I had absolutely debilitating insomnia for my entire life. In the last couple of years I discovered something interesting. I’ve got a condition called aphantasia which means that I cannot see any images in my mind. For my whole life I heard the phrase counting sheep and thought it was a metaphor. Just like. Thinking about sheep since visualizing wasn’t something that I thought people could do.

Anyway, in researching about the condition I found an article online for an exercise where you can work on trying to visualize something. Basically you close your eyes and use the flashing remnants of vision to try to force a shape to exist. Sometimes you need to push on your closed eyes and a little pressure will cause some patterns to appear. You’re supposed to do this exercise while talking to someone outloud. Even if it’s just making a recording. The article I read said you must say it out loud or you will fall asleep. Me having never fallen asleep in my life without hours of concerted effort completely ignored this warning and much to my surprise it absolutely made me fall asleep within minutes.

Ever since then I’ve been able to use this technique to fall asleep every night. It’s like my mind finally learned how to do it. Most of the time I don’t even need to do these exercises any more.

That being said I was so pleased with this side effect I never even tried the say it out loud to try to improve mental images and I still can’t see anything in my minds eye. But being able to sleep every night without fail is a freaking miracle. So I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Here is the original instructions I found on it. https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photographers/

Same. There’s dozens of us

C

Or be self employed.

Lol. Iphones came out just shy of decades ago in 2007, and there were portable phones even in the 80s. Though admittedly they didn’t play audio for you back then. But I had a non smart candybar phone in the late 90s early 2000s with a built in media player I loaded phrases into for various trips.

I love this. It’s a perfect example. If we manage to continue having elections is on the ballet. It’s actually in question.

The other side being crap is completely irrelevant at that point. It’s absurd that I of all people am telling you to vote for Joe Biden, who I don’t agree with about anything. I think Bernie was too to the right for me personally.

Do there need to be fundamental changes? Absolutely, when you can’t vote for anyone at all it’s going to be much harder to affect the change you want.

yeah, cause Donald trump doesn’t support genocide too.

There’s no discussion here. You get one or the other.

No amount of not voting changes the result to the point where you aren’t getting Trump or Biden.

With trump you lose the progress people have fought for. With Biden you get status quo bullshit. At least the status quo preserves the efforts of the past people can still build on in the future. It’s a non argument. Every one of your points is irrelevant for this election right now.

So I guess we gotta realize you’re just a bot after all. This election matters. Every election matters. But progress isn’t only made during major presidential elections, there’s plenty of ways to keep moving the needle outside of this. I won’t be wasting further time with you. But hopefully people reading don’t fall into the same trap you have or are paid to present.

See, in America we have a two party system. It isn’t great but it’s what we have. As the oldest constitutional democracy, they made a ton of progress but didn’t quite understand parties and how the systems set up would play out. Under this system, you don’t get a great candidate to vote for. You get a middle of the road lukewarm candidate. And now we get that and a complete crazypants candidate. Choosing to not vote against the complete crazypants candidate because the lukewarm one isn’t your ideal candidate is such an obvious trap that a lot of people think only Russian bots can fall for it. I’m not quite that optimistic. I know people are susceptible to propaganda, and if you throw on a heaping pile of repeated disappointment it’s an excellent environment for it to work.

So, it was a fairly coherent response. But not for people who are Russian bots, or in the throws of apathy from a huge disinformation campaign and just generally awful human existence. Honestly? I hope everything gets better for you too. Cause it doesn’t look like life is great for Russian bots or republicans or disillusioned people who don’t know where to turn. Best of luck my dude (or bot)

I was in Japan for a while a few decades ago and I would often just get on a train and go somewhere to see what I’d run into. I didn’t speak any Japanese but I did have some phrases down and a bunch more saved on my phone I could listen to repeatedly and just try to mimic them. Anyway I get turned around and it is getting late, I need to get back on a train so I can head back to where I’m staying for the night, so I ask a random guy in Japanese if he speaks English. He says yes well enough so I explain my situation and ask for direction to the nearest line that’ll get me home.

He proceeds to speak in what he must have thought was English for a solid 5 minutes. I couldn’t understand a single word he said. He pointed in basically every direction at one point or another during the monologue. And I didn’t want to be rude so I listened politely and just planned on thanking him and asking someone else if I could find anyone. But at the end of this huge long gesturing play he was putting on he said in the clearest English with absolutely no accent. “are you picking up what I’m laying down” I’d never heard that phrase before at that time and was absolutely floored. He even nailed the L in laying. I legitimately think even to this day that i was being pranked.

I asked some expat friends who had been living in Japan for a long while and they said there were tons of English phrase books and that was just probably a phrase he practiced a lot. But it was so surreal that every other utterance was so obviously not English.

I thanked the guy and found someone else who literally took me to the station themselves. But it is one of the strongest memories I have from my time there.

Whoops, I told them not to put the dang power button right there. At least they could have covered it with glass or something. Why does it even have a power button.

Oh well.

I’m glad to see that the La Croix methods are catching on

Super flatulence powers is an anime I didn’t expect to happen again.

Added it to that archive place for you and updated my first post.

https://archive.is/AUBdZ

Sorry I have so many paywalls and ad blockers going I had no idea it even had one.

I read several articles to try to understand this. This one was the most helpful to me.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-13-8-or-26-7-billion-years/

Non paywalled version hopefully

https://archive.is/AUBdZ

Doomerism is just reskinned denialism. Things can be done. Don’t let people trick you into believing this.

I don’t mind if you have new wheels in 5 years. If you can’t get this working contact me and I’ll take care of it. Hopefully you can get it working without giving the greedy bastards anything though. =P

Lol. Looking into that app a little bit and what a shitshow. I’m even more pissed off than I was before.

I’m infurated you have to pay 300 bucks for An app on this situation. Incensed beyond reason. Please link to the specific app in question, and then if you can’t get anything working contact me and I’ll buy the stupid thing for you.

I’d much rather make sure things like this never make any money for anyone. But not at the cost of someone in your situation having to wait any longer to access the tools you need. Man am I pissed about that kind of paywalling on medical devices. Holy hell.

uggggggggggh. I’m using Firefox because chrome is really going too far with it’s manifest v3 garbage killing decent adblockere and Firefox is basically the only non chromium based option. Please for the love of everything that is holy. Just. Make. Your. Browser. Better. Don’t need ai gimmicks. Definitely don’t need to lay people off. You need to get back on track. Holy heck. This is the worst.

Deets pls