Finished reading "ADHD Is Awesome" by Penn & Kim Holderness.

Part memoir, part family story, Penn shares his ADHD journey while Kim offers the partner's perspective. They're clear that no two diagnoses are alike, but this is their story and experience.

Relentlessly positive — sometimes to a fault — but the practical strategies feel genuinely lived-in and earnest. A warm entry point for anyone newly navigating an #ADHD diagnosis.

4/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180352087-adhd-is-awesome

#bookstodon

I am happy with this DECSystem-10 MUD system for now; it's been a 35-year task.

If anyone is bored enough to be curious!

31 January 1991: Essex University's DECSystem-10 closes, meaning that MIST and ROCK, and the dodgy version of MUD we had on there, had to close. I had a mostly working VMS system that would run it with some extra programming, but I'd already sent out AberMUD to Vijay, and he'd sent it out to the world, and TinyMUDs were becoming common. MIST was losing its captive audience, and it needed that level of addiction and co-dependence to run, so I decided to let it die in its prime, rather than become a sad old relic that nobody played.

2003 and the next 20 years: I decided to build a TOPS-10 system on a VMS machine and install MIST/MUD and ROCK. Got quite a long way, and then discovered there was no BCPL compiler existing anywhere in the known world. A few years later, Richard Bartle told me that Paul Allen (I think) had found one. So this became possible, and Quentin (dot-co-dot-uk) took a great stab at it with some really old code, and Viktor Toth had BL running, so I figured that was enough. Sometime in this period, Bletchley Park got something that looked like a PDP-10, and they suggested that I go and put MUD onto it for the museum. It wasn't a PDP-10, but I did look into putting it onto a VAX for a while, but the management of Bletchley, as it turned into The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), was getting more corporate and boring, so I gave up bothering.

19th Feb to 22nd Feb, 2026: I decided to build a PRIMOS machine on a Simh emulator for no apparent reason. It went fairly smoothly, so I wondered again about a DEC-10. I was missing TOPS-10 anyway, so why not? Proof of concept, setting up some test systems, seeing where TOPS-10 emulators were at these days and seeing how far Quentin had really got and how much extra work was needed. Realised I am going to have to start from scratch, mostly, using a prebuilt Steuben distro of TOPS-10 7.03 as the base.

Took a couple of weeks off to ponder whether the rest was worth it, but decided my $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription may as well pay for itself with background research, so I decided to go ahead.

9th March 9 to 18th March, 2026: A long sprint, and I mostly got it all working. 92 hours of concentrated swearing and about 15 hours of destroying the planet with GPT Deep Research mode later (*), after at least 2 false starts and complete wipes. I got a system I am relatively happy with. Somewhere in there is about 4 hours of relearning TECO and fighting with getting ROCK working on code it was never meant to work on. There's still more to do, but that's just maintenance now.

BUT I FOUND ROCK! I thought it was lost forever. Somehow, that's my major victory in all this. Building the setup was hard, tedious, and very frustrating work. It probably did need somebody who knew a lot about both DEC and Unix systems management, and the MUD engine, to guide it, but it was still mostly a matter of putting together things that already existed and forcing them to work together. ROCK, though, I genuinely thought was 100% lost.

It's taken a hundred plus concentrated hours, two new dedicated hosts, a small town's water supply, and probably a few megawatts of power in the background. But this is the final re-creation of the systems I closed at the start of the 1990s.

MIST (and MUD and ROCK) will still probably end up as relics that nobody properly plays, but this project is not pretending to be anything other than an interesting throwback and museum piece now, which, 35 years after I closed it down, seems a fitting end. It also means I can resurrect Duncan Rogerson's arch-wizard, and that seems right, somehow. I will leave it up and running now.

(*) Since someone whined about my use of GPT - I could not have mentioned it, but I did because, for some tasks like this one, it saved me hundreds of hours and a lot of Googling. If I have to pick (which I do!) I'd rather use GPT than Google still. One of the useful things you can do with Deep Research is to give it a topic you want to aggregate information on (like ACCESS.USR usage) and send it away to make a summary PDF of the key points of what's useful, but triple-checked and sourced. I have read the Original TOPS-10 manuals that are wonderfully hosted on @bitsavers many times, I could knock up a perfect ACCESS.USR in a drunken stupor, whilst half asleep once, but these days I barely remember the 3-part octal protections, so I am happy to have a reference I don't need to read 10 parts of 3 different manuals to make. That's why I use AI, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. Since I work in AI Ethics and actually put into practice what I preach, I am comfortable with my use of AI, and I always disclose it :P

#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security #TNMOC #blog #ADHD #Autism

Alt...

Old Man Yells At Cloud (Abe Simpson shaking his fist at the world)

Alt...

A 1970 brochure showing the typical layout of a DECSystem 10. Showing 17 large cabinets, and a console. There's no chair or hatstand in here to throw the tape rings at, it doesn't seem realistic.

#makeShitMonday, crochet edition, in which I have a socially acceptable fidget toy...

@mbroome and I are taking a weeklong vertical cave rescue class, and it has been a looooong time since I tried to cram this much information into my head this fast. Fortunately one of the course leaders is a teacher as her day job and understands ADHD, so she's totally okay with me crocheting my way through the classroom instruction.

We're three days in, and I've already finished the hat for my BIL and gotten a good start on the [crochet lace shrug](https://www.ilikecrochet.com/magazine/crochet-shawl-patterns/jade-vines-crochet-shrug/) I'm making with the nice cashmere yarn I got on super sale!

This shrug pattern is *perfect* for classroom #ADHD management - simple stitch, no finicky counting, just cluster into the chain-2 space over and over until I run out of yarn... 🥰 It's so much easier to concentrate on the lecture material when my hands are occupied! I even managed a halfway-decent Russian splice, from memory, when I ran into a break in the yarn.

@cannibal @crafters

Alt...

completed crochet lace hat in a blue & black gradient yarn, sitting on a task book for NCRC Level 1 cave rescue

Alt...

an ugly but serviceable Russian splice in red yarn, next to a paperback Manual of U.S. Cave Rescue Techniques

Alt...

completed crochet lace hat in a blue & black gradient yarn, sitting on a task book for NCRC Level 1 cave rescue

DO NOT CREATE THE BIG SIT!

#ADHD #ADHDMeme

Alt...

Screenshot of bluesky containing 3 posts by @ewacat.bsky.social Post 1: the only ADHD advice that anyone needs is: don't sit down, never sit down, sitting down is what gets you Post 2: gonna have a little sit before you do the thing? NO YOU WON'T. YOU HAVE CREATED A BIG SIT AND YOU ARE LOST IN IT. Post 3: the natural enemy of ADHDer is the sit down

A random shout-out to THE FLOOF.

When I first learned about this comfy dog basket for humans, it seemed like an exceptionally silly idea. But by now I can attest that this thing actually works well as a retreat for the neurodivergent during a sensory overload. We have bought or recommended several for autistic loved ones in our life and they absolutely love their floof.

It's also handmade by an Etsy shop owner, which is just great.

https://floofcouture.com

#autism #adhd

Alt...

A product photo of the floof.

where’s my #ADHD fam at? 👀 😩

Alt...

a still from the TV show Porn Stars, a show about people who bring in items that they hope will be very valuable treasures and the pawn shop staff who usual have to break it to them that their treasure is actually mundane and lacking value black text on a white background across the top of the image reads: Me: “Hi, I would like to be organized.” text across the image of the pawn shop staff reads: ADHD meds: “Best I can do is focus.”

@actuallyadhd @autistics

Ever had one of those days where, it's been so frelling long that you've forgotten what it's like to not be in burnout but you're also just mad at everything because there's no way out of burnout?

No official diagnosis & your GP threw out the preliminary test that said you're a good candidate for autism that you got years ago. The waiting list is impossibly long so by the time you:
1) Pluck up the dice / spoons to face the GP (I'm still working on it 😣)...
2) Get an appointment & (by a miracle) maybe still have the dice / spoons...
3) Actually persuade the GP an AuDHD diagnosis is what you need...
4) Jump through whatever hoops to get the preliminaries sorted...
5) Get the green light for getting a diagnosis...

... You'll be waiting so long, you won't need it anymore as you're too old to work & are on minimum pension.

My messed up bodyclock doesn't help either.

Oh, it's you Depression... 😫... Just what I need 😡😩.

I hate it when I give myself reality checks 😔.

#AuDHD #Autistic #ADHD #ActuallyADHD #ActuallyAutistic
#MindFog #Burnout #Spoons #NoSpoons
#SelfCare #Depression
#Life #Sleep #Insomnia #SleepProblems

Quite proud of myself.

As someone with #ADHD, it's fair to say that I am *shit* with money. I've always been very impulsive and really, really bad at saving.

So when we bought a new TV a couple of years ago with an Argos credit card I was eligible for, I was worried that I'd somehow fuck it up. I put together a spreadsheet detailing how much my repayments needed to be, largely so I could track it and know how I'm getting on with it.

Last year, the original TV went tits up. We managed to get a refund from LG, which we put towards a much better TV, which cost twice what the original did. I updated the spreadsheet accordingly and added another year's worth of repayments. Then I bought my kid some headphones on the card, and added them too.

Over the past two years I've missed two payments. One was planned, because we were going on holiday, and the other was two months ago, because it was January and I was skint, and kinda forgot.

The credit agreement ends in 15 days, and I've just made the penultimate repayment.

I've got £45 left on the card, on which I'll have to pay a few pence in interest next month.

And then the TV is all mine.

I'm 45 and I've never manged to do that before.

#ADHD

Alt...

ADHD is the most poorly named affliction ever. like hi do you have a profound physical inability to accomplish your goals specifically because they're your goals and also the thought of your friends not liking you makes you want to die? You may have trouble sitting still disorder.  it's so obvious they named it based on how we inconvenience them rather than what it actually does 

This is a stupid and unreasonable #adhd whine

My #bluetooth #headphones take too long to turn on and off.

When I'm done using them, I want to talk away from the computer NOW. I don't want to spend 5s holding a little button down until that's interpreted as a "long press" and it powers off.

So my choices are to be mildly annoyed every time I leave the computer OR be majorly annoyed once in a while when I find them completely uncharged.

@murdoc @autistics
Announcement: I've got my Luanti/Voxelibre game server (Minecraft clone) set up on an automated timer, should you wish to join. The game times (and other connection details) are here:
https://docs.autis.toque.im/#timing/
The server is *only* on for those listed 4 hours per week. This is to encourage everyone joining at a regularly-recurring time. That's tomorrow late afternoon to evening.
If you're into Minecraft-style trains/train-construction, hang gliders, or steampunk blimps, then this server especially for you! There are also wild animals wandering around. You might see an occasional #owl if you're fortunate.

I can possibly be convinced to download and enable new Luanti mods, once assured they are Voxelibre-compatible. But having said this, too many mods, installed with reckless abandon, might make the server unstable.

PS: there is a technical support forum for luanti here: https://forum.luanti.org/

#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #ADHD #game #games #gamedev

@Ric wow this is really well written & understandable! Thanks a lot for digging it up and sharing it here.

I can feel my next #ADHD hyperfocus weekend coming up already😂

Please remember that, to #autists or other #ND folk,
a "meltdown" is not a #tantrum, or 'throwing a bit of a wobbler', it's something very real, that isn't at all what you think it is. Thanks 👍😀

#Autism
#ADHD
#AuDHD
#neurodiversity
#neurodivergence

Anti-intellectualism isn't only attacking the concept of expert knowledge and people who have it, but also attacking and dismissing the people who could, even if in many cases only partially, have and understand that knowledge in the future.

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing", but having less of it just leaves more room for belief, speculation and resentment and therfore makes it more dangerous.

6/6

#ActuallyAutistic #ADHD #AntiIntellectualism #Autism #Education #Expertise #Learning

EDIT: #PleaseBoost to help with federation.

#Introduction #IntroductionPost #NewHere #NewInstance

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve"… or something.

Hello, or hello again—if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything nice.

If you think you know me by another name… I cannot argue with that… not even a little bit.

New here, and by that I mean that this is a brand new instance.

Single user GoToSocial instance, self-hosted on my own hardware; this is not my first.  It's just like that scene from the Matrix with the Architect: we just keep torching it and starting over, and we're starting to get pretty damned good at torching it.

I've had a WriteFreely instance before, and I think I might have another one here in the near future, honestly.

GED in 2011 at 17; no qualifications otherwise, at least literally on paper.

No human children; cat dad, though.

NixOS diehard on desktop/server.  The host machine for the VM for this server, as well as the VM itself, both run NixOS and always will.  Currently using Niri on the host machine and loving it. GrapheneOS diehard on mobile.

Love projects, especially the kind that are never finished because they're never supposed to be.

Grew up in Oregon and moved to New Mexico with my family when they did.

I ride a unicycle.  Trying to learn violin. These things don't necessarily have anything to do with each other, I hope.

ADHD and Tourette Syndrome, both professionally diagnosed for the first time when I was 20-something.

My dad passed away last October.

#ADHD #Cinemastodon #FediLab #FilmReview #GoToSocial #Memes #MovieReview #Movies #NM #NewMexico #Niri #NixOS #SelfHosted #TouretteSyndrome #Tourettes #Unicycle #WriteFreely

More than half of TikTok ADHD content is misinformation, new research finds The Independent

#adhd #tiktok #socialmedia #misinformation
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/tiktok-adhd-misinformation-autism-mental-health-neurodivergence-social-media-b2941211.html