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.)
Many wonderful additions have been posted in the reblogs if you care to look through them (the post would be a giant if I added them all, plus I don’t see them all myself).
Edit: Previously, this post explained how to sanitize a sponge in the microwave - something I did read on several sites before adding to the list. However, I removed it due to concerns expressed by other readers about the creation of super bacteria/possibly melting plastic based sponges.
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Bras last longer if you let them air dry. Don’t put them in the dryer.
If you have a problem with frizzy hair, don’t dry your hair with a towel. It makes the frizzies worse. (I recently read an article that said to use a t-shirt? I brush mine out and let it air dry.)
Whites wash best in hot water. Everything else can be in cold - save on your electricity bill.
Airing out your room/house and letting sunlight in every so often can decrease the number of household pests like silverfish and ants.
Black underwear is best during your period as stains are less likely to be visible.
To save money, put aside 10% of each paycheck into a savings account. It’ll add up.
Unless your hair has something on/in it (like grease or mud or something), using conditioner first can actually be the better choice. The conditioner holds in the good oils that help you hair look sleek and beautiful, which shampoo would otherwise wash away.
Speaking of shampoo - if you have long hair, washing just the bits that touch your scalp is generally enough. The rest of your hair gets cleaned with just the run off from your scalp.
If you put a tampon in and it’s uncomfortable/you can feel it, you didn’t do it quite right/it’s the wrong size. A properly placed tampon is virtually unnoticeable by the wearer.
Apply deodorant/antiperspirant a couple hours in advanced of when you need it. This gives the product the chance to block your sweat glands. Using deodorant just before going somewhere where you’ll sweat (this means walking outside for people in high humidity places) results in your sweat washing the deodorant off and starkly limiting its usefulness.
After running the dryer, use the dryer sheet from that load to brush out the lint catch - it gets everything off in a fraction of the time it’ll take you to get it clean with your bare hands. Paper towels also work well.
Wash your face everyday, or as often as possible. Forget which brand of cleanser is best. Just washing your face everyday will guarantee you clearer skin. And do you best not to pop pimples, as tempting as the urge may be.
Fold laundry asap after taking it from the dryer to avoid wrinkles. This may seem obvious for dress shirts and silly for things like t-shirts, but you’ll notice the difference even then once your shirts stop looking like unfolded paper balls.
Fun fact: in the 80′s the Dutch Unemployed Union held ‘fridge raids’ to protest against poverty.
They’d find out when a politician of big boss who upheld poverty and starvation wages was speaking at some public even, then they’d carefully break into his house with a LOT of people and they would eat EVERY piece of food in his house and leave the empty dished behind without taking anything else.
When I became freelance, one of my first marketing contracts was fixing my boss' blog posts and articles that he had 'written' with ChatGPT.
It was the single most soul-sucking task I have ever done in my life. I could have ghostwritten it for them faster than it took me to edit it.
ChatGPT would often hallucinate features of the product, and often required more fact-checking than the article was worth.
It is absolutely no surprise that 77% of employees report that AI has increased workloads and lowered productivity, while 96% of executives believe it has boosted it.
The reality is that it's only boosted the amount of work employees have to do which leads to increased burnout, stress and job dissatisfaction.
Source.
"Clothing tags, travel cards, hotel room key cards, parcel labels … a whole host of components in supply chains of everything from cars to clothes. What do they have in common? RFID tags.
Every RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag contains a microchip and a tiny metal strip of an antenna. A cool 18bn of these are made – and disposed of – each year. And with demands for product traceability increasing, ironically in part because of concerns for the social and environmental health of the supply chain, that’s set to soar.
And guess where most of these tags end up? Yup, landfill – adding to the burgeoning volumes of e-waste polluting our soils, rivers and skies. It’s a sorry tale, but it’s one in which two young graduates of Imperial College London and Royal College of Art are putting a great big green twist. Under the name of PulpaTronics, Chloe So and Barna Soma Biro reckon they’ve hit on a beguilingly simple sounding solution: make the tags out of paper. No plastic, no chips, no metal strips. Just paper, pure and … simple … ? Well, not quite, as we shall see.
The apparent simplicity is achieved by some pretty cutting-edge technical innovation, aimed at stripping away both the metal antennae and the chips. If you can get rid of those, as Biro explains, you solve the e-waste problem at a stroke. But getting rid of things isn’t the typical approach to technical solutions, he adds. “I read a paper in Nature that set out how humans have a bias for solving problems through addition – by adding something new, rather than removing complexity, even if that’s the best approach.”
And adding stuff to a world already stuffed, as it were, can create more problems than it solves. “So that became one of the guiding principles of PulpaTronics”, he says: stripping things down “to the bare minimum, where they are still functional, but have as low an environmental impact as possible”.
...how did they achieve this magical simplification? The answer lies in lasers: these turn the paper into a conductive material, Biro explains, printing a pattern on the surface that can be ‘read’ by a scanner, rather like a QR code. It sounds like frontier technology, but it works, and PulpaTronics have patents pending to protect it.
The resulting tag comes in two forms: in one, there is still a microchip, so that it can be read by existing scanners of the sort common within retailers, for example. The more advanced version does away with the chip altogether. This will need a different kind of scanner, currently in development, which PulpaTronics envisages issuing licences for others to manufacture.
Crucially, the cost of both versions is significantly cheaper than existing RFID kit – making this a highly viable proposition. Then there are the carbon savings: up to 70% for the chipless version – so a no-brainer from a sustainability viewpoint too. All the same, industry interest was slow to start with but when PulpaTronics won a coveted Dezeen magazine award in late 2023, it snowballed, says So. Big brands such as UPS, DHL, Marks & Spencer and Decathlon came calling. “We were just bombarded.” Brands were fascinated by the innovation, she says, but even more by the price point, “because, like any business, they knew that green products can’t come with a premium”."
-via Positive.News, April 29, 2024
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Note: I know it's still in the very early stages, but this is such a relief to see in the context of the environmental and human rights bullshit associated with lithium mining, and the way that EVs and other green infrastructure are massively increasing the demand for rare metals.
I'll take a future with paper-based, more humane alternatives for sure! Fingers crossed this keeps developing and develops well (and quickly).
I’m a young-adult woman with the hopes of becoming a well-known writer. I’m a dreamer, a music lover and a chaotic human being, curious about what the future will bring but without any idea of what to do with it. As for this tumblr, we’ll see. I will make an attempt to make an interesting place but for now I still have to figure out what to do with it.
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