What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

There was a thread about this coincidentally exactly one year ago, give or take three hours. Ah, to be back in January 2020

I've been poking around on the fediverse again and I figured I'll never start using it unless I'm following some people. So, who here is on it? Please share some other people you follow, if you like.

I made an account a while back, and it was on the default instance since I didn't know any others to choose. I feel like it's a deliberate choice though (if nothing else it will give me a more curated timeline to scroll through) so I'd like to be deliberate about it at some point.

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 week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

The question is open to anything that anyone wants to share about changing one’s name (e.g. social, familial, or legal proceedings), but in particular I’m most interested in what the personal process of deciding on a particular name was like for you. Was there one that just “clicked”? Did you try out different names until you found one that fit? Did you choose the name based on meaning, aesthetics, association, or something else entirely? How did it feel to change your own name in your own head? How did it feel when others started using it to refer to you? What do you like most about the name you chose?

Also, I don’t want to pressure anyone to share their name since that is very identifying information, so feel free to share details of your experience without sharing your name itself — unless that’s something you’re comfortable with putting online here.

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

Emphasis on interesting, please. Obviously subjective, but I'll say I don't generally find dramas qualify unless they also examine a system or make a commentary in the process, e.g. The Wire, The Newsroom. Just about anything else is fair game.

Any language welcome. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever.

"Wrong" here can be intentional or unintentional. Maybe you completely missed that a character had a certain ability and got through the entire game without knowing there was so much more you could be doing! Instead, maybe you specifically challenged yourself to get through the game without using that ability, seeing if you were up to the challenge! Maybe you activated cheats to cruise through on easy mode, or maybe you accidentally activated a cheat and had no idea that the game wasn't supposed to be that easy (ask me about my FF7 playthrough).

"Wrong" can also be however you decide to interpret it: counter to the developer's intentions, exploiting the game engine, uncovering a loophole in the game's systems, pursuing your own goals instead of the game's goals, etc. It's not meant to be a moralistic judgment by any means (play any game however you want!) but more just an identifier that you went against the game's standard norms and expectations.

Tell us what you did "wrong", why you did it that way, and what the outcomes were. Did it make the game more fun or exciting? Did it ruin the game for you?

This thread is inspired by an off-topic discussion in another thread that was so interesting that I wanted to make a whole post about it. I've often seen people on the net express surprise that others have different modes of thought, typically with statements like "It was surprising to learn that others do/don't have an internal monologue!", where the do/don't choice depends on the person. I've thought for a while that a lot of this confusion might arise from people interpreting "Internal monologue" differently, and that people might actually think more similarly that it appears at first glance. My attempt to explain this in that thread was:

For example, I certainly do not vocalize all of my thoughts and it seems like my speed of thought goes much faster than the amount of time it would take to vocalize every single thing going through my head. That being said, once I concentrate on what I am thinking about, there is definitely a vocal component. If I think about going downstairs to get a snack, my thoughts are non-vocal, but once I think about the fact I am thinking about going to get a snack, I impose a narrative that has some type of vocal quality to it - I will think, I believe in words, that my thought was "I am going to go get a snack". I suspect in discussions like this a lot of people perhaps conflate the thought with the thought about the thought, since the latter is necessary to convey what one is thinking about and (at least in my case) has some type of narrative element.

So I am curious, Tildes - can you explain how you think, preferably both in moments where you are not actively thinking about thinking and those where you are?

(I don't personally have any interest in trying much of anything if anyone interprets this post as such. And yes, 'drugs' is a general/vague and loaded term and I might be asking too much in a single topic)

My opinion on drug legalization was generally summed up as pro-legalization, but really because just banning everything doesn't work and generally just understood drugs as bad.

However, I often hear people talking about drugs as giving them new experiences, enhancing sensations and generally being fun.

However, being Brazilian/Latin American, drugs here are often associated with illegal traffic, gangs, poverty, crime, among other bad things and, unlike in the US and Europe, this is generally something that is exterior to us, nor a position held overwhelmingly by social conservatives who rant about "the devil's lettuce", because it affects poor people (although, yes, that's also true in the US).

So back to the title question:

What separates people that have positive and negative experiences with drugs?

The 3 obvious differences are:

The drugs used. Drug gangs traffic stuff like cocaine and areas like [the] Cracolândia are populated by people dependent on crack, while people advocate for legalization of weed or psychedelics which are very different and "weed is no worse than alcohol" is confirmed to be truth and has been for a while. A question I have concerning this is what separates 'good' drugs from 'bad' drugs?

Preparation, since obviously you don't want to be high at work (or asking for help on a Tildes thread, that happened.) A question I have in that area is what preparations do people take before taking weed or DMT and other drugs.

Their motivations for taking drugs, since a lot of the bad examples come from people taking drugs to fill holes in their lives, while good examples are the vast majority of the time recreational (aka, for fun.)

Are there any other differences anyone wants to delineate?