Is that including the r/Australia main sub? I didn’t go there very often because, well, it’s just going to parochial at best but it was somewhere I’d see the occasional top post now and then. I probably first ever visited it and spent any time there around 2013 and it was weird man. It was so hardcore right-wing and overly political that it was impossible to browse it functionally, if I actually waded in on anything explicitly political in nature it was a nightmare. I also even had weirdly innocuous stuff I said just straight up deleted by mods, I’d never up until that point had interaction with any reddit mods so that felt just crazy. That was an abiding and striking memory of the place that I found very odd indeed and weirdly out of step with the experience of reddit in general. One gets used to their bubble and Reddit had always felt like 20-30 something year old male liberal-ish tech enthusiasts so when you accidentally step in to a mixture of a Liberal voter retirees and the One Nation fan club it’s disconcerting. It meant that I was even less likely to ever really see or actively seek anything from that corner of Reddit.

A few years later I returned there, I can’t remember when this would have been but I guess maybe 2018-ish? And then it’d gone a lot more normal. It’s a general forum and there for interaction so I try not to describe and analyse exclusively through the lenses of 2 dimensional political leanings but it’s useful here and I think it was accurate to say, it’d settled on a mainstreamish slightly left of centre type of crowd for most posts where politics featured. This was noted by the occasional disgruntled conservative who disliked having to be in relative minority, but nowhere near the vitriole of before. I always wondered if there’d been a cleaning of house or something, and how that managed to happen if so. I also always wondered where the previous majority of One Nation admirers had scurried off to. Having also quit Reddit a year ago, obviously I’ve not been back and between 2018 and last year I wouldn’t have been in r/australia a great deal anyway, but if it’s gone full Murdoch as your describing I wonder what weird forces were at work to bring it back to its former repellant mix of visitors and moderation policies.

What? Why?

Never heard of anything on the playlist before and I doubt I would have really stumbled on it normally because it’s not the style I normally seek out but so far it all slaps. How is it they’re allowed to include this stuff on their website?

Sounds like you unintentionally fit the brief anyway.

At least it’s broadly kind of informative in description of some of the categories before the ‘continued’ section. That may seem a low bar but I guess efforts to educate on this topic have set such a drastically low bar in decades past that it’s encouraging to see it lifted slightly off the floor. The categorisation scheme takes a bit of a nosedive when they get to marijuana which for some reason has its own category, also for all the drugs and categories they describe they make the mistake of failing to describe the effects that make people want to use the drugs in the first place. I can see why they might be hesitant to do that, you don’t want to actively encourage people to use the drugs, but I remember when getting similar lessons on the topic thinking that it was an obvious omission because it’s hardly like people took the drugs, repeatedly, because of how much they enjoyed the “impairment” especially as I has my own first hand experience running directly counter to it. The failure to address the positive sensations taking such drugs produces that have caused people throughout all of human history to seek drugs out, damages the credibility of the information since it clearly sought to discourage at the cost of objectivity.

I think my surprise here is that given the program’s reputation, and your experience with it, it seems there was quite some gulf between theoretical intent and practice. Educating children about drugs, probably seems relatively uncontroversial to most, I think you could get a lot of people with otherwise pretty different views on drugs to get behind the idea. The way the D.A.R.E. program went about it and the content of the program and the accuracy of the education they attempted to deliver seem from a distance to have been very questionable. This is why it’s so perplexing to me why you hold such a surprising level of respect for D.A.R.E., I mean sure the intent could have been education, but it doesn’t sound very much like the intent and the reality had a lot of overlap. I’m careful with my wording here because where I grew up we didn’t have ‘D.A.R.E.’ specifically so I can only form judgment based on what one hears and reads about the program.

Given your experience and the way they made you feel from the practitioners’ sheer ignorant and biased approach I would have thought you’d definitely be the first to call the program “dumb” as the very least of the criticisms to be levelled at it.

As part of just living in… the world, I already kind of assumed it was possible for some parties, credit card companies in particular, to pry in to my financial activity and also interested governments to compel banks to hand over whatever they had, and/or possibly just hand over everything about everyone to government all the time automatically. This was bad enough, however, even I was surprised and shocked to learn how bad it was with my own bank when they sent me a letter gleefully telling me that as of the date of the letter they had now managed to sell my data to even more 3rd parties. I was not, up until that point aware that they were selling my data at all, and that 3rd parties (other than the credit card company) were getting access to it not just because of powers to compel, like people might expect of governments, but purely because the bank was literally handing it over to whoever was willing to pay for it, no consent on my part necessary. I don’t know what changed that required them to apparently have to now disclose this to me, but I assume that they were forced, hence the letter. The sneaky motherfuckers didn’t frame it that way though, not “due to recent legislation the bank is obliged to inform you blah blah blah”, no just “good news removed, we were selling your data, we still are, but we used to too, and now we’re selling it to more people, hope you like egregiously unethical behaviour because we put a travesty in to our travesty so you can experience a travesty while processing the first travesty”.

It’s not reviewed and may have harmful content, so please read the harmful content on an app instead?

Well I mean what did you just read? He already said those are the facts bro.

Around about 2009 or so I had a mobile plan with Virgin that did that same trick (I think this was plugging your phone in to a computer as a modem as opposed to wireless hotspot but same thing anyway) and it was limited to 5 MEGABYTES after which they wanted 15pence per KILOBYTE I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I never ran afoul of it because I checked this out first when buying the plan and made sure never to use that function but it just seemed literally unreal. I’ve been shocked at how much things cost before but that seemed more like a mistake or something, I just can’t imagine they ever actually made anyone pay for that, the negative press would be too bad. It was not unheard of at the time for people to have excess charges on limited plans waived because it was a shock and they were unaware or unprepared for those charges accruing so the idea that someone might have checked emails, read a news article, checked Facebook and possibly a web video having not read the fine print and ended up with tens if not over a hundred GBP of charges just doesn’t seem feasible. Really fucking crazy.

I believe while I was figuring this out I discovered one of rogue amoebas apps that I could use in conjunction with sound flower and I was nearly certain I had it, it was something to do with how Skype worked that sabotaged me, I couldn’t believe how stubbornly persistent Skype was despite how hard I tried to workaround it. I believe I was trying to make a single virtual sound device that combined my mic output with the system Audio so I could choose that as my microphone in Skype but SOMEHOW it was always able to fuck me over don’t remember how, only that I was extremely angry.

I tried to set this up on a mac using soundflower so I could share my screen with an edit project with the director during lockdown and still chat to them at the same time. Didn’t work for some frustrating reason relating to Skype.

The really fun part is that the first few times this happens to you, you’re the same age and feel insecure that someone your age achieved more, but as you age in to your mediocrity you gradually get to see people who are younger and younger than you achieve more than you ever did, and now, likely ever will. But hey, there’s always the memes to take your mind off it… oh wait.

I’m surprised it would be on the play store since presumably if you were a carrier or creditor of some kind you want this installed in a pretty clandestine way and wouldn’t want to draw attention to it by having an app store listing.

Notes of Smothers O’Neil to this post

I guess I should say “appears haphazard” as I don’t know if it really has been stacked with reckless abandon or of it’s a kind of organised chaos as the two tend to look very similar. When your colleagues stack the dishwasher at work, they’re adding to the load a little at a time until there’s literally no room and someone has to run it. In such an instance there’s no particular method to their madness other than fitting their one plate or one cup that they’re personally trying to deal with.

When you’re stacking a full load start to finish you’re stacking with the aim of fitting everything you have from a large load of dishes of which really don’t want to have any left out. In doing so, I at least, find that while one starts with some attempt at being organized, you’ll eventually realise that if you just slightly lift this concave object slightly up so it’s still upside down but not completely, you can squeeze this one awkward shaped small object in next to it, and this large flat but not very deep baking dish for which there is now no room on the bottom shelf will juuust fit if I kind of wedge diagonally a little and over the top some cups and small objects which hopefully will be small enough that some water can get between them and spray up and clean the baking dish. In the end it it can look like you put no thought in to it all but you know that you tesselated a 3d puzzle quite nimbly to squash the maximum possible number of dishes in there and then more often than not, despite all the fretting that certain types have over correct stacking, it ends up coming out much the same as when it’s a lightly stacked load with optimal spacing. It definitely sometimes doesn’t work out that way, but even then, in the absolute worst case scenarios where several dishes, not just one or two, didn’t get all the way clean, you need only then unstack those that did clean fully and the remainders are already stacked ready for another cycle right away or to wait til later to make a fuller but hopefully not as full load.

This honestly looks fine. (Assuming this is before the dishwasher has run). There’s not like solid chunks of food or anything just the actual stuff that you own a dishwasher to wash off for you so you don’t have to. The configuration of the dishes is haphazard and chaotic but if you want to fit a lot of dishes it usually ends up that way. The cup and cup like vessels not being upside down is a problem but for the most part things are upside down or on their side as they should be. I want the dishwasher to wash dishes for me not the other way around. If you get the occasional dish after a cycle that hasn’t completely cleaned you have to wash it yourself, which sucks, but that doesn’t always happen so there’s a reasonable chance you won’t have to, and when it does happen, it’s still way cleaner than it was so you’re talking a cursory fix up of very few dishes. I’d take that over rinsing each and every one every time or having to hand wash half the load when there’s a lot of dishes in service of a neater stacking configuration that’s optimal but less space efficient.

The democrats seem more… ribbed in this drawing.

What’s the context of this?