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I have a specific ask at the end, but any and all musings on this topic are invited.

Lately it's become apparent that the endless fire hose of content and subsequent extinction of boredom is one of the most insidious shifts of modern life. While social media and the internet have accelerated this, upon further reflection I realize this battle to hijack our time and attention is something basically all of us were born into (and an even steeper climb for those of us blessed with ADHD).

These reflections have been borne out of a desire to protect my toddler's curiosity and passion for life outside a black mirror for as long as I can reasonably manage.

The issue as I see it is not the existence of content beyond what one could ever consume (books have been that way for centuries). It's the evaporation of friction. One click and you're on an infinite loop, optimized and engineered to keep you there.

I used to think this was a symptom of the smartphone & tik-tok era. However, looking back at my own childhood TV habits, cable TV was the precursor: dozens of channels that never went dark and 24/7 news cycles that bred fear and never stopped churning.

The ask: How have you set up an environment for your kids (or yourself!) to delay the hedonic content treadmill as long as is reasonably possible?

The goal is to avoid a smartphone until we can't. I'm not anti-screen. There are loads of great educational TV and movies, I just want to introduce them slowly and with intention. But unfortunately now every TV front-end is ad-stuffed and every streaming app is basically a recommendation engine in disguise.

How do you share content with your kids without letting the algorithm worm its way inside their brain? How do you give them access to the collective wisdom of mankind in the internet without turning it into a slot machine?

Hello all! My lease is up mid-March of this year. For personal mental health reasons I would like to secure a move-in date of around mid-February and perhaps even earlier than that, because I'd like to have things finalized before my ex starts her own moving out process. This is the first time I'll be apartment hunting on my own, and while I have definitely talked to many friends and mentors regarding my options, I figured I wouldn't mind getting thoughts from folks here.

I have a few hard requirements for personal reasons: I would ideally not be too far from groceries (I have a car), be able to go for walks/runs without having to drive to a specific place, not too far away from the main airport here as I have to fly for work very very occasionally or when visiting family, and central HVAC. I have, generally, two options to choose from:

1. The expensive option, 1500 base rent and estimated 300-400 for utilities/parking/etc. At this time I do not believe it possible or even worth looking for anything slightly cheaper than this - whether it's a studio or a 1bed, the cost is more or less the same in this area. And even if the location were less of a factor and I looked farther away from the main city / big hubs, at best we're looking at $100 cheaper and I don't think that is big enough savings given how inconvenient location is.

2. The budget option, estimated 700-800 with utilities included, 3 housemates. A friend is currently sharing a house that his family owns with two other housemates. I've never met said housemates but they are personal friends of his. All housemates are male, I am female. I would be getting a single master bedroom, attached bathroom. At this time I do not consider the... eyebrow-raising-ness? of being the sole woman to be a problematic factor.

Some of the factors I'm considering, that probably isn't comprehensive because I'm new to all this:

• Living with housemates. I haven't had to share a house with so many people since my first year of college, which was 14 years ago. My ex did keep me honest over the last year of living together, and from a brief call with the friend who would be renting out the room, his housemates do keep to themselves, don't really use the kitchen, plenty of fridge space, etc.

• Living alone. I actually haven't "lived alone" since the last semester before I dropped out of college. My roommate at the time was taking a leave of absence and I had the studio to myself for three months. I feel neutral about this.

• Laundry? House has in unit laundry. No apartment I've looked at has in-unit laundry unless I add at least $200 on top of the base price.

• WFH and personal space. I do work remotely and for my entire WFH life, I have always had my personal PC setup, bed, and work setup in the same room. This has been difficult for me in the last two months while recovering from the breakup, and moving into a 1bed apartment would allow me to have a dedicated work setup away from bed since I personally value that higher than a nice living room space (no television, no problem). Or I could even fit that work setup into a small but still cozy living room space, who knows. However...

• MONEY. I've broken down all my fixed monthly costs, including any recurring annual subscriptions. I am estimating very, very high for absolutely everything, such as monthly grocery costs (400/mo, which is the highest that my ex and I split over the last 10 months. We're both very light eaters and "groceries" would include the occasional toiletries restock and such). Right now I am looking at taking home around $1300/mo living in my own apartment, vs. $2300/mo sharing the house.

  • Furnishing a new apartment, vs... not. Ex and I split all costs 50/50 for everything BUT furniture, and she paid for most items such as the sofa, coffee table, TV console, dining room table, ie. she will be taking those items with her. I do not want a large sofa but cozy seating in a living room space is, well, not cheap. The only furniture I'd bring with me is a decent Ikea shelf cabinet thing, my two standing desks, a single bookshelf, a twin bed. I would not be acquiring additional furniture if I move into the single bedroom.
  • Schooling costs. I don't know if I've gotten into this online degree program yet, won't know until probably April, and even if I do get in I am not sure if I will jump into it (though at this time I am leaning towards it just to have a guided path which I'm lacking right now with my career). This is an estimated 30k over the course of 2 years, or $625/mo. Not counting any potential textbooks.
  • Lasik/PRK? I have pretty poor eyesight. I have always been afraid of pulling the trigger on this, but I would like to in the next few years.
  • Current savings. I have a little over $20k in savings. I don't know anything about stocks, I have a 401k I never look at. My financial literacy boils down to "I use my credit card like a debit card" and my only current debt is a financed car, costs are factored into the numbers posted above.

• Mental health? Monthly therapy costs are factored into my numbers. So is a $150/mo cost of classes at a local muay thai gym (picked up recently for sake of both physical and mental health, joining a community, a regular activity to take me out of the apartment).

What considerations am I missing from the above? What would you go for? I mentioned I have not lived on my own for a very long time, and to be honest I don't have concrete long-term financial goals. Obviously property ownership is like... the American Dream and whatever... but frankly I am so very far from being able to realize such a goal that it just is not a factor when it comes to me saving money. I just don't want to look back at myself in 2027 and regret my finances. My family is in another part of the state and I can't rely on them for money or housing... well, I actually can, for housing, and save even more money, but I vastly prefer the climate where I am at now and my mental health will suffer far more living with family than with 3 housemates.

I really appreciate any thoughts! I know I have time, there is no rush, but I am also aware that distracting myself with this has been pretty helpful with, you know, not being too depressed about circumstances.

not sure if this is the appropriate sub group for this question or if its even allowed but figured I'd try.

I am curious the demographics of tildes users. You can be as specific as you feel comfortable.

I am in a dude in my 30s in Canada who works in software development.

I am really not sure if this topic belongs in ~tech or ~society or ~talk but I trust the moderators to re-assign accordingly.

So, this is the layout of the "development" team of my companies.

there are 4 "development" teams which reports to the development manager who also occasionally codes.
There is one team, that's the one I am on. 7 people, 6 males.
there is another team, 4 people, 3 males.
there is another team, 5 people, 4 males.
The last team, I don't really consider "development" team. its a team of 4 females. What they are best suited for is QA in the sense of manually testing the product to ensure the experience is sufficient for push to PROD, But because of budget restrictions, they are being forced to learn code and testing suites so they can be the people to develop our testing structure. They are great people and excellent Manual QAers but they really are not developers.

All our tech managers and team leads are men with the exception of the team lead for QA (obviously).

And just to be clear, the culture is friendly and respectful and no complaints. It's just the gender ratio is pathetic.

So our tech gender ratio is really 17 people and 3 women which is 17%.
If you want to consider the QA team a dev team to bump up the numbers, you get 21 with 7, that's still only 33%.

At a recent company meeting, they were talking about how diverse our workforce is and blah blah blah (I tune out most of that stuff as we are fully remote and I spend most of my time coding), but then they showed a slide that claimed our gender ratio for tech roles was like 50% or something.....

I message a colleague at work, being like "where on earth did they get that number??", he was like ":shrug: maybe they are counting the people who use the product we are making?"

To clarify that, the product we work on is rarely used by external customers. Instead we have employees who know how to use our product and correspond on our behalf with external customers. So all these employees are doing is using a webapp the real tech employees develop.

So long story short, my company pulled a number out of nowhere to claim we have gender equity in the tech roles and now I dont know how to trust any stats a company puts out about how equal the gender roles are in their "tech" departments.

I am always curious about these kinds of situations.

for example, I live in Canada and (iirc) in 2021, there was a discovery of unmarked graves (I think) near a church that used to be a residential school for the indigenous children at the time.

given its closeness in time to the George Floyd protests, it sparked a discussion up here regarding our own failures of how to do proper truth and reconciliation with the remaining indigenous community.

my university graduation was also around that time, and the university wanted to jump on the bandwagon of appearing to be woke. their attempt at this was to have a former student of a residential school come and speak at the event about her experiences at the school. forseeably real sad stuff. you can't help but feel sadness hearing it.

Then, we had to sing the national anthem of Canada.

I have never stopped finding it funny that whichever genius was tasked with planning the schedule for that day, decided the most appropriate thing to do after hearing about the lengths that the church and government of Canada tried to go to to "stomp the indian out of the child" is to proceed to sing a song celebrating that government. You can kinda make an argument that we were singing a song to celebrate the ideal of Canada, which is a country that is about always trying to do better but from my perspective, what it felt like was they had a template of what a graduation ceremony was like and just decided to shoe-horn in that lady at some point in a pre-existing template.

One other funny story I've heard (I think from an indigenous comic who was a guest on an NPR podcast) was he relayed a story about how during covid, when their work went remote and had meetings on zoom and the DEI was gaining more and more popularity at the time in corporate environments, their bosses best idea was to do land acknowledgements on zoom..while everyone was at home. He had a whole bit about it that was quite humorous and I can't really remember but it was hilarious.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

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This is one of those posts that make me wish we could tag multiple tildes. Because this would apply to ~tv, ~movies, ~comics, ~games, ~books, and ~anime, with possibly even more.

A long time ago I read an article about weird crossovers, and it made the point that thanks to unrelated crossovers and six degrees of separation, the Archie comics Sonic technically existed in the same universe as... Some popular live action shows, because that show had a crossover with some other show that crossed over with Sonic. Obviously not really, but it was a funny thought.

I failed to find the article I remember, but my brief search did bring up the Tommy Westphall Shared Universe, which comprises 400+ shows thanks to various crossovers, cameos and in-universe references. There is a whole fandom wiki dedicated to it. There's also this site that lets you search for connections between TV shows. The site's description from DuckDuckGo is "Easily search and find the relationship between shows in the Tommy Westphall Universe and beyond." It's silly, but fun!

Thing is, most of my cursory searching into it has people focus on live-action TV and movies. And... Well, like I said at the start: the article I remember reading made a connection between Archie comics Sonic and some live-action show thanks to some crossover.

Since that first article, I've wondered off and on about the weirdest crossovers out there, and just how weird of a shared universe could exist. I don't want to limit it to one or two mediums, I want to find crossovers that can transcend mediums! Comics, TV, games and more!

So: what are the weirdest crossovers, cameos and in-universe connections you know of? What are the wildest connections we can make? And, for bonus fun, what are the ramifications of shoving all these wildly different series into one ridiculous universe?? how many different apocalypses can we shove into it

For a while now, I was getting micro-annoyed by all the "colour vomit" in my app drawer and on some modern websites and apps - even with my fairly minimal set of apps.

Thus, around a month ago, I spontaneously decided to reduce my screen's saturation by almost half... And it actually felt pretty natural! I stopped noticing it merely minutes later, and I still never notice it unless I look at another screen while using my phone or unless I'm trying to take a photo of something where colours are very important - like when I wanted to show someone my eyeshadow blend recently. Today, my partner and I were watching old pictures/videos of the cat, and she didn't notice the lower saturation either.

I'm aware someone on Tildes is using a phone in pure greyscale mode, but is anyone using the same "trick" as me? What are your experiences

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What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.