I was a Homeland fan right from the start. Great performances, constant suspense, smart developments. The show remained watchable in later seasons, but the amount of action was greatly increased. Previously smart characters became dumb, and on season 7 Carrie Mathison was more action hero than spymaster.

Most recently, this is happening in Amazon's series Jack Ryan. The first season was a good thriller with interesting twists. The second was basically "Jack Ryan: Navy Seal". We know right from the start who the bad guy is, and, in the end, we get a "twist" that is both lazy and predictable. Not only that: Jack's "cowboy" behavior gets absurdly dumb (he's kind of an asshole too...), in a way that is not compatible with his backstory. I won't spoiler anything, but in this season he does things that would make Jack Bauer stand and applaud.

To me, that's frustrating because I love all that spy shit, preferably with large doses of realism. If I want action I'll watch Mission Impossible or something.

One of the possible reasons for the increase in action scenes in successful spy shows is the larger budgets. They start small, with character-driven stories, and grow to be action movies.

Another might be the need to please and retain a larger audience gained in the first seasons.

They also tend to get less and less realistic, like The Americans.

I wish there was a spy show that kept being a spy show all the way through.

(I am trans-inclusive. I believe trans rights are human rights. I believe in self-identification. I will use whatever pronouns someone choose, and I try not to assume pronouns.)

In the UK recently there's been a bit of a debate between trans-phobic "gender critical" feminists who say that for sexual safety women need spaces that are women only, and that this means they need to exclude trans-people.

I think this is bullshit. I'd like some good quality arguments to use against this.

What are your ideas?

This question has come up a few times now in the "Unofficial Tildes Chat" Discord server meta/curation channels, but I wanted to open up the discussion to ~tildes at large so we can perhaps finally get a more definitive judgement on it. So here goes:

What are people's thoughts on using the above topic tags in cases where a Tildes user posts something that they themselves have created, have hosted on their own site (or another), and/or could potentially profit from (monetarily or otherwise)?

Should only one of the tags be standardized on, or is there enough of a distinction between some of them for their use to be situational?

Should such tags be required?

Can anyone think of any better tags for such situations than the ones listed?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.