Hi,

How often are satellite images taken? Why are more periodic images takes with less resolution (is it a different process?)

for example https://zoom.earth takes every 12 hours, but on the most frequent ones i am not able to zoom much (before it switch to older ones)

This was the first expedition of the Heroic Age, organized by Adrian de Gerlache, and funded by King Leopold's image problems. de Gerlache was a restless man of thirty, his life oscillating between breathtaking daring and breathtaking mundanity --- a man of the Belgian Navy, working on the fishery protection detail, then a seaman on an English vessel, failing to round Cape Horn and ending up on a scrapyard in Montevideo; an officer on a ferry between the prosaic Ostend and the boring Dover; then writing a flurry of letters, petitioning for a chance to go to Africa with Stanley, to the Arctic with Nordenskiöld, to anywhere with the Royal Geographic Society of Britain. Finally, a plea to the Geographic Society of his native land drew flame, a ship was purchased (MV Belgica), and funding was secured from the king. de Gerlache's crew included more than just Belgians; among others, the Norwegian 25-year-old first mate Roald Amundsen, destined for later fame, and the 26-year-old Pole Henryk Arctowski, a later authority on meteorology, who was much teased for his overappropriate name.

Belgica sailed south by the way of South America, where their reception was warm, the local scientists were enthused, all seemed well.

In truth, they were sailing into a world they knew very little of, into an implacably hostile world, and they were ill equipped for it. They reached Graham Land --- the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula --- in the January of 1898, skirting west between the peninsula and the islands flanking it --- not knowing if what they took for the farthest tip of the continent was just another archipelago, kitted together with glaciers and pack ice. The same month a sailor was washed overboard and lost.

In February they crossed the Antarctic Circle --- they sailed down the western side of the Peninsula, mapping and observing the flora and the fauna and for the lack of them, the stars and the moon. They tried to find a peninsula-breaching passage to the east side, the Weddell Sea, for their return --- and on the 28th of February, 1898, towards the end of the Antarctic summer, they got stuck in ice.

Some say this was an accident; some say this was on purpose: a ploy of de Gerlache or (say) the first mate Amundsen, to gain additional glory or experience.

If it was done on purpose, it nearly killed them all.

They would be stuck for over ten months, including two months of total darkness --- when Belgium sees the middle of summer, the Antarctic sinks to polar night.

They were unprepared: they piled on all their clothing, and it still wasn't enough to shelter them outside the ship. They had nothing to do: there was nothing but cold, darkness and death outside the ship; inside, the same hateful faces, the same ``three books and four issues of a magazine, a Bible and the mandolin that Amundsen tossed onto the ice by mid-March''. They did not have enough food: it was necessary to supplement it, but the choices were low. An officer by the name of Danco fell ill and died in June, raving that the others should promise to not eat him. A Belgian sailor went mad and walked out, shouting he was going to return to Belgium by foot --- he was not seen again, though several others claimed, for months, to hear him shouting outside, inviting them to join him. One more sailor did.

There weren't breaks in the ice to allow fishing; the nearest open water was (they thought) tens of miles away.

They had prepared, as best as they could, before all the horrors of the winter set in. In February, when the ship was still sailing, they had killed dozens of penguins, and harvested their meat for eating, storing it in the cold of the ship's open deck.

The meat might have been better fresh, but de Gerlache tasted it, and ordered the cook to not serve a gram of the disgusting slop to anyone. He didn't know the superstitious cook had adulterated the meat with soap and sand, spurred to this deception by the dream he had had of the birds talking like men, no doubt disturbed by how they already walked like men.

By midwinter, the men were ill of scurvy --- the lack of vitamin C, which first manifests as lassitude, weakness and soreness of limbs, and then goes to bleeding gums, falling teeth and other terrifyingly general symptoms. What's worse, at the time ``vitamin'' was an uninvented word; the two easy sources of it, vegetables and fresh meat, were not widely understood. de Gerlache was seriously ill by this point, writing his will, staring out his frost-encrusted window for hours at a time, willing the mountains of ice to move, at times twitching as if they did, and then shaking his head, knowing better.

Georges Lecointe, the ship's captain, was similarly ill; on his orders, the penguin meat had been dumped off the ship, and only its encasement in ice had kept it from being thrown in the waters. Lecointe stalked the ship, asking the crew strange questions --- later accounts have said he suspected some had been substituted with treasonous penguins, intent on sabotage, but this is likely nothing but malign rumors.

With de Gerlache and Lecointe so distracted, the first mate Roald Amundsen and the ship's doctor, Frederick Cook, acted. Cook had been with Peary in the Arctic,(footnote) and so knew fresh meat was the key against scurvy --- there weren't too many vegetables to be found in the Arctic --- so they walked round the ship, cracking piles of snow to find the piles and bundles of penguin meat.

(footnote: Indeed, Cook had claimed to have reached the North Pole with Peary (1909) and by himself (1908); neither claim stood against the scrutiny of outsiders. To read Cook's account of the Belgian Expedition is to come away thinking Amundsen hardly did anything; this is a constant pattern in Cook's accounts of his life and supposed deeds.)

This meat was of course no longer fresh --- it had been frozen for months. But it was good enough for a while.

With the cook now abandoning superstition in the face of survival, the meat was cooked and proved if not tasty, then at least edible. When it was served to de Gerlache, he did not ask what it was; when it was served to Lecointe, he said ``Is this penguin?'', and on being said so, cried out, made the sign of the Cross, muttered a few confused words on the state of his soul, and ate.

Thus empowered and restored, the crew organized a hunting party, with de Gerlache taking the lead. They marched thirty terrifying miles over the hills and valleys of creaking midwinter ice, in full darkness, the sun gone for weeks (and to be gone for still more weeks), until they found the edge of open water, and a small colony of penguins.

They fell among the birds with rifles, pistols, swords, cudgels, nets, gloved fists. In a fury of survival and hunger they slaughtered the birds, clubbing and striking them one after another, their beards stiff with frozen drool. The snow acquired a crimson hue; their cries were as harsh, bestial and varied as those of the doomed birds.

Adrien de Gerlache, the man of ups and downs, the noble-featured and mild-mannered Belgian officer, was the first among them, a demon with a saber and a pistol, his face and chest caked with diamonds of red frozen blood and penguin gore.

After the massacre was done, they tied the dead birds together into lines, fifteen to each, and then dragged, through the moaning winds of the unceasing darkness, them back to the ship.

de Gerlache himself fainted after the killing; the blood on his face and down it was from a copious nosebleed occasioned by the harsh environment and the monstrous occasion. Before falling down --- to be dragged back to the ship, just like his prey --- he raised his saber at the even deeper blackness of the open waters, and cried: ``Come, beast! We killed these --- we will kill you too! No matter how big --- we will kill mountains!''

The expedition lived on penguin meat and their official provisions for the rest of the winter. Boredom and the stresses of the alien environment continued to haunt them, and many felt guilty for their slaughter of the penguins --- or rather, haunted by it. Many mention in their memoirs the odd noiselessness of the battle, the utter surrender of the enemy, the terrible frenzy that overcame the men, as they ran from bird to bird, striking them down, crippling, stopping, slashing and crushing, then finally eliciting the discordant caws and croaks and cries the birds made --- the way they killed so many, and the way the rest slipped, like shadows, into the waters without as much as a ripple. One memoir, no doubt inspired by de Gerlache's ravings, mentions seeing a vast shape out in the water, a black iceberg that slipped underwater as the last bird quorked its last. But most of the memoir-writers wrote nothing of this all, choosing to imply a much more sanitized narrative of fresh meat.

Eventually spring came; the season of autumn in the northern world.

By January 1899 the ship was still stuck.

The ice was over two meters thick. There was open water, half a mile away, but it was not getting any closer --- and January was the height of Antarctic summer, meaning the halfway point!

Desperate to escape another winter in the ice --- and another war in search of meat --- they took to the ship's tools, and laid dynamite on the ice with drills and axes. The first explosions but warped the ice, and nearly crushed the ship's hull. The men attacked the ice with mattocks and hammers; some of the tools broke, their frozen nature no match for the native ice. A hammer's head famously shattered on the first blow, and a flying iron shard cut a line in Amundsen's cheek.

de Gerlache fell into a deep depression, and retreated to his cabin; around this time he covered its window with bootblack, and kept it so closed for the remainder of the expedition, referring to the view as ``the black mountain''.

In the meanwhile, Amundsen took control of the crew, and laid explosives right in front of the ship's keel. The blast rocked the ship and had the incensed captain Lecointe nearly shoot the first mate; but it had made for open water at the front, and with the ship's weight and the endless application of manual tools, the crew was ever so slowly able to move the ship forward. After two weeks of nonstop day-and-night work, they were in open water, the ice closing after them as if nothing had ever been there, and nothing had passed through.

It took them another month --- the last half of February and the first of March --- to navigate another six miles of the iceberg- and ice floe-choked water. By then the summer was over; the floes were knitting together into the impassable dead plateau of lengthy winter. But by the 14th of March, they were out of the ice, onto open water, and they immediately headed north, away.

The Belgian Expedition reached 71 degrees 30 seconds south. One degree of longitude is approximately 69 miles, and as the Pole is full 90 degrees south, the Pole was still some 1280 miles away.

Despite its name, the Belgian Expedition was the most multinational and, in a way, least greedy of the expeditions of the Heroic Age. Those that followed de Gerlache were much more conscious of the double glory they sought --- not just for themselves, but for their country.

As for de Gerlache, he did not return to the Antarctic. He joined Charcot's 1903 expedition, but left before it reached the Antarctic; he cited quarrels within the expedition, and others let understand he had suffered a major breakdown at seeing something vast and dark out in the ocean.

So lately I've been working on a chatty, digressive pseudo-non-fiction book that's 80% true facts about Antarctica, suggestively arranged, 15% amazingly truth-like lies about Antarctica, and couched in those two, 5% increasingly loopy lies about the sleeping penguin-faced menace that's waking up from beneath the Antarctic ice, any day now, because we made forbidden pacts with the quorking, cawing, tux-clad guardians of the Last Continent.

Ahem yeah high-quality discussion. What's the strangest creative project you've stumbled into, or thought of?

Hi,

for example, on reddit the prefered image hosting is imgur (at least, most of the non reddit hosted images are hosted on imgur).
What is the prefered hosting here?
If not yet, will we have a hosting for tildes(so that users can send images directly to tildes)?

I mainly use my keyboard to navigate around in Firefox so decided to edit UserChrome.css to create a custom, ultra-minimalist "one line" UI for myself and also maximize my screen real-estate by removing the window Titlebar and Tab Bar (using Tree Tabs sidebar extension instead). I also dislike how cluttered the Firefox interface is with unneeded options scattered everywhere, and how much redundancy there is with many options showing up in multiple places for no good reason, so I removed most of that as well. Here is the results:

Main UI (Navigation and "Hamburger" toolbar buttons removed)
Tree Tabs sidebar & More Tools both open
"Find in page" moved to the top, with Menu bar also toggled on
New Tab Page (my Bookmark Toolbar auto-unhides itself only on this page)
My Home Page, set to the FF Library "popout" page (chrome://browser/content/places/places.xul)

Context Menus (with lots of redundant and unused options removed):
Address bar dropdown
Page context menu
Image context menu
Link context menu

If anyone is interested in trying it out themselves, here is the UserChrome.css (which needs to go in the /chrome directory of your Firefox profile).

And if enough people are interested in learning Firefox UserChrome.css customization using the Browser Toolbox with remote debugging, I can always write up a tutorial at some point. There are some decent resources already available over at userchrome.org and reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ too.

To clarify I'm not incompetent at computers, I'm sure people don't tend to install Linux if they aren't familiar with technology in a decent capacity. But for instance I can't code, can't operate the command line short of copying and pasting command, and don't really know what I'm doing with the technical aspect other than following online guides. I have used windows all my life. I'm Linux illiterate for lack of a better description.

I decided I wanted some form of USB bootable computer, i'm familiar with chrome books, enjoy the light weight OS, and am bed bound to the google ecosystem so I when I saw how you could plug in a USB and have the computer boot into Chrome OS running off the USB I thought that sounded perfect. But during my research of discovery I found that Linux seemed like a very good alternative, I had always had it in my head that it was very technical and finicky system where to do a simple google search you had to code in half a dozen lines into the control terminal in some bizarre 2018 text adventure to use the web, I do exaggerate of course but the image I had conjured up over the years was of a very non-user friendly experience and a system made for those running technical aspects such as web servers and system management.

I decided you can't knock it to you try it and besides turns out you can't get chrome OS on a 32GB USB it has to be 8GB or 16GB apparently. So I installed Ubuntu on my USB, no clue if this is some snooty distro, or a version of Linux that's mocked in the community, or the perfect distro but after minimal research it seemed the most popular and well received version to put it on a USB and booted into it.

Instantly all my preconceived notions we're erased. It's clean, modern, simple, light weight, and easy to use with a very intuitive and familiar UI. It's pretty much a more open and degooglified (That's a nice word) version of Chrome OS. Since Firefox Quantum was released I emigrated over to try break some ties with google for privacy reasons like it's some pervy conjoined twin of mine, I know it's not good for me, I don't want it there but I can't get rid of it without harming me.

It's got a simple UI that's familiar to windows albeit without all the bloatware and ads spread everywhere, it doesn't track you like window does (that's as far as I'm aware it did ask to collect anonymised telemetry data which I opted out of). With windows I'm so used to having to go through 3 different pop up windows to change a setting that in Ubuntu it feels like I'm missing features although I'm yet to find one that's not there. The best bit about Linux, is if theirs a setting you want to change and can't find, than someone online has wrote a guide giving you a command line code to copy paste into the terminal to fix it.

Although to me it feels more on par with Chrome OS than Windows as a bare bones OS with simple apps and a web browser to use the internet with, in this regard Linux wins easy, way more open, no profit based motivation, and more accessible allowing itself to be used anywhere.

All though that comparison holds up for the normal user and if you are someone who just browses the web and uses apps like Spotify than Linux is amazing it's not complex or difficult, truly wonderful.

What makes Linux even better is the fact it's not a fair comparison, sure to me it's like Chrome OS due to the simple purposes I use it for but what's truly great is all that nerdy technical stuff I thought Linux was for you can do, if you are hosting a web server than linux gives you a free platform to do it, it feels like you are directly modding the PCB of the computer it's that open.

In retrospect to typing all that I feel I've just blurted out a generic description of Linux and for those that use it I'm sure they just think I was naive, but this is more aimed at the average user, Linux, or at least Ubuntu, is great, it's: simple, easy, fresh, clean, open, modern, intuitive, versatile, multi-purpose, and free. It's not some difficult to use system, it's alarmingly simple, but infinitely useful

It's easy to learn and difficult to master.

We're obviously being denied the benefits of so called advances in algorithmic search, as evidenced by the poor showing of Google Itself in unusual searches. For example, if you search images for "runners wearing green hats -shamrock -st. -patrick" Guess how many runners wearing green hats you get?

So search is hard? I think it's more likely that Google and everyone else is more interested in selling you a hat than helping you find a picture of a runner in a green hat.

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.

(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.)

I'm wondering if others are seeing as many "broken" thumbnail(favicon) images to the left of externally linked posts? I'm not sure if it's simply because my browser needs to have visited a site before it will show me the website's default favicon or something else? For example please see below:

Favicon missing

Apologies if this has already been asked/addressed.

Edit: I just tested visiting the site linked and then reloading Tildes and it doesn't update so I assume it's probably on the external site's "end".

I'm a bit behind the news cycle, but I saw the first images of the families being separated on the news last night. I'm aghast. I'm just so utterly confused. Not addressing the issue of immigration or even the splitting up of families...

We don't fucking lock people in cages.

(Sidepoint: I know prisons exist, but this is a very different situation.)

For our first photo challenge, any equipment goes! Please participate regardless of skill level or experience. :) Be it an old Polaroid, a point and click, a phone cam, or a professional kit, capture those photons and post them here!

Our subject this week: between three to 10 images exploring a pastime of yours. For example:

Reading? Pics of stacks of books, libraries, e-readers, pages of text, people absorbed in the printed word...

Running? Your shoes! Legs blurring by, your favorite route scenery, your muscle rub cream, brand of sock you like...

As long as you can connect it in some way to your activity, it's fair game. Let's clean our lenses and get going!

Hi folks,

I've seen a few posts and comments discussing "what is tildes.net all about?" or even "what does Tildes want to be about?" and I thought I'd throw in a related topic I've been thinking about recently. I am interested in the medium of communication itself, in addition to the goals and general philosophy of Tildes.

To start, the question of "what makes Tildes different from Reddit?" is interesting. One concern about Reddit is the huge proportion of either low-quality posts or attention-chasing memes. And a lot of Tildes users seem to be asking why that is the case; and whether a site like Tildes can be different.

Some say that Reddit is a victim of the profit cycle. As a commercial entity, Reddit must aim to bring in as many users as possible, thereby increasing advertisement revenue. And lowering the bar to new user entry means that you get more and more people who aren't really concerned with making thoughtful, high-value contributions to the discussions.

And there's certainly some truth to that. So by this model, Tildes should be different. It is non-commercial, not profit-driven, and it has mechanisms in place (and in development) that are specifically designed to weed out low-value contributions/contributors.

But still, even at this early stage, when the userbase is small and has been more selectively accumulated, some users are expressing concern that Tildes is showing signs of becoming just another Reddit. True or not -- I don't know.

Beyond the profit goal, another dimension for analysis is the medium itself. "Medium", as in the tools of communication; as in radio vs. print vs. television vs. web forum, etc. In 1985, Neil Postman wrote an interesting book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death" that reiterated Marshall McLuhan's idea that messages are partly shaped (and constrained) by the medium over which they are transmitted. And by extension, some media are better at communicating some types of ideas than others.

Postman was writing in 1985 when television was the dominant medium. He argued that the image-oriented medium of television was best suited for entertainment rather than rational argument or intellectual discourse. And thus the use of television (particularly commercial television) as a medium drifts away from thoughtful, intellectual engagement of the consumer, and toward gripping, decontextualized video clips that imprint ideas on the viewer and keep them coming back for more.

Television is just not as good as print media for communicating deep, complicated ideas that the consumer can engage with. (This isn't to say tv can't do it, but it's just not as good at it.)

So what about web forums like Reddit and Tildes? This is what I've been thinking a lot about recently, and I wonder what other Tildes users think about it.

Web forums are different than television for sure, in that they are mostly text-based, and users can interact with them by both posting text and responding to what others have posted.

But web forums are different from ye olde fashioned books too, in the sense that web forums seem to eschew longer, more highly-structured arguments. (Speaking of that, I hope this post isn't too long!) There seems to be a "king of the mountain" syndrome in web forums, in which posters vie for attention, while watching as posts rise to the top and are quickly replaced by newer, catchier posts.

Is this the fundamental dynamics or metaphysics of web forums? --the rapid turnover of attention-seeking, short posts?

If so, will Tildes get pulled down into that same whirlpool?

I don't think it has to be that way, but I believe it is a strong warning that we have to think hard about how the structure of the medium itself channels the type of content we will see here.

--
Stepping back further in Postman's argument is his deep concern about the effect of the dominant medium on popular discourse in a society.

When mainstream media is reduced to commercial jingles and quick, entertaining memes, the very foundation of liberal democratic society is at risk. People become uninformed about the important issues of the day, and become disengaged from the democratic process. As that disengagement increases, special interest groups (read: corporate lobbyists) fill the void of providing direction to governing bodies. Citizens then become more disillusioned and even more disengaged. This is a well-documented phenomena called "the death spiral of democracy", and it scares the shit out of me.

When I first read Deimos' "Announcing Tildes" blog post, I saw a motivating philosophy that I feel is one of the most important issues of our time. We don't live in a perfect world right now, but we're in a world that appears to be on the edge of tragic yet avoidable decline; a world in which the values I assume many Tildes users would like to promote are being paved over by entities that only value profit.

I think that Tildes can be really, really important, and it needs the user base to deeply engage in the analysis of what will make it work. What is it about the web forum as "medium" that shapes the content we are exposed to here? And how can we devise the mechanisms that prevent it from degrading into another Reddit? Is a shared motivating philosophy enough, or do we need to re-engineer the medium itself?

So into the discussion of "what should Tildes be about?", this post is a long-winded way of saying that I think part of it should be about discussing how we can we construct a sustainable new form of media that improves society and supports our highest values. What does this next generation medium look like?

--
Note: just to be clear, Deimos has already put a lot of great thought into this (cf. https://docs.tildes.net/). I'm just arguing that the topic of the medium and the mechanics of the medium should be a topic that all Tildistas engage with.

I was on Facebook today and saw a video being sent around with the background and caption on the image I captured: https://i.imgur.com/uUvN7JS.png

I took a look at the comments on the post, and as expected found this sort of stuff: "She must hoping trump will come and give her a pickle tickle or a medal. These are the people who should be thrown out of the country."

So, I look it up and it turns out that this video is from 2014 (source of news report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0UUmTARaOc) which was during the Obama administration and has nothing to do with "Trump's america'". And watching a news report and the original video never shows anything about the black individual having a white mother, that's just further perpetuating race baiting to get people angry and heated over this as they're also trying to make it seem like it just happened. They even captioned the Facebook post "Think racism is dead in America? Watch this."!

What do we do about things like this where this is so clearly being used to further an agenda, but the actual content isn't indicative of that agenda at all? This is apart of an epidemic of misinformation used to drive opinions that sickens me to see so many people falling for, it really does.

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

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

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

Me left, Jared right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary, IN

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

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

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

Chicago, IL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, here’s Duluth:

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

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

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

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

Two-Harbors on the North Shore of Minnesota

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

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

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

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

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

But what of mod culture?

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

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

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

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

What is good moderation and what is a good moderator?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd like to suggest that the default view for topics look something like the image below, with expanded top level replies, and collapsed lower level replies. And have an option under each reply that would expand the next level of replies below it, continuing this behavior on down to the lowest level comments. There could even be an "Expand all below this comment", although I don't show that in this illustration.

That would all readers to quickly read through many or all of the direct responses to the topic before deciding which responses to dig into deeper. It would also help direct responses which aren't listed near the top get more exposure. The site could even be coded to delay loading lower level comments until an expand link is clicked, reducing page sizes and improving load times.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0u6vuopufierijp/TildesDefaultThreadDisplay.png?dl=0

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.

ASCII table , ascii codes :
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
The complete table of ASCII characters, letters, codes, symbols and signs.
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ASCII control characters
00NULL(Null character)01SOH(Start of Header)02STX(Start of Text)03ETX(End of Text)04EOT(End of Trans.)05ENQ(Enquiry)06ACK(Acknowledgement)07BEL(Bell)08BS(Backspace)09HT(Horizontal Tab)10LF(Line feed)11VT(Vertical Tab)12FF(Form feed)13CR(Carriage return)14SO(Shift Out)15SI(Shift In)16DLE(Data link escape)17DC1(Device control 1)18DC2(Device control 2)19DC3(Device control 3)20DC4(Device control 4)21NAK(Negative acknowl.)22SYN(Synchronous idle)23ETB(End of trans. block)24CAN(Cancel)25EM(End of medium)26SUB(Substitute)27ESC(Escape)28FS(File separator)29GS(Group separator)30RS(Record separator)31US(Unit separator)127DEL(Delete)
ASCII printable
characters
32space33!34"35#36$37%38&39'40(41)42*43+44,45-46.47/48049150251352453554655756857958:59;60<61=62>63?64@65A66B67C68D69E70F71G72H73I74J75K76L77M78N79O80P81Q82R83S84T85U86V87W88X89Y90Z91[92\93]94^95_96`97a98b99c100d101e102f103g104h105i106j107k108l109m110n111o112p113q114r115s116t117u118v119w120x121y122z123{124|125}126~
Extended ASCII
characters
128Ç129ü130é131â132ä133à134å135ç136ê137ë138è139ï140î141ì142Ä143Å144É145æ146Æ147ô148ö149ò150û151ù152ÿ153Ö154Ü155ø156£157Ø158×159ƒ160á161í162ó163ú164ñ165Ñ166ª167º168¿169®170¬171½172¼173¡174«175»176░177▒178▓179│180┤181Á182Â183À184©185╣186║187╗188╝189¢190¥191┐192└193┴194┬195├196─197┼198ã199Ã200╚201╔202╩203╦204╠205═206╬207¤208ð209Ð210Ê211Ë212È213ı214Í215Î216Ï217┘218┌219█220▄221¦222Ì223▀224Ó225ß226Ô227Ò228õ229Õ230µ231þ232Þ233Ú234Û235Ù236ý237Ý238¯239´240≡241±242‗243¾244¶245§246÷247¸248°249¨250·251¹252³253²254■255nbspThe complete table of ASCII characters, codes, symbols and signs most consulted ñénye, n with tilde(alt + 164)■black square(alt + 254)²superscript two, square(alt + 253)°degree symbol(alt + 248)'apostrophe, single quote(alt + 39)µletter Mu, micro, micron(alt + 230)©copyright symbol(alt + 184)®registered trademark(alt + 169)³superscript three, cube(alt + 252)áa with acute accent(alt + 160)
frequently-used
(spanish language)
ñalt + 164Ñalt + 165@alt + 64¿alt + 168?alt + 63¡alt + 173!alt + 33:alt + 58/alt + 47\alt + 92
vowels acute accent
(spanish language)
áalt + 160éalt + 130íalt + 161óalt + 162úalt + 163Áalt + 181Éalt + 144Íalt + 214Óalt + 224Úalt + 233
vowels with
diaresis
äalt + 132ëalt + 137ïalt + 139öalt + 148üalt + 129Äalt + 142Ëalt + 211Ïalt + 216Öalt + 153Üalt + 154
mathematical
symbols
½alt + 171¼alt + 172¾alt + 243¹alt + 251³alt + 252²alt + 253ƒalt + 159±alt + 241×alt + 158÷alt + 246
commercial / trade
symbols
$alt + 36£alt + 156¥alt + 190¢alt + 189¤alt + 207®alt + 169©alt + 184ªalt + 166ºalt + 167°alt + 248
quotes and
parenthesis
"alt + 34'alt + 39(alt + 40)alt + 41[alt + 91]alt + 93{alt + 123}alt + 125«alt + 174»alt + 175Brief History of ASCII code:
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII code, was created in 1963 by the "American Standards Association" Committee or "ASA", the agency changed its name in 1969 by "American National Standards Institute" or "ANSI" as it is known since.

This code arises from reorder and expand the set of symbols and characters already used in telegraphy at that time by the Bell company.

At first only included capital letters and numbers , but in 1967 was added the lowercase letters and some control characters, forming what is known as US-ASCII, ie the characters 0 through 127.
So with this set of only 128 characters was published in 1967 as standard, containing all you need to write in English language.

In 1981, IBM developed an extension of 8-bit ASCII code, called "code page 437", in this version were replaced some obsolete control characters for graphic characters. Also 128 characters were added , with new symbols, signs, graphics and latin letters, all punctuation signs and characters needed to write texts in other languages, ​​such as Spanish.
In this way was added the ASCII characters ranging from 128 to 255.

IBM includes support for this code page in the hardware of its model 5150, known as "IBM-PC", considered the first personal computer.
The operating system of this model, the "MS-DOS" also used this extended ASCII code.
Almost all computer systems today use the ASCII code to represent characters and texts. (151) .

How to use the ASCII code:
Without knowing it you use it all the time, every time you use a computer system, but if all you need is to get some of the characters not included in your keyboard should do the following, for example:

How typing: Spanish letter enye, uppercase N with tilde, EÑE, enie ?
WINDOWS: on computers with Windows operating system like Windows 8, Win 7, Vista, Windows XP, etc..
To get the letter, character, sign or symbol "Ñ" : ( Spanish letter enye, uppercase N with tilde, EÑE, enie ) on computers with Windows operating system:

1. Press the "Alt" key on your keyboard, and do not let go.
2. While keep press "Alt", on your keyboard type the number "165", which is the number of the letter or symbol "Ñ" in ASCII table.
3. Then stop pressing the "Alt" key, and ...you got it! (152)

Full list of ASCII characters, letters, symbols and signs with descriptions:
ASCII control characters non printable :ASCII code 00 = NULL ( Null character )
ASCII code 01 = SOH ( Start of Header )
ASCII code 02 = STX ( Start of Text )
ASCII code 03 = ETX ( End of Text, hearts card suit )
ASCII code 04 = EOT ( End of Transmission, diamonds card suit )
ASCII code 05 = ENQ ( Enquiry, clubs card suit )
ASCII code 06 = ACK ( Acknowledgement, spade card suit )
ASCII code 07 = BEL ( Bell )
ASCII code 08 = BS ( Backspace )
ASCII code 09 = HT ( Horizontal Tab )
ASCII code 10 = LF ( Line feed )
ASCII code 11 = VT ( Vertical Tab, male symbol, symbol for Mars )
ASCII code 12 = FF ( Form feed, female symbol, symbol for Venus )
ASCII code 13 = CR ( Carriage return )
ASCII code 14 = SO ( Shift Out )
ASCII code 15 = SI ( Shift In )
ASCII code 16 = DLE ( Data link escape )
ASCII code 17 = DC1 ( Device control 1 )
ASCII code 18 = DC2 ( Device control 2 )
ASCII code 19 = DC3 ( Device control 3 )
ASCII code 20 = DC4 ( Device control 4 )
ASCII code 21 = NAK ( NAK Negative-acknowledge )
ASCII code 22 = SYN ( Synchronous idle )
ASCII code 23 = ETB ( End of trans. block )
ASCII code 24 = CAN ( Cancel )
ASCII code 25 = EM ( End of medium )
ASCII code 26 = SUB ( Substitute )
ASCII code 27 = ESC ( Escape )
ASCII code 28 = FS ( File separator )
ASCII code 29 = GS ( Group separator )
ASCII code 30 = RS ( Record separator )
ASCII code 31 = US ( Unit separator )
ASCII code 127 = DEL ( Delete )
Printable ASCII characters :
( alphanumeric, symbols and signs )ASCII code 32 = space ( Space )
ASCII code 33 = ! ( Exclamation mark )
ASCII code 34 = " ( Double quotes ; Quotation mark ; speech marks )
ASCII code 35 = # ( Number sign )
ASCII code 36 = $ ( Dollar sign )
ASCII code 37 = % ( Percent sign )
ASCII code 38 = & ( Ampersand )
ASCII code 39 = ' ( Single quote or Apostrophe )
ASCII code 40 = ( ( round brackets or parentheses, opening round bracket )
ASCII code 41 = ) ( parentheses or round brackets, closing parentheses )
ASCII code 42 = * ( Asterisk )
ASCII code 43 = + ( Plus sign )
ASCII code 44 = , ( Comma )
ASCII code 45 = - ( Hyphen , minus sign )
ASCII code 46 = . ( Dot, full stop )
ASCII code 47 = / ( Slash , forward slash , fraction bar , division slash )
ASCII code 48 = 0 ( number zero )
ASCII code 49 = 1 ( number one )
ASCII code 50 = 2 ( number two )
ASCII code 51 = 3 ( number three )
ASCII code 52 = 4 ( number four )
ASCII code 53 = 5 ( number five )
ASCII code 54 = 6 ( number six )
ASCII code 55 = 7 ( number seven )
ASCII code 56 = 8 ( number eight )
ASCII code 57 = 9 ( number nine )
ASCII code 58 = : ( Colon )
ASCII code 59 = ; ( Semicolon )
ASCII code 60 = < ( Less-than sign )
ASCII code 61 = = ( Equals sign )
ASCII code 62 = > ( Greater-than sign ; Inequality )
ASCII code 63 = ? ( Question mark )
ASCII code 64 = @ ( At sign )
ASCII code 65 = A ( Capital letter A )
ASCII code 66 = B ( Capital letter B )
ASCII code 67 = C ( Capital letter C )
ASCII code 68 = D ( Capital letter D )
ASCII code 69 = E ( Capital letter E )
ASCII code 70 = F ( Capital letter F )
ASCII code 71 = G ( Capital letter G )
ASCII code 72 = H ( Capital letter H )
ASCII code 73 = I ( Capital letter I )
ASCII code 74 = J ( Capital letter J )
ASCII code 75 = K ( Capital letter K )
ASCII code 76 = L ( Capital letter L )
ASCII code 77 = M ( Capital letter M )
ASCII code 78 = N ( Capital letter N )
ASCII code 79 = O ( Capital letter O )
ASCII code 80 = P ( Capital letter P )
ASCII code 81 = Q ( Capital letter Q )
ASCII code 82 = R ( Capital letter R )
ASCII code 83 = S ( Capital letter S )
ASCII code 84 = T ( Capital letter T )
ASCII code 85 = U ( Capital letter U )
ASCII code 86 = V ( Capital letter V )
ASCII code 87 = W ( Capital letter W )
ASCII code 88 = X ( Capital letter X )
ASCII code 89 = Y ( Capital letter Y )
ASCII code 90 = Z ( Capital letter Z )
ASCII code 91 = [ ( square brackets or box brackets, opening bracket )
ASCII code 92 = \ ( Backslash , reverse slash )
ASCII code 93 = ] ( box brackets or square brackets, closing bracket )
ASCII code 94 = ^ ( Circumflex accent or Caret )
ASCII code 95 = _ ( underscore , understrike , underbar or low line )
ASCII code 96 = ` ( Grave accent )
ASCII code 97 = a ( Lowercase letter a , minuscule a )
ASCII code 98 = b ( Lowercase letter b , minuscule b )
ASCII code 99 = c ( Lowercase letter c , minuscule c )
ASCII code 100 = d ( Lowercase letter d , minuscule d )
ASCII code 101 = e ( Lowercase letter e , minuscule e )
ASCII code 102 = f ( Lowercase letter f , minuscule f )
ASCII code 103 = g ( Lowercase letter g , minuscule g )
ASCII code 104 = h ( Lowercase letter h , minuscule h )
ASCII code 105 = i ( Lowercase letter i , minuscule i )
ASCII code 106 = j ( Lowercase letter j , minuscule j )
ASCII code 107 = k ( Lowercase letter k , minuscule k )
ASCII code 108 = l ( Lowercase letter l , minuscule l )
ASCII code 109 = m ( Lowercase letter m , minuscule m )
ASCII code 110 = n ( Lowercase letter n , minuscule n )
ASCII code 111 = o ( Lowercase letter o , minuscule o )
ASCII code 112 = p ( Lowercase letter p , minuscule p )
ASCII code 113 = q ( Lowercase letter q , minuscule q )
ASCII code 114 = r ( Lowercase letter r , minuscule r )
ASCII code 115 = s ( Lowercase letter s , minuscule s )
ASCII code 116 = t ( Lowercase letter t , minuscule t )
ASCII code 117 = u ( Lowercase letter u , minuscule u )
ASCII code 118 = v ( Lowercase letter v , minuscule v )
ASCII code 119 = w ( Lowercase letter w , minuscule w )
ASCII code 120 = x ( Lowercase letter x , minuscule x )
ASCII code 121 = y ( Lowercase letter y , minuscule y )
ASCII code 122 = z ( Lowercase letter z , minuscule z )
ASCII code 123 = { ( braces or curly brackets, opening braces )
ASCII code 124 = | ( vertical-bar, vbar, vertical line or vertical slash )
ASCII code 125 = } ( curly brackets or braces, closing curly brackets )
ASCII code 126 = ~ ( Tilde ; swung dash )
ASCII Extended Characters :ASCII code 128 = Ç ( Majuscule C-cedilla )
ASCII code 129 = ü ( letter u with umlaut or diaeresis , u-umlaut )
ASCII code 130 = é ( letter e with acute accent or e-acute )
ASCII code 131 = â ( letter a with circumflex accent or a-circumflex )
ASCII code 132 = ä ( letter a with umlaut or diaeresis , a-umlaut )
ASCII code 133 = à ( letter a with grave accent )
ASCII code 134 = å ( letter a with a ring )
ASCII code 135 = ç ( Minuscule c-cedilla )
ASCII code 136 = ê ( letter e with circumflex accent or e-circumflex )
ASCII code 137 = ë ( letter e with umlaut or diaeresis ; e-umlauts )
ASCII code 138 = è ( letter e with grave accent )
ASCII code 139 = ï ( letter i with umlaut or diaeresis ; i-umlaut )
ASCII code 140 = î ( letter i with circumflex accent or i-circumflex )
ASCII code 141 = ì ( letter i with grave accent )
ASCII code 142 = Ä ( letter A with umlaut or diaeresis ; A-umlaut )
ASCII code 143 = Å ( Capital letter A with a ring )
ASCII code 144 = É ( Capital letter E with acute accent or E-acute )
ASCII code 145 = æ ( Latin diphthong ae in lowercase )
ASCII code 146 = Æ ( Latin diphthong AE in uppercase )
ASCII code 147 = ô ( letter o with circumflex accent or o-circumflex )
ASCII code 148 = ö ( letter o with umlaut or diaeresis ; o-umlaut )
ASCII code 149 = ò ( letter o with grave accent )
ASCII code 150 = û ( letter u with circumflex accent or u-circumflex )
ASCII code 151 = ù ( letter u with grave accent )
ASCII code 152 = ÿ ( Lowercase letter y with diaeresis )
ASCII code 153 = Ö ( Letter O with umlaut or diaeresis ; O-umlaut )
ASCII code 154 = Ü ( Letter U with umlaut or diaeresis ; U-umlaut )
ASCII code 155 = ø ( Lowercase slashed zero or empty set )
ASCII code 156 = £ ( Pound sign ; symbol for the pound sterling )
ASCII code 157 = Ø ( Uppercase slashed zero or empty set )
ASCII code 158 = × ( Multiplication sign )
ASCII code 159 = ƒ ( Function sign ; f with hook sign ; florin sign )
ASCII code 160 = á ( Lowercase letter a with acute accent or a-acute )
ASCII code 161 = í ( Lowercase letter i with acute accent or i-acute )
ASCII code 162 = ó ( Lowercase letter o with acute accent or o-acute )
ASCII code 163 = ú ( Lowercase letter u with acute accent or u-acute )
ASCII code 164 = ñ ( eñe, enie, spanish letter enye, lowercase n with tilde )
ASCII code 165 = Ñ ( Spanish letter enye, uppercase N with tilde, EÑE, enie )
ASCII code 166 = ª ( feminine ordinal indicator )
ASCII code 167 = º ( masculine ordinal indicator )
ASCII code 168 = ¿ ( Inverted question marks )
ASCII code 169 = ® ( Registered trademark symbol )
ASCII code 170 = ¬ ( Logical negation symbol )
ASCII code 171 = ½ ( One half )
ASCII code 172 = ¼ ( Quarter, one fourth )
ASCII code 173 = ¡ ( Inverted exclamation marks )
ASCII code 174 = « ( Angle quotes, guillemets, right-pointing quotation mark )
ASCII code 175 = » ( Guillemets, angle quotes, left-pointing quotation marks )
ASCII code 176 = ░ ( Graphic character, low density dotted )
ASCII code 177 = ▒ ( Graphic character, medium density dotted )
ASCII code 178 = ▓ ( Graphic character, high density dotted )
ASCII code 179 = │ ( Box drawing character single vertical line )
ASCII code 180 = ┤ ( Box drawing character single vertical and left line )
ASCII code 181 = Á ( Capital letter A with acute accent or A-acute )
ASCII code 182 = Â ( Letter A with circumflex accent or A-circumflex )
ASCII code 183 = À ( Letter A with grave accent )
ASCII code 184 = © ( Copyright symbol )
ASCII code 185 = ╣ ( Box drawing character double line vertical and left )
ASCII code 186 = ║ ( Box drawing character double vertical line )
ASCII code 187 = ╗ ( Box drawing character double line upper right corner )
ASCII code 188 = ╝ ( Box drawing character double line lower right corner )
ASCII code 189 = ¢ ( Cent symbol )
ASCII code 190 = ¥ ( YEN and YUAN sign )
ASCII code 191 = ┐ ( Box drawing character single line upper right corner )
ASCII code 192 = └ ( Box drawing character single line lower left corner )
ASCII code 193 = ┴ ( Box drawing character single line horizontal and up )
ASCII code 194 = ┬ ( Box drawing character single line horizontal down )
ASCII code 195 = ├ ( Box drawing character single line vertical and right )
ASCII code 196 = ─ ( Box drawing character single horizontal line )
ASCII code 197 = ┼ ( Box drawing character single line horizontal vertical )
ASCII code 198 = ã ( Lowercase letter a with tilde or a-tilde )
ASCII code 199 = Ã ( Capital letter A with tilde or A-tilde )
ASCII code 200 = ╚ ( Box drawing character double line lower left corner )
ASCII code 201 = ╔ ( Box drawing character double line upper left corner )
ASCII code 202 = ╩ ( Box drawing character double line horizontal and up )
ASCII code 203 = ╦ ( Box drawing character double line horizontal down )
ASCII code 204 = ╠ ( Box drawing character double line vertical and right )
ASCII code 205 = ═ ( Box drawing character double horizontal line )
ASCII code 206 = ╬ ( Box drawing character double line horizontal vertical )
ASCII code 207 = ¤ ( Generic currency sign )
ASCII code 208 = ð ( Lowercase letter eth )
ASCII code 209 = Ð ( Capital letter Eth )
ASCII code 210 = Ê ( Letter E with circumflex accent or E-circumflex )
ASCII code 211 = Ë ( Letter E with umlaut or diaeresis, E-umlaut )
ASCII code 212 = È ( Capital letter E with grave accent )
ASCII code 213 = ı ( Lowercase dot less i )
ASCII code 214 = Í ( Capital letter I with acute accent or I-acute )
ASCII code 215 = Î ( Letter I with circumflex accent or I-circumflex )
ASCII code 216 = Ï ( Letter I with umlaut or diaeresis ; I-umlaut )
ASCII code 217 = ┘ ( Box drawing character single line lower right corner )
ASCII code 218 = ┌ ( Box drawing character single line upper left corner )
ASCII code 219 = █ ( Block, graphic character )
ASCII code 220 = ▄ ( Bottom half block )
ASCII code 221 = ¦ ( Vertical broken bar )
ASCII code 222 = Ì ( Capital letter I with grave accent )
ASCII code 223 = ▀ ( Top half block )
ASCII code 224 = Ó ( Capital letter O with acute accent or O-acute )
ASCII code 225 = ß ( Letter Eszett ; scharfes S or sharp S )
ASCII code 226 = Ô ( Letter O with circumflex accent or O-circumflex )
ASCII code 227 = Ò ( Capital letter O with grave accent )
ASCII code 228 = õ ( Lowercase letter o with tilde or o-tilde )
ASCII code 229 = Õ ( Capital letter O with tilde or O-tilde )
ASCII code 230 = µ ( Lowercase letter Mu ; micro sign or micron )
ASCII code 231 = þ ( Lowercase letter Thorn )
ASCII code 232 = Þ ( Capital letter Thorn )
ASCII code 233 = Ú ( Capital letter U with acute accent or U-acute )
ASCII code 234 = Û ( Letter U with circumflex accent or U-circumflex )
ASCII code 235 = Ù ( Capital letter U with grave accent )
ASCII code 236 = ý ( Lowercase letter y with acute accent )
ASCII code 237 = Ý ( Capital letter Y with acute accent )
ASCII code 238 = ¯ ( Macron symbol )
ASCII code 239 = ´ ( Acute accent )
ASCII code 240 = ≡ ( Congruence relation symbol )
ASCII code 241 = ± ( Plus-minus sign )
ASCII code 242 = ‗ ( underline or underscore )
ASCII code 243 = ¾ ( three quarters, three-fourths )
ASCII code 244 = ¶ ( Paragraph sign or pilcrow ; end paragraph mark )
ASCII code 245 = § ( Section sign )
ASCII code 246 = ÷ ( The division sign ; Obelus )
ASCII code 247 = ¸ ( cedilla )
ASCII code 248 = ° ( Degree symbol )
ASCII code 249 = ¨ ( Diaresis )
ASCII code 250 = · ( Interpunct or space dot )
ASCII code 251 = ¹ ( Superscript one, exponent 1, first power )
ASCII code 252 = ³ ( Superscript three, exponent 3, cube, third power )
ASCII code 253 = ² ( Superscript two, exponent 2, square, second power )
ASCII code 254 = ■ ( black square )
ASCII code 255 = nbsp ( Non-breaking space or no-break space )
Links : [ Home ] - [ PDF format ] - [ plain text ] - [ Excel spreadsheet ] - [ Word document ] - [ image 1 ] - - [ en español ] Keywords for this page - The complete table of ASCII characters, codes, symbols and signs :
How to type or write The complete table of ASCII characters, codes, symbols and signs ascii, ascii art, ascii table, code ascii, ascii character, ascii text, ascii chart, ascii characters, ascii codes, characters, codes, tables, symbols, list, alt, keys, keyboard, spelling, control, printable, extended, letters, epistles, handwriting, scripts, lettering, majuscules, capitals, minuscules, lower, case, small, acute, accent, sharp, engrave, diaresis, circumflex, tilde, cedilla, anillo, circlet, eñe, enie, arroba, pound, sterling, cent, type, write, spell, spanish, english, notebooks, laptops, ascii, asci, asccii, asqui, askii, aski, aschi, aschii, (153) .

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.

!An image

Text in one
paragraph

A link

A link

A link

A title

title

title

#A title?

A title

$\alpha \times 5 = 10$

print("Hello World")

print("Hello World")

:::
print("Hello World")
:::

:::python
print("Hello World")
:::

test test test

I suggested already to have a setting in the profile to allow the user to decide if links should open in new tab so you won't lose the content you were being on this website. In the meanwhile I made a very simple script that does that for you using tampermonkey.

The script: https://gist.github.com/theCrius/04dc86bea0ed0f1cbec7e57f1aaff9aa

Tampermonkey: http://tampermonkey.net/ (available for all browsers)

A quick tutorial on how to do it, step by step with images: https://imgur.com/a/pY51wn2

Edit: Updated to open only link in comments in new tab. The rest of the navigation will load in the same tab by default.

Hi!

This isn't a topic I know a ton about (beyond basics like the need for image descriptions for screen readers), but @nil's layout bug stemming from a very large font got me thinking about accessibility.

Has accessibility been discussed and worked on so far?

(If not, I'd like to suggest taking a look at online accessibility guidelines to see what would apply to tildes in particular. It's one of those things that's easiest to add towards the beginning of projects, and it takes making a conscious decision to include it.)

h1 Heading 8-)

h2 Heading

h3 Heading

h4 Heading

h5 Heading

h6 Heading

Horizontal Rules

Typographic replacements

Enable typographer option to see result.

(c) (C) (r) (R) (tm) (TM) (p) (P) +-

test.. test... test..... test?..... test!....

!!!!!! ???? ,, -- ---

"Smartypants, double quotes" and 'single quotes'

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• Create a list by starting a line with +, -, or *
• Sub-lists are made by indenting 2 spaces:
  • Marker character change forces new list start:
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    • Facilisis in pretium nisl aliquet
    • Nulla volutpat aliquam velit
• Very easy!

Ordered

1. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

2. Consectetur adipiscing elit

3. Integer molestie lorem at massa

4. You can use sequential numbers...

5. ...or keep all the numbers as 1.

Start numbering with offset:

57. foo
58. bar

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// Some comments
line 1 of code
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var foo = function (bar) {
  return bar++;
};

console.log(foo(5));

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Autoconverted link https://github.com/nodeca/pica (enable linkify to see)

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!Minion
<img src="https://octodex.github.com/images/stormtroopocat.jpg" alt="Stormtroopocat" title="The Stormtroopocat" />

Like links, Images also have a footnote style syntax

<img src="https://octodex.github.com/images/dojocat.jpg" alt="Alt text" title="The Dojocat" />

With a reference later in the document defining the URL location:

Plugins

The killer feature of markdown-it is very effective support of
syntax plugins.

Emojies

Classic markup: :wink: :crush: :cry: :tear: :laughing: :yum:

Shortcuts (emoticons): :-) :-( 8-) ;)

see how to change output with twemoji.

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• 19^th^
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<ins>

++Inserted text++

<mark>

==Marked text==

Footnotes

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[^first]: Footnote can have markup

and multiple paragraphs.

[^second]: Footnote text.

Definition lists

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with lazy continuation.

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    { some code, part of Definition 2 }

Third paragraph of definition 2.

Compact style:

Term 1
~ Definition 1

Term 2
~ Definition 2a
~ Definition 2b

Abbreviations

This is HTML abbreviation example.

It converts "HTML", but keep intact partial entries like "xxxHTMLyyy" and so on.

*[HTML]: Hyper Text Markup Language

Custom containers

::: warning
here be dragons
:::