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.

This thread also applies to every other annoying website.

Medium is one of the most annoying sites out there. It's slow, cluttered, always greets me with a despicable banner (no, I do not pardon the interruption!) and manages to consistently bypass uBlock Origin. I'm tired of complaining on individual threads (and attracting well-deserved reproach for my grumpiness), so here's my proposal: let's establish an informal rule that every Medium article should be shared in a sanitized version. outline.com seems to be the best tool to accomplish that, but I'm open to suggestions. As a safety measure, in case outline.com goes offline, the original Medium link could be posted in the body of the new thread.

What you lovely people think about this idea?

After our discussion about Tempest-like games, I looked at what else could at least scratch a similar fast-paced space-theme racing, with optional shooting itch on Switch.

To kick off the discussion, these are the games I already tried that I kinda like. I‘ll update this list, once people suggest other entries. I realise it’s a bit of a mish-mash, but it’s more about the feel than a specific genre.

Fast RMX is a very fast-paced pod-racer, with a similar feel to Wipeout, if you take away the weapons, and add a boost mechanic where you need to switch your booster’s code with the speed lane. I prefer playing it with motion/gyro controls, which admittedly makes it harder to play, but with that actually feels a lot more like you’re travelling at massive speed where every unintentional jerk of the steering wheel can cause you to wipe out.

Velocity 2X is a very successful mix of a vertical shooter where time matters with added platforming levels in between. Boosting for speed and warping/teleporting to solve puzzles is a huge part of the game.

The Next Penelope is a top-down 2D (pod?) racing game with weapons, where the acceleration happens automatically, but is influenced by boost, boost markers on the track and bumping into stuff. I haven’t played it for a long time yet, but once you learn the controls it seems to be a very good game.

VSR is a pure zero-gravity, zero-friction 3D space racer. Which makes mastering the controls very hard for anyone who is not used to it. To be honest, I haven’t mastered them yet either, but haven’t given up, as I really liked RPGs and shooters with such a mechanic. It just gives a specific type of zennish “in the zone” feeling, once you get into it.

Fast RMX
price: 20 € 14 € until 2019-07-25
reviews: 81 % on MetaCritic
length: 3½ h main game (57 h completionist) on HowLongToBeart

Velocity 2X
price: 20 € 8 € until 2019-07-18
reviews: 87 % on MetaCritic
length: 5 h main game (26 h completionist) on HowLongToBeat

The Next Penelope: Race to Odysseus
price: 13 € 2 € until 2019-07-11
reviews: 79 % on MetaCritic
length: 2½ h main game (5½ h completionist) on HowLongToBeat

VSR: Void Space Racing
price: 5 €
reviews: 66 % on MetaCritic
length: (no HowLongToBeat entry yet)

I'm not sure if this is the case for everyone but the new reddit can't load any data, at least for me. However, old.reddit.com works, and all mobile apps seem to work which obviously use the reddit API. I am curious, does reddit have a different version of their API for the redesign, and that's what's been down for hours?

edit: I know that reddit must allow their own product to do things that other products don't.. Like it seems the chat api is not open to 3rd parties.. but I assumed that they would have just blocked certain api endpoints from public exposure. But based on my blind troubleshooting of this case, it seems that they must be using a totally different interface all together for the redesign?

Hmm, so I've heard reddit is super-cached... is this possibly a caching fault then?

reddit uses redis, correct? And it must be sharded, right? So maybe some redis cluster nodes are down?

I'm trying to learn here, and I am likely asking the wrong questions.. The goal of my post was to understand this type of failure, as I realize that it must be partial as in if all of reddit resign was down, it would be news. If anyone could correct any of my statements or assumptions I would really appreciate it.

I realize I'm behind the curve on this one, as it made headlines a full year ago, but I just watched Nanette, which is a stand-up comedy performance by Australian lesbian comic Hannah Gadsby. I don't love stand-up comedy at all, but the person who recommended it to me knew this about me and encouraged me to watch it anyway.

I'm glad I did.

And a big part of that is because her show isn't really stand-up. It starts out that way, and I legitimately enjoyed her humor, but about halfway through she shifts from telling jokes to more serious monologuing, and the show moves from being funny and incisive to become a flat out emotional sledgehammer. I cried through a good portion of it.

She tackles a lot in her hour, and it's given me a lot to think about--most of which I haven't really had adequate time to digest yet. I found it remarkable that so much of her story was so similar to my own. She framed aspects of myself in ways I needed to hear. I think what she has to say has resonance for everyone, but I think it's especially relevant for LGBT people, and especially for those of us that grew up in environments that were toxic to us.

I just wanted to see if anyone else here has watched it and, if not, put it out there as something worth your time--even if you don't usually like stand-up.