I wrote a blog post for basically my first time ever. It's a first draft, but whatever. I never share my thoughts because I lack confidence, but I want to work on that. I welcome criticism of the way I've presented my thoughts, but my main priority is just discussing Starfield here! I want to hear what y'all think, mainly about the world of Starfield.

I was starry eyed when I first launched Starfield, but it ultimately left me feeling spaced out. After spending around 25 hours with the game I've realized that I wanted something different from Starfield, and that the game just doesn't keep my mind engaged and imagination running. I feel some guilt saying that. It took a buttload of human working hours to bring Starfield to fruition after all, and I don't want to dismiss that work. It's a very pretty game, with a lot of mechanics, characters, and stories. On paper, it's an ideal game for me. It's a first person adventure through the stars meeting strangers and ogling at alien planets packed in with loot and rpg elements. That's my kind of treadmill to be running on. The type of game loop I enjoy. Ultimately though, it did not fill the space in my head that I wanted it to.

Starting with the core game play, it's what I had the least expectations for. I am no Bethesda mega fan, but I've dabbled in their games. Their combat, stealth, traversal and so on have always registered as just serviceable to me. That's not really even a criticism as I've never gotten the impression that Bethesda's intention was to draw fans on those elements. They want to provide a simple set of tools to interact with their worlds. The tools they've provided here in Starfield feel fine. They all work. Gun play feels fine, traversal feels fine, stealth feels fine. It's the way those tools interact with their environments, characters, and narration that typically attract me, but don't here. Even their newest game play addition in space ship combat echoes their standard approach. It feels simple but solid. No extravagance like a Star Fox 64 barrel roll, but there's enough going on to feel good. Like the rest of the tool set, it's serviceable enough to let the player interact with their world. The world is what has left me cold.

Bethesda introduces us to Starfield's world in a baffling place, a place almost opposite to space, a mine. Sure, they planet isn't Earth, but it might as well be Earth. It's dark, dirty, rocky and far from a feast for the eyes. It's no surprise that mines are in the game as Bethesda has always included similar spaces in their games. Such environments are perfect for stuffing loot and combat encounters into, but imagine if Skyrim had began in a cave instead of out in its beautiful landscape. Starfield could've opened in space on a ship or on a number of visually alien worlds, and I think it's a misstep to begin the player in the most unappealing of its environments. Unfortunately, I think it's telling of a large part of the way you will be seeing Starfield's world. From a lot of interior spaces. It's often easy to forget that I'm playing a sci-fi game set in an open world space setting.

Starfield's world looks like what I imagine it would look like if human space colonization were to actually happen. In that regard, I think they were incredibly successful. It's the realization of this image that I think held Starfield back. Just like a lot of our own real universe, it is often empty and dull. Many landscapes of the planets and moons of Starfield, while sometimes pretty, are more often unremarkable. Procedural generation is an incredible tool that can easily lead to unimaginative results. I'm never able to escape the thought that what I'm looking at was probably computer generated. After visiting around 15 planets, I began to feel as though I'd seen it all before, just in different colors. Often fauna and foliage looked strange but lacked a certain spark of hand crafted creativity. I was never struck by their beauty nor their horror but only their only seemingly random assortment of attributes. On planets with human inhabitants their lacked personality in their work and living spaces with exceptions being the hand crafted major settlements. Buildings and structures felt modular and mass produced by the same manufacturer. All of this is probably an accurate depiction of a real future where we branched out into space, but it doesn't make for a fun video game to see and soak in. Major cities like New Atlantis and Akira City lent much more life to Starfield's world with obvious heart put into their creation. You can see their influences from the sci-fi genre in their construction. Instead of aiming for a large and marketable open world, it's a smaller handcrafted galaxy I wish we would have gotten. Somewhere with its own politics and drama taking place on landscapes with intent and personality. A larger existing universe could be hinted at with follow ups in sequels. Bethesda is bursting at the seems with creative talent, but there was simply too much space to make aesthetically daring from every angle. Instead that talent was stretched an inch thin and a mile wild.

The inhabitants of Starfield are offensively inoffensive and so dry they'll leave you parched. They're boring, full stop. They lack nuance and detail in their personalities. They begin and end at their core archetypes. The meaning of their existence is only to facilitate the player and be impressed by you. In my 25 hours of play, I didn't find my self endeared to any character except for a sweet old grandma exploring space, but I only liked her because I like that trope. Characters are very formal and professional which I believe was Bethesda's intent. After all, the context of most every interaction has you acting in an official capacity for one of the factions. You're a representative for the professional work these factions are doing, like being a volunteer cop for the United Colonies or Freestar Collective's Rangers or an explorer-researcher for the stuffy Constellation. It makes sense that conversations would be formal, professional, and often to the point. Ultimately that just doesn't make for compelling conversation. I engage with fiction, especially genre fiction, for its strong sense of personality. The characters I found in Starfield feel like they're just going through the motions of their 9 to 5 job. Their framing as a talking head when having conversations with them only highlights their stiffness.

I believe Starfield is a well-done realization of Bethesda's intent. It's a very corporate and made by committee vision, but it's well executed. It seems they wanted to create a world that resembles a legitimate future where humans leave Earth and colonize the stars. The result is barren unremarkable planets, sterile labs, boring mining and manufacturing facilities, mass produce modular homes, and plenty of empty space. I think they're right, this is what a settled galaxy looks like, but it just doesn't make for a satisfying video game.

edit: fixed spelling from "feel" to "fill"

For a while now I am personally completely dissatisfied with the direction the (mainstream)technology is taking.

Almost universally the theme is simplification on end user facing side. That by itself would not be so bad but products that go this route currently universally include loss of control of the user including things I would not have believed would be accepted just a decade or so ago. Forced telemetry(aka spying on user habits), forced updates(aka forcefully changing functionality without consent of the user), loss of information - simplification of error messages to absolute uselessness, loss of customization options or their removal to parts that are impossible to find unless you know about them already, nagware and bloatware and ads forcefully included in base os install. And that is simply the desktop/laptop environment.The mobile one is truly insane and anything other "smart" is simply closed sw and hw not regarding user agency at all.

Personally I consider the current iteration of "just works" approach flawed, problems will inevitably arise. Withholding basic information and tools simply means that the end user does not know what happened and is dependent on support for trivialities. I also consider various hmmm, oops and such error messages degrading and helping to cultivate a culture of technological helplessness.

To be honest I believe the option most people(generally) end up taking of disinterest in even the superficial basics of technology is an objectively bad one. Computing is one of the most complex and advanced technologies we have but the user facing side even in systems such as Linux or Windows 7 and older is simple to understand and use effectively with minimal effort. I do not believe most people are incapable of acquiring enough proficiency to for example install an os or take a reasonable guess at what a sane error message means or even understand the basics of using a terminal, they simply choose to not bother. But we live and will continue to live in a technological world and some universal technological literacy is needed to prevent loss of options and loss of agency of the end user. The changes introduced in mainstream sw are on a very clear trajectory that will not change by itself.

I have this vision of a future where the end user interacts solely with curated LLM systems without the least understanding of what is happening, why it is happening or who makes it happen. The blackbox nature of such systems then introducing subtle biases that were not caught in brute force patches over the systems or simply not caught, perpetuating who knows what. Unfortunately I do not think it is sufficiently unlikely by the current trends.

Up to a point I get not wanting to deal with problems with technology but instead roadblocks are introduced that are as annoying to get through with the difference that they will not stay fixed. Technology is directing massive portion of our lives, choosing to not make an effort to understand the absolute surface of it is I think not a sound decision and creates a culture where it is possible to introduce disempowering changes en masse.

So far this has been a rant honestly and perhaps I just needed to vent but I am actually interested in the thoughts of the community on this broad topic.

It's nearly 6am here and I can't sleep because our sitter has decided last minute that she can only look after my pup from 9am - 7pm this coming weekend after confirming an overnight months ago, which has left us scrambling to find suitable care. I appreciate that because my dog has some stranger danger issues we're working through, his care isn't straightforward but apart from that he's young and healthy (no need for medications at specific times, etc.).

We've had multiple paid meetups with her since December last year to make sure he's comfortable around her. We've been explicit from the beginning that we will be back from this event late at night therefore we would be happy to pay an overnight fee and there is the option of staying in the guest bedroom if she's not comfortable travelling home that late at night. I said this multiple times. I understand that part of it is because she's been unwell for a while and another part is needing to get back to her own dogs but this is an absolute nightmare. We've been planning this for months. She's suggested getting someone else to cover the bit from 7pm onwards but because of his fearfulness of strangers I'm terrified of this happening without our supervision.

We have a backup sitter but she's recently gotten a puppy of her own so I have no idea if she'll be able to pitch in and help at such short notice. We need to be at the venue at 9am so my pup will need to be crated until the main sitter arrives - we already can't be there for one handover, the thought of another one having to happen is just more co-ordination to go wrong and more stress and worry for me. The easiest thing to do at this point would be to cancel the whole sit and miss my friend's wedding (at the very least my partner can still attend). There's just no good outcomes anymore: it's either cancel and stay home or we get sitter cover, we both go to the wedding, I'm miserable and worried the entire time.

It's not just this one off thing though. Actually finding a suitable sitter in the first place was a complete headache and it's been a constant uphill battle with trainers too. We had a trainer who was fantastic for several months but then got sick with covid before Christmas and since then contact with her has just completely petered out. Another trainer offered a six week package so I paid for the initial £115 assessment only to be told that she suddenly had to move to Manchester and couldn't commit to six weeks anymore, but she could offer two sessions in the fortnight that she had to get ready to leave (spoilers: she couldn't, turns out moving cities is a lot). A third trainer talked a big game over messages but it was utterly impossible to organise a session with him at all. As soon as I suggested an actual, tangible date instead of asking for his availability for a third time it was radio silence. Our weekly puppy classes are the only reliable constant in our lives.

It's genuinely put me in a bit of a crisis. Am I the problem? Have we just had fantastically shitty luck? Is this just the industry standard? Like, is this normal and does it just suck for everyone? My mood's absolutely spiralled from reflecting on all this, I love my boy to pieces but if this is the typical experience I just don't think I have it in me to own another dog after this. I want to believe that I'm just tired and cranky and it'll get easier once he's 2 or 3 years old, but right now everything around dog ownership is a miserable, miserable slog.

Other dog owners: please, please share your experiences.

My parents live in Los Angeles so I'm there often, but I feel like I've always done the big things that everyone's done (Hollywood Sign, Disneyland/Universal, Sunset Blvd (not worth it imo)) and eaten the popular foods (Leo's Tacos, Din Tai Fung, etc) so I'm wondering what other things I can do the next time I'm out there! I'm going out there for a bachelor party with a couple of friends in May, if that helps :)

A similar thing with Vegas, we'll be stopping by there for a couple of days after LA, and I know of all the popular things to do, mainly some gambling, buffets and shows, but is there anything outside of that that are considered -must do's- that we could check out?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like three cheers, yuzu and butterflies. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone has a spreadsheet going.

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

I wanted to give an update to something I wrote about a while back, because i have something to show for it and wanted to express some gratitude.

Behold!

I used the eraser tool on the bottom part, we have a business line but we're not open yet. When we are I'll have some more pictures and it'll be included.

That old post was the first time I had committed most of that to writing, and it was really encouraging for folks to take an interest, especially Akir's questions. Being asked and writing out the answers helped me clarify further, what I was intending to do and how I would get there. So, for the folks who read that, I wanted to share an update.

I'm really confident about this endeavor. It makes me anxious to say that but I've come to learn the position we're in just could not be better. Part of getting it started is forming an LLC, so I've gotten some time to talk with folks more professionally connected to the town. From what I gather, we don't actually have much direct competition. That's because the local venues are very high priced, and primarily do weddings. With some of them, it sounds like a case of possibly resting on laurels - one story was of a wedding, $10,000, which did not include things like tables and chairs and the house was not clean. Each venue charges quite a lot, I think because they're renting out most of their own supplies. We don't have to do that - we have enough already to accommodate up to around 150 people, and the space can accommodate up to ~350 if they're hanging out outside. We can do an event like that 10k wedding for around 3k with stuff provided.

No one offers stuff that's smaller scale. At least with all the places I researched, it's just weddings. No one really tries to host things like, say, a dinner for a local business, school groups, smaller parties. The first event we're set to do, is a tea party for around 30 people (it's for a little girl's birthday). I got to speak with someone who owns a local accounting firm, and learned from them what we are planning to do is pretty much an unserved market. Folks want to be able to go someplace nice that isn't a restaurant. The lowest priced venue sits around ~$3500, and that's just the price of being there. Bear in mind, this is Brookhaven, MS - it isn't a wealthy place by any stretch. The venues currently operating seem to be relying on folks finding them online, and catering to those higher end kinds of events (again, it's mostly just weddings. Some of them do bed and breakfast but it's clearly not what their branding is about). We have practically no overhead, no loans, no investors, and our plan targets stuff that isn't available but is in regular demand. We're doing a few small events to get some practical knowledge and in May we'll open officially.

There's a separate story in there, of two independent folks figuring out how to live together. Neither of us is used to having someone around to do things. Changing my environment has meant being more productive and motivated, which has been pretty nice. Grandma rocks, that's really all there is to it. It really feels like having chosen to do something at precisely the right time, at least with respect to making the business work. I can't speak to the more lofty goals and ideals, because I haven't gotten far enough yet for those to really enter the picture. Upcoming: Business cards, a pamphlet, posters. There's opportunities for advertising that are either free or quite cheap. The print shop owner can get an ad out to 10,000 in the local area for around $500, which I think will have to be good because they're the only folks doing a mailer. That's the only consistent issue, things just move more slowly here and choice is extremely limited. I came here from a city of ~1m, so I guess I had gotten pretty used to having about a bajillion choices. On the other hand, it's been very easy to get the beginnings of a professional network going. I grew up in a place like this, so getting along is no big deal, and everybody knows everybody. A good first impression means something; a good conversation travels. Folks have loved the idea thus far, and have been nothing but encouraging. I don't ramble about the long term plan with anyone, ya'll are the only folk who really got that. As I go along I intend to see how that all shakes out, give an account of how it takes shape. I appreciate folks checking it out and responding. Happy to report anything you're interested in.

Anyway, that is it for now. I hope to return with some cool stuff from a big reopening party. I wasn't sure where this should go so I figured ~misc would work.

I want to learn a new language that I can use for personal projects. But I want to pick the right one for me, given the fact that learning it will be a time investment and I don't have a ton of time for "fun" stuff these days.

I've spent a decent amount of time tinkering around with Rust and my experience has been decent so far, if I'm trying to filter it through the lens of the current Rust craze. It just seems that the code has a somewhat... ugly(?)... aesthetic to it? I'm not willing to cast it aside yet and I think the "ugliness" just comes from me not really recognizing the syntax very well.

I started looking at golang and was immediately interested in the marketing message of it being "a better C". Aside from Hello World, I haven't done anything else with it.

Some random notes/points about my experience and what I'm looking for:

• I am very accomplished with PHP, quite accomplished with C, somewhat accomplished with C++ and Python. Of those, I find Python to be too "free and easy", PHP (Symfony specifically) and C++ to be so OOP-oriented that I just end up writing a bunch of boilerplate, and C is just... C (I'd rather pull out a tooth than have to work with C strings).
• Aside from the obvious pains of C, I think it's the most fun of the bunch. I don't know why I think this, because again, I absolutely hate C strings.
• I appreciate the package management and ecosystem of Rust, from what I've seen. C-with-Cargo would be awesome.
• The older I get, the more I appreciate strong typing.
• I like a language that allows me to systematically and logically organize my code into various modules, directories, etc. This is where PHP/Symfony shines in that there's a place for everything, as opposed to a bunch of .c and .h files all dumped into a folder.
• Ideally, I'd like something that can compile into a binary that doesn't require JVM, etc.

I'm open to suggestions outside of Rust and Go... those are just the ones I've been seeing mentioned the most over the past decade.

Take a look at the Tildes Statistics site. Couple things:

1, and most obvious: there has been a decline in users over the past few days for the first time that I'm aware of.
2: (I was going to make this point before the user decline occurred but it's probably moot now) Due to the scaling of the Y-axis, it appears that there is healthy user growth in the site. But if you look at the numbers, we're talking about user growth of roughly 60 people over the past month.

I know we want controlled growth, and I know we don't want to open it up to the masses. But we also want this site to succeed (i.e. provide interesting discourse and keep people coming back on a regular basis). I don't believe success can happen when growth is stagnant (or, declining!)

I don't think that the conversations are necessarily stagnant per se, in fact there's an impressive amount of thoughtful discussion relative to the size of the user base. But if a given topic is too niche (e.g. MLS football or MUDs, two of my interests), the odds of finding like-minded users to discuss with is obviously lower.

Is it time to consider some sort of growth campaign (one that is not reactionary a la the Reddit API changes) in order to infuse some new life into this awesome site?

Am I the only one?

They've made some serious improvements and I generally enjoy using Firefox but I occasionally run into issues that just shows complete disregard for end users. Assuming, of course, my issues are not isolated.

Every month or so, when Firefox updates, it completely resets itself. This doesn't happen with every update, but Mozilla pushes an update that breaks the functionality of my browser. My browser settings, my userChrome profile, my extensions and their settings, and my bookmarks are all gone. Everything.

I do have sync but that doesn't work properly either. It only syncs some of my settings (which actually makes it harder for me to figure out what's enabled/disabled) and while I do get my bookmarks (none of which have their favicons), the extensions that manage to sync (meaning the ones that were installed from the store) don't sync their settings unless they have cloud support.

I do not understand this. Why do I, as an end user who care about Mozilla's mission, have to deal with this? I'd overlooked many of Firefox's shortcomings in the past, but when the browser works, it works well. I have some issues, but browsers are complicated and running into issues are to be expected. I understand that, but I simply cannot understand how eager they are to break the end user's workflow. Isn't it supposed to be a cardinal sin for every software company, especially the ones trying to survive, to not do this?

I just spent roughly half an hour of my day to get my browser back to its previous state. Adding the times I had had to deal with this issue before, I've spent hours on dealing with Firefox that I shouldn't have. I don't think I have another half an hour to spare for it and I don't want to anymore, but is there even an alternative for Windows that suck less?

(Apologies for the rant, but I needed to vent and perhaps get a discussion going about the current state of browsers.)

I want to make a game.

... is what I've been telling myself for the past few weeks. Honestly, I might have subconsciously had this thought for the past few months, if not years.

Strange as it sounds, I've gone on a weird mental journey in getting to the point where I'm able to acknowledge this desire. I've always had a vague, constant urge to be creative, but for the past few years, this urge has been tied to an outcome: "I want to write a JS library because it'll make for a cool product later"; something like that. Inevitably, having that outcome in mind makes me set a standard of perfection for what the thing is supposed to be, which makes me start planning every piece of the thing, which... tires me out, and then I just don't do it.

I'd say I've been better about this recently, in that I'll sometimes do one-off things because it seems like fun at the time. Small coding projects that serve no purpose at all. I randomly got into drawing for a week, so the day's drawing for that week. Rediscovering this process has been fun, and it's definitely been fulfilling to just marvel at my work without having to check off boxes for what the thing is supposed to do.

But now, I've got the idea that I want to make a game. A game isn't a small project, or at least not as small as what I've been working on recently. I'm pretty sure my motivation for wanting to do this is entirely intrinsic: I just want to do it, I don't want to sell it, I don't care if nobody plays it. And yet, I'm still finding it pretty hard to do anything.

Firstly, I don't have much time during the week to work on this game; I also work full-time. Second, when I do have time, I find it pretty hard to make any progress. A game isn't small, so I feel the need to plan stuff out, even just roughly. Which is what I do at work. So then it just feels like work. I tire of planning pretty quickly, and I think I've come to conflate this tired feeling with burnout at work, so I just stop and scroll on the internet.

Sometimes I'm able to focus and just write something without planning. It's nice when I'm able to do this, but inevitably I start thinking about the bigger picture... "Okay, the protagonist feels X because the theme I'm going for is Y, which..." and then the planning starts again.

Anyway, this is all a very long way to say that I struggle with creating for creation's sake, partly because budgeting my time as a full-time laborer is hard, and partly because I have trouble seeing the trees for the forest, so to speak. Have you all ever had to deal with this? I'm curious to know what's helped you, or just your thoughts on the topic/my situation.

Cheers!

What's the thing that was promised, not delivered, and just really upsets you?

For me, it's "The Doors of Stone" promised by Patrick Rothfuss. Every couple of months I think about how badly I'd love to read this book and it just really makes me angry. When I first read The Name of the Wind, I was awestruck. I just freaking loved this book. The Wise Man's Fear was a wait, but when delivered, it really satisfied me. Now, it's been 13 years!! Some days I think to myself, "I'm not even going to read his stupid book when it comes out." But, I'm kidding myself. Of course I'm going to read it...if he or I don't die first.

We are officially one week away from the Oscar's and all the precursors (being the award shows that happen before the Oscar's) have come and gone. Here's where I think the Oscar's will go on March 10th.

Picture: Oppenheimer

It's a done deal.

Director: Christopher Nolan - Oppenheimer

Original Screenplay: Anatomy of a Fall

After unexpectedly winning the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay it immediately became the front-runner in the category besting previous front-runners The Holdovers and Barbie (which got switched over to Adapted anyway). Having picked up the BAFTA in the same category, it's locked.

Adapted Screenplay: American Fiction

Also having won the BAFTA for Adapted Screenplay, beating out Poor Things and Oppenheimer (which BAFTA loved) this is also pretty clearly the favorite to win here. Two weak winners in a row for this category imo.

Lead Actor: Cillian Murphy - Oppenheimer

This seemed obvious for a long time, but now that he's swept all the awards it's a done deal..

Lead Actress: Lilly Gladstone - Killers of the Flower Moon

This is actually a tight race between her and Emma Stone in Poor Things. They both won the Globe and Stone won the BAFTA while Gladstone won SAG. Gladstone wasn't even nominated at BAFTA (despite the jury being there to nominate minorities) which complicated the race. However, with SAG having gone after BAFTA I think that'll have more influence and give Gladstone more momentum. Also, most of the time when SAG gives Best Ensemble to the eventual Picture winner they tend to go 4/4 in the acting categories.

Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr. - Oppenheimer

He swept like Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Supporting Actress: D'avine Joy Randolph - The Holdovers

Also swept.

Original Score: Oppenheimer

Original Song: What Was I Made For? from Barbie

Sound: Oppenheimer

Production Design: Poor Things

Cinematography: Oppenheimer

Makeup & Hairstyling: Maestro

Costume Design: Barbie

Poor Things won BAFTA, however BAFTA as a whole did not like Barbie very much. And there's too much iconography attached to the film in this category that I think the Oscar's will go for it over Poor Things.

Film Editing: Oppenheimer

Visual Effects: The Creator

After the branch snubbed both Oppenheimer and Poor Things, it muddled the winner in this category. People initially thought Guardians of the Galaxy 3 would be the winner. But there's pretty severe anti-superhero bias in the category. The Creator won at the VFX guild, it's flashy, it looks good, and it's somewhat of a "serious" movie.

Animated Feature: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

This isn't as clear as a race as I thought it would have been. Globes and BAFTA went with Boy and the Heron in this category while Critic's Choice and PGA went with Spider-Verse. The Oscar's usually goes populist in this category (eg they went with Toy Story 4 when Globes and BAFTA went in a more artsy direction). So I'm sticking with Spider-Man here.

Documentary Feature: 20 Days in Mariupol

Live Action Short: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

This would give Wes Anderson his first Oscar win, if the Academy doesn't blue ball him.

Animated Short: Letter to a Pig

Documentary Short: The ABC's of Book Banning

I have no idea how to word this, as every similar post that I've seen has had an obvious cause, in some way shape or form. I, on the other hand, feel pretty shitty even writing this up know that others have actual problems that I am taking that visibility from.

When I wake up, I get to go to work a job that mentally stimulates me, teaches me new things (both in terms of a legacy system and in terms of new technology), and lets me work from home 3/5 days a week. On top of that, I have a very solid housing situation where I don't need to worry about rent being raised. I have a (reliable) car that only needs routine maintanence, and has very good MPG. I have a dog that I love, and would easily die for without a second thought. I have family living nearby, that, while we don't agree religiously or politically most times, can all get along and enjoy holidays or get togethers.

And yet, feel like I lied about my life just now.

When I wake up, the first thought isn't that my dog is waking me up to go out, it is the feeling of the weight that merely existing seems to put on me. As I just stated earlier, my job is not the cause of stress, neither is housing, nor food, nor family. I have no reason to feel the way that I do.

I've recently (in the last 6 months) started journaling, and the main theme that I have found is that I am constantly thankful for having everything that I do. And yet, tomorrow, when I open my eyes, either due to the alarm, or due to my dog waking me up to go outside, I will have a weight laying over my chest that I can only attribute to the fact that I still exist.

I try to ignore the news (while staying informed enough to vote properly on candidates), I don't use social media except for Tildes and to share the once a week or two photo on Instagram, and I am both active physically, and creatively. None of this seems to remove the weight. I feel like I am either wasting my existence when I am consuming media, wasting my time attempting to create when others have voices or messages with stronger meaning, or wasting other's time when I hang around them.

I have no right to complain about my life. Hell, two years ago I would have killed for what I have now. And, yet, I feel like I am wasting what I have been given. I am legitimately happiest sitting out in my backyard with my dog, either sipping a beer or just watching the stars. The issue is, that when I do, a weight slowly lays itself over me, one that I do not know the cause of, or reason for. A weight that I cannot shake, and can only attribute to simply existing.

I would like so very much, even temporarily, to remove it.

I've long been uncomfortable using platforms that have a bad reputation with respect to:

1. Human rights / genocide
2. Disinformation
3. Privacy

All three of those can be connected with advertising revenue, among other things. When I use platforms that are shady in this regard, I know I'm colluding with them and contributing to the problems they create. So it's been a relief to see new platforms like Tildes emerge, as well as those based on ActivityPub.

But even platforms that don't have overt advertising (Telegram?) do have a problem with hate groups that go unchallenged. And I know that if I was running an instance of an ActivityPub compatible platform such as KBin, I mightn't be able to keep on top of moderating things like disinformation.

So I suppose my question is, where do you draw the line? I've deleted my Twitter and Meta accounts and I'm exploring alternatives, but I'm not sure if I'm going from the darkness to the light, or just into shades of grey.

At 22 years old, after months long assessments, I have been diagnosed with severe ADHD, depression and moderate anxiety. Here is a quick timeline of my experience:

• May - August :
  • I started CBT therapy and Sertraline 50mg
  • Gradually I was upped to the a dose of 75mg.
  • In this whole period I did not experience any improvements or side effects, except a loss of appetite in the first few days.
• September:
  • I started taking Methylphenidate 18mg and went back to just 50mg of Sertraline.
  • From the first day I had felt a sentiment of calmness and control. But it slowly faded away and I still felt I could not concentrate on things or act productive.
  • I also stopped going to therapy as I saw that CBT was not effective for me.
• October - November:
  • This was a completely different month. I wasn't fully in control of my attention span but it was much better than I've ever been. What was more shocking was how internally I felt at peace and something that I'd describe now as euphoric (as I assume this was just a side effect of the medication). U
  • Until mid november I was actually going around telling people I think I might not be depressed anymore, as I had felt for the first time in a way that I haven't felt since early childhood. I was able to accomplish incredible feats related to discipline and I saw my academic results improving greatly. Unfortunately this sentiment slowly faded away and I was back to my old self by the end of November.
• December - Now I was upped to 36mg of Methylphenidate and I noticed a much better control of my attention but unfortunately I have not felt that feeling of relief again. And as it seems the effectiveness of the dose diminished from the first few days to now.
  Since December I've had numerous breakdowns, feeling completely exhausted and burnt out. I suffered from classic problems of procrastination starting to work on difficult projects only a couple of days before the deadline and it was all crashing down. I submitted multiple disgustingly low quality pieces of work because I just did not work in time enough but the few days I did work I did incredible amounts of effort and I do feel like the pills helped me stay focused. After this deadline period though I was just met with my normal depression symptoms where I had a long streak of days that I could not even get out of bed or brush my teeth.

I don't know what more to do. I always knew I was broken and needed help. And for all my life I thought that seeing a psychiatrist is a last resort in case "I can't fix myself" on my own. Now it's been almost a whole year and I am in a critical time period where I need to excel and put in the work but I find myself succumbing to my symptoms while jumping up and down with the doses of some pills that barely seem to have an effect.

I didn't have many people around me from the start, and many of them would not understand my condition at all (nobody from my family does). But now it seems that even the few that were empathetic I have unfortunately tired out. I've heard my fair share of bad remarks that have gradually demoralised me (ADHD is not real. I'm just lazy. I just like to complain. etc) and due to the fact that I also have codependency problems this has greatly hurt me and made me feel like I am completely alone and nobody cares for my troubles or has my wellbeing in their best interest. Right now I just wish I'd know what to do. I wish there was some clear step by step goal oriented way to "happiness" or at least normality. I don't even know what more to tell my psychiatrist other than how I don't feel well, which is what I've been telling him since the start.

If you've been through a similar journey, I'd love to hear your experience and any advice you wish you had received earlier.

Follow up to this post

I did my first ever platelet donation!

This one was a bit more intimidating than the blood donation. For platelets, the donation takes around two hours not counting the onboarding time. Additionally, during the donation, you can’t move either of your arms, as you have needles in both. The blood draws from one arm, goes into a centrifuge where they separate out the platelets, and then your blood gets returned to you in your other arm.

I was a little worried about how it was going to go leading up to the appointment, but I’m very happy to report that everything went fine! All of the needles went in easily and it was a nearly painless process. After that it was actually kind of boring! They had a screen with Netflix on it, so I watched three episodes of a TV show.

My least favorite part of the whole thing was not being able to scratch an itch when one arose, which is not so much a complaint as it is an endorsement. If the worst I can say is that I couldn’t scratch my nose once or twice during a multi-hour process involving multiple needles and my blood leaving and re-entering my body, then I’d say it went really well!

The staff kept checking in to see if I needed a blanket because most people feel cold when donating platelets, but, weirdly, I actually liked the chilled sensation I got? It wasn’t like a regular “cold” feeling; I found it genuinely pleasant.

Also, the whole experience was an interesting experiment in forced attention. I couldn’t check my phone, so I just watched a show, uninterrupted. I can’t remember the last time I did that? I got home and tried to continue watching it and, sure enough, now that my arms were free I was looking at my email and checking messages and the news instead of paying attention to what I had on. The whole donation session had a genuinely nice, calm, almost meditative quality to it. It was a nice way to start out a Saturday.

You can donate platelets separately from blood, and platelets have a much lower “donation cooldown” (you can donate them every seven days). I don’t think I’ll be keeping to that rapid of a turnaround, but I’m going to start doing it once a month. One thing I learned from this is that, unlike blood which can be stored for up to a year (edit: turns out it’s only 42 days), platelets have to be used within five days, so they’re pretty much constantly in demand because they can’t be stockpiled.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my little mini-milestone with everyone here. The novelty of being able to donate as a gay guy still hasn’t worn off for me. I love the idea of being able to do it regularly and support people over time!

Let me preface this by saying that I’m genuinely not trying to stir the pot. I’m hoping we can discuss this in a civil manner.

The discussion about the I-P conflict has me worried that Tildes is tearing itself apart. In the past few months, I’ve seen (at least) one pro-Palestinian user get banned, another stop posting here, and at least two Jewish Tilderinos quit. I get that Israel and Palestine are really important issues, that affect millions of people. But I’ve seen a degradation in the rhetoric, and I don’t want that to consume this place. We all need to “remember the human” behind the screen, and that folks have a view for a reason. I like this place. I don’t want to see it go away.

I’m sorry if I haven’t articulated myself well. I just had to get this off my chest. It’s been bothering me for a few weeks now.

I am currently doing some research into small folding bikes and it is surprisingly difficult to find comparisons online. Reviews are not that great and it seems the folding bike world has Brompton-mania.

My location

I live in Berlin. Traveling with train and bike would reduce my current commute time from 45 minutes to 25 and I also use car-sharing, often end up picking up friends to drop them off home and being able to go somewhere on the bike and return with a car would help reduce my costs even further. My apartment is tiny, bikes get stolen from the inner courtyard... so... I want to get a portable bicycle that I can just take with me.

Size

I am 192cm tall though. I tried a Tern Eclipse and the rid comfort was incredible for a folding bike, but it does not fold into a compact backpack-sized bundle. It Is cumbersome to carry up stairs to the train. I also tried a Brompton and even though comfort is reduced, it is still decent even with 16" wheels.

Price

I am currently deciding between the Tern BYB with 20" wheels for 1899EUR, the Brompton C Line for 1550EUR and a Dahon Curl i4 for 1080EUR. I don't see much difference between the Brompton and the Dahon, so I am leaning towards Dahon because of the price. There is a new one coming out this year with disc brakes though... I may wait for that if the price is within the range I listed above...

Comparisons

Any other folding-bike commuters out there? How the quality of Dahon? Brompton? I am actually surprised how small the folding bike review world is. The Dahon Curl and Tern BYB don't really seem to be on the map for most and the Brompton seems to be the only bike that has long-term reviews from real commuters... I am also willing to buy a used Brompton, but they do not seem to get much cheaper used... I found an older model for 900EUR though.

Thoughts?

I don't think I have an account on GitLab, so I'll just share this here and tag @Deimos.

It's not possible for me to log into Tildes on Firefox. I receive a "Page expired, reload and try again" error every time I try. It occurs in all cases, including:

• If I'm using a stale tab and if I open a new tab or refresh the page
• With browser extensions enabled and disabled
• In private browsing mode with no extensions enabled
• With Enhanced Tracking Protection turned on or off
• When I specifically add https://tildes.net as an exception in my tracking preferences
• When I'm not signed in or syncing data from another browser
• After I delete my Tildes password from my browser
• Even when I clear cookies/cache..

I have only tried this on Firefox desktop, but I found this Git issue from @Omnicrola describing the same problem for Firefox mobile. Some differences:

• My problem seems to happen every day of the week, not just Sundays.
• My problem does NOT resolve itself within 24 hours. I have to use a different browser like Cheome to log in.

Not experiencing this with any other website. Maybe the website/server/browser thinks I'm in a different timezone or something, as theorized in that thread, CSRF and all that, but I've been in the same place for a week or two now. If I go to Web Developer Tools I can see error messages like this:

Cookie “” has been rejected by user set permissions.

Cookie “session=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz12345; Max-Age=31536000; Path=/; expires=Wed, 19-Feb-2025 22:34:16 GMT; secure; HttpOnly” has been rejected by user set permissions.

Request to access cookies or storage on “https://tildes.net/login” was blocked because of custom cookie permission.

That links to this page which isn't very helpful because I've already tried that. It's possible that I have some other privacy configuration in Firefox that's screwing with Tildes, but I wouldn't know what. Wondering if anyone else has experienced this and gotten around it?

While there were conversations about this in the past, those were much more generalized.

Now, I personally don't have issues creating world maps, regional maps, or 'battle' maps, as it were, but when it comes to city maps... I'm consistently at a loss. That said, I don't want this to just be me begging and whining into the void about how I can't find something that I prefer to make city maps in, so here's what I've used and would recommend over the past 15 years or so:

• World Maps: Wonderdraft, Photoshop, Campaign Cartographer (probably about ten years ago, and I never finished a map with it)

Of these, I definitely recommend Wonderdraft the most. I think if you put in enough time and effort, Photoshop can turn out better (and most detailed), but if you're interested in a style that Wonderdraft has support (and assets) for, it's pretty much perfect. It's a one-time cost, has been getting consistent updates and support since it was in beta years ago, and the community assets are pretty much unending. The one caveat to Wonderdraft is that if you want to make an absolute behemoth of a map (like I'm apt to do), it will eat some serious resources and can begin to lag, due to how it handles each individual tree/mountain/path as a singular, editable asset.

Campaign Cartographer is an oldie that I tried about ten years ago, had some success with (mostly in how it designed continent outlines and things), but just didn't feel like it had enough malleability to create things the way I saw fit.

• Region/Continent Maps: Wonderdraft, Photoshop, Inkarnate

I think everything I said about world maps applies here, as well. I haven't used Inkarnate in the better part of a decade, but I know the free version was very limiting and there were some concerns about the company 'owning' anything you created in the program. That said, a brief look at it now makes it look like a more closed-off version of Wonderdraft, but with a subscription instead of a one-time purchase.

• Battle Maps: Dungeondraft, Photoshop, a plethora of generators that I can't even begin to remember dating back 10+ years

Before Dungeondraft, I pretty much hated making maps for combat. Early in my GMing 'career', I would just have a blank canvas on Roll20 and draw on details as it was needed, and eventually I just pivoted completely to theater of the mind for all of my combat. And then Dungeondraft rolled around, and it was pretty quick to export from there, incredibly quick to import to Foundry (with a module), and Just WorkedTM. Before that, I did occasionally try and make things in Photoshop, and would follow tutorials from time to time, but it was all just so time-consuming, and with a lot of asset hunting if you wanted consistent art style and detail to what you were doing. It was just so much.

Which, of course, brings me to...

• City Maps: Wonderdraft, Dungeondraft, City Designer 3, Photoshop, Watabou's Medieval City/District/Village generators, AI...?

Ah, the problems. So, I tried to make city maps in Wonderdraft, but it's very obvious that it was built for a larger scale, and there are a lot of 'hacks' (or workarounds, I guess?) you need to do to make it work, and it can be frustrating and very time-consuming, as there's nothing there to really automate the process at all. For example, Wonderdraft has this beautiful 'paint brush' for assets such as trees or mountains that will 'spatter' them across a set radius, with a set density, etc. This is very helpful for something random like forests, but essentially useless for placing buildings. Dungeondraft is a little better in this regard, but has the opposite issue: Everything is too 'small' and focuses on more grid-based, rigid design, given that it's built for, well, dungeons. And battle maps in general.

I purchased City Designer 3 (along with a big pack of Campaign Cartographer add-ons) as part of a Humble Bundle a while ago, and I kind of enjoyed it, but it really felt like the amount of effort required wasn't worth the end result, which - at best - would be using art assets designed to give the feel of the maps from D&D 5E. And even then, that limited the asset options because it didn't seem like there was a lot of additional third party support for the program (which is definitely showing age). That said, it's the only one I've used that seemed able to handle good building placement along roads, able to do it automatically. That said, Photoshop?

Probably the best time I had making city maps. I had to stylize them, but with enough ingenuity, good knowledge of automation (through recording Actions), and following some art style tutorials, you can make a "cheap" city map that's able to have a lot of variation. If you're interested in map design in Photoshop, I highly recommend the tutorials of Jonathan Roberts, who is very much my 'gold standard' for map creation. Unfortunately, he doesn't really update his site any more, and some of the tutorials show their age, but all of the content there is still great.

Then, we have generators. The ones linked above are the best ones I've found, though the city ones leave a lot to be desired as far as graphics and specific details go. But the village generator for small towns and the like? Beautiful. It's genuinely just a perfect little generator if you don't care all that much about the specifics of the map. So, for most towns and villages, it's fine. But what if it's a town built up against a mountain, that sprouted up around a mine? Well... that's not gonna work. What if it's a town that's split on two sides of a river, protecting passage? No such luck. A swamp town, or one in tree-tops? No, not really gonna work all that well.

And just last year, I was turned towards AI generation here on tildes, thanks to @atomicshoreline and his fairly extended description of how to set things up. But, I eventually gave up bothering him after my old video card kept having VRAM issues with only 8GB.

I have seen some very good city maps made in Inkarnate, but I don't know that I'm interested in something that has a yearly subscription, and I can imagine it being very frustrating long-term to invest in something that I've seen issues with in the past.

So, all of this is to say that I really enjoy making detailed content for my world, but I've always had issues with cities. There's just so much content that needs to be hand-placed in almost every program, and even an un-finished city has taken me well over a hundred hours in Dungeondraft, and that was with me still actively hating looking at it..

So, if anyone has other suggestions, I am quite literally always searching for new ways to make city maps, and I've tried just about every suggestion given to me at least once, often to the detriment of my bank account.

Oh, if someone can think of a better title to this post and wants to change it, please be my guest. I just wanted to contribute my knowledge and recommendations, rather than just throw a "give suggestions" post out into the ether, and wasn't sure how to phrase that.

Intro

Whenever smaller keyboards come up online, I often see a lot of the same reactions/dismissals. I've found many of these to be foolish, but also that the community around such devices has its own barriers. It sometimes is represented from its most extreme aspects rather than someone with a more normal approach and use case.

So here is yet another pitch on why you might want to consider trying out some of the smaller keyboards out there, and the various advantages it can bring. This will probably be quite long, but I hope it at least is interesting.

Daily Drivers

Skills Required

I think the only real "skill" you must have to consider downsizing your keyboard is the ability to decently touch type without looking. If you're the sort of person who still hunts and pecks, no judgement, but this is not for you.

If you're someone who has to code, do data/numerical entry, or type a lot for work, then I encourage you to read on. Those are common barriers I hear thrown out, but in my experience are actually easier with a smaller keyboard.

Why?

The normal keyboard for most machines has a lot of dead/wasted space that could just be used better, and has some keys that are important or have grown more important in really poor positions.

Some main offenders

1. Capslock - How often do you use capslock? How often do you NEED capslock? If I can convince you of one thing to try out right now it's this, remap capslock (check out powertoys on windows) to left control. As it stands capslock is one of the easiest buttons to hit, and yet it if you moved it over next to Scroll lock you'd probably never mind. A large portion of my job is coding SQL and I never use it because that's what modern formatters are for. Please try remapping it(throw capslock on left control or some combo if you want).
2. Spacebar- Hear me out, as this might vary depending on how you type. Do you use one or both thumbs to hit your spacebar? If you're anything like me, you use one, and in my case it's the left thumb. This means that I've got a massive portion of my keyboard dedicated to one button, even though I'll never touch more than half of it (you'd be surprised how small you can make the space key and still hit it reliably). Now you might think that you don't need that space, but I'll dive into that more later.
3. The number row- More on this later, but my brief take on this is that humans are actually pretty bad at knowing exactly where the numbers are when they get away from the home row, and as anyone who's ever had to do lots of number entries know, the 10key/numpad is the way to go.
4. PgUp/PgDwn/Home/End/Delete- These 5 keys (and control and shift) are great for navigating/editing text/code/spreadsheets/webpages quickly, and could not be farther away from where you really need them to actually do that easily.
5. Arrow keys- A lot of people think it's fine that they're waaaaaay out there away from everything. I will be proposing an alternative given these are also critical to quick navigation.

How is smaller better then?

The core idea is simple. You can find the home row easily with the homing keys (j/f generally have a bump or some defining feature). You're probably excellent at hitting the keys in relation to that if they're 1 step away from the home row. The farther you are from that, the more likely you'll need to look, and the longer it'll take you to press the key even if you don't. So where possible, it's ideal to try and use space more efficiently to keep the keys you actually need to use near this position.

But how are you going to fit all those keys anywhere near the home row?

My Keymap

As an example, to help explain moving forward, here is the keymap for my mercutio 40.

You'll want to save that json, and then upload it at qmk configurator, which will make it much easier to explore. If you've never looked at this before it can seem insane, but I promise you it's pretty tame ignoring some edge case stuff.

If you don't feel like going through the hassle here's screenshots from the site with descriptions of each layer.

Mostly the same as below but i did fix some missing info below so sorry about that. I'm also leaving the descriptions of my "gaming" layers 4/5/6 in the imgur only because I think that's out of scope for this).

The magic of programable layers and context.

Space is an interesting key. It's a key only ever really tap, never hold (outside of games, more on that later). So, why not double it up, and make it do something different when you hold it?

Well in this case, tapping any of my 3 space buttons gives you a space like anyone would expect, but if you hold either of the left 2, it "shifts" you to layer 1 (base layer is 0), and holding the right one, shifts you to layer 2.

I put shifts in quotes because it's just like the shift key. If you hit 7 on your keyboard, you get a 7. If you hold shift and hit 7, you get &. This is the same concept, and just keep the layers organized in a way that makes sense, keeps it very easy to know what layer what key you want is on.

The Detailed Layers

The shorter version

If you don't want to read all of that, the basic idea is that your average person can type on the keyboard with minimal explanation. If they forget where a key is, the other 3 layers all follow rules to help guide them. One layer for navigation and keys that don't actually output characters (home/end/delete/esc/et) and one layer for the rest of the keys that output characters, namely the numbers, which are then also your numpad and ALWAYS under your right hand, centered and ready to go. The final layer is, mainly, for the function keys, still following the numpad from the previous so you can again easily figure out where the button you want is.

What does this gain you?

In the end the main benefits i've found are easier navigation, as I essentially now have a navigation layer with every key i could want on it, and much faster access to numbers. I still do data entry and lots of numbers, and having the numpad always one keyhold away is awesome.

On top of that it's just nice to not have to move my hands so much to type, and to get so much of my desk space back.

I type just as fast as I do on a normal keyboard for basic text, as there's almost no difference, and I type faster doing code/editing text because my numbers, brackets, and navigation keys are all closer at hand and in such a way I don't need to look or even move my hand from the home row to hit them.

So is it just all upsides?

On the typing side, honestly yeah. I've seen a lot of excuses like "well i prefer a numpad" or "how do you type numbers" which I've tried to address in this post.

The only issue i've run into is gaming, where I already really solved most of my problems as shown in the extra layers in the imgur gallery, and think it might even be better for gaming vs the normal layouts.

The only remaining hassle is roguelike games such as stone soup or caves of qud, which LOVE to assign every fucking key a use so there's no easy way to remap things and I have to actually add another layer JUST so i can hit the numpad numbers because I need them to navigate....

BUT unfortunately, you might actually want to acquire one of these keyboards, and that's where stuff gets a little tricky.

Programmability

All the upsides I just mentioned assume you can actually program the keyboard. Thankfully this has gotten much much easier with both Via and ZMK making the process very simple. QMK is doable, but difficulty wise it shared a lot of similarities with trying to get the perfect modded run of Fallout New Vegas going with about 20-40 mods. If you are not more comfortable in the tech world, I recommend ONLY boards that support via software. I believe these days anything that supports QMK supports VIA, but it's worth checking on the via website to make sure the board you're about to get works.

Some assembly required

The mercutio and the discipline I built myself after ordering the parts. They're through hole soldering and were some of the first soldering I'd ever done on my own outside of a quick kit I bought off amazon to practice. It is actually not that hard BUT you need the equipment. It's not horribly expensive to get but it's not cheap either. I do really enjoy just throwing on music and putting these together, but I totally understand that you might just want to, you know, buy the fucking thing already built.

Thankfully many sites offer build services (or you can find them on etsey) which charge a fee to assemble it for you. This is what i've done with every corne i've ordered because it is NOT through hole soldering and I don't have the guts for it, and even still they've all had some eventual issues (although again, i carry mine with me in a very unprotected state because i'm insane so some of that is on me).

Made of money

Especially if you're paying for the aforementioned build services, these things can get into the 200-400 range FAST, which is a lot for a keyboard. There are some cheaper options out there, and the Mercutio was only $70ish before switches(not bad) and keycaps (range from dirt cheap to ungodly expensive).

Still I would not recommend ANY of these for a first time buyer. My first smaller board was a 60% mechanical and those range from $70-100 these days from what i'm seeing.

Take my money....please?

Sometimes you just won't be able to find or buy the board you want in the way you want. There are lots of interesting boards i've seen over the years, but they're either very expensive or only open for a limited time. I had a working cornish zen that died on me. I'd love to replace it. I cannot as they currently don't sell them. Will they make more? Dunno. I hope they do.

Recommendations

I DO NOT recommend diving in head first and suggest starting with something simple like a 60 or 65, probably keychron, as they're a decent budget brand. You might want to go even cheaper with just a 60% off of amazon that isn't even programmable just to see if you outright hate it, but I do think that getting something you can start to tweak as you begin to understand what you want helps adoption.

Final Thoughts

I hope this gave some of you the push to look into all this. I'm glad I dipped my toe in it, less glad about the absurd amount of money i've spent on it (dear god keycaps), and really glad about the moment where I thought "huh i really just don't need all these keys" and pulled some out. I hope I can convince a few others give it a shot and hopefully see the same results. No dvorak or home row modifiers and weird triple tap macros. Just some layers and common sense.

I do still, if nothing else, highly recommend switching left control to caps lock.

There hasn't been a megathread for a while so I wanted to post the latest news as well as a couple other pieces of news from the past week along with a couple articles providing additional context.

The latest piece of news is Ukrainian forces withdraw from Avdiivka to avoid encirclement, army chief says. This is very concerning and I hope encourages people to continue urging their politicians to find ways of supporting Ukraine in a larger capacity than they have in recent months.

The other day there was also this article titled Rate of Russian military production worries Europe's war planners. If you don't have time to listen to Perun's hour-long PowerPoint from 4 months ago on the same subject (Russian Defence Production 2023 - Can Russia keep up with equipment attrition in Ukraine?), then The Guardian article is a decent primer.

It also links to a Foreign Affairs article published in January of 2024 going into more detail about Russia's economic expenditures and its uneven footing: Putin’s Unsustainable Spending Spree: How the War in Ukraine Will Overheat the Russian Economy (Archive.is link). This is a particularly interesting article as it details the expenses as a percent of GDP that have recently made the rounds in the news this week, as well as how military spending as spurred growth in some industries, while others also tangentially related are lagging behind despite the government's stimulus. Additionally, Russia is spending the equivalent of billions of dollars on annexed regions of Ukraine. It then details the consequences of this substantially increased spending and increased wages that may be dislocating the civilian economy in favor of maintaining enough supplies for a further extended attritional war.

The Guardian article say that:

New analysis by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimates that Russia has lost 3,000 armoured fighting vehicles in the last year and close to 8,800 since the war began.
Unable to produce anywhere near that number of vehicles, Russia has mainly refurbished ageing hardware ...
Russian factories claimed to have delivered 1,500 main battle tanks this year, of which 1,180 to 1,280 had been reactivated from storage, according to IISS. Those numbers, along with reactivated armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, meant Russia would “be able to sustain its assault on Ukraine at current attrition rates for another two to three years, and maybe even longer”, the group said.

For reference, the landing ship that was recently destroyed by Ukrainian Unmanned Surface Vessels (Magura V5 sea drones), Caesar Kunikov, could carry 10 main battle tanks and 340 troops or 12 armored personnel carriers and 340 troops. Though it's not clear what role that ship was playing, as trains play a significant role in deploying men and materiel to the frontlines.

Finally, an article I'd meant to post several months ago to just sort of talk about in general terms: What would happen if Russia invaded Finland? I went to a giant war game in London to find out. Has anyone ever participated in war gaming, have a background or took a class on game theory, or enjoyed the history of tabletop gaming that dates back to this war-time activity? Just interested in what people have to say.

Hullo! I'm very much a list person, but I'm also very much a visual person. So, I've found that simple grids of images work really well for me when I want to plan and organize information, aesthetics, etc. However, I've struggled to find my ideal website or program that allows me to do this.

My wants:

• To upload images with minimal clicks. (My workflow would likely be to find an image somewhere, get the image's URL, navigate to a page, and upload via URL, without necessarily needing to enter form fields or save an image locally first.)
• To display medium resolution images as clear thumbnails (e.g. anywhere from 200x200 to 500x500). Enough for detail, but not necessarily "HD".
• To offer the ability to crop (or even just display) images as square thumbnails (for the purposes of a neat and uniform grid) without me having to go through https://squareanimage.com (real website!) for every single image.
• To categorize images into groups (i.e. to display a set of images as a coherent little grid/gallery). I'm not picky about whether this is done via fixed category pages, or tags + filtering.
• To maybe add extra information attached to each image (e.g. descriptions, links, etc.) without necessarily cluttering the grid.
• As for whether the service is public or private, cloud-based or local, I don't really mind!

Some of the options I've tried:

• Wordpress: Really nice grid-based themes, but the "blog post"-based system feels cumbersome for what I'm trying to do (images only). So many clicks to add images and make new posts.
• Tumblr: Lovely for content discovery, the quick reblog feature saves a lot of clicks, and tagging is flexible. But, this has many of the same downsides as Wordpress (lots of clicks to upload your own images, post-based system), and Tumblr as a platform is so much more than what I'm looking for (don't want/need social features).
• Pinterest: 10/10 for content discovery -- their image similarity algorithms and image search are unmatched. Wonderful for quickly spinning up a collage of themed pictures. But, horrid for uploading new pictures, given that they'll become public pins with comments/links/etc. Too many clicks + unnecessary fields. I worry about attribution for artists with Pinterest specifically -- I don't want to perpetuate a lack of attribution with publicly re-shareable images. Also, the collages are very busy with ads and unnecessary text. Plus, it's kind of cumbersome to reorganize images between boards if you want to change your board scheme.
• Pinry: Open source, self-hosted version of Pinterest. Was a bit too rough around the edges the last time I tried to use it, but maybe it's good enough now?
• Are.na: A bit too... New York trendy? For my tastes. Also, the social elements aren't really my thing... Also, costly!!!
• Google Keep: Surprisingly good? Perhaps the best option I've tried? For image notes, it's very flexible with regards to grid-based layouts, tagging, adding optional details, adding multiple images to a single note, etc. My main criticisms are that uploading images and tagging notes does take quite a few clicks; the grid stops being aligned the moment your notes begin to differ (e.g. add images of varying size, add titles/details, etc.), so it can start to look a bit visually cluttered; the UI doesn't seem to be designed with many tags in mind; the default layout shows all notes (I never want this).
• Local files and folders: Dead simple, but with very few features. Thumbnail views in file explorers are really space inefficient compared to grid-based image galleries.
• Random photo organizing software: Largely geared towards actual photos taken with an actual camera (real life subjects, camera EXIF data, organizing by date taken, etc.). Too many unnecessary features for my needs, not enough features geared towards digital non-photo images (e.g. graphics).
• "Speed dial" new tab pages for browsers: Helps me organize bookmarks! I like being able to see the icons, like a desktop for webapps. I will use image grids for everything.
• Artwork grids in media libraries / tracking websites: Plex, MusicBee, Letterboxd, Goodreads, Anime-Planet... you are heaven to me.

Here is a gallery of screenshots for websites/services I have tried, to give you an idea of how I use these services. The first one (tumblr) is the closest to visually ideal (dense + uniform grid), but Keep is the closest to ideal feature-wise. Surely there is a website or service I'm missing that could be the best of both worlds!

I know I've seen a bunch of people say they want more positive posts here in ~lgbt, and happily I have the opportunity now!

I live in Germany and here top surgery needs to be individually approved by your insurance provider for them to cover it. I got a letter back from them on Monday agreeing to cover it, and as of today the hospital scheduled my surgery for late March! I was expecting a lot more delay between getting the approval from my insurance and when the surgery could be scheduled (especially after the months it took to gather all the paperwork I had to send my insurance!), so I'm super hype.

My work will give me all the time I need off, and I live with my wife who should be able to take over any tasks I can't do during recovery. As much as I complain about how trans healthcare works in Germany atm, I wouldn't have been able to get this surgery back home in the US for cost reasons. So I'm feeling really lucky right now -- my transmasc friend in college had to save up for years to afford their surgery.

I'd love any recommendations anyone has for how to make my recovery as easy and comfortable as possible. I've got transmasc friends who have got top surgery, but most of what I've got from them has been "take more time off work than I did" and "drains suck". The surgery is in only a little over a month, so longer-term stuff like "get to a healthy weight" and "gain pectoral muscle to get a better aesthetic" are probably off the table, but I welcome anyone's practical recommendations! Obviously I'll get instructions from the doctor but I figure there are likely people here with personal experience who might have suggestions that a doctor wouldn't think to mention.

Also, I'm getting double-incision (only real option at my size) and atm I'm erring on the side of not getting nipple grafts. Not a huge fan of my nipples and I want to avoid any potential complications or dissatisfaction with them. I figure if I regret it I can always get nipple tattoos, whereas if I get the grafts and regret it there's not a ton of options. If anybody here has personal experience one way or the other, I'd really love to hear your perspective.

But most importantly, I'm just so excited that things are finally moving forward at a brisk pace! It's like finally getting the opportunity to stop and take a sharp rock out of the inside of my shoe.

EDIT TO ADD: oh god I just realized how am I going to keep my cats from lying on my chest

Hey folks - I've been wanting to go whole hog on automating my home, I read through this smart home automation - tips and tricks thread started by @Merry and had a lot of useful information.

Some of the things I took away from it:

• Home assistant is pretty great (if you don't mind tinkering)
• Getting something that will boot back up after a power failure is great
• Use smart plugs / switches vs bulbs
• Maintain it's usefulness if there is an internet outage

Like I mentioned I'd really like for this to be privacy focused and mostly self contained. Sure I'd love to be able to control stuff from my phone while I'm home and also recognize that I'm home or away.

I just am a bit smooth brained when it comes to even seeing "would something like this work with the wiring / circuity that I have in my home already?"

If there are any good guides to follow or really specific advice / steps I could follow to begin this process I'd really appreciate it.

I've been slowly fiddling around with setting up a little homelab and media server for the last few months. As a web developer, I've always wanted to learn a bit more of the infrastructure side of things, hence the homelab part. The deteriorating quality of major streaming services finally pushed me to set up a media server as well.

Right now, my setup is very basic. I've been using an old repurposed office laptop. It's a simple dell latitude 5540 I got ridiculously cheap due to it's barely usable crusty keyboard, but since I mainly SSH into it that's not really an issue. I formatted it, doubled the ram, and installed the latest stable Debian release. (Headless)

After that, I chose to install yams which was recommended here. Definitely saved a lot of time there! Finally, I added an old unisex raspberry pi I had lying around. The idea is that it's the only part of the setup that is on 24/7, since it has an almost negligible footprint. Whenever I want the main server running, I SSH into the raspberry and use wakeonLAN to start the main server. I'm probably gonna make a tiny web interface for that soon.

Now on to the part I need advice for. The laptop and attached HD are quickly running out of space. I know just slapping on extra hard drives has a limit, and am vaguely aware of things like unraid existing, but am a bit overwhelmed right now with all the information and options in this space.

Does anyone have some advice on something I can tackle for a reasonable amount of work/budget? Something basic, but with the possibility of expansion in the future?

Any other tips on where to go next in general are of course also appreciated. (On that note, I'm right now not opening up the server to ingress from outside. I only interact with it on the home network, as I primarily work from home)

Recently had a conversation with a good friend about dating, and it had me curious about how everyone on Tildes approaches dating. Tell me a bit about how you date! Here's a few prompts/thoughts I'm curious about:

• How long does it take for you to know if you're attracted to someone (sexually, romantically, emotionally, shared interests, etc)?
• What do you like to do when you date and does it change depending on how many dates you've been on or how well you know the person?
• Once you start dating someone, how long does it take you to understand whether you want to date the person long term or whether it's not going to work out?
• Do you only date people you meet in real life or do you use dating apps? How do you approach going from stranger to dating them?
• What's most important in deciding whether you want to date someone? Do they need to have an interest in activities you enjoy, shared values, emotional intelligence, a certain kind of humor, or something else?
• Is there something you don't understand about dating and want to share your frustration?

Please share your garden plans, ideas, and wildly overambitious green fantasies here!

Weird and treacherous climate change weather is distorting my garden sense. Normally, it's not a good idea to plant anything tender until late May here, but I'm betting we won't get frost past May 1 this year, or nothing that can't be handled with strategic use of row covers and cloches.

My fingers are itching to get the hot peppers started. I'm restraining myself from starting the tomatoes too early (again!), and the snapdragons and other slow annual flowers are starting to germinate. I could probably sow kale now.

We'll see which of last year's bulbs survived the critters until the spring. Reinforcement of the deer fencing is happening as soon as the ground is thawed deeply enough to set proper posts, and dry enough to work with wood frames and cattle panel.

I'm going to get a few logs set up for shiitakes, oysters, maitake, and maybe see if last year's happenstance wood chip pile morels can be encouraged. Fingers-crossed that December's wild garlic (ramps) test planting took hold - if that works, I'll get more slips and expand the patch in more of the shady areas that aren't suitable for much else.

Depending on how my hands and spouse's shoulders are holding up, there's a lot of digging in this year's permaculture expansion. A couple of Hugelkultur beds, some (mostly?) American chestnut trees, more berries and apples, planting the overwintered pawpaws, and another try at elderberries. I've got vague plans for building a grape arbor this year, but that's going to depend on availability of spouse's hands during the busy winery season.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

I'm not here to talk about the New York Times bestseller, so apologies to anyone who's come looking for an informed discussion on that. Apologies if I'm posting this in the incorrect place, please move or delete the post if it's inappropriate. I had something of a breakthrough in therapy recently and I don't have anyone to share this with (for reasons that may become obvious) so I'm turning to Tildes to vomit these thoughts out into the world somewhere.

Like a lot of us growing older, I've been spending a some time trying to better understand myself and come to peace with the person I am. One of the aspects people around me (and myself) find perplexing is how I'm able to be personable and friendly, even popular in some circles, but given the choice I will stay away from people as much as possible (except for a very select few I can count on one hand). I often joke that if it weren't for my wife and kids I'd probably be feral and live in the woods, bite anyone who tries to get too close. That lady that lived alone in a cave for over a year? Life goals. I thought I was just a mega introvert, but something my therapist and I discussed made me realise that that side of my personality may be (at least partly?) a manifestation of past trauma. So here is my villain origin story.

I've shared before on Tildes that I was very sick with cancer for a good chunk of my infancy. Whenever someone finds out I had cancer (it's left fairly visible marks, so the topic inevitably comes up) I always say it's ok, I don't remember it at all, so really it's my parents who lived through the trauma, not me, ha ha. I no longer believe that is entirely true. The body does keep the score after all. My therapist pointed out that I must have spent many moments alone dealing with the consequences, unable to fully share or understand what I was going through. Moments where I was physically manipulated whichever way, by people and instruments, dealing the nausea, the pain and the fatigue. I was too young to fully articulate my distress, ask for help (beyond crying) or seek solutions to the problems I faced. So for some moments at least I had only myself to rely on. Did the part of me that would normally seek out others die a little then?

My parents used to remark that as a child I never cried out, just tears streaming silently down my face. They speak of how I used to play contentedly alone for hours. How I rarely asked for help when I really needed it. Don't get me wrong, I'm able to form relationships with people, and I'm perfectly capable of functioning in society. I do seek out others for company, connection, validation, love, etc, and vice versa. But I can't shake the feeling that there's something broken in those connections. It feels like something is amiss, even if I've mostly come to terms with being this way. I'm left thinking - did the trauma (at least partly) make me who I am? Where does the trauma end and where do I begin? How many of us are potentially totally different people today because the body remembers when we have completely and utterly forgotten? And if that's the case, is that...ok?

It's not something I've thought about much until I had a conversation with someone who sets up their RSS reader, and uses it, completely differently to me.

I self-host FreshRSS, and typically just use the Web UI provided by that - sometimes I use Android RSS apps to consume from that, but I've never found one I like that much. But I just categorize my RSS feeds by broad theme, e.g. computing & tech, local news, programming, tech news, gaming, business and so on...

For the most part, I just browse through my main feed a few times per day and see if anything catches my eye. The only exception to this is that I have a few feeds in the 'Important' feed. One example is the forum related to a university project, where I need to know about entries pretty quickly.

The person I was discussing with never subscribes to anything noisy. No BBC, no Ars Technica, and really nothing that posts more than once per day. They split their feeds into "Important", "Casual", "Videos", "Podcasts" (I never thought to add Podcasts, as I use a separate map) and "Comics". They have it set up with the intention of reading everything that comes through.

I respect the curation effort that it must take to have an RSS feed where everything is interesting enough that you'd want to read it all. But for me, RSS is a method of discovering content. I don't need it too clean or overly curated. For the most part, I'm just going to skim it for interesting titles and subjects. The most curation I do is removing feeds after a while, if I notice I'm never interested in their content.

I'm very keen to hear how you use RSS.

Hello everyone,

I hope you're well. I've been wrestling with two "philosophical" questions that
I find quite unsettling, to the point where I feel like life may not be worth
living because of what they imply. Hopefully someone here will offer me a new
perspective on them that will give me a more positive outlook on life.

(1) Why live this life and do anything at all if humanity is doomed to go extinct?

I think that, if we do not take religious beliefs into account, humanity is
doomed to go extinct, and therefore, everything we do is ultimately for nothing,
as the end result will always be the same: an empty and silent universe devoid of human
life and consciousness.

I think that humanity is doomed to go extinct, because it needs a source of
energy (e.g. the Sun) to survive. However, the Sun will eventually die and life
on Earth will become impossible. Even if we colonize other habitable planets,
the stars they are orbiting will eventually die too, so on and so forth until
every star in the universe has died and every planet has become inhabitable.
Even if we manage to live on an artificial planet, or in some sort of human-made
spaceship, we will still need a source of energy to live off of, and one day there
will be none left.
Therefore, the end result will always be the same: a universe devoid of human
life and consciousness with the remnants of human civilization (and Elon Musk's Tesla)
silently floating in space as a testament to our bygone existence. It then does not
matter if we develop economically, scientifically, and technologically; if we end
world hunger and cure cancer; if we bring poverty and human suffering to an end, etc.;
we might as well put an end to our collective existence today. If we try to live a happy
life nonetheless, we'll still know deep down that nothing we do really matters.

Why do anything at all, if all we do is ultimately for nothing?

(2) Why live this life if the development of civilization will eventually lead
to a life devoid of fulfilment and happiness?

I also think that if, in a remote future, humanity has managed to develop
civilization to its fullest extent, having founded every company imaginable;
having proved every theorem, run every experiment and conducted every scientific
study possible; having invented every technology conceivable; having automated
all meaningful work there is: how then will we manage to find fulfilment in life
through work?

At such time, all work, and especially all fulfilling work, will have already
been done or automated by someone else, so there will be no work left to do.

If we fall back to leisure, I believe that we will eventually run out of
leisurely activities to do. We will have read every book, watched every
movie, played every game, eaten at every restaurant, laid on every beach,
swum in every sea: we will eventually get bored of every hobby there is and
of all the fun to be had. (Even if we cannot literally read every book or watch
every movie there is, we will still eventually find their stories and plots to be
similar and repetitive.)

At such time, all leisure will become unappealing and boring.

Therefore, when we reach that era, we will become unable to find fulfillment and
happiness in life neither through work nor through leisure. We will then not
have much to do, but to wait for our death.

In that case, why live and work to develop civilization and solve all of the
world's problems if doing so will eventually lead us to a state of unfulfillment,
boredom and misery? How will we manage to remain happy even then?

I know that these scenarios are hypothetical and will only be relevant in a
very far future, but I find them disturbing and they genuinely bother me, in the
sense that their implications seem to rationally make life not worth living.

I'd appreciate any thoughts and arguments that could help me put these ideas into
perspective and put them behind me, especially if they can settle these questions for
good and definitively prove these reasonings to be flawed or wrong, rather than offer
coping mechanisms to live happily in spite of them being true.

Thank you for engaging with these thoughts.

Edit.

After having read through about a hundred answers (here and elsewhere), here are some key takeaways:

Why live this life and do anything at all if humanity is doomed to go extinct?

• My argument about the extinction of humanity seems logical, but we could very well eventually find out that it is totally wrong. We may not be doomed to go extinct, which means that what we do wouldn't be for nothing, as humanity would keep benefitting from it perpetually.
• We are at an extremely early stage of the advancement of science, when looking at it on a cosmic timescale. Over such a long time, we may well come to an understanding of the Universe that allows us to see past the limits I've outlined in my original post.
• (Even if it's all for nothing, if we enjoy ourselves and we do not care that it's pointless, then it will not matter to us that it's all for nothing, as the fun we're having makes life worthwhile in and of itself. Also, if what we do impacts us positively right now, even if it's all for nothing ultimately, it will still matter to us as it won't be for nothing for as long as humanity still benefits from it.)

Why live this life if the development of civilization will eventually lead to a life devoid of fulfilment and happiness?

• This is not possible, because we'd either have the meaningful work of improving our situation (making ourselves fulfilled and happy), or we would be fulfilled and happy, even if there was no work left.
• I have underestimated for how long one can remain fulfilled with hobbies alone, given that one has enough hobbies. One could spend the rest of their lives doing a handful of hobbies (e.g., travelling, painting, reading non-fiction, reading fiction, playing games) and they would not have enough time to exhaust all of these hobbies.
• We would not get bored of a given food, book, movie, game, etc., because we could cycle through a large number of them, and by the time we reach the end of the cycle (if we ever do), then we will have forgotten the taste of the first foods and the stories of the first books and movies. Even if we didn't forget the taste of the first foods, we would not have eaten them frequently at all, so we would not have gotten bored of them. Also, there can be a lot of variation within a game like Chess or Go. We might get bored of Chess itself, but then we could simply cycle through several games (or more generally hobbies), and come back to the first game with renewed eagerness to play after some time has passed.
• One day we may have the technology to change our nature and alter our minds to not feel bored, make us forget things on demand, increase our happiness, and remove negative feelings.

Recommended readings (from the commenters)

• Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World by Nick Bostrom
• The Fun Theory Sequence by Eliezer Yudkowski
• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
• Into the Cool by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan
• Permutation City by Greg Egan
• Diaspora by Greg Egan
• Accelerando by Charles Stross
• The Last Question By Isaac Asimov
• The Culture series by Iain M. Banks
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund
• Uncaused cause arguments
• The Meaningness website (recommended starting point) by David Chapman
• Optimistic Nihilism (video) by Kurzgesagt

Kid's vision just keeps getting worse: it's -3.0 now in one eye. The rate at which I have to get the kid's vision tested and new glasses (plural because kid) is alarming.

My husband and I both have 20/20, as did both our parents before they got old people eye stuff....so I'm really new to the world of prescription glasses.

What's real and what are just old wives tales? Go outside more, get sun, limit screen time, don't read in the dark, these are kind of obvious but are they scientifically backed? I take super terrible care of my eyes and eyeballs are nearly touching the screens all day and I still have 20/20.....

Eye drops that fix your eyes? Omega 3 do anything or just in general a good nutrient for everyone?

Myopia control lenses (Miyosmart) -- legit or marketing hype? They seem to be a bunch of money and the brochures / site reads a bit like marketing nonsense...... How does a piece of lens fix eyeballs?

Did you get Lasik? Is it still the thing to do for correction, and has it gotten better? Could my kid reach a point where even Lasik can't help?

When did you get glasses and did the uh, progression (?) slow down or get better with age?

Edit: what about blue light lenses?

I've been using syncthing for a while now and more recently I've started to use a VPS but I find it to be a mild pain in the ass to setup and I'm wondering if there's a better way or just how are you administering?

I've been just editing the config.xml file and restarting it. It feels clunky editing it in nano especially when I have to delete a folder or remove a device.

I'm starting up on a new VPS and doing this initial setup again is mildly frustrating.

Another question, a friend is also going to be backing up some files onto this server (both of us treating it as untrusted), would it be better practice to set up 2 users each running their own syncthing@user service or just have it all under one?

I have, at times, experienced that opinions I share online fails to win people over, to the extent that the essence of the thread transforms from that of an exchange of ideas into that of a shitstorm.

Curiously, this is seldom caused by me having controversial views. I’m not especially hateful, and I don’t hold any conservative core ideas, such as advocating for an even less equal society or attacking or belittling various minority groups. If it were just that, then there would be no mystery; my views horrible, and for that reason, they provoke a strong reaction. But despite this not being the case, my views, which are truly very civilised and boring indeed, are sometimes intepreted in interesting ways.

I think the issue is me not expressing myself as well as I could. Assuming this to be the case, what follow is my own notes on how to better get your (mine) ideas across without misunderstandings.

Beware of the shortcoming of contemporary writing

Most of todays readers do not read. Rather, they impatiently give the text a quick glimpse, their brain already craving the next bit of novelty. I've noticed this in myself when I impatiently select random random test when trying to get my brain to read a text online. What's more, those who write has begin taking into account that their audience does not read. This has spawned a peculiar writing style which, for the first time in history(?), is designed not to actually be read, but merely glimpsed through.

It mostly consist of short paragraphs.

Often just a single sentence.

Sometimes two sentences. Maybe three. Four sentences are considered the max.

To help readers easier skim through it.

Read more: How can you write web content that people can skim?

If actually read, it has a staccato-like feel.

Almost like free verse poetry.

There are other characteristica too.

• Scattering links throughout.
• Inserting “Read more about“ references to other articles.
• Inserting list such as this one.
• Adding heaps of headlines.

I guess pretty much everyone have seen this particular style, and, to some degree, adapted it themselves. So there is a tendency to naturally try to boil everything down to a single, ultra-short paragraph. However, human language is not computer code; trying to destill a deeper set of ideas down to a Xwitter-length sentence will inevitably cause its fragile essence to be lost in translation. There is a reason why books are the length of, well, books, and not just the SparkNotes summary thereoff.

To build upon this idea, note that most dog-whistles comes in the form of a single, short sentence, as the shortness, unlike computer code, make it vague, opening it up for multiple interpretations. Indeed, some dog whistles doesn’t contain any words at all, but consists of a single emoji, such as “milk” or “the OK sign”.

If you write about more elusive fluffy ideas, ideas where your angle runs the risk of being read the wrong way, your writing has to go all the way, fully exposing your point with absolute clarity. You have to show it from every angle to make your vision travel through the written words and into the mind of the reader.

Sleep on it

If you aren’t sure you got everything right, no rush. You can always wait a bit, and go over it later.

Don’t accidently target other users

Lets say that someone posts the notorious recipe “Chicken and ham extravaganta”, and say that they don’t think society should go vegan because a balanced diet is better than a green one. You just happen to have a bunch of replies to that. For one thing, flesh food is not traditionally balanced, but centered around the meat, with everything else being mere decoration. Also, there are lots of protein sources other than meat. But most importantly, the vegan movement is not about what is the most healthy diet, but about it being morally wrong to kill a sentient creature just to eat its meat.

But this is a general argument about veganism. If you write it as a reply to someone recomendinging a “Chicken and ham extravaganta”, you’re essentially calling them a bad person.

So don’t reply. If you want to push your point, at least wait a bit and then create a new post, so you don’t target a specific user.

Don’t drink and post

Nope. Just don’t.

Avoid provocateur headlines

I might have given this post the headline “How to speak honestly without being banned for misogyny, racism, transphobia, and fascism”, or maybe “I was banned and censored on tilde.net. Here’s my conclusions.” Headlines which are undeniably more juicy, more clickbaity, if you will. You can almost smell the raising adrenaline. Controversy! Read all about it!

To me, this is hard to resist, because I really love the aethetic of blatant, vulgar marketing. But it also tends to backfire more often than not.

Also, even if the actual content of my post is okay, people who have experienced racism or transphobia might not be super thrilled about me playing around with racism and transphobia in my headline. Saying something “jokingly” is still saying it.

As an aside, me being temporary banned and having my posts deleted was what inspired me to write this post. I don’t have anything much to say about this itself, other than I would have liked it if removed post had a line about the reason for removal, and I would also note that, if you get banned, the red text bleed into be backgrund in a way which is aestetically displeasing.

Diversity reading

You might try mentally test reading your post from the perspective of groups which play a role in the content of your post. After all, if you talk about someone, you should be able to say it to their face. Also, it is entirely possible that your post will be read by those you talk about.

Take the rules for being a good listener, then invert them

Listening is a skill which most people haven’t learned. So when you speak your mind, it is worth taking precautions for the likely scenario that your readers will not follow the rules for the optimal listener. So let’s try inverting the rules:

When listening to others, always give their view the most generous intepretation —> If your words can be interpreted as ignorant, biggoted, or fashy, they will be, always.

Truly listen to others and try to understand them before giving your answer —> Assume that people will skim through your post.

I want to point out that (in bold and uppercase just for the heck of it) I DON’T SAY THIS TO WHINE ABOUT BAD PEOPLE READING MY POSTS UNFAIRLY. Nope, absolute nope. My point is the exact opposite; I have a deeply held belief that any writer or author who is “misunderstood” could have avoided it by writing better. The writer should be expected to know his audience and know how to write in circles around any potential misintepretation.

Got that? Ok. Let’s look at what we can do to address those two issues.

If your words can be interpreted as ignorant, biggoted, or fashy, they will be, always.

When writing a post, I sometimes get the notion that something I write might be taken the wrong way. But then I forget about it, because I’m busy building a clever metaphor finding just the right word. And without fail, my post get misinterpreted in exactly that way I thought it would. So always listen to that little voice. In my experience, it is seldom wrong.

This is not just to avoid you getting trashed online. Another more important aspect which is typically overlooked, is that if your post can, somehow, be misinterpreted in horrible ways, it may also be read as such by people who truly hold those views, people who then sees you as an ally. You really don’t want that.

Sometimes it is a simple matter of changing your phrasing. Other times, directly stating what you do or do not believe is in order.

Assume that people will skim through your post.

While you can’t predict exactly how our post is going to be skimmed through, It is likely that they will have read your headline. So use that as leverage to push your most important points, or the general vibe of your post. Your first paragraph is likely to be read too. If your post is longer, you can also add subheaders with key info. You can also use the inverted pyramid structure, leading with the information any reader must know, followed by things which will grant them greater understanding, and ending with the interesting nice to know stuff.

This is what I got so far! If you got any advice of your own, please share!

This is a thought I've been having a lot lately. It seems like 90% of notifications I get these days both on my phone and computer are ads begging me to either: upgrade a service I already have ("you're running out of space on [insert cloud service here] at 75% usage will you please UPGRADE?") or re-engage with an app that hasn't sucked enough of my attention ("we MISS you! PLEASE engage!"), with the remaining tiny minority being useful actionable information. I've noticed too that social media notifications NEVER give you enough detail about something that's going on to not have to open the app directly. It's kind of exhausting to the point where I've disabled most notifications on my devices altogether. I don't really know the point of this post other than to commiserate and to simply open it up for discussion. Thoughts?

EDIT: WOW this blew up! Thanks everyone for your contributions!

Discovered Go not too long ago, finding it quite enjoyable.

I know there's plenty of reading material out there, but I'm unaware of what exactly would be worthwhile, especially for someone who's been dabbling around at it for 3 months at most.

Grateful for any and all suggestions!

I won't bury the lede - my friend isn't non-monogamous or polyamorous, and that's the crux of the issue. At the least, he has never really considered non-monogamy before.

My (31F) marriage is uniquely suited for non-monogamy and has been for ten years strong, and my husband (30M) is entirely comfortable with what I'm proposing here. My biggest concern is the risk to my friend’s (30M) feelings and his perspective. So, before I speak to him about it, rather than seeking advice exclusively from people who practice ENM, I am actually curious what everyone might think of the situation. I also think Tildes probably has the only pool of monogamous people on the internet who would be interested in discussing this topic respectfully and approaching it with curiosity or empathy rather than disgust - I know it's a strange topic for most people.

Essentially, over the past two years I've been spending more and more time with a friend of mine. My husband is a pretty good friend of his, but they are not extremely close or best friends, they know each other through me. My friend doesn't date a lot, and we simply find ourselves drawn to spending a lot of time together, having very long conversations late at night, and doing things like going on a few vacations alone together. We haven't discussed it, but there is an overwhelming sense that we would probably date, had I been single when we met. He's very respectful of me and my marriage, but sometimes we each end up innocently flirting with the other - small compliments about our appearances, comments about how our “love languages” tend to be similar, etc. A few weeks ago he asked me if my husband and I have an open marriage (I don't often share that aspect of my life, my husband and I have been functionally “monogamous” since I've known my friend, and we haven't dated anyone else for quite some time.) I answered by saying that I actually do have an open marriage, yes. His question caught me off guard. I didn't expect him to ever ask because he doesn't seem like the type of person who would be interested in non-monogamy. So, I asked him what he thinks about non-monogamy, and he said he hasn't thought about it much, and has always been monogamous in past relationships. I wanted to think more about what to do next, so at the time I didn't let him know that I was specifically attracted to him.

Certainly, it may be very wise to accept that my friend is likely just monogamous, as most people tend to be, and simply continue on with our normal platonic friendship as it is. However, recently I'm finding it harder to contain my feelings on the matter, and he doesn't exactly make it any easier on me, because I really think he engages as well. Recently a mutual friend asked me if something was going on between us because she noticed him flirting with me. A couple of friends have agreed that the chemistry seems undeniable, so I don't think this is entirely one-sided.

At the least, I think I need to be honest with him that I'm attracted to him and open to some kind of romantic/sexual relationship with him. That way, if he says this makes him uncomfortable, I know I have to adjust my expectations and put proper boundaries in place. Of course, my hope is that he might be interested as well, at which point we can discuss what that would look like, but that's a separate topic because first I want to approach this with caution and respect.

I feel that it's really the sexual element that is up in the air. We already spend a lot of time together, and any purely monogamous person would probably already consider our behavior to be “emotional cheating,” if it happened to their marriage. I don't think most male/female friendships involve endless late night conversations, casual flirting, and prioritizing each other over other friends. To me, adding sex to the relationship seems like a no-brainer since we seem attracted to each other, but obviously most people wouldn't feel the same way.

Also, imagine the same situation, but with the genders flipped. We've all heard stories of unfortunate women who thought they had a great friendship with a man, only to eventually find out that the guy had been pining after her sexually for some time. My worst fear here is making my friend feel like our relationship was shallow, or that I was just trying to get something from him. But I didn't end up here on purpose, I just found myself here somehow - and I also would be more than happy to remain just friends with him if that's what he wants.

What would you think if you were a fairly monogamous person, and your close, non-monogamous friend admitted they have feelings for you? Would you be offended or hurt? Do you think there is a tactful way to bring it up? Would you prefer they never tell you, so you can just continue your friendship as normal, or for them to just move on without you if they can't let go of the idea?

Of course, the only real answer is that I won't know how he feels unless I ask him about it. I just thought I would talk this out with some kind strangers before jumping in. My brain seems quite wired for non-monogamy, and sometimes I struggle to see things from the perspective of monogamous people. Jealousy is not an emotion I have experienced often in relationships. I am flattered when any of my male or female friends admit attraction to me. Some of my friend groups are very queer and/or polyamorous, where behavior like dating your friends or being friends with ex-partners is fairly typical. But this friend is from a part of my life where non-monogamy is not as much of a given. I am also a bit worried about what our monogamous friends would think, as we do spend a lot of time in the same group of friends. I am worried that if he were to meet someone in the future who he wanted a relationship with, the woman wouldn't be comfortable having me around in the group, especially if I am still practicing non-monogamy at the time. I have many worries. Non-monogamy is complex. But mostly, I feel like this could work.

I know some of you are non-monogamous and I'm definitely interested in your thoughts, but I wanted to specify that I'm open to anyone else's take as well.

I'm currently working on decluttering, and coming up with processes to stop clutter from building up in the future.

Even after getting rid of a bunch of junk, I'll be left with a ton of stuff that historically has just "floated around" my living space (cables, adapters, small tools, stationary, batteries, etc...).

I'd ideally want a bunch of appropriately sized containers that I can organize stuff into. I'd love for each box to be some tesselation of a standard volume, so that I can arrange and stack those containers neatly in a drawer or on a desk.

If you happen to work with 3D printing, this may sound a lot like Gridfinity, a modular open-source grid storage system. And I agree! Gridfinity's goals completely meet and shoot past what I'm looking for. But I currently have no interest in investing the money or time into buying a 3D printer and making prints. And there doesn't appear to be an obvious commercial version outside of "random" folks on Etsy.

I also considered getting a Drawer Grid like you'd see in a Maker Space. I might end up getting this if I can't find a better option, though I'd prefer a storage solution I can stuff in a drawer.

I was curious if:

• Anyone had any product recommendations that might fit the bill
• Anyone had any thoughts on the organizational endeavor itself, and if there are any ways I could be going about this better.

[SOLVED]

... well, this is in many ways very unsatisfying, because I have no idea why this worked, but I seem to have fixed it.

Server A has two Ethernet ports, an Intel I219V and a Killer E3100. Several months ago, when trying to debug sporadic btrfs errors (I had my RAM installed incorrectly!), I had disabled some unused devices in BIOS, including the Killer Ethernet port.

Since I had no other ideas, and it seemed like this was somehow specific to this server, I just re-enabled the Killer port and switched the Ethernet cable to that port. I'm now getting 300 Mb/s transfers from my wireless devices to my server, exactly as expected.

I'm gonna like... go for a walk or something. Thank you so much to everyone who helped me rule out all of the very many things this could have been! I love this place, you all are so kind and supportive.

Original:

I'm trying to debug a perplexing networking situation, and I could use some guidance if anyone has any.

Here's my setup:

• UniFi Security Gateway
• UniFi Switch Lite
• Two UAPs
• Two servers, A and B, connected to the USW-Lite with GbE
• Many wireless devices, connected to the UAPs

Here's what I'm experiencing:

• Network transfers from the wireless devices to server A (as measured by iperf3 tests) are very slow. Consistently between 10 and 20 Mb/s.
• Network transfers from server A to all devices are expected speeds. 900-1000 Mb/s to server B, 350-ish Mb/s to wireless devices.
• Network transfers between server B and all devices (in both directions!) are expected speeds.
• Network transfers from the USG to server A also seem slow, which is odd. Only about 60 MB/s.
• Network transfers from the USG to server B and the wireless devices is about 300 MB/s

So, specifically network transfers from any wireless device to server A are slow, and no other connections have any issues that I can see.

Some potentially relevant details:

• Server A is running Unraid
• Server B is running Ubuntu
• Wireless devices include a Fedora laptop, an iPhone, and a Macbook Pro
• UniFi configuration is pretty straightforward. I have a few ports forwarded, a guest WiFi network (that none of these devices are on), a single default VLAN, and two simple "Allow LAN" firewall rules for Wireguard on the USG. No other firewall or routing config that I'm aware of.

If anyone has any thoughts at all on how to continue debugging, I would be immensely grateful! I suppose the next step would be to try to determine whether it's the networking equipment or the server itself that is responsible for the throttling, but I'm not sure how best to do that.