I love microtonal music. Ever since discovering the concept about 6 years ago, I’ve become deeply fascinated by alternate tuning systems and have sought out and listened to microtonal music wherever I can. Most people I’ve talked to are not familiar with microtonal music, or have had a bad experience with it, so I wanted to make a post that explains what it is, and how one might appreciate and eventually acquire a taste for it, along with providing a variety of examples to choose from. All discussion related to microtonal music welcome!

What is microtonal music?

In short, microtonal music is any music that contains notes or intervals not found in the standard Western tuning system. Of course, this invites the question: what is the standard Western tuning system? If you are a musician, you are probably intimately familiar with it: the division of the octave into 12 equally-spaced steps, to which we typically give letter names like C or E flat (etc.). Most people come to unconsciously use these notes as the baseline for determining whether a note or interval is in tune or out of tune.

However, there is nothing intrinsically ‘correct’ about the Western tuning system. In fact, by some standards, it can be quite out of tune. If you listen carefully, you may even notice that our major thirds are ‘wobbly’ - the notes come close to a 5:4 ratio of frequencies, but the interval is about 14 cents too wide, which causes a subtle wobbly sound. We find these slightly ‘off’ intervals acceptable in part due to sheer familiarity. But it turns out, you can familiarize yourself with almost any interval!

There are a great many ways to design a tuning system that produces notes and intervals which are different from what we’re used to. Some of these might be more ‘in tune’, others less so. And there are even those that are in tune with respect to ratios that don’t even exist in the Western tuning system. As a result of these unfamiliar features, microtonal music may give the uninitiated listener the general impression of being ‘out of tune’. But if you give it a chance, it may surprise you - the only way to develop the familiarity that governs taste, after all, is to keep listening.

I think it also helps to know a bit about different tuning systems, to ‘see what’s going on under the hood’, so to speak. This conceptual familiarity may eventually support a degree of aesthetic familiarity.

Tuning Systems

Equal Division Tunings

Where the Western tuning system chose 12 steps, we can also divide the octave into some other number of equally spaced steps. These tunings are often referred to ‘EDOs’ (Equal Division of the Octave) - e.g., the Western tuning system could also be called 12-EDO.

Globally, perhaps the most common EDO (other than our very familiar 12-EDO) is 24-EDO, which is used by many musical traditions in the Arab world, such as Turkish, North African, Persian, or Arab itself. Conceptually, 24-EDO is interesting because it ‘contains’ all the notes of 12-EDO, plus 12 new notes exactly in between the other 12. As a result, it can be used to play all the intervals we are familiar with, and music which strongly relies on this feature is definitely on the more accessible end.

I tend to refer to 24-EDO music as simply being ‘quarter-tonal’ (the 12 semitones of 12-EDO being divisible into 24 quarter-tones). This distinction is useful since in many cultures, quarter-tonal tunings are not precisely 24-EDO, but some slightly sharp or flat variation of the general 24 notes per octave structure. It can be hard to distinguish the two, so ‘quarter-tonal’ is probably most accurate.

You could divide the octave equally into any number of notes, though - I’ve seen as low as 5 and as high as 500. Each has a unique sound depending on what intervals the division produces. Some EDOs, such as 19-EDO, 31-EDO, and 53-EDO produce very similar intervals to what we have in 12-EDO. Played with some restraint, they can be difficult to distinguish from 12-EDO, though they also have the option to play unfamiliar notes as well.

Other EDOs, such as 17-EDO, 22-EDO, and 27-EDO sound quite different from 12-EDO, producing lots of unfamiliar intervals while ‘missing’ ones you’d expect to hear in 12-EDO. And finally, there are of course EDOs such as 10-EDO, 13-EDO, 23-EDO (and many more) that produce few truly ‘good’ sounding intervals. Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop people from trying to extract something decent-sounding from them!

Just Intonation

In short, just intonation is the practice of tuning different intervals to exact ratios of frequencies. Instead of trying to accommodate or work around ‘out of tune’ notes you might find in EDOs, why not just make every note perfectly in tune, after all? The result of this is notes that harmonize perfectly with each other, even if these harmonies are at first unfamiliar to the untrained ear. Often, just intonation produces intervals or whole chords that have a very clear, resonant quality.

The downside of this, though, is that since the notes do not equally divide an octave, you cannot simply transpose scales and chords to a new key. You may have made everything in tune with respect to, say, B flat, but it may turn out that with respect to D, the ratios are far more complicated and their sound commensurately dissonant. To compensate for this shortcoming, a lot of just intonation music tends to play in only one key, or perhaps a few related keys. Certain genres of music, such as drone music, or modal examples of rock and folk, better lend themselves to this technique.

There are many possible tunings within the broad category of just intonation. Usually a musician selects, say, 9 different notes that form specific frequency ratios with each other, and limit themselves to that. So describing specific just intonation tunings often comes down to a list of ratios, which can be hard to interpret without experience in microtonal music.

Free Intonation

Enough of ratios and equal divisions - maybe you just have a particular sound in mind, and you’ll know it when you hear it. This practice of tuning notes semi-arbitrarily, is known as free intonation. The notes chosen may simply sound good to the musician playing them, and at times they may even come close to the just intonation ratios. At other times, they may be chosen because they are out of tune. Maybe the ‘beating’ quality of out of tune notes provides a desirable texture, or maybe a certain ugliness itself is desired.

Free intonation per se is somewhat less common than the other two categories of microtonality. However, some musical traditions are actually more similar to free intonation than anything else, the difference being that instead of the ‘ad hoc’ quality of free intonation, the specific tunings are passed down from generation to generation.

Examples of cultures that use non-just, non-EDO tuning (for lack of a better name) include Indonesian gamelan music, Georgian liturgical music, and lots of different types of African and Asian music, just to name a few. If you needed proof of the notion that microtones are, in principle, capable of becoming familiar, even ‘normal’, these long-lasting traditions of unsystematically tonal music should suffice.

Examples

After listening to a lot of microtonal music, some good, some bad, some very bad, I have amassed quite a collection. Below I have listed what I feel to be prime introductory examples of microtonal music in a variety of genres. A lot of it is very approachable to people unfamiliar with microtones, and I hope you can find something you enjoy among the albums listed.

Of course ‘microtonal music’ is such a broad category I can’t hope to be even close to exhaustive. In many cases I am summing up a huge subcategory (such as Turkish psych rock or Arab dance music) with one or two representative examples.

For any other fans of microtonal music out there, please post your favorite albums or tracks! I’m sure there is some great stuff I’ve missed, and I would love to expand my collection further.

Rock

Altın Gün - On
YouTube / Bandcamp
Altın Gün - Aşk
YouTube / Bandcamp
A lot of Turkish folk music uses a tuning similar to the quarter-tonal tuning used in the rest of the Arab world, and a lot of modern Turkish rock music (especially starting in the 70’s and 80’s) features these same tunings. I think Altın Gün is probably the best example of the ‘Turkish Psychedelic Folk’ style from the past decade or so. Some songs on these albums, in part or in whole, focus more on the normal Western tunings. But pay attention to the vocal parts and the baglama (similar to a guitar) and you’ll hear lots of quarter-tonal inflections. These two albums are a very accessible introduction to quarter-tonal tunings, in my opinion.

Balungan - Kudu Bisa Kudu
YouTube / Bandcamp
This album is a juxtaposition of Javanese gamelan music (explained in detail at the very bottom of this list) with RIO-style avant-rock (featuring the drummer of French band Etron Fou Leloublon) that uses the more typical 12-EDO. Bombastic and strange without being too inaccessible.

Brendan Byrnes - Neutral Paradise
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Brendan Byrnes - 2227
YouTube / Bandcamp
Brendan Byrnes has some excellent microtonal rock music which generally uses a lot of electronic elements as well (synthesizers, digital effects, and occasionally drum machines). Sometimes this recalls synthwave, but genre-wise it’s very much its own thing. He uses a variety of tunings, particularly 22-EDO, but also 27-EDO and just intonation, among others. His guitar work fuses these exotic tunings with fluent, articulate playing that is a joy to hear.

Compro Oro - Simurg
YouTube / Bandcamp
Another great modern example of Turkish psychedelic folk, from a psych / funk / fusion band whose other albums do not use microtones (most of them exploring a more ‘Ethio jazz’-influenced style). As with a lot of music in this style, the microtones often play a more ornamental role, which makes them more accessible to the uninitiated listener.

Feeding Fingers - Do Owe Harm
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Some very fresh-sounding post-punk / darkwave that uses quite a diverse selection of exotic tunings (listed on their Bandcamp page). This album has that dour, ‘Joy Divison’ sound, and the use of microtonality alternately lightens the sentimentality or darkens the menace that music in this genre evokes.

Horse Lords - Interventions
YouTube / Bandcamp
Horse Lords - Comradely Objects
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Horse Lords are one of the most exciting, interesting microtonal rock bands out there, in my opinion. They primarily use just intonation tuning, and a lot of their tracks even use other compositional elements to point out the mathematical features of this tuning (for instance, using a 3 on 5 on 7 polymeter, with instruments that play the 3rd, 5th, and 7th harmonics of a note). Polymeters and polyrhythms are a regular feature in their music, and along with other cool techniques such as hocketing, change ringing, and repetitive riff structures reminiscent of North African music, they serve as a fascinating, unique vehicle for exploring just intonation. These two albums are probably the best examples, but pretty much everything this band has put out is excellent.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - K.G.
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - L.W.
YouTube / Bandcamp
King Gizzard is probably one of the biggest-name artists on this list, and while only 3 of their albums (out of like 20-something) are exclusively microtonal, they are a great example of heavy psych rock or garage rock that draws a lot from Turkish psychedelic rock. This is some high energy rock music for dropping acid and kicking ass. Flying Microtonal Banana, which marked the point at which I personally got very into microtonal music, is almost entirely based on the microtonal ‘Huseyni’ scale most common to Turkish folk music. The other two albums on this list have more variety, but still employ the characteristic quarter-tone tunings.

The Mercury Tree - Spidermilk
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Some very aggressive prog rock using the curious 17-EDO tuning. The sound of this tuning is very different from the standard 12-EDO, which gives this album a dark, otherworldly sense of harmony that fits its angular melody and unconventional rhythms. And yet, the vocal parts are very smooth and natural sounding, which is an interesting contrast. The Mercury Tree have several other albums using this tuning, but I think Spidermilk is their best work.

Secret Chiefs - Book M
YouTube / Bandcamp
Extremely eclectic music (featuring members of the bands Mr. Bungle and Estradasphere) that employs Arabic-style quarter-tones. The band wanders between folk traditionalism, speedy electronica, swanky funk rock, and industrial metal with each subsequent track, but somehow the aesthetic is all of a piece. Some really great musicianship here as well, especially the violin parts (in my opinion). A few of the band’s other albums feature microtones but I think this one is the most cohesive and approachable.

Ventifacts - Ventifacts
Bandcamp
A duo consisting of the frontmen of The Mercury Tree and Jack o’ the Clock, who play rock music which heavily features the hammer dulcimer (of all things). Stylistically, you could call it progressive rock, leaning towards acoustic but still quite intense in places. Some of the songs use quarter-tones, but others use such tunings as 10-EDO or the 17-EDO favored by The Mercury Tree.

Yossi Fine & Ben Aylon - Blue Desert
YouTube / Bandcamp
Israeli hard rock / world rock which uses the standard Arabic quarter-tone tunings. Heavy desert vibes, with simple, approachable riffs and microtonality that is way out in the open, but still very accessible.

Metal

[syzygy] - [escape]
YouTube / Bandcamp
10-EDO is a pretty wild-sounding tuning, and [syzygy] works it beautifully into some stoner doom metal. This EP unrepentantly embraces the out-of-tune feel that this tuning has, but it was surprisingly easy for me to acquire a taste for. It helps that the singer belts out a very strong performance, exactly nailing those hard-to-grasp notes. Not necessarily for beginners, but rewarding if you can get into it.

Agonanist - The Cynicism of Solitude
YouTube / Bandcamp
Atmospheric black metal with extra creepy microtones (I’m pretty sure it’s 17-EDO but I couldn’t find any information about it). The microtonality is a good fit for the genre, where the extra-dissonant parts find themselves buried among blast beats and guttural roars. Yet at times, the tuning provides a melancholic feeling that is softer than you might expect. Really interesting stuff, especially if you’re already into black metal.

Cryptic Ruse - Unfertile
Bandcamp
An impressively heavy sludge metal album featuring the super dissonant 23-EDO tuning. Cryptic Ruse has albums with other tunings, but this one is especially impressive with how well such a strange tuning works. Of course, by any reasonable standard, it’s still extremely bizarre, so tread with caution.

Jute Gyte - Perdurance
YouTube / Bandcamp
Jute Gyte - Mitrealität
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
If there was such a thing as using quarter-tones for evil, Jute Gyte is it. Absolutely crushingly heavy avant-black metal with hyperspeed blast beats, harsher-than-harsh vocals, and the most dizzying, angular approach to quarter-tones possible. These two albums are a good place to start if you like the sound of pure madness. The liner notes on the Bandcamp page for Perdurance explain a bit of the (really crazy) compositional approach.

Kostnatění - Úpal
YouTube / Bandcamp
Blackened death metal that incorporates microtonality through the usage of fretless guitar. A lot of the microtonal sections seem to roughly follow quarter-tones, but there appears to be some free intonation stuff as well. It’s a surprisingly accessible album, at times seeming to draw a bit from (Slovakian?) folk music. A really catchy release, overall.

Last Sacrament - Enantiodroma
YouTube / Bandcamp
Death metal using the 16-EDO tuning. Interestingly, this tuning preserves the tritones and minor thirds present in 12-EDO, so it’s a good fit for a genre that heavily relies on these intervals in its riff structures. At times it almost just sounds like regular death metal, though there are plenty of places (such as guitar solos) where the microtonality shines through.

Scarcity - Aveilut
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Atmospheric black metal using 72-EDO. With high-numbered EDOs like this one, you get so many intervals you can approximate almost anything you want, which allows this album’s droning guitars to be quite consonant - when they want to be. Long song structures allow for very gradual development of harmony, and it’s all underpinned by blast beats and screams like you might expect from the genre.

Victory Over the Sun - Nowherer
YouTube / Bandcamp
Blackened sludge metal using 17-EDO. Really dissonant, not only due to the standard screams and guitar distortion, but also along with sections that are kind of minimalist and not overwhelmingly distorted - rather, just written to be intentionally kooky and compositionally abrasive.

Electronic

Aphex Twin - London 03.06.17 [field day]
YouTube / SoundCloud
Aphex Twin is a pretty big name in electronic music in general, producing stuff in the IDM / drum & bass / acid genres, but a lot of his music is also microtonal. The London 03.06.17 EP is one where pretty much the entire thing uses microtones (I’m not sure of the tuning; it might be free intonation), but you can also find a healthy dose of microtonality on several of his other works, including Syro and Analord.

FASTFAST - New Color Bomb
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Bright-sounding funky synthwave which uses a wide variety of tunings. Very accessible, with some really refined-sounding, psychedelic vocals which gives even the most electronic tracks a slightly more organic quality. A lot of the chords are nearly the same as you’d hear in 12-EDO, but the changes between them occur over microtonal intervals. Neat stuff.

Lynyn - Lexicon
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Hyperactive drum & bass / IDM music that occasionally incorporates microtones (sometimes quarter-tones, other times more of a free-intonation thing). These harmonic qualities really fit the wonky, glitchy sound of the music, at times playing almost more of a textural role - as a result, it’s a very accessible album if you like the genre.

Omar Souleyman - To Syria, With Love
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
The music of Omar Souleyman is like something you’d hear at a Syrian wedding party. Quarter-tones are common to most forms of pan-Arabic pop music (a huge category that would of course be hard to effectively summarize), but I’ve found that I keep coming back to this album, among others that Omar has recorded. Incredibly fun dance music (‘dabke’) with a sort of cheesy 90’s techno vibe.

Sevish - Harmony Hacker
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
Sevish - Morphable
YouTube / Bandcamp
Sevish is a big name among electronic microtonal hobbyists, and for good reason. Bright, uber-synthetic timbres are used on these albums to deploy a wide variety of equal temperament and just intonation tunings. Alien sounding for sure, but the fun, pop drum & bass approach keeps the overall experience pretty approachable. Sevish is probably many an internet-dweller’s introduction to microtones.

Trauma Triad - A North Facing Window
Bandcamp
I feel awkward promoting my own music here, but I do honestly think my album of quarter-tonal IDM / fusion is actually pretty decent and worth a mention. Primarily using electric piano and 808 style bass synthesizer, I tried to explore quarter-tones from a more harmonic and less modal perspective. A more detailed explanation of the harmony is included with the (free!) Bandcamp download of the album, for any deeply interested parties.

Jazz

Amir ElSaffar - Rivers of Sound: The Other Shore
YouTube / Bandcamp
This album explores a combination of contemplative spiritual jazz and quarter-tonal Iraqi folk music. The large ensemble provides a huge diversity of instrumental texture, and long song structures provide a chance to let the microtonal harmonies sink in before proceeding through the sprawling yet gentle improvisation. A must for any jazz lover.

Firas Zreik - Salute
YouTube playlist / Bandcamp
The first half of this album leans towards quarter-tonal Palestinian folk music, while the latter half develops more into actual jazz. The star here is the kanun, an instrument similar to a dulcimer, which Firas absolutely shreds. The mastery of this instrument on both a rhythmic and harmonic level is really impressive. Overall quite accessible and entertaining.

Giorgi Mikadze - Georgian Microjamz
YouTube
The full album doesn’t seem to be available on YouTube or Bandcamp, but one track should at least give you a taste of the truly unusual Georgian folk harmonies. Neither equal temperament nor just intonation (nor even an approximation of either), this is some extremely strange sounding stuff, especially combined with some spacey instrumental timbres. Yet it’s ultimately buffered by a more familiar jazz fusion stylistic approach, complete with virtuosic solos and skittery rhythms.

Land of Kush - Sand Enigma
YouTube / Bandcamp
This album features Arabic quarter-tone styles worked into large ensemble avant-jazz. The addition of multiple vocalists is also rather unique. At times, the music swings like you’d expect, but a lot of the music here is more textural and experimental. There are sections of fiery free jazz, creepy noise-sculptures, and much more.

Mike Battaglia - Sweet Lorraine
YouTube
While I try to focus more on albums than individual songs, this cover song from YouTuber microtonalist Mike Battaglia is particularly fascinating. Using a stride piano style that gradually works in more and more quirks of the 31-EDO tuning, it perfectly toes the line between detuned honky-tonk piano and truly intentional microtonality. Mike has a bunch of other neat microtonal covers on his channel if this provokes your interest.

Ambient / Electroacoustic / Folk / Classical / Etc.

75 Dollar Bill - I Was Real
YouTube / Bandcamp
Incorporating the quarter-tonal aesthetic of North African music, 75 Dollar Bill deeply plumbs the idea of desert folk for this really excellent, wide-ranging album. Many of the tracks are in a sort of meditative near-ambient style that highlights the subtly-amplified guitar. In others, hand percussion and occasionally other instruments (e.g. viola, saxophone) push lightly in the direction of rock. Overall an extremely relaxing album.

Basiani Ensemble - Georgian Polyphony Singing
YouTube
I bet you didn’t think you’d be listening to microtonal Georgian church choir music today, but here you are. As I explained for ‘Georgian Mikrojamz’ above, Georgian folk tunings are quite otherworldly, but here as a solemn purely vocal performance they acquire a strange profundity that is hard to describe. Some of the tracks use typical 12-EDO harmonies, but about half of them have these odd, resonant microtones that probably sound even better in a huge space like a church (I imagine). Start with tracks 2 and 5 if you want just a taste.

Duane Pitre - Omniscient Voices
YouTube / Bandcamp
Ambient electroacoustic music primarily featuring piano. The very slow pace and gentle, quiet sound are very conducive to hearing the details of just intonation tuning, whose exactly tuned ratios produce intense and evocative ringing sounds. A great album for relaxation or meditation, in my opinion.

Guillaume Costeley - Seigneur Dieu ta pitie
YouTube
Guillaume Costeley was a 16th century French composer, and one of the first Western examples of experimentation with microtones - particularly, he used the 19-EDO tuning, which is good at approximating similar intervals to 12-EDO, but gives new options for key changes. This video is a brief composition of his, played on microtonal organ, along with sheet music and a more detailed explanation of how this tuning works. Fascinating stuff.

Julia Reidy - World In World
Bandcamp
On this album, just intonation tunings are played using only almost exclusively clean electric guitar, using heavy reverb, delay, and looping to create some expressive, mystical soundscapes. The almost tactile textures produced are sometimes rather dark, though never sinister. At other times they are bright and expansive, though no less quiet and intimate. Another great relaxation album.

Methods Body - Methods Body
Bandcamp
Electroacoustic avant-rock that uses free intonation to create harmony that is bizarre yet curiously organic-sounding. You can hear the warbling texture of the intentionally out-of-tune intervals in a lot of these tracks, which fits the earthiness of the acoustic instrumentation. A lot of the tracks also have a danceable groove to them reminiscent of some free intonation African music. Methods Body also recently released an album called Plural Not Possessive that is an even more low-key, ambient example of some of these features.

Sound Tracker - Gamelan
YouTube
Indonesian folk music, also called ‘gamelan’ music, uses some very unusual tunings - neither equal temperament nor just intonation, but some idiosyncratic set of intervals cooked up long, long ago. In addition, gamelan ensembles pair up instruments that are tuned slightly differently, so when they play in unison you get a beautiful, ‘shimmering’ texture. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of high quality recordings of purely traditional gamelan music. This is probably the best one I’ve seen, and it also lets you see some of the musicianship involved in actually performing the stuff.

I've noticed we've gotten in the habit of using the author.[name] tagging convention on articles and blogs and I think this is a great idea. But to me it just seems more important than having to see it as just a tag amidst all the other tags. Right now we put the site name and favicon in a prominent spot whenever we post a link, and I get that this is much easier to extract reliably from just scraping the page than the bylines tend to be. But I wonder if any author.[name] tag could get promoted to a special spot in the "Article: X words" element?

Of course this does leave the question of what to do about multiple authors, but I think the usual convention in academia is to list the first author who appears on the list as the primary author.

I assume this has been discussed before, but when I tried searching for it the abundance of topics with "author" tags made it so I couldn't find anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Since there are topics about cult classics and movies that everyone loves, I figured I'd make another thread about movies that you love that everyone else hates!

I've got to start with Jupiter Ascending. A lot of you know that I'm an unabashed fan of the Wachowskis, and this is almost universally recognized as their worst movie. It's pretty easy to see why; it's a confused mess. But even so, you can see the vision behind it. The story goes that they wanted this to be a three-film series much like they did with the Matrix sequels, but at one point the studio decided that they just wanted to make one film, so we got a very long hyper-compressed version where things weren't allowed to make much sense. The visuals are fantastic as you would expect from a Wachowski film, but the real diamond in the rough here is Eddie Redmayne's performance.

Branded is an almost objectively terrible movie. It's a fairly well put-together movie, but the idea behind it was bad. To make matters worse, the company that promoted it released trailers that basically just lied about what it was about, basically just scamming the audience into thinking it was a much more interesting movie. The IMDB page still has a fairly misleading description to this day. Thankfully I went into it blind, and I actually enjoyed it. The message was good, even if the storytelling wasn't, and it had a surprisingly excellent soundtrack.

Keeping it rolling with our weekly post series bringing ~music ten of the best new Drum & Bass + Jungle tunes from across the globe.

You can find the songs shared on this Spotify playlist. Follow it for new stuff, now updated every Sunday. Have no clue what Drum & Bass is? Start here!

_ - BEGIN TRANSMISSION - _

NEW MUSIC

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Bensley & Justin Hawkes - Don’t be Scared [UKF]

[Spotify] | [Apple Music] | [More]

High energy and melodic, this summer time scorcher from Bensley & Justin Hawkes has been burning up sets since the start of the season. Propellant and uplifting, the buzzy bassline and bouncing vocal play perfectly off each other for a feel good fusion of these two producer styles.

Tantrum Desire - Rhythm [Technique]

[Spotify] | [Apple Music] | [More]

The boss is back! Tantrum Desire’s well known for his jump-up anthems, but ‘Rhythm” sees this veteran producer step it up with an anthemic prime-time roller on Technique. Featuring a classic vocal slice of big room cheese taken from Corona’s eponymous “Rhythm of the Night” plus some pounding drum work and squelching synths, this one will drive a dance floor mad.

Rockwell - Comfy [Obsolete Medium]

[Spotify] | [Apple Music] | [More]

Like bugs in the brain, this highly infectious cut from Rockwell will burrow into your playlists and never want to leave. The title track of his latest EP is a technical exercise in precise sonic engineering and percussion.

Giant22 - We Go [Obsolete Medium]

[Spotify] | [Apple Music] | [More]

Bright, bouncy and ready to rock for any summer party, Giant22’s “We Go” plays tight drum work and a little ‘chopped and screwed’ flavour vocal against echoey, off-kilter synths that create a swinging, swaggering cut that’s good to go in any fan or DJ’s playlist.

Matec - Adrift [All172Things]

[Spotify] | [Apple Music] | [More]

Hard. As. Hell. This cut from the mysterious Matec brings to mind Black Sun Empire and Prolix at their most pulse-pounding. Unrelenting synths and razor sharp drum programming drive this one through its 4 minute run time with unrelenting energy and a dystopian atmosphere throughout.

A.Way - Closer [Neksus]

[Spotify] | [More]

With a finger on the sound of ‘now’, A.Way’s “Closer” makes its mark in the same arena next-gen producers like Imanu, Caracal Project and [Borders] play. Epic vocals, soaring synths and stuttering, digitally frenetic vocals ride clattering, swaggering drums that bounce between full on roller and half time swing.

Disrupta ft. Eden - Do You Believe [DNB All Stars]

[Spotify] | [Apple Music] | [More]

Like a beach front sunrise, Edens anthemic vocals soar over this certified summer anthem from the unstoppable DNB All Stars camp. With an unapologetic cheese factor you can’t deny, this one brings back memories of the best High Contrast and Hospital Records epics. After “Shine like the sun”, Disrupta has proven they’re on quite a roll in the past year. .

SUUNE ft. Young Gho$t - Signal VIP [In The Lab Recordings]

[Spotify] | [Apple Music] | [More]

Down low, deep and dirty, the vocals of Young Ghost keep white-hot producer SUUNE’s latest firmly in the depths of the darkest warehouse raves. Bouncing with energy and confidence, be sure to keep this one ready for the right moment.

Hieroglyphics & Feux - Belief [Critical]

[Spotify] | [Apple Music] | [More]

From his newest full-length album on Critical “I’ll Wait, I guess”, Hieroglyphics brings the drama with a smooth, sombre cut that’s already wining over atmospheric and intelligent DNB fans far and wide. Pair those bubbling bass-lines with with a soulful vocal like this, and you’ve got a recipe for success.

KOAN Sound - Ascension [Shoshin]

[Spotify] | [Apple Music] | [More]

Something from far orbit, former Dubstep stalwarts KOAN Sound are back with a cinematic, soaring epic that’s forward thinking beyond any dancefloor. Fusing world music flavours, soundtrack style orchestration and touches of classic jungle breaks, this one’s bound to stay a favourite for years to come. Simply beautiful.

NEW MIXES TO CHECK OUT

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Subtle Radio - 10/06/23 - Delta 9 Recordings w/ Flipz

[SoundCloud]

Italy’s Delta9 get things moving with a guest spot on Subtle Radio, and online community broadcaster. Deep cuts and some tougher stuff get rinsed out while host Flipz keeps things lively on the mic. A great intro to the labels sound and a fun listen for your weekend afternoons.

VISION RADIO - S03E24 - Hosted by Dave Columbo Jenkins & Martijn

[YouTube] | [SoundCloud]

Noisia, although “retired” from the DNB scene, continue the essential VISION radio series, which has always proven to be a great place to find the latest from their own label and other fresh new music from the scene’s best… this week they premiere ‘Hide Sun’ by Machinedrum & Holly plus new music by SMG, Censored The Audio, Klippee, Thys, Molokai and more.

HCKRS - Repack Radio June 2023

[YouTube] | [SoundCloud] | [MixCloud]

Warning: Shameless self promotion! Had to plug my own latest mix: a snapshot of some current, classic and unreleased stuff that embodies the “my sound” of DNB. An hour long blend of big room stuff like Dimension, ShockOne and The Prototypes with some deeper cuts from Amoss, Polyrom and other fresh tunes…and some new stuff from yours truly. I think it slaps pretty hard, so I’m adding it. Enjoy!

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♥ DNB? Join In! Heard something you like? Share it below? Been to show? Let us know! We want ~music.dnb to be a place for fans and newcomers to share our love of the scene in a positive space.

If you’ve read this far, thanks! Stay tuned, I’ll be back next week with another 10 #DNB / #Jungle tunes you can’t miss. Feel free to throw me a DM with love / hate / questions.

This is a place to post your ideas about what to do about Tildes groups and tags. I'm going to write about some problems (as I see them) and save my ideas about solutions for the comments.

The taxonomy problem

We have tags and groups and they are somewhat arbitrary. A tag could be a group someday. A group can be downgraded to a tag if it's not used much.

Topics can have multiple tags, but they can be in only one group (and its ancestor groups).

It's hard to pick the right group. An example: a post about animals could go in ~enviro (for wildlife), ~hobbies (for pets), or ~science (for a scientific study). So where do you put news article about a scientific study of the effects of house cats on wildlife?

Adding ~animals seems like it would be a good thing because now you have an obvious place to find all the posts about animals. Animal lovers rejoice! But from a taxonomy point of view, it makes things worse, because now you have another place where you could logically put an article and another place to go looking for it. More groups means more edges and more edge cases. It's enough to make you wish for crossposts.

The competition problem

Tags are better for taxonomy, so why not just have tags? Because classifying topics isn't the only thing we want to do. As Deimos wrote about, eventually we'd like to have somewhat more independent communities, closer to subreddits but hopefully without their downsides. It would be nice if subreddits that wanted to migrate to Tildes could actually do it. We also want to have a good mix of topics on the front page, while allowing some groups to have a lot more posts than others.

I'll start with an analogy: if a school has only one sport that matters, the people who are good at that sport win socially, and other people don't have as much of a chance. But if you have multiple sports and clubs that people care about, there are more ways to win at something. I don't believe pretending everyone is a winner works all that well, but more ways to win promotes diversity and creates useful social ambiguity.

The front page of Tildes is the most visible and has limited space. That creates an all-against-all competition between topics. We also have groups with their own leaderboards, but they are lesser competitions and it's unclear if they matter yet. (I'm using them more, though.) Meanwhile, each topic has an independent leaderboard for its comments that doesn't conflict with any other game. (Maybe that's why I like megathreads?)

I haven't been thinking of Tildes in terms of leaderboards, but maybe it can explain why old-timers are often reluctant to post topics? We aren't really trying to win, but we have ideas about fair play. When there's only one game anyone cares about, we don't want to drown out other worthy topics by entering too many contestants. We're also a bit reluctant to enter anything that's too specialized into the competition, because it doesn't "deserve" the attention. It's not a worthy contestant and it's just gonna lose.

Also, sometimes this isn't a game you want to win. Entering a controversial topic into a competition can get you unwanted attention, and that's often no prize at all. When a game isn't one you wanted to enter, getting attention is more like losing than winning.

For the front page, I expect this problem will get worse with more people. Entering the competition brings more attention than before.

Note: thinking of a topic listing as a leaderboard for a game is only an analogy and I don't mean to promote competitiveness. They weren't designed to be leaderboards and I think we'd like to see design changes that reduce competitiveness. There are known downsides to competition that we don't want, like "cheating" to win with "unworthy" strategies and the rules-lawyering and jealousy that come with that.

Ideas?

Some rules for this "game": Please post one proposal per comment. If you have multiple independent ideas, you can post them separately, but post them together if they're interrelated.

Hi all, I'm a recent reddit refugee who is very happy with my transition here. I like the spirit of the community a whole lot and am a fan of the admin approach, which is designed to promote engagement and deep content and prevent a shallow (advertiser-friendly) scrolling experience.

A the philosophy page on content says:

In-depth content (primarily text-based) is the most important

and

In general, any changes to the site that will cause "shallower" content to gain an advantage should be considered very carefully.

I agree with this fully. My thoughts, though, are that there are definitely forms of image post that are not just memes or jokes, and do lead to deeper discussion.

For instance, if somebody has created some art and would like to post it for feedback (or just to share), this feels more like a discussion topic than a 'quick scroll' post. I feel that this kind of image post is 'pro community'. Somebody is posting something they care about and want to discuss.

On reddit, a sub I always liked was ImaginaryMonsters, where people post cool pictures of monster art and discuss them (either original art or properly credited). This is for people who want to admire and discuss artwork. Again, I don't think this necessary falls into the category of 'shallow content'.

So, what am I suggesting?

I think it would be good for the site to actively promote the posting of the right kind of image content in the right places.

My angle is, essentially:

• Some image content does promote depth of discussion.
• This type of content may be quite vital for certain wedges of the community, especially moving forwards as the site grows (and making creatives feel more welcome).
• Rules regarding self-promotion already exist in the Code of Conduct.
• Because of how the web works, it would make sense to have limited embedding of certain images in at least thumbnail format (but it needn't show the full image in the feed like other scrollable 'content' sites). .
• Creating certain groups/subgroups specifically for posting certain types of images doesn't need to be seen as a slippery slope, if the rules are clear.
• There is even the possibility of purging image posts that don't have n amount of engagement within a specific time, so as not to end up with clutter.

I should point out two things:

• I am aware that images can already be posted as links on the site, and I applaud the reasoning for the overall tentative approach. Here, I'm talking about some select subgroups of the site that are specifically for certain types of image posting.
• I don't necessarily think I'm right. I am new here and making observations - I'm thinking about things I'd like personally - I know I don't have all the information to understand the full impact of such things here, but I am interested in knowing what other people think.

So, do you have an opinion on this? Thanks for reading!

Edit:

I just wanted to point out a couple of things based on responses.

• When I mention image posts, I'm not talking about image hosting - that's a whole can of worms - the site already allows links. I'm just talking about image links (with maybe some QoL surrounding that).
• I wasn't totally clear above, I'm not suggesting image posts everywhere, or even necessarily a whole new post type. My first thoughts were about one or two specific, limited subgroups with specific purposes.
• Those concerned about moderation, I understand that angle, but I am keeping in mind this recent post by @Deimos, where they talk about expanding moderation, or even handing it off to individual communities, subreddit style:

If the activity stays at this level or keeps increasing, we will probably need to add more moderators soon.

• Those concerned about feeds being overrun by images, there were thoughts about this from Deimos in the same post:

I think we should probably take advantage of this current high activity level to try moving the groups towards being more independent spaces. This would involve switching away from the current "opt-out" approach to an "opt-in" one, and would probably need updates to a few different sections of the site to support it.

• I also think it's worth mentioning my thoughts above do not preclude having some minimum text requirement along with every image. I agree about not encouraging shallow content, and am attempting to focus on exactly where that line lies.
• Finally, I do want to make it clear I'm not coming here as a new person trying saying "nice site, change it like this!" - which I think some people may have taken this as (I had one or two single-sentence responses). I genuinely like what I've seen so far because of what it is, but am also aware things may well be changing in some other ways already (as per the post I linked). Sorry if this seems like 'another reddit user trying turn us into reddit' - this is not my intent whatsoever, I am just interested in specifically how it could be done in a Tildes way. I am glad it started a half-decent discussion though!

I got into it at the beginning of this year and I have to say this is the most fun hobby I've ever picked up. I've always loved plushies but have been greatly intimidated by sewing. But I've also always been good at modeling with clay and being able to visually break down objects into shapes. Needlefelting is like being able to make plushies using the skillset of modeling clay vs the skillset of sewing. At least that's how my brain sees it.

So far I've made two plushies, one Black Frost from SMT and one Gammamon from Digimon Ghost Game. If it's possible to post pictures here I would be happy to show them, but I don't know how, if anyone would like to enlighten me I'd appreciate it. Otherwise I could link to a tweet with pics but I'm not sure if there's rules against self-promotion as my Twitter is linked to an online shop.

Anyone else here needlefelting? Share what you're working on! Or any tips you have!

It's pretty clear that those times are over, but I'm sure many of us remember the heydays of VC funded tech extravagance. These are the ones that come to my mind, hoping to hear others experience.

• At one point, uberpool was cheaper than the cost of public transport in the city.
• No sales tax on Amazon!
• So many promotions and code to get you to join in on their platform. This was also before they try to get you to subscribe to their monthly plans.

I figured that more than complaining about the dearth of random and weird websites, I might ought to contribute something. I almost went to MassArt for new media installations. In those days I was a web monkey with a solid design bent and very orthogonal thinking. I still have a smidgeon of the thinking, we'll see what I have left of my design skills, but my tech skills are hopeless. Back then my tools were freehand, dreamweaver, bbedit, photoshop, flash, Perl, Solaris, mySQL. My last website was done with rudimentary css.

I would like to get right to the design and expression phase, I don't have an inclination to dive into coding. I also don't want to worry about security. I'll throw a few bucks down.

I'm still comfortable in photoshop, but would like a more fun tool. I cannot stand illustrator, and would love to have a vigorous chat with the folks at Adobe who chose to promote it and shelve freehand. Better yet, an even more vigorous chat with the moron at the FTC who approved Adobe's buyout of macromedia. You can bet that will be on the website. Is there any equivalent to freehand? I saw the post about a free, online illustration tool that came through recently, that might be a smidge rudimentary. What about dreamweaver? And how to publish? I don't care to learn about content management, scripting, databases, etc. if I can avoid it.

Bonus if there are AI tools to help.

In this post, I'm going to say something which might seem controversial, politically incorrect or even downright harsh to some of you. Feel free to let me know and express your strong disagreement if that's the case. Everyone's world view is different and I'm ever ready to adjust my own in light of new found facts and evidences.

What I'm observing these days is that many big tech companies and large corporations are pushing lot's of content on Linkedin, Twitter, etc. which conveys the idea that these companies are standing up for the rights of supposedly oppressed section of the masses (females, minorities, etc.). 8 out of 10 postings from them are typically about these, a group picture of women employees, retweets or likes of those who have posted on new joining and promotions, etc.

With all due respect, the problem here isn't with the virtues of women empowerment, etc., needless to say these are good things to be celebrated in a society. But the problem is with their approach. When 8 out of 10 posts are only on these topics, the impression or narrative being pushed becomes that the world at large is very cruel and gruesome whereas these large capitalists are the ones who are implementing just rules and ethics on that world. Do you think this narrative or story they're selling is based on any factual reality?

I've seen and experienced a fair part of that "world at large" myself and while there are indeed many problems with it and it's far from perfect, it's a bit rich of these capitalists to make that kind of narrative signaling when, in fact, they're the ones who are partly responsible for keeping it ever poor and oppressed. These companies have the highest privileges of the world and they profit out of a crony system that thrives and benefits from the gates which keep the competition away.

Now, I'm not one of those "ancap" dudes who blatantly cancels capitalism entirely. Oh no, we all do need capitalism, not only because it's a system that pays your salaries and bills but also because the alternative is much worse and we have seen what it did in Russia and Korea and China. I just wish capitalism was more inclusive and of the Adam Smithian Laissez Faire and free competition kind and less of the big tech and surveillance capitalism kind.

This constant narrative pushing by the corporates, in effect, keeps people distracted from this truly bad aspect of capitalism. The masses are gullible, they can't see it, but the people sitting at top positions in these companies should know better. What kind of society are they trying to create with this? These companies have nothing to fear. Even if the masses actually realized and start thinking about this problem, they're hardly in a position to do anything about it. The way our rigid systems are designed and work, I don't see it changing for at least decades, if not centuries. But I wish these brands stop pushing on the narrative front in the meantime. In fact, the only thing that will change is make them more trustworthy in the eyes of wise people in the society, that's what I think.

Long story short I am a web developer that currently makes more money than I've ever made in my life to this point. The downside is that my benefits package is sub-par. Very few vacation days, no health insurance (though we do get $ on our checks to go toward costs), fairly bare-bones retirement plan, etc. I also feel kind of aimless at this job. There is no clear path for raises or promotions. It's too small of a company for that.

I got an offer today for a job with a company that a former manager of mine works at (We both left our previous jobs around the same time, so no poaching concerns there). It's an opportunity to change my specialty from backend development (databases, server-side code) to frontend development (HTML, CSS, JS). I've always enjoyed frontend development more than backend. Feel free to giggle about this terminology because it's definitely ridiculous. The job basically resolves all of my benefits issues. Unlimited vacation, pretty good health insurance, and a more robust retirement plan. There are also very clear paths for raises/promotions. In fact one of the first things you do when you get hired is sit down with your manager and department head and plot out a career track for yourself. So in my case I'm aiming for team management or something along those lines in a few years. So they would cater my training and promotions around that. There's a guaranteed yearly raise, plus a nice 5% bonus at end of the year.

So what's the problem? Because the second job seems perfect, right? Well the second job pays nearly 12% less a year. So what's the problem? Because that's an insane drop in pay, so clearly stay where I'm at, right? Well I was told by my former manager (and potentially new department head) that the plan would be to fast-track me into something closer to my current salary once I'm there for a few months and start excelling at my job. And I trust this guy because he fought for me to get raises twice when I worked under him before. It's rare to work under someone who will go to bat for you, and he was always that guy for me and I've no reason to think he wouldn't be again.

Because the way I see it, once I get a raise or promotion under my belt I should be pretty close to where I'm at now, but with substantially better benefits. And in a place with more of a future for me than my current job.

I just really don't know what to do here. I've "made a decision" in my head about a dozen times today, going back and forth between options. I kind of feel like it's worth taking the hit in the short term to be working at a place that will pay off better in the long term. Not just financially, but I'll get to broaden my skill set and actually have a concrete plan for progressing in my career.

Looking for any advice, or opinions, or whatever. I'm completely torn here.

edit -- Just wanted to thank everyone here. I decided to accept the job offer. My wife and I are working on a plan to weather the loss of income. Next step is writing the resignation letter....which always sucks. I hate disappointing people and it's a small company that I'm leaivng so my departure will be felt.

*Disclaimer: I am not an apologist, theologian, or a philosopher, just someone interested in the topic. Perhaps this could've been asked in r/AskPhilosophy or maybe even r/changemyview, but I figure the conversation might be good here

The recent post here on Absurd Trolley Problems has had me thinking about ethics again, and I realized I've never been introduced to how one can be an atheist and be not only a moral objectivist, but a moral realist. I remember a debate I watched years ago with William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens where Craig asks Hitchens what the basis of morality is, and he acts insulted, insinuating that Craig intended to say that atheists couldn't "be good without God" (which I think became a famous moment for the both of them.)

But I never got the answer to Craig's question that I wanted. Without God, how should we determine what moral facts there are? How should we determine if there are moral facts at all? I grew up in a fundamentalist religion, and found myself in adulthood deeply interested in apologetics, and see similar responses in debates to the one mentioned above. Now while I believe Hitchens was a moral relativist, I often see and hear cases where atheists do seem to want to say that [insert atrocity here] was objectively morally wrong. Can atheists reasonably claim that there are not only moral facts, but objective moral facts that they can access? Upon examination, aren't you ultimately required to derive an "ought" from an "is"?

I skimmed The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris some years ago, and it seems to "avoid" (i.e. commit) the "is/ought" fallacy by simply declaring that "human flourishing" (however that may be defined, separate issue) is an irreducible "ought" in his eyes. The book is great, I think that science should be part of the discussion about how one ought to live their life if the goal is some end like human flourishing; doctors already give prescriptions for behavior based on a presupposed goal between both parties to promote health and well-being. Both of these necessarily presuppose a state of affairs that one "ought" to seek to attain.

But none of this answers why one "ought" to do anything; sure, there are facts about what one "ought" to do in order to attain a state of affairs, but that isn't morality: that's true of any subject where two people agree to share a goal. It doesn't tell us why they should have that goal. None of this feels like a satisfying answer to the question Craig posed. I don't feel like I'm any closer to these objective moral facts.

I should say this topic is really meaningful to me. I've thought a lot about veganism, and the suffering of non-human animals. I've thought about the impact of my consumption decisions instead of perpetually leaning on the "no ethical consumption" crutch (even though there are reasons why that would have merit in certain circumstances. I literally can't stop thinking about climate change and how powerless, yet simultaneously complicit I feel. I've read Peter Singer, Scripture, Kant, John Stewart Mill, Rawls, and works from many others, and can't find any reason for an atheist (and maybe even a theist?) to think that there are these moral facts at all, much less objective, accessible ones. This really leaves me with "I guess I should just do whatever it is that I feel like doing", which probably seems to you as unsatisfying as it was for me to type.

I just wanted a pretext to share my first successful Expert+ song on 150% speed + Ghost Notes :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HQIvNCF9RA (two-part video, first half on Ghost Arrows, second half on Ghost Notes)

I got back into Beat Saber a week ago after a 2 months hiatus. I like the new OST and mechanics and I love the new Fall Out Boy DLC. Highly recommend it!

Has anyone else been playing it lately?

I'm working on opening a VR arcade in Brussels and thinking of promoting Beat Saber quite a bit there :)

Just finished watching it, and while I’m sure I need to process and reflect a little more on it, I can at least give my initial impression: meh.

I came in not expecting much because, to be honest, the trilogy didn’t end as good as it started. I was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t end up a kaleidoscope of colors either, since the promotional material seemed to insinuate it might take after some of the other Wachowski’s works.

The first hour felt like a rehash of the first Matrix. While the callbacks were good fan service, it felt uninspired and something I would expect from a Disney franchise. The second half seemed to lose the thread and the plot got rambled through to the point that you forget what the whole point of the movie was supposed to be. It basically ends as a…love story? The deeper philosophical elements of the trilogy were eschewed for predictable tropes and artificial suspense.

The characters lacked depth, and I was particularly disappointed in the new incarnations of Agent Smith and Morpheus. The younger actors lacked the gravitas that the original duo brought to the screen. The bated, deliberate delivery that provided weight to the characters was replaced by trite, pithy lines that don’t do the original characters any justice. Neil Patrick Harris is also better suited for a comedic role rather than a dramatic one, and his character failed at both in this movie.

The movie had a decent environment and art direction, but it got ruined by overuse of CGI and green screen. The action scenes either had stilted fights with aging actors, or had so much action that they lacked any real sense of danger (there were scenes with throngs of people attacking the main characters with bullets never seeming to hit anyone important).

I had hoped that after 20 years there would be some real contribution to the canon, but this movie answered enough questions to explain why Neo is alive, without contributing any further philosophy into the series. It ends with a clear open ending for future installments, which would only serve as cash grabs.

The movie started off with many meta-references to itself, making a joke about sequels being unoriginal. I had hoped this self-awareness would have translated to either a new level of meta-discussion or at least an attempt to not fall into the folly of most half-assed sequels. Apparently that line was solely a joke, and it cheapens the movie because of it.

Was it a good movie? Not really. Was it a bad movie? Not necessarily. It was entertaining in the same way a Michael Bay explosion is entertaining, but those looking for intellectual stimulation will be left empty-handed.

(This is basically me blogging. I have a blog but I haven't posted in a decade, so I figure I might as well write here.)

We live in a weird times when people often question basic premises of economics. Some populists and/or scam artists promote cryptocurrencies, meme stocks, and other unorthodox investments. It's easy to make fun of. Meanwhile there has always been a populist distrust of banks (particularly in US history) and distrust has increased since the 2008 financial crisis.

A lot of populist distrust isn't based on any deep knowledge of how finance works, but rather a deep-seated feeling that someone must be getting away with something. And yes, someone probably is getting away with something, but that doesn't mean you need to believe every crank theory that becomes popular on Reddit.

That being said, I'd like to tell you about my slightly unorthodox way to think about money and banking. It comes to the same thing in the end (banks still work the same way) but it seems like a useful framework.

I'm going to set up a hypothetical example. There is a casino where gamblers use plastic chips to gamble, and there a cashiers' window where they can buy chips to gamble with when they arrive and turn them in for cash when they leave. So here is the question: are these plastic chips money?

From a gambler's point of view, when they want to know how much money they have, they count their chips. These chips behave as essentially as money for them, and I claim that they actually are a kind of money, at least within the casino. Though this is unlikely, you could even imagine a nearby store that accepts chips for purchases and goes later to the casino to cash them in. When the store counts its money, it would be reasonable to include any chips that it didn't turn in yet. You could think of it as "cash" or (in a more orthodox way) as a "cash equivalent" but this is a matter of accounting definitions; the chips serve the same purpose in the system.

When the casino counts its money, it never counts its own chips as cash. If they ask "how much cash does the casino have" then that's just the cash that the teller has behind the window. If they ask about the casino's financial assets more generally, if the chip is held by the cashier, it doesn't get counted at all; it's just worthless. All the chips that they gave out to gamblers are subtracted because the casino will lose cash when the gambler turns in chips before they leave.

So the status of a plastic chip depends on who's asking and how they're counting. The chip hasn't physically changed, but its status depends both on its location and your point of view. Weird, huh?

If someone says "this plastic chip is money," what kind of statement is this? Is it subjective? There are reasons why gamblers might disagree on the value of a chip. Let's say that, while the casino is closed, one gambler trusts that the casino will always honor its debts, but another has come to believe that they're a scam and they're never going to reopen, and your chips are worthless.

You might think of this as a prediction. Saying that "this chip is money" is a prediction that the teller will give you cash when you go to the window and other gamblers will treat it like it's worth money, and maybe the nearby store will too.

Such a prediction can depend on time. For example, maybe the chips could have an expiration date where the teller won't accept chips after that. So, from a gambler's perspective, the chip is money before the expiration date and no longer money after that. Or, more subjectively, a gambler might think that the casino will open tomorrow but be gone by next week.

So we see that statements about money aren't timeless, that they depend on your point of view, that they can be matters of opinion, but they are statements people will eventually be right or wrong about. In this way they are like promises and other predictions about the future. Nobody knows what the future will bring, but there are some promises we trust over others.

Okay, now we can look at bank deposits. What does the number in your account in the bank's computer actually do? For you and almost everyone else, bank deposits are money. (For example, they are officially part of M1.) But to the bank, they are a liability, because you can withdraw money from your account. From a bank's point of view, a deposit in any other bank is money, but the deposits in their own bank are not.

So a key point here is that banks create money, but only for other people. They can never create money for themselves, and they won't create money for other people for free, because they will pay later. How much later? Well, that's a prediction.

For the same reason, the teller in the casino won't just give you a chip, and the casino will have strict security to make sure nobody steals the chips. Sure, the casino owner could take a chip to a nearby store and buy something, but this is a form of buying on credit. This turns a plastic chip that's valueless for them into money for the store owner, but the casino will pay for it later.

I have an idea for Tildes.
You can give people the option to promote their own posts ,using either real money or cryptocurrency, so their posts can appear on the homepage, they get exposure and they support Tildes whilst doing it! Other people can also tip posts, both Tildes and the OP get a share of the revenue! The money Tildes makes from this will be able to support the site!

Please add this. I don't want annoying Google ads.

Does anyone know of any communication platforms [1] which use a credit system or have a 'cost' attached to actions such as making a post or commenting? I am imagining something like Reddit or a forum where users have a balance, and actions have a cost which is charged against that balance. So if I have 100 credits and posting in r/whatever costs 2 credits/post and 1 credit/comment then that limits the amount of interaction in that sub.

I am wondering if a cost system like this would be useful for moderation or to promote high-value content, since it effectively turns the platform into a market. One effect of this system is that it would discourage low-value posts/replies/comments, because there is a cost associated with making a post, namely opportunity cost of posting something else later. Perhaps the credits are purchased with real-world currency, which I assume would amplify this effect?

I imagine a sustainable system would have some way to reward users of high-value content with more credit so they are incentivised and able to produce more content: maybe upvotes count as credit, or users can donate credit to each other?

[1] I hope this term is vague enough to encompass all forms of modern digital communication. I am curious about direct communication (email, WhatsApp, ...) as well as social media in its various forms (Reddit, Tildes, Twitter, ...), niche platforms (Letter), wikis, fora, and anything else under the sun.

It seems like there are not that many new topics posted on Tildes, and that we could post a lot more. But I sometimes find myself reluctant to do so. Don't I post too much already?

Recently there was a survey and apparently many people think Tildes is too tech-oriented. I don't think it's all that tech oriented, not like Hacker News or lobste.rs, but that makes me a little more reluctant to post tech links. (Though, really, other people should post more of the kind of links they want to see.)

I suspect it's not just me. Periodic topics sometimes get a lot of comments. Periodic topics have been started specifically to avoid having too many top-level topics on one subject.

But, why are we avoiding this? What's wrong with posting more links? If this were a social bookmarking site, I'd be saving more links. Maybe I'd save a bunch of accordion links, without any regard for whether people are interested?

It seems like we need something like folders. When new links are posted in a folder, they don't get listed individually at top-level. You could drop a bunch of links in a folder if you felt like it, without feeling like you're monopolizing conversation, because people would have to open the folder to see what's there. Or maybe instead of folders it would be something like creating a playlist. You could start a topic that's basically a list of links, and then anyone can add links to it if they want.

It seems like groups don't really do this, somehow? They feel a bit too open and exposed. Everything shows up on the front page regardless of group. (I mean, you can filter or unsubscribe from groups, but many of us don't. Partly because they're too broad. Who's going to unsubscribe from music just because they aren't interested in some music?)

So instead we use topics and post links as comments. It sort of works, but it's given me a lot of practice at writing markdown-formatted links on a mobile keyboard, and they appear differently in search and aren't tagged.

It seems like links posted within a topic and posted top-level should be more similar in the UI. Maybe if there's some conversation about a link within a topic, a moderator could promote it to top-level? Maybe a lot of topics would start that way, and then the site would feel a bit more full.

So, let's say I wrote something on my blog[1] and want people to check it out. Since I don't have any proper "audience" (and I don't expect one given I rarely post something), I don't really see any way other than sharing my own posts on places like Tildes, relevant subreddits, etc.

But doing this feels bad. I feel like I'm using these places just as a dumping ground for my own posts, trying to boost my own site or whatever, even though I don't earn anything from it.

If I check my Tildes history, 3 of the 4 topics I submitted are self-promotion in some way. On my comments the ratio of promotion vs "natural" comments look lower, but even just saying that makes me feel like I'm trying to lie about something.

One thing about my small number of topics are that I don't really think about sharing links I come across, since I feel like none of them would fit the site, and most of them are already shared here.

I don't know if the self-promotion is frowned upon, if I should continue, how I'd "diversify" my posting habits, and all that. What do you all think?

[1]: Doesn't have to be a blog post, it could be anything.

Some years ago, I wrote a book about telecommuting, including a section about the reasons people don't want to be remote workers. High on the list was, "It's too hard to move up in the company" because if you're out of sight, you're out of mind.

Well, now suddenly nearly everybody is a telecommuter, whether or not they like the idea. So that particular skill is particularly relevant. And I've been assigned an article on "How to 'manage up' when you work from home." I'd like your input.

My article is meant to compile practical how-to tips for people working from home on “how to stay on your boss's radar.” What advice do you have to share?

Ideally: Give me a bullet point (“Do XYZ”), why (“It accomplishes this”), and perhaps an anecdote sharing how it made a difference.

Please don’t expend energy telling me why it’s important, or what the barriers are. Take that as a given. I’m looking for solid “Do this” suggestions.

Hi!

My wife and I met through our mutual love of horror films, and really love watching movies together in general-- good or bad. For the past three years we'd go to the local horror film festival around her birthday which, sadly, is not happening this year, so I thought I'd wrangle up some horror films available online for us to watch instead.

Do you have any favorites?

Here's some of mine!:

• Transmission 1 (warning: starts loud): This was a webisode released to help promote the 2007 horror film The Signal in which a sound emitting from electronics affects how people behave.
• Spider: A prankster doesn't know when to stop. (trigger warning & mild spoiler: some eye stuff)
• Lights Out: Something seems off more than the lights (all of this guy's stuff is pretty decent as far as short horrors go).

I know those are higher production value than most of the stuff you'd see at a festival, so don't worry about that. We really enjoyed one last year called Finley that was just a complete delight.

I'm running out of time to finish the spend requirements on a credit card promotion. I was planning on buying a VR headset, but I realized there was something that would actually be much more useful; a new router.

The market for consumer routers has been really strange; We are on the sixth generation, yet it's super common for consumer routers to be two or three generations behind, especially the less expensive ones. So much of the stuff on the market only goes up to 802.11n, and half of the time the firmware they include is halfway broken or is missing important features.

So I'm looking for a router that is relatively future-proof. I want Wifi 6. I want something that won't be interrupted by the microwave. Open source firmware would be excellent, but not a requirement. I don't need mesh networking; my house is not that big. I do want it to be relatively inexpensive; I'd consider $300 to be a hard limit unless someone has a persuasive arguement to justify the cost.

I would also prefer to avoid Netgear. I have no idea how they stay in business with the mountains of problems I have had with their products and their horrible support. The last time I owned a Netgear product, I was forced to give them my email address to download the driver and they illegally added it to their marketing mailing list without my permission. I don't do business with people who betray me.

This question has come up a few times now in the "Unofficial Tildes Chat" Discord server meta/curation channels, but I wanted to open up the discussion to ~tildes at large so we can perhaps finally get a more definitive judgement on it. So here goes:

What are people's thoughts on using the above topic tags in cases where a Tildes user posts something that they themselves have created, have hosted on their own site (or another), and/or could potentially profit from (monetarily or otherwise)?

Should only one of the tags be standardized on, or is there enough of a distinction between some of them for their use to be situational?

Should such tags be required?

Can anyone think of any better tags for such situations than the ones listed?

I find this to be a pretty important question when news organizations like Fox News are literally aiming to help the Republican Party to stay on power, CNN and MSNBC promote centrist candidates and media aggregators ranging from r/the_donald to r/chapotraphouse banning anyone who opposes them. Thing is, these are the most well known examples. How could we tell faulty media sources and aggregators apart from good ones in mass? Do you think that's possible?

I recently came across an article about setting up automated builds (installation, code quality check, running tests) using Github Actions. I've since found a few more articles excitedly promoting the feature and, from my personal testing, it seems to work quite well.

I was wondering if others had begun using this feature for their own projects, or had tried it and disliked it and used something else. Is there any broader community consensus towards which tasks it's best-suited for and when to use something more robust?

Scott Morrison stands by Liberal ad promoting government's bushfire response

Here's the advertisement itself: https://twitter.com/ScottMorrisonMP/status/1213330419044638722

For the non-Aussies, and for the Aussies who aren't political tragics like me... the reason everyone's up in arms is that this video has been released by the Liberal Party, not by the Australian government. We can tell by the "Authorised by" statement in the final frame. Government information comes with the Commonwealth coat of arms and says "Authorised by the Australian Government, Canberra". Party political advertisements have to be "authorised by" someone within the political party. In other words, this is a political ad, not a government press release. The Liberal Party (not the government!) is promoting itself on the basis of what the government is doing for the bushfires.

Scott Morrison has already been an utter failure during this crisis. He went on holiday after the fires started. He's done as little as possible since he returned. And people have noticed. People have abused him when he turned up to visit their town. People have literally refused to shake his hand (but he grabs their hands and shakes them anyway!).

But, despite all this wrong-footedness, this new advertisement is the most tone-deaf thing he's done (so far!). It reflects his background in marketing. Everything's a message for him. Unfortunately for him, the message here is "I'm using your suffering to promote myself".

Scott Morrison has fucked up yet again.