The survey has been closed and the results are in!

Thank you to all the 213 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results!

I'd like to thank @TaylorSwiftsPickles and @DefinitelyNotAFae once again for helping out with this survey! <3

• ZIP download of the data

Thank you all again for participating! Hope to see you in the next survey! :)

About every six weeks, I go on a "stock the pantry" shopping trip to buy long-keeping items and non-perishables in quantity - cat food and litter, Costco, etc. After two hours of shopping yesterday, I was a little shocked to realize I'd spent half of my take-home pay on a trip that previously was about 25% less expensive. No one item had drastically increased in price - everything had just gone up that much.

[I'm also smarting because my primary care physician announced she was switching to a concierge care model, and I just made the first quarterly payment. U.S. healthcare sucks so badly that I can't take a chance on the two-year waitlists for in-network primary care M.D.s who provide 10-minute "annual exam" visits in my area.]

I'm dropping subscription services, buying cheaper conventional food instead of organic, getting generic personal care products instead of brand names and using less of them, cooking even more at home, thinking about making my own cat food, skipping buying pretty flowers for outdoors this year... and still feeling like the budget isn't going to keep stretching.

I know a great many aspects of Western lifestyles aren't sustainable, and I've tried to do my part to minimize material consumption. But there are so many expectations that you'll pay for perhaps excessive shelter (we didn't need a house the size we have, but it was what was available and affordable), have a car for work, be able to pay for services for things you don't have time, skill, or physical capacity to do yourself, and other monetary drains. I'm losing some sleep.

What are you doing to cope with exorbitant rents/mortgages, skyrocketing utility and grocery bills, extravagant medical costs, unaffordable childcare and services?

Do you feel like your quality of life has declined, due to missing luxuries, anxiety, fewer opportunities to connect with friends and family, or anything else?

Open rant here.

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.

Hello Tildes.

I feel like i have movie fatigue, i don’t feel like i manage to get hyped for new movies.
Do anyone of you have any recommendations for older movies, lets say 2010 and older. It can be any genre.
Can go really old as well, i really enjoyed 12 Angry Men.

Thank you very much in advance!

Yesterday the family was driving home from dinner and ...Ready for it? came up in the playlist:

In the middle of the night, in my dreams, you should see the things we do

So in the vein of A Speculative List of Jay-Z's 99 Problems, and other than the boring, obvious answer, what do you suppose they get up to in her dreams?

Most social media sites have options for muting and blocking people. As we know, muting is one-way (they see me, I don't see them) and blocking is two-way (neither see each other).

Recently, while having too much caffeine in my system way too late, I had the thought that "blocking" is a far more negative term than what it should be. Sometimes it's done in spite, absolutely. You wanna slap somebody for being how they are.

But sometimes you just recognize that there's someone who you have nothing against, whom you might even like if you met them in real life, but in this context of limited human connect, you understand that the only possible communication between you and them would be toxic. That your opinions, your way of speaking, perhaps your whole existence offends them. Or vice versa.

So you protect them from yourself by blocking them, in lieu of a better word. I think there should be a better word but I haven't figured out what it should be yet. "Spare"?

(P.S. I think tildes should perhaps have such a functionality)

I am looking for a Buy-It-For-Life pen. I've had the Parker Jotters for years and love them, but I am in need of something with a little longer life expectancy on the barrel.

My first thought was James Brand The Burwell, however I am just now really diving into the BIFL Pen world and curious on what you guys suggestion / use.

Assume the money cap of $100 for now, unless you have some out of this world amazing option over that cap.

Server host: tildes.nore.gg (Running Java 26.1.2)
Verification site: https://tildes.nore.gg
BlueMap: https://tildes.nore.gg/map/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TildesMC

The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.

We recommend you install our mod web-chat so that you can chat while in your web browser. It turns the server into an old-school chat room.

<- Previous Thread Next Thread ->

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.

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!

Dear Tildes team,

I’ve been on here for a year now, I think, and after praising Tildes to a friend for a long time, he recently asked me for an invite code.

I had never invited anyone before, but when I went to the invite page, it read: “You aren't able to generate more invite links right now.”

Any idea what the issue might be?

I was talking with a friend about recent events that seemed eerily suspicious to me, and was wondering if all of you might have any similar experiences.

(Preemptively tagging this as politics. If anything in this thread is deemed malicious or inflammatory, let me know and I'll delete the thread)

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like ecology, writing and moderation. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was out of the loop.

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!

Once more I come to you with this eternal annoyance of mine, that just won’t go away, with regard to 100%ing games:

I own a Switch 2. It’s my one and only entertainment device (I don’t watch shows, movies, or do anything else).

I already limit myself to only buying Switch 2 games (meaning, no Switch 1 or classics on NSO), so I don’t get overwhelmed with all the options, but good new games come out so quickly now, and there’s so many that I am dying to play, that I’m still feeling like I can barely keep up.

I never buy a new game (even if on discount) before I roll the credits on the one that I am currently playing. That would kill me, to just have them sitting there, on my digital shelf, collecting dust.

For me, anywhere between 20 to 40 hours with one game is ideal, but many of the kinds of games that I enjoy and buy take more than 50 or even 100 or more hours to 100%. I don’t buy them because they’re huge. I buy them because I like their worlds, their stories, and/or their mechanics. If I chose my games based on how long it takes to roll the credits or 100% them, then I’d probably not play almost any modern games.

By the time I roll the credits, I usually feel ready to move on, I feel satisfied with how much I got to experience that world, story, and/or mechanic, but if I do move on, then I also feel bad for not 100%ing the game. It’s some kind of OCD or “all-or-nothing” mental issue that I have. I don’t know.

I guess there’s nothing that I can do about it, because I’m even less interested in grinding for hundreds of hours to 100% a game. The magic and newness of whatever world, story, and/or mechanics a game has to offer have usually worn off by the time I roll the credits, so I would just be forcing myself to check off a list of chores and that’s not fun at all for me.

By that time, there’s also usually a new game that I am dying to play anyway.

So, the choice is between leaving games behind without 100%ing them, or playing two or three games a year, slowly and tediously chipping away at them. The new experiences tip the scale for me.

How about you?

I just wish that I could make this nagging feeling in the back of my head go away and accept that moving on from a game that I didn’t 100%, is OK.

That being said, on occasion, I play a game that is designed to be 100%able on the first playthrough, and those are by far my favorites. Very few games are like that anymore though, which I find sad.

Edit: A short poem I made (with some inspiration from ChatGPT) to help me get over my desire to 100% games. I entitle it, “An OCD Gamer’s Mantra”.

Credits rolled, story told.
New adventures shall unfold.
Rolled the credits, closed the quest.
Move on and discard the rest.
Credits rolled, I’ve seen the end.
Loose threads I need not to mend.
Rolled the credits, let it be.
The next great game is calling me.

I'm aware that it'll be really hard to thread this needle and make this movie work, but I'm excited to see the attempt. The reviews I've read have only made me more interested.

Amy Nicholson for Los Angeles Times described the film as a feature expansion of Kane Parsons' viral internet project, praising its unsettling visual concept but thought it less a conventional horror film and more a surreal, dreamlike experience of a moving Salvador Dalí painting.

Another mentions sparse dialogue, which I'm happy to hear.

I've wanted this movie since long before it was announced. I have a few hopes, no expectations, but I've deeply enjoyed Parsons' other work.

Only a few days left!

Post your current bingo cards.
Continue updating us on your games!

Quick links:

• Backlog Bingo Site
• Week 4 Discussion
• Week 3 Discussion
• Week 2 Discussion
• Week 1 Discussion

Week 4 Recap

11 participants played 9 bingo cards and moved 43 games out of their backlogs!

There were three bingo wins. Congratulations to u/CannibalisticApple, u/kfwyre, and u/Wes! 🎉
There was one ✨⭐️ HONORARY BINGO ⭐️✨ for u/aphoenix.
There was one betrayal. u/Wes will go on trial following the conclusion of this event

teamellow

• u/BailerAppleby
• u/Bullmaestro
• u/CompChris
• u/dannydotcafe
• u/Durinthal
• u/JCPhoenix
• u/SingedFrostLantern

TEAMOTIVATED

• u/1338
• u/CannibalisticApple
• u/kfwyre
• u/Wes

Y'all are going to have to wait on the game list. I got my allergy shots today and they wreck me, so I don't have the energy to link up everything right now. I'll get to it tomorrow. Sorry!

Game list:

• Alt-Frequencies
• Another Crab's Treasure
• Baba Is You
• Beyond Blue
• Cat Quest 2
• Crash Time - Undercover
• Crescent Bay
• Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time
• Dreadhalls
• Dead Space Demake
• Escape First Alchemist (x2)
• Fabledom
• Gods Will Be Watching
• Haimrik
• Hexcells Plus
• Hive Jump
• Immortals Fenyx Rising
• Infinite Air with Mark McMorris
• Intergalactic Bubbles
• Ironclad Tactics
• Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls)
• Keyboard Sports
• Magicka
• Minami Lane
• NUTS
• Out There Somewhere
• Pie in the Sky
• Quern - Undying Thoughts
• Quiet City
• Ritual of Raven
• Rogue Mansion
• Roman Sands
• SMIB: Mission Cure
• Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical
• Still There
• SUMMERHOUSE
• SuperTuxKart
• Tales of the Neonsea
• The Ball
• theBlu
• Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane
• ZODIAC XX