I happened across Veronica Roth's blog post via GoodReads about a book tour for her upcoming book Seek the Traitor's Son. She'll be visiting various places around the US and UK. I can't say I've ever really thought about going to a book signing or a book tour, but recently I've been thinking it would be a nice change of pace to go to an event like this and support an author or other creative this way. Roth is not first on my list, but it did get me thinking about how to find other events and hopefully get my hands on some cool merch as well.

Do you know of any creatives (but mostly authors, since this is ~books) who are doing tours this year? How do you keep informed about dates of book tours and festivals?

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!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like nuclear power, animalist and pivot. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was perplexed.

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!

Experiences, past or present? Age, medical, genetic, no reason? Anything worked for you or a waste of time / money ? What works, what doesnt, or just acceptance?

Intended for open discussion for everyone interested

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?

Preemtively this is not about Linux but it does serve as a basic example of a low effort, low cost switch that I personally consider ultimately beneficial long term. Not even necessarily for itself but how it captures the pre Windows 10 mindset of sw being the tool for the user.

The old joke of in Russia the television watches you is relevant here. On multiple levels.

Other and an even easier thing to do would be to switch from Chrome to Firefox as an unideal alternative still but with less default problems and better options to possibly switch to later.

These are only examples and are not important by themselves. What is important, is how these attitudes enable ever less effort and attention to be placed on the end user in mainstream sw.

A lot of the time whenever there is any mention of switching to Linux there is a lot of talk about how you cannot expect normal people to want to follow even the basic steps and possible but unlikely troubleshooting needed to get it to work. Where society is concerned opinion is reality. The sw and hw are magic black boxes that cannot be understood so the consensus is to avoid trying to understand even the superficial basics that would be considered trivial even a decade before.

Neither it is likely to change closer to the ideal of just working than it already is without further adoption. It is not a problem of Linux but of insufficient support by third parties creating edge cases.

I admit that it is unlikely this changes. There is no societal acceptance for it and arguably more important for the individual topics of financial literacy, basic involvement in governance or medical awareness have abysmally low knowledge levels generally.

Voting is the most basic, least effort way to have some effect and yet two thirds turn out is usually considered large.

I'm really tired of finding groups of people to play D&D (in person), is there any solo/two people campaign that me and I friend can play with?

Please something simple, I have a little more experience playing it but have never DM'd before, but we're both very creative, so I can think we both can still have fun