I'm starting a new phase in my life and with that, quite a few shifts in personality/hobbies. The big hobby that I've started to get into is filmmaking. I feel really comfortable and confident in the technical aspect, such as cameras and all the equipment used to make good films.

The huge part that I've struggled with and continue to struggle with though is writing and creativity in general. I feel like I'm in some sort of restraint when it comes to my personal creativity since I suppressed a lot of my emotions when I was younger and now that's coming back to haunt me. I don't know how to "break free" from said restraints to become more creative again. Sometimes there have been little bursts of creativity that I've had sometimes after waking up as a remnant from dreams or potentially just the recovery of sleep but I don't know how to capitalize on it.

Do y'all have any recommendations on how to become more creative or just to be able to come up with ideas more easily?

I just watched an interesting This Week in Startups interview with the CEO of a nascent but successful new "news" organization from the Netherlands called De Correspondent. They are launching a new US-based company called The Correspondent, which has some high profile supporters. This list includes Nate Silver, William Julius Wilson, Rosanne Cash, and some others.

Their business model allows them to attract high-quality journalists by optimizing for journalistic integrity and independence. They have around 60,000 members paying around $70 per year in the Netherlands. They do no advertising business and are a for-profit corp with a dividend cap of 5% to make themselves unattractive to VC-type investors. The CEO claims they "ignore the news," meaning that they try to avoid the sound-bite quips that can be very distracting. They do not report on individual's scandals, instead focusing on systemic issues.

Journalists are required to share their stories with the members as they are developing. Stories are not guarded secrets while in development unlike traditional news organizations. This allows members to contribute to the stories via a form of curated crowdsourcing. For example, they reached out to members when doing a story on Shell, and found a few members who had access to the company which led to discovery of Shell's own internal Inconvenient Truth type video which was made in 1991.

The CEO also mentioned that he always includes a developer or designer in story discussions so that the latest investigation and presentation tools can be used on a story from day one.

Please take a look at the links and let me know what you think of this model, and its chances in the US market. I am pretty excited for anyone trying anything new in this space. What do you think? Would you pay for something like this?

^{Edit: I'm not sure if there is a better ~group for this topic, please move it if there is. Also, formatting, phrasing, and clarity.}

Here is a direct link to the CEO's Medium account with more information.

So this is the dumb post of the day. Bear with me.

All I can say about art (like paintings and sculpture) is "is cool", "I like it", "it makes me sad" and look like a complete idiot totally out of place. (On the other hand, I can deliver a nuanced analysis of graffiti and hip hop so yeah it's all about the background.) I want to take my partner to a museum and start saying fancy shit like "oh you see the lines here these remind me of Donatello's style of light and shadow". Like I know it's possibly the dumbest thing to want but I really would like to learn more about it and be able to give informed opinions on art pieces.

Anyway, any recommendations? Maybe some youtube videos or some books? Or should I just say that everything past 1400 is derivative?

(EDIT: Those in the comments have asked me to remove specific names. I have replaced names with emoji that I like.)

We recently had:

• a thread whose OP defended a confederate statue erected by white supremacists on purely apolitical grounds
• a thread whose OP defended scientific racism on purely apolitical grounds

I'm really annoyed. If you really want to defend something that looks to everyone else like white supremacy, please avoid:

• Claiming to be apolitical while disagreeing with someone's politics. If you're telling someone else "your political stance is wrong," you're having a political opinion. "You're being too political" is a political opinion the same way "there is no God" is a religious opinion. This happened like a kajillion times in both threads.

• Granting benefit of the doubt to white supremacists or sources only used by white supremacists. Example: In the confederate statue thread, 🦇 effectively said "OK, so the builders of the statue hired a white supremacist speaker to commemorate it -- but they're not white supremacists and neither is the statue." Seriously, come on. And stop citing the spokespeople of white supremacist groups to prove they're not white supremacists -- they intentionally tone down that shit for the media, which is why you look super tone deaf when people post actual accounts of things they did, like holding town hall meetings about how great lynchings are when they thought no one was looking.

• Claiming you'd agree with whoever's arguing with you, except for one inconsequential fact you never mentioned any other time. Example: In the confederate statue thread, 🦈 said that he wouldn't mind if the statue had been taken down legally -- but every other time it came up he said it was wrong to take down the statue at all, because that was whitewashing history.

• Calling leftists "childish" and "easily-offended." Words like this do have a place in politics, but you've been misusing them. I read both threads front to back -- one or two people ended their arguments with "I'm offended" but basically everyone also said "here's why your view of the world is wrong" or "here's why this is bad and it hurts people." When you start your post by saying "oh, how childish!" and then just repeat the thing you said in the first place, you're basically saying "I'm not listening."

• Accusing leftists of being unwilling to grapple with the facts. Again, this is allowed and fine when it's true, but you've been abusing it. For instance, in a thread by 🦐 on The Bell Curve the original poster claimed The Bell Curve was state-of-the-art, and leftists were ignoring it. That's not true: there was a huge leftist response immediately after it was published, from academics and popsci guys too. Several people linked leftist articles and takedown videos, which he ignored. Maybe the leftists are wrong, but it's not that they ignored it.

Here are some of the ways you were possibly tricked into believing white supremacists:

• They told you their sources were good, and instead of checking, you believed it.
• They told you left-wing sources were shrill and unresearched, and instead of checking, you believed it.
• They told you there was a conspiracy against their viewpoint and that's why the criticism isn't credible. (For The Bell Curve, it's the political correctness conspiracy -- for statues, it's the easily-offended liberal masses.)
• They told you there was more nuance to the situation than it looked like and made an emotional appeal. Intelligent people like to imagine there's no way things could be as simple as they look -- "not everyone would be smart enough to uncover that this apparent act of white supremacy was, in fact, politically neutral!" -- so you believed them.
• You are probably a little bit racist. (Or even a lot racist.) You might not be racist enough to hate black people, but you might be racist enough to find white supremacists more credible than their victims, even though you know the historical facts say their victims were telling the truth.

Here are some preemptive comments:

• I don't want to censor anybody. This thread is not censorship.
• I do want to shout bad opinions down with better opinions. People who support free speech, which I think is most of the people on this website, also want this. This is an example of me trying to do that.
• Yes, leftists can do all the things I listed. (And yes I'm a leftist.) When I go to a site like Twitter or Tumblr I see left-wingers saying all kinds of horrible, unsupported shit they heard from their idiot hippie friends. It's frustrating and sickening and it's a giant part of the reason I don't go on those sites very often. But on this site I only saw right-wingers doing this stuff, not left-wingers. That kinda surprised me because usually it's the side with the biggest groupthink bubble that says really stupid stuff and keeps on trucking.

Thank you and sorry for the long, mean post.

I don't know if it seems too pedantic but I feel like it would be much more convenient to tag any posts linked to articles as such, so that people could focus in on or filter out articles at their convenience. Personally, I never read articles people post unless the subject matter greatly intrigues me, and in that case, I've read it because of reasons beyond it being an article. I think it'd be a pretty easily enforceable thing, as we have tagmods now and tagging articles (if anybody forgets) would be simple and quick.

I've been pretty curious about this particular subject for a while. I have Tourette's Syndrome but I don't often meet people with Tourette's so there isn't a lot of room to get others' experiences. I didn't want to limit it to just small disabilities either because I see no reason to exclude bigger ones. I guess we can use this thread as a way to share experiences/commiserate

note: title subject to change

A few days ago I asked this question and got a few replies, so I figure this idea is worth trying out. If there's enough interest I'll probably move the day that this gets posted to something more regular for the week like Friday/Saturday/Sunday, but I figured I could make this one and gauge interest for the week.

Anyway, what have you been watching/reading this week?

Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its Anilist, MAL, or any other anime/manga database you use!

I've found that I prefer to see comments sorted by order posted, rather than having the most upvoted as the first item. I'd rather read through the thread before deciding the relative merits of any post, and find that "most upvoted" often isn't necessarily the most insightful, especially on long discussions.

It's not a huge effort to change the view, but I don't want to encourage my own lazy habit of looking at the first post and saying "good enough".

May I request that a setting for default sort method be added?