Finally, after almost two years of waiting, my insurance cleared me to do a neuropsychological assessment. After ten sessions speaking with a specialist, she diagnosed me as 2e, gifted and ADHD. Yay.

I was pretty certain that I had ADHD, but I also thought I might be on the autism spectrum. This is a very important result for me, because in case I ever need to find a new psychiatrist I won't have to go through that old loop of being treated like a drug addict because I want ADHD medication. Lisdexamphetamine works extremely well for me, and it would be a shame if I had to stop taking it.

I have to admit I was surprised at her assessment that I'm not autistic. I scored pretty high on the RAADS-R and I notice several aspects of autism in my behavior. It would explain many things. However, she thinks I am... gifted.

Let me tell you folks, I need some help with that. I hadn't thought about this before, and I'm really sorry to say this, because I feel like I'm really close to being ableist here, but... I hate being gifted. The reason why I say that is that I had never really considered what it looks like to even discuss giftedness.

I've been online for a couple of years, lurking in spaces that discussed neurodiversity, this site included, and I found these spaces to be full of incredibly cool people. Open-minded, welcoming, warm people who want to share their experience being neurodivergent. People who discuss ADHD and autism not as something to be ashamed of, but as a unique part of their own identity.

But then when I look for communities dedicated to gifted people, I might as well be trying to browse a MENSA forum. Everywhere I looked it was always a gaggle of people humblebragging about their IQ and how it's so difficult to be so much deeper than everyone around you. The "highest IQ" people were out there saying the dumbest shit I had ever seen.

That's when I realized that I don't even know how to talk about this. Neurotypical people are largely open to discussing autism and ADHD. Nowadays, with increasing awareness of the implications of neurodivergence, I find that people have become increasingly open-minded and willing to learn about how to accommodate the needs that neurodivergent people might have.

However, how am I supposed to tell people that I'm gifted without sounding like an asshole? According to this assessment, I have a very high IQ, but that's not something I feel comfortable discussing with most people. I will talk openly about my ADHD, but it really sucks that this other aspect of my brain that I'm so eager to discuss and learn more about has to be kept under wraps, because otherwise people will think I'm an arrogant prick.

I hope you folks understand. How do you even deal with a giftedness assessment? What's your experience talking about it with people who are less informed about neurodivergence, and do not understand the negative side of giftedness? It honestly feels like the loneliest part of my brain.

Also, one last thing. My personality assessment had a category of traits related to openness, as in the Big Five personality model. Within this category, there's a trait identified as liberalism, and I'm in the 80th percentile for that. I believe this means I've been officially diagnosed as the least liberal person on this website.

No but seriously, what the hell is going on with his eyebrows lmao

Hey comrades, I've found myself over the past four months or so becoming a huge mechanical keyboard nerd. It's an expensive hobby but it's so much fun and I want to know if anybody else here has also fallen into this money black hole.

I'm currently exploring different keyboard sizes, my new 75% is about to arrive but I think my favorite so far has been my 65%. Judging from my personal experience, I'm pretty sure I'll be a 75% guy mostly. I have no interest in trying a 60%, because I love the convenience of having arrow keys.

I used to think I needed a numpad, but nowadays I find full-size to be way too large and unwieldy. My GMK104 is gathering dust, probably soon to be sold, and my F108 Pro (the keyboard that got me hooked on this hobby) is up for sale. My goal is to make my own keyboards, and I'm probably going to start by making a DIY numpad that I can use alongside my 65% or 75%.

I've been exploring switches and I find that the whole thing about thocky keyboards is way overblown. I want loud clack with a sharp bottom-out, and I can't really make up my mind as to whether I prefer tactiles or linears. I've tried excellent switches of both types. I might lean a bit towards tactile, but not by much really.

Although I'm okay with burning through the disposable fraction of my income on this stuff, I'm not made of money. I won't be trying high-end switches, or any switches that are not available with affordable shipping from Aliexpress. I'm very happy with my experience so far with affordable ones, like Akko, HMX (my favorites), MMD, KTT, Outemu and Gateron.

Regarding keyboards, I don't see myself ever buying anything that costs more than about $60 or $70. Duty fees are extremely high in my country and my currency is very undervalued right now. I'm happy with my GMK67 and GMK87, and I have a QK81 on its way right now. I found a Loop 65 for a ridiculously low price on Aliexpress recently, so I got myself one as well, but that's as far as I'll go with buying keyboards. From now on all my new keyboards will be homemade!

In fact, having this goal of making my own keyboards has been incredibly rewarding and motivating. I'm currently relearning how to work with electronics a decade after dropping out of engineering school, learning how to use a CNC (I have a cheap 3018 that I'm still figuring out), refining my 3D printing and modeling skills and, since I'm a woodworker, I'm thinking my DIY keyboards will have wooden cases.

I don't really have a community or many friends with whom I can nerd out over this kind of thing. There's an insane amount of gatekeeping in this hobby, more so than in other hobbies I've explored in the past, and I think that if any of my fellow Hexbears are into this stuff, I'm sure you'd be the coolest people to talk about this stuff with!

So I saw that CoD Black Ops 6 was free until tomorrow and decided to give it a go. It's been at least a decade since I've last played a CoD game, and I have fond memories of a time when I could play one of these games without rolling my eyes at the non-political politics of badass operator slop. I also remember that incredible Soviet campaign from CoD World at War and that was enough to give this game the benefit of the doubt.

My overall impression is: What in the name of everloving fuck is this thing?

First off, it was a 150GB download. What is this, a massive open-world game? This is not Starfield, there's nothing here that could possibly justify this size. But eh, whatever, just went ahead and downloaded it overnight, installed it and then booted it for the first time last night.

What greeted me was several layers of separation from the actual game. It asked me to create an Activision account, which then rebooted the game, then it showed me a whole screen full of DLC and loot that I could presumably buy with whatever the fuck currency they're using.

It was, simply put, a shopping mall stocked with colorful guns and variations of camo outfits and hats and whatnot. It was utterly undecipherable to me. How do I get out of this screen? I struggled to actually find out how to continue on to the game because the screen was just covered in an endless amount of garbage and season pass ads and whatever else. It gave me flashbacks to the time when I tried to play Gears of War 5 and was greeted by pretty much the same abomination of a screen. Is this what triple-A is supposed to look like now?

Anyways, I navigated my way just barely in order to find a button, any button, that would take me to the fucking game. There was one that would take me to the multiplayer lobbies, another one for the zombies mode, another one that would take me to a store, and presumably half a dozen other ones where I would go to a hundred different things that were not the goddamn single player campaign.

Finally, I made it, found the button, with my thumb already reaching for the alt key and my middle finger wanting to stretch towards F4, and I booted the goddamn campaign. It closed what I thought was the game window, and restarted into what seems to be another executable. Was I not even in the game yet?

Anyways, all this to play just two missions and feel bored mindless after like half an hour. It's still pretty much the same gameplay from a decade and a half ago, but a little bit more advanced and better looking. Generic badass operator slop, very well produced and the generous budget clearly shows, but it's so goddamn boring.

It boggles the mind how this shit can keep going on after so long, the same game being re-released every year. Who even needs AI slop when we can have humans putting out this shit that's essentially just a premium form of generic content?

As a palate cleanser before going to sleep, I booted Tactical Breach Wizards. You know what happened? I double clicked the desktop icon, and within twenty seconds I was playing the fucking game. No ads, no nonsense, no trying to upsell me after I paid for the base game. Just a damn good game that I can sit down and play.

https://ground.news/

I haven't seen much discussion about this website in here, and I'd like to know what you all think of it. I've seen it being advertised by several Youtubers I follow, and I've been meaning to check it out for a while. The paid features don't really seem all that exciting, to be honest, and I took a look at it and instantly spotted an overwhelming amount of bullshit in their "left-right" scale for describing news sources.

That being said, I'm The One True Communist on Hexbear and thus immune to such gimmicks. In other words, I'm not really interested in this feature from the site, but I'm thinking it might actually be pretty good as a news aggregator that's not a social network like Reddit or X The Everything App - Blaze Your Glory. I just feel like I've been wasting too much time on these online Skinner boxes and I think I'd be better off using Ground News for an overview of what's going on in the news, paired with an RSS reader to read from individual journalists and writers whose work I like.

What do you all think? Do any of you actually use this? What do you think of the paid features, in case you actually use them?

Here are some additional suggestions of ways in which you can make great, creative use of culinary sodium hypochlorite:

About two decades too late, but now the DCEU finally has the chance to actually be entertaining slop instead of a depressing slog full of Übermenschen. I actually really enjoyed the new Superman, so maybe we'll get more fun excuses to eat popcorn this time around.

This based living legend was arrested along with two of her punk friends for kicking the shit out of some nazi in São Caetano, in the state of São Paulo. Of course, the local press is describing this as being an instance of punks assaulting a young student for no reason.

I originally pirated this game on release, but my PC back then couldn't run it reliably. I played it a couple hours and for some reason I can't remember, I just dropped it and never came back.

Picked it up for really cheap recently on Steam because I wanted to give it a second chance with better hardware, and holy fucking shit, how is this game six years old?

Playing in 2025 a game originally released in 2019 really shows me that there's a certain degree of diminishing returns in the games industry, not necessarily in a bad way, but in the sense that I think we've pretty much reached kind of a peak in game development, in terms of tech. As long as you can provide a solid experience, games will still feel great for much longer than they used to.

I might be mistaken and I don't have any handy examples to back this argument, but I feel like ten years ago, a six-year-old game would definitely feel much more dated than this does. Does that make sense? I don't think games used to age this gracefully 10+ years ago.

I can't think of any modern game that just feels this good. Everything is incredibly responsive, the graphics and art style are stunning, the sound design is top notch, the lore is really captivating and it just overall feels like an incredibly polished experience that's leagues ahead of most recent games.

If it were not for the Hiss and all the nightmarish SCP shit going on in The Oldest House, I'd want to live there. I want to touch these gorgeous brutalist slabs of concrete.