I Make Prompts Sometimes

now, about caffeine: stimulants work differently in adhd brains. Some doctors believe it is because people w/ adhd do not produce or retain high enough levels of dopamine. Thus, the theory is that stimulants bring an adhd brain closer to 'standard' arousal levels (arousal, here, meaning 'excitement' in general and not sexual arousal).

Important to note: for most people, caffeine literally makes them unable to be tired. Iirc, it blocks melatonin receptors.

If you drink caffeine and get more tired, or if it has literally 'no' effect, your brain is goofing up somewhere. It should literally actually make you more alert and awake. People aren't exaggerating or making up the symptoms commonly associated with caffeine- neurotypical people get caffeine jitters, become more alert, and literally cannot feel tired with large enough doses of caffeine.

1: if you relate to ADHD posts, you ain't gotta get a diagnosis to use the tips and tricks ppl have posted to help with ADHD

2: if you do have access to a health professional and feel comfortable asking for a new prescription, you don't need a diagnosis to be prescribed non-stimulant ADHD medicine, like strattera or other dopamine-reuptake-inhibitors. hell, if your doctor is cool enough they might get you stimulants without a diagnosis (though there is currently a shortage in the USA, so ymmv)

3. my biggest catch-all tip for ppl w/ ADHD is this: Do it the way you want/need to do it. whatever 'it' is.

If you need to take the cabinet/pantry doors off so you can see what's in there, do it. If you need to store your vegetables in the front of the fridge and not the vegetable drawer so you actually see them before they wilt, do it. If you need music playing to focus on homework, do it. If you need to keep snacks at your desk so you actually remember to eat, do it. If you need to set 16 reminders per day to get your work done, do it. Do it scared, do it wrong. You don't even have to do your best. 30% is better than 0%.

Grace was put into coma by the people who cared about him. They (especially Yáo being Yáo) probably double-triple-quadruple checked everything. They watched him sleep for those first few days — I doubt they went into coma immediately after leaving Earth's orbit. They probably talked to him, assuring him that he'll be okay.

Ilyukhina's coma procedure was probably supervised by Yáo. He made sure that everything was in order, but — he is just one man and he is not a doctor. There was much more room for mistakes.

When Yáo went to sleep, he was alone. He had to rely on the technology completely.

You send people to space to save the literal entire world and you still don't trust them to dispense their own drugs

Aro and ace activism is healthcare reform, so that no one needs to rely on a spouse for health insurance, so that healthcare is available to everybody regardless of income, so that no one’s lived experiences or basic dignity are dismissed or overridden by doctors

Aro and ace activism is well-funded and expansive public transit, so that you don’t need to have someone on hand to drive you places if you are incapacitated, so that you don’t have to pay for an ambulance if you need to get to the hospital quickly

Aro and ace activism is disability and elder care services, so that no one needs a spouse to care for them, so that no one needs children to care for them, so that marriage is not a bind for disabled people, so that people on disability who want to and can live alone can

Aro and ace activism is community-building, it’s public events, it’s free social activities, it’s mutual aid, it’s activities that bring community members together without socializing relying on just a romantic partner

Aro and ace activism is developing a culture of believing when people tell you who they are and what they want rather than assuming you know them better than they know themselves

"Sorry, I don't mean to offend--"

Which of course, I brace for hell, since he is around 60, and i am a gangly cryptid that people usually struggle only to find the right slur to apply to. But i dutifully keep my work voice and go "nah nah, don't worry, what can I do?"

He hits me with "Are you--uh, I've been saying 'thank you ma'am' but are you... okay with that? What should I call you?"

And i live in a small conservative pocket within one of the most liberal states in the US, so my experience in public is varied. People have guessed, they've gone with she, he. they, they've awkwardly avoided it, but no stranger had ever asked me.

So i panicked and chuckled. This felt kind of like walking into a fake tumblr post. I said "Oh, you can call me whatever you want, its fine."

Any cis person would probably sound a little insulted. i knew i was confirming some kind of gender fuckery, but giving him the out that he didn't have to change anything. Fucker kindly smiles though, and like. Pounces. Asks, much more confidently, "But would you prefer sir? What are your pronouns?"

He's on script now, I'm astral projecting to a different plane where i'm a bug on a well lit microscope and my throat's a little tight all the sudden. I say, "Oh. I uh--I use they/them."

I use they or he, but 'they' is the language curveball. I know this, which is why i usually just let people use whatever. He nods, and I choke out (because its been a bad bad day, autoimmune flare pain on top of record high patient numbers) "Thanks. No one... has ever asked me. Have a good day."

He told me the same, I booked it, because the dim room was hiding watery eyes but not for much longer. Got it together in a nearby closet (ha) and moved on.

Came back later on in the evening because I had promised to visit when his wife was there earlier in the day. She's sweet, he's sweet, I do my usual spiel, he avoids any 'ma'am' studiously, but on me going to head out again, hits the dilemma of having no polite substitute for 'ma'am' or 'sir' that isnt gendered in some subtle way, and he's fucking trying, but this is not second nature obviously.

So what comes out is "Have a wonderful night, Them!"

Beaming, proud, right next to his extremely confused wife, who he seems to have not outted me to (nice) who now thinks he's probably having a stroke (funny, but not nice lmao)

have you noticed that it's "trans men are men" and "trans women are women" but "nonbinary people are valid?"

have you noticed that it's "love trans women" and "love trans men" but "respect nonbinary people?"

have you noticed it's "brothers" and "sisters" but not "siblings?"

have you noticed that it's "transfem" and "transmasc" but not transneutral, transandrogynous, or otherwise?

have you noticed that nonbinary characters are sorted into "masc" and "fem" but not allowed to be anything in-between or outside?

have you noticed that it's "lesbian" and "gay" but not cenelian, or enbian, or gai, or strayt, or any other nonbinary-focused attraction label?

have you noticed that it's "yaoi" or "yuri" but any nonbinary equivalents are jokes?

have you noticed that everything is this or that?

have you noticed the binary?

have you noticed?

have you noticed?

Hell, some of us fucking SLEEP WALK. We move around in our sleep a concerningly amount! (Now I'm imagining Grace sleepwalking shenanigans and Rocky suddenly getting a lot more vindication for needing to watch over Grace as he sleeps lol Because instead of it being a trauma cultural thing, it's legitametly for his saftey because Grace can get up and fucking touch things while being fully unconcious what the hell Grace weird crazy human--!)

But also... the interesting thing with our brains, our memories, even with medically induced amnesia... we still remember, deep down. That information those memories hold are still stored somewhere, even if we can't conciously access them. And some of the ways our brain does access them is through dreaming. But we don't remember our dreams often times. Our brains have several dreams over the course of a single sleeping sesson, if we hit deep REM sleep.

I truly thought we were going to get a scene of Grace waking up from a nightmare, terror still blazing through his system, Rocky freaking out because he can hear Grace's body responses and they're going haywire... but Grace doesn't remember what he was dreaming about. Just the faint looming dread of death on his horizon. He chalks it up to stress, and thinking about Earth slowly dying, and thinks maybe he had a dream he was still on Earth as the apocalypse was ripping his world apart.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

See, if women aren't real people, then the things that gender-mark women are real gender markers that identify them as not-people, but the things that gender-mark men are just normal people things, not gendered. Because the male gender doesn't exist, it's just women and people.

So you can't be gender-euphoric about becoming a man; all you're doing is shedding gender and becoming a genderless "normal person", because normal person is male.

It is really really weird that misogyny against women ends up, through a circuitous route, as redefining men as genderless, but this is the effect of generations of men being "normal" and women being "gendered".

Trans men, of course, know better; they can clearly see the gender marked-ness of masculinity, and feel euphoria when they reach it, because they're specifically looking for it. But cis men don't see it because women are the gender-marked class, and trans women might not see it for that reason and because they've been trying to achieve gender-markedness. Maybe they haven't put enough thought into the construction of the gender they're trying to leave behind to recognize that in fact masculinity is marked. (Any enby could have told them that, but it can be genuinely hard to recognize how marked masculinity is because even feminism falls into the trap of "women are the gender marked class and everyone else is just a person".)

Given how hard people have to fight to be seen as "manly" you'd think we'd all understand how very gender-marked masculinity is... but the fight to be manly is often constructed as the fight to not be womanly. Like, this is how normal people behave, and this is how girls behave, and you don't want to be a girl, do you?

this is a knock-on effect

of misogyny.