Do you devour dessert first?

Do you eat your pizza with a fork and knife?

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

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

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

The current political climate in the US sucks, and I want to do something about it. I'm a software engineer and I've been feeling lately that I need to apply my skills towards something more important and impactful than building a product for a private company. Honestly, I like my current job for many reasons, and it's been mostly quite fulfilling up to this point, but every executive order by Trump feels like a step backwards and makes me less comfortable with not being involved in the opposition.

I'm looking for advice on what I can do to meaningfully contribute to progressive causes and resist the threat that this administration poses to our democracy and society. What kinds of organizations are doing the most in this area, and would be in need of a software engineer? How can building software help with this problem (if at all)?

For context, I live in Massachusetts, so while I feel proud of how my community and local government is pushing back against Trump, I'm also well-aware of how much worse things are, and will get, for people elsewhere.

2 Grand Prix races finished already. I'd forgotten what Shanghai International Circuit looked like; cool track.

Not as exciting as Melbourne, but that's probably because the rain really spiced up AusGP at the end. Some thoughts as I watched:

• Alonso retired due to break issues in Lap 5. Not a great start to the season
• Weird to see Max lose two spots at the start of the first lap and not immediately recover
• Poor Yuki with his broken frontwing. Broke out of nowhere, too. Man just can't catch a break...
• Great little fight between Charles and Max in Lap 53. Max did eventually recover to his starting P4
• Both Haas in the points? Nice! Ocon P7 and Bearman P10

Congrats to Piastri on his 3rd F1 win! I get the feeling we're going to be seeing this McLaren 1-2 frequently. Who's in which position, we'll see. Though with the Ferraris, Russell, and Max also mixing it up up top, this should be a good season.

Next race:

Japanese Grand Prix
Suzuka Circuit
Sunday, April 6, 2025

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

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

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

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

All previous Save Point topics

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

Bottom line: I live in Western Pennsylvania in the US. I may shortly need to replace my aging Honda Ridgeline. I need a mid-sized truck/van/SUV that can be a good "road trip" car for a family of three that chronically overpacks.

What car do you like? What car buying or car selling wisdom do you have in the post-pandemic car market?

The world outside my doorstep is unorganized chaos and I am blind to most of its existence.

Say I'm looking for a job. And I know what job I want to do. I can search for it on a job listing site, but there will still be many such jobs that won't be cataloged on the site and that I'll hence be missing. How can I find the rest? What are some alternative approaches?

Also there are two ways you can end up with a job: either you find it (going on a job search), or it finds you (headhunters etc.). Obviously the latter possibility is much better as it's less tiring and it means you end up with an over-abundance of opportunities (if people message you every week). What are some rules of thumb for life to make it so that the opportunities come to you? (and not only for jobs)

Often I don't even know what opportunities are on offer out in that misty unknown (and my ADHD brain finds it straining to research them (searching 1 job site feels almost futile because you don't know how many of the actual opportunities you aren't seeing)), so the strategy I resort to is imagining what I concievably expect to be out there and then trying to find it. This has several weaknesses: firstly I could be imagining something that doesn't actually exist and waste hours beating myself up because I can't find it. Or, almost even worse, my limited imagination might be limiting what sorts of opportunities I look for which means I miss out of the truly crazy things out there.

Here's an example of an alternative approach that worked for me once:

Last month I wanted to visit a university in another city for a few days to see if I liked it, and I needed a place to stay. I first tried the obvious approach of searching AirBnB for rents I could afford, but none came up. Hence I had to search through the unmapped. What ended up working was: I messaged the students union -> they added me to their whatsapp group -> sb from my country replied to my post on there adding me to a different WA group for students from my country -> sb in that WA group then DM'd saying I could crash on their couch.

I would have never thought of trying an approach like this when I set out, and yet I must have done something right because it worked. What? The idea to message the students union and join whatsapp groups took quite a lot of straining the creative part of my brain, so I'm wondering whether the approach I took here can somehow be generalized so that I can use it in the future.

TL;DR: Search engines don't map the world comprehensively. You might not even be searching for the right thing. What are some other good ways to search among the unstructured unknown that is out there?

My partner and I like to have a drink while we cook/ after work, and we've usually switch between some wine or more recently nice cocktails. I'd like to up my cocktail game when I'm hosting though.

What simple cocktails would you guys suggest?

So far my favourite cocktails are Negroni, White Russian, Old fashioned, and for after dinner a friend of mine made that Im not too sure about that's a 50 50 mix of whisky and amaretto with a cherry that's surprisingly good.

I’m new to Tildes and really hope to get into interesting conversations. I’m not really interested in looking at the content behind links and commenting on them though. Is there a way to completely filter them all out so that only text posts remain visible to me?

I was going to get screenshots to backup what I am talking about but apparently they aren't kicking around in the system forever so most of the evidence is gone but I often see mycketforvirrad editing the title of a post I make to exactly what it already was while they are editing tags as they see fit.

What's up with that?

I was going to post a question regarding the topic logs but looking through my old posts, I see that much less than I remember have any topic logs on them.

I can't tell if I am imagining that alot more of them used to have topic logs or Deimos coded it to be a temporary record of the changes that the mods here make?

and if so, why temporary?

I woke up around 23 this evening to some noise from the common room which I live right next to (large apartment building). No biggie, I thought, I have noise cancelling earbuds so I can listen to some music to drown it out. Well, right as it struck 24, it was like a bomb went off. The music was turned up beyond belief and they were yelling and screaming and stomping in the floor to the point that I could feel it in my own floor and my room was shaking a little bit. Absolutely nuts.

Having anxiety, I had to summon the courage for a while to prepare myself to go out and complain about it, and ask them to please keep it down, it's past midnight, people are sleeping, etc. etc.

When I opened my door to the hallway, two guys were standing there, also in pajamas. Obviously in those outfits they were not part of the party so I asked them if they were here to complain too, and they said yeah they live right above the common room and had their sleep ruined because of it. So I said that like, well if we are 3 people from 3 separate apartments, it will probably help a lot that the partiers took it seriously. They had already been in there to complain but they joined me anyways. Turns out the party is because of Iranian new year, and that's why it was a relatively measured party but went so crazy at midnight.

We ended up in the hallway chatting for a while about the noise and one of the guys had even called the police in the past when another party happened, and I said yeah I was thinking of doing the same tonight - it seems to have worked all fine though, so no need, because it's now about 2 o'clock and they are keeping it quiet-ish out there.

The one guy said he's American and only been here for 3 months, so he's not really sure about the customs about parties, nor really the house rules because somebody once knocked on his door to complain to him in the middle of the afternoon because he plays the violin in the symphony orchestra here. So I told him the house rules and whatnot, explaining that no, it's never okay to bother your neighbours like this, no matter the time of day. But the other guy and him share a wall, and he said he never hears him at all - so that's why he was confused about the rules I guess.

Anyway that other guy had to get up super early apparently and went back upstairs to go to bed, so we wished him good night and sleep well, but the American and I smalltalked a little bit more. Just like names, handshake, where are you from, what do you do for a living blah blah. He said that he had had such a long day, doing rehearsals for hours and then played a concert in the evening. So I thought well he really needs to sleep then, so I was about to just say goodnight to him as well, then jokingly said that maybe we'll meet again - as in, complain about noise together some day.

I think he didn't quite get the joke though, so he said that yeah sure, I should come watch him play sometime, they do concerts every week. Or I could come up for tea if I'd like.

So I think I was just asked out on a date???? I'm not really interested in that so if we do go ahead with meeting up again I should probably tell him that, but that I wouldn't mind making a friend. What a story that would be though:
"How did you two meet?"
"Oh we bonded over telling people to shut up."

So yeah, that was pretty strange lol, just a a funny encounter that I wanted to share - probably a bit of a long story. I am not very concise but thanks for reading!

So Assassins Creed Shadows released this week, and so far the discourse surrounding the game is really all over the place with lots of good and bad reviews across the spectrum. I was a big fan of the Assassins Creed games from 1-3, and then I skipped the PS4 console generation so I didnt play any of the more recent ones. But this new one is about ninjas, which is rad, so Ive been following news about the game.

One thing I noticed, which is the main thing I want to discuss, when seeing clips of the game online is the focus on sword combat, and more specifically open combat. I dont know if this is a thing that became more of a focus in earlier games like Valhala or if its more a response to the success of Ghost of Tsushima. Im wondering if anyone else has thoughts on how the role of combat has evolved as the series has advanced.

In my personal view, a ninja assassin game should have minimal focus on direct combat. The ideal way an assassination should go is something like this:

1. Do some early missions to gather intel or do prep work

2. Take on "the approach" to your target, which will involve a combination of parkouring over rooftops and stealth kills to remove guards. Your efforts in step 1 will make this easier or harder.

3. Get into position and wait for the right moment when the target moves into the right place

4. Spring your trap, whether that be pouncing on them with a dagger or setting off an explosive or whatever

5. Drop a smoke bomb, disappear into the shadows, maybe jump off a rooftop into a haystack for good measure

When pulled off correctly, it should be like you were never there. Aside from the dead guy. If you are getting into a direct head on confrontation as a ninja, you have fucked up at ninja. To this end, I feel that in a stealth assassination game open combat should be more of a penalty for when you screw up and get caught, not part of the core strategy.

Looking back at the early games, this concept was applied in AC1. Getting into a fight with a Templar was pretty difficult and tedious. You didnt want to get stuck doing it, and if you did it was often better to just run. The times you were forced to fight head on it felt like you were trapped in a dire situation that was not to your advantage, so it was a good way to apply pressure to the player to make a scene seem tense.

In AC2 the combat was reworked and became significantly easier. I actually really like the way it was implemented. Technically you can get away with just hammering away at most weaker enemies until you break their guard, but the combat really shines when you fight defensively. If you focus in dodging and counter-kills, big fights become a thing of beauty. Ezio dodges and weaves effortlessly through the crowd, doing a slick spin slash every so often to slice a bad guys neck. Its all very stylistic and elegant and graceful in a way that makes Ezio look like a badass but is still very evocative of the idea of a master assassin.

And then AC3 is fine, I don't have a ton to say about that one.

Returning to Shadows, when I look at clips of people playing the game there is a lot of sword combat. The combat seems to often follow a pattern where the enemy will perform a fixed attack pattern with visual indications like a colored aura around their weapon, which the player must mitigate through precision by either dodge rolls or parrys, after which there will be a pause during which the player can whack at the enemy a few times and reduce their health bar. Repeat a couple times until they are killed. I think it is specifically the hacking away at an enemy like you are taking a machete to jungle foliage that I dont like about this. Whittling away at an enemy who just tanks it and soaks up damage feels decidedly un-assassiny to me.

Now, if open combat is intended to be a big part of the game then I can see why this is the case. You cant make every enemy a long drawn out chore like AC1 because if youre going to have to do this like a hundred times that will get old fast. And you cant do glorified quick time events like AC2 because itd be too quick and a major pillar of your gameplay will feel trivial. So I can see why this newer style of combat is being used, I just don't feel its a great fit for the genre.

What are your thoughts? Are you a fan of stealth-action games? Do you enjoy dodge-roll-centric combat? How would you want to see combat handled in an assassins creed type game?