Tag: adhd

I want my brain back

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, video gamesLeave a comment

I have believed myself to be entirely neurotypical for my entire life, other than, y’know, the anxiety disorder and occasional crippling depression, so … yeah, maybe this wasn’t the right sentence to start with? But I’ve definitely never thought I had ADHD before. Until this week. My god. It has been a nightmare week in a lot of ways, some of which I’ve talked about and some of which I haven’t, so maybe I’ve earned it, but … ugh. I read nearly 9,000 pages in January according to Storygraph. I don’t think I’ve managed 200 this week. I can’t focus. It’s driving me batshit.

Now, a good chunk of that is Nioh 3, I’m not gonna lie; I’ve put 24 hours into it already since it came out. I knew it was going to eat my life, and eat my life it has. The other thing, though? Have you heard of Redactle? It’s the worst fucking thing ever. Imagine a Wikipedia article, with all the words except maybe the 15 most common English words blanked out. Selected at random. And then the game is you guess words until you get the title of the article. Which might be, like, “Jesus,” or something you’re familiar with, and might be Niamey, the capital city of Niger, or maybe it’ll be Navier-Stokes Equations, which you will somehow solve in 178 words? “Adivasi,” by comparison, took 401.

It’s not … fun, so much as addictive and horrible? But I haven’t done one yet today and I will before I go to bed. Right after I beat this boss. And then maybe I’ll get some sleep before I pick my wife up at the train station tomorrow morning, and hopefully my life more or less returns to normal.

(Thirteen minutes and 235 words for today’s puzzle, btw.)

In which I’m getting dumber

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

Man, I don’t know if I should blame my phone or the Current Unpleasantness or what, but my powers of concentration have been significantly diminished lately. I may deliberately abandon the “20% of my books this year should be nonfiction” goal because I keep bailing on nonfiction books halfway through, and the novel whose cover up there and whose title I am deliberately not going to use anywhere in this post is an objectively good book— shut up, that’s a thing– and I’m halfway through it and I am suffering, y’all. And it is 100% because this book demands you pay attention to it and I am currently not capable of paying sufficient attention to complicated texts to have any real idea of what’s going on. It’s making me nuts.

I dunno, man. I don’t want to quit this book but I also don’t want to be miserable when I’m reading and it’s not like I can’t pick it up again later. That’s the good thing about books; you put them on the shelf and they stay there for as long as you want them to. They don’t grow legs and walk away. If you have even the slightest interest in juuuuust barely pre-Christian Britain and aren’t currently brain-rotted like me, you should check this book out because you’ll like it. But right now I just don’t have my shit together enough to properly appreciate it. I’m giving it one more day and if something doesn’t click I’m going to put it away and pretend it’s a temporary choice. Again, this is completely on me. I want my brain back, dammit.