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. 🏳️‍🌈

For this post I was thinking of games more along the lines of an early access title that was abandoned or had a 1.0 release announced when it was not feature complete or still had bugs/issues that were never addressed. If you feel like a live service/MMO game that has shut down should have kept going, feel free to share it as well.

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?

A problem I have every summer is either going to sleep cool and waking up in the middle of the night hot or going to sleep warm and waking up in the middle of the night cold. I used to have a similar problem in the winter, but I was able to solve that by getting a down comforter. Any recommendations for a good summer blanket for midwestern summers?

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.

Submit your response here!

• Direct link: https://survey.tildes.community/-/what-is-your-favorite-video-game-8/
• This survey closes on June 14, 2026 at 10:00 UTC
• The results will be published on June 14 shortly after the survey has closed. I'll edit this topic and post a comment about it!

The current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:

I was initially thinking of doing something like kfwyre suggested where you could submit a top 5 or so, but then I thought it would be more fun if I made you decide on a definitive answer. Like how with the pineapple pizza survey there was only Yes and No as answers, you have to make a choice!

So that's what I've decided to do! Pick your ultimate favorite video game. And feel free to discuss your honorable mentions in the comments, of course. ;)

Please submit your ideas for questions here! Even if they've been submitted already by someone else. All input is valuable! You can view all submitted questions on this dashboard.

Thank you all for participating!

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<- Previous Thread

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.

Last year, I took a promotion at work which meant I would be managing a few people and also involved with/overseeing a number of long term projects. As I've learned how to manage people, I've also learned that my previous methods for note taking are insufficient for what I'm doing and I'm losing track of things in my paper notebooks.

My employer has offered to buy me a new laptop but I'm actually pretty satisfied with my current laptop, so I've been doing some research into e-ink tablets which I think will help me stay more organized while also allowing me to take notes by hand (my preference) rather than typing things into a Google doc as I've been doing for my one on one meetings.

I don't have any experience with this technology and no way that I can get any hands on experience before buying something, so I'd love to hear from anyone who has used something like this, and especially if there's anything I need to consider that I haven't thought of.

My use cases:

• note taking / digital organization
• online reading (I run literary magazines and our submissions come in through an online system, and there's no convenient way to download them as pdfs to read offline, so having access to a web browser is important)
• access to Google Drive ideally so I can get to my notes from my desktop or laptop
• it'll be used at my desk or on my couch in full light, so no backlight or front light is not an issue

One of my coworkers has a remarkable tablet but he told me it's been less useful for him than he thought. In my research, this seems to be too limited for my uses.

The Onyx Boox Go 10.3 seems to be what would work best for me but I've also read a lot of warnings about their poor customer service so I'm a bit hesitant.

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.

Hey, Im trying to share a post from マリウス.com, but clicking the submit button just returns an error that the link is not a valid URL. Ive also tried percent encoding to %E3%83%9E%E3%83%AA%E3%82%A6%E3%82%B9.com, with the same results. I assume this is not intentional @Deimos?

EDIT: It looks like punycoding it to xn--gckvb8fzb.com works.

Edit: Just bought NSO + Expansion Pack. 39.99 EUR/year to celebrate the console’s first anniversary. 💸

Edit 2: The Direct is scheduled to 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET. Here’s the YouTube link.

It’s a me, your resident die-hard, hopeless, Nintendo fanboy normie.

In this post, we’ll discuss four tangentially-related topics:

1. What are your predictions and wishes for the upcoming Nintendo Direct? What are you hoping for? Make a list and then edit it after the fact to see what you got right.
2. What is a Nintendo franchise that you think is in dire need of a change, and what would that look like for you?
3. How would you rate the Nintendo Switch 2’s first year, and what Nintendo games did you enjoy playing the most?
4. Give us your thoughts on the Direct after you’ve watched it.

What are your predictions and wishes for the upcoming Nintendo Direct?

I’ll say right up front that my experience with Nintendo Directs over the years has been that whatever I want the most is always what I don’t get.

This time around, that’s news on the Zelda movie and the Ocarina of Time remake. In fact, I’m fairly certainly they’ll reveal more on those in September instead.

I’m leaning on that certainty for three reasons:

(1) If I’m wrong, then I’ll be pleasantly surprised, and if I’m right, then I won’t be sorely disappointed.

(2) I only really care about these two because I do know a little bit about them. Whatever else I don’t know about, doesn’t bother me. So, other announcements, even very big ones that might positively shock me, aren’t really what I’m worried about. This is also the reason why I’d much prefer it if no information ever leaked at all. I want to be surprised. I can’t isolate myself from leaks if I “surf on the web” at all. It’s impossible. So, Nintendo’s ninjas need to step up their game and silence the leakers.

(3) It seems to me that Nintendo is working hard to move away from the “big Direct” model of making announcements. It might be difficult for them because at least once a year they need to communicate through that medium in order to give investors and shareholders a heads-up (who would otherwise not know about anything because they don’t care about the industry and don’t follow it closely). However, for us, the customers, they’d much rather operate with more flexibility, showcasing games and products individually, spacing out announcements to keep the Nintendo brand fresh in people’s minds, and reveal new titles close to launch to create as much buzz around them as possible. That’s my guess. I could be wrong.

As for my list, I’ll put all the items in a single one. Some of them I think are more plausible than others. Some are entirely wishful thinking.

• Ocarina of Time remake gets a teaser... ⭕️
  • ...and a release date in November... ❌
  • ...on the same day as GTA VI (would be fun for me). ❌
• Zelda movie gets a trailer. ❌
• Zelda 40th anniversary is kicked off. ❌
• We get Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD bundles together and sold separately like they did for the Super Mario Galaxies. ❌
• Some more announcements for Star Fox. ⭕️
• Some more announcements for Splatoon Raiders. ⭕️
• Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave gets a release date... ⭕️
  • ...in August. ❌
• Two new first-party titles to fill out September and October are announced... [I got October right ⭕️]
  • ...one of which could be a Switch 2 edition game... ❌
  • ...or a game for all Switch systems... ❌
  • ...or an entirely new Switch 2 exclusive... ⭕️
    • ...from one of their bigger IPs... ⭕️
      • ...potentially a 2D Mario... ❌
    • ...or an entirely new IP. ❌
• A Switch 2 edition game could be...
  • Pikmin 4, ❌
  • Luigi’s Mansion 3 ❌
    • (for October),
  • but not my beloved Pokémon Legends: Arceus. 💔
• An entirely new Switch 2 exclusive from one of their bigger IPs could be...
  • ...a new Paper Mario... ❌
  • ...or Mario Maker 3. ❌
• One new Switch 2 exclusive announced for 2027, which could be...
  • ...based on a big Nintendo IP... ⭕️
    • ...potentially a 3D Mario. ❌
  • ...or be an entirely new IP. ❌
• New DLC for...
  • ...Mario Kart World (leaning on this one)... ❌
  • ...or Pokémon Pokopia. ⭕️
• Two more GCN games for NSO... ❌
  • ...one of them being Twilight Princess... ❌
  • ...I wish it was the Viewtiful Joe series though.
• There might be absolutely zero Pokémon news. [I’m not sure if I count Pokopia, because I meant everything but that, so maybe ⭕️]
• Wii or NDS announced for NSO... ❌
  • ...with Wii remote being sold again... ❌
  • ...or an accessory to hold the Switch 2 sideways, so it stands vertically and you can see both DS screens. ❌
• New Amiibo. ❌
• One completely wacky new game or product that people will find weird. ❌
• One very divisive announcement... ❌
  • ...which could be the Ocarina of Time remake... ❌
  • ...or the Zelda movie, if they do them wrong. ❌

What is a Nintendo franchise that you think is in dire need of a change, and what would that look like for you?

(1) The Legend of Zelda

My hope is that the Ocarina of Time remake is not just a recreation with better graphics. The 3DS version already did that. I hope that it is a reimagening. As big as Hyrule felt in 1998, it feels small enough today that I could see it being the perfect size for Nintendo to add to. They could make it half as big as Breath of the Wild, and it would still feel pretty sizeable, for me at least (I never even gave 100%ind Breath of the Wild a try for how big it was).

The point of the remake for Nintendo, I think, is two-fold:

(A) Introduce a larger, fresh audience to the franchise, by giving them the gold-standard of what it has to offer, while wasting minimal resources developing it (so, kind of what they’re doing with Star Fox) and in time for the big release of the movie next year, so the two products can cross-promote each other. We’ve seen them do this with the two Mario movies.

(B) Flex those “linear Zelda” muscles a bit, which have become extremely atrophied during the long “era of the wild”, so that the next major title, becomes something that is more of a compromise, something that has that large open world for one group of players to sink hundreds of hours into, but also that highly curated puzzle-solving experience with a meaningful story that the group of players that I am in personally love the series for. The last two major titles were a feast for people who like checklists. For me, they were frustrating. I still loved them. I loved the gameplay. I loved the breadth (of the wild). I didn’t like the “dungeons”, and I absolutely hated the stories. The latter of these had me fuming. They had zero substance for me. They even “soft-rebooted” the series if you think about it. They just placed the games in an entirely new “era”, completely detached from the rest of the franchise. I honestly hope we never return to this era, unless it adds something meaningful to the story. I wanna go back to the wacky timeline from the previous era and make it wackier.

(2) Animal Crossing

Zelda and Animal Crossing were my favorite video game franchises of all time. In fact, I played every mainline Animal Crossing title extensively. I say “were” though, because Pokopium, as I endearingly like to refer to it, has dethroned Animal Crossing. New Horizons was such a disappointment for me. The series became a decorating sim. My favorite is still the GCN entry, if you can believe it. It’s the one game I love returning to.

It seems that Tomodachi Life is Nintendo’s answer to people like me. Nintendo has heard us. I haven’t played the most recent entry in that series because it released on the Switch 1, and I have this weird (I know) rule that I only buy Switch 2 exclusives so as to not overwhelm myself with my options. Pokopium also happened to release shortly before and to say that I got very busy with it would be an understatement (cough cough 160+ hours in and counting). If they release a Switch 2 edition of that though, then I’ll jump in. I am in dire need of that proper, funky social sim, where the characters say and do weird stuff.

This is to say that I don’t know what Nintendo could do to make me want to return to this series. If the next entry is just more of the same, more decoration, even if it’s a “bigger world”, then... it might be time to say goodbye to this franchise. I really don’t know what they could do though. I have heard people suggest an MMO take, where there is one big world and everyone is playing in it simultaneously... yeah. Except that Nintendo would never do that.

Tomodachi Life allows you to do some really out there stuff with your characters, and guess what? It has no online multiplayer of any kind (at least that I’m aware of). That’s how Nintendo “worked around” having to monitor player interactions 24/7. Nintendo is never doing an MMO. They know that degenerates would immediately flood it. Even so, that wouldn’t be enough for me. I just don’t like decoration sims, MMOs or otherwise.

Tell you what, Nintendo: The people deserve their decoration sim. That’s fair. If you want my money though, release a new Tomodachi Life or a Switch 2 edition of the current one, and I’ll buy that. I think that’s also fair, right?

(3) Super Smash Bros.

I had so much fun with the N64 entry, Melee, and Brawl. The first two I played a ton with friends, locally. I actually had that experience. Crazy, am I right? Every time I think about it, it feels like a bygone era. I actually had friends over (and many at that), and also visited friends, and we all played Smash with each other, and it was a lot of fun. I had enough online friends to play Brawl with as well, but far less so.

These days I just don’t care about multiplayer games at all. There are two reasons for that:

(A) I don’t have the time. I could make time to play with other people between 7 PM and 9 PM on most days, but I live in one of the least convenient time zones: UTC+2. Most of the Nintendo world is either asleep or waking up at that time.

(B) I’d just simply rather... experience great single player games? I don’t know. My taste has changed. I’ve also come to hate competitive games more and more. I can’t imagine dedicating myself to one game to become good enough at it so that I don’t get rounded up while playing online and actually get some enjoyment out of the experience. The time that I would waste to git gud, I could be experiencing an epic adventure with instead.

Super Smash Bros. could still bring me back if (and that’s a big if) they included a revamped single-player experience (“Subspace Emissary” was kind of fun for me), and also significantly changed up the formula. I get that it’s a platform fighter, but it’s starting to get ridiculous. Are there seriously any significant gameplay experiences between Brawl and Ultimate? Real ones? Major ones? I played Ultimate, and my mains, Peach and Zelda, felt like they hadn’t changed at all.

I know that if they do something other than a 2D platform fighter, there will be riots, but they’re also going to get a lot of complaints from people saying that it’s just “more of the same”.

Also, I think that 20 to 30 characters is a good sweet spot. You can reduce the Fire Emblem characters to Ike and Marth as well, and while we’re at it, maybe invite some Western characters to the roster? I know that Japan has a lot to offer, but Lara Croft and the Master Chief, for example, make 100% sense in Smash Bros.. If Duck Hunt and Game & Watch can be on the roster, so can Lara and John. Heck, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon should be in the roster. Don’t give me any excuses. If you’re going to get characters from non-Nintendo IPs into the game at all, then I don’t know what’s holding you back from getting more of the ones that everyone wants.

(4) Everything else

Whatever new 3D Super Mario, Paper Mario, Zelda, Metroid, or Metroid Prime they release in the future though, I’m fairly confident that it’ll be good, and that I’ll buy it even if its more of the same.

How would you rate the Nintendo Switch 2’s first year, and what Nintendo games did you enjoy playing the most?

I think I’d give it an B+.

I’m a Nintendo fanboy, so it would be difficult for me to give them a lower score, but I think that the case can be made that this first year was actually quite good.

The releases may have seemed slow in the first half, but there was a brand new Mario Kart World (for those who liked it, not me) from the start, as well as Donkey Kong Bananza not long after that, which I loved so much, I 100%ed it in 50+ hours.

Pokémon fans got that Z-A title that I skipped on, mostly because it just looked boring and gray (though I heard good things about the gameplay).

Kirby Air Riders turned out to be an amazing game that I didn’t play, and very few other people did. It’s just too niche.

Metroid Prime 4 I loved to bits, but most people hated it, because of the desert, the characters, the pacing, and how similar to Prime 1 it was. I didn’t like how the story ended, and I didn’t like that it was a Prime title that didn’t include, well... Metroid Prime/Dark Samus. I guess the point of them being called “Prime” now is that they’re first-person adventure games. It’s whatever. Just make another one and forget about the open world thing. Make a Metroid game, you know? Not a Halo-inspired game featuring Samus Aran.

I also had a ton of fun with Hyrule Warriors, which was the story-driven Zelda I didn’t know I longed for. Excited for more Warriors spinoffs in general, and not just in the Zelda franchise...

Third parties eventually picked up, and they gave us a ton of games that somehow run amazing on this little boy. I’m thinking Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata (the latter of which I played and loved), though there were others, some of which were Switch 2 ports, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. There were many others, but these four seemed to have dominated the Switch 2 third-party discussion, at least this half of the year. I should add that Capcom is hitting it out of the park. Now please go and give me some news about that Okami sequel, will you?

It may have felt like there were some lulls, but it was actually a packed year, and that’s not to mention all the NSO stuff and the Switch 1 games that run the Switch 2.

As I have told you all a million times before though, my absolute darling, without which I would have given this year a C+, was Pokopium.

Animal Crossing + Minecraft + Pokémon made by the guys behind Dragon Quest Builders. Who would’ve thought that this could be worse than opium? I’ll tell you what: I did! Right from the moment the game was announced in September, everyone I talked to about this told me that they weren’t sure or even seemed disinterested. I felt very vindicated when the game released to such an acclaim, that it became the highest rated Pokémon title ever, and it isn’t even a mainline one!

To the people who worked on Pokopium, thank you very much for your hard work. It paid off. Now please go and make a sequel or DLC so I can give you more money.

To Nintendo: Outstanding work on the Switch 2’s first year. Some bumps along the ride, but in general, you did well. You delivered is the goods. Now go and give us this generation’s heavy hitters. Also, stop being so secretive, and clog up the leaks!

Give us your thoughts on the Direct after you’ve watched it.

First of all, this was an absolutely wild ride of a rollercoaster. It had many extremely slow moments, punctuated by announcements that had me literally clapping in my studio apartment.

My highlights were as follows (in the order that they appeared during the Direct):

• Pokémon Pokopia update and paid DLC
• Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave (Sep 17)
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1, 2, and 3, Switch 2 editions
  • 1 - Out today!
  • 2 - Jul 30
  • 3 - Dec 3
• Xenoblade Genesis (2027)
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (2026)

I would have given the direct a B if it wasn’t for Ocarina of Time. It was a real slog at times, even though the Pokopium DLC and the insane drop of all three Xenoblade entries had me going nuts.

I feel as though Nintendo felt forced to tease Ocarina of Time because the entire planet was asking for it. They showed us so little though because, as I have explained before, they want to say a lot more about it at a later point, when they are also ready to show us the first teaser/trailer of the movie, alongside the kickoff for the 40th anniversary. If I had to bet, I’d say that we’ll hear more in September at worst, late August at best.

I think that the art direction for the game will be divisive. It will retain some of its charming fantasy features, but will be realistic in tone. I was divided in my head between that and an adaptation of the art work for the original game. I’m glad they went with this. It feels cinematic to the nth degree. I think that I will love it. I’m not sure that everyone will though.

“““Little””” details I noticed: Voice acting. The Triforce of courage appears on Links’ hand before he pulls the Master Sword. The Triforce glows on his LEFT hand.

So, my game plan for the rest of this year is:

1. I want to finish Tales of Arise in time for Adventures of Elliot on the 18th this month.
2. On July 23rd I’ll get Splatoon Raiders.
3. In August I’ll be fully immersed (pun intended) in the Pokopium DLC.
4. I’ll get Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave on September 17.
5. Nothing of interest to me seems to be releasing in October, so that’s the month for the first Xenoblade, so I can finally get into that. I’ve been waiting years for this moment.
6. If I had to guess, Ocarina of Time releases in late November.

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

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

Hi and welcome to this post

I was just wondering if anyone else (besides me) is currently interested in the indie web and also in extension 88x31 Buttons.

I have a small (and very much in-progress) website that I mostly coded myself. I started sometimes 2 years ago, so in 2024. And through that time it has gone through so many iterations. My site only consists of HTML and CSS and some minimal JavaScript. So I was just wondering if anyone also has an interest in the indie web and more importantly also has some buttons?

The idea or goal with this post was to just find some more people to add as neighbors because I find it somewhat scary to just ask people out of the blue or email them.

I also made my own if anyone wants to link it to their site please let me know.

This is my button:
https://postimg.cc/xqYQ8dJr

<a href="https://luna-uwu.nekoweb.org"><img src="https://luna-uwu.nekoweb.org/button-luna.png" alt="Luna's Button"/></a>

I guess the link to the site is this:
https://luna-uwu.nekoweb.org/ (I think i posted it before)

I guess that's about it. I hope you have a nice time of day wherever you are.

Kings of the losers

Incels imagine a world in which they can only lose. The result: no girlfriend, ever. We met them in the saddest places of the internet— and in real life.

A report by Philipp Daum: https://www.zeit.de/autoren/D/Philipp_Daum/index
Translation of the online version, last updated May 30, 2026 08:55 UTC+1 by @Grzmot.
Originally published in German in ZEIT am Wochenende, issue 22/2026.

Gifted link to the German original: https://www.zeit.de/digital/2026-05/incel-bewegung-internet-maenner-depression?freebie=84491b05

1. Rejection

The boy was new in class. A shy teenager, interested in hiking alone and watching anime. He had the telephone numbers of two classmates to talk over homework. No friends otherwise. One day, a girl asked him in front of the entire class if they wanted to do something together. He was immediately suspicious. He thought: if I say yes, everyone will laugh. Later, it turned out that the girl lost a bet.

He said no. The class laughed anyway.

This boy is a man today, 29 years old. To this day, he hasn’t forgotten this story with the girl. In this text I’ll call him sprixxles, by his username on Reddit. No one in his analog life knows,that he is an incel, and that shouldn’t change.

Sprixxles remembers when he came across the term incel online. He remembers thinking, “I hope that doesn’t describe me,” and how he slowly and painfully realized that it did.

Incel means involuntary celibate. Men who can’t find a woman and believe they never will because they are too shy, too ugly, not worth loving, but also because they believe that women today have way too high standards. In the past, men hid their virginity. From that the internet forged a collective identity.

Incels carry within them something shameful, apparently full self aware. They gather in online forums, Discord servers, and on reddit. They have usernames like subhumanDNA or invisiblebeta. Scroll a bit through those forums, join some discord servers, and soon you’ll see someone celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Someone posts a video where a woman is beaten up. The incels do everything they can to enrage the normies, which is what they call us.

But their world also contains surprising places. Essays and philosophical debates, where incels respectfully debate feminists. The American journalist Naama Kates once described the incel world as “multi-layered, eloquent, incredibly funny, enraging, and deeply heartbreaking.”

When I was a teenager, I let my hair grow down to my shoulders. I listened to sad music and played The Dark Eye with my other long-haired friends. We sat at big tables, imagining, in week-long planning sessions, dwarven warriors and elven mages, and rolled dice with twenty sides to play out their complex battles. The dark eye is the German variant of Dungeons & Dragons, on which the musician Marilyn Manson once commented: “If a cigarette shortens your lifespan by seven minutes, then every game of Dungeons & Dragons delays losing your virginity by seven hours.” We played every weekend, sometimes three parties spaced out across two days.

What exactly differentiated incels and me? At which crossroads of life did we take separate paths?

2. The revelation of FaceandLMS

In 2016 the user FaceandLMS uploaded a video to YouTube, that “changed the internet forever and which very few people ever realized.” At least, that’s what a comment under the video says.

Hailing from Britain and identifying as an incel, FaceandLMS disguised himself as an attractive man on the dating platform Plenty of Fish. He named this persona Carl. He used pictures of a male model. With this experiment he wanted to contradict what society tells shy men, and what my mom always told me too: women like someone who’s friendly and confident, someone with good character.

Quickly, Carl is overwhelmed with requests to talk. He chats with many women at the same time and tries his best to do everything wrong. He writes that he is on antidepressants, that he is incredibly insecure, that he’s broke. He is unfriendly, sometimes racist (”ching chong chang, do you want to bang?”)—and still successful. The lesson appears clear: women pretend that they care about character, but really they only value good looks.

At the end of the video, FaceandLMS reveals what makes a male face attractive, with drawn in lines, angles and squares that should show the ideal proportions of different parts of the face:

• Short philtrum (the tiny valley that connects the upper lip with the nose)
• Predator-animal-like eyes
• A high facial width-to-height ratio; the higher the value, the more attractive the man is
• Defined maxilla (upper jaw), mandibule (lower jaw), and chin
• Body fat percentage between 10 and 12 percent

A commenter under the video is impressed and writes: “The true godfather of the black pill.”

The black pill is the ideological core of the incel movement. Summarized, it means: forget status, forget money, forget confidence. Good looks are everything, and for those that aren’t attractive enough, the search for a partner is over before it’s even begun. The metaphor is a reference to the film The Matrix, where protagonist Neo has the choice between a blue and red pill. Blue means he keeps living his life, happy to be lied to and naive. Red is harsh. Brutal. It means looking reality in the eye.

Black is the pill of the incels, because black is the color of hopelessness. Destiny and your bone structure can’t be changed. Or can they?

The first who told me of the black pill was Luis. 23 years old, he was the first incel I talked to. I met him on the subreddit DebateIncelz. The interview was conducted via video chat. He lives in Southern California, in his parents’ house. The sun shone through the window; a cat prowled through the room behind him. Luis was one of the few incels who showed me his face. Most disable the camera.

Luis has a fine, slightly feminine face and long, wavy hair. He reminded a bit of young Keanu Reeves, if Reeves had parents from middle America. A lot better than I imagined meeting my first incel.

He grew up in a working-class home. His mother comes from Mexico, his father from El Salvador. “I love my mom very much,” he says. “I love my sister very much. I do not despise women.” Luis didn’t appear hateful at all, a trait he shared with many incels I would later talk to. He appeared defeated.

He was an insecure, overweight child. He was bullied a lot in school for his looks. As a teenager he discovered FaceandLMS during the pandemic. Luis was fascinated by his clarity and logic. He told me: “It offers me a framework to understand how dating and life even work.” The well-meaning advice from his immediate surroundings (“go out and be around people,” “talk to a girl if you like her”) didn’t land. “I need numbers,” he says. “I need logic.”

Luis says that he spent a lot of time on Looksmax.org, a forum where men rate each other’s looks. There he was graded as a high low-tier normie. So fairly average, which surprised him in a positive way. He also learned that his philtrum was too long, that he had a receding chin, and that his upper incisor teeth covered his lower ones too much.

Incels really only see two ways to react to the revelations of the black pill. Either they accept that they have a low chance of success as unattractive or very average men, or they try to change their appearance.

Luis chose the latter. He started looksmaxxing. He lost weight. Bought medication against hair loss. Bleached his skin. “On one hand I couldn’t believe what I was doing to myself, but I knew that looked better afterward.”

Luis finished every step possible when softmaxxing. He took all the options of changing his appearance without surgery. Now hardmaxxing was supposed to begin. Luis had a whole list of planned surgeries: multiple jaw surgeries, hair transplants, transplants of his own fat, correcting his ears. And then? “Then I’ll look for a partner.”

Luis did what many women already do: he looked at his own appearance without mercy.

Why is Luis so convinced of his own bad appearance? I am fifteen years older than him and grew up at a time when beauty standards for girls were hard, but less so for boys. No boy from my school class went to the gym. I wasn’t on any social media that bombarded me with rock-hard abs daily. Back then it was impossible to inject Hyaluron into your jawline on your lunch break.

Like Luis, I was insecure; I didn’t feel pretty. But I was not reminded every single day, how much more beautiful other men were.

3. The scientist

For a long time, the public and academic researchers talked about incels, not with them. That changed a few years ago, when Andrew Thomas, an evolutionary psychologist from the University of Swansea in Wales, found a way to talk to them. Until that point, researchers had stuck to analyzing online forums where incels met. When I talked to Thomas, he said that approach is like looking only at the tip of the iceberg. A majority of the posts in forums stem from a few super-users. If you only base your research on those, you won’t understand what’s going on in the heads of most incels, only what their most extreme representatives write about.

Thomas interviewed 561 men from the United States and the United Kingdom for his study. He learned that incels are pretty diverse: some are working class, some upper class. About half of them are people of color: Latinos, Black Americans, Arabs. Politically they placed themselves slightly left of center. They were pro-gay equality. They supported a well-equipped welfare state. On one point they held similar views: the overwhelming majority of incels rejected feminism. Many made light of rape.

How dangerous are incels? Thomas says that the highest danger is in the digital space. Some incels abuse women online, sending them hateful emails or comments on social media. Most of them are so repressed, they rarely become violent outside the internet.

Deserts of love

There are exceptions. Incels have produced terrorists. The most infamous example was Elliot Rodger. He killed six people in 2014 in Santa Barbara, California. He left a manifesto behind, where he complained that he was still a virgin as a 22-year-old college student. He wrote: “I will punish all women for keeping sex away from me.” As if women owe men sex. It’s an ancient pattern: a man talks to a woman, is rejected, and feels ashamed and hurt. He channels those feelings into hatred against women.

But most incels, Thomas says, internalize their emotions: they develop immense hatred against themselves. Terrorists form a vanishingly small part of the community. Even men who commit sexual violence are rarely incels. “Many studies show: it’s the sexually most successful men that commit the majority of sexual violence,” says Thomas.

Then Thomas talks about the suicides. Incels who participated in his study were often deeply unhappy. Forty percent of them reached the threshold for a clinical depression in questionnaires. A fifth thought about suicide daily.

4. 80/20

I talked to a user called bright spring. An Indian man, 20 years old, he told me he studied English and lives at home to take care of his ill father. Bright spring is the name of his latest Reddit account; the previous were banned. In the past, he moderated some subreddits, which also got banned. It wasn’t easy to convince him to do an interview, but at some point he wanted to talk. He wanted to, he said, correct the record on “what most incels think.”

What he thinks: dating apps changed everything. An overwhelming amount of matches went to a few percent of the most attractive men. Those not attractive enough—too small, too dark, too autistic—had no chance. That’s not an opinion, he says, that’s a fact. The entire incel worldview is built on data. Statistics. “Brutal statistics.” He only hinted at his personal story in our conversation. Supposedly he’s very social; he just doesn’t fulfill the minimum standards to even be noticed by women.

At some point he complained. It’s a “softball interview.” He wished for more confrontational questions. We agree to a second round. I show him posts from the community that he supervised as a moderator. In them, men disparage women as “foids,” “female humanoids.” He says that it’s a loud minority and that I’m cherry-picking four cases out of thousands of posts. He overlooked those posts, or he would’ve deleted them. He is strictly against dehumanizing women in posts. It does nothing for the cause. Then I show him a post which he wrote himself. Women are incapable of loyalty. Romantic love is an invention of men to humanize women, like how many people humanize their pets. He laughed nervously when I read him the post. He said that he gender-swapped a misandrist post from a feminist subreddit. He couldn’t show me the original.

He was angry back then, he says, about the posts in which women complain about white men, about Indian men, about neurodivergent men, and are celebrated for it. He wanted revenge.

This dynamic rules many parts of Reddit. Many incel subs are dedicated to posting screenshots of women that denounce men on Instagram or TikTok. Places like inceltears in turn live off sharing the most hate-filled comments from incel forums. I ask him: you keep this vicious cycle going, right? He responds: “I try to avoid it. Sometimes I don’t succeed.”

All incels I talked to told me of their experiences with dating apps. The digital rejection seems to be a core building block of every incel biography. One tried it for one week only: “I got a single match, and she never responded. I guess she matched by accident.” Another one told me he needed years to get a match. “You swipe for hours and nothing happens. Dating apps are a wonderful way to hate yourself fast.”

In 2015 an anonymous author wrote a blog post detailing the spread of likes on dating apps. He described Tinder like a national economy based on attractiveness. He surmised that the most attractive 20 percent of men receive 80 percent of all likes of women, while barely anything is left for the remaining 80 percent of men.

The post’s factual basis is very narrow at 27 female profiles analyzed. But even more dependable studies show that attention is very unevenly divided on dating apps. According to a study from Queen Mary University of London (PDF), likes from women are seventeen times more likely to lead to a match than likes from men. An analysis by the dating app Hinge (which was later deleted off their own blog) came to the conclusion: if female Hinge were a national economy, then wealth there was divided about the same as Western Europe. Male Hinge would be among the top ten worst performers in regard to wealth parity. Put differently: dating apps are great for attractive men. For average or ugly men, they are deserts of love where nothing ever happens.

The Medium post was canonized into the 80/20 rule, made it into the Wikipedia article on inequality, and appeared in the Netflix incel drama Adolescence, a story of a student radicalizing on the internet and murdering a female class mate. Many incels believe in the 80/20 rule. They’ve constructed their entire belief system around it: a majority of women is into a minority of men, whom the incels call Chads. The less attractive men, the betas, can hope for a lukewarm relationship without real passion. Unattractive, shy, neurodivergent men are damned to a life as incels. There is no hope for them.

And, as it so often goes with viral things on the internet, sometimes they contain a grain of truth.

5. Men as office staplers

The scientist Andrew Thomas told me of the matching hypothesis. Men and women try, when it comes to long-term relationships, to find partners that are similar to them: similarly attractive, intelligent, similar sense of humor. Attractive long-term partners are friendly, potentially good parents, financially stable. Men and women look for identical things.

It’s different for flings. Thomas says: “Women become pickier and men the opposite.” Traits desirable in long-term partners are less important for one-night stands. It’s not that important how nice someone is, and completely irrelevant how good of a father he’d be. What matters: how attractive someone is.

Women, on average, are less into casual hookups than men. For them, casual sex is also less casual and more dangerous: they can get pregnant. They are often weaker than men and expose themselves due to that. They can also contract sexually transmittable diseases that lead to infertility much more often than in men.

Andrew Thomas told me: “Because casual sex is connected to more risks, the thought goes: I’ll only accept this risk for someone that is exceedingly attractive.”

The exact opposite happens for men. They lower their standards, because they’re more into casual sex on average. So they’re fine with sleeping with women they wouldn’t marry.

“The 80/20 rule has a grain of truth.” says Andrew Thomas, but the crucial mistake of incels is that from this strategy of selecting short-term partners they create an immutable psyche that all women supposedly possess, and in that one move exclude all women who did not meet their partners through apps. Who were friends first, who met them through mutual acquaintances, where they meet regularly and first impressions can change. That is also an important finding of psychology: attractiveness is not static. The more time people spend with another, the more attractive they find each other.

Dating apps complicate everything. They are, no matter what they try to market themselves as, apps for casual hook-ups because their basis is the optical first impression. Women there get so much attention from men, they have to radically filter. Andrew Thomas hints that this isn’t moral calculus; it’s not even a matter of taste; it’s simply a strategy to deal with an oversupply.

Andrew Thomas also works as a therapist. He has incels as patients. Sometimes he conducts an experiment with one. He asks him to search for office staplers on Amazon and narrate it step by step. Okay, says the patient, there are ten thousand results. So he filters; 4 or 5 stars, not too expensive, fits at least two hundred tacks, only in the color red. “And then I tell him: you picky bastard! What’s wrong with the blue staplers? How can you be so narcissistic and have such high standards?”

6. Digital cutting

The incels disappear. One user called fuckitall responds to my interview request: “Go fuck yourself.” Another does the same and appends that I should get a real job. Another posts a photo of me and calls me a soyboy: a man feminized by the overconsumption of soy products.

I had about the same experience as an average-looking man on a dating app. I sent a lot of messages, got few responses, and in the end got only one meeting in reality: with sprixxles.

I had huge expectations. Then I see him standing at the entrance gates to a park in Vienna and think again: that’s how an incel looks? (He had his camera off during the video interview.) He waits in front of the gate, in a shirt and sneakers, well dressed, a little grungy, a little hipster. He has a narrow chin. He wears designer glasses. He appears friendly.

We stroll through the park, and he narrates. He was a shy kid, a teenager with “nerd hobbies.” No friends in school. He moved for college, from the rural farmsteads into the big city, where it was equally difficult. He had time. A lot of time. A lot of time he spent on the internet.
It was, he explains, the peak of his inceldom. His days spent on the 4chan board r9k, where anonymous users share pictures and texts. It is one of the most culturally influential places on the internet. A favored way to express oneself there is so-called green texts, short stories about failing in social situations, filled with sarcasm and self-deprecation. The mood is extremely negative, but the place had a strange pull on him, says sprixxles. “This form of negativity can be addicting.”

One motto of r9k is: you are here forever. If you’re a young student reading posts from men in their 30s saying that it’s just not going to get better, you think, “Fuck, that could be me.” He felt something similar to an adrenaline rush, excitement over how pointless it all was.

“Sounds like digitally cutting yourself?” I ask.

“One way to put it.”

During those times he visited a therapist a few times, but she couldn’t really help him. Looking back, he likely was already severely depressed.

That’s behind him. He’s 29 now and works in a big company. He spends barely any time in the incel community. At some point the constant bemoaning and complaining became too much. “At some point it’s annoying.” He doesn’t have any time for it anymore. He rarely visits, mostly out of sentimentality. He never understood the hatred.

He lives in a small apartment in one of those old but well taken care of Vienna buildings. The center is a large kitchen. Against the wall, a vinyl record player. On a shelf, old game consoles he collects. On a large desk, filling out the entire wall, two computer screens.
He loves getting lost in details. He taught himself Japanese to better read manga. He also says that he has “autistic tendencies.” Sometimes it seems like our conversation tires him out a great deal. He swings his legs back and forth, runs his hands through his hair and wipes across his eyebrows. He never looks into my eyes for long. He yawns a lot.

Hope is vulnerable

He’s been living in this apartment for ten years. He can’t imagine living with someone else any more. Alone he doesn’t have to care about anything. He can cook at night, if he wants to. Freedom, it appears, is something he cares about a great deal. Maybe it’s also a shield.

Sometimes colleagues ask him if there is someone in his life. He responds with sentences that sound good in colloquial Austrian. Nothing right now. or You know how it is. Face-saving words making it sound like there was something, or that there could be something again.

I meet him three times, in the evening after work. He’s stressed and tired. Problems at work; he has to work overtime. I see him rush through his life, which he fills, like many of us, mainly with work. In the evening he quickly goes to the store, cooks, eats. If he has time, he plays some video games, reads, takes care of his Pokémon card collection. Then he sleeps.

Soon, he’s 30. If it keeps going like this, it’ll all be fine, he says. By now he’s noticed that life is more than missed-out-on relationships. He has his hobbies. He can travel. He makes money and doesn’t have any worries. He doesn’t plan on dating.

But sometimes, something flashes through. A life, how it could be. Eight years ago he kissed a woman; it was the first and so far last kiss of his life. She was a little smaller than him, dark hair, nose piercing, wearing a cardigan over a striped dress. They didn’t know each other; they started talking because she found his drinking choice of gin and tonic unconventional. She leaned against him. He was drunk. I’ll try, he thought. So he kissed her. “With tongue?”

“Yeah, like one does, first time round. Not very elegant.” He imagined his first kiss as a more romantic one. Not drunk in the club. “But it was beautiful.” He says, “It was great.” He went home without asking for her number, and was happy and relieved to have put this milestone behind him.

7. Crab bucket

I realize that dealing with incels and the black pill changes something within me. Within the editorial staff at work, I begin studying the faces of my male colleagues. Who has the most defined chin? Whose eyes look the most like a predator animal? At some point I uploaded a selfie to a website that determines the facial width-to-height ratio. It answers with a 1.7. My face is too long, like a horse.

I reduce men to their looks. What did Hamudi say, one of the most famous incel YouTubers? I don’t see people anymore, I only see genetics.

When you deal with the incel definition of attractiveness, you will develop an inferiority complex. You keep comparing and keep getting smaller and smaller.

There’s a discussion within the scene: who is a real incel? Who belongs? Is someone fucked enough to qualify? Multiple times my interviewees mentioned that they might not be “real” incels after all, because they have been on dates, for example. Because they don’t have an autism diagnosis, because they, god forbid, kissed a woman before. Online, men accuse each other of being fakecels or nearcels. Only who has tried everything without success is a real incel, a truecel. A subhuman.

Aside from this social Darwinism, there’s also surprisingly woke vocabulary in the community. Feminists are accused of gaslighting lonely men, talking them into believing that their solitude is their own fault. There is talk of “privilege,” like female privilege or sex-privileged men. Lonely women who want to belong to the community are accused of committing cultural appropriation. My culture is not your costume. I even discovered an inceldom pride flag. Lots of black and shades of gray.

Boys find each other on the web, the boys that in their class are at the bottom of the hierarchy. What do they do? The same that groups always do: build a status pyramid. They just invert it. The guy on top is the king of the losers.

They protect this inverted hierarchy too. Occasionally there are stories of incels developing hope or believing in themselves, and they are kicked off the forums. This phenomena has a name: the crab bucket.

Throw a few live crabs into a bucket and they begin to crawl up the walls. They step on each other. In their attempt to climb, the lower crabs pull the upper ones down. The same thing happens in incel forums. Those who hope are ridiculed, those who develop a strategy insulted, and those who make progress banned.

Incel culture is growing. Its engine is hopelessness.

I once talked with an incel that embodied this well. He lives in the north of Germany, his user name on Reddit is remarkable box. It was a joy to talk to him. He didn’t mention any studies; he talked of his “boys”: his friends, his sisters, college sports, loving parents.

I noted: “Happy incel?”

Then he said that if you put a thousand men into a room and him next to them, he’d surely be the ugliest.

Remarkable, 23, has stopped talking to his parents or friends about his relationships with women. They’d only encourage him. They’d tell him that he’ll find someone, that he’s attractive enough. He says it hurts him.

Hurts?

Remarkable fights with himself a little. If someone encourages him, it only causes the opposite. He could grow hopeful, which in turn leads to trying again—and getting disappointed again. To be sure of the future, that’s got a worth of its own.

He explains with an example. “The winner of the silver medal always looks sadder than the guy with bronze on the photos, right? I’m the guy with bronze. I’ve accepted how my life is.” With “his life” he means his friends, his sport, the good relationship with his family, and the fact he’ll never have a girlfriend. “If I start believing now that I could truly win gold and fail in the attempt, then I would be the guy with the silver medal. I’d be less happy than now.” So he doesn’t try. He keeps his bronze medal.

Remarkable exchanged hope for security. That’s the promise of the black pill. It protects: who doesn’t try can’t fail. Incel scientist Andrew Thomas told me that incels share a psychological disposition. They posses, what psychologists call “external control conviction”: the idea that what happens to you in life doesn’t have anything to do with you, but that outside forces are responsible, immutable forces: your own ugly bone structure. The impossible-to-fulfill standards of modern dating culture. That’s why incels collect hoards of studies. That’s why they built their own wiki, with an entry titled “The scientific black pill.” If you copy it into a Microsoft Word document, it’s nearly 300 pages.

All this work just to prove that they will fail, no matter what they do.

The black pill isn’t really a collection of studies. It’s not science; it’s not even ideology. It’s just the conviction that it’s safest at home. It’s depression, disguised as a way to view the world.

8. Intelligent, empathetic and cute

In Vienna, while meeting sprixxles, I started talking to a Russian woman on Reddit called pristine cost. Months back she dove into the incel world, seeking to understand these weird, unhappy men living in the privileged West. They are a puzzle her: how can intelligent men believe such a thing?

The smart and empathetic posts from sprixxles impressed her. She messaged him. They chatted. They became friends.

I wanted to talk to her, so we called on Discord. She told me she really likes sprixxles, that there are a lot of good things about him. His biggest problem is that he’s locked up emotionally. “He doesn’t show anyone how great he is.” It’s really difficult to break out of this pattern. He needs a helping hand. A shove. In the conversation it became clear that she understands herself as the woman to shove him. She encouraged him to buy new clothes. She’s gradually encouraging him to follow his dream of a doctorate thesis.

Believing in yourself doesn’t happen through thought, but through experience. By leaving your room and doing things that are hard and wonderful. By achieving things that could also fail and learning that you are stronger and more attractive than originally believed.

My roleplay friends and I, we once were crabs in a bucket. We tried for a long time to climb out of it. We even started a band; I was the bass player, because everyone knows how to play bass. A friend taught me the guitar and told me that I have a beautiful voice. On some weekends we no longer played role-playing games, but guitar. We sat around camp fires, in large groups that weren’t just boys. With one of my friends, we went on holiday, where we met two women, nearly thirty, both telling us how they had had enough of men. The hotel was otherwise full of old pensioners, and we had brought our guitars, so we helped make their evenings more interesting. After one such drunken guitar evening we both lost, as elderly men at the start of our 20s, our virginities. As if we had agreed to a pact to make it all appear like the plot of a high school comedy.

We climbed out of the bucket, but we offered each other our shears.

After my conversation with pristine, I met sprixxles a last time. I told him that pristine finds him intelligent and empathetic and nice. “She also said that you’re cute.”

“Okay,” he says and laughs in a shy fashion.

“And that it’s insane that a woman hasn’t snagged you yet.”

“Okay,” he says again.

Recently he hung up a full-length mirror in his living room. Pristine told him to work on his style. Could this perchance be a careful small step back into dating?

“Probably,” he says.

“Maybe,” he says.

“Let’s see,” he says.

In the near future he has to solve problems at work.

Of course, pristine said, one can live life without romantic love, and be even satisfied with it. But with sprixxles, she says, it’s just a question of time till he finds a woman. “It’s just impossible not to, with him,” she says.

Let’s wish him luck.