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Introductions | May 2020
We're overdue for another introductions thread, we've had a couple hundred new people come in since the last one and today's seeing a wave of new people interested in joining.
So, tell us about yourself, as much as you want to share. How did you find out about Tildes? Do you have any questions, hobbies, interests? The ~talk group is the most casual part of Tildes, you could think of it as a sister to /r/casualconversation, so feel free to talk about anything!
Past introduction threads for posterity: -1- . -2- . -3- . -4- . -5- . -6-
I found tildes through a reddit thread and really liked the general attitude and mission. I'm big on digital privacy and open source software/principles.
I am getting close to wrapping a masters in mechanical engineering and work at an engineering software company, so I'm always interested in talking tech and engineering. I've done some serious photography and love to discuss music, HiFi, and general listening enjoyment. Edit: I play the bass, drums, and melodic percussion, among many other percussion instruments, but haven't been able to do much playing lately. Listening is just the next best thing.
And a warm welcome to another music aficionado ! What are your genres of choice ?
Prior to 2013 it was a lot of post-grunge rock. You know, Fuel, Three Doors Grace, Seether, all that. I've been on a quite a genre journey since about 2013. I got really into trap music when it first hit, then that turned into bounce (which never went away lol), then house music, then a huge pop phase, new R&B/soul, and now americana and singer-songwriter. I've also always loved '00s club music like Nelly and Lil Jon since it's like what I heard a lot growing up. I rotate all those genres depending on how I feel now, but much of my discovery has been a lot of more relaxed stuff.
Yikes! It's a mistake but it has me laughing. I was thinking Three Doors Down and Three Days Grace and here we are...
What kind of photography ?
I did a photodocumentary project on black and white medium format film called Louisiana Gone. We interviewed residents of coastal Louisiana communities affected by land loss and subsidence. Our social media and website is really outdated but it's still up. We self-published a book and some of the prints hang at LSU. My partner did a TEDxLSU talk and there's a podcast called Coastal Voices that is a similar project but investigates a different angle.
LFTL: https://www.louisianagone.com
Lots of nice photos in the gallery! :)
Thanks :)
Sometimes I forget all the work that went into that project. I'm very proud of it, though! Every photograph has a story, even though the gallery doesn't have captions.
Oh hey! I also play melodic percussion, or at least I used to when I had access to a marimba (sadly no longer). I think it's an absolute joy to play and a gorgeous instrument both tonally and aesthetically. I would love to have my own vibraphone some day.
One of my favourite memories is in tight quarters, in a pit band for a Christmas musical and getting to just go nuts on the bell chimes with rawhide mallets. The trombone player who sat near me always tried to make space because she was nervous about all the hammers.
I am in the same boat! I just don't have access to those instruments anymore. I played a handful of vibraphone solos and a duet and it is definitely my favorite percussion instrument.
So I've been here a while now - but never introduced myself.
I got here via a IRL friend who lurks the forums and then through a random "who wants an invite" from another (IIRC).
I'm a 43 year old gay dude from Sweden, living in Gothenburg, with husband and cat. I'm an illustrator, graphic designer and interaction designer dabbling a bit in animation right now. I have an extensive background as a contributor in the Libre and Open Source Software world and the KDE community in particular.
I'm also a massive (pen and paper) RPG nerd who spent most of my youth playing different roleplaying games with friends.
My husband (who's also 43) and I quite recently figured out that one night when we where 17 he and a friend managed to sneak in to a club, get really hammered, high and then go home with a respective partner - was the VERY same night I played AD&D until dawn and managed to roll up a holy avenger sword on the loot table! So... yeah - massive nerd :D
In general I don't like being sarcastic, I always strive to be nice or not comment at all (even if I disagree) - and my personality is that of "labrador". I live for compliments, I like humans a lot and I tend to treat people overly nicely by default.
EDIT: my nick is a Swedish word meaning "The Vermin"
It sounds like you have a really swell life :)
Would you care to share more about how you got into contributing to KDE and also doing illustration? I'm curious how you were able to overlap those two interests.
Yeah its pretty nice if somewhat fiddly :)
Long ass post. Sorry. I ramble easily.
Illustration
I have worked since I was 17 in different weird jobs. I've been drawing daily since I was 7. I did some illustration for friends and friends projects when they asked and got some money every now and then from that.
But I grew up "knowing" what a real job was and knowing that (and this is an honest quote from a substitute art teacher when I was a kid) "art isn't important, its not like people like us will ever become artists".
I really bought in to that idea until I met my husband when I was 30. He basically told me I should go for it, as I told him he should go back to school to get a librarian degree he wanted. So I kept working (I was a forklift operator/docker at that time) when he was studying and then he worked while I was taking that chance at illustration work.
(my husband divides my life in to "before husband" and "after husband", he forced me to reconnect with my family and properly come out to them. He got me realizing that art and creative work wasn't something magical which could only be done by upper middle class academics and so much more. Before husband I was genuinely terrified of a lot of things based on my childhood. I feared rejection so much I moved to different cities as a way to flee problems. I took pride to mean that no one should ever see if I was weak etc etc. My husband really was the person who got me out of that and made me a better human)
Since I didn't and don't have that idea that things are done by experts I leapt on different projects and acted like I was not only employed to do that one thing, but as if the whole project was my passion work.
(also being kind of egomaniacal means I really never get that some skills are hard to learn because I think "if X can do Y, then it should be easy for me" and that new skills are just skills I haven't bothered learning yet)
Being someone who also can get enthusiastic and absurdly focused on one thing for a long time quickly helps - with the downside that I can completely ignore things I find boring and can get bored with something at the drop of a hat and just stop doing it.
KDE and Libre Software
I got in to Linux when Windows crashed for the umpteenth time dragging a weeks of work with it down in to the depths and I vaguely recalled this thing called "Babuntu" or "lonox" that an old room mate talked about. So swapped and have never looked back.
I got in to contributing for KDE through a guy called Aaron Seigo. I provided a lot of mockups for future applications and ideas concerning improvements as the work for Plasma 5 started (as a scratch-my-own-itch kind of thing) and he basically forced me to travel to the Kickoff sprint for Plasma 5. There I found a lot of developers who where/are just plain awesome people - inclusive to a fault and friendly to new ideas.
From that came the idea of forming a similar way as for programmers but for designers to get more design contributions to Plasma, formulating a human interface guidelines etc.
Since I can be an obnoxious bastard - I managed to talk a lot of people with an interest in design and get them to join. Everything from seasoned designers to complete beginners. The idea was to divorce design from the ivory tower ideal that still existed in many Libre/Open Source projects when it came to design work.
From that the VDG was born.
What needs to be pointed out is that my skills as an interaction designer was rubbish at that point so I had to learn on the job - but since by then designers like Andrew Lake, Thomas Pfeiffer (to name 2 out of about 20), where very much in charge of the design work and hopefully felt more empowered by my being their hypeman, it was pretty easy to learn.
Combined with devs like Alex Fiestas, Aleix Pol, Bhushan Shah (3 out of a 100+ names) the work was and is amazing.
I then got sponsored by Blue Systems to be able to work full time. I already was, but now I didn't have to do a second job at the same time. But I still did do a second job full time on the side.
Around here is when my first burn out happened. I was sitting on the tram to a local school since I had decided to take a course in Art History on the side as well - when suddenly an absolute and overpowering fear and nausea struck me and I had to leap off the tram and walk home through paths of the city I knew would be abandoned. I didn't know it at the time but this was what Agoraphobia felt like.
My work got impacted by it, even if I tried to keep up it was almost impossible. The thing with the VDG and KDE work is that in theory you can do it 24/7. Contributors around the planet ensure that you don't ever have to sleep. A combination of shame for not doing what I should and fear of missing out got me going way longer than I should instead of trusting the process and the people around me I kept shuffling on which resulted in that the second my first wave of burn out got beaten down another came on its heels.
What miffs me out is that my skill at finding awesome people to surround myself with is something I always pride myself in - but apparently didn't trust.
At the arse end of this I managed to snag (I kinda still think I did get him in) Nate Graham who as I kept dropping ball after ball started picking them up. Nate being more technically apt than me, more of a organized creator than me and quicker to learn took to the work like a duck to water AND managed to organize it better (basically fixing the busfactor of one) and he is sort of in charge of it now (check out pointedstick and "this week in KDE" to see how he really is running hard with the work like a madman and it rocks! He rocks).
The fact that I'm such an idiot that I don't trust people around me made the swap harder than it should have been.
KDE is in my heart totally for the vast and great community. I can't describe in words how awesome it is. It has impacted my life at the same level as roleplaying games (which is saying something). Being at an Akademy (the yearly conferance) is being surrounded, inundated, in this sea of creative geniuses. Freaks and Castaways in many cases that have a hard time being contained.
That in turn makes KDE an anarchic experience focused on allowing things to be rough if the trade off is "more people joining in". The polish happens because all those people manage to agree on something and someone just goes "Oh I can do this" and does it. It's a creative cesspool of awesomeness that I urge anyone to wallow in at least for a while.
I like you already.
I like you even more!
The former is because I do text and basic UI well, but I suck at anything that's graphical beyond the level of a six-year-old. Always looking for people to collaborate with on that front.
The latter is 'cause I'm one too, even though I'm yet to play a game of such in my life. I'm currently developing a system of my own, which you may or may not enjoy given your preferences.
Welcome! With such good audio equipment, what do you listen to?
Oof I'm getting old
Hello! I'm eve, named after eve from Wall-E, not the biblical figure lol. I have a degree in Writing and currently work as a technical writer for a blinds and shades manufacturer. I only have a couple weeks left there though (thanks pandemic).
My SO invited me to tildes because I was interested in the community, and I thought the mission statement and general vibe was very cool! I was a very early user so it's a little wild to see all these new people and NOT recognize usernames.
I primarily lurk but occasionally post. My hobbies are rock collecting, light bird watching, baking, crocheting, knitting, sewing, reading and drawing! Drawing is the one I've done the longest. I've been doing it an embarrassingly amount of time with comparatively slow improvement but a lot of that rides on the fact of me not working mrle technically on my art as other with more time and focus on it can. I am slow. I also am trying to learn some coding so what's one more hobby? A dumb aside but I really love using Adobe illustrator for work and personal stuff.
I think it's really great to get more people with more interest here so it's less inundated with tech and comp sci homies. I'm looking forward to more people and more interests posted.
Totally offtopic, but your comment made me realize how long it's been since I last saw Wall-E. And what do you know, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) it turns out it's on Disney+!!!... so guess what I am going to be doing later tonight? It's such a lovely little movie too, so I am actually really looking forward to it. :)
Heck yeah!! I love Wall-E so damn much. My SO and I got a couples mug of eve and wall-e that make a little heart shape when you put them together. But that movie is so good and wholesome, it's one of my favs! I hope you enjoy your viewing, I am now tempted as well to watch it again!!
I post so often that I assume most people who have been reading for a while have probably noticed me by now, but here's my bio:
(Incidentally, you can read anyone's bio by clicking on their username and then looking in the sidebar. You can edit your bio in settings.)
I love your accordion posts even if I don't comment on them! My late grandfather played the button accordion and I've always been fond of it. I've dabbled in a bunch of instruments, but I already have a solid base in piano so I'd love to pick up a piano accordion and learn that.
Problem is of course there's not a ton of local resources in terms of shops and local musicians. My fiancée actually owns an accordion despite having no musical aptitude (she just loves John Linnell maybe more than she loves me), but it turned out to be unplayable and I don't think it's worth the money to repair. :(
Do you have any suggestions for picking up a beginner instrument, and any book or piece suggestions for getting started?
Yes, this is a common problem and frequent question on r/Accordion.
Unfortunately, new accordions are expensive (over $1000) and used ones are tricky to buy. If you're fortunate to have an accordion store is nearby then they may sell used instruments for somewhat of a discount, but probably not much of one because they know what they're worth. On the other hand, they should provide a warranty and will often do trade-ins.
A common alternative is to buy locally via Craigslist or other websites like that, but then the instrument has to be evaluated in person, or it's a gamble. This isn't so easy right now due to the pandemic. Here is a web page I like about what to look for.
Also, sometimes people who give accordion lessons will have one they can loan out, and in Washington State there is a well-regarded accordion store that rents them.
While it's not an accordion, you might find a melodica easier to get as an alternative instrument. They are cheap, portable, and fun (particularly with previous piano experience), and you can buy them online. The keyboard skills should be transferrable for playing the treble side of a piano accordion.
I'm a young adult American. Been lurking on this site for about a year now but I figured I should start being a bit more active. I always have been a fan of the fantastic community this site has and how the solid the discussions have been.
I like to talk about music, video games, and tech, but also find myself often participating in other miscellaneous topics.
My name comes from my favorite physical format for music.
Good morning y'all! I am a 34 year old attorney, he/him, from the East Coast of the U.S.A. who works in labor and employment law. I don't want to be a lawyer forever, but I have so much debt I need to pay off from law school, it's got to keep going for at least a few more years. I found Tildes through reddit several years ago, but I am engaging a lot more with Tildes now that I am taking a break from reddit and facebook, which both stress me out.
What do I enjoy in my spare time? Well, I'm going through a bit of an early mid-life crisis right now, and trying to figure that out for myself. I used to think that my enjoyment and relaxation consisted mainly in playing video games and consuming media, but after years of sitting in front of the monitor and not being able to decide which game to play or what movie to watch, then turning it off almost immediately after I make a decision, I think it's time for me to re-examine my motives. I really enjoy being in nature, reading good books, and writing music, but I don't do enough of these things.
Politically, I consider myself to be a socialist, though what that means for me has changed over the past 5 years. I thought my political development was basically complete until 2016, when I was rudely awakened like so many others. Since then I have veered from social democrat to tankie and I am now in my recovering tankie phase. I still believe that actually-existing socialism gets a worse rap than it deserves, but I'm not going around trying to debunk all the lies anymore, and I'm much more accommodating of my anarchist comrades.
I run a left-wing meme page on Facebook with 180,000 followers, but I'm taking a hiatus from posting there because it stresses me out. On the one hand, I feel like in 20 years, I'll look back on my role there and be happy that I did the right thing by trying to influence the political conversation. On the other hand, it's kind of frightening when I realize that I have a platform which can reach up to 6 million people per week or more, total strangers know about it, and if I cross-post to other platforms, I'm likely to hear someone ask about it.
I have/had strong fandom tendencies, particularly regarding getting invested in the Star Trek franchise, but I realized it was ridiculous for me to get so emotionally invested in a product, even if it was important in my childhood. I am trying to identify and ameliorate these fandom tendencies in other areas of my life, too. I get fixated on things easily and I need to watch out for it. I have also been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and I have a lot of trouble giving myself a break.
Science and philosophy are also big interests of mine. My most recent completed read was Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder. I'm currently almost finished re-reading Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy, in which Russell talks smack about philosophers from antiquity to WW2. I read a review in which the reviewer stated "Russell is so condescending in this book towards other philosophers that the best way to enjoy it is for the reader to be even more condescending to Russell than Russell is to any of his subjects," which I found really funny, since I had been doing exactly that since starting my re-read. He is an excellent writer and philosopher but also has some pretty weird and old-fashioned views, which are easy to spot.
Comedy-wise, I was raised on SomethingAwful, The Daily Show, The Onion, and Tim & Eric (in rough chronological order), and I used to be really into stand-up comedy. My sense of humor is probably best described as absurdist, but I enjoy most kinds of comedy and I laugh really easily, especially at live shows. These days, I watch a lot of Conan O'Brien on YouTube, and Everything Is Terrible.
Hi there, people! I'm 21 from Israel, studied electrical engineering for two years. My nickname came from you know what. Saw some thread about having kids in the modern world and got sort of angry at the article, so decided to ask for an invite and register here to write my opinion. Still haven't written the opinion piece but I'm intending to do it very soon lol
This site in general has high value for me because more than on other sites (like Hacker News) I find something that is genuinely intersting for me
My biggest interest is in music, as it's one of the few things that get me excited at all. I play piano though at a subpar level. I love groups having it big, putting on a show. I'm a big Queen nerd :P
I've been interested in technology for a long time, but I generally prefer to have the least amount of it as possible while being able to achieve the maximum usefulness. The last few years I barely participated on any forum or social media
My favorite podcasts are Ben Shapiro's and Joe Rogan's. I've been listening to some lectures from Yale University about politics which I find very interesting
I guess I'll repost, with a tweak or 2 I guess.
...OK, that's terribly brief and I'll elaborate more. I suspect my main interests are politics, coding and just speculation about history and the future but I admittedly haven't really done too much soul searching or tried too many hobbies. The Brazilian part doesn't play too much in my life other than the fact that nearly everything I read is euro-american so I have no idea what's going on more close to me, unfortunately. This also means that the progressive movement going on in the US which I identify with doesn't exist and likely can't exist here due to government corruption being far less transparent and solveable, meaning the political movement I want to belong to will probably never come to me, leaving me with nothing to follow in my country's politics beyond watching right-wing populists parrot whatever to their supporters :p
Otherwise it means I'm terribly disconnected from the people around me IRL, meaning I spend far more of my time talking as this account than I do as the person behind it.
The last into thread was in May '18 and I joined in August that year. Well, here goes nothing.
I'm 22, male, from Austria currently finishing my bachelor degree in Computer Science. Will most likely go for a masters after that, but I don't know yet exactly.
I like video games and books, and I like DnD but haven't gotten the chance to try it out yet, but I will most likely at some point. I think I'd do great as a dungeon master because I enjoy designing that kind of stuff.
I also like writing, but like most people who don't write a lot, but writing's pretty bad. I've been a member of the roleplaying community in the past because I enjoy it when someone actually reads the stuff I write and judging by the comments I got, it was decent enough. Problem is that my novella kind of style writing doesn't really fit into the RP community, where most people are either teenagers or stay-at-home moms and thus tend to prefer shorter responses. So I've been trying to write on my own, but I need to get some structure into it and actually plan out a plot instead of just writing out stuff.
I also play the guitar. I've been told I can sing.
Hello Tildes (officially) !
I heard about this wonderful place on reddit, posted in Official Invite Requests Round 13 and yay, misterw sent me an invite link.
From past experiences on forums and the like I generally react in a positive way when I can find out something quite 'insider' about a place or a country. It just feels nice to get local knowledge in an online way. My nationality is 🇨đź‡Swiss and I'm open to communicating a) with other Swiss people to be amazed at the odds of several people of that small country finding their way to Tildes. And b) with people from nations I could see myself visiting in the future. I read about the bio in this thread - so I will write some places I'd like to visit in there. :)
I am dabbling in lurking, writing a few respones and getting better in labeling posts. First I always felt joy when I was labeling something Exemplary and the left border of the comment turned blue. But then I found out it does that everytime, at least for the view I have.
See you around and who knows, maybe I continue my search for fellow Swiss people in the next Intro thread.
PS: Almost forgot - Gruvbox Dark or bust!
Glad that we're getting some new users! Is there some ingestion source I'm not aware of that is causing a bump in signups?
This morning we got around thirty folks in the /r/tildes invite thread. Might have had something to do with /r/opposinggallowboob getting banned a couple of hours ago. We've had a handful of bursts like that recently, unhappy rumblings in reddit's underbelly. Folks keep plugging us in hackernews comment threads as well, though that tends to burst emails rather than reddit posts.
Do I even want to know?
Yeah. Same. I'm always a bit averse to "sign up bumps" just because some dumb internet drama went down somewhere on Reddit or another site—ideally people are signing up from Tildes because of the intrinsic value of Tildes, not just because there's a chance to recreate a Reddit 2.0 (admittedly, these aren't mutually exclusive goals).
When I'm sending out invites I've come to judge it in a laughably simple way.
Early on we had a lot of signups just because one had to have an account to view anything, so we were getting a curiosity bump. A lot of those folks either lurk now or moved on basically the same day. I'd get like one thank-you reply for every hundred invites sent.
When it became open to read, the invite volume cratered. Curiosity can be satisfied without the need to be invited first. What I wasn't expecting was that the ratio of thank yous to invites would rise into the 70+/100 range and stay there even with the new folks this morning. Didn't expect it, never would have predicted it or believed it, and yet it's the new normal somehow.
I think as long as we're seeing a high thank you response rate from the folks we're sending invites to, we're in excellent company.
What a heart-warming metric. Thanks for your work in bringing people here!
You handle most /r/tildes invites these days (you're too fast!), but I have noticed that even the few I send out nowadays tend to receive a lot more "thank you" type replies too. It's nice. :)
As someone who came in today, I appreciate your aversion. There are a lot of sites that could've been reddit 2.0 but fell to the those banned from reddit. Tildes feels different. I wasn't that comfortable posting on reddit. I'm really excited to be a part of building a new, better website with a group of folks that have a like-minded goal. I hope that the other users that joined share in that excitement.
Well summarised. Welcome, and enjoy your stay :)
For what it's worth, I idly wandered into a post from that subreddit randomly from /r/all and didn't even realize it was a whole targeted drama subreddit until after it got banned. Someone else had brought up Tildes as a reddit alternative, so I clarified in the thread that a lot of the content that's tolerated on reddit would not be tolerated on Tildes, linked the first blog post, and invited the people who responded positively.
I figured there'd be a lot of outrage enthusiasts and free speech absolutists in the thread given its context, so I was very upfront that those kinds of people would probably very quickly become frustrated here.
I think the people who send out invites are probably thinking about this. I of course want this site to grow but I want it to grow sustainably; the mission statement of this site is really all about trying to create a more positive online culture so I have faith that other folks here feel the same. :)