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Idk What Im Doing Here

@magpie-maple

I’m probably just going to reblog things and post my art? Idk the anxiety got to me, so who knows

In hindsight it's very insulting to be told that flunking out of college due to adhd is actually "quite common"

just like, if there's a history at your institution of disabled kids not being able to make it you realise that's your fault right. like why don't you fucking do something about it. i guess they tried to do something about it with me and it failed so they let me go. crazy. nice work. why should we try to do any better.

only 5% of people with adhd who go to college finish a degree. FUCKING. FIVE!!! PERCENT!!!!!!!!!!!

that should disgust and enrage you.

if any other demographic of students had a 95% failure rate, we would be demanding reform and studies to understand why that’s happening

when i was at my first university, trying to get accommodations for my ADHD, they just kept asking me what accommodations i wanted, and refused to answer when i would ask what was available to me. how the Hell am i supposed to know what i can have? what’s available???? also, i don’t know!!!! i’m an adhd sufferer, not a fucking disability expert for the fucking college, unlike you, DISABILITY EXPERT WHO WORKS FOR THE COLLEGE.

but because the us is OBSESSED with making sure no one gets anything “”for free””, she literally would not tell me what my options were until i broke down in tears and asked her why she was refusing to help me. and then she did a big sigh, like i was fucking up her entire career by *checks notes* asking the disability center in my university to help me, a disabled student

at the second uni i went to, i tried to explain to a dean that i was literally two gen eds that had nothing to do with my degree away from graduating and that i was burnt out and broke and exhausted and suicidal and i just needed to be able to finish my degree without the gen eds. and this. fucking. guy. looked me right in my face and said in the most patronizing tone he could muster “if you can’t handle it, then maybe college just isn’t for you.” keep in mind that up until that semester, i had been an honor student who made Dean’s List every semester and didn’t get below Bs. if it hadn’t been for my mental breakdown, i would have graduated cum laude, maybe even summa cum laude.

but this dean of students looked a disabled person right in the face and said well i guess you just can’t do it, short bus

Pulled these from a couple articles really quick but yeah the statistics are not kind. I remember writing a scathing essay about my issues with ADHD and college as part of an assignment for academic probation. I got back an email calling me entitled and lazy. Somehow, this thread helps me feel a lot better. I still have about a semester of school unfinished that I’m unsure if I’ll finish but… yeah. Makes me feel better to know it’s not just me.

PSA: The Job Accommodation Network maintains a searchable database of accommodation suggestions for a wide variety of disabilities.

The full database can be accessed here and the ADHD page is here. The full database can be filtered by disability, by limitation, by work-related function, by topic, and by accommodation. Many of these accommodations are applicable to academic settings as well as the workplace.

Here are the section headers for ADHD accommodations ideas to give an overview of what the page contains - this post would become Do You Love the Color of the Accommodation if I attempted to list them all here

The ADHD page linked above also includes case examples and strategies for determining what sort of accommodations might be necessary. More broadly, the JAN website as a whole is a treasure trove of information related to the Americans with Disabilities Act and resources for both individuals and employers.

Oh fuck that's really nice, I will read it

Also just heard a podcast interview with a software developer who had good suggestions

The head of disability accommodations at my college just kept ablesplaining to me that “accommodations are to level the playing field, not give you an advantage,” and that her job is to “protect the school’s rights” rather than help disabled students. The only accommodations they would offer me were 1. extra time on tests, and 2. an alternative test-taking location - neither of which I needed. I ended up getting (most of) what I actually needed by unofficially asking the individual professors, but it should have been legally protected.

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

Share the knowledge

Okay, here we go! I'm gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I'm not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.

Level 1: browser extensions

This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.

Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.

Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).

uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.

Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.

FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.

Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.

Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.

With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.

To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.

Level 5: automated media piracy

The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.

The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.

Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.

Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.

Level 6: fucking with Android

Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.

Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.

Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.

You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.

Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.

Level 8: switching to Linux

I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.

And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!

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imagine you are a gay man in your 60s and you've been in the military most of your life so you've never been free to be yourself or to seek out people like you and as a result you're now elderly and alone and you've spent a lifetime betraying yourself and you've never been loved and you get experimental brain surgery to cope with this and then one day you learn that the innocent child version of yourself who knows nothing of your isolation or your sins fell in love with another man and the man he loved was killed for pursuing that relationship and then your other self is also killed presumably for the same reason but you meet the other version of the man he loved and he's married but he wants to get to know you and you don't know him but you have some inextricable connection, something is pulling you towards him and you know you shouldn't trust him but you do and you just don't want to be alone and his husband is kind of a dick so you follow that feeling and it leads you right into a trap he set for you and it turns out that he was just manipulating you all along, to make you let your guard down, and you fell for it because there's a part of you that wants to put your life in his hands and so you do and he takes you to a train station and tells you to get as far away from here as you possibly can, he's saving you perhaps even at the cost of his own life and you think maybe you weren't entirely wrong about trusting him so you tell him you want him and he doesn't deny he wants you back, you tell him you're ready to be loved by him and you don't even know what that means but you keep saying it over and over because it just feels right, like you've been waiting for this your whole life, and maybe you have, all you know is your life hangs in the balance but for the first time you're not afraid, and maybe his interest in you was under false pretenses but you don't care because there's a part of this that's real and you both know it, he doesn't let you kiss him but he lets you touch his face and stroke his cheek with your thumb and then you walk away and get on the train with your dog going to god knows where and as the tracks whisk you away into the great unknown and the dying light of a cold winter day paints your face you think maybe you have been loved all along. happened my friend irving bailiff

Lots of thoughts recently. Everything feels plastic.

I could go on and on about why all that AI "art" is bad. I could mention theft, lack of creativity, it's impact on the work field and environment, but countless people have already said all that. I wanted to touch on something that to me is the most utterly wrong about all of it.

Art is more than just something pretty to look at or listen to. It's therapeutic. It's a form of communication. A tool for human connection. It's a pure, human need.

Support real artists ☀️

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Gemma Scout, on the phone with her bank: Yes I’m just trying to reopen my account. ‘Marked as deceased’ yes I know, but I’m not dead. Yes I know my husband sent you my death certificate. My death was faked in a really elaborate scheme so—no, not by me. Look just turn on CNN. I’m all over the news. It’ll—'can I come in with my husband?' No, I can’t. He’s dead now. Well maybe not dead. But he’s probably never coming back alive. They can’t get his innie in the elevator. Yes they tried that. But he sticks his arms and legs out real wide like a cat so they can’t get him in the elevator.”

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The words they're afraid of.

The recently appointed Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth (formerly Fox News pundit, perpetually soused creepy uncle, and current group chat leaker of classified intel) banned images of the Enola Gay from the Pentagon’s website for the offense of “DEI” language. In keeping with the far right’s stated war on anything vaguely resembling diversity, equity and inclusion, even historical photos are up for cancellation. When a literal weapon of mass destruction is censored for being a bit fruity under the Trump administration’s war against inconvenient truths, what exactly is left untouched?

This is clown show stuff, but the stakes are far from funny. While some might be hesitant to compare the current administration to the very worst history has to offer, we can at least all agree that they are dyed-in-the-wool grammar Nazis. Policing language has been the objective of the MAGA culture war long before Project 2025’s debut—the wave of book bans orchestrated by astroturf movements like Moms for Liberty, and Florida’s 2022 Don’t Say Gay bill have already had a profound effect in the arena of free speech and freedom of expression (despite the far right’s long tradition of doublespeak performative free-speech martyrdom to the contrary). Don’t Say Gay ostensibly targeted K-3 education, but LGBT+ content at all levels of education (and beyond) was either quietly censored or entirely preempted in practice. The results were not just a war on so-called ideology, or words alone—but on reality and essential freedoms.

Now, words as innocuous and important as racism, climate change, hate speech, prejudice, mental health, and inequality are targeted as subversive. Entire concepts are being vanished from government institutions, scrubbed not only from descriptions but from metadata, search indexes, and archival frameworks.

If you don’t name a thing, does it exist?

Artist trading card set #2, “Pigeons,” and what I traded them for

This was for my design craft class, I am as stated before a try hard.

Mine^

What I traded for^

The top left card is my teachers (a different one) and everything else is from classmates except obviously the one I kept for myself.

This set was hard to trade, I got emotionally attached :( and nobody but like five people in class were done so people either didn’t want to trade because of that, or they too were to attached to their cards.

So there really wasn’t a tenth person to trade with and that was my favorite card :)

Artist trading card set #1, “Cycles of Life”, and what I traded them for.

This is for a drawing class, and I’m a try hard. Just for reference.

Mine^

What I traded for^

The first one the top left was my teachers she asked me to save the secretary bird card for her. Everything else was traded with classmates from that hour.

(Also ignore the difference in photo quality :)

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when i remember that no amount of waiting will make me brave and no amount of fear will keep me safe

edit: image description by voxratasma added to alt text

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Idk how many people will see this but

Does anyone have a short story or poem, original or recommended, that I could try my hand at illustrating?

If so let me know however you want, DM me, in the replies, or reblog. Literally however you want.

I’ll reblog this post with an unofficial and shoddy portfolio of sorts.

Here’s my “portfolio” if you will

I know it’s not the best photography but I tried to get some diversity in media/ medium, if there’s a preference let me know

Again, if anyone has a short story or poem that I could illustrate (to put it loosely) pls let me know

Idk how many people will see this but

Does anyone have a short story or poem, original or recommended, that I could try my hand at illustrating?

If so let me know however you want, DM me, in the replies, or reblog. Literally however you want.

I’ll reblog this post with an unofficial and shoddy portfolio of sorts.

I can’t remember if I posted artist trading card set 2 but here it is, in most of the detail

Theme: pigeons

I forgot to take a picture of the last one but it’s the one I kept so itll get posted later :)

here’s the full set

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lumon's department sizes are so funny. "how many people do we need to refine some super important data?" uhhhh four i guess. at most. "what about the company marching band?" fuck ur so right. we need a company marching band with like fifty people. this is of prime importance to the lumon mission.

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“Cold Harbor is at 100%”. Very happy to share my final poster for season 2 of Severance! Congrats to the entire cast and crew on an incredible finale and season. Can’t wait for season 3!

If anyone is interested in prints, visit jjlendl.com/lumon. Prints for this episode and the rest of my episode-inspired posters will be available for a ONE WEEK ONLY limited timed pre-order window ending next Saturday, March 29th. Thanks!