Right now there's a lot of discussion ongoing about community culture, building Tildes' attitudes as a community into something that is solid enough to withstand waves of new users without being disrupted too heavily by newcomers that have yet to learn the culture.

But what of mod culture?

This topic isn't only for those that have mod experience, there are plenty of users with experience talking to mods that have their own negative stories. Over on reddit the actions of one mod team affect the brand-image of all modteams on the entirety of reddit. One bad action by a mod that occurs in a default subreddit backed up by the other mods in that subreddit becomes (in the eyes of users) the behaviour of all "reddit moderators".

Often I see mods making things far far worse by being one of the most combative and hostile in-groups on the site. Talking to users in a manner that is best described as the way the worst teacher in school talked to teenagers as if they were 4 year olds, not listening to anything a user is actually saying and dismissing them outright because they're the user and they're the moderator. I understand some of it comes from difficult interactions with genuinely toxic individuals that waste enormous quantities of time better put towards better things. However what I see are moderators approaching every interaction with every user with criticism as if they are almost certainly the same-old toxic user. This is not the case.

This is exceptionally important here on Tildes because it won't be a mistake to take the actions of one moderator and have it colour your image of other moderators on the site. When the site holds responsibility for moderator actions due to oversight and control then the actions of all moderators are going to be considered the actions of the site and the rest of the mods.

So, how do we want our mods to talk to users? How do we want them to interact with users? What controls can be put in place to appreciate quality moderation? What can stop quippy mods that shut down valid discussion with 1 line reductive answers? Etc etc.

What is good moderation and what is a good moderator?

Personally what I try to apply to my own behaviour is to actually LISTEN to people and act as an equal, or at least present the appearance of listening. The thing that bothers people most feeling like something they care about is dismissed.

What are the many issues that you've see in moderator behaviour (in front and behind the scenes) and in what ways can Tildes go about things differently to stop them?

I do this a lot. I did it just now. I wrote about five paragraphs on a topic, deleted it and started over, wrote about five more and did the same thing. Got frustrated. Some thoughts that went through my mind:

• "this is not concise at all. It's disorganized and needs to be re-done"

• "this is going to trigger an emotional response and that will filter how they read it, so I'll be less likely to get interesting responses"

• "maybe I should just do this as a journal entry and keep it private"

• "these thoughts are worth something, and even if they aren't super cogent, maybe they can be a starting point for a collaborative thinking process"

• "that's dumb, nobody cares about my ramblings anyway. everyone has thoughts like this, mine aren't more important"

• etc.

So what usually ends up happening in instances like this is I just don't post. Other times, I get wrapped up in trying to make a post super-high quality and it comes across as over-produced... and if I've somehow triggered an emotional response then that aspect becomes an avenue for attack.

Does anyone else experience something comparable to this? Is it a good thing for helping to maintain quality content and discussions? If not, what are strategies to improve situations like these?

There is a user I do not wish to mention to prevent a witch Hunt or if I am wrong. In the past two days I have seen them post two topics with fairly contentious topics, but nothing was wrong with the topic itself. The user however, has a flame bait sentence in each of these posts, ex. "I am against homosexual marriage". He then waits for a few heated responses and then edits out the flame bait sentence.

This makes it look like an innocuous post is suddently full of hot heads immediately starting fights based off their assumptions and not what the user posted.

How do we deal with what seems like a troll that operates like this? I won't be posting on his posts anymore as you shouldn't feed the troll, but he definitely got me the first time and it's unreasonable to expect everyone to always be on the lookout for this.

Edit: to everyone saying I am jumping the gun by accusing him of being a troll. That may very well be, which is why I declined to name the user. Even if it's not intentional, it's causing problems if we want this to be a place for high quality discussion. Messaging @deimos has been suggested as an option and is probably the best choice for now but will not scale. What should be our solution to this issue going forward that scales?

Most religions base their beliefs on the Bible. If so, where was the bible based on? Clearly, the bible was written by a bunch of men. Men. Humans. Humans are prone to corruption. We cannot tell whether these authors corrupted or even invented stories? So, why should we base our virtues on a thick book when we don't really know if it's accurate or not?

Science has already proven that Adam and Eve didn't exist. Evolution does exist. And Science have evidences. The bible said the Earth was FLAT and have 4 corners and sides. Science said the Earth was spherical, and it proved what it said. Science seeks evidence. Science seeks the TRUTH. The bible? It was just created by men many years ago to answer questions they cannot answer.

There are tons of wars and crusades that were religion driven, whether we had holy wars or wars because of terrorists following inhumane beliefs, many people ultimately died. Just like wars almost eradicated humanity, that is what should happen to be Religion. Become eradicated. Adding on to that we see many deaths every day just because of religious differences.

The bottom line is, The holy book is repulsive and its repulsiveness creates a huge barrier to development. The world would be a better place without religions. Religions claim themselves right. And because of that, people around the globe were divided by awful beliefs. It's really sad to think that people do good things because they FEARED the awful HELL and because they wanted to go to the fictional HEAVEN. Religious people were driven by a 'holy' book which cannot speak and collect evidences for what it says. We should wake up. Be united by an accurate tool that seeks truth. Science. We should base our virtues on our intelligence and common sense.

Greek mythology was once a religion, and it flopped and became a myth. Religion in the US is now declining according to surveys. With our eyes, watch and see how will religion disintegrate through the years while the development, peace and stability of the world integrates. To add to my initial statement, I can provide sources for every argument against religion and the "holy book"

So, it might just be that I'm older and notice these things more, but it really seems to me that fan groups are becoming more and more toxic overall. It feels like over the past 5-8 years specifically fanbases are reaching toxic levels faster and faster.

I remember when bronies became a thing, it took them like 3-4 years before the dangerous, threatening, and assholeish behavior really began to become common. Then Steven Universe came out and it only took them like 2 years to start sending death threats to people who didn't support their head-cannons. Rick and Morty went toxic in under a year and a half.

Then there's the shit in long-running franchises. Star Wars has had multiple of the actors shutting off social media from the toxic bile being shot at them. Chris Pratt is getting hate for what Star Lord did in Infinity War.

There's memes too, weirdly enough. Calarts is the biggest example I can think of. People made a dumb joke about how all the cartoons look a like today and someone pointed out how a few of the artists went to this one school in California and it became a catch all term for the shitty artstyle, and then within like 4 weeks the school has to go into lockdown because someone made a tongue-in-cheek threat of shooting the school up. A few years ago trolling attempts would be things like ordering a bunch of pizzas to the school or something annoying and dickish but overall harmless like that.

I know toxicity amongst fanbases has always been a thing, but it really seems to me that they're reaching unseen levels and doing so faster and faster. I mean Rick and Morty fans rioted over fucking dipping sauce, there are the aforementioned Steven Universe death threats, the directed attacks of actors on social media, fucking joking about shooting schools up because you don't like the art-style a few of their graduates used in a time where we've seen like 6 school shootings in half a year, there was that whole Voltron incident where a fan stole storyboards or something and threatened to release them to the public unless the creators of the show made their favorite gay ship a thing.

I guess what I'm getting at is what the fuck is happening that's poisoning every single community online? It's like everything has suddenly devolved into Youtube comments. How did we get to this level of toxicity? Or am I just more aware of this shit now and it's not really all that different from how it used to be?

Well, there comes a time in every community's existence where someone gets an idea for discussion from another thread he wishes were better framed. So buckle in. This discussion is intended to sit at an uncomfortable cultural crossroads.

In the EU, gay spouses are now able to have the same freedom of movement rights as straight spouses. The Supreme Court in the United States ruled that a baker was treated unfairly by a Colorado regulatory commission when they tried to suss out if he discriminated against a gay couple who wanted to purchase a wedding cake.

In Brazil (you thought I was going to let this one be), courts have explicitly allowed conversion therapy to continue.

In Chechnya (a part of Russia that I always seem to struggle to spell), you could be hunted down and tortured or killed if you were gay, with people turning their own family members over to the local government. The local government, in absurdity, claimed after the purge that there were "no gays" in Chechnya, so there could have been no purge.

The point I'm trying to make here is that LGBT+ discrimination is an issue that should touch just about everywhere.

Before we get too deep, a point on terms. Discrimination, strictly speaking, is separating one thing from another. It is not necessarily a hostile act. If I say "you can drive only if your vision is good enough to read signs while you drive," that is discrimination on the basis of your ability to see, but most people aren't likely to say it's unreasonable discrimination (there is a rather obvious safety implication, for starters). Similarly, if you tell women to go to the bathroom in one space, and men to go to the bathroom in another space, that is discrimination based on gender. Is it reasonable discrimination? That might depend on if you're trans, and what state you're in.

This topic has to be more limited than this set up implies it will be. We won't be able to narrow things well enough to have a meaningful discussion otherwise. Today, we're just going to touch on the simple (ha!) matter of whether baking a wedding cake is art, whether refusing a wedding cake to a gay couple is discrimination, and what a government should be expected to do about it. So, the questions:

• Is making a custom wedding cake for a wedding "art"?
• Is refusing a custom wedding cake to a couple because it would be for a cause you do not support discrimination on the basis of that couple's identity?
• How should a just government resolve a dispute between a couple who feel unreasonably discriminated against and an artist who feels compelled to use speech for a cause they do not support?

And a bonus question:

• What role should a judicial branch have in advancing various groups' rights? Does relying on this less democratic method for securing rights open a movement up to counter-reaction or is the counter-reaction simply an inevitable consequence of a movement's success?

At some unspecified date in the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter into seven pieces. As the remnants of the Moon begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science popularizer "Doc" Dubois Harris calculates that the number of collisions will increase exponentially. A large number of moon fragments will begin entering Earth's atmosphere, forming a "white sky" and blanketing the earth within two years with what he calls a "Hard Rain" of bolides; this will cause the atmosphere to heat to incandescence and oceans to boil away, destroying the biosphere and rendering Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. It is decided to evacuate as many people and resources as possible to a "Cloud Ark" in orbit, including a "swarm" of "arklet" habitats that will be able to avoid the debris from the moon—both to attempt to preserve the human race and to give the remaining doomed inhabitants of Earth something to hope for, to prevent civil disorder from breaking out on Earth before its surface is destroyed. Each nation on Earth is invited to choose by lot a small number of young people to become eligible to join the Cloud Ark.

The Cloud Ark is to be based around the International Space Station (ISS), currently commanded by American astronaut Ivy Xiao. The ISS is already bolted onto an iron Arjuna asteroid called Amalthea, which provides some protection against moon debris. Robots are used to excavate Amalthea to provide more protection in a project run by mining and robotics engineer Dinah MacQuarie. Technicians and specialists, including Doc Dubois, are sent to the ISS in advance of the Hard Rain to prepare it to become the headquarters of the Cloud Ark.

The plan is that the Cloud Ark must be self-sufficient for 5,000 years and capable of repopulating Earth once it is habitable again. A Human Genetic Archive is sent to the Cloud Ark, with the intention that it will be used to rebuild the human population. Approximately 1,500 people are launched into space in the two years before the Hard Rain begins.

Suspecting that some architects of the Cloud Ark are interested only in pacifying Earth's inhabitants with false hope (rather than creating an environment that will actually survive in the long term), a billionaire named Sean Probst realizes that the Cloud Ark will need a ready supply of water in order to provide propellant for the space station and to prevent it from eventually falling into the earth's atmosphere. He embarks on a two-year expedition to extract ice from a comet nicknamed Greg's Skeleton, using a nuclear reactor to provide power to bring it back towards Earth.

The Hard Rain begins approximately two years after the destruction of the moon as predicted; human civilization as well as nearly all life on Earth is obliterated, although some try to take shelter underground (such as Dinah's father) or in the deep ocean (such as Ivy's fiancé). Markus Leuker, appointed leader of the Cloud Ark, declares all nations of Earth to be dissolved, and imposes martial law under the Cloud Ark Constitution. Despite a worldwide agreement that members of government will not be launched into space, the President of the United States, Julia Bliss Flaherty, manages to get herself sent to the Cloud Ark at the last minute. Shortly afterwards the main cache of the physical Human Genetic Archive attached to the ISS is ruined by the thrusters of an arklet passing too closely, leaving only samples that had been distributed amongst the arks.

There is disagreement on the Cloud Ark about the best way to organize its society and avoid the debris of the moon. Some "Arkies" favor converting the Cloud Ark into a decentralized swarm of small space vessels at a higher orbit out of range of debris, rather than maintaining the central authority of the ISS. Doc Dubois wants to shelter in the "Cleft", a crevasse on the now-exposed iron core of the moon. Others want to go to Mars. Julia Flaherty starts to acquire a coterie of followers and encourages the proponents of the decentralized swarm plan.

Sean Probst's expedition has succeeded, and he has brought a comet into an orbit that will soon pass by Earth. His radio has failed and he has built a replacement by hand, and is able to communicate with Dinah MacQuarie by Morse code. However, he and his party die of radiation sickness caused by fallout from their nuclear reactor long before the expedition is complete. Markus Leuker and Dinah travel to the comet with a small crew to take control of it and bring it back to the Cloud Ark, in order to provide sufficient propellant to reach the Cleft on the moon's core. Just before Dinah returns with the ice as the sole survivor of the mission, Julia Flaherty persuades the majority of the population to abandon the ISS and move to higher orbit in a decentralized swarm, and sends a preliminary expedition to Mars. In the course of their sudden, unauthorized departure the ISS sustains catastrophic damage to many sections. The surviving portions of the Human Genetic Archive are carried along with them, but due to the Arkies' ignorance, these surviving portions are discarded or ignored. Only the digital version of the Human Genetic Archive survives aboard the ISS. The ISS and remaining third of the cloud ark combine through reshaping the ice into a support structure, and is rechristened Endurance.

During the three years that it takes for Endurance to reach the Cleft, the majority of its population die of various causes (cancer caused by cosmic radiation, suicide, bolide strikes, etc.); by the time they are within range of the Cleft, only about 30 survivors remain. Julia Bliss Flaherty's Swarm splits into two factions, who fight; Flaherty's faction is defeated. Running out of food, the Swarm resorts to cannibalism, and by the end of three years only 11 survive, including Flaherty and the leader of the opposing faction, Aïda. Aïda requests to reunite the remnant of the Swarm with the Cloud Ark before it reaches the Cleft, but secretly plans a battle for control of Endurance; as a result of that battle the population is diminished even further.

By the time Endurance reaches the relative safety of the Cleft, there are only eight surviving Homo sapiens in space, all of whom are women. One, the sociologist Luisa, has reached menopause, and the remaining seven (Dinah, Ivy, Aïda, Tekla, Camila, Moira, and Julia) come to be known as the Seven Eves. The Human Genetic Archive has been destroyed, but they have sufficient resources to use the surviving genetics laboratory to rebuild the human race by parthenogenesis. They agree that each of the Seven Eves gets to choose how her offspring will be genetically modified or enhanced. Aïda predicts that, hundreds of years from now, this project shall result in seven new races.

The narrative jumps to 5,000 years later. There are now three billion humans living in a ring around the Earth, and they have indeed formed into seven races, each one descended from and named after the Seven Eves who survived the events of Part 2. These races have quite distinct characteristics, including "Moirans" who can undergo "epigenetic shifts", radically changing their bodies in response to new environments. The iron core of the moon has mostly been used to build space habitats, but the Cleft itself has been turned into "Cradle", an exclusive piece of real estate attached to a tether that occasionally "docks" with Earth.

Humanity has divided mostly along racial lines into two states, Red and Blue, which are engaged in a form of Cold War characterized by cultural isolation, espionage and border skirmishes, mediated by treaty agreements more honored in the breach than the observance.

The orbiting races, the Spacers, terraform Earth by crashing ice comets into it to replenish the oceans, and seed the planet with genetically created organisms based upon re-sequenced DNA data saved from the escape to orbit. Once a breathable atmosphere is recreated, and sufficient plant and animal species have been reseeded, some members of the orbiting races ("Sooners") resettle the planet, in violation of treaty agreements.

A "Seven", a group of seven people with one member from each race, is recruited by "Doc" Hu Noah, to investigate mysterious people who have been sighted on Earth. As the story unfolds, they discover that some humans did indeed survive the Hard Rain on the planet by living in deep mines ("Diggers"), while others survived in ocean trenches using submarines ("Pingers"). Although these survivors have also evolved socially and biologically to form two additional races, the survival of root stock humanity separate from the Seven Eves causes turmoil in Spacer high politics. Ground conflict eventually occurs because each of the orbiting camps (Red and Blue) wishes to establish a preferential or exclusive relationship with the Earthbound races: the Diggers, although descendants of Dinah's family, interpret the Blue state's presence on their territory as an act of aggression and develop an alliance with Red, prompting Blue to seek out an alliance with the Pingers on the strength of Ivy's connection with one of their founders. Matters are further complicated because the Diggers claim all of the Earth's land surface as their own, and initially hold the Spacers in disdain (despite their high technology) for having fled the planet eons ago.

In an epilogue it is revealed that a separate, secret underwater ark had been created concurrently with the cloud ark, leading to the development of the Pingers, based on analysis of the "selfies" Ivy's fiance had sent her, using diagrams and sketches in the background as clues. Ty invites the surviving Seven (along with Sonar and Deep, representatives of the Diggers and the Pingers, respectively) back to apartments at his bar in the Cleft with the intent of forming the first "Nine".

At some unspecified date in the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter into seven pieces. As the remnants of the Moon begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science popularizer "Doc" Dubois Harris calculates that the number of collisions will increase exponentially. A large number of moon fragments will begin entering Earth's atmosphere, forming a "white sky" and blanketing the earth within two years with what he calls a "Hard Rain" of bolides; this will cause the atmosphere to heat to incandescence and oceans to boil away, destroying the biosphere and rendering Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. It is decided to evacuate as many people and resources as possible to a "Cloud Ark" in orbit, including a "swarm" of "arklet" habitats that will be able to avoid the debris from the moon—both to attempt to preserve the human race and to give the remaining doomed inhabitants of Earth something to hope for, to prevent civil disorder from breaking out on Earth before its surface is destroyed. Each nation on Earth is invited to choose by lot a small number of young people to become eligible to join the Cloud Ark.

The Cloud Ark is to be based around the International Space Station (ISS), currently commanded by American astronaut Ivy Xiao. The ISS is already bolted onto an iron Arjuna asteroid called Amalthea, which provides some protection against moon debris. Robots are used to excavate Amalthea to provide more protection in a project run by mining and robotics engineer Dinah MacQuarie. Technicians and specialists, including Doc Dubois, are sent to the ISS in advance of the Hard Rain to prepare it to become the headquarters of the Cloud Ark.

The plan is that the Cloud Ark must be self-sufficient for 5,000 years and capable of repopulating Earth once it is habitable again. A Human Genetic Archive is sent to the Cloud Ark, with the intention that it will be used to rebuild the human population. Approximately 1,500 people are launched into space in the two years before the Hard Rain begins.

Suspecting that some architects of the Cloud Ark are interested only in pacifying Earth's inhabitants with false hope (rather than creating an environment that will actually survive in the long term), a billionaire named Sean Probst realizes that the Cloud Ark will need a ready supply of water in order to provide propellant for the space station and to prevent it from eventually falling into the earth's atmosphere. He embarks on a two-year expedition to extract ice from a comet nicknamed Greg's Skeleton, using a nuclear reactor to provide power to bring it back towards Earth.

The Hard Rain begins approximately two years after the destruction of the moon as predicted; human civilization as well as nearly all life on Earth is obliterated, although some try to take shelter underground (such as Dinah's father) or in the deep ocean (such as Ivy's fiancé). Markus Leuker, appointed leader of the Cloud Ark, declares all nations of Earth to be dissolved, and imposes martial law under the Cloud Ark Constitution. Despite a worldwide agreement that members of government will not be launched into space, the President of the United States, Julia Bliss Flaherty, manages to get herself sent to the Cloud Ark at the last minute. Shortly afterwards the main cache of the physical Human Genetic Archive attached to the ISS is ruined by the thrusters of an arklet passing too closely, leaving only samples that had been distributed amongst the arks.

There is disagreement on the Cloud Ark about the best way to organize its society and avoid the debris of the moon. Some "Arkies" favor converting the Cloud Ark into a decentralized swarm of small space vessels at a higher orbit out of range of debris, rather than maintaining the central authority of the ISS. Doc Dubois wants to shelter in the "Cleft", a crevasse on the now-exposed iron core of the moon. Others want to go to Mars. Julia Flaherty starts to acquire a coterie of followers and encourages the proponents of the decentralized swarm plan.

Sean Probst's expedition has succeeded, and he has brought a comet into an orbit that will soon pass by Earth. His radio has failed and he has built a replacement by hand, and is able to communicate with Dinah MacQuarie by Morse code. However, he and his party die of radiation sickness caused by fallout from their nuclear reactor long before the expedition is complete. Markus Leuker and Dinah travel to the comet with a small crew to take control of it and bring it back to the Cloud Ark, in order to provide sufficient propellant to reach the Cleft on the moon's core. Just before Dinah returns with the ice as the sole survivor of the mission, Julia Flaherty persuades the majority of the population to abandon the ISS and move to higher orbit in a decentralized swarm, and sends a preliminary expedition to Mars. In the course of their sudden, unauthorized departure the ISS sustains catastrophic damage to many sections. The surviving portions of the Human Genetic Archive are carried along with them, but due to the Arkies' ignorance, these surviving portions are discarded or ignored. Only the digital version of the Human Genetic Archive survives aboard the ISS. The ISS and remaining third of the cloud ark combine through reshaping the ice into a support structure, and is rechristened Endurance.

During the three years that it takes for Endurance to reach the Cleft, the majority of its population die of various causes (cancer caused by cosmic radiation, suicide, bolide strikes, etc.); by the time they are within range of the Cleft, only about 30 survivors remain. Julia Bliss Flaherty's Swarm splits into two factions, who fight; Flaherty's faction is defeated. Running out of food, the Swarm resorts to cannibalism, and by the end of three years only 11 survive, including Flaherty and the leader of the opposing faction, Aïda. Aïda requests to reunite the remnant of the Swarm with the Cloud Ark before it reaches the Cleft, but secretly plans a battle for control of Endurance; as a result of that battle the population is diminished even further.

By the time Endurance reaches the relative safety of the Cleft, there are only eight surviving Homo sapiens in space, all of whom are women. One, the sociologist Luisa, has reached menopause, and the remaining seven (Dinah, Ivy, Aïda, Tekla, Camila, Moira, and Julia) come to be known as the Seven Eves. The Human Genetic Archive has been destroyed, but they have sufficient resources to use the surviving genetics laboratory to rebuild the human race by parthenogenesis. They agree that each of the Seven Eves gets to choose how her offspring will be genetically modified or enhanced. Aïda predicts that, hundreds of years from now, this project shall result in seven new races.

The narrative jumps to 5,000 years later. There are now three billion humans living in a ring around the Earth, and they have indeed formed into seven races, each one descended from and named after the Seven Eves who survived the events of Part 2. These races have quite distinct characteristics, including "Moirans" who can undergo "epigenetic shifts", radically changing their bodies in response to new environments. The iron core of the moon has mostly been used to build space habitats, but the Cleft itself has been turned into "Cradle", an exclusive piece of real estate attached to a tether that occasionally "docks" with Earth.

Humanity has divided mostly along racial lines into two states, Red and Blue, which are engaged in a form of Cold War characterized by cultural isolation, espionage and border skirmishes, mediated by treaty agreements more honored in the breach than the observance.

The orbiting races, the Spacers, terraform Earth by crashing ice comets into it to replenish the oceans, and seed the planet with genetically created organisms based upon re-sequenced DNA data saved from the escape to orbit. Once a breathable atmosphere is recreated, and sufficient plant and animal species have been reseeded, some members of the orbiting races ("Sooners") resettle the planet, in violation of treaty agreements.

A "Seven", a group of seven people with one member from each race, is recruited by "Doc" Hu Noah, to investigate mysterious people who have been sighted on Earth. As the story unfolds, they discover that some humans did indeed survive the Hard Rain on the planet by living in deep mines ("Diggers"), while others survived in ocean trenches using submarines ("Pingers"). Although these survivors have also evolved socially and biologically to form two additional races, the survival of root stock humanity separate from the Seven Eves causes turmoil in Spacer high politics. Ground conflict eventually occurs because each of the orbiting camps (Red and Blue) wishes to establish a preferential or exclusive relationship with the Earthbound races: the Diggers, although descendants of Dinah's family, interpret the Blue state's presence on their territory as an act of aggression and develop an alliance with Red, prompting Blue to seek out an alliance with the Pingers on the strength of Ivy's connection with one of their founders. Matters are further complicated because the Diggers claim all of the Earth's land surface as their own, and initially hold the Spacers in disdain (despite their high technology) for having fled the planet eons ago.

In an epilogue it is revealed that a separate, secret underwater ark had been created concurrently with the cloud ark, leading to the development of the Pingers, based on analysis of the "selfies" Ivy's fiance had sent her, using diagrams and sketches in the background as clues. Ty invites the surviving Seven (along with Sonar and Deep, representatives of the Diggers and the Pingers, respectively) back to apartments at his bar in the Cleft with the intent of forming the first "Nine".

For those not in the know, Brazil is going to be having a presidential election this year. The reason the title of this thread is what it is relates to the scandals that engulf all three of the current and past presidents: Current President Michel Temer, and past Presidents (in order of most recently in office) Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula was found guilty and began serving his 12-year jail sentence for accepting bribes in early April, maintaining his innocence and that his investigation and trial were politically motivated to prevent him from running in this year's election.

There are few countries as publicly wrestling with corruption allegations in explicit quid pro quo deals between politicians and companies as Brazil.

If you're interested in a pretty decent introduction into this wild ride, the wikipedia article on Operation Car Wash--and that is how this scandal gets referred to--is a good place to start.

So, using publicly available evidence (in Portuguese if you have to), what role does corruption play in the highest political offices in Brazil, and how can Brazil begin rebuilding what seems to be a clearly shattered reputation?

What's your go-to weekend dish? Whether it's a fried breakfast or eight hour smoked pork shoulder, what do you love to cook on the weekend?

Personally it's split between bacon and egg sandwiches on homemade bread; my chili recipe, loosely based on SeriousEats Best Ever Chili and potato, chorizo, and cabbage hash with a runny egg on top.

Author's note: I posted this a couple days ago in @Kat's WIP thread, but I felt it was a little too tough of an ask to put there. This is probably going to take a more serious time commitment to review than the average submission, so I want to make sure everyone knows what they're getting into (such as through that nifty word count that will appear in the thread title). To that end, let me lay out some context so you're more grounded as to what this is, where I came from, and how serious I am about it.

For starters, I wrote this as part of a complete manuscript (about 63k words total) over a couple months late last year on a challenge from a friend. Liking the direction it was going, I then spent much of the early part of this year fixing and tweaking and revising because it turned out I liked it so much I decided to plan out three more independent stories set after this one.

So what is this? This is a first-person science fiction story of a test subject within an ongoing science experiment. It is set in not-too-distant future, 60-80 years give or take--I didn't want to be too specific for World Building Reasons. The nature of that experiment is unknown to the subject. I need to work on my blurbs.

What type of feedback am I looking for? Any you're comfortable giving, and I've got a very thick skin (many calluses from toxic league of legends players, I'd joke if it weren't true). This is the fourth-or-so draft and I could use fresh eyes on the little things. I also highly value emotional feedback, like what something is making you feel, whether you found something upsetting or funny or confusing. This is an unreliable narrator, so there should bit of each. Endgame-wise, I am probably going to look to publish this somewhere somehow, but I want to make sure that I'm not barking up the wrong tree before putting too much more energy into this.

If this isn't a great format for this sort of work (and I get it. This text is twelve pages on a good day), I am open to suggestions on how it might be easier to consume and respond. I've used my markdown wizardry to mimic the format of my word doc, which I'm not planning on uploading directly. So please forgive weird formatting things like inconsistent italics. I tried to catch them all, but it's like playing a game of whack a mole over here.

Editor's note: The following text came to us within encrypted song files in specific order. We were also provided an executable file that decrypted the text so that we could publish it. The relationship between these songs and the narrative is often not clear. To allow readers the opportunity to judge any potential relationship for themselves, we have titled each bit of text with the correct song file it was encrypted within. The order was preserved.

Prologue

"Yesterday”.FLAC

I'm not breathing. I'm dead. Is this hell? Heaven? I’m in a white room with Adam and Eve in white robes as the gatekeepers. Why is the room tilted? It’s not a hospital; it’s far too dirty. Will I recognize anyone? Am I dressed for heaven? The grime makes me think maybe this hell. That’s the breaks then, huh. But why would demons be in lab coats? And what are those tops? Is that a scarf? Indoors?

Oh shit, they're staring at me.

Hi. Am I dead? Did I say that? Can I speak? I can’t breathe.

They looked at each other. Did I say anything? Maybe I'm not dead. But I'm not breathing. I’m not just not breathing, but I can’t breathe. I don't feel like I can move. Why can’t I breathe?

Holy shit, I don't have any legs. My arms aren't mine. They're someone else's. Some hairy darker bastard too. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. What the fuck is happening?

You're not dead, but you did die. That has all the clarity of a Taoist monk. I think the woman said it. She stepped forward a little bit and tilted her head to the side with some mouth flapping to match the words. Did I really hear it? How can I not be dead? Whatever happened in America froze you. Like, we talking cryogenics frozen? Disney movie Frozen? The Iceman cometh frozen? Even frozen people should be able to breathe, right? They needed to replace my arms? What was wrong with my old arms if I was frozen to death? You’re in a new body. Those arms are yours now.

Yeah, the woman has to have said some of that. She started leaning in during the mouth-flapping like she was talking to a child. Now she’s straight as a country boy at church. I’m going to have to track her specifically. This is tedious.

Asian woman. If you can hear this: sorry, I’m new here.

“My name is Nadia, not ‘Asian woman.’ Can you tell us your name?” She glanced back to the man before looking back at me, with her hands clasped like she was pleading. Do I need to be pleaded with? She put her hands back to her sides. Where am I?

“You’re in Istanbul.” That’s not Nadia. Her mouth didn’t flap. I think it’s a voice, and I think it’s the man’s, but I couldn’t see him flap. Nadia was blocking the view. I think she’s like two feet away or something. Just out of arm's reach, but close enough that I can’t see the man anymore. Now she’s backed away. Why does she do that? The timing is weird.

So I'm in Istanbul. My legs are gone. My arms are fake and way super hairy. I'm not breathing, but I'm not dead, though I did die. I felt my eyes roll. I guess you two did something to me then.

“Well,” This is the other voice. Now that Nadia has backed away I can see the man’s mouth flapping, but he’s barely doing anything else. Not even a simple hand-gesture. I thought he was just wallpaper. Breathing wallpaper. Or is it mine? Maybe mine is the mouth that’s flapping.

“The frozen you died, but your brain was intact and incredibly well-preserved by whatever happened. We transferred the data that your brain contained into an android unit we designed for this purpose, and here you are." Yep, not mine. It’s got to be the dude, especially because he did a weird, body-length bobblehead bounce the entire time that voice was happening. Wait--

“You designed an android not to have any legs?” I heard that one. That’s me. Okay, I'm getting better at this. That explains the breathing, I think. It at least explains the arms. I'm not dead, but I'm also not alive. This is fun. I'm having fun. “So what did you do to me and how the fuck did I get to Istanbul?”

Whatever script these two had, I'm sure I've deviated from it. They're spending a lot more time looking at each other in silence than mouth-flapping. Okay. Fake-breath. What didn't I notice? The recorder is a little black thing on a little spot at the bottom of the mirror. Oh, I'm laid on this weird chair thing that has me positioned to look across the room. That’s why everything at an angle, I guess. Well, let’s just get off of that. I can just lean against this wall. It’s drywall, but that’s fine so long as I’m not throwing myself at it. I’ll have to lean because my ass is rounded with holes where legs should be. If I imagined legs there, I’d probably look like I have a nice ass.

The room looks like a room you use to interrogate someone mixed with a kid’s idea of wall-design. The wall behind me and to my left are drywall, looks like. The opposite wall with the door and the wall to my right with a mirror are concrete. Not even brick, like just solid concrete. I didn’t even realize that was still code. If this is a hospital, I’m reporting a lot of code violations. This place looks like a pigsty, one that not even the hired help cleans up. Though, that might just be those concrete walls. I’m especially complaining about the lack of legs.

"We felt it was a safety risk to give you legs." Safety risk? Safety for whom? I can’t breathe. Who is this guy anyway? "I'm Mehmet."

"Wait, how did you hear that? Have I been saying everything?" I'd rather have a little privacy at some points, you know?

"Well, you haven't exactly been silent." Huh. That's going to be a problem.

"You should be able to create a subroutine for the thoughts you want to save without speaking." Nadia to the rescue, but how would I do--oh, I see. That's new.

Let's restart this, then.

"Mr. Roboto".FLAC

Goooooooooood morning, subconscious! WELCOME TO THE FUTURE! Cue audience applause and cheers. I'm your host, Mr. Android! As you know, we’ve been off the air for a while. There’s a lot to catch up on. That’s why we’re bringing in two special guests to help reintroduce us to the anxiety of life: Mehmet and Nadia! We got a great show for you tonight, so stay tuned because you have no choice anyway.

Before the break, Mehmet, you were saying that you felt it was a safety risk to give us legs?

"That's right, Mr. Android. The design team and I thought that if you had legs, you'd be likely to use them.”

You’re damn right. Cue audience laughter. What’s wrong with using legs?

“If you had that mobility, we don’t know what you’d use it for. You could do anything a normal person could do, even walk right on out of this building.”

I presume you wouldn’t like it if I walked out right now. What if I just wanted a coffee from our proud sponsor: BB's Coffee™?

"First, don’t drink coffee. Don’t drink anything. That mouth wasn’t designed for drinking."

We’ll see about that. Cue audience laughter.

“Second, we need you not to walk out because we’re trying to monitor you to make sure you’re safe, as well as try to figure out what happened around your death.”

We'll have to come back to that, Mehmet. First, tell us a little bit about yourself.

"Sure. I was born and raised here in Turkey, but my grandparents were studying tornadoes in Oklahoma when everything went down."

Your grandparents? How long ago are we talking about here?

“It’s been a bit more than a half-century.”

Alright, what is ‘everything’ and how did it impact your grandma?

"Well, whatever happened to kill you. No one is really sure what caused the incident to happen. The best we could make of it at the time is that there was a large eruption near America's capital, and after that almost the entire east coast was some form of an infected mess. People who didn't die immediately had their immune systems too compromised to handle any other serious illness. That killed most of them within a few years." A moment of silence fell on the stage.

How bad was the devastation?

"Most of the coast was gone. Flights were stopped by the US almost immediately, so people in those areas were stranded. One flight got out to Montreal and it wiped out nearly a quarter of the city’s population. Cities along in the infected area lost an average of 75% of their population within a couple weeks.”

How far did it get?

“Atlanta was the northernmost city along the coast to weather the outbreak. A well-timed storm system kept the illness from spreading further west than it did. The mountains usually marked the furthest west it got. People who flew from those areas in the moments before the quarantine were tracked down and quarantined forcibly.”

Did anyone come to help?

“Sure, if a vulture helps a corpse.” Cue audience laughter. Audience might not laugh. “No one dared try to go near the infected areas, but Mexico declared a relief effort. That really was an attempt to annex most of the west and Great Plains under what it considered its historic claim to the land. The locals did not see things the same way. It turned into a classic occupation situation. They were resisted.”

So Texas is the new Palestine? Or would Crimea be a better analogy? What did your grandparents do?

“It was something like that. My grandparents just wanted to keep studying meteorology. There really wasn't a place in the United States safe enough to do that anymore. They applied for refugee status in Turkey and moved here. From there, they had a typical immigrant story. They earned enough money to start a restaurant and set their children up with a good education to be successful in Turkish society." Cue audience awe and applause.

Fascinating stuff. Nadia, it's your turn. Tell us a little about yourself.

"Well, I'm from Saudi Arabia. My parents were in California until about a decade before I was born. My mother was German-American, from Oregon. My dad was second generation Chinese-American, Californian born.”

California was impacted by the incident?

“Indirectly. After the incident, California tried to maintain some semblance of normalcy, but there were too many other nations that wanted to claim California for it to keep that dream alive for long. Russia, Canada, Japan, China, and Mexico each fought the other and the Californian government as they tried to claim it for their own.”

So they were the prettiest gal at the ball. Cue audience laughter. How did they deal with that sort of peer pressure?

“California had to start a mandatory draft program to keep up with the military needs of the new environment. Every citizen was theoretically part of the military’s reserves. After a few decades of near constant skirmishing at sea and especially in the north where most of the invading forces fought, California was out of resources and friends and collapsed after a military coup. Turns out if you can’t pay the active service personnel, you can’t keep a country.”

Intense. How do your parents fit into that?

“My parents saw the writing on the wall and applied for visas to work and live in Saudi Arabia a few years before the government collapsed. Saudi Arabia’s requirement for immigrants were twofold: it has to be a family and the man has to be educated, so here I am." Cue audience applause.

That's wild. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are refuges for the educated for more than two generations. How much more than a half century are we even talking here? I feel like a Twinkie from a time capsule. Cue audience laughter.

“It’s been about 60 years.”

You heard right, subconscious. We've been dead and 'incredibly well-preserved' for about 60 years. Everyone you knew is probably dead. Everything you know doesn’t matter. Your parents are statistically 99.99% certain to be dead even if they did survive and were outside the zone impacted. You're a man out of time. Are you even really a man anymore? Oh well, at least you don't have to put up with that breathing nonsense anymore, right? That sure was a drag*.*

Tune in next time for an interview with Toto. What is the matter with Kansas? Find out what Dorothy's breath smelled like as we ask Toto about his upcoming tell-all biography: Help, I'm A Dog And My Owner Takes Me On Tornado Rides.

"Clint Eastwood".FLAC

Oh good. There's a way to combine these tracking subroutines with living in the present. Now I don’t have to live in mortal fear of every errant thought becoming vocalized.

"Thanks, Nadia. That was very helpful." I’m a bit surprised about how my voice sounds. It’s tinny and higher pitched than my voice. Almost nasally too, but that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no nasal cavity for this voice to work through, right? There is no booming echo that I’m used to feeling when I talk. I have a strange confidence that I hear my words exactly as they sound, with no perspectival shift involved as the one saying them. No sense in telling them about that. I don’t even know for sure what we’ve been talking about.

I can tell that they've started to ease up. Nadia’s doing less of that leaning-to-the-children thing and Mehmet’s shoulders aren’t as far back as it’s humanly possible to bend them. He almost looks relaxed now. The bobblehead days might be behind us. Still, I think their increased comfort is more because I was off in that other subroutine most of that time. It feels like coming out of a blackout. Damn I'm going to miss alcohol.

"You're welcome, but a lot has happened in 60 years that we should get you caught up on." Oh, we've moved on. I thought I was just making all that up. I guess not. Weird. She’s hovering near the recorder like she turned it on recently. Or maybe turned it off? That wouldn’t make any sense though.

"You know what, Nadia. I think that's a lot to soak in. Unless there are more subroutines that help me process stuff like world events or that give me some newspaper articles or stuff from the past 60 years or something, I think I'm okay moving on from that for now. It's more interesting to me to talk about why you've revived me and what it is you're hoping to get here."

"Are you sure? I made a presentation for you outlining the biggest trends and current ongoing conflicts around the world." This woman is a nerd. I like it, but damn. Calm down. I hope she didn’t make any spreadsheets. For her sake.

Speaking of calming down, I should probably take a moment myself. Let’s see. The room isn’t nearly as white as I thought. I should have been either dead or in a hospital. This place doesn’t make sense. These people don’t make any sense. They’re not in any lab uniforms I’ve seen. They look rather like they’re about to go clubbing.

Nadia is average height. She looks like she's in her late twenties or early thirties. Her look matches a mix of her parents’ heritage: half Chinese-American and half German-American. I wonder what part of China. Brown hair, brown eyes, olive skin. Now that I think about it, I’m not actually sure what about her face strikes me as especially Asian. Maybe high cheek bones are what do it. Small noses really don’t mean much to me. It’s just a holistic thing, I guess. She could easily be mistaken for just about any ethnicity. She’s wearing jeans and no burka, so hurray for Saudi progressivism. I bet she might even be allowed to drive! She’s wearing a traditional white lab coat, but it’s open and I can see a black flowy thing that is tucked into the front of the jeans. She is joyously well-prepared to talk about shit that’s in her wheelhouse. Then again, I do seem to be these people's lab rat and I know these two are just the ambassadors of a much larger team of scientists. Preparing for this moment is probably their job.

Mehmet is probably in his thirties or forties. I can never tell age with men. Once you're over 26, you could be as old as 45 before I notice. He's maybe about six feet tall or six one--although this is Istanbul, so height is probably in centimeters here. What even would that be in centimeters, 181 cm? Anyway, he’s also wearing the open, white lab coat. Under it is a blue and gray checkered button down shirt with his jeans, and this tiny yellow argyle scarf. It isn’t long enough to protect your neck from winter, so it’s weird. Boots are yellowish. He's got sandy brown hair and ocean blue eyes. They look radioactive. They have to be fake. Eyes aren’t that blue. He also doesn’t have much of a tan. For a Turkish boy that’s awkward as fuck, but I guess his grandparents are from Oklahoma so maybe he's just a traditional, melanin-challenged, white American type. He didn't say anything about his other set of grandparents, but that's not related to what they want from me. Maybe Germans. Turks and Germans always had a close relationship going. Probably best to assume that Germans are part of an experiment like this anyway. They’re always getting into shady shit. Viva la Nuremberg.

"I'm sure, Nadia. But we can go over your presentation later. Or maybe there's some way for me to watch it on my own time, or something. I don't know. You designed this thing." I hope there isn't. Call me old fashioned, but I don't like people messing with my thoughts.

"Oh there is. Yeah, I'll upload it later." Great. Thanks, Nadia.

"To your question about purpose, we revived you because we don't know what happened 60 years ago,” Mehmet, as usual and fitting the German thesis, is stiff and blunt with his delivery. He doesn’t make hand gestures as he talks, which I never realized someone could accomplish. He barely moves. Makes me wonder who’s the real robot here, you know? “It was an important historical moment. We want to understand what happened to put it into a broader context of how the world changed since the fall of Imperial Era America." I'll let that label slide. Too many things to focus on to let a naming convention derail things.

"So you're hoping I can fill you in on the details."

"Exactly, at least what you know," he says.

"It would be a lot easier to put things into context if I had some idea of what context to put them into. Aren’t there like relevant stories or movies or something you can show me? Or anything that makes me feel a little less like a lab rat?" Mehmet winced, and Nadia glanced at him again. It’s especially noticeable because Nadia is almost always closer to me than Mehmet, so she has to turn around to look at him. Something makes them uncomfortable about me. Am I deemed unnatural? Is this entire experiment sacrilegious? Wouldn't be the first time for either. I goddamn hope there are some ethical qualms here.

While I was searching for an answer for their perpetual discomfort, Nadia chimed in. "We have a list of topics that we agreed as a team to discuss. I hope you'd understand if we took your suggestion to the team before agreeing to it? If we give you too much context we might skew your presentation. It’s just something we’d need to carefully plan out with the team."

"Sure, of course. Makes sense to me." Why are you even asking me though? I don’t have any power in this exchange, physical or emotional. Hell, you've even made sure I can't run at you. Oh shit, they’re about to leave.

“Hey, before you head out, is there a way I can be positioned so I can see that mirror over there? I’d like to see myself. I don’t even know if I make facial expressions.”

Nadia responded much faster than either of them have been up until now, “Oh you make facial expressions alright.” Fuck. She’s chuckling under her breath too. What have I been doing? If there were any blood in this husk, it’d all be in my cheeks right now. I used to cosplay as a tomato when I’d get the least bit worked up. I have that feeling right now.

Mehmet moved in closer to the table I’m on for the first time. Unlike Nadia, who often looks to him, he doesn’t look to her before grabbing a side of the table. He looks to her after though, and gives her a nod. I can’t tell if that’s workplace hierarchy or respect or just a man in the workplace or what. "Yeah. We can move you. Could you get away from that wall?" Without responding, I slid away from the wall as he suggested. Made sense if they were moving the table with me on it.

“Hang tight,” Nadia said, but she didn’t need to. I had already grabbed onto the edges of the table. Mehmet and Nadia lifted the table a couple inches and walked it slowly to the wall that was to my left. I’m not under any illusions about what this mirror is. It’s a one-way with a team watching on the other side. There’s no way it isn’t. The wall the mirror sits in looks like they broke through it just to put the mirror in; it’s got all sorts of chips and cracks like somebody actually chiseled the hole out. The important thing here is that I can see myself now.

They certainly had an eye for detail. My face has a bigger, more squished nose than I'm used to. It’s all olive, which of course I imagined from the arms, but to see it brings a new depth to this place. Is this actually me now? The dark brown eyes are new, though they are probably contacts anyway. I bet they look red when the light catches them. That’ll be a test for later. They should be light-brown things that would look yellow in the light. They’re not. I can’t believe I miss them assuring me I’m going to be blind by the time I’m 50. Eyebrows are just as thick--like caterpillars resting on a face. They didn't bother with hair on the top, but that's understandable. Hair is hard and they put all their hair energies in the arms and eyebrows. For some reason they put on a light stubble all along my jawline. Why would they want to show I could grow a beard? That was never true before. I'm not really crushed it still isn't true now. They replaced all my freckles with a simple mole just under my left eye. They thought to put on a mole? Can androids even get skin cancer? It looks like real skin, except it doesn't play as much. They must have made me to look like the most stereotypically handsome, bald man in society, with a mole to make it all seem real. I'm okay with that. This body looks good. I’d date me. Now let's see those pearly whites. Holy shit, nevermind. This mouth is fucked. The teeth are perfect, but everything within it is this wiry abomination that probably didn't get enough design time.

I realize now that I'm too busy gawking to think much about how this all must look to the people behind the mirror. Of course, this was after sticking my wire cage pretending to be a tongue out at them. Nadia and Mehmet are near the door now, watching me look at myself.

I put on my best smile for them. Got to show a good game face, right? "Thanks. I was just dying to marvel at my own newfound good looks." Both Nadia and Mehmet smiled back, but it was Mehmet’s reaction I was after. It wasn’t a very big one, but it’s good enough for me. Hopefully that means he can react to a bad pun, but he could have just been smiling because I smiled. That’s a thing with meatbags. Though that smile didn’t move up an inch. It was one of those horizontal smiles that you give when you just want to be polite. This guy must have taken a martial arts class in self-expression because he does not react more than he has to.

I want to ask them what the endgame here is. If they're just going to turn me off again after bringing me back from the dead to have a good chat, then that's kind of a bad thing for me. If they're planning on keeping me around, it's not clear what use I can be outside of this experiment. Maybe they want to have proof that they can bring people back from the dead and put them into androids? A new technology that gives people (who can afford it, or are deemed worth it) immortality and further leads to the singularity and domination of all humanity by robot people. It doesn't seem like there's any way out of this mess that can be good for me. God damn I need legs.

They’re still here, watching and waiting. I might as well voice some of my appreciation for this body. "I have some hairy arms here. Oh, and I feel these washboard abs. I'm guessing that design choice was you, Nadia?" I felt myself wink. We're back. Breathing crisis resolved. “Were there some legs in the works for this project too? Are they a hairy match for these arms?" And what are the hair trends in porn these days? Is everyone hairy? I can’t ask them that. Incidentally, and unrelated: this mirror shows that this body can, in fact, blush. Not as red as I’m used to, but the cheeks do change color slightly. How did they do that?

"The legs were in development because we didn't make the final risk assessments until after the base android design was tested and showed that the legs performed far better than expectations." Dang, Mehmet. That sort of response really goes beyond what I'd think the team would want you to say. I hope you don't get iced for that. I'm starting to like your blunt, no nonsense style.

"Cool.” I nodded to make it seem like I was deeply offended. “Are there any questions you wanted to get into right away or did you want to talk with your team before moving forward?"

"I … ” Nadia held that like she was interjecting on a conversation she wasn’t in. “I think it's probably best if we talk to the team first and give you some time to get adjusted. I'll also add that video to a list you can access internally while you wait. You already have access to some music, both contemporary hits for you and more modern tunes. There are also some other things that we put together." Nadia smiled gently as though she had done me some great service, but I’d prefer to find my own way thank you. They can’t know what I like or don’t like. They don’t know me. What happened to the internet? Can't I just access that or would that be way too much of a security risk? Fuck. They're gone.

Well, might as well get a better look at this thing resembling a tongue.

As the title says, thank you to everyone who participated in the philosophy thread that I put up the other day. It was really great to get to talk to people about interesting questions and see the different ideas have on issues like determinism versus free will.

I'm really loving this site because of the great, reasonable discussion that's been going on, and I hope that we keep it going!

P.S. If anyone has some more interesting philosophical questions, please make a post about it! Based on the response to the thread the other day, I think a ton of people would be interested in discussing with you. I know I would be.

Maven tries to be the kitchen sink in a lot of ways - rigid requirements to use plugins instead of scripts, trying to wrap your scm, and even act as a docker wrapper... this is insanely frustrating and an anti-patter for the rest of the software space. I would rather find a new job than work at a company that keeps pumping out maven and jhipster apps. It doesn't play nice with CI, it uses an insanely ugly configuration (xml) and most java developers don't even really know what they are doing when they are using it.

Making a micro-service api? You don't need jhipster or maven or even java - there are so many other better alternatives. Need something simple? flask. Need something performant? go. And there are so many others in between that won't give you a NullPointerException, require you to download the entire internet just to serve some serialized json, or make your devops team hate you.

Interested in hearing rebuttals and other peoples alts and overall preferences.

In a nutshell (TL;DR)

Dolmas are stuffed grape leaves or vegetables (commonly peppers or zucchini) steamed for several minutes inside a pot with about an inch of salted water (or broth) brought to a boil, then kept at a low simmer with a lid. The stuffing components vary and are easily tweaked for vegan/vegetarians or allergies, but often include a mixture of herbs and spices, rice (cooked or uncooked), eggs as a binder, and/or ground meat.

For my next trick, I'll show you how to make them using only 4 words in the next sentence. Here's the entire process.

Grocery list (ingredients in bold are suitable for vegans. Ingredients with a † are optional.)

Dolmas

• † 30 - 50 fresh grape leaves or brined leaves
• 4 bell peppers
• 1 - 2 tablespoons olive oil for drizzling
• † juice of half a lemon
• water or stock enough to cover an inch in the pot

Filling

• 500g [1 lb] ground meat (pork, beef, and lamb are most common)
• † 180g [1 cup] uncooked white rice
• 10g [1 TBSP] kosher salt
• † 1 whole egg
• † 1 diced medium onion
• 2 - 4 tablespoons ground cumin
• 2 - 4 tablespoons ground paprika
• † 2 - 4 tablespoons ground coriander
• † 1 - 2 tablespoons ground turmeric
• 2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper
• † 1 tablespoon dried red chili flakes

Vegan prep

Double the uncooked white rice and cook as directed on the package in water or vegetable stock with the salt, pepper, and spices. Let cool, then mix in diced onion (if using) and proceed with assembly and cooking as directed below, but reduce the total simmering time to 15 - 20 minutes.

Step-by-step (with higher res photos)

• Trim the stems off your fresh grape leaves and cut the tops off the bell peppers (if using), removing the stem and seedy core. Retain the cut piece as a "lid" for each pepper.
• Add your stuffing ingredients to a large bowl and mix them all thoroughly with a spoon or clean wet hands.
• Hold a prepared leaf centered on your palm underside (veiny side) up and place a tablespoon of filling towards the center of the leaf.
• Fold the left bottom part of the leaf up horizontally and press onto the wet filling.
• Fold the remaining left half vertically over the filling and press gently to crease.
• Fold the right bottom part to cover the remaining exposed filling.
• Fold the remaining right half of the leaf over the left.
• Firmly roll the filled part of the wrapping up once. Press to shape into a rough cylinder.
• Continue rolling until the end point of the leaf can be tucked under on a flat surface.
• Repeat for the other leaves, but retain enough to cover each pepper lid.
• Stuff the bell peppers with the remaining filling and top with a lid and a leaf to cover the stem hole.
• Place the peppers upright in a large pot, leaning them against the sides if necessary.
• Layer the stuffed leaves on the bottom of the pot between the peppers, flap end facing down.
• Add cool water (or broth) just to cover the layer of wrapped leaves, or at least an inch. Don't worry if a few float up.
• Drizzle with olive oil, grind some black pepper on, and add a couple good pinches of salt to the water - if you're only using bell peppers, squeeze in the juice of half a lemon to mimic the flavor the grape leaves would've added during cooking.
• Bring to a boil over medium high heat, then add a lid and back the heat down just enough enough to simmer.
• Let simmer for at least 45 minutes (60+ if using bell peppers) or until the meat is cooked and the rice soft enough to eat.

Storage

Store with the broth in the cooking pot for under a day. For longer, refrigerate and reheat on the stove or microwave. You can experiment with freezing cooked grape leaf dolmas and steaming them to thaw and re-cook, but I've never tried - they don't last long enough in my house.

Sourcing grape leaves

To identify a potential vine, look for curly forked tendrils that climb and clusters of tiny immature green grapes. This source has good photos and background info.

Wild grapevines grow in many locations that are conducive to growing wine grapes. They often thrive in moist habitats located next to streams or riverbanks, but can also be found in forested areas, meadows, along roadsides and are especially fond of any kind of man-made fencing.

Or you can get them in a jar online or in the international section of your local large grocery store.

NB: Do your research and be careful when harvesting wild plants. The dangerous lookalikes to wild grapes are Canada moonseed (Menispermum canadense) and porcelain berry (Ampelopsis glandulosa var. brevipendunculata)

Storytime?

What? Does this look like a typically self-indulgent food blogger post florid with vapid musings only tangentially related to the recipe because longer word count pushes such entries to top SEO results? ...ok, just this once.

Used to work with an older Iraqi watchmaker who came to the country as a highly-skilled refugee. Sometimes I'd give him a ride to the shop from his apartment, and in limited English he'd insist on cooking us dinner before I left. When he visited another co-worker's place, he noticed wild grape leaves on several vines growing out of the property, and collected them. I saw the leaf pile on the counter and asked what he was going to do with them, and if he was sure they were edible. "Yes, yes! For dolmas. I'll show you," he said, removing a pack of ground pork and bell peppers from the fridge.

For the next couple summers, I made dolmas from the wild grapes in the neighborhood, and now I have good neighbors who allow me to prune and harvest excess leaves from their fruiting grapevines during the season.

Firefox recently introduced DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR) in nightly builds for Firefox 62.

DoH and TRR are intended to help mitigate these potential privacy and security concerns:

1. Untrustworthy DNS resolvers tracking your requests, or tampering with responses from DNS servers.
2. On-path routers tracking or tampering in the same way.
3. DNS servers tracking your DNS requests.

DNS over HTTPs (DoH) encrypts DNS requests and responses, protecting against on-path eavesdropping, tracking, and response tampering.

Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR) allows Firefox to use a DNS resolver that's different from your machines network settings. You can use any recursive resolver that is compatible with DoH, but it should be a trusted resolver (one that won't sell users’ data or trick users with spoofed DNS). Mozilla is partnering with Cloudflare (but not using the 1.1.1.1 address) as the initial default TRR, however it's possible to use another 3rd party TRR or run your own.

Cloudflare is providing a recursive resolution service with a pro-user privacy policy. They have committed to throwing away all personally identifiable data after 24 hours, and to never pass that data along to third-parties. And there will be regular audits to ensure that data is being cleared as expected.

Additionally, Cloudflare will be doing QNAME minimization where the DNS resolver no longer sends the full original QNAME (foo.bar.baz.example.com) to the upstream name server. Instead it will only include the label for the zone it's trying to resolve.

For example, let's assume the DNS resolver is trying to find foo.bar.baz.example.com, and already knows that ns1.nic.example.com is authoritative for .example.com, but does not know a more specific authoritative name server.

1. It will send the query for just baz.example.com to ns1.nic.example.com which returns the authoritative name server for baz.example.com.
2. The resolver then sends a query for bar.baz.example.com to the nameserver for baz.example.com, and gets a response with the authoritative nameserver for bar.baz.example.com
3. Finally the resolver sends the query for foo.bar.baz.example.com to bar.baz.example.com's nameserver.
   In doing this the full queried name (foo.bar.baz.example.com) is not exposed to intermediate name servers (bar.baz.example.com, baz.example.com, example.com, or even the .com root nameservers)

Collectively DNS over HTTPs (DoH), Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR), and QNAME Minimization are a step in the right direction, this does not fix DNS related data leaks entirely:

After you do the DNS lookup to find the IP address, you still need to connect to the web server at that address. To do this, you send an initial request. This request includes a server name indication, which says which site on the server you want to connect to. And this request is unencrypted.
That means that your ISP can still figure out which sites you’re visiting, because it’s right there in the server name indication. Plus, the routers that pass that initial request from your browser to the web server can see that info too.

So How do I enable it?
DoH and TRR can be enabled in Firefox 62 or newer by going to about:config:

• Set network.trr.mode to 2
  • Here's the possible network.trr.mode settings:
    • 0 - Off (default): Use standard native resolving only (don't use TRR at all)
    • 1 - Race: Native vs. TRR. Do them both in parallel and go with the one that returns a result first.
    • 2 - First: Use TRR first, and only if the name resolve fails use the native resolver as a fallback.
    • 3 - Only: Only use TRR. Never use the native (after the initial setup).
    • 4 - Shadow: Runs the TRR resolves in parallel with the native for timing and measurements but uses only the native resolver results.
    • 5 - Off by choice: This is the same as 0 but marks it as done by choice and not done by default.
• Set network.trr.uri to your DoH Server:
  • Cloudflare’s is https://mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query
    (but you can use any DoH compliant endpoint)
• The DNS Tab on about:networking will show which names were resolved using TRR via DoH.

Links:
A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS
Improving DNS Privacy in Firefox
DNS Query Name Minimization to Improve Privacy
TRR Preferences

I'm not affiliated with Mozilla or Firefox, I just thought ~ would find this interesting.

TL;DR: First impressions and suggestions: infinite scrolling; comment box position; collapse comment button too small; comment previews; vote button position; search function; expandable images/videos; remembering collapsed comments; spoiler tags; saving comments/posts; ninja edit; and keyboard hotkeys. Really enjoying my time here! Tildes has been growing on me.

Been browsing the website for a couple of days now and wanted to give my first impressions. To begin with I wanna say I'm enjoying Tildes a lot. At first I thought it was a cool idea, but thought I wouldn't really get into it too much since I'm quite fond of mindlessly browsing Reddit for simple funny content. This being more discussion oriented didn't really fit my usage. Turns out I was wrong lol Of course I had to force myself to use the website initially, but I quickly started browsing Tildes naturally and participating in threads and discussions. While I still browse Reddit, I've been coming over to Tildes whenever I can pay a little bit more attention to what I'm reading. Anyways, without further ado, here are my observations as far as features go:

• First thing I noticed was the lack of infinite scrolling (having to click "next" to go to the next page).

• As I found my way to the introductions post, I came across the comment box position problem, which has been discussed at length.

• Browsing through the comments, I found that the button to collapse comments is too small. I think extending it vertically so that you can click anywhere on the left side of the comment to hide it would be ideal. Many subreddits have done that and it works great. Here's an example from /r/Overwatch (you can click anywhere on the yellow area to hide the first comment).

• I also think a comment preview would be really useful and I've seen some other posts about it too.

• Here's a potentially controversial one: a more obvious vote button. As I browsed more, I got to read more about the intentions behind Tildes and where its efforts are, so I can see how this would go against the general mindset of not turning this into a high score game. That said, this is a first impressions post and so it deserves mentioning.

• Obligatory search function mention. I know everyone is aware of this, I'm just going through my list.

• Another controversial one: expandable images/videos. I've read the discussions about it and I'm aware of the Reddit-ifying potential. With that said, I wanna play the devil's advocate here and say that images/videos are not necessarily low quality shitposts (case in point, the image I linked above to illustrate a suggestion). They are bound to be used and linked anywhere on the internet and I think this is a reasonable feature to have. In my mind, it's not the use of silly images that make a community low-effort, but the other way around. With the mindset we have here, I'd argue that images and videos would probably be used "appropriately".

• Eventually, when I went back to threads I had already visited, I noticed the comments were all expanded again. Remembering hidden comments is something I consider really important, even more on a discussion focused board where you often go back to old threads to keep the conversation going.

• I might have missed this one, but spoiler tags are definitely needed. I tried poking around to see if Markdown had built in spoiler tags, but I didn't find anything. If this already exists and I just overlooked it, I'm sorry.

• Another important feature for me is saving posts and comments for future reference.

• Pretty minor, but having a "ninja edit" feature would be nice. A grace period after submitting a post/comment where you can edit it without it being tagged as edited. This is useful for correcting typos or when you immediately change your mind about the wording of your post.

• Another minor one would be keyboard hotkeys. I use RES hotkeys all the time to browse Reddit. Voting (which might not be particularly desirable here), hiding comments, expanding images (not very relevant unless this gets implemented), saving posts/comments (damn, none of these are relevant with the website as is) are all great to have mapped to the keyboard.

This ended up being a longer post than I expected. To finish things off, I'd like to say I'm really glad someone is willing to put time and effort into this. I like the ideals behind Tildes, the privacy concerns and the non-profit choice. If this takes half as much of my free time as Reddit used to, I'll definitely drop a donation!

I'm sure this thread exists somewhere already but in my searching I couldn't find it. My hope is that we can brainstorm some good ideas in addition to what deimos has already proposed.

The recent discussion about lobste.rs reminded me of the fact that they use an invite system to limit the effectiveness of spammers and manage an invite tree to see the relationship of user accounts. A modified invite tree system would go a long way to help the trust system be more effective while not being stifling.

While it (unmodified strict invite system) would definitely make it more difficult for people to join the site the benefits of such a system cannot be overlook. Even a naive system where we would limit new accounts to require current users to "vouch" for new ones would have noticable benefits later on down the line. The main benefit of this is that users who are a source of consistently inviting troublesome accounts could be held responsible. The added benefit is that you would be a little more conscientious of the people you invite as it would affect your reputation as well.

The naive approach to this system would be a strict invite tree-based site. The only way you could get an new account on tildes is to get an invite from a current user of tildes. Like lobste.rs this woud be a very good deterrent but also (possibly unnecessarily) stifle growth. Such a system is a good starting point but I believe since a lot of effort will be put into making the trust system effective, we can do better if we put in some creative brainpower and work.

Possible ideas/tweaks for an invite tree-based system :
Parent account = person who invited user
Child account = person who was invited

• Users could create new accounts without an invite but would be severly limited in the rate they could post content (1 post a day), make comments (5 comments a day), etc. At any point they could be "vouched" for by a parent account with reputation (become child account) and those limitations would be lifted as though they had an invite from the beginning.
• User reputation would be impacted by child accounts (invite more, more likely to be punished as a result of children's bad behavior) to discourage individuals from becoming invite mills without repercussions.
• If a parent account is banned all child accounts would be demoted to "uninvited" status, child accounts would be encouraged to build up reputation to lose child status and become an independent (reputation-wise) parent account. Accounts would still be historically linked to parent accounts to pinpoint bad behavior down the line if it occurs.

Obviously a lot of effort has already been made by people a lot smarter than me to make such systems work and I think we can draw on that for tildes as well. I tried to look for some peer-reviewed papers and graduate level work about creating such a system but didn't come up with anything useful, perhaps you'll have better luck.

Just a minor UI thing - other people's vote count/vote button is on the bottom of their posts, while yours is on top. Just a bit jarring going from one to the other, is there any reason your post's vote count can't be in the same place?

What excites humans the most today is technological progress. Faster computers, better autonomous driving, colourful displays - a preoccuppation with 'means'. There seems to be much lesser excitement and study among popular consiousness with what is done with all these tech. Your smartphone is a technological marvel - but what are you doing with it?

This seems to be in similar veins as the idea of human progress from stone age to bronze to iron. "Stone age people used primitive technology, bronze age better, iron age the best. There are still peoples in the world who are still stuck in the stone age".

But this is a biased perception of human endevours. What matters is what humans did, not what they did it with. The incas, mayas and aztecs were 'stuck' in stone technology. But they built marvelous civilizations, buildings and cultures rivalling the greatest achievements in the rest of the world in their time.

Advancing technology is a fetish. One in pursuit of which we forget what matters is what we do with it. But there seems to be little of that going on. Most of the doing is for improving technology. And most of it in a fetishistic attempt to get out of the ditch we dug ourselves in from past technological 'progress'.

Today, humans are like a bunch of sculptures spending most of their days dicussing chisel technology rather than sculpting.

For the uninitiated, Surströmming is an infamous heavily fermented herring.

Below is my experience with it. Happy to answer any questions :)

Preparations

I “smuggled” (more on this below) it from Sweden a few months ago and yesterday evening my brother, a brave (or naïve) soul of a schoolmate of his, and I (not to mention our dog) opened it up near the river. We chose the riverside and the night time strategically, of course.

As was advised to us by a friend, we also took a bucket of water with us. Not – as some may wrongly assume – to vomit into, but to open the tin under water. Due to the fermentation continuing in the tin, it builds up pressure and when you open the tin, it inevitably and violently discharges the bile water. The best way to avoid it spraying your clothes is to open it under water.

The tasting

Since this was an impromptu action, – other than the bucket – we came only half-prepared. As condiments we brought only a little bread, a shallot and three pickled gherkins.

The hint with the bucket was greatly appreciated, as the opening of the tin was the most vile part of the whole experience. So if you plan to try it, do get a bucket! It stopped not only the bile spraying us, but also diluted most of the putrid smell that was caught in the tin.

Once opened and aired, the contents of the tin were actually quite recognisable. Fish fillets swimming in brine. The brine was already brownish and a tiny bit gelatinous, but darkness helped us get past that.

As for the taste and texture, if you ever had pickled herrings before – it’s like that on steroids, married with anchovies. Very soft, but still recognisable as fish, extremely salty, and with acidity that is very similar to that of good sauerkraut.

Washing the fish in the pickle jar helped take the edge of – both in sense of smell and saltiness. The onion as well as the pickles were a great idea, bread was a must!

In summary, it is definitely an acquired taste, but I can very much see how this was a staple in the past and how it can still be used in cuisine. As a condiment, I think it could work well even in a modern dish.

We did go grab a beer afterwards to wash it down though.

P.S. Our dog was very enthusiastic about it the whole time and somewhat sullen that he didn’t get any.

The smuggling

Well, I didn’t actually smuggle it, per se, but it took me ¾ of an hour to get it cleared at the airport and in the end the actual carrier still didn’t know about what I was carrying in my checked luggage. The airport, security, two information desks and the main ground stewardess responsible for my flight were all in on it though. And in my defence, the actual carrier does not have a policy against Surströmming on board (most probably because they haven’t thought about it yet).

As for acquiring this rotten fish in the first place, I saw it in a shop in Malmö and took the least deformed tin (along with other local specialities). When I came to the cash register with grin like a madman in a sweetshop, I asked the friendly young clerk if she has any suggestion how to prepare it, and she replied that she never had it and knows barely anyone of her generation who did, apart from perhaps as a challenge.

                                             How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu's debut novel, How to Life Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, could be described as a story about contemporary family life disguised as science fiction. It concerns a young man who has spent most of the past decade in a small time machine in his job as a time machine repairman. He makes calls on people who have rented time machines for recreational purposes but have become stuck in time and must be rescued by him. As the novel progresses, it is revealed that this man's name is the same as that of the author, Charles Yu. The protagonist is a lonely and rather sad fellow, who spends much of his non-working hours drifting along in his capsule, thinking about his past and his parents, especially his father who disappeared long ago. Accompanied only by his dog and a computer that has the pixilated face of a female and a cartoon-like voice, Charles hopes to one day locate his father in some alternate universe to which he apparently has traveled in a time machine. Charles's parents, a few clients, and several street performers are the only other humans that he encounters during the course of the story. He makes one trip to a city in Minor Universe 31, a residential and entertainment world made mostly from a science fiction "substrate," where the company for which he works is headquartered. His objective is to have maintenance work done on his time machine and when he goes to pick it up, he encounters his future self. Panicking, he draws his service revolver and shoots his future self in the stomach, just as his future self is attempting to tell him that the key is the book. He has no idea what this means as he stumbles into his time machine and races away. On the capsule's console, he finds a manual-type book that has the same title as the novel.

With the help of his computer, he realizes that he must read the book and make amendments and additions to it as he goes along. At some point in the future, he must give the completed book to his past self, who then will shoot him and begin the rewriting process again in an endless cycle. Charles realizes he has become stuck in a time loop. By the rules of time travel, if he changes anything that happens during this loop, he risks entering an alternate universe from which he might not emerge. Under the circumstances, escaping the time loop appears to be extremely difficult. He may be doomed to spend the rest of his life in the time machine, writing the book, giving it to himself, shooting himself, and starting the cycle again. The book is a manual about time travel, but it also offers advice on how such a traveler should live within or use time wisely. The main use of Charles's time is in thinking about his father and mother, but he begins visiting periods in his past in his time machine, watching his younger self interact with his parents. Eventually, he discovers that the book given to him by his future self is literally the key, because it holds a key that unlocks a box that his mother gave him, inside of which his father left clues to where he went in time. This inspires Charles to realize that he can break out of his time loop through the power of his mind and memory. He does so and rescues his father from the past time in which he is stuck. As the novel ends, it looks as if the family has a chance to regain normalcy and move forward with a better understanding of how to cope with the difficulties of life by facing the problems of the past with courage and honesty.

                       Praise

“Glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction. . . . Like [Douglas] Adams, Yu is very funny, usually proportional to the wildness of his inventions, but Yu’s sound and fury conceal (and construct) this novel’s dense, tragic, all-too-human heart. . . . Yu is a superhero of rendering human consciousness and emotion in the language of engineering and science. . . . A complex, brainy, genre-hopping joyride of a story, far more than the sum of its component parts, and smart and tragic enough to engage all regions of the brain and body.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Compulsively rereadable. . . . Hilarious. . . . Yu has a crisp, intermittently lyrical prose style, one that’s comfortable with both math and sadness, moving seamlessly from delirious metafiction to the straight-faced prose of instruction-manual entries. . . . [The book itself] is like Steve Jobs’ ultimate hardware fetish, a dreamlike amalgam of functionality and predetermination.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Douglas Adams and Philip K. Dick are touchstones, but Yu’s sense of humor and narrative splashes of color–especially when dealing with a pretty solitary life and the bittersweet search for his father, a time travel pioneer who disappeared–set him apart within the narrative spaces of his own horizontal design. . . . A clever little story that will be looped in your head for days. No doubt it will be made into a movie, but let’s hope that doesn’t take away the heart.”
—Austin Chronicle

“If How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe contented itself with exploring that classic chestnut of speculative fiction, the time paradox, it would likely make for an enjoyable sci-fi yarn. But Yu’s novel is a good deal more ambitious, and ultimately more satisfying, than that. It’s about time travel and cosmology, yes, but it’s also about language and narrative — the more we learn about Minor Universe 31, the more it resembles the story space of the novel we’re reading, which is full of diagrams, footnotes, pages left intentionally (and meaningfully) blank and brief chapters from the owner’s manual of our narrator’s time machine. . . . . Yu grafts the laws of theoretical physics onto the yearnings of the human heart so thoroughly and deftly that the book’s technical language and mathematical proofs take on a sense of urgency.”
—NPR

“How to Live Safely is a book likely to generate a lot of discussion, within science fiction and outside, infuriating some readers while delighting many others.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“An extraordinary work. . . . I read the entire book in one gulp.”
—Chris Wallace, GQ

“A great Calvino-esque thrill ride of a book.”
—The Stranger

“Science and metaphor get nice and cozy in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. The novel joins the likes of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Jillian Weise’s The Colony, fiction that borrows the tropes of sci-fi to tell high-tech self-actualization narratives.”
—Portland Mercury

“A brainy reverie of sexbots, rayguns, time travel and Buddhist zombie mothers. . . . Packed with deft emotional insight.”
—The Economist

“A funny, funny book, and it’s a good thing, too; because at its heart it’s a book about loneliness, regret, and the all-too-human desire to change the past.”
—Tor.com

“A keenly perceptive satire. . . . Yu’s novel is also a meditation on the essentials of human life at its innermost point.. . . Campy allusions to the original Star Wars trilogy, a cityscape worthy of the director’s cut of Blade Runner and a semi-coherent vocabulary of techno-jargon cement these disparate elements into a brilliant send-up of science fiction. . . . Perhaps it would be better to think of the instructional units of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe in terms of the chapters of social commentary which John Steinbeck placed into the plot structure of The Grapes of Wrath.”
—California Literary Review

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the rare book I pick up to read the first several pages, then decide to drop everything and finish at once. Emotionally resonant, funny, and as clever as any book I have read all year, this debut novel heralds the arrival of a talented young writer unafraid to take chances.”
—largehearted boy

“A wild and inventive first novel . . . has been compared to the novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Jonathan Lethem, and the fact that such comparisons are not out of line says everything necessary about Yu’s talent and future.”
—Portland Oregonian

“Bends the rules of time and literary convention.”
—Seattle Weekly

“Getting stuck with Yu in his time loop is like watching an episode of Doctor Who as written by the young Philip Roth. Even when recalling his most painful childhood moments, Yu makes fun of himself or pulls you into a silly description of fake physics experiments. In this way, he delivers one of the most clear-eyed descriptions of consciousness I’ve seen in literature: It’s full of self-mockery and self-deception, and yet somehow manages to keep its hands on the wheel, driving us forward into an unknowable future. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is intellectually demanding, but also emotionally rich and funny. . . . It’s clearly the work of a scifi geek who knows how to twist pop culture tropes into melancholy meditations on the nature of consciousness.”
—io9

“Funny [and] moving. . . . Charles Yu’s first novel is getting ready for lift-off, and it more than surpasses expectations which couldn’t be any higher after he was given the 5 Under 35 Award . . . How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe is one of the trippiest and most thoughtful novels I’ve read all year, one that begs for a single sit-down experience even if you’re left with a major head rush after the fact for having gulped down so many ideas in a solitary swoop. . . . Yu’s literary pyrotechnics come in a marvelously entertaining and accessible package, featuring a reluctant, time machine-operating hero on a continual quest to discover what really happened to his missing father, a mysterious book possibly answering all, and a computer with the most idiosyncratic personality since HAL or Deep Thought. . . . Like the work of Richard Powers . . . How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe fuses the scientific and the emotional in ways that bring about something new.”
—Sarah Weinman, The Daily Beast

“One of the best novels of 2010. . . . It is a wonderfully stunning, brilliant work of science fiction that goes to the heart of self-realization, happiness and connections. . . . Yu has accomplished something remarkable in this book, blending science fiction universes with his own, alternative self’s life, in a way, breaking past the bonds of the page and bringing the reader right into the action. . . . Simply, this is one of the absolute best time travel stories . . . even compared to works such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells or the Doctor Who television series.”
—SF Signal

“Within a few pages I was hooked. . . . There are times when he starts off a paragraph about chronodiegetics that just sounds like pseudo-scientific gibberish meant to fill in some space. And then you realize that what he’s saying actually makes sense, that he’s actually figured out something really fascinating about the way time works, about the way fiction works, and the “Aha!” switch in your brain gets flipped. That happened more than once for me. There are so many sections here and there that I found myself wanting to share with somebody: Here—read this paragraph! Look at this sentence! Ok, now check this out!”
—GeekDad, Wired.com

“In this debut novel, Charles Yu continues his ambitious exploration of the fantastic with a whimsical yet sincere tribute to old-school science fiction and quantum physics. . . . A fascinating, philosophical and disorienting thriller about life and the context that gives it meaning.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“With Star Wars allusions, glimpses of a future world, and journeys to the past, as well as hilarious and poignant explanations of “chronodiegetics,” or the “theory of the nature and function of time within a narrative space,” Yu, winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 Award, constructs a clever, fluently metaphorical tale. A funny, brain-teasing, and wise take on archetypal father-and-son issues, the mysteries of time and memory, emotional inertia, and one sweet but bumbling misfit’s attempts to escape a legacy of sadness and isolation.”
—Booklist

“This book is cool as hell. If I could go back in time and read it earlier, I would.”
—Colson Whitehead, author of Sag Harbor

“Charles Yu is a tremendously clever writer, and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is marvelously written, sweetly geeky, good clean time-bending fun.”
—Audrey Niffenegger, author of Her Fearful Symmetry and The Time Traveler’s Wife

“Funny, touching, and weirdly beautiful. This book is awesome.”
—Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is that rare thing—a truly original novel. Charles Yu has built a strange, beautiful, intricate machine, with a pulse that carries as much blood as it does electricity.”
—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The View from the Seventh Layer and The Brief History of the Dead

“Poignant, hilarious, and electrically original. Bends time, mind, and genre.”
—David Eagleman, author of Sum

I originally posted this as a comment here but thought it might deserve it's own discussion.

I think that the rise of megathreads/ultrathreads/collections of threads on reddit has been a large detriment to the site.

I'm a mod for a few large subreddits that utilizes them (and I know a good portion of people reading Tildes right now are as well), and as time goes on I've started to dislike them more and more.

At first they were great - they seemed to silo off all the posts and noise that happened around an event, and made the lives of mods easier. Posts that should've been comments could now be removed, and the user could be pointed towards the megathread. Users could go back to the post and sort by new to see new posts, and know that they'd all have to do with that one topic.

I believe that this silo actually hurts the community, and especially the discussion around that original megathread, more than it helps. As modteams I think we underestimate the resilience of our communities, and their ability to put up with "noise" around an event.

The fact that we are in a subreddit dedicated to that cause should be silo enough - each post in that subreddit should be treated as an "atomic" piece of information, with the comments being branches. By relegating all conversation to a megathread we turn top level comments into that atomic piece of information, and subcomments into the branches.

But that's just a poor implementation of the original! There are some edge cases where this might make sense (take /r/politics, it wouldn't make sense to have 9 of the top 10 posts just be slightly reworded posts on the same issues), but I think this can be remedied by better duplication rules (consider all posts on a certain topic to be a repost, unless the new post has new or different information).

There is something to be said about the ability to generate a new, blank sheet of conversation with a post, that is not marred with previous information or anecdotes. New comments on a megathread post don't have that luxury, but new posts do.

Additionally, I feel like the way reddit originally conditioned us to view posts is to view them then not check them again (unless we interacted with someone in it or got a notification). This prevents potentially great (but late) content from gaining visibility, as a non-negligible portion of the population will still be browsing the subreddit, but will never click the post again.

I think this site is a really neat concept, especially because the quality of discussion on Reddit has really deteriorated (which has happened concurrently with Reddit's shift from discussion and news to "repository of Internet culture"). I like online discussion, and IMO this site's design is better than Hacker News, so I'm probably going to start using this site. Is there anything I should know about this site? This is my first post and I'm not too sure how things work.

As things get going and we start getting more specific branches coming off of the main groups, posts are supposed to bubble up the branches as they get enough votes. So that a post in ~games.boardgames wouldn't initially be visible to someone who is only subscribed to ~games, but would become visible if it gets popular enough.

There is a danger of branches becoming so popular that they overwhelm the main group.

I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to "weight" the branches inversely to the number of subscribers it has. Meaning that a post in branch with 10,000 subscribers would require more votes to bubble up than a post in a branch with 1000 subscribers.

Thoughts?

The one good thing, imo, that iOS does is its continuity and handoff with other devices. What are the best ways you've found to emulate this on your devices? Like if I'm actively working on a document or on web pages how can I seamlessly continue using them on my tablet/phone without having to re-open all the tabs or docs again?

Has anyone found a better way?

At the moment I get around this a couple ways:
-Google drive is my primary basic filesystem on all my main computer (desktop/documents/downloads/pictures/videos folders)
-Google Photos on all devices
-PulseSMS for the texting
-Google Chrome which offers a somewhat fix to webbrowsing

But the actual feature of my devices popping up and letting me "carry on" with what I was doing exactly where I was doing it with the click of the button isn't there. Also, the Google Chrome "continuity" is simply the ability to let me go see recent tabs open on my devices and click to reopen them. If anyone knows a way to sync tabs across all my devices (desktop/laptop/phone/tablet) and make them open/close altogether that would be great.

In light of @Deimos mentioning that we have a lot of "favorite" topics going around, how about something a little meatier?

I've seen it a few times already around threads that someone uses the word "guy" to refer to a poster and the response is "I'm not a guy". I'm not trying to invalidate this stance, but rather make this argument in the same way I argued for a singular "they". Consider the following:

• the plural form, "you guys" is already neutered. I can walk up to a group of women and ask "How're you guys doing?" and it doesn't draw any ire
• we've similarly neutered "dude" in both the singular and plural, but it's especially casual and almost familiar
• "gal" sounds like something out of the forties, "girl" is diminutive, and "person" is clinical / formal
• we don't have another common, non-gendered, non-specific term that fits the "sounds right" criteria and fits in the environment like the one we have (wherein users are getting to know each other and don't know exactly how to address one another).

I realize that this is probably masculine-normative and therefore problematic, but my main goal here is to stimulate discussion on a meatier topic (gender) without having it be an incredibly serious topic.

[EDIT]

I want to clarify a few things, as this reads a lot more trolly than it did 6 hours ago.

generalizing "guy" is a sexist idea because it attempts to make the masculine the generic (what I called "masculine-normativity" above). However, there isn't a term that adequately replaces "guy" but is neutered (@Algernon_Asimov brought up that "dude" fits, but is as more casual than "guy" than "person" is more formal). [Edit edit: I'm an idiot. They pointed out that "dude" as I had defined it earlier in my post would work just as well, but they did not agree that it has been neutered]

Instead of bringing this up as purely a matter of diction, I set myself up as an antagonist to see what would happen. And for this I apologize.

That said, I feel like there is some good discussion here and do not want to call making the thread a mistake. More that mistakes were made in the manner of its posting.

I've noticed a lot of people in introductory threads mentioning their mental health issues and a sizeable number of people who took the survey indicated they consider themselves mentally ill. I myself have been dealing with depression for about 16 years.

Without a search function it's hard to tell if this is a repost, but I figured I'd give it a go and see if anyone out there is in need of some support. If you need someone to talk to, consider this thread a support group and I will be here to lean on. :)

I don't have the land to do it yet, but my dream is to build a year-round greenhouse in a back yard, so that I can have green all throughout the monochromatic bleakness of a New York winter. This is pretty much a daydream at this point, but I'd like to get some feedback from folks in the know.

The feature wish-list is as follows:

• a dug-out trench, shaped like a V with a flat bottom. Thinking something like 12' (or go metric and make it 4m) wide in the middle, with sides at a 60° angle going to ground level (total depth of around 10' or 2.5m)
• a double-paned glass or plexiglass roof, for insulation and lighting
• heating elements in the outer layer of roof, for snow and ice removal
• a space heater, to regulate temperature during the cold months
• an aquaponics tank (probably using goldfish, but possibly tilapia)
• aquaponics grow beds lining the angled sides
• compost-activated biochar beds on the flat part

The idea would be to run the aquaponic outflow to the top of the sloping sides, supporting herbs, leafy greens, and flowers. The runoff collects at the bottom of the slope, where it is returned to the fish tank. The flat surface would be used for root vegetables and bulbs like onions and garlic.

I realize that this is a tad ambitious (and that I may just be throwing the biochar bit because I think its cool), but part of why I'm posting this is to get the benefit of collective experience. Any thoughts?

So it all begun as a [something]monkey script but I decided to give it a try to web extensions after several years of not touching it.

If you don't care about the yada yada, skip right at the bottom now.

Why

So the whole thing revolve around a simple concept: I'd like tildes to remain as lightweight as possible with a simple and clean interface and not too many user settings.
We don't know the full structure of the code yet but, by experience, frontend and backend require quite an effort to be kept in balance so that one or either don't becomes a mess.

From this idea, the next step has been quite obvious. Users that would like a more advanced frontend experience could just download an extension (probably an app for mobile once it becomes possible).

What

Right now the extension does some simple things. It is basically just a porting of the script I made some time ago so you'll get non-tildes link in a new tab and a button to jump to new comments in a topic you already visited.
The extension don't retain any user data. it doesn't care who you are or what you browse. If you're unsure you can check the source code (below).

Future Goals

The immediate priority is to create a "settings" page so you can customize how the features should behave. As an example, about the links in new tab, letting you decide which kind of links should behave like this: all / comment's / text submission's / etc etc. I'm still thinking which are reasonable use-case

After that, I want to try and implement a user's labelling system and that is the reason for the app already requesting access to storage data on the browser. I've yet to figure it out but the gist of it is that I'll store something like username:tag duplet in your browser localstorage and on load of a page, check for usernames match and add the label you choose.

Additional Notes

I know the code is dirty. As I said, I didn't touch extensions since... I think more than 6 years ago. Maybe more.
On top of that, I went for jquery and am more of a modern framework JS developer with a strong preference and background as backend developer, so... you know.
I still think I'll stick to jquery because the syntax is quite clear and I want even non-technical people to be able to understand what's going on in the code if they want to double check.

If you want to contribute you're more than welcome but keep in mind that most basic things are still missing. To mention just a couple:

• settings page
• proper isolation of content scripts
• guidelines or at least a sample to use to implement new features

if you have any resource that you used to build something similar (web extension or the like) please share them as I've a goddamn long commute every day and have time to read :)

Links

• Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tildes-extended/
• Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tildes-extended/dinimcigfnjcblajimodbacmbknmicgl/related
• Source: https://github.com/theCrius/tildes-extended

It should work on any fork of Chrome as well.
I can't assure the same for future development.

Current features:

• Link in new tabs management
• Button to jump to new comments in topics
• Add custom CSS from external URL
• Markdown Preview
• Add User's labels

There's a really awesome thread on constructive criticism with a lot of thoughtful insight about the process. What makes criticism helpful? What causes more harm than good? What's the best way to go about asking for a critique?

I wanted to play a little game where we can turn the tables on the process and examine what makes critiques tick. At the same time, it'll give folks a chance to share some of their creations. The idea is to critique the critiques based off of how the requests are presented.

To quote @silva-rerum from the other thread,

Context and empathy are both incredibly important when it comes to the delivery and impact of creative criticism. Most people who deliver critiques while failing to contextualize or understand their recipient’s perspective will be engaging in an exercise in futility at best, or an act of cruelty at worst.

I think it would be a fun exercise to experiment with how much context can affect how good or bad a critique is.

Rules:

Content

Content should be something of your own, whether it's writing, music, physical works, visual, or whatever. If you made it and you're down to post it for some criticism, it fits.

Context

It's entirely up to you what kind of context you'd like to provide. The game is about finding what works and what doesn't, and context can play a huge factor in the quality of the critique. If you want to try to see what kind of criticism zero-context requests elicit, post your work with zero context. Alternatively, you can see what kind of critique you get from high-context, specifically targeted feedback requests.
(If you haven't read through some of the ideas in the other thread, check it out before posting. There really are some great insights in there even if you aren't planning on posting anything.)

Critiques

Perform your critiques for others as you normally would. Obviously, keep it civil. Multiple people can offer their critiques for each item up for critique. Since we're playing around with different degrees of context, try to critique on a case-by-case basis. That is, if you have more context for a critique than is proffered, try your best to set that extra context aside. There may be fudge-factor involved with that, but I think we can still end up with some interesting results.

Counter-critiques

Counter-critiques are open to all! It will definitely be helpful to hear from the creator how helpful or hurtful the critique was. If other people have input or questions, discuss away!

Side note: I don't think I've ever typed/thought the word "critique" so much in my life.

I'll put together some stuff I've worked on recently to get thing started.

Based on a post I saw asking for a ~philosophy group, it seems like there are at least a few people looking for some discussion like this. Does anyone want to talk about some concept that's been on their mind for a while?

If you do, go ahead and throw it down in the comments. It'd be great if we could get a couple of nice discussions going!

The post about group CSS got me thinking, if the identity of groups are allowed to develop enough it could become like reddit were you can't expect a consistent experience across the site, you'll have to know the etiquette of each group you visit, do they allow jokes here, only links or only text, not going off topic etc.

How far should/will it go?

So I'm moving soon and I was just curious about how those of you who move around a bit go about finding new people to hang out with. I usually just try to find the nearest gay bar and go from there. But I'm curious what all you people do.

We know how it gets on reddit during the summer holidays and I don't think anyone would suggest making an age restriction for the site, but if something is upvoted by 99% kids then it's probably not interesting to me.

So I guess the question I'm posing is:

'How do we filter out stuff that's blatantly outside of my demographics interest'

I'm guessing my suggestion of age filtering is going to run against Tildes ethics about not collecting user data, so perhaps someone will have a better solution in the comments.

Hey I think I'm caught in a time loop so I'm gearing up and making some contacts. Post something I couldn't possibly know about you so I can post it tmrw morning (today) to surprise you into letting me get in touch on short notice. I'm working on figuring out my possible range of travel and it would be good to have people. Thanks!

edit: woke up this morning (Tuesday) like a regular person, so I think the loop ended. I got four days total. I didn't bother my roommate about it on the last run, so she doesn't even remember me being weird about anything. I'm a little disappointed, but it's probably good that I can go on to live my life now. Send me a PM if this happens to you. I didn't learn much but I'll be quick to believe you if that's something that would be helpful.

I just joined the site less than an hour ago and when I registered I tried to use my normal password that I use on a lot of sites (I know, I know) and it wouldn't let me register because the password has shown up in a data breach. I double checked on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and sure enough, my password was compromised at some point. So now I know I need to go back and change my password on a hell of a lot of sites.

Anyway, thank you. I've never seen that feature on a site before and it saved my ass before an account of mine was really compromised.

Are you ready to live forever? You guys, my name is Alan Resnick, and I'm so excited to be here. I found the secret to eternal life, and I found it on my Lapbook Pro. Now, you're looking at me, and you're saying, "Alan, you are so smart and you are so small. What is your origin tale?"

Well, it all started...Two years ago. Me and Janet were having a bit of a lovers' quarrel, and she's got me sleeping on the couch. Now, I don't mind. I'm fine with it. I'm snoozing. And I'm having a dream I'm in a foggy meadow, and in the distance, I hear a voice calling me "Alan, Alan," just like that. And the fog clears to reveal a beautiful nude woman. And she's saying, "Alan, I'm ready for you. Put your dirt in me." and I'm thinking, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a minute. I'm in enough trouble with the wife as it is. This is the last thing I need." But...I do it anyways, and right as I'm about to seal the deal, out of nowhere, I get shot with a gun, and it completely, completely destroyed my face. And that's how I got my fantastic idea. What if I could back myself up like my best favorite mp3 file or like a gif or a pdf?

And after two months of hard work, I had done it. I had made an exact digital copy of myself. He calls himself "Teddy." I don't know why. My name is Alan. Now let's explain my 4-step program to live forever as you are now through 3-d scanning and other digital archiving techniques!

Step number 1 is the most important step: Getting to know yourself. Now, you're probably thinking, "Alan, I think I know myself pretty well. I've spent every day of my life by myself. There's nothing about me to even tell me that I don't already know." well, I got some bad news for you, Mason. No one knows you.

You see, by the age of 6, every human brain has formed a small calcified pebble called the Schrader clot, which prevents any amount of self-awareness. But don't worry, 'cause I've come up with an exercise to help us move past that pebble. All you have to do... Is look. Look at your face in the mirror. Look at your eyes. Look at the nose, the mouth, the philtrum. You're gonna do this for five hours every night. Then just borrow a pen or a pencil from a buddy or friend, flip off that light switch, and draw an image of what you think you saw in the mirror. Now hang up those drawings all over your house to remind you of what you did in the bathroom.

Step number 2 is my favorite, favorite step. You're gonna come to my house. I'm gonna strobe blindingly bright lights into your eyes and face while you spin in my living room. Now, my patterns are going to be queered by your headform, and they're gonna generate three point-cloud axes. And then all you have to do is boolean the axes, and you're gonna end up with a 3-D model mesh of your head. It captures every wrinkle, every tear. After all, it's our imperfections that make us human.

Okay. Have you ever gone over to your girlfriend's house and she's covered her face in disgusting makeup and you find out that, all of a sudden, you don't love her anymore? It's not her fault. It's not your fault. It's actually science. See, she didn't know it at the time, but she just destroyed that natural luminescent quality that makes a woman beautiful. Now, that's a property called the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley states that when a non-human object begins to appear more human, it starts to get really cute... To a point, and then it becomes creepy.

It's like this imagine I'm jogging, and I love to jog, so I'm jogging. And out of nowhere damn it!... Aaaaaaaaaaaah! ...I stub my toe on a rock. On an ugly rock. But, hey, I got my pen here. Maybe I'll draw two eyes on the rock, and now, all of a sudden whoa! This rock's looking kind of cute. I'm starting to like this rock. What if I draw a nose and a mouth on the rock? And now, all of a sudden whoa! This is the cutest rock I've ever seen! I can't believe I'm falling in love with a stone. And then you're gonna want to coat the rock in skin and flesh and ooh, uncanny valley. Your rock fell down into the uncanny valley. It's down there with moving corpses, and this is where your girlfriend lives, and we're gonna try to hop on over and land on the other side with a believable human with real skin and flesh.

Now, I got an internship at the morgue, and I found out that every human face can contain as many as six muscles. And those muscles expand and contract and wibble and nibble and pull and tug at the skin. Ooh! That's a lot of stress. Skin stress. Skin stress test. I put every avatar I make through a variety of intensive skin stress tests. I do ball tests. Yes, I have wiggle tests. Whoever said I didn't have wiggle tests was lying. I shake up those avatars. And last but not least, we have durability and tear testing, because the last thing you want is your avatar's skin to rip or tear when you're trying to chat about your day.

So, that's it. We've created a real-life avatar. I guess I can just go home now. Bye bye-oh, wait. You forgot the personality, and it's only the most important step.

I'm going to come into your house. I'm gonna come into your home, and I'm gonna stay with you for two months. I'll bring a cot and a humidifier, and I'm gonna find out what makes you you. Every morning, you're gonna wake up with me on top of you. I'm gonna ask you hundreds of personal questions. Hundreds of personal questions. Things like: Have you ever caught a friend telling a lie? What was the worst thing you ever had to clean off of a rug? What's the best pair of lips you ever kissed? How many books do you own? Have you ever had a soft-shell crab? How much water can you drink? How many times did you catch a ball at the ball game you went to? How do you feel when you touch a little dog's hair? What is it like to have your hand covered in old glue? And all that information gets scanned in, and it gets put into the USB drive of your computer, and it makes the brain of your avatar. So, now my avatar doesn't just look like me, he also thinks like me.

I have touched so many lives with this remarkable technology! Teddy, thank you so much for helping me share this message tonight. Folks, we live in a very spooky-style world. No one's gonna do it for you. But all you have to do is take that first step, reach for that sweet, sweet fruit, and make nothing else you ever do ever matter.

People tend to use the term Empire rather interchangeably with the term big kingdom or kingdom that owns lots of stuff that is not its own. But I don't like this definition. This definition does not give nearly enough importance to the term and waters it down, and it sometimes just doesn’t apply to certain things.

The other issue is some people think that an Empire is just a European expression intended to connect someone to the concept of Rome. The word Empire does come from the Roman idea of Imperium, which was Rome's concept of rule through law, order, and general Roman influence being incredibly high among people, high enough they start acting Roman, a hegemony.

But the idea that Empires are European is incorrect. First, let's start with Persia. The Persian ruler was at times the Shahanshah, or Shah of Shahs, or king of kings. Similarly, the Turkic (big group of people from which the guys in Turkey come from) and Mongolian languages have the term Khagan/Qagan/Kha Khan which means Khan of Khans. While a khan might not strictly be a king in a feudal sense due their nomadic lifestyle, the idea is similar. Both of these people have a very definite idea that there can be someone so great, kings, the guys normally at the top, swear fealty to them. Another point, Genghis Khan is not a name but a title, meaning Great Khan, under whom other Khans serve. These khans eventually broke away but Temujin, the OG Genghis Khan, wanted his empire to last with a Genghis Kahn at top, and the other khans loyal to him.

So this brings us to another definition, someone who rules over kings. Does this work? The Holy Roman Emperor ruled over a couple of kings. The Mameluke emperor ruled over sultans, the Roman emperor was described by a Chinese traveler as ruling over kings who were appointed on the death of a previous king. But what about Charlemagne and Charles Martel? The Frankish Emperor ruled over what was by right multiple kingdoms but I don't think he had kingly vassals. And in texts at the time the empire was referred to as both a kingdom and an empire. But this kingdom was something special as emphasis was placed on the fact that it united previously disunited kingdoms.

Similar situation with China. China is either the Celestial Empire or the Middle Kingdom, depending on context. But either way, the Chinese emperor, or Huangdi, was seen as someone above other rulers. Other rulers paid tribute to him and he certainly ruled over quite a vast territory. A territory so vast, it once had many kingdoms within it, but those kingdoms were all united, with quite a lot of force, by Qin Shi Huangdi. Perhaps one thing to do at this point is more properly define a kingdom. To do that, let’s look at the British Isles. Now today’s British Isles are a lot more complicated than they were circa 850 AD so we will look back then. Back then, there were many independent realms, to name a few: the Kingdom of Jorvik (Northumbria), Kingdom of West Seax, Kingdom of Mercia, and the Kingdom of East Anglia. These guys all existed in what would become simply England. Jorvik/Northumbria is the one that is most relevant to what we are looking at because something very interesting happened to it. When Alfred the Great declared himself king of England, he did so controlling Northumbria as a kingdom. One king, two kingdoms. Northumbria would slip away from the King of England due to inheritance issues because it was a kingdom, those typically are independent. This was such an issue that when Northumbria was reconquered, it was demoted from being a kingdom to being an earldom. So we have this idea that kingdoms are typically independent. The solution to making Northumbria stay part of England was to remove its kingdom status. So there is something special about kingdoms compared to earldoms or counties. But let’s keep looking at England because they do something really interesting in 300 years. In 300 years, they take control through conquest and marriage much of France. Like, a lot of France. Too much France, according to the reigning French king. The king of England was now King of Aquitaine, England, and otherwise owner of lots of stuff. But though we refer to what he owned as an empire, he did not. He was simply king of multiple individual places. Kind of like if you have a home and a summer home, you have two homes, not one grand property divided by lots of territory that’s not yours. So a kingdom is individual, multiple kingdoms can have the same king, and kingdoms have pesky habit of wanting to change hands. Another realm to consider is the North Sea Empire. The North Sea Empire was ruled over by Cnut the Great. However, Cnut did not consider himself an emperor but still a king. He also made sure to not have any big, king vassals as he divided England into earldoms. We see another aspect of kingdoms with Cnut, as he called himself, “King of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes." So we can see that there is some connection between kingdoms and cultural groups. We see this as well with Aquitaine being the region of Occitans, Norway home Norwegians, and Denmark home to Danes. Cnut, while not seeing himself as an emperor, definitely had the goal of establishing a dominion around a specific geographic feature. Perhaps we can see this as the beginning of imperial ambitions, as he recognized that he was king of many places and he wanted to control a big area of water, kind of like how Rome controlled the Mediterranean or how the emperor of Japan controls a big string if islands considered to be one unit. The North Sea Empire, as a union of kingdoms, dissolved upon Cnut’s death. Again, kingdoms like being independent. So a kingdom likes being independent, they appear to be a distinct unit of rulership that can change hands, kingdoms can be connected to cultural groups, and kingdoms have been demoted to prevent their pesky inheritance. So if we look at this idea of a King of kings, this is a lot more powerful. A king of king is above this pesky business of kingdoms wanting to slip away. No, these kingdoms are firmly underneath their rule (as much as you can be in feudal times). So an emperor rules over multiple units associated with some shared culture that are typically independent and it’s a big deal when they are not independent. We can see this idea in Russia. Peter the Great declared himself emperor of Russia. Lots of people tried to unite the Rus but only he was able to. And he marked that conquest that culminated in Muscovite victory with a declaration that these regions were under something above a king, in idea and reality. The idea of empires really came into vogue in the 19th century, with Napoleon declaring himself emperor of the French, an idea reminiscent of the Roman first among equals for their emperor. Additionally, Mexico had an emperor a few times. Not a king, but an explicit emperor. He didn’t last too long. Germany as well was declared as an Empire, as various former kingdoms under something supposedly above the kingdom of Prussia. This idea of an emperor uniting peoples is seen as well with Victoria, who declared herself Empress of India. So it is here that I define both kingdom and empire. A kingdom is a distinct unit of government, typically independent, frequently tied to a specific group of people. An empire is a body that has kingdoms underneath it and is an idea that it is above the kingdoms, a uniter of kingdoms, and one that has heavy influence from Rome but is not a strictly European idea. Heck, some Slavic languages used the word Qagan as emperor for a period of time.

Now, after having spent some time reading this, you might be thinking “who cares? Why is this important?” Well, this is very important. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he worked hard to distance himself from the idea that he was the emperor of china. The European Union, in my view, is a reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire. It has member states that are distinct, like kings, but who all show varying levels of respect to an increasingly centralized governing body. Form your opinions on this as you will, but keep in mind the cultural advances made in the HRE that would not be possible if all those fractured states were not protected by a larger body. India as well is huge, and is definitely an empire. India being united is on a similar level with Europe being united, with a huge diversity of cultures and religions spread across a large piece of land but those states probably won’t be slipping away due to inheritance anytime soon. By identifying what is an empire, we can apply the techniques other empires have to ensure efficient administration and collectivity of the populace. Now, one thing I do want to clarify here is that the idea of a country having one unified culture or people is a very new idea starting with Napoleon. Lands could change hands so seeing yourself as French when you were English a month ago is harder than saying you are from a certain village. England is a special case because it had a migration Germanic lands bringing in Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had a very different language and culture than the Romans and Britons already there. This was a pretty clear division between the groups, as well as the Norse who would come later. In other places, this division is harder to see but you might be able to group them based upon general lingual groups. Anyways, this is something I have thought about for a long time and wanted to type out.

A wall of text is something that is frowned upon in most, actually virtually all Internet societies, including forums, chat boards, and Uncyclopedia. You should not make walls of text because it can get you banned anywhere unless it is a place that encourages walls of text. I highly doubt any place does support something so irritating and annoying, but anything can exist, but not really because unless you are in heaven then that can happen. But no one actually knows that was just a hypothesis, a lame one that is. Actually not really lame. You can create a wall of text supporting site, but you would be hated if you do that, so do not. But you can if you like, but I discourage that. Now on to the actual information of walls of texts. The wall of text was invented when the Internet was invented, but actually it was slow at that time. So whenever it became fast. But there would need to be some free or not free community for people, and that community would be able to have walls of text. But that community probably wouldn't have actually invented the wall of text. So basically, no one except God and Al Gore knows when or where or how the wall of text existed/was invented. Noobs probably invented, but probably not. Who knows. Walls of texts are usually filled with a lot of useless information and junk. Information and junk can be the same, but only if the information is junk or the junk is information. But who cares. The information/junk inside a wall of text are usually related to wherever the wall of text is located, but the best walls of text, which are actually the most irritating, most eye-bleeding ones, are completely random. Walls of text usually make the reader asplode or have their eyes bleed and fall out of their sockets. A number of people can stand it, but not read them. Actually some people can stand and read them. Those people do not have short attention spans. These are boring and patient people who have no life or have all the time in their hands, which are the same, but not really. The punishment of what making walls of text varies of the strictness of the community. But it doesn't really matter. Nobody cares. Walls of texts should be free of links, different font colors, strange characters, which are those other symbols used in society, and capital letters because it ruins the whole purpose of the infamy of walls of texts. It makes them look fucking dumb and weird. Walls of texts are obviously free of huge spaces and outstanding things like capital letters. Of course, paragraphs should never be in a wall of text. Walls of text are known to create nausea, confusion, head explosion, and others. The others being something I can not think of either because I am lazy or if I do not feel like it or I can not actually think of anything. Like what the fuck? That was a rhetorical question right there. What the fuck? You are actually not requesting a satisfactory answer, you just say that because you try to be funny or you feel like it or if you are pissed off. You must get a proper bitch-slapping to stop making walls of text, but if you are weird then that doesn't apply to you. Walls of text are defeated by deleting them or splitting them into paragraphs. But who cares. The information/junk inside a wall of text are usually related to wherever the wall of text is located, but the best walls of text, which are actually the most irritating, most eye-bleeding ones, are completely random. Walls of text usually make the reader asplode or have their eyes bleed and fall out of their sockets. A number of people can stand it, but not read them. Actually some people can stand and read them. Those people do not have short attention spans. These are boring and patient people who have no life or have all the time in their hands, which are the same, but not really. The punishment of what making walls of text varies of the strictness of the community. But it doesn't really matter. Nobody cares. Walls of texts should be free of links, different font colors, strange characters, which are those other symbols used in society, and capital letters because it ruins the whole purpose of the infamy of walls of texts. It makes them look fucking dumb and weird. Walls of texts are obviously free of huge spaces and outstanding things like capital letters. Of course, paragraphs should never be in a wall of text. Walls of text are known to create nausea, confusion, head explosion, and others. The others being something I can not think of either because I am lazy or if I do not feel like it or I can not actually think of anything. Like what the fuck? That was a rhetorical question right there. What the fuck? You are actually not requesting a satisfactory answer, you just say that because you try to be funny or you feel like it or if you are pissed off. You must get a proper bitch-slapping to stop making walls of text, but if you are weird then that doesn't apply to you. Walls of text are defeated by deleting them or splitting them into paragraphs. Or some other things that would work but will take hours to think of. People are considered a nuisance if they create walls of text. This might be the end. If you hope this is the end, I am not sure. But if I was not sure then I wouldn't be talking. I should know. Or should I? The best way to make a better and good wall of text is to copy and paste what you previously typed or write. Hey, that reminds me. Wall of text aren't always on the internet! They could be anywhere that is able to produce symbols. D'oh. A wall of text is something that is frowned upon in most, actually virtually all Internet societies, including forums, chat boards, and Uncyclopedia. You should not make walls of text because it can get you banned anywhere unless it is a place that encourages walls of text. I highly doubt any place does support something so irritating and annoying, but anything can exist, but not really because unless you are in heaven then that can happen. Or some other things that would work but will take hours to think of. People are considered a nuisance if they create walls of text. This might be the end. If you hope this is the end, I am not sure. But if I was not sure then I wouldn't be talking. I should know. Or should I? The best way to make a better and good wall of text is to copy and paste what you previously typed or write. Hey, that reminds me. Walls of text aren't always on the internet! They could be anywhere that is able to produce symbols. D'oh. A wall of text is something that is frowned upon in most, actually virtually all Internet societies, including forums, chat boards, and Uncyclopedia. You should not make walls of text because it can get you banned anywhere unless it is a place that encourages walls of text. I highly doubt any place does support something so irritating and annoying, but anything can exist, but not really because unless you are in heaven then that can happen. But no one actually knows that was just a hypothesis, a lame one that is. Actually not really lame. You can created a wall of text supporting site, but you would be hated if you do that, so do not. But you can if you like, but I discourage that. Now on to the actual information of walls of texts. The wall of text was invented when the Internet was invented, but actually it was slow at that time. So whenever it became fast. But there would need to be some free or not free community for people, and that community would be able to have walls of text. But that community probably wouldn't have actually invented the wall of text. So basically, no one except God and Al Gore knows when or where or how the wall of text existed/was invented. Noobs probably invented, but probably not. Who knows. Walls of texts are usually filled with a lot of useless information and junk. Information and junk can be the same, but only if the information is junk or the junk is information. But who cares. The information/junk inside a wall of text are usually related to wherever the wall of text is located, but the best walls of text, which are actually the most irritating, most eye-bleeding ones, are completely random. Walls of text usually make the reader asplode or have their eyes bleed and fall out of their sockets. A number of people can stand it, but not read them. Actually some people can stand and read them. Those people do not have short attention spans. These are boring and patient people who have no life or have all the time in their hands, which are the same, but not really. The punishment of what making walls of text varies of the strictness of the community. But it doesn't really matter. Nobody cares. Walls of texts should be free of links, different font colors, strange characters, which are those other symbols used in society, and capital letters because it ruins the whole purpose of the infamy of walls of texts. It makes them look fucking dumb and weird and dumb. Walls of texts are obviously free of huge spaces and outstanding things like capital letters. Of course, paragraphs should never be in a wall of text. Walls of text are known to create nausea, confusion, head explosion, and others. The others being something I can not think of either because I am lazy or if I do not feel like it or I can not actually think of anything. Like what the fuck? That was a rhetorical question right there. What the fuck? You are actually not requesting a satisfactory answer, you just say that because you try to be funny or you feel like it or if you are pissed off. Now I just copied and pasted part of this huge wall of text, which is actually not. Wait what? Nice right? Ba boom a rhetorical question right there. Is this the end for the sanity of your eyes? What the fuck did you actually read up to here? Or did you skip to near the end and read this? Either way, you fail in life. Just kidding. Or was I? Oh well. Congratulations, or not, actually not. Get a life right now. I found a cheap life on eBay, but cheap lives are rare. Well, good luck in finding one. Not! Okay go kill yourself, but I wasn't meaning that. So go sit in the corner in your house. I do not care which, just stay there and rot. If you are not in a place with a corner, then lucky you. Find one if you can. There is no other option because I said so. Now if you pity yourself for reading this like most do, then do something productive and useful to the environment. My goodness. OK this is me here. I am starting a new section of this article. I didn't read anything in this article above here, but nevermind, because I have something important to say, and you really have to read this. So just skip everything above and just come to this part and start reading and agreeing. The wall of text was invented by engineers using typewriters. Everything was in typewriter font (because it was made on typewriters - remember when I explained that in the previous sentence?) and the point was to use all of the paper, because paper was very expensive back then, it had just been invented I think. So anyway, the point was, no margins at the top or bottom or sides. If you left a quarter inch on the sides of the paper, that was very bad. And the guiding principle was "This was hard to write, so it should be hard to read". Because they were software engineers, not writing engineers. Is there even such a thing a writing engineers? Probably. But anyway, please go back to the top of this article and read it over again. You'll get the point after you read it for approx. 10 to 15 times. OK have you done that now? Good. Now let's be honest - you're not reading down this far. Are you? Nobody would read down this far, unless they were a crazy person. Are you a crazy person? You might be. Now I'm afraid - it's just me alone with a crazy person. No one else has read down this far, just you, so it's just the two of us alone together here. Are you going to do something crazy? Maybe you will. Please don't hurt me. If you promise not to hurt me, I'll give a coupon good for a free Grand Slam Breakfast at Denny's. OK? Now just do this one thing for me, read the article over again, just one more time, and if you really truly don't agree with everything in it, then fine, I'll retire from my job with the railroad and we'll call the whole thing off and just go dancing, just the two of use, me (the writer) and you (a completely random crazy person who has actually read down this far), and boy won't we turn heads when we show up at Rockefeller Center with the entire Donner Party in tow! We'll dance all night to strains of the Lemon Pipers while the Italian 12th Armored Division prevents the Allies from thrusting into our rear! Ah, what memories we'll make, I'll never forget you, my completely insane random person. By the way this is magnificent example of wall of text. You have to be proud you read it all. Now please read article again, and this time pay attention.Wait a minute. didnt it say earlier that there shouldn't be any capitals

A wall of text consists of many lines of text that resemble a wall. A wall of text can sometimes be really big or somewhat small. Most walls of text lack grammar so they are not as appealing to read while other walls of text do contain grammar so they are actually easy to read but not as long as if you were to put a bunch of random characters or words. A wall of text might be made out of word bricks which kind of makes sense if you think of each word as a brick but that would be a tall and narrow wall unless you expand it in which case it will be a large wall in general. Most places do not allow walls of text because they count as spam and could get you banned or kicked or muted and will prevent you from posting other walls of text. Some places allow walls of text but that would be weird and probably doesn't exist. If such a platform did exist for creating walls of text and publishing them for viewers then it is probably not popular otherwise I would have seen it by now. You should refrain from posting walls of text because of the reason I stated up there that said that you could get muted for spam and another reason being that it might get a lot of dislikes or even flagged for spam. If you get flagged for spam then you will no longer be able to post walls of text which is pretty reasonable but I think people should be able to express themselves but probably not through walls of text unless you want to. I have come across a few walls of text and some of them are funny but some of them are short and there are rarely any long walls of text. Maybe walls of text were created by early internet users to troll others but that would be extremely slow because you get like a byte per second download and like a bit per second upload or something like that idk I didn't live with dial up so i wouldn't know about the internet speeds but they are probably accurate even though i should fact check that. People who create walls of text probably have a lot of time on their hands or are really boring or both and they might have very long attentions spans or maybe they are entertained by creating a wall of text because it lets them be creative with what they say. My favorite wall of text is titled "regarding walls of text" and it is a fun read because it keeps the user engaged but I don't think it is a wall of text probably more like a narration or documentary through words. Though some walls of text are large, some can be small but equally as annoying. Sometimes small walls of text are considered copy pasta because you can copy it and paste it to insert a copy of that wall of text or copy pasta. Walls of text can also be copied and pasted but what normal person would copy it? That's like copying abnormal copy pasta in a formal setting. Just imagine Jim peaking at your screen that contains a copy pasta while you're supposed to be focusing on the meeting. How would he feel? How would you feel if the roles were switched? Those questions are of course rhetorical but it's good to consider them. Are you ready to live forever? You guys, my name is Alan Resnick, and I'm so excited to be here. I found the secret to eternal life, and I found it on my Lapbook Pro. Now, you're looking at me, and you're saying, "Alan, you are so smart and you are so small. What is your origin tale?" Well, it all started...Two years ago. Me and Janet were having a bit of a lovers' quarrel, and she's got me sleeping on the couch. Now, I don't mind. I'm fine with it. I'm snoozing. And I'm having a dream I'm in a foggy meadow, and in the distance, I hear a voice calling me "Alan, Alan," just like that. And the fog clears to reveal a beautiful nude woman. And she's saying, "Alan, I'm ready for you. Put your dirt in me." and I'm thinking, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a minute. I'm in enough trouble with the wife as it is. This is the last thing I need." But...I do it anyways, and right as I'm about to seal the deal, out of nowhere, I get shot with a gun, and it completely, completely destroyed my face. And that's how I got my fantastic idea. What if I could back myself up like my best favorite mp3 file or like a gif or a pdf? And after two months of hard work, I had done it. I had made an exact digital copy of myself. He calls himself "Teddy." I don't know why. My name is Alan. Now let's explain my 4-step program to live forever as you are now through 3-d scanning and other digital archiving techniques! Step number 1 is the most important step: Getting to know yourself. Now, you're probably thinking, "Alan, I think I know myself pretty well. I've spent every day of my life by myself. There's nothing about me to even tell me that I don't already know." well, I got some bad news for you, Mason. No one knows you. You see, by the age of 6, every human brain has formed a small calcified pebble called the Schrader clot, which prevents any amount of self-awareness. But don't worry, 'cause I've come up with an exercise to help us move past that pebble. All you have to do... Is look. Look at your face in the mirror. Look at your eyes. Look at the nose, the mouth, the philtrum. You're gonna do this for five hours every night. Then just borrow a pen or a pencil from a buddy or friend, flip off that light switch, and draw an image of what you think you saw in the mirror. Now hang up those drawings all over your house to remind you of what you did in the bathroom. Step number 2 is my favorite, favorite step. You're gonna come to my house. I'm gonna strobe blindingly bright lights into your eyes and face while you spin in my living room. Now, my patterns are going to be queered by your headform, and they're gonna generate three point-cloud axes. And then all you have to do is boolean the axes, and you're gonna end up with a 3-D model mesh of your head. It captures every wrinkle, every tear. After all, it's our imperfections that make us human. Okay. Have you ever gone over to your girlfriend's house and she's covered her face in disgusting makeup and you find out that, all of a sudden, you don't love her anymore? It's not her fault. It's not your fault. It's actually science. See, she didn't know it at the time, but she just destroyed that natural luminescent quality that makes a woman beautiful. Now, that's a property called the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley states that when a non-human object begins to appear more human, it starts to get really cute... To a point, and then it becomes creepy. It's like this imagine I'm jogging, and I love to jog, so I'm jogging. And out of nowhere damn it!... Aaaaaaaaaaaah! ...I stub my toe on a rock. On an ugly rock. But, hey, I got my pen here. Maybe I'll draw two eyes on the rock, and now, all of a sudden whoa! This rock's looking kind of cute. I'm starting to like this rock. What if I draw a nose and a mouth on the rock? And now, all of a sudden whoa! This is the cutest rock I've ever seen! I can't believe I'm falling in love with a stone. And then you're gonna want to coat the rock in skin and flesh and ooh, uncanny valley. Your rock fell down into the uncanny valley. It's down there with moving corpses, and this is where your girlfriend lives, and we're gonna try to hop on over and land on the other side with a believable human with real skin and flesh. Now, I got an internship at the morgue, and I found out that every human face can contain as many as six muscles. And those muscles expand and contract and wibble and nibble and pull and tug at the skin. Ooh! That's a lot of stress. Skin stress. Skin stress test. I put every avatar I make through a variety of intensive skin stress tests. I do ball tests. Yes, I have wiggle tests. Whoever said I didn't have wiggle tests was lying. I shake up those avatars. And last but not least, we have durability and tear testing, because the last thing you want is your avatar's skin to rip or tear when you're trying to chat about your day. So, that's it. We've created a real-life avatar. I guess I can just go home now. Bye bye-oh, wait. You forgot the personality, and it's only the most important step. I'm going to come into your house. I'm gonna come into your home, and I'm gonna stay with you for two months. I'll bring a cot and a humidifier, and I'm gonna find out what makes you you. Every morning, you're gonna wake up with me on top of you. I'm gonna ask you hundreds of personal questions. Hundreds of personal questions. Things like: Have you ever caught a friend telling a lie? What was the worst thing you ever had to clean off of a rug? What's the best pair of lips you ever kissed? How many books do you own? Have you ever had a soft-shell crab? How much water can you drink? How many times did you catch a ball at the ball game you went to? How do you feel when you touch a little dog's hair? What is it like to have your hand covered in old glue? And all that information gets scanned in, and it gets put into the USB drive of your computer, and it makes the brain of your avatar. So, now my avatar doesn't just look like me, he also thinks like me. I have touched so many lives with this remarkable technology! Teddy, thank you so much for helping me share this message tonight. Folks, we live in a very spooky-style world. No one's gonna do it for you. But all you have to do is take that first step, reach for that sweet, sweet fruit, and make nothing else you ever do ever matter.

People tend to use the term Empire rather interchangeably with the term big kingdom or kingdom that owns lots of stuff that is not its own. But I don't like this definition. This definition does not give nearly enough importance to the term and waters it down, and it sometimes just doesn’t apply to certain things. The other issue is some people think that an Empire is just a European expression intended to connect someone to the concept of Rome. The word Empire does come from the Roman idea of Imperium, which was Rome's concept of rule through law, order, and general Roman influence being incredibly high among people, high enough they start acting Roman, a hegemony. But the idea that Empires are European is incorrect. First, let's start with Persia. The Persian ruler was at times the Shahanshah, or Shah of Shahs, or king of kings. Similarly, the Turkic (big group of people from which the guys in Turkey come from) and Mongolian languages have the term Khagan/Qagan/Kha Khan which means Khan of Khans. While a khan might not strictly be a king in a feudal sense due their nomadic lifestyle, the idea is similar. Both of these people have a very definite idea that there can be someone so great, kings, the guys normally at the top, swear fealty to them. Another point, Genghis Khan is not a name but a title, meaning Great Khan, under whom other Khans serve. These khans eventually broke away but Temujin, the OG Genghis Khan, wanted his empire to last with a Genghis Kahn at top, and the other khans loyal to him. So this brings us to another definition, someone who rules over kings. Does this work? The Holy Roman Emperor ruled over a couple of kings. The Mameluke emperor ruled over sultans, the Roman emperor was described by a Chinese traveler as ruling over kings who were appointed on the death of a previous king. But what about Charlemagne and Charles Martel? The Frankish Emperor ruled over what was by right multiple kingdoms but I don't think he had kingly vassals. And in texts at the time the empire was referred to as both a kingdom and an empire. But this kingdom was something special as emphasis was placed on the fact that it united previously disunited kingdoms. Similar situation with China. China is either the Celestial Empire or the Middle Kingdom, depending on context. But either way, the Chinese emperor, or Huangdi, was seen as someone above other rulers. Other rulers paid tribute to him and he certainly ruled over quite a vast territory. A territory so vast, it once had many kingdoms within it, but those kingdoms were all united, with quite a lot of force, by Qin Shi Huangdi. Perhaps one thing to do at this point is more properly define a kingdom. To do that, let’s look at the British Isles. Now today’s British Isles are a lot more complicated than they were circa 850 AD so we will look back then. Back then, there were many independent realms, to name a few: the Kingdom of Jorvik (Northumbria), Kingdom of West Seax, Kingdom of Mercia, and the Kingdom of East Anglia. These guys all existed in what would become simply England. Jorvik/Northumbria is the one that is most relevant to what we are looking at because something very interesting happened to it. When Alfred the Great declared himself king of England, he did so controlling Northumbria as a kingdom. One king, two kingdoms. Northumbria would slip away from the King of England due to inheritance issues because it was a kingdom, those typically are independent. This was such an issue that when Northumbria was reconquered, it was demoted from being a kingdom to being an earldom. So we have this idea that kingdoms are typically independent. The solution to making Northumbria stay part of England was to remove its kingdom status. So there is something special about kingdoms compared to earldoms or counties. But let’s keep looking at England because they do something really interesting in 300 years. In 300 years, they take control through conquest and marriage much of France. Like, a lot of France. Too much France, according to the reigning French king. The king of England was now King of Aquitaine, England, and otherwise owner of lots of stuff. But though we refer to what he owned as an empire, he did not. He was simply king of multiple individual places. Kind of like if you have a home and a summer home, you have two homes, not one grand property divided by lots of territory that’s not yours. So a kingdom is individual, multiple kingdoms can have the same king, and kingdoms have pesky habit of wanting to change hands. Another realm to consider is the North Sea Empire. The North Sea Empire was ruled over by Cnut the Great. However, Cnut did not consider himself an emperor but still a king. He also made sure to not have any big, king vassals as he divided England into earldoms. We see another aspect of kingdoms with Cnut, as he called himself, “King of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes." So we can see that there is some connection between kingdoms and cultural groups. We see this as well with Aquitaine being the region of Occitans, Norway home Norwegians, and Denmark home to Danes. Cnut, while not seeing himself as an emperor, definitely had the goal of establishing a dominion around a specific geographic feature. Perhaps we can see this as the beginning of imperial ambitions, as he recognized that he was king of many places and he wanted to control a big area of water, kind of like how Rome controlled the Mediterranean or how the emperor of Japan controls a big string if islands considered to be one unit. The North Sea Empire, as a union of kingdoms, dissolved upon Cnut’s death. Again, kingdoms like being independent. So a kingdom likes being independent, they appear to be a distinct unit of rulership that can change hands, kingdoms can be connected to cultural groups, and kingdoms have been demoted to prevent their pesky inheritance. So if we look at this idea of a King of kings, this is a lot more powerful. A king of king is above this pesky business of kingdoms wanting to slip away. No, these kingdoms are firmly underneath their rule (as much as you can be in feudal times). So an emperor rules over multiple units associated with some shared culture that are typically independent and it’s a big deal when they are not independent. We can see this idea in Russia. Peter the Great declared himself emperor of Russia. Lots of people tried to unite the Rus but only he was able to. And he marked that conquest that culminated in Muscovite victory with a declaration that these regions were under something above a king, in idea and reality. The idea of empires really came into vogue in the 19th century, with Napoleon declaring himself emperor of the French, an idea reminiscent of the Roman first among equals for their emperor. Additionally, Mexico had an emperor a few times. Not a king, but an explicit emperor. He didn’t last too long. Germany as well was declared as an Empire, as various former kingdoms under something supposedly above the kingdom of Prussia. This idea of an emperor uniting peoples is seen as well with Victoria, who declared herself Empress of India. So it is here that I define both kingdom and empire. A kingdom is a distinct unit of government, typically independent, frequently tied to a specific group of people. An empire is a body that has kingdoms underneath it and is an idea that it is above the kingdoms, a uniter of kingdoms, and one that has heavy influence from Rome but is not a strictly European idea. Heck, some Slavic languages used the word Qagan as emperor for a period of time. Now, after having spent some time reading this, you might be thinking “who cares? Why is this important?” Well, this is very important. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he worked hard to distance himself from the idea that he was the emperor of china. The European Union, in my view, is a reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire. It has member states that are distinct, like kings, but who all show varying levels of respect to an increasingly centralized governing body. Form your opinions on this as you will, but keep in mind the cultural advances made in the HRE that would not be possible if all those fractured states were not protected by a larger body. India as well is huge, and is definitely an empire. India being united is on a similar level with Europe being united, with a huge diversity of cultures and religions spread across a large piece of land but those states probably won’t be slipping away due to inheritance anytime soon. By identifying what is an empire, we can apply the techniques other empires have to ensure efficient administration and collectivity of the populace. Now, one thing I do want to clarify here is that the idea of a country having one unified culture or people is a very new idea starting with Napoleon. Lands could change hands so seeing yourself as French when you were English a month ago is harder than saying you are from a certain village. England is a special case because it had a migration Germanic lands bringing in Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had a very different language and culture than the Romans and Britons already there. This was a pretty clear division between the groups, as well as the Norse who would come later. In other places, this division is harder to see but you might be able to group them based upon general lingual groups. Anyways, this is something I have thought about for a long time and wanted to type out.

I was going through the responses to /u/Kat's Tildes Survey Results and it looks like a good bunch of us use Discord, me included. I decided a Tildes discord server might be of use. It's not officially endorsed or anything, but I thought there might be interest. Any suggestions would be great :)

Server Link

I've been doing some thinking and concluded that in it's current form, tildes design has a fundamental problem that is going to make high-quality discussions nearly impossible.

Assumptions

I'm relying on four assumptions here:

• A discussion's quality is proportional to it's exclusiveness. In other words, the more wide the audience participating in a discussion is, the worse the discussion gets. It's not hard to see this. A discussion about a discovery in cancer reasearch on a news site will be much lower quality than among cancer reasearchers. This has also been shown to be true by reddit's /r/all.
• tildes get more specific, the "deeper" they are in the hierachy. ~sci.biology.cancer is more specific than ~sci. ~sci also a has more subscribers.
• tildes.net wants to use this specialization to foster high-quality and qualified discussions on specific topics.
• tilde submissions "bubble up", as they currently do

The Problem

You might be able to see what I'm getting at. I think these three together are a fundamental problem for the quality of discussion in subgroups:

• Highly upvoted posts from specific subgroups will be exposed to wider audiences, thus lowering the quality of discussion.
• More generic posts have a higher likelihood of receiving upvotes from the more general groups above them, thus lowering the quality of submissions.

A Scenario

Let's simulate a scenario using my above assumptions. This might be unhelpful, since it's very easy to poke holes in such a specific scenario. This is more intended as an overall picture of the incentives the users have.

We have three submissions to ~sci.biology.cancer, about the news of three different discoveries:

• A link to an original scientific paper with it's original title
• A link to an original scientific paper, with a modified title
• A link to a news story in a popular tabloid newspaper, with it's clickbait title

So, how would these fare?

• The first submission would be upvoted by ~sci.biology.cancer subscribers, who understand the paper and topic, but are low in numbers.
• The second submission would be upvoted by ~sci.biology, who are familiar enough to understand the modified title.
• The third submission can be understood by anyone, and would be upvoted by the whole of ~sci, slingshotting to the top.

Let's take at the result in ~sci.biology.cancer:

The highest ranked post is now a clickbait article of no significant interest to anyone actually knowledgeable about the topic, filled with unqualified discussion. The second ranked post is slightly better, but still less useful than the first post, which is being drowned out by other submissions.

Conclusion

As a submitter with the current system, instead of submitting high quality content that interests the subtilde, it is in your interest to submit a post that will appeal to the lowest common denominator, the subtildes above you. This will significantly decrease the quality of specialized subtildes.

Ideas

I believe the bubbling up mechanic must be modified in some way to prevent this unfortunate systemic issue. I don't really have a good solution, but here's some ideas to get the brainstorming going:

• No participation (voting/commenting) for users higher up the chain. This would be very extreme.
• users don't see comments made higher-up the chain. ~sci.biology would not see ~sci comments. This would be extraordinarily confusing and have weird edge cases.
• Votes would be counted separately for each part of the sub-tilde chain. A post might be highly upvoted in ~sci, but only receive a few upvotes in ~sci.biology. I like this idea in general, but it does not solve the problem of the low-quality responses landing in ~sci.biology.cancer too. Maybe that's just an acceptable trade-off, though.

What are your thoughts on this?

I feel like it's been pretty well established that Tildes is supposed to be a place of discussion with maybe occasional fluff here and there that can be filtered out. But there's a large grey area that I think should be addressed.

I'll take a few of Reddit's subreddits as an example.

I think it's pretty clear that a group resembling /r/aww should not be allowed on Tildes since it is pure fluffing and does not really bring a big quality of discussion to the community as a whole.

But how about a community such as /r/QuitYourBullshit? That could arguably be either unnecessary or a place of good discussion. There's a lot of grey area regarding the quality of that subreddit.

Now, I know what some people might try to say. We shouldn't try to replicate Reddit, and we should instead let the communities grow organically.

Yet, if Tildes is going to grow at all from Reddit, people are going to want to replicate the communities they so dearly loved on Reddit, regardless of quality. People who were active on /r/dankmemes are going to want a /r/dankmemes equivalent here. People who were active on /r/todayilearned or /r/JusticeServed are going to want an equivalent here as well. So the question is: how are we going to deal with the large demand for variably fluffy groups while simultaneously keeping the quality of discussion up?

I think this is a real issue that is going to have to be dealt with before widespread adoption of Tildes can occur.

This seems like a tricky one to me, as it largely depends on the community as a whole deciding to go with a particular tone.

One example of a site that has an expectation of serious conversation is Hacker News, and this makes it a great place to get thoughtful discussion without snarky comments (but with its own biases and echochamber effects of course).

What I don't want to see Tildes become is the meme-posting, reference-laden, low quality noise of some subreddits, or the content-free fluff of Imzy.

How can we strike this balance?

Hello! I'm the girl who keeps posting about Dwarf Fortress here on ~games . When I posted about a succession game, many said they'd love to if they knew how to play. I'm going to link some resources for y'all:

INSTALLATION:
Main Bay12Games Page: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Lazy Newb Pack (tons of helpful stuff): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=126076.0

GUIDES:
Dwarf Fortress Wiki: http://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/

DasTactic's Tutorial Series: https://youtu.be/qWXgVQXzjsw

I hope this helps! <3

• DyebrewsWitch a.k.a Alexis

Any concerts you guys plan on going to/went to within the last/next few months? Last Friday there was a Kendrick Lamar concert I went to, it was pretty fun, although there were a lot of "odd" people there. This Friday I'm going to attend a Journey/Def Leppard concert. I also plan on seeing Pouya this summer, he's an underground rapper that I like, I also want to go to an Iron Maiden concert in Germany with a close friend but I'm not sure if I should spend the money at the moment.