Nice, I love a good battle jacket

I really like being able to do basic tailoring. Like, I grew up surrounded by media that made me view my body as flawed because of all the ways it deviated from the norm. The combo of broad shoulders and big boobs made it impossible to find fitting clothes that weren’t a tent on me. Being able to modify garments that I find, and repair the few items that fit me perfectly has been a big confidence boost.

Missing out on seeing this stuff on social media is probably for the best - a lot of craft content on social media tends to be very “influencer” shaped, where the goal is to make beautiful things look effortless, and that can be demoralising when it’s all you see.

Thanks for not deleting your comment

A few years ago, I read about how Mary Molony was an Irish Suffragette who disrupted a speech Winston Churchill was giving in Dundee by ringing a bell every time he tried to speak. She wanted him to apologise for remarks he had made about the women’s suffrage movement.

I remember when I read this, it reeked of something awesome that you find online that’s actually false (the story was shared on social media via a captioned photo with no sources), so I went digging for a proper source to check. I found some newspaper articles from 1908 and I learned that this event did happen, but also that people fucking hated Molony for this. There was a lot of “see, this is why everyone hates the Suffragettes”. (Sorry for saying this and then not sourcing)

It makes sense that people would be salty - Churchill was an asshole, but also a great orator, so I can see why one might be disappointed in missing the chance to see him speak, but I was shocked at the level of vitriol aimed at Molony and other Suffragettes from the time. Until this I hadn’t realised just how unpopular they were at the time. It’s drastically changed my perspective on protests and public perception.

I wish you well for whatever remains of recovering from the illness, it sounds like you’ve had a rough time.

I love the word “Epochalypse”, from the wiki page you linked

Pro tip, next time you shave your legs, change your bedsheets. Freshly shaved legs on fresh bedsheets feels divine. Also, make sure you exfoliate

Source: I’m a cis woman who started out shaving my legs because expectations, then didn’t for a while because fuck the patriarchy, then started shaving legs again, for myself rather than expectations.

Anti-paywall link https://archive.is/MfHFY

I’m doing my part!.gif

I didn’t end up with Lae’zel in the end, but I hedged my bets for long enough that I got the Long Rest scene where she wakes you up in the night. The encounter ended hilariously fast, but what followed melted my heart and made it very hard to not choose her.

I also love how quickly Lae’zel changes her entire world view, which happened around the same time for me. Mad respect for such principles and focus

I ended up with Astarion. I was en route to romancing Shadowheart, but I got surprisingly few approval moments or interactions with her throughout act 2. At the same time, my character seemed to be taking the shape of “goodie-two-shoes but sassy bitch to those who deserve it”, which gave loads of Astarion approval.

I ended up learning into it and I’m super glad I did. There’s an Act 2 Dark Urge scene that I felt completely changed the romance dynamic between my character and Astarion - it felt like it put us on a much more even footing, and I was surprised by how sincere and empathetic the scene felt (given that Astarion’s main Cope is a mask of flirting and sass).

I had originally wanted to romance Karlach, but there was a bug that prevented her approval from rising and by the time I discovered and fixed it, I had missed loads of Act 1 approval moments

I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything. Lower Decks is probably my favourite Star Trek series by a decent margin, but I think that people’s varying tastes is part of the Trek experience.

Like the first Star Trek I ever watched was TNG, with a partner who hated DS9 because of how far it was from the much more utopian tone of TNG. My best friend, however, loved DS9 most of all for that exact same reason. I can’t tolerate The Original Series because of how campy and cringe it is, but I have friends who love it for that.

If you hate Lower Decks, then your perspective is one I can’t really relate to, but that just feels like regular old Trekkie solidarity to me - with a show so varied, inevitably there’s going to be diverse viewpoints. That in mind, I’m not going to try and change mind, I’m just going to highlight why I love Lower Decks.

My favourite bit about Lower Decks is that it feels like a love letter to Trek, in all its forms. There’s a lot of references I don’t get, but I don’t need to get them to feel the warm fuzzies of knowing this show was made by people who are, first and foremost, fans of Star Trek. I like utopian sci fi because the state of the real world means that I can find real hope in the fantasy because in my heart, I believe in humanity.

Alongside all of that idealistic space exploration though, Lower Decks doesn’t shy away from the more pernicious aspects of Star Trek, and Starfleet/the Federation. The humour isn’t always my taste, but I think they use it well to poke fun at Star Trek, the show, but also the world within. The sometimes critical lens that is taken is part of why it feels so much like a love letter to Trek - if you truly love something, you’ve got to take the bad with the good and not pretend that everything is perfect.

In the past, with similar issues, I’ve had good success with requesting the book on Zlib, especially newer books.

I have a friend who says that “whatever works is elegant” and solutions like OP’s is why I simultaneously love and hate that phrase.

“as asexuality to the manosphere is like Antarctica to a flat earther”

Damn, this quote is fire.

That’s a good quote. And by good, I mean helpful in understanding the cycle of assholery.

We’ll just be very disappointed in you.

I have both autism and ADHD, and whilst it’s difficult to draw the line between the two, I do have some instances of inertia that feel more ADHD flavour than autism. I’ve also seen many of my ADHD friends struggling with something like this too, but it seems like it works differently than autistic inertia.

I think that there’s a decent chance that understanding autistic inertia will help us to understand ADHD inertia, even if they’re distinct modes

I don’t feel especially well poised to give advice here, because I’m still struggling with this, but maybe that’s the point; increasingly, I think that my idea of what “coping well” means is false and unattainable, and that real progress involves a bit of self acceptance.

On that front, my advice would be that living with ADHD means learning what battles are worth fighting, and only you can figure out.

A friend of mine used to struggle with extended chunks of work of one kind, and she spent a long while trying to force herself to work with timers and stuff, but her actual productivity shot up when she gave herself a bunch of tasks to cycle between. She enjoyed breaking up work with household tasks like washing the pots, because it’s simple, and has a defined end. Amusingly, sometimes she’d work at my place when we were students, and she’d tidy up for me and later say thank you for the opportunity.

One of my issues was I kept expecting myself to remember stuff when my short term memory is trash, even by ADHD standards. I got better at training myself to write stuff down, including sometimes asking for a break in the conversation to give me a chance to write it down so I don’t forget. That was awkward at first, but it got easier, and most people were understanding - most people seemed to respond positively in fact, because it shows that you care about what’s being discussed (certainly more positive than if I’d forgotten and incorrectly given them the impression that I didn’t care)

I spent a long time trying out different apps and systems, because novelty seeking brain wanted a silver bullet to solve all the things. Sometimes I still fall into that trap, but nowadays I know that even the best todolist or calendar app in the world won’t help if I don’t use it. It’s a me problem, and integration problem. Part of what helped me there was actually evaluating where my various systems kept going wrong. Like instead of calling myself lazy for not keeping things tidier, I made actual progress by buying a bunch of bins so that there’s always one at hand. I stopped berating myself so much. Beating yourself up for not being able to do things is internalised ableism.

Medication helps a lot, but I found that there were a bunch of maladaptive coping measures I’d built up over the years that I had to unlearn once I had medication. And then when I had a period without medication, I found myself struggling more than ever. It’s a combo approach, is what I’m saying. Don’t expect yourself to function at the same level as you would if you were medicated.

What you describe reminds me a lot of about how untreated ADHD traps you on depression.

This reminds me of when I had a player take the keen mind feat and it was an absolute God-send for drip feeding lore. “Kat, you’ve seen this shape before, the bartender had a symbol like this on their ring”

I had to drop in a few irrelevant observations to balance it out, but it was great.

What section would you put it under? It isn’t clear to me where it would fit