What are some apps that you use that aren't particularly well known? Let's help each other discover some interesting new tools!

lichess - best chess app out there IMO. Completely free and open source, has daily puzzles, and a pretty active pool of users to play against!
Syncthing - file syncing tool that works with just about any operating system (although I don't think it works with iOS). I use it to take notes and write lyrics/my journal and sync them back to my linux laptop.
Untappd - social media app for tracking craft beers that you drink. I've only just started using it, since I was on holiday and wanted to keep a note of the ales I was drinking. It's a free app, but supported by ads. I believe there's a paid tier, but the free version works well enough, and it's useful for encouraging me and my friends to try new beers when we're out and about.
WK - Japanese flashcard app, which is technically a front-end for the wanikani service. As you learn new radicals, characters, and vocabulary, it serves them back up to you after a certain length of time. If you remember it, it'll wait longer next time, and if you don't get it right, it brings it back to the top of the pile.

The FitnessGram Pacer Test is a multistage aerobic capacity test that progressively gets more difficult as it continues. The 20 meter pacer test will begin in 30 seconds. Line up at the start. The running speed starts slowly but gets faster each minute after you hear this signal bodeboop. A sing lap should be completed every time you hear this sound. ding Remember to run in a straight line and run as long as possible. The second time you fail to complete a lap before the sound, your test is over. The test will begin on the word start. On your mark. Get ready!… Start. ding

Here's a list of a things that came out in this past week, up through Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and I avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to mention anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)

Notes:
If you spot any mistakes, let us know.

Gloryhammer - Legends from Beyond... || Deluxe Album linked

Thanks to @Cleb, @cfabbro, and @Bauke!

It's a genre that friends, coworkers, and family will chide you for reading, and often self-help books will repeat the same old principles. Yet, I find myself drawn to books like How to Win Friends and Atomic Habits again and again, in a hope that reading them will fix my life's problems. And honestly, some books in the genre do provide some great advice.

Hello! Have a good or unique thread that you found on this website that you want others to see? Feel free to suggest some and I will update them in this list! After a thread is added, I will also sort it by category.

Here's a wiki for it like @Algernon_Asimov suggested
Here's another wiki although this isn't specifically focused on notable threads.
Here's a google document for it

Meta

By making both "high-quality discussion" and "transparent community development" a core part of its identity, Tildes will always be dominated by people with "moderator/power user" personalities. - A thread discussing content elitism on tildes.

Scenario

If you found the secret to immortality would you tell anyone? - Self-explanatory title.

I was asked this question in an interview and I said the downsides would be extra disk space used to store it and more disk writes from the database to maintain the index on updates. I asked a friend and he said the downsides are space used in memory to store the index as well as the fact that an index could take days to build on a large dataset.

What does everyone here think about this question?

I'm interested in a game that you still loved or enjoyed in spite of its significant flaws or issues. "Best" and "worst" are, of course, based on whatever subjective criteria you choose.

• What made the game bad?
• Why did you keep playing it?
• What enjoyment or appreciation did it give you?

Working and studying from home, it's hard not to acquire bad habits. Most of the time I follow the Pomodoro Technique, so I have constant small breaks instead of large ones. But sometimes I just stay on the computer looking at different things such as Reddit and Tildes, and it doesn't feel very restful. At the same time, if I change the context too much, it's easy to lose track of time (yes, even with apps), and I have trouble refocusing on my work, study etc.

This may seem like a trivial problem for some, but not for me!

Summing up: what can I do on my breaks (4 x 5 minutes followed by 1 x 25 minutes) that is both restful and pleasurable, but not excessively engaging?

I recently floated this idea in a comment elsewhere, but I wanted to gauge interest in having an unofficial Tildes IRC channel. The purpose of this channel would just be general, casual discussion with other users of Tildes about anything, and particularly those topics which may not warrant an entire thread on the site here. I know that these days IRC isn't the most popular chat option, with things like Discord filling the void. However IRC is appealing in that users can choose between multiple clients, and in that such a Tildes channel would not need many of the features offered by Discord. How would people feel about such a space?

Someone asked me this recently, and I wasn't sure how to answer. Not because I can't self-identify things I've accomplished, but because it can seem boastful to openly express them.

For this thread, I want to remove any and all social restrictions on boasting. Talk yourself up! Be loud and proud! Navel-gazing is not only allowed, but encouraged!

I chose the title based off how the question was phrased to me, but I'm really interested in what you consider to be your most positive achievements and characteristics. As such, consider the following series of questions as a jumping off point:

• What are you most proud of in your life?
• What are your biggest accomplishments/successes in life?
• What are you good at?
• What are your unique talents and skills?
• What makes you individually awesome and stand out from others?
• What significant hardships have you overcome?
• How you have you changed your life, others' lives, or the world for the better?

Spoilers for all seasons of both The Orville and Star Trek: Discovery.

The Orville isn't bad, but it's not the worthy successor to pre-Abrams Star Trek that a lot of people on /r/startrek—and increasingly on /r/DaystromInstitute—make it out to be, and honestly I struggle to understand how people are even reaching that conclusion.

I should start, I suppose, with what I like about this show. First, I like the characters—with two exceptions, I'll get to that later. Dr. Finn, in particular, is a delight: Penny Johnson Jerald is a very talented actress and it's really great to see her in a role where the rest of the cast draws on her character's wisdom. She plays it well. The rest of the bridge crew is great, too: Gordon, LaMarr, and Bortas are all lots of fun, and Jessica Szohr is a great addition for season 2: Halston Sage didn't quite have the skill to pull her character off.

The show looks great. Union vessels are distinct from Federation vessels and they're not just ISO Human Standard Spaceships either, which is commendable. Kaylon spheres are neat play on Borg cubes, and my only real complaint in this regard is that Moclan and Krill vessels look oddly similar. The engine effects, the depiction of celestial objects, the overall Union aesthetic, it's all very pleasing to the eye.

The worldbuilding is great. This is the one place that I think I would even go as far to say The Orville has a clear edge over Star Trek. Trek has built up loads of cruft over the years and sometimes struggles to keep it all together. For example, The Orville has swept away the inconsistent depiction of enlisted personnel that Trek fouls up seemingly very chance it gets by just depicting officers, which makes sense for a highly automated vessel. I fundamentally "buy" the Planetary Union as a human-centric interstellar polity in the same way I buy the UFP. (My one complaint in this department is that there does not appear to be any bureaucratic distinction between the Union government and the Union fleet, i.e. it lacks the distinction between The Federation and Starfleet. That seems like an oddity I hope they correct in season 3.) McFarlane is a nerd, he's fastidious about detail, and you just know he's has to have pages upon pages of worldbuilding details which helps him keep it consistent. It shows.

But the show falls flat on its face in two key ways which, unfortunately, appear to be baked into the concept.

Shortfall one: I just can't seem to warm up to either Mercer or Grayson, which for obvious reasons is a huge problem, because the show is now on record as indicating that their romantic relationship is The Key To Saving The Galaxy™. The Orville is an episodic throwback, but if it has a "main arc," that main arc is Ed & Kelly's relationship, and it just feels awkward and out of place.

I don't really dislike Grayson, but I can't find anything to really like about her either. She's just kinda there, and her story never diverges from Mercer's. Which brings me to Mercer... which... just... ugh. Never in my life have I seen a more egregious case of a show creator playing out his fantasy on camera. I cannot tell you the number of times I've seen someone make a statement which boils down to "I don't like Discovery because Burnham is a Mary Sue, and that's why I prefer The Orville" as if Mercer is not the most blatant case of a Marty Stu to ever grace network television and get renewed for a second season. I mean, come on. He's the perfect captain, he always makes the right call, yet for some reason the show keeps trying to sell us on the notion that he's damaged goods and out-of-favor with the Admiralty. It's not believable, and it irks me endlessly that anyone would lob this criticism at Discovery when The Orville is an order of magnitude more guilty of this conceit.

And that brings me to the elephant in the room: the direct Star Trek comparison. I seem to recall Season 1 having a novel episode here and there, even if they were snoozefests. Season 1 also bothered to draw from other sources of inspiration, even if those sources were Trek-adjacent shows like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone. But on the other hand, some episodes from season 1 were straight rips from old Trek. "If the Stars Should Appear"? Straight remake of "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky." "Mad Idolatry"? Straight remake of "Blink of an Eye."

And Season 2? Season 2 doubled down on the Trek remake approach. No other sources, no novel concepts: almost every episode is a remake of a previous episode of Star Trek. Sometimes The Orville at least bothered to remix a pair of episodes, and sometimes a lot of the details got changed, but with one exception, every episode was a Trek episode remake.

The degree to which a given The Orville episode is a remake of the Trek episode I've listed varies. "Home" is only similar if you look at the broad strokes: the officer on loan from the scientifically advanced Earth ally goes home where her family disparages her for spending all that time with humans. The home invasion plot from that episode was original, but it was also kinda weird and contrived. The flipside of this constant borrowing from Trek is that when The Orville does go off the beaten path, it's inevitably flat out boring. "Ja'loja" was an utterly forgettable episode because it largely focused on Ed & Kelly relationship drama.

And even if we look at "Ja'loja," there's a bit of "Amok Time" in there with the whole "returning to the desert homeworld" for the Moclan urination ceremony. Sometimes it's bits and pieces into a blender, but other times it's a basically a straight rip, like it is with "All the World Is Birthday Cake" and "Blood of Patriots." Perhaps the most blatant "homage" was introducing a surgically altered Klingon Krill to infiltrate the hero ship, right down to the name and rank of the infiltrator!

I know, everything's a remix, and I know, it's a fine line between "ripoff" and "homage," but the problem with this level of "borrowing" is that when you've seen every episode of Star Trek as many times as I have, each episode of The Orville just becomes an exercise in "I wonder which Star Trek episode this will be," and once you figure it out, it just saps all the urgency and tension out of the viewing experience. It gets boring.

I didn't get bored with Discovery. I mean, sure, Discovery has its problems. In many ways its problems are the inverse of The Orville's strengths: I struggle to care all that much about any of the characters, the show is rife with dark sets and quick shots which just isn't that visually appealing, and the worldbuilding is at times really difficult to reconcile with established Trek lore. (The Spore drive is classified? That's why we never see it again? Ummm... OK, then.) And the story, while chaotic and poorly paced & planned due to constant showrunner turmoil, is at the very least interesting and novel.

The perfect Star Trek would be a synthesis of these two shows, but apart, each show pretty much breaks even when you take the strengths and weaknesses on the merits. Which brings me to my title: I cannot for the life of me get into the mindset of the fans who see this as the True Trek of our time. It's just remakes of old Trek, and while the visuals have been updated for 2019, the stories have not.

The bottom line is that while it's great that we have two Trek-style shows on the air at the same time for the first time since the 90's, neither show is great, or even good. They're both just OK, and the huge disparity between how they've been received doesn't make much sense to me.

Posting this as a text post so that nobody has to go to Gab, but the source is here if you really want to. Full post copied below:

An update on "New Gab" and what to expect:

Progress on our new codebase is going well. For those who don't know, our plan is to fork existing open source software, Mastodon, which is based on the ActivityPub social networking protocol.

What does this mean in layman's terms?

• Gab will become an open source project, meaning developers from around the world can contribute the project and help us build.
• Gab will get several new features and PRO benefits, such as video uploading.
• You'll be able to log into and use dozens of existing mobile apps that exist on both App Stores with your Gab account and use Gab through these apps.
• We will be porting over all of your Gab posts, followers, etc to this new codebase.
• Gab will be getting a fresh paint job and be much more "user friendly." (See a mockup below, which isn't final.) Don't worry, it won't look anything like Mastodon (for those of you who know it is,) it will look like Gab.

What does the timeline look like for this going live?

At the moment we are working on building in Gab features that this open source social networking protocol does not currently have. Things like Gab Groups and editing. We are also finalizing a fresh redesign of the Gab interface. Once these two things are done, we will start porting over all existing Gab data. During this time we will invite Gabbers to beta test New Gab and give us feedback. Once Gabbers give us the go ahead we will finalize the transition and push it to Gab.com. All of these steps will occur over the next few weeks.

Why are you doing this?

• Moving Gab to open source brings transparency and additional help from developers in our community from around the world.
• Moving to the ActivityPub protocol as our base allows us to get into mobile App Stores without even having to submit and get approval of our own apps, whether Apple and Google like it or not.
• Ultimately we want to make Gab more user friendly, perform better, and be a product you all love. This will accomplish all of those things.

We are excited to share this with you and will have more information soon.

Thank you

This is a pretty interesting move by Gab. They had been kicked out of app stores, and like the post mentions, this will allow them to just piggyback on existing apps that work with Mastodon instead of needing their own. I saw at least one app dev say that they'd specifically block it from being used on Gab, but they probably won't all do that, and I'm sure they'll probably end up with some options.

People in the fediverse don't seem very happy about this overall, but it's probably also not a big deal. The main dev of Mastodon posted:

So Gab has decided that their own code that they spent $5M of investor money developing is so unsalvageably bad that they're going to use Mastodon's code instead, with the added bonus of leeching off of our apps (with Gab apps being banned from app stores)

This is an early warning to fellow admins to be vigilant and domain-block them on sight, when/if they appear (unconfirmed whether they intend to federate), and to app devs to consider if blocking Gab's domains from their app is necessary.

Remember that Gab is a sinking ship and they're basically grabbing onto Mastodon like a parasite in a desperate attempt to get attention from the "drama" of doing so.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gab-is-in-full-meltdown-and-founder-andrew-torba-blames-the-deep-state

Torba has no self-awareness to see how pathetic it looks that his master race ass is incompetent at making a working website so he has to resort to using software made by a Jew instead.

App devs will block their domains, server admins will block their domains, and that'll be the end of that.

I missed the Witcher, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones boats-- what's the next big fantasy series that's starting right now? Like one book's been recently released and it was a shock how good it was, and all of its readers want more?

I want to hop on a train that'll take me into a fantasy land when the getting's good.

Here's the background story about the video: #GenerationLockdown: Two Australians shake up America with viral anti-gun ad

And here's the video itself: Generation Lockdown (The video is not graphic in any way. It's safe for work. Whether it's safe for your emotions is a different matter.)