I started reading Liz Plank's For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity, and it opens with the author's experiences asking men this question (emphasis mine):

The more I read about men’s relationship to directions and maps, the more it explained the absence of a substantive and open conversation about masculinity. While women are encouraged to ask questions, men are expected to pretend like they know everything even when they don’t, even when it comes to large and existential questions about their gender and their lives. As I traveled across the world, from Iceland to Zambia, I asked men the same question over and over again: What’s hard about being a man? Every single time I asked that question it was like I had just asked them if unicorns can swim.

It was met with a pause, a smile, and then followed by another long pause followed by the words: “I’ve never actually thought of that.” When I asked women that same question about their gender—in other words, when I asked women what was hard about being a woman—it was like I had asked them to name every single thing they loved about puppies. I got nearly the same response from every woman I spoke to: “How much time do you have?” Judging from the conversations I would strike up with (half-)willing strangers, women had spent a lot of time thinking about how their gender impacts their lives, but men visibly hadn’t. While that conversation had been blossoming with women for decades, for men, accepting directions was proof that the system was broken, which goes against the natural impulses of what being a man means: not to admit confusion or ask questions.

I thought it was a worthwhile question to consider, and I'm interested to hear how people here on Tildes would answer it.

Also, while I'm confident in our community's ability to apply the principle of charity, I do know that discussions about gender online can often become contentious. I would very much like this to be a place for people to be able to share open and honest truths about themselves, even if those are difficult or revealing. If you are replying to someone, especially someone who has just opened up about their own personal experiences or beliefs, please make sure you are being thoughtful and considerate when doing so.

Finally, while the question is specifically about men, I don't want to limit responses to men only. I think women and non-binary people definitely have valuable insights into masculinity as well and I welcome your voices should you choose to answer.

I still mainly use Windows, although I've dual-booted Linux a few times and I have Linux Mint on an old laptop right now. One thing I've never understood about Linux is all the different distributions - their different reputations and why they have them. What is the mechanical difference between using one distribution of Linux and another? Or are the differences usually not mechanical?

For example, Ubuntu and Debian seem to be large families, meaning that a lot of other distributions are based on them (using packages built for them in their package managers at least) as well as being popular distros on their own. But what's different between the two of them, and between each and the other distros based on them? (and what's similar? I gather they all use the Linux kernel at least!)

I also know that people are quite opinionated on their choice of distro, I wondered what reasons people had for their choice. What things are easier or harder for you in your distro of choice? Is it mainly day-to-day tasks that are important or more how the OS works underneath? How much difference does your preferred distro make?

For myself, I've only used Kubuntu (though not much) and Linux Mint, which was mainly for UI reasons, and particularly for the latter, ease of use for someone used to Windows (at least that was what I found years ago when I first looked into it).

Though I doubt I'll ever fully move away from Windows I would like / need to have access to a Linux OS, so maybe this will help me to know what is important to look for. But I also hope it'll be a useful and interesting discussion topic. Also, there are some previous discussions on the latter question so I'd be more interested in learning about the main topic.

also, please do add more tags

Via email:

Effective January 26, 2021, GitLab has phased out the GitLab Bronze/Starter subscription tier.

Current Bronze/Starter customers have over a year to transition
Transition discount offers are available to current customers
Over the last few years, GitLab has evolved into a complete DevOps platform. Many Bronze/Starter customers adopted GitLab just for source code management (SCM) or continuous integration (CI), but GitLab is now a robust DevOps platform that can replace entire toolchains. GitLab customers are achieving faster releases, lower toolchain costs and more productive developers.

The Bronze/Starter tier does not meet the hurdle rate that GitLab expects from a tier and is limiting us from investing to improve GitLab for all customers. Ending availability of the Bronze/Starter tier will help us accelerate development on customers’ priority needs such as improving usability, availability and performance, and making sure that security and compliance are enterprise-grade.

We understand that this change could be disruptive for our current Bronze/Starter customers, which is why GitLab is offering transition options and price discounts to ease your transition to Premium over the next three years.

All Bronze/Starter customers can choose a free upgrade to GitLab Premium for the remainder of their subscription for the first 25 users.
At your next renewal before January 26, 2022, all Bronze/Starter tier customers can choose to
Either renew at the Bronze/Starter tier for US$ 4 per user per month for one additional year
Or opt in for discounted GitLab Premium prices for the next three years. For customers with 25 users or less, your discounted transition prices (paid annually) are US$ 6, US$ 9, US$ 15 per user per month for your first, second and third renewals respectively.
To claim this offer, please visit the GitLab Customer Portal.

To learn more about this change, watch this video, visit our customer FAQ or contact GitLab Sales.

To address your questions and feedback, we have created a space in the GitLab Community Forum, which is actively monitored by GitLab Team members involved with this change.

Thank you for the trust you place in GitLab to help you deliver software faster and more efficiently. We appreciate your use of GitLab and look forward to delivering more value to you every month.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

(Only took me 2 months /s). Also this map is by no means a complete list.

Santa-pocalypse: What if santa was (a tiny bit more) realistic?

A timeline where Santa delivers his presents via quantum tunneling and due to a failure in this device, he causes a nuclear explosion when he accelerates to relativistic speeds in order to gift Children worldwide. Given nuclear fusion doesn't work like that and the Shockwave travels westward counterclockwise, I disagree with the notion this is realistic, but that's pedantry.

What the fuck: The Timeline

Someone mashed dozens of fictitious worlds and the real world at different times to make a very weird and high-effiry map.

Industrialized, colonial, imperial China

A timeline where the Ming is an expansionist empire and puppets nearly half of the world's population. Given China has been as large and populous as entire continents at times, the fact that China had so much the leadership felt they could be self-sufficient and refuse to try to expand until like, 10 years ago, I find this scenario something that could totally have happened but didn't due to disinterested leadership.

What if the new world didn't exist?

A world where columbus is right about Geography and the Americas don't exist. While I don't think it's particularly realistic, I find this scenario underrated.

A grim, dark rainbow: What if the current rightwards shift of politics doesn't stop?

What it says on the title. Not particularly realistic given the CCP and NATO apparently collapse, but I like to use this map as a stand-in for the worst-case scenario of the near-future.

The dragon in shackles: Qing China and Japan in 1932

A timeline where Qing China re-unifies China, but at large costs to their economy, independence, infrastructure and territory.

Flavo et purpura: A world in which Islam never leaves Arabia Ca 800 AD

A very detailed map with quite a few differences from what happened IRL. Far more romanized.

Spain if the re*conquista continued into North Africa

A timeline where the Spanish conquer the Western half of the Maghreb. The justificarion is that Pre-columbian empires ally themselves to other European nations to not be colonized by Spain, so the Spanish focus their imperialist efforts into neighboring Morocco. Obviously not very realistic, but the maps are cool.

Fictitious maps based on real data:

The world divided into 200 areas of equal population

What it says in the title.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Hi Tildes. Hopefully this thread will be both a good discussion and helpful to some of you, and hopefully me.

As I'm guessing most of you know, data backups are quite important and it is best to have at least one copy locally and another copy somewhere else. At the moment, I store photos on an external hard drive and Google Drive, photos from my phone on Google Photos with copies of important original quality files saved locally, and everything else on drives in my PC and a network drive on my Raspberry Pi. It's far from ideal, I've only got one copy of some files and three or four of some others so I've been looking for something better to keep everything organised, safe and in one place.

I've tried the free trial of Backblaze, which seemed the obvious choice, but it had a few problems. I couldn't backup my Pi's network share, and in general it's a bit clunky and difficult to use. It is marketed as an easy solution to backing up data, but in doing this it just makes everything more difficult, at least for me - I know what I want backed up, and I would prefer to select it manually, but by opting in everything for backup by default you have to spend ages excluding the folders you don't want saved, one-by-one, in a UI that is difficult to use and often unclear. Sometimes the exclusions list just doesn't work - the Program Files folders are meant to be excluded by default and they were listed under exclusions but were backing up anyway. For me it found over 200,000 files, and because they were all so small it barely managed to backup 100MB in three hours. (Not that I know where the files come from because they aren't listed in the Windows app in any vaguely comprehensible way.)

So I need to find something else, and I was hoping someone here would have some recommendations. Personally I need it to:

• Be affordable and easy to setup and use
• Backup external and network drives to the cloud (physically keeping another drive somewhere else isn't an option for me)
• Be trustworthy and have strong commitments to security and privacy
• Work well for my use case: preferably automatic from Windows

Looking forward to any comments or recommendations. Thanks!

So currently I get most of my music from soundtracks ripped from games and from Bandicamp. However, quite a few artists that go through traditional publishers are not on Bandicamp.

Now, while I could go through the hassle of installing iTunes on Linux through WINE, I dont want to because:

• WINE can be a hassle, especially if the app does some strange things.
• Id rather not support apple in any way if I can

So, are there any major platforms that allow downloading .mp3 or better yet, .flac files, especially for artists going through bigger publishers?