do wish I could. I will vote tho.

Half a year ago, I watched The Menu, which is a delightful film if you haven't seen it. Depending on your perspective, you might read its whip-smart commentary as a critique on fine-dining culture, an examination of the cultish qualities of class warfare, a deconstruction of the relationship between artist, audience and financier, all of these, or more that I haven't mentioned. And yet, despite the roiling thematic depths, it's a very accessible and entertaining social horror flick. That was six months ago. And today, I got recommended a video called "Binging with Babish: Cheeseburger from The Menu." In the video, YouTuber Andrew "Babish" Rea attempts to replicate the final dish in The Menu (spoilers ahead): a cheeseburger which is only special, in the film, for its simplicity. For the fact that it is food meant to be eaten and enjoyed, not to be part of some absurd navel-gazing ritual. And for the first part of the video, Babish, in my opinion, replicates the burger near perfectly. A simple burger, on a premade bun, with deli American cheese and crinkle-cut fries. No frills; no fancy tricks. A burger you or I would make, executed well, designed to be eaten and enjoyed. By the time he's done tasting this burger, we're two minutes and fifteen seconds into an eleven minute video.

Roland Barthes (look, just bear with me please) was a French critic who is now best known for his seminal 1967 essay "The Death of the Author." But my favourite of his works is his 1957 essay collection "Mythologies." In the economic boom that followed World War II, Barthes looked around at a new emerging popular culture, and chronicled what he felt were the artistic, philosophical and political connotations of everything from wrestling to the recipes in women's magazines. In the latter essay, titled "Ornamental Cookery," Barthes described the difference between recipes in the working-class Elle Magazine, and the middle class L'Express. Barthes observed that food in Elle was fancy, aesthetically pleasing, and tremendously complex to make, with garnishes and glazes and bright colors, in contrast to the simpler food in the apprently classier L'Express. Explaining this seeming contradiction, Barthes writes,

It is because Elle is addressed to a genuinely working-class public that it is very careful not to take for granted that cooking must be economical. Compare with L'Express, whose exclusively middle-class public enjoys a comfortable purchasing power: its cookery is real, not magical... The readers of Elle are entitled only to fiction; one can suggest real dishes to those of L'Express, in the certainty that they will be able to prepare them.

In other words, Barthes thinks that the recipes in Elle are there not to be made, but to be observed and hungered for by a working class that would struggle to afford the expensive ingredients for complex home cooking, whereas middle-class cooks were capable of affording the ingredients for recipes that could plausibly be made, and so had no need for spectacle or impractical flights of culinary fancy.

This same dynamic can be observed in cooking videos on YouTube. Videos like the aforementioned Babish video, where, after completing his simple, delicious burger, Babish spends hours making his own buns, synthesizing American cheese, crinkle-cutting fries, and grinding expensive steaks to form his patties. The resultant burger, again, looks delicious. But, compared with the first burger, while it's something that I, a middle class woman, certainly could make, the cheaper, simpler burger is infinitely more practical (and, I would argue, more aligned with the themes of The Menu). This isn't a phenomenon unique to the Babish video, either. It's a dichotomy I've observed in lots of cooking videos; some of which, like those made by J. Kenji Lopez, Adam Ragusea, and the like are designed to be practical, replicable recipes; some of which, like Joshua Weissman's "But Better" series, or this delightful video from YouTuber ANTI-CHEF, are videos meant to be consumed as entertainment, only nominally replicable by a typical home cook. The Elle Magazine of today. Not that there's anything wrong with art for art's sake, food designed to be viewed as much as or more than it is to be eaten. Is there?

If, in 1957, you had a lot of money, want to eat the elaborate dishes on display in Elle, and couldn't cook, there was an easy way to do it. You could hire a chef. You could ask them to make some pink, glazed, mythical dish, or, hell, you could let them dazzle you with their creativity instead. You could let them set The Menu, so to speak. But maybe what that film argues is that perhaps the thing you would be consuming would still be ephemeral, unsatisfying, perhaps even unhealthy to eat. Maybe, when we watch videos about impractical, spectacular dishes; when we delight in the excesses of fine dining on display in Chef's Table or the excesses of home cooking in Binging with Babish, we are aligning our expectations, however minutely, along an unwholesome vision of what food should be.

It’s often argued that open-world, zombie survival, and the likes have been overdeveloped and variety needs to be introduced to help stimulate an otherwise stale market. What do you wish upcoming games had that the others do not? Were there any titles that just fell shy of your expectations?

Under lighting strike delay for 30 minutes, then started to on/off drizzling rain, hopefully we get the race in today!? Upside though, Cole Custer (Ford Mustang) in 1st place, if you're a Ford person like I am ya gotta be loving it!

UPDATE -

NASCAR has canceled the rest of the race do to rain and possibly more lighting strikes until 11AM (ET) tomorrow 7/2 on USA Network