My wife listens to audiobooks out loud when she’s alone and has left a more than few playing absent mindedly. Most of them seem to do pretty well in terms of both variety of acts and how they’re described. But there are only so many euphemisms that manage to straddle the line between overly dry and patently rediculous.

She did have one book where the author over used the word cock enough that I swear the VA reading it was pronouncing it differently each time just to keep things interesting. It was kinda like: my Cock, MY cock, my coCK, my COCK, mY Cockkkk… my? cock? for a solid five minutes.

Zugzwang strategy. You have to make move, there’s not even an option not to play.

It’s not just about capturing the mobile phone market and punishing alternate ROM developers, it’s also pushing people into the market that might otherwise choose to have a dumb phone, no phone, do things in person, via mail, etc. No android/iPhone? Good luck with online shopping, communicating with medical providers, checking your kid’s grades online, paying utility bills, taxes, etc. etc.

As the boomers die off, and fewer people do things the pre-internet way, there’s no incentive for governments, businesses, and so forth to maintain those processes and systems. Why would we have a receptionist take appointments by phone if she’s just typing them into the same web interface? Why print report cards when we can post them online? Why maintain a storefront and not just warehouses like Amazon?

Opt-in to surveillance or opt out of necessary parts of life, all under the guise of “convenience”.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you’re lonely and hurting, don’t fall in love with anything that doesn’t have a pulse. It’s only going to fuck you up worse in the end.

I’m a cis man, so maybe take this with a grain of salt, but if I get encourement from a random person like this, I absolutely kick my effort up a notch and remember it for months-years.

I’d like think people might be able to tell the difference between “keep it up” or “you’re doing great” and a full on catcall, but I’ve never been catcalled so… ¯\(ツ)/¯

We already have that, and it has solved absolutely nothing while potentially making online surveillance and privacy issues worse.

The answer isn’t age-gating or ID verification, it’s changing how the sites themselves operate. Get rid of the idea of “driving engagement”, no more stealth ads, and no corpo, media, political party, or lobbyist accounts. Hold influencers and podcasters to the same kind of standards we used to hold journalists to, where they’re required to tell you when the’re shilling for some kind of shady supplement company or political huckster.

You know, the kind of shit any sane species would do with this sort of tech, but when have we ever been sane?

This is a wild-ass guess, as I’m no religious scholar, but Paragone’s profile pic appears to be a statue of The Buddha, the emoji may represent the way Buddhists hold their hands together when bowing.

A four year degree, for the most part, proves you can hand in coursework and pass tests. It does not demonstrate the ability to apply any of that education in the real world, nor does it demonstrate any ability to acquire and apply new knowledge outside of a classroom setting.

When you look at careers where the application of knowledge and critical thinking are vital to the work, all of them tend to have some kind of post-graduate schooling or follow-on apprenticeship where one works under an experienced professional, and even people in those fields can be pretty fucking stupid when it comes to things outside of their specialty…

What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?

Pre-fucking-cisely.

I’m not sure how I missed this. It’s so obvious when you think about it!

I chuckled a little.

I took it as her being aggressively kinky and provocative to tease and embarrass her uptight partner, nothing says one way or the other as to if she’s really into that sort of thing or just messing with him since he clearly wouldn’t go through with it, and the punchline being his flustered and mortified reaction rather than just the sexual innuendo.

But the artist wasn’t shy about playing up the horniness and titillation either.

However, that’s not the only way to look at it, and it’s not like we’re dealing with Shakespeare here.

It’s like an expansion pack for flat earthers.

Sounds like exactly what I’m looking for.

Neil Postman was right.

Our educational models and methods are changing for the worse.

TV and the internet are terrible mediums for public or political discourse and this has exacerbated many of our existing issues.

Our culture has become more shallow and has started to lack something profound because of how we utilize technology for education, business, and entertainment.

Things will not improve until we change our relationship with these technologies.

EDIT: several words.

They sell travel sized rolls of that gorilla tape.

It sticks to just about anything, pretty much forever, and is totally opaque.

Should work like a charm.

Precisely, but you’re giving them too much credit by expecting them to figure it out from reading the lyrics alone.

Prejudice tends to lack a capacity for self reflection and an understanding of irony.

It’s the same with nazi punks and MAGAs who like Rage Against The Machine, they just want something that sounds loud, aggressive, and violent and rarely understand what they’re listening to or how it came about until it’s shoved right in their face. Then they get all offended about it.

Most of the time, the best they can make themselves is a cheap, talent-less imitation that lacks any sense of authenticity, and to try and overcome that they’ve resorted to something that can produce a finely polished turd that still lacks any sense of authenticity.

Locksmithing/access control is an industry that is sorely lacking new people…

Interesting. I was considering locksmithing as a way to get some supplemental income later in life. I’ve done skilled labor and light IT work most of my life and it seemed like a good fit for my skill set. I’ll have to move that to the top of the pile of possibilities.

Absolutely intentionally designed to be that way by the GOP and blatantly obvious when you look at their voting records.

One of their main arguments against taxes is that government will always waste tax dollars due to corruption and incompetence… Which is a self fulfilling prophecy, as they’ve proven to be some of the most corrupt and incompetent political leaders in history.

If you want to get into how this happens, and the way it happens with other technologies, I’d suggest Neil Postman’s Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves To Death as a good start.