@LWhiskey To me it looks like a vicious sort of trap. Either it gets approved, at which point someone has approved a hideous caricature of a character, look aren't they racist for letting it in - or it doesn't, at which point they won't approve a black character, look aren't they racist for not letting it in.
I don't believe that app was made in good faith.
@A-B The most important thing in this world to learn is It's not always about you.
You can accept that you did something wrong without accepting that all the wrong is your fault.
When you accept that you did something wrong, part of taking responsibility for that is analysing it and working out what it was that you did wrong. The next part is trying to do better.
You made a mistake! Congratulations, you're human after all. Now work out what that mistake was and try not to do that again. Me, I have a long and convoluted script running inside my head for 'what not to do in X situation'.
And get help with this analysing stuff. Seriously. Find someone who'll help you pick apart what people were saying and what they were meaning, what you said and what other people assumed you meant, and just how it all came crashing and burning down around your ears. Other people do this shit instinctively, but we have to learn. The good news is that we can.
I got formally diagnosed a couple of years ago (during Autism Awareness Week, entertainingly).
I'm in my 40s. There wasn't really a stigma around autism when I was a kid - it was just something that didn't happen to girls, and therefore I was forever being naughty and acting out, and had to be corralled back into what was socially acceptable even though it made absolutely no sense (and still doesn't). The word 'ladylike' still makes me twitch, because it was always what I wasn't and yet what I had to be whether I understood it or not. This is not an uncommon experience for women diagnosed later in life.
It occurred to me that it was a possibility when I attended a talk on neurodiversity in my then-new workplace, four years back, and a new presenter brought up a list of traits that people on the spectrum might display; I looked at it and went 'Well - I don't have those two? But other than that...' - and then a work-friend with two autistic sons said 'Sorry, I thought you knew'.
I did some background reading, then marched off to the doctor's and made them refer me. Attended a screening interview, then a diagnostic interview, and then after talking to my mother they made their minds up. During the formal diagnosis interview, the poor chap tried to gently break it to me that sometimes an experienced clinician can pretty much see it walking through the door, and that's what had happened at the screening interview. The interviews after that had been justifying the diagnosis rather than determining whether I warranted it; in some ways it was nice that it was so obvious, but I was left feeling a bit as though if it was that bloody obvious then maybe someone should have said something in the preceding decades.
So yeah. I'm on the spectrum, significantly so, and always have been. It would been nice to have known a few decades ago, to have had some coping strategies I didn't develop myself, to have understood that not everyone thinks like me and that not everyone can cope with difference. I only found out after I got my life on some sort of track, not when it could have made a massive difference to its prior path.
And then, talking to my little brother to let him know that it's in the family in case my nephews need the support I didn't get? It turned out he'd known it was likely for 20 years.
As to what MU* RP has done for me? Playing a charming character who was able to handle people let me learn how to deal with people in a friendly fashion myself. I got to test things out before trying them in reality, and I got to learn a lot about how people who aren't me think - and that helped me realise that it's not the same way I think. Not everyone has a branching code-like script for interactions with other humans. Who knew?
LARP helped hugely as well; when you've been in a battle with 3,000 people, when you've hopped up on a table to make a speech to fifty, when you've saved someone else's character with quick thinking and a spell that was never intended for that purpose, there's very little that can stop you grasping your courage in both hands and stepping up to do something that truly needs to be done.
RP teaches a lot of 'soft' skills, and without it I never would have learned to cope with people.
When the scene was incredible while you were playing it.
When you edit the log and it was still incredible.
When you open up the log you already edited, just to read it again.
I play Raymesin, partly because they wouldn't let me be Grayson Grayson.
Something to do with the code might object...
For the record, these are real cats that @Crawfish drew for me. Well, one cat, one muppet.
I believe Notre Dame is owned by the French state, having been nationalised in 1905. The Catholic church have the exclusive right to use it (while having to fork out for running costs and keeping it free to visit), but they don't own it.
Repeating 'Do not take the blame for things that happened while you were dealing with real life'. It's not your fault. Don't take the blame. Do get in touch if you wish to.
I cannot remain where I do not trust the staff to behave in an ethical manner.
Farewell.
I am a clumsy fuckwit. I have been known to fall up stairs, to walk into doors, and hook my own belt loops on the door handle. I always have bruises, and remembering what caused them is a rarity. I'm so bad I could clumsy for England.
Today I have injured myself... while on a first aid course.
Only me.
I frequently have random conversations on busses and trains. Most often, when the damn thing's broken down, or when traffic is just that hideous, or when the bus has to go a different way because there's been a crash on the main road and nothing's getting past.
I rarely have conversations in McDonalds, but if the milkshake machine's broken it's pretty much guaranteed.
People like to moan and share their grumbles with others affected.
I'll also greet anyone wearing a heavy metal T-shirt, or anyone carrying something to do with a hobby of mine, or anyone reading the right genre of book but not seeming entirely engrossed in it, or someone older who's dyed their hair bright colours, etc., and that greeting is either the start of a conversation or just an acknowledgement of someone else's humanity depending on them. Either I have things in common with those people or they've done something they want to talk about, and a conversation is always more interesting than not if they want one - and they usually do. I've made a good friend with 'I love the hair', and a few more with 'Great book, is this your first time reading it?'.
And then there's the times I'm sitting on the bus or train with handwork, and people will start talking with me about what I'm doing and why and who it's for and who they used to do that for and all the stuff they've made, and it's glorious, especially when children sit there wide-eyed and curious and bouncy over a new thing while granny smiles.
Life is as boring as you make it. It seems some people have very boring lives.
Today's message is to always check your drug interactions and be aware of the possibilities.
I still have an SO because I figured out what was going on in time.
A MU* set in an American military hospital during the Korean war.
MASHMUSH.
@mietze said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
I love crisis work and I thrive it it but apparently not constant sales goals crisis.
There's a difference between an actual genuine crisis and a manufactured eternal 'crisis'. The first, something happened, something needs to be done about it, you pull out all the stops and somehow get it done, and peoples' lives are very much improved from what they were. You have the feeling of a job well done, and people are grateful. The second, someone simply hasn't hired enough people to do the job, and when you pull out all the stops and somehow get it done you have to do it all over again tomorrow because they somehow think 110% effort is sustainable.
It isn't.
Don't confuse the actual crisis with the manufactured crisis. One of them isn't real and you know it, and the constant pressure to throw everything you have at it will just burn you out.
"I can see that the database is already built and operational, but everything I want I can get with that spreadsheet that you send out and Power BI, so I don't see why we need a database at all."
Where the bloody hell do you think I get the spreadsheet, out of my arse? And why didn't you say something 18 months ago, before I built the bloody database? Or in March, before I started putting data in it?
@too-old-for-this said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
I was called a slacker. An underachiever. A quitter. Everyone was forever disappointed in me for not living up to my potential. And they never stopped, once, to think that I was waiting for them to catch up. That experience has shaped a lot of my adult life and its only now as I get into my 40s that I can even really talk about it and not have people roll their eyes or think I'm just making shit up to cover my laziness.
My schools did not allow competition, to the point where sports day got banned at one of them, because they thought that was the cutting edge of pedagogy. There were two people in my year who could have kept up with me and competed, but we were deliberately split into different classes for everything as far as possible, and I didn't share any classes with either of the other two (although they did share with each other for some). And we all three of us got held to the pace of the slowest in the class, and no-one got the chance to be taught more, and self-study was frowned upon (and boring anyway).
It was hell.
Geography was so slow that I practiced holding my breath while the teacher was droning on explaining the bleeding obvious (I did a lot of swimming at that point, with an emphasis on staying underwater for a while).
And no, I didn't bother with homework either. Why would I? I'd learnt it the first time round, then we spent another three quarters of an hour repeating it in class, and now you want me to do it again? Great good gods let me do something interesting, I learned that because you made me, I already know it, I explained it five times over in ten different ways to people who didn't understand it in that class, and I have better things to do with my own time.
But girls couldn't have neurological differences. We had to be polite and kind and ladylike at all times, and where competition was frowned upon the idea of a girl being ludicrously competitive - and especially taking on and beating the boys at anything - was utter anathema. My mother now admits that they should never have left me in that school, but I know there was no choice at the time. It doesn't make me any less angry at the education system of the day, though.
@too-old-for-this To quote my SO in an interview: 'My tolerance for boredom is higher than my tolerance for poverty'.
