Here's a list of a things that came out in this past week, up through Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and we avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to bring up anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)

Notes:
If you spot any mistakes, let us know.
Parental Advisory version of all albums linked, so expect NSFW.

Ugly God - Bumps & Bruises | Deluxe edition linked.

Thanks to @Cleb, @cfabbro, and @Bauke!

I started this last week, and plan to continue posting this topic weekly.

So, what have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.

This thought was brought to you/sponsored by my perception that there's an increasing number of comments on Tildes that attempt to "answer" questions posed in the titles of posts, but don't necessarily demonstrate that the user has read the article before commenting. I won't link specific comments, but I've noticed a fair bit of it as of late. I get that those titles bait people into voicing their opinion, but often it's at the detriment of overall discussion. Should a prerequisite of clicking the actual link in question be a requirement before the user is allowed to post a top level comment? Or perhaps a cooldown period of entering a thread versus commenting may help?

The goal here would be to disincentivise the posting of "driveby" or similarly reductive comments that often don't demonstrate nuance or knowledge that is conveyed in the associated article. Sure, we can't ever know if the user has actually read the article, but it's not designed to be a foolproof strategy, just a discouraging one.

There's a few ways this could be implemented, probably via the utilization of a small bit of javascript that toggle's a user's reading state for a particular post. Thoughts?

Just to clarify since I've edited this post: I mean top-level comments only. Replies are more likely to be in response to the parent comment, rather than the title and wouldn't be affected by this proposal.

I'm writing this in an attempt to explain more clearly some ideas about the dangers of having an oligopoly in control of the Web, and the current difficulties of discussing that without being taken as some kind of "free speech absolutist". It's an analogy and, as in any analogy, it's only valid to a certain extent. The important thing is for it to be valid enough to explain a point.

There was a city in which four companies had ended up owning every bar, except for a handful of them in the outskirts. Upon one moment, they started to regulate which kind of conversations could be held in their bars and which couldn't, something they had a legal right to do and felt was their responsibility. So they prohibited any racist, homophobic or sexually explicit conversation, as well as conversations which they thought could carry any risk for society as a whole. Almost no one could really object to that, after all who would defend that kind of behavior? Some far right gangs said it was against their right to free speech, but they were correctly answered that they didn't have any right to determine the conversation policy of bars that weren't theirs.

Others tried to point that, while that policy wasn't inherently wrong and those companies were in their right to implement it, in the past this was dealt with on a bar-per-bar basis, and although the immense majority of bars didn't allow that kind of behaviors, they had different degrees of flexibility about different topics so bars were more varied and diverse, and you were free to choose a bar which conformed to your interests.

But they were quickly accused of defending some supposed right of that people to be given a place to discuss and organize, and sometimes even accused of defending those ideas. "If you don't like how the Four Companies manage their bars, go elsewhere".

The problem is that the far right gangs and other kind of undesirable people, when forced to leave the Four Companies' bars, went straight to the bars in the outskirts, overflowing them. Some of those bars were already owned by far right people, others though the answer to the Four Companies was to keep a more tolerant policy, and were overtook by neo-nazis. The few independent bars that didn't accept to become far right havens were forced to implement policies not that far from those of the Four Companies, or else face a far right invasion. Their clients spent a lot of time discussing wether something was off-limits or not instead of just enjoying a good time like they did before, and those bars were also very small and far away. They were interesting places, to be sure, but they were cut apart from most of the night life of the city, which took place on the hundreds of Four Companies' bars.

But now, there was a growing problem. The Four Companies had started to prohibit other subjects, for several reasons that aren't really important. Some were distasteful subjects, other were against their political interests or the city council's. But, as the far right gangs kept stabbing people and trying to reclaim their "right" to be accepted into the Four Companies' bars, most people thought that the risk they posed weighed more than anything else.

But they were missing the point. In another nearby city, there were never a handful of companies owning most bars. Still most bars didn't allow far right gangs, and discussion was diverse and fun, and sometimes helpful to combat the excesses of the city council and local police. Still, there were some neo-nazi bars, and most bars had one or two unlikable people. Neo-nazi bars sometimes caused trouble and had to be closed by the police, most were not only under police surveillance but under the neighbors' surveillance too. And, as neo-nazis were a very small minority, if you didn't support the same team as the owner of your closest bar, you could go to another bar which supported your team without it being forcefully full of neo-nazis or otherwise disgusting people.

Both cities had neo-nazis and sometimes problems in their bars, although Four Companies' bars were quite more peaceful on average, as they were heavily policed in a uniform and homogeneous way. But they were lifeless too, and lots of interesting discussions and possibilities of neighbors facing local injustice together were lost forever. Everyone ended up thinking the same, watching the same, liking the same sports and supporting the same teams. Bars weren't a fun and exciting place anymore.

This is just an analogy, so it's limited. But I think it explains well my general view and worries on the subject, which have nothing to do with leaving free way to racists and neo-nazis. It has to do with putting an end to the oligopoly before it's too late.

I have been noticing a disturbing trend in psychedelic groups lately, in which powerful mind-altering substance are being used for emotional and sexual manipulation -- especially among young and vulnerable demographics. In order to combat the collective trauma resulting from these practices, I am attempting to spread harm reduction information far and wide as it pertains to the subject.

This is one of my more recent articles. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, in case anyone would like to build off of it. If anyone has constructive criticism or experience, any feedback would be immensely appreciated. Thank you :)

Psychedelics facilitate increased intimacy

There is a tenuous association between psychedelics and cliquey, tribal, or cult-like group behavior. This should be taken seriously, especially in large group whose members bond through regular psychedelic sessions. Psychedelics have a number of potential effects that can make individuals more suggestible, and may occasion rapidly-escalating intimacy:

• facilitate deep feelings of connection to others
• induce dissociation, depersonalization and ego loss
• increase suggestibility, making it easier to impress new beliefs or ideas upon the user
• re-expose the user to potentially traumatic memories
• evoke emotional re-association and object transference, including trust and sexual interest that may not otherwise be present
• invoke religious or metaphysical experiences, that instill a sense of meaning and personal significance
• create a sense of paranoia or suspicion, in part as a result of being involved in a potentially illicit activities
• evoke symptoms of mental illness in vulnerable users, making one reliant on external social and economic support

Not all of these effects guarantee problems, but rather indicate how psychedelics can open users up to remarkably strong bonding. The ability of hallucinogens to connect individuals into family-like organizations is notable, as psychedelic have been foundational to many rituals, communities, and cults through history. In part due to these effects, many psychedelic groups exhibit some degree of organizational eccentricity, marked intimacy, or social drama.

Identifying safe group dynamics

If you need help identifying whether or not an organization exercises exploitative practices, consult the following guidelines on cult behavior and gaslighting. Troublesome psychedelic groups are usually large in size and have organized leadership structure, exhibiting the following qualities (as adapted from the Cult Education Institute’s webpage):

• possessing an egotistical leader of social or creative influence, who may have a record of abusing power or individuals
• a rigidly directed ideology, and excluding or punishing members who do not conform to it
• provoking members who are under the influence of psychedelics, or attempting to selfishly influence the psychedelic integration process of another member
• maintaining a culture of misinformation or fear or threats, in which members are easily excluded or blacklisted
• illicit dealings and in-group abuse that is concealed by a culture of secrecy, including: promoting or selling increasingly risky drugs, sexual or romantic grooming, or the use of psychedelics as “tools of seduction”

Perhaps the best takeaway from the association between psychedelics and cult activity is this: psychedelics have the ability to destabilize and rearrange one’s sense of self, which makes them more susceptible to peer pressure and the influence of others. For users who already are mentally liable or require a secure mindset and setting, it is essential to make sure that they feel in control of their drug use, and have the personal autonomy to ensure their trips are safe and serve personal growth.

The Cult Education Institute’s signs of a safe group/leader are also adapted below:

• can be asked questions without judgement
• discloses ample information such as structural organization/finances
• may have disgruntled former followers, but will not vilify, excommunicate, or forbid others from associating with them
• will not have a record of overwhelmingly negative articles and statements about them
• encourages family communication, community interaction, and existing friendships
• encourages critical thinking, individual autonomy, self-esteem, and personal growth
• leaders admit failings and mistakes, accepts criticism, and follow through on implementing constructive changes
• operates democratically and encourages accountability and oversight
• leader is not be the only source of knowledge excluding everyone else; group values dialogues and the free exchange of ideas
• members and leaders recognize clear emotional, physical, and emotional boundaries when dealing with others

Gaslighting & manipulation tactics

Many of the tactics that both individuals and groups use to manipulate people are examples of gaslighting, or attempts at convincing members that they are somehow mentally compromised in order to control them. This is often done by withholding information from them, invalidating the victim’s experiences, verbal abuse (including jokes), social isolation, trivializing the victim’s worth, and otherwise undermining their thought process. When combined with the suggestion-enhancing properties of psychedelic drugs, these kinds of behavior can be traumatizing to individual victims, while remaining relatively undetected or overlooked by onlookers.

In order to help identify gaslighting by a group, consider if you relate to its effects, as described by Robin Stern in her book The Gaslight Effect:

• constantly second-guessing yourself, feeling confused, or as if something is wrong
• asking yourself “Am I too sensitive?” throughout the day
• frequently apologizing to people who hold power over you, feeling as if you can’t do anything right, or running over things you may have done wrong
• frequently wondering if you are “good enough”
• frequently withholding information from your friends or family so you don’t have to explain the group or make excuses for it
• you lie to group members, to avoid being put down or gaslighted
• paranoia about bringing up innocent conversation topics
• speaking to group leaders through another member, so you don’t have be worry about the leaders becoming upset with you
• making excuses for group members’ behavior to your friends and family
• friends or family try to protect you from the group
• becoming furious with people you used to get along with

If you suspect you have been involved in a psychedelic cult or gaslighted, you may be experiencing regular instability, dissociation, or feelings of uncertainty. Although it can be difficult at first, finding a new group that demonstrates a high degree of member safety and accountability may help rebuild one’s sense of safety and trust. If you shared psychedelic experiences with group members while being taken advantage of, it may be beneficial to seek out a professional psychedelic integration therapist to help emotionally contextualize these memories. Victims may also benefit from adjunct trauma therapies, such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and Radically-Open DBT, somatic bodywork and movement therapies, therapeutic massage, and other complementary therapy practices.

Sources

Douglas, James. (2017). Inside the bizarre 1960s cult, The Family: LSD, yoga and UFOs. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/13/the-family-great-white-brotherhood-australia-melbourne-cult-anne-hamilton-byrne

Evans, P. (1996). The verbally abusive relationship: how to recognize it and how to respond. Expanded 2nd ed. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Media Corporation.

Mayorga, O. and Smith, P. (2019, May 19). Forgiving psychedelic abusers should never be at the expense of their victims. Psymposia. Retrieved from https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/forgiving-psychedelic-abusers/.

Neiswender, Mary. (1971). Manson Girl’s Acid Trips Detailed. CieldoDrive.com. Retrieved from http://www.cielodrive.com/archive/manson-girls-acid-trips-detailed/.

Ross, Rick. (2014). Warning signs. Cult Education Institute. Retrieved from https://www.culteducation.com/warningsigns.html.

Stern, R. (2007). The gaslight effect: how to spot and survive the hidden manipulations other people use to control your life. New York: Morgan Road Books.

Windolf, Jim. (2007). Sex, drugs, and soybeans. Vanity Fair. Retrieved from https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/05/thefarm200705.

MAJOR SPOILER WARNING

What I Did

The game took me around twenty hours to beat, and I stretched that out over the course of about two months. Sometimes I would dive in deep and play non-stop for an hour or two, but most of the time it was me playing it almost piecemeal, for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Enough to get through one or two panels that I had been stuck on and then stop again.

I would have liked to do longer gaming sessions with it, but I found that I sort of had finite mental resources to apply to the game. I would hit a panel, be thoroughly perplexed, stare at it for 10 minutes while trying different solutions in my head, on paper, and in the game. Nothing would work, so I'd stop the game. The next day I would boot it up and, more often than not, have the solution in a minute or two--sometimes even the first try! I think my brain was working on these in the background.

Something that helped me massively was not letting myself get intimidated by the game. As I would work myself farther and farther down a strand of puzzles, I would instinctively start to feel the pressure that they were getting harder and harder each time. Rather than feed into that feeling, I simply reassured myself that each puzzle was its own thing, and each one had a solution right there, staring me in the face. I just had to find it.

What I Loved

I think the game is gorgeous. Stunning. Beautiful. An absolute joy to look at. It made me realize that we don't often get vibrant color in games that aren't pixel art. I also think the world is beautifully designed. The island is a memorable place with lots to explore.

I also loved the game's ability to teach you its rules wordlessly. The line puzzles aren't just puzzles--they're a language. The whole game felt like some geometric force was trying to communicate with me, but first it had to teach me its alphabet, grammar, and syntax.

Furthermore, I can't tell you how many times I would fight for a solution to a difficult puzzle, feeling it was nearly impossible all the way, only to find the seemingly one right answer. The only way it could possibly work. The next panel? The same damn layout but with an added rule that ruined my prior solution! I loved that the game made me rethink my own thoughts and forced me to see, quite literally, that there is often more than one way to solve a problem.

What I Felt

I was probably 12 to 14 hours into the game when I accidentally stumbled onto the knowledge that there were lines that could be activated outside the panels. I can't remember where I was but holy hell can I remember the feeling. I've got goosebumps right now as I type this from revisiting it in my memory. It was the sublime feeling you get from a great plot twist. There was a sense of revelation, the feeling of frission, and a newfound respect and appreciation for the design that went into the game.

What's sad is that it shouldn't have taken me that long. I saw the circles and lines throughout the environment as I made my way around the island and just assumed that it was a sort of visual motif, or maybe a stylistic flair, much like the game's sort of cartoony, polygonal look. Finding out that I could, in fact, trace them just like every other line I'd been making for the past ten hours was absolutely flooring to me. Experiencing that moment is one of the high points in all of my gaming history. It was the moment the game went from "this is definitely a clever game!" to "FUCK...this game is SO. DAMN. SMART." After that moment I think I spent two hours frantically running around the island hunting environmental lines. Now that I knew what to look for, they were EVERYWHERE. Hiding in plain sight! I was stunned. In absolute awe.

At probably about the 15 hour mark, I found the movie room and had the input for one movie. It was a scene in which a man lights a candle and attempts to walk across a courtyard, and each time the candle goes out, he returns to the beginning. I took this to be a metaphor for the game--specifically that it is about the journey rather than the destination. As such, this was the point that I realized I wasn't going to get some revelatory story at the end of the game, and that making it to the end of the game, while definitely a goal, was not what gave the game meaning.

The sub-takeaway from the film was the idea that the effort is worth it. The man in the film could have just crossed the courtyard and lit the candle at the end. The fact that he didn't showed self-restraint and a committment to the rule. I took this to be a comment on how the game is played. I could have looked up solutions to the puzzles online and just inputted them easily as a way of breezing through the game. While it would get me to where I was going (the end), what was the point? My playthrough was the lit candle route--harder because I was forcing myself to put in the work rather than taking the easy way out.

Oh, and did I mention that the film also had an environmental line at the end you could activate if you went behind the screen while it was running? Genius. This game is SO. DAMN. SMART.

What I Didn't Love

Because I didn't pay attention to detail and made assumptions when I shouldn't have, I didn't realize that I could enter the mountain without all the beacons activated. My gamer mind simply saw OBVIOUS GATED DESTINATION and OBVIOUS DESTINATION GATE KEYS and went "yup, gotta get all of these to unlock the end!" As such, I overplayed my game a bit by doing all of that first. I was all set for entering the mountain to be the ending, especially because the village beacon felt like a "final exam" to the game, incorporating all of the other puzzle types. I kept coming back to it after learning a new symbol/rule and would chip away here and there until I finally got through all of it.

As such, when I got into the mountain and there were even more puzzles I was miffed. My steam had run out. Add to that I'm pretty susceptible to motion sickness in games, so the flashing, scrolling, and color-cycling puzzles were deeply unpleasant for me. I literally had to look away from the screen for the scrolling ones. I solved them on paper and inputted them with the panels in my peripheral vision.

The double-sided room below those was equal parts brilliant and frustrating, though I was impressed as hell with the room with the four sub-puzzles that fed into the larger one on the floor. Unfortunately, I ended the game on quite a low note, as the pillar puzzles at the very end turned my stomach on account of the rotating camera. I was able to power through those only because I knew I was so close to the end.

What I'm Left With

While I didn't love the ending, I, as previously mentioned, don't think it's about that. The game gave me 20 hours of puzzle-solving bliss in a beautiful, rich environment. It gave me legitimate chills when I figured out its secret. It made me think, it made me work, and it made me feel legitimately fulfilled. Good puzzle games make you feel baffled and then they turn around and make you feel brilliant. This one made me feel all sorts of brilliant.

The game has so many legitimately clever moments. I loved the pagoda area where you have to look through branches at the right angle to see the solution. The last puzzle has two pieces of the answer, but a section is missing. After traipsing around, trying every possible visual angle, I look down and find a branch broken off at my feet. The missing piece. Brilliant.

It was filled with little things like these. Little thoughtful twists or nudges. Each puzzle strand was an iterative sequence, and each time you thought you knew where it was headed, they'd push it further. Then further. More and more. Often in ways you wouldn't expect. It's not just that the idea of the game is good but that its execution is so rich and thoughtful that it makes me reverent.

As for post-game stuff (because I know there's a ton I haven't gotten to), I'm taking a break from the game right now, but I might return to it a little later. I kept screenshots of puzzles I didn't solve or environmental elements that I was pretty sure were really activatable but that I couldn't quite figure out (the brown railroad tracks in the white limestoney area, for example).

I have the inputs for a couple more movies that I haven't watched, so I'll probably go back for those. I know there's a challenge area as well, and I'm presumably equipped for it given that I did all of the beacons, but I don't know if I'm up for that. Not just yet, at least.

What You Can Help Me With

For those of you that have gone through the post-game content, do you recommend it? Are there certain things I should focus on? I'm not terribly concerned about spoilers, but if there's something "big" like the environmental line revelation, maybe just give me a hint or point me in the right direction.

I also have a couple of lingering questions. Feel free to answer them unless you feel that it's better if I try to figure it out by myself.

• What do the individual, standalone panels lying around the island do (the gray ones with the triangles)? I've figured out the rule, I just don't know their purpose.

• Does finding all the environmental lines serve any larger purpose?

• Is there story or lore in the game? Does the island or its frozen inhabitants get explained? I activated a few audiologs, but those were mostly philosophical ponderings rather than narrative.

• How on earth do I get that environmental line with the railroad tracks? Of all the ones that I haven't been able to figure out how to get, that one's bothering me the most.

Finally, to anyone who's played the game (which is hopefully anyone who read this), I'd love to hear your experience and thoughts. What was The Witness like for you?

EDIT: Writing the post inspired me to go back into the game instead of sleeping. I watched two other videos I had found inputs for. One was a woman talking about freeing yourself from want, and the other was a man talking about science and knowledge. Interesting stuff.

Then I started exploring and I found an environmental line made by the negative space in the sky when properly bounded by a cloud and wall from the exact right angle. This game is SO. DAMN. SMART.

EDIT 2: Disregard where I said I was going to take a break from the game. I'm diving back in. I want to explore and find these environmental lines. It's so satisfying when you find one.

There was one on a bridge leading from the village towards the foresty area with the orange trees. I could see it from the ground and knew it definitely was one, but I could never quite position myself right to actually trace it. I tried climbing in the castle area since it seemed like I needed to be elevated, but that didn't work. I tried it from the rooftops in the village, and that didn't work. Then I looked: the tower in the middle of the village! I'd forgotten to try from there because once I got to the top of that I headed straight for the mountain. Sure enough, that was the spot.

Also, can we talk about how the sound is so satisfying when you get one? So good.

EDIT 3: The game might be trying to teach me a lesson in freeing myself from want. Now that I'm fired up to dive back into it, it's hard crashing after I start it up. It loads fine and I can walk a few steps, then it locks up my whole system.

I'm running it on Linux through Proton and tried all the different Proton versions assuming that was the culprit (it has crashed before) but the outcome is the same. I might be technologically barred from going further, which I guess is in the spirit of the game's ending and philosophy, right?

EDIT 4: My OS had some graphics library updates for me today, and after installing them I'm back in business--no more crashing! (Sub edit: I spoke too soon. It crashed after about half an hour, but that's way better than what I was getting before). I spent a while traipsing around the island, looking for environmental lines. It's amazing how, in hindsight, so many areas or destinations that I thought were just kind of dead space are actually strategic locations for environmental lines.

A good example is the very beginning of the game. You can get onto the roof of the overhang you first walk out from. At the beginning of the game I got up there, saw some pillows, and just thought it was set dressing in an ultimately useless space. Nope! Not only is there an environmental line you can get from there, but there's an audiolog as well if you're paying attention to detail (which, of course, I wasn't in my first go-around).

Here's a list of a things that came out in this past week, up through Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and we avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to mention anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)

Notes:
If you spot any mistakes, let us know.
Parental Advisory version of all albums linked, so expect NSFW.

Channel Tres - Black Moses | EP isn't due until Aug 16, linked single instead
Flume & Reo Cragun - Quits | Song.link says "Single" but it's the EP
Tennis System - Lovesick | No song.link yet, album not due until Sept 6, linked bandcamp single instead
Volbeat - Rewind, Replay, Rebound | "Deluxe" album linked

Thanks to @Cleb, @Bauke, and @cfabbro!

Some of you may remember this post from last year. Well, it has happened: the last BronyCon. 10,215 people attended (with rumors that there were enough uncollected badges to hit the 11,000 hard-cap), beating their previous record of 10,011 in 2015. They chose to make this the last year because attendance has been trending downward, and the show it is built around (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic) is in its final season.

I was there, and it truly was the experience of a lifetime. They intended to go out with a bang, and they absolutely delivered. Did anyone else here attend (or want to attend)? What were your thoughts on the event this year? Any other current (or former) Bronies on the site?

Some news articles about the event:

• https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2019/08/02/end-of-bronycon-in-baltimore/

• https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bs-fe-bronycon-20190731-g5zqppemhfa7nb7xnia6vheqcq-story.html

Also, people made a memorial on the 200 level of the Baltimore Convention Center. This was from August 2 at 2:37 PM, and this was from August 4 at 2:05 PM.

A few of the other groups have been doing recurring topics like this, and I think we should really do it more regularly in ~games too.

So, what have you been playing lately? (Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game as well.)

A free form poem.

You sing the devotion song and
your people drink from your font
of well-meant falsehoods.
They sway in the breeze,
roses ripe for cutting,
so you reap. And I deal with it.

Brain revolting, hands shaking, heart beating
Sweating, aching, freezing, creeping thoughts
that I'm not enough.
I'm a failure. I don't deserve it. What if this goes wrong?
"Sometimes it can take awhile to find the right combination of medications."
And I deal with it.

The blood in the streets is cleaned, pristine,
likewise the crimes of an otherwise good man.
Heads shake and hands pray,
repeating robotic platitudes, but I do
nothing.
And I deal with it.

The sun shines high and the wind blows cool.
Our future dances and plays in the light.
We watch and her skin is soft, her hair yet softer, and I hold her
against me.
This too shall pass, my gut twists in knots.
And I deal with it.

Dark nights, dark thoughts
in front of a washroom mirror.
Lightning thunders, they come and go.
Drinking my hopes to keep them gone,
I tell myself, "This isn't you," but it hurts and it's true and I can't stop the dreaming of passing this down
And I deal with it.

i intended to actually post these like three days ago but that didn't happen because it has to be super fucking late for me to even want to post these and unfortunately they've now aged sufficiently that i categorize them firmly in the "intensely mediocre" column with everything i ever do. unfortunate, tbh. anyways here's stuff:

bűnös

UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER—
or i'll shatter your bones
and crush your heart—
to dance with me is to dance
a fine line that wrenches two worlds apart

for on one side there is a hall of saints—
on the other
the brimstone of hell—
and to stay on the side of the hall of saints
is something you'd best do well.

and brave souls that dare toe the line—
that cross it
are mighty thin—
and their ranks are made of anarchists
who commit most grievous sin.

UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER—
state your allegiance
to the vaunted line—
or soon you too shall join the ranks
of those who deserve malign.

fáj

when i was seventeen
the panic attacks began.
the nightmares.
the violence. the violence. the violence.

violence is a funny little thing—
insidious, slithering in through one grate
and out the other.
it always begins with little things,
little fantasies in one ear and out the other.
dreams here and there, manufacturing terror and hurt.
invasive thoughts, marching to an intensifying drumbeat.
one offs.

it's not normal to
want to hurt so bad.
it's not normal to
want to cut yourself everywhere,
is it?
to feel those feelings,
to bear them like a cross shackled on your back?
to wish some days you could cut to the bone
even though you're afraid of blood?
to mutilate yourself until you can't feel anymore
even though you know those feelings are irrational?
to wish you could die violently, publicly
even though you're afraid of death?

violence isn't a very funny little thing—
terrifying, inescapable and ever recurring
one night after the other.
it was the little things once,
the little fantasies that used to be but now
consume the dreams, the
waking thoughts, becoming a great crescendo.
every day.

when i was nineteen
the panic attacks were normal.
the nightmares.
the violence.

Since @Deimos has stated he will likely not be restarting the tradition of the Official Daily Tildes Discussions, which is something I and a number of other users greatly enjoyed and miss, I have decided to attempt to take on the responsibility of continuing them unofficially (with his blessing). And since these are not official (so won't be in ~tildes.official, which everyone is subscribed to and probably shouldn't unsubscribe from), I will only be doing them weekly instead of daily, and we now have topic tag filtering (so unofficial weekly discussion can be filtered out), hopefully the people who found the official daily discussions annoying can more easily ignore/hide these unofficial ones.

With the explanation out of the way, on to the topic for this week:

Suggestions/ideas/concerns for future unofficial weekly discussions

I thought it would be appropriate to have the first one of these be a bit of an open-ended, meta-meta discussion on the future of these topics. And to kick things off:

• What would everyone here like to see discussed in these topics in the future? Are there any particular site features (planned, suggested or theoretical), policies (tagging, moderation, etc), or other meta issues/subjects you would like to be the topic in future discussions?

• What would you like us to try to achieve with these discussions? Should we have any specific goals in mind, or should they just be fun brainstorming/theory-crafting/naval-gazing sessions?

• Does anyone have any suggestions for me with regards to how I should handle these discussions? Is there anyone out there who would like to help me with these in some capacity going forwards?

• Does anyone have any concerns regarding these unofficial discussions, and if so, can you think of any ways we can try to address them?

The floor is open, and I am all ears. :)

Tildes Official Docs : Donate to Tildes | Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board

We're sorting out our process for these to be more efficient, so hopefully we won't be missing weeks anymore. Sorry again about that.

Here's a list of a things that came out in this past week, up through Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and we avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to mention anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)

Notes:
If you spot any mistakes, let us know.
Parental Advisory version of all albums linked, so expect NSFW.

Thank you to @Cleb, @cfabbro, and @Bauke!

One thing I really like about Tildes is the exemplary tags for comments. I love being able to let someone know I thought they had a great post, and I especially like that it's anonymous (though I realize some people like signing theirs, which I'm fine with too).

One thing I've found myself wanting to be able to do is give someone an exemplary label not for any one individual comment but for their contributions to the community at large. Maybe they're consistently thoughtful and insightful; maybe they go out of their way to post a lot of content for the community; maybe they're contributing code to the platform. It's less that any one particular thing they've done is amazing (though they often have individually great contributions too) and more that they've demonstrated a noteworthy and consistent pattern of good behavior.

As such, I think having something similar to the exemplary tag but applicable to a particular user could be very beneficial. I realize privately PMing a given user can currently accomplish this, but those are not anonymous, and I really like the idea of supporting others without revealing who I am, since I don't want my praise of others to influence their opinion of me. Furthermore, for the community at large, I think there's a benefit to praise of that type coming from "a voice in the crowd" rather than specific identifiable users, as it promotes community goodwill rather than person-to-person cheer.

Of course, with any type of anonymous feedback the thing to consider will be the potential for misuse. Someone could easily target/harass someone using an exemplary user feature by writing a nasty message, but this is also currently possible with exemplary tags and I don't know if it's been a problem? Nevertheless, it's something to consider. Perhaps a built-in report feature should something cross a line?

Furthermore, if such an appreciation mechanism were to be implemented, I would strongly advocate against any sort of publicly visual indicator on the site (like the blue stripe on comments). I think applying differences to that at the user level can create an appearance of user hierarchy, which is undesirable for a variety of reasons. Instead, I feel like it should be invisible to everyone except the recipient--basically an anonymous PM that they can't respond to, letting them know that they're awesome and why. I also think a similar "cooldown" system would benefit it. In fact, I'd probably advocate that it be longer than the one for comment tags.

Thoughts?

I thought it would be fun to take Tildes's temperature on humanity's future prospects. If you respond, can you include your approximate age, your opinion, and maybe a brief explanation of why you think/feel the way you do.

I'm in my early 30s. I'm cautiously optimistic. I think it's an interesting time to be alive, as its the first time humanity is facing a problem of this scale. I think it'll pull through in one way or another. It may get bad for a bit, but nobody will let it stay bad for very long. I also think humanity has more control over the current situation than it realizes, it seems like the last two generations and maybe the current gen were content to let tunnel-visioned, big business interests do the metaphorical driving. Hopefully that'll stop soon, and we'll put people without a profit motive in the driver's seat.

Thanks for participating!

This was written for a themed flash fiction contest (the theme was Technological Dystopia) and ended up losing, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to share it here. It's not my proudest work but, as flash fiction, I think it works well enough. I hope you enjoy!

She was three floors from the bottom of the sunken tower when the crying first reached her. A quick swipe earned her a pair from the rack nearby and she continued her descent.

With the aid of technology this process had been streamlined and systematized such that these checks were only needed once a month, but everyone dreaded them. She had drawn the short straw this time and, though it had been years since last she’d ventured to The Lab, she still remembered her last haunting experience. It wasn’t that she was a dissenter or rebelled against that which needed to be done. This was a necessary evil to save their species, but she was still a human being. Seeing them all like that, all tubes and tapes running from frail flesh, was enough to turn any stomach.

A pair of heavy iron doors sat ominously in her way as she bottomed out. She could see the white, crisp interior of The Lab beyond and pushed forward, swallowing her hesitance as best she could.

Before her lay a large room with clean white tile, walls and harsh, flourescent light. It smelled and looked like a hospital because that’s exactly what it was. 10 rows and columns of small, clear, plastic boxes stretched between her and the far wall. The muffs were doing their job exceedingly well, but she could still hear the awful racket bouncing around her memory. She took a deep breath, steadied herself, and started working.

Her primary duty was to make sure the machines were functioning correctly, mostly the arm that glided to and fro above the boxes, administering medicine or changing bags of various fluids as need be. She would also be checking the tubes for clogs that may have been missed by any old or worn out sensors; this was the part she dreaded the most. She flipped the lid on the nearest box and checked the left, then the right, and lastly the tube running into its belly button, and closed the box quickly.

It couldn’t have taken her more than 5 seconds but that short time was enough for the anguished face to plaster itself onto her mind. Everyone does their part, she reminded herself, from the start to the end. It didn’t serve a purpose to bemoan that which she could not change. She moved on to the next crib, hoping this would go by faster than she expected.

Halfway through her checks she hit a snag. There was a clog in Crib 54. She could register the fault in the system and it would fix it on its next hourly cycle, as were her orders, but it was such a small clog. The tube simply needed to be changed, and as a nurse she was well-versed in the procedure. In that moment it was decided.

The tubes themselves were specially designed to be thin and flexible, but rigid enough to fit the shape of a tear duct. Her first task, after finding a pair of gloves, was to gently remove the tube currently in the eye. She hovered over the crib and gently pulled the tube out of the right tear duct. It came slowly, millimeter by millimeter, each bit covered in more goop and mucus than the last. It wound its way up into the sinuses which meant, by the end of it, she had pulled at least five inches of tubing. This she discarded.

Next she had to insert the new tube (these were kept in abundance in a draw underneath the crib). She grabbed one, snipped it to length with a pair of scissors hanging from the IV stand, and took a moment to recent herself. Inserting the tube while the child was crying would be much more difficult than removing it.

As gently as she could she reached down and, with her index finger and thumb, pried open the eye of the little one. With one came the other, the muscles young and unwilling to work independently, and she found herself staring into a pair of brilliant green pools. Her heart melted and, for the briefest moment, she thought of taking it. She could smuggle it out. The bed being empty would trip the system but she could clear the error and explain it away somehow. But no, that was silly. This wasn’t a decision for her to make; things were done this way because there was no other choice.

She pushed the tip of the tube into the tear duct confidently, shoving the traitorous thoughts from her mind as the child’s cries were renewed with pain. She was here to do a job, cold and emotionless. It wasn’t her place to question the way things were done. The tube went in without a hitch and the child’s eyes snapped closed again once she released them. The little bundle of agony before her squirmed and she saw the tears begin to flow anew. With swift, definite movement she closed and latched the lid.

The rest of her checks went smoothly, but she couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that now ran rampant in her gut. She hated Lab duty, and she expected that would always be the way. With a heavy heart she signed the documents needed to record her visit, noted the tube change in the work log, and left The Lab through its heavy iron doors. The trip upstairs would be long and tiring, but at least she could try and forget ever having been here.

i got fire in my blood

Wild Turkey and the nicotine

might just call my doctor

have him put me on amphetamines

driving past the memories

i'm pushing on 100 speed

crossing single-white lines

with a blade til my bones weak.

cold-brew hipster

gothboi fantasies

hard to think straight when

my thoughts are attacking me

here i let the voices out

inner demons writing rhapsodies

before i go and swing from

a noose and a dramatic tree

.

can't decide what i want between

freedom and consistency

i say i want it done

but i think i want her missing me

last week i bought a gun*

this week i went to therapy

when will i be free from all the

thermo-manic tendencies?

.

drowning in my bed

breathing wild turkey

i couldn't feel if i were dead,

but i like the way she hurts me

i've come to know the pain

it's like a second home to me

liquor novocaine

im falling from autonomy.

if mecca was a bedroom

girl you were a God to me

and laying here alone is

a wicked act of blasphemy.

never knew you were a snake

feeding hate from an apple tree

I'll chop it down, and build a tomb

so you can hold me,

as an effigy

(* didnt actually buy a gun. me no like. literally 0 plans to.)

There's a conflict in my mind that I would like others' perspective on.

On one hand, I like privacy. For example, I use Signal as my primary messaging service because I like the idea that the end-to-end encryption keeps my conversations private. It feels right that someone shouldn't be able to look over my shoulder when I'm communicating one-on-one with friends and family.

On the other hand, I also like deplatforming. I believe strongly in the idea that inhibiting communities that espouse fascist or other anti-social beliefs is a key lever in keeping their ideas from gaining social traction.

Unfortunately, I feel like there's a tension between these two ideals. Private platforms can conceivably allow for the inviolable platforming of hateful groups because they can then exist without social oversight or accountability. But maintaining some sort of oversight also feels wrong to me because it's fundamentally invasive?

I don't know what to make of this, as I do think we should be encouraging greater privacy on an internet where our actions are being scooped up wholesale for the benefit of large tech companies, but I also worry about how increased privacy measures will enable bad actors. Anyone have thoughts on this or want to help me sort this out?

i got a job

i got on meds

i got a car

still wanting death.

still here at night

alone in my bed

still hear her voice

ring in my head

“why do you look like i abused you?”

.

i bought a bottle

i bought some cards

can’t kill my thoughts

my god it’s hard

just make it stop

“i don’t think i love you anymore.”

.

anxiety’s

taken over me

every interaction

i worry

did i act weird?

what do they think?

i guarantee

they laugh at me

can’t beat it all

can’t bear it all.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.
.

.

don’t want to live

don’t want to die

i fantasize

(that) it’ll be alright

she’ll cuddle close

and hold me night

and pet my head

and kill the fright

i can’t escape

don’t want to fight

god let me die

god let me die

This is kind of a question for Tildes as well as a discussion topic on Social Media more generally. For context, "The Right to be Forgotten" is an idea being kicked around in international law and human rights circles. It's kind of a corollary to the "right to privacy" and focuses on putting some guardrails around the downsides of having all information about you being archived, searchable, and publicly available forever and ever. It's usually phrased as a sense that people shouldn't be tied down indefinitely by stigmatizing actions they've done in "the past" (which is usually interpreted as long enough ago that you're not the same person anymore).

This manifests in some examples large and small. Felony convictions or drug offenses are a pretty big one. Another public issue was James Gunn getting raked over the coals for homophobic quotes from a long time ago. Even on a smaller scale, I think plenty of young people have some generalized anxiety about embarrassing videos, photos, Facebook statuses, forum posts, etc. that they made when they were young following them around the rest of their lives. For example, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had people try to shame her for dancing to a Phoenix song in an amateur music video. An even darker version of this happens with people who might be the victims of targeted harassment. Often doxxing happens by people digging through peoples' histories and piecing together clues to figure out who they are or at least narrow down where they're from, where they work, etc.

In the context of Tildes, this would basically be a question of how do we feel about peoples' comment history lingering forever? Do we care about/agree with this "right" in principle and if we do, what should be done about putting it into practice?

The root of the issue is the existence of archives of data about yourself that is 1.) searchable, 2.) publicly viewable, 3.) under someone else's control, 4.) forever. Even if the ability to delete comments exists, it's infeasible for any individual to pore over the reams of data they create about themselves to find the stuff that might be problematic. The solutions would revolve around addressing any one of those numbered items. Unfortunately, hitting any of those has upsides and downsizes. Some examples:

Some people like being able to look back on old contributions and having them get deleted after a period of time (hitting problem #4) would be a bummer unless there is a system to selectively archive stuff you want to save from atrophy, which would be a function/feature that would take a ton of thought and development. What's more, there is no point in just saving your own comment if everyone else's stuff is gone because comments without context are indecipherable. It could work in a more selective way, so rather than a blanket atrophying of posts, but then you have the context issue again. Someone you were having a discussion with might choose to delete their entire comment history and there goes any sense of logic or coherence to your posts.

We could address the searchable bit by automatically or selectively having posts pseudonymed after a period of time. But in a lot of cases a pseudonym won't work. People tend to refer to each other by username at times, and some people have a distinctive enough style that you could probably figure it out if they're well known and long-tenured.

That's just some general food for thought. I'll yield the floor

I'm in no rush to buy but I am considering getting a Switch. From my brief bit of duckduckgo-ing, it appears that a new Switch is on the horizon, either a newer version (Switch 2) or a mini-Switch and the current release may drop in price.

Any thoughts? What would you do at this point? Most of the shops around here that sell them are out of stock anyway so unless I was to buy online, it's not necessarily an option.

Thanks all!

Update: I bought a Switch. With Mario Kart and Zelda. It's brilliant!

It looks like a super light week, so feel extra free to mention them here!

Here's a list of a things that came out in this past week, up through Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and we avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to mention anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)

Notes:
If you spot any mistakes, let us know.
Parental Advisory version of all albums linked, so expect NSFW.

Andhim - Duno EP | Song.link says Single but it's the EP.
DAGames - Pizza Puppet Panic | No song.link yet. Linked DAGame's YouTube where most of the tracks can be found.
Jaden - ERYS | Deluxe version linked.
Lou the Human - Painkiller Paradise | No song.link yet. Linked Soundcloud instead.

Thank you to @Cleb, @cfabbro, and @Bauke!

I realize I'm behind the curve on this one, as it made headlines a full year ago, but I just watched Nanette, which is a stand-up comedy performance by Australian lesbian comic Hannah Gadsby. I don't love stand-up comedy at all, but the person who recommended it to me knew this about me and encouraged me to watch it anyway.

I'm glad I did.

And a big part of that is because her show isn't really stand-up. It starts out that way, and I legitimately enjoyed her humor, but about halfway through she shifts from telling jokes to more serious monologuing, and the show moves from being funny and incisive to become a flat out emotional sledgehammer. I cried through a good portion of it.

She tackles a lot in her hour, and it's given me a lot to think about--most of which I haven't really had adequate time to digest yet. I found it remarkable that so much of her story was so similar to my own. She framed aspects of myself in ways I needed to hear. I think what she has to say has resonance for everyone, but I think it's especially relevant for LGBT people, and especially for those of us that grew up in environments that were toxic to us.

I just wanted to see if anyone else here has watched it and, if not, put it out there as something worth your time--even if you don't usually like stand-up.

A really long time ago I was introduced to the Evoluent Vertical Mouse. Even though I was only in my early twenties I already had wrist issues and I thought this thing was god send. It was clunky but totally worth it.

These days there are a ton of vertical mice available. Is anyone else into these? I am looking to get a new one now that I'm on the mouse/keyboard a lot again. Do you have a preferred model?

note: If you have wrist issues and are curious, I highly recommend trying one out. One caveat is that the cheap one I got off of amazon recently is a bit too small for a decent sized guy like myself. Filling out your palm seems really important for maximum relief.

I just finished Breaking Bad, second run-through. I had first started watching it when Season 4 had just started; binging seasons 1-3 and followed it episode-by-episode after.

I was surprised to notice that the content I binged stayed with me much better than the seasons I watched one-episode-at-a-time.
Also… Holy shit. Breaking Bad gets dark towards the end (Jesse getting imprisoned and forced to cook for months; his ex-girlfriend getting shot). I had forgotten all about that. I had forgotten almost everything about the last … 4-5 episodes.

The scenes that had stayed with me the most from my first watch: Box Cutter's throat-slicing scene, the Prison Shankings, Hank vs. the Cousins, Hank's death scene, Gus's death scene.

But, seriously, rewatching it reminded me how good of a series Breaking Bad is. I couldn't help but binge the entire rewatch marathon. It's an incredibly intense experience.

In the context of what happened to Game of Thrones I'm also very happy to see the consistent quality and execution in Breaking Bad's storytelling. It's a series that set out to tell a story. The story makes sense from beginning to end, and gets resolved nice and tidy.

I'm a little disappointed we don't get to see more of what happens to the family while Walt is gone. The trial etc, that all seems like potentially interesting stuff.

On rewatch, I noticed my sympathies changing. I have a lot less sympathy towards Walt, even very early on. Knowing some things in advanced completely changed my view on him; whereas on first watch I rooted for him quite a bit.

My sympathy towards Skyler also flipped. On my first watch, I disliked her a lot at first, but grew to like her when she "went dark". On this rewatch, I disliked her less and sympathized more with her, though her behaviour beyond season 4 became incomprehensible to me.
I like Marie a lot more this time around as well. She's still pretty unbearable when it comes to shoplifting and generally the way she talks to people; but I hadn't realized just how much she loves Hank. How much she supports him through his PT (despite how atrocious Hank is specifically to her). Knowing Hank's death was coming, my heart broke into pieces when I heard their last phone call end in "I love you. // I love you too.". Hearing her say "He isn't picking up, probably because he's in the thick of it".

I don't think I even noticed anyone's grief the first time around, most likely because I was dealing with my own. Hank's death was a shock then. This time, I knew it was coming, and I had a lot more time to process how people felt about Hank before and their reactions to the news.

Just a bunch of random thoughts about that series. I usually only rewatch "comfort series" such as comedies, animated series, etc; I very rarely rewatch epics (except that I used to re-marathon GoT before a new season). But I don't regret giving Breaking Bad a full rerun. It is such an intense experience; during Seasons 3&4 I yelled in my pillows a few times on credit roll, just from the adrenaline.

You too should give it a shot.

Here's a list of a things that came out in this past week, up through Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and we avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to mention anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)

Notes:
If you spot any mistakes, let us know.
Parental Advisory version of all albums linked, so expect NSFW.

G-Eazy - B-Sides, says Single but it's actually an EP.
Novelist - Reload King | No Song.link, linked Soundcloud instead.
Peggy Gou / Hiver / I:Cube - DJ-Kicks | Linked DJ Mix and EP version.

Thank you to @Cleb, @cfabbro, and @Bauke

Consider the life you want to live, from the essentials to the luxuries. House, car, food, tech, kids, etc. Furthermore, consider where you want to live. Rural France? Downtown Tokyo?

For the purposes of the question I don't want you to think of the life of your wildest dreams (e.g. private jet, personal island, etc.), but I don't want you to think bare minimum either. Focus instead on "comfortable and fulfilling" according entirely to your own standards--a life that lets you live well and follow your aspirations with a sense of financial safety. Do not feel obligated to give a low, reasonable answer if your aspirations are higher, and don't feel obligated to shoot high if you're fine with a lower-cost lifestyle. Set your number entirely based around the desired archetypal life you want, rather than what you think is necessarily achievable based on your current financial situation.

Furthermore, don't anchor your hypothetical income to real-world standards. If you want to, for example, teach kindergarteners for a living and live in downtown San Francisco, and your desired income is $200,000 USD a year, that's perfectly fine for the purposes of this discussion despite the fact that you would be hard pressed to find a school there in real life that pays that much. I'm much more interested in the hypotheticals of the costs in your life rather than the feasibility of the income. Think of this less as a real-world budget and more of a thought experiment/personal reflection.

With all that in mind:

• What are the details of the life you want to live?
• Where do you want to live it?
• How much money would you need each year to make that feasible for you, and why?

I'm not interested in anything exact--just a ballpark estimate. And you don't need to give a full budget or anything. This should loose napkin math at best.

Also, to make things easier for everyone:

• Give your money as an amount per year.
• Give the currency you're using.
• Use combined income if your desired life involves multiple people.
• Do not judge someone else's desired life nor income.

Also, please specify which currency you are reporting in so that people can convert it to their local currency if needed to get a better sense of it.

Hi there, I've started a new public server on Discord for music discussion, recommendations, etc. I've seen a number of these go down in flames or completely lose the appeal for their core audience, so I've borrowed some principles from Tildes, adapted for the somewhat different but related issues this kind of Discord server typically runs into. I thought this may be of interest to some users here, so you're all welcome as long as you play by our rules!

If you'd like to see our rules and goals first, check the paste here. They'll be pretty familiar to anyone here, though they are subject to change depending on our needs. This should go without saying, but to be clear, this server is not officially connected to Tildes, nor is it exclusive to Tildes users. There just might be some overlap in ideas :)

Here's our permanent invite link if you'd like to join: https://discord.gg/kC4sSQq

I bet this is already taken care of, but if I type @Silbern or /u/Silbern , will I get a notification I wonder?

Edit: Nope, but someone else replied to a comment right before I hit refresh, so for a brief moment, thought I did. Thought I was quite clever for a moment, but alas.

Hey folks, we had our 3rd meet for the current campaign last night all went really well. Last time our Rogue upset everyone he met, stole everything that wasn't and was nailed down, including the nails. Then managed to get killed by an NPC that we were helping, it was amazing.

Now I wanted to get a little more creative with my character and since level 3 for Paladin is the oath level I went with Vengeance and wrote an Oath. I posted it in my last thread but will post again if anyone is interested.

Now I also wanted to have a go at making a dice bag, the first one is reversible but was too long so I made a few smaller ones. Then had the thought of making each of the guys a small bag with their names on them, each has a name longer than my leg so that failed before it started. I ended up with the initial of their first names, the Rogue wouldn't give up the name or initial so I did something different for his. The guys all loved the gifts especially the Rogue (now a Monk) these are the bags I made next thing I try will be a multi compartment job. All was done by hand because I couldn't get the sewing machine to work ...

Preface

It's not uncommon for a written piece of code to be both brief and functionality correct, yet difficult to reason about. This is especially true of recursive algorithms, which can require some amount of simulating the algorithm mentally (or on a whiteboard) on smaller problems to try to understand the underlying logic. The more you have to perform these manual simulations, the more difficult it becomes to track what exactly is going on at any stage of computation. It's also not uncommon that these algorithms can be made easier to reason about with relatively small changes, particularly in the way you conceptualize the solution to the problem. Our goal will be to take a brief tour into what these changes might look like and why they are effective at reducing our mental overhead.

Background

We will consider the case of the subset sum problem, which is essentially a special case of the knapsack problem where you have a finite number of each item and each item's value is equal to its weight. In short, the problem is summarized as one of the following:

• Given a set of numbers, is there a subset whose sum is exactly equal to some target value?

• Given a set of numbers, what is the subset whose sum is the closest to some target value without exceeding it?

For example, given the set of numbers {1, 3, 3, 5} and a target value of 9, the answer for both of those questions is {1, 3, 5} because the sum of those numbers is 9. For a target value of 10, however, the first question has no solution because no combination of numbers in the set {1, 3, 3, 5} produces a total of 10, but the second question produces a solution of {1, 3, 5} because 9 is the closest value to 10 that those numbers can produce without going over.

A Greedy Example

We'll stick to the much simpler case of finding an exact match to our target value so we don't have to track what the highest value found so far is. To make things even simpler, we'll consider the case where all numbers are positive, non-zero integers. This problem can be solved with some naive recursion--simply try all combinations until either a solution is found or all combinations have been exhausted. While more efficient solutions exist, naive recursion is the easiest to conceptualize.

An initial assessment of the problem seems simple enough. Our solution is defined as the set of array elements whose total is equal to our target value. To achieve this, we loop through each of the elements in the array, try combinations with all of the remaining elements, and keep track of what the current total is so we can compare it to our target. If we find an exact match, we return an array containing the matching elements, otherwise we return nothing. This gives us something like the following:

function subsetSum($target_sum, $values, $total = 0) {
    // Base case: a total exceeding our target sum is a failure.
    if($total > $target_sum) {
        return null;
    }

    // Base case: a total matching our target sum means we've found a match.
    if($total == $target_sum) {
        return array();
    }

    foreach($values as $index=>$value) {
        // Recursive case: try combining the current array element with the remaining elements.
        $result = subsetSum($target_sum, array_slice($values, $index + 1), $total + $value);

        if(!is_null($result)) {
            return array_merge(array($value), $result);
        }
    }

    return null;
}

Your Scope is Leaking

This solution works. It's functionally correct and will produce a valid result every single time. From a purely functional perspective, nothing is wrong with it at all; however, it's not easy to follow what's going on despite how short the code is. If we look closely, we can tell that there are a few major problems:

• It's not obvious at first glance whether or not the programmer is expected to provide the third argument. While a default value is provided, it's not clear if this value is only a default that should be overridden or if the value should be left untouched. This ambiguity means relying on documentation to explain the intention of the third argument, which may still be ignored by an inattentive developer.

• The base case where a failure occurs, i.e. when the accumulated total exceeds the target sum, occurs one stack frame further into the recursion than when the total has been incremented. This forces us to consider not only the current iteration of recursion, but one additional iteration deeper in order to track the flow of execution. Ideally an iteration of recursion should be conceptually isolated from any other, limiting our mental scope to only the current iteration.

• We're propagating an accumulating total that starts from 0 and increments toward our target value, forcing us to to track two different values simultaneously. Ideally we would only track one value if possible. If we can manage that, then the ambiguity of the third argument will be eliminated along with the argument itself.

Overall, the amount of code that the programmer needs to look at and the amount of branching they need to follow manually is excessive. The function is only 22 lines long, including whitespace and comments, and yet the amount of effort it takes to ensure you're understanding the flow of execution correctly is pretty significant. This is a pretty good indicator that we probably did something wrong. Something so simple and short shouldn't take so much effort to understand.

Patching the Leak

Now that we've assessed the problems, we can see that our original solution isn't going to cut it. We have a couple of ways we could approach fixing our function: we can either attempt to translate the abstract problems into tangible solutions or we can modify the way we've conceptualized the solution. With that in mind, let's take a second crack at this problem by trying the latter.

We've tried taking a look at this problem from a top-down perspective: "given a target value, are there any elements that produce a sum exactly equal to it?" Clearly this perspective failed us. Instead, let's try flipping the equation: "given an array element, can it be summed with others to produce the target value?"

This fundamentally changes the way we can think about the problem. Previously we were hung up on the idea of keeping track of the current total sum of the elements we've encountered so far, but that approach is incompatible with the way we're thinking of this problem now. Rather than incrementing a total, we now find ourselves having to do something entirely different: if we want to know if a given array element is part of the solution, we need to first subtract the element from the problem and find out if the smaller problem has a solution. That is, to find if the element 3 is part of the solution for the target sum of 8, then we're really asking if 3 + solutionFor(5) is valid.

The new solution therefore involves looping over our array elements just as before, but this time we check if there is a solution for the target sum minus the current array element:

function subsetSum($target_sum, $values) {
    // Base case: the solution to the target sum of 0 is the empty set.
    if($target_sum === 0) {
        return array();
    }

    foreach($values as $index=>$value) {
        // Base case: any element larger than our target sum cannot be part of the solution.
        if($value > $target_sum) {
            continue;
        }

        // Recursive case: do the remaining elements create a solution for the sub-problem?
        $result = subsetSum($target_sum - $value, array_slice($values, $index + 1));

        if(!is_null($result)) {
            return array_merge(array($value), $result);
        }
    }

    return null;
}

A Brief Review

With the changes now in place, let's compare our two functions and, more importantly, compare our new function to the problems we assessed with the original. A few brief points:

• Both functions are the same exact length, being only 22 lines long with the same number of comments and an identical amount of whitespace.

• Both functions touch the same number of elements and produce the same output given the same input. Apart from a change in execution order of a base case, functionality is nearly identical.

• The new function no longer requires thinking about the scope of next iteration of recursion to determine whether or not an array element is included in the result set. The base case for exceeding the target sum now occurs prior to recursion, keeping the scope of the value comparison nearest where those values are defined.

• The new function no longer uses a third accumulator argument, reducing the number of values to be tracked and removing the issue of ambiguity with whether or not to include the third argument in top-level calls.

• The new function is now defined in terms of finding the solutions to increasingly smaller target sums, making it easier to determine functional correctness.

Considering all of the above, we can confidently state that the second function is easier to follow, easier to verify functional correctness for, and less confusing for anyone who needs to use it. Although the two functions are nearly identical, the second version is clearly and objectively better than the original. This is because despite both being functionally correct, the first function does a poor job at accurately defining the problem it's solving while the second function is clear and accurate in its definition.

Correct code isn't necessarily accurate code. Anyone can write code that works, but writing code that accurately defines a problem can mean the difference between understanding what you're looking at, and being completely bewildered at how, or even why, your code works in the first place.

Final Thoughts

Accurately defining a problem in code isn't easy. Sometimes you'll get it right, but more often than not you'll get it wrong on the first go, and it's only after you've had some distance from you original solution that you realize that you should've done things differently. Despite that, understanding the difference between functional correctness and accuracy gives you the opportunity to watch for obvious inaccuracies and keep them to a minimum.

In the end, even functionally correct, inaccurate code is worth more than no code at all. No amount of theory is a replacement for practical experience. The only way to get better is to mess up, assess why you messed up, and make things just a little bit better the next time around. Theory just makes that a little easier.

Update! After a few hours of struggling I managed to set up Read the docs for Tildee, it should help using the library significantly.

After getting some inspiration from TAPS I thought that maybe I try to work on something vaguely similar on my own. And after… some? hours of coding today I came up with this: tildee.py (source)
It's a wrapper for the Tildes Public/Web API that is already used by the site internally to make it work. The obvious problem with that is that it will at one point break when this unstable API is changed. It can do basically all things a normal user can do with the notable exception of applying comment labels (because I haven't gotten around to that yet).

Example of usage for a DM reply bot (result):

import sys
from tildee import TildesClient
import time

# Initialize client and log in, 2FA isn't supported yet and will probably break in horrible ways
t = TildesClient("username", "password", base_url="https://localhost:4443", verify_ssl=False)

while True:
    # Retrieve the "unread messages" page and get a list of the conversations there
    unread_message_ids = t.fetch_unread_message_ids()
    for mid in unread_message_ids:
        # Access the conversation history page; this also clears the "unread" flag 
        conversation = t.fetch_conversation(mid)
        # Get the text of the last message
        text = conversation.entries[-1].content_html
        # Abort if it's from the current user (I don't think this could actually happen)
        if conversation.entries[-1].author == t.username:
            break
        print(f"Found a message by {conversation.entries[-1].author}")
        # If the message contains a reference, reply in kind
        if "hello there" in text.lower():
            print("Replying…")
            t.create_message(mid, f"General {conversation.entries[-1].author}! You are a bold one.")
        # Delay before processing next unread message
        time.sleep(3)
    # Delay before next unread check
    time.sleep(60)

This has a lot of potential. Haven't yet figured out potential for what, but I'll take what I can get.
I'd be really grateful if someone with a little more experience than me (that's not exactly a high bar :P) could give me some pointers on the project's structure and the "API design", hence the ask tag. Other creative ideas for what to use this for are appreciated, too.

@cadadr's 4 word poetry challenge is one of my favorite Tildes threads to read through on account of the many clever and thoughtful responses, so I figured I'd try to kick off another one. This one is a little more conceptually involved, but I think it still has the potential to be a good time like the last one.

Rather than going with a strict word or line count, instead I am creating a restriction based around personification:

Challenge:
Your poem must:

• Be written from the point of view of an inanimate object
• Give the object personality/emotion
• NOT name the object, so that people have to infer it from what you've written

An example might be an automatic door that is bored to tears from opening and closing ad nauseum. Or maybe a watering can that is excited to tend to its garden.

In trying to come up with a model I decided to channel a resentful milk carton:

It's fine
I get it
You don't have to justify yourself
Lots of better things have come around
Since you first chose me

Just know that I'm still here
If you need me
Waiting for that blissful moment
Where you light up my world
And take me in your hand
And make me feel like I'm flying
Before you lower me down
In a lover's embrace

It's fine
I get it
Until then I'll sit here
In the cold, cold dark
Trying not to go sour
Next to the slowly molding cheese
And forgotten grapes

It's far from perfect but hopefully it gives you an idea of what the assignment can look like. While I saved my "reveal" to the end, don't feel obligated to use that tactic unless you want to. You don't have to hide the identity of your object, just don't name the object outright in the poem.

Feel free to make your poem as long or short as you wish. Feel free to make it as meaningful or silly as you want. Above all else, have fun!

If you need help with ideas or just want the challenge of writing to a randomly selected specification, you can use this noun generator for objects and this adjective generator for sentiments.

I apologize if this is the wrong topic for this post, and if this feature already exists, I apologize for that too. I looked around and couldn't find it (it's possible I could have missed it). But I thought a dark mode for Tildes would be most excellent. Right now, there's a lot of white space and combined with my 24" monitor, this site lights up my whole room like it's in the middle of the day. Anyways, thanks for reading. :)

good morning, tildes--this is not a test. we are 496 days and dropping away from possibly the biggest election day in recent american history. we have one opinion piece this week and a number of [LONGFORM] pieces this week. our polling section continues this week as well.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 • Week 2 • Week 3 • Week 4 • Week 5 • Week 6 • Week 7 • Week 8 • Week 9 • Week 10 • Week 11 • Week 12 • Week 13

News

Polling

• From Emerson (B+ on 538); margin of error +/- 4.5: National poll

Joe Biden continues to hold his announcement bounce, and has gained a point since May – now holding 34% of the vote, followed by Senator Bernie Sanders who moved up 2 points to 27%. Senator Elizabeth Warren has broken away from the rest of those running, into 3rd place – improving from 10% of the vote up to 14%. Senator Kamala Harris comes in fourth with 7%, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is in fifth with 6%, and Senator Cory Booker follows in sixth with 3% of the vote. All other candidates poll at 1%.

• From YouGov (B+ on 538): National poll [PDF Warning]

Biden 26%
Warren 14%
Sanders 13%
Buttigieg 9%
Harris 7%
O'Rourke 4%
Booker 2%
All others 1% or less

General Stuff

• from Vox: 2020 Democrats share plans to fight poverty at presidential forum. this week has been rich with townhalls and events, one of the first of which was the Poor People's Campaign forum, specifically dedicating itself to the issues of low-income Americans and poverty. a number of the perennial one-percenters showed up, as did frontrunners biden, sanders, warren, and harris; in general, the frontrunners took the opportunity to show off their plans where they had them for low-income america, and the one-percenters tried to make a case to voters.
• from FiveThirtyEight: Democratic Candidates Answer Yes-Or-No Questions About Criminal Justice Policy. FiveThirtyEight decided to ask some criminal justice questions of the candidates running, and the results are interesting. the chart summarizing responses to the questions is here. literally the only thing all the candidates who answered agree upon unconditionally is pell grants for prisoners, but everybody basically agrees upon death penalty abolition (ryan, the sole dissenter, wants an exception for terrorists but otherwise does not support it), abolishing cash bail (inslee is the one exception), and marijuana legalization (delaney and klobuchar are the exceptions). inversely, only sanders and gravel support granting prisoners the right to vote; gravel is also the only person who answered in the affirmative to all six questions.
• from NPR: 2020 Democrats Offer Up Affordable Housing Plans Amid Surging Prices. increasing concern with housing prices is driving democratic candidates to seek to tap into a voting base which spans a large part of the electorate. if it seems like not a coincidence that housing is playing a much larger role in this primary than it ever did in 2016, tha's because it is and it's being driven by voter sentiments. "When [Democratic pollster Geoff Garin] asked voters in 2016 if they thought housing affordability was a problem where they lived, 39% said it was a fairly serious or very serious problem. This year, that number is 60%."
• from Vox: [LONGFORM] We asked all the 2020 Democrats how they’d fix child care. Here’s what they said. Vox's second entry in this section sees them asking around about child care policy, which is something that a number of candidates have taken up this year in their campaign planks. their findings are:

universal childcare supporters: warren, sanders, harris, o'rourke, swalwell, klobuchar
tax credit supporters: gillibrand, buttigieg, bennet, moulton, williamson
universal preschool supporters: castro, yang, booker, ryan
other: biden (no stated policy); de blasio (NYC-type program?); hickenlooper ("subsidies on a sliding scale"); bullock ("universal access to voluntary, early childhood education")
did not respond: inslee, gabbard, delaney, messiam

• from POLITICO: The gloves come off in the Democratic primary. the previously amicable primary got mildly spicy this week because of a number of plotlines. last week we of course began the "biden sorta kinda praising segregationists" plotline, for which he drew significant criticism but doubled down inexplicably; earlier in the week we also had the "sanders criticizes warren as corporatist" plotline, which sanders later said was actually directed at a moderate thinktank called third way. now that the veneer of not criticizing other candidates has been worn off, we're probably bound to see some other beefs flair up as the primary goes on.
• from NPR: 8 Political Questions Ahead Of The 1st Democratic Debates. NPR offers up 8 questions for consideration given that tomorrow is the first debate of this long, grueling cycle:

1. Will Biden stand up to the scrutiny?
2. Is the debate an opportunity or danger zone for Bernie Sanders?
3. Does Warren make the most of commanding the stage?
4. Can Harris and Buttigieg stand out?
5. Do the pragmatists or progressives win out?
6. How much of a focus is Trump?
7. How will foreign policy factor in?
8. Who will stick in voters' minds?

Elizabeth Warren

• from POLITICO: Warren emerges as potential compromise nominee. warren has been the biggest beneficiary of the moderate/centrist wing of the democratic party realizing that its influence over the party is waning and that the increasing normal is going to be candidates in the vein of warren and sanders. warren is most likely getting the benefit here for obvious reasons: she self identifies as a capitalist, and sanders for the most part does not. of course, if you actually compare notes on their policies, they're mostly the same, so... not sure this gambit is going to work out?
• from POLITICO: How Sen. Elizabeth Warren would try to ban private prisons. policy wise, warren unveiled a plan this week to ban private prisons. this is pretty straightforward:

Warren would end federal contracts with the Bureau of Prisons and Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for detention facilities and private prisons. Warren would try to extend this ban to states and localities as well. In addition, the plan calls for prohibiting contractors from collecting service fees for "essential services" such as phone calls, health care, and bank transfers."

• from the Guardian: Biden stumbles over abortion rights while Warren receives cheers. warren is not the sole focus of this piece, but she ones one of the best received at the planned parenthood forum this week of the candidates that attended (which was nearly all of them). of note:

“This is a democracy. In a democracy, the laws should reflect the values of the people. So I say it is time to go on offense with Roe v Wade. It’s not enough to say we’re going to rely on the courts. We need to pass a federal law to make Roe v Wade the rule of the land.”

Bernie Sanders

• from CNN: Elizabeth Warren's rise opens a new chapter in the progressive primary. although titled for warren, this piece is actually about bernie sanders and how warren's rise in the polls threatens to balkanize the progressive vote between the two of them. it als goes into some details about the controversy over the sanders tweet that was apparently aimed at warren but which sanders said was actually directed toward third way.
• from Vice: Bernie Sanders Wants to Wipe Out All Student Loan Debt. sanders's big coup this week was a plan to eliminate all student loan debt. Vice explains that: "Under the Sanders plan, there would be no eligibility standards — it would cancel 1.6 trillion in undergraduate and graduate debt for all 45 million people who hold it. Sanders would also make public universities, community colleges, and trade schools free." and as for how you pay for it, "Sanders intends to pay for the plan with taxes on Wall Street, namely a 0.5 percent tax on stock transactions and a 0.1 percent tax on bonds. The plan is projected to cost $2.2 trillion over 10 years."

Pete Buttigieg

• from CBS News: Officer-involved shooting remains Pete Buttigieg's biggest 2020 challenge yet. buttigieg has had a rough week dealing with what can really only be described as a complete clusterfuck of a situation. the set-up: "Prosecutors say the officer who killed Logan, Sgt. Ryan O'Neill, was responding to a report of a person breaking into cars when he encountered Logan in an apartment building parking lot. O'Neill told authorities that Logan had a knife, and when he refused the officer's orders to drop it, O'Neill opened fire, shooting Logan in the stomach. Another officer took Logan in a squad car to the hospital, where he later died." no body camera was activated.
• from CBS News: Pete Buttigieg faces South Bend protesters: "You want black people to vote for you — that's not going to happen". unsurprisingly this has not gone over well with some segments of the black community, for which this is a regular occurrence. buttigieg was first confronted with protests prior to the town hall this week which were somewhat tense because of his seeming failure to address the problems in south bend's police department.
• from the LA Times: Black residents of South Bend unload on Mayor Pete Buttigieg. this tension continued into the town hall, where buttigieg was at times roundly criticized by some members of the black population in a town hall that was kind of a train wreck. the town hall was a proxy for some of the broader gripes that members of south bend's black community but also for some of the problems various community members have with each other, and just in general things went badly. buttgieg for the most part was fine, but obviously shaken both in the town hall itself and afterwards when interviewed by CNN.
• from NBC News: Buttigieg learns the hazards of campaigning for president as a mayor. this all has of course gotten buttigieg off message at possibly the worst (or best, depending on how you see it) time on an issue that has not been especially good for him and could potentially jeopardize what little black support he does have.
• miscellany: south bend has basically had everything possible go wrong with it in the past week and change. there was the police shooting which has caused much controversy; there was also a mass shooting which killed one a few days later; most recently, there was also an EF2 tornado which impacted part of the city.

Cory Booker

• from TIME: [LONGFORM] Cory Booker's Moment is Yet to Come. this longform profile of cory booker by TIME goes into the significant efforts of the booker campaign so far to make a splash, and how despite those efforts and a fairly flawless campaign so far, booker has yet to see particularly good poll numbers, even in iowa where he has invested extensively.
• from Vox: Cory Booker has a plan to reform the criminal justice system — without Congress. booker also has some policy on establishing a clemency system unilaterally. "Booker’s plan calls for granting an early release to as many as 17,000 to 20,000 people in federal prison for drug offenses, and establishing a panel within the White House that would make recommendations for more clemency applications in the longer term."

Beto O'Rourke

• from Buzzfeed News: These Donors Helped Give Beto O'Rourke A Historic Start. They're Disappointed With What Happened Next. beto's slip in the polls has not exactly inspired his voterbase. he's not dropping support like flies here as the article makes clear, but at least a vocal portion of his donor base is less than impressed and some of them are seeking to go elsewhere with their money, which is generally not good, especially given that beto is actually polling better than most candidates in the race currently even with his rather bad numbers. it's possible that if this continues, he'll end up in a feedback loop which drags down his candidacy. we'll have to see.
• from USA Today: Beto O’Rourke: From Juneteenth to today, Americans are still on the march for justice. nonetheless, beto is still on the beat, and this week he had an op-ed in USA Today promoting his new voting rights act, which would "crack down on draconian voter ID laws; prevent politically motivated state officials from purging the voter roles to game the system; expand vote-by-mail and early voting; and declare the first Tuesday of every November a national holiday, so no one has to choose between going to work and participating in their democracy."

Andrew Yang

• from NBC News: Some Asian Americans are excited about Andrew Yang. Others? Not so much. andrew yang is an interestingly polarizing character in the asian-american community. while he is getting some of his best funding from them, he also is struggling with winning over many asian americans, which makes his path quite difficult since he doesn't really poll well with any other groups to make up for that.
• from The Baffler: Andrew Yang’s War on Normal People. this article from The Baffler runs through the fairly comprehensive list of criticisms against yang, and especially his proposal for UBI. namely it argues that yang is taking a silicon valley approach to a problem that is decidedly not a silicon valley solvable problem. it also argues that yang, while he has the right rhetoric on paper, his execution both historically and currently falls well flat.

Everyone Else

• from NBC News: Biden doubles down on segregationist comments, says critics like Cory Booker 'should apologize' to him . as mentioned in the last thread, biden's big controversy this week was touting his ability to be bipartisan with segregationists, then doubling down on it and insisting that cory booker apologize for raking him over it. this has gone unresolved as far as i know; booker and biden talked about it at some point during the week but i'm not sure that they actually made up over it. booker refused to apologize to biden in the immediate aftermath of the remark here and really does not have a reason to apologize in the first place.
• from CBS News: Kamala Harris: Concerns about my prosecutorial record are "overblown". kamala harris is finally getting enough heat for her prosecutorial career that she's decided to address it, apparently. harris has previously received large amounts of criticism from the progressive wing of the democratic party but especially leftists for some of her decisions as a prosecutor. harris has expressed regret for some of the policies that she helped enact and uphold, but in general she is fairly unrepentant about her record, as seen here.
• from NBC News: Julián Castro wants to transform housing assistance for poor, give renters tax credits. julian castro has some housing policy: "[Castro] wants to transform the housing assistance program, known as Section 8, into a fully funded entitlement program — a reference to federal safety net programs such as Social Security. In addition, Castro called for a refundable tax credit for low- and middle-income renters if their rent exceeds 30 percent of their income."
• from POLITICO: Michael Bennet pushes sweeping plan to remake political system. michael bennet has some political reforms he'd like to pass, which include "a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, a lifetime ban on members of Congress becoming lobbyists, a prohibition on political gerrymandering and a push for ranked choice voting. Bennet is also supporting a laundry list of long-desired Democratic reforms, including automatic voter registration, D.C. statehood and greater transparency around super PAC fundraising and spending." most of this is fairly stock for democrats, but some of it is not.
• from CBS News: Joe Sestak, former congressman and 3-star admiral, joins 2020 presidential race. another rando, joe sestak, decided to cast his lot in. sestak was a representative of pennsylvania's house delegation for a number of years before trying and failing to run for senate twice. he is democrat number 25 to enter the race.

Opinions

• from the Guardian: The secret to Elizabeth Warren's surge? Ideas. our sole opinion piece this week comes from the Guardian, and argues that the rise of elizabeth warren in the polls is driven by her unrelenting torrent of policies and willingness to treat voters as if they can understand that policy instead of watering it down.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

I just moved into a new apartment, and am using a 32" tv in the living room. The TV is already way too small, but I'd rather prioritize spending on the speakers first.

I thought I could live with the TV speakers, but have quickly realized that they have made watching movies impossible. The dialogue is impossible to hear without cranking up the volume. And then if there is anything other than dialogue, it's way too loud.

The walls in the apartment are fairly thin, so I'm pretty sure a subwoofer is out of the question. So I was looking at soundbars but keep seeing conflicting advice. There are articles like this that make them sound fine, yet when you go to place like /r/hometheater, everyone despises them.

So my next step was to look at powered bookshelf speakers. They seemed like a pretty good option, until I went to best buy to listen to them. I'm not sure if they just weren't set up properly or what, but none of them sounded that great. Especially when compared to the tower speakers they had.

So now I'm at a loss. Should I go with a soundbar, bookshelf, or tower speakers? My budget is under $500.

Here's a list of a things that came out in this past week, up through Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and I avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to mention anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)

Notes:
If you spot any mistakes, let us know.
Parental Advisory version of all albums linked (so NSFW).

Ghostemane & Parv0 - Human Err0r | Song.link says Single but is actually EP.
Idris Elba Presents: The YARDIE Mixtape | No song.link. Can't find anywhere. Linked his record label's official soundcloud, since that's where the other Idris Elba Presents are located, so I assume this one will show up there eventually too.

Thank you to @Cleb, @cfabbro, and @Bauke!

Introduction

I want to give an introduction on several physics topics at a level understandable to laypeople (high school level physics background). Making physics accessible to laypeople is a much discussed topic at universities. It can be very hard to translate the professional terms into a language understandable by people outside the field. So I will take this opportunity to challenge myself to (hopefully) create an understandable introduction to interesting topics in modern physics. To this end, I will take liberties in explaining things, and not always go for full scientific accuracy, while hopefully still getting the core concepts across. If a more in-depth explanation is wanted, please ask in the comments and I will do my best to answer.

Previous topics

Bookmarkable meta post with links to all previous topics

Today's topic

Today's topic is spintronics storage devices for computers. I will try to explain how we can use an electron's spin to read and write data and why this is more efficient than current technologies.

What do we need to have a storage device?

In order to be able to save a bit (a 0 or a 1 in computer science speak), we need to be able to represent both the 0 and the 1 in some physical way. We could for example flip a light switch and say light on is 1, light off is 0. We will also need to be able to read the information we stored, in this case we can simply look at the lamp to see if we're storing a 0 or a 1. We would also like for this information to be stored even when power is cut, so that next time we power the hardware back on, we will still be able to read the data. Lastly, we want to be able to change between 0 and 1 freely; no one wants to go back to the CD days for storage.

Now for some basic concepts.

What is spin?

Spin arises from quantum mechanics. However, for the purpose of explaining spin storage devices we can think of an electron's spin as a bar magnet. Each electron can be thought of as a freely rotating bar magnet that will align itself with the fields from nearby magnets. Think of it as a compass (the electron) aligning itself to a fridge magnet when it's held near the compass.

Why are some metals magnetic?

Why can we make permanent magnets out of iron, but not copper? In all metals, we have spins that are free to rotate. This means that we can turn a metal into a magnet by holding it near another magnet, it will "copy" the other magnet's magnetisation - its spins will rotate in the direction of the field. But as soon as we remove the magnet, our metal will stop being magnetic. This is because the spins are freely rotating, the spins will align to the magnet's magnetisation when they feel it, but nothing is holding them in place as soon as it's removed. We call this property paramagnetism.

However, iron (and some other metals) will retain a nearby magnet's magnetisation even when the magnet is removed. This is because in these materials, called ferromagnets, it costs energy for the spins to rotate away from the material's magnetisation. They are pinned into place.

What happens if we expose half of our ferromagnet to a magnetisation pointing in one way (let's call it up), and the other half to a magnet whose magnetisation is pointing the other way (which we call down)? The ferromagnet would copy both magnetisation directions and create a boundary region - a so-called domain wall - in the centre. The spins in this domain wall will slowly rotate over the thickness of the wall so that at one end they're pointing up and at the other end they're pointing down.

How can we use spin to store data?

What if, instead of a light bulb, we used a bar magnet as our storage medium. We could magnetise our bar magnet in one direction to store a 1 and magnetise it in the other direction to store a 0. To read what we have stored, we simply check the bar magnet's magnetisation.

Let's work out this idea. We want to be able to efficiently change the magnetisation of a bar magnet and we want to be able to read the bar magnet's magnetisation. We will use a ferromagnet because it will retain our data indefinitely (its magnetisation will not change unless we force it to). We know it costs energy to flip the spins inside a ferromagnet, so we will want to use a very tiny ferromagnet - it will have less spins which means it will cost us less energy to change the magnetisation (i.e. flip the spins).

Magnetoresistance

A-ha, now we're getting into the fancy-titled paragraphs. What do you, dear reader, think would happen when we send a current (e.g. a bunch of electrons) through a magnet? What would happen to the current's electrons (also called itinerant electrons, to distinguish them from the non-moving electrons of the metal)? At the boundary of the magnet, where the current enters, only the electrons who (through random chance) have a spin that's aligned to the magnet's magnetisation will pass through. We call this effect magnetoresistance, as in effect part of our current will feel a resistance - they cannot pass through to the magnet. So to rephrase, the current inside the magnet will be "magnetised" - all of the spins of the itinerant electrons are pointing the same way.

Current induced domain wall motion

So now we know what happens to a current that's inside a magnet. What happens when this current meets a domain wall - the region where the magnetisation changes direction? The itinerant electrons' spins will start rotating along with the magnetisation, but the static electrons of the ferromagnet will also start rotating in the opposite way due to the magnetisation they feel from the current (more experienced readers will recognise this as conservation of angular momentum). So the spins inside the current will slowly rotate until they are pointing the opposite direction and can continue passage from the up-magnetised part of the ferromagnet into the down-magnetised part. But the spins that belong to the ferromagnet itself will be rotating in the opposite manner, slowly rotating from down to up as the current passes through. This means the boundary region between up and down magnetisation, the domain wall, will move along with the current.

So in short, by sending a current through a magnet that's magnetised in opposite directions at each end, we can force our preferred magnetisation to expand in the current's direction. By reversing the direction of the current we can then magnetise the other way again.

So we can say magnetising up (pushing current through (let's say) from left to right) can be our 1 and magnetising down (pushing current through from right to left) can be our 0. This would allow us to store data permanently as even when we remove the current our magnet will remember its magnetisation. If we make a really tiny ferromagnet we will only need a really tiny current to flip it's magnetisation too. So we can scale this process down to get to really good efficiencies. In the lab these types of devices are down to nanometre scale and require extremely little current to be operated.

Reading the data

OK, so now we know how to write data. But how do we read it? The key effect here will be magnetoresistance, as explained earlier in the post.

Let's look at this picture. The red dotted line shows our write currents, the big bar is our ferromagnet. The arrows pointing up and down at the sides are our magnetisation direction, the double-pointed arrow in the centre shows the region where we flip the magnetisation by sending through a current.

Now we jam a third, permanently magnetised, bit of metal (let's call it the read terminal) on top of the centre of our bar. We send a current from this read connector to one of the ends of the ferromagnet. If the ferromagnet's magnetisation is aligned to that of the read terminal we will experience a low (magneto)resistance, but if the ferromagnet is magnetised in the opposite direction we will experience a high resistance. By measuring the difference in resistance we can determine if we have a 0 or a 1 stored. We just need to be careful not to send too big of a current, else that would influence our ferromagnet's magnetisation. But small currents means better efficiency, so this is not a problem at all.

Conclusion

This concludes the post, we have seen how to use spins and magnets to both write and read data and we understand why this is efficient.

Feedback

As usual, please let me know where I missed the mark. Also let me know if things are not clear to you, I will try to explain further in the comments!

Hey everyone! I was browsing around and came across this old topic again, late 2000's skeuomorphisism vs modern flat design. I've always strongly preferred the former for a variety of reasons and thought flat design was a regression, but I was curious, what do you guys think?

Mine is: do others see the same colours that I do? As in, is my "green" the same as your "green"? Or would my "green" look "blue" to you? I like this one because it's completely possible, points out the plasticity of our minds and makes a distinction between sensation and perception. There are variations of this but I like it formulated as such. It's my favorite because it was also my first foray into the philosophy of consciousness and I'm often reminded of it when in an altered state of consciousness (e.g. by psychedelics).

Your favorite experiment can be whatever: either something that has affected you deeply / changed your life or just something fun and amusing to think about.

I was thinking about how I can get caught in negative/critical thought patterns and fail to give gratitude to the people and things in my life that I love and spend time with. I end up taking a lot for granted or spending too much of my mental energy critiquing small flaws instead of appreciating the bigger, better picture.

As such, I'm curious to hear about stuff in your life. It can be big or small. It can be a person or a thing, or a person behind a thing (e.g. I'm grateful to the people that grow and roast the beans in my favorite coffee). What deserves more love and admiration in your life?