Wondering what’s your favorite self-help book, with the most practical, down-to-earth advice that maybe changed your life.
I’ll go first: I really liked Mindfullness in Plain English, removed all the myths around meditation and broke it down to very digestible concepts allowing me to practice the same on a daily basis.

Looking forward to hear yours!

After seeing some interest in philosophical discussion threads in this group last night, here's one for all of you.

Ever since I watched the movie Arrival and saw this quote, I've had this set of questions about humans and how our minds and our perception of reality is influenced by language. I'm going to throw some of those questions out below as a discussion starter and see where we end up. Sorry they're a bit general, feel free to restate any of them to be more specific or more interesting to you.

How does language limit us? Is our inability to really understand and explain concepts such as quantum reality, existence past an event horizon, or a scenario without spacetime (e.g. prior to the big bang) a product of the limitations of language or is it a fundamental limitation of humanity? Can language evolve to be able to capture such concepts? If language does evolve, how will it affect our perception of reality?

I see there is an issue open to add a saving feature for topics, which is great! I would like to make a suggestion for this feature.

Do you think it would be possible to give users the ability to add their own tags to a saved topic?

A lot of times I search for content related to a project I am working on, and it would be nice if I could tag the topics I find as "project-xyz", as this would allow me find them easily when I come back to reference something. This tag would be useless to anyone else, but having our own personal tags, that only we can see, would be very useful in curating content.

One way this could be done is by having a new section named "Your Tags" that appears under the existing "Tags" one, in the sidebar for a topic. Then on the Saved page, the sidebar could list all your unique tags, and clicking one would filter the topics.

Anyway, just throwing out an idea. I can add a comment to that GitLab issue, if this is a possibility and something people are interested in.

Astralis 2-0 Team Liquid

Inferno: 16-5
Map stats: https://www.hltv.org/stats/matches/mapstatsid/70988/astralis-vs-liquid

Nuke: 16-12
Map stats: https://www.hltv.org/stats/matches/mapstatsid/70995/liquid-vs-astralis

Astralis win the Grand Final!

So, I've been playing this campaign with some friends for a while where I am a crocodile-themed lizardfolk hick with a thunder cannon named Cletus Cornelius Crocodilius the 3rd. Much fun has been had so far, but today something extra special fun happened.

So a while back our party found a stone that basically makes whatever it's being wielded by as light as a feather. So naturally our undead pirate monk has been using it to fuck with Cletus by shoving it into his mouth and then pushing him great distances. I thought it was funny, the DM thought it was funny, and it'd give us all a great laugh. But, it did give me an idea.

See, we were all hunting down this nasty chimera, and after some scouting we knew it could fly. That was no bueno for us and we needed something to clip its wings. Suddenly, I remember that we have a stone that made me weigh about as much as a toddler. I also had several bear traps. And since I was a crocodile, I could grapple things with my mouth, leaving my hands, and my thunder cannon, free to attack.

So, we lure the flying chimera out with out bird-person bard, who lures it into range. We take all our ropes and strap the bear traps to Cletus and then an anchor line around his waist. We then have the sorcerer gnome cast enlarge upon himself, making him the massive size of a slightly larger than average human. He and the monk then chuck me as hard as they can at the chimera, which I proceed to stick to like a giant reptilian tick. I then spat the stone out onto the ground, and suddenly this tick weighed 800lb again.

I proceed to spend the entire combat session locked to this thing, blowing chunks off of it with my thunder cannon until it is grounded and no longer able to fly. It was still a tough fight, but we managed to prevail in the end.

It then became a desperate struggle to cut Cletus out of the bear traps before the dead Chimera fell off the bridge we were fighting it on. Thanks to a few lucky dex saves from myself and the bird person, Cletus managed to leap off the plummeting chimera at the last second.

I love this game.

USgamer put this series of articles out over the last week. Here's links to the 3 parts:

1. Out of the Wild West: Inside the Evolution of Games Writing
2. Narrative Paramedics: Meet the Writers Called in to Patch Up Games
3. From The Witcher 3 to Queer Dating Sims: How Writers are Expanding the Boundaries of Video Game Storytelling

Hi fellow Tildes Beta users!

I primarily do my browsing on an iPad or my iPhone. Currently I'm using Chrome.

Until an app is made, what do you all find the best way to browse Tildes is? The formatting is a little wonky for me, which is perfectly understandable. It's not exactly a deal breaker, but it would be a lot easier having a more optimized experience.

I doubt I'm alone, so what're y'alls preferences?

With so many threads asking about what operating system people use, favorite music, favorite tv-shows, etc, I feel like this is a good subgroup for all of the groups (other than maybe tildes and talk).

So, I am currently attending a big scouting event in Europe and there are people from over 50 different countries. And I have noticed, that quite a lot of them are acting (at least for me) in a very disrespectful manner towards the flag. Starting with the smaller thinngs, most people have flag tied on a rope between their tents (the flag is tied in top left and top right corners). In my opinion, it should only be tied on the left side, while the right is hanging freely. But I can kind of understand that, because the flag is much more visible, it's easier and nicer to do it this way. However, it gets worse. Earlier today, when it started drizzling, I saw some people using their flag as head protection. And, in my opinion the biggest sign of disrespect, when we had the opening ceremony, there were people laying their flag on the ground and sitting on it, not caring who steps on it or anything.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Is this just me overreacting? Or do you think this is a serious problem?

If you've lived long enough, read widely or suffered through the usual collegiate education requirements, you may find that your head has vast stores of disconnected knowledge which don't necessarily relate to anything necessary for daily life. That is, until the moment some dusty lump of data becomes a relevant jewel.

J.R.R. Tolkien coined the word "mathom" to describe questionably valuable clutter that you can't throw out:

Mathom
Last but not least, here’s a word you can use to switch up your everyday vocab. Next time you go to visit your grandparents, keep your eyes peeled for mathoms, a popular Hobbit possession.
Mathom comes from the Old English ‘maðm’, meaning treasure, which fell out of use in the 13th century. In the Shire, it’s commonly known as a Hobbit’s trinket, typically a useless heirloom. Tolkien went further and revived ‘mathom-house’ as a museum stuffed with old curiosities.

Do you find yourself collecting and seeking out information in odd corners just on the off-chance it will be useful?

Have you a story of the time when some obscure, trivial factoid suddenly saved the day?

Yesterday my phone completely broke its SIM card settings and I had to do a factory reset. I thought the backups that my phone did to my Google Drive backed up everything I needed, but apparently they don't! So now I get the pleasure of remembering every little configuration change I've done over the past three years. Maybe it's time for a new phone...

What about you? What do you want to complain about? Please, complain with me.

Hi. I recently realised that I don't do much is a sense that I only do two or three things all the time while on my free time, and those are usualy just watching youtube or browsing interenet in general. I am the kind of person that finds anything interesting when I start, but I usually drop it if there is a learning curve right at the start (eg. lockpicking). So any of you have sort of a hobby that would suite me?

EDIT: signups are now closed.

relevant blog post

teknik.io is a website that provides services like email, [encrypted] file uploads, Git repos, blogs, URL shortening, and more. I've used them for a few years and they're wonderful. It's all open-source and privacy conscious, maybe some Tildes users would like it?

Registration is usually invite-only, but it's open for a few hours.

Thanks @duckoverflow for mentioning this.

Edit: also their privacy policy is short, simple, and easy-to-read if anyone is interested in that. I'd consider it a great example of what a privacy policy should be.

I have a question about AMP links in new topics.

I posted this with the AMP link as an experiment. After a few days of life at 2G data speeds I have begun to appreciate the benefits of AMP. Also, fast load times seem to be in line with light and quick philosophy of Tildes.net.

One downside of AMP is that it is a mobile layout which is not ideal layout on desktop with high resolution.

What do you all think of using AMP links in topics?

Not sure if anyone will remember by now, but a few months ago I made a philosophical discussion thread in ~talk since a group like ~humanities didn't exist yet. I was super excited by all of the great discussion that I was able to join in, and now that we have ~humanities (thanks @Deimos!), I'm wondering how people would feel about some threads for more general discussion of various questions as opposed to the mostly link-based discussion that's gone on here so far.

Would anyone else be interested in that sort of thing? I'd be more than happy to start a few threads up over the next few days if people are interested.

To clarify I'm not incompetent at computers, I'm sure people don't tend to install Linux if they aren't familiar with technology in a decent capacity. But for instance I can't code, can't operate the command line short of copying and pasting command, and don't really know what I'm doing with the technical aspect other than following online guides. I have used windows all my life. I'm Linux illiterate for lack of a better description.

I decided I wanted some form of USB bootable computer, i'm familiar with chrome books, enjoy the light weight OS, and am bed bound to the google ecosystem so I when I saw how you could plug in a USB and have the computer boot into Chrome OS running off the USB I thought that sounded perfect. But during my research of discovery I found that Linux seemed like a very good alternative, I had always had it in my head that it was very technical and finicky system where to do a simple google search you had to code in half a dozen lines into the control terminal in some bizarre 2018 text adventure to use the web, I do exaggerate of course but the image I had conjured up over the years was of a very non-user friendly experience and a system made for those running technical aspects such as web servers and system management.

I decided you can't knock it to you try it and besides turns out you can't get chrome OS on a 32GB USB it has to be 8GB or 16GB apparently. So I installed Ubuntu on my USB, no clue if this is some snooty distro, or a version of Linux that's mocked in the community, or the perfect distro but after minimal research it seemed the most popular and well received version to put it on a USB and booted into it.

Instantly all my preconceived notions we're erased. It's clean, modern, simple, light weight, and easy to use with a very intuitive and familiar UI. It's pretty much a more open and degooglified (That's a nice word) version of Chrome OS. Since Firefox Quantum was released I emigrated over to try break some ties with google for privacy reasons like it's some pervy conjoined twin of mine, I know it's not good for me, I don't want it there but I can't get rid of it without harming me.

It's got a simple UI that's familiar to windows albeit without all the bloatware and ads spread everywhere, it doesn't track you like window does (that's as far as I'm aware it did ask to collect anonymised telemetry data which I opted out of). With windows I'm so used to having to go through 3 different pop up windows to change a setting that in Ubuntu it feels like I'm missing features although I'm yet to find one that's not there. The best bit about Linux, is if theirs a setting you want to change and can't find, than someone online has wrote a guide giving you a command line code to copy paste into the terminal to fix it.

Although to me it feels more on par with Chrome OS than Windows as a bare bones OS with simple apps and a web browser to use the internet with, in this regard Linux wins easy, way more open, no profit based motivation, and more accessible allowing itself to be used anywhere.

All though that comparison holds up for the normal user and if you are someone who just browses the web and uses apps like Spotify than Linux is amazing it's not complex or difficult, truly wonderful.

What makes Linux even better is the fact it's not a fair comparison, sure to me it's like Chrome OS due to the simple purposes I use it for but what's truly great is all that nerdy technical stuff I thought Linux was for you can do, if you are hosting a web server than linux gives you a free platform to do it, it feels like you are directly modding the PCB of the computer it's that open.

In retrospect to typing all that I feel I've just blurted out a generic description of Linux and for those that use it I'm sure they just think I was naive, but this is more aimed at the average user, Linux, or at least Ubuntu, is great, it's: simple, easy, fresh, clean, open, modern, intuitive, versatile, multi-purpose, and free. It's not some difficult to use system, it's alarmingly simple, but infinitely useful

It's easy to learn and difficult to master.

Hi guys,

I often find myself writing small text files for projects, like a bit of documentation or TODOs. I have a proper system in place for larger projects, but would love to be able to scribble down things for larger ones.

As big of a fan of Markdown as I am, I find that it's often inappropriate for these kinds of tasks. For example, I find myself mimicking a task list with multiple-paragraph list items.

What do you guys use? Do you know of any Markdown alternatives that give you a bit more control over the layout?

Thanks!