among the things i have been working on for the past day and change is documentation of the novel uses of hierarchical tags on tildes, how they vary by group (or in the cases here, across most or all of the site), and how we might best begin to standardize, introduce, or deprecate them going forward so we're on the same page and end up with tags that aren't a giant, unfriendly, user-unintuitive mess.

obviously, though, this is something that should probably include community input since the community generally determines the tags used in the first place; therefore, this is your chance to check my work, suggest additions, removals, etc. to this draft and in the end, hopefully help craft a standard of hierarchical tagging that's simpler, more intuitive, and more consistent for everybody on the website to use so we can reduce future meta discussions on this and make tags better overall.

this will be done in chunks for convenience purposes (your sake and mine). therefore, if you would be so kind as to try and limit your suggestions to the pertinent tags, that would be most helpful.

Mostly group non-specific tags

There are also a number of tags which are more general and occur or can occur in several or all groups on the website. Some of the more common conventions of hierarchical tags that are generally not group-specific are:

economics. and similar tags

The economics tag can occur in several groups, most often ~science, ~news, and ~misc. While it can take hierarchical tags, standalone economics is usually fine. Nonetheless, with specific branches of economics like microeconomics and macroeconomics, hierarchical tags should probably be used (thus economics.micro, economics.macro, economics.applied, and so on). Examples of this in action (and further specification under this scheme) are:

• economics.trade (economics and trade)
• economics.micro.urban (urban microeconomics)
• economics.policy.employment (economic policy with respect to employment)

However, when placed in ~science, the standard is always socialsciences.economics over economics. to align with the standards of tagging in that group, thus socialsciences.economics.trade instead of economics.trade. Given that economics. in this case is itself a hierarchical tag, it may be pertinent to break off the last hierarchical tag into its own tag where it would lead to three consecutive hierarchical tags, like so:

• socialsciences.economics.micro and urban areas
• socialsciences.economics.policy and employment

law.

The law tag takes a very large number of modifiers and can be used in just about every group due to the fact that law generally transcends the current set of groups Tildes has. Historically, topics related to law have been tagged in the [modifier] law format (i.e. medical law, copyright law, us law, and so on); however, this has generally been phased out by the community in favor of using hierarchical tags for the modifiers. Therefore, with respect to pre-existing tags, constructions like medical law should be deprecated in favor of law.medical. In addition, the following tags which do exist should be converted accordingly:

• medical law (convert to law.medical)
• international law (convert to law.international)
• labor law (convert to law.labor)
• employment law (convert to law.employment)
• antidiscrimination laws (convert to law.antidiscrimination)
• copyright law (convert to law.copyright)
• maritime law (convert to law.maritime)
• environmental law (convert to law.environmental)
• gun laws (convert to law.guns)

All single modifier tags should follow a pattern like this. In other words, if you were going to tag something as "abortion law", you should do law.abortion instead of abortion law. Currently well established tags following this format are: law.citizenship, law.international, law.labor, law.marriage, and law.juvenile.

The following tags with location tags in them (and similar tags like them) should be converted slightly differently from the above tags. Instead of being rolled directly, the locator tag (or what would be the locator tag) should be broken out from the tag, and the tag that is left should have its modifier turned into a hierarchical tag if possible. Thus:

• usa federal laws is converted to law.federal and usa. (To elaborate in this case, the usa is separated, leaving federal laws which can be converted into law.federal)
• us law is similarly converted to law and usa
• european law is converted to law and european union

However, this should generally not be done with tags which refer to specific laws. For example religious neutrality law, blue laws and safe haven law are tags which should not be converted to use hierarchical tags because it makes little sense to do so.

There are also two specific tags which should generally not be rolled, which are martial law and law enforcement. Martial law is mostly used to refer to a specific state of affairs rather than an actual subset of law, so it makes little sense for this to be grouped into the law tag, while law enforcement is not really law in the sense being tagged here and is also covered by other tags like policing; using law.enforcement for this purpose would also be ambiguous, since it more likely would refer to enforcement of legal doctrine.

The use of the sharia law tag is ambiguous. Since sharia is de jure a form of law, it would make sense to roll it like the other examples so that the tag is law.sharia; however the two uses of it on Tildes are sharia law and there is currently no real consensus on whether or not to roll it in this manner.

nsfw., trigger., tw., cw. and similar tags

nsfw., trigger., tw, and cw. are all universal tags that have been used in one form or another to separate out content which might be objectionable and which are still useful for these purposes. Although all four have been used, the community has largely settled on a standard of using trigger. over tw. and cw. with potentially triggering content primarily for reasons of clarity (the trigger. tag also been put forward by Deimos previously as a way of handing potentially triggering and objectionable content). nsfw. is also sometimes used, but this is less frequent and usually carries a different implication than trigger. does.

As mentioned above, if you are using intending to use a tag of this sort, the preferred option in almost all cases is trigger. over tw. or cw.. For all intents and purposes, tw. and cw. should be considered mothballed and previous uses of them should probably be converted into trigger. at some point (particularly the duplicates tw.death, tw.suicide, and tw.selfharm).

The main established tags under the trigger. banner are:

• trigger.death
• trigger.selfharm
• trigger.suicide
• trigger.sexual violence
• trigger.rape
• trigger.assault
• trigger.child abuse
• trigger.transphobia
• trigger.homophobia (not used yet, but presumably applicable due to trigger.transphobia's existence)

These are self explanatory for the most part, and cover most bases; however, if you feel that a particular topic is likely to be triggering for some people, it would be courteous to tag it accordingly in line the above tags. (Do also note that all of these tags can be and often are applied as standalone tags instead of being grouped under trigger. due to the fact that trigger. has waxed and waned in popularity over Tildes's existence.)

If you are intending to post graphic content, or content which has the potential of exposing people to graphic content (broadly construed) and want to tag it accordingly, nsfw. is generally preferable over trigger.. nsfw. is quite rare, but one example of it in action is the nsfw.racism tag on Ignore The Poway Synagogue Shooter’s Manifesto: Pay Attention To 8chan’s /pol/ Board due to the exceptionally racist content screencapped as a part of the submitted article. nsfw.sex is also seen on Do Police Know How To Handle Abuse Within Kinky Relationships? due to the explicitly sexual nature of the article's subject, but this is more of a courteous measure than a necessary one--a qualified nsfw tag is generally not necessary, and if one is a moderator will most likely add it after the fact.

hurricanes., cyclones., and typhoons.

Tropical cyclone news generally fits into several places, most often ~news, ~enviro, or ~science. Generally, the standard for tagging tropical cyclones, whether they are hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, or other similar storms is to use the applicable term for the storm in question, and then use a hierarchical tag for the storm's name. Actual examples of this are:

• typhoons.yutu for the Pacific typhoon basin's Typhoon Yutu
• hurricanes.michael for the Atlantic basin's Hurricane Michael
• cyclones.idai for the South-West Indian basin's Cyclone Idai

This is relatively straightforward, and covers the nomenclature of all existing basins. However, some basins have not been represented on Tildes thus far, so here are the two cases where standards overlap for reference:

• the Pacific hurricane basin and the South Atlantic basin would both be represented by the same standard as the Atlantic basin (thus, hurricanes.patricia for the Pacific Hurricane Patricia and hurricanes.catarina for the South Atlantic Hurricane Catarina)
• the Australian, North Indian, and South Pacific basins would be represented by the South-West Indian basin's standard (thus, cyclones.tracy for Australian Cyclone Tracy, cyclones.fani for North Indian Cyclone Fani, and cyclones.gita for South Pacific Cyclone Gita).

For convenience purposes, storms which are named but have not hit hurricane status should probably still be referred to with the corresponding cyclonic storm tag for their basin, even though they have not formally reached hurricane, cyclone, or typhoon status.

If there is no name to refer to (i.e. a name has not been designated for the storm), a hierarchical tag should probably not be applied at all, since that would get messy and likely necessitate updates. With storms that have only nicknames or lack a name under the nomenclature since they predate cyclone naming (for example, the 1938 New England Hurricane) there's really no best way to do things, however, using a truncation of the nickname may be the most preferable option (for example: hurricanes.1938 new england).

week eight graces us with a particularly large edition of This Week in Election Night, 2020. a lot of candidates have been in the news, for good reasons and bad, and there's a bunch of stuff to go through. no opinion pieces this week, since i didn't end up compiling any particularly good ones and this is going to be pretty long already.

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 • Week 5 thread • Week 6 thread • Week 7 thread

News

General Stuff

• from NBC News: As Biden predicts a shorter race, rivals dig in for long fight. we begin with a prediction by biden, and disputes by everybody else, basically. this could honestly go either way, and it's really contingent on what happens on super tuesday in 2020. so many states vote on that day (13 states, falling on march 3) and they represent such a large share of delegates (almost half of them in total) that if anybody takes super tuesday decisively they're pretty much a lock for being the favorite at the convention--however, if super tuesday isn't decisive, it could very well come down to the wire.

• from the Guardian: California: why the cash cow state will take center stage in the 2020 race. in that vein, the biggest crown jewel of the super tuesday states will by far be california, having something obscene like 500 delegates. any candidate which decisively carries california is setting themselves up well for the convention (and incidentally in this respect harris has an inherent advantage since it's her homestate), so expect candidates to really target this state as we get closer to primary day and try and build a ground game there for the future.

• from Fast Company: Black women are the key to victory in 2020. Stop ignoring them. i said in the last thread that this was unlikely to go away, and unsurprisingly it remains an issue. see also last week's Women of color want 2020 Democrats to work for their vote and week 6's Black female voters to Democrats: 'You won't win the White House without us'.

Joe Biden

• from Reuters: Exclusive: Presidential hopeful Biden looking for ‘middle ground’ climate policy. we begin on a high note, with joe biden deciding... well... this: "Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden is crafting a climate change policy he hopes will appeal to both environmentalists and the blue-collar voters who elected Donald Trump, according to two sources, carving out a middle ground approach that will likely face heavy resistance from green activists." as far as details, this appears to be the most we have so far:

The backbone of the policy will likely include the United States re-joining the Paris Climate Agreement and preserving U.S. regulations on emissions and vehicle fuel efficiency that Trump has sought to undo...
The second source, a former energy department official advising Biden’s campaign who asked not to be named, said the policy could also be supportive of nuclear energy and fossil fuel options like natural gas and carbon capture technology, which limit emissions from coal plants and other industrial facilities.

• from VICE: A Biden Presidency Would Be a 'Death Sentence,' Climate Activists Warn. to put it lightly, biden's plan is getting fucking obliterated by climate activists. activists are unsurprisingly worried that biden, by trying to seek a middle ground, is basically just going to bring us into hellworld--a likely prospect, honestly, just going off what we have. VICE also expounds on just how unhelpful and non-specific biden's climate policy is so far with this detail:

Biden’s campaign website contains only three sentences about the greatest crisis ever to face humankind, and these are located midway down a secondary page. “We must turbocharge our efforts to address climate change and ensure that every American has access to clean drinking water, clean air, and an environment free from pollutants,” the site reads.

• from Mother Jones: The Planet Is Heading to Catastrophe and Joe Biden Apparently Wants to Take the “Middle Ground”. Mother Jones also has some other reporting which expounds on the amazing fact that biden somehow was the first person to really introduce climate change into the political arena, and yet his policy on it is borderline regressive nowadays. not the best look, although i doubt it'll change votes

• from POLITICO: Bernie Sanders: Biden’s reported climate plan ‘will doom future generations’. if you thought this criticism stopped at voters though, you'd be wrong, because sanders is just as unimpressed with this plan, and i'd imagine he is not the only candidate like this. this is probably about as strong of a rebuke as you'll ever see this early on: “There is no ‘middle ground’ when it comes to climate policy,” Sanders tweeted Friday. “If we don't commit to fully transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels, we will doom future generations.”

• from POLITICO: Florida takes shape as Joe Biden’s firewall. on a lighter note for biden, he is--for now anyways--the solid frontrunning candidate. florida in particular looks like a key state for him to win, which would be good news for him since it'll give him an advantage in the later half of the primaries (it will, in 2020, be one of the last large states to vote on account of not being a super tuesday state). given its demography, if he's on track to lose in this state, don't count on him realistically winning the primary.

Bernie Sanders

• from Roll Call: Bernie 2020 becomes first unionized presidential campaign in history. bernie sanders made history earlier this year by having his staff unionize (tildes discussion), and this seems to have finally been completely formalized this week. will this be a forebearer of a future presidential standard? i dunno, but it doesn't look like anybody else is going to pick up the idea this cycle, at least as things currently are, so probably not.

• from Pacific Standard: Bernie Sanders Says His Campaign's New Sexual Misconduct Policy Is the 'Gold Standard'. this was an issue in sanders's last presidential campaign (and it's also increasingly a campaign issue in general), so unsurprisingly sanders has rolled out a sexual misconduct policy this time around. this article mostly focuses on dos and don'ts, i should note; the original reporting here was done by the guardian o'er yonder and you can find the actual document for the campaign here.

• [LONGFORM] How Can Dems Win Back Rural America? Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Agree on the Answer. this is both a sanders and a warren piece, focusing mostly on their commonalities in agricultural policy. this has been a theme for the both of them early on; sanders has a very comprehensive set of proposals; of course so does warren. this article also goes into the general background of the issues they're trying to tackle.

Elizabeth Warren

• [LONGFORM] from TIME: 'I Have a Plan for That.' Elizabeth Warren Is Betting That Americans Are Ready for Her Big Ideas. i don't have a whole lot to say here. we have a tildes discussion on this piece, as it was posted earlier this week, so i would encourage you to post there if you have thoughts on this one like i did.

• from POLITICO: Trump backers applaud Warren in heart of MAGA country. warren's been hustling around a bit in the past week and change, even stopping over in rural west virginia on friday to talk about the opioid crisis and other socioeconomic factors which have been massively fucking over the region. pitstops like these presumably aren't going to be swinging things blue in west virginia again anytime soon, but as the article notes: "...Warren was here to try to send a message that she’s serious about tackling the problems of remote communities like this one." also, in case you're curious, you can find her policy on the opioid crisis here.

• from Reuters: Democrat Warren confronts 2020 electability question head-on in Ohio. she was also over in ohio this weekend, where she barnstormed on similar issues of tackling income inequality and the likes of that.

• from Slate: Warren Has Earned Her Wonk Reputation. this article from Slate is mostly an overview of the many, many policies that elizabeth warren has proposed just over the course of the campaign so far. it's a lot! the article does note that currently she seems to lack detailed policies on many of the big issues prioritized by democratic voters, but we're still pretty early in the campaign so i assume she'll roll those out in the future.

Kamala Harris

• from NBC News: Kamala Harris blows past Democratic rivals in fundraising in communities of color. kamala harris has been relatively quiet on the media for the past bit, but she's making headlines this week for her fundraising. she seems to be the significant frontrunner among minority communities as far as that goes. NBC finds that:

Harris pulled in at least $1 million from ZIP codes where most residents are not white, about two-and-a-half times the total of former Rep. Beto O'Rourke of Texas, who was second to Harris, raising more than $408,000 from the same set of neighborhoods, the analysis showed. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was third, about $1,400 behind O'Rourke, and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., was fourth, with at least $391,000.

• from CNN: Kamala Harris eyes black voters, women in campaign tour to win over Midwest. aside from fundraising, harris spend most of last week swinging through the midwest barnstorming in minority communities; her current angle seems to mostly run through women and minorities, and while she's doing relatively poorly in polling, people do seem to have interest in her campaign. CNN's most recent polling found "...Harris at 5% but leading the field at 23% among those polled when asked which candidate they'd most like to hear more about."

• from Reuters: Kamala Harris stood up to big banks, with mixed results for consumers in crisis. one of harris's signature points on which she's been campaigning is, in Reuters's words, "the $20 billion relief settlement she secured as California attorney general for homeowners hit hard by the foreclosure crisis"; this article proceeds to pour a bit of cold water on how this played out in practice, though, as harris's actions didn't prevent significant damage to many people's livelihoods.

Amy Klobuchar

• from The Guardian: 'Iowa slingshot': Amy Klobuchar plots midwest route to victory in 2020. klobuchar has also been pretty quiet (and been polling quite badly), but she's also gotten some attention this week. as this article talks about, her path to the presidency has always been basically the same: win over midwestern voters which democrats have been collapsing with since obama cleaned house in 2008. she has the electoral history to back this up: despite relatively close races up-ballot being pretty regular in minnesota since 2000, klobuchar has regularly destroyed her republican opponents statewide and won otherwise-republican-voting white people.

• from Politico: Klobuchar says she isn't worried that older white men are leading the 2020 race. she's also pretty optimistic about her chances. she notes that her campaign is still in the early stages and that despite the dominance of white men, there's still harris and warren in the top-eight, which suggests that she too could have capital as her campaign continues.

• from the Huffington Post: Amy Klobuchar On Female Presidential Candidates: ‘Discount Them At Your Own Peril’. and of course, she notes that discounting female candidates is something to be done at your own peril--female candidates have been particularly successful in recent electoral cycles.

• from Reuters: Klobuchar pitches pragmatism as she seeks to carve identity in Democratic presidential field. klobuchar's main ideological approach so far has been to be the "pragmatic" female candidate, advocating for a more incremental tackling of the issues instead of sweeping progressivism as advocated by people like warren. no signs of this changing, although she does openly consider herself to be a progressive in the same vein as people like warren and sanders.

Pete Buttigieg

• from POLITICO: Mayor Pete blindsides Kamala Harris in California. california has been a state targeted by just about every candidate so far, but the one with probably the biggest impact relative to how they poll has been buttigieg, who is putting a lot of people who might otherwise be donating to or endorsing harris in an interesting position with where they're going to place their support. LA mayor eric garcetti, who appeared at an event with buttigieg on thursday, might summarize this best:

“We have a lot of people who are very candidate curious,” Garcetti notes. “Kamala has a ton of love up and down the state, but people might say, ‘That doesn’t mean I’m not going to shop around … Maybe I’ll keep her as my senator and go with somebody else as president.’”

• from CBS News: Could Pete Buttigieg make history in LGBTQ-friendly Nevada?. buttigieg is also, obviously, hoping to make history with his candidacy, and he's been making overtures toward LGBT organizations accordingly. on saturday he was a headliner at the human rights campaign gala in nevada--nevada it should also be noted has a pretty large LGBT population, which is likely to help him significantly in the state.

• from NBC News: Buttigieg is the only top 2020 candidate not offering staffers health care yet. however, buttigieg hasn't had all good headlines this week. NBC news highlighted his campaign's failure to offer healthcare to staffers, an ignominious feat for him and something which stands in contrast to the rhetoric he's espoused on the campaign trail so far. NBC reports:

Buttigieg’s campaign currently has 49 workers, but has been staffing up rapidly, and plans to hit the 50 mark imminently.
“Crossing this threshold will put us in a position to get a good multi-state group plan, which we are currently negotiating,” said Buttigieg press secretary Chris Meagher.
In the meantime, the campaign is giving salaried staffers a $400 monthly stipend to buy health care themselves. That’s just enough for a single adult with no children to cover a “silver plan” through the Obamacare exchanges, according to national cost data analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Everybody Else

• from Buzzfeed News: Beto O’Rourke Has Hired The “Unsung Hero” Of Obama’s First Campaign. beto o'rourke scalped jeff berman, one of obama's most important staffers, which seems like pretty good news for him given that his campaign has been a bit of a mess with staffing in the past few weeks. berman was integral to obama's first presidential campaign, and was also on clinton's staff in 2016.

• [LONGFORM] from The Guardian: The astonishing disappearing act of Beto O’Rourke. of course, o'rourke is still in a great deal of trouble, having slid back into middling popularity with the democratic base, and this piece by The Guardian goes into detail both on his past, his current, and what he's hoping will be his future.

• from the Huffington Post: Kirsten Gillibrand Vows To Only Nominate Judges Who Uphold Roe v. Wade. despite only polling at like, 2%, gillibrand is still pushing the resistance angle. in contrast to donald, she is pledging to only nominate pro-choice judges.

• from CBS News: Cory Booker unveils "Justice Academy" to recruit, teach volunteers. cory booker meanwhile is kicking up his campaign organizing, setting up training camps for volunteers and all that fun stuff. the purpose of these: "Volunteers ... will learn community organizing techniques to engage supporters around a wide array of Booker's main campaign issues, including criminal justice reform, gun violence prevention, and health care."

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

Wow it was hard to describe this in the title! I should have said "data-centric APP" not UI. Sorry! LOL
I have had an idea for 25 years that I keep NOT pursuing because I was convinced that the next big version of Linux/Windows/etc would include a more civilized way to manage data. It just seems obvious in my strange mind, I guess that means intuitive. I've discussed the idea and worked on refining the concepts with about 20 people and they all agreed.

My idea is based on a huge paradigm shift about managing all forms of data by the user. It's about how we manage data, not just file-system stuff or yet-another Windows/File Explorer or any of the numerous current Linux varieties. I'm honestly shocked that in 2019, the most original idea that's come about is to remove all the menus and toolbars (freeman) or add a bunch of tabs and hundreds of buttons (pretty much everything on Windows).

I am a software engineer and designer with 35 years experience - but with business class apps, not OS stuff. I am semi-retired and have a great deal of time to work on whatever interests me. And please note: Despite my advanced years ;-) LOL I am very current on the technologies I work with daily, which is mainly .net/c#. However, I just finished a year-long project that had a Java client running on a Raspberry Pi (which I love) paired with a WCF service running in IIS, along with an asp.net web client. Now I'm not an expert in any of that, but I'm not too shabby I don't think as I've made a good living and do mostly volunteer work right now.

I currently manage a massive amount of data, from files/dirs on Windows and Linux file-systems, to MSSQL and mySQL on both Windows and Linux, and of course some cloud data. And it takes several tools as you know, and it's incredibly inefficient and painful. And of course on Windows, Windows/File Explorer is - eh, I can't find a word strong enough. On Linux not much better. And I've spent the past two years searching, researching, testing, and praying.

My idea is to build an app that allows users - not just developers like me - but mostly aimed at business users - to manage data from various sources/technologies in a single unified and intuitive manner. The physical aspect is divorced from the UI which is divorced from the management engine. And it's grouped the way the user THINKS and WORKS with it. For example, let's say for PROJECT-A (and Client-1) I have various source code locations on 2 local hard drives, but also documents (technical specs, or maybe letters to the client, spreadsheets or timelines), and of course likely a database or two, some web-site links. How many places and how many apps would I have to use today to keep them all close by so I could get to them? Well, there'd be a couple of drive letters probably, maybe a few sub-folder levels deep, maybe documents on a network share, some collaborative docs in the cloud, and some web-site links in whatever-browser-you-use. You get the idea.

No file manager on any OS can give you much more than "Places" or file-system - drive letters on Windows or some mount points on Linux. Things like MyDocuments, MyMusic, MyInsanity - that stuff makes no sense because it's not how people work. What I want is a "work-space" where I can have any number of what I call "Data Sources" - and it doesn't matter what physical technology is underneath it - local hard drive, local sub-folder, mapped drive, unc mount, cloud, ftp - don't care - don't need to. I create a work-space, add data sources, order them however I want, name them whatever I want, and each "Data Source" has a manager or provider. A filesystem provider would make your data source look like Windows Explorer. But a database provider could look like MS SQL Server Manager or other db admin tool. And you put that workspace in a tab if you want, and have as many others in other tabs - or you put them on a menu, or on a popup that a middle-click brings up - doesn't matter. And everything I've just written, plus it's settings, is represented by Viewer objects. A hierarchical - tree-view or the likes - a flat view - a list-view - a preview pane, or editor pane - navigation tool (path/breadcrumbs) - a command line shell pane - drag/dock wherever in the tab you want. A main menu/toolbar + status-bar would be global and shared. And all THAT is bundled into a PARENT object - which contains the work-spaces, which contains the tabs, which contains the data sources + provider views/panes. And you can have as many of THOSE - parent objects - as you need, easily accessible in the custom titlebar at the top, or bottom, etc..

The point is - when I am working on PROJECT-A I manage it in a tab that contains ONLY the drive letters, or mount points, that are relevant (and named what I choose, meaning no drive letters forced on me even if that is the underlying reality nor any full paths or full URLs - just logical names I assign). This will NOT be some massive file manager with every folder on the system or 18 drive letters I'll never use. It will have all the web-site bookmarks I need, as well as databases I'm working with. This won't be an ALL-IN-ONE type of thing - you will STILL use your external apps, web browser, IDE or editor, mail app - but it will be a SINGLE place where ALL those data items get represented and where you can manage them in exactly the same way. I can copy/paste an email message to a file on my workstation, or copy a file from a network share to some machine remotely using ftp or http.

I hope this makes some kinda sense and doesn't just sound like the ramblings of yet-another aging geek who thinks he's got a great new idea. My usage scenarios are literally based on things I do every day, and are the result of observing myself as I work to see what my mind is doing. I do realize that we all work in our own way, and I've taken that into account. But there are basic things we all do concerning data management. And as I have hired, trained, and worked with a huge number of fellow programmers over my 35 years - without exception this was the most common soft point for them all. Keeping track of data. The same applies to all my clients. I've written software for accountants and attorneys, and a wide variety of business types - and without exception - every one of them had trouble with managing their data. One look at their Desktop or MyDocuments - or just watching them trying to find a letter in MS-Word - tells the whole story.

Ok there's my pitch - I'm looking for anyone who has interest, no matter what your skill level or how much time you can or cannot devote. We need people who can contribute only opinion and advice, as well as hardcore keyboard jocks like me who love to code for 36 hours at a clip ;-) LOL

Preface

Recently I briefly touched on the subject of cyclomatic complexity. This is an important concept for any programmer to understand and think about as they write their code. In order to provide a more solid understanding of the subject, however, I feel that I need to address the topic more thoroughly with a more practical example.

What is cyclomatic complexity?

The concept of "cyclomatic complexity" is simple: the more conditional branching and looping in your code, the more complex--and therefore the more difficult to maintain--that code is. We can visualize this complexity by drawing a diagram that illustrates the flow of logic in our program. For example, let's take the following toy example of a user login attempt:

<?php

$login_data = getLoginCredentialsFromInput();

$login_succeeded = false;
$error = '';
if(usernameExists($login_data['username'])) {
    $user = getUser($login_data['username']);
    
    if(!isDeleted($user)) {
        if(!isBanned($user)) {
            if(!loginRateLimitReached($user)) {
                if(passwordMatches($user, $login_data['password'])) {
                    loginUser($user);
                    $login_succeeded = true;
                } else {
                    $error = getBadPasswordError();
                    logBadLoginAttempt();
                }
            } else {
                $error = getLoginRateLimitError($user);
            }
        } else {
            $error = getUserBannedError($user);
        }
    } else {
        $error = getUserDeletedError($user);
    }
} else {
    $error = getBadUsernameError($login_data['username']);
}

if($login_succeeded) {
    sendSuccessResponse();
} else {
    sendErrorResponse($error);
}

?>

A diagram for this logic might look something like this:

+-----------------+
|                 |
|  Program Start  |
|                 |
+--------+--------+
         |
         |
         v
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+
|                 |    |                 |
|    Username     +--->+    Set Error    +--+
|    Exists?      | No |                 |  |
|                 |    +-----------------+  |
+--------+--------+                         |
         |                                  |
     Yes |                                  |
         v                                  |
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+  |
|                 |    |                 |  |
|  User Deleted?  +--->+    Set Error    +->+
|                 | Yes|                 |  |
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+  |
         |                                  |
      No |                                  |
         v                                  |
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+  |
|                 |    |                 |  |
|  User Banned?   +--->+    Set Error    +->+
|                 | Yes|                 |  |
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+  |
         |                                  |
      No |                                  |
         v                                  |
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+  |
|                 |    |                 |  |
|   Login Rate    +--->+    Set Error    +->+
| Limit Reached?  | Yes|                 |  |
|                 |    +-----------------+  |
+--------+--------+                         |
         |                                  |
      No |                                  |
         v                                  |
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+  |
|                 |    |                 |  |
|Password Matches?+--->+    Set Error    +->+
|                 | No |                 |  |
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+  |
         |                                  |
     Yes |                                  |
         v                                  |
+--------+--------+    +----------+         |
|                 |    |          |         |
|   Login User    +--->+ Converge +<--------+
|                 |    |          |
+-----------------+    +---+------+
                           |
                           |
         +-----------------+
         |
         v
+--------+--------+
|                 |
|   Succeeded?    +-------------+
|                 | No          |
+--------+--------+             |
         |                      |
     Yes |                      |
         v                      v
+--------+--------+    +--------+--------+
|                 |    |                 |
|  Send Success   |    |   Send Error    |
|    Message      |    |    Message      |
|                 |    |                 |
+-----------------+    +-----------------+

It's important to note that between nodes in this directed graph, you can find certain enclosed regions being formed. Specifically, each conditional branch that converges back into the main line of execution generates an additional region. The number of these distinct enclosed regions is directly proportional to the level of cyclomatic complexity of the system--that is, more regions means more complicated code.

Clocking out early.

There's an important piece of information I noted when describing the above example:

. . . each conditional branch that converges back into the main line of execution generates an additional region.

The above example is made complex largely due to an attempt to create a single exit point at the end of the program logic, causing these conditional branches to converge and thus generate the additional enclosed regions within our diagram.

But what if we stopped trying to converge back into the main line of execution? What if, instead, we decided to interrupt the program execution as soon as we encountered an error? Our code might look something like this:

<?php

$login_data = getLoginCredentialsFromInput();

if(!usernameExists($login_data['username'])) {
    sendErrorResponse(getBadUsernameError($login_data['username']));
    return;
}

$user = getUser($login_data['username']);
if(isDeleted($user)) {
    sendErrorResponse(getUserDeletedError($user));
    return;
}

if(isBanned($user)) {
    sendErrorResponse(getUserBannedError($user));
    return;
}

if(loginRateLimitReached($user)) {
    logBadLoginAttempt($user);
    sendErrorResponse(getLoginRateLimitError($user));
    return;
}

if(!passwordMatches($user, $login_data['password'])) {
    logBadLoginAttempt($user);
    sendErrorResponse(getBadPasswordError());
    return;
}

loginUser($user);
sendSuccessResponse();

?>

Before we've even constructed a diagram for this logic, we can already see just how much simpler this logic is. We don't need to traverse a tree of if statements to determine which error message has priority to be sent out, we don't need to attempt to follow indentation levels, and our behavior on success is right at the very end and at the lowest level of indentation, where it's easily and obviously located at a glance.

Now, however, let's verify this reduction in complexity by examining the associated diagram:

+-----------------+
|                 |
|  Program Start  |
|                 |
+--------+--------+
         |
         |
         v
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+
|                 |    |                 |
|    Username     +--->+   Send Error    |
|    Exists?      | No |    Message      |
|                 |    |                 |
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+
         |
     Yes |
         v
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+
|                 |    |                 |
|  User Deleted?  +--->+   Send Error    |
|                 | Yes|    Message      |
+--------+--------+    |                 |
         |             +-----------------+
      No |
         v
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+
|                 |    |                 |
|  User Banned?   +--->+   Send Error    |
|                 | Yes|    Message      |
+--------+--------+    |                 |
         |             +-----------------+
      No |
         v
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+
|                 |    |                 |
|   Login Rate    +--->+   Send Error    |
| Limit Reached?  | Yes|    Message      |
|                 |    |                 |
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+
         |
      No |
         v
+--------+--------+    +-----------------+
|                 |    |                 |
|Password Matches?+--->+   Send Error    |
|                 | No |    Message      |
+--------+--------+    |                 |
         |             +-----------------+
     Yes |
         v
+--------+--------+
|                 |
|   Login User    |
|                 |
+--------+--------+
         |
         |
         v
+--------+--------+
|                 |
|  Send Success   |
|    Message      |
|                 |
+-----------------+

Something should immediately stand out here: there are no enclosed regions in this diagram! Furthermore, even our new diagram is much simpler to follow than the old one was.

Reality is rarely simple.

The above is a really forgiving example. It has no loops, and loops are going to create enclosed regions that can't be broken apart so easily; it has no conditional branches that are so tightly coupled with the main path of execution that they can't be broken up; and the scope of functionality and side effects are minimal. Sometimes you can't break those regions up. So what do we do when we inevitably encounter these cases?

High cyclomatic complexity in your program as a whole is inevitable for sufficiently large projects, especially in a production environment, and your efforts to reduce it can only go so far. In fact, I don't recommend trying to remove all or even most instances of cyclomatic complexity at all--instead, you should just be keeping the concept in mind to determine whether or not a function, method, class, module, or other component of your system is accumulating technical debt and therefore in need of refactoring.

At this point, astute readers might ask, "How does refactoring help if the cyclomatic complexity doesn't actually go away?", and this is a valid concern. The answer to that is simple, however: we're hiding complexity behind abstractions.

To test this, let's forget about cyclomatic complexity for a moment and instead focus on simplifying the refactored version of our toy example using abstraction:

<?php

function handleLoginAttempt($login_data) {
    if(!usernameExists($login_data['username'])) {
        sendErrorResponse(getBadUsernameError($login_data['username']));
        return;
    }

    $user = getUser($login_data['username']);
    if(isDeleted($user)) {
        sendErrorResponse(getUserDeletedError($user));
        return;
    }

    if(isBanned($user)) {
        sendErrorResponse(getUserBannedError($user));
        return;
    }

    if(loginRateLimitReached($user)) {
        logBadLoginAttempt($user);
        sendErrorResponse(getLoginRateLimitError($user));
        return;
    }

    if(!passwordMatches($user, $login_data['password'])) {
        logBadLoginAttempt($user);
        sendErrorResponse(getBadPasswordError());
        return;
    }

    loginUser($user);
    sendSuccessResponse();
}

$login_data = getLoginCredentialsFromInput();

handleLoginAttempt($login_data);

?>

The code above is functionally identical to our refactored example from earlier, but has an additional abstraction via a function. Now we can diagram this higher-level abstraction as follows:

+-----------------+
|                 |
|  Program Start  |
|                 |
+--------+--------+
         |
         |
         v
+--------+--------+
|                 |
|  Attempt Login  |
|                 |
+-----------------+

This is, of course, a pretty extreme example, but this is how we handle thinking about complex program logic. We abstract it down to the barest basics so that we can visualize, in its simplest form, what the program is supposed to do. We don't actually care about the implementation unless we're digging into that specific part of the system, because otherwise we would be so bogged down by the details that we wouldn't be able to reason about what our program is supposed to do.

Likewise, we can use these abstractions to hide away the cyclomatic complexity underlying different components of our software. This keeps everything clean and clutter-free in our head. And the more we do to keep our smaller components simple and easy to think about, the easier the larger components are to deal with, no matter how much cyclomatic complexity all of those components share as a collective.

Final Thoughts

Cyclomatic complexity isn't a bad thing to have in your code. The concept itself is only intended to be used as one of many tools to assess when your code is accumulating too much technical debt. It's a warning sign that you may need to change something, nothing more. But it's an incredibly useful tool to have available to you and you should get comfortable using it.

As a general rule of thumb, you can usually just take a glance at your code and assess whether or not there's too much cyclomatic complexity in a component by looking for either of the following:

• Too many loops and/or conditional statements nested within each other, i.e. you have a lot of indentation.
• Many loops in the same function/method.

It's not a perfect rule of thumb, but it's useful for at least 90% of your development needs, and there will inevitably be cases where you will prefer to accept some greater cyclomatic complexity because there is some benefit that makes it a better trade-off. Making that judgment is up to you as a developer.

As always, I'm more than willing to listen to feedback and answer any questions!

"Every year the LGBTQ youth support group of The Humsafar Trust, Yaariyan, organizes a flashmob at a prominent location in Mumbai during Queer Azadi Mumbai Pride Month. This year it is extra special because it is the first LGBTQ flashmob after decriminalization of the LGBTQ community."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX2wjjOFL3w

Because sometimes we need a bit of joy in our lives...

Introduction

I want to give an introduction on several physics topics at a level understandable to laypeople (high school level physics background). Making physics accessible to laypeople is a much discussed topic at universities. It can be very hard to translate the professional terms into a language understandable by people outside the field. So I will take this opportunity to challenge myself to (hopefully) create an understandable introduction to interesting topics in modern physics. To this end, I will take liberties in explaining things, and not always go for full scientific accuracy, while hopefully still getting the core concepts across. If a more in-depth explanation is wanted, please ask in the comments and I will do my best to answer.

Previous topics

Bookmarkable meta post with links to all previous topics

Today's topic

Today's topic is the dual nature of light and matter, the wave-particle duality. It is a central concept in quantum mechanics that - as is tradition - violates common sense. I will first discuss the duality for light and then, in the next post, for matter.

The dual nature of light

In what terms can we think of light so that its behaviour becomes understandable to us? As waves? Or as particles? There are arguments to be made for both. Let's look at what phenomena we can explain if we treat light as a wave.

The wave nature of light

Let's start with an analogy. Drop two stones in a pond, imagine what happens to the ripples in the pond when they meet each other. They will interact, when two troughs meet they amplify each other, forming a deeper trough. When two crests meet they do the same. When a crest and a trough meet they cancel out.

Now if we shine light through two small openings and observe the resulting pattern, we see it's just like ripples in a pond, forming an interference pattern. When looking at the pattern formed on a screen placed at some distance from the openings, we see a striped pattern Light can be described as an electromagnetic wave, with crests and troughs. It sure seems like light is wavey! The wave nature of light allows us to describe phenomena like refraction and diffraction.

The particle nature of light

When we shine light on some metals, they will start tossing out electrons. This is called the photoelectric effect. How can we understand this process? Well we know light is a wave, so we imagine that the wave crashes into the electron that is chilling out near the surface of the metal. Once the electron has absorbed enough of the light's energy it will be able to overcome the attractive forces between itself and the positively charged atom core (remember, an electron has negative charge and so is attracted to the atom cores). So a higher intensity of light should make the electron absorb the required amount of energy more quickly. Easy, done!

However, there's something very peculiar going on with the photoelectric effect. If we shine low frequency light on said metal, no matter how intense the light, not a single electron will emerge. Meanwhile if we shine very little high frequency light on the metal, no matter how low the intensity, the electron will emerge. But how can this be? A higher intensity of light should mean the electron is receiving more energy. Why does frequency enter into this?

It seems that the electron needs a single solid punch in order to escape the metal. In other words, it seems it needs to be hit by something like a microscopic billiard ball that will punch it out of the metal in one go. The way physicists understand this is by saying light is made up out of particles called photons, and that the energy a photon carries is linked to its frequency. So, now we can understand the photoelectric effect! When the frequency is high enough, the photons in the light beam all individually carry enough energy to convince an electron to leave the metal. When the frequency is too low, none of the photons individually can knock an electron out of the metal. So even if we fire a single photon, with high enough frequency, at the metal we will see one electron emerging. If we shine low frequency light with a super high intensity at the metal, not a single photon will emerge.

So there you have it! Light is made out of particles. Wait, what? You just told us it's made out of electromagnetic waves!

The wave-particle duality of light

So, maybe light is just particles and the wave are some sort of emerging behaviour? This was a popular idea, one that Einstein held for some time. Remember the experiment where we shone light through two small openings and saw interference (commonly known as the double slit experiment)? Let's just take a single photon and shoot it at the openings! Because light is particles we'll see the photon just goes through either opening - like a particle would. Then all the non-believers will have to admit light is made out of particles! However, when we do the experiment we see the photon interfere with itself, like it was a wave. Remember this picture which we said was due to wave interference of light? When a single photon goes through the openings, it will land somewhere on the screen, but it can only ever land in an area where the light waves wouldn't cancel out. If we shoot a bunch of photons through the openings one at a time, we will see that the photons create the same pattern as the one we said is due to wave interference!

Implications

So it would seem light acts like a particle in some cases, but it acts like a wave in some others. Let's take a step back and question these results. Why are we trying to fit light into either description? Just because it's convenient for us to think about things like waves and particles - we understand them intuitively. But really, there is no reason nature needs to behave in ways we find easy to understand. Why can't a photon be a bit wavey and a bit particley at the same time? Is it really that weird, or is it just our intuition being confused by this world we have no intuitive experience with? I would love to hear your opinions in the comments!

Observing photons

To add one final helping of crazy to this story; if we measure the photon's location right after it emerges from the slit we find that it doesn't interfere with itself and that it just went through a single slit. This links back to my previous post where I described superpositions in quantum mechanics. By observing the photon at the slits, we collapsed its superposition and it will behave as if it's really located at one spot, instead of being somehow spread out like a wave and interacting with itself. The self interaction is a result of its wavefunction interacting with itself, a concept that I will explain in the next post.

Conclusion

We learned that light cannot be described fully by treating it simply as a wave or simply as a bunch of particles. It seems to be a bit of both - but neither - at the same time. This forces us to abandon our intuition and accept that the quantum world is just fundamentally different from our every day life.

Next time

Next time we will talk about the dual nature of matter and try to unify the wave and particle descriptions through a concept known as the wavefunction.

Feedback

As usual, please let me know where I missed the mark. Also let me know if things are not clear to you, I will try to explain further in the comments!

Addendum

The photoelectric effect is actually what gave Einstein his Nobel prize! Although he is famous for his work on relativity theory he was very influential in the development of quantum mechanics too.

Introduction

I want to give an introduction on several physics topics at a level understandable to laypeople (high school level physics background). Making physics accessible to laypeople is a much discussed topic at universities. It can be very hard to translate the professional terms into a language understandable by people outside the field. So I will take this opportunity to challenge myself to (hopefully) create an understandable introduction to interesting topics in modern physics. To this end, I will take liberties in explaining things, and not always go for full scientific accuracy, while hopefully still getting the core concepts across. If a more in-depth explanation is wanted, please ask in the comments and I will do my best to answer.

Previous topics

Bookmarkable meta post with links to all previous topics

Today's topic

Today's topic will be light emitting diodes, better known as LEDs. As the name suggests, we'll have to discuss light and diodes. We will find out why LEDs can only emit a single colour and why they don't get hot like other sources of light. Let's start by discussing diodes, in case you are already familiar with diodes note that I will limit the discussion to semiconductor (p-n with a direct bandgap) diodes as that's the type that's used in LEDs.

What's a diode?

A diode is an electronic component that, ideally, only lets electric current through in one direction. In other words it's a good resistor when the current flows in one direction and a really good conductor when the current flows in the other direction. Let's look a bit closer at how diodes function.

Semiconductors

Diodes are made out of two different semiconducting materials. In everyday life we tend to classify materials as either conducting (metals being the prime example) or non-conducting (wood, plastics, rubber). Conductance is the flow of electrons through a material, a conducting material has a lot of electrons that can move freely through a material while an insulator has none. Semiconducting materials fall in between these two categories. They do conduct but not a lot, so in other words they have a few electrons that can move freely.

N-type semiconductors

We are able to change a semiconductor's conductivity by adding tiny amounts of other materials, this is called doping. As an example, we can take silicon (the stuff that the device you're reading this on is made out of) which is the most well-known semiconductor. Pure silicon will form a crystal structure where each silicon atom has 4 neighbours, and each atom will share 1 electron with each neighbour. Now we add a little bit of a material that can share 5 electrons with its neighbours (how generous!). What will happen? Four of its shareable electrons are busy being shared with neighbours and won't leave the vicinity of the atom, but the fifth can't be shared and is now free to move around the material! So this means we added more freely flowing electron and that the conductivity of the semiconductor increases. An illustration of this process is provided here, Si is chemistry-talk for silicon and P is chemistry-talk for phosphorus, a material with 5 shareable electrons. This kind of doping is called n-type doping because we added more electrons, which have a negative charge, that can freely move.

P-type semiconductors

We can do the same thing by adding a material that's a bit stingy and is only willing to share 3 electrons, for example boron. Think for a moment what will happen in this case. One of the silicon atoms neighbouring a boron atom will want to share an electron, but the boron atom is already sharing all of its atoms. This attracts other electrons that are nearby, one of them will move in to allow the boron atom to share a fourth electron. However, this will create the same problem elsewhere in our material. Which will also get compensated, but this just creates the same problem once more in yet another location. So what we now have is a hole, a place where an electron should be but isn't, that is moving around the crystal. So in effect we created a freely moving positive charged hole. We call this type of doping p-type. Here's an illustration with B the boron atoms.

Creating a diode

So what would happen if we took a n-type semiconductor and a p-type semiconductor and pushed them against one another? Suddenly the extra free-flowing electrons of the n-type semiconductor have a purpose; to fill the holes in the p-type. So these electrons rush over and fill the holes nearest to the junction between the two semiconductors. However, as they do this a charge imbalance is created. Suddenly the region of p-type semiconductor that is near the junction has an abundance of electrons relative to the positive charges of the atom cores. A net negative charge is created in the p-type semiconductor. Similarly, the swift exit of the electrons from the n-type semiconductor means the charge of the cores there isn't compensated, so the region of the n-type semiconductor near the junction is now positively charged. This creates a barrier, the remaining free electrons of the n-type cannot reach the far-away holes of the p-type because they have to get through the big net negative charge of the p-type near the junction. Illustration here. We have now created a diode!

How diodes work

Think for a moment what will happen if we send current* (which is just a bunch of electrons moving) from the p-type towards the n-type. The incoming electrons will face the negative charge barrier of the p-type and be unable to continue. This means there is no current. In other words the diode has a high resistance. Now let's flip things around and send electrons through the other way. Now they will come across the positive charge barrier of the n-type semiconductor and be attracted to the barrier instead. The electrons' negative charge compensates the net positive charge of the barrier on the n-type and it will vanish. This destroys the equilibrium situation of the barrier. The p-type holes are no longer repelled by the positive barrier of the n-type (as it no longer exists) and move closer to the junction, this means the entire barrier will fade and current can move through. We now have a conductor.

OK, but I don't see what this has to do with light

Now let's find out how we can create light using this method. When current is applied to a diode what happens is that one side of the diode is at a higher energy than the other side. This is what motivates the electrons to move, they want to go from high energy to low energy. If the p-type semiconductor is at a higher energy than the n-type the electron will, upon crossing the junction between the two types, go from a high energy level to a lower one. This difference in energy must be compensated because (as @ducks mentioned in his thermodynamics post) energy cannot be destroyed. So where does the energy go? It gets turned into light!

The energy difference between the p-type and n-type is fixed, meaning a fixed amount of energy is released each time an electron crosses the junction. This means the light is of a single colour (colour is how we perceive the wavelength of light, which is determined by the energy of the light wave). Furthermore, none of the energy is lost so there is no energy being turned into heat, in other words the LED does not get warm.

Conclusion

So now we know why the LED is so power-efficient; it does not turn any energy into heat, it all goes into light. We now also know why they only emit a single colour, because the energy released when an electron crosses the junction is fixed.

Next time

I think next time I will try to tackle the concept of wave functions in quantum mechanics.

Feedback

As usual, please let me know where I missed the mark. Also let me know if things are not clear to you, I will try to explain further in the comments!

Addendum

*) Yes, current flow is defined to be opposite to the flow of the electrons, but I don't want to confuse readers with annoying definitions.

Google knows a lot about its users. Facebook knows a lot about its users. FitBit knows a lot about its users. And so on.

But what happens when these companies all sell their data sets to one another? It'd be pretty trivial to link even anonymized users from set to set by looking for specific features. If I went for a run, Google tracked my location, FitBit tracked my heart rate, and Facebook tracked my status about my new best mile time, for example. Thus, Google can narrow down who I am in the other sets using pre-existing information that coincides with theirs. With enough overlap they can figure out exactly who I am fairly easily. Furthermore, each additional layer of data makes this discovery process from new data sets even easier, as it gives more opportunities to confirm or rule out concurrent info. So then when, say, Credit Karma, Comcast, and Amazon's data enter the fray, my online identity stops looking like an individual egg in each different basket but a whole lot of eggs in all in one. And they can do this across millions/billions of users--not just me!

I don't know for certain that this is a thing that happens, but... I have to assume it definitely is happening, right? How could it not? With how valuable data is and how loose protections are, this seems like a logical and potentially very lucrative step.

Right now, is there an aggregate version of "me" that exists in a data store somewhere that is a more comprehensive and accurate picture than my own self-image? After all, my memory and perception are imperfect and biased, but data stores aren't.

I have used a Nest (gen 1) for many years and recently switched it out for an Ecobee 3 with 3 additional room sensors.

The Nest worked as advertised and I was happy with it. I moved my thermostat location to a higher-traffic area of the house and used Nest Sense to have it automatically determine if I was away. All in all, I was pleased. The only reason I switched to Ecobee was so that I could use my Nest in another home and try something new.

The Ecobee is pretty much the same as the nest. They was you schedule temperatures is to first create Comfort Settings and then you schedule when they should run. It's a little less intuitive than the Nest, but it accomplishes the same task. The additional sensors are a nice touch but I find they are too sensitive. My ~50 lb dog can trigger them, which can run additional air conditioning when I wouldn't otherwise want it to run.

Hello Tildes, one common thread that I've noticed in a lot of the threads I've been browsing under ~hobbies and ~creative is that it seems like a lot of folks are looking for new hobbies and things to get into.

To that end one great hobby I've picked up somewhat recently is playing and collecting board games. To some of you, the term 'board game' likely inspires thoughts of old school board games like you may have played in your youth (Clue, Connect 4, Shoots N Ladders, Monopoly, Stratego) "Modern" board games can certainly still be as simple as some of those, but we are actually in a sort of second golden age for board games right now.

What I mean by the above statement is that quite recently (the last 5 years or so) Tabletop and board games have really become popular again, to the point where if you live in a major city there are most likely several places to buy games, and likely even a couple of places you can go to just hang out and play games that belong to the store. Between that, and the popularity of things like Wil Wheaton's TableTop on Youtube, both major game companies as well as small independent folks are creating more and arguably better games than ever in the past.

Now - to the actual subject of the post title. The games I'll list below vary from things most people have heard of or played (Cards Against Humanity) to somewhat obscure, but they should all be pretty easy to find, and very easy to pick up and get into. I'll try to include as much relevant information for each of them (Price, Number of players, Game type etc) and a brief description of what the game is like to play.

If anyone has any other suggestions to contribute please do - One of the best parts of the hobby is the community aspect and finding new games to play.

Let's start with something popular, but not quite ubiquitous yet -
Cards Against Humanity: (3-Unlimited(?) players, $25 Base game + Expansions, Play time Varies based on player count and house rules, ~1hr is a safe bet, but can be made shorter or longer by adjusting rules)
Cards against humanity is a NSFW card game described as 'a party game for horrible people' on the box, which is pretty accurate. Gameplay consists of one player (The judge) playing a black card from the top of a deck with a sentence on it such as "I drink to forget ______" after which the rest of the players will play a white card with things like "My ex-wife" or "Random Erections" or "A bigger, blacker dick" written on them. Once all of the players have played their white cards, they are shuffled, read aloud, and the "Judge" decides which of the white cards is their favorite, awarding a point to the player that played that white card. This is a great icebreaker game because it pretty much forces everyone to get outside of their comfort zone and get weird with it. There are many expansion packs, which are generally themed, but some are just general. These include more cards to keep things fresh after you've played through the originals too many times. - Note: Not recommended for Family Game Night.

Cthulu Dice (3-Unlimited(?) players, $11, Play time ~5-10 minutes):
Cthulu dice is what is called a "micro-game" it consists of just a single plastic (or metal, if you want to dent your table) die with some symbols on it. It's a variant of the old "put and take" game with a bit of a cthulu twist to it, this kind of game is great because it's simple, portable, can be taught to new players in minutes, and also makes a great drinking game. You can also add house rules or look up other variants to keep things fresh

Next up - Dixit (3-6 Players, $30 base game plus standalone expansions, Play time ~30-45 Minutes):
The gameplay of Dixit is somewhat similar to Cards Against Humanity with one player acting as a judge, but from there things get different and rather interesting. Whereas Cards Against Humanity has cards with absurd, obscure, or obscene sentences or words, Dixit has cards with pictures on them. The pictures are generally bizarre, surreal, and kind of whimsical art (Like these examples: https://i.imgur.com/VHtISAZ.png). The way the game is played is the "Judge" player will select a card from their hand and say a single word or phrase that describes something about the picture on the card (It could be a color, an object in the picture, the way the picture makes you feel, what the picture makes you think of, anything that makes sense really) and then plays the card face down. The other players then try to select a card from their hand that matches the judges phrase as best they can in order to fool the other players into picking their card instead of the judges. Once all players have played their face down cards, they are laid out and all players vote on which card they think is the original one played by the Judge, Points are handed out accordingly. Similar to Cards Against humanity, the expansions for this game are additional packs of cards, often following some loose theme to freshen up the game. Most of the expansions contain enough cards that they could be used to play the game standalone. This is a great game to play with people of any age or maturity, it can be as clean or as dirty as the people playing the game but is just generally always a good time.

For the next few games, the actual mechanics of gameplay can get pretty complex, and so rather than explain what the gameplay is like, I'll just link a relevant episode of TableTop for anyone who is interested enough to check them out.

Red Dragon Inn (2-4 Players, $35 Plus Expansions, Play time ~30-60 Minutes) Unfortunately, no TableTop of this one, I can expand if there's interest:
Red Dragon Inn is a game about what the adventurers from DnD do during their 'long rests' at the inn. It's intended to be a drinking game, with players assuming the roles of characters at the inn ( The base game comes with a Wizard, a Rogue, a Priestess, and Warrior ) and are given decks of cards containing context-sensitive actions and abilities. The goal of the game is to be the last person at the inn that isn't broke or passed out from injury or alcohol. The three main resources tracked are a characters health, sobriety, and coins and various cards can affect each of these in various ways. There's also a gambling mini-game that is a lot of fun. The expansions come in 2 types, main releases which consist of 4 new characters (later ones, 4+ seem not to work as well with the earlier ones, and may do better as standalones) as well as single character decks that aren't included in any of the main releases.

Tokaido(2-5 Players 3+ preferable, $30 + Expansion, Play time ~45-60 Minutes):
Tabletop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pipFRzGYgdk

Tokaido is a bit different than the rest of the games on this list so far in that it isn't explicitly competitive. At its' core, Tokaido is a game about seeing who can have the best vacation. Each player assumes the role of a different traveler (each with their own benefits and abilities) and proceeds on their way, trying to stop at the different available locations in such a way that they end the game with the most points (how points are scored is kinda complex, Watch the TableTop for this) but it tends to be a nice, low stress game as there's few ways to really 'attack' other players. There is currently one expansion out for it which introduces some new mechanics and does a good job of freshening up the game for players who have had it a while.

The Resistance/Avalon/Werewolf/Mafia and similar games (Many players, ~$15, Price varies, Play time ~30 minutes, depending on the variant):
Tabletop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_QRczGzXqw

The Resistance and similar are games about lying to your friends and trying to convince them that you are somebody that you're not. Or maybe they're games about telling the truth and trying to get people to believe you, that all really depends on the cards you draw. These are some of my favorite party games to play in a big group because it can really show you who among your friends has the best poker face. Games tend to go pretty quick so when a player is eliminated it's generally not a big deal (this can sometimes not be the case if the group is way large). Of the different variants I've played, Avalon is my personal favorite of the different variants due to the interesting mechanics that the additional roles bring to the table in this one.

Finally - Betrayal at the house on the hill (3-6 Players, more is better, $35 plus expansions, Play time ~60+ minutes )
Tabletop (Part 1 of 2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MINNKyE4fjs

Betrayal is my go-to example of how great a modern board game can be. It's a moderately complex game, but don't let that scare you off - after you play it once you'll get it just fine, and setup is relatively quick and easy compared to a lot of the other sort of "DnD Lite" games that exist (Lookin at you here, Arkham Horror!). The game consists of players exploring rooms in a spooky house, building out the map as they go from a stack of game tiles with rooms on them. The rooms will have different effects and trigger different types of events as the players explore through the house collecting items and discovering 'omens'. These 'omens' tie into the whole point of the game implied in the title, the "Betrayal". What this translates to in real terms is that for the first half of the game, all of the player characters are cooperating, trying to help each other get as many useful items and to position themselves in the house in such a way that when one of the other players inevitably fails the 'omen' check and triggers the 'haunt' and begins the second half of the game that the non-betrayers can survive and/or escape. Survive and/or escape what you might ask? That is one of my favorite parts about this game, in the base version there are over 50 different scenarios depending on a bunch of different factors. These scenarios can be everything from demonic possession, ghosts, werewolves, 'the blob' and many other creatures, monsters, and horrific situations and do an absolutely fantastic job of giving the base game a TON of replayability. On top of that, they released an expansion for the first game (Widow's Walk) which introduced even MORE scenarios, as well as new rooms and an entirely new floor to the house, as well as Betrayal at Baldur's Gate, which has similar gameplay but takes place in that universe.

I could really keep going all day, but I think this post has gotten well long enough. Let me know in the comments what games you guys play and love, or if you want to hear about some other kinds of games (There are too many to think about even coming close to touching on all of them: Deck building games, Dice building games, Pandemic-like games, Classics like Catan, Ticket to Ride, Dominion, Milles Borne etc etc etc)

Example post.

Should we add continent tags? We do it with europe and sometimes with asia or south america. But I've never seen north america alongside with usa or canada. When I searched for it, north america tag was used just once, 93 days ago.

Lots of new folks seem to be coming in these past days, so I wanted to make a post that compiles some useful things to know, commonly asked questions, and a general idea of tildes history (short though it may be). Please keep in mind that tildes is still in Alpha, and many features that are usually present such as repost detection haven't been implemented yet.

Settings

First of all, check out the settings page if you haven't yet. It's located in your user profile, on the right sidebar. There are different themes available, the account default is the 'white' theme, which you can change. I recommend setting up account recovery in case you forget your password, and toggle marking new comments to highlight new comments in a thread. There are more features available but you should go look in the settings yourself.

Posting

You can post a topic by navigating to a group and clicking on the button in the right sidebar. Tildes uses markdown, if you are not familiar with it check the text formatting doc page. Please tag your post so it is easier for other people to find, and check out the topic tagging guidelines. Some posts have a topic log in the sidebar that shows what changes were done to the post since it was posted. You can see an example here. Some people have the ability to add tags to posts, edit titles, and move posts to different groups. They were given the ability by Deimos, see this post.

Topic Tags

You can find all posts with the same tag by clicking on a tag on a post, which will take you to an url like https://tildes.net/?tag=ask, where ask is the tag you clicked on. Replace ask with whatever tag you want to search for. You can also filter tags within a group like this: https://tildes.net/~tildes?tag=discussion, and it will only show you posts within that group. Clicking on a tag while you are in a group achieves the same effect.

You can also filter out posts with specific tags by going to your settings and defining topic tag filters.

Comment Tags

Comment tags are a feature that was present in the early days of tildes, but was removed because of abuse. There were five tags you can tag on someone else's comment: joke, noise, offtopic, troll, flame. The tags have no effect on sorting or other systematic features; they were only used to inform the user on the nature of a comment. The tags would show up along with the number of people who applied them, like this: [Troll] x3, [Noise] x5

People used these tags as a downvote against comments they disliked, and because the tags appeared at the top of a comment in bright colors, they often would bias the user before they read the comment. The abuse culminated in the first person banned on the website, and the comment tags were disabled for tweaking.

As of September 07, 2018, the comment tags have been re-enabled and are experimented with. Any account over a week old will have access to this ability. The tagging button is located on the centre bottom of a comment. You cannot tag your own comment. Here are the comment tagging guidelines from the docs.

Currently, the tags are: exemplary, joke, offtopic, noise, malice. The exemplary tag can only be applied once every 8 hours, and requires you to write an anonymous message to the author thanking them for their comment. Similarly, applying the malice tag requires a message explaining why the comment is malicious. The tags have different effects on the comments, which you can read about here, and here.

Search

The search function is fairly primitive right now. It only includes the title and text of posts and their topic tags.

Default sorting

The current default sorting is activity, last 3 days in the main page, activity, all time in individual groups. Activity sort bumps a post up whenever someone replies to it. 'Last 3 days' mean that only posts posted in the past 3 days will be shown. You can change your default sort by choosing a different sort method and/or time period, and clicking the 'set as default' button that will appear on the right.

Bookmarks

You can bookmark posts and comments. The "bookmark" button is on the bottom of posts and comments. Your bookmarked posts can be viewed through the bookmark page in your user profile sidebar. Note: to unbookmark a post, you have to refresh first.

Extensions

@Emerald_Knight has compiled a list of user created extensions and CSS themes here: https://gitlab.com/Emerald_Knight/awesome-tildes

In particular, I found the browser extension Tildes Extended by @crius and @Bauke very useful. It has nifty features like jumping to new comments, markdown preview and user tagging.

Tildes Development

Tildes is open source and if you want to contribute to tildes development, this is what you should read: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

For those who can't code, you might still be interested in the issue boards on Gitlab. It contains known issues, features being worked on, and plans for the future. If you have a feature in mind that you want to suggest, try looking there first to see if others have thought of it already, or are working on it.

Tildes' Design and Mechanics

In other words, how is it going to be different from reddit? Below are some summaries of future mechanics and inspiration for tildes' design. Note: most of the mechanics have not been implemented and are subject to change and debate.

1. Tildes will not have conventional moderators. Instead, the moderation duties will be spread to thousands of users by the trust system. [Trust people, but punish abusers]. More info on how it works and why it is designed that way:

   • Docs on future mechanics
   • Possible levels of trust that users can acquire
   • A long rant
   • Bubble-up mechanics: 1 , 2
   • A group is it's worst own enemy
   • If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault
   • On a technicality
   • This neat game about trust and game theory

2. Instead of subreddits, there are groups, a homage to Usenet. Groups will be organized hierarchically, the first and only subgroup right now is ~tildes.official. Groups will never be created by a single user, instead, they will be created based on group interest ^{[citation needed]}. For example, if a major portion of ~games consists of DnD posts and they are drowning out all the other topics, a ~games.dnd subgroup would be created - either by petition, algorithm, or both^{[citation needed]} - to contain the posts, and those who don't like DnD can unsubscribe from ~games.dnd. There is currently no way to filter out a subgroup from the main group.

3. Tildes is very privacy oriented. See: Haunted by data

Tildes History/Commonly answered questions

I recommend you check out this past introduction post by @Amarok before anything else, it's a bit outdated but contains many interesting discussions and notable events that have happened on tildes. @Bauke also tracks noteworthy events each month on his website https://til.bauke.xyz/. Also see the FAQ in the docs. Other than that, the best way for you to get an idea of how tildes changed over time is to go to ~tildes.official and look at all the past daily discussions.

Below are some scattered links that I found interesting, informative, or important:

• There are 2 announced bans, you can read about them here, and here. There have been more bans since, just unannounced. You can tell if a user is banned from their user page: there will be no private message button. An example. This differs from deleted accounts, which have all content removed and say "This user has deleted their account". An example. Note that when an account is deleted, whether all posts are deleted or not seems to depend on the user's choice. There is no official commentary, but there has been examples of deleted user comments left intact. Example: deleted user, intact post.

• The first group proposal, and the resulting group additions.

• You used to be able to see who invited a user on their profile, but now you can't.

• Past introduction posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

• The very first post on tildes: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/2/welcome_to_tildes

• The first page of ~tildes.official, if you want to start reading from the beginning (there really should be a chronological sorting option): https://tildes.net/~tildes.official?after=5k

• What should the names of Tildes users be?

• There used to be comment tags, but they were removed because of abuse, and now they are re-enabled again.

• Some tradition that has started to develop:

  • programming challenges

  • music weekly threads

  • black mirror watch thread

  • what are you reading these days?

  • what have you been watching/reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

  • the "layperson's introduction" series

• How do we fund tildes?

• How to handle account deletion

• Anonymous posting

• Demographics survey: year 0 and results, year 0.5 and results

• How should we deal with low effort content?

• Why is the comment box at the bottom?

• How does Tildes feel about bots?

• The Tildes unofficial Minecraft servers: 1 , 2

• The Tildes unofficial wiki (now closed due to inactivity and spambots)

• How will Tildes work with bans?

• Should we have a mascot?

• Scraping Tildes/Statistics

If anyone thinks of a link that should be included here, post a comment with the link and I'll edit it in.

Markdown source for this post: https://pastebin.com/Kbbh7pYU (outdated, and probably will not be updated unless someone explicitly asks for it)

To the rest: have fun!

Fellow LGBTQ+ ~ers, I'm hoping you can give me some direction and pointers in dating advice.

I'm a male in my early 40s who has become single after a dozen years and finally realizing/admitting that I'm gay. This isn't a huge deal (I've always identified as queer/not straight) but it does leave me in a place of total ignorance on how to proceed in meeting gay men and dating them.

I'm not intetested in sex-without-friendship, so Grindr is out. I'm not a fan of social media, so FB is useless to me. Even if there are any gay bars left, I'm not the bar type. My preferred personals site was craigslist... which shows you how out of the loop I am.

Any advice on dating sites and/or alternative ways of meeting people? I'm thinking about getting a bunch of shirts printed with a wittier version of "Introduce me to your gay friends!" and a rainbow necklace or bracelet...

If location matters, I'm a fair distance outside the Seattle area but get there often enough.

Thanks, all!

This post is taken from one made several years ago on /r/fragrance by /u/acleverpseudonym. It's very well written, but I've edited and added to it a bit.

The concept of a perfume house probably isn't that familiar to most of you - it's a fairly niche topic even for those who wear the stuff. Generally speaking, there are a few "great" perfume houses: Chanel, Lanvin, and Creed for example, but the greatest among them, the one considered "legendary", is Guerlain.

When approaching a history as long and a catalogue as extensive as Guerlain's, it can be intimidating. It's hard to know where to start and olfactory fatigue limits the number of fragrances you can really appreciate in a single outing. It can be hard to tell which fragrances are the important and good ones and which are the fillers and by the time you smell some of the really complex and beautiful classics, your nose might be blown out already and unable to appreciate them.

This is a guide to those important scents, and why they matter.

About Guerlain

Guerlain is one of the oldest and most respected perfume houses in the world. They first opened in a small shop in Paris in 1828 making custom fragrances for the moneyed classes (and royalty - Pierre-François Guerlain was His Majesty's Official Perfumer to Emperor Napoleon III of France). Guerlain sold the first fragrance marketed as a parfum (Jicky, 1889). This was also among the first fragrances to use synthetic ingredients. Guerlain also sold the first Oriental fragrance (Shalimar, 1925) (my personal favourite, and one I wear very often).

Guerlain fragrances are famous for sharing a common olfactory accord called "Guerlinade" that was originally created back 1800s, This accord can be found in most all of their famous fragrances. It was developed by Aimé Guerlain, the creator of Jicky, and is said to contain bergamot, rose, jasmine, tonka bean, iris, and vanilla. Once you become familiar with it, it's very easy to pick up on it in many Guerlain scents.

There have been 5 master perfumers for Guerlain over their almost 200 year life; 4 of them have been from the Guerlain family. The most recent, Theirry Wasser, is not.

The Perfumers

• Pierre-François Pascal Guerlain, active 1828-1864 - founder. So far as I can tell, only a single fragrance of his is still made, Eau de Cologne Imperiale, 1860, made for the Emperor Napoleon III's wife.

• Aimé Guerlain, active 1864-~1900. 3 of his fragrances are still around. Jicky, 1889 is by far the most famous and most important.

• Jacques Guerlain, active ~1900-1955. He made most of Guerlain's most famous women's fragrances. He hold's 40% of the slots in Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez's top 10 women's fragrances ever made, including the fragrance that is LT's favorite Mitsouko, 1919. He made the first Oriental fragrance as well. If one were trying to decide on the best perfumer to ever live, he would certainly be on the short list. His fragrances are complex, subtle and deep.

• Jean-Paul Guerlain, active 1955-current, though he hasn't been the official master perfumer for years. He made most of Guerlain's most famous men's fragrances...and some pretty famous women's fragrances as well. I think of him as one of the last old-school perfumers. He might think that "aquatic" is a bad word. His fragrances are more bold than Jacques Guerlain, but not in a bad way.

• Thierry Wasser, active 2008-current. I was skeptical, but I've been won over. He's certainly taking Guerlain in a slightly different direction, but he's also made several amazing fragrances. His are by far the most modern of Guerlains, but they still manage to keep the signature Guerlain flair. He also has done something awesome: try to fix the reformulations of the old stuff. He’s spent significant amounts of time and money on better synthetic oakmoss and on reformulating Guerlain’s classics so that they smell more like the originals. Mitsouko, in particular, has benefited from this.

Where can I smell them

If you live in the US and you only shop at Sephora and mid range department stores, you’ve probably only seen a very limited selection of Guerlains, many of which are poor examples.

The common ones are:

• La Petite Robe Noir, 2009 - a very new line, done under the direction of Theirry Wasser by Delphine Jelk. People like it, but it’s not really the classic Guerlain I’m trying to introduce to all of you. It's not something I'd personally wear.

• Shalimar, 1925 - One of the classics, but not department store sniff friendly. Shalimar is made to smell amazing on the skin 2 hours after being put on, not smell amazing on a paper strip 30 seconds after being put on. Also, It wasn’t made to be sold in EdT concentration like you find it in many stores (EdC concentration in drug stores). It was made to be smelled in parfum extrait concentration. I’ll talk more about Shalimar in a bit.

• Guerlain Homme, 2008 - This is a HUGE departure for Guerlain. Not characteristic of them at all.

• Samsara, 1989 - A feminine masterpiece from Jean-Paul Guerlain and an good example of Guerlain, but it also probably smells to many like their mothers (or grandmothers) and their mother's friends

To get a good selection of Guerlain fragrances, you need to go somewhere like Neiman Marcus. The best place in the US is the Guerlain boutique in the Venetian in Las Vegas. Canadians have a distinct advantage here: we have one of the few actual Guerlain Institutes in North America, located in Toronto on Bloor Street. It's one of my "must visit" destinations whenever I'm in the area. The best place in the world is at their flagship store in Paris.

How expensive are they?

Retail is generally $100/100ml for EdTs, $125/100ml for EdPs and $330/oz for perfum extraits. (US prices)
Some special edition items are more than the standard EdT/EdP price, running from $200/bottle-$300/bottle. Many of the common ones are available on Fragrancenet and other online fragrance discounters. There isn’t a huge counterfeit market for Guerlain like there is for Creed and Chanel. I've bought a number of items in my collection on fragrancenet, and can attest to their authenticity.

What should I smell

That depends on whether you want an education, or you’re looking for something for the club. Guerlain has many, many, beautifully constructed, classic fragrances that are wearable on a daily basis, but they reflect a different aesthetic than mainstream fragrances today do. You’ll notice an almost complete lack of aquatics, for example. Guerlain fragrances are made for the dry down, not the opening like many of today’s fragrances. They show better on the skin than on test strips.

I’m going to create 2 lists for this: one for education and one for some additional modern scents.

A note on reformulations

Guerlain has been forced to reformulate most of their most famous fragrances throughout the ages due to changes in IFRA regulations limiting the amounts of certain ingredients that can be uses. Many of these are only a shadow of their former glory. Vintage bottles are often still available on ebay, and this is where most of my personal collection comes from.

Smelling the History of Guerlain

This list covers the most famous and influential of their fragrances. I’ll note if a particular fragrance is REALLY hard to find (Mouchoir de Monsieur, I’m looking at you, bud)

Also, as a note, a couple of the classic women’s fragrances have a “matching” men's fragrance that smells similar, but is named differently. It’s a quirk of Guerlain that they did it this way, possibly because it was before the “pour homme” and “pour elle” stuff caught on.

• Eau de Cologne Imperiale
• Jicky
• Apres l’Ondee
• L’Heure Bleu
• Mitsouko
• Shalimar
• Vol de Nuit
• Vetiver
• Habit Rouge
• Samsara

The list, in depth

• Eau de Cologne Imperiale, 1860 - Pierre-François Pascal Guerlain - This was the fragrance made for Napoleon III’s wife. Unisex, though it’s officially for women. Citrus, neroli and lemon verbena with rosemary and a bit of Tonka bean. If you try wearing this as a fragrance now, you will be sorely disappointed in the longevity. It was meant to only last for a few minutes as a refreshing scent or to scent handkerchiefs. It’s certainly pleasant and wearable, but it’s like the fragrance version of the Model T, not hugely complex and not very long lasting. As a side note, though, it’s become traditional for every master perfumer to make a traditional Eau De Cologne. Theirry Wasser’s is brilliant and relatively long lasting (Eau de Cologne du Parfumeur, 2010).

• Jicky, 1889 - Aimé Guerlain - Considered the first modern perfume. Before this, fragrances were used differently and constructed differently. It was considered to be a fougere back then, though it doesn’t really meet the modern definition. It’s officially for women, but it very unisex. The legend is that it was originally meant for men, but the fashion of the time didn’t call for men to wear fragrances so they sold it to women instead. It was famously worn by Sean Connery though. It smells of lavender, citrus, herbs, tonka bean, vanilla…and civet. It has a very animalic smell that is certainly out of fashion now, but was very much considered sexy back then. It was supposed to be like a summer garden party with an edge of sexuality to it. Jaques Guerlain made a something that was very clearly supposed to be a men’s version of it (even though Jicky is very unisex) in 1904 called Mouchoir de Monsieur. Good luck finding somewhere to smell in the US outside of the Guerlain boutique in Vegas.

I love this description of Jicky from /r/fragrance:

Oh my. Regardless of what you think about a man who aspired to expose (and sell!) his mistress's bottom to the general public, Aime Guerlain certainly nailed it. Yes, a revolutionary fragrance, bold, modern, enduring, etc... Jicky smells like taint.

I've been lucky enough to try this scent in Extrait concentration (thank you, GI Toronto!), and on me it was... not that. There IS a distinct note of civet, but it was very soft and wearable.

• Apres l’Ondee, 1906 - Jacques Guerlain - For women. This is supposed to be one of Jacques Guerlain’s best fragrances, a mix of violet, orange blossom, and heliotrope. A light, easy to wear scent, perfect for a summer's afternoon.

• L’Heure Bleue, 1912 - Jacques Guerlain - For women. It’s considered a masterpiece because, well, it is. Where Apres l'Ondee is all about the violet, L'Heure Bleue is all about the iris. This is rich, decadent, while retaining a lightness that makes it approachable.

• Mitsouko, 1919 - Jacques Guerlain - This fragrance is amazing, one of the first Chypres. It’s a woman’s scent, but can be worn by a confident man - it's peach and woods and oakmoss and vetiver. I also catch a fair amount of labdanum from it. It’s gloriously complex and exotic, moody and introspective, and lingers close to the skin. This is Luca Turin’s favorite fragrance, and also one of mine. It’s also the fragrance that benefited the most from Theirry Wasser’s attempt to improve the reformulations. The most recent version is MUCH better than the one from 7 years ago. Guerlain has the best synthetic oak moss out there, and it shines in Mitsouko.

• Shalimar, 1925 - Jacques Guerlain - For women. Vanilla, incense, leather, citrus and florals. This was the first Oriental fragrance, and remains the classic example of it for a reason. Often imitated by inferior perfumeries (if you've ever smelled BPAL's Snake Oil, this is what it's trying to be), it’s shocked many a woman idly spritzing the latest from Gucci and Jessica Simpson and Marc Jacobs onto test strips. It is not meant to be smelled on test strips, it’s meant to be worn. The opening can smell a bit medicinal, but it dries down to a glorious, sexy vanilla. A sample of vintage Shalimar extrait is what started me on my Guerlain perfume obsession, and I have since amassed quite the collection. The men’s companion to this scent is Habit Rouge, 1965

• Vol de Nuit, 1933 - Jacques Guerlain - For women, but wearable by men. A lovely cool, oakmossy, green, aldehydic scent. Cool, yet warm. It name means “Night flight” and it smells like a flight on a cool, autumn night across moonlit vistas.

• Vetiver, 1961 - Jean-Paul Guerlain - For men. I fell in love the first time I sniffed this. It was so different from what I had been smelling that I was shocked. It’s not sweet at all. It’s citrus is a very dry citrus and with heavy overtones of pepper and nutmeg. It dries down to grass and pipe tobacco and vetiver with an incense smell to it. I’ve heard it described as “what a board room must have smelled like in 1950.” Very grown up. I had sprayed some on my skin and kept going back to it. If you’ve smelled Tom Ford’s Grey Vetiver, it’s an homage to Guerlain Vetiver, a modernized version of it.

• Habit Rouge, 1965 - Jean-Paul Guerlain - For men. The masculine version of Shalimar. Definitely a fall/Winter scent. It opens smelling of very dry citrus and an almost paraffin scent. It dries down to a sweet vanilla leather scent. Apparently it’s best experiences as a vintage EdC. I haven’t gotten a bottle of the vintage, but it’s readily available

• Samsara, 1989 - Jean-Paul Guerlain - For women. A gorgeous, luxurious, sandalwood jasmine and ylang-ylang fragrance. I personally love it, but it does have that 1980’s “I’m here!” boldness to it. I suspect that many folks here will associate it with older women in their lives.

BONUS

• Derby, 1985 - Jean Paul Guerlain - For men. I've never personally smelled this. I think the only source of it may be vintage stock on ebay; the reformulation isn't worth persuing. The old one made Luca Turin’s top 10 list of all time for men. An oakmossy, nutmeg and leather chypre.

Some great modern Guerlains to smell

Here’s where I’m putting the things that are a bit more modern (post 1990) that I really like.

• Eau de Cologne du Parfumeur
• Encense Mythique d'Orient
• Tonka Imperiale

The second list, in depth

• Eau de Cologne de Parfumeur, 2010 - Theirry Wasser - Unisex. This is a beautiful, traditional eau de cologne with fresh juicy citrus, neroli, lavender and just enough green notes to keep it interesting (galbanum, fresh cut grass and mint primarily). Unlike most colognes in this style though, it lasts for several hours (though it turns more into a fresh citrusy musk after 2-3 hours).

• Encens Mythique d’Orient, 2012 - Theirry Wasser - Unisex. Incense, rose, aldehydes and ambergris (either real ambergris or the best synthetic anyone has ever smelled). Wow. This is a stunner. Available to smell at maybe a dozen places in the US. It was originally intended only for the middle eastern market, but has since become more widely available, comparatively speaking.

• Tonka Imperiale, 2010 - Theirry Wasser - Unisex. Tonka, rosemary, spices, white honey, vanilla, almond, woody notes, amber and tobacco. This is my go-to winter scent, it's like being wrapped in a warm amber and vanilla cloud. Hard to find, but worth it.

EDIT: Since a few people now have not realized how old this topic is before making a comment, see above date ↑. :)

My old PC's CPU (i7 930) started to critically fail after 8+ years of being overclocked from 2.8 to 4.0 GHz, so I decided to build a new one based on the Ultra-Compact Mini-ITX Gaming PC Build from TechBuyersGuru.

I went with Mini-ITX this time since my old PC was in a huge Antec P193 tower which weighs 16.4kg (36.2lbs) before components and so was a giant PITA to move around. The new Sugo SG13 case is roughly 1/7th the volume and initial weight so is much more convenient to move (but not build!).

p.s. I was unsure whether to post this 'buildapc' style content in ~tech or ~comp.... thoughts?

PCPartPicker Part List
^{Parts labeled incompatible are not... see "Notes" below in Build Process section.}
Salvaged from old PC:
GPU   -     $0 - EVGA - GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Superclocked ACX 2.0+ Video Card
SSD   -     $0 - Samsung - 850 Pro Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive
SSD   -     $0 - Samsung - 840 Pro Series 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
HDD   -     $0 - Hitachi - Deskstar NAS 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive

New Components:
Case -   $72 - Silverstone - Sugo SG13B-Q Mini ITX Tower Case
Mobo - $190 - Gigabyte - Z370N WIFI Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard
CPU   - $325 - Intel - Core i5-8600K 3.6GHz 6-Core Processor
Cool - $114 - Silverstone - NT06-PRO 74.0 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler
RAM   - $220 - Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory
PSU   - $175 - Silverstone - 600W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular SFX Power Supply
M.2   - $143 - Crucial - MX500 500GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive
M.2   - $143 - Crucial - MX500 500GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive

Total:  $1382 (CAD)

Build Process w/ Pictures:

TL;DR - Behold my new Battlestation, IN ALL HER GLORY!!!

After saying goodbye to my old, heavy, oversized, Antec P193 case...
Unboxing the new one, which is almost the same volume as my UPS!...
And prepping all the new PC components for a photo op...
I began the arduous process assembling my new computer.

Everything went fairly smoothly to start. I installed the RAM, M.2 Drives, CPU and CPU Cooler before mounting the motherboard to the case, as instructed in the build guide. The CPU Cooler was a PITA to attach but that's no surprise as they always are.

Note: These "incompatible" parts listed on PCPartsPicker actually do fit together as the build guide said they would. However the RAM and CPU cooler fan are actually touching and I barely managed to squeeze them in together, so the build guide probably isn't lying when it said that particular low-profile RAM might be the only one that actually works with the cooler.

I then mounted the motherboard to the case and began slowly plugging everything else in. This was a particularly slow and frustrating process as I have pretty large hands and everything was incredibly tiny, in incredibly cramped positions, and required more finesse to get in place than I could muster with my fingers alone. As a result I wound up using long needle-nose pliers, including some bent-angle ones, to get most everything plugged in.

This is when I ran into my first major problem though... and one that was not mentioned in the build guide at all. The Case's front panel USB cable wouldn't fit in the motherboard with the CPU cooler fan in place. After trying fruitlessly to get the cable plugged in for 30min I finally gave up and decided to solve the issue the old fashioned way and it plugged in just fine afterwards. (Thanks for saving my ass yet again, Mr. Dremel!)

The other potential issue was due to the CPU cooler and case mounted PSU, which aren't supposed to work together, but once again as the build guide suggested they actually do... with a whopping 3mm clearance between them! At this point I also decided to swap out some of the ribbon power cables that came with the new PSU for some spare braided ones I had from another build since they are much nicer looking and allow for better airflow.

Note: The other supposed incompatibility listed on PCPartPicker is due to the fact that the case only officially supports 3x 2.5" drives or 1x 3.5" with 1x 2.5" but that's easy enough to get around, as explained below.

I also decided to cram an extra SSD under the front case fan, secured with double sided tape to the properly mounted SSD on the case floor panel. It worked just fine and allowed me to get my 3.5" 4TB HDD properly mounted on the underside of the top plate. Linus Tech Tips, in his similar Sugo SG13 build, even managed to squeeze 2 more SSDs above the PSU using double sided tape as well, so I guess that even leaves me with some room to expand my storage later. ;)

The rest of the build assembly process went relatively smoothly and once everything was hooked up, in position and plugged in, it booted straight into windows 10 (which was still on my old 1TB SSD). The moment when a new PC build gets past the POST is always a huge relief, however that momentary relief soon turned to dread as I quickly noticed a pretty big problem; The machine couldn't detect one of my new M.2 SATA drives.

After several hours of frustrated tinkering and much googling I finally found out the reason why, cursing PCPartPicker for not warning me and face-palming pretty hard for not having read the motherboard specs more carefully. It turns out that the Z370N motherboard actually only supports 1x M.2 SATA drive and the second M.2 slot is NVMe only. I had apparently just wasted $140+ on an M.2 SATA drive I couldn't use and my plans to configure them both in RAID 0 was shattered. But that's honestly not the worst part... in order to get the useless M.2 drive back out I had to basically FULLY DISASSEMBLE my entire build again since the NVMe M.2 slot is located on the bottom of the motherboard!

Despite the serious temptation to just leave it in there even though I couldn't use it, I wound up going through with the disassembly purely because I had a pretty good idea for how to actually make use of that second M.2 SATA drive based on something I saw on Linus Tech Tips a few months ago. So rather than leaving it in there or even returning it, after ordering myself the necessary enclosure I now have myself a pretty nice DIY 500GB Thumb drive. ;)

So several hours later after completely taking apart my new build, removing the bottom mounted M.2 SATA drive, and fully reassembling my build once again, I booted it up, it got past the POST and into Windows 10 again. I then reactivated Win 10 on the new hardware configuration (which was surprisingly painless compared to how it used to be where you needed to actually phone Microsoft) and then began the process of installing Linux Mint on the M.2 SATA drive I still had remaining.

Conclusion:
After several days of going at it now, I am finally done and my new computer is fully assembled, functional and ready to use. As always with building computers it was a bit scary, a bit painful, and more than a bit frustrating but ultimately well worth it. I couldn't be happier with the results and can't wait to overclock this bad boy when I get the chance!

I posted an article yesterday about name-blind hiring processes, and it got me thinking of discrimination slightly differently.

I actually don't feel that we run into outright racial discrimination as much nowadays. Instead it's more subtle. It's not about technical merit, but about cultural fit. Often times, distilling down to one skill - English (both spoken and written).

It brings up questions such as:

• Can a candidate communicate verbally for the job? (Technical, though sometimes this may be judge harder than for a native English speaker that isn't always clear)
• Do they "get" jokes and other subtleties? (Cultural fit)
• Do they have an accent? How heavy is it?

I believe this is for a couple reasons:

• Candidate just can't display enough charm or charisma during the hiring process
• Raise doubts about a candidate's education/upbringing. This in itself is discriminatory (though location is not a protected class), but some regions are though to train their students in more blunt force manners than skills in problem solving

What do you all think?

No, not the PC classes in your game - the classes that describe the people you play the game with.

Mister Fantastic: Every single number on this player's character sheet has been optimized beyond comprehension to be at least 20% higher than you thought was possible, and it's all legal. Reading one of his sheets will teach you about traits, feats, and rules you never knew existed. Often mumbles cryptic, one-word answers while barely paying attention that end ongoing rules discussions leaving the other players with blank faces. His characters are nearly invincible except for one small key weakness (AC 26 at level 1, but with a CMD of 5). This player can typically one-shot the BBEG and reverse the party's fortunes in a single round. If he's charmed or dominated it will result in a TPK unless dealt with instantly.

The Veteran: A quiet fellow wearing a T-Shirt that says, "Don't tell me about your character: just play." He's never flashy, and seems to do very little, content to let everyone else play and have fun. Always prepared for any situation when no one else is. More likely to aid other players than act directly. He'll only involve himself when everyone else is making a mess out of things, and when he does wake up, his ability to deal with any given situation leaves Mister Fantastic green with envy. Has been known to kill BBEGs via roleplaying. Has the ability to summon natural 20s on demand but rarely uses it. The GM often consults with him on rules issues.

Negative Diplomacy: No matter the class or the character's abilities, whenever this player opens their mouth to talk to someone who isn't in the party, you know the group is going to be in combat to the death in less than three rounds. The GM is uniquely powerless to prevent this from happening. His superpower is always knowing the worst possible in-character thing to say.

Milla Vanilla: Every character this person plays is the exact same thing - even when playing different classes. For whatever reason, this player cannot mentally step into the shoes of their character, and ends up on endless repeat. Often not noticeable until one has played multiple games with this person and notices that their ninja assassin is remarkably similar in temperament to their paladin.

The Conspiracy Theorist: This player is convinced that every single thing that happens is part of some grand tapestry and he is on a mission to figure it out. Often obsesses over small details, makes bizarre (sometimes nonsensical) connections between events, places, and facts. Your worst fear is that he's giving the GM ideas. It's confirmed when some of his wilder predictions come to pass later in the game.

Aaron Justicebringer: The kind of perma-lawful good holy crusader who walks into a tavern and announces, "Greetings! I am Aaron Justicebringer. You may flee if you wish." He's on a mission to smite evil. Since he's always got detect evil running, he finds quite a lot of it and smites often, without concern for trivialities like local customs, ettiquette, roleplaying, and plot. This player always plays crusader types.

Kaboom: Kaboom likes loves lives to set things on fire. Often a wizard or sorcerer, and the kind of fellow who can reduce six enemies to ash in a single round (even if those were six fire elementals). Flaming spells, flaming daggers, flaming hair, and one can track him across Golarion just by following the smoke. Unfortunately, that's all he's good for. Kaboom is a blunt instrument, best kept wrapped in asbestos until the party finds a target he can be aimed at in a location that hasn't got too much potential for collateral damage. This player comes in non-fire flavors too.

Sleepy Pete: Sleepy Pete has a wife, six kids, and a stressful day job. By the time he makes it to the session, he's been clinically dead for two hours already. He'll be asleep within an hour of starting, even faster if food or alcohol is involved. Sleepy Pete is also prone to missing sessions with little forewarning. You're not even sure what his character or personality is because you've been given almost no opportunity to observe him in a conscious state.

Brandon The Builder: A player who in all other ways is relatively normal, Brandon must never be given downtime in any way, shape, or form. With a full set of item crafting feats and flawless mastery of the downtime rules, Brandon will not only rule the entire kingdom in less than six months, he'll find a way to provide every single party member with a Headband of Mental Superiority, Belt of Physical Perfection, two +5 Tomes or Manuals of their choice, and a well staffed keep while doing it.

Broken Billy: This player has no comprehension of the mathematical progression of the games he plays. Instead, he jumps at the first thing he finds that sounds cool. This leaves him with a hodgepodge of abilities that quickly become useless as the game progresses, leaving poor Billy more and more frustrated as the game goes on. Broken Billy steadfastly ignores all advice and all warnings given to him by the GM and more experienced players. Prone to having five first level classes on his fifth level character.

The Novice Namer: Never good at coming up with names, this player has given birth to many legendary heroes: Bob the Barbarian, Robert the Ranger, and who could forget Sheldon the Sorcerer.

The Knife Hoarder: For whatever reason, this player insists on having at least 2 knives on his belt and 4 hidden on his person. He'll never actually use these knives, but as they'd say "just in case."

The 1-Leaf-Clover: This person's dice are trying to kill him. Oh he might roll a natural 20 to get a cheap room at the inn or tell if an item is masterwork (its not), but the second he's in combat, the most you can expect is a 12 or 13.

The iGenie: Only looks away from his laptop when his name is said three times.

The Bookworm: If not taking an action, is found face first in a book looking for a rare never before seen rule that will get him out of the in-game situation. There has got to be rule specifically for negotiating with a different race to reduce the price of a toll. There just has to be!

Secretly Evil: This player almost always plays a Wizard/Sorcerer and takes a Necromantic path. They'll write a sizable and traumatic back-story. Then in game they'll never do or say anything evil in front of the group(in or out of character). In fact, they'll do very little in general. Instead they wait until everyone is gone and tell the DM what evil things they actually did while "no one was looking".

You should try FATAL: Makes all their characters and every encounter somehow revolve around sex.

Spellsaver: Spellcaster that never casts their spells because they think the next fight is going to be harder.

The Lore Keeper: This player may not be the most talkative person at the table, but that's possibly because they're too busy writing down every even happening in the game. Conversations, shared loot, timelines, and character sketches -- this player is devoted to the story, and keeps track of all of it.

What are we missing?

(Some inspiration from this old reddit thread.)

I have been using Tildes for about a week now. I have come over from Reddit where I am primarily a lurker. I lurk because I often feel my thoughts and opinions on topics and discussions have been touched on because discussions are already hundreds of comments deep by the time I arrive. The biggest positive with Tildes is the fact that the community is currently small and I read the post/sarticles that interest me instead of jumping straight into the comments to be given a synopsis. I now read more than just the headline.

I still have not found my 'voice' in regards to posting comments related to articles/stories that I have read. I think it is because I haven't found a discussion that I am really interested in. I have posted a couple of news articles that provide information about the part of the world I am in but, while they interested me, I didn't feel the need to discuss their contents further so I didn't add any comment to start a conversation to the post.

Regarding providing some more content to the site. My hobbies include, like everyone else, traveling, reading, and photography. I am no where near being an influential voice in any of these! I am not interested in having a travel blog or a website but I would like to provide information, incase someone else here is interested or has experiences too. For example, I recently took a short weekend trip from Bangkok, Thailand to Ayutthaya, Thailand. I rode the train, visited the sites, visited a bar, ate some food, and stayed the night. I want to provide a write up on my experiences and thoughts of this trip. Is a post in ~hobbies with the tags of: thailand, ayutthaya, bangkok, train the way to go?
What do y'all think?

Sharing photographs - Taking pictures is another hobby I share with everyone else. I enjoy sharing pictures I am proud of. I tend to post to r/nocontextpics, because I like their rules of no back story in the title. I also post to location specific sites. I do this to show off my pictures and to feel good from earning points. I do not post pictures to facebook very often because I like having the feel of anonymity. I don't want to be perceived as a pretentious twat. How does everyone feel about picture posts in ~hobbies with the tag(s) like: location, device used, etc..

My problem would be not 'spamming' photos. With the age of the site, and my brief interaction with it, no one wants to see 2+ picture posts from one user in the ~hobbies group.
Any thoughts on etiquette or rules for picture posts? Allow: Yes/No?

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

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

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

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

So. I'm Dming a group and this night we had an unusually large session. We just added in a new PC who will be joining us for the remainder of the campaign and a visiting friend who was a guest character for the night.

The PC had successfully managed to get into the favor of a local Baron, who invited them all to dinner. The guest was playing a premade character, the bastard son of the baron who had just returned home hoping to earn his asshole father's respect.

So dinner goes fine, the Baron is a smarmy asshole and a monster attacks. After a very tough fight the PCs are victorious. Then things get weird. The son goes to the Baron to tell him of the victory and they have a moment. Fearing his father losing interest, the son then lied and told the baron that there was a treasure trove of a caravan down waiting for him at the foot of the 200ft tall hill the Baron's castle is located on. The pair start walking down, the son the whole time trying to think of some way to get out of the lie he made.

The other PCs follow them outside and stop at the top of the hill, and one of them says, "You know, that Baron was a real asshole. Be a real shame if something heavy happened to fall on him from this high up."

A quick investigation later and they find a 200lb barrel of tar in a barn. One of the PCs, who is both good aligned and canonically an idiot, tries to stop them and gets knocked the fuck out and tied up. The remaining PCs manage to lift the barrel, carry it to the top of the hill, and then toss it.

Meanwhile, the son is nailing his charisma rolls against his father and soon has him eating out of his hand. They get to the bottom of the hill and the father for the first time in the son's entire life tells him he's proud of him.

And then a 200lb barrel of tar lands on the Baron after falling 200ft, instantly killing him.

What follows is a roaring rampage of revenged that killed one PC and nearly killed another, so in the end we decided to take everything after the boss fight as a non-cannon fever dream the whole party had.

It was probably the hardest I have ever laughed during a D&D session in my entire life.

I love this game.

I've been working on a plan for a local treasure hunt, but I could use some feedback. It'll be hosted through my youtube channel, and will most likely consist of a variety of hikes (some short, some longer, but nothing too crazy), some basic crypto, some cheesy poetry, and some treasure that I've made/will make as the prize.

So that's the nutshell explanation. I'm having trouble making decisions about some of the details. But first, let me go over some of the specifics I have worked out. My plan as of right now consists of the following:

• 5 hunts total, 4 that are similarly structured with 1 final hunt
• The first 4 hunts consist of 3 locations where clues are hidden, and one final location where the treasure is hidden
• The clue locations are revealed equally to everyone participating
• The clues are non-removable, difficult to destroy, so more than one can find them
• The clues are required to determine the final location of the treasure for that hunt
• The final hunt's locations can be determined by supplemental clues hidden in the first 4 hunts

I'm thinking of doing an episode per location, per week. Each episode will consist of searchable features like road signs and trailheads, followed by clips showing highlights of the path to the clue. If the clue is hidden to the general public, I'll show more or less where people can expect it. The clue itself will be a semi-permanent installation. That is, it'll be a physical form that's locked up somewhere for the duration of the hunt. After the hunt is over, I plan on going out and removing them. This is mostly because I don't want rogue hunters to destroy the clues so that no one else can find them. I plan on making a rule that if someone goes out and the clue isn't where it's supposed to be, I'll publicly post it. I doubt anyone would, but I still think it's a good idea to have a deterrent.

I wanted to get some outside perspective on how you think this would play out, and what sort of issues I'm missing as far as game mechanics.

• Would this be the kind of thing people would enjoy bringing friends along for, even though there's only one treasure per hunt? Is there some way I could make it more worthwhile to people playing in groups, without diminishing the value of effort for a single hunter?
• Would it be better to cluster the 3 locations for each hunt together? I feel like it might be more fun as an activity, but there's a much greater danger of making it too easy and having the first person out discover it. I like the idea of spreading the clues out time-wise and space-wise so that more people have an opportunity to take part.
• I have no idea how many people will participate. I have very few followers and almost all of them are friends. I'd like to try and promote it, but I also know that I'm pretty horrible at that sort of thing. Still, I'd like to come up with a design that would work well regardless if it's 5 people or 500 people playing. What sort of issues might happen as the player base scales up?
• I'm kinda going from scratch on these ideas. I've hosted basic treasure hunts before but nothing this complex. Mostly just "crack this cryptogram, figure out what the poem means, find the spot". This is basically the same thing, just with multiple locations required to find the spot. Are there other formats I should consider?
• Should the treasure be hidden? Or would it be better to send it to a winner? If it's hidden, it's probably way more satisfying for the person who finds it. But there's also a risk of someone random finding it. The hiding spots will have to be really good, but there's also a lot of people in this city who get out and about. Having a final problem to solve could be fun if it's done right, or it could be really annoying. I also don't really want to have to ship the pieces. And I think it adds in a dubious factor where people might be more inclined to question the legitimacy of the winner (which happens occasionally with online giveaway contest sort of things). I'm leaning toward just hiding the treasure, but I'm also open to ideas.

For context, not for self-promotion: I'm not really trying to plug my channel or anything like that, I genuinely could use feedback on this and I've really been digging the threads on here. If you feel like you want some context though, I'll put some links. I don't think they're necessary because I hope I explained it well enough and the videos don't really add anything, mostly because I made them before I started planning this. They're more like a weird, long intro.

It started because I was annoyed with my neighbor who kept asking for a favor, and to get sweet, petty revenge, I sent him on a treasure hunt. I liked the idea and wanted to make something similar for everyone else. It tied into a project theme I've been working on lately, so I started making a series of glass sculpture elementals, and introduced the artifact hunt with the first making-of video.

Planning on doing a video for the making of each piece, plus the videos for the hunts. It's gonna be a lot of work so I'm trying to get as much sorted out beforehand as I can. I've been really scratching my head over this for the past few weeks, so thanks in advance for any thoughts!

I know the site is still in its infancy and cross-posting won't be much of an issue at the moment, but I was interested to see what other users thought about cross-posting, whether we should allow it and if so how it should be done?

Personally I am in favour of cross-posting but I think some site mechanic should exist that doesn't allow two separate threads to be created. Instead, the cross-post should link directly to the original thread so that discussion of the topic can be kept in a single location but the topic itself can reach multiple tildes. For example, say an article about music being created artificially by a robot was originally posted in ~music. Someone may want to cross-post this to ~tech, and to do so would only have to click some sort of cross-post button and select the tilde they want to cross-post to. Anyone browsing the ~tech tilde would see the post, but upon clicking it would be taken to the comments page of the post originally made in ~music. Some indication of where the post was originally made could be given as well when viewing the cross-post on another tilde.

Hi! This is a minor suggestion, but when you're browsing Tilde, the vote button for comments is located at the bottom left, underneath posts. Makes sense right? Well unfortunately, this doesn't apply to your own comments, where the vote counter appears in the top left, at the beginning of the post. For consistency's sake, I was wondering if it would be a good idea to move vote counts on individual comments down to where the vote button normally is, so vote counts are always displayed in the same location?

In a nutshell (TL;DR)

Dolmas are stuffed grape leaves or vegetables (commonly peppers or zucchini) steamed for several minutes inside a pot with about an inch of salted water (or broth) brought to a boil, then kept at a low simmer with a lid. The stuffing components vary and are easily tweaked for vegan/vegetarians or allergies, but often include a mixture of herbs and spices, rice (cooked or uncooked), eggs as a binder, and/or ground meat.

For my next trick, I'll show you how to make them using only 4 words in the next sentence. Here's the entire process.

Grocery list (ingredients in bold are suitable for vegans. Ingredients with a † are optional.)

Dolmas

• † 30 - 50 fresh grape leaves or brined leaves
• 4 bell peppers
• 1 - 2 tablespoons olive oil for drizzling
• † juice of half a lemon
• water or stock enough to cover an inch in the pot

Filling

• 500g [1 lb] ground meat (pork, beef, and lamb are most common)
• † 180g [1 cup] uncooked white rice
• 10g [1 TBSP] kosher salt
• † 1 whole egg
• † 1 diced medium onion
• 2 - 4 tablespoons ground cumin
• 2 - 4 tablespoons ground paprika
• † 2 - 4 tablespoons ground coriander
• † 1 - 2 tablespoons ground turmeric
• 2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper
• † 1 tablespoon dried red chili flakes

Vegan prep

Double the uncooked white rice and cook as directed on the package in water or vegetable stock with the salt, pepper, and spices. Let cool, then mix in diced onion (if using) and proceed with assembly and cooking as directed below, but reduce the total simmering time to 15 - 20 minutes.

Step-by-step (with higher res photos)

• Trim the stems off your fresh grape leaves and cut the tops off the bell peppers (if using), removing the stem and seedy core. Retain the cut piece as a "lid" for each pepper.
• Add your stuffing ingredients to a large bowl and mix them all thoroughly with a spoon or clean wet hands.
• Hold a prepared leaf centered on your palm underside (veiny side) up and place a tablespoon of filling towards the center of the leaf.
• Fold the left bottom part of the leaf up horizontally and press onto the wet filling.
• Fold the remaining left half vertically over the filling and press gently to crease.
• Fold the right bottom part to cover the remaining exposed filling.
• Fold the remaining right half of the leaf over the left.
• Firmly roll the filled part of the wrapping up once. Press to shape into a rough cylinder.
• Continue rolling until the end point of the leaf can be tucked under on a flat surface.
• Repeat for the other leaves, but retain enough to cover each pepper lid.
• Stuff the bell peppers with the remaining filling and top with a lid and a leaf to cover the stem hole.
• Place the peppers upright in a large pot, leaning them against the sides if necessary.
• Layer the stuffed leaves on the bottom of the pot between the peppers, flap end facing down.
• Add cool water (or broth) just to cover the layer of wrapped leaves, or at least an inch. Don't worry if a few float up.
• Drizzle with olive oil, grind some black pepper on, and add a couple good pinches of salt to the water - if you're only using bell peppers, squeeze in the juice of half a lemon to mimic the flavor the grape leaves would've added during cooking.
• Bring to a boil over medium high heat, then add a lid and back the heat down just enough enough to simmer.
• Let simmer for at least 45 minutes (60+ if using bell peppers) or until the meat is cooked and the rice soft enough to eat.

Storage

Store with the broth in the cooking pot for under a day. For longer, refrigerate and reheat on the stove or microwave. You can experiment with freezing cooked grape leaf dolmas and steaming them to thaw and re-cook, but I've never tried - they don't last long enough in my house.

Sourcing grape leaves

To identify a potential vine, look for curly forked tendrils that climb and clusters of tiny immature green grapes. This source has good photos and background info.

Wild grapevines grow in many locations that are conducive to growing wine grapes. They often thrive in moist habitats located next to streams or riverbanks, but can also be found in forested areas, meadows, along roadsides and are especially fond of any kind of man-made fencing.

Or you can get them in a jar online or in the international section of your local large grocery store.

NB: Do your research and be careful when harvesting wild plants. The dangerous lookalikes to wild grapes are Canada moonseed (Menispermum canadense) and porcelain berry (Ampelopsis glandulosa var. brevipendunculata)

Storytime?

What? Does this look like a typically self-indulgent food blogger post florid with vapid musings only tangentially related to the recipe because longer word count pushes such entries to top SEO results? ...ok, just this once.

Used to work with an older Iraqi watchmaker who came to the country as a highly-skilled refugee. Sometimes I'd give him a ride to the shop from his apartment, and in limited English he'd insist on cooking us dinner before I left. When he visited another co-worker's place, he noticed wild grape leaves on several vines growing out of the property, and collected them. I saw the leaf pile on the counter and asked what he was going to do with them, and if he was sure they were edible. "Yes, yes! For dolmas. I'll show you," he said, removing a pack of ground pork and bell peppers from the fridge.

For the next couple summers, I made dolmas from the wild grapes in the neighborhood, and now I have good neighbors who allow me to prune and harvest excess leaves from their fruiting grapevines during the season.

                                             How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu's debut novel, How to Life Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, could be described as a story about contemporary family life disguised as science fiction. It concerns a young man who has spent most of the past decade in a small time machine in his job as a time machine repairman. He makes calls on people who have rented time machines for recreational purposes but have become stuck in time and must be rescued by him. As the novel progresses, it is revealed that this man's name is the same as that of the author, Charles Yu. The protagonist is a lonely and rather sad fellow, who spends much of his non-working hours drifting along in his capsule, thinking about his past and his parents, especially his father who disappeared long ago. Accompanied only by his dog and a computer that has the pixilated face of a female and a cartoon-like voice, Charles hopes to one day locate his father in some alternate universe to which he apparently has traveled in a time machine. Charles's parents, a few clients, and several street performers are the only other humans that he encounters during the course of the story. He makes one trip to a city in Minor Universe 31, a residential and entertainment world made mostly from a science fiction "substrate," where the company for which he works is headquartered. His objective is to have maintenance work done on his time machine and when he goes to pick it up, he encounters his future self. Panicking, he draws his service revolver and shoots his future self in the stomach, just as his future self is attempting to tell him that the key is the book. He has no idea what this means as he stumbles into his time machine and races away. On the capsule's console, he finds a manual-type book that has the same title as the novel.

With the help of his computer, he realizes that he must read the book and make amendments and additions to it as he goes along. At some point in the future, he must give the completed book to his past self, who then will shoot him and begin the rewriting process again in an endless cycle. Charles realizes he has become stuck in a time loop. By the rules of time travel, if he changes anything that happens during this loop, he risks entering an alternate universe from which he might not emerge. Under the circumstances, escaping the time loop appears to be extremely difficult. He may be doomed to spend the rest of his life in the time machine, writing the book, giving it to himself, shooting himself, and starting the cycle again. The book is a manual about time travel, but it also offers advice on how such a traveler should live within or use time wisely. The main use of Charles's time is in thinking about his father and mother, but he begins visiting periods in his past in his time machine, watching his younger self interact with his parents. Eventually, he discovers that the book given to him by his future self is literally the key, because it holds a key that unlocks a box that his mother gave him, inside of which his father left clues to where he went in time. This inspires Charles to realize that he can break out of his time loop through the power of his mind and memory. He does so and rescues his father from the past time in which he is stuck. As the novel ends, it looks as if the family has a chance to regain normalcy and move forward with a better understanding of how to cope with the difficulties of life by facing the problems of the past with courage and honesty.

                       Praise

“Glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction. . . . Like [Douglas] Adams, Yu is very funny, usually proportional to the wildness of his inventions, but Yu’s sound and fury conceal (and construct) this novel’s dense, tragic, all-too-human heart. . . . Yu is a superhero of rendering human consciousness and emotion in the language of engineering and science. . . . A complex, brainy, genre-hopping joyride of a story, far more than the sum of its component parts, and smart and tragic enough to engage all regions of the brain and body.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Compulsively rereadable. . . . Hilarious. . . . Yu has a crisp, intermittently lyrical prose style, one that’s comfortable with both math and sadness, moving seamlessly from delirious metafiction to the straight-faced prose of instruction-manual entries. . . . [The book itself] is like Steve Jobs’ ultimate hardware fetish, a dreamlike amalgam of functionality and predetermination.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Douglas Adams and Philip K. Dick are touchstones, but Yu’s sense of humor and narrative splashes of color–especially when dealing with a pretty solitary life and the bittersweet search for his father, a time travel pioneer who disappeared–set him apart within the narrative spaces of his own horizontal design. . . . A clever little story that will be looped in your head for days. No doubt it will be made into a movie, but let’s hope that doesn’t take away the heart.”
—Austin Chronicle

“If How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe contented itself with exploring that classic chestnut of speculative fiction, the time paradox, it would likely make for an enjoyable sci-fi yarn. But Yu’s novel is a good deal more ambitious, and ultimately more satisfying, than that. It’s about time travel and cosmology, yes, but it’s also about language and narrative — the more we learn about Minor Universe 31, the more it resembles the story space of the novel we’re reading, which is full of diagrams, footnotes, pages left intentionally (and meaningfully) blank and brief chapters from the owner’s manual of our narrator’s time machine. . . . . Yu grafts the laws of theoretical physics onto the yearnings of the human heart so thoroughly and deftly that the book’s technical language and mathematical proofs take on a sense of urgency.”
—NPR

“How to Live Safely is a book likely to generate a lot of discussion, within science fiction and outside, infuriating some readers while delighting many others.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“An extraordinary work. . . . I read the entire book in one gulp.”
—Chris Wallace, GQ

“A great Calvino-esque thrill ride of a book.”
—The Stranger

“Science and metaphor get nice and cozy in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. The novel joins the likes of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Jillian Weise’s The Colony, fiction that borrows the tropes of sci-fi to tell high-tech self-actualization narratives.”
—Portland Mercury

“A brainy reverie of sexbots, rayguns, time travel and Buddhist zombie mothers. . . . Packed with deft emotional insight.”
—The Economist

“A funny, funny book, and it’s a good thing, too; because at its heart it’s a book about loneliness, regret, and the all-too-human desire to change the past.”
—Tor.com

“A keenly perceptive satire. . . . Yu’s novel is also a meditation on the essentials of human life at its innermost point.. . . Campy allusions to the original Star Wars trilogy, a cityscape worthy of the director’s cut of Blade Runner and a semi-coherent vocabulary of techno-jargon cement these disparate elements into a brilliant send-up of science fiction. . . . Perhaps it would be better to think of the instructional units of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe in terms of the chapters of social commentary which John Steinbeck placed into the plot structure of The Grapes of Wrath.”
—California Literary Review

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the rare book I pick up to read the first several pages, then decide to drop everything and finish at once. Emotionally resonant, funny, and as clever as any book I have read all year, this debut novel heralds the arrival of a talented young writer unafraid to take chances.”
—largehearted boy

“A wild and inventive first novel . . . has been compared to the novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Jonathan Lethem, and the fact that such comparisons are not out of line says everything necessary about Yu’s talent and future.”
—Portland Oregonian

“Bends the rules of time and literary convention.”
—Seattle Weekly

“Getting stuck with Yu in his time loop is like watching an episode of Doctor Who as written by the young Philip Roth. Even when recalling his most painful childhood moments, Yu makes fun of himself or pulls you into a silly description of fake physics experiments. In this way, he delivers one of the most clear-eyed descriptions of consciousness I’ve seen in literature: It’s full of self-mockery and self-deception, and yet somehow manages to keep its hands on the wheel, driving us forward into an unknowable future. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is intellectually demanding, but also emotionally rich and funny. . . . It’s clearly the work of a scifi geek who knows how to twist pop culture tropes into melancholy meditations on the nature of consciousness.”
—io9

“Funny [and] moving. . . . Charles Yu’s first novel is getting ready for lift-off, and it more than surpasses expectations which couldn’t be any higher after he was given the 5 Under 35 Award . . . How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe is one of the trippiest and most thoughtful novels I’ve read all year, one that begs for a single sit-down experience even if you’re left with a major head rush after the fact for having gulped down so many ideas in a solitary swoop. . . . Yu’s literary pyrotechnics come in a marvelously entertaining and accessible package, featuring a reluctant, time machine-operating hero on a continual quest to discover what really happened to his missing father, a mysterious book possibly answering all, and a computer with the most idiosyncratic personality since HAL or Deep Thought. . . . Like the work of Richard Powers . . . How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe fuses the scientific and the emotional in ways that bring about something new.”
—Sarah Weinman, The Daily Beast

“One of the best novels of 2010. . . . It is a wonderfully stunning, brilliant work of science fiction that goes to the heart of self-realization, happiness and connections. . . . Yu has accomplished something remarkable in this book, blending science fiction universes with his own, alternative self’s life, in a way, breaking past the bonds of the page and bringing the reader right into the action. . . . Simply, this is one of the absolute best time travel stories . . . even compared to works such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells or the Doctor Who television series.”
—SF Signal

“Within a few pages I was hooked. . . . There are times when he starts off a paragraph about chronodiegetics that just sounds like pseudo-scientific gibberish meant to fill in some space. And then you realize that what he’s saying actually makes sense, that he’s actually figured out something really fascinating about the way time works, about the way fiction works, and the “Aha!” switch in your brain gets flipped. That happened more than once for me. There are so many sections here and there that I found myself wanting to share with somebody: Here—read this paragraph! Look at this sentence! Ok, now check this out!”
—GeekDad, Wired.com

“In this debut novel, Charles Yu continues his ambitious exploration of the fantastic with a whimsical yet sincere tribute to old-school science fiction and quantum physics. . . . A fascinating, philosophical and disorienting thriller about life and the context that gives it meaning.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“With Star Wars allusions, glimpses of a future world, and journeys to the past, as well as hilarious and poignant explanations of “chronodiegetics,” or the “theory of the nature and function of time within a narrative space,” Yu, winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 Award, constructs a clever, fluently metaphorical tale. A funny, brain-teasing, and wise take on archetypal father-and-son issues, the mysteries of time and memory, emotional inertia, and one sweet but bumbling misfit’s attempts to escape a legacy of sadness and isolation.”
—Booklist

“This book is cool as hell. If I could go back in time and read it earlier, I would.”
—Colson Whitehead, author of Sag Harbor

“Charles Yu is a tremendously clever writer, and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is marvelously written, sweetly geeky, good clean time-bending fun.”
—Audrey Niffenegger, author of Her Fearful Symmetry and The Time Traveler’s Wife

“Funny, touching, and weirdly beautiful. This book is awesome.”
—Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is that rare thing—a truly original novel. Charles Yu has built a strange, beautiful, intricate machine, with a pulse that carries as much blood as it does electricity.”
—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The View from the Seventh Layer and The Brief History of the Dead

“Poignant, hilarious, and electrically original. Bends time, mind, and genre.”
—David Eagleman, author of Sum

Are you ready to live forever? You guys, my name is Alan Resnick, and I'm so excited to be here. I found the secret to eternal life, and I found it on my Lapbook Pro. Now, you're looking at me, and you're saying, "Alan, you are so smart and you are so small. What is your origin tale?"

Well, it all started...Two years ago. Me and Janet were having a bit of a lovers' quarrel, and she's got me sleeping on the couch. Now, I don't mind. I'm fine with it. I'm snoozing. And I'm having a dream I'm in a foggy meadow, and in the distance, I hear a voice calling me "Alan, Alan," just like that. And the fog clears to reveal a beautiful nude woman. And she's saying, "Alan, I'm ready for you. Put your dirt in me." and I'm thinking, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a minute. I'm in enough trouble with the wife as it is. This is the last thing I need." But...I do it anyways, and right as I'm about to seal the deal, out of nowhere, I get shot with a gun, and it completely, completely destroyed my face. And that's how I got my fantastic idea. What if I could back myself up like my best favorite mp3 file or like a gif or a pdf?

And after two months of hard work, I had done it. I had made an exact digital copy of myself. He calls himself "Teddy." I don't know why. My name is Alan. Now let's explain my 4-step program to live forever as you are now through 3-d scanning and other digital archiving techniques!

Step number 1 is the most important step: Getting to know yourself. Now, you're probably thinking, "Alan, I think I know myself pretty well. I've spent every day of my life by myself. There's nothing about me to even tell me that I don't already know." well, I got some bad news for you, Mason. No one knows you.

You see, by the age of 6, every human brain has formed a small calcified pebble called the Schrader clot, which prevents any amount of self-awareness. But don't worry, 'cause I've come up with an exercise to help us move past that pebble. All you have to do... Is look. Look at your face in the mirror. Look at your eyes. Look at the nose, the mouth, the philtrum. You're gonna do this for five hours every night. Then just borrow a pen or a pencil from a buddy or friend, flip off that light switch, and draw an image of what you think you saw in the mirror. Now hang up those drawings all over your house to remind you of what you did in the bathroom.

Step number 2 is my favorite, favorite step. You're gonna come to my house. I'm gonna strobe blindingly bright lights into your eyes and face while you spin in my living room. Now, my patterns are going to be queered by your headform, and they're gonna generate three point-cloud axes. And then all you have to do is boolean the axes, and you're gonna end up with a 3-D model mesh of your head. It captures every wrinkle, every tear. After all, it's our imperfections that make us human.

Okay. Have you ever gone over to your girlfriend's house and she's covered her face in disgusting makeup and you find out that, all of a sudden, you don't love her anymore? It's not her fault. It's not your fault. It's actually science. See, she didn't know it at the time, but she just destroyed that natural luminescent quality that makes a woman beautiful. Now, that's a property called the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley states that when a non-human object begins to appear more human, it starts to get really cute... To a point, and then it becomes creepy.

It's like this imagine I'm jogging, and I love to jog, so I'm jogging. And out of nowhere damn it!... Aaaaaaaaaaaah! ...I stub my toe on a rock. On an ugly rock. But, hey, I got my pen here. Maybe I'll draw two eyes on the rock, and now, all of a sudden whoa! This rock's looking kind of cute. I'm starting to like this rock. What if I draw a nose and a mouth on the rock? And now, all of a sudden whoa! This is the cutest rock I've ever seen! I can't believe I'm falling in love with a stone. And then you're gonna want to coat the rock in skin and flesh and ooh, uncanny valley. Your rock fell down into the uncanny valley. It's down there with moving corpses, and this is where your girlfriend lives, and we're gonna try to hop on over and land on the other side with a believable human with real skin and flesh.

Now, I got an internship at the morgue, and I found out that every human face can contain as many as six muscles. And those muscles expand and contract and wibble and nibble and pull and tug at the skin. Ooh! That's a lot of stress. Skin stress. Skin stress test. I put every avatar I make through a variety of intensive skin stress tests. I do ball tests. Yes, I have wiggle tests. Whoever said I didn't have wiggle tests was lying. I shake up those avatars. And last but not least, we have durability and tear testing, because the last thing you want is your avatar's skin to rip or tear when you're trying to chat about your day.

So, that's it. We've created a real-life avatar. I guess I can just go home now. Bye bye-oh, wait. You forgot the personality, and it's only the most important step.

I'm going to come into your house. I'm gonna come into your home, and I'm gonna stay with you for two months. I'll bring a cot and a humidifier, and I'm gonna find out what makes you you. Every morning, you're gonna wake up with me on top of you. I'm gonna ask you hundreds of personal questions. Hundreds of personal questions. Things like: Have you ever caught a friend telling a lie? What was the worst thing you ever had to clean off of a rug? What's the best pair of lips you ever kissed? How many books do you own? Have you ever had a soft-shell crab? How much water can you drink? How many times did you catch a ball at the ball game you went to? How do you feel when you touch a little dog's hair? What is it like to have your hand covered in old glue? And all that information gets scanned in, and it gets put into the USB drive of your computer, and it makes the brain of your avatar. So, now my avatar doesn't just look like me, he also thinks like me.

I have touched so many lives with this remarkable technology! Teddy, thank you so much for helping me share this message tonight. Folks, we live in a very spooky-style world. No one's gonna do it for you. But all you have to do is take that first step, reach for that sweet, sweet fruit, and make nothing else you ever do ever matter.

People tend to use the term Empire rather interchangeably with the term big kingdom or kingdom that owns lots of stuff that is not its own. But I don't like this definition. This definition does not give nearly enough importance to the term and waters it down, and it sometimes just doesn’t apply to certain things.

The other issue is some people think that an Empire is just a European expression intended to connect someone to the concept of Rome. The word Empire does come from the Roman idea of Imperium, which was Rome's concept of rule through law, order, and general Roman influence being incredibly high among people, high enough they start acting Roman, a hegemony.

But the idea that Empires are European is incorrect. First, let's start with Persia. The Persian ruler was at times the Shahanshah, or Shah of Shahs, or king of kings. Similarly, the Turkic (big group of people from which the guys in Turkey come from) and Mongolian languages have the term Khagan/Qagan/Kha Khan which means Khan of Khans. While a khan might not strictly be a king in a feudal sense due their nomadic lifestyle, the idea is similar. Both of these people have a very definite idea that there can be someone so great, kings, the guys normally at the top, swear fealty to them. Another point, Genghis Khan is not a name but a title, meaning Great Khan, under whom other Khans serve. These khans eventually broke away but Temujin, the OG Genghis Khan, wanted his empire to last with a Genghis Kahn at top, and the other khans loyal to him.

So this brings us to another definition, someone who rules over kings. Does this work? The Holy Roman Emperor ruled over a couple of kings. The Mameluke emperor ruled over sultans, the Roman emperor was described by a Chinese traveler as ruling over kings who were appointed on the death of a previous king. But what about Charlemagne and Charles Martel? The Frankish Emperor ruled over what was by right multiple kingdoms but I don't think he had kingly vassals. And in texts at the time the empire was referred to as both a kingdom and an empire. But this kingdom was something special as emphasis was placed on the fact that it united previously disunited kingdoms.

Similar situation with China. China is either the Celestial Empire or the Middle Kingdom, depending on context. But either way, the Chinese emperor, or Huangdi, was seen as someone above other rulers. Other rulers paid tribute to him and he certainly ruled over quite a vast territory. A territory so vast, it once had many kingdoms within it, but those kingdoms were all united, with quite a lot of force, by Qin Shi Huangdi. Perhaps one thing to do at this point is more properly define a kingdom. To do that, let’s look at the British Isles. Now today’s British Isles are a lot more complicated than they were circa 850 AD so we will look back then. Back then, there were many independent realms, to name a few: the Kingdom of Jorvik (Northumbria), Kingdom of West Seax, Kingdom of Mercia, and the Kingdom of East Anglia. These guys all existed in what would become simply England. Jorvik/Northumbria is the one that is most relevant to what we are looking at because something very interesting happened to it. When Alfred the Great declared himself king of England, he did so controlling Northumbria as a kingdom. One king, two kingdoms. Northumbria would slip away from the King of England due to inheritance issues because it was a kingdom, those typically are independent. This was such an issue that when Northumbria was reconquered, it was demoted from being a kingdom to being an earldom. So we have this idea that kingdoms are typically independent. The solution to making Northumbria stay part of England was to remove its kingdom status. So there is something special about kingdoms compared to earldoms or counties. But let’s keep looking at England because they do something really interesting in 300 years. In 300 years, they take control through conquest and marriage much of France. Like, a lot of France. Too much France, according to the reigning French king. The king of England was now King of Aquitaine, England, and otherwise owner of lots of stuff. But though we refer to what he owned as an empire, he did not. He was simply king of multiple individual places. Kind of like if you have a home and a summer home, you have two homes, not one grand property divided by lots of territory that’s not yours. So a kingdom is individual, multiple kingdoms can have the same king, and kingdoms have pesky habit of wanting to change hands. Another realm to consider is the North Sea Empire. The North Sea Empire was ruled over by Cnut the Great. However, Cnut did not consider himself an emperor but still a king. He also made sure to not have any big, king vassals as he divided England into earldoms. We see another aspect of kingdoms with Cnut, as he called himself, “King of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes." So we can see that there is some connection between kingdoms and cultural groups. We see this as well with Aquitaine being the region of Occitans, Norway home Norwegians, and Denmark home to Danes. Cnut, while not seeing himself as an emperor, definitely had the goal of establishing a dominion around a specific geographic feature. Perhaps we can see this as the beginning of imperial ambitions, as he recognized that he was king of many places and he wanted to control a big area of water, kind of like how Rome controlled the Mediterranean or how the emperor of Japan controls a big string if islands considered to be one unit. The North Sea Empire, as a union of kingdoms, dissolved upon Cnut’s death. Again, kingdoms like being independent. So a kingdom likes being independent, they appear to be a distinct unit of rulership that can change hands, kingdoms can be connected to cultural groups, and kingdoms have been demoted to prevent their pesky inheritance. So if we look at this idea of a King of kings, this is a lot more powerful. A king of king is above this pesky business of kingdoms wanting to slip away. No, these kingdoms are firmly underneath their rule (as much as you can be in feudal times). So an emperor rules over multiple units associated with some shared culture that are typically independent and it’s a big deal when they are not independent. We can see this idea in Russia. Peter the Great declared himself emperor of Russia. Lots of people tried to unite the Rus but only he was able to. And he marked that conquest that culminated in Muscovite victory with a declaration that these regions were under something above a king, in idea and reality. The idea of empires really came into vogue in the 19th century, with Napoleon declaring himself emperor of the French, an idea reminiscent of the Roman first among equals for their emperor. Additionally, Mexico had an emperor a few times. Not a king, but an explicit emperor. He didn’t last too long. Germany as well was declared as an Empire, as various former kingdoms under something supposedly above the kingdom of Prussia. This idea of an emperor uniting peoples is seen as well with Victoria, who declared herself Empress of India. So it is here that I define both kingdom and empire. A kingdom is a distinct unit of government, typically independent, frequently tied to a specific group of people. An empire is a body that has kingdoms underneath it and is an idea that it is above the kingdoms, a uniter of kingdoms, and one that has heavy influence from Rome but is not a strictly European idea. Heck, some Slavic languages used the word Qagan as emperor for a period of time.

Now, after having spent some time reading this, you might be thinking “who cares? Why is this important?” Well, this is very important. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he worked hard to distance himself from the idea that he was the emperor of china. The European Union, in my view, is a reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire. It has member states that are distinct, like kings, but who all show varying levels of respect to an increasingly centralized governing body. Form your opinions on this as you will, but keep in mind the cultural advances made in the HRE that would not be possible if all those fractured states were not protected by a larger body. India as well is huge, and is definitely an empire. India being united is on a similar level with Europe being united, with a huge diversity of cultures and religions spread across a large piece of land but those states probably won’t be slipping away due to inheritance anytime soon. By identifying what is an empire, we can apply the techniques other empires have to ensure efficient administration and collectivity of the populace. Now, one thing I do want to clarify here is that the idea of a country having one unified culture or people is a very new idea starting with Napoleon. Lands could change hands so seeing yourself as French when you were English a month ago is harder than saying you are from a certain village. England is a special case because it had a migration Germanic lands bringing in Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had a very different language and culture than the Romans and Britons already there. This was a pretty clear division between the groups, as well as the Norse who would come later. In other places, this division is harder to see but you might be able to group them based upon general lingual groups. Anyways, this is something I have thought about for a long time and wanted to type out.

A wall of text is something that is frowned upon in most, actually virtually all Internet societies, including forums, chat boards, and Uncyclopedia. You should not make walls of text because it can get you banned anywhere unless it is a place that encourages walls of text. I highly doubt any place does support something so irritating and annoying, but anything can exist, but not really because unless you are in heaven then that can happen. But no one actually knows that was just a hypothesis, a lame one that is. Actually not really lame. You can create a wall of text supporting site, but you would be hated if you do that, so do not. But you can if you like, but I discourage that. Now on to the actual information of walls of texts. The wall of text was invented when the Internet was invented, but actually it was slow at that time. So whenever it became fast. But there would need to be some free or not free community for people, and that community would be able to have walls of text. But that community probably wouldn't have actually invented the wall of text. So basically, no one except God and Al Gore knows when or where or how the wall of text existed/was invented. Noobs probably invented, but probably not. Who knows. Walls of texts are usually filled with a lot of useless information and junk. Information and junk can be the same, but only if the information is junk or the junk is information. But who cares. The information/junk inside a wall of text are usually related to wherever the wall of text is located, but the best walls of text, which are actually the most irritating, most eye-bleeding ones, are completely random. Walls of text usually make the reader asplode or have their eyes bleed and fall out of their sockets. A number of people can stand it, but not read them. Actually some people can stand and read them. Those people do not have short attention spans. These are boring and patient people who have no life or have all the time in their hands, which are the same, but not really. The punishment of what making walls of text varies of the strictness of the community. But it doesn't really matter. Nobody cares. Walls of texts should be free of links, different font colors, strange characters, which are those other symbols used in society, and capital letters because it ruins the whole purpose of the infamy of walls of texts. It makes them look fucking dumb and weird. Walls of texts are obviously free of huge spaces and outstanding things like capital letters. Of course, paragraphs should never be in a wall of text. Walls of text are known to create nausea, confusion, head explosion, and others. The others being something I can not think of either because I am lazy or if I do not feel like it or I can not actually think of anything. Like what the fuck? That was a rhetorical question right there. What the fuck? You are actually not requesting a satisfactory answer, you just say that because you try to be funny or you feel like it or if you are pissed off. You must get a proper bitch-slapping to stop making walls of text, but if you are weird then that doesn't apply to you. Walls of text are defeated by deleting them or splitting them into paragraphs. But who cares. The information/junk inside a wall of text are usually related to wherever the wall of text is located, but the best walls of text, which are actually the most irritating, most eye-bleeding ones, are completely random. Walls of text usually make the reader asplode or have their eyes bleed and fall out of their sockets. A number of people can stand it, but not read them. Actually some people can stand and read them. Those people do not have short attention spans. These are boring and patient people who have no life or have all the time in their hands, which are the same, but not really. The punishment of what making walls of text varies of the strictness of the community. But it doesn't really matter. Nobody cares. Walls of texts should be free of links, different font colors, strange characters, which are those other symbols used in society, and capital letters because it ruins the whole purpose of the infamy of walls of texts. It makes them look fucking dumb and weird. Walls of texts are obviously free of huge spaces and outstanding things like capital letters. Of course, paragraphs should never be in a wall of text. Walls of text are known to create nausea, confusion, head explosion, and others. The others being something I can not think of either because I am lazy or if I do not feel like it or I can not actually think of anything. Like what the fuck? That was a rhetorical question right there. What the fuck? You are actually not requesting a satisfactory answer, you just say that because you try to be funny or you feel like it or if you are pissed off. You must get a proper bitch-slapping to stop making walls of text, but if you are weird then that doesn't apply to you. Walls of text are defeated by deleting them or splitting them into paragraphs. Or some other things that would work but will take hours to think of. People are considered a nuisance if they create walls of text. This might be the end. If you hope this is the end, I am not sure. But if I was not sure then I wouldn't be talking. I should know. Or should I? The best way to make a better and good wall of text is to copy and paste what you previously typed or write. Hey, that reminds me. Wall of text aren't always on the internet! They could be anywhere that is able to produce symbols. D'oh. A wall of text is something that is frowned upon in most, actually virtually all Internet societies, including forums, chat boards, and Uncyclopedia. You should not make walls of text because it can get you banned anywhere unless it is a place that encourages walls of text. I highly doubt any place does support something so irritating and annoying, but anything can exist, but not really because unless you are in heaven then that can happen. Or some other things that would work but will take hours to think of. People are considered a nuisance if they create walls of text. This might be the end. If you hope this is the end, I am not sure. But if I was not sure then I wouldn't be talking. I should know. Or should I? The best way to make a better and good wall of text is to copy and paste what you previously typed or write. Hey, that reminds me. Walls of text aren't always on the internet! They could be anywhere that is able to produce symbols. D'oh. A wall of text is something that is frowned upon in most, actually virtually all Internet societies, including forums, chat boards, and Uncyclopedia. You should not make walls of text because it can get you banned anywhere unless it is a place that encourages walls of text. I highly doubt any place does support something so irritating and annoying, but anything can exist, but not really because unless you are in heaven then that can happen. But no one actually knows that was just a hypothesis, a lame one that is. Actually not really lame. You can created a wall of text supporting site, but you would be hated if you do that, so do not. But you can if you like, but I discourage that. Now on to the actual information of walls of texts. The wall of text was invented when the Internet was invented, but actually it was slow at that time. So whenever it became fast. But there would need to be some free or not free community for people, and that community would be able to have walls of text. But that community probably wouldn't have actually invented the wall of text. So basically, no one except God and Al Gore knows when or where or how the wall of text existed/was invented. Noobs probably invented, but probably not. Who knows. Walls of texts are usually filled with a lot of useless information and junk. Information and junk can be the same, but only if the information is junk or the junk is information. But who cares. The information/junk inside a wall of text are usually related to wherever the wall of text is located, but the best walls of text, which are actually the most irritating, most eye-bleeding ones, are completely random. Walls of text usually make the reader asplode or have their eyes bleed and fall out of their sockets. A number of people can stand it, but not read them. Actually some people can stand and read them. Those people do not have short attention spans. These are boring and patient people who have no life or have all the time in their hands, which are the same, but not really. The punishment of what making walls of text varies of the strictness of the community. But it doesn't really matter. Nobody cares. Walls of texts should be free of links, different font colors, strange characters, which are those other symbols used in society, and capital letters because it ruins the whole purpose of the infamy of walls of texts. It makes them look fucking dumb and weird and dumb. Walls of texts are obviously free of huge spaces and outstanding things like capital letters. Of course, paragraphs should never be in a wall of text. Walls of text are known to create nausea, confusion, head explosion, and others. The others being something I can not think of either because I am lazy or if I do not feel like it or I can not actually think of anything. Like what the fuck? That was a rhetorical question right there. What the fuck? You are actually not requesting a satisfactory answer, you just say that because you try to be funny or you feel like it or if you are pissed off. Now I just copied and pasted part of this huge wall of text, which is actually not. Wait what? Nice right? Ba boom a rhetorical question right there. Is this the end for the sanity of your eyes? What the fuck did you actually read up to here? Or did you skip to near the end and read this? Either way, you fail in life. Just kidding. Or was I? Oh well. Congratulations, or not, actually not. Get a life right now. I found a cheap life on eBay, but cheap lives are rare. Well, good luck in finding one. Not! Okay go kill yourself, but I wasn't meaning that. So go sit in the corner in your house. I do not care which, just stay there and rot. If you are not in a place with a corner, then lucky you. Find one if you can. There is no other option because I said so. Now if you pity yourself for reading this like most do, then do something productive and useful to the environment. My goodness. OK this is me here. I am starting a new section of this article. I didn't read anything in this article above here, but nevermind, because I have something important to say, and you really have to read this. So just skip everything above and just come to this part and start reading and agreeing. The wall of text was invented by engineers using typewriters. Everything was in typewriter font (because it was made on typewriters - remember when I explained that in the previous sentence?) and the point was to use all of the paper, because paper was very expensive back then, it had just been invented I think. So anyway, the point was, no margins at the top or bottom or sides. If you left a quarter inch on the sides of the paper, that was very bad. And the guiding principle was "This was hard to write, so it should be hard to read". Because they were software engineers, not writing engineers. Is there even such a thing a writing engineers? Probably. But anyway, please go back to the top of this article and read it over again. You'll get the point after you read it for approx. 10 to 15 times. OK have you done that now? Good. Now let's be honest - you're not reading down this far. Are you? Nobody would read down this far, unless they were a crazy person. Are you a crazy person? You might be. Now I'm afraid - it's just me alone with a crazy person. No one else has read down this far, just you, so it's just the two of us alone together here. Are you going to do something crazy? Maybe you will. Please don't hurt me. If you promise not to hurt me, I'll give a coupon good for a free Grand Slam Breakfast at Denny's. OK? Now just do this one thing for me, read the article over again, just one more time, and if you really truly don't agree with everything in it, then fine, I'll retire from my job with the railroad and we'll call the whole thing off and just go dancing, just the two of use, me (the writer) and you (a completely random crazy person who has actually read down this far), and boy won't we turn heads when we show up at Rockefeller Center with the entire Donner Party in tow! We'll dance all night to strains of the Lemon Pipers while the Italian 12th Armored Division prevents the Allies from thrusting into our rear! Ah, what memories we'll make, I'll never forget you, my completely insane random person. By the way this is magnificent example of wall of text. You have to be proud you read it all. Now please read article again, and this time pay attention.Wait a minute. didnt it say earlier that there shouldn't be any capitals

A wall of text consists of many lines of text that resemble a wall. A wall of text can sometimes be really big or somewhat small. Most walls of text lack grammar so they are not as appealing to read while other walls of text do contain grammar so they are actually easy to read but not as long as if you were to put a bunch of random characters or words. A wall of text might be made out of word bricks which kind of makes sense if you think of each word as a brick but that would be a tall and narrow wall unless you expand it in which case it will be a large wall in general. Most places do not allow walls of text because they count as spam and could get you banned or kicked or muted and will prevent you from posting other walls of text. Some places allow walls of text but that would be weird and probably doesn't exist. If such a platform did exist for creating walls of text and publishing them for viewers then it is probably not popular otherwise I would have seen it by now. You should refrain from posting walls of text because of the reason I stated up there that said that you could get muted for spam and another reason being that it might get a lot of dislikes or even flagged for spam. If you get flagged for spam then you will no longer be able to post walls of text which is pretty reasonable but I think people should be able to express themselves but probably not through walls of text unless you want to. I have come across a few walls of text and some of them are funny but some of them are short and there are rarely any long walls of text. Maybe walls of text were created by early internet users to troll others but that would be extremely slow because you get like a byte per second download and like a bit per second upload or something like that idk I didn't live with dial up so i wouldn't know about the internet speeds but they are probably accurate even though i should fact check that. People who create walls of text probably have a lot of time on their hands or are really boring or both and they might have very long attentions spans or maybe they are entertained by creating a wall of text because it lets them be creative with what they say. My favorite wall of text is titled "regarding walls of text" and it is a fun read because it keeps the user engaged but I don't think it is a wall of text probably more like a narration or documentary through words. Though some walls of text are large, some can be small but equally as annoying. Sometimes small walls of text are considered copy pasta because you can copy it and paste it to insert a copy of that wall of text or copy pasta. Walls of text can also be copied and pasted but what normal person would copy it? That's like copying abnormal copy pasta in a formal setting. Just imagine Jim peaking at your screen that contains a copy pasta while you're supposed to be focusing on the meeting. How would he feel? How would you feel if the roles were switched? Those questions are of course rhetorical but it's good to consider them. Are you ready to live forever? You guys, my name is Alan Resnick, and I'm so excited to be here. I found the secret to eternal life, and I found it on my Lapbook Pro. Now, you're looking at me, and you're saying, "Alan, you are so smart and you are so small. What is your origin tale?" Well, it all started...Two years ago. Me and Janet were having a bit of a lovers' quarrel, and she's got me sleeping on the couch. Now, I don't mind. I'm fine with it. I'm snoozing. And I'm having a dream I'm in a foggy meadow, and in the distance, I hear a voice calling me "Alan, Alan," just like that. And the fog clears to reveal a beautiful nude woman. And she's saying, "Alan, I'm ready for you. Put your dirt in me." and I'm thinking, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a minute. I'm in enough trouble with the wife as it is. This is the last thing I need." But...I do it anyways, and right as I'm about to seal the deal, out of nowhere, I get shot with a gun, and it completely, completely destroyed my face. And that's how I got my fantastic idea. What if I could back myself up like my best favorite mp3 file or like a gif or a pdf? And after two months of hard work, I had done it. I had made an exact digital copy of myself. He calls himself "Teddy." I don't know why. My name is Alan. Now let's explain my 4-step program to live forever as you are now through 3-d scanning and other digital archiving techniques! Step number 1 is the most important step: Getting to know yourself. Now, you're probably thinking, "Alan, I think I know myself pretty well. I've spent every day of my life by myself. There's nothing about me to even tell me that I don't already know." well, I got some bad news for you, Mason. No one knows you. You see, by the age of 6, every human brain has formed a small calcified pebble called the Schrader clot, which prevents any amount of self-awareness. But don't worry, 'cause I've come up with an exercise to help us move past that pebble. All you have to do... Is look. Look at your face in the mirror. Look at your eyes. Look at the nose, the mouth, the philtrum. You're gonna do this for five hours every night. Then just borrow a pen or a pencil from a buddy or friend, flip off that light switch, and draw an image of what you think you saw in the mirror. Now hang up those drawings all over your house to remind you of what you did in the bathroom. Step number 2 is my favorite, favorite step. You're gonna come to my house. I'm gonna strobe blindingly bright lights into your eyes and face while you spin in my living room. Now, my patterns are going to be queered by your headform, and they're gonna generate three point-cloud axes. And then all you have to do is boolean the axes, and you're gonna end up with a 3-D model mesh of your head. It captures every wrinkle, every tear. After all, it's our imperfections that make us human. Okay. Have you ever gone over to your girlfriend's house and she's covered her face in disgusting makeup and you find out that, all of a sudden, you don't love her anymore? It's not her fault. It's not your fault. It's actually science. See, she didn't know it at the time, but she just destroyed that natural luminescent quality that makes a woman beautiful. Now, that's a property called the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley states that when a non-human object begins to appear more human, it starts to get really cute... To a point, and then it becomes creepy. It's like this imagine I'm jogging, and I love to jog, so I'm jogging. And out of nowhere damn it!... Aaaaaaaaaaaah! ...I stub my toe on a rock. On an ugly rock. But, hey, I got my pen here. Maybe I'll draw two eyes on the rock, and now, all of a sudden whoa! This rock's looking kind of cute. I'm starting to like this rock. What if I draw a nose and a mouth on the rock? And now, all of a sudden whoa! This is the cutest rock I've ever seen! I can't believe I'm falling in love with a stone. And then you're gonna want to coat the rock in skin and flesh and ooh, uncanny valley. Your rock fell down into the uncanny valley. It's down there with moving corpses, and this is where your girlfriend lives, and we're gonna try to hop on over and land on the other side with a believable human with real skin and flesh. Now, I got an internship at the morgue, and I found out that every human face can contain as many as six muscles. And those muscles expand and contract and wibble and nibble and pull and tug at the skin. Ooh! That's a lot of stress. Skin stress. Skin stress test. I put every avatar I make through a variety of intensive skin stress tests. I do ball tests. Yes, I have wiggle tests. Whoever said I didn't have wiggle tests was lying. I shake up those avatars. And last but not least, we have durability and tear testing, because the last thing you want is your avatar's skin to rip or tear when you're trying to chat about your day. So, that's it. We've created a real-life avatar. I guess I can just go home now. Bye bye-oh, wait. You forgot the personality, and it's only the most important step. I'm going to come into your house. I'm gonna come into your home, and I'm gonna stay with you for two months. I'll bring a cot and a humidifier, and I'm gonna find out what makes you you. Every morning, you're gonna wake up with me on top of you. I'm gonna ask you hundreds of personal questions. Hundreds of personal questions. Things like: Have you ever caught a friend telling a lie? What was the worst thing you ever had to clean off of a rug? What's the best pair of lips you ever kissed? How many books do you own? Have you ever had a soft-shell crab? How much water can you drink? How many times did you catch a ball at the ball game you went to? How do you feel when you touch a little dog's hair? What is it like to have your hand covered in old glue? And all that information gets scanned in, and it gets put into the USB drive of your computer, and it makes the brain of your avatar. So, now my avatar doesn't just look like me, he also thinks like me. I have touched so many lives with this remarkable technology! Teddy, thank you so much for helping me share this message tonight. Folks, we live in a very spooky-style world. No one's gonna do it for you. But all you have to do is take that first step, reach for that sweet, sweet fruit, and make nothing else you ever do ever matter.

People tend to use the term Empire rather interchangeably with the term big kingdom or kingdom that owns lots of stuff that is not its own. But I don't like this definition. This definition does not give nearly enough importance to the term and waters it down, and it sometimes just doesn’t apply to certain things. The other issue is some people think that an Empire is just a European expression intended to connect someone to the concept of Rome. The word Empire does come from the Roman idea of Imperium, which was Rome's concept of rule through law, order, and general Roman influence being incredibly high among people, high enough they start acting Roman, a hegemony. But the idea that Empires are European is incorrect. First, let's start with Persia. The Persian ruler was at times the Shahanshah, or Shah of Shahs, or king of kings. Similarly, the Turkic (big group of people from which the guys in Turkey come from) and Mongolian languages have the term Khagan/Qagan/Kha Khan which means Khan of Khans. While a khan might not strictly be a king in a feudal sense due their nomadic lifestyle, the idea is similar. Both of these people have a very definite idea that there can be someone so great, kings, the guys normally at the top, swear fealty to them. Another point, Genghis Khan is not a name but a title, meaning Great Khan, under whom other Khans serve. These khans eventually broke away but Temujin, the OG Genghis Khan, wanted his empire to last with a Genghis Kahn at top, and the other khans loyal to him. So this brings us to another definition, someone who rules over kings. Does this work? The Holy Roman Emperor ruled over a couple of kings. The Mameluke emperor ruled over sultans, the Roman emperor was described by a Chinese traveler as ruling over kings who were appointed on the death of a previous king. But what about Charlemagne and Charles Martel? The Frankish Emperor ruled over what was by right multiple kingdoms but I don't think he had kingly vassals. And in texts at the time the empire was referred to as both a kingdom and an empire. But this kingdom was something special as emphasis was placed on the fact that it united previously disunited kingdoms. Similar situation with China. China is either the Celestial Empire or the Middle Kingdom, depending on context. But either way, the Chinese emperor, or Huangdi, was seen as someone above other rulers. Other rulers paid tribute to him and he certainly ruled over quite a vast territory. A territory so vast, it once had many kingdoms within it, but those kingdoms were all united, with quite a lot of force, by Qin Shi Huangdi. Perhaps one thing to do at this point is more properly define a kingdom. To do that, let’s look at the British Isles. Now today’s British Isles are a lot more complicated than they were circa 850 AD so we will look back then. Back then, there were many independent realms, to name a few: the Kingdom of Jorvik (Northumbria), Kingdom of West Seax, Kingdom of Mercia, and the Kingdom of East Anglia. These guys all existed in what would become simply England. Jorvik/Northumbria is the one that is most relevant to what we are looking at because something very interesting happened to it. When Alfred the Great declared himself king of England, he did so controlling Northumbria as a kingdom. One king, two kingdoms. Northumbria would slip away from the King of England due to inheritance issues because it was a kingdom, those typically are independent. This was such an issue that when Northumbria was reconquered, it was demoted from being a kingdom to being an earldom. So we have this idea that kingdoms are typically independent. The solution to making Northumbria stay part of England was to remove its kingdom status. So there is something special about kingdoms compared to earldoms or counties. But let’s keep looking at England because they do something really interesting in 300 years. In 300 years, they take control through conquest and marriage much of France. Like, a lot of France. Too much France, according to the reigning French king. The king of England was now King of Aquitaine, England, and otherwise owner of lots of stuff. But though we refer to what he owned as an empire, he did not. He was simply king of multiple individual places. Kind of like if you have a home and a summer home, you have two homes, not one grand property divided by lots of territory that’s not yours. So a kingdom is individual, multiple kingdoms can have the same king, and kingdoms have pesky habit of wanting to change hands. Another realm to consider is the North Sea Empire. The North Sea Empire was ruled over by Cnut the Great. However, Cnut did not consider himself an emperor but still a king. He also made sure to not have any big, king vassals as he divided England into earldoms. We see another aspect of kingdoms with Cnut, as he called himself, “King of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes." So we can see that there is some connection between kingdoms and cultural groups. We see this as well with Aquitaine being the region of Occitans, Norway home Norwegians, and Denmark home to Danes. Cnut, while not seeing himself as an emperor, definitely had the goal of establishing a dominion around a specific geographic feature. Perhaps we can see this as the beginning of imperial ambitions, as he recognized that he was king of many places and he wanted to control a big area of water, kind of like how Rome controlled the Mediterranean or how the emperor of Japan controls a big string if islands considered to be one unit. The North Sea Empire, as a union of kingdoms, dissolved upon Cnut’s death. Again, kingdoms like being independent. So a kingdom likes being independent, they appear to be a distinct unit of rulership that can change hands, kingdoms can be connected to cultural groups, and kingdoms have been demoted to prevent their pesky inheritance. So if we look at this idea of a King of kings, this is a lot more powerful. A king of king is above this pesky business of kingdoms wanting to slip away. No, these kingdoms are firmly underneath their rule (as much as you can be in feudal times). So an emperor rules over multiple units associated with some shared culture that are typically independent and it’s a big deal when they are not independent. We can see this idea in Russia. Peter the Great declared himself emperor of Russia. Lots of people tried to unite the Rus but only he was able to. And he marked that conquest that culminated in Muscovite victory with a declaration that these regions were under something above a king, in idea and reality. The idea of empires really came into vogue in the 19th century, with Napoleon declaring himself emperor of the French, an idea reminiscent of the Roman first among equals for their emperor. Additionally, Mexico had an emperor a few times. Not a king, but an explicit emperor. He didn’t last too long. Germany as well was declared as an Empire, as various former kingdoms under something supposedly above the kingdom of Prussia. This idea of an emperor uniting peoples is seen as well with Victoria, who declared herself Empress of India. So it is here that I define both kingdom and empire. A kingdom is a distinct unit of government, typically independent, frequently tied to a specific group of people. An empire is a body that has kingdoms underneath it and is an idea that it is above the kingdoms, a uniter of kingdoms, and one that has heavy influence from Rome but is not a strictly European idea. Heck, some Slavic languages used the word Qagan as emperor for a period of time. Now, after having spent some time reading this, you might be thinking “who cares? Why is this important?” Well, this is very important. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he worked hard to distance himself from the idea that he was the emperor of china. The European Union, in my view, is a reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire. It has member states that are distinct, like kings, but who all show varying levels of respect to an increasingly centralized governing body. Form your opinions on this as you will, but keep in mind the cultural advances made in the HRE that would not be possible if all those fractured states were not protected by a larger body. India as well is huge, and is definitely an empire. India being united is on a similar level with Europe being united, with a huge diversity of cultures and religions spread across a large piece of land but those states probably won’t be slipping away due to inheritance anytime soon. By identifying what is an empire, we can apply the techniques other empires have to ensure efficient administration and collectivity of the populace. Now, one thing I do want to clarify here is that the idea of a country having one unified culture or people is a very new idea starting with Napoleon. Lands could change hands so seeing yourself as French when you were English a month ago is harder than saying you are from a certain village. England is a special case because it had a migration Germanic lands bringing in Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had a very different language and culture than the Romans and Britons already there. This was a pretty clear division between the groups, as well as the Norse who would come later. In other places, this division is harder to see but you might be able to group them based upon general lingual groups. Anyways, this is something I have thought about for a long time and wanted to type out.

I really want to learn how to draw a map (a proper one, from a real location, not a fantasy one).
Where should I look? Couldn't find a lot of proper tutorial on the internet.
The location I want to map is underground (no cellular network or GPS down there) and quite big (300km-ish).
There's already some maps of the place but they omit some of the tunnels (to protect them).

Hi, first post - be gentle. I don't know whether this has been mentioned but I couldn't find it anywhere else.

I worked on a hierarchical tree before (for customer support scripts) and after a while the wealth of material became increasingly complex. One problem that presented itself was the difficulty of 'multiple points of entry'. There are many ways of approaching the same topic.

In the context of Tildes, I would give a simple example of music (since that was used already). If you have a top level called ~music, your next level may be .folk, then say .Macedonia. This is how you categorise the topic.

However, if I'm in ~Macedonia then I should be able to visit .music and then .folk but arrive at the same discussion group as above.

By default, any two groups with the same set of identifiers, whatever the order, should point to the same location. In fact, there should be an infinite number of ways to get to any group, in theory.

Do we want a group called ~history.Renaissance.artists.Italy.LeonardoDaVinci and also have a different group ~science.engineering.history.LeonardoDaVinci, along with 50 others about the same individual? An ability to merge disparate tildes might be useful.

In addition, I would imagine trying to perfectly map the world of ideas and discussion into a single hierarchy is a Quixotic task, that way madness lies - especially for the nitpicky Reddit crowd. I've seen plenty discussion on this already. If it was a bit looser, we'd get to the discussion quicker, without all the 'meetings to decide on a working group name'.

Just throwing it out there for discussion. Thanks.

Hey folks! I'm travelling with my wife to Paris for about 2 weeks. If you have any Paris stories, I'd love to hear them! Have any travel advice? I'm all ears. Local knowledge or location tips like awesome places to eat or places to see off the beaten path would be amazing.

This is a very hard puzzle. There is a solution that guarantees 100% chance of escape.

You and your friend are incarcerated. Your jailer offers a challenge. If you complete the challenge you are both free to go. Otherwise you are condemned to die. Here are the rules:

-The jailer will take you into a private cell. In the cell will be a chessboard and a jar containing 64 coins.

-The jailer will take the coins, one-by-one, and place a coin on each square on the board. He will place the coins randomly on the board. Some coins will be heads, and some tails (or maybe they will be all heads, or all tails; you have no idea. It's all at the jailer's whim. He may elect to look and choose to make a pattern himself, he may toss them placing them the way they land, he might look at them as he places them, he might not …). If you attempt to interfere with the placing of the coins, it is instant death for you. If you attempt to coerce, suggest, or persuade the jailer in any way, instant death. All you can do it watch.

-Once all the coins have been laid out, the jailer will point to one of the squares on the board and say: “This one!” He is indicating the magic square. This square is the key to your freedom.

-The jailer will then allow you to turn over one coin on the board. Just one. A single coin, but it can be any coin, you have full choice. If the coin you select is a head, it will flip to a tail. If it is a tail it will flip to a head. This is the only change you are allowed to make to the jailers initial layout.

-You will then be lead out of the room. If you attempt to leave other messages behind, or clues for your friend … yes, you guessed it, instant death!

-The jailer will then bring your friend into the room.

-Your friend will look at the board (no touching allowed), then examine the board of coins and decide which location he thinks is the magic square.

-He gets one chance only (no feedback). Based on the configuration of the coins he will point to one square and say: “This one!”

-If he guesses correctly, you are both pardoned, and instantly set free. If he guesses incorrectly, you are both executed.

-The jailer explains all these rules, to both you and your friend, beforehand and then gives you time to confer with each other to devise a strategy for which coin to flip.

What is your strategy? How do you escape?

Original source and answer: http://datagenetics.com/blog/december12014/index.html