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!

We're lucky when we share mutual interests with friends, but often there's that category of things for which there isn't much overlap. Though it speaks to us, we're seemingly alone in appreciating it, yet long for someone to connect with it over.

What's that thing for you?

I'm a 23 year old male originally from Southern California, and like the title says I'm curious to see if anyone else near my demographic has seriously looked into emmigrating in light of the past year and a half.

What factors motivate you to move?
What would be an ideal location for you?
What timeline would are you looking at?

One of the main motivators I seek to emmigrate is climate change. As the world continues to progress and evolve I do not think the United States will be able to equitabbly address the changing landscape and ways of life. As for when I would want to move, I'm not sure; currently it seems like a far off probability, but I know it's a choice I will have to make in my own lifetime.

Adam Savage once said we don't have "favourite" things, but rather things that are important to us, for different reasons. I would love to hear your top series and what put them there. Not just because they're good: Maybe you have a sentimental connection to it, or a particular episode. Maybe it taught you something. Let's hear 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.

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

There's been quite a bit of discussion lately about people don't want to see, but not that much about what sort of content we do want to see. What would you like to see more of?

For the official stance, I'll repost the instructions that most of us are probably skipping over by now.

Tildes prioritizes high-quality content and discussion
Please post topics that are interesting, informative, or have the potential to start a good discussion.
Please avoid posting topics that are primarily for entertainment or that don't have discussion value.

This seems vague, and we probably have different ideas of what's high-quality and what counts as good discussion?

I'm also wondering if we should be here more for the links or for the discussion. When I arrived, I was just happy to find a quiet place where I could post links to articles that I found elsewhere and were particularly interesting to me. (But I think I had gotten into a rut for a while after getting obsessed with the pandemic and politics.) Maybe we should try posting more links?

My niece turns 18 later this month. I'm getting her a Kindle and loading it up with as many "welcome to adult" books as I can.

Not really "self-help" books per se, but more "understanding your life and place in the world now that you're finally recognized by society as an adult". Here's the first few books I put on the list for ideas of what I'm going for (all non-fiction so far but I'm open to any fiction that fits the bill):

• Lies My Teacher Told Me

• The Power of Habit

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

• Bullshit Jobs

• Why Buddhism is True

I would include Sapiens and Homo Deus on the list but I know she's already read or reading them (after I gifted them to my brother / her dad and he passed them on to her).

What would you add to the list? What books do you wish someone had given you at this age that would have helped you navigate your early adulthood?

For the purposes of the question, I want to ignore official remasters/rereleases since those are essentially separate, newer full releases. I'm interested in old, original games. Titles that you can "manually remaster" yourself with mods are fine, since you're still playing the "original" game to some extent.

Also, "regularly" in the title doesn't have to mean daily/weekly and can instead be "once every couple of years".

• What keeps you coming back to them?
• Is your love for the games strictly nostalgia-based, or could an unacquainted newcomer still find similar value in them?
• If there are any modern games that try to scratch the same itch, do they succeed or fail?
• Would you want an official remaster of the game (if one isn't already available)?

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!

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?

It might sound silly to most, but I have had one for years now.

I started to really listen to music on my own volition in the early 2010s when I was in my early 10s, and I was really big into EDM at the time (big room house, brostep, electro house, progressive house, etc).

At some point in 2014 I wanted to expand my tastes so I ended up on rateyourmusic.com which is the kinda place you always end up on at some point if you go down this path the way I see it, and at first I just checked the overall charts and shrugged since it wasn't my kind of music at all (The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Radiohead, etc), but at some point it started bothering me; "why is all that crappy old music so highly regarded?" and I started giving the stuff a try. Didn't like it at all, but I somehow starting feeling compelled to try and understand/appreciate it.

Eventually, I fell down a sort of rabbit hole when I started reading discussions on how some music is "objectively better" than others and I completely believed it. Pushed around by the extremely harsh disdain towards the EDM I loved and godly praise of the type of thing I just mentioned, I just kinda felt like I was supposed to move on and basically listened to a lot of stuff like that.

Another while later I eventually realized that the whole "objectively good/bad" thing is one ugly sack of false shit, but I've been really burned out since then, and now I don't even really feel the music I used to like. Problem is, at this point the act of crawling through the charts looking for new music, constantly listening to new stuff, thinking about genres, etc, is so deeply ingrained in my behavior that I can't seem to stop. I have music on at nearly all times, and I force myself to listen to everything in full despite not feeling it at all.

Something that's also gotten me is the whole repeated listening thing, I've always really loved the idea of being able to enjoy something you initially didn't care for or were lukewarm towards by simply repeatedly listening to it. That also caused me to disregard my own impressions and force myself to repeatedly listen to almost everything. I'm mostly out of that phase now, but I sometimes still find myself digging through random stuff I've given low ratings and listening to it again purely to see if I suddenly like it, but it has literally never even worked once. I also think this has been a contributor to me being burned out on music.

At this point I kinda feel like I'll never truly enjoy music again like I used to and it's really sad. Sometimes it does return a little, but if have to explain it with a rating, I can't say I've ever really felt anything above a 7/10 again, most of the time it's between a 3/10 and 6/10. I totally realize I just need to take a break, but I simply can't seem to stop (through a lot of effort I have actually managed to take a full break last month, but I immediately relapsed when I resumed this month, and even without that it doesn't seem like it helped all that much). What a lot of people have with things like gaming and food, I basically have with music.

Does anyone else have anything like this?

Let me preface that I'm well aware that if given the choice between frequent, untargeted ads or fewer targeted ads, the average Tilderino's response would be "Neither."

However, given that social media at scale has yet to establish a sustainable business model that doesn't rely on advertising (people like free content, after all), it seems advertising has become a necessary evil (and has pervaded nearly all forms of media for the past century regardless).

With that in mind, I think coming up with creative solutions to deliver relevant advertising while preserving user privacy and avoiding destructive feedback loops (i.e. where the search for ad revenue compromises the user base and content generation) is an interesting thought exercise. This is one of social media's largest problems, imho, but it might be easier to analyze just Reddit as a platform due to its similarities (and notable differences) to Tildes.

A couple thoughts of my own:

• Whitelist "safe" subreddits - A massive problem for Reddit is identifying content that brands want to avoid association with (e.g. porn, violence, drugs). While new subreddits crop up every day, the large ones do not change so fast and could be classified as safe content spaces (e.g. /r/aww)
• User subreddit subscriptions - Rather than target ads based on the subreddit currently being viewed, why not use the subs people have voluntarily indicated they are interested in?
• Allow users to tag content - While people can report content to the mods today, there is no ability to tag content (like Tildes has) from a user level. Content that's inappropriate for advertising may not necessarily be a reportable offense. By allowing users to classify content, better models for determining "good" content vs. "bad" could be developed using ML.
• Use Mods to determine content appropriateness - User supplied data may introduce too much noise into any given dataset, and perhaps mods are a better subjective filter to rely on. Certain subreddits can have biased mods for sure, but without trying to overhaul content moderation entirely, could mod bans/flair be used to indicate suitable content for ads?
• Use computer vision to classify content - While this wouldn't work at scale, an up-and-coming post could have a nebulous title and difficult-to-decipher sarcastic comments. The post itself could be an image macro or annotated video that could be used to determine the subject matter much more effectively.

To be clear, the spirit of my initial prompt isn't "how can Reddit make more money?" per se, but how can it find a sustainable business model without destroying itself/impacting society at large. Facebook and Twitter seem to have optimized for "engagement" metrics which leads to prioritization of outrage porn and political divisiveness. Snapchat and Instagram seem to have succumb to being mostly an ad delivery engine with some overly-filtered content of "real life" influencers (read: marketers) strewn in between. None of these seem like a net-good for society.

What are all your thoughts? Perhaps Big Tech social media is irredeemable at this point, but I'm trying not to take such a defeatist attitude and instead explore any positive solutions.

Inspired by a similar thread @kfwyre posted a while ago.

I've been given an Android phone for a work contract and I don't want to carry two devices, so I will likely migrate from my Blackberry Z10 soon. The BB10 OS (not to be confused with BBOS, which ran the Bolds, etc. of BB's heyday) was intuitive, useful, and wayyyyy better than most people who never used it would have expected, only being doomed by the app gap. I'd have considered buying another Blackberry this year if I hadn't been given this other phone. I have long been wary of Android due to both privacy concerns and UI/UX gripes. Having tooled around for a couple days already, I'm struck by how many simple things I apparently can't do out of the box, and the fact that there are so. many. ads. Even in the apps! I know I will root and de-Google the device as much as I can once I get a hang of the OS.

So, I'm mainly looking for app recommendations, but general advice is appreciated as well. My use case is very functional - email, scheduling, messaging, browsing, navigation, weather, and calls. Preference given to FOSS and/or ad-free apps, but I'll pay up if it's really worth it. So far I've uninstalled a bunch of bloatware, installed Firefox, found SwiftKey to be the only half-decent replacement for Blackberry's terrific keyboard software, and the best free no-ad weather app looks to be a Norwegian one called Yr.

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.

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 weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

My husband and I invested in a smoothie blender for the purposes of incorporating more fruits and veggies into our diets. We made our first batch this weekend — quite tasty, but definitely not perfect. Does anyone more experienced in the art of homemade smoothies have any wisdom they can share as we start to experiment with them?

Tell us about an album that means a lot to you, and, most importantly, why it means so much.

What makes it resonant? Why do you connect with it so strongly?

To be clear, it doesn’t have to be literally applicable to your life. It could be, for example, an album that you listened to at a certain point in your life and thus connect it with that. I’m asking this question more to get at the stories than the music itself. Tell me yours!

Anything goes -- all answers are fair game, no matter how big or small! All that matters is that something amazing isn't getting its due.

Also, it probably goes without saying, but let us know why (you think) it's amazing and why (you think) people take it for granted.

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 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?

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

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'm mostly just curious what types of in-depth projects you all get up to. The weekly "what are you working on threads" are always full of cool things, so I am curious what people's self-rated most difficult or complex projects have been.

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!

A few years ago I watched a movie -- can't even remember what it was -- that heavily involved pagers. One character got mad at another for not returning their call, and there was a dramatic scene where they yelled something like "I PAGED you like an HOUR ago!" At the time of its release it probably made perfect sense, but from a modern perspective it had some unintentional comedy to it -- not to mention that younger audiences might not even understand what was going on given that pagers have likely fallen out of common understanding at this point.

I'm curious as to other things that haven't aged well, whether that's due to technological changes, shifts of the social or moral landscape, or even things that are fine in isolation but are hard to divorce from a larger context (e.g. They Might Be Giants released a song in late 2011 that jokes about Whitney Houston being the drummer for the band, but Houston died unexpectedly in early 2012).

Really anything is fair game: what hasn't aged well, and why not?

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?

Hi my lovelies,,

I've been having a hard time over the past few weeks because my life is pretty much a never-ending stream of problems and insecurities right now, most of which I cannot resolve for at least a few months. This has led me into a state of intense listlessness and unhappiness. I do not like being unhappy and have Officially Decided that I would like to be happy again. But I think I need some help getting there.

Moving beyond the basic "I'm terribly lonely in this very unpleasant pandemic" stuff, my main issue is that I actually am not alone at all, at least physically or socially, I am just alone emotionally/spiritually. I live with a bunch of other people my age and certianly have opportunities for interactions (quite a few). I get dinner with some of my very favorite people every week (on Wednesday!!!!) and am kept on at least a slightly consistent social/exercise schedule with some of my other very favorite people every day. My issue is that in most or possibly all of these settings, there is something preventing me from totally relaxing. I can only talk about my surface-level problems, like "oh haha I'm so busy with class ahah lol joke" and not "my deepest darkest insecurities are clawing their way into my brain more intensely every day and I Cannot Stop Them." Its like I keep my little shield up the whole time and don't allow myself to be vulnerable. I suspect there are a few factors going on here:

• I have several leadership positions, either formally or informally, and actually have a very difficult time not stumbling into them and accepting more responsibility in general. I think I have internalized the stoicism or steadfastness I try to exemplify in those positions, in my everyday life
• I often (usually?) look like I have my shit together, even when I very much do not. My default way of existing is just pretty relaxed and I think people assume that means I have no stress in my life (false lol)
• I like it when people think and say Good Things about me and not when they think and say Bad Things about me, and that includes their perceptions of me as someone who has their shit together all the time

sooo the leadership thing is unfortunate because it means that kind ofa lot of people look up to me as a beacon of stability and idealness. I know this because I have been told it several times by several different people, and it's sort of obvious when people emulate your mannerisms or call you at 2 am because they're drunk and lost and need help. There is exactly a 0% chance that I will do anything other than express my normal "everything is going good" attitude when I am running a meeting or giving a presentation or whatever because doing so would signify "everything isNOT good" and therefore "oh no help where is my beacon of stability beezselzak ahhhhhhh" (we cannot have a crisis at the same time because I must be there to attend to their crisis whenever it happens. Part of the job) And also it would upset my narcissistic tendency toward being perfect always.

Even when I'm with my friends, who I can be at least moderately normal around, I still find it very difficult to begin talking about anything that is rather Serious because it is much more pleasant to just talk about enjoyable things, and though I see these people on a regular basis, it is not ever for very much time, so I don't want to waste it. I would feel very awkward bringing up serious mental health problems at dinner. And also even though we're close friends there is still a little bit of an expectation to have your life under control? you know how it is. I have 2-3 people who are sort of individual confidants (about specific things), and there are occasions where we can have very insightful conversations. But it's hard because the covid makes getting together unrealistic and I find it very challenging to initiate Serious Conversations over the telephone. And even in person, I still think I have some barriers yet to break with them.

The end result here is that I am kinda just walkin around every day with a lot of issues and nowhere to exactly put them, and everyone thinks it's all sunshine and roses and I really feed into that perception because it makes me feel good short-term (even though it makes me feel worse long-term). I have a therapist, but you know how that goes. It's not the same as talking to a peer, which is really where I'm stuck. So this is my question to the wise and learned gentlefolk of Tildes:

How do I shed this annoying habit of trying to be perfect even when it's really not necessary and really not helpful? I know that there's a problem, I just can't give up my leadership positions (at least for now) and am having a hard time giving up my narcissism.

and yes yes I do therapy and journaling and the mindful meditation and whatever, I am not interested in generic self-help advice. I'm more curious about your rituals, or forms of understanding that are personal to your struggles in regard to being vulnerable with friends, your SO, and people who look up to you. I'd like to learn more about how any of this might resonate with you, and then how you have dealt/would deal with it yourself. Because I am Young And Naive I think I lack most of the experiential knowledge about like, "how to exist," and I want to be able to take your ideas into account. Things that matter, things that really just don't matter, ways to conceptualize the self versus the great vast universe of possibility and collective individuality to ultimately be less concerned with perfection and the like. etc. Also I ought to teach some of these people how to be better at being independent functional humans and that is a little tricky when I am not one myself.

xoxoxo
beezselzak

I hate watching reflections on my screens. My old laptop had a super reflective screen. So does my tablet and smartphone, but I was successful in applying anti-glare on them. Reflective screens are annoying in any condition besides total darkness. Anti-glare is such an improvement! Yes, I lose a small amount of brightness, but I need a lot less brightness when my screen is not a freaking mirror!

Hence the question, "Why don't more screens come with anti-reflective coating?"

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.

So there is this game called Valheim that recently released. You may or may not have recently read the article where they claim to have sold over a million copies around a week after release.

I bought it to give it the 2-hour smell test and it seems pretty darn good. However, this game seems best played with others and I doubt my friend group will end up playing this. Renting a server seems pretty cheap so I was wondering how interested you would be in a Tildes community server? I would be down for paying for a month and seeing where it goes from there.

It looks like min slots for a server would be 10 slots but I would imagine that's okay since we all wouldn't be in the same time zone. I can scale this up if the demand is there.

Thoughts?

Other Info:

What is Valheim, the Viking game blowing up on Steam?

Server is set up!

Game is password protected but if you click me, you will find what you need.

Following up on @kfwyre's post asking "What's Something That Hasn't Aged Well", I'm curious what's something that's improved with age?

I always hear the phrase "it gets better with age" in reference to wine, and sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not. Or at least, there's often a limit on how long it improves before it starts to decline again.

One odd thing that got better with age is the terrible Sandra Bullock movie "The Network." When it came out, almost none of the things in the movie were actually possible because not very many of us had much information about ourselves on computers that were actually accessible to the internet at large. Now everything about us is online whether we put it there or not.

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!

A political example might be the fact that according to gallup, people have supported a popular vote for the US presidency for more than 75 years (this article is 20 years old, but the numbers still stand), albeit the partisan difference in opinion seems to be more recent and it's not clear if people knew what to replace it, or if they knew about all the other faults in the US political system.

Other more cultural examples might be things like romans drawing dicks on Hadrian's wall, eating fast food and their timeless graffiti, surrealism being 100 years old as opposed to 'Zoomer humor', etc.

So, what are your examples?

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 weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

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?

The advice can be something idiomatic ("there are more fish in the sea!"), commonplace ("be yourself"), or just a sort of widely held cultural norm ("respect your elders").

Explain what the advice is, why you disagree with it, and how you would edit/tweak the advice to improve it from your perspective.

What product features would you hope the vendors would add in preparation for that eventuality?

For example... For the last year, we all have had “one connection, one face on screen.” That’s given everyone a kind of equality, where we each have an equal seat at the table. (With or without cat filters.) Now we have to contemplate returning to an environment where SOME people are in the office, and thus huddled around a conference table, and the rest of the team is working from home. It was like that in the Before Times, but now everybody is more cognizant of the disadvantages… not the least of which is the poor video organization in conference rooms. Few companies are smart enough to install a camera that’s pointed at the people around the conference table, for instance, however simple/cheap an option that is.

Most of the men I know grew their hair long this year. I've got mine at its longest ever and I'm planning to let it keep going for another year. My conditioner use has quadrupled and I used a straightening iron for the first time the other day. Anyone else?

I purchased a license and activated DEV MODE on the Xbox Series S, with the purpose of running some SNES games I definitely own... But part of the procedure involves using the Games and Apps tab to set Retroarch as a game. Without that, it doesn't have access to all the system resources. The problem is that the tab disappeared and I don't know how to get it back. Anyone have the knowledge to fix this? I really don't want to reset my Xbox to factory just because of that... thanks

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!