here are a variety of light fixtures

Dee, 30-something, she/her or they/them Eng/日本語 A sort-of professional person by day, huge nerd by night. I do commissioned writing and translation. I lived in Japan, currently live in America. I tag fandoms and things of interest, and also any triggers I've been asked to.

[homunculus-argument]

Betrayed and backstabbed by your scheming evil advisor? Psch. Skill issue. Absolute amateur problem. Just hire two of them and reward them for snitching on each other. Just make sure that neither of them is gay or they'll just end up hate-fucking each other and fucking you over all the same.

[miss-hexatrix]

"hire two evil advisors but make sure neither of them is gay" are you hearing yourself right now. be serious

[screambirdscreaming]

One of the big things I struggle with functions-wise is getting stuck in what I call optimization loops. Where there's several tasks that need doing, and some would be optimized by having another task done first, but it can't be shaken out into a clear executable task list.

Simple example: I need to shower, eat food, and go to grocery store. I'm hungry and don't have energy to cook, so the easiest food option would be to get a deli item at the grocery store. But I want to shower before leaving the house. But I don't have energy to shower without eating first.

It feels very silly to get stuck on such a minor dilemma for as long as I have! But there are times I've spent hours looping through this list, trying and failing to start it anywhere. And the only way out, I find, is to manually override it: to catch it happening and say, fuck it! I can go to the grocery store stinky! It's fine!!

It could be considered a subset of perfectionism, because the override very much involves hitting yourself with the idea that it's ok to do things suboptimally. But it feels like it comes from a slightly different place. As someone who struggles with executive function, I get myself through a lot of tasks by trying to optimize to the smoothest, lowest-friction way through. The task order that minimizes having to do any step more than once, or having to remember too many things at a time. If I can arrange my tasks just right, sometimes I can get one task to cover part of the work of doing another! And if I can put my tasks in an order that feels natural and ideal, I can lower the energy of activation it takes to get moving. And, sometimes, avoid the choice paralysis of not being able to pick a task out of a list of equal priority.

Except that, obviously, sometimes the optimization process throws up glitches of its own. There's the closed loop I described, and there's also another catching point where a task I have the mental energy and wherewithal to do gets stuck behind a task that's too big/intimidating/difficult to tackle. For example: I just sent some emails I've been procrastinating on for over a month, because I need to set up a new email address, and I was telling myself it'd be better to get that set up before I contacted people, because it would save me the hassle of dragging a bunch of conversations over to a new account when I did get it set up. I still haven't made the other email! But I realized that hypothetical future hassle was not worth the delay of not sending those emails for as long as it's going to take to actually get my brain together to figure out a new email service.

Surprisingly, doing something like this often actually makes the difficult task I was stuck on easier! Another thing I struggle with is a flinch reaction from tasks that are both pressingly important, and unapproachable to do. The more I need to do a task immediately, the more stressed and overwhelmed and self-recriminating I get about the fact that I don't know how to even start doing it. It gets so bad I can't even think about it directly - I think about the general shape of it, flinch, and divert my attention so I don't panic.

And when I've got a minor, pressing task stuck behind a big nebulous scary task, it presses the unapproachable task forward, makes it urgent, and that makes it harder to figure out how to do. If I can get around it, and do the actually pressing task in some contrived way that pushes some miscellaneous messy consequences forward, it takes pressure off the big task. And then I can actually think about it, without panicking, which makes it possible to actually work on doing it.

That last point also often applies to asking for help. I have a weird hangup here: I find it excruciatingly difficult to ask for help if I haven't at least *started* the thing I need help with. Which gets into the same dynamic: I have a big unsorted task I can't think about directly without panicking, or the path of steps to doing it that I've managed to figure out starts with one I can't make myself tackle, so I'm stuck doing nothing with no way in. Asking for help means admitting to someone that there is going to be mess, that I can't tackle the problem in the optimal front-to-back way so there's going to be inconvenient problems generated in some of the steps that will have to be dealt with at other steps, and some of that inconvenience might be to people other than me!! But just managing to say this, to admit this upfront, is sometimes enough to cut the gordion knot of not being able to start anywhere.

So, ok, it is a little bit about perfectionism. But perfectionism that comes from a slightly sideways place: the desperation to avoid creating problems in the future, to the point where instead you create problems now.

[hypokeimena]

hope this is okay to reblog - those optimization loops are absolutely my most disabling exec dysfn issue, too, and i often have to remind myself of this comic--ESPECIALLY "get rid of secret rules." that's been the most helpful piece of advice for me, personally, largely because it puts into words even the idea that there might be secret rules i don't even notice i'm following. now that it's something i even think to check with myself, it has become so so so much easier to realize that i can just Stop Doing That.

[deanon]

having now watched the movie twice I have thoughts on lex luthor (2025)

specifically: I don’t think Superman’s dick would fix him, I think it would make him worse. and we should try it anyways

in every scene he has even a little power or advantage over superman he’s so turned on he can’t see straight, imagine the megalomania if he rode Clark until his brain was leaking out his ears??

Honestly they’ll baby trap each other, lex makes the test tube baby but Clark is the one that’s like “this is our child and we need to put our differences aside to be his parents” bc superman isn’t leaving his kid with luthor and luthor isn’t handing over his prize experiment so i guess we’re stuck sharing custody. oh no. what a shame

[moonmagicshop]

Lex Power Bottom Luthor made Ultraman top him so he could live out his homoerotic psychosexual hate sex fantasies of Superman. I know this to be true because James Gunn beamed this canon directly into my brain while I sat in that IMAX theater and watched Lex delicately touch Clark’s hand through the torture prison glass box.

[kal8elle]

R.I.P. Malik Ali, the falafel vendor 💔

[kal8elle]

For those wondering, it was Clark who wrote the article honoring Mali.

[ao3fujoshevik]

happy lex luthor’s psychosexual obsession with superman summer

[sassylittlecanary]

There are many, many differences between Lex in Smallville and Lex in Superman (2025), but one of the biggest ones is that SV!Lex absolutely knows he’s down bad for Clark in a gay way while 2025!Lex has his “I hate you, stupid alien” blinders on so tightly that he doesn’t realize what he really wants is to fuck Superman. SV!Lex is like “we’ll be the stuff of legend” and “you and I share a destiny” and “I’ll always love you” because he knows exactly what’s up, whereas 2025!Lex is like “I’m so obsessed with you that I memorized your every move” and “I tried to start a war just to get a chance to meet you” and “I cloned you” with a big dose of “which could mean nothing!!!”

[zeppydeppyautodepressy]

no notes just this post

[uglynavel]

Man the vibes I'm getting from Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor is telling me that Conner is right around the corner. I mean look him. He's probably cooking our boy up in the lab right now

That looks like a man that would baby trap Clark out of spite.

And these promo pics tell me that they will be making Conner the old fashioned way

[amaryllizsblog]

cooking in the lab?….are we sure about that

[p4nishers]

hey so what the fuck was this about

[kcsplace]

I loved every minute of Superman

[silver-soul00]

Clex material in Superman marketing was not in my bingo 2025😭

[spider-mann]

Lex Luthor + Letterboxd reviews — Superman (2025) Dir. James Gunn

[nightfall-in-metropolis]

I need to make some noise for this because the way I spit out my water-

[runawaymarbles]

I know you wanted me away But I am called to be the first Pope from the USA I heard that there's a special place where God talks directly to me every time I pray

I'm having holy dreams, of ruling the Holy See Hear Santa Monica, her son is calling me Won't make the bishops proud, the USCCB Will see their bro in Christ, I know they're gonna scream

"God, what will you do? You once were our boy, then you went to Peru," oh Fathers I'm on the balcony In my vestments, they elected me as the

[runawaymarbles]

I'm pontificating as the

I'll be treading closer to the

✨ OLD STATUS QUO ✨

But bigots will keep calling me the

[runawaymarbles]

High School Me: when am I ever going to actually have to know who Saint Augustine's mother is and why do I have to learn it

Me from the future: memorize this because in 2025 you're going to be able to make a really specific joke about the new American Pope based on a song by a known lesbian who is one of the biggest names in music that year

High school me, probably: so does that mean destiel can be canon

[ilovewhales]

a lot of things get on my nerves. im constantly annoyed. and i also have a deep love of humanity and the world but everything is really annoying

[salty-fryingpan]

shawty had them

[artndetails]

pink moon.

[fair-itself]

I feel like this is the kind of thing you only reblog if you have an aesthetic blog, which I do not, but goddammit I just love it when the moon lines up with stuff

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

dandelion sun~

[raisinchallah]

like a solid 60% of weird fandom tropes were invented by women who needed slightly more avant garde ways to fuck spock.... wanting to fuck spock is in many ways a load bearing pillar of fandom like if u took it away the source code would just break theres like a molecule of wanting to fuck spock or reaction to everyone wanting to fuck spock within the heart of fanfic all fanfiction is about wanting to fuck spock except fanfic about wanting to fuck spock which is about women in stem