December 2019 archive

My Ancestry results are in!

According to 23andMe, I am:
56.9% British and Irish
27.5% German
1.7% Scandinavian
10.5% Broadly Northwestern European
2.2% Southern European (this was formerly Portuguese/Spanish)
1.1% Broadly European
(and before this, 0.10% Broadly Northern East African, where’d that go?)

According to Ancestry, I am:
71% from England, Wales, and Northwestern Europe
25% from Ireland and Scotland
4% from Germany

That’s quite a stretch between the two of them.

Honestly, I think my Germanic DNA and my Irish DNA are having a fistfight.

I didn’t expect them to be so vastly different in terms of feedback, but here we are, I suppose!

“I won’t defeat this boss for my kids.”

This is actually something that I have heard gamer (gaming?) parents say.

It’s usually also the ones who state that “anyone who uses walkthroughs is not a real gamer, or not a good enough gamer,” so the two kind of go hand in hand. I try to avoid these parents if I see them “out in the wild”.

They literally say, with their mouths, that if their kids struggle in a game that they will not help them. Or some of them say that they will, but that they “won’t help them with the final boss, because they have to do it on their own”. Do you know what kind of message that might send your struggling kid, especially if they’re young? Not only do the kind of parents that say these things tend to… carry it over into other aspects of parenting, but this is a really fantastic way to make your child want to give up on gaming (which is another thing that these parents, the Patrons of Gaming, would probably seethe over if it happened in front of them).

Tell me though, what is so bad about helping your child when they need it?

What is so bad about helping your child when they need any sort of help from you?

Because that sends the message that they can come to you for help for any reason and that you will be there to help them no matter what. And this will achieve exactly what you want to achieve but are going about trying to achieve in the worst possible way — your child will remain interested in video games and might pass that interest on to their children. (Or, you could do exactly what you’re doing now, cause your child not to be interested in video games at all, and stop that with this generation. This is your call here…)

Ways that I accommodate for my disabilities.

These are just some of them, and I thought I would share them here.

· wearing sunglasses in the house, or indoors, as necessary
· keeping lights in my area of the house dimmed (sufficiently on, but dimmed)
· keeping the brightness setting on my cell phone suitably low
· running fl.ux on my computer in Cave Painting mode
· taking medication for migraines at the very first signs of a migraine, rather than questioning it
· setting up posts to queue when I’m feeling alright, just in case I have a particularly bad migraine (for me)
· getting as many non-daily chores done as I can when I’m “having a good run of things”
· trying to limit screen time (especially so I can “use those spoons” on video games for Bub as needed!)
· keeping the volume low, or even off, on things unless it absolutely needs to be on for whatever reason
· making sure that I get plenty of sleep each night, and making the conscious effort to do so

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