Hell yeah. I bought the Milwaukee shop vac a few weeks ago. Didn't realize it comes without batteries... which come without a charger. But I couldn't be happier with it. We have a cat that will create mounds - tall mounds - of cat litter in front of the litterbox entrance. Just hurls it out the hole somehow into a big pile. I just empty out the big tray at the bottom of the shop vac, suck up the litter in a few seconds, and dump it right back into the box. It's quick, clean, and easier than trying to change a cat's behavior. And for cat barves, like when they eat too fast, I just take the filter out and vacuum that up no problem, and it's powerful enough that you can't even tell that anything happened on the rug. (It's always on a rug, never on the hardwood floor. Naturally.) It's a game changer for this cat owner.
I'm the same, for the most part. I worked at a small dev shop with two coworkers. One liked to put on classical music, and the other would often play whatever the hell kind of music Pat Metheny is, and while the richness of those particular genres appeared to _stimulate_ their ability to code heads-down, it rendered me pretty much useless. My attention would glom onto the scales and arpeggios of Vivaldi's Four Seasons or onto the weird proggy time signatures of the other stuff.
However, I have had much success with black metal bands that shriek (or whatever) in a foreign language. The fullness of the sound - blast beats, distorted guitars - just really does it for me for some reason. And I don't get distracted by the vocals because I don't understand e.g. Finnish (and with bands like Horna, it's probably better that way). It makes finding that flow state much easier, and I suspect it may be working as a fidget spinner does: a certain base level of constant but predictable sensory input soothes whatever it is in my brain that gets me antsy when engaging in an activity that requires a lot of energy expenditure without proportional immediate feedback. But as soon as you up the complexity of the music past a certain point, it swings all the way the other way and makes willful concentration pretty much impossible.
Yep. It's ADHD and its weirdness with the rewards system, for sure.
This calls to mind Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of _flow_. There’s too much of it to go into here, but this page illustrates how it happens and what it's like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
I posit that any activity which falls short of flow state will also cause energy drainage in kind. What distinguishes introverts and extraverts in a given social interaction, then, has to do with the degree to which they consider themselves challenged and how skillfully they think they are performing. High challenge + high ability = flow, which is an energizing state where you lose track of time. Mess with those parameters a bit and you get boredom and anxiety (along with shades of other things), which are draining states different in kind.
"SEO Expert Hired and Fired By Ashley Madison Turned on"
Hehe. Good catch. I doubt the use of "turned on" was intended to be funny here, given the source, but it sure does read like a satirical news headline.
Re: figuring things out, for me, it’s pretty rare that I’m able to resolve anything from _within_ the loop. It's only when I switch to another context and then switch back to it that I'm able to finally stop the looping. I can think of a few reasons why this works: there's evidence of brains doing "background processing" when asleep or occupied with something else, which I find especially fascinating. Sometimes I'm sure it's because there's something that would provide an "exit condition" if I could just see it, but there's some heuristic active in the present state that's causing that line of thinking to be skipped over and/or zapped of enough salience for the brain to consider it worth chewing on. Maybe in order to return to something the brain has to perform some sort of "bootstrapping" in order to "re-render" whatever ideational substance is involved, and somewhere in that bootstrapping process there's an exit condition that is absent from within the loop, I don't know.
I would also defend to the death that not all brain-loops are actually "resolvable" in any meaningful way. For example (stretching the meaning of “rumination” here), I have music going on in my head 24/7. Always. Most of the time they're in the form of short-ish loops, so they repeat a lot. This in and of itself isn’t so terrible - it can actually be really nice sometimes to "overhear" what's playing and join in, because I can help drive the musical procession forward, since the part of my thinking self that’s aware and has free will can focus on the music, innovate on what’s playing, lead the music around, change the song, etc. But unfortunately, the musical homunculus squatting in my head who's always awake is also never satisfied with a particular song coming to a close - try as I might to resolve a looping refrain by bringing the song to a close, the goddamn "Achy Breaky Heart" fanatic I never invited into my inner world in the first place just presses play again. Finishing the song does nothing! Here, there is no _resolution_; there is only _substitution_. At this point, if I don't just refuse to give up, I now find myself forced to trawl through my catalog of catchy songs to put on, so that the worst DJ ever, who has no ability to read the room, might hear what _I'm_ playing and decide to join _me_, before I can find any relief. It feels incredibly stupid when the current time is a very wide-awake 4am and it's at that point where you just have to say _fuck this, this isn't working, I'll never drift off to sleep with this asshole (yourself) playing this crap I didn't pick (well, actually, you did) on repeat_, so now you have to try to think of _other_ songs that get stuck in your head so that you can try playing them in your head to yourself until one of them "takes," in order to stop yourself from annoying the shit out of yourself and keeping yourself awake - all because you can't ask yourself to just stop (because you won't listen)! - but also (and this is my point here) because there's nothing that actually _resolves_ a musical "thought" in such a way that makes it "invalid," "irrelevant," "solved," etc. and thereby any less likely to just cue up again.
Oftentimes isn't not even a song - it's a jingle. A fucking jingle!!!
Similarly, I've had unresolvable brain-loops deriving from weed paranoia, where I _cannot_ reason with the lizard part of my brain in any way whatsoever. The only thing that works is distraction. This is main reason why weed is just not for me - I hate having to will myself to distraction because any sense of presence is too unsettling.
I totally forgot about Ad Nauseam! I used to use it instead of uBlock Origin (which, if I remember correctly, is what Ad Nauseam actually uses for its adblocking). Google banning it from their extensions marketplace only strengthened my loathing for Google and my resolve to use it. I don’t remember why I eventually stopped - probably the inconvenience. Now that I’m a Firefox user, I should pick that back up and give it a spin again. It was entertaining to see the visualization of all the ads it had clicked on.
I also used to use Chaff (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chaff/jgjhamliocfh...), which opens up a tab and browses on its own when the browser is idle and disappears when you start using it again. As with Ad Nauseam, the means of protecting privacy behind it is not anonymity, but rather obfuscation - muddifying your actual browsing behavior by flooding the data you leave behind with junk data (at which point it ceases to be data, I suppose). The problem with that extension was that I would sit back and wait for it to start browsing, and then I’d waste too much time watching it / customizing its behavior.
The book _Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest_, written by the authors who developed Ad Nauseam and TrackMeNot, has a great chapter on chaff (the obfuscation tactic, not the Chaff extension mentioned above).
Don't do this, you're not making your browser any more private than just blocking using uBlock Origin.
Any kind of "obfuscation" extensions that change browsing behavior significantly modify the fingerprint. There are a lot of uBO and other adblocking users but very few Ad Nauseam users or users of other weird extensions.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a way to filter out those "clicks" anyway from the ad provider's side.
They are risky and mostly written by people who think they sound cool without thinking of the side effects.
Your consistent advice in your post history is don't ever use any extensions besides uBlock Origin because of fingerprinting and "privacy"
But what if I want actually use the web instead of just blocking ads. Sponsorblock, TamperMonkey, 1Password, CamelCamelCamel, etc are all useful extensions as well that make browsing the web specifically for me better.
There are so many fingerprinting techniques that it seems pointless to have a detrimental experience generally instead of using a sandboxed computer for specific dangerous activities.
I'll continue to use Ad Nauseum, despite your recommendations against it, because I'd rather have a known worthless profile than a worthless browser.
>I also wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a way to filter out those "clicks" anyway from the ad provider's side.
Theres no evidence supporting this, but Google blocking it from the Chrome store is strong evidence that filtering out those clicks is actually difficult
Edit: Also its a moot point as extensions can't be used for fingerprinting if you just don't use Chrome https://github.com/z0ccc/extension-fingerprints#extension-fi... . I assume any activity I do in Chrome is sent back to Google (or Microsoft or Brave) regardless of plugins installed.
Yeah, no. This is a non-starter. Restaurants have high price elasticity of demand - higher menu prices cause a significant fall in demand because there are alternatives to dining out (you can choose to eat at home for food, you can choose to see a movie for date night; even if you still decide to eat at the same restaurant after they jack up their prices, you can still make choices to lower your bill, such as not ordering drinks or appetizers).
Compare this to food you buy in the grocery store - you still need to buy food, even if food prices double overnight. You may buy less of it and pick cheaper brands, but your fundamental consumption habits will not change much.
Can confirm. I slipped up for a few seconds once while torrenting. My cease-and-desist letter from Sony was personally delivered to my door by the Hausmeister.
I recently encountered this interview with Frost, the drummer behind the black metal bands 1349 and Satyricon, in which he talks about his ritual prior to going on stage. It serves to clearly delineate the two contexts from each other, and once he's crossed over, he's in the mental space he needs to perform.
I found it both chuckleworthy and relatable at the same time. Here's one of the most technically skilled drummers who plays some of the most demanding and intense drumming there is - totally out of reach for most drummers (look up some drumming videos that feature him, it's insane) - showing his human, soft side. His ritual is yoga and putting on the corpsepaint. I like to imagine him putting on the corpsepaint first, then the yoga pants, then putting on an Enya playlist, etc.
