Your parents may be wonderful and loving people, but they are not mental health specialists. Games and social media are not the cause of your ADHD or your language disorder.

Too much social media or games are not good for you because they generally only show you the best and sometimes the worst sides of humanity. It is very natural to compare yourself to what you see there. They are not real life. Nobody is successful or happy all of the time. Nobody is good at every subject. Some of the brightest people I’ve ever met have terrible life skills, and it’s okay to be bad at stuff. That’s part of being human. The things we see on social media are more like single frames of a movie. Video games, broadly speaking, allow the player to stop and resume with no consequences. Real life has no pause button or quests that will be available when you’re ready and you feel like it. Real life is what happens between those frames and during those pauses, even now as you read this.

You now know you have ADHD and a language disorder. That’s a great first step because it helps you understand why you feel the way you do. If you want to change how you feel, you need to take the next step: get treatment for your problems. I speak from experience when I say untreated ADHD can affect the trajectory of your life in ways you do not realize. DO NOT IGNORE IT. It will not go away or get better on its own. You must act. This is the way to fix your life, to find a way to enjoy life. If you’re already getting treatment, then step three is Do. Do cool shit. Do make mistakes and learn from them. Do fun things, do hard things, do self care things. Do take a moment to appreciate your milestones, your victories however small or great, and then…keep doing.

You do not need to be better than other people. Just be the best version of you that you can be.

Rest when you are tired, but never give up. Perseverance is perhaps the most powerful tool we have.

But not so shy that you wouldn’t get naked on a beach, take a photo, and post it to the internet. I don’t think you know what that word means.

Sometime around the mid 2010s, I worked at one of Goodwill’s busiest locations in the country. So busy we got calls almost every day complaining about the giant fucking traffic snake of donors blocking streets as they all lined up in their suburban safety bubbles to dump their literal garbage into our blue bins.

Absolute shitbox of a store. Run down, dirty, and always a mess. Especially the shoes and toys section. I already hated retail customers but that really sealed the deal. Just a bunch of broke ass motherfucking customers making broke ass workers days even harder. Two of my full-time coworkers were homeless. Those were just the ones I knew about because I worked by their side every day. Despite our poverty wages and grinding hours, I worked with some genuinely good people who cared about each other. It felt like we were all clinging to each other as we drowned in the rising tide that lifts all boats. None of us had so much as a life raft to rest in. Treading water while we gasped between waves of desperation.

Brian, I know you’ll never see this but I hope you’re still alive and got the help you needed. Daniel, you are far too intelligent and capable to waste your life there. I hope you got out.

A few times I had to visit the allegedly original Goodwill store. You might think if there’s one store corporate cares about enough to put a bit of polish on, it would be that one. But no. It looked like the most dystopian shopping experience imaginable. Crumbling architecture, merchandise strewn all over as if the customers were in a fight for their lives, and just like my store, workers who looked ragged, tired, and barely holding it together inside. And there worked at least one young woman with Down Syndrome who I reckon was making about a third of my not-even-close-to-livable wage of $10/hr. I was starting to suspect this Goodwill place isn’t in the business of good will. Then I visited the Training and Education Center which also serves as their corporate HQ in Seattle.

It was modern. Spacious. Clean. Safe. Nobody looked poor or unhappy. Any illusions I might have held about Goodwill were entirely shattered beyond any doubt.

I’ll never shop or donate there again and I’ll take every opportunity to tell anyone who will listen why they should stop patronizing the most for-profit nonprofit I’ve ever worked for.

Fuck you, Goodwill. Fuck you forever.

Non-millenial here, also watching my payments skyrocket by 440%. Can’t get loans with my excellent credit score because my debt to income ratio is super high. At this point it would cost me less to tank my credit, go into default, and be garnished since my credit score is meaningless anyway.

Are you overreacting? No. Start spiking trees if you want to save them.

Perhaps one of the Super Dorks will help us.

Acorns beget acorns. Stop the cycle of acorn violence. Take em out before they sprout.

I think they’re overtrained by fear based training like Killology. They’re afraid of everything. I guess we can now add acorns to the long list of things that justify astounding incompetence and willful endangerment of others.

I don’t write them down anymore and don’t have them as often as I used to but every single one of the future dreams that came to pass were dreams of totally ordinary events and conversations.

Always brief, a moment of realization that it’s happening confirmed by the next 10-30 seconds of events. It has always happened in a social setting. At work, at school, but never at home.

Once in a while part of it doesn’t happen. For example the future memory included a brief conversation and even though everything else in the moment is just like the dream, the conversation part doesn’t come to pass. That has only occurred twice to my recollection.

I personally take it as an indicator that I’m exactly where I’m “supposed” to be, whatever that means.

Cable companies say they’ll will raise the price without early termination fees? Oh please. They’ll do that whether there’s early termination fees or not. They’re just threatening to bump it up on the schedule.

Before you take the plunge, do some research and consider what you will be printing for most often.

This is an overgeneralization but there are two main types of printing methods-- vat polymerization and material extrusion.

The set up pictured in this post is VP. It uses light and mirrors to cure resin layer by layer. I think the main advantage to this method is fine detail and less post production polish. The main disadvantage is, unless you have a lot of money, you have a smaller printing space. Excellent method for artistic works such as miniatures.

The other way is basically pushing a plastic wire through a hot nozzle layer by layer. The main advantage is that it’s faster, cheaper, and offers more printing space at entry level prices. The disadvantage is that the lines will be quite apparent and will require more post processing work for a clean look. Really good for rapid prototyping and functional prints.

Although it is a helpful skill to have, you don’t need to know how to make 3d models. There’s a ton of free models for just about anything you can think of.

Engi all the way! Started building up a scout after 300+ hours of nothing but engineer. Scout is fun, I like the mobility. I love having a good driller in my squad, so I think that will be my next class after I level up scout for a while.