Disclaimer I was going to post this on ~tildes but thought we could have a more casual conversation about it here.

So how can tildes stop corruption from happening on its platform, it’s no secret that other similar websites have become corrupted the best example of this is Reddit they do what advertisers want them to do or who ever is giving them money, only a couple of days ago I saw this video about a guy who was running a cult on there recruiting vulnerable people and they did nothing because he was buying thousands of awards a day.

Tildes doesn’t have advertising and is a non profit with no investors so those are 2 big places it can’t get corrupted from. One place I could see problems is donations I would be interested in if all donations are Anonymous I should probably have looked into them before writing this but maybe someone else knows the answer, if they aren’t what is stopping big donators getting special treatment?

My main reason for this topic is the video mentioned above but I also thought it would make an interesting discussion on here.

This is a follow up to the thread from a few days ago, and specifically my comment in that thread regarding the use of a "Escalation" label.

As many users identified in that topic, political discussion on Tildes has the potential to become very heated, very quickly, and often the standards of discussion on these topics is below what we expect elsewhere on Tildes. In that thread, many suggestions were offered in order to remedy the situation, including banning overt political content entirely, more liberal moderation by @Deimos, more liberal usage by the community of labels, addition of new labels, and more. All of these solutions have their advantages and disadvantages, but I want to talk about the one I believe would be the most effective and least disruptive to the site as is: addition of new labels.

Right now, there are two main tags that might be used on a comment that is seen as falling short of Tildes's standards: noise and malice. Users seem to have some variation in how they interpret how each tag should be used, but it seems like there is at least some agreement on the 'noise' tag being used for comments that are clearly low effort. Users seem to have more hesitation to use the 'Malice' tag, however. While it is sometimes clear when a comment is hostile or malicious, this is not always the case. Argumentative is not always hostile, and sometimes topics are naturally contentious. One takeaway from that thread (for me) is that labeling something as malice confers a judgement on intent, and users are not always comfortable doing this as it can be difficult to tell if someone truly meant to be malicious. But in political threads, the intent matters less than the effect a comment has in a discussion. Someone can not be acting maliciously, but still be clearly making the situation worse. This is the point of an 'Escalation' label.

An "Escalation" label should be applied to comments that have made the situation worse.

Furthermore, an "Escalation" label would not only affect the sorting of a comment or thread, but has the potential to halt the discussion if there is too much escalation in a short amount of time. Here is what I envision:

Define the heat of a comment (as in, "ohhh this conversation is getting heated") as follows:

H = k*n ∑ N_i / d_i

where k is a tuning constant, n is the number of escalation tags given to the comment in question, and the sum ranges over the comment's direct ancestors and descendants in the thread with N_i being the number of "Escalation" labels given to the other comment and d_i is the distance from the current comment to that other comment. Here is an example thread:

.
├── A
├── C0
│   └── C1 (N=1)
│      └── C2 (N=0)
│          └── C3 (N=2)
│               └── C4 (N=1)
└── B0
    └── B1

The heat of comment C3 would then be

H = k*2 (1/2 + 1) = 3k

Finally, define the heat H(T) of a thread T to be the sum of the heats of its comments. My proposal is that if the heat of a given thread surpasses some threshold value H_c, replies are locked in that thread only. This essentially shuts down extremely heated conversations before they get out of control and cause an entire topic to be locked.

The above definition can obviously be modified, but it has a few good properties that I think should be retained.

1. It takes into account the relative positions of comments. A thread that is 20 comments long that has a comment with 1 "Escalation" at the beginning, midpoint, and end is probably a better and more controlled situation than a thread with 3 "Escalation" labels in a row.
2. One extremely heated comment (n is large) that generates many okay or slightly heated replies (n~1) is oftentimes just as bad as many comments that each escalate a bit (a long chain of comments, each with n~1).
3. It considers a the whole thread as opposed to on a comment by comment basis. If there is only one person in a thread posting heated comments, even if the replies are measured and reasonable, there is a good chance that thread is not producing a worthwhile discussion. If that one problem user stays problematic too long, eventually the heat of the thread will surpass the threshold and the chain will be locked.

I am sure there are disadvantages that I am not thinking of right now, but I truly think a system like this could be beneficial if implemented and used by Tildes. Furthermore, if two people are genuinely interested in the discussion and want it to continue, it is in their interest to avoid posting comments that get generate a high heat score so that the thread doesn't become locked. If they are not interested and keep escalating anyway, that conversation probably shouldn't continue.

I am interested in your thoughts on this idea. However, I don't intend for this topic to become a repeat of many of the suggestions and comments in the thread linked at the beginning - I don't mean to reignite that discussion.

Sorry for the huge train of thought, but I prefer it raw like this.

We are dating for 3.5 years and the subject came up a couple of times. We both didn't want, but it was not set in stone. We just didn't want at that time.

Three days ago she said she want one in the future. I don't, but I'm not sure.

I asked jokingly if this is where we have to let each other go.

What now?

I have three nieces and I know the hard work and problems my two brothers are dealing with (two are teenagers).

I don't want that, but at the same time i look at my youngest niece and she is so amazing.

I can't figure out if i want this or not.

I don't think we should have kids because she is obese and dealing with food and anxiety issues, and I deal with anxiety and alcohol issues.

I would teach them a good relationship with food. I'm active, eat clean, i'm slim, fit, lift weights, but have the problem with alcohol which i try to manage, but not at all. I drink too much at least once every one or two weeks.

My SO eats junk food, soda, sugar, everything. She is obese now. She wasn't when we started dating. Overweight, but not obese.
She is now at risk of diabetes. I hate it and i'm resenting this to the point I lost attraction.

It got to the point were i feel ashamed when I see her family eating a lot, which is all they do. Her brother was ok, now he is obese. His girlfriend turned obese.

I know people say you need to break up because we are incompatible, but it doesn't work like this. We are good together in every other aspect. We treat each other with respect, we have hobbies in common, we are a good couple on the surface.

If I break up, what reason I could give? It's not a matter of just telling "we are incompatible" after almost 4 years.

I have no health issues when i checked with the doctor last year.

We both made promises of solving these issues, but it's not happening.

If we have a child, who teaches him about food, what to eat or not? What should we buy? And about alcohol?

Gym and fitness. I adore. She does not. What example should we give to our kid?

Alcohol. I drink a lot. She drinks, but only enough.

How does this work?

This is eating me alive...

Edit: we don't live together and have jobs at different cities. In this pandemic we are at our homes, which is the same city, but once this pass we will live apart until one of us can transfer to live together.

I watched the streamed version of 'By Jeeves' today. I have thoughts that I want to express.

There’s a saying in show business: “If you have a good strong finish, they'll forgive anything.” (Well, maybe it’s only Rose in ‘Gypsy’ who says that, but it has wider applications.) This show was the opposite of that. I was going along with the badness of the adaptation, the absurdity of the plot, the silliness of the narrative framework, and the falseness of the characters – and then the ending came along and trumped everything else with its awfulness.

For starters, the narrative framework was silly. Bertie Wooster is due to give a banjo recital at a local hall, but the banjo goes missing, so his valet Jeeves convinces Bertie to entertain the audience with a reminiscence. But rather than commit wholeheartedly to the story, Bertie and Jeeves keep popping out of it with references to bad props and lighting and music. At the times when the plot went along as normal, it was quite an enjoyable play, for what it was. Then Jeeves would appear with a car built from a sofa and some cardboard boxes, or a ladder going to nowhere, or a pig mask (more about that later), and destroy the mood. I wish the writer Alan Ayckbourn had committed to the plot, rather than framing it in this way. It felt silly. It set the wrong tone. P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories are comedies of manners, not farces (although they often contain farcical elements). The comedy is subtle, not broad.

On the matter of tone, I noticed a distinct lack of the 30s slang which gave the original stories their flavour. Bertie spoke generic upper-class English in this play, rather than the lingo of his time and his culture.

With regard to the story, I’m not sure where this plot came from. I don’t pretend to have read all the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but I do have the book that the setting for this play comes from: ‘The Code of the Woosters’. The backdrop of Totleigh Towers and most of the characters in the play come from this novel. But the plot is nothing like the book. It has elements that are reminiscent of Wodehouse’s stories, such as characters pretending to be each other (which was too over-the-top in this play), and Bertie having to steal something to create a diversion, but the plot itself is an invention of Ayckbourn’s (I assume).

The scene near the end of the play with the whole household running around chasing a man in a pig mask, while singing about hunting and implying that they think it’s a real pig, was jarring. The pig mask came from the framing narrative, where Bertie’s trying to give a banjo recital but has to tell a story instead. Jeeves is stage-managing the story-telling, and produces a pig mask that he found in the back of the theatre for Bertie to wear when he acts out breaking into Totleigh Towers and pretending to steal a bag of swag because… who cares. He wears the mask as a prop to tell the story. But, in the story that Bertie is telling, the other people see a man wearing a pig mask, and start talking about a chauvinist pig, a real pig, and hunting wild boar. If the pig mask came from the theatre, then it wasn’t used in the original fake burglary, so the people wouldn’t have seen a man wearing a mask, so they wouldn’t have been singing “It’s a Pig!”

I get the feeling that Alan Ayckbourn didn’t really understand the source material, and wrote his own play, using some names from the original stories.

As evidence of this, Bertie Wooster himself was wrong. He was far too competent and intelligent. Situations kept happening to him, rather than being caused by him. He’s not supposed to be a sensible man surrounded by useless people; he’s supposed to be one of those useless people, but lacking the self-awareness to see himself as such. He’s supposed to be just as useless as his friends Gussie Fink-Nottle and Bingo Little. But he didn’t feel like that in this play. (I also wonder if the actor playing him wasn’t a bit too old for the role. Bertie seems like a man in his mid-20s to early 30s, whereas the actor seemed about a decade older than this.) I may be influenced by the fact that I’ve recently started re-watching the ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ television series: I think Hugh Laurie [actor] and Clive Exton [writer] had a great take on the character of Bertie, while this play missed it entirely.

Other wrong moments in the play include the song “Half a Moment” which was far too romantic and sincere for this play, and the song “It’s a Pig!” which added a tone of absurdity (as mentioned before). And the song “What Have You Got To Say, Jeeves” was totally misjudged. Bertie turns on Jeeves, and accuses him of incompetence. That’s out of character for Bertie; he always knew that Jeeves was the smart one.

Ah, Jeeves. Poor Jeeves. He might be the title character in this play, but it doesn’t do him justice.

For one thing, where are his sartorial judgements? A running joke in the stories is that Bertie wants to wear a particular item of clothing, Jeeves advises against it, and Bertie wears it anyway. After the action is over, and Jeeves saves the day, Bertie stops wearing the item. It’s an indirect way of him acknowledging Jeeves’ intelligence and apologising to Jeeves for not paying attention to his advice. That never got a mention in this play.

Then we get to the ending. The denouement was wrong. So very very wrong.

In the stories, Jeeves is subtle, even Machiavellian, in his manoeuvres. He solves problems by manipulating things and people quietly behind the scenes. He gets a letter delivered to the wrong person. He distracts someone with a new romantic interest. He plays on people’s character weaknesses. In this play, he spins a prop fountain to move Cyrus Budge into Bertie’s position. Not only does he break the fourth wall to implement his solution (in the story that Bertie is acting out, the fountain would have been real and not able to be spun), but that solution is very uncharacteristic of Jeeves.

And that’s just the beginning of the bad ending. Suddenly, all three sets of star-crossed lovers couple up, without any resolution. They just... get together. They literally run across stage into each others' arms.

And then… and then…

… the replacement banjo arrives and the play goes totally off the rails.

I have a feeling that Ayckbourn and Lloyd Webber thought they were creating the proverbial good strong finish, after which audiences would forgive them for butchering the Jeeves and Wooster stories. Instead, they were jumping up and down on the corpse of those stories.

Jeeves gives Bertie a silent banjo and tricks him into thinking it’s playing music that everyone else can hear. Then Jeeves suggests a full chorus accompany Bertie – at which point the entire cast comes on stage wearing costumes from 'The Wizard of Oz'!

This is just further evidence that Alan Ayckbourn and Andrew Lloyd Webber never really understood the nature of the material they were adapting. They put cheap laughs into a play that’s supposed to be a subtle satire on the wastrel upper class of the 1930s. Like I said before, the Jeeves and Wooster stories are a comedy of manners, rather than an open comedy. They’re subtle comedy, rather than broad comedy. You don’t laugh at a Wodehouse story, you smirk knowingly - or, at most, you chuckle quietly. And I don’t think the writers got that at all. They wrote this play to get laughs, rather than smirks.

Also, the use of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is anachronistic. The Jeeves and Wooster stories are set firmly in the milieu of the 1920s and 1930s. In the framing narrative, everyone in the hall listening to Bertie is dressed in the fashions of the 1930s. However, the ‘Wizard of Oz’ movie wasn’t released until 1939. Yes, the books were published 30-40 years earlier, but the costumes used in this play are from the movie versions of the Oz characters. As the most obvious example, one person comes out dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West, complete with green make-up on her face, but the Wicked Witch did not have green skin in the orginal book: that only came from the movie.

The ending is a shambolic climax to a play that didn’t know where it was going to begin with.

Two minor notes to finish up with:

• Someone needed to tell the actor playing Cyrus Budge how to pronounce his dialogue. It’s “stomach UPset”, not “stomach upSET” (that is, “upset” used as a noun, not an adjective). And “incandescence” might originally have been a French word, but it’s not pronounced in the French style.

• It was a joy to see the actor who plays Paula in ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ as Honoria Glossop in this. She managed to upstage Bertie in the one scene she had with him, and it was a delight to watch.

I like to talk, I used to talk quite a bit more, but I still talk... a lot. I was always told I was a smart kid when I was young, and I always felt I had a lot to contribute. I honestly don't feel like I'm that smart anymore, even though I still feel that I have much to contribute. I'm not autistic or special needs, I don't feel I have any reason to ramble so much. I'm often told I'm not rambling, people insist they like to listen, I don't believe them.

While in real life I've learned to pipe down, the internet is a different beast. The internet allows me to check myself more easily before I speak; I can fact check. There's a larger filter in that the submit button is a physical barrier, vs my cognitive ability to filter myself. There is feedback from internet communities that you don't normally get in social settings, I guess the submit button isn't as much as a barrier for some people. Due to these reasons, I can take my time to form a position and a statement. This leads to the entire thought process landing in the reply box. I don't mean to come off as /r/iamverysmart material, it's just how my brain works.

My worry is that my verbosity turns people off to my conversations and ideas, to me as a person. How many people have gotten to a thread or a forum post and seen a wall of text and just backed out? TL;DR is a thing for a reason I guess. How many times have you seen somebody ramble on about something, unable to notice that the other person in their conversation (who is now more of a prisoner than a participant) has just tuned out?

I don't know, just a rant I guess, I've got some stuff I'm procrastinating from.

EDIT: s/attribute/contribute/

Hi all,

I am a PhD student focusing in cosmology. I wanted to up the science content here on Tildes, and I thought that one way to do so is to have an informal little Q&A session. As such, feel free to use this post to ask any questions you might have about cosmology specifically, and physics in general.

This may not be as exciting as some other science AMAs given that I am a rather early graduate student, so there may be a lot of questions I don't know the answer to. However, I'm willing to try my best and answer over the next few days, and to let you know I don't know if I don't!

A bit about myself: I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago where I studied physics and mathematics, and then I was a student researcher in a computational cosmology group at a national lab. I subsequently enrolled at UC Davis to continue studying cosmology. Ask me anything about physics, cosmology, or high performance computing!

I also invite anyone else with expertise to chime in as well!

a phenomenon I think I've witnessed is what I might call...

Group-think Attribution

Many people interact on this Internet of ours via many different outlets espousing many different opinions. Yet, often, certain opinions seem to froth to the top in people's minds when convenient for those people. Depending on the views of Those People, they may attribute a form of "group-think" to those Internet outlets where many opinions are being collected. I find Reddit to be a major example of this phenomenon occurring, if only because it is the "front page of the Internet."

I'm writing this as I go and my thoughts are scattershot, so read disregard the previous stuff. Or read into it further.

My main point is: we (or...I) often read many opinions and thoughts from many different people on the Internet and kinda roll it all into one. Personally, I experience this when I read different experts giving their expert opinion on many subjects and condense it in my mind to "wow, everyone is so damn smart and I'm not" when in reality it might be closer to "wow, a person who is an expert in their field is so damn smart in their field but probably not as smart in other fields (and I'm not, too)."

But, also, this goes for ideology. People may read many different ideological opinions and only register those that are counter or pro their opinion depending on how receptive they are to a certain viewpoint at that moment. Which makes it easy for someone to say "wow, <website> feels x about y! What a buncha <jerks>/<friends>!" And, also, those people may speak on the supposed hypocrisy of a community and say something along the lines of "When <community> sees THIS they act like THIS, but when they see THAT they act like THAT" disregarding the fact that THIS and THAT groups are entirely different groups of people.

Well, when you scroll through all the voices in these communities that give us voices, are you cognizant of this? Or do you tend to blend all the individuals into some shit-colored mess?

[M/29/small town India, English isn't my first language]

I'll admit to being what is called a country bumpkin. The education I received was lacking in many ways, I wasn't taught about the real world, I never really thought about how the food on my plate was grown or how we plunder the living world for resources etc.

My question is, how did humanity reach 7 billion plus people without even paying a thought about educating the kids properly.

There is a bitter irony to the fact that we have all been convinced to use the word "growth" to describe what is ultimately a process of depletion and breakdown. tweet

If we are depleting the earth of all resources, how will coming generations live?

But if we don't grow, how can we progress?

Edit: Why can't we have good quality education for everyone and good quality healthcare for everyone on this planet?

Does there exist a function that does not include any trigonometric function in its definition that has similar properties (periodicity, for instance) as trigonometric functions? I can't think of any, and this strikes me as a bit surprising.

Edit: I thought of a simple answer: piecewise functions can achieve this!

What is a "game concept":

• visually-unpolished but functional game
• costs little compared to the full product
• only basic UI and UX
• solid, release-worthy mechanics
• released publicly in order to test a particular kind of gameplay (standalone, not part of any other game)
• retracted once the testing period is over
• testers get 50% off purchasing or updating to the polished, complete game (possibly also in-game perks)

Pros:

• game design team gets to test quirkier ideas without the investment of a full game
• mostly prevents flops (idiocy and hubris can still lead on)

Cons:

• players have to pay in order to participate (fewer players will want to join)
• game is retracted after testing is over (may cause player discontentment)

The essence of early access. Relevant to titles anywhere between AAA and indie (though more suited to AAA). Good early tests generate publicity. Bad tests are not as bad a publicity due to disclosed status.

Thoughts?

Hi all -- I have had a Moto G5+ for the last two years, and have been largely happy with it. However, it's recently developed some serious issues w/ charging -- it tends to not ever get past ~45%, and the battery indicator seems to be ... disconnected from how long the phone actually lasts. I have attempted cleaning out the charging port (there was a lot of caked-in dust), changing the charging cable and port, to no avail. It works ok-ish for the moment, but I have largely been limiting it to emergency usage and I suspect it's on it's way out.

So, I find myself in the market for a new phone. In the past I have typically gone with whatever the cheapest reasonable Android phone has been (hence, the G5+ which I really do like quite a bit besides the poor camera). I am not a heavy phone user, and I really don't care about having the latest and greatest, my priorities are:

• long battery life (my Moto G5 lasts two days fully charged)
• cheap (say 200-300$, the SE on this thread is probably the upper bound of what I'd want to spend)
• reasonably performant
• preferably reasonable privacy protections (probably a pipe-dream)

The Moto G series have checked all boxes (apart from privacy) in the past, but I am considering whether I can take this opportunity to rid myself of another Google device in my life. I was thinking potentially going for a refurbished iPhone, but I really have no idea what to be looking for there. I haven't used an Apple device since my iPod (iTunes on Windows PTSD is real, and I don't even want to think about Linux support), and I am more than a bit hesitant to tie myself into their ecosystem, but it's hard to deny their superiority from a privacy standpoint.

I had also considered a Librem 5 at one point, and would be willing to spend a bit more for something so privacy oriented. But the 6-month order window, and other things I read about Purisms' roll-out have left me a bit wary there.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

I've been thinking about the feasibility of defining a language spec that can both be compiled and interpreted lately. I first thought about it while writing code in crystal, which, for the unfamiliar, is a compiled language based heavily off the syntax of an interpreted language (ruby).

Here are a couple reasons I find the idea interesting:

• It effectively neuters the interpreted/compiled language debates. Why just choose one, when both have such big upsides?
• You could develop a program in the interpreter with the same playfulness as you get in a shell, and then compile it into a speedy 'lil thing!
• It would be wonderful for metaprogramming! From my experience, languages usually define a little janked together syntax for compile-time execution. If the language had an interpreter for itself within the compiler, you could metaprogram and program in the exact same language.

I'm curious if any languages like this exist, or if you can think of more benefits.

Edit:
I just want to mention that my reference to 'feasibility' earlier is not born of disbelief - you can write a compiler or interpreter for any (to the best of my knowledge!) well defined formal grammar with enough effort. I suppose I left that word there to account for the fact that I might have unknown unknowns here.

I often come across a topic that I find somewhat interesting, but end up being much more interested in a discussion happening within that topic. I think it would be useful to be able to "watch" a comment/thread to be notified if someone replies to a comment. Thoughts?

I'm working on this for a poetry class I'm taking, any criticism is welcome.

Edit: Italicized some text I forgot when I copied it out of Word.
Edit 2: Fixed some phrasing.

Coming Out 2.0

When I first came out
I thought it was over.
Done.
I know myself now,
My life can finally be
worthwhile and fun.

But there was always a mess I dared
not touch. Who do I like? What gaze
makes me blush? I suspected the feminine
but held out hope – only taking up one letter
made it easier to cope.

And some people do change after starting
HRT, so patiently I hoped men would appeal
to me. I had some feelings before, it seemed reasonable
they would grow. But as time went on I realized I had
nothing to show. My feelings for men were entirely gone,
but still hopeful for a straight-passing future, I pressed on.

I had definite feelings for women before,
But at times the attraction seemed a bit more –
Did I want to be them or did I want to be with them?
The former I assumed, as it helped to distract,
focus on my work, brush my desires under the mat.

I’d think “She looks cute”, but “in that outfit”, “with that hairdo” and other qualifiers
I began to append, convincing myself what I felt was normal and, like a
Chicagoland road, no bend. When I began to notice some feelings bubbling up I said
“Female friendships are close, it’s nothing, the end.” But try as I might, they flowered
and bloomed, and soon I could not help but be all-consumed. Maybe I’m bi, I thought,
That isn’t so bad. More options for dating, how can I be mad? I told my friend my feelings, and as
expected, for me she had none. She’s still one of my best friends, so I’d neither lost nor won.

I dealt with the rejection and moved on. I could still be bi, better not
jump the gun. You can’t take back coming out, you’ve got one shot – nail it
and be done. I thought everything would be the same, but the floodgates were open,
my restraints had been broken. I could finally be honest about my feelings
for women (endless, confusing and interwoven) and for men, which were at most
an appreciative token.

A week after confessing to my crush, it was obvious
who won. The Sapphic feelings and desires made
their presence known, their intent to stay,
and more difficult than coming out
as trans was admitting
to being gay.

Assorted questions. As always, don't feel like you have to treat them like a quiz and answer them one-by-one (though you certainly can), but more like jumping off points for discussing whatever you feel is relevant:

• Who here games on Linux?
• How long have you been doing it?
• What is your setup like? Full-time Linux? Dual booting? GPU Passthrough?
• Which distro do you use, and why? Did gaming-related factors have an influence on that choice at all?
• What are some of the positives about gaming on Linux?
• What are some of the drawbacks/frustrations?
• What are some of your favorite native Linux games?
• What are your thoughts on the main gaming platforms' support or lack thereof for Linux?
• Do you personally feel a friction between open source philosophy and playing closed-source games?
• Do you think that Valve's Proton initiative is a help or hindrance for Linux gaming?

Share anything else you feel is relevant as well. I'm mostly interested in hearing what other people's experiences are.

Also, I debated whether to put this in ~games or ~tech and ultimately decided on the former, but if it's better placed in ~tech I'm fine with that.

Mine is about my spirit animal.

Manatees have long been known as gentle giants, and somehow sailors once confused them with beautiful women. What fewer people know about manatees, is that they control their buoyancy with flatulance. Their whole life is floating around and eating seagrass. They get gassy and start to float up, so they let a few farts out to get back down to the seagrass. And you thought dolphins had life figured out.

I'd like to ask for recommendations for FLOSS (Free/Libre, Open-Source Software) games, playable on Linux or Android. I saw an old thread on this topic, but it's over a year old, so I thought it'd be okay to ask this year. Genre-wise, I'm pretty open. RPG, adventure, FPS, RTS, TBS, 4x, puzzle, sidescroller, platformer, single-player, multi-player, online, offline... whatever. I would prefer not needing to have original (commercial) game assets.

Fine print: I do like a good FPS, but, having played commercial titles on PS3 and PS4, I've found that the FLOSS FPSes I've tried just don't hold a candle to them. Also, I prefer having a short TTK (think: hardcore mode, R6S, BFV), and every FLOSS FPS I've tried has had a long TTK.

I've already played:

Linux:

• Wesnoth
• 0 A.D.
• roguelikes (currently have an active character in Angband)
• Ur Quan Masters
• Minetest
• bzflag (long ago)

Android:

• SuperTuxKart
• Pixel Dungeon
• Andor's Trail
• Mindustry
• Pixel Wheels
• Vector Pinball
• Minetest
• Wesnoth
• HyperRogue

What I haven't played, but might check out:

• FreeOrion
• Endless Sky
• Glest, MegaGlest
• Warzone 2100
• Zero-K
• KeeperRL
• OpenRCT2
• Oolite

Hi Tilderinos!

As the title says, I have used Android almost my entire life. Many parts of the internet (especially reddit) really look down on Apple for many reasons (may of them valid). Starting about 3 weeks ago, I started to wonder if the grass really was greener on the other side. I would like to share my experience.

My first smart device was an iPod tough 4th generation. Back then, iOS was really bad. Notifications took over the screen. If you didn't want to deal with a notification right then, you had to dismiss it permanently. Multitasking did not exist (until a few updates later) Android was miles better then. Switching was the obvious choice. Flash forward to now, through many different android devices. I had a Samsung Galaxy S10e, Galaxy Watch LTE, and Galaxy Buds. I had the best ecosystem of devices that Android has to offer (Tizen vs WearOS is arguable, but I have not used WearOS).

I wanted to get back into mountain biking, and I wanted to bring only my buds and watch. This should be an obvious use case for an LTE watch and bluetooth earbuds. Unfortunately, transferring music to the watch is a difficult prospect. You must have the files downloaded onto your phone, but I use Spotify or Google Play Music. Spotify does have a Tizen app, but it is pretty terrible. Also, I wanted to have audiobooks and podcasts downloaded to listen to. I could not find any apps for audiobooks or podcasts for my Galaxy Watch. All my google-fu got me to the answer: Just transfer the files and play them in the watch music app. This was a pretty bad solution for a few reasons. First, listening times did not sync with the phone. Second, I don't think that the watch music app would save the timestamp when you closed it. Finally, the Galaxy Watch has 4gb storage, and only leaves around 2gb usable. Game of Thrones book 5 weighs in at about 1.3gb. If I wanted my book and even a single episode from most of my podcasts, that would not be enough storage.

Because of this experience, I started looking into the Apple Watch. My grandfather gave me his old iPhone 6s+ and I got an Apple Watch series 3 LTE for a great deal on craigslist. I thought the phone would be a downgrade from an s10e. In a few ways it is, such as the screen, battery life, and camera. But for everything else about this phone, it is just as good as my s10e, which is 4 years newer. I still have my s10e, and I keep it charged. There are very few times where I want to use my s10e over my 6s+. This was not what I was expecting when I switched. I expected to use the 6s+ to see if I could handle a new iPhone, just so I could use an Apple Watch. Since then, I borrowed my dad's old MacBook Pro mid 2012 non-retina, to see if I liked OS X. I am currently typing this in that MacBook. I also bought the AirPods Pro.

Almost every single interaction between these devices is quick, intuitive, and seamless. OS X is way better than windows. Parallels makes running windows software a dream. When I bought parallels, I was able to pay with my watch through Apple Pay. I have not heard of any software doing anything like that with google/samsung pay and windows. Overcast is able to automatically sync podcasts and playback times to the watch, and easily switch which device is playing. Audible is a bit more clunky (and I am still looking for an alternative for books), but it is possible to get books on the watch, and the playback time syncs without issue. The AirPods Pro seamlessly switch between the phone and watch. They are already paired with the MBP through iCloud, although they do not seamlessly switch. I think this is because the bluetooth chip in the computer is too old. CarPlay is miles better than android auto. Siri is just as good for most thing as google assistant, and is more consistent.

This is a pretty long post already, but the bottom line is every single apple device I am trying out is better than the corresponding android/windows device that is 2-4 years newer. After many years of shunning apple, I am back on the apple bandwagon. I am currently planning on replacing all of my devices with something from apple (except my gaming desktop, unfortunately). I would like to hear about your experiences with switching to or from either ecosystem.

(Mods: I wasn't sure if this should be in ~talk or ~tech. Please move it if necessary)

So I’ve been hearing about this show for years and seen clips and always thought it looked shit well I was very wrong, I started watching it last month and I can’t believe how unique and different it is, I’m hooked and wondering what others think I know I’m very late to the party but if you haven’t seen it yet definitely give the first episode a watch.

Quick one for the Gitlab:

Just how comment submitters get a few minutes of breathing room to make adjustments and edits to their comment before an indication the comment has been edited appears, it'd be nice if the topic history which records title adjustments/tag changes/tilde moves doesn't record history by submitters just after posting?

Usually, I'll forget to add a tag or two, or decide the title can be appropriately clarified further within a minute or two of submitting. Today I made a particularly egregious mistake which is now recorded for all time (and further documented here!) by submitting that post to ~tildes initially!

Usually, edits by the post submitter within the first few minutes aren't of particular consequence, so recording them is a bit much, in my view. This would generally dovetail well with the notion that Tildes discards information if it isn't needed. Thoughts?

We haven't had one of these in a while, and given the amount of time people are spending indoors, I figured it might be good to share some movie recommendations.

I will post my own comment regarding some movies I've seen recently, but I wanted to also share some quarantine / pandemic movies that might be interesting given the strange times we find ourselves in. Warning: they are probably not a great way to take your mind off things, if that's what you are searching for, hence why I'm separating them from my other comment.

• Contagion (2011) - Probably one of the more relevant movies, and certainly on people's minds. It's an interesting worst case what-if scenario, and actually tackles some of the political struggle with organizing around a pandemic.
• Perfect Sense (2011) - Overshadowed by Contagion, which is arguably the better movie, but I liked the premise of this one: a disease that slowly takes away your 5 senses, one at a time. I didn't like the ending, but for a thought experiment it captured my attention. It threw in a love plot line which may or may not have been necessary when the reaction was more interesting, but it does help provide a ground floor experience of a more terrifying epidemic.
• It's a Disaster (2012) - I have somehow managed to miss watching this movie, despite it being on my watch list for some time. A comedy, which may come in use in this trying time, it centers around a group of friends who invariably become part of a self-quarantine at their house.
• Rear Window (1954) - A Hitchcock classic. Jimmy Stewart is confined to his NYC apartment due to a leg injury, and has all the time in the world to spy on his neighbors, where he becomes obsessive over a potential domestic dispute between a couple across the way.
• The Lighthouse (2019) - Superb acting by Willem Dafoe. Two men, a seaman fresh to the trade and a seasoned veteran, are servicing the sole lighthouse on a tiny island as part of a contract. They are forced to stay longer than either imagined due to a storm passing through them. They get at their wits end with each other and their sanity slowly falls apart. Beautifully shot in black and white and with authentic vernacular, it really transports you to a different time period.

For the past few years I haven't had any speakers connected to my PC due to a lack of space in my room and on my desk. For the most part I have been using a pair of headphones which are great, but they aren't the most comfortable thing when I just want to watch YouTube on my second monitor and keep my ears available for my significant other.

So now I am looking for alternatives to desktop speakers. Right now I am either thinking of:

• Bone Conduction Headphones

• Bose Soundwear

I think the bone conduction headphones would give me a ton of options to use while I am biking and sitting at my desk. The Bose on the other hand have excellent sound quality. A small, discrete speaker bar may also fit my needs if there are any good ones that can be recommended. Any thoughts? Have I missed an audio product that may fit my needs that you could recommend?

This may seem like I'm rambling but, please bare with me, I think I have some point(s) to make.

• I've been trying to locate a common ancestor image to the album cover of Gnarls Barkley's single Crazy and the banner of an interesting talk titled Imagination and it's resistance to chance. I think the resemblance is sufficient to suggest one an ancestor exists and it's not just a crazy coincidence. Can anyone help identify it?

• The same academic conference linked above hosts a fascinating introduction to Intensionality, Invariance, and Univalence. It captures some of the most exciting mathematics going on at the moment. Presumably I should be posting this in ~science tagged as mathematics. Is there some limit at which particular tags become popular enough to warrant their own subtilde? Are there queries users can run to determine tag counts? These questions were prompted by the slight irritating thought of classifying mathematics under science.

• People could respond to many different parts of this thread since I've written so much. However, the points are slightly related, at least in how I present them. If I were to split them up into separate posts, not only would it add to the noise, each point would lose whatever relation they had. So, I wonder if, much like r/IAMA, could there be a better format for conversations where many users are speaking to a particular individual? An expert or celebrity perhaps. Trying to track all the replies of the main user was always a hassle in those IAMA threads.

If there's interest in such an extension to tildes, I'd like to offer my help in implementing it. That's my main point really and why I posted here.

I'm reading a book right now that I am finding fascinating, but I don't want to forget the thoughts and ideas presented in each chapter by the end. I was wondering what you all do when reading books like this. In college, I would usually jot down a few notes on the chapter I was reading, but I always found the act of interrupting my reading to write to be very disruptive.

• Do you take notes and highlight directly in the book, or use another notebook or software?
• Do you take notes as you go, or wait until the end of a chapter or section?

I want to arrive at a system that works well for me, so I'm looking for suggestions here.

I suspect many of you are, like me, working from home today and in the near future. I thought that it might be nice to have a single thread where we can chat about WFH and our day to day lives while self-isolating in order to feel a bit less isolated. If people think this kind of thing is a good idea, perhaps this can be a daily (or weekly o_o) thread.

Feel free to talk about:

• Day to day life at home
• What's on your agenda for work
• Your thoughts on self-isolating and quarantine.
• Casual talk that you might normally have with coworkers .
• Anything else! (Though of course, the rest of the site still exists)

I personally tend to get more work done while working from home as there are less interruptions in the form of meetings and informal breaks. So in a weird way I'm looking forward to this time in order to get quite a bit done. Still, it's hard not to get cabin fever.

How are you all doing?

I skim-read multiple news aggregators daily, and for weeks now, every single day, 75% or more of the news is specifically about Covid-19.

By comparison, it is worth reminding younger readers that we didn't even know about the Spanish Flu until ~30 years ago. During WWI, we (humans) suffered the deadliest pandemic of the modern era, and it took 60-70 years before anyone even noticed.

If you didn't grow up before the Spanish Flu became common knowledge, that may be a hard thing to grasp ... but during the late-80s and into the '90s, there was this slow, years-long trickle of news from medical researchers, historians and (FFS) archeologists (?!!?) about how there might actually have been a massive global pandemic during WWI that no one knew about.

Today in Wikipedia, there is just one little tidbit about how various things like (intentional) under-reporting and co-mingling of flu deaths with war casualties, led to it being nicknamed "the forgotten pandemic" ... which doesn't really capture that sense of "Holy Fuck"-ness when you discover that up to 100 million people died of the flu one year, and no one even noticed.

Okay ... at any rate .... you get my point. In 1919, the news intentionally under-reported it worldwide (except in Spain ... hence the name), in part to help prevent panic.

Today, the news media coverage is just incredible. Nothing on Earth happens any more, except Covid-19. A few thousand people die (I'm sorry, but yeah, more people die in car accidents), and the Media loses its mind.

OTOH, honestly, it's mostly been pretty good, accurate, up-to-the-second coverage (as best I can tell), really driving home the message of "we know it sounds lame, but wash your hands, dammit ... a lot", and etc.

So ... thoughts? This constant in-your-face media coverage ... good or bad? How much is media causing the panic vs just reporting on it?

Following an off-topic conversation starting here:

https://tildes.net/~health.coronavirus/mq7/advice_from_a_doctor_who_studied_coronaviruses_for_50_years#comment-4qi7

I thought it would be handy to establish that life still continues even in pandemic lockdown. One participant mentions a successful video date, and another wishes for sex.

The questions below may be personal and sensitive - please use your best judgement in answering or refraining to do so. Usual Tildes rules of courtesy apply.

1. If you're in a relationship, what are you doing to keep it alive and healthy?

2. If you're not partnered, what are you doing, if anything, to date or otherwise meet your needs while everything is closed down (if this is the case where you are)?

3. Does your idea of love or sex require physical contact?

4. If physical contact is required, what, if anything, are you doing to stay safe right now?

hello Tildes! (again hahahahah). As I explained on my first post here, I had already started blogging my curry cookings elsewhere before finally deciding to post them here. I was asked by user @cfabbro to post the others on this website, so here I am, making a big post for the first 7 of 9 curries I have made so far ! hope you enjoy :P (sorry for the low quality on some of these pictures hahahah, I try my best !)

Curry #1: Rendang daging / Beef Rendang

The first dish I decided to cook up was this dish from Malasya, it was beef rendang. A dish consisting of weird unknown ingredients to me, like galangal, a nice cut of braised beef and a metric fuckton of coconut. Like, it mostly tasted like coconut with a bit of galangal and lemongrass. And I am definitely not complaining. Ive never really tasted anything like it, and it really felt like a great experience to make it. Hadn't had this much fun in a while ahahahah. This definitely left a good mark on me, starting this whole stupid ass idea pretty well.

Picture of the dish: https://imgur.com/a/4QfLDyS
Recipe: https://imgur.com/a/Fdbll1E

//

Curry #2: Kerala Lamb

This was a dish consisting of, yet again, a fuckton of coconut. This had also a lot of mustard seeds and whatnot. Ended up tasting interesting too, although it was very similar to the rendang I made the week before. Which is surprising because theyre from two completely different parts of the world (first one is from South East Asia, this one was from India.) A good, well rounded dish that I would've probably enjoyed more if I didn't make it a week after the rendang.

Also, something that ended up being a mistake was making this with bone in storebought lamb cut into cubes, it ended up being too boney and didn't have enough meat. Kind of a letdown, but that's my own incompetence shining through.

Picture of the dish: https://imgur.com/a/LnoRoEN
Recipe: https://imgur.com/a/AxVBkKm

//

Curry #3: Murgh makhani / Old Delhi Style Chicken Curry

For the third week I decided to make a more classic dish, butter chicken! Which had less butter than I thought it did, but that's besides the point. This was the first dish where the meat wasn't entirely braised, which made it have a different texture to the last two ones. We used chicken breast, which might've not been the best idea, it came out a bit dry. This recipe calls for garam masala, which is a pretty classic spice mix used for a lot of different recipes. I can tell ya, it's pretty amazing. The whole recipe was a joy to make, and ended up being the best recipe I had eaten so far honestly. I'd highly recommend doing this !

Also, shoutout to my homemade naan bread that ended up being p sucky. Will have to keep experimenting until I perfect the recipe.

Picture of the dish: https://imgur.com/a/QrxP9T0
Recipe: https://imgur.com/a/6Kcbpc9

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Curry #4: Kozhy kuruma / South Indian Chicken Korma

A month into this curry business, and also the third time I try to make naan and the only time it has come out well, very happy with the bread ! The recipe calls for mostly a water and spice based "broth", no sort of milk product like the other ones I made. Also called for some cachews which was surprising. It's genuinely surprising how much you can do with water and some spices, I'm genuinely really surprised. By far the easiest recipe I've made so far and honestly well worth it. Can see this as a recipe you could make as a weeknight dish. With the naan bread coming out so well, I think this was my favourite experience making one of these !

Picture of the dish: https://imgur.com/a/4Hp8Yxk
Recipe: https://imgur.com/a/2PKt7II

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Curry #5: Jamaican Goat Curry

So I had been eyeing this recipe for maybe a month or so now, and I'm very happy to finally make it. Funnily enough, I didn't get the opportunity to use goat for this recipe. My dad and I went through the entire city, butcher by butcher, trying to find some god damn goat, but to no avail. That's alright, though, we just used lamb instead. The recipe called for "Caribbean curry powder" which was very vague in in of itself, so we found this real nice spice mix from the spice market near our house that kind of made this dish what it ended up being. I don't think this ended up tasting anything like what it was supposed to taste like, but who's to say that's a bad thing ? I loved this as a curry, even though the experience making it ended up being a bit tedious (going around the city trying to find something you ultimately don't find really gets you a bit cranky hahah) but well worth it after all. I think my mom is starting to get tired of this silly tradition I've cooked up, but I don't really think I'll be stopping anytime soon.

The curry ended up being very coconut-y like every other coconut milk based recipes I've made so far, but so far I think it's been the best of it's kind. Definitely does not taste like anything from India, which makes sense since, it's, y'know, carribean. This being pretty different but similar to things I've eaten before made it a fun and enjoyable experience in the end. Definitely recommend you make something like this someday, maybe with some real goat instead of lamb.

Picture of the dish: https://imgur.com/a/2K6Yw5H
Recipe: https://imgur.com/a/Bh72GGt

//

Curry #6: Gang keo goung / Green shrimp curry with fresh dill

Sixth curry in, this one was surprisingly incredibly simple. It had like three steps to it. Really cost efficient, too. This recipe called for some lime leaves, which give a sort of orange peel flavour to the whole dish. I'm not the biggest fan of this, like I think it's good but it's not something I seek. I do think it worked well with this specific recipe, though. Other than that, the potatoes were really nice and tender inside and the curry paste we used had nice flavours. We also added some peanuts alongside the dill for garnish, which wasn't part of the recipe but it really brought the thing up to a new level. Overall, I am very satisfied with it, but it might still be something that I need to indulge a little bit more in to find its truest colours.

Picture of the dish: https://imgur.com/a/Vq7Wxlv
Recipe: https://imgur.com/a/8OpcWRd

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Curry #7: Geng Massaman / Muslim-style curry of duck with potatoes and onions

Genuinely one of the strangest cooking experienced I've lived through, I learned what people meant by "don't touch your Weiner after cooking with jalapeños" maybe in too much of a hard way... Sheesh... And just, in general,

What the fuck is this dish?

It calls for tamarind water, pineapple juice, cumin, lemongrass, sugar !!!!, coconut milk and cream, cinnamon, cloves, garlic, shallots, and so much more. I didn't even cut the lemongrass well so the paste I ended up making was really fiberous and it wasn't that great of a paste but God damn those flavour combos are off the charts ! I've never eaten anything like this before, it tastes like a sweet soup that also managed to be spicy and taste like god damn onions !!! You had to DEEP FRY the god damn duck, potatoes, and even peanuts!!!! DEEP FRIED PEANUTS !!!! that means some idiot like me who picked up this book and decided to make this recipe had possibly deep fried peanuts in God damn peanut oil !!! (Which is honestly pretty hilarious to think of)

I genuinely don't know what to say other than I had a blast making it. My dick basically caught on fire and we made a huge mess. One of the best cooking experiences I've ever had and the result doesn't even look like the recipe we tried to make !!!!

The flavours were so complex it just blew my fucking mind, I love this so much. If you're looking to expand your palette and wanna try something real different from any other Western culture I fucking recommend this. Solid solid dish, and would be better if the execution wasn't so disoriented and disorganized.

Picture of the dish: https://imgur.com/a/GzT7sjF
Recipe: https://imgur.com/a/UbAAJ8n

//

Today's question: what makes you personally enjoy home cooking? What makes it something you desire to do?

Have a great day <3
Tomi, your friendly neighbourhood marshmallow~

— Are we dreaming? — She asked.

— I don't know, my dear. I really don’t know. — He answered.

— It feels real.

— Yeah, it does.

— Look how old we are! Isn't that crazy?

— Not really. — He says while putting his arm on her shoulder. She calms down for a moment.

— Yeah, but I thought... Well, I thought something, but everyone probably thinks the same. It’s silly.

— What did you think?

— I thought we’d be different. Old, sure, but perky, wise, matured from adventure. Something noble like that. But no. We’re the same, but older. — She shakes her flaccid arms and looks both marveled and terrified by the loose skin wiggling back and forth.

He adjusts his glasses.

— Sometimes, when I remain silent to appear profound, I’m surprised by the indigence of my thoughts. I may look like Aristotle himself while I try to remember what I ate for lunch. It’s hard to make inwards the theater we make for others.

— But, after all, when have you become so old?

— To tell you the truth, I don’t even know how we got here.

— It’s weird: despite the complete darkness, we can see everything clearly. And there’s no place to rest my legs.

— Sit here on the ground. Beside me. Put your head on my lap. — He gently caresses her head, trying to ignore his surprise with her white hairs.

— I’d be nothing without you. But I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember your name.

— I might be offended, but I don’t remember yours either. — He smiles.

— Are we close to wake up? This old body is getting on my nerves.

— Of course, my love. This is a dream, but no more than everything else. Time is a nightmare from which we never wake up, and old age is punishment for those that refuse to die.

— Don’t talk nonsense. This will go away in a minute. We’ll wake up young and beautiful, as always. As I remember you, and as you remember me. Everything will be fine. — She says that with forced certainty as if trying to convince herself.

— You’re right. The nightmare will end soon, and we’ll be back to our bodies.

— ... This conversation tired me. Good night, my love. — She pushes her head against his thigh.

— Good night, my angel.

And they wished to never wake up.

always seem happy and dandy
and talk of love and romance
a riven smile on the face
to hide thoughts of pain

for her, everything has a verse
a waltz at each step
a flimsy variety of beauty
that melts after rehearse

huge hipster glasses
coffee without any taste
a window facing concrete
is now hummingbirds enlaced

and when she sings all her love
I am always in disbelief
cause when someone shouts too much
I sense a hooded grief