Impatient Idealist

Which communities here on DW do you find to be interesting and active?

How do you discover communities to join?

Advice solicited. What are your news sources?

One of the things World Without Mind successfully convinced me is that if individual consumers want good, reliable, thoughtful, accurate written content, we're going to have to be willing to pony up.

I want journalism that is not recycled clickbait with outrage-inducing tweaks to the headlines. I want news articles with some investigation and fact checking behind them. I want editorials with depth and with critical thinking. I cannot expect to get the news content I want via the gateways of Google or Facebook. The market forces actively, strongly, and diametrically oppose it.

(I also want nonfiction books that are well-researched and professionally edited. I need to consider whether I can get those via the gateway of Amazon. So far, I can, if I'm choosy.)

So. I'm looking for good news sources, web OK but they need to be places I can go directly - and I'm willing to pay to subscribe.

How do you evaluate your news sources? Do you research where their money comes from? Do you base it on what you've read by them? Do you base it on what you’ve read about them? Do you do something else I haven't thought of? What are your favorites, and why?

(This is a public entry. Access-limited entry here for folks who don't want to comment on public entries.)

I went on a friending (er, grant-access and subscribe) spree. I went looking around and if I recognized your handle from the old LJ days I added you. If you recognize mine and the memories are at all positive, please add back. :)

Noel! I adore seeing the stuff you read! So nifty!

I think it’s really amazing how MUCH interesting stuff there is out there in the world. I love seeing more of it through other people’s eyes. I guess some of this is akin to “if I had no demands on my time I would camp out in Powell’s for a couple of weeks” and some is akin to “every person I meet is a window into a whole different world”.

Insomnia is a lot more boring (but more pleasant, for all that) without Facebook.

Woke up about an hour and a half ago for Yet Another Cleanup Party and boom, that’s it, no more sleep tonight. That’ll give me a total of three and a half hours for the night. Last night - hmm, terminology gets weird: Saturday night - it was about three. Another night or two of this and I won’t be safe to drive a car. Already the other day I caught myself waiting for a stop sign to turn green.

How do people deal with this kind of thing? (By “people” I mean “people with jobs they have to show up for at regular times”; I know how I would deal with it if I had flex time and sick days and the like.)

I’m realizing this morning that social media isn’t social. It’s news, or at least the best most of us get for news. (And a poor and unreputable aggregator it is, but that’s another topic.)

What I miss most about social media of days gone by is social contact. There aren’t places like that now. Does anyone even have time for that?

Wow. I hear MeWe chat is end to end encrypted. That site does get more intriguing.

I have what might be some pretty remarkable insomnia. (I'm not 100% sure how much of that is pathology and how much is aging change plus never having needed quite as much sleep as some folk.) Anyhow, I often wake up somewhere around four in the morning, after about five hours of sleep, and then there's no way I'm getting back to sleep again.

This often doesn't really bug me any more. I can spend an hour doing quiet stuff - catch up on Dreamwidth, play a short brain-teaser game on my phone, maybe listen to a lecture on cognitive behavioral therapy.

I like my mornings.

Someone from FB noticed I had gone silent and reached out to check in and say hello.

I didn't think that was possible. I'm genuinely impressed.

And touched. I'm dangerously close to shedding a tear, here, and I swore I was done with that.

If you're reading this, you know who you are: next time we are in the same zip code I shall buy you a drink and toast you with my own glass.