This could be a gaming series that is very popular but for some reason or another doesn't resonate with you, or maybe a weird one-off within a genre that you love. What aspects didn't resonate with you and what could have been done differently that would made it easier to like the game?

I apologise if this comes off as self-indulgent. I'm not have a good few days and writing this has helped. I'm also not entirely sure it's in the right place so please do move if needs be.

--

Goodbye then. I think we both knew this day was coming but it was always going to come too fast, too soon - I would always want one more day, one more stroll in the woods together, one more evening snuggle by the fire.

But in the darkness of loss a whirling, glittering constellation of memories shines brightly. The first moment I saw you in that badly lit, chilly ferry terminal, you were all wobbly and woozy from the boat trip. You never did get over that travel sickness, despite everything we tried. All the first times, all the adventures, all the unspoken moments of connection between us.

I remember running around the garden together as summer storms drenched the thirsty ground, yelping and laughing and soaked to the skin by hot rain. Eating raspberries fresh off the cane for breakfast as the dew sparkled on our toes. Lying quietly by the fire as the party slowly died away. The awful long, hot, car journeys to far-away places where your eyes would light up with joy at the sight of a new beach, a new hill to climb, new people to meet or a new place to explore.

The time we clambered over the rocks and you terrified me with your boldness, seemingly unafraid to fall. The time after we were first apart for days, overflowing with happiness and relief to be together again. The time we went camping and you were not sure about it but discovered the wonder of waking up with the dawn and being outside all day. The time you first saw the snow, the sheer amazement in your eyes as we stepped outside to a blanket of white just waiting to be played in.

The time, all those years later, we first brought the baby home and you were so gentle, as if his tiny body might break at your slightest touch. Don’t think I didn’t notice you quietly taking guard over him, for all your gruff standoffishness, I know you loved him and wanted to protect him as much as I did.

And the worst time of all, the blackest star looming large in my mind’s sky. The nurse taking you away as your life drained from you, tired and afraid and so far away from me. I’ll always regret I couldn’t be there with you at the very end, but such regrets are dwarfed by the enormity of the joys of all that came before.

The small things stand out more than the big. The little rituals of the day that I get partway through before remembering you’re not there any more. The patterns are broken - getting ready to go to bed, getting up the next day, preparing food or finding our cosy places in the evening. All those familiar shapes to life are gone, shattered like ice, the shards of how we lived together destined to quietly melt away, as unstoppable as the tide.

You touched so many people’s lives, brought so much joy and love to the world, but to no-one more than me. Those days when my back hurt so much I could barely bring myself to do anything, you gave me the strength to at least go for a walk, and that always helped. Those dark nights when I felt alone and afraid, you’d always notice and come over with some love to make me feel better. It might be too much to say you saved my life but it might not.

I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you as much as I could have been for the last year, we’ve all struggled, we’ve all been tired and I know now you probably needed me more than you could tell me. Neither of us knew the cancer was taking you from the inside, not until it was far too late. If I could have the last few months again I’d be by your side every day, I’d be more patient with your struggles because they were so much more than I understood.

Goodbye, old friend. The pain is over now, and the life before it was beautiful. I love you.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

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?

After loving Waiting for Godot in the theater years ago, I recently tried to read the novel Molloy, by Samuel Beckett, in the Portuguese translation. It was a humbling experience. Most of the time I did not know who was talking, where they were talking, to whom they were talking, or what they were trying to talk about. The words were definitely arranged in interesting ways that pleased me at times, but I can't really say if what I was doing could be qualified as reading.

Half the book doesn't even have paragraphs, it is just one continuous block.

Maybe that is the point? I don't know. Critics do seem to get a lot more from these than I do, to the point that I ask myself "are they just deluding themselves, creating meaning where there is none just to justify their very existence? Wouldn't a work with little to no meaning render critics useless anyway?".

I don't know, I'm rambling. I'm looking at Molloy defeated, like one day I looked at Joyce's Ulysses.

Maybe I should read these books without thinking, like listening to music with lyrics in a language I don't speak (I can kinda do that in a movie, but a movie is only 2 hours...).

Maybe I'm not worthy.

I've been working on some music, and while I'm not quite ready to show it to the world, I might be in the near future. I was curious where other musicians are putting their music? I've checked out both SoundCloud and BandCamp, and they both seem reasonable. Any pros or cons to using one over the other? Any other places you upload your music for streaming and/or purchase?

Suggestions from the comments:
BandCamp : Hosts and shares your music
SoundCloud : Hosts and shares your music
DistroKid : Distributes your music to various services†
TuneCore : Distributes your music to various services†
OneRPM : Distributes your music to various services†
AudioMicro : Sells your royalty-free music and sound effects
Jamendo : Hosts and shares your indie music or royalty free music

† Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Tidal, Amazon Music, TikTok, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Deezer, Instagram, etc.

I've been thinking, and it seems like most genres are a love/hate thing (metal and punk are highly controversial for example, they have super hardcore fans but are largely disliked by the majority of people, pop is the opposite, most people like it but there's a very vocal minority that absolutely deplores it and wants to watch it burn, electronic music as a whole also tends to gather mixed reception, etc), but out of all music I pretty much never see any dislike aimed at r&b, funk, soul and jazz (except for smooth jazz, although a lot of people don't consider it actual jazz).

Is there some truth behind this? I personally don't like these genres (and neither do the people around me) and I've always had the feeling we were pretty alone in that sense.

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!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

The contest is still more than a month away, but all songs have been released, so let's have a listen and a discussion!

Eurovisionworld has links to all the songs (ordered by how likely the bookmakers consider it for them to win the contest). There's also a YouTube and a Spotify playlist of all the songs.

So which songs are your favourites? Guilty pleasures? Overrated, underrated? Most fun? Most excited to see performed live? Predictions? Etc.

I've recently been playing a bunch of the Board Game of Thrones (the epic strategy/war/negotiation game) online over at thronemaster.net, and was wondering if any of you fine folks would like to join me in a game?

Intro

A while ago, we held a LGBT Q&A panel that allowed people to ask questions to LGBT people that they might have been afraid to ask otherwise. I think this was incredibly valuable, and I would like to try a slightly less structured and topical version of the thread.

This thread is for questions about any topic that you're worried might come across as insensitive or invasive or uncomfortable or whatever -- questions that might get responded to negatively if you were to ask them elsewhere. Ask a question that you tend to keep to yourself, for whatever reason.

My hope is that people can ask some questions in good faith and get answers in good faith. In order to do that though, I do think it's important that we have some norms in place:

Ground Rules

Anyone can ask questions or provide answers or both. This topic is not a panel but a Tildes-wide discussion.

Askers

Ask a genuine question that you want a genuine answer to. Feel free to ask informational questions, experiential questions, and opinion questions. They will be afforded the principle of charity, but also understand that this is not a thread for hot takes or passive aggressive shots or anything like that.

Follow-up questions are allowed and encouraged.

To keep threads organized, post a new top-level comment for each separate question, unless your questions are all related to the same topic and work better as one comment.

Answerers

Give genuine answers to the questions given. The goal of the thread is education and understanding. Even (and especially) if a question is difficult, frustrating, or off-putting, I think one of the best things you can articulate is why it is that way for you as a way of helping others understand your experience and perspective.

All

Please abide by this principle: if your words have the potential to cut, then please have the courtesy of using some anaesthetic. If you know you're entering into potentially inflammatory territory, please go out of your way to soften sharpness and defang your words. The last thing I want this thread to be is a set of escalations or inflection points.

If you're worried your question might look provocative, openly state your intention and give some background for why you want to ask, to show that you're acting in good faith and willing to listen to answers. If you're worried your answer might slam on someone, openly state your intention and give some background for why this is a topic that elicits such strong feelings from you.

If a question or answer does cross lines or occurs in bad faith, please label it as malice.

If you do not want to see this topic in your thread for any reason, please use the ignore post feature.

I am hoping that we can have some very thoughtful, compelling, and insightful conversation here, and, based on what I know of the Tildes community and our last attempt at a thread like this, I have full faith that we can achieve that.

Long time lurker, first time poster. I have a 7 year old lenovo y-40 running Ubuntu which has served me well, but I am starting to get concerned that it may be time to put it out to pasture. Nothing has broken, but I know it's getting a little old.

The way I see it, my options are to stick with this computer and upgrade the ram (currently 8gb, space for up to 16) and perhaps replace the hard drive (although replacing things makes me a little nervous, I have only replaced the battery thus far), or buy a new computer.

I kinda hate buying things but will throw down for a decent piece of gear if I need it. I have a budget of ~1000 (but if it can be cheaper that's better), want to run linux and use my computer mostly for programming and internet-stuff. I am also unsure if I need to stick with a laptop-I almost never take my computer anywhere and have it hooked up to a monitor anyway. I mostly have been looking at getting a T14 or something from System76 but they all seem a little pricey. Thoughts?

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Where to post this feels tricky. The terms in my post title -- "Product Backlog" and "Sprint" are very IT-specific terms from a popular business management philosophy (Agile) and methodology (Scrum) for creating software.

However, I am intentionally trying to adopt and adapt these concepts to my own life goals, personal improvement efforts and general day-to-day "get shit done" task lists.

Has anyone else done this? It only just now occurred to me to search the 'Net to see how unusual this idea is, and of course, I'm seeing plenty of evidence that I'm not the first person to think of it.

For the non-IT folk, here's the nutshell version. Large, long-term software development projects get broken down into bite-sized tasks, those pieces get prioritized and best-guesstimated as to each one's difficulty, and then short-term "Sprints" (each generally 1 week to 1 month long) are devoted to completing a selected subset of those tasks.

As an on-going process, the overall project goals and tasklist (the "Product Backlog") get reviewed, re-evaluated and re-prioritized, and past efforts are regularly evaluated for effectiveness, and the lessons learned get incorporated into future planning.

Probably the most significant piece of the Agile philosophy is the iterative process. Never lose sight of the overarching goal, but focus -- hard -- on those bite-sized pieces, always review your own efforts and learn how to improve your process of getting things done, and always be ready to modify all mid-term and long-term goals as the journey unfolds, as new information comes to light.

... And I realize I'm meandering, perhaps, a bit too much into the philosophy of software development ... but I hope it's clear how well this could translate over to personal development, life goals, self-help, stuff like that.

At any rate, that's what I'm doing over the next two weeks ... I'm running my own personal "Life Goals" Sprint, adopting the various tools and terms and ideas built into Agile -- and specifically, the Scrum-style implementation of Agile (which is more philosophy than process). Depending on how it goes, I may well be doing this for a long time to come.

Would love to discuss the idea, get feedback, pros and cons, yada ...

docs don't have preview for these:

I think this starts at ~~9 PM~~ <ins>10 PM</ins>
I think this starts at 9 PM 10 PM
E = mc<sup>2</sup>
E = mc²

also,

markdown inside expandable text:

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