gonna use this as an opportunity to launch my ted talk:

there’s no such thing as anything but “race mixing” since every single human on the planet is a mix of different ancient races anyway

(or to put another way, race is a bs term anyway since we’re all homosapiens)

really? cos you’ve left me smitten

Below is my general sleep guide.

From your post these points sound the most relevant:

• Once in bed, no work/study/planning thoughts. Identify and then free your mind of any thought patterns which keep your mind going. Resolve to address them at another time.
• You can even pre-allocate a time to resolve them during regular waking hours. eg. before getting into bed, remind yourself that any thoughts which ‘need attention’ will be resolved at ‘12pm tomorrow’ or ‘during your commute’ etc. If they pop up during the night, you already have a precooked answer which doesn’t involve waking your brain up even more.
• Don’t keep looking at the clock or trying to calculate how many hours of sleep you can get.
• Avoid looking at phone screen once you’re in bed, if you need to adjust volume use buttons or remote etc with your eyes still closed.

General

• Observe if caffeine plays a role, you can eg. avoid it after lunch or after dinner - whatever works for you & your body.

Late Evening

• Avoid cold (bluer) colour lighting & use warm (redder) colour lighting from late evening until bed. This is important and melatonin effectiveness is directly controlled by this ¹. To put it very very simply, we’ve evolved for redder light = sunset->sleep, bluer = day->awake. Angle of the light can also play a role if you want to go deeper into it.
• Schedule blue light filters on your phone & computers. Should be standard on modern phones & use something like f.lux for computer ².

Before Bed

• Avoid alcohol, lots of sugar or sugary drinks for at least an hour or so before bed.
• Some other otc/“natural” sleep aids to consider: l-tryptophan, valarian, hops, passion flower, chammomile. There’s some ‘complex’ products which are basically derived from these kinds of things eg. ³. [Always check anything you take for possible interactions with eachother or medication you’re on].
• Supplements like magnesium can help reduce effects of muscle tension.
• Ensure any herbal teas or other foods, drinks etc don’t contain more caffeine than you’d planned for. eg. some chocolates contain caffeine.
• Showering or bathing just before bed can help you relax.

In Bed

• Once in bed, don’t keep looking at the clock or keep trying to calculate how many hours of sleep you can get.
• No work/study/planning thoughts. Identify and then free your mind of any thought patterns which keep your mind going. Resolve to address them at another time.
• Is temperature or air flow effecting you? Some people find an oscillating fan can help regulate the airflow & temperature, and the repetition can be soothing.
• Are sounds keeping you alert or waking you up? Consider fan, white noise machine or rain sounds ⁴. You can adjust the EQ to mask specific problem sounds, eg. bass for thumps, mids/high for clatter or voices etc.
• Is light making problems? eg. light from electronics in standby mode, light coming through or around edges of windows, other lights in the house? Identify and cover them or your eyes as needed. Remember blue light is not your friend at this time, blue LEDs might look nice but can mess with the brain chemistry of sleep ¹
• Avoid looking at phone screen once you’re in bed, if you need to adjust volume use buttons with your eyes still closed.

Sound

Falling asleep to sounds can sometimes help. Different people like different things on different occasions: music, YT, movies, TV, audio books, ambient soundtracks (rainforest, crackling fire), even boring monotone talking can be good. Avoid any ads if streaming or TV as they’re designed to grab your attention.

There are music genres almost designed for sleep, various ambient genres can be great especially if they employ low frequency variations and alpha, theta and delta wave type transitions ⁵. There’s a bit of bs around this, but also some legit bio-entrainment science too. In general find what works for you.

If listening, consider using your phone & use a sleep timer app on your phone to automatically gradually lower the volume and switch off after a scheduled time, this can help avoid being woken up by it later in the night. Find the timer periods which work for you. Also ensure your alarm will still wake you.

References

¹ https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/88/9/4502/2845835

² https://justgetflux.com/

³ https://www.flordis.com.au/products/redormin-forte/

⁴ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JyE47-Ykjo [Download rather than stream to avoid interrupts/ads during the night.]

⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Wave_patterns

look deeper, i think he’s trolling

excellent writeup

i agree with alot of what you said and will try to hit a few key issues and hope i can add something to the excellent perspective you’ve cast.

The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.

exactly, they know its a very useful mechanism to accumulate power. so imo we should constantly remind ourselves - they’d be doing this anyway. if homosexuality didn’t exist or was non-viable for this, they’d be onto something else. they’d have used any topic to get what they want. (you could ofc have a metadiscussion about why certain topics are more powerful than others. but thats a different discussion).

anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years

another critical point, as you correctly identified, this is how christianity has become, not what christianity was even purportedly about. if you take the actual words attributed to jesus in the bible, afaict never said a god damn thing about being gay trans whatever. according to their own book - after centuries of fucking with the bible - it STILL says the greatest commandment of all is to love your neighbour as yourself and you can’t judge cos you’re all fuckin sinners afterall.

so it’s all hypocrisy built upon hypocrisy , basically typical “there are 5 lights” bs. in other words it has all the fingerprints of a propaganda pathology not an expression of positive spirituality.

Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime

yeah to that end i think the OPs timeline of 40 years was a bit optimistic, or we at least have to recognise that represents a cross-section of OPs experience which wasn’t necessarily universal 40 years ago. that said i feel there has been a backslide in the last say 10-15 years)

conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.

tbh i think thats because its probably both at the same time, its a documented soviet technique to covertly fund two sides of an issue to control the outcome. not picking on the soviets btw, just that they did a great job perfecting these kinds of things, wrote it down and then the power structures keeping them secret began to collapse and the methology leaked to the public.

we see this in a simpler form where corporations invest in pride month and also unironically heavily invest in homophobic organisations, (so i guess it doesn’t always have to be a cold war operation for powerful entities to effect control via seemingly conflicting interests).

and in what is presumably a less consciously aware context, consider how jk rowling veils her attacks on the trans community behind a thin veneer of “caring about gay people”. i’m strongly of the belief if she’d been born 50 years earlier she’d be jumping on the homophobia bandwagon instead of the currently “trendy” transphobia bandwagon.

to say another way, not everyone pretending to be our friend has our interests at heart, infact sometimes they’re just trying to accumulate power by taking the positive stance on this issue - probably for no other reason than the negative position won’t currently yield them as big a return.

and this can lead to eg. conservatives becoming outraged about a stance taken by someone who is vocal and politically motivated, but who has no business speaking on our behalf, then conservatives end up feeling like they’re “under attack from the homosexuals” when it wasn’t even a homosexual who said it!!

next the conservatives says some hateful thing in retaliation, people respond to that and it spirals…everyone loses (except perhaps the actual perpetrator). this is definitely a flaw in human thinking where our tribalism clouds our perception, we feel under attack and in the heat of the moment incorrectly assess which side someone is taking (or even that there’s only 2 sides, when in life there’s probably rarely ever only 2 sides).

Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.

again, its probably both? tbh i don’t think that laziness is the only explanation for the woefully shoehorned characters we’re currently getting. honestly its fucking insulting (to us, not the biggots - though the biggots might feel insulted too?). as you mention its a profitable cash grab, and i’m sure it hasn’t escaped their notice that a certain type of aggressively half-arsed inclusivity will provide alot more value to them from the hysteria it generates vs actually doing it ‘right’ in a sensitive and compassionate way, which might actually lead to healing.

if healing is what they actually wanted i think it’d look very, very different than how it currently looks. and the kindest interpretation is they’ve realised it’s more profitable short-term to produce hysteria instead of healing.

compare in contrast to what i still think (despite modern news) was a great example of inclusivity characters with the lesbian main characters in buffy:

in 1999 no less, it showed a lesbian couple in bed and instead of a cheap sexiness grab, they’re literally sitting up in bed reading & having a mundane conversation. no sexualisation of the lesbian relationship as something existing only for hetero male gratification, or out attacking heteros. just plain, believable real life characters living a boring normal part of their life. so yes i very much agree that the boring normality is a very powerful thing. surely ALOT more positive overall than aggressive hysteria.

In summary my take-aways are:

• their MO is to use a scapegoat, they’d be attacking someone vulnerable, regardless of whom

• not everyone pretending to be our friend actually wants to help us

• hysteria is sadly apparently more profitable (short term) than healing

A positive note?

I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is

i really don’t either, though something think how homosexuality has been hijacked in modern perception (by that 1000 years of fake christianity as you mentioned). in eg. parts of ancient societies, men could love men and women could love women, someone could be a third gender, and it wasn’t even a thing to get upset about it, because it was just normal life. why do we suffer when they didn’t even know they were supposed to be suffering?

why does it need to be device agnostic?

happy to get into into these subtopics, but it’s also possible i may not be understanding you properly because i agree with alot of what you just said.

what are you attributing the close to 0 probability to?

if you wanna say “whats the probability that CMG was at least partly talking out their arse about their capabilities (and especially any claim they were currently in possession of that capability)?”

i’d also give it like >90% probability they (CMG) are full of shit. in which case you could say i agree with you (to within say 10% error margin).

if you’re instead saying the probability is ~100% that audio surveillance capability cannot possibly currently exist outside TLAs because “someone would’ve published it already” then i really cannot agree. (and afaict that ars article does not support that stance either)

extremely good question to ask OP.

thinking on it right now, perhaps Moon (2009)

Not disputing the three letter agencies

The capability they were claiming to have would make a three letter agency very excited.

sorry i didn’t understand. didn’t you say you don’t doubt TLAs likely already have this capability?

oppressive regimes

most (all?) of whom are operating outside typical legal constraints and likely already have access to the million dollar exploit trade which already exists.

further, i’m not sure how this changes the landscape anyway? its not without precedent that variations on capabilities can be useful to more than one market segment concurrently?

trivial to discover and flag as malware

can you explain further what you mean by this? i’m not sure there’s anything trivial about conclusive analysis of the deep complexities and dependencies of modern smart devices

Apple and Google would also be very keen to find and squash whatever loophole let’s them record without showing the notification.

historically we’ve seen google can take over half a decade to address such things, afaict (welcome correction on this) apple’s generally been faster to respond, and i do agree apple’s current public image attire would be contrary to be seen to enable this. [not simping for apple btw, just stating that part of their brand currently seems to be invested in this]

in reality there are a confluence of many agendas and there’s likely ALOT of global users running non-bleeding edge or other variations on the myriad of sub-system components, regardless of what upstream entities like google implement. if you are aware of any conclusive downstream binary analyses please link

which if true would have been exposed/validated by security researchers long ago.

i agree the probability of discovery increases over time. and the landscape is growing more hostile to such activities. yet i’m not aware that a current lack of published discovery is actual proof it’s never happened.

tbh we have our doubts this leak is directly connected to solid proof “they are listening”.

but we’re not currently aware of any substantiated reasons to say with certainty “they’re absolutely not listening”

well they’re an ad company, so being full of shit is pretty much mandatory.

but i’m not aware of any evidence they’re actually 100% full of shit on this exact issue or not? can you explain a little more how you know for certain they’re full of shit. or you just meant “they’re most likely full of shit”?

deleted by creator

can you please explain further what you mean? it could be interpreted a number of different ways.

i’m not sure if this is your point or not? but there is obviously overlap between each of those groups, there’s black sixpack dads, and poor/middle class lgbqti etc etc

anyway imo none of this revived division appears organic. there’s always going to be the odd biggot, but afaict the majority of modern biggots are being indoctrinated and radicalised by an organised media effort (and our leaders are either complicit or ‘inexplicably’ powerless at protecting us from it). for sure these radicalised biggots should do better, but we’re also talking about average people going up against billion dollar propaganda machinery. it’s certainly asymmetrical warfare.

governments have all shifted more to the right on average

it appears to be the case. though afaict none of it appears to be organic.

100% shoegaze fits the bill perfectly for OPs request. i’d add slowdive to that list

there’s some great, highly independent shoegaze on yt

also, some Dandy Warhols & Brian Jonestown probably fits the bill, eg. this track

honestly i think this is due to unplanned voice calls essentially being broken technology now.

imagine we had 2020s email spammers while mail servers had 1990s spam filters, that’s basically where we’re at now with unplanned voice.

The planet does

The planet which happens to be where we live and borrow atoms from to make our physical bodies?

Poisoning the planet is poisoning ourselves.

Where do you think that CO2 is even coming from? It doesn’t magically teleport into the air. It’s coming from the very pollution sources we’re talking about. In one year ~89% of CO2 pollution came from emissions sources which are harmful to us and other life.

Stop poisoning ourselves == stop poisoning the planet.

The mentality that we can somehow magically separate one from the other suits the polluting industries very well.

Notice how public discourse goes round & round in a lively show, but never seems to get anywhere?

This is strawman public discourse, and its largely by design.

Stop thinking, worrying and especially talking about climate change.

Instead talk about pollution & poison

Everyone can see it. It can’t be denied or handwaved or debated away.

STOP POISONING OUR AIR, WATER AND SOIL.

WE NEED THEM TO BREATH, LIVE AND GROW OUR FOOD. (duh)

When you work in an industry where the entire collaborative workflow of everyone is based on software that doesn’t run on Linux, then not running that software is equal to not being able to work in that industry.

there’s no denying that’s true, though ofc it has alot to do with microsofts very agreessive and anti-competitive practices.

though its all a bit tangential, the main issue i think comes down to what someone means when they say “everything”. certainly if someone said “you can do everything”, i’d expect them to qualify what is (should be) obviously a slight exaggeration as parlance. they don’t literally mean “everything” they just mean most everyday things. i think its fairly common in everyday speech for someone to be able to work out thats what they meant.

in the few rare cases when someone literally means absolutely everything, then yes that silly statement would be incorrect. and if strictly intended with that meaning would certainly qualify as misinformation.

Not sure if when people say you can “do everything that windows does”, they should be interpreted to mean “every single piece of software/drivers ever written for windows was also written for linux”.