Gustephan

joined 1 year ago
 

I'm currently working on a PhD, and I had a meeting that felt like an intervention with my advisor where she encouraged me to take a few months away from the program to take care of myself. For context, I used to work for the airforce, and apparently I picked up some pretty severe mental health problems that have lead to not sleeping and panic attacks when I read papers about military hardware (not ideal when my current interest is hardware side cybersecurity).

What the fuck does "take care of yourself" mean? Like, I don't know what to do with my hands. I've spent my entire life with a fast paced schedule, either with school work or some other crisis I've needed to attend to. Now I'm like... trying to accept going to therapy and I'm doing yoga with some people in my research group a few times a week, but i don't know what to do with my time otherwise. I feel like smoking all of the weed in this state playing video games and rotting in bed isn't the answer, but that's where I'm at. I'd love any advice or to hear from anybody who's been in that position of being told to take a few months off for mental health

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Funding goblins from elitist high society university decide that money is still more important than academic integrity. What a surprising development that nobody could have predicted

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Idk. I was in a highschool debate club a bit over a decade ago, and I was very good at the public forum event. Like, regularly in the top 32 for both the NFL and CFL national tournaments good. There were other people at the top of that ladder with me that made very effective use of the "pound the table" strategy, and how well it worked often boiled down to judge variance. People act that way in debates because it absolutely works on some viewers

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

It's basically chaff, lol. We've known chaff is an effective radar countermeasure since the 40s, and it seems like the researchers have found the lidar and optical equivalents of chaff. What really scares me is the idea of this evolving into more sophisticated deception attacks like range or velocity gate pulls. No idea how you'd do that with lidar or optically, but I'd bet money that's a line item on a black budget somewhere

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Reasons I developed a "therapy is an expensive waste of my time" mindset after living in FL for a decade. I'm not paying $200 a visit for some pompous shitbag to tell me I'm sad because I don't simp for Jesus

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I hope you find what you're looking for bud.

The closest I've ever found to anything like that is just... hanging out in queer spaces. Online or in person. My experience is that they tend to be welcoming, and accepting of our difficulties and more willing to help explain things that don't make sense. I think there's also a reasonable amount of overlap between how to cope with being queer in generally bigoted areas and how to cope with being neurodivergent but surrounded by NT people who display varying levels of acceptance.

I bring that up because like... a lot of what I used to think was difficulty understanding myself was mostly caused by internalized ideas that I was lazy or useless or w/e other nonsense I've been called by people with no understanding of or sympathy for situations I find abnormally difficult. I assumed the way I am was wrong and i couldnt understand why i was more comfortable being wrong. Material in queer spaces isn't coded exactly for the negative ideas that are usually associated with ASD people, but the self affirmation messages are there

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 8 points 8 months ago

I've really enjoyed how much ATS incentivizes that optimization, given that years spent on a settlement count toward the blightstorm cycle. It's really satisfying to figure out how to max rep as quickly as possible, especially with really hard modifiers like the "no orders" one

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I do 5 on, 2 off for eye contact timing. It seems to work pretty well in terms of passing as nt and focusing on the task of timing it reduces the discomfort of eye contact in the first place for me

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My closest friend is also autistic, but most of my friends are NT. Small talk is just the price of entry with a lot of people. Lemme give you an alternate definition of small talk: "Talk about safe bullshit unlikely to offend or start a fight until you know the other person well enough to expose your opinions and beliefs to possible criticism or rejection." The substance of the conversation is meaningless. Smalltalk is about gaging a person's body language and temper and reactions and all other manner of nonverbal signal. It's a lot easier if you go in with the understanding that the actual words are meaningless and you barely have to pay attention to them

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would entail admitting that climate change is real and that GQP mythos was wrong about something. Based on the way we handled covid, I wouldn't worry about most floridians migrating due to climate change

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

It's been like 8 years, but a chromebook dual booted with debian+xfce got me through undergrad. There's a set of scripts out there called "crouton" that made it really easy to do