symptoms of a scatterbrain

over 25 * aro/ace * any pronouns fine Hello! This is just my personal blog, mostly for reblogging things! :) Background by fairylandalse! My anime/video games blog is festivalofthe12. My history blog is adhd-ahamilton.

[gumy-shark]

playing stupid games but im really bad at them so im not even winning the stupid prizes

[superchat]

there was a great study a few years that went into the whole "ppl online are bigger jerks than irl cuz theres a virtual wall and no repercussions" and the researchers were expecting to see that be the case but it turns out that people who were really angry or argumentative online were also found to just be assholes in person and people who were pretty patient and nice online were found to be patient and nice in real person as well

and it just debunked that whole cynical idea that people will naturally be mean if theres no punishment for it

[superchat]

source another source

the researchers found that being online didnt make people more hostile, but that being online allowed already hostile people to dominate forum conversations, and the less aggressive people were much less likely to reply or engage, ending in just the aggressive people bickering at eachother

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

Who would win: the twelve angry men from Twelve Angry Men or the seven samurai from Seven Samurai?

max i will not entertain this fandombrained powerscaling foolishness from you. the fact that you would even ask is offensive. it's the samurai by such a wide margin that your asking beggars belief

[yiiiiiiiikes25]

i take it back this is an incredible paragraph that should live forever in the paper of record

[yiiiiiiiikes25]

prev DELIGHTFUL tag

[bailesu]

I think the bulk of fanfic proves that most authors have never seen their own bodies. Let alone other people.

[22degreehalo]

I will be honest: this doesn't even sound like a virgin thing? It's pretty common for newer writers, especially if they write fairly slowly, to lose track of the physical state of a scene, and that goes double for people with aphantasia. Or maybe if the author does an edit at some point and forgets to re-read the rest of the scene to check it all still makes sense. I have certainly caught worse mistakes in my own writing from time to time, to which I can only conclude that there must be at least one or two cases that I didn't catch.

[dedalvs]

By special request from the LTS Discord…

Who’s more sexually desirable: Scar or Thanos?

No context; no middle ground. Choose your fighter.

Who does it for you?

Scar

Thanos

Voting ended onAug 2

[22degreehalo]

Literally doing stuff on your own is just sooooo much better than doing things with other people. You can pace yourself and properly taste your food and drink. You can read or listen to stuff you enjoy. You can sit back and breathe and exist in the moment. You don't have to anticipate things. You can idly look around and smile to yourself. And when you're done, you can leave when you want, without having to wait around or rush yourself before you're ready.

This is the world Tumblr wants to take from you. :(

[22degreehalo]

I think a lot of people on tumblr who like to talk about the goodness of community would be very startled if they actually got themselves into a situation where regular community interactions were unavoidable. And would learn that a lot of people out there are actually quite mean and judgmental and closed-minded and callous.

[27thfirefly]

subtextjob from a girl with huge implications

[dykecinema]

there should be a jesus on the cross emoji. not for any religious reasons. just so I can use it for every slight inconvenience.

[hatikvah-shalom]

I feel like in the past ten years, boycotting has stopped being a tool for forcing action on specific policies and become a form of harassment and monastic self-denial. Less “I will not be giving my money to you until you improve these specific conditions” and more “don’t touch the contaminated thing, lest you also become contaminated.”

[xclowniex2]

Its become a moral purity thing. If you purchase from a company doing something bad, you are deemed complicit in the bad thing because you spent $5 on shampoo.

Boycotting is not about keeping yourself morally squeaky clean. it's about forcing companies into stopping and changing bad behavior, with the power of multiple people's dollar.

[fittingoutjane]

Also, boycotts should have a specific and feasible demand. I will not buy from this company until their workers' union has a new contract. Or until they stop buying materials from a specific place where there's tons of exploitation going on.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

so much of the "research" on "phones bad" is just statisticians congratulating themselves in a circle

[dragon-in-a-fez]

example: I am right now reading an article on "phubbing", which is apparently the term for ignoring people you're with in order to pay attention to your phone. we'll slide right past the claim that this is a normal word people use.

the authors have developed a "phubbing scale" and demonstrated that it has strong correlation with the existing "maladaptive technology use" scale. from this, they conclude the "phubbing scale" is a valid and useful metric.

the "maladaptive technology use" scale, if you go and read that paper, has shown strong correlation with the "problematic smartphone application use" construct.

have you caught the problem yet? nowhere has it been proven that scoring high on any of this is actually bad for you.

imagine someone told you "if the ground is wet it probably rained recently". then you talked to someone about rain and they said "if it rained recently there were probably clouds". yeah okay sounds reasonable. then all three of these people told you their research proves clouds, rain, and wet ground are all signs of demonic possession in giraffes. you'd be like hold up, I think you lost me somewhere

[ollievion]

I don’t need a study to know using my phone makes me feel like shit

[dragon-in-a-fez]

do different things on your phone then. I'm guessing you haven't written off paper as a technology just because tax forms make you want to cry

[weeknightbrutal-deactivated2026]

It's fair to be skeptical of research into problematic mobile phone usage on the basis that while some studies have shown it to be correlated with anxiety, insomnia, and depression, correlation is not causation and it is difficult to establish a causal relationship when studying this kind of problem. It's also fair to be skeptical of psych research in general due to the problems that are pervasive in the field.

But being not just skeptical but confident that you've debunked all the extant research on the basis that...the dumb statisticians never even bothered to check if this was actually bad for you LMFAO IDIOTS is just plain anti-intellectual though.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

> spend 5 years getting a PhD in youth and digital media

> express annoyance with a common failing of academic writing in your field

> get called anti-intellectual

[dragon-in-a-fez]

now reading a paper where the researcher:

asked students to volunteer to take a "screen-free challenge" where they didn't use electronic devices in class for a semester

recorded students' views on the challenge at the end of the course, and found that most of the students who participated had positive views while most of the students who didn't participate had negative views

completely ignored that this might just mean "people who thought something was a bad idea didn't do it", and instead concluded "the screen-free challenge leads to more positive views on the learning experience"

I'm getting whiplash from all the looking into the camera I am doing here

[allore]

Just to clarify, they only recorded the students’ views at the end of the study?? They didn’t ask the students what they expected at the beginning or ask why they participated??

That seems like such a basic step to mitigate your #3!

[dragon-in-a-fez]

the thing you have to understand is that "screens bad" research gets published so easily you can basically make every research mistake ever invented and be fine

[dragon-in-a-fez]

re: that discussion about 'brain damage' - what is your stance on the impact of technology usage on children's development and their parents' role in (preventing?) that?

its role in growth and learning (terminology I prefer to "development" for reasons I won't go into) is, in my view, totally individual and extremely context dependent.

and I know that's kinda frustrating as an answer but the truth is anyone who says they can take a huge complicated aspect of the human condition and an equally complicated technology and collapse their relationship to a simple cause and effect statement is...probably selling something.

computers and phones are like other technologies in your house. I mean the things you might not even think of as "technologies". knives are a technology. fire is a technology. you need them both to cook dinner. they can also kill you. ideally you don't introduce your kid to fire by tossing them a pile of matches and saying "good luck" but also ideally you do not act like they're going to be better off never encountering fire without you hovering over their shoulder.

what you probably want to do is something along the lines of "let me show you how the stove works so you can start using it to cook if you want to"

if you study a class of 12-year-olds and their relationships with fire you're going to get a huge range of results. you'll have the outdoorsy kids who can build and light a perfect campfire. the ones who are scared of the candles on their own birthday cakes. the one kinda scary kid who likes to melt their toys. the one who started learning how to weld last year and is perfectly comfortable working with a thing hotter than the surface of the sun.

and parental input is only one component of how any of those kids ended up where they are.

parents have to get comfortable with the idea of doing their best to support their kids developing healthy relationships with technology - all kinds of technologies - while also accepting that their kids are whole people who are shaped by things beyond their control and have the right to make personal decisions they don't like.

you don't get to decide if your kid takes up juggling torches at age 16, but when they're 8 and ask you how the barbeque lighter works, you do get to decide whether you treat it like a normal tool they can master or a scary death machine they should be ashamed of wanting to touch.

[oodlyenough]

a thing about me is i basically never notice a wig or other kind of hairpiece in tv/movies. it has to be party city territory for me to even twig it. people will complain about characters' wigs looking bad and i will nod along but there is like a 90% chance i did not notice for a second while watching. i consider this mostly a blessing.

[22degreehalo]

I just don't... fundamentally understand. How some people - seemingly quite a few people! - can understand that a person's mental health struggles are so severe as to render them unemployed or unemployable, homeless, divorced, destitute, and suicidal.

And yet the absolute millisecond another person is added to the situation - particularly one it is believed that the original person bears responsibility for - suddenly, anything and everything can be achieved through willpower alone.

A man's mental health issues are so bad that he can't keep a job and struggles to even take care of himself? Poor guy! That same man, but he struggles to organise his child's education? Or manage his finances so as to take proper care of said child? Even, maybe, forgetting something important in relation to his child now and then? He should be ashamed of himself. He needs to Do Better. It shouldn't be his wife/girlfriend's responsibility to nag him or take over things. (And it is, always, assumed that the person is a man who is in a relationship witha woman.) It's Not His Fault But It Is His Responsibility.

Responsibility to do what, though?

In cases of personal crisis, many can understand that sometimes there just isn't really much that that person can do alone: that therapy, medication, a carer, or charity will be far more beneficial. But when it's another person being affected - even if that person is objectively affected far less than the person with mental health issues themselves - that all seems to get forgotten under the banner of 'responsibility.'

Don't bother asking these people what they have a responsibility to do. 'It's your job to work that out.' But surely, if a person is already struggling, they are already trying to work it out? And not coming up with any answers? It's hard not to see that 'it's not my job to teach you' as an easy way to avoid having to consider that, maybe, there really isn't much else that this person could be doing.

That, or they'll give one very generic suggestion, and when the person confirms that they've already tried it - because they have been struggling with this thing their whole life and of course have made efforts to overcome it - the other party will sigh and shake their head and say that it seems to them that this person has already given up, and isn't even trying anymore. Look, look: they gave a perfectly good suggestion! If that doesn't solve it, they don't even know what could. Which obviously means that it could only be the victim's fault.

Any requests for help or guidance are 'whining'. Are 'making yourself the victim.' Who they REALLY feel sorry for in all this is the poor wife/girlfriend (again, always assumed to exist) who's having to take care of you!! Avoid mentioning these responsibilities and you'll receive a world of goodwill about capitalism and poverty and how we need to do better for people with mental health problems. One other person is being inconvenienced by your struggle to survive, though? What an asshole, making this all about yourself! Your first step should be to Take Responsibility. Because right now, you're obviously not even trying.

By 'take responsibility', they mean 'refine your mental illness symptoms to a surgical level so that you are left only with those which affect yourself.' Be a perfect husband, a perfect boyfriend, a perfect friend and father and teacher and whatever else. Only then can you morally earn anything in the way of sympathy.

'Poor people can't just lift themselves up by their bootstraps!' But people with mental health issues can just will themselves into being Better, apparently. (Go to therapy!!! ...what, you're already going? You're obviously not trying hard enough there! Can't afford therapy? How much more do you think you're losing by not paying?!) So long, that is, we rephrase the advice as about 'doing better'.

[22degreehalo]

Not 'people can never change (and so you should abandon anyone who ever makes a mistake as incapable of ever doing good ever again', and also not 'everyone can change if they actually care to do so (and so you should abandon anyone who ever makes a mistake twice as they clearly didn't care enough to stop doing that thing' but something else: 'people can generally improve themselves by trying harder, but it's not always obvious how much people are trying, and none of us have unlimited resources, and so there are some circumstances in which a person cannot practically "try harder" anymore, at which point any improvements would have to come from a change in circumstances (e.g., help from others, fewer competing responsibilities etc.)'.

[malottie]

girl who is so so scared all the time. girl who once passed as 'smart' but now finds it hard to think. girl who's always half lost because of memory issues and dissociation and trouble with inhabiting a physical space. girl who is a failure in a way that is neither interesting nor endearing.

[1five1two]