I'm a supporter and believer in the small web and minimalist websites (i.e. NOT "minimal design" websites, which are not minimalist more often than not).
Some examples:

• Tildes.
• Sourcehut.
• HackerNews.
• To a limited degree, the different motherfucking websites (as they are, in essence, websites with no purpose).
• Members of the 512kb club (also see https://10kbclub.com/).
• Tools like Miniflux and Kanboard.
• Pinboard.in.
• And many others.

What is your experience, if any, with the small web?
Which steps have you taken (if at all) to ensure your website is not bloated?
What do you think can be done better both individually as well as globally to make the web a nicer, faster place?

Edit: So I don’t look like I don’t practice what I preach, this is my blog. I try and follow the minimalist principles.

I appreciate Goodreads for its pretty extensive catalogue of books, the ability to see reviews from other readers, and the social aspect of following what my friends are reading. However, I find both the website and the app very slow and not very well designed. Plus, I liked to minimize my interactions with Amazon. Has anyone used or built any alternatives? While the features I listed above are nice, the only ones I would really want are:

• The ability to quickly look up and add a book to my "want to read", and to keep track of books I have read
• The ability to leave notes or reviews on books (not necessarily visible to others).

I've started to keep a reading log in Notion which satisfies the second point above, but there's no easy way to search through a data base of books and add a book to one of my lists. It would be nice to be able to do so on the fly as I browse books at the store. So Tildeños, what solutions have you all come up with to track your reading?

I am 20 and I was going to move to a different country to pursuit my bachelors. I was going to make my parents proud! But, 2 days ago, I had a severe panic attack in the middle of a night and a terrible nightmare which preceded the attack. I started seeing weird things when I closed my eyes and I couldn’t manage a day without crying and continuously kept having tremors so I sought professional help.

Now, I have been diagnosed with severe depression and moderate anxiety and I have deferred my plans to pursuit my higher education.

I was once ahead of my peers and enthusiastic about life but now I just feel stuck in life, I feel worthless, undeserving and a piece of shit. I haven’t accomplished anything in the past 4 years which could work as a groundwork for my motivation and I only seem to fall deeper into despair. 

I feel as if I won’t be able to accomplish my goals or achieve anything in my life.

I haven't thought of harming myself but I think the fear of not being able to achieve anything might just make me suicidal.

I have found the tildes community to be observant and kind, I was a lurker before and asked someone for an invite just to post this here. I don't know if I am looking for advice or comfort or anything else but I sure wanted to put this out here.

Currently on book 3 of the Red Rising series. I've been trying to get back into reading for years but I've felt like "quicker" forms of entertainment (video games, etc.) have broken my ability to sit down and focus on a book. Case in point - I've had Red Rising book 1 downloaded to my kindle for years after a friend of mine gave it a overwhelmingly positive recommendation. I tried reading it a few times but my lack of attention span made me fail after just a few pages.

Well all that changed recently when I finally sat down again and gave the book a proper chance by reading more then 3 pages I feel like I'm 14 years old again just crushing books in a few days. Several times I have not been able to put the book down and read until 2AM.

Since the end of June I've finished the first 2 books and am around 1/3rd through the 3rd one.

Wondering if this group has recommendations on some of the best rewards or other savy ways to spend for traveling that are not credit card based?

Particular hotel chain, gas station, fast food based. My husband and I do a trip once annually plus to go back to our hometown typically via car and we already get decent credit card rewards for travel but wondering if there are other rewards we might be missing out on?

Next trip were definitely looking at what museum memberships might exist to do or get discounts on several locations during the trip. We do have a local zoo membership that gets us reciprocity when we travel.

I'm in need of "the next" great Sci-Fi / action series to binge on. I've currently gone through read most / all of:

• Craig Alanson
• Andy Weir
• Jeremy Robinson
• John Scalzi
• Jonathan Maberry
• Timothy Zahn (all his Star Wars works)
• Max Brooks (WWZ)
• Earnest Cline (RP1/2)

I like Star Trekky plots and plucky nerd protagonists.

Also, I'm finding that I'm getting a bit tired of R.C. Bray (I think he narrates the majority of the above. At some point every snarky AI sounds like Skippy). Marc Thompson of the Star Wars series is an amazing narrator.

Side comment: I'm inclined to listen to a good audiobook just for the narrator's performance alone.

If I wanted to create an Instagram to try to build a brand but value privacy, what are some good tips and tricks for using the app and not have all your personal data harvested by Meta?

Of course they're going to collect whatever info I post but are there some mitigation strategies? Always use a VPN? Should I get a brand new phone number?

Was recently discussing this with someone after we saw Dial of Destiny: lots of movies the past few years have been much longer than they need to be. DoD was 2 and a half hours, Spiderverse 2 made the jump from under 2 hours to almost 2 and a half hours. Is there some incentive for studios to make movies longer that we're not seeing?

I'm thinking first order of business is cleaning and then I'd like to paint, and then cleaning up the unkept yard. But I still haven't even moved yet and I know reality will be different.

Does anyone who's been in this situation before have some general advice?

I've been tasked with naming the Tildes Fantasy Football League. I am notoriously bad at naming things.

My only idea is "League of A-holes" because the first vlog post introducing Tildes, Deimos mentioned

Tildes will not be a victim of the paradox of tolerance; my philosophy is closer to "if your website's full of assholes, it's your fault".

But I don't really like it.

My friend and I embarked upon a journey over the past few months to create a tabletop board game. The interesting part is that we were motivated by the emergence of generative AI and the capabilities it had in rapid prototyping concepts. On a whim we said, let's see how far we can push making a board game. We pushed Midjourney, ChatGPT, and a variety of creative tools to help build the foundation for our game. We both have design chops and are into diy, creative design, and 3d printing, and technology to help get this thing past the finish line.

We are now at the point were after many iterative sessions, we have a functional and fun to play game! Our intention is to give it away as a free downloadable that folks can 3d print and paper print all the parts so they can play too! Huzzah! We are balancing the rules and creating the instructions which is not something we are relying on AI aside sticking to the theme. We are in search of inspirato on what makes gameplay fun for folks today.

Question What are the most fun, exciting, or challenging aspects of any tabletop or board games you play? What keeps you engaged?

EDIT
I didn't give many specifics on the game itself, and figured it might help. Remember we used AI to come up with this storyline. The prompt was to write a story for a "Sci-fi Christmas Horror" board game...

The basic premise is that you are attending a party at the North pole celebrating the research of Dr. Frost on ancient Christmas magic. Predictably things go bad, and you have to find your way out before it's too late and you are killed by a troop of Christmas themed monsters.

The games objective is to work together to escape the facility by collecting sleigh parts, fighting monsters, navigating a maze in dark hallways, and visiting special rooms to solve puzzles. It's all kinds of ridiculous but fun it its own way.

There's a couple of other words that describe what I'm talking about - neoliberalism, lassez-faire capitalism, and in a more general sense, the Chicago school of economics - but I chose market fundamentalism because it seemed to best describe precisely what I'm talking about. I mean the belief that the market is capable of self-regulation and that governmental intervention will cause damage to the economy.

I'm asking this because there's still a lot about economics that I don't know about and so I was hoping someone with a background in the subject who would be able to better answer the question. But I realize it's probably also a political question. I wonder if it's more of an issue of our politicians pressing these views than economists and academics.

Personally, with my life's experience, it seems almost obviously wrong. I've lived through several market downturns and even a crash, and looking through history it seems like every market crash can be attributed to the market failing to correct itself.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

Obviously taste is subjective and people are complicated, but at least on the surface, I'm sure most avid listeners can pick an artist or band that they really enjoy, but don't seem to have the popularity or recognition to match. I'd love to hear your picks - preferably, post a link where something can be streamed for free and purchased easily, like Bandcamp. Give us a little synopsis, or at the very least, genre or similar artist, as well.

How did you guys feel about this one? There were some funny moments, like T'Pring's dad being shot down by the mom whenever he was enjoying himself. Not a fan of all the teen romance movie stuff that's in the newer Trek shows though.

Anyone here go through a grounded play through ? I’m trying to currently and tbh…it’s kicking my ass.

Any one here got some tips or advice for this kind of play through ?

Or just discuss the game too! I’d love to join in.

Thank you in advance!!