Conversations about finding and losing love are everywhere. Which is no suprise, when people are swimming in new love drugs they want to talk about it. Likewise when they're drowning in loss or trying to navigate relationship troubles. And they're interesting conversations to have because almost everyone can relate. Love and relationships are at the core of the human experience.

But so are relationships that last. Love that keeps working in spite of the constant drag of, sometimes mundane, everyday life. High functioning love.

It's quieter, less interesting for uninvested parties and more difficult to articulate in a simple, accessible way without sounding boring or cliche. Which is maybe why it gets talked about less. It's not that it doesn't have all the hallmarks of a good adventure. There are highs and lows, challenges that seem impossible in the darkest moments, unexpected redemption, soaring elation. It's often exciting when you're in it. But more often by volume, if somewhat less in memory, are small moments of shared joy, companionable silences, ambivalence, soft landings on hard days and endless personal growth to support the happiness of another human. Or maybe more accurately to support the health of this third space you've created together.

There's also shared identity, which amounts to the expansion of your idea of self. There are the sorts of moments in life which no one can really understand if they weren't there without the help of especially inspired poetry. And, most of the time, there's this other person who was, in fact, there. No explanations needed. More than that, they bring different context and add different perspectives to the experience that become a part of your own.

There are the moments when you face the reality of impermanence, mortality and futility and the way that somehow having this warm, breathing second witness takes the edge off the howling chaos at the edges of civilized existence. It makes it easier to accept the process of life and death in ways that are difficult to articulate. It's sort of a non sequitur but something that comes to mind is the way that curling up by a fire on a stormy night is somehow more cozy than if it was tropical out and you didn't need a blanket at all.

I could go on, but my goal wasn't really to talk about my ideas about love. I'm hoping other tildinians will be excited to talk about their experiences with, and thoughts about, love that lasts. That could mean your own relationship(s) or it could mean general musings. Whatever comes to mind.

Equal space for the parts that are good and bad. There are usually two people involved but there's nothing binary about it. It's all nuance.

I've mentioned a few times I'm working on making a tactical RPG engine, and I'm finally at the point where I'm doing the actual important part of determining turn order.

It's a harder design decision than I thought, so I thought I'd ask for opinions.

I'm trying to make a game in the style of Shining Force, where the turn order is determined by a unit's status. There's quite a few games like that, but I'm wondering if that design is actually good. The thing that makes that style of game good is that they're actually fairly easy, and the "noise" of stat-based turn order, where you can't depend on a specific turn order, seems to make the game harder. Or at the very least, it closes the door on more precise tactics. I've had plenty of experiences where I thought a unit was safe because they had enough HP for one more hit, and the enemy ended up hitting them twice before their turn came up.

In reality, I'm actually pretty set on keeping this in my engine for better or for worse (boy, is it hard to resist expanding scope), but I'd be interested in hearing some opinions nonetheless

Since it is the Oscar season and there are awards for acting, I thought it will be interesting to hear about peoples favorite actresses. As an alternative to the usual "my favorite movies". I will make another topic about actors in a couple of days.

So who are favorite actresses, what makes them special for you and what are their best movies?

I have a bit of a curveball for the kind folks of tildes. I have a fairly successful, flourishing and comfortable business of manufacturing-export in India which I handle with my dad.

I handle communication with customers, some documentation work like invoicing, the wages for the workers (we employ a 150 people). I also handle the manufacturing schedule, the quality team and the product development along with planning for material.

It is a fairly technical line of business ;processes range from press stamping, welding, milling, drilling, turning, hot forging, polishing, chrome plating, zinc plating, powdercoating etc.

Alot of my work is just looking over what my team does and just guiding them, motivating them and making sure they are taken care of.

I have worked hard to reduce the Labour turnover and uplift my workforce financially. It's a big family, albeit with hiccups from time to time.

But I have learned from mistakes and kept on improving.

Now on to the advice bit. I got married and my partner moved from the UK to be with me. We discussed all the challenges and thought we could make it work.

But it has been extremely difficult for her to move here. Quitting her job, leaving her family and not being able to settle here is affecting her mentally.

Seeing the state of the country she doesn't want to raise our kids here. Which I wouldn't mind either, but it will be extremely difficult for me to start afresh in another country.

The business is very hands on, and I'm not sure I can handle it remotely even if I find someone to handle the supervisors. Training someone alone for that role will take a lot of time, trial and error.

To find someone who will care for the work and put in the effort will want a good amount of money, and finding someone you can trust in itself is a challenge for a small business.

30% of my revenue goes into salaries, rent and electricity. About 40 to 50%% into material and maintenance, not to mention unanticipated expenses like bribes. So there isn't a lot of margin to experiment with big hirings anyways.

A big reason for our profitability is because we're quite lean.

Winding up the business would also be difficult. It would take a few years to do, it would be difficult emotionally for my parents and me. I know the amount of work my dad put into it.

They will want my happiness so it's not impossible to do. They could live their retirement years on rental income and me taking care of them.

The final challenge would be finding a job in UK or Europe (wherever we move). I'm not sure how employable I will be in a corporate environment. I don't have any other work experience other than an internship in Toyota in supply chain during my mba days (I have an economics background with an mba in marketing)

I know ultimately only I myself can figure this out. But I just needed a sounding board and just share as much as I could.

If anyone read this far ahead, thanks for taking out the time, really appreciate it.

I've had this idea rattling around in my head all day and feel I need to get it out. I apologize in advance if my thoughts seem jumbled or unoriginal, I'd just like them to escape.

As a preface, I speak of being a step-parent to young children through adolescence. The dynamics change when you are older and your parents remarry.

What does it mean to be a step-parent? I've wrangled with this most of my life in some way - my grandparents divorced before I was born, and I had a step-grandma from the start. Being around her always came with extra rules. I would later realize this was always the case with new step-parents, after my own parents divorced. Is that really what it means to step-parent though? To come into a situation and impose your own new rules and routines on this child that isn't yours, who has no real connection with you? I chafed with these restrictions and impositions. I disagreed many times, and it hurt me when I felt that my parents didn't support me, their child, and instead agreed with this impostor.

Of course this is a simple, childish view, but it was certainly correct in some ways. Most often, I simply felt confused and angry about why these adults who were not my parents were pretending to be. Much of this is likely unresolved trauma from the divorce itself - it was very messy.

At times though, I was right to mistrust these people who had step-ed into my life. My stepmom was (is) emotionally abusive, and my dad enabled and supported that behavior. My stepfather tried to force religion on me, nearly kicking me out of the house over it. Fortunately in that case my mother was ready to leave with me (literally, with packed bags) and he backed down.

So how does one handle a step-parent? How does one be a good step-parent?

Years ago I met a woman who I came to love. She came with two children, who I became a stepfather to. Now I was in the position of the impostor, the interloper to this family dynamic which was already established. I really tried my best to figure out where I should draw what lines. How would discipline be handled? What rules did we need? How would I know that I didn't overstep some boundary or line? Given my history, I felt both prepared and utterly lost for what to do. I didn't feel that I'd ever had a positive model of a step-parent in my life. The closest was my stepmom in some moments where she truly supported us - between the abuses. I certainly wasn't going to be just like HER though.

Like any rational human being then, I talked to my wife about this at length. We established a few ground rules: We would do our best to be consistent (between mom, dad, and me), We would always keep the best interests of the children in mind, and we would never badmouth/doubt/cast shade on the decisions or actions of the other parents involved - at least not to the kids. These gave a good foundation, and we are also fortunate in that the adults in the room could get along and act in good faith with each other.

I work as a teacher, and fell back on that role often - a person of authority, who isn't a parent, but is certainly there to help you succeed and work with the parents. This seems to be a good framework to build off of.

What does it mean to be a step-parent? For me it means being a co-authority, a sort of triumvirate of care for the children. It means accepting that complex situations mean there are few easy, simple answers, and being able to navigate that. It also means knowing where your boundaries are, and not butting up against them, or worse, going over them.

If you are a step-parent, or have had one that's been a positive influence for you, I would love to hear your thoughts. Even if you aren't, or don't, I would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you for reading my messy opinion piece, and maybe for the next one I'll write when I have more than an hour to work on a post!

In an age of increasing misinformation and division, I've found that it's increasingly easy to find yourself in an echo chamber of opinions (of people and/or bots). And when I go searching outside that echo chamber, I usually don't find well reasoned discussion, but a different echo chamber with the opposite opinion.

This is especially true on sites like Reddit and Twitter, but also applies to pretty much every website (including Tildes) to some extent. Even newspapers aren't helpful as they are all largely owned by a handful of billionaires with an agenda. And real life isn't much better. My friends and family all share similar values and ideals, which is great for getting along, but it doesn't help me figure out how many people actually support something in particular.

The closest thing I've found to objective polling are elections. Unfortunately, they largely group everything into one of two buckets and don't have room for nuance on individual topics. Also, a lot of people don't even vote, which doesn't necessarily muddy the data, but it does leave out the opinions of a lot of people.

Is it even possible to determine this without an individual referendum on each topic? Am I worrying too much about something unknowable?

I joined MetaFilter in 2016, but I've only ever posted a handful of things there and I've browsed the site very little. I always thought it was a fantastic idea to charge $5 to join. It seems like a great way to counteract ban evasion and prevent people from trolling or behaving badly.

Does this idea that sounds great to me in theory work in practice? MetaFilter seems cool, but my experience with the site is shallow. So, I don't really know.

I'm also curious about people's thoughts and experiences with MetaFilter, perceived differences and similarities with Tildes, and theories about what makes social media and forums and online communities good or bad in general.

Also: wow, while I was writing this, I looked up how big MetaFilter is and it's tiny! This site compiles statistics. Note this important definition:

Active users means users who made at least one comment or post on the selected site in the given month.

There have only been around 2,800 to 2,900 monthly active users for the past year. It's been about 3,000 to 4,000 for the past 5 years. And the absolute peak was January 2011 with 8,100 active users.

The number of users who have ever posted anything to the site is a little less than 48,000.

A stats page from 2013 has more info:

• about 62,500 accounts existed at that time (this means at least 14,500 people have paid $5 for an account and have never posted anything)
• about 39,400 people visited the site while logged into their account that year
• there were 81.7 million unique visitors to the site that year
• the site got 231.4 million pageviews that year

That is wild. I had no idea the number of readers was so much astronomically larger than the number of writers. 39,400 writers (tops!) to 81.7 million readers is crazy.

I'm sad that MetaFilter is so small, has always been small, and seems to be dwindling over the last 12 years. I would have guessed that it had 100,000 monthly active users or 1 million, not 2,900.

This question was inspired by a question from a US immigrant citizen who came from a country that had been under Soviet political hegemony. They said that in their experience authoritarianism and corruption were kept camoflauged for fear of political backlash, but our new US government is shameless.

I'll put my tentative answer in the comments. I'm very interested to hear your thoughts if you care to share.

Succinctly as possible, what is the purpose of government? And with genuine effort to avoid condescension or disparagement, what do you think someone politically opposite to you would say if they were to thoughtfully articulate an answer to the same question?

I've given a lot of thought to what my tattoo(s) would say. Since they're stuck on me for life, they need to be meaningful.

For sure, I know I want a tattoo that says "timshel" which comes from East of Eden by John Steinbeck. There's a whole beautiful verse in the book about the meaning of timshel, which the author explains translates to "thou mayest" -- or, we can choose our destiny. Caveats: I'm not religious, and I understand that Steinbeck didn't get the translation quite right. But I don't care about that -- it's the verse itself and the meaning behind it that is so powerful to me. I want the "Steinbeck timshel," not the actual Biblical translation.

If there will be a second tattoo in the future, I'm leaning toward "this too shall pass" but I'm not quite as certain on that one.

Since I'm a tattoo virgin, I have all sorts of questions:

• Where's the best place to get a "timshel" tattoo?
• So what do I do, just mock something up in Adobe Illustrator or tell the artist "here's what I want in this font"? Or do they have a bunch of presets?
• How do I find a good tattoo artist?
• At this stage in life, should I rethink this scheme altogether?

EDIT: I want this/these tattoos to serve as reminders for myself, not to show off to other people. Not that I care if other people see them... Not sure if that helps with placement.

Previous topic - https://tildes.net/~comp/1jsx/my_even_smaller_keyboard_upgrade

I'm making this a new topic because this keyboard once again got me to think about a couple of interesting things in regards to both having a smaller keyboard and how to actually make that work. Plus while niche as hell I'd like to contribute some sort of topic to tildes every now and then. For this one i'll be rambling about some of the reasons I've stuck with these things, and the sorts of design concepts it's forced me to think about and problems I ran into (like where the hell the shift key is).

1. Power users and the Nav cluster -

The nav cluster is the Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn/Delete/Insert section and maybe the arrow keys below it on a standard fullsize keyboard. These keys are SUPER useful for text and other sorts of navigation, to the point that it seems most "power user" systems(IDE's or even things like vim, or vimum for browsers) just remap the functionality to somewhere that can be easily reached.

In fact moving the nav cluster and numpad to be somewhere easier to access, so i wasn't constantly moving my hand back and forth, was one of the main reasons I started looking into custom keymaps and eventually smaller keyboards. Being able to trivially hit Home/End without lifting my hands is just so much nicer.

I mention all this to show you the kind of thinking that originally went into me going down this rabbit hole.
In essence:
I wanted to type/navigate faster, oh you can use these keys to be faster, but wait, i'm only a little bit faster and it's MUCH more annoying because I constantly have to move my right hand back and forth, how do I stop that?

Thus i'm always somewhat surprised at how vehemently people can get about remapping keys. Having Up/Down/Left/Right on I/K/J/L with Home/End/PgUp/PgDwn on U/O/Y/H is super intuitive(right handed WASD, with home/end/pgup/pgdwn in line with their corresponding movement) and makes flying around the screen so much easier, and can also open up keybindings that were otherwise used with just porting all this functionality to keys you can easily hit.

2. Chords, and the first major problem -

I'm sure there's a more technical definition but for the purposes of this topic chords are anytime you're hitting one or more keys at once. Shift + a is a chord for A. Ctrl+Shift+Esc is a chord for opening the task manager on windows.

One of the things you don't instantly think about when you get into smaller boards is what chords are popular, and how adding layers to your workflow will affect them. You really want your modifier keys to be accessible at all times, and in a way that makes sense. I don't have a problem that since my Esc key is not on the base layer, the Ctrl+Shift+Esc becomes Ctrl+Shift+Space+Tab for me. To break that down, Ctrl+Shift are on all layers, Space, when held, is the modifier to go to one of my other layers, and on that layer tab becomes esc.

In short, I've added one extra key to the chord, and it doesn't bug me.

What DID bug me, was that with this smaller keyboard, I no longer had room on the left side to put all of those modifier keys. You'll notice that the chord can be easily hit with your left hand alone, and with my previous map, I had shift on the right side. So now I need two hands to hit this chord instead of one. Oh well, right? It's just one chord and I need to use both hands...., whatever?

3. Oh yeah, the mouse......oh shit -
While I do think that more software should be written to allow mostly keyboard interaction, the mouse still serves a useful purpose in my ideal world. Being right handed, I use my right hand for the mouse. Sure I have some mouse functionality bound on one of my layers, but that's not going to replace the speed and precision of the mouse.

And that brings me to Win+Shift+S on windows for taking screenshots. Or more precisely, for selecting an area to take this screenshot....using the mouse.

First off, if you didn't know about this chord and you're on windows, please use it, it's fantastic for those quick "no i mean this" moments where you're trying to send someone a picture of a problem.

Second, this chord SUCKED on my new keyboard layout. On any of my previous keyboards including a normal one, I could hit this chord with just my left hand alone, while I moved my right hand to the mouse to quickly select the area I wanted and then edit it (often drawing red lines around the buttons I needed someone to click on...again....as mentioned in the documentation......).

My new layout had shift on my right hand, and oh dear god did I quickly realize how many other little workflows suck when you need to use both hands to hit the chord and THEN lift up and move it over to the mouse. Most importantly, multiple line/file selection, now required me to move my right hand to the mouse, and my left hand to the right keyboard, so I could hold shift and select things.

Or in overly dramatic terms, lo i had flown too close to the sun and was falling!

4. Wandering in the dark -

For those that for some reason don't have the 5x3 Chiri CE physical layout memorized, here it is (bottom one).

First try:
Move shift to the top button of the left thumb cluster. This was currently tab, but clearly I needed shift on my left hand more. Tab cold go on the right middle, where shift had been, and shift can go where tab was. Problem solved.

No good. That key is often hit with my index finger instead of my thumb, making something like shift+t/g/b super annoying. Hitting that key with your thumb actually requires a shifting of your hands position, and thus feels unnatural.

Worse, the key below it is my space/layer button, so something like shift+ctrl+left, to select previous words(left in this case being space + j), was super uncomfortable to hit. Just moving my thumb up to hit both keys at once did not feel good as I couldn't properly apply pressure and it just felt weird, but I wouldn't be shocked if some people out there are comfortable with that.

Second try:
Ok, we'll just move one of the other 3 thumb keys on the left to the right and put shift there, probably the win key.

No good. Ctrl and Win (or gui/super/meta/whatever) are just as important as shift. That small cluster being close to each other on normal keyboards, so they're left hand control only, means that almost ALL programs assume as much and have built their default hotkeys around it.

Windows window movement and terminal navigation being two of the bigger ones that affected me. Further this still wouldn't solve my win+shift+S screenshot issue, as now i'm just moving the windows key over there. There's no way in hell i'm putting ctrl on the right side because that's also constantly used in assuming its on the left side for various hotkeys, shortcuts, and other behaviors.

Third try:
It was at this point I was entertaining finally looking into homerow modifiers and setting up tap/double tap modifiers instead of hold. I'm still skeptical of how useful any of that is (but being open minded because of course I was skeptical of all of this and now I preach it), and realllly didn't want to go down that road for all sorts of little workflow reasons I was worried it'd collide with.

5. The solution. Pinkies and two shifts -

This stumped for for about two days after I'd decided I just couldn't live with right shift (there were plenty of other awkward workflow things due to having the number layer key be the leftmost thumb on the right pad). I'd really been trying to practice getting used to hitting both thumb keys with my thumb, as I assumed that might be the solution, and unlike basically every other adjustment I've ever had to make for a keyboard, this just felt rough.

So I took a break and just thought about my previous and normal keyboards. Well, again, in those cases, all these chords assume you're using your thumb for one modifier, and your pinky for the other. Sooooo why not just do that?

Thus the solution was born:
MT(MOD_LSFT, KC_X)
MT(MOD_RSFT, KC_SLSH)

For the few of you who don't have your Via/QMK mappings memorized, this just says that if I tap the key in question, type z (or / for the second one), and if I hold the key in question, treat it as if I'm holding the shift key.

So my shift keys are now used by my pinky, just like normally. I have them on Z and /, so I can easily hold either for whatever chord. If I need something like ctrl+shift+z I can just use the right shift, and ditto for ctrl+shift+/.

Even better, this was already my natural inclination. It only took a bit for me to find out just how much faster and easier this was making things, as I already was used to the idea of moving my left pinky downwards to hit shift. In fact, it was even easier than normal. Every now and then I'll get zi instead of I because I didn't hold the key long enough for it to trigger the "shift" function, and I could get really messy and start screwing with how long the keyboard takes to recognize the difference between a press and a tap, but I'm super happy with it.

6. Conclusion -
My wife is right to judge me and I don't care from my superior position in typing valhalla.

My partner and I have friends from China, and they pushed us to watch Ne Zha 2, the animated movie produced over there. It's pronounced "nuh zah" by the way. We had no idea what the fuss was about, and we were skeptical since it has literally no marketing in the US, and we hadn't seen the first movie either. All we heard is that it's insanely popular in China, and making records in the domestic box office there.

Now, I can say I was honestly blown away. It's like, ruined other animated movies for me, for a while. Again, I had no expectations going in, and the first ten minutes of the movie, I thought this was not the movie for me, it looked like a kids' movie, I was almost rolling my eyes in the beginning of the movie tbh.

We didn't look at any clips on the Internet beforehand, and I'm glad, because they would not do the movie justice!

What got me, I think it was the visuals, the nonstop action that looks like it was made with an insane budget, and animators working way beyond healthy hours to produce. Oh, and the sound production with the deep bass, so I could feel every impact, I have to thank the theater for that lol. I didn't even know it was an action movie, so it caught me off guard just how many scenes they crammed in there! Once it started, it really felt almost nonstop, no time to breathe like most movies would do

The story is actually good too, and there are definitely parts where people could cry

I'm also not used to seeing much of Chinese fantasy settings, so that part was entertaining for me. I don't know how much was out of the director's imagination, or coming from Chinese mythology, or Chinese video games, it all came together so well though

If you like action, and fantasy, and animation or video games, and are okay reading subtitles, please do yourself a favor, watch this one!

Disclaimer: I'm a US citizen, I'm not affiliated with Chinese media, I'm not a marketer, I really genuinely loved the movie

The cutoff age would be different for different people. Early music shapes us. I have read that even people with dementia respond to music from their early life. I thought of a few for me, and I was curious about people here.

Hi Tildes community,
I'm seeking your suggestions for spinning up Windows virtual desktop.
Allow me to set the context...
My offspring is in second semester of their first year of university, and needs to use Adobe Photoshop for one of their classes this semester. They don't use a regular laptop, and have been doing quite well at uni. with their beefy Ipad. While they have used photoshop so far on their ipad, there are some growing pains. Of course, they have access to super beefy desktop Apple Macs at their school's computer lab, but its a pain to get usage of them for a few reasons. At home, all my machines are linux except for my partner's which is an old clunker Windows laptop - which i am in progress of migrating themn away from that Windows machine towards linux laptop...Hence, I don't really have a solid, modern enough machine for my offspring to load Photoshop onto.

Then, I thought, hey, maybe i can spin up some Windows virtual desktop somewhere for my offspring to use photoshop on...Its only needed for about 10 or 12 weeks remaining this semester...and they only need to use it once per week for each week's assignments. I feel like as long as the virtual windows machine is beefy enough to suppoort photoshop workloads, it can get them through the semester...and then in summer i can decide if I need to buy them an actual laptop (like an Apple laptop, etc.).

So, may i ask of you dear Tildes community members...Does my approach make sense (of trying to use a windows virt. desktop)? And, if so, are there any recommendations for which provider to use, and how to spin these up? Like, should i try something via AWS or Google Cloud or Azure? Or, should i not even consider this virtual windows approach? I'm open to hearing any/a ll recommendations. If you have links to share for me to research, or if you actually wrote your own blog post on similar topic for example, i'd love to hear it! Thanks in advance!!

Edit: 2025-02-24 UPDATE: Wanted to update folks on where i am on this...After reviewing these comments, researching some more both online and offline, etc...I arrived at the decision of biting the bullet and just buying my kid an Apple Macbook laptop. I want to thank you all for all your greet feedback and suggestions! Thanks so much Tildes community!!!

My kids and I recently picked up Deep Rock Galactic, and after playing a few rounds I feel a bit overwhelmed. I think either I'm just not fully accustomed to the game yet, or perhaps missing something.

Anyway, I thought I would ask the people of Tildes for tips and tricks. Anything you wish you knew earlier? Or maybe just some general advice for a new player?

Thanks much!

I recently watched Rūrangi (2020) and appreciated it¹ for having a story centered on a trans man and his experiences.

I’m interested in recommendations of other media featuring trans men/masc individuals. I want to cast a broad net, especially if there are other people who might find this useful, so:

• Any type of media is fine (books, memoirs, movies, shows, webcomics, anime, manga, games, etc.)
• Trans men and/or trans masc people should feature, but they don’t have to be the main focus
• The media can be specifically about the individual(s) trans identity or journey, but it can also simply feature the character(s) without delving into those aspects

Now, I’ll also add some more parameters for what I’m looking for specifically if you’re looking to recommend to me personally rather than in general. Don’t limit your recommendations to just these, though. I’m ultimately open to anything and want this topic to be valuable to others with different tastes/preferences as well:

• I’d love for the trans man to be older, since a lot of the trans representation I do already see tends towards depicting younger individuals (nothing wrong with that, of course, and I definitely understand why that is, but as a middle-aged guy myself I’m more drawn towards stories about people my age/older)
• I am interested in stories that are specifically focused on trans identity and journey
• As a gay guy, I’d love to read about my gay trans brethren
• Like Chappell Roan, I want nonfiction (but fiction is cool too)

1. While I did enjoy it, I thought the pacing of the movie was really odd. It wasn’t until after I watched it that I learned it was originally broadcast as a series and was later cut into a single film (which explains the pacing issues). For anyone interested in watching it, I assume the series version does a better job with pacing than the film version.

I've been rereading The Fellowship of the Ring and saw the mention of Hobbits having their coming of age at 33.
"At that time Frodo was still in his tweens, as the hobbits called the irresponsible twenties between childhood and coming of age at thirty-three."

It made me wonder what all of your opinions are on adulthood/coming of age. Some questions I thought might be interesting around this topic include:

• Are there any coming of age ceremonies where you live or that you partook in?
• Are there any coming of age ceremonies you've heard of that you think would have been cool to participate in or think should be more widely adopted?
• When did you feel like you were an adult?
• Do you think the legal age that someone is considered an adult in your country should be changed?
• Do you think there are some things that should be age gated beyond the age of legal adult good? (I.e.: in the US alcohol being restricted to those who are 21+ years of age while someone is a legal adult at 18.)

Curious to see your thoughts on this!

Did you watch the royal rumble? How did you like it? I thought the winner was quite unexpected, especially winning directly against John Cena. Overall the performance of both the men's and women's rumble was really good.

This topic is a part conversation starter, part request for help in finding.

For those that are attempting to keep up with the many weird and sometimes interesting products both announced and teased recently in the field of AR/XR glasses- what are your thoughts?

Examples, off the top of my head, include a number of devices revealed at CES 2024. The Asus AirVision M1- a pair of full-HD display-in-glasses form, similar in many ways to the Xreal lineup. The new Xreal Air 2 Ultra and Xreal One line. Snapdragon's new XR2+ Gen 2 chip for high efficiency portable computing and a successor to the chip used in the Meta Quest 3 headset. The Halliday glasses, which forego any form of waveguide or combining optic and opt to project directly into the eye using a monocular microled projector. And older devices, such as the "open source" Brilliant Labs glasses which have been previous discussed on Tildes.

Personally, I'm disappointed in most (if not all) of these options, but that might largely be because the industry and I have very different ideas of what smart glasses should be. The industry is focusing heavily on social media features- cameras, filters, translation- and even more heavily on AI. Why anybody would want an LLM strapped to their face I do not know. I feel that the goal of full augmented reality (rendering tips and visuals over the real-world) is a noble one, but also not one I am particularly interested in. My ideal device would be purely a heads-up display with a long battery life. The ability to cast notifications and information to a reasonably pretty display, but the freedom to decide what. No cameras, no data collection, no overcomplications- does anyone know of any options that fulfill these criteria?

Discuss.

Ever since my diagnosis two years ago, I have had this as an ongoing conversation with my family. I always felt like there was very little accurate representation of ADHD in media. The few examples I could always think of were either very loosely coded as ADHD, or extreme stereotypes. I want to crowdsource some examples of ADHD representation in media, both good and bad.

Doug from Up: This is a common one that comes up a lot. I think it’s a really poor example. The only ADHD symptom is the squirrel joke they use a handful of times. It’s also (for my presentation at least) extremely inaccurate. Random things I see will indeed distract me, but Doug can come back from the conversation without a missed step. I think this one is extra harmful because it gives a false sense of how the ADHD brain works.

Dory from Finding Nemo: This is another common one people bring up. Dory’s intrusive and impulsive thoughts are much more accurate to my presentation, so it’s an improvement from Doug. I don’t like that she is often portrayed as stupid or careless. I’m not against a character with those traits, but with so few examples of ADHD in media, I think people may think it comes from the ADHD.

Evelyn Wang from Everything Everywhere All At Once: This example showed up recently on my Internet searches. I want to rewatch it again with the context of ADHD. I feel like it is probably a decent representation, but I can’t say for sure without a rewatch.

Percy Jackson: This is the only one on my list that is explicitly diagnosed with ADHD (and dyslexia and other issues). I will give them kudos for the explicit diagnosis, but I don’t think it’s a good representation. ADHD seems to just mean that he is bad at school. It seems that it has no impact on Percy outside of that. For my particular case, I was quite good in school, so it is inaccurate for me. I would be interested to hear if other people resonate more with it. Dyslexia seems to come up more in the books, so it may be a better representation for that.

Todd from Bojack Horsemen: I saved my personal favorite for last. I first watched Bojack Horsemen before my diagnosis, and ADHD wasn’t really on my mind. After my diagnosis, I realized how good of a portrayal Todd is. As a bonus, it is the only portrayal I have heard of that includes hyper focus (When Todd hyper focuses on writing the rock opera, and then the hyper focus switches to a video game). With the exception of the rock opera, I think I have had the same exact scenario play out in my own life. I had something I wanted to do, was able to focus on it, but was stolen away into a video game hyper focus.

Are there any other examples you have found?

Homeland - 5/10

First paragraph works as both the tldr as well as the beginning of the review.

This show is all over the place. Some parts are really good, some parts are really bad, most parts are just meh. This show lends itself to be picked apart too easily. There are plot holes, convenient coincidences, contrived nonsense, and so often intelligent characters behaving like idiots over and over again which leaves you wanting to yell at the screen. So many eyeroll moments, cheesy stuff, questionable story writing, a lot of times that they tell, not show - it should be show, don't tell of course - and that classic trope that everything would have been solved if they just talked to each other, and another about just doing one single simple thing instead of getting distracted for dumb reasons. It is also pretty unrealistic despite trying to appear grounded. A lot of this show is too reminiscent of Jason Statham movies, if that makes sense. However I was entertained enough by it to keep watching, and it worked fine to pass the time when I was bored. Despite never really getting all that into the show as a whole, the good parts or episodes were worth the wait.

Family drama in this show was not good. It was just kind of something you had to sit through to get to those good parts. Monica Baccarin was fine and Damian Lewis was incredible, but I really just didn't care all that much about their relationship nor their children. It's a show that is being sold as an action spy thriller, but too large a part of it is this sort of more or less regular drama. It reminds me of The Americans where you of course don't watch it for the family stuff with the children, but because they were super cool undercover Soviet spies. This type of show's biggest weakness is this stuff. It just acts as filler and drags things out unnecessarily. And this goes for the main character's family too. The relationship with the sister was alright, but when the main character gets a daughter? Just kind of felt like a waste of time.

Most characters are pretty run-of-the-mill spy show stereotypes. Not great, not terrible. The main character, Carrie, was quite unique with a lot of depth, but she ends up going through way too many unbelievable situations. She and her tiny team, or even she all alone, saves the world half a dozen times. Her character at best decent, and that was only in the first few seasons. But then she goes completely down the drain and off the rails in season 4 and never recovered. I am probably in the minority with this opinion but I can't imagine most people see it this way since it's the star of a show that ran for 8 seasons so I guess take this opinion with a grain of salt.. but she just does not land for me after seasons 1-3.

She is highly unlikable. She is one of the worst mothers I have ever seen in any show or movie. She is very neglectful and abusive mother, she is also a mass murderer who practically never repents or regrets what she has done, she disobeys orders constantly, mostly making things worse, she uses people all the time, and she has such a massive victim complex so 90% of the time she blames someone else for her often fatal fuckups - of which there are a lot. By far the biggest problem with all this is that it is quite clear that the creators of the show want the audience to sympathize with her and are trying to pass her off as the reluctant hero. She was never that good a character, nor do I think actor Claire Danes is very good in the role - just alright. However season 4 and onwards she just in no way works. Just impossible to root for, which is of course a big problem when it's the main character. She's not a cool antihero, it just became a chore to watch her scenes. The best summation is something Saul said to her in season 2: "You're the smartest and the dumbest fuckin' person I've ever known." Characters that are supposed to be intelligent who then do such truly dumb things.. characters are only as smart as their writers. So it's just bad writing.

On a more positive note, there are a few characters I really liked: Astrid, Quinn, Saul, Max. Astrid was not in the show very much but she was great as the German spy counterpart in the BND. She just had a way about her and I felt the relationship she had with Quinn was quite interesting. She was a joy to watch, just like Quinn, played by Rupert Friend whom I recently saw in Hitman: Agent 47 which was an awful movie, so I was kind of nervous when he first appeared here in Homeland. Turns out though that he was just horribly miscast in the former because in this show, he is great! There's no nonsense with him, it's the "competency porn" feeling while watching him. Same goes for Saul and Max. Saul's actor Mandy Patinkin (who also played Inigo Montaya, couldn't believe it when I looked him up lol) steals most scenes he's in. He is great as the older, experienced spy, the mentor for our main character. His voice is both soothing and dramatic to listen to and even though half his face is invisible because of his huge beard, he still has such good expressions and body language that he really draws you in. As for Max, he was a very minor character to begin with but his role became bigger towards the final two seasons and like I said, it was a joy to watch him on screen and great that he was given more screentime.

Not much of a joy however was all the nonsense that they had to implement in order to make the show work - they took the easy route to explain things away instead of actually implementing them well. For example they practically never have surveillance drones or satellites available, nor nightvision or thermal cameras, so they constantly lose track of people that they are following. Nor do they have much more than pistols most of the time. The agency does have these things available, and more, so it's just dumb that they pretend it doesn't exist in this show - some special ops guys had nightvision one time in one of the first seasons but I think season 7 was the first time a thermal camera was used and then we saw it maybe twice more. There are also often no contingency plans. Back-up being nonexistent 90% of the time, handwaved or ignored with a quick line or reason that wouldn't really make sense. Plus, everytime they needed to make something thrilling, they added a time constraint element to do it.

Something I did like was the representation of mental illness. You really see the ugly side of Carrie's bipolar and even though I don't have it, and so can't actually speak to whether or not it's actually a good portrayal, it seemed good. I feel it's important to show regular people what it looks like, and I felt the same way with Max's neurodivergency - that he was quiet and forward added a lot to his character. He could have definitely just been the kind of techy nerd stereotype that is seen everywhere, but I'm glad they didn't go that route.

And another great thing, I think the best even, was Damian Lewis. It was such a shame that he was written out but it does make sense that they couldn't do all that much with his character. I have only seen him in Band of Brothers, but he was one of the highlights in that show too, so it's not surprising that I liked him in this one too. The best scene of the show for me was the one where he is wearing the bomb vest in the bunker next to all the high ranking officers. The up close shot of his trembling and shivering face.. I have no idea how he was able to even do that. He has won awards which is well deserved.

Bingewatching the show over about a month instead of watching it week to week across 8 years probably did not do this show any favours. I think maybe it's easier to see through the formula then. Better shows barely even have formulas, but this one certainly does, and I'm not a fan of it. Every single season has ways that they can't trust anyone anywhere. It's always this small team versus the world. That's not unique to this show but it stands out because it's often the same way they do it - they think they can't trust anyone, there's a mole, they're on their own because reasons, etc. In any case, the show was an alright use of my time but definitely not going to watch it again.

Would love to hear anyone's thoughts about either the show or what I have written here!

Every time I get a haircut, my barber hands me a small hand mirror so that I can bounce an image off the wall mirror and see the back of my head. My hair is noticeably thinner in the back each time.

I recently was at a function and saw pictures of me standing around, some of which included the back of my head. The thinning is clearly starting to stand out in a bad way.

I feel like I’ve got two options:

1. Do something to try to save my hair (medication?).
2. Shave my head and try to rock a bald look.

I’m open to tips, tricks, and guidance on either of these (or options I’m not aware of).

I’m not very attached to my hair, so this isn’t a super emotional thing for me. I’m also not scared of going bald since, as a gay guy, I’m well aware of how compelling a bald + beard look can be on some men (my beard isn’t thinning at all, thankfully).

There’s still a question of whether it would look good for me specifically though. Also I don’t know if I’m ready to give up on my hair just yet?

One advantage I do have is summers off (I’m a teacher), so I’m going to be able to do a bald test run in a few months without too much risk. If it turns out that I’m a complete disaster without hair, I’ll just stay home and let it grow back out.

Anyway, I’m open to any and all thoughts on balding, hair loss, hair loss prevention, etc. Tell me your own experiences and what decisions you made. Let me know the tricks of the trade.

I recently heard something that I didn’t like. It was about the growth of fascism in the US, and it said something that I was uncomfortable hearing; ignoring it is the same as acceptance.

I am not subscribed to ~society. I was automatically added when it was created but I quickly noped out. I had already lowered my news consumption to a minimum before Trump won the election, but after I have actively avoided even those few programs that I thought were good. I didn’t have the will to hear about the terrible things on the horizon.

So now I am thinking about what I should do, and right now the thing that seems like the most concrete action is to buy a gun.

Honestly, though, I hate guns. I’ve done a shooting range a few times when I was a kid and I guess they were kind of fun but the idea of using it against people sickens me. On the other hand, we are living in an age where police forces are paramilitarized, the president can and will use CBP as a military force within the US border, and our civil rights are being pried apart.

But what would I actually do with a gun? What difference will it actually make? Bring part of deadly violence is the last thing that I want.

Ok, this is one of those thoughts I have in my brain and that I can't quite get rid of.
It breaks down into a couple of questions. For the purposes of this, I'm aware that what eyes see is the reflection of light bouncing off objects, but I'm curious the impact on the visibility of both objects and other lights.

A. If eyes emitted any light, could they still see anything at all?
B. If eyes emitted, for example, red light, could they see everything except red items? What about red lights? Does this change if the light is green or violet?
B.1. If they can't red things would they just be invisible?
B.2. If they can't see red lights, would it matter if the red light they're seeing is brighter or dimmer, and would it still be an invisible/blank space?
C. I'm not sure how infrared interacts here but I know animals that sense infrared do emit it, is there a reason that's different, if it's different.

The internet is mostly not super helpful with this, since eyes don't emit light, just reflect it and look glowy, but yeah, anyway... thanks for entertaining my weird fixation.

Recently my wife was complaining how her phone has been getting overzealous when flagging incoming phone spam, and as a result she's missed some important calls. It made me think about how easy it is for me to avoid spam calls, despite using a 3rd party dialer on my phone without any kind of spam ID features.

It's because around 15 years ago when Google started letting you pick your own phone number through Google Voice, I (for various reasons) needed to change my phone number. I ended up choosing one with what I thought was a really cool area code, and I've ported that number to every new provider I've swapped to so it's stuck with me since then. It turns out that all the spam callers, bless their hearts, like to spoof incoming phone numbers with the same area code as the number they're dialing. It means whenever I see a call coming from the same area code as my number it's ~100% guaranteed to be spam, and if I see a call coming from the same area code that I actually live in it's ~100% guaranteed to be something actually important (doctor, pharmacy, kids' school, something like that). It wasn't my intent when picking the number (I just wanted the cool area code), but it turned out to also be the perfect spam call ID system. (At least so long as I never move to the place that matches my area code.)

So I'm curious if anyone else has similar stories, where you did something for one reason but it turned out to actually be awesome for an entirely different, unexpected reason?

It’s been about a month and a half since our big Kagi trial giveaway, which means most people are probably about halfway through their trial periods, so I figured we were due for a follow-up.

To those who started using it recently, what are your thoughts?

What do you like and dislike about Kagi?

Do you think you will continue your subscription past the end of the trial?

Note: I’m not affiliated with Kagi in any way besides being a happy customer myself. I’m asking this entirely out of curiosity.

SOLVED
Bit of a long shot here because this is one of those issues where I search for the problem and you get a sea of replies like "have you checked the settings?" or "have you tried changing HDMI cables".

I just got a brand new LG OLED TV and I'm happy, but I've been watching Arcane on it and I notice jarring changes in brightness through the episode.
I'm playing through a native app (Stremio) on WebOS and it's not the source file, I've tested the same file on two different monitors and it's fine.
I went through the settings and disabled every autocorrect and "boost" capability the TV has to try and diagnose it, and the first pass did seem to improve the rate of changes, but it still happens maybe once every 5 mins of watch time.
From what I can tell it seems to be picking up particular colour/brightness changes in the source (Arcane is full of then being so vivid) and when it does, it just changes the brightness of the whole display.
I'm no expert here, I'm also colour blind, so I won't categorically claim it is definitely brightness changing, it could be contract or colour, I'm not sure, but it looks like brightness because the whole picture gets darker or lighter.

I wondered if it was actually flip flopping between SDR and HDR which honestly, it might be. If it is I have no idea how to fix that, as the TV seems to have no option to enable or disable HDR on native apps.

Any advice, thoughts, things to try would be appreciated. I'm technically orientated but I don't really know much about changing picture settings to be honest, I tend to pick the most basic/neutral setting and leave it like that.

Edit: I've dug out the old 4k firestick as suggested and don't get the flickering at all through that. Also running through the guide below helped make the picture look even better! Thanks everyone!
I might yet grab the service remote though and see if I can make the native apps work, then I can retire the firestick for good.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts who watched through the basho.

I don't have all my thoughts together yet but wanted to post this after watching the last day of the basho to get the ball rolling on any discussion.

While many of you are an inspiration to others on your own creative merits, I wonder if there is anyone else who sets aside little (or big) passages and other quotations from authors, poets, film, or TV whose work gets you in the mood to write or in some other way encourages you into a certain manner of expression.

I keep around a digital notebook of some of my favorite thought-provoking, creativity-motivating, or words that paint an immediately vivid picture. Sometimes they add color to a character or world in an intense way, or they're clever ways to word things I wouldn't have thought to express from that angle. Sometimes they're ways of phrasing or writing a concept or theme that we don't often see in modern fiction but might work for a fantasy setting or elsewhere and I want to keep around that idea as a reference of how I might do something similar, but different.

Please share and feel free to provide some context if necessary, such as a passage from a sci-fi novel that really gets you motivated to write something science-y, or a bit about the person if the passage is from a memoir.

For the last 10-years or so, I've been much more interested in US history, it started because I wanted to be a more informed citizen, but continued because of how much recorded history differed from how I was taught. Then I started seeing how the lofty offerings of America, as an idea, had really never existed.

Like, when the rest of the world was watching the Soviet Union from the outside as it proudly proclaimed how amazing they were and everyone was kind of glancing at each other and whispering "They know we can see how it's going, right?" I wonder if the same is happening now, as countries watch US politics unfold. How close are we from a failure here or there to cascading failure?

I'm at a point of accumulated facts, doing my best to remove my personal bias, that I can't help but think we were arrogant to think we could keep a continent this large in one piece. The weight of national systems that can support a population this spread out is immense. The upkeep of infrastructure at this scale is a logistics nightmare. Passing any national laws has become the chore that just never gets done, we'll always get to it tomorrow. The people, Americans, can be amazing, but that's a truth of humanity, not nationality.

I'm sad to think I could be witnessing the end of something really impressive and inspiring, even if a lot of it was some makeup and nice lighting. Thoughts?

I was looking through some pictures and realized that, starting from pictures taken a few years ago, you won't be able to tell how old a picture is based only on picture quality, even though that's been the case pretty much since the invention of photography.

As a follow up to this, I now have a blog that I intend to use for longer write-ups on things I find interesting enough to want to share, and continuing this chain of thought, it would effectively fill the purpose of what I would until now use a text post for. This very post serves as an obvious counter-example of something that would make sense as a blog article, so there would presumably be exceptions, but overall that would mean I would switch from text posts to links to my blog where the text is (and I'd probably add a collapsible copy of the article as a comment for redundancy in case something happens to the blog. I have no idea if I'm keeping this specific domain name in the long term, and in fact I do want to switch to a proper domain name I own rather than using yunohost's domains, but for right now it's not in the cards.).

To me, this reasoning makes sense and isn't in conflict with Tildes' principles, however I have a concern regarding the code of conduct's self-promotion policy, specifically the it shouldn't be the primary reason that you post on the site part. My gut tells me that I would be in the clear since the overall intent of this policy is to curb outright advertising and self-serving behavior, and I assume linking to my blog which is non-monetized and decoupled from any endeavor I might profit from wouldn't apply. While I think this is the most natural interpretation, I can't argue in good faith that, taking the text purely at face value outside of the broader context, "ceasing submitting text posts and replacing them with links to my blog" isn't pretty much making that blog the primary reason I post on the site (at least outside of the comment section).

So, as a sanity check, I'm asking if going ahead with this does fit the expected conduct on Tildes and I'm not missing something that makes it not okay. If I am missing something, what should I do instead?

Heads up: the following is abnormally wordy even by my standards, and I'm the kind of person who regularly runs into the Discord character limit by accident despite the Nitro subscription increasing it. The underlying context is a set of two videos that by themselves reach almost 3 hours of runtime. I tried to sum up some of the main points enough that you don't strictly need to have watched the videos to follow while also not needing to slog through a play by play of the same video I recommended you to watch if you did. While I believe the subject is interesting, I fully understand if you don't have the time to dedicate to this. If you do and weren't scared away by the size of the scroll bar, feel free to read on.

Context

This all starts with the seemingly straightforward question in the title: How many Super Mario games are there? You would think it would be easy to answer given that this series is so massively impactful in video game history that to many it defines what a video game is. The truth, like most things, is a lot more complicated. jan Misali, who you might also know for their Conlang Critic series and various video essays on other deceptively complex subjects they find interesting, gathered data through a survey to collect people's answers to that question, and made a video on the subject. The video is about 45 minutes long, and that's only because they deliberately cut it short. The discussion that sparked from this video eventually led to them starting another survey at a larger scale with a revised methodology, culminating to a sequel to the previous video, this time with a two hours runtime, and it, too, was cut short. If you have the time to set aside for this, I would greatly recommend watching both videos as they're very insightful and most of what I have to say is commentary to these two videos (and doesn't even come close to covering as much as the videos themselves do).

What question are we even asking here?

Like all good debates on the internet, it starts with an ambiguity issue: What is a "Super Mario game"? In simpler cases, a video game series can be defined as the first game and its sequels and that's enough to establish an uncontroversial list. Things get more complicated when we look at an entire franchise especially one as massive as the Mario franchise, which contains a ton of video games, an even bigger pile of non-video game media... and works that blur the line. You can probably see where this is going, but I'll get back to that particular can of worms later. Focusing on the video games, among the entire franchise, the question focuses on the "mainline" series. That is what jan Misali refers to as the "Super Mario" series, distinguishing them from spinoffs and other games that are part of the franchise. You'll note that I specified "what jan Misali refers to as the "Super Mario" series", not "what the "Super Mario" series is".

Multiple-choice confusion

Using the video runtime as a yardstick, we are 2 minutes into the first part, and there is already a binary tree's worth of debate, and it's only getting bigger from here: the existence of a mainline series as a separate entity from the overall Mario franchise is commonly accepted, but not unanimously. Among those who do agree, there is disagreement on the scope of the mainline series (with how gargantuan the franchise itself is, even the spinoffs have their own spinoffs, and it would be a perfectly reasonable take to consider some or all of them, such as the Mario Kart games, as a core part of the series). Among those who agree on the scope, there is disagreement over what the first game of the series is (do we start at Super Mario Bros? Mario Bros? Donkey Kong? The Game & Watch series?). In order to keep the video at 45 minutes and not 45 hours, jan Misali picks one definition they feel is reasonable among others: the Super Mario series is one distinct series among others in the franchise, made up of Super Mario Bros. on the NES and its sequels, which are mostly platformer games. With this baseline established (even if the survey doesn't 100% agree), how do we figure out which of all the Mario games are the sequels to SMB1? There are many methods to go about this... And not only none of them converge to a single answer, they all diverge in different ways. Let's start with the most direct source of data jan Misali had access to as a direct result of the process of making the videos: the surveys.

The one thing we can agree on is that no one agrees

jan Misali isn't just presenting their own thoughts on the matter, they're also analyzing the data gathered from a survey they made before recording both videos. The first one merely presented you with a premade list of games and asked you which of them you considered to be a Super Mario games, and the second one goes more in depth but still had the same overall goal. If there was any sort of consensus (assuming the survey wasn't sabotaged or otherwise flawed enough to distort the ability to interpret the data to the point of uselessness), you could derive the broadly accepted list of Super Mario games from looking at the most common answers to the survey, right?

If you interpret "the most common answer" as "which games people overwhelmingly (>95%) agree are part of the series", the survey gives us Super Mario Bros, Super Mario bros 3, and Super Mario World (by the time of the second video, the second survey added Super Mario 64 to the list, as well as Super Mario Bros. Wonder)... which almost anyone who has an opinion on the subject would agree is a grossly incomplete list. If you interpret "the most common answer" as "which is the list that the most people agreed is the full list of the Super Mario series", you end up with a much more complete list of 18 games which by definition is what the highest percentage of people answering the survey agree on. You could consider it the survey's overall answer to the question... except the percentage in question is less than 2% (although in the second survey analyzed in the second video, this same list, with the at the time newly released Super Mario Bros. Wonder added, actually stood at just above 5%. Closer, but still very much a minority group within the survey). Almost everyone who answered still disagree to some degree with that answer. While there is plenty of insight to be gained from the data (including regarding the limitations of the survey itself), it also conclusively establishes that public opinion (or at least in jan Misali's audience) doesn't have a truly agreed upon answer to this question.

Hang on, let me call my uncle at Nintendo

So, we have an answer, but not the answer, and even worse (...or better, if you like analyzing seemingly trivial arguments that secretly hide a rabbit hole of semantics, linguistics and cognitive science) the only thing we can say about "the" answer is that it cannot exist. So let's try finding more answers by going from another angle. If we learned anything from politics, it's that an answer derived from polls can absolutely be wrong, so it makes sense to consider that there is an authoritative source that can give a definitive answer over public opinion. The most obvious lead would be Nintendo itself, the owner of the IP... except that instantly fizzles out because while Nintendo does provide a list of mainline Super Mario games on their website, the one they give you isn't the same depending on whether you ask Nintendo of America or Nintendo of Japan. We can also look at what Wikipedia deems to be the list of Super Mario games, which naturally is different from both Nintendo US and Nintendo JP's list, and on top of that is arguably inconsistent with itself: the page's release timeline lists Bowser's Fury as an entry like the others, but the infobox that redirects to the various Mario games under the "main games" section lists it between parentheses as a sub-entry to Super Mario 3D World, the same way it lists New Super Luigi U as a sub-entry to New Super Mario Bros U which the release timeline in turn omits completely. There are rational reasons to do it this way which I won't go into since jan Misali explains it in the videos themselves, but technically that means Wikipedia doesn't have an internal consensus either. The Super Mario wiki, while unaffiliated with Nintendo, is also a good candidate for an authoritative source, which gives you another, different, answer. We could go on, but let's stop here and conclude that, once again, there is no agreed answer.

Give me your argument and I'll tell you why we're both wrong

Neither polling the public nor going by the authoritative sources have given a concrete answer, which leaves us in front of the semantic rubble trying to piece back a coherent understanding of the Super Mario series. Not to try and find the Correct™ answer, we've already established there isn't one, but it would give us valuable insight as to why no one can agree to a specific answer in the first place. jan Misali spreads this approach over both videos as they give their reasoning from various angles. They deliberately haven't gone over this exhaustively, and neither will I (not that I would be able to), but I do have thoughts I'd like to share based on their observations... Which yes, means I've written 1,5k words establishing the base around the videos I want to talk about despite operating under the assumption the reader has already watched them before going over my own thoughts. I'm certain I could have been more concise, but I felt this was necessary so that this post could stand as a coherent chain of reasoning and not a completely disjointed rambling that won't make sense to anyone who hasn't made the significant time investment that fully watching the video essays represents, and still not make sense to most who did (and if I misunderstood something critical, someone reading this can point it out from my attempt to lay out the context rather than after 12 confused replies down the thread). I'll try and tie my thoughts together in broader parts with increasingly silly titles.

"Home console purism"

I will start by addressing this not because it's the most important (if anything it's the least important detail I have something to say about) but because it lets me introduce a talking point I'll reuse later. Something that jan Misali mentions early on is what they call "home console purism", defining it as the belief that the mainline Mario series, as a rule, cannot include handheld games. While they don't explicitly state this at any point nor do I have a specific reason to believe implying it was their intention, it somewhat came off to me like bringing it up as a flawed argument just to dismiss it, especially after it was brought up again regarding Super Mario Run as a comparison to the belief that mobile games "don't count". If you leave it at that, I absolutely agree that it's silly to exclude a video game for that reason, especially with the Switch blurring the line. After thinking about it, though, while I'd still disagree with using it as a reason to exclude a video game from a series in this specific case, I think it deserves to be looked at in more detail.

Gatekeeping or shifting perspective?

The least charitable interpretation of this argument is that handheld and mobile games are deemed to not be worthy of being included alongside the "real" games released on home consoles or PC, usually with a side of implying that you're a "fake" gamer if you play them (not to mention the higher layer argument from the same basis that also excludes any console games, leaving only PCs as the "true" gaming platform and everything else as lesser toys for kids) which can safely be dismissed as elitist gatekeeping. However, from a perspective of classifying games within a series, there is a much more sensible way to approach this argument.

The "Call of Duty on the DS" problem

Nowadays, between the handheld PCs like the Steam Deck which can give desktop PCs a run for their money in terms of specs and the Nintendo Switch that refuses to be classified as a dedicated home console or handheld, the distinction would look a lot sillier, but the handheld game market used to be closer to an isolated sub-segment of the overall video games market than a fully integrated part of it. Disregarding the whole "exclusive releases" circus, faithfully porting a PC game to a home console was generally agreed to be feasible. Handheld consoles were another matter entirely. Most (all? was there a handheld notable for outperforming contemporary home consoles?) of the time, handheld consoles had vastly inferior specs to contemporary home consoles and computers making faithful ports of a given game to them a pipe dream if the game was too resource intensive, and a tendency to have a much more varied control scheme than you'd expect from home consoles, sometimes to the point of "porting" an existing game requiring restarting the game design process from scratch.

You've gotta hand it to the Need For Speed DS game devs, they certainly tried to make them similar to the other platforms

Where this starts mattering in this context is what this means for releases within an individual game series, and how game studios would treat developing a given entry for each system. Some just stuck to only home consoles or handhelds, some would aim for the best compromise between having a unified experience for a given game no matter which device you were playing it on and leveraging a specific console's unique features, some would confusingly release games under the same title on different platforms but actually make them completely different games (even Nintendo themselves are guilty of it!), and, most relevantly, some would deliberately make handheld games stand out from the home console games as a sub-series.

Why this doesn't really matter here, but the point I'm building up to does

This outlook makes a lot less sense if you look at the Super Mario series in a vacuum, which, as a mainly platformer series, struggles a lot less with making a handheld release that convincingly fits the vibe of the home console releases than other genres might (in no small part because designing a 2D game makes just as much sense as it does in 3D for this genre, making the specs gap between handheld and home consoles a lot less important), and as a first party franchise, Nintendo isn't going to be blindsided by a new console's weird features like a third party studio might since they're the ones making the console... But if you consider the market in general across the years, siloing the home and handheld side of a given series as two separate entities, with the home console being granted the "mainline series" role was a very real phenomenon. If you start from this premise and look at the Super Mario series which debuted on the NES, it makes sense to apply the same framework and say "None of the handheld games are part of the Super Mario series, they're part of their own series". I would still disagree, but it's definitely a lot more sensible to base it on past observations of the market than gatekeeping.

The Super Mario release timeline needs its own timeline

To elaborate, I would find this argument a lot more convincing back when the DS (which was so atypical that even porting a game from another handheld to the DS' bespoke dual screen and touch screen setup was a non trivial affair, let alone the home consoles) was the current-gen Nintendo handheld than now where the Switch 2 (a console with a mostly conventional control scheme and powerful enough that porting an arbitrary PC/home console game to it without visibly changing anything about the game makes just as make sense as any other platform) is about to come out. And with this I'm finally arriving to the talking point I wanted to introduce. If the evolution of the broader market can affect the validity of someone's criteria to determine which games are (or aren't) part of the Super Mario series, then we can generalize that to the following: A game can be (or no longer be) considered part of a series depending on when you ask even if absolutely nothing has changed about the game in isolation.

Sure they're all a Mario game, but which one is THE Mario game?

One thing that jan Misali picked up on from the original survey is a major ambiguity that made answering (and therefore interpreting the resulting data) harder is the remakes, remasters, enhanced versions with their own release, and other related weirder cases. These games range from almost completely identical to previous releases to non-controversially a variant of the same title but still different enough to provide an experience meaningfully separate from the original title, to different enough they're arguably not the same game, adding a dimension to the answer that makes enforcing a flat "yes" or "no" choice less useful. This is why the survey that led to the second video made it possible to call an entry a "mainline Super Mario game", a "major spinoff", a "minor spinoff", "not canon" and finally "not a Mario game" (and "unsure", just in case) at the same time as you answer whether you think the title is a distinct entry in the series (or you're unsure), to be able to clarify the general sentiment that if a game saw more than one release under different versions, they can all be acknowledged as an incarnation of that game without making each individual release an entry to the mainline Super Mario series of its own. This allowed the answers to be more nuanced, but this by itself doesn't help answering the original concern: if multiple releases can all be the same game, and that game is part of the series, can more than one of these releases be called a "distinct" entry? If you think there can't, which one is it? And this last question is what I'm going to focus on for my next thought.

Mario games are temporary but Doom is Eternal

Forced reference aside, let's look at other franchises for comparison. Doom Eternal, originally released on PC in March 2020, got a Switch port later in December that year. Thanks to skillful optimization allowing it to somehow run on glorified 2015 Android tablet hardware, this port is faithful enough that I don't think it would be controversial to call it the same game as the PC release compared to, for example, The Sims 2, where while a game named The Sims 2 was released on the Nintendo DS, it is so radically different from the PC release that I would consider it an entirely separate game (and for that matter not a part of the mainline Sims series, but I'll put away that thought before I completely lose the plot). If I asked "Between the PC and the Switch release of Doom Eternal, which is the main release?" and we assume "both" isn't considered a valid answer (which is itself debatable) I would expect the natural answer to be the PC release simply because out of two functionally equivalent releases of the same game, the PC release came first. Similarly, if we consider, as a general rule, that there exists one, and only one, release of a given game that embodies a distinct entry in the mainline Super Mario series, with any other release not counting (while still accepting that they're a version of that game), the earliest release being the distinct entry makes intuitive sense. After all, they're the original version of the game. If it could be of the future ones it would mean a release could stop being the distinct entry in a mainline series despite nothing having changed about the release itself, which doesn't make sense... right?

What's in a name?

Time to bring up that one point from earlier: there's nothing inherently preventing the status of a game release as a mainline series entry from being affected by external factors. Quick disambiguation note: I've been using the word "release" in the context of video games being made available for purchase, but the word "release" can also be used to mean a software update, no matter how minor. Video games also being software, this distinction is now going to matter. To avoid confusion, I will only use the word "release" to mean a game being made available to purchase and refer to a new software version for an already released game as an "update". With this cleared up: before internet connection became a standard feature in consoles, the general expectation was that releasing a game meant permanently locking down the state of its software. Game companies would not want to update a game between releases and end up with different versions of a physical game in circulation if they can't ensure that the customers would get the most recently updated copies as it would inevitably confuse players, so it would only be considered for truly major issues that weren't caught in time for the release. As broadband internet came into the picture, it suddenly became a lot less important to make sure the game stayed the same after release as you could simply get the customer to upgrade their game over the Internet. This quickly became standard operating procedure for PC games, with consoles catching up a bit later, including Nintendo's. And with it, came the practice of content updates over the lifecycle of a game before the next release.

Dragonborn... reborn?

Even if the individual updates don't change the game to a meaningful degree from one update to the next, as they pile up you can eventually end up with a wildly different game than what it was when it originally released, even if it's supposed to be the same entry into its series. If you agree that the release you accept as the distinct entry of its mainline series can change its characteristics over time, wouldn't it make sense to also agree that which release of a game you consider to be the distinct entry of the mainline series can also change over time? Let's turn to another series as an example: The Elder Scrolls, and specifically Skyrim which is infamous for its amount of re-releases. It is at the time of writing the latest game in its series, and has been since 2011... but is the by now almost 15 years old original release really still the main entry in the Elder Scrolls mainline series? As far as Steam is concerned, the game you can purchase if you search for Skyrim on its store isn't the original release, nor is it even the Legendary Edition release from 2013, but the Special Edition from 2016 (while also letting you buy the Anniversary Edition as a DLC to the Special Edition). With the original release no longer being on sale and the more recent Anniversary Edition being classified as a DLC rather than a "proper" release, it would make sense for me to call SE the "distinct" entry representing Skyrim in The Elder Scrolls over the original release. Is there an instance of this happening in the Super Mario series? It would be a huge stretch, but you could argue (although frankly I wouldn't agree) that Super Mario 64 isn't a distinct entry in the Super Mario series because you consider the Super Mario 64 DS remake to be the "true" entry in the series. Sure, claiming that Super Mario 64, the first Mario 3D platformer isn't a mainline Super Mario game sounds ludicrous, but so does "Skyrim (2011) isn't a mainline Elder Scrolls Game but Skyrim Special Edition is" and I did consider it a plausible argument. A slightly less unhinged instance would be to consider New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe to be the representative entry in the mainline series over New Super Mario Bros. U.

Strictly defined criteria and their pitfalls or: why is a sweater a Super Mario game?

By this point I've highlighted ambiguities over the meaning of pretty much word in the question "How many Super Mario games are there?".

• How many: No consensus on the number of games in the series, let alone which ones they are
• Super Mario: No consensus on what makes an individual game part of the series
• are there (present tense): No guarantee that the list can stay consistent with regards to time, in either direction

There is one left to achieve total semantic obliteration: games. This was inevitable, really. How could you overanalyze this question and not bring up nitpicking over the meaning of the term "video game" itself? jan Misali has already done most of the work for me, as part of the second video involves them mentioning that attempting to derive an appropriate list of mainline Super Mario game solely from an objective definition while is doomed to fail. Whatever the approach, you will always be working with an unstated semantic "guardrail" of some sort that cannot be comprehensively worded into the definition. The first basic example they give is "Anything with 'Super' in the title is part of the Super Mario series." Under any reasonable context we know what is meant by "anything" but without it, this definition includes infinitely many things that very obviously aren't Super Mario games. But even progressively narrowing it down to something that sounds sensible will still leave a semantic hole that includes something absurd. This culminates into the following bit:

So, maybe you can use this "has Super in the title" method as a starting point and add more stuff to it until it becomes a useful definition. And, in the comments from part 1, many people have tried to do exactly that. And very often what they come up with something like: "The Super Mario series consists of the games developed by Nintendo for Nintendo consoles that have 'Super Mario' in the title, excluding RPGs, party games, Mario Kart, sports games, and reissues of previously released Super Mario games."

At which point jan Misali unleashes their inner Diogenes and reveals what I've been hinting at in the header: Behold, a man mainline Super Mario game! However, while I'm all for leveraging semantic technicalities for the sake of comedy, I think this is a part where jan Misali loses the plot a bit. Even accounting for a VERY permissive understanding of what a video game is, I don't think I am a teacher: Super Mario Sweater plausibly counts as one. Obviously knowing the incoming storm in the comment section, they supplied the following definition for a video game: "interactive software with a visual display for the purpose of entertainment". I agree that if you accept that's what a video game is, I am a teacher: Super Mario Sweater is in fact a video game. What I don't agree with is that the definition itself is accurate enough.

My favorite video game is Tildes

jan Misali's last argument in the video in favor of IaaT:SMS being a video game is regarding the value of knitting as entertainment, which I'm not disputing, but that's not where I believe the issue with this definition is in the first place. IaaT:SMS does have interactivity, yes, and it was designed for the purpose of entertainment, but to me that is not enough to constitute a video game. For it to be one, the interactivity needs to be a necessary part of the entertainment, which isn't the case here. The interactive part, inputting your measurements, choosing a file and scrolling through the selected knitting pattern isn't the entertaining part. The entertaining part, which is knitting a sweater, requires none of the interactivity provided by the software; a completely non interactive slideshow of the various patterns would accomplish the goal just as well. And, while this was ultimately just part of jan Misali's overall point that you cannot bolt together a purely objective definition without relying on some level of unstated common sense, I think that point would have been better served by highlighting the holes in the provided definition of a video game itself than taking it at face value to poke a hole in the definition of the Super Mario series that relied on in the first place (not that this is even required, as jan Misali proceeds to show more examples of games that clearly wouldn't be argued in good faith by anyone to be part of the mainline series and are still noncontroversially video games, and then goes on to explore the ambiguities in pretty much every other part of the definition). You know what else counts as a video game under that definition?

• mspaint.exe
• Arch Linux
• Tildes
• Any movie DVD that features a menu
• BonziBuddy
• The Youtube video player
• The onboard widget display of the Logitech G510 keyboard
• Kangjun Heo's Rensenware
• A chat interface with an LLM whose system prompt instructed it to entertain the user without any further elaboration
• The firmware running on my pair of wireless earbuds (a LED counts as "visual display", right?)
• Twitch chat
• The YouAreAnIdiot prank website
• The Times Square ad billboards (yes, it's interactive, even if the controls are atypical)

You will note that even with my caveat, you could still argue that a lot of these still fit this alleged definition of a video game, so whatever a video game is, it's not just that. Instead of continuing this list and losing the plot myself for the second time in the process of writing this, I will point out that jan Misali's second video has been classified under the "I am a Teacher: Super Mario Sweater" game category, meaning that apparently Google agrees that this is in fact a video game. Shows what I know.

Video killed the Mario star

And of course, you can't cover debating what's a video game without also covering the video part. When people ask "how many Mario games are there", the video game part is implied, but there is definitely an argument to be made that being a video game is not necessarily a prerequisite to be part of the mainline Mario series, especially if you hold the belief that the Game & Watch games aren't actually video games (I personally do think they are, but it's debatable enough for jan Misali to not be fully sure, at the very least) but are still significant enough to be part of the mainline series (there is a Super Mario Bros. game in there, after all, and it's even a platformer!). This can also be further argued to include other media that aren't even games (if the NieR series can include stage plays, what's preventing the Super Mario series from including, say, its licensed movie?), though I personally don't have any non-video game candidate in mind to argue in good faith that they should be part of the series.

413 Payload Too Large

At this point I don't think I have much else to add that isn't basically paraphrasing jan Misali themselves, so I'll wrap up this post so I don't have to spend another day adding to it and proofreading, and I'm fairly confident that between it and all the other interesting points the video raised that I haven't mentioned there will be more than enough jumping points for discussion (and if I forgot something I wanted to add, I can always do that later). What are your thoughts on this? _{And did you realize before I pointed it out that I wrote over 5k words about the question without giving my own answer at any point?}

Recently I did an update on my Macbook and it started showing alerts about Apple Intelligence. I've heard a little bit of marketing about this but I haven't really spent any time trying to figure out if it is just hype. Well, I've tried it a few times and I'm completely underwhelmed.
One of marketed features is that Siri is much improved. That would be nice, I thought, because there are only a few use cases like "Set an Alarm" where Siri could ever do anything besides a google search.

So there are two times recently I tried to use this improved Siri to solve a problem. My background using AI: I use Copilot at work. I get mixed results for it, but it does use my local context (open files etc) and is able to ask follow up questions if my prompt is too vague.

First Use Case: I want to solve a technical problem on my laptop

• My Prompt: "Can you help me fix Discord so that audio is shared when I share a video stream"
• My Expectation: Maybe an AI summary of the cause of the issue. Maybe open up system settings or open up Discord or give an explanation of why this is a technical problem on Macs.
• Actual Siri Response: Does an internet search and shows some links. Essentially just did a google search which I could have done by typing the same prompt in a browser.

Second Use case: I want help finding a file on my laptop

In this case, I made a summary of my finances on my laptop a few months ago. I can't remember what I named the file or what kind of file it was. Maybe a spreadsheet? I know it was on my local computer.

• My 1st Prompt: Can you help me find a specific file on my computer
• My Expectation: Maybe some follow up questions where it asks me for a date range or something that is inside the file. Yes, I know that I can do this in Finder but I want Apple Intelligence to save me a few minutes.
• Siri: Shows the result of a web search on how to find files on a computer. The first few results are for Microsoft Windows
• 2nd Prompt: Can you help me find a specific file on my mac
• Siri: Tells me to use Command-space and use the search

In both cases, Siri just acted like a shortcut to a google search. It didn't even recognize that I was asking the question on a Mac. This is same as Siri has always been. I assume that it can still figure out to set a timer and do a few things, but it doesn't seem to be working in a way I would expect an AI to work at all.

We have this big project at work...an "all hands on deck" kinda thing that has us rank-and-file frontend devs working alongside our manager more closely than I'm used to. And it was fine, because I like the guy and he's been a decent manager. But this project is killing me.

On multiple occasions now I've written code, had it pass code review (often with his approval after a round of changes/guidance), and then every few days we get these massive re-write PRs from him where he completely rewrites large chunks of what we've done. It's leaving me feeling a few different ways:

1. Angry because how quickly your code gets replaced is a (imo, bullshit) metric used as a part of our annual reviews and promotion discussions
2. Doubting myself because in my head a good developer doesn't have their code rewritten that quickly.
3. Confused because features I thought I understood are constantly being rewritten leaving me wasting time trying to relearn how things work
4. Wondering what the point of writing code is if it's just going to be thrown in the garbage later in the week?

And like I'll be the first to admit I'm not the most proficient developer on our team. React and Typescript are relatively new concepts to me, despite a long career in web development. But I've been writing with it for about a year now and I had thought I was finally getting a good grasp on things. But now I'm wondering if I'm just an idiot? Is it imposter syndrome or have I actually somehow coasted through a 15 year career across various stacks and it's just now catching up to me?

Or is this just the nature of massive projects like this? We had a half-baked product scope to begin with and its getting daily changes with entire chunks of it not very well thought out by our PM. I can see how it would make sense that the more senior developer might see the need to refactor things when things are constantly changing and we're left writing code based on assumptions and half-written requirements. I'm also getting are comments on my PRs that request changes, but mid-comment he's like "I'll just take care of this because it's blocking me".

It's just really taking a toll on my mental health and how I feel about my job. I've been trying to find another job for a few months now, but I'm not having any luck. Job hunting sucks and when you're already demoralized as hell, it's hard to sell yourself to prospective employers.

Could really use some insight from other experienced devs, please!

So during covid pandemic, a big issue that I kept hearing about in the news and on the Journal podcast was that the economy is hot which is bad and causes interest rate spikes from the Fed if you are in the U.S. or Bank of Canada if you are in Canada.

tbh, I never fully understood that. we live in a consumerism, materialistic and capitalist society. i thought that people buying non-stop was what corporations and American govt valued, hence why we are hit with ads everywhere we go. and yet it was somehow a bad thing and was causing economic issues?

so I looked into it and came across a reddit post that basically explained it in simplistic terms like this:
the iPhone costs 1,000$. now, if not many people can afford the iPhone cause it's out of budget, what that implies is that not many people have 1,000$ which means that 1,000$ is hard to get which raised the value of the dollar, which is good for the economy.
If a lot of people can afford the iPhone, it means lots of people can afford to spend 1,000$ which means it's not as unique position to be in anymore, to have 1,000$ in spending money which apparently makes it worth less, cause more people have access to such funds.
Moreover, besides lowering the value of the dollar, more people being able to afford the iPhone is apparently also not a tenable situation cause apparently supply for iPhones could not meet the demand if it's suddenly now in so much more demand, so the value of the dollar going lowering is not only bad for the economy, but also has an effect on supply-chain issues.

Now, if I understand correctly, during covid and shortly after, the stimulus checks were given to people, both middle and lower class. the stimulus checks allowed for lower class to be able to afford more basic necessities from what I heard. This also however, also caused middle class people to be able to afford both more basic necessities and also to spend on luxuries (gonna continue with my current example of the iPhone). So the lower and middle class people having more spending power to be able to afford their necessities and maybe splurge a bit on luxuries causes the value of the dollar to go down cause now things are more affordable to people. and the value of the dollar going down causes wall street/the fed to freak the fuck out. and this causes them to raise interest rates, which has a domino effect of causing unemployment which obv leads to less people having spending power which causes a dampening effect on how much people are buying which brings the value of the dollar back up and the Fed is happy again.

I know I have probably oversimplified some parts cause I am not an economics person and God forbid the Journal podcast actually do their job and breakdown how the economy is screwing people so most of what I know comes from online research and what I can glean from the news but is anything I said incorrect?

cause if what I said is correct, that means that whenever the government keeps saying "the economy is fine" in response to people saying the times are tough, I get confused how that's a counterargument from the govt and not actually a subtle confirmation that times are tough for people. cause what it actually means is "the value of the dollar is fine, but the people are hurting cause that is needed for the dollar to be fine"?