Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 23

ADHD medications 1/2

The first medications I tried were Ritalin and Ritalin LA. They worked, but not reliably, and with too many side effects.

I tried Vyvanse, but it didn't really have much of an effect on me, at least not at a dosage I had enough of until my next psychiatrist appointment.

I returned to Ritalin and soon discovered that plain Ritalin was nicer to me than Ritalin LA, despite containing the same substance, so I'm just taking small but frequent doses of that now.

Every answer I can find to the question "What should I do with my life other than work, eat and sleep until I die?" is quickly followed by a "Yes, I could do that, but why?" and every answer to *that* is in turned followed by a "Yes, but why?" and so on ad infinitum.

3/3

I used to be the person leaving that mess, but now I struggle to have empathy for my roommate, who remains the same. It's only been a few weeks since I began treatment.

I got home not long ago and my roommate seemed oddly cranky. I didn't get why until he mentioned the underpants...

2/3

My roommate was sleeping in his bedroom. Knowing how rarely he showers, I picked the underpants up with a paper towel and left them on his blanket, together with some bits of paper he hadn't cleaned away.

I've been keeping the house spotless recently, and I'm starting to turn into one of those people who gets irritated when someone else leaves a mess.

1/3

Tensions between me and my roommate / second cousin are increasing after I began treating my ADHD.

He's always been a very slovenly person and it's likely that he himself has ADHD.

This morning, I found a pair of his dirty underpants on the bathroom floor. They were bright red and very easy to spot on the empty dark grey floor.

I think the resistance against ADHD as a diagnosis is that the symptoms are basically a description of a slovenly or scatterbrained person. Most people will perceive those traits as moral failings that should be held against people, not something congenital that they can't help.

"If you're not alert, organised and motivated, that's your own fault, you should feel ashamed, and nothing can excuse it," is the basic attitude. "Why, if it was congenital, I couldn't take credit for all my hard work!"

In 100 years, we'll look back at news reports about self-driving vehicles gone astray and the ensuing skepticism and find it rather adorable. Think back to old newspaper clippings about the first automobiles, back when people weren't used to them, and the infrastructure for them didn't really exist. They were unreliable, unsafe and people frequently got into dangerous situations with them. It's going to be the same way with self-driving vehicles. The tech will mature. Just give it time.

I have Night Mode scheduled in the Display settings on macOS, but I also wanted Dark Mode to activate and deactivate at the same time.

I found a recipe that schedules an AppleScript file using the Calendar app, which made me wonder if it wouldn't be better to just use a crontab entry?

I ended up adding the lines below to my crontab. You have to set it to a minute after saving the file at first, so you can give it permission to run the script, but after that, it works perfectly.

Why is every YouTube channel sponsored by Audible?

Moonlight nightlight in my bedroom.

I don't have any research to back up my claim that low dopamine/noradrenaline in ADHD makes you more sensitive to your environment, but casual observation and common sense tells me that this is true.

If you have low amounts of the chemicals that power your brain, small changes in their levels will feel bigger, because they are bigger in terms of the percentage.

Issues with getting out of bed in the wintertime weren't the first thing that clued me on to my sensitivity to the seasons.

Rather, it was depression. My mood would always be much lower during the winter months, especially up north, where you barely get any daylight during those months.

It could be seasonal affective disorder, but I could also chalk it up to the ADHD. When your dopamine and noradrenaline levels are low, they are also more sensitive to little things.

I don't know when I started becoming sensitive to daylight at dawn. It started sometime in my early thirties.

I've always been very sensitive to seasonal variations in daylight in general, but I didn't really become aware of it until adulthood, when I noticed that I would always have less trouble getting up for work in the summer.

I didn't notice that I was a summertime early riser as a child. There was no school to get up early for then, and I was bad at keeping track of the time.

Even with all the stuff I placed over and around the windows, the small amount of daylight that leaks in at the break of dawn (currently 4 AM) is enough to wake me up.

Because I can't do any more to block it and still let in some air, I'm trying something new: Instead of using the red Nightlight preset on Philips Hue, I have made a Moonlight preset, which is just the Energize preset (cold white) on minimum brightness. It seems to mask daylight better.

"The breakthrough moment came in 1937, when the Temmler-Werke company introduced Pervitin, a methamphetamine-based stimulant. Within months, this [...] was available without a prescription [...] and was widely adopted by all sectors of society to elevate mood, control weight gain, and increase productivity. It’s impossible to untangle Pervitin’s success from Germany’s rapidly changing economic fortunes under the Third Reich."

This explains a hell of a lot about the Nazis.

SwiftKey and other keyboards should understand grammar and correct spellings based on that. They do some kind of Markov chain thing currently but they should take it more in the direction of natural language analysis and eliminate words that couldn't possibly occur at that point in the sentence.

YouTube and Spotify have serious trouble pinning down my tastes. For some reason, Spotify kind of figured out a thing or two after I added some Mezzoforte (Icelandic jazz funk fusion band) tracks to a play list recently. All the other stuff I've been adding didn't make anywhere near as much of a difference.

Why is the range of Bluetooth so god damn long? Every time a car with Bluetooth passes me along the road, the audio on my headphones drops out.

I feel so weird about these medications, because taking them is like experiencing years of maturation in a matter of hours, and I can never quite get over it, because my perspective on things, and what I prioritise, changes so much.

They're all sensible changes, but it sort of feels like a loss, because I'm not as carefree.

Tuning out and relaxing takes active effort, because all my brain wants to do is think about housework, finances and work.