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Haymitch was your normal small-town teen while Katniss was the local stray cat that sometimes dropped dead birds on your porch.

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Fun thing about my school: instead of bells coming through a speaker on the wall, a few years back they changed it so that it comes through teachers' computers. To make sure that its audible, the system automatically turns up the computer's volume for a few seconds.

Now I typically keep my computer's volume at about 15%. That's plenty loud for anything I'm doing. For the bells that gets cranked up to 90%.

So as a nice treat a few times a day I get bells blasted into my face at about 6 times the comfortable volume.

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probably waiting for Padme and Luke at the spaceport or sth ajshdgkasd

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“A sleeping mother snow leopard curled up in a doughnut shape, front paws resting against her back, while her tiny, eyes-and-ears-closed kitten nuzzles into the fur of her belly and wraps their arm around her”

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Then there’s a third cost to believing you can multitask, one that you’ll only notice in the medium or longer term—which we might call the “creativity” drain. You’re likely to be significantly less creative. Why? “Because where do new thoughts and innovation come from?” Earl asked. They come from your brain shaping new connections out of what you’ve seen and heard and learned. Your mind, given free undistracted time, will automatically think back over everything it absorbed, and it will start to draw links between them in new ways. This all takes places beneath the level of your conscious mind, but this process is how “new ideas pop together, and suddenly, two thoughts that you didn’t think had a relationship suddenly have a relationship.” A new idea is born. But if you “spend a lot of this brain-processing time switching and error-correcting,” Earl explained, you are simply giving your brain less opportunity to “follow your associative links down to new places and really have truly original and creative thoughts.”

—Johann Hari, Stolen Focus

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So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do. I wanted to know: How often are most of us engaging in switching like this? Professor Gloria Mark, at the Department of Infomatics at the University of California, Irvine, who I interviewed, has discovered that the average American worker is distracted roughly once every three minutes. Several other studies have shown a large chunk of Americans are almost constantly being interrupted and switching between tasks. The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are “multitasking”—which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day. I had to look again at that figure several times before I really absorbed it: most office workers never get an hour to themselves without being interrupted.

Whenever this problem is talked about in the media, it’s described as “multitasking”—but I think using this old computing term is a mistake. When I picture multitasking, I picture a 1990s single mother trying to feed a baby while also taking a work call and preventing the food she’s cooking from catching fire. (I watched a lot of bad sitcoms in the 90s.) I don’t picture somebody taking a work call while also checking their text messages. We now use our phones so habitually that I don’t think we consider doing a task and checking our phones at the same time as multitasking, any more than we think scratching your butt during a work call is multitasking. But it is. Simply having your phone switched on and receiving texts every ten minutes while you try to work is itself a form of switching—and these costs start to kick in for you too. One study at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab took 136 students and got them to take a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received text messages performed, on average, 20 percent worse. Other studies in similar scenarios have found even worse outcomes of 30 percent. It seems to me that almost all of us with a smartphone are losing 20 to 30 percent, all the time. That’s a lot of brainpower for a species to lose.

Johann Hari, Stolen Focus

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would be very funny to me if The Pitt submitted themselves as a comedy so that they were up against The Bear this year.

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Seeing people's hot takes online and being like, wow you watched that whole movie/show and didn't even understand the most basic premise! And we're not talking about Finnegan's Wake or something. You failed the comprehension test on a Marvel movie.

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little kids make me laugh. i was at a party yesterday and a kid was there and she noticed that i have a long straight cut along the length of my thumb and asked about it, so i told her it was a cat scratch, almost healed, didn't hurt. and then she was sorta staring and touching it for a bit and went "you had bone surgery. because there were termites in your bones."

so i played along and went "oh man, i hope they got em all!" and she went "no. they put in more." lmao

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Just saw a Coriolanus and Lucy Gray edit to "The Great War" and I'm sorry but has there ever been a couple that more fully embodied NOT surviving the great war?

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Let's just give Deke Shaw a Bop-It and set him loose

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I’m HOLLERING, CLARK!

“If you would be so kind as to h*cking Perish”

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genuinely being a tv enjoyer in this current time sucks balls because tv is trying to do what movies do and it makes it WORSE. the best part about tv is that you spend time with it consistently week after week year after year and now because tv shows are fractured and have the budget of major movies they're becoming shorter with way longer time between seasons and it hurts the one (at least to me) best thing about tv!! which is that it's reliable and consistent and has longevity because tv is a long form format!!! But it's being pushed into being made more short term like movies because of all these economic pressures and bonkers expectations. I'm sick of it!!! I'm sick of tv shows being acclaimed when they don't feel like tv shows as if that's a bad thing!!! I'm sick of waiting 2-4 years for 4-8 episodes. I'm sick of reading about the best writers in the business not being able to make a living. I'm sick of it!!!! I want tv back!!! I miss my friend tv!

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hey i hope this isn't a bad time but one billion points lava damage

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Silent Characters: Echo/Maya Lopez v Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

Echo/Maya Lopez: Hawkeye (2021) Echo (2024)

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: Oswald Cartoons (1927-28)

The OG! While Pete is older and Mickey is better known, Mickey’s older brother is an iconic character in his own right with 27 cartoons under Disney - some of which were even remade as Mickey cartoons! Kidnapped from Disney after his original cartoons, Oswald was finally returned home in 2006… and has lost none of his scrappy, mischievous charm since. Imaginative and resourceful, a of a wise guy, Oswald can turn anything into a tool to get himself into and out of trouble - and is a delight to watch while he’s at it!

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what petition do I need to sign to have researchers stop listing "mormonism" under "Christianity"