@Sarah Brown I had the same issue this morning. I fixed it by disabling the Smiley Button addon. I meant to post about the issue, but got distracted and it didn't happen.
Welcome to Operation Pastel de Nata. The third and final annual instalment of our epic adventure where we move out boat, Scarlet, to Portugal. The first phase 2 years ago was Operation Oui Oui Baguette where we moved from Gosport in the Solent to Quiberon in France. We had hoped to make it to La Rochelle but we had an engine fire at Quiberon and overwintered there to make repairs.
Then last year we departed Quiberon in Operation Churro and went via La Rochelle and Hendaye before crossing into Spain before making our way to Bilbao. We had wanted to go further but all of us had the inconvenience of being diagnosed with ADHD and having to titrate stimulant medication and so we set off very late in the season, and the Biscay weather turned.
Now we depart Bilbao and head west. Today’s goal is a short hop to Laredo where we will shelter from a local weather phenomenon for a few hours before setting off in the dark for Gijon. We hope to make A Coruña next week and then have a bit of a breather before returning and heading for the Portuguese border. That part is a
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Welcome to Operation Pastel de Nata. The third and final annual instalment of our epic adventure where we move out boat, Scarlet, to Portugal. The first phase 2 years ago was Operation Oui Oui Baguette where we moved from Gosport in the Solent to Quiberon in France. We had hoped to make it to La Rochelle but we had an engine fire at Quiberon and overwintered there to make repairs.
Then last year we departed Quiberon in Operation Churro and went via La Rochelle and Hendaye before crossing into Spain before making our way to Bilbao. We had wanted to go further but all of us had the inconvenience of being diagnosed with ADHD and having to titrate stimulant medication and so we set off very late in the season, and the Biscay weather turned.
Now we depart Bilbao and head west. Today’s goal is a short hop to Laredo where we will shelter from a local weather phenomenon for a few hours before setting off in the dark for Gijon. We hope to make A Coruña next week and then have a bit of a breather before returning and heading for the Portuguese border. That part is a race against time before the Iberian orcas migrate north and make the Rias of Galicia too dangerous to pass until next year.
If we can get to Vigo before the orcas arrive (July ish, maybe), then we should be good. Otherwise we are stuck until next year.
This is your crew, Sarah, Zoe and Jess signing off. Wish us luck!
This is a protocol for assigning IP addresses to clients on a network. It is very advanced and better than every other one because I started working on this last week and I already understand it really well.
The server: Upon receipt of a request from the client it will respond, "In a bit, just doing a thing", or maybe it won't. Then the client will ask again 5 minutes later and the server will cry because it thinks the client hates it. Eventually, just before the client times out, the server will provide an IPv4 address, netmask, router, and DNS information. It might be the same address issued to the previous client because it was done in a hurry and its didn't edit the copy and paste. Look, IT'S AN ADDRESS, OK?
The client: Upon joining the network the client will request an address. Or maybe it won't. Maybe it'll get round to doing that thing in 6 months but it will get to it because it's important. Requests are sent by just talking on the network. You have to interrupt because oh my god the other
This is a protocol for assigning IP addresses to clients on a network. It is very advanced and better than every other one because I started working on this last week and I already understand it really well.
The server: Upon receipt of a request from the client it will respond, "In a bit, just doing a thing", or maybe it won't. Then the client will ask again 5 minutes later and the server will cry because it thinks the client hates it. Eventually, just before the client times out, the server will provide an IPv4 address, netmask, router, and DNS information. It might be the same address issued to the previous client because it was done in a hurry and its didn't edit the copy and paste. Look, IT'S AN ADDRESS, OK?
The client: Upon joining the network the client will request an address. Or maybe it won't. Maybe it'll get round to doing that thing in 6 months but it will get to it because it's important. Requests are sent by just talking on the network. You have to interrupt because oh my god the other clients won't let you get a word in edgeways and also you were going to request an address when they did ages ago and they never gave you the chance and now they're all downloading porn instead. This is why you don't go to bars. They don't care about your IP allocation. They probably find you annoying and hate you.
IPv6: Yeah, should probably sort that. Probably only take 5 minutes. What are "SLAAC" and "ULA" anyway? Look, I have to go watch some YouTube videos about closed railway stations and also dinosaurs. STOP PRESSURING ME.
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What with having to provide all the extra space for segregated toilets (and build in space for expanding the regime) some retailers won’t have any room left for merchandise. The only protected characteristic I didn’t have room to offend was ‘religious belief’
One massive Unisex loo in every premises. Problem solved. The queues will be long, and every business should be obliged to have one large lockable room with wash hand basin, toilet, and all the facilities for able & disabled people. It is an offence to urinate in public, so the government must ensure there are toilet facilities available for all who need to use them. How many of those objecting have segregated loos in their own homes? I bet none of them have. #TransRights
@HarriettMB All the loos in my house are designated transgender and, since the law is symmetrical, cisgender visitors are shown the back garden with its many private bushes.
@jackeric But discrimination against men is OK? How very odd. And nothing in that document protects people who are born intersex. A baby appearing visually genitally male or female at birth is probably the worst possible way to identify and control that child’s life forever.
@2legged I think a lot of buildings are now going to find there is not enough space for variations of single sex space - men, women, disabled, people with kids etc. That would really upset the #TERF, and I’m totally on board with every premises having one large self-contained lockable unit that can facilitate anyone who needs to use it.
@HarriettMB @2legged My observation is that folks manage to make gendered toilets out of whatever they’re given. In 2010 NHS NW moved from one side of Piccadilly Station to the other, in gleaming new open plan, adaptable environmentally friendly offices. Each floor had two lines of self-contained toilets meeting the latest standard but, on the day we moved in, our floor had already designated one row for men and one for women with handwritten signs blutacked to the wall.
Behold clever hidden shoe rack in the Airbnb I’m in being defeated by ADHD “not actually lack of object permanence but please let me SEE my things” fail.
So War of the Worlds is like, what if the Martian version of Elon Musk planned an invasion of Earth?
You have like, 4th millennium tech including collimated fusion directed energy weapons (read Stephen Baxter’s sequel, “The Massacre of Mankind”. It’s really good), and yet you lose two of your assets to a TORPEDO RAM ironclad; a ship so tactically useless that they built one ever and then tried to forget about the whole thing …
… and then you half arse the prep for the advance landing party because the experts who told you that Earth’s microbiome will FUCKING DIGEST YOU if you don’t take precautions is too woke.
What led me down this rabbit hole was wondering why street speed is racemic when pharmaceutical dexamphetamine for ADHD is made by triple reduction of l-phenylalanine, which is really similar to how those zany yanks make meth from Sudafed, only with fewer explosions and cut with lactose monohydrate instead of Persil.
And figured the street guys were probably somehow attaching benzene to isopropylamine.
Which would give you racemic amphetamine (janky shit like Adderall. What is it with the US and their “we found this in a crack house but it’ll probably help” approach to ADHD meds) but also MAYBE 2-phenyl 2–aminopropane.
Which is not chiral but also a structural isomer of amphetamine and I have absolutely no idea what it does.
You mentioning the triple reduction here was eye-opening for me: I was today years old (as they say) before I recognized that.
But then again, I went through a lot of time in my previous life as a chemist studiously ignoring most pharmaceutical chemistry as a series of rabbit holes that didn't interest me. I'm getting over that, now, and paying catch-up, but in a much more informal way.
@like jam or bootlaces Obvious when you think about it. Phenylalanine is just phenethylamine with methanoic acid on the alpha carbon.
So a single reduction turns it into an aldehyde
Double into an alcohol
And triple into ... well just methane
At which point it's literally just amphetamine.
And you make dexamphetamine from levophenylalanine because I guess the priority between the amino and carboxylic acid functional groups is the other way round to methyl and amino.
Reform has strongly refuted claims that its local election candidates were poorly vetted, following revelations that newly elected Essex County councillor Darren Pinhead was an extra-dimensional de…
My only recommendation besides more frequent dyeing is ... If you're only using Elvive shampoo, buy the conditioner too. I found the conditioner really helps, seal it in, kinda. I know, thin hair, conditioner bad, heavy, but it does help somehow. Maybe an extra day or two
So an internet phenomenon I've encountered is the person who thinks that ADHD is being diagnosed willy-nilly, and that everyone is "seeking labels these days", and that "doctors hand out meds if you go in and say that you can't concentrate"
Let's just examine this for a moment.
I've said it often enough but I didn't realise before I got diagnosed and medicated what ADHD meds actually are.
We all love to joke that they're speed, and when I first saw diagnosed ADHDers talking about their "legal speed", I assumed they were being hyperbolic.
They/we are not. Speed, for most of the world, is amphetamine: Wizz. Billy. Poor man's cocaine. Dexys. Call it what you will.
The current state of the art in ADHD treatment is Elvanse (Vyvanse in the US). This is the only custom designed second generation ADHD drug on the market. It is lisdexamphetamine dimesylate.
"Ah, so it's not speed! It's some weird derivative!"
Well no.
I mean, fair enough, a LOT of medicine is substituted amphetamines. Sudafed contains pseudoephedrine which is Beta Hydroxy N-m
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So an internet phenomenon I've encountered is the person who thinks that ADHD is being diagnosed willy-nilly, and that everyone is "seeking labels these days", and that "doctors hand out meds if you go in and say that you can't concentrate"
Let's just examine this for a moment.
I've said it often enough but I didn't realise before I got diagnosed and medicated what ADHD meds actually are.
We all love to joke that they're speed, and when I first saw diagnosed ADHDers talking about their "legal speed", I assumed they were being hyperbolic.
They/we are not. Speed, for most of the world, is amphetamine: Wizz. Billy. Poor man's cocaine. Dexys. Call it what you will.
The current state of the art in ADHD treatment is Elvanse (Vyvanse in the US). This is the only custom designed second generation ADHD drug on the market. It is lisdexamphetamine dimesylate.
"Ah, so it's not speed! It's some weird derivative!"
Well no.
I mean, fair enough, a LOT of medicine is substituted amphetamines. Sudafed contains pseudoephedrine which is Beta Hydroxy N-methyl amphetamine, for example, and you don't get Jarvis Cocker writing songs about being sorted for lemsip.
But no. Lisdex, as we like to call it, is a prodrug. It converts in the blood to dexamphetamine, which is the most potent of the two amphetamine stereo isomers. It's delayed release speed, basically.
And then after mine runs out (I start the say on 70mg lisdex), I then take, usually, 10mg of dexampetamine and then 10mg more a few hours later. Dexamphetamine is pure, pharmaceutical grade, speed.
In the United States, they have a drug you have probably heard of called "Adderall". This is a 3 parts to 1 part mix of dexamphetamine and levoamphetamine. Levo is the other isomer. It's not as effective, has more side effects, but I believe it had a longer half life. Ostensibly they added it for that. In reality, it was for patent reasons.
Adderall is much closer to street speed (which is 50/50, typically). The US also has an ADHD drug of "last resort" called Desoxyn.
Desoxyn is methamphetamine. Straight up meth. As in Breaking Bad. That one. They prescribe it. To people with ADHD.
The other main drug used is methylphenidate, which was discovered by a Swiss chemist in the 19th century who promptly named it after his wife, who everyone called Rita. Methylphenidate is Ritalin. Like amphetamine, it is a central nervous system stimulant but possibly not as potent (this point is complicated). Call it a speed tribute act.
So that's point one. The FIRST LINE treatment for ADHD in much of the world is speed. Literal speed. I have taken in every day for nearly 13 months now. I am on speed writing this right now. It's making me feel a bit sleepy.
So the second point: ADHD is one of THE most objectively testable mental health conditions. Quite possibly the most testable.
You can do a thing called a "continuous performance task" (I did one as part of my diagnosis), and what's really cool is that you can do these on a computer, in a web browser. Mine took 21 minutes, and the webcam watched my eyes while I did it.
People without ADHD describe these as "a bit zen" or "quite relaxing really".
After 10 minutes I was sobbing.
After 15 I was trying to claw my face off.
After it finished, I was basically shaking from trauma and drank an entire bottle of wine. That was the last time I was drunk. 14 months ago.
In my subsequent diagnosis appointment it turns out I redlined it. They are designed to torture ADHD brains and we tend to utterly suck at them. They are not perfect. They produce false negatives, bur rarely false positives.
And after that there is the diagnostic interview, which is called DIVA V. You are interviewed by a clinician who not only listens to your answers but evaluates HOW you give them and your manner while doing so. You can train a nurse practitioner to administer DIVA V in a weekend. It's not hard. It's a standardised questionnaire to diagnose adult ADHD and you have to hit a certain number of categories out of 18 in adulthood, and the same 18 in childhood, to be diagnosed. 9 are for inattention, 9 are for hyperactivity. I think you need like, 6 in each for childhood and maybe 5 for adulthood? Can't remember. So like, 12:10
I was 18:18
What's the point of all this? Well, standardised and pretty reliable testing regime (be nice if people actually used it rather than telling people they can't have ADHD because they have one of "A-Levels" or "Tits"), and the treatment is speed. Wizz, as in sorted for.
And yet these eejits live in a world where you can apparently just waltz into a GP office, tell them you're easily distracted, and walk out with a script for "some profoundly good shit".
And I'm like ... how is it that they think drug dealers still exist?
(Oh, and if you're interested in the CPT test thing, and we know each other decently, HMU in DMs)
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woo red zone. I have to redo that test and i'm putting it off. Because halfway through I started mentally wandering off, wondering wtf am I doing, training to be a drone? Why the hell do I want to be that.
The stuff I got from the NHS was so horrific and not DIVA-5 based at all. No wonder they "couldn't" diagnose me.
eh I have to do the test via the people whose care I'm under unfortunately. And maybe the meds will make it less torturous. I think that's the theory. Some measurable improvement.
More thoughts on ADHD medication, specifically amphetamine, after a year.
Like lots of people, I started them and BANG! Neo waking in his pod in The Matrix. Life changing. The scales fell from my eyes. I suddenly understood. It all made sense. The stuff I found so incredibly difficult for half a century and other people could just ... do it?
I wept.
"Don't chase the high", they all warn. What does that mean?
About 4-6 weeks later I had an argument with Zoe. I felt some of the old behaviours creeping back in. What? Why is that happening?
Then I started to go to bed late again, and procrastinate, and some of the other stuff. Not all though, I kept the place clean. The piles of clothes never came back. I was still getting relief from sensory issues.
And each new titration dose brought it all back.
Until titration stopped, and I was on my final dose.
And it slipped, slowly, it slipped.
Why did it slip? "Tolerance! You have become tolerant to amphetamine! Take a meds holiday!", they all chant.
I tried. I got as far as 3pm befo
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More thoughts on ADHD medication, specifically amphetamine, after a year.
Like lots of people, I started them and BANG! Neo waking in his pod in The Matrix. Life changing. The scales fell from my eyes. I suddenly understood. It all made sense. The stuff I found so incredibly difficult for half a century and other people could just ... do it?
I wept.
"Don't chase the high", they all warn. What does that mean?
About 4-6 weeks later I had an argument with Zoe. I felt some of the old behaviours creeping back in. What? Why is that happening?
Then I started to go to bed late again, and procrastinate, and some of the other stuff. Not all though, I kept the place clean. The piles of clothes never came back. I was still getting relief from sensory issues.
And each new titration dose brought it all back.
Until titration stopped, and I was on my final dose.
And it slipped, slowly, it slipped.
Why did it slip? "Tolerance! You have become tolerant to amphetamine! Take a meds holiday!", they all chant.
I tried. I got as far as 3pm before I couldn't stand the bullshit.
Thing is, the evidence that drugs tolerance to therapeutic doses of amphetamine in ADHD even develops is ... dubious. There's a great video by Russell Barkly on this, here: youtu.be/RbZjL7czIy0?si=6xHaoY…
It's not though. I worked out what has happened, and it's fine.
Unmedicated, undiagnosed ADHD is marked by horrible disregulated emotions (more severe in the combined (me) and hyperactive forms I believe), non existent executive functioning, difficulty focusing, and yada yada.
It is, in a nutshell, "really bloody awful".
If you think you have ADHD but are undiagnosed, you possibly just read that and felt like a fraud, didn't you? "But I don't feel that awful!"
How do you KNOW? You have never known any different.
Because here's the thing. You grow up with this crap and you start to mask it, because you HAVE to.
But masking and coping strategies are profoundly psychologically expensive. They destroy us with burnout run the long run.
So we mask to the point where we can more or less make it through the day, and no more.
And it's a pretty sodding miserable existence (Yes, it really is, yes, for you, person reading this wth "some traits". Lots of stuff you accept as a normal part of being human simply is not. I know you don't believe me, even if you think you do. I wouldn't have believed me either).
And then we get diagnosed.
And medicated.
It. Goes. Away.
It all goes away.
Annnnnnnnd breathe!
You are suddenly Mr Spock. You are impervious to your emotions. You can just DO STUFF! You CAN clean the house and you DO and you ENJOY IT! What witchcraft is this?
"I'm cured! Why did nobody tell me about this?" (We did. You ignored us)
You also aren't cured. You still have ADHD.
Your emotions are still there.
You still have executive dysfunction,.
You still struggle to focus.
All of it. It didn't go away.
You just can't hear it.
Why? Because ... well, you are outside and it's stupid sodding bright, and loud. Insanely loud.
And you've been out there for hours.
Then you come into a dim room which is quiet. You can't see anything, you can't hear anything. It's all there though, just below your level of sensitivity.
A few month later when stuff starts coming back and you conclude the meds are failing? They aren't. Your eyes are adjusting to the dark.
Here's another metaphor: A shelled of water has been dumped on a landscape, continually, over thousands of years. It carves out a basin. It finds its level. Water always finds its level.
Move it to the side and it will flow back into the basin it carved. And so it is with us. We start meds and the level of effort we have always applied to make it through the day, which was borderline killing us, suddenly makes it STUPIDLY EASY.
Borderline killing us. Still is.
So you start to dismantle your big expensive coping strategies, because they were hurting you.
You dismantle them until ... well, you start to approach the level of functionality, or rather disfunctionality that you are used to. And then you stop.
Because water finds its level.
You conclude they aren't working, so you take a meds break and OH MY GOD IT'S HORRIBLE.
What the hell is going on? You turned the bloody difficulty knob up to max again. That's what the hell is going on.
After a week you start meds again, and they magically work! IT WAS TOLERANCE ALL ALONG!
No it wasn't, you muppet. You just started to match your effort to the difficulty level again.
You can get trapped in this cycle.
Or you can realise that you deserve a rest, you've had a rest, and that's nice. Now get up and do your goddam laundry, which is a thing you can do, and is still far easier than it ever was.
@Heather 👻 @Zoë O'Connell I have noticed people with inattentive ADHD tend to have a very different response to meds than the two hyperactive types, but it's a limited sample size.
I have been on meds for 4 years now and have gotten past the question of does it still work? Any time I have questioned and stopped taking them, I have lasted no more than 3 days before I’m crying and screaming to have them again. My biggest symptom relief is RSD. They still work amazingly well.
But your post has reminded me that I live in a house that is tidier than it would have been in the past. And that’s with no conscious effort. Not driven from anxiety. Not from the fear that someone will visit and I need to fix the house so I don’t look like a failure of a person. Sometimes it’s messy, I don’t like it, and I tidy up.
From what I've been told, people get more sensitive to amphetamines over the long term. I dunno any specific studies though. When I went on amphetamines, it was the same year My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic came out, so I can't say which of those two things contributed to my ability to suddenly write a few novels. All I could really feel from the drug was sleep deprivation and a racing heart. I can say now that the show is dead, and I finally got off those awful amphetamines, I have worked on... one new story for the past 6 years, with no ideas for anything more.
I know it’s late but I need to write this down before I forget it.
So here’s a nice rule to live by: I aim to always extend at least as grace to (presumed) neurotypical people as I perceive them to be extending to me, and to work at least as hard to negotiate the double empathy problem as I perceive them to be working.
This seems to me to be more than reasonable, patient, and tolerant.
I’m sure they would agree.
(Which must be true because very learned types have said that people like me don’t understand sarcasm, nor subtext, and they are obviously right)
Having one of those “oh god, the meds don’t work any more. I’m still time blind and distractible and have executive dysfunction. Everything is fucked” drops.
And then I go into my room to get ready for bed past the washing machine that’s running and the dishwasher that has run twice today, been emptied twice, and refilled, under the clean and clutter-free work surface.
The sink does not have a three week old pile of teabags in it.
The bedroom floor when I get there has no clothes on it. My chair has no clothes on it. I know where all my meds are. I have cleaned my teeth twice in the last 24 hours. I take my clothes off and put them away; laundry basket or hung up for reuse.
I stopped doomscrolling to do all that. Consciously. Wilfully.
Also I don’t hate myself. Better even; I like who I am. I’m a good person. And I’m funny, even if my sense of humour is somewhat niche. That just makes it a delicacy.
I haven’t impulse bought stupid shit on Amazon in ages.
And I ate vegetables today. Lots
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Having one of those “oh god, the meds don’t work any more. I’m still time blind and distractible and have executive dysfunction. Everything is fucked” drops.
And then I go into my room to get ready for bed past the washing machine that’s running and the dishwasher that has run twice today, been emptied twice, and refilled, under the clean and clutter-free work surface.
The sink does not have a three week old pile of teabags in it.
The bedroom floor when I get there has no clothes on it. My chair has no clothes on it. I know where all my meds are. I have cleaned my teeth twice in the last 24 hours. I take my clothes off and put them away; laundry basket or hung up for reuse.
I stopped doomscrolling to do all that. Consciously. Wilfully.
Also I don’t hate myself. Better even; I like who I am. I’m a good person. And I’m funny, even if my sense of humour is somewhat niche. That just makes it a delicacy.
I haven’t impulse bought stupid shit on Amazon in ages.
And I ate vegetables today. Lots of them.
My total alcohol consumption for 2026 is: 2 units. At no point in the last 12 months have I ever been illegal to drive.
And when someone gets upset, I don’t assume it’s about me.
So yeah. Don’t forget where you came from. Sometimes it’s too easy to do that.
OK, gonna preface this by asking you to read to th end before judging.
It's been more than a year now and initially my experience of diagnosis was very much, "I hate this thing and would love it to go away".
And to be fair, I still hate this thing and would love it to go away. But it isn't going to.
However, this did colour my views of the terms "neurodivergent" and "neurodiverse", because while I saw the former as simply descriptive, and largely value neutral: my neurology is an outlier, the latter seemed to normalise what I very definitely experience as pathology and sometimes even want to celebrate it.
And I don't want to celebrate the way my own nervous system torments me constantly, nor do I seek to regard that as "just another equally valid way of being that's no worse than any other", because it is objectively worse.
My nervous system torments me. That's not a good thing.
BUT:
I find my position evolving quite a lot more nuance. One of the things I've been doing for the last year is therapy. I had loads of therapy before but this ti
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OK, gonna preface this by asking you to read to th end before judging.
It's been more than a year now and initially my experience of diagnosis was very much, "I hate this thing and would love it to go away".
And to be fair, I still hate this thing and would love it to go away. But it isn't going to.
However, this did colour my views of the terms "neurodivergent" and "neurodiverse", because while I saw the former as simply descriptive, and largely value neutral: my neurology is an outlier, the latter seemed to normalise what I very definitely experience as pathology and sometimes even want to celebrate it.
And I don't want to celebrate the way my own nervous system torments me constantly, nor do I seek to regard that as "just another equally valid way of being that's no worse than any other", because it is objectively worse.
My nervous system torments me. That's not a good thing.
BUT:
I find my position evolving quite a lot more nuance. One of the things I've been doing for the last year is therapy. I had loads of therapy before but this time I had specific requirements.
I wanted a therapist who was: female, late diagnosed ADHD, LGBT positive, and on stimulant medication.
And there are reasons for all of these, but the ones that may not be immediately obvious are why she needed to be late diagnosed and on stimulants.
It's because I didn't want to have a recurring expense while I talked to someone weekly for an hour a time during which I spent large fractions of that hour having stuff pushed at me that I KNOW DOES NOT WORK, and having to argue the toss.
I needed commonality of reference.
Let me give you an example: mindfulness meditation. I can't. Don't reply to this saying that I just have to practice, or I haven't found my thing. I can't do it. Any form of metacognition while I'm in the unmedicated state results in setting off an ADHD thought chain that starts ruminating on metacognition, which ruminates on rumination on metacognition, which ruminates on ruminates on STACK OVERFLOW! CORE DUMPED!
Or in common parlance, "it gives me a right fucker of a migraine".
That's the unmedicated state (in case it's not clear, stimulant meds aren't like, say, antidepressants where you aim for a constant effect. What you get instead is two modes: medicated and unmedicated, and you will switch from one to the other sometimes as abruptly as under a minute. You can seem to be two different people). I can do mindfulness meditation in the medicated state.
There's just no point that I've discovered to doing that. Useless activity. "Find inner calm!" Um, got it. That's why I am able to count my breaths or some shit. So what?
"Well it's like exercising a muscle, and eventually you'll be able to do it unmedicated"
No I won't, because that MAKES MY SYNAPSES CRASH MY BRAIN, and if it didn't I wouldn't be in the unmedicated state, knobhead.
My therapist asked me, "can you meditate?"
"No"
"Ok, cool. Me neither. Let's do something else"
Easy. "Something else" was reparenting my inner child and it's been crazy effective.
And it helped crystallise something I've been thinking more and more because YouTube has been increasingly pushing pop psychology videos at me and something most of them have in common is this: They present common neurodivergent behaviours as "trauma response", and never once mention neurodivergence.
And yeah, that's exactly why I'm starting to feel that "neurodiversity" is something that I can identify with. Yes, my neurology results in things that are objectively pathological and they never won't be.
But the fact that I'm playing with a Whacky Tracks fidget stim whilst typing this is not one of them. That's harmless, and it doesn't mean "I'm stressed", or that "mummy didn't love me". It just means that I enjoy having something in my hand to fiddle with.
The Fediverse to Bluesky crossposter is gonna have a field day with this one. I wish it the best of luck. If you want to see it unadulterated, try here: thegoatery.dyndns.org/profile/…
Buy The Autistic Survival Guide to Therapy from the publishers with discount code "YoSam20": https://uk.jkp.com/products/the-autistic-survival-guide-to-thera...
My current poppsych irk is Highly Sensitive People.
mate, you're probably ASD on some level.
It doesn't seem to be a proper diagnostic thing, just something someone came up with in the 90s that most/some have somehow accepted as okay.
It's like "indigo child" erugh...
and yea having a nice therapist is good. Mine didn't try to force me to stop rumination when i said it's linked to my (then suspected) ADHD. Which no one had ever said/accepted before.
My youngest was assessed for ADHD by a late-diagnosed woman with ADHD and the assessor thought Youngest had ADHD *but* he doesn't meet the diagnostic criteria because his life is basically optimised for living with ADHD and autism in this household; he has none of the trauma stuff going on at all, and the "fitting into routines that are not going to work for your brain" is absolutely minimised. He'll try again in a few years when there are more obvious problems to see, and when adult diagnosis is an option, and that might get him somewhere.
It's good to see that you know yourself this well, that you can advocate for yourself this way, and you see the pitfalls of pigeonholing you into 'go to' therapies that won't work. (I know of at least three people who dispair every time they meet a new professional who thinks only CBT is appropriate and avaialble.)
I'm also sad that it likely took a long journey for you to reach that position, and that the rest of the world doesn't know what to do with it.
It's one of those ambiguous things like yes, people who are in severe isolation will fidget, and rock in place, and crave ASMR, and weighted blankets. And people who got their legs cut off will not be winning any marathons, but that doesn't mean they have cerebral palsy. All we can measure are the symptoms, but they do not indicate the underlying cause!
I mean it's not that complicated. "Are you severely socially isolated?" "No." "Well you probably have autism, then." But experimentation is definitely needed and any therapist who just falls back on existing studies regardless of the patient ought to have their license revoked.
Some world religions and philosophies have this idea that self hate and suffering is moral, righteous and a good thing to be endured with stoic grace and I am begging my fellow ADHDers to JUST TAKE THE GODDAMN MEDS AND STOP FOUNDING RELIGIONS THAT JUSTIFY DEMENTED DEFAULT MODE NETWORK BULLSHIT.
I'm terrified of my new glasses. I can't even tell you what holds me back, I think a large portion is comfort, but I think another large portion is simply, "...
@Akki I'm risking being controversial here, but I think, for me, waiting for the divine is the problem here; not the deferring to the divine.
In the same way you can't love someone else until you love yourself, the divine isn't temporal, it's not like Green Shield stamps, it's something that has to be nurtured and grown and lived in the moment.
It's this daft idea that life's a kind of mortgage where you make monthly payments of misery to be rewarded by a guy on a cloud when you're dead -- miserable is bad because I get minus-two miserable when I am dead.
It's the usual stupidity of utilitarianism: I am unhappy yet this is right, so there must be an "extra term" in the world's equation to make that good: Heaven Stamps.
Resisting only makes sense if it is rewarded in the divine-eternal-now.
(But often, just do the thing like the video says)
(I know this looks like I'm selling crystals or yoga classes, I don't like talking like this, but I can't come up with a better way of saying how I feel).
ASRS is a screening test for adults to see if it's worth pursuing an ADHD diagnosis. It is 18 questions, written by neurotypical people who assume their external observations of ADHD are accurate representations of what it's like to have it, so needs to be translated into "actual person with ADHD" before you fill it in.
That's why it includes stupid shit like, "do you feel driven by a motor?" No, I do not. Things driven by a motor spin round and round and I do not spin.
And, "Do you have problems remembering appointments" to which everyone responds, "It's 2026 and I have a fucking SMARTPHONE".
So that being the case, I have often thought one written BY ADHDers, FOR ADHDers would be better.
It would include questions like: . "Do you think your friends all dislike you and that you annoy them?" . "Is there a song on repeat in your head? Is it the same 3 bars over and over? It is, isn't it?" . "Your partner says, 'we need to talk'. Do you flee to Antarctica? If not, is that because you got distracted by TVTropes when trying to find out how to
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ASRS is a screening test for adults to see if it's worth pursuing an ADHD diagnosis. It is 18 questions, written by neurotypical people who assume their external observations of ADHD are accurate representations of what it's like to have it, so needs to be translated into "actual person with ADHD" before you fill it in.
That's why it includes stupid shit like, "do you feel driven by a motor?" No, I do not. Things driven by a motor spin round and round and I do not spin.
And, "Do you have problems remembering appointments" to which everyone responds, "It's 2026 and I have a fucking SMARTPHONE".
So that being the case, I have often thought one written BY ADHDers, FOR ADHDers would be better.
It would include questions like: . "Do you think your friends all dislike you and that you annoy them?" . "Is there a song on repeat in your head? Is it the same 3 bars over and over? It is, isn't it?" . "Your partner says, 'we need to talk'. Do you flee to Antarctica? If not, is that because you got distracted by TVTropes when trying to find out how to flee to Antarctica?" . "Do you do the thing with candles? You know the one. Yes you do, stop playing dumb." . "'Right, but you need to show your working' - how much homicide do you want to commit when you read this?" . "How many bottles of ketchup are there in your fridge? Did you have to get up to count?" . "How many are expired?" . "By more than a year?" . "You left the fridge open, didn't you?" . "Which leg is bouncing and why is it always the same one?" . "Do you rehearse conversations in your head before having them?" . "And then get annoyed when the other person doesn't say their correct lines?" . "How long have you managed to lie in bed desperate for a pee without getting up to pee and why is it six hours?" . "Cleaning your teeth twice a day is easy|common|aspirational|not happening|I own a toothbrush?|I own five toothbrushes?|And don't know where any of them are? (delete as applicable)" . "You notice a scab on an easily accessible body part. How many seconds is its life expectancy?" . "Where did you get those bruises? The ones on your legs? You don't know, do you?" . "Rock climbing, knitting, or both?" . "How long have the clothes in the washing machine been there?" . "And is Indiana Jones getting excited about the early Mesopotamian sock layer at the bottom of the pile on your chair?" . "Ikea Skadis. I know, right?"
@Heather 👻 That's not really the point. The things they claim the meds DO NOT help with are literally the things they do help with, regardless of how much.
I kinda disagree because this is one of those subtle differences things and kinda understanding things aren't that clean-cut. I dunno i'm fricken tired tonight.
The meds definitely help a LOT mind you, they just don't fix everything, possibly because those things aren't ADHD things - I wasn't unreliable in those areas before meds either.
yeah that's a big one in my life. Making someone else bleed repeatedly would be way higher on my priority avoids instincts than making myself bleed repeatedly.
You just fix one ND and another peeks out from behind it.
Funnily i got warned about that but my allegedly ASD traits of overloaded by sounds in busy places, like pubs, has gone away with medication. It's like I wasn't displaying autistic traits, I was just very overloaded from ADHD. My actual AQ50 score is around 11. Sooo... 🤷♀️
This is possibly heretical but while IPv6 is hilariously vulnerable to accidental man in the middle attacks (join an IPv4 network, do RAs, oh look, you're everyone's new best friend), I'm otherwise starting to quite like it
@Ailbhe L-phenylalanine is what you get if you take amphetamine and replace the alpha methyl group with formic acid. It's an amino acid that is used as a precursor for all sorts of stuff the body does with substituted phenethylamines. In particular, it makes dopamine from it, via a few extra steps. Raw material basically, It's listed because there's a condition called PKU which is very very rare but involves being unable to metabolise away a lot of substituted phenethylamines and so if you have too much in your diet you can end up with dopamine poisoning.
It's stupid rare tho.
Anyway, for us ADHDers, it can often massively amplify the effect of amphetamine.
Basically, we can use it recreationally when we're medicated and get high from diet pop.
Don't keep doing it daily though, or it'll stop working.
Oh shit, kids in Kindergarden did exactly this with my 6yo son kast month. This was not a thing when we were in school decades ago, this is STILL a thing that's happening. I could scream in pure rage. And you do not want to know what my wife told the Kindergarden staff, because she became very angry.
She went to the kindergardener who is assigned to our son and told her what the other kids do. She said she's going to have an eye on that particular group. The next day, when I picked up my son, she went to me and said the kids did it again and this time she saw and heared what happened and stepped in.
That's the difference between kindergarden kids and teenagers: They don't hide their shit and get caught easily.
After this summer he will go to elementar school. My wife is the head librarian there, we are in close contact with the principal and almost all teachers already know him from her having to bring him to the library because I was at work and the kindergarden was closed. I don't expect that shit like that will happen there and I know the principal does not tolerate bullying, especially against neurodivergent kids. We're on an first name basis with the school social worker and it looks like he will get his older brothers teacher who is very familiar with ADHD.
I know, it's THE DREAM for an AuDHD kid and for us parents, too.
I also know that the principal is in close contact with the Kindergarden about the new first graders, especially with splitting up and handling bully groups. They had one 4 years ago when my older son was in first grade and they analyzed the groups social structure together with the kindergardeners to effectively split up the group. The three people on the head didn't change at first, I think one changed school, one was suspended a few times and the last one eventually stopped when he learned that it's basically him against the others. Because the other neurotypical kids started protecting the NDs and the younger kids from them, stepping in on fights while a few kids went on to get the next teacher.
Oh shit, I remember why one of the bully kids got suspended! After school the kids went to get their bikes and go home. My son already had his helmet on. The kid grabbed his helmet, pulled it backwards from his head and was basically choking him with the chin strap until the entire class stepped in pulling the guy back and getting help from a nearby teacher.
Yeah, the kids
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I also know that the principal is in close contact with the Kindergarden about the new first graders, especially with splitting up and handling bully groups. They had one 4 years ago when my older son was in first grade and they analyzed the groups social structure together with the kindergardeners to effectively split up the group. The three people on the head didn't change at first, I think one changed school, one was suspended a few times and the last one eventually stopped when he learned that it's basically him against the others. Because the other neurotypical kids started protecting the NDs and the younger kids from them, stepping in on fights while a few kids went on to get the next teacher.
Oh shit, I remember why one of the bully kids got suspended! After school the kids went to get their bikes and go home. My son already had his helmet on. The kid grabbed his helmet, pulled it backwards from his head and was basically choking him with the chin strap until the entire class stepped in pulling the guy back and getting help from a nearby teacher.
Yeah, the kids are good. I have the hope this will really end for good.
Had to convince an AI chatbot I was in fact already talking to the AI chatbot because it kept telling me I needed to talk to the AI chatbot in order to start a warranty claim. The future is grand.
April 16, 2025. One year ago today. Zoe and I took speed (Elvanse) for the first time.
Less than an hour later - “oh”.
The profundity of that one word; when everything changed. Everything.
Because suddenly you KNOW.
The thing that was there your entire life. The thing that trapped you. Hurt you. Turned you into an alien amongst your own species. The thing you could never understand. Could never know WHY.
Suddenly you know.
All of it.
The force of the revelation was like a supernova.
Fifty one years after they formed, for the first time ever my synapses worked properly.
And they did what they should have done all along.
I’m still processing the grief.
But it’s not just grief. I’m also furious about the revolting way people treat us. The advantage they have over us and neurological power imbalance is immense.
And most of them use that imbalance to use us as convenient receptacles for their own frustration, knowing somehow that we are incapable of fighting back, and apparently revell
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April 16, 2025. One year ago today. Zoe and I took speed (Elvanse) for the first time.
Less than an hour later - “oh”.
The profundity of that one word; when everything changed. Everything.
Because suddenly you KNOW.
The thing that was there your entire life. The thing that trapped you. Hurt you. Turned you into an alien amongst your own species. The thing you could never understand. Could never know WHY.
Suddenly you know.
All of it.
The force of the revelation was like a supernova.
Fifty one years after they formed, for the first time ever my synapses worked properly.
And they did what they should have done all along.
I’m still processing the grief.
But it’s not just grief. I’m also furious about the revolting way people treat us. The advantage they have over us and neurological power imbalance is immense.
And most of them use that imbalance to use us as convenient receptacles for their own frustration, knowing somehow that we are incapable of fighting back, and apparently revelling in the ease with which we can be made to experience unbearable emotional distress.
One thing that really seems to confuse people is when it just … stops working.
And for the first time in your life you assert boundaries.
Every day now I take four times the amount of amphetamine than was in that starting dose.
And I hope I will for the rest of my life.
Because if I ever stop, I will be what I was again, within days. I will KNOW, all of it, and I will know WHY; and I will know what’s coming, and I will be utterly powerless to stop it.
It’s not something I like to contemplate.
Knowing is a cursed gift.
But it’s still a gift.
Amphetamine not only saved my life; it started it. I woke up for the first time ever a year ago today, at the age of 51.
I’ve recently learned there’s a name for a thing I have encountered all my life and been actually quite traumatised by: The Double Empathy Problem.
In a nutshell, if you’re a neurodivergent person you start from a very young age, before you can even speak maybe, trying to work out how to interact with pretty much everyone else using a system of rules and procedures which nobody ever explains to you and which seem Byzantine and inconsistent. The amount of effort you put into this is exhausting, and yet no matter how hard you try to behave exactly the same way everyone else does, and try to clarify things when you don’t understand, or try to join in with “smalltalk”, most of your interactions are judged as malicious and get you yelled at.
Then you eventually get diagnosed and work out that you basically have complex post traumatic stress from decades of this.
And so you find your people and you limit interaction with people who hurt you. You still have to exist in their world because you have to buy things and pay taxes, but othe
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I’ve recently learned there’s a name for a thing I have encountered all my life and been actually quite traumatised by: The Double Empathy Problem.
In a nutshell, if you’re a neurodivergent person you start from a very young age, before you can even speak maybe, trying to work out how to interact with pretty much everyone else using a system of rules and procedures which nobody ever explains to you and which seem Byzantine and inconsistent. The amount of effort you put into this is exhausting, and yet no matter how hard you try to behave exactly the same way everyone else does, and try to clarify things when you don’t understand, or try to join in with “smalltalk”, most of your interactions are judged as malicious and get you yelled at.
Then you eventually get diagnosed and work out that you basically have complex post traumatic stress from decades of this.
And so you find your people and you limit interaction with people who hurt you. You still have to exist in their world because you have to buy things and pay taxes, but otherwise … you back off for your own sanity because it seems no amount of effort to try and accommodate them will ever be acceptable to neurotypical people.
Meanwhile when neurotypical people encounter you they tell you that you are incapable of empathy, have no theory of mind, and are rude and annoying. They have tried nothing to understand you, and are all out of ideas.
Apparently I don’t understand their social rules, but unlike them I do understand irony.
@David Howell tailored to my body as well. Custom build. Lovely lady in Brighton. Very suburban. Very respectable. Makes the filthiest kinky clothes. Love it.
Love it. I got married in a corset and circle skirt made for me by an IRC friend who makes LARP costumes, the former navy taffeta and made for even deep pressure rather than body shaping in the traditional sense, the latter from a metallic blue fabric I picked out from John Lewis by way of being unable to stop stim-staring at it.
I did have a gender questioning period shortly before then, but settled on my gender being presumably-cis but entirely secondary to The Tism and more specifically the sensory stuff. Hence "skirt go spinny" as extremely an isolated thing in itself, and the corsetry intention being Wearable Hug. (I wore the corset over a yellow shirt. My spouse - demigender, not identifying that way at that time - wore a kilt, also for sensory reasons.)
I curse the Compulsory Not Shiny of male-coded clothing!
I’m increasingly understanding why the idea that some of us with neurodevelopmental disorders are considered “high functioning” is basically crap.
Recently, by myself, I managed to unmask pretty much completely and … in that moment had anyone seen me they would not have considered me “high functioning”.
I speak two languages and yet I felt like speaking none. I gave up any pretence of trying to act like *them*, and it was liberating.
And it gave me a level of relaxation hitherto only achievable on amphetamine (I’d dropped into the unmedicated state when I did this).
And that’s when it hit me. There’s no difference in kind between me and a “rain man” stereotype. No. Some of us in infancy are pushed into masking as a necessary but ludicrously expensive survival mechanism and some are not.
And masking works, and they call us “high functioning”, but the cost is astronomical. I realise that now.
I think it’s where the idea of the “savant” comes from as we
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I’m increasingly understanding why the idea that some of us with neurodevelopmental disorders are considered “high functioning” is basically crap.
Recently, by myself, I managed to unmask pretty much completely and … in that moment had anyone seen me they would not have considered me “high functioning”.
I speak two languages and yet I felt like speaking none. I gave up any pretence of trying to act like *them*, and it was liberating.
And it gave me a level of relaxation hitherto only achievable on amphetamine (I’d dropped into the unmedicated state when I did this).
And that’s when it hit me. There’s no difference in kind between me and a “rain man” stereotype. No. Some of us in infancy are pushed into masking as a necessary but ludicrously expensive survival mechanism and some are not.
And masking works, and they call us “high functioning”, but the cost is astronomical. I realise that now.
I think it’s where the idea of the “savant” comes from as well. As our NT peers develop the executive functioning that we never do, our differences increasingly paint a target on our backs.
And so we try to fina an acceptable way to escape. If adults were going to help us, we wouldn’t have had to start masking in the first place and one of the first lessons many of us learn is that indeed, the adults in our life are just as dangerous as our former friends.
But they mostly approve of book learning. And it gives us a way to keep ourselves apart.
And it hits our novelty and interest triggers.
And thus the path we are on reinforces itself. We spend the following decades using all of our intellectual and emotional capacity to bolster this survival mechanism and turn to things like alcohol or worse to manage the stress.
And then finally, some of us eventually find help. It took five decades in my case. I was exhausted.
To see me now, many would think me “regressing”.
I’m not. I’m just starting to live my truth. I deserve that. I need to rest. I’ve more than earned it.
We have got a function in the whole datetime functionality that fixes known patterns. That "double timezone" thing is already fixed by a PR that I created today.
I appreciate that IPv6 is necessary but couldn’t it also have been necessary and “able to be understood by more than 2.5 people on the planet” at the same time?
Having used networks with public v4 for every host instead of rtc1918 addresses and NAT, I don't think this really is an IPv6 specific thing. But v6 comes with prefix delegations that can help.
The part that I don't understand is why any proxying would be needed. That sounds like using the same /64 on multiple vlans?
@Whreq Jnnyobre I'm not using the same /64, no. I have a /56 and a /48 which I split apart into /64s. The risk is that it ENDS UP being the same /64 if you configure the router wrong.
And then some stuff is handed down from the parent interface, some comes via DHCPv6 (how does that work? Nobody knows), and some via SLAAC (dark magic, don't ask).
Do individual VLANs want to be master interfaces for RA? Probably not. Seems to work if you hand it off upstairs. Don't forget to let the clients know that DHCPv6 tells them where the DNS servers are as well.
And so on, and so on, and so on, for page after page of v6 config options.
Compared to "This is my IP address, this is the netmask, yeah, we're doing DHCP and you start at this address and end at this one, here's the router, here's a tickybox to turn NAT on and off, done"
@Whreq Jnnyobre Oh, and the prefix delegations ... you're sort of expected to know that this shit randomly breaks if you don't hand down a /64 because obviously most vendors just assumed that and your router absolutely lets you put a different number in there but your lightbulbs will CRY.
@Whreq Jnnyobre oh, and there’s DHCP which isn’t SLAAC which is also DHCP. Yes. You need both. Probably. Nobody knows. Two DHCP servers. They play nice. Anyway, so here’s your globally reputable address.
Oh yeah, you still need the v6 equivalent of your private /24. It’s called “link local”. Just assign that one and carry on using NAT? Nobody knows how to turn NAT on for v6. Yes you do have to keep the private subnet. Why? Don’t ask awkward questions. Look, you’re getting lots of IP addresses. It’s fun! Don’t ask stupid questions.
True, that SLAAC needs /64 or larger is a thing one just has to know. It's weird that almost all configuration software will allow smaller subnets without any warnings.
Do you really *need* DHCPv6 though, if you don't use PD? I honestly have never provided DHCPv6 for a client subnet, only between routers. (Except when I used OpenWRT which enables it by default. I don't see a point in disabling it.)
As for needing a private address space - I disagree that it would be needed, at least for regular networks. It can come in handy if you can't depend on a stable prefix from your ISP and use raw IP addresses instead of (m)DNS, but I don't think I've come across any network that had it (except my own servers which use a unique local prefix for inter-container communications).
Turning on NAT for IPv6? Most routers don't support that. Linux can do it with nftables, in which case it's done the same way as IPv4 NAT.
I wasn't paying attention and read unique local (fc80::/7) where you said link local (fe80::/10). I now understand how someone could find questions about that to be awkward, because indeed I guess many people who use IPv6 daily would not be able to answer those 😀
Link local isn't the equivalent of your private /24, though (unless you mean multicast 224.0.0.0/24 perhaps, which shares some properties but doesn't usually show up in ifconfig etc? 😀). It is not routable and can't be used with NAT. You can mostly ignore its existence but turning it off (is that even possible?) would break things because it's used internally for other IPv6 stuff, not in the least neighbor discovery, DHCP, and SLAAC.
I guess if you could turn it off, and would assign a static configuration that includes neighbors, maybe things could keep working? Yeah, you're right, I don't think I'd be brave enough to try. 😁
@Whreq Jnnyobre Yeah, and I understand why it can’t be used with NAT, but it’s just more complexity. “You need two subnets. You just do. Yeah, you need a globally routable one even if you’re using NAT. Yeah, you just do.”
Noticed my YouTube recs are getting increasing filled with pop psych content that all seems to be talking about classic ADHD traits without ever mentioning ADHD, once.
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