I like to write notes for work and sketch/draw in my spare time. I'm about to finish another paper notebook, and I noticed a few ads for the ReMarkable & decided to check it out. A few YouTube videos later, I'm now quite interested in getting an e-ink tablet to replace the notebooks I've been going through.

Thing is, with this type of technology I'm always a bit worried that I won't use it enough to justify the price. If anyone has one of those - have they managed to replace the classic paper/pen combo for you? Do you regret your purchase or are you happy with it?

If anyone is curious, I was specifically looking at the ReMarkable 2 and the Supernote Nomad. The ReMarkable seems to be the most popular choice, but I really like how the Supernote emphasizes repairability (notably, the battery is replaceable). I'm also very much open to other suggestions if you have any!

How do people here keep up with upcoming niche games? Most of the blogs I've followed for this have been abandoned over time and I'm looking for new one(s). Ideally, I'm looking for something that:

• Supports RSS
• Highlights trailers or other creator-made pages showing off lesser-known games
• Focuses on the "hobby itch.io experiment" to "Annapurna / Devolver-published" segment of the Lo-Fi to AAA spectrum (nothing more AAA than that)
• Posts occasional reviews/interviews with games/creators (optionally)
• Has no/little focus on industry-insider news

I'm obviously biased towards "small-web" blogs or forums, but I'd love to hear about however you stay up to date with cool things creators are making!

situation: Watch video until the end, and want to get back to "home" with as little drama/clicking as possible.

Current process:

• hit the tiny ass'd "x" at the top right to close the suggestions overlay (usually after several attempts)
• drag the video position back 30+ seconds so that the "up next" overlay is no longer obscuring the minimize video carat in the upper left.
• hit the tiny ass'd minimize video carat (usually after several attempts)

I keep wishing there was just a 'go back to home screen' option available at the end of videos that I'm just missing.

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!

My whole life I have lived with the regret of not becoming proficient in a musical instrument. I grew up with a piano and acoustic guitar in my childhood home, and I actually took lessons for both but never committed to practicing or improving. As a result I grew up tinkering with both hit never learned how to read music or actually develop any fundamental techniques to play either.

I am an autodidact and have always felt that with the right resources, and a little discipline, I could at least learn enough to play a few songs on either instrument, and possibly with time become a sight reader.

To that end, I am curious, musicians of ~Tildes, what resources are the best to self-learn piano and guitar? Books, videos, apps, anything that you’ve used or know people have used and actually went from complete novice to reasonably proficient?

Thanks and happy new year!

it's the end of 2023, and I figured it would be fun to put together a list of the games which made the best impressions on me throughout. Post yours! It's cool if it wasn't a game made in 2023; if you found it this year, that's good enough. It's your year, not this year lol.

I've written about most/all of these in longer form here on Tildes. I might end up repeating myself a bit, but if you want a more thorough description they'll be easy to find in my history. Goes without saying I'd recommend any of them. The order here doesn't mean anything.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon - this was my personal game of the year, and one I'll cherish long after. Armored Core has you building, customizing, and then piloting a mech. AC VI took ideas and mechanics from across its series, blended them together into a new framework, and the result is a fast, explosive experience. As it was in the past, the game takes you through first learning the ropes and exploring new parts, then pushes you to get as good as you can with whatever is fun to you. In the best way, it feels like a game from an earlier time in history - its straightforward mission structure makes for a game you can quickly jump into, make a lot of progress, and jump back out of without having to worry about missing much or forgetting what you were doing. Everything about it has been polished, honed to be about as nice as you could reasonably expect. It looks good, plays great, and tells a story that does with mecha what Fromsoft did with AC's mechanics - it's a little bit of everything, elegantly smashed together.

Exanima - This game is perhaps one of the most unique experiences I've yet to see, despite looking like a lot I have already seen. Exanima takes a very detailed, simulation kind of approach to the objective of dungeon crawling. What makes it unique is its physics system. Controlling a character is more like moving a marionette, where you tug the character along to build momentum and aim your swings. Weapons feel significantly different to each other, and heavy armor changes how well you can move. Once you get used to it, the result of working with this system is a dynamic, visceral kind of combat where you may feel confident, but never certain. An errant slash or clumsy step can mean taking a heavy blow, and recovery is not easy. When the game was younger, folks played and loved the combat so much that it inspired an arena mode. The arena is a separate, distinct mode in which you are tasked with building a roster of characters and participating in tournaments. It is a game unto itself. If you're a fan of games with a very high skill ceiling, Exanima is providing you a system that can go really, really far. The game is a project being worked on by a small group of people, already has a lot of content available, and seems poised to continue development practically forever. Don't let "Early Access" put you off, this one is in a state where it's just good to get more of it. What's there is more than worth its price.

Kenshi - I just got into this one and have been blown the hell away by how much there is to it. In Kenshi you take the role of a person dropped into an alien world, and are tasked simply with surviving. How you do that is up to you, and the world is built to notice and react. There is no story, no main quest or objective. Rather, you can learn more about the world by engaging with it, and determine your own goals within it. As you do things like visit new places, eliminate important people, build your own town, etc., the state of the world will change. This can go in many directions, and there are hours upon hours of videos out there of folks pulling off all sorts of wild shit. Truly, it's a game where your playthrough will become a story the further you go. Mechanically, it's like someone combined Morrowind, The Sims, and Neverwinter Nights, with a big coat of Mad Max paint all over it.

Cyberpunk 2077 - I had played this before, when it first released, and though I did like some of what it was trying to do, the gameplay was busted to the point I didn't care to come back. Now that it's had its expansion and a lot of bugfixing, this game stands pretty tall and I was really impressed with it this second time through. Definitely a case of "they fixed it"; they really, actually did. It's not a No Man's Sky-scale redemption arc but a redemption arc nonetheless, I guess. The big ball of stories and systems rolls along and you roll right up in it, with missions playing out similar to an episode of a higher end tv show. They weave and wrap up satisfyingly, and by the end I feel I had a pretty complete experience of having been a Night City mercenary.

Tactics Ogre: Reborn - Tactics Ogre was always one of my favorite tactics games and this remake both ups its presentation and provides a different kind of challenge. Specifically, it eliminates the ability to power-level anyone; your level is capped as you make your way through the story, forcing you to engage with the game's other systems in order to work out an advantage. The best way I can think to put it, is that it goes in a more Chess-like direction, where you need to be carefully considering how your individual pieces work and planning out a sound approach, because you can no longer action-rpg your way out of it by grinding. At least for me, it felt like a fresh take on something I've enjoyed for a long time, and so became the version I most enjoy playing. If you like Final Fantasy Tactics, TO is its precursor. Give it a go and see what you think - at least for me, it won.

Lunacid - Lunacid is a simplistic game that does what it does exceptionally well. Borrowing primarily from King's Field, it's a first person dungeon crawler in which you piece together the weird place you're in by finding stuff and opening up new paths. It's playing the King's Field influence pretty straight; it lives off being spooky and weird, and spruces up combat to suit a more modern sensibility. What impressed me was just how good of an iteration it is; King's Field is a tough series to get into these days and this game feels like a successful effort to bring it back.

Honorable Mention - Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries - this one gets an honorable mention because just to be frank, the base game is kinda mediocre. It's through mods that I had a fantastically good time with it. I was never into Battletech, but did play the old Mechwarrior games, and while I did miss some of the more simulation-ish aspects of the older games, MW5 + the mods I used gave me enough to do and experiment with that it just didn't matter in the end. In particular, Coyote's Mission Pack, vonBiomes, and Yet Another Mechlab added just a ton of stuff, and of course you can go much much further with it if you want. The base game is not bad on its own, it's just easy to see all it has to offer really quickly. The mods primarily add variety, to tasks and options, and it's in that swirl of ideas and systems where I found a lot of the fun I had.

Post your picks! Just about all of this is on sale right now, so hopefully too we'll all find some neat stuff to check out.

One of my favorite rabbit holes is lost media. There are two definitions for how it usually comes up: first is media which is considered lost or otherwise inaccessible. The second isn't necessarily lost for sure, but simply relatively obscure media people can't identify. A lot of searches start with people recounting some vaguely traumatizing memory of some TV show, movie or book from their childhood, which can then turn into a vicious hunt that takes years to solve. The most famous example is probably the "Clock Man" which played a big role in drawing general attention to the concept of lost media.

Famous examples include the early seasons of Doctor Who, London After Midnight (and many, many, many other silent films), the first Superbowl, an extended version of the ending of Freaks, the original 9-hour cut of Greed... You can find countless ongoing searches today for all sorts of media ranging from songs to video games to commercials and even commercial bumpers.

It's a fun rabbit hole, particularly when you look into the searches themselves and how media gets found. Does anyone have any particular pieces of lost media you're looking for or invested in, or a search or piece you just find interesting? Feel free to talk about cases that have been found, too!

Looking for an app/platform for logging and rating the games I've played. I play a lot of classic games (playing Dragon Warrior 2 right now) so something with support for older stuff is a must. Tell me what you use!