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First off: I added yet another page to my website, haha. This one is an OC Directory formatted like a newspaper. It's mostly silly right now, pretty full of my sense of humor and not a lot of substance, but I'm planning to add subpages with actual bios for my characters over time, to replace my old weebly directory.

In less fun news, I've been thinking about a lot of things, but especially critical thinking. I keep seeing misinformation, targeted campaigns to try to convince people of things that aren't true, for a variety of purposes. Sometimes political, sometimes a personal vendetta, sometimes seemingly just for the heck of it. And I think about kids in schools relying on AI to write papers and as a way to avoid engaging with the class, and to avoid, like... learning. At all. In any meaningful way. And I think that's by design.

I think about how facism relies on people believing disinformation, how fascism endeavors to take away access to the tools to spot lies and hear propoganda and manipulation for what it is. How it destroys community, so people don't have a support system that can help them see the lies and disinformation for what they are, and combat it. How it depends on people feeling hopeless outnumbered and giving up because facism feels inevitable in the kind of environment it works to create.

I don't think I have anything helpful to add to any of it, I've just been noticing it a lot. I also have someone in my immediate family who has ADHD and struggles quite badly with empathy and they are likely linked. They have a hard time putting themself in the place of others, with considering any person's point of view besides their own. It seems to be something nearly impossible for them, but I know that's not true. I've been struggling a lot to understand what the difficulty is, because I also have ADHD but I figured it out a long time ago. So why can't they? Do they really just not give a fuck? I don't think that's it, although it sure feels like that a lot of the time.

I guess I'm trying to spend more time putting myself in other peoples' shoes, to figure out where they're coming from, as a way to practice the skills I need to fight things like fascism. Human minds and their infinite variety have always fascinated me, so it's not like it's a hardship to practice it more, but I've been feeling extra pressure lately, I think. It's never been more important to connect with people, to relate to them, and, maybe most importantly, to leave space to allow people to be different from one another, and to find a way to be okay with that.