I saw an ADHD influencer recommend wearing ear plugs in public to block out environmental noise to keep conversation directed at you still audible.

I get distracted in public when my ears pick up conversation around me - especially people who are fighting or gossiping and I find it very entertaining compared to the discussion I’m in - so this is something I’d like to try the next time I have a dinner out at a busy restaurant with others.

Editing to add: I just listened to about a minute of the femtanyl song you linked and I realized that I also get in the zone productive with some types of music in which I can’t understand the lyrics. I listen to a Pandora station built around Sigur Ros because I can’t understand the language lol

By virtue of the fact that up until just a few months ago, you could even go there and casually peruse security sensitive and classified information if only you found the right bathroom, I guess you could say it was priceless.

This makes me wonder if team Trump isn’t preemptively muddying the waters for pending news of Trump’s inevitable death. I wonder if Trump got a prognosis recently and this is just a type of staw poll taken about how ready and willing the GOP would accept a replacement name on the ticket.

I guess you missed it when the story was broken that apparently Nancy Reagan used to give epic jobbers.

But no school district in Texas who stupidly thinks that chaplains should work in public schools would knowingly hire Satanists when there are probably many Christian denomination chaplains available.

Different story if the only applicant is a Satanist, but the district just declares the search as failed without interviewing the Satanist. Then it’s a matter of religious discrimination in the hiring process for that one individual.

I can’t think of any situation in which the actual chaplain at any given school could challenge this law to the point it starts moving through the courts.

To get into the court system, some parents are going to have to sue. I’m predicting a Jewish family, Muslim family, or Bahai family raising suit after the WASP chaplain starts evangelizing to the non-believers.

Of course he said that because if Trump is disqualified because of J6, then so would also half the GOP’s varsity team from Congress. I think if all of Trump’s in-government co-conspirators (just to name a few, but not an exhaustive list: Meadows, Scott, Hawley, Boebert, Gaetz, Greene, etc.) were expelled and never allowed to return to government, I’m pretty sure at least half those seats would go to middle of the road Democrats (I mean at least Boebert’s seat, minimum) and the GOP would lose their razor thin margin in the Senate.

I think this is one of the many major reasons Pence keeps towing this line for Trump.

Absolute lack of self awareness. Like, what does it mean if the criticism is coming from both the left and now the right about how blind the loyalty is to this orange fascist? They’re desperate to link DeSantis and Hillary, but don’t you think DeSantis also stands to benefit from conservatives’ blind loyalty. When even he is trying to be the wake up call, and they reject it… Good God.

America. Where others’ enjoyment of looking at your pregnant body is more important than what you can do with your own body.

A couple of years ago, my mom somehow seemed very insistent about the “caravan” crossing the border. Turns out she had started watching Fox news when I didn’t even know her to pay attention to news at all.

I was trying to explain to her that this was really small potatoes news since - at the time - I had seen very few headlines about it on the usual subs on reddit. I also encouraged her to strive toward empathy about why a person would leave their home and all their previous life to travel by foot through Mexico to the US. And then after more news came out, tried to point out that they were asylum seekers from a country the US had intentially interfered with to maintain control in the region. She never got super Trumpy, but she seemed to keep talking about the “border crisis” almost every time we had a discussion. I then flatly told her that this was a distraction because of mid-term elections.

Eventually, she abandoned Fox news, but I’m not sure if it was my brow beating or some other reason. She started watching CNN a lot and a few times that I’d walk through the living room in the evenings, Don Lemon’s big head (or Chris Cuomo) was just always at this shrill tone of exasperation. One day I told her that just because we may agree with what’s being said here doesn’t make this news either. News shouldn’t tell you how to feel about what’s going on in the world.

I’m harkening back to my college journalism days when my professors bemoaned the 24-hour news cycle. Working in a newsroom, we would sneer at the way TV stations covered current events. And now, I don’t know how or when we will ever get to a point where the news can be communicated during prime time that doesn’t get editorialized to hell - on either side of the aisle.

The reason left wingers don’t have the presence the right does on Facebook, YouTube, etc isn’t because of a lack of voices or audiences - it’s because of deliberate manipulation of what is put in front of people.

I recently have gotten into wasting tons of hours on YouTube shorts, and I was very surprised that after a grand total of maybe 12 hours of using the platform, Andrew Tate content was just shoehorned into the algorithm of shorts being presented to me. Up to this point in time I was watching cosmetics, baking cookies, comedy, cooking, just funny hot takes, but then completely out of the blue one day that guy’s ugly ass monkey face was on my phone, and even though it was so quick that I couldn’t even think of his name, my lizard braid already recognized that he is very dangerous to women, so I opened the menu to select the feature on YouTube that prevents those channels from being promoted to me ever again.

There is 0% chance that the content that I had previously been watching links up in the algorithm to Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, or Andrew Tate. This leads me to believe that YouTube intentionally carves out space for these content creators and makes promises about getting their content in front of everybody’s eyeballs, regardless of level of interest in that type of content.

Tagging @ernest in case instance owners don’t have a larger community in which they share news like this with each other.

Possibly dumb question, but are you u/PoppinKream???

There is a single user who is posting dozens of times a day in my magazine (for which I am a moderator). Another mod on my team has raised the alarm about the user, like surely they’re going through a personal crisis to be so terminally online and posting so frequently.

I’m realizing now they might be a bot. The sources of articles are varied, and quality of article is like 30/70 serious/bullshit. The user occasionally comments on the submissions and I’m realizing the comments are generic rabble rousing instead of being complex language or referencing complex details from the articles shared.

Could anyone speak more to how to identify bot accounts? Many thanks!

Oh good. Millennials are due for another world calamity. We’ve had one plague. Why not a second plague?

I am reading this and commenting from kbin.social.

I hear you and agree that reddit was peak awful in the past few years, but I do in my heart of hearts want a reddit-like experience.

What I think is intriguing about the Fediverse is that it almost doesn’t matter how many people seem to be on any on instance because they mostly talk to each other.

I commented elsewhere two weeks ago that I think reddit’s redesign attracted a bunch of users who were looking for a facebook-like experience, and at the risk of falling into the false dichotomy of normies vs redditors, I think the redesign brought too many normies who didn’t want to learn reddiquette. I think something that will help kbin immensely is how (I say this lovingly) ugly and mostly featureless it is. There aren’t bells and whistles to make it an attractive draw for any other reason besides you want to be here and engage the content and community.

I do hope that as many of these early instances who seem to be “in it” for the right reasons quickly and unequivocally defederate from instances started up by companies like Meta, though.

I think prospects of going public via IPO were tanked when a tech giant like Google is publicly venturing opinions about the platform.

Wouldn’t this at least advance her career for a possible SCOTUS nomination?