As the title says, I am looking for your go-to recipes for when you are not in the mood to cook. They should be fast and simple to make and be preferably not too expensive.

Let me start this: Tortelloni with tarragon-cream-sauce (3-6€/2servings, depending on the tortelloni)
*500g Tortelloni, 250ml (sweet) cream, 2 tomatos, tarragon/salt/pepper;

1. Water with salt in one pot, cream with tarragon and 4 short splashes of water in another;
2. Cut the tomatos into pieces and add the to the cream when it boils slightly
3. When the tomatos are added, stir the cream (it should get slightly red from the tomato juice
4. add salt and pepper
5. at this point the water should be boiling, add the Tortelloni
   5.1 I usually buy the Tortelloni from the fridge, they only need to be boiled for 2 min, adjust the timing when you heat up the cream according to needed time to boil the pasta
6. When everything is finished put everything together and enjoy

I have been using Tildes for about a week now. I have come over from Reddit where I am primarily a lurker. I lurk because I often feel my thoughts and opinions on topics and discussions have been touched on because discussions are already hundreds of comments deep by the time I arrive. The biggest positive with Tildes is the fact that the community is currently small and I read the post/sarticles that interest me instead of jumping straight into the comments to be given a synopsis. I now read more than just the headline.

I still have not found my 'voice' in regards to posting comments related to articles/stories that I have read. I think it is because I haven't found a discussion that I am really interested in. I have posted a couple of news articles that provide information about the part of the world I am in but, while they interested me, I didn't feel the need to discuss their contents further so I didn't add any comment to start a conversation to the post.

Regarding providing some more content to the site. My hobbies include, like everyone else, traveling, reading, and photography. I am no where near being an influential voice in any of these! I am not interested in having a travel blog or a website but I would like to provide information, incase someone else here is interested or has experiences too. For example, I recently took a short weekend trip from Bangkok, Thailand to Ayutthaya, Thailand. I rode the train, visited the sites, visited a bar, ate some food, and stayed the night. I want to provide a write up on my experiences and thoughts of this trip. Is a post in ~hobbies with the tags of: thailand, ayutthaya, bangkok, train the way to go?
What do y'all think?

Sharing photographs - Taking pictures is another hobby I share with everyone else. I enjoy sharing pictures I am proud of. I tend to post to r/nocontextpics, because I like their rules of no back story in the title. I also post to location specific sites. I do this to show off my pictures and to feel good from earning points. I do not post pictures to facebook very often because I like having the feel of anonymity. I don't want to be perceived as a pretentious twat. How does everyone feel about picture posts in ~hobbies with the tag(s) like: location, device used, etc..

My problem would be not 'spamming' photos. With the age of the site, and my brief interaction with it, no one wants to see 2+ picture posts from one user in the ~hobbies group.
Any thoughts on etiquette or rules for picture posts? Allow: Yes/No?

Markov Chains are a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. By analyzing a document in some way and producing a model it’s possible to use this model to generate sentences.

For example, let’s consider this quote:

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

Let’s start with a seed of be, which there is only one of in this text and it’s following word is who. Thus, a 100% chance of the next state being who. From who, there are several next states: you, mind, and matter. Since there are 3 options to choose from, the next state has a 1/3 probability of each. It’s important that if there were for example two instances of who you then you would have a 2/4 probability of next state. Generate a random number and choose the next state, perhaps mind and continue until reaching a full stop. The string of states we reached is then printed and we have a complete sentence (albeit almost certainly gibberish).

Note: if we were in the state mind, our next two options would be . or don’t, in which if we hit . we would end the generation. (or not, up to you how you handle this!)

To take it a step further, you could also consider choosing the number of words to consider a state. For example, two words instead of one: those who has two possible next states: who matter or who mind. By using much longer strings of words for our states we can get more natural text but will need much more volume to get unique sentences.

This programming challenge is for you to create a Markov Chain and Text Generator in your language of choice. The input being a source document of anything you like (fun things include your favourite book, a famous person’s tweets, datasets of reddit / tildes comments), and possibly a seed. The output being a sentence generated using the Markov Chain.

Bonus points for:

• Try it a bunch of times on different sources and tell us the best generated sentences
• Using longer strings of words for the state, or even having it be variable based on input
• Not requiring a seed as an input, instead implementing that into your Markov Chain (careful as infinite loops can occur without considering the seed)
• Implement saving the Markov Chain itself, as it can take very long to generate with huge documents
• Particularly Fast, efficient, short or unique methods

Good luck!

P.S A great place to find many large plain text documents for you to play with is Project Gutenberg.