I'd just like to say that I never make meta posts like this one, but for some reason this topic has really struck a chord with me on this Wednesday evening...

We recently lost a user from Tildes. I don't know which day, but I'd already noticed they weren't around a few days before I did some digging into it. The names here are not important. But this user had been a prolific poster over the last six months. As someone on Tildes who does a lot of tagging, they were high up on my 'user interaction list' in the passive way that comes from amending tags can do.

Some departing users leave all of their contributions behind, along with their username, never to be seen from again. Perhaps they regenerate with a new handle or perhaps they find pastures fresh elsewhere. Some users take all of their topics with them, along with the conversations, the ideas, the thoughts, and in my mind a little piece of the Tildes community. The latter is what happened here with our prolific user.

This has made me unusually sad. There are lots of users I miss on a personal connection level, whether that be the status they held in the community, or simply missing the elegance of their prose. Sometimes they return and I smile at my keyboard. Sometimes I check how they're doing by looking on Reddit. The sadness here comes from a feeling that when a prolific user leaves with their topics, it feels like a library user leaving the country with their borrowed library books. I've never been very good with analogies.

People talk about link rot and video game preservation and the walled gardens of the internet and it feels like this mourning over lost information from a link aggregator with a close-knit community bound up in it fits in there somewhere in the discourse.

In a comment to this topic I'm going to link to as many of the lost topics as I was able to find. These will be direct links to the articles, not to the Tildes discussion. I don't want this act to feel like grave-robbing by linking to deleted Tildes pages.

This is the end of my hopefully only foray into meta posting. I don't think I have the wordsmith-ery for it.

Last night while my wife was going through my Spotify to pick a song to listen to while I was driving, she mentioned that 90% of my library consists of instrumentals. (Most of which are game OSTs) I find it much more pleasant to listen to, instead of song with lyrics.

Which made me wonder, there might be some hidden/not so hidden gems that I might be missing out on!
Please share your favorite game OSTs with everyone. (New gems, old gems! Either the entire OST or even 1 song of a game! we don't discriminate!)

Bonus point if it's on Spotify

What I currently listen to:

• Armored core 6
• Shadow of the Erdtree
• God of War: Ragnarok
• Nier: Automata
• Devil May Cry 5
• Celeste
• Scarlet Nexus
• Zenless Zone Zero
• Silent Hill
• Flipwitch (Which I understand to be an 18+ game, which I have NEVER played. I just happened to find the OST on shuffle and it got me addicted. Try the song "A Witch's Thoughts")
• Cult of the Lamb
• Fable
• Atelier series

Hello! Could you please recommend some hard science fiction books? I am struggling to find a good one. My favorites are Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts, but I have failed to find anything similar.

I also enjoyed The Martian by Andy Weir and The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, though in my opinion, these aren't quite what I would call hard science fiction.

Additionally, I enjoyed books that blend fiction and non-fiction, like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

What are your favorite hard science fiction books?

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.

So bit more than one month ago my very old Microsoft Sidewinder X4 keyboard broke the membrane on the 'A' key, meaning it was effectively kaput. I decided that I wanted to try a mechanical.

The Search

My use-cases are as follows, in the order of importance:

1. Gaming
2. Programming
3. General typing

These were the first requirements I settled on, based on my limited knowledge of mechanical keyboards:

• ISO nordic layout
• Full size: Because I make heavy use of both numpad and the insert-delete-home-end-page island of keys. Whatever it is called. I have zero interest in compromising on the standard layout.
• Nice to have: Metal body
• Nice to have: General high-quality
• Nice to have: Wireless, but only if 2.4Gz.
• Nice to have: Tactile switches
• Nice to have: Backlit keys
• Nice to have: Simple elegant aesthetic. I especially want to avoid typical gamer aesthetic.
• Budget basically unlimited

With these requirements I eventually settled on Keychron Q6 Max with Jupiter Brown. But just before ordering one, I started thinking about the height of the keys on a normal old-school mechanical.
I don't remember when I have last used one, all my recent keyboard had been modern low-profile so I didn't have a reference for what I was buying other than images.
I started reading about wrist problems from keyboard height and the recommendation of a wrist rest. I looked at the Keychron options and saw that they only had rests that were completely detached from the keyboard.
Thing is that I move my keyboard around my desk a lot, so I figured that having a wrist-rest that was not attached would become an annoyance.
After this I decided to just stick to what I am used to and added another requirement:

• Low-profile

Unfortunately when you set requirements for 100%, ISO, and low-profile, then the otherwise extensive Keychron catalogue becomes super limited. So I started looking elsewhere.
At the time there was a new post about a search engine on the /r/MechanicalKeyboards front page.
Using this I discovered the Cherry MX 10.0N. This seemed like a good deal. High quality all-metal body.
The only real sticking point was that the switches are linear with very short actuation, but I liked the look of this keyboard so much that I decided I could probably learn to live with it.

The review

The keyboard looks great in person. The all-metal body feels very solid and high-quality. It's got good heft and sticks to the table. The entire board is very thin and feels good to rest on.
The keys also feel high quality with minimal wobbling, and long keys sound and feel the same whether pressed on the edge or in the middle.

That's all the good stuff. Now on to the less good.

The foot

The adjustable foot in the back has no real positions. Meaning that there is no point in adjusting it where it will click in place and stay there, and it is under constant spring pressure to return to the stowed position. This means that the only thing keeping the extended foot in place is the weight of the keyboard. As mentioned I move my keyboard around frequently, and this means that everytime I move it I have to readjust the foot.
Additionally, it's highest position is sort of a balancing point, meaning that it you are a bit off, or accidentally push the keyboard a bit in this position, then the foot will suddenly collapse.
It's a minor annoyance, but one that is unique to this keyboard since I don't see this kind of foot design anywhere else. Otherwise the full-length metal foot is really nice, if only they had added proper click positions in its travel.

The switches

As mentioned, these are linear with very short actuation. CHERRY MX LOW PROFILE RGB SPEED switches to be specific. My first thought when trying to type with these was "Oh my god I hate this, how can some prefer this?!".
Constant mistyping was the name of the game. I was so used to being able to slightly miss a key, but still only actuate the intended. But that doesn't fly with this keyboard. If you depress any key even the slightest, it WILL actuate.
For gaming I first didn't understand why I sometimes kept jumping. I eventually figured out its because the mere weight of my thumb resting on the spacebar can be enough to actuate it sometimes.

After 1 month of regular usage, I can confidently say that my thoughts are now "Oh my god I hate this, how can some prefer this?!". Okay, I improved my typing somewhat to maybe half my mistyping. Gaming is still a pain, and I've had to regularly rest my thumb on the table instead to stop the sudden jumping.
Unfortunately this keyboard does not have hot-swappable switches, so there is no fixing it unless I want to buy a soldering iron and replace every single key, which I am not willing to.

Key spacing

So while the keyboard is technically 100%, Cherry has still designed it to be as compact as possible. One area where they have shaved off the length is the spacing between the main keys and the arrows keys and those above. Aswell as on the other side with the numpad.
I didn't know this prior to puchasing this keyboard, but apparently this spacing is essential for my muscle memory to be able to find those keys. The lack of spacing has meant that maybe 25% of the time I use them, I press the wrong key.

Overall

Now the issue with the switches and spacing is really an issue of preference. These aren’t quality issues. They were designed this way because some people like it (somehow). So if this keyboard looks interesting to you, and these preference design choices don't bother you, then I can only recommend the Cherry MX 10.0N. It really is a very high quality keyboard.

For me though, I just can't overlook these choices, so I have started looking for another keyboard again. I'm currently split between the Cherry KW X ULP and Logitech G915 X Lightspeed. None of them are full-metal body unfortunately. The cherry one seems to be the higher quality, but the the key caps remind me of laptops keys, which I really hate the feel of. Maybe I'm overreacting to it. The Logitech one is lower quality, but has all the the features that I would want. If you know of something better then please do leave a comment. I might reconsider my low-profile requirement. I'll give it at least another month before I become serious about switching again.

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