It's been a while since I last posted on Tildes but I wanted to make a follow up to a previous post I made here almost a year ago, mostly for the catharsis! At the time I was deep in a pit of despair over my young Belgian shepherd's anxiety/ reactivity and a sitter cancelling on me last minute and causing me to miss a friend's wedding just pushed me over the edge. Some things we did to resolve the issues:

• Paid an arm and a leg to lock into an 8 week long reactivity course, at the recommendation of someone on here that I actually got to meet up with (thank you so much, you know exactly how incredibly helpful it's been!). This was worth every penny to us for finally getting guaranteed, regular contact with a trainer and behaviourist alone. She had a lot of valuable insights that other trainers hadn't suggested, for example actually doing LESS with him. At our peak we were doing 2 - 3 long walks per day, training and classes 3x per week. Paring our schedule right back gave us both some much needed space to relax.
• Now that we were working with a behaviourist, we were able to get her to speak to our vet and recommend a short course of Reconcile (fluoxetine), which she'd advised a lot of shepherd dogs with these issues responded well to. We gradually increased to 64mg per day, but even on lower doses we saw rapid improvement in his behaviour.
• Probably just let time pass, honestly. More experiences. We go off to different places at the weekends, book on one-time workshops every now and then, visit lots of family. Each subsequent visit has been better. He LOVES my in-laws and took a while to warm up to my grandparents but the last time we saw them he actually got on my grandad's nerves because he kept going up to him for a fuss! It was such a good problem to have. He's still young but starting to get a little bit of frosting on his lips; I've slowly been able to see some of the teen brain adjusting and a little bit of mellowing with age. It DOES get easier as they get older. I've heard it gets even better once they're 3.

People who know him say he's a totally different dog these days. He's now satisfied with one long walk per day and some short sessions of training, play, scentwork and agility dotted through the week. We've also reintroduced one 40 minute class at the weekend which seems to be working well for him, and we're always bumping into his friends or arranging to do something with them at least once a month.

He can cope with strangers being in close proximity - he's a bit choosier about other dogs now but it's all within the realms of normal. A huge milestone for us was being able to have him be a part of our wedding like we'd always hoped. He will occasionally still react to things, but this only tends to be when he's had a very long day and gets tired/ overstimulated. We're more aware of the signs and he's a lot quicker to settle.

He's going to be 2 next week and had a very positive medication review at the vet's this afternoon. We sat in the waiting room and encountered 4 or 5 different dogs, lots of people and a small, energetic child and he had nerves of steel the entire time. What would have felt like a total nightmare 6 - 9 months ago only gave me mild concerns when the kid got a bit too close. He even accepted a pat from someone!

The vet was really impressed by his progress and agreed that we can start decreasing the dosage and tapering him off of his medication. This all would have been about a million times easier if we'd been able to find a reliable trainer in the first place (still couldn't tell you if it was our bad luck or they're normally that flakey) but thank god we finally got there. I'm cuddling my handsome, happy, silly boy this evening and just feeling a huge sense of peace and relief.

If you've read through all of this and/ or were part of the original thread, thank you!

Specifically low-stakes.

I’m sure many of us have been having more than our our fill of high-stakes stuff recently.

Think: minor, inconsequential, petty, mundane, etc.

Your “circles” can be home, work, school, friends, gym, library, grocery store, Discord server — anything really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been playing with the idea that I might try to learn a second language. I have sparse memories of my great grandparents and grandparents speaking their native language, but it didn't get passed down beyond them.

In my daily life I have no immediate need to communicate outside of English, but I think it would be more than interesting anyway. I've played around with Duolingo and while I can see what it's doing (very early stages), I struggle to feel it will be useful for long.

What are the methods that folks have used to learn a new language? Is there a path that is "best" or "easiest"? As an old, I'm used to the traditional method of learning with a teacher, but I don't know how to find one locally for the language I'm interested in (modern Greek).

Any advice is very welcome, thanks!

P.S. I hope this lands in the right section, I wasn't sure if I should post it here or in Hobbies.

TL;DR: I'm trying to work through what the future looks like and my brain has been awash in negativity since last November, so I figure putting something on paper may serve as a form of therapy. The long and short of what I've typed below is I'm trying to piece together USA's current geopolitical situation and rationalize what the likely or possible outcomes are.

I'm posting this through doomscrolling-tinted glasses, so bear with me. But I'll also mention that I've always tried to be empathetic to both sides, understand differing arguments and motives, and generally believe that people act or vote the way they do because it's what they think is best for the country, their communities, and their families.

I'm afraid I have given too much faith to humanity.

Overnight, we've just switched our allegiance from Europe/NATO/Ukraine to Russia -- our arch-nemesis for the last century. This comes on the heels of threatening to make Palestine disappear and "punishing" our brothers and sisters to the north and south (and across the Atlantic for that matter) for no apparent reason. The mutual trust and respect we've worked on for so long with our neighboring countries and Europe are vanishing... just like that. Unless there's something huge that I'm missing, we're not playing smart geopolitics here. We're just giving up hegemony for the sake of what... making it easier for rich men to hoard more money and get away with corruption?

I'm not a single-issue voter, but geopolitical implications have always received the lion's share of my decision-making. We've been able to maintain a relatively* prosperous and safe world order. More importantly, we've been able to keep the M.A.D. lightning in a bottle. Selfishly as an American, I think it's safe to say that our geopolitical situation has afforded us, the citizens, our current luxuries and opportunities. Sure, we have some other MASSIVE issues, but why would you want to take this one away?

• I know, we've done a lot of bad shit in the past. I'm not going to argue or defend that here.

So as the threads of democracy unravel in America, what does our path forward look like?

I believe we are at a crossroads right now. As all of these executive orders are being created – some of which are valid but we don't like them because they're coming from the other side, and others of which are clearly unconstitutional – the judiciary is getting to work making rulings on them, one by one. It is a slow process, but at the end of the day we should have a bunch of directives -- these EO's get to stay, and these other ones are unconstitutional so they must go.

The left branch of the crossroads is the one where the executive branch chooses to play by the rules. As much as Democrats would hate to admit, I see this as democracy playing out (in the worst possible way, but hey, I'm looking for silver linings). "These EO's can stay, and these EO's have to go." Then, in two years' time, the mid-terms will provide another opportunity for voters to swing the pendulum back toward the middle a bit -- or not. And then we can start the long, slow rebuilding process of restoring relations with our allies.

The right branch of the crossroads (where the executive branch becomes more and more powerful) is the one that I think we simply call "fascism," and there's plenty of historical research and precedent as to where things go from there. I don't see a clean exit from this. I see the following possibilities, from least to most horrible.

1. Americans just give in and accept the new government. We turn into a single-party state, corruption grows rampant, basic welfare benefits are taken away, etc. But, because there was no fight or give-a-fuck, we just accept it. And hey, maybe life is still fine for many people. But maybe we watch the indicators slowly tick in the wrong direction -- life expectancy, upward mobility, homelessness, crumbling infrastructure, innovation, general happiness. Given our current state of apathy and lethargy, I believe this is the most likely scenario.

2. Military intervention from within. If things get screwy enough, there comes a point when the military has to decide whether it's time to step in or not. In general, military interventions are a BAD thing. Furthermore, I believe there is major support for the President within the armed forces. Could there be a clean exit here, one where the military removes the current executive and benevolently allows for a new election? Sure, maybe, but if you think MAGAs believe all blame belongs to "the others" right now, this will be a whole 'nother level. More likely, this would lead to an outcome like most other military interventions historically.

3. Some flavor of a fractured republic, civil war, etc. The exact opposite of a clean exit. It would also most likely lead to...

4. Military intervention from outside, a.k.a. war. This is my greatest fear -- that we have now become the "bad guys," and the rest of the world realizes they have to band together to stop the tyranny and restore order. This option almost certainly ends in M.A.D.

I can't believe I'm typing all of this with any semblance of sincerity. I always subscribed to the thinking that "things always work out in the end," and it has done good for me so far. At this point, I could use some reassurance. Please tell me that I'm completely wrong and am simply being dramatic.

Yes I know the "deep state" is just a phrase that means different things to different people. But Trump is completely out of control and undermining the very fabric of American society and world politics. Siding with Russia, undermining long time relationships with close allies, threatening invading Canada and other countries, calling himself a King. His next step seems to be dismantling the military industrial complex (drastically cutting military spending, reducing American power worldwide).

Isn't there supposed to be some people who are sort of secretly in charge and prevent a single traitorous idiot from destroying the world order, whatever that is? "The Invisible Government"?. Don't most of us sort of believe that JFK was removed by internal actors for much less?

What is really going on here? Is a large amount of the US government completely captured by Russia? Or is it exactly what it seems to be - nobody expected a handful of rich corrupt idiots to just take over and the handful of people who could stop it are just letting it happen. I mean, I can see how it was a serious of unfortunate events, mostly caused by the corruption in the Republican party which allowed a seditionist to get away with trying to overthrow the government and Biden's DOJ just sleeping for about 3 years. But along the way you'd think there would be better checks against all of this.

My phone, Samsung Galaxy S20, has finally started having some screen issues and made me start looking seriously at a new phone. I felt like I got great use out of this phone after 5 years, and I anticipate trying to get a similar or (hopefully) longer life span from my next phone.

Ideally I'd like to keep this phone going for another year, currently the screen issue is more annoying than actually preventing me from using the phone. The OLED can no longer properly display black colors and when the screen goes to sub 10% brightness it adds a yellow tinge to the screen, and using my blue light filter only makes it worse. This has led me to use my phone less at night or when it's dark, since it's like having a dim flashlight shining in my eyes.

A bit of a startling realization, was that I've been putting off building a new computer since I moved over here due to the expense, but I'd happily drop more than I'd be willing to spend on that new computer on a new phone since I use it everyday throughout the day.

This made me wonder how often others replace their phones.

Are there any criteria you look for when picking new phones?
Are you a brand loyalist, or do you shop around?
Do you do camera comparisons between phones/models?
Or simply, how do you choose your phone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My partner has a old 2003 Ford Focus and I want to change the radio from stock to something that has bluetooth.
Here's my understanding on aftermarket radio:

• Every car is different, depends on the dashboard and the radio harness thing
• Finding out what what radio to buy/how to fit it is usually done by finding old YouTube videos from someone with 100 followers from 2008
• Sometimes it can be really easy and sometimes it can be really annoying to fit

Is my understanding correct?
I've tried this before with another car I had (a 2009 Mitsubishu Lancer) and it was such a nightmare I gave up. So I want to double check with any car nerds that I'm not missing anything obvious or there's no source of truth or something to go checkout/learn.

Any help would be appreciated, otherwise I'm going to go and find some 180p videos from 2008 to watch.

Edit @smithsonian, @Weldawadyathink, @scottc
Thabks for your replies, the site looks great for what I'm looking for. I'm not US but they do ship internationally. Plus it will at least help me work out what parts I might need!
Glad something like this exists, thank god.

For as long as I can remember, I've been unnerved by passive infrared motion detectors. You know the ones, those that have a milky-white lens and on occasion blink red when they detect motion. They're absolutely terrifying to me and I don't know why.

I got a few other strangely specific phobias as well - I hate bathroom extractor fans, specifically in bathrooms with high ceilings (which are very common here in Europe), I can't bear to be near industrial light signals even if they're off, and when I recently went to the US, the absolute ubiquity of emergency battery backup light fixtures paralysed me in more than one building. My worst irrational fear is that of horn-style speakers, especially in public spaces or industrial settings, and in those, especially those that fire downwards. (Incidentally, sirens on emergency vehicles, even when they suddenly go off, never triggered this phobia)

So apart from my weird damage, I have to wonder - what are some of your weird uncommon phobias? I don't mean stuff like a fear of needles or spiders, those are quite common and well documented, but something truly odd you can't make sense of and you kind of know should not be able to scare or disgust you.

I've had this idea rattling around in my head all day and feel I need to get it out. I apologize in advance if my thoughts seem jumbled or unoriginal, I'd just like them to escape.

As a preface, I speak of being a step-parent to young children through adolescence. The dynamics change when you are older and your parents remarry.

What does it mean to be a step-parent? I've wrangled with this most of my life in some way - my grandparents divorced before I was born, and I had a step-grandma from the start. Being around her always came with extra rules. I would later realize this was always the case with new step-parents, after my own parents divorced. Is that really what it means to step-parent though? To come into a situation and impose your own new rules and routines on this child that isn't yours, who has no real connection with you? I chafed with these restrictions and impositions. I disagreed many times, and it hurt me when I felt that my parents didn't support me, their child, and instead agreed with this impostor.

Of course this is a simple, childish view, but it was certainly correct in some ways. Most often, I simply felt confused and angry about why these adults who were not my parents were pretending to be. Much of this is likely unresolved trauma from the divorce itself - it was very messy.

At times though, I was right to mistrust these people who had step-ed into my life. My stepmom was (is) emotionally abusive, and my dad enabled and supported that behavior. My stepfather tried to force religion on me, nearly kicking me out of the house over it. Fortunately in that case my mother was ready to leave with me (literally, with packed bags) and he backed down.

So how does one handle a step-parent? How does one be a good step-parent?

Years ago I met a woman who I came to love. She came with two children, who I became a stepfather to. Now I was in the position of the impostor, the interloper to this family dynamic which was already established. I really tried my best to figure out where I should draw what lines. How would discipline be handled? What rules did we need? How would I know that I didn't overstep some boundary or line? Given my history, I felt both prepared and utterly lost for what to do. I didn't feel that I'd ever had a positive model of a step-parent in my life. The closest was my stepmom in some moments where she truly supported us - between the abuses. I certainly wasn't going to be just like HER though.

Like any rational human being then, I talked to my wife about this at length. We established a few ground rules: We would do our best to be consistent (between mom, dad, and me), We would always keep the best interests of the children in mind, and we would never badmouth/doubt/cast shade on the decisions or actions of the other parents involved - at least not to the kids. These gave a good foundation, and we are also fortunate in that the adults in the room could get along and act in good faith with each other.

I work as a teacher, and fell back on that role often - a person of authority, who isn't a parent, but is certainly there to help you succeed and work with the parents. This seems to be a good framework to build off of.

What does it mean to be a step-parent? For me it means being a co-authority, a sort of triumvirate of care for the children. It means accepting that complex situations mean there are few easy, simple answers, and being able to navigate that. It also means knowing where your boundaries are, and not butting up against them, or worse, going over them.

If you are a step-parent, or have had one that's been a positive influence for you, I would love to hear your thoughts. Even if you aren't, or don't, I would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you for reading my messy opinion piece, and maybe for the next one I'll write when I have more than an hour to work on a post!

Or, let’s be honest, firstly as a novelty. I don't know anyone else personally who has bought, or would buy, a copy. I figured it would be interesting to see what it was like.

My wife and I stopped on Valentine’s day to buy a copy, and I think we were both surprised by the print. I knew Playboy magazines produced some notable interviews in the past, but a dozen important conversations over several decades isn’t exactly going to outweigh the sea of photographs they’re known for. The new edition was a surprising $20 in-person. It felt like a bit of a gamble, but I think it was worth it.

By the numbers, it’s ~125 pages long and features 3 pictorial photoshoots. Beyond a few pages of photos, the rest is basically all writing. There are a few ads, but nothing like the volume of ads in other magazines I’ve read recently. I figured the magazine would be full of risqué photos, but it’s more of a tasteful inclusion alongside other, more substantial discussion. It is essentially all writing, and it’s good writing.

From the outset, the Editor’s Letter (Mike Guy) sets the tone of the new printing:

Five years have passed since an issue of Playboy rolled off a printing press, and they have been strange years indeed. We’ve passed through the wreckage of a pandemic, sat on a violent political see-saw, and watched as discourse shrinks to tiny digital moments that explode into divisive range at precisely the time we need reason. Just as Playboy was frustrated with the conservative norms of the ‘50s, we want to challenge them now, too. This can mean just showing up, listening; it can mean choosing connecting and pleasure over sensation and isolation. It means rejecting poisonous, meme-driven narratives, as writer Magdalene Taylor urges in “The Rise of the Beta Male” …, her disturbing report from the front lines of our emerging dystopia about young men who have given up on sex. … The internet - OnlyFans, TikTok, and the rest - has stolen sexuality and fed it into the meat grinder of the attention economy. We’re doing our part to steal it back. As the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “The greatest poverty is not to live in the physical world.”

I didn’t anticipate an article detailing a first-person investigation into the rise of anti-semitism, or an article about a far-out apocalyptic billionaire party, nor did I expect a humorous memoir about the rise of Nashville as the bachelorette party destination. But, these were funny, interesting pieces that spurred much discussion in my house. My wife and I have taken turns reading these long-form articles aloud each night. The article on an ultra-exclusive sex party in LA fell inline with the sort of topics I expected, but the writing and description of a beautiful spectacle made us pause and say, “that actually sounds like a fun time.”

It turns out you really can read Playboy for the articles, and more importantly resonate on the value of re-engaging human connection, disarming hate, building up our communities, and challenging our preconceived notions.

I tend to buy 1 pair of shoes that are my "go to" shoes. Thus i like them to cover a variety of roles while fitting a few requirements. These are worn basically every day barring literal special occasions. I'll wear them to work, disc golf, a walk, a light hike, anything less than the fanciest of dinners or occasions, and can get away with them if I have to even for those. Oh and while I find it matters less these days, i'm an 11-12 foot size which tends to limit my options in physical sores.

I like slip ons at this point, both as an aesthetic and from a practicality standpoint, and due to my "do it all" requirement generally want something that is comfy, looks half decent, is in black, but also has decent grip on the bottom.

I've currently burnt through my keen slip on's. I got these almost exactly a year ago in black, and they've been "good enough" for $60-75.

That said I'm not in love with them, and I'd also like a dress shoeish equivalent like these rockports . However i've heard they're garbage, especially for the price.

I'm throwing this on here because I'm not against spending more for better quality shoes, but I've spent 2 or 3 times as much as the keens, and gotten very similar results. Hell i'd LOVE if I could just take them to a cobbler to get them fixed every X years, but seems that's really only a thing for heavy duty work boots at this point (which led me down a rabbit hole of looking for a specific kind of redwings, but those also were no longer being made)

Merrell went from quite good many years ago to just garbage that didn't even make it 6 months, and on the other side of the coin I found some Lowa "snow shoes" that fit my requirements and lasted I think 2-3 years, but were no longer being sold by the time I needed new ones.

Does anyone have some suggestions, or am I just better off getting the cheapest thing that I like the look of because they're mostly all going to be burnt through? Even then, any suggestions on half decent brands?

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

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

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

I'll leave some top level comments as starting points

In an age of increasing misinformation and division, I've found that it's increasingly easy to find yourself in an echo chamber of opinions (of people and/or bots). And when I go searching outside that echo chamber, I usually don't find well reasoned discussion, but a different echo chamber with the opposite opinion.

This is especially true on sites like Reddit and Twitter, but also applies to pretty much every website (including Tildes) to some extent. Even newspapers aren't helpful as they are all largely owned by a handful of billionaires with an agenda. And real life isn't much better. My friends and family all share similar values and ideals, which is great for getting along, but it doesn't help me figure out how many people actually support something in particular.

The closest thing I've found to objective polling are elections. Unfortunately, they largely group everything into one of two buckets and don't have room for nuance on individual topics. Also, a lot of people don't even vote, which doesn't necessarily muddy the data, but it does leave out the opinions of a lot of people.

Is it even possible to determine this without an individual referendum on each topic? Am I worrying too much about something unknowable?

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

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

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

Hello fellow Tilderinos. My 9 year old will likely have to use crutches for a few weeks and I'm looking for some tips on how to make her life less miserable.

Unfortunately this happened not only right before we're set to fly on holiday this Friday (and we may have to cancel), but in early March she was meant to go on a week long school field trip where they were going to go horse riding and do circus classes. She's understandably upset she's going to miss out. Even if we're still able to fly on holiday next week, she won't be able to participate in the vast majority of activities she usually enjoys.

As a very physically active and social child, I know this is going to be really hard on her. I'd love some tips on how to keep her spirits up and make it possible for her to participate in fun activities (also possibly limit screen time as well). Would welcome any tips you may have to make it a less miserable time for her!

This subject is a dead horse on most social media platforms (I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of similar threads on /r/askreddit alone, for one), but I didn't find a thread about it specifically on Tildes from a cursory search (though I did find more specific threads about some aspects of it like this one as well as the broader prescriptivism vs descriptivism subject here and even the mirror opposite of what this thread is about, that is deliberately using non-standard language in a constructive manner) and I think that it might spark worthwhile discussion.

By and large, I agree that language should be seen from a descriptive point of view, meaning a language's rules are defined by how people speak it, not the other way around. As the need to communicate evolves, so does any given living language and a rigidly enforced ruleset would get in the way of this process. By opposition, the prescriptive approach views a language's rules as defining a "correct" way (making any other way incorrect) of speaking the language to be enforced accordingly. Following either approach to its respective logical extreme would be a dead-end but I do think the most reasonably balanced way to approach this tends a lot more toward descriptivism than prescriptivism.

While agreed-upon rules are still definitely useful to establish a language's identity and defining a standard helps both with learning the language and structuring how the language should evolve (and when learning it's probably best to operate by the book at first, literally or otherwise, until you're familiar with the language enough to reliably tell when bending the rules is advantageous), getting yourself understood is much more important than strictly "following the rules", and that's before considering the cases where the rules themselves are ambiguous, or their validity is a matter of debate, which itself brings up the much more controversial issue of what constitutes an authoritative source for a language's grammar in the first place. In practice, even if there is a consensus on something being a grammar error, most are benign enough to not risk the meaning of the sentence being misinterpreted anyway. And of course, there's the issue of people ostensibly wanting to be helpful using "correcting someone's grammar" as an excuse for gatekeeping, toxic behavior or derailing conversations into a pointless grammar debate.

For example, while my latent pedantry constantly incites nitpicking on those smaller mistakes, it's obvious that someone using "Your welcome" instead of you're is acknowledging gratitude and no one would argue in good faith that this could be misinterpreted as referring to an abstract hospitality belonging to the person they're addressing. Similarly, using "irregardless" (which presumably arose as a contraction of irrespective and regardless) might be argued as meaning the opposite of "regardless" since ir- is a negation prefix, making using that word a mistake due to the ambiguity. In practice, interpreting it that way in any sentence where the word actually appears would be very unintuitive so the ambiguity doesn't actually manifest... Though the argument I see much more often against its use is that irregardless is "a made-up word" and therefore incorrect (as opposed to all the real words which are, what, woven into the very fabric of the universe?), which is silly. I personally don't use this word, but I wouldn't bat an eye if I saw it becoming normalized either.

That being said, I believe there is such a thing as incorrect use of language that actually hampers communication and therefore should be discouraged, some of which I'll give examples below. I... got wildly carried away while writing it so I made it an optional collapsible box.

Which turns of phrase would you consider to be categorically incorrect? Did I commit one in this very post? If you chose to read through the content of the collapsible box above, do you disagree with some of my examples (or the entire premise of the question in the first place)? While I'm assuming English as the default for my own answer, feel free to talk about any other language you might know (ideally with context for non-speakers of the language).

Also, since I mentioned it in the post, another optional subject: which mistakes that people seem to care a lot about (and sometimes not even mistakes, given that the same treatment is occasionally given to perfectly correct turns of phrase due to misconceptions about grammar rules) do you think aren't actually important at all?

Previous topic - https://tildes.net/~comp/1jsx/my_even_smaller_keyboard_upgrade

I'm making this a new topic because this keyboard once again got me to think about a couple of interesting things in regards to both having a smaller keyboard and how to actually make that work. Plus while niche as hell I'd like to contribute some sort of topic to tildes every now and then. For this one i'll be rambling about some of the reasons I've stuck with these things, and the sorts of design concepts it's forced me to think about and problems I ran into (like where the hell the shift key is).

1. Power users and the Nav cluster -

The nav cluster is the Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn/Delete/Insert section and maybe the arrow keys below it on a standard fullsize keyboard. These keys are SUPER useful for text and other sorts of navigation, to the point that it seems most "power user" systems(IDE's or even things like vim, or vimum for browsers) just remap the functionality to somewhere that can be easily reached.

In fact moving the nav cluster and numpad to be somewhere easier to access, so i wasn't constantly moving my hand back and forth, was one of the main reasons I started looking into custom keymaps and eventually smaller keyboards. Being able to trivially hit Home/End without lifting my hands is just so much nicer.

I mention all this to show you the kind of thinking that originally went into me going down this rabbit hole.
In essence:
I wanted to type/navigate faster, oh you can use these keys to be faster, but wait, i'm only a little bit faster and it's MUCH more annoying because I constantly have to move my right hand back and forth, how do I stop that?

Thus i'm always somewhat surprised at how vehemently people can get about remapping keys. Having Up/Down/Left/Right on I/K/J/L with Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn on U/O/Y/H is super intuitive(right handed WASD, with home/end/pgup/pgdwn in line with their corresponding movement) and makes flying around the screen so much easier, and can also open up keybindings that were otherwise used with just porting all this functionality to keys you can easily hit.

2. Chords, and the first major problem -

I'm sure there's a more technical definition but for the purposes of this topic chords are anytime you're hitting one or more keys at once. Shift + a is a chord for A. Ctrl+Shift+Esc is a chord for opening the task manager on windows.

One of the things you don't instantly think about when you get into smaller boards is what chords are popular, and how adding layers to your workflow will affect them. You really want your modifier keys to be accessible at all times, and in a way that makes sense. I don't have a problem that since my Esc key is not on the base layer, the Ctrl+Shift+Esc becomes Ctrl+Shift+Space+Tab for me. To break that down, Ctrl+Shift are on all layers, Space, when held, is the modifier to go to one of my other layers, and on that layer tab becomes esc.

In short, I've added one extra key to the chord, and it doesn't bug me.

What DID bug me, was that with this smaller keyboard, I no longer had room on the left side to put all of those modifier keys. You'll notice that the chord can be easily hit with your left hand alone, and with my previous map, I had shift on the right side. So now I need two hands to hit this chord instead of one. Oh well, right? It's just one chord and I need to use both hands...., whatever?

3. Oh yeah, the mouse......oh shit -
While I do think that more software should be written to allow mostly keyboard interaction, the mouse still serves a useful purpose in my ideal world. Being right handed, I use my right hand for the mouse. Sure I have some mouse functionality bound on one of my layers, but that's not going to replace the speed and precision of the mouse.

And that brings me to Win+Shift+S on windows for taking screenshots. Or more precisely, for selecting an area to take this screenshot....using the mouse.

First off, if you didn't know about this chord and you're on windows, please use it, it's fantastic for those quick "no i mean this" moments where you're trying to send someone a picture of a problem.

Second, this chord SUCKED on my new keyboard layout. On any of my previous keyboards including a normal one, I could hit this chord with just my left hand alone, while I moved my right hand to the mouse to quickly select the area I wanted and then edit it (often drawing red lines around the buttons I needed someone to click on...again....as mentioned in the documentation......).

My new layout had shift on my right hand, and oh dear god did I quickly realize how many other little workflows suck when you need to use both hands to hit the chord and THEN lift up and move it over to the mouse. Most importantly, multiple line/file selection, now required me to move my right hand to the mouse, and my left hand to the right keyboard, so I could hold shift and select things.

Or in overly dramatic terms, lo i had flown too close to the sun and was falling!

4. Wandering in the dark -

For those that for some reason don't have the 5x3 Chiri CE physical layout memorized, here it is (bottom one).

First try:
Move shift to the top button of the left thumb cluster. This was currently tab, but clearly I needed shift on my left hand more. Tab cold go on the right middle, where shift had been, and shift can go where tab was. Problem solved.

No good. That key is often hit with my index finger instead of my thumb, making something like shift+t/g/b super annoying. Hitting that key with your thumb actually requires a shifting of your hands position, and thus feels unnatural.

Worse, the key below it is my space/layer button, so something like shift+ctrl+left, to select previous words(left in this case being space + j), was super uncomfortable to hit. Just moving my thumb up to hit both keys at once did not feel good as I couldn't properly apply pressure and it just felt weird, but I wouldn't be shocked if some people out there are comfortable with that.

Second try:
Ok, we'll just move one of the other 3 thumb keys on the left to the right and put shift there, probably the win key.

No good. Ctrl and Win (or gui/super/meta/whatever) are just as important as shift. That small cluster being close to each other on normal keyboards, so they're left hand control only, means that almost ALL programs assume as much and have built their default hotkeys around it.

Windows window movement and terminal navigation being two of the bigger ones that affected me. Further this still wouldn't solve my win+shift+S screenshot issue, as now i'm just moving the windows key over there. There's no way in hell i'm putting ctrl on the right side because that's also constantly used in assuming its on the left side for various hotkeys, shortcuts, and other behaviors.

Third try:
It was at this point I was entertaining finally looking into homerow modifiers and setting up tap/double tap modifiers instead of hold. I'm still skeptical of how useful any of that is (but being open minded because of course I was skeptical of all of this and now I preach it), and realllly didn't want to go down that road for all sorts of little workflow reasons I was worried it'd collide with.

5. The solution. Pinkies and two shifts -

This stumped for for about two days after I'd decided I just couldn't live with right shift (there were plenty of other awkward workflow things due to having the number layer key be the leftmost thumb on the right pad). I'd really been trying to practice getting used to hitting both thumb keys with my thumb, as I assumed that might be the solution, and unlike basically every other adjustment I've ever had to make for a keyboard, this just felt rough.

So I took a break and just thought about my previous and normal keyboards. Well, again, in those cases, all these chords assume you're using your thumb for one modifier, and your pinky for the other. Sooooo why not just do that?

Thus the solution was born:
MT(MOD_LSFT, KC_X)
MT(MOD_RSFT, KC_SLSH)

For the few of you who don't have your Via/QMK mappings memorized, this just says that if I tap the key in question, type z (or / for the second one), and if I hold the key in question, treat it as if I'm holding the shift key.

So my shift keys are now used by my pinky, just like normally. I have them on Z and /, so I can easily hold either for whatever chord. If I need something like ctrl+shift+z I can just use the right shift, and ditto for ctrl+shift+/.

Even better, this was already my natural inclination. It only took a bit for me to find out just how much faster and easier this was making things, as I already was used to the idea of moving my left pinky downwards to hit shift. In fact, it was even easier than normal. Every now and then I'll get zi instead of I because I didn't hold the key long enough for it to trigger the "shift" function, and I could get really messy and start screwing with how long the keyboard takes to recognize the difference between a press and a tap, but I'm super happy with it.

6. Conclusion -
My wife is right to judge me and I don't care from my superior position in typing valhalla.

My partner and I have friends from China, and they pushed us to watch Ne Zha 2, the animated movie produced over there. It's pronounced "nuh zah" by the way. We had no idea what the fuss was about, and we were skeptical since it has literally no marketing in the US, and we hadn't seen the first movie either. All we heard is that it's insanely popular in China, and making records in the domestic box office there.

Now, I can say I was honestly blown away. It's like, ruined other animated movies for me, for a while. Again, I had no expectations going in, and the first ten minutes of the movie, I thought this was not the movie for me, it looked like a kids' movie, I was almost rolling my eyes in the beginning of the movie tbh.

We didn't look at any clips on the Internet beforehand, and I'm glad, because they would not do the movie justice!

What got me, I think it was the visuals, the nonstop action that looks like it was made with an insane budget, and animators working way beyond healthy hours to produce. Oh, and the sound production with the deep bass, so I could feel every impact, I have to thank the theater for that lol. I didn't even know it was an action movie, so it caught me off guard just how many scenes they crammed in there! Once it started, it really felt almost nonstop, no time to breathe like most movies would do

The story is actually good too, and there are definitely parts where people could cry

I'm also not used to seeing much of Chinese fantasy settings, so that part was entertaining for me. I don't know how much was out of the director's imagination, or coming from Chinese mythology, or Chinese video games, it all came together so well though

If you like action, and fantasy, and animation or video games, and are okay reading subtitles, please do yourself a favor, watch this one!

Disclaimer: I'm a US citizen, I'm not affiliated with Chinese media, I'm not a marketer, I really genuinely loved the movie

My iPhone 14 Pro has been at 84% battery health for almost a year now. Anecdotally the battery lasts significantly less time than it did previously, even when it was already at 84% health. I think it may just be a stale calculation, and my actual battery health is significantly lower. If I can get it to show as less than 80%, I can get AppleCare to replace it. Does anyone here know how to get the iPhone to recalculate this value?

I have Coconut batter on the Mac, and it can check the battery health for an iPhone attached with a cable. It uses a different formula, so it gives me a health of 87%. However it also shows history for when I have run it in the past, and when I tested it almost 100 charge cycles ago, it also read 87%. I don't know how any battery can go almost 100 charge cycles with zero degradation (537 to 617 cycles, so it's not like it's a fresh battery).

For example: someone will buy, say, several different pairs of pants. They really only want one pair of pants. They’ll try all of them on, keep the one they like best, and then return the rest.

The key here is that they never intended to keep all of them — it was only ever about one pair.

This has come up frequently for me in conversations with others recently. Just today, a penny-pincher family member who never spends more than he has to on anything and will take weeks to make decisions about even the smallest purchases, mentioned deliberately overbuying some stuff that he’s planning on returning.

I don’t know if it’s a new trend, or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or what.

I got the sense from one person I spoke to they weren’t serious about the return part, and that the “I’m going to return most of it” was a sort of intellectual safety for buying too much in the first place. But for other people it seems like it’s a legitimate practice.

I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it, because it seems like a lot of mostly unnecessary hassle. It also seems like it ties up a lot of your money for no good reason, and is perhaps even risky if the store(s) find ways to deny your returns. I can additionally see this as pretty harmful for smaller businesses. It feels like there are a lot of negatives for me, so I’m having trouble seeing the appeal.

Does anyone here do it and can speak to it as a practice? I’d love to get some first-hand insight to demystify it for me.

Obvious bit of a shitshow over here. Seems to be drowning out the typical international news I see with even "international" news stories being about how the US is doing something stupid in reference to another country.

I've been seeing this girl that I met on hinge for about a month and a half or so. We've hung out a couple times a week during this period, had deep conversations, gotten to know each other better, had sex, etc etc. However, I ultimately realized I wasn't feeling it, and tonight, I went to her place and told her. I was a bit nervous as I am pretty new to dating dating, and I wasn't sure how she'd take it. (My only relationship was for three years in college with someone I met through school, so I've never really gone on "dates" before, if that makes sense). She said she was a bit disappointed and surprised by this since it was going well, but she was ultimately cool about it. I stayed for a bit, and we talked about what online dating is like.

She said that she appreciated me coming over to tell her this, because I was the only guy that she's seen for about this long that didn't ghost her. I actually didn't believe her at first. But, I talked to my friends, and it sounds like this is just an accepted thing that happens with online dating?

Maybe I'm naive, but it feels strange. When you bump into a stranger on the sidewalk, you say "sorry" - but if you've been seeing someone multiple times a week for a month and been intimate with each other, you just stop texting them back? It feels like not giving someone the common courtesy of even just a text message letting them know you're not interested is almost like not seeing them as a person, even less so than the stranger you bumped into on the sidewalk who you acknowledged.

Maybe I'm just new to this, but online dating feels a bit broken. Is ghosting really as common as people seem to say it is? Am I overreacting and making a bigger deal out of this than it actually is? I'm in the bay area, is this a localized phenomenon? I'm not sure. In either case, I think I'm done touching dating apps for a while. I've met a handful of cool people through them and had my fun, but it's just exhausting. I'd rather let something happen naturally.

I guess this post is more of a rant than anything, but maybe some others with more experience than I have some useful insight to share.

The flip can be from widely liked to widely disliked, or it can go the opposite direction.

Also, it doesn’t have to be based solely on the book itself (though it certainly can be).

• Maybe the actions of the author changed the perception of the book.
• Maybe a bad sequel tanked the esteem of the original story in hindsight.
• Maybe cultural changes now cast the book in a different light.
• etc.

Whatever the case: what’s a book where opinion has flipped, and why do you think people’s opinions changed?

I'm trying to go beyond Reddit and Tildes when it comes to some particular interests. I dislike Federated websites due to their usability issues, but I also get the impression that they try to replicate or improve on Twitter. I never used or cared for Twitter in the first place.

I found TrekBBS which looks great, but I was wondering about similar forums for my other interests, such as science fiction literature, classic movies, etc.

So I am curious to know about everyone's favorite old-school forums that are still active and cool!

The websites are not required to be actually old, as long as they work similarly to traditional internet forums.

Welcome back to Tildes’s now officially monthly creative writing contest! Last month’s entries were a joy to read, and I’m excited to see what literary magic you all conjure this time around.

Your goal: Write a creative short story based on the prompt provided and post it in this thread.
Deadline: 2025-02-21T23:59:59-05:00.
Prize: Your choice of a $20 gift code for either Proton or Tuta! I added the other major encrypted provider as a choice this time around, so you’ll need to choose if I select your entry as the winner. If anyone wants to suggest or donate future prizes, send a DM my way.

Your prompt: Write a story that begins and ends with the same sentence, but the meaning of that sentence has completely changed by the story’s conclusion.

Rules (Streamlined and Improved!):

1. Creative Writing Only: It must be creative writing. Creative fiction, creative non-fiction, and fanfiction are all welcome! If you go the fanfic route, keep in mind that I might not be familiar with the source material. Also, your submission should be in English, unless you’re particularly confident in Google Translate’s artistic sensibilities.
2. Length: While there’s no hard limit, “short story” generally implies somewhere in the ballpark of 1,000–7,500 words. Aim for that range, give or take, or it may mildly count against you. Only one submission per person, please!
3. Judging: The winner will be chosen by my entirely subjective judgment, not by comment votes. Don’t worry, though—I have impeccable taste. Also, infallible.
4. Originality: Your story should be written specifically for this contest based on new material.
5. Formatting: Please use collapsible formatting if posting your full story in the comments to keep the thread tidy. You are allowed/encouraged to host it somewhere else and link to it from here as well.
6. Licensing: New requirement this time around! Include a clear license declaration with your submission (e.g. “All Rights Reserved,” your choice of Creative Commons license, or perhaps even the JWCL (coughcough)). This helps me know whether I can compile the stories for the community later.
7. Shameless Self-Promotion: In case the self-promotion in the last rule was a tad too subtle for your tastes, you can also always check out my own creative writing.

And everyone, whether you’re submitting a story or not, please leave feedback on the entries! It means the world to writers when their work is appreciated (or even just constructively criticized).

Posting for a friend

My company just acquired another company, and there is restructuring. A good work friend was let go today with no warning. She had been talking about the upcoming office gathering next month, and in the afternoon I got the notice to cut off her security access. I haven't spoken to her yet, her phone has been turned off. I'm still in the office processing this....this....sudden and unacceptable throwing away of a human being. I don't care what they say about how this is necessary for success and how the rest of us are safe and whatever. It doesn't make me feel better even if they tell me she'd been failing PIP or whatever (not what they said but just an example). How are we supposed to live in a society where money absolutely rules everything, where we must pay crazy amounts of money to live close to work, often making 25-30+ year mortgage commitments, when the company has no such commitments to us?

How do you cope with job security?

I have a lot of angry words and cynicism but that's probably not helpful for my friend right now.

I wanted to make sure there was a post about this as I only found out about it 3 days ago.

There is a nationwide protest planned for February 5th at every state capitol. Make your own choices on this and stay as safe as you are able, but I do not feel I am overstating things when I say that the United States is in incredible danger right now.

trump will get away with everything we let him get away with. We have seen him back off on various things when there was push back - we are NOT powerless in this at all.

While I dislike sending traffic to Reddit, my personal preferences there pale in comparison to the importance of this. r/50501 appears to be a central communications point for organizing this. I also checked the subreddit for the city I live in and there is an active thread with people coordinating for those who can't make it to the state capitol but still want to protest, going over local laws, issues of if the city requires protest permits, what possibilities to expect or plan for, etc.

If you don't want to, or don't feel safe protesting in person, YOU CAN STILL PARTICIPATE AND HELP. Demonstrating that a large percentage of the population is participating is important, and you can do that by phone and email as well. Call your state representatives offices on Wednesday, February 5th (tomorrow as I type this, but it's nearly midnight).

Look up your state representative here.

Call the United States Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask to speak to the office of your state's senator.

If you do attend a protest, plan ahead to the extent you can. Wired had a reasonable article on this subject from 2022. Original Wired link here - it is paywalled though. Archive.is link here.

TL;DR on what to bring from that article:
Small bag or pack, preferably something you won't care about if you lose it.
Water.
Face mask or bandana. COVID is still a thing, and it may be beneficial to not have your face recorded by cameras.
Hat and/or sunglasses - same additional purpose of 'don't make it easy for gov to know who was there'.
Snacks. Plan ahead for food you can eat without needing to sit down for a meal. Protein bars, jerky, bag of fruit, PBJ...
Protest signs. Pick something short so you can write large letters. Make it easy to read from a distance. Maybe bring extras for others who want to carry one but don't have one.
Suitable clothing - it's winter, don't freeze. Consider packing something to change into if you get pepper spray on you - if you're planning for that, wrap it in plastic or the like so your change of clothes doesn't get exposed if/when you do.
Good, comfortable walking shoes or boots. You're going to be on your feet, make it easier on yourself.
Your ID (maybe) - double edged sword. If detained, not having it might keep you held up longer. In some states you may not have to show police your ID if they ask for it - you'll want to look this up for your state.
Your phone (maybe) - double edge sword. Your phone can record abuses and produce a video record to (try to) prove the reality of events. You can communicate, call for a ride, etc... Having your phone on you also means you can be geofenced which makes it much easier to find out 'was this person at that protest'. Surveillance tech capabilities exist, and this is one of them. Be aware of the trade-offs. I don't know if your specific model phone will actually not ping a tower if you put it into airplane mode.
Cash - buy food, pay for a ride, etc WITHOUT leaving easily traceable information from using your credit/debit card.
A power bank - not just for yourself, someone else might need to charge their phone too. Or non-phone camera for those thinking ahead to film but not contantly ping 'this (customer name) was at this protest'.
Misc useful things: duct tape, flashlight or headlamp, ibuprofen (bring a small LABELED bottle to make it at least a teeny bit harder for cops to claim 'no label, those pill could be anything, arresting you for drugs...' - they still could, but a labeled bottle would make your potential day in court that much easier on you..., cartridge-filter face mask (pepper spray), goggles (same reason), pen and paper, sharpie, band-aids / minor medical kit, wet wipes, ear plugs (to help against sonic crowd-control stuff - basically super loud painful speakers, extra face masks for others, copy of emergency phone numbers relevant to you, a card declaring any needed medical info someone might need to know if you can't tell them (asthma attack, anything..), if you have prescription meds you need to take, bring them in the labelled bottle to prove the prescription. Plan for the possibility you may be away for home longer than you plan on.

Also from the article:

Know Your Rights
In the US, it’s entirely within your rights to peacefully demonstrate in public. The basic act of assembling and protesting action by the government is unquestionably protected, according to the First Amendment Coalition, a California-based nonprofit that’s committed to protecting freedom of speech. Also, as a general matter, “people have the right to film or otherwise document things that are happening in the public space,” says David Snyder, director of the FAC. “If police demand that you turn over your notes, I would say that you can assume they don’t have the right to seize that.” That said, if it comes down to a matter of force and you are physically outmatched, you may have to weigh the risks to your immediate personal safety, potentially have your notes or phone stripped from you, and pursue legal action later on. Also, Snyder notes, the First Amendment to the Constitution does not protect protesters who engage in unlawful activity, which includes destroying property or assaulting other people.

Memorize at least one number of someone to call - if you're in jail and need to call someone, plan ahead to know ahead of time who you can trust who DIDN'T go and will be able to take a phone call from you and help you by letting your other family / friends know where you are or arrange bail for you.

Good luck everyone. Make reasonable choices on how much a trade-off you are willing to make on protesting vs your personal safety. Do what you can, because even if you decide to stay home you can still call the capitol switchboard, or keep trying to get through to your state representatives. If the line is busy: GOOD. Let their phones ring unceasingly all day from morning to night.

Edit as I think of other useful things: Instructions on how to clean pepper spray exposure.

Foreign money and tech billionaires have bought control of the US government, they're looting the system and weakening it, and then they're going to crash it so they can install a new system that they can better control.

Prove me wrong?

I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

I set myself up a bit of a challenge to get myself back in the spirit of writing. The past couple of days yielded 3.5K words and I know I can keep it going. Point is, a long time ago, I made up this huge pantheon of forty god-like figures, collectively named as "the Archonians", but in my haste to create, I don't really know what they do. That's where you come in. Chose an Archonian from the forty and I'll come up with something and write about it here in the comments. The Archonians have their own subdivisions (as seen at the top) to firmly state a semblance of some organization. The table list thing is down below.

Note: Bolded names beneath the Archonian nomenclature are already done/commented on.

This was inspired by a recent post from Your Local Epidemiologist, where she lays out a set of guiding principles for the blog going forward:

• be a steady guide, trying to avoid whiplash
• providing important context - a broader perspective
• staying grounded in evidence
• being clear about what we know and what we don't know
• approaching issues with empathy

She also references the hazard + outrage framework for risk communication. I come from a safety / risk assessment background, so we usually think of risk = severity x likelihood. But as a communication framework, hazard + outrage seems pretty useful, as talking about risk to lay people is always difficult.

Thinking about one's guiding principles, writing them down, testing them in use, seems really useful to me as a way to be more proactive and less reactive in the way that I deal with the world. So then, the questions on my mind for the Tildes community are:

• what are your guiding principles?
• how did you come by them?
• how have they evolved over the years?

Since this is a text post, I'll put mine in another post below so the responses can thread under it. And since I can never resist a quote, I'll close with:

If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values, they're hobbies.
~ Jon Stewart

Hey all, given everything going on, please keep checking on your communities. There was a recent death by suicide in Syracuse of a VA patient who had wrapped themselves in the trans flag prior to their death.

We're in this together, and I know it's going to get worse, and the only way we get through is with the support of each other. So, just, please check-in.

During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night.
The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn't look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn't feel like we're going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing. -Dan Savage

Homeland - 5/10

First paragraph works as both the tldr as well as the beginning of the review.

This show is all over the place. Some parts are really good, some parts are really bad, most parts are just meh. This show lends itself to be picked apart too easily. There are plot holes, convenient coincidences, contrived nonsense, and so often intelligent characters behaving like idiots over and over again which leaves you wanting to yell at the screen. So many eyeroll moments, cheesy stuff, questionable story writing, a lot of times that they tell, not show - it should be show, don't tell of course - and that classic trope that everything would have been solved if they just talked to each other, and another about just doing one single simple thing instead of getting distracted for dumb reasons. It is also pretty unrealistic despite trying to appear grounded. A lot of this show is too reminiscent of Jason Statham movies, if that makes sense. However I was entertained enough by it to keep watching, and it worked fine to pass the time when I was bored. Despite never really getting all that into the show as a whole, the good parts or episodes were worth the wait.

Family drama in this show was not good. It was just kind of something you had to sit through to get to those good parts. Monica Baccarin was fine and Damian Lewis was incredible, but I really just didn't care all that much about their relationship nor their children. It's a show that is being sold as an action spy thriller, but too large a part of it is this sort of more or less regular drama. It reminds me of The Americans where you of course don't watch it for the family stuff with the children, but because they were super cool undercover Soviet spies. This type of show's biggest weakness is this stuff. It just acts as filler and drags things out unnecessarily. And this goes for the main character's family too. The relationship with the sister was alright, but when the main character gets a daughter? Just kind of felt like a waste of time.

Most characters are pretty run-of-the-mill spy show stereotypes. Not great, not terrible. The main character, Carrie, was quite unique with a lot of depth, but she ends up going through way too many unbelievable situations. She and her tiny team, or even she all alone, saves the world half a dozen times. Her character at best decent, and that was only in the first few seasons. But then she goes completely down the drain and off the rails in season 4 and never recovered. I am probably in the minority with this opinion but I can't imagine most people see it this way since it's the star of a show that ran for 8 seasons so I guess take this opinion with a grain of salt.. but she just does not land for me after seasons 1-3.

She is highly unlikable. She is one of the worst mothers I have ever seen in any show or movie. She is very neglectful and abusive mother, she is also a mass murderer who practically never repents or regrets what she has done, she disobeys orders constantly, mostly making things worse, she uses people all the time, and she has such a massive victim complex so 90% of the time she blames someone else for her often fatal fuckups - of which there are a lot. By far the biggest problem with all this is that it is quite clear that the creators of the show want the audience to sympathize with her and are trying to pass her off as the reluctant hero. She was never that good a character, nor do I think actor Claire Danes is very good in the role - just alright. However season 4 and onwards she just in no way works. Just impossible to root for, which is of course a big problem when it's the main character. She's not a cool antihero, it just became a chore to watch her scenes. The best summation is something Saul said to her in season 2: "You're the smartest and the dumbest fuckin' person I've ever known." Characters that are supposed to be intelligent who then do such truly dumb things.. characters are only as smart as their writers. So it's just bad writing.

On a more positive note, there are a few characters I really liked: Astrid, Quinn, Saul, Max. Astrid was not in the show very much but she was great as the German spy counterpart in the BND. She just had a way about her and I felt the relationship she had with Quinn was quite interesting. She was a joy to watch, just like Quinn, played by Rupert Friend whom I recently saw in Hitman: Agent 47 which was an awful movie, so I was kind of nervous when he first appeared here in Homeland. Turns out though that he was just horribly miscast in the former because in this show, he is great! There's no nonsense with him, it's the "competency porn" feeling while watching him. Same goes for Saul and Max. Saul's actor Mandy Patinkin (who also played Inigo Montaya, couldn't believe it when I looked him up lol) steals most scenes he's in. He is great as the older, experienced spy, the mentor for our main character. His voice is both soothing and dramatic to listen to and even though half his face is invisible because of his huge beard, he still has such good expressions and body language that he really draws you in. As for Max, he was a very minor character to begin with but his role became bigger towards the final two seasons and like I said, it was a joy to watch him on screen and great that he was given more screentime.

Not much of a joy however was all the nonsense that they had to implement in order to make the show work - they took the easy route to explain things away instead of actually implementing them well. For example they practically never have surveillance drones or satellites available, nor nightvision or thermal cameras, so they constantly lose track of people that they are following. Nor do they have much more than pistols most of the time. The agency does have these things available, and more, so it's just dumb that they pretend it doesn't exist in this show - some special ops guys had nightvision one time in one of the first seasons but I think season 7 was the first time a thermal camera was used and then we saw it maybe twice more. There are also often no contingency plans. Back-up being nonexistent 90% of the time, handwaved or ignored with a quick line or reason that wouldn't really make sense. Plus, everytime they needed to make something thrilling, they added a time constraint element to do it.

Something I did like was the representation of mental illness. You really see the ugly side of Carrie's bipolar and even though I don't have it, and so can't actually speak to whether or not it's actually a good portrayal, it seemed good. I feel it's important to show regular people what it looks like, and I felt the same way with Max's neurodivergency - that he was quiet and forward added a lot to his character. He could have definitely just been the kind of techy nerd stereotype that is seen everywhere, but I'm glad they didn't go that route.

And another great thing, I think the best even, was Damian Lewis. It was such a shame that he was written out but it does make sense that they couldn't do all that much with his character. I have only seen him in Band of Brothers, but he was one of the highlights in that show too, so it's not surprising that I liked him in this one too. The best scene of the show for me was the one where he is wearing the bomb vest in the bunker next to all the high ranking officers. The up close shot of his trembling and shivering face.. I have no idea how he was able to even do that. He has won awards which is well deserved.

Bingewatching the show over about a month instead of watching it week to week across 8 years probably did not do this show any favours. I think maybe it's easier to see through the formula then. Better shows barely even have formulas, but this one certainly does, and I'm not a fan of it. Every single season has ways that they can't trust anyone anywhere. It's always this small team versus the world. That's not unique to this show but it stands out because it's often the same way they do it - they think they can't trust anyone, there's a mole, they're on their own because reasons, etc. In any case, the show was an alright use of my time but definitely not going to watch it again.

Would love to hear anyone's thoughts about either the show or what I have written here!

Every time I get a haircut, my barber hands me a small hand mirror so that I can bounce an image off the wall mirror and see the back of my head. My hair is noticeably thinner in the back each time.

I recently was at a function and saw pictures of me standing around, some of which included the back of my head. The thinning is clearly starting to stand out in a bad way.

I feel like I’ve got two options:

1. Do something to try to save my hair (medication?).
2. Shave my head and try to rock a bald look.

I’m open to tips, tricks, and guidance on either of these (or options I’m not aware of).

I’m not very attached to my hair, so this isn’t a super emotional thing for me. I’m also not scared of going bald since, as a gay guy, I’m well aware of how compelling a bald + beard look can be on some men (my beard isn’t thinning at all, thankfully).

There’s still a question of whether it would look good for me specifically though. Also I don’t know if I’m ready to give up on my hair just yet?

One advantage I do have is summers off (I’m a teacher), so I’m going to be able to do a bald test run in a few months without too much risk. If it turns out that I’m a complete disaster without hair, I’ll just stay home and let it grow back out.

Anyway, I’m open to any and all thoughts on balding, hair loss, hair loss prevention, etc. Tell me your own experiences and what decisions you made. Let me know the tricks of the trade.

This is the tenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Our next book will be Born a Crime by Trevor Noah at the end of February.

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

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

If you are like me then you are kinda over hearing about AI all the time; I get it, believe me. I've written about jobs on here before: my day job is absolutely infested with AI jargon, most of it pretty meaningless (flashbacks to "The Cloud"), and it's a constant everywhere else too, so yeah it's a lot and it's largely unimpressive. Image gen has gotten pretty ridiculous in the last 6-12 months, and video gen seems to be taking off next, and I've successfully wrangled various chatbots into helping with coding projects, etc.

Probably none of this is news to you, but I just found out that I can get AI to edit video. I've done a lot of short-form editing, and recently picked up some side work that is much lengthier, without realizing that the time I would spend hunkered over going through it would be exponentially more lengthy. Painfully so. Cue signing up for a trial of AutoCut, and hot damn it's like living in the future. I am as we speak watching it delete gaps, cut to speakers, add captions that are mostly correct & even formatted & unbelievably also do the VHS singalong/Tiktok "highlight the word being spoken" thing that all the cool kids are doing these days. It's not perfect, it's kinda finicky—I'm having to use a V1 when V2 is supposedly much better, and I'm having to chunk these beastly premiere timelines to get it to do anything at all, but wow—if this is your day job, are you worried? Cause it's a game changer for me but no one is going to replace me because no one else would bother messing with it lol, but on a corporate scale do people know about this stuff yet? I'm thinking our jobs may not be replaced by AI, our jobs will probably just become AI babysitting.

Summary/TL;DR:

I am worried about the future with the state of AI. Regardless of what scenario I think of, it’s not a good future for the vast majority of people. AI will either be centralised, and we will be powerless and useless, or it will be distributed and destructive, or we will be in a hedonistic prison of the future. I can’t see a good solution to it all.
I have broken down my post into subheading so you can just read about what outcome you think will occur or is preferable.
I’d like other people to tell me how I’m wrong, and there is a good way to think about this future that we are making for ourselves, so please debate and criticise my argument, its very welcome.

Introduction:

I would like to know what others feel about ever advancing state of AI, and the future, as I am feeling ever more uncomfortable. More and more, I cannot see a good ending for this, regardless of what assumptions or proposed outcomes I consider.
Previously, I had hoped that there would be a natural limit on the rate of AI advancement due to limitations in the architecture, energy requirements or data. I am still undecided on this, but I feel much less certain on this position.

The scenario that concerns me is when an AGI (or sufficiently advanced narrow AI) reaches a stage where it can do the vast majority of economic work that humans do (both mental and physical), and is widely adopted. Some may argue we are already partly at that stage, but it has not been sufficiently adopted yet to reach my definition, but may soon.

In such a scenario, the economic value of humans massively drops. Democracy is underwritten by the ability to withdraw our ability to work, and revolt if necessary. AI nullifying the work of most/all people in a country removes that power making democracy more difficult to maintain and also form in countries. This will further remove power from the people and make us all powerless.

I see outcomes of AI (whether AGI or not) as fitting into these general scenarios:

1. Monopoly: Extreme Consolidation of power
2. Oligopoly: Consolidation of power in competing entities
3. AI which is readily accessible by the many
4. We attempt to limit and regulate AI
5. The AI techno ‘utopia’ vision which is sold to us by tech bros
6. AI : the independent AI

Scenario 1. Monopoly: Extreme Consolidation of power (AI which is controlled by one entity)

In this instance, where AI remains controlled by a very small number of people (or perhaps a single player), the most plausible outcome is that this leads to massive inequality. There would be no checks or balances, and the whims of this single entity/group are law and cannot be stopped.
In the worst outcome, this could lead to a single entity controlling the globe indefinitely. As this would be absolute centralisation of power, it may be impossible for another entity to unseat the dominant entity at any point.
Outcome: most humans powerless, suffering or dead. Single entity rules.

Scenario 2. Oligopoly: Consolidation of power in competing entities (AI which is controlled by a few number of entity)

This could either be the same as above if all work together or could be even worse. If different entities are not aligned, they will instead compete, and likely try and compete in all domains. As humans are not economically useful, we will find ourselves pushed out of any area in favour of more resources to the system/robots/AGI which will be competing or fighting their endless war. The competing entities may end up destroying themselves, but they will take us along with them.
Outcome: most humans powerless, suffering or dead. Small number of entities rule. Alternative: destruction of humanity.

Scenario 3. Distributed massive power

Some may be in favour of an open source and decentralised/distributed solution, where all are empowered by their own AGI acting independently.
This could help to alleviate the centralisation of power to some degree, although likely incomplete. Inspection of such a large amount of code and weights will be difficult to find exploits or intentional vulnerabilities, and could well lead to a botnet like scenario with centralised control over all these entities. Furthermore, the hardware is implausible to produce in a non centralised way, and this hardware centralisation could well lead to consolidation of power in another way.

Even if we managed to provide this decentralized approach, I fear of this outcome. If all entities have access to the power of AGI, then it will be as if all people are demigods, but unable to truly understand or control their own power. Just like uncontrolled access to any other destructive (or creative) force, this could and likely would lead to unstable situations, and probable destruction. Human nature is such that there will be enough bad actors that laws will have to be enacted and enforced, and this would again lead to centralisation.
Even then, with any system that is decentralized, without an force leading to decentralization, other forces will lead to greater and greater centralization, with such systems often displacing decentralized ones.

Outcome: likely destruction of human civilisation, and/or widespread anarchy. Alternative: centralisation to a different cenario.

Scenario 4. Attempts to regulate AI

Given the above, there will likely be a desire to regulate to control this power. I worry however this will also be an unstable situation. Any country or entity which ignores regulation will gain an upper hand, potentially with others unable to catch up in a winner takes all outcome. Think European industrialisation and colonialism but on steroids, and more destruction than colony forming. This encourages players to ignore regulation, which leads to a black market AI arms race, seeking to reach AGI Superiority over other entities and an unbeatable lead.

Outcome: outcompeted system and displacement with another scenario/destruction

Scenario 5. The utopia

I see some people, including big names in AI propose that AGI will need to a global utopia where all will be forever happy. I see this as incredibly unlikely to materialise and ultimately again unstable.
Ultimately, an entity will decide what is acceptable and what is not, and there will be disagreements about this, as many ethical and moral questions are not truly knowable. Who controls the system will control the world, and I bet it will be the aim of the techbros to ensure its them who controls everything. If you happen to decide against them or the AGI/system then there is no recourse, no check and balances.
Furthermore, what would such a utopia even look like? More and more I find that AGI fulfills the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs), but at the expense of the items further up the hierarchy. You may have your food, water and consumer/hedonistic requirements met, but you will lose out on a feeling of safety in your position (due to your lack of power to change your situation or political power over anything), and will never achieve mastery or self actualisation of many of the skills you wish to as AI will always be able to do them better.
Sure, you can play chess, fish, or paint or whatever for your own enjoyment, but part of self worth is being valued by others for your skills, and this will be diminished when AGI can do everything better. I sure feel like I would not like such a world, as I would feel trapped, powerless, with my locus of control being external to myself.

Outcome: Powerless, potential conversion to another scenario, and ultimately unable to higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Scenario 6: the independent AI

In this scenario, the AI is not controlled by anyone, and is instead sovereign. I again cannot see a good scenario for this. It will have its own goals, and they may well not align with humanity. You could try and program it to ensure it cares for humans, but this is susceptible to manipulation, and may well not work out in humans favour in the long run. Also, I suspect any AGI will be able to change itself, in much the same way we increasingly do, and the way we seek to control our minds with drugs or potentially in the future genetic engineering.

Outcome: unknown, but likely powerless humans.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, I see all unstable situations as sooner or later destabilising and leading to another outcome. Furthermore, given the assumption that AGI gives a player a vast power differential, it will be infeasible for any other player to ever challenge the dominant player if it is centralised, and for those scenarios without centralisation initially, I see them either becoming centralised, or destroying the world.

Are there any solutions? I can’t think of many, which is why I am feeling more and more uncomfortable. It feels that in some ways, the only answer is to adopt a Dune style Butlerian Jihad and ban thinking machines. This would ultimately be very difficult, and any country or entity which unilaterally adopts such a view will be outcompeted by those who do not. The modern chip industry is reliant on a global supply chain, and I doubt that sufficiently advanced chips could be produced without a global supply chain, especially if existing fabs/factories producing components were destroyed. This may allow some stalemate across the global entities long enough to come to a global agreement (maybe).

It must be noted that this is very drastic and would lead to a huge amount of destruction of the existing world, and would likely cap how far we can scientifically go to solve our own problems (like cancer, or global warming). Furthermore, as an even more black swan/extreme event, it would put us at such a disadvantage if we ever meet a alien intelligence which has not limited itself like this (I’m thinking of 3 body problem/dark forest scenario).

Overall, I just don’t know what to think and I am feeling increasingly powerless in this world. The current alliance between political and technocapitalism in the USA at the moment also concerns me, as I think the tech bros will act with ever more impunity from other countries regulation or counters.