The unsupported use case of Bix Frankonis’ disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon.
No fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis.
Read the current manifesto. (And the followup.)
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There is a chance that Myth of Man, the first narrative film from Jamin Winans in a decade, is a wrenchingly beautiful film about a truly dangerous idea. It can be read as such, but it absolutely also can be read very differently. The difficulty in trying to talk about it is that it really could be the case that Winans believes a truly dangerous thing, yet managed to make a wrenchingly beautiful film about it. Is this true?
Everyone over the past several days has been lauding this McSweeney’s piece by Anaïs Godard, an open letter to Wormwood in defense of the author’s five-year-old autistic daughter. McSweeney’s primarily is a humor publication, which perhaps in part is why the piece has gotten so much traction. Its flaw is that Godard tries to have it both ways.
The following letter from customers of the Albertson’s family of grocers was exclusively “obtained” by Bix dot Blog and is reproduced here in full.
Today I realized, or else this was been simmering unconsciously for awhile and chose today to burst into conscious thought, that there is a tension in me wherein because I myself blog, it’s somehow implicitly incumbent upon me to read lots of other bloggers, yet I just can’t seem to fit that into my attentional load. This tension manifests as feeling bad for myself when I try, because hitting this attentional resource limit is cognitively claustrophobic, but then also as feeling bad about myself when I fail, because not meeting that sense of implicit incumbency is ridden with guilt.
I’m not really using Mastodon for anything these days, having settled into Bluesky because it’s where all the people I used to want to be around on Twitter have ended up, but I do (for some reason) still follow the #Blogging hashtag there, and that’s where I saw a former wellness coach posit that you are not your story.
My mother emailed me a link to this David Cox piece for the BBC on genetic research into autism and asked me what I thought about it. Mostly what I think is that the truly important bit got kept back until the very end.
Sitting in my living room this afternoon watching the Red Sox game with the audio feed from WEEI’s radio coverage, suddenly in the third inning the two Wills (Flemming and Middlebrooks) were chatting with an autistic person who was diagnosed as an adult, who threw out the first pitch, and who will be running the Boston Marathon this coming Monday. My entire nervous system braced for impact.
I’d no intention of writing anything about new Apple TV show The Studio but Charlie Jane’s observations of the early episodes changed my mind, although I’ve dropped the show after its fourth episode. It batted .500 for me and while that’s great for a baseball player it’s grossly insufficient for a television show.
Earlier today, possibly while I was sleeping, Wormwood spoke about autism through the lens of misreading a new study from the Centers For Disease Control about the increase in rates of diagnosis, or “prevalence”. In the end, whether that misreading is willful or ignorant isn’t especially relevant as the effect and impact will be the same.
Much of what I’ve said on this is lost to social media ephemerality, but I need to revisit something I wrote two years ago about baseball needing new stats specifically focusing on how a player’s performance contributes to actual wins.