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    18. Daily Tildes discussion - figuring out some early details of the group hierarchy

      ~tildes.official Text 347 words
      This week, I'm trying to focus on the last few pieces needed to finally get the site's code open-sourced (really, I am!). One of those pieces is that we'll need a group on Tildes for discussing...

      This week, I'm trying to focus on the last few pieces needed to finally get the site's code open-sourced (really, I am!). One of those pieces is that we'll need a group on Tildes for discussing development, answering related questions, and so on. The obvious location for this is something like ~tildes.dev, but adding it opens up a few questions related to the group hierarchy in general, so that's what I want to talk about today.

      Currently, we only have one subgroup on the site, this one (~tildes.official). The way it works right now, if you visit or subscribe to ~tildes, you will also see the content from ~tildes.official. You also have the option of going to ~tildes.official directly, so that you see only the content from that group without the posts from its parent group. However, there's no way to see only the content from ~tildes without ~tildes.official. This will become more significant when ~tildes.dev is added, because that group will probably only be interesting to a small group of the site's users—people that are involved in (or interested in) the actual code/development behind the site.

      So now we have a more interesting case, a subgroup that most people looking at the parent probably won't want to see. How should this work in practice? Some more specific questions that might help thinking through it:

      • When someone visits ~tildes, do they see ~tildes.dev posts in there?
      • When someone subscribes to ~tildes, are they automatically subscribed (implicitly or not) to both ~tildes.official and ~tildes.dev?
      • If someone only wants to see the content from ~tildes and ~tildes.official, what sort of process should they need to go through to make that happen?
      • How might these ideas work once the hierarchy gets much larger (for example, imagine a ~games with hundreds of subgroups inside many branches)?

      Any input about the topic is appreciated—try not to worry too much about whether a plan is "perfect", we can always adjust it as the hierarchy actually starts becoming more extensive.

      34 votes

    21. "The book was better than the movie." How important is the medium used in the storytelling?

      ~talk Text 299 words
      A number of years ago at a family reunion, I remember a rather raucous aunt of mine who sat at the table gloating that she reads “so many books.” After she thoroughly disparaged society for its...

      A number of years ago at a family reunion, I remember a rather raucous aunt of mine who sat at the table gloating that she reads “so many books.” After she thoroughly disparaged society for its preference of films, television, and video games, etc., it was revealed that the entire corpus of what she reads is harlequin romance novels.

      Being the shy and tepid fellow that I was, I didn’t call her out on her somewhat vapid achievement. But, the thought that crossed my mind was, “Two hours spent watching ‘A Clockwork Orange’ or ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ would be a much more rewarding and mentally invigorating experience than spending six hours filling my head with the risqué adventures of Fabio.”

      To which, this (kind of) opens up a question about the worth of the medium that we use for storytelling. Is there intrinsic value in written stories versus audio/visual ones? Often enough, a film will be adapted from a book. The sentiment that frequently seems to follow is, “the book is better than the movie.” Is this because we value books as a format more? Is it the greater degree of detail? Perhaps our “mind’s eye” creates a more appealing interpretation than a film director ever could? Or maybe it just makes us feel good to say that we like to read.

      I’m just using the books and movies dynamic as an example. The truth is that we can have this debate about all forms of artistic medium, whether it is live theater, television series, poems, music, radio plays; the list goes on. Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase, “The medium is the message.” How true is this, and how does it affect how we value each different kind of medium? What are your thoughts?

      19 votes

    27. Meat and Salt and Sparks by Rich Larson [Sci-Fi] [7365 words]

      ~books Text 81 words
      tor.com/2018/06/06/meat-and-salt-and-sparks-rich-larson/ A futuristic murder mystery about detective partners—a human and an enhanced chimpanzee—who are investigating why a woman murdered an...

      tor.com/2018/06/06/meat-and-salt-and-sparks-rich-larson/

      A futuristic murder mystery about detective partners—a human and an enhanced chimpanzee—who are investigating why a woman murdered an apparently random stranger on the subway

      Found this today and read it for my morning break. I'm worried about spoilers, but I'm curious about people's thoughts on being a non-human intelligence and the subsequent integration into human society. Did this short evoke any particular emotions in you?

      9 votes