Kafka once wrote in a letter that he thought we ought to read only the books that wound or stab us. The quote is longer (because it's German), but I think we all get the drift.

This thread was inspired by a question that @scituselectrum asked me in the last book-reading thread: what books have you read that have allowed you to see the world in a new light? Put in Kafka-esque terms, what books have impacted you like a disaster and acted as an axe for the frozen sea within you?

I thought it was such a good question that I wanted to know other answers. Maybe add some reading to my already intimidating list.

I'm curious how many other furries (if any) have came here so far, and have a couple questions:

1. Which furry communities did you participate in the most on Reddit?
2. Which of those communities, if any, do you think would work well on Tildes?

Personally, I'm very partial to furry_irl, since there's a lot of friendly discussion in the comments, but I'm not sure the post content would fit very well here, unless fluff content was allowed.

To anyone confused, this and this are very brief introductions to what a furry is.

I'm not a native speaker, but from browsing reddit, understand 95% of what I read / hear. I also watch TV Shows exclusively in english. However, when i write a comment or something in english, it always feels like it doesn't really "flow".

How can i, or other non-native speakers improve our writing skills?

Personally, I feel like I'm in between. I started off as a Manufacturing Engineer, and something just didn't feel right. I sort of fell backwards into Health and Safety, and I love the field, but it's yet another job where you've got to be the bad guy. My mission is to have people believe that I really care about their safety, not some arbitrary numbers.

How about you? What's your favorite part of your job? Least favorite?

What regrets do you have in your life, minor or major?

Personally, I regret signing up to a new cool website without name changes and NOT just taking the name Scar or Whom, instead making my name long and awkward.

The book Code Complete changed me as a programmer and as a person. It is the best book I have ever read and if you're a programmer I highly recommend you read it.

The book was so good that after having read the pirated version of it I just had to give the author its money's worth. The problem was that almost nobody sells a PDF version of the book - Amazon sells it as a Kindle book, but I prefer PDFs (can use my chioce of software to read it). After searching for a short week I finally found a seller that sells a PDF version. I have never been so happy to find a legal PDF version of a book. Having been a pirate in my teens I'm proud of having gone to such lengths to the right thing. That's all. Just wanted to share this with you.

TL;DR: Instead of pirating a book because I didn't find a legal PDF version spent time searching for a seller and bought it legally.

Okay I haven't slept in almost 24 hours so I'm not exactly thinking straight but I was wondering:

What is that one thing in your life that makes everything better? It can be philosophical or it can be something others might consider "small", but I am geniunely curious on what makes you happy.

Now that a community is starting to build here, I'm curious if anyone else is interested in languages.

Personally, I realized that I enjoy learning languages when I took a Spanish class in high school. The only languages I've studied seriously are Spanish and Russian, and unfortunately these days my Spanish is pretty rusty, but I still enjoy the process of learning about different languages, how they relate to each other, and learning how to communicate at least a little.

Anyone here share my interest? What language(s) are you learning/have you studied, and what do you like or dislike about it? What has struck you as the most interesting or weirdest thing about it?

My wife just found a candle that was gifted to her by a coworker that contained this phrase and it caused somewhat of a debate about its destiny, which made me wonder... are we discussing religion and/or the lack thereof here? /r/atheism became a circlejerky hive of scum and villainy, can we do better? Or is a topic so inherently divisive inherently beyond reproach? Can emotion and anecdotal experiences ever compete on even footing with logic and reason?

Yesterday, Ireland passed a referendum that will repeal a constitutional amendment that banned abortions. The government of Ireland will now have the explicit authority (as soon as the results are certified) to legislate matters of abortion directly. This seems likely to lead to a substantially less restrictive stance toward abortion in one of the most restrictive member nations of the EU. It would still likely end up being slightly more restrictive law than in the United States.

Ireland's history regarding abortion's legality is explicitly tied as a counter-reaction to Roe V. Wade, the American supreme court case that found abortion legal until the third trimester under a rights-balancing test under the 9th and 14th amendments (which--implicitly--enshrines a right to privacy and--explicitly--expands that right to the state level, respectively). While this balancing test was later changed to a standard requiring "fetal viability," states and activists through the United States organized against the Supreme Court's decision to create new limitations on abortion.

So today, I'm seeking to sidestep some of that history to wrestle with the core underlying balancing test Roe v Wade and other similar legal frameworks have tried to answer: when is a pregnant woman's rights more or less important than the life of the living being growing inside of her? In what circumstances (if any) should a woman be allowed to choose to end her pregnancy?

I really like the vlogbrothers on YouTube and wanted to shared.

To me the channel is about 'imagining others complexly'. So often it feels like my various feeds are full of surface level assumptions without really interrogating the world around us. To me, vlogbrothers is an exception.

They walked through the candidates tax plans in the last election. Not to show how bad they are, but to really try to understand them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgicDQHbV3M

Hank wrote a song about quarks, and I think it is really fun. It helps demystify something that can seem scary if you don't have the right background.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0kXkWXSXRA

One of my frustrations with political threads generally is that they are often too broad to be meaningful in terms of policy discussion. So I thought I'd narrow the topic of discussion. I am quite interested in political discussion and this seems a fine enough place to have it as any.

So let's talk: Nuclear energy policy!

With the Paris accord attempting to have countries pledged to reduce their carbon footprint to keep the globe from warming past 2 degrees above industrial era temperatures, it seems like a lot of countries have a whole lot of work to do in a rather short period of time. Maybe the US decides to commit to some informal reduction in carbon emissions eventually. Maybe it doesn't. Here we're talking about shoulds.

So for non-US people: how should a given country go about meeting their commitment to the Paris Accord?

For the US peeps: 1.) should the US bother trying to reduce carbon emissions and 2.) how should it go about doing it?

For everyone: What place does nuclear energy have in an energy portfolio that reduces carbon emissions?

If not Friday, then replace your start-of-weekend day for off-business week schedules, but what's your usual 'get home and do what?' tradition to start your weekend time?

I enjoy getting home, setting my stuff down, pouring just a bit of port wine into glass and enjoying it for an hour or so just to unwind/disconnect.

Saying hello to the cat and dog fits in there, intermittently, too.

I'm from Belgium. Belgium is one of the two countries in the world, along with France, that uses AZERTY. The big problem with an AZERTY keyboard is that there is no tilde key. So, in orde to use the key or tag a sub (ex. ~fantasy, like you'd do /r/fantasy), AZERTY users have to manually copy the tilde every single time they want to use it. Usually this isn't that big of a problem, but when the tilde is such a key feature on a website, I think it does become a bit of a problem.

For reference, France has a population of 67M, while Belgium has around 11M.

On the heels of President Trump pulling out of talks with North Korea over nuclear disarmament in the Korean peninsula, the United States' pending withdrawal from the Paris agreement (coming soon! ... the day after the next presidential election), and the United States' unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, combined with ongoing Russian and Iranian leadership in resolving the Syrian civil war and Chinese leadership in talks with North Korea, we seem to be heading toward an ambiguous point in international geopolitics.

So this question is simple and nasty: Is the United States on its way to losing its status as the unquestioned dominant world power in the international order?

If it is on its way off the top of the food chain, who will challenge it? Are we returning to a cold war-style era or are the lines shifting and different? If the United States is not on its way to losing its dominant status, how might it maintain its footing in a world that seems increasingly disillusioned with it?

I'm looking forward to someone creating a family tree from the creation of Tildes to some future point in time. Since the entire site is invite only would be interesting to see the who invited who and how the site blossomed.

... and we're only a few bunch on an alpha website.

While actually the fact of being a small group could be playing a big role in this feeling, it just feel good to realise that some unrest I was feeling in the last months was just due to lack of meaningful discussions.

I was finding myself checking Reddit over and over (the meme about Reddit as an empty refrigerator feel terribly apt today) while I check here a couple times a day and get some interesting insight every. Single. Time.

So, enough rambling and just tank you @Deimos to put this up, that mod from reddit/science that made me discover this platform and every single one of you for providing some quality conversation :)

Keep going on!

Hey! I practice IP law with my brothers in Southern California. I primarily do trademark, copyright and litigation work. My brothers do patents and litigation.

I also moderate stuff on Reddit, like IAmA. Ideally, I'd like to host some AMAs here. This is kind of a test to see how it goes at an early stage.

Ask me stuff!

Proof with TruePic

Edit: This was fun. Thank you guys. I'm headed out for a bit. :)

Hello tildes, sorry if this is the wrong ~tilde to ask about it.

I have been a mod of /r/brasil for almost a year now, and recently became a mod of /r/europe. One of the things that I really kept me on Reddit were the AMAs (I loved the Obama and Bill Gates AMA) and cultural exchanges. You see, since 2015, /r/brasil organized this event between different national subreddits like /r/de, /r/AskAnAmerican, /r/singapore, /r/portugal, /r/CasualUK, etc. You can see the full list here. Also, we're currently running one cultural exchange with some Canadian subreddits (link). I really like how the Internet can still help us learn different perspectives, new music, food, and some funny banter between countries.

When I see people lamenting the current state of the Internet, I try to point them out to this kind of thing, because I genuinely see good things. I see opportunity to learn, to understand, to gracefully disagree or agree with someone.

When I first found out about tildes I thought, "how can we do this kind of awesome event between different cultures and nations?", and I guess there's no way to do this unless it's relevant for the context of a post. In a way what I want to say is, "there's more to internet discussions than the US and their issues".

Anyway, I guess this way kind of a ramble, kind of a question to y'all.

My husband and I went out for a really nice dinner last night at a "farm to table" restaurant. While the waitress was explaining the menu, she warned us that since there are no fresh tomatoes right now, one of the dishes on the menu used tomato paste. I had to try hard not to snort, it was so absurd.

Is it just me or is "farm to table" the ultimate in pretentious self delusion? You act like you're saving the world, but actually you're demonstrating your privilege?