new in town

Happy mušḫuššu monday everybody

What have you been up to? Um well it's getting warmer so I've been having to brush my cat every day.

Like no it's not that interesting of a thing to say. But now they can respond to it. They could say, man yeah it really is heating up, I've been trying to think of things to do inside more often. Or, oh you have a cat? What's their name?

Lost my mind a little and added (if my math is correct) 5,615 beads to Nim Teasdale's Odenwald pattern. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!

The goal was “soothingly weighted but not uncomfortable to wear, even as someone with chronic pain.” It could have been a little heavier, so maybe I’ll make a shawl with larger beads another time, but I’m very pleased with this one. I used size 6/0 seed beads, applied as I go with a .6mm crochet hook.

Yarn-wise, used 2 cakes of YarnArt Flowers. I knitted the fully purple sections from both, then knitted all the way through the yellow-oranges with a single ball. When I hit the beginning of red-oranges, I used yarn from both cakes, alternating between them. (Not the entirety of both, I played it by ear to make sure I made it through the full rainbow.)

I do have edited charts with bead placements. I will only share them with Nim's permission.

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

me: my dude we just woke up!! It’s time for wakefulness and doing things and Productivity

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

It didn’t register for me until recently that my experiences of being forced to strip naked multiple times at the mental hospital to be ‘checked’ when I was 14 was sexual assault, because the people who did it were nurses/doctors who clearly didn’t find me sexually attractive but instead used it as a form of humiliation and control towards children they deemed as ‘unruly’ and ‘uncooperative’ (ie. children who asked to be treated like people). I thought only people who fit into this idea of a child attracted pedo could be child sexual abusers, so I thought my experience didn’t count.

my stepfather would openly sexually harass me and my siblings at dinner while also loving the fantasy of killing pedophiles. whether he personally found our abuse sexually gratifying was frankly irrelevant to whether it traumatized us. whether he would be considered a pedophile or not doesn't change that he committed sexual abuse of children