Wanted to see if we could get some conversations going with any freelancers who may be around. I figured a good place to start is with one of the more commonly discussed topics, which is the online marketplaces catering to freelancers.

These days, Upwork seems to have gobbled up a huge chunk of that market, while garnering plenty of criticism and complaints along the way for how they handle it. The graphic design space seems to have a little more competition in marketplaces, with 99designs being a frontrunner it seems. Truthfully, there just aren't that many platforms to pick from regardless of your specialty. Which can be a positive, as it provides a centralized place to look for and post available work, can increase exposure to the freelance market as a whole, and ensures you don't have to maintain profiles across numerous platforms which can be far too time consuming sometimes. But of course there are many downsides that come along with that.

The standard advice that comes with such discussions is to ignore the online marketplaces entirely because of those downsides. Competing against an international labor pool, as well as an under-experienced labor pool much of the time, in a format that heavily encourages price competition above other factors can be disastrous for your bottom line (and your sanity). These platforms also generally remove a lot of the negotiating power that a freelancer needs to leverage, as it is much more difficult to establish the captive audience that can be built with more personal interactions.

And frankly, that standard advice has continued to be my own, both for my career as well as to others who may seek such advice. But it does make me wonder if there is a better way to do it. Of course as a developer I'm always looking to find a way to solve problems, so I can concede I may be looking for solutions in a place that is misguided to try to fix.

What has been your experiences with freelance online marketplaces? What advice do you give when asked about it? What would you like to change?

I love all kinds of music, but am unable to play everything I like at work.

If anyone here has the desire to introduce me (and anyone in this thread) to some beloved stuff that may not be familiar, I would appreciate it.

As my name suggests, this is in a restaurant, so it would just have to exclude anything too introspective/atonal/delicate, and anything too speedy/loud/without melody (curses and lewdness are fine with my boss, though, interestingly enough!)

I would certainly listen to that sort of stuff, personally, though so please be free to include it with caveat.

No offense to artists who are household names and near it, but I am sorely tired of all the songs I've heard before, and my coworkers are never going to leave out the early 90s Madonna, so I am just trying to mix it up!

As the title says, I am looking for your go-to recipes for when you are not in the mood to cook. They should be fast and simple to make and be preferably not too expensive.

Let me start this: Tortelloni with tarragon-cream-sauce (3-6€/2servings, depending on the tortelloni)
*500g Tortelloni, 250ml (sweet) cream, 2 tomatos, tarragon/salt/pepper;

1. Water with salt in one pot, cream with tarragon and 4 short splashes of water in another;
2. Cut the tomatos into pieces and add the to the cream when it boils slightly
3. When the tomatos are added, stir the cream (it should get slightly red from the tomato juice
4. add salt and pepper
5. at this point the water should be boiling, add the Tortelloni
   5.1 I usually buy the Tortelloni from the fridge, they only need to be boiled for 2 min, adjust the timing when you heat up the cream according to needed time to boil the pasta
6. When everything is finished put everything together and enjoy

I have been using Tildes for about a week now. I have come over from Reddit where I am primarily a lurker. I lurk because I often feel my thoughts and opinions on topics and discussions have been touched on because discussions are already hundreds of comments deep by the time I arrive. The biggest positive with Tildes is the fact that the community is currently small and I read the post/sarticles that interest me instead of jumping straight into the comments to be given a synopsis. I now read more than just the headline.

I still have not found my 'voice' in regards to posting comments related to articles/stories that I have read. I think it is because I haven't found a discussion that I am really interested in. I have posted a couple of news articles that provide information about the part of the world I am in but, while they interested me, I didn't feel the need to discuss their contents further so I didn't add any comment to start a conversation to the post.

Regarding providing some more content to the site. My hobbies include, like everyone else, traveling, reading, and photography. I am no where near being an influential voice in any of these! I am not interested in having a travel blog or a website but I would like to provide information, incase someone else here is interested or has experiences too. For example, I recently took a short weekend trip from Bangkok, Thailand to Ayutthaya, Thailand. I rode the train, visited the sites, visited a bar, ate some food, and stayed the night. I want to provide a write up on my experiences and thoughts of this trip. Is a post in ~hobbies with the tags of: thailand, ayutthaya, bangkok, train the way to go?
What do y'all think?

Sharing photographs - Taking pictures is another hobby I share with everyone else. I enjoy sharing pictures I am proud of. I tend to post to r/nocontextpics, because I like their rules of no back story in the title. I also post to location specific sites. I do this to show off my pictures and to feel good from earning points. I do not post pictures to facebook very often because I like having the feel of anonymity. I don't want to be perceived as a pretentious twat. How does everyone feel about picture posts in ~hobbies with the tag(s) like: location, device used, etc..

My problem would be not 'spamming' photos. With the age of the site, and my brief interaction with it, no one wants to see 2+ picture posts from one user in the ~hobbies group.
Any thoughts on etiquette or rules for picture posts? Allow: Yes/No?

Last night I posted a topic called "real sad boi hours", a ritualistic kind of post I've carried over from Reddit. I chose to post it in ~talk since the description for the group says it is for "Open-ended discussions with fellow Tildes users, casual or serious", and I felt there is nothing more open-ended or casual than real sad boi hours. At first, the topic was meant just as it usually does on Reddit. Got a few responses in which people talked about their day and how they were feeling. But right now, the most voted comment is complaining about how we need to restrict invitations to prevent low effort users like me from joining. One thing the user said was that is is obvious there are users joining who have not read the manifesto. I'm just going to spew my own opinion on a few points here:

1. I don't think gatekeeping is a solution, especially since iirc this site is not going to be permanently invite-only. Not to mention that's just a childish solution anyway.

2. I don't know what is expected from ~talk. As I said before, I legitimately believe my nightly "real sad boi hours" posts fit exactly what the description of the group says. However, that is up to interpretation I suppose.

3. If my post was against some rule (which apparently roughly 17 users believe it is), there should be some kind of rule set or moderation set in place (though I understand why there isn't, the site being private still and all). My impression so far has been that if you don't like content, you just ignore it. But now I'm seeing that apparently, people don't like to ignore it. They want me gone.

4. Is every user expected to read the manifesto? You may be able to get away with this while it's private (and even then, there is still users like me who only read a few pages) but if/when this site goes public, expecting every user or even just most the users to read the manifesto is a pipe dream. As far as I can tell, the reddiquette (which I have also not read) is shorter than the manifesto and nobody reads that either unless they need to. The only reason I know the reddiquette is because I've picked up on bits of it as time went on.

Maybe I'm just a butt-hurt bitch that people complained about me and I can't take criticism. I'm sure people who disliked my post will think that is it. I also may have a skewed perception of what this site is. I view it as an improvement upon Reddit and honestly I think some of this innovation may work great, which is why I'm here in the first place. I want to hear your take on what I said, and anything else you'd like to add.

Could we get new post ordering: something like reddit Hot system?

Now, the ordering by activity is great, but the big issue with it is, that when you go to less-active ~, you only see two or three topics. Even on front page, there are just 15 or 20 topics. I know, it's because I limit threads to only several days, but there is problem when I set limit up to week, or two: there are very old threads on the front page right at the top.

So could we get something like reddit has? Display posts according to upvotes/time (comments?), but do not limit them to few days and show them at least +- chronologically - so no two weeks old posts at the top of front page.

Maybe this could be achieved just by tweaking the current activity order by boosting young threads more and vice versa.

I was looking over some of my charts of albums recently and I thought this might be a cool idea.

If you don't know what a chart is, basically you can go here and put together a chart of up to 100 of your favorite albums to show people a quick look at your taste or whatever. I've seen people use this as favorite albums, albums that mean a lot to them but aren't necessarily their favorite, people putting custom pictures and making a list of their favorite artists, people making a chart of albums with a "theme" (food on the cover, albums about break-ups, albums of certain genres, etc.), the possibility is whatever you feel like putting together a bunch of albums/artists/anything else you can think of together to show to other people interested in them. I thought it might be a cool idea to see what other ~music users enjoy listening to.

You can also use this to show your rateyourmusic account if you have one, your last.fm, your sputnikmusic, anything pertaining to music that would be cool to look at.

Before we get started, PLEASE, no political agenda harping, shit posting, trolling, etc. This is something that is on a sharp increase right now in the Bay Area and I'm genuinely wanting to hear other people's thoughts and opinions on this.

The homeless camps have officially reached an out of control level. There is no denying this. Trash and used hypodermic needles litter the streets. Drug use and sales is seen on street corners near the camps. I personally have seen residents of the camps painting graffiti in broad day light. There are unsafe cooking set ups causing explosions and fires putting residents at risk and leaving charred remains for weeks at a time. Cite: https://evilleeye.com/news-commentary/public-safety/explosion-home-depot-homeless-encampment-rattles-emeryville-west-oakland-neighbors/

What is going on here? How come cities are not cleaning this stuff up? I realize that if the city did conduct some massive eviction/clean up, the residents would just move somewhere else. But what about the trash? Can't that be cleaned up? In many places, I've seen it up to the ankles of people walking around in the camps.

I truly don't know what the non-camp residents are suppose to do? Do we just turn a blind eye and let the trash pile up? Or do we demand action to keep our streets clean and safe?

An agreement on Friday June 22nd caused oil prices to increase by the largest one-day jump since OPEC agreed to reduce output at the start of 2017. At the beginning of 2017 OPEC and 10 other oil-producing countries agreed to reduce their combined output by 1.8 million barrels a day, roughly 2% of global output. The 2017 deal was a reaction to the massive over-supply that brought prices down significantly since late 2014 when Saudi Arabia led the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to allow market prices to dictate their output. While the 2017 deal called for a reduction of only 1.8 million barrels a day, many countries reduced output even further resulting in 150% compliance of the planned quotas, or nearly 3 million fewer barrels of oil a day. Some members of OPEC had faced unexpected production outages whereas others simply chose to withhold their stockpile but the result was the same: oil prices were rising and global stockpiles were being used up to avoid a dangerous price spike.

The new agreement, taking effect in early July, aims to reign in the over-compliance of the 2017 deal and add more barrels of oil to the global market by returning to 100% compliance. To go from 150% compliance to 100% compliance, roughly 1 million barrels a day of crude oil would be added to the global market. However, some producers may be unable to increase their output for various reasons resulting in an expected increase of only 600,000 barrels a day. Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak claims the $80 a barrel threshold hit in May of 2018 reflects the global inventory of surplus crude oil being reduced to a point where the oil market can rebalance itself. Saudi Arabia's Oil minister Khalid al-Falih promises his country will increase oil sales gradually starting in July. Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh had reservations about any deal because economic sanctions from the US put them in a position whereby the increased output of others may take over Iran’s market share. Oil producing countries have to weigh the risk that big consumers may invest in renewables as well as produce their own oil, when available, if prices rise too quickly.

Leading up to this decision, the price of oil steadily fell from the $80 tipping point in late May with the expectation that OPEC and affiliated oil-producing countries would flood the
market similar to the 2014 decision. While supply will increase due to this new deal it is a far cry from the amount many investors had feared - and consumers had hoped for - therefore the price of crude saw a 3% increase due to the news instead of decreasing further. The month-long anticipation of increased supply lowered the price of crude oil but the end-result of the deal caused a market correction as speculation was replaced by the true figure. While the agreed-upon figure is an additional 1 million barrels a day, the expectation is that only 600,000 barrels will be added a day however some countries wish to produce an even greater amount of oil to take advantage of the high prices while they last. Such an over-correction could still happen in the coming weeks leading to a drop in oil prices but investors believe their fears of another 2014 crash is averted.

Without this boost to supply, OPEC feared prices could spike to surpass $100 a barrel which would drastically reduce global demand and severely cut into the profit of oil-producing
countries who rely on the revenue from companies exporting oil. Many worried the supply increase would cause American oil prices to drop below $30 a barrel again, which caused
massive unemployment in the industry and a huge loss of revenue. From 2014 to 2016, as much as $4 billion in American employee wages was lost in the oil industry.

Countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia have the ability to produce oil at a far lower opportunity cost than most other countries, giving them a comparative advantage in the global oil
market. During the 2014-2016 period of oil surplus that brought US prices below $30 a barrel, American producers had to develop the technology to continue production despite the nearly 200,000 oil workers who lost their jobs in the shale industry. US producers made good on that pressure and were able to maintain production gains through more efficient extraction and refining methods. The relatively loose regulations on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, provided a much needed advantage to US producers who were able to leverage that technology and avoid Saudi Arabia's attempt in 2014 to shut small firms out of the market.

Avoiding a spike in oil prices in excess of $100 a barrel is beneficial to producers and consumers as demand would quickly plummet despite the short-term gains by companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp as well as countries such as Russia hoping to capitalize on the high prices. Spikes in oil prices turn consumers away from their unhealthy dependence on oil in favor of renewables and alternatives to plastics; invites pressure from big consumers such as the United States who aren’t afraid of imposing reactionary economic sanctions; and benefits countries such as Russia whose major exports are oil. Massive increases in supply have the effect of hurting the governments who rely heavily on high oil prices to make their profit as well as hurting the small oil producers that struggle to produce efficiently when oil prices drop. With oil prices rising by over 40% since early 2017 due to geopolitical risks to supply causing unexpected shortages and the increasing demand matching increased economic growth, the global oil supply needed a moderate boost.

The United States exported a record high of 3 million barrels a day during the week of the Friday June 22nd deal - producing 10.9 million barrels a day. Progressing from exporting no oil to exporting more oil than all but three OPEC countries pump out of the earth is not solely the result of US efficiency - some analysts say a portion of the record-breaking exports was sourced from US stockpiles. Maintaining this level of oil exporting is not only unsustainable, it is hitting US consumers in the wallet at a time where oil prices are on the risk of surging to a new high for 2018 - perhaps even surpassing the triple digits per barrel. This may be viewed as the United States attempting to force smaller members of OPEC and most non-OPEC producers out of the world market for oil as this export record comes at a time when most countries have finally expended the last dregs of their stockpiles. Countries that can afford to increase output considerably include the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia - and the former two appear very eager to commit to flooding the market without a care for the resulting over-corrections of the market which would send the pendulum of oil prices swinging back and forth causing international uncertainty especially for countries heavily dependent on the oil industry.

Sources

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/27/us-oil-exports-boom-to-record-level-surpassing-most-opec-nations.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/opec-meeting-starts-amid-detente-between-saudi-iran-1529661983?mod=hp_lead_pos3

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/12/03/opec-reaches-a-deal-to-cutproduction

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2016/12/05/heres-what-oil-did-the-last-timeopec-cut-production/#6007220b38b3

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/12/03/opec-reaches-a-deal-to-cutproduction

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/business/worldbusiness/18opec.html

https://www.iea.org/oilmarketreport/omrpublic/

https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/CO1:COM

http://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/historical-prices/oilprice/usd/1.1.2013_30.12.2017?type=wti

Partially inspired by the Abduction as Romance topic.

Both the Damsel in distress and Women in refrigerators tropes exists heavily in both written and screen media, especially in the comic book world, where women are reduced to easy plot devices to tell a man's story.

Women are "important" in that they matter to a man, usually the hero. They are mothers, daughters, girlfriends, but nothing more. They are defined purely by their relationships to the hero. If they are depowered, maimed or murdered, the tragedy is in the hero's loss, not hers.

People, men and women, do get hurt and die in fiction and in reality, and I'm definitely not saying this cannot be done on the page. A guy grieving his girlfriend's death doesn't automatically make her a "refrigerator girl".

For example, Gwen Stacy, who may or may not have been accidentally killed by Spiderman in his attempt to save her. Her death, and Peter's reaction afterwards has always been very organic and real to me. Her death didn't feel frivolous, and readers felt the loss as much as Peter.

As for an example of a damsel/refrigerator girl, (there are too many to choose from), let's go with Mr. Freeze's wife, Nora, who is literally in a fridge. I'm pretty sure there's no even passing Batman reader who doesn't know Nora. But do we honestly know anything about her?

Thoughts? Any common damsel/refrigerator girl that you think actually shouldn't be classified as such?

Just wanted to start talking about anime in general see what people like, share some of our favourite titles and such. I propose we link to MAL or AniList since Tildes doesn't necessarily have a bot that would do that automatically. I'll start!

• Shaman King was probably one of the first anime I watched alongside Pokemon back before I knew what anime was. It's a very nostalgic show for me and the english opening still gives me shivers.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is something I've gotten to appreciate much more since I watched it later down the line when rediscovering anime for myself and starting to really get into it. It's one of the highest rated shows on MAL and it definitely deserves every bit of praise it gets.
• Spirited Away and The Wind Rises. If we are talking movies, these two would probably be my picks. The former brings forward very nostalgic memories and the latter I happened to see in the theaters and I loved every second of it. I feel like most of Miyazaki's works are going to end up on a lot of people's favourites lists.

I'd love to discuss each one deeper if people are into it but I want everyone to feel free and share as much as they'd like, including personal stories and anecdotes.

edit: Amazed to see so many people sharing their favourite shows in detail, and also glad that there are so many people on tildes who share one of my favourite pastimes. :)

I feel like there's so much going on back at the mothership.

The whole vibe and color scheme of this place is just so relaxed, and everyone so far seems so polite and actually interested in genuine discussion. Like if there was a ~writing or something like that, I could settle down in a sweater with some of my username and just flip through this place for hours.

thanks for keeping the place awesome!

Hey everyone!

So I've been writing poetry and ghostwriting lyrics for friends of mine for nearly a decade at this point.

Due to recent life events, I've gotten back into the hobby of writing my own songs.

Up til now, it's been entirely topline work. Sifting through instrumentals online until I find one I can't help but write for, then staying up until four am driving around for a couple nights and churning out lyrics. I've recently grabbed an entry-level DAW and a couple courses aimed at producing my own instrumentals. I'd like to be able to go beyond writing lyrics and get to a point where I can cover the whole process. It sounds fun to me to put money aside and casually build up a home studio! :)

One thing that's caught my attention recently is the different vocal styles that a lot of artists have. Not just in their delivery, accent, etc. but also in the way that the tracks are edited! Pardon the lack of jargon, but for some examples:

I notice artists like Hålsey tend to have a very "crisp" kind of sound,

artists like Joji tend to have a more "echo-y" sound,

and artists like Lil Peep do this cool thing where it sounds like he triple-layers his voice to give a more dynamic sound to his songs.

Are there any books or courses online I can look into to learn vocal editing? I follow along with YouTube channels like Roomie and Andrew Huang, so I've seen them play around with AutoTune a few times, but that's the limit of my knowledge.

Thanks!

I would like the ability to save threads or comments, especially if they have links. Something within the platform that would allow me to go back later and watch a linked video or re-read someone's long synopsis would be super useful.

A rant honestly, but I thought this might belong in tech since it's a bit more of a tech society thing for me. I'm sure other industries have this issue too, but tech definitely does. If others disagree, please feel free to move it.

So yesterday, we had two new hires show up and we were informed this in our weekly leads meeting, so this is a pretty private setting. When our manager gave a quick blur of one, it was "we expect a lot from him, he's a bit more knowledgeable, did well on our tech test", that kinda thing. And then, when discussing the woman, he kept referring to her as a "girl", so I pointed out that maybe we should use "woman" instead.

I got made fun of - "maybe we can use lady or female or ..." honestly started tuning it out, can't remember the rest. Also accused of nitpicking.

I've been in the industry for a while now and though in general things are good, every now and then something small like this happens and it makes you check the date (yes it's still 2018, I didn't go back 20 years).

To be fair, I know my manager was being funny, but it's easy to joke at someone else's expense.

Wondering, other's experiences on both sides. Have you noticed changes in your workplace, for better hopefully? Maybe other ways you were discriminated against or singled out?

I have been reading a lot of the articles on uncivility. A big complaint is politicians don't like the power it gives people. Which I understand can be bad, but it also seems like for the first time in a long time, the average person has a way to impact these high powered politicians. Ordinarily there is nothing we can do, we can't touch them when they continually do things not in the best interest of the people they represent. They do shady things, and we have to go with it.

They are arguing uncivility is dangerous because it creates the problem of officials being scared to make decisions based on how they will be impacted. If a judge rules one way, and the masses start making his life hard, they say it isn't really fair to the judge. Which makes sense.

This is the information age. We have access to so much more going on than adults did before us. We actually have platforms to be heard on a large scale. Which means pressuring these people to do right through "uncivility" could be harnessed and used positively to enforce change. If the people making these decisions that are not in our best interest have something to lose, maybe they will finally start doing right by us.

What are your thoughts on this aspect of the uncivility debate going on right now?

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1s2iTsjvNthl8cmgvcF7q2vUewu69mGLb?usp=sharing

It's missing a screen decal and some software tweaks, but the #MAME#Sega arcade machine is about done. I really wanted to built something that could handle a game of Street Fighter 4 as easy as it could swap to Daytona USA on Model 2 or Virtual On using Demul.

Here are the components.

1 #Thrustmaster wheel and pedals2
Six button Sanwa/IR arcade controls sets
2 8 way mini flight sticks (For Twin Stick games)
1 Ipac ultimate

I'm a first time wood worker and vinyl applicator, and have a long long list of things that I learned not to do in the future. I'm still figuring out what the best way is to run all of this gear, but so far so good. What's not evident in this photo are the 1/2 lines of plexi that live beneath the decal around the perimeter, and that are illuminated with addressable LEDs. The window in the speaker area (speaker grills are coming, still) has a Dreamcast swirl LED sequence that travels through a spiral inside as well.

**As far as hobbies go, this one had a big learning curve and required the purchase of a few tools. That said, it was totally worth it.

The steam sale has been going on for a few days now. I'd like to start a discussion on recommendations for games that might not immediately grab attention or were given bad reviews at launch or really any criteria at all.

Recommend something!

Hey guys. I got MGSV on Xbox games with gold last month and I've been absolutely LOVING it but I'm not super creative with the game mechanics and I'm trying to branch out. They don't tell you too many advanced techniques, at least with how far I've been. I try to mainly go non-lethal with the occasional rocket blast (I'm addicted to Fulton capturing soldiers), but I would love to hear some stories and tricks you have used to great effect!

I'd have to go with The Long Walk, personally. It's quite haunting, the way they had every choice to sign up, but chose to anyway. The way they never quite get used to seeing their fellow walkers get shot. I love the ambiguous fascist state: what exactly happened to America in the Long Walk? There is an oblique reference to fighting Nazis in the 50s for instance, but the time period is never quite mentioned.

All in all, it's remarkable, but terribly sad. It reminded me of boys going off to war, and the truth behind all ambition.

Not the release date (last intel: not in 2018, that's all we know), but the content. What's going to happen? Who's going to die? Here are my brief guesses for some of the main characters:

Jon: Inhabits Ghost for a while after his human body's death (like Varamyr in the ADWD prologue), then gets resurrected by Melisandre. GRRM has said he always found it cheap that Gandalf returned hardly the worse for wear in LOTR, so I'm interested to see how Jon's different. In the show he seems slightly more carpe-diem, but it also seems like the show has mostly forgotten about it.

Stannis: Takes Winterfell (look up the Night Lamp theory if you're not familiar with it) from the Freys and Boltons, and holds onto it against an eventual siege by the Others.

Bran: The show has probably disproven this, but I still think he becomes a prisoner of the Others next to his uncle Benjen, because the Others can't kill a Stark for some reason.

Sansa: I think Harry the Heir turns out to be a nightmare, but Sansa learns to deal with him and use the power of the Vale to help the Starks in their fight to retake Winterfell.

Arya: I think she comes back to Winterfell and gives the gift of mercy to her mother, after seeing what she's become.

Daenerys: I think she'll have a longer experience taking over the Dothraki than in the show, and she'll fly west across Essos, laying waste to the free cities and setting the slaves free. In Westeros it will be completely unclear to everyone whether she's mad or not.

Tyrion: I think he will continue to fall into moral decay and after becoming a close advisor to Dany will encourage her "fire and blood" side. (Especially since she's his aunt!)

Theon: Something about "what is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger" makes me think he's coming back as a wight.

Victarion: Blows the horn and dies from it.

Cersei: I think Jaime will kill her, and fairly early on. I think Aegon will have the role she had in the most recent seasons of the show.

Jaime: I think he survives the confrontation with Lady Stoneheart and, disillusioned with both her and Cersei, leaves high society to lead the Brotherhood Without Banners.

Brienne: Someone has to die with Lady Stoneheart, right?

Aegon: I think he successfully conquers King's Landing. He'll eventually die by foolhardiness, but probably not for a while.

What do you all think? Anyone I'm forgetting?

I'm going to college soon, and I'm in the process of straightening out my accounts and login information. What password managers would any of you recommend? I'm looking for something that can be accessed on both desktop (PC) and mobile (Android).

Edit: I have set up KeePass and it looks like a great solution! Thanks for the help.

I have been writing a paper on the history of a type of online social space called public access Unix systems, and I'm posting a Tildes-tailored summary here in case anyone is interested. If you enjoy this and want to read more (like 10+ pages more) look at the bottom of this post for a link to the main paper-- it has citations, quotes, and everything, just like a real pseudo-academic paper!

I wrote this because a summary didn't exist and writing it was a way for me to learn about the history. It was not written with the intent of commercial publication, but I'd still love to share it around and get more feedback, especially if that would help me further develop the description of this history and these ideas. If you have any thoughts about this, please let me know.

What are Public Access Unix Systems?

When the general public thinks of the Unix operating system (if it does at all), it probably isn't thinking about a social club. But at its core, Unix has a social architecture, and there is a surprisingly large subculture of people who have been using Unix and Unix-like operating systems this way for a long time.

Public access Unix systems are multi-user systems that provide shell accounts to the general public for free or low cost. The shell account typically provides users with an email account, text-based web browsers, file storage space, a directory for hosting website files, software compilers and interpreters, and a number of tools for socializing with others on the system. The social tools include the well-known IRC (Internet Relay Chat), various flavors of bulletin-board systems, often a number of homegrown communication tools, and a set of classic Unix commands for finding information about or communicating with other system users.

But more than just mere shell providers, public access Unix systems have always had a focus on the social community of users that develops within them. Some current systems have been online for several decades and many users have developed long-standing friendships and even business partnerships through them. i.e. they're a lot of fun and useful too.

Of interest to Tildes members is that public access Unix systems have for the most part been non-commercial. Some take donations or charge membership fees for certain tiers of access (some in the U.S. are registered 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(7) non profits). They almost invariably do not take advertising revenue, do not sell user profile data, and the user bases within them maintain a fairly strong culture of concern about the state of the modern commercial Internet.

This concept of a non-commercial, socially aware, creative space is what really got me interested in the history of these systems. Further, the fact that you have this socially aware, technically competent group of people using and maintaining a medium of electronic communication seems particularly important in the midst of the current corporate takeover of Internet media.

History

Public access Unix systems have been around since the early 1980's, back when most of the general public did not have home computers, before there was a commercial Internet, and long before the World Wide Web. Users of the early systems dialed in directly to a Unix server using a modem, and simultaneous user connections were limited by the number of modems a system had. If a system had just one modem, you might have to dial in repeatedly until the previous user logged off and the line opened up.

These early systems were mostly used for bulletin-board functionality, in which users interacted with each other by leaving and reading text messages on the system. During this same time in the early 80's, other dial-in systems existed that were more definitively labeled "BBSes". Their history has been thoroughly documented in film (The BBS Documentary by Jason Scott) and in a great Wikipedia article. These other systems (pure BBSes) did not run the Unix OS and many advanced computer hobbyists turned up their noses at what they saw as toyish alternatives to the Unix OS.

Access to early dial-in public access Unix systems was mostly constrained by prohibitively expensive long-distance phone charges, so the user bases drew from local calling areas. The consequence was that people might meet each other online, but there was a chance they could end up meeting in person too because they might literally be living just down the street from each other.

The first two public access Unix systems were M-Net (in Ann Arbor, MI) and Chinet (in Chicago, IL), both started in 1982. By the late 1980's, there were more than 70 such systems online. And at their peak in the early 1990's, a list of public access Unix systems shared on Usenet contained well over 100 entries.

Throughout the 1980's, modem speeds and computer power increased rapidly, and so did the functionality and number of users on these systems. But the 1990's were a time of major change for public access Unix systems. In 1991, the Linux operating system was first released, ushering in a new era of hobbyist system admins and programmers. And new commercial services like AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe brought hordes of new people online.

The massive influx of new people online had two big impacts on public access Unix systems. For one, as access became easier, online time became less precious and people were less careful and thoughtful about their behavior online. Many still describe their disappointment with this period and their memory of the time when thoughtful and interesting interactions on public access Unix systems degraded to LOLCAT memes. In Usenet (newsgroups) history, the analogous impact is what is referred to as "The Eternal September".

The second impact of this period was from the massive increase of computer hobbyists online. Within this group were a small but high-impact number of "script kiddies" and blackhat hackers that abused the openness of public access Unix systems for their own purposes (e.g. sending spam, hacking other systems, sharing illegal files). Because of this type of behavior, many public access Unix systems had to lock down previously open services, including outbound network connections and even email in some cases.

For the next decade or so, public access Unix systems continued to evolve with the times, but usership leveled off or even decreased. The few systems that remained seemed to gain a particular sense of self-awareness in response to the growing cacophony and questionable ethics of the commercial World Wide Web. This awareness and sense of identity continues to this day, and I'll describe it more below because I think it is really important, and I expect Tildes members agree.

2014 and Beyond

In 2014, Paul Ford casually initiated a new phase in the history of public access Unix systems. He registered a URL for tilde.club (http://tilde.club) and pointed it at a relatively unmodified Linux server. (Note: if there is any relation between tilde.club and Tildes.net, I don't know about it.) After announcing via Twitter that anyone could sign up for a free shell account, Ford rapidly saw hundreds of new users sign up. Somehow this idea had caught the interest of a new generation. The system became really active and the model of offering a relatively unmodified *NIX server for public use (a public access Unix system under a different name) became a "thing".

Tilde.club inspired many others to open similar systems, including tilde.town, tilde.team* and others which are still active and growing today. The ecosystem of these systems is sometimes called the tilde.verse. These systems maintain the same weariness of the commercial WWW that other public access Unix systems do, but they also have a much more active focus on building a "radically inclusive" and highly interactive community revolving around learning and teaching Unix and programming. These communities are much, much smaller than even small commercial social networks, but that is probably part of their charm. (* full disclosure, I wield sudo on tilde.team.)

These tilde.boxes aren't the only public access Unix systems online today though. Many others have started up in the past several years, and others have carried on from older roots. One of the most well known systems alive today is the Super Dimension Fortress (SDF.org) that has been going strong for over three decades. Grex.org and Nyx.net have been online for nearly as long too. And Devio.us is another great system, with a community focused around the Unix OS, particularly OpenBSD. Not all these systems label themselves as "public access Unix systems", but they all share the same fundamental spirit.

One system that I find particularly interesting is Hashbang (aka #!, https://hashbang.sh). Hashbang is a Debian server run and used by a number of IT professionals who are dedicated to the concept of an online hackerspace and training ground for sysadmins. The system itself is undergoing continual development, managed in a git repository, and users can interact to learn everything from basic shell scripting to devops automation tooling.

Why is Hashbang so cool? Because it is community oriented system in which users can learn proficiency in the infrastructural skills that can keep electronic communications in the hands of the people. When you use Facebook, you don't learn how to run a Facebook. But when you use Hashbang (and by "use", I mean pour blood, sweat and tears into learning through doing), you can learn the skills to run your own system.

Societal role

If you've read other things I've written, or if you've interacted with me online, then you know that I feel corporate control of media is a huge, huge concern (like Herman and Chomsky type concern). It's one of the reasons I think Tildes.net is so special. Public access Unix systems are valuable here too because they are focused on person-to-person connections that are not mediated by a corporate-owned infrastructure, and they are typically non-profit organizations that do not track and sell user data.

You're no doubt aware of the recent repeal of Net Neutrality laws in the U.S., and you're probably aware of what The Economist magazine calls "BAADD" tech companies (big, anti-competitive, addictive and destructive to democracy). One of the most important concerns underlying all of this is that corporations are increasingly in control of our news media and other means of communication. They have little incentive to provide us with important and unbiased information. Instead, they have incentive to dazzle us with vapid clickbait so that we can be corralled past advertisements.

Public access Unix systems are not the solution to this problem, but they can be part of a broader solution. These systems are populated by independently minded users who are skeptical of the corporate mainstream media, and importantly, they teach about and control the medium of communication and social interaction itself.

Unix as a social medium

So what is it that makes public access Unix systems different? This seems like a particularly interesting question relative to Tildes (so interesting that I even wrote another Tildes post about it). My argument is partly that Unix itself is a social and communication medium and that the structure of this medium filters out low-effort participation. In addition to this, public access Unix systems tend to have user bases with a common sense of purpose (Unix and programming), so users can expect to find others with shared interests.

In contrast to modern social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, you have to put in some effort to use Unix. You have to learn to connect, typically over ssh; you have to learn to navigate a command line shell; and you have to learn the commands and options to run various utilities. And to really use Unix, you have to learn a bit of programming. It's not incredibly hard in the end, but it takes significantly more effort than registering for a Facebook or Twitter account and permitting them to scan your email address book. Once you get over the learning curve, it is powerful and fun.

This effortful medium does two things. For one, it weeds out people who aren't willing to put in effort. And for two, it provides learned users with a diverse palette of tools and utilities for building and sharing creative output.

Public access Unix systems are all about active creation of content to be enjoyed and shared with others, and not about passive media consumption. They are about the community that develops around this purpose and not around the profit that can be squeezed out of users' attention.

Future of public access Unix systems

Public access Unix systems have been around for nearly four decades now. They have seen ups and downs in popularity, and they have been humming along in the background as computing has gone from the ARPANET to the spectacle of the commercial World Wide Web. Early public access Unix systems were largely about the novelty of socializing with other hobbyists through a computer, and that interest has evolved into the learning, doing and teaching model of an online hackerspace today.

These systems are not huge, they are not coasting on advertising revenue, and they get by purely on the contributions, volunteer effort, and enthusiastic participation of their users. But as a contrast to commercial social network sites, they are an example of what online socializing can be when individuals put effort, thought, and compassion into their interactions with others. And just as importantly, they pass on the very skills that can independently maintain this social and communication medium for future generations of users.

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As promised in the intro, if you're interested in reading a much more in-depth version of this article, here's the longer copy:
https://cmccabe.sdf.org/files/pubax_unix_v01.pdf

Today's political climate has all sorts of terms being thrown around with varying meanings and history behind them. There are Liberals (political ideology for FREEDUM), and Liberals (foreign policy), and Liberals (economic policy), and Liberals ("conservatives"), and Liberals ("centrist, anti-absolute monarchists"), and Liberals ("democrats"), and Liberals (some other field that annoys the shit out of me). There are Progressives, and Conservatives, Nationalists, Socialists, Social Democrats, unreconstructed Monarchists, Reconstructed Monarchists, Anarchists, and I'm sure some other political identity that I've missed.

So, given the rather long list of ways to identify politically, and the just about as long history for those ways to identify politically, I thought we should have a discussion focused exclusively on the political history of the terms we used.

So, the questions:

1. What terms do you commonly use to describe yourself and others in your political environment? 
2. What is the relevant history that informs the way you use common political terms to describe yourself and others?
3. Got any links, movies, books, etc., that delve into that history?

This has the potential to get hairy because of how broad it is, so I'm going to try to remind people of some best practices that I use when engaging in meaningful discussion:

• Understand before criticizing. - Be able to frame someone's view in a way that they can agree with themselves before critiquing their view. Questions are your friend, but make sure the questions are focused on better understanding someone's view, not on biasing reactions to a view.
• Assume good faith. - Calling people "trolls" makes me very angry. Don't do it. For any reason. To anyone. If your case is so bulletproof that you'd be willing to call someone out for it here, take it to @Deimos instead. I don't want to read it here.
• I Could Be Wrong - There is nothing wrong with having confidence in your view, but there should be some part of you that recognizes you can be wrong about whatever claim you make. Nothing is 100%. Absolutely Only Sith Deal In Absolutes, etc.

Alright, so in the ideas thread, several of you expressed that you'd like / it would be more active if we went for a listening club that goes for something more general. As I think ~music is in a bit of a rough spot right now and needs a little more to bind it together, I'm going to try and have a bit of a hybrid solution that can hopefully be interesting for a lot of us.

Again, the idea is to come together and listen to the same record each week, discussing our thoughts on that album over the course of that week in these threads. For now, let's make our goal to build a community and become familiar with the thoughts, tastes, and musical histories of each other!

For every odd numbered week, we will listen to an acclaimed or important album of some kind that will hopefully have far-reaching appeal. I'm going to exercise my own judgement in picking these out of the qualifying albums, but expect them to be the OK Computers, A Love Supremes, and Illmatics of the world. If and when we reach a point where we've exhausted too many of these classics, we can restructure or retire this listening club.

For every even numbered week, we will listen to a more obscure record as voted on by the participants of the thread. For an initial guide, as stolen from @Eva, we will define "obscure" simply as not being certified Gold (or anything higher, of course). This is of course a very loose definition of the term, but it's at least a concrete starting place. As ~ gives us a raw vote count, we will do this through voting on comments. All nominations must be made as a reply to my top level comment. Everything else will be ignored, and this will help keep things organized once this voting occurs on a thread that's dedicated to its own week's record. If it becomes necessary, we can vote on an external platform.

I'm open to suggestions on how to change this process, but let's try to run it like this for a little bit. I don't want to get caught in that loop where you have so many tweaks and find so many flaws that you don't end up doing anything at all.

The first thread will be posted tomorrow (Thursday the 21st here) and will continue on from there weekly.

When we start our first record, feel free to listen, comment, and vote throughout the week. ~ gives us an opportunity to bump things and keep discussion going for a bit longer than Reddit, so let's take advantage of that where we can.

Okay everyone, so with the grand total of one response (and being informed that it's apparently been discussed before) saying there's interest in setting up a listening club, I'm going to try and get something going. Even if it's just a few of us, it seems like a fun thing to me.

For anyone that doesn't know, a listening club is pretty much what it sounds like, we choose an album and all listen to it over the course of the week, with discussion on it occurring in the weekly threads. Over the club's length, the idea is generally to better understand the subject of the club, usually being a genre, movement, or era.

There's a few ways to go about deciding what to listen for these. We could go by outside lists, allow users running listening clubs to curate their own listening lists (my preferred method just because it's so easy to set up), or vote every week for the next record. The last option seems the most natural, but also requires a certain level of community involvement that may not be reliable, and it gets a little bit awkward before the hierarchy system is running / before we have a trust system or community moderators.

So, what do you guys think? How would you like to see these organized? What should we start with, since a general "all music" listening club doesn't seem quite right? Do you want to participate in these at all? I'm willing to manage anything yall want to do, but I would personally love to do user-curated ones and run my own hip hop essentials club. Of course, that requires trusting an individual to do their own thing, which may not be where we want to go...up to all of you.

First of all: Desabafo is an idiom in Portuguese which means "to get things off your chest, when you're upset about something". I didn't find a one-word English equivalent, but, hey, at least your learnt something :P

Anyways, I'm a Brazilian man in my mid 20s and I can speak English and Spanish pretty well (at least, I think), but I don't get many opportunities to practice both languages verbally. I found this local group "poliglotas" which hang out in a restaurant every week for 2 hours to practice foreign languages (mostly English). I actually liked this group a lot and it's helping me get better at talking, each week there's a theme so we have something to guide the conversation

The thing is, yesterday's theme was "patriotism" and, as you can guess, the conversation got to politics pretty fast. And... it was weird...

The conversation started with Brazil vs US patriotism, but it quickly went to how the US border control policies are justifiable, how in the scandal about the children of immigrants being separated from their parents is the parent's fault. There were a few rebuttals mostly from me and one other guy

Then it went to the problems we have with Brazil and how it could be solved. The arguments presented were to inflate the sense of nationalism, taking votes away from people who they felt were not qualified to choose their own politics, one of them specifically feels that we need a dictatorship and gave compliments to people in the veins of "Rodrigo Duterte" the infamous guy from the Philippines and even mentioned things like how Hitler was great for Germany, just not the rest of the world (wtf). Needless to say, I didn't agree with anything about it and just decided to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the meeting

The most extremist one though did want to hear my opinion, which I said very non-confrontational way "we need stability, we can't keep changing our government whenever things go bad. We need to choose a path and stick with it" but I also took the opportunity to talk about the things we lose with a dictatorship: freedom of speech, transparency, people being alienated

And they countered by saying that in democracy people are alienated because of "fake news" and that giving rights to people is no good if they don't know how to use them. The worst argument in my opinion though is how an older woman said that our people are like children who can't take care of themselves, so they need a parent to give the rules and take care of them until their old enough to be able to take care of themselves

Their mindset border those of a conspiracy where democracy is actually hurting people and that we need some saviour to free us from some unknown enemy force. It really left a bad taste in my mouth, I think I'll keep going there because I don't think someone's political opinion defines who someone is, but it's a little hard to swallow this last experience I've had

Pheew, making this desabafo made me feel better :)

Thanks for reading, feel free to share your opinions about it or to make a desabafo of your own!

Hey ~ers, I'd like to keep a weekly discussion going on this topic (every Wednesday or so?). Let me know if this isn't something you want to see in the future, I always liked these, but maybe not everyone does? Last one got a lot of interesting posts, let's see how it goes this time!

I've been playing Grim Dawn quite a bit lately. I've kickstarted it back in the day, but never got around to really playing it after the early access period. I was burned out on Diablo clones at the time: Torchlight 2, Victor Vran, Van Helsing, etc. I think the break did me good, as playing it fresh is quite enjoyable. There's a good variety of classes and builds, fun abilities, and tons of gear number crunching (playing thunder smashing shaman now). Just the way I like it! I'm hoping to snag one of the DLCs once I reach a high enough level and play with my friends on one of the unlocked hardcore difficulties.

While reading up on what it takes to run this site, it just occurred to me that the site is hosted on one server with one network connection. Adding a CDN or cloud based DDOS protection would run contrary to the "no third party" thing we've got going on here, so that doesn't seem like an option.

So I got to wondering, what would happen if a malicious actor were to sic a botnet on us? I imagine the outcome would not be good. Do we have any strategies to deal with this?

In multiplayer games where there is open chat between teammates or worse, among all players there is rampant toxicity. It is known.

I think that most game companies believe that if they crack down too hard that they will lose their player base.

My belief is that the opposite would happen. A sincere effort (with human review) would require a HUGE initial outlay of resources but with the right punishment (30-day ban from ranked play for example) would nearly eliminate toxicity and also significantly reduce the need for human review.

DOTA did a half-assed measure in like 2015 or something and it worked really well for the time they kept it. But there was a serious change in people's attitudes when it got implemented. Games went from total-toxic to mildly-toxic.

I would bet that a game company that has a decent game (thinking mobas but FPS's probably involved too) such as Hots, Dota, or LOL, they would not LOSE playerbase, but instead gain a HUGE playerbase of people that just want to play games and know that if someone tells you that you are a non-team-playing motherfucker for choosing the hero you think best (but they don't).... they might get banned for 30 days... that might stop them from going off the rails and politely asking instead.

Anyway, I fucked your mom last night.

For any sort of art in general. What are you excited about creating?

For me, I'm a photographer, and I've got some plans for some large format shooting during my camping trip. Because my trip lines up nicely with a nearly new moon, and I'm going to be in an area with nearly no light pollution, I want to try capturing the Milky Way on slide (color positive) film, and also doing a shot of some star trails behind a lighthouse in that area, or star trails reflecting off the lake.

Mine's definitely Evan's Gambit. IF I can get a game with it I'm going to play it. Always leads to a fun, spicy game with enough tactical mess to make for a great blitz game. For any classical game though I'd probably just stick with open Italian systems but castling queenside and throwing pawns if they dare castle first.

How about you guys?