Science Side Of Tumblr PLEASE Share Your Tips/advice/hacks For Academic Conferences!

guys. please

I think something a lot of other people can relate to is the way that you get so conditioned to discomfort that you stop registering it.

I remember sitting at the table with my family, eating dinner as a child. I’d try to eat, because of course I was hungry. But sometimes the flavor or texture was so repugnant that it moved into a category of Not Food.

“Two more bites before you can leave the table.”

“I can’t,” I’d say, trying to explain the impossibility.

But because I was a child they heard, “I won’t,” and made me sit at the table. I’d sit in dull agonized silence, bored and hungry for hours until bedtime when they’d give up. I’d hate myself for not eating and my parents for forcing me to sit there. The few forcefeeding moments ended in vomit.

They’d say, “If you don’t eat this you can’t eat a snack later,” and I moved past trying to communicate my discomfort into accepting that I’d just be hungry.

That state of affairs didn’t last, because my parents realized nothing could force me to eat so they catered to my palate, worrying they’d starve me. But the message stuck. If you can’t do anything about a situation, just accept the suffering.

A few years later my mother called me off the playground to ask, “Are you limping?”

I shrugged. My feet had hurt for a long time, but that was just the way things were now. My mom pulled my socks and shoes off and gasped. The soles of my feet were covered in huge painful planters warts.

“Why didn’t you say anything?!” She demanded but I could only shrug at her. I’d learned a long time ago that saying things about my discomfort didn’t matter, so now I had no words. Sometimes things hurt and sometimes they don’t. I simply accepted and did my best.

Now as an adult trying to learn to improve my own conditions can be hard. If I make food that I can’t eat I’ll force myself to sit at the counter still, full of guilt and self loathing, trying to will myself to eat it.

At first I needed my betrothed to gently take it away to present me with something I could eat. Now on my own I can usually admit that it’s not happening before too long and get something else, but I still feel guilty.

Laying in bed at night waiting for my betrothed to finish getting ready I let out a huge sigh of relief when they turned the lights off.

“Why didn’t you turn them off if they bothered you?” they asked the first time it happened.

“I didn’t even know it was bothering me until it was gone.”

Assessing my physical state now to see if I can improve it is something I’m still relearning but I’m relieved to finally have the space and support to do it.

I have to do this every year or two, when vertigo strikes. Every time, I'm in awe of Dr. Foster for inventing this. That she did it while in the throes of vertigo herself is fucking superhuman.

hey Elvis is the glass half full or half empty to you?

Woah mama it depends on whether you're filling or emptying

Here's my tagging system, at least for now.

#mist speaks - look it's me. saying things

#not advice - stuff that's not tips or advice

#adulting - stuff about adulting. A couple subcategories including:

#cleaning - stuff about cleaning or organizing

#jobs - stuff about job etiquette: applying, working, and more

#college - stuff about college. textbooks and more.

#food

#technology - stuff about technology.

#internet tips - tech tips specifically for the internet. Often cool websites.

#hobbies - resources for new hobbies/activities

#mental health - general mental health resources

#adhd - tips specifically for adhd

#autism - tips specifically for autism

#political - political things or advice

#us medical system - tips for us medical system/insurance.

#reminders - general reminders

#social - tips for social interaction and stuff

#lgbtq - queer stuff

#cool things - cool stuff or things

#science - science things

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

Light Cues

From the "find what works" department of my life...

I was telling my prescribing psychiatrist about this and he really loved it, and it occurred to me I'm not sure I've ever talked about it on here, but I've started using light cues instead of alarms for some things.

I don't use a lot of alarms regularly throughout the day (I don't need one to wake up unless I'm getting up at an unusual time, for example) but I use them for one-off stuff like "time to start getting ready to go out" or "today you have a doctor's appointment". I found after a while that with an alarm for a regular repeating task, there comes a point where I just silence it and forget to do the thing. Like, I have almost all notifications on my phone turned off and it's still muscle memory for me, as it is for many people, to have my phone beep for attention and just silence it unthinkingly. So I started using lighting cues.

It's evolved a lot, starting with the end of the workday. The lighting in my bedroom is all floor lamps; the one over my work desk is on a smart switch, which plugs into the wall and then the lamp plugs into the switch. I set the switch to turn the lamp on at 8am just before I start work, and off at 4:30pm to remind me to stop work, which I don't always remember to do. The light suddenly going out makes that corner unpleasantly dim, and it's more work to turn it back on (open phone, open app, fin the right switch) than it is to stop work for the day.

Then I thought, this is so irritating it must be useful for other things. So I set it to go off from noon to 12:03pm. It's more of a pain in the ass to turn it back on than it is to get up, go to the kitchen, and do what I'm supposed to do at noon anyway: take my second Adderall dose. And the light is back on by the time I get back.

But I was running into the problem of taking the dose on an empty stomach as you're supposed to, but not having eaten since breakfast at like 5am. And now I'm in the kitchen. Having forgotten to eat my Early Lunch at 10:30. But the Adderall needs like 20 minutes to kick in before I eat, and by the I'm back at work, and then I wonder why I eat my body weight in pasta at 5pm.

So I set a light cue for 10:30 to remind me to take a break and eat. But I don't want to use the same cue for everything. The lamp on the other end of the bedroom doesn't have a smart switch but it does have a smart bulb, which is even more flexible, so at 10:30am it dims to 50% (irritating) and turns deep blue (doubly irritating). I leave the room, go eat lunch, and usually come back to sit on the bed with the cats for a few minutes. I don't mind the dim blue light when I'm on the bed -- I just can't work with it that way. So at 11 the light goes back to full white brightness and I get my cue to go back to work.

I have various other cues -- the living room lamps go off and the LED string on the headboard in the bedroom goes on low and red to indicate it's bedtime, and the LEDs go off a little later to remind me NO, it is BEDTIME NOW.

Obviously a lot of this is only possible with either analog daily timers or smart bulbs/switches, and those can be cost-prohibitive for some while others don't like having their lighting on the internet. But it's all switches and bulbs that I can remove easily, and they've come down a great deal in price -- mine are all Kasa brand so they're controlled from a single app, and I've found them extremely helpful.

Plus sometimes at night I put all the lights to deep blue and pretend I'm underwater and that's fun.

as a fairly successful woman with ADHD i will tell you that the two strongest tools in your kit are "be so competent they don't notice you're unmanageable" and "strategically deploy weaponized incompetence to avoid having to do things you hate" and a third is "learn a little about a lot of subjects so you'll always be able to make small talk and network because when people like you as a person they'll overlook a lot of personal failings." it's honestly that straightforward

Sad Bastard Expectations

It's 2025, and we're sadder than ever!

Maybe it's time for a Sad Bastard Cookbook sequel? Maybe a spin-off for parents of small children? Maybe both?

I'm new here. What's a Sad Bastard Cookbook?

Glad you asked! We wrote a cookbook full of judgement-free recipes you can make when you're suffering from mental illness, physical disability, poverty, or anything else late-stage capitalism throws up that makes basic self-care feel impossible. Some of the recipes were our own, some we collected from the community.

The ebook is free--you can download a copy here if you wanna check it out.

I'm a community! Or at least, a Person! Can I contribute my recipe for survival food?

YES PLEASE.

If you have a survival recipe that you make for yourself, or to feed a baby, toddler, or small child, please share that recipe here.

I’m a fan of the original Sad Bastard Cookbook—when will the new ones be here?

We really have no idea. We’re in the very early planning and writing stages of the two projects, but when we have more information, you’ll probably see it here first!