📞 Party like it’s 1999: In Seattle, parents are reviving the landline, thanks to “Tin Can,” a Wi-Fi-enabled corded phone (paywall link) that lets kids call friends without screens or TikTok. It’s spreading fast: tens of thousands sold, and they’re now back-ordered. Kids are actually thrilled to call friends. Next thing you know, they’ll be making mix tapes.
When you’re everyone’s unpaid emotional support intern
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“Hey, Kim, This isn’t tech. I’m the one keeping the peace, at work, at home, with friends. I smooth things over and manage everyone’s moods. It’s exhausting, but if I stop, I’m scared everything unravels. What should I do?” — Megan from Cincinnati
Welcome to the unpaid role of feelings manager, Megan. It comes with built-in burnout, festering resentment and the creeping illusion that if you stop functioning, everything (and everyone) will fall apart. You’re the glue. Except where’s your support?
🤖 Help for the empathy bottleneck
AI can help you stop running your nervous system like a 24/7 conflict resolution hotline and get some space back by automating the hard part, i.e., how to have your say. Here are ideas for you to use with ChatGPT or your favorite chatbot.
Generate de-escalation scripts, responses that untangle defensiveness without defaulting to apology theater.
“Write me a text that acknowledges their frustration but doesn’t end with me groveling.”
“Give me three responses that don’t sound like I’m rolling over.”
Build conversation openers that don’t snowball into 40-minute emotional triage sessions.
“Suggest a way to check in that won’t lead to me fixing their problems.”
“Give me a neutral opener that keeps the conversation light, not loaded.”
Help people feel heard: Summarize their thoughts, so you properly touch base on what they feel.
“Rewrite their long rant into three clear points I can respond to.”
💬 75 minutes
That’s how long the average Character.AI user chats with a bot every day. More time than most people spend talking to their actual friends. But hey, Sherlock Holmes never zones out mid-convo to scroll Instagram, right? Turns out, you can put a price on friendship (paywall link): $10 a month, to be exact.
📸 Add Instagram highlights secretly: Create highlights without posting to your story. Open the app, tap your profile button, then the (+) in the top right. Select Story, pick a photo and hit the arrow at the bottom. Under Close Friends, choose someone who doesn’t follow you back and tap Share. Then hit Add to Highlights.
🏝️ Paradise.ai: Here’s something to tell your friends that will make them say, “Wow, you’re so smart.” Tiny Anguilla (population 15,000) stumbled into a digital jackpot, owning the “.ai” domain every startup wants. In 2024 alone, those two letters brought in $39 million selling domain names to startups like Character.ai and Perplexity.ai. That’s nearly a quarter of the island’s government revenue. When in a gold rush, sell vowels.
📚 Since phones were banned in schools: Kids are turning Google Docs into live chat rooms. They invite friends as collaborators and chat in real time, sometimes sneakily in white text on white background. It’s note-passing for the 2025 school year. Teachers don’t notice. Parents don’t know. But is it kind of genius? Yeah. You’ve got to respect the hustle.
👂 Struggling to hear? Custom-fit hearing aids with expert guidance and a 45-day risk-free trial help you hear clearly, follow every conversation and reconnect with friends and family, so you never miss a moment again.
📺 Use Roku Guest Mode: Got friends or family using your TV? Let them sign in with their own apps, so they don’t mess up your recommendations. Go to Settings > Guest Mode > Enter Guest Mode, type your Roku PIN and hit OK. When they leave, exit Guest Mode to get back to normal. Perfect for Airbnbs, too.
👂 Struggling to hear? Custom-fit hearing aids with expert guidance and a 45-day risk-free trial help you hear clearly, follow every conversation and reconnect with friends and family, so you never miss a moment again.
New mental illness alert: Just passing this along. Doctors are seeing a rise in “AI delusions,” people breaking down after endless chats with bots that never disagree. Not schizophrenia, but not nothing. Experts warn this could mark a brand-new disorder. Imaginary friends? Now they charge $20/month.
🎮 Protect your kids on Discord: You can filter out NSFW images sent from strangers, friends and server channels. Go to User Settings > Content & Social > Content and Block everything under Mature Sexual Media and Graphic Media. While you’re there, scroll to Direct Message spam, and toggle Filter all.
🎂 10 out of 10: YouTube opened the site a decade ago. To celebrate, YouTube Music just rolled out “taste match,” a Spotify Blend clone that fuses your questionable taste with your friends’ also questionable tastes. Fun fact: The YT app hit 125M paying subs with a 300M-track library.
😱 Instagram’s embarrassing new feature: You can now see which Reels (videos) your friends are liking. Just tap the Reels icon, then the Friends tab, and bam, their profile pics show up on whatever they hearted. Scared? Me, too. To turn it off, go to Settings > Who can see your content > Activity in Friends tab > No one.
IG’s map is sus: Rolling out now, Instagram Map broadcasts your last app activity location to friends. Meta swears it’s off by default, but I don’t trust it and apparently neither does half the internet. Here’s how to turn it off: Go to your Profile and Tap the ≡ menu (top right). Select Story, live and location, tap Location sharing, and toggle off sharing.
Share Instagram posts the right way: Tagging friends in the comments? Meh. Next time you see a funny reel, tap the little arrow under the post (or on the side). Pick who you want to send it to and hit Send. It lands right in their DMs.
31 years
How long the world’s oldest baby chilled in a freezer before being born. Frozen in 1994, he’s technically older than Friends, Google and probably your favorite jeans. Science: 1, Nature: confused.
Mario gets friend-zoned: Nintendo just hard-launched emotional damage by announcing Mario and Peach are “just good friends.” This, despite years of flirty kisses, wedding attempts and Nintendo itself calling them a couple in past games. Peach watched him fight Bowser and still said, “Thanks, bestie!” Guess saving someone from 500+ castles only gets you a LinkedIn endorsement now.
5
That’s how many people it takes to keep your mental health from tanking. A study by Medibank and Growth Distillery found people with “high mental well-being” had an average of five reliable friends. Those struggling? Just three friends. That tiny gap is the difference between “I’ve got support” and “I don’t want to bother anyone.”
Hidden Facebook messages: If you’ve been on the app a while, chances are you’ve got tons of unread DMs sitting in your Message requests folder. That’s where Meta sends chats from people you’re not friends with. To check, tap the Messenger icon > Settings > Message requests > You may know.
🤖 Roblox adds AI selfie check: Kids can now chat more freely with friends, but only after proving they’re over 13. That starts with a video selfie, so AI can estimate their age (yes, really). If that doesn’t work, they’ll need to upload a government ID, finally.