I've seen discussions on here about nostalgia or nostalgic moments. It seems not only in this site, but others find themselves reminiscing about a time long passed. I've seen it popping up more and more. Some brush it aside as people being nostalgic about a time when they didn't have to work, but I find myself thinking that the increased rise of people reminiscing about the past is because the quality of life and/or the world itself feels so much worse than it did in the past. I've done this as well, too many times.

What're your thoughts on this?

So from earliest childhood, I have experienced that from time to time the electrical grid becomes unavailable for use and it can take days or even weeks to restore service. I'm having trouble comprehending the scope, scale and plausibility of what changes would need to be made to increase the electrification of everything in the way that is being pushed by policy advisors.

Everyone is pushing electric cars. I think it's a great idea, but I have questions about how the grid can support it.

People tell me that the next big advancement in the workplace is going to be the incorporation of artificial intelligence. Doesn't AI require servers on a massive scale? How plausible is it for AI to reach all corners of society and economy on our existing grid or reasonable expectations for plausible improvement of the grid?

The banks seem to be lobbying for the substitution of electronic accounts for cash. Again, electric power is not always available. Also some people who need to use money don't have homes and can't reliably charge electronics. If I remember correctly the payment system went down in Canada a while ago and people without cash were out of luck.

What insight can you share with me?

Is there something you just don't get? Something that you have no idea why people like it? Something that baffles you personally, but clearly not everyone shares your neutral-to-negative feelings? Now's your chance to ask.

Here's the way it works:

1. Someone names something they want to understand the appeal of.
2. People respond, doing their best to convey why they (or others) like it in a way that's understandable to a skeptical audience.

This can be anything: musical genres, food combinations, personal habits, life experiences, etc.

Importantly, this is NOT meant to be a thread about grousing about what other people like. Think of it less as "telling people to get off your lawn" and more "why do those people like to spend time on my lawn in the first place?"

Specifically you and your methods. And that which is beyond your control could either be on the macro scale such as community-wide or worldwide events, or the more personal side of things such as family, friends or complicated relationships.

I personally am desperate for distraction right now as a result of crisis with my younger brother. It's beyond my control now (though it never really has been) and it's difficult to focus in this period of waiting. For a while, I found some distracting solace in Diablo IV, actually, because the game teeters just enough into mindless action that it keeps me from overthinking. But I need to be working right now and cut through the noise. I am certainly curious about other methods from other folks.

Edit: Thank you to everyone who took the time to share your stories and advice thus far. It has truly been helpful and, in a way, creating this post and reading these responses felt like a method of coping I didn't expect.

Does leadership imply ego? Does it require ego? What are good characteristics of either? Can leadership be altruistic? Can ego and altruism co-exist? Or do all leaders function from a place of self-interest?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this.

Greeting everyone, first time actually posting on tildes so try and forgive me for any shortcomings as it's hard to tap out paragraphs on a mobile device.

So I wanted to ask you all, when you think nostalgia what specific idea or memory comes up for you?

When i give it some thought my specific memories of nostalgia are of the late 90s early 2000s. I picture a freshly constructed suburban neighborhood where there are no fences built yet, no trees planted or grown, and just grass everywhere - giving it a very liminal feeling. I reflect back on the hours spent outside until after dusk where the amber glow of the street lamps brought a feeling of warmth and coziness on a warm spring evening.

I also think about the technology, or lack thereof, at the time and how we used it. Beige computers transitioning to black ones as the 2000s crept up, using your big toe to turn them on, playing runescape or Sims Deluxe Edition mindlessly for an unhealthy amount of time etc. I think about the connectivity we had to each other, no smart phones, a wild west internet, and in my case a house phone with a kilometer long cord so that grandma can call europe with calling cards for hours on end while she tangles us all up with the cobweb of wires.

The list of memories can go on forever, but now I turn it over to you guys/gals.

I came across this phenomenon naturally once again when I saw an article asking why people thought a cornucopia was once a part of the Fruit of the Loom logo, going on to describe the Mandela Effect. I was flabbergasted as my mother frequently bought me this underwear brand throughout the 90s and I distinctly remember the logo being that way. Specifically as rendered in this image. The company says this was never the case and yet thousands remember it to be true and more disturbing still, there are articles going back decades that describe the logo having a cornucopia. (Conspiracy theorists call this 'residue', or the lingering of the 'truth' after some psychic or interdimensional catastrophe)

Now with other cases of this phenomenon, I'm skeptical. So what if so many kids misremembered how a childhood book series was spelled (Berenstein/Berenstain) or misattributed when a famous person died.

This Fruit of the Loom one rocked my world. Is this mass hysteria? Government conspiracy? Time traveler interference? Parallel universes colliding?

I'm not really sold on any of it and normally I'm a skeptic who believes in rationality and generally agrees with Occam's Razor. This underwear logo though...it scared me.

This weekend, my spouse and I were hit by a car that missed a stop sign and crashed into our car head-on. It was the most terrifying moment of my life, and both of us thought it'd be our last. We ended up ok, but it definitely shook us. I feel immense gratitude to be alive and breathing right now.

What near death experience have you had, and how has it impacted your life afterwards, if at all?

I'm seeing a lot of doomer content lately and plenty of defeatist commentary to match. I know it sucks out there but surely there's an air balloon that looks nice in the sky or something, right? It's exhausting to see the same negative stuff that I would see on reddit.

I need something positive and maybe you do too.

Here, I'll share something nice to get us started: This 72 year old guy graduated and his 99 year old mom cheered him on.

I'm ashamed to admit that I've been on there way too much the last couple of weeks. I had always planned to use Reddit in my google searches because google sucks without it now, but I've been spending time talking there.

My niche interest in question is visual novels. There are very few places on the internet where you can discuss them. There was recently a final translation patch released for the Tsukihime Remake. I beat it and wanted to talk about it! Reddit has a Tsukihime subreddit. I don't know if there is any other English community on the internet that wants to talk about Tsukihime. It's niche enough that I know of no one in person who has that interest either. Without Reddit, where do you even look for an alternative?

I feel like I'm going continue being drawn back for similar things even if they are less niche than visual novels. For example, I wanted to talk about Final Fantasy XVI. I could have made a post about my thoughts here and maybe I would have gotten good discussion about it. Slipped my mind honestly. But I was drawn back to Reddit where there are thousands of people wanting to talk about it right this second. An alternative could have been Gamefaqs, but its a bit more toxic and I hate the style of forum (unthreaded, every post in chronological order, only way to follow conversations is with quoted text. Is there a term for that kind of forum?)

Does anyone else feel themselves feeling a similar pull?

Non-SFOite here. I’ve heard twice over the weekend how “bad and unlivable” San Francisco (proper) has become. Someone referred to it as a “failed city”, and “worse than LA”.

I’ve been to both cities and I’ve seen the tent cities in LA fashion district.

I’m curious to know if it truly had gotten that bad or if it’s just people being hyperbolic (like entire city level collapse).

I often engage in thoughtful discussions with my friends regarding our current socio-economic situation, and I find it challenging to discover a more fitting description than the term coined for it.

Wherever I direct my attention, I observe life increasingly being shaped by the well-oiled machinery of capitalism, a system devoid of inherent morals and existing solely to maximize profits for its shareholders.

To me, the notion of "late stage" capitalism implies a bleak future fueled by the insatiable demand for constant and unsustainable growth. This, in turn, hampers our ability to effectively plan for the future, as investors prioritize immediate gains. Consequently, our planet suffers the repercussions through climate change and the exacerbation of wealth inequality.

Moreover, the ruling of FEC vs Citizens United, wherein corporations were granted the ability to lobby as individuals, seems to have unleashed a relentless flywheel that perpetuates and nourishes the insatiable beast of capitalism and greed.

I am genuinely intrigued by the perspectives of others on this topic. If we collectively recognize that we are heading in an unfavorable direction, what steps can we take to regain a more positive trajectory? How can we incentivize prioritizing moral values and environmental impact over monetary gains?

Just wondering how many average 10 year olds you think you can fight off before being overwhelmed. Here are the basic terms of fighting: the kids are very angry at you, each one will fight you until they get hurt enough to quit or become unconscious, you are unarmed, and you are in a gated school playground as the battle arena. The playground is about 50 feet around, closed gate around in an octagon and closes up top like a dome. First one kid comes at you, then it adds one each time you defeat a group. Defeat 1 and 2 come, defeat the 2 then 3 come, and so on. Each group arrives by sliding down a pole into the middle playground and sliding down the slide. From there, they rush at you full force.

I feel confident in my abilities to fight. I'm pretty sure I can get to group 13, so that would be roughly give or take 70 kids if I can take a few out in that round.

What do you think?

I currently work for a “prestigious” company (you’ve heard the name) and have for a few years now. As a college student, my peers, friends, and my parents friends kept telling me how jealous they were of me for getting into such a great company.

I am quickly finding out that the “prestige” this company has was in reality really great marketing and that I do not particularly enjoy working there. I work way too much (12 hour days, 5am - 5pm are not uncommon) and I don’t like the toxic culture. It makes me anxious and depressed.

Is it really worth it? Should I apply to the local government jobs that pay $20k less but offer actual pensions (not 401k), are chill (my friend does Azure/AWS trainings and scrolls Reddit, and 40 hours a week if that? Everyone I bring this up to says it’s a total career downgrade and a bad idea.

People often propose the question of if you were trapped in a video game world which would be best, but which one would be the absolute worst possible one. Really think about it too cause like being in like a zombie apocalypse or under a brutal dictatorship would be bad, but it could definitely get worse.

Inspired by an old topic from 2021 on here: https://tild.es/uti
How do you think?
Have you ever thought about how you think?

Do you have a voice in your head? Is it your own voice? Do you think in visuals? How strong are the visuals?

Let's have a conversation about it. We all think differently!

As an exercise, if I asked you to sit down and solve a cross word in silence, how would you think it through?

Edit: thanks for all the very interesting and very insightful replies! I've been reading them today and I really appreciate everyone's input.

Yesterday someone on /r/lgbt posted this picture of themself at a pride event, and several people in the thread commented on OP's self harm scars - one asking them to please and thank you spoiler tag the image and post a trigger warning as they found the sight of OP's self harm scars triggering.

As someone who has very similar scars as OP I said fuck that, I disagree. I found it offensive that the sight of someone else's scars somehow grants you the right and allows you to tell them to cover up or hide themself because they find it triggering. To ask to have trigger warnings and spoiler tags added is unfair, in my opinion - the commenter then replied that it's not that hard to do. But for me it's obviously not about the effort it takes to do it, it's about the fundamental principle of asking someone to cover up or hide their body that I take issue with.

OP said elsewhere that they have struggled with mental health in the past but moved on, and clearly they are now at the point that they feel comfortable or don't mind that other people can see their scars. And I certainly feel like they should be allowed to wear whatever they like. I think that showing scars like this is 1) brave, 2) helps reduce stigma surrounding self harm, and 3) should be entirely that person's prerogative - their body, their choice.

So I am curious what you all think about this?

Is it fair to expect or ask someone to tag their picture like this, to hide their scars, to cover up, etc.?

Conventional wisdom tells us money does not buy happiness, perhaps the opposite. "Studies" (don't quote me on this, just going off headlines/articles I've read) say happiness grows asymptotically and levels off around an income of 70k USD (perhaps more like 90k inflation adjusted?). I would be interested to know how any of this matches your personal experience. Has your happiness consistently grown with income? If so, where did that growth level off, if at all? And to what would you attribute it? better consumer goods, more security, more freedom...? Have any of you experienced a decrease in happiness associated with growing income? I eagerly await your thoughts!

It feels like in the last few years so many companies are becoming incredibly greedy in a chance to try and raise profits and please the shareholders, companies hoping that people will comply as they have no choice and give away more of their money to allow these companies to make record levels of profits.

It seems like people are getting less and less and what they have left the companies just want more and more from everyone. I'm not referencing any specific company here but I have seen these trends in the last couple of years get a lot worse.

Customer Impact

• Raising prices there is some valid reasons to raise prices, but sometimes prices are raised just as a way to make more money quickly.
• Quality reduction it feels like companies are asking more money for less quality goods more than ever.
• Excessive manipulative marketing especially on social media and other playes which can misleed people.
• Data explotation companies mis-using peoples data just so they can make some quick money.

Employee Impact

• Wage stagnation Despite the soaring profits many companies refusing to increase wages, leading to financial insecurity.
• Unfair labor practices Companies expecting more from their employees for less money basically.
• Job insecurity replacing workers with automation and outsourcing to cut costs.
• Mental health high pressure enviroments to force profit-driven companies causing record levels of mental health issues.

Society and Enviromental Impact

• Polluting Companies prioritising profits over the enviroment leading to pollution, waste etc
• Economic Inequality Coporate greed leading to income disparities, undermining social coheison.
• Unfair influence on policy Companies using their power and wealth to influence policy making

My question is, when is enough is enough? At what stage should something be done? Anything? to stop corporate greed from runing society?

Stories involving dragons tend to be in medieval periods so maybe we can try to extrapolate forward in time a bit. Dragons could be from any mythologies or fictions of your fancy!

For my take, a dragon is a flying fire-breathing giant lizard with the size and toughness of a big building. I believe a critical factor is how tamable dragons are. If not at all, they'd go from something humans fear and run away from, then being hunted for glory and materials, then being protected in conservation areas to prevent going extinct. If they can be fully domesticated (like dogs), they could expedite for warfare, transportation and industrialized metalwork. The most interesting scenario imo is the in-between where they could only be partially trained. Maybe a skilled trainer can get them to behave 80% of the time but there's a low but significant chance that they get agitated and wreck havoc. How do we make use of them while ensuring safety and intervenability?

On the cultural side, we might not have as many myths and legends about dragons anymore. We might find the idea of giant flying fire creatures utterly mundane (phoenixes might be less interesting by relation even if they still don't exist in this universe). What would we mythologize about instead?

It's officially Christmas in New Zealand. Australian parents are telling their kids they want just a few more minutes to sleep in. Santa is over Zambia.

I hope you all enjoy your time with family and friends (and kooky internet weirdos such as myself.)

There's a type of watch that's very popular. It has a clean, clear, design. It's definitely a classic. I have mixed feelings about it because of the origins of the design.

The watch is big. I has a black dial with white numbers and index marks. At the 12 o'clock position there's a triangle. There's plenty of lume on the dial. They usually have a leather strap, and that strap often has two rivets.

Sometimes the dial has two index rings, the inner ring has hour markings and the outer ring has minute markings.

IWC makes the most well known example: https://www.iwc.com/en/watch-collections/pilot-watches/iw329301-big-pilots-watch-43.html

There are lots of homages:

https://whamond.com/products/laco-watch-pilot-original-heidelberg-39-862094?variant=20123598716982&currency=GBP&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=google+shopping&gclid=CjwKCAiAp7GcBhA0EiwA9U0mtgW5zl3U-UDVpOj2xzQugfY8gjG7C01nWLIjDNRRPNV9C5Ybim0tFRoCrtUQAvD_BwE

https://www.jurawatches.co.uk/products/laco-watch-pilot-basic-aachen-42-861690-2?utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=Shopping&variant=10940401025060&sfdr_ptcid=3694_524_461850736&sfdr_hash=d57409f84f1ff15872832c2e5817a3ae&gclid=CjwKCAiAp7GcBhA0EiwA9U0mtpzVPcdQyfLtQzP4-E5jrfi5c7FKYtNrpJD8SnV0DqRqgYthNF70PBoCXgcQAvD_BwE

https://shop.diywatch.club/products/new-arrival-diy-watchmaking-kit-f01-lite-vintage-pilot-watch-with-date?variant=42068938358997

https://www.watchshop.com/watches/mens-sekonda-aviator-watch-3347.pdp

https://mwcwatches.com/products/vintage-ww2-style-german-pilots-watch-1

This style of watch is called "B Uhr", or "B Uhren"and you get many results if you use that search term. It's German, and it's an abbreviation for "Beobachtungs-uhren" which means "observation watch".

My problem with the watch is that is that it was specifically designed for the Luftwaffe in WW2.

https://monochrome-watches.com/the-history-of-the-pilot-watch-part-five-b-uhr/

After the war other airforces, including the British RAF, started using very similar watches.

Most watch sellers do not celebrate the Nazi history of the watch. But some do: https://b-uhr.com/en/collection/b-uhr-luftwaffe-flieger-chronograph.html

So, I don't know how I feel about this watch. Can its clean design be appreciated when I know of its Nazi link? Can I separate the creator from the product?

Do you thrive on chaos or structure? Are your personal spaces clean or populated by all kinds or objects? Do you wear bright colors or white shirt and jeans? Do you prefer fast cuts or meditative editing? Probability or deduction? Heidegger or Russel? Buñuel or Buster Keaton? Lynch or Spielberg? Godart or Hitchcock? John Lennon or Paul McCartney? A party or a small gathering? A lot or just a little?

:)

Question is for our users here who work/worked in the tech industry (in any capacity) or in a techy position in any industry.

What have you learned?
How did it change you?

Previous questions in series:

What have you learned from...
...being a parent?
...going through a breakup?
...moving to a new place?

These threads remain open, so feel free to comment on old ones if you have something to add!

This might just be because of the change I’ve made in my online behavior, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

I’ve talked many many times about my long stint on Twitter. Specifically the brief stint where I was highly active on leftist twitter from early to mid 2020 (where I managed to get around two thousand followers which seems crazy to me now considering I’m just a random guy). Back then tensions were high. People were getting laid off, high profile civil rights protests were happening, and there was nothing much to do but to be online. Personally my internship I had lined up during the summer (since I was just about to graduate college) ended up getting cancelled which led me to a period of depression. It’s also the reason I started spending so much time on Twitter and what led me to drink heavily and gain a bunch of weight. I imagine a lot of people who became extremely online during this period were in similar boats.

Anyways, I made a couple of online friends during this time period. It initially started as “Bernie” or “Rose” twitter. We were all pretty normal social democrats supporting Sanders for the presidency (which before Super Tuesday seemed like a big possibility). And then when it became clear that Biden would be the democratic nominee, a lot of people ended up going to the dark side. They started using hammer and sickle emojis on their display name. Started talking about how they were going to read Marx and Lenin (but they never did). They started making memes about how awesome Castro and Mao were. Bios went from “BernieOrBust” to “Marixst-Leninist-Maoist.”

A lot of talk started happening of “grow your own garden the end of the world is near” and also “arm yourselves comrades the class war is among us.” Somehow everyone became very fond of the second amendment. There were twitter accounts LARPing about joining the Socialist Rifle Association, e-girls were taking provocative pictures of themselves posing with automatic rifles in front of a Soviet flag. It became a whole thing. Some of this online behavior was covered in articles like The Cut's Before We Make Out, Wanna Dismantle Capitalism?

I ended up disconnecting from all this around September/October of 2020. I actually ended up voting for Biden in November which I wasn’t planning on when I was addicted to Twitter. I go a little bit into this detox here.

Fast forward to this year. A wave of mass shootings happen. Something that used to be a normal thing pre-pandemic but which stopped/slowed down thanks to lockdowns and schools remaining closed. With all of this in the news again, I start thinking back to the friends I used to have. And their gun loving, revolutionary wanting, “libs get the bullet too” type of tweets that they were writing back in 2020. I don’t remember most of them let alone their names. But I do remember a few.

I look them up. And there are dozens of tweets about the need for gun control. They’re talking about how nobody actually needs guns, and all of the typical liberal arguments in favor of gun control. A stark contrast to what they were saying before. They still have “socialist” in their display names and bios, though from the retweets I saw of them they were no longer following the “Mao is cool” type of people. For lack of a better term, they calmed down. They don’t long for a revolution to happen. They don’t want blood on the streets.

I think what had happened is that they all forgot what mass shootings were. How destructive they were. And now that society is mostly back to normal, including mass shootings, they remembered what that was like.

Now this is too niche of a corner on twitter to talk about in terms of larger online behavior. But back in 2020, I did predict that when Biden became president a lot of these online socialists would retreat into the liberals that they used to be. And it seems like that has happened, at least to some extent.

I mean, I’m glad for them. They seem more balanced, and it’s good that they eventually found themselves like I did (even if I did it a little quicker than they did). But it is still an interesting progression that a lot of my former online friends took.

*Disclaimer: I am not an apologist, theologian, or a philosopher, just someone interested in the topic. Perhaps this could've been asked in r/AskPhilosophy or maybe even r/changemyview, but I figure the conversation might be good here

The recent post here on Absurd Trolley Problems has had me thinking about ethics again, and I realized I've never been introduced to how one can be an atheist and be not only a moral objectivist, but a moral realist. I remember a debate I watched years ago with William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens where Craig asks Hitchens what the basis of morality is, and he acts insulted, insinuating that Craig intended to say that atheists couldn't "be good without God" (which I think became a famous moment for the both of them.)

But I never got the answer to Craig's question that I wanted. Without God, how should we determine what moral facts there are? How should we determine if there are moral facts at all? I grew up in a fundamentalist religion, and found myself in adulthood deeply interested in apologetics, and see similar responses in debates to the one mentioned above. Now while I believe Hitchens was a moral relativist, I often see and hear cases where atheists do seem to want to say that [insert atrocity here] was objectively morally wrong. Can atheists reasonably claim that there are not only moral facts, but objective moral facts that they can access? Upon examination, aren't you ultimately required to derive an "ought" from an "is"?

I skimmed The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris some years ago, and it seems to "avoid" (i.e. commit) the "is/ought" fallacy by simply declaring that "human flourishing" (however that may be defined, separate issue) is an irreducible "ought" in his eyes. The book is great, I think that science should be part of the discussion about how one ought to live their life if the goal is some end like human flourishing; doctors already give prescriptions for behavior based on a presupposed goal between both parties to promote health and well-being. Both of these necessarily presuppose a state of affairs that one "ought" to seek to attain.

But none of this answers why one "ought" to do anything; sure, there are facts about what one "ought" to do in order to attain a state of affairs, but that isn't morality: that's true of any subject where two people agree to share a goal. It doesn't tell us why they should have that goal. None of this feels like a satisfying answer to the question Craig posed. I don't feel like I'm any closer to these objective moral facts.

I should say this topic is really meaningful to me. I've thought a lot about veganism, and the suffering of non-human animals. I've thought about the impact of my consumption decisions instead of perpetually leaning on the "no ethical consumption" crutch (even though there are reasons why that would have merit in certain circumstances. I literally can't stop thinking about climate change and how powerless, yet simultaneously complicit I feel. I've read Peter Singer, Scripture, Kant, John Stewart Mill, Rawls, and works from many others, and can't find any reason for an atheist (and maybe even a theist?) to think that there are these moral facts at all, much less objective, accessible ones. This really leaves me with "I guess I should just do whatever it is that I feel like doing", which probably seems to you as unsatisfying as it was for me to type.

like, say I've invented a magic trick that I don't know how it's done. What is my moral obligation to report novel phenomena? If a divine singularity spontaneously opens up in my living room, or in my kidney, and somehow I harness it and taught myself to fly -- do I have to tell people, or do we think it would be too scary? It seems really obscene and disruptive to announce something so premise-shattering. Shouldn't I labor in secrecy? Do I have to expose my abilities to some sort of mandate before I can start?

I have never been in the military, nor wanted to. I assume a great degree of hardship is required in military life, but I wonder what everyone thinks of the exaggerated, highly theatrical shouting and demeaning language used on recruits. Does that actually make someone a more apt soldier? Does that really prepare them for difficult/tough/combat situations?

What I meant is a world without any barriers whatsoever for the circulation of people. Each country would have border checks for things like explosives, heavy drugs, and weapons, but apart from that everyone would be allowed in, always. I'm not sure about economy measures, trade barriers, and circulation of goods, though.

But please, feel free to interpret "world without borders" however you wish! ;)

I'm not sure if this goes here or in ~talk, so if it needs moved, that's fine.

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about why I use Tildes.

As noted in my bio, I left Tildes for an extended period of time, after getting embroiled in some heavy arguments that, in the scheme of things, didn't matter. Such arguments consistently make me feel worse; I get into them on this account, too, though I do try to use uBlock Origin and the tag filter to keep out of the threads that will most obviously affect me.

But I can't seem to leave Tildes entirely. Even when I log out on all devices, I keep opening the site. Even when I had no account, I kept typing til<Enter> in the address bar and coming back.

So, why?

--

First, Tildes is what I love about the web. It's complete but uncluttered; it's featureful but not bloated; it uses client-side interactivity to improve the experience but does not break or reimpement default browser functionality. Overall, it's a good piece of software, designed to create, catalog, and discuss documents, like God Tim Berners-Lee intended.

Second, and more important, Tildes is a community. It's a community like my college dorm was a community; I know people here, and while I definitely don't like all of them, I recognize the personalities behind the names. Leaving, and diving mostly back into the world of Twitter and Mastodon where conversations are short, ephemeral, and deeply restricted, feels like losing relationships, no matter how damaging and negative some of those relationships are.

I don't know if gaining this understanding means I'll be able to - or even want to - drop the site again. We'll see. But I would love to know why y'all use it. Is it a community for you, too?

My two roommates and I just finally got over some kind of weird cold-like illness, took us 11-12 days to recover. Not Covid (based on 1 negative PCR test for one of us; I'm assuming we all had the same thing). Presumably, just your random cold/flu-type bug. A remote co-worker (400 km away, both of us in EU) has been experiencing a similar illness for over a week now, still not over it.

It took the three of us almost 2 weeks to get over it. The symptoms kept changing every 1-2 days (sore throat, then harsh cough, then chest/lung pain, then gas and intestinal issues, then headache, then back to coughing); had a false "I'm all better now" moment halfway thru, then Phase 2 kicked in. On top of which, I don't get sick much, and when I do, it's usually very mild and I'm over it very quickly.

So, I have a hypothesis. Thanks to all of the social distancing, OCD hand-washing, masking, etc for the past 18 months, "regular" colds/flus/germs have probably been going through some pretty extreme evolutionary stresses, just like Covid ... and are probably mutating/evolving a lot, just like Covid. Except all the researchers and specialists are pretty much completely preoccupied with Covid research/work, so no one has been paying much attention to all the other day-to-day respiratory illnesses.

I've seen a fair bit of news about how colds/flus have been much less common of late, due to the Covid-precautionary measures, but I have not seen any research or discussion about how those measures might be impacting other non-Covid illnesses.

Thoughts?

Is there an example in sharing a comedy(amusing, causing laughter) NOT at the consequence of something else's tragedy(distress, suffering, downfall)...?

Is there a funny story that doesn't diminish an other?

I never considered myself an introvert or shy. I’ve always been comfortable talking with strangers, whether that was in my college class or just sparking up a conversation with someone next to me in line.

I haven’t talked to a stranger irl since the pandemic started and I’m running scenarios in my brain about how I would talk to someone when I just met them. And every situation I’m going through I’m being awkward and uncomfortable.

I can talk to my family and my cousins, who are essentially my only friends, just fine but that’s different since there’s already an established way of communication there.

I just feel like I’m gonna be so rusty at talking to people, which is a shame because I’ve spent years learning how to talk to strangers in a certain way to make them comfortable and to very easily have a conversation. And I feel like I lost all of that now.

Up until recently my girlfriend’s grandmother had a relatively good life. She’s taken care of, had some interesting allucinations, slept most of the day and had funny interactions with her grandaughter, some of which ended up on Instagram.

In recent weeks, she started refusing food and spent days at the hospital. The sudden lost in autonomy made her hostile. It’s a struggle to change her diapers. The situation was made worse by the feeding tube up her nose, which she attempts to remove non-stop, and can only be replaced at the hospital. We had to restrain her arm. That is no way to live.

She's made it very clear she does not want to be in this world any longer. Today I heard a hundred year old lady scream, multiple times: "just let me die!".

I don't know what to make of it.

Edit: I'd like to thank everyone's answers. I wasn't really looking for a solution since the legal situation in my country does not allow for any wiggle room. But it is always nice to read the smart people of Tildes passionately explore their ideas, sharing knowledge with compassion. Sometimes it is enough to feel less alone. Thank you and good night.

What product features would you hope the vendors would add in preparation for that eventuality?

For example... For the last year, we all have had “one connection, one face on screen.” That’s given everyone a kind of equality, where we each have an equal seat at the table. (With or without cat filters.) Now we have to contemplate returning to an environment where SOME people are in the office, and thus huddled around a conference table, and the rest of the team is working from home. It was like that in the Before Times, but now everybody is more cognizant of the disadvantages… not the least of which is the poor video organization in conference rooms. Few companies are smart enough to install a camera that’s pointed at the people around the conference table, for instance, however simple/cheap an option that is.

This thread is inspired by an off-topic discussion in another thread that was so interesting that I wanted to make a whole post about it. I've often seen people on the net express surprise that others have different modes of thought, typically with statements like "It was surprising to learn that others do/don't have an internal monologue!", where the do/don't choice depends on the person. I've thought for a while that a lot of this confusion might arise from people interpreting "Internal monologue" differently, and that people might actually think more similarly that it appears at first glance. My attempt to explain this in that thread was:

For example, I certainly do not vocalize all of my thoughts and it seems like my speed of thought goes much faster than the amount of time it would take to vocalize every single thing going through my head. That being said, once I concentrate on what I am thinking about, there is definitely a vocal component. If I think about going downstairs to get a snack, my thoughts are non-vocal, but once I think about the fact I am thinking about going to get a snack, I impose a narrative that has some type of vocal quality to it - I will think, I believe in words, that my thought was "I am going to go get a snack". I suspect in discussions like this a lot of people perhaps conflate the thought with the thought about the thought, since the latter is necessary to convey what one is thinking about and (at least in my case) has some type of narrative element.

So I am curious, Tildes - can you explain how you think, preferably both in moments where you are not actively thinking about thinking and those where you are?

(I don't personally have any interest in trying much of anything if anyone interprets this post as such. And yes, 'drugs' is a general/vague and loaded term and I might be asking too much in a single topic)

My opinion on drug legalization was generally summed up as pro-legalization, but really because just banning everything doesn't work and generally just understood drugs as bad.

However, I often hear people talking about drugs as giving them new experiences, enhancing sensations and generally being fun.

However, being Brazilian/Latin American, drugs here are often associated with illegal traffic, gangs, poverty, crime, among other bad things and, unlike in the US and Europe, this is generally something that is exterior to us, nor a position held overwhelmingly by social conservatives who rant about "the devil's lettuce", because it affects poor people (although, yes, that's also true in the US).

So back to the title question:

What separates people that have positive and negative experiences with drugs?

The 3 obvious differences are:

The drugs used. Drug gangs traffic stuff like cocaine and areas like [the] Cracolândia are populated by people dependent on crack, while people advocate for legalization of weed or psychedelics which are very different and "weed is no worse than alcohol" is confirmed to be truth and has been for a while. A question I have concerning this is what separates 'good' drugs from 'bad' drugs?

Preparation, since obviously you don't want to be high at work (or asking for help on a Tildes thread, that happened.) A question I have in that area is what preparations do people take before taking weed or DMT and other drugs.

Their motivations for taking drugs, since a lot of the bad examples come from people taking drugs to fill holes in their lives, while good examples are the vast majority of the time recreational (aka, for fun.)

Are there any other differences anyone wants to delineate?

p.s the difference between this post and this post is that I want to ask questions and get people's opinions and answers in this one more.

Here's a few examples, last one being an argument between a few people where most people, including Deimos agreed with this idea.

Personally, I find this idea almost terrifying because it implies social media in it's current form cannot be fixed by changing or expanding human or automoderation, nor fact checking, because moderation can't reasonably occur at scale at all.

However, I have 2 questions:

1: If large social media platforms can't really be moderated what should we do to them? The implied solution is balkanizing social media until the 'platforms' are extended social circles which can be moderated and have good discussion (or more practically, integrate them to a federated service like mastodon which is made to be split like this or something like discord.) An alternative I've heard is to redo the early 2000s and have fanforums for everything to avoid context collapse and have something gluing the site's users together (something I am far more supportive of) or a reason for invite systems and stricter control of who enters your site but doesn't explain the idea that once your site hits a certain usercount, it will inevitably worsen and that is something that stems from human nature (Dunbar's number aka the max amount of friends you could theoretically have) and so is inevitable, almost natural.

2: Why is moderation impossible to do well at large scales? While I think moderation, which I think is analogous to law enforcement or legal systems (though the many reddit mods here can definitely give their opinions on that) definitely likely isn't the kind of thing that can be done at a profit, I'm not entirely sure why would it be wholly impossible. A reason I've heard is that moderators need to understand the communities they're moderating, but I'm not sure why wouldn't that be a requirement, or why would adding more mods make that worse (mods disagreeing with eachother while moderating seems quite likely but unrelated to this.)

I read the Wikipedia article about "gaslighting" and know it comes from a 1944 film of the same name in which an abusive husband gradually dims the gaslights at home – while denying doing so – to drive his wife mad.

Yet whenever I see the term used (which happens a lot, lately) I can't make the connection. It seems people use it for the simple act of lying or denying something, which to me is mostly just... lying, not "gaslighting". Any kind of stupid, misguided act is getting the sinister "gaslighting" stamp as if it some 5d chess move when it simply looks like incompetence. The core principle of it seems to revolve around having a plan to psychologically manipulate someone but I mostly don't see the plan nor the actual goal. If anything untruthful you say about an important topic is "gaslighting", then the term doesn't seem to have a lot of value on its own. Wikipedia actually mentions "unconscious" gaslighting which seems to contradict its purpose of actually wanting to manipulate someone.

So, given its popularity, I'm curious if there might be a (succinct) definition of the term that helps me understand it properly? Do you think it's just a trendy term to throw at politicians doing shit you don't like? Am I missing an important detail?

I’m pretty sure every dog owner thinks their dog is the best most unique dog in the world, and the same is true about cat owners, snake owners, etc!

So make your best case: why is your animal companion the coolest in the whole world?