InvisibleUp

I brought up here on HN in a similar ADHD thread just a couple of months ago that I was going through an investigation with my therapist for ADHD.

Yesterday we finalised it and I got the diagnosis, I have ADHD. When reading through resources like this: https://invisibleup.com/articles/27/ I could relate to an extreme extent to a lot written there. Both in the blog post as in some of the further resources linked in the end.

I've gone downhill since the pandemic started, it was bad before but I've definitely tumbled down (and hence why I also started searching why I was like that). Initially I thought it was just some bad behaviour: being lazy, being tired and/or that my anxiety was getting worse due to the pandemic. I never had major issues with anxiety before but it runs in my family and I started feeling it physically.

Yesterday I finally understood myself better. I've felt guilt and shame through my whole life for simply not being able to perform with the same work ethic as my peers. Guilt and shame for feeling overwhelmed when I have tons of messages from friends and family to answer. Guilt and shame for procrastinating seemingly mundane tasks, being a time optimist when planning my day, not being able to organise myself with to-do lists and long-term planning, etc.

I did very well in school but could never do homework, or any kind of school project I wasn't interested in the subject. Just sheer pressure from stress could move me to do the minimum to get a decent…

I don't know how not a single comment here has mentioned ADHD, but it's possible your kid could be suffering from some form of executive dysfunction that could be linked to ADHD. Internet gaming (and the internet in general) intentionally exploits these types of vulnerabilities, which makes it even worse. Here are some resources on ADHD:

https://invisibleup.com/articles/27/

https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html

https://twitter.com/ErynnBrook/status/1011311249513070594

I am autistic and have ADHD myself so I know a bit about it. If you suspect something it may be worth bringing it up with your kid to see if they care. If they're anything like me they'll care, but if they don't care the situation gets a lot more complicated.

In other words: there's a difference between genuinely wanting to get good grades and not being able to, and blowing it off because you only want to do the bare minimum. I fell into the former bracket. Solutions vary between them.

"Not being able to" doesn't mean not being capable of doing it. It usually means being fully capable of doing it but being unable to actually get your brain to do it because it wants to do something else more. This is a thing and it's called ADHD. It's usually easy to tell when someone has it because they can be incredibly gifted and then barely manage to use that gift (resulting in everyone calling them lazy).

For some context about why a portable, user-friendly, hardware-level emulator for classic Mac systems is such a big deal, see this blog post from 2020: https://invisibleup.com/articles/30/

For game consoles, we've had emulators like Nestopia and bsnes and Dolphin and Duckstation for years.

For PCs, virtualisation systems like VMWare and VirtualBox have covered most people's needs, and recently there's been high-fidelity emulators like 86Box and MartyPC.

The C64 has VICE, the Amiga has WinUAE, even the Apple II has had high-quality emulators like KEGS and AppleWin, but the Mac has mostly been limited to high-level and approximate emulators like Basilisk II.