• Activity
  • Votes
  • Comments
  • New
  • All activity
    1. Observations on needed features and issues now that the site has gotten busier

      Now that the site has gotten a little busier, I’ve noticed a few shifts in how I've engaged with the site and jotted down notes on things that I've noticed might be nice to have. We already have a...

      Now that the site has gotten a little busier, I’ve noticed a few shifts in how I've engaged with the site and jotted down notes on things that I've noticed might be nice to have. We already have a "what don't you like" thread I know, but this is more like "what didn't I notice when the place was a lot quieter" sort of thing.
      



      Edit bumps for megathreads

      I recently created a megathread for the Apple VisionPro reviews. But I realized that if I continuously edit in new reviews as they come in, the thread won’t bump. I’d need to actually post each time a new review comes in AND edit it into the self-post. It might be nice if I could choose to bump a self-post if I’m making a substantive edit to the content. Though I can see the opportunities for abuse here so I wonder if there’s a more elegant solution for it besides just occasionally posting when there are updates.

      Following/Subscribing to Topics

      Yes topics get bumped as conversation happens in them, but with the level of activity we have right now I’m having trouble keeping up with conversations I’m actually invested in following. Bookmarks are good, but there’s two issues. One is that they’re hidden in a folder off to the side. So it’s easy to forget to check them. Two is that they’re currently serving dual purposes, they can either be for saving specific topics because I think they’re good enough that I might want to reference them again or they can be because I want to keep up with the conversation in them.
      I’d be interested in separating the functions a little bit. I’d like to be able to bookmark topics as a “save” function but also “subscribe” to topics to get alerted up top when there are new posts the same way I am alerted to stuff in my inbox. Alternatively, just having an “unread” count next to the bookmarked topics link and sorting the list of bookmarks by acitivity might do it.



      A Drafts section

      This post right now I mostly composed in a note-taking app because it’s a collection of random thoughts I had while using the site the past couple of weeks but didn’t want to post until I had time to marinate on them. Being able to save drafts directly in Tildes would have been a nice feature. It would also be good for replies since it gives you a chance to be like “Hmmm, do I really want to engage with this conversation right now?”



      “Shortlisted” groups

      The list of groups is a bit long, especially when you’re scrolling it on mobile. People might not (and probably don’t) actually care about all of them. It might be nice if we could “star” a group to have it show up higher on the list or have all non-starred groups in a collapsed list.

      Choosing groups from the new post view instead of posting from the groups view

      Since groups are currently being treated more like “super-tags” than separated communities, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to designate the group in a dropdown menu above the tag bar when we’re posting instead of needing to go into a group to create a new post. In some cases, I might think a self-post belongs in one group but by the time I’m done writing I realize this ~humanities post is really more of a ~life post. This will, of course, depend on the outcome of the “treating groups more as separate entities” discussion.



      Subscribed topic tags

      Filtered topic tags is a nice feature because it’s one interaction mode that serves dual uses. You can both remove a selected class of content from your main feed but then you can also navigate into it to see ONLY that content. This basically lets you use it alternatively as a “favorites” option instead of an anti-favorites option. (I guess this is less of a feature suggestion and more of an observation for a non-obvious use of the function.) We could, maybe, separate out the list of filtered topics by why you’re filtering. Either “I don’t want to see this stuff” or “I want to be able to specially focus on this stuff.”

      Built-in invite request form

      Currently to get an invite you have to ask on Reddit or something. Maybe we should have a page where people can request invites within Tildes so we aren’t reliant on having to pick-up flotsam from other social media platforms. The downside, of course, is that you can’t vet people. So this invite path would probably be the lowest priority and only handed out during quiet periods where noxious posters can be handled quickly.



      “Only New” filter for comments


      I mentioned this issue with the Arc browser that makes it so the “collapse all old replies” function breaks if I open it in a background tab. Maybe it might be nice to also have this as a button I can trigger next to the Collapse replies and Expand all buttons. Or, if it doesn’t over-complicate the UI, maybe even a way to “collapse all before [datetime]” with the last session time pre-filled in. Or perhaps more like a clock that you can wind backwards in 30 minute or 1 hour increments.



      Rethinking time-limit on Exemplary labels


      I think it’s crucial that these remain a rare commodity, but with the current volume of good posts the 8 hour limit is feeling mighty constraining. Although previously the time limit didn’t feel like a constraint at all because there legitimately wasn’t much to label. Not sure if this should actually change or not, maybe the time limit can stretch or compress based on how active the site has been over the past X hours.



      Add a “Funny” modifier to the “Joke” label

      The effect on sorting should be the exact same and it should be invisible to everyone, but I just think it would be fun and would also encourage people to label jokes as such (trick folks into narcing basically). Maybe when there is a reputation system in place it can be used to adjust how big of a negative weight your joke posts get. Funnier people get dinged less.

      Rethinking the necroposting warning

      With more people here there are more active conversations and topics seem to remain active a lot longer. In topics like the one for questions from new users it’s so active it feels kind of silly to see the “this topic is over X old” warning. We do want to encourage maintaining conversations as long as they’re going so maybe we should suppress this warning on active topics (like ones that have had more than 5 posts in the past 3 days).

      Improved search

      
I know search is hard, but it is difficult to find old stuff. I’ve been trying to dig up examples of old posts or previous conversations on things when answering questions and I’m often trying to wrack my brain for specific phrases from conversations a year or more ago. It just doesn’t work for this. Discord search works pretty well and gives you modifiers for who posted, where, around when. I get the potential for abuse here, but maybe enable this kind of deep search for my own post history and nobody else’s?



      Mark direct messages as unread

      Exactly what is says on the tin. Sometimes people ask you something and you need to come back to it later.



      Tag cloud

      Knowing what to tag things as is intimidating for newbies and old heads alike. There need to be mechanisms to make this more approachable. I think perhaps if, underneath the tag bar we just displayed a “word cloud” of the common tags sized according to frequency it might help get people started. The word cloud would have to be per group and maybe refreshed per day based on a rolling-sample of the last 100 posts.

      Put a vote button on the bottom of the post for self-posts.

      Seriously, do you realize how much scrolling I have to do to go back up and upvote kfwyre when he posts something like this? It's especially a hassle on mobile.

      87 votes
    2. Nozick, the Fediverse, and the internet in general

      Intro This will be something of a long and theoretical post, but I'm interested in others' opinions on this - and a quick google search of Robert Nozick and Fediverse turned up literally nothing,...

      Intro

      This will be something of a long and theoretical post, but I'm interested in others' opinions on this - and a quick google search of Robert Nozick and Fediverse turned up literally nothing, so I'm thinking that this is a new connection. The recent news about Beehaw defederating from other instances, and the wider discussions about how federation might or might not work reminded me of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), which I imagine anyone who's formally studied philosophy will have come across. The main point of this book is to make the case for the libertarian minimal state, with the overall thesis in the preface being:

      Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. (p. ix)

      The book, while influential and important, is I think deeply flawed, and there's some general agreement about this in the philosophy departments I've been involved with. (Same with many of Nozick’s general opinions.) Unfortunately, the parts of the book that tend to be taught are the first two, and in particular the Wilt Chamberlain argument (pp. 160-2) in which he argues that unequal distribution of wealth and goods is fine as long as the unequal distributions were caused by a history of mutual freely consenting exchanges.

      I say 'unfortunately' because– while the first two sections and the Chamberlain argument are definitely important and influential– Part III, Utopia, is the strongest. I'm not a libertarian, but it's a novel, well-structured, and interesting argument for the minimal state, based in part on possible-world semantics, and I think it looks a lot like what the Fediverse is going for, which is why I'm interested in the crossover.

      The Possible-World Model

      Nozick begins by defining Utopia and identifying its main issues:

      The totality of conditions we would wish to impose on societies which are (preeminently) to qualify as utopias, taken jointly, are inconsistent... The best of all possible worlds for me will not be that for you. The world, of all those I can imagine, which I would most prefer to live in, will not be precisely the one you would choose. Utopia, though, must be, in some restricted sense, the best for all of us; the best world imaginable, for each of us. In what sense can this be? (pp. 297-8)

      He then sets up this perhaps rather convoluted idea, based on the concept of imagining possible worlds. The core idea is this: that in any possible world you can imagine, it must include that all other rational agents in that world will also be able to imagine other possible worlds, and that (if they prefer) they can then move to those possible worlds.

      The question then moves to: is it possible for this to be stable? Because Nozick is interested in whether utopia as traditionally explored by utopian theorists and authors (and note that to an extent he’s subtextually talking to socialist utopians throughout) is possible, the key question is whether worlds will keep being created over and over, with people moving over and over, or whether there'll ever be a world where everyone in that world chooses to stay. And stable worlds must then:

      [satisfy] one very desirable description... namely, none of the inhabitants of the world can imagine an alternative world they would rather live in, which (they believe) would continue to exist if all of its rational inhabitants had the same rights of imagining and emigrating. (p. 299, his emphasis)

      This is, given that people are able to move to worlds they imagine (which Nozick calls 'associations' - as opposed to 'east-berlins' in which inhabitants are unable to move to other worlds).

      He puts this also in set theory terms (quoted just below), and then points out an equivalency of members of S choosing to form an association of their own, vs. members of S refusing entry to those members of A who are not also members of S.

      if A is a set of persons in a stable association then there is no proper subset S of A [note from me: 'proper subset' means it's a part of the whole but not equal to it. So {1, 3} is a proper subset of {1, 3, 5}, but {1, 3, 5}, although a subset of itself, is not a proper subset of itself] such that each member of S is better off in an association consisting only of members of S, than he is in A. For, if there were such a subset S, its members would secede from A, establishing their own association. (p. 300)

      There is then a fairly lengthy section expanding on this, caveating it, and also doing some more in-depth logic/set theory, which I'll skip over as it's not as relevant (and this is already getting long). It's pages 301-6 if anyone's interested in reading, though. Page 307 onwards is where Nozick begins analysing how this model laid out above could be seen in the real world.

      The Real World

      Obviously, the above possible-worlds model is very idealised, and there are several limitations in the real world. Nozick lays out the following four:

      1. In the model, we can imagine infinite possible people to associate with (although we cannot have an infinite number of people in an association); in the real world there are firstly not infinite people and secondly we can't create them. So even if I can imagine the perfect association for me, it might not exist; same with a community I might want to join.
      2. In the model, the only ways associations interfere with each other is by drawing away its members - in the real world, communities impinge on each other in all kinds of ways.
      3. Information costs - it takes effort to find out about other communities in the real world; in the model it's instantaneous and easy.
      4. In the real world, some communities don't let their members know about, or move to, other communities.

      It’s worth noting here that Nozick was writing in 1974, before the advent of the internet (and to a lesser extent, globalisation in general), so point 3 is less of an issue here. Particularly regarding moving and travel costs, which are vastly, vastly, reduced online. In fact, I think these issues are all reduced on the internet, which is relevant when it comes to the potential for implementation. I say more about this at the end of this post, and it’s one of the main things I’m interested in hearing opinions about.

      Nozick, now, is interested in the implementation (or influence) of the possible-world model in the real world, and his key point ends up being this:

      The idea that there is one best composite answer to all of these questions, one best society for everyone to live in, seems to me to be an incredible one. (And the idea that, if there is one, we now know enough to describe it is even more incredible.) (p. 311, his emphasis)

      The ‘questions’ he refers to are questions of values, of activities, of interests. Security or adventure? Luxury or austerity? Private property? Religion? The fact, Nozick thinks, that utopian authors attempt to imagine a utopian society demonstrates a blindness to the heterogeneity of human nature. Which is demonstrated by the fact that they all have their own visions of utopia, and the fact that the inhabitants of their visions all lead different lives.

      The conclusion Nozick draws is that there is no sense in having one type of community in a utopia - rather, that “Utopia is a framework for utopias” (p. 312, my emphasis because it’s the most important point here). We should be aiming for a kind of “meta-utopia”, and this is where the real-world limitations flagged above come into play. The meta-utopia is necessary precisely because of these real-world limitations. What does this look like?

      [T]he environment in which utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular utopian visions are to be realised stably. (p.312)

      Nozick thinks this conclusion can arise from a few forms of arguments. One is, that people are different, and so thinking there’s any ‘best’ world for everyone is foolish. That’s what’s happening when he states that there’s no composite answer to the questions of how best to live/structure society. But what if there is a society that’s the best society for everyone? Nozick reckons that that still leads to this meta-utopia. His reasoning for this involves what he calls “design devices” and “filter devices”.

      Design devices basically attempt to structure an ideal society from the ground up, with a bunch of people discussing what the best society is, constructing a model for this society, and then implementing it.

      Nozick basically thinks that this is a non-starter. I think this analogy puts his ideas well:

      It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it. Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us? (pp. 313-4)

      EDIT: I want to note that I mean that this analogy puts his ideas well. I share the scepticism of design devices, while simultaneously thinking that many societies denoted as 'primitive' tap into important and valuable aspects of human communities which 'modern' societies dismiss.

      The complexity of the human condition is also a large part of his reasoning here why design devices don’t work. So, the alternative is filter devices, which “involve a process which eliminates (filters out) many from a large set of alternatives” (p. 314). This is desirable for a few reasons:

      1. It requires less knowledge than design devices. Filtering processes don’t need to know precisely what an end-product looks like; they can just have some ideas about what they don’t want and begin with that.
      2. The filtering process naturally improves with time. When you have a filter for new candidates, then those candidates are, on average, of better quality (however that’s defined in this particular community), so the filtering process now has better material to work with.
      3. New material creates novel ideas, which would not be accessible with a design process (Nozick doesn’t outright state this, but I think it’s clear that he thinks it).

      Moreover, one single filtering process will be insufficient. Nozick describes it thus:

      [P]eople try out living in various communities, and they leave or slightly modify the ones they don’t like… Some communities will be abandoned, others will struggle along, others will split, others will flourish, gain members, and be duplicated elsewhere. Each community must win and hold the voluntary adherence of its members. No pattern is imposed on everyone, and the result will be one pattern if and only if everyone voluntarily chooses to live in accordance with that pattern of community. (p. 316, his emphasis)

      Some advantages he lists to this: given that the filtering process is largely constituted by people leaving communities they don’t like, this will cause communities which people want to live in; mechanical processes are limited “given our inability to formulate explicitly principles which adequately handle, in advance, all of the complex, multifarious situations which arise” (p. 317) - this one is very, very similar to many recent discussions I’ve seen about moderation and the ‘don’t be an arsehole’ clause.

      So what does all this lead to? Basically, that the utopian framework should be one that is informational. Whichever framework provides the best means for finding out about various communities, is the one that should be adopted– first, because that is what best facilitates the filtering process, and second, because it best mitigates the real-world issues laid out at the beginning of this section.

      Conclusion

      Ok, so, that’s the bulk of what I wanted to put down. The rest of Utopia focuses very much on the physical world - it’s well worth a read. (NB I’m using ‘physical world’ rather than ‘real world’ or ‘actual world’ (which Nozick uses) because the internet is part of the real world. As opposed to the ideal world, which one example of is the possible-worlds model laid out above.)

      I was initially going to offer my own thoughts about how this connects to the Fediverse and the internet in general, but just the sharing of Nozick’s framework has gotten long enough that I think I’ll leave it there. Part of my motivation for sharing this is that, although I’m very much not a libertarian, this is imo one of the strongest defences of the minimal state; in addition to this, I’m much more sympathetic for a kind of meta-libertarianism when it comes to spaces like the internet, especially if they function to facilitate filtering processes.

      That said, I still have worries about the way this can be, and is, implemented. There’s been a lot of discussion on Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, and although I personally don’t see a problem with it, I can understand why people are annoyed. I wonder if this is a consequence of people thinking they’re existing in the meta-utopia, when in fact they’re existing in an instance of it. I also don’t want to label the Fediverse as the meta-utopia, although I do get the sense that that’s what they’re aiming to become.

      Nozick has a relevant section on the Beehaw thing, actually, and I’m just going to quote it because I’ve just about reached my energy limit for explaining/elucidating philosophy lol. Feel free to skip it, it’s a side-note to this post and not a main point.

      A person will swallow the imperfections of a package P (which may be a protective arrangement, a consumer good, a community) that is desirable on the whole rather than purchase a different package (a completely different package, or P with some changes), when no more desirable attainable different package is worth to him its greater costs over P, including the costs of inducing enough others to participate in making the alternative package. One assumes that the cost calculation for nations is such as to permit internal opting out. But this is not the whole story for two reasons. First, it may be feasible in individual communities also to arrange internal opting out at little administrative cost… yet this needn’t always be done. Second, nations differ from other packages in that the individual himself isn’t to bear the administrative costs of opting out of some otherwise compulsory provision. The other people must pay for finely designing their compulsory arrangements so that they don’t apply to those who wish to opt out. (p. 321-2)

      Another reason why I’m interested in opening up this discussion, is that I’ve experienced almost no discussion on this section of Nozick’s work in my experience of academic philosophy. The other two sections– and particularly Wilt Chamberlain– are talked to death, but Utopia has relatively little engagement. On one hand, I get this - a large part of philosophical education is understanding the history of ideas, and Utopia is comparatively uninfluential. You need to know Wilt Chamberlain if you’re entering academic philosophy; you don’t need to know all this. On the other hand, it’s a shame, because I think it’s the strongest part of Nozick’s work.

      I also think that it’s somewhat more relevant to the internet than it is to the physical world. Not because of the legitimacy of its ideals, but purely because of the relative ease of implementation. The four issues mentioned above are really reduced in online spaces.

      1. We still don’t have infinite people, but the variety of people we can interact with is potentially wider. Potentially. The issues with lack of– or exodus of– minorities, which I’ve seen discussions about on Tildes while searching past posts, is an important one here. I’m not necessarily referring specifically to Tildes here - I’m too new to the site to really have a good sense of the community. But just like in the real-world, I can’t conjure up people and create my own version of Tildes which includes all the people here currently and also all the other people I’d like to see.
      2. Communities on the internet obviously interfere with each other, just like physical-world communities. This isn’t that reduced, perhaps only in terms of stakes. Physical-world community interference can cause wars, financial boycotts, etc. Maybe doxxing or the like is analogous? Regardless, it’s reduced although not eliminated in severity, as far as I can see.
      3. The difference in information costs should be immediately obvious. It’s much easier for someone to try out Tildes, than it is for someone to try out France.
      4. Relatedly, internet communities don’t have the same power as physical communities to limit information, although there are definitely still issues here, especially with an increasingly-corporatised internet. On the other hand, the internet itself does work in breaking down these barriers in the physical world, at least in terms of information (not in ease of moving countries). At least, there’s usually no real financial costs to hopping platforms.

      Guess I’m leaving it here? Maybe all I’ve accomplished is sharing some cool philosophy– at least, I think it’s cool.

      The page numbers all reference Anarchy, State, and Utopia - I don’t know if I’m allowed to link PDFs here, but suffice to say it’s the first one that shows up.

      This Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy page also includes some useful context, and a bit of discussion on the Utopia section - although, again, relatively brief. Nevertheless a great source.

      20 votes
    3. Does anyone else habitually go unshod for health reasons?

      This is something I picked up a few years ago, but basically, my logic is that: It's what evolution designed us for (shoes only go back about 40,000 years) Objects on the ground aren't a threat if...

      This is something I picked up a few years ago, but basically, my logic is that:

      • It's what evolution designed us for (shoes only go back about 40,000 years)
      • Objects on the ground aren't a threat if you watch where you're going, unless you're someplace you'd probably rather not walk even in shoes
      • Hookworm is actually species specific, and human hookworm isn't an actual threat unless you're in a third world country (or Alabama, apparently)
      • It's the thickest skin on your body (especially if it's given the chance to "properly" develop), so general dirt is a non-issue
      • It's actually probably more hygienic considering you probably clean your feet much more frequently than your shoes (which are warm, moist and dark)
      • As an extra, the health department (any health department) actually doesn't care what customers do - feel free to verify this yourself

      You kind of have to retrain yourself, as far as both gait (forefoot strike instead of heel strike) and gaze ("scan" ahead every few seconds), but you absolutely can acclimate to it, so thoughts of "I could never!" are probably wrong.

      22 votes
    4. Experience with and opinion on Proton Mail and co.?

      Hi, I saw that Proton now has a Family Plan that includes all of their services including mail, calendar, drive, etc. I've been looking to detach my and my family's life a bit from the big corps...

      Hi,

      I saw that Proton now has a Family Plan that includes all of their services including mail, calendar, drive, etc.

      I've been looking to detach my and my family's life a bit from the big corps like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Proton sounds interesting.

      At the same time I am wondering if they're really to be trusted any more than any other company. I found some critique of the E2E encryption being basically snake oil and not properly implemented etc. I am of course aware that there're always tradeoffs and while privacy is definitely nice, I don't need to go to an extreme degree of "no logs whatsoever, never even turning anything over to the police", I think I am just mostly looking to make me and my family less of a product of advertising, possibly AI/ML and so on, so some compromise is definitely possible.

      I am curious, does anyone here have any experience with or opinions on the company and their products?

      44 votes
    5. Community organization brainstorming: decentralizing society

      What the recent Reddit protest cemented in my mind is how ineffective protest tends to be the larger and more entrenched an established order is. There's no real incentive to change because...

      What the recent Reddit protest cemented in my mind is how ineffective protest tends to be the larger and more entrenched an established order is. There's no real incentive to change because ultimately everyone knows that the protestors have little recourse.

      If you want to enact change, just trying to get people enraged and trying to get them to express that rage is not a great tactic. What you need as an alternative for people to go to instead, because that's the only real threat that matters to the establishment, the threat of being replaced.

      So to that end, I'd like to start a conversation about what it is that people need, and how we can arrange structures to get those things without needing to rely on external actors who don't have your interests at heart.

      For example, community mesh networks are a way of expanding internet into more of a public amenity so everyone can have access to it.

      Virtual power plants can allow communities to produce their own power reliably and reduce their reliance on major power providers.

      These are the kinds of things I am interested in. I feel that the most effective way to push back against profiteering corporations is to simply reduce our need for them in the first place.

      What are some good community oriented solutions to societal needs that you feel deserve more attention and interest?

      18 votes
    6. Looking for suggestions on new piano pieces to learn

      I've recently started teaching myself piano again after a long hiatus. I started by picking back up a piece I half-remembered from years ago -- Chopin's Nocturne in E Minor, Op. 72 No. 1 -- and...

      I've recently started teaching myself piano again after a long hiatus. I started by picking back up a piece I half-remembered from years ago -- Chopin's Nocturne in E Minor, Op. 72 No. 1 -- and about the first half of it feels right for my current skill level (basically everything up until all the RH 16th note runs start). While that's going great so far, I no longer have a piano teacher to recommend me new pieces beyond just this one, and I'm not entirely sure where to look myself to find things that are interesting without being too technically challenging. Would love a few recommendations from any pianists on here, either for specific pieces to look into and/or for good ways to find suitable pieces more broadly!

      15 votes
    7. List of recurring threads and their schedules?

      Do we have a list of recurring discussions and their schedules anywhere? I know they're generally weekly, but I often find myself having to do a quick search for when the last one was and...

      Do we have a list of recurring discussions and their schedules anywhere? I know they're generally weekly, but I often find myself having to do a quick search for when the last one was and determine whether or not I should hold onto my contribution to that thread until the next one occurs. eg if the new discussion is created tomorrow, I may as well just post my comments tomorrow rather than today. Admittedly a very minor inconvenience.

      Having a list somewhere easy to see could also help prevent folks from unintentionally creating duplicate discussions during the period between one week's discussion going quiet and the next week's starting.

      And maybe eventually it could be something like we subscribe to a recurring discussion and then it shows up in the sidebar somewhere in a list of upcoming discussions? Just spitballing here.

      Any thoughts?

      11 votes
    8. Fishing - angling for others hooked on the hobby AND folks who want to try

      Do you Fish? Do you eat them or let 'em go? How'd you get into it and what were the confusing bits? Memory of a good time or lessons you wished someone taught you? Do you want to try but haven't...

      Do you Fish? Do you eat them or let 'em go? How'd you get into it and what were the confusing bits? Memory of a good time or lessons you wished someone taught you?

      Do you want to try but haven't ever been? Did you fish as a kid and never again? What would make it easier for you to give it a go? Tried your city's "learn to fish" programs? What if you had someone else clean and cook it?

      If your experience or interest limited to digital fish only, what's your thoughts on why every game and its predecessor has fishing mini-games? It's the dangnabbit armageddon but let's pause and fish for a bit first. Wild.


      inspired by this super cool thread on treasure hunting kind of fishing,

      19 votes
    9. Docker Nextcloud AIO Mastercontainer update failing

      I've got a problem with my nextcloud and as tildes is my favourite nice place to ask for tech-support, maybe somebody here can help me with that. I can start and run Nextcloud AIO without any...

      I've got a problem with my nextcloud and as tildes is my favourite nice place to ask for tech-support, maybe somebody here can help me with that.

      I can start and run Nextcloud AIO without any problems. I can update the subcontainers without any problems. But the update of the Mastercontainer always fails and I don't kno why, only that it has to be something with docker.sock and permissions, but I could not resolve the issues, and google does not seem to be helpful (or I'm looking for the wrong stuff).

      my update logs:

      time="2023-06-14T12:47:59Z" level=debug msg="Sleeping for a second to ensure the docker api client has been properly initialized."
      time="2023-06-14T12:48:00Z" level=debug msg="Making sure everything is sane before starting"
      time="2023-06-14T12:48:00Z" level=info msg="Watchtower 1.5.3"
      time="2023-06-14T12:48:00Z" level=info msg="Using no notifications"
      time="2023-06-14T12:48:00Z" level=info msg="Only checking containers which name matches \"nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer\""
      time="2023-06-14T12:48:00Z" level=info msg="Running a one time update."
      time="2023-06-14T12:48:00Z" level=debug msg="Checking containers for updated images"
      time="2023-06-14T12:48:00Z" level=debug msg="Retrieving running containers"
      time="2023-06-14T12:48:00Z" level=debug msg="FIXME: Got an status-code for which error does not match any expected type!!!" error="Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?" module=api status_code=-1
      time="2023-06-14T12:48:00Z" level=error msg="Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?"
      panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
      [signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x30 pc=0x9f4a22]
      
      goroutine 1 [running]:
      github.com/containrrr/watchtower/pkg/metrics.NewMetric({0x0, 0x0})
      	/home/runner/work/watchtower/watchtower/pkg/metrics/metrics.go:31 +0x22
      github.com/containrrr/watchtower/cmd.runUpdatesWithNotifications(0xc0002fd830)
      	/home/runner/work/watchtower/watchtower/cmd/root.go:375 +0x15e
      github.com/containrrr/watchtower/cmd.Run(0xc00033c300?, {0xc000281300?, 0x4?, 0x4?})
      	/home/runner/work/watchtower/watchtower/cmd/root.go:168 +0x570
      github.com/spf13/cobra.(*Command).execute(0xc00033c300, {0xc0000300b0, 0x4, 0x4})
      	/home/runner/go/pkg/mod/github.com/spf13/cobra@v1.6.1/command.go:920 +0x847
      github.com/spf13/cobra.(*Command).ExecuteC(0xc00033c300)
      	/home/runner/go/pkg/mod/github.com/spf13/cobra@v1.6.1/command.go:1044 +0x3bc
      github.com/spf13/cobra.(*Command).Execute(...)
      	/home/runner/go/pkg/mod/github.com/spf13/cobra@v1.6.1/command.go:968
      github.com/containrrr/watchtower/cmd.Execute()
      	/home/runner/work/watchtower/watchtower/cmd/root.go:71 +0x52
      main.main()
      	/home/runner/work/watchtower/watchtower/main.go:13 +0x17
      
      

      my startup command

      sudo docker run \
      --sig-proxy=false \
      --name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer \
      --restart unless-stopped \
      --publish 8080:8080 \
      -e APACHE_PORT=11000 \
      -e APACHE_IP_BINDING=127.0.0.1 \
      --volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config \
      --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
      nextcloud/all-in-one:latest
      

      output after start:

      Trying to fix docker.sock permissions internally...
      Creating docker group internally with id 998
      WARNING: No swap limit support
      Initial startup of Nextcloud All-in-One complete!
      You should be able to open the Nextcloud AIO Interface now on port 8080 of this server!
      E.g. https://internal.ip.of.this.server:8080
      
      If your server has port 80 and 8443 open and you point a domain to your server, you can get a valid certificate automatically by opening the Nextcloud AIO Interface via:
      https://your-domain-that-points-to-this-server.tld:8443
      ++ head -1 /mnt/docker-aio-config/data/daily_backup_time
      + BACKUP_TIME=04:00
      + export BACKUP_TIME
      + export DAILY_BACKUP=1
      + DAILY_BACKUP=1
      ++ sed -n 2p /mnt/docker-aio-config/data/daily_backup_time
      + '[' '' '!=' automaticUpdatesAreNotEnabled ']'
      + export AUTOMATIC_UPDATES=1
      + AUTOMATIC_UPDATES=1
      + set +x
      {"level":"info","ts":1686746753.2700157,"msg":"using provided configuration","config_file":"/Caddyfile","config_adapter":""}
      {"level":"info","ts":1686746753.2748601,"msg":"failed to sufficiently increase receive buffer size (was: 208 kiB, wanted: 2048 kiB, got: 416 kiB). See https://github.com/quic-go/quic-go/wiki/UDP-Receive-Buffer-Size for details."}
      [14-Jun-2023 12:45:53] NOTICE: fpm is running, pid 106
      [14-Jun-2023 12:45:53] NOTICE: ready to handle connections
      
      

      I tried to change permissions on /var/run/docker.sock
      I tried to change permissions on /lib/systemd/system/docker.sock

      same but with restart of docker.sock
      same but with restart of docker.sock and docker.service

      nothing helped

      does somebody know where I go wrong or can me point in the right direction to resolve this problem? It's not a game stopper as I can update the container manually, but it is annoying.

      edit: it runs on a ubuntu server 20.04.6 LTS

      6 votes
    10. “Which group should this go to?”, “Which tags should I use?”, and other posting anxieties.

      A short story Last night, I posted an article about fraud related to COVID funding in the United States. I debated about where to put it. Was it ~news since it was an investigative report that was...

      A short story

      Last night, I posted an article about fraud related to COVID funding in the United States.

      I debated about where to put it. Was it ~news since it was an investigative report that was just released? ~finance because it was about money? ~health because it was about COVID?

      In reading through other comments here, especially related to our current group structure I’ve noticed other people expressing similar sentiments about submitting things.

      The same goes for tagging your topic. What are the right tags? What if I use the wrong one? There’s a non-negligible amount of anxiety regarding submitting things to the site.

      If you go to the article I posted, and then click Topic Log on the sidebar, you can see what got changed. I realized I forgot to add the tag usa. You can then see that another user changed the capitalization on my title, moved my post from ~news to ~health, and added additional tags.


      The betrayal(?)

      Someone moved my post? Someone changed my title? Without telling me?! 😡

      Yes, they did, and I’m here to tell you that I couldn’t be happier about that. It’s not a betrayal; it’s a collaboration. 🥰

      Submissions on Tildes aren’t like other places. You won’t get your hand slapped here for not following the right protocol, especially because there’s not a fully clear protocol in the first place. Topic placement, tagging, and titling are all things that often require judgment calls. It’s not uncommon for the titles we see on Tildes to actually differ from published titles to make them less clickbaity or clearer, for example.

      Furthermore, Tildes isn’t a place where people are competing to post content. There’s no karma to be harvested or influencers to influence. On other sites, big news items will often get dozens or hundreds of duplicate posts because, on other sites, who posted the content matters a whole lot. People will post and repost things because it’s important that they, individually, get “credit” for that.

      Tildes works a bit differently, with submissions being owned more by the community at large rather than individual posters. It doesn’t mean we don’t have our own content (and it definitely doesn’t mean someone can or will edit the actual body of a post, like what I’m writing here), but more that the content’s place and appearance in the community is something we work together on. If you want to discuss something and you see someone already posted it here, that’s not a bummer — it’s a great thing! It saves you some work, plus you know at least one other person is on the same page as you and wants to discuss the same thing.


      Which group should this go to? Which tags should I use?

      Don’t worry too much about those things! We’ll collaborate on them. There are several users here who are librarians of Tildes, dutifully organizing submissions behind the scenes.

      When I first started posting, I was nervous about getting my tags and title exactly right. I’d occasionally post a title with a typo and cringe, hard, wondering if I needed to delete the post entirely.

      Now, when I post, I’m happy that if I don’t know what to do exactly or I make a mistake, someone else will come along and help me out with it. No more anxiety!

      I hope all our new users can feel that way too. Having your submissions reorganized is not combative; it’s collaborative. Don’t stress about posting anything perfectly. Someone will help you out if need be.

      104 votes
    11. Why Nintendo games never go down in price, according to Satoru Iwata

      In the book Ask Iwata, former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata is quoted as having said: After a piece of hardware is released, the price is gradually reduced for five years until demand has run...

      In the book Ask Iwata, former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata is quoted as having said:

      After a piece of hardware is released, the price is gradually reduced for five years until demand has run its course. But since the demand cycle never fails, why bother reducing the price this way? My personal take on the situation is that if you lower the price over time, the manufacturer is conditioning the customer to wait for a better deal, something I've always thought to be a strange approach. Of course, this doesn't mean that I'm against lowering prices entirely, but I've always wanted to avoid a situation where the first people to step up and support us feel punished for paying top dollar, grumbling, "I guess this is the price I pay for being first in line."

      What do you think of what he said here?

      50 votes
    12. Is it even worthwhile to turn off ad personalization or location tracking for services/apps?

      So, I’m moving to a new phone and revisiting a lot of accounts, apps, and settings. When it comes to things like location history or ad personalization or whatever, is it even worthwhile to turn...

      So, I’m moving to a new phone and revisiting a lot of accounts, apps, and settings.

      When it comes to things like location history or ad personalization or whatever, is it even worthwhile to turn it off? Am I really supposed to believe that because I have some toggle off that Google suddenly doesn’t track where I drive on Maps? Like if they are going to be tracking me, which I assume they are, I might as well be able to see it to rather than have it exist in the aether somewhere where the info is attributed to me but not viewable in the UI.

      Even with ads, I know shadow profiles are a thing, and that they definitely have data beyond what they show in the UI, so might as well opt in there too right? Plus, the non-targeted ads I get are basically porn-tier ads or stuff for gay men.

      What should I do here? Move into the woods? Feels like I can’t win.

      22 votes
    13. Marvel Snap players - How's your season going?

      Interested to hear from anybody who plays Snap. What's your thoughts on the current meta? What do you find the Ghost Spider and Silk so far? Any other cards you're saving tokens ford? Have you...

      Interested to hear from anybody who plays Snap.

      What's your thoughts on the current meta?

      What do you find the Ghost Spider and Silk so far? Any other cards you're saving tokens ford?

      Have you tried Conquest?

      I'm mostly pretty casual. I'm free to play, and the highest rank I've reached is 70. I've been playing a my own attempt at a Sera Surfer deck lately (can't bring myself to net deck), and it's been pretty going well for me.

      I've got mixed feelings about Conquest so far. Since you're matched up with the same player for several matches, it can be a bit more of a time commitment. And if you get an emote spammer, it can feel a it gruelling. But it helps me think about my matchups in more depth, which is actually kind of cool.

      17 votes
    14. I, and many other like me, have a responsibility with invite codes

      I’ve been here three days. I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what makes this place tick, and have only had a glimpse of the culture encouraged here - and I love what I’ve seen thus...

      I’ve been here three days. I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what makes this place tick, and have only had a glimpse of the culture encouraged here - and I love what I’ve seen thus far.

      Thanks to @deimos I now have five invites to share. Sure, they’ll be tracked if I’m being irresponsible by sharing them with nutcase randos, or if I put them up for sale on eBay (obviously I won’t!).

      But I love this place so much already that I’m going to be super selective in my distribution.

      I love that responsibility! As a newbie I get to be adulting, and it’s SO welcoming!

      49 votes
    15. Sitting with boredom

      I was inspired to share this after seeing this comment on another thread: https://tildes.net/~talk/162y/not_entirely_sure_how_to_fill_the_void_reddit_has_left#comment-87j6 Again, new to tildes...

      I was inspired to share this after seeing this comment on another thread: https://tildes.net/~talk/162y/not_entirely_sure_how_to_fill_the_void_reddit_has_left#comment-87j6

      Again, new to tildes here, so not quite sure if this sort of thing fits. It's not really a question, more, sharing something I do that I thought could be interesting for others. Maybe it belongs in a different group.

      So the last few years I've started doing this little exercise: I will pick a time frame (usually few days, but a 24 hour period is great). I will turn off the phone (not just silence, but turn it off), turn off my modem, turn off the radio and music, pretty much any electronic device, and just... sit there.

      I get bored quickly. But when the boredom comes, I sit with it. I analyze it. I try to understand boredom itself, and the unpleasant sensation its causing. I try to be aware of any urge that comes to distract myself from it, and I deny that urge, and see what happens internally when I deny that urge.

      The boredom is uncomfortable, I won't lie. I really want to do other things. But I realize I'm capable of enduring it, and I so I sit there, because I want to see what will happen. And then something kind of wonderful happens: once the initial discomfort passes, and I accept I'm going to keep doing this, in the absence of things to distraction myself with, my thoughts begin to gravitate towards things that are genuinely important to me. What are the problems that I want to solve? What are the ideas that I want to work on? How do I want to make the world a better place? (Not what the news tells me is important, or friends, or the internet, it's all fucking noise - what problems are important to me?) This sounds like it should be so obvious, of course you know what's important to you, right? But something about this exercise illuminates it (for me at least). Almost like, I've got this tiny little flashlight, that I can point to whatever is important to me (we all do). When I'm in society, connected, I find that everyone has their flashlight on. Then big companies, news outlets, whatever, they have these giant ones, spotlights, all pointing in different directions. When all of this is on at once, it's so bright I don't even notice my own. I'm constantly distracted. I start to wonder "huh, that spot is bright, I wonder if I'm pointing my flashlight there." It's so easy to get confused. It's only once I turn it all off, and the world is dark, that I can clearly see what I'm pointing at. It's just so easy then.

      This is not meditation, actually it's pretty much the opposite. I am not trying to clear my mind at all. I'm trying to see where my thoughts go when it's free of noise. Where they go is very revealing to me.

      I'm still uncomfortable with boredom, I don't think that's changed at all. But I've become comfortable with sitting with it, and the fruits of this exercise have made it worth it to me. Moreover, the more I've done this, the more uncomfortable I've become with all the noise. I used to think I loved being connected, but now that I realize I don't have to be, it's actually the opposite... I really don't like having my phone on, I don't like having my modem on, and I dislike news, politics, and lots of that kind of stuff. It makes me feel almost claustrophobic. I find a lot of calm in being away from all of that. I'm still very grateful for these things, I just feel uncomfortable being connected to them 24/7, and I like to be away.

      58 votes
    16. What were your out-of-warranty Tesla issues?

      Model 3 SR+ about to go out of warranty. Wondering what others have had to fix out-of-pocket since their warranties expired? Under warranty, I’ve had service for: replace front passenger control...

      Model 3 SR+ about to go out of warranty. Wondering what others have had to fix out-of-pocket since their warranties expired?

      Under warranty, I’ve had service for:

      • replace front passenger control arm
      • replace both rear upper suspension links
      • replace touchscreen
      • replace metal tips that are on the charging port
      • replace front passenger seat adjustment switch
      • replace front passenger seat (yes the whole thing)
      • replace the front driver lower camera (twice)
      • resealed both front upper control arm ball joints with urethane
      • replaced rear passenger door trim panel
      • wipers made contact with the hood causing a small gouge in the hood
      • replaced front passenger door handle

      Mind you this was one of the first batch of 2019s so, yeah they had to remediate quite a bit.

      13 votes
    17. My completely subjective ski town tier list

      Intro & Tier Definitions I've been mulling over a ski town tier list in my head for a few weeks and I was just thinking of putting it on paper when all the reddit stuff happened. So instead of...

      Intro & Tier Definitions

      I've been mulling over a ski town tier list in my head for a few weeks and I was just thinking of putting it on paper when all the reddit stuff happened. So instead of posting it to /r/skiing I'm posting it here. This is completely subjective and is only based on the relatively small number of ski towns I've lived in or visited. My ulterior motive here is to get your thoughts on additions to this list along with which tier they should fall into... specifically S Tier places I haven't visited. I'm not doing any research - this is strictly based on my opinions from places I've personally been to.

      A quick note: I'm only thinking about the towns themselves here. Not the quality of skiing, snowfall, or anything else. For the purposes of this ranking system, a 200' hill in the Midwest with a great little town at the base would fall into S Tier while 10,000 acre mega-resort with a $10B purpose-built resort village would fall into B Tier.

      Here's my completely subjective ranking system:

      S Tier: S tier is the "perfect mountain town". These towns typically existed prior to the ski area, and still have a strong community of locals living right in town keeping things vibrant (admittedly, in most places short term rentals have made that community smaller). The towns are also right at the base of the mountain; if they didn't run the plows you could ski from the top of the highest peak right down onto main street, pop your skis off, and start après.

      A Tier: These towns are S Tier towns but for one problem - they're just a little too far from the actual ski area to ski right into town. You're going to have to hop in your car or take a bus, or take a long bike ride to get to town. While these towns are still amazing, beautiful places, they're not quintessential perfect towns for that one reason alone. I think for the purposes of this discussion the town has to be within a few minutes of the ski area. Most of these towns will have a B Tier style village at the base as well, but the village isn't the focus here.

      B Tier: These towns aren't really "towns". They're purpose-built shopping malls or villages made for the ski area with condos and hotels. Unlike A Tier towns, they don't have a nearby "real" town to tie onto. They may be big and vibrant villages, but they don't have (many) locals living in the core village area, and they never have.

      C Tier: Basically a parking lot. Maybe a bar, cafeteria, and a ski rental shop. Usually have a larger town nearby to support some locals, but it's going to be too far away to feel like it's part of the ski area scene. Finally, I'm not really filling out C-Tier that much unless it has an interesting anchor town within 30 minutes or so. I'm also leaving off the dozens of Midwest and East Coast ski areas that I've been to because I frankly haven't skied east of the Rockies in so long that I don't think I could properly categorize them based on memory.


      S Tier

      • Telluride
      • Breckenridge
      • Park City
      • Aspen (Ajax)
      • Heavenly: If memory serves, you can't actually ski to town. But you take a gondola down to town instead of a car/bus so I'm counting it as S Tier. Also South Lake is an interesting take on a ski town. I was on the fence but I'm leaving it in S Tier.
      • Kleine Scheidegg-​Männlichen-Grindelwald-​Wengen: you have to take a train to Interlaken but I think the "villages" here count as actual towns, so this is S Tier.

      A Tier

      • Steamboat Springs: Almost S Tier. I think if you really tried you could ski from the top of Pony Express into town.
      • Silverton
      • Whitefish: should maybe be B Tier. I can't remember how close Whitefish (the town) was to the actual ski area.
      • Crested Butte: I initially had this in S Tier based on memory, but after looking at the map I realized it was a little further from the base to town than I remembered.

      B Tier

      • Jackson Hole: this was a tough one. Jackson, WY is one of the coolest towns I've ever been to. Teton Village is also a great little base area. But Jackson is just too far from the tram to really bump this up to A tier.
      • Vail: I've lived here since 2015 and I haven't met a single person who lives in Vail Village or Lionshead year-round. The north side of the highway doesn't count as a town, it's really just an amalgamation of box stores, strip malls, and parking lots...
      • Keystone
      • Beaver Creek
      • Aspen (Snowmass & Highlands): not really close enough to Aspen proper to go into A Tier. But close...
      • Winter Park
      • Big Sky
      • Copper
      • Squaw
      • Kirkwood

      C Tier

      • Arapahoe Basin: close to Dillon / Frisco / Breck.
      • Aspen (Buttermilk): I've only been here during X Games but I think without all that infrastructure they bring in it would just be a parking lot and a cafeteria. I might be wrong. Close to Aspen.
      • Monarch: close to Salida.
      • Ski Cooper: close to Leadville.
      • Bachelor: close to Bend.

      Edit: I'll append this list with your suggestions if you'd like to add to it.

      Edit 2: The lists within the tiers are in no particular order. I just happened to type them in that order when I thought of them.

      17 votes
    18. Redditors of Tildes, which subreddits are you missing the most during the blackout?

      I am really struggling without r/selfhosted. I truly believe it is, by far, the best community for self-hosters that I have come across. What I am missing most of all is, whenever I search for...

      I am really struggling without r/selfhosted. I truly believe it is, by far, the best community for self-hosters that I have come across. What I am missing most of all is, whenever I search for questions to self-hosting problems - especially for smaller projects - the answers are nearly always found within posts on that sub.

      At least with things like programming, there is stackoverflow and a bunch of other small communities.

      I'm going to end up going to Discord to find my solutions, which is the next big community. But it means having to go on there and ask the question (that has probably been asked hundreds of times before), rather than just searching the issue.

      198 votes
    19. How to go about mirroring a repo to separate real identity from online identity?

      I struggled to word this question. Let's say that I wish to work on a project to benefit Tildes (I don't currently have an idea, but just for example). Anything I did, I would like to keep...

      I struggled to word this question.

      Let's say that I wish to work on a project to benefit Tildes (I don't currently have an idea, but just for example). Anything I did, I would like to keep opensource and would encourage other users to contribute. But I would like to keep everything linked to my pseudonym as not to dox myself.

      However, I would like to have a copy of everything on my personal GitHub as well, because I am a professional programmer and that is effectively my CV.

      Is there a good way to mirror a repo in a way that any git history contributed by me, "John Smith", is changed to "bugsmith" on the mirrored repo? (or vice versa).

      6 votes
    20. Comic collectors, how do you store and manage your collections?

      My current collection is over 3500 individual issues with the 2 most numerous publishers being Marvel and Image. To try and make things easier I have a series of boxes devoted simply to image...

      My current collection is over 3500 individual issues with the 2 most numerous publishers being Marvel and Image. To try and make things easier I have a series of boxes devoted simply to image comics, sorted alphabetically. The downside is when I go to add issues to the A-D box, it becomes full, so I need to move a chunk of the D's to box 2, which then fills up and need to keep shifting down until I need a new Image box for T-Z. Even more fun is I digitally track with CLZ app and have to make large moves there between boxes.

      Do you also fall into the same trap of constantly adjusting boxes or do you have a better system?

      15 votes
    21. Are you using the latest Apple betas as your daily driver? How's it going?

      I immediately installed iPadOS 17 Beta 1. Apart from quirks with saving images from the browser, it's been about as solid as the latest 16.x.x. Anyone running the other betas as your daily...

      I immediately installed iPadOS 17 Beta 1. Apart from quirks with saving images from the browser, it's been about as solid as the latest 16.x.x.

      Anyone running the other betas as your daily drivers?

      I'm also eager to hear from Sonora users. Considering updating my i7 Mac Mini.

      9 votes
    22. Did money buy you happiness?

      Conventional wisdom tells us money does not buy happiness, perhaps the opposite. "Studies" (don't quote me on this, just going off headlines/articles I've read) say happiness grows asymptotically...

      Conventional wisdom tells us money does not buy happiness, perhaps the opposite. "Studies" (don't quote me on this, just going off headlines/articles I've read) say happiness grows asymptotically and levels off around an income of 70k USD (perhaps more like 90k inflation adjusted?). I would be interested to know how any of this matches your personal experience. Has your happiness consistently grown with income? If so, where did that growth level off, if at all? And to what would you attribute it? better consumer goods, more security, more freedom...? Have any of you experienced a decrease in happiness associated with growing income? I eagerly await your thoughts!

      43 votes
    23. Could someone explain accumulating bond ETFs?

      I understand how distributing bond etfs could work, you get part of the coupons when the etf distributes profits, which compensates somewhat for the price changes of the etf. Interest rates would...

      I understand how distributing bond etfs could work, you get part of the coupons when the etf distributes profits, which compensates somewhat for the price changes of the etf. Interest rates would affect the price of the etf but that would be partly compensated by the distribution.

      But how does this work on accumulating etfs? If the profits are always reinvested in the fund, shouldn't the price of the fund always go up? Assuming all/most bonds dont default, interest rates would affect the price but that would be compensated by the reinvested profits?

      I am missing something here, dont see the point of a bond etf if the price can change so much.

      13 votes
    24. Which apps do you use for your mental health and wellbeing, if any?

      I have lost my r/finch community, and am feeling curious to see if there are any folks here who also find apps can be helpful for their mental health. I struggle with anxiety and am processing a...

      I have lost my r/finch community, and am feeling curious to see if there are any folks here who also find apps can be helpful for their mental health.

      I struggle with anxiety and am processing a lot of grief, and may or may not have ADHD (I am in the process of getting tested, but it takes a while). My experiences with therapy are a bit mixed, so I am currently going down the route of trying to DIY my wellness a little. Starting simple with things like, sleep more, try to focus on drinking enough, go out in nature, switching off podcasts and phones and reading more. It's actually helped me, bit by bit.

      One of my 'tools' is an app called finch, a virtual pet that encourages you to set goals, check in how you are feeling, journal, do mindful breathing and such. I tried many things and this app is the one that stuck and actually works.

      Just wanted to ask, do any others here use wellness apps? And have they worked for you? Which do you recommend?

      Just to be clear, I mean apps that work as a stand alone solution, rather than apps like 'better help' which ultimately just connect you to a therapist. Although Better Help has its uses too!

      30 votes
    25. Experiences with emotions (do you feel them often, and how to feel more emotions?)

      This might be a strange topic, and I'm not sure if others can relate, or if I am 100% strange here. Feel free to remove(?) this if it's not relevant.. This is just something I'd love to learn the...

      This might be a strange topic, and I'm not sure if others can relate, or if I am 100% strange here. Feel free to remove(?) this if it's not relevant.. This is just something I'd love to learn the experiences of others about and get some ideas, as I imagine everyone is so different.

      So, I have a very annoying problem: I don't experience emotions very strongly (e.g. while some folks get moved by films or art, or maybe get worked up with joy or frustration in life, I seem to be far more emotionally neutral, even in very extreme situations.) This can be very useful (emotions can be misleading and lead to poor decisions), but also problematic and limiting (emotions can feel nice, help with creativity, it's a good way to express love to people, etc).

      Occasionally, I do feel little bits of emotion, but they tend to go away very quickly. I really wish I felt more, but I don't know how.

      I'm curious about the emotional experiences of others. Do you get naturally emotional? Could you cry from watching a movie? For those like myself who have underwhelming emotions - what does make you feel emotional? Do you have any tips or tricks for feeling more emotional, or, hanging on to emotions when you do get them? Has anyone ever been able to "overcome" this issue of not feeling emotions?

      Thanks for any insight.

      EDIT: If this is not the correct group for such a topic, please do let me know, and I will remove it.

      41 votes
    26. Tips on starting a good discussion topic

      For creating link topics, see Posting on Tildes in the official documentation. When you don’t see the discussion you want, you can create a new topic. Starting a new Tildes topic is pretty easy....

      For creating link topics, see Posting on Tildes in the official documentation.

      When you don’t see the discussion you want, you can create a new topic. Starting a new Tildes topic is pretty easy. However, It can be done in better or worse ways, so here are some tips:

      1. Choosing a group

      Don't worry about this too much. Unlike subreddits, Tildes groups mostly don't have their own rules or subcultures. They're folders for organizing topics. If you put a topic in the wrong place, someone will move it. Either ~talk or ~misc are good if you don't know where to put it.

      But you do need to click on a group to go to the group's page. Then look in the sidebar on the right side. (If you're on mobile, you will need to open the sidebar.) There's a blurb explaining what the group is about, and a button under it to start a topic.

      2. Choosing a good title

      For discussion topics, a question often makes a good title.

      Tildes has users from all over the world. Asking people to share their own experiences lets anyone participate and you can learn interesting things about people in other places.

      • Bad: "What do you think of this terrible weather?"

      • Better: "What's the weather like where you are?"

      Discussing a specific weather event would also be fine, but you need to say where it is.

      A downside to asking a very generic question is that it might get more attention than you're hoping for. (For example, you might get advice that's not relevant where you live.) If you want to narrow things down geographically, be specific about which country or region you're interested in. We probably don't yet have enough users for hyper-local topics to get many responses, but feel free to try.

      3. Writing an introduction

      For a discussion topic, you skip the link box and write something in the box below it. You can write whatever you like here.

      3a. Setting ground rules (optional)

      Sometimes you have something specific you're looking for and it helps to make a sort of game out of it by making up some rules. A good example is @kfwyre's AlbumLove topics. If you just ask for music recommendations, people are going to answer in any old way, maybe by making long lists. So instead the game is to review one album.

      Tildes users are usually pretty cooperative as long as you make it clear what you're looking for and the game isn't too weird. (And if they get the rules a little wrong, it's usually not a big deal.)

      4. Tags (optional)

      This is optional because if i you skip it, someone will do it for you, but if you want to help out, there is more about tags in the official docs. You could also look at similar topics in another window to see what tags we use.

      5. Seeding the topic (optional)

      After posting the topic, you might want to add some top-level comments to get it going. For example, if it's a megathread then you might put a link to a different article in each reply. Or, if you have a lot of questions to ask, you could put each question in a separate comment. This would keep the answers to each question separate.

      6. Encouraging discussion (optional)

      You will see a notification at the top of any Tildes web pages you visit whenever someone posts a top-level reply in your new topic. Replying and upvoting (if warranted) will help keep conversation going. Conversation encourages more conversation. You can do a lot even without any formal “mod” powers. (Some users also have ability to label replies, which affects sort order.)

      Okay, that's it for me. What are some tips you have about starting new topics? One tip per comment, please! <= See what I did there?

      41 votes
    27. Let's talk about Reddit alternatives, shilling, and Tildes bans

      @Deimos can tell us how many bans we've had so far on Tildes. Last count I knew was in the 50s months back, and some of those were the same person - out of 13,000 users. I'm sure it's rising right...

      @Deimos can tell us how many bans we've had so far on Tildes. Last count I knew was in the 50s months back, and some of those were the same person - out of 13,000 users. I'm sure it's rising right now, I'm also pretty sure it's still under a hundred, and I don't actually care if it's 1500. (Edit: It was four new bans, omg so nazi.)

      If you take the time to learn something about social forums, you'll discover that 1% of the users cause 90% of the problems. Tildes will ban that 1% aggressively. Act like an asshole, attack someone, and you will find the door. You do not however have to tiptoe around like there are landmines here - nobody is going to ban you unless you start attacking other users or trolling all the time. You are in fact allowed to swear here, just not at people. Take a lesson from Louis Black - rants are best when aimed at inanimate objects. :)

      Have you ever been to a nice big social party? Did you act like an asshole there? Did the bouncer throw you off the balcony? Probably not. That's because you didn't punch people in the face, piss all over the kitchen floor, or set the living room rug on fire while you were there (I hope). Try pretending that this is a real world party and adjust your behaviors accordingly. It is really not that difficult. Extend people here the same courtesy at a minimum that you would for a real world social gathering - maybe even go as far as you would for a black tie affair. The rest of us would appreciate it, I promise.

      I'm sure by now most of you know about /r/redditalternatives. It's an old subreddit that has been collecting links to anything and everything even remotely like a social site for years that came out of the 2015 blackouts. Most of their favorites are long dead, and most of the ones they love now will be dead in a few years. They've been telling us we would be dead in two months for the last five years - which tells you how much their average user knows about social software. They are not exactly well read on the topic.

      They are a useful link archive, and also a place for people to whine about the bans they've earned from other websites, or to shill for their own websites. Plenty of astrotrurfing for lemmy and squabbles going on there. Some of you folks are over there right now trying to sell them on Tildes, or worrying about the complaining about the bans.

      I'd advise you not to waste your time commenting in that place. They do not want us there shilling, and you will never convince a redditor of anything due to the mindfuckery that place has inflicted on its users for decades. Let them be. Everyone who gets banned here (or on most other sites) posts a thread about it over there, and always has - this is tradition now. Laugh at it, like I always do. It's Shawshank all over again - everyone in there is innocent, lawyer fucked them.

      Tildes was linked in the /r/videos post, which was #1 on reddit and why Deimos has an inbox taller than mount everest today. The 'secret' is out now. You do not need to go into forum warrior mode and try to defend Tildes. That's what your instincts are telling you to do, because 'tribes' are a thing, but it's not the right course of action. I guarantee you will have a better day if you just go for a ten minute walk, right now, rather than posting on reddit.

      Frankly, bettervanilla's big collection here is the only useful thing to show up in that place in years, so good on them for giving that place a purpose again.

      If you do want to help out, then use your invites. It's better if you pick, rather than just emails and invite threads. You do realize if Deimos tops everyone up to 5 codes, that's almost 100k new invites available and almost 20k people who can send them out, five at a time. This place is already past the point where it can die from the evaporative cooling effect, which did in fact have us on ice for a while there, but that's over now.

      Look for conversations not where people are looking for alternatives, but where people are talking about real forums, pining for the old days of the internet, deep discussions, and complaining about cat posts and low effort content. Those are the people who will thank you for telling them about Tildes. Let's not be the same spamming, astroturfing jerks that every other website has become.

      Edit: I take it back, this is also a remarkable post about the fediverse's moderation problems and I wish that place had more discussions of that nature. Also, Deimos says he banned 4 people in the last week, out of thousands of new users. Clearly, we're being unreasonable. :P

      228 votes
    28. What operating system do you run your home servers on?

      I'm going to set up my first home server with an Intel NUC, but I can't decide what OS to use. Ubuntu seems popular but I like Pop!_OS and am not sure if that would be a good option. Then there's...

      I'm going to set up my first home server with an Intel NUC, but I can't decide what OS to use. Ubuntu seems popular but I like Pop!_OS and am not sure if that would be a good option. Then there's TrueNas and Unraid, but as a newbie, what's the best choice?

      I'm also just curious what everyone else is using :)

      Edit: Thank you for your great responses!

      49 votes
    29. This Week in Drum & Bass / Jungle | New Releases + Mixes

      I love it here on Tildes, so I figured It's time to give back to this community in the best way I know how...through my obsessive love of niche electronic music! SO HERE WE GO! Kicking off a...

      I love it here on Tildes, so I figured It's time to give back to this community in the best way I know how...through my obsessive love of niche electronic music!

      SO HERE WE GO!

      Kicking off a weekly post series to bring you 10 of the best (note: in my humble opinion and in no particular order) new Drum & Bass + Jungle music from across the scene! Tildes is a great place for discussion and discovery, so I thought hey, why not get the community going myself ;)

      Don’t want to read all this stuff? TL;DR - You can find the songs shared here on this Spotify playlist. Follow for new stuff every Monday. Have no clue what Drum & Bass is? Start here!


      Hugh Hardie + In:Most & KOJO - RWTS [Soulvent]

      Listen: SPOTIFY | APPLE

      Hugh Hardie returns with another sublime slice of jazzy, throwback Drum & Bass that’s equally great for sunny days or hazy nights, with a lovely vocal performance from Kojo that soars over Hardie’s as usually excellent drum work.

      Nia Archives + Off Wiv Ya Headz [Island]

      Listen: SPOTIFY | APPLE

      Jungle revivalist Nia Archives cracks another one out of the park with her clattering, rattling and oh so addictive ‘Off Wiv Ya Headz’, channeling the ghosts of Remarc and Congo Natty to reformat them for the new millennium.

      Basstripper - Left Me Bleeding [Self Released]

      Listen: SPOTIFY | APPLE

      DNB Allstars alum Basstripper is on an unstoppable tear lately, with ‘Left Me Bleeding’ keeping it classic with neon bright hardcore flavour and a bouncy bassline that’s definitely got the energy.

      Jonth - Even The Stars [Discover]

      Listen: SPOTIFY | APPLE

      Firmly flying amongst the stars, this trance-flavoured peak hour tune is overflowing with energy and emotion.

      Jam Theives - Disco 45 [Technique]

      Listen: SPOTIFY

      Jam Theives are back with another deep and dirty little dub on Bassline Smith’s Technique Recordings. Hypnotic and pneumatic in equal measure, this is another itchy little number who’s clipped, metallic soundscape almost forces you to move your body.

      Phibes - Bang Bang [Phat Planet]

      Listen: SPOTIFY | APPLE

      Phibes are on a roll lately with another uptempo tune on their own Phat Planet imprint. Much like their previous release ‘Bassdrop’, this one’s packing a rapid-fire, wobbly bassline that gets under your skin, paired with a big ol’ breakbeat that propels this one into prime time.

      The Sauce - Hypnotic [TSR]

      Listen: SPOTIFY | APPLE

      DNB Trio ‘The Sauce’ return with another self-released DJ tool that’s definitely due for some attention with it’s addictive kick-step rhythm and buzzing bassline.

      Levela x Eksman - Zone Out VIP [LVL]

      Listen: SPOTIFY

      Levela bringing the throwback energy on this one, with some classic Renegade Hardware style sirens and a rough and rugged vocal from the legendary Eksman. Definitely not one for the summer picnic.

      Toronto Is Broken ft. Natty Lou - Altered States [FiXT]

      Listen: SPOTIFY | APPLE

      A nasty little number with an unabashed punk / industrial influence proudly on its sleeve. Great vocal from Natty Lou and some crunchy drums play off TiBs sonic warfare for another big tune from LA’s FiXT camp.

      DNMO ft. Wolfy Lights- Bombalaya [UKF]

      Listen: SPOTIFY | APPLE

      Rounding out our wrap-up (or wrapping up our round out?) with the short, sweet and oh-so sublime ‘Bombalaya’ from DNMO on the mighty mighty UKF imprint. Pairing jazzy influences with heavy bass, not disimilar to Camo & Krooked’s SMASH ‘Sientelo’, this is another Latin-flavoured Ear Worm that wont live your top tracks all summer long.


      SO what are YOU listening to this week? What do you think of the songs above? Share what DNB you're into below and let's keep the vibe alive...

      27 votes
    30. How to get started on hydroponics (in a way my wife will approve)

      I have an Aerogarden Harvest. It's a pretty neat little device I picked up a few years ago on sale, and I use it as a starter for my outdoor garden. My outdoor garden inevitably fails due to...

      I have an Aerogarden Harvest. It's a pretty neat little device I picked up a few years ago on sale, and I use it as a starter for my outdoor garden. My outdoor garden inevitably fails due to forgetfulness, rabbits, or bugs. This year, after my lettuce was ravaged for the third time, I decided I'd like to scale up my indoor growing solution. My wife is on board, albeit hesitantly as she knows I'm a utilitarian and give little concern to form once function is established. We have a relatively small space, and no out-of-sight-storage-rooms to utilize for the project.

      In short: I'm looking for advice on small scale, low startup cost hydro/aqua/aeroponic DIY projects for leafy greens/herbs that can be made to be "cute" or at least finished-looking, rather than a heap of PVC and 5 gallon buckets.

      My best guess currently is one of the single-tower vertical PVC pipe systems with a nice hardwood box built around the 5 gallon bucket sump (lipstick on a pig) or a stacked/tiered NFT system with a nice wooden frame and channels made from some "nicer-looking" gutter.

      Has anyone here actually accomplished an indoor grow that they were allowed to keep in their kitchen?

      Edit: There's been a lot of great input here. I'm still researching, and if anyone else is going down this road, this channel has been very informative: https://www.youtube.com/@KeepOnGrowin

      24 votes
    31. Finished project: 32L hiking backpack

      In my infinite wisdom I posted this to r/myog yesterday, just before the blackout started. I'm going to repost it here as a way to gauge how well it fits in on Tildes – this type of post is pretty...

      In my infinite wisdom I posted this to r/myog yesterday, just before the blackout started. I'm going to repost it here as a way to gauge how well it fits in on Tildes – this type of post is pretty central to the r/myog community and I am hoping some of us can migrate here.
       

      Goldilocks Pack

       
          In April of 2021, lo these many years ago, Reddit user savvlo posted in the r/myog Swap Thread that he was placing a wholesale order for Ecopak Ultra EPL200 and was wondering if anyone wanted a few yards. I had heard of this material and was eager to get my hands on some; none of the major UL pack manufacturers had started offering it yet and the only way to have an Ultra backpack was to build it yourself. I had the skills (4 or 5 packs already under my belt) and I aimed to be one of the first.
       
          Well, so much for that. I fell out of love with MYOG for a year or so, and by then the project seemed so insurmountable that I didn't even know where to start. I did plenty of designing and redesigning (because that's the fun part) but the truth was that I just didn't really need another backpack, so there was no motivation to start a project that would consume dozens of hours. And then finally, this spring, my trusty old Hyperlite started showing its 4000+ miles and gave me the kick I needed to actually make this damn thing.
       
          You can guess from the title that this pack fills a hole in my lineup – for years my two pack options were my 40L Windrider and my 27L summer pack, and most often I found myself wishing I had an in-between option in the 33L range. The MLD Burn fits right in that pocket and after seeing one in action on a high route trip with a friend I knew that was going to be my model. The overall dimensions of my pack match the Burn exactly; the main modifications I've made are to the pockets, straps, and components. The comments in the Imgur album go over the specifics.
       

      Specs Imperial Metric
      Weight 13.3 oz 376 g
      Internal Volume* 2000 in^3 32 L
      Width 10 in 254 mm
      Depth 6 in 152 mm
      Height 29 in 737 mm
      Torso 19 in 483 mm

      *this is just my best guess, I don't have a good way to measure volume
       

      Thoughts

          I'm from the Midwest and I hate tooting my own horn so you'll know I speak truth when I say that this is, undoubtedly, my finest work. Other than a few trivial mistakes everything pretty much fell together perfectly. This is not normally the case with my projects and naturally it makes me quite nervous.

          The one thing I can't get over is this fabric! I can't believe this stuff only weighs in at 3.5 osy. It feels so much tougher than the Hybrid DCF I'm used to working with; it's so hard to cut through even with my sharp sewing scissors. Only time will tell if this pack really is as tough as it feels, but my hopes are sky high. Thanks for reading and looking at my pictures!

      24 votes
    32. Do you do anything with eye-opening/thought-provoking text content?

      I found it difficult to formulate a topic for this post, but I hope that you'll all "get" what I'm talking about. You're reading something, maybe in a book, maybe an article online, maybe a...

      I found it difficult to formulate a topic for this post, but I hope that you'll all "get" what I'm talking about.

      You're reading something, maybe in a book, maybe an article online, maybe a comment on Tildes, or Reddit, or a Tweet, anything really.

      Do you do anything with it? Do you save it somehow? Do you write it out in a dedicated notebook? Do you share it? If you do, how do you share it?

      I'd love to hear about your approaches to this topic, the tools you use, what you like and don't like about your current workflows, the types of content you like to save, how you share it both with people that are close to you in real life, people who are close to you online, and maybe even strangers?

      Also, how do you use it once it all ends up wherever it ends up? Do you even use it? Or do you just like the feeling of curating your own personal archive of things you read that meant something to you at some point?

      I'll get the ball rolling:

      I've gone through a long journey with this myself, starting with bookmarking older services like Instapaper and Pinboard, trying out newer services like Readwise before eventually creating my own (totally worth all the time it took to create now that I have my own "perfect workflow" to save everything from Kindle highlights to Tildes comments!)

      I learn a lot from high quality comments online, so it's really important for me to be able to save them, however, I don't trust the built-in functions on sites like Twitter, Reddit etc. (for reasons hopefully now obvious 😅), and because I like to be able to search through them all in one place easily.

      The main reason that I refer back to them is usually because I want to share something in conversation (either in person or online), and it's nice to be able to link to the source text quickly. I also like to be able to give people a glimpse into what I'm reading on topics that are important to me, and recently I'm thinking that the best way to do this is to go back to the 90s/00s and embed RSS feeds of my saved highlights on my website, split by topic.

      I'm generally okay with the idea that I'm never going to "use" everything I save for anything particularly big or grand; it just feels nice to have a trail of text content that has been influencing my thinking over a long time period to look back on from time to time.

      17 votes
    33. What is the simplest possible marinade recipe?

      I'm looking for the simplest possible marinade recipe. Something with very few ingredients that will work on any cut of meat. My plan is to use that as a base and learn to modify it based on the...

      I'm looking for the simplest possible marinade recipe. Something with very few ingredients that will work on any cut of meat.

      My plan is to use that as a base and learn to modify it based on the meat, dish, and flavor profile I'm going for.

      15 votes
    34. Bobiverse

      Any fans of this series over here? I was planning a series reread before book 5 comes out. It was going to be hosted on the bobiverse subreddit, but... well, ya know. If enough people want to do...

      Any fans of this series over here? I was planning a series reread before book 5 comes out. It was going to be hosted on the bobiverse subreddit, but... well, ya know.

      If enough people want to do one here I'd be happy to host it, probably starting in about 4 weeks and doing one book every 2 weeks.

      22 votes
    35. A small WebView wrapper for Tildes

      I know a lot of people have been asking for an app, if just for a home screen/app drawer icon, so I cobbled together a small WebView wrapper that installs on your phone as an app. It's for Android...

      I know a lot of people have been asking for an app, if just for a home screen/app drawer icon, so I cobbled together a small WebView wrapper that installs on your phone as an app.

      It's for Android only (sorry iOS users) and probably will receive very little support, since I'm not an Android developer! In fact, this is just a fork of the vastly more capable woheller69's gptAssist, ported over to support Tildes and with some limiting functionality removed. Absolutely check out some of their stuff! My app and the original gptAssist are both licensed under the GPLv3. If anyone would like to contribute, please do! In fact, if you're an Android dev, feel free to fork and make it much better.

      I absolutely appreciate the design philosophy of the Tildes devs and think that a WebView wrapper is a good compromise between having an app and using the thoughtfully-built website. If you're anything like me, you just like being able to tap on an icon to get to where you're going. I put this together with that in mind.

      19 votes
    36. On losing weight and keeping it off -- thoughts eight years in

      I've lost weight, and regained, and lost, and regained more. Every method, I tried it, succeeding for months until not succeeding anymore and quitting (and regaining). Finally, starting in 2014 at...

      I've lost weight, and regained, and lost, and regained more. Every method, I tried it, succeeding for months until not succeeding anymore and quitting (and regaining). Finally, starting in 2014 at the age of 51, I lost weight and I've kept it off.

      In total, I've lost 125 pounds since July 9th of 2014, down from 298 pounds (135 kg) pounds to 171 pounds (78 kg). I'm male, 5'11 (179cm). I had a semi-desk semi-field job during most of this time, working as a jack-of-all-trades "IT guy" for a hospitality company with spas and restaurants and hotels in my region.

      Today in The Daily Stoic book, I read from Epictetus, “In this way you must understand how laughable it is to say, ‘Tell me what to do!’ What advice could I possibly give? No, a far better request is, ‘Train my mind to adapt to any circumstance’….In this way, if circumstances take you off script…you won’t be desperate for a new prompting.”

      In weight loss, I think it's a given that the most important step is to start. But after that gets going, to stay started and to adapt as you learn more and figure things out. Don't quit, even after caving in to a big eating day or weekend. Shake off the mistake and keep going. Don't quit in a plateau. Don't quit thinking you don't need to diet anymore or that your diet is too weird or untenable or that your body just won't ever lose weight. Instead adapt and continue.

      Ultimately, Epictetus is right that this becomes not a diet with weird rules and tight restrictions, but a way to gain the training about how and how much to eat as ourselves. Not following a script but gaining the skills and second nature habits of living a healthy lifestyle. Ultimately, we have to keep off the weight we lose and still be eating the foods we grew up with, the foods our family and friends share, what was and will likely still be our long-term forever diet -- but tuned and tweaked so that we keep off the weight. If we start on keto or IF or cabbage soup, at some point transition to your regular and normal foods and figure those out. Those foods and food situations are in our future, so that's the puzzle we truly need to solve.

      Even if we calorie count (and I do), the calories are just our data -- they're helpful to see the way but calorie counting itself is not the way -- the things we do, perhaps measured by calories, is what causes weight loss/gain to happen. A focus must be on shaping the internal long-term habits -- Train my mind to adapt to any circumstance -- so that the natural thing to do when life gets rough and distracting is going to keep us from gaining weight. We don't just eat healthy and light out of intention but also out of thoughtless, automatic "in the zone" or "flow" habit.

      40 votes
    37. [PC build] - AM4 or AM5 for low-power non-gaming build with lots of storage?

      My main needs are: Not too pricey Very low idle power At least 6 x SATA I don't need a beefy GPU (the iGPU will be more than I need) or lots of CPU performance (I'll probably pick one of the...

      My main needs are:

      • Not too pricey
      • Very low idle power
      • At least 6 x SATA

      I don't need a beefy GPU (the iGPU will be more than I need) or lots of CPU performance (I'll probably pick one of the cheapest compatible CPU).

      AM5 is still pretty expensive and the cheap(-ish) motherboards mostly only have 4 x SATA so I would need an extension card. But I'm considering it because 5nm vs 7nm should improve the power efficiency, right? What kind of improvements should I expect there?

      Are there any other reasons to go for AM5? I might prefer it for emotional reasons (the lastest and greatest always feels better) so I could use some input from kind strangers.

      I could also just wait a bit longer. When should I expect the low-end AM5 comonents to become cheaper?

      13 votes
    38. The Expanse: Thoughts on railguns

      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...

      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?

      45 votes
    39. Gag and parody dubs

      So let's be real, a lot of dubs don't live up to the original. Stuff gets lost in translation, the actors aren't as good, for some reason they choose a guy who sounds like he's 10 to voice the...

      So let's be real, a lot of dubs don't live up to the original. Stuff gets lost in translation, the actors aren't as good, for some reason they choose a guy who sounds like he's 10 to voice the teenage protagonist (coughanothercough). A lot of people prefer subs for that reason.

      But sometimes, sometimes the dubs throw out the original script and go all-in on the hamminess for gag dubs, and by god they can be amazing.

      The golden example: the Ghost Stories dub. They got a generic ghost hunting anime that they knew wouldn't sell that well in western markets, and thus gave the English distributors free reign on changing the script. Every episode is like an Abridged series, and so politically incorrect but so amazing for it. The voice actors are very obviously having a blast with all the ad-libbing going on, you can see them developing the characters themselves and loving it.

      So what other amazing gag and parody dubs do you guys know of?

      9 votes
    40. 76th Tony Awards, 2023

      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...

      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.”

      16 votes
    41. Pokémon Go forums outside of Reddit?

      I noticed that r/pokemongo and r/TheSilphRoad are down because of the blackout, so now I'm not sure where to go for information. The actual Silph Road forum was shut down by Niantic, and ones like...

      I noticed that r/pokemongo and r/TheSilphRoad are down because of the blackout, so now I'm not sure where to go for information. The actual Silph Road forum was shut down by Niantic, and ones like Pokemon Go Hub aren't as focused on PvP or have the kind of discussion that the subreddit did. Does anyone know of other forums out there?

      11 votes
    42. Heading to Japan next month - must sees?

      I'm heading to Japan for about 10 days next month for the first week of July and then some, and I was wondering if there's anything I've missed in my trip planning process. I'm gonna be in Tokyo,...

      I'm heading to Japan for about 10 days next month for the first week of July and then some, and I was wondering if there's anything I've missed in my trip planning process. I'm gonna be in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka.

      So far I have a nice list of stores to visit for fashion, specifically streetwear and techwear, (Mountain Research, Arcteryx, PARCO building, etc), and a good list of foods I'm looking forwards to, (sushi, ramen, onigiri, etc). I'm planning on going to Tsujiki Fish Market, Akihabra, and Shibuya, and I have a tattoo appointment for one of the days. I also have a reservation for the Pokemon Cafe!

      My family is originally from an Asian country, so I'm already familiar with the beauty and quality of Asian 7-11's/FamilyMarts. (If you haven't tried them yet, definitely do!) Not a huge fan of anime in general, and I prefer cities for sure. Probably gonna see Osaka Castle and the one in Tokyo as well!

      43 votes
    43. What do you struggle with, how are you doing, and (how) do you try to get better?

      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...

      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.

      41 votes
    44. Cheese lovers: What's your go-to/favourite cheese?

      Always a tricky question, and always an interesting answer - personally my favourite cheese right now is Blacksticks Blue, a creamy blue that goes excellent melted on a pizza (subject to change at...

      Always a tricky question, and always an interesting answer - personally my favourite cheese right now is Blacksticks Blue, a creamy blue that goes excellent melted on a pizza (subject to change at a moment's notice, mind you).

      34 votes
    45. What video games have a player insert character who actually reacts like you would?

      I'm looking for some new rpgs to play and I'm interested in stories that they and act like tye player character is some clueless out of towner to basically act as an avatar for the player. I feel...

      I'm looking for some new rpgs to play and I'm interested in stories that they and act like tye player character is some clueless out of towner to basically act as an avatar for the player.

      I feel like most of the gltimes I've seen this done its pretty hamfisted and doesnt seem like the interactions go right. I'm wondering if anyone has encountered good examples of this idea?

      28 votes
    46. Who here knows about water softeners?

      I’m building a new home and we have hard water around here. I want to save our brand new plumbing and fixtures from being loaded up with deposits from day one. I’ve never used a water softener...

      I’m building a new home and we have hard water around here. I want to save our brand new plumbing and fixtures from being loaded up with deposits from day one. I’ve never used a water softener before. What’s the best route to go?

      10 votes
    47. What are you 3D printing now? What setup do you have? What issues are you running into?

      I'm personally a little busy for 3d printing at the moment - but I love to see and be inspired by what others are doing. I know this is text based, but I'm also interested in what issues you are...

      I'm personally a little busy for 3d printing at the moment - but I love to see and be inspired by what others are doing. I know this is text based, but I'm also interested in what issues you are running into. I find it useful to see examples of what common problems and solutions others are running into.

      I've got an "old" Prusa MK3S that is still going strong for me. When I get the time again I've got a few projects lined up: a brain, a mask, and a fluid desk sculpture that I'm excited to get printing.

      What have you been printing lately?

      28 votes
    48. A new Ex-Mormon community

      In the worst case scenario that Reddit dies; I'm going to miss the /r/exmormon community the most. It's a religion that is not easy to leave (many societal repercussions); and many ex-members...

      In the worst case scenario that Reddit dies; I'm going to miss the /r/exmormon community the most. It's a religion that is not easy to leave (many societal repercussions); and many ex-members experiencing a "faith transition" rely on the discussions in that sub (275K+ subscribers).

      22 votes
    49. What are some Minecraft content creators that you enjoy watching?

      Personally, I would recommend Pixlriffs. A few days ago, he has started a new season of his Minecraft Survival Guide series coinciding with the release of Minecraft 1.20. The series goes over each...

      Personally, I would recommend Pixlriffs. A few days ago, he has started a new season of his Minecraft Survival Guide series coinciding with the release of Minecraft 1.20. The series goes over each step, including the basic ones, to get yourself started and beyond on a Minecraft world. Here is a direct link to the start of season 3 inside a playlist. If you are a new or returning player to the game, I think it's a very nice resource to get the hang of it.

      The channel has been going for quite a few years now so there's a lot of content to watch, including a separate channel that he handles the writing and narration for dedicated to recapping the event of the Hermitcraft multiplayer server. The Hermitcraft players are themselves content creators I'd recommend checking out.

      21 votes