I'm conflicted about this. On one hand, not prompting users to post alot may result in more quality content; however, on the other hand it may mean that the website is missing out on great quality posts and discussions. Your thoughts?

Tildes is 100% donation-supported. It sounds great but I'm doubtful it's a sustainable model. Countless sites have started this way but ended up seeking other ways to monetize, including...

1. Showing ads on the site
2. Intermingling "sponsored posts" or "promoted posts" with regular posts, basically giving preferential treatment to content from users who paid for extra visibility (native advertising)
3. Selling user data
4. Cryptocurrency mining (either with user permission or on the sly)
5. Opening a store for selling branded merch
6. Periodic "pledge drive" fundraising campaigns
7. Enacting paywalls

I've been thinking a lot about site monetization in the abstract lately. Some of these options are better than others. Personally, I'd draw a hard line against 1-4 on Tildes. I think all of those are in direct opposition to what this site is all about.

I think 5 is a "good in theory, but not in practice" idea. A merch store might generate enough revenue for the first few months but would see rapidly diminishing returns. It would have to resort to increasingly gimmicky promotions just to reach eyeballs and meet its goals.

I think 6 could be a popular option but I personally recoil from the annual hard-sell guilt trip. The recurring drama of "THIS COULD BE OUR LAST YEAR IF YOU DO NOTHING" is exhausting and paints the site's future as constantly in turmoil.

Finally we come to 7, the paywall. Traditionally I hate these too, especially when they block content like news that is available for free elsewhere. Sometimes they are "soft" paywalls that give you free access to an article (or the first few paragraphs of one) before they ask you to pony up. I feel that these are the worst form of paywall because they tease and frustrate users, and are often easily circumventable anyway.

That said, I think a "hard" paywall might actually be a good choice for Tildes. For starters, this is already a walled garden. We're actively trying to cultivate a community by not exposing the site to the wider world. That would at least make the transition to a paywall easier to swallow than if the site had been open the whole time.

It's 2018. By now it's evident to me that TANSTAAFL online. If you're not paying for something, you are the product. I'm a dyed in the wool cheapskate and I don't like opening my wallet to use a website, but at this point I'm even more tired of being treated like a commodity. If I'm going to invest in an online community, I'd much rather pay a small subscription for access than be jerked around in shady ways. I feel it's the most honest and straightforward solution for a site like this.

Caveats are that it would need to be cheap. Really cheap, like $1 a month. I don't know what the site's operating expenses are, but I would hope something in that ballpark would cover them, at scale. Also @Deimos would face the temptation to implement multiple options from the list as time goes on. Like, after we're used to the paywall, he might want to add "unobtrusive" ads too, or start selling "non-identifiable" user information. I think it's vital that the site never compromise like that. Raise the price if it comes to that, but don't get greedy. A page in the docs formalizing some promises about respecting users would be a nice thing to put on the record.

What are your thoughts? I should say that I'm talking about the future here, I think it's way too early to put up a paywall now. The community would have to be large and mature enough to justify a paid subscription to it, and we're not there yet.

I've been seeing a lot of conflicting opinions on Fallout 76. Most of it seemingly boiling down to people being in favor of the experimentation by Bethesda, but against the lack of mod support or the always online component. I'm wondering: for those who are invested in the Fallout franchise, where do you stand on the idea of Fallout 76 and why?

I'll probably elaborate my own thoughts a little later in comments but for now I'm interested in reading other people's opinions.

With the incredible pace of automation and AI taking place across all sectors of our Global Economy, countries/governments/citizens need to start seriously thinking about how we can continue to survive when there are simply not enough jobs to be had. UBI is one option that countries have attempted to "beta test" with varying results. What is ~'s[sic] opinion on UBI and automation and AI "taking our jerbs"?

Ok so I have been really interested in Tildes and yesterday I was looking at the /r/Tildes subreddit and low and behold I was in time to comment in the invite thread and get one. This was great I have been really excited to see what it was like.

So I hope on and get familiar with the layout, look at some posts and some comments. Really digging it, I want to say it has a minimal vibe but that is only because I'm used to so many sites having a gajillion buttons, notifications, chats, garbage, ect. It's clean for lack of a better word.

I decided I should contribute to the community and see what posting is like. I remembered a simple joke which gave me a chuckle the other day:

'I like my Women like I like my golf scores. In the 80's with a slight handicap.'

With the hectics of the real world, I didn't have much longer to look around any longer and had to go.

When I checked back later people seemed against the posts, after reading the comments I was conflicted. It seemed like such a tame joke and people were saying they didn't want to see jokes on Tilde. I had a bit of a think and realised the problem, of course, that one post by itself is relatively harmless and ok but if you allow posts along those lines it becomes very spammy which is exactly why I don't like reddit as much anymore.

Jokes are a relatively low effort post, you could come up with several poor ones in a minute, that's what twitter is for. However, if people come and see that jokes are the norm it will likely encourage them to post them as well, and it resorts to a huge unbalance in quality posts.

I am in favour of removing all kinds of jokes that come in the form of a standalone post (if they are in the comments I feel they should remain ok). Some were saying they were ok with a dedicated ~jokes however I thought about it and feel this would be a poor decision, it still leads to people like me who can easily make low effort posts. The problem is that the number of good jokes will be rare in comparison to bad jokes it would be a net loss in terms of quality, sure you could moderate out the poor jokes but humour is subjective and that leads to all sorts of opinion based complications that are best left alone.

While I myself agree with this sentiment I still posted a dumb joke. Why? Because I didn't know. Admittedly only 4 people voted on the post and the comments aginst the post were much higher than the post itself it is still essentially spam on the feed. (The only reson for not deleting it is so others can see its negative response). Now I have posted this im very aware not to do this. However I still made this mistake while Tildes is a closed invite system, when it is no longer closed off it could be very easy for low effort posts to take over. The community needs to make sure we inform these people who make these posts and don't vote on them, or we should inform the users much better about what tildes stands for.

Just my thoughts, interested to know what the community thinks.
My original dumb joke post

I know the site is still in its infancy and cross-posting won't be much of an issue at the moment, but I was interested to see what other users thought about cross-posting, whether we should allow it and if so how it should be done?

Personally I am in favour of cross-posting but I think some site mechanic should exist that doesn't allow two separate threads to be created. Instead, the cross-post should link directly to the original thread so that discussion of the topic can be kept in a single location but the topic itself can reach multiple tildes. For example, say an article about music being created artificially by a robot was originally posted in ~music. Someone may want to cross-post this to ~tech, and to do so would only have to click some sort of cross-post button and select the tilde they want to cross-post to. Anyone browsing the ~tech tilde would see the post, but upon clicking it would be taken to the comments page of the post originally made in ~music. Some indication of where the post was originally made could be given as well when viewing the cross-post on another tilde.

I'm writing about my two trips to ER over the last two days, mostly as a way of processing for myself, but also because some things came up that were interesting to me. This story is very detailed medically, which may be gross to some people.

Many years ago when I lived in Chicago, I had a few weeks of life that were utter hell. I would be in constant lower right flank and abdominal pain. I would feel hot and cold flashes. I began drinking water constantly, but would throw up everything until I could vomit was bile. The pain would be so intense that I would have to take scalding hot showers to distract from it for a little relief.

After several weeks, I was convinced that I was dying somehow. Maybe something had ruptured? I didn't know. As a student, I had some insurance. But I had no friends or family at all in Chicago. Finally, one day I walked the three miles to the ER and was seen. They did a sonograph of my groin and said nothing was wrong. They asked me, "Have you been under a lot of stress lately?"

I had been, and they attributed it to that. This event forced me to move back in with mom (I was 19 at the time), back in a rural part of the state. I began the long and tiresome process of working on stress management as a religion, and strong boundaries as a lifestyle. Since then, my patience has grown, and I am able to stay calm even when being physically assaulted or threatened with death (something that happens often in the acute psychiatric setting in which I work).

I never really bought this diagnosis, though. It seemed like a diagnosis of exclusion.

Years later in the current day, I began having some similar symptoms. At work one night, I started having trouble focusing because of pain in my lower flank. I attributed this to stress and went through my steps to see what might be bothering me, but I couldn't find anything. I then thought about what I'd been drinking and realized that I had drunk nothing but coffee, tea, and Mello Yello for the last two days. I went out to my car where I keep 24 packs of water and started drinking some more. Pain went away, no big deal.

On Sunday morning, about 8:30 AM, I awoke in tremendous pain. The same place, I recognized it. I drank more water, the pain wouldn't go away. I took two Naproxen, no relief. I went to the shower to douse my back in scalding hot water - relief. Temporary, until the water stopped.

Then I tried urinating, and it didn't go very well. I couldn't get out more than a few drops, and they were brown. Having worked in medical settings for most of my adult life, I knew this was no bueno.

I hate going to ER, but I hate it more when I have to give a vague complaint like "Lower Back Pain." When I worked in the ER, this phrase was often coding for, "I'm here for my Norco." But I went anyway.

The ER was huge, and I was seen by a doctor very quickly. They did a CT which showed a <5mm kidney stone still in my kidney. They told me it would pass in a few days. They took a urine sample, which I was able to provide, and it was the darkest sample I've ever seen. They came back and told me that there was so much blood in it that they had to "swab it manually," because their machine wouldn't work fast enough (I assume this is common, but have no idea).

They gave me Norco 5 and a medicine to help dilate the ureters to encourage the stone to pass. I had never had Norco, and was intent on going to work that afternoon. The ER Nurse strongly discouraged this, so I called my boss (who is also a nurse) to see what her suggestion was. Per her, I took the evening off - and I am so glad that I did.

I got home and the first dose of Norco was hitting in. I really dislike pain medicine, and I usually don't take it even if prescribed because of a family hx of addictive behavior, not to mention my experience working on the front lines of treatment in the opioid epidemic. The stuff demands respect. I slept for a few hours, then woke up in minor pain. I waited for the 6 hours to have passed, took my next dose.

Except, nothing change. The pain got worse. I would not take more Norco outside of the prescription guidelines, so I went to Walgreens and got a heating pad, icy-hot, and Ibuprofen that the MD told me I could stack on top. Nothing helped. Around 10, I started vomiting. I hadn't eaten much, so I was vomiting up my medicine and all the water I'd been drinking. The pain was so bad that I ran a scalding bath and just laid in it. I had to do this over and over again all night, vomit, shower, bath. That hot water is what let me get a few 10-15 minutes of sleep here and there.

Finally, after suffering through to 6:30 when my next dose of Norco was up, I took that and the Flomax. I waited another hour, nothing. I vomited again and realized it'd be a big waste of time to keep taking the meds if all I was going to do was vomit them up. I called the ER to get their advice, and they told me to come in.

When I got there, about 24 hours after I'd been the first time, they put me in a different room and did their assessments. The pain was much worse, and I was holding back tears. They told me they were going to give me an IV painkiller and some other medicines. The MD came in within me having been in the room for about 10 minutes and told me about my CT again. He explained that a lot of "kidney stoners" are able to pass <5mm without a problem, but a small percentage become very symptomatic and experience a lot of pain. He said they were going to consult with Urology and try to get me into surgery today to have it removed if possible or at least put a stent in.

The nurse came back with a syringe, "This is fentanyl, it's going to help with your pain." I was astounded that they were giving me fentynal for this. Yes, I think it was appropriate, but I have never had a painkiller like that. Working in the field that I do, I hear many stories about accidental overdose often involving fentynal. We talked about dosage, half-life, and expectations before she gave it to me.

The feeling was... Strange. My whole body became a little numb. The pain went away about three minutes after the shot. My head felt warm, then the rest of my body did. I felt like I was floating. I now understand why the stuff is addictive. I was very tired, so I nodded in and out of sleep while watching CNN on the hospital TV.

A Urology PA came in to consult with me and explain the surgery, she was super nice and clear. I got moved up to Same Day Surgery and nurses there explained everything to me. They asked, "Who is picking you up today?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"You're going to be under general anesthesia, so we can't let you sign yourself out. Someone has to come up to provide care for you."

"I don't have anyone that fits that description within 100 miles." (I moved here about 6 months ago, and while I have friends from work, I wouldn't really put them in this category[1]).

The nurse got a facial expression that I've seen many nurses put on, I call it, "Well, that sucks, but too bad." She said that if no one could come, I'd have to stay in Observation overnight. Too rich for my blood. I put in a call to mom who started on the way up.

The surgeon came in and spoke to me, saying that the stone was probably too high up to try and get without damaging the kidney, so they would put a stent in if they couldn't get it out safely. I was okay with that. Went into surgery, it lasted less than an hour and woke up 20 minutes afterward in the recovery section.

I have a lot of experience coming out of anesthesia because of a birth defect that required a lot of surgery when young. Sometimes I came out combative, sometimes over emotional with a sense of the world ending. I came out of this anesthesia fully functional, running some of my own assessments and talking to the nurses about the surgery. My perception of time was wonky, as far as how long these were taking, but nothing too serious.

They had to put a stent in. Has anyone ever had a stent running from their kidney to their urethra? It's not fun. I constantly feel like I need to urinate a little, and there is a severe burning sensation when doing so. My first urine sample was straight blood, which didn't surprise me.

My mom got there around this time. I spoke to the nurse and discharged a bit later. We went to get some lunch, then the grocery store, and she dropped me off at my house before going home. I was very appreciative that she came up, but I don't feel like I need someone with me for the 24 hours they suggested.

I took a nap, and just now woke up.

I write this mostly to process in my head and help facilitate memory storage. But some themes came up:

1. I have insurance, and yet still waited as long as possible, because I have a $2000 deductible (this is lower than my old one, which was $4k.

2. I made a statement, "Not friends that I'm going to involve in this."
   This one, for me, highlights some old behavior. I used to have a very rigid social classification. Work friends, school friends, and that's it. I disliked when the boundaries crossed. This got me into serious trouble in Chicago, because I had gone out of my way not to make friends, and found myself in a bad way medically without help. Do other people do this? I find it to be a little unhealthy and will be trying to work on it as time goes on.

3. I think that I got better treatment once I started talking about working in ERs in the past and doing psych care now. I'm not sure, but medical culture loves the Patient Story or scary tales of practice. I exchanged some with the nurses and doctors and a sense of camaraderie develops quickly.

I'm also just writing for myself because I think it's super helpful to debrief. If you made it this far, hope you enjoyed!

Dune was not well-reviewed when it premiered, with Roger Ebert calling it the worst movie of the year, though it has since become a cult classic. I recently read the book and had never seen the movie, so I decided to check it out.

I understand the criticism; parts of it feel rushed, and there are many little things from the book that are incorporated into the movie but aren't fleshed out very well. However, having read the book, and therefore being able to piece together the things that were glossed over in the movie, I thought it was pretty great.

The costume design, spaceships, sets, and sand worms were all executed well, though they are obviously dated by today's standards. Those things all contribute to the overall mood of the movie, which I thought matched the book nicely.

They took some liberties with the villain, the Baron Harkonnen, who they gave a skin condition and the ability to float around, which aren't present in the book (or at least were a small enough part that I don't remember them), and I thought were a little too over-the-top.

Overall, I rate the movie 8/10, but I don't expect it would hold up that well if you haven't read the book.

There have been many, many, many threads over the past few weeks in which users (some new, some with a few posts under their belts) ask questions or make suggestions about items that are explicitly discussed in the documentation. Additionally, the documentation contains a lot of thoughtful items discussing the goals of the site and the mechanics for achieving those goals. The documentation is an integral part of this community, yet many people don't seem to be reading it.

How can the community help ensure that users read and understand the documentation prior to becoming a member of the community? A potential solution could be to have a short quiz based on the documentation, which would ensure that users at least skim it.

Any other ideas?

I summarize the project that the following is taken from here: https://tildes.net/~talk/1yr/are_you_writing_a_diary_if_so_in_which_ways_does_it_help_you#comment-kuy

Some of what's discussed below builds on ideas familiar only to my friend and I, but the gist is probably understandable enough, and as the occasion for my writing this is a momentous one, I want to share and see what people might think of some of my thoughts on it. Some of the language is probably a little flowery or seems silly, but that's okay—who has time for shame?

Feedback, questions, discussion, etc., are all welcome.

. . .

Something you may have gleaned by now from my entries and our private discussions both is that I've been wondering for a while at the sheer scope encompassed by the whole of life's perspectives taken together. Something you said to me tonight seems particularly acute in relation to this thought:

"but it makes sense that anthony bourdain could kill himself
to us he represents just a random facet of the universe
but to him he was the universe, painting it with his eyes, and he hated his eyes."

The Universe is made in the eyes of its beholder. The philosophers (and the philistines alike) have been making that observation for a long time now; they call it solipsism, or subjectivity. So I'm not unique in my also identifying it. But that's okay, because the idea is as valid as it ever was. If there's anything our recent discussions have made clear to me, it's that we can believe in nothing but that, and can't but trust in the Universe in its every moment of presentation as a mirror.

In my saying "wonder" above, I mean just that; it is wonder which I feel towards this thought. Life as experienced in the moment is ossified in the next; as soon as an experience is registered it is passed and past, becomes one among many tomes relegated to the bookshelves which fill to the brim the expansive vault called Memory, and with time it and its shelf are pushed further and further into the ever growing obscurity. One can walk those halls again, venture far into those depths, but with distance one finds the shelves dustier and the names of the tomes which line them more difficult to make out.

In such a recognition everything has become compressed (but wasn't it so all along, and it's only now that I've come to see it?). Life is become compartmentalized, broken into bite-sized pieces for its more comfortable consumption. Everything is a mood, a color, a sound, a smell. The terms 'synesthesia' and 'aura' become interchangeable. Part of the difficulty in trying to retrace one's steps through that maze of shelves—and most frustrating is to set out in search of just one particular tome among all the multitudes, some of which cry out like sirens in hopes of diverting one's attention—is that all the colors which mark each shelf are so easily mixed up, confused with each other, and with that of the present moment, that their being received just as they were in the moment of their edification seems probably impossible; and should one come to the right shelf after all, where is the book that shines with just the same sheen with which it shone upon its binding? There's a great deal of work to be put in, it turns out, in seeing in Shrek exactly what one saw in watching it as a child.

By "consume", as I use the term above, I mean just that. Life is consumed in the moment of its passing, just as experiences become memories and thoughts are born and die in the same moment. Everything is in constant movement (remember Heraclitus? A man never steps in the same stream twice). Enter the importance of momentum. Momentum can now be better defined than it was when first I dealt with it (and we can do away with the whole discussion around dialectic, though that doesn't preclude taking what is useful from it—a kind of [auto-]cannibalization). We can call it a refusal to linger on suffering, a choosing to embrace rather than curse the inevitability of movement, of passing, of distance. In movement of this sort is to be found the Promethean, if that term can be recycled also. Love flowers in a maintenance of momentum; love is the seed, momentum the water.

In memory, too, can we find ourselves renewed. An aura lost is not lost forever, and part of the thrill of retracing one's steps is in the search itself. True, the shelves become dusty, the tomes decrepit, as towards a more distant past one reaches; but what child loves not to get lost among old sheafs and musty stacks, places of secrets and lost knowledge? And is it not taught, and can we not agree, that there is far more to be said for a reader's interpretation of a text than for the text itself? One must remember to chew mint from time to time; it can make a big difference.

On this day I graduate from high school. The following pledge is my choice of commemoration in marking that accomplishment: I choose to look towards the future with as much optimism and positivity as can be mustered, to spurn resentment and suffering, nostalgia and hate—the last being permitted only in its manifestation in opposition to all things anti-life. We must remember to remain lovely and loving beings, to take things seriously enough to be able to take things easy, to appreciate as beautiful what is foolish, but ours in its foolishness, and to love delirium of the sort known by the psychonaut convinced of the profundity of a truly meaningless revelation. We must in our approach to life in all its majestic whole say as Nietzsche (and, more recently, the writers of Futurama) would have said if asked to go through it all again: Fuck yeah.

I think it would be rather cool and suited to tildes style of conversation to have some sort of referencing system built into markdown that is similar to Wikipedia's. Users can format a link so that it appears as a superscript number in the main bulk of the text and then also appears at the bottom of the post automatically after being posted in the classic number referencing style. It could look something like this, where the webpage title would be given as well next to the page and cutoff after a certain amount of characters (please excuse my terrible paint skills). This is clearly not a necessity as we could still just use standard square and normal brackets to insert links, but I think it would be rather nifty to have a built in system that automatically creates a mini list of references, especially if the user writes a rather long, well thought out argument that might require more than a few citations.

Tildes is still in the process of being built and there's been much discussion on what kinds of content and posts we'd like to see here. Users have also been outspoken about the content and posts that they think should be discouraged. With this in mind, I thought it might be interesting for us to have a conversation about how to engage in a civil conversation with someone with whom you disagree, and what kinds of behaviors make a discussion worthwhile.

Here are a few links to get us started.

• A Better Way to Argue by Jay Heinrichs
• One Civil Conversation Please from schoolofthought.org
• The Danger of a Single Story a TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation a TED Talk by Celeste Headlee

So what do you think? How should we communicate with each other in order to really make Tildes a great place to engage with one another? Do you have any conversation tricks or rules that have been successful in your own lives? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Trailers

• Battlefield 5 Official Multiplayer Trailer

• FIFA 19 Official Reveal Trailer with UEFA Champions League

• Origin Access Premier: Official Reveal Trailer

• Unravel Two Official Reveal trailer

• Sea of Solitude: Official Teaser Trailer

• NBA LIVE 19 Official Reveal Trailer

• Madden NFL 19 - Official Reveal Trailer

• Command and Conquer: Rivals - Official Reveal Trailer

• Anthem Official Cinematic Trailer

• 4 Minutes of Anthem Open World Co-Op Exploration Gameplay - E3 2018

Thoughts?

I’ll go first. Back in the late 1990s I worked at a startup out of Seattle. The founders had a previous exit and had a winery in Sonoma. They flew us all down there and things started out fun. We had a scavenger hunt in San Francisco, we all picked grapes at their winery, and saw how the wine was made. The third day got weird. We were all supposed slaughter a goat and eat it. No one wanted to kill the poor thing, so a farm hand did it, and we all ate the terrible meat.

On the final evening we were all sat down in a barn with lots of candles. We did some semi-normal stuff like write down everything we have been avoiding in our lives, then we burned the lists.

Next, the person running the thing thought it would be a good idea to reenact the biblical thing where Jesus washes poor peoples’ feet. But she got it backwards, and some of the VPs were supposed to wash the CEO’s feet.

A couple of us vocally freaked out, then the whole thing fell apart and we all went home early.

I know my story may be extreme, but does anyone else have any misguided or just strange team building events like this in their work history?

Can we get an Edit history on posts (also potentially comments).

This is sparked by a post a few days ago in which a poster asked a question about people's standpoints on gay marriage and then published their standpoint as well, heavily against gay marriage.

I made my comment here questioning them on their standpoint and they edited their post without any evidence, making it look like I was jumping to conclusions.

Post history would prevent this kind of thing and would also equip commenters with the ability to see what OP has changed.

Please let me know if you agree or disagree for whatever reason, I am interested to hear other people's thoughts.

Edit: The poster in my comment link was banned shortly after that post. Linked by @Jedi here.

I flew to Ely, Minnesota in August with my friend Jared.

Hope the images work, I'll rehost if they don't.

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2631.jpg

Me left, Jared right.

He takes a regular trip with his family into the Boundary Waters (BWCA) and my in-laws have a cabin on a BWCA lake. In order to avoid driving and to get some flying hours in, we took this tiny plane from Columbus, OH to Ely, MN.

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/flight-path.jpg

Red line is actual GPS route. Blue line is simply airport-to-airport route.

We were trying to avoid flying over large bodies of water because when you’re in a single engine airplane, you don’t have a lot of options besides swimming if your engine goes out (ours didn’t).

We meant to get fuel after Chicago but the day we were flying we had 30 (thirty!!!!) knot headwinds even low to the ground. It was stupidly impressive bad luck. So we had to stop in Gary, IN to grab some gas before heading up again.

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2647.jpg

Gary, IN

After grabbing gas, we were off. We saw the Blue Angels parked on the north ramp of the airport as we were taking off but it was too late to grab a picture. Turned out they had a show over the Navy Pier in Chicago a little later in the morning.

We know because we flew through the TFR (before it activated).

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2657-e1506799924440.jpg

Chicago, IL

We thought we only had about 15 minutes to get through the TFR which we thought we could barely make, but also thought if we’re going to get intercepted, would be pretty cool to get intercepted by the Blue Angels, then realized the time change to Central and that we had an extra hour still before the TFR went active. The Blue Angels did not intercept us.

Next we flew up towards Duluth. Still staying low because of the ridiculous headwinds, but that meant things were also super bumpy.

Jared puked for the first time ever in a small airplane. I always have a puke bag in the plane for emergencies but never expected to use it with two pilots on board.

So Jared pukes. The turbulence and motion wasn’t getting to me until then, but that puke-bile smell? Oh yeah. I could feel it.

The problem was that I only had one puke bag in the cockpit. If I had to hurl, it was going to be in the same bag Jared used earlier. Gross.

Furthermore, Jared told me point blank that if I hurled, he was going to need the bag back to go again.

Faced with the prospect of sharing a puke-bag and passing it back and forth, we decided to land and take a 45 minute break.

We felt better after taking off (and getting the back-up puke bag from the baggage compartment).

Anyway, here’s Duluth:

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2675-e1506800330868.jpg

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_3147.jpg

After turning the corner at Duluth, we went along Minnesota’s North Shore to drop Jared off in Grand Marais.

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2689-e1506800486520.jpg

Two-Harbors on the North Shore of Minnesota

Then finally, with the plane to myself, I flew over the Boundary Waters due west to land in Ely, MN.

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2716.jpg

Somewhere in the BWCA between Grand Marais and Ely. Endless untouched nature.

Was a fun trip. 9.3 hours in the plane due to the ridiculous headwinds. I was super happy to get a burger on the ground.

Last night before bed, I was posting about some books that I really liked. One of them is called Stay: A History of Suicide & The Philosophies Against It. Another person noted that it sounded interesting, and I started to reply to that user. I got about a paragraph in before stepping back and thinking, "this isn't something I should write here," and deleting everything.

This morning, I rolled over and checked my phone. Anthony Bourdain, died by suicide at 61.. This hurts. I loved Bourdain, his work for years was to broaden our cultural awareness and open us up to new worlds. He was, in many ways, a tangible Star Trek. His death will be mourned by thousands, and that he was taken by suicide will be considered by many, many, other people with suicidal thoughts.

Suicide spreads as a contagion - it can be looked on almost epidemiologically. The way that we talk about suicide is... Telling. It's something that we try to avoid talking about, despite us almost all knowing someone who has died by suicide.

I have worked in mental health for several years and in high acuity settings the past year. I work with people experiencing suicidal ideation every single day. It is often my job to talk around what I consider to be a monster that lives in our heads. To try and convince or guide people away from their monster and take the day for themselves. Some of the people I've worked with have ideation only, sometimes they have had as many as two dozen hospital-resulting attempts in their history. This work is stressful, it's draining. It's very meaningful, especially when change or at least the flash of change is present. It hurts, too, when it isn't enough.

A big part of our education attempts is to be able to talk about the monster. It isn't easy for someone experiencing suicidal ideation to talk about it. There are fears that they will be seen as attention seeking - they are! It is a just thing to seek attention when you feel that you're losing the battle. There are fears that they won't be taken seriously - and often they are not. We minimize our problems to bad days or bad weeks or bad years. We say, "Just get over it," and sometimes people simply do not have the capacity to do it by themselves.

We would never, ever, tell someone with a broken arm to get over it without treatment. We would never, ever, tell someone with a bone protruding from their leg that they were just looking for some attention. And yet, this is how we approach mental health.

I have been suicidal myself, somewhere in the haze of depression that clung to me for about five years. Even as I write this, I feel the urge to minimize it and say, "but never to the severity of those I've worked with." Simultaneously minimizing my own experience and serving to stigmatize those that I serve. The monster's power lies in its language. The more we refuse to talk about it, the more we isolate, the more control it has.

I went to counseling for sixteen weeks, and was only minimally invested. It took me another two years after having left counseling to start using the tools. A big part of my own ability to hold on was the book, Stay, because of its humanistic approach to prevention, one that does not rely on religion. An unfortunate thing about working in mental health is that I now understand what it is to plant a seed and not know if it will grow or not.

Anyway, I wanted to write something about this when I saw the news this morning. One of the major themes of Stay is that suicide is theft not just from your friends and family, but from yourself. I have not felt suicidal or depressed for several years, and I can say that this theft would have been true. Except it doesn't include just my friends or family, but the people that I've interacted with and helped with similar thinking styles along the way.

I encourage you, if you think a friend or colleague is struggling, ask the questions. "How are you feeling today?" You never know how this might help. Do you feel like someone you know might be suicidal? Ask the question. Asking someone if they are feeling suicidal is not a significant trigger that may cause them to commit - though this fear often stops us from asking. Consider, they live with the monster every day, how welcome it must be to have someone else recognize it?

I will leave off with Hamlet's Soliloquy. I have never been huge on Shakespeare, lacking time to read. I read this as well in Stay, and now I listen to it frequently. I even had the opportunity to use it in a Group I lead the other day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYZHb2xo0OI

Link: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

Full Text:

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

Dear Tildes community,

this is an issue that's bugged me for some time. I might struggle to put this into the right words initially, because I have not studied either philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology or anthropology. Yet, all of those fields could input into this. I will edit this post to clarify things once people start commenting.

I will begin by stating the question at the root of the issue I am trying to explore:

Does de-humanisation of others occur automatically, as soon as we believe that we can predict their actions?

Things to consider:

• What is a measure of 'humanity'? Is it consciousness? Self-awareness? Intelligence? Empathy?
• Is it true that a more 'conscious' or 'intelligent' creature is closer to us in nature and therefore should enjoy more rights, considerations, or respect? (Case in point: Some countries will not allow performing surgery on an octopus without anesthesia, due to them being considered very high up on the ladder of consciousness)
• It is easy to conflate consciousness and intelligence. I think that's a bit of a trap. I have often looked at intelligence as a sort of "clock rate" of the brain. As in, you might be able to process information very quickly, but that's still pointless if you're running the wrong algorithms, or have very little knowledge to rely on. Intelligence all by itself is not a good measure of how 'conscious' or 'aware' or 'human' something is. Often, however, people tend to call animals more intelligent or less intelligent when they mean 'more highly developed', or 'more conscious'. The same probably applies to people as well.
• Additionally, among self-aware, conscious beings (humans), empathy and intelligence van cary wildly. Therefore, does consciousness, or even 'human-ness' vary? Is a highly intelligent psychopath less human than a much less intelligent but empathetic person?
• What do we use to assess whether a human is highly developed, or less developed / desirable? (Brushing aside the notion that we obviously shouldn't do so). I think it is important to look at what mechanisms have been used in the past to demonise swathes of the population, in order to discredit them or further some kind of agenda. Take African people during the slave trade. They were called primitive, less intelligent, less human. In fact, in more subtle ways this even happens to women nowadays. They are constantly belittled by chauvinists, for supposedly being less intellectually capable due to their gender. Are these all forms of de-humanisation, linked predominantly to intellect?
• What is this founded upon? Is it predictability of their actions? Let's try to go full circle. How does one discredit a part of the population? One observes them and demonises their behaviours (and with that, culture, etc.) The predictability of such behaviours is essential in this. You cannot reliably say that "those brutes do [x], how disgusting", without there being frequent evidence of it actually happening. (On the flip-side, could people be predictably advanced or developed?)
• What do we think of predictable people in general? Predictability has negative connotations. At best it's boring (say, a highly intelligent beaurocrat), at worst, stupid / less human (say, racists talking about another culture being predictably primitive)
• Is there an implication of people, or beings, who are more predictable, having less free will? If your intellectual faculties are limited, or you operate on instinct more than you do on rational or logical deduction, you become more predictable, ergo, predictability == stupidity. (I know this is a fallacy, but I am trying to establish why one might irrationally and subconsciously dehumanise, not arguing in favour of this dehumanisation or trying to defend it)
• Take our favourite pets. Cats and dogs. They are pretty highly developed and if it wasn't for humans, they'd be unchallenged apex predators ruling the world. They display complex behaviours, at times even hard to predict ones. But still, they are animals and behave in reasonably reliable patterns. They are also not able to pass the mirror-test for self awareness, implying they are not (or only in extremely limited ways). So, one could argue they are less human, less intelligent. Now look at insects. Even less intelligent. Even though it could be argued that some (like ants) display a form of swarm intelligence, they are still extremely predictable. (Except for, perhaps, the flight patterns of flies or mosquitoes, which evolution has scrambled into extremely random patterns to avoid them being swatted. But that's just hard-coded into their genes, not an intelligent thought process)
• So, once more. Think of someone you really don't like. Do you ever call them stupid for their actions? Would you ever say "here we go again, they are doing this again". Particularly if they are your boss? Perhaps it helps you cope with their shitty behaviour to dehumanise that person. Make them a lesser human being, to compensate for the fact that they make you feel powerless in their work. If dehumanisation is such an immediate and convenient mechanism to protect yourself from feelings of inferiority, or to stop yourself from being threatened (say, by a different culture), perhaps it is in fact an ingrained behaviour, which expresses itself on a larger scale once fueled by propaganda and political intent. If we identify it and understand how it happens, we may protect ourselves against it by elevating others to a higher status of 'human-ness'.
• When we 'have figured someone out', we are stating we can predict them. Are we putting them beneath us, henceforth? Are they 'less' than us in some ways? It gives us power to be able to predict, so it makes us more powerful than them in some way, so it makes them lesser beings in some ways.

Why am I bringing all this up? In my life, so far, I have gone from being very insecure, mistrusting and scared of people, to much more open, trusting and confident.

The more insecure I was, the more time I spent trying to prove to myself that I was somehow superior to others. Generally using intelligence as an argument (uggggh....). You know, like the goth teenager sitting in their basement, who is oh-so-individual and everyone else is so stupid and nobody understands my pain, etc. (see, dehumanising my past self right there, haha).

The more I started trusting people and the more I started seeing everyone around me as humans, humans just like me, the more I began to see how others still apply these weird dehumanisation mechanisms to make themselves feel superior. This made me wonder whether there is some kind of innate drive to do so. Try to predict others, or paint them as predictable, to prove that you are superior to them, because they would not be able to predict your actions, as you are so far beyond their capabilities.

So yeah, uhm....let me know what comes up in yer heads as you read through this, I'd be most interested to hear your perspectives.

I just thought that it might be useful for a person to see how many posts and comments they have made on ~. As that data is already available for manual collection it might be nice to have it available more easily on that profile.

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?

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?

Warning, this is a rant. Feel free to criticize me.

1. As ESL speaker, there's a "butt" in the name.
2. SSB is the protocol, you have to download client called "patchwork" which is not an attractive name either
3. After setup patchwork, idk what to do next except staring at a blank "timeline" something
4. So I grabbed documentations (you need manuals to use a god damn social network software), obviously you have to join pubs to dive in.
5. After joined pubs, you start to stare list of "pubs followed you/someone else joined the pub" message explode.
6. After a awkward self-post on "#new-people", I learned that you have to follow others to get content. So am I supposed to follow thousands of strangers on the Internet for a good degree of influx content?
7. After several rounds following, I still dont get how to make new friends. I mean by what? I cant judge if I should follow someone because of random recent posts.
8. So I started to search for stuff. The search is mostly broken, the results are not in chronological order, only English alphabet works, I dont know if reply someone's 2 year old post is polite or not. Engaging a conversation but expect no response feels wrong.
9. The only way to tell if a "channel" is popular or not is through the search box. The "all channels" page does not show numbers at all.
10. Channel names are a mess. The plural form and alternative spellings are killing me. I always feels worried that I might miss good content by not thinking of what creative "channel" names people invent. When making posts it gets worse, you have to paste dozens of bullshit channel names just in case.
11. There's no way to tell if the software is functioning or not. Sometimes it took up to ten minutes busy downloading stuff, the rest times it's totally static. F5 does not work, Cmd+R reloads the whole electron app frame.
12. When downloading stuff, I totally do not want old posts. There's not way to filter that.
13. There's an "Active Channels" on the left side of the software, it jumps indefinitely for no reason. When I click one of the channels, I see old posts without any "activity". Again, you have to follow people in that channel to get fresh content.
14. There's search for name tag function. Maybe there are people social with each other just by lookup Internet IDs. Since names can be the same on Secure-Scuttlebutt, you have to use public keys to identify people accurately.
15. It's written in Nodejs/Javascript. I lost my motive to contribute.

TL;DR barrier of harvest is wayyy too high.

Anyone else using/tried secure-scuttlebutt? What are your thoughts?

I've been consuming a ton of media about the world wars lately. There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of historical fiction, records, memoires, and documentaries. But so far, very few things have come close to painting a cohesive picture.

Most of it focuses on hot spots like Verdun, Pearl Harbor, Dunkirk, Normandy, the haulocaust, the atomic bomb, enigma, u-boats, the luftwaffe, Stalingrad... And I can see why. Even on a microcosm level, the conditions of the stories are unimaginable.

The issue I'm having is that I feel like our cultural memory of these events his been eroded over time. We have these impressions of what we think it was like, but not an overarching understanding of the complex series of events throughout the 20th century. We have an overabundance of records, photographs, film, and documentation in general, but maybe it's the overabundance that makes the digestion such an insurmountable undertaking.

What are your experiences with studying this time period? How do you feel about the quality of your understanding? And finally, do you have any recommendations for myself and others?

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.

A long time ago I had noticed a trend developing on reddit where people were starting to preface their comments with: "I for one". It's pretty insignificant, which is why I never made a post about it at the time. Since then, its use seems to have spread significantly on the site and I've seen it a bit here as well.

It makes sense to use the phrase when talking about or quoting another person to help separate their opinions from your own. The weird thing is many people now seem to use it when its not ambiguous that the comment is their own opinion. I was under the assumption that the default position should be that the comment is the opinion of the person that posted it.

For example:

"I for one, prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate."

Is the same as:

"I prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate."

There's nothing wrong with using the phrase, it just reads like someone trying to pad out an essay for school.

Have you noticed people using the phrase on other sites? Is it a phenomenon more specific to reddit?
Do you use the phrase yourself? If you do, what is your thought process when typing it out?

Just a quick idea: Seems like the only way to comment right now is to scroll to the bottom, but what if there's a text area box for posting a comment on the right sidebar? Seems like there's space for it underneath the post info, plus I don't think it will slow down the load time in any way. Thoughts?

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!

Online/digital bookmarking and excerpting is something that really interests me because I think most if not all existing options for it fall very short of the functionality I wish existed, and that I think could exist.

One of the first online bookmarking services I used was Delicious, and for a few years it was irreplaceable for me. However it languished after it was bought by Yahoo and then resold, and since then I’ve observed its slow and steady decline from afar.

The purpose of this post is twofold:

1. I want to know the current state of online bookmarking for you. I’m curious to know if it’s as much of an unmet need in anyone else’s life as it seems to be in mine.
   • Were you once a bookmarker and gave up due to the seeming futility of it?
   • Have you never been interested in bookmarking and/or don’t see the point of it?
   • Are you an active bookmarker, and if so what tools or workflows do you use, and what kinds of content do you bookmark?
2. I thought I would share some of the research I did into Delicious’ various design iterations over the years via the Internet Archive. It’s a cool birds-eye survey of how the service’s ethos, goals and design changed over time. Beyond the value it provides as a case study, I think there are greater lessons and insights that can be gained from observing the rise and fall of what was once such a beloved online service.
   • del.icio.us | 16 September 2005
   • del.icio.us | 20 December 2005
   • del.icio.us | 11 October 2006
   • Delicious.com | 11 May 2011
   • Delicious.com | 27 November 2011
   • Delicious.com | 12 May 2012
   • Delicious.com | 30 August 2012
   • Delicious.com | 14 October 2013
   • The period between 2013 and 2016 seems to be one endless loading screen from the archive’s perspective
   • Delicious.com | 15 March 2016
   • At some point in 2016, they went back to their original domain name – del.icio.us | 14 May 2016

As a sidenote, I also found this explanation of Delicious' approach to tagging to be very interesting: del.icio.us/help/tags | 21 February 2006

I hadn't realized that Delicious was actually the first to introduce the concept of user-controlled tags for bookmarks:

When Delicious was first launched, it was the first use of the term "tag" in the modern sense, and it was the first explicit opportunity where website users were given the ability to add their own tags to their bookmarks so that they could more easily search for them at a later time. This major breakthrough was not much noticed as most thought the application at the time "cool" but obvious. – Source

Edit: I hope it's alright to edit a post this many hours after having submitted it. There were a few important updates that I really wanted to include here.

It's a slight inconvenience to have to scroll past dozens of comments just to reply to the thread. What do you guys think? Does having the ability to quickly jump into the conversation stifle discussion? I can see if some people feel that it should be necessary to read a more posts before posting in the thread, but I also think that a lot of people will just hit the END key or scroll past comments without really paying attention to them (if they just want to quickly reply).

I'm currently in a "how can I improve and refocus" and wanted to see what this group thinks since either seems we have some pretty thoughtful and techy people here.

I have toyed around for years with different techniques. I got really into GTD and used several apps focused on that even writing my own JavaScript app to use with Google sheets.

I've used spreadsheets, OneNote, Wunderlist, plain text files.

What do you use to keep your tasks moving forward and how do you use these tools to manage your tasks and get work done? I found spreadsheets are nice because you can do a lot of scratch work but it's hard to "check them off' but many "check them off" tools don't give you a lot of scratch workspace. OneNote is cool but I can't stand the Microsoft environment and it doesn't seem to give a lot of indication how best to use the tool. Maybe I should do a training....

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.

What are some of your favorite videos that explain deep topics in depth?

I've recently been on a 3blue1brown binge (youtube) and am looking for more videos of that ilk. Doesn't have to be a series or a consistent uploader, one off videos are sometimes the best. Just thought I'd ask ~comp if there's anything in particular that comes to mind.

This is in part inspired by the video posted by /u/Deimos in the Technical Goals section of Tildes, titled Simplicity Matters

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?

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?

You probably know the drill, but in case not - you get an unlimited supply of one specific beer to drink when marooned on an island - presumably til death.

I love California blondes. I want to try some others that ~ loves, and thought other folks might like to do the same.

Firestone Walker 805 for me. You?

edit: just to say, oops, not dessert...desert.

A well known issue of reddit (and most of the internet these days) is gifs as a fundamentally more popular way to consume videos. There are good reasons for this in the current makeup of the internet with mobile browsers dominating the online space. Voters are likely to be using mobile browsers and mobile browsers are likely to be the dominant browser. Gifs have no sound which is preferable out-and-about, they also tend to load better than videos, especially if a user doesn't want to switch to a dedicated mobile app that will load that video or popup a "open in" notification. Even many PC users simply don't like the extra time it takes to load videos over a gifv.

This is however not preferable for a high-quality site. It results in content creators not getting views for their work. It results in sources of content not being posted at all on many occasions, even in comments. Many of the game subreddits have people that create gif clips of a video just because it will be more popular, then post the source video that it's from in the comments. It's not ideal.

How can this be solved?

I encourage everyone to answer this question using the wildest of fantasies, even if you think the idea might be unfeasible at a technology level. Let the people working with the code decide if its feasible or not, put forth your wildest idea to solve it.

I'll start: Perform processing of video to gif as a function of the site. Provide users with the ability to choose a preference of gif vs video. Give people the section of the video as a gif clip but also provide the content source with a view of the clipped section (somehow) so the source actually does get a view of that video in that section for its clipped part.

This potentially unfeasible suggestion provides the best of both worlds, providing the user with the type of clip they want (gif/video) which will be better for their browser while also providing the source creator with a view on their video even if the user views the gif. At the same time this also ensures that a majority of gif content (at least for videogames/twitch/youtube, the majority) actually does have the source because it used the site's own clipping tool to set the gif. No need to use anything else if it is site integrated.

Other ideas and thoughts on this topic? Programmable ways to solve it? Preferences? Moderation?

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.

Hi tilders (tildes? tilded?),

I thought it might make sense to group threads by hobby for now, to start -- and the hobby I've been spending the most time with recently has been fountain pens. They're great! I hope you like them too.

Wrote something out to kick things off: https://i.imgur.com/vNOS7QK.jpg

Write something back in return?

Hey there! Thought it would be nice for some ~creative silliness!

This particular jam is for everyone, not just orginal poets. Although we will need some original poetry to kick things off.

People posting original works post to the main thread! People who would like to respond with their own poems, snippets of lyrics, excerpts from famous poems, or an artful piece of prose, please respond to the original work or comment that set you off.

Jam's considered done when we hit a week or a hundred posts, whichever comes first!