The Setting

For the past two months I've been dealing with a lot of stress because I've been trying to balance two extremely challenging remote university classes at the same time as my work has been asking more hours of me. More work hours are usually good for me because my job doesn't pay all that well, but they can be challenging because sometimes I'm asked to teach classes that are just outside my area of experience, so I need to spend more time learning the details so I can answer student questions.

This is the last week of classes, so right now I'm extra stressed because I'm trying to finish the last week's worth of classwork. I've still got one assignment to do which I haven't really started because I can't make much sense of this week's material; it's due on Wednesday evening. So my plan was to wake up early, go to the gym to get my workout out of the way, and then go to the library to study until my class in the afternoon.

Last night I discovered the mask for my CPAP unit is broken, so I tried to go to sleep without it.

The Day

If you have sleep apnea then you already know what trying to sleep without a CPAP machine is like; it's a miserable experience. I woke up five times last night, and when I woke up I felt miserable. I took so long to get up because of that, even though I couldn't sleep past 6:30 or so, I didn't actually get to the gym until around 9:00. Today was supposed to be a cardio day to give my muscles a bit more time to rest from my more heavy resistance workouts, but even then I only managed to do 20 minutes of fairly light intensity before I was exhausted.

After that I took a seat to cool down and get the sweat dry before I went to do a massage chair session. I pulled up Tildes and saw that one thread that's making the rounds about being attractive. And I'll be real, it came at just the wrong time. I was super angry about it and I spent more than half an hour writing and deleting all the things I wanted to say. I'm legitimately happy for the poster, but every single word they said made me hate them in that moment. My theme for the past year or so has been learning to love myself, but reading that post made me legitimately feeling like I wasn't just terrifyingly ugly and unloveable, but permanently so. To give you the context for why I felt like that would take a novel's worth of text, so I'll omit the majority of that and just tell you that in spite of losing a great amount of weight, I am still grossly obese, and having been so fat before means that my body is permanently deformed in an extremely unattractive way that cannot be fixed without a series of surgeries that are far more money than I will realistically have within my lifetime given my career; heck, I've already given up on the possibility of retiring. if I had the body of someone who was always at my current weight, it wouldn't be that bad, but as things are my body looks like one of those novelty inflatable "sumo wrestler" costumes that have been half-deflated.

While I was spending that time processing my feelings, I finally decided to not respond to that topic at all and simply click on ignore so that I could get it out of my head. Unfortunately, there is no ignore buton in my head. But at that time I was filled with so much nervous energy I needed to find a way to get rid of those thoughts. It turns out the gym is a pretty perfect place to do that; I skipped the massage chair, took a caffeine tablet, and got on the elliptical again. I pulled up a video workout and worked out all of my anger ("60 RPM is moderate? Fuck you!"). Every time I made a wrong move and my arm fat slapped against my side fat, It gave me more fuel for the fire. It got me fired enough to get through the whole workout, another 25 minutes at a much higher intensity than before.

After cooling down and doing my recovery, I went into the locker room, stripped, and took a shower. Taking a shower in the gym is something that I do partially because I sweat a lot and don't want to make my car stink too much, but on a more personal level it's something that I do as a kind of personal therapy. To do so requires me to lose my self-consciousness and body issues, at least up to an extent. It makes me feel just a bit more normal.

Today someone else was taking a shower at roughly the same time, and they just so happen to have chosen a locker just a few feet away from me. When they finished, they took their clothes out of the locker and moved over to a different bench to change. The obvious assumptions would be that they were doing it because they were trying to respect our space, or it was their modesty or body shame. But let's just say that in the moment it didn't help me feel like I was normal.

After I got out of the gym I got a message from my employer saying I've got a new class scheduled. A good thing, I guess, since many of my other classes have run their course. I could really use the money, and with any luck the classes I'm taking next term are not going to be nearly as challenging.

The Rest of the Day

It hasn't even happened yet. It's not even noon. The title was a lie, I guess.

The question is, then, was this partial day representative of my life? For the most part, yes, it is. I think these thoughts and feel these feelings every day, and I go through the same affirmations and rationalizations to deal with them every day. Today was just a little bit more emotionally intense than normal.

So why did I decide to post it? To be honest, I don't entirely know. Maybe I'm still processing some of those feelings from reading that post that set me off today. Or maybe I just want to say something for people who are dealing with the same feelings. Maybe I'm even feeling a little bit guilty from the impostor syndrome given previous comments I wrote about self-love. But I'm not posting this because I want people to feel sorry for me, or because I need help coping with it. I'm a strong person, and I actually do have a good sense of self-worth and self-love even if it's constantly under threat of the other thoughts in my head. Maybe I'm just selfishly using this public space to process some of my own feelings, or I'm engaging in some twisted form of narcissism. I just hope that you, the one reading this now, have taken something from what I had to say.

Hey all,

I just recently got a Switch 2, and am looking for some games to play on it. I currently have Mario Kart World (and have been enjoying it), but nothing else.

I have not owned a Switch before, so if there are good switch games that work on the switch 2 I would appreciate those recommendations as well.

Looking primarily for single-player & local 2-player games. No real genres I dislike, except I don’t play a lot of horror games. I have played a bit of splatoon on a friends switch, and that wasn’t my cup of tea.

I do have a PC and have played a lot of games there (like Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, Tunic, Hollow Knight, etc), so mainly looking for games that are console-exclusive, or that might’ve slipped by my radar.

It’s before 5am CT, and I’ve been awake since… 2:30am. Most nights, I can feed my newborn and fall right back asleep. I believe that some work stress has kept me awake. It got me thinking about some questions to ask the group:

1. For those of us who would rather be productive than lie in bed awake for an extended period of time, how long before you decide to just get up and do something? I’m a little surprised I haven’t just gotten up yet. I think I will here in a few minutes.
2. What are some fun activities you like to get up to when it’s the middle of the night and everyone is asleep? I’m a software engineer by trade so I tend to work on a side project. Maybe a music project if it’s something quiet.
3. The age old question: how can I fall back asleep? I can usually count backwards from 100 and by the second time through I’ll be out. Does anyone have anything more interesting?

I’m sure variations of this topic have been posted before, so I apologize if this is less than novel. Retitle as necessary, I couldn’t think of a good one.

I recently found myself on the other side of what might be a generational divide:

I was talking with two younger family members, and they were talking about being mildly annoyed at sharing their location with the friends via their phones -- as in they could mutually see where everyone was at any given time.

My husband and I were utterly baffled. Giving friends permanent access to our current locations felt unbelievably invasive.

They felt that way a bit, but they also mentioned that it was a way of keeping up with one another and seeing what people are up to. They'd often see they were at a bar and send the other a text telling them to "enjoy the drinks!" or "have a good time!"

I can kind of understand the appeal of this, especially as a step away from the pressures of social media. Instead of having to take pictures at the bar to put up on Instagram, you can just be at the bar, and if someone thinks that's interesting they can let you know. In a weird way, that does actually feel healthier?

They also said that not sharing your location can be seen kind of negatively -- as being aloof or closed off. This gave me even further ick, because it made it seem like there was a strong social pressure to share (similar to the "if you have nothing to hide..." argument).

So, my question is basically: what's the social landscape of location-sharing like these days? Is what my family members do common, or is that an oddity specific to their friend group? Is it actually a generational thing, or am I overgeneralizing based on my one conversation?

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.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like websites.niche, consumerism and association of research libraries and public knowledge. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone loves this kinda thing.

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!

TL;DR: I’m interested in your thoughts about this the current problems in UK higher education, and how they can be fixed.

I recently read an opinion piece in the Guardian about the problems currently faced by UK universities and their students. These problems aren’t new, but they’re getting worse year by year, and Simon articulates them particularly well.

It seems to me that there are three main criticisms of our current university system: that it is too costly for students while failing to fund the universities adequately; that degrees do not provide enough value to students; and that there are too many students attending university, especially (so-called) “low value” degrees, but increasingly also “high value” areas such as STEM.

The main solutions being presented are replacing students loans with a “graduate tax”, shuttering low-quality institutions and degrees, and sending more students to apprenticeships or trade schools rather than universities.

My view on this, as someone who has recently graduated university, and will be returning next year to begin studying for a PhD, is conflicted. I can definitely see that these problems are real, but I’m not convinced by the solutions being offered.

Firstly, I don’t think most people discussing these issues and offering their solutions are addressing the most fundamental problem, which is that universities have forgotten how to, or simply stopped, actually teaching. Many degrees only teach you what you need to know to pass the exams and produce acceptable coursework, which is not the point of a university degree.

This is a very challenging issue, because obviously universities must assess their students. But the purpose of a degree, its value, lies not in the assessment, nor even in the certificate awarded upon its completion (despite what many people believe), but in how you can learn and grow to have a deeper and more rounded understanding of your degree area, and the world at large. A university degree should make you a more curious person and build your critical thinking, enabling you to think through and approach many problems intelligently. But instead universities are continuously lowering the bar necessary to pass, because failing students is too costly for them, and thus also lowering their teaching standards.

The problem, it seems to me, is that the purpose of university is to educate, yet many who graduate university do not display the level of education, understanding and intelligence we would expect them to have achieved after investing at least three years of their life and tens of thousands of pounds in their education. This is not a crisis of too many students, but of a lack of quality in teaching. It seems to me that this has been driven by the funding model, which incentivises universities to grow their cohort size in order to receive more funding. Of course, this makes it harder to teach them all, and thus promotes the lowering of assessment standards so that students of sub-par quality - whether it be their work ethic, prior education, or simply learning at university that lacks - can graduate successfully.

If this is our problem, then I don’t think any of the proposed solutions serve to ameliorate it. This problem is equally common to humanities as it is STEM subjects, so the issue is not in students studying in “low value” degree areas. Whilst an apprenticeship might provide better value to a student in terms of the skills they would acquire, it is addressing a different goal and need to a university education. And while a graduate tax might be fairer than our current loan system (which favour high earners who can pay the loan off faster), it would not solve the currently perverse financial incentives universities are subject to.

The solution to this is obvious, but a hard sell. It is necessary to remove the financial incentive for universities to grow their cohort sizes. It seems to me that we must either fix, or at least cap, the funding universities receive, such that it does not grow with larger student bodies. Perhaps it should instead be linked to some performance metric, or maybe the faculty size - the more lecturers and other teaching staff the university employs, the better its funding. Of course, a complete solution to this will require a lot of thought and nuance, but I think it’s clear that the basic issue is the funding model.

The value to be gained (as a society) from a well educated population is massive, but we are currently selling hopeful high school students up the river with underwhelming university degrees that don’t educate them properly. I believe it’s the wrong answer to say that these students should give up on their dreams of a university education. We need to fix the funding model so that universities are incentivised to provide as high quality teaching as possible, not to provide the lowest level acceptable to as many students as possible.