TIGT

Behavior Average person Person with ADD* Loses keys (they’re gone) Once a year, at most 4 or 5 times a year Forgets important appointments 2 to 3 times a year At least monthly Blurts out remarks that distress others Once a month at most At least weekly Constantly moving about; can’t sit still Not a problem If person with ADD is hyperactive, a problem much of the time Periods of attentiveness An hour or two A few minutes or, if very interested in task, 3–4 hours Can think of creative ideas Several a week Constantly has ideas; it’s sorting them out that’s the problem Late for work or other appointment Rarely Frequently Agrees to do 3 things in same timeframe Rarely Frequently. Tries to do them all. Sometimes succeeds! Loses important papers like checks Rarely Up to once a month

I don't mean that metaphorically. When diagnosing my ADHD, I scored 30th percentile recalling unrelated sentences. The bad 30%. Drunk people do better.

I've successfully memorized a mere handful of things, and I can sum them all up right here:

My birthdate (but not how many years old I am)

My address for ≈20 years, and my current one

4 phone numbers, 2 of which are nigh-identical

My dad's, brother's, and sister's birthdays

I know theirs because I think of my sibling's birthdays as relative to mine, and dad's is a day away from a holiday.

I still can't remember mom's. I know. I remember the month, and when it approaches, I look it up.

In my first relationship, I forced myself to retain our anniversary and her birthday. Because if I didn't, that information would no longer be relevant, if you get my drift. It was really hard. Strong emotions are my one lifehack for this, but they need to be industrial-strength.

And I'm pretty sure I remembered the anniversary only because it was October 3rd, and I had just seen Mean Girls.

So how do you remember anything then

Immersion helps. I can't remember anyone's name until I've heard them called ten times by others.

When that won't work, there's only one thing I can do: understand it. If I learn how new information relates to a system as a whole, I'm good to go.

That's why I blow hard at names, addresses, and dates — most of the time, they're arbitrary.

This also means I learn differently. I understand for most folks, memorization is the easiest solution. But for me, I have to dive in and really grok what even the arbitrary bits are. A lot of coding terms are literal jokes (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor and GNU's Not Unix, for example), but learning those stories makes them stick.

As a result, when learning something big, I have an extended, frustrating period of incompetentence and hopelessness, then suddenly it all clicks and it's second nature. This has its ups and downs. Pro: second-nature knowledge is a powerful asset. Con: but sometimes it's knowledge about, oh, some real-life examples:

Minecraft engine quirks

Obsolete HTML elements and attributes

Weird animal facts

Huge Power is a notoriously busted Pokémon Ability — it doubles the entire Attack Stat, which is a stratospheric power boost. Diggersby and Azumarill go up ≥3 tiers by having it.

It doesn't make much sense, though. I initially wrote it off as something given to Azumarill to make it unterrible (and then Azumarill kept getting buffed). But there is a next-level pun and story behind Huge Power.

Dajare is a Japanese wordplay tradition kind of like a pun and homophone rolled together. And it is everywhere; Japan, as it turns out, is infested with dad jokes.

And boy is this ever a dad joke.

Huge Power's Japanese name is strictly translated as "Muscleman". That's all Bulbapedia explains, because Bulbapedia and nuance are mutually exclusive. But if you paste the characters into a more sophisticated translator, you get two results:

力持ち (ちからも) — Noun

muscleman; strong man

力餅 (ちからもち) — Noun

fortifying mochi; mochi that improves one's strength

mochi received from one's parents after giving birth

mochi given to a toddler on its first birthday

It's one of them Dajares. But what does mochi have to do with anything?

We speak of "the man in the moon" in the West, but Japanese mythology considers the patterns on the moon's visible face to instead be a rabbit making rice cake — that is, mochi.

And who gets Huge Power?

Azumarill, the Aqua Rabbit Pokémon; Diggersby, a bunny with big beefy arms for ears; and Mega Mawile, which looks rabbitish with the second giant alligator mouth coming out of the back of its head.

Old Minecraft ideas, from way back when—I'm thinking 2011. I used to be more into it more than was healthy; it's what I did when dropping out of UMaine, to think about something other than how useless I was.

Originally they were just pencil and marker, so I inked them on a whim.

You can probably see this predates bats, golems, villagers/Testificates, and even Endermen, hence my take on the concepts.

The goblin villagers were based off of an old, old post from the original Minecraft development blog, which neither Tumblr nor Google can find, sadly. The yeti, worm, and shark were just some one-off ideas for monsters within various kinds of terrain; the yeti lived only around snow, the worm could "dig" (phase) through dirt blocks, and you can probably imagine where the shark showed up.

I've heard a few complaints about Patreon, where people say it looks like a shill/cashgrab/desperate ploy. Worse than having ads, even.

I suspect that's a psychological issue. Maybe it does seem worse to some people. But as someone who messes around with web development, my humble opinion is that NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY BE WORSE THAN ADS.

Ads track you as hard as they can in barely-legal (or worse) ways. Block cookies? Have an ad-blocker? Doesn't matter. There's a million different ways of spying on you. Notice Apple's is built into the operating system.

Ads load who knows what, whenever they feel like it. Ever been to Wikia? It will make your browser cry with piles of Flash, GIFs, and poorly-coded JavaScript, hammering your computer trying to figure out who you are and what you'd like to buy. All of which, by definition, is not what readers go to a site for.

The only people ads make money for are really big sites (and the ad brokers, but you knew that). So for the little people who would even bother with a Patreon, ads wouldn't help anyway. And if you use an ad-blocker to mitigate the first two issues, then the creators make even less money.

TL;DR: ads invade privacy, make websites slower and crashier, and then don't even work on top of all that.

Goblin sketch.

Matching avatars for you and your friends

I found some old art files of mine, which means I can update this with the full photoset version of this piece. Literal years old, so while I'll appreciate any feedback (Especially regarding fixing its levels), just know it may not be implemented for a while.

I read up until the final translated chapter of Goodnight, Punpun a week or so ago. I liked it so much I felt obligated to do a fanart.

This is the protagonist of a short comic, to practice comic storytelling and various other things before I start Mortropolis. Ideally I make all the really bad mistakes with this one to get them out of the way.

I'm shooting for 20 pages as a soft goal, but ultimately the story will dictate how long it is.