{
  "author": "@json (Jason)",
  "message": "Hello, people of Tildes. This does seem like an excellent platform for discussion. I hope you enjoy my kinda bad joke."
}

@Jason was taken, so I had to drop the a and become a data format. I have used json as a username in many other places before, when available.

I like thinking about alternative history. There are people like Harry Turtledove who write extensive alternative histories based on whether the South's main general's war plans got to the Northern armies' general in time for the Battle of Antietam. For me there's something appealing about thinking back through complex events in world history and finding critical moments and critical decisions that might have gone another way. I'm also quite taken with the idea that some historical events end up in hindsight looking like perfect storms, where a number of complex variables make the world we now know, but where any one of those variables would have produced a massively different result.

But I'm less interested in thinking about waving a magic wand to change the weather of some day or to change facts on the ground or morale or something like that. What I'm most interested in are situations where someone's individual decision might have dramatically altered the world. Can you identify one decision that happened in the past that you would have that person making it change? How might that set us up in a different reality?

A small note on housekeeping before I let you go. I know this might be a type of topic that walks the fence between something designed for ~talk and something best suited in ~humanities. I think of this as kind of an experiment to see how best to handle topics that straddle two different tildes.

I'm interested in all responses, but if the answer is "well" or better and the following are factors that contributed to that sense of well-being, could you divulge your job industry, if applicable, and/or the Canadian city where you currently reside? (If privacy-minded or jealously guarding a secret utopia, province would suffice. Thank you.)

About me: besides the current political and lazy-to-anti-intellectual climate of the US, I'm pressingly concerned about global warming; after a dozen years of living in and around refreshing Seattle (compared to southern California), I had to give in and buy an air conditioner this summer. Anecdotally, it seems to be a trend.

My favorite genre right now is probably the slice of life genre. i've recently finished 3-Gatsu no Lion, and i gotta say for an anime about shougi it hit me hard i may or may not have teared up on a few occasions... my favorite from the genre though is probably Clannad: After Story, now this one really made me cry, they break the floodgates and keep rescheduling repairs. so i have to recommend those two if you're looking for great slice of life anime.

Hi everyone, glad to see you here in week number 5! It's time for another classic record discussion: John Coltrane's A Love Supreme!

Here's the place to discuss your thoughts on the record, your history with it or the artist, and basically talk about whatever you want to that goes along with A Love Supreme. Remember that this is intended to be a slow moving thing, feel free to take your time and comment at any point in the week!

If you'd like to stream or buy the album, it can be found on most platforms here.

Don't forget to nominate and vote for next week's obscure record in response to this comment!

Choose three words to describe the kind of community you want here, and explain why you chose those words.

Diverse

More points of view makes for a more in depth, nuanced conversation that brings viewpoints I may not have considered before. I have plenty of experience as a native woman in Canada, but that isn't the only viewpoint. Much as it pains me to admit, I don't know everything and sometimes I miss layers of conversations that others can point out to me. Those viewpoints are the ones I need to read if I want to continue growing as a person.

Welcoming

I want a community that isn't full of gatekeepers, who don't arbitrarily decide who should or should not belong before they've even had a chance to contribute. I want to see people given a chance to show who they can be on a new platform, and how they can make this a better place. The last thing we need is to chase away people who might otherwise make valid contributions to the community by being dicks.

Interesting

More threads, more topics for discussion, more traffic in general. I want to see dozens of threads I can contribute to or at least read on a daily basis, whatever that topic may be. A new book series, a hobby, a viewpoint on politics. But we're not going to get there without a diverse, welcoming group to keep new people engaged.

I just realized that I completely glossed over this week's programming challenge. For this week, let's do something more flexible: write a program that accepts a file as input--either through a file name/path or through standard input--and perform any form of analysis you want on its contents. That's it!

For instance, you could count the occurrences of each word and find the most common ones, or you could determine the average sentence length, or the average unique words per sentence. You could even perform an analysis on changes in words and sentence structure over time (could be useful for e.g. poetry where metre may play an important role). You can stick with simple numbers or dive right into the grittiest forms of textual analysis currently available. You could output raw text or even a graphical representation. You could even do a bit of everything!

How simple or complex your solution ends up being is completely up to you, but I encourage you to challenge yourself by e.g. learning a new language or about different textual analysis techniques, or by focusing on code quality rather than complexity, or even by taking a completely different approach to the problem than you ordinarily would. There are a lot of learning opportunities available here.

Hi all,

I've been thinking about this for a couple days, and since there's another discussion about the alt-right/racism/offensive attitudes, I figured it was a good time to hopefully initiate the discussion even though I myself don't have much to contribute to it.

What I'm asking for is ideas to foster inclusiveness on Tildes. I personally haven't noticed much on Reddit that's bad, but then again, I'm a young (well, sorta) white dude. What I have noticed is that, as a man, I am the "default" gender on Reddit. People are always calling me "man" on there, even when I have not given any clues about my gender.

As for my race, I haven't noticed anything making my whiteness the "default"--people call me "man" all the time, but they don't call me "honky man," after all--but I unfortunately might not notice that. Anyway, I should stop blabbing, because I unfortunately don't have much to add to this discussion.

My question is, though--and I hope other people agree that it's an important topic to discuss--what can Tildes do to encourage inclusiveness? What can Tildes do to make everyone feel welcome, regardless of their sex/gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, and identity in general? If I were a woman and someone called me, "man," I expect that I would feel less welcome.

Edit: I should clarify that I'm looking for systematic ideas for what to do: if Tildes were as big as Reddit, what policies or structures could be implemented to remind people or encourage them to be more open to everyone? Is there anything that's even possible?

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