I felt the same way (spoilers for whoever hasn’t read it). The protagonist just kept encountering significant people where it seems like there’s going to be a struggle to overcome, leading to character development and newfound maturity, but no. He just moves on to another scene instead and they’re not seen again. It was just annoying.

The teacher that feels he’s not living up to his potential? The private school friends that he hangs out with but often finds frustrating? The childhood friend who he shares unexplored romantic tension with? The nuns whose meals he pays for despite having dwindling funds? The prostitute he just wants to have a conversation with? Her pimp, who attacks him? The potentially rapist family friend? For pretty much all of them a relevant conflict is initiated just for him to leave it unresolved, probably after labeling them a phony.

The only exception is his sister, who he sees like two or three times. And then the final conflict at the end is like: “Hey sorry for taking your birthday money so I could keep wandering around these past couple of days instead of talking to our rich parents.” “That’s ok, I forgive you. You’re my brother and I love you. But I worry about you sometimes.” “Yeah anyway, I’m bitter about the world so I kinda want to disappear into the wilderness.” “Please don’t do that.” “Ok I won’t.”

I think you’ll be hard pressed to find someone progressive enough for lemmy to like that will also be interesting to a Joe Rogan fan. I would recommend Destiny though. I wouldn’t say he’s like Joe Rogan, but he frequently does debates with commentators of all politcal positions including those with similar beliefs to Joe. He has an aggressive, confrontational style that would be your best bet at trying to demonstrate the weaknesses of the views Joe would advocate for.

If you’re not familiar with his views, Destiny could probably be described as a left-leaning liberal institutionalist moderate. His community can attract a variety of viewpoints and is relatively accepting of criticism for Destiny so your brother would have an easier time interacting with them than someone like Hasan.

It’s nice you are trying to look out for your brother like this. Good luck!

Oh, today I learned!

It wasn’t my decision, but getting fired from an exhausting job was amazing for me. I wasn’t going to pull the trigger myself, but walking out of my boss’s office I couldn’t keep a huge grin off my face. I was in no rush to find a new job so the months of uneployment that followed were some of the happiest of my life. And I have a better job now that pays less but is so much less stressful.

No one has mentioned Vivaldi yet. I haven’t found it slow in the years I’ve used it. It does hog memory with the amount of tabs I open, but no more than any other browser I’ve used. Fortunately it has inactive tab suspenders as an option to help with my bad habits (natively now, and through chrome extensions before that). Also, it is undoubtedly the most visually customizable browser I know, so it being ugly is really you making the sandwich.

If this was just bait, I guess it got me. If not, anon could try Tor if they value privacy, or maybe something minimalist if they really care about performance.

IIRC, the hiring people said they worried candidates scoring too much higher than average would be more likely to show turnover from finding more prestigious jobs later or would not fit in well with their colleagues. Whether or not you agree with the decision, those are reasonable concerns to have when hiring and were applied to everyone, so he lost the discrimination suit.

Audiobookbay and smart audiobook player is my setup too. I probably got it from a similar thread. My only annoyance is using audiobookbay’s search can be annoying sometimes, but altogether I love both.

hbomberguy recently had a video that “ruins” Youtubers who have been very successful from educational videos while using blatant plagiarism. It’s 4 hours long but it’s very engaging and might be something you enjoy.

Part of the problem is trying to be authoritative with broad conclusions. You can have a documentary cover a story or a person’s life while being thorough and entertaining, but things like an overall industry’s practices are just too complicated to go over quickly. People are going to have lots of varying experiences with it, and just giving facts about it misses human elements that allow people to imagine being there. It needs to be a story, but just one story also can’t apply to everyone.