Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es

stream canceled due to tech issues

https://twitch.tv/madewokherd Still doing the chaotic game-switchy thingy.

This might be an adaptive characteristic based on teachers frequently asking me to do things that I found practically impossible. If I weren't able to disregard them, it would've destroyed me.

It might also be where I learned to accept my experiences as real, even if no one else seems to get it or believe them.

In certain ways, adults trained me from an early age not to trust them.

I'm realizing that in most of my life I'm not very responsive to external motivation, but in software development I absolutely am. Or maybe it's just that the flavor of external motivation I respond to is "this has a concrete benefit for someone" and not "someone is asking me to do this".

A project I've been working on for 2 years is now out in the wild (Proton bleeding-edge branch, enabled by default for 4 games: the non-special-edition Skyrim release, Mugster, Clustertruck, and Red Faction). It add gamepad support to launchers that don't have it built in. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/627d220fa3d7a489ddf258a96b2bf557604d5db9

This is real and not an April Fools joke.

So the process of quieting our brain was:

• Observe (through meditation, hypnosis, or whatever works) how you think.
• Try to identify the whole chain of events. For us, that was a nonverbal thought followed by internal speech. Which led to more thoughts, causing a feedback loop.
• Once you can see the chain of events, find a way to intentionally interrupt it. We did that by directing our attention to somewhere there weren't thoughts.
• Practice until it's easy.

We had the important realization recently that there was a condition that needed to be met before we could learn that. In order to decide not to voice a thought, we had to be aware of thoughts before we heard them. But it wasn't enough to just observe them as many people do in meditation, once we could observe them we had to actively suppress our automatic response to them.

Backstory: We used to have constant verbal chatter going on in our brain. It didn't stop even when we slept, it just became incoherent. Then, we started exploring hypnosis, and at some point it clicked, and we found a way to, with difficulty, not voice our thoughts. It was such a relief, and we practiced it until it became the default, and our mind became much quieter and calmer. We've wished since then to teach it, but we never understood well enough how it happened.

Does anyone else have, like, a nearly-transparent layer of static overlaid on their vision, only noticeable if you focus on it or turn off perceptual filters?

https://twitch.tv/madewokherd am doing a little chaos

Boost if you cook like a video game where you just smash some ingredients together and see what happens.

I just read a message that started "one of my friends had a weird glitch" and for a moment thought that this was referring to the friend's behavior rather than a computer system the friend was interacting with. -Menderbot

gender-affirming mare