this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Your life will be much better if you avoid commercials, it isn't difficult, they creep me out whenever I am unfortunate enough to see/hear one, they are so contrived and so clearly aimed at people who have forgotten how to think.
I usually let them go for me out of laziness, but I mute them for my family to spare them the exposure. I also regularly discuss the problems with the way things are advertised with my kids so that they won't get sucked in by them. Crazy world. Hard to avoid adverts in the U.S.
I cut the cable TV cord in 1999. For whatever movies/TV we've wanted to watch, we've just gone to our public library to get DVDs and later on, streamed stuff.
uBO in all the browsers as well.
If you make a concerted effort, you can de-TV the household and it takes little time to find ways pick up on watching the things you like - w/o commercial interruption.. I could not imagine watching an evening of broadcast TV.
Given that the average show is now 40 minutes long - thats an hour of commercials between the 3 primetime hours of 8 and 11 pm.
I'm not going to waste an hour every night looking at things I do not want or need in my life.
Fuck that shit.
wait they're 40 now? i could have sworn we has 22s and 52s. fuck.
Yup! Pull down a torrent of a current season broadcast TV show and check out how long it isn't.
52 minutes was the length of shows in the 60s and 70's. This is why it's almost impossible to see uncut episodes of the original Star Trek on a cable channel, let alone a broadcast one..
It was already all but impossible to find when I cut the cord in '99.
Looking at the commercial TV cable channels - I have the first 8 seasons of The Walking Dead.. they run from 43 to 51 minutes in length (though the longer ones appeared in the 8th season (?) - was that when the channels started overlaying ads during the credit rolls? I know that's a thing.)
huh i always thought they just sped the broadcast up 10% or so. almost imperceptible unless you've got good pitch.
You implicitely mentioned the internet, but I want to make it explicit:
I haven't had a need for linear TV for over 20 years. News and entertainment over the 'net, much better to have a choice both in time and content.
WHY WON'T YOU LOOK AT ME??? I LEFT YOU A BANANA IN THE MICROWAVE!!!
YOU! YOU are the one that left the frigging banana in the microwave w/o telling me?
The fucking thing rotted and became a fruit fly farm.. When I went to heat my leftovers, last Friday.. I released the swarm o'doom!
BASTARD! I curse theeeEeeEe for eternity!
that was for op? sorry, i thought it was a gun.
Look into setting up Pi-hole. Blocks ads and trackers. Been using it for years.
Also uBlock Origin as was mentioned.
Haven’t seen any ads in a very long time, and that’s only when watching over-the-air local TV and my finger stays near the mute button.
Advertising has become an omnipresent psychological assault.
note that pi hole doesn't block YouTube ads in smart TV apps. they push those through the actual video stream in order to get through ad blockers more effectively. I spent a weekend setting up a pi hole only to discover this sad fact.
its still useful for other cases though. ublock for the web browsers, pihole for everything else
Makes sense for those who have children. I don't have children so I never considered that monitored exposure to adverts would be a necessary part of their education. I have no idea how a parent could effectively raise a child to understand how bad the adverts are, when children these days are so over exposed to those adverts from day 1.
Well, you just start like most anything, I guess. I talk to them. A commercial comes on and I say why I don't think it's good to listen to. I talk about them targeting children, why that's a problem, normalizing unhealthy things, predatory practices for poor/uneducated/whatever, and so on. I point out specific wording or presentation that makes it problematic and explain it. They probably don't understand most of it yet, but the way I look at it, I'm planting seeds that'll make more sense when they're ready for it.
Unless you watch live sports, it's really not.
I've watched NFL games for years. 2.5 minutes is engrained into my brain. Mute just before the fade out, and I just feel that the time has come where I can look at the screen again.
Yeah I am still baffled that... people watch commericials.
Then I realize I'm the outlier, and the consumer/workaholic apocalpyse is what most people call "normal" or "just how it is."
Normal and average are 'fun' words. They seemed to be absolutes when I was young, but they are merely reflections of contemporary society, easily manipulated. Falling off a cliff could be classed as normal, and average, given the right/wrong context.
Yes, but far too many people don't know better, and they are the majority. They love targeted ads and especially that's why so many of them are radicalised by targeted political propaganda. That's why it's a Sysiphean task to tell people about this, tell them to dismantle capitalism because we're heading to its logical conclusion-- fascism. I didn't think that Brave New World's soma (the digital devices in our case) will directly lead to 1984's Oceania. And what a great combo!
I did... :)
Adverts are one of those things that once you have been away from them for a time (no commercial radio, no tv/streaming, no social media apps, ad blockers on browsers etc) that any exposure to adverts makes them appear so obviously absurd, cheap, tacky, and obvious. I recently had a job where they forced staff to listen to commercial radio, that is one of the reasons why I left, my brain was melting, along with my remaining faith in humanity. If people are stupid (or whatever) enough to fall for that level of advertising, how are they able to raise children, drive, or vote well? Oh wait, they aren't.