As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I've had an interest in 3D printing since first hearing about it many years ago, but at the time printers were expensive and learning materials and resources were scarce. Nowadays, it seems like 3D printing is as common as regular old 2D printing but I feel left in the dust.

What's really making me want to get started now is I've collected a lot of junk over the years that I've told myself I could repair, but a lot of the repairs would be much easier with a 3D printer and custom modeled parts. Dearest to me would be an old watch that my grandfather gave to me before he died. The part of the watch that connects the strap to the case (lugs, I think it's called?) has broken off and gotten lost, and it's a proprietary part with no replacement parts available. I'd love to just 3D-print a solution but have no idea how to get started.

I consider myself a creative person, I have plenty of experience with Photoshop and illustrator, but I have never once dabbled in 3D modeling software like Blender or AutoCAD. The closest I ever got was peering over the shoulder of an artist who was working on a video game character model in Zbrush, or maybe working on custom Half-Life maps in Valve Hammer. So I'm looking for the most basic, easy-to-follow set of instructions to get me from zero knowledge to successfully printing bespoke DIY repair parts at my local makerspace.

Would also love to have this be a discussion on 3D printing in general. How did you get started? How have the tools and techniques evolved over the years? What do you think are the next big things coming in the hobby? What are things you wish you knew when you started but only learned after mistakes were made? Share your thoughts and anecdotes, I'd be happy to read them.

My vacation destinations are already set for the next year, but last night I saw a video about Hoffbrauhaus in Bavaria. It ended up captivating me because it sounds like something really mundane until you look further into it. Learning about the history, the cultural importance, and the general experience of going there really made me want to go.

I live in the Southwestern United States, so travel to me is usually stuff that's in the US or Mexico. One of the trips we're thinking of doing will lead us to Canada for a while. But this part of the world is still relatively "new" and the cultural stuff is just a bit too familliar, and so most of it ends up just looking at pretty views. And I'm getting really tired of nice views.

With that in mind, I'm looking for places to go to add to my bucket list of places that have a lot of cultural value (while hopefully still being accessible to a clueless American) or perhaps has more sensual elements like interesting regional cuisine or visiting a famous historical bathhouse. I know there's tons of places that fit that description, but surely some of you have some favorites you'd like to recommend.

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 have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

I understand with the rise of music streaming people have been introduced to a wider variety of bands than ever before, but what's your favorite band that no one has heard of? I think everyone has that one band that they love that no one in their friend group has ever heard of.

I think I have a few, but I'll throw out Kadavar who have a Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath feel to them.

I'm a little late on this, admittedly. $dayjob is requiring us all to set up a pair of YubiKeys, and I'm using them for the first time and my mind is a little blown.

I was seeing articles about "passkeys" all summer, not really grokking what they were talking about, clinging to my usernames and passwords and 2FA codes coming out of 1Password, etc.

I just set it up on a few accounts today, initially as an additional 2FA source, but when I set them on GitHub, I saw for the first time how exactly they are used instead of the username and password and 2FA combo to log in, and it seems incredible to me!

For long-time YubiKey users: what are some cool things in the ecosystem that you would recommend looking at?

Next week, I will be closing on my first ever home (hello Michigan tilderinos!). One of the projects I want to tackle and work on after I move in is setting up a smart home ecosystem that is sustainable long-term. I saw the open-source Home Assistant but I think I need to do more research on it and find compatible products. For now, my wishlist of projects are:

• Controllable lighting from my phone or computer
• Carbon Monoxide/Natural Gas detection
• Water leak and usage monitoring
• Thermostat

Are there any other use cases that you use home automation for? If you use Home Assistant (or used it in the past), what are some things I should consider? Any products that you bought in the past and regret now?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I'm not new to two-factor authentication (2FA) as a concept, but available options and how they'd fit into a workflow has always felt somewhat opaque. Everytime I've been required to use 2FA, I've used SMS despite knowing how insecure that really is.

GitHub's 2FA requirement is about to lock me out of my personal account, so I figured it's time to get a grasp on this:

• What second factors are available to me and what do the workflows looks like?
  • Preferably these second factors wouldn't require me to sign up for some associated service.
• What are my options for redundancy?
  • Can I have multiple second factors?
  • Where are you supposed to keep recovery codes? (I've read that keeping them in your password manager essentially defeats the purpose)
• What happens if I screw up and lose my second factor? With services that just have password requirements, you can use your email to reset, are there analogous systems for 2FA?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like automotive industry, enshittification and donald trump. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was unclear.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Let's say I want to draw/paint things like this: 1 2

Think black/death metal album covers, medieval renaissance, dark/sci fi scenarios.

I know this takes years of practice and I just want to do these as a hobby.

I am just lost to where I start. Just pen and paper and focus learn how to draw people first? Is there any online courses/resources?

The second thing is I don't want to spend money so I won't learn to do these with oil or any real world material. If I do commit to the hobby with pen and paper, I will go to digital (drawing tablet + Linux/krita) and stay on that forever.

It's the same with guitar. I play guitar for years and I'm settled for life with a nice guitar + mid priced digital pedalboard with nice effects/simulations (ampero II stomp) and a 1x12 flat speaker cabinet. No more purchases.

I've been really bad at coming up with things to cook lately, resulting in me eating the same unhealthy food all the time. I'd like to change this and to get familiar with new recipes, so I was wondering if the users of Tildes have any good recipes to share. Vegetarian and vegan are preferred, but non-vegetarian recipes are also very welcome!

What are your go-to cheap, easy and healthy recipes?

Edit: I'm too overwhelmed by all your comments to respond to everybody individually, but I thank you all for the great suggestions, these are of great help!

I'm trying to get back into drawing. Ye gods, my skills have gone downhill. As a total pro, I started out drawing a head and went from there with no care for composition and no clue where I'm going with this one—guess it should be some sorta chibi barbarian or something? Anyhows, any suggestions appreciated.

I know I need some darker tones to give it that spatial feel. Some pencil pieces, even if they're merely sketches, manages to get the tones just right. I think some of it is about having degrees of shading, where some smaller detail have even darker shadows. But it is hard to get right, don't even know if there's a word for it.

Here's my sucky drawing!

I decided to set up automatic backup of my files from my phone and laptop to Backblaze B2. I didn't find a good solution to sync photos from my phone directly to Backblaze, so I decided to do the following:

1. Sync photos from my phone to my laptop using Syncthing
2. Back up those photos as well as other files from the laptop to Backblaze using Restic

Is this backup solution fine, or are there any issues with it?

Also, most of the stuff I need to back up, even on my laptop, are photos/videos. Is there a point in using Restic with it's deduplication and incremental backups for this use case, or should I just use Rclone directly? I'd assume deduplication won't save me much storage because photos generally don't have similar byte chunks, although I may be wrong.

I have a business phone number that I use for work in addition to my personal cell phone number which I’ve had for 20+ years. I’ve always used my work number for anything job-related (colleague contact, vendors, sales reps, networking, LinkedIn, etc) and only provide my personal for, well, personal contacts.

But having had my personal number for as long as I have, it’s very easy to Google my name and find that number associated to me.

My issue is that I’m constantly receiving phone calls and voicemails on my personal number from vendors, sales reps, etc that are either for services we use at my job or from vendors in relevant fields contacting me for various reasons. I realize some may lump this kind of outreach into “spam”, but I want to differentiate this kind of outreach from what I consider true spam (robocalls, phishing, non-work related sales calls like for home internet, etc) which just goes ignored and blocked.

I don’t want to answer every call to correct someone to use my work contact info. I can continue ignoring but it does fill my voicemail and I’m hoping to reduce the number of calls I receive on my cell every day (even if it were to only cut it down by 5). Someone suggested changing my outgoing voicemail message to flag it’s my personal number and any work related messages would be ignored while providing my work number. I think this may be the best approach (though I’d skip providing my work number as I don’t need it to start receiving robocalls). I know I’m not the only one that deals with this (but maybe I’m in the minority rather than a majority) and am curious if y'all have this issue and if so, how you manage it?

Recently I've been getting Instagram ads for those "side quest" decks that are designed to make you do more spontaneous things on a day to day basis. Things like, "Go to a local coffee shop you've never been to" or "Talk to a stranger". I've been slowly sinking into the fall season apathy and winter blues and have been looking to spice my life up, but I kinda don't wanna spend money on a bunch of cards.

What are your experiences with spontaneity in your daily life? Anything exciting that has come out of it?

This year I spent a bunch of time in different countries and wrote about it a month ago here

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'm curious of what other people say when someone (say, a coworker or a complete stranger) asks prying questions-- or even questions you just don't feel like answering!

Personally, I enjoy giving irrelevant answers to the busybody I run into at least once a week, from the classic "I'm going to iron my dog" (more of an excuse, but still great for befuddling), to the recent favorite: "This human suit is chafing and I need to remove it to apply baby powder."

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

Tell us what it is, and why.

Previous posts in series

Additional Details

I have been going over services for which I pay monthly in my business. I have 17 clients where I do unattended cloud backups as well as doing a backup that I hold onto myself. Overall I backup around 4TB of data. I'm looking at possibly changing cloud services as the one I currently use has progressively increased their fees. I understand the need to pay for a good, reliable service as it reflects upon myself , my business and the service I provide but feel there are more competitive companies out there.

None of this is for personal use and many cloud services are just that, personal use. These are all server (Windows and Linux) use cases.

Minor Starfield lore spoiler's ahead

Originally written for /r/games, but the last discussion thread of Starfield in that place saw many user who said they personally like the game downvoted and replied to by mentally-questionable individuals that said not-so-nice things.

As I pass 170 hours in Bethesda newest, hottest, controversial game. I am happy because it is just as fun as I had hoped it to be.
Yet as I explore the cities it has to offer there is always a small detail that I keep failing to ignore (whenever I'm not busy thinking of new ship designs that is).

200,000 units are ready with a million more on the way

So say the slender being that has been tasked with creating an army to defend a galactic spanning government of countless worlds. At this point Montgomery, Zhukov, MacArthur, Jodl, or any-other-WW2-command-figure-of-your-choosing are rolling on the ground clapping each other's backs laughing their socks off. Because 1.2 million is an absolutely puny and pathetic number of troops for a galactic war.
I'm no Star Wars deep lore fan, I understand that fans and later authors has since tried to 'fix it' by making the Clone War more that just the clones. And yet those 1.2M clones was all there was when episode 2 released to theatres.
Most Sci-fi writings has similar a problem with scaling to their subject. It is not news. It even has a tv tropes page (the page is more about distances, but it's in the same ballpark).

Quest for the Peoplefield

So where does Starfield go wrong in this? The ships are puny. The wars and the numbers stated are puny.
Certainty more ways than one, but the one that I wish to focus on is this: where the hell are all the people?
A brief summary of the lore. Humanity has invented FTL and has seemingly solved all energy problems. They had to evacuate Earth, but this was successful and so the starfield should be absolutely teeming with tens of billions of human souls spreading to all corners of the galaxy and its many already habitable worlds.
And yet, Starfield feels so barren. I see no grand interstellar civilizations. Only dirt huts on a hill surrounded by walls that support barely a thousand people. Yet this dirt hill is supposed to be a capital or an interstellar superpower. Heck, they are even scared shitless of their own fauna.
The opposites capital is no dirt hill, yet still smaller than a modern earth country town.
And it's not like the main population centers are just outside player-accessible areas. All the NPCs ever talk about are Akila, New Atlantis, and Neon. These tiny puny cities.
It doesn't feel like the evacuation of Earth was a success. It feels like it was a catastrophe, and all that remains are scattered remnants playing civilization.

And yet... The Starfield is actually lively, just not where it should be. There is a scale imbalance, because spread across nearly every world in the settled systems are countless research stations, outposts, deserted or populated, you name it.
Yes, those procedually-generated buildings that spawn nearly everywhere you land in the settled systems.
Where did these come from? Surely the UC couldn't have built them. Manning just the ones that I have come across in my playthrough would empty New Atlantis 10 times over!

Bethesda built their open-world game style upon Fallout and Elder Scrolls. For both it makes sense that the worlds are sparely populated. One being post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the other a medieval society.
But now they have built something in a completely different realm. But they way in which Bethesda built the scale at which the game is presented remains the same.
So why did they go with this approach? I don't know. Maybe they just like making "small" worlds and didn't want to fit the new universe. Maybe the idea of 'climbing any mountain you can see' is a very hard rule and they didn't want to limit player movement in metropolises, that would undoubtedly be unfeasible to make fully traversable.

But lets pretend they actually tried. And perhaps it can be done without really changing how the game is designed or played.

So you can do it better huh?

A Microsoft executive plays the game as it's nearing launch. He feels there is something missing with the scale of the Starfield universe.
So he does the only rational thing he can think of and storms into the street and picks the first rando he can find, puts the Bethesda crown upon his head, and orders him to fix Starfield's problem of scale.
The exec is later found to be mentally ill and fired, but it does not matter for I am now king of Bethesda and my words are design directives.

Tell, don't show

The simple solution that requires no real work but some change in lore. New Atlantis is no longer a capital, just a administrative and diplomatic outpost. Akila is now just a small border city. The real population centers are now on entirely different worlds. Inaccessible to the player.
Why can't players go there? Well it shouldn't take much suspension of disbelief to acknowledge that governments might not want any random idiot, in a flying hunk of metal capable of tearing space-time at it seams, to go anywhere near their main population centers without considerable control.
NPCs should no longer talk of sprawling New Atlantis, Neon, or Akila, but rather these other places that you can see on the map but are not allowed to go to.

Show enough

The population planets are now accessible, but restricted in where you can land freely. On the map it should show big cities. And just like how you cannot land in water, you can neither land anywhere in cities or its surroundings.
Just like with New Atlantis and Akila, you can land at a designated spot. The difference is when you look into the horizon, because rather than a procedurally generated landscape you will instead see a sprawling metropolis that tells you "Yes here! Here are all the people!".
The other change would be that, unlike the landscape, if you try to go beyond the player-area of the city you will hit a wall. But that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
New Atlantis and Akila can stay, but like the other solution they would change status.

All in all the scale issue is no big problem and the game is fine as it is. This was just something that has been on mind for some time and I wanted to put it to writing. So do you agree that Starfield has a scale problem? If yes, how would you fix it? Or maybe I missed some crucial info-dump and the entire premise of this writing is wrong?

Aiming this question at parents mostly.

I'm about to be a dad in the next week or so and I obviously want to raise my son to be a good person. My father was/is an absent drug addict, so I have a good roadmap of "don't." But I saw very little in the way of "do."

Where is the line between being too authoritarian vs too permissive? What are your thoughts on gentle parenting? I don't want to trade "well-behaved" for "well-adjusted" or vice versa.

I'm also open to newborn advice since that's what I'll primarily be dealing with for the next little while, obviously.

This is Album of the Week #2. This week's album is The Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt

Year of Release: 2010
Genre(s): Contemporary Folk
Country: Sweden
Length: 35 minutes
Album.Link

Excerpt from Paste Magazine

Matsson makes the acoustic guitar sound like an orchestra on “You’re Going Back” and the banjo like a full-throttled band on “Troubles Will Be Gone,” a song about goodwill written in the verbal style of Robert Frost. The entire album is full of these tiny orchestras and miniature choirs—a sound few of Matsson’s contemporaries were able to recreate. But many folk artists who’ve arrived in years after The Wild Hunt have seemingly been taking notes. The like-minded Joan Shelley treats her acoustic guitar with a similar reverence, instrumental artist and former Silver Jews musician William Tyler probably learned a thing or two about pacing and rhythm from Matsson and Hiss Golden Messenger’s M.C. Taylor carries on the legacy of curving his sultry, lilting vocals into a style resembling Dylan, as do Kevin Morby and Waxahatchee, who share that same distinct vocal formula. The Wild Hunt gave proceeding indie-folk artists something to aspire to in terms of both authenticity and craft.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

I had been waiting for this game since 2012, when it was first announced. I bought it day one, without reading any reviews, and it was an instant refund for me.

Now that update 2.0 supposedly makes the game better, I'm thinking of giving it another shot. Has anyone tried this update? What do you think about it?

Hi all - I need some help troubleshooting my internet and really don't feel like dealing w/ customer service reps. I don't consider myself a tech savvy person, so I'm wondering what this community might know..

I've been having issues with my internet for a while. we have xfinity with a plan that promises up to 1000mbps. I'm lucky if i get up to 250 on a good day. beyond that, we constantly lose connection, or get very slow connectivity. i'm using a Netgear c7000v2 as my modem/wifi router combo paired with a Google Nest Mesh router. My home is roughly 1000 sqft footprint split level. my computer is in a different room, but there's no doors between and about 600 ft from the modem/mesh routers.

i called xfinity to talk about the issue, they said that my modem likely needed to be replaced. the initial modem was also a Netgear c7000v2, but i figured maybe the hardware just burnt out(?) they sent me an xfinity modem, and everything seemed to work great (still not 1000mbps, but definitely better). when I realized they were charging me more than I was willing to pay monthly for a rental fee on the modem, i decided i'd go back out and buy a new modem. i bought a Netgear c7000v2 again, because it should be able to handle those speeds, and to my understanding is a decent enough modem. i also bought a new coaxial cable to double check. but after replacing, my internet is still spotty and constantly goes in and out.

i don't have any device to plug directly into the ethernet cable (because it's 2023...), so i can't pinpoint the issue through that. i haven't had an xfinity tech come out yet, because apparently that takes anywhere from 6-8 weeks to get a visit...

any ideas on what i should do? part of me is convinced that xfinity is throttling my internet because I'm not using their modem and paying them a rental fee, but i don't want to give into conspiratorial thinking...i'm about to file an FTC complaint on them because I'm just fed-up at this point.

For context I did not grow up reading books, came to it in my early twenties and found I preferred historical, academic or social books. Therefore reading really felt like a chore and I struggled.

Read what I would consider my first novel/story book last year which was The Iliad and found that I quite enjoyed it, decided I was going to try something else. The Lord of the rings came to mind as I have rewatched the movies countless times, I researched recommendations on editions and how to read, therefore I started with the Hobbit back in June.

I just finished reading the last book of the trilogy today, which compared to my previous reading habits is lightening fast. And I am a little sad, I will read the appendices but am uncertain what to do next. I'm thinking unfinished tales and then the silmarillion.

Wondering if anyone has any suggestions, also about any other series or universe to read about after these, preferably with movies that I can watch before hand as it helps me with imagining what I'm reading.

Edit:
First of all I wanted to thank everyone for sharing your ideas, it has been immensely insightful and I feel like there are a lot of possibilities for me to pursue even if not immediately but in the near future.

I've decided I'm not quite ready to leave middle earth yet and so I will be persuing the silmarillion, and then unfinished tales. Any thoughts on tom bombadil?

After this the following quite interested me:

• prince of nothing
• the resurrection OST
• dune

I feel like I might actually start with dune as it will be a foot in the door into sci-fi but let's see

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I am faced with an unusually busy year this year between work and school. I have one window for a vacation between December 27 and January 7. My planned travel companion can no longer come along. My ticket can be changed to most destinations worldwide.

Before I choose to go alone or to not travel this year, I decided to ask this community the following question. Is there anyone who lives on a continent I consider less risky to visit alone, who would be open to a meetup and provide some local travel advice? I understand that many people fiercely protect their anonymity and I am not trying to convince anyone. If no one responds, that is fine.

I also don't need or want handholding or babysitting. I am a middle aged, american married woman with some health issues. I am a moderately experienced traveler.

If you are open to discussing this possibility, please feel free to reply or message.

Apologies to my friends in South and Central America and in Africa. I need this trip to be relatively easy and to feel 99 percent safe while traveling alone.

I've been climbing for about 2 years now and yesterday I was finally able to complete my most difficult route yet without stopping for a break! I've tried this 6C about 15 times or so and only finished it twice, but I usually fall or have to stop to rest in the middle, so I was really pleased I did it in one!

What about you guys?

(P.s apologies if this is the wrong place for this. At first I was going to post in ~sport but that looked more like pro sport news)

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

So the discussion at https://tildes.net/~movies/1ar2/martin_scorsese_says_fight_back_against_comic_book_movie_culture_by_supporting_directors_like made me think about mainstream Hollywood way of movies versus - well everyone else? I am not even sure I like the term "arthouse" movies, because movies are movies regardless of the boxes we put them in, but for the sake of the argument movies that don't fall in the category of traditional mainstream storytelling. Is it just French artsy fartsy pretentious weirdness or is (quote) real cinema (unquote)?

I think my movie habits have been pretty average. I am not American, but most of what I have watched during my lifetime have been Hollywood productions. By a huge margin. In recent years I found myself going more and more bored with both movies and tv series from whatever the algorithms at the streaming services were pushing to me. Not that it was bad, just felt more and more like a product designed after a specific set of criteria aimed at my taste demographic. So I forced myself to break out of the bubble and watched movies totally outside my comfort zone with something I am sure the algorithms would never have recommended me. Started with movies by Kieslowski and Wong Kar-wai. And since then I feel like a whole new world of movies has opened up for me. Not that everything is magically great. There are still pretentious French movies that make me roll my eyes, but most of all it is something different. Story telling rules I thought couldn't be broken are thrown in the air and something completely unexpected appears on screen instead.

It takes some getting used to. I really struggled with a good deal of self-doubt whether I could actually understand these movies, because I have studied film theory or went to art school. At the end of the day it is really just about watching things intuitively and trying not to analyze everything or thinking about what things are supposed to mean, and be curious to why the movie does things that maybe the complete opposite of the film techniques I was used to from more mainstream movies.

This is not to bash at the Hollywood blockbuster way of filmmaking, because when that formula works - it really damn well works. But so can something completely different like Hlynur Pálmason's Godland, Haneke's Funny Games or Bujalski's Computer Chess - just to name a few of my recent very compelling movie experiences.

I've taken on the monumental task of scanning my family photo albums in and saving them to a NAS (plus cloud, of course). 1000+ photos in, and I had the great idea of also banging through the images with AI to clean them. Anyone who plays with AI knows it can be a little hit-and-miss. The tool of choice was GFPGAN and in some images it cleaned them lovely, others, not so much.

To help sort this out I'm looking for a side-by-side image viewer, similar to something simple like Gwenview, that allows me to look at the files and simply pick the better image. I'm not sure this software even exists after the exhaustive time I've been looking for it. I'm on Linux, so that may be the hindrance here. Brownie points if I can pick the better image, and it copies the file to a new folder to allow building out a mixed bunch of files from the two source folders.

Absolute worst case, I'm willing to put some money in a pot for someone to develop this very needed tool. Best case, if the software doesn't exist and they build it for timasomo.

Note: Tried XNView but it won't compare across folders.

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.

Kinda thought it was boring race. A few entertaining passes, but that was it.

On to Qatar in two weeks (Oct. 6-8)!

I just made this coronation chickpea sandwich filler and I feel compelled to shout from the rooftops how good it is! I love a good meaty dish but I genuinely feel like this is better than the traditional coronation chicken version - to the point that I don't see a reason to bother with coronation chicken again. I will always have this instead now. There is a caveat; I did make a few tweaks to this:

• I replaced the tinned chickpeas with 200g of dried chickpeas, soaked overnight and cooked with a few bay leaves and plenty of salt
• I replaced half of the mayonnaise with greek yoghurt (I do this for coleslaw and potato salad too and it's great)
• I toasted whole spices and made my own curry powder

Even without these changes I'm sure it's still a very tasty end result. Has anyone else had a similar experience? What vegetarian or vegan dishes have you found that are superior to their meat counterparts?

It doesn't need to be from countries known for "bad" cuisine. Just try to avoid obvious countries like Italy, France, Japan or China (as a handful of examples).

Having said the above, that is also coming from a western (European) perspective. If those countries are not well known for their cuisine in your area, then feel free to choose them!

This is Album of the Week #1. This week's album is Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I Might See

Year of Release: 1993
Genre(s): Dream Pop, Neo-Psychedelia
Country: United States
Length: 52 minutes
Album.Link

Excerpt from Pitchfork

The undertext of a decision to push a female frontperson further into the spotlight is that beauty (or, more cynically, sex) sells. But capitalizing on Sandoval’s image perhaps unintentionally trivialized her role in the band, making her seem like merely the Nico to Roback’s Lou Reed. (Nico, of course, spent a lifetime reclaiming her agency from the myth of the muse.) But So Tonight That I Might See is not about keeping one musician behind a curtain. The creative partnership between Roback and Sandoval is the heart of Mazzy Star. They knew that the band would wilt if pushed into the spotlight more than necessary. So they stuck to the shadows, two quiet, introspective souls deeply engaged in one dream. Together, they drifted into a hazy unknown.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

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Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

I find that while romantic relationships are quite specifically defined in our society, friendships don't seem to have the same universally understood characteristics or “road maps” for their development, so I find them interesting to discuss, especially considering the modern epidemic of loneliness many people are experiencing. Most people share the same understanding of what makes someone your romantic partner, but when does someone become your friend, vs. just an acquaintance? What makes someone a good friend or a bad friend - essentially, what can we expect from our friends, and what should we give in return?

I remember a scene from the show “Love on the Spectrum” (a reality show about people with autism in the dating world) that stuck with me. One of the people on the show explained that because he didn't understand socialization very well naturally, he had taken it upon himself to study the psychology behind it for many years, to the point where he became quite a charming and socially capable guy. I'm not autistic, but I was homeschooled up to age 14. I believe it made me quite socially stunted, and I didn't really learn how to maintain friendships until my mid 20s. Instead of learning social skills naturally over building blocks in preschool, I was reading books and journaling about it as an adult. Looking back, I no longer resent it, because being forced to work on it like a skill seems to have benefited me in the long run, and after a very lonely early life, I now have many dear friends who bring me joy.

I have a “system” of sorts that seems to work very well for me. There are three elements: consistency, vulnerability, and adaptability.

#1. Consistency

When people talk about their struggles with making or keeping friendships, this aspect is usually mentioned the most often. People are busy, schedules can get tight, and we all have a lot of things that get in the way of spending time with the people in our lives. Commonly, people aren't sure how often they should reach out to their friends, or worry that they are bothering someone who isn't interested in spending time with them. (Usually friends don't break up, after all, they just fade.) I think a lot of friendships are lost or missed because both people simply stop reaching out.

I never take it personally when I ask someone to hang out once or twice and they don't respond, or it doesn't work out. I just give it some time and try again later, at least a few times. Also, I try to reach out without requiring much time or effort from the other person, like just messaging to tell them something that reminded me of them, without scheduling anything at the moment. It also helps to learn people’s preferred communication styles - some people might never respond to texts, but enjoy casual phone calls, or visa versa. Sometimes I miss my friends but I'm way too busy to do more socializing at the time, so I schedule something weeks or months in advance.

Consistency can come in different forms, some people I see for short amounts of time each week, and others I only see a few times a year for quality time on a vacation. Both are good! Another part of consistency is making an effort to follow through on commitments - it's okay to cancel on friends a certain amount, but it's important to give notice and reschedule promptly.

#2. Vulnerability

A friendship needs consistency as a foundation, especially new ones. However, if you see someone every week and don't eventually learn personal things about each other, it can only go so far. And once you have introduced vulnerability, it can be difficult to find a balance. Many people worry about over sharing, and others struggle to recognize when they might be sharing too much. I try to match the energy of the person I'm interacting with. I don't come out swinging by mentioning my difficult religious upbringing and relationship with my parents (obviously,) instead, I ask people casual questions about their family, for example, and see what they're comfortable with sharing. When someone does share something vulnerable with me, I take note of it, and later on I tell them something of a similar nature about myself. Vulnerability is like a ladder - a ladder that is best climbed gradually.

I find that men tend to struggle with vulnerability the most (perhaps to no one's surprise,) particularly in friendships between two men. A few months ago my husband found out that his mother had relapsed, and he mentioned that he wished he had a friend to talk to whose parent was also an addict. I told him that actually, one of our friends had a father who passed away from addiction, something I knew about him despite being friends with the guy for a shorter period of time, and I said maybe he should talk to him about it. Of course, this is a sensitive topic that some friends simply don't always share with each other, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it got me curious about the likelihood of men sharing that information with each other, compared to a man sharing it with a woman, or to a woman sharing with another woman. Men and women alike have much to gain when we share vulnerable information with each other in a healthy way.

(side note: I struggle with friendships with people who are very private, or are more likely to share after being prodded a bit. I ask questions, but I'm not likely to push someone who isn't giving a lot of information, so with shy people I sometimes struggle to bring the friendship to a closer place. Most of my closest friends are all extroverts, and I would like to figure out how to get to know my shy, quiet friends a bit better, without being invasive or too intense.)

#3. Adaptability

Where consistency is most important at the beginning of a new friendship, adaptability becomes more important later on, for the longevity of a friendship. An adaptive friendship can survive when people's interests, schedules, and circumstances change. If you know you can have a good time with someone in different environments, a friendship is more likely to survive when people move, change careers, have kids, generally grow older and more mature, etc.

A good example is the fact that I had a lot of surface-level “festival friends” or “concert friends” in my mid 20s, and despite hanging out with them consistently for years, I'm not friends with most of them anymore. This is mostly because our tastes in music or hangout spots changed, and there was nothing else tethering or deepening our friendship, so when those things changed, it ended. On the flipside, most of my closest friends today actually are people who I met at festivals or parties, but it's because I've invested in those relationships and expanded them to exist beyond the circumstances that we met under. I can lose interest in going to electronic music festivals and not worry about losing the friends that I camp with there, because I make sure to pull those friends into my normal day to day life, by going hiking, cooking dinner, getting coffee, etc. I also try to do new things with friends, so we have a shared new experience together.

Another example of adaptability is which social contexts you are in when you spend time together, as in, hanging out in group settings only, or getting together only when a mutual friend is there, vs. spending time 1:1. When I invite a friend of a friend to hang out with me without the original mutual friend, that's taking a step into a relationship that exists independently. I keep this in mind whenever one of my friends starts dating someone that I really get along with and make it a point to form my own friendship with that person, so if the relationship doesn't last, I have the opportunity to keep that person in my life.

Maybe some of these things seem like common sense or human nature, but it certainly took me a while to recognize some of them. Whenever I meet someone I really get along with, I make sure to keep these principles in mind. And when I feel myself drifting away from a good friend, I think about which of the three elements could use some attention.

What are your thoughts on cultivating quality friendships? Does it come naturally to you? Anything you struggle with in particular?