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 thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.

If you'd like to help support Ukraine, please visit the official site at https://help.gov.ua/ - an official portal for those who want to provide humanitarian or financial assistance to people of Ukraine, businesses or the government at the times of resistance against the Russian aggression.

I am preparing to make beef bourguignon for my Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow (Kyiv cake for dessert) so I am watching Julia Child's take on it.

She mentioned that if you want the dish to be really French than you could buy imported bay leaves from France because they have a different flavor than American bay leaves. It made me start thinking about where my spices were grown and if all of them have specific regional variances that can take specific dishes to the next level. I knew honey can taste wildly different based on the region's flora that was available to make the honey, but never thought too much about spices.

Have you found that using spices from their region of origin significantly enhances a dish?

Three weeks in! Update your bingo cards and tell us about what you played!

Q: I missed the beginning of this event. Can I still join?
A: Of course! It's open all month.

Topic etiquette:

• It is fine to make multiple top-level posts throughout the week if you play multiple games.

• It is fine to respond to yourself with updates if you're continuing a single game and walk to talk more about it as you go.

• If you are playing Backlog Bingo, feel free to make a top-level post with your card that you edit as you go, while making new posts underneath that to talk about the games as you play them.

Gameplay guidelines:

• Goals for this event (if any) are entirely individual and self-determined.

• You do NOT need to finish games unless you want to. The point is to try out games and have fun, not force ourselves to play things we're not interested in.

Backlog Bingo

Thanks to the amazing efforts of our very own @Wes, we are debuting Backlog Bingo! This is a completely optional way to participate in the month.

You can generate a unique Backlog Bingo card from a collection of 73 different categories. Choose the ones you want in your batch, and then use Wes's custom-made online tool to automatically create your own individualized bingo card.

Wes's tool automatically assembles the markdown for your table, so it will paste beautifully into comments here on Tildes. For example:

Play games throughout the month to check off categories in the Bingo card. The ★ in the middle of every card is a free space -- there are no requirements for that square and any game you play fits there!

The most basic win condition is five-in-a-row, but, if you're feeling really wild, you might go for a win pattern that's a little more involved. Your choice!

Here's an example of someone "winning" the card above:

Bingo Golfing (thanks @Wes and @aphoenix!) is also an option: trying to clear a pattern by counting multiple categories for a single game, thus “winning” with as few games as possible.

Step 3 of Wes's tool includes instructions for checking off games, which has to be done manually. If you need an in-thread guide, you can use the following example below:

||
|:-:|
| ✅ ~~Struckthrough Example Category~~ <br> **Bolded Game Title** |

If you can't figure out how to check off categories or you break the Markdown for your table, feel free to ask for help in the comments or PM me and I can help you out!

FAQs

Prime has the documentary "Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe" while Netflix is running "Escaping Twin Flames" which were produced by different investigative reporters but take a similar approach to exposing this new group. Both rely on the testimony of ex members of the group to expose the founders power and control and how things changed when the group wasn't working out as they planned.

Apparently the group has a strong presence on facebook and there is also an entire reddit sub for its adherents.

I watched both of these multi part documentaries and was fascinated by the origin and rise of this group. The founders, Jeff and Megan (who now goes by Shaleia) are preying on the desperation of mostly female followers who are desperately seeking their 'one and only true love', their "twin flame". Using a technique of turning all hurts and pains inward the pair asserts they will help heal people who will practice their 'mirroring' technique.

But it starts to get really strange. Shaleia appears to be the one who started with the 'spiritual' aspect of the enterprise and Jeff appears to be the one with a fervent entrepreneurial bent who has turned it into a money making proposition.

They were living in a run down apartment when they began, but now a few years later, have bought a large home with a lake view in Michigan, with Jeff boasting about his Corvette and Porsche in the driveway. Even stranger, they have people living and working in their house to keep their enterprise running. There are shades of other religious communities with a strong 'messianic' leader that have started this way with Waco being mentioned in the documentary. Jeff even suggests, very strongly, that he may be the Christ.

The adherents pay for private or group facetime sessions with Jeff and Shaleia and are encouraged to take their video courses, which can be anywhere from $100 to $8,888. And those who have taken on the role of being life coaches under them are also encouraged to find more life coaches - it seems to be a combination of multi level marketing, religion and some kind of mass delusional 'teaching' to desperate and gullible people.

Jeff and Shaleia encourage people in their group to cut off relationships with anyone who is not supportive of Twin Flames, a sure sign of a cult, and there are several testimonials from hurting parents who are desperate to be back in touch with their children.

And in probably the strangest twist, when very few people were finding their "twin flame" to be responding, Jeff proclaimed that their twin flame already was part of the group - but since most of the group were women, he insisted that several of the women pair up and that one of them was now a "divine male", to the point of asking some to change their clothes, hair and go by a new male name.

It's all quite fascinating, and I couldn't believe that in an age where information on cults and cult activity is so easy to find, that so many people would be sucked into Twin Flames Universe and not see the control and manipulation going on in their lives.

Both are well worth watching but if you only have time for one, I'd recommend Prime's documentary - seems to be a bit more professionally produced.

Being Danish I've never really had any reason to know anything about this holiday - all I know is cursory stuff from movies and whatever one might stumble upon on the internet. Something about pilgrims and eating and/or pardoning birds. But yeah my friend invited me for Thanksgiving because her wife is American and wants to celebrate. But I don't know what I've gotten myself into 😅

There will be other expat Americans as well which makes me a little more nervous, so I'm hoping to learn a thing or two from you all on tildes so please give me any and all advice you can!

I'm looking for general advice about it but I guess I have a couple of specific questions too. They are not very traditional people so it's not going to be formal, and they have called it both Thanksgiving and Friendsgiving - but is there any particular difference between the two? And my other question is what would be a good present for the hostesses - do guests usually give anything particular? Or will the usual flowers/wine kind of thing be okay?

Hi everyone! I'm looking for a nice chef knife (or small set of cooking knives) for Christmas.

I'm looking around medium end so I'm wanting to spend 100-200 bucks, I'd prefer a small set of 2-4 knives, no large 12-16 sets as I don't believe those are good value.

I've heard good things about Wusthof and Henckels from my friends but I wanted to get a wider net of recommendations just in case before I made a decision

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!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I have tried and tried to write a daily journal/diary and always gave up after a while. My longest stretch was over the course of five years. It always devolves into a litany of banality, though, and when I look back at it, invariably appears a bit cringy.

So I have decided to start keeping a commonplace book- a place to write down interesting thoughts, quotes, ideas I come across and so forth. Without the chronological format of a journal I feel less compelled to list down stuff for the sake of it and am actually listing down ideas I'd like to remember.

Do any of you do something similar?

I was wondering what the best open source EPUB reader was, for both Android and Windows 10/11. It's ok if it's a different app for each platform.

I don't need to be able to convert EPUB to proprietary formats, I just need to be able to read some DRM-free EPUBs I have, preferably on an app that's open source so just does its job without collecting a bunch of data.

I often find myself ruminating over something I said that didn’t get the “right” feedback. Maybe this means my opinion wasn’t validated, or someone proved I was wrong, or I was completely ignored. The repetition of these moments in my head can last for days, sometimes years. I’ve learned a few coping mechanisms because no one can be perfect, for example, just telling myself that it’s a learning lesson and realizing that most of the “embarrassing” things I’ve said in the past are completely forgotten by anyone else who heard usually helps get me through. Can anyone who relates to this share some other good tips/tricks?