Edit: This community is amazing, thank you all for all of your suggestions. Feel free to keep them coming. I have a Google doc full of ideas with my comments that I'm going to drop on him. I was trying to respond to everyone and then discovered that Tildes will rate limit you. So if I don't respond to you, I'm sorry but I definitely read your comment and checked out your suggestions!

My friend suffers from depression and lives 6 hours away from me so the happiest I see him is when we are regularly gaming together. The problem is that I haven't been able to find a game we both wanted to play for a while.

I just cannot get into all the survival crafting games that seem to dominate co-op gaming these days. I am looking for suggestions for anything else. Also, it needs to be an online co-op instead of a couch co-op.

His computer isn't the best so that needs to be a consideration, nothing wrong with older games. Ideally we are talking about PC games on Steam.

Examples:

• we played a ton of Risk of Rain 2, probably the last game we played a lot together
• we have played through Halo co-op a bunch of times.

Who has ideas for me?

Next horror film is the cannibal horror movie X from 2022 directed by Ti West. A prequel Pearl was filmed at the same and released later the same year. Comments on that is welcome as well in the discussion.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Since this is the month of horror movies, did you find it scary, unsettling, creepy, eerie, spooky or horrifying?

The rest of the schedule for June is:

• 24th: The Exorcist (1973)

I'm looking for recommendations for good web tech job sites, ones which are most likely to lead to interviews. While I can always do a websearch myself, I haven't done a job search for many years, so I don't know what job sites are trustworthy or not nowadays. Working remote is almost must-have, otherwise Canada would be the region of interest.

What media representation resonated with you personally?

In teaching, we talk about kids’ need to access diverse literature in the framing of “mirrors” and “windows”. A mirror is a character that the child can see themselves in; a window is a character that is different and requires perspective-taking.

A gay child seeing a gay character in a story might see that character as a mirror of themselves, while straight readers might see the character as a window instead, offering some perspective into what it’s like to be gay.

No mirror or window is a perfect match, of course, and people can still identify with characters who don’t exactly align with their identities (which is what makes fiction such a powerful tool for empathy!).

Share some of the characters and people that have resonated with you (whether as windows or mirrors) across any media types (books, movies, television, music, comics, anime, podcasts, etc.).

They can be people who helped you understand yourself better, or people who gave you insight into others' experiences (or both!).

Addenda:

• They do not need to be fictional characters. Real-world people can be windows and mirrors too!

• You don’t have to specify whether someone’s a "window" or a "mirror" for you unless you want to. It’s a simple shorthand way of helping kids understand the concept, but it can feel a little limiting and boxy for adults to use it, since people and characters are complex individuals.

Event Guidelines

Everyone is welcome to participate. This includes allies! You do not need to identify as LGBT in order to join in the topics.

I will use "queer" and "LGBT" interchangeably as umbrella terms to refer to all minority sexualities and gender identities. These are intended to be explicitly inclusive.

Be kind; be gracious; listen to others; love lots.

Schedule

I won't reveal everything upfront, but with each post I will give a teaser for what's next:

June 1st: Introductions and Playlist
June 4th: Who is a historical LGBT advocate that you admire?
June 7th: What positive changes have you seen in your lifetime?
June 10th: What's something you wish more people understood?
June 13th: Ask almost anything
June 16th: What media representation resonated with you personally?
June 19th: (teaser: a check-in on those close, or maybe not so close, to us)
June 22nd:
June 25th:
June 28th:

If for whatever reason you would not like to see these topics in your feed, add pride month at tildes to your personal tag filters.

Was just driving through a town in southern Manitoba and pulled over to take a break and saw these tiny homes: https://i.imgur.com/hG9NAGR.jpeg

Tiny homes have always intrigued me so I talked to the owner. Its in a trailer park and this was a lot that was available for development so they had 16 tiny homes built in three sizes. The smallest is a 510 sf one bedroom, then a slightly larger one bedroom and the biggest one is a 920 sf two bedroom.

They are "modular" homes which means they were manufactured in a factory a couple of hours away and trailered into the site. But despite the fact they travelled by trailer and that they sit on screwpiles instead of a foundation, they are fully built as regular homes.

Its cold here in winter (down to -40c) so the homes are super insulated with about 12" of insulation in the floor and ceiling and 6" in the walls with another 2" of foam insulation on the outside walls. They are completely heated by the mini split system with the addition of a convection electric heater in each room to keep them warm in the coldest part of winter. Amazingly in a place where my own bills for electricity can hit $250 in winter without heat, the most the owner said she paid was $80 for electricity including heat.

The interiors look like any regular home only smaller:https://i.imgur.com/aFufGMI.jpeg and definitely dont give the same vibe as a mobile home. It feels like a house with small rooms.

So far the 2 bedroom units are selling fairly well but the one bedrooms arent moving as easily. Part of the problem was covid. In this town a 'starter' home can easily be 350k and they were hoping to sell these from 80k to 120k. But during covid everything skyrocketed from materials to moving costs and the least expensive unit is now 175k and the biggest one is 220k. Add on the 350 a month for lot rent, which includes yard care/shovelling, and its pushing the envelope of what most would consider "affordable" anymore but there's not much they can do now to bring the price down.

Buyers so far tend to be those who are looking for tiny easy to care for space: a widow who sold her house and wants something small she can leave and go travelling, a guy who works for a railroad who's only home one week a month, a new immigrant family who are just happy to own something rather than pay the same amount in rent.

I applaud them for having a vision and actually pursuing it. There are some kinks to work out and it would be great if the prices could drop significantly but at least its an alternative to renting or buying an older mobile home. Its one of the first tiny home communities Ive seen up close and I came away with a positive impression. I think its going to be a great little community of tiny home lovers.

I watch it every year, though it's not ideal to follow from the Pacific time zone of the United States.

My daughter and I always get up super early on Sunday morning (6 AM) to watch the last hour of the race. My dad has started coming over to our house to watch the last hour with us, too.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Israel-Hamas war content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

Please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

Protests Seen as Harming Civil Rights Movement in the '60s

I've recently had some conversations about activism and protesting about climate change on Tildes, which made me remember these polls again. I think they are a good historical reminder, and they demonstrate that masses much too often care more about comfort and privilege rather than justice.

These polls also show that you don't need to convince the majority to effect change. In fact, focusing on that might be detrimental to your cause. People who are bothered by your protest, because it disrupts "order", will try to tell you how to effect change while sitting in their own comfort. But this is not important.

Here is the gist of it, with MLK's own words.

"First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

Believing in the timetables created by comformist opinions would be a grave mistake for climate activists. We need more confrontation, more radical acts, and more direct action. We don't need to make friends with the majority to do this. We need to shake things up, and most people don't like that. You can see this by the worsening majority opinion of the Civil Rights movement after they intensified protests. But the activists were right, it was an urgent matter, and they succeeded. So, we don't need to play nice.

For example, after MLK's asssassination people started burning down cities, which resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1968 passing. You can see this in the citations; basically the government feared further escalation, and that's why they had to pass the act. Another example is the suffragettes' bombing and arson campaign in Britain and Ireland, which helped with their cause by putting pressure on people in power.

I'm not giving these examples to say there should or should not be one-to-one copies, but to show that being radically confrontational does work. Radical confrontation and direct action are what we need for climate justice, because time has been running out for a while, and every day past without a radical change makes things much worse. So we should cast off the yoke of mass approval and meekness. We need to embrace the confrontation.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.