Moon6Shadow

Context: Original Post, Chrono

Oh yeah, absolutely they have to give lessons on tactics and strategy to everyone. They have maybe a year to get ready for it all, with the sabotage they run on the droid factories. Anakin and Obi-Wan being Better At War because of their experiences is a running thing I have in time-travel fics, and it's useful because wow they want to save as many Jedi and clones and civilians as possible, (and the admirals and other natborn non-Jedi officers, I guess), but it's especially fun in this one because everyone expects them to "be omegas about it."

Which is absolute bullshit, obviously, even in-universe, but especially for the two fuckers who know what they're doing.

So what you've got is two genuinely competent individuals who know strategy and tactics, negotiation and logistics, the types of soldiers they've got and the type of technology they'll be using, all of it. They have differing, complementary specialties, and work extraordinarily well as a two-man unit. They are two of the only people in existence that know how to fight a war that's larger than a single system. They understand galactic warfare in a way even Yoda doesn't, because even Yoda wasn't alive when the last one happened. There are a few Legends characters who were (e.g. Master Fay), but few if any of them are actually ready for a war, and it's been a thousand years. They've had time to forget, and I'm sure they've tried.

You know, for trauma reasons.

Obi-Wan definitely still has a lot of trauma about it, it’s just a lot less 'Qui-Gon being so astoundingly neglectful that you want to throw him off a bridge, holy shit.’]

Thanks to a fanfic author I follow love of a certain anime because there are _adult characters_ in it, and because Reflection on beloved fandoms as I’ve gotten older.

Once it gets pointed out, you start realising very quickly how much there _aren’t_ adults in stories, at least not in a meaningful way, they’re always conveniently Not There when the Drama happens because the parents are dead, sick, kidnapped, whatever the author needs to get them out of the picture unless they are useful to Plot. If there Is an adult, then that adult is often the mysterious mentor type who never joins the fight, except you know that one time they Do and are utterly badass but they are also Old and probably die somehow at some point with maximum Drama.

Except plot wise it’s easier to keep parents and guardians out of the way or downright neglectful so the main child/teenage character, who’s the same age as the target audience, can go off and have extreamly risky but awesome sounding adventures.

And then fandom goes ‘well drama is awesome but we want to delve into the Trauma because Hurt/Comfort is awesome plus lots of us would really like a hug’ also the people in the fandom get older, or were older than the target audience from the beginning, and are having a lot of ‘Why is there no trauma recovery, I want to see what happens next and in the missing Slice Of Life scenes that were skipped for Drama sake, and WTF are the adults!?’ Feelings.

eg. Jedi Quest by Jude Watson novel, (mild spoilers) Anakin and Obi-Wan and a few other Master-Padawan pairs are together on a mission. Except the adults go off to do something while the teenagers stay behind due to a limited number of safety gear and needing to do something else. It’s _meant_ to be a short seperation only for the adults to be belatedly informed that because they entered the quarantine area they can’t leave, safety gear or not, and now the communication lines are having issues and ‘oh no now there is a bunch of teenage Padawans left to fend for themselves in a disaster zone while trying to carry out the last mission objectives they were given to the best of their abilities and needing to make their own decisions how to best fulfil the mission in a rapidly changing situation.’

Even when the adults aren’t being shown as bad guardians, the author is still working to get them out of the way and splits the story to be about two groups of people, the adults and the kids. The group could have originally split into two masters and two padawans each instead, but where is the drama in that?

Anakin: Oh no. Leave Obi-Wan to me, stay out of his way this morning

Ahsoka (visibly confused): What are you talking about? He seems like he’s in a good mood today, he’s just drinking tea

Obi-Wan talking over holocall with Anakin and Ahsoka after almost dying on a _Sith planet_ that was attacking him constantly through the Force for _days_ not that he tells either of them that.

Anakin Deeply Concerned: X excuse my ass. You’re on medical leave _again_. (You were meant to be in recovery and safe at the Jedi Temple while I lead things, after you just got blown up! Hence why I’m all the way out Here and you’re There.) What Did You DO!?!

Ahsoka: He seems fine, I’m sure it’s nothing much to worry about, Master.

Granted to be fair she’s Very New to being Anakin’s Padawan and has probably had little to _no_ interaction with Obi-Wan at this point. Her last interaction with Obi-Wan was after he had _three_ bombs go off near him and he was on death’s door, Obi-Wan upright and talking probably looks Amazing in comparison.

She may have also had to deal with a Deeply Stressed Anakin for the last few days, on top of a stressful battle and then losing Artoo, because while Anakin Didn’t Know about the Sith Planet he could Feel that Something was Wrong with Obi-Wan. Which Ahsoka may have chalked up to Anakin still being stressed about Obi-Wan recently being blown up. Anakin meanwhile like ‘actually it’s because Obi-Wan’s _already_ found _something else_ to get in trouble because he’s Like That.’

Meanwhile Obi-Wan who was literally just on Death’s Door _again_: Yes exactly, I’m totally fine.

I see a lot of conversation floating around about how AO3 regularly makes over its goals, and while that’s true, I think people don’t quite get the situation.

1. Donating $10 gets you “membership”. This allows you to vote in OTW Board elections. Does this ultimately matter? Maybe, maybe not. Many past elections have been uncontested or had candidates who were functionally pretty similar. On the other hand, being involved in the political process is never a waste. However much AO3 already has, if you want a vote, you need to join.

2. OTW’s fundraising goals, especially during the pandemic, have been… unrealistic. They’ve pared it down to what they need to stay open. That’s not a real goal. That’s a kindness to not panic fandom during trying times.

If we want AO3 to invest in serious code improvements like making the damn no-fandom tag wrangling possible again or actually completing those plans for a block feature, that means more money than just staying barely afloat. If we want OTW to expand what it does–image hosting on AO3, for example–that means money in reserve, an endowment, interest income. These are good and important things for the long-term health of any charity or arts organization.

I haven’t been involved in years, so I don’t know the internal discussions around money, but it’s obvious from the outside that AO3 is basically treading water. Every six months or year or so, some big thing comes down the pike that makes AO3′s traffic go nuts or creates some massive headache for the support staff. To move past this kind of status quo, OTW would need serious money, far, far beyond what they get in drives now–and I’m talking the full amount they get, not the absurd initial goals.

Granted there would probably be a _heap_ of different opinions on what x things should be, but I remember seeing one post once were someone basically went ‘if AO3 told us how much money it needed to support podfic hosting then we (the podfic community) would do it. Need money to hire someone to write the code for it? Sure just tell us how much we need to raise for it.’

For those who don’t know the podfic community had major loss on content on an external hosting site awhile back, although I don’t know all the details about that but I heard enough to realise that having a stable, reliable, trusted and open minded hosting site for podfic would be a Big Deal for the podfic community. The same could probably be said about those wanting to post images, videos and all sorts of things so really AO3 has a lot of storage intensive communities wanting to be hosted there which are unfortunately needing to compete for AO3’s limited resources, on top of the stuff AO3 needs to do to just keep the site running.

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As for the friend I’m guessing it’s a different online generation/used to different online platforms thing. I remember when I was at school we had police come in and do a speech about online safety and never sharing personal details online.

And then Facebook happened…. cue graduating and people expecting you to have a Facebook page so you could ‘keep in contact’ and they could find you again for school reunions. As if it doesn’t go against literally _everything_ they were teaching you a few years ago.

Because never _ever_ post a picture of yourself online but make sure you put one on Facebook so people know it’s really you!!

And now we have things like parents posting pictures and videos of their kids online, never mind how adults used to tell kids Never Ever Do This, and people using their real names across social platforms, businesses and organisations wanting to use Facebook as their notification centre and politicians on Twitter and it’s just ‘normal’ to those people.

I also remember when I was on a social website were they used to do art live streams or Google docs etc. and you just realised that is was a Thing for commonly active people to know what country the others lived in or at the very least had an idea of people’s time zones and if they were a native English speaker or not and thus could make educated guesses. Online privacy was still a Thing so it was polite to not pressure people into revealing anything potentially identifying even if you’d known them awhile but there was less concern against revealing birthdays etc. amongst those you socialised with regularly. Also there was a mixed bag of different views on what people did or didn’t feel comfortable sharing with people or those they were close to online Eg. Whatsapp may or may not be comfortable for people due to needing to use your phone number.

So yeah people’s perspective of online privacy can be _very_ different depending on what they are used to. The friend has likely built trust with these people or platform so online privacy might not seem as much of a concern to them as it may be to the person being introduced to their friends/club, because to you those friends/club are still strangers. Also people’s idea of what is or isn’t safe to share with online friends or what people feel comfortable sharing, even if they’ve known them for awhile, can be very different as well.

Basically… Culture Shock/Cultural Differences? Could perhaps be used to describe this, since for you this idea is obviously unthinkable and horrific to ask someone, where as to them I’m guessing this seems ‘normal’.

You mentioned they asked their group if you could join without asking you first. Which from your stance seem back to front but if I could see how it could happen. Since it may be polite for them to ask their group before adding another person, I don’t know how big the group is, but if it’s a smaller or close knit group I could definitely see I being a Thing to ask permission or giving the group a head-ups before bringing an unknown person in. Perhaps even asking permission for a bigger group as well since it seems they do things like check age before letting people in.

If they’d asked you if you wanted to join first this could have put them in the awkward position of asking you to join without knowing if you actually could join because they hadn’t checked with the others first. So asking the group if it was okay before inviting(?) you to join if you wanted to could make sense from that perspective.

Although it seems there have been confusion with ‘invitation you could accept or reject with no pressure either way’ being mixed up with an expectation you will join or want to join or perhaps you feeling backed into a corner because they asked their group so now you sort of feel like you have to accept and insulted/upset they didn’t ask if you wanted to join first before bringing other people and by extension potential social expectations into this, at least that’s what I’m getting from this. On top of culture shock due to different expectations of what is socially acceptable to ask people to reveal about their personal life online.

The venerable Wonderful World of Makebelieve was started in 1999, and its host squidge.org in 1994. Back in the day, this is where you found safe hosting for your porny slashfic.

I’ve just been alerted to the fact that they’ve updated from the old eFiction software to AO3′s and WWOMB has become the Squidgeworld Archive.

I have wanted to attempt this for ages…I have a lot of downloaded/saved fic (as text files/PDFs) that I don’t have author permission to share but would love to have for myself in an AO3-type system. @squidgiepdx off the top of your head, would you happen to know if this is possible? Anyone else is welcome to chime in too. I’m guessing it would probably be way harder than going from an actual software like eFiction to OTW Code. 

I personally think it would be so much better than something like Calibre. And it could be open-source and not have all the issues Calibre does! And have a better interface for fanfic! Has anyone else tried this? If so, how did it go?

If it were easier to sort later on one’s own computer, I think I’d probably download more stuff.

Since having tags are one thing but to make it epic you need all the tag organisation behind them.

So what would be great would be a way to tap into AO3’s continually updating tag wrangling organisation. Not the tag wrangler volunteers themselves but to have access to the tag organisation they already wrangled. So that way you don’t have to start all over again with tag organisation and you’d only need to wrangle the tags that aren’t on AO3 and thus haven’t already been organised.

I’m not sure if you can already do that but from what I’ve seen SquidgeWorld is already going to have to spend months just to get character subtags connected to their main character tags again.

https://www.squidgeworld.org/admin_posts/8

So if AO3’s wrangled tag organisation could somehow became an automatically updating open source resource that you could use and perhaps even build on, adapt or add to etc. that could be amazing.

The big distinguishing feature is whether the men touch each other.

In romance novels, even V-shaped relationships usually have some level of emotional intimacy between the two who aren’t fucking. Personally, though, I only like triads, not Vs.

But in m/f/m erotica, there tends to be a very, very strong No Homo vibe. It’s also very much Mary Sue and her harem, which is a vibe I hate regardless of gender.

They’re not all like this, but when I’m looking for a fandom-style m/m/f OT3, what I want is a romance novel, hopefully with some plot beyond just the romance. I’m interested in their emotional lives and how they got together.

(Meanwhile a typical ‘Love Triangle’ would be a Love V, two pairings with the person in the middle holding it together.)

I’ve gotten the sense that defining the difference between fandom and non-fandoms take on threesomes is why some people seem to like using ‘poly’ (polyamory) instead of ‘threesome’. Since threesome could give the feel of ‘just for fun’ while ‘poly’ could help tell people the story is aiming for something more permanent, a life choice/way of life. Granted I’m not sure if everyone uses it that way or if it’s the same outside of fandom.

You can’t “just stop saying sorry”. You do something, something so little, like accidentally bump into someone. You feel horrible about it. Your brain starts panicking and you have trouble trying to breathe. You stutter an apology. They say it’s okay, but you accidentally do it again, and you apologize again. They just say “Aha, you can stop saying sorry.” And you feel horrible that you’ve probably made them angry or upset, so you mutter out an apology for the third stupid time, and they just say to stop saying sorry. Stop saying sorry. 

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Also to extent this to any creators, artists, writers etc out there. Perhaps try thanking the fans who were patient with you instead of feeling bad and saying sorry for being late etc. all the time. Try and avoid beating yourselves up so much and be a little kinder to yourselves. <3

But I don’t think I can claim to have ADD? Like, I didn’t struggle at all in school? (until I started university, and then I felt like my social anxiety was the biggest hurdle)

I’m hardly ever on this site anymore, but I wanted to stop band say you should check out this documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyUVc0Iteb0

Not only does it have important ADHD/ADD info in general, but there are little gems like this, which helped start me down my own path of figuring stuff out:

ADHD affects many people differently, especially across gender identity lines, and the lack of a one-size fits all presentation makes it hard to diagnose and often leads folks to doubt their own symptoms when they finally begin to recognize them. All that said, no one knows you better than you, and half the battle is allowing yourself to hone in on what’s going on and what you feel comfortable doing about it, while shutting down the awful voice that says you have no right to it. You are not barred from ‘claiming” something like this just because you don’t fit the old, outdated textbook. 

I do have a nephew who has ADHD, and my sister/his mother likely does as well (she hasn't been diagnosed though), but they have pretty obvious hyperactivity and impulsivity symptoms, neither of which I have.

afab people are more likely to have the inattentive type, formerly known as add. theres also combo or hyperactive. and it differs from person to person! just because you arent impulsive or hyperactivity doesnt mean you cant have adhd!

I don't really think I have internal hyperactivity - I mean, I like to think a lot about stuff, and it takes me some time to fall asleep at night because my mind brain would rather think than fall asleep

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#actually neurodivergent #actually autistic

(For those not familiar, ADHD and autistic are both neurodivergent and have a bunch of similarities. So I’m drawing from ADHD and Autistic stuff I’ve seen plus autistic experiences.)

In regard to those ‘Is there a word for someone who has this without it being a disorder!?!?’ type questions.

I suggest you look at the question differently a neurodivergent, in this case an ADHD person, doesn’t have a ‘disorder’ so much as their brain works differently.

Just because their brain works differently that doesn’t mean it is always going to cause issues. Rather the diagnosis could be seen in terms of ‘okay my brain works like this so I might not always struggle with things all the time but there are some things I do struggle with sometimes and it can be hard to figure out how to deal with them because my brain doesn’t work the same way as other people’s brains might and hence the typical copying strategies might not work for me.’

‘So having this diagnosis can help me figure out how my brain works and by extension what may or may not work for my brain.’

Also the picture quotes above and these comments highlight a good point that seems to be a common theme for getting diagnosed, for born females at least, is often they don’t get diagnosed until they basically have a mental breakdown because they may seem ‘normal’ or ‘okay’ right up until something/s changes and their brain can’t cope.

It likely won’t be obvious or all at once either, just lots of things building up until it gets to be too much.

So if you are noticing you might be ADHD, or maybe something else, and your potential ADHD isn’t an issue for you right now. That’s a really good thing!!

It means that if you get diagnosed or even if you’re just aware that your brain may work differently you may be able to better understand your brain and things it might have trouble with and better plan for that and if you do start struggling you may be able to notice a problem and figure out why you are having those problems and ways to deal with them sooner rather then later.

Basically being more Pro-Active rather then Re-Active about trying to work with your brain.

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As for how the brain works. There is a great short video by How To ADHD that talks about the issue of having a ‘Now’ and ‘Not Now’ switch for when you do things and how ADHD people struggle with switching from Not Now to Now.

Which is probably one of the main reasons people might fall apart at Uni, Uni is very much self management which reeeely doesn’t agree with someone who struggles with switching between Now and Not Now without external help. So knowing how your brain works and by extension why so many typical help tips likely don’t work for you can be really helpful.

Btw, if you are struggling with the idea of 25 minutes focus time try giving yourself a smaller amount of time to get you started. Maybe tell yourself you’ll sit down and study for 15 minutes or even 5 minutes since once you’ve started it’s easier to keep going.

Basically if you’re struggling to focus and don’t think you can focus for a certain period of time just cut the time down to something you think you can do to get you started since actually starting can be the hardest part.

The Forest App is great for this because you can set it to ‘Count Exceeded Time’ so if the set focus time ends and you keep going it’ll keep tracking your focus time until you tell it to stop.

If you are worried about over focusing perhaps set a second alarm for 25 minutes -1 hour or even a desired meal break time. Second alarms could also be useful for marking the passing of time and getting you back on track if you get distracted.

Since one of the common issues seems to not to be an inability to focus on something so much as an issue with focusing on the ‘wrong’ thing or finding something else more interesting to focus on.

(A ‘mind keeps jumping around to focus on other things that are more interesting/less stressful’ rather then ‘mind won’t shut up’ point of view or maybe different situations.)

Which results in situations like someone might struggle to focus on things that they consider boring/hard/‘don’t feel like doing that right now’ without external help to switch the Not Now to Now switch but be able to spend hours intensely focused on something they enjoy maybe even to the point of forgetting to eat/put off eating, or wonder why they have such an urge to keep snacking while doing whatever they are doing until they realise they haven’t eaten [lunch] yet.

This ability to focus extreamly well/extreame struggle to focus may seem completely contradictory to an outsider but the key difference is enjoyment and ‘being in the zone’ once to switch is flipped from ‘Not Now’ to ‘Now’ and you’ve gotten the momentum going from getting started.

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‘Hearing checked because you didn’t register when people spoke too you.’

XD Oh yes.

No idea of the official reasons but I think it’s the brain needing a moment to switch tracks because it’s utterly absorbed in one thing to the exclusion of all else. Which doesn’t have to be reading, can just be being lost in thought.

Sometimes even after focusing on someone I’ll still miss the begining of the conversation as my brain switches gears and even then detailed instructions for later are just like ‘Nope!’

Which in my case likely ties into delayed processing, except it’s not so much delayed as the first time you literally don’t hear them and then it just derails after that because it becomes a ‘game’ of ‘can you repeat that?’ for a countless number of times:

Looks up from book/pulls out earphones.

‘Sorry I didn’t hear you can you repeat that?

aaah yeah didn’t catch that (can you repeat?)

(nope, still not processing, too many details to remember at once. I catch onto one thing and then immediatly lose it under the rest of the details until I just get so used to this happening I just let the details flow past me without even bothering to try and mentally grab hold and hope it wasn’t important except you’re still talking to me so this is probably important and I should really be trying to catch what your saying right now in a way it won’t slip through my fingers immediatly. Okay where’s a pen?/Can you repeat-)

(Said person is already walking away)

(Oh.)

(Okay bye!)

(Fuck.)

(some time later) Sooo... what was it I was meant to do again? Feed the dog at x time right? (Already mentally cringing. Okay I know I only got a fraction of that right, what was all that other stuff you told me? What did I miss?)

So if anyone is giving me instructions for later eg. can you feed the dog, pick someone up at x, do whatever, I know it’s immediatly a lost cause to rely on my memory and time to reach for my phone pull up the alarms/calander/paper and pen and then get them to repeat everything or better yet catch them early and ask them to hold a second while I get my phone/paper and pen out. Also inputting the data means I’m processing it and I have an iron clad copy of the exact details I need rather then going ‘was it this time or that time?’

I’m probably still going to parot the details back to said person after I input them/while entering them to check I got them right. Plus once you start to note down details you can slow people right down to a speed that’s more manageable for you rather the rapid fire instructions via going ‘feed the dog at x time and then?’ (Not a garenteed method for slow people down to your processing speed but it can help.)

It’s a Thing, asking me to do anything (later) will be met with an immediate request for them to write that down/text me the details (so I can triple check I understood them right later) or I write that down and set alarms/reminder alerts.

Also really useful to keep alarms for later eg. Dog gets fed at x time (alarm details: feed dog, check the water, take them to the toilet, check on the other animals food and water) so next time you need to do that you can just find that alarm again with all the details and set it again rather then having to redo everything.

Lots of notes with alarms/reminders so I have something to remind me later on to do the thing or if I need to give a message to someone else there is a semi official place on the kitchen bench for leaving message notes since it’s almost garenteed people will see them there. That or maybe put them on someone’s place at the dining table. Taking a note is one thing, finding the note again/remembering to do the thing later and on time is something entirely different.

Normalize cuddling without a sexual expectation.

Normalize cuddling without a sexual expectation.

Normalize cuddling without a sexual expectation.

Current mood over here is:

Clear day, looking up 2 minutes later to air full of smoke and going ‘What the Fuck?!?!??!’

Hello wind change.

This is being a very ‘how to find Aussies 101’ experience.

The current online mood seems to be a way less upbeat version of:

Or perhaps more correctly

Except it’s not just the koalas this time.

On a semi side note, I’ve been seeing a bunch of Black Friday (Sales) stuff zero cultural awareness there. Their timing is dismal to say the least.

Are they just going to ignore the fact they’re using Black Friday, the name of one of the worst natural bushfire events in Australian history, scratch that, the entire world, a name that is used to raise awareness of how dangerious Australian bushfires are, as sale tactics while the country is on fire?

Just because they ignore doesn’t make it any less true.

Why history is important:

[In a particularly apt passage, Judge Stretton lamented the lack of environmental knowledge of the victims. These words chill my spine every time I read them:

Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough. The experience of the past could not guide them to an understanding of what might, and did, happen.]

Black Friday (sales) have already been renamed in other parts of the world to White Friday (sales) but they haven’t done that here.

Full song <3

(the majority of this post is pulled from an older reblog I did on my main, @vantasticmess.)

it’s ADHD Awareness Month so here’s a post about it. :D

I’ve gotten sooo many ‘#not adhd but man i feel this’ tags on adhd posts i’ve made, and tbh tags of this type drive me nuts (b/c they make me doubt the validity of my diagnosis.)

but if you, a not-adhd person, see a post about adhd experiences and relate to it, please consider the following: 

maybe you do have adhd?

maybe it’s because most things that adhd people experience are things that most everyone experiences sometimes, only they experience it all the time.

at its heart, adhd is the inability to pick what your attention is locked onto, sometimes combined with a need to move constantly (hyperactivity).  This manifests as:

lively internal life + rapid thought & intuitive leaps of cognition - good when being creative, bad when trying to make a logical decision

overthinking things

impulsive behavior

short attention span + being easily distracted

unnaturally long attention span + inability to notice outside stimuli

short term memory dysfunction

executive dysfunction

no sense of priority (everything is equally important)

no sense of time in relation to self (cannot effectively tell how long an activity will take or develop a sense of urgency based on a deadline until the deadline is perilously close or already passed)

failure to follow through (leaving work incomplete)

forgetting to remember/remembering tasks at inappropriate times

intrusive thoughts

And pretty much everyone experiences one or all of these things at times, and these symptoms can spring from other causes than ADHD (for instance, executive dysfunction accompanies depression and anxiety as well).

But adhd people have this happen so constantly and so intrusively that we cannot complete basic tasks, even if we want to:

The only thing consistent about us is inconsistent results: sometimes we’re on time, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re reliable, sometimes we’re not. sometimes we’re studious, sometimes we’re not … (and trust me we’re not enjoying it any more than you are)

We fail classes, we drop out of college, we lose jobs, and no matter how much we try, we cannot fix it.

We can’t just remove distractions - our brains are a distraction.

We can’t just ‘try harder’ - our wayward mind might be focusing on our studying today, but tomorrow it might not. The same effort level will have wildly different results on different days because our attention cooperated … or didn’t.

it is literally impossible for us to choose our focus. pretty much ever.

it pisses off our friends, it pisses off our bosses, it pisses off our family, and it even pisses off ourselves. it affects every part of our life.

& here’s some more stuff that can look like adhd - or that adhd can look like - but aren’t adhd:

auditory processing disorders

dyslexia

various learning disabilities

anxiety

depression

obsessive-compulsive disorder

bipolar disorder

under-educated/unpracticed in decision-making/critical thinking skills

something I’d like to make clear: 

the OP post is aimed at people who are neurotypical & mentally healthy (or rather, people who believe they are NT & mentally healthy).

It’s a rebuttal to the deeply invalidating claim often thrown at ADHD people by (supposedly) NT people when ADHD people describe their symptoms: ‘I do that too.’ ‘everybody feels that way.’ ‘that’s normal.’

NT & mentally-healthy ppl adding/tagging posts about the experience of having ADHD by ADHD people with ‘I don’t have ADHD but I do this/I feel this’ is … very adjacent to the experience of being told ‘I do that too’/’that’s normal’/’everyone feels that way’ by NT & mentally well people IRL.

it’s often well-meaning, but it feels like ‘your diagnosis is BS’.

but of course, plenty of people who don’t have ADHD DO find ADHD symptoms relatable because of some other neurodiverse state or a mental illness. And they have absolutely no obligation to divulge that information in their tags/reblogs! 

also: frankly, it’s wrong of me to assume that everyone who tags my ADHD posts ‘I don’t have ADHD but’ is NT &/or mentally healthy!

the takeaway I would like people to have from this post is:

if you think you are NT &/or mentally healthy but you strongly relate to significant numbers of posts made by neurodiverse &/or mentally ill ppl about their experiences: consider that you might not be as NT/mentally healthy as you believe.

if you think you are NT &/or mentally healthy but you strongly relate to and reblog posts made by nd &/or mentally ill ppl about their experiences: is it really so important to make sure everyone knows you’re not nd/mi? (besides, it’s not anybody’s business why you relate to/reblog a post if you don’t want to explain yourself. I’m not judging you - I promise!)

this is WAY LONG so I’ll probably make this addition into its own post later.

*eg. ‘actually disabled’, ‘actually neurodivergent’, ‘actually mentally ill’ etc.

I’ve also started using ‘actually [disabled] op’ (op= original poster) when the OP’s actually tags that already exist don’t match mine but I want to keep the specific actually tags.

(Context: I personally view keeping or adding ‘actually tags’ to a reblog as my way of telling others ‘hi I have this as well’ and hence try to avoid ‘claiming’ actually tags that don’t belong to me when reblogging. Hence umbrella actually tags and actually [disabled] op tags come in really handy. :)

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I’ve come across a post that reassured people the actually tag isn’t a gatekeeping tag and talking about not feeling ‘[disabled] enough’ to use actually tags. So in light of this here’s some brief history on how the actually tags came to be:

“I named this page after the tumblr tag #actuallyautistic, which was created in 2011 by the tumblr autistic community [...] The tag was created because neurotypical people were flooding the autism tag with their opinions. So a group of autistic activists came together and made the actuallyautistic tag as a place for the community to be open, comfortable and safe. This beautiful idea paved the way for other actually tags (eg. actuallydisabled)” - Actually Autistic (Facebook, pinned post) #tw autism speaks mentions in post

@ineffablefool I can’t say I noticed… But my brain autotranslates so often now that I forget too. Of course, I’m American. And don’t like the word “cookie”. It sounds odd. Biscuit makes more sense. Though I always wonder what sausage and biscuits sounds like to a non American English speaker. I think if it like mandolin. One is for music and one is for slicing. Your fingers appreciate it if you know the difference.

your fingers appreciate it if you know the difference

(Aussie) I immediatly got an image of a sausage and a timtam. XD

I intuatially thought you meant the sausage and biscuit as two individual things since I was still thinking biscuits vs cookies. Took me a bit to realise ‘waaait, this is a bangers and mash thing where the two words go together isn’t it?’ XD

Looking it up it sounds like sausages and biscuits is ‘biscuits and gravy’ which I do know is the name of some foreign dish.

tfw you need to do more research about something to write dialogue but also don’t want to do that research Right Now 

Characters name/spelling? Brackets.

Species Name/spelling? Brackets.

Need to reword a phase later? Brackets

the very CONCEPT of bodyguards is so narratively juicy and excellent, and I don’t just mean like “character x is character y’s bodyguard so they can be in the same place and fall in love”, I mean the protectiveness, the tension of trying to balance personal and professional, the unified dichotomy of devoted guardian/loyal servant!  the power dynamic.

Because the principal has all the *societal* power. You’re a king in his throne room laying down the law. Who even cares about some random muscle-y guy standing in the corner? 

But the bodyguard has all the *physical* power. Injured and surrounded by enemies? Doesn’t matter if you’re the chosen one or the god emperor of the universe, you NEED someone to fling you over their shoulder and fight their way to safety.  

the tension of trying to balance personal and professional

The First Daughter

the sheer delight of watching someone kick righteous ass in defense of their principal!!

Artemis Fowl

They both take turns being the most powerful guy in the room, and the least powerful. No in-between.