Veritasium is like that for me. No clue why.

I used an android app called Clean Time Counter for years.

Makes total sense to me that you think this way then.

I teach middle school and I think mostly verbally with pictures thrown in.

“I should staple this” plays in my head and I have a dreamlike image of a stapler I’m looking for, or perhaps its location. If I focus, I can make those pictures very vivid, but usually they aren’t in my day to day.

I talk to myself in my head literally non-stop. It’s a full day dialogue with myself - which I suppose makes it a monologue. But it’s pretty involved with a lot of back and forth.

Do you enjoy coding, math, and logic?

I’m sure it depends on how you define intelligence.

There are probably people without internal monologues who can solve any problem you put in front of them. But I do think there is a certain level of emotional intelligence that can’t exist without an internal monologue. I suppose one could externalize this process and just talk aloud to themselves in order to mull something over. But even then, you likely couldn’t do that all day every day. Those of us with internal monologues must glean some sort of benefit from essentially self-reflecting all day.

Granted, all of this hinges on my limited understanding of consciousness being somewhat accurate. It’s possible that everyone has an internal monologue and some people just lack a connection in their brain that brings it to the forefront of their consciousness. Maybe some people’s IMs are in their subconscious and inform their actions in ways they simply aren’t aware of.

I imagine your priorities become different.

You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.

Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.

Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.

Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”

I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.

I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.

I like the idea that tolerance is a social contract.

You’re only covered by it when you practice it.

You break the contract by being intolerant, nobody is obligated to be tolerant to you anymore.

Tiny Scanner for Android

The whole thing with folk music and punk rock is that it can be good whilst not technically sounding good.

As an example, Johnny Hobo is perfectly situated between folk and punk rock. Horrible chain-smoking voice pushed to its max, shitty acoustic guitar just being beat on, and it sounds so like it was recorded on a laptop.

But it’s completely unique, authentic, and heart wrenching.

You can feel his despair and a lot of it is precisely because of these things. I don’t think any high-quality version of this song would make nearly the same impact. In fact it would probably sound like shit.

I think it’s relative.

But yes it’s valuable. Even at only 30 years old, I often learn from the 8th graders I teach.

Adults overcomplicate things and rationalize bad decisions. All it takes sometimes is one kid with a “naive” outlook to ask, “Why would you be friends with someone you don’t like?”

Then you think, yeah… Why would I?

So interesting. I wonder why your brother feels so insecure. Sounds like he felt he was under a lot of pressure to be successful with that lecture or something.

One thing I didn’t share with you is that I also have a younger, younger brother who is bipolar. And I’m very fascinated by the fact that you mentioned your brother dramatizing his life and adding bits from movies. My youngest brother actually does that too. Our childhoods had enough shit to complain about but he always takes it that one step further and adds one small detail to make it worse.

The classic example is the time my brother lost his shit (bipolar, remember) and pushed past our grandma on his way out the door. My mom (perhaps rightfully?) grabbed his shirt and pushed him against the wall, angrily explaining that our grandma was old and pushing past her was way out line. My youngest brother recounts that story as the time my mother choked him until he had bruises. My other brother and I don’t recall it that way at all. And to be honest, I think if you’re pushing past your grandmother, whatever happens to you next is pretty justifiable. Had she fallen and broken a hip, that would have been bad. My brother called CPS and they didn’t find his claim to be credible, so that adds to my belief that I’m remembering it correctly.

We were just a regular middle class family but my mom had pretty poor taste in men to be honest. Hence my drunk and absent father plus youngest brother’s bipolar which he inherited from his father, my mother’s second marriage.

I also recall the time he ran away to a friend’s house, which he recalls as the time that my mother “kicked him out and left him homeless for a week.”

I think the truth of all this is probably somewhere in the middle for us all. Our parents treated us differently because we were different kids. I had fewer issues and I’m sure I was easier to deal with. Maybe my mom scared my brother when she jacked him up against the wall. Maybe he felt like she didn’t want him home which is why he ran away. It’s just funny how perception works, especially when you throw in confounding factors such as mental illness and insecurity, different ages, different temperaments.

Well, best of luck to you and your brother. The best parents in the world still fuck up kids on some level. We can only try to be better for our own kids. This has been on my mind a LOT now that I have a newborn at home myself. I just want to be there for him and break the cycle of absent, drunken fathers. It’s a cycle that goes back to my great grandpa on my dad’s side, so even though I don’t do drugs or drink in my adult life, I worry about the family curse, haha.

You know your situation better than anyone so feel free to ignore this if I’m way off base.

But I’m guessing two things here:

1. Your parents were able to provide you with things you needed as a child. Perhaps things like college and clothes on your back were the things you needed to grow into a fulfilled and happy person. But maybe your brother needed your mom to control her emotions better during an episode. Maybe he needed your dad to be predictable and consistent instead of drinking and behaving in ways that were irritating or unpredictable from a child’s perspective.

2. You might not be fully acknowledging some of the things they did (or didn’t do) that made you feel bad when you were little. It doesn’t have to be physical abuse for it to have an impact on you. We know now that children form attachment styles at least partially based on how their parents responded to their cries during infancy. Kids can be amazingly resilient, but also incredibly delicate.

Also, the odds that they treated you differently based on birth order, their age when they had each of you, gender, your personalities, etc. is very high.

You should ask your brother what really bothers him deep down. I’ll bet you get some tears and probably some very deep, very impactful memories/feelings about your parents.

If you asked my younger, more relaxed brother about our parents, he would say, “Yeah man dad’s a dick for drinking and bailing on us, and mom likes to guilt trip us but oh well.”

I would be the one to explain how their constant fighting, dad’s drinking/drugging, mom’s emotional manipulation and authoritarian parenting, etc. made me feel deeply unsafe and insecure as a child. I felt bad about myself and my life. I wished I could get a letter from Hogwarts more than anything. And when our father got so into drugs that he became absent completely, I felt lonely and abandoned. Took me many years to make peace with it and realize he was really sick and struggling.

The thing is, I suspect that I’ve actually come a lot further in my healing than my brother has. I don’t think he’s aware of some of the things he does or why he does them. Any chance your brother is actually onto something here?

I’m interested! Can you PM me? I currently use an IPTV service that’s just okay.

They should be careful. Plenty of alternatives cropping up. No, they’re not as technically impressive, but anyone with some basic Photoshop knowledge can do the same things on GIMP, paint.net, photopea, etc. Might just take a few extra steps.

All going to be less relevant soon with AI art though. If we are in the rotary phone stage of AI, wait until we get to the iPhone stage.

Can you elaborate on this more?

Is this really an issue? I mean it makes sense with the security updates being non-existent for a long time now, but would bots really hardlock the machine fairly quickly?

Another prime specimen of the master race.

Cool truck too.

Capitalism can commercialize anything including critiques of capitalism.

Similarly, corporations can sell anything, including critiques of themselves.

Reminds me of the Beatles selling “Beatles Hater” merch.

You’d miss exactly nothing.

I have tried several times over the years to pick up a game of theirs that looks interesting due to the story, setting, or due to the fact that it’s a sport game my friends are playing.

Every single time, for well over a decade now, it’s taken me about 20 minutes to realize they haven’t changed one thing about their formula in any genre.

All of their games feel kind of cheap, floaty, and/or just “off” somehow in terms of physics and gameplay. They have nonstop in-game purchases, and they fill their game with hundreds of thousands of copy and paste quests. Like, the most tedious thing in the recent Zelda games is getting the Koroks seeds, and even that is more varied and interesting than the vast majority of Ubisoft quests.

If Ubi made smaller games less frequently, they’d be an amazing studio I’d bet.

The sports games from EA are also the same exact thing every single year. Similarly, if EA released fewer sports games, instead just updating rosters and stats through free downloads, they could probably make some pretty incredible games.

One thing I’d like to see EA do is add more fun and experimental features. First person mode in Madden where you play with a full team of guys, creative rule sets, totally off the wall fantasy settings and rule sets, career modes where you start as a high school player and get noticed, marathon games where you don’t get to call plays and instead it’s a constant stream of making it to the end zone and having to immediately punt the ball to the other team so they can start running and passing freely instantly, etc.

They could do so much to make sports interesting to non-spors guys. And someone who likes sports more could probably tell me some of the more realistic/simulation style upgrades they’d like to see from these games. Things that have been missing way too long.

Holy shit.

^sometimes, ^we ^need ^dark ^humor ^to ^make ^it ^through.

I’ll assume you meant that in good faith.

If being trans is caused by microplastics, alright. They’re still not hurting anyone. If there is an environmental culprit, then hopefully conservatives would finally acknowledge that there is a biological process at work and it’s not a choice made by deviants or whatever.