I need to add that to my quotes book, it’s great

What do you have on it? I’ve considered setting one up, but I’m not sure what I’d put on it yet, and I don’t want to do the thing where I make something I never use.

It’s not the most robust analogy, but I actually really like your comparison to painting restoration; to do it well, one must understand the techniques and materials used in the original (even stuff below the visible surface).

Not a lawyer, but I think the original work is still copyrighted, and that restoration wouldn’t (or certainly shouldn’t) constitute a new artwork. Though now I’m wondering about that terrible Jesus painting restoration from a few years back — it’s certainly different from the original, and whilst it might not seem reasonable to call it a new piece of “art”, it’s certainly inspired a great many people(to make memes)

I think many people who are responsible for pushing the campaign forward would agree it’s a much bigger issue. It’s just that the bigger issue is big enough that there are multiple fronts one could fight on, and this is a politically useful opportunity to push forward. A victory from this campaign will be unlikely to lead to the larger developments without more of a fight, because achieving the general rule will take a few instances of arguing the specific case.

For now, I’m excited to see where this leads, even if the answer might be “nowhere”

I think I saw a paper on this kind of thing over a year ago. Iirc, it said that engagement is lower on Mastodon, but higher quality.

Elsewhere in this thread, you mentioned that Immich has great documentation. Are there any other FOSS projects that stand out to you as having great user documentation?

I really enjoyed the characters. When I think about Mass Effect 3, for example, I think of how I felt when making peace between the Quarians and the Geth, because of how I had gotten to know the characters of Tali and Legion. Or Wrex enthusiastically greeting Shepard as an old friend, something that’s only possible if you talk him down in the first game.

I was as disappointed as everyone else at the actual ending to Mass Effect 3, and I do think the plot goes a bit weird even before that (the ending boss fight of mass effect 2 is a bit weird, but again, I think more of the personal stakes that had been set up by good character writing (plus Jack Wall’s “Suicide Mission” makes what could’ve been overly cheesy instead feel grand and epic)), but I found the smaller, interpersonal stories that Mass Effect tells to be quite compelling.

I haven’t self harmed for a long time

Your comment has made me understand this better than anything I’ve previously read has. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

Oh yeah, Bluey is pretty great. I have a couple friends who don’t have kids who put it on when they need soft, warm, background noise. It’s better than a lot of stuff for the same age range — I have a brother who is significantly younger than me, so I’ve seen my fair share of children’s TV trash and Bluey is a freshing contrast

Ask her what her favourite episode is. Once you get small kids talking, it’s actually great, they tell such great stories.

Share (age appropriate of course) opinions of your own along the way. Like, don’t just say “have you seen [episode with pots and pans]”, expand it by saying stuff like you’ve not seen much Bluey, but you have seen the one with the pots and pans — does she know the one you mean? I suggest this because kids are actually pretty socially adept and I’ve found myself in analogous situations where I caused confusion by mentioning something I barely knew and the kid reasonably interpreted this as “this person wants to talk about this thing”, and then when I didn’t seem to know anything about the topic I had suggested, the kid seemed pretty thrown off and uncertain how to respond.

Or completely open ended questions, like “I know you like Bluey, but I’ve never seen it before. What’s your favourite episode?”, which could lead into asking for more details on what happened in that particular episode and why she likes it.

The thing about small talk is that I’ve found there’s a distinction between being good at it, and enjoying it. I used to think I was awful at smalltalk, before I realised that actually, I just didn’t find it enjoyable. I think to some extent, the point isn’t to enjoy it, but to build a conversational back and forth rally which builds initial rapport to figure out what common ground exists between two people (which can lead to more enjoyable proper conversation). Some people do enjoy small talk though. The rally model was useful for me because it underscored how I need to serve the other person options to hit back with.

For example, most kids go to school, so that’s a decent enough topic for if you’re running out of ideas. With kids, you can get away with clunky conversation starters like “What’s your favourite subject at school?”. Better than that though is something like “My favourite subject at school is science, what’s yours?” because it gives your conversation partner the option of responding either to your statement (such as with “ugh, I hate science, [teacher] is so mean!”), or your question, and having multiple options to hit back with allows for flow to help. Once you hit on a topic the kid is excited to talk about, you’re golden: just keep being interested in their perspective and give bits of your own perspective so they don’t feel like they’re being interrogated.

Edit: This was a great question, btw OP — It’s led to a lot of interesting discussion, thanks for asking it

As someone who is currently learning emacs, I gotta say, this comment has the energy of someone offering heroin to someone struggling to moderate their cannabis usage (given OP indicated that custom config if a thing they’re finding burdensome in a way)

Oh my gosh, that’s incredible. It’s so cool to compare it to This one from 12 years ago

Oh no, now I’m going to have to search for an old floppy disc

Okay, I think you win on the “insignificant decision” part of this question. That’s hilariously butterfly-effect. You tell the story well; I bet you’ve told it before.

Man, I hate people like you, because I am constantly reminded of how I really need to get round to checking out Searx, but I never get round to it.

(I am joking, because the only person who is putting pressure on me about this is me, and that’s because finding time to do this is something I want to do. Thank you for reminding me, even if I will keep procrastinating)

Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don’t know of any communities, perhaps because I’m a scientist who loves maths rather than a mathematician.

However, I will use this opportunity to share some fun stuff from people I like.

https://youtu.be/H0Ek86IH-3Y by Oliver Lugg on Youtube is great. His channel is very eclectic though, and there isn’t much pure maths. I love his shitposting tone though, and he has a discord community that were pretty mathsy when I was in it.

A blog-type site that I enjoy is Tai-Danae Bradley’s https://www.math3ma.com/about, largely because I’ve discovered many other cool researchers through her site.

I also really enjoy Eugenia Cheng’s books, especially as someone who is interested in understanding how to write good scientific communication that is accessible without “dumbing things down”. I recently finished “The Joy of Abstraction”.

Apologies that this isn’t what you actually were looking for. I share your distaste at Reddit: I have used Reddit occasionally for those niche communities that aren’t available elsewhere (yet!), but the atmosphere is increasingly toxic. I fear that smaller communities that flee are congealing in harder to discover places, like Discord.

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I like that as a framing question, and it helps me to further understand why it is that scenes like the RE4 one feels so weird to me.

I think the thing that makes me uncomfortable in that scenario is the fact that Leon is the hero. I’m a woman who has loved gaming for basically my whole life, so I’m used to playing as someone who doesn’t look like me — there’s a certain amount of abstracting away of gender that’s necessary if I want to be able to participate in some heroic escapism. That’s why scenes like Leon being a creep are so jarring, because he’s the hero. The narrative of the game is endorsing this kind of behaviour because it’s being done by the hero.

Dead Rising is a somewhat more ambiguous example, but still weird overall. I don’t necessarily even mind that the photography intro quest highlights the fact you can take sexy(?) photos, because the NPC in that quest is written in a way where it’s like the game itself is saying “yeah, this guy is a weird creep”. Getting points for “erotic” photos is a bit weird though, because whilst you can choose to not take photos like that, it feels like the mechanics of the game are endorsing the creepy dude’s mentality overall.

I really like Firefox Relay. I think they have a paid version, but the free version allows 5 different emails masks, and you can set masks to either forward emails, or to just block them. I find this latter function useful for things that make you put in your email address to get past a wall (which doesn’t necessarily involve signing up).