i wish i was one of those people, i would be deep into some obscure rabbit hole every night and creative about it and barely conscious

Canadian comedian Dave Thomas says a close call with death in 2020 brought his life into sharper focus.

“I had sepsis and my arms and legs were twice their size. I was in the hospital. I was actually in hospice. And I thought I was basically done,” the "SCTV" actor and writer says in a recent video call from Los Angeles.

“What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” recalls the 75-year-old, who along with Rick Moranis played "SCTV"'s fictional patriotic brothers Bob and Doug McKenzie.

The St. Catharines, Ont.-native found his answer in an unexpected place: Ukraine, a country still under siege as Russia’s full-scale invasion grinds into its third year.

To this day, she remembers the racing thoughts, the instant nausea, the hairs prickling up on her legs, the sweaty palms. She had shared a photograph of herself in her underwear with a boy she trusted and, very soon, it had been sent around the school and across her small home town, Aberystwyth, Wales. She became a local celebrity for all the wrong reasons. Younger kids would approach her laughing and ask for a hug. Members of the men’s football team saw it – and one showed someone who knew Davies’s nan, so that’s how her family found out.

Her book, No One Wants to See Your D*ck, takes a deep dive into the negatives. It covers Davies’s experiences in the digital world – that includes cyberflashing such as all those unsolicited dick pics – as well as the widespread use of her images on pornography sites, escort services, dating apps, sex chats (“Ready for Rape? Role play now!” with her picture alongside it). However, the book also shines a light on the dark online men’s spaces, what they’re saying, the “games” they’re playing. “I wanted to show the reality of what men are doing,” says Davies. “People will say: ‘It’s not all men’ and no, it isn’t, but it also isn’t a small number of weirdos on the dark web in their mum’s basements. These are forums with millions of members on mainstream sites such as Reddit, Discord and 4chan. These are men writing about their wives, their mums, their mate’s daughter, exchanging images, sharing women’s names, socials and contact details, and no one – not one man – is calling them out. They’re patting each other on the back.”

With extra extra jpeg for her pleasure.

I got this from reddit. In one of the comments I found this about Washington state: Governor Bob Ferguson signed into law a bill that restricts out-of-state military forces from entering Washington. House Bill 1321....

I suggest we write our local governments to enact the same type of law before it is too late.

I’ve been in this weird headspace lately where life is just… strange. On the surface, everything is fine. I go to work, eat relatively healthy, try to stay on top of errands, keep things running — the usual. But underneath it all, there's this constant feeling of dull pressure, like I'm being stretched thin by things that don’t really matter. It’s like I’m always busy, but rarely present.

Every day feels packed, but nothing sticks. I go through the motions, check off tasks, scroll a bit, eat, sleep, repeat. I end the day drained, like I ran a marathon in my head — but can’t really remember anything meaningful that happened. It’s not burnout in the dramatic sense, just this low-grade hum of tiredness and disconnection that never really turns off.

Socially, things have gotten quieter too. I barely see my friends anymore. Most of them are still into drinking and going out — stuff that used to feel exciting but now just feels... loud and repetitive. There was no big falling out. Just different rhythms now. Slower ones. And sometimes I sit with that and wonder if it’s just part of growing up, or if something deeper got lost along the way.

And then my brain starts spinning, usually late at night, when everything’s quiet. I start thinking about the future — and it honestly kind of scares me. Not in a dramatic, apocalyptic way, but in that creeping "things-are-moving-too-fast" way. AI is suddenly everywhere. Wars are happening in the background of our everyday lives. Economies feel fragile. Everything seems more unstable than it used to be, like we’re just pretending things are normal while the ground shifts under us.

And weirdly, my mind keeps drifting back to 2006. I don’t even know why exactly — maybe because it felt slower. Simpler. The internet was just fun and weird, not all-consuming. There were fewer screens, fewer existential threats in the news feed. Boredom existed, but it didn’t feel dangerous — it felt open. It felt like space to breathe. Now everything feels compressed, even rest.

I don’t think I’m depressed. I’m not miserable. But I feel… detached. Like I’m watching my life from the outside, waiting for it to feel like mine again. There’s this quiet emptiness running underneath everything, like background static. Not loud enough to break me, just enough to make everything feel slightly out of tune.

Anyone else feel like this? Have you figured out how to shake it — or at least live with it in a way that makes sense?

The researchers used a novel superconducting circuit architecture to show nonlinear light‐matter coupling that is about an order of magnitude stronger than prior demonstrations, which could enable a quantum processor to run about 10 times faster.

There is still much work to be done before the architecture could be used in a real quantum computer, but demonstrating the fundamental physics behind the process is a major step in the right direction, says Yufeng "Bright" Ye Ph.D., lead author of a paper on this research.

"This would really eliminate one of the bottlenecks in quantum computing. Usually, you have to measure the results of your computations in between rounds of error correction. This could accelerate how quickly we can reach the fault‐tolerant quantum computing stage and be able to get real‐world applications and value out of our quantum computers," says Ye.

Archive link: https://archive.is/npgMy

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian suggest a source of drinking water close to a $1bn (£800m) mining project owned by the Indonesia-based Harita Group on remote Obi Island, was contaminated with unsafe levels of hexavalent chromium (Cr6), the cancer-causing chemical more widely known for its role in the Erin Brockovich story and film.

Cr6 can cause liver damage, reproductive problems and developmental harm when ingested or inhaled. Long-term exposure through drinking water has also been linked to stomach cancer. Evidence has shown that Cr6 in drinking water can be a result of industrial processes.

The Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate has condemned the arrest of a prominent local journalist by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank.

Ali al-Samoudi, who has worked extensively with Western media, was detained during a raid on his son's home in the northern city of Jenin early on Tuesday.

The 58-year-old was interrogated for half an hour at an unknown location and was later transferred to an Israeli hospital due to a deterioration in his health, his son Mohammed said.

The Israeli military said Samoudi was "identified with the [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad terrorist organisation" and "suspected in the transfer of funds" to it, without giving any evidence.

The Trump administration’s support for these claims, while stopping other new refugee arrivals, has inflamed uncomfortable conversations about how far racial reconciliation still has to go, three decades after the end of white minority rule.

The US president’s offer was a “godsend”, said Kyle, now a salesman working remotely for an overseas company: “I’ve got white children, they’re at the bottom of the hiring list here. So, there is no future for them. And the sad thing is they don’t even know what apartheid is.”

White Afrikaner governments racially segregated every aspect of life from relationships to where people were allowed to live during apartheid, repressing South Africa’s Black majority while keeping the white minority safe and much better off.

South Africa remains deeply unequal, more than 30 years since the system ended. The black South African unemployment rate is 46.1%, for example, compared with 9.2% for white people.

An out of season Saw Whet in New York City!

From Wild Bird Fund

This little quy is a Northern saw-whet owl, and he appears to be as surprised as we were to find him at the clinic. He was found on the Upper East Side, unable to fly and very wet. He came in drenched, cold and stuporous. After a blow dry, some warmth and fluids, the owl perked up, then spent the night in an incubator with oxygen. Today he was feistier and defensive.

We suspect he suffered a collision of some sort, based on his demeanor and some dried blood under his chin. But we'll be doing further examination once he's more stable.

Photo by Eugene Oda

I remember seeing at least one other community related to this, which had regular math problems.

What I'm thinking is having a general community for any of the following:

• joke style riddles
• more complex riddles (ex. missing dollar riddle)
• math problems (geometry, infinite doors, monty hall)
• optical illusions
• those physics 'what would happen' questions (ex. which bucket would fill first, which way would the balloon move)

Keeping it open would allow for more content, and it will also keep things fresh, since having the same type of question every day might get boring for users.

What should the community be called? Some ideas so far:

• riddler: might be too specific to the character, or the concept or riddles
• ???: I thought this was fun, but it might cause issues with other fediverse platforms
• what: Not as fun, but solves the issue above

What instance should the community be on?

Any best practices? We could have tags for the approximate difficulty of the question. [easy] for mobile game ad type questions, [average] for common riddles, and [advanced] for the complex math questions? + [meme] for joke posts