I've been grumbling about many of the things Tildes is trying to address for years. And I'm not alone. OTOH I have seen some sites that do some bits right, and some sites that almost got it right only to fall flat at the penultimate hurdle. Let's try to collect and enumerate what I think is good and bad, both here and elsewhere. I'm optimistic about here because Tildes is a work in progress and some of these are quite readily fixable.

Tildes, the good:

#1, a long way ahead of everything else: Non-profit.
I think Twitter and Reddit and Facebook all amply demonstrate why any general discussion forum that tries to make a profit is doomed to mediocrity and worse. Google+ is an edge case - the service may be free, but Google is watching and measuring your every move. And constantly optimising for their own performance metrics, of which fostering intelligent discussion totally is not on the list and is actually discouraged. See:
'The Algorithm' is Not an Idiot, It Is Actively Deceptive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/51mme29dSMy

#2 Markdown (also a coutny mile ahead of the alternatives) - elegantly simple markup; not too much, not too little. Even if you have technical quibbles with markdown's capabilities, the system is widely-enough known to outweigh them. I honestly can't think of a more appropriate choice.

#3 Clean simple UI (couple of grumbles though - see below)

#4 'Votes' rather than +1s, thumbs up, likes or or other cutesy shite. Elementary good UI practice - say what you mean.

Tildes, the bad including what I hope are readily fixable or just oversights:

#1 Poor display contrast. Don't use light grey text on white, you numpties, just because it's fashionable. If you want this site to be around long-term you'll have people of all ages posting, some with e.g. poor eyesight. There are well-known guidelines for the optimum contrast ratios for online text. Look 'em up and bloody stick within them. If you go for AAA that will be another point where you're ahead of the Google, Apple and other fashion-driven sites. Don't care if it's unfashionable, and if you want to be around in 20 years (as another successful discussion site I'll cite later has been) you should stick with what's usable, not what's currently cool. KTHXBAI. WebAIM: Colour Contrast Checker
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

#2 Missed opportunity, fixable:

You can look at activity from the last hour, day, 3 days etc, or enter a flexible range. But you've only made the range one-ended!! So how are you supposed to find a post from 'about 6 months ago' without scrolling through thousands of entries? Again, if you're interested in longevity, you have to ensure that it's possible for humans to refind older posts, and to check back to a specific date range that may eventually be months or years back. My 'long-lived site' inserts markers with month and year so that you can tell where you are in the feed without having to peer at some tiny date in light grey on lighter grey.

#3 Vague datestamps

Use dates FFS. 'About 2 hours ago' is a moving target, duh. How are you supposed to refind a post timestamped 'about 2 hours ago' on a fast-moving thread that was left sitting unrefreshed on your laptop for half a day while you were disconnected from the internet? Useless. For short periods, yes, some users may prefer a vaguer indicator, but once a post is more than about 12-16 hours old, just use the date and time, OK? Vague timestamps, while superficially user-friendly, are a superb and subtle way to disrupt the serious discussions Tildes wants to foster. That's why Google+, for example, does it, and that's why you shouldn't. Also, if the date's in a predictable, stable form, you can search for it. Load a shit-ton of posts going back months, then try searching for a post made 'two months' ago; then search again in a couple of weeks and the same search will give different results!

#4 Preview and save button

Where's my post preview button? I would have like to preview this screed before posting it. And given how long it is maybe saving it as a work in progress would have been useful too!

Missing feature: effective filtering/killfiling
Long-term, if the site gets big, it will live or die on this. Seriously.
You need to be able to filter users, posts, and thread and groups temporarily or permanently.
That includes being able to temporarily hide people you follow and like just to get their posts out of the way. So, mute for an hour, mute for a day, mute for a week, mute for a month (maybe), mute permanently. Applicable to every possible category on the site you can think of. dredmorbius (who is also here) goes on about this a lot. The ability to filter stuff out is far more important than the ability to 'find' stuff. Just filtering out the stuff you don't want helps the stuff you do bubble to the surface!

Saveable filters (long term feature)

When I want to collect cat memes, non-cat memes are noise and I need to filter them out (see above). When I want to read about other sutff, the cat memes are noise and I need to filter them. I don';t want to have to keep creating and discarding filters. As soon as your filtering system is powerful enough to be useful, it will be too much work to keep redoing, so make 'em saveable and organisable. There's uses for all of whitelists, greylists and blacklists.

Post auto indexing (long term feature)

I have to manually write and maintain my own damn post indexes on G+, otherwise all my old posts just vanish into limbo, inaccessible unless you know a unique search phrase from that particular post or are prepared to scroll for hours. [But the Goodle internal servers can access and analyse them all just fine.] My post index, with some comments: https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/XoWoRujTBun

Rapid browse mode, paginated

When you're reading in depth, it may be OK to have a Google+-like UI with only half a dozen posts on-screen at once. (Tildes is currently shopwing me ten at a time, which ain't enough of an improvement to be worthwhile.) But this is hair-tearingly inefficient if you want to scan a lot of posts rapidly. You need a dense display format that shows large numkbers of posts so people can skim and find things quickly. With thumnails for images and indicators for links. Paginated, with the pages staying at consistent points. That way you can keep track of you place when you're browsing back in the archives, and even bookmark old stuff. Sometimes you want leisurely mode, but sometimes you want to jump back a way before switching to leisurely. Having only a slow browsing route is very effective at killing access to older discussions. Anything older than a few days or a few dozens of posts is effectively lost.

Soft auto-lock for old posts
Posts should auto-lock after... about 3 months of inactivity is a good number IME. But ideally it should be a soft lock, which means people can resurrect them. If you post on a soft-locked thread, you get a warning, or the owner gets to decide whether to unlock the thread and let your post appear. So consequently you need a preference setting so that post owners can indicate whether they want a soft or a hard lock on a post, and the time till it triggers.

Per forum thread/post limits
If you've got a forum with 1,000 active threads, you haven't really got one forum. You've either got several, in which case they should be split up, or you've got one forum with a lot of noise. So there might be something to be said for limiting the number of discussion threads in proportion to the number of users; for example, if ~dogs.chihuahuas has 5 users, let them have the default of 20 threads. Of which they might only use six. Nothing says you have to use all 20. But if ~dogs.pugs had 40,000 followers, perhaps it should be permitted 70 threads. If 70 isn't enough, it's probably past time to split ~dogs.pugs up. There is an uppser and a lower limit to how many people you can have a sensible discussion with. The lower limit is 2, and for small forums or up to a couple of dozen regulars 20 threads should be ample. When you get to hundeds or regulars, the thread count does need to go up a bit. But when you get to 10,000s, the noise levels starts to go up and it's time to split the group into subgroups. A thread count is a decent way to enforce that - I'd say even the biggest forum isn't allowed more than 2-3 screenfuls of threads. So 30-60, maybe. If that's not enough, it's time to subdivide, because keeping communities from getting too large keeps discussion quality higher. You can always follow both groups even after the split. But if you dislike regular A in group X, you can switch to group Y where they don't post. If everything's lumps together without regard to community scaling, you never get away from regular A unless you unsubscribe from group X altogether.

Other sites

Google+

Circles (bad, it turns out) - seemed good at the time, but it turns out they're at the wrong end of the broadcast stream. The recipients have no way to filter what you post into the categories they want, and it's their preferences that matter at this point.

Collections (good, it turns out) - this was the better way to do it. If someone posts cat pics, politics, and astronomy, you can just follow the subset of their posts you're interested in. This is reasonably effective, implicit filtering.

Infinite scrolling windows (very bad) - [But excellent for Google's purposes of stifling anything but superficial conversations.] Finding anything older than a few hours may take literally hours of scrolling unless there's a search term you can enter. So tough shit if you wanted to find an image post with no associated text.

Awesomely atrocious search Google used to be good at search. You wouldn't think so from the comedy search tool they provide on G+.

Notifications (meh) - When you only have a few followers, it's nice to know you've been followed or mentioned or whatever. As your user count grows that becomes noise and then spam. Notifications have to scale intelligently, because a user with 240,000 followers has massivly different needs from a user with 12.

My own comments: Google Plus User Feedback Archive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/DUanxsc7ya1

Ello

I like the clean UI, and it's very good for image posting.
The discussions ain't too bad either, but it's maybe a bit too minimalist, and again, there was no way to find old posts,l so they're effectively lost.

Twitter

Well it would be good if people actually used it for short posts of up to 2xx characters or whatever the present limit is. But when you have people writing articles that need dozens of Tweets (and there's aggregator apps to collect them back into full articles FFS) then the system is clearly not being used in the way it was originally intended to be. I think this is what corporations would like the future of all discussion to be. Basically babble, where even the good stuff vanishes without trace after, well, potentially a few tens of minutes if you follow a lot of people. It's like drinking at a firehose. Jeez. You harldy need to exert effort to bury stuff. Just wait a while.

Usenet

Good for: killfiles, threaded discussions, clue, and asynchronous discussions spanning weeks, months or longer.
Bad for: trolls, spam. Especially spam.

I sincerely hope there are some Tilders who are thoroughly familiar with the dynamics, successes and failures of Usenet. It does a lot of things right that you'll also need to get right. And now all the morons are on the web, I'm not sure if Usenet is reverting to clued people only, or if the spammers are killing it off completely. TBH I'm not sure there's much point spamming Usenet these days; next to no-one goes there, and those that do are tech-savvy and exceptionally spam-hostile. Haven't been on myself for years. A very good example of a private usenet area that works well is the Povray news hierarchy. Another demonstration that focus on a single subject (the PoVRay raytracer) does a good job of keeping site/forum/whatever clue levels high. news.povray.org http://news.povray.org/groups/

Web Forums

Good for: focussed discussions on a single subject. In general, the more focussed the higher the quality. The Wesnoth forums, for example, are all about the Wesnoth computer game. So it's easy to tell what's off-topic and remove it. But the Giant in the Playground forums, which also include general roleplaying, are not as focussed and the clue level of the posters, while not atrocious, is noticeably lower, and a much greater degree of moderation is needed. But the GiantITP forums are much bigger than Wesnoth, so there a lot of just scaling effects going on there too. You also see this on, I guess, the Steam forums and Reddit groups, where the small niche communities (e.d. OpenTTD on Reddit) tend to be much more pleasant places to visit than the forums for mega-games like, I dunno, World of Warcraft.

Reddit

Good for: Actually handling collossal volums of posts on all sorts of subjects without collapsing into chaos.
I'm not a big Reddit fan, but I have to give them credit for working at all, given their traffic volume.

Also good for: Reddit Gold isn't a terrible way to fund a commercial-ish site. Aspects of that could be stolen.

Wikis

Placeholder

Suspect there may be some things that could be learned from how Wikis do things, but nothing comes to mind at present. May revisit later.

Email lists

Good for: digests?

Digests might be a useful feature when you're following a long-running discussion?
Google+ almost got this right - you can opt to recieve an email whenever someone comments after you, but you can't get G+_ to send you emails fo your own posts, or to send you a summary/digest of the full discussion. So you can have a partial email archive of threads you've been involved in, but you can't have an email record of your own contributions. So, half of a useful feature there. Nice one, guys.

Mornington Crescent

These sites have been running for decades. They're basically text databases plus a bit of Perl glue code. A decent developer could (and has, more than once) knock out a fully functioning Mornington Crescent site in a matter of a few afternoons.

Good for: longevity, stability, simplicity, 'weak user IDs', asynchronous discussions which can become realtime if you're online at the same time as your correspondent.

Probably bad for: scaling, security
The Crescent sites have a couple of dozen game threads each, and you post a comment wherever you feel like. Then the next person does the same, and so on. Some of the long-running games (e.g. the genral chat thread) have 30,000+ posts spanning years. But becuase it's paginated rather than an infinite scrolling window, you can jump back e.g. 1,000 posts (a few months) with relative ease.

These sites all predate markdown, so they let you use basic HTML instead. A feature which has been horribly abused, most notably in the bad HTML game, and Acre Street (don't ask). A modern MC site, you'd use markdown.

They still work on any browser - even Lynx - they don't even depend on Javascript. It's a web form with two or three fields. You type on your comment, click submit, and your comment is inserted into the page. Then the next person does the same, over and over for years, and the page grows as you do. As simple as a a web forum can possibly be, I suspect. And if bandwidth/performance becomes a problem, you can auto-split it into year-sized or 1000-post-sized chunks. Yes, people mostly only browse the last few tens of posts, but a paginated system lets you jump back further on occasion without placing an undue burden on the servers. (I go on about pagination a lot. I think it's a make-or-break feature, and it's only out of favour at the moment due to the whims of fashion and the web-corps' desires to make and keep online conversations at a superficial level. The black hats are doing it intentionally, and others are emulating them because they wrongly think they're following good - rather than evil - practice.
Speaking of evil practice - check out Dark Patterns in Design for some of the ways we're manipulated: https://darkpatterns.org/

'Weak User ID' - there's a text box you type your name in. Most people use the same name every time, because it establishes reputation. But it's just a text box so you could type in anything. That bit probably wouldn't scale, but for us, given that between us we all know everyone who posts except for the occasional random who shows up, it works fine.

'Non-persistent chat' - one of the sites, which has since shut down, had a rolling chat page that was only transient. Chat posts older than about a week and more than 100 posts ago just disappeared off the bottom of the chat page and were lost for good, unless someone saved the chat. For some discussions - e.g. things like cat memes, this kind of transient chat is probably ideal. You could even implement an infinite scroller, because you know the end of the chat is never going to be more than 5-10 screens away. That wouldn't be so good for 50-100 screen. As a yardstick my G+ posts would probably go back about 1200 screens. Who the hell would ever scroll through that? If Tildes becomes successful, it will quickly hit to same point. Pagination, chaps. It's not sexy, but it's the only reasonable way to manage long data streams.

OK, initial data dump done. This is more complete than I epxcted to get for a first go, but more typos too :-)

Am likely to revist.

Would there be a way to show the number of new posts on a topic since the last time you read it? I find a lot of threads tend to linger for a couple days, and I forget how many comments there were the last time I checked. It would be awesome if it could display something like '10 Comments (2 new)' on a topic I'd visited before.

It would also be awesome if there was a way to highlight the new comments on the page when you click through as well to make it easier to find them.

P.S.: Sorry if this has been covered somewhere else. Still not sure what the best way to find old topics without manually reading every post is.

(Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I know the difference between a "theory" and a "hypothesis". I'm using the colloquial usage of the term. I'm not submitting a formal paper here.)

I figured a post like this now and then might be a little fun. I wanted to discuss a little theory of mine about the Mario universe. As the title suggests, the short version is that Mario is a dictator.

This theory hinges on one important point: There are inconsistencies within the stories that are told about Mario's adventures that suggest that his exploits are fabricated.

Let's begin with the most central theme in Mario's adventures: The repeated kidnappings of Peach. Consider for a moment that in every kidnapping event, Peach has had less-than-stellar security detail--typically none at all--despite the number of kidnapping events that have occurred over the years. If arguably the most high-profile member of a kingdom is being kidnapped on a regular basis, you would expect their security detail to be significantly greater than it's consistently shown to be, so why is it always so lax? The three most logical explanations are either a) the security detail is actually much tighter than is shown and Bowser is just that much stronger, b) the security detail is thinned out before every kidnapping event due to a coordination between Bowser and an insider in the mushroom kingdom, or c) there are no kidnappings at all and they're merely being portrayed as such.

We can eliminate option (a) fairly easily: Are we really expected to believe that an ordinary plumber can single-handedly take out an entire kingdom that an entire other kingdom was unable to stand against while their princess was captured? This plumber has no military training whatsoever, and we're expected to believe that he can stand against an entire army by himself? Unlikely.

That leaves us with two logical explanations: Either the kidnappings are coordinated on the inside, or the kidnappings are completely fabricated. Deciding which of the two is the most likely requires further considerations.

With that in mind, you may be wondering if there's any support for either of those accusations, so let's first discuss Bowser himself. Specifically, let's discuss his physical traits. He's a scary-looking dude, no doubt. But Bowser is clearly not a creature that evolved for aggressive behavior. If we examine his build from an evolutionary perspective, we can see that he has a large and bulky shell; his claw strikes are powerful, but slow; his fire generally lacks range or (in the case of earlier Mario games where range was better) sustained use, and its speed is generally terrible; and he can't move quickly at all, except in short bursts. All of these traits suggest a creature that isn't built for aggressive, offensive action, but for self-defense. A creature like Bowser is unlikely to attack another kingdom at all, unless he's acting in self-defense or given some other form of incentive.

Now, between the remaining two options, we again have either an inside job or a fabrication. Without deciding yet which it is, let's at least consider this: If it really is an inside job, there are only two ways in which someone could stand to benefit:

1. Mario would stand to benefit due to receiving and perpetuating his status as a hero, so he would have to have some kind of way to incentivize Bowser to coordinate with him, otherwise Bowser wouldn't have any need to work with him. If Mario really is a plumber, however, then there is absolutely no way he would have the wealth or political leverage for Bowser to benefit in that relationship. It's possible that he was a plumber at first, but ended up becoming a puppet to Bowser, but in no situation does Mario remain a plumber if we're to assume that he's continually coordinating with Bowser, otherwise he would have no way to deal with the increased security detail.
2. Peach isn't actually being kidnapped, but is attempting to escape the kingdom with Bowser's help. If Mario is actually an independent dictator rather than a puppet, then it would stand to reason that prior royalty would want to escape in order to avoid harm. In this case, it's easy for a coordinated escape with another kingdom to be portrayed as a kidnapping.

So, to quickly recap, we have inconsistencies in the security detail, in the antagonist, and in the protagonist. These already suggest that the stories of Mario's exploits may not be at all what they're portrayed as.

With the above in mind, let's take a look at one more damning detail about Mario himself: The mushroom peoples are said to have transformed into bricks, yet Mario has no qualms with destroying them throughout his adventures.

With everything above in mind, we can see the following narrative fall into place:

1. The mushroom people were never turned into bricks. It's a false story used as a dehumanization tactic in order to justify Mario's murder of innocent people. It's pretty easy to justify killing your own people, after all, if you convince people that a brick wall was erected and had to be destroyed so you could save the princess, so the loss of those transformed people was necessary.
2. Mario isn't really a plumber. It's possible that he was at one point, but he definitely can't be anymore.
3. Mario's exploits are either staged, or he's continually re-kidnapping a fleeing princess seeking refuge in another kingdom and the kidnapping is being portrayed as a rescue.

Now, a final important point: Over time, we've seen the narrative shift in Bowser's reasons for kidnapping Peach. The most recent case was an attempted marriage in Odyssey. It stands to reason that, as a dictator, Mario has to continue controlling the narrative as news leaks out regarding foreign events, e.g. a marriage between a "kidnapped" princess and a foreign ruler. The continuous stream of foreign news and gossip could install doubt about your prior narratives--"Why is our princess marrying someone from another kingdom? Was she even really kidnapped or did she run away?"--and force you to adopt a new one--"The princess is being forced into an unwanted marriage by her kidnapper!". This is a far different narrative than those cases where Bowser was said to want to destroy the mushroom kingdom.

We can therefore establish that Mario's image is absolutely essential. Any crack in his portrayal as a hero could cause the mushroom people to revolt, so he needs to assert control in any way possible. Thus, he will create any narrative necessary to paint himself as a hero and to make himself more relatable, and to make his adversaries as monstrous as possible. It's also particularly unlikely that he's Bowser's puppet, otherwise we wouldn't expect Bowser to allow himself to be thwarted so frequently, something that would make him appear weak to his own people and threaten his place. It's far more likely that Mario is acting independently and losing his grip on his narrative.

So the story that seems to have the least inconsistent narrative is as follows:
Mario is a dictator who wants to appeal to the working class by being viewed as a plumber, so the citizens of the Mushroom kingdom will think "he's a true blue collar worker, he's one of us!". Peach isn't actually being kidnapped, but is attempting to flee from Mario's dictatorship and seek refuge in the Koopa Kingdom. Mario continually assaults the Koopa Kingdom in order to re-kidnap Peach. In the process, he ends up murdering countless sympathizers who try to aid in her escape, or even uses the opportunity to destroy his opposition in a way that's easy to brush off. During all of this, he continually pumps out propaganda about Peach being kidnapped when she's really seeking asylum and about his heroic rescues when he's really taking his own army with him, paints Bowser as a villain, and dehumanizes his victims and normalizes their murder. In addition, because of his clear readiness to dehumanize his own people, it's likely that Bowser and the rest of the Koopa Kingdom are also being dehumanized and portrayed as monsters in order to justify the slaughtering of countless foreign people and to help instill fear and anger among the mushroom people. Peach and Bowser have also likely fallen in love and attempted to marry, but Mario continues to lay siege on Koopa Kingdom in order to kidnap Peach, and Mario's propaganda network paints this marriage as a forced one between an unwilling Mushroom Kingdom princess and a terrifying and ruthless Bowser.

In short: Mario is dictator using a propaganda network in order to paint himself favorably while painting his adversaries as monsters or objects in order to justify mass murder and prevent a fleeing princess from seeking asylum in a foreign kingdom.

What are your thoughts? Have I made any critical errors? Is there more evidence that I missed that supports this theory? Do you have an alternative theory you'd like to share?

(If you notice any typos or repeated sections, please let me know. This took a while to write up, so it's possible that I missed something.)

In governance, sortition (also known as allotment or demarchy) is the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates. The logic behind the sortition process originates from the idea that “power corrupts.” For that reason, when the time came to choose individuals to be assigned to empowering positions, the ancient Athenians resorted to choosing by lot. In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was therefore the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of true democracy.

Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries or citizens' assemblies).

The mechanics would be something like this: users report a post/comment, when there's enough reports the systems randomly selects 3/5/7/... currently active users and ask them to determine if the reported post contravene to the rules. The decision is then automatically taken with a majority rule.

Why ?

1. It's the only system that scales (to my knowledge). More users mean more content to moderate, but since the users are also moderators the system works at any scale. Systems that don't scale lead to all kind of problems when the number of users become large.
2. It's very robust to manipulation. As moderators are chosen randomly it's very hard to coordinate or try to influence the decisions.
3. It promotes a participatory attitude and a sense of responsibility in the users. There's no "them against us" (the bad mods against the users).

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.

So I was thinking the other day -- is there any good reason to allow voting from the main ~'s page? For clarity in this discussion, I'm talking about this view.

Some pro's and con's for removing the vote button from the main page:

Pro:

• Discourages "drive-by" voting. We all (mostly?) know that reddit in particular is notorious for having highly up-voted posts that most users read the headline / top-comment and not the article itself. This is particularly noxious for political posts, as often times a vote on a post is an extension of one's own biases / beliefs, rather than an engagement on the topic at hand. This hasn't reared it's head to the same extent on ~'s yet (this post with 15 votes / and only 1 comment would seem to be the closest I can find), but I think it would be a mistake to think that this sort of behavior wouldn't migrate over from reddit. Other reasons for voting on a post without at least getting into the comments are equally bad e.g.: "Oh, I like that band / song / movie / whatever" -- this is a key driver of recycled content on /r/music or movies or tv etc. This reason alone is enough for me to consider removing front-page voting a net-positive

• The user is forced to enter the comments to vote, wherein they may actually read something that sparks their desire to read the thing / interact with the post. The goal on ~'s is to promote substantive discussion, and I think this would be an interesting tool to try to direct users to said discussion.

Cons

• It's more inconvenient, but hey -- so is putting the comment box at the bottom of the page (and I think that's a good idea on net as well)

• UI inconsistency -- this is a bad thing, but we've got a lot of smart computer people on here. We can probably figure out some way to make this work.

• It doesn't actually force the user to read / listen / interact with the submission, just suggests that they do. But hey, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, eh?

Hanging Questions

• What about voting on ~group pages? My off-the-cuff idea would be that voting on ~music.world.calypso would be a good thing (to promote organic growth of quality posts from small ~groups), but not voting on overarching groups (~music) -- but then the UI issue rears' it's ugly head

• What about comment / submission voting from other places e.g.: user-pages, notifications, inbox replies, etc.

I thought about posting this as a comment in the other active pronoun conversation but I didn't want to derail it with a tangent. For starters I should make it clear I believe honoring someone's pronoun preferences is a matter of basic decency and respect. Conversely, insisting on using a different word when you know someone doesn't like it is, frankly, a jerk move. It's being antagonistic for no good reason.

That said, an acquaintance recently informed me that her 4-year-old prefers to use the pronoun "they." I have to admit something about this situation doesn't sit right with me. I'm also the parent of a 4-year-old, and it's clear to me that kids that age aren't developmentally equipped to make an informed decision about gender identity.

I can't help but feel like the parents are putting words in their kid's mouth, projecting a non-binary assumption onto a minor who lacks the cognitive and emotional maturity to manage it in any meaningful way. Saddling a preschooler with that kind of baggage just strikes me as irresponsible parenting.

I'm not saying there should be some kind of hard-line age of consent, just that four is too young. One ought to be far enough along developmentally to come to one's own conclusions about pronouns and gender presentation.

Apologies if I'm strawmanning, but I guess the argument could be made that all kids should be referred to as "they" — by default — until they reach an appropriate age to choose their own gender identities. I can sympathize with that as a goal, but it strikes me as unrealistic. I don't think society would ever be able to attain that kind of widespread change.

I'm curious what my fellow tilders think about this subject. (FWIW, I am referring to this kid as "they" and keeping my objections to myself, apart from this discussion.)

I feel so cheated- I went into college with no clue what my interests are and got a degree in something irrelevant that doesn't interest me ( BBA in digital marketing).
I was too young when I made the decision to get this degree and in the years since, I have discovered my passions are art and the environment- I can't see myself feeling fulfilled working in any other field.
But now I don't have the qualifications or skills to get into either, and it seems like a bit of a stretch to go back to college and do another four years!

I just don't know where to go from here, I feel demotivated and I wish that college was something that happened to us later in life. I would do things so differently!

I'm taking some time off to figure out what to do next, but honestly...I don't have a clue.

I've been working on a plan for a local treasure hunt, but I could use some feedback. It'll be hosted through my youtube channel, and will most likely consist of a variety of hikes (some short, some longer, but nothing too crazy), some basic crypto, some cheesy poetry, and some treasure that I've made/will make as the prize.

So that's the nutshell explanation. I'm having trouble making decisions about some of the details. But first, let me go over some of the specifics I have worked out. My plan as of right now consists of the following:

• 5 hunts total, 4 that are similarly structured with 1 final hunt
• The first 4 hunts consist of 3 locations where clues are hidden, and one final location where the treasure is hidden
• The clue locations are revealed equally to everyone participating
• The clues are non-removable, difficult to destroy, so more than one can find them
• The clues are required to determine the final location of the treasure for that hunt
• The final hunt's locations can be determined by supplemental clues hidden in the first 4 hunts

I'm thinking of doing an episode per location, per week. Each episode will consist of searchable features like road signs and trailheads, followed by clips showing highlights of the path to the clue. If the clue is hidden to the general public, I'll show more or less where people can expect it. The clue itself will be a semi-permanent installation. That is, it'll be a physical form that's locked up somewhere for the duration of the hunt. After the hunt is over, I plan on going out and removing them. This is mostly because I don't want rogue hunters to destroy the clues so that no one else can find them. I plan on making a rule that if someone goes out and the clue isn't where it's supposed to be, I'll publicly post it. I doubt anyone would, but I still think it's a good idea to have a deterrent.

I wanted to get some outside perspective on how you think this would play out, and what sort of issues I'm missing as far as game mechanics.

• Would this be the kind of thing people would enjoy bringing friends along for, even though there's only one treasure per hunt? Is there some way I could make it more worthwhile to people playing in groups, without diminishing the value of effort for a single hunter?
• Would it be better to cluster the 3 locations for each hunt together? I feel like it might be more fun as an activity, but there's a much greater danger of making it too easy and having the first person out discover it. I like the idea of spreading the clues out time-wise and space-wise so that more people have an opportunity to take part.
• I have no idea how many people will participate. I have very few followers and almost all of them are friends. I'd like to try and promote it, but I also know that I'm pretty horrible at that sort of thing. Still, I'd like to come up with a design that would work well regardless if it's 5 people or 500 people playing. What sort of issues might happen as the player base scales up?
• I'm kinda going from scratch on these ideas. I've hosted basic treasure hunts before but nothing this complex. Mostly just "crack this cryptogram, figure out what the poem means, find the spot". This is basically the same thing, just with multiple locations required to find the spot. Are there other formats I should consider?
• Should the treasure be hidden? Or would it be better to send it to a winner? If it's hidden, it's probably way more satisfying for the person who finds it. But there's also a risk of someone random finding it. The hiding spots will have to be really good, but there's also a lot of people in this city who get out and about. Having a final problem to solve could be fun if it's done right, or it could be really annoying. I also don't really want to have to ship the pieces. And I think it adds in a dubious factor where people might be more inclined to question the legitimacy of the winner (which happens occasionally with online giveaway contest sort of things). I'm leaning toward just hiding the treasure, but I'm also open to ideas.

For context, not for self-promotion: I'm not really trying to plug my channel or anything like that, I genuinely could use feedback on this and I've really been digging the threads on here. If you feel like you want some context though, I'll put some links. I don't think they're necessary because I hope I explained it well enough and the videos don't really add anything, mostly because I made them before I started planning this. They're more like a weird, long intro.

It started because I was annoyed with my neighbor who kept asking for a favor, and to get sweet, petty revenge, I sent him on a treasure hunt. I liked the idea and wanted to make something similar for everyone else. It tied into a project theme I've been working on lately, so I started making a series of glass sculpture elementals, and introduced the artifact hunt with the first making-of video.

Planning on doing a video for the making of each piece, plus the videos for the hunts. It's gonna be a lot of work so I'm trying to get as much sorted out beforehand as I can. I've been really scratching my head over this for the past few weeks, so thanks in advance for any 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

[EDIT]

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

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

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

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

I 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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looks like it's been about a week since @Flashynuff's post, so I figured I would make one for this week. As seems to be tradition, I'm going to borrow @Whom's description :)

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something!

Feel free to give recs or dicuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Ok, this is less than a half-baked idea, but here goes.

I just got here, but I really feel like you all “are my people.” I know there are possible issues with this, echo chamber, etc.. but darn it, I like this group right now. I may like it even after lots of user growth. But.. what if there was some magical way to use the site in the future as it was in the past.

My initial thought was what if we “forked” the user base at different times. Here is my best thought on how that might be implemented.

What if there was a user setting called Shrinkage, Time Machine, Good Ole Days, or something. It would be a date field that had a minimum value of your tildes birthday, max value of now. You could set it to n whenever you wanted and then you would see the site with only the posts and comments of the users that existed prior to n + 1 day (so your are included.)

I think other folks will have this same “good ole days” feeling even when they sign up years from now, they could always go back to their original community.

OK, I think that this implementation is pretty harmless. Shoot me down. What unintended consequences did I not think of? Do you see any value in this?

edit: missing word

Tipster tags for comments?

I was going to post this on the daily discussion about tag, but I'm not sure it's something "easy" to implement or even worth considering. Some feedback would be appreciated.

I was thinking there could be a special type of tag or report that goes directly to the poster in a private way (like a "whisper" tag, similar to the whisper comments someone suggested).

This could be useful especially in polarizing topics, I believe.

The idea is something like this: a (somewhat) trusted user sees a comment that is worded in a confrontational or maybe aggressive manner or its unsubstantiated and foresees conflict, but instead of tagging it like "flame" for everyone to see, they tag it as "rephrasable" or "sounds confrontational?" or even "citation needed" (I'm sure you guys can come up with better names and ideas, but you get the gist, something that communicates that it could be worded in a softer, more objective way or using a source, etc.), only the OP sees this tag on their own comment and can thus react appropriately (or maybe ignore if it seems unfounded, or discuss -privately?- with the anonymous reporter) by editing their comment (possibly leaving some kind of trace of the change or acknowledging the report).

too long/didn't understand: allow giving the poster a private warning that someone thinks their comment is problematic before things get too heated!

The trust system is something that I'm looking forward to for several reasons. It allows for community moderation that is "decentralized" to a point. It takes pressure off of the admins to police content. The possibility of being able to ensure that quality content remains the core product of this site. There are also negatives like the possibility of creating a "power user" class that is resented by the rest of the user base or the potential for misuse by those with the power. Along with some more complex issues such as disagreements between trusted users about how to interpret and curate content. These are all things that we as a community should iron out before a larger scale rollout of this system.

What I wanna talk about today is something a little bit different tho. From my experience with other sites that have achievable user class "upgrades", there will, almost no matter what the precautions put in place, be users that will game the system to rise up through the ranks as quickly as possible. From my point of view, as long as there is a system, written or not, about what needs to be done to achieve the "Trusted" status, there will be users that will do their best to get their as quickly as possible. There are a few ways that this can be looked at:

• It's fine because while they may not be contributing for the "right" reasons, they are still acting in what is seen as a positive manner in the community.
• Concern that because they are only working towards the status symbol "Trusted" that they are not going to be acting in the best interests of the website, but in the interests of keeping the status.
• Wanting to keep this kind of behavior to an absolute minimum because want everything should be as ideal as possible.

While this discussion is had on a fairly regular basis, the consensus seems to be that it is a necessary evil to endure because it would be both too much work to police/figure out who is acting for the right reasons (even standardizing what the "right reasons" are is hard).

The way this can be combated by having requirements that would be deemed too much work for most of the people who are just in it for the status and not for the site. The issue with this solution is that it can make it very difficult for those who truly care about the site to maintain the position that allows them to curate and keep the site in the condition that we aim for.

In the end I think that the deteriorating system will solve at least a portion of these problems because those who are just in it for the status symbol are often likely to quit trying after they are achieve the goal they want. This leads to periods of inactivity, and therefore, decay.

I wanted to post this to see what the greater community had to think about this.

One thing I've been recently thinking about regarding ~'s tags is how much hate "Noise" gets. I realize that it doesn't further the discussion every time, but we also need to look at the context.

I've seen a few posts here tagged as noise when a community member posts something they've made or would like feedback on. In my opinion, when someone says "that's great!" or "I agree" that's completely acceptable. I've heard the "just upvote and move on" argument, but by our own admission, per the posted rules here and on reddit, the vote button does not equal "agree." It only means that the content is of value.

I'd love to tell someone "I really love the way you phrased that" or "I didn't know other people felt that way, too!" for something I agreed with but didn't have a whole lot to add without just being repetitive.

I'm not married to this idea, just something milling about in my head since on ~, it really seems like we're trying to use the vote button not for just "agree/ disagree." I posted on ~talk rather than ~tildes because I'm curious how other people see the issue, and I don't feel the need to lodge a formal suggestion.

The default "activity" sorting means that topics which lead to a lot of conversation tend to get bumped to the top. It seems like, in the long run, controversial topics will end up drowning out topics where the link itself is interesting but doesn't provoke people to react with a comment. I find that a lot of the most interesting links for me on other sites are the ones with the fewest comments.

I think it could be worthwhile to experiment with different default sorting, or even different mechanics. For example, Everything2 has a feature where, at a certain rank, users are able to add pages to a "Cool User Picks!" sidebar.

The current solution, custom sort ordering, doesn't seem like it will scale very well. People will tend to vote on the posts they see; if most people sort by activity, most of the votes will go to the most active posts anyway.

Anyway, just food for thought. I don't think this is super urgent, but it seems like something that would be good to think hard about and get right in the long term.

Tilde pretext - I have no idea what to tag this, but if anyone likes Shadowrun or Earthdawn pnp lore this info is a pain in the ass to find.

I spent way, way too much time trying to track down information on Verjigorm. I enjoy exploring the lore of the Shadowrun universe, and the hoops I had to jump through to get this info was way more than I expected. I kept seeing references to books I didn't have, and finally actually got a copy of Earthdawn's Horror book to copy this down.

I realize no one requested this, but I'm just posting this excerpt in the hope it will save people the massive amount of time I spent fumbling around trying to get anything substantial on this subject.

This is verbatim from the Earthdawn Horrors book. If this is somehow violating a policy I missed let me know and I will edit and change as needed.

I'm not sure who specifically wrote this, so here are the listed writers for the book:

Writing: Robin D. Laws, Teeuwynn Woodruff, Greg Gorden, Sam Witt, Allen Varney, Chris McCubbin, Caroline Spector, Fraser Cain

Additional Writing: Louis J. Prosperi, Rob Cruz, Dian Prion-Gelman, Andrew Raglan, and Rich Warren

pg 66 Eathdawn - Horrors

The following account was graciously provided by the Great Dragon Icewing. The Library of Throal, and indeed all the Namegivers of Barsaive, owe this generous dragon a debt of undying gratitude for the information he has provided on this entity. Scholars throughout the land agree that Verjigorm is the most powerful Horror that has ever existed-- a terrible, vile abomination whose strength towers above that of all other Horrors. May the Passions protect us all against the curse of the Horror called Verjigorm and its unnatural spawn, for its unmatched power and malevolent intelligence may yet spell the end of all that we know.

-- Leranto Myrn, apprentice scholar, Library of Throal, 1507

Generations of Name-givers throughout Barsaive and the lands beyond have learned to fear the great dragons. Even your most powerful magicians are but bumbling children in things magical when compared to us, and your most celebrated heroes cringe like frightened old women at the thought of facing the sword-like teeth and scythe-like claws of a dragon in battle. There is no shame in this fear. Beings of much greater power than you little folk have learned to fear us, for we great dragons are ancient and powerful beyond imagining. We walked these lands and rode the wind thousands of years before the first t'skrang tasted the waters of the Serpent or the first windling unfurled its wings in the cool morning air.

But one being exists that even great dragons fear, a being that existed long before my ancient race appeared in Barsaive. Some call if the Horror of a Thousand Faces, or the Corrupter. Others know it as the Horror That Is Worshiped as a Passion, or the Great Hunter. Even today, dragons speak its cursed Name only in whispers, for it is said to have ears that hear all and eyes that never close. It is the Horror that always was, the Horror that is, the Horror that ever shall be. It is Verjigorm.

The words of Name-givers cannot describe this Horror's all-encompassing evil, but I will try to do so in the hope that some day the monster might be banished forever from our world. Perhaps the following story, which I heard often as a hatchling, may help you understand.

Long before the first dragon soared through the sky, the world was darkness, a never-ending moonless night that even the sun and stars could not penetrate. Thick, black clouds choked the sky and spawned cold, biting rains that scoured the barren land like a plague of hungry locusts. The seas and rivers were foul, bubbling cesspools teeming with plague and death.

This was the age of the Dark One. One thousand and seven eyes sprang from its head, so that it might watch forever its cursed kingdom. Its terrible ears never shut, so that it might always hear the gnashing of teeth and the wailing and moaning of all living things. From its mouth flowed countless foul poisons into the waters and the winds. Its decaying flesh gave birth to countless abominations--creeping, sightless many-legged things that crawled and slithered across the land; black-winged, cloven-hoofed creatures that swarmed in the storm-filled skies; powerful, many-toothed beasts that ruled the dark waters.

As the ages passed the Dark One grew bored with its foul minions, for they were mindless entities. And so it spawned others in its own image. Soon the children of the Dark One, the horoi, began to birth their own foul spawn into the world. Each tried to outdo the others by creating the foulest creature to impress the Dark One, and soon the horoi grew insanely jealous of one another. Then the Dark One's children began to attack one other[sic], directing their terrible spawn as a general commands troops against an enemy. Their vile blood filled the oceans, and their minions fed on the putrid corpses that littered the land. The Dark One rejoiced at the carnage and spawned new horoi to replace those devoured by their brothers.

Some time during the world's endless night, the Dark one bore a horoi that was not like the others. At first it seemed a little different from its vile brethren. But as time passed, the horoi slowly changed. First, it withdrew from the terrible battle that consumed all the others. It stretched its dark, webbed wings and soared into the sky. The grotesque minions of its brethren pursued it, clawing at its skin and pecking at its eyes, but it paid them no heed. It continued to climb higher and higher, until it passed the dark storm clouds and its tormentors could no longer follow it. It soared on the winds until it reached the other side of the world, a place the Dark One had not yet corrupted. Exhausted by its journey, it set down and fell into a deep, deep sleep.

For ages it slumbered, as the carnage and suffering continued unabated in the domain of the Dark One. Then one day a break appeared int he ever-present clouds overhead, letting in a stream of sunlight that warmed the horoi and wakened it. As it looked about, it noticed that its slimy, pockmarked, blackened skin had turned into gleaming white scales. The formless hulk of its body had been replaced with four strong legs, a slender tail and neck, and a pair of graceful wings, all connected to a stout and powerful middle. As the horoi gazed at itself in wonder, it realized that the air was silent-- free of the cries of pain and fear that filled the Dark One's domain. As it surveyed its surroundings, the horoi realized that it was alone. Nothing crawled underfoot or slithered through the seas or swarmed in the sky. For a moment, the horoi felt a great relief. Then the horoi closed its great eyes for a moment and felt something else. For the first time in its life, the horoi knew it was lonely.

As the thought entered its mind, a wonderful thing happened. Beneath its feet, it felt grass burst through the earth: then bushes and trees and entire forests. Suddenly, the sound of waves crashing against the shore reached its ears, and the horoi knew that an ocean lay over the horizon. Next came the sound of running rivers and waterfalls, then the sounds of animals in the forests. As the horoi surveyed what its loneliness had called forth, its heart grew full of something it had never know--joy. At that moment, nine large tears formed in its eyes and fell to the ground. At the spot where the first drop struck, a handsome winged creature resembling the horoi appeared. This created, it called Dragon. The second and third drops yielded creatures the horoi Named Elf and Human. The fourth and fifth drops created Obsidiman and T'skrang. The sixth and seventh formed Dwarf and Windling; and the eighth and ninth, Troll and Ork.

These new creatures traveled across the new land, swiftly producing other of their kind. Their voices were like music to the horoi's ears, and their settlements were like jewels set upon a giant tapestry. As the days passed the horoi taught its children all it knew. It taught them how to harvest food from the forest and rivers, how to sing and write and paint. And with great sadness, it taught them how to forge and wield the sword and shield. The weapons puzzled the horoi's inquisitive children, for they knew not war; but the horoi told them that one day a darkness would descend on them and they must be ready to fight.

Meanwhile, the Dark One's domain grew until its spawn reached the edge of the untouched lands. When the foul things saw the wonders that their transformed brother had wrought, they hurried back to their dark master and told it what they had seen. When the Dark One heard their news it cowed to destroy the heroi and its children, and fathered its minions together into a terrible army.

The Dark One's army filled the sky like a storm cloud and teemed across the untouched land like a giant shadow. From all sides the Dark One's minions attacked the horoi and its children, spewing venom and gnashing teeth, cutting, and burning and striking and killing all in their path. For seven days and nights the battle raged, as the horoi's children fought with sword and shield against the overwhelming foe. Finally, only the horoi and its nine firstborn children remained standing against the Dark One and its legion of abominations.

At that moment the horoi reared up on its hind legs, spread its wings and shouted in a voice that echoed like thunder across the plains, "I am Nightslayer, Mother of Beauty and Father of Good. Protector of All That is Light! I command you to leave this place! Be gone!"

As the horoi's children watched, a strange thing happened-- the land itself, the water rose up against the Dark One and its spawn. Terrified before a power greater than their own, the wretched creatures fled, flying higher and higher until they disappeared from view. The Dark One watched helplessly, shouting at its minions to remain and fight, but it could not stop them. Enraged, the Dark One turned toward the horoi.

'Ungrateful horoi, you know not what you do," the Dark One said. " But you will pay for your insolence. I, Verjigorm, will hunt your children for the rest of time. I will slay every last one of them, and my minions will feed on their pain and terror. But I will not give the mercy of death to your favorite--- The Dragon, the one you created in your image. The Dragon will know eternal pain. As you betrayed me, the children of the Dragon's line will betray you. I will corrupt them, twist their souls and make them my own. Then I will return to reign over all the world."

With that the Dark One fled after its minions, throwing an enormous ball of fire at Nightslayer as it did so. As the flowing orb approached, the horoi gathered its children under its wings. When the ball struck Nightslayer, it exploded like a thousand thunderclaps. The earth and sky rumbled, and a vast cloud filled the sky. After a time the great rumbling stopped and the sun shone once again. Nightslayer's children then gathered near the horoi's head, but the great creature had died. They were left alone to await the return of the Dark one called Verjigorm.

So one of the things I really liked about the project is point 1 of the privacy section of the Mechanics (Future).

Proactive not reactive; preventative not remedial: When creating new features, think about what data will need to be stored, and consider how harmful it might be if that data was to be leaked in the future. Is it possible to reduce the amount of data being stored to lower the potential harm? Can the data eventually be aggregated or anonymized so that we're only storing recent data instead of a full history?

I think a good first step would be to not have a public comment/submission history. Users should evaluate other users contributions based on the conversation the are having/reading, not past submissions.

This doesn't make you anonymous, but at least it can prevent nosy people from knowing too much. (I get there are valid reasons to want to find other posts by the same user, but I think individual privacy is more important). At least, if not enforced for everyone, this should be an option, making your profile not display your history to others.

Now, one of my biggest problems with reddit is that it doesn't make it easy for you to stay anonymous and also keep your content on the site.

Let me explain. I don't like people being able to see my submission/comment history, because I don't want to give the chance for people to identify me if I don't choose to do so personally. It's not about reddit knowing what I like or do (I mean, I use Google, they know everything I do), it's about individuals, about other users knowing things I'm not happy sharing with them for whatever reason.

There are only two options on reddit: deleting my content (using a script or whatever or going one by one) or deleting my account. This results in me deleting all my comments and submissions on reddit every few weeks.

Now, I would love to be able to leave most of what I post on reddit online, because sometimes I have really interesting conversations and I try to be detailed and clear and other people might find (some of) my posts useful. But I don't want anyone who knows my username or anyone who sees a comment of mine going through my history. There's too many crazy people. Also, I haven't suffered doxxing, but that's just not nice.

There are many reasons why someone could prefer to not be identifiable. Just to give some examples that come to mind: people might have an ideology that other users don't like/respect, people might post pictures of themselves (think fitness groups, for example), people might post in local groups revealing their location, people might look for counsel and talk about their personal problems, etc. Putting all of that together might make it easy to identify someone.

So, what I would like to propose is a way to leave my content online if I wish to and giving other people the option to read it in the future, without it being publicly tied to my username.

How could this be done? Well, I think users should be able to anonymize their participation in a thread individually and throughout the site. There could be an button (on every thread for thread only anonymization and on your profile for full site anonymization) that you tap and your username is replaced all through each thread with a randomly generated username (it'd be great if the username is consistent within the thread, so people reading would know its the same person).

These usernames should be words, ideally, not difficult to parse by humans. Of course this would generate a great number of usernames, but there are some solutions.

One could be using something like Google Docs uses when several anonymous viewers are watching a document. Each gets a name (RedFox, whatever) which is consistently used throughout the thread. The same username (RedFox) can then be reused in another thread for any other anonymous user. (So RedFox wouldn't be referring to the same person in different threads, but to two random, anonymized persons).

I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to generate these (similarly to how reddit gives you suggestions to new usernames when you open an account).

Also, in order to avoid the admins having to reserve many usernames in advance, these usernames could have a special mark (like *RedFox or °RedFox, or ~RedFox~, for example). This way, a new user can register any available name without interfering with these anonymous usernames. A thread could have some non-anonymized user called RedFox and an anonymized user called °RedFox (or whatever mark is used).

In any case, the user should be able to access all of their submissions and comments on their profile even after anonymizing, being able to edit or delete them if they wish to.

Ok, I think that's it, I hope I was clear. I'm also not gonna be able to log in again until tomorrow. So please, go ahead and discuss and tell me what you think and I'll come back when I can.

EDIT: User karma should not be public either. I can make an argument for it tomorrow if needed or we can discus it on another thread.

Hello,

I saw in another thread being mentioned that there is no use for API for real users other than bots. So wanted to voice some real API uses that I would be interested in:

1. When I post a new blog post, if I find it worthy of sharing here, it would be nice to mirror the comments I get here back on my blog post. I can imagine using API to fetch all the comments from a tildes thread, including the hierarchy relationship. The API would return a JSON with Markdown and/or HTML like the XML that Disqus exports (but JSON). When people want to comment on that post, they can come to tildes to do so, or if they don't want to create an account here, or if they don't have an invite, they can comment via other means that I have (Webmentions, Twitter, email).
2. Second use is make something like hnrss possible.

Hi there!

First things first, I just want to say thank you for the invite, but more importantly, thank you for taking the time to create this platform. I, as I imagine most people on here, have a love-hate relationship with reddit. Clearly the site has had a tremendous impact, in many ways positive, but with many things structurally and fundamentally holding it back. I've been a subscriber to /r/RedditAlternatives/ for a while, and there have been very few sites that have compelled me to learn more and actively take part in them, and yours is of course one of them. I just got done reading all of the articles on your docs page and was very pleased - "finally", I thought, someone who's taken into account all of the articles on the internet that have been written about designing and building communities, from both a social and technical perspective, and put it into practice. You've addressed many issues that are often ignored by the platforms themselves and done it in a brilliant way so as to ensure that our voices are heard first and foremost, and I think that's just awesome.

Okay, now that all the praise is out of the way... :P

I did notice something that was not addressed in the docs pages, so I'll be blunt and simply ask: how do you plan to address the filter bubble, or rather, do you plan to address it at all? Maximizing user freedom regarding which communities you want to see content from seems obvious, but that inevitably ends up with users being stuck in their own bubble. reddit already has an infamous reputation of being an echo chamber, and gives users tools to make it an even bigger echo chamber. A long time ago, there was a commonly held belief that the internet would bring us closer together because it would force us to expand our worldviews and interact with people as people, not knowing where they're from or who they are (the "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" saying about anonymity). As reddit moves more and more toward becoming a social network like Facebook and less like the pseudonymous and anonymous internet discussion forums of old, this problem has only gotten worse, to the point of having real-world political and social consequences (especially with the increasing deluge of so-called "fake news"). I'd really like to hear your take on it.

I do have other concerns, namely: scalability, and the stance on free speech. The donation model has worked well for Wikipedia, but, well, they're Wikipedia. They're an incredibly important resource and people have clearly valued their resource so as to have sustained their model, mass donation drives with Jimbo Wales' face plastered all over the site notwithstanding. If tildes becomes the Wikipedia of internet discussion platforms, I am sure many people will find it valuable enough to donate to, though I am still not sold on how sustainable it really is.

The stance on free speech in the announcement blog post also has me concerned. As you mentioned, it is a difficult topic; that much is clear. I am mostly just curious as to where the lines are drawn in regards to how "threats, harassment, and hate speech" are defined. With an absolutist position like "we are 100% pro-free speech", things are very clear and simple, whereas any other position, I believe, comes down to the whim of the moderators/admins. Certainly most people will generally follow the golden rule and abide by basic common sense and decency (i.e. "don't be a dick"), but when discussions get heated I think it's important to not have a reasonable fear that you're going to get permabanned because you hurt someone's feelings (just as an example).

All these issues aside, I am very excited about the development of tildes and hope you & the community can come up with excellent technical and social solutions to these difficult problems.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

(p.s. apologies for not posting this in the daily discussion topic, thought it warranted its own topic)

edit: formatting

A bright light illuminated my workshop suddenly, causing me to drop my tools on the table. A figure appeared at the opposite side of the small office, encased within a surreal shadow in the middle of the blinding light. Slowly the light faded, as I made out the visitor. I was looking at myself.

"Wh-what are you- what am I...?" I stumbled, unsure if I could even blink anymore.

"I'm you from the future," the other me said. He appeared slightly older than I remembered from my mirror that morning.

"So it works?" I asked, wondering how else I would be there.

"Yes, it works," he answered, obviously wondering why I would ask such a thing.

"But why are you here?" I asked, just noticing I wasn't as happy as one would expect from meeting themselves. Not me, I was dazed but ecstatic. The other me seemed like he had been crying. "Are you ok?" I asked myself.

His eyes widened, but then quickly relaxed. "It's fine, but I just came to the wrong time."

"You didn't mean to meet me here?"

"No, this is too late." His voice became cold. "My work can still be recovered if I do it here."

"Do what here?" I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.

The other me stared, as he pulled out a handheld device, much smaller than my phone. After pressing some buttons on the screen, the bright light returned, enveloping him again until he quickly disappeared from the room. I'm not sure why, but I ran into the area of his departure before the light faded. I panicked when I realized I didn’t know where or when I was going, but my thoughts were interrupted when the light faded and everything went black.

I came to what seemed like hours later to find myself in my office, but I wasn't alone. The other me- or some other other me was lying on the ground by the table, gasping for air.

"What happened?" I asked running to my counterpart’s side frantically. "Did... I do this to you?"

"It's all wrong," he said, clutching his chest. Blood trailed around him, seeping through his closed fist. "None of this makes sense."

Before I could speak again, I noticed something odd. He didn't look younger than me. He was older. "You're the me that I just met, aren't you?"

"Yes," he started, spitting up some blood. "I pulled out my knife, but he grabbed it out of my hand and stabbed me before I could get to him."

"But why?" I yelled, desperate to understand why I would attempt to kill myself.

"You try to fix one thing," he trailed off, his eyes losing focus. He became still and my mind turned into override.

I had watched myself die. I ended up going back in time to kill myself, but my past self killed me instead. That was my future. Why would I do that? Was I still going to do it, knowing what I knew? If I didn’t, how was I in still in the past?

"Don't even try it," a voice called behind me. "I don't know why you guys came back, but I'm not letting you kill me."

I turned around to see a younger version of myself standing in the doorway, wielding a bloody knife in one hand and the handheld device in the other. Before I could respond, he pushed a button and light filled the room once again. A few moments later, I was alone.

It was a time before I had even started working on time travel. My only way back disappeared with my past self, which didn’t even seem to make sense. How could he become me if he wasn’t even there anymore? Would I become me? My head hurt.

“Hello,” another voice called into the room. It was female, so I immediately knew it wasn’t me again. I turned toward the door to find the solution to one of my lingering questions.

“Gwen,” I answered, walking toward her with my hand extended. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“How did you know my name?” she asked, shaking my hand with a confused look on her face.

Smooth move. I didn’t know her name the first time this happened. But at least it revealed the date. This was the day I met the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. “I saw your name on the sign-in sheet,” I answered. “You must be the new girl. I’m Chris. Chris Michael.”

I began to lead her into my office. “Let me show you around. This is my off-”

What was I doing? There was a dead body on the floor by my worktable. Not just any dead body, my dead body.

“On second thought, my office is a mess,” I sputtered. I turned Gwen toward the hall. “Why don’t you head over to the break room around the corner and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee? Just give me a few minutes.”

“Sure,” she smiled. She began walking away, but stopped momentarily and shot me a wink. “You’re an interesting guy, Chris.”

As Gwen walked down the hall, I darted back into the room. My future death was still where I left it. Police weren’t an option, what would I tell them? An older version of me was killed by a younger version of me? The only option was to dispose of the evidence. Trying to think back to old gangster movies, I heard footsteps by the door.

“Uh, don’t come in here!” I yelled. “There’s a, uh-” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Two men stood in the doorway. I was looking at two identical versions of myself.

“Hey, Chris,” the one on the left said. “Sorry about earlier. I didn’t know you weren’t here to kill me too.”

“So you’re the me from this time, right?” I asked Lefty. “Who is this then?”

“Hi Chris,” the one on the right said. “I’m him, but after he stopped me from saving our future self there“

“But you didn’t-” I turned to the left. “You killed him.”

“I did,” said Lefty. “Pay attention, because this will get even more complicated. After killing future us, I had to know why he came back, so I went to the future. You know what I found? Future you. Stranded, you had taken my place, fell in love with Gwen, and never invented time travel.”

My head hurt again.

“There was no way to know what happened,” interjected Righty, “because time was overwritten. So the original timeline had to be restored.”

“How?” I asked no one in particular.

“I went back to before our future self met me.” I’m not sure who said that, I was too busy clutching my head. “I took care of him and then sent you back to your proper time before you woke up. Everything continued normally and I followed the timeline to figure out what originally happened.”

“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this part,” I said.

“It’s all about Gwen,” said Lefty. “As you know, she eventually broke up with you because you were too dedicated to your work. Apparently you fixed that mistake when you had another chance back here.”

“Gwen,” I whispered. “She’s waiting for me in the break room.”

“We know,” said Righty.

“So where did you come from then?” I asked Righty.

“I had to undo what I did,” answered Lefty. “With you back in your time, you finish inventing time travel, but things don’t end well with Gwen.”

“I already know that,” I sighed. “She broke up with me before. This is old news to me.”

“But,” started Lefty, “with the addition of time travel, you become obsessed with fixing things. It gets a little more complicated here. You basically go back in time and try to make it work with her over and over, but it never ends well. Eventually, you decide you have to go back to the beginning and… start all over.”

“By killing you and taking your place?”

“Exactly. My place.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Lefty, who was giving me an unnerving stare.

“What about me?” I asked “And Righty?”

“Righty…? Oh, because I’m standing on your right. He wants us to leave.”

“You two take the time machine,” said Lefty. “Go live with the dinosaurs for all I care, just stay away.”

Righty patted me on the back and raised his eyebrows in an approving nod. Lefty handed him the handheld device, which looked different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there seemed to be more buttons or something. Righty pushed one of them, but something was wrong. The expected light was there, but it was red. As Righty began to fade, a screeching sound emanated from the epicenter as he let out a horrendous scream.

“What did you do?” I yelled jumping into the hallway where Lefty had previously moved. His eyes widened as he pulled a familiar knife from his pocket.

“I can’t have you coming back and messing with my life!” he shrieked, swinging the knife in my direction. “I’ve already killed two of you, there’s no way you’re getting away!”

I jumped back into the room as the red light cleared, leaving behind a charred mark on the floor. Lefty followed me, still swinging. “Hey, what’s that?” I yelled, pointing behind him. He turned his head to find nothing, but before he could turn back, my fist met his chin. After pulling the knife from his hand I quickly buried it into his chest. As he fell to the ground, I could hear footsteps coming down the hall.

“Chris?” Gwen called.

I ran out of the room and slammed the door behind me to find Gwen holding two cups of coffee. “Hi, Gwen,” I said hysterically. She gave an odd look but then laughed, handing me one of the cups.

“I figured since you were so busy, I’d buy you the coffee this time. Would you like show me your office now?”

I looked at my closed door and then back at Gwen. “No, I still have some more cleaning to do. I have a new research project I need to prepare. But for now, how about we go enjoy these coffees in the break room?”

A couple of us were chatting about recent events and figured it would be a good idea to rattle off some of the things that go without saying. We've already had two ex-mods who clearly needed them said. /shrug

• 1. CHILL. That should be your top priority at all times. This is the internet, it is not serious business. Don't let some dipshit issue on reddit that's going to vanish off of the page in three hours bother you, life's too short for that shit.
• 2. Keep mod chat and this backroom confidential. Don't share this stuff with the rest of reddit. If you do, that shows you can't be trusted and we pretty much gotta axe you at that point. Even if you're just sharing petty bullshit, it's a trust issue, the content doesn't even matter.
• 3. This goes triple for any other parts of reddit that have privileged access, such as /r/defaultmods. That not only makes us not trust you, it makes our mod team look like chumps to the rest of reddit.
• 4. When in doubt about something, ask! Ain't nobody going to fault you for questions or because you're just learning the ropes. We weren't born knowing this shit so ask away.
• 5. Be cool when dealing with other moderators. We're trying to weed this garden together, tempers may flare, if someone is having a bad day don't take them too seriously either.
• 6. If there's a problem with a specific user and yourself, hand that shit off to another moderator to deal with, one who hasn't got anything invested in that mess. It makes it easier to be impartial.
• 7. No special treatment. Mods gotta stick to their own rules, otherwise nobody is going to take any rules seriously. If there's something about the rules that's bugging you, post here and let's talk it over, and maybe change that rule for the better.
• 8. Pay some attention to what the other mods say. Everyone's opinion is supposed to count, this isn't meant to be just a team of button clicking robots. Mods here all get a say in how things are run.
• 9. No powertripping, period. That's just immature, you can do better. This is a stewardship, not ownership. Reddit owns this place, not us, and it's nothing without the admins that pay the bills and the users who come here to share music. Any credit that could be claimed by anyone in this place is spread far too thinly to justify a holier-than-thou attitude. If anyone gets to claim a boss attitude, it's radd.it - and he stepped down to avoid conflicts of interest. :P
• 10. If despite your best efforts some shit does go down - especially if it's a conflict between mods - talk to a mod who's been here a year or more such as myself, astarkey12, multi-mod, boredop, or g_yore. Don't let things get to the point where someone has to leave the team before addressing concerns. When in doubt, sleep on it.
• 11. Do not go begging for subreddit moderation invites from other members of our mod team, and do not be one of these crazy people collecting subreddit mod bits like they are some kind of new age pokemon. The more subs you mod, the less time you have to spend moderating here. We're not interested in part-timers. Having a couple other subs you moderate is fine, but not like 70 or 300!

(0) Background

This is coming off a discussion in today's thread on forming new groups around whether or not to add a group for politics. I expressed there that, given my moderator experience on /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, I opposed making such a group given how Tildes currently stands.

(1) Political discussion is nearly always garbage.

I don't think anyone needs reminding of this, but political discussion almost uniformly fails to achieve anything positive in almost any social media platform. Your uncle's facebook rants? Garbage. Political sniping on Twitter? Garbage. The endless repetitive point scoring and outrage fest on most political subreddits? Garbage.

So, we have to ask, why is this content garbage?

(2) People want to be heard, but nobody wants to hear.

I do not think political discussion is garbage because of bad faith trolling. That certainly exists and does not help, but usually it's not hard to ID the trolls, and excepting egregious stuff like doxxing or threats, to ignore obvious bad faith absurdity.

The much bigger issue is that what people want to do is to be heard and validated in their political views. This is not merely that they want to proselytize or to win converts, but that they're seeking validation and a sense of rightness or righteousness in their statements.

This desire is toxic to a neutral forum, because invariably on any divisive issue, you will not merely be heard and validated, but will be challenged and denigrated. Indeed, often the challenges and denigrations themselves are the same performance in reverse. Members of each team trying to dunk on the other and earn validation for how hard they owned the other side.

(3) To overcome this, a successful political forum must have a purpose other than mere commentary.

On /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, we have been able to build forums which have large amounts of productive and non-hostile political discussion. The key to this is that neither forum allows for being heard, or general discussion, as its reason for being.

On /r/ChangeMyView we limit posts to views people genuinely hold, and are open to changing (CMV rule B). This requires that OPs cannot come to troll or soapbox. It is by far the most frequently used rule of ours in terms of removing submissions, almost always on the soapboxing side.

On /r/NeutralPolitics, we limit posts to neutrally framed questions about political subjects, which can be answered with facts. By doing this, we narrow the scope of discussion away from soliciting feelings (which is an invitation to people posting just to be heard) and towards bringing forth factual information, where people might learn something.

I don't know what purpose a political forum on Tildes might have, but to succeed it must have a clear purpose, and that purpose must be one which excludes people posting merely to be heard.

(4) In addition to a purpose beyond being heard, a political forum must have extreme civility rules.

Both CMV and NP have extremely similar rules in this regard, and they are absolutely crucial to the success of the fora.

In general, any comment or post which in any way denigrates another user should be removed. This is an extremely broad civility rule that is well past what most subreddits do. Calling another user a liar, or accusing them of bad faith posting is banned on both CMV and NP for example, even when such accusations are true.

The prohibition on what even may be seen as justified rudeness is I think the key to a civility rule. It immediately removes from the moderation process any discretion around the substance of the politics, and makes it a neutral rule which can be applied evenly to all parties.

It is also necessary because nothing productive ever happens after bad faith is accused. Almost uniformly, once someone is rude, if there is a response back to them, the response will be rude in kind, usually more severely. People love to try to get the last word in, and a clear, objective rule banning "they started it" spats is also an important component. CMV's wiki has a really good overview of how we enforce this rule there.

(5) Conclusion/TL;DR

I don't know exactly what political content should exist on Tildes. I do know that a general politics group will not work, and that rather a politics channel should be focused on a discrete purpose other than just discussion.

I would almost certainly ban link posts from any politics group, since inherently they're going to act as just headlines for people to pontificate on, without guiding discussion towards a particular goal. I would also obviously enforce civility, and have much stricter moderation of it than I might on a non-politics forum.

Edited for formatting