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!

My D&D group mostly used Lego for the longest time, but we recently decided to give miniatures a shot because we were adding more people and I only have so many minifigs to share (unless you want Stormtroopers in your fantasy setting, that is!). A few weeks ago we met up to paint our miniatures for our new campaign and I think that was the most relaxing, calming thing I've ever done. We all sat in silence basically, noobing our way through the painting process and we had a lot of fun.

My character is a sheltered rich southern man who sounds a bit like a mix between Colonel Sanders and Foghorn Leghorn. He's a sorcerer and despite how is mini ended up looking, he does not cast bubblegum -- https://imgur.com/fr4tc6Z

But anyway, looking at it now there are some obvious spots where I messed up and certainly some things I'd do differently now. But until I'm able to get my hands on another miniature, I was wondering if anyone here had experience with painting miniatures and would be able to share some advice?

Picard begins investigating the mystery of Dahj as well as what her very existence means to the Federation. Without Starfleet's support, Picard is left leaning on others for help, including Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) and an estranged former colleague, Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd). Meanwhile, hidden enemies are also interested in where Picard's search for the truth about Dahj will lead.

I've been discovering recently how convenient Discord can make developing with the feedback of your community, or of selected members of your community.

This is assuming that you are already talking with your dev team and community on Discord and have a server for that.

Create your game on the Discord platform (they do the same thing as Steam basically), and integrate an alpha-access store page right into your Discord server as a channel. This store page can be restricted to whomever you want via normal Discord permissions. Binaries can be distributed wonderfully simply this way, becuase if you're talking with the community in Discord already, you can just send them to that store page channel embedded directly in your server where they can simply click "install" to test your most recent binaries.

The agreement with Discord restricts only a few things that I wasn't interested in anyway: They don't want you to do an exclusive deal with another distribution service (duh), and anywhere you advertise your game you must mention that it's also available on Discord in addition to wherever else you're distributing it. That's pretty much fine with me.

Anyway, I'm having a lot more fun with this than I had previously trying to distribute pre-release alpha binaries, so I wanted to see what you all thought about it. And what criticisms there are to be had.

Rules

1. Please identify your city, and post a link to Wikipedia if the name is ambiguous or not well know. If you do not wish to provide this information for privacy reasons, you can provide some general informations about your city or nominate a similar one.

2. Your funds are unlimited, but you're limited to a maximum of 3 projects. The projects can be as big or small as you want. And try to give a reasonable amount of detail. This is not intended for comedy or fictionalized speculation. Please submit ideas that you think are actually viable!

3. You must increase any metrics included on or related to the Human Development Index^[1] of your city.

4. The projects don't need to focus on your birthplace or where you currently live. Any city you have significant knowledge of will do. But it must be a single one.

5. Both consequentalist and deontological ethics must be observed. The projects must not contradict the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In other words, be excellent to each other!

6. Unlike my previous ~talk thread, in this one I won't play a jackass genie or anything like that. The purpose of this thread is to have a healthy discussion on urban development by sharing our aspirations for the cities we love.

Example of areas to improve

• culture
• education
• internet access
• employment
• transportation
• water
• environment

^[1] This is only a starting point. There is space for subjectivity

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Clicking on "Roadmap" at the bottom of any Tildes page brings up an issue board. I'm wondering if that's still being maintained and whether it's worth keeping?

The items listed under "in progress" don't look like they are actually in progress. For example, "Add sticky / pinned topics" is marked as "In progress" but in fact it's a year old and there's been no activity for four months.

Prompted by a recent tildes post about vice, and also this from the bbc, and a conversation with a colleague who just went to a strip club, I keep thinking about this issue.

I have a stake in this, despite being cis male: I have mother, sisters, wife, and most importantly young daughter. And I am a feminist, on simple moral grounds.

My baseline position is that whether a woman chooses to engage in sex work is, and should be legally and socially supported as, entirely her own choice.

The only question I have any business answering, or participating in finding an answer, is whether my patronage of sex work is inherently exploitive, to either the woman whom I am patronizing* or to other women individually or to womanhood and general issues of gender.

And I just can’t come up with a good answer. I do look at porn, but increasingly, as with meat, the potential ethical problems of it are reducing the enjoyment. I have tried to ease my conscience by limiting myself to cartoons and stories, but those wouldn’t stop the harm that is caused by the mere existence of porn, if any exists.

As a purely practical matter, the existence of the industry leads to opportunities for exploitation of individuals, and the advancement of a culture of gender exploitation. But as the war on drugs has so ably demonstrated, any attempt at prohibition only increases the level of exploitation, while smart regulation decreases it. Regardless, though, there’s plenty of exploitation to go around the world, I heard there’s thing called #metoo.

I come from a sex-suppressing, fundamentalist “Christian” background. The quotes are there to indicate that I think much of the practices were anything but christ-like. The principles there swirl through the culture around me in varying degrees of intensity, and they inform and direct my choices (sometimes against my will and my better hopes and ideals). I have to be open to the notion that any objection I have to sex work, or my participation, is entirely a cultural construct. And while I don’t think it is true, I cannot dismiss the notion that morals themselves may have no possible objective existence, having relevance and utility (if at all) only in very time and space limited scopes.

It is what I believe the sociologists call a “wicked” problem. It involves really complicated normative stances, and there’s no data analysis that can provide any guidance. For myself, I expect my participation to continue to wane as I mature. I only hope that whatever I do only further enables and empowers the women in my life and everywhere.

• I almost stopped myself from using this word when I realized potential implications, but ultimately left it in because it (and the fact it was my natural inclination to select it) really highlights the issue for me and hopefully others

Bonus hypothetical: If porn is somehow wrong and harmful, even drawings and writings, are sex fantasies also wrong?