I just read over the Technical Goals page, and I agree with everything you're doing. I feel like I'm the only one who's annoyed by the recent trends of web design and development that involves heavy use of icon-based navigation and JavaScript. I'm stoked to see what Tildes will become given this direction.

I know I'm not nearly as skilled and experienced as you -- Deimos and the Tildes team -- at web development, but if there's any way that I -- a sysadmin with experience in AWS -- can help, I would be happy to be a part of it. Otherwise, I can continue to lurk, occasionally post, and sing praise of Tildes! Cheers!

This is mostly a question for @Deimos, just out of curiosity: is there are particular reason for the choice of Pyramid as the framework for TIldes? Is it familiarity, or clear advantages over sth. like Django or Flask?

(Edit: actually I'd welcome comparisons favouring one or another from anyone too, related or not to Tildes itself.)

Each November hundreds of thousands of writers attempt a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. Results vary, but it's a ton of concentrated writing and storytelling practice and always a blast, especially if you're in a region with meet-ups. More information at nanowrimo.org.

Is anyone here participating? This will be my fourth year (after a good ten-year break) and my third as a Municipal Liaison (regional coordinator) setting up events in coffee shops and libraries. Are you already planning what you'll write, or just letting inspiration strike on the first? Any great tales from years past?

Have you ever really looked at what you eat? If you have, you may notice one common ingredient present in everything from vegan sauces to certain ketogenic foods. Taking those specific diets into consideration, the widely accepted figure for keto is <100 grams, and similar in the vegan sphere as well(Often times you'll see a quoted 30 grams, but the kicker always comes in the comments where someone says fruit based sugars don't count towards this. They do, very much so, count towards it). This is far, far, far too much sugar for any one human to be taking in a day. The FDA has no recommended figure for their DV scale of food labels, but other groups certainly do. The World Health Organisation recommends no more than 5% of daily calories be from sugar of all types. This is equivalent to 25 grams for a 2000 calorie diet. The American Heart Association recommends the same figures.

Now, you may be asking yourself, why would the AHA bother themselves with sugar? Certainly that's more for a diabetes association to study than a heart disease one? Well, it's because sugar is heavily linked to heart disease. From the source:

participants who took in 25% or more of their daily calories as sugar were more than twice as likely to die from heart disease as those whose diets included less than 10% added sugar

So, not only are you at risk for heart disease, but there are new studies that suggest alzheimer's is nothing more than a 3rd form of diabetes.

I'm not hoping for much in posting this, except that someone somewhere looks at their diet and resists the stranglehold sugar has on our present society.

tu sais qui c'est

alright so the fuck is up with you people!? did y'all see my last post up here got like eighteen votes?

that's crazy! that's one of the best-received things i've posted on tildes, just, overall lmao.

glad to see my sober stuff can be decent competition to my drunk stuff.

on that, i pretty much don't drink on my own anymore (i mean some wine with dinner blah blah) but like drink ya feel?

if i'm at a kickback i'm always down to get fucked up, but coming out of this sober week i kinda restructured how i'm using stuff now.

like i used to try using kratom to get high p often and discovered that that's a shite idea. i just got all wirey and had stomach aches lol.

however just a little bit (~0.75g) in some tea is small enough to avoid any side effects and big enough to work as a solid mood regulator.

much to my discontent this just isn't the kinda thing you take recreationally (the whole reason i picked it up to begin with), but it does definitely boost your mood up like 30x, boost your self confidence, and even help you get some good sleep (if you're sipping red vein varieties.)

i was feeling like a lazy piece of shit (y'know as usual), sipped my tea, and ended up knee-deep in this udemy course for electron apps (building desktop apps like skype or something), made a solid breakfast, wrote this here ditty, and played like 3 hours of risk of rain. (gotta be lazy somewhere i guess.)

anyway this isn't a blog.

i had a weird concept for this piece and i'm not sure if it came through at all lmao. this was done in maybe 30 minutes.

let me know if you can guess what the piece is describing.

cheers,

bishop.

drip
drip

there's water on the
floor, so don't

slip
slip

shake your head,
try to catch a

grip
grip

drowning in your
dreams, your legs

kick
kick

bags under your
eyes, you're looking

sick
sick

.

try to move your
hand but you cant

feel
it

she wants to cuddle
up in your bed

but
it's

made of steel and
you can't seem to

budge
it

staring up in-
to a funnel

what's
this?

---

oh the autumn sounds
raining patters on the ground
i wake up with a jolt
on every time you come around

and you never text to
let me know before the fact
i'm second guessing every minute
tryna find out when you're at

now we're laying back,
looking straight into your eyes
wonder if the next thing you say
will be a goodbye

your silence is a lie
your crying leaves me mortified
let me go, let me go,
fuck, got water in my eyes.

---

drip
drip

drip drip

drip

drip

d..
.

.

drip
drip

drip
drip

there's water on the
floor, so don't

slip
slip

shake your head,
try to catch a

grip
grip

drowning in your
dreams, your legs

kick
kick

bags under your
eyes, you're looking

sick
sick

.

try to move your
hand but you cant

feel
it

she wants to cuddle
up in your bed

but
it's

made of steel and
you can't seem to

budge
it

staring up in-
to a funnel

what's
this?

(p.s. fuck yeah canada.)

It’s no secret that the Internet has significantly changed even from just a decade ago. I’ve been thinking about online communities - particularly forums - and I’ve really begun to miss the sense of discovery when finding a new one while browsing online. It was like lifting a rock and finding an entirely new collective of people writing to one another about anything (complete with graphic signatures). It was an internet subculture in progress. Something something Wild West.

Small forums like that did a number of things that I feel we haven’t been able to replicate. You got to know people over time. It wasn’t a feed you vaguely subscribed to, but a forum (in literal definition of the word) that you chose to participate in.

I often think about what probably defines a typical experience online for people these days and I feel that the smaller and more cozy feeling of actual community has been replaced by the digital equivalent of big box stores. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Netflix. Big corporate places with portals and algorithms.

These aren’t necessarily bad things in and of themselves (aside from the chasing of a world in which nothing is left unplanned), but I’m trying to hone in on the idea that the sheer randomness of this medium has more or less vaporized. The concept that anything and everything you do on the Internet wasn’t aggressively being tracked and developed into digital profiles to be traded, used, shared, and sold by ad companies and an array of other organizations was a fart in the wind compared to what it’s like online today. Websites simply didn’t have 5 megabytes+ of Javascript whereas now you need a half a dozen browser extensions to make the internet a halfway decent thing to be on.

My hunch is that once upon a time, people (at least those that even had access to it) had a kind of amateur desire of wanting to create an account at a website (particularly a forum). Coming up on 2019, I think long and hard before creating another account anywhere. There even was an expectation to introduce yourself in some introduction subforum at many of these boards.

A theme that has become completely domineering is the inflated ego linked to tribalism. I see people being so serious about everything; there can be no reciprocal discussion about anything.

I think it’s probably trivial to dismiss this as nostalgia but I feel there are some real truths to this. The Internet is something you had the choice of actually logging off and disconnecting but today, everyone is constantly connected. We are in the age of distraction and preoccupation. Think about it: how many times have you picked up your (smart)phone purely out of reflex, not even to check something with purpose? You see it everywhere in public, certainly. The constant stream of brightly colored iconography, beeps, alerts, buzzing, push/notifications, and beyond are endless. Everything demands your attention, and it is never enough.

Imagine if you are married and want to have kids, and you have a friend who clearly has better looks and/or health than you or your spouse. Would you like to ask them to provide egg cell or sperm? Why not?

What's the value of true lineage for humans who can select using human mind, not only being led by instinct? Is selfishness the only reason to have your own biological kids or there's something else?

“There are no girls on the internet” is one of the “rules of the internet” of the olden times. It was a tongue-in-cheek saying that meant two things. The first interpretation is that women don’t hang out on online forums because only loser guys do that. This obviously wasn’t totally true, but it felt true because of the second interpretation: gender doesn’t really exist on the internet, or at least it didn’t back then. Someone posting on IRC or 4Chan could be male, female, black, white, or any combination or race or gender, but you wouldn’t know that. Your post just existed in a void, completely separate from your social identity. While sexism and racism existed, someone wouldn’t be discriminated against on those grounds, because on the internet there are no girls. Only people.

People who brought up their gender were accused of being attention seekers who couldn’t get by on their own merits. This was probably just a shitty excuse to justify harassment (ie tits or gtfo), but there might have been some truth to the idea that your gender and race have no effect on the legitimacy of your opinion.

Today on the internet, a the “rule” “there are no girls on the internet” is completely done away with. Not only is the social makeup of the internet much more diverse today, all of the major networking sites have profiles on which you can proudly display your gender, race, sexuality, etc.

I only just now came to realize this difference as I was reading some threads that posted statements like “as a gay man” or “as a girl who...”. These kinds of statements used to attract ridicule, but are now accepted as the norm.

I’m not sure if this is an improvement or not. I do think it’s an improvement that harassment is no longer tolerated, but I struggle with the concept that it’s okay to that someone’s race/gender/etc can legitimize a claim, but it is not okay to think that it could deligitimize someone’s claim.

Again, I want to add a disclaimer that I do not think it is or ever was good to harass people, or to discriminate based on identity. I just want to start a conversation about how the internet has changed in this respect, and whether or not online discourse has been hurt by this change.