I don't have much to add as the title kinda says everything. If anyone wishes to disclose their personal goals that is fine but not required.

I am not good at long term planning so learning how others do it can help me make my own.

As always in this kind of question I will keep things broad. There is no limit in scope, difficulty, complexity, etc. Any planning methods are welcome.

Thanks!

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?)

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.

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?

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.

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.

This was partially inspired by kwyfre... (damnit)... @kfwyre's thread on 2024's reading retrospective, partially by talking to @cfabbro and @DefinitelyNotaFae about 2024 being much grimmer than post-scarcity sci-fi, and partially because a lot of my reading is re-reading my favourites.

Whenever I get down about the state of the world, I re-read Iain M. Banks' Culture series, with my favourite reading order. My job can be quite high stress and deal with a lot of casualties, so it is comforting reading stories about hyper-smart machines working with humans to provide a utopia for the vast majority, and intervening to stop barbarism where they can.

For the last couple of years, I've been re-reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, which I think a Tildes user recommended to me. It feels very cozy and happy to me, which I don't often find in sci-fi.

I've found that some people online look down on re-reading as kinda lazy, but I figure it's like finding something great on a menu at your favourite restaurant - you're not being a coward for not trying something new every time.

I used to think my parents were crazy for rewatching old episodes of formulaic detective dramas when they knew the outcome, but as I get older I realise there's a big comfort in knowing what's coming. It's way easier to wind down when you know things are going to be okay (or not, but, you know - at least no depressing surprises).

What are your favourite comfort re-reads?

I was contacted by a recruiter regarding a job in my field but they wanted someone with data analytics skills. I'm taking this as a sign that I should improve my skill set. Does anyone have advice for where or how to start with a very small budget?

Thanks for your help.

If you know me you probably know I hate advertising with a passion. I have blocked ads on my computer but I have limited control on my TV and phone when it comes to YouTube advertisements. And the other day I got this incredibly bizarre ad.

I only speak the tiny amount of Spanish I have learned through osmosis, but the phrase they are using is essentially “we’ll eat at home.” The scenario is a familiar one; you’ve got a kid in the car out in town and they see a restaurant they want to go and they ask if they can stop to eat. The parent says no, we’ll eat at home, because there are a lot of reasons why it’s better for them. Home cooked meals are cheaper. They can be higher quality, both in terms of taste and nutrition. They might have food that will go bad soon and so they want to go and eat it first. They don’t want to normalize eating rich unhealthy foods for their kids.

But this isn’t an ad for groceries or processed food products. This is an ad for DoorDash. A food delivery app. Literally none of the reasons you would want to eat at home apply here. Actually, using DoorDash in this particular situation is dramatically worse, because you are paying more money to get food you could have just picked up on the way only to get a worse version of it because it is no longer freshly prepared and is likely cold.

I just can’t get over this because it’s so incredibly out of touch with reality. Many people have had to have signed off on this for me to see this ad. What were they thinking? Are they so out of touch with reality that they think this is something that people do? The fact that this is clearly targeting Hispanic Americans makes it even worse. I live in Southern California and about a third of the people I know are Hispanic and all of them would laugh at this. I can’t help but wonder if the teams working on them were full of privileged white guys who are saying “yeah, this is what Mexicans are really like” or if there are also rich Hispanics on board who thinks this is something that people really do.

But this is just the most egregious example of out of touch advertising. YouTube ads are supposed to be targeted right? But why do I get ads for CRM, ERP, and accounting products when I don’t own a business? Why do I get ads in languages I don’t speak? Why is it that I can report and tell Google that an advertiser is inappropriate or against their terms and still they will show me the ads again?

And beyond that I am astonished at how many ads I see that exist to mislead you. Almost every time you see something compared or tested there is somthing they aren’t telling you. The most obvious example is Scott toilet paper; they advertise that they have rolls that are significantly longer than their leading competition. But what they neglect to tell you is that their product is single-ply while their competitors are double- or triple-ply. They actually have a very comfortable amount of toilet paper on each roll. Weirdly, all toilet paper is misleading though; what is a “mega roll”, how does it differ from an “ultra roll”, and why is one roll of it somehow equivalent to six of some unspecified other type of roll? In the meanwhile Old Spice is trying to take advantage of balding men like me by telling me that their shampoo increases the volume of hair by however many percent while there is fine print at the bottom saying that it is compared to unwashed hair, meaning their shampoo probably doesn’t do anything the cheapest generic product at the dollar store won’t.

I know this is basically just a rant, but I can’t be the only one who notices this stuff, am I?

I've been thinking about this question lately. We have so many options for consuming literature these days - checking something out from the library, listening to it on your platform of choice, etc. Many options don't require spending money specifically on that item (for example, if you use the library, Kindle Unlimited, or other options where you might pay for a subscription but not for a particular item).

For me, because of this abundance of choice in consumption for free, I've started to feel a bit paralyzed by decision fatigue when trying to decide if I want to purchase a book - either physical or digital. Digital is easier to make a final call on - I'll check the library. If they don't have it, I may or may not buy it in digital form, depending on how compelled I am by reviews or peer pressure. Recently, I've been snagging anything interesting-looking that is available for free on Kindle, so my digital purchasing might increase in the future, or I might subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.

But physical? Recently, physical books have come to mean a couple of things to me: first, clutter. I am less likely to accept even a free book because we don't have room to hang onto something I'm not actively invested in. We have two bookshelves and they're both full. Second, owning (and keeping) a physical book says that it's special to me in some manner - I either really like it or wanted to support the author or both. When I do buy a physical book, I try to buy from a local bookstore (though I'm not amazing at this yet). I just preordered two books after maybe a month of debating and comparing purchasing avenues. (Meanwhile, I purchased a set of 8 children's books at 6 am yesterday because I dreamed about a character from them... so my decisions aren't always rational!)

What are your criteria for buying books? Feel free to share how you make your decisions for any format - and also anything about your personal setup that might make decisions for you!