That tattoo is not at all anatomically correct. The heart is in completely the wrong place and doesn’t have the right shape, furthermore most of the organs are missing. If that was her actual anatomy she’d die on the spot.
Please don’t use sharpie on your skin. Depending on your body chemistry you can end up with chemical burns doing that. Use tattoo pens or something else designed for your skin. */end MUA rant*
In short, “Jim”, you’re clearly managing to put everyone here off the people you are supposedly trying to promote. Or as Willis put it:
why does anybody think this is an effective way to proselytize
I had zero feelings about [Yang] until folks got up in my fries and now I’m counting down the hours until he drops out, just out of spite
Don’t try to argue you’re not being annoying, by the way. We see through that bullshit, and through your attempts of sealioning.
Instead, realizing that the only thing you are managing to do is to antagonizing yourself and your supposed idols, you now have two choices:
1: Continue the same path as you are doing now; contributing nothing positive whatsoever. The only reason you’d be doing this is because you’re not actually trying to promote Yang and Gabbard. No, what you’re hoping to achieve here -is- the negative reaction. That way, you can then go “home” to your flock on whatever 4chan forum you gather in, and talk to them about everyone’s being mean to you; and they will tell their stories, and together you will bond and feel safer together and knowing you are the righteous ones.
This is a common strategy by many religious cults, by the way. To make their members meet hostility outside their own arena; in order to reinforce how much better life is inside it. They do it specifically to ensure that nobody’s going to leave them.
2: You can try and figure out how to promote Tulsi and Yang without being annoying. Admittedly, that’s a pretty tall order; especially with the way Tulsi managed to disgrace herself so much recently (again, don’t bother denying this. It won’t do you any good.). But I’m sure it might be possible. And if you actually want to promote Yang and Gabbard; that’s your only real option.
I mean, I’m sure you can also 3: Just leave this comment field the hell alone forever; but I’m pretty sure the only way you’ll do that is by getting yourself banned (which you’ll use as evidence of Willis being mean, of course)
Re: the tweet thread Lux had posted of Willis’ which you are on within the last hour. Good point on how sarcasm is willfully ignored by some people with an axe to grind.
Dude, if you want to push for your preferred candidates there are much better ways to go about it. You could try making actual arguments with reasons why you think they’re better for one thing. And maybe try posting about them in a political discussion forum instead of the comments section of a webcomic.
Nah, she’d get even less traction in the Republican primary. She only works as an outlet for frustration on the Democratic side. She’s not in position to be an establishment Republican and she’s not nearly extreme enough to pick up the extreme votes on the right.
Hopefully, she’ll do the right thing and concede as the primary race tightens – like the other candidates will. Or she’ll prove that her nay-sayers were right by running a third-party spoiler campaign on a platform of “Democrats were mean to me”, with a backing mostly of Russian troll farms.
I don’t hate the concept of third party, but when a gun is being held to someone’s head, use the tried-and-true disarming, don’t cross your fingers and hope the gun misfires.
More parties would be great, problem is our most-votes-wins “first past the post” elections encourage a two-party system at best, or make it a necessity at worst. A third party would have to unite the center against the fringes, which also goes against decades of two-party marketing. As it stands, third parties just siphon votes away from whichever of the big two they agree with more, leaving the other a bigger overall slice of the pie. We’d have to go to some kind of ranked-choice system nationwide to eliminate this problem, but guess whose decision it would be to get that ball rolling…
CGPGrey has some old videos that I think illustrate the problem pretty well.
In which Amber starts up where Dorothy ended. Honestly though neither of them really need to help him with this, he’s a big boy who needs to grow up and learn how to study. Dorothy and Amber cannot MAKE him wanna study, even with perky boobs.
Kinda different if he actually has ADHD and has gone this long undiagnosed. He’ll likely need medication to balance it out and also need someone to support him as he goes forward.
My little brother has ADHD and it makes learning for him difficult sometimes, even with the meds. Not helping matters is that he has anger issues and when people try to help him he ends up lashing out as if we’re pitying him, only for him to then struggle with the work and beg for help later.
ADHD is something that can’t just be handled on his own. Plus, this is Walky. He’s 18 but a lot of the time he acts like he’s 13 on a sugar rush. He needs someone to be able to slap him silly and support him while he adjusts to his new life.
Had his ADHD been known beforehand and Dorothy still left while Amber stayed, I’d have less respect for Dorothy and more for Amber. Being with someone with a mental disability like ADHD can be challenging, and while I wouldn’t fault Dorothy for being unable to handle him on her own, I would fault her if she could handle him and decided she didn’t want to deal with him just so she can advance her political career.
Amber however has a metric fuckton of her own issues to deal with, so for her to actually try and be supportive for Walky during all this with all her own issues, it would actually be worthy of respect. That she’d still do all this, helping out him while worrying about herself. Obviously not the most healthy thing to do since she DOES have a metric fuckton of issues, but still worthy of some respect nonetheless.
The reasons Dorothy left had nothing to do with his adhd. I think it’s a bad idea to stay with someone you don’t want to stay with just because they have some issues.
Then again, I have some issues on my own and I hate unnecessary special treatment because of that. I’m different enough as it is. People don’t need to make me even more different.
Meds do help lots of people, though, and shouldn’t be thrown out from the start.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of personal issues with ADHD medicines myself. I spent a lot of my childhood on ritalin, and all it ever managed to do was make me feel like I was a robot, a puppet for the chemicals piloting me.
But that doesn’t mean it does that to everyone. While I would 100% advocate for finding other ways to cope first, sometimes, for some people, medication is the best option. Sometimes even when it fucks up your head for 10 of the most important years of your life, the answer isn’t to swear off medicine forever, but to keep looking for one that works. It took me an additional 15 years to begin to accept that for myself.
But also, sometimes, fuck medication. If you don’t want that shit messing with your head you’re under no obligation to let it.
Joshi, did they ever try lowering the dose? Robot/zombie syndrome is a classic ADHD stimulant overdose symptom, so the Internet tells me. The fact that it zombified you rather than stimulated you indicates that stimulants are potentially helpful in the right dose and formulation. It had the opposite effect on me: the higher the dose, the more wired I got. By the time my Dr. and I stopped the trial, I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I also experienced irritability andTourett’s-like motor and vocal tics.
On the other hand, meds helped me a lot. I had always had trouble dealing with homework in a timely fashion since high school. Math was especially bad, since I couldn’t pay attention in class and finishing homework took me literal hours, but I did well overall as a student, pulling A’s in classes I had a greater interest in, and thanks to teachers with VERY flexible deadlines, maintaining C’s in the rest.
When I got to college, I dealt with exactly the kinds of problems Walky is experiencing. But it wasn’t until my eyes regularly kept rolling up into the back of my head involuntarily during an admittedly less than stimulating class that I nonetheless found intensely interesting and wanted to focus on out of interest, that I finally admitted to myself that there might be something more at play than a simple lack of self-discipline.
I contacted a professional, got diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, and was prescribed medication. I have been fortunate in that my experience with medication has so far been an entirely positive one, barring the price when transitioning between insurance situations, which is ridiculous even for generic prescriptions.
Long story, short: medication does help some people.
I will also be in the “meds seriously helped me”. I was diagnosed without my knowledge at a young age, and because my father didn’t believe in meds, he kept moving me to different therapists who taught me every coping strategy and organizational technique under the sun until finally saying to my parents “I really think medication would help here”. When I finally as an adult went to try to figure out why I couldn’t adult even a little, I was diagnosed with ADD so severe my doctor expressed admiration I graduated high school, let alone college. Both of which I barely managed by putting in 4 times the work everyone else did and also having a very high iq. College the second time around with medication was a life changer. Even now I’m barely able to function as an independent adult with a home and job, and that’s only because of medication.
I get helped a lot with meds but also I find at least with Ritalin it comes at a cost of creative thinking. My ADHD lack of brain filter is a strength when I am working on problems which need out of the box thinking. I need to not have the inhibition against blurting out stupid ideas and on Ritalin the inhibition is there and it reduces my effectiveness.
Also Ritalin makes me feel like my head is buzzing and that gets super annoying after a while (I wanted to switch to something else but the doctor didn’t want to switch me so I quit it). It’s like a vibration sensation that I know doesn’t exist. Imagine having a set of barber clippers vibrating against your skull all the time. IDK what the name for that would be but holy hell was it annoying.
So now I am trying to manage without meds which is easier said than done. :/ Eventually when I get a family doctor I will see if trying something else is an option. Maybe concerta? My sib has good results with that one
Mild ADD here. What used to really set me off was when people tried to help with infantilizing techniques like blocking most of a page off with paper to “take one problem at a time” (in eighth grade), or slowly repeating themselves as though that’s somehow explaining it differently. I didn’t find any of that helpful, it was just condescending and made me feel fucking stupid, compounding the frustration and anxiety I already felt by not ‘getting it’ in the first place. “Explain it differently” doesn’t mean “explain it like I’m five”.
Meds just made me feel like a zombie. This was years ago and I don’t remember what it was, but I was a space cadet on that stuff. It was like my brain was running in slow motion at half its clock speed. “Stick it out, you have to get used to it”, yeah no. I stopped taking it, and suddenly I could finish more than half my assignments before class finished again. (Drug your kid because he can’t concentrate, then punish him for beligerence in school because he’s suddenly not doing anything. Good job, teachers.)
Meds let me hold down a full time job and have a hope of going to grad school.
For me until I got proper treatment I internalized a lot of stuff to do with ADHD. I thought I was just lazy or a failure and that all of the issues were because I wasn’t as good as the other people. I was in a similar space to Walky and it took me years after my diagnoses to properly maintain a medication regime and admit that yeah I had ADHD (I was embarrassed for years at the idea of a disability).
Medication without a doubt have let me get as far as I have.
But it was people saying how awful they were that prevented me from actually taking them for years. I am still angry over the fact that I had wasted that much time and caused myself grief for not using the medication.
My main point here is that neither Amber nor Dorothy are equipped to help Walky with this. And I doubt Amber’s gonna point him towards psychological help. If Amber starts trying to help him study he’s gonna get a complex about his girlfriends/romantic interests/uuuh whatever Amber is, always trying to ‘fix’ his study habits and him feeling like a burden for it.
As someone with ADHD, I don’t think I can overstate how massively insulted I would be to learn that my partner was staying with me because they thought it was their duty to “handle” me despite how “challenging” I was. Please rethink your attitude towards me, your poor brother, and people like us.
Furthermore, most ADHD people end up with boatloads of trauma caused by NTs trying to literally smack sense into us because our brains don’t work like normal brains.
Your common sense doesn’t work for us. Sometimes it’s actively counter-productive for us.
(If I had a dollar for every bit of NT advice I have since been told by professionals is a bad idea for ADHD brains, I would have no debt)
Like I said to LauraS, don’t go assuming anything about my brother when you only have a paragraph to go on. Don’t act like my common sense is the same as neurotypical when I’ve got both ADD and Aspergers.
My brother I have to remind myself is a person a lot of times, not because of me seeing him as a virtue badge, but because he acts like a damn monster more often than not. I’m a 21 year old man and I am sometimes AFRAID of my 13 year old brother with how he acts, and his treatment of me gives me PTSD to the bullying I suffered in school.
I was trying to be sympathetic to what Walky and Amber are going through and saying I was proud of Amber, since not everyone can so easily say they’ll deal with their own problems while staying with someone else with problems.
But it seems I can’t even say that without triggering someone.
Okay, first off, I never said anything about a partner staying only because of a sense of duty. I was saying I felt it was a respectable thing that Amber would stay with Walky in spite of his issues when she has her own metric fuckton of issues. It comes across as her truly loving him, since she’d be accepting him for all the good and the bad.
Second, don’t assume anything about my brother from just a tiny excerpt. I only glossed over what he is and he isn’t but poor. You know that stereotype in media where the older brother is always picking on the younger brother? It’s inverted in my family. My little brother is 13 and I’m 21. He has ADHD and is a complete Narcissist. I have ADD and Asperger’s Syndrome. And he proceeds to act like a complete prick to me, treating me like the bullies I had in school did. Belittling me, hitting me, and acting like he’s my superior in every way. He’s even called me shit to my face before. The kid is nuts.
I try to be sympathetic but its kinda hard to be to the kid who repeatedly mocks you and hit me in the balls so much its a wonder I’m not sterile. So don’t you dare go assuming my brother is the poor one in the family when he treats not just me, but my mother, my grandmother, and anyone he isn’t trying to manipulate like crap.
Speaking as a person with ADHD, wanting to study isn’t the problem.
Attention regulation is.
And the reason attention regulation is the problem is our brains suffer a number of biochemical deficits: 1, we don’t feel as rewarded through routine stimuli. So you know how you can do a load of dishes and feel pleased that you got it done? I do a load of dishes, hate it the whole time, and don’t feel any satisfaction at the end. This lack of satisfaction when you complete something makes it really hard to keep up with stuff that isn’t inherently rewarding (see also why people with depression also tend to let chores etc slide).
2. Our brains aren’t as aroused by routine stimuli. In my case since I am presently unmedicated: I feel almost groggy unless I am in hyperfocus (more on that later) or very stimulating environment. Problem with very stimulating environment is #3. Imagine feeling exhausted and brain fog unless you’re doing something interesting. That’s just scratching the surface.
3. ADHD brains have deficits in executive function (EF). What is EF you ask? EF is a catch-all for the brain functions related to prioritization, attention regulation, and cognitive control of behavior. Meaning, in other words even if you can willpower past having no satisfaction in a job well done and feeling terrible the whole time you do it, our brains can’t prioritize well and filter out impulse. Everyone knows the Wikipedia or TVTropes holes, right? Imagine the TV Tropes hole is your *life*. While studying you feel hungry so you go to grab food and you notice your dishes are dirty so you start carrying them out to the kitchen to wash but on the way you see your roommate who asks what you want for supper and you realize we’re out of milk on the way to the grocery store…. That’s what ADHD is like if you have significant impulsive features. At no point did you decide not to study… You just got sidetracked. A lot.
4. Because of difficulty in attention regulation it’s a common misunderstanding that ADHD people can’t focus at all (think the squirrel stereotype) and that’s actually untrue. We can focus exceptionally well on activities we find inherently rewarding- in other words, fun stuff. The reason why goes back to brain understimulation. Fun stuff stimulates our brains more than not fun stuff – since fun activities are the only time unmedicated people with ADHD even feel normal let alone good (remember, unmedicated people with ADHD usually feel a mix of tired and brain fog unless we’re bored and bored is unbearable – more on that later), we obviously want to do fun stuff way more. This is why people with ADHD are over-represented in addictions – our brains are chemically wired to be vulnerable to that feedback loop. However even if we don’t get addicted to the only things that let us feel not bad, executive function bites us here: our brains when stimulated can’t multitask. We can’t monitor our thirst or hunger or be aware of what’s going on around us. This state is called hyperfocus and as an ADHDer I both love and hate it.
I love it because it feels amazing and I am super productive in it. I hate it because it’s not healthy to work on anything for 36 hours straight without breaks for water or food or sleep or etc. Which is what I will do if uninterrupted.
4, Boredom intolerance. This is a combination of chronic brain underarousal and executive dysfunction, but ADHD people can’t handle boredom without assistance. We just can’t. Boredom is much worse for an ADHD brain than an NT brain. You know how ADHD brains are constantly understimulated and feeling tired or groggy just in normal activities? Now take away even the little bit of stimulation we can get. I can’t really explain to an NT what boredom feels like but let me say this in all seriousness: I would rather experience physical agony than boredom. Boredom is a worse experience for me than dislocating a joint. To a lot of people with ADHD, me included, it isn’t hyperbole to say that boredom is agony. You can’t willpower yourself past agony. Believe me, I have tried.
There’s a whole bunch of ways all of these interact with each other to produce other symptoms (like how executive dysfunction and understimulation can make it hard to make decisions or get stuff started despite the stereotype of the impulsive ADHDer or how those plus the fact that ADHD kids get scolded by adults at a rate about 10x the non ADHD kids leads to rejection sensitive dysphoria and people pleasing) but this is long enough.
TL;dr: ADHD is a real brain disorder. There’s actually more evidence of the physical basis of ADHD than there is for almost any other brain disorder. It’s not a character flaw and not something people can willpower past.
And Walky looks a lot like a twice exceptional ADHDer: gifted so he was able to compensate until he wasn’t at which point he crashes and burns.
It’s amazing how sometimes, people here will make a really long, descriptive post with a ton of information, and it’s basically like looking into an ASCII mirror.
(Diagnosed with either ADHD or ADD, but every time I tried to get clarification, it was met with hostility, so I stopped trying.)
It’s not necessarily too late. I didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD (type 1) until I 34. The “lost” time can be gained back, but it’s made a lot of things easier moving forward since I started taking adderall
My mom just got the diagnosis of ADHD a few months ago. She almost at retirement but having the knowledge and a plan for treatment has made her look forward to that part of her life more now.
Thank you so much! I have a slightly modified dopamine reception due to a GABA malfunction which is common in my area and get some points you describe very well. But more from the depression/maniac viewpoint. Other points I don’t know from myself at all but from two working from my husband. Especially the hyperconcentration, extremely good skills with interesting work and no tolerance for boredom. The last one frustrates my husband quite a bit in meetings. Is there any way to tell a person, that you think they have such a condition? We thought so for a while now, since I was tested before, but your post sort of nailed our suspicion down.
That you think they have the thing? I would wait till they’re complaining about an ADHD symptom and then drop it in offhand, “Hey yeah my ADHD gets me like that” or “Someone I know has ADHD and you remind me of them.”
That you think you have the thing? Depends if friend or medical pro. If friend, probably just come out and say it. If pro, list the symptoms you’re dealing with and if anyone you know has mentioned it to you say , “My X thinks it might be ADHD?” but otherwise don’t mention ADHD directly because if you say you think you have it they’re probably going to write you off as drug-seeking.
Yeeeeah not getting diagnosed with ADHD, especially when you are smart can be a real cluster fork especially in college. I found coping mechanism in college, but it wasn’t until I was an adult and got on meds and got an official diagnosis (and thank you How to ADHD on youtube) that I was able to regulate better, but it’s still a cluster fork.
Once upon a time, Mini!BBCC liked drawing on herself with pen and/or sharpie and/or markers and it was always a pain to scrub off, even if it was washable.
Eh. Walky’s been failing upward through life as it is. A little ADHD not gonna stop him. Even if he just decides to give up he’ll probably end up owning few Mcdonalds or something bare minimum.
I also wouldn’t put it past him getting big in the Youtube game as one of those guys that tastes fast food inside their car. Probably his dream job honestly.
It’s only been about a week since they broke up, right? I think Dorothy dumped Danny at the end of move-in day, there were a few weeks between then and Hell on EarthFamily Weekend.
I have the feeling that this version of Mike isn’t an asshole for assholery’s sake – he indulges in asshole behavior sometimes, but he actually gives half a damn about people at the same time.
That’s why he follows up a crude gag about Amber’s boobs with a trenchant observation about the help Walky really needs.
This is actually unusual behavior for Mike – he’s making a crude and potentially-upsetting remark, yeah, but he’s actually offering possibly-helpful advice with his second bit as well. Usually he just sticks to the first one; see, for example, the time when he concocted an elaborately-faked series of webpages claiming Dexter and Monkey Master was cancelled, cut off Walky’s access to the Internet otherwise, showed him the pages, and then recorded him crying in his sleep over the show’s “cancellation”…just so he could then show that recording to Walky’s social circle and claim he had been crying in his sleep over a different subject.
He is not. We have seen him be cruel to her multiple times. This is actually weird because he is actively helping but she is too distracted by her desire to help Walky to realise Mike is being weird.
Mike said recently that he’s turning over a new leaf. He’s been acting differently since that thing with Ethan. Still rude but has so far managed to avoid seriously hurting anyone’s feelings.
Like I have a load of funny stories that would be most people’s drunk party stories but in my case is just what happens when a 17YO with ADHD goes away to uni.
I am so glad I didn’t start drinking till my mid 20s. Alcohol plus immature kid Me’s impulsivity and lack of danger sense would have been a dangerous combination.
I have been thinking this same thing for months, good lord. The strip ages ago where Walky is staring at his textbook in bed in different positions without retaining anything? Hi! It me!
It would be nice if there was less emphasis on textbook memorisation as the One True Way of gaining knowledge. Not all of us can retain information with the same ease with the same methods, and we shouldn’t have to forcibly contort our brains to get worse results.
Oh sweet gods, if I could convince my girlfriend to write me messages on her body I’d study any subject. Not sure how much I would actually learn though.
I’ve long thought that tackling a really big crazy novel would actually be a cool date idea (Has anyone here tried to read a Culture novel? Those things are opaque), but I think I’m quickly discovering a new fetish.
Okay, now let’s do Mike [Accidentally] Performs A Feel (about Ethan, cuz he was acting reeeeal weird after they slept together and I can provide links if needed!!!)
Call him on it, Amber! …if you’ve actually noticed him acting weird, which seems unlikely… Because Mike’s the only person in this cast who actually pays much attention to what’s going on with other people. Damn.
He also told Amber she was growing up to be her (monstrous abusive) father, so until Mike stops jerking people around entirely he can fuck off into a fire.
I’m not saying he’s a good person, just that I enjoy him as a character, even when he pisses me off sometimes. Also, the fact that he keeps saying he is “turning over a new leaf” and trying to actually be helpful while being, at least, slightly less of an asshole… well, it certainly isn’t enough to redeem him as a person, but it gives me hope that it’s possible for him to get to a place where that’s something he considers even approaching. Mike is, by his OWN admission, “an irredeemable one-dimensional troll of a non-person” [book 7/ch 3/Needs], but he seems to be reining it in just a smidgen at the moment, and has indicated that it’s intentional and he intends to continue, so I’m inclined to at least see where that’s going.
Again, I’m not saying he’s a good person or condoning any of his actions, but I do enjoy his wit and he makes an excellent designated asshole while also driving the plot forward. He also appears to be the only character who is not so self-engrossed that they rarely notice people/things outside of their own tiny spheres of personal influence. I greatly appreciate his observance and intelligence as character attributes, as they often give situational and/or character insights that no other characters are either able to notice, or willing to voice. While he is definitely an asshole, I also have a small level of appreciation for his honesty (in those instances).
In any case, no, he’s not really morally defensible as a human being at this point. But I hope Willis plans to take the opportunity to actually allow Mike some character development sometime soon, because I really rather enjoy the “disillusioned asshole grows a feels gland and slowly/painfully attempts to become a slightly better person” trope, and Mike is absolutely a star candidate.
Also, I don’t know if it makes a difference to you or not (probably not, I suspect) but Amber totally called him out on how that was over the line (Book 10/ch 1/Charming), and he explicitly acknowledged it was pretty mean, and basically implied he was intentionally not moving out of punching distance because he knew he deserved it if she chose to hit him… all, of course, without actually ever actually taking responsibility or apologizing, naturally. Because it’s Mike, and that kind of sudden change would probably be incredibly suspicious, and leave Amber questioning him on end (just like Ethan did when Mike offered to make out with him) because it’s Mike and he always has an ulterior motive. Honestly, that was probably the closest he could actually get to sincere while still having Amber actually accept it as genuine, given her knowledge of him as a person.
…One more time, just to be clear. I AM NOT SAYING MIKE’S WORDS WERE OKAY. He is a fictional character, and I enjoy him. That is all.
Okay also I’m shipping him and Ethan like no other, and hoping that was the turning point where he accidentally unlocked his Feels Gland and shit it escaped before he could chain that motherfucker back up in the dark where it belongs, which will be the catalyst for at least some small form of character growth on his part, whether he ends up with Ethan or not….
…but I recognize that this is more of a personal failing on my part than a defensible moral standpoint. ;P
Amazigirl: Ahh, another night of trouncing evildoers. Oh dear, I seem to be covered in sweat and the blood of miscreants. Time for an Amazi-shower. I’ll just disrobe my Amazi-bosoms and DAMMIT AMBER!!
Wrong, Mike. Walky learns with fast food. Make the problems be related to chicken nuggets and hamburgers and he will be working as a manager of a McDonald’s, or a Wendy’s if he is lucky.
Also, Walky isn’t the only horny one. Amber obviously still has the hots for him, and considering she has such a questionable taste in men that she would bang a sociopath like Mike (and has done in an alternate reality), she needs a little help from Walky Jr. (a reference to Jacob Jr.). I mean, Amber, Joyce, all the women…. and all the men need to take a break to think clear before Willis makes us experience 10 more years of theis “dumbing”… of age.
Wow, real bright future you’ve dreamed up. He gets to be the least valuable person in the building, at the worst fast food company. He’s a flake in college, so his future is utterly hopeless. Because the very first semester of college matters that much and holds that much weight against your entire life.
We are talking about Walky, not a regular college student from first semester. Of course failing the first semester isn’t the end of the world, and I know what is to fail in a semester.
Walky has stated his life goals include having a firefighter pole in his room, and he spent more time making a super hero costume instead of studying, and he is aware of that. Him getting a job at a crappy restaurant franchise is a best case scenario and not the end of his life. He could still afford that firefighter pole and all his childhood fantasies with minimum wage and not worry about the high expectations of Linda and his exes.
I guess first semester is also the cutoff point for personal growth, self-improvement, and changing your life goals. Whatever you’ve got in mind by your first college Christmas is legally binding and can’t be altered. At least, that’s how you’re making it seem. You’re talking like there’s no possible outcome other than “slightly better-paid wage slave”, just because he’s wasted some time within a 2-month period.
Look, I work fast food. I’ve gone through a few different companies, and so far? I’ve encountered maybe four good managers. The rest have had god complexes that put cult leaders to shame and the mental capacity of a broken Furby. Managers are the only ones I’m looking down on, personally.
I’ve worked food, retail, call centers, groceries, corporate lite – you encounter that everywhere. Good bosses are rare no matter where you work. And even still, if you’re just looking down on managers, you still shouldn’t be looking down on people, especially by what job they work at. People should not be defined by their jobs/careers.
People aren’t and shouldn’t be defined by their profession, I agree. I’m doing the opposite. I’m defining a profession by the people I’ve met who hold that profession. So far, that definition is full of god-awful juvenile behavior, a holier-than-thou attitude, and a complete lack of basic problem-solving skills. It’s not a position I respect in any capacity, and I haven’t been given a personal reason to.
Again, I am talking about Walky, not regular people. The guy whos fear of responsibility caused many problems in other universe. His attention problems, his self defeating behavior and his manchild tendencies are his problems to overcome, and he will need help from a professional or get his shit sorted by himself to avoid depending on a his mom or a girlfriend to fix him.
And yes, fast food restaurants’ jobs are horrible, but unless Walky gets it together he will be doomed to be like Scott Pilgrim before his epiphany.
I recall back when Heinlein characters would talk about boobs in mathematical terms. (Of course, one of them was Andy Libby, who was likely on the spectrum somewhere.)
(Who was also trans, sorta, but that’s irrelevant here.)
Saaaame. My parents got me diagnosed when I was 12; they had suspected since well before then but wanted to be sure first. Can’t say I blame them, but it’d have been nice to know before.
I was diagnosed in my late twenties. Still working through the issues of being called “lazy” whenever I wasn’t doing enough- or well enough- because of how intelligent everyone said I was too.
Fuck the lot of them though, now I work with dogs which is basically ideal? Physical activity, change of scenery all the time, even when it’s the same thing it’s not exactly the same thing, can listen to music at the same time. Just struggle with the business side.
I see your “You’re so smart, just apply yourself” and I’ll raise you one “Since you’re so smart you can do anything if you apply yourself, we’re gonna stop teaching you. From now on, you’re your own teacher, but also we won’t let you have material above this arbitrarily low level. And if you try to learn more or take interest in anything we haven’t assigned you, you’re getting in-school suspension. …Why aren’t you learning anything yet, asshole?”
“you’re so smart you could do anything! But you won’t because you don’t apply yourself.” Amirite?
Also: am the rare unicorn of gifted kid who retains high IQ in adulthood and uuuuugh career coaches who are all “You could do any job in the company!” Are the actual worst.
No, I can’t. Because if it involves every day being the same, I will get bored within 3 months. And once I am bored, I fail. See also the neverending series of part time jobs I started out as a star trainee and eventually quit two months in before they could fire me during uni.
Ok sorry will quit now (impulse control is apparently not a thing today!) But also if I could pick one thing to wave a magic wand and get NTs to understand about ADHD, it’d probably be exactly how awful boredom is for us.
Ugh, yeah, mine runs a little longer but I do have a bad habit of hemorrhaging skill at work after a year or so, uuuugh. Luckily with restaurants we switch up the menu so that staves it off but damn
ADHDer but by sheer dumb luck I am gifted and also Autistic and also genuinely interested in most academic subjects so it didn’t get spotted until my MSc when I smashed hard into the wall of bad at intrinsic motivation and then careened off that into the wall of “what is time?”
My ADHD weirdness was chalked up to Gifted Kids Are Weird and Autism.
Funny thing is one of my sibs got diagnosed at 14 with it when I was 15 and at the time I was like “if my sib has it I have it” but my folks brushed that off because although I was a behavioral train wreck I was getting really, really good grades (as in I graduated 2nd in my class in HS).
Oh yeah, Asperger’s was the hip new diagnosis at the time so they tried that first. Didn’t help that a lot of the symptoms lined up. I was a “gifted” kid too actually; I was one of the top kids in my class and I could read really early, I just couldn’t sit still and do homework unless it was a subject I liked.
Oh god. You get him diagnosed with something and I bet his Mom is going to be livid. She sounds like exactly the sort of person who would slap someone for insisting that her perfect little baby might be “broken”. In fact if he actually has ADHD, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s already done exactly that to some poor teacher in his past who brought it up.
I would not be surprised if Walky’s ADHD hasn’t gone unnoticed, but Linda squelched any chance of treating it because she prefers to maintain appearances, or because she flat-out denied her boy could have a disorder.
Kids of color do tend to be under diagnosed, with their symptoms misattributed to willful misbehavior, but Walky was considered gifted so I don’t think that played a large role in his particular case.
This is how my father responded to a teacher insisting I had ‘some sort’ of learning disability in first grade. She was right. I have dyscalculia and didn’t figure it out until my senior year of high school after years of failing math.
Of course dyscalculia hasn’t really come to light until recently so idk how much real help I would’ve gotten at the time, but it would’ve been better than being punished for ‘not trying hard enough’ at math.
I’m surprised Walky got this far in life. If he were a jock I’d believe it since they get plenty of passes as long as they bring in the spectators, but what’s special about Walky?
His parents have money and connections. And until this point, he was a “gifted” kid who didn’t have to study to get good grades. I figure he was also a big fish in a small pond.
Someone I know managed to not be able to read until the end of third grade, because she remembered the texts she heard.
If you remember stuff easily, no one notices what you do not do.
His hometown’s larger than his university town. Dunno how much big fish/small pond is true. We do know he went to public schools, so depending on the quality and class sizes in Evansville…maybe?
Then it may very well be the case. I don’t know anything about Evansville’s education system. If it’s crappy, Walky might very well have a case of big fish/small pond going on.
Public schools vary. I’d rate my education experience as being greater than average and was prepared for college once I started. They didn’t just promote kids to the next grade just to be rid of them or to keep up statistics since there was one kid who was with me in kindergarten, but still in 10th when I graduated. Of course that was 20 years ago so standards may have changed.
Of course they do, but without knowing the specific school he went to (or, equally possibly, the reputation of the fictional school he went to) I can’t comment how big a pond it would have been.
They don’t seem to be that connected. I can totally believe Billie got through school coasting on her parents’ money and popularity until her DUI, but aside from having enough money to send Sal to a boarding school after her run in with the law I don’t think the Walkertons could rig things for their son for so long and even if they did they’d be delusional to think this wouldn’t catch up with him in college.
Wait a minute. Amber can’t just ask Walky to take an Adhd exam without start to find help with her schizophrenia. It would be hypocritical. I think this is what scare her.
Pretty sure Amber doesn’t have schizophrenia, she has DID (or at least symptoms strongly resembling DID, since she hasn’t been “officially” diagnosed with anything). They’re two very different things.
Sorry I didn’t want to be ironic. But in Europe the DID is considered a disorder under the schizophrenia umbrella. Sometimes I forget that in America some things have different interpretation.
I can’t find any indication that that is in fact true, and it’d be a bit bizarre if it was, given that medical classifications are usually fairly standardized across western cultures. It’s even more bizarre given that DID shares absolutely none of the treatment methods, symptoms, fundamental nature, or genetic basis of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are on a shared spectrum of mental illnesses, sharing many symptoms and nearly identical treatments. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is also considered related and can occasionally overlap in treatments, as well.
While there’s a long-standing public confusion between DID and schizophrenia, both in the US and in the EU [and this seems more likely to be where your own confusion stems from, rather than from any official EU stance on the matter], they share absolutely nothing in common.
Historically, those with DID were instead diagnosed with schizophrenia (with the split personalities being considered a schizophrenic delusion), and therein lies the root of the lingering misconception of there being any shared nature between the two. There was never any actual medical basis for association between the two spectrums.
Multiple Personality Disorder* and Schizophrenia share a surface similarity in, to some degree, “hearing voices” and that’s where the association first arose. DID integrates Disassociative Amnesia, which in the case of DID means an inability to recall actions taken by secondary personalities.
While there may be a genetic component making one more susceptible to developing DID, DID is associated directly with traumatic triggers, while schizophrenia/bipolar/NPD/etc are associated firmly with genetic predisposition and lack any meaningful relation to external catalysts.
While treatment for DID is a bit unclear, DID is fundamentally treated similar to PTSD, sharing much the same perspectives and treatments. Of course, inherently, DID is a disassociative disorder, where PTSD is an anxiety disorder (though both disassociative and anxiety disorders do tend to share the same orgination point of traumatic stresses). The previously mentioned Disassociative Amnesia (where one has memory lapses or scattered memories, either with firm memory gaps between different personalities or with scattered symptoms somewhat similar to dementia), along with Depersonalization Disorder (wherein one feels disconnected from one’s body), fall under the same Disassociative Disorder umbrella.
Anxiety disorders, such as PTSD, are rather similar in premise (and are considered to be closely related to disassociative disorders), though such disorders (self-apparently) manifest with anxiety/stress/focus related issues, while disassociative disorders manifes with memory/self-awareness/self-realization disorders. Disassociative amnesia may however go along with an anxiety disorder (and is, by my understanding, actually fairly common among PTSD sufferers), and anxiety issues may go along with a disassociative disorder. Hence, when medication is deemed to be suitable, the two categories can be rather similar in what medications are recommended.
Again, treatment for such disorders is fairly similar, primarily involving therapy, anxiety reduction, and mood regulation. Medication is primarily based in anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication. Anti-psychotics can potentially be used in rare circumstances, for the sake of regulating certain factors, but they’re generally discouraged for both categories due to their potential for making things worse and the fact that they cannot directly treat core symptoms.
Conversely, psychotic disorders [which primarily is a spectrum between bipolar and schizophrenia, with schizoaffective disorder being the Reese’s Peanut Butter cup between the two] are considered mental illnesses and are treated primarily via anti-psychotics, with many of the same medications being favored as go-to-es regardless of where one falls on the spectrum.
Let me reiterate: There is absolutely nothing shared between psychotic disorders and disassociative disorders / anxiety disorders. That’s a comparison between two different spectrums with a completely different range of circumstances from one another.
Even if Europe did in fact make such an association, it would simply be flat out wrong, as there’s absolutely no basis whatsoever in any way for such an association and, further, it would be inherently misleading and harmful to make such an association.
*Note that Multiple Personality Disorder and Split Personality Disorder are simply the preceding terms for Disassociative Personality Disorder. However, DID has a strict requirement of the personalities not sharing certain information with one another, which leaves a potential undefined area wherein someone may have multiple “voices” within their head at once but not actually be schizophrenic. A fragmented ego along with traumatic brain injury could, for example, form such a circumstance. That said, there no longer appears to be an official classification which would cover such a circumstance, and thereby the otherwise outdated term of “Multiple Personality Disorder” continues to be unofficially associated with that specific circumstance.
Amber is a lot closer to a dissociative identity disorder (DID) than schizophrenia. DID can develop as a mind’s way to cope with trauma. But, no matter how knitpicky I get about the psychiatric diagnosis, I think you’re right about Amber feeling hypocritical if she decides Walky needs treatment for a problem and she doesn’t. I wonder if this little arc might lead to some personal growth for Amber in addressing Amazi-Girl and how the persona is unhealthy?
“Don’t be ridiculous. Walky’s problem is simple and easily treated while mine are deep and complicated and beyond help. Plus he deserves it, while I’m just a monster.”
And there’s enough truth in there to give it some credibility. As I understand it, DID is much harder to treat or even find a therapist willing and able to try.
This is my hope too. Amber need to face her relationship with Amazi-girl, and if she will find the strength to do it for help Walky with his difficulty she will be really heroic.
God this strip and arc remind me too much of myself. And getting through high school with out studying and with undiagnosed adhd. It hit me pretty hard in grad school especially when everyone around me was just as smart. But could study. And I finally forced myself to accept that there was something wrong and needed to get medication.
I don’t think he needs to be all that familiar with her to recognise that she’s on the chesty side. He’s also completely tactless, so that’s not much of an obstacle.
In honor of Walky and ADHD Awareness month, here are some ADHD sites, podcasts, and books I like:
understood.org, add.com, totallyadd.com, additudemag.com,How to ADHD (on YouTube)
Taking Control: the ADHD Podcast, Distraction, ADHD Rewired, Attention Talk Radio.
Books by Edward Hallowell, Thomas E. Brown, Susan Pinsky, and Russell Barkley. I’m interested in Sari Solden, but haven’t read any of her books yet.
Shout out to the people with ADHD who posted. You made me feel a little less like an outcast, and a little more like a member of a community.
There’s an ADHD awareness month??! Wtf, thank you so much for telling us, I will make sure to tell all of my fellow neuroatypical friends <3
…Also super glad I was finally able to refer that student of mine for observation cuz I think he's got it too. Perfect timing, self. (He's like actually a baby Walky. Same hair and everything. This definitely checks out.)
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or, ya know, https://www.target.com/p/bodymark-by-bic-8pk-collection-tattoo-marker/-/A-54081956
As Tamara from Friday the 13th VIII clearly showed, that works better for biology lessons.
I’m sure Jason found it very informative. Now he knows exactly what he’s stabbing at!
According to Groucho Marx, body art is also good for teaching both geography and history.
Lydia!
That tattoo is not at all anatomically correct. The heart is in completely the wrong place and doesn’t have the right shape, furthermore most of the organs are missing. If that was her actual anatomy she’d die on the spot.
On a side note, tattoos may not be necessary for teaching math. http://wapsisquare.com/comic/yay-for-nadette/
Permanent Sharpie? Amber, he’s gonna get new material every week.
Well, Sharpie will still come off after a couple washes. She should probably go with washable makers, though.
The marker may be permanent, but your skin isn’t.
IKR?
Just shed it
Please don’t use sharpie on your skin. Depending on your body chemistry you can end up with chemical burns doing that. Use tattoo pens or something else designed for your skin. */end MUA rant*
Not at all sure I’d trust tattoo pens either.
David, why do you have such disdain for Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang?
I didn’t read the comments yesterday and now I’m scared.
But if this is from something on Twitter, maybe discuss it there?
to be clear this is the same guy who kept randomly posting comments about Yang last month who’s now including Gabbard because David made an offhand joke yesterday
https://twitter.com/damnyouwillis/status/1178511825467531264
I knew that post sounded familiar.
Familiar and boring and annoying.
In short, “Jim”, you’re clearly managing to put everyone here off the people you are supposedly trying to promote. Or as Willis put it:
why does anybody think this is an effective way to proselytize
I had zero feelings about [Yang] until folks got up in my fries and now I’m counting down the hours until he drops out, just out of spite
Don’t try to argue you’re not being annoying, by the way. We see through that bullshit, and through your attempts of sealioning.
Instead, realizing that the only thing you are managing to do is to antagonizing yourself and your supposed idols, you now have two choices:
1: Continue the same path as you are doing now; contributing nothing positive whatsoever. The only reason you’d be doing this is because you’re not actually trying to promote Yang and Gabbard. No, what you’re hoping to achieve here -is- the negative reaction. That way, you can then go “home” to your flock on whatever 4chan forum you gather in, and talk to them about everyone’s being mean to you; and they will tell their stories, and together you will bond and feel safer together and knowing you are the righteous ones.
This is a common strategy by many religious cults, by the way. To make their members meet hostility outside their own arena; in order to reinforce how much better life is inside it. They do it specifically to ensure that nobody’s going to leave them.
2: You can try and figure out how to promote Tulsi and Yang without being annoying. Admittedly, that’s a pretty tall order; especially with the way Tulsi managed to disgrace herself so much recently (again, don’t bother denying this. It won’t do you any good.). But I’m sure it might be possible. And if you actually want to promote Yang and Gabbard; that’s your only real option.
I mean, I’m sure you can also 3: Just leave this comment field the hell alone forever; but I’m pretty sure the only way you’ll do that is by getting yourself banned (which you’ll use as evidence of Willis being mean, of course)
Oh, and by the way, Lux: In case it’s not entirely clear, every “you” is directed at Jim in my post.
Re: the tweet thread Lux had posted of Willis’ which you are on within the last hour. Good point on how sarcasm is willfully ignored by some people with an axe to grind.
I am more proud at how I managed to turn Willis’ bragging about still having it into another butts disease mention.
Heehee. Well done.
No worries, I figured 🙂
I’m assuming that “Jim” a Russian trollbot run out of Macedonia.
Oh, please. It’s clearly run out of Maldova.
Maybe he’s slipped in and is run from Michigan
Minnesota, perhaps?
Gabbard is angling to be independent by parroting republican talking points. Yang is capitalist garbage.
Dude, if you want to push for your preferred candidates there are much better ways to go about it. You could try making actual arguments with reasons why you think they’re better for one thing. And maybe try posting about them in a political discussion forum instead of the comments section of a webcomic.
She’s a DINO. If there was an actual Republican primary this year, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her change parties.
Nah, she’d get even less traction in the Republican primary. She only works as an outlet for frustration on the Democratic side. She’s not in position to be an establishment Republican and she’s not nearly extreme enough to pick up the extreme votes on the right.
Hopefully, she’ll do the right thing and concede as the primary race tightens – like the other candidates will. Or she’ll prove that her nay-sayers were right by running a third-party spoiler campaign on a platform of “Democrats were mean to me”, with a backing mostly of Russian troll farms.
Russian troll farms confirmed:
https://twitter.com/cbouzy/status/1185332311983869952?
Yeah, I had no idea eight years ago we’d need a full-time site separating trollbot supporters from real people, but here we are.
So she’s basically this season’s Jill Stein, except more Libertarian than Green? Sounds about right.
I don’t hate the concept of third party, but when a gun is being held to someone’s head, use the tried-and-true disarming, don’t cross your fingers and hope the gun misfires.
More parties would be great, problem is our most-votes-wins “first past the post” elections encourage a two-party system at best, or make it a necessity at worst. A third party would have to unite the center against the fringes, which also goes against decades of two-party marketing. As it stands, third parties just siphon votes away from whichever of the big two they agree with more, leaving the other a bigger overall slice of the pie. We’d have to go to some kind of ranked-choice system nationwide to eliminate this problem, but guess whose decision it would be to get that ball rolling…
CGPGrey has some old videos that I think illustrate the problem pretty well.
In which Amber starts up where Dorothy ended. Honestly though neither of them really need to help him with this, he’s a big boy who needs to grow up and learn how to study. Dorothy and Amber cannot MAKE him wanna study, even with perky boobs.
Kinda different if he actually has ADHD and has gone this long undiagnosed. He’ll likely need medication to balance it out and also need someone to support him as he goes forward.
My little brother has ADHD and it makes learning for him difficult sometimes, even with the meds. Not helping matters is that he has anger issues and when people try to help him he ends up lashing out as if we’re pitying him, only for him to then struggle with the work and beg for help later.
ADHD is something that can’t just be handled on his own. Plus, this is Walky. He’s 18 but a lot of the time he acts like he’s 13 on a sugar rush. He needs someone to be able to slap him silly and support him while he adjusts to his new life.
Had his ADHD been known beforehand and Dorothy still left while Amber stayed, I’d have less respect for Dorothy and more for Amber. Being with someone with a mental disability like ADHD can be challenging, and while I wouldn’t fault Dorothy for being unable to handle him on her own, I would fault her if she could handle him and decided she didn’t want to deal with him just so she can advance her political career.
Amber however has a metric fuckton of her own issues to deal with, so for her to actually try and be supportive for Walky during all this with all her own issues, it would actually be worthy of respect. That she’d still do all this, helping out him while worrying about herself. Obviously not the most healthy thing to do since she DOES have a metric fuckton of issues, but still worthy of some respect nonetheless.
The reasons Dorothy left had nothing to do with his adhd. I think it’s a bad idea to stay with someone you don’t want to stay with just because they have some issues.
Then again, I have some issues on my own and I hate unnecessary special treatment because of that. I’m different enough as it is. People don’t need to make me even more different.
There’s also a lot of psychological stuff going on, on top of whatever learning disability Walky may or may not have.
Meds? Ugh. None of that helped my brother (despite all of the well-meaning attention), he just had to deal with it.
Meds do help lots of people, though, and shouldn’t be thrown out from the start.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of personal issues with ADHD medicines myself. I spent a lot of my childhood on ritalin, and all it ever managed to do was make me feel like I was a robot, a puppet for the chemicals piloting me.
But that doesn’t mean it does that to everyone. While I would 100% advocate for finding other ways to cope first, sometimes, for some people, medication is the best option. Sometimes even when it fucks up your head for 10 of the most important years of your life, the answer isn’t to swear off medicine forever, but to keep looking for one that works. It took me an additional 15 years to begin to accept that for myself.
But also, sometimes, fuck medication. If you don’t want that shit messing with your head you’re under no obligation to let it.
Joshi, did they ever try lowering the dose? Robot/zombie syndrome is a classic ADHD stimulant overdose symptom, so the Internet tells me. The fact that it zombified you rather than stimulated you indicates that stimulants are potentially helpful in the right dose and formulation. It had the opposite effect on me: the higher the dose, the more wired I got. By the time my Dr. and I stopped the trial, I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I also experienced irritability andTourett’s-like motor and vocal tics.
On the other hand, meds helped me a lot. I had always had trouble dealing with homework in a timely fashion since high school. Math was especially bad, since I couldn’t pay attention in class and finishing homework took me literal hours, but I did well overall as a student, pulling A’s in classes I had a greater interest in, and thanks to teachers with VERY flexible deadlines, maintaining C’s in the rest.
When I got to college, I dealt with exactly the kinds of problems Walky is experiencing. But it wasn’t until my eyes regularly kept rolling up into the back of my head involuntarily during an admittedly less than stimulating class that I nonetheless found intensely interesting and wanted to focus on out of interest, that I finally admitted to myself that there might be something more at play than a simple lack of self-discipline.
I contacted a professional, got diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, and was prescribed medication. I have been fortunate in that my experience with medication has so far been an entirely positive one, barring the price when transitioning between insurance situations, which is ridiculous even for generic prescriptions.
Long story, short: medication does help some people.
I will also be in the “meds seriously helped me”. I was diagnosed without my knowledge at a young age, and because my father didn’t believe in meds, he kept moving me to different therapists who taught me every coping strategy and organizational technique under the sun until finally saying to my parents “I really think medication would help here”. When I finally as an adult went to try to figure out why I couldn’t adult even a little, I was diagnosed with ADD so severe my doctor expressed admiration I graduated high school, let alone college. Both of which I barely managed by putting in 4 times the work everyone else did and also having a very high iq. College the second time around with medication was a life changer. Even now I’m barely able to function as an independent adult with a home and job, and that’s only because of medication.
I get helped a lot with meds but also I find at least with Ritalin it comes at a cost of creative thinking. My ADHD lack of brain filter is a strength when I am working on problems which need out of the box thinking. I need to not have the inhibition against blurting out stupid ideas and on Ritalin the inhibition is there and it reduces my effectiveness.
Also Ritalin makes me feel like my head is buzzing and that gets super annoying after a while (I wanted to switch to something else but the doctor didn’t want to switch me so I quit it). It’s like a vibration sensation that I know doesn’t exist. Imagine having a set of barber clippers vibrating against your skull all the time. IDK what the name for that would be but holy hell was it annoying.
So now I am trying to manage without meds which is easier said than done. :/ Eventually when I get a family doctor I will see if trying something else is an option. Maybe concerta? My sib has good results with that one
Mild ADD here. What used to really set me off was when people tried to help with infantilizing techniques like blocking most of a page off with paper to “take one problem at a time” (in eighth grade), or slowly repeating themselves as though that’s somehow explaining it differently. I didn’t find any of that helpful, it was just condescending and made me feel fucking stupid, compounding the frustration and anxiety I already felt by not ‘getting it’ in the first place. “Explain it differently” doesn’t mean “explain it like I’m five”.
Meds just made me feel like a zombie. This was years ago and I don’t remember what it was, but I was a space cadet on that stuff. It was like my brain was running in slow motion at half its clock speed. “Stick it out, you have to get used to it”, yeah no. I stopped taking it, and suddenly I could finish more than half my assignments before class finished again. (Drug your kid because he can’t concentrate, then punish him for beligerence in school because he’s suddenly not doing anything. Good job, teachers.)
Meds let me hold down a full time job and have a hope of going to grad school.
For me until I got proper treatment I internalized a lot of stuff to do with ADHD. I thought I was just lazy or a failure and that all of the issues were because I wasn’t as good as the other people. I was in a similar space to Walky and it took me years after my diagnoses to properly maintain a medication regime and admit that yeah I had ADHD (I was embarrassed for years at the idea of a disability).
Medication without a doubt have let me get as far as I have.
But it was people saying how awful they were that prevented me from actually taking them for years. I am still angry over the fact that I had wasted that much time and caused myself grief for not using the medication.
Sorry if I made it sound like meds are bad, because they absolutely aren’t.
The ones I tried just weren’t right for me, and the general misunderstanding of my situation at the time was unhelpful to put it kindly.
My main point here is that neither Amber nor Dorothy are equipped to help Walky with this. And I doubt Amber’s gonna point him towards psychological help. If Amber starts trying to help him study he’s gonna get a complex about his girlfriends/romantic interests/uuuh whatever Amber is, always trying to ‘fix’ his study habits and him feeling like a burden for it.
As someone with ADHD, I don’t think I can overstate how massively insulted I would be to learn that my partner was staying with me because they thought it was their duty to “handle” me despite how “challenging” I was. Please rethink your attitude towards me, your poor brother, and people like us.
Yes, this.
Your brother is a person, not a virtue badge.
Furthermore, most ADHD people end up with boatloads of trauma caused by NTs trying to literally smack sense into us because our brains don’t work like normal brains.
Your common sense doesn’t work for us. Sometimes it’s actively counter-productive for us.
(If I had a dollar for every bit of NT advice I have since been told by professionals is a bad idea for ADHD brains, I would have no debt)
Like I said to LauraS, don’t go assuming anything about my brother when you only have a paragraph to go on. Don’t act like my common sense is the same as neurotypical when I’ve got both ADD and Aspergers.
My brother I have to remind myself is a person a lot of times, not because of me seeing him as a virtue badge, but because he acts like a damn monster more often than not. I’m a 21 year old man and I am sometimes AFRAID of my 13 year old brother with how he acts, and his treatment of me gives me PTSD to the bullying I suffered in school.
I was trying to be sympathetic to what Walky and Amber are going through and saying I was proud of Amber, since not everyone can so easily say they’ll deal with their own problems while staying with someone else with problems.
But it seems I can’t even say that without triggering someone.
Okay, first off, I never said anything about a partner staying only because of a sense of duty. I was saying I felt it was a respectable thing that Amber would stay with Walky in spite of his issues when she has her own metric fuckton of issues. It comes across as her truly loving him, since she’d be accepting him for all the good and the bad.
Second, don’t assume anything about my brother from just a tiny excerpt. I only glossed over what he is and he isn’t but poor. You know that stereotype in media where the older brother is always picking on the younger brother? It’s inverted in my family. My little brother is 13 and I’m 21. He has ADHD and is a complete Narcissist. I have ADD and Asperger’s Syndrome. And he proceeds to act like a complete prick to me, treating me like the bullies I had in school did. Belittling me, hitting me, and acting like he’s my superior in every way. He’s even called me shit to my face before. The kid is nuts.
I try to be sympathetic but its kinda hard to be to the kid who repeatedly mocks you and hit me in the balls so much its a wonder I’m not sterile. So don’t you dare go assuming my brother is the poor one in the family when he treats not just me, but my mother, my grandmother, and anyone he isn’t trying to manipulate like crap.
Speaking as a person with ADHD, wanting to study isn’t the problem.
Attention regulation is.
And the reason attention regulation is the problem is our brains suffer a number of biochemical deficits: 1, we don’t feel as rewarded through routine stimuli. So you know how you can do a load of dishes and feel pleased that you got it done? I do a load of dishes, hate it the whole time, and don’t feel any satisfaction at the end. This lack of satisfaction when you complete something makes it really hard to keep up with stuff that isn’t inherently rewarding (see also why people with depression also tend to let chores etc slide).
2. Our brains aren’t as aroused by routine stimuli. In my case since I am presently unmedicated: I feel almost groggy unless I am in hyperfocus (more on that later) or very stimulating environment. Problem with very stimulating environment is #3. Imagine feeling exhausted and brain fog unless you’re doing something interesting. That’s just scratching the surface.
3. ADHD brains have deficits in executive function (EF). What is EF you ask? EF is a catch-all for the brain functions related to prioritization, attention regulation, and cognitive control of behavior. Meaning, in other words even if you can willpower past having no satisfaction in a job well done and feeling terrible the whole time you do it, our brains can’t prioritize well and filter out impulse. Everyone knows the Wikipedia or TVTropes holes, right? Imagine the TV Tropes hole is your *life*. While studying you feel hungry so you go to grab food and you notice your dishes are dirty so you start carrying them out to the kitchen to wash but on the way you see your roommate who asks what you want for supper and you realize we’re out of milk on the way to the grocery store…. That’s what ADHD is like if you have significant impulsive features. At no point did you decide not to study… You just got sidetracked. A lot.
4. Because of difficulty in attention regulation it’s a common misunderstanding that ADHD people can’t focus at all (think the squirrel stereotype) and that’s actually untrue. We can focus exceptionally well on activities we find inherently rewarding- in other words, fun stuff. The reason why goes back to brain understimulation. Fun stuff stimulates our brains more than not fun stuff – since fun activities are the only time unmedicated people with ADHD even feel normal let alone good (remember, unmedicated people with ADHD usually feel a mix of tired and brain fog unless we’re bored and bored is unbearable – more on that later), we obviously want to do fun stuff way more. This is why people with ADHD are over-represented in addictions – our brains are chemically wired to be vulnerable to that feedback loop. However even if we don’t get addicted to the only things that let us feel not bad, executive function bites us here: our brains when stimulated can’t multitask. We can’t monitor our thirst or hunger or be aware of what’s going on around us. This state is called hyperfocus and as an ADHDer I both love and hate it.
I love it because it feels amazing and I am super productive in it. I hate it because it’s not healthy to work on anything for 36 hours straight without breaks for water or food or sleep or etc. Which is what I will do if uninterrupted.
4, Boredom intolerance. This is a combination of chronic brain underarousal and executive dysfunction, but ADHD people can’t handle boredom without assistance. We just can’t. Boredom is much worse for an ADHD brain than an NT brain. You know how ADHD brains are constantly understimulated and feeling tired or groggy just in normal activities? Now take away even the little bit of stimulation we can get. I can’t really explain to an NT what boredom feels like but let me say this in all seriousness: I would rather experience physical agony than boredom. Boredom is a worse experience for me than dislocating a joint. To a lot of people with ADHD, me included, it isn’t hyperbole to say that boredom is agony. You can’t willpower yourself past agony. Believe me, I have tried.
There’s a whole bunch of ways all of these interact with each other to produce other symptoms (like how executive dysfunction and understimulation can make it hard to make decisions or get stuff started despite the stereotype of the impulsive ADHDer or how those plus the fact that ADHD kids get scolded by adults at a rate about 10x the non ADHD kids leads to rejection sensitive dysphoria and people pleasing) but this is long enough.
TL;dr: ADHD is a real brain disorder. There’s actually more evidence of the physical basis of ADHD than there is for almost any other brain disorder. It’s not a character flaw and not something people can willpower past.
And Walky looks a lot like a twice exceptional ADHDer: gifted so he was able to compensate until he wasn’t at which point he crashes and burns.
It’s amazing how sometimes, people here will make a really long, descriptive post with a ton of information, and it’s basically like looking into an ASCII mirror.
(Diagnosed with either ADHD or ADD, but every time I tried to get clarification, it was met with hostility, so I stopped trying.)
ADHD *is* ADD nowadays – what used to be called add is now adhd-PI (primarily inattentive type), if that helps!
It does help, yeah. Too bad it’s too late to do much with the information, though. The damage is basically done.
It’s not necessarily too late. I didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD (type 1) until I 34. The “lost” time can be gained back, but it’s made a lot of things easier moving forward since I started taking adderall
My mom just got the diagnosis of ADHD a few months ago. She almost at retirement but having the knowledge and a plan for treatment has made her look forward to that part of her life more now.
Thank you so much! I have a slightly modified dopamine reception due to a GABA malfunction which is common in my area and get some points you describe very well. But more from the depression/maniac viewpoint. Other points I don’t know from myself at all but from two working from my husband. Especially the hyperconcentration, extremely good skills with interesting work and no tolerance for boredom. The last one frustrates my husband quite a bit in meetings. Is there any way to tell a person, that you think they have such a condition? We thought so for a while now, since I was tested before, but your post sort of nailed our suspicion down.
That you think they have the thing? I would wait till they’re complaining about an ADHD symptom and then drop it in offhand, “Hey yeah my ADHD gets me like that” or “Someone I know has ADHD and you remind me of them.”
That you think you have the thing? Depends if friend or medical pro. If friend, probably just come out and say it. If pro, list the symptoms you’re dealing with and if anyone you know has mentioned it to you say , “My X thinks it might be ADHD?” but otherwise don’t mention ADHD directly because if you say you think you have it they’re probably going to write you off as drug-seeking.
Thank you for using TVTropes as a metaphor for ADHD. It makes it so much easier to understand.
Yeeeeah not getting diagnosed with ADHD, especially when you are smart can be a real cluster fork especially in college. I found coping mechanism in college, but it wasn’t until I was an adult and got on meds and got an official diagnosis (and thank you How to ADHD on youtube) that I was able to regulate better, but it’s still a cluster fork.
I’ve already got a name for the Slipshine: Study Date.
Text on a contoured, non-rigid surface should be super easy. 😉
Also, written by someone looking into the mirror.
aw come one! That slipshine name MUST include Dorothy.
Oh wow. I’ve got a new thing to draw.
I don’t know if there’s a god, but if you’re not doing his work then I’m starting a new religion.
The cult of Yoto doesn’t accept money or gifts. We just ask for +1s, thumbs up and praise.
Praise be + 1 thumbs up!
I kinda hope you would!
Yep! Probably this will require more that one draw.
Tattoo of a full college curriculum. . . sounds like a real show of love.
Something something Riza’s tattoo from Fullmetal Alchemist.
That things was like the holy grail of Dark Souls Pyromancy… Good thing Roy and Riza erased it so no one would create another Bed of Chaos.
Amber, no, that stuff’s a bongo to wash off.
It takes a couple washes and will get on your clothes or sheets in the meantime.
I KNOW Amber please.
I’m sure there is an interesting story here
Involving bosoms?
Once upon a time, Mini!BBCC liked drawing on herself with pen and/or sharpie and/or markers and it was always a pain to scrub off, even if it was washable.
The end. 🙂
For real though, ink is the enemy.
All inklings disliked that
Truly the modern epic!
Not with hand sanitizer. That dries the skin out though.
Your experience. Not mine. 😛
It also blocks out UV rays. I had “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit” tanned onto my chest for WEEKS after a protest.
A living legend of our time.
Playing Cards Against Humanity with Flash Cards from the teachers’ supply store.
It’s a lovely bosom….
Eh. Walky’s been failing upward through life as it is. A little ADHD not gonna stop him. Even if he just decides to give up he’ll probably end up owning few Mcdonalds or something bare minimum.
I also wouldn’t put it past him getting big in the Youtube game as one of those guys that tastes fast food inside their car. Probably his dream job honestly.
My favorite video in that genre involves the guy eating and reviewing pickles in a sewer.
yeah…. but then his mom will scream at him.
By the way, does Linda and Charles know that Dorothy broke up with him? Seem like something they might scream about.
Walky didn’t tell them, right?
Dorothy will have another ex’ parents doting on her, thinking they are still together, right?
It’s only been about a week since they broke up, right? I think Dorothy dumped Danny at the end of move-in day, there were a few weeks between then and
Hell on EarthFamily Weekend.I am confused. Is Mike actually nice to Amber regularly? I know he objected to her being discriminated against as a kid.
I have the feeling that this version of Mike isn’t an asshole for assholery’s sake – he indulges in asshole behavior sometimes, but he actually gives half a damn about people at the same time.
That’s why he follows up a crude gag about Amber’s boobs with a trenchant observation about the help Walky really needs.
This is actually unusual behavior for Mike – he’s making a crude and potentially-upsetting remark, yeah, but he’s actually offering possibly-helpful advice with his second bit as well. Usually he just sticks to the first one; see, for example, the time when he concocted an elaborately-faked series of webpages claiming Dexter and Monkey Master was cancelled, cut off Walky’s access to the Internet otherwise, showed him the pages, and then recorded him crying in his sleep over the show’s “cancellation”…just so he could then show that recording to Walky’s social circle and claim he had been crying in his sleep over a different subject.
Mike is one of Amber’s childhood friends…ish.
I think part of it is that amber doesn’t care that much about his crap because she has so much worse crap to deal with.
He is not. We have seen him be cruel to her multiple times. This is actually weird because he is actively helping but she is too distracted by her desire to help Walky to realise Mike is being weird.
Mike said recently that he’s turning over a new leaf. He’s been acting differently since that thing with Ethan. Still rude but has so far managed to avoid seriously hurting anyone’s feelings.
Called it (as I’m sure many others did). ADHD-inattentive, represent.
I crush everything except the “H,” and I knew I identified with Walky for a reason.
Now if only he’d stop being such an ass, I could feel better about that.
Last sentence: Malaya as enby rep
Schpoonman, ADHD without the H actually is ADHD-inattentive (also known as type 1, previously known as ADD before a recent update)
ADD and Asperger’s here.
/highfive
/double five, with an extra fist bump for anxiety
ADHD and Autistic here.
I am mixed type ADHD (AKA so quiet until I am talking a mile a minute and for some reason trying to climb the outside of a staircase sober).
Um the above is an actual story from uni. I was 20.
Most of my friends back then thought I was on drugs and when they found out I had ADHD they were like, “THAT’S WHY THE STAIRCASE THING!”
Also the tree. And the bench. And walking on curbs like a balance beam (I still do that and am 32). And etc.
Most ADHDers lose hyperactivity as they age. I… Did not.
Like I have a load of funny stories that would be most people’s drunk party stories but in my case is just what happens when a 17YO with ADHD goes away to uni.
I am so glad I didn’t start drinking till my mid 20s. Alcohol plus immature kid Me’s impulsivity and lack of danger sense would have been a dangerous combination.
I have been thinking this same thing for months, good lord. The strip ages ago where Walky is staring at his textbook in bed in different positions without retaining anything? Hi! It me!
It would be nice if there was less emphasis on textbook memorisation as the One True Way of gaining knowledge. Not all of us can retain information with the same ease with the same methods, and we shouldn’t have to forcibly contort our brains to get worse results.
Yas.
For me, it’s all about the interactive learning: watching someone else do the thing, do the thing myself, feedback, repeat.
Holy fuck, yes. I call it my Mimic Method. Monkey see, monkey do, right?
I’m getting a tattoo with a Mimic on it. Not sure what game, but by god it’s happening.
They’re my favorite miniatures to paint, honestly. So many color options and fun designs.
Whoo! (Sadface)
ADHD inattentive and anxiety for those curious.
@PB: Same here. Vetran of six failed medication trials, and more useless “aĺternative” treatments than I can count.
Oh sweet gods, if I could convince my girlfriend to write me messages on her body I’d study any subject. Not sure how much I would actually learn though.
I often complement the aptness of your avatar. Today will not be one of those days, however.
I do my best, Sarah and I share a lot in common but we do differ in some areas unfortunately. 😛
I dunno, I feel like Sarah would definitely not mind having her law studies written down on Jacob’s body…
For real, though. It’s educational, supportive, and involves nudity. What could be sexier?
“Oh sweet gods, if I could convince my girlfriend to write me messages on her body I’d study any subject.”
By Braille, if necessary!
Kinky.
I’ve long thought that tackling a really big crazy novel would actually be a cool date idea (Has anyone here tried to read a Culture novel? Those things are opaque), but I think I’m quickly discovering a new fetish.
I’ve read and enjoyed them all. Though I did have the advantage of watching discussions of them on message boards for several years before hand.
(Assuming you mean the science fiction novels of Iain M. Banks.)
I dunno, body writing seems like a valid way to learn anatomy.
I went through something just like this when I was in college, so I know exactly what the solution is:
Offer Walky fried food products every time he can study for half an hour
Walky’s still got a ways to fall, methinks.
Invention idea: Dry Erase Bra and Panties.
Cover yourself in post-it notes with math problems.
Maxine from Leftover Soup has got you started. (Semi-NSFW link.)
http://www.leftoversoup.com/gallery/postitfinal.html
Wouldn’t they get erased by your pants and shirt? Or do you wait until those are off, before you start writing?
Yeah, unless you want marker all over your pants.
Well, I mean. That’s none of my business. >_>
She would have to write it backwards and upside-down from her perspective.
Easy to make mistakes . . .
Rubber stamp kit, flavored ink. Easy, efficient, and cleanup is a breeze.
“Fuck his obvious ADHD, I need to get laid!”
…. so you’re saying “fuck” literally, there.
We’re about to get real abstract in this B.
And this would be a more painful arc than Joyce lying to Jacob’s brother.
Good to know I wasn’t just projecting my ADD onto him lol
Okay, now let’s do Mike [Accidentally] Performs A Feel (about Ethan, cuz he was acting reeeeal weird after they slept together and I can provide links if needed!!!)
Call him on it, Amber! …if you’ve actually noticed him acting weird, which seems unlikely… Because Mike’s the only person in this cast who actually pays much attention to what’s going on with other people. Damn.
Mike has a talent for saying the right things in the worst way possible.
Just one of the many reasons why he’s my favorite. <3
He also told Amber she was growing up to be her (monstrous abusive) father, so until Mike stops jerking people around entirely he can fuck off into a fire.
I’m not saying he’s a good person, just that I enjoy him as a character, even when he pisses me off sometimes. Also, the fact that he keeps saying he is “turning over a new leaf” and trying to actually be helpful while being, at least, slightly less of an asshole… well, it certainly isn’t enough to redeem him as a person, but it gives me hope that it’s possible for him to get to a place where that’s something he considers even approaching. Mike is, by his OWN admission, “an irredeemable one-dimensional troll of a non-person” [book 7/ch 3/Needs], but he seems to be reining it in just a smidgen at the moment, and has indicated that it’s intentional and he intends to continue, so I’m inclined to at least see where that’s going.
Again, I’m not saying he’s a good person or condoning any of his actions, but I do enjoy his wit and he makes an excellent designated asshole while also driving the plot forward. He also appears to be the only character who is not so self-engrossed that they rarely notice people/things outside of their own tiny spheres of personal influence. I greatly appreciate his observance and intelligence as character attributes, as they often give situational and/or character insights that no other characters are either able to notice, or willing to voice. While he is definitely an asshole, I also have a small level of appreciation for his honesty (in those instances).
In any case, no, he’s not really morally defensible as a human being at this point. But I hope Willis plans to take the opportunity to actually allow Mike some character development sometime soon, because I really rather enjoy the “disillusioned asshole grows a feels gland and slowly/painfully attempts to become a slightly better person” trope, and Mike is absolutely a star candidate.
Also, I don’t know if it makes a difference to you or not (probably not, I suspect) but Amber totally called him out on how that was over the line (Book 10/ch 1/Charming), and he explicitly acknowledged it was pretty mean, and basically implied he was intentionally not moving out of punching distance because he knew he deserved it if she chose to hit him… all, of course, without actually ever actually taking responsibility or apologizing, naturally. Because it’s Mike, and that kind of sudden change would probably be incredibly suspicious, and leave Amber questioning him on end (just like Ethan did when Mike offered to make out with him) because it’s Mike and he always has an ulterior motive. Honestly, that was probably the closest he could actually get to sincere while still having Amber actually accept it as genuine, given her knowledge of him as a person.
…One more time, just to be clear. I AM NOT SAYING MIKE’S WORDS WERE OKAY. He is a fictional character, and I enjoy him. That is all.
Okay also I’m shipping him and Ethan like no other, and hoping that was the turning point where he accidentally unlocked his Feels Gland and shit it escaped before he could chain that motherfucker back up in the dark where it belongs, which will be the catalyst for at least some small form of character growth on his part, whether he ends up with Ethan or not….
…but I recognize that this is more of a personal failing on my part than a defensible moral standpoint. ;P
Permanent sharpie is tattoos.
Amazigirl: Ahh, another night of trouncing evildoers. Oh dear, I seem to be covered in sweat and the blood of miscreants. Time for an Amazi-shower. I’ll just disrobe my Amazi-bosoms and DAMMIT AMBER!!
Thanks, I had a shitty day and this mental image made me laugh do much XD
Wrong, Mike. Walky learns with fast food. Make the problems be related to chicken nuggets and hamburgers and he will be working as a manager of a McDonald’s, or a Wendy’s if he is lucky.
Also, Walky isn’t the only horny one. Amber obviously still has the hots for him, and considering she has such a questionable taste in men that she would bang a sociopath like Mike (and has done in an alternate reality), she needs a little help from Walky Jr. (a reference to Jacob Jr.). I mean, Amber, Joyce, all the women…. and all the men need to take a break to think clear before Willis makes us experience 10 more years of theis “dumbing”… of age.
Wow, real bright future you’ve dreamed up. He gets to be the least valuable person in the building, at the worst fast food company. He’s a flake in college, so his future is utterly hopeless. Because the very first semester of college matters that much and holds that much weight against your entire life.
We are talking about Walky, not a regular college student from first semester. Of course failing the first semester isn’t the end of the world, and I know what is to fail in a semester.
Walky has stated his life goals include having a firefighter pole in his room, and he spent more time making a super hero costume instead of studying, and he is aware of that. Him getting a job at a crappy restaurant franchise is a best case scenario and not the end of his life. He could still afford that firefighter pole and all his childhood fantasies with minimum wage and not worry about the high expectations of Linda and his exes.
I guess first semester is also the cutoff point for personal growth, self-improvement, and changing your life goals. Whatever you’ve got in mind by your first college Christmas is legally binding and can’t be altered. At least, that’s how you’re making it seem. You’re talking like there’s no possible outcome other than “slightly better-paid wage slave”, just because he’s wasted some time within a 2-month period.
There’s a lot of looking down on fast food workers and franchise owners right now and it’s weird.
Look, I work fast food. I’ve gone through a few different companies, and so far? I’ve encountered maybe four good managers. The rest have had god complexes that put cult leaders to shame and the mental capacity of a broken Furby. Managers are the only ones I’m looking down on, personally.
I’ve worked food, retail, call centers, groceries, corporate lite – you encounter that everywhere. Good bosses are rare no matter where you work. And even still, if you’re just looking down on managers, you still shouldn’t be looking down on people, especially by what job they work at. People should not be defined by their jobs/careers.
People aren’t and shouldn’t be defined by their profession, I agree. I’m doing the opposite. I’m defining a profession by the people I’ve met who hold that profession. So far, that definition is full of god-awful juvenile behavior, a holier-than-thou attitude, and a complete lack of basic problem-solving skills. It’s not a position I respect in any capacity, and I haven’t been given a personal reason to.
But yeah, #NotAllManagers, I guess.
Again, I am talking about Walky, not regular people. The guy whos fear of responsibility caused many problems in other universe. His attention problems, his self defeating behavior and his manchild tendencies are his problems to overcome, and he will need help from a professional or get his shit sorted by himself to avoid depending on a his mom or a girlfriend to fix him.
And yes, fast food restaurants’ jobs are horrible, but unless Walky gets it together he will be doomed to be like Scott Pilgrim before his epiphany.
People do mature. Some not as quickly as others, but it is possible.
i’m at least 80% sure Dorothy has tried that already
And that didn’t work either.
amber writes math lessons on boobs.
Because of some convoluted, aminiesque sequence of events, she end up topless just as Jason walks by.
music starts playing, birds starts singing, Jason realises that he is in love.
All it took was the right setting (a half-naked chubby brunette in glasses) for him to finally understand his true feelings for math.
Jason’s bowtie spins uncontrollably upon seeing boobs.
Yeah, I mean, that’s what they are for. Right?
The bowties I mean, not the boobs.
Or…. nevermind.
However, it all comes crashing down when he finds a spot where she forgot to carry the 1.
Why not do both? Just saying. Use the boob math as a stop-gap while you work on the ADHD thing.
That said who is this and what have they done with Mike?
Honestly, there’s no valid reason it should be an either/or choice. Nobody loses in this situation, if we’re all being completely honest.p
Amber loses if she has to take the time to write Walky’s math lessons on her boobs.
Why can’t *he* be writing math on her boobs. Help keep him focused. Or would it?
“Has to” implies she wouldn’t want to do it in the first place.
High level math written on Amber’s boobs?
…I’ll be in my bed
Doing what? O_o?
Math, clearly.
I recall back when Heinlein characters would talk about boobs in mathematical terms. (Of course, one of them was Andy Libby, who was likely on the spectrum somewhere.)
(Who was also trans, sorta, but that’s irrelevant here.)
This sounds like a good way to get Walky horny every time he thinks about math. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad actually.
Should I dig up that “Blackboards in Porn” site that was around a few years ago?
(Someone analyzed the quality of stuff written on blackboards in porn videos.)
Or he thinks about math anytime he gets horny…That might work though.
Called it. I knew Walky seemed familiar way back when he was studying with Jason; this is what everyone with AD/HD goes through eventually.
“gifted” kids also go through it. Doesn’t help a ton of them have undiagnosed ADHD, myself included.
Saaaame. My parents got me diagnosed when I was 12; they had suspected since well before then but wanted to be sure first. Can’t say I blame them, but it’d have been nice to know before.
I was diagnosed in my late twenties. Still working through the issues of being called “lazy” whenever I wasn’t doing enough- or well enough- because of how intelligent everyone said I was too.
Fuck the lot of them though, now I work with dogs which is basically ideal? Physical activity, change of scenery all the time, even when it’s the same thing it’s not exactly the same thing, can listen to music at the same time. Just struggle with the business side.
Oh man “you’re so smart why don’t you just apply yourself ” kids represent
I see your “You’re so smart, just apply yourself” and I’ll raise you one “Since you’re so smart you can do anything if you apply yourself, we’re gonna stop teaching you. From now on, you’re your own teacher, but also we won’t let you have material above this arbitrarily low level. And if you try to learn more or take interest in anything we haven’t assigned you, you’re getting in-school suspension. …Why aren’t you learning anything yet, asshole?”
“you’re so smart you could do anything! But you won’t because you don’t apply yourself.” Amirite?
Also: am the rare unicorn of gifted kid who retains high IQ in adulthood and uuuuugh career coaches who are all “You could do any job in the company!” Are the actual worst.
No, I can’t. Because if it involves every day being the same, I will get bored within 3 months. And once I am bored, I fail. See also the neverending series of part time jobs I started out as a star trainee and eventually quit two months in before they could fire me during uni.
Ok sorry will quit now (impulse control is apparently not a thing today!) But also if I could pick one thing to wave a magic wand and get NTs to understand about ADHD, it’d probably be exactly how awful boredom is for us.
Ugh, yeah, mine runs a little longer but I do have a bad habit of hemorrhaging skill at work after a year or so, uuuugh. Luckily with restaurants we switch up the menu so that staves it off but damn
Hard same.
ADHDer but by sheer dumb luck I am gifted and also Autistic and also genuinely interested in most academic subjects so it didn’t get spotted until my MSc when I smashed hard into the wall of bad at intrinsic motivation and then careened off that into the wall of “what is time?”
My ADHD weirdness was chalked up to Gifted Kids Are Weird and Autism.
Funny thing is one of my sibs got diagnosed at 14 with it when I was 15 and at the time I was like “if my sib has it I have it” but my folks brushed that off because although I was a behavioral train wreck I was getting really, really good grades (as in I graduated 2nd in my class in HS).
Oh yeah, Asperger’s was the hip new diagnosis at the time so they tried that first. Didn’t help that a lot of the symptoms lined up. I was a “gifted” kid too actually; I was one of the top kids in my class and I could read really early, I just couldn’t sit still and do homework unless it was a subject I liked.
This is why Amber is ideal for Walky: They both have a similarly otherworldly idea about what constitutes “normal behaviour”!
if the next Slipshine does not involve Walky snorting dexamphetamine from the crack of Amber’s ass, I will be sorely disappointed
Oh god. You get him diagnosed with something and I bet his Mom is going to be livid. She sounds like exactly the sort of person who would slap someone for insisting that her perfect little baby might be “broken”. In fact if he actually has ADHD, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s already done exactly that to some poor teacher in his past who brought it up.
I would not be surprised if Walky’s ADHD hasn’t gone unnoticed, but Linda squelched any chance of treating it because she prefers to maintain appearances, or because she flat-out denied her boy could have a disorder.
Kids of color do tend to be under diagnosed, with their symptoms misattributed to willful misbehavior, but Walky was considered gifted so I don’t think that played a large role in his particular case.
Oh shit, yes.
This is how my father responded to a teacher insisting I had ‘some sort’ of learning disability in first grade. She was right. I have dyscalculia and didn’t figure it out until my senior year of high school after years of failing math.
Of course dyscalculia hasn’t really come to light until recently so idk how much real help I would’ve gotten at the time, but it would’ve been better than being punished for ‘not trying hard enough’ at math.
I’m surprised Walky got this far in life. If he were a jock I’d believe it since they get plenty of passes as long as they bring in the spectators, but what’s special about Walky?
His parents have money and connections. And until this point, he was a “gifted” kid who didn’t have to study to get good grades. I figure he was also a big fish in a small pond.
Someone I know managed to not be able to read until the end of third grade, because she remembered the texts she heard.
If you remember stuff easily, no one notices what you do not do.
His hometown’s larger than his university town. Dunno how much big fish/small pond is true. We do know he went to public schools, so depending on the quality and class sizes in Evansville…maybe?
Having lived in/right outside Evansville for a while, I might have bad news about the local quality of education. At least, in the areas I frequented.
Then it may very well be the case. I don’t know anything about Evansville’s education system. If it’s crappy, Walky might very well have a case of big fish/small pond going on.
Public schools vary. I’d rate my education experience as being greater than average and was prepared for college once I started. They didn’t just promote kids to the next grade just to be rid of them or to keep up statistics since there was one kid who was with me in kindergarten, but still in 10th when I graduated. Of course that was 20 years ago so standards may have changed.
Of course they do, but without knowing the specific school he went to (or, equally possibly, the reputation of the fictional school he went to) I can’t comment how big a pond it would have been.
Ergo, we get Evansville school district(s?) generalized.
They don’t seem to be that connected. I can totally believe Billie got through school coasting on her parents’ money and popularity until her DUI, but aside from having enough money to send Sal to a boarding school after her run in with the law I don’t think the Walkertons could rig things for their son for so long and even if they did they’d be delusional to think this wouldn’t catch up with him in college.
It’s amazing how far you can get if you can vomit out good tests and fart out 500 words of bs.
“So this next problem is about finding cusps and inflection points.”
Not surprising at all, I didn’t have to study at all in k-12 and crashed hard when I got to college and I know I’m not a unique case at all
Hey this isn’t the comment I was replying to
This isn’t the comment you are replying to.
You can go about your business.
Move along.
There are a couple of really good advices and both of them can be used. I mean,,, one do not exclude the other.
Wait a minute. Amber can’t just ask Walky to take an Adhd exam without start to find help with her schizophrenia. It would be hypocritical. I think this is what scare her.
Pretty sure Amber doesn’t have schizophrenia, she has DID (or at least symptoms strongly resembling DID, since she hasn’t been “officially” diagnosed with anything). They’re two very different things.
Thanks for the clarification.
Sorry I didn’t want to be ironic. But in Europe the DID is considered a disorder under the schizophrenia umbrella. Sometimes I forget that in America some things have different interpretation.
I can’t find any indication that that is in fact true, and it’d be a bit bizarre if it was, given that medical classifications are usually fairly standardized across western cultures. It’s even more bizarre given that DID shares absolutely none of the treatment methods, symptoms, fundamental nature, or genetic basis of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are on a shared spectrum of mental illnesses, sharing many symptoms and nearly identical treatments. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is also considered related and can occasionally overlap in treatments, as well.
While there’s a long-standing public confusion between DID and schizophrenia, both in the US and in the EU [and this seems more likely to be where your own confusion stems from, rather than from any official EU stance on the matter], they share absolutely nothing in common.
Historically, those with DID were instead diagnosed with schizophrenia (with the split personalities being considered a schizophrenic delusion), and therein lies the root of the lingering misconception of there being any shared nature between the two. There was never any actual medical basis for association between the two spectrums.
Multiple Personality Disorder* and Schizophrenia share a surface similarity in, to some degree, “hearing voices” and that’s where the association first arose. DID integrates Disassociative Amnesia, which in the case of DID means an inability to recall actions taken by secondary personalities.
While there may be a genetic component making one more susceptible to developing DID, DID is associated directly with traumatic triggers, while schizophrenia/bipolar/NPD/etc are associated firmly with genetic predisposition and lack any meaningful relation to external catalysts.
While treatment for DID is a bit unclear, DID is fundamentally treated similar to PTSD, sharing much the same perspectives and treatments. Of course, inherently, DID is a disassociative disorder, where PTSD is an anxiety disorder (though both disassociative and anxiety disorders do tend to share the same orgination point of traumatic stresses). The previously mentioned Disassociative Amnesia (where one has memory lapses or scattered memories, either with firm memory gaps between different personalities or with scattered symptoms somewhat similar to dementia), along with Depersonalization Disorder (wherein one feels disconnected from one’s body), fall under the same Disassociative Disorder umbrella.
Anxiety disorders, such as PTSD, are rather similar in premise (and are considered to be closely related to disassociative disorders), though such disorders (self-apparently) manifest with anxiety/stress/focus related issues, while disassociative disorders manifes with memory/self-awareness/self-realization disorders. Disassociative amnesia may however go along with an anxiety disorder (and is, by my understanding, actually fairly common among PTSD sufferers), and anxiety issues may go along with a disassociative disorder. Hence, when medication is deemed to be suitable, the two categories can be rather similar in what medications are recommended.
Again, treatment for such disorders is fairly similar, primarily involving therapy, anxiety reduction, and mood regulation. Medication is primarily based in anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication. Anti-psychotics can potentially be used in rare circumstances, for the sake of regulating certain factors, but they’re generally discouraged for both categories due to their potential for making things worse and the fact that they cannot directly treat core symptoms.
Conversely, psychotic disorders [which primarily is a spectrum between bipolar and schizophrenia, with schizoaffective disorder being the Reese’s Peanut Butter cup between the two] are considered mental illnesses and are treated primarily via anti-psychotics, with many of the same medications being favored as go-to-es regardless of where one falls on the spectrum.
Let me reiterate: There is absolutely nothing shared between psychotic disorders and disassociative disorders / anxiety disorders. That’s a comparison between two different spectrums with a completely different range of circumstances from one another.
Even if Europe did in fact make such an association, it would simply be flat out wrong, as there’s absolutely no basis whatsoever in any way for such an association and, further, it would be inherently misleading and harmful to make such an association.
*Note that Multiple Personality Disorder and Split Personality Disorder are simply the preceding terms for Disassociative Personality Disorder. However, DID has a strict requirement of the personalities not sharing certain information with one another, which leaves a potential undefined area wherein someone may have multiple “voices” within their head at once but not actually be schizophrenic. A fragmented ego along with traumatic brain injury could, for example, form such a circumstance. That said, there no longer appears to be an official classification which would cover such a circumstance, and thereby the otherwise outdated term of “Multiple Personality Disorder” continues to be unofficially associated with that specific circumstance.
Further reading:
https://www.sane.org/information-stories/the-sane-blog/mythbusters/busting-the-myths-about-dissociative-identity-disorder
https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/dissociative-disorders/expert-q-and-a
Amber is a lot closer to a dissociative identity disorder (DID) than schizophrenia. DID can develop as a mind’s way to cope with trauma. But, no matter how knitpicky I get about the psychiatric diagnosis, I think you’re right about Amber feeling hypocritical if she decides Walky needs treatment for a problem and she doesn’t. I wonder if this little arc might lead to some personal growth for Amber in addressing Amazi-Girl and how the persona is unhealthy?
“Don’t be ridiculous. Walky’s problem is simple and easily treated while mine are deep and complicated and beyond help. Plus he deserves it, while I’m just a monster.”
And there’s enough truth in there to give it some credibility. As I understand it, DID is much harder to treat or even find a therapist willing and able to try.
And this will be the beginning of a huge fight between Amber and Walky who will end up really bad for both of them.
This is my hope too. Amber need to face her relationship with Amazi-girl, and if she will find the strength to do it for help Walky with his difficulty she will be really heroic.
Something something grading on the curve.
Wait. She expects Walky to focus on studying while there are BOSOMS there?
Ya gotta make math fun, by any means necessary.
I’m sorry, I still see every interaction between Amber and Mike through a prism of their relationship in Shortpacked!verse.
Me too.
God this strip and arc remind me too much of myself. And getting through high school with out studying and with undiagnosed adhd. It hit me pretty hard in grad school especially when everyone around me was just as smart. But could study. And I finally forced myself to accept that there was something wrong and needed to get medication.
I mean, this is Dumbing of Age, Why would anyone do the smart thing… Except in a dumb way. That is allowed.
Dress up as walky and pass all his classes.
Replying to the alt-text
At least Good Mike is still dickish
Have Mike and Amber ever been intimate as high schoolers?
Mentioning one’s bosom out of the clear blue without a prior point of reference or familiarity is just asking for a roundhouse right to the teeth.
I doubt it, if you mean did they make out. Is he from the same school as Amber and Ethan?
Saying things that might get you slapped or punched seems to be Mike’s preferred mode of communication.
He’s an old school friend of theirs, yes
I don’t think he needs to be all that familiar with her to recognise that she’s on the chesty side. He’s also completely tactless, so that’s not much of an obstacle.
Well, Amber has made past remarks on how hot she finds shirtless Mike to be…
In honor of Walky and ADHD Awareness month, here are some ADHD sites, podcasts, and books I like:
understood.org, add.com, totallyadd.com, additudemag.com,How to ADHD (on YouTube)
Taking Control: the ADHD Podcast, Distraction, ADHD Rewired, Attention Talk Radio.
Books by Edward Hallowell, Thomas E. Brown, Susan Pinsky, and Russell Barkley. I’m interested in Sari Solden, but haven’t read any of her books yet.
Shout out to the people with ADHD who posted. You made me feel a little less like an outcast, and a little more like a member of a community.
There’s an ADHD awareness month??! Wtf, thank you so much for telling us, I will make sure to tell all of my fellow neuroatypical friends <3
…Also super glad I was finally able to refer that student of mine for observation cuz I think he's got it too. Perfect timing, self. (He's like actually a baby Walky. Same hair and everything. This definitely checks out.)
Panel 1: Possibly me.
…okay, almost DEFINITELY me. And I HAD my ADHD diagnosed, all the way back in seventh grade. :\
https://imgur.com/a/jSF6hGP
BONUS activity. If you can figure out a way for AG=AoM gets bonus points.
Quintuple Bonus points if you can make X=58008
+1 for you my friend, as deserved.
Panel five: Are Amber’s eyes drifting downwards as she contemplates how many math lessons she can write there?