I dont think it would be unusual to say that I enjoy life when things are running smoothly and everything feels under control, stress levels are low and I can plan for an enjoyable future without much worry.

And then everything goes to hell in a hand basket. Like being wracked with unimaginable pain so bad I wake my wife in a cold sweat at 2 am and choke out "We need to get to Emergency now". And then, unbelievably, it gets even worse, so bad that thoughts that death might actually be sweet relief start to creep in.

That was two weeks ago when I found out that not only did I have a 3 cm gallstone stuffing up my gall bladder but it had perforated into my liver and my gut was filling with infection, a condition that can shut down organs or even be fatal if not treated rapidly. Through the miracle of modern Canadian healthcare, they had me multi tested, diagnosed and into emergency surgery in short order.

And a fortnight hence, I have a lot to ponder (because Im still too damn weak to do much more than type) and its made me admit that unexpected adversity is a gift not a curse.

Foremost, it focuses the mind. When youre laying on an operating table surrounded by surgeons and nurses and wondering if you're going to come out of it alive, a lot of things become unimportant. I didn't care about politics. Or bills. Or investments. Or achievements. Or just about anything. I just wanted to be ok, not only for my own sake but especially for those I care about. And at that point there was crystal clear realization that what counts is only that - those I care about. The rest is dust and meaningless in the grand scheme of things. A lesson I've learned profoundly once before, but the mind dulls with an easy existence and needs a refresher on occasion, unwelcome as it may be.

Coming through also taught me how much I take for granted, especially having reasonably good health. I've had random unexplained attacks before, but for a day I dealt with incredible pain and it was unbearable. I had to think of the people who deal with that kind of soul crushing challenge continuously - their existence and will to persevere is challenged on a daily basis. And hardly anyone sees that exhausting internal grind but just having the will to stay alive is a hard won battle every single day and no one's handing them trophies for it. I have respect for those who do it, and a much greater understanding for those who just can't and decide to opt out. I get why that makes sense for some.

I also have a newfound debt of gratitude to people with character, foresight and undefeated willpower like Tommy Douglas who fought for universal healthcare in this country, against the will of most doctors at the time who (to my great surprise) actually went on strike to oppose him. After 20 tests, xrays, a CT scan and emergency surgery (with 2 surgeons, anesthesiologist, and 4 nurses), and multiple days recovery in big, brand new private room and being sent home with all my meds my entire bill was zero. No one even mentioned money and there is no insurance or co-pay to settle. Its done. I cant imagine the burden Id be feeling today if I was now saddled with crushing debt, but I am deeply grateful for the system that did all this for free, even if I do have to pay higher taxes to get it. I will remember that the next time my income tax bill comes around and make a mental note that my taxes are not 'wasted'.

I'm not going to be yodelling with joy if something this painful slaps me upside the head again anytime soon. But I also meekly acknowledge that sometimes life's most profound, most well remembered lessons dont come out of joy, they are often seared into memory by unexpected, even shocking adversity. I might not like it at the time, but in hindsight, it's a gift. An unwanted but valuable gift.

Hey all - after a couple threads discussing randomizers and Archipelago, we should try to get a multiworld game going here! I'm thinking this would start the night of May 8th depending on availability and interest. If you are interested, just shoot a reply in here and let us know your planned game! I'll tag a post about a week out asking for YAML files, and I'll likely make a Discord server for the event itself so we can stream and share info.

This is a bit far into the future and I wanted to make sure the date would work for people interested, so no need to send YAMLs or anything yet. But do let me know if you'd like to join - no matter your skill level, we'd be happy to have you!

(edit: hid that bigass faq thingy)

Having received a jury summons, and with my mental health being how it is, I recently took a bus to the nearby used bookstore. The rule of buying secondhand books is this: You must pretend, while in the store, that your phone doesn’t exist; you must not come in looking for anything in particular; you must let yourself be guided by the titles and covers and the blurbs alone. So I followed my nose over to the “poetry and art criticism” shelf of the store (which, I am convinced, is to blame for my poor performance at parties) and started browsing.

There I found Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games and immediately developed a crush. Maybe it was the title, which seemed carefully engineered not to appeal to the general public. Or maybe it was the editor, Carmen Maria Machado, whose short story collection Her Body and Other Parties is a personal favourite. Either way, the anthology of nineteen pieces from nineteen authors about approximately nineteen games was in excellent condition, and had been marked down to eight dollars, so I added it to my little stack of purchases and wandered over to the checkout.

Like all anthologies, Critical Hits varies widely in quality across its component essays (and one comic). It starts strong: its introduction is a delight, with some of the best footnotes I’ve ever enjoyed. Likewise its first essay, Elissa Washuta’s “I Struggled a Long Time with Surviving,” an exploration of her experience with The Last of Us, pandemic, and intractable illness was deeply impactful and genuinely changed how I looked at the game. But this is par for the course with anthologies (at least, well-compiled ones) which know to dazzle you off the bat with their best material, so that you’re willing to endure their worst. Here, in my estimation, the worst is Anders Morson’s “The Cocoon,” which cites Brian Tomasik (one of those insufferable San Fransisco Rationalists) to argue that, in aggregate, it’s unethical to kill video game NPCs. Morson then goes on to list every Aliens game ever released, for six pages, with dazzling insights like “Aliens: Colonial Marines for PS3 Xbox (2013) is definitely an Aliens-y FPS.”

In aggregate, though, the anthology is more good than bad. Apart from “The Cocoon,” the worst essays here are mostly just mediocre, or meandering. And there are some true standouts here: Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Cathartic Warfare,” nat steele’s “I Was a Teenage Transgender Supersoldier.” And the reason I’m here, writing this essay of my own: Larissa Pham’s “Status Effect,” an exploration of depression, damage-over-time, and Genshin Impact.

Released globally in 2020 for PC and mobile devices, Genshin Impact is an action-adventure game which sees players assemble a four-person team from its extensive cast of characters and then wander out into its expansive open world to complete monsters, open quests, and kill chests (something like that, anyway). A live-service game, Genshin has seen regular map expansions and a remarkably stable playerbase for the last five years, and, like WoW before it, has spawned a wave of copycats hoping to take a bite out of the aging titan’s colossal corpus. Larissa Pham and I would have started playing Genshin at around the same time – she describes becoming obsessed with the game in the winter of 2020-2021; I first launched the game in February of 2021, in the icy depths of the pandemic, shortly after failing to kill myself, as something to do while waiting for the hospital bills to pour in.

In Status Effect, Pham recounts a minor controversy from the fall of 2021. Genshin’s meta had stagnated: a year into its lifespan, no one wanted to include healers on their team, when shielders were proactive and dodging was free. So the developers implemented a damage-over-time status effect called corrosion, inflicted by certain enemies and in certain phases of endgame content, which ignored shields and would wipe the whole team if not healed through. Genshin’s community was and is large enough that any kind of meta shift (however necessary) will spark outcry, controversy, and apocalypse prophets heralding doom (I was one of them: “What, am I just not supposed to use my Zhongli? No one’s gonna pull for fucking Kokomi”), but for Pham, that debuff gave her the language to think and speak about her depression more concretely.

Genshin has never given me the language I needed to think or speak about anything. Frankly, I don’t think the game’s story, which is consistently a mediocre slog (with a few bright spots) is capable at this point of doing anything interesting or novel. Even in Pham’s case, Genshin’s “corrosion” debuff might have been fungible with any damage-over-time debuff in any game – Pham just happened to be playing Genshin at the time when she needed it. But even saying this, even speaking as someone who cares about a game’s story more than any other element, I think Genshin is a fantastic game, in at least one major aspect: its exploration and world design.

Upon its announcement, Genshin was panned as “anime Breath of the Wild” a comparison enabled by its gliding and climbing and stamina meter and early-game monster designs and the shade of its grass. But cosmetic similarities aside, Genshin is actually doing something very different – very unique, I think. Genshin presents the player with an extremely large, colorful, and ever-expanding world, peppered with a truly mind-boggling amount of chests, environmental puzzles, and enemy camps. From any given point in the world, you can probably see several little leads to follow: a locked chest in a monster den; a blue faerie waiting to lead you to its court; a movement time trial; a floating elemental oculus. And once you pick one of those, and figure it out, you’ll once again be able to look around and see more chests to open, more stuff to collect, more things to do. So the world is incredibly dense with collectibles, but traversing it is surprisingly weighty. Climbing, gliding, running; all of these are either slow, or stamina-intensive, so you’ll move through the world at a light jog much of the time. This means that you can often see and plan a route to many different puzzle or collectibles before getting to them; it means that, instead of a constant stream of opening chests, each little dopamine hit is separated by a long breath, where you can appreciate the absolutely gorgeous world, and its stirring, melancholy music. And often, quests and puzzles and chests and collectibles will be laid out in a remarkably subtle web, designed to tug the player off the beaten path, towards some of the game’s most gorgeous sights, its most scenic vistas (of which there are plenty).

So maybe in terms of its exploration philosophy Genshin is an open-world collect-a-thon, more similar to a Super Mario Odyssey than a Breath of the Wild. But really, it’s nothing like either game, or anything else I’ve played; so much could be said about the game’s combat, its world quests, its approach to rewards, the way the game’s levelling systems encourage diverse engagement with the open world. I’ll instead conclude with this: Genshin Impact has my favourite exploration experience of any game I’ve ever played, and nothing else really even comes close.

Early in the game’s lifespan (December 2020), the developers added the new Dragonspine region: a frozen mountain, home to the bones of dragons and the ruins of an ancient civilization, introducing lethal new mechanics as a way to shake up exploration. Arguably a precursor to corrosion, while in Dragonspine, a status effect called “sheer cold” would accumulate and, once maxed, drain your health at such a high rate that no shielding or healing could keep up. Getting wet would accelerate cold accumulation; eating hot foods, lighting fires, or standing near heat sources would slow or reverse it. It encouraged a different playstyle; beyond keeping a fire character on your team, sheer cold also encouraged players to explore more deliberately; to stay close to heat sources and not stray too far from the path.

In Dragonspine, the main plot involves restoring an ancient relic called the Skyfrost Nail – an enormous pillar, shattered. Beginning at a base camp at Dragonspine’s foot, you slowly ascend the mountain, fighting monsters, exploring ancient, sealed laboratories, and maybe getting distracted to grab a chest here or a crimson agate there. On the way up, you learn fragments of the story of the ancient civilization that dwelt on Dragonspine, before it froze over; you hear of their research in alchemy, and the celestial nail that was flung down by the gods – to stop their research, before they climbed too high? It was this nail that froze Dragonspine, and somehow corrupted it; it is this nail that you find in broken fragments at Dragonspine’s peak. Beset by truly diabolical monster encounters designed to freeze you fast and absolutely ruin your afternoon, you thaw these fragments and watch as they ascend, reforming the nail, the enormous pillar hanging high above Dragonspine, ready to fall once more. You can, at last, ride the wind currents all the way up to stand on the head of the nail, at what was at the time the highest point in all of Tevyat, to gaze at the world around. All the lands accessible: Liyue and its harbor; Mondstadt and its cathedral, and beyond them, those inaccessible, not yet implemented into the game, represent as abstract hills, mountain, and sea, rolling endlessly into the distant grey fog.

It was February of 2021, and I had failed to die. Had been released from the hospital into the slushy, wet aftermath of a winter storm, with enough medication to last two more weeks and (though I didn’t know it at the time) enough debt to last through to this very day – if only because I stubbornly refuse to pay it. I returned to my on-campus apartment to discover that I had no heating, no power. Hot water, at least, for tea and baths and thin, meatless soups. According to the thermostat, my poorly-insulated home was hovering around 51°F, so I dragged my mattress off the bedframe, into the corner where it was warmer, sealed myself under a mountain of blankets, and opened my laptop.

I had meant to start drafting emails to professors, to explain my weeks-long absence and ask for extensions, grace, and leniency (all would eventually give it, and I didn’t even have to use the s-word, or show the doctors’ notes I had so dutifully accumulated). But in that moment, my hands were shaking from the cold and the anxiety: the knowledge that my life could be ruined, my academic scholarship lost, if any of them declined. So instead, I opened the app store, downloaded Genshin Impact, and, after a couple days of sleepless, bloodshot gaming sessions, climbed the Skyfrost Nail in Dragonspine.

Genshin might not have been capable of giving me the language to understand my experience with depression, dysphoria, and suicide, but it was certainly there when I needed it – the unique, frictional experience it provided offering a strange resonance with my own. And I kept playing it for a long time, perpetually enchanted by its world, its music, the waves of nostalgia and grief that would wash over me at the strangest times.

In the summer of 2021, I wrote a poem, for a poetry class, which began with the lines, “The economy being how it is / Instead of finishing school / I took a job this autumn at the Indiana Dunes.” It was a narrative poem, the only type of poem I’ve ever been able to write. In it, the speaker wanders around on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan in the aftermath of a heavy storm, picking their way around shredded volleyball nets and desolate lounge chairs, all half-buried under wet, sandy drifts. They’re looking for their phone, probably hopelessly lost amidst the dunes, but in the end, climbing Mt. Baldy (a very tall dune; not actually a mountain), they find that what they were searching for was not actually their phone – was, instead, perspective. A broader view of the world’s beauty. “On a clear day, from there, you can see all the way to Chicago,” they think, before beginning the climb. But in the end, reaching the top, the day is not clear, so they are left to “feast [their] eyes on the endless expanse of grey water.”

I must apologize for exposing you to my immature poetry, but the fact that I remember so many lines from that tiny, throwaway piece, from one of my least notable college classes, has always been suspicious to me. I suspect that it contains some sort of heartbreaking insight into my mindset at the time – a tragic longing for the picturesque (to quote a book I haven’t read). I played games where you climbed a mountain, wrote poems where the speaker climbed a dune; some nights, I walked a quarter mile to the parking garage near my apartment and climbed to the top level and leaned on the concrete railing and stared out through life-affirming chicken wire. I wanted to see in color, I suppose; to recapture the vividity of a world that I found increasingly exhausting, but mostly saw only greys: grey distance fog, grey water, and the grey existence of a college-town suburb, shining dully under the light-polluted grey sky.

In November of 2022, Genshin Impact released its 3.2 update “Akasha Pulses, the Kalpa Flame Rises,” which didn’t add any new regions to the map. Instead, it contained the concluding act of the Sumeru region’s main story quest, where the player teams up with a god, a couple academics, a dancer and a cop to fight the evils of the censored internet. For Genshin, this quest (and its preceding acts) were well above par, featuring (among other strengths) actual themes, and a plot that went beyond its gnostic inspirations. So, sure, 3.2 was a timely, relatively compelling update. It was also the update where I quit playing Genshin Impact – for good, I thought. There is simply only so much exploration, questing and combat that can be done in the same world, structure and systems before a work of art overstays its welcome. It wasn’t with any malice that I quit Genshin – I had simply had enough, and that was that.

My life had changed a great deal in the intervening period. I had finished college, moved cities, learned to cook, become a woman. Gotten a second dose of the COVID vaccine, the day before the move, and spent the entire ride to my new home feeling miserably ill because of it.

Around the same time, Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon, compilers for Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games would have been working on their collection. It’s a collection that lives in the shadow of COVID-19 – almost every piece here, you can detect the pandemic’s penumbra (if it isn’t explicitly mentioned). For a lot of people, the pandemic was isolating, lonely, cold. For writers, it might have been that too, but we are solitary creatures, and the thing it gave us was, most of all, time: to play games, to write or fail to write, to think, to spiral.

Perhaps to counteract this spiral, Graywolf Press, a Minnesota-based not-for-profit publishing house, spent the pandemic hosting “cute mental health cocktail hours.” Lennon was there, Machado was there (my beloved Her Body and Other Parties was published by Graywolf) and it was there that Critical Hits was conceptualized.

“What we wanted to do was have a really diverse group of writers to provide a very diverse perspective of gaming, by writing about games however they want. We sort of gave them free rein,” Machado says, in an interview she and Lennon gave to Dazed Digital. “It was wild how people were like, ‘Oh my God, yes!’ Everything that came in was so good and so interesting and so different. It was a really extraordinary group of artists who had so many things to say.”

I don’t know how Larissa Pham, who wrote my favourite essay in the collection, first became attached to it. Shockingly, there aren’t that many interviews or monographs out there describing the creation process for Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games, a book with fewer than 500 ratings on Goodreads. Pham has written a smattering of fiction, nonfiction and creative nonfiction; essays, short stories, criticism. Avant-garde poetry, presented on an interactive github website. Kinky lesbian erotica. A cultural commentary about tradwives and baking. She also, at least for a while, played Genshin Impact, at the same time I and everyone else did. I am struck by the strange syzygy of our experiences. Pham graduated Yale; I went to a state school. She gets published; I post to Tildes. She teaches classes; I am constantly struck by how much I have to learn. But in the winter of 2020-2021, both of us, grappling with our respective illnesses, crossed paths with this game, and it was there for us when we needed it.

In January of 2025, I bought and read Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games. In early February, instilled with a sense of nostalgia for a game I hadn’t touched in years, and tired of playing Shadow of the Erdtree (another game with excellent exploration of a very different kind) I downloaded the HoyoPlay launcher and, with it, Genshin Impact.

Logging in, I was greeted with an embarrassment of little red exclamation marks, attached to almost every UI element, there to helpfully explain what I had missed, what was new, and all the crazy exciting retention-driving bonuses the game would give me to help me catch up. According to the huge new blank spaces on the map, I had many more regions to explore; according to the quest log, many more mediocre stories to sit through. According to my backpack, enough saved-up resources from before I had quit to immediately acquire and build the 5-star character Arlecchino, the only female character in the game – out of some sixty, now – who could plausibly be described as handsome (her vest buttons on the left). Perhaps I should have been overwhelmed. But sinking back into Genshin’s loop felt like coming home. Swimming through the new undersea regions, Fontaine and the Sea of Bygone Eras, offered a welcome twist to what was still a fundamentally fantastic exploration loop. Quests like “The Dirge of Bilquis” and “Masquerade of the Guilty” might not have been brilliant, but featured gorgeous locations, entertaining set pieces, and even an excellent VA performance or two.

Apparently, I was coming back at a bad time. Shortly before I collected my Arlecchino, a new character had been released: Mavuika. I never got around to playing the quests where she was featured, but apparently she was poorly written and presented a real problem for Genshin’s balance. Mavuika, you see, has a magical motorbike that a). Doesn’t really fit with Genshin’s usual magitech aesthetics and b). Removes all discernible friction from exploration, with its ability to drive super fast, climb walls, ride on water, and even, for a short time, fly. I was slightly scandalized when I heard about her, frankly.

“Sure,” I thought, “This doesn’t affect me, I’m never going to use her. But if a new player spends their limited resources to get Mavuika (a smart decision; she is, in addition to everything else, a very strong DPS, powercreeping Arlecchino) won’t that ruin the game for them? Won’t her ability to bypass all the exploration challenges in the game take away the one thing that makes it so special?” It felt like the game jumping the shark, releasing a broken character to make a quick buck at the expense of its long-term health. But truthfully, I was a tourist in Genshin this time, coming back to gawk at how it had changed after years of absence. I have no real stake in its balance. I don’t really recommend anyone play it. What happens to the meta and monetization of this game I once loved terribly is now water off a dyke’s back.

Things that I used to get very up-in-arms about no longer really bother me. I’m sometimes unsure whether that’s a result of healing or hypernormalisation.

I had jury duty at the Seattle Municipal Court that month, a boxy building downtown. Had to report in at nine in the morning, riding the bus, shaking slightly from the cold and the anxiety. Of course, it’s not yet illegal to be a transsexual in one of the most wonderfully LGBT-indifferent cities on the planet, but the current political climate lends itself to overthinking.

Potential jurors are to report to the eleventh floor, to an airy, high-ceilinged, window-walled space crammed with chairs and tables and an attached kitchenette – the vending machines offering instruction on how to contact the county for reimbursement. We were to be paid twenty-five dollars per day (plus transit and food costs, if applicable). We were to watch informational videos, fill out cursory forms, and read quietly until called. It was all terribly adolescent, terribly bland. I found myself ruminating on the abstract sculpture pieces hanging from the ceiling, wondering whether their creators had intended them for this space, or whether they had been sentenced to hang here – as a punishment for reckless driving, maybe? What kind of cases even get tried in municipal court? Eventually, I went out onto the rooftop terrace, with only my coffee to protect me from the chilly, cloudy February weather.

To the west, I could see out the Port of Seattle, its great cranes priestly in their red and white liveries, their still solemnity. A container ship lay still in the bay, making no progress to its destination. And nearer: a sliver of downtown. An empty pit, filled with the refuse of aborted construction, bags of trash, tiny blue dumpsters. Graffiti, content indiscernible. Brown brick buildings; a yellow taxi (!) threading between them. A whole city, half asleep, stirring amid the late morning fog. It started to rain, a miserable spitting drizzle, and I scurried inside to protect my book and my temperamental hair.

This February, on my last day playing Genshin Impact, I received a DM from a random, low-level stranger named Quentin. “HELP!!” it said. I joined his world in co-op mode.

Quentin was exploring Dragonspine. When I arrived, his shiny new (low-level) Mavuika was frozen solid by an ice mage, a couple steps away from drowning in a nearby pool, like my own characters had been four years ago. There are some challenges, it seems, that even the most broken character cannot bypass.

Quentin and I summited Dragonspine together. I was shocked to discover that, even after four years, I still remembered the climb almost perfectly. Still remembered the jagged ruins; the wind currents; the terrifying monsters that had killed me over and over again. I hadn’t resorted to messaging strangers to defeat them, but it’s pretty common to do so – new players almost always struggle with Dragonspine. And so there I was, the helpful stranger this time, jogging forward, activating waypoints, lighting fires, killing chunky minibosses with a single unbuffed normal attack while Quentin stood behind me and put motivational stickers in the chat (stickers are the de facto mode of communication in Genshin co-op, as it’s never a surety that any two players will share a language). Quentin was there – why else? – to repair the skyfrost nail. Sure, his Mavuika could motorbike faster than my characters could climb, but still he slowed down so that we could make the ascent side-by-side. And when he seemed to struggle with the light puzzling involved in thawing the nail fragments, I sat my Arlecchino down next to important clues that he was missing and posted slightly stern stickers until he noticed.

At the end of the cutscene where the pillar at last rises into the sky, Quentin and I climbed and ran and rode the wind currents up to stand on the head of the Skyfrost Nail. We couldn’t stay long; sheer cold accumulates fast up there, and neither Quentin nor I had brought a healer or a portable stove. But we still stayed, as long as we could, staring out over Teyvat.

Over the course of over four years of updates, scenery that had once been indistinct rolling hills and sea, fading into fog, had been replaced by new regions, sprawling far beyond our view. Quentin and I could just make out, in the distance, the towering Inazuman mountains, crested by the blossoming sacred sakuras of the Grand Narukami Shrine. The curving tree-city from which sprouts the Sumeru Akadeymia. The baroque arches and elevated crystalline waterways of the Court of Fontaine. And more besides – landmarks I had explored, that Quentin might one day explore: a view onto the entire world with all its colors and its vistas, chests and quests and every artifice of gameplay erased by distance.

Quentin teleported away to warmer pastures and I remained standing there, struck still and wordless, once again, by the syzygy.

He and I will never interact again (shortly, he would say, “Thank you Father” – a title often used for Arlecchino – and then kick me from the world). But for that brief moment, our experiences came into alignment with Genshin Impact, across time and very possibly national borders. I know even less about Quentin than I do Larissa Pham, but he and I at the very least got to share that moment of awe and wonder at the top of the world. I wonder what it meant to him.

In the prologue to Critical Hits, Carmen Maria Marchado writes about her experiences being introduced to new games by friends and partners: “As I keep writing I am struck… by the intimacy of the form; the way the experience of it is specific, even erotic. What did it mean to receive someone’s tutelage? To let yourself be watched? To open yourself up to new ways of understanding? To die over and over again?” Perhaps Critical Hits’ greatest strength, its most distinct quality as an art object, across almost every piece within, is that peculiar intimacy. To watch writers and critics open themselves up to games; then, through those games, open themselves up to you. In much the same way Quentin did by inviting me into his world, Pham and Villarreal and Adjei-Brenyah and Washuta and, yes, even Morson invite us into their worlds, show us how video games refracted their experiences to help them understand themselves with new vividity and clarity.

I feel a little guilty to have, once again, dedicated so much time and mental energy to Genshin Impact, a game which arguably does not deserve it. While playing it this year, and since then, I have played Signalis and Lies of P and 1000xResist and (fellow gacha game) Reverse:1999, have read Borges and Dillard and Ian Reid – artists and works that are considerably more unified and artistically compelling than Genshin. But none of them hit me quite as hard as this 2020 open-world live-service Chinese gacha game; none came at just the right moment, to connect with my particular experiences, my past; to color my vision.

My name didn't get called for jury duty, so at 3PM I rode the bus home (stopping briefly for bread and doughnuts at the bakery in order to earn the approval of the women I live with). Genshin Impact no longer lives on my computer. Once again, I got what I needed out of it, and then let it go. Having finished writing this piece, Critical Hits will be put on my bookshelf, probably never to be touched again. But as we move forward into an uncertain future, these small, impactful experiences, insignificant though they were, will continue to live with me. And if you read through this entire meandering essay, maybe some small fragment of them can live with you, too: proof of our shared essence, an invitation into my world.

I've decided to try fantasy bingo this year. The most obviously challenging category for me on the reddit list is the challenge to find a book I will enjoy featuring fiber or fabric crafting or artistry.

Does anyone have suggestions?

I have read and enjoyed Surrender None by Elizabeth Moon which fits but I want to read something new and save rereads for the end of the year if I get stuck. Surrender None fits at least two bingo categories as it is also a story about disrupting systems.

"Challenging" is up to your own interpretation: length, word choice, writing style, subject matter, etc.

Whatever the challenge, you had to put in more effort than normal to read the book, but you came out on the other side feeling like it was worth it.

What's that book?

What makes it challenging?

And why do you feel it's worth it?

There were supposedly 1200 simultaneous protests in the USA on Saturday. The one I went to seemed like it was mostly attended by people who had never protested before. That's great: more people are engaging in the civic process and learning about how to make a difference. I'm writing this as a short guide for people who want to make a difference beyond that.

Understand types of advocates

You can roughly classify advocates into the following stages:

1. Unaware: people who simply have no idea what's going on and/or don't care. In general, these people are completely unreachable unless an issue affects their livelihood in an immediate and obvious way.
2. Stay-at-home: people who broadly have opinions but have no reason or structure to voice concerns. In general, these people show up only to events if solicited by family/friends.
3. Sporadic activists: people who are receptive to calls to action, but do not seek them out proactively. They may be on a few mailing lists, but probably ignore some CTAs. If a cause gets their attention, they'll be very engaged! (but just for a day or two)
4. Core demonstrators: people who reliably attend relevant direct action events and proactively spread the word to acquaintances, also going out of their way to look for additional opportunities (surveys, government engagement, etc).
5. Initiators: people who take the initiative with event organizing and calls to action. A subset of core demonstrators in leadership roles who steer advocacy campaigns.

Most Americans fall into category 1 or 2. Most people protesting on Saturday were probably between 2 and 3. People on Tildes skew higher. Each successive category is easily 1/10 the size of the previous one.

Event organizers implicitly target certain audiences for their events. In practice, events tend to be primarily composed either of people around 3-4 (smaller events) or 2-3 with some 4s (bigger events).

This is a simplification, but helps to appreciate the different personas in play.

Understand the purpose of different actions

You can broadly categorize direct action protests on a grid with two axes:

• Specificity (ask is more general/multi-faceted/long-term, vs more specific)
• Directionality (event is focused on protestors themselves or internal/allied speakers, vs. focused on external and probably non-allied stakeholders)

Specificity can measure the difference between "we're mad about the government" (yell about everything) and "we're mad about line 67 in HB 1234" (yell about something in particular). Specificity mostly corresponds with actionability. The more specific the thing you're protesting, easier it will be to identify constructive ways to follow up. Successful advocacy uses both of these models at the appropriate times during an extended campaign.

Directionality can measure the difference between "we're mad and we're gonna get riled up!" (cathartic release/venting; perhaps social) and "we're mad and [external stakeholder] is gonna know!" (targeted, though not necessarily aggressive). While both are public, the first is implicitly focused on base engagement and the second is more focused on pressuring an external stakeholder. Successful advocacy requires the appropriate balance of "community-building" (advocates feeling good about themselves) and action (advocates literally forcing a response).

In general, specificity and directionality are correlated: as protests become narrower in scope, they tend to become more directed at specific individuals (usually elected officials or other public figures), with a few exceptions. In theory, all 4 quadrants of this plane can be very successful direct action events!

• Unspecific and directionally inward: rallies with broad thematic goals publicized to a lot of people, possibly involving marches and chants and inviting famous speakers. In my opinion, the 50501-type protests today fall into this category. I would call these unspecific because while they were broadly "anti-Trump," they were also "anti-Elon," and variously "progressive/pro-rights," which is ultimately a fairly loose collection of themes without an obvious follow-up. I would call these directionally inward because they were fairly non-disruptive marches/rallies and therefore mostly cathartic vent sessions of like-minded people. People want to feel like they are doing something, and this is a useful way for them to get connected with each other and learn about next steps.

• Specific and directionally inward: similar to the previous category, but with a more clearly articulated scope. I think this comes up most often with legislative issues that are currently novel/fringe but perceived to require significant public support. For example, getting up on a soapbox in a public space and preaching about the need to add or abolish a particular Constitutional amendment. I'd call this specific because, well, it's about exactly 1 amendment --- you could read out the text of your proposed change if you wanted. I'd call this directionally inward because, while the point of this is ultimately to get some legislator to sign a bill into law, your direct action is really distant from that goal; the immediate purpose is more to proclaim your personal opinions and to create an audience saying "Yeah, I agree! What a great idea!" Later iterations of this can involve recruits, and can shift toward being more directionally outward.

• Specific and directionally outward: actions with narrow, articulated goals; with clear external stakeholders (target being like 1 person or 1 defined group) and ideally time-bound and repeatable on a timeline if needed. For example, a tiny biking nonprofit in my city had a campaign last year in the wake of a biker fatality. The campaign protested a quasi-legal/illegal arrangement that some wealthy/politically powerful churches had made with local government to permit temporary bike lane obstructions during worship. The direct action involved bikers physically stopping worshipers from parking cars in bike lanes, therefore forcing the attention of the congregation and pressuring church administrators to voluntarily relinquish the permits in the bike lanes (the bikers offered an alternative parking proposal), while also garnering media attention. The ultimate goal of the campaign was to force the city to upgrade signage, enforcement, & physical barriers along bike lanes along that corridor, but the goal of the direct action itself was far more granular. I would call this specific because it had an extremely defined ask (to the point of delving into absurd minutiae), focused on churches along a specific corridor (1 at a time), and offered a clear & easy solution for all parties. I would call it directionally outward because it was not about activists letting off steam [about something], it was about making an external institution look selfish for effectively endangering people riding bikes.

• Unspecific and directionally outward: in practice, this sort of event is not actionable but also not necessarily an effective forum for community-building. For example, a digital protest/rally asking a Senator to "support science." I'd consider this unspecific because "science" is actually many things, and "supporting" science could come in many forms, not all of which might be what you care about. I'd consider it directionally outward because it nominally focuses on an individual external stakeholder. The problem with this kind of event is that presenting an external stakeholder with an unspecific set of demands is not compelling and will result in you being ignored. Additionally, digital protesting has zero of the community-building benefit of real-life interaction (no energy, no vibes) and all of the technical difficulties. A lot of campaigns failed during COVID when organizers attempted to move online and couldn't keep up the momentum. I could see this type of event working for specific internet-savvy demographics or specific edge cases of politicians, but rarely.

This is a spectrum, so the hundreds of different varieties of "direct action" you can think of all fall on a range. There are also some outliers!

For example, protestors may travel to the state capital to lobby legislators about a specific bill as a group. I would call this specific because it's about exactly 1 bill, and the action involves physically talking to the people who have the legal authority to enact that bill. I would call it directionally outward because it's clearly focused on achieving a legislative objective by engaging external stakeholders. However, I would also call it directionally inward because this sort of "travel somewhere with a smallish group of people" event is extremely good for community-building in a volunteer network. And indeed, a good directionally outward project should have an aspect of inwardness insofar as any direct action should be moderately to very fun. So these categories aren't completely exclusive.

Understanding the pipeline

So, really, a lot of campaigns start with unspecific and directionally inward protests: huge rallies with people waving around signs and not doing a whole lot. These are important because they expose people to protesting in ideally digestible and non-scary formats, they can get a ton of media attention (because they're usually about very well-known topics), and they can make people feel included and part of a supportive community --- which is essential.

But any unfocused rally needs to fairly quickly splinter off into specific campaigns. This means a lot of behind-the-scenes planning work needs to be done. One of the most important ways you can help turn energy into real-world change is to pick an issue that's meaningful to you, get involved with an organization whose mission statement covers that issue, and volunteer to do paperwork, planning, or logistics for them! (Sometimes, no such group will exist, so you may wish to create a new one. This is challenging, but very doable, and maybe I will talk about it in a later post.)

For example, according to Wikipedia the 50501 movement calls for: the impeachment of Donald Trump, an investigation into Elon Musk, investigations into all other Trump appointees, reinstatement of DEI at the federal level, protection of LGBTQ rights, protection of (racial?) minority rights, protection of the Constitution, reinstatement of military aid to Ukraine, and the lifting of tariffs on other countries. That's like 20 billion different ideas. Some of them are kind of related to each other. Most of them aren't. Ideological fragmentation in a movement this large is absolutely inevitable and could forestall a lot of change from an organizational insider perspective. More importantly, it's just too complicated to keep track of. No one is an expert in more than 1 or 2 of those subjects. Even just 1 of those issues is extremely broad. For instance, protecting the US Constitution: there are entire nonprofits dedicated just to protecting the 1st amendment! You have to get granular.

(There's no problem with teaming up with allied organizations to co-host a rally about a few topics, and no problem with attending these. But they're only impactful if they're followed by more specific actions.)

Some of the most impactful campaigns are ones which start with general, big-turnout events... and then have a clear pathway toward multiple small actions with defined success criteria. If you go to one unspecific protest for one organization, that's only as useful as the follow-up. Did you join their email list? Have you looked at their website? Did you talk to anyone who volunteers there? You have to do some legwork. Great organizations will have simple and easy onboarding processes, but not every group is so fortunate! As long as you can stay in touch, that's the important part.

Your role as an advocate

You also have to think about how, as an advocate, you want to fit into the puzzle. Is your definition of (personal) success to be a participant in broad-movement rallies, or do you want to take a more involved role? Do you want to lead chants, set up sound equipment, or file for road closure permits from local police departments? Or do you want to lobby a specific politician to adopt a specific piece of legislation? Or run a website or develop a strategic plan on behalf of some organization to do these things?

If you plan to volunteer with an existing organization, some things to keep in mind are:

• You have significantly more influence over local politics than state or federal politics. If you ask me, the #1 place you should be volunteering is in your local community, solving problems on the neighborhood level.
• If you do enough direct action, you will potentially end up in a situation where you risk arrest. If you don't want to do that, don't. But if you do, be aware of what it entails. A night in jail is not fun!
• Volunteering with a specific group is a temporary thing, as long as you want. But for some, it's a lifestyle, not just something to do when fashionable. Advocacy never truly ends. There will always be more battles to fight.
• Most direct action campaigns fail. Most lobbying campaigns fail. Most plans fail and need major revisions. Most things fail, and most people fail a lot. Sometimes, you will work very hard on a project/event, and do a great job, and a stakeholder will derail it anyway.
• All organizations are composed of people doing their best. When people are working on projects they're passionate about, emotions can run high. Take a deep breath! You're all on the same team.
• There's an enormous cultural difference between grassroots, all-volunteer nonprofit organizations and large-scale NGOs. Small nonprofits can feel exciting to work with because they're so flexible and open to new ideas. The larger the organization, the more bureaucratic volunteering is likely to be, which may be demoralizing. However, they'll probably have more funding, and they'll probably be managed in a less chaotic way.
• In general, you will only have strategic volunteering opportunities in grassroots organizations. But if you prefer to be assigned things to do or say, pretty much any org will have something for you to help out with.
• Joining the Board of Directors of a nonprofit is a great way to make an amazing long-term impact. However, being on a board comes with a fiduciary duty and various other legal considerations.
• Volunteer burnout is real. It's easy to become tired and jaded. Many people who volunteer for nonprofits in administrative roles avoid direct action for this reason (and vice versa).
• You can't individually solve every problem with an organization, you can't manage every other volunteer, and you can't work on every project. It's just not possible, and even if it were, it would be bad practice.
• Many large corporations offer matching donations for employee charitable contributions. If you want to make a difference, but can't see yourself volunteering on a regular basis, making a qualified donation and having your company match it would be impactful for that group.

It's getting late so I need to call it, but I hope that was helpful to someone.

The popular online discourse on Large Language Models’ (LLMs’) capabilities is often polarized in a way I find annoying and tiresome.

On one end of the spectrum, there is nearly complete dismissal of LLMs: an LLM is just a slightly fancier version of the autocomplete on your phone’s keyboard, there’s nothing to see here, move on (dot org).

This dismissive perspective overlooks some genuinely interesting novel capabilities of LLMs. For example, I can come up with a new joke and ask ChatGPT to explain why it’s funny or come up with a new reasoning problem and ask ChatGPT to solve it. My phone’s keyboard can’t do that.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are eschatological predictions: human-level or superhuman artificial general intelligence (AGI) will likely be developed within 10 years or even within 5 years, and skepticism toward such predictions is “AI denialism”, analogous to climate change denial. Just listen to the experts!

There are inconvenient facts for this narrative, such as that the majority of AI experts give much more conservative timelines for AGI when asked in surveys and disagree with the idea that scaling up LLMs could lead to AGI.

The ARC Prize is an attempt by prominent AI researcher François Chollet (with help from Mike Knoop, who apparently does AI stuff at Zapier) to introduce some scientific rigour into the conversation. There is a monetary prize for open source AI systems that can perform well on a benchmark called ARC-AGI-2, which recently superseded the ARC-AGI benchmark. (“ARC” stands for “Abstract and Reasoning Corpus”.)

ARC-AGI-2 is not a test of whether an AI is an AGI or not. It’s intended to test whether AI systems are making incremental progress toward AGI. The tasks the AI is asked to complete are colour-coded visual puzzles like you might find in a tricky puzzle game. (Example.) The intention is to design tasks that are easy for humans to solve and hard for AI to solve.

The current frontier AI models score less than 5% on ARC-AGI-2. Humans score 60% on average and 100% of tasks have been solved by at least two humans in two attempts or less.

For me, this helps the conversation about AI capabilities because it gives a rigorous test and quantitative measure to my casual, subjective observations that LLMs routinely fail at tasks that are easy for humans.

François Chollet was impressed when OpenAI’s o3 model scored 75.7% on ARC-AGI (the older version of the benchmark). He emphasizes the concept of “fluid intelligence”, which he seems to define as the ability to adapt to new situations and solve novel problems. Chollet thinks that o3 is the first AI system to demonstrate fluid intelligence, although it’s still a low level of fluid intelligence. (o3 also required thousands of dollars’ worth of computation to achieve this result.)

This is the sort of distinction that can’t be teased out by the polarized popular discourse. It’s the sort of nuanced analysis I’ve been seeking out, but which has been drowned out by extreme positions on LLMs that ignore inconvenient facts.

I would like to see more benchmarks that try to do what AGI-AGI-2 does: find problems that humans can easily solve and frontier AI models can’t solve. These sort of benchmarks can help us measure AGI progress much more usefully than the typical benchmarks, which play to LLMs’ strengths (e.g. massive-scale memorization) and don’t challenge them on their weaknesses (e.g. reasoning).

I long to see AGI within my lifetime. But the super short timeframes given by some people in the AI industry feel to me like they border on mania or psychosis. The discussion is unrigorous, with people pulling numbers out of thin air based on gut feeling.

It’s clear that there are many things humans are good at doing that AI can’t do at all (where the humans vs. AI success rate is ~100% vs. ~0%). It serves no constructive purpose to ignore this truth and it may serve AI research to develop rigorous benchmarks around it.

Such benchmarks will at least improve the quality of discussion around AI capabilities, insofar as people pay attention to them.

Update (2024-04-11 at 19:16 UTC): François Chollet has a new 20-minute talk on YouTube that I recommend. I've watched a few videos of Chollet talking about ARC-AGI or ARC-AGI-2, and this one is beautifully succinct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHezX43I-4

This post will talk about piracy. I won't provide any links or direct instructions. That said, if a mod or admin thinks there is something inappropriate about talking about that stuff, feel free to mention this in the comments and I will remove any inappropriate details as soon as I can.

Like many Latin Americans, I am a long-term pirate. I have pirated stuff with floppy disks, with CD-ROMs, through IRC, FTP, Kazaa, Napster, Soulseek, websites, and torrent. I have also purchased several illegal media from street vendors. The whole idea of traditional piracy is to get the files I want for me to own, which is why I made a Plex server for myself.

Stremio is a challenge to all of this. It is much easier to setup than Plex and basically requires no maintenance. It is a program that allows me to stream video content from a variety of sources, legal or illegal. It took less than 30 minutes to set it up on my computer, and I know that it exists for both of my TVs. I am using it with the Torrentio addon.

Stremio changed my viewing habits much in the same way paid streaming services did. I am more spontaneous in my choices. I have watched Doctor Who from 2005, ER, Tiny Toons Adventures, Animaniacs, The Twighlight Zone (original), The Magicians, Blackadder, and Falling Skies (alien TV show with Noah Wyle!). Playback sometimes takes a little while to start, but went it does it rarely stutters, even on old or less popular shows. A paid debrid service should improve on that. I am now considering removing most of our extremely expensive paid streaming services and replacing them with Stremio. Money is tight and, when added up, they make quite a dent on our budget!

One bad thing about Stremio is that it is basically a leech. It does not seed the torrents. I am considering getting Real Debrid as it seemingly reduces the strain on torrents via caching.

Right now, my only concern with changing everything to Stremio is that my wife will probably dislike choosing between multiple sources for an episode, and some episodes come with bad subtitles. That would require minimal effort to solve, but might still be too much for her.

Anyway, I am very impressed by Stremio. It is so good, in fact, that I am half-jokingly worried about the police knocking on my door.

Just kidding, that doesn't happen around here.

Hey Tildoes, my partner and I have been navigating a broad, government level health challenge and I was hoping to pick the hivemind for help on navigating it.

As some of you may have seen in articles posted here, there was a massive fire at the lithium ion battery plant in Moss Landing a few months ago. It ended up spewing a slough of nasty chemicals into the air, which inevitably landed in the surround agricultural fields and waterways. My partner was in Australia when the fire occured, thank god, but was still freaking out about downstream effects. There have been studies from a 3rd party group from UC Davis and San Jose State - that found elevated levels of heavy metals - however those have been downplayed by local agencies claiming there are not major impacts and that distribution was surface level. With everything we know about state and federal agencies oversight, sometimes they are less than transparent about reporting toxic impact factors - like what happened in Hinkley and was popularized by the movie Erin Brockovich. However today the California Certified Organic Farmers put out their own update and press release. They summarized what has happened and seem to be endorsing the safety of the farms they have certified in the area.

So here is the rub: Federal, state, county, and local agencies have determined there is not significant contamination, the CCOF has agreed with these agencies, and my partner is still uncomfortable eating local produce. It feels a bit like we're back in covid times, and she is looking for cherry picked studies to justify strict behavioral and consumption restrictions within our household. We have always agreed to "shift our risk tolerance according to data" and now - with the Trump administration and a general distrust of our fed/state agencies - she's advocating we continue to avoid these foods until there is "definitive proof" that the food is safe.

I'm kind of at a loss of what do to. On one hand, it's a minor thing to change where we get our food. Food systems are complex and we can kind of get it from anywhere. On the other hand, I love my time at our farmers markets, experimenting with new foods, and supporting our local community. I also think the more obscure the process from farm to shelf, the more possibility for health/employee/environmental shenanigans by the producers. To me buying broadly "American" or "Mexican" kale doesn't mean we aren't going to have similar or worse impacts to our food.

I'm trying to find a reasonable middle ground or a bellwether indicator we can use as a go/no-go, but every time I think we've agreed on one it feels like the goal posts have been moved. Do any of you have similar issues or possible navigated differences in risk tolerance during Covid well? If so, how did you do so? I know this is a bit of a random thread, but I'd love to hear what you think!

Heretofore, I have held the idea that, 1)Russia is a despotic aggressor, 2)Ukraine is largely innocent holder of resources and land, and 3)Ukraine is largely winning due to a combination of pluck and western supplies.

But I heard a recent podcast, however, that caused me to question my line of thinking. The podcast was Chapo Trap House* and they had guest podcasts hosts War Nerd or something, who seem to have some expertise in the slavic world. And they presented a very different narrative. Namely, 1)Ukrainians really want the war to end, even if the country loses some land, 2)There’s tons of corruption in the military, as bad as leaders demanding payment from soldiers to avoid deployment to the front lines, 3)There are fascist units in the military, and they shake down the civilians, 4) Zelensky was of a mind to deal with Russia until Biden asked him not to, 5)Russias economy is very resilient and has adapted to sanctions, and 6)Russia has been very adept at neutralizing new western military tech, and 7) there is a conspiracy of silence about Ukrainian casualties. Side note, there may be problematic funding of all the open source intelligence arms, especially bellingcat, by US Governemtnt intelligence interests.

I managed to confirm at least partially one of the objections:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/politics/russia-jamming-himars-rockets-ukraine/index.html

But some of the claims seem less strong:

https://kyivindependent.com/a-very-bloody-war-what-is-the-death-toll-of-russias-war-in-ukraine/

Mixed on some of the others:

https://theintercept.com/2024/06/22/ukraine-azov-battalion-us-training-ban/

The podcast was a useful reminder, at least, to retain a humility about my beliefs, and that news media is especially suspect in our present moment.

It’s not like I have any power to influence the outcome, but I do still buy into the myth that a responsible citizen retains some degree of information about events around them. My query to tildes is, what’s your narrative about the war, and what sources of information are you drawing upon?

*I’m vaguely aware that there’s somce controversy around these guys. I find the podcast entertaining, however, and they seem to share some of my values about how a sane society would function, and, like this report, they sometimes really challenge my understanding of what I think is going on.

I am trying to figure out and process my aversion to pursuing a career change.

What I have surmised is that I come to the conclusion, "well, in your past, most of the jobs you have studied or trained for, were not, in fact, what you thought they would be like in practice, so how do you know this is not the case with your new interest in career?"

What I'm looking for is people to challenge or confirm my assumptions: Example: "No, actually, your perception is distorted, most jobs are what people expect them to be."

I'm also looking for, validation or commiseration, "yeah, I feel that way too, it sucks" and am open to some problem solving, "I was once in your position and I did X,Y,Z and here were my results, YMMV"

Thank you for reading!

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 didn't know where to post this, sometimes I invite people on instagram to suggest ideas or things for me to draw and post; I found it's a nice way to interact on the internet in a different way and challenge myself and practice at the same time. If anyone's interested maybe we can do it here, this is not for commissions and it's totally free, I'm just trying to do something fun and collaborative with strangers.

Even if this doesn't take off feel free to contact me and see what we can do, I'd love to make something for somebody else, I can share some of my drawings so you know what to expect.

Maybe we could organize and turn it into a monthly topic with a different prompt for anyone who wants to draw and participate and share. Would love to read your opinions on this.

Apologies if this is the wrong space for it.

I have a bit of a curveball for the kind folks of tildes. I have a fairly successful, flourishing and comfortable business of manufacturing-export in India which I handle with my dad.

I handle communication with customers, some documentation work like invoicing, the wages for the workers (we employ a 150 people). I also handle the manufacturing schedule, the quality team and the product development along with planning for material.

It is a fairly technical line of business ;processes range from press stamping, welding, milling, drilling, turning, hot forging, polishing, chrome plating, zinc plating, powdercoating etc.

Alot of my work is just looking over what my team does and just guiding them, motivating them and making sure they are taken care of.

I have worked hard to reduce the Labour turnover and uplift my workforce financially. It's a big family, albeit with hiccups from time to time.

But I have learned from mistakes and kept on improving.

Now on to the advice bit. I got married and my partner moved from the UK to be with me. We discussed all the challenges and thought we could make it work.

But it has been extremely difficult for her to move here. Quitting her job, leaving her family and not being able to settle here is affecting her mentally.

Seeing the state of the country she doesn't want to raise our kids here. Which I wouldn't mind either, but it will be extremely difficult for me to start afresh in another country.

The business is very hands on, and I'm not sure I can handle it remotely even if I find someone to handle the supervisors. Training someone alone for that role will take a lot of time, trial and error.

To find someone who will care for the work and put in the effort will want a good amount of money, and finding someone you can trust in itself is a challenge for a small business.

30% of my revenue goes into salaries, rent and electricity. About 40 to 50%% into material and maintenance, not to mention unanticipated expenses like bribes. So there isn't a lot of margin to experiment with big hirings anyways.

A big reason for our profitability is because we're quite lean.

Winding up the business would also be difficult. It would take a few years to do, it would be difficult emotionally for my parents and me. I know the amount of work my dad put into it.

They will want my happiness so it's not impossible to do. They could live their retirement years on rental income and me taking care of them.

The final challenge would be finding a job in UK or Europe (wherever we move). I'm not sure how employable I will be in a corporate environment. I don't have any other work experience other than an internship in Toyota in supply chain during my mba days (I have an economics background with an mba in marketing)

I know ultimately only I myself can figure this out. But I just needed a sounding board and just share as much as I could.

If anyone read this far ahead, thanks for taking out the time, really appreciate it.

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.

My parameters are

• Any kind of racing - F1, Moto GP, X games, rallycross, antigravity... you name it.
• No subscriptions
• I lean away from sim/management games... I don't mind some customization, but I don't want to have to choose from 10 different types of brake pads for best performance on each track.
• Combat optional
• If it makes a difference, I'll be playing with a controller, not a racing wheel.

[Edit: I should have specified - a modern racing game. I'm pretty versed on the options pre-2010, it's the new stuff I'm looking for.]

I originally wanted a rally game to scratch a hillclimb itch but I'm open to whatever now. Trawling through Steam has made my head spin though.

Previous racing games/series I've played and liked - Rallisport Challenge (really, if I could just play this again I'd be set), Wipeout 3, Road Rash, Ridge Racer Type 4, Twisted Metal 2, Jet Moto, Wave Race, Mario Kart, Sled Storm... OutRun! Showing my age here.

Somehow I've never really liked Need For Speed.

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.

Fix an annoyance.
Take out a level.
Revamp a system.
Expand a world.
Etc.

Pick a game, any game, and tell us what ONE thing about it you would change, and why. It doesn’t have to be feasible or reasonable or whatnot. You’ve got a magic wand with one charge left.

Also, your goal CAN be to make the game better, but it doesn’t have to be! Maybe you want to make the game more challenging. More chaotic. More hilarious. More broken.

Entirely up to you!

Also, you only get one change per game, but it’s fine to talk about what you would do for more than one game.

Donation Total: $2,325 one time + $25 recurring

Lambda Legal is an American non-profit organization focused on legal action in support of LGBTQ individuals.

They have already committed to challenge Trump’s anti-queer executive orders in court.

I am encouraging people here to donate to Lambda Legal if you are able to.

Incentive: The following people have committed to match donations:

• u/kfwyre - up to $250 (met!)
• u/smores - up to $1000 (met!)

If anyone else is willing to match donations as well, please let me know and I will edit this post to include you.

Also, check to see if your employer will match donations.

If you donate, simply comment here or PM me. You do NOT have to provide proof that you donated — just share your amount.

If you would rather donate to a different organization instead, please do so. Also please share it here in case others would like to join you.

To our trans users here, especially those in the US: please remember that there are still SO many people out there who love and support you and want you to be able to live your lives with the dignity that you deserve.

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.

Picture:

1. Emilia Perez
2. Conclave
3. The Brutalist
4. Anora
5. A Complete Unknown
6. The Substance
7. Wicked
8. Dune Part Two
9. A Real Pain
10. Nickel Boys

Director:

1. Brady Corbet - The Brutalist
2. Jacque Audiard - Emilia Perez
3. Edward Berger - Conclave
4. Sean Baker - Anora
5. Coralie Fargeat - The Substance

Original Screenplay:

1. Anora
2. The Substance
3. A Real Pain
4. The Brutalist
5. Challengers

Adapted Screenplay:

1. Conclave
2. Emilia Perez
3. A Complete Unknown
4. Nickel Boys
5. Dune Part Two

Lead Actor:

1. Adrian Brody - The Brutalist
2. Timothee Chalamet - A Complete Unknown
3. Ralph Fiennes - Conclave
4. Colman Domingo - Sing Sing
5. Sebastian Stan - The Apprentice

Lead Actress:

1. Demi Moore - The Substance
2. Sofia Gascon - Emilia Perez
3. Mikey Madison - Anora
4. Cynthia Erivo - Wicked
5. Fernanda Torres - I’m Still Here

Supporting Actor:

1. Kieran Culkin - A Real Pain
2. Edward Norton - A Complete Unknown
3. Guy Pearce - The Brutalist
4. Yuriy Borisov - Anora
5. Jeremy Strong - The Apprentice

Supporting Actress:

1. Zoe Saldana - Emilia Perez
2. Ariana Grande - Wicked
3. Margaret Qualley - The Substance
4. Isabella Rosellini - Conclave
5. Monica Barbaro - A Complete Unknown

Film Editing:

1. Emilia Perez
2. Conclave
3. A Complete Unknown
4. Wicked
5. The Substance

Cinematography:

1. The Brutalist
2. Dune: Part Two
3. Emilia Perez
4. Nosferatu
5. Conclave

Sound:

1. Dune: Part Two
2. Wicked
3. A Complete Unknown
4. Alien: Romulus
5. Gladiator II

Original Score:

1. The Brutalist
2. Conclave
3. The Wild Robot
4. Emilia Perez
5. Challengers

Original Song:

1. El Mal from Emilia Perez
2. Kiss the Sky from The Wild Robot
3. Mi Camino from Emilia Perez
4. The Journey from The Six Triple Eight
5. Compress/Repress from Challengers

Costume Design:

1. Wicked
2. Dune: Part Two
3. Nosferatu
4. A Complete Unknown
5. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Hair & Make-up:

1. The Substance
2. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
3. Wicked
4. Nosferatu
5. A Different Man

Production Design:

1. Wicked
2. Dune: Part Two
3. The Brutalist
4. Conclave
5. Nosferatu

VFX:

1. Dune: Part Two
2. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
3. Wicked
4. Alien: Romulus
5. Twisters

Animated Feature:

1. Flow
2. The Wild Robot
3. Inside Out 2
4. Memoir of a Snail
5. Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

International Feature:

1. Emilia Perez
2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
3. I'm Still Here
4. Kneecap
5. Flow

First of all: this system brought undeniable historical advances in the West (formal equality, freedom of speech, universal suffrage). There's no way to deny this when compared to monarchies and the civil-military authoritarian regimes in Latin America. However, even so, current democracy inherently carries the objective of preserving the economic order. The political structure is designed so that economic elites (whether bourgeois or corporate) maintain control through campaign financing, legislative influence, and media dominance.

With this in mind, I decided to bring up for debate why democracy is considered the ultimate and best system we currently have, leaving no room for criticism of the system itself (representative democracy). This system derives from a stratified one (Greek) that has been refined over centuries to take power away from monarchs and transfer it to the bourgeoisie. Today, we live in a bourgeois-liberal democratic state that restricts any minority group’s access to the center of power. Everyone notices this, but since proposing or thinking of something distinct from representative democracy is dangerous, most people aim to patch a system that was designed to be this way: exclusionary and elitist. In the end, this term (democracy) has been elevated to an absolute moral ideal, leaving no room to question its central premise (the maintenance of centralized power in financial capitalism, which now finances the most radical right-wing movements).

By the way, it’s worth considering how the right gained power in the world (money). And how it maintains its hegemony over cultural thought worldwide (money). Who funds this? Who benefits from this? Why couldn’t a decentralized yet ~autocratic~ proposal (I understand the difference between autocracy and the lack of checks and balances, but I fail to see why the current system is inherently better) be superior to a centralized government defending the interests of a dominant class? (Hint: the right maintains its hegemony because it controls financial resources and the means of cultural production; it’s not just about governments but a machine operating at multiple levels where the dominant ideology reflects the ideology of the ruling class.)

Continuing, there are no decentralized and autocratic proposals (in the sense of concentrating power efficiently for certain decisions while decentralizing access to power overall) because these challenge the traditional logic of checks and balances, which ironically has been more effective at blocking structural changes than preventing abuses of power. For instance, the concept of distributive autocracy (a model in which power is temporarily centralized to carry out rapid structural reforms, followed by mechanisms of redistribution and decentralization of power) is rarely discussed because the tripartite and bicameral system locks this debate in place to maintain control through financial power (amendments) of the country.

We remain hostages to a system that has become humanity’s manifest destiny, where no questioning can be raised without the individual being labeled as morally inferior. It’s not that representative democracy is inherently superior, but that it was historically designed to be acceptable within the context of bourgeois power. The question, therefore, is not simply "autocracy vs. democracy," but how we can create inclusive, participatory, and redistributive systems where power structures are transparent, accessible, and fair for everyone.

I promised @chocobean that I would talk about my recent turn to Christianity, so here goes.

The short, trite answer is that I’m taking a leap of faith on a few mystical experiences, and because I’ve run out of spiritual options. Everything else I have tried to do with my life has come up short. A lot of this outcome results from a traumatic early childhood formed, perhaps ironically, in part from Christian religious abuse. In some way perhaps I am trying to synthesize and re-narrate that experience. But also, I really want to go to a Church that is fun, fulfilling, challenging, and does progressive good in the world. There just ain’t a lot of those to choose from, so I figure I need to start my own. For a little more detail, read on. You can skip to the last two paragraphs for a little more reasoned “why Christianity here and now,” independent of my experience.

I was born into a fundamentalist family. Lots of rules, hell, purity, that sort of thing. Very traumatic, and I mean clinical trauma. I left the church in high school thanks to drugs and some smart people, but I maintained a kind of love affair (infatuation?) with good preaching. Something deep inside me responds to the gospel message. I cry when I listen to Jesus Christ Superstar, and a passionate preacher with a good heart, and great gospel music. This is likely tied to suffering-religion at its best helps us grieve and carry on, find joy in a broken world.

One time in college, after a psychedelic party, I found myself unable to sleep, a common side effect I experienced from LSD. I turned on the local gospel station, and suddenly was struck with the urge to go to church. This was black folks gospel, and so I wanted to go to a black church. There was one I knew about, and I have no idea how it was in my consciousness. It was called Life Community Church in Durham, NC. I put on my best suit, tied my tie, and with dilated eyes and doughy disposition I set off. I arrived at precisely 10:30, the service time identified on the marquee.

You may be familiar with black folks time, which is often most evident at church. Black folks time is about moving when the spirit moves you. When I arrived, on white folks time, the church was half-full. It met in an old movie theater, the kind with hundreds of seats. I was ushered to a seat, which was basically the next available seat, they were filled sequentially from the front. This was different from other churches I attended, where members generally seat themselves in their customary location, a respectful distance from others.

There was a large, energetic gospel ensemble delivering the real gospel goods. Large choir, lots of electric instruments, percussion. Everybody dressed better than I was. And I did my best to keep up, clapping hands and shouting and grinning. I was all in.

After a while, the pastor came on stage, a 6’8 Nigerian native. He made a few comments, and invited us to pass the peace. In a white church, this takes a couple minutes, and you politely smile and shake the hands of the people around you. At Life Community, however, everybody left their seats and wandered around giving hugs and smiles and lots of time to each other. No idea how long we were at that, but I did notice that space was now standing room only.

Then the preacher was joined by his 5’4 (at most) Guatemalan wife, who greeted us cheerfully before the pastor began his sermon. It was all mostly about leading a decent life, strong families, moderation, godliness, fairly conservative socially. I was riveted to every word, I clapped and shouted and prayed.
When everything was finally over, and I had been repeatedly and warmly welcomed and invited to come back, I finally made it to my car and noted the time: 3:30 p.m.! And I knew then, this was what I wanted to do with my life-bring this kind of joy, and be a channel of this kind of power.

I didn’t have any real religion then, however, wrongly thinking that was some kind of requirement, and so I left the dream on the table. I went on to become a drug addict, get clean, get married, have kids and begin life as a lawyer.

When the kids started to get mobile, their mom and I decided we ought to go to church, that it would be good for the kids morals, provide community, that sort of thing. I was buddhist/atheist/soft new age, not really in on the Jesus thing, but it seemed right. We found a church with a great garden out front and a pride sticker on the door, and headed in. Compared to Life Community Church, the preaching was good, but not as passionate, though the message more closely aligned with my values.

The best part of the experience was Sunday school, however, and I even taught a couple classes, really enjoyed doing the bible study part of it. I started paying more attention and getting more involved. We brought in Nadia Bolz-Weber as guest preacher one Sunday. Nadia is a powerful preacher, and her work in Colorado was very promising for a time. While she was preaching, I had a mystical experience, a feeling of lightness and an urgent awareness that I should be up there doing that same thing. My (now Ex) wife was surprisingly into the idea, and so were the pastors. I went and toured a seminary in pursuit of the call. But at the seminary I was like, there is no way I can spend three years with these people, and I still wasn’t really a believer, so I let the moment pass. It’s one of the few regrets I have in life, following the call then may have led to my marriage having a very different outcome. Alas for life choices.

Come forward a few years, the marriage has dissolved bitterly, I have come out of denial about how awful my childhood was and how dysfunction of a human I had become, and how much my kids suffered as a result. Among my many ongoing efforts to remedy this, I found myself at a spiritual retreat in what is known in some circles (mainly Quaker) as a “Clearness Committee.” It’s a space where someone with some kind of intractable problem becomes the subject of a conclave of caring folks. I was there to figure out career transition. There were some q and a, some breathwork, and in the middle of a silent spot someone asked the shockingly straightforward question, “what do you really want to do?”

The answer in my mind was immediately, “I want to preach.” And almost as immediately, a voice came into mind “you can’t do that,” coupled with a profound fear of saying so out loud. I knew from previous spiritual work this was a sign that I should immediately take the contrary action, and so spoke it out.

Now, this was not a Christian gathering, but as it happened, the person who asked the question was a Christian pastor, and she gave me some names and numbers of people to talk to. As it also happened, she used to work for a guy in my current Church, who, as it further happened, was the past president of a prestigious divinity school. This was my favorite guy in Church, and so I talked to him, and here we are. A lot of yes all in a row.

So, it’s really a gamble on a set of experiences I don’t fully understand about a God I barely believe in. But I knew almost instantly as soon as I arrived in divinity school that I was doing the right thing. I still don’t believe, but I have made a decision to act in faith anyway. From an intellectual point of view, I have a strong impulse to do something, anything, to try and bring some goodness to the world. And since, in my estimation, for better or worse, America is a Christian nation, it seems Church could be an effective vehicle for that. Plus, I really do want to be a preacher.

I was about to end there because it sounded cool, but I want to say a little more about why Christianity might be especially good for my values, and for the West. More than just custom and tradition, I’m discovering that a lot of the way I think about the existence of the world is really Christian in nature. Most intellectuals since the 18th century or so would point to Plato, or more recently, to chaos as the proper way to order a mind. But in practice, most people are espousing a neo-Platonist Christian kind of justice and morality. In a super short sentence, this is that creation and humanity were made for each other. Ten years ago I would have said, and a large part of me still believes, the truth is more a kind of Manifestatum ex Chao of both together, and perhaps there is nothing particularly special about humanity. However, most people, practically at least, seem to recognize that rational ordering exists uniquely in the human mind alongside a more programmatic animal nature. They also seem to believe in the notion of goodness. Many humanists argue that we can be “good without God,” however, as far as I can tell they arguing about a goodness which is derived from Christian scholarship (love your neighbor). Even if I’m wrong on that, and/or they are right about the uselessness of God for good, most people in the way they act suggest an assumption that true compassion flows from the Christian God. As a result, I think the best way to foment good for most people here where I am geographically is within the Christian religious framework.

Finally, I’m partial to the notion of classical (medieval?) professionalism: a professional is one who professes a noble principle, i.e. clergy profess goodness, educators profess truth, military officers, peace, lawyers, justice, physicians, health, and artists, beauty.

I'm looking to see if anyone can speak to how life is (good, bad, or meh) with using one of the popular OneDrive clients on a common enough Linux distribution.

Ok, so allow me to set the context...

• My partner uses Windows laptop, and with next year's end of life on Win10, I need to make decision to advise them on whether we get them another Windows laptop (presumably running Win11), or finally get them to take the plunge on using Linux - (a laptop running some common enough linux distro).
• I run linux as my personal daily driver on my laptop for more than a decade, and on server side having been using and dabbling with linux since about 2004. So, i will add also that i'm all bought in on the linux, libre/free and open source lifestyle.
• I'm not a fan of Windows, but not judging that others like my partner use it. By the way, my partner doesn't care about tech nor computing, they simply use applications and move on with their life. (Yes, i have politely nudged them over the years to try linux, but they have been hesitant to do so without a true need, so why rock the love boat, right?)
• My partner's computing needs are quite basic, but slightly tricky...Here is what i mean:
  • They use a web browser or mobile apps for the vast majority of their compouting/app needs
  • For office suite, they use desktop versions of MS Word and Excel
  • Quite importanrtly, they use OneDrive to sync their files (and there are alot important files for them and our family)

So, from a computing needs perspective, that's pretty much it. For every other function and need (e.g. email, productivity, etc.), they simply use browser or mobile apps as noted above.

You might be thinking, well, move them to linux, and if they like Microsoft, then use the Word or Excel browser app, right? Well, they LOATH having to use the browser or mobile versions of Microsoft Office. Being of a certain age, they might be ok with LibreOffice, since it mimics close enough to desktop versions of Word, Excel desktop apps...So, I think the desktop and office suite are less of a problem to find an alternative if needed...
But, OneDrive, yeah, this is the one app that they won't let go. Not because they love Microsoft (they could careless about the company), but because they have a good trust and experience of its functions to date on Windows. Onedrive has really empowered their workflow. That is, because they jump from browser to mobile app often through their day, etc....the feature of having a file easily and reliably sync (via onedrive) between devices is probably the most important need that they have.

Now, before anyone says, well try "NextCloud"...yeah, been there and done that. Nextcloud works wonderfully for me (has for years)...but it does not conform exactly to my partner's workflow. I've tried Collabera, but could never get it to work reliably enough. I want to state again, i am a strong, emphatic open source advocate...But if my partner can't get their work done without me constantly diagnosing and fixing things....then its not proper solution for them.

So, while i have a solid linux or open source option for all of their other needs, Onedrive is the challenge here. So, can anyone advise, how things are with onedrive clients on linux? Any particular client that is worth me looking into? What about a specific linux distro that, maybe possibly works best with a particular onedrive linux client? I should add that my partner is willing to pay for file synching and does NOT want to have me self-host things for this single function since they don't want to have me kill myself in supporting it. So, if there is a valid alternative to onedrive that is awesome on linux, and that they can pay a company to reliably host, that is welcome as well.

Or, should i simply advise them to stick to Windows through EOL, get them set on Win11 along with native Onedrive, and move on with our lives?

I'm thankful for anyone's recommendations and advice. Cheers!

Special Ed. Teacher here.

This year I've been assigned a tough caseload. But my most challenging student is easily the student with Reactive Attachment Disorder and possibly autism. I'll call him Jake.

Edit: He's in middle school, btw.

To protect his privacy and my own, I can't give many specifics. This student is chronically online and I wouldn't put it past him to Google situations he's caused in my class.

Some vague descriptions of the things he's done this year:

-Repeatedly jokes about pedophilia and teachers who have been arrested for it. It makes me uncomfortable that he does this, obviously. The only saving grace here is that he has thrown it around so many times, including calling multiple teachers pedophiles last year, that everyone knows he is just being rude and it's not a serious accusation. Thoroughly documented and I'm not really concerned about actually being accused. Fyi, I have informed his adoptive parents and they have informed his counselor. They are taking it seriously and have started investigating whether or not this is just shocking humor or a more serious part of the Jake's history before adoption.

-Waits for the perfect time to drop rude or shocking comments to inflict maximum damage. When he wants to say something awful to me or in general, he will hold off until he has an audience and the room is relatively quiet.

-Constantly mocks and shit talks certain students. We have dealt with it. He isn't just getting away with it. But even after consequences, separation from the students, and punishments at home, he doesn't stop. He's hung up on hating a couple of kids in particular but will generally be rude to whoever if he wants to. One of these kids is a scrappy kid from a rough school and I could totally see it ending in punches if we don't manage this.

-Absolutely refuses to share any serious thoughts. Even when asked what kind of support he needs, what kind of rewards would motivate him, or what's bothering him, he just gives ridiculous answers in a high-pitched voice or walks away. This kid wants no part in coming up with solutions and won't even engage in a conversation about his behavior or even the behavior of others.

-Speaking of his high pitched voice, this is the voice he always uses to say rude things. He has his normal speaking voice and then he uses this higher pitched voice when he says things that are rude or shocking. Like he has two different brains and one wants to be mean.

-Last year, he kept a list of times he felt students and teachers had broken the code of conduct.

-absolutely hates special Ed. Hates me for being a special ed. teacher. Reminds the other kids in my class that they're "special" constantly.

For the record, all of these things have been addressed many times. The school has been supportive, the parents have been supportive, and everyone knows that this behavior, if continued for much longer, will likely result in a change of programming for this student. He would be placed in a more restrictive setting.

This is kind of my last ditch effort to see if anyone has ideas, because this student is on the verge of leaving my classroom. If there is anything I can do to make it work with this kid, I would do it immediately. He's smart, witty, and unfortunately very funny in a South Park kind of a way. But he's raising hell every day and he's the first student I've had where it feels like I can't connect with him at all. And not for lack of trying.

October 1st has already hit in some parts of the world, so Timasomo has officially begun!

Posting in this topic is your official entry into Timasomo. Let everyone know what your actual plans are: what are you going to make?

Anyone who was not already on the notification list will be added with a comment in this topic.

Once the date turns over to October 1st wherever you are in the world, feel free to start creating!

FAQs

Timasomo is "Tildes' Make Something Month": a creative community challenge that takes place in the month of October.

The best way to get a feel for Timasomo is to check out our previous Showcase topics, where creators share their creations with the community at the end of the event:

• 2023 Showcase
• 2022 Showcase
• 2021 Showcase
• 2020 Showcase
• 2019 Showcase

There are no hard and fast rules on what you can create. You can make anything!

All of the Timasomo topics will be over in ~creative.timasomo, so if you're interested in participating or following along, make sure you're subscribed there.

All people who respond to this topic will be added to a notification list that I will ping each time I put up a new Timasomo topic. If you do not wish to be added to the list, or you wish to only be notified for the final Timasomo showcase, please let me know.

The Roll Call thread will be posted in ~creative.timasomo on October 1st. That is the official beginning to the event and is where people will formally commit to their projects for Timasomo.

FAQs

This Thread: Planning!

Post your ideas.

Give feedback to others.

Set up collaborations.

Ask questions.

Everything in this thread is non-commital! Bounce around ideas and figure out what you'd like to do in our communal brainstorming session.

Also, please do NOT start work on your project yet! Stage setting, planning, and other preparations are allowed (e.g. getting supplies/materials, setting up workspaces, etc.), but save the creation initiation for the 1st.

Get excited for another GREAT Timasomo!

Hi DnD friends,

I'm tackling a new DM challenge and could use some guidance. I'm designing a dungeon where humanoid beavers are attempting to awaken a sleeping god. Their efforts get derailed when they offer the god a magical plant that overgrows their entire base, warping the rooms and fusing many surviving beavers into half-plant, half-beaver creatures.

Since our group is relatively new, I've found that combat can be a bit slow. To speed things up and make combat more dynamic, I want to include environmental elements and traps—things like shelves that can be pushed over or a chandelier that can be dropped on enemies. I hope this will make the players feel more impactful when they pull off creative moves.

I plan to design a large building that encourages investigation, puzzle solving, and backtracking. My goal is for the players to get familiar with the map before combat, allowing them to discover useful items or environmental features they can take advantage of when enemies appear.

Since I've never done anything like this, I'm seeking advice on how to approach the design. Are there common pitfalls I should avoid to keep the building fun? How large should the maps be if I want to run this over 3 sessions, each about 3 hours long? And what types of puzzles would fit well in this environment?

Thanks a ton for your ideas! I’m already feeling like I may be reaching too high, but I’m excited to give it a shot!