With Advent of Code upon us, I wanted to check out how everyone is planning on participating. If you hadn't heard, this year has been shortened to 12 days along with the removal of the global leaderboard.

• Any changes to how you'll approach this year based on the updated format?
• Are you using an interesting language/approach?
• Any goals you're setting for yourself?

I'm a sucker for puzzles in general, but I also love hearing about everyone else's experiences, so I'm excited to hear what y'all are looking forward to!

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

I am thinking of buying a treadmill so I can run even when its nigh impossible outside (for example this week most days had slippery snowy goop out, probably still can run most days but coupled with how early it gets dark and how cold it is I am just not morivated most days in the winter). Biggest problem I have is that I live in an apartment, so I am scared I couldnt run cause my downstairs neighbors would hate me. Is there any way to make it work? Or does anyone have any ideas how to properly motivate myself to run in winter? I used to go running every other day and I loved it and I want to run more somehow, I barely force myself to do it like once a week now in the winter. Its just annoyingly cold before I warm up, or if I put on too many layers instead I am too sweaty after I warm up. Maybe I need better clothes?

Let me define a campaign as an episodic story with a clear hook, rising action (or actions), climax, and ending. It would ideally be a story that goes for multiple (at least 4 or 5) play sessions so as to distinguish it from a one shot.

How do you, as a DM, develop and run these?

Over the years in my group we've all taken turns running campaigns, one shots, sessions, etc and what's always fascinated me most is how everyone's planning style is so different. Some get into ridiculous detail, while others (guilty...) tend to improv.

My wife and I are potentially adopting a cat.

The cat is an adult, not sure the exact age (but will see if that’s known when we get it).

The long story short is, a close friend had 3 cats (I think strays as kittens but not 100% sure, I think they were acquired at different times - they do not appear to be related to each other), but due to the current political state of the US ended up moving abroad on a visa for this past year, and is planning on staying away for longer. Initially, the cats were staying with another friend but that has recently fallen through (I think they did not expect the 3 cats to be as much to handle as they are, they keep getting onto counters, eating food that is left out/left unattended, and scratching furniture, and at this point they’re getting fed up with them), and we were asked if we could take any of them

We have met the cats quite a few times, and they do seem friendly towards us.

My wife seems very allergic to one of them, but only mildly allergic or significantly less allergic to the other two.

We currently live in an apartment that does allow pets, but this would be the first time either of us have owned a cat, so unfortunately I think we could only take one of them.

I’m thinking we could probably use some advice on things to consider and best practices.

Preliminary research has said to get 1 or 2 litter boxes, feed at regular times, running water bowls are preferred, and get lidded trash cans. We plan on keeping the cat on the same food and litter type, at least initially. I know there are other things, and we will take the cat for a check-up and establish a vet. Due to my wife’s allergies, we are planning on keeping the cat out of the bedroom and running an air purifier there, and hopefully visiting an allergist before we adopt the cat if time permits.

But I’m wondering what others’ experiences have been with a cat in an apartment and what advice you may have? (How to keep them off of counters? Keep them from getting bored while at work or while working from home?)

I recently “upgraded” my wife’s computer, since it was about 7 years old and I think the WiFi chip in the motherboard was starting to go (and the motherboard wasn’t Windows 10 compatible either, and she wanted to upgrade to Windows 11).

Of course, upgrading the motherboard to the latest WiFi standards meant upgrading the CPU (also swapped from Intel to AMD), which resulted in getting new RAM as well (a rough time for that, given the prices).

All of that to say, I’m now sitting on a mostly functional old motherboard, cpu, and ram. Basically an entire computer sans case and power supply (I’m sure I have a hard drive laying around somewhere).

Any thoughts on what I could do with it? I’d thought of trying to build out a NAS (or some other home server of sorts), but I’ve been thinking that for 2 years and haven’t done it yet because I haven’t really found a “need” for one. I basically just use my computer for gaming, and I don’t really have or plan to have media collections with seem to be the main use case of a hobby NAS.

American Thanksgiving was yesterday, so I get a nice long weekend. My husband and I spent yesterday with family, while today has been us chilling with our dog while enjoying canned cocktails and delicious leftovers.

In the spirit of the holiday (and speaking on behalf of the drinks I’ve consumed) I want to let everyone know that I’m happy this place exists and is filled with kind, thoughtful people. Tildes is marked by a coziness that, I believe, is largely missing across the modern internet.

I like recognizing people’s usernames and getting to know them. I like the slower pace of things here. I like that people put in effort. It feels good.

I know we’re all random internet nobodies inhabiting a tiny, niche corner of the web, but I’m happy I get to share this space with y’all. What luck that we ended up here, together.

Cheers, everyone. 🍻 Thanks for being awesome.

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!

Looking to buy a new laptop, and of the model I'd like (thinkpad carbon x1), it seems like I can choose one with or without an NPU.

My surface-level understanding is they make built in AI processing and a couple other niche uses more efficient. Flip side, they're maybe a marketing gimmick?

Price aside (price difference doesn't seem too great), I'm wondering: should I buy a model with an NPU to help potentially future proof? Are there potential downsides to an npu model? Upsides?

I know there are lots of technical people here, I'd love to hear your thoughts or experiences!

Every once in awhile I have one of these ideas, but this one I think would be incredibly fun and interesting to have: ~electronics or (~tech.electronics || ~engineering.electronics), , programming || ~tech.programming. forgot momentarily that ~comp was a thing.

Not as a community for tech news or product discussions (we have ~tech for that) but for electronics research, electronic hobbies/diy, ideas, Q&A, etc etc. With our seemingly higher than average hard tech professional community on here I think this would be great and really bring a new type of content into our fold that could be interesting and and exciting.

I've brought up ~hardware before, but I think ~electronics is more widespread, could include anything to do with electronics: PCBs, computers/desktops, sound/audio, lighting, robotics, electrical work, etc.

While I was writing this I realized, and was quite surprised that we don't have something like ~tech.programming on here either, maybe that should be one as well to consider. ~comp is a thing, I post there.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like jmail, cookies and coming out. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was befuddled.

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!