Look at this beauty

I've been wanting a cool pen that I could carry around and for the price I've read that these ones are the best to acquire (Zebra F-701 was a strong contender but I saw so many people "modding" them that it looked like it would require some extra effort).

For all the shit that goes in this world and all the toxicity on the internet, I'm fascinated by how easy it is to find a forum dedicated only to pens. It's just marvelous. Like I know it sounds stupid, but it's almost fucking magic. I remember growing up my only source of esoteric information like "what is the best pen for me" was Gabe, the guy in the paper store next to my parents' apartment, who spent the day reading magazines about modeling, arts and crafts, etc.

That is also why I am so excited about tildes. If we manage to minimize toxic behavior while increasing in content, this could be like having specialized Gabes about different topics, like going to your local store and seeing that friendly face that tells you "what's up boss" and just gives you info about the best socks you'll ever see, or the most obscure way to buy great glasses for cheap. I was just reading the thread on non-tech workers. Imagine if we could share our knowledge without putting our egos in the middle, how much power we could attain if we just stop clashing against each other. Like for example I just learned a bit about the world of pulp novels thanks to @koan and they are like "oh yeah I write maybe a novel a month no big deal" wtf!!!! And they are freaking humble about it!! I'm sorry I'm melting down a bit here but sometimes it feels like everyone takes this stuff for granted and then proceeds to behave like assholes (especially when I browse reddit or facebook feeds) and it makes me so angry and sad.

/rant

But for real, stop and think about the internet sometimes, it's like stopping and looking at the stars and realizing how vast the universe is.

To put this into context: I'm still minor, in Europe, and I was hired into SW company as backend developer. I'm making about 2-3 times as much as my friends in fastfoods.

I'm basically making WS that would be unified wrapper for about 15 another WS - instead of crafting request for each of those, you will just call the API and it will do everything for you.

Everything was fine, until I encountered a nightmare: WSDL/SOAP protocol over HTTPS with need to use client certificate.

Full of false hope, I thought: "It'll be easy, I finished communication with another companies in few hours, this will be quick".

I was very wrong. I spent countless hours on this. I tried 3 programming languages and 4 different frameworks, copy-pasting solutions from stack overflow and wondering why does this still throw errors! I copied it from stack overflow! I used windows alongside linux and installed like 10 wsdl/soap clients from 2008 forums.

I created 8 or so SO questions, most about different language/framework, but the same problem.

Worth of mentoining, at the time, I could obtain wsdl and xsd of the WS with usage of two certificates (crt.pem and key.pem) over PHP. I tried to use PHP SoapClient, which accepted just one certificate file. I used .pem certificate that I received and should get the work done.

Then, I started writing the final question. Including PHP that downloaded wsdl and SoapClient that didn't work. Knowing someone will probably want to see certificates, I used cat key.pem cert.pem > certCombined.pem and diff certCombined.pem cert.pem. cert.pem was the certificate I received and should work. I expected no differences. When I saw two pages of differences, I started to suspect the cert I was given is wrong. So I pointed the PHP SoapClient to certCombined - and it started working!

This would have never happened (at least for several more hours) unless I known someone will want to see diff between working and not-working certificates. Thank you, rubber duck debugging! Next time I'll be solving something, I'll write on paper everything I use and know.

What are your stories?

I saw this movie last week, so I thought I'll share some thoughts on it.

First off, spoilers! Be warned.

I start of by saying, I'm not really a romcom fan in general, and wasn't specifically into watching this movie because it was an all Asian cast. I grew up watching Chinese dramas (HK, mainland and from Taiwan), and so many of them are romantic comedies. So, though I love the idea of Hollywood taking on more diverse stories, movies like "Crazy Rich Asians" already exist.

Having said all that, I honestly loved the movie! And I believe one of the major reasons why is the depiction of different Asians, specifically Asian-Americans (or as we're referred to in Chinese, foreign-Chinese or overseas-Chinese).

...unrelated to the movie itself, but a little background if anyone's interested...
I'm a Canadian-born Chinese and grew up when people thought all Chinese people lived in Chinatown. I literally had teachers confirm with my parents that the address I gave was correct and that it was in fact not in Chinatown. I was automatically placed in ESL classes, though English is my first language. So, little bit of an outsider in the country I was born in. When I visit family and friends in Hong Kong though, I'm the white girl. Literally everything I do is a novelty. I can write my own name in Chinese, I recognize famous Chinese songs (like Beatles level famous), or I can order my own breakfast (a bun with coffee).

So back to the movie. In Crazy Rich Asians, in Rachel, I feel they captured this really well. If this movie was less Asian centric, I feel "Asia" would have been overly exotic, instead of gross wealth being exotic. If this movie were made in HK or China, I feel, Rachel would have been portrayed as far more foreign and her "Banana" qualities exaggerated.

I also really appreciated that a lot of jokes, and moments, especially the MaJong scene weren't explained. The jokes were so funny, especially the lucky red colour. I haven't laughed out loud in a theater for a while.

This post is already getting sort of long, so I might do another one on the strong women in the movie, which I believe they were really well done too. Rachel was amazing!

Who else has seen this? What are your thoughts?

Edit: I added a spoiler tag, but guess I really didn't. Still leaving it in, in case comments contain them.

Anyone else excited for the next installment in the franchise? DQ11 is the first US console release of a mainland DQ game since DQ8 on ps2 in 2005. I've been playing DQ5 on Android for the last few months and it still holds up!

Old stories are always being updated for lots of reasons, ranging from trying to appeal to new audiences to correcting toxic depictions to fitting better to the current social or political climate and more. There's nothing new there. However, one thing I find a bit odd lately, as in the last five years or so, is that a lot of this modernization is actually done pretty poorly in main stream media. We see more forced diversity, queerbaiting, and generally bad storytelling. Not totally sure how I'll do this yet, but I'm thinking of posting stories that stand out to me for better or for worst, starting with a classic.

There will be spoilers for both movies.

Cinderella (2015)

This is one I honestly didn't think worked at all. To be fair, I believe Disney's goal was just to sell a beautiful movie, and not a good story. This whole movie was gorgeous. It was also really boring, which I honestly believe is the greatest sin in storytelling.

Cinderella herself is "smarter" in this movie than the old classic cartoon. She's well read and has some agency, which honestly makes her more a damsel than the original cartoon for me. In the cartoon, she was an abused child that had no where to go. Her being trapped made sense. In the new one, she's sort of a fighter...who doesn't fight. I didn't get it.

Another issue is that Cinderella was really the only character they modified, which is why the story is still shallow.

Ever After (1998)

This is honestly one of the best modernization of the fairy tale I've ever seen. What worked for me, is that they fleshed out all their characters. Danielle, Henry, the stepmother, stepsisters, everyone! This makes for a much richer story, where characters themselves can be modernized, but still fit the time of the period piece. It's not about dropping a fourth wave feminist into an aged story, but about adding the dimensions that would have still existed then. Danielle is strong, well read, and obedient. Her servitude is not without reason. She's seeking a "mother", and her relationship with her stepmother is more than simply being a slave. The audience is shown the moments of kindness Danielle seeks from her stepmother.

My quick two-cents. I also find it interesting that Ever After came out over 15 years before Cinderella.

So what are you thoughts? Any good fairy tale adaptations you can mention?

No spoilers, just a vague example.

A long time ago, I watched TRON: Uprising (2012). It's a really good Disney kids show that was unfortunately cancelled after one season or 19 episodes. It carries a rating of TV-Y7.

One thing that always really struck me about this show was that it's actually quite violent, but censored. We see gladiator fights where "people" are just smashed into little cubes signifying their death.

This is not at all a new concept, and I'm not saying we need absolute realism, but is there an imbalance to the amount of violence we show without "real" consequence? And in doing so, glorifying the action of violence itself?

We don't want to traumatize kids, but maybe we should, just a little. And for those saying that the age range for some shows are too young for them to understand, these shows have really adult concepts to begin with. In Voltron, for example, we're talking about galactic war, genocide, torture and misuse of good technologies turning them to weapons.

And though I posted in ~tv, in games especially when there's a violent action executed by the gamer. Games are rated a bit differently, and I'm not as familiar with children games, so hopefully another Tilderino will have more to add here.

Imagine that your boss told you that the company is happy to send you to one or two conferences next year, with the aim of helping you to improve your leadership skills.

In this context, "leadership" includes Culture; Coaching & Mentoring; Teamwork; Continuous Improvement; Collaboration; Agile; Culture Change.

You want to make a list of conferences worth considering in order to estimate the budget. What events would you put on your list?

It's been about a decade since I had a vacation and I have a wedding to attend, so to kill two birds with one stone we will be traveling from Florida to New York by car. Me and my girlfriend of 7 months will be taking the trip together and its both of our first times taking a vacation in forever.

Aside from the more obvious stuff like toothbrushes, clothes and condoms (humble brag), what should I think about? After the wedding we'll have nearly a full week to do anything we want or go just about anywhere within reason/distance.

Here's what I have covered so far:

• Trip route is planned for there and (somewhat) back.
• Car oil changed, tires replaced, cleaned & roadside assistance available 24/7.
• Cat is taken care of, will be well fed and spied on via a security cam.
• Got lots of good snacks for the road, small cooler with water etc.
• Will be using airbnb or a somewhat affordable hotel most nights, we're not scraping by but we want to try and spend money on fun stuff instead of rooms.
• Got plenty of phone charges, plugs, etc for all our electronics.
• Got an emergency medical kit and a paper US map in the car (For fun, and just in case.)

So any suggestions, anything I am missing? Anything I can do to make the trip more fun for me and my girlfriend? Any fun road trip things to do between FL to NY would be nice as well!

It's Monday again, and that means it's time for Movie Monday, a thread where anyone and everyone is welcome to post a movie review about films that they've seen recently, or just liked or disliked in the past.

If you're wanting to post a review, I'd suggest reading trough Movie Monday: week 1 to read through the rules and what to write, but for the most part I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible.

The two rules that I do have are: So far, the only rules are:

All top level comments should be reviews. (if you have any questions or suggestions on how to do things differently, either send me a private message or post in the discussion thread I linked up above)

No spoilers in top level comments. Ideally any spoilers should be in children comments (with sufficient warning) if you wish to write a review with spoilers, make another comment below your top level comment and write the spoilers there. Anyone who doesn't want to know any spoilers should un-expand the comments at the top before they start reading comments. Hopefully this should allow discussion of both the film and the review without forcing people to see spoilers.

But other than that, happy Movie watching and have a great Monday :)

There is a conspicuous lack of that sort of thing here so far. I get that Tildes might not want to be a repository of "hey what stock do I buy" or "Oh my god MU is still going down" but strategy-oriented discussions around positions in markets and the way changes in the world will effect your financial future seems like high-quality content to me.

I often stumble in to threads with entire comment chains deleted. I assume most people here have faced the same situation as well, either here or on reddit.

I'd like to see a move to locking comments rather than deleting them by default. That would mean no further replies to the comment or any other comment in that chain, no one being able to delete or edit their comments, no one being able to add or remove votes to a comment, etc.

I understand for particularly egregious comments removal is completely necessary (especially when it goes hand-in-hand with banning users), but a lot of times comments are deleted as a means to prevent long argumentative back-and-forth chains that spam and derail topics, as well as antagonize users.

In a lot of cases I feel like deleting the comment only further serves to hide what is unacceptable behaviour (even if that behaviour should be obvious), rather than setting an example for the userbase.

The Ottoman Empire ended in 1922. The Roman Empire, 476, though it was survived by the Eastern Roman Empire which lasted until 1453 and the Holy Roman Empire which stuck around in some form until 1806.

Obviously these dates are inexact, but it's a useful historical tool to pick two events and use them as bookends to describe the arc of a given empire or society.

So with the benefit of sufficient hindsight, say 500 or 1000 years from now, what do you think will be the generally accepted date printed in history books for "here's the event that signals the end of this period of history"?

Do you believe it will be some point in the past, or the future? If you think it's in the past, how far back? What event?

If you think it's in the future, how far in the future? What do you predict will happen at that time to be the historical marker?

^{p.s. don't say "all history will be forgotten because of nuclear war". I agree that's a distinct possibility, but the likelihood of it happening is best addressed as a separate topic from this one. for the purposes of this thread assume we haven't completely fucked ourselves as a species and at least some records of our current time period exist.}

Hi,

I am looking into flight simulator games, they seem pretty cool, i've seen videos of guys with cockpits on their homes, is there any tilder(?) that plays any flight simulator and has a cockpit at home? If so tell what your setup is and maybe post some photos :)

Article: https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/japan-starts-space-elevator-experiments-2018-08/

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17898152

I know some people here have strong opinions about space travel, which came up during the Elon Musk topics on Tildes. I wonder if, based on the limited information we have, people think Japan is taking the right approach with the space elevator; whether the cost estimate ($9 billion) sounds reasonable; and if you think they can succeed?

If the cookies never stop being produced, then it is logical to assume that, if unchecked, uneaten cookies will eventually choke the earth, leaving us uninhabitable. What is your plan, and how long do you think we'll last in this cookie apocalypse?

As for some general rules, the machine is impossible to break, and it can inexplicably produce cookies infinitely without having to refill on ingredients.