What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

I recently finished The Crippled God and loved the book and the entire series. I'm already looking forward to a reread through the series to notice new things and see how events play out from the perspective gained after finishing the series.

I'm still trying to get my thoughts in order for this whole series, but I had some questions that I thought would be interesting to hear from people here after talking about it a bit with my coworker.

What were some of your favorite characters?
Favorite moments?
What did you not see coming?
How did you feel about the perspective shift on the Crippled God as the series progressed?
Have you reread the series, and did you enjoy it more during an additional read?
Anything else fun you'd like to talk about for these books

Please note, this is a discussion of the 10 Malazan Book of the Fallen novels. I've yet to delve in to the rest of the Malazan series, and I am taking a break before I start on the Novels of the Malazan Empire series.

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.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with different desktop monitor setups, primarily for productivity-focused work as a systems engineer (coding, writing docs, Slack, email, terminals, etc.). Over the past few years, I’ve rotated through:
• 3× 24” 1080p monitors
• 2× 24” 1080p monitors + laptop display
• 1× 32” 4K monitor + laptop display
• 1× 32” 4K monitor
• Laptop display only (on a stand)

Surprisingly, I’ve found that I feel the most focused and productive when I use only my laptop display and rely on Alt-Tab to switch between apps.

With larger monitors or multiple displays I start to feel scattered. It almost turns into sensory overload, and my focus drops off.

Has anyone else experienced this? Do you find that larger or multiple monitors decrease your productivity? What setup works best for you?

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?

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 was never a wordle fanatic, but I am hooked on this Alphable game now https://geoffpevlin.com/games/alphable/. I also play https://cluesbysam.com/.

Do people know of other web-based (hopefully free) logic puzzles like these? I like the daily format, but wouldn't limit myself to that if there are others that are also interesting.

I've done all of the https://www.rustylake.com/ games too, which I quite enjoyed, but these types of puzzles require a little bit more time investment that I don't really have right now. (I also hated that some of the "logic" in those games did not seem to make sense to me, and I'd have to google the answer to continue with the game.)

I also like https://timeguessr.com/ but don't return to that one as frequently because I can't play it on my phone.

I really like in-person escape games but they are expensive and vary drastically in quality, so was very happy to find these types of games scratch that same itch.

The rules are as follows:

• If you can lift an object above your head unassisted, you can put it into your inventory.
• There is no limit in the total quantity, volume or weight of objects in your inventory.
• You can immediately store or produce a stored item to and from your inventory at will.
• Objects will remain in their original state when stored in an inventory. From their perspective, no time has passed.

Basically, where do you go online or on your phone when you just need a distraction and don't have the energy or mental bandwidth to read something in-depth? Games and apps are okay, too.

I appreciate the community and the quality of discussions that are had here on Tildes, but sometimes, I just want to veg. I basically want to scroll through a large supply of pictures, memes, short-form videos, but without the toxicity and manipulation that comes with the main social media platforms. I don't think I need to create a whole list, I think we all know what the main social media sites are to avoid.

And I also want to distinguish this topic from other "where do you get your news from" or "what are some interesting feeds you're subscribed to" topics. I'm looking for easily digestible and mostly positive/happy/funny things to consume. Where do you regularly turn to when you just want a distraction?

For me, the biggest is definitely Modern Baseball.

To set the scene, it's 2016, I was in high school, and a girl I was friends with told me about this band Modern Baseball. I liked them a lot, but I wasn't quite at my peak emo phase (that would come about a year later during my freshman year in college lol), so I didn't get super into them or anything. Anyways, a few months after that, MoBo came through our city on tour and that girl and one of our other friends literally offered to pay for my ticket to the concert if I DDed for them... and I said no.

Fast forward like 7 months and Modern Baseball goes on hiatus in early 2017, a hiatus that continues to this day, though they played a few one-off shows throughout 2017. Anyways, fall 2017 comes around and I listened to Modern Baseball more and realized I really liked them... but they're on hiatus and I missed my chance to see them!

Anyways, I mostly made this thread because the fact that I turned down going to that concert is something I still think about from time-to-time and I wish I went, but I'd love to hear if anyone else has similar stories or just stories of bands you wish you could have seen.

This is the first Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twentyfirst overall. We are discussing Fire on the Mountain by Bissen. At the end of February we will discuss The Truth by Terry Pratchett.

This is the first time that I as your coordinator have not finished the book myself. It was not my cup of tea and I might or might not add my impressions to the discussion.

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.

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.

Steam Next Fest is currently underway, lasting until March 2nd. Coincidentally, I had just been thinking a little while ago that I kinda miss game demos. About a month ago I came across a little twin-stick shooter called Minishoot' Adventures and ended up paying it more attention than any other random game I see that looks kinda cool, because they had a demo available. I installed it, played it for a couple hours, and instantly bought the full game once I was done. It's quite a good game, but they got my money primarily because the demo was able to hook me into making an impulse purchase, totally defeating my usual standard of decision-making about buying games.

For Next Fest, Steam is recommending me a deluge of indie 2D platformers and metroidvanias, and I'm not sure if that's because those are the games in development that tend to have demos or if Steam thinks that's all I'm interested in (spoiler - I'm not). So, have you discovered any truly noteworthy upcoming games in this year's Next Fest? Also, what was the last demo to win you over?

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.

Let me start off by saying that I'm exhausted by AI hype. Being interested in LLM agent technology (AI agent hereafter for brevity) means skimming over a lot of hype for one or two useful, semi reality based, bits of information. Maybe the part that I find the most frustrating is how effective the hype is. I don't know if there's ever been a hype cycle like this. Probably a big part of the reason for that is the internet has already proven, within living memory for most people, that technological revolutions really can change everything. Or mess everything up. Either way they generate a lot of economic activity.

So this post is not that. I'm not going to tell you about how AI agents are the second coming for Christ. I'm not selling anything.

Fairly early into learning about AI agents I wanted a way to connect to the agent remotely without hosting it somewhere or exposing ports to the internet. I settled on tailscale and a remote terminal and moved on, I rarely used it. Somehow the tiny friction of "Turn on tailscale, open terminal app, connect, run agent" was enough to make it not feel worth it.

I know I'm far from the only person who had the same "I want it remote" thought, the best evidence: OpenClaw. It's just one of those things that everyone naturally converges on.

If you're not familiar with OpenClaw, the TLDR is: Former founder with more money than he'll ever need vibecodes a bridge between instant messenger apps and LLM APIs. Nothing about it is technically challenging or requires solving any particularly hard problems. It almost immediately becomes the fastest growing GitHub repo of all time and is currently at number 14 for number of stars. It blew up the (tech) internet like very few things ever have. Within months he was hired by Open AI.

OpenClaw now does more than just connect messaging and agents, but I believe that one piece is the killer feature. My tailscale terminal solution, combined with a scheduled task or a cron job and some context files could already do all of the things that OpenClaw can do, and countless people had already implemented similar solutions. But I think it was the tiny bit of friction OpenClaw removed that was responsible for a lot its popularity.

I thought that was interesting but I have no interest in the security nightmare that is OpenClaw, or the "sentience" vibe for that matter, so I built my own tool.

Essentially it's just a light secondary harness combined with a bridge between Signal and Claude Code. It does some other things too, things I wished existing harnesses did, some memory and guidelines, automated prompts and reminders to wake the agent up and have it do stuff, some context to give the agent some level of persistence, make it less LLMy, less annoying. None of that is particularly interesting though.

Once I got it working (MVP took less than a day) and started playing with it, the OpenClaw phenomenon made a lot more sense. Somehow having the agent in a chat interface, with almost zero friction (just open the chat and send something) was cooler than it had any reason to be.

I can't explain it any better than that at the moment. Not only was it kinda fun, it lent itself to a whole range of "what ifs". What if it could do X? What if I wrote a tool that gave it Y capability? I've been experiencing that for some time, but somehow agent in your pocket has a different feeling.

Here's an example of a "what if". What if it could do our grocery shopping? I definitely want that. I already had a custom browser tool that I built for agent coding assistance so I was most of the way there. It was just a matter of teaching the agent to login and navigate a website, something they're already trained to do. Some hand holding, a few helper scripts, and an evening's worth of hours later and I had it working. The agent can respond to a shopping request by building a shopping list based on our most recent orders, presenting it to us for approval/edits in a Signal group chat, doing searches for any additional product requests and adding the finalized order to the cart. It could also checkout the order and schedule the delivery time but I'm doing the last 2 clicks manually for the time being. It's an idiot savant, it seems like a bad idea to give it access to my credit card. Maybe eventually.

The fact that I can handle shopping with a couple of signal messages feels effortless in a way that handling shopping by connecting to my PC terminal remotely via tailscale terminal wouldn't have. Especially when I can include people in the loop who have no interest in tailscaling anywhere. Everyone can use messaging apps.

I imagine before long solutions like this will be built in, either in the grocery websites and apps, or into the frontier harnesses themselves. There will probably be agents everywhere, for better or worse. Probably I'll wish that the agents would all fuck off. In the meantime it's exciting how easy it is to get these tools to do useful things.

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.

There's a lot of stories of people getting off caffeine and documenting the changes and benefits they experienced. But I'm wondering if anyone has gotten on caffeine as an adult and could share what benefits, if any, they gained. For reference, I've never consumed much caffeine and have been debating doing so. In terms of actual work and school, I've never found the need. But, I'm generally a bit lethargic/slow paced by nature (have trouble getting up in the morning, inefficient with my time especially when I don't have much going on) and maybe a light jolt and ritual in the morning would be worthwhile.

Hi friends,

Given the current state of AI and other technologies, do you consider higher education to still be worth pursuing? For those of you with children, will you be advising them to go to college?

I’m asking because I am enrolled in a masters program for statistics and have ~2 years left. I’m concerned that by the time I’m finished, the degree won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on. Like many of you, I work in software. Some days I think I should be learning an entirely different skill set in a non tech related field to diversify my value instead of doubling down on a potentially dying field.

I am not really interested in “you should pursue education for the sake of education”. While this is probably true, at the end of the day I need a way to make money to survive and education is the historical way of increasing one’s value in the job market. Furthermore, I can educate myself for far cheaper if education from a university is no longer considered valuable.

Anyone else in the same boat? Am I being dramatic? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like liberation, archive today and spaces.third. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was at a loss.

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!

On Monday I was in my local mall and there was one of those gem / crystal shops. I have no idea how these people make rent and salaries, so I figured I'd take a little look around.

I ask the dude for a stone to make me happy and he gives me a few options then suggests this other luck / wealth one; $3! Well, me, being a genius, bought both and immediately bought a lottery ticket.

Wednesday rolls around and I just checked the numbers. After nearly 20 years of never winning anything more than a buck or a free ticket, I won $108 (4 8 15 16 23 42 oh my!)

If we ever do a meet up, I'm gonna be 30lbs heavier with all the rocks in my pocket. I really need a stone for tagging this nonsense post...

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

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

This is the ninth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing The City We Became by N K Jemisin. Our next book will be Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson at the end of January.

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.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Eagleson's Law states

"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else."

I keep reading how fewer and fewer of the brightest developers are writing code and letting their AI agent to do it all. How do they know what's really happening? Does it matter anymore?

Curious to hear this communities thoughts

Studios these days tend to make a lot of movies reusing existing IPs because that's what they know will sell.

You have the "new entry in a long running franchise" kinda IP utilizing movies, like say Alien Romulus or the latest MCU film.

Then you have the "legacy sequel" and "remake", when there might have been only 1-3 original movies, and they bring it back 15+ years later. These are often called "cash grabs", "disrespectful to the original", "unaware of what made the first one good", or something similar. Other times, though, they can be genuinely good, if not better than the first one in some ways.

The Naked Gun (2025) is the one that inspired this post. I went in without any expectations, and I thought it was a great time. They had some really good jokes about life in the 2020s (such as Tesla door handles being death traps, for example) that I thought were delivered very well. Also, since the genre of parody movies in the style of The Naked Gun or Airplane essentially died off, having a new one felt actually necessary unlike many phoned-in legacy sequels.

Another example that comes to mind is Blade Runner 2049. Before it came out, the idea of a Blade Runner 2 was so ridiculous, I believe it was a throwaway South Park gag. People assumed that if it ever came out, it'd be a cash grab. But it ended up being so good, I've heard people argue in places like Tildes that it's better than the original.

The third example I can think of is Top Gun: Maverick. Ever since it's release I've see a lot of people online sing its praises whenever it's come up. In fact, there is a night-and-day difference in the Rotten Tomatoes score for the two films, with the original having a 59% and the legacy sequel having a 96%.

Can you think of any other legacy sequels or remakes that hold a candle to the original film(s), or surpass them? Bonus points if it's one nobody expected to be good until it released.

I have probably a 1/4 of a roll of filament that slid off a roll when I swapped it between a Bambu reusable spool holder. It's been on my floor for a couple months and I have not found any way of getting this back onto a spool, either by trial and error or by finding a good resource online.

All the videos I see are people with tangles on spools, and this would be nice if I was in this situation but I am not.

Any time I try to do this it's just so challenging to get any sort of rhythm or easy process with our ruining the entire thing.

Any advice?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

Tildes links take about a minute to open on iOS Safari. Firefox Focus by comparison (again, iOS) has no issues.

I've tried clearing the cache/data for Tildes in the Safari settings. It may have helped initially but the problem persists.

Given some other very strong and interesting discussion on male loneliness recently (I'm intentionally not linking to avoid adding to drama or bringing that tension here), I thought I'd try and spark a discussion on what I see as a major problem that addresses male loneliness significantly without digging into the thorniness of gender norms and responsibilities: the death of third spaces.

There has been a decent amount of writing on the fact that third spaces - spaces that are not home or work where people can meet, hang out and build community - have been disappearing since at least the 90s (and really going extinct since Covid), and that we need to actively recreate them. But I have not yet seen any proposal that I think could be easily replicated and addresses the core needs that third spaces address. In fact, I haven't even seen any agreed-upon definition of what an ideal third space is, or what specific needs they should address!

So, let's talk about it. In no particular priority or order:

• What are some third spaces you enjoy or fondly remember?
• What are the key features of third spaces to you? Do they need to be free, or just low enough cost that people can join in relatively easily?
• What key needs should a good third space address?
• Who should run them? The government? Community groups? For-profit?
• Are there any groups or initiatives that have shown a good formula for re-creating third spaces across their communities?
• How do we ensure people are motivated to join third spaces? We aren't going to get really lonely, isolated people out just by opening up doors most of the time.

Kind of an XY problem, so I'm hoping that I'm just missing something stupid simple.

I found this tool (which is super cool) rss-librarian and I'm looking to make it stupid simple to send things I find on my phone to the url associated with my "account". I already have a bookmarklet set up in firefox on my laptop.

First thought was that I could use the "share" ability to simply share a cool link with a URL, but that seems to require some dev work. Second thought was to use Tasker to script something out, but that's looking to be a medium level of complicated. So, hopefully, there is something simple that I'm missing or don't know about that I could do to use this functionality from my phone.

Any suggestions? If not, I'll have to learn tasker :(

TL;DR: NASA's public Planetary Data System is at risk of being shut down. Anyone have any ideas for backing it up?

Hi everyone,

Bit of a long-shot here, but I wanted to try on high-quality tildes before jumping back into the cesspool of reddit. I'm posting it in ~science rather than ~space as I figure interest in backing up public data is broader than just the space community.

I work regularly with NASA's Planetary Data System, or PDS. It's a massive (~3.5petabytes!!) archive of off-world scientific data (largely but not all imaging data). PDS is integral for scientific research - public and private - around the world, and is maintained, for free, by NASA (with support of a number of Academic institutions).

The current state of affairs for NASA is grim:

• NASA Lays Off ISS Workers at Marshall Space Flight Center
• More layoffs at JPL
• NASA is sinking its flagship science center during the government shutdown — and may be breaking the law in the process, critics say

And as a result, I (and many of my industry friends) have become increasingly concerned that PDS will be taken down as NASA is increasingly torn down for spare parts and irreparably damaged. This administration seems bent on destroying all forms of recording-keeping and public science, so who knows how long PDS will be kept up. Once it's down, it'll be a nightmare to try and collect it all again from various sources. I suspect we'll permanently lose decades worth of data - PDS includes information going all the way back to the Apollo missions!

As such, we've been pushing to back-up as much of PDS as we can, but have absolutely no hope of downloading it all within the next year or two, nevermind in a few months if the current cuts impact us soon.

If you or someone you know would be interested in helping figure out how we can back-up PDS before it's too late, please let me know here or in a DM. I've already tried reaching out to the Internet Archive, but did not hear anything back from them.

Edit: to clarify, the larger problem is download speeds - we've topped out at 20mb/s with 8 connections.

Back in the relatively recent years of 2017(or maybe not, that's nine years ago already), smartphone standards were far below what they are today. You could find phones configured with less than a gigabyte of RAM and 16GB of storage could be considered reasonable. Granted, these weren't going to be considered spec beasts during their time, but they were serviceable for the price. However, as compute power increased, these stragglers failed to hold on after being cluttered by user activity like bottlenecked storage or simply higher spec requirements. Thusly, Android Go was born around the tail end of 2017.

I don't intend to make this a history post, but just for the sake of comprehensiveness, Android Go really took stride by doling out optimizations for barebones cellphones and limiting some features like picture in picture and split screen. It really hit it's stride around Android 11 to 12, when phones were still transitioning to modernly reasonable specs.

Mayhaps the most surprising part is that the main constituent of Android Go is essentially a hard-bound toggle set by the manufacturer. But what may be overlooked is that Android Go still exists in the present day. So some developers still end up using it! But why does it still see use in the present day?

In the current iteration of Android Go, phones with 4GB of RAM or less by default are required to use Android Go. But nowadays, we can utilize virtual RAM extensions by allocating some storage space as quick read memory in settings. So this gives manufacturers the power to provide 8GB Android Go phones, making them honestly ovespecced for their on paper capabilities. Often times, these phones have to tone down their bloatware too, so that they don't sap the phone of too much power.
It isn't all upside though, as the aforementioned limitations on multitasking features are arguably the biggest deal breaker.

Manufacturers that use Android Go today are those that have models that cater to ultra-budget and emerging markets. Lower end Motorola and Redmi phones are the ones that are widely available. A notable example are all the phones of Transsion, whose main target market is in Africa and emerging SEA countries.

What's the experience of using it today though?
Aside from the PiP and split screen, The biggest difference isn't really all that strict: the Android Go apps. These can even be downloaded on regular Android and are often just stripped down and more data efficient versions of official Google apps that haven't been given the fresh do-over of Android Go itself. The notable exception is that Android Go will always have Google Assistant, for Google doesn't have plans to release a version of Gemini for Go. Which is ironic as EoL Android phones with lower spec than the current maximum of Android Go(4GB RAM) actually do have Gemini OTA updated on them. Go phones are trying to modernize, so they nowadays have 120hz screens, punch-hole cameras, and enough compute power for everyday. And yet they still compromise by having SD card slots and headphone jacks. The rest is really in the hands of your OEM. Samsung, Redmi, and the Transsion phones all have their little tweaks on the software, some being a little more egregious than most (cough Samsung cough). Motorola should be mostly stock though.

All in all, I just wanted to spread the word that Android Go still exists. Honestly, considering the world RAM crisis, we might actually see more devices on the horizon that utilize Android Go. What're your thoughts?

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.

Could be from a place you visited or moved to. Could be from a community or group you joined.

Whatever it was, there was something new or unfamiliar to you, and you had to wrap your head around that something that you weren't used to.

What was the culture shock, how did you respond to it, and how do you feel about it now?

At a visceral level I hate Art Deco. I'm all for elegance in architecture, but something about it feels so self-aggrandizing, isolating, and hollow. On the other hand, I think Brutalism, when not overdone, is great. A medium sized Brutalist building with a little bit of moss on the outside and an abundance of plants inside, chef's kiss.

1

A few days ago I started watching "Hirogaru Sky! Precure", after seeing someone post a clip from it and being like "its funny how when they say the word white they instead say hwhite". I looked at the clip and was like yeah they do say "hwhite", after which I thought, "hey isn't this the magical girl anime where they have a magical boy?" I got curious, and after confirming that with some random wiki I found, I went and decided to watch a bit of it.

I pretty quickly learned how the show works, it's extremely formulaic. Each episode is 24 minutes long, but out of those 24 minutes probably at least maybe like 6 minutes, or one quarter, is spent on fully copy pasted scenes which are basically fully the same between episodes. The obvious ones are the intro and outro (which is pretty normal for anime), but there are also minutes long transformation sequences where the heroes transform from ordinary people into magical girl heroes by doing a dance while saying some random fancy words while a lot of flashy effects happen in the background. Each* episode also has a monster, that even has the same name every time even though its a different monster every time. Oh also the villain creating the monster has a copy pasted effect. And each of the main heroes has a spell that has a copy pasted effect when they use their special "move".

None of this is actually very important, I am just trying to say that the creators might be trying to go more for quantity over quality. Which is probably pretty obvious also because they are making literally one episode each week? And I do mean each week, I am looking this up right now and apparently the show has been running from 2004 and there have been 1067 episodes during that time, which according to my vibes based calculations means they missed maybe like 3 weeks on average each year. It might also be obvious from the fact that it's target demographics is basically preschool children.

Anyways what I am trying to say that this is slop right? Its kinda mindless, its the same over and over. Oh, but that first day I did watch 9 episodes of it in a row. From a big part it was because I really wanted to see the magical boy show up. But I also can't deny that I enjoy it. I continued watching it the next day, even after I saw the magical boy show up, after all. I think I saw like 15 episodes now (so no spoilers please, haha), and I want to see more. I've been feeling kind of down, hopeless, and without motivation for quite a long time, and the sort of naive positivity in the show at least sort of makes me a bit optimistic, at least very temporarily. And it also makes me almost (or not almost) cry.

At the same time I feel very guilty of liking it. And I've been thinking really hard about why.

The fact that it's kinda dumb is definitely a part of it, but it can't really bother me that much considering how many hours of my life I have wasted playing videogames mindlessly, or watching/listening to Youtube videos which might be even dumber, as an example I probably watched more than 1000 episodes of Northernlion playing the Binding of Isaac. It's kinda just inevitable that people waste a lot of their time, and there's nothing wrong with that really right. Well, when I was trying to fall asleep but instead kept on pondering my thoughts about this I did decide to go talk with my room-mate, which resulted in us talking about this topic, and life in general until like 2 am, I am really thankful that he's the kind of person who I can do that with. Our discussion didn't really come up with a concrete conclusion, we just kinda were like, "yeah life kinda sucks but it's better to not dwell on that, and oh yeah you probably actually kind of need to consume some lower quality media for the higher quality more thinky media to actually hit more" and then I went to sleep.

The second and I think bigger part is that it's literally made for like 8 year old girls. Uhhh, and there's kind of no way around that I think? Like that just feels embarrassing to watch for me. For context, I am kinda basically a guy even tho I am also probably more feminine than most (maybe it'd be fairer to myself to say that I am nonbinary, but you know, if you are nonbinary in a forest where no one can see you are you really nonbinary? yes? yes. but also I am just perceived as just a guy by most people so lets keep it simple.), it still feels basically illegal to like something like this as an adult guy. When I examine this more I do think it definitely shouldn't feel like that. If someone tells me they like Pokemon I don't really find it weird at all, even though it's theoretically made for preschool boys. Or maybe more similar is what I am guessing is My Little Pony, which I never watched, but which a lot of guys on the internet liked pretty visibly. I even met someone who I really respected who told me that he liked the show. And I did feel a bit iffy about that, but also when actually thinking at least somewhat critically I saw no problem with. I guess the same is for Precure. If I think about it, I just feel it's sort of weird, but also just kinda fine. I thought about how cool it'd be to make a cosplay of Cure Wing (the magical boy in the show), I've been getting into sewing, and I do think it might not be that difficult to make. And then I think how I could like be silly and try do some of those dances from the show in that cosplay. But then I immediately think how it's too much. And how embarrassing is that I am even thinking about that. I just don't really know.

2

Just a few hours before writing this post I saw a video by Jeffiot called Peak Art, Peak Slop. I'd recommend watching it, it's sort of related to what I wrote about here, but not really. Very, very, oversimplified it tries to somehow explain why something like Twin Peaks might be better than a Mr Beast video. It basically says that all the edges of Mr Beast videos are perfectly sanded off to make it as easy to digest as possible, which they succeed at very well, but it to really enjoy given closer examination, and so when you watch one you don't even really remember what you watched. While something like Twin Peaks breaks a lot of conventions that make things easy to watch, but which also makes it quite memorable. I do take some slight issue with that -- for example, because I can kind of think of what happens in some Mr Beast videos, for example I think in one he recreates Squid Game, though thinking about it I am not really sure if I even actually saw that video. And for example because I did watch all of Twin Peaks, but also can't really remember all that much that happens in it, though again when in the video Jeffiot mentions some of the things I did think to myself yeah I sort of remember that.

I am definitely taking this a bit too literally and sort of just wanted to try be a bit funny here. In reality I think it's just true that something like Twin Peaks makes you think more, and even though it's made in a way that isn't the easiest to watch, thinking about it is really interesting and makes it memorable. There definitely are parts I can think of immediately since they were so so so memorable -- for example episode 8 of season 3 -- even if I don't fully remember the specifics.

Which finally gets me to my point. Precure made me think a lot too. And I sort of remember what's happening in it, and even if I forget the specifics, I don't really think I am ever completely forgetting that I watched it. So I think after all this it might not really be slop, even though it definitely is a bit low quality, and a bit stupid, and made in a way to be easy to watch. It's sort of in a weird way where the context of me not really being the target audience (I think? like maybe I am being unfair here considering they did decide to have a magical boy after making the 900 episodes or whatever before it so maybe they wanted to expand the audience? I have no idea honestly) makes it be more interesting then it otherwise might be? I think? Like while it's definitely made to be easy to watch I did also describe why watching it makes me feel pretty guilty, so that kind of makes it not that easy to watch, right? Or maybe I am just making stuff up to make myself feel better about watching it.

Ok, this is besides the point but I do want to defend Precure (or at least the 15 episodes I watched, I guess I can't vouch for the 1050 others or however many there are) a bit more. I do still think it's better than something like Mr Beast, since it at least has a genuinely positive message and tries to make people be kind and think about what other people feel, which has to be worth at least something right? Meanwhile Mr Beast instead does basically the most parasocial things imaginable, I guess on the very surface he's giving out money, but like he's using the money that to bribe people to embarrass themselves, or even sometimes harm themselves. So I am trying to say that while both are probably slop, some slop is still better than other slop. Shrug.

I am not really sure which group to put this in? Maybe this should be somewhere else instead? Probably ~anime? Or ~tv? ~life? ~lgbt? Feel free to move this elsewhere, I don't really know.

A loss
A problem
A struggle
An emotion
Something difficult
Something perplexing
Something that takes a lot of effort
Something that doesn't fit neatly into an easy description

What are you working through, and how is it going?

Personally, I find RPGs to be at their best when they are reasonably short - somewhere between 5 and 20 hours. Games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound seem to come to mind. For more open-ended experiences like Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim I find that I generally lose interest after somewhere between 30-50 hours regardless of how addictive the gameplay is.

I haven't played tabletop RPGs so I don't have anything to say about them, but please feel free to chime in with them as well.

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?