As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like feudalism.techno, gmail and the oatmeal. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was truly bamboozled.

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!

Ok, so my computer is starting to fail in a way I can't fix (never get an Alienware, folks. It's not easily user serviceable, and the parts are very specific to fit in the fancy case so you can't easily replace things when they fail,) and so I'm back on the market for something new. Given the impending forced transition to Windows 11, I'm thinking this is the right time to also switch from Windows to some Linux distro, so I can have all the fun of figuring out a new OS on new hardware.

Given that I'm stepping into unknown territory here, is there anything specific that the fine people of Tildes can suggest/advise/warn me about when it comes to getting a new computer with Linux? I know there's a bunch of different flavors of Linux, and most of the major computer brands seem to offer Ubuntu as a default OS if desired, but I'm just hoping y'all can help me avoid any really obvious pitfalls.

I use my PC for a combination of work and gaming, but the work is all entirely online, so Firefox is all I need on that end. I play a bunch of games, but from what I can see most games can be played in Linux these days?

I guess I'm mostly hoping to not get caught out by anything I don't know I don't know. Help?

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

This post is full of spoilers of Silksong

I’m a married, working person so the time I can allocate for gaming is not much. I’ve been enjoying silksong very much and tried a spoiler free gameplay, having played hollow knight before and knowing how much team cherry loves secrets.

I’ve followed the normal gameflow and beat the boss. After that I wanted to keep playing and following leads I had before the ending.

Investigating missing parts, the boss runback in bilewater destroyed my nerves so I looked up if there was a bench closer to the fight - there had to be one since this was outright ridiculous. Turns out there’s a secret bench that’s so hidden I don’t know if anyone other than the most determined secret hunters could find. The boss was also as hard as it gets, felt kinda unfair.

Looking up bilewater opened a can of worms for me. I kept seeing spoilers and continued looking up info. After a day I found out there are 3 other endings, a whole another act, and bunch of unlockables.

I love when a game doesn’t handhold you and forces you to enjoy it. I get it. But I think this is too much, too obscure. It requires meticulous backtracking and there’s never an indication when you’re capable of taking on a new quest. Finding new items, you don’t know who should it be given to. You don’t even know if there are still areas you haven’t been to.

I guess team cherry wanted the player to have a play log each session and we should’ve kept logs of weird stuff we’ve seen along the way so that we remember to go back. Well, as fun as that might’ve been, I did not keep a log and forgot a lot of early game stuff.

I believe they should’ve prepared a guide themselves, spoiler free, which could include some info the game does not offer so the player can keep unlocking new stuff and would’ve known generally what to expect. Existence of act 3 honestly shocked me, and I don’t think I’m someone who doesn’t pay attention.

In their quest to be anti-handholdy gaming, I believe team cherry went too far. Onerous backtracking and note taking shouldn’t be the solution.

I loved the game and it’s easily GotY for me. I’ll keep playing it even after seeing spoilers but I can feel half the fun being gone now that I’ll just be chasing objectives I’ve seen online. If I hadn’t looked stuff up, I’d have switched to bananza or hades 2.

Edit: if this post does not meet the general quality standards of Tildes, I absolutely understand and apologize. Likewise if I should have posted this in a different subsection - ~misc or ~talk maybe?

So, recently I've been annoyed by this new thing in Gmail (and yes, I should be transitioning away from Google services) where this field pops up at the top of my email list called 'Happening Soon'. It mostly has shipping / tracking notifications saying 'hey, this thing with a tracking number is arriving tomorrow'.

I've been annoyed by it because there wasn't an easy way to disable this 'feature' and that perceived loss of agency (and reminding me that my Gmail account isn't really 'mine') was frustration inducing.

So I googled it (I recognize the irony here) - "disable "happening soon" gmail" - and found a Gmail help / community post with a bunch of people expressing the same desire to not have this forced upon them: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/346511942/how-to-disable-happening-soon-for-those-who-see-it-on-gmail-inbox-which-is-related-to-an-amazon-pu?hl=en but while plenty of people shared my frustration, I wasn't finding definitive answers on how to properly disable it.

So I decided to poke around inside of settings. There actually was a section for smart tracking reminders but that was not enabled. Then I saw a rather vague 'Smart Features' that was enabled that I didn't remember seeing before. I disabled that, Gmail had to restart, and then those notifications were gone.

I wanted to share this how-to with all the other people who posted to that Gmail support thread. I simply replied with "To disable this on desktop, go into settings and disable 'Smart Features'. That seems to fix it."

Suddenly I understood why no one else had posted the fix. My post was flagged instantly for 'content policy violations'. Specifically it said "Failed to post. Content violates Community Policy."

Yes, helping other Gmail users figure out how to turn off experimental 'features' we never asked for violates their policy of, I presume, being able to experiment on their userbase. Arg. That ticked me off.

Hey all, some of you may remember me from several months back saying that my psychiatrist put me down as "Asperger's coded" and how I was unsure what that meant.

Well I had another appointment since then where she did say I was autistic but it was left open ended as to whether or not I was diagnosed. At least that's how I interpreted it.

So at today's appointment I just asked point blank if I was diagnosed. And she said not with autism spectrum disorder but with Asperger's syndrome via the ICD 10. Which is weird because I'm in America but whatever. I asked if that was a type of autism and she said according to the DSM V Asperger's was turned into ASD 1 (if I remember correctly) but I was diagnosed via the ICD 10.

So yeah all that to say is that I think it's finally fair to say I'm autistic. I'm not a fan of the word Asperger's so autistic is what I'm going with. Please correct me if I'm being offensive.

It only took 30 years. Though I didn't have to go through any major testing which makes me feel like an imposter. I just answered a few questions.

Can you pivot to other tasks, or are you dead in the water? What about others? Your team/department? Tell us what its like for those minutes/hours.

How often does the internet drop for you (if at all)?

If you don't ever lose internet at work (lucky you!), answer hypothetically about what would happen.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!