So, it might just be that I'm older and notice these things more, but it really seems to me that fan groups are becoming more and more toxic overall. It feels like over the past 5-8 years specifically fanbases are reaching toxic levels faster and faster.

I remember when bronies became a thing, it took them like 3-4 years before the dangerous, threatening, and assholeish behavior really began to become common. Then Steven Universe came out and it only took them like 2 years to start sending death threats to people who didn't support their head-cannons. Rick and Morty went toxic in under a year and a half.

Then there's the shit in long-running franchises. Star Wars has had multiple of the actors shutting off social media from the toxic bile being shot at them. Chris Pratt is getting hate for what Star Lord did in Infinity War.

There's memes too, weirdly enough. Calarts is the biggest example I can think of. People made a dumb joke about how all the cartoons look a like today and someone pointed out how a few of the artists went to this one school in California and it became a catch all term for the shitty artstyle, and then within like 4 weeks the school has to go into lockdown because someone made a tongue-in-cheek threat of shooting the school up. A few years ago trolling attempts would be things like ordering a bunch of pizzas to the school or something annoying and dickish but overall harmless like that.

I know toxicity amongst fanbases has always been a thing, but it really seems to me that they're reaching unseen levels and doing so faster and faster. I mean Rick and Morty fans rioted over fucking dipping sauce, there are the aforementioned Steven Universe death threats, the directed attacks of actors on social media, fucking joking about shooting schools up because you don't like the art-style a few of their graduates used in a time where we've seen like 6 school shootings in half a year, there was that whole Voltron incident where a fan stole storyboards or something and threatened to release them to the public unless the creators of the show made their favorite gay ship a thing.

I guess what I'm getting at is what the fuck is happening that's poisoning every single community online? It's like everything has suddenly devolved into Youtube comments. How did we get to this level of toxicity? Or am I just more aware of this shit now and it's not really all that different from how it used to be?

                                                              Book Plot: Spoilers

The book opens by introducing the gunslinger, Roland Deschain, who is on a journey to find the Man in Black. As he ventures across the desert with his mule, he meets a farmer who goes by the name of Brown with his crow, Zoltan. The gunslinger begins to tell of the time he spent in the town of Tull. When Roland first comes to Tull, he missed the Man in Black possibly by a week. It is later revealed to Roland by the barmaid, Alice, that during his stay the Man in Black brought a dead weed eater by the name of Nort back to life. Roland makes Sylvia reveal to him that she is pregnant with the Man in Black's child (more importantly the child of the Crimson King). Roland uses his gun and rips the unborn monstrosity out of Sylvia. Outraged, Sylvia convinces the entire town of Tull that Roland is the spawn of the devil. Roland guns down the entire town of Tull: men, women, children, and even his lover, Alice. The story refocuses on Roland at the dwelling of Brown. Roland goes to sleep and wakes up to Brown telling him that his mule died of heat exhaustion and wonders if he can eat it. Roland leaves on foot to continue his pursuit of the Man in Black.

As his journey continues, Roland happens upon a way station and sees someone there in the distance. Roland believes this to be the Man in Black, but finds out it is a young boy by the name of Jake Chambers. Roland is near death when he arrives at the way station and Jake brings him jerky and water from an atomic slug water pump. Jake tells Roland that the Man in Black passed by a few days before. The way Jake talks reveals that he is not from Roland's world. Roland asks Jake about where he came from, but Jake cannot remember anything. Roland proceeds to hypnotize Jake and learn about where he came from.

Jake reveals to Roland that he is from New York and was on his way to school when a man dressed like a priest snuck up on him and pushed him into the street. Roland believes this man to be the Man in Black. Jake is then hit by a car and dies, but not before the priest approaches him and blesses him.

As they prepare to leave, Roland goes down to the cellar and encounters a demon speaking to him from a hole in the wall. After their palaver, Roland reaches into the hole and pulls out a jawbone. They then depart from the way station, and eventually make their way out of the desert into somewhat more welcoming lands. Roland awakes in the middle of the night to find Jake gone. Roland tracks down Jake and finds him about to be taken by the Oracle of the mountains. Roland uses the jawbone to lure the Oracle away from Jake. He then gives Jake the jawbone to concentrate on while he is gone and couples with the oracle himself in order to learn of his fate and path to the Dark Tower. Once Roland returns, Jake discards the jawbone. Come morning, they continue their trek to the mountains.

Along the trek Roland tells Jake a bit about his past. He tells of Hax, the cook, who was hanged for being an aid to the enemy. Hax was to poison the town of Farson/Taunton. Roland and his friend Cuthbert overhear the plot and alert their fathers of the traitor. Hax is hanged and the boys are allowed to watch with permission from their fathers.

Roland also reveals how he became a gunslinger at the age of 14. As he is walking home, his father's advisor Marten Broadcloak calls Roland to see his mother, Gabrielle, in Marten's bed covering her shame. Angry, Roland charges off to challenge Cort so he may receive his guns. He defeats Cort with the use of his hawk, David.

Roland and Jake soon come to the mountains and enter a series of tunnels under the mountains riding on a mine cart. On their journey, they are attacked by a group of Slow Mutants. Roland battles the Slow Mutants and they move along without the mine cart. They eventually come upon the exit from the tunnels. Jake trips and is left dangling from the tracks. As Roland tries to help him, the Man in Black appears and tells Roland that if he saves the boy then he will never catch him. Roland decides to let Jake fall; Jake knows this and spouts, "Go then. There are other worlds than these." Jake then falls to his death as Roland goes to talk with the Man in Black.

They meet in a golgotha and palaver. The Man in Black reads Roland's fate from Tarot cards. Roland's fate includes The Sailor, The Prisoner, The Lady of Shadows, death, life (which the Man in Black burns), and the Tower at the center of everything. The Man in Black tells Roland he is only a pawn for Roland's true enemy who now controls the Tower itself. The Man in Black tries to convince Roland to give up on his quest by creating a representation of the universe and showing him how insignificant he is. Roland refuses and is forced into sleep. When he awakens, ten years have passed and there is a skeleton next to him, which he believes to be the Man in Black. Roland departs from the Golgotha and sits at the edge of the Western Sea contemplating the next step in his quest for the Dark Tower.

Currently the subscribed groups list is only shown in the sidebar of the index page, but given that the sidebar isn't currently used for much else and doesn't take up much vertical space, it would be nice to have the group list persisted across at least the individual groups if not threads themselves, to make navigation easier without having to go back to the top level to check a different group.

I would love to hear about stuff you are interested in. Do you have a hobby you really, really love? Is there a subject you could talk about for hours? Something you tend to rant/rave on about even though you're pretty sure everyone around you has had enough of the subject? Please share it here, and don't worry about going on for too long - I love to hear people talk about stuff they are passionate about and I'm sure others do too!

So I've been really excited about this page, but lately I keep coming here, glancing at the front page, and then leaving. I think it's in part the minimalist design and the way the colour of the clicked links is very similar to the colour of the unclicked ones, making it unclear at a first glance which threads one has visited already.

Since the pace of debate is moving much slower than on Reddit here (which I think is a good thing), it would be very useful to have some kind of a 'my discussions' page that you could save threads to - either threads you are participating in or just threads you are excited to see the responses to. This would make it much easier for users to return to interesting discussions without having to browse around ~ for ages trying to find that one interesting topic.

As some of you may know, Tildes is written in Pyramid. I've done some OSS work in Pyramid and Flask, but my paid web dev work the past few years has been mostly in Django. There are some newer frameworks out there like Sanic or Falcon, and some older ones like Zope, CherryPy and Turbogears, that I've played with but have no real experience in.

Personally, I like Django for its "batteries included" and its big ecosystem, Flask for its minimalism and Pyramid for its elegant design. There's no single framework that fits all needs and all have their share of annoyances - Django can be quite difficult to swap out things like the default ORM or template system (though these have gotten better in recent versions), Flask has some architectural issues with request and other global variables, and Pyramid perhaps suffers from a relatively small ecosystem and lack of "one way to do it".

What are your experiences and preferences?

Three examples :

American English have lost the u in word like "color", because it is closer to its phonetics (the u is silent and there's no particular sound associated with "ou"). The letter u has an anglo-norman root.

Swiss French (and for this particular example Belgian French) differs little from standard French, apart from the numbering system. It is ironically more metric than standard French since it streamlines what's left of the base 20 (vigisimasomething) system, i. e. it's "seventy and eighty" ("septante et huitante*") instead of "sixty-ten and four-twenties" ("soixante-dix et quatre-vingts". Historically people all over the world used some sort of base 20 system, probably because we have twenty toes and fingers.

*no one ever use "octante". Belgian people think the Swiss uses it, while Swiss people thinks the Belgian it. I don't know why its that.

Swiss standard German (not dialect) have ditched the Eszett ligature (ß) in favor of a more simple "ss ". That ligature was more common in the middle age.

With those example in mind, do you find value in the "old" vs the "new" way of writing?

(in other words: spelling reformer partisan and opponent : what goes through your mind?)

Hi there everyone. I gave up on smart watches after Pebble sold out to fitbit and my OG Pebble started having screen issues (again). I never watched to spend hundreds on a smart watch or switch to the iOS ecosystem to use an Apple watch.

I was wondering if anyone here has had success with any other watches after having to give up their Pebble, something with a great battery life and good notification features without resorting to terrible china-watches.

Hope you have a great day!

Dear Tildes community,

this is an issue that's bugged me for some time. I might struggle to put this into the right words initially, because I have not studied either philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology or anthropology. Yet, all of those fields could input into this. I will edit this post to clarify things once people start commenting.

I will begin by stating the question at the root of the issue I am trying to explore:

Does de-humanisation of others occur automatically, as soon as we believe that we can predict their actions?

Things to consider:

• What is a measure of 'humanity'? Is it consciousness? Self-awareness? Intelligence? Empathy?
• Is it true that a more 'conscious' or 'intelligent' creature is closer to us in nature and therefore should enjoy more rights, considerations, or respect? (Case in point: Some countries will not allow performing surgery on an octopus without anesthesia, due to them being considered very high up on the ladder of consciousness)
• It is easy to conflate consciousness and intelligence. I think that's a bit of a trap. I have often looked at intelligence as a sort of "clock rate" of the brain. As in, you might be able to process information very quickly, but that's still pointless if you're running the wrong algorithms, or have very little knowledge to rely on. Intelligence all by itself is not a good measure of how 'conscious' or 'aware' or 'human' something is. Often, however, people tend to call animals more intelligent or less intelligent when they mean 'more highly developed', or 'more conscious'. The same probably applies to people as well.
• Additionally, among self-aware, conscious beings (humans), empathy and intelligence van cary wildly. Therefore, does consciousness, or even 'human-ness' vary? Is a highly intelligent psychopath less human than a much less intelligent but empathetic person?
• What do we use to assess whether a human is highly developed, or less developed / desirable? (Brushing aside the notion that we obviously shouldn't do so). I think it is important to look at what mechanisms have been used in the past to demonise swathes of the population, in order to discredit them or further some kind of agenda. Take African people during the slave trade. They were called primitive, less intelligent, less human. In fact, in more subtle ways this even happens to women nowadays. They are constantly belittled by chauvinists, for supposedly being less intellectually capable due to their gender. Are these all forms of de-humanisation, linked predominantly to intellect?
• What is this founded upon? Is it predictability of their actions? Let's try to go full circle. How does one discredit a part of the population? One observes them and demonises their behaviours (and with that, culture, etc.) The predictability of such behaviours is essential in this. You cannot reliably say that "those brutes do [x], how disgusting", without there being frequent evidence of it actually happening. (On the flip-side, could people be predictably advanced or developed?)
• What do we think of predictable people in general? Predictability has negative connotations. At best it's boring (say, a highly intelligent beaurocrat), at worst, stupid / less human (say, racists talking about another culture being predictably primitive)
• Is there an implication of people, or beings, who are more predictable, having less free will? If your intellectual faculties are limited, or you operate on instinct more than you do on rational or logical deduction, you become more predictable, ergo, predictability == stupidity. (I know this is a fallacy, but I am trying to establish why one might irrationally and subconsciously dehumanise, not arguing in favour of this dehumanisation or trying to defend it)
• Take our favourite pets. Cats and dogs. They are pretty highly developed and if it wasn't for humans, they'd be unchallenged apex predators ruling the world. They display complex behaviours, at times even hard to predict ones. But still, they are animals and behave in reasonably reliable patterns. They are also not able to pass the mirror-test for self awareness, implying they are not (or only in extremely limited ways). So, one could argue they are less human, less intelligent. Now look at insects. Even less intelligent. Even though it could be argued that some (like ants) display a form of swarm intelligence, they are still extremely predictable. (Except for, perhaps, the flight patterns of flies or mosquitoes, which evolution has scrambled into extremely random patterns to avoid them being swatted. But that's just hard-coded into their genes, not an intelligent thought process)
• So, once more. Think of someone you really don't like. Do you ever call them stupid for their actions? Would you ever say "here we go again, they are doing this again". Particularly if they are your boss? Perhaps it helps you cope with their shitty behaviour to dehumanise that person. Make them a lesser human being, to compensate for the fact that they make you feel powerless in their work. If dehumanisation is such an immediate and convenient mechanism to protect yourself from feelings of inferiority, or to stop yourself from being threatened (say, by a different culture), perhaps it is in fact an ingrained behaviour, which expresses itself on a larger scale once fueled by propaganda and political intent. If we identify it and understand how it happens, we may protect ourselves against it by elevating others to a higher status of 'human-ness'.
• When we 'have figured someone out', we are stating we can predict them. Are we putting them beneath us, henceforth? Are they 'less' than us in some ways? It gives us power to be able to predict, so it makes us more powerful than them in some way, so it makes them lesser beings in some ways.

Why am I bringing all this up? In my life, so far, I have gone from being very insecure, mistrusting and scared of people, to much more open, trusting and confident.

The more insecure I was, the more time I spent trying to prove to myself that I was somehow superior to others. Generally using intelligence as an argument (uggggh....). You know, like the goth teenager sitting in their basement, who is oh-so-individual and everyone else is so stupid and nobody understands my pain, etc. (see, dehumanising my past self right there, haha).

The more I started trusting people and the more I started seeing everyone around me as humans, humans just like me, the more I began to see how others still apply these weird dehumanisation mechanisms to make themselves feel superior. This made me wonder whether there is some kind of innate drive to do so. Try to predict others, or paint them as predictable, to prove that you are superior to them, because they would not be able to predict your actions, as you are so far beyond their capabilities.

So yeah, uhm....let me know what comes up in yer heads as you read through this, I'd be most interested to hear your perspectives.

Korea is rather anti gay. This way they can be together in public without scorn. Is this cover up a common practice in other parts of the world?

Whenever I notice a couple like that, I always want to cheer for them, give them a thumbs up, or shout out loving words of support, but I ultimately just do nothing. Otherwise it acknowledges the fact that their cover is not perfect, which will probably cause them more anxiety than relief.

If anyone out there who did that is reading this, just know : i am rooting for you!

I know subgroups are still a very new thing, but this seems (to me at least) like an obvious one, with ~comp currently seeming to act as "~tech, but advanced". The topics are very similar, with ~comp's most active post right now being about machine learning and ~tech's being about open source code, topics that could easily be swapped between the groups and still fit in.

My DM just sent me the following great tactic for use in a D&D campaign: the Peasant Railgun. What do you think about it? Any other impressive tactics that you know about (whether also available on the 1d4chan wiki or otherwise)?

I just thought that it might be useful for a person to see how many posts and comments they have made on ~. As that data is already available for manual collection it might be nice to have it available more easily on that profile.

Since computers and computer-like devices are prevalent in most modern societies shouldn't we be teaching people how to use them effectively and for purpose, rather than saying "oh, they'll pick it up" or "they grew up with it, they'll understand it just fine". Both of which, are clearly not the case.

What does tildes think of a mandatory computing class in early grades, and/or several years of classes to master the concepts, like the U.S. does with History, English literature, Math, and Sciences?

Should computers be necessary to learn as an academic subject?

Or is it fine that many people can't do very simple tasks on computers?
Is it fine that they do not understand basic computing concepts? e.g. keyboard shortcuts, searching, folder management

Any recommendations? I’ve been reading Maurice Druon’s Accursed Kings series, historical fiction about medieval political drama in France that precipitated the Hundred Years’ War. George R.R. Martin calls it “the original Game of Thrones”, and honestly, if you liked the political intrigue aspect of ASOIAF/GOT, The Accursed Kings blows it out of the water.

Based on a post I saw asking for a ~philosophy group, it seems like there are at least a few people looking for some discussion like this. Does anyone want to talk about some concept that's been on their mind for a while?

If you do, go ahead and throw it down in the comments. It'd be great if we could get a couple of nice discussions going!

It's a slight inconvenience to have to scroll past dozens of comments just to reply to the thread. What do you guys think? Does having the ability to quickly jump into the conversation stifle discussion? I can see if some people feel that it should be necessary to read a more posts before posting in the thread, but I also think that a lot of people will just hit the END key or scroll past comments without really paying attention to them (if they just want to quickly reply).

There's a really awesome thread on constructive criticism with a lot of thoughtful insight about the process. What makes criticism helpful? What causes more harm than good? What's the best way to go about asking for a critique?

I wanted to play a little game where we can turn the tables on the process and examine what makes critiques tick. At the same time, it'll give folks a chance to share some of their creations. The idea is to critique the critiques based off of how the requests are presented.

To quote @silva-rerum from the other thread,

Context and empathy are both incredibly important when it comes to the delivery and impact of creative criticism. Most people who deliver critiques while failing to contextualize or understand their recipient’s perspective will be engaging in an exercise in futility at best, or an act of cruelty at worst.

I think it would be a fun exercise to experiment with how much context can affect how good or bad a critique is.

Rules:

Content

Content should be something of your own, whether it's writing, music, physical works, visual, or whatever. If you made it and you're down to post it for some criticism, it fits.

Context

It's entirely up to you what kind of context you'd like to provide. The game is about finding what works and what doesn't, and context can play a huge factor in the quality of the critique. If you want to try to see what kind of criticism zero-context requests elicit, post your work with zero context. Alternatively, you can see what kind of critique you get from high-context, specifically targeted feedback requests.
(If you haven't read through some of the ideas in the other thread, check it out before posting. There really are some great insights in there even if you aren't planning on posting anything.)

Critiques

Perform your critiques for others as you normally would. Obviously, keep it civil. Multiple people can offer their critiques for each item up for critique. Since we're playing around with different degrees of context, try to critique on a case-by-case basis. That is, if you have more context for a critique than is proffered, try your best to set that extra context aside. There may be fudge-factor involved with that, but I think we can still end up with some interesting results.

Counter-critiques

Counter-critiques are open to all! It will definitely be helpful to hear from the creator how helpful or hurtful the critique was. If other people have input or questions, discuss away!

Side note: I don't think I've ever typed/thought the word "critique" so much in my life.

I'll put together some stuff I've worked on recently to get thing started.

Most religions base their beliefs on the Bible. If so, where was the bible based on? Clearly, the bible was written by a bunch of men. Men. Humans. Humans are prone to corruption. We cannot tell whether these authors corrupted or even invented stories? So, why should we base our virtues on a thick book when we don't really know if it's accurate or not?

Science has already proven that Adam and Eve didn't exist. Evolution does exist. And Science have evidences. The bible said the Earth was FLAT and have 4 corners and sides. Science said the Earth was spherical, and it proved what it said. Science seeks evidence. Science seeks the TRUTH. The bible? It was just created by men many years ago to answer questions they cannot answer.

There are tons of wars and crusades that were religion driven, whether we had holy wars or wars because of terrorists following inhumane beliefs, many people ultimately died. Just like wars almost eradicated humanity, that is what should happen to be Religion. Become eradicated. Adding on to that we see many deaths every day just because of religious differences.

The bottom line is, The holy book is repulsive and its repulsiveness creates a huge barrier to development. The world would be a better place without religions. Religions claim themselves right. And because of that, people around the globe were divided by awful beliefs. It's really sad to think that people do good things because they FEARED the awful HELL and because they wanted to go to the fictional HEAVEN. Religious people were driven by a 'holy' book which cannot speak and collect evidences for what it says. We should wake up. Be united by an accurate tool that seeks truth. Science. We should base our virtues on our intelligence and common sense.

Greek mythology was once a religion, and it flopped and became a myth. Religion in the US is now declining according to surveys. With our eyes, watch and see how will religion disintegrate through the years while the development, peace and stability of the world integrates. To add to my initial statement, I can provide sources for every argument against religion and the "holy book"

What excites humans the most today is technological progress. Faster computers, better autonomous driving, colourful displays - a preoccuppation with 'means'. There seems to be much lesser excitement and study among popular consiousness with what is done with all these tech. Your smartphone is a technological marvel - but what are you doing with it?

This seems to be in similar veins as the idea of human progress from stone age to bronze to iron. "Stone age people used primitive technology, bronze age better, iron age the best. There are still peoples in the world who are still stuck in the stone age".

But this is a biased perception of human endevours. What matters is what humans did, not what they did it with. The incas, mayas and aztecs were 'stuck' in stone technology. But they built marvelous civilizations, buildings and cultures rivalling the greatest achievements in the rest of the world in their time.

Advancing technology is a fetish. One in pursuit of which we forget what matters is what we do with it. But there seems to be little of that going on. Most of the doing is for improving technology. And most of it in a fetishistic attempt to get out of the ditch we dug ourselves in from past technological 'progress'.

Today, humans are like a bunch of sculptures spending most of their days dicussing chisel technology rather than sculpting.

They are not overly long and often give some nice information on local transport, currency, scams, food and cultural etiquette. These are two of their videos. One focusing on the Kyushu island in Japan and the other on Copenhagen in Denmark.

• Kyushu in Japan:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpFSqZikbHQ

• Copenhagen:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMGrL8NazOw

If any of you know of other good online travel resources, I'd love to hear about it!

A long time ago I had noticed a trend developing on reddit where people were starting to preface their comments with: "I for one". It's pretty insignificant, which is why I never made a post about it at the time. Since then, its use seems to have spread significantly on the site and I've seen it a bit here as well.

It makes sense to use the phrase when talking about or quoting another person to help separate their opinions from your own. The weird thing is many people now seem to use it when its not ambiguous that the comment is their own opinion. I was under the assumption that the default position should be that the comment is the opinion of the person that posted it.

For example:

"I for one, prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate."

Is the same as:

"I prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate."

There's nothing wrong with using the phrase, it just reads like someone trying to pad out an essay for school.

Have you noticed people using the phrase on other sites? Is it a phenomenon more specific to reddit?
Do you use the phrase yourself? If you do, what is your thought process when typing it out?

For the past few months I felt less and less inclined to engage in conversation on Reddit and other discussions platforms. The risk of any expression being met with a (severely) negative response is just too great. I don't know if it was always like this and that I just don't find it worth it any more or if there is an actual trend of people being more of an asshole more of the time to each other online.

I've only joined Tildes a couple of days ago, and enjoy most of my time here. I've also noticed that I'm now more active again on other platforms. It's made me want to express myself again. I put more effort in my contributions. I'm not necessarily getting more pleasant responses, but there are fewer negative ones, I think.

Does this sound familiar to any of you?

Having surfed reddit for several years, I've always had the impression that its voting system cannot handle controversial topics well. Although it's an official rule that comments shouldn't be downvoted in disagreement, downvotes are very often used that way. This sometimes leads to less "valuable" content being on top of threads, for example jokes.

I think that it's beneficial for discussions to have good controversial opinions in higher positions as they are now on reddit. But I understand that people want to state their disagreement and don't always want to comment to do so. Also, I think many disliked that the public upvote/downvote counters were removed.

Something that could help with all of that would be a disagree button for each comment together with a counter that shows how many people clicked that button. The button wouldn't have any effect on sort sequence.

What do you all think of this?

Edit: Added clarification that there wouldn't be an effect on sort sequence.