What are some things that you enjoy, are useful, or recommend. I'd ask that you include the price in your native currency to give a ballpark and save folks the trouble of following links that are out of their budget.
I prefer Android and something linkable with a PC but for others obviously iOS options too.
I wanted to hit the gym all my life, but I never really made it until this year. Granted, I do have a sports background and have been active most of my life, but going to the gym was never really for me, until I decided to really do it this year. After years of shoulder and knee problems, I thought adding some muscle to my frame was definitely needed if I didn't want to be in pain all my life.
Since I had thought about going to the gym for years now, I feel like I gathered a good bit of information that REALLY helped me to go now. Here they are:
The routine is more important than the results; regardless of any information I give you about macros, weights, sets, proteins, whatever all that, going to the gym one more time is going to be better than not going. Results take a LONG time. You will not see progress after a month. You may not see progress after 2 months. You may start to see some progress after 3 months. Real progress takes many months, years. That's why your number one priority should simply be to go to the gym, even if your workout is the worst ever and you use two machines in 30 minutes. Going to the gym 4 times a week is better than 3, going 3 times a week is better than 2 and so on. It takes about 3 months to a year to have the routine set in your life. After that and during that, you'll have all the time in the world to think about how to optimize your training, but just going and sticking to the routine of going is more important than anything else.
Choose the easiest, most accessible gym option; the goal is to go. You should make this the easiest for you. Choose a gym that is easily accessible, before or after work. The closer, the better. Heck, your gym can even be your own home! Make some place for you to workout if you want to. You can easily do very good home workouts with maybe 100-150$ worth of equipment.
Stick to a simple workout plan; There are some easy plans: target 2 muscle groups per workout, or alternate upper lower body; try to hit the muscles two times a week (2x biceps, 2x triceps, etc.). 3-5 exercises per workout is fine. 1-2min rest, take more if you feel like it, take less if you feel like it.
Listen to your body for reps/weight; Going for 5 reps or going for 15 reps, it doesn't matter that much at the start, as long as you can do 2-3 series of that. Try to aim for anything from 6 to 12 reps, if you feel you can do more, do it, if you feel like you cannot, then don't. Some times I do 6, sometimes I do 12, but I try to aim for 8. The routine is more important than the results, all you need to do is go to the gym, the perfect workout can come in later.
The movement is more important than the weight; building muscle is simply your muscles tearing and healing. As long as your muscles tear, you've done a good job. But that tear must come from a movement done well, or else you'll tear something that was not supposed to. Go for slower reps if needed, less explosion in your movements. Watch a video on how to do specific exercises if needed, some are mandatory to make sure you don't injure yourself (squats, deadlifts).
Don't overdo it, progressive overload is the key; getting injured is EASY, the goal is to go to the gym, not be hurt. Go lower on the weights at first, it's not a competition. I started my dumbell press with like 10 pounds, shaking like crazy, it's normal. We've all been there. Don't ego lift. The routine is more important than the results. The big weights will take a while to reach, but it'll happen progressively.
Have some kind of goal that is not tied to a number; I guess this one is more personal, but I feel like it's way easier to stick to the routine when you don't "care" about the results as much. The true goal is to be fit or to be lean or to be muscular or to be healthy, no? I feel like those are achievable long term and are guaranteed to come from the routine. I think if you're a beginner and set some kind of arbitrary number, you're not an expert to know if that goal is realistic or not and it makes the whole working out thing to be dependent on a result that you don't have the slightest idea how difficult it is or how long it takes to reach it. I think goals with a number should come after the routine is set in, not before going to the gym, but hey, that's just my two cents.
Eat enough, drink water, get more protein; protein shakes are easy and not that costly, just having a protein shake is fine. Not having it is fine too. If you want to build muscle, you should aim for 100-150g of protein per day. Make sure you eat enough and well, but in the end, the routine is more important. Remember, getting fit happens at the gym, getting lean happens in the kitchen. Weight loss and weight gains both happen in the kitchen. Realistically, a normal genetic male will gain AT BEST 10-12 pounds of muscle the first year of working out (assuming optimal results), so you can aim for that, but just know that your weight gains might not be muscle.
Use ChatGPT to help if needed; When I started going at the gym, I followed all these tips, but I didn't really know that to do. So I asked ChatGPT to make me a 4 days a week workout plan, 5 exercises: pull, push, legs, full body. I tried what it gave me for about a month, but I used that month to just replace exercises I didn't like and I slowly started making my own program to fit what I wanted. But I was super happy that I at least had a starting program. I realize that's what's stopping a lot of people and you can use AI to help you out with that, especially if you don't have money to buy a program or pay a trainer to make one for you.
Be disciplined, but be kind to yourself; There will be days when you will not be able to workout. There will be days when you will not want to workout. There will be days when you will feel bad about working out. It's ok to miss a day, it's ok to miss a week. Remember, the routine is more important. Just make sure to go back to your routine as soon as possible. Missing one workout after going 20 times in a row feels a lot less bad than missing 2-3 every week.
Finally, if you have any questions about starting the gym, feel free to ask. I'll gladly help.
Welcome back to another edition of the good news thread. Where I challenge folks to find and post good news. Don't just link to a source of good news, pick one out and share it. Personal good news stories are also welcome!
Even if it's good in the face of bad, even if it's the sort of good that can also remind you that shit's fucked up. For this thread, we focus on the good and we don't let the fact there's still also bad in the world drag us down.
Deep in the Caribbean, the pirate haven of MĂȘlĂ©e Island is home to the deadliest brood of ne'er-do-wells what ever sailed the seven seas: the infamous scurvy seadog Meathook; the buccaneer Sword Master whose name is feared in every corner of the isle; and most horrifically, the spectral ghost pirate LeChuck. Onto these disreputable shores late one night arrives the hapless, clueless, and utterly guileless flooring inspector Guybrush Threepwood, with nothing to his name but the dream of somehow becoming a real pirate himself.
Discover a thrilling world of swordplay, thievery, and, er, treasure huntery in The Secret of Monkey Island. Insult your enemies, fire the cannons, find true love, concoct mysterious voodoo brews, poison guards, evade cannibals, traverse hellish catacombs, raise a pint of grog, and (maybe) discover the Secret for yourself!
Happy December! This month we're playing the legendary 1990 Lucasfilm Games point-and-click adventure from the minds of Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman.
You see, one of my favorite rides in Disneyland is Pirates of the Caribbean. You get on a little boat and it takes you through a pirate adventure⊠Your boat keeps you moving through the adventure, but Iâve always wished I could get off and wander around, learn more about the characters, and find a way onto those pirate ships.
I was sorting through some boxes today and I came across my copy of Tim Power's On Stranger Tides, which I read in the late 80's and was the inspiration for Monkey Island. Some people believe the inspiration for Monkey Island came from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride â probably because I said it several times during interviews â but that was really just for the ambiance. If you read this book you can really see where Guybrush and LeChuck were
plagiarizedderived from, plus the heavy influence of voodoo in the game.
The Secret of Monkey Island is renowned for its zany humor, great (and mostly fair) puzzle design, gorgeous pixel graphics, and memorable soundtrack. Unlike other adventure games of the era, SMI invites you to try anything and everything without worry â you can't die. It's chock full of goofy swashbuckling anachronisms and hilarious good times. Maybe a little frustration too. Hey, you can just look up the answers when you get stuck. We couldn't do that in the '90s. Respect the grind.
The game originally released for DOS, Amiga, Macintosh, Atari ST, FM Towns, and Sega CD. Those versions are no longer available for purchase in the usual places (you might try eBay but save up your pieces o' eight if you go that route). All the original versions are playable in ScummVM if you lack the necessary hardware. If you find yourself needing access to a Dial-A-Pirate wheel, the original has been helpfully digitized here for your convenience.
Different releases of the original game have different audio and graphics. Some people have opinions about which version is best. These are all valid. I prefer the version I grew up with, but no shade on the others. They all have their own charms.
The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is a 2009 remaster that is the official recommended way to play today. It includes fully recreated high-resolution graphics, music, and voiced dialogue, with a modernized UI. It includes a quick toggle between classic and remastered modes, which is a nice touch. The Windows version is currently on sale for 50% off from GOG (DRM-free), and also available from Steam. It is reportedly playable on Steam Deck.
This interview with Dominic Armato hints at one of my favorite real-world stories related to Monkey Island. This aspiring voice actor was a huge fan of the first two games in the series, which were originally unvoiced. He was in the right place at the right time to land the role of Guybrush in the third installment, which was the first to have voiced characters. It's a good but not great game, and very different from the first two due to being helmed by an entirely different team. All other things aside, Armato NAILED it. He is Guybrush. He returned to voice the fourth game and then... was brought back to reprise his role in the Special Editions of SMI and MI2. It was a dream come true for him, but amazing for fans of the series too; finally the original games have full voiced dialogue and the main character is played by the guy who was born to do it.
The rest of the voice cast is great too. This aspect of the Special Edition really rounds out the game nicely and I consider it an essential part of the experience now. That said, personally I find the SE visuals and music to be really lackluster, and I prefer the original UI as well. You can toggle the classic mode but this removes the VO too... which is why I will instead be playing the Ultimate Talkie Edition, a fan hack of the DOS release (playable in ScummVM) that adds the SE voice tracks and keeps the original everything else. It can be easily found online but I'll refrain from linking it here since SMI's abandonware status is debatable.
From what I can tell the Special Editions of SMI and its first sequel were also sold as a bundle for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and iOS. I can't speak to the current availability of any of those but they're probably all terrible ways to experience it anyway.
Limited Run Games has also issued a few re-releases of the original game in recent years. I don't know much about these, and good luck finding them for sale anywhere.
Genres: Adventure, Point-and-Click
The main purpose of this topic is to get people up and running with the game. As such, it's recommended that you:
Another purpose of this topic is to revisit the game and its time period:
Finally, this topic is the beginning discussion for people starting to play it:
It is recommended that you reply to your own posts if you are making consecutive updates so that they are in the same thread.
IMPORTANT: Any links to the game should be legal distributions of the game only. Please do NOT link to any unauthorized copies.
IMPORTANT: Put any spoilers in a dropdown block. Copy/paste the block below if needed.
<details>
<summary>Spoilers</summary>
Spoiler text goes here.
</details>
Colossal Game Adventure (CGA) is Tildes' retro video game club.
Each month we will play a different retro game/games, discuss our thoughts, and bask in the glorious digital experiences of yesteryear!
Colossal Game Adventure is a reference to Colossal Cave Adventure. It's one of the most influential games of all time, one of the first text-based interactive games, and one of the first games to be shared online.
What do we want to do with this group? Play influential games; interact with each other through text; and share the love for retro games online!
It also abbreviates to CGA (because we love chunky pixel art), and its name communicates the Colossal amount of fun and excitement that we have with retro video Games in our shared Adventure of playing them together.
No. Participation is open to all.
There is a Notification List that will get pinged each time a new topic goes up. If you would like to join that list, please PM u/kfwyre.
Each month will have a focus game or games that will guide our discussions. Beyond that, there are no restrictions. The philosophy of CGA is to play in a way that works for you!
This means:
If you have already played a game and want a different experience:
There is no wrong way to participate in CGA, and every different way someone participates will make for more interesting discussions.
Each month the Insert Cartidge topic will be posted on the 1st, while the Remove Cartridge topic will be posted on the 20th.
Nomination and voting topics will happen in March and September (every 6 months).
Schedules are also posted then.
All CGA topics are available using the colossal game adventure tag.
Inserting and removing cartridges are our retro metaphor for starting and stopping a given game or games.
The Insert Cartridge topic happens at the beginning of the month and is primarily about getting the game up and running.
The Remove Cartridge topic happens toward the end of the month and is primarily about people reflecting on the game now that they've played it.
There are no hard restrictions on what has to go in either topic, and each can be used to discuss the game, post updates, ask questions, etc.
How appropriate, you fight like a cow.
This is your place to share any and all thoughts on your movie viewing for 2025.
Movies you talk about do NOT have to be limited to this yearâs releases.
Feel free to share:
Let us know how your movie watching for 2025 went.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
This is your place to share any and all thoughts on your reading for 2025.
Books you talk about do NOT have to be limited to this yearâs releases.
Feel free to share:
Let us know how your reading for 2025 went.
So a little background: my father just died and a big part of his life was listening to music, for most of his life he's been building themed compilations of songs he liked using whatever medium was available, magnetic reel tapes in the '60s and '70s, then cassette tapes, then CDs, and of course playlists for the last 20 or so years. Now my mother and I would like to back up and save a lot of that work as those compilations have a lot of sentimental value and are pretty unique. There's lots of old obscure rhythm and blues and soul songs that you aren't really going to come across anywhere else. However, it's pretty much all locked into Apple Music, which isn't really a problem in the here and now, because we all have tended to use macs since my mother adopted them in the '80s or '90s. However, we don't really want that data just locked into a private ecosystem that has been getting more and more restricted and where we have less and less control.
So I'm looking for a way to keep those playlists intact and export them out of Apple Music in a playable format and into a less locked in system to then back them up. Most of the music should be DRM free as a lot of it would have been taken off of CDs probably as MP3 files, though a lot of that would've happened 15+ years ago.
Does anyone have any ideas about the best way to do that? I seem to be able to manually export each one into a .txt file but of course it's not really playable sound files. My tech skills are pretty limited, I have about an average amount of knowledge or even slightly more for someone my age (30s) who grew up around computers and the internet but I grew up after it necessary to have basic coding skills to use computers so my experience doing even basic coding or running scripts is pretty much nil. Any ideas would be appreciated.
Edit: itâs version 1.0.6.10
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.
Allow me to introduce myself.
I came over to Tildes fairly recently after Twitterriffic died and Apollo announced it would shut down.
As a relative youngster, I tend to mostly browse on mobile.
While I do appreciate Tildes' philosophy of having a simple website that works well on desktop and mobile, I've always preferred mobile apps. I'm a strong believer that a well-built native application will always provide a richer experience than a website.
But enough talking.. showing is way more fun - here's a lil' something I've been messing around with:
Introducing Surfboard for Tildes
The goal is simple: to be the best way to interact with Tildes on mobile.
Surfboard is still extremely early, and is missing many features.
With that said, here is what it currently supports:
The design draws some inspiration from Apollo for Reddit, an app that I loved & am very sad will be discontinued.
I would love to get some feedback from other Tildes users on the app. If you are interested in trying it for yourself, you can get it here via TestFlight
Surfboard is built for iPhone, and requires iOS 16.0 or higher.
Inside the app is a 'roadmap' of sorts which is basically a list of things I know are missing, but if there's something you want that isn't listed there, I'm all ears.
Formatting is a little rough at the moment, although I made enormous improvements on the parsing & rendering there over the last day.
It should support just about anything you throw at it other than a <details>
(I'll get around to them, I swear..)
If you run into issues viewing a post/comment, you can easily open them in an in-app safari window from the menu.
As mentioned above, it's very early, but it's already becoming my favorite way to browse Tildes. I hope that others will enjoy it as well. Consider it my gift to the Tildes community.
Cheers !
Edit:
The best way to submit feature requests & bug reports is to add it to the issue tracker and/or leave a comment on this thread and Iâll get around to adding it myself.
Thanks !
Here we are at the end of another year. This was our first full year of the Tildes Book Club, so congratulations are in order for reaching this milestone. Currently we're taking a well-earned December break, until we return in January for more.
This year saw us reading more variety across both fiction and non-fiction, covering scifi, history, autobiographies, and short stories.
Here are some stats for 2025:
The superlative awards:
The full list of 2025's discussions can be found here:
Much thanks as always to @boxer_dogs_dance for organizing this club for us. We have a great lineup for 2026, including renowned authors like Kafka, Nabokov, and Pratchett.
Feel free to share your favourite Book Club reads from 2025, or what you're looking forward to in 2026.
I know Steam Replay isnât out yet, but I figure itâs still a good enough time to get the ball rolling.
This is your place to share any and all thoughts on your gaming for 2025.
Games you talk about do NOT have to be limited to this yearâs releases.
Feel free to share:
Let us know how your gaming for 2025 went.
I'm planning to launch Tildes Minecraft season 3 some time mid November. What mods should we add or remove? Any other recommendations or requests?
Edit: As per the majority of the feedback, season 3 will be delayed until the beginning of January.
Edit 2: Server goes online January 3rd, 2026 at 11am Pacific time.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
My oldest zygote is 5 years old. Up until now, I've been able to keep a good lid on what he's allowed to watch. We have Roku with a handful of streaming services, and he's comfortable navigating it himself to watch shows. I'm big on teaching agency and responsibility, and he's responded well to that: he watches shows we've okayed, asks about other shows he's interested in, and respects us if we tell him no. He's a smart kid and I'd like to keep him that way.
It's starting to get harder. Originally I could say on on grounds of age appropriateness, or I could point to things about a show that I outright didn't approve of for him. This is important to me because I want to teach him to think about these things and make good choices for himself in the future. So instead of telling him "No, you can't watch that", I want to tell him "No, you can't watch this because _________."
Now that he's getting older, he's asking more and more to watch things. And in some cases, I find myself saying "No. It's hard to explain why, but this isn't good." I hate saying that because I know that's not satisfying at his age, and it doesn't teach him anything about how to make good choices about what to watch.
YouTube is rife with examples. If my son is watching a branded show about Spiderman, I know what to expect. There are brand standards that I don't always agree with, but I know what the damage is, and the problems I have with those shows are problems I can talk through with him.
But when YouTube recommends videos that are low production quality videos of people in their living rooms playing with Spiderman figures, I don't want him watching it. Some of it feels Elsagate-adjacent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate) in that it seems harmless but you are just waiting for it to veer into weird or inappropriate territory. There's no trust between me and the content creator. Sometimes they're just harmlessly dumb. But in any case it's hard to explain why I don't want him to watch something that appears harmless to him.
Does anyone have similar experiences? Advice? Commiseration? Perspectives?
I picked up Fairy Tale because I like fantasy. I'm really enjoying it. Also in the time I have spent on the book suggestions and book discussions subreddits, I have noticed that he is still a much loved author.
So if I want to explore his work, where should I start?