Having finished out the Amazon Prime series "The Expanse" I'm now working my way through the novels and I keep coming up against a problem with with railguns. Specifically, the way that railguns are used in The Expanse doesn't mesh well with the way they're portrayed.

First, some background. Ships in The Expanse are generally unarmored. There are a bunch of reasons for this but the short version is "most things that can hit you in space will kill you anyway" and armor adds mass which makes every manuver more expensive in terms of reaction mass. So no one has armor. This is important because it means that ships in the Expanse can get ripped up by something as mundane as a stray bullet from a Point Defense Cannon (PDC). PDCs are... well, they're guns. Regular guns which are flinging around much less mass and at much lower velocities than railguns.

Thus, ships in the Expanse are equipped to handle impacts but nothing much bigger than a sand-grain moving at a few km/s.

When we're introduced to rail-guns in the series we're given to understand that they use magnetic acceleration to chuck a 5kg chunk of tungsten and/or uranium at a target at an "appreciable percentage of C." That's much faster than a bullet or any micrometeors ships are likely to encounter. Even 1% of C is ~3,000 km/s.

5 kg of Tungsten is less than you think. Some back of the envelope math suggests that's about cube about 2.6 inches on a side... which is not big. That works out to an incredible energy density which would make a lot of sense if railguns were routinely being fired at planets or asteroids but, since they seem to mainly target ships, the vast, vast majority of the energy that goes into flinging that slug at its target is going to carry through to the other side of the ship.

All total we're talking about 488.5 million Newtons of force for 1% of the speed of light. Helpfully, this scales roughly lineraly so long as we don't get too close to C and induce relativistic mass issues, so 10% of C is 4.8 billion Newtons and so on. So, that railgun slug is carrying a lot of energy. At 1% of C it represents 22.5 trillion joules of kinetic energy. Written out long-ways so we can appreciate all those zeros it's 22,500,000,000,000 J. At 10%, we're talking 2.25 quadrillion joules. To give some sense of scale, that means that, at 1% of C, three rail-gun slugs are delivering about as much energy as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. At 10% of C one round carries about 537 kilotons, or about the yield of a modern, city-busting hydrogen bomb.

Those are absolutely titanic amounts of energy but, realistically, they'll never deliver that much power to a target. After all, a railgun round can only push on its target as hard as the target can push back on it. If the round just punches through the entire ship like it's made of paper, most of the energy stays in the railgun slug as it exits the other side of the ship and you get a neat hole rather than a gigantic flash as trillions of joules of kinetic energy turn into heat.

And obviously, if we're trying to kill things, we want the latter. The solution to this problem is fairly obvious: you need fragmentation. While it's great to have a tungsten cube all tightly packed together as you accelerate it, if you're shooting at a ship, you want a fairly diffuse impact, especially if we're talking about a 10% of C railgun slug. There aren't a lot of things out there in the solar system which can take 500 kilotons of hate and come out the other side in one piece. Moreover, at the distances at which a rail-gun fight happens, that spread would help ensure that you hit your target. Like a shotgun loaded with birdshot, a fragmenting railgun round would provide a cone of impact rather than a line, making dodges less effective.

And, as I mentioned earlier, you don't need a ton of mass to make this work. If a PDC round can go straight through a military craft then we can safely assume that a chunk of tungsten with the same kinetic energy will do the same thing. PDCs look rather a lot like the close in weapons systems in use on many naval ships today so we'll use those as a guide. The 20mm cannon on a Phallanx CWIS tosses out rounds at about 1,035 m/s. Those rounds weigh about 100 g (0.1 kg) which gives them a kinetic energy at the muzzle of 53,422 J.

So, if we could predictably shatter our 1% C railgun round into 421,136 pieces, each would have about the same kinetic energy as a PDC round and be able to hole the ship. At 10% C we could go even smaller and do the same thing with upwards of 40 million shards. 1% is plenty though. Each hull-penetrating piece of our original 5 kg bullet needs only weigh about 1/100th of a gram, which works out to being about 1/100th of the size of a grain of sand.

Put another way, if the fragmentation of a rail round could be precisely controlled, a target ship would experience hundreds of thousands of individual hull breaches with the mean distance between them determined only by the geometry of the ship and the angle of the attack. The result of this would be either the delivery of a titanic amount of energy to the ship itself as the armor attempts to absorb the impact or, if no armor is present (as seems to be the case in the Expanse) the rapid conversion of the interior of the ship to a thin soup.

This, however, seems never to happen in the series and what leaves me scratching my head. As a book and TV series, The Expanse does an otherwise bang-up job with hard science fiction. Most things in universe make sense. This, however, does not. We have take as a given that the materials science technology exists to allow the mounting and firing of a railgun on a ship -- there are a lot of challenges there -- but the straight-line-of-fire use of them is a rare problem with the world-building.

Any fans have any suggestions to help me square this circle?

I'm following the New York Times' liveblog and list of winners; I'll try to update this post.

• Best Play: “Leopoldstadt”

“Leopoldstadt,” a wrenching drama that explores the destructive toll of antisemitism by following a family of Viennese Jews through the first half of the 20th century, won the Tony Award for best play on Sunday night.

The play is by Tom Stoppard, an 85-year-old British playwright who is widely regarded as among the greatest living dramatists, and who had already won the best play Tony Award more times than any other writer. This is his 19th production on Broadway since his debut in 1967, and his fifth Tony for best play, following “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia.”

“Leopoldstadt” is an unusually personal work for Stoppard, prompted by his late-in-life reckoning with his Jewish roots, and the realization that many of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust. Stoppard was not yet 2 years old when his own family fled what was then Czechoslovakia, where he was born, to escape the Nazi invasion; he was raised in Britain and has said he only fully came to understand his family’s Jewish heritage when he was much older.

“Leopoldstadt,” directed by Patrick Marber, was first staged in London, where it opened in 2020, shortly before the coronavirus pandemic forced the shutdown of theaters, and then resumed performances in the West End after theaters reopened in 2021. That production won the Olivier Award for best new play in 2020.

The Broadway production began previews Sept. 14 and opened Oct. 2 at the Longacre Theater. The run is scheduled to end on July 2.

The play, named for a historically Jewish section of Vienna, begins in 1899 in the living room of an affluent and assimilated Austrian Jewish family and continues until 1955, after much of the family has perished; some members of the family had mistakenly thought that their integration into Viennese society would somehow protect them.

The show is quite large for a Broadway play, with a cast of 38, including several children. It was capitalized for up to $8.75 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The lead producer is Sonia Friedman, a prolific British producer who has notched an impressive set of wins on Broadway: She was also a lead producer of the best play Tony winners in 2020 (“The Inheritance,” which was granted the award at a pandemic-delayed ceremony in 2021), 2019 (“The Ferryman”) and 2018 (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”).

• Best Musical: “Kimberly Akimbo”

“Kimberly Akimbo,” a small-scale, big-hearted show about a teenage girl coping with a life-shortening genetic condition and a comically dysfunctional family, won the coveted Tony Award for best musical Sunday night.

The musical is the smallest, and lowest-grossing, of the five nominees in the category, but it was also by far the best reviewed, with virtually unanimous acclaim from critics. (Nodding to the show’s anagram-loving subplot, New York Times critic Jesse Green presciently suggested one of his own last fall: “sublime cast = best musical.”)

The show, set in 1999 in Bergen County, N.J., stars the 63-year-old Victoria Clark as Kimberly, a 15-going-on-16-year-old girl who has a rare condition that makes her age prematurely. Kimberly’s home life is a mess — dad’s a drunk, mom’s a hypochondriac, and aunt is a gleeful grifter — and her school life is complicated by her medical condition. But she befriends an anagram-obsessed classmate and learns to find joy where she can.

“Kimberly Akimbo,” which opened at the Booth Theater in November, was written by the playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and the composer Jeanine Tesori, based on a play Lindsay-Abaire had written in 2003. The musical, directed by Jessica Stone, began its life with an Off Broadway production at the nonprofit Atlantic Theater Company in the fall of 2021.

The musical, with just nine characters, was capitalized for up to $7 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that’s a low budget for a musical on Broadway these days, when a growing number of shows are costing more than $20 million to stage. The lead producer is David Stone, who, as a lead producer of “Wicked,” is one of Broadway’s most successful figures; this is the first time he has won a Tony Award for best musical.

• Best Revival of a Play: "Topdog/Underdog"

A new production of “Topdog/Underdog,” Suzan-Lori Parks’s tour de force about two Black brothers weighted down by history and circumstance, won the Tony Award for best play revival Sunday night.

The play, first staged at the Public Theater in 2001, was already a widely hailed masterpiece: In 2002 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making Parks the first African American woman awarded that prize, and in 2018 a panel of New York Times critics declared it the best American play of the previous quarter century.

The new production, which ran from September 2022 through January 2023 at the John Golden Theater, was directed by Kenny Leon. It starred Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as the two brothers, ominously named Lincoln and Booth.

In the play, Lincoln works in whiteface as a Lincoln impersonator at an arcade, while Booth makes ends meet by shoplifting. They share a one-room apartment, a fondness for three-card monte, and a set of familial and societal burdens from which they cannot escape. “‘Topdog/Underdog’ is both a vivid, present-tense family portrait and an endlessly reverberating allegory,” the New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote in 2018.

• Best Revival of a Musical: "Parade"

“Parade,” a musical based on the early 20th century lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia, won the Tony Award for best musical revival Sunday night.

The prize cements a remarkable rebirth for the show, which was not successful when it first opened on Broadway in 1998, but which is shaping up to be a hit this time, thanks to strong word-of-mouth and the popularity of its leading man, Ben Platt. It was one of several shows this season about antisemitism, as the number of reported incidents has been rising.

The success of “Parade” is also a significant milestone for the musical’s composer, Jason Robert Brown, who is widely admired within the theater community but whose Broadway productions have struggled commercially. Brown wrote the music and lyrics for “Parade,” and the book is by Alfred Uhry; both men won Tony Awards for their work on the show in 1999.

... Audible groans here as Jason Robert Brown, the composer behind “Parade,” gets cut off at the microphone. He started to say something about Mary Phagan, the girl whose murder in Georgia set the Leo Frank trial in motion.

• Best Leading Actor in a Play: Sean Hayes, “Good Night, Oscar”, as Oscar Levant

Sean Hayes, who portrays the witty but troubled pianist Oscar Levant in “Good Night, Oscar,” won the Tony for best lead actor in play.

Best known for his long-running role as Jack McFarland in the television series “Will & Grace,” Hayes received critical praise for his drastic transformation in this stage production, adopting the hunched posture, irritable scowl and anxious twitching of Levant, who channeled his neuroticism into crowd-pleasing radio and television banter.

Hayes, 52, has also brought one of his lesser known talents to the stage for this performance: classical piano, which he started studying at age 5.

Telling the story of one night in 1958 when Levant finagled his way out of psychiatric hospital to be interviewed on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show,” the play focuses on the pianist’s idiosyncrasies, compulsions and struggles with opioid addiction as surrounding characters try desperately to manage him.

This is Hayes’s first Tony Award. He was previously nominated for his Broadway debut in the 2010 revival of “Promises, Promises,” a musical adaptation of the Billy Wilder film “The Apartment.”

• Best Leading Actress in a Play: Jodie Comer, "Prima Facie", as Tessa Ensler

The leading actress in a play category this year was a face-off of extremes: Jodie Comer, who delivers a physically and emotionally exhausting performance in Suzie Miller’s one-woman legal thriller “Prima Facie,” versus Jessica Chastain, who scarcely stirs from her chair during the entirety of “A Doll’s House.”

In the end, it was Comer who triumphed, for her tour-de-force solo turn as a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault. Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, described it as “a performance of tremendous skill and improbable stamina.”

It was a remarkable win for the 30-year-old English actress, who is best known for playing the assassin Villanelle on the television show “Killing Eve.” She not only took home her first Tony Award on her first try; she won it for her first performance on a professional stage — ever.

“It kind of felt unattainable,” she told The Times in April of the prospect of doing theater.

• Best Leading Actor in a Musical: J. Harrison Ghee, "Some Like It Hot", as Jerry/Daphne

J. Harrison Ghee, whose portrayal of a gender-questioning musician fleeing the mob in “Some Like It Hot” has charmed critics and audiences, won a Tony Award for best leading actor in a musical Sunday night, becoming the first out nonbinary actor to win that award.

Ghee’s victory came shortly after Alex Newell, who is also nonbinary, won a Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical, becoming the first out nonbinary performer to win a Tony.

The Tony Awards, like the Oscars, have only gendered categories for performers, and Ghee and Newell agreed to be considered eligible for awards as actors. (Another nonbinary performer this season, Justin David Sullivan of “& Juliet,” opted not to be considered for awards rather than compete in a gendered category.)

Asked in a recent interview with The New York Times about having been nominated in a gendered category, Ghee said: “Wherever I am, I will show up as who I am. Someone’s compartmentalization of me doesn’t limit me in any way.

“I hope for the industry we can remove the gender of it,” they added, “because we are creators and we should free ourselves beyond so many labels and let the work speak for itself.”

At least two performers who later came out as nonbinary have previously won Tony Awards as best featured actress in a musical: Sara Ramirez, who won in 2005 for “Spamalot,” and Karen Olivo (also known as K O), who won in 2009 for a revival of “West Side Story.” Also: Last year, the Tony Award for best score went to Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss for “Six,” and Marlow is nonbinary.

Ghee’s depiction of a main character in “Some Like It Hot” reflects the way views on gender have evolved since 1959, when the Billy Wilder film it was based on was released. In the movie Jack Lemmon plays a musician named Jerry who dresses as a woman named Daphne to flee the mob; in the musical Ghee plays the same character, but Jerry’s path to becoming Daphne becomes one of self-discovery, not disguise.

The performance earned critical praise. Jesse Green, The Times’s chief theater critic, wrote that Ghee “carefully traces Jerry’s transformation into Daphne, and then the merging of the two identities into a third that takes us into territory that’s far more complex than jokey drag.”

Ghee, 33, worked as a drag performer before finding success in musical theater, with key roles on Broadway in “Kinky Boots” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” before “Some Like It Hot.”

• Best Leading Actress in a Musical: Victoria Clark, “Kimberly Akimbo”, as Kimberly Levaco

Victoria Clark won the Tony for best leading actress in a musical on Sunday night for her role in “Kimberly Akimbo,” in which she plays a teenager with a rare disease that causes her to age rapidly.

As unusual as Clark’s role has been as a sexagenarian playing a gawky teenager with a fatal diagnosis, critics pointed to the pedestrian subtlety with which she imbued her performance.

“So remote is she from the bellowing divadom of those tourist-bait extravaganzas that I’m tempted to call what she does not singing at all, but acting on pitch,” wrote Jesse Green in his review of the musical for The Times.

This is Clark’s second award in the category: In 2005, she won for “The Light in the Piazza,” a musical in which she played an American tourist traveling with her daughter — a performance that Ben Brantley of The Times praised as a rare reflection of a “real human being” in an American mainstream musical.

A veteran stage actress, Clark, 63, has performed on Broadway since the 1980s, earning Tony nominations for featured roles in “Sister Act,” “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella” and “Gigi.”

• Best Featured Actor in a Play: Brandon Uranowitz, “Leopoldstadt”, as Ludwig Jakobovicz and Nathan Fischbein

Brandon Uranowitz, a four-time Tony nominee, won his first Tony Award on Sunday for performing a pair of featured roles in the critically acclaimed play “Leopoldstadt.”

The play, by Tom Stoppard, follows an Austrian Jewish family — the Merzes — from 1899 to 1955. In the early days, the bourgeois family is comfortable and complacent, shown enjoying time together at holiday gatherings and family functions. But eventually the Nazis arrive, and their lives are upended and destroyed.

“My impostor syndrome is on fire,” he said in accepting the award.

“Thank you, Tom Stoppard, for writing a play about Jewish identity and antisemitism and the false promise of assimilation with the nuances and the complexities and the contradictions that they deserve,” he added. “My ancestors, many of whom did not make it out of Poland, also thank you.”

• Best Featured Actor in a Musical: Alex Newell, "Shucked", as Lulu

Alex Newell, a “Glee” alumnus who is bringing down the house nightly with a barn-burning number in “Shucked,” won the Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical Sunday night, becoming the first out nonbinary actor to win a Tony for performance.

Newell, who identifies both as nonbinary and gender fluid, plays a fiercely self-reliant whiskey distiller in “Shucked,” which is a country-scored, pun-rich musical comedy about a small farming community whose corn crop begins mysteriously dying.

“The standing ovation isn’t jarring as much as the consistency of it,” Newell told The New York Times last month. “I’m beside myself a lot of the time because I’m like, ‘Y’all are really still standing up.’”

Newell agreed to be considered in the gendered actor category, explaining, “I look at the word ‘actor’ as one, my vocation, and two, genderless. We don’t say plumbess for plumber. We don’t say janitoress for janitor. We say plumber, we say janitor. That’s how I look at the word, and that’s how I chose my category.”

• Best Featured Actress in a Play: Miriam Silverman, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window”, as Mavis Parodus Bryson

Miriam Silverman, the only acting nominee from “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” has been with this production since its Chicago debut. “I’m always more drawn to complicated, tricky, flawed characters,” she told the Times. “And not trying to make them likable, per se, but just trying to be inside of them in all of their humanity.”

Alice Ghostley won a Tony for the same role when the play debuted in 1964.

• Best Featured Actress in a Musical: Bonnie Milligan, “Kimberly Akimbo”, as Aunt Debra

On Sunday night, Milligan, 39, took home her first Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical, for her scene-stealing performance as Debra, Kimberly’s scheming aunt.

It was the first Tony nomination for Milligan, known for her vocal range and vocal belting, who made her Broadway debut in 2018 in “Head Over Heels,” a musical that combined a Renaissance pastoral romance with the music of the Go-Go’s.

• Best Direction of a Play, Patrick Marber, “Leopoldstadt”

Patrick Marber won his first Tony on Sunday for his direction of the harrowing, critically acclaimed Tom Stoppard play, “Leopoldstadt.”

Marber, who was previously nominated for directing a 2018 revival of Stoppard’s “Travesties” has also written plays and worked as a stand-up comedian.

“I’m thrilled to win this,” he said, calling Stoppard one of his heroes.

• Best Direction of a Musical: Michael Arden, “Parade”

“‘Parade’ tells the story of a life that was cut short at the hands of the belief that one group of people is more or less valuable than another and that they might be more deserving of justice,” he said in accepting his award. “This is a belief that is the core of antisemitism, of white supremacy, of homophobia, of transphobia and intolerance of any kind. We must come together. We must battle this. It is so, so important, or else we are doomed to repeat the horrors of our history.”

Arden went on to recall how he had been called a homophobic slur — “the F-word,” he said — many times as a child. And he drew raucous cheers as he reclaimed the slur, making clear that he was now one with a Tony. “Keep raising your voices,” he said.

One of the production’s most talked-about features is Platt’s wordless presence onstage during the entire 15-minute intermission. Arden recently told Michael Paulson that he “wanted to challenge the audience, when they’re getting their cocktail or texting their friends or talking about what they’re having for dinner, to look back and see Ben onstage, and to get a sense that while the world was turning, this man was sitting in a prison cell.”

• Best Book of a Musical: David Lindsay-Abaire, "Kimberly Akimbo"

A tough category this year, with fine work addressing daunting needs. David West Read somehow made a jukebox musical (“& Juliet”) witty. Robert Horn (“Shucked”) came up with more corn puns than anyone thought possible. Matthew López and Amber Ruffin revamped a classic farce (“Some Like It Hot”) as a contemporary exploration of race and gender. But David Lindsay-Abaire may have had the hardest job of all: turning his own play “Kimberly Akimbo” gently, cleverly, ruthlessly into a great musical.

• Best Original Score: Jeanine Tesori (music) and David Lindsay-Abaire (lyrics), “Kimberly Akimbo”
• Best Choreography: Casey Nicholaw, “Some Like It Hot”

Casey Nicholaw won the Tony for best choreography for “Some Like It Hot,” a boisterous Prohibition-era musical with tapping, swing dancing and intricate staging.

Nicholaw, who also directed the production, has been nominated in the category six times before, but this is his first win. In 2011, he shared the Tony for best direction of a musical with Trey Parker for “The Book of Mormon.”

• Best Orchestrations: Charlie Rosen and Bryan Carter, “Some Like It Hot”

Broadway World: In their visit to the press room, recently annointed Tony winners, Some Like It Hot orchestrators, Charlie Rosen and Bryan Carter discussed the timely and important subject of the need for Broadway-sized orchestras for Broadway shows.

Bryan said, "Having an 18-piece orchestra is a luxury. We're hoping that the show inspires new companies to use large orchestras because orchestras really are the heartbeat of musical theatre."

In discussing the challenges of bringing their larger-than-life orchestrations to life, Charlie shared, "The challenge of this show, in particular, was that I hold Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman in such high regard. They're such legends, I really thought twice, three times, four times, about every single note that I wrote on the page. I really wanted to do their score justice because they're so incredible and so prolific," Charlie added.

• Best Scenic Design of a Play: Tim Hatley and Andrzej Goulding, “Life of Pi”

NYTG: The Broadway transfer gave the cast and creative team the opportunity to make changes. "We were able to make some positive adjustments to the story based on the feedback from the West End," said director Max Webster, noting the first act was tightened.

The move also gave the designers the opportunity to expand the design elements of the show. “It is always good to get the opportunity to work on a show for a second (or third, or fourth...) time,” said scenic and costume designer Tim Hatley. “In my experience designing for theatre and film over the past 30 years, I have never walked away from a production thinking I have managed to get it all right.”

Most importantly, the design teams needed to adjust the scope and scale of the scenic design to fit the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York, which is wider and shallower than Wyndham’s. “This has, of course, had a knock-on effect, and video and lighting have had to adapt their designs to work with the new dimensions,” Hatley said.

For his part, video designer Andrzej Goulding (co-nominated with Hatley in the scenic design category) upgraded the show’s simulations. He also worked with lighting designer Tim Lutkin to recolor some scenes for the Broadway run and blend his projections, which naturally light the set, with Lutkin's lighting of the actors. The designers also had to adjust certain visual elements to accommodate different sight lines.

“The heart of the design is the ability to transition seamlessly from the hospital into Pi’s story, which is, for the most part, at sea,” said Hatley. The split-second transitions, which happen in full view of the audience, are integral to the narrative. “This was my challenge as the designer of the show, and I am pleased to have pulled it off.”

• Best Scenic Design of a Musical: Beowulf Boritt, “New York, New York”
• Best Costume Design of a Play: Brigitte Reiffenstuel, “Leopoldstadt”
• Best Costume Design of a Musical: Gregg Barnes, “Some Like It Hot”
• Best Sound Design of a Play: Carolyn Downing, “Life of Pi”
• Best Sound Design of a Musical: Nevin Steinberg, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”
• Best Lighting Design of a Play: Tim Lutkin, “Life of Pi”
• Best Lighting Design of a Musical: Natasha Katz, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”
• Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement: Joel Grey and John Kander

The actor and director Joel Grey, 91, will be honored for Lifetime Achievement at the Tony Awards this evening for his “everlasting impact” to the theater, said Heather Hitchens, president and chief executive of the American Theater Wing.

• Isabelle Stevenson Award: Jerry Mitchell

Parade: When Jerry Mitchell moved to New York City in 1980 to dance in his first Broadway show, Brigadoon, he'd inadvertently walked into one of the worst tragedies of American history. By 1985, he'd lost his first friend to AIDS. By 1990, he'd lost four more. As a gay dancer and choreographer performing in New York, he lived in the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic and felt helpless as his friends and colleagues died.

That helplessness turned into action in the early '90s, after Mitchell was cast in The Will Rogers Follies, in which he was "dancing every night...practically naked" in a tribute to the Ziegfeld Follies. "I was really in great shape," he told me over coffee on a warm May afternoon in a park only a few blocks from Broadway. "I looked hot, and people were noticing...and so a friend of mine said, you should go dance at the Splash Bar on 17th St., which was this famous gay bar, and raise money for our fundraiser." The fundraiser in question was for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, an organization founded in the theater community to fight back against the disease that ravaged their friends and loved ones.

"A light bulb went off over my head. I called seven friends who were in Broadway shows who also, I knew, had great bodies, and I put together a strip show, a burlesque show on the bar. We made $8,000." And that was the birth of Broadway Bares.

While Broadway Bares my have started as an eight-man strip show in a gay bar, its Chelsea nightclub days are long behind it. In total, the dancing/body-celebrating fundraiser has earned more than $22.5 million for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, with the burlesque dancers raking in nearly $1.9 million last year alone. The charity provides lifesaving medications, health care, nutritious meals, counseling and emergency financial assistance to those in need due to HIV/AIDS and other illnesses.

• Regional Theater Tony Award: Pasadena Playhouse

LA Times: Pasadena Playhouse will receive the 2023 Regional Theatre Tony Award, becoming only the second Los Angeles institution to earn the honor and continuing its triumphant streak after years of turbulence.

The prize, which includes a $25,000 grant sponsored by City National Bank, will be presented at the 76th Tony Awards on June 11 in New York.

The Mark Taper Forum, in 1977, was the first L.A. theater to receive the Regional Theatre Tony. Other Southern California recipients include the Old Globe in 1984, South Coast Repertory in 1988 and La Jolla Playhouse in 1993.

The award marks an astonishing turnaround for Pasadena Playhouse, which was on the verge of shutting down in 2010, when it laid off most of its staff, canceled the remainder of its season and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Rescued by the generosity of donors, the theater was back on shaky ground when producing artistic director Danny Feldman was appointed to succeed long-term artistic director Sheldon Epps in 2016.

• Tony Award for Excellence in Theater Education: Jason Zembuch Young

Jason Zembuch Young is the artistic director of the public South Plantation High School in Plantation, Fla. He stages full-length musicals and a full-length plays in both voice and American Sign Language.

Now, his efforts are being rewarded with a special Tony Award, granted each year in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to a U.S. educator who has “demonstrated monumental impact on the lives of students and who embodies the highest standards of the profession.”

• Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theater: Lisa Dawn Cave, Victoria Bailey and Robert Fried

Broadway will have an unusually busy summer

There usually tends to be a lull in new Broadway shows between the Tony Awards eligibility deadline in late April and the start of the school year. But this season is shaping up to be different, with seven openings between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

The first, a horror play called “Grey House” starring Laurie Metcalf, has already opened. Jesse Green had mixed feelings about it, describing it in his review as “so expertly assembled from spare parts by the playwright Levi Holloway and the director Joe Mantello that you may not notice, between the jump scares and the shivery pauses, how little it has on its mind.”

Up next is “Once Upon a One More Time,” about the feminist awakening of fairy tale princesses set to the music of Britney Spears. That show will be followed by two other big musicals: “Here Lies Love,” about Imelda Marcos, a former first lady of the Philippines, with a score by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim; and “Back to the Future,” adapted from the hit film.

Broadway’s summer openings will also feature a comedian, Alex Edelman, performing his acclaimed solo show, “Just for Us,” as well as two comedic plays, “The Cottage,” which is a contemporary version of an old-school farce, and “The Shark Is Broken,” which is about the backstage chaos that challenged the making of “Jaws.”

I'm writing this post in the spirit of the powerful conversations that I had participated in on reddit in /r/adhd. I'm giving up reddit, after this recent fiasco. And, so, I hope to find a similar community here.

And, so, here we go.

I recently quit my job in Big Tech after 7 years in that space. Corporate America, and Big Tech in particular (among other fields) is a human meat grinder. Humans go in and husks come out. After taking a medical leave of absence from work due to complications from anxiety, and multiple medical interventions, I realized that I needed to evaluate whether my job, even my career, was sustainable for me. It only took a few weeks, after returning to work, to accept that, yes, this job and perhaps this career are actively harming me. After talking about it with my wife, at length, I found relief in quitting.

At the core of it: my career has simply been incongruent with my values.

Sure, I've always been a nerd. I was the "brainy" kid. I didn't know how to people well (though I'm told that I'm not on the spectrum or not in any meaningful way). I'd always been overweight and prone to stress. Throughout my life, I was often labeled as the "sensitive" one by people. I rarely felt as though I fit in with any group of people, save perhaps for the other misfits who would band together because they didn't with in with any group of people.

Just before the pandemic began, at the tender age of 47, I was diagnosed with ADHD Combined type. More recently, I was diagnosed with C-PTSD, that I have likely suffered for 40 of my 50 years.

Now I know where that weight comes from: self-medication to give me a dopamine hit and numb me to layers of trauma. I also know where the emotional reactivity comes from: emotional flashbacks resulting from the C-PTSD.

1. Lexapro for well over a decade. It helped to blunt the lows but, I've found, also the highs. I rarely feel poignancy with Lexapro. When I have occasionally been able to ween from it, I have felt a far greater range of emotions.
2. I've had an excellent therapist for going on 8 years who practices ISTDP. He's helped me learn to show up for my more challenging emotions instead of instantly reaching to numb them.
3. Adderall and Vyvanse both used to help until I received a stellate ganglion block (Disclaimer: I have been a client of Dr Mulvaney's practice though I link to it as his explanation is excellent; I'd make this a footnote alas tildes doesn't support that extension for markdown)
4. Ketamine (prescribed) to better address the depression and anxiety. Ketamine, as a psychedelic, combined with the skills learned in therapy has let me dig deeper into my layers of trauma, leading to better overall mental health and better self-understanding.
5. Stellate Ganglion Block mentioned above. Short version: it reduced my seemingly PTSD-driven emotional reactivity to about 10% of what it was prior to the SGB. It's like getting a new nervous system. Unexpected side effect: medications that act on my nervous system now respond differently. As a result, stimulants are now extremely uncomfortable for me whereas before they were effective. Before the SGB, I would say that fear was my primary emotion. Now, I feel things.

I know: I'm privileged. I'm an "old white dude who profited from being in Tech". Yep. True. But I can't retire yet; we don't have that kind of money. We do, however, have enough such that I have the luxury of time to figure out my next steps.

What I have right now is the plan to make a plan. The core of it: live a life congruent with my values--not just at some far off retirement but here, now.

At first, step 1 was to answer this question: "What is the minimum amount of money that I need to earn for us to not massively disrupt our lives?" But then I realized that this is a fear-based question. It means starting out by saying "no" to everything that doesn't earn "enough" money for some arbitrary value of enough.

Where I'm at now, Step 1 Mark II, poses a more inspiring question: "What does retirement look like for my wife and I?" I don't know that we truly get to retire in the sense of living a life of leisure as seemingly many Boomers and earlier were privileged to do. Besides, part of my sense of accomplishment and peace is knowing that I did something to make the world better.

So what do you struggle with?
How are you doing?
What are you doing about it?

Be well.

P.S. This is me trying to do my part, as a new member of this community, to encourage growth not in membership but into different areas of discussion.

For those of you who are new I usually post awards predictions from time to time. Some people seem to like it, at least when it was just a handful of active users.

Anyways these are predictions I currently have for “the guilds” meaning industry awards that are not the Oscar’s. Segmented by different unions. They usually are more populist than the Academy, due to many members being from the TV and commercial world. Whenever there’s an artsy contender that they avoid, the Academy nominates it anyway (Drive My Car, Triangle of Sadness, Phantom Thread being some recent examples that come to mind).

Producers Guild of America Awards (PGA):

1. The Holdovers
2. Killers of the Flower Moon
3. Oppenheimer
4. Dune: Part Two
5. Barbie
6. Past Lives
7. The Zone of Interest
8. The Killer
9. Saltburn
10. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part 1

Directors Guild of America Awards (DGA):

1. Martin Scorsese - Killers of the Flower Moon
2. Christopher Nolan - Oppenheimer
3. Alexander Payne - The Holdovers
4. Denis Villenueve - Dune: Part Two
5. Greta Gerwig - Barbie

Writers Guild of America Awards (WGA):

Original:

1. The Holdovers
2. Past Lives
3. Saltburn
4. May/December
5. Air

Adapted:

1. Barbie
2. Killers of the Flower Moon
3. Oppenheimer
4. Dune: Part Two
5. The Killer

Screen Actor’s Guild Awards (SAG):

Ensemble:

1. The Holdovers
2. Barbie
3. Killers of the Flower Moon
4. Oppenheimer
5. The Color Purple

Lead Actor:

1. Paul Giamatti - The Holdovers
2. Cillian Murphy - Oppenheimer
3. Leonardo DiCaprio - Killers of the Flower Moon
4. Colman Domingo - Rustin
5. Barry Keoghan - Saltburn

Lead Actress:

1. Margot Robbie - Barbie
2. Greta Lee - Past Lives
3. Natalie Portman - May/December
4. Zendaya - Challengers
5. Fantasia Barrino - The Color Purple

Supporting Actor:

1. Robert Downey Jr. - Oppenheimer
2. Ryan Gosling - Barbie
3. Robert DeNiro - Killers of the Flower Moon
4. John Magaro - Past Lives
5. Dominic Sessa - The Holdovers

Supporting Actress:

1. D’avine Joy Randolph - The Holdovers
2. Lilly Gladstone - Killers of the Flower Moon
3. Emily Blunt - Oppenheimer
4. Julianne Moore - May/December
5. Taraji P. Henson - The Color Purple

American Cinema Editors Awards (ACE):

Comedic Editing:

1. Barbie
2. The Holdovers
3. Next Goal Wins
4. Poor Things
5. No Hard Feelings

Dramatic Editing:

1. Dune: Part Two
2. Killers of the Flower Moon
3. Oppenheimer
4. Past Lives
5. The Killer

Hello Tildes geocachers! Found any good caches lately? Going in any good trips? Going to the Greater Bay Area Mega at the end of the month? I would love to know, and meet you online! I’d love to learn more about any interesting caches you’ve found lately and maybe we can discuss puzzles and challenges here.

Many of us listen to whatever music strikes our mood, but there are some out there who, in addition to mood, listen to and appreciate music in focused listening projects. It could be a discography of an artist you want to finish, or it could be listening to all the top 10 albums from each year. There's really no end to the listening projects we get ourselves involved in. I'd like to open a discussion about this.

I've been involved in a number of listening/appreciation projects over the years. For example, even though half the year hasn't elapsed, I've already finished my 2023 Listening Challenge, in which I listened to 50 albums on a variety of criteria.

Right now I'm discog diving some of my favorite artists, and the experience has really opened my ears to the lesser-known avenues of exploration. I've completed so many already, satisfying my urge to always be doing something goal-oriented. Right now, for example, I'm listening to The Musings of Miles as part of my Miles Davis discog dive.

So what are you into project-wise? Please share your experiences!

It has been a while since the last time we did something like a programming challenge, so here's one for ya.

The life story of the author before you get to the recipe

I've been working on a little "today" website, showing what day it is, if it's a significant date for holiday/independence/... reasons, and one of the things I wanted was a small calendar display that showed the full month and days in each week. Like how XFCE's Clock plugin does it.

So I got to figuring it out and after finishing it up I thought this could be a nice little programming challenge. It has one input (the date) that can be in any of the rows and columns, and it's up to you to figure out all the rest.

Here's how mine looks in about 250ish lines of TypeScript (TSX technically) and SCSS.

The Recipe

Make a mini calendar display that shows all the days of the current month and at least one day of each adjacent month. So for example for May 2023: the 31 days in May, the 30th of April and the 1st of June should at least be visible.

It can be in any language with any method of rendering; simple text, TUI/GUI toolkit, web-based, raytraced in some game engine, nixie tubes, whatever.

Bonus Points

• Highlight the current day name in the first row, if you're including day names.
• Highlight the current day number, wherever it is.
• Highlight the current week row, wherever it is.
• Differentiate the days of current month and the days of the other adjacent months, wherever they are.

Some Tips

Showcase

If at all possible and with at least a few entries I will try to run all the submissions myself and create a little showcase website for it.

Picture:

1. The Holdovers
2. Killers of the Flower Moon
3. Dune: Part 2
4. Oppenheimer
5. Past Lives
6. Barbie
7. The Zone of Interest
8. May/December
9. Saltburn
10. The Killer

Director:

1. Martin Scorsese - Killers of the Flower Moon
2. Christopher Nolan - Oppenheimer
3. Alexander Payne - The Holdovers
4. Denis Villeneuve - Dune: Part 2
5. Jonathan Glazer - The Zone of Interest

Original Screenplay:

1. The Holdovers
2. Past Lives
3. May/December
4. Saltburn
5. Drive Away Dolls

Adapted Screenplay:

1. Barbie
2. Killers of the Flower Moon
3. Dune: Part 2
4. Oppenheimer
5. The Zone of Interest

Lead Actor:

1. Paul Giamatti - The Holdovers
2. Cillian Murphy - Oppenheimer
3. Leonardo DiCaprio - Killers of the Flower Moon
4. Barry Keoghan - Saltburn
5. Colman Domingo - Rustin

Lead Actress:

1. Margot Robbie - Barbie
2. Greta Lee - Past Lives
3. Natalie Portman - May/December
4. Annette Bening - Nyad
5. Zendaya - Challengers

Supporting Actor:

1. Robert Downey Jr. - Oppenheimer
2. Robert DeNiro - Killers of the Flower Moon
3. Ryan Gosling - Barbie
4. Jesse Plemmons - Killers of the Flower Moon
5. John Magaro - Past Lives

Supporting Actress:

1. D’avine Joy Randolph - The Holdovers
2. Lilly Gladstone - Killers of the Flower Moon
3. Emily Blunt - Oppenheimer
4. Julianne Moore - May/December
5. Rosamund Pike - Saltburn

Anyone else following the world chess championship?

Background info (feel free to skip if you're already familiar with this):

After reigning champion and world #1 Magnus Carlsen declined to defend his title, the winner of the Candidates tournament 2022, Russia's Ian Nepomniachtchi (world #2), faces the second place finisher in the Candidates, China's Ding Liren (world #3). The championship match takes place over 14 games from April 9-April 30 in Astana, Kazakhstan. As of today, April 13, the score is even at 2-2 after 4 games.

Ian Nepomniachtchi (aka "Nepo") won the Candidates tournament in 2020-21, which was split in two due to covid. He proceeded to challenge Magnus Carlsen for the title in late 2021. Both players performed with computer-like precision for the first five games. Game six became the turning point, when Nepo made a serious blunder which allowed Carlsen to eventually convert the game to a win in what would turn out to be the longest game in world championship history, lasting more than 7 hours and 136 moves. After this grueling loss, Nepo's play seemingly collapsed, allowing Carlsen to take a comfortable win with games to spare.

However, Nepomniachtchi would bounce back to win his second Candidates tournament in a row in 2022. When it became clear that Carlsen would not defend his title, the runner-up of that tournament, Ding Liren, became the second player to compete for the title.

Ding has been a top 5 player for years, with 2018-2019 being his best period yet, when he reached world #2 with well over 2800 Elo, and was undefeated for 100 games of classical chess. This is his first appearance in a world championship final, and also a first for China as a nation.

Russia, of course, has a long history of world champions, dominating the chess world for most of the 20th century. Nepomniachtchi, who is a critic of the invasion of Ukraine, competes under a neutral FIDE flag in this match.

This is only the third time the reigning champion has not defended his title since the first world championship in 1886. Bobby Fischer famously disagreed with the match regulations proposed by FIDE, chess' international governing body, and refused to defend his title in 1975. He subsequently retired from competitive chess and didn't re-emerge until the 1990s. The other instance was Alekhine in 1948 -- he had died two years earlier. (There was also a time in the 1990s when the reigning champion, Garry Kasparov, broke with FIDE and organized his own world championship, but I won't get into that complicated story here.) This is the first time a world champion has continued to play competitive chess while refusing to defend their title.

Nepomniachtchi comes into the match ranked as the world #2 (2795 Elo) while Ding is #3 (2788). The abdicated king of chess, Magnus Carlsen, remains #1 (2853).

How to watch

If you want to watch live, the time zone is a bit unfavorable to European and American viewers, as the games start at 3PM Astana time (11 AM Central European summer time, 2 AM Pacific). You can follow the games without commentary here: lichess chess24 chess.com. There's several streams with grandmaster commentary available. FIDE has an official broadcast, but my favorite is chess.com's coverage, which features commentary by GMs Anish Giri, Daniel Naroditsky and David Howell.

For live computer analysis that's stronger than what you can (likely) get from running a local instance of Stockfish on your own computer, check out Sesse (which is just Stockfish running on a decently beefy server setup).

If you want shorter after-the-fact recaps, there are several Youtube channels catering to differing levels of chess skill, including:

• Powerplaychess (GM Daniel King)
• FIDE (GM Daniil Dubov)
• Gothamchess (IM Levy Rozman)
• Agadmator
• Chessnetwork

And probably at least a half-dozen more.

Who's your favorite to win it all? Does the fact that the clearly best player in the world refused to compete make the whole thing uninteresting to you? Will Nepo crumble again like he did against Carlsen, or will Ding's inexperience with world championship matches be his undoing?

I was playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with my kid the other day and it was a blast. Nintendo have really nailed this game, especially in the balance of accessible enough for beginners to have fun but hard enough for people to have a challenge too.

My other favourite game (although I haven't played it for a while) is Sega Rally Championship on Sega Saturn. This game has 4 tracks (one of which needs to be unlocked) and 3 cars (and again, one of these needs to be unlocked). The tiny number of cars and tracks means that you get to do the same corners over and over. This might sound tedious, but when you hit the corner just right you know it. You can get a sense of mastery over it. I've spent many hours playing games in the Gran Turismo series, and I really enjoy them, but fair play some of the tracks and cars are just shovelled into the game and you don't spend much time with them

In the first Gran Turismo the licensing tests were properly hard. They weren't messing around. Getting bronze requires people to read the manual and understand what the point of the test is. Getting all gold is an actual challenge for experienced players. I feel like the tests (at least, the bronze levels) got easier in later games. The UK soundtrack was small but pretty good.

My final mention is the Burnout series. I loved the crash junctions. I'm not sure the open world of Paradise was fun - it meant spending a lot of time driving across a map to get to the start line of various events. I feel the same way about many games - I'd rather just have a menu of levels and what I need to do to complete them (GoldenEye, SNES PilotWings, BlastCorps are all good examples) than have this stuff obscured by the open world. Burnout on the Nintendo DS was a genuinely awful game. I think Burnout Dominator was my favourite in the series.

So, what do driving games get right? What do they miss? What interesting game mechanics do you enjoy?

Timasomo is "Tildes' Make Something Month": a creative community challenge that takes place in the month of October. This is its fourth year!

If you would like to participate (or simply follow along), make sure you are subscribed to ~creative.timasomo.¹

The Roll Call thread will be posted there on October 1st. That is where people will formally commit to projects for Timasomo.

1: All previous subscribers of ~creative have been automatically subscribed to ~creative.timasomo. However, if you're interested in participating, it's worth double-checking, just to be sure!

FAQs

This Thread: Planning!

Post your ideas.

Give feedback to others.

Set up collaborations.

Ask questions.

Everything in this thread is non-commital! Bounce around ideas and figure out what you'd like to do in our communal brainstorming session.

Also, please do NOT start work on your project yet! Stage setting, planning, and other preparations are allowed (e.g. getting supplies/materials, setting up workspaces, etc.), but save the creation initiation for the 1st.

Get excited for another round of awesome projects!

Today is day three of my "war against writer's block"!
As I keep fighting with my proverbial pen, I hope that some day I'll be able to get out of my block and be able to write some real stuff like research paper or novel or story book.

What I realized today is that Word Power is a very important skill. A writer is essentially a Wordsmith or someone who carves and arranges the words and phrases into sentences, just as a sculptor or carpenter would do with wood or other raw materials. To be a better writer, you must learn to fall in love with words which is probably easier said than done - especially for us non-native speakers!

Having a regular habit or routine helps with this. Each time you come across a difficult word, you open the dictionary software or app and learn its meaning. It hardly takes a few minutes but it's a very useful skill as each new word you know of acts like a raw material or building block for your writing. Better still, develop linguistics as a hobby as mastery of grammar is equally important and so is learning about how languages, cultures and people basically work and interact at the core.

Apart from that, noting down right ideas as they come is also very important. For example, the idea about the Wordsmith thing occurred to me yesterday when I was having a cup of tea. I noted it on time (before it could vanish into the depths of that dark matter called subconscious mind and become irretrievable again!), and made a note of that on my computer so that I can write it in today's proverbial pen.

Even after having these basic tools and ingredients, you may not be able to write anything at all if you lack that focused energy or passion to write about a particular topic - be it a research paper, novel, story book or something else. You need to have that energy to write which I feel I'm lacking right now. I might be able to feel that energy some day as I continue with my battles, at least I hope so! Thanks for reading this and staying with me in these challenging times.

I'm posting this outside of the language learning thread because I worry those not currently learning languages are skipping it altogether :) In this post, I want to share general advice and takeaways about language learning, so this is for everybody, not just current learners!

Today, I've hit I think a big milestone: I am now comfortable calling myself "conversational" in Russian. This comes on the heels of a 30 minutes, all-Russian, naturally-flowing conversation with my coach who was very impressed, and a couple days after having participated in a total of 4+ hours of conversations that included a native speaker who doesn't actually speak English (training wheels are off, now!).

The goal I set myself mid-may to reach in 1 year, has been reached in 3 months. My Duolingo streak is on 87 days (or 89? I don't know if it counts the two streak freezes that were used), but I picked up DL a week after I started.

During this time, I journaled my progress here on Tildes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - really, I hope Tildes isn't getting sick of my spam!), and rekindled my love for learning languages. I think it's time for a recap: What worked, what helped the most, etc.

Summary

I didn't follow one specific technique or guide. Everything from the beginning has been improvised, based on experience from previous languages, and gut feel.

I talked about my methods in-depth in the journaling posts, but here's the bird's eye view of it:

1. Learn the script first, and how it's pronounced (I had already done that years ago, kinda)
2. Rigorously followed a single, complete-beginner crash course to get me started. In my case, a 9-hour, 30 episodes youtube series called Russian Made Easy, at an average of 45 min/day.
3. Started using Drops to start accumulating vocabulary; this replaced Flashcards for me.
4. After a little while, started the Duolingo course (but I don't use Duolingo the way most people do - See the old journals for details) and kept up with the streak since.
5. Started listening to spoken material on YouTube, as much as possible, even before I could understand what was being said.
6. Force myself to interact with the language by switching away from English in a variety of devices and apps
7. Watch loads of short videos on various bits and pieces about grammar, etymology, word lists and misc advice
8. Started writing in Russian on IM apps (at first using Google Translate, then without) with natives. Ask for feedback on it all.
9. Regularly try to speak, to whomever would have a conversation with me.
10. Regularly introspect: appreciate my progress, share it, and think about what I need to work on

Deep dive

Motivation

I wrote about how important motivation is. People start learning a language and then abandon it after a few weeks like a gym membership purchased on January 2nd. Having a motivator that goes beyond "this sounds cool" is really important, because all this is a lot of effort and your brain won't see the point of making all that effort if you don't have a proper need to go through it all.

I found that motivation is not a constant, either. It is something which has to be maintained. Sharing this experience with you all has been immensely useful in that process. And having native speakers in your life who can really appreciate your progress and encourage you is excellent.

Variety

The most useful part of my "method" is definitely the variety of the language diet. It seems to me that following only a set of single-source courses will just leave you with huge gaping holes as soon as you leave its bubble. It'd be like learning to read by only reading the same 100 words, over and over, until you become very quick at reading specifically those words. And then you're done and you come across the word "exhaustion" and you're like, what the fuck do I do with this?

So yes, a variety of activities that will cover all types of input (reading, listening) and outputs (speaking, writing and thinking). And with the varied diet, one should also be careful not to burn themselves out by doing too much. I ensured that a lot of what I was "doing" was passive: Switching my phone's language, leaving audio in the background, asking others to speak to me in the language and translating if I need, etc. My active learning was only being done when I felt like it. This circles us back to the motivation aspect: If that's rock solid, then you will want to keep studying/reading/learning, and you'll do more.

Regularity

So yes, quantity and regularity are also important, and keeping the language in your brain every single day is, I believe, critical to help it develop. The languages I do not think about on a regular basis don't develop. Despite speaking Greek my whole life, only interacting with that language once every couple weeks at most has kept it from evolving beyond a pretty basic level, and now I'm convinced my Russian is better than my Greek. Oof, this puts shame on my supposed bilingual heritage.

Finding comfort

I think it's easy to get frustrated at a language you're not yet good at, because you're so used to how you normally do things, that communicating is SO FRUSTRATING when you don't have your whole toolkit.

Speaking in the target language, with people who know your primary language(s), can also highlight that frustration because the barrier feels "artificial". For me, I have not particularly enjoyed speaking to non-natives, and that hasn't motivated me much. However, speaking to natives has been much easier because it's really nice to think "Hey, you've been making all these efforts to speak in a language I understand, let me do the effort this time".

And well, finding a way to be comfortable speaking is critical. Olly Richards mentions that, if you start speaking too early and in an unsafe space, you can scare yourself into a "bad experience" and regress because of that. I can definitely see that, and I personally was careful to challenge myself without trying to push too hard.

Over time, you can get very good at getting a sense of how difficult a certain activity or material is for you. You have three grades: Things you are comfortable with (level+0), things that are challenging and teach you (level+1), and things that are straight up too difficult for you (level+2).Input-based method proponents often advise staying at +1, without really defining what that means, but it's true you kinda know it when you see it. For example, watching Let's Plays in Russian is still my_level+2 for me, but I see them slowly edging towards +1, and that type of material is super effective because, any time you see the progress happening, your motivation is massively improved.

Mistakes

Developing on comfort: You have to be comfortable making mistakes. This is what really scares everybody, and it was definitely the case for me as well.. I was (and still am) ashamed of my bad grammar especially, and if I don't know how to say something properly, I hesitate to say it at all. But you gotta push through that. There's a balance to strike as always, and you still need to be ok with

How I use Google Translate

I've been doing something which has helped a lot, and in hindsight it's obvious to me why, so I want to share this and popularize this technique.

I started writing to native speakers on IM very, very early (people often use and recommend Tandem for this). Because I didn't have a good enough control over the language yet, what I would do was: Write in Google Translate what I want to say. But without writing long, complex sentences; instead, I would write things I felt I wanted to be able to say. So instead of "Hey, I'm super hungry right now, do you wanna meet me and grab a bite on the way?", I would write "Hey, I am a bit hungry. Can we go eat together?".

I would take the translation, understand it, and usually I would write it again on the keyboard rather than copy-paste (this helps with memorization). Sometimes I would use voice input, because cyrillic keyboard hard.

Then, over time, as I got better at output, I would think about what I want to say directly in Russian and write that into Google Translate to check it (and sometimes do a little back-and-forth dance to see if it suggests alternate forms).

So, yeah, this has been extremely helpful because it's given me a way of using the language as a tool from pretty early on. It's great because Google Translate really is going to adapt to your level, so if you want to be at "level+1", you just have to figure out what that looks like for you in your native language.

Conclusion

Wow, what a journey. Of course it's not over, but I've actually hit my goal... with nine months to spare! That's enough time to make, like, a whole baby.
I want to keep improving, not stagnate, so I'm now going to keep using the language and I think wait that full year before I really start learning a new one. (Ukrainian was next on my list, but I'm shocked at how much I now understand of it, it's much closer to Russian than I thought; so I'm still undecided).

I have loved sharing this experience with you, Tildes, and I really, really hope I motivated some of y'all in your own language learning journeys. If these threads have helped you in any way, please do share it with me here or by DM, I want to know!

2020. That's when I met her.

To some of my close friends it sounds silly to them when I tell them we loved each other. It's hard for some people to grasp the intensity that a long distance relationship can have. But I don't have anything to prove to anyone - I truly did love her.

Being with an ace, I thought, would make things more complicated as I am not asexual myself. But if anything it made things simpler. It made the long distance easier to deal with. It made it easier to be patient. Easier to deal with her not being in my life all the time, because when push came to shove, she was in my life when I needed her to be. In fact, she was the main reason I labeled myself as polyamorous this year. I realised that I didn't want to pretend we were just friends anymore. I cared for her too much for that.

In so little time, she changed me into a better person. She taught me subtleties about love, sex, relationships but also about life in general. She helped me through mental struggles. She was my first call when we got my SO’s sister out of Kyiv this year. In fact, the day of the war, we talked for over six hours in a row.

She was always, always positive no matter the challenge. A true constant. Saw the flip side nobody else could see. No matter how ill she would get, she'd always brush it off and get back on her feet. In the two years I knew her, she had never made me cry, and her messages would always put a smile on my face.
Difficulty tends to make people stronger. She's had an incredibly difficult life, and was the toughest person I knew.

None of those challenges defined her. She was not defined by her gender, illness, sexuality. She was defined by her constant, absolute positivity. And her unending love for Korea.

She believed, as I do, that we're all one entity - the universe experiencing itself. That her role here had been to spread love and positivity. I hope everyone here will be lucky enough to meet someone like her, at some point in their life.

She was 30. The world is worse without her in it.

About:

This is an updating resource of news articles on Finland and Sweden's path to potential membership of NATO.

The articles are sorted by publication date, with the most recent at the top. Feel free to recommend articles in the comments.

The thread title contains the date of the latest update to the main thread, for ease of use.

Articles:

NATO nations sign accession protocols for Sweden, Finland

The thirty NATO allies signed off on the accession protocols for Sweden and Finland on Tuesday, sending the membership bids of the two nations to the alliance capitals for legislative approvals — and possible political trouble in Turkey.

AP – Raf Casert – 5th July 2022

NATO summit: Sweden, Finland boost unity against Putin

NATO's ambitions are growing. Sweden and Finland are set to join and the alliance is strengthening its eastern flank with more troops. This is the right approach against Vladimir Putin, says Bernd Riegert.

DW – Bernd Riegert – 29th June 2022

Turkey says summit is not deadline for talks on Finland and Sweden's NATO bids

Discussions between Turkey, Finland and Sweden about the Nordic countries' NATO membership will continue and an alliance summit in Madrid next week is not a deadline, Turkey said after talks in Brussels on Monday.

Finland and Sweden applied for NATO membership in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But the bids have faced opposition from Turkey, which has been angered by what it says is Helsinki and Stockholm's support for Kurdish militants and arms embargoes on Ankara.

Reuters – 20th June 2022

Former Kurdish rebel has key role in Sweden’s NATO bid

When Turkey’s president rails against “terrorists” in the Swedish Parliament, Amineh Kakabaveh is convinced he is talking about her.

The former Kurdish rebel fighter turned Swedish lawmaker has emerged as a central figure in the drama surrounding Sweden and Finland’s historic bid to join NATO. Turkey opposes NATO membership for the two Nordic countries, accusing them of harboring Kurdish militants.

AP – Karl Ritter – 14th June 2022

Turkey threatens year’s delay to Swedish and Finnish entry to NATO

Turkey has said it is willing to delay Swedish and Finnish membership of NATO for more than a year unless it receives satisfactory assurances that the two Nordic countries are willing to address support for Kurdish groups it regards as terrorist organisations.

The Guardian – Patrick Wintour – 14th June 2022

Sweden to seek constructive progress with Turkey over NATO bid

Sweden will look to make constructive progress in talks with Turkey on Ankara's objections over the Nordic country's application to join the NATO defensive alliance, Foreign Minister Ann Linde said on Friday.

Reuters – 10th June 2022

Finland and Sweden prepare for large NATO naval drill, amid Turkish concerns

Finland and Sweden are preparing for an enlarged NATO naval exercise in the Baltic Sea on Sunday, amid Turkish concerns over their membership.

NATO's fortnight-long 'Baltops 22' is being hosted this year by Sweden, with the Finnish Navy and Air force also taking part.

Euronews – Philip Andrew Churm – 4th June 2022

Sweden's NATO bid: 'We are not naive,' defense minister tells DW

Russia's invasion of Ukraine "fundamentally" changed the way Swedes thought about joining the NATO military alliance, Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told DW.

DW – Rebecca Staudenmaier – 1st June 2022

Finnish foreign minister optimistic that 'sooner or later' Finland and Sweden will be NATO members

Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto expressed optimism that "sooner or later, Finland and Sweden will be members of NATO" and said discussions with the Turkish government would continue as Ankara threatens to block the two nations from joining the defensive alliance.

CNN – Jennifer Hansler – 27th May 2022

Finland, Sweden to send teams to Turkey to discuss NATO bids, Haavisto says

Finland and Sweden will send delegations to Ankara on Wednesday to try to resolve Turkish opposition to their applications for membership of the NATO military alliance, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said on Tuesday.

Reuters – 24th May 2022

Ukraine war: US fully backs Sweden and Finland Nato bids, Biden says

Sweden and Finland have the "full, total and complete backing" of the US in their decision to apply for Nato membership, President Joe Biden says.

Both countries submitted their applications to be part of the Western defence alliance this week, marking a major shift in European geopolitics.

To join the alliance, the two nations need the support of all 30 Nato member states.

But the move by the Nordic nations has been opposed by Turkey.

BBC News – 20th May 2022

Why some young Swedes remain uneasy about joining NATO

While the majority of Swedes are in favor of joining NATO, there are others who even took to the streets in protest. They warn the decision is rushed and that Sweden should better stick with its tradition of neutrality.

DW – Priyanka Shankar – 18th May 2022

Why has Erdoğan doubled down on threat to veto Nordic NATO bids?

After initial hesitation about the seriousness of Turkey’s objections, its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has doubled down on his threat to veto Finland’s and Sweden’s applications for membership of NATO, saying there is no point in either country sending delegations to Ankara to persuade him otherwise.

The Guardian – Patrick Wintour – 18th May 2022

Finland and Sweden may join NATO – but even they can’t guarantee that will make them safer

For a long time, the Nordic countries saw themselves as sleekly humanitarian, peace-keeping powers. To an unusual degree, the national identities of Sweden and Finland are bound up with their foreign policy: Swedes identify with a centuries-old tradition of neutrality, whereas Finns point to their talent for realpolitik, making the best of their volatile geography, which includes an 830-mile border with Russia. As both countries now formally submit their applications to join the North Atlantic alliance, each of them will forgo this deviation from the European norm. Finland in particular now seems poised to adopt a more standard-issue foreign policy. But at what price?

The Guardian – Thomas Meaney – 18th May 2022

Finland and Sweden’s historic NATO bids, explained

Finland and Sweden are seeking membership to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a historic shift for two traditionally non-aligned countries and a major expansion of the Western alliance as war continues in Europe.

Vox – Jen Kirby – 17th May 2022

Finland's Parliament likely to vote on NATO application on Tuesday

President Sauli Niinisto and the government decided officially on Sunday that Finland would apply for membership but the decision is pending Parliament's approval, which is expected with an overwhelming majority.

Debate in the legislature began on Monday and the first session finished more than 14 hours later, after midnight, after members gave 212 addresses on the topic, the vast majority in favour of joining.

Reuters – 17th May 2022

Finland formally confirms intention to join NATO

“Finland is applying for NATO membership,” said the country’s president, Sauli Niinistö, at a press conference. “A protected Finland is being born as part of a stable, strong and responsible Nordic region. We gain security and we also share it. It’s good to keep in mind that security isn’t a zero-sum game.”

The Guardian – Jon Henley – 15th May 2022

Turkey won't block Finland and Sweden joining NATO, Denmark says

Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod believes the NATO alliance will prove united on the potential accession of Finland and Sweden, despite signals from Turkey suggesting Ankara is not ready to support the historic expansion.

Newsweek – David Brennan – 14th May 2022

Opinion: In keeping with its 1939 tradition, Finland is saying 'nyet' to Vladimir Putin

Finland's membership in NATO would signal the end of over 70 years of Moscow's most enduring policy. This is a humiliation for Vladimir Putin, writes DW's Konstantin Eggert.

DW – Konstantin Eggert – 13th May 2022

NATO: New challenges for the alliance as Finland and Sweden inch closer to membership?

Finland has announced its decision to join NATO as quickly as possible, Sweden is expected to follow suit shortly. What does this mean for the alliance?

DW – Priyanka Shankar – 12th May 2022

Sweden plans to send NATO application next week, Expressen daily says

Sweden's government plans to submit an application to join NATO next week, following neighbour Finland in re-writing its post-World War Two security policy in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, daily Expressen said on Thursday.

Reuters – 12th May 2022

Finland must apply for NATO membership "without delay", Finnish leaders say

Finland must apply to join the NATO military alliance "without delay", Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said on Thursday, a major policy shift triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Reuters – Anne Kauranen & Essi Lehto – 12th May 2022

Ukraine conflict: What is NATO and will Finland and Sweden join?

Boris Johnson has said the UK would support Sweden and Finland if they came under attack. Both countries are considering whether to join NATO, with a decision expected shortly.

BBC News – 11th May 2022

Is NATO's Nordic expansion a threat or boost to Europe?

Finland and Sweden, two neutral Nordic countries, are so alarmed by Russia's invasion of Ukraine that they are both now seriously considering joining NATO, as early as this summer.

BBC News – Frank Gardner – 9th May 2022

Scandinavian allies support Finnish, Swedish NATO bids

The Scandinavian members of NATO have given their full backing to the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining the intergovernmental military alliance.

"This is your decision and your decision alone. But be assured: If you decide to join, you have the full support from Denmark," Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on the sidelines of a summit between the five Scandinavian countries and India on Wednesday.

DW – 5th May 2022

Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats divided on decision to join NATO

The first signs of a backlash to a possible Swedish application to join NATO have emerged within the ruling Social Democrats, at the start of a critical month in which Sweden and neighbouring Finland are expected to move rapidly towards a decision.

The Guardian – Patrick Wintour – 4th May 2022

The NATO accession Sweden never saw coming

On May 17, President Sauli Niinisto of Finland is scheduled to arrive in Sweden. He’ll meet with King Carl XVI Gustaf and the Swedish government before leaving the next day. And sometime during his visit, Sweden and Finland are expected to announce they’re both applying for membership of NATO. Finland has—remarkably—taken the lead, and Sweden is likely to follow, simply because if Finland joins there’s really no reason to not to do the same. Sweden is, in fact, NATO’s luckiest-ever joiner, a country swept into the alliance without having to lobby for membership and without its government even expressing a desire to join.

Foreign Policy – Elisabeth Braw – 29th April 2022

Putin is pushing Finland and Sweden into NATO’s arms

Mr. Rasmussen is a former secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a former prime minister of Denmark.

When announcing Russia’s imminent invasion of Ukraine back in February, President Vladimir Putin mentioned NATO 40 times. It was clear he wanted to present NATO as the devil — but it wasn’t always like that.

New York Times – Anders Fogh Rasmussen – 25th April 2022

Going Nordic: What NATO membership would mean for Finland and Sweden

As they watch Russia unleash total war against a European neighbor, Sweden and Finland seem to agree: It’s finally time to join NATO.

With public opinion turning strongly in favor, both countries are inching closer toward formally joining the Alliance. Just this week, their prime ministers publicly telegraphed their strong support for such a move, though Finland appears more certain than Sweden and likely to move first.

But what would that look like? For answers we reached out to Leo Michel, a nonresident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center’s Transatlantic Security Initiative and the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, who previously served as director of NATO policy at the Pentagon. Check out his responses to our questions below.

Atlantic Council – 15th April 2022

Will Finland and Sweden join NATO?

The war in Ukraine may bring NATO new members. Finland and Sweden are closer than ever to ditching their neutrality and applying to join. Bernd Riegert reports from Brussels.

DW – Bernd Riegert – 14th April 2022

Sweden’s decision to join NATO isn’t just about security

Will Sweden join Nato? The country looks set to join Finland in applying for membership, but the debate in Stockholm is far from straightforward.

New Statesman – Megan Gibson – 14th April 2022

Finland is closer than ever to joining NATO

Since 1945, Finland has sought cordial relations with its vast Russian neighbor. But Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has emboldened champions of Finnish NATO membership — and made things harder for left-wing critics of the military alliance.

Jacobin – Tatu Ahponen – 13th April 2022

Finland and Sweden belong in NATO

Though fundamentally geared toward defense, NATO looms as a mortal threat to Russia in President Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical imagination. Mr. Putin has grown increasingly agitated with NATO’s eastward expansion since the Cold War’s end three decades ago, which has brought most of Europe under the alliance’s mutual security guarantee. Mr. Putin cited the need to prevent NATO from reaching Russia’s borders via the inclusion of Ukraine as one of his reasons to invade that neighbor on Feb. 24.

Washington Post – Editorial – 13th April 2022

In Sweden and Finland, even the skeptics are coming round to NATO bids

In Sweden, support for joining NATO among the population as a whole has risen from around 35 percent to 46 percent over the past month. In Finland, it has spiked to over 60 percent.

Politico – Charlie Duxbury – 8th April 2022

Putin’s strategic error

When Vladimir Putin began laying the groundwork for his invasion of Ukraine, he pointed to what he regards as the existential threat posed by the West encroaching farther into the post-Soviet space. Nearly two weeks into Putin’s devastating and costly invasion, that fear has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy: The once-remote possibility of Ukraine joining the European Union and NATO now seems more plausible, and even in historically neutral countries such as Finland and Sweden (both of which are already EU members), public support for joining NATO has surged to record levels.

The Atlantic – Yasmeen Serhan – 9th March 2022

Swedish PM rejects opposition calls to consider joining NATO

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson on Tuesday rejected opposition calls to consider joining NATO following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, saying an application now would destabilize security in Europe.

Reuters – 8th March 2022

Finland, Sweden brush off Moscow’s warning on joining NATO

Finland and Sweden have brushed off warnings from neighboring Russia that their possible joining of NATO would trigger “serious military-political consequences” from Moscow for the two countries.

AP – Jari Tanner – 26th February 2022

Finland and Sweden wait for the Baltic states

The Baltic States used to be a problem for Russia. Now they are a headache for their Nordic neighbors, Finland and Sweden. Likely membership of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in NATO is forcing Finland and Sweden to reconsider their commitment to military nonalignment. Traditionalists in Helsinki and Stockholm do not like it a bit.

The Baltic enthusiasm for NATO and the Finnish-Swedish distaste for the organization stem from the same source: a refusal to believe that NATO has changed in any meaningful way. The Baltic states see it as directed against Russia and want to join it for that reason. The Finns and Swedes share the perception and reach the opposite conclusion: They want to hear nothing about membership.

New York Times – Risto E J Penttila – 25th January 2022

Russian threats against Ukraine could push Finland and Sweden toward NATO

Russian military threats against Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s unpredictability are forcing Sweden and Finland to reconsider their policy of non-alignment toward NATO. If admitted, each would enhance security in NATO’s northeastern flank and put Russia on notice. NATO’s open door policy allows nation-states to initiate membership plans if they meet guidelines delineated in Article X of the North Atlantic Charter. Finland and Sweden are ideal NATO candidates.

The Hill – Chris J Dolan – 19th January 2022

Finland not negotiating about NATO membership, foreign minister says

Finland has no plans at present to join NATO, its foreign minister Pekka Haavisto said on Friday, amid heightened security tensions between Finland’s giant neighbour Russia and Ukraine.

“Finland does not discuss with NATO joining it, nor does Finland have such a project upcoming … Finland’s security policy remains unchanged,” Haavisto told reporters at a teleconference following a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in France.

Euronews – 15th January 2022

The hem and haw of Sweden’s relationship with NATO

To date, Sweden has looked at whether or not it joins NATO as a matter of identity and image rather than an existential security issue. After the end of World War II, Sweden chose to continue its policy of neutrality, which had served it well in both world wars and continued to do so during the Cold War. At the same time, it is a known fact that Sweden collaborated with Germany in World War II and has cooperated with NATO since the establishment of the Alliance. The essence and meaning of this cooperation have changed and it has now become a decisive factor in ensuring Sweden’s national security. There is increasing talk about joining the Alliance. The topic that has long been a taboo has entered the programmes of political parties.

ICDS – Riina Kaljurand – 22nd April 2019