My mom was bipolar, but since she grew up in the 60s and 70s her experience probably isn’t going to match your son’s much. Especially since she didn’t even get a diagnosis until her mid/late 20s, after having symptoms for years.

So, the not sugar coated version of what I experienced: she was a drug addict, alcoholic, and would alternate between abuse and neglect. I’m sure part of that was no/wrong meds for a while, plus it culturally just being more okay to smack your kids back then. I saw a lot of screaming and arguing and crying that I thought was normal. She and my dad lost custody of one of my siblings for a while.

So that’s what poorly treated bipolar disorder can look like. That’s the bad place it can go if he decides he doesn’t need his meds anymore and there’s nothing wrong with him, which is made worse by the fact the meds are supposed to make you feel ‘normal,’ and some people prefer the mania to ‘normal.’

It’s absolutely manageable for many people, especially if he stays on top of his meds. It may not mean that he never has symptoms or that they don’t change, or that they never temporarily get worse or better. If he isn’t already in therapy that’s something you should really encourage, because meds are just one tool in the box, not the whole set. You mention a psychiatrist, but they manage meds rather than the emotional aspect, and it’s important to see a psychologist or therapist at least for a while on top of that.

I imagine a solution could be the same one from Web 1.0: webrings. Find one site on one and you’ve found a lot more interesting, curated ones as well.

Someone is very mad all their posts kept getting naughty notes!

In some airport I’ve had transfers in a few times (I want to say Detroit?) they have a smoking lounge that’s just four glass walls hooked up to a filtration system, and it cracks my shit up every single time to see the smoker terrarium.

My stupid is 100% organic. Can’t have the AI make you dumber if you don’t use it.

Good to hear that’s changing!

Remember being able to walk people to their gate, hug them goodbye, and watch the plane leave? Now you can only do this if you’re taking an unaccompanied minor to their gate.

“Nonsmoking section” that wasn’t even a separate room, just a half wall divider 🫠

People will say it doesn’t make a difference, but it apparently made enough of a difference that they still can’t find the guy that was putting pipe bombs around the US capitol. I think at least a portion of the “they can still identify you under your mask with computers” claims are based on very niche situations (high quality footage of someone wearing a thin, fabric mask) and exaggeration or allowing people to incorrectly draw their own conclusions.

Hm, I guess this is esoteric in the sense that most people aren’t interested in it?

Some clothes are made with what’s called ‘slub cotton’, which is cloth made from cotton thread that has irregular lumps jutting out of it. It gives the final woven fabric an interesting look, almost like static. If it’s done with bright or contrasting colors it can give a really interesting pop to the final item.

Yeah, I would expect a printer I paid 6k for to not have malware!

That’s possible, but they aren’t really typical office printers either, it’s for specialized art printing. Again it’s definitely bad, this just isn’t typical office equipment.

Also it’s for a UV printer, not an inkjet or laser printer, with the cheapest option on their website being $1900 and the average being around $6000. So, not a regular printer you would buy off the shelf. It’s still bad of course, but only so many people even could be impacted by it.

This plus being forced to watch a video of a woman giving birth for us. Also that birth control methods in general, including condoms, aren’t very reliable. Well, guess what happens when you tell teenagers a condom might not even make a difference in preventing pregnancy…

Absolutely nothing about consent either, so the nastiest shit was said about a teenager who got pregnant from statutory rape (7+ year age difference). LGBT? Absolutely nothing. I think someone might have said something in one of my classes asking if we were going to cover it, and the (gym coach) teacher making loud disgusted noises while laughing and saying no.

Christ, the 90s and 00s were not great in a lot of ways.

It comes across like you feel we can’t protect gay/minority children from being exploited by huge corporations online because it would be homophobic to protect gay kids from psychological manipulation.

This is some weird ass fanfic you are writing about me for asking how the researchers came to their conclusions about LGBT ads, specifically, being judged to be inappropriate. I’m not engaging with this anymore.

You’re classifying all of these as malicious by virtue of being ads, which the researchers obviously didn’t. Take that up with them.

I question the idea that the reason these were classified as inappropriate was because of sexual pop ups. If that was the case than many innocuous sites with crappy ad practices would have also made it onto the list.

Knowing that queer people exist and that you could be queer isn’t “sexual advertisement,” by the way. Which is why I wanted to know more about how the researchers came to the conclusion that these particular ads were inappropriate.

Absolutely true! If the quiz contents were inappropriate in some way beyond like… acknowledging LGBT people and depression exists, I would like to hear about that part.

Adding an “are you gay?” quiz to the list of inappropriate ads shown to children immediately makes me question the researcher biases and methodology. Unless those have gotten WAY spicier since I was a kid, I remember passing so many quizzes like that around with my friends at that age.

How many ads related to heterosexuality were classified as appropriate? How does that compare to their classification of LGBT ads?

I was talking about the historical presence in sci fi and pop culture of fear of mind reading machines in general, as opposed to this specific one. But I mean, do you think cities are spending tens of thousands of dollars because they don’t think it works like that? They at least believe they can convince people that it reads minds.

It doesn’t read your mind. It gives output, that’s not the same thing as mind reading any more than the polygraph was lie detection. The real threat was and always has been cops and the state.