Lycanthrotree

Look up the channel "Kitten Lady" on YouTube; she has a lot of really great tutorials on caring for newborn kittens and a few with advice on giving flea baths to kittens.

If you do give them a bath it's really important to keep them warm and make sure that they don't get cold when drying off. Fleas also cannot stand dish soap if you use that to bathe them (usually useful for making a ring around their necks to stop the fleas from swarming their head while the kitten's body is under water). Since they're SUPER newborn babies, I don't know if I would risk a bath just because they're so fragile with their temperature - I'd ask a vet there. But, with or without a bath, I think you should try your best to get as many fleas off as you can, maybe with a flea comb. They're so small that they don't have a lot of blood to lose so fleas can do more harm than you might think.

Long term, therapy and medication and taking care of yourself. It's tough, but with a lot of work you can start to figure out the pieces of it - which parts are physical/environmental, which parts are mental thoughts patterns and changeable with therapy, which parts are chemical and need the right medication. They all feed into each other, of course, but after a lot of years and work I've gotten a pretty good sense of which part is my "chemical" depression which changes with medication and which parts are modifiable by me.

Of course, that all takes time. In the short term, first, do a health check: make sure every day fhat you've eaten, you've drunk water, you've slept, and you've gotten some sunlight and a bit of a walk at least. These are not cures but they are compounding factors. If you're depressed and hungry and exhausted the depression is going to be magnified a lot more than if you are well fed and rested. Then, do your best to stop thought spirals. If you don't want to be alone with your thoughts, find a podcast or YouTube channel or show that you like and always have it on. Listen to that instead. If you have a hobby you can do that doesn't rely on making "good" results or being inspired, do that (for me, I learned that I can't write or draw while in depressive spirals because I'll start thinking everything I make is trash and that makes it worse, but I can play the piano and practice songs I already know - figure out what works for you). Again, this isn't a fix, but the goal is to stop any spiraling thoughts from getting worse. Do whatever it takes to distract yourself - "ignoring it" is better than "dwelling on it" until you get to a point where you can actually start fixing it.

In the medium term, start getting on therapy and medication and work on getting to a stable place - friends you like, job and living situation that you like well enough, etc. If you can have pets, pets are great - they will remind you that it's time to eat or sleep or go out, and they're great companions. My cat will try to physically herd me into bed if she thinks I'm up too late, and she's usually right.

Hope this helps and that everything starts looking better for you.

Seconding this. A doctor showed me one stretch for the backs of my upper legs that got rid of my back pain. Follow the other advice here and see a doctor if it's bad, but leg stretches are free and easy so it's worth a try.

Stand on one leg and put your other leg up straight on a surface like a chair or bed so your legs are pointing at 6 and 3 on a clock. Keep your raised leg straight so your toes are pointing at the ceiling (not bent at the knee or twisted). Lean into it as much as you can while keeping both legs totally straight.

It doesn't seem like much of a stretch, but if it's hard to do, that may be your problem muscle group that's locked up and causing the pain.

Totally anecdotal, but I took escitalopram (the first depression medication mentioned in the study) for years. It worked all right for a while but I was always very low on energy, and after a while it stopped working for me. After some trial and error my doctor and I landed on bupropion (which is also used for ADHD treatment) and it made an enormous difference. I would absolutely believe there is a lot of overlap in treating the two conditions, especially for helping with the the willpower/doing things side of the symptoms (e.g. having energy to do anything in the first place, completing tasks that need to get done, overcoming executive dysfunction, and not getting "stuck" in negative thought spirals).

But of course, it depends on each person and their kind of depression. My doctor warned me that it could make anxiety worse, for example, because the added focus and energy could feed right into someone's anxiety and make them feel mildly panicked all the time. It's highly individual.

My whole group is new to Pathfinder, and we were still undecided on Pathfinder 2e vs. D&D 5e after finishing the beginner's box. So my campaign is designed as a series of short, flexible jobs rather than one long story arc. This lets people completely change up their characters in between missions if they end up not liking their class down the line, will give us early campaign "outs" if we decide to try another different system, and works really well to explain why characters aren't there if a player has to miss a session.

The premise is that they're all employed at the start-up of a huge, extraplanar magical museum. The "owner" hasn't explored nearly all of it herself. The party is hired to explore the deeper wings of the museum where the dangerous artifacts and mysteries are, help escort tour groups around and save them from getting kidnapped by fey folk, guard it from would-be thieves, take fliers and advertisemends out to nearby towns, and retrieve magical artifacts from dangerous places that would make good museum displays (think Indiana Jones). So far the premise has been lighthearted but the players have brought plenty of drama in with their character backstories, so I'm weaving that in as well (one is part of a cult, one has assassins after them, and so on).

To the same extent that every trait is relative, I suppose. There's not a big physical block of stupid somewhere we can point to, so we have to judge it relative to others. If someone is kinder than most people we say that they're kind, if someone is smarter than most people we say they're smart, if someone is more beautiful than most people we say they're beautiful - it's not something unique to stupidity or to negative traits. It 'doesn't exist' in that it's not something you can pick up and hold in your hand, but it can be measured as an identifying trait when compared to other people and generally agreed upon.

I could say my dog is brown and my friend's dog is white. I can't go touch 'brown,' it exists only in my mind and my brain's perception of wavelengths of light, but the brown dog is still more brown than the white dog. As long as you have 2 objects you can come up with these kinds of differentiated descriptions of them. (I wouldn't say "my dog exists in 3-dimensional space and breathes air" because all dogs exist in 3-dimensional space and breathe air, therefore it isn't usefully descriptive the way "brown" is.)

Hm, I'd say it's individual actions that are stupid, and if a person does a lot of stupid actions, then they get called stupid as a person by association. Same for being smart - you can say one smart thing and not be considered smart in general, but if you do a lot of smart things consistently you get called a smart person. (Or any other trait, really - if you sing a song once in the shower that's just one action, if you sing every day for a living you get called a singer.)

I think that probably all people are smart and stupid in different ways. Steve Jobs was stupid about his health but smart about his business. People can be amazingly intelligent doctors, but horrible at social skills, or incredible artists but terrible at money management. I suppose it depends on how often you act one way or the other and how much impact your actions have. Steve Jobs dying because of his juice cleanse choice makes that action have more weight than if he was wearing an amethyst healing necklace but also getting regular treatment. The consequence of the former was that he died; yhe consequence of the latter would be that he'd look silly but (probably) live.

There's nuance to it, for sure. In the case of religion, I think it can be either or neither. If someone makes a bad faith-based choice because they've been raised in a cult, or they're a kid who has been fed a lot of religious doctrine but doesn't have any real world experience, or they live in a super religious community and only know scary lectures about atheists or people of other faiths, that's ignorance. They don't know any better and don't have many avenues to fix that. If it's something like Steve Jobs doing spiritual juice cleanses instead of getting cancer treatment despite having all the best medical resources and doctors in the world available, that's stupidity. If it's somebody who has a religious belief but doesn't let that affect their decision-making detrimentally (they believe in miracles, but they'll still go to the doctor for treatment when they're sick) then they're not stupid or ignorant. They may not be totally right but that's some other fallacy - being too optimistic? Rose colored glasses? - that's less harsh than stupidity or ignorance.

Your question about believing without understanding is a good one. There are a lot of things people believe without total understanding or proof. I believe Canada exists even though I've never been there. I suppose the difference there is the possibility of learning and proving it, as well as common consensus - I could go to Canada, I can talk to Canadians, I can see that Canada competes in the Olympics and is labeled on a globe. There are lots of different ways to verify it, and if all of the maps in the world vanished overnight people would find Canada again. But if I believed in a new undiscovered continent named Lemmy then I'd have to insist on believing it's there despite there being no Lemmy citizens, no flag, no presence on a map, and so on, which makes it a much sketchier thing to 'believe' in than Canada.

IMO ignorance is chiefly a lack of knowledge. If you drop someone who has no knowledge of cars into a mechanics shop and tell them to fix a car, they're going to be really incompetent and look bad compared to the mechanic. But, if they had car manuals to read and learned some mechanical engineering and watched the mechanic work and spent time tinkering with the engine, they could figure it out.

Stupidity is a failure of logic and self-reflection, like continuing to insist that obviously wrong things are true when presented with undeniable facts ("this isn't a car at all, it's a plane, nobody can fix planes, that's why I'm failing!") holding two ideas that are in opposition to each other and not acknowledging the dichotomy ("all car mechanics are really stupid but they make these cars so complicated that no reasonable person could ever figure it out"), flip-flopping back and forth between statements, blaming other people or things ("this is all Big Oil's fault") and generally not thinking things through.

Both might make equally terrible cars at first but ignorance is a lot more fixable and might not be the person's fault (like if they grew up Amish and never saw a car's engine before), while stupidity is more about refusing to learn or self-correct when given the option.

I find that the policies built on "logic only" tend to break down because they ignore emotion and feelings entirely. People are emotional by nature and our feelings, sense of well-being, sense of justice, sense of oppression, and so on are very real in that they drive how we react and respond to each other. Trying to make a utopia based on people not reacting to their emotions is like trying to make a utopia where people don't need to eat - it might be nice, but it's unrealistic.

Imagine if someone came up and kept stabbing you with a rusty pin every day, and whenever you jump away and say "ow!" they roll their eyes and say "logically, this shouldn't bother you, because it only hurts for a second, you're not bleeding and I know that this pin won't give you tetanus. You're being very irrational right now." Based on their logic, they're right, you won't be measurably hurt, but it still has a real effect on you and you'll want to do everything you can to stop getting randomly stabbed by a rusty pin every day. Your lived experience is real to you.

(Super mild 6.0 alliance raid spoilers? Not sure how to mark spoilers).

My theory is that there'll be a new casting job and Krile will be our showcase character for it. I think they've said that Krile is going to be on our new scions-equivalent team in 7.0, and in the Euphrosyne raid story she wandered off and seemed to be poking around at natural power sources and had a line about how she felt weak and was hoping to get stronger. Something like a geomancer, maybe? Green mage, time mage? I don't think she'd ever be a physical combatant.

Then I bet we get a second job that can share Scouting gear, just so ninja isn't alone there.

Hm, I think most tablets could probably do margin notes and color coding somehow? I'm not sure if it's a specific program, but one of my players has her character sheet on an iPad and she colors all over it and erases it throughout the session to keep her hands busy. As a last resort you could open up the pdf in an art program and draw on top of it (which is where my mind goes since I use my tablet for art), but I would bet there are a lot of a dedicated notetaking or organizing apps that would allow it.