My wife has hella aphantasia. And facial blindness. She jokes that she would make the world’s worst eyewitness to a crime - she wouldn’t be able to recognize the perp or be able to describe 'em even if she could!

But as it has turned out, she’s been having trouble hearing as she’s grown older. We keep the subtitles on and avoid dining in even slightly noisy restaurants. Anything besides nearby face to face speech is a crapshoot.

So she saw an audiologist who ran the standard battery of tests and said “Your hearing is fine… But have you heard of auditory processing disorder?” Turns out that a portion of our auditory processing overlaps with a bit of our visual processing. For my wife, whose visual systems don’t all work right, her ability to filter noise and extract meaningful sound has started to degrade a bit. Mechanically her hearing is fine. But she can’t process the signal right - possibly related to her aphantasia.

There’s a lot we don’t know yet about aphantasia. Like synesthesia, it’s only been described medically in the very recent past. But if you ever start struggling to understand conversations… Check for auditory processing disorder alongside the rest.

For my wife… well, sge was able to get hearing aids - which look sleek now - and it’s been night and day. Instead of shifting frequencies, these are like noise canceling headphones on steroids. She’s suddenly able to follow conversations in noisy environments that would have been impossible before! So… if any of that sounds (heh) familiar - there’s help available!

Harsh - but the first of these to make me actually lol

Once upon a time, I built a proof of concept distributed social network that ran entirely on cell phones.

I eventually ran into enough complications that I abandoned the project. But the tech did work. I could create posts, add friends, etc. (It just wasn’t reliable in its sync mechanism and I gave up trying to fix it.)

So… Imagine Lemmy, but a community’s data is stored collaboratively on mobile devices, the load shared by all its subscribers.

We all walk around with goddamn supercomputers in our pockets. We should put them to work.

Ah! A fellow holder of the belief that time travel stories are better when they are internally consistent! I hate e.g. Looper for having time travel that makes no goddamn sense. It takes me out of the story when the characters are literally watching the timeline change before them as it magically radiates out from one point. And then our protagonists somehow remember the original timeline… Bah.

…So I must ask - have you seen Primer? If not, maybe you’d like it!

Check out Golvellius: Valley of Doom. It was a Zelda clone, but I think it’s more fun than the original.

It’s hard to compare apples and mangos, but if we’re gonna consider favorite tropical fruits, I friggin love fresh mangosteen. It’s like a little fruity Bob-bom. Smooth and silky texture, creamy sweet flesh and just fantastic. They don’t seem to travel well, unfortunately.

Or fresh pineapple.

I had fresh pineapple off a farmer’s cart in the tropics two decades back. Afterward, I couldn’t eat pineapple in the US for almost three years. It was so much better than the canned or grocery-store stuff there was just no comparison.

A few years back I started working on a P2P-based social media app.

The things I did:

• Pull-based: you don’t see anything from people you aren’t subbed to.
• Natural vs algorithm-driven growth: Introduce friends instead of shoving randos into every conversation.
• No ads: Servers are expensive. P2P architecture removes (most of) them, so we can afford to run on donations of time and money.
• Community-based publishing: When you share, it’s to a community of users you’ve curated. “Family”, “Co-workers”, “Cool co-workers”, etc
• Community-based moderation: local + shared tags and filters to control what your communities can show you. (E.g. Block all #politics posts from Uncle Fergulous and all #soblessed posts everywhere. Sub to other users’ tags to make them part of your personal moderation team)
• Data Ownership: I don’t want your data. You host it. You own it.
• Right to be Forgotten: Automatically delete older posts (This is impossible to achieve completely, but having it as the default makes casual abuse harder)
• Pseudonymous: I don’t care who you are. If the FBI cares, they may be able to track you though.