Yeah, I agree that it is time consuming and distracting. When I was able to do it, I was studying full-time so I could afford the time and effort.

These days I hardly look up any words (digitally or otherwise) 😭

this probably won’t help you, but just in case:

I went through a phase in my development where I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary. There was a constant tension between wanting to stay with what I was reading and wanting to look up a word.

I got in the habit of keeping a pad of paper and a pencil nearby when reading, and I made it a habit to look up each word I wanted to know - I could either look it up later and keep reading, or I could look it up right then. After a while I got faster at navigating the alphabetic order of the dictionary and I could open the dictionary close to where the word would be. It was just a matter of practice.

Writing the word down was not just a deferral strategy, but also a way for me to memorize and appreciate the word I looked up - I put in effort to stop reading and look it up in a separate book, and when I first started I would keep forgetting the word and I had to look up words multiple times. Writing it down at first let me quickly refer back to recent words I was trying to learn or remember, but I noticed even just writing it at all made it more likely I wouldn’t forget in the first place (so my pad of paper wasn’t even all that necessary as a reference, though I could and sometimes did use it that way).

This is all much more effort than the digital approaches you are talking about, but it was a method that really helped me learn. I would say the learning phase was really intensive for a three to four month period, then it leveled out and I was looking up words less frequently and it was less necessary. It was especially helpful to study the etymology and learn Latin and Greek roots, which then helped me piece together the meaning of words without a dictionary (just from context and etymological guesses). For a while I even stopped carrying a dictionary, and instead carried a concise etymology dictionary, which let me learn the roots of the word and generally had much less about the definition (but gave me better access to the meaning and being able to memorize it).

I haven’t read him, but Brandon Sanderson has been mentioned to me more than once for his world-building. I’ve heard good things about Tress of the Emerald Sea, though I don’t know how world-buildy it is compared to his other books.

Oh, I love that - greyscale as a warning.

For a while I had my whole phone on greyscale, but I don’t have trouble with spending time on my phone - it’s really the laptop that I have an issue with.

Maybe I should write software to conditionally greyscale my desktop/laptop screen!

Thanks for the link and details, so helpful!

Yeah, I like to get distracted and sucked into things, esp. on the computer. When I get that way I don’t get hungry or thirsty, I don’t realize I need to use the restroom, etc. - just completely ignoring the body (which is nice for me). I’m pretty sure it ruins my posture and creates muscular-skeletal problems, too.

Either way, interesting idea about listening to sounds or music - maybe that would increase enjoyment, but I worry it would reduce the usefulness of the resting (part of what I think helps is that I seclude my senses and I usually lie down in a quiet and dark place). Still, something to explore and see if it wouldn’t make it easier to motivate me to do it instead of rotting on the screen.

hey thanks!

One thing I have noticed is that I sometimes turn to this impulsive behavior when I feel really tired and I just need to rest, and I think of scrolling social media as an enjoyable kind of mental and physical break. So I’ve tried a few times to just set a timer on my phone and lay down and close my eyes for a bit instead, which makes me feel much more rested and works better as a break for my mind and body than scrolling social media.

However, this requires the awareness in the moment that the motivation for the social media impulsivity is that I’m tired and that I need a break, and I need the additional will-power to choose the better and admittedly less fun sounding alternative of actually resting - so as you can imagine establishing that new behavior has been a losing battle.

Anyway - I appreciate your positivity, thanks for your question and comments!!

What timer do you use, and does it lock access after a set time or does it just notify you when the alarm goes off?

EDIT: I found this app: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mind-the-time/

It keeps track of how much time you spend on different websites (so not so much an intervention / reminder as a time tracker).

That is good advice, but I don’t have any apps and I don’t tend to spend much time on my phone. I find the mobile UI annoying, so it’s really desperation when I turn to a phone to browse a place like Reddit. Usually I do it when I have a burning question that I want to explore and I’m not otherwise able to use my desktop or laptop.

I’m trying to find a way to nudge myself away from this impulsivity on desktop, which the redirecting helped do. I keep thinking maybe I could write some javascript and use greasemonkey to load it and do what I need.

1. I prefer to feel in control, and when I notice impulsivity and difficulty stopping or changing the behavior, it’s a red flag for me
2. the amount of time spent is too much and I find it wasteful, the time could be better utilized, even if on a different down-time or recreational activity which leaves me feeling better or is more enriching
3. Lemmy / Reddit / whatever social media usually has some content that is useful or good in some way, but I would say most of the content I consume when engaging impulsively ends up not supporting my mental health (e.g. doomscrolling is a more common outcome from this impulsive behavior than, for example, engaging with community or other reasons that I seek these places in the first place).

Other addicts are exactly the people to ask.

Sleep paralysis may include hallucinations, such as an intruding presence or dark figure in the room.

Had this happen when I was a teenager, and it was terrifying. I started to scream and woke everyone in the house up. Of course my parents decided it was caused by what I liked to read and banned my pleasure reading.

James Herriot’s books are pretty clean and SFW (like All Creatures Great and Small), but they are also wholesome. They are auto-biographical stories about being a vet in a rural part of north England. He stretches the truth to make a good story, so I would consider them mostly fictional.

Each chapter is relatively stand-alone, which would work with the context of people coming and going - they might get a little slice of the book, but it won’t matter that they weren’t there for the rest of the plot.

It just seems like a good author for the general public.

You could also play popular science books, like those by Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything, At Home, and A Walk in the Woods are all great).

Something educational, uplifting, and/or wholesome seems like a good context for the general public, especially public transportation.

How does this help? Vivian didn’t say she remembered being four and not saying those things, she said when she was four she clearly wasn’t going around miming gay stereotypes like Elon Musk claims, because no four year old is:

• picking out clothes for their parent and describing the outfit as “fabulous”
• enamored with musicals and the theater

Vivian’s point is that these are not behaviors typical of a four-year old. The person whose testimony would be valuable is her mother’s and nannies’ who actually were there when she was four years old (unlike Elon Musk).

I think you missed the part where he wasn’t around when she was four years old. How does he know what she said when he left her to be raised by her mom and nannies?

Even if camp has a history of being looked down upon (particularly in the mid-20th century), that view is a bit outdated as postmodern artists have long incorporated camp and kitsch into those same elitist contexts that previously rebuked it.

Art history and shifting attitudes towards camp aside, it doesn’t seem like the context of Vivian using a descriptive term like camp to point out the almost excessive artifice in Elon Musk’s made up stories is intending to denigrate the lower classes, even if for some people “camp” carries some classist associations.

It is good to be sensitive to classist attitudes, but it seems a bit weird to call it out in this context, especially considering the power dynamic of the context where Vivian, the victimized trans daughter, is standing up to her father, Elon Musk, literally one of the richest people in the world.

I don’t think its too spicy, I just think it isn’t very smart or strategic.

The ACAB crowd obviously doesn’t love Harris precisely because she’s a cop, but as Transient Punk pointed out, the ACAB crowd didn’t choose Harris and don’t represent most of the Democratic party, who skew right-wing. (Whereas the back-the-blue types overlap much more with uncritical enthusiasm for Trump, who they see as an innocent man who has been wrongfully convicted by a corrupt and politically motivated justice system.)

The Democratic coalition made up of progressive, leftists, and more right-wing liberals holds together by pragmatically overlooking these divisions and cooperating against the even-further-right, and this meme sows division right before a major election where Democrats are divided (e.g. over Israel) and having a hard time unifying.

In that sense this meme will get a reaction, but again not because it is spicy but because it is divisive.

Interesting, let me know if you find a book on that, I would be interested too. It reminds me on research I was taught about gendered differences in communication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacinda_Ardern

Labour prime minister of New Zealand. She was great, I was sad when she stepped down.

Pandering to the right, yes - but this is just how coalitions work. Obama’s ability to appeal to rank and file white workers in places like Michigan is part of how he won. A lot of Obama voters in those states voted for Trump.

Not everyone on the right is an ideological zealot (even if those are the most visible and make up the base). Being able to pick up some votes among “center-right” voters is a long-standing electoral strategy for the Democrats.

Yeah, though supposedly SEO could actually penalize articles for something like this, the SEO requirements keep changing but I bet there is a balancing act between keeping SEO happy and keeping up your ad impressions.