IMPORTANT

We now have a splash screen. (Thanks @Boojum!)

ALSO IMPORTANT

Please read all directions for submitting a proper ballot.

Any improper ballots will NOT be counted, but you will get a polite message from me before the count asking you to fix them. XD

• All ballots must be top-level comments.
• All top-level comments should be ballots ONLY.

I will be using the Collapse Replies button to tally votes, so any ballots not in top-level comments will not be counted.

After you submit your ballot, you can respond to your own post in a new comment to lobby for your choices (which is optional but highly recommended). It's completely fine to have conversations downthread from the ballots, but please make sure that the top-level remains clean.

Submitting Your Ballot

• Each person has 20 votes to distribute among games they see fit.

• Each person can allocate a maximum of 5 points per Single Game/Arcade Special.

• Arcade Specials count as one block (do not vote for each game in them individually).

• Votes should be listed as NAME (VOTES) -- e.g. Pong (3)

• Voting closes 48 hours from the posting of this topic.

Please ensure your titles match mine exactly (copy/paste highly recommended). I will be using CTRL+F to tally votes u/Spore_Prince has written a program to tally the votes, so any different spellings will not being counted. See examples below, as well as my actual ballot in the topic.

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (5)
Portal 3 (5)
Half-Life 3 (3)
Team Fortress 3 (2)
Night Trap (2)
Xexyz (1)
Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon (1)
Left 4 Dead 3 (1)

Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (10)
Protal 3 (7)
Wand of Gamelon (5)

Voting Outcomes

• The top 6 games/Arcade Specials will become the next 6 months of CGA.
• Of the remaining games, the bottom 50% will be cut from the list.
• The remaining 50% will stay on the list and will enter the next voting round starting at their current point totals instead of 0.
• The next round of nominations will happen in 6 months, and participants will be limited to nominating 1 new game OR 1 new Arcade Special.

Nominees

Arcade Specials

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!

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 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?

I need you to do me a favor: please keep an open mind and reserve judgement until after you've thoroughly digested the ideas I'm presenting here. These are not my ideas, and I have no connection to this project. I hope to do them justice in representing them accurately and as clearly as I understand it all.

Please don't be dismissive. Please don't jump to conclusions. I would not be posting about this if I did not believe it has tremendous potential to reshape the digital economy, and therefore everything that governs how civilization progresses in the next century. Dramatic, much? Yes, but I hope I have your attention.

I'm not posting this as a plain link, because the website looks incredibly sus. Just trust me for a few minutes. Links are at the end.

(No generative AI was used to write this post.)

What is PrizeForge?

PrizeForge is a financial service that can be best thought of as "Representative Crowdfunding" (my term, not theirs). Like direct crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter), it lets people pool their money to support expensive projects that would otherwise be impossible to fund. Similar to Patreon, it can also be an effective tip jar for much smaller things that would otherwise go unrewarded.

The innovation is two-fold: first, contributors never move alone. As a contributor, you set a ceiling on your weekly payment. This is the "enrollment" amount. However, the actual amount of money disbursed each weekly cycle is the amount that is successfully "matched" with other contributors. In the simplest example, if I wanted to enroll for Tildes at $20/week, and one other user enrolled at $5/week, the disbursement would be the sum of the matched funds: $5 + $5. In this way, nobody ever pays an unfair proportion of the total, and small donations become an integral part of funding allocation. Additionally, like how philanthrophists often match charitable donations to meet a fundraising objective, matching provides a powerful incentive for individuals to contribute by making individual contributions feel more significant, since any money you part with can be doubled by another contributor. The more you put in, the more others will too. (PrizeForge calls this algorithm "Elastic Fund Matching". The full algorithm gets considerably more complex, but they have a neat visualization on their site and videos.)

Second, unlike existing crowdfunding and patronage systems, creators and companies do not receive fund disbursements directly. Rather, representatives ("Delegates") send the money to the people and organizations that should receive funds to deliver value to the stream's contributors.

"Won't delegates just siphon funds to themselves?" you ask. Well, yes, that will 100% happen at some point. Corruption is a human problem that can't be solved with technology alone. PrizeForge aims to provide mechanisms to allow the community to be very dynamic, so contributors can easily switch to a new representative—for any reason. Additionally, tools for transparency in how the money moves would go a long way in keeping delegates accountable.

In the context of open-source software, delegates should be experienced power users who are well equipped to evaluate features and bugfixes, and then can award the prizes to developers according to their best judgement.

The use of a representative has many advantages over direct crowdfunding. Someone highly invested in a software product has valuable experience and would be more effective at setting priorities for features and bugfixes. An experienced and trusted delegate would save developers time having to parse the requests (...demands?) of individual users who may not be able to articulate what they really want. Also, if a developer or company stops doing what people want (providing value to the people who care), then funds can flow to competing alternatives in a very granular and dynamic way, as the delegates shift funding and/or new delegates arise.

If we could pick a delegate here for Tildes, would anybody really object to @cfabbro?

These trusted delegates already exist, everywhere! We just haven't been able to cooperate in the right ways to delegate our individual power, so they can truly move the needle on funding the projects we care about. PrizeForge is, I believe, the first truly sustainable funding model for community-owned and directed open-source.

Addendum

Watch this video first! Before you get scared away by the terrible scammy-looking website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO46oEdlkY8

The FAQ: https://prizeforge.com/faq

The company's github page: https://github.com/positron-solutions

Looks like just two people, with Psionikus doing all the promotion and running accounts. The company is incorporated in South Korea. They've got a bunch of emacs tooling, and I believe the PrizeForge concept originated out of a desire to improve the funding/development process of emacs, then the lem editor. They also apparently have a bit of beef with the FSF due to emacs politcs. Check out the last FAQ for a fun easter egg.

The sub-reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrizeForge/

The Hacker News comment that took me down the rabbithole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036360

Bonus thoughts:

• What's really crazy is that this is not a crypto or blockchain project. You can do a simplified version of the elastic fund matching with just money, pen & paper.
• This financing scheme is basically an idealized utopian voluntary tax system. I can imagine a granular delegate system being extremely effective at making politics incredibly boring. Imagine electing a local representative only to have potholes fixed in your area, using only the funds earmarked for fixing potholes. It would be so much simpler to keep them accountable. Either the roads are crap or they aren't! Where's the money, bub?! Why've you got a fancy new lawnmower?! I want my $2 back!
• If this reaches critical mass, it ends surveillance capitalism and digital feudalism. I don't want to live in Black Mirror, and this seems like the way out of that future.
• I would really love it if we can establish a funding stream for Tildes. I know I can donate to Tildes directly, but it would be a great test run to help PrizeForge get operational and build credibility. I only need one other crazy person. Isn't the internet great? (My credit card has not been stolen btw)
• The password login is still in development, so you have to login via Google SSO. I absolutely hate using Google SSO but I get it from a developer perspective. Proper auth is hard and companies like Tailscale took the same path and still don't support password login. (My google hasn't been hacked either fwiw)

I'm finishing a full rewatch of the films from the Coen Brothers tonight and have decided to go with PTA next. PTA really has no stinkers in his filmography. Fincher is pretty close, but I haven't seen Alien 3 and I'm willing to forgive the first film or two.

Who else can share this level of consistency?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like sideloading, messaging and friendship. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was eagle-eyed.

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!

I joined their waitlist last month and still didn't get an invite, now they even have mobile apps but still invite-only... so any chance I can get an invite code from someone here 👉👈. I just want to try and see what it's like

Edit: I didn't expect so many comments, I hope everyone gets an invite! but I just want to say, it seems it doesn't work the same way as tildes and from what I can tell, you need to be a "Groundbreaker" to create invites and only 2 invites can be created? (would appreciate if someone can clarify that in the comments) and I'm personally not able to create invites from my account unfortunately, otherwise I would've sent an invite to everyone who commented. :(

For folks unaware, the identified shooter in today's Minneapolis Catholic school shooting appears to have been a trans woman. There are a lot of uncertainties at this time and this isn't the thread to discuss the shooting*, but regardless it seems clear that trans people, perhaps particularly trans adults this time (and unfortunately my trans sisters always) will be the target of increased bigoted and violent rhetoric. Even if you're not in the US the words being spoken already have an impact on people worldwide.

Be safe, take care of yourselves and each other and find ways to get involved and speak out when and where you can. And look out for the trans kids too.

💜🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 𖡼𖤣𖥧𖡼𓋼𖤣𖥧𓋼𓍊

*Please don't make this thread that, nor tag it as such. It's purely a support thread with context. Ty

so Google's AI Studio used to have an option to finetune gemini flash for free by simply uploading a csv file. but it seems they have removed that option, so I'm looking for something similar. I know models can be finetuned on colab but the problem with that is it's way too complicated for me, I want something simpler. I think I know enough python to be able to prepare a dataset so that shouldn't be a problem.

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.

When I made my post about Chex Quest, it got me thinking about the classic Doom games released from 1993-1997, and I thought it would be great hearing some fellows Tilders thoughts about these classic games that can run on just about anything.

I thought of some questions, but please share anything Doom related! I think it's awesome seeing how this game has had such a lasting impact over the last 30+ years and how people continue to push this game in new and surprising ways.

• When did you first play/"get into" Doom?
• What is your favorite source port of Doom?
• What are your favorite WADs?
• What are your favorite total conversions of Doom/games built on the Doom Engine?
• What are your favorite mods for Doom?
• Do you still play Doom regularly?
• Have you introduced anyone who plays more modern shooters to Doom, and how did that go?

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!