I drink quite a lot of caffeine (four or five strong coffees most days) and i’ve not had any problems, or noticed much of a difference on terms of ‘over caffinated’ symptoms compared to pre-Methylphenidate.

In fact, the one time I tried to cut back on coffee (I’d been really ill for a week and had stopped drinking coffee, so I decided to not restart the habit) I found that without coffee my medication didn’t seem as effective. After two weeks of no caffeine I wasnt feeling caffeine withdrawals, I wasn’t tired in the morning or craving coffee, but I just felt like i was on too low a dose for my ADHD. My attention, focus, willpower were all back to being a struggle. Then I read somewhere online saying that this could happen, and that caffeine increased the effects of the meds. For some people, I guess that means that too much coffee would lead to an overly strong dose. But for me, I’d much rather have a couple of cups of coffee than have to move to a higher dose of Ritalin. So I started having coffee again and things went back to normal.

No wonder. Artie is straight-up adorable.

Yeah, given that that account got deleted not long after that (if it’s the one I’m thinking of) then it quite probably was a bot…

Most insults are some attempt to link an aspect of a person or their behaviour with a negatively perceived thing. Most powerful insults also include breaking some form of social taboo.

Thus we have mild insults like “your argument is…” “weak-sauce” which associate the argument with the (presumably undesirable) sauce of insufficient strength; “shit” which is mild taboo but so widely used and conventional that it doesn’t hit hard; “loose stool-water, arse-gravy of the worst kind” which is both a bit taboo and reasonably novel (but wordy and pretentious).

If you’re trying to find insults that are going to impact someone, you have to find things that are upsetting / undesirable or them, so that association with that negative thing is bad and they want to avoid it. This is tricky if they have a different worldview, because what is offputting to you might be fine to them (eg. religious people insulting behaviour as ‘sinful’ or ‘satanic’ doesn’t really land for non-believers).

This is extra tricky if you don’t agree with what they find disgusting, because when you use something that disgusts them as an insult you are reinforcing the idea that it IS something to be disgusted by. Making fun of Trump’s ‘Lady-hands’ or ‘micropenis’ might be hurtful to him (or his supporters) but it also telling men that traditional masculine features and penis size are the qualities of real men. But that’s the problem, you can’t use someone’s beliefs against them while also challenging those beliefs as wrong.

So you can just accept that insults are problematic, and continue to call people ‘retarded fags’ because you know that has a negative association to them, ignoring the innocent minorities also hurt by that language. Or you can find things that are universally seen as bad and undesirable (mostly varistions on bodily functions) or that don’t really hurt the stereotyped group (“you’re whining like a little baby” is less problematic than “like a woman on the rag” or “like a little removed”). But these generally aren’t as impactful…

Thanks! That’s pretty much what I do. As I said in my reply to shneancy, it’s made a lot harder by my neurodivergent partner having serious communication issues around the topic. So it isn’t even to get feedback, but they’re the one who love aggressive sex.

I have experimented with some stuff on myself to get a gauge of how hard is too hard. But tbh, I don’t really enjoy getting slapped in face or choked so, it’s hard to guess what’s the correct level for someone else!

I’m familiar with that in principle, and it’s a great system. But my partner is shockingly bad at communicating during sex (they’re on the spectrum). I’ve tried to talk about safe words, or even just any indication that something is not working for them. But they refuse, partly saying “that it’s pretty obvious when I am enjoying something or not” (it is not, or at least not to me). But I suspect the real reason is that they have quite poor body awareness in general (often injure themselves with exercise because they weren’t aware that something was hurting them) and that trying to monitor their own safety is tiring and unfun. But they’re also not super expressive during sex, so I can’t reliably pick up on cues.

We’ve been together a long time, and I think we’ve found things that work for us, but it’s pretty stressful trying to ‘play rough’ without a real feedback mechanism (and I have gotten it wrong and gone ‘too far’ and they’ve been very upset with me). I’ve tried talking about it, and even had a period of refusing to do anything like that at all hoping it would force them to agree to some sort of save-word system. But it didn’t, they just seemed decreasingly satisfied with sex, so I gave in and went back to guessing what’s okay…

Good call! It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, partly because of comments from other ADHD people. We do some bdsm adjacent (I don’t really know where the line is…) stuff cause be partner likes to be treated rough. I guess it helps keep me focussed, cause there’s more variety and stuff to do, but it also leads to a lot of meta thinking and second guessing “was that too much? Was that too soft? How long have they been in that position and is that going to actually harm their neck…”

Maybe being in a sub role would be kinda relaxing because of the lack of control / responsibility, but I prefer the Dom/top role, and my partner is 100% the other way. I do think it’s easier when there’s more novelty in general, just being somewhere different or my partner wearing some new outfit I find hot helps. But making stuff different everyday would soon get exhausting, while changing my imagination is quick and easy.

That’s absolutely true. If your comment had said “That can be a trauma response that manifests in some NDs lvining in an NT world. It’s not always innate.” I wouldn’t have replied.

There are a depressing number of people who make very absolute claims that all the problems of neurodiversity come from the world not being designed for them. While I understand why it sometimes feels like that, it’s absolutely not true for many people with ASD, ADHD, etc.

I have to actively keep myself focussed on sex by fantasizing some scene or story to myself. Just actually having sex isn’t enough, not because I’m not into it or not enjoying it. It’s just that if I don’t fill my mind with something sexy it’s going to get full with chores, or dinner options, or the way the bed squeaks… And then I’m completely out the moment.

My ADHD family and I rush through things and interrupt each other because if we don’t were likely to forget something important that just popped into our mind. But by interrupting we made the other one forget what they were talking about.

Living in a world that isn’t adapted to my needs can be exhausting, but it’s not the reason I rush through things. That’s pretty innate to my neurodiversity.

As a certified manflu sufferer, I gave this an upvote. I know that there’s been a lot fun made at guys ‘overreacting’ to colds, but maybe it’s time to listen to the victims. Occasionally, I get a cold where i just feel a bit shit, tired and full of snot. But most of the time a cold shuts me down entirely, I can’t think, talk nonsense, if I try and drive I almost crash. I’m a compete mess. Sure, maybe my body is just overreacting to the virus, but so is anaphylaxis and that kills people.

I’m pretty sure that labour is worse, but…

Looking at this data Norway seems to have low levels of economic inequality, low rates of poverty, and a high median disposable income (behind Luxembourg but around that of France and Austria).

Its far from perfect, but I imagine social inequality for stuff like gender and race is pretty low, officially speaking at least. I get the feeling that Scandinavians can be a big negative about foreigners, but I have zero firsthand knowledge on that.

Think he looks pretty good!

Meeting other people’s friends groups (as you described meeting your partner’s friends) is a great way to shortcut that awkwardness. Its not just that someone else has done the hard work of filtering folks out, but that people are just on better form when with friends. Part of the problem of making friends in random social events is most people are either a bit awkward or putting on a social ‘mask’, which makes it harder to actually identify the people you’d like once you got past that.

My wife social circle has a bunch of people who entered as someone’s partner for a whole, but stayed friends with us after they broke up (even if there was a delicate period post-split where we hung out with them both, but never together).

It’s not weird to think about the other paths you could have gone down. But I would avoiding feeling too much regret. If something genuinely seems interesting to you, make it part of your current life, even just as a hobby or side project. Remembering that we are more than just our current selves is important for not getting swallowed by the grind.

If it’s feeling envy about the better life some alternate you has, try to keep in mind that nothing is simple. Although other choices might seem appealing in abstract, maybe they’d also lead to more problems. Sure, you could have been a doctor, but maybe the stress would have driven you to burnout and opiate addiction (69% of doctors misuse prescription substances).

I’d also say, that as I get older, I feel like I hit different “Save Points” that prevent to much regret. I chose to study philosophy instead of law, which means I’m a lot less rich than I might have been, but I would trade my weird, chilled friends from uni for the bunch of competitive over achievers I would have been “friends” with if I’d gone down that route. I met my spouse during a stressful period in my life, completing a degree for a profession I no longer work in. I could see that whole period of study as a complete waste of time, but if I’d never met the person I married the my life would be incomparably poorer.

Wow, that site is unhinged. Also, that article feels like it’s been heavily rewritten by AI, if not pure ai slop. Normally I enjoy crazy paranoid rants about demonic symbolism on cereal boxes, or whatever, but that article was shallow and vacuous.

I probably agree, but I’m not quite sure what you mean. Do you mean that people who are in a disadvantaged group in a society are more sensitive to language that is biased against their group? So women notice (and can be offended) by phrases like “you throw like a girl” while men might not care, or even notice, that it’s sexist.

Or do you mean people in disadvantaged groups are, in general better at detecting bias in language? So, poor people are better at spotting politic bias in reporting?

Do you think emotional abuse is more common from immigrant parents? I feel like I see a lot of comments about the stress and pressure that immigrant parents put on their kids, but it’s not something I know anything about.

If so, why do you think it’s like that? Is it just that families that immigrant are often in difficult financial situations, without lots of social support so the parents are super stressed? Or that the kinds of people who are willing to immigrate are aspirational and so demand a lot of their children? Or is partly that their way if parenting would be normal back where they grew up, but for its difficult for their kids growing up in a society with different standards and expectations around childhood?

Thanks for the reminder, I had genuinely forgotten this morning. Why is it so hard?

There’s lots of architectural guidance, building codes, etc. normally linked to number of people in the household. But it’s all pretty damn relative, both culturally and individually.

When I lived in the city, I was pretty comfortable with a small appartment, because I spent a lot of time out of my home in cultural spaces. Now I live in the country, and in city-terms our house is gigantic for just the two of us. Netherthless, we’re continuing to convert old out buildings into more space because the demands on our home are much higher and we have lots of unused space.

Not only do we live there, but we’ve got jobs that involve a lot of remote working, and it’s also a building site/workshop as we renovate and make our own fixtures and furniture. Plus, because it’s more remote, we want guest bedrooms and extra space so that guests can come and stay for a while without feeling cramped. Then we’ve got animals, who bring their own clutter, and we also want to create a guesthouse that we can rent to tourists. Even without those extra requirements, we choose to sleep in adjacent, but seperate, bedrooms because we have sleep issues. And I know that is a crazy luxury that we wouldn’t have been able to afford in the city, but when space is cheap, there’s no real reason not to.

I know that my example is pretty extreme, but everyone’s needs are different. I have friends who basically live in one room and love that, because everything is within easy reach and they don’t want to have guests. But I know it would be depressing and claustrophobic for others. Sharing an apartment with four adult strangers is a different experience from a family home with four children.

I think there can be rules (you can’t claim something is a bedroom if it’s smaller than 6sqm) but there isn’t a one size fits all solution.