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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • It absolutely isn’t, and it’s for sure off-topic, but I glad it was posted here rather than somewhere more specialised. People in assistive tech might already know about this sort of thing. I think it’s cool to imagine how different social media would be if we could actually hear each other’s voices, and all the general information about age, background, confidence and humour that the voice can convey. There’d probably be less misunderstandings and trolling, but when it happened it would probably hurt more.

    But maybe op could change the title to an actual thought, “social media might be less awful if we heard each other’s voices” or whatever.



  • Absolutely. Movies are often slow, and because they rely on visual storytelling more than tv, so I can’t even be doing something else while watching them. A trick that worked for me was starting 15/20 minutes into the movie, that way stuff is actually happening rather than some slow setup, and I get the extra challenge of trying to figure out what’s happening and what I’ve missed which keeps my brain busy. Then, if I enjoy the movie, I’ve got an extra 15 minutes to watch later as a bonus!


  • Comfort eating. Before I got adhd meds I had zero impulse control, so I’d eat nothing or eat everything. I would be 75% through a giant bag of snacks, and I’d be actively not enjoying them and wanting to stop, but I just couldn’t. I’d stop and put them away and ten seconds later I’d be back eating, even though I was feeling sick and gross.

    On meds, that’s stopped and I’ve realised that my craving for snacks is all about comfort, stimulus, and self regulation, and nothing to do with hunger. But even knowing that, I struggle to bother with other harder but healthier ways of stimulating and relaxing, when I could just eat crackers with thick slabs of salty butter, or alternate between dark chocolate and salty peanuts. It’s not the worst, but I’m very conscious of that it’s not really about the food and so it feels like a lot of empty calories just to chill me out a little.




  • I’ve had lots of problems in life (late diagnosed neurodiversity), walked out of jobs, changed careers, gone back to uni three times, and had a series of mental breakdowns. But despite all that, because I had a caring family, I knew that the worst that could happen is I’d have to move back in with my parents, which might be. A bit humiliating but would be easy, comfortable and safe.

    This security allowed me to spend two decades fucking up until I got the right diagnosis, medication and a satisfying professional career. I’m extremely conscious that if I’d not had love and support I’d have ended up an unemployed alcoholic, or dead. I have so much respect for people fighting through life on hard mode, but I’m also so glad I happened to get the lucky draw.

    Similarly, being a normal looking white guy is an amazing superpower. Although “invisible disabilities” absolutely have their own challenges, the fact that my problems aren’t easily spotted means that despite being repeatedly terrible at a wide variety of jobs, and a general screw up, I have gotten every job I’ve interviewed for, often massively beyond my actual skills and expertise. And it’s not just the external appearance, the confidence I grew up with from being white, male, straight passing, and middle class, has meant that people just believe stuff when I say it, and take me seriously even if I don’t really know much about whatever we’re discussing.

    Obviously there’s some small amount of individual traits and whole lot of luck (you can still lose a game in easy mode, and sadly I know folks who have) but it so obvious I’m playing with a stacked deck compared with most of the world, that it boggles my mind that people try and deny their ‘privilege’.



  • Because that’s the logical fallacy of Denying the Antecedent . If “it’s raining” then “the sidewalk is wet”. Knowing that it’s raining tells us something about the sidewalk, it’s not dry, it’s wet. And knowing the sidewalk is dry tells us something, it can’t be raining (because if it was, the sidewalk would be wet).

    But knowing “it is not raining” doesn’t tell us about the sidewalk (it could be dry, it could be wet, maybe it rained earlier, maybe a dog peed on it). And similarly knowing the sidewalk is wet doesn’t tell us anything about the rain.

    So even if “mo money causes mo problems” all that tells us is that someone with mo money will not be problem free. People with no money might also have mo problems, the syllogism doesn’t tell us about that.