Bye Blogs (Yours, Not Mine)

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.

Story Itself

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.

The Wrong Trousers

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.

Manifesting The Bootstrap Myth

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.

The Opposite Of ‘Oh Yeah!’

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.

The Eugenic Bitterness Of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

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.

WAR (What Is It Good For?)

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.

An Open Letter To WEEI

It’s no secret to anyone who’s seen me whinging on social media about how bad the calling of baseball games can be these days, both on television and radio that I lament the loss of the way games used to be called which has been supplanted by a format where the play-by-play almost is of secondary concern.

A Small Anti-Corrosive

While most things continue to corrode, it’s worth posting an update about the corrosion which prompted that post late last month: in early April, Amtrak began restoring Cascades service by bringing in cars from elsewhere around the country. As of a week ago, all service is restored even if most lines are running at half-capacity.

Autumn Is Coming

For some time now, comic book creator Matthew Dow Smith has been teasing something he’s referred to as Project Park Bench. For even longer, I’ve been wondering whatever happened to his The October Girl, which began in 2012 as a series from Monkeybrain Comics for comiXology, then was announced as a three-volume graphic novel series in 2023 from Insight Comics, then just… disappeared.