Huh, interesting. To me, “moggy” is just a slang term for a cat, e.g. “who’s a pretty moggy?”. But also, I’ve only once met a cat that was of a particular breed, so perhaps the general nature of “moggy” for me stems from that. (For context, I am from the UK)

I’m not typically someone who squees over photos of other people’s pets, but those are two beautiful cats

The vets that I have experienced tend to use the human’s surname as the pet’s surname. If that’s the case with you also, it is humorous to imagine a cat’s chart basically saying “Cat [your last name]”

No no, you’ve got it the wrong way round: autism causes telescopes

I am in this image and I don’t like it.

Look at the cute lil guy. He’s so pleased with his hat

It’s hidden enough that I have had to provide tech support to my friends a few times on this. I think it’s easy to forget how expertise shapes our perspective on these things

“The only exception is like Stardew Valley, where they put the save directory in a normal folder.”

It’s been years since I played Stardew Valley, but stuff like this is why I consider myself a fan.

“Her discussion of media and news is maybe not as relevant here but still pretty on point in my experience.”

I remember being surprised how much I enjoyed her video about Star Trek: Picard, given that it was a multiple hour long rant video — it’s amazing how much difference it makes for someone to be engaging in good faith criticism

Whilst I broadly agree with your sentiment about people being weirdly judgy about some coping measures as opposed to others, I can’t help but sympathise with the people who express concern; I do think there are some coping measures that are better than others, in terms of giving us the best chance to grow and potentially thrive. I’m reminded of a couple of words that a chronically suicidal friend of mine coined to describe this kind of thing: “vivagenic” and “vivalytic”, roughly meaning “life promoting” and “life destroying” respectively.

For me, there are times when indulging in substances like cannabis is vivagenic. However, I know that I am also prone to chasing an unhealthy kind of escapism sometimes, resulting in substance use that’s vivalytic in nature. Although sometimes the solitude of smoking alone is sometimes exactly what I need, I have found a decent correlation between solo smoking and the vivalytic kind of smoking. My own ADHD probably plays into this.

It’s not for other people to decide what is vivagenic or vivalytic for you, but I wonder whether some of people’s judgemental comments are because it’s harder for people to see how you’re doing when your coping measures are skewed towards more solitary activities. Beyond their concern, they may also be coming at this from a sort of selfish angle of preferring when you were doing the dance stuff because they may have perceived you as being more of a member of that community — even if they weren’t directly interacting with you in that context, it’s reassuring to see the people we care about appear to be coping, and community dance is much easier to fit into a conventional model of “coping”.

It can be difficult to discern what comments are worth listening to when there’s so many: some may be perceptive friends struggling to articulate their concern about potentially vivalytic coping measures; others may be unproductively projecting their own values onto your life and feeling unwarranted concern at things that are working well for you; and then there are people who are just assholes who don’t care about your wellbeing but will judge you whatever you do.

This comment got longer than I planned, so I’m not sure how to end this. I suppose the thing that caused me to start writing is that I related to your comment a little too much, and I felt compelled to share my well wishes. I don’t know what is best for you, and I know we’re all just doing what we can to get by, but you seem like a pretty cool person, so I hope you don’t become too isolated, regardless of whatever your coping strategy is. I’m not suggesting you should be doing the dance stuff instead, because God knows I understand how ADHD can lead to a rocky relationship with moderation. I don’t know what I’m suggesting. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I’m just a random internet stranger who was surprised by an emotionally impactful thread on a meme post, but I wish you the wisdom to recognise what strategies could help you live, rather than just helping you to survive. I also wish you strength, because it’s exhausting to have to constantly fend off others’ judgement in order to carve enough thinking space for oneself.

I’ve come to understand that feeling this way is just part of being an adult. I suppose this means that we’re doing it right, so props to us for continuing to tread water (even if it may feel like we’re barely doing that).

Truly, this blurs the line between memes and art

I did an internship at a bank way back, and my role involved a lot of processing of spreadsheets from different departments. I automated a heckton of that with Visual Basic, which my boss was okay with, but I was dismayed to learn that I wasn’t saving anyone’s time except my own, because after the internship was finished, all of the automation stuff would have to be deleted. The reason was because of a rule (I think a company policy rather than a law) that required that any code has to be the custody of someone, for accountability purposes — “accountability” in this case meaning “if we take unmaintained code for granted, then we may find an entire department’s workflow crippled at some point in the future, with no-one knowing how it’s meant to work”.

It’s quite a different thing than what you’re talking about, but in terms of the implementation, it doesn’t seem too far off.

It reminds me of how apparently firing squad executions used to have only some of the guns loaded with live guns, and the rest with blanks. This way, the executioners could do some moral gymnastics to convince themselves that they hadn’t just killed a person

I saw a toddler pretending to take a phone call from an imaginary phone a few weeks ago, and it really threw me that she was holding her “phone” like one would a smartphone (As opposed to putting your thumb to your ear, and outstretching your pinkie towards your mouth).

“You know how some people use a bell slowly fading out as a meditation tool? That’s the association I have for that sensation.”

Oh man, this comparison is going to stick with me; it’s one of my favourite things I’ve read in recent weeks

So majestic

I find it amusing that this is like the epitome of cool. This means that if a person’s goal was to become cool, their surest path there would be to forsake their quest of coolness and learn how to be unabashedly themselves

I hope I’m a good meme. The kind of meme that makes you roll your eyes and smile despite yourself.

This is wisdom that I wish I had had years ago. I learned this the hard way