What In The World Is Solarpunk Please Tell Me

Goncharov (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese

“The greatest mafia movie (n)ever made.”

Remember that if you want to do more of something, you have to do less of something else. It's that time of year where people set goals for the new year and they have plans and hopes and it's always focusing on what they want to do more of. More studying, more exercise, more crafting, more socialising, more making things from scratch. Okay, great. What are you going to do less of in order to have the time and energy to do more of those things you really want to do?

(source)

Fruit will last 3 weeks longer….

Why You Should Keep Fruit In Mason Jars Instead Of The Containers They Come In…….

When you get your fruit home from the grocery store, the first thing you should do is remove it from the plastic containers they’ve come in and recycle them. Next, clean out your sink and fill it with water (you could also use a large bowl). Then, toss in a few tablespoons of distilled vinegar. You’ll then want to submerge your fruit in the water and let it soak for about 10 to 15 minutes. The purpose of this is to get rid of any mold or bacteria on the fruit which is what causes them to go rotten more quickly.

Once the fruit has had a nice soak, remove it from the vinegar water, transfer to a strainer, and rinse with cool water. Leave the fruit out to dry on a tea towel or paper towel. Once dry, transfer the fruit to mason jars and seal up those lids. This is the best way to make your fruit last, particularly berries, which tend to be very prone to mold and bacteria buildup.

And that’s it! Incorporating these few extra steps into preparing and storing fruit can help you eliminate food waste, save money, and keep your fridge stocked with fresh produce for much longer.

Wait, so you said that you can learn to trust others by building friendships, but how does one go about doing that? Wouldn't someone I don't know be creeped out or annoyed if I suddenly walked up and started talking to them?

Friendships are built of repeated low-stakes interactions and returned bids for attention with slowly increasing intimacy over time.

It takes a long time to make friends as an adult. People will probably think you're weird if you just walk up and start talking to them as though you are already their friend (people think it's weird when I do this, I try not to do this) but people won't think it's weird if you're someone they've seen a few times who says "hey" and then gradually has more conversations (consisting of more words) with them.

I cheat at forming adult friendships by joining groups where people meet regularly. If you're part of a radio club that meets once a week and you just join up to talk about radios, eventually those will be your radio friends.

If there's a hiking meetup near you and you go regularly, you will eventually have hiking friends.

Deeper friendships are formed with people from those kinds of groups when you do things with them outside of the context of the original interaction; if you go camping with your radio friend, that person is probably more friend than acquaintance. If you go to the movies with a hiking friend who likes the same horror movies as you do, that is deepening the friendship.

In, like 2011 Large Bastard decided he wanted more friends to do stuff with so he started a local radio meetup. These people started as strangers who shared an interest. Now they are people who give each other rides after surgery and help each other move and have started businesses together and have gone on many radio-based camping trips and have worked on each other's cars.

Finding a meetup or starting a meetup is genuinely the cheat-code for making friends.

This is also how making friendships at schools works - you're around a group of people very regularly and eventually you get to know them better and you start figuring out who you get along with and you start spending more time with those people.

If you want to do this in the most fast and dramatic way possible, join a band.

In 2020 I wrote something of a primer on how to turn low-stakes interactions with neighbors and acquaintances into more meaningful relationships; check the notes of this post over the next couple days, I'll dig up the link and share it in a reblog.

I see a lot of people joking about the adhd thing of "I have a appointment/phone call at 3pm, guess I won't do anything all day!"

But no one seems to make the connection that it's a time blindness thing. One of the symptoms of ADHD is not having a good and accurate sense of time. And not doing stuff prior to an event with a hard deadline is an obvious coping mechanism for that.

Can I go to the store? It's 10am and the appointment is at 3pm. How long does going to the store take? An hour? Three hours? Five hours? I DON'T KNOW!

I get anxious trying to do things before appointments because I'm aware that I don't know how long those things take, and that if I think I do, I may be very wrong. Too often I've been like "hey I can walk to the corner store and grab a drink, that'll take like 15 minutes!" and then an hour later I get back and whoops my rice has burnt.

Plus there's also the fact that ADHD people know that motivation and focus is a two-edged sword.

Like, let's say you decide to play a video game. You've got time, you can pause/save whenever, so this should be a perfect fit to make good use of your waiting-time. So you start playing and WHOOPS you get really focused for some reason today (because people with ADHD do not get to pick when their brain decides to focus) and the next time you look at the clock it's 2:49 and you haven't showered or dressed and the appointment is 30 minutes away. Fuck. (you could have set an alarm, but now you're asking people with the forgetting-things-and-time-ignoring condition to remember it set alarms)

And with motivation, it can be almost worse. Instead of playing a game, you so something useful or creative. You clean your room or fix your plumbing or write a story or draw a picture. And suddenly it's great. Your brain is firing on all cylinders. You've got all the motivation you can ask for, and you are FLYING. the ideas are brilliant, your hands are nimble, you're getting stuff done you've been putting off for weeks or months. And then the alarm goes off. Time to go to your appointment. Fuck.

You drive there, your brain still full of ideas and plans. But by the time you get back, the motivation is gone. You may still have the ideas but you don't have the drive to write them down. You can't force yourself to do it. Your sink is still in pieces. Your room is half-cleaned, and you have to shove all the sorted clothes into one big bin just so you have somewhere to sleep. You've left things half finished again, in a cycle that has been repeating your whole fucking life. It seems sometimes that nothing ever gets finished.

So next time you don't even start. There's not time. You've been burnt too many times. Why add another half-completed project to your pile of shame?

My point is that people seem to be going "lol I can't do anything all day if I have an appointment at 3pm" like this is a quirky "oh I'm so scatterbrained!" weirdness they alone have, and not a major complication of a disabling mental illness.

(and that's not even getting into the secondary effects. If you know that having an appointment ruins your whole damn day, you're going to avoid them. Even when it's things like "going to that party" or "meeting your friends for a drink/game" or "going to a movie with that cute girl from your math class". Things you should enjoy. Things that'd help you be social. Things that make you feel human.)

A Nausicaa screenshot redraw

There are four types of fish scales!

Cycloid scales are thin, overlap, and flexible. They're found on primitive teleosts (like minnows and carp).

Ctenoid scales have small, backwards pointed scales (known as cterns) make the fish more hydrodynamic and faster. They're found on Advanced Ctenoids (like perch and sunfish).

Ganoid scales are thick, diamond-shaped, and mostly non-overlapping. They're found on Chondrostei (like sturgeons and paddlefish).

Placoid scales are spikey and tooth-like with nerves. These are found on Chondrichthyes (like sharks and rays).

Ichthyology Notes 3/?

ADHD reward system? Please tell me your secret!

My therapist has been helping me find a reward system that works for me, and as it turns out, gold star stickers are really helpful for making me feel like a tangible goal was met, and helps give me that sweet, sweet dopamine release that comes with completing a task, something which us ADHD’ers really struggle to achieve and are already coming at from a disadvantage with our brains regularly not producing enough “happy” hormones as it is.

It was supposed to be “a sticker for every time you finish a chapter”, but after some revision, my therapist said that was too tall of a goal, and that I should pick something smaller. So instead I now get a star every time I finish a 500-word milestone, placing the sticker in my writing calendar/journal thing that I use to keep track of my writing, and ironically, I have started to produce more work than when I was stiving for one chapter a day.

To give you an idea of how staggeringly effective this has been for me, I’ve written over 30k of original fiction in the last week. (75k total if you include my social media and blog stuff, which I currently do not but likely should.)

So this is what it looked like when I was attempting to do a chapter of edits and revisions a day during the month of December 2019 (note: I was supposed to start this in Nov, so you can see how well that worked out for me lol):

ID: A calendar showing days of the month with a shiny star sticker showing a completed task.

And this is what my writing journal looks like now that I’m doing a star for every 500 words:

ID: an image of a handwritten journal with the dates mapped out, followed by a shiny star sticker for every completed 500-word milestone. There are 65 stars in total for the month of January 2020. It’s also tinged by a green light cause I’m doing a chronic pain experiment, so far with positive results!

So as of today, January 8th, with ever star = 500 words, then 65*500 = 32500 words totalled in 7 days. This does not include, like I said, my social media output where I am far more productive, this is just my fiction and some editing work for friends.

(Which side note: this is not to flex, or to say that others should be able to achieve this level of output. I am a professional writer, this is my main job and only source of income. And also, I was forged in the fires of understaffed editing hell where we would be expected to churn out 100k+ a week in edits and revisions to keep on track. I have the time and a learned skillset I have spent years amassing to be able to do this and am working towards a rigid deadline. I simply have not been healthy enough in a long time to manage it, and am finally working my way back up to speed after years of illness. Don’t look at this and think, “I’m not achieving enough”, every victory no matter how small is worth celebrating. And I say that with the utmost sincerity, as someone who spent most of the last 2-3 years unable to get out of bed.)

I’ve also started using it to help keep track of bills and chores around the home. So every time something gets done/done on time, whoever completed the task gets a star on the calendar. This includes Oppy the Not-A-Roomba, who does a very good job of taking care of the house on a daily basis:

ID: an image of a chore calendar denoting various tasks that have been marked off with a holographic silver star sticker, including our robot vacuum who does an excellent job and deserves all the stars. (Our names got blurred out cause ETD doesn’t want his real name out there in the world, so that’s what is blurry.)

This system is useful for several reasons, the primary one being a sense of achievement and continued motivation, and the second, to allow you to review each month to see where you are doing well, and where you might otherwise be struggling.

For example, if I have a bad day for writing or decide to take a day off, I write that down in the calendar rather than leaving it blank, so that I have a record of what went wrong (or right, if I am electing to self care that day and take a day off) and how my overall progress is doing.

In terms of house stuff, this has been especially useful for ETD and myself, as it shows us where we are managing to do a good job with the house, and where our executive dysnfunction issues really trip us up and where we need to make improvements. And I don’t just mean in an “I should try harder way”, I mean you have to actively sit down and be like “hey! What is preventing me from completing this thing” and trying to figure out effective ways to either get around it or resolve a larger issue at hand.

So for us, the biggest thing we tend to miss is doing dishes after dinner, meaning we get left with a pile-up of dishes to deal with first thing in the morning, and my ADHD can’t handle that. It won’t let me eat until I’ve cleared all the mess, but I usually don’t have the energy to clean up if I haven’t eaten, so it’s this awful cycle of ineptitude. We’re doing better with the star reward system, cause it’s showing us our progress loud and clear on the fridge door, but we are both usually so fatigued and exhausted by the end of dinner that doing dishes is just one thing too many for our mutual disorders. So, the solution for this would, of course, be a dishwasher, cause if we had one of those, we could load stuff in, turn it on, and let those dishes get done while we go to bed then put them away in the morning. We can’t afford to do that right now, and we have other appliances we need to buy/replace before we can do that (still don’t have a tumble dryer, or a washer I can access, rip) but it does give us a tangible goal to work toward, and also, the motivation to keep on top of things because it goes from “an endless task with no end in sight” to “there’s a solution for this, we can manage a while longer.”

Now you could be saying, but Joy, I’m an adult! Surely I shouldn’t expect rewards for completing every day tasks that I should be able to do?!

To which I say, neurotypical people get rewards all the time and get an unconscious dose of dopamine/serotonin from their brains every time they complete a task. They’re playing the game of life on easy mode, the gold star is your achievement for completing it daily on Nintendo 99 hard mode. IF THE STICKER WORKS, TAKE THE STICKER

YOU’VE EARNED IT.