Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like patrick stewart, flavio bolsonaro and indexing. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was out of the loop.

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!

I have always had earphones break after 2-3 years cause of wear and tear, which, fair enough.

but I have a pair of earphones that I literally use for videocalls when WFH. so I use them at my desk...and they still are starting to fray.

I luckily got warranty with them so buying new ones won't really set me back much, but it has made me wonder if there a decent pair of earphones that cost maybe 50-60$ and actually last a good while without breaking down?

I am looking for USB-c earphones and hoping I can find options with or without mics.

Whenever I look on amazon, I always only see weird brands I dont recognize so I get worried about spending too much on an a purchase that seems experimental.

This isn't a complaint at all and it's maybe not even true, it's just a genuine question I have: why does there seem to be so many posts about Denmark relative to its size? I feel like I see more posts about Denmark than practically any other European country. Do we have a lot of Danes here or am I just crazy? :P

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?

In the spirit of "what are you reading?", "what are you playing?" etc. threads I see regularly posted in other groups, come tell us about your campaign! Whether you're a GM or a player, share with us what you're playing and how its going.

What game system are you using and what do you think of it? How many sessions has your current game been running? How's your group doing? Did something cool or funny happen in the last session? What are you looking forward to in the next session?

I'm trying to pin down a half remembered scene from a movie or a TV show. I'm most confident that it's from a TV show, but it could also be a movie. I can only remember small snippets, none of which I'm certain are accurate or not false memories, but I'm here to try and get help from my fellow Tilderen!

The scene involves someone being chased by killers who may or may not be employed by some rogue clandestine government agency. Possibly just one, but I think there are two. I think the victim is a teen? The chase leads into an outdoor car park, where the victim is managing to remain hidden. One of the killers deliberately loads/cocks their gun loudly, and starts giving some bravado speech about how he's done it to make the victim feel afraid. It's something along the lines of "Do you hear that? I bet you wonder why I didn't have my gun loaded already. It's because that's a scary sound. And I want you afraid."

That's it. That's the memory. I'm really hoping there's enough to go on here that someone can help me out, because this has been driving me crazy!

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?

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.

Hi Tilderiños,

This post is long enough for a TLDR: I made this thing, it's a platform for conscious consumerism. I'm launching the beta on Tildes. It's far from complete, expect imperfect scores in many cases. Scoring is a work in progress that's part of the platform but not the sole focus. It's invite only, and on Tildes only, see my top level reply below or DM me for an invite.

To start, I'm a long time member who posts enough that at least some of you would recognize my username. I made a new account for this project because I don't want to think about being a representative on my main account.

Early on during development I decided Tildes would be the perfect place to launch a private beta because Tildoes are some of the best people on the internet in my experience. And also fairly diverse by internet standards. Aside from a handful of friends and family you'll be the first to see it.

I should give you a little backstory. A couple of years ago I lost my income. Fortunately we were in a place where we could mostly afford to live without it for a while, so I had some time to figure out what I wanted to do next. For context I have over 30 years of experience in software development. Similar for marketing, brand strategy, business development, mostly but not exclusively in the context of the internet. I'm not quite as old as that sounds, I was still a minor when I starting building things on the internet, back when almost no one really knew what the internet was or what to do with it. In short, I'm comfortably fluent in all the languages of the internet.

I've built all sorts of different types of applications and businesses, mostly commercial. This time I wanted to build something that would have a positive impact and I wanted that to be the point, rather than a side effect. I spent most of a year researching the feasibility of a number of ideas before I landed on this one.

I've been on the internet long enough to see a lot of well meaning ideas fall flat. At this point I have no idea if this is another one of those. I know the concept is solid, but that doesn't mean it will inspire people. Or more specifically in this case, be a platform people can use to inspire each other. This is complicated by my intention to be as uncynical as possible about the project. I know all sorts of tricks for capturing attention and creating hype, I know how to monetize an app and sell products. But all of that feels out of place to me if the goal in uncynical. No doubt Tilders could have a long conversation here about the balance between good intentions and practical reality. I'd have lot to contribute.

The Ethoscore Project is an attempt to make the entirely unsexy concept of conscious consumerism easy and accessible. I genuinely believe it's a viable way to make the world a little better. It includes things like company scores and community lists (including boycott lists) and accepts community contributions and corrections for every company data point including scoring. I won't make a wall of text about all the functionality and features here, you can find out more on the site.

The project is currently self funded, which will hopefully be able to last long enough to see if the idea has potential. For now, funding is a problem for later.

The roadmap is long and wide. There are so many things I want to add, at least some of which aren't terrible ideas, but at this point development has been going on for over a year and I think it's time to see what strangers think. The project's 50k lines of code took time but the larger part of development has been company research, there are currently over 15,000 brands and companies covered, which is really just a start.

You might imagine that researching the international conglomerates that own most of the brands we see would be depressing in a capitalist dystopia sort of way and you wouldn't be wrong. But there's also more good news that I expected. There are big, successful companies doing the right thing when they don't have to. More than you'd expect. And there's evidence that their practices are inspiring other companies to do the same. I don't know if it's outpacing the general capitalist race to the bottom but it's not nothing! I see reasons for optimism.

I'm hoping some of you will be kind enough to take a look. I welcome all questions, contributions and feedback. The company database and scoring are far from complete, my goal for the beta was to have enough coverage that scanning products at a big box grocery store would result in more hits than misses. I think scoring is necessary but, to me, community lists are more interesting and have more potential to be useful. At this point there are going to be a lot of bugs, imperfections and companies with scores that seem off. I want to hear about all the issues you encounter. I'm more excited about your impressions and ideas though. How does it feel to use it? Does it make sense? Is it low friction? As a user is there something important missing that you'd expect to be there? What works well? Would you do anything differently?

There aren't smartphone apps yet, I want the codebase closer to complete before I start on the joys of maintaining two more codebases and dealing with the app stores. You can install it as a PWA (web app) on your phone if you like, which mostly just makes it quicker to access. I definitely recommend using your phone if you want to play with the barcode scanner.

Throughout the beta the app will be invite only and available only to Tildes users and people I personally invite. See top level comment below for an invite.

My Nebula subscription renewed recently, but I've realised I barely use it! I don't follow many creators and some of them post very infrequently. I want to know what the people of Tildes think (since I believe we have some Nebula subscribers here): which Nebula creators do you feel are worth watching? What do they make? Is their work exclusive to the platform?

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.

This is the ninth Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twenty-ninth overall. We are discussing Dr. No by Ian Fleming.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Sorry everyone for yet another post about the ~life.women post but the second thread about that same topic in ~life.men made me realize we could have used two separate threads from the start.

Instead of hoping that all the men instinctively knew to stay quiet and be dissappointed when some inevitably failed to notice, there'd be less friction if the people had two separate discussion spaces, one meant for women as the current default expectation (and be in ~life.women), and another (either in ~life.men or ~life) to provide an outlet for those who have things to say but nevertheless feel uneasy doing so in the same space.

There need not be any compulsory gatekeeping. The conversations in the two above 2 threads have me believe that if the option was available, and people were made aware, most would be considerate enough to know where to go and respect boundary.

Women who don't want to having to bother wading through seas of men's opinions regardless of how well-intentioned, could now conveniently hit 'Ignore' on the alternative thread once and be done with it. Or if that thread was in ~life.men and they have already unsubscribed, nothing to be done and the experience would be seamless.

Some potential concerns:

Ideally this setup needs to be done as early as possible from the moment the sensitive post goes public.

Maybe the poster themselves could create the two threads from the start.

However, I imagine in practice this would not be most common scenarios. The average users are not tuned in to all the potential sources of drama and just post whatever they find interesting first, only realsing when there's blowback after the fact. So the cases when this approach may be needed would also more likely be reactive. (Maybe with a pinned comment, a title change and a 2nd post. Since we cannot do pinned comment, probably have to rely on boost voting to keep it on top).

The people who are in position to make the judgement of when to create this setup are veteran and highly trusted member of the community. Someone who has been around enough to be able to quickly recognize the common painpoints for the community, able to remain impartial without getting dragged into the conflicts themseves, and know when such intervention is warranted. They're users who people can trust that if they do so, it's not an attempt to control the narrative.

Normally if I come up with any random ideas, I'd prefer to test it out myself and see the results directly. However, this is the kind that requires buy-in from the whole community, as well as the right people to take the helm. Hence this post. The ultimate aim is maintaining harmony among the community. If you think it's worth a try, you may also choose to nominate who you think is trustworthy enough for this responsibility. Those who may want to step in could benefit from the confidence boost that others trust them.

This post is motivated by the recent event with the ~life.women post but I hope it's clear the proposal is aimed at being a more general approach to future conflicts of similar nature.

Edit: Welp, I gave this a shot. See everyone here again in a few months :)

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!

We each shape our living spaces in our own ways, and I feel like sharing your own approach can often help inspire others.

This could be anything, small or large; from the kinds of furniture you prefer and how you arrange it, to the standard home improvement work, to how you decorate your spaces, and even how you choose to use them.

Desk setups/home offices/battlestations all count, and pictures are welcome!

Step 1: Post anything with a rage bait title
Step 2: Some poster comes in with an obviously bad take
Step 3: That obviously bad take gets upvoted/liked/whatever
Step 4: Now people have to engage with it because it's been pushed to the top
Step 5: Drama/engagement/so much traffic tho

Social media sites just automated steps 1-3 and all us dummies fall right into it.
I wish there was a meta category? Is there? #meta-tildes
Edit: oh there is a ~Tildes. apologies.

If you have more than one passion, try and pick the one you are... Most passionate about!
If you can't, then go for it, explain why you have more than one.

• What is your passion? If it's something obscure tell us about it!
• How did you end up with that passion? What was the inspiration?
• How long has it been your passion?
• How do you practice or express it?
• Sell it to someone reading, why is your passion so great to you?

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 just got the newer version of Firefox (v157.0) and I'm amazed at how snappy it is. It feels like Firefox does when you have 0 extensions, except that I have uBO and a few others.

It used to feel so sluggish, pages took 500ms or even 1 second to display anything after typing the address, but no more; they render almost instantly.

A very nice surprise indeed!

If you left Firefox because it was too slow, now's the time to ditch Chrom{e,ium} and reign Google's chokehold on standards and utter contempt for privacy in!

Ran some benchmarks on an X230 (i5 3rd gen):
FF 156
speedometer: 3.27
jetstream 3: 65.3
motionmark: 456.52 60fps +-7.50%

FF 157
speedometer: 7.16
jetstream 3: 68.49
motionmark 593.57 60fps +- 8.93%

The speedup is quite noticeable

First of all, I am not asking for advice about what to invest in.

TLDR: I just want to ask for advice about how to know what to invest into?

Background information and/or irrelevant rambling below:

I have minimal experience with stocks, having only invested €2500 into a pension account thanks to it being a gift from my father some years ago. Early this year I got taxed about €200 for unrealized gains of my stocks, mainly one of them (RHM.DE) and it takes up a little more than half of the value of the stocks I have. At that point in time when I got taxed it was up almost 100% compared to when I bought it almost two years ago. It has now fallen quite far again and as a result is up less than 10% and my gains are €180 so basically the massive gains (if I had sold at the right time) got cancelled from the taxes. Although to be fair I don't actually know if that's how the tax system works, but I do know I was unlucky to not just sell it off at that peak. But speaking of luck, I am still up like 60% overall thanks to another lucky stock which is up 150% (ENR.DE) compared to when I bought it.

Again, I have no sense for economics or financials or investing lol, genuinely just lucky??

The investing I did was based entirely on Merz changing the direction of German defense policy when he got elected where he said his government will heavily invest in defense. Rheinmetall being a German weapons manufacturer, it only made sense (and it paid off for a while) and the Siemens investment I made was just an afterthought in order to not have all my eggs in one basket. I also have other stocks that are up like 60% 75%, 90%, and then get this: a stock I didn't even buy (it was like a split-off of something else, and given to me automatically?) is up over 800% so I still have an overall value of €4000 from a starting point of about €2500 and €1500 gained in less than two years is, of course, and I cannot emphasize this enough, just purely luck lol

I might as well have gone to a casino.

Long story short and reason for posting I'm now wondering what to do with that RHM.DE stock. Because it doesn't seem good anymore and maybe the ~€2100 value is better spent somewhere else? But how do I know?

Spouse and I are trying to get bids from local solar installers and we'd appreciate some crowdsourced knowledge from Tilderinos. Questions first, then some context...

• In the current market, is "no, your equipment can't talk to the Internet" actually an unreasonable demand?
• Is there a term or phrase we should be using to look for, or guide installers towards, solar setups that fully function without Internet access?
• Are there any equipment types -- microinverters, for example -- that definitely will not work due to architecture?
• Are there battery controllers, or central inverters, that are known to play nicely (read: can be expanded later) with batteries from other manufacturers?

For each installer, we start the conversation with "it's essential that the system work entirely offline, without Internet." We're flexible on nearly everything else: system size (probably ~15kW), number of panels, battery, etc. Our first concern is making sure that a 25-year investment is not dependent on some company's cloud servers; secondly, that we're not inverting our dependency graph by making our electric power reliant on the whims of our ISP. There's also the privacy angle. But we're not looking for a totally off-the-grid setup, just trying not to lock ourselves into a bad purchase.

So far, one third of the installers (3/9) have immediately told us we're unreasonable and to just go away. Two others said "sure!" and ghosted us afterwards. One was a little more forthcoming, saying that the equipment requires periodic connections to the manufacturer for monitoring and they couldn't provide a warranty without it. The last two provided bids, but it's difficult to tell if they're telling the truth given the conflicting info we've seen.

This is not a request for new rules, as Deimos has made it clear that is not going to happen. This is not a callout post for any individual, including our esteemed admin, or any one user.

This is an honest, earnest plea. I like to joke on Tildes, so this is quite hard to write.

I've been on Tildes for a few years now, under various usernames. This site has consistently lost great users because people come into ~life.women and ~lgbt to say versions of 'I haven't seen that', 'that's not my experience', or 'I don't think this is a big issue.'

We lost another user today over this issue. People aren't aware of it, because by the time people are so disgusted they leave, it's usually just a PM notification to their closer contacts who tend to be in a similar headspace, not a dramatic announcement on the front page.

Tildes is for discussion. It is not for 'let me tell you why you are wrong', no matter what wording you use. This type of action is explicitly against the core ethos of the site.

If you are struggling to imagine ways in which you can hold back from bringing negativity to a space you are not welcome, here are two examples from my experience of using the site. The following are two things many users care passionately about:

• 1. AI. I do not believe the conversation about it is interesting. Sometimes, the way it's talked about makes me actively angry. But many users of this site find conversation about AI enriching and enjoyable. Instead of me following my instant reaction and commenting to say 'I think this is boring, and this never impacts my life', I filter the posts, or do not read them.
• 2. I don't know what it's like to be a programmer. The plight of programmers is foreign to me. From the outside, looking in, I could make a bunch of assumptions about the hardships experienced by programmers, or system adminstrators, or software engineers are often saying they are experiencing on this site. Instead of saying 'have you tried finding another job?' or 'Well, I've never seen that', to call into question your experiences, I do not comment, because I know nothing about it.

The experiences of women, who are a minority on this site, are things that the vast majority of users do not have first-hand insight into. The same goes with gay users, asexual users, intersex users, gender non-conforming users, and users who are queer in a way I may never have come across before.

The pile-ons in these two groups are persistent, ongoing, and I have observed them for enough time to know it's generally not intentional, and it is relatively user-churn agnostic. This site attracts more cisgendered heterosexual men than it does women or queer people. That's how it is.

I am not asking for a verification system where you have to prove your bona fides before commenting. I am not asking for these groups to be quarantined off, because that further marginalizes minority groups on the site.

I am asking for users who are not women, or identify as queer, to think very carefully before posting comments that (regardless of the intention) are perceived time and again as invalidating the real experiences of people you do not know, and cannot experience yourself.

I am very sad that a lot of the people I have made close connections to on Tildes have left due to the prevalence of this issue. We know now that the site is feature-complete. You either try and set the culture, or you end up with one.

I would like us to set a culture that is more respective of the spaces intended for women and queer people to discuss issues pertaining to their lives. I am very upset that this continuously is a challenge, especially for members who post, comment, and lurk in those groups.

If you constantly feel the need to 'challenge' or 'dispute' articles and posts made in those groups, please examine why. This cycle of members of these groups having to explain sexism and oppression to people who have not experienced it in the same way women and queer people do is exhausting, and puts the emotional labor on the minority groups on this site.

The majority of the site is very welcoming to heterosexual men. Regardless of your intention, please do not 'just ask questions' or feel the need to say 'You know, I've never seen that!' or 'This reminds me of when my Project Manager called me out at a scrum unfairly.'

We are losing valuable intellectual, cultural, and gender diversity over the persistence of the issues outlined above. If you don't care about this, that sucks, but it makes Tildes a much better place for me and many others who are sadly no longer here.

TL;DR: If you're inserting yourself into Tildes groups about women's lives and the discussion of LGBT issues without being a member of either group in your actual life, please think twice before posting quick reactions to content that may have made you defensive, or content that you (for whatever reason) feel the need to disprove.

Assuming good faith, your unsolicited opinion about a topic you have not experienced personally is consistently not welcomed by the contributors, commenters, and lurkers who use those groups to discuss issues impacting them directly.

If you find the content annoying or feel the need to debate its veracity constantly, simply unsubscribe. It is not hard. It is the base level of respect this community relies on to survive.

I am sorry if this is coming across as aggressive, mean-spirited, or me taking on airs above the station of a normal user. That's not my intention, but I hope these words perhaps help other men on Tildes to think about the issues raised here in a different way.

I am a user, asking others like me to be kind and thoughtful. If you need help in how to unsubscribe from groups, or how to set up topic tag filters, please ask in this thread and many users will be able to assist you. It is a system I didn't initially find intuitive and am still learning about.

Thanks.

There are certainly a few people here, who will be buying Steam Frame VR headset.

I enlisted myself a few days ago for the first wave lottery reservations. After a bit of thought, I also enlisted my daughter, to double my chances from almost 0% to double of that but still near zero in my eyes.

A few minutes ago I got e-mail. I'm on waiting list after first wave goes out... Well, maybe this year?

My daughter checked her e-mail as well. And what do you know? Doubling of the chances paid off and the chance was actually higher than near 0% - her account got picked by Valve! It seems we are getting the headset in upcoming days/weeks.

Now the question is: Should we get the head and handstraps also? I think we should. But I don't knowbif I should get also new foam/seal. I'm not spending 170€ on color camera, at least not for now.

Sorry for this kind of post, we are just so happy and I wanted to share the happiness. I hope some of you got on the list for first wave as well.

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.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like kindness, certificates.security and php. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was scratching their head.

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!

I am honestly not sure making this post is a good idea, but I want to at least make an honest attempt at this topic and putting it in ~life.men - because it seems silly that this topic tends to get more discussed in ~life.women - and it obviously rarely ends well.

Please approach this with the best good faith intent and lets be civil.

I am 100% in the target group for that video, though I hope this doesn't end up being just another discussion of the same video but the topic in general, as I am a straight white man having worked in tech for two decades. And I am manager with women on my team, and I have been rightfully called out on certain biases and can recognize having glossed over problematic behaviour in the past.

I personally don't take much offense on the #YesAllMen thing, but I can understand why it can be irksome and there is a part of the me where it doesn't quite feel right to me, even though I know it isn't intended that way. It can feel like being lumped together in a "guilt by association" type of way, that we generally don't accept with other groups in society. And what I often have a problem with in these types of discussions, is how a very wide range of problems with very different severity is being lumped together - and I don't think that is fruitful. We see examples of open hostile sexism like "you fucking whore" or outright sexual assault, and most men of course don't recognize themselves in those sort of examples, and thus get defensive. Instead we should be more open to look at all the seemingly "minor" things that aren't as severe, but from what I think I understand from women on being a minority in a workplace is the "death by a thousand cuts"-effect. A constant reminder of seemingly minor things that just adds up, and is rightly being experienced as part of more severe forms of sexism.

Not sure where I am going with this - as I didn't write this as a well thoughtout thesis - just a quick way to try to start a hopefully healthy discussion in the right space, but I assume no men here on Tildes are outright sexually assualting women, but I would 100% believe that most of us still have blind spots that could be improved and is indirectly part of the problem.

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!

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.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Dear Tildesterites: my trusty PC has led a dutiful life of eleven years and, along with my keyboard, has finally met its earthly doom (total organ failure). I wish it luck across the ultraviolet lithographic bridge, at the other side of which we'll someday reunite to play Skyrim together again.

In the meantime, I would like another PC on which to play various modern AAA games except for The Elder Scrolls VI. I'd intended to replace my machine ~4 years ago when it was in fairer health, but other efforts took priority. Since then, the product market has inflated in price and all the SKUs have changed, so I'm back to being mostly clueless about the state of the industry.

I put together a parts list from some basic research and would like a gut check. I'm coming from an i5-4460, GTX 970, and 16 GB RAM at 1080p 144hz, which may as well be neolithic. I only really need this PC to play video games smoothly and to do standard workstation tasks (nothing remarkable).

PCPartPicker Part List

Rationale and notes:

• 60hz to 144hz was the greatest upgrade I ever made and now it seems like 180hz or 240hz is the new 144hz. I've also wanted to move to 1440p for years. I reviewed the Gamers Nexus GPU benchmarks and it seems like 120fps+ is broadly possible at this resolution.
• Nvidia's cards seem unreasonably priced. A friend of mine offered me his RTX 3070 for free, which I would be happy to accept as a stand-in to keep the initial cost down, and in a year I might come back to get a newer card like the 9070 XT or whatever replaces it?
• I'd like an M.2 to keep cable management to a minimum.
• I will not overclock or undervolt the CPU. I'd just like it to run.
• I'd love for the thing to be quiet.

My questions are:

1. Does the build feel balanced? Are there any egregious oversights?
2. How much RAM is prudent, at what speed/latency? Do we expect prices to drop anytime soon?
3. M.2 PCIe 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0 x4? Does this matter for games? Is a dedicated OS drive still best practice?
4. IPS or OLED? WOLED or QD-OLED? Is Freesync Premium sufficient? (@AugustusFerdinand we spoke about this some time ago; has your opinion changed?)

I thank you in advance for your insights. I'm not going to buy this immediately (this summer at the earliest), but I'd like to know how close to reasonable I'm being.

I share some posts from my blog here, and almost all of them have a meta-discussion regarding “self-promotion”. The latest prompted me to bring up a proper meta-discussion on the subject.

Tildes' Code of Conduct says:

If you have your own site/project/channel/etc. that you'd like to share on Tildes, that's generally fine (in moderation), but it shouldn't be the primary reason that you post on the site. Tildes is a community, not a free advertising platform. Sharing your own content is welcome as long as you're involved in the community, but don't just treat Tildes as a source of an audience.

I guess we need to address what constitutes “moderation” and sharing one's own stuff as “primary reason”. Am I abusing this rule? If so, why? If not, what am I doing to avoid abusing it? (Using myself as a “control group” for the discussion; feel free to bring made up examples.)

As I said elsewhere, I like the discussions that happens here, try to engage in topics other than mine, and I share my blog posts candidly.

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 am a hobby programmer and spend most of my evenings coding. My monitor has a built-in backlight, but I've always found that just a bit too weak for my liking. Turning on the lamp in the room is too bright and produces glare, using a table lamp is directional and imbalanced. Using an LED strip on the underside of the table does not illuminate my desk at all, so it's not particularly useful.

Recently, I stumbled across monitor lights again, and for some reason impulse-bought one. A super simple ~45cm wide, dimmable straight one with warm white colour. Let me tell you this thing is incredible. It provides exactly enough light without producing glare. The light comes from the centre and my hands cast an unobtrusive shadow. I've only used it for a couple of hours at this point, but the difference is remarkable. My eyes feel way less strained.

For context I'm using a 32:9 UW monitor with 1800R curvature, so this doesn't cover more than ~40% of the screen, yet there is absolutely no visible glare at all! The monitor looks completely unaffected.

Do you use one as well? What's your experience with 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.

You start at max level with everything unlocked. As you play the game, you slowly level down, choosing which attributes to reduce and which skills to forget.

Obviously, it will have to be tied to the story - maybe you are poisoned/cursed in a fantasy game, or an implant is malfunctioning in a sci-fi game. I'm sure a good writer can come up with something really cool to justify it narratively.

It will solve many problems modern RPGs have:

1. Solves "the world-saving heroes are a bunch of murder hobos" issue. If killing levels you down, players will avoid killing as much as possible. Like, you know, actual heroes would.

2. Fits the actual player skill level. When you start a new game, you are bad at it. Makes sense to compensate by giving you powerful abilities. Late game you know how to play well, you know the enemy weaknesses, you know how everything works. You can successfully kill the enemy with a much weaker character.

3. Allows you try out stuff. You can try the abilities before you forget them, see what you like to keep. In current RPGs you don't know which are the cool (or needed) abilities so you might spec into something you dislike. The current "fix" is to allow players to respec later, but that always felt like a bandaid solution. And a bad one at that, as it removes the weight of making choices, as you know you can always undo it. And respeccing rarely makes sense narratively.

4. Fixes pacing. Current RPGs start strong with the story, but then people put it on hold to do lots of side content. 80 hours of chasing question marks and 117 games of gwent later, people barely remember what the story was about and kinda speed through it just to finish it, because they are already kinda done with the game. But if you had leveling down, people would be naturally incentivized to move on and not level down too much in the same area.

5. Creates urgency. I hate the ludonarrative dissonance in RPGs where the world is supposedly about to be destroyed, but the heroes are busy solving every rando's basement rats problem. It's ridiculous.

6. Gives side-quests weight. Do you wanna help that orphan and level down, even though they won't give you anything? Or help the rich asshole who'll give you a powerful weapon you'll need late game? Or maybe you help both and spend hours on the next battle because you were underleveled, making you think twice before helping everyone in the next village?

7. Solves item hoarding. People love to keep potions and scrolls for later "just in case". But that "case" never comes because you only get more powerful later on. But if you were to get weaker, those items are actually needed late game. A lot more uses for that stamina potion if your stamina actually is shit.

8. Creates replayability. Instead of doing one run of a 200 hour bloated game, where you kinda got tired of it a while ago... you could have a regular 40 hour run and only do small part of the side-quests. Then you play something else. Then you come back to it and do another run, do a different set of quests, maybe this time spend more time in a different area.

Obviously I doubt any major studio will do something like that. I'm asking them to punish the player for playing the game. But maybe as the tools to create good-looking games become more accessible/cheaper, some smaller team can make something like this, I do think it has a lot of potential. I wouldn't be surprised if it already exists as a passion project in RPG Maker or something, but I kinda want to play something with actual graphics.

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!

Do you have a song, band or artist that you can't find a satisfying cover of? I have a couple of musical white-whales of my own that I'll post as a seperate comment below.

A few months back @kacey posted an excellent thread on cover songs which I'm still working my way through to this day (and may shamelessly bump shortly to add a few tracks of my own). This post is inspired by that thread and is absolutely worth checking out if you missed it.

More anime awaits! Check out lists of upcoming titles MAL, Anilist, AniDB.

Similar to the AotS thread, the anime doesn't have to be actually released this season, as long as it's something you plan to watch in the coming 3 months.

Share your intial expectation here and see how they'd hold up by the time the season ended.