I agree, you’ve captured much of why I came away from the article feeling a bit ‘hmmm’.

Something I read somewhere that I found super interesting is that on Windows, when a process completes, the user often gets a notification or popup alerting them to this, whereas on Linux, it’s more normal for there to not be any confirmation messages when a process is finished. I hadn’t consciously realised this difference until I read this and reflected on how many times I’d have to double check things when I first started using Linux.

You might enjoy Freya Holmér’s videos - I mostly know her for her excellent mathsy video essays, but she has loads of videos about “maths for game Devs” that might be useful.

When I was at university, the student union had a small fund for creative projects that weren’t related to your degree. Many of the people who applied for cameras also included Adobe licenses on their funding application, because many of them were new to film or photography so they defaulted to what is “industry standard”, because that’s what the majority of online tutorials are available for.

Book bundles make things messy, yeah.

Something that I’ve really struggled with is that I wish it were easier to make notes of where you’ve gotten a recommendation from. Like let’s say I’m learning Python and there’s a dizzying amount of books available for that. Someone I personally know and respect gives a glowing recommendation of a book, so I download it and process it’s metadata in calibre or similar. Then a Reddit thread has a dump of free books. I download and import those. Then a blogger I really like recommends a few books, so I retrieve any of those I haven’t got yet and import them. Time passes, and I go looking in my library for a book to learn Python with, and I get overwhelmed by choices and I can’t remember which of them were good and for what reasons.

I have a similar problem with bookmarks, because sure you can add tags, but tags are best when you’ve got a limited vocabulary, to maximise reusability. What if I just want to write a brief note about why I deem this worthy of saving, so that I’m not confused when I’m skimming over bookmarks months or years later.

Something that I’ve found useful is finding ways of leveraging inertia^[1]. A big part of this is using separate devices for different things. Some people find it useful to have a clear divide between work devices and personal, but that’s never worked for me, I tend to separate contexts. I’m getting too abstract, so I’ll bring it back with a few concrete examples:

• If I decide to take a break and do something fun on my laptop, I might sit somewhere out of reach of my charger, which limits me to around 2 hours of battery life. If I have to get up to put my laptop on charge, I find it easier to change task back to working if I’m already up.

• If I am gaming on my PC and want to wrap that up but am at risk of a “just 10 more minutes”, I might order takeout (if I remember to eat), because that’s another forced stop to my task and when I’m up, it’s much easier to honestly ask “is gaming what I want/need to be doing right now” than it is when I’m mid-game

• If a friend I want to reply to has messaged me when I need to work, I may make myself reply to them from my main computer at my desk, because I’m less likely to get stuck doomscrolling on my phone in bed in that world.

Inertia definition below, in case you or anyone else reading this are unfamiliar with it in this context: [1]: a term borrowed from physics, which means basically the same in the neurodivergent context as it does in physics: an object in rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to stay in motion, UNLESS acted on by an outside force. In an ADHD sense, this captures some aspects of task switching; procrastination and task activation; hyper focusing and cycles where you do lots and then crash.

I hadn’t thought about it from that angle, thanks for sharing your perspective, it’s really interesting

A tension that I find very interesting is how YouTube creators with a decent but not huge subscriber base (I’ve mainly seen it in video essayists, but that’s just what I watch more of) grapple with the sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit dichotomy of “content” vs “art”, where “content” is what the algorithm wants and what will pay their bills, and “art” is the weird stuff they actually want to make.

It’s nowhere near a full replacement to Spotify, but something that eased my switchover was Listenbrainz for open source music recommendations. It’s not as good as Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists (yet!), but the greater transparency is worth it imo. I have the app from fdroid and it tracks what songs I’m listening to (especially useful if you connect it to a streaming app) and gives recommendations based on that.

Is that really what you want, to be a part of perpetuating hostility? I legitimately don’t understand why the tone escalated so much: You said use screens less, someone replied to you with a few reasons why that might not be possible for some people, and in your reply to that, you just sort of blew up?

The reality is that most people are less patient than I am and will just downvote and move along. Maybe I should have too, but I thought that your original comment had the potential to seed an interesting discussion. I could say more here, but it’s not my job to convince you of the merits of not being an asshole in a world where that niche is already more than fulfilled. And who am I to talk, maybe negating discussion and getting downvotes are the results you want

I remember a few years back, after I finished my university exams (which were online), I was desperate for a break from a screen, but all of the things I would do to chill out from exams (namely, spending time with friends) was mediated by a screen.

This seems unnecessarily hostile. I think your original comment makes a good point, as does the person replying to you. If you don’t want to be a part of a discussion, then fair enough, but this is an oddly judgemental comment to be making.

I need to try audiobooks. I generally struggle with auditory input, but that’s mostly if I’m trying to dedicate all my focus to it. Games + audiobooks might be my jam

I really love calibre, but agree it can be a bit quirky. Like many ADHD people, I’m my own worst enemy sometimes, when I attempt to do a big import of books and then it’s too much work and my library gets messy. Something I did that helped was I had different tags for different levels of processed. Newly imported books would be auto-tagged “new”. Then I’d batch process them and remove the tag if I fully completed it. Often I’d burn out when I’d discover a book that still had DRM, or was missing OCR (ability to select text within pdf), so I’d add “DRM” or “NoOCR” tags. My workflow works pretty well for me now, because I’ve made it easier to do half a job

I enjoyed reading this rant, I found it very relatable, even though it sounds like we have quite different academic backgrounds. Nowadays, I read a decent amount of non fiction for fun, but I still struggle with reader’s block if I don’t feel like I have a reason to read, like a sort of self-given assignment to be studying for. That’s probably school’s fault too

For me, this might mean studying with the knowledge that when I get antsy and need to task switch, I can do the dishes instead. It feels like a weird form of circuit training

I mean, racism has as much reason to exist now as it ever did. “I’ll protect me and what’s mine” has been the dividing line between species for thousands of years, and we have to choose whether we’ll continue it. A “Kill or be killed” mindset might keep you safe, but you’ll never know if the person you killed did indeed mean you harm, or if you could’ve instead lived without killing, and broke bread with a rival. The logic still applies

Yup. We’re least safe when we most think we’re safe. Architects of self fulfilling prophecies

I’ve already played it but yes, that’s a great recommendation for anyone who has enjoyed the games I mentioned. I especially enjoyed it because I’m also a fan of Dark Souls (& other FromSoft games), and it was neat to have souls-like combat in such a cute packaging.

Probably incomplete list that I may update after a nap.

• Outer Wilds The most sublime game I’ve ever played. I can’t begin to describe how this game made me feel. It’s also an excellently designed game. If you’ve never played it before, go in blind, because even the smallest spoilers risk diminishing your experience. It’s an open world, exploration adventure game, which involves space travel, a quaint setting and fun physics

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• Disco Elysium Another game that made me feel things. One of my favourites

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• Tetris Played it on a Gameboy back in’ day. It’s a great game

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• Rollercoaster Tycoon 2

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• Halo Reach I don’t even know if I believe this was the best Halo game, I was just indecisive and I’m biased because I like the DMR and the SWAT multiplayer game mode (no shields, so a headshot kills in 1)

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• Deep Rock Galactic Feel like it’s the peak of the four person squad based kind of game. I’ve literally got hundreds of hours in this game.

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• Stardew Valley I didn’t actually vibe with this too much personally, but I’ve got to respect it for how accessible it is to many different kinds of gamer. It executes what it set out to do perfectly.

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• Faster than Light
  • I don’t even like rogue likes generally. The soundtrack is great.

(Edit 1: formatting)

Mental health systems are so overburdened that it’s not uncommon for someone assessing a trans person’s poor mental health to go “well, you’re experiencing [wide array of concerning mental health symptoms], but it’s my opinion that these symptoms are almost entirely attributable to gender dysphoria, and you’re already on the waitlist for the gender identity clinic, so there’s nothing more I can do.” and then they discharge them.

With such huge wait lists, it would make sense to keep someone on your books to keep an eye on them at least, if they’ve expressed feelings about self harm, but that doesn’t happen because the system hasn’t sufficiently acknowledged just how fucked the trans healthcare wait times are. Like, in the UK, there’s a statutory maximum of 18 weeks wait from when the referral was made until your first appointment, but the standard wait for an adult to have a first appointment at a gender identity clinic (which doesn’t involve any treatment, that comes months later) is literally years. But officially, you should be seen within 18 weeks, and under those circumstances, well the mental health people discharging you is reasonable if there’s little they can do to support you