When I last wrote about money, some people liked it but u/MimicSquad had issues with my simplified explanation. After thinking about it, I'm going to try again. I don't want to make my "casino world" analogy too complicated, but I will make some changes so that we can talk about payments. (Caveat: I'm not a financial expert, but this is how I think it works.)

So let's say there is a town with two casinos. In the Yellow Casino, gamblers use yellow plastic chips, and in the Purple Casino, they use purple plastic chips. Otherwise, they are much alike. Each casino has a teller window where gamblers exchange the national currency (which we might call green money) for its own chips.

So there are three currencies (yellow, purple, and green) and two exchanges (the teller windows). The casinos want their chips to be worth the same amount as green money, so their teller windows always trade them at par. (This makes yellow and purple chips worth the same amount too, even though nobody trades them directly yet.)

Suppose that a gambler who has yellow chips walks into the Purple Casino. "You can't use those chips here," they say, "but for your convenience, we will trade you a purple chip for each of your yellow chips." Which they do. Then they send an employee to the Yellow Casino and trade the yellow chips for green money.

This is a basic payment system. It's implemented as two trades, one visible and one hidden. The Purple Casino's teller visibly trades yellow chips for purple, and behind the scenes there is a settlement process, implemented using a trusted employee who carries chips and money to do another trade. The gambler doesn't need to know about trades between casinos, but they're essential for providing this service.

Notice that, although the gambler carried yellow chips from Yellow Casino to Purple Casino, the second trade (a withdrawal) causes the Yellow Casino to have less money. The money followed the chips and the chips came back home.

It doesn't need to happen quite that way, though. If Yellow and Purple agree, the Yellow casino could trade anything that's worth the same amount in return for getting its chips back. So, more abstractly, some financial asset must follow the chips from Yellow to Purple.

Furthermore, if the casinos trust each other, they can delay settling up. Perhaps at the end of the day, the Purple Casino will have some yellow chips and the Yellow Casino has some purple chips, so they can exchange yellow for purple and they can use green money (or any financial asset) to make up the difference.

Why settle at all? Partly because of risk. The casinos don't want to trust each other too much. If the Yellow Casino gets into financial trouble, the Purple Casino doesn't want to end up holding worthless yellow chips instead of the green money that they have more confidence in. (Also, they probably find green money more useful than yellow chips.)

These casinos are are my thinly-disguised model for banks. To make things a bit less abstract, I'll talk about the US. There around 4,000 banks (and 5,000 credit unions) in the US. Each bank has its own computers that implement money as bank deposits. They have payment systems that tie them all together and hundreds of thousands of ATM's that trade electronic currency for cash.

We could think of US banks as having 4,000 different currencies that all trade at par. While we normally think of the US dollar as a single currency, it could also be thought of as a federated system of many currencies, all tied together with payment systems that do lots of trades. (Nothing really changes; this is just a different way of thinking about it.) There are some currencies with special status, like paper money and coins and federal reserve accounts, but these are in addition to all the others. (You could even think of each kind of coin as its own currency, and making change as a form of currency trade.)

There is a historical basis in early US history for treating each bank as having its own currency. US banks back then issued their own paper money, and although they tried to make them trade at par, these banks sometimes failed and were sometimes frauds, and their paper money often traded at much less than par. These days banks are much better regulated and we normally don't have to worry about such things, but much as a multicellular organism has cell walls as a sort of remnant of earlier times when cells were more independent, the boundaries between banks still matter, despite all the regulated mechanisms that make their currencies practically the same to us.

Since each bank manages its own computer systems, there is a sense in which electronic money never actually moves outside its own bank. ​When we "move money" electronically, it's done by trading, and there has to be a payment system to bridge the gap. The timing of the trades varies, depending on the details of the settlement process.

What about creating money? In casino world, the Yellow Casino makes yellow chips and the Purple Casino makes purple chips, but they can only make their own chips. Similar, a bank could make money in its own computer system, but they are limited in what they can do in anyone else's computers. They influence other bank's computers via trades.

If a bad bank created a lot of their own money and then spent it (perhaps disguised as making a loan), they would still be on the hook during the settlement process, which essentially requires them to take their money back in return for a financial asset worth the same amount that wasn't created by them, such as money in their central bank account. Payments can be very complicated and there is often short-term debt involved in the settlement process, but ultimately a legitimate bank needs to honor its debts.

It's similar to how anyone with a checkbook could write bad checks, but this will catch up with you during settlement. The physical ability to write large numbers on checks isn't a superpower that lets you buy anything. What a criminal could do with it is somewhat limited and short-term.

Every bank has accounts with the central bank and one thing they are used for is implementing settlement. Having "reserves" with the central bank, even there isn't a legally required balance, is something every other bank needs to handle some kinds of payments. Just as you need money in your bank account to write a check and have it not bounce, banks need a high enough balance with the central bank to handle the payments their customers make. (Though I don't know the details of what sort of overdraft protections there are.)

The only bank that can buy anything it likes without consequences to itself is the central bank, which doesn't participate in settlement like everyone else. The central bank's power to create its own money might look superficially similar to other banks, but it's special because payment is complete after the first trade; there is no further settlement after receiving central bank money. (Though a bank could trade reserves for cash if it needs it for its ATM's.)

The end, for now. Sometimes I've been writing in a definitive way here, but keep in mind that I'm still not a financial expert and I welcome corrections from people who know better.

I'm not sure if this goes here or in ~talk, so if it needs moved, that's fine.

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about why I use Tildes.

As noted in my bio, I left Tildes for an extended period of time, after getting embroiled in some heavy arguments that, in the scheme of things, didn't matter. Such arguments consistently make me feel worse; I get into them on this account, too, though I do try to use uBlock Origin and the tag filter to keep out of the threads that will most obviously affect me.

But I can't seem to leave Tildes entirely. Even when I log out on all devices, I keep opening the site. Even when I had no account, I kept typing til<Enter> in the address bar and coming back.

So, why?

--

First, Tildes is what I love about the web. It's complete but uncluttered; it's featureful but not bloated; it uses client-side interactivity to improve the experience but does not break or reimpement default browser functionality. Overall, it's a good piece of software, designed to create, catalog, and discuss documents, like God Tim Berners-Lee intended.

Second, and more important, Tildes is a community. It's a community like my college dorm was a community; I know people here, and while I definitely don't like all of them, I recognize the personalities behind the names. Leaving, and diving mostly back into the world of Twitter and Mastodon where conversations are short, ephemeral, and deeply restricted, feels like losing relationships, no matter how damaging and negative some of those relationships are.

I don't know if gaining this understanding means I'll be able to - or even want to - drop the site again. We'll see. But I would love to know why y'all use it. Is it a community for you, too?

This is a webpage for a courier company. This screengrab is the whole page as served to me. If I want to track my parcel I have to enter the details into the pretend phone on the right and pretend to use it like a phone, complete with tiny screen and fiddly controls.

I get that they would like me to install their app but this is almost offensively user-hostile design, and pretty much ensures I'll never install anything of the sort. I might consider installing the app of a company who deliver to me regularly and have a good track record of being good at their jobs, if that app offers useful functionality which can't be offered via a web page - but even that's unlikely. But these guys who I have never heard of until today and are pulling this nonsense? No way.

#couple
Defined as:

noun:
couple; plural noun: couples

1.
two individuals of the same sort considered together.
"a couple of girls were playing marbles"

a pair of partners in a dance or game.

MECHANICS

a pair of equal and parallel forces acting in opposite directions, and tending to cause rotation about an axis perpendicular to the plane containing them.

2.
two people who are married, engaged, or otherwise closely associated romantically or sexually.
"in three weeks the couple fell in love and became engaged"

3. INFORMAL

an indefinite small number.
"he hoped she'd be better in a couple of days"

verb: couple;

3rd person present: couples

past tense: coupled

past participle: coupled

gerund or present participle: coupling

1.
combine.

"a sense of hope is coupled with a palpable sense of loss"

join to form a pair.
"the beetles may couple up to form a pair"

2.
mate or have sexual intercourse.
"as middle-class youth grew more tolerant of sex, they started to couple more often"

#Discourse of the use of the word/phrase in this particular case

You

"how many would you like?"

Them

"just a couple."

When someone requests 'a couple of...' I respond with something similar to: 'How many do you want specifically?', which leads to the discourse of, 'A couple is two, a few is >2, several is <x' and so on.

I agree with the first two clearly stated definitions of 'couple', but in the informal use of a couple (eg. a depiction of a quantity) is not specifically two...nor is 'a few' three. How many specifically is several..?

I understand the semantics within the conversation. But, the expectation of understanding that two, and only two, is implied in the use of the phrase 'a couple' in a request; is ambiguously stating what one party desires. I'm the asshole now, just tell me how many you want.

And now...your thoughts, please.

The distinction between Hard and Soft paywalls used to be clear:

Hard paywall sites only allowed paying subscribers to view their contents;
Soft paywall sites typically used a metered approach that limited non-subscribers to a certain number of free article views per month.

This made tagging paywalled submission here on Tildes, as either paywall.hard or paywall.soft, pretty easy to do, and doing so provided tangible benefits. They let submitters know when to consider providing a summary of the article, or even mirror/alternative links, so non-subscribers weren't left out. It allowed users to easily avoid or filter-out hard paywall submissions entirely, if they so chose. And also indicated when a paywall was soft, and easier to get around (e.g. by clearing browser cache, or viewing in private-browsing mode), so the article could still be read.

However in recent years the distinction between Hard and Soft paywalls has become increasingly blurry. And with all the new, constantly evolving, often opaque, paywall mechanics now in play, it has become more difficult to identify and keep track of what type of paywall a site has. E.g.

Some sites have begun adding article sharing mechanics as a perk for their subscribers (NYT). Some with hard paywalls now allow certain articles of "public interest" to be viewed by everyone (Financial Times). Some still hard paywall their print articles but allow the rest to be viewed for free (Forbes). Some have hard paywalls for recent articles but older ones are free (Boston Globe). Some decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not to paywall each individual article, based on editorial board decisions and other unspecified metrics (Business Insider). And apparently some now even switch from Soft to Hard paywalls depending on where in the world the traffic is coming from (WaPo?).

And as a result of all this, accurately tagging paywalled articles here has become increasingly difficult too, especially since there is no easy way to update all previously applied tags on older articles when a site's paywall type changes.

So, the question is, what should we do about this?
Should we simply stop trying to distinguish between hard/soft paywalls in the tags?
Should we add another "hybrid" category?
Should we just do away with the paywall tag entirely?
Or is there a better solution to this problem?

p.s. I started a "Hard vs Soft Paywalls" wiki entry to try to keep track of all the paywall types, as well as the various new mechanics I have been able to identify, for the sites commonly submitted to Tildes.

The Cowboy Bebop live-action adaptation caught the attention of many users here, so I'll link some of the reviews I could find. The show is not yet available to the audience, but entertainment websites clearly had access to it.

AV Club: Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop is a bloodless substitute for the real thing.

EW: A colorful, campy attempt at live-action anime doesn't justify itself.

The Verge: Netflix's Cowboy Bebop has heart, style, and some rough edges.

Indie Wire: Netflix’s Live-Action Riff on Everyone’s Favorite Anime Is a Cosmic Disaster

Games Radar: A Stellar Remix That Hits All the Right Notes

Polygon: Cowboy Bebop turns a classic anime into a Saturday morning cartoon

IGN: mixed

Slate: Cowboy Bebop Is Netflix’s Latest Live-Action Anime Mistake

Hollywood Reporter: negative

Rolling Stones: The Live-Action ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Takes an Anime Classic Into the Stratosphere

The Atlantic: What’s Lost When a Classic Anime Is Adapted by Netflix

RogerEbert.com: Cowboy Bebop Fails to Find a Rhythm

Time: Netflix's Live-Action Cowboy Bebop Misunderstands What Made the Original a Classic

Vulture: Cowboy Bebop’s New Shine Can’t Replace Its Old Soul

Collider: Netflix's Live-Action Show Is a Colorless, Soulless Copy of a Landmark Anime Series

Vanity Fair: Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop Is the Rare Remake That Works

Rotten Tomatoes: currently 41%

Metacritic: currently 40, Mixed or average reviewsbased on 18 Critic Reviews

I’ve been getting more into perfumery, and wanted to share a bit of my interest. I usually wear Fougère Gothique from Barrister and Mann - I really like the coumarin and ash it has. I picked up samples of Casablanca, Song of Aubrac, and Pandora from St. Claire recently. Casablanca is incredible - floral and animalistic; Song of Aubrac is also great, but a bit too floral for my tastes; and while Pandora is wonderfully put together, something about it reminds me too much of a grandma’s bathroom. Today I’m wearing Song of Aubrac layered with Fougère Gothique, and have been thoroughly enjoying the combination. I have a number of samples coming in of other fragrances with ash notes that I’m excited to try, namely Mandrava, Eshu, and Homa from Prin Lomros as well as Beaver from Zoologist. I also have Bat and Bee from Zoologist, as well as Resonance, AEOOJ (LMB), and Leaves My Body from Chris Rusak on the way to try. I’d love to hear any opinions anyone here has about fragrances, or their own adventures with them!

Insight once came to me after I was prepped for a surgical procedure. As my body's weight began to evaporate, a pain I had never recognized, but which must have always been sounding in the background noise of my being, vanished. The superadhesive worry--which sometimes frightened others as much as myself, that in order to socialize, I had learned to sometimes twist into a temporary shape resembling charm--came unstuck and peeled away. Then followed a great thought, a mandate for how I should spend the remainder of my life. Also, I needed to poop. But more than that, I needed to get out of this semi-public hospital bed and to a private space immediately, so I could allow this cosmic insight a moment to fully bloom. Time was against me. Anesthetized, I knew I was slipping toward, maybe even over, the falls past which I would forget everything of this experience until a groggy post-procedure awakening brought dull daylight and its senseless aches back to me. I had to somehow save the thought. I searched, but the bathroom gave up no markers, no specimen cup labels to write on. I wondered about tearing toilet paper into little letters, hiding them above the cabinet. But would I remember to return to read the message? With an increasingly calm desperation, I dug my nails into the flesh of my hand and repeated again and again the life-saving insight delivered during communion with the world that lay beyond pain. Please remember, please remember this thought.

When I regained consciousness, it was waiting for me like a friend who had lost patience, and now seemed much less attractive. What I had somehow stolen from the gods, secreted in my closed palm through a swim across the river Lethe, was this message: “Do Drugs.”

I had realized that analysis, working on the problem of myself both mentally and verbally, had won me no appreciable gains. Insight, I had. But relief, happiness, an improved outlook? Nothing I had done had really helped me feel better. Anesthesia instantly had. These aren’t the words of an addict coming on-line. I was a reluctant user of any substance. However, in the years following I forced myself to again undertake drug trials with my psychiatrists. Methodically, I worked through every class, waltzed backward through the eras of drugs, danced off-label with each oddball wallflower, ingested every twisted molecule to ever win over the FDA with a promise of psychiatric benefit and maybe some that merely had intrigued one of my more historically-curious doctors. When Eddie Haskell, MD wanted to resurrect a drug of the bad old days just to see what it’d do to a person, I was the patient with his hand out.

I overslept and didn’t sleep. I gained and lost a third of my body weight. My head felt like a styrofoam block, then like the slate of a blackboard being scraped with tableware. I was more or less charged, sweaty, sensitive to light, and shaky. Some drugs make you feel like Benjamin Braddock in his birthday diving suit. Others make you feel like an amnesiac idiot in Benjamin Braddock’s birthday diving suit. A common theme emerges. These substances could help me feel slower, distant from the world, claustrophobic, clammy, sensorily distorted. Sometimes, they dulled my anxiety, or dried my hair-trigger tear ducts, but they accomplished this through impairment, and very clumsily. I have never been drunk, but I think it’s like a drunk traffic cop: success in psych meds comes about by the stopping of certain avenues, slowing up of traffic, blocking lawful turns. And it’s sometimes noted in the overall impact that fewer crashes have occurred. To me this is not success. Impairment so far hasn't been healing for me. I want my turn at quoting the line, "I feel like myself again."

And so, my heart sinks at every day's new headline about psychedelics. If you follow health news at all, you know they are a hot topic, showing a ridiculous amount of promise. Despite fitting the diagnostic profile, my former home was far from anywhere with signups for studies. I reached out to several "clinics" offering psychedelic-assisted therapy. They struck me as resembling many legal weed shops--loads of young bros polishing their presentation and sanitizing an extortionate drug deal in hopes of financing a Tesla. With fees starting at 8x the plane ticket to administer and contextualize a drug that costs less than $20 a dose, I wouldn't credit their soft patter as containing much idealism.

And here I am--for other reasons besides. Yes, a part of me thought living here would put legal psychedelics within my reach, but I'm not seeing any opportunities. Now I'm kicking myself for never having tried to cultivate mushroom spores, never having ventured to ask acquaintances for a hand. I'm marooned here and psilocybin is about blow up in the States.

I just finished watching it (pirated, because I wasn’t going to give Disney money after all the controversy regarding Taiwan).

Uhh, it.. was bad? I mean I’m usually pretty positive especially about all the Disney remakes, and I liked the general darker mood of this Mulan version. But what’s with the 90s era cgi physics?

Also, and I get the Mulan plot line is entirely about how ridiculous gender-gating is in general, but whew there is a serious case of The Stupids around a lot of the tradition, much more so than in the original. This felt very tropey to me, convenient idiocy. I mean yes okay this takes place 1200 years ago but …

I appreciated not seeing mushu, but the Phoenix could have just been a lot lot lot more subtle.

And I’ve never seen snow look so much like party foam. This is the same studio that produced Frozen?!

Man, this movie felt like it was written, produced and directed in 1998. I would say I watched the wrong one by mistake but the original was actually good for its time.

What happened, did I miss something? This could have been an amazing movie full of great music, awesome choreography, and a super dark take on the original. Instead, I watched the equivalent of a machine learning exercise in turning anime to live action.

I've recently experienced something multiple times and wanted to see if others are seeing this. I'm seeing various news articles where the first few paragraphs basically say the exact some information over and over again 3 or 4 times in slightly different ways. My most recent experience was this article about some hackers selling information on billions of Facebook users.

The article starts off with the title "Personal Information of More Than 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum". Straightforward and to the point. Next we get this paragraph in bold:

The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally.

Next is a bullet list of the highlights of the incident:

Highlights:

• Data scrapers are selling sensitive personal data on 1.5 billion Facebook users.
• Data contains users’: name, email, phone number, location, gender, and user ID.
• Data appears to be authentic.
• Personal data obtained through web scraping.
• Data can be utilized for phishing and account takeover attacks.
• Sold data claimed to be new from 2021.

This rehashes the number (1.5 billion) and place (Facebook), but does contain new information like what was leaked, and some unsubstantiated claims about whether it's authentic and how it was obtained.

The next paragraph repeats the 1.5 billion number a fourth time, and repeats that the data is available on a hacker forum. Two paragraphs later, we get another list of bullet points which are identical to the 2nd bullet point above; namely that the info contains:

According to the forum poster, the data provided contains the following personal information of Facebook users:

• Name
• Email
• Location
• Gender
• Phone number
• User ID

At this point I stop reading because I mistakenly think that I'm re-reading the same paragraph over and over again. It's an incredibly unpleasant experience.

Is anyone else seeing this? I've been seeing this not just on smaller sites like the one linked here, but on major news sites like CNBC and CNN, too. I know that news sites are having their budgets slashed, etc., but I literally can't read articles like this. I mean my brain just won't let me complete them because it thinks it's caught in a loop or something. It's hard to describe.

My two roommates and I just finally got over some kind of weird cold-like illness, took us 11-12 days to recover. Not Covid (based on 1 negative PCR test for one of us; I'm assuming we all had the same thing). Presumably, just your random cold/flu-type bug. A remote co-worker (400 km away, both of us in EU) has been experiencing a similar illness for over a week now, still not over it.

It took the three of us almost 2 weeks to get over it. The symptoms kept changing every 1-2 days (sore throat, then harsh cough, then chest/lung pain, then gas and intestinal issues, then headache, then back to coughing); had a false "I'm all better now" moment halfway thru, then Phase 2 kicked in. On top of which, I don't get sick much, and when I do, it's usually very mild and I'm over it very quickly.

So, I have a hypothesis. Thanks to all of the social distancing, OCD hand-washing, masking, etc for the past 18 months, "regular" colds/flus/germs have probably been going through some pretty extreme evolutionary stresses, just like Covid ... and are probably mutating/evolving a lot, just like Covid. Except all the researchers and specialists are pretty much completely preoccupied with Covid research/work, so no one has been paying much attention to all the other day-to-day respiratory illnesses.

I've seen a fair bit of news about how colds/flus have been much less common of late, due to the Covid-precautionary measures, but I have not seen any research or discussion about how those measures might be impacting other non-Covid illnesses.

Thoughts?

Is there an example in sharing a comedy(amusing, causing laughter) NOT at the consequence of something else's tragedy(distress, suffering, downfall)...?

Is there a funny story that doesn't diminish an other?

I've noticed some people making a point of editing titles on articles to either impose or undo title case on articles. I dug around a bit and haven't been able to find any style guide suggestions on the matter.

Barring some kind of official stylistic standards being laid down, that I'd like to respectfully request that curator roles refrain from overruling a submitter's formatting choices without good reason.

This has been a thread I’ve wanted to make for a while but I’ve hesitated to for fear of it going badly. Recent events, however, have made me think it’s a topic that’s we can’t really afford to ignore.

When people read the phrase “toxic masculinity”, some see a clear collection of bad behaviors or mindsets that exist independent of men as a whole, while some see an indictment of an entire gender or identity. I’ve talked to men who have admitted to not knowing how to be masculine without being “toxic”because they can’t see a clear line where one ends and the other begins.

Thus, I’m interested in exploring what specifically gets defined as “toxic masculinity” and how we distinguish it from neutral or positive masculinity.

Part of what has kept me from asking this is that I see in people here two different experiences that I fear might collide in bad ways. I know we have people here (myself included) who have been directly harmed by behaviors and mindsets that would fall under the umbrella of “toxic masculinity”. Likewise, I know we have people here who have been harmed by an over-application of the phrase — being seen or treated as “toxic” simply for being men and thus being denied the dignity of their own identity. Giving credence to one experience can feel like it overrides the other.

Even just the phrase itself is the kind of thing that often divides people into camps and causes conflict, and I’m hoping we can avoid that here. (Though, to be honest, Tildes always impresses me with how we handle difficult topics, so I’m not sure where my worry is coming from). My goal for this topic is for everyone to have the opportunity to speak openly to convey understood truths and lived experiences in ways that maintain dignity for everyone involved.

The guiding question is about distinguishing masculinity from toxic masculinity, but answers don’t have to be limited to that. I’m interested in hearing about people’s relationship with masculinity in general, both in people who identify with it and those who don’t.

Following the London E-Prix I thought I'd share some ideas I've had on how Formula E might be able to improve generally. Of course they'll never see this, but that's not the point right?

Live Broadcast

• The timing tower needs some improvement, mostly with adding team colours or logos to help differentiate them at a glance. This is definitely needed to better understand what's happening, especially with a 24-car grid.
• In group qualifying, the live lap timing appears seemingly in whichever order the director selects the drivers in. It would be better to order them showing whoever started their lap first, first.
• The broadcast, both this weekend and previously, has lacked a little polish. I know they're operating on a smaller budget than other world championship motorsports but fixing the audio and team radio issues, and not cutting away from an overtake that's about to happen, are a minimum in my opinion.
• They might do well to showcase the car development a little more. It's not a spec series but you'd be forgiven for thinking it is given how little they mention it - given road relevancy is a key focus of the sport I don't see why they don't focus on development of the powertrains every so often and how that is being carried over to road cars.

Racing

• More consistent penalties would help the sport's reputation a little. At the moment this is an easy way for people who don't watch the sport to criticise it - rightfully, as similar incidents are given very different penalties that seem to have no relevance to the incident itself.
• I think most locations should host double headers. Firstly, why spend all the effort building the track and paddock for a single 45 minute race? Secondly, it's more compelling to say a driver is looking to reverse a poor result "tomorrow" rather than "in three weeks".
• The championship should start and end in the same year. Having to say "2020-21 season" is more wordy than simply "2021 season" and the reason we need to use terms like "season 7" instead.
• I hope they keep group qualifying! The drivers love to complain but it keeps the championship close without artificial reverse-grids, and the title still goes to the team and driver who best maximised the situations they found themselves in.
• FanBoost is difficult - I don't take part in it, but don't hate it either. I like how there's still some skill involved - it's not a guaranteed overtake button, and sometimes the driver fails to get past. I do think it would benefit from preventing drivers repeatedly getting FanBoost, giving others a chance. Perhaps if a driver wins it twice in a row, take them out of voting for one or two races?

Others

• Better communication, especially with ticket sales. Right now it's not a given that an event will be able to host spectators, but they could have announced either way a bit earlier to give fans a chance to make or cancel plans to attend.
• A way to watch historical races would be a benefit! There doesn't seem to be a universal way right now like there is with F1TV & was with Formula E races on their YouTube channel. For some reason, probably broadcasting rights, they took them down - I think it would be beneficial to put them back as it's an easy way for a fan to share a good race with someone else.

What do you think?

Hello everyone,

I recently got put on some SSRI for my worsening suicidal ideation and honestly I can't believe the difference it's made. It's like a version of myself that I find hard to believe existed, but can draw parallels with the version of me before I got depressed, etc.

I'm just curious how I should be viewing these changes in me: Are they really me without depression/anxiety or is it a more lurid exaggerated version of that?

Any other thoughts on SSRIs in general welcome! I'm interested in seeing Tildians' thoughts on them :)

This tournament has been absolutely bonkers so far with last night as the culmination so far. What an absolutely mad night that was. 14 goals and a penalty shoot out. The world champions are out after a heroic effort from the Swiss and Croatia putting up one helluva fight against Spain. I can't remember a EURO or WC so exiting before.

Edit: Just to clarify - this wasn't meant as a provocation or a dig at this sites lack of interest in sports. I'm just excited.

As a new member I am really hesitant to post this but I recently posted an article to ~news that was related to lgbt issues and it was moved to ~lgbt. I fully support a sub section devoted to lgbt but news should be news regardless.

Just because it has an lgbt angle does not mean it should be moved. I'm not even lgbt myself but I find it sort of hurtful that a news article was pushed off ~news. So I ask this, and once again not trying to make waves. But why?

Edit: I would love to be a member of this community as I am personally seeking a less asshole filled reddit alternative. But pushing a news article to another ~ just because it relates a bit more to them shouldn't be a thing. If you are tolerant it relates to us all. And yes I know I posted it in ~news because I was trying to participate and I'm a news junky.

Sorry.

Edit 2: This was a sad sorry way to come in to this community. I apologize.

I never considered myself an introvert or shy. I’ve always been comfortable talking with strangers, whether that was in my college class or just sparking up a conversation with someone next to me in line.

I haven’t talked to a stranger irl since the pandemic started and I’m running scenarios in my brain about how I would talk to someone when I just met them. And every situation I’m going through I’m being awkward and uncomfortable.

I can talk to my family and my cousins, who are essentially my only friends, just fine but that’s different since there’s already an established way of communication there.

I just feel like I’m gonna be so rusty at talking to people, which is a shame because I’ve spent years learning how to talk to strangers in a certain way to make them comfortable and to very easily have a conversation. And I feel like I lost all of that now.

Looks like Tildes hasn't discussed this show for a year or two. I just finished binge-watching the first 5 seasons (I'm hoping there is a Season 6 in the offing), and of course, I now feel like discussing it. This thread is wide open to whatever anyone wants to bring up about the series. But my first question for people is this--

Did anyone notice any significant change in quality after Amazon took it over? If so, better or worse? How?

For me, somewhere around Season 3 or 4, it felt like the story quality declined. Not that it's "bad" in any way ... just that it got less original, more like traditional series plot devices. And that could just be me, or that--in general--even the best shows tend to lose some of their edge after the first few seasons ... or maybe they're just following the books (never read 'em) and this is how the books went.

But, yeah ... it's turning into a nicer, more nuanced Stargate ... the Good Guys trying to save humanity from The Terrorist Mastermind ... the Evil Post-Soviet Empire conspiring to help said Terrorist, etc. They even had Snidely Whiplash tying the poor girl to the railroad tracks.

I'm obviously over-simplifying here; it is still an excellent show ... just, like I said; it started to feel less original. I'm wondering if that's just my impression, and if not, do we know that it's an "Amazon" thing, or what?

The main reason I ask this is that, given these types of songs exist mainly to rile up a people in support or opposition to something, which leaves very little serious discussion to be had, other than the top comment offering some context. So what do you think? Given these songs are mostly more about nations, peoples, faiths, I'd probably post them in ~humanities inst of just ~music, but I want other opinions. I also generally make exceptions to sad music of this type, mainly because it's more meaningful.

Whether it be for school, work, a hobby, or personal interest, what are you learning right now? How are you learning it and what prompted you to start learning? What are some things that surprised you about what you are learning? What advice would you give to someone who just started to learn about it?

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've never been one to follow much social media - certainly not the kind that is just a (almost certainly fake) presentation of a perfect life. Someone's highlight reel. But I did catch myself on the other side of this. I spent hours on some days baking or cooking specifically to flex on people with well-crafted photos of the finished food. I still enjoyed it, but once I realized what I was doing I started cooking much more reasonably difficult dishes - so I'm sure it was motivated by a wish to instill envy in others.

So I think I understand that side of the equation. But I had a more or less captive audience (a Slack #food channel). Can anyone speak from the side of the willing consumer? The avid subscriber?

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.

Episode 4 of Falcon and Winter Soldier had me contemplating the architypes these characters represent. If you haven't seen the latest episode, I recommend watching it first because it actually does a lot to develop their characters (also spoilers are bound to come up).

Anyways, both characters show a clear commitment towards a guiding set of morals. Zemo with his unwavering commitment against super powered individuals. Cap with his fight against terrorism in the name of justice. Cap obviously believes himself to be good, but his actions don't always reflect that. Meanwhile Zemo seems to be aware that his zealous actions are morally problematic, but doesn't really care.

I realize it's kind of a silly question, but the ambiguity of the actions these characters take has me wondering where they would traditionally fit on the good ole' alignment chart.

Has anyone watched the second season yet? I quite liked it, although it's been getting a lot more meta than Season 1, which made it feel a lot more "Rick & Morty"ish.

(Tag spoilers accordingly please!)

I finished this the other day and given how popular it is, I'm surprised there's been no discussion thread here. No spoilers in this top post but go ahead with spoilery discussion in comments.

• Network: Netflix
• Format: 7 episodes mini-series (45-70min runtime)
• Drama set in the 60s-80s, based on a book, that follows an orphan chess prodigy and follows her as she grows up into the chess world.

I'll greatly recommend it. Quick and high quality. Wonderful acting.