Fiber arts. SoCal. Social justice. Snark.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 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




  • 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.








  • If you pick up this book, I highly recommend another book written by the same author - Michael Ende - called Momo.

    The fantasy parts of the NES sometimes feel like allegory but mostly feel like folly. But Momo is ostensibly an allegory from the beginning. It also feels like waking up your inner child.

    The parts of the NES that were not adapted into the films are absolutely whimsical and amazing. It’s a true wonder why some details were used in the film and not others. It’s a lot of fun!



  • 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.






  • Wow, that’s on another level.

    So since starting this thread, I had to change my login account to a professional account on my phone, and then after I was done I switched back to my personal account. All of my " do not recommend settings " have completely reset. I’m seeing videos on shorts that were shown to me two months ago. I’m getting recommendations for Ben Shapiro, his fucking sister, people doing interviews with Jeffree Star and his problematic ass. I can’t believe that the algorithm totally resets just because you switch accounts! I have to start all over again trying to take the trash out.



  • 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.