I have a bunch of docker containers running network services. Each one has a globally routable IPv6 address. They're behind a firewall so that's fine. It does mean I can refer to them by name rather than IP address though, without needing multicast DNS.

I have spent WEEKS wondering why my iPhone and Mac struggle to connect to them.

Apple is being "helpful" by trying to proxy non local sites to avoid trackers.

The proxy can't reach them.

Because they're on my LAN.

Which is behind a firewall.

I turned the tracker prevention off and Everything. Just. Worked.

RATFSCKERS!

The word for arranging a lesbian polycule in a bed was right there all along: Titris

In a sign of how well AI adoption is going, I noticed that Adobe is referring to manual edits I made by hand in Lightroom Mobile as “AI edits”.

“Nobody wants this so we will pretend they used it”

I just upgraded to 2026.05

There are ... emojis

Everywhere

This does not seem right

So War of the Worlds is like, what if the Martian version of Elon Musk planned an invasion of Earth?

You have like, 4th millennium tech including collimated fusion directed energy weapons (read Stephen Baxter’s sequel, “The Massacre of Mankind”. It’s really good), and yet you lose two of your assets to a TORPEDO RAM ironclad; a ship so tactically useless that they built one ever and then tried to forget about the whole thing …

… and then you half arse the prep for the advance landing party because the experts who told you that Earth’s microbiome will FUCKING DIGEST YOU if you don’t take precautions is too woke.

Yup. Can totally see how that could happen.

More thoughts on ADHD medication, specifically amphetamine, after a year.

Like lots of people, I started them and BANG! Neo waking in his pod in The Matrix. Life changing. The scales fell from my eyes. I suddenly understood. It all made sense. The stuff I found so incredibly difficult for half a century and other people could just ... do it?

I wept.

"Don't chase the high", they all warn. What does that mean?

About 4-6 weeks later I had an argument with Zoe. I felt some of the old behaviours creeping back in. What? Why is that happening?

Then I started to go to bed late again, and procrastinate, and some of the other stuff. Not all though, I kept the place clean. The piles of clothes never came back. I was still getting relief from sensory issues.

And each new titration dose brought it all back.

Until titration stopped, and I was on my final dose.

And it slipped, slowly, it slipped.

Why did it slip? "Tolerance! You have become tolerant to amphetamine! Take a meds holiday!", they all chant.

I tried. I got as far as 3pm before I couldn't stand the bullshit.

Thing is, the evidence that drugs tolerance to therapeutic doses of amphetamine in ADHD even develops is ... dubious. There's a great video by Russell Barkly on this, here: youtu.be/RbZjL7czIy0?si=6xHaoY…

It's not though. I worked out what has happened, and it's fine.

Unmedicated, undiagnosed ADHD is marked by horrible disregulated emotions (more severe in the combined (me) and hyperactive forms I believe), non existent executive functioning, difficulty focusing, and yada yada.

It is, in a nutshell, "really bloody awful".

If you think you have ADHD but are undiagnosed, you possibly just read that and felt like a fraud, didn't you? "But I don't feel that awful!"

How do you KNOW? You have never known any different.

Because here's the thing. You grow up with this crap and you start to mask it, because you HAVE to.

But masking and coping strategies are profoundly psychologically expensive. They destroy us with burnout run the long run.

So we mask to the point where we can more or less make it through the day, and no more.

And it's a pretty sodding miserable existence (Yes, it really is, yes, for you, person reading this wth "some traits". Lots of stuff you accept as a normal part of being human simply is not. I know you don't believe me, even if you think you do. I wouldn't have believed me either).

And then we get diagnosed.

And medicated.

It. Goes. Away.

It all goes away.

Annnnnnnnd breathe!

You are suddenly Mr Spock. You are impervious to your emotions. You can just DO STUFF! You CAN clean the house and you DO and you ENJOY IT! What witchcraft is this?

"I'm cured! Why did nobody tell me about this?" (We did. You ignored us)

You also aren't cured. You still have ADHD.

Your emotions are still there.

You still have executive dysfunction,.

You still struggle to focus.

All of it. It didn't go away.

You just can't hear it.

Why? Because ... well, you are outside and it's stupid sodding bright, and loud. Insanely loud.

And you've been out there for hours.

Then you come into a dim room which is quiet. You can't see anything, you can't hear anything. It's all there though, just below your level of sensitivity.

A few month later when stuff starts coming back and you conclude the meds are failing? They aren't. Your eyes are adjusting to the dark.

Here's another metaphor: A shelled of water has been dumped on a landscape, continually, over thousands of years. It carves out a basin. It finds its level. Water always finds its level.

Move it to the side and it will flow back into the basin it carved. And so it is with us. We start meds and the level of effort we have always applied to make it through the day, which was borderline killing us, suddenly makes it STUPIDLY EASY.

Borderline killing us. Still is.

So you start to dismantle your big expensive coping strategies, because they were hurting you.

You dismantle them until ... well, you start to approach the level of functionality, or rather disfunctionality that you are used to. And then you stop.

Because water finds its level.

You conclude they aren't working, so you take a meds break and OH MY GOD IT'S HORRIBLE.

What the hell is going on? You turned the bloody difficulty knob up to max again. That's what the hell is going on.

After a week you start meds again, and they magically work! IT WAS TOLERANCE ALL ALONG!

No it wasn't, you muppet. You just started to match your effort to the difficulty level again.

You can get trapped in this cycle.

Or you can realise that you deserve a rest, you've had a rest, and that's nice. Now get up and do your goddam laundry, which is a thing you can do, and is still far easier than it ever was.

That is all.

OK, gonna preface this by asking you to read to th end before judging.

It's been more than a year now and initially my experience of diagnosis was very much, "I hate this thing and would love it to go away".

And to be fair, I still hate this thing and would love it to go away. But it isn't going to.

However, this did colour my views of the terms "neurodivergent" and "neurodiverse", because while I saw the former as simply descriptive, and largely value neutral: my neurology is an outlier, the latter seemed to normalise what I very definitely experience as pathology and sometimes even want to celebrate it.

And I don't want to celebrate the way my own nervous system torments me constantly, nor do I seek to regard that as "just another equally valid way of being that's no worse than any other", because it is objectively worse.

My nervous system torments me. That's not a good thing.

BUT:

I find my position evolving quite a lot more nuance. One of the things I've been doing for the last year is therapy. I had loads of therapy before but this time I had specific requirements.

I wanted a therapist who was: female, late diagnosed ADHD, LGBT positive, and on stimulant medication.

And there are reasons for all of these, but the ones that may not be immediately obvious are why she needed to be late diagnosed and on stimulants.

It's because I didn't want to have a recurring expense while I talked to someone weekly for an hour a time during which I spent large fractions of that hour having stuff pushed at me that I KNOW DOES NOT WORK, and having to argue the toss.

I needed commonality of reference.

Let me give you an example: mindfulness meditation. I can't. Don't reply to this saying that I just have to practice, or I haven't found my thing. I can't do it. Any form of metacognition while I'm in the unmedicated state results in setting off an ADHD thought chain that starts ruminating on metacognition, which ruminates on rumination on metacognition, which ruminates on ruminates on STACK OVERFLOW! CORE DUMPED!

Or in common parlance, "it gives me a right fucker of a migraine".

That's the unmedicated state (in case it's not clear, stimulant meds aren't like, say, antidepressants where you aim for a constant effect. What you get instead is two modes: medicated and unmedicated, and you will switch from one to the other sometimes as abruptly as under a minute. You can seem to be two different people). I can do mindfulness meditation in the medicated state.

There's just no point that I've discovered to doing that. Useless activity. "Find inner calm!" Um, got it. That's why I am able to count my breaths or some shit. So what?

"Well it's like exercising a muscle, and eventually you'll be able to do it unmedicated"

No I won't, because that MAKES MY SYNAPSES CRASH MY BRAIN, and if it didn't I wouldn't be in the unmedicated state, knobhead.

My therapist asked me, "can you meditate?"

"No"

"Ok, cool. Me neither. Let's do something else"

Easy. "Something else" was reparenting my inner child and it's been crazy effective.

And yesterday I watched this video: youtube.com/watch?v=zL_s6dKitH…

And it helped crystallise something I've been thinking more and more because YouTube has been increasingly pushing pop psychology videos at me and something most of them have in common is this: They present common neurodivergent behaviours as "trauma response", and never once mention neurodivergence.

And yeah, that's exactly why I'm starting to feel that "neurodiversity" is something that I can identify with. Yes, my neurology results in things that are objectively pathological and they never won't be.

But the fact that I'm playing with a Whacky Tracks fidget stim whilst typing this is not one of them. That's harmless, and it doesn't mean "I'm stressed", or that "mummy didn't love me". It just means that I enjoy having something in my hand to fiddle with.

The Fediverse to Bluesky crossposter is gonna have a field day with this one. I wish it the best of luck. If you want to see it unadulterated, try here: thegoatery.dyndns.org/profile/…

ASRS is a screening test for adults to see if it's worth pursuing an ADHD diagnosis. It is 18 questions, written by neurotypical people who assume their external observations of ADHD are accurate representations of what it's like to have it, so needs to be translated into "actual person with ADHD" before you fill it in.

That's why it includes stupid shit like, "do you feel driven by a motor?" No, I do not. Things driven by a motor spin round and round and I do not spin.

And, "Do you have problems remembering appointments" to which everyone responds, "It's 2026 and I have a fucking SMARTPHONE".

So that being the case, I have often thought one written BY ADHDers, FOR ADHDers would be better.

It would include questions like:
.
"Do you think your friends all dislike you and that you annoy them?"
.
"Is there a song on repeat in your head? Is it the same 3 bars over and over? It is, isn't it?"
.
"Your partner says, 'we need to talk'. Do you flee to Antarctica? If not, is that because you got distracted by TVTropes when trying to find out how to flee to Antarctica?"
.
"Do you do the thing with candles? You know the one. Yes you do, stop playing dumb."
.
"'Right, but you need to show your working' - how much homicide do you want to commit when you read this?"
.
"How many bottles of ketchup are there in your fridge? Did you have to get up to count?"
.
"How many are expired?"
.
"By more than a year?"
.
"You left the fridge open, didn't you?"
.
"Which leg is bouncing and why is it always the same one?"
.
"Do you rehearse conversations in your head before having them?"
.
"And then get annoyed when the other person doesn't say their correct lines?"
.
"How long have you managed to lie in bed desperate for a pee without getting up to pee and why is it six hours?"
.
"Cleaning your teeth twice a day is easy|common|aspirational|not happening|I own a toothbrush?|I own five toothbrushes?|And don't know where any of them are? (delete as applicable)"
.
"You notice a scab on an easily accessible body part. How many seconds is its life expectancy?"
.
"Where did you get those bruises? The ones on your legs? You don't know, do you?"
.
"Rock climbing, knitting, or both?"
.
"How long have the clothes in the washing machine been there?"
.
"And is Indiana Jones getting excited about the early Mesopotamian sock layer at the bottom of the pile on your chair?"
.
"Ikea Skadis. I know, right?"

Hey all,

Been running 2026.01 (docker) for a week now. Took a few goes before the worker would play nicely.

A lot of this in my logs. Also RSS appears to have stopped updating.

Is my database corrupt?

I have seen the Pomodoro technique described as a “low stress way to help focus” and honestly I find it hard to imagine something being much more stressful and less likely to help me focus than Satan’s tyrannical alarm clock.

Urgency trigger urgency trigger urgency trigger urgency trigger

WHY ARE YOU SO ANXIOUS?!?!!?!!?!!!!!!!

Just seen someone saying they support bans on trans healthcare for under 18s because “let kids be kids”.

By the time I hit puberty, I had KNOWN for a decade.

I also knew that telling anyone would be profoundly dangerous.

So I hid who I was and, am almost grateful that the neurodivergence gave the other kids something else to latch on to. They were so busy calling me a “mong” that they didn’t notice I was trans.

Because that might have got me murdered.

Or pushed me into a position where I felt I had no options other than the same end result.

So I hid it.

And I hid it really well.

And one of the things that happens when a 5 year old child is terrified of their parents, or their families, or the school bullies finding out who they really are is that they end up traumatised.

A 5 year old child. Traumatised and ashamed.

Ashamed because adults openly talked about them.

Or people like them.

And what they said was horrific. What they said made it very clear that they would regard their own kids as subhuman monsters if they ever found out.

So we hid. And an important part of ourselves died in childhood. A light that should have shone, went out.

I’ve tried my best to rekindle it.

I’ve managed somewhat but it will never be right. Not really. I’ve made peace with that.

“Let kids be kids”. Trans kids like me never got to be.

Because of people who say things like that.