They don't have to be significant in any way; just threads you personally enjoyed.

The ones that immediately come to mind for me are:

Chasing the American dream has got me jaded - started by @dodger.

https://tildes.net/~talk/29a/chasing_the_american_dream_has_got_me_jaded

and

grab some tea baby, it's midnight. this is today's slam thread. - led by the fantastic @earlgreytea.

https://tildes.net/~creative/3gt/grab_some_tea_baby_its_midnight_this_is_todays_slam_thread

Neither of them had hundreds of comments, and neither of them were particularly active; I just find myself particularly fond of them for whatever reason.

I've found that the red (X new) indicator next to a thread's comment count on the main page keeps me coming back to the discussion to see the latest messages. This is a good thing, but the UX for actually navigating through those messages leaves something to be desired.

There are two relevant existing features I'd like to discuss:

• All new comments since I last viewed the thread are highlighted with a conspicuous red stripe.
• The sidebar on any given discussion page has a link to jump to the most recent comment.

I use the most recent comment link in threads that I know only have one new comment. The link takes me right to it. But in threads with more than one new comment, it's a lot less foolproof. My only method for seeing them all is to scroll down the page and stop when I see a flash of that red stripe. This is tedious in busy discussions which both update frequently with new comments to read, and take a long time to scroll through every time I check them. It's also easy to miss something this way, and since comments are considered "read" after you load the page, there's no second chance to see whatever I missed.

I'd like to propose a method for iterating through all unread comments on a page, either in chronological order (oldest first) or in order of appearance on the page. Or if @Deimos wants to get really fancy, some kind of hybrid sort that keeps nested comment chains grouped together for contextual continuity when navigating.

This would require two controls: "Jump to next unread comment" and "Jump to previous unread comment." These could be "sticky" clickable icons on the page, or just some sort of keystroke (like , and . for previous and next, respectively) without a UI at all.

An important secondary feature of this would be a count indicating both how many unread comments are on the page and how many within that set you have jumped to with this mechanism so far:

Viewing 2 of 7 unread comments

This could remain visible or only appear briefly when jumping to the next/previous unread, then fade away. It could also be shortened to something more minimal:

2/7

That on-screen feedback would help prevent getting lost in busy threads with high unread counts, particular if the sequence is not determined by order of comment appearance on the page.

Edit: Whoops, fixed my formatting error I didn't notice after posting.

So, as a followup to the music tagging thread from a few days ago, I would like to propose the following for discussion.

1. Should all musical posts be tagged with at least one high-level musical genre?

The consensus from the last post appeared to be a yes on this. Please note:, this doesn't mean that anyone who submits a track is required to go look up / determine the best genre themselves. If they choose not to, one of the tag mods may do so for them while browsing. Further, we seemed to reach a consensus last time that in the future it would be best to automate this step as completely as possible.

2. Which tags do we want to use?

I / @Whom have done some digging and found several different schemes we might use as a basis. For convenience, I've reproduced them in a table for you below:

I think ideally we will be able to come up with (say) a list the size of wikipedia, allmusic or discogs such that determining the right genre isn't much of a burden on tag mods. In the future, we could expand this or even start inheriting the RYM genre hierarchy (e.g., Ska -> 2 Tone, Jamaican Ska, Spouge, Third Wave Ska)

So with that out of the way, I think the best way to proceed is for each of you to either:

A) Build a list of your own with one of these as a basis. We can count up how many people include a genre an count as a vote for it's inclusion.

Or

B) Argue for / against a specific genre's inclusion.

Sound good? Did I miss anything?

Tildes code of conduct says

Do not post anyone's sensitive personal information (related to either their real world or online identity) with malicious intent.

Can you change that to just say don't post personal info? Even if it's not done with malicious intent it should still be removed to protect people's privacy.

Also while it does say to not post spam on tildes terms of service I think It should say that on the code of conduct.

Edit: I mean posting personal info without consent and not public information.

Telling someone how to contact a company would be fine but not posting someone's address.

I've finally finished writing something. It's been about four years since I actually finished something nicely.

I'm entering the editing phase, which generally takes longer... But I'm a bit excited.

Hopefully this is an acceptable thing to talk about, and I'm going about things the right way.

So... To spin off into discussion, here's two things:

A part of the story:

The ground rose up and struck Raul in the face.

He blinked, stumbling backwards, seeing his master standing nearby.

The old man was glaring, his hands clutched around a brightly coloured stone.

Raul opened his mouth to question, but the old man was whisked away to a distance hillside, and the boy found himself tumbling head over heals backwards down a hillside.

He scrambled onto his knees, staring as he found himself on the shore of the lighthouse.

His master placed a solid hand on his shoulder, and muttered gibberish.

Raul glanced up, but found himself staring at the light of the lighthouse.

Spinning.

A bright light, round and round.

Lightning struck him, and Raul screamed, stumbling backwards.

The rod lay in front of him.

He tore his gaze away with effort, and saw his master, hands outstretched, the stone of red, gold and silver floating between them.

Almost as astonishing, the stone was clean.

A hammer hit him between the eyes.

Raul found himself stumbling behind his father, watching as the old man struck stone, separated it, revealing the river of solid copper within it.

"Boy!"

I'm hoping I've got the grammar at least semi-right. My illness means I can forget words, or my brain can replace words at random with others that it thinks are related.

Any guidance or critique is welcome. (I'd give a bigger quote... But this is probably more than enough to discuss.)

The build script I'm using:

#!/bin/sh

set -e

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo 'Please provide an output file name.' >&2
  exit 1
fi

tmp=$(mktemp)

echo 'Building...'

cat title.txt > "$tmp"
echo '' >> "$tmp"
cat LICENSE.md >> "$tmp"
echo '' >> "$tmp"
cat Prologue.md >> "$tmp"

for file in 0*.md; do
  echo '' >> "$tmp"
  cat "$file" >> "$tmp"
done

for file in 1*.md; do
  echo '' >> "$tmp"
  cat "$file" >> "$tmp"
done

echo 'Converting...'

pandoc --toc "$tmp" -o "$1" 2>/dev/null

rm "$tmp"

echo 'Done'

title.txt is basically just YAML markup for pandoc. The other files should be fairly obvious.

I'm silencing pandoc's output, because I make use of a self-reference to add comments to the Markdown, that get killed by the parser and never make it to the output:

[//]: # (This is a Markdown comment. Isn't that cool?)

However, as all the references point to themselves, pandoc warns.

I'm using pandoc this time around, because it produces fairly clean files. I've used GitBook and Calibre in the past, and though the ebooks they produce work and look okay, the amount of crazy markup they produce means the books lag on some ereaders.

However, that does make a lot of back and forth. Building, checking output, rebuilding, etc.

Summary

A study of the effect of Shinrin-Yoku or "forest bathing" (immersing oneself in nature by mindfully using all five senses) on human physiological and psychological systems.

Extract

In general, from a physiological perspective, significant empirical research findings point to a reduction in human heart rate and blood pressure and an increase in relaxation for participants exposed to natural GS. Even research involving the use of nature videos of the forest or the ocean have the same physiological effects. From a qualitative and psychological perspective, Danish participants reported a sense of safety, calm and overall general wellbeing following exposure or engagement with nature. South Korean participants with a known alcohol addiction and high pre-test scores of depression benefited more from the Forest Therapy Camp than participants with lower pre-test scores of depression and alcohol abuse. Differences in culture, gender, education, marital or economic status were not associated confounding factors in many of the empirical studies. Overall, our review of the literature, as illustrated in Table 1, points to positive health benefits associated with SY and NT while confounding factors were clearly identified by the researchers.

Link

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5580555/

Summary

The article describes the investigation of a 5,600-year-old mummy from Egypt, how it predates known mummification by 1,500 years, but uses ingredients still used thousands of years later.

Extract

Dating to some 5,600 years ago, the prehistoric mummy at first seemed to have been created by chance, roasted to a decay-resistant crisp in the desert. But new evidence suggests that the Turin mummy was no accident—and now researchers have assembled a detailed recipe for its embalmment.

The ingredient list represents the earliest known Egyptian embalming salve, predating the peak mummification in the region by some 2,500 years. But this early recipe is remarkably similar to the later embalming salves used in extensive rituals to help nobles like King Tut pass into the afterlife.

Link

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/08/news-egyptian-prehistoric-mummy-embalming-recipe/

Key points:

• The petition for a party room meeting of the Liberal Party got 43 signatures, so Turnbull allowed the meeting to be called.

• The party room voted 45:40 to spill the leadership.

• Three candidates nominated: Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison, Julie Bishop.

• Bishop was eliminated in the first round of voting.

• Morrison won the second round of voting against Dutton, 45:40.

• As the leader of the Liberal Party, Morrison becomes the new Prime Minister... probably. It now depends on whether their coalition partners, the National Party, support the new Liberal leader (but they probably will: the alternative is to lose government).

EDIT1: And Josh Frydenburg is the deputy leader of the Liberal Party. That does not make him the Deputy Prime Minister: that role goes to the leader of the National Party whenever the Coalition is in government.

EDIT2: The news: http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-24/scott-morrison-wins-leaderal-leadership/10160168

Follow live here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-24/live-turnbull-leadership-challenge-looms/10159462

Some background on Scott Morrison: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-24/scott-morrisons-rise-to-prime-minister-of-australia/10160458