Done and In Progress

Too many writers are using generative 'AI' to make their book covers, so I've written a guide on how to make your own cover for free or cheap without turning to a machine.

If you can't afford to pay an artist, you CAN make your own!

2026 - Make the Republicans hurt for all the ways they're trying to strip people of their votes and put a check on Trump. We can flip the House and maybe even the Senate and actually put some of the checks the Constitution intended back in place. SCOTUS is still fucked and not a lot will get passed over Trump's veto, but we can stop the bleeding.

2028 - Get Trump, Vance, and all the fascists out of the Executive Branch. It's also the only way to start on SCOTUS reform and getting back on the right track. This is also the president who will be overseeing the next census that controls which states get how many Congresspeople.

wanna see something cool and a lil scary

Why does Mozilla Firefox allow up to 10GB of storage per site/page?

In identifying my graphics processor it can uniquely identify me on the internet? And no permissions are required AKA there's no way for me to stop that

I went back and forth to do the screenshots and yikes, it knew I did that

Then this last one which was the same as Firefox but this put more detail in about why that's such a big deal. Also that the website didn't actually request this information. The Chrome is out there running around giving the internet the equivalent of my underpants randomly

Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman... ...I would say "how lucky am I"

Father in heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water... ...Who would then transform me from a man to woman? Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...

What shall I say? why cry or be bitter? If my father in heaven has decreed upon me and has maimed me with an immutable deformity then I do not wish to remove it. the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure and for which no comfort can be found. So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground. Since I have learned from our tradition that we bless both, the good and the bitter I will bless in a voice hushed and weak: blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.

context: grew up in an abusive, controlling home, escaped to uni, had a prolonged mental breakdown, became a teacher and worked in a dysfunctional school with amazing kids and nightmare management for years. I did not realise I have adhd and autism for a long time. (You might even be able to scroll back through this blog to find the time around which I did realise lol.)

ANYWAY, things that have helped me because my body can no longer handle any kind of stress without flaring up:

If you’re doing anything that requires you to do a lot of prep before you begin the actual thing (e.g. cooking, deep cleaning a room, moving house), mise en place. That’s a fancy french way of saying get everything ready before you begin. So if I’m cooking idk spaghetti carbonara, that means fry and chop the bacon, separate the egg yolks from the whites, put water in the kettle, put dry spaghetti into a pan. Once everything’s ready, it reduces the mental load and means I can focus on the actual cooking and any clean up that I can do along the way. H/t to @ms-demeanor for this, you changed my life!

the Might As Well rule. This one works really well for me but you gotta be careful otherwise you’ll get sucked into the Vortex. Basically, let’s imagine you’re in the bathroom, brushing your teeth. You notice that the extra roll of toilet paper has been used. instead of thinking, “I’ll get to that later”, and then forgetting about it until you sit down on the bog (no judgement, we’ve all been there), you think “Might As Well put an extra roll while I’m here!” This tends to help with the little tasks that build up over time. This Does Not Work for big tasks.

Leading on from no.2, Do It Immediately/ASAP really helps me too. My current boss will email me on a Friday and say, ‘don’t reply to this now! Leave it til monday!’ But she and i both know that if i leave it til monday, I will forget and get stressed and this will make me Very Ill. So, instead, the moment i receive the email, I’ll either schedule in replying to it as soon as I’m done with my current thing, OR I’ll reply to it immediately.

Anything that can’t be actioned immediately, i mark as Unread. Anything Unread in my inbox is a future action, and i check those Unread emails/texts/whatevers Every. Day. To make sure whether today is the day i have the info to action it. (This also means i have to stay on top of my inbox. I read all my emails and then mark them accordingly. I’m also brutal with unsubscribing)

The House Always Wins. Both in a literal sense, because i am in a constant battle with keeping my house clean, and i know now that I’ll never get it as clean as i want it. It’s impossible, i no longer have the energy or stamina to vacuum and scrub everything. But also just in a life sense. I’m never going to achieve things to perfection, and perfect is the opposite of done. And getting things done is that much more important when you have limited energy and strength. Accept that you often have to half-arse life in order to Full-Arse the few things that really matter to you.

Have multiples of everything, everywhere. I wear support gloves, so i need to have handcream at every sink and everywhere i sit down in the house. I try to keep it unobtrusive, but it means i don’t have to trek upstairs just to moisturise my hands. Gum, phone chargers, pens and pencils, water bottles, hand sanitizer, whatever you need.

Work with people, even if it’s online. Body doubling actually works. Also I’ve found that if I’m working on assignments, taking myself to a library or study area that isn’t my bedroom helps so much.

Show off! Tell people on here or elsewhere in your life about the fact that you’ve just written 100 words! Or that you’ve cleaned the fridge and that’s a really big deal for you. Celebrate your wins, no matter how small.

Basically, you’re aiming to reduce the mental load as much as possible. Wear the same types of clothes all the time to minimise the amount of laundry. Eat the same three lunches so decision fatigue doesn’t take over.

For anybody looking for resources from someone dealing with actual ADHD, I have an incomplete but ever growing list of ADHD tips, tools, and suggestions on my website.

A lot of the pages on that site are adapted from my tumblr posts, for instance I'm adapting this post about car repair projects with ADHD into a guide on project management and completion with ADHD.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

In the TIST model, the intentions of a part are differentiated from its actions: what is the suicidal fight hoping to accomplish? How is it trying to protect the client? The following example describes the first client treated with the TIST model as it was first being developed in a state hospital setting. Katya illustrates how switching from a uni-consciousness model to a parts model and from a treatment method for borderline personality to a treatment approach for trauma could quickly change the treatment picture:

Katya had been hospitalized now for well over 2 years because of her unrelenting suicidality and self-injury, drug use, and violence toward staff. Although Katya recognized the role of her fight part once the new treatment model was described to her and validated its contribution to her survival, its determination seemed to increase with each unsafe event. Sometimes, Katya could unblend and differentiate herself from the fight part’s violent impulses by repeating as a mantra: “It’s just the fight part—it’s just the fight part—I don’t have to do what it says.” But sometimes the fight part hijacked her seemingly “behind her back,” and suddenly an act of aggressive or self-harming behavior would occur. Worried that the suicidal fight part was treading too close to the edge, I decided it was time that Katya and I found out what was driving it. I inquired, “Could you ask the suicidal part what it’s worried about if it pauses and takes some time to let you work on all this? What is the suicidal part afraid will happen if it stops trying to kill you?”

Even Katya was surprised by the answer. “The fight part says: ‘It’s the only way to push people away—they can’t hurt you if they can’t get close.’” In the hospital, she had developed close relationships to certain staff who would comfort her little parts, joke around with the adolescent parts, and connect to her normal life self. But the fight part had pushed away her family and successfully convinced her fiancé to end their engagement because he couldn’t tolerate the fear that she might die. Hearing the suicidal part’s agenda evoked panic in her attach part and worry in her normal life self: what about her wish to love and be loved? To marry and have children someday?      As I coached her, Katya asked the suicidal part: “What would you need from me to trust that I could handle these relationships that I want to have?” The suicidal part replied, “I would have to believe that you would be OK, that you couldn’t be devastated.” It would take many months for Katya to prove herself to the fight part and many more months to finally be approved for discharge from the state hospital.    

Today, she lives on her own, with the love and companionship of her cat, the closest comfort to her attach part and the emotional center and regulator of any negative feelings. She is proud to have grown into the normal life she once dreamed about, a life that includes college classes as well as caring for herself, her apartment, and her cat. The fight part now trusts her to choose relationships well and to soothe parts that might feel hurt or rejected by others before their implicit memories are triggered and become overwhelming. She in turn trusts the fight part to discriminate when people are taking advantage of her or expecting too much. Now, with growing communication and collaboration, Katya can heed the fight part’s warnings and set boundaries before it reacts aggressively to potential threat. Her ability to comfort the attach part reduces the sense of aloneness and vulnerability, allowing the fight part to sit back and leave her to do her job. By learning to “ask inside,” Katya learned how to dialogue with her fight part, rather than interpreting its behavior, until she finally discovered why it was so determined to lead her down a self-destructive path, even if that meant she was “incarcerated” on a locked ward in a state hospital. When the fight part acknowledged its primary purpose was to keep her safe from any attachment, even to her parents, the last few years suddenly made sense to her. Knowing how much she and her attach part yearned for closeness, she had immediately understood what she’d have to do to be free to live her life as she wished it to be, rather than the way her traumatic experiences had dictated that it be.”]