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YOU ARE THE REASON
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@baeddelshinsgirl
ADHD medication withdrawal
ROYALLY SUCKS.
Also, in case you were wondering, ADHD meds do not actually address attention networks. They increase wakefulness and pre-reward you, making boring tasks more tolerable. And probably more to the point and more dangerously, mask the effects of sleep disturbances. So if you're on ADHD meds, you could have dangerous sleep apnea and be covering it up with your meds.
Can I borrow a scrap of dopamine? Please?
Me to Russell Barkley
“Does it amuse you to imagine me as a dreary man in a tedious job?” – Lieutenant J.G. Jean-Luc Picard, to Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Tapestry.”
I can't have invented a word, can I?
Two days ago, I needed a word for a "prosthetic" that actually harms function. I chose "antithetic."
I cannot find any reference to someone else using this word in this way. But I invite the disability community to use it.
DOWN WITH ANTITHETICS.
my life isnt perfect but at least im not doing a mans laundry
reading comprehension questions:
might there be a reason this post resonates with a lot of women?
can you describe the phenonemon of learned helplessness? give an example.
in what ways might the gender pay gap have influenced this post?
in most cultures, women are expected to do the majority of childrearing and domestic work, even if they also work outside of the home. in what ways does this influence the post?
Weaponized incompetence, not learned helplessness!
Oh, Terrible Maps. You forgot that NASA is absolutely, positively full of NERDS.
Tip:
When it comes to stuff like racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, I’ve found it’s usually way better to think to yourself ‘I don’t want to be’ than ‘I’m not’.
I.e. if someone goes ‘that thing you just did is ableist’, instead of going ‘I’m not ableist, I don’t hate disabled people!’ it’s usually a lot better to go ‘I don’t want to be ableist, I should rethink what I’m doing/saying/etc in light of that fact’. Because that shifts your thinking so rather than jumping straight into denial and attempts to defend your character, you’re instead more inclined to look at how your actions could be misrepresenting your intentions. Or whether you’ve overlooked something, been callous, or acted in ignorance.
I literally wrote an entire goddamn essay about ADHD and am now having to massively revise it because hooooooo leeeeeeee shiiiiiit the internalized ableism.
ADHDers have the unlimited right to refuse and reject artificial deadlines and artificial consequences as an "accommodation." Because the only thing that those things are is abusing the adrenaline-cortisol response loop to force urgency-action.
While I'm at it, learning about sluggish cognitive tempo/cognitive disengagement syndrome was the point where I had a strong realization that Barkley is full of himself. Like… "You have a neurological disorder characterized by the "freeze" neurological response to stress, and we're going to call it by an insulting name."
Tabletop RPG with an old school "you can die during character creation" lifepath system, except most of the disqualifying events are stuff like "made it to adulthood with no major traumas" or "discovered a love of carpentry", so your actual goal is to make just enough bad life decisions that your character is a big enough loser to become an adventurer.
I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text" thing I keep alluding to, so here's the bullet point version of that argument:
Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.
Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.
In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.
D&D is not a universal entry-level game.
All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.
D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".
Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.
They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.
So how does Hasbro square that circle?
Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.
Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.
The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.
The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.
The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.
Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.
(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)
The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.
In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.
It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.
Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.
That's the second trick: these are not opposites. The GM as human Xbox and the GM as tyrant of the table both represent the GM doing all the actual work of making the game happen. The latter isn't the outcome that Hasbro wants, but it's a logical conclusion of the position they want the GM to be in.
I've seen a few folks in the notes respond "okay, but if that's true, why is D&D so much more flexible than most indie RPGs?", and the answer is that it's not. That's part of the sleight of hand I've talked about where the GM's labour is framed as part of the product. To break it down:
As noted above, all game rules are opinionated about what kind of game they wanted to produce. This isn't just a matter of setting (though setting-neutral games are often misleadingly called "universal" games), but also a matter of the basic structure of the narrative which emerges when you follow the rules.
The rules of Dungeons & Dragons are not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (Again, having strongly opinionated rules is not something that's wrong with D&D; it's merely something that's inconvenient for Hasbro's marketing goals in a way they're unwilling to address.)
In brief, D&D really, really wants your game to be a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl. If the GM is using the framework of play furnished by the rules at all, or if the players are responding to the rules' player-facing incentives even a little bit, it's going to squish your game into something dungeon-crawl-shaped.
(This should not be surprising; it's literally in the name!)
The rules of D&D being opinionated in this way tends to fly under the radar for a couple of reasons, one less problematic and one more so.
The relatively benign reason is that many popular RPG premises are not done any great violence by being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.
A cyberpunk smash and grab caper? Basically a dungeon crawl already.
A special forces op in a modern military game? That doesn't need to be shaped like a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl, but it can be shaped like one and remain intelligible as what it's supposed to be.
Gritty logistics-driven survival horror? Not inherently dungeon crawl shaped, but the two genres are compatible – a game can be both at the same time, as video games like Fear & Hunger and Look Outside demonstrate. (Indeed, Look Outside's apartment building follows the structure of an old school D&D megadungeon nearly beat for beat!)
Thanks to D&D's pervasive cultural influence informing what people expect a tabletop RPG to be, as long as this kind of compatibility is present, many folks won't even notice their intended premise is being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.
If your chosen premise isn't compatible in this way, or if the group notices what's happening and decides to push back against it, though? That's where the sleight of hand I alluded to above starts to come into play.
Remember: a Good GM™, even a total novice, ought to be able to use any set of rules to produce any desired experience of play, right?
So get to work!
i.e., just as much of the game's putative approachability is the product of Hasbro selling the players their GM's labour in a D&D-shaped box, much of D&D's putative flexibility is the product of the GM being sold their own labour in a D&D-shaped box.
To be clear, this is not militating against homebrew content or rules. Homebrew is perfectly cromulent, and certainly, some games are more or less structurally amenable to it (though modern D&D tends to fall on the "less" side).
The problem is that what we've got on our hands is a culture of play that wants to have its cake and eat it too: when doing extensive homebrew is treated as part of the GM's basic, entry-level responsibilities, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the product of that labour as merely being a feature of the game.
Which is, of course, exactly what Hasbro's marketing ghouls want.
(I feel I should emphasise for the folks going "yeah, D&D sucks!" in the notes that at no point in either of these breakdowns have I said anything for or against D&D as a game. These problems would still exist even if D&D was the best game in the world at being the kind of game that it is!)
I like Pathfinder better than D&D (I like to characterize it as D&D's slightly easier, much queerer cousin) but I have to emphasize that Pathfinder is only SLIGHTLY easier than D&D.
Russell Barkley is a Failure
In 2 decades since Ron Barkley's death, the state of people with ADHD has not changed in the slightest. Russell Barkley's methods DO. NOT. WORK. And I'm tired of people pretending otherwise.
WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE ANNOYING.
Do the traits and behaviors of ADHDers annoy neurotypicals? WHO CARES? ABA was thoroughly rejected by the autism community as abusive, and they were right to do so. We can and should reject behaviorist interventions that treat our brains as collections of behaviors without agency. ANY “symptom” of ADHD that can be formatted as “this is how people with ADHD annoy neurotypicals” can be immediately and categorically rejected as a false characteristic of the condition. It is, at best, a “symptom” of neurotypical obsession with forcing ADHDers to obey neurotypical ideas. As such, the ENTIRE DSM-5-R characteristics of ADHD must simply be thrown out.
ANY treatment of ADHD as a condition of executive function MUST start from the Miyake-Friedman Executive Function model.
I entirely reject the Barkley Deficits of Executive Function Scale series, finding it to be specifically created to reify the domains of externally observed behaviors seen in the conventional DSM diagnostic. The BDEFS is also, as its name describes, explicitly designed to find deficit and therefore will do so whether it exists or not. It is not used outside of diagnostics for ADHD and therefore can be dismissed as having been created out of motivated reasoning. The BDEFS model, in particular, focuses on suppressing socially-inconvenient behaviors that are irrelevant to the goal of maintaining task-oriented behavior – the ADHD equivalent of the spectre of “quiet hands” in the autism world.
Gina Pera is Russell Barkley Without the Credentials or Ethics:
Tightly related to the Barkley "pseudo-ABA" model is Gina Pera's model of relationship management - and it is a model of management because she follows the exact same pattern of building controlling "scaffolds" that reify while ironically claiming to be fighting the "nagging wife-incompetent husband" relationship. Her model validates anger toward people with ADHD by encouraging non-ADHD wives to vent their frustration with respect to their husbands without turning that into a functional and mutually-respectful way to approach that relationship.
Gina Pera has a BS in Mass Comm. That's it. She has no formal training in psychology and does not have the ethical standards or training of medical personnel. She boasts about her 20 years of research and experience without ONCE mentioning that she has NO medical training and has NEVER had to consider the ethical standards governing the things she says. And it shows with the way she actively belittles and attacks people online who criticize her.
There is only one goal of identification of someone with ADHD:
Create ADHD-friendly ways of living.
People with ADHD have measurable and marked achievement gaps with their neurotypical peers. 20 years of professional-intercessor-led modification training and other harms – the ADHD equivalent of the ABA methods that are universally reviled in the Autistic community – have resulted in stagnation for the ADHD community. The Barkley-Pera model of professional-intercessor “symptom management” has at best made no improvements and at worst done harm and must be done away with immediately.
There's a bunch of adhd advice out there that's like "people with adhd tend to work better under deadlines due to the anxiety so here are ways to artificially induce a stress response in order to get you to get work done" and it's like well what if I don't want to be stressed out all the time in order to function
This is why one of the points in the ADHD manifesto I'm writing is:
The right to reject overuse of urgency as stimulation.
Urgency generates high levels of cognitive friction and should be used sparingly. Generating “artificial consequences in the prosthetic environment” (Barkley) is actually generating artificial urgency, which is essentially highly revving an engine without oil in it (or if we want to use the brain-as-computer analogy, taking the heat sink off your CPU and booting up the machine): It will generate results at extreme cost to the longevity of the system. An example of a Barkleyite “artificial consequence” widely seen as “positive” is trading “10 minutes of math homework to earn 2 minutes of video game time.” Not only is this “artificial consequence” profoundly uneven (trading a large amount of executive energy for a small "reward" that doesn't get you past the executively costly portion of a video game and into what is actually rewarding) and fundamentally misunderstands how video games even work, it is creating significant cognitive overhead for the person who is being subjected to the “prosthetic environment,” inevitably causing catastrophic friction. Its goal is compliance disguised as reward.
I'm working on a self-diagnosis series for ADHD. No, I do not have any scientific credentials. Yes, this is a distraction from the actual things I'm working on.
One of my "numerical" follies in this thing is adding a letter to INCUP to represent stimming ("M" for "Manual," though stims can obviously be non-manual in nature) and splitting them apart into ICP (internal motivators) and NUM (external motivators)... because in my internal experience ADHD is kind of a clown show. ;)
"girls could NeVeR!!1!1! beat '''''males''''''™ in athletics????? it's BiOlOgY!??!?!?"
idk bud have you tried um. feeding them
these murderous idiots are teaching young girls and women to be afraid of calories when eating a LOT of calories is literally vital for performing well in competitive sports. and then claiming it's 'natural' to uphold sex segregation bc of this imposed malnutrition. it's fucking crazymaking.
the mechanics here are truly horrific. systematically deny [cis] women athletes adequate nutrition and hydration, overwork and injure them. deprive them of the ability to realize the true extent of their strength and skill. segregate athletics based on false ideas of "sex" based on generations of malnourishment and poor training. blame trans woman athletes for the mere possibility that one might beat a cis woman, while claiming that the cis woman's defeat is inevitable. create emotionally stressful and often sexually humiliating tests to "purify" competitive athletics rather than foster the physical health of athletes. continue punishing all women for daring to play sports + have bodies.
Has anyone figured out what’s so viscerally wrong with this woman yet
She’s so one dimensionally evil you guys 😭😭 how is she real
read this and remember it. read this and remember that she is going to use the profits of her fucking ego-stroking reboot to decimate trans rights. read this and remember that every time you pay into her IP, you are emboldening her to hurt us more.
our lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.
trans lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.
Controversial AI actor Tilly Norwood had dropped a bizarre, flamingo-filled music video in which she sings ‘AI’s not the enemy, It’s the key
No she didn't, she's not a real person. Her OWNERS dropped a music video talking about how great AI was, as she doesn't have the capacity to do such on her own.
"AI's not the enemy"
Me:
"Can you write a symphony?" "Can you?" "Maybe my symphony will be absolutely terrible. But it will exist, and it will be the product of a human brain and human hands. It will have a human's input into it. It will have taken time and blood, both metaphorical and possibly literal. And through the practice, I will get better at writing a symphony. You, on the other hand, can only 'get better' at writing a symphony through legions of underpaid humans correcting the pseudorandomly generated bullshit that your programmers want to call music."
Whenever I actually think about Omegaverse (as opposed to having the knowledge that it exists kind of float in the background of my awareness) it makes my skin just crawl. Oh hi, let's create a fanfic trope where we take the creepiest form of compulsory heteronormativity, forced breeding and determinism based on primary sexual traits, and pretend that it's Good Actually because Biology and Pack Dynamics (humans are not pack animals, we are definitely social animals but human social dynamics are more fluid than many other social animals). Yes, I'm aware there are people who find it liberating or at least cathartic but I find the *extreme* focus on Breeding and Pregnancy as the sole marker of someone's worth to be alienating (hi, infertile). And A/B/O's focus on using the wealth and power of an Alpha as a stand-in for them being good in any other way is frustrating and infuriating in a world where we know that REAL rich and powerful men are fucking horrible people.
