By the way, you can improve your executive function. You can literally build it like a muscle.
Yes, even if you're neurodivergent. I don't have ADHD, but it is allegedly a thing with ADHD as well. And I am autistic, and after a bunch of nerve damage (severe enough that I was basically housebound for 6 months), I had to completely rebuild my ability to get my brain to Do Things from what felt like nearly scratch.
This is specifically from ADDitude magazine, so written specifically for ADHD (and while focused in large part on kids, also definitely includes adults and adult activities):
Executive functioning skills range from working memory to cognitive flexibility to inhibitory control, and beyond. They power our daily func
Here's a link on this for autism (though as an editor wow did that title need an editor lol):
Practical Strategies for Enhancing Executive Functioning Difficulties in Adults With Autism - Living with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as
Resources on this aren't great because they're mainly aimed at neurotypical therapists or parents of neurdivergent children. There's worksheets you can do that help a lot too or thought work you can do to sort of build the neuro-infrastructure for tasks.
But a lot of the stuff is just like. fun. Pulling from both the first article and my own experience:
Play games or video games where you have to make a lot of decisions. Literally go make a ton of picrews or do online dress-up dolls if you like. It helped me.
Art, especially forms of art that require patience, planning ahead, or in contrast improvisation
Listening to longform storytelling without visuals, e.g. just listening regularly to audiobooks or narrative podcasts, etc.
Meditation
Martial arts
Sports in general
Board games like chess or Catan (I actually found a big list of what board games are good for building what executive functioning skills here)
Woodworking
Cooking
If you're bad at time management play games or video games with a bunch of timers
Things can be easier. You might always have a disability around this (I certainly always will), but it can be easier. You do not have to be this stuck forever.
nothing but respect for our troops (smut writers) but listen. i dont want to be the person to tell you this, but not every character is going to be a dom or a sub. some people. and i know this is hard to hear. but some people do have vanilla sex. and some of those people might even be The Character.
David Leviathan on Suzanne Collins // Revenge of the Sith novelization // Taylor Swift, Hoax // Aeschylus, Orestes // Paramore, Last Hope // Aeschylus and Robert Icke, Orestia // @sw_holocron & Tony Gilroy, Twitter
Really really curious what your thoughts are on the last three episodes of Andor? I’m assuming you watched them since you reblogged the Mothma speech.
I most certainly have, and I've been trying to parse through a response for the last couple of days. Any articulation of just how impressed I am with episode 8 and 9 feels lacking when I firmly believe there is going to be a plethora of research published on Andor's presentation of Imperialist regimes and revolution.
But firstly, I am so immensely shocked Disney greenlit season 2. In the era of constant censorship and totalitarian response to protest I am blown away Disney executives allowed season 2 to air without requiring heavy changes.
On social media I've seen people getting really upset over lots of Star Wars fans/viewers missing the direct parallels between the Ghorman Massacre and Palestine. And that is certainly a parallel Gilroy is clubbing people over the head with, but I also don't think it's as simple as that. Andor isn't commentary on a single atrocity or a single imperialist state, and I think to reduce it to a singular horror is reductionist. Because Andor (and greater Star Wars) is a spotlight on Empire and totalitarianism and authoritarianism in many forms.
I absolutely think Andor is a dialogue on Palestine, especially with Mothma's speech on standing up for truth and calling the "Ghorman Plaza Riot" for what it is, genocide. But I also think, with the heavy handed French resistance aesthetics and the hiring of French actors to pronounce the Ghorman language as phonetically French and ALL of the direct allusions to World War II, we can also take it for what it is, France and Poland and the greater theater of Nazi Germany. I also think it's Tiananmen Square, and Myanmar, and so many protests in the United States I can't begin to list them all. It is the authoritarian propaganda machine and twisting of truth and turning the public against innocents and peoples fighting for freedom. Is is every iota of CIA involvement in Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Cambodia, Laos, Brazil, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua...I could literally go on for pages.
Andor is also representative of the state alienating and criminalizing the other, of which every major political power on this planet is guilty of. But it is especially the United States terrorizing immigrants while extorting their 'usefulness'. It is sexual abuse and crimes against humanity committed by ICE and other government enforcers.
It is the constant propaganda machine, unceasing and unforgiving, which will always seek to demonize anyone who resists. It is media censorship and ad campaigns and flat out blatant LIES. Because truth is freedom, truth is a weapon.
I think my favorite part of Andor is the unflinching examination of what it takes to resist though. I think a modern penchant, especially on the Internet, is many people's obsession with a moral high ground. The constant need to be utterly right and the expectation of moral purity from others and ourselves equates people frozen by inaction and the fear of getting their hands dirty or others perceiving them as wrong or bad. It's why there is so much infighting in leftist spaces, because of disagreements of doctrine and moral code, and that refusal to give ground and work together, it means the Empire wins. But revolutionaries of the past were not squeaky clean apostles of goodness. A spy in the French resistance killed people, maybe even innocent people. In that particular war, western society tends to paint over it all, and agrees that the fight for freedom was justified, and that the people who took up that fight were good. This is because we won that war. But revolution is a bloody business, resistance is not clean or pure, made up of saints and Luke Skywalkers.
The price of freedom is paid by people like Andor. It's Luthen's monologue completely, "I burn my decency for someone else's future, I burn my life to make a sunrise I know I'll never see."
In all, Andor, but especially the last few episodes, I think is a horrifically accurate examination of what systematic oppression and violence under totalitarianism looks like. I think it is also an unflinching examination of what resistance actually is. No one escapes a regime morally unscathed, Palpatine did not build the Empire from nothing nor alone, and the unfortunate price of freedom and justice is not moral purity. The Rebel Alliance are not pacifists, nor were the Jedi for that matter. So what is the price paid, to fight fascism, totalitarianism, imperialism, authoritarianism etc.? What is the price to fight, for yourself, but mostly for the people you love? It is everything. And I think the question Andor ultimately asks is, is it worth it? And I think the answer is simple but not easy, yes.
I'd just like to clarify some things about Senator Cory Booker's marathon Senate speech in protest of the present administration and everything they are doing to the American people.
Senator Booker was NOT allowed to sit down, eat, or use the bathroom during his speech. Sitting or leaving the room to use the bathroom would be considered yielding the floor. Eating would have interfered with his speaking and the person who has the senate floor must continue to speak, except when listening to questions that they will then answer.
He only took occasional sips of water.
The person who previously held the record for longest speech on the Senate floor did have bathroom breaks and also did things like read from the encyclopedia.
Senator Booker did not do that. His speech was to point out the damage that this administration is doing and he stayed on that subject.
Senator Booker's speech did reach many people. It wasn't a silly stunt that was done so that he could take the record for longest speech. He wanted to show the country that democrats will do something to bring attention to the problems we are facing. That democrats are listening to them.
Senator Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours and 4 minutes to "make good trouble."
Cory Booker broke a record with his 25-hour Senate floor speech. How did he prepare to do it?
He trained himself to give this speech by practicing and then implementing limits on food and water intake leading up to this. He cut out food for days, then cut out water the day before.
He then went to do an appearance on Maddow after yielding.
hey. i'm outside. hey look if u could just. hey. Let me in. it's really cold out here and i see you've got a bowl of baby spinach there. I love baby spinach. Please let me in
Bright the sun shone | at the time of Þor’s birth,
And bathed his count'nance fair.
Loki, wolf-father, | the trickster, the liar,
I found on the cold pavement
While returning in glory | from a grand hunt
For a 3 AM quesadilla.
“cory booker is not actually accomplishing anything” I need you to stop being a pessimistic hag every second of ur life. u can be disillusioned. u can wish there was more done already. but this is SOMETHING!! he has broken the longest senate speech record and has been standing up for americans (and against a fascist racist oligarchy) for over 25 hours straight. hundreds of millions have and are watching him. HE is the news cycle. he is reading democratic and republican testimonies alike. people are hearing him, whether they chose to or are forced to!!!!!!! will it solve all our problems? no. but it is a Spark that will hopefully catch flame
btw i’ve never seen pacific rim but i had a dream last night that there was a new pacific rim movie and the kaiju and the big robots were fighting and there were all these gratuitous shots of them stepping directly on cybertrucks with the drivers still inside them and in an interview guillermo del toro said that those were his favorite shots in the entire movie
You can suspend your disbelief for the man transformed into sentient rocks by space radiation, the interdimensional bird, and the flaming biker skeletons, but one guy being a little old is where you draw the line?
#its also worth noting that marvel *DID* change magneto's backstory#he was originally presented as someone who had survived the shoah as an adult#and marvel retconned it to him surviving it as a child#iirc his original debut backstory involved him losing a wife and two kids??
Well, no, not really. When Magneto was made to be a Holocaust survivor, he was a survivor from childhood, though by the end of the Holocaust he was in his teens. His daughter Anya was killed by an antisemitic mob after the Holocaust, at some point in the 1950s.
While there are definitely living Holocaust survivors today, most of them aren't up to doing half the shit Magneto does, and it seems to be affecting the impact his stories have on audiences. I remember reading Magneto stories as a kid in the 90s, knowing he was a little younger than my grandparents, and getting hit with a truckload of sympathy for the dude. He just wanted to have a normal life like Grandma and Granddad, and then the war happened and oh FUCK. Younger readers now are much less likely to have that personal connection; that's just how human lifespans work. And it's only going to get worse. Magneto does need some future-proofing.
That's not to say I think Magneto's origin should be changed, or that he should be permanently killed off. Far from it. This is comics; all kinds of timeline bullshit happens all the time. As someone pointed out above, Wolverine is most of the way into his second century of life.
What I'd do--and what I'm shocked Marvel writers don't seem to have done yet--is wave the mutant bullshit wand and make Magneto functionally immortal. Secondary mutation, maybe. Something something magnetic fields. The mechanics don't matter any more than "Wolverine is functionally immortal because healing factor" does. What matters is this:
At some point, Magneto will be the last living Holocaust survivor. And he will not let the world forget.
There was a story I read as a kid where Magneto took a handful of soil from the camp where his family died and spread it on the surface of the moon, where he was building a mutant haven of some kind. The image of him on his knees with soil running through his fingers and an agonized look on his face has haunted me ever since. To some part of him, it's always 1945. Never again is quite literally now.
I want to see Magneto as the furious conscience of the Marvel universe. I want him to rip a hole in the UN General Assembly building and stride in with his full regalia on--except for one sleeve, stripped to the forearm to show his tattooed number--and read the UN the riot act in all his nigh-unkillable glory. I want him to storm into summits between warring planets, atomize the ferrous metal in everyone's weapons, and lay down the galactic law that is There Will Be No More Genocides On My Watch, And My Watch Is Eternal. And I want future writers to use his story, and his enduring popularity as a character, to make sure that audiences don't forget either.
Magneto being a Holocaust survivor is only a flaw in the storytelling if you're a goddamn coward.
evangelicals being like "god made men to do This and be like This and women to do That and be like That that's just how it is" and it's just a picture of a white man and woman following traditional gender norms makes me so insane like you boring fascist fucks. god made 2 million species of beetles. god made whales, ducks, humans, and 1500 other species capable of same sex behavior. god made fish and amphibians that change sexes. god made more than 30 different intersex variations in human beings. god, in his infinite curiosity. wake up!!! fuck!!
"god wants women to have perfect no-makeup makeup looks and stay at home not talking back and upholding capitalism" god??? that guy who made lizards that shoot blood out of their eyes?? that guy who made salmon do whatever the fuck that is?? are you fucking crazy???
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