Tweetstorm related: https://twitter.com/bioxcession/status/1028322450910732289

Upfront: the basic premise of the book is that Theranos was an exploitative, evil company headed by two exploitative, evil people. It makes an effort to not apologize for Elizabeth, or blame her actions on anyone else. She was sucked into the vortex of literally being a bloodsucker. In fact, the book - at one point - goes so far as to suggest she may be a sociopath.

Now, the book was a good read, and I think the point makes sense - bad company is bad. But it's stirring up a ton of music in my head - especially since it compared Theranos to "vaporware companies" - practices that the Valley has engaged in since forever (promising endlessly and not delivering).

Vaporware: software or hardware that has been advertised but is not yet available to buy, either because it is only a concept or because it is still being written or designed.

Theranos was no different, except it tried selling vaporware in the form of a healthcare device. Insisting that this device worked (it didn't), and insisting that most of their received blood tests were running on it (they weren't).

It's my opinion that Theranos would have been hailed as an enormous success if they had delayed for long enough to make this technology work. I believe that my point is furthered by the fact that Walgreens waited through two years of delays, of and tolerated outright lies. If the tech ever came out, all would have been forgiven.

My argument boils down to this: Elizabeth wasn't a shitty person, she operated correctly in a shitty system.

She took risks, yes - but they were necessary to maintain the illusion that she had a product that amounted to anything. Eventually, she hoped, her team would crack the nut and she'd come out unscathed.

The problem amounts to our system encouraging this type of behavior - she was visited by the vice president, Kissinger, Mattis, had dinners with the Clintons, and was a fellow at Harvard medical school. Nobody thought twice because the tech was so exciting.

Tildes, what can we do to prevent this type of behavior, and am I overlooking something?

I just finished writing the first draft of a short story called "Thirteen Cuts", weighing in at 4,493 words.

Dr. Gilbert Porter is a psychiatrist who must weigh his own conscience after a patient has hasn't seen in months admits to having participated in the judicial murder of an person who was not guilty of the charges against him. Does Dr. Porter have what it takes to help see justice done?

It's going to take some revision before it's ready for publication, though. I know shouldn't be this stoked about finishing a first draft, but it's the first time I've finished any sort of written fiction since I finished Silent Clarion in 2016. I just wanted to celebrate a little, and my wife's out of town.

In France, we all need two identity documents to vote, a voter's card and a national identity card (or passport). It is not at all controversial, even at the far left of the political spectrum. In America, people say it's voter suppression.

The ethics of piracy have been discussed, with some coming down on the side that it's indefensible, and others coming down on the side that artists make their money via ticket sales/merch/donations, that sharing of culture should be a right, that the price of music is too expensive, etc.

I happen to mostly be in that latter group, but as we all know, the various industries in whose interest it is to keep old business models going wield incredible influence and will slaughter us with lawsuits. In the age of the internet, with information being instantly transmittable from pole to pole, is it time we collectively stood up and laugh at these ridiculous demands they have? How much clout can you really have? They can't arrest everyone. AFAIK, this is what Pirate Bay does. They just don't tolerate the intimidation.

So I just got back from a fireworks show for my city celebrating something or another. The center was blocked of from traffic for the day and lots of police around. Generally a massive event with the fireworks lasting almost an hour - kind of grueling by the end.

It's not like this is a once a year ocation, we had a national day fireworks show not even two weeks ago.

When walking back there was an apartment surrounded by fire trucks - can't imagine how they made in through the streets.

So is it worth it? Are there better ways to mark an ocation? Any fireworks related stories? Eork in pyrotech?

For those of us have our browsers set to clear all cookies upon exit find it annoying to login in the middle of the night only to get our eyes blasted with the white theme. Settings need to dug around with to switch is to something darker every time. This could be avoided by having the server remember the theme preferences of the users.

If this is something that's already discussed previously or planned to be worked on internally, please correct me below. Thank you

I currently use Lastpass, and while I'm overall happy with what I have right now, some issues (like slow firefox support, android functionality that only works arbitrarily) makes me want to look at other solutions.

I have heard about other popuar managers like Keepass and Bitwarden, but haven't made the plunge yet. So I thought I could kickstart a discussion on this topic.

Which password manager do you use or have you used? Why do you recommend it (or not)?

I had a thought, which I'm not sure I agree with, but figured it would be a good conversation.

So much of our social discourse, and exploitation of our social platforms, can be associated with anonymity. Given the divisiveness of our times, it feels like it's almost a pre-req for a platform like this (this has already been discussed in other threads).

A slightly different question: Is there ever a place for folks that want to announce their identity, and go through something like a Twitter verification process? This could feed into the future trust/reputation feature.

So our little group gained an extra player and after our last session two people were going away for sometime (married couple) so our DM came up with a fantastic way to introduce our new person, our DM asked all of us to come up with a backstory for our characters and what he did was very creative.
We are playing The lost mine of Phandelver, our last session we had run into a Nothic not long after we had a long rest. So our DM set the scene that our married couple would watch over us while the rest of us went to sleep, this is where the backstories we created came up. We all had reoccurring nightmares about the worst moment in our lives and had to change the pivotal point of the dream, as each of us changed the dream they would pop up into the next person to help along the way. Once the dreams were all complete we found ourselves in a 5th dream with an unknown Gnome wizard who fought a necromancer and became cursed and was the Nothic, once we broke that spell our new member joined the party.
I should add this was the first time our DM tried anything like this and since we are all rather new to the world of table top RPG it was really great.

So how was your last session? anything fun or not so fun happen?

One rule I really like on askreddit is that you can't out your own answer within the body of your question post. Rather, you're encouraged to answer in a comment. It prevents soap-boxing and "story time", and allows discussion of your answer to be nicely compartmentalised from discussions of everyone else's answers.

While I don't at all think this should be a rule for ask-style posts on Tildes, I think it's a great guideline. I always try to do this myself, and I thought I should put it out there and see if it's something the rest of our community would adopt. Thoughts?

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/