Its a heavy show but three episodes in, I'm loving the single shot approach that they took.

Without cuts, it's all about the pace of the drama, the honesty of each beat and the quality of the performance. That, and I haven't seen a show tackle toxic masculinity in quite this way and I'm super here for it.

Has anybody else seen it? What did you think?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films 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.

This is the twelfth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Our next book will be Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky at the end of April.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself. Also, this month will be slightly different. I have been exceptionally busy and didn't finish the book this time. I am hoping that you all who did read it will come up with interesting questions in addition to your comments/ reviews.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like yemen, brave and septic tanks. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was documenting.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

I'm not a very smart person, and never studied philosophy at school or college. I've been reading Discworld books since I was a wee little person and even though I've pretty thoroughly absorbed the messages to the best of my understanding, I'm sure there's lots I've missed.

I know this question has a bit of complexity in it, as someone like Vimes believes different things to the Patrician, or Granny Weatherwax, or Brutha, or Death.

Still, I feel like there might be something that links it all together and was wondering if anyone smarter than me might know?

What would your past self(intentionally vague) say about your current self(also intentionally vague)?

Look forward to hearing others' thoughts.

2 Grand Prix races finished already. I'd forgotten what Shanghai International Circuit looked like; cool track.

Not as exciting as Melbourne, but that's probably because the rain really spiced up AusGP at the end. Some thoughts as I watched:

• Alonso retired due to break issues in Lap 5. Not a great start to the season
• Weird to see Max lose two spots at the start of the first lap and not immediately recover
• Poor Yuki with his broken frontwing. Broke out of nowhere, too. Man just can't catch a break...
• Great little fight between Charles and Max in Lap 53. Max did eventually recover to his starting P4
• Both Haas in the points? Nice! Ocon P7 and Bearman P10

Congrats to Piastri on his 3rd F1 win! I get the feeling we're going to be seeing this McLaren 1-2 frequently. Who's in which position, we'll see. Though with the Ferraris, Russell, and Max also mixing it up up top, this should be a good season.

Next race:

Japanese Grand Prix
Suzuka Circuit
Sunday, April 6, 2025

I am Brazilian and I have used software to assist me in writing both English and Portuguese since I the 1990s. That was a great boost to my learning process, as I could see the corrections made to my writing and incorporate them in my writing. I also enjoy concoting sentences that feel correct and proper.

However, writing this way has disavantages.

First, when I write correct English, readers will assume that I am a native English speakers, generally American. This comes with a lot of baggage and expectations for the interpretion of sophisticated context which I lack. When I fail to conform to those expectations I am met with hostility. At that point it is useless to disclose my nationality, since the bad vibes are already set.

Second, formal and properly written paragraphs give the impression that I think too highly of myself, that I wish to give more weight to my ideas than they really have (someone was aggressive to me because I used the word "ontological" once...). Much of the world prefers the informal mode of communication which I personally find unpleasant. But bad interactions are way more unpleasant. So perhaps I shoud change the way I write to be intentionally informal and a little improper. That way everyone will understand that I am not a native English speaker and also that I do not believe that my ideas are inherently superior to everyone else's. Also, a little bit of error prevents people from thinking I am an AI.

I did not proofread this post and I feel ashamed. Maybe it is for the best.

eBay is updating its privacy policy, effective next month (2025-04-27). The major change is a new section about AI processing, accompanied by a new user setting with an opt-out checkbox for having your personal data feed their models.

While that page specifically references European areas, the privacy selection appears to be active and remembered between visits for non-Europe customers. It may not do anything for us at all. On the other hand, it seems nearly impossible to find that page from within account settings, so I thought I'd post a direct link.

I'm well aware that I'm anomalous for having read this to begin with, much less diffed it against the previous version. But since I already know that I'm weird, and this wouldn't be much of a discussion post without questions:

• How do you stay up to date with contract changes that might affect you, outside of widespread Internet outrage (such as recent Firefox news)?
• What's your threshold -- if any -- for deciding whether to quit a company over contract changes? Alternatively, have you ever walked away from a purchase, service, or other acquisition over the terms of the contracts?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films 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.

So Assassins Creed Shadows released this week, and so far the discourse surrounding the game is really all over the place with lots of good and bad reviews across the spectrum. I was a big fan of the Assassins Creed games from 1-3, and then I skipped the PS4 console generation so I didnt play any of the more recent ones. But this new one is about ninjas, which is rad, so Ive been following news about the game.

One thing I noticed, which is the main thing I want to discuss, when seeing clips of the game online is the focus on sword combat, and more specifically open combat. I dont know if this is a thing that became more of a focus in earlier games like Valhala or if its more a response to the success of Ghost of Tsushima. Im wondering if anyone else has thoughts on how the role of combat has evolved as the series has advanced.

In my personal view, a ninja assassin game should have minimal focus on direct combat. The ideal way an assassination should go is something like this:

1. Do some early missions to gather intel or do prep work

2. Take on "the approach" to your target, which will involve a combination of parkouring over rooftops and stealth kills to remove guards. Your efforts in step 1 will make this easier or harder.

3. Get into position and wait for the right moment when the target moves into the right place

4. Spring your trap, whether that be pouncing on them with a dagger or setting off an explosive or whatever

5. Drop a smoke bomb, disappear into the shadows, maybe jump off a rooftop into a haystack for good measure

When pulled off correctly, it should be like you were never there. Aside from the dead guy. If you are getting into a direct head on confrontation as a ninja, you have fucked up at ninja. To this end, I feel that in a stealth assassination game open combat should be more of a penalty for when you screw up and get caught, not part of the core strategy.

Looking back at the early games, this concept was applied in AC1. Getting into a fight with a Templar was pretty difficult and tedious. You didnt want to get stuck doing it, and if you did it was often better to just run. The times you were forced to fight head on it felt like you were trapped in a dire situation that was not to your advantage, so it was a good way to apply pressure to the player to make a scene seem tense.

In AC2 the combat was reworked and became significantly easier. I actually really like the way it was implemented. Technically you can get away with just hammering away at most weaker enemies until you break their guard, but the combat really shines when you fight defensively. If you focus in dodging and counter-kills, big fights become a thing of beauty. Ezio dodges and weaves effortlessly through the crowd, doing a slick spin slash every so often to slice a bad guys neck. Its all very stylistic and elegant and graceful in a way that makes Ezio look like a badass but is still very evocative of the idea of a master assassin.

And then AC3 is fine, I don't have a ton to say about that one.

Returning to Shadows, when I look at clips of people playing the game there is a lot of sword combat. The combat seems to often follow a pattern where the enemy will perform a fixed attack pattern with visual indications like a colored aura around their weapon, which the player must mitigate through precision by either dodge rolls or parrys, after which there will be a pause during which the player can whack at the enemy a few times and reduce their health bar. Repeat a couple times until they are killed. I think it is specifically the hacking away at an enemy like you are taking a machete to jungle foliage that I dont like about this. Whittling away at an enemy who just tanks it and soaks up damage feels decidedly un-assassiny to me.

Now, if open combat is intended to be a big part of the game then I can see why this is the case. You cant make every enemy a long drawn out chore like AC1 because if youre going to have to do this like a hundred times that will get old fast. And you cant do glorified quick time events like AC2 because itd be too quick and a major pillar of your gameplay will feel trivial. So I can see why this newer style of combat is being used, I just don't feel its a great fit for the genre.

What are your thoughts? Are you a fan of stealth-action games? Do you enjoy dodge-roll-centric combat? How would you want to see combat handled in an assassins creed type game?

I was having a recent conversation with my friends about PTO and who thought they had too much or too little.
The results were interesting, so I thought I'd ask Tildes.

• Are you happy with the amount of PTO you get? Do you wish you had more or do you struggle to spend them?
• US and European PTO is very different, how do you feel about the other side of the pond?
• Do you like the format you get given PTO? Or is there a better way you'd prefer?

Let me know!

Edit: Thanks everyone for responding! So many interesting thoughts and different policies, it's really hard to reply to any specifically lol. I've read them all though!!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like sourcehut, steam.spring sale and communications workers of america. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was keeping track.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Premise: Pretend that human hibernation/cryostasis is a real technology that's both mature and affordable. You can choose to go into hibernation and wake up at some point in the future to resume your life. It's a safe and reliable process.

You choose when to enter hibernation (could be now, could be 50 years from now or more), and you set your exit either for a certain date or on some condition(s) that you dictate in advance.

You can expect that you'll be taken care of during that time and your rules for being awakened will be followed.

What I'm interested in hearing about:

1. Would you choose to do it? Why or why not?

If you would decide to do it, some follow-ups:

2. How would you decide when to enter hibernation? Would you base it on your age? On specific events in the world?
3. How would you decide when to exit? Would you base it on time, or on certain conditions? Why?
4. What preparations would you take? How would you help your family and friends understand this decision?
5. What would you hope to see or experience once you awaken?
6. How would you plan on adapting to a world that might be completely different from ours on many different fronts (e.g. technology, language, culture, identity, etc.)?

Even though the situation is hypothetical, I want you to base your answers on your actual experiences and life. So, the question is about whether you, as you are living right now, would choose hibernation (either now or in the future).

Why is it so hard get most people to care or even get them to engage in actual discussion about indirect effects of their actions?

I'm mainly going to be talking in the context of tech and privacy since that is my main sphere of concern but it applies to a lot more things.

I am not dismissing the effects of systemic incentives but there are trivial actions that anyone could do to lessen the likely negative effects that almost no one does.

The current climate makes it incredibly hard to actually eliminate personal impact but it still easy to minimize it with negligible impact on one's own life. Like in sw development the first 90% take 90% of the time and the other ten procent take the other half of the time.

Getting a minimal computer literacy of being able to navigate an unfamiliar GUI, explore and understand the settings and be able, read the messahes they are getting on the screen and willing to search their problems would make anyone much more resistant to any number of dark patterns, yet there is a tendency to defend tech illiteracy.

Personally I don't really do that much and I make compromises easily but sadly I get the impression that I am still in the small minority.

Title kinda gives the gist of it all.

I have been wondering about a way to have a "full" desktop with just XR glasses, a phone, bluetooth keyboard, and an internet connection.

Not sure if this is easily doable, or if Windows VMs would be so expensive to make it pointless. Maybe something like WINE or w/e the not 20 year outdated current thing is to run Windows software.

The main use would be to run 1-2 browsers and trading software.

Just curious if this is a foolish idea or not.

It is easy to feel helpless at times. As if there is nothing you can do to impact the "greater good." Many of us currently feel rather helpless in relation to politics, but there are many other reasons for this as well.

One argument I hold against this helplessness is the Butterfly Effect, which (in this context) proposes that even the smallest action can significantly alter the future.

An example could be giving encouragement to someone about to give up on a task (even if you aren't aware of it), which keeps them on a trajectory they would have otherwise never continued.

Have you been fortunate enough to identify when this has happened around you?

Of course, there could be negative outcomes related to this too, but I hope we can identify some positive ones.

(Meta note: I was debating if this should be under ~talk or ~life and went with ~life, but feel free to move it if you disagree.)

Welcome back to Formula 1! And what a start to the 2025 season with a wet track and even heavy rain in Melbourne!

First things first: Poor rookies. Hadjar was into the barriers during the formation lap. Then Doohan was out after the restart. Or was that the actual start since Hadjar triggered an aborted start? Which not a rookie, that triggered Sainz into the barriers during the safety car. Lawson then had his chance to hit the barriers during Lap 47, with Bortoletto into the walls somewhere there abouts. Though for those last two, that was during the heavy rain. Alonso, the eternal rookie, rounded out the group of wallflowers.

The only rookie to survive? Antonelli. And he ended P5! He would've ended P4, but he got a 5sec penalty for an unsafe release earlier. Regardless, impressive.

EDIT: After a successful appeal, Antonelli's 5sec penalty is removed! He regains his on-track P4, with Albon back to P5. Results updated below.

When the rain hit, it was pure chaos. All the tire strategies went out the window. Some went straight to inters, while some stayed on slicks. Max was P1. Then Hamilton was P1. But then they and everyone else went to inters. Norris ended up back in P1 and ended the race there.

Lastly, Piastri's recovery drive was something to watch. Sometime around Lap 45, he ended up beached in the grass. But he was like "Hell no," and willed that car back onto track. He dropped from P2 down to the back of the field since it took him so long to get out. But he still ended up in the points at P9. Felt like he was driving on pure frustration and anger...and it worked!

Onward to Shanghai next weekend!

Next race:

Chinese Grand Prix
Shanghai International Circuit
Sunday, March 23, 2025

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films 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.

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like zooey zephyr, digital markets act and breakfast. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was astute.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Hi tildizens, the NYC subway often has posters with a poem and artwork on them which provide some relief from the ads that decorate the trains. On my commute today, I found this poem by Srikanth Reddy quite tantalizing.

Everything

by Srikanth Reddy

She was watching the solar eclipse
through a piece of broken bottle

when he left home.
He found a blue kite in the forest

on the day she lay down
with a sailor. When his name changed,

she stitched a cloud to a quilt
made of rags. They did not meet,

so they never could be parted.
So she finished her prayer,

& he folded his map of the sea.

Unfortunately, the single piece of related online discourse I can find is a two-line comment on a 2008 blog post of the poem. So tell me: do you like this poem? What do you make of it? Is it about a couple that splits up due to infidelity (as Google's gemini ai told me) or people that are connected despite having never met (as Mistral's le chat claims)? What of the kite? Why is it blue? Why might his name have changed? To me, it seems he must be a sailor (but different than the one she lays with?) and she relatively poor. We're reading a lament of a missed connection, perhaps.

I'm currently in the process of job shopping and, while it feels like all my friends are happy to tell me why I shouldn't work where they do, I do enjoy hearing from people that are satisfied with their line of work.

I personally like that my current work gives me free reign of the warehouse we operate in, if we met our metrics we could hold a game of poker in the back without too much fuss. What are some qualities in your work that make you a happier employee?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like diplomacy, baby boomers and great depression. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was astute.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

I'm about 5 percent into the book Hyperion and I am already noticing that the author is drawing on a rich context of cultural background knowledge from a wide variety of sources and disciplines.

This thread is a place to collect observations about culturally laden content within the book that might enhance understanding. It is not a place to spoil the plot.

No obligation, but feel free to contribute what you see.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films 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.

I have grown dissatisfied with my mattress. I bought a new one 2 months ago, and I chose the firmest grade of foam available in my country. I don't like springs. When choosing a mattress, my goal is to find something that provides sufficient support without being too rigid. The foam grade vendors suggest for my weight is extremely soft, like sleeping on cotton candy. I don't know why people have this obsession with softness -- it is uncomfortable and terrible for your back.

My new mattress is perfectly fine but it is still not firm enough. Foam quickly loses its rigidity, and I can feel that it is happening already. It is not as firm as it was when it arrived. On a whim, I decided to sleep on the floor. Not literally on the floor, as I have no wish to press directly against the ground all night. I piled the folded plastic plaques we previously used for my son's playpen and wrapped them in a pair of thick quilts. The result was still very rigid but gentler on my joints. I slept on it yesterday. It was a success. I felt refreshed, only woke up once and got back to sleep right away. It was better than sleeping on my mattress.

I looked up traditional Japanese tatamis and futons, but they must be imported in my country because they were more expensive than a mattress. I ordered 4 meters of EVA -- each roll is 2 meters by 1 meter, 1 centimeter thick. I intend to stack them for a thickness of 2 centimeters, providing greater comfort with the same amount of rigidity. I may transition to (kinda) sleeping on the ground full time.

How do you like your mattress? Do you sleep on the floor as well? Or in something that resembles sleeping on the floor?

Going to try something a little different, guess we'll see how it goes. Main thinking is just getting baseball discussion going. So, meaning not just talking about spring training and not even just about MLB - any baseball discussion what so ever.

Don't know baseball? Good place to ask :)

I figure a kind of more casual thread to get to know other fans here would be a good thing to have before the season starts - and people can just set it a single thread to ignore if they have no interest.

I'll leave some top level comments as starting points

I’ve been wondering about this lately.

Recently, I made a post about Ukraine on another social media site, and someone jumped in with the usual "Ukraine isn't a democracy" right-wing talking point. I wrote out a long, thoughtful reply, only to get the predictable one-liner propaganda responses back. You probably know the type, just regurgitated stuff with no real engagement.

After that, I didn’t really feel like spending my time and energy writing out detailed replies to every canned response. But I also didn’t want to just let it sit there and have people who might be reading the exchange assume there’s no pushback or correction.

So instead, I tried leveraging AI to help me write a fact-checking reply. Not for the person I was arguing with, really, but more as an FYI for anyone else following along. I made sure it stayed factual and based in reality, avoided name-calling, and kept the tone above the usual mudslinging. And of course, I double-checked what it wrote to make sure it matched my understanding and wasn’t just spitting out garbage or hallucinations.

But it got me thinking that there’s a lot of fear about AI being used to spread and create misinformation. But do you think there’s also an opportunity to use it as a tool to counter misinformation, without burning ourselves out in the process?

Curious how others see it.

This is the eleventh of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Born a Crime by Trever Noah. Our next book will be Hyperion by Dan Simmons at the end of March.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films 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.

This is a bit of a round about story, but bear with me.

I like PowerPoint, I love using it, it's intuitive to me. Google slides is okay, (I never delved into OpenOffice or any other offshoot really), but when I have a choice, I like using PPT.

I consider myself a comfortable Apple user as well, I prefer it for most of my computing needs, but not all, so it's not like I am not capable of using the Apple ecosystem.

However, whenever I have tried Keynote or Pages or any of the "office" tools, I don't like them.

I cannot tell if this is because these products or projects were killed off because of lowspread adoption at their onset, and thus did not get any development or improvement. Apple often does not release things and then just let them die, it usually waits a long time before it releases something, so they don't release things with potential failure (maybe I'm wrong, my memory doesn't recall anything like that other than this very example lol, and I guess their camera, but I digress).

I guess my rambling is, is PowerPoint just good and Keynote just bad or is there some more interesting story to it?

So I'm about to attend a Green Day concert on my own. First time in my life doing that, I think in a sense I'm proud of myself for attending something like this solo, it shows that I'm prepared to do things I enjoy on my own purely because I enjoy them, but in a way it makes me a little sad to think that I don't have a friend or a group of friends that I couldnl share this with. What do you think about attending things like live music, movie, entertainment solo?

I am trying to figure out and process my aversion to pursuing a career change.

What I have surmised is that I come to the conclusion, "well, in your past, most of the jobs you have studied or trained for, were not, in fact, what you thought they would be like in practice, so how do you know this is not the case with your new interest in career?"

What I'm looking for is people to challenge or confirm my assumptions: Example: "No, actually, your perception is distorted, most jobs are what people expect them to be."

I'm also looking for, validation or commiseration, "yeah, I feel that way too, it sucks" and am open to some problem solving, "I was once in your position and I did X,Y,Z and here were my results, YMMV"

Thank you for reading!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like algorithmic complacency, volodymyr zelenskyy and null. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was eagle-eyed.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

My thoughts on the show

An overarching theme of the show is that we aren’t very good at naming our emotions when we’re feeling them and that it’s important to learn the vocabulary for our emotions and call them by their right names.

Call stress stress, not overwhelm. (Are you “in the weeds” or “blown”?)

Call vulnerability vulnerability, not anxiety.

Call awe and wonder awe and wonder.

When we name what we’re feeling, we open up so much more agency and freedom to guide our lives in the direction we want them to go. Language is a portal.

I found this show moving and illuminating when I first watched it in 2022 and it was moving and illuminating all over again when I rewatched it over the past few days.

Awe and wonder are two of the emotions that stick out to me. These are not words I used regularly before watching the show. I use them now. I think I used to believe these emotions were nice to feel and a good part of life, but kind of like the icing on the cake. I have come to see them as necessary nutrients in the human emotional diet, more core and more central than I thought before.

Maybe we can’t feel awe and wonder very often, but maybe like the elephants who walk long distances to lick the salt off cave walls, it’s something we need in our diet and should go out of our way to feel.

I have a copy of Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart, which the TV series is based on, and it mentioned that, among other things, experiences of awe and wonder make people more willing to cooperate with each other. Doesn’t that sound like something we need in this world?

Where to watch

Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart is streaming on HBO Max in the U.S. and parts of Europe and Latin America, on Crave in Canada, on Binge in Australia, and on Sky in New Zealand.

HBO Max: https://www.max.com/shows/brene-brown-atlas-of-the-heart/dfad262e-b764-4b92-ae63-72886f8a0d81

Crave: https://www.crave.ca/en/tv-shows/brene-brown-atlas-of-the-heart

List of countries and streaming services where the show is available: https://brenebrown.com/find-the-series-outside-of-the-us/

JustWatch, a generally useful tool for this sort of thing: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ajustwatch.com+Brené+Brown+Atlas+of+the+Heart

I’m jumping off of the controversy about the release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman mentioned here.

Regarding the question: it means that something stood in the way of that particular book “getting out” but, for better or for worse, it did. This could be the author’s direct wishes, government or publisher censorship, it being found or leaked, etc.

• What are some of those books?
• Are they worth looking into?
• Does the fact that we weren’t “supposed” to read them change how we understand or appreciate them?
• If the author themself didn’t want their works published (such as Kafka), what do we have to take into account when deciding to go against those wishes?
• What do we gain/lose by respecting/ignoring those wishes?

Also, I’m open to answers that involve parts of books rather than the whole books themselves, since I know there are many books out there that were partially censored or edited and have since been restored.

This is a topic I keep revisiting. It's constantly evolving, with new laws in different parts of the world happening pretty often. And also there's a lot of grey area with vague or incomprehensive language that hasn't yet been tested in courts.

I recognize that it's a bit of a niche topic, but I think there are a lot of us at Tildes who have to think about it. After all it potentially impacts anyone maintaining or building a non-platform web presence. It also applies to less obvious things like running an advertising campaign that involves media requested from a server you control (which can therefore potentially log requests).

For my part, I've needed to research laws relating to PII in order to come up with policies and practices in various contexts. In broad strokes it's pretty simple but as you get into details what I continue to find is that there are a lot of conflicting opinions both from professionals and lawyers. A lot of it is still open to interpretation.

I'm wondering what kinds of experience other tildenauts have around data protection and PII? Have you implemented solutions? Do you wonder about it for your own websites? Have you been involved with it at companies where you've worked? Do you have questions about it?

Conversations about finding and losing love are everywhere. Which is no suprise, when people are swimming in new love drugs they want to talk about it. Likewise when they're drowning in loss or trying to navigate relationship troubles. And they're interesting conversations to have because almost everyone can relate. Love and relationships are at the core of the human experience.

But so are relationships that last. Love that keeps working in spite of the constant drag of, sometimes mundane, everyday life. High functioning love.

It's quieter, less interesting for uninvested parties and more difficult to articulate in a simple, accessible way without sounding boring or cliche. Which is maybe why it gets talked about less. It's not that it doesn't have all the hallmarks of a good adventure. There are highs and lows, challenges that seem impossible in the darkest moments, unexpected redemption, soaring elation. It's often exciting when you're in it. But more often by volume, if somewhat less in memory, are small moments of shared joy, companionable silences, ambivalence, soft landings on hard days and endless personal growth to support the happiness of another human. Or maybe more accurately to support the health of this third space you've created together.

There's also shared identity, which amounts to the expansion of your idea of self. There are the sorts of moments in life which no one can really understand if they weren't there without the help of especially inspired poetry. And, most of the time, there's this other person who was, in fact, there. No explanations needed. More than that, they bring different context and add different perspectives to the experience that become a part of your own.

There are the moments when you face the reality of impermanence, mortality and futility and the way that somehow having this warm, breathing second witness takes the edge off the howling chaos at the edges of civilized existence. It makes it easier to accept the process of life and death in ways that are difficult to articulate. It's sort of a non sequitur but something that comes to mind is the way that curling up by a fire on a stormy night is somehow more cozy than if it was tropical out and you didn't need a blanket at all.

I could go on, but my goal wasn't really to talk about my ideas about love. I'm hoping other tildinians will be excited to talk about their experiences with, and thoughts about, love that lasts. That could mean your own relationship(s) or it could mean general musings. Whatever comes to mind.

Equal space for the parts that are good and bad. There are usually two people involved but there's nothing binary about it. It's all nuance.

Just asking for opinions. I've got a subscription to Apple Music at the moment (redeemed a free three months I've been sitting on before it expired), and the one thing that's been bugging me is that some songs are available with spacial audio; they're "surround" mixed, and when listening to music with my airpods, it tracks the rotation of my head and simulates speaker placements based on it.

Does anyone really think that their music is actually improved with this feature? Seriously. I don't get it. Why is it better that when I turn my head the quality of the mix goes down? It wouldn't be too bad, but I'm rather annoyed with Apple's implementation because it assumes that if your head is in one place for a while that's how the virtual speakers should be orientated, which is really annoying when using my desktop multi-monitor setup, which requires me to move my head from time to time.

I didn't know where to post this, sometimes I invite people on instagram to suggest ideas or things for me to draw and post; I found it's a nice way to interact on the internet in a different way and challenge myself and practice at the same time. If anyone's interested maybe we can do it here, this is not for commissions and it's totally free, I'm just trying to do something fun and collaborative with strangers.

Even if this doesn't take off feel free to contact me and see what we can do, I'd love to make something for somebody else, I can share some of my drawings so you know what to expect.

Maybe we could organize and turn it into a monthly topic with a different prompt for anyone who wants to draw and participate and share. Would love to read your opinions on this.

Apologies if this is the wrong space for it.

Once or twice a year, my friends and I do a "Friend Getaway" where we rent an Airbnb and all communally nerd out. Magic, D&D, videogames, tabletop stuff, etc. It's a great time. We look forward to it every year.

Unfortunately, our experience with Airbnbs has progressively gotten worse over time (not that it was ever great), with this past weekend being our worst ever. We ended up leaving early and escalated a complaint with the platform (not that I actually think that will do anything, which is one of the problems with Airbnb in the first place).

Unfortunately, we're kind of stuck with going with an Airbnb (or similar, like VRBO) if we want to keep doing this because they're the only thing that give us what we want: private common spaces.

The reason we get an Airbnb in the first place isn't for the destination or the attractions around it. It's so we can all hang out together in the living room and dining room, and cook group meals in the kitchen. We retire to the beds to sleep, but 90% of our waking time is spent grouping ourselves up in the common areas by interest.

If we could stay at a hotel and rent out a living room, dining room, and kitchen for the group, we absolutely would. Ever since Airbnbs became a thing, I was hoping hotels would move a little bit in the direction of offering similar setups, but it feels like at most you can simply get a regular hotel room with a kitchenette. They're not really conducive to groups at all.

To me, there's currently a huge gap between what hotels offer and what Airbnb offers, and if you want the latter, you have to put up with a lot of awfulness that's just sort of embedded into their business model.

I don't really have a point in posting this other than to highlight that and hope that it starts some discussion. I'm also hoping that someone tells me that I'm completely wrong and that there are hotels out there that actually do offer Airbnb-like stays/facilities and I just don't know about them.

Let's Talk Worldbuilding!

I really enjoyed doing this on the other site, so I'm bringing it here: Let's discuss the fictional worlds you've created! Share the worlds you've built in your notes, writing, art, or wherever you develop your ideas.

What is Worldbuilding?

For those new to the concept, worldbuilding is the art of constructing a fictional world. This involves creating people, places, concepts, magic systems, technologies, creatures, histories – anything you can imagine. You then assemble these elements into a cohesive whole that can serve as a setting for stories, art, games, or any other creative project.

If you already have a world, please introduce it in the comments! Ask questions about other users' worlds in the replies. This allows everyone to share their creations and potentially even get new ideas through discussion. You might even get a question you haven't considered before, which can actively help you develop your world further!

If you're interested in worldbuilding but haven't started, feel free to participate in the discussion! Maybe you'll be inspired to create your own world. You can create anything you like, incorporating elements you find compelling, interesting, cool, or even funny – it's entirely up to you!

If you have artwork related to your world, please share it! We'd love to see it.

Next week we will be discussing the City We Became. Our next book discussion after that will be at the end of January.

I've organized this schedule so that longer books are followed by shorter ones. I look forward to reading with you.

Last week in January : Kim Stanley Robinson Ministry for the Future,

Last week in February: Trevor Noah Born a Crime,

Last week in March: Dan Simmons Hyperion,

Last week in April: Adrian Tchaikovsky Elder Race,

Last week in May: Victor LaValle a People's Future of the United States,

Last week in June: T Kingfisher A House with Good Bones,

Last week in July: James McBride the Heaven and Earth grocery Store,

Last week in August: Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Last week in September: Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life and Others

The recent topic on grammar errors that actually matter got me interested in all of your opinions about style. Working in academia, I have developed a surprising number of strong opinions about style and formatting over the years. I'm curious to hear what you all care about. I am also curious to see if I can be persuaded to cool down some of my own hot takes based on your responses. I'll share a few to get us started.

1. For the love of all that is holy, do not put a footnote in a title or in an abstract.
2. Similarly, do not put a citation in a title or an abstract!
3. An abstract should be... an abstract, not your life story or even a summary of the paper. It most certainly should not develop and defend arguments.
4. Does a published manuscript really need to be double spaced?
5. I'm in the punctuation-inside-quotations camp, but I am open to the alternative. I am somewhat of a weirdo in believing that individual authors should be free to use either style (so long as they remain consistent in their usage).
6. Bibliographies should prioritize the language of the original source; meaning, it is ridiculous to transliterate the titles of non-Latin works in a bibliography. What are you going to do with that information? If you don't know that language, then it is utterly meaningless, and even more so because you can't even do anything with that transliterated text. Plus, good luck getting a standard transliteration out of anyone. All this does is just obscure the fact that these sources were cited, at least as far as indexers are concerned. It would make more sense to just include translated titles next to the original, but eliminating the non-Latin text altogether is so absurd (looking at you APA).
7. On a similar note, foreign words should not be italicized or emphasized any other way just because they appear in a text. All this does is fill up the text with needless emphasis that distracts from the things you do mean to emphasize.

Okay, I will stop here before I cross the threshold where I won't be able to get anymore work done today! :b