Following this month's discussion of the Dispossessed, we are set up for Project Hail Mary towards the end of June. After that we will discuss Ocean at the End of the Lane at the end of July, Small Gods at the end of August and This is How You Lose the Time War at the end of September.

I look forward to reading with you.

This is the third of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing the Dispossessed.
Our next book will be Project Hail Mary around the end of June.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

I have tried and failed to journal many times in the past. I always find myself self-editing, avoiding writing certain thoughts or feelings and just overall not being as authentic or honest or genuine as I should be to actually get some value out of journaling. I wish I could get over this “self-censoring” habit because I love reading and writing and really think journaling could be a great outlet for me.

So, I ask, what tips do you have to help write? To help actually get your thoughts and feelings out on the page, without judging yourself or feeling self conscious or critical? What do you write? What do you find helps you write more honestly and genuinely?

Could really use some help and guidance.

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.

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!

So, I have some crap lying on the floor. Not crap in the sence that it goes straight to recycling, just lots of tidbits which I don't exactly know what to do with; semi-sorted papers, notebooks, various VR gear, some books which I don't really have room for in my bookcase, some folders where some of the papers should probably go into, my laptop, a stone which I guess I use for weightlifting except I forget to do that, and when I see all this stuff, my brain just shortcircuits.

So I decided that, okay, I can just ignore this and try tidying up this shelf which I had tried to make into a sort of cabinet of curiosities but which over time had degenerated into a bit of mess; a LCD game, the box to said LCD game, vintage headphones, vintage phone, retro Nokia mobile, beach glass, fossils, various stones, some mess which doesn't really belongs here, a cat skull (I think) ... and of course, the same thing happened. My brain just said nope, too much to deal with.

I know there are ways to go about it. If getting my apartment in a habitable state is too much, I can ignore all of it and just focusing on one room. If my coding project seem to overwhelming, I can decide on a alpha milestone to work towards and based on that make a bucket list of the tasks and start with the most basic one, and if the first one is too overwhelming, split it up into sub-tasks. So there are some tried-and-true ways to deal with it.

But for the first time, I started to wonder what exactly goes on with the brain here? Why does something consisting of a relatively small number of sub-tasks seem so overwhelmingly hard? Is it like that for everyone, does it have a name, what?

I'm very sorry, but this is going to be rant. One that may seem to come up almost daily, but I still feel the need to vent.

Every day I feel like I'm jumping through hoops to keep a little bit of privacy and autonomy, without ever winning. DuckDuckGo is my search engine, use a paid mail provider, I try to stay away from anything Google and Meta, use only Signal, ad blocking everywhere, hosting most services locally, etc. It seems, however, to make no difference in the long run. The user-profile-building just seems to enter the home faster than I can mitigate it. Kids install some new app or new hardware ends up listening in, privacy infringement is there.

The reason I'm starting this post now is because I switched ISP and TV provider recently, but it has been on my mind for a long time. Finding one that isn't owned by one of huge 3 parent companies, is almost impossible here. After a year of deciding, I finally figured it was time to throw in the towel and just pick the least bad option. Yesterday was the day of switching and it has been such a frustrating process.

The provided router doesn't allow me to turn off its WLAN. I live in a city, so the airwaves are already crowded enough as it is. No need to keep that antenna on, but screw me, that's not possible. Opened up the device to just remove the card, but everything is soldered on the board and disconnecting the antennas didn't do shit.
It's possible to buy a modem/router myself, but it'll need to follow their requirements and will set me back $200. It would be okay if the rest of the service was great, but here comes the TV part!

The device they use for TV is apparently Android TV. I assumed it would be IPTV with this subscription, but Android TV isn't that. Booting the device makes it immediately clear they are here to harvest data. It makes me so unhappy that a service I'm paying for, is also making money on the side by collecting data. To get a quick idea of what's being done, I routed the box through wireshark to sniff DNS traffic. It's riddled with domains used for data collection and ads. That combined with the features this box wants me to agree to (location, using the mic, access local network, sign into PlayStore, make a profile including real life information) does not make me trust this device. So I've decided to not play and will be sending it back.

People around me are pretty conscious about what they do online, but compared to them I'm highly paranoid. Wherever I look, there are privacy issues. It seems impossible to escape from. How are other people dealing with this?

UPDATE: I don't know if anybody is really interested, but I thought I would update anyway. I decided to listen to my gut and I cancelled the subscription. It feels like the best decision I've made in a long time. It's nice to feel like I'm still a little bit in charge, even though I know that's also just a false sense of autonomy. Suck it, Google! You're not the boss of me :-)

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like gpt.4o, surcharges and judaism.orthodox. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was fussed.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

I noticed that Tildes has had no previous discussion of Andrew Hickey's wonderful music podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. So I thought I'd write a little about it, in case it might bring as much joy to someone here as it has brought me. It's easily my favourite podcast, and it might actually be my favourite work on music history in any medium. It's really that good.

The podcast started something like six years ago, and like its name suggests, it presents a history of rock music. But not just the "four white guys and some guitars" rock music of the 1970s and beyond, but a far more in-depth exploration of where the genre came from and how it has evolved. This is not one of those podcasts where a host or hosts have chosen a topic, done some light resarch and then talk about what comes to their mind. Instead, each episode is thoroughly researched, pre-written and edited. It is a high quality audio lecture delivered by an excellent and witty storyteller who knows what he is talking about.

The first episode was on "Flying Home" by the Benny Goodman Sextet, a jazz and jump blues track released in 1939, and therefore naturally not really a rock song, but something that works as a good starting point in the wider discussion of the genre's evolution. From there, episode by episode, Hickey has told us about the (or rather "a") history of rock music chronologically, taking us through the 40s and 50s, and currently heading towards the end of the 60s. He has indicated that just as 1939 was a somewhat arbitrary starting point, his 500-song history will end with a song that was released in 1999. Looking at his current pace, it may be a while until we get there.

The latest episode is song #174, "I Heard it Through the Grapevine", first released in 1967. It's part one of a two-part narration, with the current episode concentrating on the song's early history and its writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, while the upcoming episode two will look at Marvin Gaye's version and career at that point.

Hickey has in fact recently started to split some songs into multiple episodes, and he did it also with the previous song, song #173, Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower", first released in 1967. That one had Part 1 that concentrated on Dylan's version, and then Part 2 that covered Jimi Hendrix's version. Although, when I say that those episodes concentrate on Dylan's and Hendrix's versions of the song, that's not exactly true. It would be more accurate to say that Part 1 concentrates on Dylan's career in the late 60s, as well some related subjects and artists from the era, while Part 2 looked at Hendrix's career at the time, as well as subjects and artists related to him around that time.

And this is actually an important point to make. While the episodes certainly tell you a lot about the song that they are discussing, they are not solely about the song in question, and they never really aim to give you a subjective interpretation of the song or anything like that. Instead, you are given plenty of historical facts, you hear a lot of interesting stories, and you find out how the song and the people who were involved with it fit into a larger narrative of rock music. And you also get to hear excerpts of some really good music along the way. Hickey is very much an expert in the topic, a great storyteller, and seems like someone who knows how to do his research.

The podcast's early episodes were shorter, about half an hour or so, while some of the more recent episodes have become much longer, some reaching over four hours, which is the reason why Hickey has started to split some episodes into multiple parts. In addition to the main podcast, there are also Patreon bonus episodes which are not part of the main narrative, but which I can highly recommend. They function as companion pieces to the main story, and typically last between 10 to 30 minutes; for instance, the bonus episode for the first "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" episode was on the song "Bend Me, Shape Me" by Amen Corner. And so, although he is officially just at song #174, Hickey has probably covered well over three hundred songs so far.

The podcasts are free of ads and fully community supported. You should be able to find the podcast on all the main podcast providers, and it has a dedicated website at 500songs.com. If you don't know where to start, the double episode on "All Along the Watchtower" that I mentioned earlier could be a good way to check if the podcast is for you. Or, if you have some favourite artists or songs from the 40s, 50s or 60s, check out the tags on the website to see if he has made episodes on them. Or you can of course just start from the beginning, like I did.

Last year, Hickey was also a guest on Rick Rubin's podcast, and that interview could also be a good introduction to Hickey and his work.

Following the recent upsets with both Twitter and Reddit, how have people here been exporting/archiving their bookmarked/favorited/liked/etc threads, posts, and the content within (images, links, etc) for later reference?

It hit me not too long ago that there’s a lot of good stuff I’ve bookmarked over the years on both and it’d be unfortunate for viewing it to be locked behind keeping accounts active. Additionally, more and more of it’s disappearing over time not just due to link rot (which seems to have been accelerating dramatically in the past decade), but also as a result of users deleting their posts on the way out.

I’m particularly interested in solutions that saves content locally, because exporting these things to e.g. a cloud read it later service or bookmark manager really just shifts the problem around instead of solving it, but beggars can’t be choosers and all that.

I guess I'll post another thoughtful analysis rant on tech trends. It has been mentioned here in a few threads already but I simply wanted to try to start a focused discussion.

Personally I first noticed significant degradation of search functionality around 2018 or so, while specifically Google was mentioned at least as far back as 2016. But it is not simply Google or even just general search engines. Any random site specific search functionality or discoverability algorithms on various sites share these trends too.

It really seems that the focus is simply on delivering as many results as possible with actual quality or even relevance being somewhere on the tail end of priorities. It is not even just lack of(useful, consistent) search operators, lack of transparency, lack of structured search possibilities, lack of sorting options, lack of granularity - it is the simple disregard for the basic intent of the query with some implementations sometimes being actually more accurate with fewer keywords with no option to modify this behavior.

It is especially damaging for(at least my) ability to research a topic. A decade and half ago I could go in with a topic I had no idea about and emerge two hours later with a very basic but likely mostly accurate and slightly in-depth overview by refining my searches. Now I'm lucky to get one single thoughtful blog post or discussion among dozens or tutorials, 10-bests and ads with the query being almost completely disregarded and keywords being straight up ignored to deliver this deluge of both low quality and mostly completely irrelevant results.

Are there any projects, search engines or anything other that aim to deliver actually useful, steerable, user directed results?

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?

Hey everyone!

Do you have any experience with time blocking? Do you use any apps to help or do you do it all manually in your calendar? I recently watched a video I found on Tildes by Answer in Progress (https://youtu.be/vYaNiC4kchg?si=zh02N4bStqAhBBAe) about attention span. I have heard a lot about time blocking in the past, but always thought I never really needed it.

However, recently I've been starting to realize maybe I'm not doing well mentally..days can slip by on YouTube, or a video game, and the things I wanted to get done get pushed back to the next day..and the next day, and so on..or things I was passionate about, things I want to succeed in that I am good at..just sort of slip away, and I stop doing them and lose my drive. So maybe I need to block time to get it done... I'm not sure. So I guess I can try Meditation and time blocking..

Anyway, anyone have some suggestions if they do this? Have you found that it helped?

Hello everyone.

I am planning to get back into Linux development after working with Mac only for almost a decade. On Mac, one of the most important lessons that I learned was to always use Homebrew. Using various package managers (e.g. Homebrew, NPM, Yarn, Pip, etc.) creates situations in which you don't know how to uninstall or upgrade certain pieces of software. Also, it's hard to generate a complete overview.

How do you Linux folks handle this?

Bonus question: How do you manage your dotfiles securely? I use Bitwarden, and it's a bit clunky.

If that helps, I want to try Mint and always use Oh My ZSH!.