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 a car that's ~10 years old and I like to listen to music as I drive. I was relying on the CD player, but it only works intermittently these days, so I'm looking into alternatives.

I'm not big on connecting my phone via Bluetooth for security reasons, battery life concerns, and poor connection for streaming. I've got radio of course, but it's slim pickings where I live.

I starting looking into digital audio players. They sound ideal - compact, big offline library, physical controls - so I was hoping someone on Tildes can recommend one to me. Alternatively, if you've another solution, I'd love to hear it.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like search engines, ea and jane goodall. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was inquisitive.

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 know! It seems obvious, right? We are a hot, humid, colorful, vibrant Latin American country. Of course, our literature is the same! But that wasn't always the case! In the 1990s, Rubem Fonseca was a huge hit with his dry, ruthless Brazilian noir. Luís Fernando Veríssimo often mirrored Ernest Hemingway with long dialogues with little to no explanation.

Well, for better or worse, this is how I write most of the time. Trying to get the most from a minimal amount of words and not many adjectives and adverbs.

That seems to confuse paid Brazilian readers. There's never any consideration of style or why I choose to write the story that way. They stamp my writing for infringing on half a dozen rules and proceed to completely ignore the content.

The idea is that writing must be riddled with metaphors, poetic language, and sensorial anchors through extensive descriptions. Something I only do when I feel that it is necessary.

I sent a dry, minimalist story written in language that reflected the harshness of those people with an equally dry open ending. One reader essentially suggested turning it into an emotional journey with a Black Mirror ending.

That is often what happens with Brazilian readers: they just don't get it.

English speakers, on the other hand, get everything, including the style. They understand that the ideas are the important bit, speculate on them, and bring their own references. They seem to get everything I do easily.

I am starting to think that I should make writing in English my priority.

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?

It's been a while since I've watched an old TV show. We've had widescreen TVs in our houses for decades now. When HD and digital video came into the scene, it basically came hand in hand with the 16:9 aspect ratio. It was more cinematic. It was basically a mark of quality in and of itself.

On a whim, I decided to watch Wolf's Rain, an original Bones anime that was produced in 4:3. I thought it would be difficult to adapt to the more narrow screen. I was thinking what I'd be missing out on by the missing part of the screen.

In hindsight, those thoughts were pretty rediculous. The people who made the show knew they were going to target that aspect ratio, so they built the entire show around it. It's animation: every frame is literally a painting. The aspect ratio was never a limitation to the artist because it was effectively the same limitation any given piece of paper or canvas they would apply their art to.

By no longer producing video in 4:3, we have lost something important to framing: verticality and angularity. 16:9 means there's a lot more room to the left and right than there is up and down, and because you have so much more horizontal view dutch angles tend to be extra disorienting. While Wolf's Rain doesn't use dutch angles very often, vertical framing is extremely common. One early episode has a particularly striking scene where a white wolf is running vertically up a cliff towards the moon. Other times it's used to show off the scale of large structures, which can better express a sense of dread or oppression. The show also often has circular framing; where characters and objects are arranged in a circle, which doesn't seem to work quite as well aesthetically on widescreen formats.

Now that I've started thinking about this, I started to think about what a shame it is that we are actually losing some of our treasured 4:3 shows from the past. TV shows aren't terribly well archived in general outside of ultra-popular shows, and even then many old shows that were made for 4:3 have been bowdlerized into 16:9. Many shows have been stretched out or had their tops and bottoms deleted in order to fit into 16:9. Some shows were shot on film and had new scans done in order to use the parts that were originally designed to be cropped out. But because they are ruining the intent of the cinematographers, the addition is not necessarily a good one.

But what do you think? I know this is probably not a popular opinion, but I'm sure that I'm not the only one who thinks this.

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!