Even with all the political upheaval, my day to day has not changed. A sign of some level of privilege, but also something of growing discomfort. I feel like i should actively doing something to fight or preparing for the worst.

I often hear that we need to organize but i find that vague and not helpful. Going to rallys and protests shows public anger and frustration but dont see how that directly affects the current administration when they just dont care. Its still a start, but how are people turning that frustration into a action?

How have your lives been changing and what are you doing to confront the change?

What are some ways groups have organized to take direct action?

I like modern tech, but I'm slowly coming to hate the internet.

I read Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism late last year and found it preaching to the choir, but noticed that most of the negative effects of technology use were actually from internet use. The attention economy, privacy violations, enshittification, etc. are all mostly byproducts of the internet being so tightly integrated into our lives. When I heard about CVE potentially losing its funding (I know very litte about CS or anything related to software, so I'm unsure of how big a threat this really is to an end-user), the thought popped into my head... "is it time to get offline?".

I am 20 years old, so my entire life has been spent in a world where devices are connected to the internet far more often than not, and I wonder if it's time to switch to an "offline first" mentality? I already embrace this philosophy when it comes to music, downloading the songs I want to my computer and syncing them to my phone through iTunes, but this would take that one step further: turn on my computer's wi-fi to check emails, read through the new posts here, check some other sites, etc. and then turn it off until I explicitly need to do something online.

I'm lucky enough that most of the (important) things I do on my computer can be done 90% offline, but I wonder if it's even worth doing? I'm curious to hear thoughts on this from the people of Tildes, or any methods that you have implemented in your life.

EDIT: I should clarify: I already have basically no social media, I use beeper to see my instagram DMs (I can't really get rid of this without abandoning any age-adjacent social life) and that's it. You could call Discord and Tildes social medias, but that's maybe pushing it. I'm more talking about the recent resurgence of physical media and reframing the internet as something that is accessed rather than omnipresent in my usage habits.

I don't know how well known this show is. Maybe I'm saying something obvious, like "hey, have you all heard about The Wire?", but in most of my social group this completely slipped under the radar. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine I started following discussions about geopolitics and international conflicts on our local discussion board, and in there it's the opposite, apparently everyone knows it.

It's a show about deep undercover agents working for DGSE, the french equivalent of CIA.

It has two main layers. Firstly it's apparently quite accurate with regards to how real intelligence agencies work, plus it's obviously strongly inspired by real events. It mostly deals with ISIS, but also with Russia, relations between France and the US and other issues. This is very interesting on its own.

Secondly it's basically a psychological drama/thriller. The lives of undercover agents consist of constantly lying, constantly being on guard and never fully trusting anybody, and there cannot be a tangible division between their professional and their personal lives because they can never fully switch off. And human failures in their profession, whether small or large, cannot be fully avoided.

The premise of this whole show is exploring how those failures happen and what are their consequences. And those consequences are often terrible, so it's sometimes a heavy show to watch.

What I love about The Bureau is how it's all relatively civil, showing things without exaggeration, overly emotional music or other stylization. I want to say it's very un-american in this aspect, and on one hand mean that, I'm incredibly tired of film makers beating me over the head with horrible things like slow motion shots accompanied by emotionally simplistic music, as if I'm too stupid to understand what I'm supposed to feel simply from what's happening in the story.

But at the same time The Wire is also american and it's a good example of a show that does the exact opposite (and I love it for that). The Bureau does not go as far as The Wire, if only because human emotions are a much bigger focus of the show. However it is much closer in style and in quality to The Wire than to some imaginary "hollywood average". Overall it doesn't feel like it's playing tricks on you. People die and suffer horribly, and sometimes it is characters you love, but it doesn't feel like some cheap "ha! I got you, I bet you're devastated now!" and it doesn't happen often, for shock value (edit: actually suffering does happen all the time, but killing off characters does not).

In addition to the style feeling quite fresh in the context of mainstream cinematography, it's full of great and outside of France relatively unknown actors. They make it easy to fall in love with many of the characters. The characters have layers and development and nobody is black and white, it's a delight to watch them.

I'm putting it next to The Wire, Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad as a 10/10 show.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like 4chan, buttholes and tags. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was mortified.

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