You do it, and it's against the grain -- outside the norm.

But you like it, or think it's worthwhile.

In fact, you'd recommend that more people do it, so that it can shift the grain or become the norm.

What is it, and why do you recommend it?

Welcome to the third installment of Tildes’s monthly creative writing contest! The February entries showcased some truly spectacular storytelling—my heartfelt thanks to everyone who participated or left feedback. Now let’s see what March brings!

Hm? What’s that? The title’s wrong? I’m posting this on the 8th, not the 7th? No, no; that must just be your imagination. I would never miss a deadline like that. No, the light isn’t growing dimmer over time, why do you ask?

Your goal: Write a creative short story based on the prompt provided and post it in this thread.
Deadline: 2025-03-22T23:59:59-04:00. I’m giving you an extra day on the usual deadline because I’m a kind and generous host, and definitely not for any other reason whatsoever. (Note the timezone shift—daylight savings and all that.)
Prize: Your choice of a $20 gift code for either Proton or Tuta! As always, if anyone wants to suggest or donate future prizes, my DMs are open.

Your prompt: A character must solve a problem using their worst flaw, trait, or habit—something others have always criticized them for.

The Rules:

1. Creative Writing Only: Fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, fanfiction—all welcome! Just make sure it’s, you know, creative. If you’re venturing into fanfiction territory, remember I might not know your favorite obscure anime from 2013. Also, submissions should be in English, unless you believe that Google Translate can only improve your work.

2. Length (Soft Rule): Try to aim for the “short story” sweet spot of 1,000–7,500 words. Too short and you’re writing flash fiction; too long and you’re writing a novella. Both are wonderful forms! Just not what we’re doing here. One submission per person, please.

3. Judging: Winners will be chosen through the highly scientific process of “whatever I think is best.” Comment votes are nice for ego-stroking but won’t influence the final decision. Trust me, my literary judgment is completely arbitrary absolutely impeccable.

4. Originality: Your story should be freshly created for this contest. No recycling that brilliant piece you wrote in college that’s been sitting in a drawer for years. Though if it’s that good, maybe you should publish it anyway?

5. Formatting: Use collapsible formatting if posting directly in the comments. This keeps the thread tidy and prevents the inevitable scroll-a-thon when reading multiple entries. Feel free to host your story elsewhere and link to it here as well.

6. Licensing: Include a clear license declaration with your submission. Whether you’re going with “All Rights Reserved,” a Creative Commons option, or perhaps even the JWCL (which is not a shameless plug and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise), I’d like to know how/if I can compile these for the community later.

7. Feedback: This isn’t actually a rule, but more of a desperate plea: please, please leave feedback on other entries! Writers thrive on knowing their work has been read, whether the response is effusive praise or thoughtful critique. Even a simple “I enjoyed this because…” can make someone’s day.

Oh, and if you find yourself with spare time between writing masterpieces, you can always peruse my own writing. I promise it’s at least as entertaining as these posts are.

Happy writing, everyone! I’m genuinely excited to see what you come up with this time around.

Background:

I've been using a 9-year-old 13.3 inch Dell Latitude 7370 laptop running MX Linux to stream games via Moonlight from a beefier desktop machine. It is SO good and works flawlessly. My only complaint is the smaller screen size.

I would like to upgrade to a larger computer, and given that the computer will literally only be used for streaming games, it doesn't need to have great stats. I'm looking at used/refurbished models -- both for price and because buying something new feels like complete overkill for my needs.

My only requirements are:

• 17 inch screen
• USB-C charging

That's it! I'm assuming that literally anything I can get with that will work for what I need given that my small, decade-old laptop is already doing the same job perfectly. USB-C charging is a must-have for me. I already have USB-C power cords in all the places I plan on using it, and I don't want to have to use a separate charger for it.

My Situation:

Because I'm searching for used/refurbished models, I'm limited to what's available rather than going for any specific model of computer. I can easily find listings for computers with 17 inch screens. What I can't find easily is whether or not they support USB-C charging. Most sites don't have a filter for that, and a lot of the listings don't specify the type of charger used and just list "AC adapter" (or don't mention it at all). Many sites don't have pictures of the ports, or the pictures they do have are stock photos that aren't of the exact model.

Is there some easy way to find these that I'm missing? Some keyword, or a site that does have a filter for that, or brand knowledge that can point me in the right direction?

Also, if anyone has any recommended sites for used/refurbished laptops, let me know. I have had success with Backmarket for used tech before, but I'm open to recommendations.

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.

The previous introductions thread was waaaaay back in June of 2023, figured it might be time for a new one, eh?

This is a place for new and existing users to post an introduction with a few fun facts about themselves. You will find the post box at the bottom the page. Maybe say "Hi!" to someone else you see while scrolling down?

If you like, you can also write something about yourself in your profile. See "Edit your user bio" on the settings page. Anyone who clicks on your username will see it in your profile. (It appears on the right side of the page.)

You can find out more about how to use Tildes in this topic: "New users: Ask your questions about Tildes here!.

**How long have you been on Tildes? How did you find out about us?**

**How did you choose your username?** 

**What are your interests?** 

**A/S/L (age/(gender|pronouns|identifier)/location)**

**What do you do? This could be in your spare time, for work, your passions.**

**Do you want other users to PM/DM you from this thread?**

**Give us a fun fact (or a link!)! If there is anything to know about tilderinos, it's that we value knowledge sharing!**

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyVHrGLiTcc (46m20s)

Transcript: https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-maximizing-d11e648eb56f (10,314 words with footnotes and references)

Excerpt:

...for simple maximizers, its choices are just about numbers. That means its choices are in the numbers. Here, the choice between two desserts is just a choice between numbers. We could say its choice is already made. And that it has no responsibility, since it’s just following what the numbers say.

Reason-based maximizers don’t just see numbers, though, they also see values. Here, there’s a choice between two desserts — but it isn’t a choice between two numbers. See, it’s also a choice between two values. One option means being a seize-the-day, intensity kind of person. The other means being a foody, aristocratic, elegance kind of person.

My personal thoughts about this talk: it's a kind of strange, kind of dubious philosophical and multi-disciplinary reflection on metrics for organizations, especially metrics for tech companies, and on the pitfalls of optimizing for metrics in what the speaker argues is too "simple" a way.

I don't entirely trust the speaker or the argument, but there was enough in the talk to stimulate curiosity and reflection that I thought it was worth watching.

Do you devour dessert first?

Do you eat your pizza with a fork and knife?

Do you put ketchup on your steak, or eat it well-done?

This is a place to confess your food crimes -- the worst, oddest, or most atypical ways/things/combinations that you eat.

In addition to confession, you may also take a moment to preach. Win over some converts. Convince others of your ways. It could be that, after hearing your defense, the jury here will actually find you not guilty...

My fiancee and I are considering adopting a dog, most likely in the age range of 6 months to 2 years. I've read before that pet insurance is only worth it if you get the dog as a puppy, but I'm wondering what real people think, particularly for a dog that's 2-3 years old. Does anyone else have a pet insurance policy? Who is it with? How's it working out for you? Would you do it again?

Lately there's been a rash of people ripping apart AC units on small business' so they can sell them for parts (mostly the copper). Tends to take days to months to discover, and by that time they're long gone and the police are rarely interested in it (in my experience even when you figure out who's actually buying stolen copper, or car parts....but i digress).

I was asked as a friend to help with this for a couple of small business locations that otherwise don't need normal security. To start it's just one large, 60x300', roof with a couple of units on it. They're willing to spend money, but also don't want to get scammed, so I've been looking into it for them.

They're getting a quote from one of the big security companies like ADT, but didn't feel they were getting it right since they just wanted a camera pointing at the access ladder, when it sure looks like the first time this happened it was someone who brought their own, so they really do need some good coverage and not just one camera pointed at a ladder while they pay for some 24/7 person to stare at the feed.

The rough requirements are:

1. Some decent weatherproofing, as this will be on a roof all day. We can put an enclosure around it but trying to keep this simple.

2. Easy remote access to footage, ideally with notifications that can be setup for things like human motion, or lost connection.

3. Ideally fewer cameras. Not exactly because of cost, but because of the difficulty of getting the power/network up there. Be a lot easier to do one drop in the middle of the roof than say a drop at every corner.

4. Probably not wifi cameras. I figure we need to run power up there anyways, so it might as well be POE if at all possible. Added bonus being that you don't need to worry as much about wifi signal and the rare enterprising criminal with a jammer/scrambler/whatever?

and the tricky one
5. No on site storage. Likely they'll want cloud.

My first thoughts:
I have ubiquiti at home, and this seemed fine for it as a nice in-between since they probably need 2-4 POE cameras max (was going to see if i could get away with 2 in the middle of the roof, one looking each way). Was going to mess around and see what level of alerts they give and make them a couple of accounts (basically one alert to the person who'd call the cops and one to the person who'd look at it if the feed went down).

The no on site storage thing however, complicates stuff....i think?

The short version is there's no way to do even a basic NVR there (i've been over this thoroughly, and it's more a drama thing than a business thing). I figured that wouldn't be an issue, they'd just have to pay extra for some cloud storage and host it there, and it would probably scale well for them if they liked the solution and rolled it out anywhere else. Rather than having a bunch of NVR's they could just have one cloud based one, neat.

buuuuut it seems ubiquiti doesn't really do that. The people i'm helping are somewhat technical but i'd like to keep this turnkey as possible. I don't think there's any clean/easy way to accomplish this with ubiquiti, or at least that I can find?

In theory I think there might be some clever network way to host the NVR at some other physical/central location (with less drama) and then route all the traffic there, but that's beyond my current ability, and i'm skeptical that even if I learn how, i can keep it simple enough that i'd feel comfortable suggesting it.

The followup research:
So there's huge professional companies like verkanda/axis. I did some basic pricing research and it looks like $2kish, minimum, a year for these things. That might be within their budget (i'm told the damage done was easily into the 5 figure territory), but it also feels like extreme overkill for something that should be easier to solve?

Another one i've come across before is Reolink, but I have 0 experience with it and haven't found much in either direction that makes me think it'd be a good solution or a terrible one.

I'm pretty against ring/nest just due to a mixture of "fuck em" and also feeling like you don't get what you pay for.

Overall-

Anyone have any experience or guidance with this sort of thing? I really feel like my own home network/camera setup has me right on the edge of being able to say "ah yeah here's what you need...." and yet i've fallen at the finish line. Is there some easy way to make ubiquiti work (seems to meet all the needs except the cloud storage)? Or some system you're familiar with that does have that feature?

I feel like i bump into these kinds of problems more and more where the options are "make it a second hobby/job" or "pay through the nose" when it feels like there should be a reasonable inbetween.

This is the twelfth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Our next book will be Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky at the end of April.

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. Also, this month will be slightly different. I have been exceptionally busy and didn't finish the book this time. I am hoping that you all who did read it will come up with interesting questions in addition to your comments/ reviews.

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.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

I just got bit in the ass by this.

I had my firefox open with all my open tabs as per usual. I notice that one of the tabs that I expect to exist is not there, so I went into my history and noticed for some reason, it covers only 2 days of history.

ducking told me to open firefox in troubleshoot mode to see if that would get me more of my history back. It did not but what it wound up doing is losing the session that had my open tabs. I closed firefox and re-opened it, all my open tabs gone. I power down my machine and started it back up, same story.

long story short, I am now following the recommendations on here to create regular backups of my firefox session cause apparently that is something that can be lost.

Btw the fact that is not a default feature of firefox to create multiple backups of your open session and deletes backups if you close and re-open is the dumbest logic imo

This post will talk about piracy. I won't provide any links or direct instructions. That said, if a mod or admin thinks there is something inappropriate about talking about that stuff, feel free to mention this in the comments and I will remove any inappropriate details as soon as I can.

Like many Latin Americans, I am a long-term pirate. I have pirated stuff with floppy disks, with CD-ROMs, through IRC, FTP, Kazaa, Napster, Soulseek, websites, and torrent. I have also purchased several illegal media from street vendors. The whole idea of traditional piracy is to get the files I want for me to own, which is why I made a Plex server for myself.

Stremio is a challenge to all of this. It is much easier to setup than Plex and basically requires no maintenance. It is a program that allows me to stream video content from a variety of sources, legal or illegal. It took less than 30 minutes to set it up on my computer, and I know that it exists for both of my TVs. I am using it with the Torrentio addon.

Stremio changed my viewing habits much in the same way paid streaming services did. I am more spontaneous in my choices. I have watched Doctor Who from 2005, ER, Tiny Toons Adventures, Animaniacs, The Twighlight Zone (original), The Magicians, Blackadder, and Falling Skies (alien TV show with Noah Wyle!). Playback sometimes takes a little while to start, but went it does it rarely stutters, even on old or less popular shows. A paid debrid service should improve on that. I am now considering removing most of our extremely expensive paid streaming services and replacing them with Stremio. Money is tight and, when added up, they make quite a dent on our budget!

One bad thing about Stremio is that it is basically a leech. It does not seed the torrents. I am considering getting Real Debrid as it seemingly reduces the strain on torrents via caching.

Right now, my only concern with changing everything to Stremio is that my wife will probably dislike choosing between multiple sources for an episode, and some episodes come with bad subtitles. That would require minimal effort to solve, but might still be too much for her.

Anyway, I am very impressed by Stremio. It is so good, in fact, that I am half-jokingly worried about the police knocking on my door.

Just kidding, that doesn't happen around here.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like yemen, brave and septic tanks. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was documenting.

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!

Most of my time in any given day is spent sleeping (eight hours), working (nine hours, plus another one or two for commuting), chores (maintaining the home, personal hygiene, etc.), and spending time with my wife (and occasionally with friends and family).

This means that I don’t have a lot of “spare time”. I maybe get one or two hours a day, and a few more on Saturdays and Sundays.

I often feel anxious and depressed about this inescapable reality. I have a lot of projects and hobbies that I would like to fill my spare time with, but not enough for all of them.

Years ago, I began to try to reframe the circumstances of my life in my mind in order to prevent a complete mental collapse. I tell myself that this life is finite, that I will never be able to have all the experiences that I would like to, and that’s OK. I can live with that reality. And I should instead, focus my energy on dedicating myself to the projects and hobbies that I absolutely do not want to miss out on.

I still struggle to stick to just a few of those, because there are so many (especially creative) activities that I enjoy. I regularly go through cycles of taking on too many of these, then becoming overwhelmed because I don’t have enough time for each, then cutting out most of them to focus on the ones that I want to prioritize, and repeating the cycle.

Today, I have reached the part of that cycle where I will cut some of them out.

Whenever I do that, it really helps me to take inventory of what those activities are, so that I can stay focused, and delay taking on more or new ones until I am satisfied with where I got with my current ones.

So, here are the projects and hobbies that I want to spend my spare time on, starting today:

• Reading one hour every morning (been diligently doing that since January 1). Two books I am reading through the year. A third book I read as much as I have time left (have read more than ten this year already). I also occasionally read some blogs on Bear Blog.
• Writing on two blogs (one daily, one occasionally), as well as writing my book.
• Occasionally chatting on a forum, Tildes, and four Discord guilds.
• Taking one daily walk while listening to a podcast.
• Occasionally watching YouTube videos (I am—coincidentally—subscribed to exactly 50 channels, almost all of which have an upload schedule of one video every other week or slower).

What are your activities?

Side notes: The list above is a summary. My list is a lot more precise, to help me focus. Also, I’m currently unemployed, but before I quit my last job, I had actually been working almost without interruption for several years. My day-to-day routine back then was exactly as I described it in the beginning of this post.