Also Me (Voice of Reason): I had to leave the house once per day for the last three days to do one quick errand and now I'm so tired and brain foggy that I feel like I'm stoned. I can't even focus my eyes enough to read. Last night I sat down at my desk and couldn't move for about an hour. I was so goddamn thirsty and there was a glass of water in front of me and my muscles refused to listen to my commands to reach for it. For an hour.

Me Again (Voice of Internalized Ableism): I probably could have if I really tried. I probably just didn't really want to and I was playing up how tired I was to "prove" that I'm disabled and therefore have no obligation to try.

Twice now. Twice. I have been instructed by a dermatologist to go to a pharmacy to purchase something (expensive!) for a medical issue, got it home, opened it up, and was blasted in the face with a floral perfume which immediately made me feel sick.

One of them was a medicated lotion that the doctor said would help with my dry skin and eczema, since nothing else was helping. Not only could I not use it, but even after closing the container, I had to move it outside of my home until I could find someone else to take it because the smell kept wafting off of it.

The other was a medicated shampoo. The label had the audacity to list "hypoallergenic perfume" in the ingredients as though there existed a perfume in this world that no one is allergic to. I tried using it anyway (the smell didn't seem that strong at the start) and then just re-washing with my usual scent-free shampoo to get rid of the perfume. The smell remaining in my hair, after being washed twice, wound up being so strong that my fucking pillow reeked after lying in bed for a few minutes. I had to wash my hair again several times and also wash the pillowcase several times to get rid of it. I was not able to use the shampoo anymore, and there was no similar product in existence without the perfume.

When I told the dermatologists about these issues, they were shocked. It's hypoallergenic though, you should be fine! They suggested I should just use it anyway and I would probably, uh, get used to the smell.

You are. A DERMATOLOGIST. How is it possible that you've never encountered a patient who was sensitive to ALL PERFUMES (not to mention a lot of other chemicals commonly found in soaps, shampoos, and lotions)?

And I'm lucky. I may have a mild form of MCAS (can't get a diagnosis because it's not severe enough and the shitty tests are always negative, but no one has a better explanation for my random reactions to things I am officially Not Allergic to), or maybe I just have a lot of really weird sensitivities. I might get a rash, I might get hives, I might get a sore throat and itchy face, I might wheeze and be short of breath. But I won't die. I won't go into anaphylactic shock.

Person Who Plays Minecraft Nonstop, Trying Another Game In The Same Genre For The First Time: Oh wow look they have like the treecapitator mod in this! And they gave us an extra row of inventory!

Like guys, even setting aside how insane it is to act like every single thing that's different from Minecraft is some kind of mod or dramatic change to a different game, it might be time to face the fact that Minecraft isn't so popular because it's actually good. It's that popular because it more or less created this genre and people have been playing it so long they don't realize that it's perfectly possible and in fact, not even especially difficult to make a game in the same genre that doesn't objectively kind of suck. This isn't even the first one, you just haven't tried the others yet because you've been marinating in Minecraft for a decade.

Don't get me wrong, I spent many hours in Minecraft and I still enjoy watching people do crazy stuff with it, but, and I say this with all the love in my heart: it's kind of a pile of jank and always has been. It was the first real try at this kind of game and they were for sure on to something! But let's be very honest with ourselves guys, they didn't exactly nail it on the first try. play vintage story you cowards

I will never forgive the psychiatric community for what they did with the word "narcissist." And in my opinion, no one should be more angry about this than people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

And I need to make sure some of you know that words can have more than one meaning, and the vast majority of the times people call someone a narcissist, they are not in any way implying that they have NPD.

The word "narcissism" has been in use since the early 1800s. Outside psychiatry, it has always meant someone self-centered or egocentric. Calling someone narcissistic was the same as calling them self-obsessed or incredibly vain, based on the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. It has always been an inherently negative and uncomplimentary word.

And then psychiatrists started to study and learn about and codify what we now know as NPD, which did not even exist as a formal diagnosis until 1980, something like 175 years after the word had been in use to mean "self-centered asshole." And when it was time to name it, they decided to call it "self-centered asshole disorder."

People with NPD, you should be pissed as hell about this. They did not need to call it that. You don't struggle because you're so in love with yourselves that you don't care about anyone else~, but that is what the name of the disorder implies. It's kind of incredibly fucked up.

The thing is, outside of Tumblr and similar spaces, most people don't know about NPD. Most people wouldn't recognize the term. Most people don't even know what personality disorders are. But they know what "narcissist" means. It means self-centered asshole.

When you hear someone calling a person "narcissistic," they are most likely NOT trying to say they have NPD. They're just calling them a self-centered asshole. Go ahead and look up narcissism in your dictionary of choice. The first (which means, most commonly used) definition in every dictionary is the original one, the one your average person knows. Merriam-Webster has simply "egoism, egocentrism." Dictionary.com says "inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity." Oxford Learner's Dictionary defines it as: "(formal, disapproving) the habit of admiring yourself too much, especially your appearance."

This is the primary definition of the word. All these dictionaries do also list the secondary definition, which is: a person with narcissistic personality disorder. This is the less common and less well known meaning.

I'm just so tired of seeing angry posts on Tumblr dot Com from people furious that they heard someone calling an abuser a "narcissist." "You can't just go diagnosing assholes with a personality disorder! That's not what NPD is!"

Correct! That is not what NPD is! But that is what a narcissist is, according to the primary meaning of the word, to the vast majority of people. They aren't talking about a diagnosis or a disorder. They are talking about a self-centered asshole.

If you have NPD then it is incredibly fucked up that your diagnosis is named that way. I sure as hell would be pissed off if a doctor told me I had self-centered asshole personality disorder. It's unbelievable that they get away with that. This is only one of many gripes I have with psychiatry, but it's a big one.

And of course, if you find people out there who are armchair diagnosing random people with NPD, absolutely call them out. That is fucked up and potentially ableist behavior. I 100% agree with that.

But when you hear someone use just the word "narcissist" (without the "personality disorder") to describe a self-centered asshole, before you leap at them with your teeth bared screaming ABLEISM, I am begging you to take a moment to give that person the benefit of the doubt and assume good intentions until proven otherwise. Because in the overwhelming majority of cases, they're not talking about NPD at all.

Gem: She's the only hermit who is actually already playing (single player only so far), focusing on cozy building and gradually making progress while also enjoying the eldritch monsters. This continues on the server, with a focus on cottagecore building, of course. Eventually opens a restaurant at spawn selling cooked meals, bread, and pies. Grian: Uses the chisel to create a labyrinth of secret passages for a server-wide game of hide-and-seek. Impulse: Builds a massive base at the bottom of the ocean, spending many hours clearing out the water and building a glass dome over the top. Bdubs: Literally exactly the same bullshit he does in Minecraft, using painting techniques (and the chisel) to create insanely beautiful builds and landscapes. Permanently destroys his hand in the process. Cleo: Inevitably finds the chisel and begins producing gorgeously detailed decorative blocks for the entire server, grumbling regularly about the inability to rotate chiseled blocks vertically. Joe: Sets up a massive community farm and resource center at spawn complete with a temporal storm shelter. Spends hours grinding out metal tools for whoever needs them (this includes a large supply of hammers and chisels for Cleo), makes sure everyone has enough food and warm clothing for winter, and sets up guardrails around any dangerous holes in the ground. Insists on using only flint and copper tools for the entire season.

Etho: Calculates the most efficient way to capture and breed animals, then gets really into cheese making. Perfects a system for making blue cheese. His kitchen is gorgeously decorated but there are no exterior walls and he uses a crude wooden door for the entire season despite everyone else regularly begging him to make a proper one. Beef: Massive farm. Occasionally receives anonymous "gifts" of vintage beef from other hermits. No one explains and he remains baffled by it for the entire season. Keralis: Builds a massive modern resort which looks entirely out of place but is nevertheless beautiful. Regularly gets distracted by sunrises, sunsets, god rays, and the landscapes of the game in general. Is heartbroken when he discovers that his "tropical" base will be covered with snow during the winter. Skizz: Carries on his trend of metaphorical representations of (pseudoscientific) psychological concepts by building a maze entirely out of dirt representing Myers-Briggs personality types. He tries to get other materials but most of his episodes are just a series of clips of him screaming in terror and dying to wild animals and monsters. False: Builds a cylindrical base. (I don't know what to tell you, that's what she does!) Xisuma: In keeping with his tradition of focusing on whatever new content has been added to a new version of a game, speedruns getting an elk and kitting it out, completing the Archives wearing only bearskin armor. Makes sure the game world has at least one massive ocean, which he builds a fully-furnished sailboat to cross with his elk. Journeys back and forth from the tropics back to spawn to deliver various materials such as purpleheart and ebony logs, which he uses along with coral blocks to build the majority of his beachside base. Tango: Despite the lack of redstone, finds a way to invent a new kind of minigame using gliders and windmills in ways the developers did not intend to be possible. Pearl: Builds a massive road system out of path blocks connecting up everyone's bases, with plenty of signposts to help everyone get around. Her own base is built inside of a dense forest, with sod roofs on everything, so if you didn't know where it was, you wouldn't notice it was there.

Cub: Masters the movement mechanics before anyone else and builds a brutally difficult parkour course that only one other hermit manages to complete before the end of the season. Rendog: Invents his own lore for the monsters and NPCs. Builds a "forgotten village" around a trader. Joel/SmallishBeans: Frustrated by the fact that there are no horses to kill, he declares himself Lord of the Drifters. Somehow builds a massive dark fortress out of basalt, chert, and various entire blocks of metal without ever seeming to grind for the resources. Claims to draw his power from the temporal storms. Wels: Exactly the same as in Minecraft: builds a gorgeous castle and then quits until the next season. Only difference is that it takes so long to get the materials that this takes the entire season to finish anyway. Zedaph: Sets out to collect one of every block in the game. Most of the season is taken up by the search for Phyllite. Doc: Accidentally solves several of the game's major unfixed bugs while exploring the game files looking for a way to hide a bell locust under Scar's base without it despawning. (The developers nevertheless do not bother to implement the fixes.) Also makes a massive secret hare-breeding farm and unleashes them into Scar's farm every time his crops are nearly ready to harvest. Scar: Wolf And Bear Death Montage (with occasional special guests Unexpected Temporal Storm, Starvation, and Oh No It's Winter and I Am Wearing Rags). Nevertheless, by the end of the season he has constructed a beautiful wildlife park which he somehow managed to fill with all the different kinds of deer, goats, and even pandas and sun bears, which are no easy feat to chase from the tropics all the way to his base. It is largely made of wood and catches on fire at least once.

I haven't watched enough of XB, Hypno, or Jevin recently to make a guess about them. I'll have to catch up on their videos sometime.

I would be very interested in other people's ideas as well. I wish the hermits would indeed play Vintage Story for a season, but somehow I suspect most of them would be too frustrated with the difficulty and lack of automation.

Edit: HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN MUMBO???!?

So I ordered a pair to try them out. They were delivered to a parcelbox yesterday morning, and I picked them up in the afternoon.

The process of going to get them (a roughly 8 minute total walk) wore me out so I set them down, still in the plastic packaging they were shipped in, against the wall.

They are still there. I haven't even opened the package to make sure they're the right ones. I haven't had the energy.

I just opened their site to add a few things to my cart for the next order so I don't forget, and after about 30 seconds their stupid fucking AI assistant icon in the corner of the screen that's been there for several years now despite my repeated complaints to their customer service department about not being able to disable it, fucking OPENED A CHAT WINDOW without my permission to say "You usually add a (local item) to your cart, but I noticed you haven't done that yet. Should I add it for you now?"

And the fucking rage that instantly flooded my entire body made me actually physically shake. I am still shaking with rage right now.

This company is clearly owned by some techbro idiot piece of shit because first they added this AI "helper" with an icon in the corner that you can't close, then for a while they were selling (and heavily pushing) chocolate bars with those fucking NFT apes on them with a recipe that had been "designed by AI" (obviously they flopped so hard that they disappeared before too long), then they started adding "AI summary" buttons in the descriptions of every food item (FOOD! ITEMS! fucking VEGETABLES!!!!), then they renamed their premium tier to "Xtra" and changed all the icons to Xs so it looks like a button to close something instead of a useful designation, then they added extra "AI assistant" buttons in other parts of the screen (making it more likely you might click on them by accident), and now they've reached the point where they're having the fucking thing send you messages without ANY input from you.

I have complained so many times about the inability to remove this bullshit from my screen and it has, of course, amounted to nothing.

I am tempted to write them and say the next time their fucking AI shit opens or sends me any text without my prompting it, I am canceling my premium membership and quitting their site entirely because despite my need to ration my energy, it might be worth going back to physically buying food at the supermarket rather than putting up with this shit. But unfortunately I'm not sure if I could follow through with that, because it IS difficult for me to get out often enough to buy food for myself, and I have no one to help me.

Maybe I should just cancel the premium membership (which mostly amounts to them waiving the delivery fees) and just only put in orders once or twice a month (which would cost less than paying the monthly fee so I can get deliveries once a week).

I'm just fucking livid. I'm so furious. It's bad enough they keep trying to get people to use this shit, it's bad enough how many people willingly do, but if they start FORCING it on me I feel like there have to be SOME kind of repercussions....

It is straight up not true.

I'm not sure where or how the number in that statistic was found, but for one thing, they certainly only counted people who'd been not only diagnosed with ADHD before starting university, but had declared their diagnosis to the school officially, which is not something most people do.

A huge percentage of people with ADHD don't get diagnosed until much later in life, and many never get formally diagnosed at all.

Even of those diagnosed, many do just fine in school, or are able to manage with medication and/or strategies they've learned and therefore don't need to inform the school of their diagnosis, because they aren't looking for accommodations.

I have ADHD. I finished university and got my bachelor of arts with honors, and also completed the honors program (which involves extra coursework and a separate thesis). I wasn't even diagnosed at this point, let alone medicated.

Was it harder for me than for students without ADHD? Absolutely! But not impossible, not by a long shot.

I have many friends who also have ADHD. Some were diagnosed as kids, some in adulthood. Some are medicated, some are not.

Every single one of them who tried, graduated from university. Only one friend with ADHD doesn't have a degree, and that's because they never tried going. They got a trade certification instead.

In fact, of the many people I know who are diagnosed with ADHD, not a single one of them failed out of or otherwise did not finish university once they'd enrolled.

I'm sorry, but there's zero chance that I just happen to have the most high-achieving ADHD friend group on earth.

Yes, plenty of people do fail out or quit university. People with ADHD are probably at a higher risk for that, just like we're at a higher risk for not finishing high school. A lot of stuff is harder for us!

That does not mean there's only a 5% chance of finishing once you enroll.

That statistic is clearly founded on bad data, and worse, it discourages people with ADHD from even trying to pursue higher education, because they think it's basically impossible.

Not everyone needs a college degree. Not everyone wants to go. And for some people, they will try and just not manage to finish. That is all, honestly, quite fine and normal. You aren't any less valid or valuable without that degree. Yes, a lot of jobs require one, even ones that shouldn't, and that is disheartening. But there are other options. Look into getting a trade certification if you're worried about work but don't want to deal with college.

But if you have ADHD and you're considering going to university but you're afraid to even consider it because you've heard you only have a 1 in 20 chance at finishing no matter how hard you try?