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I find the process itself a balm for the soul. It’s the one part of my life where only my vision matters, and I am free to completely disregard what others want. That includes some kind of imaginary audience.

I have a bunch of friends who also make music for fun and we share demos and build each other up. Sometimes we make stuff together, send each other inspo, discuss how to improve something in a song, etc.

But I have to say, the end result is completely irrelevant here. We’re all doing it for the fun of making, not for the finished product.

Given that you said you get the energy from the social element and approval, you could build a social network that will be a source of that approval for your creations. Otherwise you could find a hobby that gives you what you’re looking for without the less enjoyable parts.

Renshuu provides fantastic SRS based tools for memorizing the hell out of vocabulary, has a huge bank of grammar lessons and a variety of grammar quiz styles to bed in the knowledge through practical applications. There are multiple quiz styles that are more or less challenging, including typing out answers instead of multiple choice questions.

Using just Renshuu and Wanikani I learned enough Japanese to be able to engage with Japanese content and for it to be actually comprehensible.

In the past I tried learning through immersion only, made no progress, found it demotivating and gave up. You need a baseline of vocab and grammar, and I don’t think it matters much where exactly it’s coming from (apps, lessons, textbooks).

Making mistakes and seeing exactly how you’re being misunderstood is the best thing for improving your speaking skills. There’s absolutely no reason to wait before speaking, as wanting to be understood provides incredible motivation to correct issues as you discover them.

In the tests they’ve conducted the blue light had better results than the ordinary UV light.

I believe this is true for all learning, we consolidate knowledge by applying it, not by hearing about it.

How would this account for wildly different regional accents?

I like your visual approach. Very unique among bookmarking apps!

Training data?

A lot of playlist owners take submissions, and some have pricing lists, charging a set amount for featuring a song for a month or longer.

This is a technique that every music marketing outfit will recommend nowadays. It’s one of the most effective ways to promote new music, but it requires the effort to create and maintain playlists.

It started out on a service called Linkydink https://medium.com/@rrhoover/the-wisdom-of-the-20-minute-sta...

Weirdly, earplugs can make it easier to hear certain detail, despite the reduction in volume. I wear earplugs at concerts and I can hear all the instruments, despite them somehow reducing the intensity of crowd noises. It’s also a lot easier to hear people talking to you, as long as they’re speaking in the direction of your ears.

Fair, although previously I’d buy the same three packs without issue.

Not sure whether it was the removal of best before dates or Brexit, but fresh food and veg in Britain is often already rotting in supermarkets. So now instead of the store throwing out loads of produce past its best, I have to do it when I get home and realise that yet again one in each pack of 3 onions is rotted.

In the UK the NHS recommends “pacing” for ME/CFS, which is a very slow, gradual increase in activity without triggering over-exertion - same as what you found effective. I believe there are some materials and support groups available to people who qualify for them, it’s definitely one of the recognised treatments. [1]

Changing a lifestyle in support of recovery is of course much harder than taking medication. Can people’s jobs adapt? Can the benefits / social security systems? Do people have support networks which they can rely on? So I agree that maintaining health is super complex, and there are additional social/economic challenges here.

1: https://www.cambscommunityservices.nhs.uk/Bedfordshire/servi...

Some features are “missing” or don’t work in a similar way. For example, Affinity Designer doesn’t have shape replication tools like Illustrator, manual copy paste is required. You also can’t trace an image to turn it into vector outlines. Just two things off the top of my head that I noticed because I used them extensively in Adobe Illustrator. So if you’re only using a subset of features you’re probably fine, but without testing Affinity’s products for yourself it might be hard to tell if they’re a like for like replacement for you.

Can’t speak for other people but I find it more time consuming to get ChatGPT to correct its mistakes than to do the work myself.

They used to have Soundtrap, which is a DAW in the browser and had two separate apps. They sold it back to the founders AFAIK.

I switched to Apple Music for exactly the same reason.

Agreed that the stigma is unnecessary and likely stops many people from getting the support they might find helpful.

In my case the hearing damage is not sufficient to warrant a hearing aid, but it’s also enough to make it hard to understand conversation when there’s background noise. I don’t have the numbers on this but I’d assume there are a lot more people like me, who benefit from added clarity in specific situations, who would not need or even qualify for an actual hearing aid. In those cases a device you already have and use in other context hands down wins over a specialised medical device.

You should look into the Conversation Boost if you haven’t already. Has given me the ability to socialise in noisy environments

I get that we associate focus and attention with not having anything in our ears. But consider that many people, myself included, will wear AirPods in noisy environments, because the Conversation Boost feature makes it possible to hear speech more clearly.

Are you assuming that the goal for being creative is to produce content? Because often being creative is just a nice way to spend time while being alive, regardless of whether it produces any output.

Like you I don’t have any work apps or accounts on personal devices, so it’s very easy to shut the work laptop down at the end of a day and keep the separation of church and state.

I’m the same, but in most workplaces I’d been the odd one out. Many colleagues would check Slack even on holiday, so I had to be really explicit that when I’m not working, I am _really_ not working.

Edited to say that this attitude never got me in trouble. Given the conversation on mental health, work-life balance etc this clear boundary seems to be well respected. I’m in the UK.

Human therapists certainly do challenge their clients, at least in my experience. Mine certainly did challenge me frequently, and many of my friends brought up being challenged by theirs.

Do you have a reference for the 90% stat?

HRT for menopause is very common. “Around 15% of women aged 45 to 64 in England are currently prescribed HRT, which has increased rapidly in the last 2 years from around 11% and continues to increase.” as per https://www.gov.uk/government/news/hundreds-of-thousands-of-...

This is exactly what therapy is for.

That was the main reason I switched to Apple Music.