...Sunday isn't that far from Thursday...

...I'm sorry!

Here's a list of a lot of things that came out in this past week, mostly up through Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and I avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to mention anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)

AJR - Neotheater (Electropop, Trap [EDM]) || Song.link - Spotify

Alan Parsons - The Secret (AOR) || Song.link - Spotify

Aldous Harding - Designer (Singer/Songwriter, Contemporary Folk) || Song.link - Spotify

Amon Tobin - Fear in a Handful of Dust (Electroacoustic, Progressive Electronic) || Song.link - Spotify

Aries - Juramento Mantarraya (Art Pop, Indie Pop, Psychedelic Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Awaken I Am - The Beauty In Tragedy (Post-Hardcore) || Song.link - Spotify

Bailen - Thrilled To Be Here (Indie Rock, Americana) || Song.link - Spotify

Bear's Den - So That You Might Hear Me (Indie Folk, Indie Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Billie Marten - Feeding Seahorses by Hand (Singer/Songwriter) || Song.link - Spotify

blackbear - ANONYMOUS (Alternative R&B) || Song.link - Spotify

Black Zone Magick Chant - Voyage Sacrifice (Ambient, Drone) || Song.link - Spotify

Catfish and the Bottlemen - The Balance (Indie Rock, Post-Punk Revival) || Song.link - Spotify

Chelou - Out Of Sight (Indie Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Claude Fontaine - Claude Fontaine (Psychedelic Pop, Bossa nova, Pop Reggae) || Song.link - Spotify

Co Cash - F.A.C.T.S. (Trap Rap) || Song.link - Spotify

Craig Finn (of the Holy Steady) - I Need A New War (Singer/Songwriter) || Song.link - Spotify

The Cranberries - In the End (Pop Rock, Alternative Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

The Damned Things - High Crimes (Hard Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Danko Jones - A Rock Supreme (Hard Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Delsbo Beach Club - A burger in Åkersberga (Indie Pop, Indie Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

DJ Nate - Take Off Mode (Footwork) || Song.link - Spotify

Dub Trio - The Shape of Dub to Come (Math Rock, Dub) || Song.link - Spotify

Dylan Scott - Nothing to Do Town (Dylan Scott) || Song.link - Spotify

El Momo a.k.a Mario Maher - Sueños reales (Hip Hop) || Song.link - Spotify

Ezra Collective - You Can't Steal My Joy (Jazz Fusion) || Song.link - Spotify

Farruko - Gangalee (Reggaeton) || Song.link - Spotify

Foxygen - Seeing Other People (Glam Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

George Benson - Walking to New Orleans (Rock & Roll, Rhythm & Blues) || Song.link - Spotify

The Get Ahead - Deepest Light (Americana) || Song.link - Spotify

Guided by Voices - Warp and Woof (Indie Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Hannah Cohen - Welcome Home (Art Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Hardline - Life (Hard Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Hembree - House On Fire (Alternative Rock, Indie Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Hillsong United - People (CCM) || Song.link for "LIVE/VISUAL" - for "LIVE" - Spotify

IamSu! - Its Always Pure Love (West Coast Hip Hop) || Song.link - Spotify

In the Valley Below - The Pink Chateau (Indie Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Jackie Mendoza - LuvHz (Indie Pop, Psychedelic Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Jacob Latimore - Connection2 (Pop Rap) || Song.link - Spotify

James TW - Chapters (Singer/Songwriter) || Song.link - Spotify

JJ Cale - Stay Around (Blues Rock, Country Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation - Sacred Dreams (Art Pop, Psychedelic Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Josh Ritter - Fever Breaks (Indie Folk, Folk Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Justin Garner - Imprint (Contemporary R&B) || Song.link - Spotify

Justin Moore - Late Nights and Longnecks (Contemporary Country) || Song.link - Spotify

Kelly Finnigan - The Tales People Tell (Soul) || Song.link - Spotify

Kevin Abstract - ARIZONA BABY (Alternative R&B, Pop Rap) || Song.link - Spotify

Kevin Morby - Oh My God (Singer/Songwriter, Folk Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Kiefer Sutherland - Reckless & Me (Country Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Fishing For Fishies (Boogie Rock, Psychedelic Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Lamb - The Secret Of Letting Go (Art Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Local Natives - Violet Street (Indie Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Lord Dying - Mysterium Tremendum (Sludge Metal) || Song.link - Spotify

Maddie & Tae - One Heart To Another EP (Contemporary Country) || Song.link - Spotify

Marina - LOVE+FEAR (Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Marissa Nadler And Stephen Brodsky - Droneflower (Singer/Songwriter, Ethereal Wave) || Song.link - Spotify

Matt Martians - The Last Party (Alternative R&B) || Song.link - Spotify

The Mountain Goats - In League With Dragons (Indie Folk, Singer/Songwriter) || Song.link - Spotify

NBA Big B - 5th God (Trap Rap) || Song.link - Spotify

New Years Day - Unbreakable (Alternative Metal, Alternative Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Nick Murphy (AKA Chet Faker) - Run Fast Sleep Naked (Indietronica) || Song.link - Spotify

Nils Lofgren - Blue With Lou (Heartland Rock, Singer/Songwriter) || Song.link - Spotify

Olivia O'Brien - Was It Even Real? (Contemporary R&B) || Song.link - Spotify

OLSSON - Tropical Cologne (Indie Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

OMB Peezy - Preacher To the Streets (West Coast Hip Hop) || Song.link - Spotify

Otoboke Beaver - Itekoma Hits! (Hardcore Punk) || Song.link - Spotify

P!nk - Hurts 2B Human (Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Party Favor - Layers (Trap [EDM]) || Song.link - Spotify

Peakes - Absent In Person EP (Indie Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Peter Doherty & The Puta Madres (Indie Pop, Folk Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

The Pilgrim - Walking Into The Forest (Psychedelic Rock, Folk Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Pure Bathing Culture - Night Pass (Dream Pop, Chillwave) || Song.link - Spotify

Radical Face - Therapy EP (Indie Pop, Folk Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Rob Thomas - Chip Tooth Smile (Pop Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Rodrigo y Gabriela - Mettavolution (Acoustic Rock, Flamenco nuevo) || Song.link - Spotify

ScHoolboy Q - CrasH Talk (Pop Rap) || Song.link - Spotify

Sid Le Rock - Scenic Route (Electronic, House) || Song.link - Spotify

Sneakk - SAY LESS (Contemporary R&B) || Song.link - Spotify

SOAK - Grim Town (Singer/Songwriter) || Song.link - Spotify

Spotlights - Love & Decay (Post-Metal, Atmospheric Sludge Metal) || Song.link - Spotify

The Story Changes - To Hell With This Delicate Equation (Alternative Rock, Emo-Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Sublime With Rome - Blessings (Ska Punk) || YouTube for "Light On" - for "Wicked Heart" - Spotify

SUNN O))) - Life Metal (Drone Metal) || Song.link - Spotify

Teen Daze - Bioluminescence (Chillwave) || Song.link - Spotify

Tesla - Shock (Hard Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Tiny Fighter - Tell Me EP (Indie Rock, Indie Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Trade Wind - Certain Freedoms (Alternative Rock) || Song.link - Spotify

Various Artists - For the Throne (Music Inspired by the HBO Series Game of Thrones) (Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Various Artists - UglyDolls (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Walker Lukens - Adult (Pop Rock, Indie Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

The Well - Death And Consolation (Stoner Rock, Doom Metal) || Song.link - Spotify

Winnetka Bowling League - Cloudy With A Chance Of Sun EP (Indie Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

YFL Kelvin - Neva Lookin Back (Trap Rap) || Song.link - Spotify

Your Heart Breaks - Drone Butch Blues (Indie Folk, Indie Pop) || Song.link - Spotify

Spotify Master playlist, all albums (minus the two 'various artist' sets above)

Notes:
If you spot any mistakes please let us know.

Thank you to @Cleb, @cfabbro, and @Amarok for the help!

Hillsong United - People || has two versions? live and live/visual. linked both since they have different results.
Sublime With Rome - Blessings || album not due til May 31. linked 2 youtube singles, and spotify has 4 tracks.

raindrop

on the tongue

of the parched, de-

flated beach ball

in the hands of the young, lit

cig 'tween the fingers

of a nun,

one sin's never gonna be enough

fuck the prose

words will never be enough.

the writing's on the walls

but you can't read it

you aren't here

i need a sign you

can't ignore or a call

you're bound to hear

.

the words just aren't enough

on their own

to pull my heart strings

i can't find peace

without my blood

on guitar strings.

.

the words are going cold

the poetry has not a heartbeat.

i need to take the stage

and pray to god that they can't see me.

It would be nice to have an optional feature that filters out posts that a) you have read and b) don't have any new unread comments. When a post gets new comments it should reappear. That way we could see more unread content on the page, but still keep long running topics going. Have it not affect search, so people can still find posts for reference.

In Euro Truck Simulator 2 you start off as a driver with no truck or money, take jobs, save up, get your own truck, buy/upgrade garages, buy more trucks and hire a fleet of drivers to work for you. There is little to spend the money on, other than more garages and more trucks, which means means more employees and more money coming in. Once you get a certain amount of employees it becomes so unbalanced that money becomes pointless.

There is a config setting `g_income_factor' that affects how much jobs pay. Set it to 0.5 and all jobs pay half as much as they normally do. There are mods that set it to various values to make it more challenging. The problem with setting it to a low value is that it makes the early game too hard. It can take way too long to buy the first couple trucks and start hiring people.

So my strategy is to change `g_income_factor' as I play. I start out with it as 1 (full income) and every time I buy a new truck I change it. I set it to 0.85^(the number of trucks in my fleet) . That way the more employees I have the less each makes and the less I make from my own driving. It also introduces a trade off to hiring new drivers. Is the new driver going to be worth the reduced income from the rest of my fleet? It reverses the dynamic where in normal play the more employees you have the easier it is to get more to a dynamic where the more you have the harder it becomes to grow.

week five begins with another page worth of links, a big presidential announcement, and the long creep of this cycle that will make us all go fucking crazy by the end of it. the [LONGFORM] tag continues, but i don't think there's any longform this week either, so c'est la vie.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 thread • Week 2 thread • Week 3 thread • Week 4 thread

News

General Stuff

• from FiveThirtyEight: What The Potential 2020 Candidates Are Doing And Saying, Vol. 15. if you're curious what candidates have been up to, FiveThirtyEight has you covered with this week's roundup.

• from FiveThirtyEight: Who Might Make The Democratic Debate Stage?. this is probably the most important question now that the field is basically set: how many people will qualify for the debate stage? the DNC has said the cap is 20 candidates, and we have at least 21 running with potentially more on the way. a lot of them meet at least one criterion for being included. the DNC seems to have prepared extensively for that possibility, so it's not like they're on the backfoot here, but i suspect the politicking surrounding this for some of the smaller candidates is going to be pretty wacky.

• from The Atlantic: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet, like CBS News's roundup, this extensive piece covers every candidate currently declared, why they're running, and what they're running on. pretty good resource for those of you needing to cite something.

• from The Atlantic: The Strategic Move That Gave Bernie Sanders a Fundraising Edge. despite its title, this article mostly focuses on fundraising and how it's been either lackluster for democrats or not been, depending on who you ask and under what criteria, and whether or not that even matters in the grand scheme of things. it's an interesting discussion.

Joe Biden

we begin with two words: HE'S RUNNING. The Atlantic first reported this in a piece on the 19th called Joe Biden Is Running for President, and he was expected to announce yesterday but curiously, something (Biden's team was warned about announcing 2020 bid on same day as forum focused on women of color) seems to have interfered with that master plan that joe biden should have known about, so he announced this morning instead.

here is his announcement video:

The core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy...everything that has made America -- America --is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States.

and nobody was really surprised. anyways, onto articles covering his announcement. take your pick of source:

• NPR: Biden Launches 2020 Campaign As Rescue Mission For America's 'Soul'
• NBC: Biden launches 2020 presidential bid, says 'we are in a battle for the soul of this nation'
• The Guardian: Joe Biden announces 2020 presidential run
• CBS: Joe Biden says he's running for president, in video announcing bid
• Buzzfeed News: Joe Biden Is Running For President

moving on to analysis:

• from Time: Joe Biden and the Hard Choices for Democrats in 2020. this article mostly focuses on biden as a living example of the wedge between the progressive, youthful faction of the democratic party and the older, more traditionally moderate wing of the party. whether or not he gets selected is probably mostly going to come down to what voters prioritize, since the next biggest frontrunner is sanders who is on the literal opposite side of the spectrum from biden. for an alternative perspective on this angled more with respect to biden and #MeToo, you may refer also to this Vox article: The Joe Biden culture war - There’s a split among Democrats on #MeToo and more. Biden might have picked the losing side..

• from The Guardian: Biden brings broad appeal in battle for 2020 – but don't expect a revolution. biden's appeal as a candidate is definitely not going to be for his progressive chops. aside from his... frankly odd ideas and not-ideas of what "progressive" means in the modern discourse (and his identification or lack thereof with the term), it's pretty obvious he's not going to be approaching this race with the intent of radical change. whether that endears him to voters or sinks him also remains to be seen.

Bernie Sanders

• from Buzzfeed News: Bernie Sanders Isn’t Fighting The Wars Of 2016, His Campaign Says — The Democratic Establishment Is. in case you haven't noticed, we're still religitating the bullshit that characterized the 2016 primary because nobody can drop it. nowhere is this more clear than with the sanders campaign, who feel like they're still having to defend themselves from the same lines of attack they did back then. whether or not this is accurate is probably debatable, but it's pretty obvious that this isn't going to just go away, so expect it to continue to be a fracture point this year.

• from The Guardian: Sanders dares Democrats to stop him – but is he the man to beat Trump?. in a similar vein, the sanders campaign seems to be contending with the prospect of the democratic party trying to meddle in the primary and anoit a non-sanders winner, as they were accused of doing in 2016. this is going to also likely remain a fracture point, because the democratic party no doubt feels it has reasons to step in here--but also, it would absolutely be inviting trouble if sanders is the leading candidate when everything is said and done at the convention and they step in, given 2016.

• from Vox: Republican strategist Karl Rove says Bernie Sanders could beat Donald Trump in 2020. whether realpolitik or genuine concern (and in contrast to rick wilson in the above piece), karl rove seems to think that sanders is the exact sort of candidate who would beat donald in 2020.

Beto O'Rourke

• from Buzzfeed News: A Top Adviser To Beto O’Rourke Has Left His Presidential Campaign. beto's campaign lost two people significant to his presidential campaign a few days ago on what appear to be mutual, pre-determined terms. the article gives the reason for these two departures:

In a statement about her and Malitz’s departure to BuzzFeed News, Bond said it was “time for us to move on to other challenges.”
“Launching a presidential campaign without a big staff or even a campaign manager was no easy feat and it took everyone pitching in,” she said. “We’re proud to have been part of the team of deeply dedicated staff and volunteers who nearly pulled off a historic upset in the 2018 Texas Senate race and broke records launching Beto’s campaign for the presidency.”

• from the Huffington Post: Beto O’Rourke’s Non-Media Strategy. on a more strategy-driven note for beto, his campaign has interestingly been one of the only thus far to not have a nationally televised town hall. this seems to be intentional. as the article notes:

O’Rourke ... sa[id] he preferred interacting with voters “eyeball to eyeball” rather than by doing TV, as evidenced by his dozens of events where he regularly takes questions from the audience and reporters alike. But he acknowledged “at some point, I may have to give in” to doing cable television.

it's a bold strategy for certain, but i do suspect that he's going to have to at some point get his voice out nationally. he's been slightly slipping in recent polls, mostly to candidates like buttigieg, and it suggests that he's lost a bit of his lustre with democratic voters.

Elizabeth Warren

• from TIME: Elizabeth Warren Calls for House to Start Impeachment Proceeding Against President Trump. warren decided to become the first democratic candidate to stake her claim to this particular idea. as far as i'm aware, nobody has gone out on this limb with her, but i'd be shocked if she isn't eventually joined by someone else.

• from NBC News: Warren's plan to wipe out student debt (and how she'd pay for it). another one of warren's seminal policies is wiping out student debt, which NBC News helpfully has a piece on (and of course, how she intends to pay for it since the question is literally inescapable). to save you some trouble: she pays for it with her wealth tax.

Pete Buttigieg

• from Buzzfeed News: Pete Buttigieg’s Presidential Run Has Many LGBT Democrats Eager For Their Obama Moment. buzzfeed has a piece on the significance of pete buttigieg to LGBT americans and how he's been able to leverage that to tap into a donor network that's usually pretty splintered. it's unclear to me that he's going to be able to parlay that untapped base into success, though, and more recent polling seems to have buttigieg sorta stalling out around 10% with the logjam of other sorta-kinda-frontrunner candidates.

• from CBS News: Pete Buttigieg on the presidency as a "moral office". this is mostly a personality piece on buttigieg and both his history in afghanistan and his electoral history, and how that has influenced his current candidacy and what he views as priorities. it's kinda straightforward and the title sorta speaks for itself, so there's not actually that much to be said for it.

Kamala Harris

• from Buzzfeed News: Kamala Harris Says She’ll Take Gun Control Into Her Own Hands As President If Congress Doesn't Act. kamala harris has decided that congress will do something about guns in a reasonable timeframe if she becomes president, or else she's just gonna take the nuclear option and just start dropping executive orders:

Harris said she would mandate universal background checks on anyone selling more than five guns a year, ending a loophole that allows private gun sellers to bypass background checks on 1 in 5 gun sales nationwide, bar people classified as fugitives from buying guns. She would also, her campaign said, close a loophole in federal law that allows perpetrators of domestic violence to keep their guns if they are not married to their partner.

• from POLITICO: Kamala Harris says she supports adding third gender option to federal IDs. she also supports the fairly small idea of adding a third gender option to federal IDs. i guess you gotta have some tiny policies in there too with the big ones for maximum efficiency. it is possible this raises questions about her history of LGBT policy, though, which is probably not something that she wants to litigate because it's not the best.

Everybody else

• people who joined the race this week: Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts representative
• people who did not join the race this week: Terry McAuliffe

Opinion/Ideology-driven

• from the Guardian: Joe Biden is the ultimate centrist Democrat. Is that a liability or strength?. this oped mostly focuses on whether or not biden's whole centrism thing is actually good, or whether or not it's just going to end up splitting the party now that biden is in the race. this is a legitimate question, and i'm not sure anybody really knows how it's going to shake out.

• from NBC News: Cory Booker wants to be the nicest Democrat running for president. But his own past makes that difficult.. this one, i think i'll just quote directly since the last paragraph kinda summarizes the whole thing:

For voters, Booker's Wall Street ties and his T-Bone stories are part of the same problem: Authenticity. Can you be a liberal Democratic willing to take on billionaires, entrenched corporations and the deregulation unleashed by the Trump Administration after years of cozying up to Wall Street and pharmaceutical donors? Can you address the racial divides in America — not just what's in people's hearts, but the problems of differential education, mass incarceration and inequality of opportunity — if you can't bring yourself to call Trump a racist? And can you be trusted to tell the truth of why you've arrived at your liberal politics if you made up a T-Bone to explain to white people a cartoon version of black intergenerational trauma?

• from NBC News: Kamala Harris' candidacy requires a nuanced debate about her record, race and gender. Is the left ready?. this op-ed focuses on the issue of parsing out where harris is being actually held accountable for things she genuinely took a "bad" stance on, and where she's just being held to a standard that nobody would expect of a non-minority, non-female candidate. it's a tough question, of course, and it's also not exactly one you can have with soundbites and hashtags--but that's probably not going to stop people from continuing to do that.

• from NBC News: Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign will face the scrutiny Clinton got in 2016. Here's what voters missed.. this op-ed mostly focuses on the not-exactly-perfect record of voting and policy positions of bernie sanders prior to the 2016 election, and how that will likely come to the forefront this time around since it was barely focused on in 2016 and sanders wasn't running against literally 20 other people.

• from NBC News: Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and the sexist hypocrisy of the 'likability' media narrative. Here we go again.. this op-ed is not necessarily about elizabeth warren in the same way the other op-eds are about candidates--rather, it's more of a piece that uses warren as an example of how the standard of "likability" that tends to be assigned to female candidates is kinda arbitrary and usually bullshit, and how the narrative of warren's candidacy has changed as she's gone from a sort of outsider-looking-in to a near frontrunner.

• finally, from NBC News: Elizabeth Warren's ideas blow rival 2020 Democrats away. Her public lands plan is no exception.. this other warren op-ed is more candidate focused, and basically makes the case that warren's plans are super good and that literally no other candidate comes close to having policy like it.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

What did you like about school?
What did you dislike about it?
What were the most important things that you learned?
What would you change about education if you had the power?
If you could go back and re-do things knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

I'm not necessarily looking for individual answers to each question, I'm just putting those out there to frame the kind of thoughts I'm looking for. I'm really just interested in hearing other people's stories! I'm a teacher and frequently do a lot of talking about education from my own perspective, but I don't feel like I do enough listening to others' views.

Also, to avoid gumming up the questions with multiple tenses, I wrote everything in past tense. That doesn't mean I'm only interested in the responses of people who are done with their formal education though. I'd love to hear from people who are still in school as well!

(Let me make this clear before you continue reading, I don't know any good solutions)

Recently, all over the internet, I feel like I am seeing more and more companies filtering out content that are considered hate speech. I personally do not like this for two reasons.

1. I think it is a band-aid solution. People who have their voice taken away from themselves are not suddenly going to change their mind.
2. In a way, it is a form of removing freedom of speech. Now, I understand that a lot of the companies that are censoring hate speech are doing it primarily for the sake of sponsors, but I mean this in a more broad scope.
3. It is effectively hiding societal problems.

I think one argument for the increased censorship is: even if it doesn't combat hate speech, it stops the spreading of hate speech. By spreading, I mean more people believing that hate speech. Though at first this could be a good idea, I think it is the wrong way to go about it. I really don't know what exactly is the right way to deal with this issue. Maybe more inclusion of different communities? Maybe education? Learn how to think critically?

Here are a couple other things I have been thinking about, but I am not too sure about. I do not know if they are true or not, but if any of you could provide more insight, I would like to know more:

1. Hate speech is actually lower than ever. The reason why some people feel like it is higher is because the hate speech is entering to people's bubbles through the internet. Before the internet, there was still that kind of talk, it was just in a different medium.
2. Though not hate speech, but in a way related, with Anti-vax, the people who are most susceptible to converting to an anti-vaxxer, are parents. A lot of times these are the people who didn't grow up with the internet, the way they view the internet is not exactly how younger people view the internet. There is more doubt in what we see online between younger people than older.

And I have had people say I must be a white upper class person to have these kinds of opinions. No. I am not white. Not upper class. I have dealt with racism in one way or another for all of my childhood, less so as an adult.

Here's a list of a lot of things that came out in this past week, including many which are set to release on Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and I avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to mention anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)

(oh and don't bully me for the genre tags, a lot of these things have very limited resources available and I couldn't individually listen to everything and determine what fits best, so I'm pulling from third parties and an artist's past work a lot of the time)

Thanks to @Cleb for the help again and @cfabbro for grabbing the song.link urls!

1THE9 - XIX (K-Pop) | Song.link

After the Burial - Evergreen (Metalcore, Djent) | Song.link

Allegaeon - Apoptosis (Technical Death Metal, Progressive Metal) | Song.link

Angélique Kidjo - Celia (Fon Music) | Song.link

Anna Tivel - The Question (Indie Folk, Singer/Songwriter) | Song.link

Ann My Dice - Thorn EP (Metal) | Song.link

Bananarama - In Stereo (Dance-Pop, Electropop) | Song.link

Beauty Queen - Out Of Touch EP (Indie Pop) | Song.link

Bells Atlas - The Mystic (Neo Soul) | Song.link

Bernard Fowler (of Rolling Stones) - Inside Out (Rock) | Song.link

Beyoncé - Homecoming: The Live Album (Contemporary R&B, Pop) | Song.link

Cage The Elephant - Social Cues (Indie Rock, Alternative Rock, Indie Pop) | Song.link

Cayucas - Real Life (Indie Pop, Sunshine Pop) | Song.link

Countless Goodbyes - Cycles (Metal) | Song.link

The Cringe - Everywhere You’ve Never Been (Rock) | Song.link

Daniel Norgren - Wooh Dang (Contemporary Folk) | Song.link

Diane Coffee - Internet Arms (Art Pop) | Song.link

Dinah Jane - 1 (Contemporary R&B, Dance-Pop) | Song.link

Drugdealer - Raw Honey (Psychedelic Rock) | Song.link

Erick Sermon - Vernia (East Coast Hip Hop, Boom Bap) | Song.link

Faith Eliott - Impossible Bodies (Indie Folk, Chamber Folk) | Song.link

Fat White Family - Serfs Up! (Neo Psychedelia) | Song.link

Field Medic - Fade Into the Dawn (Indie Folk, Singer-Songwriter) | Song.link

Flaural - Postponement (Psychedelic Rock) | Bandcamp

Foolio - Never Wanted Fame (Trap Rap, Pop Rap) | Song.link

Fredo Bang - Big Ape (Trap Rap) | Song.link

Grand Magus - Wolf God (Heavy Metal) | Song.link

Gus Dapperton - Where Polly People Go to Read (Hypnagogic Pop, Indie Pop) | Song.link

Heart Attack Man - Fake Blood (Pop Punk, Power Pop) | Song.link

Heather Woods Broderick - Invitation (Singer/Songwriter, Art Pop) | Song.link

Heavy As Texas - Heavy As Texas (Heavy Metal) | Song.link

Hit-Boy & SOB X RBE - Family Not A Group (West Coast Hip Hop) | Song.link

The Hot Sardines - Welcome Home, Bon Voyage (Jazz) | Song.link

Izzy Bizu - Glita EP (Pop Soul) | Official site

Jade Bird - Jade Bird (Singer/Songwriter, Contemporary Folk, Country Pop) | Song.link

Jahkoy - 404 (Contemporary R&B) | Song.link

JOHNNYSWIM - Moonlight (Folk Pop) | Song.link

Jonatha Brooke - Imposter EP (Singer/Songwriter) | Song.link

Jung Seung Hwan - Dear My Universe (K-Pop) | Song.link

Kelsey Lu - Blood (Art Pop) | Song.link

Kinbrae - Landforms (Ambient, Progressive Electronic) | Song.link

Lizzo - Cuz I Love You (Pop Rap, Contemporary R&B) | Song.link

Loyle Carner - Not Waving, But Drowning (UK Hip Hop, Jazz Rap) | Song.link

Maren Celest - I Saw The Sun (Lofi Indie) | Official site

Mark Peters - New Routes Out Of Innerland (Progressive Electronic) | Song.link

Menoh Beats - MENOH! (Instrumental Hip Hop) | Song.link - Soundcloud

Mitch Woods - A Tip Of The Hat To Fats (Blues) | Song.link

NCT 127 - Awaken (K-Pop, Dance-Pop) | Song.link

The O’Jays - The Last Word (Pop Soul) | Song.link

Pamplemousse - High Strung (Garage Rock) | Song.link

Peggy Gou - Moment EP (Nu-Disco) | Song.link

Pi'erre Bourne - The Life of Pi'erre 4 (Trap Rap, Cloud Rap) | Song.link

Pivot Gang - You Can't Sit With Us (Trap Rap, Pop Rap) | Song.link

Pressa - Prestige (Trap Rap) | Song.link

Raffi - Motivational Songs (Children’s Music) | Song.link

Russ Tolman - Goodbye El Dorado (Roots Rock) | Song.link

Sabbath Assembly - A Letter Of Red (Psychedelic Rock, Hard Rock) | Official site - Bandcamp

Sad Planets (Patrick Carney and John Petkovic) - Akron, Ohio (Alt Rock) | Song.link

Sarah Mary Chadwick - The Queen Who Stole The Sky (Art Pop) | Song.link

Seaway - Fresh Produce (Pop Punk) | Song.link

Shotgun Sawyer - Bury The Hatchet (Blues) | Song.link

Shy Glizzy - COVERED N’ BLOOD (Trap Rap) | Song.link

Smokepurpp - Lost Planet (Trap Rap) | Song.link

Starbomb - The Tryforce (Comedy Rap, Nerdcore) | Song.link

Stealing Sheep - Big Wows (Psychedelic Pop) | Song.link

Super Junior-D&E - Danger (K-Pop) | Song.link

The Tallest Man on Earth - I Love You. It's a Fever Dream (Singer/Songwriter, Contemporary Folk) | Song.link

Tech N9ne - N9NA (Hardcore Hip Hop) | Song.link

TR/ST - The Destroyer - 1 (Synthpop) | Song.link

Tripsitter - The Other Side Of Sadness (Soft Rock) | Song.link

The Vamps - Missing You EP (Electropop) | Song.link

Various Artists - MOOMINVALLEY (Official Soundtrack) - (TV Soundtrack) | Song.link

Wand - Laughing Matter (Psychedelic Rock) | Song.link

Wargirl - Wargirl (Indie Pop) | Song.link

Your Heart Breaks - Drone Butch Blues (Indie Pop) | Song.link

Notes from cfabbro:
I will check again tomorrow and update below links as required.

Flaural - Postponement | no song.link yet, bandcamp linked
Izzy Bizu - Glita EP | not released yet? no song.link yet, official site linked
Maren Celest - I Saw The Sun | book+album art project? no song.link, official site linked
Menoh Beats - MENOH! | not released yet? song.link is single, soundcloud is single, no official site?
Sabbath Assembly - A Letter Of Red | not released yet? no song.link yet, official site and bandcamp linked

I received this email yesterday but haven't seen any blog posts or press releases about it yet:

Hello Administrator,

Since our Beta Program announcement last year, we’ve been testing an enterprise-ready version of Google Voice. Over the next seven days, Google Voice will become available as a core G Suite service for all eligible* G Suite customers (additional fees apply to this new, managed version of Google Voice). This email will help you understand the transition details but you can also refer to the Voice webpage for more information.

What's changing:

• Managed Google Voice is available in 3 tiers and will become a core G Suite service for your domain after subscribing to a service tier.
• Managed Voice accounts will be covered under your existing G Suite agreement and additional Google Voice service specific terms.
• Support for managed Voice accounts will be the same as other G Suite core services.

What's not changing:

• The Google Voice service will remain “on” by default.
• If users in your domain signed up for Voice prior to this launch, they will be able to maintain their legacy unmanaged Voice subscriptions without additional cost, and will remain subject to the Google Voice consumer terms of service. You can add a Voice subscription and upgrade these users to managed Voice users in your Admin console.
• Hangouts Meet (also a core G Suite service) is integrated with Google Voice, allowing meeting participants to dial in or be added by phone.

What do I need to do?

• If you did not participate in the Google Voice Beta Program and would like to use Google Voice for your organization, follow these steps to add a Voice subscription.

We're here to help

If you have additional questions or need technical assistance, please contact Google support. When you call or submit your support case, reference issue number ----------.

Sincerely,

The G Suite Team

* Google Voice is not yet available for G Suite for Government customers. Google Voice is available for purchase in select countries.

It looks like Google Voice is going to be sticking around for awhile. You can even use Polycom desk phones with it if you get the $20 tier.

week four is upon us because i have simply run out of space to put links in. i have a literal page of links that comprise today's post, and that suggests to me it's probably time to make another one of these. the [LONGFORM] tag continues (although this week there are no longform pieces) and once again, i will also be sorting by candidate--but also with a Fundraising header today since reporting deadlines came yesterday and there are a lot of pieces on that, and a Polling header since we have a few polls going now.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 thread • Week 2 thread • Week 3 thread

News

Fundraising

• from FiveThirtyEight: What First-Quarter Fundraising Can Tell Us About 2020. probably the seminal piece of fundraising reporting from the slate since it's 538, this article is pretty straightforward. in general, this means basically nothing for the actual 2020 election--but it means a lot for the primary, since fundraising is a decent barometer for energy and likability and suggests a candidate will be able to hold their own. 538's metrics suggest that sanders, warren, and harris, and gillibrand are punching well for their weight class and the primary itself, while beto, buttigieg, booker, and others are punching well for their weight class, but not necessarily the primary.

• from Vox: 7 winners from the first big presidential fundraising reports. Vox takes a slightly more subjective approach to their reporting than 538, but a similar story arises: they name their winners on actual fundraising as sanders, harris, warren, and buttigieg. interestingly, they also name biden a winner because nobody did truly "exceptional" in fundraising in their view which keeps his path slightly open; john delaney's consultants get an amusing mention for shaking him dry of money.

• from NBC News: Six things we've learned from the 2020 candidates' fundraising reports. NBC News gives raw numbers on contributions, cash on hand, burn rate, so if you're curious about the numbers themselves, this is your source. as far as analysis, NBC crowns the two big winners as sanders and o'rourke on their fundraising totals, mostly on their average daily amount raised (sanders 445k over 41 days; o'rourke 520k over 18 days). they note that most of the senators in the race are doing respectably (although outside of kamala this is partly because of campaign transfers), and also think castro is the big loser with a paltry 1.1 million raised, less than some of the minor candidates like yang and marianne williamson.

Polling

• from Emerson, a B+ pollster on 538's pollster rankings: April National Poll: Bernie Takes Lead for Democratic Nomination, Mayor Pete On The Move

A new national Emerson poll, including 20 Democratic candidates for President, found Senator Bernie Sanders ahead of the pack with 29%, followed by former Vice President Joe Biden at 24%. They were followed by Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 9%, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Senator Kamala Harris at 8%, and Senator Elizabeth Warren at 7%. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang and former HUD secretary Julian Castro were at 3%. The poll was conducted April 11-14 of Democratic Primary voters with a subset of n=356, +/- 5.2%.

• from Morning Consult, a B- pollster on 538's pollster rankings: April 15 Morning Consult Poll (National & Early Primary States) [PDF warning!]

Joe Biden on 31%, Bernie Sanders on 23%, Kamala Harris on 9%, Beto O'Rourke on 8%, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg on 7%, Corey Booker on 4%. All others below 3%. n=5,000, +/- 1%.

Buttigieg ticks up again, and now has 7% of the Democratic primary vote share. This is the fourth straight week his vote share has increased. High income earners in particular are warming to Buttigieg: in the last six weeks, his vote share among Democratic primary voters earning more than $100k has risen from 1% to 11%. Bernie Sanders holds a strong lead with young voters: 41% of 18-29 year-old women and 39% of 18-29 year-old men support Sanders as their first choice. Andrew Yang lands in 5th place with 18-29 year-old men, with 5% of the vote.

If Biden doesn’t run, Sanders has the most to gain. A projection based on second choice vote shows that Sanders would pick up 12 points if Biden opts not to run, enough to give him a 23 point first place lead.

• from Monmouth University, an A+ pollster on 538's pollster rankings: April 11 Iowa Poll: Biden leads pack in Iowa; beating Trump a priority for caucusgoers

In a field of 24 announced and potential candidates, Biden holds the lead with 27% support among Democratic voters who are likely to attend the Iowa caucuses in February. He is followed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (16%), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (9%), Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (7%), California Sen. Kamala Harris (7%), former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke (6%), Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (4%), New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (3%), and former cabinet secretary Julián Castro (2%). Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, California Rep. Eric Swalwell, and entrepreneur Andrew Yang each receive 1% support from likely caucusgoers. The remaining 10 candidates earn less than 1% or were not chosen by any respondents in the poll.

Bernie Sanders

• from The Guardian: How Sanders left political wilderness to become leader of Democratic pack. this article focuses mostly on the rise of sanders as a figure and the ideas he has in the democratic party, and whether or not they can continue to grow or will hit a ceiling in the very near future. the difference could be crucial, obviously, given the number of people in the race and all the positions they could take which could scalp potential sanders voters.

• from The Daily Beast: Bernie’s Fox News Town Hall Was a Ratings Smash. More Dems May Follow Him There.
  . sanders's main coup over the past week was his big fox town hall, which by all accounts appears to have been a big success for him (although some would contest this as having enabled the network's absolutely shitty employees). this appears to have actually jarred some other democratic candidates into trying it for themselves--we'll see how that progresses.

• from Jacobin: Bernie 1, Fox 0: Bernie Sanders didn’t just face down Fox News and prevail — he called the bluff that underpins our whole two-party system.. for a more meta narrative on sanders's town hall and its apparent success mixed in with some analysis of the implications, jacobin has this article. (this is, like all jacobin articles, a leftist take and not a liberal one, so it does not spare the democratic party of criticism by any stretch of the word).

Cory Booker

• from Reuters: Booker launches 'Justice' tour, aiming for surge in U.S. presidential bid. cory booker ostensibly kicked off his middling campaign a few days ago, starting on a two-week whistle stop tour that'll see him around the country like the other candidates. booker is in a weird position, polling wise. he's not quite a frontrunner, but he's also not irrelevant (and he's probably siphoning votes from kamala, to be honest). theoretically, he has a path to the presidency, but i'm not entirely sure that the way he's trying to position himself is going to be particularly helpful in that end.

• from NBC News: Booker kicks off campaign in hometown of Newark, promises to stay above the fray. NBC News has a more policy-focused article on booker's campaign launch: "Democratic ideals of health care for all, LGBTQ rights, economic equality and a pathway to citizenship for immigrants" among other things. he's also trying to embrace civility politics, it would seem. how well that works for him remains to be seen, but i would bet on him staying about where he is for the time being.

• from Buzzfeed News: Cory Booker’s Campaign Hasn’t Gotten The Candidate’s Memo On His Message Of Urgency. the booker campaign as a whole is also fighting a battle of contradictory messaging: booker is an energetic candidate--his campaign, however, is very much a slow and steady affair. the booker campaign in general seems to be admitting it won't be able to keep the pace of the frontrunners, and so instead of fighting a battle it knows it can't win, it'll instead sit back and try and gain institutional backing that will benefit booker's chances in the likely event that the primary doesn't end with a presumtive nominee. it's an interesting strategy (it probably will not work, though). there's also some additional policy in this article that NBC and Reuters don't touch on, if you're curious about that.

Pete Buttigieg

• from The Guardian: Does everyone really love Mayor Pete? His home town has some answers. pete buttigieg's record and history as south bend, indiana's mayor is getting some traction in the media this week (as you'll see from some of the other articles in this section), and this is no exception. this article focuses mostly on the favorable reception south bender have toward both buttigieg and his candidacy, and the good things that his mayorship did for the city.

• from NPR: Pete Buttigieg Helped Transform South Bend As Mayor, But Some Feel Left Out. contrast NPR, which has this article (similar to last week's Buzzfeed article) on the people who are less thrilled with buttigieg's tenure as mayor and his efforts to win the presidency, and the greater context they place buttigieg in.

• from Slate: The Mayor Who Wants to Be President: Pete Buttigieg is a long shot. But so was Donald Trump.. this is the transcript of an interview that one of slate's podcasts did with pete buttigieg about a week ago, mostly focusing on his political history and policy issues but also on some of buttigieg's personal history like coming out. probably a good place to start if you're unclear on who he is or what he says he stands for.

• from Reuters: Millennial 'Mayor Pete' Buttigieg makes case for U.S. presidency. this small article mostly focuses on buttigieg's formal launching of his campaign, which occurred a few days ago. we have a tildes thread on this, so i feel like there's not much to be said here that hasn't already been said there.

• from Vox: Pete Buttigieg, Barack Obama, and the psychology of liberalism. this article basically puts into context one of the ways buttigieg seems to be trying to position himself and his campaign, and there's not a whole lot more to be said about it. this article is one of those ones that really only makes sense if you read it, and trying to explain it back to people just makes it a bit confusing all around, so if you're curious about this one, just read it.

Kamala Harris

• from Reuters: Kamala Harris carves distinct early-state path in her 2020 White House bid. the kamala harris path to the white house probably does not involve many of the early states necessarily, but that has not stopped harris from stumping in places like iowa and south carolina extensively in the past few weeks. harris would probably be the frontrunner if she were to do very well in the early states; california will be favorable to her, you would think, and comes very early in the 2020 primary cycle (early march) this year relative to where it fell in 2016.

• from CBS News: Kamala Harris releases 15 years of tax returns. harris is also the frontrunner in this weird litmus test democrats have going on. will anyone upstage her on this? probably not. is it important? probably not. but here you go, if you wanted to know what her tax returns are like.

Everybody else

• from CNN: Seven takeaways from CNN's town halls with Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson. andrew yang and marianne williamson both got town halls, and both of them are pretty interesting people when you actually press them on issues instead of having them shoot things into the wind without needing to really back them up. williamson is arguably the more interesting of the two, but really i think you'll find some of what CNN took away here from the both of them as pretty novel.

• from FiveThirtyEight: Can Julian Castro Rally Latino Voters?. 538 poses this question--to which the answer seems to currently be no by most accounts. to be clear he's positioning himself pretty well with latino voters, but his problem isn't really latino voters so much as everybody else. he does quite badly with all non-latino demographics, to put it lightly, and him getting the latino vote only really matters if he can do well with other demographics on top of that. maybe he'll turn it around, but judging by his fundraising numbers, i think we might already be able to relegate him to the bin with yang and williamson and the other 'basically novelty' candidates

General Policy

• from CBS News: Democratic presidential candidates stay vague on immigration. despite what you might think based on how much of an issue it's been, julian castro is literally the only democrat so far to have a particularly detailed immigration policy plan. most candidates thus far have been pretty quiet on the subject, although i'm sure you can at least guess how most of them would structure an immigration plan. we'll probably see some be rolled out later on in the primary cycle as the race actually gets going, but at least for now this is the one thing castro can pride himself on that other candidates cannot.

• from NPR: Democratic Candidates Are Releasing Tax Returns, Answering Big Questions For Voters. tax returns are a litmus test this year, and you can expect to see more of them in the future since most of the major candidates have either released them already or will do so at some point in the future. pretty straightforward.

Opinion/Ideology-driven

• from The Guardian: Elizabeth Warren is the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic party. this op-ed mostly focuses on warren's extensive policy proposals and how, in moira donegan's view, this makes warren the aforementioned intellectual powerhouse of the democratic party. this is not wrong--warren is probably far and away the most policy-driven candidate so far in the campaign--but also it's not necessarily indicative of anything voters want. in the last election, hillary clinton had a pretty extensive set of policies, to which voters kindly responded by electing our non-clinton president. it does remain to be seen if they're more kind to warren, or if her ideas get picked up by other people in the race.

• from The Guardian: Buttigieg is the Democrats' flavour of the month. Just don't ask what he stands for. nathan robinson hammers home one of the bigger criticisms of pete buttigieg in this op-ed, namely that nobody seems to know what he really stands for and he very much reeks of a "flavor of the month" democrat who is going to peter out at some point when the novelty wears off. robinson is actually pretty brutal to buttigieg here, to a point where i think i'm just going to quote him to give you an example of how not-sparing this op-ed is:

But politics shouldn’t be about people’s attributes, it should be about their values and actions. Buttigieg is a man with a lot of “gold stars” on his résumé, but why should anybody actually trust him to be on their side? (Amusingly enough, in his campaign book Shortest Way Home, Buttigieg describes an incident in which a voter asked him how he could prove that he wasn’t just another self-serving politician. Buttigieg couldn’t come up with an answer.) The available evidence of his character is thin. Has he spent a lifetime sticking up for working people? No, he worked at McKinsey before he entered politics. Has he taken courageous moral stands? No: while Gary, Indiana, declared itself a sanctuary city in response to Donald Trump’s immigration policies, Buttigieg’s city of South Bend did not.

yeah.

• from The Guardian: How wide is Bernie Sanders' appeal? This cheering Fox News audience is a clue. bhaskar sunkara has another op-ed this week about the sanders fox news town hall, which he uses as proof that sanders has more widespread appeal than people give him credit for. considering that you're already seeing other candidates try and arrange similar plans, there's probably something to be said about whether or not that also applies to other candidates and the modern democratic message, too. (also, it does seem somewhat weird that candidates don't do this more often considering how much bipartisanship gets played up.)

• and lastly, from NBC News: Fox News, Bernie Sanders and the value of discomfort. steve krakauer on the other hand argues a more pragmatic viewpoint: sanders going on fox news for the town hall was good for both himself but also for fox news because it pierced the filter bubbles that exist in modern politics, and allowed crosspollination of viewpoints that don't normally do so.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

I just came across this field of 13 admin-removed comments and frankly it left me feeling rather unsettled. That's a lot of content to just nuke all at once. Contextually, the thread up to that point was genial and non-controversial, so it seems especially odd that there's just this black hole there. What struck me mostly was how opaque the moderation was. There is no indication of what kind of content was removed, why it was removed, or specifically who did the removal or when it happened.

Then I scrolled down and at the very bottom I found what I guess is meant to address these concerns, a comment from Deimos:

Sigh, I saw this thread was active and thought it was going to have an actual on-topic discussion in it. Let's (mostly) start this over.

It's not always clear online so I want to say that I'm not rage-posting or bellyaching about censorship or any of the usual drama that tends to crop up on sites like Tildes from time to time. I trust Deimos' moderation and give this the benefit of the doubt. What I'm actually doing, I guess, is making a feature request about better annotation for removed comments.

Would it make sense to show a note (like Deimos' comment) in-thread at the position of the deleted content? Instead of down at the bottom of the page or unattached to anything relevant? In my opinion some kind of "reason" message should always be provided with any moderation activity as a matter of course. Even if it's just boilerplate text chosen from a dropdown menu.

Also, would a single bulk-annotation for all of the related removals make for better UX than 13 separate ones? I think that would be both easier to read, and easier for Deimos to generate on the backend.

I feel like we may have had this conversation previously, but I couldn't find it. Apologies if I'm beating a dead horse.

Hi everyone.

Hello to all the new faces who don't know my name - (or how out of character it is that there are capital letters in this post!) This isn't really for you - or for anyone in particular I guess; I just wanted to write something to those who have followed my work on here.

So, you.

Howdy.

It's been a minute.

I just wanted to give you all a quick update; let you know that I'm safe. I've had a few of you reach out to me since my last post. I hope I didn't scare anybody.

For those interested - things... aren't all that better now, hahaha. Sorry.

But the good news is, they're trending up in a really good way.

I've decided to stop drinking for awhile; I figured that isn't really helping my cause at this point. I'll pick that back up when there's something worth celebrating, when I'm in better company, and when I'm back in control of myself.

I've started getting a lot more interviews for work; shouldn't be long now until I have a position landed and I'm back to being a functioning adult.

And uh - I started therapy. Been about a month now. I like my therapist, they're very sweet, very weird in a fun/eclectic kind of way. (My kinda person.) And that's been going well.

In fact, that's part of this.

It's not just Tildes I abandoned.

I've let a lot of very important people to be fall to the wayside lately - total isolation. Tonight, I started calling them back, apologizing, letting them know what was going on. And that's gone well so far.

Now I'm here doing the same for you.

I don't know if I'll be back on Tildes all too frequently. There's a lot on here I might just need to let rest.

So I just wanted to say that I'm here. I love you. I'm sorry. And, bye.

For now.

eyes crackle open

half past three

stomach on fire and

my body feels meek

i stumble out my chair

and here the creak in my knees

you're only in your twenties

and you're living ninety

.

my head feels funny

and i'm tired of the numbing

and there's too much week

at the end of my money

a little bumblebee lost

wishing for his honey

beat my head against the hive

until the world starts buzzing

and it falls.

.

and i

set

foot

down

on that unpaved road

step

forward like an orphan

on a search for a home

walk

forward hand to God

if he answers my call

honey (i'll) be

leaving for now

hope it won't be long

.

soul

full of gravel and

a heart made of gold

imma

face my music and

play my song

send

me down to hell

if it rights my wrongs

honeybee

i'm leaving for now

hope it won't be long.

This is going to be a bit of a ramble.

I'm not even sure where to even start.

Browsing r/egg_irl has me confused. Am I trans? What does it mean for someone currently living as their birth-assigned-gender to be trans? Would I be happier as a woman? Or non-binary? I don't feel major bodily disphoria. I don't dislike my body. I am curious what it would be like to have a female body.

When I was a teenager I read Commitment Hour, by James Alan Gardner. It's about a village where young people switch back and forth every year (go to sleep as one, wake up as another), until they turn twenty and have to choose one or the other. I loved it. I fantasied about what it would be like to quickly switch back and forth. I liked the idea of finding out what it's like to have a female body without having to permanently commit to it. That fantasy has tempered a bit since then, but I wouldn't say it's completely gone.

I've been growing my hair out, but I've also grown my beard out. Both started as laziness. I didn't feel like bothering to get my hair cut or mess with shaving my face. I hate shaving. Now it's something of a security blanket. I feel exposed without them. Another reason I grew my beard out was because there were a couple of times when I was a teenager that a stranger thought I was a girl and it made me uncomfortable. I grow hardly any chest hair and I like it that way; but I have a lot of leg hair, and I like that too.

I've never been the macho type or had much use for machoness.

I don't know If I would like being female, or if I just like the idea of it. There have been other things that I liked the idea of but not the thing itself. How can I respond to others seeing it as a phase if I'm not even sure myself if it's a phase.

I don't like the social stigma around it. I come from a conservative family. I don't know how they would react. I live in a small predominately Mormon community where everybody knows everybody and gossip runs rampant. I don't know if being female is what I really want, but I at least want the space to experiment and find out.

I don't know what I want and I hate not knowing. Even deciding whether or not I should even type this out, let alone post it, has been a major mental battle.

I've been on Tildes a while, but I created a new account because my main account could be connected to my real identity and I'm so not ready for that. Even putting this out there anonymously has me terrified.

week three brings a deluge of essays and pieces long enough that i'm going to break this week down by the candidate. news today is sorted by candidate, while opinion will remain unsorted for now since there's not much going on there worth talking about. i've also, for clarity's sake, added a [LONGFORM] note to the longer pieces in this slate for those of you on a time crunch.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 thread • Week 2 thread

News

Bernie Sanders

• from the Huffington Post: Bernie Sanders Says Felons Should Be Able To Vote While In Prison. bernie sanders called for the end of felony disenfranchisement over the week, which is a thing that almost all states do currently in some form. iowa in particular has possibly the most severe such law, something that the republican governor kim reynolds has been (unsuccessfully) trying to change, making it a fairly large issue there. this currently is not a litmus test for the Democratic Party, but don't expect it to go away, because the ACLU is pushing for candidates to adopt it as a plank.

• from Jacobin: Votes For All. for a leftist take on the above, Jacobin has you covered. this article mostly focuses on the historical push by socialist and socialist-adjacent movements in america to do away with felony disenfranchisement and achieve universal suffrage, and sanders in that broader context.

• from Slate: The Favorite: Can Bernie Sanders finally start acting like the one thing he’s never been?. slate mostly focuses on sanders's curious status as a genuine goliath in this race here, in contrast to the underdog status which has characterized basically the entirety of his political career previously. in many respects, this is unprecedented territory for sanders, and it is a genuine question whether he'll be able to adapt to that fact (or if he'll need to at all).

• from TIME: Sen. Bernie Sanders Unveils New 'Medicare for All' Plan With Support From Some 2020 Rivals. policy wise, sanders unveiled his idea of what medicare for all looks like. this appears to have the support of gillibrand, warren, booker, and harris, who signed on to it (although they've also signed on to less things like a public option), so at least for now, you could probably say it's the leading healthcare reform option on the table.

Pete Buttigieg

• from CBS News and TIME: Buttigieg challenges Pence on LGBTQ rights: "Your quarrel is with my creator"; Pete Buttigieg Criticizes Vice President Pence in Speech About LGBTQ Rights: 'Your Quarrel, Sir, Is With My Creator'. buttigieg is the first person i'm aware of to take shots at either of trump or pence besides sanders, who has led with it the whole of his campaign so far. it's not surprising that the inflection point here is LGBT rights--buttigieg is gay, obviously--but for a presidential campaign, this is fairly unprecedented.

• from NBC News: Pence: Buttigieg is attacking my faith to stand out in 2020 crowd. pence responded to buttigieg's remarks this morning by the way and basically called it a political ploy. i suspect this is not the last we will hear of this particular issue between the two.

• from Slate: How Astonishing Is Mayor Pete’s Rise?. slate has an article on the meteoric rise of buttigieg--although it does note that it's not all roses for buttigieg, who is still only polling about as well as cory booker and amy klobuchar despite basically becoming a media golden boy in the past few weeks. still, buttigieg is doing an order of magnitude better than you'd expect of someone whose mayorship presided over a city of a little over 100,000 people. (compare this guardian article which i highlighted in the last thread).

• from Buzzfeed News: [LONGFORM] What Happened When Pete Buttigieg Tore Down Houses In Black And Latino South Bend. of course, pete also has skeletons which are bound to come out, and his redevelopment plans in south bend probably count as those. officially they were successful, but some people do (understandably) contend that came at the cost of people and essentially led to gentrification in parts of south bend. whether that's a knock on him or just the cost of doing business as mayor of a rust belt city, i leave to you.

Kamala Harris

• from The Atlantic: [LONGFORM] Kamala Harris Takes Her Shot. this is a pretty comprehensive piece on harris, who made a big splash early but is now mostly trying to tread water without losing further ground to bernie and biden or giving up position to warren, buttigieg, or o'rourke. it's humanizing, but it also covers a lot of the criticisms and contradictions of harris's political history, and some of the nagging questions surrounding her political positions as she bids for the white house. if you're curious about or unfamiliar of what some of those criticisms people often launch at her are, this piece is probably for you.

• from Buzzfeed News: Kamala Harris Wants Her Teacher Pay Raise Proposal To Bring Young Black Americans To The Profession — And To Her Campaign. as far as policy, harris has been staking her wagon to teachers in the form of pay raises. those of you who pay attention to the news might have heard her bring this up previously, as it's been an early feature of her campaign so far. it'll be interesting to see if other people take up the beat if she finds success with this issue--so far nobody really has, explicitly speaking, which might be because it's gotten relatively little attention.

Everybody else

• from TIME: California Rep. Eric Swalwell Announces Candidacy for the 2020 Presidential Race. just in case the race wasn't crowded enough for you, eric swalwell decided to become "significant" candidate number 19 in the clowncar of a race that this is. i have no idea what he's running on or what he's angling himself to be, i'm afraid, but i'm sure CBS has it over at the 2020 contenders page.

• from Dissent Magazine: [LONGFORM] Yang Gang Education: If Andrew Yang’s fans are this excited about UBI, imagine how they’ll feel when they learn what socialism can do for them.. this piece is a fairly straightforward critique from the left of andrew yang's UBI proposal and some of the problems that will likely inhibit it from doing what yang wants it to do; however, it's also a general discussion of yang's supporter base and how their support for him is perhaps indicative of receptiveness to more leftist ideas than just UBI.

• from NBC News: Warren targets big business with $1 trillion 'profits' tax. warren has remained mostly on the policy beat so far in her campaign, and this is just the latest of the big sweeping policies she's seeking to sell to the american public. in case you've missed out on her other big policies, see her WaPo op-ed on her proposed Corporate Executive Accountability Act, and her Medium post on her proposed farming policy.

• from Vox: Kirsten Gillibrand used to have moderate positions on immigration and guns. Voters want to know why she’s changed.. kirsten gillibrand is running a pretty sleepy campaign so far, of which this might be the biggest recent headline. she's repositioned herself a bit in the trump era, and she's currently the senator who votes with him least often according to 538, but previously she's been a more moderate voice in congress. people haven't let that slide, and it does suggest her efforts to sell herself as the "resistance" candidate probably aren't helping her campaign much. maybe things will change, but things aren't looking great for her so far.

• from the Huffington Post: Senator Cory Booker Announces He’ll Offer Bill To Study Potential Reparations. cory booker is pushing the reparations litmus test into some form of actual legislative action, signalling that we're probably going to have that become a wedge issue in this primary on top of some of the other stuff. that'll be a fun conversation.

• from the Huffington Post: Amy Klobuchar Says She’s Raised More Than $5.2 Million For Her Presidential Campaign. amy klobuchar's fundraising numbers are about where booker was, so behind beto, sanders, harris, and buttigieg. given where she's polling, that's probably about what you'd expect. there will definitely no shortage of money in this primary.

• finally, from The Atlantic: Mike Gravel’s Plan to Rock the Democratic Primary. those of you who read the first week of this may remember the Buzzfeed News piece on mike gravel's then newly-launched campaign to make the democratic primary stage. he might not make it, but so far it's not for lack of trying--his campaign has 8,000 donors, and the american left is putting a decent amount of weight behind him so far. i think most of us can at least agree it'd be pretty entertaining to see him on stage, so on some level i do hope he makes it.

Opinion/Ideology-driven

• from In These Times: The Case for Using Ranked Choice Voting in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries. this article makes the case for the primaries using ranked choice voting which, to be honest, would probably really help when there are literally going to be like sixteen people in iowa next year (especially given the fact that the democratic party has a 15% popular vote threshold for attaining any delegates in a state). this will definitely not happen this year, but maybe we'll see movement in the future toward something like RCV being used.

• from The Week: The Democratic Party Is Not Going Nuts. It's Coming to Its Senses.. this piece by The Week puts foward the argument that the lurch to the left by the Democratic Party isn't some sort of weird mirroring of the lurch to the right in the GOP, but rather the Democratic Party realizing that centrism isn't really what people want. whether or not that's an accurate assessment, i'll leave to you.

• finally, from The Guardian: Barack Obama is stuck in the past. He represents the old Democratic party. this piece is by bhaskar sunkara, who you may know as one of the figureheads of Jacobin. his case here is mostly that obama's remarks last week about cautioning the party to not become a circular firing squad are motivated more by his desire to continue to hold power within the party than by genuine desire to see the party succeed. again, whether or not that's an accurate assessment, i'll leave to you.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

edit: some minor grammar stuff

it has not been about a month since the last thread, but it would probably be more convenient to just do these threads on the first day of each month instead of in the middle of the month and waiting for another twenty or so days to get on that track is ridiculous, so i'm going to just start this one now and then do the next one on may 1st. anyways, we're back again! here you can share/provide updates on some of the projects that you're working on. they can be of any kind--digital, physical, work related, passion project, whatever. pretty straightforward, i think.

I'd like to hear something different, and am curious about what both the current and past trends have been so anything's welcome really!

Honestly it doesn't even have to have any sung parts; lately I've been getting in Berlin's indigenous techno scene and found myself with lots of remarkable material to listen to.

Here are a few spotlights of mine:

• A particularly good DJ session of Dirty Doering. His music is what's really pushed me to dip my toes into the techno scene; went to few of his nights and never regretted it so far.
• Songs such as Le Temps de la Rentrée by France Gall, La Mer specifically sung by Julio Iglesias and Champs Elysees by Joe Dassin are some of my go tos when I'm cooking something.
• HaifischNikez Allstar is a really good trashy song, pleasant in its own way in my opinion. Watch it as there's a jumpscare at the beginning of the video.
• Any song by Caparezza. I won't link a specific one cause they're not exactly "melodic", moreso they are extremely clever in the wordplays he makes in each and every one. If i had to suggest an album of his I'd go for Museica.
• Heard a number of catchy tunes while visiting Israel but ended up not knowing any specific title cause while there my phone died...

edit: pointed out jumpscare

enikő

a story written on the edge of sleep and sanity

The dreams never seem to come unless they're tortured memories or painful reminders of some ill-begotten past nobody wants to remember. To sleep is to live with that reality, but there can be no sleep in such reality either, and neither can there be peace. In the reality there is Enikő, eyes strained against an all-consuming darkness, and the many fractured people that exist within.

"No sleep," mutters Enikő into the void. There are no people around to hear that, except the many fractured people within. Enikő flashes out of existence at once and the fractured people take their spaces, dance their dances against the blackness.

"You know," scolds Alyaza Birze, who flashes at once into existence, "you must cease to suppress me one of these days!" Probably Enikő is not truly around to hear this in the reality, for Enikő is just as nonexistent as all the other people within the darkness. Alyaza pays it no mind, for she is accustomed to such.

"Why must you always tax yourself so, Enikő?" calls Alyaza out to the void. "You know as I that you must sleep. The nightmares are no more common than the daydreams, and neither too are the thoughts. They are not often for you. Rest at once." The void does not answer.

Alyaza flashes back into nonexistence, and so takes her place is Natja Avidina. In some other place in some other space, it is so that Natja and Alyaza exist as roommates. In this reality though they are consigned to singular existences, never seeing one another. They are opposites, yin and yang, and in this reality yin and yang cannot be at the same time. Natja cannot exist where Alyaza does, nor can Alyaza exist where Natja does. Natja pays this no mind, for she too like Alyaza has long resigned to the void reality.

"Why do you make yourself suffer, Enikő?" slips the quiet voice of Natja into the void. "Surely you too must be tired, even with the nightmares and the thoughts, and surely you too must realize that there is no guarantee you will even remember them if you rest?" And then Natja too snaps out of existence and is replaced by Enikő.

"I don't want the thoughts or the nightmares or the dreams." says Enikő from reconstitution. "I have dreamed and thought like a crazy person for years and every day my sanity slips a little more because of it! Must I be consigned to suffer then like every other facet of life simply because you two demand it of me?"

Enikő's eyes drift, and into the void Alyaza calls back a simple "yes" before disappearing again. In the void little figures dance to the rhythm of a silent melody, one-two like so then one-two again, not figures like Alyaza or Natja but the manifestations of the thoughts and dreams and every little thing the brain conceives and conspires to employ in this god-forsaken hellspace of a reality. Fire and brimstone could never compare to the void that taunts and harasses the very depths of soul and sanity.

Enikő's eyes drift back into the void. "I refuse," she says with conviction. Sleep will bring upon this void all the figures dancing to the invisible beat a thousand times over complimented with the worst machinations of the mind. One thousand times too many has this happened and one thousand and one will not tonight.

Enikő gives way to another shard of a body, the one that always confronts the thoughts. The eyes of Twilight Sparkle methodically survey the void for the usual actors, the ones that seem to recur every time she is spirited to this curious place. This is not her home, nor has it ever been, and why she is here she never does seem to know. In another place she is lauded but anxious perpetually, sent against fate and time and gods themselves in the name of an abstract concept she supposes she represents. Here, she exists as a mixture of reason and reaction, and in the void it is never certain which side dominates. She has never been used to the void, but the void cares little for such things.

"The thoughts aren't anything you haven't experienced before." she says carefully. "If it were my call, I'd take it. Better than what the rest of the mind can spit out if you stay in this void for too long."

The manifestation of reason disappears, and reaction it seems has lost the day for once. But Enikő responds only with "I refuse" and vanishes once more into nonexistence. The Thompson-esque scene must shamble along once more, resembling more and more an acid trip gone awry with its talking purple ponies and radical socialist gryphon-kind. The void answers the call with frantic pace, the one-two double timing without a breath to spare and the void reaching with the first tendrils of abject paranoia. The void must call its call and spread until entropy overcomes its will. Sleep must one day win over void, or void must overcome all things otherwise.

But Enikő only pops back once more to refuse. "I shall not sleep, and none shall tell me otherwise. No void shall overcome me, no matter what, and I would sooner die than feel the thoughts once more."

Alyaza Birze has a plan. She is no strategist of course, and pays no claim to being such, but just as Enikő was the body within which all of the fractal personalities contained themselves, Alyaza was a person into which Enikő could project. And just as Enikő knew Alyaza, Alyaza must then have known Enikő.

The one-two one-two staccato of the void grew seemingly always more and more discordant, for which Enikő would no doubt pay in short order. But the void reality was not the only reality into which all of the fractal personalities could contain themselves, and Alyaza Birze knows this. There are many vectors by which to project yourself into another reality, and this too Alyaza Birze knows, but it is a very specific reality that Alyaza Birze seeks. And so into the void, with sudden rhythm, is a familiar humming.

Doo do, doo do do do.

Do do do do, do do do do, do do.

It is some indiscriminate time, in a place that is less so indiscriminate. Alyaza Birze is on a podium at the head of a sea of curious lifeforms in a reality that places her in a Thompson-like Battle of Aspen. But far from Aspen, this reality invokes some mayoral election for a town named Ponyville in a land called Equestria, in some god-forsaken reality that demands words but defies them and calls for no less than six tabs of acid. It is Birze, the uncharismatic but ever convention-defying radical speaker who raises a Gonzo fist to a species with no opposable digits and recites with conviction "All you maggot-smoking fags on Santa Monica boulevard." No explanation for these words or their significance to the Birze campaign is given, nor for the Gonzo fist, and the reality at once seems to shatter into a million ill-fitting pieces from such an illogical state of being. Birze pays none of it mind.

Somewhere to the side of the sea of life is a Twilight Sparkle equally oblivious of the void and all too aware of it, cringing at every word spoken by Birze and no doubt trying to distance herself from every syllable that is enunciated on that grand podium. No self-respecting person would be caught dead wholeheartedly agreeing with some platform literally based in nothing in this reality (except of course for the vast masses already doing so but without saying so). But then all of this is irrelevant and Twilight knows this and it is merely pomp and circumstance to the call of the void which exists and eats away at everything like a malignant cancer even in so far away a place as this. Behind the thinly veiled, multicolored sets of this reality jolt the rhythms of the void reality, ready to expand and consume here just as it too shall consume Enikő. And so it is under that circumstance that exponentially titled future Mayor of the Reality of the Freak Power Ponyvillians Alyaza Birze and shattered personality Twilight Sparkle meet both knowing and not knowing why it is they meet.

"To what pleasure do I owe speaking to the visit of our presumptive mayor?" asks the purple pony in the Thompson-esque scene. The void at least will not eat these words, so there is point and purpose in the intonation put on them.

"Someone as smart as you surely must know why I am here and not anywhere else today. Void is void, Tevilias. It is another one of those." said Alyaza with reservation. "And certainly I am no mayor, for the record."

"You must forgive me," Twilight strings together with lackadaisical attitude, "but what would 'one of those' mean?" There is an air of resignation in the words, like the inevitable weight of a hundred-million realities is about to crash down on this reality and consign it to some bad acid trip where it belongs.

"Well you know as I, Tevilias, that in twenty-odd hours I shoot all of you to that beat and tune, that bullshit line of "All you maggot-smoking faggots" in this strange smoke and mirrors bullshit reality that exists. That is where the thoughts go, that is what the void calls, and it is you who will die there too in agony a hundred times any other. And no doubt you know that I have no desire to do that. We've been through this a hundred times, haven't we? And we know what happens if we do that."

"Sure." The resignation is enviable.

"And so we will not let that happen, will we? Because it's not like I want to murder. And you know what will happen if we do." The three-headed cerberus that inhabits the void makes itself known then.

"I WILL MURDER YOU ALL IN COLD BLOOD" bays the first head. The second nods solemnly as though carried along for a ride it never asked. The third head is manic, bearing no mind to anything but the vast and acid-like surroundings and teetering back and forth on the cusp of some far off reality from here. All of them are Alyazas, stuck in a body that never represented them in a world that never cared for them, or so it seems. No one head ever seems to dominate, except when it surfaces and becomes The Alyaza Birze, the one that people know. And never is there a time when one knows which one is The Alyaza Birze or if none of them are The Alyaza Birze, the one that everybody interacts with. Perhaps twenty-odd hours from now it will be the first that will do the killing.

"So perhaps," says Alyaza Birze, the cerberus disappearing at once, "we should make this quick then." And Twilight Sparkle can merely nod as one of the fragmented personalities once in her own reality and soon to again no longer be.

The void cannot pace itself any longer, and the discordant harmonies cease at once to contain themselves. The thoughts grow darker and drearier as they always do and the figures in the void give way to the schizophrenic happenings of the night. The shadow figures that once were become again and reanimate against the pitch black, the vividness ever greater. Sleep is enviable, but the void shall not overcome. The thoughts shall not overcome, not the dreams of dying or doing the death dealing nor the inenviable and inevitable thoughts of wanton mutilation. "The void will not overcome me, and I shall not sleep." says Enikő, and the void surges its tendrils once more.

Alyaza Birze and Twilight Sparkle and all her friends and all the other fractal personalities but Natja Avidina constitute themselves in the void once more, humming the refrains to a song which they all care to know as fractal personalities to a person. What a thing to be a witness to the sunshine! What a dream to just be walking on the ground! Into the void must strum the beat to something more cheery, something to at least dispel the thoughts and the agonies and the void for awhile, something that isn't so depressive and destructive. Don't get so upset, the refrain cries, the world was never fair--but there are ways yet to get through the day and so too perhaps the night. None of the fractal personalities sing, for singing is never quite their tempo. In some other, non-void reality perhaps this is so, but here they simply drown in the thoughts. And the thoughts are drowned, slowly, but inexorably, by the feelings of the music.

The void begins to slow, and entropy takes its course as does inevitably for all things. Soon the dreams are gone and so too go the thoughts with them, and at once there is a true void where the nightmares and the thoughts frolic no longer.

"Well that was not so hard." says Alyaza Birze. "A work done well by everybody, I suppose." Twilight merely scoffs, and says nothing of it before she is reconstituted into her own reality, to perhaps be shot again sometime in not-so-far-gone future. So too out of existence and into their own blink her other friends, ever present in this void from time to time as she but never quite players in its major doings. One day in the not-so-far-gone future it is they too who may die at the hands of some Alyaza Birze. But tonight they are merely fractal personalities in a large symphony of them, called upon ever and remembered never.

Into the night Alyaza Birze skitters onto paper a little testimony she picked up on a day she can no longer remember but which sticks into her mind evermore.

It reads:

In my own country I am in a far-off land
I am strong but have no force or power
I win all yet remain a loser
At break of day I say goodnight
When I lie down I have a great fear
Of falling.

And then she too blinks into nonexistence, perhaps in some not-so-far-flung future destined to be as she was this night to kill, perhaps destined to rewrite the words of testimony, but ever destined to repeat the cycle of doing and being and defusing crises on this night and all others a million times over now and forever more.

And for the first time in a long while, Enikő is at peace and sleeps.

I’m in the process of moving house. We’ve been visiting the new house over the weekend, but we haven’t moved any furniture in yet.

During our errands, my housemate said “let’s go home”, and it took me a moment to realise that he was referring to the new house. He was being slightly facetious, but it made me think. That new house obviously isn’t “home” yet, but when will it be “home”?

I realised there are two answers for me: a functional one and a psychological one.

The functional answer for me is “home is where the bed is”. The day after I’ve moved my bed into the new house and have slept there overnight is the day I’ll refer to it as my home (as in “let’s go home”).

The psychological answer is that it will feel like my home when I’m comfortable walking through the house in the middle of the night in bare feet – when I know the place well enough to walk around in the dark without anything to protect me from danger. I have to have lived in a place for a while for it to feel like home.

So… what makes a place “home” for you? When you move into a new house or apartment or condo or tent or treehouse, what makes it feel like “home”? What’s that moment when you know that this house is now a home?

I'm looking for a cheap small factor mechanical keyboard. I love the looks of XD64 or a JJ50. How do i go about it? I Don't want the numpad, don't care about leds and prefer more retro/sober styles than the ones with wings and dragons and lasers blazing across the keys.

I live in Brazil, so i'll have to import everything. I'm looking to buy everything from one place if possible.

I was looking at KPrepublic. What do i need for the xd64?

1. Plastic case
2. Key caps
3. XD64 PCB with gateron switchs (Kit 10)

Do i need plate and stabilizers? It's already $91 without it. If it's necessary, i think it would be a better idea to just buy a Durgod Taurus k320 since it's cheaper.

What do you guys think?

EDIT: Got a Magicforce 68 for $47. Thanks for the help!

after some delay, we're back with the second week of this thread as we chug headlong into what will probably be a shitshow of a primary and an even bigger shitshow of an election. this is going to be longer than the last one, because there's been quite a bit going on, and i'm going to split the actual news from pieces that are either opinion or ideologically driven.

as with the previous thread, common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 thread

News

from CBS - The 2020 contenders. this is probably one of the most comprehensive rundowns of who exactly all of these people are, what they stand for, are what their qualifications are. (it also demonstrates what an absolute clown car of a race this is already, but that's another thing). if you're shopping around for a candidate in the democratic primary to support, this might be a good place to start.

from FiveThirtyEight - What The Potential 2020 Candidates Are Doing And Saying, Vol. 13. in case you were curious what all of these people scurrying around the country were up to this week, 538 has you covered. of note are the whistlestop tours that sanders, o'rourke, yang, and harris are going on in iowa, as well as the ones gillibrand, booker, and currently speculative candidate michael bennet (the democratic senator from colorado and just-diagnosed pancreatic cancer victim) are going on in new england.

from NPR - Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan Joins 2020 Race With A Populist Pitch To Blue-Collar Voters. the clown car of a primary continues to grow with tim ryan's announcement. tim ryan, for the unaware, is a democratic congressman from ohio who currently sits in a district that voted D+6 in the last election, but is probably quickly sprinting to the right along with most of ohio. whether this is him trying to get ahead of what will probably be a hard seat to hold on to or him just being opportunistic, i dunno, but he's a fringe candidate to say the least. i'd be surprised if he made the debates, and he'll likely retain his seat since ohio is a state that allows you to run for two offices at the same time.

from The Hill - Swalwell running for White House on gun control: report. incidentally, we should also know by next week whether or not the primary will gain another member in representative eric swalwell (rep for california's 15th congressional district), who appears to be angling himself as the gun control candidate. for those of you keeping track, this will make him candidate number 19 if he does run (20, if you count ojeda before he withdrew). we're probably on track for at least 20 declared candidates, seeing as biden is presumably going to announce at some point.

from NPR - Sanders Tops Democratic Fundraising As O'Rourke, Harris And Buttigieg Draw Big Sums. fundraising is a very large part of the early stages of the race, and so far it's been a bonanza of cash for the frontrunners. sanders hauled in 18 million, harris hauled in 12 million, o'rourke 9.4 million, and buttigieg 7 million among others. smaller candidates will probably be releasing their numbers in the next few days or, if they don't, we'll see them on april 15th.

from Buzzfeed News - Andrew Yang Is Finding New Ways To Get Attention Offline. support for andrew yang is largely an internet phenomenon, but that hasn't stopped yang from campaigning like he isn't. we'll see if it pays off for him (he's seemingly in a weird middle ground between the second-tier of viable candidates and the ones that are basically guaranteed to get 1% in iowa and drop out), but i suppose actually being in front of the media can't really hurt him right now.

from Buzzfeed News - Joe Biden Says He'll Be "More Mindful" About Personal Space After Allegations Of Inappropriate Contact. if you've paid any attention to the news, you've probably seen the raking of joe biden recently for his history of being touchy-feely toward people who don't necessarily want it. this is his first personal acknowledgement of that, and while we'll have to see how it goes over, i don't think this is the last you'll be hearing of that particular subplot.

from The Guardian - Why the populist wave is setting the tone for Democratic candidates. this is a pretty straightforward piece on the undercurrent of populism--or the decided lack thereof--in the campaigns of many of these candidates on the campaign trail. expect to see this label come up a lot now that it isn't only sanders who it gets applied to.

Opinion/Ideology-driven

from Vox - Howard Schultz hasn’t gotten into policy specifics. Here are 4 ideas from women candidates who have. one of the early issues people are taking with the media so far in reporting on the primary is the decided lack of attention given to the female candidates (to which there may or may not be merit based on 538's tracking of candidate mentions). enter vox, then, with this piece highlighting some of the policy proposals they have. i could have probably categorized this under news, but it feels more like an opinion piece than not, so i'll leave it under this subheading.

from The Guardian - Democrats need a 2020 candidate who inspires. Joe Biden isn't it. biden is a fairly popular democrat both inside and outside of the party, but whether that lasts and whether or not people think he's worth voting for is a different story. there are plenty of people who have criticisms of biden, and this op-ed goes into a few of those criticisms. they're probably familiar to you if you've gone anywhere biden gets discussed, and whether or not they'll tank him if he runs remains to be seen.

from Slate - In a Diverse Candidate Field, How Is Pete Buttigieg’s Sexuality Factoring Into His Appeal? and A Conversation About Pete Buttigieg, Identity, and Diversity in the 2020 Race. these two pieces on buttigieg have been slightly controversial over the past week in their point that buttigieg, gay man as he is, doesn't really get treated like a gay man because he's also white and well off and shares more in common with sanders and o'rourke than any of the female or minority candidates. that's of course something you can probably dispute, but it's an interesting discussion to have (which is probably why there's a follow-up piece in the first place).

lastly and also from Slate - Elizabeth Warren’s Proposal to Imprison More Corporate Executives Is a Bad Idea. this article makes the case for the misguidedness of one of warren's proposals (which you can find here and also find her op-ed about here). on premise i personally agree, but i do find it curious that this objection comes when it's about corporate executives, seeing as corporate executives aren't exactly immutably corporate executives and they're also not a large portion of the population. i dunno, food for thought.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

https://tildes.net/~hobbies/bzx/what_are_your_hobbies_and_how_do_you_get_into_them#comment-2z4f

See for yourself. Text is squished to the left side of the page, one or two words per line. No idea if anyone else can see this but since it happens every time l visit that link l thought it was worth asking.

Going to poke @Deimos on this one l suppose.

Edit: Issue created.

A recent thread has had its title changed due to the title being sensationalized. I'm not sure that this is the correct move, as the title in question was also the title of the submitted article. I think this does a disservice to the community as a whole, as it makes it appear as though we want to editorialize the content submitted here which seems to go against the ideal of fostering quality discussion.

"But wait!", I hear you say, "We have a topic log!" That will be ignored, easily, especially by those seeking to equate the community with something else. While we're busy misrepresenting content (because that's what changing a title does, it misrepresents), others will point at us and shout about how we're misrepresenting the content being posted. I cannot agree with this, and I think its detrimental to the community and the idea of Tildes as a whole. Note: Text-only posts obviously are excluded from this, I'm concerned with titles on submitted links that have their own title.

Now, what happens when the title of an article is already sensationalist and editorialized? The authors, editor, and publisher obviously have biases and platforms they want to support. It currently seems as though we are changing titles to something different than what the title of the article is, and I find this extremely off-putting. I can understand wanting to avoid bringing that bias over to Tildes, but I cannot understand a reason to deliberately misrepresent that bias by changing an article's title. I think this is going to be detrimental to the community and the mission of Tildes to generate high-quality discussion.

Where articles with sensationalized headlines are posted, I propose that we must retain those titles. The system of tagging is sufficient to indicate that a title is too strongly sensationalized. Deviating from this norm is antithetical with Tildes' mission to generate and foster quality content and discussion.

There are too many responses to really get into things individually, but I must say I feel as though there has been a breach of trust. I had no idea that altering the titles of submissions would go so far, and it has destroyed the image I had of the site. Maybe the site will evolve more as the experiment continues, who knows. In the meantime, I've been accused of making arguments in bad faith multiple times in this thread. I'm deeply offended by this, as I've tried to present my thoughts and feelings as clearly as I could. This is deeply troubling to me, especially since those accusations have been given strong support by other users.

unless we stopped editing titles

This is a misrepresentation, I only ask that titles match the article they're from. Edit away if the title doesn't match the article, or is a user's text post. Maybe I wasn't clear, but there it is spelled out.

Also, there was never an ultimatum, but Deimos and other users would smear me with such claims. Being unsure of whether or not a community is a good fit for yourself is not nearly the same thing as an ultimatum.

Inspired by discussion here.

Toxic players don't create toxic games. Toxic games create toxic players.

About a year ago, I wrote up a comprehensive report on why Overwatch's community is such a shitshow. Give it a read if you're at all interested in why game communities turn toxic, or if you're curious why Overwatch didn't stick longer as a phenomenon.

(At this point, with Overwatch now past its prime and usurped by other games due in large part to reasons I described there, I'd like to also offer a nice fat 'I told you so' to actiblizz. I didn't want to stop playing...)

The baseline question was this: Overwatch has great representation, an entertaining formula, and good messages. The game is super fun to play on the surface, and offers hundreds of hours of unique new experiences. So why is it so easily considered to have one of the most toxic competitive communities out there?

There's no explanation or reason for why naturally toxic players would gravitate towards the title, stick around, and infect the rest of the community. Nothing about Overwatch would indicate that it was going to somehow filter out the worst of the worst and keep them for itself, and that's because - bumbudaaa! It didn't.

Toxic players didn't infect Overwatch; Overwatch created toxic players.

The same things can be said for basically any other huge competitive game on the market, with CS:GO, LoL, and DOTA2 being the easiest examples. Their communities are all total swamps.

Despite this, there is virtually no game on the market which properly addresses the root cause of community-destroying toxicity: the game itself.

I'd rather not repeat myself because that above link will do a better job of going in-depth and can be applied to a lot of games, but the baseline problem is this: games catch and ban bad apples, but do nothing to stop those bad apples from forming. Failing to realize that parts of an otherwise amazing experience are fundamentally frustrating, the focus and blame is put on the players for reacting (see above thread) in exactly the way the games are designed to make them.

Chief among these issues? Games demand teamwork, cooperation and a community voice, but do nothing to facilitate them. Games that are designed to be fun casually will be frustrating competitively - and vice versa. Toxic communities will not form where every style of play is catered to, which is sometimes balance, but often a fundamental disconnect between what the game was built for, what's actually promised, and what the player's trying to get out of it.

So, I'd rather send the discussion in the other direction, which is why I posted this here. Rather than blame the community, it's time to look for solutions from the actual people responsible.

(To be clear: yes, there are assholes in the world, and yes, they play games. But the idea that the culture has only just now soured to a patch of racism and misogyny is laughable to anyone who grew up playing Xbox Live. It's been blown completely out of proportion by a fundamental discontent with games themselves, like further kindling on a fire, driven mostly by competitive culture.)

I'm in search for new ones to watch, but can't seem to find anything. I'm curious about what they are going to do with the new Child's Play reboot.

Anyway, the ones i liked so far:

• Hereditary
• Suspiria
• The Ritual
• Halloween
• The Clovehitch Killer
• The Void
• Gerald’s Game
• It
• Get Out

Preface

Conceptual models in programming are essential for being able to reason about problems. We see this through code all the time, with implementation details hidden away behind abstractions like functions and objects so that we can ignore the cumbersome details and focus only on the details that matter. Without these abstractions and conceptual models, we might find ourselves overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the problem we’re facing. Of these conceptual models, one of the most easily neglected is that of data and object structure.

Data Types Galore

Possibly one of the most overwhelming aspects of conceptualizing data and object structure is the sheer breadth of data types available. Depending on the programming language you’re working with, you may find that you have more than several dozens of object classes already defined as part of the language’s core; primitives like booleans, ints, unsigned ints, floats, doubles, longs, strings, chars, and possibly others; arrays that can contain any of the objects or primitives, and even other arrays; and several other data structures like queues, vectors, and mixed-type collections, among others.

With so many types of data, it’s incredibly easy to lose track in a sea of type declarations and find yourself confused and unsure of where to go.

Tree’s Company

Let’s start by trying to make these data types a little less overwhelming. Rather than thinking strictly of types, let’s classify them. We can group all data types into one of three basic classifications:

1. Objects, which contain key/value pairs. For example, an object property that stores a string.
2. Arrays, which contain some arbitrary number of values.
3. Primitives, which contain nothing. They’re simply a “flat” data value.

We can also make a couple of additional notes. First, arrays and objects are very similar; both contain references to internal data, but the way that data is referenced differs. In particular, objects have named keys while arrays have numeric, zero-indexed keys. In a sense, arrays are a special case of objects where the keys are more strictly typed. From this, we can condense the classifications of objects and arrays into the more general “container” classification.

With that in mind, we now have the following classifications:

1. Containers.
2. Primitives.

We can now generally state that containers may contain other containers and primitives, and primitives may not contain anything. In other words, all data structures are a composition of containers and/or primitives, where containers may accept containers and/or primitives and primitives may not accept anything. More experienced programmers should notice something very familiar about this description--we’re basically describing a tree structure! Primitive types and empty containers act as the leaves in a tree, whereas objects and arrays act as the nodes.

Trees Help You Breathe

Okay, great. So what’s the big deal, anyway? We’ve now traded a bunch of concrete data types that we can actually think about and abstracted them away into this nebulous mess of containers and primitives. What do we get out of this?

A common mistake many programmers make is planning their data types out from the very beginning. Rather than planning out an abstraction for their data and object architecture, it’s easy to immediately find yourself focusing too much on the concrete implementation details.

Imagine, for example, modeling a user account for an online payment system. A common feature to include is the ability to store payment information for auto-pay, and payment methods typically take the form of some combination of credit/debit cards and bank accounts. If we focus on implementation details from the beginning, then we may find ourselves with something like this in a first iteration:

UserAccount: {
    username: String,
    password: String,
    payment_methods: PaymentMethod[]
}

PaymentMethod: {
    account_name: String,
    account_type: Enum,
    account_holder: String,
    number: String,
    routing_number: String?,
    cvv: String?,
    expiration_date: DateString?
}

We then find ourselves realizing that PaymentMethod is an unnecessary mess of optional values and needing to refactor it. Odds are we would break it off immediately into separate account types and make a note that they both implement some interface. We may also find that, as a result, remodeling the PaymentMethod could result in the need to remodel the UserAccount. For more deeply nested data structures, a single change deeper within the structure could result in those changes cascading all the way to the top-level object. If we have multiple objects, then these changes could propagate to them as well. And what if we decide a type needs to be changed, like deciding that our expiration date needs to be some sort of date object? Or what if we decide that we want to modify our property names? We’re then stuck having to update these definitions as we go along. What if we decide that we don't want an interface for different payment method types after all and instead want separate collections for each type? Then including the interface consideration will have proven to be a waste of time. The end result is that before we’ve even touched a single line of code, we’ve already found ourselves stuck with a bunch of technical debt, and we’re only in our initial planning stages!

To alleviate these kinds of problems, it’s far better to just ignore the implementation details. By doing so, we may find ourselves with something like this:

UserAccount: {
    Username,
    Password,
    PaymentMethods
}

PaymentMethods: // TODO: Decide on this container’s structure.

CardAccount: {
    AccountName,
    CardHolder,
    CardNumber,
    CVV,
    ExpirationDate,
    CardType
}

BankAccount: {
    AccountName,
    AccountNumber,
    RoutingNumber,
    AccountType
}

A few important notes about what we’ve just done here:

1. We don’t specify any concrete data types.
2. All fields within our models have the capacity to be either containers or primitives.
3. We’re able to defer a model’s structural definition without affecting the pace of our planning.
4. Any changes to a particular field type will automatically propagate in our structural definitions, making it trivial to create a definition like ExpirationDate: String and later change it to ExpirationDate: DateObject.
5. The amount of information we need to think about is reduced down to the very bare minimum.
6. By deferring the definition of the PaymentMethods structure, we find ourselves more inclined to focus on the more concrete payment method definitions from the very beginning, rather than trying to force them to be compatible through an interface.
7. We focused only on data representation, ensuring that representation and implementation are both separate and can be handled differently if needed.

SOLIDifying Our Conceptual Model

In object-oriented programming (OOP), there’s a generally recommended set of principles to follow, represented by the acronym “SOLID”:

• Single responsibility.
• Open/closed.
• Liskov substitution.
• Interface segregation.
• Dependency inversion.

These “SOLID” principles were defined to help resolve common, recurring design problems and anti-patterns in OOP.

Of particular note for us is the last one, the “dependency inversion” principle. The idea behind this principle is that implementation details should depend on abstractions, not the other way around. Our new conceptual model obeys the dependency inversion principle by prioritizing a focus on abstractions while leaving implementation details to the future class definitions that are based on our abstractions. By doing so, we limit the elements involved in our planning and problem-solving stages to only what is necessary.

Final Thoughts

The consequences of such a conceptual model extend well beyond simply planning out data and object structures. For example, if implemented as an actual programming or language construct, you could make the parsing of your data fairly simple. By implementing an object parser that performs reflection on some passed object, you can extract all of the publicly accessible object properties of the target object and the data contained therein. Thus, if your language doesn’t have a built-in JSON encoding function and no library yet exists, you could recursively traverse your data structure to generate the appropriate JSON with very little effort.

Many of the most fundamental programming concepts, like data structures ultimately being nothing more than trees at their most abstract representation, are things we tend to take for granted and think very little about. By making ourselves conscious of these fundamental concepts, however, we can more effectively take advantage of them.

Additionally, successful programmers typically solve a programming problem before they’ve ever written a single line of code. Whether or not they’re conscious of it, the tools they use to solve these problems effectively consist largely of the myriad conceptual models they’ve collected and developed over time, and the experience they’ve accumulated to determine which conceptual models need to be utilized to solve a particular problem.

Even when you have a solid grasp of your programming fundamentals, you should always revisit them every now and then. Sometimes there are details that you may have missed or just couldn’t fully appreciate when you learned about them. This is something that I’m continually reminded of as I continue on in my own career growth, and I hope that I can continue passing these lessons on to others.

As always, I'm absolutely open to feedback and questions!

Here's a list of a lot of things that came out in this past week, including many which are set to release on Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and I avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to mention anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)

(oh and don't bully me for the genre tags, a lot of these things have very limited resources available and I couldn't individually listen to everything and determine what fits best, so I'm pulling from third parties and an artist's past work a lot of the time)

03 Greedo & Mustard - Still Summer in the Projects (West Coast Hip Hop, Trap Rap)

1TEAM - HELLO! (K Pop)

A Brilliant Lie - Threads: Weaver (Alternative Rock, Pop Punk)

American Pleasure Club - Fucking Bliss (Post-Industrial, Ambient Pop, Drone)

Ben Platt - Sing To Me Instead (Pop)

Betty Carter- The Music Never Stops (Vocal Jazz)

Billie Eilish - When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (Alternative R&B, Electropop)

Borleone - Hard to Kill (Trap Rap)

Brutus - Nest (Post-Hardcore, Alternative Rock)

C Duncan - Health (Indie Pop, Indie Rock)

Carcer City - Silent War (Metalcore)

Chris Cohen - Chris Cohen (Singer-Songwriter, Indie Pop)

Clint Alphin - Straight to Marrow (Singer-Songwriter, Bluegrass)

Coughy - Ocean Hug (Indie Pop)

DJ Muggs & Mach-Hommy - Tuez-Les Tous (East Coast Hip Hop)

Devin Townsend - Empath (Progressive Metal, Avant-Garde Metal)

Facs - Lifelike (Post-Punk Revival)

Fennesz - Agora (Ambient, Electroacoustic)

Fredo Bang - Big Ape (Trap)

Garcia Peoples - Natural Facts (Psychedelic Rock, Roots Rock)

George Strait - Honky Tonk Time Machine (Country)

I Prevail - TRAUMA (Metal Core)

ILL BILL - Cannibal Hulk (East Coast Hip Hop, Hardcore Hip Hop)

Ian Simmonds - All That's Left (Downtempo, Jazz)

JBJ95 - Awake (K Pop)

Jake Miller - Based on a True Story. EP (Pop)

Jake Owen - Greetings from...Jake (Bro Country)

Jamie Lawson - The Years In Between (Singer Songwriter)

Jo Schornikow - Secret Weapon (Ambient Pop, Indie Pop)

K Á R Y Y N - The Quanta Series (Art Pop, Glitch Pop)

L.A. Guns - The Devil You Know (Hard Rock, Glam Metal)

LION BABE - Cosmic Wind (Contemporary R&B)

La Bouquet - Sad People Dancing (Contemporary R&B)

Laura Stevenson - The Big Freeze (Indie Folk, Folk Rock)

Lil Debbie - Bay Chronicles (Trap Rap)

Logic - Supermarket (Soundtrack) (Indie Pop, Pop Rap)

M. Lockwood - Communion In The Ashes (Alt-Country, Indie Folk, Power Pop)

MaHaWaM - Is an Island (Hip Hop, House, Indie Pop)

Magic Circle - Departed Souls (Traditional Doom Metal, Heavy Psych)

Marvin Gaye - You’re the Man (Soul)

Matthew Herbert Big Band - The State Between Us (Big Band, Electronic)

Mdou Moctar - Ilana: The Creator (Tishoumaren)

Mechanical God Creation - The New Chapter (Death Metal)

Mekons - Deserted (Art Punk)

Melii - phAses (Pop)

Monsta X - Shout Out (K Pop)

Moodie Black - MB I I I. V MICHOA (Industrial Hip Hop)

Moon Tooth - Crux (Progressive Metal)

Musket Hawk - Upside of Sick (Grindcore, Doom Metal)

NEIKED - Best Of Hard Drive (Dance Pop)

Nightmarathons - Missing Parts (Pop Punk)

O.A.R. - The Mighty (Pop Rock)

OWEL - Paris (Emo, Indie Rock)

Ohtis - Curve of Earth (Indie Folk)

Okey Dokey - Tell All Your Friend (Indie Pop)

Oshiego - The Book of Wonders (Death Metal, Thrash Metal, Grindcore)

PENTAGON (Korea) - Genie:us (K Pop)

Park Ji Hoon - O'CLOCK (K Pop)

pH-1 - HALO (K Pop)

Pink Sweat$ - Volume 2 EP (Singer Songwriter)

Quelle Chris - Guns (Abstract Hip Hop)

Randy Randall - Sound Field Volume One (Ambient, Drone)

Reaches - Wherever The Internet Goes, Sorrow Follows (Dance Pop, House)

Saweetie - ICY EP (Trap Rap)

Section H8 - Phase One (Hardcore Punk, Heavy Metal)

Show Me The Body - Dog Whistle (Hardcore Punk)

Simple Creatures - Strange Love (Pop Rock, Electropop)

Small Feet - With Psychic Powers (Indie Pop, Indie Folk)

Son Volt - Union (Americana, Alt-Country)

Soulja Boy Tell 'Em - Tell Ya (Pop Rap)

Stella Parton - Survivor (Country)

Steve Earle & The Dukes - GUY (Americana, Country Rock)

Stray Kids - Clé 1: MIROH (K Pop)

Suzi Quatro - No Control (Hard Rock)

TAEYEON - Four Seasons (K Pop)

Tay Iwar - GEMINI (Singer Songwriter)

The Bobbleheads - Myths and Fables (Pop Rock, Indie Rock)

The Maine - You Are OK (Pop Rock, Alternative Rock)

The Strumbellas - Rattlesnake (Indie Rock, Folk Rock)

The Underground Youth - Lust & Fear (Psychedelic Rock, Gothic Rock)

The XCERTS - Wildheart Dreaming EP (Power Pop )

Tom Williams - What Did You Want To Be? (Indie Rock)

Triumvir Foul - Urine of Abomination (Death Metal)

Unkle - The Road: Part II (Art Pop, Trip Hop)

White Denim - Side Effects (Indie Rock, Psychedelic Rock)

Whitechapel - The Valley (Deathcore, Groove Metal)

Wincent Weiss - Irgendwie anders (Pop)

Yelawolf - Trunk Muzik III (Southern Hip Hop)

Yngwie Malmsteen - Blue Lightning (Neoclassical Metal)

woods + segal (Billy Woods & Kenny Segal)- Hiding Places (East Coast Hip Hop)

So, tilder person. What is your lifting/exercise routine right now, what works and don't for you, what you did in the past, what method, what supplements, anything.

Let's trade ideas, rants and nude pictures of our sculpted bodies.

I just woke up from a nightmare. I will go back to sleep and post my part later.

People are regularly using regional tags like "south america", "europe", "asia", and "africa" on posts... but almost never "north america". If we're going to use tags based on continents, should we be consistent and include North America as one of those tags?

On the other hand, are continental tags even relevant? Should we just drop them, and use only country-specific tags?

(previous discussion)

There are a lot of "eu" tags being used, which leads to ambiguity about whether it's "europe" or "european union".

I think we should stop using "eu" entirely, and use only the longer, more informative, tags.

(previous discussion)

EDIT: Typo.

So the pre-announcement announcement for the next Borderlands game (which is probably not going to be Bord3rlands but something else) was posted today. It's pretty neato. But, as a HUGE fan of the first 2 games (Pre-Sequel was aight), to say that I'm pessimistic about the future of the franchise would be the understatement of the decade.

The odds are so completely stacked against the next Borderlands game, that it will be a miracle if the game is anything less than a catastrophe.

Every possible thing that could go wrong with the game, will go wrong, from the industry's standards to the developer and publisher of the title. I want to be wrong about this, but considering the circumstances surrounding it, I'm very comfortable expecting otherwise.

Allow me to go down the list, here:

• The Borderlands formula was built for loot boxes. You could even argue that it was the first AAA game to be designed AROUND them. The W/G/B/P/O rarity system that the game established has been used by every other similar system since. The entire game revolves around tiered loot, attained primarily through low-chance drop tables which the player has to grind through the game to find. The previous entries in the series made this formula fun for a bunch of reasons that are self-evident while playing, and by some miracle, Borderlands: TPS somehow came out before Overwatch showed the industry just how amazingly profitable it is to put unregulated gambling in a game made for minors.

I expect that the next game won't JUST have monetized loot boxes, but because they'll likely nerf Borderlands 2's already comparatively abysmal drop rates to make them more appealing, the game will REVOLVE around monetized loot boxes. Different tiers, different prices, approximately 30% of which can be earned in game, but only if you grind your heart out, because the game is also going to be designed for that. Next point:

• 2k Games, publisher of the previous three titles, is one of the only AAA publishers out there that hasn't yet successfully jumped onto the "games as services" bandwagon, and with the Borderlands formula basically being that of an MMO minus the enormous playerbase, plus decent shooting mechanics, you can expect it to follow in the footsteps of other such glorious recent titles as Anthem and Destiny 2.

Not only will the game likely be released unfinished and with the standard array of season passes and roadmaps that plague the industry, but the game will likely sacrifice what made the first 2-1/2 compelling and enjoyable (them being first and primarily progression-based RPGs) to keep players playing, grinding, and waiting for the next DLC drop. I'm expecting that the game will not have a proper end or a new-game-plus mode, instead turning the formula on it's head and following the aforementioned "Live Services" in their footsteps to create a dull, grindy experience which will basically serve as a platform to sell the aforementioned loot boxes and whatever else will be included, which, speaking of...

• like every other game produced by a company accountable to shareholders, you can expect aggressive monetization, stopping just short of pay-to-win gameplay, if it even does. 2k is one of the worst offenders for this, and at launch, I'm expecting a full, $60 game with a $25-$30 season pass that's ESSENTIAL to eventually get the finished product, and an array of loot boxes to further dig into your wallet. Not only that, but you can easily also expect other gameplay "enhancements", including:

• Drop chance and quality boosters (to make up for piss-poor drop rates)
• Experience and progression-circumvention boosters (to make up for the god-awful grind)
• A full array of new cosmetic options (now removed from the base game entirely, available only by purchase)
• 2-3 in-game currencies (and at least one premium currency on top of that, used to buy better loot)
• A vast swath of DLC which is NOT included in the season pass, announced anywhere from a few weeks to a few months after launch (most of all of which will be disappointing or the absolute bare minimum, at best)

• this is only barely touching on the gameplay and story itself, which is being developed and produced by Gearbox, a company who is at this point legendary for their inability to... function. From their CEO being one of the industry's most prominent jackasses to their... interesting... writing department their (apparently) sexist, rather uber-like office bro-culture, the most astonishing thing about the company is that it still exists - their last and only 3 major releases since Borderlands 2 in 2012 were Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Aliens: Colonial Marines, and Battleborn. They're also known for such titles as Bulletstorm, the most recent Duke Nukem, and, hilariously, are front-and-center in the publishing clusterfuck that surrounded We Happy Few being awful.

With their record, it's not just a surprise that they still exist, it's a surprise that the Borderlands franchise was ever produced successfully at all. Now, they're relying basically entirely on the next Borderlands launch in order to stay afloat - only one more nail in the coffin for the above points about monetization.

To say the odds are stacked against this game is doing it a disservice. The idea that it might be DECENT, never mind as good as it's predecessors, is laughable.

It saddens me to say it, too. I hold out hope that they'll pull a rabbit outta the hat on this and that the game will magically be one of the only examples of an uncompromising AAA game in the last 5 years. They somehow managed to produce the first few games in the franchise, and this one's been in development for a hellova lot longer.

But I'm not holding my breath.

I am going to be graduating with a BA in Economics in May, and I am overwhelmed, like most people, with all the stuff that I am now responsible for. I was mostly wondering what advice you wish you heard when you were 22.

I was fed up with the chores of writing consistent git commit messages, so a while ago I started developing a hook in Emacs which I used with Magit (actually git-commit-mode) which uses some crude heuristics to fill out the COMMIT_EDITMSG buffer for me. Here is what it does (| stands for the cursor):

• If only a single file modified, insert <filename>: |

  • If can figure out function name, insert <filename> (<functionname>): |

• If only a single file added, insert Add <filename>|

• If a TODO added to Readme.org, insert ; TODO <headline>|

• If a TODO was DONE, insert ; DONE <headline>|

• If the files are Readme.org and Readme.org_archive, and no new TODO's were added anywhere, insert ; Archive DONE|

• If the file is .gitignore, insert ; Ignore |

• If the file is TAGS, insert ; Update TAGS|

I extend this when I find new cases where I repeatedly do the same thing. The code is below. It's probably a good idea to use it as a starting point and personalise it because this reflects how I like to write my commit messages (and I like pretending how they do it over at Emacs git repo). It is sloppy and probably buggy, but I don't think it can be destructive.

Final note: I can't figure out how to set this up so that after this takes effect, the buffer is marked as modified. I want to flip the modified bit so that in some cases I can just hit C-c C-c and go. But I need to modify the buffer somehow to commit in some cases (I just type C-o to open a new line in those cases). Here is the function:

(defun gk-git-commit-mode-hook ()
  "Set up git commit buffer."
  ;; If a single file is modified, prefix the message w/ it.
  (let ((modified-re "^#	modified:")
        (new-re "^#	new file:")
        (issue-re "^[+\\- ]\\*+ \\(TODO\\|DONE\\) ")
        current-defun filename addp onlyp issuep)
    (save-excursion
      (with-current-buffer "COMMIT_EDITMSG"
        (goto-char (point-min))
        (re-search-forward "^# Changes to be committed:" nil t)
        (forward-line)
        (beginning-of-line)
        (cond ((looking-at modified-re)
               (re-search-forward ":   " nil t)
               (setf filename (thing-at-point 'filename t)))
              ((looking-at new-re)
               (re-search-forward ":   " nil t)
               (setf filename (thing-at-point 'filename t)
                     addp t)))
        (setq onlyp (progn
                      (forward-line)
                      (not (or (looking-at modified-re)
                               (looking-at new-re)))))
        (when (and onlyp (equal filename "Readme.org"))
          (goto-char (point-min))
          (when-let* ((pos (re-search-forward issue-re nil t)))
            (setq issuep (progn
                           (re-search-backward "\\*" nil t)
                           (buffer-substring (1+ (point))
                                             (line-end-position))))))
        ;; Try to set ‘current-defun’.
        (when onlyp
          (save-excursion
            (goto-char (point-min))
            ;; Error if not found, means verbose diffs
            ;; not enabled.
            (re-search-forward "^diff --git")
            (goto-char (line-beginning-position))
            (let ((str (buffer-substring (point) (point-max)))
                  (default-directory (expand-file-name "..")))
              (with-temp-buffer
                (insert str)
                (diff-mode)
                (goto-char (point-min))
                (setq current-defun (diff-current-defun))))))))
    (if onlyp
        (cond
         ((and issuep (not addp))
          (goto-char (point-min))
          (insert ";" issuep))
         ((equal filename "TAGS")
          (goto-char (point-min))
          (insert "; Update TAGS"))
         ((equal filename ".gitignore")
          (goto-char (point-min))
          (insert "; Ignore "))
         (filename
          (goto-char (point-min))
          (if addp
              (insert "Add " filename)
            (insert
             filename
             (if (and current-defun)
                 (format " (%s)" current-defun)
               "")
             ": "))))
      (when (and (equal filename "Readme.org")
                 (save-excursion
                   (goto-char (point-min))
                   (re-search-forward (concat modified-re " +Readme.org_archive")
                                      nil t))
                 (save-excursion
                   (goto-char (point-min))
                   (re-search-forward "\\-\\*+ DONE" nil t))
                 (not
                  (save-excursion
                    (goto-char (point-min))
                    (re-search-forward "\\+\\*[\\+\\-] TODO" nil t))))
        (goto-char (point-min))
        (insert "; Archive DONE")))))

(add-hook 'git-commit-mode-hook #'gk-git-commit-mode-hook)

Hope you find it useful.

in the interest of trying to slightly curtail the domination of politics in ~news for people who don't care for it while also consolidating discussion for people who potentially do, i think we should try one of those weekly threads that's so hip and popular on the rest of tildes, so here we go: this is a test run of a weekly thread on 2020 presidential news/analysis/etc. it's probably not going to get any lighter from here, news wise, so it might pay to establish a recurring topic like this before the media really gets rolling with election coverage (and potentially before ~news becomes a deluge of 2020 topics).

i think common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread if it works out, so i guess i'll just say: if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

leading off (and demonstrating that there really is going to be no dearth of 2020 primary and election news about this despite this week being pretty quiet on that front):

from NBC - Why some Democrats say: Don't sleep on 'Mayor Pete' Buttigieg. buttigieg is a pretty small candidate in a field of big names, but that hasn't put the damper on people's optimism for him as this NBC piece shows. i personally don't think he's got the runway necessary for takeoff, but with the debates, who knows. it might be that the debates stratify the field even more than it's already stratified--or it might be that they level it out a bit, to the benefit of people like buttigieg

from Buzzfeed - The Romance Of Mayor Pete In The Season Of Scam. another piece on buttigieg. this one is a bit light on substance and is basically an opinion piece, but if you're curious about buttigieg's qualifications you might be interested in it.

from Heavy - Bernie Sanders’ Los Angeles Rally Draws So Many, Overflow Crowd Fills City Hall Steps Across the Street [PHOTOS]. bernie sanders made the second of three stops in california yesterday, and he drew a pretty major crowd that's currently estimated at around 15k--and could potentially be as high as 20k or 25k, depending on the setup of the venue. his stop the day before was in san diego where he drew a crowd of about 6,400, and today he'll be in san francisco, which could lead to an early messaging and marketing win if he can draw a comparable crowd to kamala harris's kickoff in oakland (which drew 20k).

from The Guardian - The B-Team: are Beto, Biden and Bernie the best Democrats can offer?. i'll let this one present itself: "...But three of the top-polling candidates for 2020 so far are white men: Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, O’Rourke and former vice-president Joe Biden, who has not even declared his candidacy. Does that present a problem?" one of the big criticisms of the democratic party is that, even as it diversifies its slate of candidates across the board, its biggest hitters generally remain white and male, especially in this presidential election. whether or not that's a particularly valid criticism, i'll leave up to you.

from POLITICO - Harris and O'Rourke go straight for each other's strongholds. sanders wasn't the only one buzzing around this week: o'rourke and harris have both been on tours of their own in states that will be pretty instrumental to the path of any democrat that wants to win the nomination. o'rourke, you may remember (tildes discussion), is the current day-one fundraising leader, and it appears we now actually have his individual donor numbers now (112,000, average donation of $55). so far, he doesn't appear to have parlayed that into particularly large crowd sizes (and outside of her campaign launch, harris hasn't really either) but we're still very early on, so i anticipate as their campaigns ramp up they'll start pulling larger numbers.

from NBC - Beto O'Rourke could be a threat — to Biden on his right and Sanders on his left. this article, as you can probably guess by its title, mostly focuses on how beto is trying to position himself in the primary, but also how some of the people he appeals to feel about his candidacy and why they support him.

lastly, from NPR - Small Donors Hold The Key To Campaign Buzz And The Democrats' Debate Stage. this NPR article on push by democrats to incentivize campaigns to build up their small donor bases in the leadup to 2020. the democrats have pretty much always been the undisputed champions of small-donor politics since the internet became a significant player in american politics, mostly on the back of things like actblue. nevertheless, there are still a lot of places they've been looking to improve (and it's really only a matter of time before republicans build infrastructure of their own), so it makes sense that they're really trying to shore up that advantage where they can while they can.

this isn't even every article that i could have tossed on here, but i've already been working on this post for like an hour, so i think that'll suffice for now. feel free to contribute other interesting articles or comment on some of the ones up there.

Youtube has a giant lead in the online video streaming market and in spite of many controversies (demonetization, click bait being promoted to peoples' front pages, etc.) there doesn't seem to be any indication that this is going to change. What do you think about the future of this industry? Which (if any) providers have a chance to become viable competitors to YouTube?

I've been thinking a lot recently about space exploration and colonization, and the big question that's been running through my head has been this: would I be willing to leave everything on Earth behind and go to Mars, even if there was a strong possibility that I would never return home?

Wondering what everyone here on Tildes thinks about that question.

Accelerationism: most of us have heard of it, few of us have read into it, and a fair amount of us have shared memes around it (gotta go fast), but have any of us formed substantial opinions on it yet?

With a variety of authors of various views each weighing in on it, like Mark Fisher and the notorious Nick Land (alongside his genderswapped, trans, slightly less-racist partner-in-crime, Nyx Land); it really does seem to be (slowly but surely) gaining considerable mindspace. Have any of you ever read any works in the genre you adored? If so, feel free to share!

I've been somewhat of a lurker here, actively reading posts, but today I came across a topic which had a small typo in it. No big deal, but if this was wikipedia, I could easily go in and fix it... Then it hit me, what would a site like tilde be like if anyone could propose an edit to a post, and have that edit go into effect if the original poster approved it? Of course revision history would need to be available too, for accountability. Good idea? Bad? I'm just curious how that might play out.