311–320 of 324 posts
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Good manga and anime are even more rare.
great ones like berserk, 5cmps, cowboy bebop, your name are rare. Good ones are plenty. In fact, considering, how shitty western writers have become, even the trash manga/manwha are infinitely better.
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Reddit on defaults is a crazy experience. Subs with names like /r/wowlookatthis are posting blatant "west bad" propaganda. Making USA and EU people feel bad. Yet I walk outside in Sweden and I'm in one of the best functioning and beautiful nations in the world. Yet Swedish Reddit will post "west bad" propaganda on how everything is right wing doom. I mean from their perspective, sure... but so so so wrong they are. I…
> Wake up. All default subs are left wing crazy. Worldnews bans you instantly if you disagree with Israel. That's a default sub, yeah? Left or right wing?
On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read…
Things were a lot better for the brain when information wasn't coming in as an unending stream that even sometimes responds to what you have to say.
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A lot of postmodern maximalist books like IJ try to reckon w/ these problems. Its easy to reflexively hate the meaningless, ironic, media-fried worlds they build, but they are mirrors, not instruction manuals.
One of IJ’s most important topics is the critique of the empty destructive postmodern cynicism that you are referring to. Wallace was in fact trying his best to do more than just reflect. One of IJ’s main and most likeable characters, Mario, is basically a walking sentiment of this. Infinite jest is surprisingly preachy in this regard; “this is water” and some of his other essays are even more so in this regard. that…
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How much time did it take since you completely cut off caffeine for the anxiety to settle down ?
Took a few weeks off, couldnt deal with the headaches, went back to one cup every 2-3 days of measured espresso. No more getting anxious and worked up about small things and picking fights with my partner. When you are trying to have none, it's suddenly everywhere and in your face without realising it.
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My opinion, anything driven by an algorithm is inherently bad. It’s hard giving up those sites, not because that’s where the people are but because we are all addicted to them. If you switch to mastodon or pixelfed, you’ll find good stuff there, but you won’t engage with it as much because it’s not algo driven, which to me is a win.
That’s an interesting algorithm you use to classify anything driven by an algorithm.
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I used to think the same way, that people have always overreacted to new technology. But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad.…
Agreed. As a society, we have this silly habit of dismissing criticisms of incoming societal shifts because previous ones “turned out fine”. We grab the most extreme of the bad contrarian takes of the time and use it to ridicule the position as a whole. We often ignore those previous shifts were influenced by the criticisms of the time (not all of them bad) and that how it turned out was a result of the push and pull…
Read "Amusing ourselves to death" for exemple; written as a criticism of TV-media in the 80s but even more applicable on the short-form content of today.
Put Toqueville in a time-machine. Would he really regard the current state of society as something that should be aspired to?
Watch a televised primary or presidential debate from mid 20th century and you will be astounded at the quality of argument and focus of the discussion.
I think most people severely underestimate how far public discourse has fallen.
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> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point. I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instag…
Reddit is a site which I would only recommend to someone I truly hated. It's poison on every level imaginable, more so than basically any other social media I've ever used. People will say Twitter is worse, but the Twitter algo with actually listen to you (in my experience) when you tell it what you do/don't want to see. My feed was nearly 100% furry artwork because I refused to interact with anything else.
The problem with Reddit is that all the news subs and all the politics subs are just massive echo chambers and there is simply no way to interact with them unless you follow the agreed upon views espoused by the mods.
If you go on a conservative sub and say that you agree with 90% of what they offer but not the last 10%, you'll just be branded as a commie/socialist and the opposite is true on the left wing subs.
Nuanced comments are few and far between and the worst of all for me as someone living in Europe is /r/Europe which is very left-wing and honestly reminds me a cult of some sort. US bad, Europe great, left is good, right is bad. It is just insufferable.
I think on the contrary X/Twitter is more balanced as I can choose to follow different people on opposite sides of the aisle without fearing getting banned when I comment on some of their posts with views that may not be shared by the original poster.
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I tried to use it a year ago just to see what it was really like. It ended rather quickly with me staring at my own comment looking for ways to twist what I wrote into something ban worthy. Then it happened again! LOL! 1985 Johannes Paulus II visited the Netherlands and some comedians made a song about it that was on TV. The song text is roughly that he enjoys his job and that he has to visit NL. https://www.youtube.…
The real offence is posting without being a bot. The subreddit has to look a certain way, idk what they have in mind but always something, they use bots to make it look that way, you can also post if you contribute to the project but if you ever go against their unstated wishes, then bam!