A very dear friend, who is a psychiatrist, says that the DSM is mostly to help GPs to identify symptoms, to be able to send people to the psychiatrist, not to actually diagnose.

Five vs. One

Kind of lost at “luck” before starting, no?

I don’t really believe it’s a spectrum. I believe that you either have a dopamine processing deficiency, or you don’t. I think the differences we see are the result of how well some of us learn to cope, or devise self protecting strategies.

I mean, there may be slight differences, but I wouldn’t call it a spectrum, at least in the way that autism is, where you have mildly socially incompetent people to nearly non functional people.

I was undiagnosed bipolar for over 40 years, masked by my success in employment and entrepreneurship, which lasted about 2-5 years every stage, when tedium became unbearable, and had to look for other challenges to fuel my dopamine. No one, even myself, connected the dots between my intense drive, and the following depressive stage, and the next jump. I finally crashed hard, and sought a psychiatryst. Once properly medicated, my mood swings normalized, the ADHD symptoms were unmasked.

Now we are working on dialing in meds for ADHD. Pretty hard to balance.

In my case I belive I don’t more or less ADHD than others, but that I was good at (extreme) damage control.

My opinion.

I was explaining to my sister about how my diagnosis, as an older adult, was going, and how it explained many things in my life. She immediately told me she suspects she has it, because she has a short attention span.

She is an elementary school principal, who leads a perfectly organized life, set on a path in her 20’s and has followed it to the letter, she has an insanely well set up financial structure, budgets to the cent, is learning a third language in her spare time, leads a regimented daily schedule, even on weekends and vacations.

Yeah.

Dry and then store in sealed container with silica gel. Silica will maintain dryness, but will not dry filament by itself.

Also, containers must have a seal of some kind. Regular plastic tubs will let some moisture in. For a few days or a couple of weeks that’ll be fine, but over a month they’ll let moisture in. Get vacuum bags.

There are pretty cheap reusable vacuum bags that use a little pump. I use a cheap kitchen vacuum machine, and regular food storage vacuum bags.

I live in a dry climate. Trust me, dry your PETG.

Get Rapid PETG. Regular PETG. I’ve printed a few rolls of regular PETG, and it can be a source of frustration. Same with PLA. Get a PLA +.

I live in a dry climate, and thought drying PETG was unnecessary. After a lot of frustration, I made a (very good) redneck dryer, and my printing life became much better. PETG really likes water, and printing humid PETG is a source of major frustration.

Also, don’t dry filaments in ovens, microwaves, or other food use things. A lot of idiots on YouTube recommend that, and it’s obvious that you don’t want to cook foods in ovens that have been coated in unknown VOCs.

Us nerds don’t buy laptops?

I don’t either, but there are many in my family and friends I will gladly support.

Shit. I used Baileys. Is that bad?

Also, metal needles or equivalent can raise contacts and do their damage. I cut the toothpicks with a cutter so that they are wedge shaped.

Wit

Titus tech tip’s windows decrapifying tool is pretty awesome for removing windows shit.

His YouTube channel is pretty cool too.

Toilet

Weaning yourself from doomscrolling to start focusing on (258) projects or hobbies is not embracing boredom, it’s getting your dopamine fix from positive things.

Time to order a few SanDisk cards

Neurodivergent is also a word I dislike. Neurodivergent literally means that your brain has strayed.

No, I’m not divergent. I have a certain type of traits.

This is intertwined with “Neurotypical” . There is no such thing. I have a professional relationship with one of Europe’s foremost Psychiatrists. Talking about this, he told me that the concept of the “normal”, i.e. well adjusted, reasonable, even-keel person may be applicable to maybe 20% of the population. Everyone else has some form of mental issue, often undiagnosed.

We are not sick, we have mind that evolved for purposes that are a lot less useful in the present. Meds allow us to tone down our tendencies, to be able to cope better in current societies.

If your meds are zombifying you, dosage or medication are not right. Ideally I’d shoot for baseline plus a small amount of ADD