The November 2024 Backlog Burner event is officially over!

Over the course of the month of November, 17 participants moved 136 games out of their backlogs.

There were 9 bingo wins from:

• u/aphoenix
• u/AugustusFerdinand
• u/CannibalisticApple
• u/CrazyProfessor02
• u/Eidolon
• u/Evie
• u/kfwyre
• u/SingedFrostLantern
• u/Wes

Also, a big thank you to ALL who participated in the event, whether that was by playing games or joining in conversations.

It has been an absolute blast doing this with everyone. Thank you all for participating.

Use this topic to post your final bingo cards, give recaps of your games, and share any thoughts you have on the event itself.

See you again for the next Backlog Burner in May 2025!

Statistics

• We averaged 8.0 games per person and 31.7 games per week.
• There were 245 comments posted across 5 different topics.
• Two games were played twice: Hades and Monster Hunter Wilds
• We played games that started with every letter of the alphabet except Q.

Highlights

The following highlights were aggregated from participants. Thank you to those of you who wrote in! I'm sharing these as written, though I did make some minor edits to maintain anonymity.

• u/Wes made a great bingo site that works really well for this event.

• It's touching that u/Wes took the time to respond to nearly everyone. He really made this feel like a community.

• A special mention for @Wes, who seems to have read and thoughtfully replied to every single writeup this month, which was very kind (and I really liked their writeup of Praey for the Gods).

• I love the evolution of the Bingo card over the past several events, and I really liked this form.

• There were so many great entries that I enjoyed reading this time around, actually, and I really wanted to keep trying games that other people tried.

• @SingedFrostLantern for their hole-in-one golf

• The highlight for the whole event to me was @SingedFrostLantern's hole-in-one and the wonderful writeup that went with the game.

• My favourite writeup had to be @SingedFrostLantern with their Keylocker Hole in One, a fun little exercise that put me onto a new game that (regrettably) went straight back into the backlog.

• @JCPhoenix for creating full video reviews for many of his entries

• @Eidolon's Neverwinter Nights for bringing the classics back

• @kfwyre for Journey to the Savage Planet, and finally getting to be the dog

• u/kfwyre completely missing the joke

• @Evie, with basically every write-up she did. Dead Space, Prey, and Outer Wilds were all very good.

• @CannibalisticApple with Lost in Blue, finally tackling the game cartridge lost somewhere in a closet

• @J-Chiptunator with four unique console selections

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.

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!

I'm open to hearing from folks who have used iOS longer than me. How is the iOS dialer so terrible when it's supposed to be the primary usage of a phone, calling people?

1. Why can't I type the letters of a name in my contacts list, eg "5-2-6" for "JAM" and have all the "James" show up? Android has had that since forever because it's not rocket science.
2. Why can't I type to correct a digit in the middle of the number dialed? Or correct a number I've pasted in?
3. Seriously, is there no way to replace the dialer with something better? And if there is and I just missed it, what are your recommendations?
4. Same question for the god-awful contacts list. I use Google Contacts, have 3 google accounts in which the contacts are… and the syncing seems piss-poor.

Ok, this turned out to be more of a rant than I anticipated. I've gotten to like iOS quite a bit, especially because the android ecosystem has become a very "worst of both worlds" option. But man the dialer's shit. Someone please tell me I'm missing something obvious.

There was a thread about shows with a great beginning and a comment in the thread made me want to ask, what about the opposite? Shows with a really satisfying ending that feels like they wrapping things up in a satisfying way?

A pretty quick work trip has been planned. I will fly into Heathrow Saturday morning. I'll have until Sunday evening to get to Warwick. I'll be in Warwick for 5 days before flying back out the next Saturday.

I'm looking for any general advice but also if there is anything specific to the following:

• I'm going to book my own hotel in London the Saturday night I fly in. Saturday and Sunday are essentially my "tourist" days. Where is good to stay? Not too concerned with price.
• I'm taking a train to Warwick and mostly have that figured out but is there an app or pass that I should add to my Apple wallet for transit around London?
• I like museums of all types. Are there any in particular I should check out?
• Any classic pubs or restaurants I should try to get to?
• Once the week starts I don't think I'll have much time to do touristy stuff and I won't have a car. Any recommendations on things around Warwick/Birmingham that I can get to some evenings via train or bus?

I've made a strong effort toward intentional news exposure by trying to limit the times I run across news articles. This has "minimized" my exposure to the times when I specifically look to read news sources.

I'd be curious to know if anyone here is accomplishing something similar by filtering out Tildes tags and, if so, what does your list look like? Seems to be a hard balance between quieting the unwanted news posts and not limiting exposure to posts and articles I'd like to see.

With the recent news about Synapse, I am a little on edge with the safety of my money. I am currently living in France for school, and am hoping to immigrate here permanently. All of my savings is in USD, so I need a way to easily and cheaply convert between USD and EUR, and be able to spend EUR locally. After a ton of research, I decided to move almost all of my banking to Wise. They don't offer traditional banking features like in-person branches or checks, but I didn't use those anyway. I can get a local bank number in any of the many countries they support. The savings account APY is insanely high (higher than I have seen from even the best high yield savings accounts. I have a debit card that allows me to spend directly from any one of my bank account currencies, and auto convert to other supported currencies. And the USD account is insured by FDIC passthrough insurance.

In the thread about the Synapse collapse, people were saying that passthrough FDIC insurance doesn't always mean that the customer's money is actually insured. And apparently some fintech services will just lie about what is covered by FDIC insurance. I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea how to validate Wise's claims about passthrough FDIC insurance.

I was recently able to open a France bank account, which was surprisingly difficult. (To open a bank account you need proof of address, like a cell phone or electricity bill. I don't pay for utilities in my school apartment, and to get a cell phone plan I need a bank account. That was fun to try and navigate.) I have these bank accounts currently: my Wise account with US USD, Belgium EUR, and UK GBP, a US Credit Union account, and a French EUR bank account. My US credit union and French banks give a very low or zero APY, so keeping my money in my Wise accounts is preferable for that reason. But I also can't afford to loose all my savings if Wise collapses. My question is this: Is Wise safe enough for general money storage, or should I use it just for converting between currencies and keeping a small amount for spending? If Wise isn't safe, what about another similar product? I have heard of Revolut, but I didn't do much research since Wise seemed better for my use case.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like chrome, users and wicked. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was researching.

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!

Only a few days left!

Post your current bingo cards.
Continue updating us on your games!
Finish your Backlog Burning by December 1st!

Quick links:

• Backlog Bingo Site
• Week 1 Discussion and Event Guidelines
• Week 2 Discussion
• Week 3 Discussion
• Week 4 Discussion

Week 4 Recap

10 participants played 9 bingo cards and moved 27 games out of their backlogs!

• 4 people played Flow bingo cards
• 5 people played Flux bingo cards
• 1 person played free choice

There were FIVE bingo wins.

Congratulations to:

• u/aphoenix
• u/CrazyProfessor02
• u/Evie
• u/kfwyre
• u/Wes

Thus far, a total of 114 games have been played for the November 2024 Backlog Burner.

Week 4 Game List:

• Assemble With Care
• Between Horizons
• Card Shark
• Crying Suns
• Duskers
• Encased
• Europa Universalis IV
• Gearshifters
• Girls Like Robots
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker
• Hourglass
• Keylocker
• Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
• METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN
• Mighty Switch Force! Collection
• Outer Wilds
• Pattern
• Pistol Whip
• Ragnarock
• Spiritfarer
• Star Citizen
• Sticky Business
• Tank Team
• The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
• UpGun
• Warhammer: Vermintide 2
• Xenoblade Chronicles X

Good race, fun race, but overshadowed by the baffling stewarding decisions and race direction.

What appeared to be a mirror that broke off a car is in the middle of the track, and no VSC or something to grab it? Then two cars get punctures, possibly from driving over that debris, one right after another in basically same place, but no safety car or anything called until a few laps later?

Then add on the harsh penalties. Plus Max's weird penalty for impeding-but-not-really from yesterday where he lost P1 after quali. As it's said, nothing as consistent as the inconsistent stewarding.

On a positive note, glad to see Zhou finally in the points! On his penultimate drive, no less. Only Sargeant and Bottas remain without points this year. Maybe Bottas will get some in his final race.

At least we'll get a down-to-the-wire championship showdown in Abu Dhabi. Ferrari vs McLaren for P1 in the WCC. Who are you all rooting for?

UPDATE: That was likely Ocon's last race with Alpine. Rumor, which Sky Sports appears to be confirming, is that he'll be out in Abu Dhabi, with Alpine reserve driver, Jack Doohan in for the last race. This is so Ocon can do post-season testing with Haas.

Next race:

Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
Yas Marina Circuit
Sunday, December 8

So this isn't your usual art request.

I'm currently looking for REAL photos of either a tiger up close, or African Savannah at sunset with animals in silhouette. Do a Google or Bing search, I dare you.

Where have all the real images gone? Everything is an AI generated crap-fest. Where can I go to find real photographs these days?

I've tried looking through the old Bing Wallpaper archives and found a few decent images there, but Adobe, iStock, everywhere I look it is all computer generated. What happened to real photography?

Thanks.

Edit: Flikr seems to be the place that isn't infested with AI yet!

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 recently upgraded to a pixel 9 pro and noticed that the higher resolution resulted in text that was often too small.

I went to my settings and increased my font size to 125%. However, I noticed that this doesn't seem to apply to titles on Tildes, at least not in a uniform way.

It's hard to say without going back to my old phone, which I can't easily do right now, but I do think I recall title font size varying depending on the length of the title. But perhaps the difference wasn't as drastic on my old phone due to the difference in resolution? Perhaps the titles with smaller font sizes were still easy to see so I didn't really notice? It's just very noticable on this phone. I don't want to increase zoom on Chrome for every website just to solve this issue.

Ideas?

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Middle East war 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.

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.