modern-leper

[modern-leper]

from letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke

[modern-leper]

The best advice i can give any creator is do it before you're good at it, do it BEFORE you're happy, do it while you suck, do it while you're doubting yourself and get stuck the fuck in, because waiting around to be "good enough" is a motherfucking trap of the highest degree. You'll get good along the way and better after every project is complete. Remember, this is the greatest thing you've ever created, and then you'll do something else. You're only ever gonna get better, but not if you stand still.

[modern-leper]

i swallow my own shadow and return to myself

[modern-leper]

[modern-leper]

decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

[modern-leper]

Psychologist Katharina Bernecker and her colleagues measured participants’ tendency to engage in self-control as well as their hedonic capacity, in other words, their ability to experience pleasure. As the design of this study implies, people vary in their ability to enjoy things! Some people just experience pleasure more readily and are more motivated by pleasure than others! This alone should lend you some comfort, I think. If you are not an especially pleasure-wired person, whether by trait or by trauma, you are far from alone.

People high in hedonic capacity were people who tended to agree with the following statements (note, some at the end of the list are reverse-scored):

I am good at pursuing my desires. I can follow my desires in the here and now. I often do what I feel like doing. In my spare time, I can relax well. In my spare time, I can "switch off" well. In my spare time, I find it difficult to turn off thoughts about what is still left to do. Thoughts about my work sometimes prevent me from enjoying pleasant activities and moments. Sometimes I cannot stop myself from thinking about things I still need to do. I often think about my duties even while I am enjoying a good moment. I often think after the fact that I should have enjoyed the moment more.

These high hedonic capacity pleasure-seekers were compared with people high in self-control, who tend to agree with the following items (or to disagree with the reverse-scored items, which are marked with a minus sign):

1. I am good at resisting temptation. 2. I have a hard time breaking bad habits. - 3. I am lazy. - 4. I say inappropriate things. - 5. I do certain things that are bad for me, if they are fun. - 6. I refuse things that are bad for me. 7. I wish I had more self-discipline. - 8. People would say that I have iron self-discipline. 9. Pleasure and fun sometimes keep me from getting work done. - 10. I have trouble concentrating. - 11. I am able to work effectively toward long-term goals. 12. Sometimes I can't stop myself from doing something, even if I know it is wrong. - 13. I often act without thinking through all the alternatives. -

If you are a person who has masked your Autism traits for a long time, or otherwise carefully regulates how you present yourself and the choices you make about your behavior, then congratulations, you are probably a very high self-controlling individual. And if you find it very difficult to slow down in the moment or experience pleasure, you probably don’t have a very large hedonic capacity.

In a series of three studies, Bernecker and colleagues looked at how high self-control and high hedonic capacity individuals approached spending their free time. When given an hour to spend however they liked, participants who were high in hedonic capacity (in other words, the ability to enjoy pleasure) preferred to pursue activities that they ranked as highly pleasurable, including baking, eating, napping, talking with a loved one, or taking a walk. Conversely, individuals who were highly self-controlling were more likely to spend their time doing activities that they ranked as meaningful (such as reading, working, gardening, doing chores, or working out).

It might sound pretty self-evident that people who are interested in pleasure choose to spend their time on pleasure and that people who exert a lot of restraint over themselves choose instead to take part in activities they find meaningful. But what’s really interesting here, I think, is how much participants enjoyed the activities that they selected and found them satisfying.

It turns out that high self-controllers didn’t just decide to spend their free time doing laundry or working because they felt they should do so. They also got more satisfaction from meaningful tasks, more than if they had chosen to spend their time on supposedly ‘pleasurable’ activities. They were not motivated by the pursuit of straightforward pleasure. They ranked reading a book, knocking an item off the to-do list, or lifting some weights as more enriching, fulfilling, and motivating for them, and they cared more about these aspects of life than they did about pleasure! Individuals high in hedonic capacity, in contrast, preferred and were more satisfied with activities they said left them feeling soothed, amused, relaxed, indulged, and so on.

This study points to the fact that happiness is not everything, and people actually differ quite dramatically in which ways of spending their time make their lives better. And that means there are no recommendations for leading a good life that are one size fits all.

If you are someone high in self-control and low in hedonic capacity, you may have had the frustrating experience of trying to lay back and relax on your day off and being unable to quiet the whirring of your brain. You take a bath, but you can’t keep your eyes off the soap-scummy grout that needs to be scrubbed off. You share a languid restaurant meal with a best buddy, but through every course you can’t help but think about the items on your to-do list and grow panicky and bored.

Now of course, an inability to enjoy activities can come from burnout, depression, or excessive pressure to be productive. But you also might feel frustrated when you seek pleasure because you are just not wired to enjoy pleasure right now, and would find it easier to let go and enjoy yourself if you had an interesting challenge to keep you busy instead. Many Autistic people find working on a project related to their special interests to be a far better way of recharging their energy and lifting their mood than attempting to “relax” or have fun in neurotypical-approved ways. You may find, Anon, that the same is true of you.

In Bernecker and colleagues’ paper, participants high in self-control tended to appreciate activities that they described with the following adjectives. Why don’t you take a moment to read through this list, then write down what life activities feel this way for you?

What Activities Feel:

Meaningful?

Worthwhile?

Fulfilling?

Productive?

Important?

Purposeful?

Inspiring?

Elevating?

Motivating?

Enriching?

An interesting challenge of Autism unmasking is figuring out what a worthwhile life even feels like for us, and abandoning the expectation that such a life will feel the way it does for non-Autistics. Our best lives might not look happy, outgoing, energized, extroverted, or anything else that we have been taught it has to be.

I wrote all about the inability to experience pleasure, the fact that we evolved to be anxious more than to be happy -- and how to make life worthwhile in spite of it all. You can read the full article for free on my Substack.

[modern-leper]

One of the greatest songs ever made by the way!

[modern-leper]

decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

[modern-leper]

from an article on fag hags in xy magazine. featured are photographs of gay men with their hags, published july 1999.

[modern-leper]

Good addition to the list of words here

[modern-leper]

2024 + HORROR

[modern-leper]

Arrested Development – 2.12: Hand to God

[modern-leper]

Hey kid you want a job?

Great get online and go to a job board. Indeed, Linkedin whatever. Now you're gonna search for a role that's in your city, fits your qualifications, and doesn't seem like a bad time.

See that easy apply button? Don't hit it they just throw those in the trash. Now you're gonna want to go to the company's website and check their careers page.

Oh? That job doesn't exist anymore. Cool go back to the job board and find another one.

Great you found another job, you're on the company's career page and the job exists!! So you're going to need to make an account on the career page website. They're using Workday, the same site as the last job you applied for? Who cares? You need to make another account for THIS job's workday page.

Now you're going to upload your resume. That'll autopopulate about 15 boxes with everything on your resume, except formatted wrong and with tons of errors. So just go through and painstakingly check the dates on all of that and rewrite everything you already laid out in an aesthetically pleasing format on your resume.

Ok time for the cover letter, explain why this specific job and company are deeply important to you. You love their mission statement and wouldn't even laugh if their ceo was gunned down in the street. You'll really want to reiterate the things you just spent the last 20 minutes filling out on the resume section

(Remember to include language from the job description, people who work in HR are lower than dogs and they need patterns or they get confused.) Write about a page, but hey don't sound too desperate or robotic this is where they judge your character!

Maybe add your portfolio site at the end here, who knows if that helps no one has ever clicked mine haha.

Anywayyy time to hit apply! Congrats! You'll see that confirmation email come in and you should be getting the rejection letter in about 2 weeks. Unfortunately your resume didn't have the right buzzwords and the AI auto rejected you :(

Time to start again and try not to kill yourself!

[modern-leper]

where's that picture that ruined my life

[modern-leper]

self indulgence isn’t self respect, giving yourself every unhealthy thing you want isn’t self respect, babying yourself and having no deadlines or hard and fast rules for how to live would not be how u treat someone whose intelligence and work ethic you respect …….you have to act out of respect for your Self first and foremost

[modern-leper]

[modern-leper]

nothing dry abt the way i hump