Hey guys,

Deimos gave me a bunch of invites to give out and I have a post on Reddit where I’ve been giving them out.

So far I’m looking at each persons history to make sure they aren’t a troll, and have posted generally positive and insightful content.

What do you guys think we should be vetting?

Since I’m assuming Tildes won’t be Invite-Only forever, is this just delaying the inevitable?

At first I didn't want to post this idea, because its pretty big change, but I think I'll post my idea here, thanks to @kiyoshigawa. Here is my comment that pretty much sums up my idea.

My idea is, that when people read something, and they agree/disagree with it, they want to express their agreement/disagreement (this is covered in this thread). When you want to express disagreement, you have to, because it's no downvote here, comment to disagree with some opinon. But when you want express agreement, and you don't want to comment (or simple 'I agree' wouldn't add anything to the debate), you just hit the upvote button. And that's problem, as the Vote button should serve as "quality content here" indicator, not "popular content" indicator. We've seen it on Reddit, where the effect is even larger because of the downvote button.

So my idea is - Add agree/disagree buttons. These buttons doesn't have to do something - I even think, that it'll be better if they didn't do anything. But they'll help users express themselves, so when someone agrees with me, but doesn't want to simply say "I agree", he can hit the 'I agree' button - and he won't hit the vote button. This way, popularity won't affect the "quality" score of the post.

Edit: As @Kat, @Kijafa, and others said, maybe add only agree button - not the disagree one. I think they might be right, disagree button might have negative effect, as now users have to express disagreement via comments.

Edit 2: Thank you all for discussion. You made me change my mind about disagree buttons, you are right - it'd be used as downvote and would probably suppress discussion. However, I'm still curios about the "I agree" button and if it would decrease of usage Vote button to express agreement.

Wondering what’s your favorite self-help book, with the most practical, down-to-earth advice that maybe changed your life.
I’ll go first: I really liked Mindfullness in Plain English, removed all the myths around meditation and broke it down to very digestible concepts allowing me to practice the same on a daily basis.

Looking forward to hear yours!

After seeing some interest in philosophical discussion threads in this group last night, here's one for all of you.

Ever since I watched the movie Arrival and saw this quote, I've had this set of questions about humans and how our minds and our perception of reality is influenced by language. I'm going to throw some of those questions out below as a discussion starter and see where we end up. Sorry they're a bit general, feel free to restate any of them to be more specific or more interesting to you.

How does language limit us? Is our inability to really understand and explain concepts such as quantum reality, existence past an event horizon, or a scenario without spacetime (e.g. prior to the big bang) a product of the limitations of language or is it a fundamental limitation of humanity? Can language evolve to be able to capture such concepts? If language does evolve, how will it affect our perception of reality?

I see there is an issue open to add a saving feature for topics, which is great! I would like to make a suggestion for this feature.

Do you think it would be possible to give users the ability to add their own tags to a saved topic?

A lot of times I search for content related to a project I am working on, and it would be nice if I could tag the topics I find as "project-xyz", as this would allow me find them easily when I come back to reference something. This tag would be useless to anyone else, but having our own personal tags, that only we can see, would be very useful in curating content.

One way this could be done is by having a new section named "Your Tags" that appears under the existing "Tags" one, in the sidebar for a topic. Then on the Saved page, the sidebar could list all your unique tags, and clicking one would filter the topics.

Anyway, just throwing out an idea. I can add a comment to that GitLab issue, if this is a possibility and something people are interested in.

Astralis 2-0 Team Liquid

Inferno: 16-5
Map stats: https://www.hltv.org/stats/matches/mapstatsid/70988/astralis-vs-liquid

Nuke: 16-12
Map stats: https://www.hltv.org/stats/matches/mapstatsid/70995/liquid-vs-astralis

Astralis win the Grand Final!

So, I've been playing this campaign with some friends for a while where I am a crocodile-themed lizardfolk hick with a thunder cannon named Cletus Cornelius Crocodilius the 3rd. Much fun has been had so far, but today something extra special fun happened.

So a while back our party found a stone that basically makes whatever it's being wielded by as light as a feather. So naturally our undead pirate monk has been using it to fuck with Cletus by shoving it into his mouth and then pushing him great distances. I thought it was funny, the DM thought it was funny, and it'd give us all a great laugh. But, it did give me an idea.

See, we were all hunting down this nasty chimera, and after some scouting we knew it could fly. That was no bueno for us and we needed something to clip its wings. Suddenly, I remember that we have a stone that made me weigh about as much as a toddler. I also had several bear traps. And since I was a crocodile, I could grapple things with my mouth, leaving my hands, and my thunder cannon, free to attack.

So, we lure the flying chimera out with out bird-person bard, who lures it into range. We take all our ropes and strap the bear traps to Cletus and then an anchor line around his waist. We then have the sorcerer gnome cast enlarge upon himself, making him the massive size of a slightly larger than average human. He and the monk then chuck me as hard as they can at the chimera, which I proceed to stick to like a giant reptilian tick. I then spat the stone out onto the ground, and suddenly this tick weighed 800lb again.

I proceed to spend the entire combat session locked to this thing, blowing chunks off of it with my thunder cannon until it is grounded and no longer able to fly. It was still a tough fight, but we managed to prevail in the end.

It then became a desperate struggle to cut Cletus out of the bear traps before the dead Chimera fell off the bridge we were fighting it on. Thanks to a few lucky dex saves from myself and the bird person, Cletus managed to leap off the plummeting chimera at the last second.

I love this game.

USgamer put this series of articles out over the last week. Here's links to the 3 parts:

1. Out of the Wild West: Inside the Evolution of Games Writing
2. Narrative Paramedics: Meet the Writers Called in to Patch Up Games
3. From The Witcher 3 to Queer Dating Sims: How Writers are Expanding the Boundaries of Video Game Storytelling

Hi fellow Tildes Beta users!

I primarily do my browsing on an iPad or my iPhone. Currently I'm using Chrome.

Until an app is made, what do you all find the best way to browse Tildes is? The formatting is a little wonky for me, which is perfectly understandable. It's not exactly a deal breaker, but it would be a lot easier having a more optimized experience.

I doubt I'm alone, so what're y'alls preferences?

With so many threads asking about what operating system people use, favorite music, favorite tv-shows, etc, I feel like this is a good subgroup for all of the groups (other than maybe tildes and talk).

So, I am currently attending a big scouting event in Europe and there are people from over 50 different countries. And I have noticed, that quite a lot of them are acting (at least for me) in a very disrespectful manner towards the flag. Starting with the smaller thinngs, most people have flag tied on a rope between their tents (the flag is tied in top left and top right corners). In my opinion, it should only be tied on the left side, while the right is hanging freely. But I can kind of understand that, because the flag is much more visible, it's easier and nicer to do it this way. However, it gets worse. Earlier today, when it started drizzling, I saw some people using their flag as head protection. And, in my opinion the biggest sign of disrespect, when we had the opening ceremony, there were people laying their flag on the ground and sitting on it, not caring who steps on it or anything.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Is this just me overreacting? Or do you think this is a serious problem?

If you've lived long enough, read widely or suffered through the usual collegiate education requirements, you may find that your head has vast stores of disconnected knowledge which don't necessarily relate to anything necessary for daily life. That is, until the moment some dusty lump of data becomes a relevant jewel.

J.R.R. Tolkien coined the word "mathom" to describe questionably valuable clutter that you can't throw out:

Mathom
Last but not least, here’s a word you can use to switch up your everyday vocab. Next time you go to visit your grandparents, keep your eyes peeled for mathoms, a popular Hobbit possession.
Mathom comes from the Old English ‘maðm’, meaning treasure, which fell out of use in the 13th century. In the Shire, it’s commonly known as a Hobbit’s trinket, typically a useless heirloom. Tolkien went further and revived ‘mathom-house’ as a museum stuffed with old curiosities.

Do you find yourself collecting and seeking out information in odd corners just on the off-chance it will be useful?

Have you a story of the time when some obscure, trivial factoid suddenly saved the day?