Rounds one and two of the Tildes Writing Club have been smashing, if small-scale, successes. In the interest of luring out a few lurkers with a timely provocation, I want to establish this month's theme by fiat.

What do you have to say about madness? Your contribution can resemble a clinician's assessment, a confession, a polemic, an absinthe specter, the cry of the cuckoo, the diagnosis offered by Major Clipton (but hopefully of greater length), or a 1980s ska band. That is, whether you take the word to be romantic, offensive, biographical, inspirational, or risible, take it as inspiration for your writing this month.

Just follow these easy guidelines:

Your submission can be prose or poetry of any reasonable length. Less than 7,000 words, surely.

Watch for the April 23 submissions thread to appear. Reply to it with a link to your work, which may be housed anywhere you like, including on Tildes. Prioritize venues that are not known to be aggressively anti-privacy (e.g., Google Docs). You may provide questions for readers.

You must provide feedback on 3 submissions if you are posting a submission. Only one needs to be a substantial critique. If you see a post without feedback, consider giving it preference in the order of your responses. No one likes to be left hanging.

You don't have to follow the theme. Your detective fiction about beaver glands is welcome, too.
Feel free to post questions or comments.

I’ve missed a lot of the older mmos growing up like Everquest and dark age of Camelot. What are some good older mmos to play that can still be enjoyed either as a single player or coop experience with friends that still have online and supported servers? Doesn’t have to have a massive player base or anything, it can even have just a few thousand players. I would also like to avoid WoW, I’ve had a fair amount of time in it and don’t have any desire to go back.

I finished this the other day and given how popular it is, I'm surprised there's been no discussion thread here. No spoilers in this top post but go ahead with spoilery discussion in comments.

• Network: Netflix
• Format: 7 episodes mini-series (45-70min runtime)
• Drama set in the 60s-80s, based on a book, that follows an orphan chess prodigy and follows her as she grows up into the chess world.

I'll greatly recommend it. Quick and high quality. Wonderful acting.

My fiance is an artist who was laid off because he worked for a major employer in the entertainment industry that required him to be in contact with people.

So he's been unemployed for a long time now, but he has been trying to find work, but there isn't really anything available that uses his particular skills. So we invested in a digital art workstation (basically just bought a monitor with a digitizer built in to use a pen with) so that he could work on becoming an independant artist. But he's so bad at marketing and he spends so much time worrying about fine details that it takes him over a week to finish a single piece, so he hasn't had any success.

So if you combine this with a broken tooth that he hasn't been able to get taken care of because of a lapse in his dental insurance, he's not been in a good place.

I just bought a Mac and was looking for mac-native graphics programs (I sometimes work on marketing, so I need to do photo editing from time to time. Also I used to do photography as a hobby and want to get back into it), when I came across Serif's Affinity Designer Workbook. And I thought to myself that getting my fiance a training course in graphic design would allow him to shift gears into a segment where there is more work. It'll also give him a bit of a kick in the pants to get him moving and feeling better about himself.

I'm sure everyone knows there are millions of online training courses available right now, so I'm hoping someone might have any recommendations. I have some money saved up, so I don't mind paying a little bit extra if it'll result in better results. I'd prefer if it were a class that didn't rely on Adobe Illustrator if possible, but I know that it's the 'standard' and he'll probably have better luck if he has experience in it.

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.

I have started playing D&D basic with my family as a way to spend time together away from devices.

I found the original character sheets:
http://www.ultanya.com/2015/10/throwback-thursday-character-sheets.html

Anyone else have favorite character sheets for D&D?

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!

I've been thinking a bit lately of starting to look for another place of work. Nothing is really bad at my current employer, but I've been there since 2017 and my feet are starting to itch a bit. In addition, I'm not really to engaged in my work at the moment since I feel the domain is fairly boring and the tech is rather mundane. This might be a reflection of my sentiment of IT industry in general, i.e. lots of toys but mainly they are just different flavours of the same thing (especially when it comes to building XYZ web app).

Formerly my approach to finding a new job has been to look for companies that are looking for people with skills in technologies I am interested in learning. However, since I'm a bit dissilousioned with tech I think I need to switch my approach and look more for a mission driven organisation I can get behind!

What are your thoughts on organsations that do some kind of important work? If you were to pick a top 3 organisations where you would work which ones would you pick?

Note they don't have to be tech focused. I'm generally curious about different organisations I should look into and also to hear your thoughts on the matter!

Non-comp person here; is there a record for longest period of time a DDOS attack occurred on a website? Would it be possible to forcibly keep a site offline for an extended length of time with a continuous DDOS attack?

My husband and I recently started listening to Tones and I who has a song called Johnny Run Away. It’s a short story about a boy who has feelings for another boy and is told by his dad to “run away” not because the father is homophobic but because he’s trying to protect his son from getting bullied:

His daddy walked by with a sigh
Said, "Johnny, sit by my side
I'm gonna give you the best advice
You've ever heard in your life
See that boy named Jimmy, yeah, he's a cutie
But no, no, Johnny, no, no, no
Johnny run away”

I like the song partially for its musicality (so catchy!) but also its narrative is genuinely touching to me. My father-in-law once told me he knew his son (my husband) was gay early on. He said that never changed how much he loved his son, but he was always worried about how much harder life would be for him because of that. I think a lot of parents support their LGBT kids but also live with the very real fear of knowing that the rest of the world won’t necessarily do the same, and I think this song captures that perspective.

Anyway, I would love to hear about other songs that feature LGBT stories and perspectives, especially if they’re personally resonant for you or someone you know.