Harry-potter-scary-o - Mechanic-halfling

Yes, that was on my mind as well!

Ok I made this reference talking about my job in my crash day post, but I wanna tangent on it a bit because this clip, weirdly enough, describes an ADHD thing perfectly 😛 it's a clip from the episode of My Little Pony called Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3.

In it, Dash demonstrates an "ability" that just kind of comes standard with ADHD sometimes, and can actually cause a lot of frustration for us when we don't know how to explain it to others. See, most people have natural floodgates that let in sensory data that matters and disregards the rest. Neurotypical people can just... Focus on only one thing. Because that's the task at hand. They have no problems paying attention to their teacher in school because the sensory data of listening to their words, reading the board and textbook, and physically writing notes are the only data that matter in that moment. For ME though, those floodgates are busted, and have been blown fully open pretty much since I was born. My brain doesn't have the ability to filter things out— the bright colors of the tree leaves out the window and the sound of the kid next to me tapping their pencil are the same level of priority as what the teacher is saying and the words in the book, so I get kind of force fed or water cured every bit of sensory data I can perceive at the same time. This overflow of data is part of what leads to memory based issues like "inattention" and inability to form habits or memorize things. Everything is coming in all at once, and I subconsciously have no way to sort out the important bits fast enough, so my brain just ends up letting it all kind of run through. As a result, when people ask me "how would you describe your learning style? Are you more of a reading, listening, or watching person?" I have to give the very unhelpful, vague answer of "it depends on what I'm learning and doing? I kind of just absorb information without thinking."

There IS a way to game this glitch and turn it into a feature, though, as demonstrated by Rainbow dash. The trick to paying attention and effectively learning things for us is..... To try to not pay attention 😆 by adding a non-invasive, repetitive, automatic task in the foreground and putting the stuff we're trying to absorb in the background, we can kick our brains into that hyperalertness and soak in info by accident. The foreground task has to be something that doesn't require complex thought, a half-task that's too boring to sustain on its own— examples include jigsaw puzzles, coloring books, knitting, listening to instrumental music that fits what we're doing. Personally, it's one of the reasons I've been enjoying learning to cross stitch lately; it's repetitive and can be as abstract as I want it to be, so it forces me to focus on my surroundings in a meditative way. I can listen to the birds and trees on the porch and relax, or I can pay better attention to the security camera feed and patrol schedule at my new job. I become more conscious of having to flick my eyes through 2 screens, the lobby and windows around me, and back to my hoop, and my brain activates better with the added challenge of speed analyzing at a glance. If I tried to only focus on the feed and lobby and not do my little project, I'd eventually space out and not actually NOTICE any of the things I can SEE. Basically, this new job works for me, because I work like Rainbow Dash— while doing the repetitive background task of flying, she's able to speed analyze her surroundings and actually process her environment better. Us ADHD folks ARE actually paying attention to everything, all the time, we just require that hyperaware, high speed anylization to be activated in order to UNDERSTAND it all.

Wider community benefit to not experiencing adult relationships the way other people do, and not having a line between "acquaintance" and "friend" — If I do interact with others, tend to make people feel "included"... by accident?

When someone says, "pass this gift along to a friend", I immediately think of everyone in my neighborhood I've ever had a friendly interaction with.

I don't experience an "in-group" and an "out-group". i just... interact with people. So when I think of doing something nice for people from church for Christmas, I don't think of it as "outreach" vs "visiting friends". It's all equal to me.

Sometimes it means being overly friendly to someone who wonders why I'm acting "like we're friends" when we're not. Sometimes it means thinking of someone who's desperately lonely and is glad I remembered them. I never know unless they tell me.

Taiw those space lemons and shove them into life's face!

This is one of the new, limited edition prints I've made. Get them now at www.tomgauld.com/shop

World heritage post, definitely?

Her name is Katalin Karikó. Hungarian. Daughter of a butcher. Her thesis work became the basis of the mRNA vaccine technology. Read the article here.

How to see the next step ahead

Source: https://martinrue.com/to-be-productive-be-prepared/

Motivation by itself gives us the willingness to do something, but nothing more. Once we make a start, the game changes and it becomes about knowing how to make progress.

Knowing how to make progress and making progress are two different things, but we often conflate them and treat them as the same thing. We basically jump into the task and start. Only, it’s not really starting because we’re repeatedly stopping to think about design, architecture, security, how it will look, how it will work, which database to use. The list goes on.

But knowing how to make progress before you start is important. Before you start your next task, complete the following in as much detail as possible:

Describe exactly what the new [feature/bug/thing] will do

Describe exactly how it will do it, giving as much technical detail as you can think of now

If it has a visual element, quickly sketch out how it’ll look

If you can do this before you start, you’ll have a good idea of:

What you’re doing and what the definition of complete is

What to add (or what to change) in order to make it happen

Roughly how it looks or feels, which often clarifies details of the point above

Hi everyone,

I thought I would share this interesting Infograph about ASD I found on Pinterest. I found this very fascinating so I hope you all do too.

Autism Spectrum

Powerpuff Girls was actually a show about a group of small children crushing the patriarchy and no one will convince me otherwise

It was pure love - "pure" not as the opposite of filthy, but pure in the sense that pure uranium is pure. Not tarnished by thoughts of resentment or distrust, but also not dilluted nor watered down by things like common sense. Perhaps twinged slightly with pure madness, though that may have just been covergent evolution. They fill the same niche, after all.

every software is like. your mission-critical app requires you to use the scrimble protocol to squeeb some snorble files for sprongle expressions. do you use:

libsnorble-2-dev, a C library that the author only distributes as source code and therefore must be compiled from source using CMake

Squeeb.js, which sort of has most of the features you want, but requires about a gigabyte of Node dependencies and has only been in development for eight months and has 4.7k open issues on Github

Squeeh.js, a typosquatting trojan that uses your GPU to mine crypto if you install it by mistake

Sprongloxide, a Rust crate beloved by its fanatical userbase, which has been in version 0.9.* for about four years, and is actually just a thin wrapper for libsnorble-2-dev

GNU Scrimble, a GPLv3-licensed command-line tool maintained by the Free Software Foundation, which has over a hundred different flags, and also comes with an integrated Lisp interpreter for scripting, and also a TUI-based Pong implementation as an "easter egg", and also supports CSV, XML, JSON, PDF, XLSX, and even HTML files, but does not actually come with support for squeebing snorble files for ideological reasons. it does have a boomeresque drawing of a grinning meerkat as its logo, though

Microsoft Scrimble Framework Core, a .NET library that has all the features you need and more, but costs $399 anually and comes with a proprietary licensing agreement that grants Microsoft the right to tattoo advertisements on the inside of your eyelids

snorblite, a full-featured Perl module which is entirely developed and maintained by a single guy who is completely insane and constantly makes blog posts about how much he hates the ATF and the "woke mind-virus", but everyone uses it because it has all the features you need and is distributed under the MIT license

Google Squeebular (deprecated since 2017)