I was musing about this recently with the recent models becoming more capable. The core of gen AI is the model, which is trained on a massive dataset. To date, gen AI has improved because the models have become larger, more efficient, the data they are trained on has become better and the software/harnesses around them has improved to help query them.

As I see it, surely the bottleneck will soon become the data they are trained on? If we imagine a scenario where a models could consume an infinite amount of training data, and there is no limit to the training time or quality. The sum of human skill/knowledge is the limiting factor. Gen AI should (in theory) never be able to out preform or push the boundary of the sum of humanity at time of training.

Or, counterpoint, is there enough randomness and speed to iterate that gen AI can actually step change and improve if training times/cost were less prohibitive? Most companies/models today will save good output and feed it back into the next iteration, but right now that's taking months. What if that took minutes?

What do you think?

Is gen AI going to take us to general intelligence?
Will gen AI get to a place where it's "intelligence" and reasoning is actually better than the sum of Humanity?

I'm using the phrase 'internet discussion site' pretty informally, so I hope my meaning will become clearer as you continue reading.

I got rid of Snapchat around 4 years ago now. At some point in 2023 I noticed a sharp downtick in discussion quality on Twitter, and got rid of it as well. About two years ago, frustrated with the lack of human interaction and the vying for attention, I deleted Instagram. Near the end of 2025, I stopped using Discord. The final nail in the coffin has now arrived, since I'm unfortunately coming to the conclusion that Reddit is no longer worth visiting, leaving me almost entirely cordoned off from internet communication at a time when more humans are using it than ever before.
I won't bother repeating my personal reasons for this exodus since I feel confident that most people on this website have feelings on the matter that at least approximate my own.
Realistically this is a sign that it's time to prioritize interaction in the real world, and that's certainly a worthwhile thing to pursue. But bluntly society has restructured around the internet in a pretty substantial way, and I don't think it's an unreasonable ask to find various forms of forums on which more meaningful discussions can take place.
Here is my personal survey of the current landscape:

• tildes.net: Basically good. I really enjoy this website and I think in a lot of ways the 'bar/pub/cafe' model for a forum, where you can peer through the window but require permission to gain admission, is the only viable model for future online discussion places as the internet becomes ever more saturated with bots and bad actors.
• lobste.rs: Also basically good, for the same reasons as tildes. In some aspects, limited by the fact that it has a particular focus. In other ways, that's a really good thing. Maybe in a perfect world there would be a lobste.rs equivalent for every hobby, and we would return to an early internet forum world.
• Hacker News: Also basically good but perhaps a bit less so than the above two. I think most of the things posted on there are interesting, but a lot of the discussion has lately felt less insightful than it used to. I think a different tildes post noted this as well, but it's very caught up in the AI news cycle, often to an unfortunate degree.
• Rateyourmusic: The core site is enjoyable, and the forums are usually fun to check in on every now and then. Certainly a worthwhile place to visit if you enjoy music.
• Stackexchange networks: This is cheating since this is obviously many sites. I'm a mathematics student and I've found MSE and MathOverflow to be really wonderful places to learn and converse, albeit with some very arcane and strict rules for posting. The philosophy SE seems also generally of a high quality, and there are many other SE sites that I occasionally stumble into and am pleasantly surprised by. Unfortunately I expect its time is finite, since the UX has slowly but surely been degrading and the site traffic dropping.
• Fediverse networks: These sites clearly have potential, but for whatever reason it's still just not there. I drop into lemmy and Mastodon occasionally, but the posts are rarely of high quality. In many ways they just feel like "Reddit/Twitter but with a different name".

Surely these can't be all, right? It's a little soul-crushing to think how many people are online at any given time and how hard it is to find a place not drowning in noise. Maybe this is just my lament.

I feel like seeing dead birds was very rare before but it feels quite common this year. Maybe I'm just driving more in a different area this year and the rate was surprisingly low last year, but I really feel like I'm constantly seeing dead birds over the last few weeks.

There's something small that you've been meaning to do but, for whatever reason, you haven't done it. Rather than just forgetting about it, however, your brain has decided to make it take up a minor amount of space in your awareness -- not enough to make it an immediate concern or something you plan to act on, but still just enough to be annoying.

Well, this is your call to address the issue head on! Pull that mental splinter out and get rid of it for good!

Maybe you need to...

• change an air filter
• tighten your showerhead
• go through that stack of mail
• box up a return
• put more air in your bike tires
• rearrange a bookshelf
• throw out some expired cans
• vacuum behind the couch
• clean the dust out of your computer fan
• etc.

Whatever it is, this topic is your call to GO DO THE THING.

And then, come back here and tell us what you did.

One minor annoyance solved for only one person? Not a big deal.

LOTS of minor annoyances solved for LOTS of different people? GIGANTIC DEAL!

This topic is our space to communally revel in the glorious shared feeling of being slightly more annoyance-free, together.

IMPORTANT: Clearing up multiple annoyances is explicitly allowed!

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.

If any therapists are reading this, feel free to skip this post or at least know that I do not intend to offend you or your profession.

I happened upon that phrase while scrolling somewhere. I thought that it is a harsh thing to say and while it is not something I entirely agree with, I also do not entirely disagree with it. It was real provocative too, so it really got me thinking.

As someone that has done hundreds of hours of therapy with little to show for it, I feel like it is an understandable thing to say because on a deep fundamental level, I truly get it.

If you are talking to a friend or loved one (who is not being paid to talk to you) about mental health, if you bring up some personal issue, raise a life problem, anything deeper than surface level interpersonal stuff, there is a high likelihood that the conversation will steer towards a version of this question: have you tried therapy?

That is - probably unintentionally and unbeknownst to them - the signal to me that the conversation is now over. They do not have the mental capacity to talk about it at the moment, maybe they feel they are out of their depth with such a heavy subject matter, or perhaps they do not have the life experience to relate to it. Maybe all of the above. It is all fair enough. So they bring up their best bet for a solution that in their mind might help. It gets very old but I remind myself to appreciate their good faith and good intentions.

The answer to that question is that yes I have indeed tried therapy. I have tried so much therapy, in fact, that whole teams of therapists have concluded that therapy cannot help me. I would be remiss if I was not open about that bias, and it is probably the reason I have found the incentive to spend so many hours writing this post in the first place.

The way we behave and interact with each other is unrecognizable compared to just one or two centuries ago before industrialization. It used to be that whatever troubles you were dealing with, you probably had a community around you. Even if you did not talk about what troubled you directly, the people were there to make you feel safe. You didn't have to talk about diagnostic criteria and therapeutic methods and psychiatric theories and mindfulness and self-help resources... you had people to talk to. The simple fact that people were around you all day every day meant that you got on with it and coped with things. You had a neighborhood or village or whatever in which friends and family lived and worked closely together every day. People to talk to all day. That is therapeutic in itself.

Nowadays, work-life balance is such an enforced thing that connections seem to be in rigid boxes. Not that people are not friends with their coworkers, but it is my impression that it is kind of rare to truly befriend a coworker. So you have a box that is called work, and you have a box that is called life. And you do not much mix them together - you certainly do not talk about heavy life things at work. Big no-no, even though it is the former that takes up a majority of most people's time awake during the week. Not to go on a tangent about capitalism, but the way our entire system is built up around individualism is not something that can be ignored here either. Through urbanization, we seem to have lost our sense of one another. I of course cannot speak to other societies than my own, but I do see these sentiments from people that live in other countries of the western world too.

I do not think that it is controversial to conclude that individualism can be extremely harmful. The we-society of the past pretty quickly transformed into our current me-society. So much so that "self-help" is a huge industry. A lot of people are getting by just fine of course, but for those of us who are not fitting into boxes, this societal obsession with individualism only worsens our states of mind. Off to school, off to university, off to work, start a family, get married, build a house, mow the lawn, rinse and repeat for the next generation. That is what the majority is doing and they have little to no problems doing it. Some of them think it is so normal and easy, even, that it becomes repetitive so they find themselves calling it the hamster wheel and start writing articles about how boring it is to be married and have children and own property.

But if you do not fit into those boxes, are not capable of these things, do not have a supportive environment, well good luck to you, there will be no networking, no meaningful connections, there will be major hardship ahead if you have not somehow managed to figure it all out on your own. Due to being even slightly socially inept, behind your peers in any way, or if you chose a different path in life, chances are that you are sooner or later going to run into this so-called platonic prostitution of the therapeutic industry.

On your own, family might be there but they are not truly supportive, might have a friend or two but they are not really close friends that can be relied upon for important stuff. Try to talk to them about things and they end up distancing themselves because it is either not that kind of relationship or they do not actually care or you are simply too much to handle for them. Therapy becomes the answer when you bring up the tough subjects and the things that happened as a child, be it bullying or emotional neglect or some kind of violence against you that the adults should have been there to protect you from or at least have seen the signs afterwards but never did. You are far enough outside of what is considered the normal problems, or you are already far enough into a long spiral of mental health issues, or far enough into the depths of psychiatric diagnoses that in order for someone to talk to you, to help you, they have to be paid to do it. How humiliating. But you are told therapy is the only way to help you.

Unfortunately all you can get is one session every two weeks. And the therapist does not even have time for all your problems despite being paid a hefty hourly rate by you or by the system. Come back next time and hope they remember their notes because otherwise you will spend half of their precious scheduled time reiterating your issues and reminding your therapist of your history. But you tell yourself that it is fair enough that they forgot some minor details like the death of your loved one. They are paid to be there, but they are only human after all, you tell yourself it is not fair to expect them to perfectly remember everything. Never mind all the other problems that arose in the time since the previous meeting, but there is not enough time to talk about that. But this is therapy, this will help and things will get better now!

I would usually spend the rest of the day after a therapy session thinking about what I forgot to bring up. The next day I would try to write a few things down, but once the next session comes around, those things are already out-dated and they do not seem to be relevant anymore. It does not matter anyway because there might have been a new cut on my arm because of things brought up in therapy that there was not enough time to process, and I did not care to hide it, and so now the entire new session is spent treating this tiny symptom of illness instead of the years of trauma that is the reason for it. That is how it has to be because the therapist has rules to follow, a system designed in such a way that something like self-harm must immediately be brought front and center. Forget your traumas for now. Forget your life circumstances. Let us do some breathing exercises! Let us do some grounding techniques! We should engage in some mindfulness!

Anyone would probably become mentally unwell and fulfill diagnostic criteria for something or other if their living situation became bad enough. Top of your class, job interviews, get romantically involved and move in to a great apartment together, get accepted to university, probably not going to be a whole lot of symptoms there when things are going great and breezing by. Lose it all though and you are suddenly a textbook example of multiple mental illnesses. Have you tried therapy?

But it will not cure loneliness, unemployment, financial ruin, bad environments, abusive homes. Probably not a lot of therapists would claim that it does, but those unfamiliar certainly do tout it as the cure-all, because they simply do not know better, because individualism is taught as the way of life from the moment you exit the womb. And it is so harmful. The things that therapy claims to solve is to stand on your own two feet and be self-sufficient, self-reliant, stable, need minimal help from the outside. It has even gone so far that a concept of co-dependency has been invented to be a criteria for diagnoses because god forbid you are actually a human being who relies on others like the pack animals we are. Even if you do not rely on others, if you truly desire to do it all on your own, it takes months and months and years and years to get there because of the time between each appointment you can get. It is not even in any way a holistic approach. It is one piece in a huge puzzle, the rest of which you probably cannot even find professional help with.

Let us say that the solutions to all sorts of problems in life are contained in a big toolbox. All those tools will be needed in one way or another, at one point in time or another, throughout life. Therapists are, for some reason, said to know the entire toolbox. Again, they do not claim this themselves. It is society that vaguely thinks so. But the therapist really only knows how to use a small set of the tools needed to repair you. Hopefully the therapist you find is competent, but you might get unlucky and not even know it before it is too late and damage has been done by the wrong treatment being used. They specialize in specific methods but end up applying the wrong one to you. Laymen put them on a pedestal as a mythical force that can solve all manner of serious and complex issues with just a few words of wisdom here and there, or they have hidden gems of mind blowing advice.

But as I have come to see it, the cure to most things that therapists try to solve is simply the formation of a bond. Yet when they undergo their training, it is specifically instilled in them that they should not ever form a bond with their clients because they should not get emotionally invested in them on account of it would cause burn-out to take on so much suffering from people every day. So they create a wall between themselves and the client, a distance they proclaim to be healthy for themselves but what most people would think was worryingly cold if it were any other meetings between two humans. But because one part is paying the other, it is fine, and it is also not a real bond with another person anyway because money was exchanged and services provided. It is robotic.

A bond and a community is what would solve the problems a lot of people who are in therapy have. But we are on average way too individualistic for that. Therapy would not exist to the extent it does if it wasn't so difficult to find solid friends and relationships in modern society. If we all had a tight knit circle that we could lean on, there would not be anywhere near the current demand for therapists and psychologists and psychiatrists and social workers and mentors and advisors and teachers and whatever other mental health professionals I could list.

The key is that the client-therapist relationship is inherently transactional. And so it can never be the nurturing environment that it needs to be to get better and to improve and to become a functioning individual. Even terms like emotional labour have been invented only to become a commodity through which an entire industry is built. People selling their time to help the less fortunate because they sure as hell will not do it to such an extent for free. Maybe some of them also volunteer their services, but I have a hunch that they are few and far between. They are good people for trying to help, but at the same time, they really are only even talking to me because they are getting paid to. That simple fact ruins any and all feeling of sincerity right away.

Why is a therapy-like session not something the average person simply just does for their next of kin? A favour to be returned when the time comes. Some people require more, some people require less, and that ought to be fine. But instead we have this whole industry of people that can sell themselves as the solution to oftentimes unsolvable problems. And those that never even tried it will also help sell it because their social media regurgitates fancy terms that sound smart on their feed, making it sound like a miracle.

But because of our individualistic way of life, or because what we struggle with is outside the norm, or because we did not grow up in a supportive environment, or we experienced things when we were very young, or we do not fit into exact boxes... Whatever it is. It is now entirely socially acceptable for everyone and anyone to say that they cannot deal with this, it is too much, you should get professional help. You do not need a friend, you need therapy.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like eulogies, ai overviews and gog. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was beady-eyed.

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!

This is the fourth Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twenty-fourth overall. We are discussing The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See. For May, we will discuss Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov.

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.

Things suck but dammit it's pride, please share things that are bringing you joy right now! And if you need some joy yourself please come and fill your cup or ask for something you need so we can lift you up. 🏳️‍🌈

I have a friend that is lucky enough to have retired at 40. A year ago he was adamant he'd never work again, having been burnt out from his time at big tech. Back then he was also an absolute AI hater and wouldn't listen to anyone who claimed LLMs were useful for programming.

He finally tried LLMs when Claude Opus 4.6 released and immediately changed his mind in the face of the overwhelming evidence that LLMs can in fact program pretty well. And now with the release of Fable 5 he's giddily creating all sorts of things that would have taken far too long to make prior to AI-accelerated software development. He actually plans to try and found his own business now. He's a very smart guy, so I hope he can make something interesting that people want.

There are a lot of AI doomers and haters. In person I mostly see people doing the same thing they've always done, but now saving time on various tasks. But this is the first time I've seen someone go from grumpy and checked out to giddy and optimistic thanks to LLMs.

Another year, another Le Mans race

Anyone staying up for the full 24 hours?

Hyperpole:
Thursday, 11 June 2026 - 20:00 CET (18:00 UTC)

Race Start:
Saturday, 13 June 2026 - 16:00 CET (14:00 UTC)

I've wondered before what it means to be anti-racist. I recall once asking online and got a not so helpful response of "well maybe you should think about that". But today my friend exemplified the idea.

He was sitting in a bus in San Francisco when an older white man started yelling racist shit at someone else on the bus. My friend is a model citizen. The kind of guy to call in issues to 311 as he's walking home. A frequent volunteer as well. So when he saw this altercation he stood up and got in front of the yelling man. That was enough to interrupt him. But more action was needed. Justice was needed.

He just so happened to have a need to relieve some gas. And so he aimed... and fired right onto the guy. When he walked off he turned to the racist and said "To be clear, I farted on you intentionally because of what you said". I'm told the face he got in response was exactly the same as Hide the Pain Harold's.

We should all strive for this level of bravery. And maybe, one fart at a time, we can end racism.

Long story short, I'm making an everything arcade cabinet and soaring no expense. At this point, I have a racing wheel and plan to install wind sim receptacles on a custom pull-out wheel drawer.

My challenge now is that really want to build flip out armrests that have cockpit controls attached and give me a spot for the car gear shifter, so I'm thinking of buying two VKB Gladiator joysticks to mount into the armrests.

Most of all I want it to look awesome and fit the design I'm after. Second, I want to actually play sim games.

My issue is as stated. Is a purchase like this crazy? Should I be starting with a second hand hotas unit to see if I even like it?

And for those of you who do enjoy racing, flight or work sims, were you once a casual user who got hooked? Did you wish that you'd bought decent gear right away?

Before I go into my rant I would like to ask you: Have you played Destiny or Destiny 2? What are your thoughts on Bungie, the imminent death of Destiny, their push for Marathon, and “games as a service” in general?

As for my opinion, I think that the real problem is that (probably) most managers, CEOs, investors, and shareholders involved in live service games aren’t gamers. They don’t care about the quality of the games. A majority of them probably don’t even play what they publish.

What they care about is to maximize revenue with minimal effort, cost, and risk.

The programmers and artists suffer from low wages and job insecurity, and the gamers suffer from live service slop that eventually gets sunset even when it has a dedicated fan base (that could grow if the game was better).

We can’t win against this horde of managers, CEOs, investors, and shareholders. They got AAA in a chokehold, especially in live service.

We gotta continue to vote with our wallets and give our money to the companies who deliver quality games, and pull our money out when they don’t.

If Bungie dies, I’ll be sad because I have a long history with Halo (Combat Evolved, 2, 3, ODST, and Reach), but so be it. Something better may rise from their ashes.

We gotta resist the slop. It’s like fast food. We gotta resist it even if it’s addictive, and go get better quality grub elsewhere even if it costs more. If we keep eating the slop, they’ll continue frying more of it.

Edit: To make sure I don’t confuse anyone, I should add that Destiny 2 will receive one last content update this month, and will remain playable, just as its predecessor, for the time being. What I think most people are complaining about is that a game that could potentially be excellent, will be left in a messy state, designed mostly around maximizing revenue through micro-transactions, rather than offering a good experience. It has a large and passionate fanbase, but will basically abandoned by Bungie, in favor of their new game Marathon, which no one cares about

Monaco Grand Prix
Circuit de Monaco
June 5-7, 2026

Next race:
Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix
Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya
June 12-14, 2026

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.

As a kid and young teen I used to be the kind of smartass aspiring nerd that I assume some of you were as well and many of you encountered at some point: smart, interested in technology, cool music, and anything non-mainstream, but with less than stellar social skills, lacking the knowledge and wisdom that you get by actually doing things instead of talking about them, and with not many friends, because few people around me shared my interests.

I did have some friends in the offline world who were quite similar, but they each lived in a different town and we only saw each other a couple times per year. The upside of that was that we valued every meeting all the more, where we talked, listened to newly discovered music (this was pre-Spotify but also pre-Youtube), played video games either in splits-creen or just by taking turns in an interesting singleplayer game, rode bikes around and did lots of more or less dumb shit.

Most of us grew out of this phase and became... well, we became nerds, but ones who were more or less well-adjusted and social, with our own friend groups, girlfriends, interests and hobbies that we actually participated in and not just talked about.

Nick was less lucky. He was perhaps the most stereotypical of us all, both in the type and depth of his interests and in his inability to meaningfully participate in them or to participate in society in general, really. Looking back, many things about him make much more sense if I think of him as autistic - not something you grow out of. Perhaps a diagnosis would help him accept this and adapt, but he had a dislike of any kind of institutions and doctors specifically.

I didn't mind though. He understood some of the things I liked, much more than the average person, especially a person my age. I used to hate electronic music, and Nick was the guy who gave me a CD with some early jungle and drum'n'bass, which was my entry drug.

Of course, the file called something like "jungle <date> <author>.mp3" was actually terrible early drum'n'bass, and the file called "drum and bass mix.mp3" was actually a brilliant jungle set - I'm quite sure it was Kemistry & Storm, sounded something like this, only without the MC and even junglier.

He also introduced me to some instrumental hip-hop like DJ Krush, whose music I sometimes listen to to this day, and Art of Noise, which I'm frankly not a huge fan of these days, but it served as a great counter-argument in the early-to-mid days of online nerdom when many otherwise smart people thought that all electronic music is stupid.

Of course I gave him music that I discovered as well. And we also exchanged videogames, old DOS games, new releases, but also some great shareware and freeware games often meant for hot-seat multiplayer, with up to four kids sitting around one keyboard, which was amazing fun for many hours. Being twelve years old buys with access to a CD burner, we natually exchanged other things as well.

The interesting thing is that despite his in retrospect likely autism, he seemed quite socially resilient. When he was I think 8 years old, his parents travelled from a poor, only briefly free and democratic Czechia, to a large city in Texas for a year, where his mother was to teach at an inner city high school through an exchange programme.

That year brought a ton of interesting stories, it was a shock for all of them, but that's a different topic. He returned with drastically improved English skills, prejudice against obese people and mild racism towards black people. Hey, don't look at me, I'm just telling it how it is.

The interesting thing is that racism was very much alive and present in Czechia at that time, but not against black people. Our history is completely different in that regard, so it was very common for people to say "I hate Gypsies, but I have nothing against Black people, Black people are cool." This changed later as we basically imported American racism as a side effect of importing more and more American media, though we still neither commonly practice nor truly understand (likely applies to me as well) this kind of racism.

As we grew up and stopped meeting twice a year, for new year's eve and during summer vacation, we lost touch. The last good thing I did for him was sending him an invite to my favorite local discussion board, which is to this day the only general purpose discussion board I know of that is much better than Tildes.

I think I hadn't seen him for at least a decade when a friend of our parents', whom we also knew well, unexpectedly died. We all met at a memorial party some time after the funeral, talked and played board games. Nick was invited to play table football, but couldn't join because for some reason he was losing the ability to grip things firmly and accurately.

It was quite new, so he nervously joked about it. Some of the other people present tried to get him to a good neurologist early through their connections (and failed). It took I think about a year until he got his diagnosis: not a rare, aggressive type of multiple sclerosis, but ALS, the thing with the ice bucket challenge, the thing Stephen Hawking had. He was 32 years old.

To this day I have no idea if there's any medication that can at least slow it down, because his personality and "social resilience" meant that he rejected all institutional help. This made it quite hard for his aging parents too. He hated having his hair touched but also later couldn't really wash it or brush it himself. He hated getting help in general, so he dressed himself for as long as he could, even when it took him two hours to put on a t-shirt.

This is all irrational and stupid. It was also all granted to him untill the very end, and so untill the very end he was allowed to keep his dignity in that way.

The sad part is that I only know all of this from second-hand information. I can't say I was indifferent, but when he was diagnosed we hadn't been in any contact for a decade, we weren't friends anymore. And through all that time I have been battling a chronic illness of my own that is unlikely to kill me, but that limits my life a lot, and when it doesn't, I have so many things I want or need to do when I suddenly can. I also live on the opposite side of the country, however small it is.

That said, of course I could have messaged or visited him if I truly wanted to. By the time I thought about it, he was barely able to speak and at that point I frankly didn't have the balls to do it. Of course, he normally refused to see anyone, he did not want to be seen like that, but he did sometimes accept people he knew from childhood.

A few months ago, he started having breathing problems. It may not have been the ALS progression yet but an infection, so despite his hate of doctors and hospitals, his parents managed to convince him to get hospitalized. He was just barely able to swallow tiny bits of food at that point, so he still had something like a breakfast with his parents, very underweight but without a feeding tube.

During the night he died, aged 38. If you know about ALS, you know there is some mercy in this. Dying at home with your family is always preferable, but with ALS that commonly means gradually losing the ability to breathe and slowly suffocating.

The saddest thing about Nick is that his life was marked by unfulfilled potential. He was not very socially competent and very impractical, but also quite intelligent and undoubtedly capable... of something. But he never managed to find the something. Worked a basic tech job for which he was not overqualified exactly, but certainly sharper than the job required (though I'm not entirely sure how he felt about it). Didn't really build anything for himself. As far as I know he never was with a woman despite almost certainly wanting to. I don't think he was particularly happy with his life either. And he never got the chance to change that.

Seeing myself in the slideshow of photos from his life during the funeral only made it more apparent how important our group of friends was in his life. The funeral took place in a neighboring town because the town where he lived only has a church next to the graveyard, not a secular ceremonial building, and he wouldn't want to have his funeral in a church. We all came, his family came, and so did his work colleagues, some of whom cried as well.

After the funeral we talked and ate and drank in his parents' flat. One that they will be forced to leave soon after probably nearly 30 years, moving into a smaller one and getting rid of some of their stuff. Through a slit in the door I saw a glimpse of what I assume was furniture and/or machines designed to make care easier, obtained despite his hardheadedness.

Okay, wipe your tears.

When I was a kid, Pornhub didn't exist. At some point we got Shoutcast, online radios and TVs thanks to which you could literally watch porn in Winamp, but before that me and my classmates sometimes watched a porn VHS one of us found in their parents' bedroom, and we also swapped CDs with porn. Those were hard to come by (no, don't say it), so each was precious, and during breaks in school we would talk about who's hotter, whether Amanda or Natascha. We were probably 12 years old when this started and I think we all turned out fine despite that.

Well, the one thing I got from Nick and never returned is a CD with his handwriting saying "P.vids .mpg open". When the three videos he burned on the CD didn't fill it entirely, he didn't finalize the burning process so that more could be added later, he was practical like that.

After remembering that something like this probably exists, I went through a box of my old stuff at my parents' house and actually found it. I still own an old laptop with an optical drive, so I put the CD in, but it failed to read. I tried cleaning the laser lens with a q-tip just in case because it looked dusty, and it really worked. VLC, one of the best free applications ever, naturally came (no!!) through as well.

The "last modified" date on each of the three files said December 19th, 2003. Obviously I looked at the videos, and it turns out that we were completely normal heterosexual boys with completely normal tastes. Not surprising, but nice to have a confirmation. One of the girls had Garfield socks, something that I remembered and laughed when I saw it so many years later.

This CD truly is the only physical thing that I ever got from him, as far as I know. I mean, there may have been some small things we exchanged as kids, but those were lost to time, whereas the CD rested among CDs of 70s French avantgarde and old Manowar albums.

I really don't need to explain how sad the whole situation was. But this one stupid CD gave it a funny and honestly kind of cool twist, which also made it easier to share this whole situation with various friends of mine who never met him, and who very much appreciated the absurdity, wholesome and morbid at the same time.

So now you can too.

I still think it is effectively the best possible version of a mainstream game platform that can realistically exist under current conditions and I think it is better that it exists than if it didn't. In particular their desire to not be reliant on Windows means the Linux gaming is in significantly better place than it would have been otherwise. They simply constantly remind me how low absolute bar the best possible version of the worst possible kind of game store platform is.

My non exhaustive list of problems in no particular order is

• Inability to filter by addtional EULA/DRM/account needed. Steam is already about all of what I am willing to tolerate. Not letting me hide these products is only wasting my time.
• Review system heavily biases towards positive and kills nuance.
• Inability to turn off game updates. For me personally this is the single biggest problem I have with the platform
• Related is inability to go back to previous game version.
• Refund window is a bad joke. For some kinds of games it is fine, for others it does not even allow to get out of tutorial. Sadly it is still better than a lot of other platforms
• I'm seeing more helpful recommendation features that are not possible to turn off - Calendar
• The wishlist/sale feature is extremely effective in enticing impulse purchases. Features that would limit this are of course not implemented. For example setting wishlist alerts only for below a certain price

I was talking with a friend about recent events that seemed eerily suspicious to me, and was wondering if all of you might have any similar experiences.

(Preemptively tagging this as politics. If anything in this thread is deemed malicious or inflammatory, let me know and I'll delete the thread)

Do you think it is ethical?
Should robots be remotely controlled at all times or should they be automated?
Who do you think should be held responsible if a robot accidentally commits a war crime?
Do you think war would be more frequent if there were no humans fighting?
Also a more general question: what do you think is the future of robots?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like social media, trackers and hats.tinfoil. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was keen-eyed.

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!

This is the fifth Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twenty-fifth overall. We are discussing Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. For June we will discuss How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Wexler.

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.

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.

A little less than a year ago, I asked for your recommendations on bread maker tips, tricks, and recipes, and thought I’d give a small update.

The bread maker I bought is functionally the Breville Custom Loaf, rebranded for the local market (“Tramontina by Breville”). I paid R$3069 for it. It was on sale: the same machine now sells for anywhere between R$2991 to R$3690. (These equate to about 565USD then and 594USD to 732USD now, considering contemporaneous exchange rates.)

My +/- weekly recipe eventually settled upon via much trial and many errors comes from an amalgamation of various sources, by now mostly lost. In the summer, I have to halve the recipe and make bread twice as often, or the maresia / damp sea air makes it mould before we can eat the whole thing!

I have also not tried to make anything but this exact bread since I started. My dreams of raisin buns are as of yet unrealised. Next year for the end of the year, I plan to make panettone in it, as we don’t plan to travel.

My unhalved recipe is:

• 450ml water (filtered, cool)
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 4 cups 100% whole wheat / integral flour
• >1 tsp demerara sugar
• <1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp (freezer stored, instant dry) yeast
• ~3/4 cup walnuts, in pieces, raw, unsalted, to fill the “automatic” dispenser on the machine (sometimes the bulk goods shop by me is out of nuts. the bread is better with nuts, but fine without.)

Cost wise, this breaks down to:

• 500mL olive oil : R$25 (0,75/loaf)
• 1kg flour : R$7 (3,17/loaf)
• 1kg sugar : R$10 (0,05/loaf)
• 1kg salt : R$4 (0,02/loaf)
• 100g walnuts : R$10 (12,50/loaf)

I didn’t include the yeast in the breakdown because I have yet to buy any. The 1kg package of yeast I purchased four years ago to make pizza and kept in the freezer since is still going strong. At present, a kilo of yeast costs ~R$23.

Without nuts, my cost per loaf is R$3,99, while with nuts, it’s R$16,49. My local supermarket sells a (frankly inferior) and much smaller (350g) “100% whole wheat” loaf for R$25.

Having kept incomplete records, I believe for most of the year we have made a loaf about every five days: let’s pretend means over the past year, I’ve made 70 loaves at about a 50/50 split of nuts or no-nuts, so let’s put my total cost of making bread as R$716,80. If we buy bread, it’s an every-other-day occurance, so R$4562,50 spent on bread in a year. Adding the cost of the bread maker to the mix, if these were real figures, we would have saved R$776,70 so far, just in this year alone.

And it has served us well, with some slight oddities!

The first is based on the machine: never once in the usage of the machine has the “automatic” dispenser of nuts automatically added the nuts at the proper stage. I have read the documentation, and I can find no explanation. At present, if I want nuts added, I have to remain at home when the maker is going, as it screams something awful (buzzer) when it’s “going to” add the nuts, and then I run along and poke open the dispenser door with my finger until the latch opens and the nuts dispense into the awaiting dough. If I know I won’t be home, I don’t add nuts, because otherwise, I will come home to a nice loaf of bread and a small dispenser of lightly warmed nuts. (Heh.)

The second is that my recipe is not as good when I have to halve it! In the damp season, I had to throw away a few half-loaves, as mold loves my poor little bread, and the bread does not survive well in the fridge. But splitting the recipe (and altering the settings on the bread maker to reflect, which is itself an imprecise science) has yet to lead to a smaller version of my usual recipe: what comes out is a biscotti-shaped, flat, dense, but still edible loaf. I’m still figuring it out!

All in all, thanks to everyone who encouraged me in the previous thread, and let this be encouragement to anyone else on the fence to try out a breadmaker!

Most social media sites have options for muting and blocking people. As we know, muting is one-way (they see me, I don't see them) and blocking is two-way (neither see each other).

Recently, while having too much caffeine in my system way too late, I had the thought that "blocking" is a far more negative term than what it should be. Sometimes it's done in spite, absolutely. You wanna slap somebody for being how they are.

But sometimes you just recognize that there's someone who you have nothing against, whom you might even like if you met them in real life, but in this context of limited human connect, you understand that the only possible communication between you and them would be toxic. That your opinions, your way of speaking, perhaps your whole existence offends them. Or vice versa.

So you protect them from yourself by blocking them, in lieu of a better word. I think there should be a better word but I haven't figured out what it should be yet. "Spare"?

(P.S. I think tildes should perhaps have such a functionality)

So we had baseball-sized hail suddenly come through my city a few days ago, and everyone at my work got to watch our cars get destroyed from the front windows. I opened a claim immediately after the hail stopped and could go take pictures, but still haven't heard anything other than that an agent was assigned.

City-wide, body shops are already talking about having a year-long backlog and having to triage repairs that don't affect immediate drivability. I've heard people talk about them being totaled already. Rental cars are hard to come by, because they not only have huge demand but had damage as well. The county is petitioning FEMA, because houses were damaged as well.

I'm just in a depressive waiting state, where I don't know how things will start to play out yet, with my undrivable car sitting at the office with trash bags taped over it while I work from home. And my old backup car (almost 20 years old), which was slated for one of the stepdaughters to receive once she gets her license, also had extensive damage making it unsafe to drive. My fiancée's car survived, being on the other side of town at the time, but she has a very busy schedule to the next few weeks.

I had the realization that every car I've ever bought myself was just destroyed, and I get fairly attached.

The Civic Sport Touring (2017), I still owe about $4000 on and expected to pay off this year. It's thoroughly dented across the whole body, with a completely shattered (to the point it's opaque) windshield, broken mirror assemblies, 2/3 cameras are probably broken, a tail light is broken down to the LED board, and the moonroof assembly appears to be bent and sagging slightly, probably from the roof and side parts being bashed so heavily. Not sure how much water got in during the ensuing torrential downpour.

Realistically, it being to totaled seems likely, given the cost of many of the parts. Which means I'm going to be stuck buying new, because used ones are a relative rarity (I jumped to buy mine when it showed up in stock) and there's barely a price difference these days.

I'm curious if anyone else here has had experiences with that sort of thing or knows what to expect.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like ecology, writing and moderation. 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!

If you're a native English speaker, you know what "tramp" means. If you're not, you can read the wikipedia article, but also look up "tramp stamp" to get a different, more contemporary meaning. Neither is particularly helpful here though.

If you're in Czechia or Slovakia, it means something else altogether. "Tramping" describes a hobby and an identity that strongly relates to woodcraft, Scouting and perhaps a romanticized version of the old-school hobo life. Basically tramps are a loose community of people who like to walk through the forests, sleep outside, sing songs around the fire, usually drink, all the while respecting the nature and each other.

The part that I want to write about, though, is more interesting: their camps. Semi- or entirely illegal hidden spots in the forest, built and maintained by volunteers and free for use by anybody who finds them and behaves.

The community has existed for over 100 years and what helped it quite bit were oppressive regimes - first Nazis and then especially communists. People liked to escape the everyday atmosphere of oppression in the towns and disconnect from it in the countryside, where they could feel truly free for a couple of days.

When you want to sleep in the forest, you can of course just use a tarp and a sleeping bag anywhere, but there's a much more comfortable way: tramp camps. Some are legalized, with private ownership, and these days often contain your standard countryside cottages. But the majority is not. Popular tramping areas are full of spots that range from just a campfire with a couple of logs to sit on, through many places that contain comfortable benches and a wooden sleeping platform with a tarp-covered roof, to full-on small log cabins.

Some of these, mostly the bare campfire spots, are easy to find and near main trails. Others, especially the log cabins, tend to be hidden. There are no public maps. The more hidden they are, the more helpful stuff they tend to contain: a saw for making firewood, various pots for cooking and also for carrying water to douse the fire, a fire grate, sometimes even shelf-stable condiments, books, more comfortable sleeping arrangements... And most have a visitor's logbook too.

The beauty here is that all of those are free to use for anyone who finds them, and many of them are also completely illegal. I'm not sure what the rules are specifically in standard forests (though as far as I know making a fire is illegal even in those), but many tramp camps are in protected forests as well. This may sound bad, and sometimes it is. But many of the camps existed for decades before the environmental protection was established, and the people using them tend to not cause issues, so they're usually tolerated.

A large group of people of all ages that isn't organized in any way and merely like doing what they do has spent countless hours working to build and maintain these spots - just to bring joy not only to themselves and their friends, but also to other people they've never met.

It all relies on two things. First, the locations of these spots will only be shared privately or found by people who care and make the minimal effort to find them, and therefore are unlikely to abuse them. Second, the authorities know this too and therefore have no reason to interfere even where law says they should.

I love these instances of systems that work entirely without the involvement of any official structures, based on trust among completely unknown people, only protected by minimal gatekeeping. What they're doing could be harmful to the environment if they were selfish or irresponsible, but they're neither, so it has worked for a century.

Their image has some specifics

Oh, and there's one more thing that may seem cute to people from north America. Tramp culture used to almost idolize some small parts of US and to a smaller degree Canadian history and culture. This was understandable - the freedom of living in the wilderness of old-timey North America or in the wild west as known from literature and Western films felt like the complete antithesis to living under the oppression of soviet-style communism. But it often brought things that in retrospect may seem cute, a bit silly or even wrong.

For example every legalized and permanent tramp village had a leader who would settle disputes etc., called a sheriff. Unfortunately, those people were often targets of the communist secret police, trying to break them to snitch on their friends. Many camps have vaguely foreign names, or names inspired by real places in the US or Canada. I remember a camp called "Ontarko", a diminutive of Ontario.

But aside from western symbols like clothes, cow skulls etc., sometimes some Native American imagery or military references (tramps to this day like older versions of US Army backpacks) you would also often see Confederate flags.

These days they're almost gone, but you may still encounter them among old tramps. In the pre-internet era, with heavily censored information coming from the west, they were often seen simply as a symbol of rebellion, freedom and independence. American Civil War was barely understood here, and almost nobody saw the negative connotations that many people in the West immediately perceive today.

Why am I writing this now?

One of the prime tramping locations is around the area where my parents live, and every time I visit I take a bike to ride into the hills and then walk around interesting potential spots - near streams and springs, on steep hill sides farther away from paths, behind unusually dense patches of forest etc. So far I have found around 7 of them nearby (and probably 10 others elsewhere). It's like a game of geocaching that, instead of just giving you a virtual point, grants you a new place you can grill sausages and then sleep in, often times quite beautiful too.

Unfortunately, the fact that many of the spots are on protected land and therefore illegal has one obvious downside: it would just take one person with a lot of time and energy to start pressuring the authorities to remove them, even if they don't want to.

Quite honestly, some of the camps are a bit much. Log cabins partially covered in creosote (preserves wood but is quite far from eco friendly), with store-bought doors, on protected land... Yeah. I can see why somebody would have a problem with that. This is a small minority though.

As often happens, the one person unfortunately eventually appeared and started pushing for the removal of all of those camps. He's a journalist known mainly for being contrarian and combative. There are some minor aspects of tramping that are clearly too much as mentioned above, and others that are clearly up for discussion, but this is not his approach: his work feels truly personal, fueled by hostility towards the whole subculture, ego, and an unwillingness to understand why these places matter to people.

His communication is spiteful, full of juvenile snark, including things like mockingly misspelling tramp slang. He (or possibly some accomplice) also uses dirty tactics like mapping the camps and then anonymously publishing the maps online and in smartphone apps, where the pretense is "democratizing access to the camps", but the real intent is to remove the gatekeeping so that people who do not care about nature start using the camps, leaving a mess and causing issues, which forces authorities to act.

Unfortunately it works. In the most popular protected area many of the camps have been removed, others are scheduled for removal. Just a few camps are planned to be legalized with some conditions, despite his demands, at least.

So far this only concerns the protected areas, the hills behind my parents' house should be safe for now. Most of the forests around there are privately owned, which may or may not help when he tries to target them in the future. I hope it does. The mapping of the area is already slowly starting though.

I'm giving you some crude phone photos of the camps I or other people have found. I really want you to imagine the feeling of walking around the beautiful temperate forests of central Europe and knowing that these places are probably somewhere around you and they are free for you to use and enjoy, if you just find them and leave them in the same state after using them. They're not alpine cabins intended for survival, they are purely for enjoyment with your friends, family or alone.

A couple examples

I wish I could share more, but I only started taking photos of them relatively recently, and there are a couple that I'm not comfortable sharing even anonymously here.

Here's a tiny gallery

And here's a video of my band playing a very old tramp song from 1939 (yeah, I know what I say below) in another one - a big campfire with a half-circle of benches around it, likely established by a local scout troop.

I am not a member of the subculture, I am not a tramp. I hate the music they traditionally play, I don't like cheap rum and I don't have that much in common with many of them. But I have a lot of respect for their traditions and the beauty of the whole concept is that I can experience some of it on my own terms.

I can only hope that in the future, when the one majorly disliked person pushing for their removal no longer has the strength to do what he does, the camps will gradually get rebuilt and the tradition will recover in some way.

(no, I will not address the clickbait elephant in the title)

I was pretty disappointed by the entire fifth season. The show has been floundering after season 3, when it was clear that the natural climax of the story was post-poned because they couldn't handle a show without Homelander.

There's a number of issues that I have with S5, starting with the pacing. The episodes are paced incredibly weirdly. We spend a lot of time on things that, given the show is in its last season, really shouldn't be the focus. New B-side superheroes are introduced and take a lot of focus away from the core protagonists who's stories we are supposed to be finishing up. There's a whole haunted house bottle episode. There's a 5 min sequence of two new villains sniffing each other's asses because they're animal themed in the penultimate episode. The consequence of this is that the actual climax is incredibly rushed and dealt with in all of 30 minutes. There's a whole storyline that's introduced with a stronger superhero drug that makes you immune to the virus the Boys are cooking up to kill Homelander, and he takes it and then within 2 episodes they just find a new dumb way to kill him. It reeks of upping the stakes without a good reason.

Another issue is how cheap everything felt. There's a distinct lack of set-up shots and extras. Most of the time, it's named characters sitting in a closed room, talking at each other. If there's action, it's just a fist fight with maybe some dry-wall punches. The entire climax of the show is confided to a single room's decor getting torn to shreds and that's while evil superman is getting killed. There's a chase sequence in ep 2 which made me laugh out loud because of how stupid it looked. In this high stakes situation it's just people jogging down roads.

I do feel for the show because for something written pre 2024, they got outpaced by reality on the satire. But that doesn't absolve you from dogshit dialogue that cannot stay away from crass words and sex jokes. All the time. S1 was raunchy and gory at times, but it was timed well and balanced out by genuine, normal conversation. The word fuck loses all it's fucking meaning if you fucking put it in fucking front of every fucking other word. Ignoring even that, the writing still sucks from start to finish.

I'm happy it's over and that I can let this franchise rest. I stuck with it because S1 was really good. I'm sad that a show which had such a clear through line from S1 onwards with the Boys killing their way up the Seven was turned into, well, whatever happened in seasons 4 and 5.

I don't usually write things like this, but I'm having difficulty and think I need to get it out. I had to put down my dog Willow on Monday (two days ago, as of writing), and I am not okay.

This is not the first pet I've lost. Several childhood pets, but those weren't really mine, they were my parents', and so I didn't have the same level of responsibility over the animal as I did with Willow.

Even of my pets, this is not the first loss. In 2022, I adopted a retired working dog Yukon and an elderly cat Gomez. We lost Yukon in May 2024 (aspiration pneumonia due to megaesophagus) and Gomez in May 2025 (renal failure). The renal failure was a prolonged decline, and so while we tried to manage the disease we had some time to come to terms with things. The pneumonia was very fast decline and more of a shock. I loved them both, but this now feels much worse. I guess because I only really knew them 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 years respectively. I feel guilty about that, like it shouldn't matter and I should have grieved for them the same, but I don't.

This was the first pet that was mine, in the sense that my wife and I have had full responsibility for her the entire 10 years we've had her. She was the best behaved dog I've ever had. Always by my side at home. Especially when I worked from home during/after Covid lockdowns I took her with me wherever I could. Loyal. I just killed her.

Well, I didn't do it, we took her to a vet and they did typical euthanasia. It doesn't feel like the difference matters.

Willow also had renal failure, which we learned about at stage 3 (already severe) in January. The past few months have brought back a lot of pain about Gomez since it was the same disease. Realistically, the fact she made it all the way to May still walking on her own is remarkable. Meals have been challenging for the past month or so. Since late last week she refused to eat, and her condition deteriorated quickly over the weekend. We knew this was coming, but childishly it somehow felt like she'd just keep going forever because she'd been doing so well. Of course that's not how it works, but I guess it's easier to imagine that things are normal.

I think we gave her the best final day we could. We took her to the same pet stores, park, restaurants we used to take her to when she was in her prime. I got her some drive-thru chicken nuggets, her favorite, and she actually ate all of them! She must have been hungry. I want to believe I could have kept feeding her fast food for a few more days or weeks or months, but I know it's simply not true. She moved slow, but still walked on her own at the park and pet store. By the time we arrived at the vet she seemed satisfied, tired, and ready for a nap.

I don't know.

As I say, I've done this before and I roughly know the "usual" advice about grief and how it seems to work for me. My wife and I support each other. We still have other pets, and it helps a little to hold them. Enduring a death the same month three years in a row is taking its toll. All our other pets seem healthy and relatively young, and I'm not superstitious, but some deep emotional part of me can't help but fear May 2027. I think I'm just tired.

Our cat Pinto, still a 9-month old kitten, we've had since she was newborn and abandoned by her mother. We think she was abandoned because she couldn't latch properly to nurse, so we fed her on bottle day and night. Given how much it hurt about Yukon and Gomez after just a couple years, already old when we adopted them, and how much it hurts now about Willow after 11 years, who was a young adult when we adopted her, I am terrified of losing Pinto. I know it'll happen. I don't know what I'll do.

The quality of the pain doesn't really feel new, but the quantity is so much worse than I expected. Feeling guilty about that is new. The fear is new. Not really sure how to process it. You're not supposed to have favorites but I guess you do anyway.

I don't really know what I'm trying to get out of posting this. Pity? Not really. I guess I just need to get it out of my head. I'll probably look back at this thread in a few days to see what people have said but I think I just need to get this out and step away from it for a while and process.

https://i.imgur.com/U1Nq7X8.jpeg

I'm not some big psychonaut or anything. I haven't even had a proper trip outside of smoking some laced weed a decade or so ago. I microdosed shrooms (golden teacher) for a few years, but I topped out at 100mg twice a week. I've done about 2g of shrooms (different varieties), but at that level its more like a really great buzz off of alcohol with a little euphoria on top. Nothing crazy.

Anyway, I have a cartridge of NN DMT. I'm going to start light with only one hit, which should last only five minutes or so. I have a connect for ayahuasca, but it all seems to intense and drawn out and... just more than I want to do for a first go. I also don't really want to be that deep into something around a bunch of randos who also coughed up a couple hundred bucks to trip in some lady's living room.

I've been reading up on it for a while and have absolutely no anxiety about it. Even though its light, I'm still going to have a friend sit for me just to play it safe.

Ultimately, I don't have any grand expectations or anything. What I get out of it, positive or negative, will be good. I've read about higher doses actually improving the task-switching in the brain, which would be nice for my ADHD. I don't take any drugs for ADHD, depression, or anything, so I'm in a great spot on that front too.

Tell me your experiences (good or bad!)

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like plex.pass, graffiti and novels. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was bemused.

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!

Background:

While playing games for the Backlog Burner, I was surprised to learn that the Humble App (which is a "free" perk of having a Humble Choice subscription) has a few games that are actually exclusive to it.

Part of the reason I chose to play games from the Humble App is that I don't expect it'll be around much longer. It isn't getting updates or new games added to it. Also, Humble Games, the publishing arm of Humble which released many of the games available through the app, was abruptly dissolved in 2024.

With this in mind, I went through the entire current library for the Humble App and tried to identify games that I could not find available for purchase/download elsewhere.

Below is a list of games that I consider to be "endangered" because they might become unplayable/lost media if (i.e. when) the Humble App does shut down or stop working.

If you've got the Humble App, it might be worth playing some of these sooner rather than later.

If you've got game preservation sensibilities, it might make sense to download and archive these for posterity.

Game List:

Here are the games that are, as best as I can tell, Humble App exclusives and in danger of being lost permanently.

For each title below, I tried to find a decent link that gave information about the game. Many of these simply don't have a lot of online presence.

Some of them have Steam pages linked, but in those cases, they're just placeholders and you cannot actually buy the game.

• A2Be - A Science Fiction Narrative - Steam page

• after HOURS - info link

• Crescent Bay - info link

• Divinoids - Steam page

• Elephant in the Room - trailer

• fistful of nothing - homepage

• Heeey! Park-Boy - Steam page

• Jawns - playable on the web but no download available

• Keyboard Sports - Steam page (note: I found an itch.io page with it available for download, but it is clearly unofficial)

• Lyric Sonata - gameplay video

• Operator - trailer

• Quiet City - trailer

• Rogue Mansion - Steam page

• Roman Sands - gameplay video

• Space Routine - Steam page

• Spoolside - trailer

• The Groundz - gameplay video

• THOR.N - gameplay video

• Woten - Steam page

• Yojimbrawl - gameplay video

• Zodiac XX - trailer

Feel free to check my work and let me know if I missed any, or if some of these games are actually officially obtainable outside Humble and I didn't find them.

Also let me know if I whiffed any of the links or if you find better ones for any of the games.

Canadian Grand Prix
Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve
May 22-24, 2026

Next race:
Monaco Grand Prix
Circuit de Monaco
June 5-7, 2026

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.

Miami Grand Prix
Miami International Autodrome
May 1-3, 2026

Next race:
Canadian Grand Prix
Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve
March 22-24, 2026

Not sure if this is the right section for this post, might be better off somewhere else.

But a sentiment I've seen more and more frequently online is the idea that there's a pretty simple "razor" (like Occum's razor, or Halon's) that if a billionaire or huge corporation is telling me something is bad or will hurt people, it's usually a sign that the opposite is true. Or if a billionaire goes on the news and says that this new law is good for the poors and people should support it, it's a good sign to go out and vote against it.

Do we have a catchy name for it yet? I was thinking maybe "The Bezo's inversion" or something similar.

Edit: Shout out to /u/Rosco for expressing my intentions from this post better than I could have. The discussion in this thread didn't really go the direction I was expecting and that's probably on me for how I structured the original post.

I read this as more of a fun catharsis. We're in a society that is getting disproportionately out of whack. Wealth inequality is at a pretty untenable level, the average person is having a hard time getting by, and those with extreme wealth are actively trying to change our media, regulatory, labor, political landscapes to their benefit. I think a big of off gassing is warranted and this seems like a fun to way to engage with it. Obviously it's not actually going to function as a law, like I agree with Tom Steyer's stance on the Environment. But, on the flip side I came across the voter guide in the Palo Alto Daily in 2020 and it was literally the exact opposite - on every single proposition - than what I was planning to vote for. So it also kind of works? Regardless, it's harmless fun.

Hey all,

My family and I are leaving for a vacation tomorrow, and I won't be back until Jun 11th. I likely won't have very consistent internet access while gone since we're going on a cruise which only has rather expensive and slow satellite internet, so I just wanted to leave a message here on Tildes somewhere so nobody worries about my absence. :P

I removed the latest /r/tildes invite thread but will make a new one when I get back. And I also likely won't be able to post the remainder of the Taskmaster episodes as they are released, so if someone wants to take over posting those while I'm gone I would appreciate it. Thanks and see you all again in a few weeks. :)