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!

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.

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?

Let's hear about religious and spiritual (maybe philosophical?) beliefs not considered "mainstream" in the modern West.

The percentage of people who identify as "spiritual", "other", or "none" is rising at the expense of larger "organized" religions.

Disclaimer: it's hard if not impossible to draw hard lines around what is considered a "religion" verses a philosophy, culture, or mere ritual or traditional practice. If you aren't sure if what you believe fits the prompt, err on the side of sharing.

Things that probably fit the prompt:

• Minority religions
• Native beliefs/cultures
• Highly syncretic beliefs
• Non-western religions or beliefs
• "Pagan" beliefs
• Esoteric or occult beliefs or practices

Things that might not fit the prompt

• Mainstream Christian beliefs or traditions
• Naturalism or a lack of belief in any particular religious or spiritual tradition

I don't exclude these two categories because they aren't important, but because they are incredibly important, and most of what we think about religious or spiritual beliefs exist in frameworks created by the above two groups. I want to use this opportunity to learn about others, and I feel that I already know a good bit more about atheism and mainstream Christian theism than most other perspectives.

This is a sensitive subject that is tied deeply to people's sense of meaning; please treat your fellow commentor's beliefs, cultures, and values with respect. Thank you in advance for your input and perspective.

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?

When I think of bows, my mind auto points to Sailor Moon, but there must be more variety I've never noticed. In Sailor Moon, each of the girls had a bow that reflected their personality and matched the rest of their outfit. As a set, they're pretty iconic, and the bows were functional (for transformation, ofc). Arguably, Kiki's bow from Kiki's delivery service is lively, but I'd also say the magic comes from the Miyazaki's animation. Would a big bow even move like that? I like the costuming details on the Sailor Moon bows, but the volume in Kiki's is undeniably cuter.

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.

One of the qualities I appreciate the most in people is generosity, however I’ve come to realise that I am not particularly generous and I don’t think many people in my family are either.

I try my best to help people as much as I can at work, but I can’t say I’ve done much more than that.

I’d love to hear what you do to be generous.

Recently had a conversation with a good friend about dating, and it had me curious about how everyone on Tildes approaches dating. Tell me a bit about how you date! Here's a few prompts/thoughts I'm curious about:

• How long does it take for you to know if you're attracted to someone (sexually, romantically, emotionally, shared interests, etc)?
• What do you like to do when you date and does it change depending on how many dates you've been on or how well you know the person?
• Once you start dating someone, how long does it take you to understand whether you want to date the person long term or whether it's not going to work out?
• Do you only date people you meet in real life or do you use dating apps? How do you approach going from stranger to dating them?
• What's most important in deciding whether you want to date someone? Do they need to have an interest in activities you enjoy, shared values, emotional intelligence, a certain kind of humor, or something else?
• Is there something you don't understand about dating and want to share your frustration?

It's not something I've thought about much until I had a conversation with someone who sets up their RSS reader, and uses it, completely differently to me.

I self-host FreshRSS, and typically just use the Web UI provided by that - sometimes I use Android RSS apps to consume from that, but I've never found one I like that much. But I just categorize my RSS feeds by broad theme, e.g. computing & tech, local news, programming, tech news, gaming, business and so on...

For the most part, I just browse through my main feed a few times per day and see if anything catches my eye. The only exception to this is that I have a few feeds in the 'Important' feed. One example is the forum related to a university project, where I need to know about entries pretty quickly.

The person I was discussing with never subscribes to anything noisy. No BBC, no Ars Technica, and really nothing that posts more than once per day. They split their feeds into "Important", "Casual", "Videos", "Podcasts" (I never thought to add Podcasts, as I use a separate map) and "Comics". They have it set up with the intention of reading everything that comes through.

I respect the curation effort that it must take to have an RSS feed where everything is interesting enough that you'd want to read it all. But for me, RSS is a method of discovering content. I don't need it too clean or overly curated. For the most part, I'm just going to skim it for interesting titles and subjects. The most curation I do is removing feeds after a while, if I notice I'm never interested in their content.

I'm very keen to hear how you use RSS.

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.

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!

I thought younger people may find it interesting to experience what older, very popular, word processors were like.

Here's WordPerfect 6.0, emulated in the browser: https://archive.org/details/msdos_wordperfect6

Here's a link to the instruction manual: https://archive.org/details/wordperfectversi00word/mode/2up

Here's a bit of history: DOSDays - WordPerfect $495 in 1983 is roughly $1500 today.

Here's the recommended specs (not the minimum specs)

Personal computer using 386 processor
520k free conventional memory
DOS 6.0 or memory management software
Hard disk with 16M disk space for complete installation
VGA graphics adapter and monitor

F1 is the default help key.

Page 409 of the manual talks about menus. This is version 6 so they give you a drop down menu. To get an idea of how version 5 and earlier would appear by default (without the menubar, just the blue screen), hit alt v, then p. T (To get the menu back hit alt =, then V, then P) People might find it weird but those drop down menus first appeared in 5.1, and were a bit deal: "On 6th November 1989 WordPerfect released what would be their most successful version - WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, selling for $495 in the U.S. This was the first version to support Macintosh-style text-based pull down menus to supplement the traditional function key shortcuts and mouse support."

I'd be interested to know how easy people find it to use. At the time I had the keyboard overlay (example for WP5) and the muscle memory, but that's all gone now.

I have, at times, experienced that opinions I share online fails to win people over, to the extent that the essence of the thread transforms from that of an exchange of ideas into that of a shitstorm.

Curiously, this is seldom caused by me having controversial views. I’m not especially hateful, and I don’t hold any conservative core ideas, such as advocating for an even less equal society or attacking or belittling various minority groups. If it were just that, then there would be no mystery; my views horrible, and for that reason, they provoke a strong reaction. But despite this not being the case, my views, which are truly very civilised and boring indeed, are sometimes intepreted in interesting ways.

I think the issue is me not expressing myself as well as I could. Assuming this to be the case, what follow is my own notes on how to better get your (mine) ideas across without misunderstandings.

Beware of the shortcoming of contemporary writing

Most of todays readers do not read. Rather, they impatiently give the text a quick glimpse, their brain already craving the next bit of novelty. I've noticed this in myself when I impatiently select random random test when trying to get my brain to read a text online. What's more, those who write has begin taking into account that their audience does not read. This has spawned a peculiar writing style which, for the first time in history(?), is designed not to actually be read, but merely glimpsed through.

It mostly consist of short paragraphs.

Often just a single sentence.

Sometimes two sentences. Maybe three. Four sentences are considered the max.

To help readers easier skim through it.

Read more: How can you write web content that people can skim?

If actually read, it has a staccato-like feel.

Almost like free verse poetry.

There are other characteristica too.

• Scattering links throughout.
• Inserting “Read more about“ references to other articles.
• Inserting list such as this one.
• Adding heaps of headlines.

I guess pretty much everyone have seen this particular style, and, to some degree, adapted it themselves. So there is a tendency to naturally try to boil everything down to a single, ultra-short paragraph. However, human language is not computer code; trying to destill a deeper set of ideas down to a Xwitter-length sentence will inevitably cause its fragile essence to be lost in translation. There is a reason why books are the length of, well, books, and not just the SparkNotes summary thereoff.

To build upon this idea, note that most dog-whistles comes in the form of a single, short sentence, as the shortness, unlike computer code, make it vague, opening it up for multiple interpretations. Indeed, some dog whistles doesn’t contain any words at all, but consists of a single emoji, such as “milk” or “the OK sign”.

If you write about more elusive fluffy ideas, ideas where your angle runs the risk of being read the wrong way, your writing has to go all the way, fully exposing your point with absolute clarity. You have to show it from every angle to make your vision travel through the written words and into the mind of the reader.

Sleep on it

If you aren’t sure you got everything right, no rush. You can always wait a bit, and go over it later.

Don’t accidently target other users

Lets say that someone posts the notorious recipe “Chicken and ham extravaganta”, and say that they don’t think society should go vegan because a balanced diet is better than a green one. You just happen to have a bunch of replies to that. For one thing, flesh food is not traditionally balanced, but centered around the meat, with everything else being mere decoration. Also, there are lots of protein sources other than meat. But most importantly, the vegan movement is not about what is the most healthy diet, but about it being morally wrong to kill a sentient creature just to eat its meat.

But this is a general argument about veganism. If you write it as a reply to someone recomendinging a “Chicken and ham extravaganta”, you’re essentially calling them a bad person.

So don’t reply. If you want to push your point, at least wait a bit and then create a new post, so you don’t target a specific user.

Don’t drink and post

Nope. Just don’t.

Avoid provocateur headlines

I might have given this post the headline “How to speak honestly without being banned for misogyny, racism, transphobia, and fascism”, or maybe “I was banned and censored on tilde.net. Here’s my conclusions.” Headlines which are undeniably more juicy, more clickbaity, if you will. You can almost smell the raising adrenaline. Controversy! Read all about it!

To me, this is hard to resist, because I really love the aethetic of blatant, vulgar marketing. But it also tends to backfire more often than not.

Also, even if the actual content of my post is okay, people who have experienced racism or transphobia might not be super thrilled about me playing around with racism and transphobia in my headline. Saying something “jokingly” is still saying it.

As an aside, me being temporary banned and having my posts deleted was what inspired me to write this post. I don’t have anything much to say about this itself, other than I would have liked it if removed post had a line about the reason for removal, and I would also note that, if you get banned, the red text bleed into be backgrund in a way which is aestetically displeasing.

Diversity reading

You might try mentally test reading your post from the perspective of groups which play a role in the content of your post. After all, if you talk about someone, you should be able to say it to their face. Also, it is entirely possible that your post will be read by those you talk about.

Take the rules for being a good listener, then invert them

Listening is a skill which most people haven’t learned. So when you speak your mind, it is worth taking precautions for the likely scenario that your readers will not follow the rules for the optimal listener. So let’s try inverting the rules:

When listening to others, always give their view the most generous intepretation —> If your words can be interpreted as ignorant, biggoted, or fashy, they will be, always.

Truly listen to others and try to understand them before giving your answer —> Assume that people will skim through your post.

I want to point out that (in bold and uppercase just for the heck of it) I DON’T SAY THIS TO WHINE ABOUT BAD PEOPLE READING MY POSTS UNFAIRLY. Nope, absolute nope. My point is the exact opposite; I have a deeply held belief that any writer or author who is “misunderstood” could have avoided it by writing better. The writer should be expected to know his audience and know how to write in circles around any potential misintepretation.

Got that? Ok. Let’s look at what we can do to address those two issues.

If your words can be interpreted as ignorant, biggoted, or fashy, they will be, always.

When writing a post, I sometimes get the notion that something I write might be taken the wrong way. But then I forget about it, because I’m busy building a clever metaphor finding just the right word. And without fail, my post get misinterpreted in exactly that way I thought it would. So always listen to that little voice. In my experience, it is seldom wrong.

This is not just to avoid you getting trashed online. Another more important aspect which is typically overlooked, is that if your post can, somehow, be misinterpreted in horrible ways, it may also be read as such by people who truly hold those views, people who then sees you as an ally. You really don’t want that.

Sometimes it is a simple matter of changing your phrasing. Other times, directly stating what you do or do not believe is in order.

Assume that people will skim through your post.

While you can’t predict exactly how our post is going to be skimmed through, It is likely that they will have read your headline. So use that as leverage to push your most important points, or the general vibe of your post. Your first paragraph is likely to be read too. If your post is longer, you can also add subheaders with key info. You can also use the inverted pyramid structure, leading with the information any reader must know, followed by things which will grant them greater understanding, and ending with the interesting nice to know stuff.

This is what I got so far! If you got any advice of your own, please share!

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?

For those out of the loop, Steam Next Fest is a week long event (Feb. 5 - Feb. 12) celebrating upcoming games through demos and developer livestreams.

Which demos have you been playing, and which releases are you looking forward to?

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?

What are some of the lessons you've learned about life, love, gender, personhood, etc. because of your LGBT identity?

What wisdom can you share with others here -- whether they share an identity with you or not?

Also, "LGBT" here is being used as an umbrella term as it is in our community name of ~lgbt. It applies to any and all minority sexualities and gender identities. You do not have to be listed in the initialism to answer!

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.

Weezer are great but Matt Sharp's side project The Rentals were also great.

The first album - Return of the Rentals shows pretty heavy Weezer influence in places, but female vocalists, violins, keyboards, bring a chaotic fun. I dunno, I was alive at the time and maybe it hasn't aged well?

Anyway: what side projects do you think we actually good?

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.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

A Couple of library users have said Project Hail Mary is going to take time to get ahold of.

Edit Based on responses so far I propose the following schedule
We will discuss Cloud Atlas in early March,
Piranesi in Mid April,
The Dispossessed in Late May
And Project Hail Mary at the end of June.

Can those of you who use libraries, check our four books and see if there is one to start with that is less in demand? Please report back with hold times and we can see if a different schedule works better.

Books are the Dispossessed, Cloud Atlas, Project Hail Mary, Piranesi.

Let me know.

@cfabbro
@kfwyre
@slothywaffle
@DefinitelyNotAFae
@0d_billie
@Bifrost51
@skybrian
@Sodliddesu
@kfwyre
@azaadi
@fraughtGYRE
@Nsutdwa
@PnkNBlck71817
@chocobean
@lackofaname
@RheingoldRiver
@OnlyGhosts
@csos95
@Wes
@CannibalisticApple

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.

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?

Just wondering what the sense is from others. Is it even a thing that you notice if you are in a more detached, work from home setting? Were “things different in my day, harumph!”

This isn’t intended to be a ranting thread on millennials or such. But I’m rather genuinely curious what is considered “normal” in terms of work ethic and work attitudes.

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?

Web devs: what's up with this trend? For enterprise apps, I get it…single sign-on needs to detect what your email domain is to send you to your identity provider. For consumers, I feel like it's gotta be one of these reasons:

• Users don't know about the tab key being able to move to other fields on a page
• Mobile users don't really have a tab key, despite there being "previous/next field" arrows on the stock iOS keyboard since its inception (Android users, help me out please)
• Users tend to hit Enter after typing in their username, leading to a form submission with a blank password
• Security, maybe? In the past I have sent a link and a password in separate emails or separate communication methods entirely. Are you hashing/salting these separately for better MITM mitigation?

Did your UX team make a decision? Are my password managers forever doomed to need a "keyboard combo" value for every entry from now on?

Non-devs: do you prefer one method over the other? If so, why?

Tildes maintainers: selfishly, thanks for keeping these together :)

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'm currently building an MVP for a startup, solo. We've got Postgres pulling triple duty as the go-to database for all normal relational data, a vector database with pgvector, and a job queue (With the magic of SELECT ... FROM "Jobs" WHERE ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED LIMIT 1). Every time I go out looking for solutions to problems it feels like the world really wants me to get a dedicated vector store or to use Redis as a job queue.

Back when I was a Rails developer a good majority of the ActiveJob implementers used Redis. Now that I'm doing NodeJS the go-to is Bull which can only serialize jobs to Redis. They back this with claims that I can scale to thousands of jobs per second! I have to assume this theoretical throughput benefit from using Redis is utilized by 0.01% of apps running Bull.

So I ended up implementing a very simple system. Bull wouldn't have been a good fit anyway as we have both Python and Typescript async workers, so a simple system that I fully understand is more useful at the moment. I'm curious who else shares my philosophy.

Edit: I'll try to remember to update everyone in a year with the real world consequences of my design choices.

I moved to a place with an "actual" winter just over a decade ago -- snow, freezing temperatures, etc. In the first couple of years, I got what felt like a genuinely solid winter. Lots of blisteringly cold days. Snow that fell in large amounts and stuck around for most of the season. I love winter, so this was great for me.

In recent years, however, the winters have been milder and milder. When we do get snow, it's only around for a bit because days above freezing are now frequent enough that it's able to melt between snowfalls. Also, the snowfalls themselves are more intermittent. This year specifically we've actually had more rain than snow. I don't remember getting rain in January when I first moved here.

It irks me a bit because the shift has been so stark and noticeable in such a short period of time. There's a part of me that thinks that it's not a big deal and maybe my first years here were unnaturally cold and snowy for the area, so what I'm seeing now is simply the other side of the mean, but then there's another part of me that feels like that's simply a comforting lie I can tell myself in the face of the obvious effects of climate change.

Is there anyone else here that feels like they're missing their winters?

Inspired by this amazing post and the subsequent discussion about the need for more queer joy:

What's a recent queer milestone you've reached/experienced in your life?

It can be something big, but it can also be something small but still meaningful. It can be an event (coming out!), a realization (oh so THAT'S who I am!), a feeling (dress go spinny!), a moment (holding hands!), a recognition (they used male pronouns!), or anything else that is distinctly queer and noteworthy.

Share what it is, what you think about it, and why it's meaningful.

Hey folks of tildes,

I wanted to see if anyone has similar experiences as mine and if they know the reason for this. I've purchased a few items which came with AAA battery pre-installed (Chromecast from Google, Weighing scale from Xiaomi). These batteries lasted for an incredibly long time, Chromecast lasted over 1.5 years and Xiaomi's scale lasted for a similar time. Any third party battery I've purchased (Energizer, Duracell, Panasonic, Eveready and few others which I can't recall) last for a couple months at best.

I've now switched to rechargeable batteries, to reduce the waste I was creating. Still, I was really curious if anyone has a similar experience, and if they know the reason for it.

It seems to me we teach kids math in a way that prioritizes mass teaching and resource management over the actual learning of mathematical concepts.

We rely on paper and pencil, and maybe some limited manipulatives like unit blocks, and there’s 1 teacher for every 15-30 kids or so.

What are some methods that might work better to establish a strong understanding of math if we were able to approach it differently?

Or what are some methods that have been proven to work in other settings and why are they able to be successful?