Some years ago, I bought the Philips OneBlade around the time it was announced. My beard grows very fast and covers a large portion of my face, so daily shaving with a razor blade is often a chore and can leave some pretty nasty rashes on my face sometimes.

The Philips OneBlade was perfect for my situation as it was a quick and painless solution to shaving. I even changed my style to something like a permanent stubble using the guards included in the package. However, after some time, I decided that I preferred my beard longer and ended up abandoning my electric razor.

Recently, though, I've decided to go back to the old stubble look and have been searching for a decent electric razor. I was pretty disappointed to see that the best product for me would still be the Philips OneBlade. It just seems that there is no other competitor in this type of electric razor (or maybe I just haven't looked enough), which I think is a bit strange considering it has been more than 5 years since the OneBlade was released. Even the OneBlade models from Philips still seem to be the same ones made back in 2016. Is the market for electric razors really so stagnant? Or is that Philips hold such a heavy monopoly on this kind of razor? I'm thinking of maybe buying the pro version this time, but even that seems to be only a fancy clipper attached to the same old product that I had.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this and know if you have any recommendations for electric razors that would be just as small and practical.

I'm going camping for the first time with just my partner (as opposed to a bigger group) and it's been a while since I've camped in general so I'm looking for some food ideas! Do you have any go to things you always make? Any special meals that are best enjoyed outdoors? Or simply dishes that are convenient and tasty for camping? I'll be car camping with a stove and cooler, but all suggestions are welcome!

I just wanted to share a handy feature in Firefox that can be used to create shorthanded keywords. For instance, you could make it so that typing "t ~books" brings you to "https://tildes.net/~books". Or "ts banana" that brings you to Tildes search engine, searching for "banana".
I've been using a similar trick on another browser I use for years (Qutebrowser), but lately I've been using Firefox more and a post on the Ferdiverse reminded me that I could do this in Firefox as well.

Instructions

• In FIrefox, open the Bookmark Manager. (Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+O , alt: Burger-menu in the upper right > Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks)
• Select a folder where you want to save your bookmark
• Go to "Organise > Add Bookmark"
• Enter whatever name you like.
• In the URL textbox, enter the static part of the url you want to use. Replace the part that can change (like the page name or the search term with this: "%s"
  • Example for switching communities or go to the frontpage: "https://tildes.net/%s"
  • Example for searching: "https://tildes.net/search?q=%s"
• Optionally, add tags seperated by a comma in the tags textbox.
• At last, choose a keyword. This is the word that replaces the static part of the URL when you use the bookmark. For example, I use "t" for the community-switching and "ts" for searching.
• Save you bookmark and try it out. When you now type just the letter "t" in your URL-bar and press enter, it should bring you to the home page. When you type "t ~books" , it should bring you to the books community page.

You can use this feature with any website, so I encourage you to play around with it :)

I have been thinking about buying a fretless bass for a while now to go along with my regular one, and I've just found a pretty nice one that's in my budget. Do you think I should go for it? Sharing your experiences and any tips/advice would be very helpful!

Hey all, my partner is newly paraplegic post spine surgery and while he's been disabled through our ten years together this is new. He's using a power wheelchair and has to transfer by Hoyer lift. And in the six days since he was discharged from the rehab (PT and OT) hospital he's been to the ER twice. We have home health set up. But all of a sudden my life is a lot more... Stressful is understating it. He's going through his own emotional journey and getting support so I was hoping to find some connections, suggestions and the like here.

Right now I'm feeling a ton of pressure not to let any of the various balls I'm juggling drop. Something that feels unsustainable, particularly with my ADHD. I feel like I'm only getting this far due to stress compensating for my lack of medication (it's packed from our recent move, I'll find it or get a new script I just haven't yet). My partner's in a rush to get a wheelchair van and I don't know if we're making a good purchase and it feels like everything has to be handled right now but also for the rest of our lives.

Are there devices that are must haves? Things I need to know about wheelchair vans? Empathy from fellow caretakers?

Mixed feelings about it all.

I think Reddit suffers from the same ‘1 discussion keeps you coming back for ten years in hope of a repeat’ that most if not all social media struggles with. It also has excellent dogs in hilarious situations and because of the amount of users, a constant refresh of what should be a tired genre but which just dosnt seem to die.

I have enough respect for r/pics for the John Oliver death march, that I cant go back.

As the games industry continues to grow there are many new things introduced which sometimes players don't like, but then overtime we either get used to them, while still disliking them (only a bit less maybe) or we realize "hmm, yes it's good to have this actually". Of course any such mechanic can be implemented very well or quite poorly. I'm not asking about specific implementations, but the mechanic itself as a whole.

Personally I can think of some quality of life changes that at first I thought are not needed or would make a game needlessly easier. When playing I would always try to go for full immersion, but overtime as I've had less and less time to be able to play in long uninterrupted stretches I've come to appreciate things like fast travel and quest markers and other features which would help resuce "wasted" time when playing.

I would like to have a discussion of the season finale and season as a whole of Silo with other book readers who know the overarching plot. Non book readers are welcome obviously, but spoilers will be here.

Overall, would watch season 2. I wanna know what ends up happening.

In a few weeks I'm participating in a three(ish) day nonstop sailing regatta. My friend and I have been put in charge of making and bringing food and drinks for the entire crew. We also have no idea what we are doing, so any advice would be appreciated!

My first thought is sandwiches/wraps but for morale I think it would be nice to have a variety of things.

We won't have a kitchen/stove/way to heat the food. No fridge, but a cooler full of ice. (It will probably not remain very cold the entire time.)

The primary goal is to sail fast so no stopping to assemble anything complicated- someone might even be on shift sailing and eating at the same time. Probably nothing involving sharp knives as the boat will likely be heeled over and that seems needlessly risky.

What kind of sammies? Brownies or cookies? What are we going to do about caffeine? Are two day old room temp breakfast tacos gross or okay?

I recently digitized some old home movies from my grandparents and looking through the film I realize I recognize almost no one. This got me thinking, I should go through this with my mother to help me identify family members as she's probably the last person who knows who anyone is.

Obviously I can just make a document with notes ex: 2:53 screen right, great uncle john"
But I'm hoping there's a more elegant solution in which I can keep info with the file and not some auxiliary document that dosent live in the same place.

I could just dump all that info into Metadata but that's maybe the lowest quality solution.
The xray function of Amazon prime video is the example of the best solution in a perfect world. (if you don't know, when you pause or bring up the context menu on prime video, there's a bar that identifies everyone one scene with a matching headshot)

I actually looked into it and there's an API that amazon uses for this called "RecognizeCelebrities" and uses images to train the program to recognize faces and populate it's menu. I'm not sure if it's open source but even if it was, it's over my level to use it practically I think.

The last option I can think of is using a video markup platform like frame.io but that's not really a long term solution.

Any ideas?

I am currently going through the official Rust book and have gone through some of the Rustlings exercises. Both resources have been excellent so far.

What resources have you enjoyed?

Additionally, is there anything about Rust that particularly caught you out when transitioning from other languages?

Hey everyone. The Steam summer sale should go live in a few hours, I thought it would be fun for us to have a topic dedicated to game recommendations. Rather than having an typical review post, I think we can do something different. Think about the games you've played in the last year and pick one that is meaningful to you, then post a comment with it and why you think others should try it.

In the next few months, I'm going to be on the rental market again for the first time in a couple of years. The last time I rented, I lucked into a very nice condo that was being rented out by the owner, and it was fantastic. We developed a great rapport. I looked after the place and paid the rent on time. She was kind and responsive whenever I had a problem. It felt like we were both getting exactly what we needed out of the arrangement.

She wanted to raise the rent when my lease renewed, but it was a very reasonable ask to cover an increase in her HOA fees. It was significantly less any increase than I had been subjected to on any prior lease renewal, which I appreciated.

After experiencing this, I decided I was done with corporate landlords who use algorithms (i.e., price fixing) to make sure they're extracting as much cash as possible and churning through tenants as they progressively price out more and more people without any regard for them and with no connection to the communities they're hollowing out on the way to more profit.

I ended up leaving that condo for a reason unrelated to the rent increase, and I'm trying to find a similar setup again… but I'm not sure where to look honestly. Pretty sure I found that place on Craigslist which seems to have since devolved into a playground for scammy "landlords" whose dear old mothers have all come up sick in some far away corner of the country so they can't show me the furnished apartment they're renting for 20% below market rate, but if I'll kindly send the deposit, they'll gladly mail me the keys.

Does anyone have any hot tips for how to find rentals like this in major metropolitan areas in the US?

I love microtonal music. Ever since discovering the concept about 6 years ago, I’ve become deeply fascinated by alternate tuning systems and have sought out and listened to microtonal music wherever I can. Most people I’ve talked to are not familiar with microtonal music, or have had a bad experience with it, so I wanted to make a post that explains what it is, and how one might appreciate and eventually acquire a taste for it, along with providing a variety of examples to choose from. All discussion related to microtonal music welcome!

What is microtonal music?

In short, microtonal music is any music that contains notes or intervals not found in the standard Western tuning system. Of course, this invites the question: what is the standard Western tuning system? If you are a musician, you are probably intimately familiar with it: the division of the octave into 12 equally-spaced steps, to which we typically give letter names like C or E flat (etc.). Most people come to unconsciously use these notes as the baseline for determining whether a note or interval is in tune or out of tune.

However, there is nothing intrinsically ‘correct’ about the Western tuning system. In fact, by some standards, it can be quite out of tune. If you listen carefully, you may even notice that our major thirds are ‘wobbly’ - the notes come close to a 5:4 ratio of frequencies, but the interval is about 14 cents too wide, which causes a subtle wobbly sound. We find these slightly ‘off’ intervals acceptable in part due to sheer familiarity. But it turns out, you can familiarize yourself with almost any interval!

There are a great many ways to design a tuning system that produces notes and intervals which are different from what we’re used to. Some of these might be more ‘in tune’, others less so. And there are even those that are in tune with respect to ratios that don’t even exist in the Western tuning system. As a result of these unfamiliar features, microtonal music may give the uninitiated listener the general impression of being ‘out of tune’. But if you give it a chance, it may surprise you - the only way to develop the familiarity that governs taste, after all, is to keep listening.

I think it also helps to know a bit about different tuning systems, to ‘see what’s going on under the hood’, so to speak. This conceptual familiarity may eventually support a degree of aesthetic familiarity.

Tuning Systems

Equal Division Tunings

Where the Western tuning system chose 12 steps, we can also divide the octave into some other number of equally spaced steps. These tunings are often referred to ‘EDOs’ (Equal Division of the Octave) - e.g., the Western tuning system could also be called 12-EDO.

Globally, perhaps the most common EDO (other than our very familiar 12-EDO) is 24-EDO, which is used by many musical traditions in the Arab world, such as Turkish, North African, Persian, or Arab itself. Conceptually, 24-EDO is interesting because it ‘contains’ all the notes of 12-EDO, plus 12 new notes exactly in between the other 12. As a result, it can be used to play all the intervals we are familiar with, and music which strongly relies on this feature is definitely on the more accessible end.

I tend to refer to 24-EDO music as simply being ‘quarter-tonal’ (the 12 semitones of 12-EDO being divisible into 24 quarter-tones). This distinction is useful since in many cultures, quarter-tonal tunings are not precisely 24-EDO, but some slightly sharp or flat variation of the general 24 notes per octave structure. It can be hard to distinguish the two, so ‘quarter-tonal’ is probably most accurate.

You could divide the octave equally into any number of notes, though - I’ve seen as low as 5 and as high as 500. Each has a unique sound depending on what intervals the division produces. Some EDOs, such as 19-EDO, 31-EDO, and 53-EDO produce very similar intervals to what we have in 12-EDO. Played with some restraint, they can be difficult to distinguish from 12-EDO, though they also have the option to play unfamiliar notes as well.

Other EDOs, such as 17-EDO, 22-EDO, and 27-EDO sound quite different from 12-EDO, producing lots of unfamiliar intervals while ‘missing’ ones you’d expect to hear in 12-EDO. And finally, there are of course EDOs such as 10-EDO, 13-EDO, 23-EDO (and many more) that produce few truly ‘good’ sounding intervals. Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop people from trying to extract something decent-sounding from them!

Just Intonation

In short, just intonation is the practice of tuning different intervals to exact ratios of frequencies. Instead of trying to accommodate or work around ‘out of tune’ notes you might find in EDOs, why not just make every note perfectly in tune, after all? The result of this is notes that harmonize perfectly with each other, even if these harmonies are at first unfamiliar to the untrained ear. Often, just intonation produces intervals or whole chords that have a very clear, resonant quality.

The downside of this, though, is that since the notes do not equally divide an octave, you cannot simply transpose scales and chords to a new key. You may have made everything in tune with respect to, say, B flat, but it may turn out that with respect to D, the ratios are far more complicated and their sound commensurately dissonant. To compensate for this shortcoming, a lot of just intonation music tends to play in only one key, or perhaps a few related keys. Certain genres of music, such as drone music, or modal examples of rock and folk, better lend themselves to this technique.

There are many possible tunings within the broad category of just intonation. Usually a musician selects, say, 9 different notes that form specific frequency ratios with each other, and limit themselves to that. So describing specific just intonation tunings often comes down to a list of ratios, which can be hard to interpret without experience in microtonal music.

Free Intonation

Enough of ratios and equal divisions - maybe you just have a particular sound in mind, and you’ll know it when you hear it. This practice of tuning notes semi-arbitrarily, is known as free intonation. The notes chosen may simply sound good to the musician playing them, and at times they may even come close to the just intonation ratios. At other times, they may be chosen because they are out of tune. Maybe the ‘beating’ quality of out of tune notes provides a desirable texture, or maybe a certain ugliness itself is desired.

Free intonation per se is somewhat less common than the other two categories of microtonality. However, some musical traditions are actually more similar to free intonation than anything else, the difference being that instead of the ‘ad hoc’ quality of free intonation, the specific tunings are passed down from generation to generation.

Examples of cultures that use non-just, non-EDO tuning (for lack of a better name) include Indonesian gamelan music, Georgian liturgical music, and lots of different types of African and Asian music, just to name a few. If you needed proof of the notion that microtones are, in principle, capable of becoming familiar, even ‘normal’, these long-lasting traditions of unsystematically tonal music should suffice.

Examples

After listening to a lot of microtonal music, some good, some bad, some very bad, I have amassed quite a collection. Below I have listed what I feel to be prime introductory examples of microtonal music in a variety of genres. A lot of it is very approachable to people unfamiliar with microtones, and I hope you can find something you enjoy among the albums listed.

Of course ‘microtonal music’ is such a broad category I can’t hope to be even close to exhaustive. In many cases I am summing up a huge subcategory (such as Turkish psych rock or Arab dance music) with one or two representative examples.

For any other fans of microtonal music out there, please post your favorite albums or tracks! I’m sure there is some great stuff I’ve missed, and I would love to expand my collection further.

Rock

Altın Gün - On
YouTube / Bandcamp
Altın Gün - Aşk
YouTube / Bandcamp
A lot of Turkish folk music uses a tuning similar to the quarter-tonal tuning used in the rest of the Arab world, and a lot of modern Turkish rock music (especially starting in the 70’s and 80’s) features these same tunings. I think Altın Gün is probably the best example of the ‘Turkish Psychedelic Folk’ style from the past decade or so. Some songs on these albums, in part or in whole, focus more on the normal Western tunings. But pay attention to the vocal parts and the baglama (similar to a guitar) and you’ll hear lots of quarter-tonal inflections. These two albums are a very accessible introduction to quarter-tonal tunings, in my opinion.

Balungan - Kudu Bisa Kudu
YouTube / Bandcamp
This album is a juxtaposition of Javanese gamelan music (explained in detail at the very bottom of this list) with RIO-style avant-rock (featuring the drummer of French band Etron Fou Leloublon) that uses the more typical 12-EDO. Bombastic and strange without being too inaccessible.

Brendan Byrnes - Neutral Paradise
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Brendan Byrnes - 2227
YouTube / Bandcamp
Brendan Byrnes has some excellent microtonal rock music which generally uses a lot of electronic elements as well (synthesizers, digital effects, and occasionally drum machines). Sometimes this recalls synthwave, but genre-wise it’s very much its own thing. He uses a variety of tunings, particularly 22-EDO, but also 27-EDO and just intonation, among others. His guitar work fuses these exotic tunings with fluent, articulate playing that is a joy to hear.

Compro Oro - Simurg
YouTube / Bandcamp
Another great modern example of Turkish psychedelic folk, from a psych / funk / fusion band whose other albums do not use microtones (most of them exploring a more ‘Ethio jazz’-influenced style). As with a lot of music in this style, the microtones often play a more ornamental role, which makes them more accessible to the uninitiated listener.

Feeding Fingers - Do Owe Harm
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Some very fresh-sounding post-punk / darkwave that uses quite a diverse selection of exotic tunings (listed on their Bandcamp page). This album has that dour, ‘Joy Divison’ sound, and the use of microtonality alternately lightens the sentimentality or darkens the menace that music in this genre evokes.

Horse Lords - Interventions
YouTube / Bandcamp
Horse Lords - Comradely Objects
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Horse Lords are one of the most exciting, interesting microtonal rock bands out there, in my opinion. They primarily use just intonation tuning, and a lot of their tracks even use other compositional elements to point out the mathematical features of this tuning (for instance, using a 3 on 5 on 7 polymeter, with instruments that play the 3rd, 5th, and 7th harmonics of a note). Polymeters and polyrhythms are a regular feature in their music, and along with other cool techniques such as hocketing, change ringing, and repetitive riff structures reminiscent of North African music, they serve as a fascinating, unique vehicle for exploring just intonation. These two albums are probably the best examples, but pretty much everything this band has put out is excellent.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - K.G.
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - L.W.
YouTube / Bandcamp
King Gizzard is probably one of the biggest-name artists on this list, and while only 3 of their albums (out of like 20-something) are exclusively microtonal, they are a great example of heavy psych rock or garage rock that draws a lot from Turkish psychedelic rock. This is some high energy rock music for dropping acid and kicking ass. Flying Microtonal Banana, which marked the point at which I personally got very into microtonal music, is almost entirely based on the microtonal ‘Huseyni’ scale most common to Turkish folk music. The other two albums on this list have more variety, but still employ the characteristic quarter-tone tunings.

The Mercury Tree - Spidermilk
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Some very aggressive prog rock using the curious 17-EDO tuning. The sound of this tuning is very different from the standard 12-EDO, which gives this album a dark, otherworldly sense of harmony that fits its angular melody and unconventional rhythms. And yet, the vocal parts are very smooth and natural sounding, which is an interesting contrast. The Mercury Tree have several other albums using this tuning, but I think Spidermilk is their best work.

Secret Chiefs - Book M
YouTube / Bandcamp
Extremely eclectic music (featuring members of the bands Mr. Bungle and Estradasphere) that employs Arabic-style quarter-tones. The band wanders between folk traditionalism, speedy electronica, swanky funk rock, and industrial metal with each subsequent track, but somehow the aesthetic is all of a piece. Some really great musicianship here as well, especially the violin parts (in my opinion). A few of the band’s other albums feature microtones but I think this one is the most cohesive and approachable.

Ventifacts - Ventifacts
Bandcamp
A duo consisting of the frontmen of The Mercury Tree and Jack o’ the Clock, who play rock music which heavily features the hammer dulcimer (of all things). Stylistically, you could call it progressive rock, leaning towards acoustic but still quite intense in places. Some of the songs use quarter-tones, but others use such tunings as 10-EDO or the 17-EDO favored by The Mercury Tree.

Yossi Fine & Ben Aylon - Blue Desert
YouTube / Bandcamp
Israeli hard rock / world rock which uses the standard Arabic quarter-tone tunings. Heavy desert vibes, with simple, approachable riffs and microtonality that is way out in the open, but still very accessible.

Metal

[syzygy] - [escape]
YouTube / Bandcamp
10-EDO is a pretty wild-sounding tuning, and [syzygy] works it beautifully into some stoner doom metal. This EP unrepentantly embraces the out-of-tune feel that this tuning has, but it was surprisingly easy for me to acquire a taste for. It helps that the singer belts out a very strong performance, exactly nailing those hard-to-grasp notes. Not necessarily for beginners, but rewarding if you can get into it.

Agonanist - The Cynicism of Solitude
YouTube / Bandcamp
Atmospheric black metal with extra creepy microtones (I’m pretty sure it’s 17-EDO but I couldn’t find any information about it). The microtonality is a good fit for the genre, where the extra-dissonant parts find themselves buried among blast beats and guttural roars. Yet at times, the tuning provides a melancholic feeling that is softer than you might expect. Really interesting stuff, especially if you’re already into black metal.

Cryptic Ruse - Unfertile
Bandcamp
An impressively heavy sludge metal album featuring the super dissonant 23-EDO tuning. Cryptic Ruse has albums with other tunings, but this one is especially impressive with how well such a strange tuning works. Of course, by any reasonable standard, it’s still extremely bizarre, so tread with caution.

Jute Gyte - Perdurance
YouTube / Bandcamp
Jute Gyte - Mitrealität
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
If there was such a thing as using quarter-tones for evil, Jute Gyte is it. Absolutely crushingly heavy avant-black metal with hyperspeed blast beats, harsher-than-harsh vocals, and the most dizzying, angular approach to quarter-tones possible. These two albums are a good place to start if you like the sound of pure madness. The liner notes on the Bandcamp page for Perdurance explain a bit of the (really crazy) compositional approach.

Kostnatění - Úpal
YouTube / Bandcamp
Blackened death metal that incorporates microtonality through the usage of fretless guitar. A lot of the microtonal sections seem to roughly follow quarter-tones, but there appears to be some free intonation stuff as well. It’s a surprisingly accessible album, at times seeming to draw a bit from (Slovakian?) folk music. A really catchy release, overall.

Last Sacrament - Enantiodroma
YouTube / Bandcamp
Death metal using the 16-EDO tuning. Interestingly, this tuning preserves the tritones and minor thirds present in 12-EDO, so it’s a good fit for a genre that heavily relies on these intervals in its riff structures. At times it almost just sounds like regular death metal, though there are plenty of places (such as guitar solos) where the microtonality shines through.

Scarcity - Aveilut
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Atmospheric black metal using 72-EDO. With high-numbered EDOs like this one, you get so many intervals you can approximate almost anything you want, which allows this album’s droning guitars to be quite consonant - when they want to be. Long song structures allow for very gradual development of harmony, and it’s all underpinned by blast beats and screams like you might expect from the genre.

Victory Over the Sun - Nowherer
YouTube / Bandcamp
Blackened sludge metal using 17-EDO. Really dissonant, not only due to the standard screams and guitar distortion, but also along with sections that are kind of minimalist and not overwhelmingly distorted - rather, just written to be intentionally kooky and compositionally abrasive.

Electronic

Aphex Twin - London 03.06.17 [field day]
YouTube / SoundCloud
Aphex Twin is a pretty big name in electronic music in general, producing stuff in the IDM / drum & bass / acid genres, but a lot of his music is also microtonal. The London 03.06.17 EP is one where pretty much the entire thing uses microtones (I’m not sure of the tuning; it might be free intonation), but you can also find a healthy dose of microtonality on several of his other works, including Syro and Analord.

FASTFAST - New Color Bomb
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Bright-sounding funky synthwave which uses a wide variety of tunings. Very accessible, with some really refined-sounding, psychedelic vocals which gives even the most electronic tracks a slightly more organic quality. A lot of the chords are nearly the same as you’d hear in 12-EDO, but the changes between them occur over microtonal intervals. Neat stuff.

Lynyn - Lexicon
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Hyperactive drum & bass / IDM music that occasionally incorporates microtones (sometimes quarter-tones, other times more of a free-intonation thing). These harmonic qualities really fit the wonky, glitchy sound of the music, at times playing almost more of a textural role - as a result, it’s a very accessible album if you like the genre.

Omar Souleyman - To Syria, With Love
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
The music of Omar Souleyman is like something you’d hear at a Syrian wedding party. Quarter-tones are common to most forms of pan-Arabic pop music (a huge category that would of course be hard to effectively summarize), but I’ve found that I keep coming back to this album, among others that Omar has recorded. Incredibly fun dance music (‘dabke’) with a sort of cheesy 90’s techno vibe.

Sevish - Harmony Hacker
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Sevish - Morphable
YouTube / Bandcamp
Sevish is a big name among electronic microtonal hobbyists, and for good reason. Bright, uber-synthetic timbres are used on these albums to deploy a wide variety of equal temperament and just intonation tunings. Alien sounding for sure, but the fun, pop drum & bass approach keeps the overall experience pretty approachable. Sevish is probably many an internet-dweller’s introduction to microtones.

Trauma Triad - A North Facing Window
Bandcamp
I feel awkward promoting my own music here, but I do honestly think my album of quarter-tonal IDM / fusion is actually pretty decent and worth a mention. Primarily using electric piano and 808 style bass synthesizer, I tried to explore quarter-tones from a more harmonic and less modal perspective. A more detailed explanation of the harmony is included with the (free!) Bandcamp download of the album, for any deeply interested parties.

Jazz

Amir ElSaffar - Rivers of Sound: The Other Shore
YouTube / Bandcamp
This album explores a combination of contemplative spiritual jazz and quarter-tonal Iraqi folk music. The large ensemble provides a huge diversity of instrumental texture, and long song structures provide a chance to let the microtonal harmonies sink in before proceeding through the sprawling yet gentle improvisation. A must for any jazz lover.

Firas Zreik - Salute
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
The first half of this album leans towards quarter-tonal Palestinian folk music, while the latter half develops more into actual jazz. The star here is the kanun, an instrument similar to a dulcimer, which Firas absolutely shreds. The mastery of this instrument on both a rhythmic and harmonic level is really impressive. Overall quite accessible and entertaining.

Giorgi Mikadze - Georgian Microjamz
YouTube
The full album doesn’t seem to be available on YouTube or Bandcamp, but one track should at least give you a taste of the truly unusual Georgian folk harmonies. Neither equal temperament nor just intonation (nor even an approximation of either), this is some extremely strange sounding stuff, especially combined with some spacey instrumental timbres. Yet it’s ultimately buffered by a more familiar jazz fusion stylistic approach, complete with virtuosic solos and skittery rhythms.

Land of Kush - Sand Enigma
YouTube / Bandcamp
This album features Arabic quarter-tone styles worked into large ensemble avant-jazz. The addition of multiple vocalists is also rather unique. At times, the music swings like you’d expect, but a lot of the music here is more textural and experimental. There are sections of fiery free jazz, creepy noise-sculptures, and much more.

Mike Battaglia - Sweet Lorraine
YouTube
While I try to focus more on albums than individual songs, this cover song from YouTuber microtonalist Mike Battaglia is particularly fascinating. Using a stride piano style that gradually works in more and more quirks of the 31-EDO tuning, it perfectly toes the line between detuned honky-tonk piano and truly intentional microtonality. Mike has a bunch of other neat microtonal covers on his channel if this provokes your interest.

Ambient / Electroacoustic / Folk / Classical / Etc.

75 Dollar Bill - I Was Real
YouTube / Bandcamp
Incorporating the quarter-tonal aesthetic of North African music, 75 Dollar Bill deeply plumbs the idea of desert folk for this really excellent, wide-ranging album. Many of the tracks are in a sort of meditative near-ambient style that highlights the subtly-amplified guitar. In others, hand percussion and occasionally other instruments (e.g. viola, saxophone) push lightly in the direction of rock. Overall an extremely relaxing album.

Basiani Ensemble - Georgian Polyphony Singing
YouTube
I bet you didn’t think you’d be listening to microtonal Georgian church choir music today, but here you are. As I explained for ‘Georgian Mikrojamz’ above, Georgian folk tunings are quite otherworldly, but here as a solemn purely vocal performance they acquire a strange profundity that is hard to describe. Some of the tracks use typical 12-EDO harmonies, but about half of them have these odd, resonant microtones that probably sound even better in a huge space like a church (I imagine). Start with tracks 2 and 5 if you want just a taste.

Duane Pitre - Omniscient Voices
YouTube / Bandcamp
Ambient electroacoustic music primarily featuring piano. The very slow pace and gentle, quiet sound are very conducive to hearing the details of just intonation tuning, whose exactly tuned ratios produce intense and evocative ringing sounds. A great album for relaxation or meditation, in my opinion.

Guillaume Costeley - Seigneur Dieu ta pitie
YouTube
Guillaume Costeley was a 16th century French composer, and one of the first Western examples of experimentation with microtones - particularly, he used the 19-EDO tuning, which is good at approximating similar intervals to 12-EDO, but gives new options for key changes. This video is a brief composition of his, played on microtonal organ, along with sheet music and a more detailed explanation of how this tuning works. Fascinating stuff.

Julia Reidy - World In World
Bandcamp
On this album, just intonation tunings are played using only almost exclusively clean electric guitar, using heavy reverb, delay, and looping to create some expressive, mystical soundscapes. The almost tactile textures produced are sometimes rather dark, though never sinister. At other times they are bright and expansive, though no less quiet and intimate. Another great relaxation album.

Methods Body - Methods Body
Bandcamp
Electroacoustic avant-rock that uses free intonation to create harmony that is bizarre yet curiously organic-sounding. You can hear the warbling texture of the intentionally out-of-tune intervals in a lot of these tracks, which fits the earthiness of the acoustic instrumentation. A lot of the tracks also have a danceable groove to them reminiscent of some free intonation African music. Methods Body also recently released an album called Plural Not Possessive that is an even more low-key, ambient example of some of these features.

Sound Tracker - Gamelan
YouTube
Indonesian folk music, also called ‘gamelan’ music, uses some very unusual tunings - neither equal temperament nor just intonation, but some idiosyncratic set of intervals cooked up long, long ago. In addition, gamelan ensembles pair up instruments that are tuned slightly differently, so when they play in unison you get a beautiful, ‘shimmering’ texture. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of high quality recordings of purely traditional gamelan music. This is probably the best one I’ve seen, and it also lets you see some of the musicianship involved in actually performing the stuff.

I recently had an SSD fail on me, less than a year old. Nothing important was on it and I'll be getting a warranty replacement, but this got me thinking - I still don't have a proper backup strategy. If my boot drive failed with most of my documents on it, that'd be lost or be expensive to recover.

What do you do to back up your data? What do you recommend others do? We have things like cloud backups, disks that act as a full backup and a whole lot more. Personally, I want to be able to set something up and not worry about it going wrong.

Kids or younger reader book. Fantasy genre.

In this book world weather can be controlled by sorcerers, and especially powerful sorcerers can summon dragons. When the sorcerers die the dragons vanish, except in the case of the most powerful sorcerers where their dragon is buried with them. The villain wanted the scales of the blue dragon that belonged to a sorcerer. There were also weather spells that were too destructive and were trapped, including the scarlet snow that made people fall asleep. The villain was holding the main character's parents hostage. The main character can summon a dragon. The main character is going to school to become a meteorologist

Other key words that may or may not be the same story -- Yeti, ball lightning, jar, lab, gardening supply shop

I have been running for 10 years. Since October 2019 I have run everyday without missing a single day. During the week I have little time and run 2-3 miles but on the weekends I try for 5-6 miles. I have made the occasional 10+ mile runs and find that at some point around mile 7 it becomes "How far can I really go today if I get through this mile." The only motivator I have is not breaking my daily run streak, nothing fancy. I know others have motivators to get into shape for a marathon or other event. What's your running motivation?

I'm ashamed to admit that I've been on there way too much the last couple of weeks. I had always planned to use Reddit in my google searches because google sucks without it now, but I've been spending time talking there.

My niche interest in question is visual novels. There are very few places on the internet where you can discuss them. There was recently a final translation patch released for the Tsukihime Remake. I beat it and wanted to talk about it! Reddit has a Tsukihime subreddit. I don't know if there is any other English community on the internet that wants to talk about Tsukihime. It's niche enough that I know of no one in person who has that interest either. Without Reddit, where do you even look for an alternative?

I feel like I'm going continue being drawn back for similar things even if they are less niche than visual novels. For example, I wanted to talk about Final Fantasy XVI. I could have made a post about my thoughts here and maybe I would have gotten good discussion about it. Slipped my mind honestly. But I was drawn back to Reddit where there are thousands of people wanting to talk about it right this second. An alternative could have been Gamefaqs, but its a bit more toxic and I hate the style of forum (unthreaded, every post in chronological order, only way to follow conversations is with quoted text. Is there a term for that kind of forum?)

Does anyone else feel themselves feeling a similar pull?

Thinking about the recent incident where the devs for Skullgirls (current devs, not original devs) went and changed a bunch of artwork and other content for the fighting game, which released in 2012 after being Kickstarted. Aside from removing the sexualized imagery of an underage character, probably a good call, what about the other things they've decided are in 'poor taste' in 2023?

Should we be going back and editing games, or even movies, tv shows, and books to reflect more modern sensibilities? Is a game like Skullgirls even worth preserving its original content?

My opinion is no, unless it's something that is now illegal, I don't really enjoy the precedent that's been set lately where we go back and correct past mistakes in media. However, I also see the argument about removing media that may encourage racist or sexist thinking or put down minorities, but is it useful to see the media as it was and see how far we've come? Is that useful enough? Should only the original creators make that decision?

Just thought this was interesting. Tag as desired.

A few years ago, I came across a light, romantic Korean show called Oh, My Ghost. It had good writing, acting and plot, and even a slightly darker undertone. I was hooked and I've been watching Kdramas ever since.

My favorites are those that don't involve the powerful, rich elites in Korea. Stories like Weight Lifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, and Just Between Lovers are more to my taste. Other, truly fine shows include Goblin, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Hotel Del Luna and It's OK to not be OK. Those last three have strong female characters, which I find a little surprising for Korean shows.

There are a lot of Korean shows available these days on Netflix. Squid Games and The Glory made an impact worldwide. Squid Games pushed me to the limit, but I managed to make it through that series. Season 2 is coming, so that will be interesting too.

This year hasn't been a great one for my tastes in Kdramas, so I'm still looking for an outstanding series to watch. The Glory lost me at some point. Revenge isn't a compelling plot line for me. Right now, I'm watching Delightfully Deceitful, and it's different enough to keep me watching. I'm on episode 4, so there's a long way to go yet.

Any favorites I've missed?

Edit: Oops, did I get one of those titles wrong! I've corrected it to Weight Lifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo.

Do you guys think they're using rate increases to kill off all the overleveraged homeowners in an effort to create a sell-off and thereby lower housing costs?

Could someone smarter than I please explain what is going on... or is our inflation that bad? Seems like some of the inflation might be what I've read as greedflation. I didn't realize we jumped almost 3.75% in less than a year last year...

I am going on a road trip with my family, including two young kids. I want to build a massive playlist for this, as we will be in the car for probably 30 hours round trip. I’m looking to branch out and add some stuff that I haven’t heard of before, but also I want to keep it PG (no swearing, sex, drugs, etc.)

Open to all genres and styles.

I may be asking a dumb question or going about this wrong but I'm not sure what to do here.

So right now, I receive an estimation from one company in a PDF. It has a bunch of fields such as customer name, product, address, etc. Then I type that data and put it into Excel, where I add additional data that I have. From there I have a second PDF which has form fields that I fill with the data of the Excel spreadsheet.

My problem is with the first PDF that I get from this other company, unless I am doing something wrong I am unable to get that first PDF to show the data as fields. If I convert the first PDF into an Excel then the table data is very messy.

The amount of typing or copy and paste that it's not hard but it is time consuming. What is the best way for me to go about doing this? I've been Googling things but I'm not sure the right words of action I'm looking for.

I hope this all makes sense, but if not please ask questions and I'll do my best to try and clarify further.

Not a native speaker, so I hope I phrased it correctly. Let me explain. It happened to me at least twice.

Some years ago, I picked up the "Metro 2033" book by Dmitry Glukhovsky. I read part of it until I read about the Stalker, who was a badass wearing a black coat. It was so cliche, I was unable to continue. I wrote off the book as trash.

Then, some time later I played the video game under the same title, which is an adaptation of the novel and I liked it a lot. It had that eerie atmosphere and a unique Eastern European feel to it, unlike games like Fallout. I decided to give the book another go, but this time I knew the lore and I had images from the game in my mind and everything changed. I really liked that book, it was a good mix of horror, action and sociopolitical commentary disguised as a postapo novel. It may not be great, but it's a very pleasant read. By now, I've read all three books and played all three video games (btw if you plan to play Metro Exodus I'd advise you to read "Metro 2035" first, as the game is a direct continuation of that story and both were written by the author) and I consider myself a fan of the series.

Another, more recent example is "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone". I am not a Potterhead, I never read any HP books, I even despised them for the most part. By the time J.K. Rowling's stories were published in my country I was already 20 or so. I was familiar with Jordan, Tolkien, Sapkowski, Williams and many more authors writing fantasy. I was into the tolkienesque depiction of wizards, so something like Hogwart with robed men and children riding brooms and waving wands is both weird and strongly off-putting to me. Also, I considered myself already too old for what I saw as children's books.

I'm 42 now and those words of C.S. Lewis resonate with me ever so more:

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

So I decided to give Harry Potter a chance. I first tried watching the first movie. I didn't like it much and dropped it somewhere in the middle. Then a couple moths ago I loaded a free sample of the first book from Kobo Store and it was... alright. I dropped it as well. I thought it was well written, but was definitely a kids book for which I was too old.

I started playing Hogwart's Legacy a week ago or so. I'm now positively hooked on that game, it's beautiful, it has characters I like, it has a good combat system and it's been my doorway to Hogwarts. So when I couldn't play, I was thinking about it and picked up that book which I dropped earlier. But this time I had a better understanding of the lore, had images of certain places in my mind and it clicked! I am still an old fart and it is still a kids book, but I have found new appreciation for it. I think it's well written on the literary level, it has a lot of situational and verbal humor (I think it has a distinct British flavor to it, like a very toned down version of Pratchett) -- I actually often chuckle when reading it. I bought the whole set (books 1-7) and maybe I'll even read them. Here's hoping that they mature with the readers, that's what I've been told. I'm sure that if I were 12 when reading them for the first time, I'd love them.

As you can see, in my case it's usually that good video games drive me to give another chance to some books that I initially didn't like and because of the great experience with video game adaptations, I start liking the source material. Do you have similar experiences?

(btw this is my first post on Tildes)

Recently went to a Baskin Robbins, and I was surprised by how indecisive I was. I ended up going with a childhood favourite of mine (cotton candy), but it was far too sweet for me now. I'm curious, what are your favourite ice cream flavours? What interesting combinations have you tried? Any weird ice cream flavours you've tried before?

In general, I found a lot of real gems this year! The indie scene is thriving like never before, and smaller teams are being enabled by the likes of Unreal Engine to create really beautiful games on a budget. So I had a lot of free time today and yesterday, and decided to go through my discovery queue and check out a few demos. That quickly ballooned into sitting down and playing right through over a dozen demos, two of which (The Lies of P and Wizard with a Gun) I didn't get far enough into to give any coherent thoughts on. How many demos did you check out? Are there any games you're looking forward to on that basis?

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood: 5/5
From Deconstructeam, a Valencian studio with a strong emphasis on narrative, choice, and empowering the player to create their own art, this demo was one of the big winners for me. Gameplay revolves around conversations, VN style, but those conversations often happen in the context of you performing, essentially, tarot readings where the cards are all designed by you. I had a lovely, relaxing time making my own cards, and the challenge of interpreting them to the people around me in a way that felt… true, I guess, was memorable. There is an impressive level of responsiveness to your choices on display here, both on a micro level and, it seems, on a macro level, so I have to think that the game will be pretty replayable. My one gripe was that the dialogue felt a bit stiff and unnatural at times. The game isn’t voice-acted, and the lack of rhythm or cadence in a lot of conversations kept them from flowing well. But that said, even if individual lines of dialogue fell a bit short, placed in context, the conversations felt meaningful, engrossing, and interesting. I will be buying this on release.

Death Must Die: 4/5
I’m a sucker for the “Survivors” genre. My first experience with it preceded Vampire Survivors, the little $3 game that swept the world last year and popularized the new gameplay style; I started with the mobile game that inspired VS: Magic Survival. I had tens of hours in that game. And each subsequent entry into the genre; VS, HoloCure, 20 Minutes Til Dawn, etc., etc. have only worn me out more. These games are all the same: more enemies fill the screen; you get more autofire weapons to deal with them and dodge around to avoid contact damage. Fun for half an hour, but don’t really leave you wanting more. Death Must Die is different. Isometric rather than top-down, the combat here is all manual. You click to fire off an attack that needs to be well aimed; enemies don’t deal contact damage but instead have telegraphed attacks that you have to dodge. It feels very ARPG, actually; a bit Diablo. And the level-up system, which sees you selecting boons from different gods, is clearly inspired by Hades and offers considerably more interesting choices (so far, at least) than the usual Survivors game. Feels a lot more skill based, and a bit more build-craft-y, than usual. And I even caught a whiff of a story, though how well it’ll be executed remains to be seen. I look forward to the full release. Just wish there were more defensive options – maybe a parry?

El Paso, Elsewhere: 4/5
This is cute. A Max Payne-style third person shooter that’s well written in a surreal, noir sort of way; corny enough to be delightful; dark enough to maintain the tension. Visually, it’s a low res, low poly callback to the PS1 era. The gameplay is pretty tough; I didn’t finish the demo, but I imagine it would be a lot of fun to master. I’m keeping my eye on this one, even if it’s not my usual type of game. A special callout: there are biblically accurate angel enemies in this game, which makes me a very happy woman.

Escape from Mystwood Mansion: 3/5
I like escape rooms, and this demo is just a well-constructed escape room – actually, it skews very closely to the types of puzzles and mechanics I’ve come to expect from physical escape rooms. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing; I do wish the game used its medium to get a little more wild with it. But the puzzles were generally pretty well constructed and offered a few fun “aha!” moments when I solved them, and I didn’t need to look at a walkthrough or lean on hints to get through. That said, the hints that I did use were pretty lackluster, and in one case, actually wrong, so that system needs some revision. Some of the sound design got a bit grating, too. I don’t know. Were this a co-op experience I’d probably like it a bit more. The appeal of an escape room is the excitement of solving it with a friend, and there are certainly enough self-contained puzzle sequences here to support that. But no; Mystwood Mansion is a solo experience, and I’m not sure if it’ll be that fun to solve multiple predictable escape rooms alone, staring at a computer screen.

The Invincible: 3/5
I am of two minds about The Invincible. This game is an atompunk sci-fi walking sim adapted from a novel (my roommate tells me) by Stanislaw Lem, and so, suitably, what we have in this demo is a slice of high-concept sci-fi steeped in personal stakes. I have a hard time thinking of anything bad to say about this game. It looks good, runs well, has an interesting story that left me wanting more. And yet, one day after playing it, I just do not want to pick the game up again. I suppose part of it was the pace. Some of the best walking sims – What Remains of Edith Finch – tell incredible stories in the space of two hours. Meanwhile this demo was 40 minutes long and felt like only a small piece of some grand, sprawling story. Environments are huge and your walking speed is pretty slow, so there’s a lot of time between set pieces where your character is just having headaches or struggling to breathe, which really wore me down. I can’t imagine playing this game for 10 hours; 5 might be pushing it. It’s not super tempting when I could just read the book.

Loodlenaut: 2/5
Oh boy, Loodlenaut. Where to begin. Okay, so, I actually like this game. It’s pretty, and relaxing; an ocean exploration game where your job is to clean up trash, rescue wildlife, and climb the tech tree. I have played through the entire demo, done everything there is to do, which took about an hour. And I will absolutely not be playing the full game. If you’ve played Powerwash Simulator, you know how satisfying it can be to get rid of muck and watch a meter climb up to 100% clean, and Loodlenaut scratches a similar itch. The problem here is that the game feels so clunky and limited that the frustration often outweighs the satisfaction. For example, you have a cleaning gun that picks up trash, destroys goop, and breaks boxes. But you don’t aim the gun, the game does, and it’s not really based on where you're facing or what you're closest to so much as it is on the game’s capricious moods. Say you’re trying to pick up a glass bottle, but there’s a crate nearby that you can’t break yet because you don’t have the right upgrade. Well, Loodlenaut will snap the gun to the crate and repeatedly try to break it, until you wiggle around enough to get it to change its mind and pick up the bottle. Wielding the gun is a constant frustration, as is sluggishly moving through the ocean. Your swim speed is slow, and your boost recharges slowly, so going back and forth between central base and the area you’re cleaning – something you have to do pretty frequently – takes what feels like an eternity until you sink lots of resources into infrastructure. None of this is a bad idea – incentivising players to craft boost rings to improve traversal is a good idea; auto-targeting is more comfortable than aiming on a controller – it’s just these systems are poorly implemented, which leads to frustration.

Luna Abyss: 5/5
Luna Abyss is a fucking wild demo. I downloaded it because the game’s description used they/them pronouns for its protagonist. I had no idea what I was getting into. So, okay, the best comparison I have for this game is to Returnal. Like that game, Luna Abyss is a high-production value 3D shooter where hitting your shots is easy, and the difficulty comes from avoiding the attacks of bullet-hell style enemies. And like Returnal, it has a strange, unsettling atmosphere, tight movement, and punchy, satisfying guns. Of course, Luna Abyss isn’t a roguelike, and it appears much more straightforward with its story beats so far. I don’t know, I’m having a hard time capturing what makes this game so great. Let’s start with the world, which is bleak and dark and oppressive. You run through cavernous metal structures, all black and grey, lit in harsh red. Enormous metal pipes twist and curl and embrace each other like enormous, mechanical intestines, and you run across them to get to your next objective. This place was not designed for you, and you feel that so clearly as you traverse it. You jump off the pipes and enter into combat, where a generous aim assist ensures that all your shots will hit. But there are a couple of enemy types to prioritize. You fire your shieldbreaker at a flying enemy, killing it, and time slows to a crawl, increasing the impact of the shot and giving you a tiny moment of respite to see what bullets you’ll have to dodge and decide what enemy you should prioritize next. A miniboss spawns in, grinning facelessly, and releases a flower of projectiles. You sprint and jump and dodge and you keep firing until she’s dead. The room is clear, and the demo is over, and your screen is awash with the bright, striking red of the UI. “Thanks for playing,” it says. I felt like I should be thanking it, instead.
It’s impossible to say, at this juncture, whether the game will be good. The crumbs of story were certainly engrossing; the combat fun; the world, striking. At the very least, Luna Abyss looks like it will be one of the most interesting and unique games of the year, whenever it comes out. I can’t wait.

Sea of Stars: 3/5
This one is alright. The world is beautiful, the music peppy, the character designs good. I just honestly have not played enough turn-based isometric RPGs to compare it to anything. I did have two big disappointments: I thought the writing was a little… on-the-nose, I guess? Characters just stated their objectives and everything was pretty surface-level. Dialogue wasn’t attacking or defending, only conveying information. And while the combat was fun and had a challenging timing element, it ended with a boss who I spent like ten minutes fighting for a single attempt, used all my items, did everything I could, and still lost to in dramatic fashion with no indication I had done any real damage. My suspicion is that the boss is simply meant to be an organic end to the demo, a scripted loss, but I don’t know; if not, it probably indicates that this type of game isn’t for me, since I found it to be quite a slog.

Stray Gods: 2/5
I really wanted to like Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical. It is, essentially, a choice-based VN in the style of a broadway musical about ancient Greek gods struggling to live in modern society. A tantalizing premise, if a bit theatre-kid-y. But my degree is literally in theatre criticism, so I have a lot of tolerance for the genre’s usual excesses. I can’t think of another musical video game, but Stray Gods’ demo did not convince me that the idea could work. The performances aren’t the problem here; Laura Bailey is a charismatic lead with pipes good enough to carry the show, and the supporting cast of big names (Troy Baker, Felicia Day, Khary Paton) are no slouches either. But so much about this game is just not working for me. Let’s start with the sound design. This is one of those games where it feels like all the actors are recording in totally separate rooms. There’s a lot of dead air, not a lot of dynamism or one person bouncing off the other during conversation. It robs scenes of a lot of momentum and impact. And when I say “dead air,” I mean dead air. Bafflingly, the game seemingly has no room noise, no background audio, so when people aren’t talking, or music isn’t playing, everything is completely, uncannily silent. It’s genuinely weird.
The musical numbers alleviate this weirdness by filling the soundscape but do little else to pull me in. We get to see four songs in the demo; two from the opening act, two picked from later in the game. All of these songs are very similar – fugues or duets, where one character has one perspective and another character (or chorus) has another perspective, and their conflict is expressed and then resolved through song. Which is a fine structure for a song in a musical, don’t get me wrong, but it is not a fine structure for every song. Even our main character Grace’s “I Want” song, the song that establishes her, her desires, and internal landscape and should absolutely be a solo, is a duet with a woman she’s just met. It does not work. And when the game has you making dialog choices during songs, it robs them of a natural arc; there’s no organic progression from the characters’ starting points to their ending points. Some part of me hopes that this game will be good, but I’m not optimistic. Stray Gods is no Hadestown.

Vampire Hunters: 3/5
In the Death Must Die blurb, I praised that game for refining the “Survivors” genre by making tweaks that allow for more skill and expression. But fuck that. Vampire Hunters is a braver game than Death Must Die will ever be, because it dares to ask, “What if Vampire Survivors was a boomer shooter where all your guns were on screen at the same time?” The result is absolutely wild; by the end of a run, more screen space is devoted to your guns than the entire rest of the game. It feels pretty weird to play, too; all of your guns have different ammo counts and may or may not be automatic, but all fire with the same button, so it can be tough to manage all of their separate ammo pools. And XP drops have a tiny pickup radius, so you really have to move to get them all. The neatest trick the game pulls is that it increases enemy spawn rate when you sprint, so moving at a high speed carries a lot of risk. But apart from that, this game is maybe too audacious to be enjoyable.

Viewfinder: 4/5
I am not a frequent puzzle game player, but I, like most every PC gamer, have a soft spot for the kind of reality-warping sci-fi-y puzzle genre originated by Portal and carried forward by the likes of Superliminal and, now, Viewfinder. First: this game is a technical marvel. You are able to, in essence, carry around entire environments, often with a wildly different art style from the rest of the game, and place them seamlessly and instantaneously in the world. I played this at 1440p, >100 FPS with nary a stutter on my midrange system. The ability to place photos and enter them is genuinely incredible on all levels other than technical, too; it feels magical, like stepping into a painting that you yourself made. My only question, one that the demo did not answer, is whether Viewfinder will be able to construct interesting puzzles out of this mechanic. This was something that I think Superliminal often failed to do, too; when the central mechanic of your puzzles is so unique and novel and powerful, how can you limit it in such a way that players actually have to think and put in effort to solve problems? For me, at least, every puzzle in Viewfinder was solved pretty much instantly, with no “aha!” moments, and that does worry me a bit.

As the holiday comes up, I’m building a tongue-in-cheek party playlist that speaks to the full color of this beautiful country we Americans call home.

I’m kicking it off with these songs, but what would you add to this playlist?

• Uncle Sam Goddamn by Brother Ali
• This is America by Childish Gambino
• National Anthem by Lana Del Rey
• American Pie by Shea Diamond
• Holiday / Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day
• Know Your Enemy by Rage Against the Machine
• Gentrify by Propoganda

What songs would you add to this playlist? I’ll add songs to my playlist as we go!

This is currently going on with me. Someone has spoofed my home phone number, and has been using it to call other people. Whenever the other person misses the spoofer's call they end up calling me. I have answered quite the handful of calls from this. It has been happening since Wednesday, and it has gotten often enough that I have been carrying around a wireless phone in my pocket. I did end up reporting it to the fcc, but that hasn't done anything yet.

Anyway this gets me wondering, have you ever had your phone number spoofed? If so, how did you deal with it?

I've always had a fairly structured routine life (clock in/out of work) and am able to stick to deadlines/routine in this format. There are only a few times in my life when I have more unstructured time and have to self-employ deadlines and things tend to fall apart during those instances (staying up late wasting time -> wake up late -> vicious cycle). I find when I'm held accountable to others (eg showing up for an appointment or a start time for work), things go fine, but when I'm only accountable to myself things tend to fall apart fairly quickly.

I'm sure many of you have jobs / hobbies where you work remotely and have to come up with your own schedules and am wondering what tips and tricks you've accumulated from your experiences that you would be willing to share that have been helpful for you to accomplish your goals?

I have a few months of free time coming up, and am hoping to make the most of it to improve my personal / professional life and make progress on my own personal projects/hobbies.

Some tips / tricks that I will be employing that have been somewhat helpful in the past:

• Creating a schedule for myself at least a day ahead
• Using time-blocking websites to block or temporize access to certain websites (I like coldturkey for PC)
• Minimizing distractions (putting phone on do not disturb / airplane mode), working in a quiet environment

Interested in what tactics you have all successfully employed in your own lives!

Previously I used to have this in my .vimrc:

if !exists('g:lasttab')
  let g:lasttab = 1
endif
nmap <C-Tab> :exe "tabn ".g:lasttab<CR>
au TabLeave * let g:lasttab = tabpagenr()

Courtesy of: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2120168

But while going through the help docs today, I stumbled across this mapping and am glad to find that this now exists by default. When it got added, however, I don't know.

Search for food banks in your area. There are three in my town and one gets really good product from some of the nicer stores in town. They give us two grocery bags to fill, then usually have two more bags filled with pasta or soup mixes. And that doesn't account for the fresh produce they provide. I've filled my, my sister's, and my mom's pantries from a single visit to the food bank. I never felt like I was taking too much, but I always end up with more than one man can eat on his own. So, my sister gets to feed her kids and my mom can feed the ladies that help her at home. Their hours may conflict with your work schedule, but a single trip can benefit you immensely. Maybe get a friend to go if it doesn't work out timing wise for you.

The Verge, Washington Post, CNET, Engadget reviews

RIP to my Pixel Fold: Dead after four days

Haven't had time to go through all the reviews but as it's a major new device from Google I thought there might be some interest here.

There are some very groovy mixes out there. Which ones are your favorite?

Mine is Alice by Pogo, whimsical and slightly spooky, just like the movie it's sampled from.

So apparently Pogo has held some problematic opinions in the past, I'll go with my second most favorite being this Breaking Bad remix.

Premise - TL;DW -

A young chef from the fine dining world comes home to Chicago to run his family sandwich shop after a heartbreaking death in his family. A world away from what he's used to, Carmy must balance the soul-crushing realities of small business ownership, his strong-willed and recalcitrant kitchen staff and his strained familial relationships.

With season 2 being released this past weekend I wanted to see if anyone on Tildes was watching it. Right now, I think it might be my favorite show. There is no hamfisted comedy. The dialog seems shockingly/surprisingly human. It has stakes, but its not overwhelming or action-packed cheese.

The whole context of the show is surprisingly fresh, a lot of the characters have flaws but good even realistic redemption or growth. I think one of the most surprising things (for me at-least) is the lack of a love interest, I can't recall the last time a show didn't have one. I could go on and gush about this show some more, but I wanted to see if anyone here watched it.

If not, give it a chance. I think you might like it.

The recent PKM thread had me thinking about what folks are using as journaling app/portal. I do use Obsidian for my second brain right now and genuinely love it. But I find the mobile app on Android to be a bit clunky, if I'm honest. Seems slow to open even with very few plugins. For jounaling I've used DayOne for years. I started back when it was iOS/MacOS only, but then switched phone to Android and haven't been back. But now they have an app and web app for that. What I don't like is the somewhat goofy format it saves in and it's on their servers. They used to allow you to at least leverage your own Dropbox, but no longer.

For the past several months I've tried several FOSS options. Main criteria is that I could host it myself, supports offline entries stored in an open file format (preferably MarkDown), and had either multi platform app or a decent web app. That lead me to try these:

Memos
Pros:

• Great persistent web app
• Slick UI that is light and snappy
• markdown support
  Cons:
• Stuffs the .md inside a database file so can be a bit cumbersome to export data
• No offline support. There is a 3rd party app that hopes to implement it

Flatnotes
Pros:

• Incredibly simple
• Another easily deployed app
• Flat Markdown files
  Cons:
• Web app on mobile is almost unusable as in it doesn't scale well to smaller screens
• Very early development, but very likely to stay as minimalistic as it is now.
• No offline and very unlikely to ever have it

Joplin
Pros:

• Multi platform apps that perform well
• End-to-end encryption supported
• Could replace both DayOne and my To-do solution (Google Keep)
• Offline support
  Cons:
• More database stuff instead of flat markdown files

One solution I've been testing lately is using IAWriter to write to a 'Journal' folder within my Obsidian vault on Google drive Obsidian Vault > Journal > 2023.... for example. This works surprisingly well. Of course IAWriter is a bit spendy at $29 for Android and then more $ for other platforms as they're sold separately.

So I'm curious what other people are using for just simple daily journaling, random thoughts, etc. If there's an approach I've missed I'd love to hear it. Joplin is so dang close but not having the structure of plaintext files is a no go for me as I don't want to be trapped by any one product should something happen to the development down the road. Doesn't have to be free, but I want control of the entries either on my own server or cloud storage.

This is the Discussion topic for all those who participated in Tildes Pop-up Book Club: Roadside Picnic, or for anyone who has previously read the book and wishes to join in.

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

For all the 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.

How did you learn to cook? Who taught you? What factors were important? Looking back, what do you think could have been better?

Or, if you're learning to cook: how is it going? What are you finding tricky? Is it easy to find teaching resources?

I'm currently using Navidrome to self-host my music collection, while using DSub to listen on-the-go.

This works very well for most genres, except for the bulk of my music which is classical music. This presents its own host of problems pertaining to cataloguing and using metadata, since there are often multiple recordings of the same musical composition, recorded by multiple conductors with different orchestras and/or soloists. There may also be different instrumental arrangements of the same musical piece. Merely sorting by "Artist" is therefore quite unsatisfactory in this scenario.

Some streaming services have come up with quite satisfying solutions in my experience (notably Apple Music Classical and Idagio), but I am not sure how to go about listening to my own self-hosted classical music.

Is anybody here on Tildes familiar with this organizational problem? I would be very eager to hear how you have tackled this. Is there any self-hosted software more suitable to cataloguing musical collections with extensive metadata?

Self-hosting has been a rabbit hole of wonder that I've explored and delved into over these past few months. I'm curious to hear what others use it for, what apps they love, and their rationale for doing so?

I'll go first.

First, in terms of rationale, this is a wonderful article that I think is worth checking out that encapsulates much my of ethos about pursuing self-hosting.

https://kylechayka.substack.com/p/essay-the-digital-death-of-collecting

The TL;DR is that we no longer have control over the things that we 'own' digitally for these massive cloud companies. For instance the songs / artists you listen to on Spotify may suddenly and unexpectedly become unavailable, certain things (most recently podcasts) may be forced upon you in unpleasant ways. Having complete control of your digital data is a very liberating feeling.

In terms of apps:

Hyperbackup - I use a synology NAS, so hyperbackup has been wonderful and use both external HD's and a cloud interface to create encrypted backups of everything which gives me peace of mind.

Plex - One of my most used apps, being able to stream anything remotely has been a dream. Plexamp has given me back control of my music library in a way I never thought I would have.

Tautulli - Great for more informatics on my plex usage

Calibre / Calibreweb - Phenomenal for keeping track of my book collections

PiHole - Ads be gone!

*Arr apps - Specifically Sonarr/Prowlarr/Radarr, really like Overseerr for an interface tying everything together

Daily Notes - A clean interface for keeping regular notes

Some things that I'm not currently self-hosting but would love to hear if others are using alternatives...

Instapaper - I know there are a few similar FOSS apps out there but haven't found one as convenient and well laid out

TickTick - To do app, but similarly haven't found a FOSS alternative that was as robust and nice to use

OneNote

Hi Tildes! Long time lurker here who recently got an account. I love the long-form thoughtful discussion here and thought this might generate some interesting replies.

I and my partner left a high-control religious community (fundamentalist evangelicalism, think a Canadian version of the Shiny Happy People doc) eight years ago, and the experience was like a bomb going off in our life that we still find ourselves recovering from in many ways.

Growing up in that environment led to us having an extremely strong, and very possibly distorted, sense of what community is. People that treat you like family; bringing meals when you're sick, throwing you wedding showers, helping with home repairs, being shoulders to cry on... the works. Of course, as we later found out, this community could very easily be turned against you by certain powerful members of it, and it turned out there were many many strings attached that only became visible once we bumped up against them. When we left Christianity our entire community essentially disowned and ghosted us and we were left adrift.

It's now been eight years and we've managed to develop some friendships with folks that we hang out with once in a while, but nothing that even approaches the level of closeness and "family" that we felt in the church.

But maybe that's not normal or a realistic expectation? The funny thing about being so immersed in a subculture like that your entire life is that when you're suddenly on the outside of it, you realize you don't really have any idea what normal is. I still feel like I don't a lot of the time.

So: What insight can you share? Has anyone had a similar experience? What do your social communities look like out here in the real world? How do you find them?

Hey folks, looking for recommendations. What's your go to word processor on Ubuntu? (EDIT: For regular writing, not a text editor for coding.) I haven't been the biggest fan of Libre office tbh (please don't hate me...) There were just several bugs in Writer that made it unusable for me. I'm curious about alternatives. I read that WPS office is on ubuntu, but I've always found it to run kind of slow (however, my experience was on Windows.).

I don't need a lot of fancy utilities, but would enjoy something a little more beautiful than notepad++ :) My biggest concern is just that it's a stable software. I'm OK with glitches or UI bugs, just nothing that's going to crash and burn and corrupt my work. (I mention this because there are several newer word processors made by single developers, and I'm a little weary to use them because I don't genuinely know how stable the software is.) I'm also not a fan of software that saves in some special format where you rely on that software to open it (or have to go through hoops to convert it.)

Any recommends?

EDIT: I'm new to Ubuntu, in case it makes a difference.

With all that's been coming out in recent years about the negative health impacts of burning gas indoors even with good ventilation, I've been looking into replacing the cheap gas range that came with my house which had been less than amazing to use anyway with a nice induction range.

I have no experience with induction ranges however and have no idea what idea what to look for. I grew up with traditional coiled-eye electric ranges where even "bad" models are still functional, but slow to heat up.

What models have those here had good experiences with, and what are the gotchas? I've done some looking around already and it seems like it's not as simple for going for a high-end option… even top of the line Bosch units seem to have a surprising number of "it ate my dog and insulted my grandmother" types of 1-star negative reviews, and it's hard to tell if that's just noise or something that should be paid attention to.

EDIT: Specifically, I'm looking for standard 30" oven combo slide-in unit. Storage drawer is preferred over second oven.

Thanks!

For many they are considered ~hobbies so ~hobbies.cars and ~hobbies.motorcycles would be a logical place. I don't know if ~transport would be a suitable main category for this since then trucks, tractors, trains and boats could also go there without bloating hobbies' sub-groups too much.

I'd like to hear your input on this, cheers.

I'm currently stuck in a hospital waiting room for probably the rest of the day, so brought my tablet along in the hopes of still being able to get a bit of work done. Plan was to use Termux to ssh into my home computer, but realized too late that this tablet's ssh key hasn't been authorized yet (it's pretty new), so that's a no-go.

Does anyone have recommendations for a good VPS host that charges only for the time you're using it? The day could still be salvaged if I could get into a fresh linux box that can run docker. The only pay-as-you-go VPS I've ever used is Amazon EC2, which is fine, but I'm hoping there are better options that are a little less cumbersome to spin up and tear down.