I’ll never forget one of my first campaigns, where a few sessions in, the one “edgy” character in our crew of demented murderhobos decided that he didn’t want to go in a cave that the rest of the party were going in. Nothing could move him on this.

Every 15 minutes or so through a multi-hour session while the rest of us explored the cave and fought beasties, the DM would ask him what he wanted to do, as a kindness that turned into a running joke by the end. His character was determined to use his abysmal crafting skills to try and make caltrops from stones outside the cave. I think that when the average rolls were calculated out over the time it took, he crafted something like three poor quality caltrops.

The player insisted that he was fine with all of it, seemed to have fun just hanging out, and it did technically fit his character. Still, it really cemented the importance of being flexible with your RP to not kill game flow.

A session or two later the DM gave each of us a “joke” magic item of questionable utility. Edgy got a pouch of infinite stone caltrops. The DM then learned a hard lesson about the cheese potential of “joke” magic items.

Realistically, however long it took for someone else to notice you were doing it and call them.

Source: had the cops called on my friends and I multiple times for having foam sword fights in parking lots at college. Apparently people from a distance thought actual fighting was going on. Not sure if that’s a testament to our acting or their poor eye sight.

This is so fucking dumb and I love it so much.

As a counter to the post putting it rudely, I’m going to try to say what’s helped me more nicely. Arguably could be summarized similarly.

If you can, get medicated. It’s not a fix-all, and it may take time to find the medicine and dosage that works for you, but I have a lot more success in “adulting” when my brain chemistry is functioning closer to “normal”.

Beyond that, try to start accepting any headway as headway. If you can, force yourself to do one thing that will take less than five minutes, and do it right now. Even if it’s as small as putting one piece of dirty laundry in the dirty clothes hamper, it’s something. Do your best to stop the internal negative self talk that it’s not enough. If the alternative was you paralyzed doing nothing, then doing even a small thing is a positive step. Whenever you start spiraling about everything in between where you are and where you feel you should be, try to stop yourself and do one thing that you can do in five minutes or less. No one just leaps to the finish line.

Any progress is progress. If you’ve ever seen Gurren Lagann, to be cheesy, every small turn pulls the drill forward just a little further.

It’s not easy, but if you keep trying you will eventually build habits. They will be far harder won, and far easier to lose, but you can. Most importantly, even if you don’t, you will still be in a better spot for trying. Any progress is progress.

And if you mess up, you just messed up. It’s not some grand failure in a chain of failures that somehow defines you. That’s just negative self talk. There’s plenty of people out there managing life worse with far less exacerbating circumstances, I guarantee it. Just keep trying.

Again, far far easier said than done. But just start with any small movement forward you can muster. Then do the next tiny movement forward that you can. And the next. When I’m in a bad state I really really try to focus on the smallest things.

I ate within an hour of when I should, even if it was junk food. I put one glass in the dishwasher, so that’s one less dirty one lying around. Etc.

Anecdotally, something I’ve identified in myself and numerous others I’ve known with ADHD is the terrible trap of comparing yourself to an idealized concept of yourself.

“If I could just get my shit together, I’d be like this. So I need to work to be like this. But I’m not like this because reasons reasons reasons spiral spiral spiral”

“I know, tomorrow I’ll start fresh and tackle all of this as the idealized version of myself that doesn’t have motivation/focus/executive processing issues”

If you lost an arm, you wouldn’t make plans to take care of things tomorrow with both hands. So don’t assume you’ll be worthless, but also don’t assume you’ll magically be motivated to do everything all at once tomorrow. I fall into this trap all the fucking time.

Stop. Take a deep breath. You aren’t competing against yourself in perfect conditions, with all your shit together. You aren’t competing against your peers and the idea of how they work through a filter of your own eyes where you can’t possibly know everything about their situation and internal thoughts.

You’re competing against yourself as you are right now. As you were five minutes ago. As you were yesterday. Try to take time and figure out how you specifically work. Identify your limitations and struggles, doing your best to self reflect honestly, without the added failings from depression speaking, and without the added ideas of how good you “could” do. You. As you are. Now.

Then try to structure things in ways that work for you. Not the rest of the world, not how your parents thought things should work, for you and the way you operate right now.

Accept your flaws and personal quirks instead of fighting a constant head on push against them. Work with them, around them.

Then eventually you can start working as often as you can (once a week, once a day) to scoot back the edges of those limitations inch by inch. A lot, maybe most, you’ll be stuck with and have to find ways to live with and around over time. Some you can overcome.

But the most important thing is to just try to do something small you can do right now, and accept that any progress is progress.

Hey guys, I’m having an issue with the US tax agency, so I should file a complaint with the UK right?

Wow, meme necromancy

LMAO, this lady has four nobel prize winners in her family and lives on an estate that is also home to a national heritage oak collection.

Of course she wants us to ignore class warfare

Not every protest is met with direct force. There’s plenty that are dismantled from the inside using tactics developed in the sixties to divide and weaken idealogical movements! Shit literally documented in intelligence agency standard procedure documents for dealing with large scale idealogical movements and breaking them apart.

Then you just sprinkle some direct force here and there as a treat!

Occupy Wallstreet was poisoned in its crib through infiltration by external forces causing confusion, internal disent, and loss of direction. That is the one “conspiracy theory” I don’t think I will ever be able to let go of.

Intersectionality and identity politics were long overdue, but there’s no way in hell that their rise from the ashes of OWS was a coincidence. Give the socially concious public something else to latch onto for a while so the 1% can shore up their defenses and power structure while the people at the bottom squabble over very important but far less impactful things.

As important as everything else is, the largest determinant of life outcome is money, almost entirely overlooked in most discussions about gender and race.

There’s some security researchers that have done this before as well, and some “grey hats” that reportedly used this technique to get Google to route traffic away from them during their commute by spinning up a whole bunch of phones in their car like this.

If you have it in you, please recreate your previous subreddit here in the fediverse. There’s less tools, but also far less users, and plenty of room to make tools.

A ton of niche communities didn’t make it over here during the “exodus”. Any little bit helps.