If anyone wants a replacement for the Tildes book club (and thanks /u/boxer_dogs_dance for running it consistently for so long!!) I run one that might interest speculative fiction readers. Be warned that it's a "dictatorship" where I pick every book, and I alternate between lesser-known books I've read and already enjoyed; and books that I'm interested in but haven't read yet.

Here is the list of books we have read:

• The Raven Scholar
• A Song of Legends Lost
• A Shadow in Summer (Long Price Quartet)
• Allow Me To Introduce Myself [the only non-spec-fic we've done thus far]
• Gods of the Wyrdwood (Forsaken Series)
• Kalyna the Soothsayer
• The Black Company (The Black Company)
• Battle of the Linguist Mages
• The Cloud Roads (Raksura)
• Sanctuary Duet
• Ten Thousand Doors of January
• The Dream Hotel
• The Element of Fire (Ile-Rien) [this is the only one so far that I hadn't read yet and didn't really enjoy]
• A Portrait in Shadow
• House of Suns [current month]
• City of Lies by Sam Hawke [next month]

The book club is in an "anyone can invite anyone but it's not publicly listed anywhere" Discord server dedicated to reading speculative fiction with about 1000 members, ~50 active), if anyone thinks like this list of books seems in line with your tastes I can dm you a join link! It's very low commitment and done with threads so you can read the current book or a backlist book and still talk about it + scroll through past discussion easily.

I can also offer advice (how to pick books, how to do things in Discord in a sane way, etc) if anyone else is interested in running something like this

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?

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

This thread got me thinking and reading about the solar eclipse next year. Here is the path. It seems like Luxor would be an ideal location, except for the likely huge crowds and the heat. Tarif, Spain or Tangiers, Morocco seems like the next most likely destination. The length of the totality is shorter, but both cities are fully in the totality, so we could likely see it from where we are staying. Another random thought would be taking a boat into the mediterranean north of Tunisia, but I don't know how practical that would be.

What recommendations, if any, do you have for this kind of travel? I am a complete travel noob, so open to all suggestions. This will be my and my wife's 20th anniversary, so it might be okay to splurge a little.

One of my younger cousins, at the end of weeks-long stay at an inpatient psychiatric facility, came out as trans to his parents. They are very supportive, if a bit surprised.

I want to help them and my cousin out and link them to some online forums/discussion spaces. He’s (AMAB, hasn’t mentioned what the new pronouns are) very online, so I’d be most interested in stuff for him. I know some of the sites don’t have the best reputation, or are very polarizing, so I’d like sites that are positive and supportive.

The eclipse is over! Dracula is sealed. Again. Kinda? Who knows, man, this was a weird bout for him. Nostradamus has gotta have some more stuff in the tank for another Belmont, but for now let's just enjoy all the Axe Armor souls we farmed.

I hope you enjoyed Aria of Sorrow! Playing it again, I've found this game is comfort food - simple and straightforward, but clicky and fun. How does it match up to the rest of the genre, or series, for you? Did you try any mods? HOW DO YOU GET PAST THE WATERFALL?!

Join us in July when u/zod000 presents Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals!

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.

TLDR; I made an electroacoustic album based on artwork, poetry, and soundscapes in Portland, OR, USA. Inspired by ambient electronica and impressionist piano, CYLCE is a dark journey through nature and urban environments.

Bandcamp Link: https://nickalus.bandcamp.com/album/cycle

CYCLE is a project of mine that had an unusual life span (at least for myself). Originally, CYCLE was a sound installment commissioned for a gallery hosted by Open Haus in Portland, OR in collaboration with visual artist Jon Hwong and poet TKTK in a very strange turn of events. Over the past two years it has morphed into an audiovisual experience (I guess that would be the word for it???) using motivic development, creative coding (NO AI WHATSOEVER), and digital degradation.

In celebration of the physical release (and my first physical release as an artist), I plan to spend the next couple of weeks (as long as the mods are okay with these posts) discussing different aspects of the project in hopes of starting a conversation about other musicians’ practices, thoughts, or critiques. I have included a list of topics I plan on covering in future posts at the bottom of this one.

Context
The project started in 2024 (feels like yesterday) while working on my own gallery DEAD WORLD THEORY. A few months out from the premiere, I was introduced to Keith, a local poet, through my co-producer Jon. The three of us talked about their upcoming gallery hosted in the neighborhood. Jon was creating a collection of artwork exploring natural form within technology and Keith was premiering a new chapbook and giving a reading of selected works.

This was a collision of multiple niche interests of mine. Technology and nature have always been something of interest in my work since joining an electroacoustic ensemble during college. And before then, I was writing weird concert music that was interested in the idea of non-musical sounds (think: hypnotist/New York school of contemporary music), and specifically setting poetry and common speech to music (similar to work such as Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “IBM 1401 - A User's Manual”).

As you can see, the synchronicity of this project was insane. I needed to be in it.

I immediately pitched the idea to the other artists: I’ll make a soundtrack for the gallery that combines nature and technology, and the poet and I could perform an impromptu lieder of his work. Both artists loved the idea and took it to the producer of the event. With a little negotiation, it was decided. I was on the bill and even invited to speak on a panel discussion they were holding that evening to discuss my own upcoming project.
The event was a great success. We had a nice turnout and I had a chance to talk with some phenomenal artists that attended the event.

Inspiration
As mentioned above, this project was a perfect storm of my influences and niche interests. I’ll break the project into two parts. Sorry you can't hear the last part (should’ve been there).

Nature and Technology: The Soundtrack
I have always been the person to challenge a rule, not because I want to break it, but because I want to understand it. Naturally, as a pianist studying composition and performance with a wicked resistance to authority, I became interested in the avant-garde of music. This new fascination started with the usual suspects: Ives, Cage, Monk, and Schoenberg. But it quickly led to the modern approach of this idea such as noise, harsh ambient, industrial, etc.

This turn of events led to joining an electroacoustic ensemble where we utilized traditional instruments with technology to create shows, galleries, and sound installations. I immediately felt the shift in my peers:

Was I a pianist or was I a DJ? Was I a composer or a producer? Was this music or was this art (or neither)?

I began to obsess over this question. Where is this line between electronic and acoustic? Where is the end of nature and the start of technology? What is the line between music and art? If you are familiar with music history I am sure you know this is a pointless question that has been argued for centuries in either direction under the conversation of programmatic and absolute music. CYCLE is a culmination of my interested in ecoacoustics, technology, urban development, rural preservation, and the psychoacoustic effects of noise.

The Impromptu Lieder
The second half of the performance was an impromptu lied with Keith’s poetry set as the libretto. This was my second cycle of lieder as a composer. The first being a song cycle for Piano and Mezzo Soprano which used T. S. Eliot's “Cycle of Preludes” as the libretto. The preludes were traditionally set using Western notation and assigning pitches to the libretto. I wanted to do something different for this one.

In my journey of the opium dens of contemporary music and the avant-garde (circa 2018), I had discovered the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The piece was titled IBM 1401 - A User’s Manual, an opera that used a printer’s user manual as the libretto. Jóhannsson correlated the user’s manual with childhood memories of his father who was a salesman for IBM. I would not consider myself a printer enthusiast, but this work was striking. This took the programmatic style of impressionist lieder but worked from something that would be considered wholly technical and categorically “Not Art”. But, now the silly manual printed on cheap paper n’est pas une pipe.

I wanted to emulate the “Treachery of Image” in a sonic medium. However, the poetry I was working with is ART. So, rather than subverting the source material I decided to subvert the performance aspect. Rather than prescribing singing to the text, it would use common speech. I worked with Keith to transcribe the natural rhythm of his collection of poems. This allowed the rhythm of the poetry to be the pulse of the music.

Doubling down on programmatic vs absolute, I worked closely with Keith to understand the meaning of his work. I kept seeing the recurrence of phases (or cycles) of life, nature, grief, love, and healing. The work had hope, but hope that was sustained through a hostile world, fighting against the downward pull of pessimism. I also asked my poor poet to destroy their own work by telling me one word. This singular word would become the “narrative motif” of each piece.

I decided to work with impressionist aesthetics for two reasons: extended harmony and programmatic composition. Firstly, the growing class of piano-composers during this era such as Rachmaninoff and Debussy were a huge influence on me as a Pianist. Secondly, the “narrative motif” from Keith would be used to decide the sonic motifs. One specific example of this is using planing fourths upward rather than using a Picardy third for moments that reflect sadness changing to happiness.

Below is a list of the topics I plan on covering in the next couple of weeks:

Location specific

Portland: Selected Soundscapes

Associated Memories: Places and the Past

Song Cycle

Modulation without Keys

Timbral Motifs

Song Cycle/Story Structure

Ecoacoustics

Nature/Transition/Urban

Audio to Video

Audio to Video: Motifs

If there is something you are particularly interested in or something you don’t see on the list please leave a comment and I’ll add it in! Additionally, this entire post is meant to be a discussion for musicians and fans of music to talk, so, please leave your thoughts below for myself or other people to jump in.

I've enjoyed reading the What game are you terrible at? topic, and it gave me the idea of making the question a bit more general.

Not "what are you bad at?" but what is something that's more difficult for you specifically. Like, I'm bad at a ton of different things, but that's because I don't put effort into them or never learned them or whatnot.

But there are certain things that I do that I find I have to put a lot more effort into to even be passable, while for other people it comes easy. That's the sort of thing I'm interested in hearing about.

• What's something that's tougher for you than it is for others?
• Why do you think that is?
• How does it impact you/others?

I just rewatched the movie Constantine. It's one of my favorite movies. I can always watch it again. But I'm sure the ending was different. I didn't find any record of an alternate ending online.

Life is especially stressful lately, and with that my usual sleep struggles are just getting worse. When I was younger, I struggled to fall asleep - and at times, I still do - and I was able to develop some strategies that helped me soothe my overactive mind (ADHD brain goes brrrrr). As I'm getting older, I'm having a different problem come up though.

Now the trouble isn't so much getting to sleep as it is staying asleep long enough to get the rest I need, or at least want. For example, this past week has been the first week of school for me as a teacher. It is absolutely exhausting. I crash out between 8/9pm every night. Then I find myself awake at 2/3am without fail and just toss and turn until either I eke out a half hour of sleep before my alarm at 5am or just give up and get up.

Of course those hours I spend lying awake in bed are the perfect time for my mind to turn to dark and terrible thoughts as well. The small hours of the morning are apparently perfect for this. That's a whole other thing I'm working on dealing with.

I know this isn't a unique problem, I know that there isn't a catch all solution, I'd just love to hear some different ideas on what to do about it.

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.

Pretty basic question I know, figure since people come and go the answers could change

Mine are Made in Abyss, Blame, Girl's Last Tour

Edit: almost forgot: Yotsuba to! Most wholesome and hilarious thing I've read!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like forums, communities.online and easylist. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was nosey.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

This is a tough question.

I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad or relive trauma, but I want to give people a space to talk about it and share their stories if they need to.

• Have you ever been outed by someone else/accident/circumstance?
• What happened?
• Who/what outed you?
• Why?
• How did it turn out?

Also, while some people will undoubtedly have serious answers to this, I also think there are some stories that are less grave and more lighthearted or positive. Those are fine to share too.

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'm asking "I" in the sense that I'd personally like an answer to this question, but really this is more about using VPNs in general.

Currently, I just use the server with the lowest latency because that gives me the least friction.

However, thinking about the GDPR in the EU, or California's data privacy protections: should I be strategically choosing a server based on those? Is there any benefit to having my traffic routed through a jurisdiction like that, or does that not really matter?

EDIT: To further clarify: will all the different websites out there log less data or treat my data differently if they believe my traffic is coming from the EU/California?

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!