Time Period: 1990-1994

Choose one album
that you love
that you think deserves more love

Tell us what it is, and why.

Previous posts in series

Additional Details

I don't necessarily mean your exact kinks, more the overall psychological and emotional aspects.

I just had a conversation with my girlfriend about this very topic, discussing why we liked the things we do.

Having thought through it more thoroughly, I find that giving up power makes me feel desired and objectified by the dominant in a safe environment, which is a feeling I seldom get to experience as I'm neither an 7+ out of 10 or in otherwise position to attract that kind of attention.

In addition, always feeling like I have to control every situation I'm in and often feeling somewhat anxious if I'm in an unfamiliar environment, this sort of play also allows me to safely relinquish control.

How about you?

So I'm in the market at the moment for a GPU upgrade. I haven't spent a dumb amount of money on something stupid in a while now and I'm thinking this Christmas season is the time. My only problem is, I've been really out of the loop since the Great Shortage. I've heard AMDs cards these days are actually more than complete jokes, and NVIDIA has been getting too big-headed and making some poor consumer choices. So a switch to AMD sounds like it might be viable for me.

At the moment, I've got an RTX 2070 8GB. I've read that lately, games have been utilizing VRAM like crazy so I want to bolster my numbers on that front. Was looking at 12GB cards since the 24GB ones are all ludicrously priced. At the moment, I'd say my budget is around 500/600 USD. Is AMD worth switching to at the moment? Or should I go for something like a 4060?

I’m having a lot of fun learning the recorder (cheap and relatively easy). I have to learn to read music too, and wrap my head around how rhythm works, but I’m finding that so much is just intuitive, even though I’ve never played anything. I like singing for fun, but that’s pretty much the extent of what I can do. (I now play a mean Hot Cross Buns though.)

Anyone else doing something similar?

I recently visited my sister who has a big screen TV that shows very smooth movement including on Star Trek, the original series. Not that I don't have smooth movement on my home TV set, but hers was ridiculous. It almost looks like raw footage before it was refined down. It was like there were frames between the frames, if that makes any sense.

What am I seeing here?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like qanon, omegle and shinzo abe. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was perturbed.

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!

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.

Recently I've been really nostalgic for really simple, daily turn-based games. Not sure how many people here may have played Empire, but this is what I'm talking about. I very fondly remember dialing in (with a modem) to 4-5 different Unix based BBSes just to play Empire every day. Each day your turn may take 10 minutes. This is the key thing I am nostalgic about...really low time investment every single day, but in a game with lot's of other players.

Other games that I really enjoyed back then were the BBS "door games" like Tradewars. Tradewars can still be played via telnetting into various BBSes that people are keeping up and running.

So, now that I've set the scene, what are the really simple games out there that you may play that are daily turn-based?

Second question, what would people think about a web based version of Empire? I'm thinking of building it, if I don't find the existence of it somewhere already. I think it would be really cool to have someone drop by the web site, click play, and have them thrown into a map with other players (up to 30 per a map or so).

This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.

If you'd like to help support Ukraine, please visit the official site at https://help.gov.ua/ - an official portal for those who want to provide humanitarian or financial assistance to people of Ukraine, businesses or the government at the times of resistance against the Russian aggression.

Week 1 is done. Update your bingo cards and tell us about what you played!

Q: I missed the beginning of this event. Can I still join?
A: Of course! It's open all month.

Topic etiquette:

• It is fine to make multiple top-level posts throughout the week if you play multiple games.

• It is fine to respond to yourself with updates if you're continuing a single game and walk to talk more about it as you go.

• If you are playing Backlog Bingo, feel free to make a top-level post with your card that you edit as you go, while making new posts underneath that to talk about the games as you play them.

Gameplay guidelines:

• Goals for this event (if any) are entirely individual and self-determined.

• You do NOT need to finish games unless you want to. The point is to try out games and have fun, not force ourselves to play things we're not interested in.

Backlog Bingo

Thanks to the amazing efforts of our very own @Wes, we are debuting Backlog Bingo! This is a completely optional way to participate in the month.

You can generate a unique Backlog Bingo card from a collection of 73 different categories. Choose the ones you want in your batch, and then use Wes's custom-made online tool to automatically create your own individualized bingo card.

Wes's tool automatically assembles the markdown for your table, so it will paste beautifully into comments here on Tildes. For example:

Play games throughout the month to check off categories in the Bingo card. The ★ in the middle of every card is a free space -- there are no requirements for that square and any game you play fits there!

The most basic win condition is five-in-a-row, but, if you're feeling really wild, you might go for a win pattern that's a little more involved. Your choice!

Here's an example of someone "winning" the card above:

Bingo Golfing (thanks @Wes and @aphoenix!) is also an option: trying to clear a pattern by counting multiple categories for a single game, thus “winning” with as few games as possible.

Step 3 of Wes's tool includes instructions for checking off games, which has to be done manually. If you need an in-thread guide, you can use the following example below:

||
|:-:|
| ✅ ~~Struckthrough Example Category~~ <br> **Bolded Game Title** |

If you can't figure out how to check off categories or you break the Markdown for your table, feel free to ask for help in the comments or PM me and I can help you out!

FAQs

Just as a preface, I am not making this post because I oppose immigration or want to turn away imigrants, much less those who can't live safely in their home countries, I just notice immigration and misery seem to be intimately related, and it honestly makes me wonder if a world without misery is also a world without immigration, at least in the form of mass migrations of a specific people group or type of person. I also recognize that more immigration and cultural diversity does have a wide variety of benefits, regardless of it's causes or motives, and that leaving your home for some faraway country looking for some high-end job not present where you live is definitely not the fault or problem of the person migrating.

I've been thinking about immigration recently and it kind of astounds me just how much of immigration happens because of misery, Colonialism or oppression. Here's a pretty broad and varied list of mass immigration phenomena and (as I understand them) their causes:

• The USA has a southern border crisis (to some extent because Republicans like to exaggerate it to justify their xenophobia and so on) because Mexico and Latin America as a whole are much poorer than the USA (something the USA itself shares a good deal of blame for) and thus want to come to the USA, with illegal immigrants often doing so by any means necessary.

• Europe (and Turkey kinda) has an Arab migrant crisis because of the (mostly) failed Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War destabilizing the region or plunging it into war, forcing million to flee to Europe, which is in large part responsible for this crisis seing as (West) Europeans colonized the whole region and set much of the stage for conflicts.

• A large share of white people from a variety of different ethnic groups in the USA were fleeing oppression or misery in Europe (and the ones that were not came here to colonize and oppress the natives):

  • Quakers fleeing to the USA due to British persecution

  • Irish-Americans coming to the USA in largest amounts following the Potato Famine

  • The height of German-American migration to the USA followed the 1848 revolution's failure to make a more liberal and united Germany

  • Meanwhile, Black Americans, after being forcibly migrated out of the African continent to be enslaved, fled the US South in the millions starting around the 1920s as this was the nadir of race relations and the heights of the Jim Crow age. White flight to the suburbs (another large migration) was one of the main northern responses to this influx of black people.

• In early 20th century Brazil, the government encouraged immigration from European countries and Japan to them in large part due to a need for cheap labor still unmet a few decades after the end of slavery and as a way to make the country more white. Many of the European migrants were poor workers looking to make a better life for themselves.

• Zionism arguably owes it's existence and success to centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe and it's culmination in the Holocaust, alongside a sympathetic British Empire and UN being able to simply lease most of the Levant that they had colonized to a new Jewish state. This is layered on top of the fact that the reason Jewish people even left the Levant in the first place was oppression by several different foreign empires for centuries since antiquity. The modern state of Israel also owes the largest share of it's Jews from neighboring middle-eastern countries which also expelled them due to their own anti-Semitism.

• In the middle of the 20th century in Brazil, millions of Brazilian northeasterners migrated to the Southeast in search of economic opportunity they lacked (and to some extent still do) at home, as well as fleeing drought in more rural zones. Notably, in the 2010s we have seen many of these people return to the Northeast following Lula massively helping the Northeast develop over his first presidency in the 2000s. For a personal anecdote, both of my mother's parents did this, and brought my mother to where I live in São Paulo, and then they also went back to the northeast in the mid 2010s.

• Virtually the entirety of the Global South and also Eastern Europe suffers from Brain Drain, where their most educated people leave in search of better opportunity and higher incomes in developed countries and the multinationals they possess. Much of the USA's legal immigration and economic power in spite of it's numerous flaws is owed to this.

• Somewhat similarly, most Western European countries have one or more large communities of people who originate from a country they had colonized as an empire. (The USA also owes much of their Filipino American community to owning them despite it not being the same colonialism as practiced by the British on the USA or by Spain.)

Looking at this fairly long list of examples, I have to wonder if there are mass migrations that happened because of more positive reasons or if any of these already existing mass migrations can be explained by more positive reasons?

Well, maybe they're not that odd, but I've not really been paying attention to what phone manufacturers are up to these days, so I need some help with what will work for me. I've previously had a huawei p10 lite (which I only sold after the news of them selling data to the Chinese government), Pixel 3a (i used that until it dying breath and then sold it for parts), and now I have a RealMe 8 5g, but I'm having charging issues with it. I might look at getting it fixed, but depending on the cost I might sell it on and buy something else.

MUST HAVES:

• Headphone jack. I'll die on this hill and I will get a phone with a headphone jack as long as they are available to me.
• good battery. It's the main reason I went for the RealMe 8, the battery has just been fantastic so far.
• No bloatware. I'm ruling out Samsung, and anything similar that is full of extra junk I can't get rid of. As close to pure android as possible is best.

IDEAL

• good for games. the heaviest duty game I play on my phone is TFT, and then I move around between various puzzle and idle games for when I'm travelling or on my lunch break, but I don't need it to be super powerful.
• wireless charging. Nearly put this as a must have, but I could definitely live without it.
• Not chinese made/owned. Also nearly put this as must have, but I don't want to limit myself massively.
• under £250 I very rarely spend even that much on a phone, but I'm open to treating myself a bit.

I don't care about the camera really. I'm a photography hobbyist and so if I want to take good photos for memories I'll just take a camera with me. If it's good then thats a bonus but its near the bottom of my list of things I think about.

What would there be out there for me? I've always liked the look of Sony phones but they're typically a lot of money, how do they fit in with my requirements? I've also been looking into the Fairphone but it really is out of my budget, and i don't know how it runs.

Thanks in advance for any help :)

I often browse Tildes on my phone, which automatically changes from Light to Dark theme at night and vice-versa in the morning.

The issue I'm having is that changing the theme on mobile is more difficult than on desktop, and I'd have to always be doing it manually.

Other websites can read the theme preference from the browser and automatically adjust. Some even give the users an option to choose which theme to associate with the Light and Dark preferences.

I'd like to propose automatic theme Change as a feature for consideration, since Tildes already supports themes, and customization of which theme is which for a later date.

Merrily abusing my piano with my horrifying lack of skill, I keep noticing songs beginning with the notes C-F:

• Moonlight Shadows
• Auld Lang Syne
• Es hatt ein Bauer ein junges Weib
• Der sad to katte på et bord
• Forest Green

It sorta feels like the melody exists in the area around F, while C is used as kind of special effect. Are there some connection or tradition behind those C-F openings, or is it just me seeing patterns where there is none?

I like the idea of MOBAs, and sometimes contemplate learning one. Not to be really good -- just enough to have fun as a lower-class player. It sounds attractive as something that might occupy my brain for a few hours, but I wouldn't wanna treat it like a career without pay, like I used to work on my chess (with serious courses, studying books, etc).

So my question it, is that something that can or should be done? And what game would be best?[1]

[1] As long as it is not an FPS.

I know this is a weird thing to ask, but google is failing me and I don't have enough agricultural knowledge to know where to start looking. I'm hoping this isn't another food thing I'm the only one who thinks about.

I love carrots but I'm increasingly irritated by the tiny long carrots that I can find in the markets. I just bought a bag of carrots that had a number of them thinner than my pinky finger. In the meanwhile whenever I look at cooking shows on Youtube that are made in other countries they have thicker, longer, or otherwise more substantial carrots. The ones in Japan seem huge; some of them look like they have a 2" diameter!

Is it just that they are using a different variety? If so, why would they be using those tiny ones here?

This is breaking news and I'm no journalist, so bear with me here.

It looks like a bunch of people at The Escapist were fired earlier today (one, two, possibly more). In response, the entire rest of the video team has quit (including Yahtzee, plus all the rest)

The video team has plans to go independent. From their new Discord, they made this statement (from Nick Calandro):

I was fired from The Escapist along with many others today, and in response the entire video team, including Yahtzee, has resigned from The Escapist.

Our plan is to go independent, but we will share more plans on that later this week.

I'm a technical writer. My company sells DevOps software mostly operated on the command line. I'm responsible for explaining this software via HTML5 documentation on our website.

One of our largest customers employs at least one software developer who is "totally blind" and requires a screen reader to work. I assume others exist, but they have not contacted us. Unfortunately, our website is not 100% ADA-compliant. It's far from the worst I've seen, but it could be a lot better.

I'm familiar with high-level web accessibility paradigms and am currently doing an informal audit of our website to determine what we need to improve to make it fully ADA-compliant. I've prioritized discovery for accessibility concerns in our next sprint. Eventually, I'd like to look into hiring a consultant to do a more robust analysis, but only if necessary because I'd need to request funding. Unfortunately, I have limited control over the text that displays in our product, just the documentation. Long-term, I'd like to collaborate with the product team to ensure our CLI is fully ADA-compliant.

I've begun reading web accessibility materials from the government. In the meantime, I wanted to ask: are any of you blind or low-vision, or have you used screen readers in the past? Or do you know any blind/low-vision devs? Either way, can you provide any personal insight into any of the things I can do as a technical writer to improve the usability of software documentation for the purpose of enabling you to do your job? My goal is to make the documentation experience great for screen reader users, not just OK.

The "album problem" is, of course, the fact that our music listening habits have changed over the past decade and the value of a well-thought-out album is not nearly what it once was. This is in large part due to the fact that it's easy for people to create playlists with a billion different songs to choose from, recommendation algorithms, "Discovery Weekly" playlists, and whatever else the streaming services can throw at us.

I may not speak for all of us, but I've personally not been able to fully consume a new album for quite a while now, finding that I gravitate toward a few songs/singles that get dumped into a separate playlist. I don't like this and I miss the days that I would discover deep cuts in the back of an album that I listened to ad nauseum.

I present to you the "Six Disc Changer" playlist. The rules are simple:

1. Create a new playlist in Spotify, Tidal, or your chosen platform. Call it "Six Disc Changer"
2. Add six FULL albums to the playlist
3. Force yourself to listen to the playlist -- maybe not exclusively -- but a fair amount. Imagine you're driving around in your 2002 Honda Civic and the only music available to you is what you've got in your CD changer.
4. Any time you want to add a new album, you must remove an old album. You should only have six CDs loaded up at any time.

If you want to take the concept a few steps further...

5. Any time you remove a CD, add it to a separate playlist called "CD Catalogue".
6. Any time you want to add a new CD to the catalogue, you must "purchase" it with an "allowance" of your choosing. I'm going with 1 new album per week. You can swap out albums from your Catalogue playlist freely, but new albums must be "purchased." This will simulate scarcity, which was a large part of what drove us to listen to albums over and over again.

But... why?

My goal is to get back to listening to full albums and truly taking them in. The best way I can think of to do that is to simulate the way things used to be. By using a streaming service instead of, say, just going back to CDs or records, you get the benefits of convenience, Last.fm, easy Bluetooth, etc.

As for what's in my CD changer right now, I've got:

1. Sufjan Stevens - Javelin
2. The Antlers - Need Nothing
3. Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues
4. Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come
5. George Harrison - Living in the Material World
6. Bob Moses - Battle Lines

Is it dumb? Probably. It's been fun so far and my music listening experience has been much more focused.

This is Album of the Week #8 ~ This week's album is Tame Impala - The Slow Rush

Year of Release: 2020
Genre(s): Psychedelic Pop
Country: United States
Length: 57 minutes
Listen! (Album.Link)

Excerpt from NPR:

As a producer, Parker has more moving parts to balance this time, but he arrives at a deft auteur-pop synergy in which every last decision, down to the assorted cathedral-like reverb effects that lend his voice an otherworldly aura, become as intrinsic to the music as the melodies or the words. Though there's a lot going on in the latticework of the music — springy analog synthesizer arpeggios, guitars doing unguitarlike things, layers upon layers of pastel lushness — the post-psychedelic swirl of The Slow Rush registers as an organic blend, with the songs never feeling cluttered or too tightly scripted.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

I'm looking to get a new laptop for when I want to go work at a coffee shop or something.

I have seen the Framework laptops and like the idea of a modular computer you can upgrade or repair.

I'm a little hesitant though. The last laptop I tried was to buy a Pinebook a year or two ago. I got it, turned it on once and it worked fine, but then after that it would just get a black screen when I powered it on. Some posts online indicated that it might be because the memory card wasn't seated properly and it might fix the problem to reseat it. But the tiny screws on the bottom were really tight and I ended up stripping one of them while trying to open it up, so now I just have a laptop I've used once collecting dust.

I want to make sure I have an easier experience with my next computer. Can anyone attest to the reliability of the Framework 13?

Timasomo 2023 is now officially complete!

Over the next few days, participants will be posting their creations and efforts in this topic to showcase their work to the community.

Comments and feedback are both welcome and encouraged.

Let these creators know what an awesome job they've done!

Creators: In posting your showcase:

• Give your project a title, and use the # markdown to make it stand out in the showcase thread!
• Link to your project in whatever way works best for it.
• If you like, give a "creator statement" that contextualizes what your project is.
• Add anything else you consider relevant! The showcase is yours!
• If you need examples, take a look at last year’s showcase.

Community:

• Treat this thread like a walk through an art gallery or a museum where you get to see different works on display.
• Simple appreciations for the creators are not noise—they are valuable community support!
• Make sure any feedback you give is constructive and meant to help.

Does anyone have any short-to-medium length content that clearly introduces the ideas of Jung?

I don't mind it being dense philosophically, but there's sort of this deliberate obfuscation of ideas that Jungian content creators utilize towards some end.

In philosophy, specific terms and jargon is necessary to ensure philosophical precision of the idea being presented. If one looks up said jargon, they can gain context about what's being communicated.

As far as Jung content online goes, there's a lot of jargon being used, but I'd wager about 50% of it is made up on the fly. When looked up, the term often either doesn't exist, is an adhoc portmanteau of two random terms, or simply doesn't make sense within the context it's used. Why? It seems like they deliberately are obfuscating their ideas for seemingly no reason. Perhaps there's a perceived invulnerability to criticism if your position on basic ideas can't be nailed down?

It seems that Jordan Peterson is the most prominent idea-obfuscator in this tradition, but I understand why he does it; some of his audience likely wouldn't care for the fact that he's likely what they'd describe as an atheist if you were able to pin down the ideas he conveys (e.g., Christ is but one of many manifestations of a Jungian archetype.)

Kinds of content I'm looking for:

• Newb friendly
• Clearly communicates ideas
• Philosophically precise
• Critical, but not polemic (i.e., no "debunking" videos)
• Video/audio/books preferred

Thank you in advance (:

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.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like careers, ad blocking and subaru. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was fascinated.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.

If you'd like to help support Ukraine, please visit the official site at https://help.gov.ua/ - an official portal for those who want to provide humanitarian or financial assistance to people of Ukraine, businesses or the government at the times of resistance against the Russian aggression.

Choose one series
that you love
that you think deserves more love

Tell us what it is, and why.

Previous posts in the series

Additional Details

All major operating systems have their own file-sharing protocols (AirDrop, Nearby Share, etc.) which are incompatible with each other. There do exist apps for "cross-platform file sharing", however, they require installation on both the sender and the receiver devices, which makes it a bad solution for quickly sending files to other people.

I was thinking about making a file sharing solution that acts as a bridge between those different protocols and only requires action from one of the parties. However, there's a huge issue with AirDrop - it uses a custom networking protocol called AWDL. There are open implementations like OWL, but they still require low-level wifi access, so it can't be run on Android without kernel modifications.

This means that the only way this can be implemented is by using a physical device, eg. a Raspberry Pi Zero W or a similar microcomputer that runs a custom firmware. An obvious problem is that it requires a lot of effort - you need to buy a Raspberry, flash it with the firmware and carry it around with you, just to be able to send or receive files to other devices without using third-party websites.

So I'm personally not sure if that's worth making. But maybe you'll still be interested? Is this a big enough problem for you to want to use a hardware solution?

November 1st is here! Technically, the creative time period for Timasomo has ended but if you need more time to keep working, go for it!

We have a few more days before the Showcase goes live, so I wanted to run through some guidelines:

Examples: The best way to get a feel for the Showcase thread and its expectations is to take a look at the previous showcases: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

Time: I will be posting the showcase when it’s approximately 8:00 AM, Sunday morning, in Auckland, New Zealand. You can use that link to see when the topic will go live for your local time (which for much of the world will still be Saturday).

Do not feel obligated to post immediately unless you’re ready to! Take the time you need — the Showcase topic will be there when you are ready for it.

Requirements: The only requirements for the showcase are a title for your project, as well as the sharing of your project (or parts/info about your project — see Privacy below) in whatever way is best for you (could be pictures, videos, download links, etc.)

Recommendations: While your project will speak for itself, the story of its creation as well as your own thoughts and feelings are also valuable and help personalize your work for people. Feel free to add any “creator’s statements” you want in addition to your work to convey that. Many of you have been posting AMAZING stuff in the weekly discussion threads, but a lot of people who view the Showcase won’t necessarily have followed that.

Think about what you want people to know about you and your project and share it alongside your work!

Unfinished Projects: It is PERFECTLY FINE to share projects that are in an unfinished state. It is also PERFECTLY FINE to wait until you’re done to share them. Go with what works best for you.

Privacy: Tildes is a privacy-respecting site, and that extends to you and your work. If you created something for Timasomo but do not wish to fully share it publicly, that’s fine. Feel free to share a limited glimpse into your work rather than the whole thing.

Alternately, you don’t have to share anything! You could simply describe what you did for your Showcase entry without sharing the product itself. It is entirely up to you how much you share and how it gets presented.

Promotion: Timasomo is an incentive to create, but it is not the roof under which your work has to live. Your work is your work, and it’s yours to share elsewhere as well. Feel free to post it on X/Mastodon/Tumblr/reddit/your blog/etc. Also, feel free to share your work outside of ~creative.timasomo on Tildes if it fits into, say, ~games or ~tech or ~life (tag it with user content). This will help your project reach a broader audience here (since not everyone is subscribed to this group).

The Tildes Code of Conduct says the following about self-promotion:

Sharing your own content is welcome as long as you're involved in the community, but don't just treat Tildes as a source of an audience.

Anyone who is actively participating in Timasomo is, by definition, involved in the community. Your work for Timasomo is absolutely welcome on the site!

Hosting: If you are looking for a good place to host images that isn’t Imgur, postimages.org is a good alternative.

If you have greater or different hosting needs and no easy way to make that happen, ask in the comments here. Tildes has a lot of wonderfully helpful people who are super knowledgeable with tech and will likely be able to point you in the right direction.

Questions: If there’s anything I missed, ask below!

Hype: I am SO excited for the Showcase y’all don’t even KNOW! It has been a joy and a legitimate inspiration to follow your projects over the last month. I am thrilled that the whole community will get to see them as well as all of you, standing tall and proud beside them (metaphorically), in just a few days’ time.

The event has officially begun! Let's Burn through these backlogs!

Use this thread to post about the games that you play.

Thread etiquette:

• It is fine to make multiple top-level posts throughout the week if you play multiple games.

• It is fine to respond to yourself with updates if you're continuing a single game and walk to talk more about it as you go.

• If you are playing Backlog Bingo, feel free to make a top-level post with your card that you edit as you go, while making new posts underneath that to talk about the games as you play them.

Gameplay guidelines:

• Goals for this event (if any) are entirely individual and self-determined.

• You do NOT need to finish games unless you want to. The point is to try out games and have fun, not force ourselves to play things we're not interested in.

Backlog Bingo

Thanks to the amazing efforts of our very own @Wes, we are debuting Backlog Bingo! This is a completely optional way to participate in the month.

You can generate a unique Backlog Bingo card from a collection of 73 different categories. Choose the ones you want in your batch, and then use Wes's custom-made online tool to automatically create your own individualized bingo card.

Wes's tool automatically assembles the markdown for your table, so it will paste beautifully into comments here on Tildes. For example:

Play games throughout the month to check off categories in the Bingo card. The ★ in the middle of every card is a free space -- there are no requirements for that square and any game you play fits there!

The most basic win condition is five-in-a-row, but, if you're feeling really wild, you might go for a win pattern that's a little more involved. Your choice!

Here's an example of someone "winning" the card above:

Bingo Golfing (thanks @Wes and @aphoenix!) is also an option: trying to clear a pattern by counting multiple categories for a single game, thus “winning” with as few games as possible.

Step 3 of Wes's tool includes instructions for checking off games, which has to be done manually. If you need an in-thread guide, you can use the following example below:

||
|:-:|
| ✅ ~~Struckthrough Example Category~~ <br> **Bolded Game Title** |

If you can't figure out how to check off categories or you break the Markdown for your table, feel free to ask for help in the comments or PM me and I can help you out!

FAQs

TestFlight

TestFlight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

Three Cheers for Tildes is an unofficial mobile app for Tildes, originally announced on Tildes' 5th birthday. The original announcement answers some basic questions about the app.

iPhone and iPad support

The app supports iOS versions as early as iOS 12.4, which includes iPhone 5s and iPad Air 1st generation.

The app also sports an iPad dual-pane layout, similar to the tablet layout in the Android version.

30-second iPad demo: https://youtube.com/shorts/S0tT2qM-Wh8

Missing features

Like the Android app, the iOS app is still missing tons of features—hence "alpha". Alpha version 0.5 is currently good enough for light use, to help check on Tildes once or twice a day. You can log in, vote, and comment.

Notable missing features as of v0.5: Submitting topics; Markdown editor; In-app notifications; Comment labels; Sort options.

Android?

(Looking for the Android alpha? See the Android alpha testing announcement.)

Now that the iOS alpha version is out, I can look at adding missing features to both Android and iOS. Thanks for your patience if you've been using the Android app in the meantime.

The release of the Meta Quest 3 seems to have been slowplayed but my take is that Zuckerberg is still going full force ahead with MR but doesn't want to have a fiasco like the last round of publicity about "the metaverse” when people were mentioning it in the same sentence as blockchains and NFTs.

I read a lot of very positive reviews about the hardware

https://www.theverge.com/23906313/meta-quest-3-review-vr-mixed-reality-headset

https://www.reddit.com/r/QuestPro/comments/17631ja/24_hours_in_my_quest_3_review/

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/meta-quest-3

so I got one and I am really impressed. It comes with a very convincing demo where cracks appear in the ceiling and walls of your room opening views onto another planet and then aliens come into your room that you have to shoot with the controllers to stuff them into a tube. I am showing this demo to people on the hopes I can sell some kind of MR exhibit to a local museum.

Karl Guttag could show that the MR quality is "awful" from an eye chart perspective but the motion-to-photon is really excellent, you can throw and catch a ball just fine wearing it, and it is totally practical to walk around the house, interact with people, read (large) text to copy, use a touchscreen, etc.

I get the feeling too that they are doing many of the right things to market it, for instance, it comes with a license for a major game that comes out in two months which will might give people who don't click with it right away a chance to re-engage. There is intensive notification based marketing with discounts and stuff which is totally textbook for a new app store and that I like at the moment but it is possible it just won't connect if the product isn't up to snuff.

I tried Horizon Worlds and ran into the problem of not being able to succeed at the fishing minigame (in real life I've only been able to catch sunfish and smelt, but you really can fill up your freezer with zero skill with the later) and also the way it is weirdly empty. I have some content that I think could be put in there which I think is often a good idea on a new platform that is heavily promoted (e.g. easy to get free publicity and other benefits from the platform) but that emptiness might mean they don't feel pressure to get content. VRChat was more fun but showed me the challenge of onboarding people to that sort of thing, I got into an entrance room where I met one person who was actually attentive and trying to communicate and I think a lot of kids who were "doing their own thing", I figured out some of how to interact in that space but the problem of "getting gud" while sharing the space with other people who might be annoyed seems tough.

My take is that the software is not up to the hardware right now but as a software developer I think that’s a great problem to have.

If you're excited about Apple Vision I think you should be excited by this. Any thoughts? Anyone tried the MQ3? Anyone developing content for it?

What is this?

Your "backlog" is all those games you've been meaning to play or get around to, but never have yet. This event is an attempt to get us to collectively dig into that treasure trove of experiences!

How do I participate?

Choose a game (or several) from your backlog and play it/them. Then tell us about your experiences in the discussion thread for the week! If you're not sure what you might write, take a look at our 2022 or 2020 events to get an idea.

Do I need to finish the games I play?

Nope! Not at all. There aren't really any requirements for the event so much as this is an incentive to get us to play games we've been avoiding starting up, for whatever reason. Play as much or as little as you like of a given game. Try out dozens for ten minutes each or dive into one for 40 hours. There's no wrong way to participate!

What's the timeline?

I will post an update thread weekly, each Wednesday, all through November. At the end of the month, I think it would be neat to tally how many collective games we all removed from our backlogs, as well as what the best finds were from our collective digging into our libraries. I expect we'll turn up some good hidden gems, as well as interesting insights.

Do I need to sign up?

You don't have to do anything to officially join or participate in the event other than post in these threads! Participate in whatever way works for you. Also, because this is ongoing, it is okay to make more than one top-level post if you're updating the thread with new information.

Do I need to wait until November to get started?

Technically yes, but I won't police it. The first official discussion thread will go up on Wednesday the 1st, but feel free to kick things off here if you're wanting to pre-game the month!

But November has Big Name Release coming out. Why this month when people will be focused on that new game?

I'm doing the best that I can! A "problem" with 2023 is that it has been an absolutely stacked year for gaming releases. There simply hasn't been a "slow" month. With limited time left, I figured November was at least better than December. Think of this as an opportunity to cut down on your backlog before all the end-of-the-year sales hit.

What if I have trouble deciding what to play?

You're in luck! I'll be debuting a Backlog Bingo Card card system when the event starts. It'll hopefully help people cut through the difficulty of choosing and make decision-making easier for those of who are cursed with both big backlogs and unhealthy doses of analysis paralysis.

Let's burn through these backlogs!

So, I used to think I hated all love songs.
I disliked them because, in the ones that id heard were the type that found on the FM radio stations, and those tend to fall into a couple broad categories:

• I just met you, and I want to marry/stalk you
• You broke up with me, and I will do anything to get you back
• Your with someone else, and Im trying to win you over

My view on them changed when I found I'll Take Lonely Tonight, A song about the temptation of cheating in an established relationship.
While not a song I can exactly relate to, it still struck me, because its, well, respectful.
Its respectful towards the woman offering the one night stand, but still describes a deep, enduring love between Tim and his wife,
that he would rather spend the night on his own then break their trust.
(I guess it probably helps that I already like tim minchin, especially his newer, more subdued works.)

Since then, Ive only discovered one other song that scratches that same itch: Like my Father, a song about how the artist's parents relationship set the standard she strives for in her own relationship (My parents relationship was very much a role model for my marriage today, so this one hits me in the feels)

Im actively looking for other similar songs, and would appreciate any other suggestions.

This is Album of the Week #7 ~ This week's album is Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else

Year of Release: 2014
Genre(s): Post-Hardcore, Indie Rock
Country: United States
Length: 31 minutes
Listen! (Album.Link)

Excerpt from The Quietus:

And damn, the boy Baldi can write a hook. While Here And Nowhere Else is a noisy onslaught that rattles along at a cracking pace, there's a real sense of fun and catchy melodies that Billie Joe Armstrong would be proud of (especially album closer 'I'm Not Part Of Me'), which will probably see the album appropriated by beer-guzzling frat boys, despite lyrically being about life on the fringes – alienation, despair, heartache. More parallels with Cobain there, perhaps. Baldi told the A. V. Club around the release of Attack On Memory that he hadn't really listened to Nirvana, pinning any similarity in their sound to a mutual love of The Wipers. However, fans of Bleach and In Utero (and anyone yearning for what might have been as the circumstances surrounding Cobain's suicide are picked apart in ghoulish detail) should lap this shit up like milk-starved pussy cats.

Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?

--

Album of the week is currently chosen randomly (via random.org) from the top 5000 albums from a custom all-time RYM chart, with a 4/5 popularity weighting. The chart is recalculated weekly.

Missed last week? It can be found here.

Any feedback on the format is welcome ~~

Every few months I get the itch to support journalism and expand my news from the low quality high fluff news sources that tend to be free and subscribe to some long-form sources of news, opinion, and investigative journalism, but every time I go through the same process of pricing subscriptions, struggling to decide which one, and then finally just giving up and not subscribing to any of them.

If money was no object I'd probably subscribe right now to:

• The Atlantic
• The New Yorker
• Harpers
• The Economist
• National Review
• WSJ
• NYT

(trying to focus on a variety of political leanings, but mostly from generally high-factuality sources)

I like Apple News+ in concept, and the price is decent, but after a trial subscription I felt like the UI was difficult to navigate, difficult to search and filter, and the news sources were still a subset of the entire publications. I also have to wonder whether the journalists are sufficiently compensated by Apple or whether they get pennies compared to a direct subscription.

So, I come here seeking recommendations -- perhaps somebody here has found a good solution to this problem?

I'm seeing a lot of news in my feed about Qualcomm chips approaching laptop performance, such as

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-looks-like-the-windows-worlds-answer-to-apple-silicon/

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21105/qualcomm-previews-snapdragon-x-elite-soc-oryon-cpu-starts-in-laptops-

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/qualcomm_x_elite/

Will this turn out any better than the last few times Microsoft tried to break away from Intel? Would you want such a laptop? Will it wake Intel out of its complacency?

Just saw this other thread about the FNaF movie actually doing quite well at the box office, which apperently is much newsworthy and something I should care about. This here thing is popular, this and that is trending, read all about it. Yay. Well sure, it's quite nice they made their money back, but I felt it looked a bit overproduced and cookie-cutter like. Okay, haven't actually seen the blessed movie, but I've decided to hate it, so there!

I know about David Lynch, I know about Cronenberg, I know about J-horror, all that old stuff, but are there any contemporary horror movies which will screw me over? Something a bit more art-house and crazy? I've been a bit away from movie for the last decades, but I'm unsure if I'm out of the loop, or if there is anything to be out of the loop about.

Hello,

I have quite some technical question and my DuckDuckGo-fu seems very weak on this one. I hope it is ok to post questions on Tildes, as it is not really discussion material... but someone can still learn and use whatever come from this.

I have Live Aid concert that I ripped from my DVDs and I wanted to merge the individual video files (there are four) into one long video. I'm on Linux and I'm used to ffmpeg in command line, though I do not know it that much. Each of the input videos has its own chapters and I would like to transfer those chapters into the final video as well. Preferably adding a chapter in between every input video.

I was unable to find if ffmpeg allows for something like that in a single inline command. I may have to export chapters from each input video and add them into one "chapter" file and redo times by hand on them and then use this file as "chapter" input when merging the videos, but all this is just a theory on my part.

Is there some FFmpeg expert here who has done something like that?

I miss photography subreddits. I don’t miss Reddit as a whole at all though, and I think smaller forums like Tildes and a couple Discord servers have helped bridge the gap in a lot of other areas. But I just have not found a good replacement for r/analog in seeing other hobbyists’ film photography and share my own. Where should I be looking?

Upcoming Dates:

• Timasomo Showcase Thread -- Sunday, November 5 (one week away!)

Technically all work should be finished before November 1st (but if you're running up on time, that's never really been a hard deadline 😉).

November 1-4 are for putting finishing touches on the project to ready it for the showcase.

If you need an idea of what the Showcase thread will look like, here's last year's.

Update us on your progress so far!

• What did/didn't you get done this week?

• Anything go according to plan?

• Anything go off the rails?

• Any successes or struggles to share?

• Do you need feedback or help on anything?

This is your topic to share anything and everything you want about what you’ve made so far.

Yo everyone, I'm fresh from the first good night's sleep I've gotten in awhile. I'm ecstatic to finally be finished (I took a longer road than most) and just felt like chatting with you fine folks.

Getting that dissertation done was a real challenge and while I'm happy I finished before George R. R. Martin finished the next ASOIAF book, I have a lot more sympathy now for him or anyone who has to write something lengthy.

Anyone else in a graduate program or recently finished? To those who have gone through the process, what'd you do immediately afterwards? I'm in the middle of a job interview process so I can't quite take a vacation, but I am planning to stick at least a full week somewhere where I travel and do nothing.

Tonight, I'm going to relax and watch The Magic Flute opera with friends which I've not done before.

I’m curious what your experience with taking pets like dogs on public transport is. Tildes has a diverse community from many different countries and I wonder how the process can differ!

I don’t own any pets right now, but I think that if I owned a dog my life would become a lot harder. I have no interest in owning a car at this point, but in my city and country, it would be hard or impossible to travel with my pet on public transit. The limit seems to be about 20 pounds for dogs on Amtrak—but I think small dogs are ridiculous creatures, so I’d already be blocked—and apparently no non-service animals on SEPTA.

Should we make public transit more accessible to animals? How do we do that? What are the challenges for transit agencies/other passengers and what are the benefits?

Can be any style, just something you like and think is interesting or fun or moving. Edit, classical music is fine if it is relatively unfamiliar.

I recently went to a random benefit concert and found Kendall Dean, who started with classical violin, added fiddle skills, vocals, guitar, modern tech.

Here is an instrumental track, but other songs are in a variety of styles and some are covers.
The Woods

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.

Hey there! Back when the pandemic was in full swing, I stumbled upon a comment that shared a link to a website with a title quite like this post. I can't quite recall if I saw the comment on Reddit, the orange site, or even here. The site was quite basic, and claimed to have a list of jobs from companies that understood that its workers would like to have a life outside of work

The job market has changed a lot since the pandemic, but if any of you awesome folks happen to know where I can find a good part-time software development job, I'd be seriously grateful.

Hey folks

I've got a couple of months to put together an overview for tools that a company could use as part of television production and I'm hoping for your input.

It goes without saying that everyone in the tech world is pushing ai heavily. Having been in IT for almost 3 decades I know what to watch, look at, out for, etc. AI is still very much regurgitation of its input but the input is vast. What I have right now is some bare bones of what I want to throw around for insight and discussion for what would help people in TV production tool wise.

For those that do not know how TV production works it's a simple idea: you generate a huge raft of ideas for shows, absolute basic outline of what the show would be about and put that in to a paper. You then sit around in your research/Dev dept and pitch to each other and the ones that people go "yeah, that could make a good show" get some extra meat added. Those ideas get pitched to dept heads who then take the best ones to channel/broadcasters execs and see if any get hooked at all. If they do, they get given some development funding to put together a taster/pilot/video version with the funding they have. This means shot on camera, run through an edit for cutting, audio, graphics, etc, still in its infancy and development state. This video and a bigger padded Treatment (documented idea with its bones, flesh and now make-up added) goes back to the broadcaster and you wait for feedback. If you get lucky you get a greenlight and order for X amount of shows and then you have a production. The production is taking the idea to it's full potential, shooting it, audio and music, graphics, the works and that's what you see on TV.

I'm after working out what tools AI offers today that would help them with this process. Right now, ChatGPT v4 will generate some great treatment ideas for shows, except I would imagine these shows already exist or have been tried to channel/broadcaster before? AI is regurgitation and not thoughtful to its own ideas and imagination. I suppose with great prompts it could generate great output.

Okay, that's the process and I'm rambling. Right now I have a short list of LLMs such as ChatGPT and Bard types that will help with the idea stage for researchers. I could use some decent links for prompters to help the research know how to ask AI for what they want out of it.

When it comes to generative AI for graphics I only have experience with txt2img using the likes of DALLE and Midjourney, along with some inpainting for changing images with lies, I mean, graphics (insert plane on fire, etc).

Does anyone have any other ideas and tools which would help production or useful things I can look at and research myself to see how they could be helpful? Auto audio generation? Graphic building that takes less time? Think of those great show intros for the likes of Game of Thrones, can that be done using AI yet or are we no where near that level for AI? Even basic video edits, where are we for AI help? Can we feed it some clips and have it autostitch based on an input document? If so, what tools should I be looking at and researching?

I'm asking here before I plop search terms in Google and Bing and then get swamped with whichever has paid the most or played the SEO game to be top of the pages. Asking for real human input is definitely better than asking AI which may actually be the whole point of my talk when it happens.

Thanks for listening and any help/pointers/sites you can give.

UPDATE:
I went off and did some research. Enjoy these if you want. I had issues linking so if a mod wants to go ahead and do that, feel free:

Pre-Production:

Treatment idea generation

Generating a great idea is usually through using knowledge and research, but these days you can literally ask an AI engine to come up with a show idea. Here I will list some good AIs that use a very large language model (LLM) to come up with ideas:

ChatGPT4 from OpenAI

ChatGPT is the best known AI out there, but essentially it's the AI that everyone uses. What's different is the data that is fed to it. ChatGPT from OpenAI has a lot of knowledge, however, it's generally backdated information and not up to the minute.

You.com

Built on ChatGPT4 AI. Data fed in more up to date as it's based around a search engine. Due to the plethora of sources being fed to the You.com Chat bot, you may find some more interesting results and ideas.

Bing.com - Chat

Directly leverages the latest version of ChatGPT4 from OpenAI but uses additional media from Microsoft sources. Responses are more natural due to the Turing Natural Language.

Copy.ai

A fun LLM designed for advertising agencies and the alike. The difference here is you can upload a back-catalogue of your own data for it to analyse to take on your brand voice, mix up your ideas and generally become one of the family.

Prompting

Just from picking one of the four AIs listed above, you can straight out ask for a basic show idea. All of them came back with interesting ideas from the prompt of "Generate me a great show idea for a television production treatment. The show should be a documentary for daytime viewing."

Prompting is the hardest part of any AI interaction, the results can wildly vary depending on what and how you ask. Due to this, there's a new type of website to help with prompting:

https://promptperfect.jina.ai/prompts

Using the line from above about generating a great show idea, promptperfect injects a lot more information into the prompt before running: "Please create a compelling show idea for a daytime documentary television production. The show should be engaging and informative, catering to a broad daytime audience. It should focus on a specific topic or theme that is both educational and entertaining. The documentary should be well-researched and provide in-depth information on the chosen topic, presenting it in a visually appealing and accessible manner. The show should aim to captivate viewers and leave them with a better understanding and appreciation of the subject matter. Additionally, please provide a brief outline of the structure and format of the documentary, including the number of episodes, approximate runtime, and any unique features or storytelling techniques that will make the show stand out." The quality of the Treatment created will be far superior to the initial request.

https://webutility.io/

An interesting take on generation of prompting. It breaks down the prompts to dropdown boxes with key words such as create, design, analyse along with the focus type. This forces the ai to create some more complex and well thought out documentation for a treatment idea with explanation of how it got to where it did.

AIs to help with show production

Location finding/scouting

With the latest AI image searching features, you can now upload an image and get a "related" search. Using this technology, you could, for example, look for English Country Gardens that you would like to film out of. Uploading this image would give you a list of locations, similar places and website associated with the image:

On each of the following sites, in the search bar, click the Image Icon to upload the image:

https://www.bing.com/images/
https://images.google.com/

Scheduling (not specifically AI)

Scheduling shoots should be simple. We've seen all the fun from an Excel spreadsheet that's laid out like a calendar, through to the most complex diary entries in a shared Google calendar. We already have the tools for this in Microsoft Office:

Microsoft Bookings: This is a great tool for scheduling a diary of a single person or a whole team. It allows to have a Web Page where people can book in time for appointments, whether virtual or in person. Perfect for a researcher trying to book interviews with a host. The AI lies in the ability to cross search a calendar and pick associated times available.

Microsoft Planner: A tool for project and time management. Breakdown the show in to buckets (categories) and assign out tasks to people and teams, due by dates or exact dates, etc. You can even keep all of the documents in the plan.

Microsoft Shifts: Team management for your production using Shifts. This allows you to schedule team members in Teams, allowing them to clock in and out, as well as specifying when they need to be available.

The three tools all work with the Outlook Calendars so each person knows what their plans are well in advance.

Post-Production

This is the one most people are interested in for AI at this time. The tools used for image generation, manipulation, etc. The market is currently being flooded with tools and not all of them are equal, but here's a few ones to watch and use.

Auto-Clipping & Social Platform

OpusClip, using the power of OpenAI, can take a long video and create 10 viral clips from it at the click of a button. The AI behind it analyses the video, looks for compelling sections and highlights, then seamlessly rearranges in to short videos. This tool will be great for generating short promotional videos of long form shows, documentaries, etc.

Descript is a great tool that can take a video, give you a transcription, then you can edit the transcript, where it then edits the video to match. You can remove words, create studio quality audio from a standard mic, remove common error words such as um, and er, etc. One of the bigger cool things it can do is voice mimic using AI. You read it a line and then you can type out a whole transcript and it'll narrate it in your voice and allow export.

AI Generative

Moving on to the more scary AI platforms, we have completely generative AI. This is where AI generates absolutely everything including the "avatar" of the human speaking. It's getting so real, you could probably make a documentary using nothing buy AI voice for narration and even have an interview with the AI Avatar.

Video Generation

Synthesia has 120+ voices, over 140 AI Avatars and an editing tool that is extremely easy to use. Mostly aimed at Sales, Training and Marketing Teams, but could easily be used to create development tasters and cuts by mixing in the AI with real video. An example video here.

AI Studios from DeepBrain is another tool, similar to Synthesia. The avatars are based on real humans being recorded but then converted in to AI models. Again, lots of models, full text to video.

Spline AI is a 3D modelling engine that will generate models from text prompts. It's still in Alpha stages but specifying something like "A cube", "rounded corners", "floating", "spinning slowly" will generate exactly that. This tool is aimed at animators but is likely where CGI effects will head.

Still Image Generation

Txt-2-img is amazing and growing at an ever rapid pace. With the wealth of images out there to learn from, the styles, etc, it's no wonder it's doing great. However, it's far from perfect, even now. You'll often find that it adds limbs or fingers to models, shadows completely wrong, crazy styles that are not what you asked for, and that's just the start of the issues with it. However, when it gets it right, it's amazing.

DALL·E3 from OpenAI is the current leader in image generation. If you need to whiz up a picture of a steam train, crossing a suspension bridge at sunset with a woodland in the background, this is the tool of choice.

Bing Image Creator is probably the second biggest right now and has very good accuracy of text to image due to the absolutely huge database of images with high detail being fed to it by Microsoft. It's also free.

I'm not going to list too many more as a lot of them stray off in to fantasy land, being trained on Anime, comics, however, DeepAI definitely deserves a mention. These are the folks behind a lot of the viral videos where you can scan your face and and speak a few lines, then it adds you to a section of a movie as a "Deep Fake". You can have it chat, generate images and even AI edit images with txt-2-img.

Video Edit Tools

The biggest AI enhancers right now are tools that help in the Edit at a professional level.

Topaz Video AI is one of the leading tools in Post production. Upscale footage from SD to 8K and HD to 16K. Full denoise, sharpening, 16x slow down with AI interpolation including building new frames. Corrects people and faces. AI Stabilized video to stop bounce and tracking issues. This is a complete Post Swiss-army knife.

Adobe After Effects which everyone knows. The Adobe AI, called Sensei, is under constant development. Easy animations of text and logos via text to video, rotoscoping video objects to remove the background of a person and replace, or removal of all objects in a scene using AI generative filling is all extremely easy.

Adode Premiere deserves a mention, but again, this down to Sensei. The current AI tools coming in to the suite are things such as Auto Rough Cut using the transcript to generate the video, full auto transcription with subtitle creation for multiple languages. Auto Colour will fix most colour issues using AI to save time in grading. AI Morph Cut adds visual continuity to cut transitions, remix for music matching with visuals, and Auto Ducking – popping dialogue over background audio to make sure you can hear voices correctly.

ColourLab AI is a new kind of grading tool where you no longer need to spend time with an artist grading every scene. The tool is a plugin to Davinci or Premiere and will do cool things such as film grain matching or stock emulation, which allows you to match any scenes together to look exactly the same. Take a video of a pigeon flying over a statue in London, and have it grade using a still frame from The Martian to get those awesome colours automatically, for the whole scene.

Audio/Narrator/Voice Over

The final piece is the new voiceover AI generation. No longer do we need voice over artists. In fact, Hollywood thinks the same and fired the whole staff of Snow White and replaced the Dwarfs with CGI and AI voices.

Altered Studio can change any persons voice, in any way you wish. Record your voice for narration and then adjust it to be male, female, Elvern, whatever. It also does full transcription and allows for VO with text-to-speech using AI voices.

A quick shout out to a member of Tildes who wants to remain anonymous for some of the cool links that they sent over - much appreciated.

This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.

If you'd like to help support Ukraine, please visit the official site at https://help.gov.ua/ - an official portal for those who want to provide humanitarian or financial assistance to people of Ukraine, businesses or the government at the times of resistance against the Russian aggression.