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?

Aww I was just about gush about how awesome they’ve been all these years. Guess I haven’t really kept up to date. I mean it doesn’t sound like it’s gone totally to shit, but just clearly embarking on a path straight in to the shit

That’s a bit like me, definitely like me for some specific tasks, but as a ratio it’s very similar to my attitude towards packing, doing homework/assignments, preparing for job interviews, preparing for any important impactful life moments except with the key difference being the label for the yellow section. For me in those scenarios, including packing, the yellow section represents time spent mentally avoiding the stress and anxiety that comes from mentally preparing for packing or anything else unpleasant by suddenly getting very interested in a random topic and reading all about it, or playing a specific videogame to absolutely ridiculous excess, or watching every episode of a long running series from at least 20 years ago, if I have it available I’m also doing most of these other tasks with a lot of weed.

It’s especially shitty because to the outsider, this looks like laziness, and that’s not wrong, I mean it’s much easier and more pleasurable to do that stuff than the hard thing you should be doing, but I’m not really enjoying that stuff because I’m doing it hard. It might sound impossible to watch a TV series hard, but doing anything in this state is a heart racing extreme form of mental concentration to absolutely fully and completely consume my mind with anything except the source of stress. So it looks like I’m watching TV and laughing at the jokes and I am, but I’m also simultaneously really stressed and tired from expending so much mental energy in to blocking everything else out. Truly a fantastic skill since I’m able to achieve precisely nothing, still get really tired, look like I didn’t do anything that would break a sweat at all and still feel like shit and be completely stressed by the end which itself will usually serve as a reminder of how little progress has been made towards the thing I was trying to avoid thinking about which induces a lot of anxiety and self loathing that needs to be fixed by even more intense even harder doing of anything else.

I don’t know why that weird ass little gross thing is so appropriate but that is probably the best possible response lol.

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.

What’s the context of this?