I've been discovering recently how convenient Discord can make developing with the feedback of your community, or of selected members of your community.

This is assuming that you are already talking with your dev team and community on Discord and have a server for that.

Create your game on the Discord platform (they do the same thing as Steam basically), and integrate an alpha-access store page right into your Discord server as a channel. This store page can be restricted to whomever you want via normal Discord permissions. Binaries can be distributed wonderfully simply this way, becuase if you're talking with the community in Discord already, you can just send them to that store page channel embedded directly in your server where they can simply click "install" to test your most recent binaries.

The agreement with Discord restricts only a few things that I wasn't interested in anyway: They don't want you to do an exclusive deal with another distribution service (duh), and anywhere you advertise your game you must mention that it's also available on Discord in addition to wherever else you're distributing it. That's pretty much fine with me.

Anyway, I'm having a lot more fun with this than I had previously trying to distribute pre-release alpha binaries, so I wanted to see what you all thought about it. And what criticisms there are to be had.

Some of my favorites are:

git add -p *

This will go through your unstaged changes in chunks and allow you to stage each chunk individually in an interactive shell.

git checkout -p *

Similar to the above, this will go through your unstaged changes and allow you to undo each chunk. I almost never use Ctrl+Z anymore and go straight for this. Want to remove all of those print-debugging statements? Use this command to pluck them out one-by-one.

git commit -a --amend --no-edit && git push --force-with-lease

I alias this one to whoops in my bash profile. It will add all unstaged changes, add them to your last commit and then (safely) force-push the local branch to the tracked remote branch. This is especially useful when working with CI and you need to make constant configuration changes to get it to work. Yes, you could squash those commits afterwards as an alternative. But this is easier.

git rebase -i HEAD~5

(Change 5 to the number of previous commits you want to see)

Interactive rebases are a core part of my git flow when working on feature branches. If a co-worker gives me feedback on a code review that requires a change to a previous commit I'll go back and edit that commit using this command. You can remove individual commits, squash commits, reorder commits, and so much more.

One thing we take for granted in social media is that any comment may receive a reply from anyone. Maybe we should rethink that? What would happen if it were optional?
For example, for someone posting in "What's a widely criticized thing that you feel is worth defending?" topic, I am not sure that everyone posting there really wanted to start a discussion.
Having replies shut off might be frustrating sometimes as a reader, particularly when something you disagree with gets a lot of upvotes. But it would make the author's intent clearer. If you're inviting further conversation, leave replies on. If you're not, turn it off.
Everyone has the right to walk away from conversation. This would make it explicit. Maybe it would make heated threads less likely, since they'd stop sooner? It seems like it's more difficult to walk away when you're also letting the other side get the last word?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

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

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

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

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Hey folks, I haven't posted in a hell of a long time and thought why not get this going again.

So when I last posted I think my Paladin had just been basically killed off and I wrote up a druid. Well this one has been amazingly fun to role play, being that he has lived most of his life in solitude he has no social skills and tends to do things that can be a little off at times. Our merry band of misfits had cleared a small towns problem warerats who turned out to be a family of Gnomes who lived there, while trying to console the final member of the family Rolen (my druid) felt the best way to give emotional support would be to congratulate the young Gnome on becoming the head of the family. This actually broke the whole table for about a minute, the DM sat in silence for a moment, laughed, tried to role play the distraught girl but failed epically.

We have also got another campaign going with a few of the same guys as the bigger campaign, this one is mostly homebrew. The first character I made I really wasn't happy with so spoke to the DM and we worked out how to kill her off and introduce the new character I made, completely homebrew this one and it's again been far more fun. He is a Dwaf Shaman whose ancestors speak to him constantly, sometimes good and sometimes not so much.

So what has been happening in your RPGs? anything big, fun or just want to chat about? painted anything cool? got new dice? anything at all.

Picard begins investigating the mystery of Dahj as well as what her very existence means to the Federation. Without Starfleet's support, Picard is left leaning on others for help, including Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) and an estranged former colleague, Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd). Meanwhile, hidden enemies are also interested in where Picard's search for the truth about Dahj will lead.

Anything is fair game: from a movie seemingly everyone panned to a company seemingly everyone hates. Give us a justification for why you think, say, nails on a chalkboard is actually a delightful sound or why Ringo is the best Beatle.

With that said, I'm interested in genuine answers, not just people playing devil's advocate, so please only submit something you actually believe! Also, while my examples are light-hearted, serious answers are welcome too.

Guiding questions:

• What are the common criticisms for your chosen thing?
• Why do you feel that it's worth defending, even in light of those criticisms?

Clicking on "Roadmap" at the bottom of any Tildes page brings up an issue board. I'm wondering if that's still being maintained and whether it's worth keeping?

The items listed under "in progress" don't look like they are actually in progress. For example, "Add sticky / pinned topics" is marked as "In progress" but in fact it's a year old and there's been no activity for four months.

I personally think it could be helpful as a group for us to attempt guiding ourselves to cooperate and do stuff like timasomo. Alternatively it could end up being swallowed by petty drama and be really horrible.