I've recently played really good game of Secret Hitler, so I wanted to let you know about it. If you don't know Secret Hitler, it's great game and I'll briefly describe it below. You can play it online, for free, without ads at secrethitler.io (opensource). You can as well buy it, or even just download pdf, print it and play with paper cards!

Secret Hitler summary

Game for 5-10 players, tabletop. Players are divided to Fascists and Liberals. One of fascists is Hitler. Fascists knows who is who, but Liberals don't know anything. There is chancellor and president, players vote them and they elect laws (president receives 3 laws, 1 discards, 2 passes to chancellor, which discards 1 law and the other one passed). Fascists win, as 6 F laws passed or Hitler was elected as chancellor with 3 or more F laws. Liberals win, if 5 L laws passed or Hitler was killed. If you want to know more, watch some gameplay at YouTube, it's really interesting game about lying to people and manipulating them. And if you will be interested in the game, we might play it together online :-)

I was a Fascist. Right on the first turn as president, I got 3 Fascists laws and I selected Hitler as chancellor - I had to because of order and it would be suspicious not to do so. So I passed him the laws and he of course had to pass Fascist law. But then, he peaked (because 3rd F law passed) at top three cards and lied about it (said FFL, was FLL). Because of this, everyone, after few turns which revealed he lied, started suspecting him. When the liberals had 4 laws passed, I tried as hard as I could to defend Hitler - he just missclicked (no, he would told us!), you know it. After about 10 minute discussion, my propose was rejected, someone else elected as Chancellor and Liberals won the game.

Leave your own stories in comments and be sure to tell, if you would like to play this with other people here, it's wonderful game. And if you would like to, I have other stories - for example when we (IRL) played Secret Hitler to 3 AM, and at the last but one turn, everyone went extremely suspicious and we played one turn almost hour and half (I don't lie about this, I started to measure it after 20 minutes of discussion).

My background: I've run a small bookkeeping business in California for the past 6 years, and worked as a bookkeeper for another 6 years before that. Over the years I've been deep in the books of dozens of businesses, both successful and not. In the process of working closely with the owners of said businesses, I've learned a lot about what makes a small business work and what means I shouldn't get too attached. I'm a generalist, working with for and non-profit businesses as well as well to do individuals (who often have financial lives more complex than my business clients.)

I'm bored and it's a smoky Sunday trapping me indoors, so if you have a question about bookkeeping or running/starting a small business, fire away.

The new expansion for World of Warcraft is supposed to drop in about a month. Thought I'd see if any of you Tilderoos play WoW and what you think of it. I have been playing on and off since I was a kid and I've been having tons of fun with the introduction of the Mythic+ system in Legion. I'd love to hear about people's WoW stories and experiences with the game!

I watched a documentary about Stonehenge tonight, and it proposed the theory that the location for Stonehenge was chosen because of a natural geological feature in the area.

There's a man-made path that proceeds south-west towards Stonehenge: "The Avenue". This path was built around the same era as Stonehenge itself. If you walk westward along The Avenue on the winter solstice, you'll be facing the point on the horizon where the sun sets. However, under The Avenue, there's an old natural geological formation from the time of the Ice Age: a series of ridges in the rock which just coincidentally align with the sunset on the winter solstice (an "axis mundi"). Before Stonehenge was built, there was a chalk knoll on that location. That meant that you could walk along a natural geological path towards the sunset on the shortest day of the year, and there was a local geological landmark in front of you.

The theory is that these natural geological formations coincidentally aligning with an astronomical phenomenon made the site a special one for early Britons. That's why there was a burial site there, and later Stonehenge was built there.

Here's the article by the archaeologist who discovered the Ice Age ridges: Researching Stonehenge: Theories Past and Present

It's been over a week since the last programming challenge and the previous one was a bit more difficult, so let's do something easier and more accessible to newer programmers in particular. Write a function that takes two strings as input and returns true if they're anagrams of each other, or false if they're not.

Extra credit tasks:

• Don't consider the strings anagrams if they're the same barring punctuation.
• Write an efficient implementation (in terms of time and/or space complexity).
• Minimize your use of built-in functions and methods to bare essentials.
• Write the worst--but still working--implementation that you can conceive of.

Last night I posted a topic called "real sad boi hours", a ritualistic kind of post I've carried over from Reddit. I chose to post it in ~talk since the description for the group says it is for "Open-ended discussions with fellow Tildes users, casual or serious", and I felt there is nothing more open-ended or casual than real sad boi hours. At first, the topic was meant just as it usually does on Reddit. Got a few responses in which people talked about their day and how they were feeling. But right now, the most voted comment is complaining about how we need to restrict invitations to prevent low effort users like me from joining. One thing the user said was that is is obvious there are users joining who have not read the manifesto. I'm just going to spew my own opinion on a few points here:

1. I don't think gatekeeping is a solution, especially since iirc this site is not going to be permanently invite-only. Not to mention that's just a childish solution anyway.

2. I don't know what is expected from ~talk. As I said before, I legitimately believe my nightly "real sad boi hours" posts fit exactly what the description of the group says. However, that is up to interpretation I suppose.

3. If my post was against some rule (which apparently roughly 17 users believe it is), there should be some kind of rule set or moderation set in place (though I understand why there isn't, the site being private still and all). My impression so far has been that if you don't like content, you just ignore it. But now I'm seeing that apparently, people don't like to ignore it. They want me gone.

4. Is every user expected to read the manifesto? You may be able to get away with this while it's private (and even then, there is still users like me who only read a few pages) but if/when this site goes public, expecting every user or even just most the users to read the manifesto is a pipe dream. As far as I can tell, the reddiquette (which I have also not read) is shorter than the manifesto and nobody reads that either unless they need to. The only reason I know the reddiquette is because I've picked up on bits of it as time went on.

Maybe I'm just a butt-hurt bitch that people complained about me and I can't take criticism. I'm sure people who disliked my post will think that is it. I also may have a skewed perception of what this site is. I view it as an improvement upon Reddit and honestly I think some of this innovation may work great, which is why I'm here in the first place. I want to hear your take on what I said, and anything else you'd like to add.

I'll level with you right now: I hate both of these terms.

"Political Correctness" is a term that gets used by a lot of people to talk about what I would consider to be basic politeness ("don't intentionally offend someone if they've made it clear they don't like a word, or would prefer to be referred in a certain way; just try"). I have suspected for a while that what these people typically really mean when they talk about political correctness is a fatigue with feeling like they're being forced to meet standards of politeness that are decided by others, and which they do not share.

"Civility" is a term that gets used just about every way you can imagine. It can mean politeness, it can mean "nonviolent protest," it can mean voting, it can mean only certain kinds of protest, and it can mean meeting decorum (which is a more formal way of saying politeness, but it has its nuanced differences, so I suppose I'll list it, goddamn, twist my arm why don't you). The range of possible meanings makes it pretty annoying, and borderline useless to talk about directly.

The title of this thread is an intentional play on one of my frustrations with a munk debate which was shared about a month ago. I believed the terms were too dependent on who "you" are in the statement. So rather than have them redo the munk debate, I thought we could have one of our own.

I definitely have my own views on this claim (that I'll be sharing below), but this has been such an awkward issue on this site that I think it's worth exploring directly. So explore with me:

1. Is there a difference between "political correctness" and "civility"?
2. Is either term valuable to society?
3. Why the hell are so many people so hot and bothered about these two terms, and also seemingly unable to interact meaningfully with anyone else?

Folks who are familiar with my username have likely encountered one of my many semi-humorous attempts at educating people on the nuances associated with the written word. There was a poem about homophones that went viral some time ago, for instance, and I'll frequently be spotted offering polite (if poorly received, at least some of the time) tips and corrections on Reddit.

While I would like to think that similar corrections would be appreciated here, I also think that the community's stated goals and structure combine to create an interesting opportunity. To that end, I was wondering if people here would be at all interested in brief, hopefully entertaining guides on how to improve their writing skills. (For those who are interested in writing professionally, I can also offer some insights on how to get your work read, how to find opportunities, and how to actually make money from the things that you offer.)

A lot of the time I'll see a discussion I don't have the chance to participate in the moment I see it. It would be nice to be able to "save" it so I could revisit later without having to hunt. Similarly, being able to do the same for comments would be handy for when someone links to something I want to follow-up on or fully explore when I have more time at hand.

Even if only implemented in localStorage per client, I feel it would be a useful addition.

The other day, I made a comment regarding our political climate that a number of people reacted to with anger. It is ironic because it is the very thing i was commenting on, that I wanted to avoid causing more emotional distress in that segment of the populace in my country which is right now very upset. I made my comment without taking into consideration that the very environment on tildes was no different than the environment I was commenting on.

It is something that has caught me off-guard in the past on this site as well, where I said something that I thought of as innocuous, which some people reacted to with extreme emotions. When I was told to police myself more, I felt indignant and infuriated. I thought I was already trying to walk on eggshells enough!

I don't think anything I've said or done on Tildes is objectively offensive or inappropriate - and I recognize that sometimes people see things from a completely different reality than I experience. I want to make a solid effort to get along with people here, and that appears to mean that I need to learn how to communicate in a way that doesn't provoke discord.

So how do I do it? What can I do to make sure that I'm not pissing people off here just by conversing and expressing my thoughts or feelings? What specific strategies can I employ to filter my self so that it is safe? Cfabbro and Deimos both have told me that I'm doing it wrong, but i want to know how to do it right. Please teach me.

A few minutes ago, I mentioned having used "an invite" to join Tildes.

As soon as the words left my lips, I realized something interesting about the word "invite" being used as a noun.

While most people would probably assume that "an invite" was verbal shorthand for "an invitation," that doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, the two terms actually appear to have discrete (albeit related) meanings that haven't officially been codified yet: An "invitation" is either an action taken to welcome someone or a means of offering that welcome (like a physical card or a verbal statement), whereas an "invite" is a means of accessing an area to which one has been invited. This distinction is most apparent in digital environments, where one might require an access code or a link in order to enter a given site.

Think of it like the difference between asking someone to come into your house and providing them with a key. The former would be an invitation, whereas the latter would be an invite... or at least, as close to an invite as one can get without straining the metaphor. Furthermore, an invite will always include an invitation (even if it's a tacit one), whereas an invitation won't necessarily include an invite.

This is one of those cases wherein the phrase "Language evolves!" actually applies, because using the word "invite" as a noun (with the above definition) meets all of the necessary criteria for correctness: It doesn't violate any existing conventions, it adds complexity or clarity, and it arises from previously codified structures. As such, well... the next time folks are provided with invites, they can use them as part of their invitations.

The Paper Bag Princess was an awesome book for little girls that I read when I was a little girl. And now that a lot of family and friends are having kids of their own, I was wondering anyone have any recommendations for similar books but for both genders?

Could we get new post ordering: something like reddit Hot system?

Now, the ordering by activity is great, but the big issue with it is, that when you go to less-active ~, you only see two or three topics. Even on front page, there are just 15 or 20 topics. I know, it's because I limit threads to only several days, but there is problem when I set limit up to week, or two: there are very old threads on the front page right at the top.

So could we get something like reddit has? Display posts according to upvotes/time (comments?), but do not limit them to few days and show them at least +- chronologically - so no two weeks old posts at the top of front page.

Maybe this could be achieved just by tweaking the current activity order by boosting young threads more and vice versa.

Hey I was wondering what if Google is tracking our behaviour and using that neural (whatever the word is) to create artificial human replicating exactly to that human's behaviour..i know it's a weird thought which lead to..what are the dark side of the tech industry which is unheard of, or nobody is paying attention on it