What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.

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.

What have you been watching and reading this week? 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!

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.

Do we have any information on how Tildes growth is going?

I only use Tildes, used to only use reddit until they pulled their bullshit last year. I don't use any social media and I feel like I am missing out on a lot of news and things. When I used reddit I had curated my subs to my interests and I feel like I was up to date on everything I wanted to be.

But now, due to Tildes being a much smaller community, the news I receive is much more generalized and I've been noticing a lot of times I miss things. For example because all video games are clumped together in one Games Tildes, only the most popular kinds of gaming news gets posted there, so more specific or niche things I miss.

Another example, I had never heard of Ozempic before the South Park episode, and a friend was shocked and told me I was so out of the loop for not knowing what it was. I'd never seen anyone talk about it on here, so how would I know?

I also notice there's just significantly less engagement overall on Tildes. I can scroll through the front page of Tildes every morning, see maybe half posts I've already seen and half new ones, and by the end of the day there will be a handful of new posts but not many. In its golden years, Reddit would have new posts every few hours with new info or news about different things. Tildes feels really small still.

Point being, I'm curious how Tildes is doing in terms of growth and whether it looks like it'll be getting larger communities which will split more subcategories into the broad categories we have now. Or if it has plateaued and this is how it'll be for good?

Trigger Warnings: parent death, pet death, drowning

Recently my mom passed away in a river accident.
She had brought her service dog (a German Shepherd) with her on a rafting trip with friends. From witness testimony, her raft got caught in some trees and as she was trying to detangle herself, her dog got spooked, and jumped into the river. My mom was tied to the dog, and they ended up drowning. They found both their bodies hours later.

I’m still reeling, and I’m in shock. It’s almost early morning and I still can’t get to sleep. I live in a different country and I need to head back to deal with her affairs. She was a single mother, so it’s up to me to figure things out. I have a lot of support, but it still feels so overwhelming.

I specifically would like any advice on how to deal with the “accident” part of her death. It would be one thing if she had died peacefully in her home. But the reason I can’t sleep is because my brain won’t stop trying to imagine what it must have been like in her final moments. The fear, the struggle, her body washing ashore and just sitting somewhere for hours until they could find her. How she must look like now. I will request they cremate her, the police pretty much recommended I don’t do a final look because of how she died. But the morbid curiosity is just there. I don’t know how to shut it off. I know she wouldn’t have wanted me to ruminate over it, but it’s almost like I’m getting the PTSD on her behalf.

I’m also so angry. Angry at her for thinking it would be safe to bring her dog on a raft. Angry at her for tying herself to said dog. But I realize this is more like “denial/bargaining”. My brain keeps making these angry scenarios where I’m yelling at her not to be so stupid. What would possess her to do something like this? But of course that’s just another part of grief.

I’m rambling, it’s late. (Or rather early?) I’m just really sad and tired. Any words would be appreciated.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like alcohol, pavel durov and police raids. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was perplexed.

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!

if i chart my life happiness, fulfilment, success over the past four years, the trend is clearly downwards. some clear wins and stretches of improvement, some quite significant, which i am proud of, but overall, i am getting worse and worse and worse. i attribute my problems mostly to two things: severe social isolation, and an extreme deficit of executive function. however i got here, i'm stuck with the fallout

my memory is bad, and my attention shot, so i kind of don't know what's happened emotionally. i know some focal points, though

this past march, i had a major depressive episode, and it feels like i spent most of a week doing nothing but crying, for no reason at all. i'm not sure how i fed myself

at the beginning of 2022, i quit my (very cushy and chill) job, which i had had for a little over a year at that point, because i felt like i was unmotivated and not actually doing work. (the facts are a bit more subtle; it was partly that the work itself was uninteresting to me, and they wanted to work with me to find something for me to do that i would find more interesting. i was going along with that, until a new opportunity appeared, which i jumped for because i wanted to be able to make a clean break. that opportunity immediately fell through.) i had been living with my parents until shortly before, so i had a lot of savings

now, i find myself in a similar situation, only much more dire. a friend got me a job working with smart people on interesting problems. i have not been doing well. i have been extremely uncommunicative. the pattern is clear: i talk to people, flex my technical chops; they are impressed and like me a lot. then i'm not very productive, and my output slowly deteriorates to nil. i think i just can't do wfh tech work. last week was a blur. i don't know what happened at all. i don't think i've checked slack in close to two weeks, and atp i'm a little bit afraid to. two weeks ago, i asked my friend/coworker to poke me every day to make sure i was doing something. it seemed and still seems like a good strategy. and then a day or two after i asked him that i just dropped off the map again

i'm not addicted to drugs or video games. it seems like i ought to be. i am a bit drunk right now, but that is quite irregular

recently, i thought i'd finally made a close friend. this morning, she broke up with me and blocked me for a really really stupid reason. i am really hurt by that, and it makes me feel a bit hopeless about the whole thing. spent the afternoon crying about it and now just feel a bit numb. i give it decent odds she comes back, but. i know one problem i have is putting my eggs in too few baskets. but there are so few baskets that seem worth investing in, and investment is so hard

she suggested i try to get prescribed add medication for my work problems, and was going to give me some illicitly to see if it helped. the latter is not happening anymore, of course. and i cannot stomach the medical system (already i have other things i have been putting off talking to my doctor about for a while), not to mention that it would take forever to do anything for me

i don't know what to do in the short to medium term. i don't know what to say to my work that i haven't said already, other than: clearly, i am just incapable of doing this. i am not super financially stable right now, and being without a job seems like a bad idea

I’m interested in everyday applications like noticing bias in commercial media as well as word-of-mouth and social media. Are there any principles or methods you know of that you’d consider especially important?

I’m also interested in any recommendations for online training.

Edit: Wow! Since there are some great suggestions in the comments, I'd like to summarise them here:

• Primary sources and secondary sources (fefellama)
• Engagement (BeanBurrito)
• Under The Influence by Terry O'Reilly [podcast] (chocobean)
• Influence, marketing, motivation, bias, dark patterns, corruption, phrasing and choice of words (chocobean)
• Multiple sources. Verbalise your thought process / question yourself (hobofarmer)
• Advanced Placement English. Ethos, pathos, logos (Wisix)
• Learning how to hold and study concepts without internalizing them. Not becoming emotionally dependent on “being right”. (bet)
• Flaws in perception and processing. The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef: "the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were" (Landhund)
• Fact checking, exercises such as mock trials (chizcurl)
• Not assuming that critical thinking transfers across domains (daywalker)
• Falsifiability, scientific psychology, psychological bias, cognition / emotion / behaviour (daywalker)
• 'Very Short Introductions' series by Oxford Press (daywalker)
• Many ways to conceptualise "critical thinking". Appreciating the humanity of other people. (mieum)
• Self reflection and acknowledgement of diversity (mieum)
• The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science [book] (gaywallet)
• Being Wrong: Adventures on the Margin of Error [book] (boxer_dogs_dance)
• Be curious and ask questions (Markpelly)
• Empathy facilitates understanding and tempers reactivity (Aerrol)
• Nobel disease or Nobelitis (saturnV)

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

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