Not a night, but my group of friends will pick a theme like 80s fantasy movies of 40s noirs, and put together 8ish films, with a mix of classics and more obscure choices. You’ve got the week to watch the movie, then at the weekend we send our thoughts / review. Generally come up with a set of review criteria, our TieDyeFuturism: 70s sci-fi season had stuff like “The Real Monster is… MAN”, “Virtually Indistinguishable from Magic” and “A woman on the Bridge?!”

This isn’t debate club.

If people aren’t suppose to discuss and possibly disagree, why post? What do you think is the purpose of the showerthoughts community?

I watched a video (can’t remember who or what it was called) that looked into the early days of radio. In the early 1900s it was a massive craze, especially among teenage boys, and quickly resulted in kids transmitting “obscene messages” and calling in fake commands and reports to naval radio operators. At the time there was no encryption or restriction on amateur radio use, and it lead to some embarrassing and dangerous moments for the navy.

The government finally acted in 1912 by forcing amateur radio to be restricted to the shortwave frequencies, decimating the hobby. This was partly driven by an incorrect rumor that these radio trolls had been responsible for, or interfered with the rescue of, the Titanic a few months earlier.

It was interesting to learn that trolls have always been with us, and also that the government could so decisively shape a new form of communication. If the 1980s giverments had banned use of the Internet by anyone outside the military and a small number of commercial or academic licence holders, things would be very different. Sure, the technology would be there and people would run amateur ip networks, or secretly piggyback of official uses, but it would be more like the dark net / tor than what actually happened.

I think you are completely misrepresenting the literature in the field. There has been decades of research on inner monologues, but whether anyone truly has no inner monologue is still a matter of debate, and suggesting that it could be as much as 50% is absolutely wild.

One recent example is Nedergaard and Lupyan (2024), who used questionnaires on 1,037 participants and found no one who reported a complete lack of inner speech. They did show a link between lower frequency of internal speech and lower performance on sole verbal cognitive tasks.

But this was frequently misreported in popular science news, which may be where you got the idea. For example, Science Daily’s headline “People without an inner voice have poorer verbal memory” and subheading “Between 5-10 per cent of the population do not experience an inner voice” certainly make some bold claims (although still well below your “up to 50%” statistic). But just a few lines into the article it’s been rephrase as “between 5-10 per cent of the population do not have the same experience of an inner voice”. This is more accurate, as all studies agree that there is a variety of experiences of inner voices / monologues, but a different experience is not the same as an absence.

In another comment you make reference to the experience sampling study (where a buzzer would sound and participants would record whether they were experiencing an inner monologue) which I assume is the work of Heavey and Hurlburt. It’s true that they claim that 5 of their 30 participants recorded no instances of inner voice, but let’s be clear about what the experimental procedure was: the participant would turn on the buzzer, which would buzz at a random time (an average of every 30 minutes) and the study was based on two periods of five samples. So, ten data points collected over approx five hours.

Even people with strong inner monologues report different frequencies of inner speech depending on their activities. Many people do not experience inner speech when actively engaging in other verbal activity - talking with friends, watching a video; while quiet focused activities such as golf show much higher reporting of inner speech. So the absence for five individuals of any inner speech during those ten particular samples is in no sense equievlant to “16% of peole have no inner monologue”. Indeed even the study’s authors acknowledge “it is possible that these participants may all have actually had quite similar inner experiences; it is merely the reports of those experiences that differed.”

Tldr: I think you’re making some very wild claims about this subject, without posting sources. No significant study I know of claims that any sizable percentage of the population have no inner voice, (although there certainly is an interesting variety in how frequent and clearly it is experienced.)

I’m older than you my friend, and it’s acurallt only something that I came to terms with in my 40s. When I was younger I did feel that pressure and expectation to complete stuff. Now I have no issue switching a movie off after an hour or stopping a book before the end. Life’s too short! And sure a story game I’m really enjoying, why wouldn’t i finish it? And play the sequel! But if I’ve played 100+ hours of skyrim without geting close to the end, and I don’t think it reduced my enjoyment. And if I’m getting bored of a metrovania I don’t see the point in grinding til it’s done.

Nah, finishing games is overrated. By the time you’re halfway through a game, you’ve seen a lot of what it’s going to offer in terms of style and gameplay. For sure, you’ll miss some amazing stuff if you don’t get to the end, but it’s hard to believe you miss as much as the new other game you could have half-completed in the same time.

There are exceptions, and I defintely think completing at least a few games is important. But if I had the choice of only having fully played 20 games in my entire life, or 40 halfway, I’d defintely have learned more, experienced more and enjoyed myself more with the half-assed approach.

Yeah, when some friends started getting married in our 30s I thought they were being impulsive. We’re a bit young to be getting married aren’t we?

Antedilluvian

Was just about to post some “what are you talking about?! Lots of people said…” but maybe that says something about the number of diagnosese my friend group have accumulated…

Fish changing sex is the most common, with pronounced physical sex changes. But they also usually simultaneously change gender, starting to behave in the manner associated with their new sex.

And there is some interesting examples of changes that seem to be more gender based. This study discusses behavior changes in wrasses where “male-typical behaviors such as courtship and aggression” start being seen in certain female fish, leading to changes in social status, before any noticeable changes to gonadal organs (the glands that produce many of the sex hermones).

The aquarium staff hoist the trans flag, and explain that “some fish change gender”. The people complaining bring up “gay”, but don’t seem very well informed about human or aquatic cultures.

I think it’s been a very long time (if ever) that YouTube searches weren’t somewhat localised. If you live in an anglophone country you might not notice it, but YouTube wouldn’t have got very far if Germans got rodents instead of advice when searching “rat”.

Most salad dressings are just savoury cocktails

Those bastards!

If anyone is curious (as I was):

In real life Nemo’s dad would have become female after mommy got eaten. https://evolution.berkeley.edu/fisheye-view-tree-of-life/gender-bending-fish/

“of all the animals, fish are sexually the most fluid” - https://www.bbcearth.com/news/fish-are-the-sex-switching-masters-of-the-animal-kingdom

Nope

I guess he is a relevant expert? And I think his tone suggests his judgement on the matter’s bullshitosity.

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. He completed his PhD in 2017 and has since authored two acclaimed books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

I could get a copy of the original “White Box” Dungeons & Dragons set, although not an actual first print run copy, because those go for $20k. But I’d probably buy the last few Planescape products I’m missing, which are also unreasonably expensive for rpg books but not in the same league as the original dnd sets, and much more enjoyable to read.

Northern Exposure is an amazing and very gentle show, if you can handle 90s tv.

Life, uh, finds a way.