supertofu

15 minutes of Pilates a day and your posture will be as good as a ballerina's. You don't even need weights.

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Re: the black visit buttons. Save black for the top 3 featured, and make the rest a milder color. It's cognitively fatiguing to have a giant list of primary buttons.

The opening sentence isn't "complex" or "fancy" writing. It's LLM writing.

The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.

Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.

"Fancy" writing would be a little more poetic, something like: "As stimulating as it is pervasive, as significant to the human experience as it is mundane, sound relentlessly occupies our sensory and mental perception: whether significant or inconsequential, substantial or infinitesimal, sound is all at once the vehicle of our heritage, the body of our cognitive terroir, and the symbol of our highest arts." This sentence is also annoying, but only because it's kind of pretentious. But there is a point here: sound is powerful to human beings.

I think the problem with our times is that people cannot tell the difference between complex writing, poetic writing, and just plain adjective-stuffed LLM writing. Which all comes down to the fact that we as a culture have devalued complex writing. Complex writing isn't read in schools, nor taught at any level of schooling. It's actually disencouraged in every Freshman writing class.

I don't think "dorky" is the right word for these glasses. Anachronistic is better. And that can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on one's perspective.

This reminds me of the year I really got into reading (5th - 6th grade), and I remember reading: Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar, Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Julie of the Wolves, the Babysitter's Club, The Giver, Holes, and Captain Underpants. I honestly could go on and on.

These are all wildly different books and I loved them all! At that age, I had no idea what I even wanted from literature. I just asked the Children's Librarian for books and she decided for me. Almost all of these books were plain old good stories.

It took me years to figure out what my reading preferences were. And as I got older, my fiction choices dramatically reduced in breadth. I kind of miss the lack of discernment I had when I was a reader of exclusively Children's Lit.

Now, it's really hard for me to read anything that's not the very specific genre of Psychological Thriller or woman-authored LitFic that I prefer.

I miss just receiving a stack of books and loving whatever I got. That there is the real magic of Children's lit.

I will never get over the fact that they used a now-convicted pedophile as their spokesperson for fifteen years. I literally cannot even see the Subway logo without thinking of despicable Subway Jared. No way I will ever eat their food again.

It seems that there is a generational divide between glasses acceptance. When I was a kid in the 90s, having glasses was seen as cool and desirable. I remember being puzzled by all the 80s movies which mocked characters with glasses, when having glasses was seen as a positive trait among my peers.

Anecdote: I have reactive arthritis comorbid with ulcerative colitis. I was getting debilitating arthritis flares once a month until I stopped eating gluten, peanuts, and added sugar. I haven't had an arthritis flare since eliminating these foods.

My rheumatologist wanted to put me on methotrexate but I declined out of fear if the side effects. He never mentioned anything about diet, but clearly a dietary intervention worked for me.

Healing from any addiction has to be self-motivated.

What this sounds like to me as someone from LA: pay $50 per hour to park in a lot and take a shuttle from there, because of course no one will consider pedestrian infrastructure between the venues and the parking lots.

There is a totally nonalcoholic kava bar where I live.

Kava is a nonintoxicating plant with alkaloids that improve mood and enhance sociability.

The kava bar a fantastic place to sit by yourself and easily fall into a conversation with other people at the bar or the kava-tender.

I do think kava is illegal in some countries, which is unfortunate, and being that it grows on pacific islands, it's probably rather hard to import for most places. But a wonderful plant and wonderful concept.

I can only answer anecdotally from my personal experience but: frequent coughing while not vaping, chest pain, very obviously reduced cardiovascular capacity and increased fatigue during my workouts.

I'm a religious person reading the comments here with great fascination and a lot of sympathy.