Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like venezuela.caracas, usa.mn.minneapolis and uber.eats. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was nosy.

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!

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.

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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.

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?

Hello,

I just rewatched the final boss fight of the spectacularly amazing 2010 movie Kickass, and I remembered something I've been meaning to float by movie-knowers...

As I see it, this boss fight is the reason this movie exists. The way I picture how "hollywood"-movies are made is that there is a writers room or producers meeting where nothing happens until someone brings out the weed, schrooms and/or coke which lets real brainstorming take place. And suddenly BAM! You have a single amazing thing happen: the Event.

Once that is settled they work backwards to building a believable story that leads up to that event.

The Event for Kickass is having a grown man beat the pulp out of a young girl without anyone really noticing or making a big deal out if it.

This creates some constraints (remember its 2008/9 at the time of writing), for example:

• the girl can not be seen as a helpless victim.
• the man can't win in the end.
• the beating must be reasonably justified within the story and not just pure sadism/misogyny.
• the beating must look very unrealistic.

From those premises they created a a scenario that would make it possible and wrote out a whole film.

I often find myself having an A-ha!-moment when I find the Event in movies, it's one of the reasons I watch them.

This is in my view one of the biggest reason why sequels are bad: the Event has already been had in the first movie so there isn't really anything of value left to the story.

I'm up for talking about things like:

• how far away I am from the real method of making films
• what defining Events you see in this or other movies
• how and why sequels in general or particular are good/bad
• who went as Kick-Ass or Hit-Girl for Halloween
• ....

• I have an AMD processor that is not supported by Windows 11.
  • I don't wanna deal with the consequences of workarounds.
• I have an old NVIDIA graphics card that was never even close to being a flagship. It is essentially unsupported on Linux (I’ve tested it).
• I intend to keep running Windows 10 for as long as possible, using either official or unofficial means.
• My current Windows installation is becoming unmanageable, as Windows often does.
• I am a competent Linux user, and I run Linux on my laptop.
  • I have WSL2 on Windows 10 and it is great. Especially because I am a heavy Emacs user. I cannot live in an OS that does not allow me the full power of Emacs over a Linux base. This greatly reduces the need for bare-metal Linux.
  • One reason to keep running Windows (at least in a dual-boot setup) is that WoW runs at around 30 FPS on Linux for me. Other games have different issues.
    • I often run games from shady origins that are not obtained from Steam and tools such as Lutris and Bottles are just not there yet in terms of ease of use. I don't enjoy doing a lot of work just to play a game.
  • I understand that there are ways around almost any issue on Linux; I just don’t have the energy right now.

Any suggestions for post-installation cleanup and removing crap from Windows 10?

Thanks!

Hello Tildes,

My partner and I are at the point where we need to get more care for my dad and I could use some advice from people who have been down this road. He's in his early nineties and still living in his home, and the family has been lucky in many respects. Dad still has good cognitive function, he has excellent health care through his military retirement (USA: Tricare for Life). My brother is living in the family home, so there's someone in the house overnight in case there's a fall or other serious issue.

Last year we got Dad set up with a medical alert service, so he's only one button press away from talking to a helper if he's in crisis. My partner and I are down visiting him about once a week to help with chores and hang out. Same with my other brother. We've been holding things together.

But Dad's having difficulty with normal life stuff (walking, bathing, eating) and he's transitioning into a bedbound state, losing weight and eating very little. He seems fairly comfortable, just extremely tired and increasingly frail.

To be clear, I'm not asking for medical advice. Where I'm stuck is: How do we initiate and navigate the process of getting him a home health aide? His medical team was entirely unhelpful when we asked about case management. They say "if he's struggling, bring him to the ER" but he absolutely does not want to go to the ER, and we're loathe to force him at his age unless he's in crisis. Also, the ER is full of people with the flu right now.

We've reached the "we can't put this off any longer" moment, I think. Any advice on getting the ball rolling would be appreciated. Do we just randomly call up home health agencies? How do we figure out what his insurance will and won't cover?

Thanks so much.

GP

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 have a specific ask at the end, but any and all musings on this topic are invited.

Lately it's become apparent that the endless fire hose of content and subsequent extinction of boredom is one of the most insidious shifts of modern life. While social media and the internet have accelerated this, upon further reflection I realize this battle to hijack our time and attention is something basically all of us were born into (and an even steeper climb for those of us blessed with ADHD).

These reflections have been borne out of a desire to protect my toddler's curiosity and passion for life outside a black mirror for as long as I can reasonably manage.

The issue as I see it is not the existence of content beyond what one could ever consume (books have been that way for centuries). It's the evaporation of friction. One click and you're on an infinite loop, optimized and engineered to keep you there.

I used to think this was a symptom of the smartphone & tik-tok era. However, looking back at my own childhood TV habits, cable TV was the precursor: dozens of channels that never went dark and 24/7 news cycles that bred fear and never stopped churning.

The ask: How have you set up an environment for your kids (or yourself!) to delay the hedonic content treadmill as long as is reasonably possible?

The goal is to avoid a smartphone until we can't. I'm not anti-screen. There are loads of great educational TV and movies, I just want to introduce them slowly and with intention. But unfortunately now every TV front-end is ad-stuffed and every streaming app is basically a recommendation engine in disguise.

How do you share content with your kids without letting the algorithm worm its way inside their brain? How do you give them access to the collective wisdom of mankind in the internet without turning it into a slot machine?

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.

January 2026's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?