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🎵 It's the most wonderful time of the year 🎵

This is our annual holiday game giveaway topic. Spread some goodwill and holiday cheer with others!

Before you participate, please make sure you read the rules below.

Rules

-Gifters

Post your available games, the platform and method of delivery, rules for your giveaways (e.g. first-come first-serve, random draw, etc.), and any additional info or requirements. Feel free to get creative!

-Giftees

Request giveaways. Please make sure you follow the gifter's posted guidelines.

-Guidelines

Anyone can choose to be a gifter, giftee, or both! Giveaway rules are set by individual gifters, but there are handful of guidelines everyone should follow:

1. No grey market keys! Only give away games from reputable sources. If you're not sure what this means, please ask.
2. Requests for games should be done in this topic, but if the gift is a key, those should be delivered by PMs only. Please don't post keys publicly in this topic, even obfuscated ones.

If you're new to these, check out previous giveaway threads to see how these usually go.

The lecturer was Sarah C. M. Paine (works at the US Naval War College)
I believe the lecture host was The Heritage Foundation.
The lecture was focused on national strategies and motivations.
It touched on the differences between nations she described as maritime powers vs. geographic powers.
The part I'm most interested in watching again was her explanation of the compounding effects of economic sanctions over years/decades.

I believe this interview with Dwarkesh Patel touches on a lot of similar material

However I am 99% certain she delivered a very similar talk to The Heritage Foundation and the person I want to watch the video puts a lot more intellectual value into The Heritage Foundation than they do Dwarkesh Patel...

I'm also pretty sure I saved the heritage foundation video in one of my youtube playlists, but ... it's gone without a trace, and I'm finding no mention of it on The Heritage Foundation website now either.

Thanks and please let me know if I should post this under a more suitable topic.

No, really. Sincerely putting this out there.

Using Tildes sometimes feels like talking into the void. The UI, even in Three Cheers, is minimal. The conversations sometimes clinical, though I greatly appreciate the compassion that comes through here versus other places that shall remain nameless.

Yet I am struck. I've seen people here, more recently, cite meeting other Tildans (Tildaniens? Tilwhoseits?).

As a somewhat reclusive 51 year-old married dude with only furry children, I don't get it. But I do know that I need more friendships. It gets harder, as you get older. (As for me, not keeping toxic friendships from school and later 2 decades working remotely led to, well, this.)

So how do you connect with humans as humans here? How do you "make friends"?

Asking as someone who has a diagnosed potent ADHD and perhaps other as yet medically undetermined NDisms.

(No idea what tags to use for this. Help?)

Hey all, I have a root canal shortly, and I thought I'd distract myself from that stress with some things to ponder.

What are your best topics that you can regularly discuss or debate but have little real life concerns? Someone whose name I forget shared wondering what sort of food/rations aliens would bring with them.

Help me lower my anxiety and/or distract me from my pain. Or just ponder yourself.

EDIT: root canal successful, but I still would love a lighthearted "what could you discuss at Christmas that isn't politics" thread so thanks y'all

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Server host: tildes.nore.gg (Running Java 1.21.1)
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Tildes website extension (shows online status & location): Firefox (Desktop and Android) - Chrome
Verification site: https://verify.tildes.nore.gg
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The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.

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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

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

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.

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.

Happy end of year, everyone!

I saw a comment today on Tildes that reminded me of a type of thread that I really enjoyed back on Reddit: end-of-year awards. Those were typically in individual subreddits and involved a lot of specifics and inside jokes related to that community, but I think Tildes is a small enough place where we could do one site-wide. (Full disclosure, I am not sure if this is a great idea and am open to any and all suggestions.)

Brief explanation:

• For starters, there are no actual awards to give out, sorry. Just some pats on the back and maybe some street cred to go with it.

• The purpose of the thread is mostly to highlight cool, helpful, and interesting things or users you've seen here on Tildes in the last year. This thread is hopefully a gateway to those interesting posts/comments/discussions that you might have missed.

• Top-level comments should be an award category (for example: Most Interesting Thread, Best Discussion, Most Helpful Comment, Funniest Joke, Most Helpful User, Best Prediction, Favorite Recurring Thread, etc.) Note that none of these examples are negative because again the goal of this thread is to highlight awesome stuff that others might have missed over the last 12 months.

• Responses to those top-level comments should be the actual nominations, preferably with a link to said comment/thread, and a quick explanation as to why you think it deserves recognition.

• Upvotes serve as the votes for each category, though I encourage you to vote for as many nominees as you'd like since the awards aren't real and the points don't matter.

That's pretty much it. I'll post a few comments as examples, but hopefully it should be pretty straight-forward. Feel free to add your own award categories, and please nominate as many users/comments/threads as you'd like!

If this thread helps at least one person discover a helpful thread from 6 months ago that they might have missed, then I'll consider it a success.

Hey everyone,

Growing up, I loved playing board games with friends and family—it was a big part of my life. Now, I’ve moved away, and my girlfriend and some of her family (who live with us) have zero interest in board games.

I’ve tried classics like Catan, Ticket to Ride, and Codenames, but they’re not into them at all. I’m really craving some board game time, so I’m thinking about branching out to more approachable games.

Does anyone have suggestions for games that are fun and easy to ease non-gamers into without scaring them off? Or maybe I’m just not starting with the right type of games? Any advice is appreciated, thanks!

Hey folks,

Since we're not reading a book this month, I thought it might be nice to have a short retrospective of the last year instead.

As some of you may know, the book club originally started back in 2023 with a "pop-up event" hosted by @cfabbro. We read Roadside Picnic after a few users expressed interest in the title. The discussion had some great comments, and that helped lay the groundwork for making the book club a regular feature.

A few months later, @boxer_dogs_dance kicked the book club off proper in January 2024 with the first nomination thread. Cloud Atlas was selected based on voter interest and ideal library wait times. Despite being a difficult first book, participation was still high and has remained so for each month thereafter.

Boxer has since organized numerous nomination and voting threads, helped establish our format and rules, and has created many discussion prompts for each book. Huge thanks to you for the efforts, @boxer_dogs_dance!

Onto some stats for 2024:

• Books Read: 9
• Total Pages: 3,277 (average of 364 per book)
• Unique Contributors: 59 (or 140 total, when counting returning participants)
• Total Comments: 476 (across 121 top-level threads)
• Nominations Submitted: 102
• Votes Cast: 508
• Repeat Nominations: 11 titles were nominated twice, and 6 were eventually chosen. Perseverance pays off!

The list of past discussions can be found here:

• March: Cloud Atlas
• April: Piranesi
• May: The Dispossessed
• June: Project Hail Mary
• July: Ocean at the End of the Lane
• Aug: Small Gods
• Sep: This is How You Lose the Time War
• Oct: Kindred
• Nov: The City We Became

A big thank you to all who have participated, helped organize, commented, or quietly read along! You folks are what make the Tildes community so great.

So just to be clear, this isn't a nomination thread or an official post. I just thought it might be nice to look back, recap our progress, and maybe touch on some of the best picks from the last year.

What were your favourite reads from this past year? What are you looking forward to most in 2025?

See you all in January when we kick off 2025 with Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future!

Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam Sale topic.

Optional: Feel free to categorize your recommendations by number of reviews (as a proxy for popularity)