Rounds one and two of the Tildes Writing Club have been smashing, if small-scale, successes. In the interest of luring out a few lurkers with a timely provocation, I want to establish this month's theme by fiat.

What do you have to say about madness? Your contribution can resemble a clinician's assessment, a confession, a polemic, an absinthe specter, the cry of the cuckoo, the diagnosis offered by Major Clipton (but hopefully of greater length), or a 1980s ska band. That is, whether you take the word to be romantic, offensive, biographical, inspirational, or risible, take it as inspiration for your writing this month.

Just follow these easy guidelines:

Your submission can be prose or poetry of any reasonable length. Less than 7,000 words, surely.

Watch for the April 23 submissions thread to appear. Reply to it with a link to your work, which may be housed anywhere you like, including on Tildes. Prioritize venues that are not known to be aggressively anti-privacy (e.g., Google Docs). You may provide questions for readers.

You must provide feedback on 3 submissions if you are posting a submission. Only one needs to be a substantial critique. If you see a post without feedback, consider giving it preference in the order of your responses. No one likes to be left hanging.

You don't have to follow the theme. Your detective fiction about beaver glands is welcome, too.
Feel free to post questions or comments.

Maybe that atmospheric death metal band you like recorded an acoustic folk cover of a Rihanna song. Maybe that bubblegum pop artist you follow made an experimental post-rock album.

The goal is to highlight range: try to find two songs that are as "far away" from one another as possible while still being from the same artist.

Link the songs here, and identify what makes them so different.

I've been thinking a bit lately of starting to look for another place of work. Nothing is really bad at my current employer, but I've been there since 2017 and my feet are starting to itch a bit. In addition, I'm not really to engaged in my work at the moment since I feel the domain is fairly boring and the tech is rather mundane. This might be a reflection of my sentiment of IT industry in general, i.e. lots of toys but mainly they are just different flavours of the same thing (especially when it comes to building XYZ web app).

Formerly my approach to finding a new job has been to look for companies that are looking for people with skills in technologies I am interested in learning. However, since I'm a bit dissilousioned with tech I think I need to switch my approach and look more for a mission driven organisation I can get behind!

What are your thoughts on organsations that do some kind of important work? If you were to pick a top 3 organisations where you would work which ones would you pick?

Note they don't have to be tech focused. I'm generally curious about different organisations I should look into and also to hear your thoughts on the matter!

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?