I requested an ADHD diagnosis while serving in the US military. Specifically, my last year of service after submitting my request for retirement. I figured, “What are they gonna do, force me to retire?”

At first, the military was resistant. You can’t join the US military if you have an ADHD diagnosis, so their response was that I don’t have it, since I had already served successfully for 19+ years. (For the record, if you’re already serving and get a diagnosis, they’ll let you continue to serve)

But I refused to take no for an answer, so they finally agreed to get me diagnosed. But of course, they don’t have anyone at the military hospital who can diagnose me, because they don’t deal with ADHD people. So I was referred to a civilian specialist in the area. A lady who got her doctorate in ADHD studies and had been in the field for 11 years.

She told me I was the worst case of ADHD she’d ever seen.

She immediately wanted to get me on a regimen of pills. She claimed that ADHD wasn’t an exact science and everyone responded completely differently to medication, so it would likely take months of trial and error to find the exact type and dosage of meds to help me.

The military immediately shut it down. They said I was only authorized for the diagnosis and they weren’t going to cover any medication at this point. The specialist did give me some meds as part of her initial consultation and recommended I try them to help identify a baseline for meds in the future.

Since then, I’ve retired and tried a few different medications. Thanks to a 100% disability rating with the VA, I’m covered for literally all medical and dental for life, so I asked them about being prescribed ADHD medications and they were more than willing to help.

After testing several different types though, I’ve realized that I’m just not myself on any meds. Despite having a bad case of ADHD, I’ve inadvertently built my life around it and have learned how to use it to my benefit.

Knowing I have ADHD makes it easier to identify when I’m getting lost in the details and helps me to pull myself back to reality. But in the long run, my specific type of ADHD means I can hyperfocus on mind-numbing projects for hours and never be bored. So I’m actually extremely productive.

Medications just made my brain all fuzzy and killed my hyperfocus. I could silence all the noise in my brain, but it wouldn’t necessarily focus me. It would just give me the space to pick a direction to focus, but then I’d start missing details and making mistakes because I didn’t have the nagging voices telling me I need to double- and triple-check my work.

In the end, I much prefer to be unmedicated. But like I said, everyone responds differently. My wife also has ADHD, but she’s unable to do anything unless she takes her meds. She’s way too distracted and basically shuts down without her meds.

So if you’re happy with who you are, you can just refuse to get medicated. A diagnosis doesn’t mean you need to take meds. The diagnosis just helps you to understand more about how you operate, and you can do whatever you want with that information.

The soundtrack itself doesn’t have any credits listed. On their soundtrack store page on Steam, it says “Kraken Express” (the development company) is the artist, composer, and label, with an “other credits” featuring Seán Dagher.

Hey, I didn’t want to speak for other cultures. I don’t know how many other countries also use this style of tally marks. But I know America does.

I’ve been playing this game all week. It’s amazing! Exactly the kind of pirate game I want to play.

It’s basically Enshrouded, but pirates in the 1700s instead of a magic/fantasy world. It’s base-building with quests and adventures. And your can sail ships, battle other ships, build your own ships, etc. which is like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, but way better.

I bought the soundtrack for the game on Steam and the entire second disc is just sea shanties! The first disc is the first four sea shanties spiced up with instrumentals for the trailers. Even when I’m not playing this game, I’m rocking this soundtrack while I’m working on my computer.

I’m really enjoying this game. I’m considering reviewing it for my “random screenshots of my games” series. It’s about time I wrote another one of those.

American tally marks vs. Japanese tally marks.

Old (early 40s) guy here. I exclusively discovered new music through the radio. I had several favorite radio stations that would introduce me to new music, then I’d use Shazam to find out what the song and artist is, then look up their albums.

But I’m extremely anti-advertisement nowadays, so I don’t listen to the radio any more. And I hate online music sources because they’re all algorithm-based and suggest similar stuff instead of new music I’ve never experienced before. It’s easy to get stuck in your own bubble with algorithms. Plus, they’re littered with ads, even if you pay for a subscription service. Which I’m also very much against doing.

So… I mostly discover new music through my wife, who is still using the radio and online music streaming sites. All the music I own, I rip to my PC in the highest quality I can, then stream it to myself through Plex, so I have my own ad-free radio station anywhere I go.

I mean, his game is called “American McGee’s Alice.” Saying “American McGee’s Alice creator, American McGee” is a bit wordy and repetitive.

TL;DR:

[…] it would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generated by one hectare of land covered in solar panels.

Found the boss.

He ded. Died from cancer while begging Trump to save him.

I’ve been trying to find a copy of this show for over a decade now. It’s like everyone just forgot about it.

It was a singular scene where Moss was fixing someone’s computer and actually hitting it off with her. But he’s so dense, he didn’t realize she was flirting with him.

She’s a nameless extra for this one scene. The show is The IT Crowd, a British comedy show about members of an IT office in the basement of a large corporation.

This feels misleading. I’d want more details on YouTube. Is this showing the streaming movies/TV shows through YouTube’s subscription service, or is this including any ol’ video clip watched on YouTube?

I’m surprised YouTube has such a high percentage compared to other dedicated streaming services. As much as people complain about YouTube trying to join the “big boys” with their own subscription service, I’d imagine they have much less subscribers than the other streaming services. So I wonder if the numbers are skewed to show all content on YouTube rather than comparable streaming media.

When I was 9 years old, my golden lab got hit and killed by a car.

He was always an outdoors dog. He just showed up on our country property when I was about 3-4 years old and decided to stay there, so we vaccinated him and gave him a collar. I named him Rusty because of his coloring.

He was an old dog at the end. Blind in one eye, hearing was going, and he had bad arthritis. He liked to just lounge around and fawn over me. Sweetest dog ever. There’s a lake across the road from my house, through a thin forested property, and he would trot down there for a swim every now and then to soothe his aching bones. One day, he popped out of the woods on his way home and got hit by a car on the road.

My mother didn’t plan to tell me about it. She didn’t want to risk traumatizing me with my first death, so she was just going to ignore it for as long as possible. Rusty would disappear for days on end, so it wouldn’t be unusual for him to be gone for a while. Then when I’d start asking questions, she’d suggest that he probably migrated somewhere new.

I was playing in my front yard one day when a minivan came up my driveway. A lady hopped out and handed me a small plastic bag. She said, “Here’s your dog’s collar. I figured you’d probably want it. I’m sorry for what happened to him.” Then she just hopped back in her car and drove off, leaving me staring blankly after her. ‘What was that all about?!’

I went inside and showed my mom the bag, told her some lady just handed it to me, and asked her what happened to Rusty. My mom immediately broke down crying, which made me cry, and we both just hugged and cried for a while.

My mom was furious that some lady just handed off a dead dog’s collar to a 9-year old instead of finding an adult. She explained what happened to Rusty and said they were going to bury his remains in our backyard. She absolutely refused to let me see him, though. She said she wanted me to remember him as the childhood friend I grew up with, not as a corpse run over by a car. I wasn’t allowed into the field out back behind my house until my dad had finished burying him.

So yeah, my first experience with death was with my first dog, and my mother could’ve handled it much better. But getting a good cry out with her did wonders for helping me deal with it.

Sync for Lemmy has a paid version that gets rid of ads. Its developer was one of the most vocal when Reddit started charging developers for access to their API. Sync for Reddit was one of the most popular third-party Reddit apps before then.

Its developer is also absent all the time. They poke their head in every few months, fix a bunch of problems, then disappear into the nether for an indeterminate amount of time.

I actually switched to Voyager because I was annoyed at how difficult it was to get anything fixed on Sync. And of course, Voyager is free.

I turn 42 next month, but my body is beat up from 2 decades of military service. I’m definitely experiencing some “catastrophic functionality” myself.

I’m doing my best. See my other reply here. I’m physically broken, so exercising is difficult.

Catalina Liberal

Although I don’t use salad dressing, so this was my favorite when I was a kid. Do they still make it? I haven’t seen it in ages.

And my parents have always been conservative, so they’re disappointed with how liberal I am, even after serving in the US military for 2 decades. Which, ironically, made me even more left-leaning. Working for “The Man” let me peek behind the curtain a bit and I’m not happy with how things are run. But I can’t convince my parents. They trust Fox News more than their own son who worked for the government. /Shrug

Ratatouille. How does pulling on someone’s hair control their limbs like a giant mech? I know it’s a cartoon and there’s gonna be some suspension of disbelief, but… there’s literally no explanation or connection to reality. It’s just a thing that happens and they expect us to accept it.

If the dude had a metal plate in his skull and tapping on certain places caused muscle spasms that could be controlled, that would make more logical sense than just pulling on hair. Still not realistic, but it would work better.

Even worse, the young chef Linguini never learns to be an expert chef (or even a good chef). He’s a complete klutz. He’s literally just the vehicle for the rat Remy to cook with. There’s no growth for Linguini’s character at all. You could swap him out for anyone and the plot would be almost identical. It would’ve been better if he actually learned from Remy and became a great chef himself.