Admittedly highly unlikely ... but also becoming less inconceivable by the day. She is 2nd in line after Pence.

So, let's just say, 3-5 months from now, They swear in Pelosi as the next POTUS. What does that do to both Repub and Dem Primaries? What does it mean for the next election? Does the US keep itself together long enough to have an election?

Heck, while I'm asking, what about a President Pence in 3-5 months. That's at least an order of magnitude less unlikely. How would that play out?

PS: Somebody recently started a 'what do you daydream about' thread ... so, you-know ... this.

From time to time I see people on the internet who remember Google Reader fondly, and miss it. At the time, I didn't have much use for something like it, so I never used it.
But a common theme in these conversations about Google Reader is that no other feed reader ever offered everything Google Reader could, but I can't seem to find details.

So what was it? Does anyone here remember Google Reader, or even still wishes it was available? Why did nothing come from the Open Source community that could replace it?

Today in twitter drama, people are up in arms about the Apple Card offering a tech entrepreneur's wife significantly less credit than her husband. Recently, other tech entrepreneurs like the Woz have noticed similar limit discrepancies. However, I think this is all missing the forest for the trees. It is likely that GS is in fact offering less credit to women. However, in both cases, higher credit was offered to male tech entrepreneurs (while their spouses got much less credit). And, given that Only 1/5th of VC money goes to startups with even a single women on the founding board, I don't think it's super far fetched that the statistics will show women, on average, are given notably less credit than men, especially when those men are tech entrepreneurs.

Ultimately, I have no idea why twitter is so surprised by this. People seem to think this is a unique case of bank discrimination, yet it's really just a reflection of a society which pays women less than men, and values their work as less than men. And I worry we might "fix" the algorithm, but never correct the larger societal issues surrounding this problem.

_{Sidenote: Currently, most cards circumvent this issue by linking spouses accounts, so they are one and the same. The Apple card, for privacy(?) reasons, does not allow this.}

This question has been going through my head for quite some time. UBI has been talked about quite a bit now, and usually the question is if it should be introduced and if yes, how much should everyone get?

But how would you stop UBI from inflating the economy? If everyone suddenly gets 1000€/month purely because they exist, how do you stop rent from suddenly going up 1000€/month? How do you stop it from going up gradually?

Apple has spent a lot of money on The Morning Show for its new tv service. It has a bunch of actors that I love. In particular I'm excited to see Anniston, Duplas, Carell, and Crudup in this.

Metacritic gives it only 60. https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-morning-show Sometimes a single terrible review can drag that number down, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. There are a few bad reviews, and lots of mixed reviews.

I don't know much about critique or how reviewing works, so I'm curious: is The Morning Show bad, or are critics terrible at reviewing, or is something else going on?

So this is probably one of the meatier episodes of the ones that we've seen so far, with the experiment taking a hit, Bad Janet being a free agent, and Brent being impossible to deal with. What do you all think?

This is what you get when you search VUDU for free science fiction movies. The plot is banal enough. A spacecraft is discovered in Colorado that is 14,000 years old. A linguist and her lover are hired to read an inscription and then summarily paid and told to go home by the mysterious and unlikeable head of the project, Richard Kontral.

This description in no way does justice to how bad the script is. My first theory was that a rich father gave his fourteen year old son a chance to create a movie for his birthday present. But it's really just a low budget sequel to an obscure cult film called Moontrap.

The lead character, Scout, is played by Sarah Butler who evidently rose to wordly fame in I Spit on Your Grave. Every line that Scout says to the villain includes adolescent sexual insults. The villain is I believe a washed up actor from an old sitcom called The Nanny. This guy is really hard to watch, the acting is as bad as the script.

There's a scene of robots fighting that looks like it was choreographed with Rockem Sockem Robots, a toy from my childhood. If you're a collector of bad movies, this is a true gem.

It was tough to watch, but our free streaming was slim pickings that night. I wanted to watch Day of the Triffids a classic bad movie from the '60's , but got outvoted. At least that movie was based on an interesting SF novel by John Wyndham. Maybe tomorrow night.

We would most likely use a service like archive.org for it but I'm not sure if we should so before making an issue, I thought I'd ask for opinions.

It'd be useful to make sure old topics don't become obsolete but it could also be undesirable behaviour for privacy reasons.

I apologize if this is a topic that has been covered before. I haven't really been able to find anything and I'm not really sure what a good search keyword is. But I noticed this as part of the Hearthstone player ban thread.

On a traditional bulletin board forum it's not really an issue because the conversations unfold chronologically anyway. When you have the atemporality of threaded comment chains that gets disorganized fast.

Basically, it's a "still developing" story where more events and news keep happening that's germane to the discussion. As the news comes up, people who already read the thread might not see the comments being posted about subsequent developments and be able to follow it because each piece of additional news or info. ends up happening in a comment/sub-thread that ends up arranged in fairly arbitrary, rather than chronological order.

The Democratic Debate threads have been similar, where the reactions and consequences of the topics being discussed can keep a discussion going for a long time, but it all happens in sub threads that people are unlikely to see. Many of these developments don't really merit a thread of their own, but after a few days or so it gets hard to actually have a big-picture discussion because the news has overtaken the scope of the discussion thread.

In a thread with an active OP, I've noticed what tends to happen is the OP will steadily edit new developments into the main post to update it. I think this has actually worked pretty well BUT edits don't bump posts as far as I can tell. Also, the people posting the updates aren't necessarily getting as much credit (in terms of votes, exemplary labels, or whatever) and, insofar as that matters to people that's a thing. Do you think this is adequate as things scale or would some novel design or subcomment system be needed?

So I've been putting in topics for each episode of The Good Place for a couple weeks, and it's been a little slow but reasonable amounts of activity. But for week to week shows in the future, would it be more appropriate to have one big thread made for the season premiere and bump that on a weekly basis and enforce marking posts when a particular episode happened, so we can better track discussion and continue threads of discussion across weeks, or would that just kinda be a mess?

If so, any thoughts before, during or after the race?

If not, feel free to ask any questions about the sport or motor racing in general, if you'd like to beef up the ole knowledges.

( Discord server invite for more action : https://discordapp.com/invite/dCnYaSw )

Now that the show is available on the NBC, Hulu and your store of choice, what did you all think about this season premiere of the Good Place? Did we want to do a thread for each episode or just one at the beginning and one at the end?

IMO one of the major issues with online debates, arguments and heated discussions is that they often tend to escalate rather steadily over time, and as each side gets more frustrated with the other they also tend to slowly get more personal as well. I am admittedly guilty of falling into this trap occasionally myself too, which has got me thinking about ways that Tildes (the site and the users here) can potentially help deescalate unproductive arguments and allow people to disengage more effectively from them. To this end I thought it might be a good idea to have a brainstorming session regarding that.

To start things off, here are most of the ideas I could find related to this issue that have previously been proposed and are already on Tildes Gitlab (click ▶ to read the full details):

Feel free to voice your support or criticism regarding the above suggestions, offer up ideas to potentially improve them, or even propose your own brand new ideas related to this issue in the comments here as well.

p.s. Once again, the point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week #1, #2

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

Despite me still being a little distracted thanks to WoW Classic and somewhat absent from Tildes lately as a result, since it's been a few weeks since the last Unofficial Weekly Discussion topic, I wanted to make sure to get one posted this week. And since it's been a while, I wanted to try something a bit more lighthearted and fun than usual to get things flowing again. So here it is:

What is your most "thinking outside the box", "pie in the sky" and/or "out there" idea for Tildes?

It doesn't matter whether you think it's really a good idea or not, it will work or not, it would ultimately have a net positive or negative effect, or how impossible it might be to implement; Let's just get the creative juices flowing and start throwing out our "craziest" ideas for the site!

p.s. Once again, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week #1, #2, #3

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

I've recently been trying to confront the fact that a lot of the things I want to do online work best if they've got some connection to my real life identity (or will eventually, almost by necessity, become connected). Things like working on open source software, writing, etc. almost always seem to lead back to other people knowing at the very least your real name and probably your email address.

I know that my threat model for people going after my identity is a lot different from someone with nation-state level adversaries like Ed Snowden or various activists, but I still find it hard to decide what gets to be connected to what. Do I put my real name on my GitHub account? Do I post things on my GitHub blog to here? Should I have my real name on my Twitter account? What about the fact that some of my usernames resemble each other?

I'm not necessarily looking for advice about my particular situation, but I would really like to hear how other people have dealt with such situations and what you generally think about things like identity compartmentalization.

@gergir mentioned the idea, and I thought, why not give it a try?

I'm a young adult from Turkey, lived up until now in Istanbul. Whether specific to that city or not, and whether about life, tourist attractions, politics, culture, etc., just AmA.

If you have anything you don't want to publicly ask, I'l love to help if you PM me your question.

The Apple Keynote is on September 10th, at 10am Pacific Daylight Time (daylight savings is in effect). I'm making this thread as a place to discuss the announcements here on ~tech.

TIme:

• 10:00am PDT (California / Apple time)
• 5:00pm GMT (Greenwich time)

Livestream Links

• Apple's website stream -- requires a browser that supports both HLS and HEVC (safari and edge)
• Apple's Youtube stream -- first time Apple is streaming on youtube. Should work anywhere that Youtube works :) They'll probably break the stream record.

Tl;Dr of actual announcements (updating right now)

• Apple Arcade announced
  • $4.99 / month and one month free.
  • 100 indie exclusives on launch
• Apple TV+ announced
  • $4.99 / month, launching November 1
  • New originals every month! 100 countries at launch
  • Including 1 year free with device (iPhone, iPad, or mac) purchases starting today.
• New base model iPad
  • 10.2 inch display, Runs A10 Fusion chip, (optional) smart keyboard
  • New iPad is made from 100% recycled aluminum (like the new MacBook air)
  • Starts at $399 (competing with chrome books). $299 for education customers.
  • includes Apple Pencil support
• Apple Watch Series 5!!!!
  • Health and Fitness video
  • 3 New health studies!!!
    - Apple Hearing Study
    - Apple Women's Health Study (How cycles affect various health conditions)
    - Apple Heart Study
    - Enrollment is voluntary. OPT-IN by downloading the app and getting enrolled.
  • Apple Watch Series 5
    - ALWAYS ON LTPO OLED display, with Dynamic Refresh Rate (1Hz - 60Hz VRR)
    - Same 18 hour battery life
    - International Emergency Calling on all cellular models
    - 100% recycled aluminum.
    - Stainless Steel, Titanium, Ceramic
    - Series 3 watch starts at $199, Series 5 starts at $499
• iPhone 11!
  • Aluminum and Glass, comes in a bunch of colors
  • Spatial audio + Dolby Atmos for next level smartphone sound
  • New Camera -- 120º FOV Wide angle camera, 12MP with 100% Focus Pixels
    - 0.5x Optical Zoom out :)
    - New Image processing pipelines, with semantic rendering and adaptive tone mapping
    - Portrait mode improvements (wider portraits, and more) (yay, now for pets!)
    - Night Mode has adaptive image slicing and fusion for reducing blur in long exposure.
    - 4K HDR video at 60fps (was previously 30fps!)
    - Front Camera is now 12MP wide angle
    - 4K 30fps HDR video, Slowmotion Video for front facing camera! :)
  • A13 Bionic processor
    - fastest GPU and CPU ever in a smartphone
    - Game demo showing off Metal 2 Shaders, Bloom, and AA in realtime at 60fps
    - Battery is now 1 hr longer than the previous XR
    - U1 Chip? (on slide, not mentioned)
  • Wifi 6 support!
  • 2m water resistance for 30 minutes
  • 6.1 inch Liquid Retina display
  • Priced sanely at $699
• iPhone 11 Pro
  • 3 camera array
  • Matte Textured Glass
  • Super Retina XDR Display.
    - 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio
    - 1200 nits of brightness
    - 426 ppi
    - Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos
  • A13 Bionic Chip Design
    - Machine Learning Matrix Multiplier Accelerators make matrix operations 6x faster on iPhone
    - Best ML platform of any Smartphone
    - Lower power design using 7nm+ lithography
    - 8.5 Billion Transistors
    - 4 High Efficiency CPU cores
    - Hundreds of Voltage domains and clock domains
    - Each region of the chip is at least 20% faster, and uses at least 20% less power
  • 3 camera system
    - 4x zoom range (0.5 to 2x)
    - 53-13mm focal lengths, and f1.8 to f2.4
    - Deep Fusion camera system - stitches together burst photos + long exposure to maximize detail and reduce noise.
    - Filmic Pro demo -- allowing multiple camera use at the same time.
  • iPhone 11 Pro at $999, Pro Max at $1099
  • iPhone 11 at $699 and XR at $599 and iPhone 8 at $499 to complete the lineup.
• Apple Store Updates
  • Apple Watch Studio - pair any watch with any band of your choice. Configure as you want
  • iPhone trade ins can now be used for a lower monthly rate if you buy an iPhone, rather than simply taking off the purchase price.
  • 5th Ave Store is being redesigned and re-opening Sept 20th!

Other miscellaneous / fun stuff

• Apple Keynote Bingo Card -- 5 in a row to win! :)
• Upgrade Podcast Draft Card -- the hosts have predicted what they should see at the event. Person with the most points wins.

Edits:

• fixed part about browsers with HLS support, and added a table showing compatible browsers.
• remved "what we're expecting" section, and started updating the event live feed.

Let's talk about recently released Neon Genesis Evangelion Astral Chain game. Developed by Platinum this Nintendo Switch exclusive had been a highlight for recent Nintendo Directs and gotten favorable reviews by critics and by the public.

Have you played it?
How do like it?
What do you think about the Legion gameplay?

Let's dive into it and try keeping spoilersto a minimum!

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any movies that you'd like to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here!

Spoilers are okay, just give fair warning so people who care about them can participate too.

@cadadr's Turkey AMA coffee commentary got me curious about what coffee consumption and cultures look like among Tilders.

If your principal national beverage is tea instead of coffee, feel free to comment on why you think that might have arisen.

I spent a bit of time chasing one of @cadadr's mentions about tasseomancy, and it's fascinating, so please describe if your coffee culture has any comparable rituals.

I grew up with my mother's Montreal Canadian coffee-drinking standards: starting around age 8 or so, a half-cup of stovetop percolated coffee with a half-cup of milk added, eventually graduating to full cups of strong black coffee by my teenage years. For most of my life, the commonest means of consuming coffee was via the Bunn restaurant coffee maker - a drip coffee maker with an electric burner that held the brew scalding hot, near-burnt.

The commonest U.S. home coffee preparation still uses a drip coffee maker. "Pod" coffee makers that use prefilled cartridges and a pressure boiler (lower pressure than espresso, but similar) are increasingly popular.

Practically all coffee in the U.S. is made from imported beans, with robust global supply chains. There's minimal boutique coffee production in the states of Hawaii and California, but the territory of Puerto Rico grows coffee for local use and premium export. Coffee is taxed at the same rates as other food products, and no import duties are levied, so it's incredibly cheap - usually $5 - 10 per 450g.

In the U.S., at least, there are now widespread corporate coffee shop chains - Starbucks, Peet's, Caribou, and others, which produce very standardized, uniform coffee, in pressure-expressed, brewed, and cold-process variations. They're often prepared with flavored syrups, and typically have dairy added, either as plain or steam-heated and frothed milk. Average cost for the fancier variations is around 5 USD, though a cup of plain brewed coffee is usually $1.50 - $2.00.

Even tiny villages have neighborhood coffee shops that serve plain brewed coffee and espresso drinks, teas, baked goods, and simple sandwiches. Local coffee roasters are relatively common, too. The coffee shops may feature their products, or the roaster may have its own cafe'. Most of the larger bookstores also serve coffee, teas, and espresso drinks in their own cafe's.

We usually drink our coffee relatively strong, around 10 - 15g of ground coffee per 200 ml of water for brewing, and dark roasts are preferred over mild ones.

Most U.S. cities support thriving international food and beverage cultures, so we get to try coffee variations from around the world. My personal favorites (aside from the obvious Italian espresso culture) are Turkish-style with cardamom, Ethiopian, and Cuban colada.

There isn't much of a national tea tradition here, though there's a common practice of herbal tisane use for health purposes.

I've visited around 43 of the 50 U.S. states and haven't noticed really distinctive regional variations, except for New Orleans chicory-flavored and New Mexico piñon-flavored coffee. My spouse adds chicory to coffee at home, and piñon coffee is delicious. We'll treat ourselves to shipments a couple of times a year. Hawaiian Kona variety beans are boutique-premium and there's some fakes, so we don't go out of our way to get it when fair-trade Ethiopian or Guatemalan varieties are better and cheaper. I try very hard not to think of the carbon footprint of any of this...

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any movies that you'd like to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here!

Spoilers are okay, just give fair warning so people who care about them can participate too.

Since we're fast approaching the second half of the year, I think it's a good time to look back on the first half, to the movies that came out this year and to share our favorites. I'm giving my favorite 10 (though in no particular order) but if more or fewer stood out to you and you want to share all of them, feel free! Blockbusters, indies, comedies, dramas, whatever stands out to you from 2019 so far. Don't feel pressured to write anything but the title or a basic synopsis if you don't want to.

• Apollo 11: Okay, I know I said this list isn't in order, but this one is definitely #1. It's history in motion, and its images and editing will surely be seared into my mind as the way I think of the Apollo launch.
• An Elephant Sitting Still: Technically came out in 2018 in some regions, but has a 2019 release in my country, which is the order I'm organizing this list in. A beautiful and heartbreaking journey into universal pain and suffering and catharsis in the tiniest things. At nearly 4 hours and with an oppressively melancholy tone, I struggle to recommend it to everyone and anyone, but if the description interests you, definitely give it a look.
• The Farewell: Hilarious and sad, often in the same moment. My love of this may well have been colored by my experiences as an immigrant under very similar circumstances as its main character, but it's an interesting look at differing cultural philosophies of the worth of the individual on their own versus their relation to society.
• The Last Black Man in San Francisco: A layered critique of gentrification and the personal individual obsessions that keep us from truly seeing it and other issues in our world as they happen. It's filled to the brim with things to say, sometimes to a detriment, and some of the screentime spent just showing the sad beauty of San Francisco could've been used to further flesh out some of its ideas, but I still found it extremely compelling all the way through.
• John Wick: Chapter 3- Parabellum: I think the John Wick movies get a little more bloat on them every entry(much like their titles, actually), but the action only seems to get slicker. I still like the balance of the world, character work, and action in Chapter 2 the best, but while I think 3 drags itself down into its lore a bit too much, its setpieces are still top of the line. I find Keanu endlessly killing people left and right to be incredibly cathartic. Should probably talk to someone about that.
• Burial of Kojo: This doesn't say "Netflix original" on it, but it does seem to be distributed by them in all the countries I checked, so I don't know what's happening there. Regardless, there's a good chance you'll find this on Netflix in your country. I'm willing to admit this movie is heavily, deeply flawed. It overtelegraphs many of its plot points repeatedly, for one. But I also think it is filled with a gorgeous charm. It's light fantasy and grounded fairy tale feels half Tarsem and half Guillermo del Toro, and I was captivated from beginning to end.
• Booksmart: I find the new crop of female led high school movies (Booksmart, Edge of Seventeen, Eighth Grade) to be far more relatable and interesting than the dozens of high school movies of decades prior. It feels like the hands of the filmmakers is more on the pulse of the struggles of modern kids. Booksmart is very much a heightened comedy compared to the other examples I mentioned, but it is great at it. It's hilarious, even if there's one scene in particular that goes on forever. The comparisons to Superbad are mostly warranted, and I still lie awake at night, sad at the fact that I saw this opening night and the theater was mostly empty.
• Dear Ex: The Netflix revolution of every indie movie ending up on streaming services and leaving the theaters to the blockbusters isn't quite happening at the speed originally anticipated, but it definitely seems like more and more of my favorites of the year end up being a streaming original. Dear Ex is a Netflix film about different people grappling with the loss of one man, and it shows the power of the individual to connect the lives of the people they love, and of the many tools we employ to try to get over losses in our lives.
• High Flying Bird: Yet another Netflix movie. Steven Soderbergh is one of the people who can make a bearable heist movie in this day and age imo, and he lends that gift to this to make a movie where the heist isn't money or jewels, but the basic rights of human beings being trampled on by a system that creates middle men to suck up money, leaving the real workers with pennies. It's shot on an iPhone, and there are moments where that seems like a limitation, but honestly, a lot of it looks really impressive.
• Ash is Purest White: This is Jia Zhangke well within his comfort zone, looking at the strain put on human relationships by the passage of time and the everchanging effects of globalization and shifting national landscapes. The World(2004) (aka Shijie) is still my favorite of his, and it is definitely an idea he's explored before, but his ideas and commentary on it have never failed me to keep me enthralled all the same.

I have a list of all the 2019 movies I see that I consider "good" here (29 films at the time of writing this) if anyone wants to take a look at all of them.

The thread about The Wizard of Oz helped me realize there were other musical fans here, and rather than go offtopic in that thread I figured I'd make a whole new one for discussion.

Topic is: musicals. Anything and everything. Tell me about your favorites, the shows you've been to, the songs that make you cry, the numbers you've performed at karaoke, what a talent Sarah Brightman is, how much you had to pay for Hamilton tickets -- whatever! It's all fair game!

THE EARTH keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill—only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle—
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

I've always loved this poem. To me, it's about a man, loved by many, that recognizes his responsibilities, but can't help but forgo them to go and have fun with friends and loved ones (in short, anyways). The first line, however, has always intrigued me, and I can never land on a meaning for it. I think it's basically saying that in your heart is your true character (your soul), and that will never change. Or maybe it's saying that everyone has that "vibration" in their heart that yearns for enjoyment. What do you think?

Thanks to @dubteedub for doing this up until now, let's bring em back :)

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any movies that you'd like to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here!

Spoilers are okay, just give fair warning so people who care about them can participate too.

Mythbusters is back, but in a tweaked format.

Adam Savage fronts with a team of six young people. Jamie, Kari, Tory, and Grant are absent, only appearing in video flashbacks to the previous show.

Mythbusters with kids could have been horrific, but they've managed to make this entertaining and informative. They've increased the amount of STEM stuff. We see people doing a bit of math while planning something out. The kids are smart, and the show allows them to be smart while also being children. Adam is a great fit, being a big kid himself but also filling the role of a pseudo parent and giving friendly advice (often around safety, such as the tag strap used to manoeuvre huge steel plates).

The old show had a some problems. They'd have too many pre-break "what's coming next" and post-break "here's what happened before", and they'd chop up the myths being tested into tiny little bits. They still do that, but not nearly as much.

It's a fun, entertaining watch, and it's safe for families to watch together.

Previous episode | Index thread | Next episode

Black Mirror Season 4 Episode 2 - Arkangel

Worried about her daughter’s safety, single mom Marie signs up for a cutting-edge device that monitors the girl’s whereabouts -- and much more.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

Josha Stradowski is Rand al'Thor

Barney Harris is Mat Cauthon

Marcus Rutherford is Perrin Aybara

Zoë Robins is Nynaeve al'Meara

Madeleine Madden is Egwene al'Vere

There's a fair amount of excitement and discussion around the choices on Reddit.

Previously, Rosamund Pike was announced as Moiraine Damodred.

I'm writing this in an attempt to explain more clearly some ideas about the dangers of having an oligopoly in control of the Web, and the current difficulties of discussing that without being taken as some kind of "free speech absolutist". It's an analogy and, as in any analogy, it's only valid to a certain extent. The important thing is for it to be valid enough to explain a point.

There was a city in which four companies had ended up owning every bar, except for a handful of them in the outskirts. Upon one moment, they started to regulate which kind of conversations could be held in their bars and which couldn't, something they had a legal right to do and felt was their responsibility. So they prohibited any racist, homophobic or sexually explicit conversation, as well as conversations which they thought could carry any risk for society as a whole. Almost no one could really object to that, after all who would defend that kind of behavior? Some far right gangs said it was against their right to free speech, but they were correctly answered that they didn't have any right to determine the conversation policy of bars that weren't theirs.

Others tried to point that, while that policy wasn't inherently wrong and those companies were in their right to implement it, in the past this was dealt with on a bar-per-bar basis, and although the immense majority of bars didn't allow that kind of behaviors, they had different degrees of flexibility about different topics so bars were more varied and diverse, and you were free to choose a bar which conformed to your interests.

But they were quickly accused of defending some supposed right of that people to be given a place to discuss and organize, and sometimes even accused of defending those ideas. "If you don't like how the Four Companies manage their bars, go elsewhere".

The problem is that the far right gangs and other kind of undesirable people, when forced to leave the Four Companies' bars, went straight to the bars in the outskirts, overflowing them. Some of those bars were already owned by far right people, others though the answer to the Four Companies was to keep a more tolerant policy, and were overtook by neo-nazis. The few independent bars that didn't accept to become far right havens were forced to implement policies not that far from those of the Four Companies, or else face a far right invasion. Their clients spent a lot of time discussing wether something was off-limits or not instead of just enjoying a good time like they did before, and those bars were also very small and far away. They were interesting places, to be sure, but they were cut apart from most of the night life of the city, which took place on the hundreds of Four Companies' bars.

But now, there was a growing problem. The Four Companies had started to prohibit other subjects, for several reasons that aren't really important. Some were distasteful subjects, other were against their political interests or the city council's. But, as the far right gangs kept stabbing people and trying to reclaim their "right" to be accepted into the Four Companies' bars, most people thought that the risk they posed weighed more than anything else.

But they were missing the point. In another nearby city, there were never a handful of companies owning most bars. Still most bars didn't allow far right gangs, and discussion was diverse and fun, and sometimes helpful to combat the excesses of the city council and local police. Still, there were some neo-nazi bars, and most bars had one or two unlikable people. Neo-nazi bars sometimes caused trouble and had to be closed by the police, most were not only under police surveillance but under the neighbors' surveillance too. And, as neo-nazis were a very small minority, if you didn't support the same team as the owner of your closest bar, you could go to another bar which supported your team without it being forcefully full of neo-nazis or otherwise disgusting people.

Both cities had neo-nazis and sometimes problems in their bars, although Four Companies' bars were quite more peaceful on average, as they were heavily policed in a uniform and homogeneous way. But they were lifeless too, and lots of interesting discussions and possibilities of neighbors facing local injustice together were lost forever. Everyone ended up thinking the same, watching the same, liking the same sports and supporting the same teams. Bars weren't a fun and exciting place anymore.

This is just an analogy, so it's limited. But I think it explains well my general view and worries on the subject, which have nothing to do with leaving free way to racists and neo-nazis. It has to do with putting an end to the oligopoly before it's too late.

Inspired by @Lawrencium265's suggestion from a few days ago on advanced topic tag filtering:

After the discussion the other day on expanding groups into sub groups I had an idea about topic tags, advanced tag filtering rules. The main argument against sub groups is that it would sequester people away from each other. By allowing more advanced tag rules you could subscribe to topics that you're interested in, but further filter those if they include topics you don't like or allow certain threads that would get filtered out unless they contain a tag you are interested in or are within a certain group. I think this would attract different people to threads that wouldn't normally be and allow more diverse discussion and insight. So instead of having gaming.tabletop you would use the tabletop tag under gaming and those who are not interested in it can filter it out and those who are solely interested in it can subscribe to it, and then if a topic gets tagged in an unrelated group that you otherwise wouldn't be interested inyou will know about. This also has the side benefit if preventing cross posting or duplicates.

I have decided that the topic of this week's unofficial discussion is going to be on the Tildes topic tag system. But rather than make it specifically on topic tag filtering and that idea in particular, I figured we could open the discussion up a bit more and have a community brainstorming session on the topic tag system in general. I.e. Anything related to tag browsing, tag filtering, tag organization/standardization, etc.

Feel free to comment on any of the open "topic tag" related issues on Tildes Gitlab that pique your interest and you would like to discuss more in depth, propose your own new ideas related to topic tags, or even just spitball.

The point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so with that in mind, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week - #1

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

Since @Deimos has stated he will likely not be restarting the tradition of the Official Daily Tildes Discussions, which is something I and a number of other users greatly enjoyed and miss, I have decided to attempt to take on the responsibility of continuing them unofficially (with his blessing). And since these are not official (so won't be in ~tildes.official, which everyone is subscribed to and probably shouldn't unsubscribe from), I will only be doing them weekly instead of daily, and we now have topic tag filtering (so unofficial weekly discussion can be filtered out), hopefully the people who found the official daily discussions annoying can more easily ignore/hide these unofficial ones.

With the explanation out of the way, on to the topic for this week:

Suggestions/ideas/concerns for future unofficial weekly discussions

I thought it would be appropriate to have the first one of these be a bit of an open-ended, meta-meta discussion on the future of these topics. And to kick things off:

• What would everyone here like to see discussed in these topics in the future? Are there any particular site features (planned, suggested or theoretical), policies (tagging, moderation, etc), or other meta issues/subjects you would like to be the topic in future discussions?

• What would you like us to try to achieve with these discussions? Should we have any specific goals in mind, or should they just be fun brainstorming/theory-crafting/naval-gazing sessions?

• Does anyone have any suggestions for me with regards to how I should handle these discussions? Is there anyone out there who would like to help me with these in some capacity going forwards?

• Does anyone have any concerns regarding these unofficial discussions, and if so, can you think of any ways we can try to address them?

The floor is open, and I am all ears. :)

Tildes Official Docs : Donate to Tildes | Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board

I know that this has been discussed before (I personally participated in some of that), but, to my knowledge, it's been quite a while since it was brought up.

Currently, the three groups that seem to make the most sense for space exploration news are ~tech, ~science, and ~misc. Personally, I perceive ~tech as being best suited for general news about what's going on in the tech industry, more or less "hey, Google released this" or "these researchers are working on graphene batteries". Similarly, I understand ~science as a place for discussing scientific discoveries and "meta" discussion about science as a whole. I think that most would agree with me on those characterizations after looking at those groups when sorted by activity or new.

Space exploration, on the other hand, doesn't really fit in either. It's not exactly ~tech material, and it's also not really the right material for ~science, since much of it isn't about specific new discoveries or studies, etc. If we had an ~engineering, I would say that that would be the correct place for space discussion, but we don't have one.

If you look at what's been happening over the last few months in the realm of space exploration, I think that it's also pretty easy to see that there's enough going on to generate enough content and discussion for a dedicated group. There've been new launches on a weekly or biweekly basis, interesting moves made by different new entrants to the industry, all of the NASA Artemis news, plenty of things from SpaceX, etc.