This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

EDIT: Latest update

This is something so rudimentary that I'm a little embarrassed to ask, but I've also tried looking around online to no avail. One of the hard parts about being a Linux newbie is that the amount of support material out there seems to differ based on distro, DE, and also time, so posts from even a year or two ago can be outdated or inapplicable.

Here's my situation: I'm a newbie Linux user running Pop!_OS 19.10 with the GNOME desktop environment. Occasionally, games I'm playing will hard crash and lock up my system completely, leaving a still image of the game frozen on the screen indefinitely. The system stays there, completely unresponsive to seemingly any inputs. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it's almost always when I'm running a Windows game through Steam's Proton layer. I suspect it also might have something to do with graphics drivers, as I'll at times notice an uptick in frequency after certain updates, though that might just be me finding a suspicious pattern where none exists.

Anyway, what I don't know how to do is gracefully exit or recover from these crashes. No keyboard shortcut seems to work, and I end up having to hold the power button on my computer until it abruptly shuts off. This seems to be the "worse case scenario" for handling it, so if there is a better way I should go about this, I'd love to know about it.

EDIT: I really want to thank everyone for their help so far. My initial question has been answered, and for posterity's sake I'd like to post the solution here, to anyone who is searching around for this same issue and ends up in this thread:

• Use CTRL+ALT+F3/F4/F5/F6 keys to access a terminal, where you can try to kill any offending processes and reboot if needed.
• If that fails, use ALT+SYSRQ+R-E-I-S-U-B.

With that out of the way, I've added more information about the crashes specifically to the thread, primarily here, and some people are helping me out with diagnosing the issue. This thread is now less about the proper way to deal with the crash than it is about trying to identify the cause of the crash and prevent it in the first place.

I didn't know tildes has trending topics.

I'd either pick the rise of the bolsheviks in Russia (You can replace them with the mensheviks, who wanted to abide by democracy.), The division of the HRE (A united germany in 900CE would be very consequential.) And the rise of the hapsburgs in what would be Austria-Hungary, since it meshed a dozen linguistic groups together.

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 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.

I was chatting with a friend today and this question came up - I drew a complete blank.

Aside from a few foreign movies retranslated into a completely different context, like Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, most remakes don't even approach the quality of the original, for my tastes.

Please enlighten me if you're aware of any superior, or even equivalent remakes that tell roughly the same story with the same characters.

In an attempt to get somewhat back into shape, I've recently taken up meal prepping again. I love cooking but my previous job was ~60 hour weeks, and some things had to be sacrificed because there just wasn't enough time in the day. However, I have a somewhat more normal job now and I can get back into the things I love(d) to do.

I made some teriyaki salmon and veggies for the next week: https://imgur.com/a/GCFPeJS

Recipe: https://www.lecremedelacrumb.com/one-pan-baked-teriyaki-salmon-and-vegetables/

I'm not good with fish and I rarely try to cook with it (landlocked state so it's hard to get it fresh), l but I found that fish-based dishes very generally tend to be healthier and dairy-free (lactose-intolerant).

What are your favorite foods to prep for a week? Got any recipes? Any tips for a fledgling beginner?

Today I went to my favorite bakery/cafeteria/restaurant/grocery store (yeah it's one place, but not large enough to be considered a supermarket - IDK the correct terminology in English but you get the gist). It's a nice place if a little pricey. About a month ago, they installed a gate. Next to the gate, there's a huge metal thing with a single red button. When you press the button, it tosses an electronic ticket (that stores every purchase you make in the system) and the gate lets you go through. These are not synchronous, sometimes the gate is unlocked a lot sooner than the ticket is tossed. So today, after I got into the store, an employee had to run towards me to give me my electronic ticket. Okay.

I noticed that, despite the machine having only one very big button, lots of people still need to be instructed by the employee in order to enter, and he's constantly manually handing out the tickets. There is also a gate to leave that slows things down.

In this last month, I went a lot less to this place. That's because, whenever passing by, I used to enter just to check things up, see if there was something new or appetizing. You know, impulse buys. The need to check myself in and out (even when I don't purchase anything) made me quit that habit. I think other people are the same. Besides, what's the good of automation if it requires a human being to make it work correctly? AFAIK, the analog system worked. And we're not in a dangerous part of town where one needs to worry about people putting products in their pockets.

That's why I say: sometimes, there is such a thing as too much technology.

In the recent topic about NBC's new streaming service the claim was made that:

This is straight-up worse for the consumer than it was before.

I responded to that comment, but wanted to expand on it a lot more. So here goes.

If you've never read about it, you might not know what TV was like before the internet, so I want to give a brief history of television in the US as I understand and remember it. I was born in the early 1970s, so that's where I'm coming from.

~1940-~1960 - Televisions are large heavy devices full of vacuum tubes. In order to watch something on your TV you also need a large metal antenna on the roof of your house. There are 3 television stations - ABC, NBC, and CBS and they all broadcast in standard definition. You can clearly pick up 1 or 2 of them, but the 3rd is always kind of staticky because their broadcast tower is just over that hill in the distance, so the signal is weak. In order to watch a show you have to be in front of your television when the show is on. All shows are in black and white. Except the characters. They're all white. And straight. And middle class. And Christian. The shows are "free" because sponsors buy advertising time at the beginning or ending of the show.

~1960-1970 - Televisions are still huge boxes that weigh a ton and are full of vacuum tubes. You still need a large antenna on your roof to get the shows, and it doesn't work very well when it's raining. There are now 2 or 3 local stations that have a variety of programming throughout the day and often show re-runs of older shows you used to watch. You still need to be in front of your television when the show is on in order to see it. Some shows are now in color! Except the characters. They're all white. And straight. And middle class. And mostly Christian, though there is an occasional Jew, usually for laughs. Oh, and the big networks use satellites to broadcast their programs to local affiliates across the country. (This will be relevant in the 1980s.) The shows continue to be paid for with your attention; ads now interrupt the show for a few short minutes between the first and second or second and third acts.

~1970-1980 - You can now buy a small television that uses transistors instead of huge vacuum tubes that always burn out. It has "rabbit ear" antennas that don't require installation on your roof. There are now 5-7 local stations including a public broadcasting station that mainly shows a strange woman doing something called "yoga". For a very high monthly price you can get cable which gives you pristine picture quality of all the channels in your area plus 1 channel that shows movies. You need to have an installer come to your house to set it up, and they can't tell you when they'll be there, but they'll come eventually. All shows are in color (except for reruns of shows from the 1950s). Even the characters are starting to show some color! (But not too much.) There are a handful of LGBT characters, usually played for laughs or shown as someone others consider sick. Advertisements now occur roughly every 5 minutes.

~1980-1990 - Televisions are now all electronic (but still has the huge cathode ray tube displaying the picture). Most don't even need a separate antenna. It doesn't matter anyway because cable is cheap enough that most middle-class households can afford it. (You still have to wait for an installer to come.) There are something like 30 channels! It's insane! You can get multiple cable channels that show recent (only 1-2 years old) hit movies. And you can video tape any show you want to see so you don't have to be in front of the TV when it's on. (Assuming you can figure out how to set the clock on your VCR, and the power doesn't blink off for even a second during the show, and the show isn't pre-empted by any news or sports, and the tape doesn't get shredded or self-destruct.) You can fast-forward through ads, and your TV may have a mute button to turn the sound off during ads if you're watching live. If you're really a TV nut you can buy a satellite antenna. It's a 6-foot diameter round metal dish you stick in your back yard. You can directly receive the feeds from the big networks. This allows you to occasionally see Tom Brokaw eating a sandwich during what would normally be a commercial break. If you can't afford a satellite dish, you get to see ads every 5 minutes, plus product placements during the shows. Characters seem to have gotten whiter, straighter, and Christianer than they were in the 1970s. Ads remain largely as intrusive as in the 1970s, there are just more of them now.

~1990-2000 - TVs remain largely unchanged from the 80s. Everyone has a VCR. Everyone now has cable. (Waiting to get it installed now takes longer than ever, and the cable companies are notorious for terrible customer service.) Cable has 100 channels. Most of it is complete dreck and uninteresting to you. Since these channels have to fill airtime 24/7, much of it ends up being "infomercials." However, because there are so many channels most of the non-white, non-Christian characters move to niche channels. (There still aren't very many LGBT characters.) Satellite dishes shrink to about 1 foot across and several companies launch satellites just to provide consumers with content. Several cable channels spring up to show re-runs with small pieces missing, filled in with ads. The ads are much louder than they used to be.

~2000-2010 - VCRs start getting replaced with digital video recorders that can set their own clocks and schedule shows by name rather than date and time. They can save a number of shows without changing tapes. Some have automatic ad-skipping technology. DVDs replace VHS tapes. Televisions start moving to high definition LCD panels. Installing cable takes longer than ever, but cable carries hundreds of channels including channels devoted only to a single sport like golf or tennis. You can get bundles that include different features like lots of movie channels, adult content, artistic content, sports packages, etc. There are a variety of channels with shows devoted to different groups of people including women, minorities, and LGBT populations. It becomes possible to download an episode of a television show or a movie to your computer or iPod over the internet in only 20 minutes. You can watch on the way to work or on an airplane!

~2010-now - Standard definition TVs are obsoleted. All TVs are now High Definition and some are even 4k Ultra High Definition with High Dynamic Range color. The satellite companies are hemorrhaging customers. People are "cutting the cord" and getting rid of cable TV, though most still get their internet through the local cable provider. There's often only a single choice of provider.

Here's what streaming TV over the internet involves:
You can now be almost anywhere and instantly watch almost any episode of any television show you want with pristine quality. You don't need to install any additional hardware and the device you watch it on fits in your pocket. You can literally go to a cell phone store, buy a phone, and start watching television on your new phone minutes later. And you can put that on your huge high resolution TV, too.

There are hundreds of streaming services, but you don't even need to subscribe to a service to find content. People are uploading it constantly. You can watch old episodes of thousands of shows as well as new original content for around what you used to pay for cable TV. You can watch educational stuff, or just short fun videos. You can find videos on every topic from every type of person about every type of person for better or worse.

And if you want to pay for video there are no ads. Nothing to mute, nothing to fast-forward through, nothing to annoy you. (There are still product placements, though they're usually subtle and make sense within the content.) If you watch part of a show on your phone on the train, when you get home, you can pick up where you left off on your television instantly. The weather doesn't affect the picture quality. Shows are never preempted because some politician is making a speech or a sporting event or awards show went longer than expected. There's always something on, even if it's a holiday or summer or there some big event you don't care about going on.

There is one down side: sometimes something you want to watch is on a service you have and then later it goes away, or it's not on a service you have. Usually you can subscribe to a service for 1 or 2 months, watch what you want and unsubscribe.

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!

I'll start (for reference, I am a 14 year old Brazilian in a presumably poor house , also in retrospect this reminds me of what they tell you to do at the beginning of most English courses, which makes me feel like a cringy kid):

• Wake up (6:15, praised be alarm clocks)

• Put on the school uniform (takes 5-10 minutes)

• Have breakfast (takes 10 minutes)

• Brush my teeth (takes less than 5 minutes)

• Walk to school (6:45)

• Reach school (less than 100 meters from my home thankfully) and enter a classroom (7:00 plus a few minutes for teachers to set stuff up)

• stay in school until 12:17 (every time the subject changes, we pack our stuff and go to the classroom the teacher of the subject is in. There is also a break between 9:30 and 10:20.)

• Leave school and go home

• Get home by 12:45

• Have lunch, usually rice and beans with either meat or chicken meat in some flattened form I can't describe, usually at 1-1:30 PM.

Do... whatever on the phone (as of recently be here or in discord, along with reddit and YouTube for longer unless it runs out of battery) Edit: see here for details.

• Have dinner (usually at 8:30-9:00, same food as lunch)

• Pack the books for the subjects they teach tomorrow

• Go to sleep at 10.

During vacation/weekends I can wake up from 5-10 AM depending on how well I slept the previous night. The rest is the same, except for Saturdays my parents go and buy some esfihas to break the monotony of lunch and dinner.

Hey there people!

Seeing how last post I could find on the topic was posted almost one year ago and how my question is a bit more specific, I thought a new one could be worthwhile.

Admittedly, I am not an assiduous podcast listener - what I'm mostly looking for is a show to 'scratch the itch' every once in a while which features good chemistry between its hosts, exploring whatever topic with humorous tones; bonus points if said topic is interesting.

To exemplify, some of the best podcasts I can think of on the spot are How did This Get Made (I can particularly recommend the episode dedicated to Mr. Nanny), or How to Fuck Up an Airport.

The first one is a serie that analyze extremely poor or obscure movies, while the second one unveils the debacle surrounding the 20 year old (and still aging) Berlin Brandenburg Airport project; I know this last one might sounds boring, but it's a baffling and hilarious journey - surely and by far my favorite Podcast.

TL;DR
So yeah, what are your most entertaining, hilarious, and generally fun podcasts?

This year I wanted to make a point to support and follow more indie game developers. I thought I'd post this topic to spread some love. Let's share indie game projects and developers that we are currently following to help them get some more exposure. Here are a few from my end:

Pizza Tower:

https://pizzatowerguy.itch.io/

The demo feels so good to play. Controls are really tight and art/animation is really charming albeit eye-straining on higher resolution.

Guinea Pig Parkour:

https://twitter.com/GPigParkour
This game is not as far along as Pizza Tower, but the game-play footage looks superb. Seems like a taxing process considering the level of polish being demonstrated. Looking through GPigParkour's twitter, apparently this is something that they have been working on since 2016.

Headcannon (Stealth):

http://www.headcannon.com/vertebreaker.html

You probably know Headcannon as the development team behind Sonic Mania. Despite the amazing job they did on Sonic Mania they don't receive much of anything for their hard work. The only pay from Sega that they received was the commission to create Sonic Mania and don't receive any revenue from sales. A recent kickstarter for the game Vertebreaker had be be cancelled because they were unable to raise enough funds for it. The founder and head of Headcannon Stealth goes into detail about this in the linked video. I highly recommend you check them out and donate to their Patreon if you can. They certainly have the talent and know how to create some cool ass games.

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 is a bit of a sibling topic to the one about changing habits for 2020. Rather than looking at habits specifically, I want to look at "swaps" that people can make.

What's something someone could change out for a better alternative?

A swap should be recommended if it is,

• more ethical,
• more sustainable,
• heathier,
• or just overall better in an individual or collective way.

Importantly: the swap should be both feasible and sensical, and should be something that is relatively easy to do. This isn't about making huge lifestyle changes but about taking what we're already doing and making it better.

Please give your reasoning for your swap, as well as any important caveats. Mentioning specific brands/companies is fine if that's an important part of the swap. Also, swaps can be for anything so don't feel limited to consumer products. Feel free to give good food/service/app/software/store swaps as well!

See my post below for an example, if the setup I've given here is unclear!

Simple question. For people's original poems posted in ~creative, should they be tagged "poem" or "poems"?

"poetry" is the broader category, and includes discussions about poets and poetry in general. However, when someone posts their poem, should that be tagged "poem" or "poems"?

The tagging guidelines say (or used to say - since I re-organised the Docs pages, I can't find this reference any more) that tags should be plural. That indicates that "poems" is the better tag. But the post contains a single poem, which makes "poem" the better tag.

Opinions?

EDIT: In the end, I went with the popular choice. When I looked at the tags used in ~creative, I found over a hundred topics tagged "poem" and only four topics tagged "poems". It seems that most people naturally choose "poem" when posting a poem, so I standardised the few differently tagged topics to use "poem".

I've recently started trying to improve my environmental impact, so I apologize for what might be a very basic question, but how bad is it to have items shipped/delivered to you, rather than picking them up from a store near you?

I'm specifically interested in two situations:

1. If I'm buying a specialty, zero-waste product that's not available in stores nearby, which is worse: having it delivered directly to my house, or having to drive a good distance in my own car to get it? Are the two roughly comparable, or is one considerably worse than the other?

2. I use a service called PaperBackSwap that is sort of like a big, distributed, online used bookstore. You give away books from your collection to people who request them, and for each book you send out you can request one to be sent to you. I like that it's putting books in the hands of people who specifically want them (as opposed to donating them or selling them to a used bookstore where they might be shelved indefinitely or pulped), but now I'm sitting here wondering how bad it is for that single hardcover of mine to travel halfway across the country. On the other hand, the book is getting reused, potentially multiple times if it then gets requested by others after that. Should I be considering this good reuse, or a waste of resources?

Outside of those two, I'd welcome any primers on the topic at large, as well as any best practices with consumer goods that I can start putting into place. I've already done a lot to find plastic-free alternatives to a lot of what I use, but I don't know if I'm trading one ill for another by getting them from places that have to send them from hundreds of miles away.

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?

I like reading about the development process of technology products (software and otherwise), even when I don't understand the tech bits.

Maybe due to their open nature, it is not hard to find detailed articles, mailing list answers, and interviews that go deep about FOSS. But I also have an interest in massively successful/unsuccessful products with large, rich and sometimes convoluted creation process. So things link Linux, Windows (all versions), Mac OS, the iPhone, iOS, Android, etc.

My interest is not necessarily in biographies or accounts that deify so-called technology geniuses, but rather in narratives that don't shy from the nitty-gritty details of the technical/creative processes while also addressing the human/personal side of things.

It also doesn't need to be educational at all, I just realized these stories are enjoyable reads.

Any suggestions? ;)

I have basic notions of HTML and CSS, but nearly zero JS knowledge. I can perform simple customizations and I know how to follow instructions.

It is not my intention to create anything from scratch (so the platform should have plenty of free themes), nor do I want to become a webdev or webdesigner. This is not a technical project for me, my main concern is the content.

I currently have a blog that uses Wordpress with a purchased theme. It's good enough, but a bit slow to load. Besides, simpler platforms might be easier to understand and manipulate.

This alternative would also need to be FOSS and easy to self-host.

As a plus, it would be awesome if I could manage the blog/website from within Emacs/Org Mode.

Any ideas?

I'm in the middle of writing my thesis and I've been (re)reading some excellent, unconventional style guides (The Sense of Style by Stephen Pinker and Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword). I'm also rereading Thank You for Arguing by Jay Heinrichs, which is less about style but is essentially a guide for effective communication.

In reading these books and applying their teachings to my writing, I've been reinvigorated with a passion for writing, namely for the craftsmanship of prose. All three books analyze excerpts from examples of great (and sometimes poor) writing. But, I'm now looking for a more immersive experience in good (i.e. stylish, evocative, concise etc.) writing in the hopes that, with my newly refined perspective and sensitivity, I can improve my own writing even more. Good writers read good writing.

Now, starting new books now won't help my current cause (my thesis) but my academic career will call for much more writing in the future. And I'm hoping that maybe the suggestions I get here will help me prioritize my current queue of books and articles—I know they're all great books but I'd like to read the ones with better writing, first.

So, I would love some recommendations on authors who you would consider as masters of writing. It can be either books or articles. Preferably non-fiction and modern (20 years?), only because fiction and older books have different standards (FWIW I love old-school sci-fi, but that's definitely not the style I'm after). My current shortcut is to read basically any "longread" on WIRED, as most of the time they are high quality and often explain complex topics.

Any other resources are also welcome! Though maybe no more style guides...

I'd love to hear about some games that are surprisingly good, deep, or different. As in, the premise or the presentation of the game does not bode well or looks weak, but the game itself rises above those preconceptions and limitations to be greater, richer, or more interesting than you expected. Think games like: a surprisingly good movie tie-in, a really great edutainment experience, a well-executed corporate mascot platformer, etc.

What is it about the game that sets your expectations low, and how does the game overcome that low anchoring?

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?

Specially those of you who attend courses on the field of humanities, in which I feel the amount of note-taking is even greater than most fields, given all the reading and talking that occurs during classes and out of them. How do you do it? Do you write on paper perhaps, or do you find that digital notes suit you better?
I'm asking this because I am about to start my studies (finally) and am curious about how other people handle this task which, honestly, has been a nuisance through all my life. I'm not the best at organizing my notes and I believe it harms my studying overall.

Whenever I try to find new albums, I find myself skipping through the entire record fairly quickly in order to find out if they’re good enough to warrant a full listen. Sometimes I’ll find an album that sounds impressive to me for very simple reasons, e.g. the sound of the bass guitar or frequent use of a pleasant synth sound. In my case, Oneohtrix Point Never is the perfect example. I enjoy virtually every single kind of sound in his discography, even most of the random sound effects. That’s why I began wondering if I’d overrate his future albums if he kept using the same synths, effects, etc. without actually bringing anything new to the table.

Is there anything similar that will always make you more likely to enjoy an album regardless of many other aspects that contribute to its actual quality?

I love single-location films, and use them as inspiration for my own very-constrained filmmaking endeavors. This is a space where great screenwriters and filmmakers shine, coming up with creative solutions to keep things fresh and enticing with little to no variation in ambiance. Some examples:

• 12 Angry Men (1957)
• Straw Dogs (1971)
• Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
• El Angel Exterminador (Exterminating Angel, 1962)
• Phone Booth (2003)
• Coherence (2013)
• The Invitation (2015)

But I want more! Any ideas?

I should add that my motivation for this question is research for my next production, and because of practical concerns I'm only looking for single-location films in which the main location is small and simple enough that its sub-divisions cannot be considered a location of their own. For example: according to my criteria, a large house or apartment would be a single location, because its subdivisions (living room, bathrooms, bedrooms, etc) can be considered as logical parts of the main one. A shopping mall, a large condominium or an apartment complex would not be a single-location, because its many buildings and apartments are distinct and independent enough to function as locations of their own. When in doubt, try applying production pragmatics instead of pure logic. If something is logically not really another location, but would be just as hard to manage as another location (a whole new set design), it is a location. Thanks!

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 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.

You've been asked to submit a proposal for a space exploration mission of your own desire, to the New Frontiers spaceflight program. These missions have a cost cap of approximately $700 million to $1 billion, and have famously produced the following spacecraft:

• New Horizons, a flyby probe to Pluto.
• Juno, a polar orbiter of Jupiter.
• OSIRIS-REx, a sample return mission to a rocky asteroid.
• Dragonfly, a drone lander to Saturn's moon Titan.

These are medium-sized missions in both scope, and cost. You can't build the Mars 2020 Rover, or the James Webb Space Telescope. What do you send, and where? Things to consider:

Technology Readiness Level

Administrators are less likely to choose your mission if you choose to integrate risky or untested flight hardware, or novel concepts into the mission design. You're more likely to get selected with more conventional hardware.

Power Source

Your best bet is probably solar panels, maybe something commercial off the shelf like NG's Ultraflex panels? The downside is that these are only effective up to about Jupiter's orbit, and generate power according to the inverse square law. How much do these cost and weigh? How much energy do you generate?

If you go further out into the solar system than that, you'll need a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG). There aren't many of those around, in fact, after Mars 2020 has taken its RTG, there's two left. What makes your mission deserving of an RTG? Is there enough power in the MMRTG to power your mission?

Propulsion

Does your mission need in-flight propulsion? Either for orbit insertion, landing, or maybe a long coast with Ion thrusters like Dawn? If the latter, you can get some pretty good Xenon-powered thrusters, like NEXT, which gives you 236mN of force from 7kW of input power (this rules out an RTG as your power source).

Don't need long-term burn capability? Maybe a COTS bipropellant engine like LEROS is your thing. Watch your weight though, bipropellants aren't efficient! Often more than half the mass of large spacecraft can be dedicated to just propulsion alone.

Instruments

Go crazy. What are you looking to research? Do you need a long range camera, a wide angle camera, something outside of the visible spectrum, a spectrometer, ground-penetrating radar? Do you have a mass-budget in mind?

Launch Vehicle

Every dollar you save on your launch vehicle, you get to add to your mission profile. Your best bet in terms of performance and cost is probably Falcon 9, which retails for $62-90 million, depending on the amount of assurance for success you need. Of course, if you can find a cheaper launch vehicle, feel free to pick it if it fits into your mission weight.

Objectives

What scientific questions do you want to answer? What are you interested in exploring the most?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

I switched to the light theme the other day. I'm typically all-in with dark themes for everything, but there was some convincing research.

I started working on a light theme, but it's fairly basic.

• main feed
• thread view

I was digging through the old thread and found a few gems, but I'm wondering what everybody has been up to since. Time for some show and tell!

I can mention many movies that influenced me in major ways.

• Stand By Me made me realize the importance of friendship
• High Fidelity helped me understand romance is not entirely about passion. It's also about respect, love, and care. There's value in something that's simply "good", and "good" is not something to brush off.
• Goonies and Godfather showed that, when shit hits the fan, family is everything.
• Manhattan taught me love is nothing without courage
• A Bronx Tale taught me that our parent figures can be imperfect and even downright criminal, but this doesn't mean they don't love us.

Ant the list goes on...

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'm interested in finding more great songwriters across different genres and I want to defeat my own bias, so don't tell me the artist or genre (or maybe put it in <details> tags).

Here are a few of mine -

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds

If you're really as tough as your defenses, you'd let them fall

Tried to deceive me, you only deceived you; what you thought was invisible was only see-through

I said, "If you won't save me, please don't waste my time"

Emotional luggage, nothing of it, I don't check bags; I just carry on, leave that bullshit in the past

Nothing no scary like a gunman voice when people beg a gunman think twice, and him say no

To turn your sick soul inside out - so that the world, so that the world can watch you die

Coincidentally, not all those songs are necessarily at the top of my recommends, but they are the first memorable one-liners that came to mind. I won't mind if your picks aren't the greatest songs of all time either if the line still hits.

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?

What drives you to create or do something new? Even seemingly straightforward motivations can have a pretty complex interaction of history and emotion behind the scenes.
What are the rates at which your motivation waxes and wanes? Does it come and go in a matter of days, weeks, or months? Or does it stay fairly consistent?
What steps would you take with the factors in an effort to increase your motivation?

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 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 feel like I have gotten as far as I can playing around with my keyboard and LMMS, so I was wondering if anyone here has any recommendations for a synth that I could start out with. As much as I really want to buy a OP-1 or OP-Z I don't think I can justify it just yet. I would like something in the style of the OP-1 or OP-Z, i.e. quite small, with they keys laid out like a piano, and controls for modifying the sound on the synth, although it doesn't need an included sequencer. I'm also pretty open to drum machine ideas, just have never really played around with them at all. My budget is like $200 max.

My personal picks would be the whole of Chinese history between the opium wars and communist rule (or the century of humiliation as it is called), and most especially the warlord era, given that this was effectively how European powers, Japan and many internal revolutionaries managed to bring down the greatest economy in the world to civil war and then total warlordism for 40 years. For a vague concept, my pick would be the great divergence, the period where the US and European nations rose above the rest of the world and became the predominant world powers and colonized most of it, along with the many potential causes of this.