You have my attention if you choose to write more but there is no need: you have thanked me, enough, truly. Write more, if you are so inspired, or invest that energy thanking others, elsewhere. We need that, today, more than ever.

I’m sure that dead-naming is far worse but would I be wrong to think that this lies in the same vein as dead-naming?

This is fascinating to me. I’ve never changed my name so I cannot have been dead-named but I do know how I feel when my family treats me in a way that denies the facets of my identity that I have accepted in my more recent adulthood – concretely: my neuro-diversity, because they don’t know that I don’t think of myself as binary.

Of course, these are not the same thing but people understand differences by bridging gaps based on common ground and all of this discussion builds common ground, in my mind. That’s why I’m asking.

I cannot agree.

I have very week, most frequently non-existent gender allegiance but I do know that there’s a tonne of stuff that’s odd about me and I often am offended or driven off by people who do things that simply don’t work with my mind-set so I can well understand why being “misgendered” (sarcasm quotes: yours.) might just be a thing that drives someone else away.

I’m not here because I’m accepting “fault” upon myself. I’m here because I want to be part of a tolerant future and I feel that this is important given the trajectory straight into hell that we are clearly currently set upon. I’m here because I’d at least like to ask “why” before I decide how I will behave in relation to others.

I choose to live as if the world was one in which I’d choose to live and, in that world, people get to choose their identities however they please. I can’t relate to why someone takes offence at “they”/“them” but, if they are offended, I can and will accept that and, conversely, I would wish that they might realise that I will surely make mistakes and get this wrong even if I do or did understand.

This is the only fair deal: I try in good faith, they understand and offer the benefit of the doubt.

I don’t perceive any attention-seeking but that’s besides the point. Even if they choose to seek attention, I don’t begrudge them that: sometimes, people seek attention. Why should I object?

Your comments might be more relevant to me than you know. I don’t know if I’m “agender” or something else. I know I very definitely do perceive that I have a gender, sometimes. Maybe an hour here and there, an evening, … but I can definitely identify with that “don’t even perceive my own gender” bit for the vast majority of my life, integrating over time.

And, as you can clearly tell, I haven’t perceived my own gender intensely enough to bother to find the right label for it so I mostly just let the world slap whatever labels they think makes them happy.

I guess that that annoys me, though, now that I come to think about it. I do know that I’m not what they label me. Most think I’m heterosexual male because that’s how I suppose I present in real life – how I dress and what you’d see on the “FKK” swimming lawn – and the rest label me “gay”-as-in-perjorative (I’m from a toxic-masculine culture, born in the 80’s, with a voice pitched too high and a body that’s not tall enough. What else would you expect?) I’m definitely neither of these. Or: nearly always neither of those and never only either of those.

Maybe this unacknowledged irritation is why I’m here, looking to find the right way to treat others even while I’ve long given up on being treated right by the wrong sort of others? (I am exceedingly lucky in that I can fly below the radar and live in a safe country so I literally can treat people who deny my existence as simply beneath my notice.)

There are many reasons.

• Multiplayer games will only target Windows, officially, and might even ban Linux altogether because of the perception that anti-cheat is more costly, impossible, or just hard under Linux. True Kernel-level anti-cheat is not possible on Linux like it is on Windows but the real reason is risk: anti-cheat is an arms race between cheaters (and, critically, cheat vendors who would sell cheat tools to them) and developers and those developers want to limit the surface area they must cover and the vectors for new attacks.

• The biggest engines, like Unreal, treat Linux as an after-thought and so developers who use those engines are not supported and have to undertake an overwhelming level of extra work to compensate or just target only Windows. When I was working on a UE5 project, recently, I was the only developer who even tried to work on Linux and we all concluded that Linux support was laughable if it worked at all. (To be fair to Tux the penguin: we also concluded that about 99.9% of UE5 was -if-it-worked-at-all and the other 50% was fancy illumination that nobody owned the hardware to run at 4k/60fps and frequently looked “janky” or a bit “off” in real-world scenarios. The other 50% was only of use to developers who could afford literal armies of riggers and modellers and effects people that we simply couldn’t hire and the final 66% was that pile of blueprints everyone refused to even look at because the guy who cobbled them together had left the team and nobody could make heads or tails of the tangle of blueprinty-flowcharty-state-diagramish lines. Even if the editor didn’t crash just opening them. Or just crash from pure spite.)

• A very few studios, like Wube, actually have developers who live in Linux and it shows but they are very few and far between. (Factorio is one of the very nicest out-the-box, native Linux experiences one can have.) Even Wube acknowledge that their choice to embrace Linux cost them much effort. Recently, they wrote a technical post in their Friday Factorio Facts series about how certain desktop compositors were messing up their game’s performance. To me: this sort of thing is to be expected because games run in windows and render to a graphics surface that must be composited to some kind of visible rectangle that ends up on screen: after a game submits a buffer to be presented, nearly all of what happens next is outside of the games control and down to the platform to implement properly. Similarly, platform-specific code is unavoidable whenever one needs to do file I/O, input I/O, networking or any number of other, very common things that games need to do within the frame’s time budget – i.e. exceedingly quickly.

• Projects which are natively developed on Linux benefit from great cross-compilation options to target Windows. This is even more true with the WSL and LLVM: you can build and link from nearly the same toolchain under nearly the same operating system and produce a PE .exe file right there on the host’s NTFS file-system. The turn-around time is minimal so testing is smooth. For a small or indie project or a new project, this is GREAT but this doesn’t apply to many older or bigger projects with legacy build tooling and certainly does not apply as soon as a big engine is involved. (Top tip: the WSL will happily run an extracted Docker image as if it was a WSL distribution so you can actually use your C/I container for this if you know how.)

• Conversely, cross-compiling from Windows to Linux is a joke. I have never worked on a project that ever does this. Any project that chooses to support Linux ports their build to Linux (sometimes maintain two build mechanisms) if they weren’t building on Linux for C/I or testing, already, anyway. (Note: my knowledge of available Windows tooling is rather out of date – I haven’t worked with a team based on Windows for several years.)

• Godot supports Linux very nicely in my experience but Godot is still relatively new. I expect that we might see more native Linux support given Godot’s increase in population.

• What’s that? Unity? I am so very sorry for your loss …

• If you’re not using a big engine, you have so many problems to handle and all of them come down to this: which library do you choose to link? Sound: Alsa, PulseAudio or Pipewire: even though Pipewire is newer and better, you’ll probably link PulseAudio because it will happily play to a Pipewire audio server. Input: do you just trust windows messages or do you want to get closer to some kind of raw-input mechanism? Oh: and your game window, itself? Who’s setting that up for you, pumping your events and messages and polling for draw? If your window appears on a Wayland desktop, you cannot know its size or position. If it’s on X11 or Win32, you can. I hope you’ve coded around these discrepancies!

• More libraries: GLFW works. The SDL works. SDL 3 is lovely. In the Rust world, winit is grand. wgpu.rs is fantastic. How much expertise, knowledge and time do you have to delve into all these options and choose one? How many “story points” can you invest to ensure that you don’t let a dependency become too critical and retain options to change your choice and opt for a different library if you hit a wall? (Embracing a library is easy. Keeping your architecture from making that into a blood pact is not.)

NONE of this is hard. NONE of this is sub-optimal once you’ve wrapped it up tight. It is all just a massive explosion of surface-area. It costs time and money and testing effort and design prowess and who’s going to pay for that?

Who’s going to pay for it when you could just pick up a Big Engine and get the added bonus of that engine’s name on your slide-deck?

And, then, you’re right back in the problem zone with the engine: how close to “first-class” is its Linux support because, once you’re on Big Engine, you do not want to be trying to wrangle all of these aspects, yourself, within somebody else’s engine.

That’s fair. Insightful.

I have very nuanced bi-sexual tendencies and, to me, I don’t personally have strong feelings towards my own pronouns but I have not personally realised any deep affiliation with “male” (my assigned gender) or “female” but I can well imagine that it is much more critical for a trans person who has realised an identity deeply enough to inspire them to transition.

I mean: I don’t even care about my own gender – call me whatever. At certain times, I have an attraction one way or the other. I’m married to a woman. I’m a father. These facts are all true but I honestly couldn’t care what pronouns or gender or sex you write down, for me. This is probably why I started this topic: I’m trying to understand how this is for others who care far more than I do.

I don’t care but I do care to honour those who do care. I certainly care to honour those who care enough to choose to transition!

But oh dear, though. That does not help me. I’d love to call your hypothetical trans woman a woman on purpose but that would require me to notice what she thinks “normal” people “normally” notice and, yeah: autistic. Maybe I’ll stop defaulting to “they” / “them” – at least online – and default to confused-blob-cat or something for pronouns.

Your therapist is onto something. It is a technique that I often use and have used all my life with some undeniable level of success.

I’m something of an author and certainly a proponent of vivid imagination and imaginings: story-telling in one’s mind. Drifting away into the realm of subconscious thought is often fun and cathartic even when it doesn’t lead to drifting off and, when it does, it often precipitates those most vivid and memorable of dreams in my experience. The practice is also widely applicable in other scenarios: visualisation can help regulate emotions and cope with adversity. It can be a catalyst for arousal or passion. It can help you maintain composure when you need to perform: I use this, myself, on the tennis court, rock face, dance-floor or stage.

All of this is good. If this technique brings you more success than I and that suffices to prevent a build-up of chronic and disabling sleep deprivation, over time, then sleep well! That’s all I could wish you.

Normal sleepers cannot understand insomnia – this is the paradox.

Normal sleepers are sometimes afflicted with unwelcome wakefulness and cannot comprehend the impact insomnia has on the insomniac’s quality of life. They do not experience the loss of quality of life due to sleeplessness but they do experience the acute discomfort of unwelcome wakefulness on occasion and the drag of exhaustion, afterwards, when they’re sleep deprived and, so, they reduce the insomniac’s complaint to mere impatience with being awake or dismiss it as a lack of fortitude when feeling tired. They conclude that the cure for insomnia is falling asleep.

They fail to realise that no matter how much of a relief it may be, sleep is not the main event: an insomniac wishes to wake up and feel well rested.

With reference to my original post (that is: in this thread. elsewhere: I have written more) the ADHD insomniac wishes to wake up and feel as if, while at rest, their brain sorted the clutter within their mind that they could never have hoped to approach while awake, leaving peace and space to approach a new chapter of consciousness free from yesterday’s overwhelm.

With reference to a long period of my adult life: the insomniac sometimes doesn’t even know what “well rested” feels like. They live in a world that stresses productivity and resilience and fortitude and overcoming hardship through determination. They’ve been rising at the wrong time of day since their teens, needing to be at school at the earliest hours, and indoctrinated into believing that that is normal. They drink six cups of coffee before noon and wonder why their hand shakes when they try to write. They quip: “sleep when you’re dead.” They think they were born ready and will answer every call. They sink into depression. The insomniac does not know that there is any other way to live until that RAM… ¬

Your analogy with RAM is apt; I’ve made it, myself, before. Do you know what a process can do when it runs out of RAM? I’ll spare you the details. But that’s what happened to me. I’m OK, today.

Or, rather, I’m not OK but I have achieved a very poor and shoddy steady-state that is keeping me alive and affords me a few nights of sleep per week. This is the hard-restart every five-to-seven days that lets me clear the RAM but I feel that the memory-leak goes untreated and remains an intrinsic foible or my individual ADHD melange. I continue to seek a better and more sustainable solution but I am up against a system that does not understand that about which I write so many words, so passionately.

I know how to make certain cogs turn in the machine and the machine prescribes pills. Pills are a mixed bag. The vast majority do nothing of use and cause unwanted side-effects. Of those I have tried, those that induce sleep with any degree of efficacy do so in a way that meets only the normal sleeper’s needs: they facilitate falling asleep but do not lead to awakening well-rested or improved quality of life the day after. They do not allow my ADHD brain to dream and sort and sift my thoughts like I feel natural slumber allows.

There is one exception but even it is highly stochastic – sometimes failing to have any effect at all. It’s also addictive and has a non-zero street value so I can only get it prescribed in quantities that allow me to take it about once or twice a week – hence my steady state. (I am loath to complain because I am still alive and doing science.)

In case my vague description of “quality of life” is hard to parse, here’s another anecdote: having any chance to sleep intensively, even once or twice a week, has all but cured a growing alcohol addiction that I frankly didn’t notice. I was approaching a bottle of cheapest wine a night, alone. I drink no more than half a dozen beers a month, now. I did not join a movement or group or start a twelve-step programme. I acknowledge that these groups and twelve-step programmes are disproportionately effective and save countless lives but, for me, they were not needed after I realised that I actually enjoyed experiencing and remembering the best moments in my life when I felt awake and vigorous enough to be present for them and, conversely, I did not enjoy being drunk and missing them, throwing up, falling over in the middle of city streets while walking home (across the entire city because I was too drunk to do anything else) and having nothing but a headache the next day.

Alcohol doesn’t make me sleepy, either. I did not turn away from alcohol because I had substituted it. It never served that purpose. If anything, alcohol makes me irritable and fidgety and hyperactive in a restless and annoying way – not sleepy.

I set the bottle aside simply because I started having fun, being awake, and forgot about drink. Quality of life means being awake and aware of waking life and that distracted me from the vice. I still drink, very occasionally, but only when “life” happens to coincide with an event that lends itself to enjoying a beer – after a few hours in the bouldering gym, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, for example – seldom, appropriate to occasion, and by choice, never by habit.

This is why this topic is dear to my heart and I wrote the original post. I’ll be the first to admit that I have drifted from the point, here, but, perhaps, you find this intriguing to read, too. (I’ve just ended another trial with different antidepressant medication that was supposed to also assist with insomnia – the outcome was disappointing on all counts – and also just ended yet another season of psychotherapy, also with disappointing outcomes, so I was in an opinionated mood when I chose to reply.)

If your imagination proves able to lull your mind – sleep well. The exercise is never bad.