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It is so, so fucking vital to your health and safety to be in cahoots with at least one person at all times.

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Research has shown that pleasure affects nutrient absorption. In a 1970s study of Swedish and Thai women, it was found that when the Thai women were eating their own (preferred) cuisine, they absorbed about 50% more iron from the meal than they did from eating the unfamiliar Swedish food. And the same was true in the reverse for the Swedish women. When both groups were split internally and one group given a paste made from the exact same meal and the other was given the meal itself, those eating the paste absorbed 70% less iron than those eating the food in its normal state.

Pleasure affects our metabolic pathways; it’s a facet of the complex gut-brain connection. If you’re eating foods you don’t like because you think it’s healthy, it’s not actually doing your body much good (it’s also unsustainable, we’re pleasure-seeking creatures). Eat food you enjoy, it’s a win-win.

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me: I have GOT to get weirder!

also me when I do get weirder: *visibly shaking* I'm going to be killed with hammers by everyone for being a freak.

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Something I think people who don’t live with chronic illness don’t understand is that there is a big difference between resting to get better and resting to avoid getting worse.

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hey bro can i ask you a question that will reveal a deep and fundamental gap in my knowledge of the world

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dropping food when you're already sad is such an intense emotion. Just the most fucking wretched self indulgent pity. One time I spilled a bowl of ice cream when i had already spent most of the day sobbing and honestly im still chasing that high

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Stray catgirl (disabled, Arab, trans) seeking a new home

Do you live near Toronto, and want a roommate? DM me!

Do you live in Canada, and wanna keep me afloat while I search for a place to live? DM me for my eTransfer email address!

Do you wanna do that, but live outside Canada? PayPal me!

Are you unable to do any of that? Reblog this!

Please. I’ll die if I’m homeless.

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genuinely fucked up that if i want to interact with someone online i have to say words and have a conversation instead of just mashing my face against them like a cat

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when you're feeling full hater mode about a piece of media but you know one of your beloved mutuals enjoys it

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When the chronic fatigue is chronic

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remember you can always make your protagonist a lesbian with some kind of psychosis

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no such thing as wasting your 20s your 20s are for recovering from whatever the fuck happened to you as a kid so that youre ready to get weird with it in your 30s

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You know what? It’s fucking hard trying to get better. It’s exhausting managing doctors appointments, doing daily PT exercises, eating better, trying to exercise, trying to meditate, and doing ADL’s. I have had a bad crash per week trying to juggle and do all of the above.

It’s easier and less acutely painful to just coast and not actively work on ‘getting better’. Is the work worth it? I don’t know yet.

But to people who’ve tried and given up, to those who don’t even bother - you still deserve care and compassion.

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13 + 15?

i forgot id rfeblogged an ask meme for a moemnt and thought people were just sending me math questions in my inbox

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"trust your gut" is such evil advice it's like. my gut is telling me there's 1000 ways everyone including friends want to attack and kill me like it's Dark Souls over here

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This all of course goes great with the fact that to get structural support you generally have to ask for help. And if you, say, go through university without asking for accommodations because of that, and then struggle because of your autism, then that becomes your fault!

I realized the other day that the reason I didn't watch much TV as a teenager (and why I'm only now catching up on late aughts/early teens media that I missed), is because I literally didn't understand how to use our TV. My parents got a new system, and it had three remotes with a Venn diagram of functions. If someone left the TV on an unfamiliar mode, I didn't know how to get back to where I wanted to be, so I just stopped watching TV on my own altogether.

I explained all this to my therapist, because I didn't know if this was more related to my then-unnoticed autism, or to my relationship with my parents at the time (we had issues less/unrelated to neurodivergency). She told me something interesting.

In children's autism assessments, a common test is to give them a straightforward task that they cannot reasonably perform, like opening an overtight jar. The "real" test is to see, when they realize that they cannot do it on their own, if they approach a caregiver for help. Children that do not seek help are more likely to be autistic than those that do.

This aligns with the compulsory independence I've noticed to be common in autistic adults, particularly articulated by those with lower support needs and/or who were evaluated later in life. It just genuinely does not occur to us to ask for help, to the point that we abandon many tasks that we could easily perform with minor assistance. I had assumed it was due to a shared common social trauma (ie bad experiences with asking for help in the past), but the fact that this trait is a childhood test metric hints at something deeper.

My therapist told me that the extremely pathologizing main theory is that this has something to do with theory of mind, that is doesn't occur to us that other people may have skills that we do not. I can't speak for my early childhood self, or for all autistic people, but I don't buy this. Even if I'm aware that someone else has knowledge that I do not (as with my parents understanding of our TV), asking for help still doesn't present itself as an option. Why?

My best guess, using only myself as a model, is due to the static wall of a communication barrier. I struggle a lot to make myself understood, to articulate the thing in my brain well enough that it will appear identically (or at least close enough) in somebody else's brain. I need to be actively aware of myself and my audience. I need to know the correct words, the correct sentence structure, and a close-enough tone, cadence, and body language. I need draft scripts to react to possible responses, because if I get caught too off guard, I may need several minutes to construct an appropriate response. In simple day-to-day interactions, I can get by okay. In a few very specific situations, I can excel. When given the opportunity, I can write more clearly than I am ever capable of speaking.

When I'm in a situation where I need help, I don't have many of my components of communication. I don't always know what my audience knows. I don't have sufficient vocabulary to explain what I need. I don't know what information is relevant to convey, and the order in which I should convey it. I don't often understand the degree of help I need, so I can come across inappropriately urgent or overly relaxed. I have no ability to preplan scripts because I don't even know the basic plot of the situation.

I can stumble though with one or two deficiencies, but if I'm missing too much, me and the potential helper become mutually unintelligible. I have learned the limits of what I can expect from myself, and it is conceptualized as a real and physical barrier. I am not a runner, so running a 5k tomorrow does not present itself as an option to me. In the same way, if I have subconscious knowledge that an interaction is beyond my capability, it does not present itself as an option to me. It's the minimum communication requirements that prevent me from asking for help, not anything to do with the concept of help itself.

Maybe. This is the theory of one person. I'm curious if anyone else vibes with this at all.

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itch getting knocked offline for a bit by a phishing report from Funko triggering their registrar to take them down is bullshit but a lot of people are over focusing on the "AI" thing. these sorts of stupid nastygrams have been a problem for decades and are going to be a problem whether the company is using an LLM or just searching for any use of the word "funko" in a page or whatever. for example, here's a 2015 article about the problem, over half a decade before you could get this kind of processing out of language models.

the root problem is that firing off spurious takedowns costs very little, abuse isn't penalized, and hosting providers are incentivized to fold in order to avoid legal pressure. blaming AI does nothing helpful here.