ELSEWHERE

Was in fact fine when I woke up again, so I got to spend ~an hour playing Digimon World on stream with Erika again! We have opened the path to Mt Panorama and after a brief detour on the other side of the bridge, that's where we're now wandering around.

 
I was going to get Stray, but I'm going to push that off another month because I really want to get this collection of Dark Souls lore. So that will not be my video game for the month, but like everyone else in the world with a steam account I have plenty of other games I could be playing instead of buying new ones.

 
In mental-health-science news, the chemical-imbalance theory of depression, which scientists have for ages been reminding people is just a hypothesis with no real evidence supporting it, has been proven to likely be false

Our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity. Most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without, and methods to reduce serotonin availability using tryptophan depletion do not consistently lower mood in volunteers.

Now just waiting for similar news about all the likely-bullshit people spread about ADHD

Speaking of ADHD, I've changed the routine by which I take my medication (not ADHD meds) and I don't know if it's just the novelty of change but it's working very well for me right now

Just read a twitter thread/tumblr post combo that talked about how mainstream writing and the publishing industry in general is hostile to neurodivergent readers and that's why so many people these days, particularly in that demographic, are struggling to read anymore

The reasons given are things like 'neurodivergent brains like filler words, and can struggle to understand nuance and context without adjectives/adverbs, both of which editors are trained to remove', which I don't entirely buy*, at least not on its face as 'the main reason' why this is a thing. But it's interesting and eye-opening, and I 100% buy an issue with the publishing industry forcing all modern writers to sound more-or-less the same, leading to readers getting bored or struggling to find books that specifically appeal to them. I don't read enough, and don't read any recently published books, to be able to say with certainty that all books 'sound the same' but I have heard of that being a thing and would be completely unsurprised to have it confirmed. Media quadropoly refuses to take risks and insists on sticking to proven formulas, what a shocker, what a twist.

But there's also a known issue of neurodivergent people struggling to maintain hobbies like reading outside of a structured environment -- we read a lot in school because we were escaping from being in school and we didn't have phones at the time to distract us instead. Now, reading involves setting aside time specifically for that, which is hard to do when you've got responsibilities you actually need to take care of, and hobbies that are more immediately rewarding and require less effort to participate in. But that explains not reading, it doesn't explain trying to read and just failing to maintain an interest in every book you try to read. Every book being 'appeal to the mainstream' bland, though? Not even in subject matter, but in the actual writing itself? There could be something to that.

 
*Like, I buy that some people with atypical wiring are wired to prefer that kind of writing, I don't buy that it's a common way for neurodivergent people to be wired, even if we narrow it down to specifically 'ADHD brains like this' or 'autistic brains like this'. 'Some ADHD people prefer reading sentences with filler words in them' does not make it an ADHD symptom to prefer filler words, even if the reason they prefer filler words is something to do with how their ADHD manifests

This is so incredibly interesting. I’d love to hear more about it if you find/read more.

I’ve been reading a lot more lately, but yeah, older books. Not /old/ but 5 or so years, or authors I already know and love. I haven’t tried a lot of new-new books, and I’m wondering what I’ll think when I do.

KnightOfCups wrote: ↑Wed Aug 03, 2022 2:51 pm

This is so incredibly interesting. I’d love to hear more about it if you find/read more.

I’ve been reading a lot more lately, but yeah, older books. Not /old/ but 5 or so years, or authors I already know and love. I haven’t tried a lot of new-new books, and I’m wondering what I’ll think when I do.

Yeah, five years is about where I'm at, too -- Broken Earth started in 2015 and ended in 2017, Raising the Stones is 1990 (which is much more recent than I'd thought; additionally Grass is 1989, which apparently my brain had glossed into "The eighties" and then misremembered as "The seventies". But Tepper does feel earlier than that, doesn't she?)

I also would not be surprised to learn that Jemisin has ADHD -- I don't want to armchair diagnose her, but looking at her outside of her books, I get a little bit of that vibe. So if we take it on face value that neurodivergent brains enjoy a certain kind of writing more, then neurodivergent writers are more likely to write in that style, and so a person with ADHD is more likely to enjoy writing done by a writer who also has ADHD.

Meanwhile, I believe Seanan McGuire labels herself ADHD and I just can't get into most of her writing. However, the only books I was able to engage with for a long time were her Wayward Children books. So -- definitely a complicated subject with a lot of nuance, whether or not it's true-as-presented by the OOP. I do definitely think there's something here, even if that something is "actually, everyone has different preferences in writing style, and the publishing industry has been ignoring that for the past five-ten years"

If we do take it as read that "ADHD brains" like such and such, I would not be surprised for it to be true that "ADHD brains" can actually be broken down into separate categories that actually have different preferences from each other -- eg "ADHD-hyperactive brains like filler words and adverbs, ADHD-inattentive brains do not". "ADHD-hyperactive brains like text to be left-aligned to give them variation to anchor them in place, ADHD-inattentive brains like justified text to prevent them from getting distracted by the layout"

Did finish off 100%ing Dangan Ronpa night before last, and then yesterday I inverted my wake/sleep cycle for a day because sometimes you just gotta do that.

For video games, I jumped back into Pathologic. I started playing through that right before we moved, and then couldn't find a controller for months so I wasn't able to continue playing through it. And I knew when I jumped back in I'd have no idea what I was doing or how to play, so I kept putting it off and putting it off.

It was indeed stressful trying to get back into it. I picked up how to play fast enough, but the game doesn't tell you shit about what you're supposed to be doing -- or, rather, it does, but in that same opaque way it tells you everything. So I followed a walkthrough until I found things that hadn't been done yet, and I sort of continued playing-by-walkthrough for the rest of that character because it was late enough game that the game sort of figured I'd have a handle on things by now.

But now I'm on a new, and the last, character, and it's very interesting. There are a lot of details that come to light in the Changeling playthrough that the other characters just, never picked up on.

I love this game very much and I always find it very inspiring when I play it. It's just so unapologetically itself, and it handles its themes and storytelling in ways that other people will bounce off of, I know, but are exactly right for me. It's similar to Dark Souls &c in how it handles exposition, which is to say it makes you work for it. It throws you into a setting and tells you, "Pay attention", and then it starts walking and if you don't keep up then that's your problem. It goes on without you.

I was today years old when I realised that the joke behind Professor Plum being forgetful in the Clue book series was not only leaning in on the 'absent-minded professor' trope but also a play on the colloquialism "plumb forgot"

I ordered some stuff a month ago and just realised I never heard anything about it, so now I have to send An Email

I took a shower and now I'm going to take a nap which means my hair is going to be extremely weird when I wake up again