So since we no doubt have many rpg gamers amongst us, I thought I'd start a weekly or bi monthly thread to post about looking for groups, looking for members and the like. So if you want to, why not come and make a post.

I myself happen to be looking for people who'd be up to play a spot of Shadowrun or preferably Cryptomancer.

You are a legendary warrior, with a several decades-long reputation of tirelessly prevailing over hordes of monstrosities. In a sudden moment of clarity, you come to your senses in a psychiatric ward – a miraculous medication has been tested on you to counter your schizophrenia. As time passes, you begin to recognize the people and other things from your former psychosis.

[This is the first attempt at having a writing prompt at Tildes. It is too long to wholly fit in the title (only 200 characters permitted – nailed it exactly), so it had to be expanded in the text field.]

Edit: as per a suggestion in another thread, please feel free to be inspired only by the title text and use the additional info here only if You feel like it helps. I believe that if a prompt sparkles something that ultimately doesn't have much to do with the prompt itself, the goal of the prompt is still accomplished.

I read the book 'Municipal Dreams' a few weeks ago and really enjoyed the history of social housing presented in it. I picked up 'Living in Cities' by Ralph Tubbs which is like a modernist new town pamphlet style book about the futures of cities & towns. I also have 'Post-Modern Buildings in Britain' which is quite nice for a flip through and some history of these buildings.

I'd definitely reccomend Municipal Dreams for anyone even slightly intrested in UK social housing (and more) and I think the way it is presented is really nice.

I was wondering if anyone knew any particularly good books about architecture (specifically about social housing's architecture), I realise this is quite hard as little has been recorded around some of this stuff.

Further any books surrounding modernist ideals that lead to this would be nice to discuss as well as I've not seen much in the way of primary sources here.

It's been a while since the last one of these, so whether you're providing an update or a brand new story: What's been going on in your game? What excitement has transpired in your life-on-paper?

-LTADnD

tor.com/2018/06/06/meat-and-salt-and-sparks-rich-larson/

A futuristic murder mystery about detective partners—a human and an enhanced chimpanzee—who are investigating why a woman murdered an apparently random stranger on the subway

Found this today and read it for my morning break. I'm worried about spoilers, but I'm curious about people's thoughts on being a non-human intelligence and the subsequent integration into human society. Did this short evoke any particular emotions in you?

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!

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

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

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

If you haven't watched Firefly, this should still be safe to read. No spoilers.

Let me start by saying I'm a huge fan of Firefly. If someone could somehow combined the core cast, the favour of the universe, the ship, the adventures and everything into one awesome person, that person would be my BFF. However, as an Asian, I probably would not be theirs.

Background

The series is a space cowboy western drama. It takes place in the year 2517 in assumed to be distant solar system from our Earth (Earth-that-was). From the comics, there's a brief comment that mentions Earth-that-was sent generation ships to colonize this new solar system. The ships were sent by the two main superpowers at the time - USA and China. This explains the general western feel mixed with, I'm going to call it - generic Asia.

Core characters

• Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds
• Zoe Alleyne Washburne
• Hoban "Wash" Washburne
• Inara Serra
• Jayne Cobb
• Kaywinnet Lee "Kaylee" Frye
• Dr. Simon Tam
• River Tam
• Derrial Book
• (The ship, Serenity)

And yes, though Kaylee, and the Tam's stand out as Asian-ish names, they are not Asian. In fact no one in the core cast is. There was mention that Kaylee was suppose to be, but they just fell in love with Jewel Staite. I honestly can't imagine another Kaylee, but still can't help but wonder. And to be honest, I'm not sure how I feel with the idea of the only Asian walking around as the only person wearing Chinese clothes.

Non-core characters

Too many to list, but feel free to scroll down the list on IMDb.

You'll find "Jim Lau" - Narrator. I also believe I saw an Asian woman in "Heart of Gold" but can't find her name, so I'm guessing it's an uncredited part.

That's right, in a universe settled by the Americans and Chinese, you'll see maybe one unnamed Asian.

Asia without Asians

But not seeing Asian people doesn't mean there's no Asian influence.

• Kaylee wears "Chinese" clothes a fair bit and even has a paper umbrella. Of course, if any of you have recently visited pretty much anywhere in China, you'll notice no Chinese people wear clothing like that walking their dog.
• Chinese food, like "bao" is also mentioned.
• Quirky Chinese things like "washing feet" and "hundreds of fat children" are woven in.
• The Chinese language in both written and spoken form are littered through-out. The ship, Serenity is named in Chinese (painted on her), but no one actually refers to her by it. Bits of Chinese are tossed around everywhere and obviously every person in this universe is expected to be fluent. There was Asian consultation on this part, so a lot of the language is "correct". They went out of their way to string together crazy sentences, so it's not anything most people would say, but honestly adds to the show. And for their part, you can tell the actors do put an effort in speaking it right, with varying levels of success.

Final thoughts

I still love the show, but do feel disappointed that someone can obviously love my culture so much to see its influence everywhere in this series, but not enough to actually include us.

Edit: formatting

for those keeping track, this title's in italian, not afrikaans.

normally don't "summer" kind of stuff, but as always, i just write what's on my mind once the liquor hits.

hope you all enjoy.<3

much love

bishop

sometimes I need a bubble bath.
ginger ale, vodka splash
couple friends, a couple grams
electronic cigarettes.
bath bomb with the glitter in
free pass to commit a sin
babygirl let's dive in.
bet we won't even remember it.

standing at the precipice
not a lot of trust to give
broken down, a sad kid
you're steady in the madness
babygirl I feel it happening
tension slipping kinda rapid
cold beers and a hot kiss
forbidden peach, like genesis

i write music
to sin to.
baby let me
sing with you
sigh the notes, we
can sing tunes
you're the nectar
the gods knew
i write music
to sin to.
baby let me
sing with you
sigh the notes, we
can sing tunes
you're the nectar
the gods knew

(beat.)

nicotine and a lotta weed
open up a new side of me
one that wanna see you smiling
fuck what your other man think
two friends in a summer fling
you bite your lip when you kiss me
's why you always invite me,
when you're home and feel lonely.

Want my music to go hard,
Sing for my friends in the dark,
Get to drunk to remember,
The bullshit feeling sad part

sometimes I need a bubble bath.
ginger ale, vodka splash
couple friends, a couple grams
electronic cigarettes.
bath bomb with the glitter in
free pass to commit a sin
babygirl let's dive in.
bet we won't even remember it.

If you want to make the site diverse then people need to stop writing as though the audience is one country. Obviously it doesn't count if they're posting in a geographically relevant group eg. ~news.usa

Expertise researcher Anders Ericsson on why the popular "ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert" rule mischaracterizes his research:

No, the ten-thousand-hour rule isn't really a rule

Ralf Krampe, Clemens Tesch-Römer, and I published the results from our study of the Berlin violin students in 1993. These findings would go on to become a major part of the scientific literature on expert performers, and over the years a great many other researchers have referred to them. But it was actually not until 2008, with the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, that our results attracted much attention from outside the scientific community. In his discussion of what it takes to become a top performer in a given field, Gladwell offered a catchy phrase: “the ten-thousand-hour rule.” According to this rule, it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a master in most fields. We had indeed mentioned this figure in our report as the average number of hours that the best violinists had spent on solitary practice by the time they were twenty. Gladwell himself estimated that the Beatles had put in about ten thousand hours of practice while playing in Hamburg in the early 1960s and that Bill Gates put in roughly ten thousand hours of programming to develop his skills to a degree that allowed him to found and develop Microsoft. In general, Gladwell suggested, the same thing is true in essentially every field of human endeavor— people don’t become expert at something until they’ve put in about ten thousand hours of practice.

The rule is irresistibly appealing. It’s easy to remember, for one thing. It would’ve been far less effective if those violinists had put in, say, eleven thousand hours of practice by the time they were twenty. And it satisfies the human desire to discover a simple cause-and-effect relationship: just put in ten thousand hours of practice at anything, and you will become a master.

Unfortunately, this rule— which is the only thing that many people today know about the effects of practice— is wrong in several ways. (It is also correct in one important way, which I will get to shortly.) First, there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours. Gladwell could just as easily have mentioned the average amount of time the best violin students had practiced by the time they were eighteen— approximately seventy-four hundred hours— but he chose to refer to the total practice time they had accumulated by the time they were twenty, because it was a nice round number. And, either way, at eighteen or twenty, these students were nowhere near masters of the violin. They were very good, promising students who were likely headed to the top of their field, but they still had a long way to go when I studied them. Pianists who win international piano competitions tend to do so when they’re around thirty years old, and thus they’ve probably put in about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand hours of practice by then; ten thousand hours is only halfway down that path.

And the number varies from field to field. Steve Faloon became the very best person in the world at memorizing strings of digits after only about two hundred hours of practice. I don’t know exactly how many hours of practice the best digit memorizers put in today before they get to the top, but it is likely well under ten thousand.

Second, the number of ten thousand hours at age twenty for the best violinists was only an average. Half of the ten violinists in that group hadn’t actually accumulated ten thousand hours at that age. Gladwell misunderstood this fact and incorrectly claimed that all the violinists in that group had accumulated over ten thousand hours.

Third, Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that might be labeled “practice.” For example, one of his key examples of the ten-thousand-hour rule was the Beatles’ exhausting schedule of performances in Hamburg between 1960 and 1964. According to Gladwell, they played some twelve hundred times, each performance lasting as much as eight hours, which would have summed up to nearly ten thousand hours. Tune In, an exhaustive 2013 biography of the Beatles by Mark Lewisohn, calls this estimate into question and, after an extensive analysis, suggests that a more accurate total number is about eleven hundred hours of playing. So the Beatles became worldwide successes with far less than ten thousand hours of practice. More importantly, however, performing isn’t the same thing as practice. Yes, the Beatles almost certainly improved as a band after their many hours of playing in Hamburg, particularly because they tended to play the same songs night after night, which gave them the opportunity to get feedback— both from the crowd and themselves— on their performance and find ways to improve it. But an hour of playing in front of a crowd, where the focus is on delivering the best possible performance at the time, is not the same as an hour of focused, goal-driven practice that is designed to address certain weaknesses and make certain improvements— the sort of practice that was the key factor in explaining the abilities of the Berlin student violinists.

A closely related issue is that, as Lewisohn argues, the success of the Beatles was not due to how well they performed other people’s music but rather to their songwriting and creation of their own new music. Thus, if we are to explain the Beatles’ success in terms of practice, we need to identify the activities that allowed John Lennon and Paul McCartney— the group’s two primary songwriters— to develop and improve their skill at writing songs. All of the hours that the Beatles spent playing concerts in Hamburg would have done little, if anything, to help Lennon and McCartney become better songwriters, so we need to look elsewhere to explain the Beatles’ success.

This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability that we saw in the music students or the ballet dancers. Generally speaking, deliberate practice and related types of practice that are designed to achieve a certain goal consist of individualized training activities— usually done alone— that are devised specifically to improve particular aspects of performance.

The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn’t say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice. But nothing in my study implied this. To show a result like this, I would have needed to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that our study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.

The question of whether anyone can become an expert performer in a given field by taking part in enough designed practice is still open, and I will offer some thoughts on this issue in the next chapter. But there was nothing in the original study to suggest that it was so.

Gladwell did get one thing right, and it is worth repeating because it’s crucial: becoming accomplished in any field in which there is a well-established history of people working to become experts requires a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. It may not require exactly ten thousand hours, but it will take a lot.

We have seen this in chess and the violin, but research has shown something similar in field after field. Authors and poets have usually been writing for more than a decade before they produce their best work, and it is generally a decade or more between a scientist’s first publication and his or her most important publication— and this is in addition to the years of study before that first published research. A study of musical composers by the psychologist John R. Hayes found that it takes an average of twenty years from the time a person starts studying music until he or she composes a truly excellent piece of music, and it is generally never less than ten years. Gladwell’s ten-thousand-hour rule captures this fundamental truth— that in many areas of human endeavor it takes many, many years of practice to become one of the best in the world— in a forceful, memorable way, and that’s a good thing.

On the other hand, emphasizing what it takes to become one of the best in the world in such competitive fields as music, chess, or academic research leads us to overlook what I believe to be the more important lesson from our study of the violin students. When we say that it takes ten thousand— or however many— hours to become really good at something, we put the focus on the daunting nature of the task. While some may take this as a challenge— as if to say, “All I have to do is spend ten thousand hours working on this, and I’ll be one of the best in the world!”— many will see it as a stop sign: “Why should I even try if it’s going to take me ten thousand hours to get really good?” As Dogbert observed in one Dilbert comic strip, “I would think a willingness to practice the same thing for ten thousand hours is a mental disorder.”

But I see the core message as something else altogether: In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement— think of what two hundred hours of practice brought Steve Faloon— but you have only scratched the surface. You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you.

This puts the ten-thousand-hour rule in a completely different light: The reason that you must put in ten thousand or more hours of practice to become one of the world’s best violinists or chess players or golfers is that the people you are being compared to or competing with have themselves put in ten thousand or more hours of practice. There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement. So, yes, if you wish to become one of the best in the world in one of these highly competitive fields, you will need to put in thousands and thousands of hours of hard, focused work just to have a chance of equaling all of those others who have chosen to put in the same sort of work.

One way to think about this is simply as a reflection of the fact that, to date, we have found no limitations to the improvements that can be made with particular types of practice. As training techniques are improved and new heights of achievement are discovered, people in every area of human endeavor are constantly finding ways to get better, to raise the bar on what was thought to be possible, and there is no sign that this will stop. The horizons of human potential are expanding with each new generation.

-- Ericsson, Anders; Pool, Robert. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (p. 109-114). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

I'M ALIVE!!!!!
Sorry about that; my get up and go got up and went without me. I wandered out of funkland today just in time to be a week and a day late.
<_<

For this week, you may use any media you like - photos, sketches, paints, collage, et. al. to portray BLUE. In any sense of the word. Posting and up voting will cease when the 16th is over and done with.

If you end up with the most votes appreciating your piece(s), you will have the honour to decide the theme to the next week's thread! If that's not enough I'm sure I can find a gif of people grovelling in your magnificent wake. \o/