I work in IT, and was the caregiver for both my parents as they aged. You'd think I would be the one that people turn to to ask this question, and yet I have been utterly frustrated by my attempts to find such.

I have a few folks who are extended family and friends that are now in the early/mid stages of different forms of dementia, and a real pain point is that they no longer have the capacity to recognize ads, and will unfailingly click and install scam apps via the Apple store. Think things like 'cleaner' apps that have a $50/week subscription fee, and other abusive tactics. The #1 subject I get called about is some ad popping up after they've finished a puzzle, and now they think they're out of space, and in a panic.

This is not a small problem. The coloring and puzzles they can still do bring them happiness and stability through their day; removal of the ipads entirely causes them a lot of stress. (TV is nothing but ragebait, and a non-starter. They do have books on tape, but get tired of listening rather quickly.)

I have been completely unable to locate ad-free, paid versions of these types of apps. I'm not looking for free. I don't care about the cost. I just need apps that only do what they say they do, and don't have unexpected pop-ups, ads, or anything else, and I thought perhaps the folks here might know of some.

Any ideas?

[edit] Only five hours in, and I've already gotten more insightful, helpful responses than anywhere else I've asked. You all are the best.

Cohost.org, an independent social media blogging platform, will be shutting down as early as next month. A lot of users are talking about how their time on Cohost changed the way they think about what an experience in an online community can be like in the modern age of the internet. People saying that they'd rather move forward with spending more time offline and with their hobbies than chasing the next social media site after Cohost's closure. I tend to agree.

After checking an old forum recently that I used to frequent in the heyday of internet forums, I found it filled with racist fear-mongering that is left unmoderated after the driving force of the community passed away half a decade ago. I wonder how much of the spirit of the old web we can realistically rekindle. If you're on Tildes, you probably know everything about the faults of giant social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit. Heck, the poor quality the YouTube comments section was a meme when YouTube was new. It was never good on those sites. Just tolerable and everybody was there so you kind of had no choice. Now, many of those platforms are self-imploding.

Cohost, like Tildes, created an atmosphere where you didn't feel like you were committing a moral wrongdoing by not immediately spewing scalding hot takes about current events, drama and conflicts. You were encouraged to write text that wasn't throwaway garbage. You could have meaningful conversations about issues and find an audience. Cohost was not without its flaws. People of colour in particular recently shared experiences of racist harassment on the site that was purely handled by moderation. But overall the takes I'm reading now is that most people will be able to look back on their time on Cohost fondly. I've seen people calling it "the Dreamcast of websites".

Cohost was a social media site that was a joy to visit for me and didn't put me on an edge by interacting with it. I could write posts, long-form posts without pressure to hit out another one-line zinger while a topic "is still relevant". I didn't see endless chains of subtweets that deliberately avoided explicitly mentioning the drama they were commenting on, lest the hate mob find their comment. I didn't get into that kind of unnerving cycle of "I don't know what this post is about, but the infrastructure of this social network suggests it's a moral failure to not chime in on the topic de jour, so I better get going and scan vile tweets for an hour to find out what's going on".

And before you say that this is only a Twitter problem, I have had pretty much exactly the same experiences on Mastodon and especially Bluesky. I feel the same in over-crowded Discord servers where it's very difficult to keep track of what's been talked about and what the current topic of discussion is. I feel the same on the few active forums that still exist, like resetera, where there's just posts upon posts that you're kind of expected to read before you chime in into a thread.

So where to go from here? I'm thinking about setting up my own proper blog, maybe hosted on an own website. That way I can continue to create long form posts about topics I want to. And bring back a little more of the spirit of the old internet. Cohost is dead, but there's no going back to me to doomscrolling. Today I set my phone to aggressively limit my daily usage of Reddit & Mastodon. I said the following when Twitter crashed and burned, but this time I'm not desperate, but genuine when I say: It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

if i chart my life happiness, fulfilment, success over the past four years, the trend is clearly downwards. some clear wins and stretches of improvement, some quite significant, which i am proud of, but overall, i am getting worse and worse and worse. i attribute my problems mostly to two things: severe social isolation, and an extreme deficit of executive function. however i got here, i'm stuck with the fallout

my memory is bad, and my attention shot, so i kind of don't know what's happened emotionally. i know some focal points, though

this past march, i had a major depressive episode, and it feels like i spent most of a week doing nothing but crying, for no reason at all. i'm not sure how i fed myself

at the beginning of 2022, i quit my (very cushy and chill) job, which i had had for a little over a year at that point, because i felt like i was unmotivated and not actually doing work. (the facts are a bit more subtle; it was partly that the work itself was uninteresting to me, and they wanted to work with me to find something for me to do that i would find more interesting. i was going along with that, until a new opportunity appeared, which i jumped for because i wanted to be able to make a clean break. that opportunity immediately fell through.) i had been living with my parents until shortly before, so i had a lot of savings

now, i find myself in a similar situation, only much more dire. a friend got me a job working with smart people on interesting problems. i have not been doing well. i have been extremely uncommunicative. the pattern is clear: i talk to people, flex my technical chops; they are impressed and like me a lot. then i'm not very productive, and my output slowly deteriorates to nil. i think i just can't do wfh tech work. last week was a blur. i don't know what happened at all. i don't think i've checked slack in close to two weeks, and atp i'm a little bit afraid to. two weeks ago, i asked my friend/coworker to poke me every day to make sure i was doing something. it seemed and still seems like a good strategy. and then a day or two after i asked him that i just dropped off the map again

i'm not addicted to drugs or video games. it seems like i ought to be. i am a bit drunk right now, but that is quite irregular

recently, i thought i'd finally made a close friend. this morning, she broke up with me and blocked me for a really really stupid reason. i am really hurt by that, and it makes me feel a bit hopeless about the whole thing. spent the afternoon crying about it and now just feel a bit numb. i give it decent odds she comes back, but. i know one problem i have is putting my eggs in too few baskets. but there are so few baskets that seem worth investing in, and investment is so hard

she suggested i try to get prescribed add medication for my work problems, and was going to give me some illicitly to see if it helped. the latter is not happening anymore, of course. and i cannot stomach the medical system (already i have other things i have been putting off talking to my doctor about for a while), not to mention that it would take forever to do anything for me

i don't know what to do in the short to medium term. i don't know what to say to my work that i haven't said already, other than: clearly, i am just incapable of doing this. i am not super financially stable right now, and being without a job seems like a bad idea

When I was about 18 years old, I had a philosophy class where the teacher said this quote: "Things over which you do not have power should not have power over you." It could also be read as "control the things you control, ignore the rest".

That lesson really spoke to me. I put a lot of effort integrating it into my personality and I must say now, almost 15 years later, it made my life so much more enjoyable.

I used to get mad, really mad about stuff or get stressed about stuff out of my control, and I could never really remove those feelings. These words kept coming back to me and through some effort, I must say that I can more or less apply them in my everyday life now. It saved me a lot of trouble on various situations and has helped me break through problems way faster than I would have in the past, simply by helping me identify the things I could change and focus on those things.

I'm curious about you guys and your life stories. Has any lesson had as much impact on your life?

What would your family do? What would a normal, healthy, supportive family do? (If different)

Hypothetical situation 1:

Two family members have had a major accident. No threat to their lives, some internal organ damage, some broken bones, not much other info is know. One of them is awake and can call/text for info, the other is in/out of surgeries and in ICU for the first two days.

A) immediately family drops everything and fly to their destination right away?

B) extended family do so?

C) discuss and send one person to go right away. Then discuss to arrange for longer term recovery + rehab care after hospital discharge

D) nothing, combo, or other ?

Hypothetical situation 2:

Family member is "not doing well", eg, mental health. Probably"moderate" level of suicide risk: no immediate plans, some reservations about morality and how devastated their partner would be, but constant ideation and philosophically don't see why not. CPTSD with more recent triggers of job loss and moving from away from a socially unsafe situation. Has entirely dropped out of communication with family. Their partner is reachable by phone or email or text and says the family member is not doing well at all and has ceased all outside of home activities such as getting mail, buying groceries, filling up the car or anything that involves other human beings.

What would a normal family do?

I'm not sure if this is the place to discuss, but as a lurker in this community of sensible folks, I'd love reading your stories and opinions on this matter.

Let me clarify that this loss of love is not due to anyone's death. Perhaps just the same however, since they do not reciprocate your love and warmth anymore, for reasons completely unclear.

The case in point now is this: I'm 25M single and an alone child. I've spent most of my life searching for bondings that nurtured my emotional being. Finding a home for my emotions has been a major theme across different parts of my life. I was lucky enough to be bestowed with a cousin (20F) whom I could meet (at best twice a year, at worst once) and bond over the text otherwise, offering solace and comfort as if from a like-minded sibling. Whenever I needed a sink to pour my love, it was towards her. All was well until I met her yesterday, the meeting for this year (we live continents apart and we know these meetings are limited); I felt I'm distant, and I was invisible on a deeper level to her. Nothing we talked about was related to our well-being as we used to. It was all about the boys in her life, Instagram likes, and other such superficial things. It was as if she didn't know what I care about (I'm not even on IG).

I wasn't sure how to approach this. In general, even with a few friends, I've always had a hard time with an apparent loss of connection. How can you demand love from someone (Rhetorical; one shouldn't)? How should I let them know that the things were better and I want that? I mean nobody can force love. Should I accept (too hard to do) that those bondings have run their course?

Sorry for the emotional dump, and feel free to edit. Thanks for your thoughts.

I struggle with trichotillomania which is a compulsion to pluck my own hair. Mine is focused primarily on my beard, resulting in unsightly bare patches. I am working through the mental health component of this condition already, but a better hair and skin care regiment could help reduce the triggers that start me plucking hairs.

I keep my beard relatively close cropped to my face. When the hairs in my bald patches start to regrow there is typically a lot of irritation which starts me touching my face, which leads me to find bumps like zits and blackheads and “weird hairs”, like kinky hairs, hairs growing in the wrong direction, particularly hard or soft hairs, anything that feels off when I run my fingers over them. This has the side effect of depositing more dirt and oils from my fingers onto my face, which creates a kind of feedback loop where the dirtier my face is the more I want to touch it, and the more I touch it the dirtier it gets. When I encounter these bumps and weird hairs I will want to pick at them and I won’t stop thinking about it until I do. It is a real struggle that I am working through and I figure if I can reduce that irritation that triggers it I’ll be less likely to touch and therefore pluck.

What I am hoping to find here are general care tips I can use for my short-cropped beard. What kind of products do you use for both the hairs themselves and your face, what methods do you use to trim, etc.? Currently I wash my face with a cleanser, followed by a toner, then a serum or lotion, but I don’t use any products specifically for my beard hairs themselves. I trim with an electric razor when my beard is between .5 and 1 inches long and I’ll trim it down to about 1/8 of an inch, or whatever setting 7, 8, or 9 is on my razor.

Admittedly the forcibly neutral headline should probably be changed.

The video has been unlisted but this is the link. One important thing to note is that he recently made a video satirizing how people pretend your life condition doesn't affect your mental health implies that wasn't satire, which is incredibly concerning.

He deleted the comment where he talks about his landlord but it has been screenshotted here. It's also proof that's actually where he lives.

Someone has unironically compiled how that house violates Canadian/Ontarian legislation

After the house tour, Jregs patreon has spiked to its highest ever, and he has gotten 52 new patrons and 230$ more a month in two days

r/jreg is in some mix of meme-ing and genuine concern.