I ask people this all the time, especially lately to check in with them, and everybody says they're fine. I get it, because I say the same thing to everyone who asks me that too. It's just "what you do" with that question, especially over text.

So, here's a chance to let someone know how you're doing beyond "I'm fine", even if it just us random internet strangers here on the site. I'd love to hear where you're honestly at: good or bad, up or down, stable or unstable, happy or sad, or anywhere in between or outside any of those.

Mine is about my spirit animal.

Manatees have long been known as gentle giants, and somehow sailors once confused them with beautiful women. What fewer people know about manatees, is that they control their buoyancy with flatulance. Their whole life is floating around and eating seagrass. They get gassy and start to float up, so they let a few farts out to get back down to the seagrass. And you thought dolphins had life figured out.

The mission

You have been tasked with the mission to kill Hitler. The mission is mandatory and you cannot decline it. You have access to a state of the art time machine: a simple Casio wristwatch in which you enter the time, date and location where you wanna travel to. It can travel to any point in past Earth's history, and it is programmed to automatically and safely return you to the present time as soon as the mission is completed.

You have access to all weapons available to humankind in the present day, but you can only take what you can carry.

You also have access to technology that will make you look ethnically German complete with Nazi uniforms, and a perfectly functioning universal translator.

How this thread will work

I will try to come up with a negative outcome for every answer in jackass genie style. Others are welcome to do the same!

I'm always curious to see what languages people speak, especially given that most communication on sites like Tildes happens in English and as such it doesn't always come up.

At one point, I was pretty fluent in Spanish, but it's been about 4ish years since I've used it with any frequency and as such I am very rusty when speaking. I can still read and write it pretty well however. The big thing is that I have trouble these days recalling vocab I knew like the back of my hand... I should read more to stay sharp.

I also took some French in college and can read it at a beginner-intermediate level, basically enough to understand threads on not super complex topics. I can write too, but require a dictionary for anything remotely complex. Speaking I'm shit however - despite having great teachers I always had a tough time with pronunciation.

Hello everyone, it's 00:16 my time and I'm finally fucking done making all the data pretty for you after about 4 hours of coding to parse all those juicy CSV files cause guess what, the excel files that JotForms gave me WHERE FUCKING GḀ͒ͬ̓ͦͅRͤ͊̔́B̴̼̫̟͍̅̆A̩̽ͮ̂̏͡G̸̭̜̑͑̃Ȇ͈͙͈̠̖̋́̌ͭ͂ͧ^{help me}

Anyway :) Let's give y'all a brief rundown of the current Tilde demographics, and some highlights, CAUSE NOW I HAVE ALL YOUR DATA AND THUS INFINITE POWER TO MAKE JOKES^{did I mention I've been doing for half the day and I'm really hungry? AND TIRED?} Honestly you owe me this moment of insanity considering I'M RUNNING ON GREEN LEAF JUICE AND HOW MUCH DATA I WADED THROUGH AHHHH-.

Also, most of these will be pictures because honestly I can't be asked to not pretty paste these figures into markdown tables or I'll legitimate go insane. Anyway, this post has plenty of sass, don't take this shit too seriously please, gracias.

The 2019 Census

Anyway.

This year we got 249 responses in total, which really annoys me cause 250 is way prettier to look at at. However, one was completely empty and the other two are... Fishy. More on that later.

Personal details

Age

When it comes to age, Tildes is heavily skewed towards people in their 20s to 30s, 45% of the responses came from people between 20 and 30. Overall, late 20s to and early 30s dominate the demographics. (before anyone screams at me about the proper use of graphs, don't worry I also took Statistics at uni, but the histogram in Excel refused to work and honestly go make your own census) There is also some statistical noise, which I'm not sure how it happened. Most likely someone typed too quickly.

Our youngest user is 11! And either very intelligent, cause they also speak 9 languages, or a fraud. If you're not a fraud, I apologize and wish you luck on your future path in life, which will surely be extremely successful, if you really speak that many languages at such an age.^{Hint, this was one of the fishy responses}

Our oldest user is 70! I really don't know what to say, cause that's a pretty high number for an internet user. How was uhh... The cold war?^{Holy fuck I should stop I need to eat}

Geographical... Stuff

Overall, the Tildes demographic hasn't changed much. US and Canada still lead by quite a lot, but we have acquired quite the little diverse userbase.

All I can do is salute my fellow other Austrian user. Can you say Oachkatzalschwoaf though? THAT'S THE SIGN OF A REAL AUSTRIAN.^{NONE OF THIS STARTING WORLD WARS SHIT}

Language

Predictably, a large number of people does not speak a second language besides English, however, due to geographical diversity, a large number of languages is represented, most of them from Europe, which is Tildes' second largest userbase.

Gender & Sexuality

Tildes is heavily male-dominated, probably due to its IT-focused population and the fact that most of us came from Reddit.

Of the 248 responses, 17 people hit marked that they were trans, pretty much all of them MTF (which is apparently the majority of trans people, Wikipedia tells me.) 3 preferred not to say and everyone else is cis.

Now, let's get to the sexy stuff. And by that I mean the point where the numbers rub together in fantastic ways.

The majority of Tildes is really fucking straight, though we have some fun sexualities represented, my personal favourite Still figuring that out. You do you mate, you'll get there eventually. Also, whoever wrote down O-Sexual also wrote X-Treme Wiccan as their religion, and at this point in I'm too afraid to google what any of that is. Clearly, we need more straight people, after all, we're in the 20s.^{Before anyone yells at me, THIS WAS A FUCKING JOKE} For now I've defined that person as Fish numero dos.

Religion

So, here's a doozy. To that one person (probably part of the 9% of <20 year olds), WHO DECIDED TO WRITE THE WONDERFUL ANSWER atheism and angosticism are not religions, can you PLEASE read the question properly next time. FUCK.^{Honestly that is such a 14 y/o thing to write, by the Ǵ͙͔͔̻͖̜́ͅO̶̱̘͡D͓̞͉̲͓̥S̢̲͙̙̟̯̙͓̱͟}

Anyway, religion is probably the thing with the most diverse answers, honestly. There are words in there I have never read in my life before. Like what is Apatheist.1? Is there some sort of ranking? Does it work with natural numbers only? Is there a Apatheist.3,51? It can't be a typo, people take religions way too seriously for that.

Politics

I averaged out the scores of everyone who answered the political questions and got the following answers (remember, these are based on the 8values quiz):

Economy - 7,02
Diplomacy - 6,9
State - 3,8
Society - 7,48

Only economy is really surprising here, though I'd also have expected diplomacy to be a little lower as well. Maybe the leftist skew ia bit of an illusion?

Work, education and really everything else these sections were a terrible idea

When it comes to education, Tildes is pretty university focused. Almost half people replying have a bachelor's, a good bunch are working or have aquired their master's. Also one (maybe soon-to-be) MD and a few PhDs. The Craftsmen and tradeship people barely balance us out, we need some more COMMON FOLK IN HERE.

IT people, rejoice! WE STILL REIGN SUPREME^{Everyone else will remember that} All jokes aside, shoutout to the stay-at-home dad, proud of ya'. And to the disabled person, I hope life goes as well as it can for you. That goes for the longterm-unemployed person as well. Someday, you'll manage mate, someday.

And to the person who said their job is a waste of time in exchange of money... Mate, you need someone to talk? I'm here. We're all here.

Surprise section about technical shit and Tildes

OS usage is as expected, due to Tildes' heavy skew into IT and the fact that Apple doesn't nearly dominate as much in other countries as in the US, it's to be expected.

Due to said IT dominance Linux has almost caught up with the leader, Windows. Though my personal favourite is Anything cool that comes into existence, like can we make a Linux fork that is called literally that? You'd be the perfect match.

When it comes to Tildes specifically, y'all need to chill out. Most people who answered the census visit Tildes multiple times a day, like the content here doesn't even move that quickly? WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING? IS THERE SOME SECRET CULT I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?_{If it's a LSD cult I'm totes in lads.}

As expected, most people who answered the survey have an account, and most likely due to the heavy IT skew most people are visiting from their PC. But I have also seen some people requesting a mobile app in the free form questions, so maybe that would go up if a native app were to be created.

The freeform questions

Well, in all honesty, not much has changed. Most people like the dedicated community, site design, in-depth discussions (though that was sometimes a point on both sides), etc. and dislike the heavy domination of IT topics and US/Europe news & politics. Also, multiple people simply said @Deimos when asked what they like most about Tildes. Get a room, y'all. Though it's well deserved, I think we can all agree on that.

Complete list of positive feedback: https://pastebin.com/KYCYLWP1

Complete list of negative feedback: https://pastebin.com/Eng6jjay

Complete list of ideas for change: https://pastebin.com/eery3mCt

Why am I posting these? Cause in all honesty, freeform feedback like this is hard to analyze and summarize, so I'd rather just post it all so everyone can form their opinion. Also, I'm tired.

Special mentions

Someone was nice enough to add the mention in parantheses that I should add them to the bisexual list instead if no one else marked pansexual. Well lucky you, exactly one other person marked it! You two can go find yourselves a room with lots of sexy pans in it now and have some fun.^{This is how it works, right?} Or just, slide into each other's DMs or something and talk about your love for pans. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I also appreciate the one person who entered their religion in the languages section on accident. That's fact now, you speak Raised Catholic, now spiritual/atheist now, no shh, no talking back, that's your language now.

To that one person that said that Tildes is too serious, this one's for you.

And cheers to Deimos, without whom I couldn't be so silly on this overly serious but fantastic platform.

Anyway, Grzmot out, I need sleep. I'll come back in 8 hours or so to regret the shit I just wrote down at 2 AM. Please don't ban me.

"Dead people receive more flowers than living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude."

-Anne frank

It is quite hard to convince someone on something if their income depends on them not understanding it."

"A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932. He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that election in World War II, including six million Jews. So what I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important."

-Bernie sanders

By putting the word SILLY in the title, I mean SERIOUS ISSUES such as those are strictly prohibited:

• politics
• religion
• abortion
• capital punishment
• gender politics
• anything else that usually causes trouble or heated discussion
• anything that could lock this thread

Allowed subjects:

• movies
• television
• technology
• love
• food
• animals
• any seemeling stupid thing that will definetely NOT cause any kind of heated discssion

I'm most interested in entertainment/media of any form - movies, tv shows, youtubers, stand-ups, theatre, music, whatever.

Something that was really (truly) funny to you, not just "comedy genre".

If you find yourself laughing more actively at the world around you then feel free to mention that too, with context.

You can explain why it makes you laugh, too, if you like. Although more importantly please indicate how much you laughed at a particular thing.

If I had a really rough day or accomplished more than expected, I make sure to reward myself as such. I've found that I treat myself to a local pizzeria or take a bath in steaming hot water and zone out from the world for an hour.

The thread about The Wizard of Oz helped me realize there were other musical fans here, and rather than go offtopic in that thread I figured I'd make a whole new one for discussion.

Topic is: musicals. Anything and everything. Tell me about your favorites, the shows you've been to, the songs that make you cry, the numbers you've performed at karaoke, what a talent Sarah Brightman is, how much you had to pay for Hamilton tickets -- whatever! It's all fair game!

No genre restrictions, so a tell-all memoir is as valid a response as a high-fantasy tome. Maybe you want to dive in deep on an anthropological topic, or maybe you want to pen a full book of contemporary political commentary. Any and all options are on the table, with the only caveat being that you'd have to write enough to fill a book, so it would have to be an area of knowledge or passion for you--likely both.

Also, for those here that have already written books, feel free to talk about those if you like, or one you hope to write in the future.

For those that haven't, don't feel constrained by real-world concerns/inhibitions. Pretend you have the time and resources to adequately devote to the book to fully see your vision through.

Make sure you give us:

• A summary of what the book would be about
• An explanation of why you'd want to write that specific book
• And, most importantly, a good title!

You know, something that, by all accounts, really shouldn't bother you that much but for some reason does. Like when the toilet paper roll is hanging the wrong way. Or when somebody doesn't use multiples of 5 on the timer for the microwave.

• What are your pet peeves?
• Why do you think they bother you so much?
• Can you get past them?
• When other people find out about them do they use them to pester you?

Also, feel free to think past IRL stuff and into online stuff and media. Maybe there's something authors do that rubs you the wrong way, or you're weirdly bothered by a particular TV trope.

Maybe it was an unexpected new piece of information you learned. Maybe someone you've known for a long time did something very out of character for them. Maybe you came across a giant spider right above your head in your basement while you were doing laundry and it caused you to spill the hamper and hit your head on a pipe.

Whatever the surprise--good or bad, big or small, meaningful or throwaway--I'm curious to hear about it.

Hanging alone? Spending time with friends? Loved ones? Going out dancing? Drinks? Sitting down with a good book? Playing games online with friends? Going hiking? Cooking? Gardening?

Also, how often do you get to spend your Friday nights in the manner you most enjoy?

Maybe it's a delicate topic people always dance around. Maybe it's a sensitive topic people just avoid. Maybe it's something that's been brewing but you never really seem to have an outlet for it. Maybe it's something niche enough that you don't ever really see anything else about it around.

Whatever it is, what is it you want to talk about but never seem to be able to?

Need to vent, brag or just talk about your day? Thought this would be a nice space for this.....

I’m in the process of moving house. We’ve been visiting the new house over the weekend, but we haven’t moved any furniture in yet.

During our errands, my housemate said “let’s go home”, and it took me a moment to realise that he was referring to the new house. He was being slightly facetious, but it made me think. That new house obviously isn’t “home” yet, but when will it be “home”?

I realised there are two answers for me: a functional one and a psychological one.

The functional answer for me is “home is where the bed is”. The day after I’ve moved my bed into the new house and have slept there overnight is the day I’ll refer to it as my home (as in “let’s go home”).

The psychological answer is that it will feel like my home when I’m comfortable walking through the house in the middle of the night in bare feet – when I know the place well enough to walk around in the dark without anything to protect me from danger. I have to have lived in a place for a while for it to feel like home.

So… what makes a place “home” for you? When you move into a new house or apartment or condo or tent or treehouse, what makes it feel like “home”? What’s that moment when you know that this house is now a home?

Inspired by this very fun twitter thread and the very fun metafilter comment thread that came from it, I want to hear people's responses here as well:

What is your weirdest eating/drinking habit you had as a kid?

I'll start: I liked to fix myself a bowl of unsweetened whipped cream with a ridiculous amount of nutmeg sprinkled on top, or a bowl of plain yogurt with broken open pills of acidophilus or other probiotic powder scattered over the top of it. This is a texture I still enjoy, a soft cream covered in a dry, unsweetened powder.

Lots of new people coming in today, and there will be lots in the next couple of days... the last Introductions post was months ago, we're overdue for another one. Drop in, say hi, tell us whatever you like about yourself, even if it's just how your day is going. On Tildes, ~talk is the casual space, so don't feel pressured to be clever or anything. :P

Past introduction threads for everyone to catch up: -1- . -2- . -3- . -4- . -5-

Also in case anyone missed it, there's an intro to tildes post to help bring you up to speed on this place.

As the title says! I recently got a fretless bass and it's super hard to intonate correctly since I'm used to the frets doing it for me. It's such a weird sound but it isn't bad. I'm learning a few songs on it already and it's funny to me that even if I switch to my fretted bass, that I still try to maintain proper intonation

Wasn't sure where to post this.

I needed a break, I am a reddit Mod and was hoping to become super active here as well. But, it was taking a bigger impact on my mental health than I knew.

I stopped posting here, on reddit and instagram (really the only platforms I use) and it really helped with my stress levels and even sleep patterns. I read waaaay more books and felt far more focused then I have been in years.

I dont know if there are any CGP Grey fans here but I am a big fan of his and was inspired by his choice to do the same.

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/cyclops

Coming back into things I am thinking I will limit myself and try and work on pacing my internet usage.

Anyway, kind of a random post, but I wanted to share it with someone and I thought our community here would apreciate it (Reddit probably wouldn't).

emotionally abusive ex-girlfriend tried to reach out.

blocked her number.

started looking for therapists.

i started following through FreeCodeCamp (more tech talk (MERN) at the bottom - i gots questions)

i started flossing two weeks ago.

i've been consistent this past week with learning japanese

and right now i got one of my comfy outfits on, chilling at the house, and i just made a french press with some beans from a roaster i used to always buy from back when i lived downtown.

i'm feelin' alright today. it's gonna be a few more months until i get where i want, but for now, i'm good.

how bout you - how you doin?

(if you stuck around for the tech stuff - here's that)

1. what's a good book to follow up EloquentJS? i'm reading through that now, and i really want to get a good feel for the language itself. i know how to get something built, but i don't know how my tools work - and that's an issue for me.

2. on a similar note - what are the best books on React? i've got a 2017 copy of Fullstack React, but someone told me that's outdated by this point, and i can't exactly afford the 2018 copy right now. anything else i should keep an eye out/save up for?

3. and lastly, best reading on CSS3? i know (again) a good enough amount of Bootstrap to be able to get something up and running, but i want to get better at vanillaCSS, css animations, and making sure that my site is responsive and supported across across all browsers.

So I was at a concert this evening and when it was over and people were leaving the concert hall, I went up to a guy and said that I thought the tattoo he had on his neck of the band's logo was really cool and showed dedication. He simply nodded and said thanks, and then his mother (or girlfriend, I have no idea) poked my shoulder and showed me an identical one. It was in sort of between her breasts, but also underneath them. So she had to pull down her top and show a not insignificant amount of cleavage to show it to me. All I could say was "wow, very nice" with a stupid smile on my face. She just laughed and walked away, and it made my night!

Was a pretty good concert too by the way. Behemoth are an amazing band! :)

Fill in the blanks. No parameters from me: I'm leaving the prompt open-ended because I'm curious to see where people go with it.

Also, to prevent low-effort/single sentence posts in response, please explain why your suggestion is a suitable replacement.

I'm rather curious - for me, about a fiver. It's all I need to be able to smash an egg at someone - legally. It'd probably be pretty fun - probably not 'life changing', though.

~£40 is probably the least for something more 'life changing'. I could buy a Pi, storage, and a charger. Then I can set up a pi-hole, and never have to worry about ads. It'd also make browsing on my weak laptop that liittle bit better.

I know this is a relatively stereotypical new years post, but I'm interested in seeing what everyone here on Tildes wants to do to improve themselves for this coming year. Personally, I want to devote more time into language learning, which would include spending more time watching foreign TV, studying vocab, etc.

Hey guys,

The whole idea of this website reminds me a lot of the forums I used to spend hours on as a kid, when those websites were just a place for people to talk about stuff and that was it, and that made me wonder, what was YOUR experience of that same era ?

Can't wait to hear your stories :)

Hello everybody! As the Americans here are probably aware, this week is our holiday for Thanksgiving. One of the traditional parts of the holiday (at least as I've always practiced it) is everybody writing a list of the things they're thankful for in their life and over the past year. Especially since this is our first Thanksgiving together since Tildes was founded, I was wondering if you'd like to contribute such a list. :)

For those who've not heard of it, the scp wiki is a community-based collaborative writing effort based around "anomalous" objects/beings and the efforts of the SCP Foundation to contain them and protect the general public. Users can submit and vote on articles about SCPs, written in the style of research/containment notes. Some popular entries are SCP-173, SCP-87 and SCP-682, alongside a few more abstract and lighter entries.

Anyone want to share some SCP entries they've enjoyed reading? SCP-3515 is the most recent I've read and I'd definitely recommend it.

We've all got our interests and things we spend a lot of time thinking about, but often they require either an external or internal catalyst to spark a comment or a post in and of itself.

What would you like to talk about? What interests or preoccupies you? What do you think is neat, or terrible?

thought it would be interesting to hear some of your guys' habits in day to day life.
feel free to answer only one of the questions if you feel uncomfortable or anything :)

these are mine:
the good habit is definitely walking for 20 minutes every day.
and the bad one is not sleeping enough.

This can be anything, I'll accept "relaxing in front of the TV with a drink" as an answer.

Personally I've grown fond of Wednesdays, because that's when I sometimes get me a sandwich from my favorite place, and Sundays because that's when I often go to play board-games with some old friends.

Do you have something you look forward to in your week? Or maybe some advice for people who are looking for something to look forward to?

Today I stumbled upon a pdf of Peter Arnell's redesign of the Pepsi logo, touted by a person on twitter as "the height of human bullshit". And it reminded me of the time I worked at a small start-up company, where these kinds of overblown but substantially empty ideas were common currency.

So I'm wondering: do any of you have any funny or interesting stories of encounters with these kinds of things.