Sobbing uncontrollably reading through a dissertation about the college experience of students with ADHD. It is like reading a report about my life that just says over and over "My experiences are real. My hardships are real. I am not lazy, I am not dumb. My struggles were not my fault, and they were not a moral failing. The failure was with the system, not with me."
Here's a line that got me in particular:
"Hotez et al.(2022) compared the health, academic, and non-academic capacities of a nationally representative sample of U.S. first-year college students with ADHD and without ADHD. Students with ADHD self-reported lower academic aspirations and more feelings of depression and overwhelm, ranking themselves lower in their general emotional health. The fact that students with ADHD scored in the highest 10th percentile for many non-academic traits, such as artistic ability, computer skills, creativity, public speaking, social confidence, self-understanding and understanding of others, compassion, and risk-tasking, suggests that this population has strengths that are frequently underappreciated in academia."
(the paper is a thesis called "Understanding the Collegiate Experience for Students With ADHD" by Gia Long, 2022)
An Israeli influence campaign is using hundreds of online avatars and fake social media accounts to attack Democratic lawmakers critical of Israel and promote news articles disapproving of the United Nations Palestine refugee agency (Unrwa), according to a report by the Israeli online watchdog, Fake Reporter.
According to the report, the targeted campaign has used more than 600 avatars, sending out 58,000 tweets and social media posts to circulate articles published by The Guardian, CNN and Wall Street Journal, among other major news outlets that amplify Israel’s position on the war.
The campaign relies on three major social networks, UnFold Magazine, Non-Agenda and The Moral Alliance, which were created prior to the war in Gaza. But the Hamas-led 7 October attack on southern Israel sent the accounts into round-the-clock posting.
The sites, according to Fake Reporter, are geared specifically to a “progressive audience”, publishing content on climate change, AI regulation, and human rights, in addition to the war in Gaza. They have more than 43,000 followers across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The avatars promoting the content talk up their identity with lines like, “As a middle-aged African American woman” and use hashtags like #FaithJourney and #AfricanAmericanSpirituality.
Some examples from the report:
And continuing,
The avatars were all created on the same day and their profiles were written with the same formula, subbing out just a few words. The declared gender and ethnicity of the avatars don’t match the profile photos, which have been taken from websites selling headshots.
The campaign works to amplify news stories published by major media outlets. First, the fake news sites share the reports. Then, the avatars share them across social media, including on the official accounts of Democratic lawmakers.
Avatars also shared social media posts showing video clips of what appeared to be Pro-Palestinian protestors calling for "massacres to be normalised" and calling for the US to "go to hell", contrasting that with peaceful protests of pro-Israel protestors.
In other cases, Avatars simply reshared widely published video clips of US lawmakers questioning the heads of Ivy League schools about antisemitism on campus.
[...] According to the report, around 85 percent of all the US politicians targeted by the campaign were Democrats, and 90 percent of them were African Americans.
Ritchie Torres, a black Democratic Congressman with generally pro-Israel views, garnered the most social media engagement from the avatars. Other lawmakers targeted included Cori Bush; Lucy McBath; House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries; and Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock.
Israeli news site Haaretz reported in January that the Israeli government had launched an online influence campaign to respond to pro-Palestinian content and reports about Hamas.
It’s unclear whether the campaign revealed by Fake Reporter is part of that initiative.
rewatched TG:M all the way through for the first time in a couple months, and god. hans zimmer did not have to put everything he owned into that singular swell. and neither did literally everyone else.
maverick: terrified and alone, realizing his son basically just blew up in front of him
cyclone warlock and hondo: different levels of hopelessness, expediting the mourning process so they can continue with the mission
hangman: physically stops breathing. can’t focus. he has to hyperventilate to get oxygen back in his body. all he’s thinking about is bradley seven summers ago, when they were still okay. and now he’s never going to be able to apologize for everything. it’s his fault. he’s the better pilot, everyone knows it, but bradley had the winning hand, the ace in the hole. so he should’ve tried harder with maverick, not picked as many fights, flown better, flown faster, fought harder, been different, done everything different. you can physically pinpoint something inside himself dying alongside bradley.
Wild how we know that Elizabeth Woodville was officially appointed to royal councils in her own right during her husband’s reign and fortified the Tower of London in preparation of a siege while 8-months pregnant and had forces gathering at Westminster “in the queen’s name” in 1483 – only for NONE of these things to be even included, let alone explored, in the vast majority of scholarship and historical novels involving her.
Look who’s back to wreak havoc on my household!!! She’s been with her siblings for the past month or so while Rebecca and I were traipsing around the country for dog shows, but she’s home again at last 🥰
just so you know, if your partner/lover/spouse/etc. ever makes fun of you for your interests, and not in the silly goofy fun way because we can all laugh at ourselves sometimes, but in the mean-spirited way that makes you feel small and like your interests are inferior, you have blanket permission to summon me and I will appear and beat them with a nerf bat. or a real baseball bat. up to you, I’ll bring both.
genuinely want teen summer camp with Henry Oak. not because his Ways could "fix" the teens or whatever, by breathing and talking about their feelings, but because the crumbs of it they do pick up on in combination with whatever teen nonsense they do that implodes Henry's summer camp plans might
fact: doc has a saxophone in his garage in both 1955 and 1985, with seemingly no ties to his scientific pursuits. hypothesis: theres some sentimental reason, maybe he played (plays?) it as a hobby since and/or prior to 1955...? conclusion: they def had at least one jam session
Never in my life did I watch something quite as ridiculous, pointless, without any coherent sense of direction or self as The Acolyte. Start to finish it created its own 'threats' and 'issues' to artificially stimulate a plot that never had a single point to be made. What on earth were they thinking? Nothing in this series follows its own internal logic. The character motivations are all over the place and often simply contradict themselves within the same episode. The intrigue and the foreshadowing all come to a null when the reveals literally are not in par with what was implied and just generally--- what on earth? You cannot say I did not come open minded. Watched all the episodes, given it grace and opportunity time and time again to prove itself but--- no, no it's actually just the worst tv show I've ever seen, and that's a serious claim as I watched quite a few bad ones I enjoyed more than I did this one. Don't even get me started on how fundamentally lacking they are in understanding what the Jedi are and who they are as an entity, there was no idea of the self or the values or even codes of the Jedi in this show. Something that could have been such a wonderful and intriguing show, with visuals we all were craving (Jedi Temple) it ended up being below mid-show, shot almost in its whole entirety on a planet that looks 100% like earth with zero intriguing visuals or anything to justify the monstrous budget they had to burn through. Wow, kudos on creating something so empty of meaning I am not even angry after watching it, only baffled that someone actually wrote it and someone actually thought it was good enough to film. Damn.
I've been thinking about the tragedy of Elizabeth Woodville living to see the end of her family name.
I don't mean her family with her husband, which lived on through her daughter and grandson. I mean her own.
Her sisters died, one by one, many of them after 1485. When Elizabeth died, only Katherine was left, and she would die before the turn of the century as well.
All her brothers died, too. Lewis died in childhood. John was executed. Anthony was murdered. Lionel died suddenly in the peak of Richard's reign, unable to see his niece become queen. Edward perished at war. Richard died in grieving peace. For all the violence and judgement the family endured, it was "an accident of biology" that ended their line: none of the brothers left heirs, and the Woodville name was extinguished. We know the family was aware of this. We know they mourned it, too:
“Buy a bell to be a tenor at Grafton to the bells now there, for a remembrance of the last of my blood.”
Elizabeth lived through the deposition and death of her young sons, and lived to see the end of her own family name. It must have been such a haunting loss, on both sides.