Hi Tildenauts,

There's a custom at Tildes, that sort of grew organically out of "what should we call ourselves?" threads, to refer to fellow Tilderians in ever changing ways. This happened because there was no obvious, non-cringy answer and anyway who cares? That's my read on it anyway, I didn't follow closely. Plus the idea of online in-groups is kinda cringy itself, but also inevitable because we're humans. The whole concept begs for ironic resignation.

Anyway, fellow Tildinites, it occured to me that I've been coming here on and off for a long time. Since not too long after it launched I think. And it's been great. I consider Tildes a huge success in its mission, or my interpretation of it: be a comparitively intimate forum where people are thoughtful and less reactionary than elsewhere online. Throw in a (just) large enough userbase to include a wide variety of life experience and perspectives and you've got an oasis in an ever more polarized and reactionary internet.

Tildes reminds me of earlier internet forums, when the tone, pace and motivations for online communication were less capitalized, in various senses of the word. Niche subreddits during Reddit's golden era are another example. It's a better vibe. I'm guessing that, during the various Reddit exodii, a fair amount of people who share that nostalgia ended up here.

I even have some nostalgia for the early days of the platforms. MySpace! Early instagram was gorgeous. Even Facebook had its moments. My social media participation has always been below average, unless you count the years where any online socializing was unusual in the general population, but it's been a semi-consistent part of essentially my whole adult life both personally and professionally. Thinking about online socializing, it's funny how it's sort of its own thing. Kind of in its own social category, a new one that we recently invented. Maybe, in part, it's because the internet is a sort of buffer, and in those buffered interactions we're all a little different. In both good and bad ways. Lately it feels unbalanced towards bad, but perhaps it will swing back.

It feels like the Tildian moderation strategy, and guidelines, have successfully created a culture that's now self sustaining to some degree. And I think that culture is pretty great. It's not perfect, in the way that nothing people do can ever be perfect, especially where communication is concerned, but it's beautiful and I'm grateful it exists.

So, cheers to Tildes! I'd love to hear what other Tilderianites think about Tildes.

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!

I get the feeling that, outside its own communities, Overwatch has mostly slipped out of the wider conversation.

We've had:

• Blizzard’s various incidents/controversies

• The shift to OW2 and all the confusion/anger around that

• The battle pass / shop pricing / F2P monetization complaints

• Cancellation of PVE mode

• General live-service fatigue

Most of that hasn’t really been “fixed”, but I'm not seeing nearly as much noise about it anymore, good or bad.

My own (slightly biased) view as someone still playing:

As a now free-to-play, live-service game with ongoing updates and "events", I feel like OW2's cosmetic pricing is (unfortunately) pretty standard compared to similar big titles. I'm not saying that's good, I think aggressive monetization is a wider industry problem, but within that landscape, the model itself doesn't feel uniquely outrageous to me if the goal is keeping a big, polished game running long-term.

I also doubt the actual dev team has much control over pricing, so that part lands more on Blizzard/ABK as a company (shocker).

Setting that aside: purely in terms of gameplay, the game currently feels the best it ever has to me. There's a good variety of modes, and things like the new Stadium mode feel very different from the usual Quick Play/Comp loop while still keeping the core of what makes Overwatch fun: the heroes, the readability, how smooth and well-designed everything feels.

What I'd like to hear from you:

Especially if you're not deep in the OW ecosystem anymore (or never were):

• Do you think about Overwatch at all these days?

• Did you drop it because of Blizzard, OW2’s launch, monetization, balance, something else?

• From the outside, does it feel “fine now”, “permanently tainted”, “kind of irrelevant”, or just background noise?

• If you never really played it: is there anything that would actually make you try Overwatch 2 in its current state?

And if you are still playing or following it closely, I'm also interested in how you feel about the state of the game vs peak OW1 / early OW2, especially whether it's earned back any trust or enthusiasm.

Not trying to rehash every incident in detail, just curious how the game and its reputation land for people who aren’t immersed in it every day.

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!

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.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

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.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

The other day I realised I should have used a disclaimer on a comment.

It is a comment that is supposed to be light hearted and fun so I started to amuse myself in a way that I haven't done in quite some time.

I've "always" enjoyed breaking down words (preferably in the "wrong" place), finding synonyms or sound-a-likes or second meanings and their synonyms or sound-a-likes or second meanings, etc, etc...

So I would like to invite you to build on my example below, bring your own examples or tell us about ways that you play with words.

Example:

It's that time of year again. The time where we randomly decide to delay our pets' dinner by an hour for no explicable reason.

My dog has been getting antsy and frantic for her 5 pm dinner starting at 4 pre-time change, so time change is going to be rough. Today I fed her at 4:30 EST/5:30 DT (Dog Time), but holding on that long was a challenge with how frantic she gets. We've joked about just leaving the house for an hour or so every day just to evade her. As the week goes on, I fear it may become less of a joke. (No advice needed for the record. We go through this every year, she'll adapt... Eventually.)

So how about the rest of you dealing with time change? How gracefully do your pets accept the sudden schedule change? Anyone else considering just becoming daily regulars at your nearest store?

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!

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?

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I've gotten very tired of fighting the GUI of my company's self-hosted charts.io instance, so I've been looking around at diagramming tools. I saw D2 posted on Hacker News, which seems like an interesting option, but I'm curious if anyone around here has a beloved tool to recommend.

I think my main use-case would be diagramming how components of a software system go together, although sometimes I'm interested in making wiring diagrams and stuff, too. Something that lets you specify overall dimension constraints for diagrams would probably help, since I often need to throw a diagram into a PowerPoint.

With a few exceptions, I have a remarkably bad memory (probably in part due to ADHD). When I have a fight or heated argument I usually remember the tone and gravity of the situation but the actual words that were said are completely forgotten in a short period. With time the entire content of the discussion fades away.

I have the impression this makes it easier for me to forgive people and forget bad events. The negative impressions don't have a lot memory to hold onto. Is the inverse also true? Does a good memory make it harder to forgive?

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.

When I was a kid, I remember the soundtrack to the world being oldies. Stuff from the 1970s and earlier. Boomers were always being pandered to by nostalgia. Decades later that pandering shifted to the 1980s, something I'm sure the Gen Xers must have appreciated. A year or two ago I realized that the nostalgia train has been in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

It occurs to me that there has been nostalgic pandering going for a long time and I just hadn't realized it. I assume it's because a lot of the most notable ones have been pretty bad, particularly in the case of movies like the Space Jam sequel or the Jurassic World series. But music has had it's share too. I remember hearing a lot of references to 90s hip hop, and old bands like Backstreet Boys and My Chemical Romance have got back together. I've also been seeing a lot of references to old TV shows like Gilmore Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (though, to be fair, people never really stopped talking about Buffy).

Personally speaking, I'm not a fan of this. Yeah, the movies have been bad, but that's basically just the state of hollywood right now. But more than anything, I'm kind of disappointing by it. I'm more interested in new art, generally speaking, and more importantly, seeing all of these throwbacks is starting to make me feel old.

After a particularly grueling and frustrating week at work, I was driving home from picking up my daughter from school, and there were several different honking exchanges at this one stoplight. This is Pittsburgh, which is more midwest than east coast, so I rarely hear anyone honk, and almost never the sustained angry honks I was hearing. I thought, "They must be having the kind of week I'm having."

A bit later, I found myself alone on the road, no other cars visible either way. I thought, maybe I could honk. So I did. A nice long one. And it felt very good. I did it again a bit later. Still cathartic. I finally had to stop because my 10 year old was going to die of embarrassment.

So that's my recommendation. Get out there and let out a big honk. Not at anyone, not road rage, just let loose a little.

What are your other outlets for relieving stress?

When I was a kid, I remember going to a book store with my Mom and asking for a recommendation from the clerk there for something in the fantasy genre. He kindly pointed me to the Dark Elf trilogy by R. A. Salvatore. I noticed that it had a Forgotten Realms logo on the cover, and when I went back to the store I noticed other books with that logo as well. That was my introduction to a setting that is shared between authors who can write stories in the same universe.

On the smaller end, there are settings where 2 (or a few) authors collaborate (like the Malazan universe), while on the larger side of things you have settings with dozens to potentially hundreds of authors (like Warhammer 40k, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc).

Some quick questions I thought of that might be interesting below, but please feel free to share anything you'd like about this topic!

• What was the first shared setting you read books in?
• Do you have a favorite shared literary setting?
• Do you mind the varying quality of the books in shared settings?
• Do you find yourself more likely to read a book in this shared setting compared to a book outside the setting?
• Are there any books in that setting that you don't recommend people read?

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.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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.

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 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!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

It's spooky month again! I've asked in the past for people to share scary, creepy and unexplained stories in October. But I figure the community doesn't grow enough to guarantee new people with new stories every year. So this year I'll mix it up:

What are some of the creepiest, spookiest and scariest places you've been?

Can be genuinely scary with a personal story attached. Can just be a spooky haunted house exhibit. Can be a place you just found really creepy for no specific reason. It could be as big as a historic mansion with a macabre background, as simple as abandoned buildings, could be that weird attic room with a lock on the outside of the door...

So share away!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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?

For a while now I have used VSCodium- which is just Microsoft's VSCode, but with as much of the telemetry stripped out (or rather, not built-in in the first place) as possible- but I've found myself with a desire to move away from Electron-based apps for a number of reasons.

Primarily, I'm ideologically opposed to the trend in which everything is an Electron-based web app packaged as a "desktop application", but on a slightly more functional note, Electron seems to behave poorly in Wayland contexts, especially on Arm64 devices.

In terms of feature set, I'm not too interested in complexity. Something open-source, relatively clean / light-weight, capable of providing a project overview and a number of tabbed or vsplit / hsplit buffers. Something with comprehensive syntax highlighting and some form of language server interface. Something theme-able, and good to look at, with relatively intuitive or well-established keyboard shortcuts. I don't much care for integrated terminals, extensive debugging tooling, or any form of built-in AI assistant.

I have been trying out Micro, with a set of plugins which allow for a project overview, a language server, and a number of other QOL improvements, but it has a list of breaking issues that will likely not be solved for years given the speed at which pull-requests are addressed, if at all. Even so- it hits most of the marks that I find most important to me.

But I'm also interested in what other people use; what other programmers find matter to them. So what text editors, or IDEs do you swear by (and please don't suggest VIM- it's overwhelming ;])?

I heavily utilize ChatGPT to generate .ics files to populate my Apple Calendar with various events, but I have been wanting to upgrade my time management and also use the Reminders app.

I recently used ChatGPT to help me populate a Trello board with tasks associated with a project I am working on, but I was getting annoyed with having my workflow split across Apple Calendar and Trello. I exported my Trello board as a CSV and was trying to have ChatGPT turn it into a file I could import into Reminders, but as it turns out, this is not easy.

.ics files do contain syntax for reminders tasks with due dates that populate the Apple Calendar, but generating an .ics file with only reminders tasks and importing into Calendar doesn’t actually work. Calendar recognizes that the .ics contains Reminders tasks and opens Reminders to import the tasks, but Reminders returns an error because it doesn’t support import, it only supports export to Calendar.

I found that Reminders has a Reminders.scpt dictionary file within the .app package that details .applescript commands that can create new tasks, so I fell into the world of AppleScript. The issue with AppleScript is that it was created in the 80s and hasn’t been updated since 2013. It has no native CSV support and is pretty clunky.

AppleScript does have text file support, so I was able to have ChatGPT convert my CSV into a .txt that I could parse with AppleScript. This allowed me to automate the creation of tasks in the Reminders app from my Trello CSV, but it was annoying and I still feel like there must be a better way.

Does anyone here use AppleScript regularly and know its full capabilities?

Also, are there any good resources out there for learning more about AppleScript? The Apple documentation is very out of date and it seems like more of a legacy language than something Apple regularly maintains.

This is such a long shot, but I have two tickets for the Friday October 24th Halloween Extravaganza Celebration @ St. John the Divine in New York City that I'm hoping to swap for Saturday October 25 tickets.

I entered and won tickets to another event Friday evening, but would really still like to see the extravaganza if possible. Both nights are sold out so unfortunately the venue can't do anything. Anyone out there happen to have Saturday night tickets they'd like to trade for my Friday night tickets?

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.

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!