(because i knew you) i have been changed For Good

them: why do you watch anime

me:

the abilities of the average tenor saxophone player

people always talk about evil clones like oooh a dark mirror oohh what if you saw what are cruel person you were/are capable of becoming. and well yes but what if you were the evil clone. what if you looked in the mirror and what you saw was so bright it blinded you. what if you had to know exactly how good you could have been.

by Gerard Kingma

I noticed today that the deadname of a client was clearly visible in their client file because it was their legal name, and flagged it for IT. I specifically flagged it as "Hey, if someone sees this and calls our client the wrong name, we'll lose them as a client." IT emailed me back immediately, and it's now invisible except on their contract with us, which the majority of us don't have direct access to, as opposed to their client file.

The reason I flagged it framing it as a loss is that what matters to most companies is money. If you can flag a bigoted practice as something that will lose customers, clients, or get them a lawsuit, that is significantly more likely to get taken care of quickly than trying to appeal to their better nature. I could have flagged it as "Hey, this is going to make our client really upset if they hear it.", which was my actual motivation for flagging it, but if I had, then it probably would have been taken care of in a few days or even weeks, not hours.

Always hit them with the profit argument for quick and decisive action.

The world exists in such a baffling state of simultaneous sex-aversion and sex-hegemony. Every social platform on the internet is trying to banish sex workers to the shadow realm but I can't post a tweet without at least two bots replying P U S S Y I N B I O. People are self-censoring sex to seggs and $3× but every other ad you see is still filled with half-naked women. Rightwingers want queer people arrested for so much as existing in the same postal code as a child and are also drumming up a moral panic about how teenage boys aren't getting laid enough. I feel like I'm losing my mind.

Derbyshire, England by Steve Cole

people say folks with adhd struggle with "delayed rewards" aka long term goals and as such we tend to focus more on short term rewards. what they don't talk about is that at when we Do accomplish long term goals we don't actually feel anything proportionate to the amount of work we did to achieve it. In my head I suffered for a while and then money spontaneously appeared in my bank account.

"Don't you feel satisfied that your windows are so clean now?" It sucked and it sucked and now I don't care. I just remember the sucking.

Hello, I have ADHD and I am also a licensed clinical therapist!

This part sucks. Not gonna lie to you. That said, our brains DO still get rewards, just not from "task completion" (something something, the combination of executive functioning whammy that is task initiation, task break down, task execution, and task transition following completion). Instead our rewards tend to come from one or more of a few areas:

Sometimes individuals have other things that can trigger rewards for them, and it's always worth making a note when you run across something like that!

I find that by popping off one of these options DURING or IMMEDIATELY AFTER a task that would otherwise be next to impossible to get thru without becoming a raging self hating asshole can make a big difference in how one experiences that task.

Examples: when I need to clean the house because my maintenance routine has fallen apart, I prep a vape with sativa delta or sativa THC, and shove it in my binder. I take a hit periodically throughout the task process to keep me functional and regulated. I also set pomodoro timers for 45 min each so I can alternate between "working" and "resting".

When I fall behind on notes, my wife buys me peanut M&Ms from the corner store and I pop a pair of M&Ms for every late note I submit for work.

When I'm having a low-function work day, I will prioritize taking my breaks outside with the dogs, and sometimes will splash water around from the hose on them and myself for a bit of a temperature change.

If I've overextended myself but still have essential tasks to complete, I will pause about every 15-30min to do a breathing exercise (5-6 count breath in through the nose, and 2-3 count breath out through the mouth - this is really good for short energy boosts and overcoming brainfog)

It's important to keep in mind, that these are not "incentives" in the traditional sense, where if you don't do the task, you don't get the reward. ANY use of your executive functioning would be rewarded in the brain to some extent for regulated neurotypicals, and just because our reward systems aren't great at self-activating as expected, doesn't mean we should have to live without the positive reinforcement that EVERYONE is supposed to get. So if you made an attempt at the thing, you get to trigger your reward response.

Overtime, myself and clients I work with have all noticed a shift in how we perceive tasks once this becomes common practice. Because we now have history and memories of tasks feeling positive to do (even when they are demanding or difficult for us), it becomes easier to interact with that task overall. You start to better notice the changes in approach that may make it even easier. You stop dreading the knowledge that the task needs to be done. It's easier to hop back into maintenance routines even after they've fallen apart. Basically, when you manually trigger what your brain NEEDS and can't self-create, a lot of the distressing aspects of executive function become WAY more manageable.

There's also a lot to be said about the experience of shifting self shaming and self blaming around what it means to "succeed" at a thing or "complete" a task, but that's sort of a different post. For now, suffice to say that being the kind and compassionate and understanding person you likely are for others, FOR YOURSELF, makes a big difference in how easy or hard the above strats will be to execute.

You probably know a few of the things that manually trigger that reward response for you. How can you make that ability work in your favor?

So if your brain won't give you a reward for completeing a task...store bought is fine?

"Yes! Exactly!" I say, nodding sagely as a bite into my precut and packaged watermelon neurotransmitter booster after successfully executing chicken related tasks, "In fact, the convenience is the point!"

Window appreciation post

Thoughts on the vision pool episode:

What we don’t see absolutely devastates me. We see Sophia making the treacherous journey to the vision pool but we don’t see Ava struggling along the whole journey as well- alone and with a pit in her stomach worried about Sophia. We don’t see her arrive at the vision pool and see Sophia under the water, we don’t see her heart sink when she has the thought that Sophia might be drowning. And then afterwards, after they fight, we don’t see Ava making the dangerous journey back to the academy alone again, this time with the feeling that Sophia hates her and blames her for ripping her away from the first time she’s seen her dad in five years. And then we find out that the only one on Ava’s side is Rory??? It makes me sick to my STOMACHHH

Other polls have found Tumblr users to be mostly 18-45 so here's a poll to get into the grit of that range.

non sexual intimacy!!!! bathing together, washing each other, playing with each other's hair, kissing every inch of their body, writing love letters on their back with your finger, connecting their moles and freckles to create constellations on their skin, running your hands up and down their thighs, ugh just expressing physical love without it having to be about sex!!!!

what i want: romance as horror

what i get: horror as romance

its "queer subtext" this "queer subtext" that until its aromantic subtext then its fucking CRICKETS from everyone. embarrassing

Wish more people understood the difference between "shipping this aro character because i want to explore their aromanticism and where they stand in the spectrum" and "shipping this aro character because i don't care about their orientation".

“Some aros date!” Yeah well some aros will also rip your head off and dissolve you in acid but your not counting them are you

the coolest people are actually weird and fucked up and strange and peculiar and they just dont care. the coolest people are actually lame as hell and they rock it. this is what ive learned

the coolest people are cringe and free

Teeth are bullshit. What do you mean you’re decaying. Get a fucking grip. You’re a bone now act like it. You don’t see my finger bones decaying from jerking it too much now do you