NYCFC @ Toronto FC
NYRB @ Chicago Fire
MNUFC @ New England
Montreal @ Sporting Kansas City
LAFC @ San Jose
Philadelphia Union @ FC Cincinnati
Atlanta United @ Columbus Crew
Houston Dynamo @ Colorado Rapids
FC Dallas @ Real Salt Lake
Seattle Sounders @ Vancouver Whitecaps
DC United @ Orlando City
Portland Timbers @ LA Galaxy

Do you believe that some cultures/societies are more 'civilized' than others? What is your definition of 'civilized' / what does it mean to be 'civilized'?
~
If you've studied history and/or anthropology then surely you've heard many uses of the term "savages" to describe groups of people that were considered to be less 'civilized' than whomever was writing that piece.
I was also just reading a book that described in detail some of the really horrible war crimes committed by both sides in the Sri Lankan civil war including but not limited to: raging mobs burning people alive, murder and rape of civilians, use of child soldiers, suicide bombers, etc. Please note that in no way am I considering the people of Sri Lanka as 'uncivilized', just using an example of what seems to be 'uncivilized' behavior.

An initial thought that I had was "huh, I'm glad I don't currently live somewhere where I could be burned alive based on my ethnicity/religion/beliefs by a rage fueled mob of people", but then the history of the western world came to mind - some of those exact same thing happened less than 100 years ago to many non-white groups of people in America, including some things even worse (read: human slavery). From here came a flood of other thoughts poking holes in whatever my initial definition of 'civilized' was. Plenty of things in present-day United States could be considered uncivilized. Yet one could make an argument that a more 'civilized' civilization might be one that allows many personal freedoms.

So, I want to ask all of you what you think of the concept of being 'civilized'. Is it a colonialistic-type term used to promote a higher sense of placement in the world that should be abolished. Does it have any merit in its use? If so, what do you think makes a civilized group of people and does one exist?

Businesses, especially in tech industry, sometimes have some okay support for clients, but in general the crucial things are walled off.

A simple example: someone in a company decides to place an ad and does that, people see that ad on YouTube, find it obnoxious, but cannot confront the original decision maker directly - they are unknown, unreachable.

Another example: many people used Google Inbox app and then Google discontinued it. Users are unsatisfied. Someone in Google, a person, made the decision. But they are unknown. A user cannot come up and ask them, "Hey you, why did you do that?" and at least get a clear honest answer. There are sugary press releases and damage control in such cases.

I understand that if many of us started a business we would want to wall our decisions off the external environment (users) too. It's a dilemma. But still, what do you think about that? How would you deal with this problem in a different way?

I've been thinking a lot recently about space exploration and colonization, and the big question that's been running through my head has been this: would I be willing to leave everything on Earth behind and go to Mars, even if there was a strong possibility that I would never return home?

Wondering what everyone here on Tildes thinks about that question.

What's the opinion on posting non-oc fanart? Is it considered fluff (which seems to currently have a negative stigma attached to it based off of my reading of previous threads)? Would more effort need to be put on the behalf of the poster before it's accepted (theme / several works from the same artist / some sort of comment showing analysis, reflection, or appreciation)?

Spoilers for Solo follow - you have been warned.

So a year after it's release and months after it went up on netflix, I finally got around to watching Solo.

For context: for most of my childhood, I was a huge Star Wars buff. I played Star Wars: Galaxies growing up, I was in the massive crowd that saw The Force Awakens opening night, I spent the better part of 2 years as part of a prerelease community for Star Wars: The Old Republic. There was a time where I could name nearly every planet of consequence in the canon and knew most of the expanded universe's timeline.

But the new trilogy has been... well, nothing. I found it to be a mediocre, hole-filled mess most of the time, too busy being Disney's Star Wars^tm politically correct safe-kid to actually be good movies on their own. Rogue One was an enjoyable exception, but still not particularly amazing... but the point I'm driving at is, the last couple of years, I've pretty thoroughly come down from the Star Wars high.

When Solo came out, I assumed it would be more of the same - panned by critics, it was presumably going to be another politically correct, lackluster, rehashed or nonsense story, this time using Han Solo's name as a marketing tactic. No desire to see a childhood hero Anakin Skywalker'd, I skipped it, and didn't even care to watch it when it popped up on Netflix.

Tonight, out of pure boredom, I decided to give it a watch and was surprised to learn that I couldn't have been more wrong. Which is to say, I enjoyed the crap out of it!

It had romance! Snappy writing! Memorable, enjoyable, non-trope characters (mostly!) Although it had some of the same flaws as Rogue One (namely that it started to drag on), it also had something that Star Wars hasn't truly seen since the original trilogy: heart and soul.

More importantly, it did something that no movie in the franchise has done since the original trilogy, and actually engaged me with the story. And this is where the spoilers come in.

First, credit where it's due: although the story tended to go on and on, at no point did I feel like any of it was unnecessary - it just felt like it was too constrained by being a single movie.

I was invested in seeing an actual romance in the story (since apparently ONLY Han Solo can do that), which saw a satisfying, and rather complex resolution. The dirty, street-level setting and story was an awesome break from the epic, world-shaking conflicts that the movies have clung to until this point (or whatever the hell The Last Jedi was). It was powered by characters, and I appreciated that.

To top it off, the reveal of Maul at the end of the movie was totally intriguing, and (IMO) beats any other reveal in the series hands-down. I was a fan of his appearances in the cartoons, and seeing him on the villain's throne in a movie, I think, would've made for a much spicier and more intriguing story than whatever/wherever/whoever Snoke was. From getting his ass kicked by the Emperor for the plot, to getting beat down by ol' Ben (for the plot), the guy's a damn competent villain that still hasn't had a real shot.

Don't get me wrong, it had its flaws: as mentioned, it was REALLY long, and I don't mean to imply that every character was perfect, or that the plot wasn't totally ridiculous in places. But the story was good enough, and the movie enjoyable enough, that I could overlook it, and that's more than I could say about the movies that caused me to not see it in the first place...

Which, to my final point, is the greatest disappointment: with the cancellation of all the non-trilogy entries in the series, it's safe to assume that Disney's learned all the wrong lessons from Solo.

Rather than attributing it's A- performance to the point that people just haven't much enjoyed their epics, remembered what happened the last time someone tried to do an origin story in the series, or were feeling Star Wars fatigue, and didn't go to see it as a result, they'll blame the format, the story, the stakes, the setting, the characters - all the things that made the movie worth watching at all.

So, with Episode 9 coming out sometime this year and us presumably going to see a mediocre conclusion to what has at this point been a completely mediocre and forgettable trilogy (with lightsabers!), all I can say is, Solo sadly will stand out in my mind as the only movie in this era that carries on the legacy of the originals. I'm disappointed, more by circumstance than anything. I think, had Solo come out 5 years ago, it would've been hailed as the proper return to the franchise that it deserved to be, far more than any of the other franchise entries have succeeded in doing since.

What'd you think of Solo, Tildes? Am I stark raving mad?

I wasn’t able to find a discussion on this, though I’m sure there has been, and for that, I apologize.

Is there any kind of timeframe on the release of a mobile app for tildes?

I would guess that on Reddit most of their traffic comes from people accessing the site on their phones at this point, but I could be wrong. In any case, it certainly is a large portion of the users that access the site in this way.

With that in mind, it would be nice to be able to access tildes from a mobile app to do away with the clunkiness that comes with using the site through a mobile browser. I don’t mean to sound like it’s terrible. The site functions well enough through a mobile browser, but it would certainly have me using tildes a lot more if the convenience of a mobile app was available.

I’m sure the developers are very busy, and I don’t want to sound demanding, I’m just curious.

And once again, I apologize if this has been discussed recently.

Seattle Sounders @ Chicago Fire
FC Dallas @ Columbus Crew
Vancouver Whitecaps @ Houston Dynamo
San Jose Earthquakes @ New York Red Bulls
Montreal Impact @ Orlando City SC
Real Salt Lake @ DC United
Minnesota United FC @ LA Galaxy
Los Angeles FC @ New York City FC
Portland Timbers @ FC Cincinnati
Philadelphia Union @ Atlanta United FC
New England Revolution @ Toronto FC
Sporting Kansas City @ Colorado Rapids

So we have many communities and everyone gets free *nix shell access, you can ssh into the remote server (mostly ubuntu) and do whatever you want! I mostly go there to talk with other users.

It is all old school, we use the command line and there is no gui that you can work with. You have to use the cli for everything you do (easy to learn).

You can -

• learn programming
• make webpages
• make new friends
• play games
• learn more about *nix

and much more.

See https://tildeverse.org to get started. (https://tilde.team/wiki/?page=other-tildes for more tilde servers)

I'll suggest you to join ctrl-c.club or tilde.town and then try other servers. You can make account everywhere ofc. I am ~cyaniventer on tildeverse, see ctrl-c.club/~cyaniventer

Edit: Not related to tildes.net

What’s up tildorans, This is more of a thought experiment then anything else, is the impact of consuming calories more or less impactful then producing the electricity needed to power the bike? And I also understand this is extremely affected by circumstance. Let’s say you eat beef 3 times a day and live in a part of the world where power is mostly generated via nuclear or hydroelectric. At that point, would the impact via electricity be less then the one via calories? What if you flip the spectrum and you’re a vegan living somewhere that produces all its energy via coal and oil, how does that affect the equation? Thanks

I was just thinking about this. It has no basis in evidence or anything, it just popped into my head. Could using terms like POC that are catch-alls for all non-white races cause a rift between white people and POC? I feel like it has the potential to create a kind of "us VS. them" mentality if it hasn't already. Because it's saying you have all the races in the world, and then you have white people. I don't really have an alternative or a solution. It was just an observation I made. Of course, me being white myself, maybe there's just something I'm not understanding. I think it could spark an interesting discussion because people are bound to have many different opinions on this subject.

Orlando City @ Chicago Fire
Columbus Crew @ New England Revolution
LA Galaxy @ FC Dallas
Montreal Impact @ Houston Dynamo
Vancouver Whitecaps @ Real Salt Lake
Minnesota United FC @ San Jose Earthquakes
Philadelphia Union @ Sporting Kansas City
Colorado Rapids @ Seattle Sounders
DC United @ New York City FC
FC Cincinnati @ Atlanta United
Portland Timbers @ LAFC

I've been meaning to make this post for a while, and it's actually going to wind up being a series of several posts. It's kind of a long meditation on what it means to socialize online and the ways in which the services we use to do that help or hinder us in doing so. Along the way I'm going to be going into some thoughts on how online discourse works, how it should work, and what can be done to drive a more communal, less toxic, and more inclusive of non-traditional (read: non-technical) voices. I'm going to be throwing out a lot of inchoate opinions here, so I'm hoping to pressure test my views and solicit other viewpoints and experiences from the community.

I mentioned in an introduction thread that I'm a policy analyst and my work is focused on how to structure policies and procedures to build a constructive organizational culture. I've been a moderator in some large PHP forums and IRC channels in the old days, and I've developed some really strong and meaningful friendships through the web. So I've always had a soft spot for socializing on the interwebs.

Okay, so that's the introduction out of the way. The main point I want to focus on is the title: Remember the Person. This was the something Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, suggested in a farewell message as she stepped down from the role in the wake of a community outcry regarding her changes to Reddit's moderation practices. The gist of it was that online communication makes it too easy to see the people you're interacting with in abstract terms rather than as human beings with feelings. It's a bit of a clichéd thought if we're being honest, but I think we still tend not to pay enough attention to how true it is and how deeply it alters the way we interact and behave and how it privileges certain kinds of interaction over others. So let's dig in on how we chat today, how it's different from how we chatted before in discussion forums, and what we're actually looking for when we gather online.

Since this is the first in a series, I want to focus on getting some clarity on terms and jargon that we'll be using going forward. I'd like to start by establishing some typologies for social media platforms. A lot of these will probably overlap with each other, and I'll probably be missing a few, but it's just to get a general sense of categories.

To start with we have the "Content Aggregator" sites. Reddit is the most notable, HackerNews is big but niche, and Tildes is one too. This would also include other sites like old Digg, Fark.com, and possibly even include things like IMGUR or 9Gag. The common thread among all of these is user submitted content, curation and editorial decisions made largely by popular vote, and continued engagement being driven by comment threads associated with the submitted content (e.g. links, images, videos, posts). In any case, the key thing you interact with on these sites is atomized pieces of "content."

Next up are the "Running Feed" services. Twitter and Mastodon are the classic examples as is Facebook's newsfeed. Instagram is an example with a different spin on it. These services are functionally just glorified status updates. Indeed, Twitter was originally pitched as "What if we had a site that was ONLY the status updates from AOL Instant Messager/GChat?" The key thing with how you interact with these services is the "social graph." You need to friend, follow, or subscribe to accounts to actually get anything. And in order to contribute anything, you need people following or subscribing to you. Otherwise you're just talking to yourself (although if we're being honest, that's what most people are doing anyway they just don't know it). This means the key thing you interact with on these sites is an account. You follow accounts get to put content on your feed. Follower counts, consequently, become a sort of "currency" on the site.

Then you've got the "Blogs" of old and their descendants. This one is a bit tricky since it's largely just websites so they can be really heterogenous. As far as platforms go, though, Tumblr is one of the few left and I think LiveJournal is still kicking. Lots of online newspapers and magazines also kind of count. And in the past there were a lot more services, like Xanga and MySpace. The key thing you interact with here is the site. The page itself is the content and they develop a distinct editorial voice. Follower counts are still kind of a thing, but the content itself has more persistence so immediacy is less of an issue than in feed based paradigms where anything older than a day might as well not exist. This one gets even trickier because the blogs tend to have comment sections and those comment sections can have a bunch little social media paradigms of their own. It's like a matroishka doll of social platforms.

The penultimate category is the "Bulletin Board" forum. PHP BB was usually the platform of choice. There are still a few of these kicking around, but once upon a time these were the predominant forms of online discourse. Ars Technica and Something Awful still have somewhat active ones, but I'm not sure where else. These also have user posted content, but there is no content curation or editorial action. As a result, these sites tend to need more empowered and active moderators to thrive. And the critical thing you're interacting with in these platforms is the thread. Threads are discussion topics, but it's a different vibe from the way you interact on a content aggregator. On a site like Reddit or Tildes all discussion under a topic is 1 to 1. Posts come under content. On a bulletin board it works like an actual bulletin board. You're responding under a discussion about a topic rather than making individual statements about an individual post or comment. Another way to put it is on an aggregator site each participant is functionally writing individual notes to each other participant. On a bulletin board each participant is writing an open letter to add to the overall discussion as a whole.

And finally, you've got the "Chat Clients." This is the oldest form besides email newsletters. This began with Usenet and then into IRC. The paradigm lives on today in the form of instant messaging/group texts, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, etc. In this system you're primarily interacting with the room(s) as a whole. There isn't really an organizing framework for the conversation, it's really just a free-flowing conversation between the participants. You might be able to enforce on-topic restrictions, but that's about as structured as it gets.

That about covers the typologies I can think of. Next up I want to delve into the ways in which the UI and design patterns with each of these platforms affects the way users engage with them, what sorts of social dynamics they encourage, and what sorts of interactions they discourage. In the mean time, I'm eager to hear what people think about the way I've divided these up, whether you think I've missed anything, or have any additional thoughts on the ones I put up.

A list of matches for the week:

Toronto FC @ Philadelphia Union
New York City FC @ Orlando City FC
New York Red Bulls @ Columbus Crew
New England Revolution @ FC Dallas
Real Salt Lake @ Houston Dynamo
Portland Timbers @ Colorado Rapids
Minnesota United FC @ Vancouver Whitecaps
Chicago Fire @ LA Galaxy
FC Cincinnati @ Seattle Sounders
Montreal Impact @ San Jose Earthquakes
Atlanta United FC @ DC United
Sporting Kansas City @ Los Angeles FC

The active development of Tildes and the feedback/discussions about features and mechanisms had me thinking. Is the conscious design and moderation of forums for public discourse a manner of social engineering?

I know the connotation of social engineering is usually negative, as in manipulating people for politics. But it's a double edged sword.

Most recently I was reading this feedback on removing usernames from link topics and while reading the comments I was thinking of how meta this all is. It's meta-meta-cognition in that we (well, by far the actual developers) are designing the space within which we execute our discourse and thinking. To paraphrase the above example: user identification can bias one's own impulse reaction to content, either to a beneficial or detrimental end, so how do we want this?

The moderation-influenced scenario is a bit more tricky because it can become too top-heavy, as in one prominent example many of us came from recently... But I think with a balance of direction from the overlords (jk, there is also public input as mentioned) and the chaos of natural public discourse, you could obtain an efficient environment for the exchange of ideas.

I'm not sure what my stimulating question would be for you all, so just tell me what you think.

Consider three examples:

1. I am a farmer. I have a piece of land that can grow just enough potatoes to feed me. I work this land, I gather potatoes, ad nauseam.

2. I am a farmer, but this time I have ten times the amount of land. I hire four workers and also work myself. Together we grow enough potatoes to feed all of us, and we also have a surplus. I sell this surplus potato for ¤5000. I am a greedy man, so I take ¤3000 for myself and give ¤500 to each of my workers.

3. The situation is the same as in 2, but this time I am a just man. I share the money equally, so everyone including myself gets ¤1000.

It seems to me that in the first case the land can be considered personal property, since there is no exploitation and no surplus is generated. In the second example the land is clearly a piece of private property, because I use it to exploit other people, taking most of the profit for myself.

But what about the third example? On one hand, the profit is distributed equally, so there is technically no exploitation, right? On the other hand, I am alienated from the workers, because I still have the power to fire one of them (or all of them if I know I can replace them) or to distribute goods unfairly (even if I don't do that). What is the Marxist point of view here?

This will probably be controversial, but I disagree with the current password policy. Checking against a list of known broken passwords sounds like a good idea, but that list is only ever going to get bigger. The human factor has to be taken into account. People are going to reuse passwords. So whenever their reused password gets hacked from a less secure site, it's going to add to that list.

Ideally, a password would be unique. Ideally, users should maybe ever use a password manager that generates garbage as a password that no one could hack. An ideal world is different from reality. Specific requirements are going to lead to people needing to write things down. In the past, that was on paper, like Wargames. Now, it's going to lead to people pasting their username and login into text documents for easy reference. That's probably what i'm going to have to do. Was my previous method of reusing passwords safe? No. Will my new method of remembering passwords be safe? Probably not either.

I'm not entirely sure what all the account security is about, either. For my bank, sure, a complex password. I have a lot to lose there. For an account on a glorified message board? There's better ways to establish legitimacy. 4chan, of all places, dealt with this (nod to 2chan), by having users enter a password after their username that got encoded and displayed as part of their username to verify that they were, in fact, the same user.

So the topic for discussion would be, what's the endgame here? Where is the line drawn between usability and security? I may well be on the wrong side of this, but I think it's worth discussing.

Edit: I think there may be some good reasons, evidenced in this reply. I think it was a good discussion none the less, since it wasn't obvious to me and perhaps not to other people.

Edit 2: I'm going to hop off, but I think there's been some good discussion about the matter. As I said in the original post "I may well be on the wrong side of this". I may well be, but I hope I have addressed people well in the comments. Some of my comments may be "worst case" or "devil's advocate" though. I understand the reason for security, as evidenced above, but i'm unsure about the means.

One of the people in an IRC channel I frequent pointed out a site I've been building uses CDNs that are IPv4 only. I never realized this, I just assumed every major provider had deployed IPv6. Oh, how very wrong I was. A quick check of some major (to me) sites shows a shocking lack of IPv6, including:

• Bootstrap (stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com)
• Discord
• FontAwesome (use.fontawesome.com)
• GitHub/GitHub pages
• GitLab/GitLab pages (self-hosted supports IPv6, but officially hosted GitLab only supports IPv4 due to Azure limitations)
• jQuery, IF you use code.jquery.com (some tutorials use ajax.googleapis.com, which does have IPv6, but an unfortunate amount use code.jquery.com, including the getting started page for Bootstrap)
• Parts of Amazon/AWS (Amazon is IPv4 only, some of AWS is IPv4 only, including S3)
• Reddit
• Stack Overflow/Exchange/etc
• Twitter

An honorable mention goes to Angular's websites because the websites themselves are IPv4 only but the libraries are hosted on ajax.googleapis.com, which is IPv6 accessible. I checked npm, PyPI, RubyGems, and Tildes, and they all support IPv6.

I can understand why companies like Amazon have partial support (upgrading can be a PITA if you're a cloud service provider with uptime requirements), but then you have services like Discord (launched in 2015 with no obligation to maintain service) that only support IPv4. At the very least, I'd expect CDNs referenced by thousands (if not millions) of webpages to be on IPv6 by now.

Am I missing something? CDNs are pretty static, it's just a matter of choosing one that supports IPv6, you don't even need to update your application if you just change the DNS entries.

I've had part of this discussion today with a work colleague: under our country's laws a judge (there's no jury) may take into consideration the condition and general being of a victim of a crime when judging the perpetrator. For example an conviction of assault and battery may be higher of the victim was disabled/had a fragile constitution compared to a more "normative" able-bodied person.

My colleague maintained that this was unfair if there is no way the perpetrator realizes the victim's fragility, as it means unequal punishment for equal actions. Specifically he takes issue with the Eggshell Skull rule. In effect his argument seemed to be that what should be judged is the action and intent of the crime itself.

I maintained that is was fair because the judgement should be proportional to the effect caused on the world.

What do other users think?

First let me say that I long considered myself an independent until I realized I always voted Democrat a number of years ago because I find they best represent my interests, so that's my POV coming into this. I consider myself generally liberal on most issues with a few exceptions (gun rights, against college for all, etc)

Some observations:

• There was much there to please Republicans regarding the economy, etc
• There was much there that I'm not sure will play well with Trump's base: economic programs for women in other countries (Ivanka's influence?), criminal justice reform, lots of praise and visuals of black Americans including several guests, seeming to waffle a bit on the "wall" - I think he reduced it to fencing, did I get that right?, he stated several times he was in favor of legal immigration (something his actions have indicated otherwise and his base seems to be against)
• We're going to make peace with the Taliban - that was a jaw-dropping moment for me and I could tell from the reaction of the Rs in the crowd that it didn't play well with them
• Democratic women wearing white - smart political move and I didn't catch they did it during his first speech
• Pelosi was great to watch. Calm as a cucumber. She had several little subversive moments where instead of immediately sitting down after clapping she shuffled some papers or pretended to read something, sending a clear message of what she thought of POTUS' remarks
• Trump's anti-immigration push still isn't focusing on any facts...sigh.
• Russia investigation was only mentioned once or twice so he didn't succumb to temptation there
• I thought this was by far his best and most presidential speech
• The Rs at work were not impressed so I thought that was interesting

Regarding Stacy Abrams' response:

• I was totally disappointed
• She completely lacked energy and I had a hard time following along because of it
• Kennedy was 100x better in his response (even with the excessive lip balm)
• I don't have much else to say...it was bland

What did you think?

EDIT: Forgot he announced we're back in a nuclear arms race with Russia and China. And what was up with bringing in all of the Holocaust survivors and WWII vets? Was that a blatant appeal to the oldest members of his base or simply to recall the last "good" war the US fought?

We're Here, We're Queer, Ask Your Questions Without Fear

I noticed that there was a lot of QUILTBAG/LGBT related education being requested in threads where it wasn't really on topic. Clearly there's a lot of curiosity. So I thought: why not make a thread specifically for that? Whee!

Please note that it's a lot of labor to ask of someone in a minority to explain themselves, as it's often the case that they feel like they have to justify existing on a daily basis anyway. Hopefully this provides more of an opt-in experience where curious folks can learn about queer issues in a respectful manner. ** Also: No one is required to answer your questions or engage with questions they don't feel comfortable with. **

I am decidedly not an authority on the subject (I don't think anyone really is) but I do fall under the umbrella- NB (nonbinary) and bi. This means that I am attracted to either gender and I do not identify as having a binary gender myself. I actually would more precisely be described as pansexual as I would date a nonbinary person BUT for identity politic reasons I prefer the term bi. As for the acronyms above, LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans. I prefer QUILTBAG: Queer, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender, Bisexual, Asexual, and Gay. It's more fun to say and it expands the acronym to include concepts that folks might not have heard of.

A brief list of definitions:

• Queer: To my understanding this is sort of a catchall term for anyone that is not straight up cisgender/heterosexual. Once considered a pejorative term, queer has been reclaimed by some QUILTBAG people to describe themselves; however, it is not a universally accepted term even within the QUILTBAG community.

• Undecided: Folks who just don't know what they identify with.

• Intersex: Folks born with anatomy that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. This can be a wide range of natural bodily variations.

• Lesbian: A woman who is attracted to women exclusively.

• Transgender: A term to describe folks who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

• Bisexual: Folks who are attracted to both binary genders.

• Asexual: Also known as "ace". An adjective to describe folks who do not experience sexual attraction.

• Gay: A term to describe people who are attracted to the gender they identify as. This is often used to refer specifically to men who are attracted to men but can be used to refer to women who are attracted to women too.

This list is by no means exhaustive! Here's a (more) comprehensive list of terms and labels: http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/sexinfo/article/glossary-sexual-orientationgender-terminology

There are many terms and labels out there! I encourage you to research to your heart's content.

Also just to give some perspective, cisgender is an adjective for folks who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

So, what nagging questions do you have about being queer? Have you been questioning your own identity and would like to hear the thoughts of people who have been in the same situation? Post here and let's see if we can't find some answers.

Hello all, hope you're doing well. It's the weekend again, and that means that a lot of us have some free time on our hands. And some of my favorite things to do with my ever-shrinking free time is dive into a large game world and just explore. With that in mind, I thought we could start a little conversation about free-roaming video games, and open-world games in general.

Some thoughts to ponder:

• What are some of your favorite free-roaming titles?

• What keeps a free-roaming or open-world title from getting boring?

• What are some of the more unique ways to populate a large game world?

• *Is Just Cause 2 the best free-roaming game ever? The answer may surprise you!

hey all!

i think this is my first ~talk post, 👀 nice place ye got here!

so, i got to thinking about social media sites a few days ago (whilst trying to brainstorm a sideproject that isn't a social media site) and i got to thinking about Voat.

it seemed like an interesting idea at first, a nearly literal copy-paste of old reddit meant a system that i was already used to, but i'd also be early enough to get whatever username i want, and they even have a cute little goat!

and then uhh

reddit got rid of a lot of hate-communities

and they all went to voat.

now - i guess that's fine. if they want to all exile themselves into their own corner of the internet, i can't stop em

but my question is like - what about the people behind Voat? obviously there's people running the site, there's investment money involved, and they have to know that their site is the front-yard above-ground pool with green water of the internet, right?

i tried looking for some interviews of the founder - but i couldn't find anything.

any of you lot know what's goin' on with voat? what are your thoughts on the site itself? its longevity?

In lieu of the recent Gillette ad, and seeing as the conversation around it has stirred the pot quite a bit, I wanted to propose a conversation where we start from the very beginning:

Without yet talking about subsets, variants, or interpretations of masculinity/femininity (toxic or otherwise). How do you define it for yourself: what makes you masculine or feminine, or what parts of you would you describe as such, do you feel that those things go as universal descriptors or are they specific to your case?

There may also be some deeper questions in here about where you think you gained this conception (your family? your immediate circle of contacts? Role models?) or who you think best embodies your ideal definition of your gender.

I was thinking about the intersection of internet privacy and politics. You could even say I was having a bit of a mini-crisis. I like to think of myself as being pretty liberal, but I wondering how that fits into privacy. I was a little upset when I learned that Obama called Edward Snowden unpatriotic. I was kind of thinking that what he did was patriotic. Wasn't the NSA monitoring US citizens without warrants. That's morally wrong right? I think I would be pretty fine with the government monitoring someone if they had a warrant given to them by a non-secret court. I'm wondering if anyone here can give me some insight on this or if anyone else feels/has felt this way.

Designing our countries to accommodate cars as much as possible has been one of the most destructive things to our health, environment, safety and social connectedness. The damage has spread so far and deep that it has reached a crisis point in most developed cities in almost every country. The suburbs we live in are subjected to strict zoning laws baring any form of high density building and any form of mixed zoning. As a result our houses are spaced so far away from each other and from the essential services we need that unless you own a car you are blocked from having a normal life. The main streets full of independent stores and markets have all been killed by megamalls 30km away from where people live with carparks bigger than most park lands. All of this was caused by car usage pushing our societies further and further apart to the point where many people find it acceptable and normal to drive 40km each direction to work each day.

One of the more devastating effects of this urban sprawl is the supermarket has been moved so far away that most people avoid going as much as possible and limit it to a single trip every 1-2 weeks. Fresh food does not last 1-2 weeks which leaves people throwing out mountains of spoiled food that wasn't eaten in time as well as the move to processed foods packed full of preservatives. As well as a shift to people buying dinner from drive through takeaway franchises because their hour long commute has left them with little time to cook fresh and healthy foods.

Owning a car in many countries is seen as the only way to get a job. This locks the poor from ever regaining control of their life because the cost of owning and maintaining a car is higher than most of these people get in an entire year. Our city streets which should be places of vibrant liability have become loud, unsafe and toxic.

Elon and his electric cars solve none of these issues. Electric cars are not the way of the future. They don't even solve air pollution issues entirely because a large part of air pollution is brake pad fibres and tire wear which is proportional to the vehicles weight. And these Teslas are not light.

The only solution is reducing personal vehicle usage as much as possible in urban areas. Of course there will always be some people who will genuinely need vehicles such as in rural areas but there is simply no reason to have the average person drive to and from their office or retail job every day. Its wasteful and harmful in so many ways.

There needs to be a huge push to reclaim our cities and living spaces to bring back the liveability that we could have had. In my city some of the side streets were closed to cars and the change was incredible. Plants and seating filled the spots that would have once been a row of free parking. The streets are filled with the sounds of laughter instead of the roar of motors. The local pubs and cafes have benefited hugely. They didn't benefit at all from street side car parks that were always filled by people who have done 5 laps of the city looking for an empty park and do not intend to shop there.

What is everyone's opinion on this topic and what can we do about it?

In 1977, Stephen King published a novel about a school shooting called Rage. It is somewhat infamous, as it has been connected to instances of real-life school shootings. King, in response, allowed the story to fall out of print and has never reissued it. The novel has a lot in common with other YA stories and tropes: a disaffected protagonist, meddling/out of touch adults, and newfound social connection with peers. While the main character is undoubtedly disturbed, the novel feels somewhat uncritical (or potentially even supportive) of his actions.

Certainly fiction is a space where authors are free to explore any point of view or theme they wish. The beauty of fiction is that it is limitless and consequence-free. No people are harmed in Rage because there are no people in it. Its characters are merely names and ideas--they are a fiction.

Nevertheless, Rage addresses a real-world phenomenon, and the beauty of fiction is that it doesn't live as a lie. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes,

"In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little..."

We like fiction because it resonates with us, exposing us to themes that can affirm, shape, or challenge our mindsets.

With this dichotomy in mind, I'm torn between whether authors should be free to explore anything they wish from the safety of make-believe, or whether they have a social responsibility because their words carry messages and ideas that directly impact lives. I'm not sure what to think, and I can come up with great arguments for both sides. What's your take? What social responsibilities do fiction authors have (if any)?

[LONG POST - 4 months of trying different planners)

I always wanted to use one but I never thought of analog (paper) planners and tried a lot of digital ones - link to a post.

About 4 months ago I saw my friend at school using a pocket diary - similar to this image, he was writing down his tasks on it (he didn't use it again). That day I bought a good pocket diary of around 200 pages, till date I've not used more than 10 pages and its still lying around.

I realised that I was not going to use it because it was very thick and I couldn't carry it in my pocket. I bought this pocket diary. This was thin and simple, perfect for me. I've used it the longest before switching.

Initially I used to dump all the tasks and cross it after completion, later I introduced a date system and it was one date for one page. I wrote down tasks for the day and crossed after completion if something was incomplete I migrated it to next day. This worked well but I needed a place to dump tasks that I had to do in future so I made a future section from backside and added tasks to it. This was the final tweak and I used it for like a month. I used it for daily tasks, future tasks, some notes and contacts (I used to make contact.txt before this).

Later IIRC I wanted to change because it was already half full and a mess because I was trying to do a lot with it. Next I mindlessly bought a notebook - something like this but with 5 sections, I didn't know what to do with it. I also don't remember why I bought it so I used it to write down stuff that I learned online and wanted to remember. It replaced my reddit save and I wrote what I wanted to remember, it is still with me and has been changed a lot (usecase).

I made a calendar on a single page of that notebook and tracked down basic stuff on it, I started using small square sticky notes to write down tasks and that's how I left my pocket diary. Not long after I lost interest in that notebook thing and updating calendar daily was not interesting. I left that and searched a lot online. Again tried a lot of digital options but I know it will never work for me so I left it and didn't use anything for like a day before I stumbled across Strikethru.

Strikethru is something like Bullet Journal. If you want to look at strikethru then see this video & this for Bullet Journal.

I took that notebook and turned it into a bullet journal, I used it for ~a week before trying strikethru and then again switching to bullet journal after a week. That was testing period and I chosed bulletjournal (bujo) over strikethru. That book was also thick so not long after I made a new bujo notebook (normal 200 pages). Again it felt like a big task that I had to do daily and I lost interest, I again restarted it with a new design. In this month I switched to different notebooks/design a lot and was never satisfied. I also tried Nextcloud tasks for 3 days before again trying out bujo.

Last year in december around a week before christmas I wanted to change it all so I went to a store and bought a new grid notebook (we used it for doing math in 1st grade). I used it for 10 days and everything broke during the last week of december, I was not at home and we went on a vacation. I took it with me but didn't update it because it was boring. It has been 5 days I was busy organising everything else again and now I've settled on what I started with (slightly better idea).

During that time I read a lot on nosurf, pornfree, internet addiction, sleep cycles, polyphasic society, tulpas, made new friends, tried a lot of todo managers, used different journaling apps and this is what I've decided to stay with.

I went to the store today to buy the same pocket diary that I've used the longest (1 month one). Its cheap, for 15 INR and works well for me. Over there I saw a box that said monthly planner, I took it and it had 13 small pocket diaries (similar to what I've used the longest but more thin) and with that a small case that would hold a notebook. There was one contacts pocket diary (perfect) and 12 pocket diaries one for each month. It was for this year and costed 170 INR, I didn't had money so I asked the storeman (idk what we call them, here we call them uncle) did he have cheaper option. He showed me the same piece that costed 140 INR but was for 2016, he said he would give it to me for 70 INR because he would have to throw it anyways.

I thought that was a great deal and bought it. So now I have 12 mini diaries for each month and one contacts diary that has my big list of 10 friends contacts. After trying a lot of different options I came back to what I used for the first time. Its simple and stupid & fits in my pocket.

It has one page for one day and I just have to cross 2016 and the day (mon, tue, etc.) thing and update it with 2019 days. In the middle it has a big two page calendar for current month, page before it has previous months small one page date list to write down events and on page after it has next months small one page date list. The last page is for notes and the cover has 2017 calender that I won't use and ignore.

Theres little patch work todo but for that price I think I bought a good set and if I actually use this for full year then I would buy a new one next one (for 2020 & not 2017 :|)

I've spent around 300 INR for all these (~ 4.5 USD)

Tl;dr -> Used a lot of systems and in the end switched to what I used for the first time which is simple and fits in my pocket.

# What do you use for managing your tasks? Do you use it daily?

I spent most of 2018 exploring the Soulsborne games (Demon's Souls, Dark Souls I (no longer for sale, thanks to the Remaster), II, III, and Bloodborne) and wanted to know all of your thoughts on them. Like them? Hate them? Want to try them? Favorite and least favorite?

From Software is probably my favorite game dev studio now. I want to say I adore all of the games, but I haven't tried Demon's Souls or Dark Souls II... yet. Bloodborne is my favorite out of the collection (or what I've played of it) because of the familiar but much faster-paced gameplay, with higher risk meeting higher reward. Not to mention they didn't put Ornstein and/or his armor in it.

Personally, I really enjoyed Bandersnatch as a one-off. Having the ability to choose what happens and trying to piece together the story by watching multiple endings.

But honestly, the story fell quite flat and it wouldn't have been a very entertaining episode had it not been for the gimmick. But what do you guys think?

Today I got into a conversation with my coworkers about how cursive is all but dead with our students. We adults all grew up learning it and were often forced to use it even when we didn't want to, but it has been out of vogue in American schools for a while now, so most of our students legitimately don't know how to read or write it. Opinions as to whether or not this was a bad thing were split. Some people considered the skill unnecessary and were happy to see it go the way of the dinosaur. Life moves on, they said--and the skill was inessential anyway because students could simply print instead. Some even took things a step further and argued that print was also going to become outdated with the prevalence of computers and phones. Nevertheless, others argued that cursive was important and valuable for kids to learn, particularly if they wanted to be able to sign their names or read documents written in script (e.g. old letters from family members, historical documents, etc.)

The discussion then continued to analog clocks. Being able to read them is still technically in the curriculum standards for many states, but it's the kind of thing that often gets briefly touched on and then discarded. Because digital clocks are so prevalent now, many students never practice reading analog clocks outside of those specific lessons, and thus they never truly master it. While more of our students can read analog clocks than can write in cursive, it too seems to be headed down the path to extinction. Opinions about whether this was bad were much stronger, with nearly everyone agreeing that it's a worthwhile skill rather than something inessential.

The conversation made me curious to hear what everyone here thinks--not just about these but about dying skills in general. What are some skills that you believe will fall out of widespread use in the coming years? Is their departure a good/bad thing?

Identification of key films and personalities in the history of cinema from a Western perspective

Top 20 movies by influence centrality

1. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

2. Star Wars (1977)

3. Psycho (1960)

4. King Kong (1933)

5. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

6. Metropolis (1927)

7. Citizen Kane (1941)

8. The Birth of a Nation (1915)

9. Frankenstein (1931)

10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

11. Casablanca (1942)

12. Dracula (1931)

13. The Godfather (1972)

14. Jaws (1975)

15. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)

16. The Searchers (1956)

17. Cabiria (1914)

18. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

19. Gone with the Wind (1939)

20. Bronenosets Potemkin (1925)

If you've been following tech news somewhat recently, you've surely heard about Article 13- the one where the EU essentially requires all content hosts to have extremely strict copyright checking tools and have automated takedown of any potentially copyrighted works.

That got put on the backburner for a little bit, but now it's back with a vote being held in early 2019.

YouTube, being one of, if not the largest content hosts in the world, is greatly affected by this motion. In fact, they have a whole website designed to encourage their creators to talk about A13 in their videos. The page very subtly hints at massive service changes that will happen in the EU if this actually ends up passing.

The CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, has also written an op-ed for Financial times (linked to official YT blog since it's free there) about the issues facing YT if A13 passes.

I haven't heard anything from official sources, but I've heard on the rumor mill that YouTube will completely suspend creators in the EU, not allowing them to upload any content, and potentially even removing their existing content from YouTube.

What if this passes? YouTube is one of the biggest sources of free knowledge and entertainment we have today, and it's become engrained into the internet as it is today.

With all this, I simply ask, "what's next?"

From the environmental standpoint shrinking of human population is often quoted to have desirable effects, and that's reasonable. But from the point of view of our daily lives and functioning of the human society, what negatives could we then expect? (I mean a soft decline due to lower birth rates, not some abrupt events.)

For example, with smaller population fewer music albums could be made every year than some time before, and people would maybe feel less inspired and satisfied. Less scientific research, less choices for relationships... and maybe other things? Would being more technically advanced compensate for the issues? Won't we feel ourselves in oblivion and romanticize the "numerous" past?

TLDR at the bottom

I played Far Cry 5 some time ago, and remember it as a good, albeit conventional, open-world FPS which freshened up the Far Cry formula and simplified it, for the better of the game. I also remember that while I enjoyed myself through it's entirety, the endings (as I immediatelly replayed the final mission to see the other ending) left such a sour taste in my mouth that it ruined the rest of the game's experience for me. I immediately uninstalled it and promised myself to never touch the game again. Both endings had completely ruined it for me. I wasn't there for the story, I was there to enjoy myself while hunting and exploring in rural Montana and occasionally killing people who deserved it (the cult is evil, the game makes this very clear).

Then you get to the end, after dispatching of Joseph's lieuteants; Faith, John and Joseph in missions, that were started through terrible scripted sequences of you being hunted down. And as it turns out, no matter what you choose (engage Joseph in combat or walk away), you can't save your friends (in fact if you walk away it is implied that you kill them yourself because of sheer bad luck) or kill Joseph, for that matter. Your silent protagonist listens to his boring and frankly infuriating monologues after locking you into cutscene, even though you came to the mission wielding an array of very deadly weapons, ranging from assault rifles to rocket launchers to a shovel. But Far Cry 5 doesn't care, you get locked into a cutscene and you are disbarred from shooting the prime antagonist, the man that admitted to you personally that he smothered his infant daughter, the man who leads the cult which kills, kidnapps, tortures and most likely rapes the inhabitants of Hope County. And you don't even get to shoot him in his fucking arrogant face, you just get to listen to his monologue. You totally could! You still have your guns, actually, you pull them out immediately after the cutscene if you choose to engange in a boss fight! But it's a game and nothing makes sense.

So Joseph shows you that he somehow captured your allies again, even though, to even engage him, you have to liberate the entire county from the grip of Eden's Gate, so realistically, there shouldn't be anyone left to capture your friends. The cultists are all dead, killed by bullets or your shovel.

Ultimately, you get to pick between taking three of your friends, leaving the rest behind and driving away, only for the driver to turn on the radio, where it just so happens to play the song which was, during the story, implanted in your brain to send you on a murderous, uncontrollable rage. Or you fight Joseph, who, after the fight ends (WHERE YOU STILL DON'T KILL HIM) reveals, that he was right all along, just as atom bombs start falling from the sky. And even then, Joseph, on his own, manages to overpower all your friends and kill them, because for some reason he's the only one not affected in any way by the atom bomb that just detonated in the distance (it is implied that it was another country that dropped the bomb, not Eden's Gate, but then, who would bomb some random county in Montana in the US without any strategical value?), locks you and himself into a bunker (which had a very capable, armed to the teeth, inhabitant living in it, which Joseph somehow kills off screen even though he marched in there unarmed) probably to brainwash you. Of course, the only right choice would be to take the secret ending, but that means not playing the game at all, and still puts the atom bombs into question and if they would still explode, and all the inhabitants of Hope County at the mercy of an evil doomsday cult.

As it turns out, in the world of Far Cry 5, the world is on the edge of starting world war 3, however, no one tells you this, there are only tidbits you hear on the radio if you drive to areas you've liberated. So everyone who turned off the radio didn't hear those. You could say that the world itself is a bit of foreshadowing, considering that everyone and their grandmother were building bunkers, but I thought that was another jab at the classic US rednecks the game parodied a lot, I missed that entirely. Apparently when you take drugs in the game, the hallucinations also hint at a looming world war, but I didn't take the drugs at all, so, barring the bunkers, the hints were too small to be noticed and gave the player something to think about.

The ending sparked a lot of discussion and speculation(one even going as far as claiming that the protagonist is Jesus) on the internet, mutiple discussion on Reddit and other sites, most people seemed to very much dislike the ending because precisely it felt that everything you did in the game was for nothing, which is an ending you can pull off (See Spec Ops: The Line) but the game has to earn with a very good plot and fitting gameplay. My major problem with Far Cry 5 is that it didn't feel earned at all. There was too much of a disconnect between gameplay and narrative (narrative which on it's own wasn't good enough for such a conclusion) to warrant such a bleak ending and pull it off in a way that didn't send the player into a salty rage. There are also theories floating around the net saying that the entire atom bombs ending was one big hallucination, considering your (and your allies) exposure to Bliss at the start of the boss fight. Honestly, I think Ubisoft could've saved some grace if the post-launch content and the DLC were maybe more focused on apocalyptic content (perhaps one big DLC which turned Hope County into a Fallout-esque desert), I actually thought that such content was part of the game, considering that the main menu changes massively after the atom bomb ending. It would've really saved the game: A classic WTF into oh no you just did not! into Oh they actually didn't. You could've even had most of the characters survive, because there were bunkers everywhere in Hope County. Instead we got lackluster post-launch DLC and content, as all three of the DLCs had a very mediocre reception.

The pcgamer article I linked makes a lot of points about how to make the game better, and ultimately I agree with them. It would've made a lot more sense if the entire plot had more gravitas from the beginning, if it were pictured more clearly that the world is in fact going bonkers, but also if the characters were a bit more realistic, both the villians and allies. You can't make a parody of rural America, structure the entire thing as a fun, wild, action-packed ride and then suddenly start dropping atom bombs and declare world war 3 at the end. People will feal cheated.

I'm interested in what the community here on Tildes thinks of Far Cry 5 and if we could get a discussion going.

TL;DR: Summing up, I don't think Far Cry 5 did enough to pull off the ending it gave us. For me and a lot of other people, it even went so far as to ruin the entire game, as everything I did was completely invalidated, all the time I spent on the game and with the characters I've grown to like (they were caricatures, but lovable ones) felt wasted, because there wasn't a single thing I could've to save anyone (except get the secret ending and don't play the game at all and even then, everything is still open). What are your thoughts?

So I've just finished watching the new season. I had low expectations going in, given how the writers had to cut out their main character at the eleventh hour, but I still can't help but feel disappointed.

Soo many plot threads left open. No repercussions for any of the shit that went down over the last 5 years. The good journalist ends up dead, Claire Underwood commits murder literally in the oval office while secret service is right outside the door and then... nothing. That's it. That's what we get for series a finale. I mean, what?

I've also been quite pissed off how they tried to turn Claire into a feminist icon. Claire is a monster. She is at least as bad as Frank. She wanted to literally start a nuclear war to deflect attention away from herself.

Don't get me wrong, having a feminist message is ok. It's good. It's even timely. But not with Claire fucking Underwood for fucks sake! In the first episode where that female soldier asks her if she even has a plan so that more soldiers won't end up dead, Claire snarks at her with "you wouldn't ask me that if I was a man". Really? This fresh recruit, this soldier who you will be sending to her death is asking you - someone who never held any public office before - whether you have a plan and your response is fuck patriarchy?

How about that scene where she fires her entire cabinet and fills it with an all-female cast? Forget about real life, it's not even realistic in the show's world. Remember how hard Frank had to fight, how many people he had to cross, bribe and even murder just to replace a single seat in earlier seasons? Where was the senate? Did everyone else just roll over; how come nobody fought her on this? It felt like the writers really, really wanted to play out their deepest, guilty-pleasure Hillary 2016 fantasies out on the show and the script suffered for it.

If they just left things at the last season's finale where Claire looked into the camera with "my turn!" it would have been a much more powerful moment, certainly better than this disorganized, directionless mess we got.

So yeah, that's where I'm at. How about you?

Prometheus (2012), Alien: Covenant (2017), Life (2017), The Cloverfield Paradox (2018), you name it. Why is everyone in the team is a complete incompetent buffoon? Why is the science behind the films so bad? Why do the protagonists do stupid crap? The crew from Alien IV looks like geniuses compared to these people.

Am I the only one who is seriously disturbed by this trend?

Let's assume that they have full control over congress, so politics isn't an issue. I think looking at what a good global climate policy would be useful, because it allows us to see where we stand. It could also serve as a platform for future candidates.

It seems to me that the new president should take a wide-ranging series of measures to curb emissions in all the major domains: electricity, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, etc. [1]. You might argue that measures taken in isolation from other countries are not sufficient. While that's true, someone has to start. The US taking the lead on climate change would have a profound impact on all other countries. The US could use its very strong diplomatic weight to pressure other countries to adopt similar measures.

So what should these measures be? The major one would seem to be a carbon tax, applied to all major sources of emissions: energy production (coal plants, ...), agriculture (cattle and meat imports), jet fuel (current taxes are very low), etc. Another one could be a tax on imports depending on how much the exporting country does against global warming. Maybe a new kind of free trade alliance among "climate-virtuous" countries could be created.

Any thoughts? Have any serious global policy proposals been made and studied in the past?

[1] : https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-climate-change

Link to the announcement -- Do read it, it's a short email.

I'm posting this here because I think it generated some good discussion over on HN, which unfortunately got .. flamewary. (Is that irony?)

I've myself created and moderated several large-ish communities over the years and my views on codes of conduct are mixed. I'm always trying to make an envi. They themselves can range quite a bit, with 'opponents' to CoCs often picking the worst offenders in terms of overreach as examples. To me, it's always felt like the software engineering world is rediscovering... forum guidelines?

This is a politically-charged topic now, where almost all discussion on CoCs being centered on black&white "if you oppose them then you're basically alt-right". This makes the topic of CoCs an interesting example, IMO, of how we ("we" as in "the internet") give loudspeakers to the most extremist voices, silencing nuance.

Reminds me of a post by @deadaluspark here discussing the effect that this increasing divide has on us.

Well anyway, I brought up the announcement in question because Stallman (someone who tends to usually be pretty radical and have clear cut opinions) positively surprised me. This seemed to resonate with people, especially the parts about replacing sticks with carrots. It felt pretty good to see someone ignore (probably by virtue of being shielded from it) the politically-charged side of the topic and simply focus on trying to improve communication. Sounds cliché, but I feel that this approach has gotten very rare the past 4-5 years, and its higher frequency on Tildes is part of why I've been enjoying reading the comments here so much.

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.

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.

Description:

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 features thrilling grounded multiplayer combat, three full zombies adventures at launch, and a massive battle royale experience.

Note: I couldn't find a proper description anywhere so I just grabbed the text from battle.net

Links:

Battle.net Xbox PlayStation Amazon

A lot of the time people will by default mark a game being buggy as a negative, and on the one hand I do understand this. But, at the same time, some of my most memorable gaming moments will be stuff like walking entering the wasteland to find an old barrel just spinning violently on the floor. Now, obviously a GAME BREAKING bug will always destroy an experience, but if you look at a civilian floating up a wall in spider-man PS4 and you're too worried about your immersion to find humour in it, I'm sure you're very fun at parties.

I was watching my favorite weekly space show on YouTube, TMRO, and I learned about Astro Live Experiences (ALE.) They will soon launch two test satellites which will be able to provide a burst of 30-40 man made shooting stars at a prearranged time and place, for a fee.

Japanese company ALE is the first "space entertainment" company of which I am aware. The only event in the same ballpark was New Zealand based RocketLab's Humanity Star which caused a large amount of controversy. ALE's initial technology will allow a 200km radius of earth to see their multi-color shooting star show. According to the interview on TMRO, in the long term, they are planning to allow image rendering and even artificial aurora.

This type of business seems inevitable as we advance into space. I can see some benefits and some downsides to this technology. What do you all think of this?

^{Maybe this topic belongs in ~misc}