Agreed. One of the first times I encountered Twitch IRL was in the laundry room of my apartment building, where a neighbor who I knew had a young child was watching a streamer play a game while he did the laundry. Good for him, I thought.
I started watching Twitch when I started working remotely several years ago. It's good for background noise, keeping up with games that I can't justify spending money or time on, and sometimes good for a little chitchat. Some people will have an unhealthy relationship with it but to go back to the musician analogy, this doesn't seem too different from obsessive Beatles or Elvis fans. (Or Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift fans, etc.) They will always exist. I'm happy to support someone with beer money for this little bit of entertainment.
I agree, and would like to add that therapy isn't necessarily a constant thing. Short- and medium-term therapy focuses on a specific issue or life event, and when one feels like they've gotten a handle on it, they don't need to continue sessions. So the fact that people discontinue therapy is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.
Flashback to the time that I bumped into my friend coming out of the research library in the afternoon. He was ABD at the time. He made an attempt to say hi but was incoherent. I played it off like a regular conversation, because I knew he'd been writing all day.
> For somebody surfing the web in 1997, a book might feel a bit… 20th century.
Hard disagree on this...
But to the point, back then web pages were simple enough for it to be trivial to learn by viewing the source, especially if you already had experience with code. You didn't even have to be studying or working in CS specifically, BASIC and Logo were taught in many grade schools.
It's been on my mind now that Discord servers are close to the BBSes of old. They are also closed communities and members get to know each other instead of shooting messages into the void. They don't quite have the charm and culture, possibly because they exist in the context of social media as a whole. But they have a lot of similarities. Even command-line text games, the revival of which really amuses me.
Message boards/forums certainly have that community culture but sadly they're on the way out. Subreddits of a certain size do also but they're fragile... they're subject to takeover by bad actors and if they become successful enough to grow larger the culture is diluted and/or replaced.
I take extensive notes at meetings because I'm terrible at absorbing information from speeches and discussion. I can maintain attention for about 15 minutes, then I zone out. So in order not to start fidgeting and looking out the window, I write notes. I may or may not look at them again... taking them is enough to make most of it "stick". I don't do any better than colleagues who don't take notes. For me it's just a coping mechanism to keep things from going in one ear and out the other.
> taking them is enough to make most of it "stick"
This is the only reason I take notes on anything. The act of physically writing something down (typing works only half as well at best) sticks it into my brain. Hand-writing notes and immediately throwing them away is 10x as useful to me as just listening or reading alone.
At school, I only have one notebook. I pay attention to the teacher and whenever I don’t understand something immediately, I redo the demonstration on paper. There were a few teachers that didn’t use textbooks or slides so I had to rely on friends and photos to review things later. But the real advantage is that I usually understand the subject deeper. I did well on explanation questions, not so on memorization question. But I could always guess the answer.
