So here's a dilemma I'm not sure what to do about. It's really minor, and in the long run who cares, but here's the thing:

Today a link was posted whose link is a URL in Japanese katakana characters. Since DNS only supports ASCII characters, those URLs get encoded as punycode. So, the site's URL gets translated from https://マリウス.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/ into https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/.

This is a hacky solution from 20 years ago. It works, but nowadays browsers automatically translate "マリウス" into "xn--gckvb8fzb" transparently, so you never really see the "xn--gckvb8fzb". Unfortunately, Tildes' tag system is one of the parts of the site that only accepts roman characters, so there's no way to tag something with like source.マリウス.

So what do we do here? Tagging something with source.xn_gckvb8fzb is obviously not ideal.

In this case, Japanese in particular has a neat and tidy solution. Romanji. Every katakana character is a syllable, and each syllable has another character or pair or characters using English glyphs. So, マ, リ, ウ, ス is: Ma, Ri, U, Su, or "mariusu", the Japanese pronunciation of the Roman name Marius.

So, if we want to transliterate the word phonetically (ie: in Japanese at least, converting the katakana glyphs directly into their romanji equivalents), we should tag it source.mariusu, or if we want to translate it, it should be source.marius.

A lot of other languages with non-roman letters are not going to be as clean since they don't have a clear transliteration of their character set into ASCII, but in the case of Japanese, I dunno, it seems like it's begging to be converted into romanji. I really just don't know though. It's a dilly of a pickle.

ANYTHING must be better than linking to source.xn_gckvb8fzb since that's literally encoded gibberish not meant to be read by humans. Not quite sure what the alternative should be though.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk.

This is the twelfth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Our next book will be Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky at the end of April.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself. Also, this month will be slightly different. I have been exceptionally busy and didn't finish the book this time. I am hoping that you all who did read it will come up with interesting questions in addition to your comments/ reviews.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

(I wasn't sure if I should post this in ~talk or ~tech. I went with ~talk because I feel like I'm about to spend a whole lot of this post rambling. Also, be warned: This is a long post.)

A summary of this post: My personal decision to try to preserve my own online privacy, the chaotic equilibrium that is me attempting to make sense of my feelings towards AI and the current zeitgeist, and the tiny concessions I've had to make in navigating all of this makes me feel, at best, tired, and at worst, a crazy person. I am tired of the direction the internet is going, I am tired of the endless discourse about AI, and my chronic tiredness is all marinating together into a tired admixture of tired chicken soup.

First of all, hi everyone. I don't post here as often as I maybe would like to. Randomly chiming in with a big ol' post like this a bit daunting. Participating in an online community isn't a muscle I flex very often nowadays, which is actually relevant to what I'm about to talk about.

Lately for a long fucking time now I've just been tired of the direction in which the internet, specifically the "corporate web", has been heading. This all started when I first joined Tildes; around that time was when the big Reddit API fiasco happened, leaving a bad taste in my mouth, and it was not long after when AI started to become A Big Thing. If you had asked me why these things had left a bad taste in my mouth back then, I wouldn't have been able to respond with anything articulate, just "big tech bad".

In the three years that have passed, I've developed enough of an opinion and have gone through enough soul searching to give a more concrete answer to why I don't like how things are going:

• Everybody wants my data, and I'd rather not give it to them
• I am tired of finding figurative AI hairs in my figurative sandwich
• Every company wants infinite growth at the expense of everything that made that company good, if it was ever good
• It's really hard to find a third space on the internet these days
• Almost nobody I know cares about any of this

Among privacy-conscious folks and small internet communities like Tildes, none of the above are particularly novel thoughts. And yet I think about all of this frequently enough that I felt the need to post a topic here for discussion. In this post, I'm going to get on my little soapbox, recount how I got to this mind space, and attempt to explain why I find all of this both endlessly tiring and constantly present in my mind.

Everybody wants my data, and I'd rather not give it to them (and almost nobody I know cares about any of this)

In the past few years I've taken the steps realistic for me in order to protect my online privacy. Why? Well, I hate being advertised to. I hate the idea of surveillance-as-a-service. I'm fortunate enough to be able to just pay for, or configure/self-host, things that do the thing they're supposed to do without knowing that I'm a 512 year old nonbinary alien from like, Nova Arrakis Prime the 2nd, Esq. or something (I am not that old, that is not how I identify, and I'm obviously not from there). I just don't buy the idea that everybody on the internet is a consumer who needs to accept this compromise in order to participate. Again, this might not be novel for a lot of you reading.

For me this has involved switching away from Gmail as an email provider, ditching Windows for Linux everywhere, cancelling my YouTube Premium subscription, deleting Facebook/most Meta stuff, browsing behind a VPN, etc. Some things I'm working on going further on; some things, like deleting Instagram, I don't want to do because that platform is how I connect with a lot of my friends. Essentially I've done what's realistic for me.

All of this has worked out fine for me. My quality of life has not measurably changed as a result, other than maybe the fact that it's slightly inconvenient to open up a new browser session and log in to my otherwise-abandoned Google account just to interact with a random Google Sheet someone sent me.

The first bit of mental friction stems from discussions I've had with my partner on this topic. She's also privacy-minded, and so isn't against the idea of taking very similar actions. But she's not in a place where she can just do so as easily as I did, either because it's massively inconvenient for her (all of her data is holed up in Google services), would require a very large mindset/workflow shift (She is not technical enough to switch to Linux without a ton of friction, for example), or would damage her relationships (It's completely unrealistic to get everybody she knows to switch to Signal tomorrow - hell, she doesn't even want to do it herself to message me). I want to be very clear that none of this is inherently bad or a stain on her character or whatnot. My point is that privacy looks different for everybody, especially over time.

Extrapolate that friction out to people who aren't as close to me though, and it feels somewhat like dying by a thousand cuts. Not in the sense of mental anguish, just general fatigue. Over 50% of my communication with my good friends takes the form of them sending me memes on Instagram. I react and reply because I'm not just going to ghost them because of muh privacy. But there's that like 1% of my brain that goes "yeah I wish you wouldn't do that". I have not bothered to ask them to stop, because I don't (yet) care to proselytize to them in the name of privacy at the risk of shutting down what is effectively one of their love languages.

The thing is, they either aren't aware of the degree of data collection going on on every major internet platform, or they don't care. I do not believe myself in the slightest to be superior to them because of this. I don't fault them for either, and I, again, don't care to intervene because I don't want to be the person that gatekeeps the entire internet from them in the name of rebelling against big corpo.

So yes, I would say the majority of my friends are not as opinionated on this as I am. Because of this, I sometimes feel I'm a little crazy whenever I propose to my partner the idea of self-hosting our own file storage, or when I happen to say "Yeah, I try not to use Google Maps really. Why? Oh, I just don't want them to know where I've been". But then I talk with those of my friends who share this mindset, or browse online communities which do, and I feel normal again. And then I bounce between these circles, and I feel, I dunno, weird.

Interlude: The AI bubble and my pride as a software engineer

Frankly, I don't know how to feel about AI. This is compounded by the fact that I am a software engineer both by trade and as a hobby.

As a cultural phenomenon, I am pretty sick of it. I cannot stand AI-generated ads, AI-generated media, AI-generated writing, AI-generated whatever. I also cannot stand ads about AI-generated ads, AI-generated media, AI-generated writing, or AI-generated whatever. The last time I was spoonfed information about a topic to a remotely comparable degree was back when crypto/NFTs were the monster of the week. This round of industry hype has felt orders of magnitude more prevalent and exhausting.

As a software development tool, it's... fine. I was pretty against AI-assisted coding at first, but after having learned how to properly utilize it (whatever "properly" means), I've found it pretty helpful as of late. I'll usually hand-write the code and patterns I want the LLM to use, tell it "ok, now do this everywhere", approve/reject its output, and it gets a lot right with an acceptable amount of post-fact correction from me. It's also been useful as a learning tool: These past few months I've been working on a project that involves data mining/parsing a proprietary encryption/encoding format for a reasonably popular video game. I was not comfortable working with binary formats to this extent before, but after several back and forths with Claude and an earnest effort to understand just what the fuck it was writing to my codebase, I feel somewhat more knowledgeable now.

The tension I've had to balance given my above stance: I work at an AI startup.

Everyone around me is AI-pilled out the wazoo. This isn't meant to be an insult. They're all great people whom I get along great with, and I like my company/don't hate our vision enough to jump ship (inhales copium). It's just that I constantly have to deal with stuff like:

• Vibecoded PRs, which I have the wherewithal to push back on when appropriate, but in so doing must balance maintainability vs. urgency (and all that other pragmatism crap that comes with being a software engineer)
• AI-flavored communications - I do a mean ChatGPT impression. "That's an excellent observation. The tension you're feeling isn't imagined. It's real. If you want, I can break down the reasons why people tend to pour the cereal before the milk—just say the word."
• Building the meta-inference layer through a combination of carefully curated ground truths, a robust evaluation pipeline, and a multi-step, quantized agent selection algorithm that's resilient to both external disturbances and continuous platform evolution (this is basically a real sentence I had to read in an engineering strategy document someone put out)

And so, similar to the privacy dilemma I spoke about earlier, I find myself constantly doing mental gymnastics while working here. I am one of a few cynics in a room full of zealots (Again, I'm not trying to paint myself as some pariah here - I'm in this situation by choice, I'm just trying to note the juxtaposition). It would be easier if I just flat out hated the idea of AI to its core - I could just leave and choose not to engage with AI anything - but no, I use it, and I find it useful. In fact I enjoy applying software engineering principles to AI, because it's an interesting set of problems to wrangle.

Again, death by a thousand cuts. Firstly, I hate the prevalence of AI in mainstream culture, and I hate how it's being pushed as a panacea in my industry. Secondly, I don't hate AI as a tool. Thirdly, I'm surrounded by the first thing. Fourth: I have to explain my job to my friends and family. Doing so usually results in them asking me surface-level questions about AI (which I don't mind entertaining), them relaying how AI is god/the devil because it made them look like a Disney character (which I am tired of dealing with), or them asking me what my opinion on AI is (if I were to give them the whole story, it would be this entire post, so I just go "eh, it's fine").

My point with this section: I feel I am constantly doing mental gymnastics to justify the attitude I have towards AI. My stance is somewhat neutral. I read a blog post absolutely glazing it, I roll my eyes. I read a blog post absolutely trashing it, I roll my eyes. I think about AI, I roll my eyes. It's all just so tiring.

And also, as is evident by now, I have an Opinion about all of this. Am I crazy? Wouldn't it be a lot easier if I could just roll over and accept AI for what it is?

Turbo capitalism has fucked up how I navigate internet communities (and almost nobody I know cares about any of this)

The most recent development that's caused me to think about the topics presented in this post is Discord's recent rollout of its identity verification system. There has been plenty of discourse on this topic as of late, so I won't go on about too long about it here.

I view this motion by Discord as the next step in the enshittification of that platform. Given my views I've shared on surveillance capitalism as well as AI's effects on the industry and the garbage shoveled into the world by its most annoying proponents, you won't be surprised that my reaction to this news is negative, and I am currently deciding on whether or not to divest myself from Discord completely.

This decision is a small dilemma for me. On the one hand, muh privacy. On the other hand, I am part of a server centered around that one video game for which I'm working on that side project, and leaving the platform means severely reducing my participation in that community, because there's no way in hell they're moving that server off Discord. I don't know which way I'm going to go. This is also the same dilemma that occurred when I decided to partially divest myself from Meta and the like: Do I care about my relationships with my friends/family more than I care about muh privacy? (Yes).

(I feel like I'm finally getting to the point of my own post here...)

I'm very tired of the fact that these small dilemmas and points of contention have been popping up for me fairly consistently over the past few years. If we all just held hands and prayed I'd have it my way, I wouldn't have to choose between being an outsider in X community and *~\muh privacy~*, and I'd be 6'3" and jacked. But the way the corporate web is developing towards the endless rat race of turbo enshittification, I feel the rate at which I'm going to have to make these kinds of choices is going to be as consistent as it is now, or it's going to go up. Probably until I die.

Epilogue: The side project I was working on

I mentioned I was working on a video game side project. I feel it encapsulates the gripes I describe within this post pretty well, because it contains the following elements:

• Parsing binary data of a proprietary encoding/encryption format (I previously didn't know shit about how to do this, so I used AI to help me do it/learn more about the topic)
• A website which acts as a game database/search tool for in-game entities (I wanted to contribute to a community I'm currently deciding whether or not to somewhat isolate myself from)
• A Discord bot as an alternative method of interacting with the application/a way to submit drop table information, all of which must be crowd-sourced (Discord Bad. I figured I'd just stand up an authenticated REST API and let others do a Discord integration if they want, but still, I wish I wasn't about to force myself to cut this out of my roadmap.)

If you managed to read through all of that, thanks. I've been writing for like an hour, and I feel my ramblings have become more nonsensical than usual.

A summary of this post (copied from the beginning): My personal decision to try to preserve my own online privacy, the chaotic equilibrium that is me attempting to make sense of my feelings towards AI and the current zeitgeist, and the tiny concessions I've had to make in navigating all of this makes me feel, at best, tired, and at worst, a crazy person. I am tired of the direction the internet is going, I am tired of the endless discourse about AI, and my chronic tiredness is all marinating together into a tired admixture of tired chicken soup.

Not just books from the 1800s or 1900s, but even older. 1400s, 800s, 100s, books from BCE, etc. It can be fiction or non-fiction.

If a small blurb about the book could be provided and its significance that would be great.

Additionally, if you could help direct me or provide guidance on where I can get a hold of the book (digitally or physically), that’d be appreciated.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like privacy, andrew mountbatten windsor and audiophiles. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was out of the loop.

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've been on an interesting train of thought these past few days. I came across some criticism of a random old movie and I started thinking that the reason why I actually hate most modern movies is because they are all cowardly avoiding having any possible political interpretation for anything that happens in them. I've experienced movies that when the big fight scene starts, I'm falling asleep because I'm just so negatively invested in the characters or what will happen to them. That made me think about why so many boring, bland movies and shows keep being made, and it made me think of an opinion that the biggest reason why studios keep betting on blockbusters that are as boring as possible is that they are dependent on theatrical box office takings because streaming killed post-release revenue streams such as movie purchases.

I think that the reason for this is at least partially a symptom of the death of desire for physical media itself. Why deal with the inconvenience of physical media when you can just press a button and the movie starts playing? But at the same time I don't think this is entirely the fault of streaming services, but the fault of movie companies attempting to exert too much control over how people access their films.

I won't bore you with explanations of the limitations of streaming services. We've all been there, surely. They don't have what we want, the stuff we do want to see is spread out on a hundred different subscriptions, yada yada yada. So why do we not deal with them piecemeal? That answer comes with good news and bad news. Good news: you can! You can both buy and rent most movies that have ever been made. Bad news: it's an absolutely terrible deal if you do.

Right now there's at least three major services that allow you to buy digital movies: YouTube, Apple TV / iTunes Movies, and Prime Video. There's also the vestiges of the industry's "digital movies" initiative called Fandango at Home, previously Vudu - the one where you'd use a code you got with a DVD that said it included a digital copy. The problem with all of these services is obvious: if you buy a movie from them, you don't actually own it. They can and will take away access from you at any time for any reason they see fit.

There's an obvious solution to this: rental. It doesn't matter if they de-list a rental because you never had the illusion of ownership to begin with. But that has it's own problem: it's way too fucking expensive.

To put things into perspective, Blockbuster, before it closed down, would let you rent new releases for between $3-5 for a 1-2 day rental, while older movies could be between $1-3. Granted, this was before a lot of inflation, but those rentals also had the costs of running a store in expensive commercial real estate as well as the people who had to manage it, the cost of purchasing the media - sometimes at retail prices - and the cost of maintaining them (rewinding cassettes, cleaning and resurfacing discs, and replacing worn media).

Lets compare the cost of renting on Prime Video today.

Dicks the Musical is a somewhat niche movie unavailable to watch on streaming sites that came out more than two years ago, and the current price to rent it is $4.99. Five bucks. I should mention this is for a movie that I already watched on Hoopla via my library card for free.

Batman Returns is a blockbuster from 1992 and is available for $3.99. Four bucks. You get a one dollar discount if you want to watch something 30 years old. Fantastic.

The category that will really open your eyes is new movies. Zootopia 2 just became available for digital purchase, with no physical editions, and is not yet available on Disney+. If you want to purchase the film, it costs $29.99. Rental is $24.99. Frankly I cannot imagine a world in which the number of people who would pay for that rental exceeds the number of people who opted to pirate but would have paid if the price was at least half that.

If you forget that the major studios own their own streaming services, then this math really doesn't work out. Surely they are getting more money per stream through purchase and rental than they are with the fractional payment they would get from licensing it.

But of course you have to remember that they do own their own streaming services - it's part of why everyone's complaining after all. The major producers, by discouraging short term rentals and pushing streaming services (note that Prime Video will try to sell you one of those subscriptions if the title is available on one), they are attempting to move from producers of cultural products to yet another industry of rent seekers.

Was there ever a write-up on why Tildes was architected the way it was? For example, why Pyramid instead of the usual suspects like Django or Flask? I'd be curious to read the reasoning from the developer(s) themselves.

I typically don't play these kind of games, the few times I've played Souls games, I found issues I had with every game I've played more or less, I've tried Demon Souls around the time where Dark Souls was a thing on PS3, it didn't take too long to get used to the general idea and flow of the game, slowish/sluggish controls on purpose, overall being very difficult, parrying being something that could make or break battles, healing items are consumables that you need to farm, dying makes you lose souls, EXP is the currency, etc.

It's been so long since I've played it, but I recall it being an interesting enough experience to stick around for a little bit, Bolterian Palace being somewhat memorable from the first 2 zones or so including the first area, but I absolutely did not finish it.
I've played the first part of the game by myself, but ended up watching my friends play it more than I did play it, so I ended up knowing that Shrine of Storms has that weapon that makes farming souls super easy, I ended up going there.
Then I encountered the rolling skeletons, I don't think I was aware at the time that Turpentine is how you fight them ,so I had miserable experience there, I think at the end I got tired of it that I ended up just quitting the game to reload to not lose my souls and halve my HP, which in hindsight, I didn't know that. you take half damage as a soul(iirc) at the time and compounded with the PS3's insanely long loading times, which eventually made me to simply quit and never return to it, not having shortcuts also doesn't help, killing the same mobs over and over just to try fighting a boss once isn't fun.

I've not played Dark Souls 1 or 2 myself, so I have nothing to say aside from that I've seen my friends play PvP a lot in DS2, and that Bed of Chaos apparently is a rushed boss by the devs to complete the game, and it shows.

Despite what the title may imply, I did play Bloodborne a little bit, I did get to the first boss(Father Cosguine?) and getting a parry on him was one of those memorable moments for me playing the game, but phase 2 happened, and I'm going to blame the camera or locking-on for my death because 3D games from that era had dogshit cameras.
I have also seen some of my friends play the game, and the weapons BB has looked so fun, of note is the Chikage, which I wanted to use when I played BB, but apparently it's not a good weapon to get on your first run of the game.

Might be worth noting that I gave Little Witch Nobeta a try to see how non Fromsoft Souls-likes are like, I also didn't really go back to it after defeating the first boss.

Then a year or two ago I decided to give Elden Ring a go, being pushed to it by an irl friend.
I rarely get a game and go "Wow I regret buying this", but ER was exactly that.
As usual, I did see a friend stream it in discord or play it while I'm at their house, so it's not that I didn't know what I was into, but I assumed it would be similar to my previous experience with souls games.
 
I picked up a Sorcerer, so my spells are barely better than hitting things with bare fists, my melee weapon is adequate at best, and my base stats were sort of gimped, I leveled up Intelligence to make my spells do more damage and for mobs, they are ok. I leveled up Dexterity as my main source of damage and that was... ok enough, at first.
 
I didn't get to Margit until a couple of hours in, I was wandering around and activating Lost Graces, just to avoid combat.
When I got to Margit, I died a lot but I did have some fun, it didn't feel unfair as much as it felt like my weapon limiting me and my spells barely tickling the boss.
Similar to how my previous Souls attempts went, I stopped playing, until one day I did accept my friends assisting me with the game instead of trying to do everything solo, and we felled Margit but with minimal intervention from my friends, we then got to Godrick and I don't remember much aside from the stairs and the stupid hitboxes.
After Godrick though, my lack of damage was even more apparent in the overworld areas after him, I can't really pick most battles in the world by myself because almost everything there is a group of enemies that notice you when you start attacking one of their group.
They handed me these souls giving item to level up my stats but despite leveling up a fair bit, my damage still felt pitiful and I didn't want to over level. When we called it a day that day, I never really returned to Elden Ring and I don't plan to, I "got" Souls games even less after that. Nightreign however seems to be a much more interesting game in general.
I think you'd need to be a big fan of Dark Souls in the first place to even find fun with ER.
 
This leads us to the past week or two where the same friend that got me to buy ER convinced me to play Dark Souls 3 with seamless co-op in memory of a recently deceased friend who has played the PC Souls games except DS3.
 
And I'm having fun, for change? I'm getting, guided, sure, and I'm not having the full experience by hitting the noob traps, and the bosses seem to get mowed down by playing with more experienced players.
Maybe it's a change in mindset, or maybe I'd only enjoy Souls games co-op.
My issue with DS3 however, is that everything looks the same to me, as in I'd get lost very easily because of how similar everything looks, which is in contrast of what I remember Demon Souls being like.
Not having a map of sorts makes me it difficult to navigate areas in games like these.
 
 

Given my struggles with the other Souls games, the fact that I really like what I've seen from BB's gameplay, the weapons, the fact that you can parry at range, what I've read of the story and lore that makes it very compelling. Are there any tips or ways that I can change my perspective so that when/if I undust my PS4 and my friend's copy of BB, I can have fun? I get that I don't need to like Souls games, but this feels like it'd be my best shot.
 
I don't intend to play it co-op because of both wanting the "full experience" and my PS4 can be modded on its current firmware.

I occasionally watch some travel videos and lately I've been getting a lot of videos of middle east countries on YouTube, I'm just curious why. I know there have been some new developments like the shebara resort and Ain Dubai. but is that the only reason?

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.

Intro

Honestly this is just something i've been ruminating about recently with the new Marathon game on the horizon.

I've consumed a lot of sci fi compared to a normal person, and probably not that much compared to a serious fan. Wolfe, Asimov, Ellison, Sanderson, Card, Strugatsky, Crichton, etc for novels. Blame! jumps to mind for Manga, and I'm sure I could name shows and movies for quite some time even ignoring adaptations and re-tellings.

In general, I like novelty to some extent in my narrative media. Once you've seen enough, you see the patterns, and that can ruin some of the fun. You can have people who just execute a well known narrative perfectly, but it's nice when you stumble across something doing things you haven't seen before, or doing things you'd thought of but hadn't seen executed.

Video games have the potential to do some interesting things, but it's not a surprise that for FPS especially it gravitates to Power Fantasy. "OH GOD EVERYTHING IS WRONG! QUICK HERE'S A SHARP STICK INVADE HELL!" started with Doom (with 2016 actually having some great Pixaresque storytelling itself) and obviously does it well. Being the lone fighter vs hordes is at the bare minimum a fun gameplay loop.

The Games

However there are a shocking number of interesting or well executed plots in the genre as well. I think the big 3 that stand out to me are System Shock (which is sorta cheating as it's also an ImSim), Half-Life, and Marathon (but honorable mentions to both versions of Prey and E.Y.E. and I'm sure I'm forgetting others).

I'm going to skim over System Shock as "oh no the AI has gone crazy and evil" has been done before, and done better (in the same year...by another game on this list). Suffice it to say that Shodan is still a wonderful take on the whole concept. However System Shock does devolve into a larger power fantasy (save the day, stop the bad guy) despite starting as a small and helpless fool.

Half Life, in comparison, you spend most of the time running around doing your best to even figure out what the fuck is going on, and ultimately fail to accomplish much of anything meaningful. The Combine is so soul crushingly vast that even some super fighter like Freeman (which itself has always been odd) amounts to little more than a blip on a dashboard somewhere (as the 2017 spoiled HL3 ending showed...although I can find no working link to that as of right now).

Likewise Marathon, which has some fantastic storytelling in its use of terminals, has you as the objectively broken superhuman slaughtering enemies left right and sideways, and yet you're little more than a Rook or a Bishop for something SO much larger than you, only to find out that it's stumbled upon something even larger than it.

I won't dive into every detail (lots of good ways to do that. Mandalore, Emms, and the classic story website ) but Marathon takes the vastness of space, the standard "what if the AI went nuts/sentient", and so many other tropes and combines them into something quite unique. It's got the feelings of cosmic horror without falling back on "oh look its Lovecraft again" and I wish more games would take notes. Naturally Bungie even then was famous for connecting ALL their lore and that's probably part of it, but I also suspect any payoff for that is long gone after decades of riding the Halo and Destiny "what if heroes shot more bad guys" plan.

The End

With a new Marathon proper finally on the horizon, I'm more optimistic than I should be. Logically I know this is the company that made Destiny and they're still looking to just milk profit out of these things. That said I don't mind it being an extraction shooter or possibly a retelling (or alt telling...) of the Marathon story, and they even seem to understand the vibe that should be underpinning all of it. Either way it had me thinking about just how well the original Marathon and Half Life immersed you into the scale of what you were dealing with by letting you be the badass you are in just about every other game, and having it basically not matter. Either because your deeds accomplished nothing in the scheme of things or because your agency is utterly denied.

I think what really drew me to these games was finally seeing the idea of something like Lovecraft without the literally copy paste of the small port town and the tentacled cthulu monsters. I'd love to know what other games really stood out to people when it comes to SciFi and/or Cosmic Horror specifically. Or if you just agree/disagree on the ones I've rambled about.

So I recently put out a custom map for Beat Saber that I had started work on when the internet was cut for 14 days 20 days in Iran to pass the time.

Gameplay video of the map, Odysseus from Epic The Musical

Everyone I sent it to enjoyed it a lot and I got the happiness that I needed.
One of them recommended to send it over to some twitch streamers as well because some of them have a bot that lets you recommend maps.

I've never used twitch, I found a steamer, made an account, sent it in the chat and had my chat at messages tts'd in the stream. It was absolutely lovely seeing their reaction and it had made my night.

Then I noticed that my 'thank you!' messages didn't tts, huh weird. After watching them for a bit longer I thought maybe I'll send some other stuff I've made their way too. Aaand it didn't send, the chat message sent but the bot response didn't come, a bunch of testing later I found i was shadow banned.

A bit more searching and I found that VPNs are the cause. So changed from TOR to Express and tried again, no dice.
Made a new account with Express and tried and success! But only for 4 messages total, then shadow banned again.

I got a friend's dedicated v2ray server and tried with a new account and my messages were sent again. So I went to a bigger streamer who was also doing the map requests and sent my map... Only to see I'm shadow banned again.

At this point the joy I had felt from seeing others enjoy what I made was gone, replaced by a familiar sadness, the same type of sadness I had gotten when the internet was cut and essentially a one way communication not too long ago.

It's a pain. these sites don't load without VPNs, I had already spent a whole hour trying different VPNs to get the 7mb map to upload to the site (and experienced like 30 errors in the process), then had to try out a bunch more to get the file to upload in Discord (with a bunch of VPNs I can only send messages, files don't upload), and then I experienced the happiness that came from seeing a live reaction and wanting to experience it more, only to have it wiped away.

I want to start work on the next project, i have so much in my mind that i want to put out into the world, but it takes time to switch back to the mentality of "I'm making this for myself and others may never see it" that I had to adopt to get back to creating.

Edit: seems a whole week has been removed from my memory, the outage wasn't two weeks

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like discord, mastercard and captcha. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was scratching their noggin.

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!

Happy February readers. This month we are reading The Truth by Terry Pratchett. This one focuses on the newspaper business of Ankh Morpork and Pratchett himself had worked as a journalist.

Have you found the book? Have you started? Do you plan to join us this month?

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.

Experiences, past or present? Age, medical, genetic, no reason? Anything worked for you or a waste of time / money ? What works, what doesnt, or just acceptance?

Intended for open discussion for everyone interested

I am currently reading my way thru Ted Chiang's guest column in the New Yorker, about why the predicted AI/Tech Singularity will probably never happen (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/why-computers-wont-make-themselves-smarter). ETA: I just noticed that article is almost 5 years old; the piece is still relevant, but worth noting.

Good read. Still reading, but so far, I find I disagree with his explicit arguments, but at the same time, he is also brushing up very closely to my own reasoning for why "it" might never happen. Regardless, it is thought-provoking.

But, I had a passing thought during the reading.

People who actually use LLMs like Claude Code to help write software, and/or, who pay close attention to LLMs' coding capabilities ... has anyone actually started experimenting with asking Claude Code or other LLMs that are designed for programming, to look at their own source code and help to improve it?

In other words, are we (the humans) already starting to use LLMs to improve their code faster than we humans alone could do?

Wouldn't this be the actual start of the predicted "intelligence explosion"?

Edit to add: To clarify, I am not (necessarily) suggesting that LLMs -- this particular round of AI -- will actually advance to become some kind of true supra-human AGI ... I am only suggesting that they may be the first real tool we've built (beyond Moore's Law itself) that might legitimately speed up the rate at which we approach the Singularity (whatever that ends up meaning).

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like nuclear power, animalist and pivot. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was perplexed.

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!

Preemtively this is not about Linux but it does serve as a basic example of a low effort, low cost switch that I personally consider ultimately beneficial long term. Not even necessarily for itself but how it captures the pre Windows 10 mindset of sw being the tool for the user.

The old joke of in Russia the television watches you is relevant here. On multiple levels.

Other and an even easier thing to do would be to switch from Chrome to Firefox as an unideal alternative still but with less default problems and better options to possibly switch to later.

These are only examples and are not important by themselves. What is important, is how these attitudes enable ever less effort and attention to be placed on the end user in mainstream sw.

A lot of the time whenever there is any mention of switching to Linux there is a lot of talk about how you cannot expect normal people to want to follow even the basic steps and possible but unlikely troubleshooting needed to get it to work. Where society is concerned opinion is reality. The sw and hw are magic black boxes that cannot be understood so the consensus is to avoid trying to understand even the superficial basics that would be considered trivial even a decade before.

Neither it is likely to change closer to the ideal of just working than it already is without further adoption. It is not a problem of Linux but of insufficient support by third parties creating edge cases.

I admit that it is unlikely this changes. There is no societal acceptance for it and arguably more important for the individual topics of financial literacy, basic involvement in governance or medical awareness have abysmally low knowledge levels generally.

Voting is the most basic, least effort way to have some effect and yet two thirds turn out is usually considered large.

I happened across Veronica Roth's blog post via GoodReads about a book tour for her upcoming book Seek the Traitor's Son. She'll be visiting various places around the US and UK. I can't say I've ever really thought about going to a book signing or a book tour, but recently I've been thinking it would be a nice change of pace to go to an event like this and support an author or other creative this way. Roth is not first on my list, but it did get me thinking about how to find other events and hopefully get my hands on some cool merch as well.

Do you know of any creatives (but mostly authors, since this is ~books) who are doing tours this year? How do you keep informed about dates of book tours and festivals?

Dear Tildes Team:

I've been a long-time Reddit user, but lately it's been feeling more
and more like Facebook. Suggested posts, hidden comments, and the
subreddits I actually subscribe to are buried under irrelevant
algo-suggested junk. The concept of Reddit is great, but its execution
is done by a public corporation nowadays and its enshittification has
been notable.

I've been looking for a simpler, less commercialized place:
chronological, user-curated feeds, thoughtful discussions as opposed
to endless low-effort memes, and in general, absence of corporate
nonsense to push engagement metrics and ads.

Tildes seems to fit the bill. I like its focus on quality over
quantity, clean and simple interface, and eemphasis on real
conversations. It seems it's the kind of place I'd actually enjoy
spending time on again.

I'd really appreciate an invite if there's any room. I am also ready
to answer any questions or provide whatever info you need.

Thanks for keeping a corner of the internet sane.

Best Regards,

I just remembered this site from a few years back, maybe during Covid times? Clearly at some point the decision to delete my account history was made...

The state of the internet now makes me so deeply anxious. Scrolling Instagram makes my head feel like sludge. I stopped using reddit about 7 years ago. Never really found my crowd on IRC. So back here I am, hoping to find some signal in the noise and to calm my mind.

Has anything changed much here? What should I check out?

When I mean underrated I mean underrated. Few self-imposed rules on this: no movies that had big award nominations and no movies that have above a 60% on RT.

1. Amsterdam (2022)

Directed by David O. Russell, this movie never had a chance. Post-metoo O. Russell is persona non grata. However, this film continue his trajectory that he had with the Jennifer Lawrence trilogy (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, and Joy). Which analyze American perseverance in the face of hopelessness.

The main characters here played by Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington are all a found family of outsiders who don’t fit anywhere else but with each other.

The film was savaged by film critics, earning a 31% on RottenTomatoes. In spite of film critics having their knives out for O. Russell, it is one of the most prescient films of the decade about the rise of fascism in the U.S. And contains perhaps the best performance of Margot Robbie’s career.

2. A Rainy Day in New York (2020)

Originally scheduled for release in 2018 by Amazon, as part of their now rescinded deal with Woody Allen, the film was shelved for close to two years before becoming widely available during the pandemic.

The last Hollywood film Allen ever made stars Timothee Chalamet, Selena Gomez, Elle Fanning, Jude Law, Liev Schreiber, and Diego Luna.

Once again, in a post-Metoo landscape, the film received a 47% on RottenTomatoes. One imagines that if this released prior to 2017 it would receive similar positive notices to Allen’s first Amazon film Cafe Society.

The film plays sweet and comforting, like much of Allen’s work. Chalamet makes an excellent Woody replacement (makes you wonder how many films they would have done together under different circumstances). And the chemistry between Chalamet and Gomez is wonderful, it is also probably the best performance Gomez will ever give.

3. The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)

On the topic of vengeful film critics, Peter Farrelly’s follow up to his Best Picture winner Green Book received a 43% on RottenTomatoes. Critics were not-so-subtlety punishing Farrelly for beating the critical darling Roma for the industry’s top prize.

It’s a beautifully shot Vietnam war drama with an incredibly layered and empathetic performance from Zac Efron. It blends comedy and drama much like its predecessor Jojo Rabbit. It’s never boring and gets criticized for “insensitivity” for whatever reason.

4. Cry Macho (2021)

Likely to be Clint Eastwood’s final lead performance, Cry Macho received a 57% on RottenTomatoes.

The film sees Eastwood do what he does best. Deconstruct masculinity through the lens of Americana, with the added element of the impending death that comes with old age.

The type of crowd-pleaser Eastwood specialized in and which was broadly better received thirty years ago.

5. The Strangers: Chapter Two (2025)

A bizarre follow up to the near shot for shot remake that was The Stranger: Chapter One. The film throws you off completely from any expectations you might have had for a horror sequel.

The lowest rated of these films at 15% on RT, it’s an energetic chase film that doesn’t let down and somehow tries to also be The Revenant. Gonzo choices are made here that somehow work as pure entertainment. And it’s anchored by a genuinely good performance by Madeline Petsch. It will be a cult classic with horror fans in a few years.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like alex pretti, anti ice and youtubers. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was bemused.

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!

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 the fifteenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing A House with Good Bones by T Kingfisher. Our next book will be the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride at the end of July.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

After deciding to get back into the gym after a long hiatus, I was shopping around my area and trying to decide between Crunch or LA Fitness, each for about $40/mo, plus steep initiation fees and annual fees. Searching for a way to get a discounted rate, I stumbled across One Pass Select, offered by my health insurer, United Healthcare. While I was fully prepared to dunk on United, because of how often Dr. Glaucomflecken does, this particular member benefit turned out to be pretty great.

One Pass Select essentially functions as a gym aggregator, offering multiple memberships for one flat rate. So rather than paying Crunch or LA Fitness $40/mo and being subjected to their terms/conditions, I pay One Pass Select $36/mo and get access to:

• Crunch
• LA Fitness
• Anytime Fitness
• Workout Anytime

And a handful of other gyms I haven't signed up for, because they're not convenient to me. Four gym memberships for $36/mo is pretty cool. Plus if I ever want to cancel, I just cancel my One Pass Select membership from their website, instead of having to sacrifice a squirrel on the 8th day of the sabbath under a blood moon while chanting gregorian monk (the level of difficulty it felt like the last time I wanted to cancel a gym membership).

A quick Google indicates that other insurers offer similar programs:

• UHC has One Pass Select
• Cigna/BCBS/Kaiser have Active&Fit Direct
• BCBS also has Fitness Your Way
• Aetna has GlobalFit

This was a great find for me, that I'd never even heard of before. Sharing it to hopefully benefit someone else, as well!

I’m a software engineer. I graduated in 2021 so I’ve only been one for around 4.5 years and definitely still feel fairly entry-level (at least, any time I look at jobs, the number of years of experience required for “senior” positions seems to have increased by one) and it feels like companies don’t particularly want anyone without a lot of experience anymore (and every time I do look at new jobs, the number of years required for “senior” positions seems to have increased by one). Meanwhile, I think it has its uses but I don’t actually enjoy using it. I want to solve problems and think and write code, not talk to an AI and become a full-time code-reviewer. My company is rebranding to have AI in the name shortly and, since early December, have been forcing us into 2+ hour long AI trainings once or twice a week. A lot of my coworkers seem like they’ve drank the Kool-Aid and are talking about new models and shit all the time and I just don’t get it.

I guess I’m kind of rambling but I just feel weird about all of it. I want to program but I don’t just want to use (or be forced to use) LLMs for everything, yet it seems like companies are just trying to get rid of actually human software engineers as fast as they can. I’ll even admit, Claude is way better than I expected, but I don’t actually enjoy sitting there typing “do this for me” and then having to just spend time reviewing code. I don’t know. I don’t think this is really even me asking for advice, just a rant, but yeah, just felt like I had to get something out there, I guess.

Thought I'd share, especially while many of us are still waiting for Formula 1.

Schedule, starting grid, and other info.

Starts today at 1:40p EST (18:40 UTC). Literally just started as of this post.

In the US, I think it's on Peacock and NBC. Internationally (or with a VPN...) it can be viewed on YouTube.

I don't watch a lot of endurance racing, but I do try to watch the 24hr races like Spa and Le Mans. I've yet to stay up a whole 24hrs, and I doubt this year's Rolex 24 will be different for me, but it's a fun little challenge!

I’m reading Stephen Kings The Dark Tower series and I’m on Wizard and Glass, and I absolutely hate it. I’m half way through now and I’m wondering if I should skip the book and read the Wikipedia page because it’s just making me angry.

I like the rest of the series and really want to see where it ends up but this book is awful, it started out good with the riddle contest but the flashback with Susan I hate every single part of and it’s making me shout at the book angry. I’m halfway through now and I can tell there is a lot being set up for a big battle and a crazy ending, but I can’t stand whatever you want to call what’s happening with Susan, her aunt, and the mayor. Should I power through or call it?

EDIT: Just called it, got to Part 3: Chapter 3. Really needed a good editor, if they cut out the sexual stuff, it could’ve been a good book, but I’m getting to physically angry to keep reading this. It’s awful. I’m going to tell myself it has a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ending where everyone gets tormented.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like bubbles.ai, transgender and world economic forum. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was befuddled.

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!

My special interest of late has been something called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction the TL;DR is:

1. One of, if not the, most missing piece of quantum mechanics is answering the question "what is measurement"? You've probably heard of things like the double slit experiment which lead to weird things like quantum erasure where one can seemingly cause a photon to retroactively determine which path to take. Spooky stuff! However, these experiments all follow the basic idea of "when something is entangled, it follows probabilistic rules defined by the schrodinger equation, then a 'measurement' happens, and the entanglement 'collapses' and only a single, 'real' value is well defined"
2. Roger Penrose, a nobel prize winning physicist, has, since the 1980s been arguing that because entanglement implies that a particle exists in two places at once prior to measure that this places gravitational pressure on the fabric of spacetime in two places at once and that measurement is a gravitational event where spacetime "heals" itself by collapsing the wave form, and making it so the particle is finally only in one place.
   Penrose further expanded this, to enormous controversy, that consciousess itself is a measurement event. He wrote a book, "The Emperor's New Mind" then a follow-up "Shadows of the Mind", neither of which I've read, but have had summarized to further develop these arguments.
3. This was, for lack of a better term, a crackpot theory. There wasn't anything testable or falsifiable so it was brushed aside. Crucially, to the point it gets its own paragraph,
   The overwhelming opinion of the physics community, to this day, believes that quantum coherence is not possible in "wet, warm, noisy" environments like the brain.
   It is, to this day, believed that, the quantum world is a thing that happens only at extremely small scales, and that's why quantum computers all start with the assumption of cooling the material to near absolute zero with as few additional perturbations as possible.
4. However, there were 2 findings I find extremely motivating to combat this assertion. First, leaves. Leaves are quantum objects and photosynthesis is too efficient to be explained by classical mechanics alone: https://berkeleysciencereview.com/article/2021/11/30/plants-do-the-wave/ Second, birds. Birds that use the magnetosphere for orientation do so by becoming quantumly coherent with the ions in the magnetophere using a protein in their eyes so they literally see the earth's magnetic field using the blue cones of their eyes https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/birds-are-real-and-so-is-quantum-physics/
5. Enter Stuart Hameroff. Hameroff was a working anesthesiology for some 20 odd years. He read The Emperor's New Mind and reached out to Penrose. He, of course, was very intimately aware of the deep biological processes that make the different between a conscious, aware, thinking human being, and a piece of meat that can be safely operated on. He believed that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule structures in the neurons were responsible for consciousness.
   After further research, they both began to believe that these microtubule structures in human neurons were capable of what others believed were impossible.
   Quantum coherence in a wet, warm, noisy environment.
6. This was still crackpottery until quite literally (IMO) last year. A group of biological researchers showed experimentally that the exact networks of tryptophan microtubule structures in neurons do exhibit super radiance (the same kind of quantum coherence leaves show) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936

To me, this is the most exciting piece of science I think I've seen in my life. The implication is that human (and other) consciousnesses are literally a byproduct of our ability to maintain and calculate quantum states in a wet, warm, noisy environment. It feels like a genuine push for us to finally move past the age of information, past the age of computation, and into the age of consciousness.

Another aspect of this is I really, deeply, believe that the substrate necessary for AGI is either necessarily biological, or, at the very least, can only be done efficiently in a biological substrate. Notably, a human brain takes 20 watts to exhibit generalized intelligence. No nuclear reactors running data centers, just a Twix bar. This last bit I honestly leave mostly as a point of discussion, because there's an enormous amount of interesting implications and avenues thereof.

What y'all Tildeans make of this? Anyone else been thinking about this kind of stuff?

Just curious if anyone other Tildes users out there are fans of the Dresden Files novels and might have read the latest, Twelve Months. It just released a few days ago and I just couldn't put it down.

I do want to keep my review spoiler free, but I think this is the best book in the series in awhile.

Wondering if anyone else had thoughts!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like business, comics.newspaper and hacktivism. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was curious.

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!

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.

I may be in the minority on Tildes who still watches cable news. My mom is the one who puts it on and I'll usually ignore/forget about it when I'm home alone, but I find it's a good way to keep track of major headlines. Also, our usual choice of national news, ABC with David Muir, tends to end every broadcast with some feel-good story which is just... really appreciated in these times. (Though tonight they played a soundbite of Martin Luther King Jr.'s final Sunday sermon, and the choice of that particular soundbite feels very pointed.)

A couple months ago YoutubeTV and Disney got into a contract disagreement though, so ABC was removed from the lineup for a bit. For a while we watched CBS News, and... Something about it just genuinely stressed me out. Of course the news is very stressful lately, but usually I can deal with it. At worst, I leave the room for certain stories that make me particularly angry.

Something about CBS just left me really agitated and stressed though. I can't say what it was exactly, maybe the delivery, or a heavy focus on the worst parts of US politics? All I know is every night I was getting increasingly worked up, the way I only ever did with the most absolutely infuriating news stories, until we switched to NBC until ABC returned to air.

This came to mind again after my mom put on CBS last night since ABC was starting late due to some sports program. It agitated me until I just snapped.

So my question: does anyone else find CBS particularly stressful compared to other cable news? If so, does anyone have any ideas on why that is? And are there any regular watchers who've noticed a shift in tone? I never really watched CBS before, but I'm wondering if maybe it's somehow tied to Bari Weiss's influence given the stuff with 60 Minutes.

Picture

• One Battle After Another
• Sinners
• Hamnet
• Sentimental Value
• Marty Supreme
• Frankenstein
• Train Dreams
• Bugonia
• F1
• The Secret Agent

Director

• Paul Thomas Anderson - One Battle After Another
• Ryan Coogler - Sinners
• Josh Safdie - Marty Supreme
• Joachim Trier - Sentimental Value
• Guillermo del Toro - Frankenstein

Original Screenplay

• Sinners
• Sentimental Value
• Marty Supreme
• Weapons
• The Secret Agent

Adapted Screenplay

• One Battle After Another
• Hamnet
• Bugonia
• Frankenstein
• Train Dreams

Lead Actress

• Jessie Buckley - Hamnet
• Rose Byrne - If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
• Renate Reinsve - Sentimental Value
• Chase Infiniti - One Battle After Another
• Emma Stone - Bugonia

Lead Actor

• Timothee Chalamet - Marty Supreme
• Leonardo DiCaprio - One Battle After Another
• Michael B Jordan - Sinners
• Wagner Moura - The Secret Agent
• Jesse Plemons - Bugonia

Supporting Actress

• Teyana Taylor - One Battle After Another
• Amy Madigan - Weapons
• Odessa A'zion - Marty Supreme
• Wumni Mosaku - Sinners
• Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas - Sentimental Value

Supporting Actor

• Benicio Del Toro - One Battle After Another
• Stellan Skarsgard - Sentimental Value
• Jacob Elordi - Frankenstein
• Sean Penn - One Battle After Another
• Paul Mescal - Hamnet

Casting

• Sinners
• One Battle After Another
• Hamnet
• Marty Supreme
• Frankenstein

Cinematography

• Sinners
• One Battle After Another
• Frankenstein
• Marty Supreme
• Train Dreams

Costume Design

• Frankenstein
• Sinners
• Wicked: For Good
• Hamnet
• Marty Supreme

Film Editing

• One Battle After Another
• Sinners
• Marty Supreme
• F1
• Frankenstein

Makeup and Hairstyling

• Frankenstein
• Wicked: For Good
• Sinners
• The Smashing Machine
• One Battle After Another

Production Design

• Frankenstein
• Wicked: For Good
• Sinners
• Hamnet
• Marty Supreme

Original Score

• Sinners
• One Battle After Another
• Frankenstein
• Marty Supreme
• F1

Original Song

• "Golden" from KPop Demon Hunters
• "I Lied To You" from Sinners
• "The Girl in the Bubble" from Wicked: For Good
• "Dear Me" from Diane Warren: Relentless
• "Drive" from F1

Sound

• F1
• Sinners
• Avatar: Fire and Ash
• One Battle After Another
• Frankenstein

Visual Effects

• Avatar: Fire and Ash
• Frankenstein
• Superman
• F1
• The Lost Bus

Animated Feature

• KPop Demon Hunters
• Zootopia 2
• Arco
• Elio
• Little Amelie or the Character of Rain

Documentary Feature

• The Perfect Neighbor
• 2000 Meters to Andriivka
• The Alabama Solution
• Cover-Up
• Apocalypse in the Tropics

International Film

• The Secret Agent
• Sentimental Value
• It Was Just an Accident
• No Other Choice
• Sirat

With CES 2026 coming to a close, I figured that like last year, I should make a thread to see what people are excited (or not excited) for.

I honestly wasn't that excited (see recent state of US economy) but I want to your thoughts!

Previous Topics:

Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've had in maybe five years
I didn't post in the thread as I didn't have much to add, the top post by @Oxalis basically sums up my thoughts

Nice to see them be honest about how this isn't really panning out. Everyone wants AI except the consumer.

Clicks Communicator: the ultimate communication companion
Again didn't post in here but I'm glad there is a still a market for niche phone.

The first ep. got its own thread on Tildes and a decent discussion, I figured I'd try to get one going for whole season. Since it finished airing like 2 weeks ago.

I binged S1 yesterday, and am very happy that I waited till all episodes were out, as the pace of the show is glacial and I would've likely lost interest were I not able to skip around a bit. That's one of my two major issues. The other being that I found Carol insufferable at moments in the show. I think it does a good job at humanizing her and explaining why she is the way she is. It's also important to note that a majority of the show plays out days after Carol's wife Helen dies and she's reeling from that loss, as well as losing everyone else too. For me this culminated in ep 6, when she has a conversation with another survivor after having uncovered that they process human corpses into protein powder, and she thinks it's a big reveal that everyone else already knows. She just wasn't told because she's made everyone not like her.

That being said, the premise of this show is excellent and I love the questions it makes me ask and think about. The way it's shot is also fantastic. Yes, all of humanity is in a blissful state, but most of us would also die due to starvation, but there's no murder, no robbings, but it's also clear that this blissful state is more akin to being happy because you're on drugs, not "true happiness". I think this was most evident in the scene when the Peruvian girl turned willingly. Just before she does, she's shown with a lamb on her lap, which she likes and pets. The moment she turns, she just walks off, leaving the lamb behind. Obviously also all expressions of individualism are gone, this means all art, plus the question hasn't been properly answered on what exactly the Others do when they don't have someone around to make happy. I guess work together as a collective on sending the signal onto the next planet.

I think the big answer is going to be when they hopefully break someone out of the hivemind in S2. I just hope that it won't be the season finale, but sooner. I dislike the trend of prestige television being at such a slow pace.

What do you guys think? Both the smart writing and the pacing issues seem to be the main two things i see mentioned online. Anything else you liked or disliked? Any theories on where it'll go?

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.

In this edition of the Good News thread, I'd love it if folks shared not just a positive news story, but perhaps a video, article, story, something that can function as a happy moment, a chill vibe, a memory that makes you smile. We're all just trying to deal with the world, so if you cannot find joy in current events, consider sharing something else joyful.

For this thread, even if something happy also reveals the sadness at the heart of the world, we're going to focus on the joy here. (Posting in misc due to the extended ask this time)

So what did everyone think of the finale?