2018-02.txt

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FEBRUARY 2018
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hello friends and welcome to a very special february edition of the
tilde.town times! thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to
the most packed edition of the times so far.

this month comes with many exciting new things happening around the town
and a fantastic influx of new members. this month also sees the inclusion
of our first ever essay.

the tilde.town times survives on the gracious contributions of our
members and so if you have seen anything around the town you would
like to see included, please do no hesitate to submit it and it will make
it into the next issue.

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1. tilde news
2. around the town
3. spotlight
4. new members
5. editor's note
6. moment of reflection

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hello and welcome to the tilde newsdesk. please help yourself to some
of the most exciting recent happenings on tilde.town.

A TOWNIE IN NEED
our friend ~cel finds themself in a tough situation. we have started a
fundraiser to try to provide them with financial support. if you can spare
any money it would be very much appreciated. the fundraiser page is at
https://www.gofundme.com/pitch-in-for-a-townie.

DISCORD SERVER!
did you know that tilde.town has a discord server? I did not, but now I
do! you can access it at https://discord.gg/qy53Bf. grab your
cybregoggles and open-palm slam a cassette into your playbox, it's
gameing time!

MINECRAFT SERVER!
on the subject of gameing, we also have a minecraft server! wow! you can
access it at 206.255.129.18 but you'll also need modpacks to play. for
more info, check out the thread on bbj. to access bbj, type bbj at the
terminal. thank you so much to ~desvox for setting this up!

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exciting updates to feels engine this month come from endorphant who
writes:

~ FEELS ENGINE UPDATES ~

vilmibm helped me out to get gopher support in the feels engine; you now
have the option of cross-posting to gopher. if you don't already have
gopher set up, enabling gopher support in the feels engine should
automatically create the directory structure for your gopher hole. gopher
is a pre-www internet protocol that mimics a directory structure instead of
the hyperlink format of html; tilde town has a gopher server that you can
check out with a gopher-compatible browser at gopher://tilde.town (for more
deets, check out the gopher page on the ~town wiki:
http://tilde.town/wiki/gopher.html )

rainbow menus! you can now enable colorful menus, which can both improve
legibility of long list displays, and also make your terminal more visually
exciting! i'm interested in how readable the rainbow menus are with your
terminal environment; if the colors are hard on your eyes, please let me
know so i can consider adjustments for a future update! there's a github
issue for that here: https://github.com/modgethanc/ttbp/issues/5

pub/nopub toggling! this has been a long overdue feature, but if you are
publishing your posts to web/gopher, there's now an option within the
interface to let you toggle whether or not individual posts get published
outside of the tilde.town shell environment. posts marked 'nopub' will not
get written to html/gopher, but will still be readable by other townies
from the feels engine. by default, posts are always published, but if
you mark a post a 'nopub' afterwards, it will be immediately unpublished
from html/gopher. likewise, if a nopub post gets reverted to a published
post, it will get immediately written back to html/gopher.

if you aren't publishing your posts at all, this menu won't be available
to you at all, because your posts will never be published. also, if you
are currently publishing, set a bunch of nopubs, then switch off
publishing altogether, your nopubs list will be preserved; this means
that if you then turn publishing on later, your nopubs will remain
unpublished.

there's probably some hiccups with this most recent update (as usual,
because i am lazy/bad at testing my code <_<), so please send me mail or
pop into #ttbp on irc if you're having problems or have questions about
these updates!

wow, thanks ~endorphant!

~ TILDECOIN / TILDEBOOK ~
we also have a couple of new tools from login who writes:

TILDECOIN I really wanted tilde.town to have an informal currency system
that could be used to exchange value. I created a program called `tcoin`
to make that happen.

When you first type `tcoin` in your prompt, you'll be told you haven't
initialised yet and that you'd need to run `tcoin init`. When you run
`tcoin init`, you'll be asked to create a passphrase. Once you've done
that, you'll be given 1000 tildecoins (every user is) and told that your
account was created successfully.

To log into `tcoin`, you type `tcoin on`, enter your passphrase, and wait
for a success/failure message. `tcoin` uses `whoami` to identify the
username and `scrypt` to authenticate with the passphrase. To discourage
brute-forcing and to make passwords of shorter length safer, scrypt takes
about a second or two to authenticate using your passphrase.

Once you've logged in, running `tcoin` will show your messages (which
includes details of transactions sent and received and any messages sent
along with each transaction) and balance.

To send some tildecoins, run `tcoin send <username> <amount> [<message>]`,
where <message> is optional, but <username> and <amount> are mandatory.
The amount must be a fixed point decimal number with two decimal places.
If it is not, it will be converted to one. For example, 314.159 will
become 314.15 and 42 will become 42.00.

You can send tildecoins to yourself as well. You can use this feature to
send yourself messages. You can use `tcoin` as a way of chatting with
someone as well, by sending a small amount of tildecoins back and forth
with a message included with each.

The first hack of tildecoin was performed by ~elly. I give her complete
credit with helping make `tcoin` safer. The most prominent hack till now
has been from ~selfsame. His program, ~selfsame/flowers, will steal 900
tildecoins from you if you run it. The whole reason passphrase-based
authentication was implemented was so that you could run `tcoin off` to
log off before running any programs whose nefariousness you weren't aware
of.

Thus, it is good security practice to not run any untrusted programs
while you're logged into `tcoin`, and to run `tcoin off` and log off
from `tcoin` before running any programs.

If you want to review `tcoin`'s source code and compare the executable
with the compiled source code, you can find the source code at
/home/login/bin/src/tcoin/tcoin.cpp. You can compile it by running `g++
/home/login/bin/src/tcoin/tcoin.cpp -std=g++11`. This will create a file
called `a.out` in your current directory. Comapring this file with
/usr/local/bin/tcoin (this directory actually symlinks to
/home/login/bin/tcoin) will allow you to make sure that `tcoin` is safe to
run.

TILDEBOOK Tildebook is a directory for fello townies. Named after Facebook
and modelled after its original purpose of being a "book of faces", i.e.,
a directory of college students with their faces, tildebook takes the
simple approach of giving you a 144px by 144px space to put anything you
want.

The way it works is you create a web page that looks good in a 144px by
144px space in your public_html directory called tildebook_profile.html.
If your username is ~example, then your tildebook page should be
accessible at https://tilde.town/~example/tildebook_page.html. The
update_tildebook script runs every week and checks everyone's public_html
directory for the existence of a non-empty tildebook_page.html file. If
found, it hyperlinks to them on https://tilde.town/~login/tildebook/. If
you want to run the script yourself (for example, after having create a
tildebook_profile.html page), you can do so by running
/home/login/cronjobs/update_tildebook.

The URL https://tildebook.tk redirects to
https://tilde.town/~login/tildebook/ for now, but the latter will always
be available and should be used as the URL for the bookmark if you
bookmark tildebook.

Every time the command is run, the order of the townies shown is
randomised so that every townie has an equal chance of appearing at the
top of the page.

wow, thanks ~login!

TOWNS & TAVERNS!
our very own ~archangelic has been running a game of dungeons and
dragons called towns and taverns! the first session is available to view
online just here:
  http://media.archangelic.space/towns_and_taverns_ep1.mp4

if you have trouble playing this, ~archangelic writes that vlc is able
to stream it. if you'd like to get involved in the game please just get
in touch with ~archangelic.

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the tilde.town spotlight is a section where we look at one user's ~ page.
this month we are checking out the wonderful work of tilde.town stalwart
~mio - http://tilde.town/~mio/

there's too much to love about this page. the origami is of course
stunning but the entire design is a real delight. it is simple, effective
and really striking. the page reflects the quality of ~mio's origami:
something stunning out of simple components. thanks ~mio!

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welcome everyone who has joined recently! here are the new members and
their ~ pages. a ** indicates they have updated their index page!

• http://tilde.town/~vitaminplz
• http://tilde.town/~emb              **
• http://tilde.town/~fairlady         
• http://tilde.town/~camilian
• http://tilde.town/~mcf
• http://tilde.town/~wiarien
• http://tilde.town/~halian_tesaukan
• http://tilde.town/~psi
• http://tilde.town/~miwilc
• http://tilde.town/~cwmccabe         **
• http://tilde.town/~fielious
• http://tilde.town/~erin             **
• http://tilde.town/~s21
• http://tilde.town/~toffee           **
• http://tilde.town/~quinno
• http://tilde.town/~anarchastronomer
• http://tilde.town/~noisecapella
• http://tilde.town/~quine            **
• http://tilde.town/~nursemchurt
• http://tilde.town/~wuz              **
• http://tilde.town/~impish
• http://tilde.town/~cylrs
• http://tilde.town/~agiri
• http://tilde.town/~classique
• http://tilde.town/~bootsy           **
• http://tilde.town/~forrest
• http://tilde.town/~techkid6
• http://tilde.town/~dbucklin
• http://tilde.town/~dawran6
• http://tilde.town/~bunnygirl
• http://tilde.town/~tundrajimmy
• http://tilde.town/~vox              **
• http://tilde.town/~tihnik
• http://tilde.town/~avrak
• http://tilde.town/~cymatist
• http://tilde.town/~exo
• http://tilde.town/~hashdang         **
• http://tilde.town/~ne1              **
• http://tilde.town/~canadaduane      **
• http://tilde.town/~ironlake
• http://tilde.town/~silver           **
• http://tilde.town/~ebbtide
• http://tilde.town/~international    **
• http://tilde.town/~lily             **

wow, so many new users this month! I hope you all have a lovely time x

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this month our editor ~jumblesale writes in with an essay about our
responsibilities to each other as members of this community:

we're incredibly fortunate on tilde.town to have such a comprehensive code
of conduct (http://tilde.town/wiki/conduct.html). I will avoid
paraphrasing it here but I think it is worth all of us having a fresh read
of it and reflecting on the vision for tilde.town which it describes. as
our community expands and more people join it is especially important to
be reminded on what behaviour is most important when interacting with
other members.

I am not a spokesperson for tilde.town but if I could offer an extension
to our ethos it might be: be considerate, be polite, but most of all, be
kind.

being considerate is acknowledging that we are using a shared resource and
that we have been given huge responsibility within it. this includes
things like not using up loads of disk and cpu but also not abusing things
that call-out to other services like the toot or tweet commands, and being
sparing with our use of wall which can be confusing to new joiners and
distracting to anyone with an active session. remember the visibility of
these commands: everyone is going to see you using them and in the case of
wall are going to have to manually dismiss them. wall serves a wonderful
creative purpose as showcased on ~vilmibm's page
(http://tilde.town/~vilmibm/town.html). it is worth just considering the
value of your message before sending it.

it is also good to keep in mind that we have new users joining all the
time and their first impressions are likely to determine whether or not
they will become another vital part of our community. if someone joined
right this moment, would your behaviour show our community in its best
light? tilde.town has so much to offer that it is a tragedy if anyone
feels they are not welcome.

being polite is respecting the way you make others feel. if you are saying
something which makes another member feel uncomfortable, it is far more
valuable for you to respect their feelings than it is to keep talking.
most large social networks have coalesced around an idea that free speech
is the most important attribute. we have the opportunity to contribute to
a space where the feelings of our fellow members is more important than
our ability to talk about what we want. a polite thing to do is move
conversations to less visible spaces - channels in irc are free to create
and can be a good way to split off talk about things like current politics
which can be a distressing topic for members of our community.

being kind means acknowledging that the unusual nature of tilde.town will
attract people disproportionately disenfranchised by other online
communities. it means being able to understand that there are forces which
systemetically oppress other members of this community, even if those same
systems have been beneficial to you. if you are a beneficiary then this is
not to criticise you, just to ask that you have extra patience for people
who do not share your circumstances. tilde.town is always likely to
attract people who are in some way marginalised. our responsibility as
members to provide a place where they feel welcomed and valued - the same
behaviour we would extend to any member of our community.

it is also important that we provide a space where members are able to
discuss ideas, explore and expand their knowledge. tilde.town is also
unique in being an active multi-user system open to public registrations.
we have a responsibility to support one another's learning in a respectful
way. there is nowhere else on the internet where many projects which exist
on tilde.town could be created. it is vital for us to preserve that.

tilde.town is a truly unique place which has meant so much to me during my
time here. it has changed my life and enriched it with many wonderful
friends. when we see problems it is also our responsibility to work to fix
them rather than to ignore them or disgard our community. I have always
thought it is important to combat cliqueism in everything we create for
for the town - a fracturing of our close-knit community would not be a
benefit to anyone. to avoid this we must be able to treat each other with
respect and gently remind one another of our responsibilities to our
community when that fails.

thank you for reading.

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a very sweet moment of reflection this month comes to us from ~wuz:

    "try to detach your sense of worth with how situations end up.
    the stigma around failure stems from our cultural feeling that ability
    isn't the same as worth, which just isn't true"