Today My Wisdom Is: The Ecological Crisis Of Our Planet Is Not A Thing That Will Suddenly Destroy Us

The Woolly mice

I had to draw them

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.

I’ve been in such a funk since the concert. I’m not even sure I enjoyed myself that much. maybe I did. I don’t know

New: Search operators for better searching!

We hear you, and we share your frustrations: it’s hard to find a specific post. You know it has a particular tag or phrase, and it was posted on this date, or at least, within a specific year. But you can't find it!

So, today, we’re excited to announce that you can use ✨ advanced search operators ✨ in the search bar now! You can now say potato from:staff year:2021 to easily enjoy that video of a potato being microwaved again.

Before we jump into the details, a couple of caveats to note:

These search operators are only available in the main Tumblr search bar. They don’t work in the search bar in individual blogs.

The search operators only work on posts created in 2017 or later.

OK! Let’s go explore these operators!

Exact phrase match

When you surround your query with regular double quotes (not curly quotes), it will match posts with that exact phrase in the post's text content, or that exact phrase as a tag.

For example, "chappell roan is roan of arc" matches posts with that exact phrase in the content, and also matches posts that have the exact tag #chappell roan is roan of arc.

Match operator

By default, the query matches the post on either the text or the tags.

You can use match:text to specify you want to search the post content, or match:tags to search the post tags. For example:

sword world match:text looks for posts with the words "sword" and "world" in the post content.

sword world match:tags looks for posts with the words "sword" and "world" in the post tags.

From operator

Use from:blog or from:@​blog to find only posts by a particular blog.

For example, halloween from:staff finds all posts by @staff that has the word "halloween" in the post content or tags.

Year operator

Use year:YYYY to find posts from a particular year.

For example, halloween year:2019 finds all posts from 2019 that has the word "halloween" in the post content or tags.

Date operator

Use date:YYYY-MM-DD to find posts from a particular date.

For example, halloween date:2019-10-08 finds all posts created on October 8, 2019 that has the word "halloween" in the post content or tags.

All together

You can combine all the tools above to form even more specific queries:

Congrats! You’re now a Tumblr search wizard! 🪄

Other syntax

As a reminder, you can already search by a tag, or by multiple tags:

Prefixing your query with # performs a tag search — that is, it will find posts with that exact tag. For example, #star wars will only return posts with the #star wars tag.

You can search for multiple tags at at time. For example, #star wars #art will find posts that are tagged with both the tag #star wars and the tag #art.

You can combine this with the new operators to find what you are looking for!

We will add a guide for this new syntax soon to our Help Center.

Tumblr Patio support

The enhanced syntax makes Tumblr Patio even more powerful. You can now open multiple search columns each with different fine-tuned queries that use the syntax above to get you customized feeds.

Feedback

We’d love to hear what you think! Please share your feedback in the replies and reblogs of this post, or by reaching out to Tumblr Support.

Hello everyone! I'd like to present to you:

Solarpunk daylight setting system!!!

What is this? This is a way of categorizing and defining solarpunk futures by how far in the future they are by using the natural daylight concept!

The Solarpunk daylight system is supposed to help define your setting, but it's not supposed to limit you in any way!!! It's also supposed to make it easier to search for particular settings in stories :D

🌱Morning Solarpunk 🌄

(Today or Seedling Solarpunk)

Morning Solarpunk resembles the world of today, it resembles the sprouts of solarpunk in societies and our current struggle under capitalism, it resembles the beginning of change.

Morning solarpunk can be happening in twenty-first century or prior.

Defining elements:

Everything you can do today to be solarpunk is what morning solarpunk is! Visibly mended clothing and tools, art on the streets in all forms, guerrilla gardening and permaculture gardens, communities uniting and people joining climate action.

Peaceful Anarchist, Violent World by kayas-kosmos

🪴Noon Solarpunk ☀️

(Tomorrow or Flowering Solarpunk)

Noon solarpunk resembles post-capitalist world or world where significant effort in abolishing capitalism is done. Things are already better, but the scars of the old world are still visible.

Noon Solarpunk is supposed to show us better times and answer the question, what happens on the next day after revolution and in the following years.

Defining elements:

Taking lots of stuff from morning solarpunk and making them more pronounced, repurposed old infrastructure, we can see new solarpunk architecture (sustainable and integrated into nature) appearing, all tech is powered by renewable energy and easily repairable, community gardens everywhere.

Art by mimiitambonne

🌻Evening Solarpunk 🌇

(The day after tomorrow or Ripening Solarpunk)

Evening solarpunk resembles late stage solarpunk world, pure science fiction! This is stories of our successors and how they are living in new refined world!

Defining elements:

Defined by being futuristic, practically unrecognizable from modern age, new hi-tech solarpunk technologies (low tech stuff still exists btw), go as CRAZY as you CAN to show marvelous bright future!

Art by thalieshelen

Things are bound to change and get more refined, please submit your ideas on how this system can be improved! :D

The problem here isn’t that large language models hallucinate, lie, or misrepresent the world in some way. It’s that they are not designed to represent the world at all; instead, they are designed to convey convincing lines of text. So when they are provided with a database of some sort, they use this, in one way or another, to make their responses more convincing. But they are not in any real way attempting to convey or transmit the information in the database. As Chirag Shah and Emily Bender put it: “Nothing in the design of language models (whose training task is to predict words given context) is actually designed to handle arithmetic, temporal reasoning, etc. To the extent that they sometimes get the right answer to such questions is only because they happened to synthesize relevant strings out of what was in their training data. No reasoning is involved […] Similarly, language models are prone to making stuff up […] because they are not designed to express some underlying set of information in natural language; they are only manipulating the form of language” (Shah & Bender, 2022). These models aren’t designed to transmit information, so we shouldn’t be too surprised when their assertions turn out to be false.

ChatGPT is bullshit

☀ The Tumblr Origins of Solarpunk ☀

Did you know Solarpunk became what it is today right here on Tumblr?

Solarpunk is (putting it very simply) an optimistic view of the future. It is a stark contrast to the often dystopian future media tends to hint we are heading towards, so Solarpunk gives hope.

Credit to it's creation is often given to a visual aesthetic Tumblr post by missolivialouise. While the term "Solarpunk" did show up a few times before that, it was the post that brought attention to the idea and started turning it into how we know it today.

Overtime, it gave Solarpunk traction to earn it's place among other subgenres; such as cyberpunk and steampunk. There is even a magazine dedicated to the subgenre.

Tumblr

Land of Masks and Jewels

Here's a thing I've had around in my head for a while! Okay, so I'm pretty sure that by now everyone at least is aware of Steampunk, with i

The vision of sustainable energy blended with advanced technology proved to be very popular, and now it is even a movement, along with Ecopunk. People are working hard to try and make solarpunk not just a dream; but a reality.

So, thanks to a Tumblr post, we now have Solarpunk as a subgenre, an aesthetic, and even a movement. It is all three things at once, and personally, I love to see where it is leading people.

I'm convinced mama dragons carry their babies around in their mouth for protection, like how crocodiles do...