Nice, I love a good battle jacket

I really like being able to do basic tailoring. Like, I grew up surrounded by media that made me view my body as flawed because of all the ways it deviated from the norm. The combo of broad shoulders and big boobs made it impossible to find fitting clothes that weren’t a tent on me. Being able to modify garments that I find, and repair the few items that fit me perfectly has been a big confidence boost.

Missing out on seeing this stuff on social media is probably for the best - a lot of craft content on social media tends to be very “influencer” shaped, where the goal is to make beautiful things look effortless, and that can be demoralising when it’s all you see.

A few years ago, I read about how Mary Molony was an Irish Suffragette who disrupted a speech Winston Churchill was giving in Dundee by ringing a bell every time he tried to speak. She wanted him to apologise for remarks he had made about the women’s suffrage movement.

I remember when I read this, it reeked of something awesome that you find online that’s actually false (the story was shared on social media via a captioned photo with no sources), so I went digging for a proper source to check. I found some newspaper articles from 1908 and I learned that this event did happen, but also that people fucking hated Molony for this. There was a lot of “see, this is why everyone hates the Suffragettes”. (Sorry for saying this and then not sourcing)

It makes sense that people would be salty - Churchill was an asshole, but also a great orator, so I can see why one might be disappointed in missing the chance to see him speak, but I was shocked at the level of vitriol aimed at Molony and other Suffragettes from the time. Until this I hadn’t realised just how unpopular they were at the time. It’s drastically changed my perspective on protests and public perception.

I don’t generally like AI generated images, but this is great

Yay, learning!

This is just needlessly hostile. You seem to dislike America, but imagine if the things that you dislike could change and America could be better. The article linked is a part of the process to understand and hopefully change things so that this kind of awfulness never happens.

Why be so unkind? You and OP appear to be on the same side, wrt being against gun violence.

How many leftover working parts were there, or was it a perfect fit with no surplus?

I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything. Lower Decks is probably my favourite Star Trek series by a decent margin, but I think that people’s varying tastes is part of the Trek experience.

Like the first Star Trek I ever watched was TNG, with a partner who hated DS9 because of how far it was from the much more utopian tone of TNG. My best friend, however, loved DS9 most of all for that exact same reason. I can’t tolerate The Original Series because of how campy and cringe it is, but I have friends who love it for that.

If you hate Lower Decks, then your perspective is one I can’t really relate to, but that just feels like regular old Trekkie solidarity to me - with a show so varied, inevitably there’s going to be diverse viewpoints. That in mind, I’m not going to try and change mind, I’m just going to highlight why I love Lower Decks.

My favourite bit about Lower Decks is that it feels like a love letter to Trek, in all its forms. There’s a lot of references I don’t get, but I don’t need to get them to feel the warm fuzzies of knowing this show was made by people who are, first and foremost, fans of Star Trek. I like utopian sci fi because the state of the real world means that I can find real hope in the fantasy because in my heart, I believe in humanity.

Alongside all of that idealistic space exploration though, Lower Decks doesn’t shy away from the more pernicious aspects of Star Trek, and Starfleet/the Federation. The humour isn’t always my taste, but I think they use it well to poke fun at Star Trek, the show, but also the world within. The sometimes critical lens that is taken is part of why it feels so much like a love letter to Trek - if you truly love something, you’ve got to take the bad with the good and not pretend that everything is perfect.

In the past, with similar issues, I’ve had good success with requesting the book on Zlib, especially newer books.

This is a great list for ableist terms . https://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html I’m disabled in multiple ways and there were a few on here that caused me to re-evaluate my lexicon.

A list has limited use because language evolves, and so do people, and on top of that, context is everything — but it can be a good place to start

I think I would probably be a jerk a few times, and it would escalate until I hurt someone unthinkingly, and seeing the results of that would shock me back to reality and I’d feel so uncomfortable with myself that I’d hopefully go back to being less of a jerk.

To be fair, in many cases, the observable behaviour of things is different at scale. A single water molecule has different properties to a cup of water, in much the same way that a high density crowd of people (greater than 4 people per square meter) starts to behave as a fluid.

I study biochemistry and I’ll never stop finding it neat how when you get down to the teensy tiny level, all the rules change. That’s basically what quantum physics is, a different ruleset which is always “true”, so to speak, but it’s only relevant when you’re at the nano scale

I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with you, that fathoming scope is difficult, but I’m suggesting that this is a property of the world inherently getting being a bit fucky at different scales, rather than a problem with human perception.

Man, I love internet nerds

Badly. I have an awful short term memory, so my priority when making notes is capturing fleeting thoughts I’d otherwise lose. This means I end up with snippets on random pieces of paper or a random note on whatever is the default app on my phone. Then, every so often, I have a big clear out where I aggregate and process all these fragments, usually when I am finding fragments everywhere.

I need to have an inbox of sorts, and make processing things from there a more routine activity. Alas.

Ea-Nasir has got to be one of my favourite internet phenomena

Explainer link for people who are blessed enough to be hearing of this for the first time: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/who-is-ea-nasir-and-why-are-people-complaining-about-his-copper-the-viral-complaint-tablet-meme-explained

I don’t feel especially well poised to give advice here, because I’m still struggling with this, but maybe that’s the point; increasingly, I think that my idea of what “coping well” means is false and unattainable, and that real progress involves a bit of self acceptance.

On that front, my advice would be that living with ADHD means learning what battles are worth fighting, and only you can figure out.

A friend of mine used to struggle with extended chunks of work of one kind, and she spent a long while trying to force herself to work with timers and stuff, but her actual productivity shot up when she gave herself a bunch of tasks to cycle between. She enjoyed breaking up work with household tasks like washing the pots, because it’s simple, and has a defined end. Amusingly, sometimes she’d work at my place when we were students, and she’d tidy up for me and later say thank you for the opportunity.

One of my issues was I kept expecting myself to remember stuff when my short term memory is trash, even by ADHD standards. I got better at training myself to write stuff down, including sometimes asking for a break in the conversation to give me a chance to write it down so I don’t forget. That was awkward at first, but it got easier, and most people were understanding - most people seemed to respond positively in fact, because it shows that you care about what’s being discussed (certainly more positive than if I’d forgotten and incorrectly given them the impression that I didn’t care)

I spent a long time trying out different apps and systems, because novelty seeking brain wanted a silver bullet to solve all the things. Sometimes I still fall into that trap, but nowadays I know that even the best todolist or calendar app in the world won’t help if I don’t use it. It’s a me problem, and integration problem. Part of what helped me there was actually evaluating where my various systems kept going wrong. Like instead of calling myself lazy for not keeping things tidier, I made actual progress by buying a bunch of bins so that there’s always one at hand. I stopped berating myself so much. Beating yourself up for not being able to do things is internalised ableism.

Medication helps a lot, but I found that there were a bunch of maladaptive coping measures I’d built up over the years that I had to unlearn once I had medication. And then when I had a period without medication, I found myself struggling more than ever. It’s a combo approach, is what I’m saying. Don’t expect yourself to function at the same level as you would if you were medicated.

What you describe reminds me a lot of about how untreated ADHD traps you on depression.

This reminds me of when I had a player take the keen mind feat and it was an absolute God-send for drip feeding lore. “Kat, you’ve seen this shape before, the bartender had a symbol like this on their ring”

I had to drop in a few irrelevant observations to balance it out, but it was great.

What section would you put it under? It isn’t clear to me where it would fit

My God, that’s hilarious, thank you for sharing it. I enjoyed “I am like the Statue of Liberty: I accept everyone, even the wretched and the huddled and people who enjoy Haskell.”

Because killing yourself would also hurt people, likely way more than your life ever could. I’ve struggled with something similar myself, and my conclusion was that if I truly felt bad for hurting people, the only moral answer is to try and do better and improve.

Often I would resent having people who cared about me, because it would be so much simpler if there were no-one who’d miss me, or be hurt by my death, but it’s too late for that because I have a bunch of wonderful people in my life who care about me, even if I don’t understand why. Sometimes I wish I’d never met them, because that would make things simpler.

A few times, I’ve had the idea that a compromise is to withdraw from these relationships and sort of wean them off of me. There’s a word that captures this approach, decathect: “to withdraw one’s feelings of attachment from (a person, idea, or object), as in anticipation of a future loss.” The logic of this approach was that if I can’t be a good person who deserves the love of the people I love, I could at least reduce their exposure to someone shitty like me.

It didn’t work out, because as I withdrew, living became more untenable and caused me to inadvertently hurt more people. It was the worst of all worlds - I wasn’t really living, but it was still hurting people similar to if I’d just died.

Quarantine doesn’t solve this and neither does suicide. Especially not suicide, which is often a selfish craving in situations like this. I don’t say that in a judgemental way, just straight up, suicide is the simpler option for people like us. It appears deceptively like justice, and there’s a nice closure to it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to consider selfish options when you’re struggling with life, but it isn’t solace or closure or justice or any of those things we wish it was. If it were so simple, you’d probably be dead already.

It sucks, and I’m sorry, but there is nothing that can undo the harms of the past. Sometimes putting in the work to do and be better can lead to some healing, but also sometimes bridges get burned and you’re trying to be better for the sake of people you’ve yet to meet. If you do truly believe yourself deserving of something so drastic as suicide, then surely the better “punishment” is to continue living through and past the consequences of your actions. Redemption exists in the better world that you stand to be a part of building, by being one more person trying to be better.

Unfortunately, it is as simple as just “do better in the future”, which is frustrating, but makes sense to me - if suicide is a not simple, but easy solution to the problem of harms caused, then redeeming yourself through life is simple, but fucking difficult.

I don’t know if it’s worth it. Sometimes I find myself thinking “I should have killed myself two years ago, and this wouldn’t have happened” when I fuck something up, and then suicide now is tempting in a “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now” kind of way, even though that’s twisting the analogy to hell. The world will not be made better by your absence - if you have any sense of duty to the world or your loved ones, then it’s necessary to live with the weight of your past mistakes and move past them. Dying just puts that burden with everyone else, condemns them to a life of wondering "what if I had done Xyz differently.

For what it’s worth (very little, I’m a random internet stranger who has no knowledge of you or your circumstances), I would rather be friends with someone who has hurt me, but knows they’re fucked up and making genuine, continuous attempts to improve than someone who is completely apathetic and hasn’t hurt me particularly, but by fluke only. I think that our actions matter much more than our (stated) intentions (especially in situations where there’s a pattern to behaviour - I have unfortunately lost a few friends in this way), but I do think the intention counts for something. The fact you feel bad about what you’ve done means something. The challenging bit is to prove it. It’s not easy, and it might not even be possible to do such high levels of self improvement, idk even in my own case. I do know that it’s always worthwhile to try.

If life were a game where you lose if your net impact on the world is negative, then it’s not game over yet. If you die, that’s it, you get taken by the score screen and you’d probably not be too happy with what you’d see there. And yeah, it’s possible that you could decide against suicide and live a long life and die of old age, and still lose the game, if the net impact comes out to be not great still, but as long as you’re alive to read or think about these words, there’s still hope of making it through and levelling up enough that you can rack up the positive impact points. Hurt and help don’t cancel out like points in a video game do, but it’s hard to not think of “net impact” when contemplating dying in this manner. This might not vibe with you, but for me, it was and still is insanely motivating to know that there is still a non-zero chance of me winning this game, and what’s more, the possibility of winning is exclusive to paths where I continue living (even if often, I would rather be dead), and trying to be better (even if often, it feels like it’d be better for others if I were dead). Suicide offers control, the ability to decide how you lose the game, but it will always be a loss.

Whatever your struggles or your circumstances, I wish you the strength to steer into calmer territory, and the wisdom to recognise change. It feels weird to give advice when this is very much something I still struggle with, but this is me trying to be better. I might not feel especially hopeful about my own journey, but I do believe what I’ve said here, that meaningful change is always possible