It’s tactical. The idea is that if you convince your supporters that your enemies are breaking the rules and getting away with it that your supporters will cheer you punishing those enemies by breaking those same rules.

It’s just like in sports. People get upset when the refs punish their team for what they perceive the other team getting away with.

This doesn’t read as just California. It’s the whole country.

Big same on the acts of selflessness. Especially over the last few years…

I’m exactly like you’re describing and a little older than you (44). Songs, TV shows, movies, animated series. It’s a trivial feat to make me tear up at pretty much anything someone might consider touching.

I suppose it’s outside of the statistical norm for our demographic, but I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with it. We feel things and we express those feelings when we have them. I’d argue it’s a lot healthier than what the statistical mean of our cohort does.

I love seeing comments like yours where people change some of their thinking as a result of online discussion.

I was starting to feel like no one listens to understand and only listen to respond, and comments like this help lift me out of that perspective.

Half of an ortholinear split keyboard and a trackball that’s missing the ball.

A thought for why it may have been easier for you to regularly use your paper journal while not maintaining the digital journal: it may be a matter of visual cuing.

With the paper journal it sits somewhere that you’ll see it regularly, probably along your route to bed. Seeing the journal may have been your mental cue to write in it, as opposed to simple routine or habit. You don’t get the same kind of cue from a digital journal because even a set reminder is no different from the bevy of notifications your phone gives you throughout the day.

Something that could help you keep up with your digital journal is to start keeping a physical journal in the same place you kept your old one. Maybe put an NFC tag in it that just launches your digital journal when scanned/tapped. Then you’ll still have that visual cue and habit reaction force to keep you journaling.

This is the story I came to this thread for. Amazing! Thanks for posting!

A thought: any ai-image detector is a defacto trainer for ai-image generators. It necessarily becomes a kind of arms race in the same way that spam generators test their payloads against spam filters.