There’s a weirdly good episode of American Dad, where aforementioned dad (an FBI agent or something) starts gaining weight, and keeps gaining weight no matter what he does.
Partway through the episode the perspective flips and you see he’s actually skeletal.
This struck me as a much better portrayal of anorexia than most, because it showed you the inside view. Subjectively anorexia is not (always) about being thin and wanting to be thinner, it’s about being disgustingly fat and everyone else arguing with you about it, probably because they want you to be ugly.
Magic of Recluce is that for ADHD (Inattentive type). Sometimes ADHD is seeing a bunch of things everyone else can do and knowing it should be easy and getting mad at yourself for finding it hard. I think this is the part that gets covered more often, and that non-ADHD people have the easiest time empathizing with, because they are also frustrated with you for forgetting your paperwork.
But sometimes ADHD is other people getting ridiculously hung up on the smallest fucking details, things that they can’t possibly actually care about. No matter how hard you work they’ll always find something because there are no actual rules, they’re just looking for things to yell about. And they take forever to say anything why can’t they just answer the g-ddamned question.
So far Recluce is otherwise a pretty standard fantasy novel, interesting only if you’re a fan of the genre. I’m not, but nothing else has captured my frustration with work so perfectly.
“
And they take forever to say anything why can’t they just answer the g-ddamned question.”
Okay, so it never occurred to me that this is a part of ADHD and seeing someone say it like that suddenly makes me feel less bad for all the times I get frustrated with how much everyone else in the world seems to just ramble their way to any answer to any question. Like…. I didn’t realize that was a part of my brain? IDK. I just always assumed it was people being dodgy and not wanted to answer me about things, or not actually knowing the answer and hoping that if they talk long enough preambling their way to it they can think of a plausible lie. Does that mean that other people don’t actually realize how long they can take to get to their point?
I mean, I assume they think they’re taking the correct amount of time and don’t realize how incredibly disrespectful it is not to distill all your thoughts into their purest essence before opening your mouth and consuming other people’s time.
Ironically I stopped reading the book because I couldn’t take another page of the protagonist describing the city’s stonework. It’s unclear if that was intentional by the author or not. The group scenes were just incredibly amateurish so they’d run out of cred with me.
But sometimes ADHD is other people getting ridiculously hung up on the
smallest fucking details, things that they can’t possibly actually care
about. No matter how hard you work they’ll always find something
because there are no actual rules, they’re just looking for things to
yell about. And they take forever to say anything why can’t they just answer the g-ddamned question.
…
I mean, I assume they think they’re taking the correct amount of time
and don’t realize how incredibly disrespectful it is not to distill all
your thoughts into their purest essence before opening your mouth and
consuming other people’s time.
A few days ago: Trump said we needed to be more concerned about Muslim immigrants because of “what’s happening in Sweden right now”. Everyone made fun of him because nothing was, in fact, happening in Sweden at the time.
The moral of the story is: if you value your life, get out of Bowling Green, Kentucky right now.
I feel like until about one year ago I almost never heard anything from “leftists” as opposed to “liberals”. EG if I heard someone making fun of “liberals”, I would assume with 99% certainty that they were a conservative. I would occasionally see communists, but they would be clearly labeled, not identify as “leftists”, and their outgroup would be “capitalists” and not “liberals” per se.
Now I encounter leftists who attack liberals all the time.
Have I just moved up in the world, or has there been a big change in leftists’ numbers/visibility?
hey parents: there is literally no non-abusive reason a person would want the ability to read someone’s emails, track their location, and go through their calls and text messages without their knowledge or consent.
I want to address the person who tagged this “what if they’re missing??”
what
this does is allow you to set up a list of people who are able to
request your location. when they do so, you have five minutes to either
refuse or grant the request. if you don’t respond within five minutes,
the request is automatically accepted, in case you’re hurt or otherwise
unable to get to your phone. your trusted contacts can also see how
recently you used your device.
in other words: if someone
genuinely wants to know if you’re okay, they can check the app and see
that you’ve used your phone five minutes ago, and that can be the end of
it. if they want to be doubly sure, or it says you haven’t used your phone recently, they can request your location. if
you want them to know where you are, or you can’t answer, they’ll have
your exact location within five minutes. if you don’t want them to know
where you are, you click deny, and they still see that you got the
request and responded to it, meaning, again, they know you’re okay. this is safety with accountability: you can’t track someone’s location without their consent unless they fail to respond to the notification, and you can’t do it without them knowing about it.
if you want to track a friend or loved one for genuine safety reasons, set this up. it gives you all the access you need if your concern is actually for the other person’s well-being, rather than a desire for control. (it’s not out for iOS yet, but Google says that’s coming soon).
(also: don’t be the jackass that makes a rule that someone has to accept all your location requests because that makes you just as bad as the people who install tracking shit covertly.)
It’s not abusive in any way for a parent to want to know where their underage child is and who they’re talking to, and saying so is a foul misuse of the term “abuse”.
anyway like I said there is literally no non-abusive reason a person would want the ability to read someone’s emails, track their location, and go through their calls and text messages without their knowledge or consent
I’m glad you live in a world where adults don’t groom kids on the net, or by calling them or sending them text messages.
I live in this world:
a world where parents are an order of magnitude more dangerous to children than “adults grooming them on the internet”, and giving parents unchecked powers of surveillance is for that reason alone more likely to put kids at risk than to keep them safe.
I live in this world:
a world where the psychologically debilitating effects of surveillance are well-established and well-known, yet adults do everything in their power to invade young people’s privacy and then ask dumbass questions like “why are kids so anxious?” and come up with answers like “it’s probably because of selfies”
I live in this world:
a world where invasion of privacy is recognized as an integral part of emotional abuse, but parents still get away with it because “they’re just doing it to keep them safe uwu~”, despite the fact that this is the same line the goddamn NSA gives us and most of us don’t take that sack of lies from them.
tldr, I live in a world where you’re not just wrong, you’re promoting attitudes that are actively harmful and you need to sit down, shut up, and listen when people are trying to educate you about issues of justice and safety.
Slaaaaaay
I remember my first foray into child psychiatry.
My patient was this teenager with a history of behavioral problems. He complained that his family didn’t trust him and monitored everything he did. I sympathized, said that this must be really hard, and that no wonder he was acting out. I had a conversation with the kid and his parents, I told the parents I thought that their overprotectiveness was inappropriate and contributing to their child’s issues, and told them that if they cooperated with him by treating him more maturely, he would cooperate with them by acting more maturely.
A few days later, I called the parents to ask how the son was doing. “We don’t know,” they said. “He disappeared and we haven’t heard from him in days.” Later we learned that he had run off with some people, gone on a multi-day drug binge, and ended up in the hospital.
This was the last time I let my self-righteousness get away from me by lecturing parents on how they were bad people for watching over their kids too closely before I was really sure I knew all the details.
Just a reminder that the first NASA astronauts were supposed to be women because generally they are smaller, lighter (less weight in the cockpit means less fuel required) and eat less than men and so would be easier to accommodate in space.
Both men and women trained (and many of the female finalists had higher scores than the men), but they were completely excluded from the final selection because of their gender.
13 women underwent final training, all were accomplished pilots with at least 1000 hours flying experience, all passed the necessary tests, all could have been astronauts if only they were afforded the opportunity.
[below, Jerrie Cobb photographed during testing]
They are collectively known as the Mercury 13, there’s a great blog entry about them here and a brilliant PBS documentary too.
Their names are Myrtle Cagle, Jerrie Cobb, Janet Dietrich, Marion Dietrich, Wally Funk, Sarah Gorelick, Jane “Janey” Hart, Jean Hixson, Rhea Hurrle, Gene Nora Stumbough, Irene Leverton, Jerri Sloan and Bernice Steadman. They should be remembered and celebrated for their role in the history of space exploration.
It wasn’t until 2 decades later that Sally Ride became the first woman in space in 1983.
7 of the surviving members of the Mercury 13 are pictured below, 33 years later in 1995.
Just a reminder that, like every story of this sort on Tumblr, this is completely false.
The first NASA astronauts were supposed to be men from the beginning. As soon as the astronaut program was started, Eisenhower declared that all astronauts had to be trained military test pilots; at the time, all these pilots were men. No women were ever considered.
After all the (male) Mercury astronauts had been selected, a former NASA consultant no longer affiliated with the organization, Dr. William Lovelace, became curious about how women would do on some of the same astronaut tests. Outside NASA he arranged to have some female aviators privately tested. They did well (though I can’t find any evidence they did “better than the men” and the tests were more about seeing how people’s bodies responded to the stress of space than some kind of competition). Dr. Lovelace publicized his results and Congress held some hearings about whether maybe having only male astronauts was discriminatory. Everyone told Congress that the women involved had no experience flying jet aircraft and no engineering degrees, both of which were requirements for all astronauts. Congress said okay, fine and didn’t take the issue any further.
At no point did any of the women take the official tests, work for NASA, or meet the requirements for NASA training.
Celestine Omin is a Nigerian software engineer who works for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s company Andela, founded to give talented African coders an entree into the leading American tech firms; this week, he flew to the USA on a B1/B2 visa to meet with the company, but he found himself detained at the border.
The CBP guards who detained Omin after his 24-hour flight were skeptical that he was a real software engineer. They apparently googled “quizzes to give to software engineers” and told him to answer ten questions (e.g. “Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced” and “What is an abstract class, and why do you need it?”) to gain entry into the country.
The ordeal ended when a CBP officer called Andela and confirmed that Omin was an engineer.
creeping dystopia, but I gotta say I wish border guards would give me a pop quiz like that, I’d love it and I’d bore them to tears
My dad’s a philosopher and has been quizzed on philosophy by border guards before. And while I haven’t gotten the full-on quiz treatment, I usually get something along the lines of “why are you going to [location?]” “Study abroad.” “Oh, what are you studying?” “Math.” “What kind of math?” “Number theory and combinatorics.” “Cool; have a great day!”
My dad, like me, is about as white as you can get (something like sixth-generation Irish-German Americans), so I’m not at all convinced this is a race thing. I was under the impression it was pretty common, when entering under a visa for a specific purpose, to be asked a couple of pseudo-small-talk questions about it to see if you have suspicious trouble answering or are otherwise Acting Oddly, and occasionally given a more thorough quiz.
Honestly, this seems like a pretty reasonable way of doing something that isn’t racial profiling, while still letting the guards feel like they are Doing Something (and possibly even Actually Doing Something, who knows); someone who’s traveling legitimately won’t have a problem answering “what is an abstract class” or “name a major work of Kant” or the equivalent for their work visa, while someone who isn’t will be lost.
(Of course, you’re going to get some false positives. My dad is amazingly bad at this sort of screening. Once they asked him ‘where are you coming from’ and he couldn’t decide whether to say ‘the US’ or ‘Texas’ and stood there contemplating for an extended period of time. The guards, reasonably enough, found this somewhat suspicious, and he got a pretty extensive grilling before they let him go through.)
I’m having a great time imagining them trying to quiz your father on philosophy. “Oh, you say you’re a philosopher, eh? Well, if you’re really a philosopher, then you’ll be able to explain to me how internal symbols can be grounded in external reality without requiring an infinite regress of mediating mental entities.”
William Jones, who first used the symbol π (pi) to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter was the father of William Jones, who first posited the existence of the language that became known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
That’s as good an excuse as any to eat PIE pie on March 14th.
- if they do not like that you research your disorder/s and treatment/s - if they do not explain the reason/s behind certain treatment/medication that they are prescribing you - if they are reluctant/refuse to let you access your medical records - if their first response to symptoms is medication without any talk therapy - if they say they “don’t believe in therapy” - if they say they “don’t believe in medication” - if they insist on seeing your parent/legal guardian without you being present - if they tell you that there are no other treatment available if you complain about your current treatment/medication not working/having unmanageable side effects - if they diagnose you without explaining how they came to that diagnosis, what it entails, and which treatments you have at your disposal - if they fall asleep during a session (you’re laughing but it happened, several times, and i’m not boring) - if they assure you that you cannot have [insert disorder here] because you are too young/wealthy/poor/fat/skinny/smiling/old/whatever bs (the only valid reasons for not having a disorder is if you do not meet the minimum criteria for it, age/body/ethnicity/etc are not criteria) - if they tell you that you obviously do not want/are not ready to get help (that’s a super abusive technique, would only see this as a valid comment to make if you are pressured into seeing them by someone who has authority over you) - if they insist on you continuing to take a medication despite the side effects very negatively affecting you (for example: if you are recovering from an ED and you get the “gaining weight” side effect and that is very triggering to you) - if they are flippant about/disregard your feelings
i’m probably forgetting a lot. feel free to add.
if you go in explaining that you are concerned you have certain symptoms and they try to “reassure” you that they do not think you have [some scary disorder] instead of looking at it neutrally and having an open and fair discussion about it and consider your words seriously.
if they use vague language about treatment options that they aren’t willing to elaborate on, or provide specific plans of action for. (ideally, with most conditions and illnesses, they should give you a variety of options and freedom to have input regarding your treatment options, hear out your opinions and concerns, answer questions about them etc.)
they use outdated language for your condition or are not aware of or concerned with recent laws and regulations regarding them. (for example, they use terms like “multiple personality disorder” instead of DID, etc.)
if you are trans, they consider your identity to be a delusion or other kind of symptom. (similar goes for orientation probably.)
if they consider you standing up for yourself to be irrational/acting out/being manipulative
caveat: both me and a friend were banned from doing research by our therapists. This was the correct move for people who use intellectual research as an avoidance strategy for the work of feeling unpleasant emotions. But if that’s not you than being banned from research probably is a bad sign..
The only one that really bothers me here is:
they use outdated language for your condition or are not aware of or
concerned with recent laws and regulations regarding them. (for example,
they use terms like “multiple personality disorder” instead of DID,
etc.)
DSM is on a constant crusade to change the name of every condition, every edition, to something silly that no one will ever remember. “Dementia” is now “Major Neurocognitive Disorder”. “Stuttering” is “Childhood Onset Fluency Disorder”. Can you imagine using those in real life?
Me: “I’m so sorry, Ms. Smith, but your grandmother seems to be developing an early Major Neurocognitive Disorder.”
Patient: “…a what?”
Me: “Did I fucking childhood onset fluency disorder?”