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Cake day: September 30th, 2023

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  • I still feel like the nouns are in the wrong place when I read this.

    I’m reading it as “New York cows new York cows bully bully New York cows”

    When I want it to read “New York cows bully new York cows” which would be “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” which isn’t enough buffalo.

    I have to inset my own “that” to be able to get my head around “Buffalo buffalo (that) Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”


  • Considering the person in the tweet posing the initial question is neurodivergent, and time blindness is a symptom of many forms of neurodivergence, I feel like being late is a poor example.

    I’m late because my condition fundamentally does not allow me to process the passage of time properly.

    For most people that would sound like an excuse. I understand that.

    I set multiple alarms, not just to wake up, but I have an alarm to tell me I need to get in the shower, out of the shower, an alarm that tells me if I’m not currently eating breakfast I need to skip breakfast or I’ll be late, an alarm that tells me to leave the house, and another alarm to actually leave the house regardless of if I can’t find my keys, go now or you’ll be late, call a locksmith later (because you left them in the laundry sink you idiot, that’s why the dirty towels are at the front door somehow)

    I’ve managed to avoid being late by being disgustingly early to everything instead.

    So when I am late, I’m already feeling like the worst possible human there is, how am I so completely useless?

    And “I somehow lost track of time despite having a countdown timer audibly playing in my headphones from the moment I woke up to the moment I got here” is not a valid reason in the eyes of people who have never experienced time blindness, so they pile up more shame on top of my guilt.

    My partner and I were standing in the kitchen planning meals and I asked him what day a certain event was because I could have sworn it was “a Monday 20-something” he tells me it’s “Saturday November 23rd” he said, “oh that’s next month” I replied, I went to write it in my diary, but it was already written in my diary.

    Later I got ready for bed, I set my alarm nice and early for the big day, and woke up today on the Monday 28th of October, started getting ready and asked my partner why he was sleeping in and he says “sleeping in for what? What are we doing so early today?” to which I reply “the event! …wait … That’s in November, why did I think it was today?” and went back to bed.

    I got home from work this afternoon, put my bag down and suddenly and immediately started panicking “oh fuck, I forgot to attend that event today!” and I pull out my phone to text someone and remember it’s not until November.

    I’m going to keep doing this until the 23rd of November, when I’m inevitably going to have somehow forgotten the event entirely and my partner will wake me up asking if I’m ready to go and I’ll say “go where? … Wait there’s some important I’m doing, don’t tell me”

    I guess my personal definition of excuse vs reason. An excuse is an attempt to get out of the consequences of what happened, a reason is an exploration of the factors that lead up to the issue, and does not absolve me of responsibility or accountability.

    To avoid being late in the future,no have to understand the reason I was late, otherwise how can I fix a problem I don’t understand.

    In my case the tooth problem is unfixable, I can only ever work to mitigate the impact, and that’s never going to work 100% of the time. So it’s tricky because it’s not an excuse, I know I’m making things harder for other people with my behaviour and I don’t expect to face zero consequences, but I can’t exactly fix it or guarantee it won’t happen again because I know it will, so I’m not going to make false promises about doing better, I’m already doing the best I know how.


  • Both the battery and the charger are old and broken in my brain.

    If it’s too hot out the battery drains faster, if I’m playing music the battery drains faster. If I’m having to swap between conversations, bye bye battery.

    Sometimes the charger works fine but sometimes it just doesn’t charge no matter what I try, and the battery stays low even if I leave it plugged in alone.

    Some days there’s a process that’s absolutely and inexplicably guzzling power, but the next day that same process barely takes up any processing power.

    Some days it just doesn’t turn on at all, and then on rare occasions I can’t get the damn thing to turn off, it’s just blasting notifications and I’m trying to sleep.

    Related: personally I think “old phone battery” is a much better metaphor than the “chronically ill spoons” metaphor that is commonly used to explain the impact of chronic illness.


  • Yes and no, applying for accommodations is as fun and easy as pulling out your own teeth with a rubber chicken.

    It took months to get the paperwork organised and the conversations started around accommodations I needed for my disability, I realised halfway through I had to simplify what I was asking for and just deal with some less than accessible issues because the process of applying for disability accommodations was not accessible and I was getting rejected for simple requests like “can I reserve a seat in the front row because I can’t get up the stairs, and I can’t get there early because I need to take the service elevator to get to the lecture hall, so I’m always waiting on the security guard”

    My teachers knew I had a physical disability and had mobility accommodations, some of them knew that the condition I had also caused a degree of sensory disability, but I had nothing formal on the paperwork about my hearing and vision loss because I was able to self manage with my existing tools.

    I didn’t need my teachers to do anything differently so I didn’t see the point in delaying my education and putting myself through the bureaucratic stress of applying for visual accommodations when I didn’t need them to be provided to me from the university itself.

    Obviously if I’d gotten a result of “you cheated” I’d immediately get that paperwork in to prove I didn’t cheat, my voice over reader just gave me the ChatGPT instructions and I didn’t realise it wasn’t part of the assignment… But that could take 3-4 months to finalise the accommodation process once I become aware that there is a genuine need to have that paperwork in place.


  • I’m forced to because I make the most ridiculous spelling mistakes that completely change the comment.

    “With” autocorrects to “without”.

    “is” autocorrects to “isn’t”

    Finally worked out why though - my right eye is impaired and I type exclusively with my right thumb (on mobile) so I’m not actually pressing the keys I think I am and I’m often hitting the “predict word” button instead of the space bar.

    Looking forward to getting tactile keys on phones again!


  • My job somehow shifted from teaching IT to seniors to teaching SOSE to migrants

    It has simultaneously been the most challenging, and most rewarding change.

    I’m forced to edit myself down from my preferred 5000 word lecture to about 150 words with clip art.

    It’s slowly helping me become less of a rambler.

    Except for the “post restraint collapse”, I get home and I can’t hold it in anymore, cue the explosive verbal diarrhoea.

    At work, fewer words are better.

    But in my own personal life I feel that the fewer words I employ to convey the way I feel the less nuance I’m embedding in my message and what is communication if not the conveyance of the core message, failing to express myself clearly would be counter-productive so surely explaining in more detail is beneficial, hello? Are you still listening? Why have your eyes glazed over.



  • When you gave up caffeine did you experience rebound insomnia?

    I gave up caffeine a month ago on my neurologists orders and it’s been easy, no obvious withdrawal symptoms, no cravings, I just replaced all my tea and coffee and redbull with herbal tea and lemonade.

    But I have not gotten more than 3 hours of consecutive sleep in this month, and I’m missing the relaxation and quiet that a refreshing 9pm redbull used to offer, I’ve got plenty of other relaxing rituals, but none so easy as just drinking coffee.

    I started drinking coffee at 15 and religiously relishing redbulls at 21. Now in my 30s, this is the first time I’ve had true insomnia symptoms.

    My mother has been an insomniac her whole life, my dad is narcoleptic, I was previously diagnosed with N24CRD and my brother has DSPS, so I come from a family of fucked up sleepers, but this is a new symptom set for me and it appears directly related to giving up caffeine.

    I’m hoping it’s just an adjustment period and my brain will sort itself out and get some sleep soon.


  • If she’s using ChatGPT to try and understand behavioural psychology, she’s not smarter than him.

    It would be one thing to go off and do some reading and come back with some resources and functional strategies for OP to avoid argumentative fallacies and navigate civil discourse, but she’s using a biased generative AI to armchair diagnose her boyfriend.

    “you don’t have the emotional bandwidth to understand what I’m saying” okay, so what if he doesn’t, now what lady? Does ChatGPT have a self development program so your boyfriend can develop the emotional intelligence required to converse with you?

    Picking apart an argument is not how you resolve an argument, ChatGPT is picking it apart because she’s prompting it to do that, where as a therapist or couple’s counsellor would actually help address the root issues of the argument.


  • Call her doctor

    I should have been more specific. Find a time when she’s not doing anything urgent, tell her it’s time to call the doctor, pick up her phone and dial the doctor, put them on speaker and put the phone down next to you while you body double your partner as they gone through the motions of locking in the appointment.

    While on the phone your partner can also give third party authorisation. It’s the first thing I do when I meet a new provider, I give third party authorisation to my partner and mother so they can make appointments on my behalf (they can’t get results for me, but they can schedule things for me)


  • Call her doctor, make an appointment, save it in her calendar, remind her in the lead up, drive her there, get the referral. Walk her to the post box to send it off, sit next to her to phone the intake office to confirm they got the referral, set appointments on her phone for every 6 months to sit with her and call to check the cancellation list until you get an appointment. Drive her to that appointment.

    If she has ADHD, the steps involved in getting a diagnosis are bigger than Mt Everest, she will need a neurotypical Sherpa.



  • I’d had the same recurring dream since early highschool. It was dream like in that it was a true labyrinth that mademoiselle no structuralism sense, walking around in the dream was ethereal, but the objects within were mundane, the toilets were broken or dirty in ways that could be reality not fantasy, but I always knew it was a dream, and for me it wasn’t panicked, it was just helplessly frustrating.

    Because it was so recurring (at one point I was having this dream weekly) I told every therapist I ever had and they’ll all suggested it was about performance anxiety, since many of the toilets were missing doors, or contamination anxiety, or even just having a full bladder before bed. None of that really resonated.

    It was in my 20s, having lunch with and old friend, they’d brought their new partner and we got talking about recurring dreams somehow. We covered the usual, the teeth falling out dream, the highschool exam you never studied for that you’re also naked for, etc. I start describing the toilet labyrinth, specifically mentioning that I’m not panicked in the dream, in just confused and frustrated, and this new guy excitedly exclaims “you’ve got an undiagnosed disability, I guarantee it”. He was half right, I was diagnosed, but I didn’t have any support systems because I’m broke.

    The toilet labyrinth is a very common stress dream, but everyone has a slightly different response to it, and it’s motivated by different factors. For some people it’s performance anxiety, for some people it’s health anxiety. Sometimes it’s a fear that your private secrets will cause public shame if they got out. In my case it was my subconscious asking the question “how is everyone else making this look easy? how is everyone else able to do this? The tools I’ve been given fundamentally don’t work! why do people keep staring at me like I’m the idiot for not being able to use a broken toilet? why is no one else talking about how to broken and unusable these toilets are? How is it everyone else managing to do this!?” because I in my real life I was trying to keep up with the able bodied peers while disabled with no support, and I wasn’t eligible for support so it was very much “but how do I do anything when I don’t have the tools? Stop asking me to jump, and punishing me for not jumping when I have no legs to jump with”

    (I have legs, that’s just a metaphor)



  • This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can’t stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.

    But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.

    Self driving cars will kill people, they’ll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.

    So do cars driven by humans.

    Human driven cars kill a lot of people.

    Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can’t truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don’t expect that of the humanity driven cars.



  • This is a common misconception with “charity shops” in the UK and “opportunity (op) shops” in Australia.

    The assumption is that the charity/opportunity is for people doing it tough to be able to buy cheap clothes and home goods.

    But the “charity” is because many shops like this are partner retailers of larger charity organisations, eg: the “profit” from Salvos stores helps indirectly fund Salvation Army Housing and food relief programs.

    The opportunity comes from who they hire, if you’re disabled or elderly, these shops are more likely to hire you than other retail providers.

    But of course, a large number of charity and op shops abuse their staff as much as Amazon and Walmart do. Wage theft and unethical labour practices galore


  • I quit caffeine a month ago (my neurologist is convinced my redbull “addiction” was causing the migraines I’ve been having since I was 6) and it’s no skin off my back to quit for 6 months to prove him wrong.

    Only the insomnia!

    I used to have a red bull right before bed to help me relax and sleep soundly, now I’ve got nothing (weed makes me want to clean my house then throw up)

    I haven’t had any caffeine cravings, but I have started hallucinating from the sleep deprivation. I was told caffeine withdrawals usually only last 2 weeks so I’m wondering if this is just my natural sleep cycle shining through.

    I’ve got a sublingual melatonin tincture that I need to remember to use because it helps somewhat, but despite multiple alarms and post it notes near my bed I completely forget I have it as an option.


  • Where does this this linguistically phenomenon come from?

    Is it a mistaken use of “an accident” with the preposition to reflect the personal involvement?

    Mistakes like “Could of” make sense to me because in my accent “could of” and “could’ve” are identically voiced.

    I can also completly understand where we get “alot” because alot is just the beginning of an acorn, minus a few hundred years of lazy pronunciation behind it (an oak corn =acorn)

    Google is telling me it’s because younger people will use “on accident” as an antonym for “on purpose”. That sounds feesible as an origin. Now I’m questioning if “by intent” is grammatically correct, I’ve been staring at words too long.


  • Yes, there are practices you can adopt in every day life that make you more likely to experience lucid dreaming.

    Certain mindfulness exercises to do during the day that essentially give your consciousness muscle memory that you later kicks in when you’re dreaming and helps you you pull a bit of control into the dream.

    If you have a Circadian rhythm disorder it helps.

    As a kid I learned I could “rewind” my nightmares and go back and do things differently the second time. Lots of nightmares where I couldn’t run fast enough to save myself I was able to rewind and run faster the second time around.

    As a teen I learned that I could just deux ex machina my way out of any dream.

    I was having one of my recurring stress dreams about not meeting societal expectations due to lacking resources. I’d had this dream a million times before, I’m desperate to pee and I’m in a labyrinth of broken toilets. Other people are coming and I going and seemingly peeing just fine and not getting lost in the labyrinth at all. but I can’t figure out how they’re using these broken toilets. Usually in the dream I just wander around anxiously looking to pee until I wake up (and notably, I don’t actually need to pee). But this time I was lucid enough to decide, fucking this, the ceiling had been made of glass the whole time, and a dragon burst through to pick me up on the her back and burn the whole Loo-byrinth down.

    So now I do that a lot. I was dreaming I was in a house slowly filling with green water and I may or may not have been a snake, but never fear, I summoned a goat from the thin air and gave it wings and we flew away.

    I had a dream where the fat bastard from Austin Powers was roomates with Oscar the grouch and I’d been sold to them as a indentured maid and for some reason they were naked and I was deeply uncomfortable with the arrangement, that’s when the lucidity kicked in, so I froze time and just walked away from the weird dream, deciding once I turned onto the main road I’d wake up because this was too bizarre to even come up with something better (I haven’t even seen Austin Powers)