Hey, so I've used an XBone controller for... God knows how long. I've been playing Mina the Hollower and realized that it's causing some pain along the muscles going from the top of my left middle and ring finger past my wrist; I've got piano fingers and kinda grip the analog pretty hard, so my fingers are going past 90° holding the thing and I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be doing this anymore.

I think if I had a bigger controller I'd be fine? I'm trying my arcade stick, but it's not great for fine motion like the analog. Does anyone have any experience with having to move out of their usual controller due to pain, and what did you do?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

What have you been 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.

I was talking with a friend about recent events that seemed eerily suspicious to me, and was wondering if all of you might have any similar experiences.

(Preemptively tagging this as politics. If anything in this thread is deemed malicious or inflammatory, let me know and I'll delete the thread)

Hello,

So, it is more and more evident that I need to do something about burning my head and squinting when facing in the general direction of the sun during summer.

Ideally I would wear something like a straw hat but I don't think I can, there is something about them that are intolerable to me.

The things I imagine I'd like with straw hats is that they protect face, eyes, scalp and neck (if appropriately sized) while still being fairly cool (as in temperature, not style!).

So, that's the requirements: some kind of garment that would protect my head from the sun, while not overheating my head, ideally giving some shade to the eyes, and not being a straw hat!

I don't care much for social norms but if you recommend something it would be nice to let me know if it is supposed to be worn by specific groups in specific circumstances (for example men attending sporting events) and what breaking those norms could result in.

I understand I could get sunscreen and a pair of sunglasses but sunglasses are in the same category as straw hats and sunscreen has to be replenished (both as in the buying more bottles and applying it on myself).

I'm up for different kinds of hats, hat-ish and fabrics, I just don't really know anything about them, yet!

Do you think it is ethical?
Should robots be remotely controlled at all times or should they be automated?
Who do you think should be held responsible if a robot accidentally commits a war crime?
Do you think war would be more frequent if there were no humans fighting?
Also a more general question: what do you think is the future of robots?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like social media, trackers and hats.tinfoil. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was keen-eyed.

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!

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?

"Different" can be interpreted in any way, in any context, for any magnitude.

When did you realize you were different?
What prompted it?
How did you feel about it then?
Has the difference changed over time?
Have your feelings changed over time?

groggy waving @ reader's screen in similish distressed moodlet

Hi uh, a recent bing update corrupted my passwords from a while back recovery options seem obscene. I swear I had the right email but didn't get anything back.

I do currently have access to the email (however have multiple mails so not sure which one) but think I did the gmail + thing & forgot the suffix.

thx!

This is the fifth Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twenty-fifth overall. We are discussing Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. For June we will discuss How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Wexler.

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.

Similarly to the few years old thread I made for webserials I would like to recommend and introduce some quests and fanfictions. Quests are a collaborative(ideally) stories that usually live in forums. The usual format is that the writer/s enable the readers an input in how the story is written which is usually done by voting. I found that fanfictions vary in quality wildly but any sufficiently popular work will have some that are very good.

For the tyrants fear your might - https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/for-the-tyrants-fear-your-might-a-quest-of-interstellar-rebellion.83706/ - (quest) - a story of a an entertainment planet in a hypercapitalistic society rebelling. Does not have a single protagonist

The Practice War - https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/the-practice-war-complete.31698/ - (quest, Practice Effect) - humanity creates space faring dragons but is defeated by an advanced and enigmatic race.

Divided Loyalties - https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/warhammer-fantasy-divided-loyalties-an-advisors-quest.44838/ - (quest, Warhammer fantasy) - a Grey wizard becomes the advisor to the Elector Count of Sylvania and later continuing on in her adventures elsewhere. Very long with several distinct arcs

RHUNRIKKI STROLLAR - https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/rhunrikki-strollar-warhammer-fantasy-golden-age-dwarf-runelord-quest.63581/ - (quest, Warhammer fantasy) - a life of dwarven golden age runemaster among the coming troubles

The Burbank Situation - https://archiveofourown.org/works/19189534 - (Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Chuck) - Chuck has some unusual hobbies, such as LARPing as a vampire hunter. First part of a series

My Name Is Beautiful - https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/155302 - (Unordinary) - reincarnation story. A side character from original story runs a rebellion built on lies and manipulation against the Authorities. Probably the darkest story on this list

To The Stars - https://archiveofourown.org/works/777002 - (Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika) - story set in a ai run world that tries its best among a brutal war with advanced aliens. And of a magical girl whose wish was to be extraordinary

Birds of a Feather - https://archiveofourown.org/works/15996890 - (Harry Potter) - this is both a solid character exploration and a depiction of WW2 Britain

A Song of Ice and Fires That Weren't All My fault - https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/a-song-of-ice-and-fires-that-werent-all-my-fault-asoiaf-dresden-files.336499/ - (Game of Thrones/Dresden Files) - Dresden makes a living in Braavos finding things. The merging of these two different settings is very good

The Maretian - https://www.fimfiction.net/story/396744/ - (The Martian/My Little Pony) - Mark Watney is joined on Mars by the crew of an alien race. More fantastical than Martian but still features engineering challenges. MLP fandom needs a lot of getting used to but has some good stories

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!

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.

Hello Tildes.

I feel like i have movie fatigue, i don’t feel like i manage to get hyped for new movies.
Do anyone of you have any recommendations for older movies, lets say 2010 and older. It can be any genre.
Can go really old as well, i really enjoyed 12 Angry Men.

Thank you very much in advance!

About every six weeks, I go on a "stock the pantry" shopping trip to buy long-keeping items and non-perishables in quantity - cat food and litter, Costco, etc. After two hours of shopping yesterday, I was a little shocked to realize I'd spent half of my take-home pay on a trip that previously was about 25% less expensive. No one item had drastically increased in price - everything had just gone up that much.

[I'm also smarting because my primary care physician announced she was switching to a concierge care model, and I just made the first quarterly payment. U.S. healthcare sucks so badly that I can't take a chance on the two-year waitlists for in-network primary care M.D.s who provide 10-minute "annual exam" visits in my area.]

I'm dropping subscription services, buying cheaper conventional food instead of organic, getting generic personal care products instead of brand names and using less of them, cooking even more at home, thinking about making my own cat food, skipping buying pretty flowers for outdoors this year... and still feeling like the budget isn't going to keep stretching.

I know a great many aspects of Western lifestyles aren't sustainable, and I've tried to do my part to minimize material consumption. But there are so many expectations that you'll pay for perhaps excessive shelter (we didn't need a house the size we have, but it was what was available and affordable), have a car for work, be able to pay for services for things you don't have time, skill, or physical capacity to do yourself, and other monetary drains. I'm losing some sleep.

What are you doing to cope with exorbitant rents/mortgages, skyrocketing utility and grocery bills, extravagant medical costs, unaffordable childcare and services?

Do you feel like your quality of life has declined, due to missing luxuries, anxiety, fewer opportunities to connect with friends and family, or anything else?

Open rant here.

A little less than a year ago, I asked for your recommendations on bread maker tips, tricks, and recipes, and thought I’d give a small update.

The bread maker I bought is functionally the Breville Custom Loaf, rebranded for the local market (“Tramontina by Breville”). I paid R$3069 for it. It was on sale: the same machine now sells for anywhere between R$2991 to R$3690. (These equate to about 565USD then and 594USD to 732USD now, considering contemporaneous exchange rates.)

My +/- weekly recipe eventually settled upon via much trial and many errors comes from an amalgamation of various sources, by now mostly lost. In the summer, I have to halve the recipe and make bread twice as often, or the maresia / damp sea air makes it mould before we can eat the whole thing!

I have also not tried to make anything but this exact bread since I started. My dreams of raisin buns are as of yet unrealised. Next year for the end of the year, I plan to make panettone in it, as we don’t plan to travel.

My unhalved recipe is:

• 450ml water (filtered, cool)
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 4 cups 100% whole wheat / integral flour
• >1 tsp demerara sugar
• <1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp (freezer stored, instant dry) yeast
• ~3/4 cup walnuts, in pieces, raw, unsalted, to fill the “automatic” dispenser on the machine (sometimes the bulk goods shop by me is out of nuts. the bread is better with nuts, but fine without.)

Cost wise, this breaks down to:

• 500mL olive oil : R$25 (0,75/loaf)
• 1kg flour : R$7 (3,17/loaf)
• 1kg sugar : R$10 (0,05/loaf)
• 1kg salt : R$4 (0,02/loaf)
• 100g walnuts : R$10 (12,50/loaf)

I didn’t include the yeast in the breakdown because I have yet to buy any. The 1kg package of yeast I purchased four years ago to make pizza and kept in the freezer since is still going strong. At present, a kilo of yeast costs ~R$23.

Without nuts, my cost per loaf is R$3,99, while with nuts, it’s R$16,49. My local supermarket sells a (frankly inferior) and much smaller (350g) “100% whole wheat” loaf for R$25.

Having kept incomplete records, I believe for most of the year we have made a loaf about every five days: let’s pretend means over the past year, I’ve made 70 loaves at about a 50/50 split of nuts or no-nuts, so let’s put my total cost of making bread as R$716,80. If we buy bread, it’s an every-other-day occurance, so R$4562,50 spent on bread in a year. Adding the cost of the bread maker to the mix, if these were real figures, we would have saved R$776,70 so far, just in this year alone.

And it has served us well, with some slight oddities!

The first is based on the machine: never once in the usage of the machine has the “automatic” dispenser of nuts automatically added the nuts at the proper stage. I have read the documentation, and I can find no explanation. At present, if I want nuts added, I have to remain at home when the maker is going, as it screams something awful (buzzer) when it’s “going to” add the nuts, and then I run along and poke open the dispenser door with my finger until the latch opens and the nuts dispense into the awaiting dough. If I know I won’t be home, I don’t add nuts, because otherwise, I will come home to a nice loaf of bread and a small dispenser of lightly warmed nuts. (Heh.)

The second is that my recipe is not as good when I have to halve it! In the damp season, I had to throw away a few half-loaves, as mold loves my poor little bread, and the bread does not survive well in the fridge. But splitting the recipe (and altering the settings on the bread maker to reflect, which is itself an imprecise science) has yet to lead to a smaller version of my usual recipe: what comes out is a biscotti-shaped, flat, dense, but still edible loaf. I’m still figuring it out!

All in all, thanks to everyone who encouraged me in the previous thread, and let this be encouragement to anyone else on the fence to try out a breadmaker!

The survey has been closed and the results are in!

Thank you to all the 115 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results! And the next four surveys we will do are:

1. In first place with 26 votes: What is your gender identity?
2. Second place with 25 votes: What's your favorite video game?
3. Third place 24 with votes: How optimistic are you about the future?
4. And fourth with 23 votes: How often do you visit/read Tildes?

• ZIP download of the data

Thank you all again for participating! Hope to see you in the next survey! :)

Question for those interested, what would be a good way to pose the next question "What is your gender identity?"

I have some ideas but I'd like to hear other people's thoughts too since I think historically this has been one of the more debated questions in the demographics surveys. And I think this one's an important one not to mess up. Let me know!

I am looking for a Buy-It-For-Life pen. I've had the Parker Jotters for years and love them, but I am in need of something with a little longer life expectancy on the barrel.

My first thought was James Brand The Burwell, however I am just now really diving into the BIFL Pen world and curious on what you guys suggestion / use.

Assume the money cap of $100 for now, unless you have some out of this world amazing option over that cap.

I've made an effort to read some more poems this year and always enjoy finding out any more when I can. In the UK you can find anthologies of "The Nation's Favourite Poems" and "The Nation's Favourite Comic Poems" et alia by the BBC, which is where I've learnt most of my new ones this year. It'd be great to see what poems have left an impression on you this year.

For brevity, I'll put a short one here and then two longer ones I discovered this year down in the comments.

Two Cures for Love - Wendy Cope

Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter.
The easy way: get to know him better.

Hey all!

I'm currently cleaning out the basement and rearranging some things after my brother in law has moved out. He spent the better part of every afternoon down here working out and (I'm assuming) sweating (figuratively) gallons. I pulled the mats up to move em around and was hit with a deep earthy smell which made me IMMEDIATELY panic. There was only one super dark spot which was immediately washed off with warm soapy water and steel wool. There are other places that don't look too bad, but I am seeing markings on the floor elsewhere that match the pattern of the interlocking mat.

I'd like to keep working out down here, but I'd also like to not cause mold problems in my own house. Can anyone think of a way to essentially insulate the mat from the cement floor without creating a different problem where the plastic bottom ALSO creates an environment for the mold to grow? It's also possible that I'm WAY blowing this out of proportion...

I'll include pics on a follow up post

Most social media sites have options for muting and blocking people. As we know, muting is one-way (they see me, I don't see them) and blocking is two-way (neither see each other).

Recently, while having too much caffeine in my system way too late, I had the thought that "blocking" is a far more negative term than what it should be. Sometimes it's done in spite, absolutely. You wanna slap somebody for being how they are.

But sometimes you just recognize that there's someone who you have nothing against, whom you might even like if you met them in real life, but in this context of limited human connect, you understand that the only possible communication between you and them would be toxic. That your opinions, your way of speaking, perhaps your whole existence offends them. Or vice versa.

So you protect them from yourself by blocking them, in lieu of a better word. I think there should be a better word but I haven't figured out what it should be yet. "Spare"?

(P.S. I think tildes should perhaps have such a functionality)

Once more I come to you with this eternal annoyance of mine, that just won’t go away, with regard to 100%ing games:

I own a Switch 2. It’s my one and only entertainment device (I don’t watch shows, movies, or do anything else).

I already limit myself to only buying Switch 2 games (meaning, no Switch 1 or classics on NSO), so I don’t get overwhelmed with all the options, but good new games come out so quickly now, and there’s so many that I am dying to play, that I’m still feeling like I can barely keep up.

I never buy a new game (even if on discount) before I roll the credits on the one that I am currently playing. That would kill me, to just have them sitting there, on my digital shelf, collecting dust.

For me, anywhere between 20 to 40 hours with one game is ideal, but many of the kinds of games that I enjoy and buy take more than 50 or even 100 or more hours to 100%. I don’t buy them because they’re huge. I buy them because I like their worlds, their stories, and/or their mechanics. If I chose my games based on how long it takes to roll the credits or 100% them, then I’d probably not play almost any modern games.

By the time I roll the credits, I usually feel ready to move on, I feel satisfied with how much I got to experience that world, story, and/or mechanic, but if I do move on, then I also feel bad for not 100%ing the game. It’s some kind of OCD or “all-or-nothing” mental issue that I have. I don’t know.

I guess there’s nothing that I can do about it, because I’m even less interested in grinding for hundreds of hours to 100% a game. The magic and newness of whatever world, story, and/or mechanics a game has to offer have usually worn off by the time I roll the credits, so I would just be forcing myself to check off a list of chores and that’s not fun at all for me.

By that time, there’s also usually a new game that I am dying to play anyway.

So, the choice is between leaving games behind without 100%ing them, or playing two or three games a year, slowly and tediously chipping away at them. The new experiences tip the scale for me.

How about you?

I just wish that I could make this nagging feeling in the back of my head go away and accept that moving on from a game that I didn’t 100%, is OK.

That being said, on occasion, I play a game that is designed to be 100%able on the first playthrough, and those are by far my favorites. Very few games are like that anymore though, which I find sad.

Edit: A short poem I made (with some inspiration from ChatGPT) to help me get over my desire to 100% games. I entitle it, “An OCD Gamer’s Mantra”.

Credits rolled, story told.
New adventures shall unfold.
Rolled the credits, closed the quest.
Move on and discard the rest.
Credits rolled, I’ve seen the end.
Loose threads I need not to mend.
Rolled the credits, let it be.
The next great game is calling me.

Yesterday the family was driving home from dinner and ...Ready for it? came up in the playlist:

In the middle of the night, in my dreams, you should see the things we do

So in the vein of A Speculative List of Jay-Z's 99 Problems, and other than the boring, obvious answer, what do you suppose they get up to in her dreams?

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we had baseball-sized hail suddenly come through my city a few days ago, and everyone at my work got to watch our cars get destroyed from the front windows. I opened a claim immediately after the hail stopped and could go take pictures, but still haven't heard anything other than that an agent was assigned.

City-wide, body shops are already talking about having a year-long backlog and having to triage repairs that don't affect immediate drivability. I've heard people talk about them being totaled already. Rental cars are hard to come by, because they not only have huge demand but had damage as well. The county is petitioning FEMA, because houses were damaged as well.

I'm just in a depressive waiting state, where I don't know how things will start to play out yet, with my undrivable car sitting at the office with trash bags taped over it while I work from home. And my old backup car (almost 20 years old), which was slated for one of the stepdaughters to receive once she gets her license, also had extensive damage making it unsafe to drive. My fiancée's car survived, being on the other side of town at the time, but she has a very busy schedule to the next few weeks.

I had the realization that every car I've ever bought myself was just destroyed, and I get fairly attached.

The Civic Sport Touring (2017), I still owe about $4000 on and expected to pay off this year. It's thoroughly dented across the whole body, with a completely shattered (to the point it's opaque) windshield, broken mirror assemblies, 2/3 cameras are probably broken, a tail light is broken down to the LED board, and the moonroof assembly appears to be bent and sagging slightly, probably from the roof and side parts being bashed so heavily. Not sure how much water got in during the ensuing torrential downpour.

Realistically, it being to totaled seems likely, given the cost of many of the parts. Which means I'm going to be stuck buying new, because used ones are a relative rarity (I jumped to buy mine when it showed up in stock) and there's barely a price difference these days.

I'm curious if anyone else here has had experiences with that sort of thing or knows what to expect.

I'm aware that it'll be really hard to thread this needle and make this movie work, but I'm excited to see the attempt. The reviews I've read have only made me more interested.

Amy Nicholson for Los Angeles Times described the film as a feature expansion of Kane Parsons' viral internet project, praising its unsettling visual concept but thought it less a conventional horror film and more a surreal, dreamlike experience of a moving Salvador Dalí painting.

Another mentions sparse dialogue, which I'm happy to hear.

I've wanted this movie since long before it was announced. I have a few hopes, no expectations, but I've deeply enjoyed Parsons' other work.

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!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like ecology, writing and moderation. 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'm a web developer and find the playwright MCP to be genuinely useful. My LLM is able to navigate my site, measure the size of elements, see console errors, network requests, etc. This is the only MCP I've ever installed and haven't yet had any cause to use others. But I'm interested in hearing what other professionals are using.

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?

Dear Tildes team,

I’ve been on here for a year now, I think, and after praising Tildes to a friend for a long time, he recently asked me for an invite code.

I had never invited anyone before, but when I went to the invite page, it read: “You aren't able to generate more invite links right now.”

Any idea what the issue might be?

Hello,

I'm into self-hosting and when my daughter (elementary school) started writing her own recipe book, I kinda went "She is young, she shouldn't be doing this in paper form" and I started looking around for a solution for kinda non-existing problem.

I stumbled upon Mealie, which is server that can be used in docker and is self-hosted recipe book/website. It seems like you can come in and say like "I have these ingrediants, what can I do?", it also seems to be able to generate shopping lists based on your selected recipe, you can use checkboxes when bringing all the ingredients on the kitchen board/table/top (non-English native speaker here) and so on.

It seems like the right software for me, but before I delve into it, I wanted to ask if someone else possibly runs such service for themselves at their home. Is there somebody who is using something like this? It doesn't have to be Mealie, specifically. But it should be server-side service, not some smartphone app. I know there are other such services, which are also open-source, but I forgot the names, sorry.

Thanks for any relevant answers!

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!

If you're a native English speaker, you know what "tramp" means. If you're not, you can read the wikipedia article, but also look up "tramp stamp" to get a different, more contemporary meaning. Neither is particularly helpful here though.

If you're in Czechia or Slovakia, it means something else altogether. "Tramping" describes a hobby and an identity that strongly relates to woodcraft, Scouting and perhaps a romanticized version of the old-school hobo life. Basically tramps are a loose community of people who like to walk through the forests, sleep outside, sing songs around the fire, usually drink, all the while respecting the nature and each other.

The part that I want to write about, though, is more interesting: their camps. Semi- or entirely illegal hidden spots in the forest, built and maintained by volunteers and free for use by anybody who finds them and behaves.

The community has existed for over 100 years and what helped it quite bit were oppressive regimes - first Nazis and then especially communists. People liked to escape the everyday atmosphere of oppression in the towns and disconnect from it in the countryside, where they could feel truly free for a couple of days.

When you want to sleep in the forest, you can of course just use a tarp and a sleeping bag anywhere, but there's a much more comfortable way: tramp camps. Some are legalized, with private ownership, and these days often contain your standard countryside cottages. But the majority is not. Popular tramping areas are full of spots that range from just a campfire with a couple of logs to sit on, through many places that contain comfortable benches and a wooden sleeping platform with a tarp-covered roof, to full-on small log cabins.

Some of these, mostly the bare campfire spots, are easy to find and near main trails. Others, especially the log cabins, tend to be hidden. There are no public maps. The more hidden they are, the more helpful stuff they tend to contain: a saw for making firewood, various pots for cooking and also for carrying water to douse the fire, a fire grate, sometimes even shelf-stable condiments, books, more comfortable sleeping arrangements... And most have a visitor's logbook too.

The beauty here is that all of those are free to use for anyone who finds them, and many of them are also completely illegal. I'm not sure what the rules are specifically in standard forests (though as far as I know making a fire is illegal even in those), but many tramp camps are in protected forests as well. This may sound bad, and sometimes it is. But many of the camps existed for decades before the environmental protection was established, and the people using them tend to not cause issues, so they're usually tolerated.

A large group of people of all ages that isn't organized in any way and merely like doing what they do has spent countless hours working to build and maintain these spots - just to bring joy not only to themselves and their friends, but also to other people they've never met.

It all relies on two things. First, the locations of these spots will only be shared privately or found by people who care and make the minimal effort to find them, and therefore are unlikely to abuse them. Second, the authorities know this too and therefore have no reason to interfere even where law says they should.

I love these instances of systems that work entirely without the involvement of any official structures, based on trust among completely unknown people, only protected by minimal gatekeeping. What they're doing could be harmful to the environment if they were selfish or irresponsible, but they're neither, so it has worked for a century.

Their image has some specifics

Oh, and there's one more thing that may seem cute to people from north America. Tramp culture used to almost idolize some small parts of US and to a smaller degree Canadian history and culture. This was understandable - the freedom of living in the wilderness of old-timey North America or in the wild west as known from literature and Western films felt like the complete antithesis to living under the oppression of soviet-style communism. But it often brought things that in retrospect may seem cute, a bit silly or even wrong.

For example every legalized and permanent tramp village had a leader who would settle disputes etc., called a sheriff. Unfortunately, those people were often targets of the communist secret police, trying to break them to snitch on their friends. Many camps have vaguely foreign names, or names inspired by real places in the US or Canada. I remember a camp called "Ontarko", a diminutive of Ontario.

But aside from western symbols like clothes, cow skulls etc., sometimes some Native American imagery or military references (tramps to this day like older versions of US Army backpacks) you would also often see Confederate flags.

These days they're almost gone, but you may still encounter them among old tramps. In the pre-internet era, with heavily censored information coming from the west, they were often seen simply as a symbol of rebellion, freedom and independence. American Civil War was barely understood here, and almost nobody saw the negative connotations that many people in the West immediately perceive today.

Why am I writing this now?

One of the prime tramping locations is around the area where my parents live, and every time I visit I take a bike to ride into the hills and then walk around interesting potential spots - near streams and springs, on steep hill sides farther away from paths, behind unusually dense patches of forest etc. So far I have found around 7 of them nearby (and probably 10 others elsewhere). It's like a game of geocaching that, instead of just giving you a virtual point, grants you a new place you can grill sausages and then sleep in, often times quite beautiful too.

Unfortunately, the fact that many of the spots are on protected land and therefore illegal has one obvious downside: it would just take one person with a lot of time and energy to start pressuring the authorities to remove them, even if they don't want to.

Quite honestly, some of the camps are a bit much. Log cabins partially covered in creosote (preserves wood but is quite far from eco friendly), with store-bought doors, on protected land... Yeah. I can see why somebody would have a problem with that. This is a small minority though.

As often happens, the one person unfortunately eventually appeared and started pushing for the removal of all of those camps. He's a journalist known mainly for being contrarian and combative. There are some minor aspects of tramping that are clearly too much as mentioned above, and others that are clearly up for discussion, but this is not his approach: his work feels truly personal, fueled by hostility towards the whole subculture, ego, and an unwillingness to understand why these places matter to people.

His communication is spiteful, full of juvenile snark, including things like mockingly misspelling tramp slang. He (or possibly some accomplice) also uses dirty tactics like mapping the camps and then anonymously publishing the maps online and in smartphone apps, where the pretense is "democratizing access to the camps", but the real intent is to remove the gatekeeping so that people who do not care about nature start using the camps, leaving a mess and causing issues, which forces authorities to act.

Unfortunately it works. In the most popular protected area many of the camps have been removed, others are scheduled for removal. Just a few camps are planned to be legalized with some conditions, despite his demands, at least.

So far this only concerns the protected areas, the hills behind my parents' house should be safe for now. Most of the forests around there are privately owned, which may or may not help when he tries to target them in the future. I hope it does. The mapping of the area is already slowly starting though.

I'm giving you some crude phone photos of the camps I or other people have found. I really want you to imagine the feeling of walking around the beautiful temperate forests of central Europe and knowing that these places are probably somewhere around you and they are free for you to use and enjoy, if you just find them and leave them in the same state after using them. They're not alpine cabins intended for survival, they are purely for enjoyment with your friends, family or alone.

A couple examples

I wish I could share more, but I only started taking photos of them relatively recently, and there are a couple that I'm not comfortable sharing even anonymously here.

Here's a tiny gallery

And here's a video of my band playing a very old tramp song from 1939 (yeah, I know what I say below) in another one - a big campfire with a half-circle of benches around it, likely established by a local scout troop.

I am not a member of the subculture, I am not a tramp. I hate the music they traditionally play, I don't like cheap rum and I don't have that much in common with many of them. But I have a lot of respect for their traditions and the beauty of the whole concept is that I can experience some of it on my own terms.

I can only hope that in the future, when the one majorly disliked person pushing for their removal no longer has the strength to do what he does, the camps will gradually get rebuilt and the tradition will recover in some way.

(no, I will not address the clickbait elephant in the title)

I was pretty disappointed by the entire fifth season. The show has been floundering after season 3, when it was clear that the natural climax of the story was post-poned because they couldn't handle a show without Homelander.

There's a number of issues that I have with S5, starting with the pacing. The episodes are paced incredibly weirdly. We spend a lot of time on things that, given the show is in its last season, really shouldn't be the focus. New B-side superheroes are introduced and take a lot of focus away from the core protagonists who's stories we are supposed to be finishing up. There's a whole haunted house bottle episode. There's a 5 min sequence of two new villains sniffing each other's asses because they're animal themed in the penultimate episode. The consequence of this is that the actual climax is incredibly rushed and dealt with in all of 30 minutes. There's a whole storyline that's introduced with a stronger superhero drug that makes you immune to the virus the Boys are cooking up to kill Homelander, and he takes it and then within 2 episodes they just find a new dumb way to kill him. It reeks of upping the stakes without a good reason.

Another issue is how cheap everything felt. There's a distinct lack of set-up shots and extras. Most of the time, it's named characters sitting in a closed room, talking at each other. If there's action, it's just a fist fight with maybe some dry-wall punches. The entire climax of the show is confided to a single room's decor getting torn to shreds and that's while evil superman is getting killed. There's a chase sequence in ep 2 which made me laugh out loud because of how stupid it looked. In this high stakes situation it's just people jogging down roads.

I do feel for the show because for something written pre 2024, they got outpaced by reality on the satire. But that doesn't absolve you from dogshit dialogue that cannot stay away from crass words and sex jokes. All the time. S1 was raunchy and gory at times, but it was timed well and balanced out by genuine, normal conversation. The word fuck loses all it's fucking meaning if you fucking put it in fucking front of every fucking other word. Ignoring even that, the writing still sucks from start to finish.

I'm happy it's over and that I can let this franchise rest. I stuck with it because S1 was really good. I'm sad that a show which had such a clear through line from S1 onwards with the Boys killing their way up the Seven was turned into, well, whatever happened in seasons 4 and 5.

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.

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.