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/

See image for what I mean: https://imgur.com/BGzLKGq

Basically, it can be hard to track new comments made in an old topic. In the recent one about tulpas, I checked in every so often to follow ongoing discussions but had to keep skimming the entire topic every time just to spot the new comments.

If there could be a kind of "recent comments" in the sidebar, it would save a lot of time and make it much easier to stay on top of evolving discussions: just click the comments you haven't seen.

The interest thread got a fair amount of... interest, so I'll be moving forward with this rewatch.

Black Mirror is available to watch on Netflix, this link should take you to it.

A thread will be posted every 3 days; this should be enough time for people to watch the episodes, and hopefully won't spam ~tv too much. The first thread will be posted on Friday, and the full schedule is below, let me know if there's anything wrong.

An additional idea I had was for us to rate the episodes. In each thread, I'll post a comment where you can reply with a number from 1-5. I'll then average these numbers to get a collective rating. At the end, we can have a list of our collective favourite and least favourite, episodes.

I'm excited to discuss these episodes, see you on Friday!