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.)
Find more blogs on Feedle, Ooh! Directory, and Ye Ole Blogroll.
There currently are 4295 posts across 16 sources in the 25 years since I started blogging in March 2000. Further restoration in progress.
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Three days before I see the Red Sox for just the second time in twenty-five years (the first being last March), Craig Breslow has traded away generational talent Rafael Devers in return for what doesn’t seem like all that very much in comparison.
I’ve been trying for days now to understand why I’m as shaken as I am by the death of local trans girl Charlotte Fosgate, who chose to die by suicide from somewhere along the span of the St. Johns Bridge, above the Willamette River.
I’ve been reading A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, and in part one’s section on “spacefarer psychology” there appears a story which regular readers immediately will know why I’m mentioning it here.
As something of a followup to the other day’s post about my toilet (I almost wrote “on”, which could be taken the wrong way), fatigue, exertion, executive dysfunction, and ticket theory, it’s maybe a good time to relate a few things I said on social media media about the current context of all of this.
While today my bathroom got cleaned(ish), it had gone even longer than usual between cleanings, and at this point between my fatigue and my autistic executive dysfunction, it’s clear that this simply is not a chore I can do on a regular, or even semi-regular, or even not-so-regular basis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the Red Sox home opener at Fenway Park on Friday, WEEI hosted Dwight Evans and Fred Lynn during the second inning, and I was going to post this as an addendum to my post about Rafael Devers needing to get out of his head and into his body, but instead I’m just going to post this all on its own.
I’m not going to belabor this but yesterday with a great deal of preparation and effort I did manage to make it into downtown Portland for the protest rally and march, although I spent my time lingering around the edges.
You might recall that there have been a couple of times in recent years where I’ve either been seen by a thing (Heartbreak High) or felt the need to tell someone who made a a thing that I saw them (Shoplifters of the World), but I certainly did not expect to see myself in Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.
It’s no April Fools’ Day joke. Buried in a CNN report on massive new layoffs at various health agencies under Mine Furor and Wormwood, comes the news.
As I write this, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is shortly to start in on his fifth hour of talking on the Senate floor, an action he says is “disrupting business as usual”. It brought to mind a piece from The Bulwark by Jonathan V. Last from last week that I only encountered in the past day or two.
The month began with me pleading with the Red Sox to just let Rafael Devers be Rafael Devers. At issue was not just the then-potential move from third baseman to designated hitter but an apparent desire on the part of the organization that he become a more front-facing and extroverted kind of leader on the team. The month ends with me wondering if the training staff understands what’s gone wrong.
Much as I noted the other day my reticence to offer a pull quote from the very end of a novel, I dislike pulling from the very end of someone else’s blog post, but the fact is that it’s the very end of Winnie’s such about selfdom that I need to highlight.
Will Douglas Heaven for MIT Technology Review has a look at some research from Anthropic in which they relate a new ability to peek inside it’s Large Language Model to get some sense of how it does what it does. Three paragraphs gave me conniptions so forgive me while I have a short fit.
Word started spreading on social media early and by this afternoon the confirming news reports hit: Amtrak is pulling all of a certain line of railcars from service due to corrosion issues, impacting the Amtrak Cascades service in the Pacific Northwest seemingly more than any other region. Train trips here are reduced to just two lines a day, with everything else being served by buses.
It’s with a near certainty and small sense of frustration that I say there was something that came before, but memory issues preclude me having any definitive sense of precisely, or even imprecisely, what it was. All I know is that it existed—or, at least, I’m pretty sure it existed. Dependent, then, solely upon what’s actually been discoverable and/or recoverable, today stands in and serves as my twenty-fifth blogging anniversary.
Today on either side of watching the Red Sox play the Sultanes de Monterrey, I checked out an Oregon legislative hearing about amending and updating the old SB 110 allowing for financing a major league ballpark, and I just have a few things I’d like to communicate to all the players (no pun) involved about baseball in Portland.
In my post yesterday about the Severance finale, I made passing reference to a particular scene which I argued was reflective of the show’s political nature. Today, I wanted to say a little bit more about the conversation between Mark Scout and Mark S. that takes place entirely through alternating recordings on the same video camera.
It’s the day after the season two finale of Severance, which means I’ve accidentally run into at least one take that would set me off. In this case, it was a Bluesky post by Aaron Bady linking their piece for The American Prospect, which suggests that “the only good Severance was the original conceit” and that “Ben Stiller is a counterrevolutionary who has diluted the pure Marxist message at the behest of Apple and Capitalism”.
Someone over on Bluesky mentioned that they dislike “support needs” language—somewhat in vogue amongst the neurodivergent as an alternative to “functioning” labels, which are unpopular due to their divisiveness—because they view it as defining us as a burden.
Terrance: Shut your fucking face, you couch fucka! You're a club fucking, knole fucking divan fucka! You're a settee fucka, yes it's true! Nobody fucks sofas quite like you!
It took five days and some change of not posting to Bluesky without anyone even noticing I was gone—despite the fact that the last thing I’d posted back on March 8 was, “My life is a waste and should have been given to somebody else.”—(the exception being my mother, because moms) before I had to relent in order to subject Chuck Schumer to some abuse.
Never one to let an opportunity to be completely feckless pass by, Senator Schumer went before cameras today and pretended that Democrats were united in opposing the Republican continuing resolution to keep the government running—but it was a lie he’s hoping Democratic voters will be too angry at Republicans to spot.
If there’s one thing I can say about the last several weeks as I’ve been dealing first with a gout flare, the worst since the first years ago that woke me up in the middle of the night feeling like somehow I had broken my foot in my sleep, and then the ensuing aftermath where I might be dealing with a gout-prompted bunion that makes me want to just cut off the entire foot, it’s that I no longer think I have the bandwidth to deal with the combination of the continuing fascist administrative blitzkrieg and the feckless, outright absent, or just plain backward Democratic Party response.
Our primary heroes are Park, an activist and thief, and Bash, a hacker and former video game designer. They’ve somehow ended up with a spaceship that’s far too large for a crew of five, and are still trying to get the hang of it.
In the wake of my open letter to my new primary physician in part to explain the ways in which I need to process things and in part to express my concerns and fears regarding the instructions to try to push more exercise in the midst of the still-undiagnosed fatigue question, I note Jesse Meadows’ recent newsletter about fatigue.
I’ve been doing some loose catching up here and there as I try to reincorporate other people’s blogs into my daily reading regimen (I’d stepped away from that a few months ago, I assume during the several month break I took from blogging itself), and I wanted to say a couple of things about Manu’s thoughts on identity from about a month back.
Where the growth of the firm could be said to be in some sense in the interest of many workers in the "Golden Age" of the Global North, today the growth—or more so the profitability—of the firm is an integral part of the same circuit which also internalizes the further immiseration, exhaustion, alienation, or disenfranchisement of those same workers and communities.
Rachel wrote about her name, and I don’t have too much to say on this subject since I’ve already done so, but there’s one part I wanted to single out, when she mentions that your sign name isn’t something you get to choose yourself but is given after you are “at least somewhat acquainted with the person who’s giving the name”.
I’m having a heated argument with someone over politics and authoritarianism, and he reaches down to break the power cord off a nearby heating pad and starts beating and whipping me with it. Suddenly it’s later and I’m before the media explaining what happened and it ruins his career.
Jacob Roy at Over the Monster had some pointed advice for the management and ownership of the Boston Red Sox. This was back in January but for some reason the post showed up today in the site’s RSS feed. Not sure what’s up with that.
And with that, the blog is relaunched on 11ty, deployed to Netlify, and redesigned via Nyssa. Internal backlinks at long last have returned thanks to Andrew Ward, but search hasn’t yet as I’m still trying to understand PageFind, and there’s no dark mode because I’m still getting around to that.
One and a half weeks ago on February 19, I posted here an open letter to my new primary care physician which I also sent to them through Kaiser’s somehow antiquated messaging system. There was a response the next day, but in my overall and general dysregulation and intermittent depression over a gout flare, I didn’t have the wherewithal to read it, until today.
This is just to followup a bit on Monday’s appointment, a common thing I need to do because the sensory, social, and anxiety pressures of a realtime conversation in a small room isn’t a dance my autistic brain is especially adept at due to all the balls you need to keep in the air at all times. Task switching (because multitasking is a lie) is a drain.
There’s no reason anyone needs to be on just one Twitter-like social media platform, but for me splitting my attention was problematic. In the end, nearly all of the people, and the types of people, who made Twitter valuable or enjoyable for me have landed on Bluesky, so that’s where I’ve been spending my social media time.
As we find ourselves somehow in the peculiar admixture of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, what would have been the seventy-ninth birthday of David Lynch, and the second inaugural of Mine Furor, one thing from the first reign of the latter that I did not miss already has returned: what I’ve decided to term the Distraction Discourse.
Today began with the death of David Lynch. I’ve mentioned Twin Peaks any number of times here, being the most central of his works in my life. Of what of my blogging that’s been restored so far, the earliest mention relates the night in 1990 that I tried to dream of Bob.
Recently I switched my breakfasts from a simple bowl of oatmeal to a breakfast skillet of frozen hash browns, frozen sausage links, and eggs from a carton. This fairly straightforward decision became something of a minor ordeal third thing every “morning”, after cleaning up and getting dressed, because the frying pan that’s part of my GreenLife ceramic set (ten inches wide and about 4 inches deep) long ago had its coating fucked up by a combination of low smoke point cooking oil and high heat.
So, I have talked a lot here about catastrophizing and the fact that I find it a critical flavor of autistic scripting. Underpinning this is the idea that anticipatory anxiety is better than compensatory, because the latter actually can lead inappropriately and disastrously to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
Former candidate for the position from District 3, Jon Walker (tagline: “He’s Boring”), has been insisting for days on Bluesky that “voters were repeatedly told” that the Mayor would have the tie-breaking vote, period—including in the matter of the Council electing its own President. Yesterday, I addressed what the Charter provides on this count.
Yesterday I got up early, sat my iPad on an articulated arm attached to my nightstand, and watched the first session of Portland City Council under its new form of government with councilors elected from geographical districts. If you read anything about the session, you probably know that it took multiple rounds of voting to elect a Council President.
The day before therapy last week, my last session of the year, I’d realized that tracking the books I read, and the movies and television shows I watch, has something of a self-regulatory effect despite the rhythms involved being more irregular than regular. It’s not a way in which I’ve previously thought about this habit.
As I noted back in October, “there are exactly two days every year that like clockwork make me feel the weight of living”: my birthday, and New Year’s Day. For the past two years, at the end of this annual hellscape, I’ve published a sort of round-up offering my picks for what I find to be my best blog posts of the year ending. It’s a way of declaring both I Was Here and I Did This as I prepare to face down another 1st of January thinking, “Here we go again.”
The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost.5 It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.
For years now in these pages I’ve wondered about trauma absent memory, by which I meant the impact of the sensory envelope of aphantasia upon the laying down of trauma in the brain. It’s of interest to me not just as an aphantasic but as an autistic adult in a world of normativity, and what’s more as someone who was unknowingly autistic in that world for four decades. Basically: is just being autistic in these ways a kind of traumatic experience, but then how does that play out when you don’t have mental imagery?
As various parties grapple with Representative Nancy Mace’s bigoted and transphobic campaign against Representative Sarah McBride, as well as McBride’s decision to “accept” Speaker Mike Johnson’s rule banning transgender people from bathrooms matching their gender despite disagreeing with it, I want to focus on something from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
There’s some annoyed chatter on social over Semafor, in an item in their latest newsletter about Jonathan Chait heading to The Atlantic, outing some remarks made in Ed Yong’s private Instagram. The specifics caught my attention because something didn’t seem right.
When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years. This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before as through all those which we have already turned.
In the end, after the past week of watching this take and that take, but mostly just avoiding any real bothering with any takes at all, about how the election went the way it did, I’ve settled in the only place that makes any sense to me.
Apparently my family back east has been arguing into the night about Israel and Gaza, and I’ll get to the actual point in a minute but I just need to say that this goes in the column against moving out there someday and losing all my independence (you know, the thought that gives me vague and uncomfortable ideations), because holy hell would I not need that environment in my life, in my home.
As I was catching up on some reading while being subjected to yet another bout of morning insomnia after feeding the cat at eight o’clock, I caught Dave’s list of Democratic mistakes. Take a hard look at what he deems their fourth such.
Since I talked about election night and I talked about the day after, and since I’ve (mostly) been limiting my social use to posting photos from the Camp Snap camera of my trip to the zoo, let’s talk a bit about today, although this will have some of those other days, too.
You don’t need me to tell you what happened: Mine Furor once again has happened here, with a very real possibility that the Republicans, having already taken the Senate, also manage to keep control of the House, in which case in just 75 days a fully fascist government is installed across all three branches of government in the United States.
As evening breaks here in Portland on Election Night, here’s a very short look at how things are going over here for me at the moment, on a day on which I stuck to the usual routine until lunchtime.
If only the day of my birth had fallen in November rather than October, my post of deep, existential despair easily could have doubled as my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival on impact, hosted by Alexandra, for reasons I’d hope are evident at least in retrospect if not entirely obvious at the time.
There’s lot of things I don’t know about, even as I’ve aspired to broaden the reach of my awareness. I’ve mentioned before how social media (specifically, at the time, Twitter) almost was single-handedly responsible for exposing me to lived experiences not my own, often by expanding the range of authors and books I choose to read, fiction and nonfiction alike.
This month, the Simons Foundation’s SPARK had autism researcher J. Kiely Law, M.D., MPH answer questions about autism research, and it should come as no surprise that I have something to say about it, especially since the very first question is about the phrase “evidence-based”.
Last week I outlined some communication problems I’ve been having with my primary care physician. I’ve had this doctor for about a year after my previous one unfortunately left Kaiser Permanente, and I chose them based in large part upon browsing the profiles Kaiser doctors have the opportunity to post online.
Being a lifelong, born-and-raised Red Sox fan, there’s no reason for me to be paying any attention whatsoever to this year’s World Series, not that I have access to it anyway. That said, being a lifelong, born-and-raised Red Sox fan I am, of course, contractually obligated to be rooting against the New York Yankees.
There was a thing going around on social about naming a movie that was released the year you were born. Having decided I’d narrow things down to my actual birth month for the sake of as much temporal accuracy as possible, that meant that I was, and am, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid years old.
Well, I am going back to not blogging for a bit, and stopping all work on the restoration project, because after conforming hundreds and hundreds of internal links to the new (and hopefully forever) permalinks format, it turns out that Weblog.LOL’s handling of dates is fucked up, and even if it got solved despite the service being frozen because everything will be switching to Neato instead, it would be a logistical nightmare to try to determine which of the hundreds and hundreds of internal links I’ve conformed to the new (and hopefully forever) permalinks format in fact are technically incorrect because I’ve been pulling them from the live posts on the published blog, where it turns out they might be wrong. (What’s happening? All timestamps in front matter are being treated as UTC despite being correct for my timezone as set in configuration. So when the system generates permalinks and post dates, some unknown number of which therefore are using the day prior to when the post actually was published.) In theory, were it fixed, I could find some sort of command-line link checker and compile a list of all the posts using the incorrect permalinks, but in practice there’s literally nothing I can do, and no reason to continue conforming links when I’ve no obvious way of telling which ones are completely fucking wrong in the meantime, and there’s no easy way to tell how much time and effort I’ve already wasted, but I’m certainly not going to bother wasting any more of it. I’d say that maybe I just need to move away from trying to use services that are one-person operations, but every time I look at any other blogging options my cognitive capacity decreases and my anxiety response increases, and I say that as someone who used to self-host MoveableType on an OpenBSD box over home DSL. This is on top of the fact that having 4,000 posts here broke tags and tag pages (which are “sources” here), rendering half the site incomplete. All of which is on top of the birthday weekend just passed, which par for the course was an existential nightmare of feeling like I’m in an inescapable hole, and I’m a little bit tired of the fact that I keep trying (this isn’t just about blogging) only to be smacked back down.
At some point in the night I awoke from a dream with a single word in my mind. Each and every time waking after this, when I’d normally try to remember any dreams to add later to my notes for therapy, instead I told myself to remember this name: Telemachus.
Let’s try something else, in the form of a sort of “heard” directed at another blogger. Misu opens their latest with an observation:
While the day itself saw a long and discursive post about autism, chronic fatigue, sarcoidosis, and death—featuring, among other things, Carl Linnaeus, J. D. Salinger, Heartbreak High, Oregon Zoo, Soul Coughing, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Powers, Shoplifters of the World, and The Bear—having been written the night before it says nothing about how the day itself went this year.
Daily we die; the passage of any hour you choose subtracts a portion of life. You have already died a considerable portion of your death.
I’ve been having a number of communications problems in my interactions with my doctors at Kaiser lately, and it’s becoming one of those things where the burden and onus entirely is placed upon me to sort out, and that’s exhausting for the actually autistic and chronically fatigued, to have to be constantly micromanaging things just to make sure you’re getting the right healthcare.
When I moved to my current Portland neighborhood back in late 2018, I opted to switch my banking to a credit union half a block from my front door. This decision today made what otherwise would have been an exhausting problem into a minor headache.
Once upon a time, I spent three years writing a blog called Portland Communique. It was well-regarded, well-read, and one of the few examples of what some called “stand-alone journalism” around at the time. For awhile afterward on my personal blog FURIOUS nads!, I continued to stick my nose into local affairs and elections.
Winnie has a lot to say on the matter of endurance as informed by her own experience combined with reading a book on the subject, and I don’t have much to say here but I wanted to think out loud a bit about the idea that “being mentally exhausted impacts our physical performance too”.
Over on social I’d come across this by Liam Konemann for The Guardian about music clubs and gigs for neurodivergent people, which I read mostly through the lens of having just attended a concert as an autistic person.
Kev is wondering if you ever read your old posts, while both Terence and Roy are tending the “old post” gardens of their blogs.
One of the last things I posted before quitting the blog in March was a thing about trying to see baseball for the first time in two decades by risking the exertion required to travel to Seattle for a Red Sox game as they played the Mariners in their opening weekend at home. I probably should follow up.
If you’ve been reading this for awhile, you know that part of the reason for registering this particular domain was an intention to restore over twenty years of blogging from across various and different sites, services, and domains. You can gather as much from the posts page.
The lack of title quotes should have been your hint that this post is not about The Wire, HBO’s seminal television series from the early 2000s. Rather, this is about Doctor Who, because back in June or July when I no longer was blogging I made a prediction on social media and I needed to get it down here for posterity, before the show returns.
For awhile now, the top item in the “now” list on my homepage has said, “Reading, reading, reading”—with an exhortation to gift me ebooks which links to sending a Kobo gift card, and since someone bought me a $50 such gift back in June I thought I’d mention what that’s gotten me so far.
Tonight I pulled the trigger on semi-rebooting the revived blog, moving from Pika back to Weblog.LOL (where it was before it moved back to WordPress before I quit in March), but for the time being only the posts since I resume blogging are here while I finish up the Markdown files for the 1,200-post archive-to-date.
So, I wasn’t going to get into this despite getting irritated about it on social, but now there’s a story by Ali Breland writing for The Atlantic with the title, “Donald Trump Flirts With Race Science”, and you know I can’t shut up because there are two things wrong here.
At the end of his apologia for the Social Web Foundation, Ben Werdmuller says this of what he terms both the growth fediverse and the movement fediverse: “Each group is approaching the problem in good faith.” The foundation’s very name disputes this contention.
I’m not interested in getting into Freddie deBoer’s primary contention about people faking disabilities (via Sara Hendren), if only because I had my worst-ever fatigue day yesterday and today had to be up early for the landlord to come fix the intermittent beeping coming from my basement, which as a sensory experience certainly didn’t at all help the fatigue.
Things here likely will remain silent for a bit, as I’ve an absolute ton of work to do to put the blog back on Weblog.LOL after leaving it for WordPress sometime last year, and then quitting blogging altogether earlier this year.
The man and a woman lead you around a corner into a sort of tunnel that seems to be made by a bunch of plywood flats leaning up against the wall. “We have to show you something,” one of them tells you.
Some folks have gotten themselves together as something they’re calling the Social Web Foundation, and I’ll cut to the chase: this is an attempt by ActivityPub partisans to rebrand the confusing “fediverse” terminology, and in the process, regardless of intent, shit on everything else that’s been the social web going back twenty-five years.
I’ve only just mentioned that I’m pausing the imports but not pausing new posts, but I wanted to note that at this point I’m likely moving off of Pika, although I’ve no idea when or how that will happen. The circumstances very much are of an “it’s not them, it’s me” variety.
Everyone’s talking about Jemima Kelly writing for The Financial Times about how Bluesky is the return of the left/liberal echo chamber because (and I might be paraphrasing just a bit here) people on that platform don’t put up with nazis in the name of balance or civility, as if we somehow don’t know about the paradox of tolerance.
While I’m going to continue posting here, when there’s a reason for it, I’m holding off on manually importing any more old posts. The best thing about Pika is that it’s dead simple and offers me almost no temptation to tinker, because except for a little CSS there’s nothing to tinker, and this is why I decided to land here.
It’s a very strange experience, seeing a band at the height of their career and then at a reunion show two decades and change later.
Earlier this week, Ross Andersen for The Atlantic considered the current state of comparative thanatology, or the question of how similar or dissimilar is the understanding of death from one species to the next. The current state mostly is the same as it’s been for awhile: there are glimpses of possible understanding on the part of animals other than humans, but it remains simply too difficult to tell for sure.
The more progressive side of things has done a somewhat decent job educating others about the shaming of other people’s bodies, to the point where body positivity and acceptance is even leveraged in advertising campaigns. As last month’s Democratic National Convention showed, however, there’s a final frontier in body shaming that even liberals continue to exploit for laughs and personal gain.
It’s happening. Or, one thing is happening. Whether or not the other thing happens along with it is up to you.
For nine months now, I’ve been telling people about what I describe as “an objectively perfect movie”, one I’ve now seen four times since finally streaming it in January. It’d been sitting on my Letterboxd watchlist for at least a couple of years, and I only can assume I stumbled upon it happenstantially while browsing Hoopla or Kanopy. It took just one viewing to go directly into my self-care rotation.
I’ve been having some trouble for a few days now parsing the latest from Jonathan Malesic, intended as some sort of warning against something I missed him writing about before, which he terms “liberal nihilism” and defines as “self-imposed helplessness in the face of the supposedly immovable oppressive structures of the world”.
In the Associated Press report on the Harris-Walz campaign accepting the proposed terms for the September debate between Kamala Harris and Mine Furor, most of the interest appears to be focused on the fact that the opposing microphone will be muted when a candidate is speaking, whereas my own interest was drawn to a completely different matter.
While prophecies of the end of Usenet or the wider internet never came true, notwithstanding the latest variant that it’s already dead, this blog is coming to a close. Since most people likely read via RSS, this final post serves as your notice.
This past Monday, I put Bix Dot Blog on an indefinite and somewhat indeterminate hiatus. That blog is where I’ve not only been posting but also slowly (so very, very slowly) been trying to restore over twenty years of blogging from across more than a dozen different sites and services.
As an actually-autistic Portlander, I hope that no one drops the ball on this proposal, and that city and county officials withstand the pushback against it. I need this noise to stop.
Sometime after midnight on Wednesday morning, I had my first-ever lucid dreaming experience, and then later that morning my second. Each began with a cellphone that had been broken in half at its midpoint. The first dream began in a Disney warehouse. The second I can’t really recall at all.
I’ll try not to belabor the issue, but obviously I am having some issues when it comes to what I want to be doing with my blogging, as well as starting to deeply consider the fact of having it, and the restoration project, on a domain that should Automattic ever decide my time in their dotblogger program is over, would cost me upwards of $1,500 each and every year, which I don’t and never will have, and so if the domain could go away how much effort should I put into things here. I don’t know what any of my answers will be, but in the meantime I’ll be tinkering with a blog of a different sort on a different domain just to keep myself writing, and I’ll note that here when the time comes, but for at least a little bit, Bix Dot Blog is on hold.
The sort of existential crisis I’ve been having lately about blogging happens to be coincident with the controversies over Automattic’s various deals to provide data for purchase, sometimes for the purposes of A.I. training with sketchy and somewhat hidden methods of opting out, and that’s not helping any as I try to engage in some self-reflection and make some decisions.
It started with an offhand mention on Mastodon that I’m tired of my blog design, again and already, then turned into a whole other thing on Bluesky because I do wonder whether unease with technical things like this isn’t actually about other things entirely.
There’s a moment in Lost when Desmond is down in an access tunnel beneath the Swan station trying to turn a failsafe key while a recorded voice on a loop warns of a system failure. That loop was stuck in my head for a time this evening as I struggled to remember its source, because today was just such a system failure.
Hot on the heels of my various posts about wanderlust and past travels, today as I watch a Red Sox exhibition game against the Northeastern Huskies to begin Spring Training, my thoughts turned to Seattle, whose Mariners open the season at the end of March at home against Boston.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I referenced what I called my aphantasiac monologue, an attempt to describe how i only can conceive of sounds, much as I only can conceive of pictures. Basically the idea that in addition to not having a mind’s eye so, too, do I lack a mind’s ear.
At the end of a long and trying day that did not go in any way that especially resembled how I’d hoped it would go, disability access designer Nick Colley posted some thoughts to Mastodon about an overlooked aspect of designing for disability.
Recently I’ve been exploring, once again, options for book tracking that aren’t Goodreads, prompted in part by this very long read about the site. Whenever I do this, it quickly becomes obvious that there simply isn’t one site or service that replicates everything Goodreads provides me: book tracking, author recommendations, and listings of new releases of the types of books I tend to read.
Like many other people my age, I’ve been rewatching Northern Exposure ever since the digital release a few months back more recently was followed by Amazon picking up the streaming rights. Yesterday, it was the episode “Crime and Punishment”.
Late last month and early this month, I got a bit morose about the idea that I’ll never be able to travel again, a thing that’s also all wrapped up in the aphantasia and SDAM which preclude me from being to re-live old travels. As if to emphasize all of this, yesterday my Timehop reminded me of a trip I’d taken since moving to Portland about which I’d entirely forgotten until that moment.
First the disclosure: I’ve read neither the Mike Masnick post nor the Jaron Lanier and Allison Stanger article that prompted it, so I’m not actually here to respond directly to either of these things. It’s just that 47 U.S. Code § 230 is being discussed again, and I wanted very briefly to return to something I’ve written before.
One problem with only having had the refurbished Apple Watch since last August is that I don’t really know how long I’ve been keeping up with the daily walk for exercise, let alone how to calculate the longer period going back into the early pandemic that then got intermittently interrupted by weather too cold or too hot. All I really can say for sure is that currently there’s about a year where it’s steady except for two weeks in and around a summer heatwave.
There’s a thing I was going to add to my post about self-censorship yesterday that I never got around to: the dust-up over Threads saying that it will not algorithmically recommend to users so-called “political” posts from people they don’t already follow, in the way that it does recommend posts on other subjects from people they don’t follow.
Whenever I bring up memory it inevitably also implicates my aphantasia, but this Musings post reminds me of that other mental process that causes much surprise at how different brains work: the so-called “internal monologue”.
There’s a little discussion going on today amongst bloggers I either follow on Mastodon or who are in my local feed. The topic is self-censorship, and because I don’t tend to engage in it myself, I’ve a few things to say because I knew in advance where the discussion would end up.
Over the past week and a half here, I’ve written three posts relating numerous experiences from my past. In therapy today, I wondered how a random third-party would feel after reading those posts if I told them I have some degree of severely deficient autobiographical memory.
So, as mentioned, I’ve been making a custom theme using Underscores that would ape the look and feel I achieved under Blogstream but without all the unnecessary jankiness the latter theme had under the hood. As of tonight, you are looking at the result. There are, however, some caveats.
There’s been much ballyhoo about Tracy Chapman appearing at the Grammys to perform her hit “Fast Car” with Luke Combs. As I said on Mastodon, I feel like people simultaneously are making both too much and too little of it. Does it matter that it was a bit of a unifying experience in the moment, and should we ponder that fact? Of course, but it’s complicated.
Over the course of my aborted college career, I couldn’t seem to write a normal paper. For a sociology class where we’d read about social drama and had to write a paper on it, I realized that I’d recently been involved in an incident on campus whose narrative perfectly fit the stages of social drama.
Last night I dreamt that I was on what appeared to be a vacation with my Japanese girlfriend to her parents’ home in Japan. To be clear, I do not have nor have I ever had a Japanese girlfriend, nor have I ever been to Japan. All I recall was tidying up some of my stuff that had found its way around the house, and then being called into the dining room.
Back in the summer of 2022, after several years of a Kobo Clara HD as my eReader of choice, I’d made the switch back to a Kindle Paperwhite. I’m not going to bother rehashing the reasons, as you can read about them in a more general post about simplifying and one about this specific decision. There’s basically nothing wrong, per se, with Kindle but once again I’m thinking about making the switch between platforms.
Manu is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival on digital relationships, and I wasn’t going to try contributing to this until reading his own entry and realizing that it might be worth talking about how my first digital relationships also were analogue ones. Here’s just a little bit about my time on the infamous NYC-based internet BBS called MindVox.
At the leading edge of this particular depression, I posted about an impotent wanderlust and tried to remember what traveling I’d done in the past. There’s some things missing in that litany, and I wanted to try finding what I could amongst the memory deficiencies.
Before heading to bed I read this Adrienne LaFrance piece for The Atlantic about techno-authoritarianism, and maybe it’s only because I recently read Clara E. Mattei’s The Capital Order but 3,000 seems like an awful lot of words not to include a critique of capitalism, which is the actual, underlying disorder.
In the back of my mind after the past several days of course I knew it was possible but I was trying very hard not to think about it. The mood dive has hit, and all I can see right now is how completely shit is my future, because a tiny bit of it starts next month with my energy assistance running out. Even if appointments somehow open up in the coming months and I can get a re-up, this is just a small taste of everything eventually to come. Recently, I came across a bunch of technologists trying to spin-up a sort of privately-run Universal Basic Income scheme, and I can’t say I wasn’t tempted despite all my internal and instinctual alarm bells going off at once, and for the same reason I regularly play the lottery: I don’t have any way out of the absolute pit of my future except free money. Or, rather (and this is why something like Comingle, even if it functions well, wouldn’t work for me), an astoundingly large sum of free money, because when you’re receiving various forms of public assistance it’s very, very easy to receive just enough in mutual aid to reduce or lose those benefits but not enough to make up for those reductions or losses. I’m stuck on a trajectory that cannot be changed absent a lottery win, and the coming sixty-six dollar increase in out-of-pocket expenses is a glimpse of where that trajectory leads. When I am dead, you won’t find as the high-water mark of my life something in my current present or my current future; it’s clearly somewhere in my past. Local variations along the way aside, it’s all very much downhill from here. The only question left to answer is how steep will be the hill.
Robert Kingett last week wrote about the need for less objective journalism, and there’s just a couple bits I wanted to pull here, mostly about the idea that, yes, journalism is a thumb on the scales of power but so-called objective journalism is pressing on the wrong side.
This morning I had to get up early in order to catch a medical transpo service to the Pulmonary Function Lab for a now-routine, annual or so, lung function test. When I’d finally remembered late last week to call to schedule the ride, I didn’t also schedule the return trip, because the last time I did this for this same test, it took much less time than they’d said and then it was a pain in the ass to try to reschedule the return.
I’m around halfway through The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, and last night I slid into an hour and a half of insomnia because I started thinking about traveling. I’d started feeling a minor pang of wanderlust, itself complicated by two things.
So, there’s a couple of things that got left out of my epic, long post about being denied adequate disability accommodations by both Safeway and the State of Oregon, or maybe one thing that got left out and one thing I wanted to elaborate.
It’s no secret that I do not especially enjoy the WordPress block editor, otherwise known by the last name of the originator of printing with movable type, and for awhile now I’ve had it completely disabled. My themes of late, then, have been non-block ones, and using the Jetpack plugin I write my posts in Markdown right in the old-fashioned Classic Editor.
When last we spoke of it, my long-running public accommodations complaint against Safeway for disabling the mute function on their self-checkout kiosks had been “administratively closed” by the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries, an action taken sometimes when the bureau is overworked and sometimes when they’ve indication that the complaint would fail. In response, I filed a public records request with BOLI for my file.
Less than a month after opening up comments and pings here, I’ve turned them all off again. I want to stress that this isn’t because of any particular comment or ping, nor is it about spam management. I’ve entered something of a flail and that usually bodes well—or, I guess, ill— for making a bunch of changes to what I’m doing online.
For most of the past week or so, I’ve been preoccupied first with moving from TV Time to Trakt for tracking my television viewing (the former having apparently done away with public user profiles); then on once again rebooting my homepage, bringing it back to omg.lol from Carrd; and then on battening down the hatches to get through the frigid weather system that descending upon Portland over this past weekend.
Well before I even got out of bed this morning, I became enmeshed in a Mastodon discussion between the author of the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress and a longstanding expert in designing for community, and it’s worth summarizing here the major point made by the latter.
There’s this autistic (and maybe elsewise) idea of samefood, wherein one of our robust defaults is to do just what it says: eat the same food all the time. That doesn’t always or necessarily mean that these tastes never change, however.
I’m not sure what happened today. After lingering in bed to crank out my earlier reminiscence, things slowly and then quickly went completely sideways. At one point I felt like nothing so much as Wile E. Coyote just after realizing he’s run himself off the edge of a cliff, but just before mavity takes hold.
Over on Mastodon, Robb’s been playing with 88x31s like we used to have on our sites and blogs in the old days, and in the process it raised something called hotlinking, otherwise known as inline linking, and that in turn brought to mind an early web story I don’t think I’ve ever blogged, from the era of the fight over the Communications Decency Act.
Matthias Ott, riffing on a conversation between Matt Mullenweg (of whom, of course, I’ve heard) and Tim Ferriss (who seems precisely like the sort of ridiculous Silicon Valley influencer type about whom I’m glad I’ve never heard anything), has some thoughts about blog comments. As someone who’s only just this week activated them for the first time in (hazarding a guess) at least a decade, I’ve thoughts of my own.
Chris at the new year has been adding old posts to his blog, inspiring Robb to do the same. The former’s earliest post in this process dates to May of 2002, while the latter found one from July of 2009. My interest here should be obvious, as this site is destined eventually to hold as much of my blogging as I can find, and my own earliest-known post already has made its way over: it’s from March of 2002.
I’m still using Goodreads for book tracking, primarily because I only follow authors and that’s how I get a fair number of my recommendations: the books enjoyed by authors I enjoy. Last year, I set my challenge at 50 books, and in the end I read 64, although this is misleading for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.
“Forget resolutions; let’s focus on being good people and helping others,” says Musings from a Tangled Mind. “Random acts of kindness, like holding the door open for someone or letting someone merge in traffic […] or being an ally where needed are the real currency of the soul.”
In 1990, New Line Cinema released a box office failure starring Christian Slater as a teenage pirate radio DJ who inspires a surge of others to take to the air and find their voice. Come and gone nearly three years to the month before I first got online, Pump Up the Volume nonetheless for me is the patron film of the blogosphere.
This time last December, I wrote up my picks for my top ten blog posts here for the year ending. I’d written 75 posts that year. I’ve written 322 this year—more than I can process into another “top ten”. However, I did some browsing and have come up with what I consider my two best posts of 2023, followed by another twenty-five favorites in chronological order.
Mike Haynes asked about names, specifically what made bloggers “choose to use your real name or not”, while Robert happenstantially mentioned not really “posting a great deal of personal information”, and I thought about what I posted almost a year ago about my name and its status over time.
One of my trepidations about turning on not just webmentions themselves but also their display on posts is that I don’t actually like likes as a concept, despite once upon a time mentioning how useful they are if and when I’m cognitively overwhelmed but want to send some sort of appreciative signal.
I don’t really do more general link posts here, figuring it’s just as easy for someone to subscribe to the RSS feed of my Linklog folder on Instapaper, but there are a couple of disparate and unconnected things I read this week that I do feel like highlighting.
If you’ve spotted the widget in the sidebar, you already know the gist of what I’m getting into here. Since the switch to Shoreditch, a number of outstanding issues have lingered even as I’ve settled one or two. It’s worth going into a little more detail on each of those that remain.
This will be highly experimental and I reserve the right to retreat behind the wall again at any given moment and without notice, but I’ve begun preparatory work to open up all of comments, pings, and webmentions here beginning with the start of the new year.
Sometimes I think about things that should be self-evident, and certainly are to me, that I wonder whether or not they are sufficiently self-evident to other people, especially those who are not themselves actually autistic. This happened again today, while I was at my regular brunch out.
Despite the time of year, the title here shouldn’t suggest that this is some sort of New Year’s resolutions post. Rather, it’s about some of the latest design tweaks I’ve made since switching the blog over to the Shoreditch theme so that I could stop having to edit theme files and instead focus on plugins and CSS.
If you’re the sort of person who, like me, recently finished Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine, or even Joanne McNeil’s Wrong Way, or perhaps Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s A Murder at the End of the World, and are looking for a movie to watch at Christmas, I’d point you in the direction of 1957’s Desk Set.
Ann Memmott last month wrote a useful post essentially debunking autism “levels” as not especially responsive to the lived experiences of autistic people at the very least because autism writ large and autistic lives individually are naturally heterogeneous when viewed through such a lens, despite the “levels” paradigm itself not accounting for this fact.
As of this morning, I’ve now encountered my fifth Kindle edition where the Enhanced Typesetting isn’t just enabling the left justification option, which it’s designed to do, but seemingly also somehow disabling Kindle’s default full justification option. At least one publisher has told me by email that they’ve submitted new files, but the problem persists.
For these final two weeks of the year I’ve been giving the Apple Journal app a test-run. I’ve not previously used any kind of journal app, although for more than a year, I think, I’ve jotted daily bullet points in Apple Notes that I use as a guide for therapy every Friday afternoon.
So, there’s no way to do this except with a very short post, despite trying very hard to avoid anything close to microblogging here, but I have three things to say about Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind.
For the record, not long after I posted about my dryer, I did once again wedge something between the back panel and the wall, but it didn’t make much difference. If I wanted to warm up my clothes for the day or my bedclothes at night, I had to stand there with one hand against the top of the machine and lean so most of my weight pushed on that point.
My therapist and I last week, although I can’t recall how we got onto it although probably it was our discussion of resilience, talked briefly about two seemingly discrepant ways in which my autistic brain approaches and handles circumstances in which my answers basically seem to be a matter of a binary “yes” or “no”.
Today is the shelter-assigned birthday of Meru, who today in 2014 was taken in by Multnomah County as a stray. By their estimate, she was born in 2006 which would make her an (assigned) seventeen. In 2017 when she was eleven, I got her Willow for her birthday, who then went on to die last year partially due to an inadequate support system and so did not get a fourteenth birthday this year.
This morning I encountered a confounding problem wherein I clicked the link to a post that appears in today’s On This Day and got the content of a different post, notwithstanding the post’s content being correct on the backend. Despite having just woken up, I quickly traced the issue to the new way I’m displaying a post’s internal backlinks after the theme switch.
Well, as I suggested on Friday, I did decide to disable the Webmention plugin, and then later decided maybe I’d put it back, but between these two times I’d done something else indeterminate that made them not work anyway, so I called it fate and deleted webmention, disabled sending pings, and installed a plugin to kill all comments code altogether. I just don’t have the cognitive to figure out what I changed that made webmention not work, so it’s back to just blogging into the null and void, with no one knowing if I’ve blogged about them and me not knowing if anyone’s blogged about me.
After a rocky week or two behind the scenes that I was not doing a very good job of either seeing them as rocky or once seen understanding why, I’ve made a couple of changes to my blogging life. One of which should be fairly evident because you’re looking at it, but the other is a change to my process.
Five years ago, just after moving in, the dryer on the old, decrepit Frigidaire stacked unit started emitting a raucous rattle, almost like something either was stuck between the drum and the housing, or some part of the drum was rhythmically striking something jutting slightly into its path of rotation.
On the heels of thinking aloud about the diagnostic language gap, it probably makes a little bit of sense for me to get into the potential changes to the U.S. Census that could result in a vast undercount of disabled Americans, as described by Betsy Ladyzhets of newly-launched The Sick Times.
While I’ve long since stopped microblogging here in favor of doing so in more ephemeral venues, I’ve a need to get this on the record. After spotting Matt Haughey ponder attending a showing of Wonka dressed as Paul Atreides, it seemed to me there was only one reply.
As you might surmise from my post about blogrolls where I mention not having posted to that “default apps” meme, I don’t really do blog memes. However, after seeing Tracy list her WordPress plugins, following the lead of Nick and of Jan Boddez, and then seeing Alex follow on, I figured I’d go ahead and drop mine here.
Another adventure in midlife adulting. Is it even still midlife when you’re 54? Last year my top sheet tore, almost certainly because my cat claws her way to get under the blanket and eventually weakened it enough so that normal movement ripped it wide open.
Back in August, I’d mentioned that I’ve been trying to get Safeway to reactivate the mute function on the self-checkout kiosks, because the incessant narrating chatter is a final sensory nightmare when grocery shopping already is a stressful activity as it is. Over a year and a half, things had progressed from emails with the store manager to filing a disability accommodations complaint with the state.
We’re now fully enmeshed in the time of year where my metabolic imperative is to fatten up, and I’m trying very hard to not replace my rice bowl with a pasta bowl and my cold cereal with a toasted bagel and cream cheese because I don’t live in a cave and spend my days on the tundra hunting for food.
Folks are starting to respond to Robin Rendle’s declaration “that we are a poem and not software”, and that perhaps the personal sites and blogs we make for the web ought to reflect this.
First came RSS Club from Dave Rupert wherein bloggers commit to some number of their posts being made available only through RSS. Definitionally this has varied from posts that literally only appear in RSS feeds to posts that technically still get publicly published to the blog but don’t appear in any post lists or searches on the blog itself.
Briefly this past October, because of Kev, I spent some time looking into Kirby as a potential replacement for WordPress, because at this point that CMS is bloated and my solutions to things often pretty janky. It didn’t take long browsing the Kirby documentation for a legit anxiety response to kick in. The kind that feels something akin to claustrophobia.
Elisa had some things to say about cheese while Radim had some things to say about watches, and together they’ve put me in mind of a story about a trip I took to France.
There are some subjects you should leave alone if you’ve already addressed them. There are some wells to which you should not return, leaving well enough alone. Alas, these are where one’s pet peeves are to be found, and so I must confront Ruben’s suggestion that you can read an audiobook.
Rachel examines her midlife crisis in contrast to the straight, white, and male version that’s become the sort of normative American default idea of what a midlife crisis looks like and so gets more than the lion’s share of our cultural attention.
That online restlessness that might not even be rooted in anything online, per earlier, burrowed its way into spurring some more tinkering with the blog theme today. In the end, my changes were not quite as dramatic as they might have been but nonetheless will be noticeable.
In the early days much if not most blogging was microblogging, and then Twitter effectively took over that niche. I’ve been off that site for some time, and I’ve played several different times with Mastodon, and lately I’ve been spending time playing with Bluesky.
It’s happenstance and coincidence, but as I’ve again recently been speaking of blog anniversaries, I should note that today is the twenty-second such of my mother following me into the early blogosphere as it stood in November of 2001. She blogged there until June of 2002, when we moved her over to her own domain, the annual renewal of which effectively serves as her birthday present. All went well until February of 2004, when apparently my server must have had some sort of meltdown (this might have been during the time I was serving websites, including Portland Communique, from a custom-built OpenBSD box over my home DSL connection) and she briefly decamped back to her original blog until later that month when I must have sorted things out. My mother, in other words, consistently has been blogging in one place for two decades, whilst I (as you can see, albeit still only partially) demonstrated consistency only in regularly flailing from one domain, and often service, to another.
Annie, another blogger who accidentally got lost in a cleanup of my feed reader a little while back, wrote up something of a concise guide to types of blog posts and, as near as I can tell, I’m pretty sure that out of the twelve listed types my posts regularly fall into five of them.
Saturday marked five years since Oregon’s disability determination process, during my first failed Social Security application in the wake of the disastrous and dysregulating Vocational Rehabilitation job placement, diagnosed me with Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Anxiety and Depressed Mood.
While the bright sun is an autistic sensory issue for me, once we’re firmly into autumn and the temperatures start hitting 50°F, I do need clear skies to be comfortable, and this afternoon that’s what Portland at just the right time to hit up one of the two neighborhood coffeeshops open at all today, so I got to go sit outside in the sun and read over a latte on a perfect sort of autumn day that also happened to be Thanksgiving.
It only just suddenly occurred to me this morning while thinking about my blog restoration project where my first webpage must have been located, and although it would have pre-dated the Wayback Machine and so is lost to time I went on a little search journey to see if it were possible at least to know what I’d done with it.
One week ago my back went out although it only kept me squatting on my kitchen floor for several minutes. What confounded me was that I’d becoming fairly convinced that my new aches and pains were the result of my shoes pretty dramatically being worn out.
Just the mere thought of trying to assemble a list of my default apps gives me mild anxiety not worth the confronting. However, I’ve slowly but methodically been browsing that compiled list of participants looking for bloggers to follow. Which brings me to the subject of blogrolls.
It’s no secret that I like reading posts about blog anniversaries, in part because of my project to restore two decades of blogging here into a single, unified place. There seem to have been many such posts recently, but Ruben’s might be the most unique.
At the end of a serious bit of incisive self-reflection about tensions between intellect and psychology, Winnie expressed some passing concern with where the post ends up.
It’s never a good sign for me to start feeling squirrely about my blog design. Partly because it’s a gargantuan task should I decide on a complete overhaul, and partly because this squirreliness often comes when I’m feeling especially disjointed or dejected about life in general.
I’m not going to belabor this one, because in truth were I still also microblogging here, this might be a short, untitled post, and I’m not yet ready to revisit that idea. That said, I didn’t want to let Dave Karpf’s thoughts on what elections are for pass by without highlighting the most important idea.
Over time and in meddling with my feed reader I sometimes lose feeds and later accidentally rediscover them. So it is with Art Kavanagh, whose writings on aphantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory were most of what I read after originally running into the former neurodivergence on MetaFilter.
There’s a long list of blog posts I’ve wanted to get to, some more so than others, but events keep intervening and I don’t have the energy or motivation for them. Instead, here’s a look at what seems to be going wrong with my brain.
Every morning when I wake up, the first thing that does in the weekly notes file I use to structure my weekly therapy session is whether or not it was a night of intense dreams, and if so, and if I can remember them, what the dreams were. Often in the night, when I wake to go to the bathroom, I try to focus on a few code words or phrases from the dreams I’d had so that I remember them in the morning.
So, it was looking increasingly like my back aches and pains were the fault of needing new shoes, because after getting new shoes things seemed to be on the upswing, with my daily walks accompanied by less and less of the aches and pains.
I’d like someone with more patience and fortitude than I have to take a close look at this recent study about autistic midlife and tell me if my initial, cursory response to it seems valid, because the thing that nags at me about it is that not once does the paper reference or use the words masking or camouflaging, which I’d think would be relevant to what the paper finds.
While saving various links to a notes file over the past week or so, what was percolating in the back of my mind was something along the lines of my roundabout on mediocrity, not least because this, too, is about whole-personhood and its thwarting. Instead, as the title suggests, here are six links followed by one final, the payoff.
So, I did manage to haul myself out of bed at an ungodly-for-me hour to hop public transit all the way across town to the zoo for Nora and Amelia Gray’s (observed) birthdays, and exhausted myself into the ground taking nearly 800 photos with the D5300.
Over at Bear Blog, I ran into Connie offering up a breakdown of what they’d do if they had no job, and I have to say that the agenda looks hellaciously exhausting. Was I ever capable of doing so much in a single day? I’ve no job and I can’t do half that.
Back in December of 2021, I’d made an appointment to go donate blood, something I’d not done since college. In part because I still don’t know my blood type, although I’ve a vague recollection from three decades ago that it was O-Positive.
Lauren Schenkman, writing for Spectrum, interviewed researcher Mirko Uljarević on the “restricted and repetitive behaviors” component of the current, mainstream view of autism pathology. Uljarević suggests that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual “may erroneously lump together distinct characteristics” in this area.
Last week, David Pierce for The Verge suggested that the future of the social internet is Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a mainstay of the IndieWeb community, and an idea that exhausts me utterly just to think on.
If ever you’ve taken a mental health diagnostic or research survey, it’s possible you’ve encountered a question here or there that stymied you a bit. I’ve mentioned this before in regards to empathy. It’s something tiramisú notes having encountered with regard to loneliness.
Mighil, I think, conflates two different things in this advice for presenting yourself online. The advice cites social media specifically but I want to broaden the scope a bit as I argue that it’s a mistake to correlate or equate the idea of being authentic and that of being unique.
I’m not one for going out of my way to make lists of things that are good, probably in part because they always feel performative although that could be the lingering smell of the era of social media (in)authenticity and wellness woo-woo.
One of the things I’ve been wanting to get around to is describing the recent changes I’ve made to how I deal with blogs, news, and newsletters. This is something that I switch up now and then, trying to find the right overall process for me. Tracy just responded to Alex Sirac on this very topic so now seems like a good time.
Ben reminisces about LiveJournal and writing posts and hosting discussion threads that “could be shared with the whole world, just with your friends, or with a subset”. It’s a part of the internet that never was part of my internet.
I’m currently siting in my living room having a trauma response. Last week I marked the second birthday Willow never got to have, and tonight Meru’s bout of atypical crying while walking around the apartment her her tail down nearly sent me immediately into a sobbing fit. Right this moment, she is sitting on my lap after a fairly routine grooming session, but this doesn’t erase the fact that less than an hour ago she was vocalizing somewhat plaintively while in unusual for her places like the bathroom. During last year’s repeated frenzies over Willow, there were at least two frantic, late night, all night trips to Dove Lewis. Occurring on the heels of more than a thousand dollars in dental surgery for Willow, the stresses and strains were physical, psychological, and dramatically financial. All of it needing to be done entirely in my own (excepting the emergency financial help from others) because I have no social support system whatsoever. When I say at the start of this the words “trauma response”, I’m not exaggerating. My entire nervous system withdrew into fight, flight, or freeze and nearly crashed. To continue not exaggerating, last year’s Willow decline nearly sent me to the hospital because I was on the verge of exhaustive collapse. I’m saved now from the full trauma experience only, I suspect, by the aphantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory precluding actually having any vivid flashbacks. But the experience nonetheless exists encoded in my nervous system in other ways. This on a day when that nervous system already is frayed from yesterday’s annual birthday depression. As she now sits her on my lap, I’m afraid to move, I’m almost afraid to breathe, for fear of setting us both scurrying for purchase that might not exist.
When a new animated Star Trek show first was announced, I was intrigued. When it turned out that Lower Decks was a comedy, I was skeptical. When I first tried it, I was in a bad sensory space and the bright colors and rapid-patter dialogue was too much for me.
There are a couple of days back-loaded into the end of the year that tend to throw me down the mood hole: New Year’s, because it’s a social demarcation of transition and the passage of time, and then today, October 25, the day I was born.
Nicola Griffith, writing for Literary Hub, warns authors to be wary of how they deploy empathy, taking care not to weaponize it needlessly. Alan Jacobs, on the other hand, cautions against that advice. Or, so he says.
Dan Shipper over at Every reposted an old interview with Robert Sapolsky, the guy in the news for his new book about the nonexistence of free will, about stress. For reasons you’ll understand if you read me regularly enough, I was struck by the strategies suggested to reduce it.
Time to do some follow-up thinking out loud about my earlier post on blogs and digital gardens because, as happens when blogosphere-like (gardenosphere-like?) things happen, there’s been some additional chatter around and about.
Apparently the last time I checked in here about the new and exciting back problems I’ve been having was Monday, when I lamented that while Sunday’s walk clear across downtown Portland went without a hitch, Monday’s evening walk in my neighborhood did not. For more reasons than one it makes sense to bookend the run of weekdays with an update.
Last night I dropped myself down a blog-browsing rabbit hole, including adding the discovery feeds of Write.as and Bear Blog to my feed reader, and somewhere on the way I ran into Joel Hooks having some thoughts on what works for him and what doesn’t when it comes to writing online.
Romello Goodman, writing in the latest Logic(s), talks code and scale through a professional history with online obituaries and guestbooks, and hits at what happens when the systems in which we find ourselves living grow too large to any longer be fully human.
This morning while lounging in bed because I managed to wrench my back, already lately plagued by aches and pains, I took to something I was going to do last night but didn’t want to stay up late.
For current events reasons, today I thought I’d go take a look at traffic to Mark Twain’s The War Prayer, which I’ve maintained continuously since late in 2001, for then-current events reasons. Typically, in “down times”, the site gets somewhere between fifteen to twenty views each day.
Today would have been Willow’s fourteenth birthday, had not a combination of degenerative illness and my autism cut short her life before she turned thirteen. (No, don’t argue. That “some other, later now” never did come.) Likely this explains why she’s been popping up in my dreams, including twice last night. I’ve no guilt from when Scully, my first Portland cat, died. Her stunted highness died of old age. Willow, I will feel forever, died unnecessarily. Or, at least, without anything and everything first having been done to try to stop it. I’ve nothing else to say, really. You can browse some photos, although given the text of the photo descriptions come of them capture my other cat, Meru.
Nick Heer, while noting that Jason Kottke is adding comments with all the benefits and travails that entails, also notes that since the fall of Twitter there’s been an uptick in email from his readers.
After worrying about the prospect of my world shrinking due to the mysterious increase in back aches and pains especially when out for a walk, something reality only continued to reinforce, the story then got weirder this past weekend.
I’m trying to clear out something of a growing backlog of prospective blog posts, and rather than belabor this one (not that it would have come close to my discursive post on mediocrity) I’m just going to lay out the relevant links serially.
There’s a stack of things I mean to blog building up in my notes file for such things, but Manu had to go and blog about shoes which means I’m constitutionally required to take advantage of the opportunity do the same. Shoes will never not be a hassle and a half.
Earlier this year, after basically two decades of searching, I finally had an internal backlinks solution thanks to an arduous process involving ChatGPT. It solved one of my two longstanding needs when it came to blogging.
Late in 2021, I responded if not with exuberance then with acquiescence to the proposed “profound autism” label, an opinion I’ve referenced more than once. As of this post, I renounce and reject that position.
Earlier this week, I detailed how a trip to the zoo was cut short by the “aches, pains, and tweaks” I’ve increasingly been experiencing in my back, and the psychological hit I took as a result. There’s already some need to follow up.
There’s been a slowly-growing list of links in the notes file I keep to remind myself of blog posts I want to write but with which I haven’t yet quite come to terms. This is one of those posts, and I’m not entirely certain I’ve figured how to bring it all together.
Earlier this year, I juxtaposed some articles on using A.I. and fMRI to recreate people’s thoughts and on the reported detection of conscious activity during death. I’d wondered just how far away we were from the movie Brainstorm.
Mandy Brown’s thoughts on writers and talkers—which, weirdly, I only seem to have mentioned before in a post about my Social Security debacle—came to mind again recently. In this case, it was Jake LaCaze posting about introverts.
Whiona last month wrote an interesting post about web design and ableism from the standpoint of websites that refuse to offer any real sort of mobile experience whatsoever. Mostly I just wanted to point you her way in case this isn’t a perspective you’ve run into before.
If you’re thinking of doing any Bixday shopping this year, now would be a good time. The newest iteration of the Beats Studio Pro is on sale for just $179 during Prime Big Deal Days, but that means this price ends Tuesday. (This is not a promotional or Amazon Affiliates post.)
I’m not sure if it’s seasonal or somehow otherwise cyclical but suddenly in recent days I once again was running into talk of aphantasia everywhere I turned. I’d first discovered the condition in early 2020 (the post isn’t here yet), likely on MetaFilter, and shortly thereafter the corollary severely deficient autobiographical memory as well.
If you’ve been reading along, you know that I keep talking about blog anniversaries, because a lot of them have been happening lately and because long-term blogging obviously is on my mind given the restoration project here.
My homepage for awhile now has indicated that my public transit trips all the way across town and back in order to visit the zoo are “increasingly infrequent due to resource levels”. Today, I challenged my body to make the trip, and it didn’t go especially well.
Last month, I laid out in some detail over the course of three posts the latest experience I was having of the Social Security Administration in the ongoing post-diagnosis process of trying to obtain disability benefits before my familial financial support eventually dies someday and my cat and I go live on a downtown St. Johns sidewalk somewhere.
Almost a full month ago, I wrote about the camera I need, something I’ve thought a lot about since getting the refurbished Apple Watch. I even designed it, sort of.
Two years ago today, after catastrophizing over the possibilities, I savaged the most recent novel by Richard Powers, saying that it seemed an “argument that being autistic is a bit like being artificial: dropped down halfway and so not worth the living”.
I’ve spent the better part of the week working to develop a custom “classic” WordPress theme that would strip things down along with disabling Gutenberg and its HTML bloat.
Just a brief note that things might or might not go quiet here for a bit because I read this Kev Quirk post about moving to Kirby, and I’m spending some time looking into it. WordPress hates the web, and the bloat under the “view source” hood is ridiculous.
Yesterday, I finished a memoir by an astronomer and astrobiologist. It’s interesting and engaging but as sometimes happens in science memoir eventually the subject of religion comes up, and this is where I get frustrated.
While I’ve no interest in having comments here, I do like knowing if someone’s blogged something I wrote, so I sat down once again to look into putting webmentions back in place on the blog.
“We are aware of the statements and inquiries about the health of Tim and Stacy Wakefield”, said the Red Sox organization in a statement. “Unfortunately, this information has been shared publicly without their permission.” The statement was released with the permission of the Wakefields.
Apply here the usual disclaimers that I’m not engaging in armchair diagnosis. Someone can have what could be seen as autistic traits without themselves being actually autistic. I just find parallels interesting.
Ben Werdmuller is wondering how the age of the internet affects parenting and I’ve nothing to say on that point. I once nannied for a friend’s kid and the most screen-time I remember him getting was repeatedly watching Mary Poppins or Yellow Submarine. On the television set.
Ben Werdmuller takes the opportunity of Tracy Durnell’s blogging anniversary to make some remarks about identity which, it won’t surprise readers here to learn, are of interest to me.
There are a few things I wanted to come back to follow up on last week’s double whammy Social Security situation that left me somewhat psychologically gasping for air, because they’re important to understand.
If you’re watching my list of recently read blogs, you might get a preview of something I’m going to blog here. Often, it’s entirely an accidental result of reading several things in close succession which turn into something connected in my head.
Toward the end of 2022, my coffeeshop allegiance shifted to a place that appeared from the mists of the former See See Motor Coffee in downtown St. Johns: Wonderwood Springs, brainchild of local whimsy-artist Mike Bennett.
It’s difficult to remember a time in Portland when getting almost hit by a car when I had the pedestrian right of way wasn’t a fairly regular thing. Certainly at least since moving to St. Johns it happens at least weekly.
Yesterday and today, I’ve been trying to find out from the Social Security Administration whatever happened with the Request for Reconsideration I’d filed back in March to a non-medical denial of my disability application before I’d even progressed beyond the initial, introductory intake portion.
This past February, I finally sat down to take another stab at filing for disability benefits. I’d originally done so, and been denied, back in 2018 after my vocational rehabilitation job placement spectacularly blew up in my psychological face.
First, they were thwarted by a global pandemic. Then, they had safety concerns. This weekend, for the first time since 2019, the Portland Polish Festival rematerialized in North Portland.
This week has brought with it a series of aches, pains, and other symptoms that in some cases might be and in one case is related to my daily, evening walks. For the time being, I’ve been seeing them as an artifact of nearing or reaching my resource limits.
Since I’ve recently rethemed this site, I thought I’d give a briefish rundown on how things are set up, because I’ve finally hit on an overall structure where I think the restoration project makes sense without being overbearing.
To celebrate Red Sox ownership finally cutting loose Chaim Bloom, who presumably did not pitch Year Four of his tenure as a haphazard and failed scramble maybe for the third wild card slot and joining a historically bad Yankees team in the division basement, I’m once again returning to the matter of Rafael Devers.
Even well before my blog restoration project, every now and then I’ve wondered what became of various “main characters” from previous incarnations of my blogging. I thought I’d take a brief tour of what Google has to say about it.
Recently as an early combination birthmas present (I was born in October, and then there’s that whole thing in December) I got a deal on a refurbished Apple Watch, specifically a Series 6 because it was the earliest model with all the current biometric sensors.
Brian Koberlein earlier this month, on using Earth to predict JWST’s ability to detect signs of life on exoplanets:
Colin Walker makes a very important point about engaging in therapy that seems worth mentioning here given my three-year therapyversary last week.
Last year, I wrote about how I’d like to get off the DSLR in favor of just using my iPhone, except that there’s limitations to the latter that keep me having camera-only devices around.
Over the past week I managed to binge all of From during a trial of MGM+. It’s mostly a sort of Lost meets Under the Dome meets Wayward Pines, and while I found it diverting enough I’ve one enormous quibble.
It doesn’t matter how satisfied I am with any particular redesign of the blog, it seems inevitable that sooner or later I will start to feel literal anxiety sensations when I open it up and will need to change it up all over again.
Despite my introverted and asocial nature, it’s nonetheless true that I enjoy having regular haunts even if my interactions there don’t tend to deviate from the basic social scripts of pleasantries and ordering.
Late on Tuesday morning I received word from The Belmont Goats that Atho, one of the four goats born into the herd early in its existence, had passed overnight. This is the second goat to die this year, the herd’s tenth anniversary.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that the “published on this day” function here reminds me that today is the third anniversary of my first appointment with my current therapist. Although, really, I’d been anticipating it because of related posts that similarly surfaced a couple of days ago.
After a full night’s sleep, my day began with a back spasm so sharp that it literally took my breath away for moment. This is the second back spasm in three days.
As I noted yesterday, even researchers whose ultimate ends might differ as to the necessity of “interventions” are starting to come around to the idea that autistic “experience doesn’t really map onto the DSM category”, and that an atypical susceptibility to stimulus overwhelm might be at the core of what we consider to be autism.
The other day I sat down and listened to an interview with Jonathan Green in part about his paper on neurodiversity which along with earlier ones on autism as “emergent and transactional” apparently yielded some Twitter response about eugenics.
As I’m sitting here watching today’s Red Sox game against the Astros, the NESN broadcasters were opining something along the lines of, “Can you imagine being told earlier this year that in August we’d have players with top OPS and Chris Sale pitching but be in this position?”
Nearly two decades ago, for awhile I managed a group blog for local Red Sox fans that shared the title of this post. It was so-named because if not for Asa Lovejoy losing a coin toss (or series of them, depending on your source) to Francis Pettygrove in 1845, we’d be living in Boston, Oregon.
After three days over one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, today’s forecast was 91° and the morning seems overcast. For whatever reason, I was awake at 5:30 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep until after feeding the cat at eight.
More than once since my diagnosis, I’ve referenced Spoon Theory, posited two decades ago by Christine Miserandino in the context of lupus. It was picked up broadly in chronic illness communities, and adapted for use in autistic and other neurodivergent communities as well.
Two weeks ago I started putting together something of a comprehensive post about my fatigue, in an attempt to have it all of a narrative piece. I haven’t had the energy to get back to it. There’s something I wanted to get into now, though.
So, I don’t know how it came about, exactly, but a week after The Belmont Goats hijacked a fundraiser in order to raise $5M to buy the Blackberry Castle and then backpedaled and misrepresented what they did, somehow The Oregonian picked up the story and decided just to run with the false narrative The Belmont Goats has been pushing in the aftermath.
For about a year and a half now, I’ve been trying to get Safeway to reenable the ability to mute the incessant narration of the self-checkout kiosks. Early on, I had emails back and forth wherein the manager, who didn’t realize it had been disabled, confirmed that it now only can be muted on a case-by-case basis by flagging down staff to come do it for you. More recently, I’ve filed a disability accommodations complaints with Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries.
This weekend while reading during the day I swapped out the LoFi Girl playlists in favor of listening to the entire discography of the late, lamented Toronto band A Northern Chorus.
I’m reading Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell and towards the end of the second chapter there’s a story that struck me.
Let’s say one thing up front: if, as was the original idea, a for-profit entity wants to purchase the so-called Blackberry Castle property and then invite The Belmont Goats to live out the rest of their existence on a spare three acres, that’s fine.
So, as I learned from Variety, Christopher Nolan recently told the Happy Sad Confused podcast something sort of final about the end of Inception, the subject of endless argument and debate since the movie’s release.
Apparently, per David Adam for Knowable Magazine, there’s some sort of psychological movement afoot to (checks notes) redefine psychopathy as good, maybe? I can’t help but notice a consistent problem with the argument.
I’m not entirely sure how much or for how long I want to belabor this, but Jesse Meadows said something recently that I my brain hasn’t let go of since, so I have to get into it at least a little bit.
Interestingly, the first time I mentioned catastrophizing here was in the context of everything piling up at once or at least one thing after another after another. “It becomes increasingly difficult to tell,” I wrote, “when you are catastrophizing and when you are being realistic.”
First things first: yes, I did spend a day and a half this week on Bluesky methodically and with ever-increasing intensity and outright mania detailing and explaining that the American Medical Association did not change its policy language regarding Applied Behavioral Analysis, culminating in a lengthy post here, since deleted.
Faith Hill for The Atlantic examines how personality changes with age in ways that raise my hackles a bit.
In an addendum to yesterday’s post despairing to know what, exactly, is wrong with my body and wrong with my brain, I mentioned that in some indeterminate number of decades a report on assisted-suicide in autistics very well could be about me.
Nearly three weeks ago now, I gave something of an update on where I’ve been at in terms of resources available to meet the demands upon them. It’s sort of been a bit downhill from there.
Some fair number of weeks ago, my library loan of Saving Time by Jenny Odell expired, and I’d been waiting for my next turn to come around. Earlier this week it went on sale for $5.99, so I picked it up and have resumed by rewinding a bit to the start of Chapter 4, “Putting Time Back in Its Place”.
There’s one remaining, outstanding organizational issue with my move back to WordPress. Thus far neither the WordPress forums, Stack Exchange, nor Reddit has offered any solutions. ChatGPT had one, but there was a hitch.
Somehow I’ve not mentioned this at all despite having been fighting my internet provider for an entire month now. I’m getting it out of the way here so that I don’t overly rant about it on Bluesky.
In my ongoing lay interest in questions of sentience, intelligence, and consciousness, I found interesting the following remarks from a conversation between Steven Strogatz and Anil Seth for The Joy of Why podcast.
Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi for The Economist, on an apparent “A.I. as shoggoth” meme with which I’m unfamiliar:
For reasons I won’t belabor in depth right now, I’ve been using the Markdown Block that comes with the Jetpack plugin to write posts here. Partly this is because everything I’d migrated into omg.lol when I was there was in Markdown, and partly this is because the Block Editor doesn’t allow nested lists or paragraphs within list items.
Recently I was struck by how capitalism can enforce seemingly contradictory values without admitting or experiencing any sort of cognitive dissonance.
Two months ago, I started helping out with social media for The Belmont Goats, the nonprofit I helped create back in early 2014 and quit in early 2019, because it’s the herd’s tenth anniversary and I wanted to help tell that story.
Yesterday for The Oregonian, Joe Freeman penned an advertorial for Portland International Raceway, a 2,000-word uncritical hagiography.
Picture, if you can, Mister Salty. The one-time eponymous mascot of a Nabisco pretzel line. Now imagine if instead of dough and salt he were made of memory foam and flat, white vinyl. His head, instead of round, is more like the sticks of his arms, torso, and legs.
Last weekend I received an email notification to log into my Oregon benefits portal for a message. It was nothing: a notice that if I’d been the victim of electronic theft I could get said benefits replaced. I hadn’t, so not relevant. While at the site, though, I spotted something else.
It seems that Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s latest gambit in the ongoing fight with moderators and users over API pricing is to claim that actually, it’s that he’s pro-democracy.
As I reported last month, I’ve been wading through decade-old tweets as part of helping out The Belmont Goats with social media during their anniversary year. This has one very interesting side effect.
It seems like in the past six months much of the meta-blogging has been about anniversaries: so many people seem to be marking ten, fifteen, even twenty years of blogging. It seems this naturally leads to thinking about why.
Calli McMurray for Spectrum reports the retraction of a paper on “the cost of autism” that for some pretty good reasons caused controversy and backlash two years ago when it was published.
Not too far back in my current blogging incarnation, I added a blogroll page and divvied it up amongst blogs, newsletters, news sites, and blog directories. I’d indicated it was somewhat provisional, as I dislike blogroll maintenance.
Throughout this mediocre Red Sox season so far, pretty much any time the somewhat slumping Rafael Devers managed to get a decent hit someone on NESN or WEEI triumphantly would crow about his return. Then the slump would reassert itself.
For awhile now I’ve had a disclaimer on posts older than ten years, something I instituted after seeing it elsewhere. There’s nothing magic about that number other than five years seeming too short and my lack of a continuous sense of self.
Sara Hendren has a brief note on alcohol and its “slowing and clouding effect” but it’s a phrase she uses later on that made me want, briefly, to revisit something.
Since the start of moving the blog from one service to another, it made use of the terrific Beaumont theme by Anders Norén. You’ll notice that as of this post, it’s currently not doing so. It could do so again, but I’ve been theme restless.
Clara Moskowitz for Scientific American talks neutrinos, the headline dubbing them “the weirdest particles in the universe”. It’s an interview with James Riordon about a new book about its history co-written with Alan Chodos.
In this current iteration of the blog and for the purposes of the restoration project, I’m writing and migrating posts using the Markdown block that comes as part of the Jetpack plugin. Not until several days ago, however, did I noticed an inexplicable bug.
As often happens with one blogger or another, Winnie Lim again notes that blogging can feel like “publishing into a blackhole” even if we know that mostly we’re doing this for ourselves.
Today’s telehealth appointment with my pulmonologist, a doctor I have due to the sarcoidosis diagnosis, focused mostly upon my consistently low lymphocyte and white blood cell counts, going back five years.
At some point last year, I think, when I’d a low supply of television shows to watch that I didn’t actually care about just to have something on when I need to decompress, I started going through Manifest, which at that point had migrated from network to Netflix.
There’s a saying that if you’ve met an autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. It’s a way to explain the heterogeneity of the condition: no two autistic people necessarily are alike in their autisticness. Hell, sometimes no one autistic person necessarily is like themselves in their autisticness from one day to the next.
Having only just learned as it was winding down of the lawsuit against the City of Portland under the Americans with Disabilities Act, I’d lamented that it only does the work of the rich and powerful by splitting what should be natural political allies.
As of a day or two ago, finally got everything here caught up to the number of posts I’d previously gotten into the blog at its last host. I’ve still not found a way to incorporate a list of sources in a way that goes with the current design. I’ve still not found an answer to getting date-based archives to use three-letter month abbreviations instead of numbers. The front page now has an unlabeled “on this day” section at the bottom. I’ve decided that the next batch of posts to by restored will be the earliest stuff I could find, from March 2000 to August 2000. As near as I can tell, this pre-dates my use of Blogger by about a year, even though Blogger existed, and so must have been done manually. This is somewhat surprising as those old posts were timestamped in hour, minute, and second, and included the three-letter timezone which even adjusted based upon whether or not Daylight Saving was in effect. So, technically I think it’s possible that I might have been using Blogger already, but I simply can’t find any evidence in the source code on the pages saved to the Wayback Machine. If the original material exists anywhere still, it would be either on and old MacBook drive that doesn’t boot, or an old OpenBSD drive that I haven’t yet found a way to mount and explore.
So, after contacting my electeds about the new SNAP work requirements, I read this CBPP analysis by Katie Bergh AND Dottie Rosenbaum that explained the “phase-in” of lifting the age cap.
Amanda Hoover and Samantha Spengler for Wired describe ChatGPT as a lifeline for autistics and outside of wanting to wave my hands back in forth in the warning gesture that always makes me think of the Giant on-stage at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks, I’m baffled by this bit.
It’s not necessarily evident on its face how these tie together, but after my thoughts the other day about what I called conformation bias, which came in response to a couple of pieces by D.L. Mayfield, I finally caught up on my L.M. Sacasas.
I’m starting to get into something of a spiral as I get all the blog posts back into place as they were before the move and have been able to start thinking about next steps.
Yesterday came the news that a presumptive deal between the White House and House Republicans to avoid a debt default includes new work requirements for SNAP recipients. What follows is the letter I sent via Resistbot to my House and Senate electeds.
When I’d started in on watching The Muppets Mayhem, my greatest fear was that it was going to “correct” Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem for not being sufficiently productive in ways required by the normative, capitalist economy.
One of the things I realized after posting about maybe not being built for being online, and which I added in the addenda, is that the conflict actually isn’t limited to being online, given that I’d also recently had an in-person confrontation with someone.
There are two things I’ve wanted as a blogger that go all the way back to the early 2000s: for post addenda to be saved separately from post content, with their own timestamps; and for posts linked by other posts to include links back to the linking posts.
D.L. Mayfield interrogates, as a late-diagnosed autistic, whether or not the pursuit of healing itself somehow can become twisted into a kind of masking.
Somewhere along the line I missed that disability activists sued the City of Portland under the Americans With Disabilities Act for permitting the unhoused to camp on city sidewalks. Apparently there is some sort of tentative settlement in the offing, and really I just wanted to mention that this is the sort of maladaptive shit that capital does to us. The disabled and the unhoused (many of whom are both) aren’t enemies, and ought to be allies. Sideshows like this are antithetical anathema to the work of building solidarity and capacity.
I’ve got some things I want to blog but I’m so deep into the new setup and migration of posts that I haven’t been able to get to any of it. Instead, a few brief notes about how things have been going in this process.
For the most part, the WordPress setup is complete, having figured out the block editor sufficiently to get an full archive page working consistent with the theme’s date- and taxonomy-based archive pages.
Next week, the TriMet Board of Directors votes on a fare increase proposal which increases the Honored Citizen fare from $1.25 to $1.40.
Jessica Maddox for Wired, pens a very weird opinion piece warning of dangers lurking in the wilds of the decentralized web.
I’ve been trying to convince myself to get back to the blog restoration project, in which I want to bring back as much as I can of my blogging over twenty years, and lately I’ve been back tinkering in my local WordPress install where I’ve been doing most of the work.
In the past day or so a number of completely different things and places have conspired to suggest that maybe I ought not to bother trying to be online in any kind of social manner and I’ve got some serious thinking to do now about my way forward as I’m spiraling and I can’t even escape to the goats because basically I can’t function in this weather.
I’ve been browsing my Twitter archive from May 2013 looking for things related to The Belmont Goats that might help the social media I’m doing for them during their anniversary this year, and I just want to say two things.
One of the things I’ve discovered over the years is that it can be difficult to tell the difference between depressed mood and recovery mode, because the respective symptomatologies are similar. Things get sluggish. Gravity feels turned up. Thoughts don’t really seem to form properly. Decisions falter. Motivation flags. Effort seems unlikely. Sleep beckons. It’s trickier still that recovery mode can yield depressed mood if it’s deep enough, because your psychological guardrails can drop away. I’ve no particular conclusion to reach here. Just gesturing weakly around me for the record of it.
This is not what I’d have expected to want to blog about from reading Bootstrapped by Alissa Quart, but it is what it is.
Becky Ferreira for Vice on combining AI and fMRI scans to recreate stories people were watching, listening to, or imagining:
L. M. Sacasas in the latest edition of The Convivial Society suggests the nature of the real AI apocalypse:
Today I got to spend the day running a Reddit AMA and associated social media activity for The Belmont Goats, as part of their 10th anniversary and on the birthday of Bambi and Cooper, two members of the herd.
Jamie C. Pagliaro, writing for Autism Spectrum News, is concerned about the future of autism and Applied Behavioral Analysis. Mostly he’s concerned about “the limited number of providers and the quality of services”, and not so much about ABA itself.
Last last month, professor of health history Matthew Smith writing for Psyche wasted no time and put it right in the title: mental health is not an individual matter, but a political one. It’s a brief(ish) look at social psychology.
I’m not even on social media anymore, really, but somehow I still know that everyone is talking too much about Twitter when there are so many more interesting things to talk about. Here’s just a few.
In my post about Heartbreak High’s depiction of autistic meltdown, I focused on the precursor to that meltdown: Quinni’s shutdown on the bus. As I said then, this mostly is because I (like Rhi) experience shutdown far more. Here, I want to come back around to talk a bit more generally about both shutdown and meltdown.
Last week, I binged, of all things, the Netflix series Heartbreak High. As surprisingly to me as much as anyone, I enjoyed it overall—but whyever was I watching an Australian teen comedy-drama in the first place? You’d have to blame the British podcast, 1800 Seconds on Autism.
Earlier today, I wondered aloud if anyone else ever experiences a kind of design dysphoria in which you grow itchily-unsatisfied with the design of your online presence. Or: I’d been actively hating what it felt like to look at my blog.
Matthew Desmond for The New York Review explicates how America makes it cost so much to be poor.
As someone who’s watched all of 24 at least twice, I’ve been streaming Rabbit/Hole, whose most superficial difference is a lack of yelling “damn it” in favor of being able instead to yell “shit” and “fuck”.
Everyone is really mad at the little kid who got Masataka Yoshida’s first home run ball because he won’t give it back for anything he and his family have been offered.
Unbeknownst to me until the other week thanks to Nigel Jaquiss in Willamette Week, Oregon has a bill under consideration to phase out gas-powered devices of the sort that routinely drive me into fits of sensory processing despair.
As I’ve been thinking lately about the tenth anniversary year of my old nonprofit, I’ve been looking back at my old photos of the goats. I’ve had to do this on Flickr, because my originals are on an old Iomega drive.
I wanted to pass along part of Sonny Hallett’s post for trans visibility day for what it says both in and of itself for the trans experience, and also for what it says more broadly.
Four years ago I resigned from The Belmont Goats due to exhaustion and burnout initially prompted by a post-diagnosis job placement a year earlier. For the first time since, I’m struggling with not having one of my old responsibilities.
Alva Noë for The Conversation on Major League Baseball’s somewhat dramatic rules changes this year:
There’s a lot in this Freddie deBoer piece which seems self-evidently sound as a way of looking at one’s life. What’s weird about it are the sideswipes he takes at a couple of New York Times pieces, dunking people who don’t deserve it.
I wish I could say that’s it’s surprising that this entire Spectrum piece by Isabel Smith, Kate Tsiplova, and Wendy Ungar on “detecting a signal amid noise in autism early-intervention research” never once mentions the single most-important question about such research.
Nathan J. Robinson for Jacobin on artificial intelligence and capitalism:
Suzana Herculano-Houzel, in conversation with Shannon Odell about evolutionary hierarchy in mammals for Grow, on natural selection:
It’s worth taking a moment to thank the folks at Instapaper, my current read-it-later service of choice. It also powers my linklog page here.
So, I don’t really at all know what I’m supposed to do with this. Someone on Reddit asked about getting SSDI as a “mild” and “Level 1” autistic with common co-morbidities. The very first reply leaves me feeling empty and exhausted.
I’d two thoughts while trying to listen to Songs of Surrender, the baffling re-recordings of forty of U2’s songs, or, rather, while skipping through just to the songs that I actually know.
There are times I almost wish my undiagnosed fatigue issues were more comprehensive and debilitating. It’s tough enough for people dealing with ME/CFS to get doctors to believe them. What chance does my mediocre version have?
Claire L. Evans and James Bridle for Grow, in conversation about intelligence in nature:
A decade or so ago, when I couldn’t afford the full MLB.TV package and bundling it wasn’t a thing my cell phone company did, I’d subscribe every baseball season to their audio-only package.
Over the past few days, Rachel Kwon, Manuel Moreale, and Kev Quirk all weighed in with some thoughts on editing posts after they’ve been published.
I’ve some deeply conflicted feelings about Mandy Brown’s thoughts about burnout, sourced in part in my troubles with the ways in which occupational burnout obscures other kinds, including autistic, especially given that the separation seems mostly unnecessary.
The other day, I talked about a sort of self-disabling event I’d backed myself into by pushing to get walks in when the weather got better, and then accidentally, if briefly, putting myself to (very limited) use at The Belmont Goats.
I’m not sure how much I have to say here, and it’d be easy for me to overwrite this, but I just finished bingeing all of Voices Rising: The Music of Wakanda Forever and it put me in a mood.
Once again I am fighting with Kaiser Permanente over not being able officially to receive the Developmental Coordination Disorder diagnosis despite the Occupational Therapy evaluation in December 2021 in support of it.
The second half of this week reminded me of an unfortunate aspect of needing to carefully manage your available resources in the face of the existing demands upon them: the spiral you can get into where you make it worse for yourself.
Once again—and, yes, already—I am working on a re-theme of the blog. This mostly has been sparked by having rebooted the homepage to be more OMG.LOL profile-like, and separated out certain of its items into a nowpage.
Mike Hall’s post about the Local timeline of Social.LOL, the Mastodon instance of OMG.LOL, only underscores my wish for two particular features I wish would come to core Mastodon.
Not long after my midlife diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features in late-2016, I attempted an application for disability. After a consultive exam through my state’s Disability Determination Services, I was denied for not being disabled.
Colin Walker said something in the latest round of the “what makes a blog” conversation that has me wondering whether I disagree or whether it’s just a case of autistic inertia making me resist.
Through a post by Tim Boucher, I learned of “apophenia”, defined by danah boyd as referring to “the idea of making connections between previously unconnected ideas”. Boucher gets this from René Walter, so I’ll start there.
After finally finding a dark theme here with which I’m satisfied, I’ve decided to buck the regular advice and not bother with a light theme at all.
Back in the Fall of 2021, I’d discovered through a research paper that without planning it my therapist and I had stumbled into what I call “unmindful self-compassion” as a way to mitigate potential after-effects of some autism pathologies.
There’s an utterly exasperating story from Alex Zielinski (who I hadn’t realized moved from Portland Mercury to OPB) about Ted Wheeler’s attempted bamboozlement of “a truth and reconciliation commission to address the Portland Police Bureau’s historic mistreatment of communities of color”.
I’m not going to belabor this, but I’ve got to call out one thing in Jeremy Brown’s look at undiagnosed adults for Autism Parenting Magazine.
I’ve talked before about wanting to add a disclaimer here so that as my blog restoration project fills out over time, I call attention to the fact that any given post might be so old its current relevance isn’t necessarily known.
Recently as I was migrating more posts into here from The Mediocre Autistic, I was reminded of this post about Divergent Minds by Jenara Nerenberg about the attempt to coin the term “temperament rights”, and briefly need to get into this again.
Last week I finished up Three-Body, the Chinese television adaptation of the Chinese science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, thanks to its availability on the streaming service Viki.
Amit Gawande digs a bit into finding one’s writing voice, wanting to do so “without the added pressure of anticipating the reader’s reaction” by blogging in such a way that “none of these posts reaches a place where responding is easy—a timeline with some way to reply”.
I’ve still not recovered capacity after a heavy last week, which is becoming something of a theme over the past several years.
I’d never in my life ever even heard of Tim Urban until Nathan J. Robinson just eviscerated the book he spent six years of his life writing. In the main it sounds at best a laughable and at worst an irresponsible use of seven-hundred pages.
Tracy Durnell last month two months ago wrote up a thing trying to understand blogs, as in trying “to hone in on what exactly we’re talking about” when we talk about them or use the term. I just want to hit a couple of points here.
Recently, I’d stumbled upon the idea of “repertoires of repair” in a piece for The New York Times about a Covid oral history project, and since finishing the piece I’ve needed to circle back on this.
Winnie Lim had some thoughts on labels and value, whether it’s “predefined ideas of what constitutes as valuable work” or even just categorizing things by one’s sense of their relative “use”.
Joe Posnanski for Esquire has a great overview of the changes to baseball this season. I only got to watch a handful of games before (weirdly) my 2022 subscription to MLB.TV expired, but I think this all will be for the best.
Lots of bloggers seem to be celebrating anniversaries lately, and as But She’s A Girl hits her twentieth she did some analysis of posts over that time, and it’d be interesting to run such a thing once I’ve completed my blog restoration project.
I’ve been avoiding the subject of Covid masking during the resurgence of debate after that recent meta-analysis, because there’s just so much selfish bunk infusing that debate, so really I just want to point out one thing.
Thanks first to Chris Ferdinandi and then to Chris Coyier, I learned that jsDelivr will serve GiHub repository files over their CDN. This gave me a way out of a CSS thicket here on the blog.
Brandon Myers interrogates his sound sensitivities in a list of triggers that would be familiar to many autistics, up to and including one of my personal pet peeves: phone conversations in public places (especially when using speaker). What I wanted to highlight comes at the end, though.
Marta Zaraska writing for Quanta Magazine about loneliness and the brain has a paragraph about adaptation that I need to get into here for reasons that might make sense if you’ve been reading some of my posts about autism.
Mike Hall notes a thing he’s placed on old posts to contextualize them as being, well, old posts. It’s a thing that is in the long-term plan for here, once Weblog.LOL will let me do it.
The latest in the ongoing sarcoidosis saga (I’ve now a diagnosis of lymphatic and pulmonary, but not ocular, sarcoidosis) is that today I went all the way across town for a pulmonary function test, which is a new one for me.
Look, I’m no anarchist myself but like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said he knew obscenity when he saw it, I feel safe in saying that know anarchism when I don’t see it.
Colin Walker has a few things to say about anxiety, coming off of Stephen of Strandlines having a few things to say about anxiety, and I wanted to cite them both as sort of an introduction to a couple of things I wanted to say about mental health and normativity.
There’s a discussion between Stefano Montali and neuroscientist Joel Pearson about aphantasia and creativity for a Scientific American podcast, and I wanted to get into what it says about memory, and what it says about trauma.
So, I finally sat down to watch the video walkthrough for managing your Weblog.LOL blog via GitHub and I am torn. While I understand, now, how it works, I can’t decide if it’s a workflow I want to use.
James Barnes, writing for Aeon, introduces me to his take on the new-to-me psychoanalytic framework of relational theory, which he calls the “relational-intersubjective model”.
Time for one of those posts where I just juxtapose two things I came across in the same week that happenstantially are worth pairing together for the Thinking Face Emoji of it all.
There’s some need for me to return to the Section 230 well one more time, partly because I want to say something else but mostly because you need to listen to how Danielle Citron talked about it in a podcast conversation with Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick.
Terence Eden struck a minor chord this week with his “necroposts” announcement, not to be confused with necroposting as posting to a long-dead, inactive thread. (Eden’s own chord was struck by Jon Hicks.)
The aptly-named, given the topic, Jennifer Senior writing for The Atlantic minds the gap between how old you are and how old you think you are, which I’ll be honest is not at all something I ever realized existed as a thing.
Recently I put into my “to-consider” shelf on Goodreads the Anil Seth book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, so I thought I’d check out this interview with Emily Cooke for Nature. As it turns out, there’s a thing I want to get into a bit.
Allegra Rosenberg for Garbage Day looks at attempts to monetize fandom and how it threatens to subsume leisure into just so much more labor, and I thought I’d take a moment to blog a piece of my own fandom history.
Today I read Reed McConnell on white walls for The Baffler not because I have a thing for white walls, or even have white walls, technically, but because last year I got the chance to reboot my living space, jettisoning a motley collection of heavy-looking and actually-heavy furniture which I’d felt had become something of a weight upon my autistic sensory sensitivities.
Yesterday I had a few, brief thoughts about Section 230 that expanded a bit to a few more, less-brief thoughts. After reading more coverage of the oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google LLC, there’s some things I want to revisit, to reemphasize my views.
Having been involved in the original fight over the Communications Decency Act as an organizer of one of the earliest grassroots online petition efforts on any issue (later aped more officially by the Center for Democracy and Technology), I wanted to share a few thoughts about Section 230 given this week’s oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dave Karpf recently explored a “technological optimism” that’s shared by the billionaire class and Silicon Valley—even outside of the Venn overlap between the two.
If we’re talking about seeing ourselves reflected back to us through chatbots (literally I originally typed “being ourselves reflected back to us”), I’ve got to make a pit stop at this Michal Kosinski paper on the pre-print server arXiv (PDF) which posits that so-called Theory of Mind spontaneously might have emerged in LLMs.
Until weekend, I’d never seen this Nora Ephron take on blogging, for Huffington Post from the blogging heyday of the mid-2000s (via Adam Wood). Its prompt was the suggestion that you could discount celebrity bloggers because they already have a voice elsewhere.
Over the past few days I’ve been playing with ChatGPT, getting it to help me tinker with PHP to interact with the Weblog.LOL API. Not so much, necessarily, because I was going to create something in PHP to manage things locally (although I thought about it) but more because I just wanted to see if I could understand how things worked.
An unnamed writer at The Economist suggests that demographic change in the U.S. is bringing with it less love for cars, leding with a Portland-area high schooler.
I’ve only vaguely been following the ongoing kerfuffle around large-language model chat services, but in the wake of the latest round of “what the fuck is going on” thanks to Bing, I thought I’d just pass along three recent reads.
I’m becoming increasingly interested in this idea to which I keep returning that what usually are considered the pathologies of autism in fact might be adaptations to mitigate the actual pathologies of the actual, underlying autistic disorder.
Let me get one thing out of the way first: I agree that whichever way you enjoy books “counts”, whatever that’s supposed to mean in this context. Nonetheless, to my dying I will disagree with anyone who says that audiobooks are reading. Reading and listening to are two different cognitive processes—with some higher-level overlap—and so deserve linguistic separation.
Yesterday I sat down to see what other bloggers from back in “the day”, of those I knew and who knew me back in that day, still blogged. In the process, I came across this Doc Searls post about whether or not Mastodon is a commons.
Somehow this week I backed myself into a mood spiral. It might have something to do with pandemic-era emergency SNAP allotments and the energy assistance for my utility bill both coming to an end next month. Financial stress almost always is a shortcut to the psychological edge.
I’m not sure where I found it (I wish there were an easy to way to save an attribution when saving something to Instapaper), but for a few days now I’ve been mulling over Derek Kedziora’s thinking about things in terms of defaults instead of habits.
Everyone’s passing around Jamelle Bouie’s op-ed in defense of trans people and while you should read it for its own sake, I wanted here to pull out a couple of things about dignity.
While doing a bit of design work on the blog (look, it’s not specifically called “roll of toilet paper”), I remembered how I used to hate emoji. It prompted me to try to figure out what had changed, which with my memory deficiencies is something of a big ask.
It’s been something of a time for The Belmont Goats and their fans. First, the unfortunate passing of one of the goats, the first such loss. Then, the very next day, self-professed (but not really) “anarchists” cut open the fence to let loose the goats in protest of a sweep of houseless campers.
Just a brief note to relate a story I was told today. It seems that an adult was discussing with a student the latter’s need to find something someone else wrote to take into their journalism class. The adult had just read my blog post about what it’s like to be goat, and suggested they take a look.
Leslie Jamison for The New Yorker has a fantastic history of imposter syndrome, framed through the twinned but mirrored lenses of Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes (the two white women who’d originally presented the idea) and Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey (the two women of color who later lodged the most prominent critique).
Over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday, my requiem for Phil (and circumstantial paean to solidarity) made the rounds online and in the process two different people made the same suggestion: why don’t I submit it to The Oregonian? I thought I’d answer that here.
Early last month, OMG.LOL added a Discord bridge to their IRC setup, leading to two changes in how IRC looked and felt that became an immediate a problem for me.
My current blogging platform, which is in beta, recently got precisely to the point at which I could put this blog together the way I’d started to see it in my head.
I’ve talked a fair bit about autistic task-switching and the like, most recently when I coined the idea of the autistic local cache and most dramatically when I’ve described the uncollapsed autistic wave function. This week there’s a piece by Jessica Hamzelou for MIT Technology Review that jumped out at me.
Over my years of blogging one thing perhaps was more of a source of frustration than anything else: trying to find or write plugins or custom functions to do something I needed when I was using WordPress.
Besides this passing reference to Kyrsten Sinema looking like a giant banana, there’s only one thing I want to talk about from the State of the Union: the Joe Biden rhetoric enabling the surplusing of millions of Americans.
Lately I’ve been reading a number of books about animal consciousness, intelligence, or sentience, and they all seem to have one thing in common: nearly every one at some point gets around to citing philosopher Thomas Nagel’s question, “What is it like to be a bat?”
There’s an interesting thing by Matthew Piszczek and Kristie McAlpine on The Conservation about the psychological benefits of commuting suggesting that while many people seem to view their commute as “a chore and a waste of time” in fact it is “a source of ‘liminal space’.”
This week I re-themed the blog, effectively conforming it to the design of my homepage which in turn picked up a couple of things that I developed for here, and I’ve also made a couple of other changes to how I’m using some OMG.LOL services and interacting with the local community here.
There’s a piece in The Atlantic by Sue Rahr, one-time Sheriff of King County, Washington, about the myth that protects out violent police culture, but its an early bit that jumped out at me.
One month ago, at the start of January and of the new year, I blogged about a campaign called Bring Back Blogging, an effort which in the end received more than 700 submissions.
It’s honestly too dense for me adequately to make sense of on its own terms, but Wouter Kusters’ meditation on the psychotic experience of time has a couple of interesting things I wanted to highlight entirely for my own purposes, because I’m always on the lookout for ways (even be they happenstantial or metaphoric) to explain some of my autistic experience.
Continuing a bit of blog tennis (so-called because decades ago I’d planned to launch a site by that name inspired by HotWired’s “brain tennis” feature), Colin Walker explains for me what he means by “consumption by default”, a phrase that I wasn’t quite grokking.
One small bit of quasi-interaction I miss from my older blogging days are trackbacks, notwithstanding the degree to which that method became overwhelmed by spam. I’ve just set up an external webmention service here. They won’t display publicly, but I’m pleased to find I can subscribe to them in my feed reader.
Om Malik wonders if the “stream” as an organizing design principle for information online might be over (via Colin Walker). He’s riffing off of Ben Werdmuller pondering how his blog is organized and seeing it anew as “a hodgepodge” with “no through line”.
I’ve spent a bunch of time over the past week building a guide to the blog restoration project. I just noticed that Mike Hall is debating himself on how much old content to bring into his blog. He’s got a disclaimer thing of the sort that I’m planning for here, although now I can’t find where I’d originally come across the idea because it was something I’d posted to Mastodon and recently I deleted all my posts before once again quitting social media. I do think it doesn’t make sense to restore two decades of blogging without a disclaimer of this sort on old posts. One of the things that’s already becoming clear as I try to track down all or most of my old blogging is that there’s probably a trove of mental health history in there, much of which I will have completely forgotten in specifics until I run into old posts about it. It’s unclear to me what amount of my old posts will be merely embarrassing versus completely wrong, but whatever the case it’s sure to be something of an adventure, especially given my severely deficient autobiographical memory. I wasn’t going to import it until I was finished assembling all of my old posts to the Portland Stories blog, but since I just noticed that this story was posted twenty-one years ago today I’m making an exception. Just one example of a yesterday, yanked from the Wayback Machine.
Just had a random, semi-formed thought about my autistic brain on my way back from my almost-daily trip to the coffeeshop to read over a latte. The idea is that my brain stores sets of information about this scenario or that context, that are situationally relevant, in discrete bundles. When entering into a known environment, we spool up into a sort of local cache the information set relevant to it. If some new stimulus happens in that environment, it takes us some extra time to process it because we haven’t previously stored that stimulus into the currently-cached information set. When we move from that environment into another, we have to re-save the first environment’s information set in case anything new needs to be added, clear our local cache, and then load into the local cache the relevant information set for the new environment. The single-mindedness or monotropic pattern autistic brains often exhibit means that it’s even more complicated, or can be more complicated, than my earlier ideas about how autistic task switching isn’t two things but five, in that entire information sets are being switched in and out of our local cache. This doesn’t even reach, of course, the matter of entering into an entirely new environment, where in advance we had to make some educated guesses about a relevant information set and then struggle to adapt it on the fly. I suspect this erupted to mind in part due to Jesse Meadows’ reference to “slow processing”, in a piece I linked earlier, percolating in the background.
There’s some disagreement out there about how to search for extraterrestrial life. One the one hand, there’s this tiny, 17-pound device.
Off of my plea for universally followable /now pages, Colin Walker has been tinkering with an RSS namespace, and you should check that out but right now I want to talk about something in the Robin Sloan post Walker links.
Jesse Meadows nails the problem with all the nonsensical handwringing over whether or not there’s an epidemic of fake autistic people online who, I guess the argument (such as it is) goes, are hopping onto some kind of trendwagon.
We’re not even through the first month of the year, and already I’ve seen what might end up my favorite story of 2023 (found via Willamette Week): Oregon’s own Dutch Bros. Coffee has a bee problem.
Today my therapist and I had a whole conversation about social media and /now pages, prompted by my decision, once again, to quit social media after attempting, once again, to make use of Mastodon.
There’s a new, small-scale study of people who’ve experienced climate disasters that examines their cognitive impact. I just wanted to pull one thing about how researchers are trying to classify this impact.
At some point in the past few months I’d thought about doing a rewatch of Cloverfield, the 2008 “found footage” monster movie from Drew Goddard and Matt Reeves. Then I forgot about it. Yesterday, I spotted on The Daily Beast that Wednesday was the fifteenth anniversary of its release.
I’ve lived in St. Johns for four years and not until today did I hop the bus up North Lombard to take a walk through Pier Park, something I’d thought about before but never quite managed. Typically, should a day arise where my available physical and psychological resources are sufficient to deviate from my routine, I invest them in heading all the way across town to visit Oregon Zoo.
So, I made it, I think, about three months this time before a daily use of and exposure to social media built up enough in my system to generate imposter syndrome just as a human being.
I’ve hit something of an impasse in my project to restore decades of blogging, coincident with one in my brain chemistry. The era I’ve been working on at this point is all untitled posts from my Write.as and Micro.blog use (as well as some Tumblr), but Weblog.LOL isn’t yet set up to do untitled posts. The bulk of this can’t be restored until the eventual import process anyway because there are just too many posts to do by hand, but even the one-hundred or so posts from Tumblr that are ready to go need to wait until the untitled posts thing is working—and it’s very much in the pipeline, so I have no stress over that part, specifically. It’s just that even though the posts that have to wait until an import process do require a bunch of manual labor on my part well before that step, and so there’s plenty I could be working on, my motivation is flagging. I think because the Tumblr posts are prepped but have to wait, my brain isn’t keen on working on the hundreds of Write.as posts or the thousands of Micro.blog posts—let alone anything from earlier eras that I consider a completely separate thing. To reiterate, this isn’t a problem caused by the Weblog.LOL development process. There’s plenty of work to do that has nothing to do with Weblog.LOL but my brain just…won’t, and that’s cascading to tank my mental state and, really, my overall sense of self-worth. I’ve been stuck all day in a version of the uncollapsed autistic wave function and a sort of underlying ripple of imposter syndrome—all as it’s now been weeks of cognitive and motor glitches and feeling like everything I handle puts up a fight—and forcing myself to walk to the coffeeshop to read over a latte did nothing to help any of it. This is not a good day, and I don’t know any way out of it except to endure it until it is over, and I’m generally done with needing just to endure…everything.
Among the thoughts I had early in John Wick 3 was to wonder how many white people are killed over the trilogy’s course. By which I mean how few. I should note that I started writing this post during the interminable Continental siege at the end which left me feeling well before it’s conclusion little more than hollow and impatient.
My television habits are if not entirely predictable somewhat clearly structured. I’ve got whatever weekly shows I’m watching, at least one show I’m bingeing, and usually one show I’m rewatching. In the mornings, I move from one science or nature or animal show to the next. Right now, that’s Our Universe. Already just from the first episode, my recurring existential crisis has returned, as it traces the pathways of energy “from star to cell”. I’m left again to be cast adrift in that expansive sense that it’s incomprehensible that the universe exists and functions at all. Most science and nature shows don’t do this to me; it takes a certain kind of approach. (Weirdly, I think print articles more frequently provoke this.) The various David Attenborough shows give me a sense of appreciation. The brilliant One Strange Rock gave me awe without anxiety. As a kid, I don’t remember Cosmos doing anything but feeding my curiosity. Our Universe in just one episode has me wondering if I should continue daily: would I be subjecting myself to this feeling every morning for a week?
Station Eleven since it aired pretty much has been my Platonic ideal of a television series, something thankfully not contradicted by the second rewatch I completed recently. It’s no small surprise to me, then, that this time through I not only noticed things I hadn’t before but specifically noticed things that by all rights as an absorbed and attentive viewer I really should have noticed before.
There’s a great look back at the heyday of Indymedia from Todd Wolfson and Malav Kanuga for Logic Magazine. I wanted here to highlight two paragraphs in particular as it navigates from that era to today’s (over)reliance upon platform social media.
An interesting thing came up earlier when I was wondering if I could figure out who originally inspired me to blog: a reference on one of my websites from the final month of 1998 to “nervous breakdowns (you know, the ones where [I sit] under a pine tree in the parking lot of the Asian market down the street, chain-smoking and watching the rain for an hour)”.
Gaby wonders who influenced bloggers to blog, and the reality is that I don’t know. It would be nice to know, given that 2023 is the year I try to get as much of my blogging from the past two decades as possible back online. I’ve been sitting here using the Wayback Machine to try to figure some stuff out, and I notice now that I was doing something in 1998 that arguably might have been blogging but it doesn’t appear actually to have gotten archived, and it’s not clear from the reference I found whether it was blogging, proto-blogging, or just some sort of intermittent, collected set of updates about things. That said, as part of that same project I was definitely blogging by early 2000. Whatever this 1998 thing was, I’d likely have some sort of archive of my own but it almost certainly would be either on an old OpenBSD drive I can’t mount anywhere, or even on an old Apple laptop whose drive I think I still have but is dead. I’m assuming that my earliest blogging might have some mention of how I found blogging, but without access to this earliest stuff I can’t verify that assumption. So the matter of who influenced me to blog remains a mystery.
Sometimes a blog post doesn’t need to be much more than the juxtaposition of quotes from two articles you happenstantially read more or less in the same sitting.
As I continue to work on my project to restore, migrate, and consolidate two decades of blogging into one, permanent place, I keep coming across random things—or more likely thinking to look for particular things.
Browsing through some of my blogging from 2019 that hasn’t yet made its way over here, I found myself needing to revisit a 2021 post about predictive processing, which for some reason I used as a way to talk about my problems with algorithmic social media feeds but not more broadly about being autistic.
Until today, I’d never heard of Tao Lin. I only know of Tao Lin today because someone sent me this gargantuan essay described by him on Twitter as including “a narrative on how I cured myself of autism”.
In the latter half of If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Justin Gregg suggests that we humans have “much larger number of cognitive processes that are potentially able to step into the spotlight of consciousness” than do other animals. “We’re not more conscious,” he writes, “we’re just conscious of more things.” This is a tricky idea to get your head around, but then he tells a story.
For awhile now I’ve been making sure to link the RSS feeds of my archive on whatever read-it-later service I’m using at the time (I’ve bounced back and forth a lot between Instapaper and Pocket), so that people can follow along with things I’ve been reading. For a bit less time than that I’ve then been sending each read link to a Tumblr as a public linklog.
Somehow last year I managed to miss Clare Coffey’s takedown for Gawker (via Jonathan Malesic) of blaming capitalism for everything wrong in your life, which pointedly springboards off of Anne Helen Petersen’s writings on burnout.
Not much more than a year ago, I posted about the fifth anniversary of being diagnosed as autistic. In that spririt, I note that today in 2018 I filed the legal paperwork to change my name to Bix. At that point it effectively had been my name for more than two decades in all but that legal sense, primarily thanks to the internet.
There’s an interesting story at Wired about the biomechanics of walking in humans, focusing on the so-called second bounce, “[t]hat is, the knee bends and extends once when the foot first touches down, then again just before takeoff”.
The original reason I picked up Justin Gregg’s If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal was that I wondered if its premise at all would speak to this idea to which I keep returning that maybe we’re not really “all that” as a species. Only a few chapters in, I’m not sure yet—but one thing that just came up certainly did exasperate me.
I have something of an unhealthy relationship with metrics and engagement. I don’t think about it much when I’m only blogging and updating my homepage, but once I have any sort of social channel involved in my day-to-day it all becomes noticeably more complicated and problematic. It’s true that I blog and update because I can’t not. It’s also true that if I share things I’ve blogged on social media and there’s but crickets, it can become a spiraling inner argument: what’s wrong with me, or is it that something’s wrong with them. At the same time, I deliberately eschew any means of response on the blog itself, save for an invitation to reply via email. Maybe I simply shouldn’t be mentioning my blog posts on social media at all, leaving that space for a deliberate ephemerality. When I started in on this latest round of trying in some fashion to make Mastodon work for me, I’d enabled automatic post deletion; I’d soon disabled it but I’m beginning to wonder if that was a mistake. (Yes, it was; I will have to rectify.) I sometimes wish I could disable anyone being able to like or boost my posts at all; I wouldn’t any longer have to think about it at all. There’s a barebones bit of tracking code on my blog and also my homepage; I wonder, too, about removing those. It doesn’t specify beyond referring domain name anyway, so it’s not like I can see what linked me. There’s a tension in a lot of blogging if you’re not some sort of niche influencer: hand one, you know you’re writing because you can’t not; hand two, you don’t want all your effort not to matter. You blog for whatever reason that matters to you, but how long can you go not knowing if there’s a reason that matters to anyone else. Likely this is the tension that runs through much of my twenty-odd years of blogging then not then back again. As much as I weary of a culture in which most all things are judged on the basis of what use they are, I also don’t know how to calm my mind over the question of what use are all these words I can’t not make.
I’m still waiting to see if I get accepted into the ranks of participants, but January is Bring Back Blogging month as self-declared by Ash Huang and Ryan Putnam. Blogs, of course, didn’t go anywhere but the argument isn’t really that they did. Rather, it’s that readers did, and some bloggers did, with the advent of microblogging via social media.
I’d wanted to have something good here with which to start the new year, but that’s also the sort of thing you don’t want to try to do Just Because. Then I sat down to read “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things” by Catherynne M. Valente (via Andy Baio), an absolute tour de force personal history of the last three decades of being social on the internet; it pairs nicely with Joanne McNeil’s Lurking, which you already should have read by now.
I’m not one for packaging the year gone by, although it’s a truism that New Year’s Eve and Day is the second of two annual occasions I can count on to depress me (the other being my birthday, just two months prior), so I suppose there must be some form or fashion of packaging going on internally.
This week’s edition of the Culture Study newsletter is an interview with one D.L. Mayfield which links to Mayfield’s own newsletter whose recent edition talks about autism tests and quizzes.
Scattered throughout the most recent years of this blog are citings of L. M. Sacasas’ newsletter, The Convivial Society. While an onging work of the philosophy of technology, it’s come up here more than once in the context of my writing about burnout in its various but related forms.
I feel like over the past couple of years, I keep running into arguments and research suggesting that the so-called “tragedy of the commons”, along with other similar bugbears, is a myth.
Colin Walker recently linked two things that resonate with me right now, given my potential plans for this latest iteration of the blog. First is Dave Winer’s succinct explanation for why people stopped blogging; second is Poorchop’s wonderings about why people blog.
Earlier this week in Quanta Magazine, Yasemin Saplakoglu examined research into the similarities and differences between perception and memory, specifically how the brain handles and encodes each process.
After reading the latest Jonathan Malesic newsletter and thinking for a bit, I’m compelled to return to the burnout discourse once again.
There’s a thing I’ve come back to a few times over the past several months that I could have sworn I’d written about, but if it isn’t here on the blog I don’t know where it would have been outside of the odd note here and there before a therapy session. It’s the idea that things that normatively are considered pathological or maladaptive in fact aren’t either of those things, or at least aren’t necessarily and inevitably those things.
I don’t know how many times or in how many ways I need to say it, but autism is neither your excuse nor your shield. The latest to attempt this misdirection is Kanye, of all people, who this week claimed to be “slightly autistic”.
I’m not sure how many times I’ve moved Bix Dot Blog around, but as of today it’s off of Tumblr and onto the pre-pre-alpha weblog.lol service from omg.lol. For now, it’s everything the blog had in its most-recent version, which means posts going back just to May 2021.
As part of the ongoing diagnostic process in and around my recent lymph node biopsy that indicated sarcoidosis (mostly in a process of elimination showing the absence of anything else, such as cancer or infection), today I had to return for a CT scan of my torso to see if the issue extends beyond my lymphatic system.
I’ve some seriously mixed feelings about this development in legal proceedings against January 6 insurrectionists. I’m not a fan of essentially excusing behavior on the basis of an insurrectionist being autistic. Autism is neither an intellectual nor a moral incapacity. However, I appreciate the apparent awareness that prison presents some challenges unique to an autistic person that might make it inherently cruel or unusual punishment.
In the month of August, Boston Red Sox slugger Rafael Devers hit .160-something. I won’t belabor the theory here, but recently I noticed that Devers no longer seems to be talking to himself between pitches/swings—a practice that I, as an autistic person, saw as self-regulatory. (To be clear: I am not armchair diagnosing Devers as neurodivergent; neurotypical people have self-regulatory behavior, too.) It got me wondering if either someone told him to stop, or something made him feel self-conscious about the behavior. Mostly, I want someone to go back and review the last couple of months of Devers at-bats and tell me if I’m right about the timing, and that his rather dramatic slump began when he stopped verbally self-regulating at the plate.
Thanks to reductions in my electric and cellular bills, I’ve got a little more wiggle room in my budget, which has resulted in me returning to the occasional trip to a coffeeshop to grab a latte and sit outside to read. In a since-deleted note on my homepage, I recently said that I wish I had the energy to do more than watch a lot of television, but the combination of having been able to do an installment plan for a new Kindle and so doing a lot more reading and finding this new room in the budget made me realize that while I don’t have any real increase in physical or psychological resources (and what little I might have found, mostly due to the living space reboot) I’ve dedicated to resuming the daily 1.5-mile walk through the neighborhood), I now had the meager financial capacity to at least get out of the apartment more often. Having remembered that there’s one coffeeshop on the main drag whose storefront is in the midday shade (among my autistic sensory processing difficulties are sensitivities to both light and heat), I’m gradually rediscovering why I prefer to live in a city, even if in one of its outlying neighborhoods formerly a town in its own right. While there are challenges to such sidewalk living—especially when the main drag is in the middle of a very long, intermittently-loud retrofit—you end up spectator to moments like a grizzled and shaggy-bearded man in an SUV ending up in a duet to the song he’s got playing on the radio with a harried-looking woman passerby in a wheelchair whom he doesn’t know.
As I said earlier, I’m starting to consider reverting to Kindle after several years of having switched to Kobo. At the time of that switch, the selling points were (in no particular order): the warm lights, native Pocket support, native Overdrive support (at the time, Kobo and Overdrive were owned by the same company), not being Amazon, and being able to link my purchases to support Powell’s City of Books.
Something that happens after a midlife autism diagnosis is that you spend years discovering ways in which it impairs you, or at least ways in which you can adjust your life to mitigate its more problematic aspects. In recent months, I discovered that all of the dark, heavy, pedestal-style furniture I had was creating a kind of weighty sensory environment for me at home. Last month, I got to perform something of a reboot, in which almost everything in my living room got replaced by light, natural wood tones mostly from IKEA. The difference is profound, although I admit that now that cat tree in the back corner grates at me with all of its dark brown presence.
For weeks now I’ve been having anxiety surges with no discernible cause. I suppose this is consistent with my therapist’s suggestion that what originally during my autism diagnosis by another practitioner was described as comorbid “anxiety features” likely instead is simply generalized anxiety disorder, but it’s rarely been this noticeably detached from some obvious specific. That said, today I got sent into an anxiety spiral browsing through my blogging from 2020. It wasn’t content-related, despite the posts being from the height of the newness of the pandemic. Somehow it was just the experiential fact of looking at a previous, recent-past blogging incarnation. I can’t tell if I was unsatisfactorily comparing myself then and now, or if I was having an identity disconnect born of my inconsistent sense of self over time due to my memory deficiencies, or something altogether different. It’s spiking again right now as I type these words. I don’t know which is worse: these pangs over something discernible if not entirely identifiable or the other pangs of late that just descend out of the empty air. I don’t like either one, and I certainly like them less than anxiety whose cause is proximate and in my face. I’m sure it doesn’t help that for the past week or two I’ve been restless in the morning, waking too early and unable to make my body fit into the world around it. This morning I awoke at five and couldn’t get back to sleep, for three hours. I can’t stand the idea of suddenly sleeping less because I dread the emptiness of having somehow to fill that many hours every day without the physical or psychological resources to meet the demands of just so much sheer time. I’m so on edge that even a news story about rogue black holes roaming the galaxy, with the probability that one is within 80 light years of Earth, set off my hypervigilance. It’s true that I’ve been remarkable low-resources for weeks now, but this is not sustainable. I feel like I have not been able to level off at all since the near-miss, hospitalization-likely, nervous breakdown I only barely managed to avoid during the Willow thing. I can’t even settle out this post. I keep coming back to add things. Hilariously, I just discovered that such black holes are called “free-floating black holes”. Like the one in my chest.
While waiting to see if I’m first in line for Ben Tarnoff’s Internet for the People when it drops on OverDrive this Monday, I read an interview about it by Wired senior writer Gilad Edelman that contains one question that left me somewhat flummoxed.
Once upon a time, I had a pretty heavy photography hobby. I never was any kind of expert, but I had a decent eye and have many great photos from political protests and pop culture conventions. It’s one of the reasons I’m glad Flickr bent some rules of thumb and let me reclaim my original account but using my preferred eponymous username.
How many blogs and single-pagers can one person have at any one time? Having recently had to move a bunch of things around, let’s take stock. It’s probably the largest number of sites I’ve ever had online simultaneously, even accounting for my fandom days.
Over the past day, I’ve managed to take one blog down altogether and use its domain on Carrd just for a particular piece of fandom writing and then spend hours methodically moving every post of this blog off of WordPress on a DigitalOcean droplet to, of all things, Tumblr. I’ve got some quibbles with their new/beta editor but it’s the only editor where they’ve enabled the ability to block reblogs of your posts, and I just don’t want to have to deal with the potential for reblogs.
Having moved my single-page websites, including my homepage, back to Carrd due to the DigitalOcean weirdness, I’m now getting restless about the remaining sites on the droplet, and whether or not I want to keep self-hosting things at all. I’m giving serious thought to moving this blog over to Tumblr, and incorporating links to the articles I’m reading and saving to my Pocket archive, and then figuring out where to put the Currently non-development blog. I’ve thought about DEV, and more recently Virality, but neither of them allow you to backdate posts so that they continue to exist “when” they should exist. That would still leave serverless my years-old fan blog for the unproduced Goners, though.
After killing off my latest attempt to launch a Mastodon instance and then having to pull a bunch of sites off my DigitalOcean droplet to try to keep it from regularly load-spiking into inaccessibility, I needed something to distract me. Since I’d moved my single-page sites back over to Carrd, on a lark I decided to try to spruce up my homepage without undermining my minimalist aesthetic.
For awhile now, my DigitalOcean droplet, which hosts a number of different WordPress-driven websites, intermittently encounters unexplained load spikes that I don’t understand. These spikes make every site on the droplet completely unresponsive for three-to-five minutes at a time. Already today I’ve experienced several in just a couple of hours. It’s so frustrating that I am about 50% of the way to a decision to just take myself entirely offline except for anything that I can go put up on Carrd, which will mean taking both my personal blog and the Currently blog entirely offline because I just can’t with this shit.
Less than a month. Once again I decided to play with the idea of launching a small Mastodon instance as a home base of sorts for people I know from various stages of my adult life who might be looking at drawing down from Twitter. it took less than a month to collapse under the cognitive weight of what even non-algorithmic social media does to me.
So, along the way I ended up with two Flickr accounts. The reason being that back in 2020 when I decided I wanted to start using Flickr again, there was no way to change your profile/photostream URL, and I’d long since abandoned the handle I’d used on that original account where I have 7,000+ photos going back to 2005.
At the start of the pandemic, I went on a sort of retro-binge of music I’d been heavily into during various stages of my life. Among the bands that made that rotation was the Australian duo An Horse, whose fantastic Rearrange Beds is so great I’ve been afraid for a decade to listen to their other music.
Recently, after much consideration, I undertook this whole process over the course of a week where I moved my banking from Chime to my neighborhood credit union (which I’d initially set up to handle the veterinary fundraiser money), which has a “round-up” savings process akin to Chime’s
It remains the case that I’ve deep difficulties with feed-driven social networking, and I’ve been off Twitter for something close to two years now, I think. In the wake of the latest kerfuffle over there, however, I’m once again tinkering with launching a Mastodon instance.
There’s a minority approach to blogging that structures itself around “day pages”, in which each day’s posts are accumulated on a single page. It’s a minority today but if my broken ability to recollect things is accurate, some early blogging software divided posts into days whether or not the days themselves were individual archive pages. I know that my own Portland Communique had date headers, at least. I feel like Blogger divided into days, with each post having an anchor-style permalink.
In the early afternoon of April 25, 2022, the second of my two cats was put to sleep at our local, neighborhood veterinary clinic. Willow passed in my arms after being given pain medication and an anesthetic before being given the final, fatal doses of whatever it is they use. Today came after months of slowly losing control and use of her back legs due to what all the available evidence suggests was some sort of neurological problem that in more recent weeks spread first to her tail and then to her bladder. While my original, difficult decision was to seek out a special needs re-homing, none of my outreach to overburdened local organizations bore any results. When the issue spread to her bladder, the demands of any potential avenues of care breached the limits of my physical and psychological resources. Somewhere, there are people who have taken care of cats in similar situations. I could not find any in time. It was neither hyperbole nor metaphor when I told people in recent days that if the demands increased even just a bit, I would end up in the hospital. It is true for most everyone that life is a struggle between one’s resources and the demands upon them, both chosen and circumstantial. When you’re also autistic, you struggle not just with those typical demands, but with the atypical ways in which they impact your brain, and with the additional demands of sensory processing, social communication, and executive dysfunction—as well as with the anxiety, anger, and other mental health stress that come with and from all of these things. Most of the forty-six years of life prior to my autism diagnosis were fraught with feeling a failure and a fuck-up. It took diagnosis and therapy to let go of that shame and guilt. The reality, though, is that Willow is dead because I am autistic. She is dead because there were no more resources available to meet her demands. She came to me five years ago after her previous family had expanded and she wasn’t taking to the addition of other animals. They surrendered her back to a shelter, where I found and adopted her. She’d already been rejected by one family, and it already was hard for me just to consider giving her up to still another in order for her to get the care she needed. In the end, there wasn’t time to make that happen. Willow is dead because I pushed as hard as I could, and it wasn’t enough. She deserved better.
There’s an absolutely terrific commentary in Autism Research by Jane Mantzalas, Amanda L. Richdale, and Cheryl Dissanayake outlining a proposed conceptual model of autistic burnout “to explore how various risk and protective factors may interact” that really gets at the heart of so much of what it can be like to be autistic. To do so, they directly draw upon both a model of occupational burnout and a theory of the conservation of resources.
Back during 2019 and 2020, trying to find some sort of middle ground between blogging and social media, I used the Micro.blog service. Over that time, I microblogged something around 300 photos that didn’t get posted anywhere else. That microblog experiment for me ended while ago now, but when I brought it to a close I did make sure to save all of those photos to a local folder
The greeting on my homepage speaks of living a mediocre midlife, “now with added global pandemic, climate crisis, and escalated tensions between nuclear powers”. These often end up in my dreams, including the following two from Wednesday night.
For the three and a half years I’ve been in St. Johns, I kept seeing this installation from the bus and then managing not to make myself go down to take a closer look and maybe some photos until this past week. While this particular shot of the entire installation was taken a couple days later when the street was clear of cars, when I first stopped by it turned out that the people who live there were in the process of moving out, recently having sold the house.
Over in a subreddit for autistic adults, someone linked this Newtsoda webcomic about this study about moral decisions in autistic people. Or, really, the webcomic uses that study to talk about how researchers pathologize pretty much any behavior if it happens to come from an autistic person. There’s a good NeuroClastic writeup of the study if you don’t want to wade through the paper itself, although you always could just skip to the discussion section at the end.
It’s exceedingly rare that Real Life publishes something I don’t bother to read, but this week’s newsletter perhaps should have been one of them. In it, the anonymous letter-writer seems to think they’ve discovered some sort of nascent fascism in crowds at a baseball game.
So it’s after 11 at night on a weekend and as I’ve been trying to manage Willow’s regression since Wednesday night without decent veterinary feedback before the weekend hit (I did try), trying to wing it on figuring out pain med schedules and a reduction of appetite and trying to make sure she isn’t constipated and for the first time in 24 hours she comes out from under my bed meowing her way across the apartment to get to the litter box and she’s suddenly back to a more floppy ataxia instead of her more recent just-stiff-back-legs thing and what the fuck am I supposed to do and why is it that every time she needs more care or I need more advice/feedback it’s the weekend when I can’t get any. My hypervigilance since Wednesday has now become knots in my shoulder blades and really what I need to be doing is getting to bed and getting to sleep. Inquiries to potential places to do a special-need rehoming all are coming to naught, because everyone already is overextended, but clearly this regression is demonstrating the degree to which caring for her will result in bad consequences for my own health and sanity. Even if I had the money to do another weekend trip to DoveLewis, and even if it was money that covered not just immediate needs but also all the additional diagnostics, they would end up having to call an ambulance for me because without question I would drop from sheer exhaustion. It is nearly midnight and if she’s currently in additional pain I can’t even give her more pain meds for another two hours. She finally at least has managed to eat something, I think because we finally got the first mirtazapine tablet into her since Thursday, and right now she’s grooming herself, but at any given moment she could turn back to plaintive meowing I don’t know how to address. Both of us are knots of (di)stress and we are alone.
Since we’re in another sort of doldrum here, I thought I’d just upload a photo. This is Carl, of The Belmont Goats. Last weekend I took my D5300 out, reset everything back to Ken Rockwell defaults, and then shot monochrome JPG in-camera. The only adjustments I made in Lightroom were applying the B&W Punch preset, which helped accentuate some texture and brightness on the subject, and then reducing highlights all the way and exposure by half in order to compensate for the slightly blown-out background. It is the best photo of Carl I’ve ever taken.
On a Monday already slated to be a stretch of my physical and psychological resources because I can’t go back to sleep for very long after getting up at six in the morning to give a cat her twice-daily pain meds, and then wait while both cats have breakfast since I’m already up but can’t leave the food out, because I have to take one of them to an acupuncture appointment, half an hour before that alarm a roaring sound erupts in my bedroom scaring me out of a dead sleep and my bed.
Emily Willingham writing for Aeon on so-called “neuroergonomics” ends up with one of those pieces that should be required reading for anyone who doesn’t really understand what the big deal is with being autistic, even though she’s not overtly writing about autism here.
What follows is the transcript of voicemail left by Oregon Humane Society, and two emails I sent in its wake.
This might be the fastest I’ve ever burned out on blogging. I’m throwing this into a hiatus again. I’m also trying to pare down my non-book reads, and focus on my ever-expanding pile of books I want to read, so anyway there won’t be as much to prompt me having thoughts in need of public exorcism.
Saturday night at DoveLewis, a lone police officer walks in and explains to the front desk that they’ve been receiving repeated 9-1-1 hang ups from there that appear to be coming from a fax machine. My two suggestions to nearby pet owners: that either a fax machine has become self-aware and the AI apocalypse has begun at a veterinary hospital, or somewhere in the back rooms the rescued hummingbird from earlier in the evening desperately is trying to call for help via fax. The latter seems to gain more traction.
If ever you’ve found yourself on a Saturday afternoon in the Spring sitting in your living room and hearing the moaning howl of some deep, barrel-chested dog outside your window only to turn around and see that it’s actually Willow, your eight-pound, thirteen-year-old cat making her way across the living room on her recently-ataxic back legs from the old office-chair backrest on which she likes to sleep under an end-table in the corner to the small “mud room” hallway where the litter box is, then you know the start of how I spent another weekend at DoveLewis Veterinary Emergency & Specialty Hospital.
I think there comes a point at which things hit a complexity threshold beyond which my autistic need for structure and predictability is stymied, and a cognitive claustrophobia traps me in cascading executive function failures. If I’m not already at that point, I’m orbiting it like a companion star spiraling the gravity well of a singularity. I’d a waking moment very, very recently whose dissociation felt exactly, and I mean exactly, like I was amidst a nightmare and could not make myself wake.
Drew Austin, whose newsletter I enjoy, managed in the latest to link to an Alex Gutentag piece for Compact, which made me mentally exclaim, “Oh, no” for two reasons—the first of which being Sarah Jones’ recent piece for New York Magazine.
Let me just say that it should be unsurprising, as written up for The Conversation by researchers Catherine Ettman and Sandro Galea, that pandemic depression was “prevalent and persistent”—and just as unsurprising “that financial assets helped reduce the persistence of symptoms”.
It’s another day where I don’t have much to say because everything but I thought it was worth noting some of the parallels between s.e. smith on disability hierarchies (I don’t remember what blog or newsletter linked this, but it’s from 2021) and Jonathan Malesic on burnout one-upmanship this past week.
I’m having a difficult time with Carolyn Chen’s piece for The Atlantic purporting to show “what the anti-work discourse gets wrong”, and I think in part it’s because she seems to generalize from conversations she had with people who work in Silicon Valley.
Sam Haselby writing for Aeon has a good look at the hows and whys of America’s work ethic mythology, suggesting in part that we tend to think about the entire thing kind of backwards and so misconstrue what most of us might actually believe.
More than once on a previous incarnation of this blog, I’ve kind of marveled at the number of pandemic experiences people were reporting that easily seemed to be analogues for what it’s like to be autistic. It began nearly two years ago when folks like Maxfield Sparrow reacted to a Manyu Jiang story on “Zoom fatigue” for BBC Worklife by noting that it was “a taste of the autistic experience”.
Luke Bailey over at The Content Mines has been pushing this idea of “structural dissonance”, described or defined by them as “that feeling you get seeing images of the invasion of Ukraine in the same content feed as memes, viral animals, lifestyle influencers, or video game playthroughs”. They claim it “defines the internet”.
Jordana Cepelewicz’s profile for Quanta Magazine of new discoveries about a tiny, multicellular animal is just the sort of life sciences writing that I’m into, detailing findings that demonstrate in “lower” animal capacities that we tend to reserve in our thinking and our assumptions for “higher” animals.
For the most part I’m looking to avoid single-source reaction posts here, but I’ve been struck by an eighteen-year-old piece by Sunny Taylor on impairment, disability, and work. It came to my attention from that piece in The Baffler about burnout that I addressed a couple days ago. It’s hard to tease out just one or two things but her discussion of institutionalization leapt out at me.
In the post with which I rebooted, once again, this blog, I talked about how an offhand remark by someone I know, as Ukraine was being invaded, that “going from Trump to Covid to this is a lot” made me realize once more that I’ve been in a state of hypervigilance since 2015, while those without my privilege set have been in one for much longer.
As I established earlier, I’m interested in the conversation around so-called occupational burnout primarily because I’m sensitive to whether it will elevate or obscure the conversation about autistic burnout, but also because I worry that the focus on work belies that our culture generally breeds a disconnect between the mythology of what we think is good for us and what actually is good for us.
Joe Pinsker writes for The Atlantic that “the narrative structure of COVID—defined by its false endings, exhausting duration, and inscrutable villain, a virus—would be unwatchable” as a movie, notwithstanding, per psychology professor Monisha Pasupathi, “a taste for the avant-garde”.
It didn’t occur to me until later, but my thoughts about the burnout discourse could have used a reference to L. M. Sacasas and his observations late last year, expressly citing “the writing of Jonathan Malesic and Anne Helen Petersen”, around the idea that you can’t optimize for rest.
I’m too wrapped up, I think, in my own experience of being autistic to know exactly where I come down on Nancy Doyle’s depiction of Long Covid as “acquired neurodivergence”. I know I’m just sort of automatically inclined toward irritation, but something sure seems to be happening to people’s brains.
In retrospect, it should have been glaringly obvious what was nagging at me about Arthur C. Brooks’ paean to becoming an outsider: only someone whom normative society does not consider already to be an outsider can contemplate the idea of freely choosing to become one. It’s not that there are no benefits to being an outsider (especially when the relevant insides, whatever they may be, are rotten), it’s that being an outsider is not some of kind of rejuvenating, spiritual idyll.
In an incisive newsletter edition about cancel culture, Charlie Jane Anders says a thing that had it come just a day or two earlier would have made it into the post with which I restarted this blog, about living in an age of hypervigilance.
In a previous incarnation of this blog, I took issue with Anne Helen Petersen’s well-circulated “millennial burnout” article for BuzzFeed News. Well, more like umbrage. To be completely fair, I was a snot about it.
I’d not really been sure what to make of the Barbie Latza Nadeau or Ryan Broderick takes on the sudden and somewhat mysterious spread of the letter “Z”, in both creative and mundane ways, as the symbol for Russian aggression in Europe—or maybe I just chose to not let it make much of an impression on me because stop already, everything—but by the time I got to Masha Gessen I was sobered.
In recent weeks I’ve started and stopped a number of blog posts, or at least thinking about them, bit I just can’t. So I’m putting this site on indefinite pause.
It was inevitable, I suppose, that I’d discover a reason I should have retained my Twitter account and its thousands (somehow!) of followers when I quit social media for the sake of my own mental health. The reason? I’ve had to launch a fundraiser for the veterinary care for the first of my two cats, Meru, and I don’t have a following at which to blast it.
Early in the wake of my diagnosis, I’d realized that a sort of introvert’s toolkit had functioned to mitigate or accommodate some of the challenges of being autistic without knowing it. I’ve come back to this idea since, often when trying to understand how in the world I ever withstood the onslaught that is San Diego Comic-Con.
Here we go again, with a (somewhat) high-profile autistic disclosure that seems only to serve to communicate all the wrong things for me. This time it’s a Big Brother houseguest revealing her diagnosis in the season finale, having hidden her diagnosis during the game to avoid potential for stigma and/or pity.
Sometimes along comes a thing that’s meant to address neurotypicals but—in ways where I don’t even know where to start—arguably is just as useful as a way to remind autistics themselves that their own behavior, in fact, is not self-contradictory.
For the past week, I’ve been struck by a fairly hellacious fatigue, understanding that “hellacious” is defined differently for different people. For instance, to use an example I’ve seen used, it’s not like I can’t even pick up a glass of water beside my bed (or even get out of bed). Rather, it’s like in addition to just generally having substantially fewer spoons available, I can literally feel each quantum of energy being used up even in very minor amounts of effort, like returning a two-thirds empty pint of ice cream to the freezer.
Last year I talked about how the idea of the brain as a “prediction engine” might help explain why things like algorithmic and context-collapsed social media feeds give me so much cognitive pain, given that for autistics “the need for a predictable environment can be almost a sort of prime directive”.
I’ve written before about how my experience of switching between two tasks isn’t three things—the first task, the switch, and the second task—but in fact five things—the first task, winding down from the first task, the switch, winding up for the new task, and the second task. There’s some related suggestion in this Guardian piece that neuroscience is putting the lie to the idea of multitasking.
When the long-running television show Doctor Who was taken over by Jodie Whittaker in 2017, one of the Doctor’s new companions was a young man named Ryan Sinclair. It was through Ryan Sinclair’s difficulties trying to ride a bike that I learned about something called dyspraxia.
I’ve no recollection of how I stumbled across it but recently a piece in Glamour brought to my attention the notion of having a sense of foreshortened future, a trauma response in which (for example) “it can be hard to imagine growing old, getting married or having children, because you feel this overwhelming sense of negativity towards the future, and lack of trust in the fact that it will ever actually arrive”.
This week, an autism commission convened by The Lancet issued recommendations including one urging the adoption of the term profound autism to describe autistics requiring “round-the-clock, lifelong care”. The term would not function as a diagnosis but as a way to communicate the challenges unique to one particular autistic population.
It’s theoretically possible, I suppose, to make for one thing or another an analogy out of autism. I’d imagine that it’d be ill-advised, and certainly tricky, but the very least prerequisite would be to get autism itself right.
At the risk of venting every last frustration I have with how autism is being discussed, I’m irked enough at this sales pitch on Autism Spectrum News for an autistic path-to-employment program that I can’t convince myself to resist.
The bulk of this response to someone concerned about their partner’s 18-year-old autistic daughter “becoming a huge source of worry and resentment for us both” is pretty much gold, and does a decent job of (gently) putting said someone in their place—something much needed given such victim-blaming statements as, “It feels sometimes that she purposely lets my partner down over very minor jobs, just so that she is not asked to do anything again.”
Recently, the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network put out a call for comments to the U.S. government’s advisory body on priorities for autism funding and research. Comments can be submitted until November 30.
Hot on the heels of Richard Powers’ offensive latest comes Dr. Brain, which from its first episode (spoiled here) positions autistics as savants so lacking in social skills and empathy that they have no interior emotional life whatsoever.
One of the things you discover as a late-diagnosed autistic adult is the idea of suddenly finding yourself becoming “more autistic” after your diagnosis. You’ll hear it from others, and you’ll start noticing it about yourself.
Every year on my birthday, the card from my father would sum up the number of miles I’d traveled around the sun thus far in my lifetime. Based upon this calculator, as of late this afternoon I have traveled approximately 30,371,045,248.8 miles in my now-52 years.
The eight-pages of psychodiagnostic evaluation paperwork which handed me my diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive features) is dated October 24, 2016—just one day before my forty-seventh birthday. Always technically autistic, this is the day on which I became an autistic.
If I say that after I finished reading Richard Powers’ Bewilderment in just three days I would have thrown it across the room had I been reading the hardcover edition and not an ebook, would it tell you what I thought of it?
When I first learned of Richard Powers’ new novel, I fretted over a character description: “Robbie is a 9-year old boy with Asperger’s-like traits” whose “behaviour grows more unmanageable”—per another source, he is “on the verge of being expelled from third grade for smashing his friend’s face with a metal thermos”.
There’s apparently some sturm und drang over this new study on the developmental impacts of a self-described “preemptive intervention” conducted with parents of potentially-autistic children.
The city of Portland owns a racetrack sited at its northern extreme. It is something of the bane of at least one adjacent neighborhood’s existence.
“Self-compassion is related to the construct of mindfulness, but unlike mindfulness, self-compassion specifically relates to how individuals respond to moments of suffering and perceived failure,” write Ru Ying Cai and Lydia Brown. “Self-compassion is also broader in scope than mindfulness, in that it involves the subcomponents of self-kindness and common humanity, which may be especially relevant as a means of downregulating negative affect during moments of stress.”
Early on in Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, Carl Zimmer has a few observations to make about slime molds.
Before I even got to the parts of this Vice piece on resilience that would almost directly speak to it, I started thinking about those sobbing breakdowns I was having during my vocational rehabilitation job placement in late 2017 and early 2018—fits which even before discussing them with a therapist at the time clearly were features, not bugs.
My therapist and I have talked a lot about trauma. In and out of that context, I’ve referenced it here and written about it elsewhere—the idea being that a lot of being actually-autistic in the world seems analogous to the way in which people relate trauma.
What follows is excerpted from a week and a half’s worth of notes taken for use during therapy this Friday. This past Friday was bladder and prostate surgery; I spent the weekend feeling purely mechanistic and empty of self.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had to endure first a quick walkthrough of my apartment by potential buyers of the property, and then a longer, excruciating inspection. Having confirmed that a sale is pending, I’ve started to worry about the prospects of needing to move—a cognitively confounding idea even without the fact that I’m currently dealing with a bunch of medical stuff.
Among the many questions prompted by a midlife autism diagnosis is some variation of “how did you go forty years without anyone noticing”—sometimes framed, as it once was for me by an actual social services professional, as an incredulous and insulting “did you really not know”.
I’m struck by the parallels between the French Open failing Naomi Osaka and Billie Eilish’s family failing her. Each is expected to subject themselves to any kind of presumptive, even if transient, ownership over body and soul, regardless of the human psychological impact. I don’t know much about Osaka, and what little I know about Eilish essentially comes from the documentary from which that agonizing scene is excerpted, but it simply should not be considered just “part of the job” to set aside one’s mental health in order to satisfy either the sports press, or “people connected to people”, or whomever the fuck. The upside of the Eilish incident is that, as the film later shows, her family members do eventually cop to having failed her—has anyone yet copped to failing Osaka? This is both purely a human issue and also specifically a labor issue. Tennis officials, sports journalists, and record label bigwigs (and hangers-on) might always want the narrative to be that so-and-so wouldn’t have a career without them, but the fact that an athlete or an artist is considered commercially replaceable by their respective powers-that-be doesn’t mean that athlete or artist can be denied agency over their own well-being.
Over the course of our pandemic year, neurotypicals kept running into things—such as zoom fatigue and a need for cognitive transitions—they’d do well to remember the next time they encounter an autistic person just trying to get through their day-to-day lives. I’m not sure what you’d call it, but recently I ran into some more.
On my fourth day on antibiotics for my fourth urinary tract infection of the year, the world started to move even when I was standing still.
Gone from social media since last year (notwithstanding the two locked accounts to which I do not post but use to contact various companies’ support channels, or to keep up with a handful of cats, goats, and zoos), I nonetheless keep an eye out for concepts which help me explain why. Enter an Aeon dissection from Sally Davies of predictive processing.
It took a long-distance hail and a jogging trot across the street, but I just barely managed to catch the most convenient bus to my destination—important, because I didn’t want to waste any more time than already had been wasted that morning.
Today at midday, failing in the energy required to do yesterday’s dishes, I set foot inside a neighborhood bar to have what in pre-pandemic days was my weekly excursion for a cheap bar breakfast, for the first time since the first week of March of last year.
I’ve long been in agreement that functioning labels need to go but I’m not sure about replacing them with internalized versus externalized presentations. Autistic presentation can be as variable as autistic functioning; this would seem to replace one inconsistent, incommunicative phrase with another.
The trouble with being a mediocre autistic is that you can’t have a purely positive response to something like Spectrum‘s pair of surprisingly forward-thinking articles on autistic strengths and special interests. I’d like to think this is something of a milestone for Spectrum; much of their coverage has felt very much in favor of so-called (and misnamed) “evidence-based” treatments designed primarily to make autistic kids outwardly less autistic.
It eventually came in over the Arabian Peninsula and crashed near the Maldives, but I failed to take Marina Koren’s advice not to “fall to pieces just because China’s rocket is”—notwithstanding Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell telling Koren that “the chance of someone being hurt is maybe a percent or so [and] the chance of you being hurt is 8 billion times smaller than that”.
Very early on in the pandemic, in February 2020, James Hamblin of The Atlantic passed along Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch’s view of what was to come, in a piece entitled “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus”.
Last year during the height of the pandemic, I quit social media. The long and the short of it being that I’d come to realize that the feed is a cognitively terrible way to present information, even setting aside the way in which it’s gamified to trigger dopamine responses. The problem, for me, is that my brain overloads when presented with the problem of a database as opposed to that of a narrative.
Below is the text of an email I sent to The Fixin’ To, a local venue just over a block away; they’d taped to the main house out front a letter of outreach to their neighbors.
This study made me think about the last time I tried eating out during the pandemic, just after my county had risen a level and allowed limited indoor dining. It was very uncomfortable, and I couldn’t settle in. Only later did I realize that, counter-intuitively, a mostly empty, somewhat cavernous restaurant with music playing and only three other tables somehow was more of a sensory distraction than that same restaurant when packed with customers. It’s as if a full house becomes something of a single background din, but a mostly empty house becomes all loud and distracting echoes.
I am trying to understand whether it would be a medical or psychological determination to determine whether or not I’ve officially got dyspraxia/developmental coordination disorder. I don’t typically have issues with fine-motor (with the exception of my intermittent motor flubs; I can generally use tools and tie my shoe-laces), but gross-motor especially when it comes to tasks requiring real coordination/multi-tasking (e.g. sports, or driving a car/riding a bike) I’ve definitely got difficulty with. It keeps coming up because I certainly identify with much of dyspraxia/DCD, and given that not everyone understands that autism itself can come with multitasking and motor issues, I wonder if I’ve enough overlap with dyspraxia/DCD features to warrant looking at a separate diagnosis of that, in which case I need to know whether that’s a behavioral health diagnosis or a medical diagnosis.
A week and a half ago, a week into taking antibiotics for a UTI, I got a sudden and recurring nosebleed. Then there’s today, where several days into taking antibiotics for (another? the same?) UTI, some spotting on a Kleenex made me worry I was again having a mystery nosebleed so I spent half an hour pinching and icing my nose while my anxiety spiked, because I just can’t. And by can’t, I mean that I felt full well that if I had to go to the doctor again, I wasn’t going to be able to do it without help. And there’s no help to call upon.
Halfway through the course of antibiotics for (yes) my second UTI in three weeks (or potentially the same one that maybe didn’t get knocked out by the first ten days on antibiotics). I am constantly tired, and feel like I don’t fit inside my body correctly, and no individual moment of enjoyment (reading, bingeing a show, whatever) collects with any others to become a general sense of enjoying life writ large, and my interoception deficits mean increased cognitive load trying to monitor what I feel in my body (e.g. is that back ache high up where I carry tension or low and to the side where they worry about kidney stuff), which just increases anxiety and makes me all the more tired, both physically and existentially.
So far my 2021 has been losing a filling, scheduling dental work, waking up to a UTI, postponing the dental work, waking up to a recurring nosebleed, rescheduling the dental work, getting the dental work, and then waking up to another UTI. Two of these happening on Fridays and interfering with my weekly therapy session. I am ever closer to my wits’ end.
I admit I believe in retail therapy. Does it count if getting something new is basically free? My phone lease is early-upgrade eligible so I am switching from iPhone 11 to iPhone 12 Mini. I’m wondering if on top of having quit social media a smaller device will seem less intrusive and even less of a thing to “camp out” on. I’ve some concerns about how editing a photo in Lightroom will feel on it. I’m looking forward to being able to use swipe-style typing, which I didn’t even know was a thing until last year, more often because the narrower width brings the entire keyboard within easy thumb reach.
Here’s a question: not long after my diagnosis at 46 (well, the day before I turned 47), I remember coming across several instances of anecdata about late-diagnosed autistics becoming “more autistic” (for lack of a more artful term) after that diagnosis. I’d written about it myself, saying it was either like a dam opening up, or like there were electrical breakers that flipped.
Today’s random realization, via my remembering that autistic sensory sensitivities can be to both external and internal stimuli, is that the dramatic fatigue I often experience between 3pm and 6pm likely is that afternoon slowdown many people experience but I seem to be more susceptible to needing to fall down; eating carbs doesn’t really help me. Like many autistic sensitivities, my reaction seems “out of proportion” (by typical standards) to the instigating stimulus. This realization came to mind because as I’m fighting off a urinary tract infection, I get not only fatigued between 3pm and 6pm but I get chills—my already-taxed system from dealing with infection is rearing a symptom when that system hits a natural sensitivity that already presents as fatigue.
I’ve got so much to say about this that I don’t even have the capacity right now to do it, but you know I’ve got a thing for the question of the autistic brain’s perception of trauma, and this particular paper set me off down several paths I’m going to get into during Monday’s postponed therapy session.
I have to say, I don’t appreciate the casual conflation in Divergent Mind of real disabilities with “temperaments”, at least in the context of the workplace. I’m all for a wider, more general social acceptance of human difference, but the last thing people who require disability accommodation need is opening the door to having their concerns dismissed as mere “temperament” and so not legally covered by disability law. There’s no such thing as “temperament rights”.
It’s important to note that much of the advice in this piece is specific to the U.K. For example, in the U.S. there is no “exemption” from mask wearing in the sense that you can just run around without a mask doing all the things masked people are doing. Rather, in the U.S., stores, for example, are required to make some form of accommodation—such as offering curbside pickup or grocery delivery. You simply can’t not wear a mask and then insist everyone around you, businesses included, just let you do that “because autism”.
Literally I was just yesterday talking about this with my therapist, except it was in the context of autistic allies trying to shift the focus on autism as only about high-support-needs people to a focus on autistics as a nascent economic boon for business hiring. What about, I asked, those of us who simply appear not to be consistently employable at all? Are we then simply to be deemed worthless, and because of our very failure to be of economic use also deemed to be unworthy of financial supports?
It would be unreasonable to suggest that housing construction generate neither noise nor vibration, but it’d also be unreasonable to suggest I spend eight hours a day wearing ear defenders in my own home, especially during another pandemic lockdown when there’s nowhere else for me to go. The least I can ask for is advance notice of what days will bring the noise and vibration. I won’t take odds on even that least being denied me. What do other people do, exactly, when the only mitigation available to you—noise cancellation—itself creates other issues (e.g. the physical irritating of ear defenders when worn for long periods of time). It’s hard for me not to see this situation as a metaphor for what generally awaits me for the rest of my life.
Technology keeps showing people what it’s like to be actually-autistic. First it was Zoom Fatigue giving neurotypicals a dose of sensory processing and social communication difficulties, then it was being stuck working from home causing task-switching problems, and now comes so-called “affective computing” forcing upon you the right way to emote.
I’ve been trying once again to nail down a fixed set of things to have for each meal, and I realized that I don’t think I ever had anyone specifically explain to me, really, what you should be eating for breakfast, what you should be eating for lunch, and what you should be eating for dinner. By which I mean, I gather that one’s body needs different sorts of things at different parts of the day, to an extent, and how would one go about making that map for oneself. So, I’ve just emailed my primary care physician at Kaiser to ask about nutritionists or dietitians or whatever. (No, this is not an open solicitation for advice; it’s a life update.) I’m pointing myself toward an authoritative discussion with someone who’s job is to know these things, and who can apply an autistic filter to the conversation.
Today’s psychoconsult in part involved me explaining that I don’t really know how to talk about the idea of “happiness” because the socially normative definitions tend to involve either a great degree or energetic excitation or things like friends, family, or significant others—or some combination of these two sets of things and ideas. I said I wasn’t sure, looking back at my two years using a mood-tracking app (discontinued months ago because it had become every bit the addiction-like encumbrance that checking into things on Foursquare used to be), whether I never had any use for the Great level (out of Great, Good, Meh, Bad, Awful) because nothing’s ever great or because that normative background radiation of what great looks like just doesn’t match what I or my brain want or enjoy. I’ve plenty of things, of course, which I enjoy, but many if not most of them are relatively solitary. Norms, were they to hear this, would look at me with some sort of pity in their eyes. I am trying to become more conscious of the idea that yeah fuck them anyway, then.
Maybe because we finally talked about aphantasia and autobiographical memory deficiencies in therapy the other day, today I found myself thinking about my thoughts on derailment and wondering to what degree my general lack of a sense of constancy of self in fact is due to those two things. I wish I knew how far back my sense of self extends, and where the cutoff is at which it ceases.
Today’s psychoconsult: why I visit the zoo (it’s a routine, familiar, physical and psychic space out of the day-to-day context), self-employment versus otherwise (it’s only in the last decade that I stopped bouncing checks, due in part to the rise of the smartphone as a tool to do what my brain wasn’t, and also I don’t need the additional financial responsibility, and also some degree of external structure can be helpful), and the potential impact of aphantasia and autobiographical memory deficiencies on traditional mental planning (I might need a custom toolbox).
So I don’t know if I’m becoming more sensorily sensitive in general or if I’m just in a period of low-level but ever-present cognitive roiling which thins my psychic skin, but lately I am having intense difficulty with neighborhood noises and sounds. It doesn’t matter if it’s sidewalk-breaking construction noise or the sounds of the neighbor who listens to his loud television through his open door while he sits outside and hacks up a lung over a cigarette. I can feel my body physically tensing against them as if readying for a bodily blow from a physical force.
I hadn’t realized that I’d quit Twitter and Instagram to protect my sanity (disclaimer: quitting comes with its own psychological challenges) in the middle of the week which wraps up with World Mental Health Day. For the record, so far I’m autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and adjustment disorder.
I’m struck by “looking around at all the items that have been background noise for four years and foregrounding them, assessing them, deciding whether to hold on or let go” mostly because this is how I’ve felt in the wake of a midlife autism diagnosis. That undiagnosed thing being a sort of “background noise” I didn’t even ever know was there. Midlife diagnosis of any lifelong condition, I suppose, feel like this: like a retcon of one’s own life. Everything, or mostly everything, gets reassessed.
Unlike most of the autistic people in this piece, I generally “don’t want friends, have little social motivation and prefer a life of self-isolation”—but I also note that “incidental human contact” is the thing that the pandemic choked off for me, until businesses started being able to open for takeout or outdoor seating.
I’ve quibbles, but on the whole was impressed by this look at deliberately neurodiverse classrooms. As with most such things, I do find myself wondering if it’s an accurate depiction? And as with some such things, I found myself noticing that a teaching approach that seems to work well for quote-unquote edge cases sure seems like it a good model to replicate for, you know, teaching writ large. I got a little judgmental at the “helping the kids learn how to focus on the eyes”, but it’s not clear to me to what degree they simply are teaching autistic kids where the signals are in social communication with neurotypicals versus outright teaching them that they must make eye contact; the former is smart, the latter cruel.
Yesterday’s low partly yielded to the infusion of Apple Cash which paid for kung pao beef from the Chinese place up the street from me. Yesterday’s low also nonetheless took so much out of me that today I had to defer until tomorrow (hopefully?) the necessary grocery errand to replace all the food I had to throw out due to the 19-hour power outage. Today so far has been slightly sleeping in, sitting outside Sparrow Bakery to read with a latte and a cinnamon knot, and then sitting at home listening to the Jdu Dench episode of David Tennant Does a Podcast With, which until the other day I’d no idea existed and it becomes the first podcast since The Good Place: The Podcast whose old episodes I will go back and get.
Today I got low. I don’t even have the resources to go into it in any detail. Suffice to say that the perfect storm of nineteen hours without electricity, the pandemic meaning there was nowhere I could go and sit with power and maybe internet, and needing to throw out at least a week’s worth of SNAP-purchased groceries—I was having not just a psychological problem in the moment but also because the moment starkly reminded me of just how financially precarious and unstable I am and therehow how generally screwed is my entire future.
Today’s achievement: convincing myself I could interrupt the Safeway staffer in the bakery department to ask if they’d slice one of the sourdough rounds for me. It did require running the conversation through in my head a few times first. Now I get to reward myself with a grilled cheese sandwich: provolone and aged white cheddar on sourdough.
On the one hand, I find this study of the sensory features of being autistic interesting; on the other hand, I’m always skeptical of research in which “the results were derived using a single parent-report measure of sensory features” rather than (as the authors themselves note) “multiple measures that provide comprehensive sampling of all key sensory domains and drawing on different measurement formats (e.g. parent-report, self-report, observation)”.
It’s interesting to read the suggestion of a link between mitochondria and anxiety, given that I’ve previously found interesting suggestions of links between mitochondria and autism, and mitochondria and chronic fatigue syndrome. (I’m not diagnosed with the latter; for various reasons my doctor and I haven’t yet started to chase down my fatigue issues.)
The search function here finally got unlocked, making my autism blog far more functional. It’s not lost on me, although it’s entirely coincidental, that it happened on the day I had my first telehealth session with the new psychoconsultant—who, not so incidentally, did more to validate the self-awareness and subjective truth of how I think and talk about my brain than did the previous one (a year and a half ago) in the three sessions we had before I quit them. Probably more, even, than did my original psychodiagnostician. Bonus: this new one was very excited to learn about AASPIRE and Autism in Adulthood. Somehow I might be looking forward to the next session? When does that ever happen.
I’d had it all worked out. Last night I got some chores done so they wouldn’t need to be done today, then I took a shower (not a daily thing; I clean myself up every day but full showers take too many resources), so I would be as refreshed as possible for today’s telehealth psychoconsult, set for noon.
The new psychoconsultant emailed just to confirm all my intake paperwork is fine and they don’t need anything else in advance of Friday. I took the opportunity to send back a heads-up that, being my first-ever telehealth appointment and my already-churning anxiety over it, I’ll be standing for the session and did, in fact, do a test-run of where to set up my laptop to make that work. Their response provides some degree of reassurance that my sense of self-care during therapy will be respected.
The downside of the exertion it takes for me to go across town for a self-care trip to the Oregon Zoo (which now only happens every two or three weeks, not weekly like it did pre-pandemic) is that I always forget that it’s not the next day when I feel it, but the day after that. Today, in other words. I feel like I’m stuck in a gravity swell, and inopportune parts of me ache.
I’m confused about this study on whether “cognitive inflexibility, alexithymia and intolerance of uncertainty” (in its words) on the part of autistic people “contribute to outbursts and irritability” (in Spectrum’s words)—in that because I can’t access the full text, I don’t understand what otherwise is considered to “contribute to outbursts and irritability”. Other than, for example, sensory processing/sensitivities.
Mostly I just want to tell people with summer seasonal affective disorder that I feel you. I don’t think I have summer SAD but a subset of my autistic sensory sensitivities mimic the summer SAD wheelhouse. I haven’t thought about whether summer makes me depressed, but the hot air and the bright sun do rapidly fatigue me. What I need is to find a climate of perpetual autumn.
What I don’t understand about this story—an update to an incident from last year—is why the autistic man in question thinks (in the words of his mother) “he is befriending people” by using the N-word. I wish there were more about this aspect. For instance, were we to take that at face value, has his family never tried to explain to him that he’s not befriending people by using the N-word, but it just didn’t take? Or did they, I don’t know, just laugh it off before this incident? Did no reporters ever try to pursue this question? I assume not.
The truly peculiar thing about Eric Fombonne’s curt dismissal of autistic camouflaging is that as a behaviorist he should recognize that “treatments” like ABA simply teach kids to camouflage. But, then, I suppose as a behaviorist he has a vested interest in not publicly recognizing that fact, else parents inflicting extreme behaviorist” treatments upon their kids come to understand that they might simply be locking up their child in a camouflage cage.
Couldn’t get out of bed until around noon, but then went and sat outside Sparrow Bakery to read a book somewhere other than at home, with latte and cinnamon knot. Pushed myself to get a grocery run done afterward; this was almost a disaster, as it stressed my anxiety levels comparatively high. Then proceeded to hyperfocus myself past lunch time doing, of all things, autism blogging and trying (yet again) to put together an autism Twitter list that I might actually keep up with, somehow.
So, what the hell is this and why is it suddenly popping up on Tumblr? Having drawn down after the year-long experiment of returning to full-blown blogging, I did want to keep my autism posts online; I’ve ported them over to here. I’ll be porting over some other things that didn’t get tagged as autism posts but are relevant to my mental health, and my general health; selfies likely will make their way over, too, since I consider them inherently a sort of “proof of life” self-care thing.
It’s just going to be stuck in my craw all day. While wearing lifts because one feels too short isn’t analogous to actually-autistic people camouflaging their autisticness, it is somewhat analogous to an actually-autistic person with sensory sensitivities wearing ear defenders. It’s a self-directed and personal accommodation to real or perceived and potentially unbridgeable differences between one’s subjective reality and the nature of the objective (built or social) world around you.
For whatever it’s worth, Eric Fombonne contributed to this paper which glowingly describes the “evidence-based” success of Applied Behavior Analysis, which also is one of two “evidence-based” treatments (the other being Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention) backed by the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, on whose advisory board Fombonne sits.
So, there’s this really frustrating piece on Spectrum, in which Peter Hess interviews one Eric Fombonne, “director of autism research at the Institute on Development and Disability at Oregon Health and Science University” right here in Portland, about a recent editorial Fombonne wrote questioning that camouflaging by autistics is anything special or unique to autism, and questioning whether or not its even “novel in any conceptually substantive way”.
I want everything deleted. I want to backup everything to an external drive and delete everything. I want to delete my social accounts. I want to delete my blog. I want to wipe and fresh-install my laptop. I want to stop reading everything but books, because all the other possible reading decisions make me too nervous. I want to unfollow everything in my feed reader. I want to unsubscribe to everything in my newsletter app. I want to want to write nothing online except occasional homepage updates. Maybe I’d include a single “status” line to hold whatever I would have tweeted, but it gets overwritten with each new status and there’s be no archive. I want to just post photos to an iCloud album I can share with you, although that cuts out everyone not using Apple, I guess. I want to want to not worry if I’m missing out on something someone else said. I want to want to be inaccessible by feed. I want to want to not want to read any feeds. I want all that confusion to go away. I want to know how to get out of an internet that’s failing my brain but not anguish over feeling left out. I want there to be a way to go away from all of this but still have some idea of what’s happening. I want not what we have. But I don’t know how to want it enough to get rid of it all.
Here’s what the web needs—or my web, anyway: a service providing both hosted and self-hosted versions of an easily-deployable non-blog website with simple, configurable pages (about, now, et cetera), where changes to the site are published via RSS feed. When I say “easily-deployable” I mean keep your current slate of static-site generators to yourself. When I say “non-blog website” I mean keep your about.me and your Carrd sites to yourself (although, technically, any such service could institute what I’m talking about). Then anyone I’d care to know what they’re up to would have to maintain such a page that I can subscribe to in my feed reader, and I would just get off of social media altogether. I’m fucking tired of feeds. There’s just no other way for me to know what’s up in people’s lives. Just give me distributed profile pages with page-update notifications via RSS.
Two things right off the bat about Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts: (1) I’m going to get a headache from this book, probably; and (2) his wordsmithing is at its most rhythmically seductive here—or, not just seductive: gravitational, like you don’t quite have entire control over your body stumble-stepping down a hill.
“Anxiety chest” has plagued me all day, since I pushed myself to do a grocery errand in the hot sun despite my sensory sensitivities; it never let up once I got home. At one point I surrendered and went to curl up in bed, but it remained in place when I woke up. Ever since, any decision I had to make, or wanted to make, no matter how small (e.g. trying to find a movie to watch) has only reemphasized the feeling. My anxiety meds are a one-a-day thing, so no extra help there.
It’s slow going in the beginning of The Seep by Chana Porter, and a bit like a kid quick-tripping through telling a story in an “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” way, but it settles down. I’d think that if you liked the James Tynion IV and Eryk Donovan triptych of Memetic, Cognetic, and Eugenic, you’d probably find this worth reading. Parenthetically, having just started in on Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer, I already can tell this one is going to give me a headache.
My new fiction read is Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer; my continuing nonfiction read is The Restless Clock by Jessica Riskin; and I’ve recently finished The Seep by Chana Porter. So far this year, I’ve read thirty-three books, with twelve waiting to read next and twenty-six still to buy or borrow.
Reading through Pratik’s jottings about Goodreads made me realize that the biggest obstacle to me switching to any alternative book-tracking site (existing or forthcoming) is that while I don’t really make use of the social aspects (I don’t have Goodreads friends), I do use it to follow authors so that I’m alerted when they have new books coming out. Any potential Goodreads substitute would need to replicate that feature, or figure its way to something analogous, to entice me into switching. I’d love to take one more step away from large ecosystems like Amazon, but alternatives need to think hard not just about avoiding the bad things about the attention economies of scale such ecosystems offer but about finding substitutes for the good things they offer.
Today during one of my intermittent checks of the web for psychoconsultants who are (1) local enough, (2) covered by my insurance, and (3) potentially applicable to a midlife-diagnosed adult autistic with Opinions About Autism And Psychotherapy, I found a place that’s a fifteen-minute bus ride away. Only one of the relevant people on staff currently is taking new clients; I sent an intake inquiry. I forgot to save a copy of what I sent them via their online form, otherwise I’d include it here. I don’t suppose browsers somewhere temporarily save web forms you’ve submitted?
The newsletter of Spectrum News this morning re-linked two older articles about kids who “lost” their autism diagnosis having all sorts of developmental, learning, psychological, or psychiatric issues “to the researchers’ surprise”. One of the articles is about research I’ve mentioned before, and I just wanted to underscore here what I said there, which is that if you’re “surprised” at a result, you should be asking why—and the crucial why here would be asking whether or not the “early intervention” treatments to which these kids were subjected in fact might be responsible for all of these other problems they have after they “lose” the diagnostic label of autistic. By which I mean: perhaps they are still in fact autistic and you’ve simply trained them to suppress it, leading to all the other things you’re “surprised” by afterward.
This week I’ll be watching Stargirl, Wynonna Earp, The 100, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, Doom Patrol, and starting in on the finale season of The Rain. I’m into season two of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts on weekend mornings, I’m starting the final season in my Justice League Unlimited rewatch, and I’m into part two of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Hannah Beachler, production designer on Black Panther, has been urging people to stop using black-and-white imagery from the civil rights movement “so people stop thinking it was 1000 years ago”; she’s been posting examples of color photography from the time. Along the way she tweeted a link to this remarkable interview with Martin Luther King Jr. from 1967, eleven months before he was assassinated. Carve out half an hour to watch this; it really kicks into gear at almost exactly the halfway mark. It’s bracing, compelling, and not only a little depressing: so much of what he says still can be said today—and is.
I’m thinking that two and a half years of regularly tracking my mood throughout the day is enough. It’s become as pointlessly habitual as Foursquare/Swarm checkins had become. I’m not learning anything, really, that I wouldn’t be aware of just from living itself without the incessant noting of each change in mood or activity. At this point, honestly, it’s just become another thing to which I have to devote my limited psychic resources, which seems at best unnecessary waste and at worst self-defeating.
My new fiction read is The Seep by Chana Porter; my continuing nonfiction read is The Restless Clock by Jessica Riskin; and I’ve recently finished The Book of Lost Saints by Daniel José Older. So far this year, I’ve read thirty-two books, with fifteen ready to read, and twenty-four still to buy or borrow.
There’s been something wrong with my cognition and impulse control the last two days when blogging. There was the Wheeler item where despite knowing I was writing about his police chief I typed the acting secretary of DHS. Then this, where I either meant to mention each of what these three people wrote or I just wrongly linked them together without thinking about it at all. I honestly don’t know which. I’ve cleared out my reading list for the day and am going to assume to start with that I’m not posting at all today, unless it’s something essentially frivolous.
Just signed up for the Literal waiting list. I’m down for a minimalist book-tracking site that runs on recommendations from trusted people rather than algorithms, and that intends to support local bookstores.. Found it via this Micro.blog thread. You can browse a founder’s profile to get a sense of its current state. It looks like you can import your Goodreads data and pick up where you left off, too.
Here’s why it’s ridiculous that Mayor Ted Wheeler didn’t learn until his police chief said it at a press conference that his Portland Police Bureau would be coordinating with Oregon State Police during the purported transition away from the paramilitary shock troops of Mine Furor’s Interior Ministry Department of Homeland Security.
New, weird stim I somehow picked up in the last couple of months: bending an arm up at the elbow in such a way as to tuck my hand into my armpit, the hand itself bent in on itself at the wrist, so that my armpit is exerting pressure on the wrist joint. Typically just one arm, while my other hand is holding my phone, or my Kobo, or the TV remote, or whatever.
When I’d first heard that Marian Call was doing a garage band album with foul language, at some point I thought about Kaywinnet Lee Frye and Simon Tam discussing the appropriate times to swear. Regardless of what you do or do not know about Call personally, her singing persona doesn’t necessarily readily suggest anything other than the Simon end of that conversation.
Don’t get your news from The Spectator, whose Kate Andrews thinks, “Today on Twitter, Trump began to hint at the one thing his critics fear most deeply: a refusal to leave office.” This is true except in the sense that it is false because of all the other, many times he has hinted about not leaving office. If you can’t even get the factual context right, why should I listen to any other part of your argument?
After a terror of a nightmare I returned to sleep only briefly before waking at five to one cat spitting up because she again drank from dirty dishes in the sink, a stomach that kept me on the toilet for twenty minutes, and the other cat leaping over me in bed to attack a mystery something on the wall. Today seems not too great so far.
So, yeah, let me say one thing: all of those prominent BLM-related groups that sprang up in the last couple of months—Rose City Justice, Riot Ribs, Wall of Moms—all rapidly becoming clusterfucks in one way or the other? This is what I mean by Portland talking a big game for itself but in reality being spectacularly mediocre.
Last night became movie night; I watched The Old Guard. It was diverting enough, but not particularly special. The one thing that popped for me was the teamwork elements in their fighting style: e.g., one person grabs and disarms a bad guy but sets up the person behind them to take the kill shot. I’d watch a sequel.
Popping up in On This Day today is this post about research suggesting that autistic brains aren’t capable, or are less capable than neurotypical brains, of habituation, potentially helping explain autistics’ sensory overload and hypervigilance, and potentially ruling out exposure therapy for autistics. This is a good starter post if you want to know what I think about my brain, as it’s one of those posts where I draw several previous posts together in a sort of unified, “Aha! See, I told you.”
Well, this is disturbing: the out of control policing-by-gas downtown appears to be causing menstrual irregularities, including “[t]rans protesters who had stopped menstruating since taking testosterone [seeing] their cycles restart”, according to interviews with “36 protesters, ranging in age from 17 to 43” conducted by OPB.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown says that “[b]eginning Thursday, all Customs and Border Protection and ICE officers will leave downtown Portland”; Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad Wolf says they “will continue to maintain our current, augmented federal law enforcement personnel in Portland until we are assured that the Hatfield Federal Courthouse and other federal properties will no longer be attacked”. Question: is Wolf saving face, or did Brown get played?
Federal authorities are arresting protesters on minor charges and then telling them “they can’t protest anymore as a condition for release from jail”. Is this blatant violation of Constitutional rights what Billy J. Williams meant when he complained that protesters simply didn’t understand that the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse “is the solution not the problem” and “absolutely represents everything essential to our system of justice”?
Sam Bloch’s ode to shade, for Places Journal, is a sort of quasi-expose of the inequities of its distribution. It’s funny how the places without shade trees just happen to be the unwealthy places with narrow sidewalks and shallow-buried utilities which preclude being able to plant any. It’s galling, too, to see non-tree tactical urbanist DIY solutions being shut down.
Sometimes I lose track of where I found a thing, and that’s the case with Nathan J. Robinson’s exploration for Current Affairs of J.K. Rowling’s literature in the face of J.K. Rowling’s bigoted personhood. I’ve never read the Harry Potter books; it’s not a genre in which I’m interested. I’m interested, though, in this sort of retrospective in light of a creator’s personal beliefs or behavior. I was surprised among other things to learn the books apparently just sort of brush off slavery as a sort of “eh, what’re you going to do” thing. Then there’s this brutal bit.
Jill Lepore’s examination for The New Yorker of the “invention of the police” has been sitting in my Pocket account, and so on my Kobo, for weeks, waiting. I finally got to it tonight, in part because Jack Bogdanski linked to William Finnegan’s New York-centric examination of the outsized role of police unions in protecting the police from reform. The two pieces are worth reading together, if you haven’t gotten to either of them yet.
Conrad Wilson and Jonathan Levinson have a pretty good look at the internal and external tensions—or, let’s say, the differences of opinion—around the various approaches, strategies, and tactics of two months of Portland protests. They talk to a number of Black activists and voices on the ground, and its great primer for understanding the dynamics of this particular debate.
Reading this pitch by Adele Peters for Accessory Commercial Units reminds me of something I read in a book at some point over probably the past year that I feel I must have highlighted but I can’t find it in either my Kindle or Kobo highlights. This means I can’t remember what city was under discussion (I’m fairly certain it was somewhere in Asia; big help, I know), but the description was of dense urban living space where the resident’s lease included an empty workspace or stall on the ground floor, beneath their housing. Basically, they could do whatever they wanted with it: rent it someone else, use it as an office (although in context I don’t think there were many office workers in this scenario), open their own shop or food stall. This is not, of course, the same as an Accessory Commercial Unit as envisioned by Peters; it’s just that the post reminded me of this other thing.
Where is Ted Wheeler? As near as I can tell, no one’s heard from the Mayor since a Saturday morning tweet (I’ve tried looking for news stories that might have gotten a more recent quote but to no avail; ping me if I missed something), and it’s difficult to view this silence as anything other than an inability for him to hop onto national newscasts to posture about Donald Trump and the abuses of his paramilitary shock troops from the Department of Homeland Security given that last night the Portland Police that he commands as Police Commissioner were full partners and participants in those very abuses. Wheeler and the rest of the City Council literally just this past week adopted a resolution prohibiting that, so I’d really love it if the local press corps could get an answer here: is the Mayor just trying to snow us all with his preening on television, while actually supporting his police’s behavior, or has he simply lost any and all control over them?
My biggest surprise in reading Jessica Riskin’s The Restless Clock is that the 17th and 18th centuries apparently somewhat were awash with automata. It’s vaguely like reading a history from a parallel world. I’ve read any number of books on various topics that cover some portion or another of the same period, some of which I’d have expected to make at least a passing reference to such a fact, but other than now and then encountering reference to Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechnical Turk I’ve simply never heard of this.
It cost a bit more in terms of money, but in order to save costs in terms of psychic resources, the salad fixings I bought for the heatwave included a package of peppers and onions that had been pre-cut for grilling, which meant no prep for cutting; just cutting. I’ve come to hate the process of salad-making, because I find it exhausting. Anything I can do to shave off some of the effort means that things like actually thinking about salad as a wya to survive the heatwave don’t fizzle out into not having the energy then to make a salad at all.
Unless I’m reading things wrong, it turns out people can scan existing 3D objects in order to generate models that then can be 3D-printed? So if I could find somewhere that could scan this hard plastic Kobo case (absent the book-like cover), a model could be generated to then print it in thermoplastic (or other printable rubber-like material), giving me the Kobo cover I want?
Facepalming at this Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD producer saying that Devs “used the word quantum a lot to make it sexy-sexy”. Quantum mechanics literally is central to the entire underlying thing in Devs. It’s not just tacked on like the technobabble most science-fiction shows use to make things sound plausible. Which isn’t to say I have a problem with technobabble; it’s crucial narrative tissue for a lot of sci-fi television. It’s just, like, I know you joked earlier about how your show just brings out quantum mechanics whenever they need to have an explanation for something, but that doesn’t mean every show that mentions quantum mechanics is doing that. It’s all the more weird because he was touting the show.
Matthew Bogart touches on differences in getting to know people on bulletin boards versus doing the same on Twitter, and I think that part of the obstacle is that “a community like Twitter” is a phrase that makes no sense. Twitter isn’t a community, although it likely manages to contain various communities which form despite the platform’s actual disinterest in community. The more I think about it, I believe that social media platforms exist at a scale that’s perhaps inherently hostile to hosting community. One of the things that happened in the earlier era of social networking is that communities formed in groups or chats, virtual places you had to reach out to, or for; in the current era of social media it’s all about that single, solitary jumble of a feed. Fundamentally, I don’t think the feed as an organizing principle is compatible with community.
People are sharing their photos from previous editions of San Diego Comic-Con, and I’ve been browsing through my old Flickr albums (I’ll post some stuff later); my con-going period was from 2008 through 2012. That last year was the tenth anniversary of Firefly and that means 2022 is the twentieth anniversary—it would also be the twentieth anniversary of WHEDONesque. I’m getting sad about the fact that I’ll never again be able to go, because that would be the next one to target, in recognition of what had been my biggest fandom and my home base fansite during my most heady fandom years.
The man shot in the head by paramilitary shock troops from Mine Furor’s ad-hoc Interior Ministry for the “crime” of holding a stereo above his head like an antifa Lloyd Dobler is getting out of hospital this weekend, suffering from impairments to impulse control and cognitive function due to a “depressed skull fracture in the frontal lobe”.
I’m reaching that point in an OverDrive borrow from Multnomah County Library at which I need to decide if I’m going to pause reading a book until the next time I can borrow it or if I’m going to buy it in order to keep reading. I dislike pausing books, but of course in this instance the book in question isn’t like a $9.99 fiction read; it’s a $21.59 nonfiction read. It’s also possible that there’s no queue for it, and I’ll be able to just borrow it again, as currently there’s no one waiting for it. We’ll see.
Nothing suspicious about the feds sending paramilitary shock troops to Seattle so they are there “if needed” the day before they then sue Seattle to stop (pdf) a ban on the use of tear gas. The judge in the case has issued the temporary restraining order but called it “very temporary” while he hears from more parties.
As someone who’s not been to San Diego Comic-Con for enough years now that I’ve lost count and don’t remember when was my last, two things have struck me about all the virtual panels happening under the Comic-Con@Home branding. First, it’s making me miss going to San Diego, but I’ll never again be able to afford to go and with the post-diagnosis “regression” (a bad but commonly-used term for it) I’m not sure how I’d deal. Second, this Brady Bunch-style multi-box panel format actually works pretty well, and even when in-person conventions resume I think it would do them some good to include a virtual track of would-be or erstwhile panels and participants who could not present at the event itself.
You might have seen not just coverage of the Wall of Moms but some indication of a bit of conflict over their usefulness in a movement for Black lives; the Moms have received a fair degree of criticism of being “white spectacle” despite what’s been, as near as I could tell, a concerted effort to weaponize the privilege of white members for that movement, and despite not all the Moms being white. Today, the group announced that, working with Teressa Raiford and Don’t Shoot PDX, all white members of its leadership have stepped down from their administrative roles “so that our leadership is entirely composed of Black and Indigenous women from most-impacted communities”.
I’m not intentionally copying Jack here but these things really are of a piece. First, Kyle Iboshi of KGW tweeted this incredible video of Billy Williams, the U.S. Attorney for Oregon, flat out denying that federal troops have been “out on the street”, at which point the video cuts to footage of federal troops out on the streets, which of course they have been, night after night, as Jack points out sometimes “as far as the bus mall”.
Steep increase today in construction-related noise right outside my windows (it also reflects back at me from the fence on the other side of my apartment), My muscles are tense, my nerves are on edge, my shoulders are hunched, my breathing is off, my heart-rate is up. And because we’re still in a global pandemic, there’s nowhere I can go to just sit somewhere else all day. I just have to take it.
There’s a compelling remark by writer Bryan Hill in one of the panels I’m watching for Comic-Con@Home today, and I’m just going to drop it here. It’s long, and I’m never any good at editing out the all the rights and you knows and stuff from people’s speech, even though I know some people do that with transcriptions.
What I appreciated about this week’s Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD is that they didn’t settle just for having found a way to do a time-loop episode, but that they supercharged it by drastically reducing the length of the loop compared to other shows that have played with this trope. Being also a bottle episode, this meant that everything necessarily could happen rapidly, since there could be no moving around.
An obvious correction to this from late last night before I went to bed: Mondainé of course right there in the op-ed itself mentions holding an event Thursday night, which indeed was held right there on the steps of the Justice Center. Nonetheless, the thrust of my point remains stuck in my craw: public, on-the-streets pressure is the only thing that’s going to create the environment in which anything can happen in boardrooms and backrooms. Maybe there’s a plan to shift the ongoing protests in a direction Mondainé thinks would be better; I don’t know. The op-ed certainly doesn’t suggest this is the case, as it effectively calls for an end to the demonstrations.
Portland’s protests at this point seem to me to have devolved into a sort of stew of noble competing clusterfucks. (Understand here that I “follow” events via social media; I am not in the action downtown.) Wednesday night, even aside from the crowd chanting “fuck Ted Wheeler” while someone on “stage” chided them because he wanted to hear what Wheeler had to say, generally seemed to be something of a roiling mess of tensions between the sentiment of the crowd and that of the people with the public address system. Thursday night apparently was struck by what one correspondent on the ground called “fence politics”, which included Black protesters arguing with each other over tactics, and confusion among the Wall of Moms as to the right course of action. Meanwhile the baffling rise and fall of Rose City Justice now has them returning from their spa retreat of self-reflection to become the beneficiary of some sort of beer fundraiser? (Their activities since retreating I admit I’m not versed in; have they been active again or not so much?) Even more meanwhile, I have conflicted feelings about this E.D. Mondainé op-ed for The Washington Post, not least because it went to a national paper rather than a local one, but mostly because Mondainé’s plea to move the fight to boardrooms, schools, city councils, halls of justice, and “smoky backrooms of a duplicitous government” seems to ignore that it was people on the streets that dramatically moved the Overton window on Black Lives Matter, economic justice, and police abolition. While I get that people are going to fear either distraction or backlash or both, the momentum to get things done in boardrooms and backrooms itself will peter out absent ground mobilization. Here I plead ignorance again: is Mondainé’s local NAACP chapter organizing its own demonstrations to keep up the pressure in whatever forms it thinks will be more message than spectacle, or only chastising the people who are literally standing up in masses for the things Mondainé wants to get done?
So that fence the feds built into the street around the Federal courthouse? Portland just warned them to get it out of the public right-of-way, especially the entirely-blocked bike lane. Given that the feds have suggested the fence will remain for as long as Mine Furor is in office, I imagine this, too, will end up in court.
Alan Jacobs accidentally reveals that despite the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over accountability culture, in the world of “the open web and the pre-web internet” you actually can’t cancel established or privileged writers, and the world he describes pretty much exactly is what Gurri and Nwanevu were talking about regarding the freedom of association and disassociation. I’ll leave it to Nwanevu.
When accountability culture came for Tom Cotton and The New York Times for an op-ed full-throatedly calling for military intervention against Black Lives Matter demonstrators, I wonder if those who came to their defense understood that you can’t actually “cancel” a sitting United States senator, who after all then simply can turn around and use the privilege of his political power to try to ban a history project about the true beginnings of the violence that was American slavery. It’s weird, though, for one person both to call openly for political state violence against Black people in the here-and-now and yet also call for hiding the historical roots of such violence from public view in our schools.
Three very good pieces on the self-interested backlash to accountability culture. Adam Gurri for Liberal Currents untangles the distinctions between censorship, social sanctioning, and the openness of media (via MeFi); Osita Nwanevu for The New Republic unwinds the ways in which the critics of progressive identity politics are, in fact, the real illiberals (via Mark Isero); and Emily Pothast for OneZero undoes the ignorance of the power dynamics at the hidden heart of this debate.
There’s been this “don’t police the protest” line going around apparently (I’m getting this from Twitter), and I find it weird. At a fundamental level, a protest or demonstration essentially runs on a sort of rolling consensus, and pivotal there is in the word consent. No one person’s protest tactics are automatically owed the consent of other protesters, and insisting otherwise is actually just the exercise of power.
I’m certainly willing to buy that the Biden campaign’s clarification of Biden saying that Trump is the first racist to be elected president in fact is what Biden meant to say, but even setting aside the merits of that clarification, I’m already finding Biden’s inability to say what he means to be saying just fucking exhausting. Lurking beneath this, though, also is my lingering doubt that Biden even truly understands that the only difference between Trump and the Republican Party of my whole god damned lifetime primarily is that Trump got elected while finally just saying the quiet part out loud instead of using the party playbook of codewords and dog whistles.
This blog might need a new Unsupported Use Case tag, as I’m always running into new ways in which I myself or things that I do can’t seem to have needs met. Today’s ridiculousness: for my Kobo, I really just need a lightweight, thin, rubberized case akin to my Spigen case for the iPhone 11. I’ve never really dropped my ereaders, and I’ve never scratched the display, despite typically not even using a case at all. The problem is that being a more cheaply-made device than the Kindle Paperwhite, the Kobo Clara HD should have something on it, as unlike the Paperwhite it’s not got a very secure grip to it in and of itself. Of course, no one makes Kobo covers that are akin to my preferred kind of iPhone case. Sometimes my google-fu is poor; if anyone spots a Kobo cover that takes this design approach, please let me know.
Three pieces on urban planning, public spaces, and architecture; as they relate to the moment and the movement of Black Lives Matter. Deirdre Mask for The Atlantic proffers that street renaming is not merely performative in an empty sense; Matt Hickman for The Architect’s Newspaper profiles the Foley Square street mural in New York City (via Civic Signals); and Craig Wilkins for Curbed proposes that architecture as a profession needs an analogue to the Hippocratic oath (via Civic Signals).
Awoke not long after five in the morning from maybe the most prosaic nightmare I’ve ever had. I was on a group trip to other countries, and during one outing I was falling behind the group walking up a long inclined urban road or path. Another of the group was straggling, too, but they went one way while I went another way, and then I even lost sight of them. Wandering aimlessly trying to find a way to help myself, I had no contact information for anyone on me, no smartphone, no bags. I ended up on a walking path above a highway, trying to find my way in what now had become night to what looked like a shopping mall, thinking maybe everyone had gone there. By the time I found my way down and away from the highway, it was just some sort of warehouse or factory, but I followed back alleys toward what seemed like more retail and office buildings, hoping to find the American consulate. On the way I had to cross an urban skyway between buildings, packed with people whose movements made the enclosed bridge sway, prompting a panic attack. Finally, I found the consulate and explained my situation. One agent started to say, “I don’t mean to be rude—” but I interrupted with, “So why do it.” The other agent said I’d be responsible for my own expenses. I said that I understood, I just needed help figuring out who to contact about finding my group. I woke up.
Here’s tonight’s pet peeve: freelance journalist Mike Bivins complaining about some of the Wall of Moms “leaving the line at the federal courthouse as protesters started pulling the boards off of the windows” toward the end of last night’s protest. My understanding of the Wall of Moms—reinforced tonight—is that they view themselves as a deescalating force, meant to help shield protesters from police abuses. I’m going to get my antifa membership card revoked here, but I’m neither crying nor gnashing my teeth if once certain protesters were actively prying the plywood barriers off the Federal courthouse, many of the moms left. It’s one thing for a unit of protestors to offer themselves up as a barrier against abuse. It’s another thing altogether if protesters via their actions say to them, “I’m going to go actively destroy the barricades around a federal courthouse; can I use you as a shield?” The latter isn’t merely “breaking a few eggs”, it’s actually its own form of abuse.
Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes posit a reason behind Mine Furor’s test-run in Portland of what David A. Graham calls the “improvisational authoritarianism” of a nascent interior ministry, while Kelly Weill and Winston Ross raise the issue of what happens if the official word is undercut by support for federal troops by police unions.
The same damned judge has denied releasing Grace, the Black teenager with ADHD who was jailed for not doing her homework despite not having been getting the accommodations she was due. So now I am angry all over again. If you read the original Pro Publica story, you actually come across impressed at her progress absent those accommodations. Can we send a busload of Portland moms to this courthouse?
Jacob Stern’s harrowing look for The Atlantic at the mental health aftermath of California wildfires had me thinking again about autism and trauma, which came to mind a bit ago when I was being struck by all those realizations about having autobiographical memory deficiencies.
Hey, makers of feed readers: do any of you make use of comments-related (sub)elements in RSS feeds? For example, I notice that my WordPress post feeds, within each item element, have both a comments sub-element linking the comments area of the post, and a namespace-declared wfw:commentRss sub-element linking the RSS feed for that post’s comments. Are there any readers that make use of these in any fashion, or are they ignored? If ignored, why does WordPress bother with them? It seems like there’s some opportunity here to help engagement with blogs, either by simply linking these things inline, or in some part of the reader UI, or even by bringing a post back into the reader as “new” if comments have been added and displaying the comments themselves inline.
Not to oversell it but legitimately I cannot overstate the degree to which the Scott Pilgrim table read this morning enabled me to close the door on the exasperating weekend; it completely interrupted and transformed the potential tenor and the tone of the day, and enabled me to focus on a number of other things, including even being able to hop on an Xfinity chat to make sure they had a note in my account about why I’d sent back the new gateway and not the old one, which if you now my autistic self and you know how emotionally bruised I felt on Saturday is no small thing.
Hey, RSS folks: if WordPress actually bothered with a <comments> sub-element in its main feed, would RSS readers make use of it to provide a link to a post’s comments? I’m trying to find a way for my RSS feed to easily direct people to a post’s comments section. I was going to use a plugin to automagically append a link to the comments section within RSS content but that raises its own issues elsewhere.
Simon Woods’ warranted drive-by of “button-based metric operator[s]” sent me off on an entire conversation with myself, partly aloud and partly internal. Not just the vigorous mental nodding, because I agree, and not just a lamenting that I don’t know how to get sites and services which use likes and dislikes, up-voting and down-voting, and the like to roll back such usage. I also got to thinking about one of the differences between the original social networking platforms versus the current social media platforms: the former’s central use of the individual profile page. Imagine if rather than letting you like tweets, Twitter let you add, say, five tweets from other people to a special pane on your profile page. Something like MySpace’s “top 8 friends” widget, but for tweets you’ve found especially useful, insightful, or funny. What if Twitter looked backward instead of forward and turned profile pages into destinations unto themselves where a person could offer a fuller bio, share more than just one of their own tweets, highlight five tweets from other people, and who knows what else. Remove some Twitter activity from the endless, scrolling Feed and put more Twitter activity into the personalized, semi-static Profile. This rattling idea isn’t about saving Twitter; it wouldn’t. I’m just drawn to ways in which, if we wanted to, we could turn back the clock a bit on social media and recapture some of the slower and more personal charms of social networking, even on existing social media sites.
By the way, other cities best get their own Walls of Moms ready. We’d already heard that, as Portland suspected all along, the Federal presence here was just a trial-run for expanding around the country but this Mother Jones piece (via Michael L. Douglas) is the first I’ve heard a clear expansion of intentions, by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Portland’s second wind in the face of Federal officers abusing and abducting protesters—and in the face of press coverage of being a city under siege by protester violence—now includes the Wall of Moms, and they’re heading back downtown again tonight. Portland takes a lot of flak, much of it warranted, but it also knows how to lean into a certain kind of whimsy as part of doing serious work. Bonus read: get a load of this Navy veteran who went down to try to talk to the jackboots and just stood there taking baton blows.
In what thankfully became the end of it, I took a deep breath and girded myself for another call to Xfinity. After fifteen minutes of the first guy repeatedly refusing to listen to what I was telling him and transfer me to the escalation queue or specialist, he finally did that. The new guy tried a couple of new things, and then decided we should just roll me back to my original gateway, have me send back the new one I never asked for, and forget about it entirely. So that’s what we did. My nerves, however, remain very tightly wound on a spring-loaded hair of a trigger. For my troubles I receive a whopping $15 account credit.
My new nonfiction read is The Restless Clock by Jessica Riskin; my continuing fiction read is The Book of Lost Saints by Daniel José Older; and I’ve recently finished Cult of the Dead Cow by Joseph Menn. So far this year, I’ve read thirty books, with seven ready to read next and thirty-one still to buy or borrow.
Status: I’ve now been more than twenty-four hours without Internet because the new gateway Xfinity sent me that I didn’t ask for but I guess they require now only coughs errors during setup and therefore does not function and none of the “Comcast Cares” reps have been of any help whatsoever, when they bother to talk to me at all rather than go silent in Twitter DMs for anywhere from two to fourteen hours at a stretch, or after half an hour of phone “support” brush me off with a “if it’s not working in thirty minutes call back”. Meanwhile, of course, their system also now won’t recognize my old gateway, so I can’t even just put that back in. And at this point, with no service—in both meanings of the word—and no recourse, I am rapidly falling now into the danger zone when it comes to my anxiety and the cognitive rigidity and emotional dysregulation that can come from being autistic and I am flailing to find a foothold to keep from dropping into a full autistic meltdown. I feel almost exactly like I do when I wake up in the morning and literally my eyes will not open.
So, the U.S. attorney for Oregon is asking Homeland Security to investigate its own behavior in Portland; I’m sure they’ll get right on that. Meanwhile, Oregon itself is suing the feds for civil rights abuses and potentially pursuing criminal charges against the one officer who shot a protester in the head. And, as expected, Homeland Security has admitted that Portland was a trial run; they’re taking this show national.
Twitter threads are things I don’t usually blog but this Tuck Woodstock thread is important at least for the reason that it establishes the context in which Trump’s policing in Portland only builds upon Mayor Wheeler’s own policing, despite Trump’s rhetoric that Portland isn’t doing anything and Wheeler’s rhetoric that he dislikes what he sees. In reality, Wheeler’s policing has paved the way for Trump’s policing; they’re just both talking about it in a way which they think serves them politically.
By now more people than I would have thought have seen OPB’s coverage of how Mine Furor’s troops in Portland are seemingly at random nabbing people off the street in unmarked cars and then denying they’d detained them. Tim Dickinson for Rolling Stone provides a good backgrounder on what’s been happening overall here in Portland, including the feckless, pointless, and spineless lack of leadership from Ted Wheeler; while Charles P. Pierce echoes the warning Portlanders have been offering that Portland is just Trump’s trial run for these tactics.
Before my return to WordPress, I’d spent some time on Medium, Write.as, and Micro.blog. Brandon’s Journal (which uses the middle one) notes three other simple blogging services. Over on Bear Blog I found someone who wants to be mediocre; over on Midnight I found someone whose internet was missing “a community where the absence of one of the members would be a noteworthy event”; and over on Listed I found someone who wonders about the gamification of everything.
One nice thing about doing a rewatch of the Justice League cartoon is that it isn’t immediately about Darkseid. Doesn’t he only show up once in two seasons? Growing up, Darkseid was still a big deal, but he didn’t show up constantly. I think there was one iteration of the Super-Friends which featured Fourth World characters.
Yale Union, once home to XOXO Fest, and down the street from where I lived for a decade, soon will be no more, as it “repatriates” the historic building to Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, a Native-led nonprofit. My favorite bit from the Artnet coverage (via Andy Baio) is the bit where someone tricked the Puget Sound Business Journal into thinking something similar happened with the Seattle Art Museum.
My new nonfiction read is Cult of the Dead Cow by Joseph Menn; my continuing fiction read is The Book of Lost Saints by Daniel José Older; and I’ve recently finished Hitler’s American Model by James Q. Whitman. So far this year, I’ve read twenty-nine books, with seven ready to read next and thirty-two still to buy or borrow.
Presuming that Syfy actually produces a Wynonna Earp season five after the forthcoming season four, the network is just one cancellation away from returning to my “nothing to watch” category for the first time in awhile. The most recent heyday of 12 Monkeys (cancelled; it lost my attention), Channel Zero (cancelled; some seasons better than others) Dark Matter (cancelled; I had mixed opinions), The Expanse (now on Amazon; terrific), Killjoys (cancelled; terrific), The Magicians (cancelled; glorious), and Wynonna Earp (returning this month) basically is over.
One of my favorite recent Netflix originals, Street Food: Asia is getting a followup next week: Street Food: Latin America. Inexplicably, instead of being considered Street Food season two, it’s dropping as season one of its own series; not sure what’s up with that. Now I just need them to drop that second season of Dogs.
I’m so angry right now. I almost didn’t make it through Jodi S. Cohen’s profile of Grace, a Black 15-year-old with ADHD in Michigan who’s been jailed for not doing her homework. That’s literally not an exaggeration. Judge Mary Ellen Brennan needs to be recalled, and Grace’s caseworker, Rachel Giroux, needs to be disciplined or fired.
Sluggish and mechanical appear to be the words for today. The only reason I didn’t sleep past 10:45am is because I had a telephone appointment with an allergy doctor. Things I learned: bee allergies are not hereditary, and they don’t even bother to test you unless you’ve had some sort of atypical adverse reaction to being stung; you typically won’t even have one until at least the second time you’ve been stung. So, no allergy test for me, but then the biggest concern for me was I thought it was a genetic thing. Meanwhile, I’ve so far been unable to make anything to eat; I’ve had tea and a couple of triple-berry Newtons. These two topics are not related, save by being relevant to the same day.
I’d think that what Ashville just adopted mostly will start a debate over what can and should be meant by reparations. Is forming a committee to promote more economically-just city fiscal priorities reparations? (Maybe it is; I’m asking.) Either way, the resolution’s recitation of what’s effectvely a long history of injuries and usurpations is impressive.
Miraz Jordan revealed to me the existence of Radioactive, a biopic of my purported relative Marie Curie who, per Kottke, “was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and the only person to ever win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific disciplines”. It streams on Amazon starting July 24.
After aborting one attempt months back, I’m again exploring making a return to using Flickr. (My old, original account still exists; they don’t allow URL changes, so I’ve no interest simply in resurrecting it.) What’s irritating me, though, is the feature inconsistencies between the iOS app and the website. For instance, the iOS app uses Foursquare for its location search, but then that mapping data appears nowhere on the website, whose location and mapping search does not use Foursquare and is missing many locations as prominent as the Oregon Zoo. Meanwhile, in the app I can only add a title to a photo, but not a description; on the website I can add either, both, or neither. I feel like Flickr is treated by whomever owns it like it’s some sort of bastard stepchild they’ve been saddled with and for whom they don’t want to have to put in too much effort despite having spent money to obtain it in the first place. Which always sort of prompts me to wonder: why should the rest of us?
Did anyone else receive this Class Action Notice: In re Apple Inc. Device Performance Litigation email? Do people really keep track of the serial numbers of all your previous devices? I’m sure I’m probably covered under this lawsuit but I’ll be damned if I know what were my old iPhone serial numbers.
There’s a problem or conflict somewhere with the custom function I use to trim post slugs, for permalinks, at three words. That last post should not have had to tack a -2 (oh, and now it’s a -3) on the end of its permalink, as the clean version of the slug does not exist. It occurs to me now that I’m not sure it’s necessary; I should just manually set slugs for titled posts just like I do for untitled posts. Did I have this custom function for import reasons? I literally can’t remember why I have it now that the site is up and running. If I manually set slugs for some posts I might as well do so for all posts.
Critics of accountability culture love to inflate outlying errors into exemplars of excesses, but if we want to find excesses just look to those critics: Geraldo Rivera is accusing a judge of “copping out to the mob” by denying bail to Ghislaine Maxwell. That’s right, cancel culture has claimed another victim: an accused procurer of sex-trafficked children.
Remember when this time last year was all about ScarJo “clarifying” some comments about playing “any person, or any tree, or any animal” by making them even worse? Lately I kept expecting her to pop up in that story about Halle Berry seeking to play a trans man because “who this woman was is so interesting to me”.
Yesterday’s technical successes include figuring out a custom function for the_post_navigation links on posts to display six-word excerpts (plus ellipsis) for untitled posts, and a similar tweak to the wp-posted-today plugin; these join an earlier solve to do the same for the <title> tag. Also, I found a plugin that lets you perform text substitutions in strings in theme template files, which let me make a minor change to the comments-title element on posts, since I couldn’t figure out how to do the above untitled-posts hack for there. Closing it out, I managed to switch over my permalinks from %postname%/.html to %postname%/ without breaking old inbound links thanks to a RewriteRule in .htaccess.
One week out from what would have been San Diego Comic-Con if not for COVID-19, electrical engineer and roboticist Grant Imahara has died at 49 of a brain aneurysm. There are few people I can think of who would have had the entire Gaslamp District conducting a wake, but Imahara is on that list. This is just stunning and brutal.
Three stories from Portland protests worth your time. First, the bad news: Jayati Ramakrishnan for The Oregonian reports on the clusterfuck Rose City Justice turned into after leading successful mass demonstrations. Then, the good news: Madison Smalstig for The Oregonian profiles Black photographers telling their own community’s stories; and Tess Novotny for OPB News details the successful efforts of the Portland Stripper Strike—to which I give the last word.
I’ll be honest: I don’t even know what to do with Alan Jacobs suggesting that dog whistles aren’t a thing. The entire trap Republicans set for themselves by electing Trump is that their decades of dog whistles suddenly became speaking the quiet part out loud. Jacobs is rabidly disingenuous here. Meanwhile, the way we know that The Letter was not what it superficially was purported to be is by the fact that this is the editor who led the charge, my first encounter of whom came last year when he tweeted his ignorance of civility being subject to asymmetric power imbalances and typically used as a weapon to punch down. The Letter was anodyne precisely to entice people who otherwise would see through the charade to sign it.
Two years ago today, when I was writing on Medium instead of blogging, I reposted my look at an unfilmed Joss Whedon project, which I’d originally posted on a short-lived blog incarnation almost exactly a year prior. It’s among the posts I’ve imported here at their original dates. If you’ve ever wondered about Goners, here you go. Comments are closed on that original post, but open here; if you’ve any questions that aren’t answered there, feel free to ask.
And another confounding need for a WordPress function is solved. My post navigation links now will show the first six words of the given next or previous post as a sort of quasi-title placeholder if it’s an untitled post, rather than Next Post or Previous Post; a title otherwise, as normal. Someone give me a cookie.
It never will not be weird to me that people feel the need to make up new names for old things. Newsletters are not blogletters just because services like Substack have come along; they are newsletters with a fancy archive. It’s also not true that “what most newsletters of this type have inherited from blogs is tone of voice”. Newsletters with a personality and a perspective have existed for a very long time and pre-date blogs. Back in the early days of blogging and even before, I can think of two just off the top of my head that I subscribed to: Red Rock Eater News Service (mentioned here before) and Entropy Gradient Reversals. Most such newsletters had an online archive of one sort or another, although in the early days it might have been accessed via FTP or gopher. EGR ran off of Topica, and so had an easily-used web archive. What something like Substack does is model its lists’ archive pages on blogging’s traditional reverse-chronological format; that doesn’t magically create a new thing, per se. Nor is sending out your blog via email once a day a new thing; blogs as a form often have incorporated “daily digest” emails for quite a long time. Arguably the sort of thing Dave Winer has been doing lately has more claim to some fancy newish term, as what he does arguably could be described as writing his daily newsletter in public, viewing each day as a discrete entity that relates to itself as it goes. My admittedly-biased gut feels like this is what happens when content marketers discover a thing that already existed: they need to rebrand it in order to claim it, because their job and their mentality is to generate hype. It’s just newsletters. They literally pre-date the web, so you can’t hardly suddenly call them weblogs.
Coming back to this, which no one had any ideas on, I think that the best solution is to wipe titles from what are meant to be untitled posts. I’ve fixed the wp-posted-today plugin I use for the On This Day page so that if a post doesn’t have a title it instead will use the first six words of the post’s content as a stand-in for a title. (This is the same fix I used for <title> elements on posts.) For this approach to work overall, however, I still need to find a way to interrupt things like the_post_navigation() in the Twenty Sixteen theme’s template files, so that if a post doesn’t have anything for %title it will do the content trim instead, rather than simply saying Next Post or Previous Post. Unfortunately, this is beyond me.
Jason Becker asked people to name a television show “with a great first season that lost you in the finale”, and it reminded me that I seem never to have come back here to mention that Devs had a spectacularly disappointing finale after a really stellar seven episodes leading into it, and, really, I’d suspected the whole time that this was going to happen but I’d kept trying to convince myself to have hope. Still, the series was better all around than his dismal non-adaptation of the fantastic Annihilation, crapper of a last episode notwithstanding.
Mine Furor sent federal police to put down the protests in Portland, and one of them promptly shot a protester in the head with “less lethal” munitions, causing skull fractures. They apparently were responsive after surgery as of this morning. Trump’s mistaken if he thinks this is going to put down local protests; it’s only going to reinforce them.
Robin Rendle passes along a good idea from Jonnie Hallman: including a “reply” link on posts in your blog’s RSS feed. In their cases, it’s a mailto: link to their respective email addresses, but the thing is: I could have sworn I’d stumbled across a WordPress plugin which would inject a link to the comment form into RSS items but now I can’t seem to find it. Once upon a time, I supported the idea of RSS readers allowing you to authenticate yourself via IndieAuth on your own blog and then reply to posts via webmention, but the more I think about it, the more I feel that replicates the lack of friction on social media platforms. I’d rather have a link to the comment form. That tiny bit of friction, forcing a reader to come to my blog to comment, itself would be a kind of community management.
Only because I’m sort of tangentially in comic books fandom, I already was familiar with everything in Asher Elbein’s concatenation and exploration of sexual misconduct in the industry. It’s a heady and heavy read, and if you think it’s not relevant to you, you’re wrong—if only because Elbein makes the cogent point that in addition to being a sexual abuse issue it’s a labor rights issue. Also, because Elbein isn’t pulling any punches.
This week I’ll be watching Match Game, Stargirl, The 100, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Doom Patrol, and The Bold Type. I’m still watching Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts on weekend mornings. I’ve started a Constantine rewatch, have resumed Diablero season two, and am contemplating a full Hannibal rewatch.
So, I don’t know why it wasn’t until this that I realize it, but now I see that some TERFs seem to think that reacting to a (perceived) loss of privilege is not actually transphobic; that an inclusive feminism somehow (inexplicably) cheapens hard-won feminist advances. But let me just respond to one point directly.
My new nonfiction read is Hitler’s American Model by James Q. Whitman; my continuing fiction read is The Book of Lost Saints by Daniel José Older; and I’ve recently finished Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan. So far this year, I’ve read twenty-eight books, with six ready to read next and thirty-three still to buy or borrow.
Facile dig at Swatch notwithstanding the actual important thing in that “forked memes” piece is its link to this Julie Beck article for The Atlantic from three years ago which further cements the case for me.
Whenever I wonder why I am still subscribed to Whitney Fishburn’s newsletter (started to create “herd immunity to anxiety and depression”), something like this comes along. (I’m not even going to get into the thrust of this edition, which sensationally conflates COVID-19 and mysterious elephant deaths.)
Interesting: Movies Anywhere (the studio-backed platform that lets you “merge” the digital movie collections you might have scattered across various services) now has a thing called Screen Pass that lets people borrow your movies, up to three each month—although it looks like in order to lend out movies you have to “purchase a Movies Anywhere-eligible movie or redeem a digital code every 6 months”. If anyone wants to try it out, my eligible movies are Desk Set, Fury Road: Blood and Chrome, Inception, A Knight’s Tale, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Remember how I wrote 400 words about that Harper’s letter only to suggest that these twelve words from someone else were better? Today I learned that the editor who led the Harper’s letter, according to his Wikipedia page, himself “appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher on October 18, 2019 to promote” a book he wrote. So, yeah.
Annie Lowrey for The Atlantic reports that cash payments as economic security during the pandemic have worked, with recipients being able to pay bills, get out from under debt, and have greater choice during job searches; in essence, says Lowrey, offering people not just some sense of financial stability but thereby psychological security as well. As noted for The New York Times by Jamelle Bouie (via Robin Rendle), keeping workers “on edge—and willing to accept whatever wage is on offer […] is a feature and not a bug of our economic system”. A feature, says Lowrey, that denies Americans the “ability not to worry” day after day, week after week, that they aren’t going to make it.
Paolo Amoroso’s thoughts on a decade of reading ebooks (via Art Kavanagh, who doesn’t like ebooks) prompted me to do a Twitter search to find out when I’d bought my first Kindle, marking my own move from print reading. The answer: my first Kindle arrived on October 15, 2011. For me, then, I’m coming up on nine years a reader exclusively of ebooks. For me, it wasn’t about eyesight or lighting conditions but initially about convenience. Typically, I am reading one fiction and one nonfiction concurrently and while I’ve more or less come to standardize a habit of the latter at night and the former during the day, I’ve always liked having options depending on my reading mood. Having to carry two books wherever I went always seemed like wasted space and effort, especially if they both were hardcovers. (Not to mention, looking back through the lens of my later autism diagnosis, wasted energy on my part lugging them around.) Once I had that first Kindle, I discovered new reasons supporting the switch: e.g. suddenly I could read on the bus, because any movement of the device still kept the book on a fixed, flat plane; paper books had that curve from edge to spine, and moved move in waves that made me nauseated. Simply put: ebooks meant I could read more often, in more circumstances, and have on hand whatever I was in the mood to read at any given moment. My upgrade to a Paperwhite came on March 9, 2013; for sure, this was all about the illuminated display. Then I upgraded to a newer Paperwhite on August 17, 2015. Most recently, I switched from Kindle to Kobo as of December 20, 2019—partly to start moving away from Amazon and partly because the Clara HD has both blue and orange lights, making reading in bed that much more comfortable on the eyes, and therefore once again increasing my reading opportunities. As I’ve said before, all I need now is for Apple to make a color E Ink ebooks reader and I’d almost certainly switch to that, making all of my devices part of the same, unified ecosystem.
My eyes sort of glazed over at that kerfuffle between Balaji Srinivasan and Taylor Lorenz until Vicki Boykis learned me that the latter “maintained that journalists should be allowed into Clubhouse to know what was being said about them” (presumably this tweet and this one) which is such a ridiculous and nonsensical overstep of journalistic entitlement that this, not anything else she’s said, is what should make The New York Times question her integrity. No private entities somehow are duty-bound to just open themselves up to journalists. Which isn’t to be taken as a defense of abusive conversations on Clubhouse, and I’m quite sure that knowing you’re being discussed, possibly in abusive ways, cannot possibly be a comfortable position—but “journalism” isn’t somehow a master password to every chat, forum, or website. Extra points to Boykis for calling Clubhouse “like volunteering to be part of a very long conference call full of buzzwords”.
Three coronavirus stories that struck me this week: Jacob Stern for The Atlantic looks ahead at the mental health impacts still to come; Melinda Wenner Moyer for The New York Times looks at potential damage to the brain (pair with this earlier piece); and Yochai Re’em for STAT offers a look at having COVID-19 symptoms lasting for more than three months.
For the first time since early March, today I left my own neighborhood; the transit trip also was the first for that since early March. With a backpack full of contingencies because my autistic brain hasn’t had to put this many resources into anything in all these months, I went to the second members-only Oregon Zoo day before they reopen to the general public. I am, however, defeated. Not just because the trip took everything I had, and I’ll be in downtime for the next two days because of it, but because almost every last one of the over six hundred photos I took is no better than an, “Eh, well I guess it will have to do.” And I don’t know why. Focus is off; everything is too noisy. And there’s no going back to try again—not with this much preparation and effort required, not with Oregon’s coronavirus patterns. Thing is, I need photos that satisfy me if to go at all requires this much effort of me. I can’t get by just on having gone, since my memories are so deficient. Getting a shot—even coming away with just one fucking shot that nails what I’d wanted from it—is the whole ballgame. And I didn’t. There’s not one shot that sticks the landing. It makes me want to break things. It makes me want to break all the things, because what was the point of going. What was the point of wasting every last thing I had in me for today, and most of what I’ll have in me for the next two days. Photos will be posted, and other people will like some of them, but I hate almost every last bit of them. They aren’t what I was after, and they leave me with nothing commensurate to the effort and expenditure of energy. I’m a fucking waste.
Emily Paige Ballou has a pretty terrific look at one of the obstacles autistic people can face that other people often simply don’t realize is a thing: transitions. It’s one of the first things I blogged about post-diagnosis, where I tried to simplify it into seeing that switching from one task to another isn’t two things, it’s more like at least five things—and each takes resources. Ballou offers several examples of ways in which an autistic person might try to adapt their environment to account for this task-switching obstacle. Transition challenges mostly fall under executive function issues, although I remember liking the reframing of it into autistic inertia, a term Ballou does use here. What’s interesting and somewhat new to me is the specific idea of motor transitions and the resources involved there; I’d been thinking of task switching purely from the standpoint of the mental inertia when you’d think with my fatigue issues I’d have thought about it at all from the standpoint of the physical question, too.
Someday when I win the lottery, I really am going to fund a reboot of the Kubrick theme; the three-year-old Responsive Kubrick isn’t enough. It would come paired with a plugin that does all the stuff I’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t because there was no plugin for it (e.g. internal references to build context, post addenda, etc.), and also let you apply some basic theme variants without even having to touch a template or stylesheet (e.g. toggle showing excerpt or full posts on any given index or archive, toggle showing cany given bit of entry meta-data any given index or archive, etc.).
The comments experiment is fine, so far. I still mostly just get spam, but I have gotten comments via webmention (most of which are actually replies on Micro.blog) and one comment via a reply on Mastodon. No one comments natively on the blog itself except for me; most of those are “addenda” to my original post.
The thing is, I’d retracted the good will I’d offered that white-people band that changed their name from Lady Antebellum to Lady A, because it turned out they didn’t bother to google and learn that Lady A already existed and she was a Black musician. Apparently, the two sides had been in talks about usage for both parties going forward that now have completely broken down. Here’s my thing, though: I don’t really fucking care that the white-people band trademarked Lady A back in 2010, when the real Lady A has been Lady A since 2001 at least. I feel like there’s possibly a story in here somewhere about access to intellectual property lawyers and privilege. There shouldn’t have to be a challenge: the band could have googled, their manager could have googled, the trademark office could have googled. The band’s usage as a nickname from 2006 onward postdates Lady A’s usage in her trade, period.
Naturally, I think even Jill Filipovic overstates the problem but there’s lots in her look at the overblown reaction to cancel accountability culture that’s worth taking some time on. The analysis of weaponizing people’s employment when employers already have too much power is especially interesting, I think; I don’t know that I fully agree but it’s enough to give me pause. It’s worth running the analysis through for yourself, anyway.
Catherine Pugh, Esq. pretty much dismantles the concept of the White Ally. If you’ve been doing any kind of antiracist work—be it in the world or just starting to come to terms with yourself—I don’t think this actually is as bruising as Pugh and others suggest it is. You should be ready for it. I’m only tossing a short quote here because the piece deserves to be read whole, both for its function and its form.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is on, and has me wondering if anyone has ever done this concept but with people of a different class and/or race—and if so, did they do it essentially as-is, which would make a statement satirically, or did they have it play out very differently, which would make a statement (maybe technically the same one?) tragically.
My new fiction read is The Book of Lost Saints by Daniel José Older; my continuing nonfiction read is Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan; and I’ve recently finished The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. So far this year, I’ve read twenty-seven books, with five ready to read next and thirty-three still to buy or borrow.
Bo and Luke are wrong: the car is not “innocent”. It’s literally named the General Lee, literally has the Confederate battle flag on its roof, and literally plays “Dixie” for its horn. For many years, there’s been a guy in East Portland who drives a replica—complete with flag and horn. It’s a giant, rolling hate crime. When I was still out in Lents, whenever he’d pass by and hit the horn, I’d sing back, to the tune: “Here I am again driving in my racist car!”
“Seeing all that white marble,” writes Ian Forrester, “does have an effect on the way we see the past.” I’ve come across this surprising tidbit about ancient sculpture before, but now it occurs to me to wonder to what degree the mistaken sense of plain white marble informed and impacted the thinking of later sculptors when creating their work.
Pairing together two pieces on how two different groups of people are holding up under their respective strains right now: Crystal Milner for STAT photographed “family, friends, and others in my community of Southern California and spoke with them about how being Black in the U.S. affects them, especially right now”; Ed Yong for The Atlantic interviewed “public-health experts who have been preparing for and battling the pandemic since the start of the year” but are “very tired, and dispirited by America’s continued inability to control a virus that many other nations have brought to heel”.
If the abolition of policing has been giving you trouble, try this Derecka Purnell piece for The Atlantic in which she explains going from growing up in a Black neighborhood that “called 911 for almost everything except snitching” to thinking of abolition as “white and utopic” to becoming an avowed abolitionist.
I’ve finished Hanna season two; better than season one, but still not as good as the movie. Now I’m faced with dozens of shows I’ve not yet started, and around half a dozen shows whose latest seasons have been waiting for weeks or months—none of which are calling out to me. Normally this is where a really good full series rewatch would come in handy, but I’m all out of those.
One confusion I’ve just sort of tried to shake off is that it’s tough to know how to reconcile voices that are imploring you as a white person to learn when sometimes those voices differ on whose lessons to heed. Kimberly Hirsh’s write-up of having just finished White Fragility reminds me that there’s been a noticeable criticism of that book lately coming from Black women, and yet it was a Black woman writer (whose book I also read) that led me to read it. Like any group of people, of course, “Black women” is not a monolith, so it hardly should be surprising that there’d be no unanimity. The trail just sometimes feels fraught with anxiety, as if following a pointer from one quarter might yield disparagement from another. I don’t think there’s anything to be done about this, per se. Navigating the rapids of educating oneself certainly isn’t exactly on any top-ten list of the world’s problems. It’s also less complaint than observation: when told to listen to Black people, it’s never entirely clear what to do when Black people themselves disagree. Maybe it’s less an observation than a question: what’s good allyship when the Black voices you hear are imploring you to go in different directions?
This piece by Johan Pries, Erik Jönsson, and Don Mitchell for Places Journal about “people’s houses” and “people’s parks” in pre-war Sweden I found interesting in part because of the ascribed tension between people’s movements and “urban planners and policy technocrats”, and how post-war “the era of grassroots energy and improvisational, movement-led placemaking was giving way to the age of expert-led ‘rational’ planning”. That tension made me think of that Jacob Anbinder piece that confused me, and also a little bit about a conversation about urbanist dreams of freeing streets from cars versus questions of representation and bias in planning.
When I started in on Space and Place, it turns out that the very first quote I noted was one I’d already heard from how I even learned of Yi-Fu Tuan in the first place. More interestingly to me is the fact that I’d then said that the quote (echoing Richard Sennett) “seem[ed] roughly consistent with ‘dwelling’ versus ‘moving’” and sure enough the second quote I noted this week was about movement. The third, noted yesterday? About dwelling and movement. Go figure.
Shannon Mattern’s longform look (or would it be listen?) at urban auscultation passes along a comparison between doctors learning to listen to the body that I know I’ve read somewhere before, but I’ll be damned if I can remember where. Anyway, as I brace for tonight’s likely followup to last night’s cosplay mortar fire, I just wanted to include here one part.
I’m trying to sit outside and read but every time a local firework goes off the sound ricochets off the door in front of which I am sitting and every single time I think someone is coming out from my apartment and so the heart-jolt of the firework immediately is followed by the heart-jolt of someone who can’t exist nonetheless surprising me from behind and now I feel like I am a perpetual startle response.
“I’m beginning to think of myself as the most unreliable narrator of all,” muses Rebecca Toh. Having just today finished up Your Brain Is a Time Machine and been reminded of the degree to which our unconscious mind is mediating—editing, really—our sensory experiences before passing them along to our conscious mind, I’d think it’s safe to say that each of us is the most unreliable narrator of all, but we’re all we’ve got.
Longish-time readers will know that I’ve talked a lot about the differences between space and place online, and have wondered about what lessons can be learned from spaces and places offline. This is why I’m very much looking forward finally to having started Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan. It’s already dropping gold nuggets such as, “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other.” Also this bit: “[I]f we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.”
My new nonfiction read is Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan; my continuing fiction read is The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa; and I’ve recently finished Your Brain Is a Time Machine by Dean Buonomano. So far this year, I’ve read twenty-six books, with six ready to read next and thirty-three still to buy or borrow.
The thing that I don’t understand about this Jacob Anbinder piece about urban planning post-pandemic (via Aaron Michael Brown) is that he criticizes both planners for self-importance and the destruction of neighborhoods and public participation processes and things like “environmental review requirements” for blocking progress, yet says that planners should reassert their authority. What am I missing here? Was there some golden age of urban planning that didn’t also destroy neighborhoods, and usually Black ones? There doesn’t seem to be any illustration of how to reassert planning authority minus the abuses. He derides urban planners for thinking of themselves as “medicine men” but then exhibits nothing so much as his own magical thinking that planners reasserting themselves somehow will just be different this time.
I think it’s important to distinguish between standards and conventions. Having a /now page or a /uses page or a /feeds page is a convention for the sake of convenience. It’s not a “standard”, per se. As the conversation on Micro.blog about this establishes, the posited /feeds page also solves a problem that doesn’t really exist. Manton Reece notes, “The actually hard part is what to do with the feed URL when someone discovers it.” Jason Becker adds, “Every feed reader I’ve ever used has had no problem finding the RSS/JSON feed from the URL.” The issue isn’t so much finding feeds on a webpage as getting feed readers into the hands of people who would use them. Which isn’t to say I think the /feeds page is a bad idea; just that first people need to be reminded that feeds exist at all.
My food stamp benefits re-up on the fourth of the month, and somehow today I managed to roust myself out of the apartment to do two grocery runs before having breakfast or even coffee. The cost? By the time I was plating breakfast (frozen pancakes and pre-cooked bacon) from the oven, all it took was being unable to open the syrup bottle and then having it slip from my hands (it did not break) for me to scream religious profanity out my open kitchen window. All of my sense of satisfaction at having been productive early, freeing up the rest of my day, evaoprated instantly as the cognitive and physical load of that productivity collapsed inward on itself.
John Philpin is right that this post from Dave Winer called “On gaslighting” has nothing at all to do with gaslighting, and I’m honestly not at all clear on why Winer thinks it does. In truth, it’s just Winer failing to come to terms with the fact that his political ideas are nothing special or unique, and that he’s only going to continue feeling frustration if he thinks that the world should be paying attention to another old white guy. It’s the same situation I’m in, except while I feel frustrated I don’t also feel entitled to attention or readership. Grappling with the fact that one’s writing, or the ideas it conveys, mostly are just spitting into the void is rough; I get it. But it’s not our world anymore, and when it was it was illegitimately so. I keep talking because I can’t not; the nice thing about blogging is I’m not taking up anyone else’s space with it. Those very few people who want to hear from me get to hear from me. Outside of that, the world spins merrily along without me. Winer, of course, over the course of his blogging life has had a wider and more involved audience than many of us. I’m sure it’s tough to lose the full sense of that. Here’s the thing though: loss of privilege is only an actual loss if you’re hanging on to your ego. And losing one’s privilege isn’t an example of “a person or a group covertly [sowing] seeds of doubt in a targeted individual […], making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment”. It’s just progress. That’s no judgement on my part; I trip up on this, too. In the end, though, his opinions, my opinions, they simply aren’t generally deserving of attention or applause. We aren’t special. We’re just us, writing because we do that.
Governor Kate Brown earlier today issued a statement about confrontations between the Portland Police Bureau and local protesters.
Examining how we approach superheroes of course is a valid thing to do, but I’m squeamish about doing so in the context of defunding the police, in the way we’re re-examining how pop culture handles policing. There’s a discussion about cops in pop culture right now because police are very real, and actual policing itself as its currently performed in America is very wrong and very racist and very violent. The fictional ways in which we portray that institution, and the distortions of reality therein, arguably are a pressing debate. Superheroes, however, are not fictionalizations of a real-world institution. There are plenty of ways to contextualize, decontextualize, and recontextualize superhero tropes, but there aren’t superheroes running around killing Black people on American streets. Superheroes surely can and do reflect and discuss some very real questions of our morality, but arguing over what superheroes are for and what they do and what they echo and what they push back against isn’t the same conversation.
Colin Walker ponders the temporality of the modern web, and I think it’s right that the matter isn’t so much of how anyone writes but on the likelihood of any given person being read. Quasi-permanent sites rather than frequently-updated blogs isn’t a thing that answers that question. When the web was young there was only so much to find, and the individual webpage therefore had an inherent sort of cachet. Having recently done a re-read of The Weblog Handbook I’d say that if nothing else people should read Rebecca Blood’s afterword, “Another Look Back and a Look Forward”, especially if you weren’t around for the beginning of the web and/or the advent of weblogs. It wouldn’t hurt also to read the first bit of of chapter one, “Weblogs Are Native to the Web”. That kind of web is gone, and I don’t think it much matters how we write and publish today so much as it maybe matters that we bother to write and publish at all.
Marian Call’s much-anticipated Swears! album is up for preorders (so is, yes, Cuss!) and the single “Fix It Fix It” is giving me complicated feelings of expectations both met and confounded that I can’t properly explain, and that also in a weird way I could see as fully intentional. Where does this track fall on the album? Maybe that doesn’t matter; it’s the first track dropped and I feel like, as I’ve sat here staring at this post and listening to the song several times over before saying anything, that maybe there’s a reason for that. Absent the rest of the album, though, I can’t know.
I’m ambivalent about Ilana Sichel’s ambivalence about living in New York City. I do find it problematic, though, to assert, “The problems are enormous, but the choices are individual.” I find it arguably dangerous to ask, “At what point do we accept that the sensory is the level to focus on, that the rest is too far out of our control?”—or, not to ask, per se; but to seriously entertain accepting that premise.
My final thoughts, I think, on having finished Dark: about halfway through the finale season they inject some extra nonsense seemingly just for the hell of being able to keep pushing the confusion. I found it unnecessarily distracting and kind of narratively pointless, and I think there was a way to do what they ultimately did without it. Meanwhile, someone at Netflix at some point should greenlight a quasi-Bandersnatch cut where you can pick a character and just watch what happens to them from their own chronological point-of-view—and then some pop culture website should watch all the possible ways to watch and give me a summary.
Since turning on blog comments for a July test-run, I’ve already gotten three spam comments; fortunately Askimet caught them. As part of this test, while I’ve not turned on webmentions (I’m still mulling), I have turned on ActivityPub support. If you’re on Mastodon or whatever, you can follow this blog using @bix@bix.blog and replies from you there will be comments here. I’m not fond of any of the @-name formatting used by ActivityPub and webmention-style comments, so it’s very likely that I will be either hiding @-mentions via CSS or simply by manually editing comments as they come in and get approved. I am not entirely sure what that might or might not do to how reply comments from here appear via ActivityPub, presuming they even do?
Rebecca Toh’s latest newsletter is both not wrong and only makes me feel more at sea. I don’t feel that anything I do is “important work”, even when we expand the definition to incorporate the very small. I don’t, in point of fact, actually do anything. Even here, these posts exist mostly because of a quasi-mechanistic “need” to be blogging again; most of the time my blogging just depresses me more because it doesn’t say anything new or unique, and it’s difficult for me not to compare it to the days when my blogging was exactly and precisely new and unique. The reality is that much like Earth is “mostly harmless” I am “mostly irrelevant”. My abilities and capacities at this stage of my life are even irrelevant to self-sufficiency—I am effectively both mostly irrelevant and fundamentally of no use.
Jonathan Levinson writing for OPB has a good look at the Portland Police Bureau terrorizing protests with so-called “less lethal” munitions; Levinson gets some pretty blunt descriptions of what these weapons do to people. Some of the munitions used here in Portland were used in Boston until they decided they were too dangerous; they melted them down into sewer caps.
Harry Potter fandom is in an interesting place now, with fansites trying to find a way forward while also shunning Rowling for her transphobic views. I was thinking about this sort of thing the other day after Ray Fisher’s charges of Joss Whedon’s abusiveness on the set of Justice League. Three years ago the fansite Whedonesque shut down as his ex-wife outed a decade and a half of issues; the site had been around since 2002. In the wake of the Fisher story, the most succinct reaction I saw was that “society has progressed beyond the need” for Whedon; I think that’s right, and Potter fandom I guess finds itself in somewhat similar a circumstance.
“But it’s never too late to stop being complicit,” writes Jonathan M. Katz. I would only add that if you end your complicity late, the lauds and laurels you receive should be proportionally reduced based on that delay. I’m not speaking here of people whose own silence was due to themselves suffering abuses; I’m talking about the ones who ride complicity as far as they can and then try to ride “speaking out” as far as they can.
Perhaps my greatest regret about realizing that I am aphantasic is that it scuttles one of my favorite parts from my online biography because my memories simply have no visual component to them at all. It’s one of the best lines I’ve ever written for anything and it falls apart under closer scrutiny. It was meant to convey the lack of an emotional component to my memories, which I’ve come since to realize likely is part of the aphantasia-related autobiographical memory deficiencies. I’m reminded now, though, that now I also wonder about the separate “internal narrative” issue referenced in that earlier post. Do other people who have internal narratives actually hear a voice in a sensory sense, or just sort of experience the conception of talking? Because I’m most definitely in the latter camp. There’s no voice; I can’t even tell if it’s “me” “talking”, per se. It’s the conception of talking but not the conception of a voice, but it progresses temporally just like speech would; to some degree there are moments where I also have the conception of what it would feel like to actually utter the words being thought. So, while I do have an internal narrative consisting of words, there’s no sensory aspect to it. Just like if I think of a song; I don’t “hear” it in my “mind’s ear” or whatever; I simply have the conception of the song.
While sitting outside on the front landing of my mother-in-law cottage reading Your Mind Is a Time Machine, my mind kept coming back to that study about aphantasia and memory deficiencies, and the implications for the inability not just to retrospectively visualize the past but also to prospectively visualize the future—and I started to wonder about potential links between a deficiency in prospective visualization and anxiety.
Last week I wondered what becomes of Albina Vision under the Rose Quarter “Improvement” Project. Today, the Albina Vision Trust pulled out of the freeway-widening project, and several political stakeholders appeared to have followed them out the door.
The problem with the latest about Trump’s unfitness for office isn’t that, it’s the fact that “his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff” also need to be brought up on some sort of charges, as they are sworn to the country and its constitution, not its president, and did nothing to step up and try to protect the country.
Let’s discriminate “indiscriminate efforts”. Here’s what I mean: White men have had the power in America for four hundred years, and over that time have constructed and molded the society in which we live today, often rerouting against challenges to their authority. (Parenthetically, I was prompted in a sort of sideways manner to come back to this by Kimberly Hirsh’s thoughts on Naomi Alderman’s The Power, somehow.) In such a socially glacial timeframe, to many people it simply doesn’t seem like they live in a structure or a system; society is just society, like the air. At the very least, it certainly isn’t a single if exceedingly complicated mechanism. (I’m setting aside for the moment those who know full well that society is a structure and a system devised to keep them in power.) So when a movement comes along seeking to address that entire structure, that entire system, of course the intellectually lazy (or the intellectually deceptive) are going to scream and whine and opine about that movement being “indiscriminate” in its efforts. Any concerted challenge to an entire unjust system is going to appear “indiscriminate” to those for whom the system was built, to those whom it privileges. In truth, the movement discriminates against unjust power and those who wield it whether as sword or shield. That only feels “indiscriminate” if you benefit from that unjust power. Or, if you prefer: that challenge can only be called “indiscriminate” if you also acknowledge that the system being challenged itself is just as “indiscriminate” in its leveraging of power in your favor.
A slight correction to earlier discussion about the “blackface Megyn Kelly” costume story: other people in fact did tell Sue Schafer it was a bad idea, including “the cabdriver who took her to Toles’s house” and “the party’s co-host, Steve Rochlin”. That’s what happens when I write about a story whose entirety I couldn’t read for myself because of the paywall. However, this correction only makes the story worse for Schafer. The incident’s recency when combined with the fact that multiple people had to tell Schafer it was a bad idea and she didn’t get the message until more forcefully confronted by an actual black woman—well, that’s why it was worth reporting on. What people should be asking it why it wasn’t reported on at the time given the proximity to the DC elite. Wait, I just answered my own question. Schafer not only had to think to herself that the costume was a great idea, she had to assume that the people with whom she socializes would as well. Maybe the story Josh Barro and Olivia Nuzzi should be working on is why she might have thought that.
Erin Ross details how Lincoln County’s guidance regarding its masks directive and an exemption for people of color blew up on social media and in the news media, and suggests what I’d suspected: that they didn’t get enough guidance from communities of color up front. Tidbit that I didn’t know until now: Andy Ngo (a danger to our community who provides kill lists to Atomwaffen) riled people up about it through his usual misinformation tactics.
Eric Ravenscraft’s look at reaching the limits of our ability to process information has more language I’d find useful in an autistic context—or, rather, in communicating to other people about various experiences of being autistic. To wit: our environment feeling “like a mental DDoS attack that drags down our mental health, allows misinformation to thrive, and even makes the job of delivering news more difficult”. Pair with this earlier thing about cognitive exhaustion.
My one caveat to Robin Rendle’s caveat to Sarah Drasner’s defense of “fussy websites” is that sometimes what text needs to be an interface for is, well, text; what I mean is: obviously it depends upon the website. Not, of course, that either Rendle or Drasner wouldn’t understand this, as we’re all three of us talking about this on sites where “the text is just...there”.
My new nonfiction read is Your Brain Is a Time Machine by Dean Buonomano; my continuing fiction read is The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa; and I’ve recently dropped The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale. So far this year, I’ve read twenty-five books, with seven ready to read next and thirty-three still to buy or borrow.
So, yeah, I’ve dropped The End of Policing, although I’m keeping it in my to-read list for now in case I feel like I can get back to it. It reads like a real slog of a textbook, with little to no humanity in it, and I feel like this is a topic which cries out for it. It needs representative stories about real and actual human beings whose lives have been impacted by each way in which we do policing wrong. Facts and figures alone don’t carry. It’s a book that should have been written by someone out in the world when it reads instead like a book written by someone at their desk. I’ll be moving on to Your Brain Is a Time Machine; I’m curious to see if it informs any of my thinking about aphantasia, severely deficient autobiographical memory (which really needs a better name), and my inability to truly picture past or future.
This week I’ll be watching Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, Match Game, Stargirl, The 100, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Doom Patrol, The Bold Type, and I’ll try the season premiere of Hanna but I’m not hopeful. I’m in season two of Good Girls; I’m watching Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts on weekend mornings; and I’m making my way through the finale season of Dark.
“New disease models released today by the Oregon Health Authority warn that daily COVID-19 infections could increase 20-fold by mid-July if trends continue,” reports Willamette Week—which also reports, “Oregon bars, restaurants and other businesses may be forced to shut down again as COVID-19 cases spike, Gov. Kate Brown acknowledged today.”
One more about all this before I go to bed for real: the stuff being said in the discussion on Micro.blog effectively is regurgitated Reason nonsense; I just read some, in fact. What the Reason “reasoning” actually demonstrated to me, however, was that the call-out here isn’t just of a middle-aged liberal lady thinking that “blackface Megyn Kelly” was a legitimate costume decision, but inherently of everyone else at that party who did nothing about it. This party was only two years ago; I don’t think the call-out statute of limitations somehow has expired. At issue is not just the wearer of the costume but a political and media culture which itself effectively cancels the concerns of those whom, say, fucking blackface harms. Literally the Reason post, for example, says that two women confronting the liberal lady in question was harassment, not the blackface. That’s the height of tone policing. I can see raising questions about whether or not the Post wrote this article in order to get out in front of a story that risked tarnishing their Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist, whose party, after all, was the scene of the crime. I can’t see, however, the idea that there’s no story in a party of, by, and for the Washington DC elite at which a woman wore blackface and it took a black woman to do something about it.
Somehow it took two days for this Nicolas Carter post about being institutionalized by Cards Against Humanity to come to my attention. The bill of particulars in the Polygon article were bad enough but this? Since I’ve been arguing tonight about cancel culture (more on that later), it’s time to cancel Cards Against Humanity. Tear it all the way the fuck down.
This morning I hit the snooze button until 8:45, fed the cats, browsed the internet on the phone from bed until 9:30, got up and dressed and ordered breakfast delivery, ate while watching television, and by noon I couldn’t keep my eyes open or my head up, so I crashed hard for two hours. Awake now and trying to locate the resources to do absolutely anything else today.
I almost deleted my LinkedIn outright recently, but instead I pulled everything off that wasn’t a job, and annotated each position with why and how it was an Unsuccessful Work Attempt (a term of art in the world of Social Security benefits) due to my then-undiagnosed autism, or with why and how it succeeded, for a time, due to coincidental accommodation or mitigation of my then-undiagnosed autism. I’d had those annotations sitting in a notes file for months, and only just realized that I could add them to my LinkedIn profile. Someday, I will need them when I make another attempt at obtaining benefits so I am not entirely dependent upon a family member’s fixed income until they’re not around anymore and I end up on the street or in a home. It’s complicated, but, even assuming another evaluation from the state’s Disability Determination Services were to make me eligible for benefits, I’d only be able to try for SSI—when it comes to SSDI, they consider me to have worked too little to be eligible on my own, and yet somehow at the exact same time too much to be eligible under a parent’s credits. In order for the latter to happen, I’d need to demonstrate that nearly the entirety of my job history consists of Unsuccessful Work Attempts, which, sure enough.
Jeanelle Hope’s look at Black antifascism (via Walidah Imarisha) pairs nicely with the recent Smithsonian Magazine piece on antifascism generally which discussed the links between antifascism and antiracism. My usual quibble: Hope conflates antifa and black bloc, a term she doesn’t acknowledge (and which, if you need to know, is unrelated to being a Black antifascist) even though she’s crediting the tactic itself.
Some research performed on Reddit suggests that a welcome message to new posters explaining community norms increases participation, which is nice and all but you still have to actually also reduce the abuse and harassment that keeps them from participating absent such a welcome message. Increasing participation through communicating expectations without also reducing the abuse just exposes more people to potential abuse.
My new fiction read is The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa; my continuing nonfiction read is The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale; and I’ve recently finished Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey. So far this year, I’ve read twenty-five books, with six ready to read next and thirty-three still to buy or borrow.
I’d go apeshit, I’m sure, if I actually listened to the podcast itself but based upon this description from MeFi I’d just like to suggest that if this speaks to you, keep the premise in mind in other contexts, such as when interacting with people already under various types of increased cognitive load—whether from, say, the nature of neurodivergence or from, say, the “nurture” of white supremacy.
Smithsonian Magazine, of all things, published a brief history of antifascism (via MeFi) and if Italy forming the “Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo, the Organization for vigilance and repression of anti-fascism” doesn’t make you think of Trump and Barr ranting about antifa, well I don’t know you.
The rules “governing” police are never not ridiculous. Any police jurisdiction that invites on-the-ground enforcement assistance from other jurisdictions can’t be allowed simply to close the case and pass the buck on complaints when the behavior of another jurisdiction’s officer is at issue. “What the…?” indeed.
My concern with Ben Mathis-Lilley’s look at Larry Kudlow saying Americans will have to just “live with” the resurgence of the virus should be with Kudlow’s blithe disregard, but I find I’m more concerned with Mathis-Lilley effectively letting Kudlow and his ilk off the hook even while superficially criticizing them.
Hundreds of mathematicians have signed a letter to appear in Notices of the American Mathematical Society calling for the field to cease collaborating with police departments, engage in public audits of algorithms, and to incorporate “learning outcomes that address the ethical, legal, and social implications” in data science courses.
Lincoln County had exempted certain classes of people from its face-covering mandate, including people of color “who have heightened concerns about racial profiling and harassment due to wearing face coverings in public”. National news media spread the story as “only white people must wear masks”, prompting “racist commentary” to flood the county.
Using a default theme now instead of a full custom job which inevitably caused issues, I’ve stopped using self-comments as post addenda; they now simply appear in the comments area. However, this made me realize that my hypothesized comments-as-addenda plugin wouldn’t need to create a whole new, parallel and internal quasi-commenting system for such entry updates. Rather, it could just use the current ability of a post author to add a comment directly from the post edit screen by adding a checkbox to mark a comment as “post update”. The plugin would then intelligently inject a comments list consisting only of these post-update comments at the end of the post’s content; all other comments—including any the post author posted but did not mark internally as a post-update—would appear as usual in the normal comments area, minus any post-update comments. So, really, any plugin for this feature could simply piggyback on the existing comments system rather than building something entirely separate. My assumption is that such a plugin also could run a “send pings” process from any such post-update comments, and also presumably include these post-update comments in site search and in the post content itself in RSS feeds, so subscribers would see them as updated items in their feed readers. Now if only someone would see this, think it’s a terrific idea, and make a plugin.
I’m being flippant in that last post but also I’m not actually being flippant at all. Literally just hours after I’ve read the part in Nikole Hannah-Jones’ call for racial economic justice where she discusses how it’s not like any of the United States’ civil rights laws made up for the past of racist economic deprivation which held Blacks back even as Whites were given both hands-up and hand-outs, I read that thing about Jenny Slate. So, I really do want to know: is she giving any of that money back, since for four whole seasons those wages could have gone to increase the financial stability and well-being of a Black actress?
The killer of Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Ricky Best at the Hollywood Transit Center three years ago after they came to the defense of two women he was subjecting to racist and Islamophobic harrassment, has been sentenced to two life terms with no chance of parole. Weeks after that attack, Image Comics, then new to Portland, published a comic book cover “graphically depicting the lynching and genital mutilation of a Muslim man adorned with a racist term for Pakistanis” and the city’s comic celebrities remained largely silent in the face of the controversy.
Anton Howe’s suggestion that “Marvel, DC, Harry Potter, and Star Wars” are modern society’s “virtue-promoting public art” makes me think of a post of mine from 2013 which I only just recently imported here, wherein I suggested something similar, except instead of pop culture being about promoting moral virtue, per se, I pegged it as the texts of our moral exploration.
Amanda Kolson Hurley’s ode to the design hacks of the age of COVID-19 has me wondering to what degree eventual standardization in approaches will buttress the pandemic going from story to setting. By which I mean, are we more likely to actively, consciously notice these design mitigations when they are disparate and novel?
I’ll not offer justification for the cognitive dissonance of supporting calls to defund the police while also being a fan of Brooklyn Nine-Nine; I’ll just note it and say that I’m curious to see what the show does now, having scrapped already-written scripts for its eighth season (link via Andy Baio).
Reading this Kate Julian piece about how telling children the hard truths about the world around them actually makes them more resilient not less (if only because kids aren’t as ignorant as some parents might like to think; they’re noticing the world), she mentions how Black parents have The Talk with their kids, about what it’s going to mean for them to be Black in this society
First a disclaimer: I am not in the need of a new laptop. (Sometimes when I talk about laptops I get family asking me if I somehow need a new one.) Having spent some time on the Apple website looking at the preview of Big Sur and its device compatibility list I fell into their MacBook pages and was frankly surprised that the current MacBook Air starts at just $999, which made me remark to myself that I’m honestly somewhat amazed that my early-2015 MacBook Air—which is compatible with Big Sur—still just merrily flies along at a pace mostly in sync with my thinking and doing. I’ll be interested to see how Big Sur performs on it once it’s an official release.
Courtney E. Martin, writing for Reasons to Be Cheerful and noting that it was just over year before Rosa Parks’ refusal to move became the Supreme Court’s ruling desegregating public buses, reminds us that it’s been only a month since the police murder of George Floyd—yet small steps already have been taken on the road to defunding the police.
Random thought I had while watching the WWDC keynote this morning, somewhat tangential to Civic Signals asking (scroll down) about what kinds of offline “third places” have any sort of online analogues: what if you could, say, open up Messages on your MacBook when you’re alone and working, and notify your contacts (or some specified subset of your contacts) that you are “available”. What I’m picturing is somewhat like when you go with people you know to get work done at a coffeeshop; everyone is working, but there’s a rolling, ongoing but intermittent chatty conversation happening; or someone finds something funny online and you all pause to check it out and then go back to what they were doing. Anyone’s who’s ever had a regular IRC channel will get the basic idea. These messaging sessions would be transient and expire, just like offline conversations do. Imagine even having a setting that would allow other contacts to “swing by” the group—the chosen group gets a notification that you’re “available”, but if you toggle this setting other people in the contacts of any group member who while in Messages notices that there’s a transient group happening could drop in and say hey, as if a friend saw you through the window of the coffeeshop and stopped in for a minute. None of this is groundbreaking; just spitballing. Temporary group chats with optional serendipitous visits, just like “real” life.
My new nonfiction read is The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale; my continuing fiction read is Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey; and I’ve recently finished The Weblog Handbook by Rebecca Blood. So far this year, I’ve read twenty-four books, with seven ready to read next and thirty-one still to buy or borrow.
This week I’ll be watching Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, Stargirl, The 100, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Doom Patrol, The Bold Type, and Dark. (I renewed DC Universe for early Stargirl and for Doom Patrol starting back up.) I’m halfway through season five in my full series rewatch of Alias, after which I will need to find a new rewatch.
No lie: when I reached the reminder that “the statue of a slave trader in Bristol, England was tossed into the sea” in Rampant’s handy and somewhat sanity-affirming list of results forced by the current popular surge of the Black Lives Matter movement (there’s also a second part), I had to pause to laugh all over again. Which is not to say the movement is a laughing matter; more that part of justice must be joy.
John Rice posits three degrees of racism in America: “taking actions that people of color view as overtly prejudiced”; “opposing or turning one’s back on anti-racism efforts”; and “when employers, educational institutions, and governmental entities do not unwind practices that disadvantage people of color”—that last of which Rice says “undergirds the everyday black experience”. Particularizing these degrees of racism, Rice says, allows us then to heed his father’s advice to “increase the cost of racist behavior.”.
Stephanie McCurry’s explication of the Confederate States of America not as some “libertarian symbol of small government and resistance to federal tyranny” but as a repressive, white supremacist, “centralized state” conscripting its population to fight a “rich man’s war” includes a description of its political reality which seems mightily and distressingly familiar.
I’ve re-themed the blog, resorting to a child theme of Twenty Sixteen, and my intention going forward is to not work in anything other than CSS customizations and custom functions. Everything else needs to be a plugin; no more creating and editing theme files. In the process of doing this, I managed accidentally how to make a very simple custom shortcode in order to get my tag cloud displaying properly on the archives page, which I needed to do because I wanted to get out of the god damned Gutenberg editor—and that meant reworking my archives page in the Classic editor, which required some learning because there did not appear to be an already-available shortcode for displaying tags. This also means that my tag cloud now displays all my tags and not just the forty-two (or was it seventy-five?) most-frequently-used ones. Tinkering will continue, and for the time being I am ignoring the fact that my “self-comments as post addenda” instead now display, well, as comments. I’ve accomplished enough and simplified a great deal, and the missing bits I’ll mull over the next few days.
In exploring re-theming the blog, I discovered that a plugin I’d wanted to use to do some bulk cleanup of post titles was failing to work because of my theme, somehow; it works just fine under an existing, properly-made theme. I’m struggling now with whether to take that as a sign that, yes, I need to abandon the custom theme and switch to using a child of a native WordPress theme, so any tweaks are built atop a theme that functions properly all around to begin with. If I do this, several things will break, and I will have to think about what features and functions matter to me and which I can suffer setting aside.
The Vast of Night engrossed me from start to finish, even if a couple of the filmmaking choices confused me. There are some delicious oners in the first half; funny how we make such a deal over oners when actors have been doing oners since before movies existed, on the stage, night after night. I disagree with the Spielberg-citing review quote but understand why the marketing team used it. There’s one element in particular—an aspect of Billy’s identity and the impact it had on his not being listened to—that really some filmmaker should run with all on its own. (Not in the sense of another story in this world; just the premise of why he and others were chosen for the work that they did.) One thing to be prepared for: it is a very dark movie, in a literal cinematographic sense; best watched with the lights out.
Reading this Kimberly Hirsh post I became interested to see if it were possible to discern the origins of the phrase: move slowly and mend things. As near as we can tell from search engines the earliest evident use is a speech given by high school teacher Rebecca Hong for the 2013 commencement at Lick-Wilmerding High School.
What’s galling isn’t only that the Trump campaign bought Facebook advertisements using an old Nazi symbol for communists, socialists, and other antifascists but that the antifascist response to it has been historically disingenuous. It took me all of maybe five minutes on Google to find that one variant or another of Antifascist Action engaged in “reclamation of the red triangle symbol used by the Nazis to label communists” and maybe two more minutes to find that the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime, an antifascist organization founded in 1947 which “emerged from victims’ associations”, had “adopted” as its symbol “the ‘red triangle’, the sign sewn on the concentration camp uniforms of political prisoners”.
Update for blog readers: I’m on something of a hiatus as I rethink my internet footprint. Right now I’m focused on setting up email hosting so that by the end of today I will delete my last Google account. I’m preparing to leave Instagram (although, I might boot up a locked account that just follows local businesses; otherwise I will have no way of knowing what’s going on in my neighborhood) in favor of VSCO. Then I’ll be looking for a service to wipe my Twitter likes and retweets and then delete all tweets older than X days, and run the latter regularly. What this means for my blogging I don’t know yet; I’m skeptical I really have enough to contribute to bother keeping a permanent, eponymous record like this.
I wonder if I could crowdfund a modern Kubrick theme reboot. I mean, presuming I could find WordPress theme hackers who’d want to do it.
I’m maybe taking another break, as something is making me feel exceedingly pointless, possibly my look back at old blogging of mine and spiraling over whether or not to put old posts back online and if so which ones and if so how even to choose, perhaps combined with thinking about how I might be cognitively prohibited from accessing both my past and my future which makes it very difficult to compellingly or convincingly feel a reason for doing things, and I came very close this evening to taking a serious look at just throwing in the towel and leaving the internet altogether.
You know how you arm or leg feels when it “falls asleep”? Not the pins-and-needles or the numbness part but how it feels significantly heavier than your regular limb? That’s how my entire body feels when a fatigue crash is going to pull me under. This post coming to you from the two-hour deep crash that just happened which somehow brought with it this comparative thought.
Colin Walker nods at Julian Summerhayes lamenting the loss of “the silence of early lockdown”, although they appear to be coming at it for different reasons. Walker in effect is grimacing at how quickly people seem to have glommed on to behaving as if the pandemic is over; I’m seeing this a lot in my neighborhood at the local Safeway where the ranks of the maskless have been growing for the past week despite our zip code consistently having COVID issues (see also: Oregon’s epidemiologist is getting nervous). Summerhayes, on the other hand (who has a site design so crisp and clean I had to double-take that it really is LiveJournal), is coming at it from a more philosphic or even asocial place; his “soul is not equipped to withstand the tyranny of another onslaught of noise, pollution and doing”—something which in my autistic sensory sensitivities I appreciate, as I’ve been trapped at home, normally quite the tranquil respite, while raucous housing construction ratchets and clangs next door.
Michael Donaldson cites Yancey Strickler’s attempt to use Liu Cixin’s “dark forest” as a descriptive model of the internet, so I’m required to note (as I did when Om Malik did the same) that Strickler got the metaphor wrong. Maybe it’s my autistic cognitive rigidity, but I just can’t let this one go. Stickler’s use of the “dark forest” doesn’t understand what Liu was saying, and I wish people would stop repeating him.
Warren Ellis wonders if you “ever have those days where you wake up and you just know that something is wrong and off” and I’m pretty sure my handful of readers know my answer. Ellis also notes James Reeves noting Paul Valéry in 1928 positing a future where “we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand” and I guess I won’t comment on wondering how much Ellis’ or my “sense of impending doom” is impacted by wondering just what those hot and cold running taps of visual and auditory images are going to bring to us today.
Art Kavanagh is the reason I know the term aphantasia, after I’d blogged about discovering that unlike me many if not most people literally can visualize things in their mind’s eye. In that post, I’d referenced something I’ve used in my online “about” pages for many years.
At some point I’d like to find a way to compile all my ebook highlighting into one place. I’d be perfectly happy to consider Readwise, except they don’t support Kobo which is where I read and highlight now. If I decided maybe somehow to roll my own, I discovered that Readwise also provides a tool called Bookcision which lets you grab your Kindle highlights, although I think it’s book-by-book.
In an ideal world, the response to the question of “Open to whom?” would be “everyone.” But in this climate, where there are so many variables that undermine that ideal, our responses and processes should read more like “Open, particularly for…” As we evolve our understanding of the different impacts the built environment has on different people, we should think about how our response to Covid-19 and civil unrest could atone for how hostile our urban spaces have been for so many. We must listen intently to those who’ve long studied and advocated for climate justice in communities where urban heat islands, toxic industry, blight, and air and water quality make being “outside” dangerous regardless of roadway configuration.
Time is nonsense. Nothing that happened recently ever feels like it was recent and nothing that happened years and years ago ever feels like it was years ago. Looking at old blog posts from other of my incarnations, I am seeing things I wrote in 2017 and thinking there’s no way that was just three years ago that I said that, as the events it discusses seem in my head like they are at least five years ago if not more, if only because the person who was writing these post seems like a person from long ago, not merely three years.
Okay. I’m going to do it: I’m going to work on seeing how much of my blogging history I can get imported into Bix Dot Blog. I’ve got export files that I’m testing out in a local WordPress install on my laptop right now. This is aside from my old Blogger sites, which would be another thing altogether.
Ben Thompson links himself in a past incarnation, quoting a post arguing for “Blogging’s Bright Future”, in a section about defining “blog”.
Does anyone else experience strange, subtle vibrating pulses in their legs? I’d seriously decided that it was the fan in my laptop except it happens when I’m not using my laptop, too. I’m literally right now trying to determine if either of the cats next to me is purring. I don’t feel it in any other part of my body.
One of my favorite posts pops up in Posted Today, where I wondered if western/white culture only had the cynical opportunity to try (disingenuously) to claim “superiority” because of the dumb luck of geology, not the destiny of genetics. It grew out of contrasting an excerpt from Superior: The Return of Race Science with stuff I was reading in Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History.
WordPress people: is there no way in wp_list_comments() to have multiple types in the type= argument? As near as I can tell, by default it accepts all, comment, pingback, trackback, and pings; and with the Webmention plugin installed it also accepts webmention, but it doesn’t also fold that type into the catch-all pings. I need a way to have wp_list_comments() include both pings and webmention.
My neighbors I guess have decided that Multnomah County did open today after all despite the pause instituted by the state, given that they’ve been having some sort of increasingly loud and boisterous, and seemingly increasingly populated, porch party outside for at least three and a half hours now.
My new nonfiction read is The Weblog Handbook by Rebecca Blood; my continuing fiction read is Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir; and I’ve recently finished Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement by Steven K. Kapp, editor. So far this year, I’ve read twenty-two books, with nine ready to read next and twenty-nine still to buy or borrow.
Ad-hoc book club anyone? At long last, I am beginning my webhistorical flashback re-reads of what, at least for me, were some seminal texts — beginning with The Weblog Handbook by Rebecca Blood. Basic Books has the ebook on sale for $1.99 right now. I’d be curious to see what people who’ve read it before think about it now (including myself!) as well as what any new readers think of it 18 years after it was published. I’m not thinking about anything especially organized; just grab the book, read it at your own pace, and blog about it. Any takers?
This is by design and I’m not exactly sure what the White House is trying to prove here, but the white nationalism is strong with this one. With the world already smoldering from the Black Lives Matter protests against the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, holding a white power rally on the day that slavery ended in the place that “remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history,” is low, even for this administration. This has the potential to be a molotov cocktail of destruction and if this all goes to shit, and America will have itself to blame and Stephen Miller—always Stephen Miller.
I fully confess that I have complicated and conflicting thoughts about Brandon’s lament for blogs that end “because the author felt shame”. For sure, a person’s home on the web should be as reflective of their self-presentational choices as is their actual home, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with using one’s blog as an escape from the weights of the surrounding world. I also think, though, that anyone’s public choices are open to some degree of public inquiry—but then I also think, though, that often people don’t know the difference between public inquiry and public inquisition, or the distinction between people who might expect the former but not deserve the latter. My complicated feelings here, of course, partly come from only just earlier today having spent an hour writing about whiteness’ obligation not to be silent about the deprivations it visits upon those who aren’t white, but of course in this particular context of someone having felt shamed out of blogging I’ve no earthly idea if they are white, let alone if, for all I know, they spend days volunteering or demonstrating or otherwise working for some sort of common good. I ran into Brandon’s post through Rebecca Toh who isn’t wrong that “we get to choose how we want to show up”, and this is especially true when other people frankly might have little or no sense of what we show up for, and when, and how. There’s no nicely-drawn conclusion here, nor any pretty bow to wrap-up my point; I’m just writing my own complications aloud, without shame.
If replies coming into a post on my blog from Micro.blog were being seen by WordPress as the “webmention” Comment-Type and not the “comment” Comment-Type, I’d be willing to approve the first one but deny the rest of them, because that first one would lead to a page on Micro.blog containing all of them, but it wouldn’t clutter the post’s Mentions section with overkill. Alas, they come in as “comment”; I have to just trash them and not display any link to the discussion at all. This is not specifically a complaint about Micro.blog, it’s just the only place where these sorts of webmentions come from so it’s the example at hand.
Two days ago I wrote the words “sometimes Oregonians […] have this weird sense of self-flagellating pride in confessing Oregon’s sins”. What most of you probably didn’t even notice, as I didn’t until later, was that this was an example of speaking in the white default because of course what I was really talking about were white Oregonians, specifically—but I didn’t actually specify, because white people tend to think of themselves in and as the default.
Lady Antebellum changing their name to Lady A after suddenly realizing “antebellum” is problematic is a story that at first glance I guffawed over, primarily because I couldn’t figure out how anyone could not know the connotations of the word. Reading the story itself, though, it struck me that’s pretty much the point about the south: this language is just sort of there, like oxygen in the air, going essentially unnoticed by those who don’t have a personal reason to notice it. Honestly, their statement is more unabashedly and actually apologetic than most of these sorts of things. I still don’t know who they are and I’m not suddenly in a rush to go find out, and it’s not a thing to dwell on because they aren’t the story right now, but, would that we had more cultural and political figures willing to be this blunt about their own dead angles when it comes to race and privilege.
Oregon Zoo email details what to expect when the zoo re-opens, although there isn’t yet a set date for that. It’s about what you’d expect: reserved-in-advance “timed entry”, limited capacity, physical distancing measures, masks required, most indoor spaces closed, a one-way path through the zoo. This is going to be the real test for me: the zoo is not nearby and requires a bus ride and a light rail ride. Even if I decide to make the trek, transit is operating with reduced capacity, and with the shortest bus route also the least-frequent, being unable to board one run could mean missing my “timed-entry” slot. It’s going to be an internal psychological battle between needing to get the fuck out of my neighborhood for the first time since the beginning of March and needing to not make an attempt to do so that could go completely awry and make me hate myself for even bothering to try.
Before it was mentioned on Doctor Who, I’d never heard of dyspraxia. About a year and a half ago, I’d done some reading and tweeting, and I’ve been thinking some about it again lately and while I’ve mixed feelings about self-diagnosis, I feel like I could make a pretty convincing case to my primary care physician that we need to add some degree and fashion of dyspraxia to the list of things which explain me.
The tension right now between protestors and politicians is about where in the iceberg to aim policy interventions. Protestors, to my view, appear to be pushing for changes in “system structure” by demanding shifts in not just the way police officers interact with people of color, but also in the way they’re funded and the laws they enforce. The politicians, for the most part, seem hopeful that by dealing with the “event”—particularly punishing the “bad apple” police officers who are directly responsible for specific acts of violence—they will solve the problem. While holding individuals accountable is certainly part of the solution, the iceberg model clearly shows that in order to create more wide-scale and lasting change, you must intervene deeper in the system, just as the Black Lives Matter movement and many others before them have been advocating. The point of demands like defunding the police and changing laws/policies that are overwhelmingly aimed at policing Black and brown people, is to focus on the more deeply-rooted “systems structure” rather than just the “events” that sit at the surface.
Dan Barrett thinks A.C.A.B. (1) is new, (2) means All Cops Are Bad, and (3) “is used in the ongoing conversation around the depiction of cops on TV”. I’m left to wonder: does Australia not have access to search engines? Literally the first four results on Google are: A.C.A.B. - Wikipedia (“A.C.A.B. is an acronym meaning ‘All Cops Are Bastards’”), A Brief History of ACAB | GQ (“If you don’t know already, it means ‘All Cops are Bastards’”), ACAB - ADL (“The acronym ACAB stands for ‘All Cops Are Bastards’”), and ACAB - Urban Dictionary (“All Cops Are Bastards”).
Had to fly Home but forgot had my car with me and it was too late to get her first
“If your software fails you,” writes Evgeny Kuznetsov, “it’s not always an indication that something is wrong with the protocol.” Which might be why my webmentions post this replies to begins, “Webmentions are strange, at least in how the WordPress plugin handles them.” Although, upon doing some reading, it’s my understanding that trackback does send a post excerpt, etc., although it’s optional; only pingback and webmention send just the URL.
Webmentions are strange, at least in how the WordPress plugin handles them, as they contain far less context about the pinging post—which is to say none whatsoever. Old-fashioned trackbacks and pingbacks at least include a snippet of the post which sent the ping. Webmentions are presented simply with, “This post was mentioned by whomever.” This does not seem especially helpful when such inter-blog links are meant to serve not just conversation but context on the web.
Far from discouraging Botha, these ignorant statements only solidified their resolve to change the scientific conversation about autistic people. Now associate lecturer in psychology at the University of Surrey, Botha studies the effects of stigma and discrimination on autistic people. The importance of Botha’s mission goes beyond principle. Autistic people are at risk for numerous mental health issues and suicide — much of it likely propelled by prejudice. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, some doctors in the U.K. have pushed for blanket ‘do not resuscitate’ orders for autistic adults without their or their family’s consent. As long as the scientific literature casts autistic people as less than human, “it facilitates maltreatment of autistic people,” Botha says. “It legitimizes violence.”
It is essential to name the manner in which our profession’s silence is assent. In its purest form, we have an obligation to protect the people’s health, safety, and welfare in and through the spaces we design. This commitment extends beyond the boundary of our buildings and landscapes and into the public realm. We narrow and neglect these commitments often on the backs of the perpetually marginalized and to the detriment of the field. Architecture has been the backdrop and often the instigator for violence on black bodies throughout this nation’s history. This is the case, in large part, because white America has found it all too easy to transpose its capital and beliefs into physical space, allowing the architecture to covertly project power in the name of white supremacy without the burden of having to sustain the unpleasant acts of overt racism themselves.
While the image that comes to mind when most people think about “antifa” is a legion of black-clad militants ready to throw punches, this kind of research is antifascist work too. In fact, monitoring is integral to antifascist operations. Antifa is a series of organizing tactics and an ethos, not any specific organization; while any decentralized group encompasses a variety of ideas, antifa consists of opposing fascist groups by any means available, including, if necessary, violence. For many antifascists, however, infiltration, monitoring, and research are their primary or sole ways of engaging in antifascism. Fighting militant fascist groups is a large and complicated endeavor, and while aiming a fist at a Nazi’s face can be part of that opposition, it is only one way. Just as other forms of social activism require a diversity of tactics—the protester who marches, the planner who puts together a city budget to defund police forces, the person who attends city council meetings—so too does antifascism. The research is unglamorous, exhausting, and involves psychologically torturous degrees of deception. You have to expose yourself to a disgusting mass of racist bile, which takes a grinding toll on the spirit. It also must be done carefully: Members of far-right groups can and do target activists and their families with death threats, harassment, and even violence.
Pretend this post went out on Sunday like it should have. This week I’ll be watching Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, Match Game, Stargirl, The 100, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and The Bold Type, which I thought was done for the season. I’m saving the two-part She-Ra and the Princesses of Power finale for the weekend. In my month of DC Universe, I’ll probably get through season three of Young Justice but not Swamp Thing. I’ve got a free month of HBO Max but I can’t watch it on my Roku TV so I probably won’t get to the last two episodes of Watchmen. I’m in the midst of season three in a full series rewatch of Alias.
The thing about how Oregon’s racist history reverberates down into the present? Despite the fact that non-unanimous jury verdicts specifically were a tool for discrimination and disenfranchisement, so far only two of nineteen defendants with vacated sentences thus far are black, despite “a previous analysis by [Willamette Week] that found black defendants were overrepresented among those convicted by non-unanimous juries”.
Nextdoor uses unpaid volunteers to run its neighborhood communities, with little to no guidance or training. It’s no surprise, then, that black users are feeling less and less safe on the platform. Gordon Strause, its director of community, gave moderators the terrible advice “to take a step back” during Black Lives Matter discussions “as long as [people] expressing their own beliefs and not attacking others”—a recipe for inevitable disaster as some beliefs inherently are attacks on one’s neighbors.
If you ration your reading of Twitter threads, bump this Michael Harriot thread to the top of your to-read list, and learn what you don’t know—about Martin Luther King, Jr., civil disobedience, direct action, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Selma to Montgomery march, James Forman, Robert F. WIlliams, the Black Armed Guard, and Rosa Parks.
For several weeks at the beginning of the outbreak in the U.S., the need to control the virus took precedence over other concerns. Now, for many people, the pandemic is no longer the most pressing national issue. As protesters and some public-health officials have said they are weighing the harms of police violence against the risk of increased viral spread and choosing to gather in the streets, state governments have made similar risk-reward arguments about balancing public-health and economic concerns. The virus does not care about these trade-offs. Retail reopenings and racial-justice protests may exist on different moral planes, but to the virus they both present new environments for spreading.
One notable moment over the weekend was when a Black Lives Matter/“defund the police” demonstrator downtown (I was watching on KPTV’s secondary channel) cautioned against letting Portland’s reputation as the whitest big city in the United States effectively erase the black people who do live here. It’s a good warning, because I think sometimes white Oregonians, or at least those in the Willamette Valley, have this weird sense of self-flagellating pride in confessing Oregon’s sins, in a sort of backwards way that’s more about showing off how they are confessing than it is about the actual sins or their reverberations into the present.
Two unsolved flaws in my “comments as post addenda” hack (in the design not the computing sense): content posted to comments isn’t picked up by site search, and I still haven’t figured out exactly how to get comments included in post items in the RSS and JSON feeds, leaving feed subscribers out of the loop on updates to posts.
I’ve decided to put the internal references project on indefinite hold until I can really think deeply about it, and am thinking about just going ahead and not only accepting trackbacks, pingbacks, and webmentions but displaying them publicly on posts. I’ve already got the latter part most sussed out but have it set only to display to logged-in users (which means just me) so that I can test it without having it truly active until and unless I’m satisfied.
Dreamt needing to move or evacuate and not having a carrier for my cat (I only had one in the dream) so I had to try to carry her by hand and then once in a bus or maybe a plane or maybe an aerial tram she started to shrink into a newt-like thing that I was panicking I would lose and I almost did when she fell from my hand to my shirt and then she just kept shrinking to insect size and I panicked that the other insects walking on my clothes would eat her and then she disappeared altogether.
Somehow in the transition from Medium to Write.as to Micro.blog to WordPress, one thing that never made it across from the start of the chain was a post about the June 1974 evaluation I received from my Monteossori school when I would have been four-years-old.
That the reforms instituted post-Ferguson appear to be insufficient is part of why support is building for a more dramatic overhaul of policing in America. Specifically, calls to defund the police have made the leap from protesters’ handheld signs to mainstream policy discussions on Twitter. When a Vox correspondent tweeted that the idea of abolishing the police was “poorly thought-out,” he was dragged to the point of rescinding it, as advocates pointed out that the theory has in fact been developed over decades by careful thinkers. It’s an example of how social media can help to propel a political critique from the fringes to the point of acceptance by a media establishment that would have otherwise comfortably dismissed it.
It’s not unusual for cops who get caught on camera using “unnecessary force” to have an unfilmed record of it across their career but Steven Pohorence must have some sort of record, having been “reviewed by internal affairs for using force 79 times in his roughly three-and-half years on the force”. As pointed out by Gruber, “that’s a review every 16 days”.
Watching the Portland protests, I admit that I’m shaken every time they mention the name Kendra James. Seventeen years ago this past May 5, James was killed by Portland police officers. The incident and its aftermath were my first detailed exposure to racist police violence, because it happened early in my Portland Communique days.
Fifty-seven members of the Buffalo Police Department resigned from an elite unit in protest over the suspension of two officers for shoving a 75-year-old man to the concrete where he bled from the head. The police union said the two officers “were simply executing orders”. That’s everything you need to know about the cult of American policing.
The most damning part of this USA Today story by Alan Gomez and Daphne Duret on how hard it is to hold police accountable even when they are running wild in plain view might have been the section header reading, “City officials defer to police chiefs, internal investigations”; or maybe the one reading, “Unions help protect police officers from discipline”; if not for the intervening one reading, “‘Shoot first and think later’ approach to policing”. When did USA Today start reporting it like it is?
A thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way. At all levels of government, the country spends roughly double on police, prisons, and courts what it spends on food stamps, welfare, and income supplements. At the federal level, it spends twice as much on the Pentagon as on assistance programs, and eight times as much on defense as on education. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will ultimately cost something like $6 trillion and policing costs $100 billion a year. But proposals to end homelessness ($20 billion a year), create a universal prekindergarten program ($26 billion a year), reduce the racial wealth gap through baby bonds ($60 billion a year), and eliminate poverty among families with children ($70 billion a year) somehow never get financed. All told, taxpayers spend $31,286 a year on each incarcerated person, and $12,201 a year on every primary- and secondary-school student.
Back during the aftermath of the police killing of James Jahar Perez, I remember that one of my great frustrations was the repeated argument that once an officer is in such-and-such a situation, force is justified even if the officer’s actions were what caused it to escalate that far, as was so plainly evident in that particular killing. I’d written a bit about it after the farcical public inquest.
Here’s how far gone are the police in America: even with a full court press of public attention focused directly at them, they can’t stop themselves from knocking an old man to the concrete where he then lay bleeding from the head, in broad daylight. The confounding question isn’t how do we reform the police; it’s how do we justify them.
Two obstacles to ending police violence that don’t get anywhere near enough attention: the scourge of police unions—which behave more like organized crime families than labor organizations; and the sociopathic quackery of William Lewinski—who tells cops and courts across the country that science says they are dead if they don’t shoot first and fast.
I’ve not felt calm in ages like I felt just now out on my tiny front landing, in the chair, reading about neurodiversity on the Kobo, noise cancelling AirPods active, with a travel mug of tea. I continue to be not capable of saying enough about the chair, to the point where I now want to find a living room loveseat effectively built to the same height and with the same seating angle. It perfectly supports my back, and the sitting position yields no restlessness in my legs. Internet, do you thing: find me such a loveseat.
The problem with blogging is not that it’s too easy or has been “made too convenient for the general population” (oh good: gatekeeping). The problem is that the form was taken over by content marketing. As for tinkering, there’s no shortage of tinkering, still. I mean, the most well-known blogging outfit there is (WordPress) to this day heavily depends upon the plugin—read: tinkering—community.
My research has found that some protest movements have more trouble than others getting legitimacy. My co-author Summer Harlow and I have studied how local and metropolitan newspapers cover protests. We found that narratives about the Women’s March and anti-Trump protests gave voice to protesters and significantly explored their grievances. On the other end of the spectrum, protests about anti-black racism and indigenous people’s rights received the least legitimizing coverage, with them more often seen as threatening and violent.
My new nonfiction read is Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement by Steven K. Kapp, editor; my continuing fiction read is Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir; and I’ve recently finished Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea. So far this year, I’ve read twenty-one books, with nine ready to read next and twenty-eight still to buy or borrow.
There are those out there that may say I need to fight harder, but dude I’m tired. I’m tired of being a Black man who has to come to a meeting after working all day to explain myself. I’m tired of being called on to educate white people for free while they try to gaslight me. I’m tired of begging for a chance to fix problems you have constructed. I’m tired of fighting with privileged allies for the right to speak for my own people when I’m being traumatized on a daily basis. I just want to feel like my thoughts & ideas matter, which hasn’t been the case with the 107ist. I just want to have a beer, jump, clap & sing without feeling like I am being used.
Spare me your empathy if it does not come coupled with institutional change. Support the initiatives and institutions that help people of color get out there, like the nonprofit Outdoor Afro and the National Park Foundation’s African American Experience Fund. Help reframe the discussion about the outdoors. Highlight the stories of the buffalo soldiers, who became some of America’s first park rangers. Tell the children about Harriet Tubman’s ability to interpret the weather. Be unafraid of the historical contexts that hold weight in our country. Explore and overturn those caricatures that are deeply embedded in the mythology we perpetuate about the unjust portions of our history. Having an integrated outdoors means embracing all of America—complete with its messy origins, complicated backstory, and currently murky future. It might mean allowing someone else to claim what you believed to be your exclusive birthright.
What did the weekend of terrifying civil unrest that has seized America’s cities look like from City Hall? For the mayors of major U.S. cities, what began as protests over police violence triggered by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25 has intensified into something else — a national uprising that’s also a complex, fast-changing threat to public safety, driven by forces and actors not yet fully understood and threaded with the unseen menace of a still-active pandemic.
Instead, it’s become normal in the U.S. for police departments to revert to tactics that amplify tensions and provoke protesters, Maguire said, including wearing intimidating tactical gear before its use would be warranted. Maguire does training for police officers and has tried, for years, to get buy-in on the idea that there could be a different way. “I have good relationships with police and I’ve been working with them for 25 years, and I’ve never experienced pushback like I do on this,” Maguire said.
Second, I’ve heard some suggest that the recurrent problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change, and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time. I couldn’t disagree more. The point of protest is to raise public awareness, to put a spotlight on injustice, and to make the powers that be uncomfortable; in fact, throughout American history, it’s often only been in response to protests and civil disobedience that the political system has even paid attention to marginalized communities. But eventually, aspirations have to be translated into specific laws and institutional practices — and in a democracy, that only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands.
My biggest fear as a Black woman and public health leader was the all-too-likely murder of an unarmed Black person at the hands of police leading to mass protests amid the virulence of two infectious diseases: racism and Covid-19. And here we are, a few weeks later, in the nightmarish scenario I can’t unsee: Black America and allies, rightfully angry and fed up with 400-plus years of racist violence and white supremacy, taking to the streets to protest in cities around the country and the world.
We all know the James Baldwin quote about how being black and relatively conscious means being in a rage all the time. This is also the plight of the black journalist. If you think consuming black death day in and day out can be remedied by some “emotional distance” and “journalistic integrity,” you are wrong.
Back in March, there’d been a pandemic-prompted reunion of sorts of my original online community (scroll down) that I even touted in response to a call for items from a newsletter I read. It didn’t, for me, even last a month, because of reasons I’d tweeted and also posted to Instagram at the time.
So, by noon today I was so fatigued I almost couldn’t get from the couch to the bed, a distance of all of about two yards. Then I slept for three and a half hours. I wake up to a news alert that Mine Furor is about to speak, which of course I don’t watch. Apparently he threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act in any state where governors don’t call up the National Guard. Then the cops storm peaceful protestors away from the White House just to he can go stand in front of a church holding a Bible and get his picture taken. All of this after an unhinged telephone call where he told governors they had to “dominate” protestors or risk looking like “jerks”, his Defense Secretary said to dominate “the battlespace” when referring to American cities, and the governor of Illinois called him out. And that phone call came after an earlier one between Trump and… Putin?
Antiracist books are selling. How to Be an Antiracist, White Fragility, and So You Want to Talk About Race all currently are trending on both Amazon and Kobo. They’re also selling on Bookshop and I’ve used Kevin Chau’s affiliate code instead of my own (he’s a Bookshop editor) because those commissions are going to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, the Minnesota Freedom Fund, and the family of George Floyd.
Instead of casting police as the public servants they are, we talk about them as heroes and warriors — the people going after the bad guys, the people shooting at criminals. And indeed, for Americans who look like me — white, middle class — the police are understood as a protective force. With the big exception of sexual violence, I generally know that I can call the police if I am the victim of a crime and they will be responsive. Because of the color of my skin, I never worry that the police will interpret my very presence as criminality. The white Americans who venerate the police as our heroes and protectors play an enormous part in this farcical system of pretending the police are heroic, uniquely brave tough guys who take on extraordinary risks; this allows us to justify handing them expansive legal and cultural cover as if they’re the most delicate, special, and vulnerable among us. It should not work this way, that one group has both so much power over others and so very little obligation to them. That one group floats on the myth that they are the warriors for peace and safety — that they put their live on the line so the rest of us can be safe — while in reality the risk is pushed off onto civilians, and there are no consequences when those same officers are active and ongoing threats to peace and safety.
Now, as ever, we must commit ourselves to the responsibility of our inheritance. This requires study, humility, attention to history. Learn to hold unknowing in your gut, to sit with complexity, to not be sure. It is a beguiling aspect of the present era that more and more people like me are starting to see ourselves as white, that we are starting to reckon with the remnants of our inheritance, to see the thread connecting black and white images of racist violence to Facebook streams of police shootings. This is a welcome development, but there is no manual for this, only best practices. Choose restraint over excessive enthusiasm, listening over talking, presence over comfort, maturity over innocence. You will fail at this, as I and many other white people concerned with racial justice have inevitably failed. But you cannot bow out. The tension between silence and protest, between taking up space and ceding it to others, is one that must be constantly negotiated. Mistakes will be made. Acknowledge them, repair the damage, move forward.
Mine Furor today announced, “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.” Antifa, of course isn’t an organization; it’s a principle: antifascism. Here’s a sampling of the people he’ll be designating as terrorists.
At long last, my blog has a functionality I’ve long wanted but for some reason no one ever bothered to develop. It really should be its own thing, but since it isn’t: given that my blog doesn’t have comments, I’ve turned native, internal WordPress comments into a system for posting addenda on posts, rather than manually adding them to the post body itself. Now any time I want to add something to an existing post, on the backend at least each update will have its own timestamp. I’ll worry later about whether or not I want to include those timestamps on the public addenda themselves. For now, I’m just satisfied that I figured out how to get this displaying the way I wanted it to, after much consternation trying to get template tags to work the way I thought they were meant to be working.
Brian Stelter was just on CNN calling events around the country “disturbingly widespread” and “terrifying”, but it wasn’t at all clear to me just what part he’s disturbed or terrified by. Personally, I’m disturbed and terrified by the fact that we seem incapable of fixing what causes people to be in the streets to begin with.
Or, to use the terminology the launch commentator then helpfully defined: “Trajectory nominal.” We’re launching from here again. Put that Falcon 9 in a museum.
My back hurts, and I’m tired, and there definitely was an anxiety spike, but I managed to get up, have a quick bowl of cereal, get to the post office, figure out how to finish packing the old laptop I sold, figure out where out back of the post office they wanted parcels dropped off, and got in the minor grocery errand I’d wanted to do and hoped I’d have the resources to add to this trip out of the house. Exhausting and stressful, but no panic attack, no sense of suffocation (so the Braddock masks, although I need to replace the elastic ear loops with head-ties secured with cord locks, are comfortable enough to not be an extra stressor), and now I can just be at home to have my one coffee for the day and see if Crew Dragon launched.
My new Posted Today page tells me that it was on May 30, 2018, that I sharply criticized the Oregon Zoo for only publicly caring about animals dying when they are marquee animals. Its first line: “Animals die.”
He’s right. Once again, Trump has led the US out of an international agreement that we used to dominate. Just two days ago, president of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass said that Trump’s foreign policy doctrine should be called the “Withdrawal Doctrine.” Trump has pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact designed to pressure China to meet international rules; the Paris climate accord; the 2015 Iran nuclear deal; the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, limiting nuclear weapons; UNESCO, the U.N.’s educational, scientific, and cultural agency; the Open Skies Treaty that allowed countries to fly over each other to monitor military movements. He pulled U.S. troops away from our former Kurdish allies in Syria, and has threatened to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—NATO—that ties 30 North American and European countries into a military alliance.
Face mask use is a social contract. My mask protects you; your mask protects me. But face masks are not perfect and they need to be used in conjunction with other measures to lower risk of infection such as physical distancing and hand washing. There is ample evidence to suggest that widespread use of masks results in significant reductions in the transmission of respiratory viruses. Mask use is grounded in biology and can have a real world and meaningful effect on slowing the spread of infection, protecting your coworkers, and those vulnerable members in your community.
When cobbling together my Locus books post, I experienced another time dilation, wherein the length of time that had passed since I read certain books did not make any sense at all to me and surely it wasn’t a year ago that I read The Raven Tower and surely it wasn’t November when I read A Memory Called Empire—but it was, and I’m unnerved.
Ed Pilkington’s excoriation of the ways in which “America’s deep and brutal fault lines […] rendered the country ill-prepared to meet the challenges of this disease” easily can be read by the light cast by Venkatesh Rao’s exploration of how the Black Death “brought a bunch of strong historical forces, which had been building up pressure, to a crisis point”.
It’s absolutely baffling to me how the Bureau of Transportation managed to tell restaurant-owners that their sidewalk permits had been revoked until October without providing sufficient reassurance and guidance regarding the new Healthy Businesses initiative to open up sidewalks, curbs, and traffic lanes. How in the world in this environment do you just up and scare people like that? I get that they’ve since owned up to the mistake in method and messaging, but I’d really like to know exactly how it went down this way.
Riffing off an observation on Twitter that coronavirus is no longer the story but the setting, Venkatesh Rao explores the idea, noting, for example, that “social distancing is an element in protests”. Rao goes on to try to “unpack what it means to for a big, all-subsuming condition to evolve from story to setting” by revisiting the Black Death, exploring the phases of our own pandemic so far, and suggesting bleak comparisons between our present circumstances and how the Black Death “brought a bunch of strong historical forces, which had been building up pressure, to a crisis point”.
Locus Awards finalists I’ve read (via Arkady Martine): The City in the Middle of the Night, The Future of Another Timeline, The Rosewater Insurrection/The Rosewater Redemption, The Raven Tower, Gods of Jade and Shadow, Pet, Destroy All Monsters, A Memory Called Empire, Gideon the Ninth (current read), A Song for a New Day, Waste Tide, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, This Is How You Lose the Time War, The Deep, The Ascent to Godhood, and A People’s Future of the United States.
The notion that any significant percent of the carbon humanity spews can be sucked up by planted trees is a pipe dream. But it got rocket boosters in July, when Zurich’s Crowther Lab published a paper, in Science, proclaiming that planting a trillion trees could store “25 percent of the current atmospheric carbon pool.” That assertion is ridiculous, because planting a trillion trees, one-third of all trees currently on earth, is impossible. Even a start would require the destruction of grasslands (prairies, rangelands, and savannas) that reflect rather than absorb solar heat and that, with current climate conditions, are better carbon sinks than natural forests, let alone plantations. Also, unlike trees, grasslands store most of their carbon underground, so it’s not released when they burn.
With all the attention given to urban applications of machine vision — from facial recognition systems to autonomous vehicles — it’s easy to forget about machines that listen to the city. Google scientist Dan Ellis has called machine listening a “poor second” to machine vision; there’s not as much research dedicated to machine listening, and it’s frequently reduced to speech recognition. 7 Yet we can learn a lot about urban processes and epistemologies by studying how machines listen to cities; or, rather, how humans use machines to listen to cities. Through a history of instrumented listening, we can access the city’s “algorhythms,” a term coined by Shintaro Miyazaki to describe the “lively, rhythmical, performative, tactile and physical” aspects of digital culture, where symbolic and physical structures are combined. The algorhythm, Miyazaki says, oscillates “between codes and real world processes of matter.” 8 The mechanical operations of a transit system, the social life of a public library, the overload of hospital emergency rooms: all can be intoned through algorhythmic analysis.
Mine Furor’s executive order “on preventing online censorship” is baffling, as primarily it orders a slew of agencies to “file a petition for rulemaking with the Federal Communications Commission”—an agency which has absolutely zero statutory authority regarding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The literal moment the FCC takes any action it will be swamped with lawsuits on that basis alone.
Handshakes are not valued equally among all the social and cultural groups that practice them. According to Yuta Katsumi, a cognitive neuroscientist who currently researches memory but has conducted several studies on people’s evaluation of handshakes, everyone he studied appreciated a handshake. They were taken as a sign of goodwill and trustworthiness and business competence. However, Katsumi saw one group’s brains light up more than all the others when they witnessed a good, firm handshake: men, and white men in particular. “There’s a good amount of evidence that handshakes are a male activity,” Katsumi says. “If you do an observational study, male-male interactions involve a handshake much more frequently than female-female or mixed-gender interactions.” A quick Google search will reveal articles cataloging multiple strains of gendered handshake angst. There are worries about grip strength, chronicles of boardroom handshake snubs, advice columns urging women to engage in flesh pressing and for men to tone down the macho bone-crusher routine when dealing with their colleagues.
Trying to figure out what streets in downtown St. Johns could work as outdoor plazas under the new Healthy Businesses permit given that the main drag—North Lombard—would be exempt due to being a transit route, I think that segments of Alta, Burlington, Leavitt, and John are good candidates, in that they could be used not only by businesses on those streets but by nearby businesses on Lombard near the intersection(s).
There’s little doubt that Amy Cooper attempted to weaponize her whiteness and Christian Cooper’s blackness against him, and as some city officials call for action I realized that perhaps one way to frame this to make people understand is that in effect she was putting out a hit. Any prosecutor who cares about the moral crime of weaponizing race would at the very least charge her with criminal solicitation and a bias crime.
Today’s only real goal: survive 90°. Windows were open all night, one with a box fan pulling in cool air. Everything now is all closed up, blinds tilted against the sun. Generally my apartment runs about ten degrees cooler than the outside. Hopefully I don’t suddenly realize I need to go out for anything.
“Today,” writes Jay Rosen, “my case to American journalists is this: You cannot keep from getting swept up in Trump’s agenda without a firm grasp on your own.” This does appear to be the crux of the problem in American journalism: they don’t seem to think they have, or should have, an agenda. Rosen offers a fairly disturbing quote from Peter Baker, who covers the White House for The New York Times.
This level of overt segregation no longer exists, of course, but its legacy lives on through the discomfort many people of color feel trying to navigate these foreign landscapes where people of color have never felt welcome. After all, people of color are concentrated in urban areas where they’re largely kept out of green spaces by default. Parks are often too far from their homes for them to enjoy, and those parks that are nearby may be riddled with toxic pollutants from local industrial facilities or gang violence, its own form of environmental hazard.
Those kinds of observations must be tempered by the day-to-day realities of those who don’t have the cheat codes of whiteness to help them avoid racial harassment, especially from police. The Jane Jacobian idea of “eyes on the street” very easily becomes “eyes on the black people” — which is why some African Americans disengage from public spaces like parks altogether. These peaceful green spaces just as easily induce anxiety and trauma for black and brown people, especially when they know the cops can be unleashed at any moment.
Because neither the news media nor the nation’s larger political culture has reckoned with the GOP’s authoritarian evolution, the habitual response is to mislabel GOP authoritarianism as hypocrisy. Calling out hypocrisy is a pointless shaming mechanism for a party that has broken free of shame. Worse, it camouflages a war on democracy as democratic politics as usual.
“As a child,” my About page says of me, “he drew pictures of wanting to be an outer space moving van driver. As a middle-aged adult, he is not one.” This was, to some extent, inspired by the Orion III Spaceplane headed to the giant, revolving Space Station V in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I’d seen at five- or six-years old during a theatrical re-release.
In my goatherd days, one of the other volunteers had a chair like this. I’ve no idea if it was from Byer of Maine or just of the same style but it was one of the most casually-comfortable chairs ever, and so as part of trying to make sitting outside at home more comfortable (and since the whole install-a-screen-door project continues to have execution problems such as not owning any of the tools I would need to trim the door and reinforce the joints) I’ve bought myself one. It’s perfectly-sized for my tiny front landing. There’s an off-chance I could have it as soon as this Friday.
Through a Tom Critchlow post that appeared in my RSS reader but doesn’t appear to exist anymore, I learn of Ponder—“a fresh approach to group journaling”—which I feel like some people I know might find interesting. My own interest isn’t so much because I feel I have a use for it in mind but because I have a passing interest in people developing more closed-but-shared places on the web.
And while findings from past epidemics can give researchers like him a good place to start, they’re not exact parallels. In general, studies specifically on the long-term, society-wide impacts of pandemics are limited, according to Taylor. It was only in the last 20 years that academics began looking at the psychological aftermath of the 1918 Spanish Flu — one of the deadliest pandemics in modern history and one that often gets compared to the current crisis — and even then, he says, its similar timing to World War I complicates the findings.
Let’s talk masks again. My current sense is that the specific type, size, and cut of these Braddock masks easily has been the most comfortable on my face, causing me no sense of suffocation. (I’d gotten a three-pack, one each of the grey, charcoal, and black.) However, the elastic ear straps leave something to be desired both because one of my three masks (the charcoal) has a strap that’s already fraying and soon will render to mask unusable—and this after receiving a three-pack twenty-four days ago and not even using a mask every single day — and because ear straps tend to exert force on my ears (especially true with the black mask) of a kind and direction that often causes problems with the AirPods, which I need for the noise cancellation. Some might suggest finding this cut of mask but with around-the-head ties, but I have trouble tying things behind my head like that. What I really need, then, I think, is this cut and type of mask but with stronger elastic straps than these that go around the head like mask-ties do, instead of behind the ears.
My only regular podcast at this point is Social Distance from Katherine Wells and James Hamblin of The Atlantic. Today’s edition (“Is Anyone Else Not Showering?”) focuses on this Daily Mail post ridiculing Hamblin’s hygiene habits—or, more accurately, misconstruing both his hygiene habits and health advice based upon a promotional appearance for his forthcoming book, Clean: The New Science of Skin.
Writing for the Star Tribune about toxic positivity Kevyn Burger (via Ryan Boren) offers an important caution from graduate student Bridget Siljander—“We act like if they just try harder they can be happy. That ignores science. It ignores diversity. It ignores trauma.”—but I was mostly struck by therapist Sherry Merriam.
My big takeaway from The Oregonian’s comprehensive guide to safety during reopening is that I don’t think anywhere near enough has been done to prepare people for how complicated this is going to be. There’s also not anywhere near enough in the way of the state requiring people to wear masks in different situations.
Blogging does need a search engine, as Colin Devroe and Brent Simmons have said, but Devroe raises an interesting point as to deciding what’s a blog these days; many publications are structured and formatted more or less like blogs. What we need is an independent or hobbyist blog search engine: personally, I don’t need a blog search site that includes The Verge or io9. Maybe the folks behind Wiby could take a separate stab at blog search?
If you’ve got autistic obstacles when it comes even to the most innocuous telephone calls, Willamette Week’s description of contact tracing should fend off any suggestions you look into it: “Initial calls to people who have tested positive can take an hour or more, as the person on the other end of the line may be hostile, ill or under duress.”
“I believe that character includes who we are in the heat of the moment,” says Alexandra Erin. At the risk of reinforcing Twitter threads over blog posts, start at the beginning for Erin’s discussion of Amy Cooper’s bias crime from The Ramble in New York City’s Central Park—while Cooper herself is in the stage of complaining that her “life is being destroyed”.
A huge number of people will need to receive a vaccine in order to stop the spread of the coronavirus and establish herd immunity — the point at which most of the population is protected against an infectious disease. To achieve herd immunity against Covid-19, experts estimate that around 70% or more of the population may need to be immune. And, since no vaccine is 100% effective, the more people who are vaccinated, the better. Getting a vaccine to all the people who need one will take a massive effort, both in the United States and around the world. There has never been a global immunization campaign on the scale that will be needed to distribute a Covid-19 vaccine.
This is to say that the kind of shame suffered most sharply by proud people has been put to use to sustain this ugly economic and social configuration, too opportunistic and unstable to be called a system. It offers no vision beyond its effects. Obviously the depletions of public life, the decay of infrastructure, the erosions of standards affecting general health are not intended to make America great again. They are, in the experience of the vast majority of Americans, dispossessions, a cheapening of life.
I’m abandoning the entire idea of self-references to build context over time in the blog until someone codes a plugin expressly for this. The entire process today was nothing but dashed hopes upon which I wish to spend not one jot more of my time and wherewithal. This is a no-brainer blogging feature and the fact that it still doesn’t exist even a decade or more after I last was using WordPress this extensively is ridiculous.
Well, blog posts now should include any links to later posts which reference them, except that there seem to be some gaping holes where the self-pings did not send when I bulk updated old posts. Something around 75 self-pings did send, but others most certainly did not. I’m not sure if they got throttled by the sheer system load, or blocked as an attack, or what. I’m not sure how to get that solved, exactly, but at least it should be working from here on out for any future posts referencing past posts.
One thing Lizzie O’Shea might be misconstruing is that back in the web’s crude, ugly days, one’s own presence on the internet tended to be more personal—whether through one’s own homepage or “just” through profiles you needed to fill out on early social networks (as opposed to later social media platforms, which are different) like Friendster. One tended to have some sort of “home” through which you described and defined your persona or personality. While there was no mythical “single collective experience” what we did have—and this is significantly what Joanne McNeil’s book was about—was an internet of people rather than an internet of users. So, I wonder if O’Shea isn’t mistaking being able to look back at the past internet and see people for being able to look back and see public space in the way in which she conceives of it. It was never public space in that sense, but it was a peopled space. In a very real sense, and one that runs against the grain of O’Shea’s argument, the move toward mass platforms—closer to, not farther away from, the “single collective experience” O’Shea mythologizes—in fact depersonalized cyberspace.
Micro.blog did this nifty thing to make a Photos page (or, it still does; I’m just not blogging there anymore) by looping through all your posts with JPGs in them (under the idea that PNGs probably were screenshots, not photos), grabbing the first photo from each post, and making a gallery out of them; each photo linked to its corresponding blog post. Today’s project: explore how to do something similar in WordPress, especially if I somehow can get it to use Jetpack’s tiled gallery format.
Today I managed to get a lot of things squared away about the blog, ran a grocery errand despite the weather making mask-wearing more difficult, took time out to get some nonfiction book-reading done outside, went for a short walk, and spent some time outside at the front of the property with the laptop to write a blog post about the internet.
I’ve managed to get an “on this day” feature working, although because I like to be difficult mine is called Posted Today. It’s powered by a plugin by Alan Levine which I slightly hacked, and which I found from this Chris Aldrich post. I think the fix I added to prevent the current “sticky” post on my front page from inappropriately appearing also will prevent a “sticky” post that happens to actually be from the current day from appearing, so it’s not quite yet a settled matter, but it will do for now.
Lizzie O’Shea, in Future Histories, just said something that I had to re-read a few times to make sure I was reading it right. About two-thirds of the way through the second chapter, “An Internet Built around Consumption Is a Bad Place to Live”, she remarks upon a changing internet.
Dan Hon, briefly discussing a novel he’s writing, says, “[O]ne phrase I had to write down in conversation with a friend figuring out part of, well, the fundamental conceit of the novel, was ‘edit wars for infrastructure’ in a world where software has eaten, well, the world”—and honestly all I could think of was that I’d once described Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline as “SJWs vs. MRAs across the wiki of Time”.
Back in February, I threatened to do a re-read of some books that were formative of my experience of the early web, but then didn’t get around to it, in part because I didn’t get to move quickly enough when several of them for some reason were on sale. Today, though, I noticed that the ebook of We’ve Got Blog had dropped to $3.99, so expect some thoughts on beginning to look back at these early books, once I’m done with Future Histories.
But when appealing to a highly educated, mobile, upper-middle class resident or employer, uniqueness gives way to a candied sameness. While publicly funded arts and cultural planning efforts can serve to materially improve the lives of residents, top-down, developer-centric efforts can result in a homogenous banality. The effect is an algorithmic kind of beauty: sleek and modern, while also gorily Frankenstein-esque. Popped color palettes, parklets, and glass-walled buildings make cities indistinguishable from each other. It’s the architectural equivalent of “Instagram face,” designed with the robotic pragmatism of a targeted ad. In coding design elements towards wealth and the professional class, cities and developers also necessarily code aesthetics toward the sensibilities of white urban transplants, given the makeup of this class.
Feelings of numbness, powerlessness, and hopelessness are now so common as to verge on being considered normal. But what we are seeing is far less likely an actual increase in a disease of the brain than a series of circumstances that is drawing out a similar neurochemical mix. This poses a diagnostic conundrum. Millions of people exhibiting signs of depression now have to discern ennui from temporary grieving from a medical condition. Those at home Googling symptoms need to know when to seek medical care, and when it’s safe to simply try baking more bread. Clinicians, meanwhile, need to decide how best to treat people with new or worsening symptoms: to diagnose millions of people with depression, or to more aggressively treat the social circumstances at the core of so much suffering.
Then I got into small Twitter feud with Timothy B. Lee, a writer at Ars Technica, about those stupid sidewalk delivery robots. He used one, waited 90 minutes for his order to be delivered, acknowledged “this generation of the technology is only going to be viable in fairly high-density areas,” but refused to accept they were yet another bullshit tech solution that could be more easily solved with e-bike couriers in the limited areas where robot delivery would make sense distance-wise. He kept arguing that scale would bring down cost, while refusing to recognize that the very same scale will mean crowded, inaccessible sidewalks, which people will not accept — the same way they hated dockless scooters intruding on sidewalks.
For some inexplicable reason, the housing construction next door has picked this particular Sunday to be active when to my recollection it never had been active on any other Sunday. It’s so unusual that I literally had to double-check the day and make sure I had not somehow slept until Monday morning.
This dramatic cover does more than mark a stark number. It rejects the toxic individualism embraced by a certain portion of Trump’s base. These people refuse to isolate or wear masks either because they believe the virus isn’t actually dangerous or because they insist that public health rules infringe on their liberty or because, so far, the people most likely to die have been elderly or people of color and they are not in those categories.
It’s not bad enough that I want internal-only webmentions so I can automatically build a web of self-references—one that’s useful rather than garbage SEO-bait linkback bullshit. Now I also want a plugin that effectively creates a riff on Submit.as, wherein I’d use the native WordPress comments functionality to take comments, but rather than publishing them there’d be a workflow by which I could respond to any given comment by making a new blog post. Think of it more like a letter-to-the-editor function built atop the comments function.
I’ve added a blogroll page, but currently it’s empty. I’m hoping that the makers of the Sync OPML to Blogroll plugin will be able to support JSON files, as Feedbin’s access to one’s subscriptions via their API comes in JSON not OPML. I’d rather find such an automatic process than need to regularly update a list here.
Annie Vainshtein, writing about the loss of social smiling, suggests that “[a]s we ease into a paradigm shift for the way we make nonverbal connections with people, there will likely be misfirings and confusion, but also, perhaps, some room for experimentation”; and I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not it might broaden people’s notions of what social interaction is like vis-à-vis, say, autistic people — and then it turned out that Vainshtein actually thought to include an autistic person in her piece.
Still, on this particular evening, I grabbed my photo ID and my credit card, just in case. But my ID still had my permanent address in Richmond, Virginia, and I’m in Fredericksburg. That wouldn’t help me. I grabbed the water bill to prove that I live in this neighborhood. I headed back towards the door, only to catch a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror. I probably didn’t look like I lived in this neighborhood. Back upstairs I went. Almost by muscle memory, I threw on a University of Virginia hoodie and a U.Va. hat. Even racists love U.Va., or its home of Charlottesville at least. I contemplated throwing on my U.Va. Law hoodie but feared it may have been too much. Would someone feel intimidated and use that as provocation? My anger began rising.
One of the numerous comic conventions that have been canceled or postponed is also, unsurprisingly, the biggest in the U.S.—San Diego Comic-Con—which usually sees over 130,000 attendees. Others scheduled for the remainder of 2020, like Star Wars Celebration and New York Comic Con, are up in the air. For fans, this means missing out on panels, celebrity sightings, social events, and spending time with friends they may not otherwise see. But for professional cosplayers—some of whom make a living or at least a supportive second income from cosplay—this also means losing appearance fees, sponsorship deals, and the opportunity to sell merchandise to fans.
My new nonfiction read is Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea; my continuing fiction read is Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir; and I’ve recently finished Gods of the Upper Air by Charles King. So far this year, I’ve read twenty books, with five ready to read next and twenty-eight still to buy or borrow.
It’s reasonable to assume that the world, left to its own devices, will continue to entrench and enrich the powers that be, during and after this crisis. It’s clear that the treatment of street vendors and the homeless are two places to start when considering the equitable implementation of al fresco streets. Police enforcement of social distancing has also shown glaring discrepancies along racial lines in some cities, as have decisions about which parks and public spaces have stayed open, and which are closed. Public transit ridership could crater long enough to kill off transit service all over the country. If people start relying on cars for even more trips, cities could lose some of the most effective resources for social and economic mobility. If people start relying on cars for even more trips, entire cities, not just bus riders and pedestrians, will be overwhelmed with the traffic and pollution caused by cars.
Setting aside that the “early internet” had no hyperlinks (this is the problem with everyone having grown to conflate “internet” and “web”, and I’m always really picky about linguistic specificity), Rebeccah Toh has a nice look back at the early days of the web and its “feeling of childish excitement and this sense that really interesting things were waiting to be discovered just around the corner, a hyperlink or two away” — back before play gave way to monetization.
With cases already spiking in Deschutes County and officials pleading with Oregonians (ahem, Portlanders) to stay close to home for Memorial Day weekend, perhaps the most we can hope for is that people heed advice about keeping gatherings small and segregated (by family group); polling suggests Democrats are more likely than Republicans to do so—the latter arguing that “the worst of the coronavirus is behind us or that the virus was never a threat”.
Mine Furor might deem churches to be “essential places that provide essential services”, but I’d think twice if your God or gods value your presence in a particular man-made structure over your sacred life. That said, he doesn’t actually care about the worship; he cares about being able to punish Democratic states.
STAT has a fascinating, disturbing look at how SARS-CoV-2 works upon cells; behavior apparently not seen before: blocking the “call-to-arms” genes which would trigger process to restrict viral replication, but triggering the “call-for-reinforcement” genes, creating “a storm of inflammatory molecules in the lungs”.
How hard do you think it would be for me, a non-coder, to write a Safari extension whose only function is to add a button to the toolbar that when clicked takes you to a URL you’d set in the extension’s configuration? I don’t want to set my WordPress admin URL as my browser home page, but I visit it so frequently it would be nice to have a toolbar button that takes me there.
Here’s essentially what I wish I could do on my blog: effectively, I’d like a webmention plugin that only handles self-references—in other words, when a new post of mine links to an old post of mine—and creates a “this post referenced by” section on the old post(s). Something that wouldn’t just be dumped into WordPress comments management, but had its own separate management hooks and administrative tab (e.g. References, or something). What’s more, because I always have to make it even harder: because only some of my blog posts have titles, I’d need the generated links to use the post title if there is one (p-name), else use N number of words from the body (e-content). Ideally it would be nice if I could have this and also a separate process for external webmentions should I ever decided to make use of them, but my understanding is that incoming webmentions use the first endpoint they find; I’d gladly sacrifice the ideal if I could have the first priority want.
Finally today I got to finish up a side project I’ve been itching to get done: restoring my old MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2011) to a clean High Sierra (the most recent macOS it can use) and listing it for sale on eBay, where this model seems to sell for as much as $320. The goal here is to get within spitting distance of an iPad Mini so that all my damned devices just naturally work together (excepting my Kobo, because Apple won’t make an E Ink e-reader)—part of my increasing midlife need for Things That Just Work.
It’s no secret that I generally dislike Twitter threads and tend to wish more people would just blog, and then selectively quote it in a couple choice tweets. Most of the time, like Alan Jacobs, I find threads to be “choppy, imprecise, abstract, syntactically naïve or incompetent, lacking in appropriate transitions” — as Robert of Frosted Echoes said it’s like “reading a novel written on sticky notes”.
So I’d been doing tea instead of coffee for two-and-a-half days, but got coffee with the breakfast I had delivered today and it’s punching me in the brain. Before the tea switch, I’d been doing decaf-to-caffeinated at home at around a 2:1 or even 3:1 ratio for months, but with the pandemic lockdown I’d been drinking too much every single day and it was wrecking (sorry here) my excretory system. Hence I’ve been doing a tea thing, and even though it’s been caffeinated black tea, and despite my the decaf ratio I’d been doing on coffee, my system has settled down. What I didn’t expect was that after just two-and-a-half days, a fully caffeinated coffee would make my head spin. Tea, though, ends up being more expensive than coffee, so I need to look at bulk tea that I can still just make pots of essentially the way I’ve been doing: four teabags in the coffeemaker carafe, water double-run through the coffeemaker, steep for awhile; then I drink that pot over the course of the day, which is less tea than I was having coffee every day beforehand.
Early monkey studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 antibodies “whether they are triggered by an infection or a vaccine” do provide immunity, but the results need to be (1) replicated, (2) confirmed in humans, and (3) extended to determine length of immunity. In the meantime, to quote Jewel Staite: hamsters is nice.
ProPublica’s new tracker for states as they start to reopen uses “metrics derived from a set of guidelines published by the White House for states to achieve before loosening restrictions”. By this data, Oregon meets four of the five criteria (positive tests per 100K people, percentage of tests that are positive, ICU bed availability, and hospital visits for flu-like illness) and isn’t far behind on the fifth (tests per 100K people per day).
I’m hesitant to link to this TTTThis post due to their position on hate speech which unlike them I will not put in scare-quotes (link, again, via Colin Walker), but for better or worse they said this really interesting thing about blogging.
Dreams of note: trapped or some such in a supermarket where I had to try to keep track of my cats while the store’s cat population was increasing exponentially; witnessing if not causing the crash of a van which swerved out of the road into a parked tanker truck, crushing the front and liquefying the parents of the children seated in back; and being part of a performance in which I had to be catheterized, which turned out to be a scam, requiring me to figure out how to decatheterize myself.
“Now that we’re in the midst of a world-wide pandemic, there’s a new urgency,” blogs Chris Foley about blogs (via Colin Walker). “We need a way forward […] from people […] who can show us what survival and growth might look like […].” Or, you can just read me having a existential breakdown in slow motion but in real time.
Thinking about my yelled blasphemous invective made me think about those job-placement crying fits in the men’s room, and now I rather suspect they are versions of the same thing: the safety valve on a pressure cooker. The difference is that while the outburst ill serves workplace, the crumple ill serves my mental health. Most people would look at the outbursts and consider them to be explosions—or, rather, meltdowns—but in truth they actually help avoid meltdowns. I’ve been through meltdowns and they don’t look merely like yelling, “Jesus mother fucking Christ!” and then moving on to the next thing. When my environment wouldn’t accept an outburst, the pressure is relieved instead through a crumple. I’m not holding my breath for suggestions on workplaces where outbursts would be acceptable, but I certainly can’t see myself being able to attempt a return to work only to face more crumpling.
I admit that I’m confused that Geoff Manaugh looks around at an internet landscape of “nothing but reaction GIFs and Donald Trump” and finds “it’s enough to make anyone quit blogging”. (This links comes via Warren Ellis.) If anything, that landscape makes it even more important that people keep blogging, or return to blogging, or start blogging. Or, if not blogging, per se, tending a so-called “digital garden” would be fine, too. Which is not to say that Bruce Sterling (whose ending of his Wired blog was what prompted Manaugh) or anyone else has some sort of obligation to the blogging commons. The state of today’s internet can be exhausting, and lord knows there are plenty of times I exhaust even myself.
As I said already on Twitter, my first three thoughts this morning were, “Another god damned day to get through.” As I typed for the previous blog post the words “I remain confused as to how people manage workaday lives” I thought mostly about one thing I know at this point for certain: I’m unable to provide any employer with predictability of presence. The last time I tried, I was under such severe stress within the first three months that I was having depressive episodes in the men’s room, and because I didn’t want anyone to think I was being irresponsible or non-responsive to the job attempt, I stuck it out for three months more despite that toll. The reality is that I can’t even tell myself on any given night what the next day is going to look like in terms of my capacities and my resources, but I’m supposed to be able to commute to and perform a job in a day-in, day-out manner? All I have is unanswered questions: where are the other autistic people who are low-support needs when it comes to the daily tasks of living on one’s own yet apparently cannot work? How can state and federal authorities not consider this to be disabled? Should I feel guilty for fearing that I’m going to be allowed to fall through the cracks, when there are plenty of other people out there who don’t even have the societal advantages of being straight, cisgender, white men with family support? Is it a bad idea to just go ahead and have today’s total existential breakdown out loud and in public here on the blog?
I know that I shouldn’t read too much into any particular aspect of a set of interviews of just twelve people, but nonetheless I find it interesting that the three people “strongly opposed” to the loss of the term Asperger’s in diagnostic manuals were late-diagnosed men. There’s a thread of autistic opinion out there which rightfully gets labelled Aspie Supremacy (typically it seemed to be people with desperate need to establish that they aren’t like those other autistic people), and almost every time I’ve encountered it directly it’s been late-diagnosed men. Which is not to say that only men identify as Aspies; just that I’d actually love to know if there’s any research on use of the term broken down by gender, as well as the degree of vehemency.
I think the conversation generally has been more nuanced than Jill Filipovic has it, but she’s certainly right when she says, “We did our part; the Trump Administration did not do theirs.” That said, Filipovic’s take does nicely summarize (can you “summarize at length”?) the complicated network of costs and benefits that have risked being over-simplified into “stop the virus versus open the economy”.
Before I once again, already, all but shut down my blogging activity for awhile due to another bout, already, of cognitive burnout, three positive stories to pass along: a nice look at little free libraries during the pandemic, a nice look at muralists on Foster Road sprucing up the strip during the economic shutdown, and a nice look at quirky ways cities have used to encourage cooperation during social distancing.
In this edition: Obama and leadership, Oregon aid money debate, early-opening drive-ins, and the context of history.
“All” I’ve done today is read in bed, get up and have instant oatmeal and frozen sausage, watch television, shower, have a sandwich, and test out the sweep-into vacuum unit, and I’ve nothing left in the tank. It takes noticeable effort just to lift my hands to the keyboard of the laptop on my lap. I put the word all in quotes up there because this is a good example of how available resources vary, and what you accomplish needs to be judged based upon those resources, not based upon some allegedly-objective measure. It’s not laziness; I’ve got nothing left to draw upon.
This week I’ll be watching Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, Batwoman, Supergirl, The Masked Singer, Stargirl, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Mrs. America, and The 100. I’ve dropped Killing Eve. I snuck in a three-day rewatch of Twin Peaks: The Return. I’m still continuing the Prison Break binge in season two. I’m finishing up season two of The Hollow so I can start in on the final season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.
This autism podcast just made a brief big deal about how a question was asked but for the life of me I can’t see what was wrong in how it was asked. I think I’ve honesty at this point determined that I frequently am more frustrated by autistic people talking about autism than I am by allistic people talking about autism. It happens at about 11:18 in this edition of 1800 Seconds on Autism if anyone wants to explain how I’m crazy.
It’s weird how Neil Gaiman defends his trip to Scotland as “going home” because voting and tax rolls but also keeps referring to his Woodstock house where three other families fled cities as home. Who among us hasn’t gotten confused as to which of our several international homes is home? How do so many jetsetting rich people think they are just normal blokes. It’s not just the lack of self-awareness but the lack even of any perceived need for it.
In this edition: reopening America, learning to be a contact tracer, the trouble with fixating on immunity, inside Trump’s brain, and Wall Street’s death cult.
I’ve managed over three days to do a complete rewatch of Twin Peaks: The Return, and all I can do is state again why I dislike the last one and a half hours of it.
In this edition: a decline in distancing, hot spots, strange new worlds, an inability to focus, mixed messages, concentration fatigue, Marion County, race and immobility, making or breaking cities, and a Grubhub scam.
“But aren’t blogs dead?” asks Tim Bray on behalf of skeptical readers. Contrast how he looks at blogging as he answers in the negative with how various other people have been “boldly” pronouncing that not only is blogging dead but that it killed the web: the latter are talking about content marketers who swarmed and slimed all over the form. Bray, instead, is talking about “economists or physicists or oil analysts or Internet geeks”.
Early last month I wondered how Multnomah County was approaching social distancing measures when it comes to ballot opening for this month’s primary election. All I got back from them was a statement saying they were following CDC guidance. OPB News managed to get much more detail. It looks like the usual tables of up to four people of mixed party affiliations now are tables of two, sitting at the tables’ ends, keeping them six feet apart.
In this edition: autism and actual masking, dining with mannequins, genetic drift, ousting Burr, cats and coronavirus, a new giraffe, black churches, reopening Oregon, COVID-19 and the brain, Oregon restaurants, the post-pandemic commute, bicycles, disability claims, the sage grouse, lockdowns and history, “Obamagate”, walking a trail, test failures, the privilege of escape, Multnomah County, the last Blockbuster, public shaming, and an invasion of goats.
If you’re looking for what might in many ways be the perfect pandemic shut-in show, I’ve committed to a full rewatch of Twin Peaks: The Return before Xfinity’s annual Watchathon event ends this weekend. I’ll be through four by the end of tonight, and its constantly-shifting pace and sometimes-jarring shifts of scene somehow seem apt in these Jeremy Bearimy times.
I get what’s being said here, and as a general argument “the people with the real power want us distracted by squabbling amongst ourselves” carries, but not engaging in social distancing measures isn’t an area where you can blame the powers-that-be; you can only blame the individuals. There’s no systematic, structural imbalance at play there; there’s only individual, if collective, responsibility.
Here’s a new question for other autistic people: do you ever find that a thing you might be able to do for yourself is not something you can do for other people? As if only an internal motivation provides the necessary lubrication for those cognitive gears to engage? I’ve often had people tell me, for example, to look at jobs 1, 2, or 3 because they’ve seen me talk about doing X, Y, or Z, but I know from the experience of decades that literally I can’t do X, Y, or Z for other people. (This is not limited to employment questions; this is just the easiest example.) I know that my brain won’t function for them the way it will function for myself, and I’ve never been able to find a way to explain this that doesn’t sound like selfishness, laziness, or simply an excuse. The above is the closest I can come to illustrating it: without the internal motivation, the gears don’t move.
Tomorrow is the scheduled arrival of my EyeVac Pet Touchless Vacuum which I hope will revolutionize my housecleaning; literally the extra back-aching steps of having to sweep the floors into a dustpan and then empty the dustpan into the trash keep me from sweeping the floors anywhere near as often as needed.
C. M. Condo’s description of trying to obtain disability benefits as an autistic person includes a lot of stuff with which I’m familiar, and some stuff that perfectly describes my fears.
Toward the end of this edition of Ouch (which actually comes from this edition of 1800 Seconds on Autism) there’s a brief discussion of autistic people and face masks that raises some other issues: on the one hand, they perhaps mean less emphasis on facial cues in conversations; on the other hand if you rely on “reading” someone’s lips to help you follow their conversation, that’s one less channel for you.
I’m glad The Washington Post published a piece by Shannon Des Roches Rosa about autistic people and masks; people need to understand that this isn’t just being willful or selfish. Of the potential issues she lists, mine primarily are “anxiety” and “sensory”. The feeling of suffocation is a big one, although my latest set of masks significantly lessens that sensation unless I’m already at a point of having low resources. My only issue when it comes to the elastic loops around my ears is that if the mask pulls to tightly, my AirPods Pro won’t stay in and I need the active noise cancellation to mitigate other autistic sensory issues. Ties potentially are an option, but I found with my DIY upcycled t-shirt mask that between the lack of line of sight and the required manual coordination (especially given not having line of sight) I am incapable of tying behind my head.
It’s weird that The Oregonian writes that the Oregon Zoo introduced Kiden, their new giraffe, to the public on Monday, given that the zoo is closed and their video of Kiden didn’t get posted until Wednesday, but mostly I wonder where they even have the room for a third giraffe, especially if they’re hoping that Kiden mates with Buttercup. Is there more indoor space at the giraffe exhibit than the part with the public-facing viewing window? My second-level concern is that now I need to learn to tell three giraffes apart, and it was only like last year, I think, that I finally learned how to distinguish Buttercup from Desi.
In this edition: PTSD at Facebook, bankrupt hospitals, conservation efforts, incel communities and autism, a surreal Senate hearing, black men in masks, losing health insurance, ignoring CDC guidance, disability tech, urban air quality, rent strikes, Oregon counties, failed leadership, protests at the Oregon coast, dogs finding whale scat, vacating non-unanimous verdicts, suburban flight, investing in black neighborhoods, testing and stigma, evolutionary psychology, defending life, and the psychology of consumption.
The lead investigator of the latter study, Noah Sasson, was dismayed to learn from Spectrum that his research was being used to support what he calls a “misogynistic and sophomoric” ideology, and says his work was misinterpreted. The study applies to both men and women and is not about women’s feelings toward autistic men, says Sasson, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Dallas. In a follow-up study, he and his colleagues found that neurotypical people’s perceptions of an autistic adult depend heavily on whether they know that the adult is autistic, are familiar with autism and have met the autistic person in question. “What this means is that negative judgments about autistic adults are in no way absolute and uniform,” Sasson says. The Incel wiki makes no mention of this more nuanced report.
Travelers, as promised, is finally completed, and leaves me wondering if I can recall a time travel series that felt ultimately satisfying. Continuum was okay, and at least didn’t betray the inevitably-bittersweet implications of what success would look like. I couldn’t even finish 12 Monkeys, having grown so increasingly frustrated in season three I can’t even remember if I finished that season. I don’t really count Doctor Who, per se, as odd as that is. Timeless I watched for awhile but ultimately bored me so I have no idea where that story even went. I don’t really count Quantum Leap here, either, because the time travel really was only there as the hook upon which to hang the mission-of-the-week. What else even is there?
I’m not sure I possibly could care less that Lady Gaga apparently complains that “she had a choice to either make good music and remain in obscurity, or become outrageously commanding of the attention of pop culture and society, and, in the process, become a parody of herself”, given that many terrific and/or entertaining musicians manage to live their lives quite happily in “obscurity”.
I can’t brain sufficiently today to really dissect this long and sometimes strange Spectrum piece about incels and autism, except to say that in the end I found myself wondering why we’ve left the guy who frames the piece feeling like he’s got only two avenues before him: being an incel or seeking therapies to make himself seem less autistic.
In this edition: presidential courage, post-pandemic cities, post-pandemic homes, disruptions to HIV care, voluntary surveillance, reopening Iceland, paying the rent, getting sick on the job, disrupting routines, mandatory vaccination, engineered misalignments, jury trials, Census undercounts, open streets, and political investigations.
I think the hardest thing for me has been the disruption to my routines. I spent the first couple of weeks sick, just a bad cold or mild flu, but that completely disrupted my running schedule. I’ve also been struggling with anxiety. A lot of my normal running routes are off limits because they have long stretches where they are too narrow to support social distancing, and even on the quieter streets there are people not following the social distancing rules. Since I get stressed out by other people not following rules in general, this is way worse now as others ignoring the social distancing rules actually could be bad for me. I know intellectually that being outside means the odds of picking up the coronavirus are quite small, yet I get a tightness in my chest just thinking about it. Even my source of relaxation and stress relief has become an emotional minefield.
During my own personal heyday of WordPress usage, I’d always wanted two particular features: a way to add updates or addenda to posts such that they automatically had their own timestamps and were their own database items, but attached, so to speak, to the posts they are on; and an easy way for old posts to list new posts which link to them, without having to open up to external trackbacks or pingbacks (or, now, webmentions). It always had seemed to me that these were pretty damned close to being no-brainers, and that they’d be features used widely if implemented, whether in the WordPress core or through plugins. I’m honestly surprised that in the decade or more since, these features still do not exist. My entire life, sometimes, seems defined by being an unsupported use case.
The second point I was trying to make is: quarantine and social isolation are actually collaboration in this world; by staying home, you’re not just hiding from the menace, you’re actively participating in misaligning one element of this complex system, so as to interfere with the progress of the infection. So this idea somehow that a citizen could actually play a part that was as important as a vaccine, but instead of preventing transmission of the virus into another cell at the ACE receptor level, it’s preventing transmission of the virus at the social network level. So we’re actually adopting a kind of behavioral vaccine policy, by voluntarily or otherwise self-isolating. I think it’s a very important point for everyone to understand, and I actually argued in that article that everyone should be awarded some fraction of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the sacrifices they’re making in order to minimize the transmission.
I’m not sure whether it was the three days of fatigue or the fact that I’d already been out of the house once with a mask on, but the moment I suited up to get the grocery errand done I could hear my pulse beating in my ears behind the active noise cancelation of the AirPods. The trip itself was something of a blur, with an almost-meltdown at the self-checkout because of the pressure of feeling watched by impatient people waiting their turn. Once I got out of the parking lot, I took the mask off and let it dangle from my hand for the walk home. Of course, I forgot rice milk, which will make me sad, angry, and frustrated with myself within a day or two.
For the nth day in a row, I did not get out of bed until around noon. Unlike the last three fatigue-heavy days, I got cleaned up and dressed almost immediately, ordered a latte and breakfast sandwich for takeout, and walked to the coffeeshop and back. That said, I still need to run that grocery errand, and I’m not sure it will happen today, either.
Decades later, it’s weird to see that individuals, developers, and corporations still don’t seem to agree on what RSS is for.
In this edition: labor surveillance, viral surfaces, blurb writing, knowing the risks, testing questions, child vaccinations, engineering ventilators, actuarial science, Cannon Beach, bunk beds, institutional discrimination, public pharma, money for Western states, virtual reality, false balance, the social safety net, salon workers, opening up the streets, and public opinion.
I think Gruber is essentially correct about Quibi, except that I think the actual important part of its ridiculous concept is that it’s basically a very logical entertainment conclusion to come to for a culture where people are supposed to be optimizing their very sense of self around their corporate productivity. Quibi is the Jetsonian dinner-in-a-pill of entertainment, and maybe the target demographic for this decided this was just one optimization too far.
Once you’ve finished Tristan Cross’ vivid description of responding to the pandemic’s social distance by recreating his favorite pub in virtual reality—and only once you’ve finished it—watch the embedded video of his friends hanging out, which is included towards the end. At one point, quite unexpectedly, it actually made me teary.
Fatigue made some bit of sense to me over the weekend, not just because of the aforementioned cognitive load but because outside it was 85º and sunny; even though I didn’t go out in it, it still impacted the environment inside. What I wasn’t entirely prepared for was lingering, if not deeper, fatigue today. I’d wanted to do a grocery run for paper towel, toilet paper, and seltzer; instead I didn’t even wake up until after noon and didn’t get dressed until almost six—and that was so that I could go stand on my front landing for awhile and watch the rain.
If you felt something reading Dave Grohl’s paean to singing “at the top of my lungs with people I may never see again […] to celebrate and share the tangible, communal power of music” (the Bruce Springsteen anecdote is especially on-point), here’s my reminder to pick up Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day.
On using webmentions solely for creating a sort of internal contextual web on the blog, I’ve basically got it working although it’s not turned on at the moment. The remaining problems include the fact that I can’t disable external webmentions if I want to; I’d be satisfied with some means of not having them sit in the “unapproved” queue other than deleting them. Also, at least as near as I can tell, the text of the reference link beneath a post is of a form that includes extraneous copy I don’t think I can get rid of. So, I’m still a ways from deploying this, but I’m at least on a track.
Colin Walker quotes Drew Coffman as saying that “notes can be a helpful archive for thoughts, or a graveyard for them”, adding that he “can’t help but feel that even the blog is the latter, especially when considering that much of it feels irrelevant”. I sort of think it helps me just to assume my blog is a graveyard, so I don’t trap myself in the inevitably downward-facing spiral of fretting over whether or not I’m making something of use.
Unbeknownst to me, over a decade ago there apparently was a short-lived school of web design thinking called, per CJ Chilvers, HTMinimaLism, the idea that web design should “embrace the simplicity, utility and beauty of the web’s most basic elements”. For all intents and purposes, this is what in the early 2000s I was referring to as spartaneity, the idea “that web design should simply serve the content”.
In this edition: only one link made it into the Link Log on Sunday, and it was about auto-centric cities.
Is it possible to suffer physical exhaustion primarily from just thinking? The entire process of migrating the blog and then consolidating my homepage to the same server was mentally—and so emotionally—arduous, but yesterday and today, after that process came to an end, I’ve been beyond tired. Had I been going out in the 85º temperatures, I’d think it was sensory, but I’ve been inside where it stays around ten degrees cooler. Cognitive reasons is the only other thing that fits in terms of the timing.
This week I’ll be watching Batwoman, Killing Eve, Supergirl, 9-1-1, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Mrs. America, The Masked Singer, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. I’ve finished the final season of the terrific Norwegian geopolitical thriller, Occupied, and started the second season of The Hollow. I’m continuing the Prison Break binge into season two.
In this edition: zip codes, movie theaters, internet dramas, driving in and through, weekend weather, Mothers’ Day, and calling the neighbors.
Charlie Jane Anders wonders what well-known franchises people would reboot. It reminds me that at least a decade ago I’d mapped the basic premise for a Max Headroom reimagining.
Notwithstanding lazy reporters writing that California is the first state in the nation to implement statewide vote-by-mail, the actual announcement from Governor Newsom and Secretary of State Padilla specifically states, “Today we become the first state in the nation to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by mailing every registered voter a ballot.” Emphasis added, for the record.
The trouble with paraphrasing is that in the process you accidentally can end up talking about something completely different, and then I get all pedantic in the service of making a point. John Philpin paraphrased John Gruber on the matter of public protests.
Sometime last night or this morning I dreamt that I’d started a pandemic podcast where I’d just spend half an hour each day talking with a different person I know on Twitter. There was no particular aim or some sort of thematic point. For all intents and purposes to anyone who listened it was more or less just another random person.
I did try to start in on the special ”What’s Good?” episodes of The Good Place: The Podcast today and maybe its just the Portland heat making me cranky today but I admit to being a bit disappointed that the very first person in their answer to the titular question included Marc Evan Jackson and The Good Place: The Podcast. I mean, I appreciate the sentiment but a not-small part of me finds itself wishing they’d kiboshed that as an answer in some rules-of-thumb for these specials; it’s sort of understood in just having been a fan of the show and of the podcast and answered Jackson’s call for entries.
Sunday afternoon: finally starting season three of the terrific Occupied months after it dropped on Netflix but the service neglected to have the new episodes appear in my queue; learning that even Stark’s Vacuums is selling masks; and listening to the dulcet thuds of the cats chasing a fly that’s somehow gotten into the apartment.
Some of you might recall that when I tiptoed back into blogging, beginning with Write.as, I couldn’t stand having to write in Markdown, having become so accustomed to various WYSIWYG approaches. Fast forward to now and one of the very first things I did upon migrating from Micro.blog (which also was Markdown) to WordPress is turn on Markdown in my Jetpack settings.
Places Journal announced a forthcoming book “by New School professor and columnist Shannon Mattern” called A City Is Not a Computer, named for an article of the same name; if the article is any indication, the book likely goes right onto my to-get list. The timing is interesting, given the economic collapse of Google’s planned “smart city” in Toronto.
In this edition: public opinion, Stanislaw Lem, more spreading, porn, Dutch cursing, being foreign, restaurant restrictions, appeasing the enemy, and architects.
I bequeath unto you this term of derision which I somehow might have just now coined, else anyone who might have beaten me to it I guess didn’t have good enough SEO for Google to find them.
After earlier reminding myself of my own thoughts on recency and temporality, I got stuck on an image: people are verbs, not nouns—which really is what I was trying to get at by saying that they live “their lives as processes, not as end-products”. What happened to blogs due to content marketers is that they wanted to shoehorn nouns into a form meant for verbs (in the process constructing all sorts of tricks purported to enhance your “search engine optimization”, like removing dates from URLs so that the content was considered by Google to be timeless and relevant in perpetuity if not actually important). So when Joel Hooks says to “stop giving a fuck and start writing more”, that’s actually a perfect description of blogging-as-it-was before the content marketers and SEO hucksters glommed on and bastardized the thing. Which, again, is not to say that the blog is everything and everything should be a blog. It’s just to say—again—that while some are building digital gardens, others should be stealing back the blog.
Unlike the existing economic relief payments which excluded any relief for adult dependents (or, rather, for those upon whom they are dependent) the new proposal from Senators Harris, Sanders, and Markey—for $2,000 monthly payments retroactive to March and lasting until three months after the public health crisis ends—includes them. Of course, the White House literally just said they won’t consider any additional relief packages this month.
WordPress accomplishments so far: custom theme cobbled together; crazy-ass export/import process sussed out; found function to limit slugs to three words, so all new permalinks will be consistent with the old Micro.blog permalinks; insane pairing of plugins used to rescue all the photos that WordPress’ import process didn’t download; figured out the pagination code (but styling is still wrong); figured out WordPress menus so my navigation menu isn’t hard-coded into the theme files anymore. This post mostly is so I have a record to remind me of the fruits of all the frustration involved.
Warren Ellis, citing Justin Tadlock, is right that a personal website doesn’t have to be a blog (especially true given that personal websites pre-date blogging), and while initially I was going to circle back to something I wrote before about people trying to redefine what a blog is (e.g. doing something not reverse-chronological but still for some reason wanting to call it a blog), I got to reading Tadlock’s post and instead I have a whole other tantrum to throw.
I cannot brain. After being up late last night navigating the migration of my blog, I slept poorly due to the return of being unable to fully breathe properly through my nose. This morning already has brought an inability to focus, repeatedly missing steps in what I’m doing at any given moment (like getting dressed), and shoddy fine motor control (I couldn’t coordinate my fingers to get a coffee filter off the stack). Today was going to include a follow-up run to the store because I need seltzer, paper towel, and I guess now Breathe Right strips (and I still don’t have access to deodorant I won’t have an allergic reaction to), but with cognitive function precipitously low and the weather set to inflict the sensory hit of bright sun and temperatures in the 80s, there’s no way that happens.
In this edition: getting outside, race and climate, herpes, lines and strains, conflicts of interest, autistic social distancing, screen time, coronavirus parties, universal basic income, tracking infection, reopening Oregon, worker petitions, public space, language, paying for transit, and Pedalpalooza.
I’ll leave it to someone else to psychoanalyze the process to determine whether or not it was sparked by all the flashbacks and throwbacks in which I’ve been swimming since social distancing began two months back, but I’ve migrated my blog from Micro.blog to self-hosted WordPress, an environment that was very familiar to me over a decade ago. There’ll probably be some bumps, but it’s, I think, mostly squared away?
So, the creepy and invasive sensation students are experiencing from online proctoring of their exams? That’s how I feel just generally from eye contact, and also is why I can’t sit in the middle of restaurants and need to sit against walls (even better, in corners) or, sometimes, at the counter. Hence why my autism diagnosis also included the “anxiety, social/performance distress” comorbidity.
On a more positive note, I had to do a major start-of-the-month grocery run and wanted to get as much as possible taken care of in one trip, which meant this couldn’t just be the properly-paid-for equivalent of a smash-and-grab; it was going to take some time, around unpredictable other people, with environmental noise, and in a mask. While my stress levels definitely rose, and it took me a bit to level off when I got home, I had no outright panic attack.
I’d forgotten just how exasperating the WordPress forums are. Ask if anyone’s seen a plugin for something, get pointed at a bunch of random functions that also do something different. Ask about elements in an .wxr import/export document, get lectured that “element” isn’t a term for pieces of WordPress code; “element”, of course, is exactly what units in an XML document are called, and what I was talking about. You have to love (no you don’t) when coders are so obsessed with inflicting their pedantry at people they don’t even actually read your question.
In this edition: profit and incompetence, the 1918 economy, the third quarter, behavioral scientists, false expectations, co-dependent states, Oregon neighborhoods, Oregon restaurants, a giant agave, emoji, the Texas governor, coronavirus parties, frontline workers, a no-sneezing policy, the bubble concept, older adults, crowds, urban infrastructure, a speakeasy, and Rip Van Winkle.
In this edition: language, the safety net, clinical trials, raw onions, Pushkin, mutation, genetic superiority, soap-box racing, zip codes, music venues, density, public space, the New Deal, and Amazon.
It took me all evening, but I managed one hell of a slog (for me, anyway) of a workaround and now can turn my RSS feed at Micro.blog into a WordPress import/export file which includes all my post categories, and even turns converts them instead into tags. Barring the unexpected, I’ve got just one issue left on the WordPress side, and it’s a true stumper: how to get posts without titles to generate post slugs, and therefore permalinks, using X number of words from the post rather than using a numerical slug from the post-ID.
I’m going to try to get offline for awhile. My consideration of migrating to self-hosted WordPress came to a crashing halt because Micro.blog exports don’t include post categories, precluding any full notion of owning one’s own content, and artificial, needless contraints rankle. I do find it ironic that the (comparatively) giant company apparently is somewhat a better steward of the open web than the upstart.
Slept in again, but then I’ve nothing which requires my early rising. The extent of unwashed dishes meant breakfast was oatmeal and frozen sausage. I did, however, manage to find a solution to one of my pressing WordPress use cases (as I continue to look into migrating my blogging life back to self-hosted WordPress for the first time in over a decade), which turned the already-planned trip out to get my first latte in weeks into something of a reward instead of only a “just because”.
In this edition: imagination, distractions, green zones, cowboys, dying wishes, environmental regulation, coronavirus models, restaurants, banned books, driving cross-country, three futures, pandemic maps, lacking tests, nationalism, a global pledge, mental health, naked bicyclists, presumptive cases, and books.
In the new study, researchers compared autistic and typical people’s pupil responses when performing a task with and without a distracting sound. Typical people’s pupils grew larger when hearing the sound, suggesting a boost in focus directed by the locus ceruleus. By contrast, the pupils of autistic people did not widen, indicating they do not modulate their attention in the same way.
I’m getting exhausted by people mistaking asociality for introversion. Introversion just means that socializing enervates where for extroverts it energizes. You can have social introverts and asocial introverts (or even antisocial ones), but you can’t just write a sentence like this one Shayla Love wrote for Vice.
Willamette Week has a great, sobering look at local music venues during the pandemic shutdown, who have banded together to lobby for greater financial support and protections, quoting Jim Brunberg (“owner of Mississippi Studios, Polaris Hall and Revolution Hall, and the founder” of the lobbying group) on historical parallels.
Portland announced its “slow streets” locations (also see the Willamette Week story) and looking at the map they are going with N. Central St. here in St. Johns, which basically runs between two green or greenish spaces — Roosevelt High School and St. Johns Park. What’s not clear to me is how the signage is going to work, as only two intersections get “barrel barrier” treatment, and depending upon how you count they are fifteen to twenty blocks apart. Surely there will be additional non-barrel signage along the route? Or, at least, surely they will let residents get away with guerrilla signage?
In this edition: testing and tracing, innovation, restaurants, urban density, Cassandra, and ghost kitchens.
I’ve been spending the day banging together a WordPress theme, even though I don’t actually know if I’m migrating or if I’m just in large need of Something To Do, but it’s somewhat remarkable how much I am remembering as I reacquaint myself with the basics—and with how comparatively uncomplicated a WordPress theme can be if you don’t actually need all the bells and whistles. It’s also, admittedly, refreshing to make changes and have them applied instantly. Any frustrations I might encounter are user error and (re)learning curve and not because things take twenty minutes to rebuild.
Since the Proseful design belongs, you know, to Proseful and adapting it was just for shits and giggles, I’m now giving serious insane thought, despite there already being a Micro.blog port of the Hugo theme Hello Friend, to adapting the Hello Friend NG version I’m using over on my homepage. Left still-undetermined is how much of this spastic flailing lately is because I really do want something different or because time has no meaning and every day is the same and I need variation—or even just to imagine variation—to come from somewhere.
In this edition: city streets, pricing by algorithm, barbershops, NASA’s ventilator, brutal numbers, old movies, NPCs, llamas, excess deaths, mariachis, coffee history, Muggletonians, air pollution, and the political conversation.
But now, everyone’s really an NPC. We’re outright forbidden to get close to people we don’t know, and strangely this seems to have made everybody much kinder. Perhaps there’s a relief in knowing nothing more is expected of us, except to be polite and maintain our 3 feet of distance and smile demurely with our half-covered faces. (I’m assuming, of course, that everyone’s as curmudgeonly as I am.) There is no possible timeline where we progress beyond pleasantries anymore, and this feels nice for a change.
This morning my mixed three-pack of masks made by Let’s Print LA from “upscaled” t-shirts arrived, and I think we’re getting closer to masks I can survive in long enough for errands without autistically feeling convulsions of suffocation. I haven’t run a full test yet, but a quick check of the “fold the top edge” tip to prevent fogging up my eyeglasses seems to work. This weekend really does need a grocery run, so a real-world test will happen soon enough.
In this edition: essential workers, Islam and coffee, reopening Oregon, urban density, hate crimes, mass disinfection, autistic emotions, death predictions, suicide, the Chinese economy, ghost town quarantine, New Zealand, the physical world, the impact of cars, and increasing infections.
However, children with mild autism traits who scored high on tests of language had more severe emotional problems throughout the study. This could be because these children can better express their emotions than those with poorer language skills can, or because they are more often exposed to stressful environments, Simonoff says.
Things that are different now that I’m back on my Micro.blog blog: site navigation now only links to my home page (which is where my “now” page has gone), my VSCO gallery, my Instapaper profile, and my local posts archive; I’m no longer including replies on posts; the blog’s name has changed, as has its tagline; and its accent color now is the #2b71ca used on Proseful blogs.
As I sit here once again counting the tens of minutes before a custom.css rebuild happens, I feel like for blogging some one-two punch of both static and dynamic site generation would be better. For example, if I have thousands of blog entries, rebuilding every single post when I change the navigation menu seems a pretty fucking dumb way to go about things. How about static partials or includes, but then each page dynamically loads those few necessary static partials. That might mean a blog post is dynamically loading, say, a static header file, a static navigation file, a static post file, and a static footer file, but I feel like that’s a decent middle-ground between “every element is generated on-the-fly from a database” and “every single post and page you have has to rebuild from scratch whenever you change a common site-wide element”.
I admit that I do not understand what Alan is afterwith this; it seems to me like a surrender, when community and, yes, even the common good are good and arguably necessary terms to fight for the definition of, rather than consigning them to some sort of linguistic oh-well shrug pile. What am I missing?
Sameer makes an interesting posit while observing the psychic flattening of our physical cities: “Our homes have become our cities and towns, our places to live and work and play and explore.” I imagine this varies depending upon just how shut down your neighborhood, town, or city happens to be, and it’s tough for me to latch onto the idea, because except for being unable to eat out or go to the zoo my days superficially are much the same as they were before all of this necessary nonsense. (I say “superficially” only because I nonetheless clearly am experiencing no little share of mental and emotional confoundment.) So I wonder if people with more widely-varying and/of outgoing lives than my own prior to the pandemic take Sameer’s point?
Marian Call suggested “lying on the floor or wherever and listening to an album straight thru, beginning to end, with your whole attention” so as part of my ongoing pandemic musical regression retrospective, I listened to all of The Helio Sequence’s Love and Distance while sitting on the couch. Their earlier stuff, before this one, perplexingly is available neither on Apple Music nor Bandcamp, but fortunately before I was smart enough to rescue my copies from my old MacBook Pro before I wiped bricked it, and so now as I sit and blog I’ve rewound back to Accelerated Slow-Motion Cinema and am working my way forward. If I recall, my first experience of The Helio Sequence was when they played a High Violets show and what I remember is that two guys sure managed to envelop every inch of space into which their sound could travel.
The upside of getting up at 8:30am in order to get breakfast takeout from my regular breakfast place on the first day of their pandemic reboot is getting to have breakfast takeout from my regular breakfast place. The downside is that my body apparently really does need to remain inactive until noon; by noon today I was short-tempered and by early afternoon I was having noticeable trouble with manipulating things like each and every item I needed to handle in order to make lunch.
“One of the many things that COVID-19 has shown us is how deep and consequential the digital and technological divide is in Australia and across the world,” Liz Pellicano, professor of educational studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, wrote in an email. “Moving our research ‘online’ might well make our research more accessible to some autistic people, but it also might make it less accessible to those who are already from ‘seldom heard’ groups.”
In this edition: autism research, men ditching books, peeing in the pool, coronavirus confusion, liminality, reopening Oregon restaurants, Oregonian death rates, mental health in quarantine, public space online, informal public characters, sidewalk chalk, intelligence, the Gross Domestic Product, the Anti-Mask League, Latinx disparities, compulsory masks in 1919, vote-by-mail hypocrisy, and saving .ORG.
Okay, I am back on my presumptive bullshit on my regular blog after my vacation on Proseful. I’m maybe going to try to retool some stuff (and I’m hating its look but don’t have a viable alternative at the moment) but hopefully without making myself want to throw my entire family of devices into the Willamette River.
Well, shit. I am trying to put things in order to return to my actual blog from my “vacation” blog, but as I add posts to my test blog here (my plan was to add them there, export, then import them here) and then edit them to make the dates correct apparently the URLs don’t update to reflect to correct posting date. They remain with today’s date in the URL. That’s no good. I wonder, will everything be correct on the eventual import? Like, as long as the dates in the exported entries are correct, they’ll be created here with the properly-dated URLs?
Another month, somehow, under our collective social distancing belts, and here at least April departs on two positive notes: there was a Parks and Recreation pandemic special, and I’ve already placed my regular breakfast order online for tomorrow morning’s takeout re-opening of Johns Street Cafe . After breakfast, I need to decide what to pursue first (since each choice means spending money): getting one of those vacuum units into which you sweep your floors, because I’m pretty sure it will bring me to sweep more often; or getting that screen door to work on trimming down and hopefully install, so that my mother-in-law cottage becomes more pleasant in the warming weather (and so my cats can see me if I’m sitting outside on the landing reading a book).
I accidentally walked backwards into tinkering, so here’s another Hugo question: is there a way to hack together a datestamp display that checks the time of the post, and if within range X prints “the morning of”, or within range Y prints “the afternoon of”, etc.—leading to datestamps such as, “The Morning of April 29, 2020”?
Catching up on my very few podcasts, Monday’s edition of Social Distance from James Hamblin and Katherine Wells—“Will the Restaurants Come Back?”—is a conversation with fellow Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, who recently argued a fairly pessimistic answer to that question.
In this edition: dashed hopes, wolves, mental health, reopening the South, corporate liability, excess deaths, a new blue, power company wifi, pet distancing, autistic voices, a Colorado quarantine, muscular Christians, letting industries fail, canceling the rent, keeping cars out, and bias in testing.
My mind has some kind of viral malaise which prevents me from having anything worthwhile to say—or, really, even think about. That’s the truly unnerving part: I’m not really having thoughts. It’s entirely possible this blog-away-from-blog shortly will collapse further still, becoming nothing but daily Link Log Roundup posts. My inner life seems spent, my outer life mechanical. This maybe helps explain why lately I’m not anymore out of bed before noon; read some things, watch some things, listen to some things, eat some things, sleep, repeat. I see people expressing their way through this particular now and I wonder how, and I wonder how they aren’t just empty and listless.
In this edition: the bus, black women, anti-vaxxers, autistic kids, governors, FilAm nurses, television production, first responders, trick photography, protests, Lithuania, Parks and Recreation, nightmares, slow streets, nannies, and retail.
CJ Eller quotes Sajesh on the matter of blog comments: “I feel like the old style of blog comments just don’t quite cut it for the modern web stack and ways we interact.” The reality is I agree, but one of the reasons I’ve taken a vacation from my actual, vanity-domained blog is because, hosted as it was on an indieweb-facing service I found that my current need for simplicity kept bumping up against the fact that the sought-after interoperability of the indieweb is far, still, from being a simple matter. I guess that I needed to retreat to a space which arguably actually is underdeveloped even in traditional terms let alone the terms of indieweb strivings. I needed somewhere away from the noise, and away from the inherent invitation to tinker.
In this edition: the PennySaver, Oregon at one month, Oregon City, the unhoused, killing methods, beaches, the right to read, grocery workers, western states, Biden, vote-by-mail, and suffrage.
In this edition: frozen steaks, immunity passports, car culture, the future normal, and quarantine fatigue.
Max Sparrow noticed something interesting about a BBC story describing so-called “Zoom fatigue” (also noted by C. M. Condo about a similar National Geographic story): the strains and stresses people are experiencing as a result of all these video meetings is not unlike what actually-autistic people experience much of the time.
In this edition: Disinfectant, Soviet Russia, pseudoscience, hygge, Zoom fatigue, webcams in lockdown, architecture, strokes, email greetings, flu season, and March 11.
Today I read what I think was my first-ever Aeon post, and mostly I have to ask regular readers of the site if they’re all this terrible?
Then afterword comes the “hangover”. In the end I slept until almost one in the afternoon (after lurching awake at seven in the morning spitting up into my mouth), despite the construction noise next door on a Saturday or indeed probably because it’s easier to sleep through it than suffer awake through it. My entire body aches, as if I myself had worked construction yesterday and not, instead, dragged myself back from the cliff of an autistic meltdown for the second time in days. Breakfast was nothing but a bowl of cereal and warmed up leftover coffee, because that’s all I have the energy to make. Which itself then runs the risk of keeping my resources so low today that just about anything could set me off again.
In this edition: socially-distant Ramadan, African-American health, the fate of cities, reopening Georgia, Instagram influencers, your pets, working from home, public transit, occult politics, essential workers, Zoom and autism, cosplayers, and third places.
Joining the ongoing musical memory lane playlist this week (part of whatever we’re calling our collective flashbacks and throwbacks in these days) are The Crabs and The Minders. So, we’re talking late-90s to early-00s, again—which makes sense because that was my Portland music-following era. Whenever my personal musical retrospective goes local, it’s going to be from that period.
It’s official: wearing a face mask triggers so many sensory and other issues that after having barely avoided an autistic meltdown the other day, today I walked right up to the line and spit over the edge. Earlier this week, I was in convulsions trying to get the mask off my face the moment I walked in the door at home; today I didn’t make it out to the parking lot as I left the grocery store before the same. By the time I got home, I was so on edge that jamming my hand on a cabinet could only have resulted in slamming the cabinet shut and screaming the loudest “MOTHERFUCKER!” this neighborhood has ever heard. The sheer amount of energy it took to head off picking up anything and everything I could find in the kitchen and hurling it across the apartment itself only expended my resources further, adding pressure to the psychic mix because now my skin has thinned even more. I’m not sure where this goes on the list of comparative problems, but I guess I’m now precluded from being able to go grocery shopping. For those keeping score: yes, there also are loud rattling construction sounds coming from next door, from which I have no escape. I’m at a very profound loss.
Yesterday I just barely accomplished my goal of getting in some Gods of the Upper Air, finishing The Lesson, and starting The Overstory—although technically that last didn’t happen until just after midnight. I’ve read all of Richard Powers, and in the case of a couple of books re-read them several times, but every now and then it takes me awhile to get around to whatever is his latest. It took me awhile to get to The Time of Our Singing, too.
This hardly is meant as prescriptive. It’s just that I’ve noticed that changes already underway in my own news consumption have increased since the pandemic began, and I thought it would help to describe how it works for me these days.
It turns out that personal nostalgia during a global pandemic Officially Is A Thing, or at least this is my takeaway from Abby Ohlheiser and Tanya Basu’s look at archivists trying to record how people are dealing.
What was great to me about the Parks and Recreation series finale is that it left open two very different possibilities: that indeed we were being given glimpses into the future, or that we merely were being given glimpses of Leslie Knope’s vision of the future. (If you recall, the finale shows us each character’s purported future only when Leslie touches them; much of what we see arguably makes more sense as Leslie’s notions than as canon flash-forwards.) In this light, then, I find news of a quarantine revival—“Pawnee, Indiana’s most dedicated public servant, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), determined to stay connected with her friends and colleagues during a time of social distancing”—in the form of a thirty-minute special interesting, in that I wonder if they somehow will be able to maintain that indeterminacy.
Apparently it’s World Book Day—“also known as World Book and Copyright Day, or International Day of the Book”.
In this edition: disaster parks, armchair experts, freeways, restaurant normalcy, cats, librarians adapting, sneezing science, Twitter rules, and underlying conditions.
My biggest complaint about the series finale of Leverage always has been that Nate deliberately selects Parker as his successor and then the show cheats on the follow-through. The only time we get to see this new team in action is a scene referencing Nate’s conversation with a client at the end of the series’ pilot; here, Parker deliberately apes Nate’s inflections and mannerisms.
I am still re-reading Phil Agre’s marathon treatise about conservatism-as-aristocracy and was brought up short by this sudden, stand-alone, one-sentence paragraph.
I’ve already added this Anita Schillhorn van Veen edition of the Why is this interesting? newsletter to my link log but I feel like these two paragraphs comparing today with the era of the Spanish flu are worth specifically highlighting.
Sarah Weinman’s interview with David Dunning for InsideHook to discuss “the rise of the so-called ‘COVID influencer’ or armchair epidemiologist” has an interesting bit in its bottom half.
Linda Poon’s ode to urban balconies for CityLab reminds me that living in a mother-in-law cottage means I do have a small front landing, large enough for a chair, on which I can enjoy a coffee and a book, but the more social aspects of balconies during a global pandemic nonetheless are out of reach, being set back from the street to the point of being behind the main house. Which is not, of course, to say that I wish I could engage in cross-balcony sing-alongs or whatnot, but it would be nice maybe to hang encouraging signs or even just be able to see other people also taking their moments of quiet refuge just outside their living spaces but still apart from the viral milieu. That said, the property on which I live in fact faces the rough, blank wall of a storage unit warehouse; there’d be no neighbors with which to silently, passively commiserate anyway.
Someone at Eater appears not actually to have read their piece on the coffee landscape, as its hed suggests it’s about coffeeshops when it really says very little about the future of actual coffeeshops and cafes, let alone anything bullish, instead focusing almost exclusively upon a couple of small business coffee empires (e.g. Portland-born Stumptown) and a few entrepreneurial efforts at feeding coffee to frontline pandemic workers. There’s lots of talk about grocery products—Stumptown is chasing Costco, for crying out loud—and effectively zero talk about how, or indeed even whether, retail coffee is weathering the storm. How do you mention all those furloughed baristas, as the article does, without wondering, and writing about, what’s to become of them, and the third places they provide the rest of us?
While setting up my quixotic petition yesterday, I’d linked the earliest-archived version of one of my early blogs. Browsing through it, I ran across an item referencing Phil Agre of the late, great Red Rock Eater News Service which made me wonder whatever happened to him.
There’s a newsletter item by Alex Danco over in my link log today that I also need to address part of a little more directly over here because of…Kierkegaard?
The other thing about that Wired piece about the surreality of life during a global pandemic is the bit about what the wife of child psychiatrist Fredrick Matzner had said to him.
Matt Simon, writing for Wired, takes a look at why life during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic seems so surreal and hits upon an interesting comparison.
Today I unfollowed an Instagram account that I’d only just recently followed for its photos of businesses around town boarded up for the duration of social distancing measures because for some reason it refused to post gallery posts, and would just suddenly post like fifteen individual posts in a row. Had they been geotagging the posts, and so each needed to be individual, I could understand it, although I’d probably still have unfollowed; they weren’t though. There’s simply no reason for them to be posting a dozen or two separate photos in rapid succession.
Earlier I saw someone angry at Mayor de Blasio calling for New Yorkers to take photos of anyone not wearing a mask and send them to the city via 3-1-1; then they made an overwrought Holocaust yellow-star reference. Setting aside the latter what-the-fuck, if you read the transcript or watch the video he only talks about “if a line has developed that’s packed too tight together, if a store’s too crowded, if people are gathering someplace they shouldn’t be not practicing social distancing”. There’s literally not a single reference in the entire speech to masks. Which is not to say that people won’t use it that way anyway; just that he never called for it.
So, the joint Biden/Sanders livestream was interesting, if a bit awkward. They structured it as a sort of Q&A, each getting to ask the other how to address a given issue. But the thing that struck me most is that Biden now is talking about institutional and structural change, and how the coronavirus crisis is revealing to more eyes our pre-existing institutional and structural problems—and is offering an opportunity to address them the way previous crises in American history have offered such an opportunity. (He literally later specifically cited Roosevelt, and seeking to be the most progressive administration since his.) Biden is saying these things now. Biden. The interesting way he put it, though, is how the people we institutionally and structurally ignore are the very people who right now are keeping the country alive, which is what they do every day even without the crisis. If he can keep up that framing—that the coronavirus crisis (like Trump himself) is revealing existing institutional and structural faultlines, and that we can treat the crisis as a wake-up call—that’s nothing but good for Democrats.
This week on 📺 I’m watching the return of Killing Eve, 9-1-1, Dispatches from Elsewhere, Briarpatch, Mrs. America, Nancy Drew, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Devs, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Better Things. I’m continuing season six of The Blacklist. I dropped Motherland: Fort Salem, am almost done with my full Dollhouse rewatch. I still plan to start Tales from the Loop but have started in on Night on Earth as something to watch in the mornings.
Sameer Vasta notes that online conversations during SARS-CoV-2 social distancing often confront the question of “the first place where we will go once the world returns to some semblance of normal”. Vasta’s answer, I suspect, is true for most people whether it occurs to them in conversation or not: our first visits will be to those third places to which we lost access during the pandemic.
Yesterday was very schizophrenic, in the metaphorical not the literal sense, up to and including my digestive system flailing for like the third day and then a sleep that was wall-to-wall stress dreams. The cat who usually sleeps under the covers with me instead slept down at the foot of the bed; I must have been hellaciously restless all night. It took almost all the energy I had this morning, but I called in and picked up a breakfast sandwich and a latte from Chop; bonus: the refrigerated case had dolmas. Construction has picked up again outside my apartment, so I might get to test out how much of the noise the Airpods Pro can suppress. My plan today mostly is to try to let my system rest from whatever new surge of stressors has been knocking it out of whack. So: catching up on television, and maybe letting a rewatch of Birds of Prey run in the background before my rental expires.
Looking at this year’s Hugo finalists, I’ve read The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders; A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine; The Deep by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes; The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark; and This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. All worth reading.
It’s the 30th anniversary of Twin Peaks so here’s the first thing I ever contributed to the internet, in the fall of 1993. (It’s just a plain text file but because there’s no .txt file extension it might try to download instead of display.) The entirety of my one-time obsessive research into potential symbology, intermixed with theory and head-canon.
The experiment I need to run is whether active noise canceling earbuds or passive shooter’s muffs are the right approach to mitigating my general day-to-day sensory issues; they do very different things, obviously. The muffs increasingly have been causing sensory issues from sitting on my head and the fit of the cups bothering my ears, but they muffle a wider range of frequencies than do active noise cancelation. In effect, I need to choose between enduring certain frequencies or enduring the sensation of wearing muffs. There is no perfect solution.
So I am getting to try the AirPods Pro, since the Max earbuds from Nuheara are stuck in pandemic manufacturing chain problems, but I don’t know how much of a workout I’m going to give them until the ear hooks for them arrive on Saturday; we’ll see if they make me less paranoid about one of the damn things falling out. An initial test of the noise cancelation when indoors definitely seemed hopeful, although there’s no outside construction noise right now, just the general indoor hum of things like the fridge. There was a momentary flash of anger when the charge cable for them didn’t actually plug into anything I have, until I realized that any of my spare iPhone cables works just fine.
The real lesson of tonight’s 🎥 rental—Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)—is that maybe these movies need to be made by people with joy in their heart rather than people with a ponderous sense of their own self-importance. (I’d pay a premium for a Harley Quinn audio commentary track to Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, especially if she were to just give up and go off on a lengthy tangent on absolutely anything else.) Hands down the best of this particular corporate franchise, Birds of Prey tells me to follow Margot Robbie wherever she wants to go in—and with—the DC movie universe.
My upcoming fiction reads are going to get a bit out of my original probable order because over on the Kobo store The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern was $4.99 and The Overstory by Richard Powers was $9.55; the Morgenstern wasn’t in my list of ASAPs but sale prices often control, and the Powers I’ve not been in the right state of mind for but it’s time.
Overnight and this morning I dreamt about a tiny monkey on a tiny motorcycle that later turned out to be part of a race amongst four tiny monkeys on four tiny bicycles. Earlier, I dreamt about convincing a porg-like species of waterfowl on an alien world that was being steamrolled toward a war by its leaders to vote to pause in order to spend massively on infrastructure and healthcare so that it would be more resilient in any future disaster.
“We’re pimps and killers; but in a philanthropic way.” Once upon a time, I cut some fan ads for Dollhouse that I don’t think I ever figured out how to use in any… useful way. They were simple: whiteouts out from which, and then back into which, fade the headshot of a particular character, a single line of dialogue playing. This was the line I used for Boyd’s ad. I’ve no idea whether any of my marketing ideas for Dollhouse would have been more effective than what Fox actually did; but I’m still dead certain they were far more interesting.
The commercials for tonight’s Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist were a bit cringe of the “on a very special episode…” variety. I’m curious how the episode itself played amongst deaf people, because as a regular viewer of the show, to me that storyline played exactly the way every other storyline on the show has played. While the commercial pitched it as a “Zoey helps a deaf person be heard” story, the show played it as a “Zoey helps a father listen to his daughter” story—right in line with what the show does in every episode. It’s not that the specifics were unimportant, because they weren’t, but that they were right in the show’s wheelhouse of helping people connect with and understand each other.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, Dispatches from Elsewhere, Briarpatch, The Masked Singer, Motherland: Fort Salem, Nancy Drew, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Devs, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Better Things. I’ve started season six of The Blacklist and finished the first season of Diablero. I dropped High Fidelity after three episodes, have begun a full Dollhouse rewatch, and might be starting in on Tales from the Loop. In need of something to watch on Saturday mornings, I’ve started The Hollow.
Andreas Kluth at least gets right how to define introversion, unlike seemingly every other reference to introverts during the pandemic, but I question the contention that we “are thus less likely than extroverts to feel deflated, isolated or bored, and more likely to be energized”. While in some respects it’s difficult to separate out my introversion from my autism and my anxiety (and while not all autistics are introverted), what Kluth ignores is the matter of control. Introverts, too, require sociality, but one thing I’d bet that most introverts and extroverts alike would say is that the ability to choose when one is social is pretty key. More so for introverts only because sociality for them is exhausting and so deciding when and where is important. The lack of control which social distancing measures force upon us is what leads introverts, too, to become “deflated, isolated or bored”; I spent three days last week in a deep depression. Being introverted isn’t some sort of magic bullet for surviving the pandemic with one’s mental state unharmed, let alone intact.
I’m struggling to embrace the irony that reading Mike Monteiro’s Ruined by Design on a Kobo will be a somewhat less than enjoyable experience because he only made it available for Kindle and so I had to run it through a conversion program that doesn’t quite understand chapter breaks. Does this make his book ruined by design?
I’m in my second year living in St. Johns and twenty-third year living in Portland. I’m in my fifty-first year of being alive and my fourth year as a diagnosed autistic. I’m in my third year of trying to figure out my health—my lymph nodes remain a question—and my second year of trying to find a psychoconsultant both knowledgeable about adult autism and covered by my insurance. I’m in my first real year of a return to blogging. I’m in the second successful month of my first-ever experience taking medication for anxiety. I’m in my nth year of not feeling like much more than a failure and a fuckup. Like everyone else, I’m in whatever week this is of a global pandemic.
Well, I think the plan to install a screen door is a bust. The nonstandard dimensions of my doorframe make installing a 32”x80” door a non-starter, and none of the ones even remotely within even the outside of a prospective budget are safely trimmable to a size that would fit. Once again, I forget that I am not supposed to get my hopes up for things.
MSNBC just aired part of a conference call between Trump, Fauci, and governors. In response to the Democratic governor of Montana saying they simply do not have the tests (or the PPE) to test people, and that their potential supply chains are basically being undercut at the federal level, Mine Furor’s response—his literal response to having just heard that testing was a problem—was: “I haven’t heard of testing being a problem.”
We continue to have a serious language problem when discussing autism. Sarah DeWeerdt—writing, of course, for Spectrum—is not describing autistic burnout, she is describing, variously, overload and overwhelm—important states but distinct from burnout. Autistic burnout is a more all-encompassing life state, not merely the reaction/response of an autistic brain to a specific overly-stimulating circumstance, event, or situation. For a better, more informed look at autistic burnout, see Dora Raymaker’s presentation (.pdf) on current research.
Established in my Doctor Who dream overnight: the nearby universe knows well of our Magellanic Clouds, although not by that name because they don’t know from Magellan; they are called Sunee and Ray-Ray after a pair of famous cartoon guinea pigs, although not really guinea pigs because they don’t know from guinea.
I am trying to enjoy the High Fidelity series, but it’s very, very tough to try to watch it fairly, especially because I think Cusack was more natural at the fourth-wall thing than is Kravitz, but also because some of the performance choices seem too forcibly “make a different choice than did Cusack” rather than actually coming from somewhere. More: I feel like it was obvious fairly quickly that Cusack’s Rob was kind of an asshole, whereas they seem to be soft-peddling that a bit for Kravitz’s Rob, and Rob being an asshole always seemed to me to be one of the central tightropes the story was walking.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, 9-1-1, Dispatches from Elsewhere, Briarpatch, The Masked Singer, Motherland: Fort Salem, The Magicians, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Better Things. I’ve slowed down watching season five of The Blacklist and can’t seem to get back into Diablero even though I enjoy it. I’ve started in on High Fidelity and when that’s done will start in on Devs.
I can’t find it now, but this morning I read that the direct cash payments do count against income limits for various social welfare benefits, so my expectation right now is that it will impact my SNAP allotment. What I don’t know is whether it will only impact it for the month the payment is received or for any month in which any of the payment amount remains unspent.
So, one half of this one particular couple at Safeway stood in my way at the cream cheese while he waited in an otherwise completely empty aisle, and then the other half when in the self-checkout line kept putting her finger to her mouth and then touch packages of jerky to see if it’s what she wanted, not take it, put her finger to her mouth to consider, touch another package; three times.
Here’s another good example of the quasi-adage that if you’ve met an autistic person you know one autistic person. This has not been my experience of the world of social distancing at all, and, what’s more, neither is it my experience of routines; just this week I noted that my routines are survival skills, not approval-seeking.
While I haven’t yet actually even found one that will fit the oddly-dimensioned doorframe, the property owner has approved my request to add a screen door to my front entrance. I won’t find one with these dimensions; it’d have to be one that can withstand being cut down an inch or two, but at least I can put this on the agenda now.
Yelp and GoFundMe are launching fundraising pages for small businesses without their knowledge or consent and making it difficult for them to opt-out, requiring personal data before agreeing to take pages down. The rights of local businesses to control their own financial response to crises is not in need of exploitative techbro disruption. Not much hope here for Jumana Abu-Ghazaleh’s plea to the industry to not return to disruption after the pandemic, I guess.
I’m sure if I devoted energy to this I could figure it out, but does anyone have handy what should be the order of Firefly episodes? By which I mean in the back half, Inara’s hair changes and clearly, say, “Heart of Gold” actually happens before episodes like “Trash” and “The Message”, just as what was used as the finale, “Objects in Space”, happens before “The Message”, too. Did we ever get, or figure out, what the original airing order would have been?
It’s distressing, maddening, saddening, exhausting, genuinely tragic. Lots of people are going to die. There’s so much wrong with what Patrick said – callous, eugenicist, immoral, based on false premises, obscures the real problem and motives, straight up evil – but one that keeps getting me is that he’s opposing any kind of economic restructuring in the name of these “grandchildren.” The economy, as is, works horribly for future generations. There’s a huge generational wealth gap, for example, that leaves younger generations with less money at the same age than any of their predecessors. It’s also causing environmental collapse that future generations will have to deal with. And employment-based health care, student debt, and other products of our current economy punish the youth as well. What he’s asking isn’t even for the immoral sacrifice he proposes - it’s that a lot of people sacrifice their lives so people in power can keep the illusion that nothing’s wrong.
I’m currently doing a rewatch of the 📺 series Firefly and having just reached Jose Molina’s “Ariel”, I thought I’d repost here an audio commentary track I recorded for the episode back in 2006 for Big Damn Commentaries, a website I ran for fan-recorded commentaries. Since Micro.blog sites without the podcasting package have free microcasting through April, I thought I’d share this here but you also can always find it on the Internet Archive, which is where I’d hosted the audio files back in the day. Below you can read my original show notes for this commentary track.
My favorite of all the Firefly flashbacks in “Out of Gas” is how Mal “found” Kaylee. For all of how backwards and assholic Mal can be, especially when it comes to Inara, he’s got utterly no judgment about why Kaylee was on the ship to begin with, never once questions what she says, immediately obeys when she asks for a tool, and hires her as mechanic on the spot.
I keep seeing some people go, “You know, it’s happened before that during wartime a president served more than two terms.” Yes, that’s true, but only because it wasn’t unconstitutional until after FDR did it. If we just stupidly concede that wartime presidents can serve longer because we remember something about FDR having served four terms, then we’ve lost that fight before Trump ever even gets to try to do it. In fact, we’d have done half his job for him.
Observations from Day One of the stay-at-home order in St. Johns, Oregon: Safeway is far more ransacked than it was just two days ago. I wish I’d taken notes in the canned beans aisle; clearly there are types of beans people just do not want. There are pink 6-foot markers on the floor in the checkout lines. There’s a ginormous table of Hershey bars in the self-checkout area; Safeway I guess banking on that being a major impulse buy in the days to come.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Batwoman, Supergirl, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, 9-1-1, Dispatches from Elsewhere, Briarpatch, The Masked Singer, Motherland: Fort Salem, The Magicians, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Star Trek: Picard, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Bold Type, and Better Things. I’m continuing season five of The Blacklist and still intend to finish Diablero, but I’ve ended up doing a Firefly rewatch on Hulu, where I also might squeeze in Devs. I won’t, however, be able to watch the return of One Day at a Time, because apparently I don’t get that channel.
I went and bought a collapsing chair with the expectation that the property manager for my mother-in-law apartment will return with news from the owner that I can install a basic screen door (presuming I can find an affordable one that fits), so that I can sit outside with coffee and a book without having to go anywhere, but my cats will be able to see me rather than the one cat just incessantly whining at the door like she is now while I am trying to read in peace.
Thanks to the latest Radical Urbanist, I learned that Verso Books is holding a “reading in a time of self-isolation” sale where ebooks are 80% off, making most of them just $2.00. I just picked up (links still go to my Bookshop affiliates link; you can find these on Verso yourself) Four Futures by Peter Frase, Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea, and Vertical by Stephen Graham. Anyone know of any other ebook sales right now?
While hundreds of Oregonians flock to the coast—endangering retirees in the process—Oregon Governor Brown reportedly is “frustrated” that Oregonians aren’t being smarter, literally while herself resisting pressure to issue a statewide stay-at-home order. This is what happens when an Oregonian “leader” believes the hype about how nice and progressive we are here: she lulls herself into a false sense of security with the myth that here in Oregon we simply do the right thing. Almost every right thing Oregonians have ever done they’ve done by making it law, not by voluntary encouragement. Every right thing Brown has done during this pandemic, on the other hand, she’s had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing.
I finally got around to asking the property management company if I could install a screen door on my mother-in-law cottage, and they have to ask the owner but it at least wasn’t something they knew to be an automatic denial. Originally I’d thought I’d need a storm door, which isn’t cheap, but realized this morning I just need a basic wood or even vinyl screen door and already have found several which slat the bottom third to prevent any pet-through-screen escapes.
What I was getting at earlier today was that even actually-autistic people with social anxiety and performance distress (let alone those who also are introverts) have regular and familiar places other than home or work which form a crucial part of the identity of our routine lives. Places which, reasonably, now are forbidden to us in the name of the public health.
I can’t even. Just as it seems as if today there will be neither construction on the next property over nor powerwashing at the property behind, my next-door neighbor is running some sort of, I don’t know, commercial wet-vac maybe? My autistic brain really needs a fucking rest. Or active-noise-canceling headphones. I have not gotten a sonic break in as long as I can remember.
What is happening here in Oregon and why? The governor makes a deal with a private lab for 20,000 tests. Two days later, neither party will even say when the state will have the first 5,600 of them. Meanwhile, going back a couple weeks now, but with increasing evidence, experts have said that a large part of the answer is test, test, test. This state is a fucking joke.
I’m curious about when people are hitting certain realization points. For me it was yesterday morning and what I termed social cost sticker shock. Someone I know online said for them it was today that was “like all the cumulative isolation stress arrived at once”. Matt Kiser of What the Fuck Just Happened Today?, in the email edition, described his experience: “I think it finally hit me today about just how screwed we are.” Is anyone else hitting this sort of psychic tipping point just in the last couple of days?
It’s always possible that this is just the first-stage of Bookshop’s ebook solution, but if it’s the extent of it, it’s wildly disappointing. I noticed a GET THE EBOOK link on Bookshop’s page for A Song for a New Day and it seems that they are using a storefront provided by Papertrell and an app called My Must Reads. That’s right: an app. Their ebook solution apears not to be in any way about buying an .epub; instead you must install an app on your Fire, Kobo, or Nook. Of course, the only Kobo that ever included apps was the Arc which doesn’t even exist anymore. (Try clicking other navigation-bar links on that page; I’ll wait.) Not only, then, is this ebooks “solution” restricted to an app, it’s one you can’t even use if your ereader is a Kobo. Bookshop’s arrival has been pretty exciting but this restricted-to-an-app approach to ebooks is powerfully underwhelming.
And I guess that season five of The Blacklist is the point at which they make otherwise intelligent characters so unfathomably stupid in the name of maintaining their mysteries at all costs, including the cost of insulting my intelligence and patience, that while I’ll continue using it as a background diversion I’ll also be looking up spoilers to get this over with because I just don’t care about their storytelling anymore.
It’s here where we can find an analogue to the infinite scroll. No matter how many different platforms there are or hashtags or columns on Tweetdeck, few places on the web serendipitously invite us to stop and sit still. Everything pulls at our attention all at once, creating a digital exhaustion. In Paris, the problem of automobile traffic and pollution has meant that Mayor Anne Hidalgo envisioned how to reprogram streets for a 15-minute-city, where walking and biking instead of driving can you what you need. As we consider this in our digital spaces, where can we find room to breathe?
So, if you’re widening your streaming horizons during social distancing measures, I’m going to reiterate that you should take your library card to Hoopla Digital and watch the Along with the Gods series, The Two Worlds and The Last 49 Days. I’m not especially sure how to describe it in any way that doesn’t do it an injustice. What Dreams May Come by way of an anime-inspired The Lord of the Rings flavored by A Few Good Men?
All the blogs and newsletters to which I subscribe have been piling up amidst living through all the SARS-CoV-2 stuff. I’ve mostly just been hanging out on IRC with people from my first-ever online community. Here’s a list of maybe-interesting stuff that I just pulled as I culled the backlog before it ended up a week deep.
According to today’s Oregonian coronavirus newsletter, 740 people have been tested, with 51 positives; that’s 6.8%. Up in Washington they’ve tested 12,486 people, with 904 positives; that’s 7.2%. We’ve been increasingly tracking Washington’s stats while, until just recently, being days or more behind in response measures. In that earlier Oregonian piece about our local healthcare entities banding together, it was suggested that what moved Governor Brown into action were the predictions of the lead data scientist at OHSU about what these numbers could mean.
Here’s a spoiler: Bernie Sanders is right. Or rather, the political philosophy Sanders has spent a lifetime championing is right. Threats like the coronavirus are not as rare as they seem; they are likely to get less rare; and they make the case for a more social-democratic form of government, one based on mutual care rather than zero-sum competition. The moral logic of coronavirus, if we’re willing to heed it, leads to more socialism.
Web forum organizational question: there are Primary tags, and Secondary tags. You can put Secondary tags beneath Primary tags (they then only can be used within that Primary tag), or leave them “free-floating”, as it were. I’m currently leaning towards only affixing Secondary tags to Primary tags for things like Support topics, and leaving everything else free-floating. My reasoning is that you might be reading a book that’s about politics, and if I affix the Secondary tag Books to the Primary tag Culture and the Secondary tag Politics to the Primary tag News, you wouldn’t be able to tag your post both Books and Politics. Does this organizational principle seem sound?
I want to reiterate how out of touch is Governor Brown. Yesterday she saw no need to restrict bars and restaurants; almost immediately Washington did just that, as did various cities around the country. This morning she stood her ground; almost immediately, the federal government dropped their guidelines for maximum gatherings from 50 people to 10. It’s unconscionable, and its dereliction of duty.
When I went to bed last night, Oregon Governor Kate Brown had last said she was tending toward not closing restaurants and bars, at which point a bunch of cities and states then closed their restaurants and bars. She was supposed to talk to the press again this morning; did that happen? Is there a decision. Shut them down.
What I was trying to get at earlier is this: it’s precisely because our economy is structured in a way that keeps the American people on a day-to-day basis one or two paychecks away from being underwater that we have to take such drastic national measures to address the economic impact of the pandemic; and that if we made big, structural changes to our economy, individual families and communities already would be more resilient in the face of the next national emergency, and fewer such drastic national measures would be necessary.
Ton Zijlstra reminded me (scroll down} that I’d only just recently recommended Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day which “turns out to be the perfect thing to read in a rising pandemic”, and it’s true: the book literally is about a near future where post-pandemic, our social distancing measures have become routine well beyond any evidence they still are needed. Which isn’t, here and now, an argument against social distancing; it’s an argument for community in any case.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Batwoman, Supergirl, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, 9-1-1, Dispatches from Elsewhere, Briarpatch, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Masked Singer, Motherland: Fort Salem, The Magicians, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Star Trek: Picard, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Bold Type, and Better Things. I’m continuing season five of The Blacklist. I’m still slowly making my way through Diablero.
It’s profoundly depressing that Joe Biden seems almost intentionally determined to not see that a large reason why this national emergency is so unsettling for people, and why so many people are insecure in the face of it, is because of pre-existing systemic issues with our economy (including healthcare). He needs to be asked what he will do, once this crisis has passed, to fix these systemic issues so that when the next national emergency hits, fewer things are so pointedly unsettling, and fewer people have reason to feel immediately insecure.
Honestly, the biggest challenge for me is going to be not getting ahead of myself on SNAP purchases, unless I’m getting non-perishables that I’d normally get at some point along the way anyway. I’m already slightly ahead of where I should be mid-month, but I think it’s almost all accounted for by my usual staples (pasta, rice, oatmeal, frozen things, etc.) so I should in the end still be on a normal track; it’s just my biggest potential red flag area.
This is going to be tougher for me than I thought, this whole thing with SARS-CoV-2 and social distancing. I’d pretty quickly gotten my head around the idea that I’d have to call off my weekly trip to the zoo, but—ironically, given both my particular autistic spectrum and my introversion—the idea that I need to look at my other, very few “out and about” activities is proving a tougher sell. I am trying to focus on the weather forecast I saw for the next week here in Portland, which looks to be in the high-50s, which means I’ll try to replicate the walk I took the other evening. I need to find good spots around St. Johns where I can just take my own travel mug of coffee and my Kobo and sit and read. I’ve often wondered if Signal Station Pizza minds if people use their picnic tables for activities other than eating their pizza? The thing for me and my brain is while “predictability” is important, it tends to be predictability of the sort which I control—that’s the cognitive rigidity flip side here. You’d think that “just stay home” and “if you do have to go out, keep it simple and keep your distance” in a sense would be appealingly predictable, but the reality is that my inflexibility is about external forces; I’m plenty flexible if it’s about what I want to do. So, yeah. Surprisingly, although maybe it should not be, this is going to be tougher for me than I thought.
The reality of the novel coronavirus pandemic is sinking in as our infections continue to rise. Still, a number of people insist that alarm about the pandemic is political, whipped up by the media to weaken the president. When New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez begged people under 40 to stay out of bars, restaurants, and public spaces to keep from spreading Covid-19, Katie Williams, a former Ms. Nevada who was stripped of her title for putting pro-Trump postings on the non-political Ms. America social media accounts, responded “I just went to a crowded Red Robin and I’m 30. It was delicious, and I took my sweet time eating my meal. Because this is America. And I’ll do what I want.”
Mine Furor’s big concern apparently is trying to financially lure a German biotech firm to the U.S. so that a potential SARS-CoV-2 vaccine would be an American thing. Maybe we should be worrying more about the fact that we probably should all have started staying home a week earlier, especially given that the asymptomatic are a serious vector?
Speaking of libraries, OverDrive (the folks behind the Libby app) has told library and school partners that it’s working to arrange with publishers to provide “free and low-cost Simultaneous Use and Cost-Per-Circ ebook and audiobook collections to serve readers of all ages with low-cost, quality titles” during social distancing for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
I’m just now learning that The Nevers Podcast did an episode last December in which they discuss Goners, the Joss Whedon film meant to happen after Serenity that instead fell into development hell, and namecheck me in the process because for years I’d written up everything ever said about Goners and then later discussed the scripts themselves a bit.
So, I’ll be honest: I cringed a bit when I saw there was an episode of Star Trek: Picard featuring a visit to Riker and Troi—and then it was one of the most humanizing and humbling treatments of Jean-Luc. Cheers to both Will and Deanna being able to call Picard on his shit, and cheers, too, to that conversation between Picard and Troi about “ache”, which maybe is the warmest and most empathetic—I wonder who taught him that…—we’ve ever seen him. (Bonus points for the unrelated scene back on the Artifact that made me think, “Isn’t that just like a nun? Brings a sword to a phaser fight.”)
So then Rachel Maddow put up a graph of “daily new confirmed cases” for New York City with the Y-axis from 0 to 70 with the line reaching to 60, and the X-axis from 3/2 to 3/13; side-by-side with a graph of “daily new confirmed cases” for Italy and Spain with the Y-axis from 0 to 3000 with the line for Italy reaching to about 2750, and the X-axis from 2/23 to maybe 3/12. And then she said this while those graphs sat on screen together.
Here’s what I’ve realized: for the things I get out of Twitter, Twitter is very good at those things. For example, quick but in-depth input and information from experts when overwhelming bits of news are happening. Experts I would not otherwise known or have heard about; that’s a service I can use. Moving to some other social platform won’t give me that, no matter how much more granular and considerate might be the functions of those platforms (e.g. Mastodon). What I’m missing from my internet experience is that thing I’ve talked about over and over, on and off, since I started blogging again: that sense of place. Over the last decade, there was a nascent movement for a “slow web” (in the spirit of blogging, those links are in reverse chronological order), and while I’m not directly informed or inspired by that, some of what the “slow web” was about can be found in these distinctions I’ve been drawing, or linking to others who have drawn, between space and place—particularly apt are the twinned notions that place doesn’t scale and that speed disrupts place. What this all amounts to is that, yes, I’m seriously and studiously examining some web forum software, with the goal of luring people “from my various and very different stages in life” to take up residence, so to speak. The forum would operate on an invitation basis (in the early going, it looks like users would have to go through me to get invite codes; I think that feature is meant to change to user-generated invites later on), so that there’s never a sudden mass influx of new people. First it’s people I know, then it will be people they know, and so forth. It’s not so much that I’m after a slow web—although there is that to it—as it is that I miss the web of places, and if no one’s going to make a new place for me, I’ll have to make one myself, and hope that other people want to be there with me.
I’m beginning to think that my repeated Mastodon itches aren’t actually about Mastodon but about wanting something social media isn’t providing. Even if, as I’ve mused, all the interesting people I know from my various and very different stages in life joined one Mastodon instance, so there’d be a worthwhile local community, I don’t think a social stream is what I want, or the thing that is missing. Maybe instead of repeatedly and apparently without any satisfaction musing upon Mastodon, I should be looking into a good, old-fashioned web forum.
Oregon Zoo provides an update on zoo access during SARS-CoV-2 pandemic social distancing. It’s like they knew I was wondering, although I’ve since decided that since going all the way across town requires substantial use of public transit, I’m going to try and tough it out without my weekly mental health trip. I’m thinking about digging out an old archive drive and posting older zoo photos during our time of need.
Inexplicably, theme parks such as Disney’s are exempt from California’s social distancing advisory. Or, maybe not so inexplicably, since casinos also are exempt. Newsom says it’s due to “the complexity of their unique circumstances”, which is a euphemism you should file away for the next time you’re a governor trying not to offend major business interests in your state, I guess. (Disney employees are screwed, though.) Bob Iger even had the gall to say this: “If you think about the world today, what we create has never been more necessary or more important.”
Out of the listings for thirty autism papers I’d saved in Google Scholar, I found all but one—“Monotropism: An interest-based account of autism”—also is listed in Semantic Scholar. I’m not sure why that’s not listed, though, as Semantic Scholar does recognize the existence of the Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Maybe just not the so-called “Living Edition”?
Researchers and academics and the like: I’d started to use Google Scholar to try to organize listings of papers I think are useful to me as an actually-autistic person—or potentially useful to a mental health practitioner, should I ever again have one—but I’m trying to ween myself away from Google as much as I possibly can. What should I use instead?
There’s often this sense of deflation when I read studies on mental health and actually-autistic people, in that few of them seem overtly to describe or define what all the parties think should be the goal of mental health activities and therapies for actually-autistic people, but between the lines they frequently read as if the unstated—and, for the practitioners involved, common sense—goal is to make actually-autistic people more effective at behaving like “normal” people when they are out in the world.
Well, I guess this internet nostalgia reread isn’t happening. Two of the four books had been $2.99 and $3.99 as ebooks, but suddenly now are $11.99 and $14.99, respectively. I should have grabbed those two last month. I’m a little baffled at why they’d out of nowhere jack the prices on Small Pieces Loosely Joined and We’ve Got Blog, though.
Sometimes I feel like Oregon is the state most likely to think it’s all that while actually being just mediocre. Case in point: sitting between two major SARS-CoV-2 outbreak states and effectively doing nothing. The state even finally received more test kits literally just before running out but apparently has given no indication it intends increased testing.
Oh good. Several days ago I’d stopped taking my triumvirate of nasal sprays, because they’d seemed to become less and less effective. So, of course, this morning I am awake at 6:30am completely unable to breathe through my nose. It was bad enough I was going to have to force myself to stay up after feeding the cats because of a plumber coming this morning; now I lose even more sleep.
Watching part of Biden speaking, I think that’s what’s going to happen here is Biden’s job is to remind people what America is supposed to mean, and after Biden we get back to the work of making it live up to what it’s supposed to mean; doing some of the latter during a Biden administration might be sort of a bonus rather than an expectation.
Sometimes I get sad when I see all these bloggers mention how long their blogs have been around; I was blogging early, but across many different domains, with many gaps between. Today at least I realized I’ve been hosting Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer” uninterrupted for 18½ years, having launched the month after 9/11. The idea was to have an entirely cruft- and ad-free version online, and indeed the logs consistently indicate that it’s routinely used by educators.
Are you skeptical of Erica Newland’s suggestion that Mine Furor might use a ginned-up Reagan-era precedent to limit the free flow of information about SARS-CoV-2? The administration’s already stalled an intel report indicating “that the U.S. remains unprepared for a global pandemic”, and then ordered removed from immigration courts CDC posters about preventing the virus’ spread.
If the press corps does not act with suspicion toward the administration, I’m afraid it will fall back on its hoary habits, behaving, as it often does, with endless benefit-of-the-doubt. Even now, after knowing everything we know, the press corps still acts as if there’s something unknown, or unknowable, about how Trump will behave during a national emergency. Respectable journalists from the largest and most trusted news outlets continue, to this day, to demonstrate an unwillingness to accept that this president is no ordinary GOP partisan. Trump is a fascist with no hope of redemption.
Oregon is about to run out of SARS-CoV-2 tests, and as noted by Paul Bausch, “Currently they’re using lack of known cases to justify their decisions.” As further noted by Jeremy Howard (also via Bausch), “By the time the impact in your community is clearly visible, you’ve missed your best opportunity.”
I’m in a miserable state of mind because the maintenance request system my landlord uses rather than using the add-on to the resident portal they could use instead resulted this morning in my lurching out of bed to be ready for a plumber the system told me was arriving in twenty minutes despite just yesterday having set the appointment for tomorrow at 10:00am not today at 10:00am. So I had to scramble to be ready despite not yet being out of bed because morning inertia is heavier under the Mirtazapine while also sending messages asking what the hell was going on and, honestly, saying they were hurting me. Despite the message that sent me scrambling, it turns out the appointment is still for tomorrow, the system just didn’t let them delete the existing item saying it was today, a fact which they didn’t tell me about yesterday. But then even that turned out to be wrong because they then message saying they were able to delete it. Behind all this is the background that when the appointment-making began yesterday, they offered me two options and then told me after that the system requires them to enter a choice for me of at least two times even if they themselves intend to only actually offer one; which is how an initial appointment for today got entered into the system to begin with: I’d replied to the text asking me to choose. I am very tired, very angry, and very mentally aflounder. And I’ve told the landlord as much.
The other bit of digital housecleaning I’ve been doing is downloading and clearing all data out of my previous Google account. I’d originally intended this to be precursor to deletion, but then I realized all my old Blogger blogs are in there, and I’m not sure if I want to remove those, as they are easier to refer back to if they are online somewhere still.
I’ve said before that I consider hyperfocus to be a trade-off, not a superpower, but the upside was on exhibit today when I did a major cleaning in Keychain Access, conforming the email address I use to login to various websites, resetting a bunch of passwords, deleting a bunch of actual website accounts, and removing old logins that don’t exist anymore.
There’s a followup of sorts to my story about my first-ever username. Once upon a time, during the Ruby Vroom and Irresistable Bliss eras of the late and lamented Soul Coughing, the song “True Dreams of Wichita” was a particular touchstone for me because for a time I’d lived in Williamsburg and used a lyric in a short story I’d written in and about the late and lamented Williamsburg restaurant Oznot’s Dish. Other users from MindVox had taken to yelling, “Play ‘Wichita’ for slowdog!” at Soul Coughing concerts as far away as the U.K. Mike Doughty did, in fact, once reply, “We’re playing it all for slowdog!” None of this, so far as I know, has anything to do with why Doughty long ago blocked me on Twitter.
Perhaps the most surprising and stupid thing in this Vanity Fair piece about Mine Furor melting down over the uncontrollable COVID-19 narrative is that “a prominent Republican” revealed that Trump calls people who dip a chip, take a bite, and then dip it again “double dippers”—as if that’s literally not what everyone calls them.
When I first got online in 1993, my original username at MindVox was slowdog, for the Belly song; it spoke to feeling like my life was very much behind where it was supposed to be. (This is not, as Tanya Donelly explained, the meaning of the song.) It also became one of my earliest domains, which popped up in Wired—as “Sluggish Canine Enterprises”—because of the campaign against the Tandy Corporation crackdown on Bianca’s Smut Shack, of all things. Imagine my surprise when I discovered late this evening that a .dog TLD exists, and a certain something was untaken. It will cost me a year from now on the renewal fee, but for a registration fee of just $5.95, posterity demanded it.
There a massive political divide between the bosses and the workers in Silicon Valley. Workers at most tech companies are most likely to donate to Bernie Sanders, the only exceptions being those at Twitter, who donated most to Elizabeth Warren, and Netflix, where Pete Buttigieg was the favorite. Amazon’s warehouse workers, in particular, overwhelmingly support Sanders. Yet elites and venture capitalists say they’d likely back Donald Trump over Sanders. In Tuesday’s Democratic primary in California, this trend was reflected in the votes.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Batwoman, Supergirl, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, Black Lightning, Dispatches from Elsewhere, Briarpatch, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Masked Singer, Nancy Drew, The Magicians, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Star Trek: Picard, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Bold Type, and Better Things. I’m continuing season five of The Blacklist. I’ll probably finish up Diablero, in which case I’ll either start in on the backlog or start something new.
The only thing more fungible than cold, hard cash is privilege. The prodigal tech bro doesn’t so much take an off-ramp from the relatively high status and well-paid job he left when the scales fell from his eyes, as zoom up an on-ramp into a new sector that accepts the reputational currency he has accumulated. He’s not joining the resistance. He’s launching a new kind of start-up using his industry contacts for seed-funding in return for some reputation-laundering.
Here’s another pet peeve: pretending that the fact a moral position cannot preemptively address every and all potential and prospective application of or exception to its rule means we therefore cannot actually take a moral position—which effectively is what this comment (again, scroll down) is arguing.
Noah Brier, writing about COVID-19 for Why is this interesting?, laments, “[T]here is one idea I’m not seeing spread as much as I would expect and that’s moral obligation.” This being the world that it is, I can only think of Chidi Anagonye and The Good Place’s use of T. M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other. Anyway, Brier notes that “the reason to be prepared for quarantine is not so if things get bad out there you’ll be able to avoid the germs, it’s so if you get sick you can isolate yourself and keep the rest of the population […] safe from you”. What I’m saying is that if you end up sick and quarantined, you could do worse than to (re)watch The Good Place.
For as long as I’ve been online, I can’t stand the argument (scroll way down; I can’t link directly to the comment) that “nuance is very difficult to convey in media (mass or social)”—also substitute “irony” for “nuance”, just to round things out. It’s not difficult; people are just either too lazy or without care or sometimes perhaps even just in a rush. This argument ultimately is reducible solely to “nuance is difficult to convey”, which surely we don’t any of us actually believe? Somehow we’ve expanded the sense of “difficult” to encompass anything with which we just by choice can’t be arsed.
There’s a new ahead-of-print paper from Autism in Adulthood about anxiety in autistic adults that evaluates use of the newly-developed Anxiety Scale for Autism-Adults (ASA-A) meant to address limitations of the Anxiety Scale for Children-Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASC-ASD), which is geared toward children, and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), which is geared toward neurotypticals.
Lost in the shuffle of Super Tuesday and COVID-19 dominating the news here in the U.S.: lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee told a court that if a recent ruling stands, they could be left with little choice but to “direct its sergeant at arms to arrest current and former high-level executive branch officials for failing to respond to subpoenas”
Finally submitted a maintenance request for my running toilet, which I’d delayed for my sanity because I didn’t need them trying to schedule something while I was dealing with medical scans; I insist upon being home for all maintenance visits. Hopefully with the change of landlord comes a change of maintenance guy, because I’m not in the mood to once again be proselytized at by someone I’m required to let into my home.
What heightened the mood of those evenings on the roof, aside from our vertiginous height? Every proper rooftop offers a sense of seclusion, an “eye” on the street, along with the sense that you cannot be seen, though could be; other tenants might imminently appear on your rooftop or on those nearby. It is exactly this partial escape from the gaze of Jacobs’s “natural proprietors”—the blurring of that “clear demarcation” of public and private space—that gives the rooftop its delicate promise of mischief and freedom. Also its intimation of danger: there is no community policing here, just you policing your proximity to the edge. Thus, there pervades on the rooftop a mood of celebratory misdemeanor, further aided by the fact that it is uncolonized by purpose. There’s no one thing you’re supposed to do on a roof, and, more crucially, nothing that’s technically forbidden. It is a private space exposed to public view, and yet with fluid rules of public conduct.
I wish I could remember where I saw it the other day, or had bookmarked it, but I saw some reporter write that the “public option” not so long ago was the “far-left position”. It’s a good example of how the American political press is trapped in a funhouse mirror. The public option never was the far-left position, it effectively was a compromise position in an already-compromised bill that despite having Republican origins received essentially no Republican votes.
While this Christine M. Condo piece is a must-read for neurotypicals, I do wish actually-autistic people themselves would refrain from the “high-functioning” language. The reality is what Condo herself describes is not functioning, it’s faking—and it’s the kind of faking, what we call masking or camouflaging, that frequently leads to outright autistic burnout. When we ourselves use functioning labels, we ourselves give people the wrong impression about how we’re getting along. Our own language choices matter and we’re only confusing neurotypicals when we talk functioning rather than support and accommodation.
One thing that especially struck me in that Data for Progress report I mentioned earlier is the concept of a voter’s “magic wand” preference. In other words, if you ask them to put aside any consideration of what they think other voters would do, what would they do; what policy of which candidate is their real preference.
What’s especially depressing to me as what I guess we’re now referring to as a Warren Democrat is that I honestly believe that she is where the majority of the Democratic Party actually is, but Democrats have this nasty habit of not believing in themselves or fretting over what other people will think of them. Democrats defeated themselves in this primary campaign, and it’s just… sad-making and all-too common a thing in this party and it needs to stop.
This morning I had to get up so early, for me, that it made me feel nauseous. The fasting since midnight didn’t help. Ultrasound is done, I grabbed a latte and two hard-boiled eggs on my way out of Kaiser, and now I kill time until I do it all over again tomorrow for the CT scan; thankfully not as early.
For anyone who might have wondered what kind of person voluntarily would marry Stephen Miller, the man who wants anyone and everyone whom he considers to be the heathenous unwashed to just go off and die, the answer is Katie Waldman, who just today scolded a reporter for daring to ask the Vice President of the United States if even the uninsured would be able to get tested for COVID-19.
The mirtazapine might be working, but it doesn’t do anything for the autistic hangover the day after pushing oneself a bit. I had to force myself out of bed to go have breakfast down the street and now I feel like I just ran two miles. It’s possible then, that while I might not experience the overt symptoms of anxiety under the Mirtazapine Regime, the autistic impact on my physical and psychic self still needs to be factored into my activities. Were I employed, for example, there’d have been no being able to work today.
Oh, I guess I found the real reason not to follow Mastodon accounts from Micro.blog, other than being able to follow me back not working: apparently there’s no Conversation view of things Mastodon users post, because Micro.blog doesn’t pull those other posts in. So, back to trying to find a Mastodon instance for this.
It’s supremely weird that in suggesting that his resignation was more about his job performance than his sexist and/or batshit remarks, Margaret Sullivan (via Dan Barrett) seems not to recognize that they’re literally aspects of the same thing. The way in which he performed his job—by bullying and blustering his way through on-air segments—apparently is how he treated the world off the air, too. It’s all just… him: the loud, obnoxious white man who feels entitled to say whatever he wants, however he wants, whenever he wants, and to be respected by default simply because it’s his due station in life.
So, I’ve had such mixed feelings about Picard, because they keep walking right up to the line of how he’s, you know, kind of a pompous, entitled, self-important ass who also represented an increasingly out-of-touch power, but then not following through. He keeps encountering people he himself or he as a representative of the Federation screwed over, but as long as he makes mournful, apologetic noises, these wronged people just fall right back in line behind him. That was frustrating enough as it was on its own, but then Raffi puts herself in the same position regarding people from her past whom she’s wronged… and she’s rejected out of hand; nothing she can say is enough. Someone will say I’m making too much here, but it’s hard to avoid the optics: the old, white male authority figure continues, repeatedly, to get whatever he wants, even from people whose lives he’s ruined or, worse yet, ignored; while the black woman on her very first go of it is brushed off, pushed away… right back to Picard, no less; he wins again.
Today might have been the first evidence of the mirtazapine’s influence beyond its side effects, as my breakfast trip was my first-ever visit to Your Inn Tavern, and first-ever visits of course are anxiety-inducers. While it’s true that I circled the place from several different walks about of adjacent streets because the “open” sign wasn’t on even though all the online listings said it opened at 10:00am, and trying the door is the sort of thing in that situation that I need to talk myself into, that long-way-around process only carried a slight twinge in the chest. At no time did I experience what I think of as Elephant Foot (that sensation of firm and building pressure on one’s chest that feels like it’s coming from the outside, not the inside). Nor did anything beyond a twinge form when I finally did open the door, go in, and sit down. I don’t want to overplay it, because while I’m only just now in the period where the mirtazapine should be having an impact upon my anxiety, this is the only situation so far that would typically present a risk of overt anxiety signs since I started on it. So, we’ll see.
Not for nothing, but in fact I do take issue with phrases such as the Twitter community or the contention that one exists, because I think it devalues the word. (We all know my various pet peeves about not devaluing words by diluting them into nonspecificity.) Twitter isn’t a community, its a userbase. There are communities—plural—on Twitter, to varying degrees, but there’s neither a Twitter community, a Facebook community, nor a Tumblr community.
Colin’s thoughts on commuting bring back dismal memories of my last job, a Vocational Rehabilitation placement, which required getting up early enough to get cleaned, get dressed, eat breakfast, and catch a 7:00am light rail for an hourish commute. The job itself only was four hours a day, but the physical and psychic burden of that commute upon my still-only-recently-diagosed autistic self was part of what led to the crash-and-burn which ended my employment after just six months.
Twenty-three years ago today in a U-Haul driven by two friends from online who came down to get me, I arrived in Portland from San Francisco where I’d lived for just under a year and a half, gotten mugged just three months in, and never gained any traction. The trip included finally touching the Pacific Ocean, sleeping in the box of the truck wedged among all my stuff, and singing of the Geritown strip mall to the tune of “Funky Town”. It’s been both uphill and downhill ever since, I’ve been at least five different, noticeably inconsistent incarnations of Bix along the way, and I’ve little sense of what I’m doing today.
The Magicians is ending and I am sad; and there won’t be another show like it and it was the surprise of the 2015 📺 season for me because I’m not a “magic” stories guy; and this is especially disheartening because the end of last season made a huge deal out of the story not always being about the usual person and so to end it now seems almost a slap in the face to that; and someone needs to sic Margo on whoever are the gods of television.
M.G. Siegler identifies one problem with the modern rise of newsletters (via Andy McIlwain): “inundation”. My own problem isn’t so much that “there are too many newsletters that I now subscribe to and want to read” but that newsletters do not yet seem to have adopted, say, the manual discovery engines of the old—and hopefully the new—blogosphere. One of the greatest and most simplest things a platform like Substack could do is build a way for newsletterers to offer a blogroll emailroll of other newsletterers they consider worthy of note. Beyond even that, I still believe there’s sense in allowing Substack writers to “bundle” their newsletters together, or for more successful newsletterers to “sponsor” less successful ones, upon mutual agreement. The former idea helps address problems with finding newsletters you might find worth your time; the latter ideas help smaller newsletters find an audience when that audience can’t afford individual paid subscriptions to every single engaging newsletter out there.
This afternoon I was struck by an anecdote in the eighth chapter of Frank Chimero’s breezy The Shape of Design in which he describes encountering a rendering bug in what for all intents and purposes and maybe in actuality is Instagram; the profile photos of people who had followed Chimero or “liked” his posts were shown grossly out of proportion to the design’s intent.
We are aware of reports that some of our Asian students were targeted and discriminated against in connection to the coronavirus. This is unacceptable and contrary to our values of racial equity and social justice. Fear of the outbreak has fueled xenophobic remarks and behaviors in the weeks since the first case of coronavirus. It is important to distinguish medical precautions from racist and discriminatory behaviors. At PPS, we value racial equity and social justice. Our responsibility is to provide welcoming, safe, and inclusive schools where every student can learn and grow to reach their potential, and we do not tolerate hate speech or acts of discrimination. This is especially important at a time when fears about the virus can too easily foster suspicion without regard for facts. Please keep close to our core values, continue to treat everyone in our community with respect and recognize the dignity and humanity of everyone.
Not for nothing, but should Biden walk into the Democratic National Convention with a plurality but not a majority, not only will so-called moderates magically no longer hold in contempt Sanders’ argument that the candidate with a plurality but not a majority should be the nominee, they won’t even see or admit to the hypocrisy of it; moderates are always in the right, you see.
Dispatches from Elsewhere is like if you’d sat down to do The Lost Experience only to wake up in Push, Nevada wondering if you’re The Prisoner or just playing The Game. I fully admit that, yes, Octavio is correct: I am Peter, and that one time I did the “Randonaut” thing (a.k.a. the Fatum Project), part of me could feel that wish that there really were some hidden, mysterious experience lurking in world waiting for you, if you’d just take that right step toward it. Really, what I’m saying is that the show is working for me, or perhaps on me. No one is more surprised.
It’s true that both the best and the worst thing after an episode of Doctor Who airs is taking a stroll through Twitter to watch all the retrogradists whinging about how it’s been ruined. No story that manages both to reach back forty-four years to recognize the “Morbius” incarnations and to restore show’s original eponymous mystery of just who is the Doctor can rightfully be accused of “destroying the canon”.
I do think there’s been some leveling off in the purely-mirtazapine fatigue, but it also seems that if I don’t overcome morning inertia when the 8:00am alarm goes off to feed the cats the mirtazapine makes it far easier to sleep past noon. Breakfast, in this case, was the no-brainer effort of instant oatmeal, frozen sausage, and reheated coffee from last night. The final episode of Seven Worlds, One Planet was watched. This afternoon I got out for a latte and a piece of quiche down the street at Chop (while getting in some more of Semicolon), but it wasn’t my preferred quiche consistency; so, I did have lunch but it was underwhelming and right at the edge of my sensory issues when it comes to food.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Doctor Who, Dispatches from Elsewhere, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, Black Lightning, Briarpatch, The Masked Singer, Nancy Drew, The Magicians, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Bold Type, and Better Things. I’ve started season five of The Blacklist, and am back to watching Diablero.
NOTE: The word was introduced by a group of virologists as a short article “Coronaviruses” in the “News and Views” section of Nature (vol. 220, no. 5168, November 16, 1968, p. 650): “…avian infectious bronchitis virus has a characteristic electron microscopic appearance resembling, but distinct from, that of myxoviruses. Particles are more or less rounded in profile…there is also a characteristic ‘fringe’ of projections 200 Å long, which are rounded or petal shaped, rather than sharp or pointed, as in the myxoviruses. This appearance, recalling the solar corona, is shared by mouse hepatitis virus….In the opinion of the eight virologists these viruses are members of a previously unrecognized group which they suggest should be called the coronaviruses, to recall the characteristic appearance by which these viruses are identified in the electron microscope.”
The other day I’d needed to reboot my Xfinity modem and figured I’d go ahead and install the xFi app. It proceeded to “upgrade” my WiFi security without first asking, but I didn’t have time at the time to figure out how to disable the “upgrade”. It turns out, this is the reason I’ve been having trouble with Winno, the closest thing I’ve found to a replacement for the late, lamented Breaking News app that operated out of some arm of NBC but wasn’t restricted to NBC as a source. Winno is curated by hand, not by algorithm, and it’s been pretty great since I started using it when I stopped “hanging out” on Twitter all day. There buried in the xFi security log was a listing for having blocked access to Winno’s domain, along with a domain related to Feedbin. I’ve turned off all that “upgraded” security nonsense. The moral of the story here is don’t let Xfinity control your WiFi security and do use Winno to stay abreast of the news.
Tonight I realized that Portland General is interrupting power on my street for up to six hours between 8:00am and 3:00pm on Super Tuesday and thought, “How dare they.” They I realized that six hours without cable or internet during the part of the day where there will be no actual news probably is more of a godsend.
Researchers argue they’ve found that while “the political differences between urban and rural people could not be reduced” to demographics (via Joe Cortright), “[p]opulation density and distance […] did exert an impact on party identification”, and suggest that “population size structures opinion quite differently in small towns compared with large cities”.
So, this is not how you instill confidence: Governor Jay Inslee issues a press release on the COVID-19 death in Washington state referring to “his family and friends”. Local and national press then report that a man has died. President Trump announces at a press conference that the deceased was a woman in her 50s. Inslee retracts and reissues his press release to refer to “their family and friends”. So, either state authorities or federal authorities got something wrong here. Feeling safe?
On the one hand, I’m no fan of Jack Dorsey (who doesn’t seem to understand that his favorite literary character is a fraudster and confidence man), but the “activist investor” which just bought a large portion of Twitter with the aim of ousting Dorsey also is a “Republican mega-donor”. David Johnson wonders “where this would take Twitter” and I can think of only one answer: Facebook.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the side effects of the mirtazapine is vivid dreams, and Midsommar is an interesting 🎥 to have watched given that psychic context. Its techniques of disorientation I hope were remarked upon at the time of its release, and heaven knows what to expect when I go to sleep tonight. I suppose, from a creative standpoint, one could only hope for dreams which rise to Midsommar’s level of attentiveness to careful framing, deliberative camera movement, and performative edits, but probably I could do with surviving the night absent any crushed heads or empty faces.
Here’s what I have to say to the Democratic officials, including 93 superdelegates, willing to burn down the house in order to stop Bernie Sanders: while I think Sanders is overzealous in his “don’t you dare” proclamations, it’s profoundly insulting, for all intents and purposes, to be conspiring—or at least openly announcing your willingness to do so—to stop him at any cost.
It is somewhat flummoxing and more than a bit exhausting that in 2020 someone still needs to explain that it’s okay for kids to read comics. (No surprise: it’s a librarian doing the explaining.) Let me let you in on a little secret: a lot of people my age in many ways not only learned to read from comics but just as crucially learned to want to read from comics. Want to grow a reader? Stop jackbooting your kid’s reading decisions.
Is there any reason to switch from Sprint to Xfinity Mobile? I could have the same setup I have now for the same price, so it’d only make sense if there’s some obvious benefit. Otherwise, I’ll stay where I am and continue pondering that upgrade fee which gets me a better iPhone camera setup for less than a dollar more per month.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I use the word agnostic it’s not to be “friendly” or because the word atheist is “scary”. I use it because it’s what I am: a devout agnostic. To me, atheism carries too much of its own belief load, in that it suggests its own certainty. I am not certain, except that I am certain neither I nor anyone else can be certain. So, I am agnostic on the matter. Parenthetically, don’t even get me started on the so-called New Atheists, who mostly are just a bunch of smug, selfish, racist assholes—and all-too-often dirturbingly rabid Islamophobes to boot.
On one and the same day, I came across Tom Whyman on “the spectre of the wallet inspector [which] is summoned whenever someone falls for an obvious grift” and Barry M. Mitnick on how “con artists are especially skillful at what social scientists call framing, telling stories in ways that appeal to the biases, beliefs and prominent desires of their targets”.
Current best-guess sense of how the fatigue side effect of the mirtazapine is affecting me is that I think it’s mostly accentuating my existing state. So if I engage in activities which tend to deplete me, it’s making me feel more depleted than usual. This in itself is not l, I don’t think, an argument against the mirtazapine, but I also just need more time to see if that’s what’s happening. It definitely hit me more that first week then it’s been hitting me the last several days, so I think there was an adjustment period where the fatigue effect was more pronounced on its own?
Someday I will find a Mastodon instance that feels right and fits me. It will either be a matter of the domain, or one of the site-local community. I’ve currently got accounts on four different instances, but nothing’s really stuck. I’m aware that I can follow Mastodon accounts from my Micro.blog account; despite the point of federation and interoperability, it’s hard for me not to want the activities to remain separate.
My difficulty, ultimately, with calling potentially-radical formal experiments “blogging”—no matter how far they might end up deviating from what we know as blogging—is that words have to mean things. It’s sort of like how I feel about “reading”. New things don’t have to usurp old words just to be valid, and in fact if they do so they can disruptively dilute the meaning, and therefore the specificity of use, of the word.
I admit that I find public proclamations that one doesn’t blog about the news to be akin to public proclamations that one doesn’t own a television. To me, a fair amount of the news is “my world” or “things happening in the realm with which I live”, and discussing it isn’t just “hive mind”. Which isn’t at all to say that one somehow is obligated to do so. It’s the weird public pronouncement that seems a bit la-dee-da to me, not the decision itself. I mean: bully for you?
Kuhn’s discovery prompted research into the plight of three of Kauai’s six remaining honeycreeper species: the anianiau, the Kauai amakihi, and the akekee. His hunch was correct — the three species now sing much more similar songs, with less complex vocal signals, due to the decreasing size of their populations, especially among mature birds that pass on song repertoires to younger offspring. It’s the first time this type of behavior among endangered birds has been recorded, says Kristina Paxton, lead author of a paper on honeycreepers published last year in the journal Royal Society Open Science, and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
Moderate Democrats have been consistently inconsistent for decades. They have been rightfully critical of the prospect of a progressive presidential nominee: A progressive could alienate centrist voters, drive up voting rates among conservatives, and imperil the reelection chances of House Democrats in districts Trump won in 2016. Moderate Democrats have wrongfully refused to be self-critical of the prospect of a moderate presidential nominee: A moderate could alienate progressive voters into not voting or voting third party, drive down the voting rates of the party’s younger and nonwhite base, and fail to win back young or liberal white working-class swing voters who swung from Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. To be a progressive in a party with a moderate is like being on a team with someone who sees all your deficiencies and does not see any of his own deficiencies, who always takes the credit when he wins, and never accepts blame when he loses.
Warren’s unbridled bellicosity Wednesday night offered an unconventional answer to that question. Some saw her performance as an act of desperation: a flagging candidate seeking discount media coverage with a parade of quotable moments. Or it may have been more strategic: driving a stake through the heart of the revenant stop-and-frisk architect, as a televised show of devotion for progressive and black voters. Either way, as countless postdebate write-ups have already pointed out, it was a return to the “fighter” identity that Massachusetts voted for in 2012. But that’s underselling its novelty.
Colin Walker (discussing a purported “text renaissance”) loops back to an earlier discussion about Dave Winer being dissatisfied with blogging. This is back when I made the observation that for all intents and purposes what Winer is doing these days is disavowing the blog and writing a bletter instead—by which I meant drafting his daily newsletter in real-time and in public.
Despite the general understanding that internet comments are an existential exhaustion, I feel (for now?) vaguely excited for replies on Micro.blog. If you missed it earlier, Manton also put up a help page about it. My one caveat for those looking to turn this feature on: typically in real community design, moderation tools aren’t an after-thought or something to be provided later, but there aren’t any here. It’s all-or-nothing, and Micro.blog’s own sense of decorum is the only thing keeping replies on your blog from becoming problematic.
The obvious and fundamental problem with Bernie Sanders’ plurality plan for the Democratic National Convention is that if all the delegates outside that plurality could agree on a single alternative candidate, that candidate would then have a majority of delegates. So, is Bernie Sanders saying that majority should not rule at the convention? Are we not supposed to find this somewhat… Trumpian?
It can’t just have been fatigue plus hyperfocus drain, because it’s coming up on 7:00pm, I’ve had breakfast, I’ve had lunch, and (just recently) I’ve had dinner, and I basically feel like I am sick. The question is, am I sick, or is this the mirtazapine, or have I just hit some sort of perfect storm of my pre-existing fatigue issues, the exertion of having left the apartment at all today, the hyperfocus drain, and the mirtazapine? All I know is, I feel at least a bit like shit.
Currently shaking from having hyperfocused myself well past needing to supplement the pancake and bacon I had at Slim’s with some additional nutrition. I went out for bar breakfast because this morning I awoke still somewhat fatigued from yesterday’s fatgue, and then came home and worked on that review of Lurking, and when I was done I had that depleted feeling of chills and whatnot. I’ve inhaled a bowl of cereal while getting a can of soup on the stove to heat up, and then I think as soon as that’s had, I need to go be horizontal in a dark bedroom for awhile.
In some sense, it’s interesting that I had to pause my reading of Building and Dwelling: Ethics in the City in order to read Lurking: How a Person Became a User (the latter suddenly came through for me on NetGalley), in that a significant part of why I’ve wanted to read the former is my casual interest in ways to apply urban planning lessons, or at least language, to online communications and communities.
Disinformation attacks this consensus. It warns us that the Democrats are ushering in “socialism” to America, but this warning is a throwback to Reconstruction, when black men began to vote just as the government instituted national taxes. Racist opponents began to argue that African Americans were voting to redistribute the wealth of hardworking white taxpayers into their own pockets through government projects. In this telling, giving men of color civil rights and a voice in their own government meant a redistribution of wealth. In 1871, opponents of black voting began to call this “socialism.”
Manton mentioned the much-anticipated ability to show replies on your blog posts, so of course I peeked at how it worked and at least for the moment have it running here, too. I do wonder how, or I guess if, this might affect how people reply to things in Timeline, since those replies no longer are restricted to appearing in Timeline? I haven’t decided yet what my decision will be here, because I have moderation questions, but for the time being I’ll leave it active.
So, Friday’s fatigue bled into Saturday which bled into today, and I had a hard crash for a couple of hours late this afternoon into evening. Literally I looked up from what I was going on the laptop around 5:00pm and realized that my entire upper body felt heavy. I moved to the bedroom, and was out like a light.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Doctor Who, Batwoman, Supergirl, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, Black Lightning, Briarpatch, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Masked Singer, Nancy Drew, The Magicians, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Bold Type, and Seven Worlds, One Planet. I’ve dropped the pointless 9-1-1: Lone Star. I’ve paused season four of The Blacklist to watch the intervening, and only, season of The Blacklist: Redemption, and am continuing to watch Diablero. I’ve put I Am Not Okay With This into the queue but don’t know yet if I’ll start in on it when it drops this week, given my streaming backlog.
The streets in Lego’s city sets had space for cars, trains, even tiny storm drains but no designated space for zero-emission, human-powered vehicles like bikes. Even worse, it appeared that Lego’s streets were becoming more hostile toward pedestrians over time. As compared to Lego sets from years ago, the cars seem to have grown larger — evolving from four- to six-studs wide — and the roads appeared to be getting wider, while the sidewalks were getting more and more narrow.
I need to thank Jay Springett for calling my attention to the fact that while it’s all well and good to be impressed with “the Volume” used for The Mandalorian, a couple years ago filmmaker Michael Plescia documented his journey developing the same approach as a means to walk away from the “no” everyone gave him because of the costs of green screen and compositing and go get his movie made on his own.
“I would love to hear a believable explanation for all this,” challenges Heather Cox Richardson, “that does not lead to the conclusion that Republicans are willing to invite Russia—or any foreign power— into our elections, so long as it means they win.” Richardson’s newsletter, which I only just found, has been a daily accounting of the dismantling of the republic. If you’re into that sort of thing.
I’m getting what at the moment is a vague historical urge to do a re-read of The Weblog Handbook by Rebecca Blood and Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger, possibly because I’m about to finish Building and Dwelling by Richard Sennett which means I’m going to have to blog about Lurking by Joanne McNeil, and I feel like maybe a refresher on what I was reading back in the early 2000s might first be in order?
I’ve adjusted my 📺 lineup and have decided not to start in on Hunters given that I remain behind on The End of the F*ing World, Glitch, The Man In the High Castle, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, but I’m definitely continuing with Diablero, which is pretty terrific, although it’d be nice if Netflix would stop dropping the subtitle track every few minutes.
One of the mirtazapine side effects I haven’t discussed much is vivid dreams and, yes, I very much am having them. I don’t necessarily remember them any better but they are noticeably clearer and, curiously, much more well-structured as stories, or at least they have a much clearer narrative premise. It’s also been much more likely that at least two different dream sessions over the course of the night will be connected by theme or subject matter.
While the concept is much older, of course, my first awareness of rear projection in filmmaking was James Cameron’s use of it in Aliens. I’ve not seen The Mandalorian, but through its production the idea has come a long way and been transformed into “the Volume”, an immersive set of LED screens generating adaptive environments via the Unreal Engine which can be filmed directly during performance.
Mostly, I maybe need to learn not to post politics before, oh, say noon or so. The thing below is completely wrong. I don’t know how Warren got the “two paragraphs” thing, unless she did what I did: load the main page and not notice the several links to specific sections at the end of each paragraph.
At some point seemingly in every debate, someone, usually Buttigieg, hits Medicare for All over its tax increase. Sanders, usually, tries in response to argue that total costs go down. Is there a reason not a single moderator ever injects themselves to ask the obvious and very simple question: If, indeed, total costs go down, does it matter that the costs which remain are being paid in the form of taxes? As near as I can tell (I did skip two debates, so correct me here if I’m wrong) not one moderator has bothered to ask Buttigieg that question, and it seems like it’s literally the crux of the matter.
Medical updates: I’m hoping to have a decent enough sense of whether the fatiguing side effects of the mirtazapine are abating to be able to get in my first shingles vaccine shot sooner rather than later. The first week of March brings a followup ultrasound to check on the gallbladder polyps. After months of pestering them, yesterday my doctors finally ordered the followup CT scan (not yet scheduled) of my lymph nodes.
Last October, however, I received a letter from CFI suggesting that “we part ways” and dismissing me from my role as co-host of Point of Inquiry. I believe the dismissal was a response to my outspoken views on CFI’s negligence toward matters of race and diversity — issues that the organization has often sidestepped in the past. If that is indeed the case, it sends a discouraging message. At a moment when racist pseudoscience is making a disturbing comeback, skeptics shouldn’t shy away from talking about race — and we can’t afford to overlook the white privilege among our own ranks.
“Republican senators affirmatively voted to allow the president to use his official powers,” wrote Adam Serwer on Wednesday, “to suppress the opposition party, [and] to purge government employees who proved more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump.” The very next day, reporters revealed that Trump had fired the acting Director of National Intelligence for briefing congressional Democrats on Putin’s continuing electoral support for Trump, replaced him with an inexperienced yes-man, and gave that yes-man a senior advisor who was Devin Nunes’ chief gaslighter on Russia.
So our intelligence agencies briefed everyone that Russia again is interfering in a U.S. election to help Trump, and he gets so angry that Congress, too, was told that he pushes out his acting Director of National Intelligence, and, further, makes a Russia gaslighter a senior advisor to the new acting DNI, whose own only qualification is being a Trump loyalist. I wonder if Senator Collins is still snowing the press with the grift of her aspirations of Trump learning his lesson.
In today’s bulletin from life inside the Mirtazapine Regime, while I wasn’t sure if the zoo would happen today because of the somewhat unpredictability of the medication’s fatiguing side effects, I did end up pulling myself out for a breakfast sandwich and latte, and got on the bus to the zoo. Despite flagging a bit when we got stuck waiting at a train crossing, in the end the excursion fatigued me about as much as it usually did prior to starting in on the mirtazapine. I won’t hasten to generalize from today; I’ll just say it would be nice if the increased fatigue over the last week turned out just to be an adjustment period.
There’s value to being sociable, but one of the perks of having your own personal site is freedom from follower counts, likes, claps, and other popularity contests that reduce your self-expressions into impressions. It’s nice to know when people like your work, or find it valuable, but the competition created from chasing impressive numbers results in unequal power structures, clickbait, and marginalised people having their work appropriated without credit. A personal site means your work can still be shared but is also more likely to stay in that location, at the same URL, for much longer. You also get the final say over who can comment on your work in your own space. Wave goodbye to the trolls, they can go mutter to themselves under their own bridges.
I’m sure there must have been drama that I’ve missed, but today I witnessed my first Micro.blog conflict, and, worse, one that’s apparently resulted in the departure of one of the site’s only people of color. (For more on what went down and what Sameer reacted to, here’s the original thread, minus his posts.) It’s worth just going ahead and following Sameer Vasta via RSS.
“When the mayor says he apologized, listen very closely,” said Elizabeth Warren at the debate. “The language he used, about ‘how it turned out’. Now, this isn’t about how it turned out. This is about what it was designed to do to begin with.” And that’s the exact moment at which I went and made the room to donate another $10 to the Warren campaign. My only other campaign contribution this cycle was… to Warren, last April.
Even if it’s not true that Mine Furor offered Assange a pardon if he exonerated Russia for its election interference, in a sane world the fact that Dana Rohrabacher told Assange this would mean that somewhere there’s an active counter-intelligence investigation into Rohrabacher. Since we don’t live in a sane world, he needs to be subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee.
All you really need to know about this ridiculous Neal Simon piece arguing that a Romney/Bloomberg ticket is what “America deserves” is that Simon, according to his Wikipedia page, has “described his fiscal positions as being closer to that of the Republican platform and his social positions as closer to those of the Democratic platform”—a logical incompatability that’s at the heart of most if not all so-called “centrist”, “independent”, or “moderate” thinking. The social positions of the Democratic Party in fact fundamentally are at odds with Republican economics; you literally cannot engender Democratic social positions using Republican fiscal positions. What’s really happening with most “centrist”, “independent”, “moderate” thinking is an insistence that one’s actions don’t define one’s character, only one’s (professed and purported) beliefs do. This sort of “independence” is nothing more than a psycholgical grift hiding harsh rightwing policies behind a hollow empathy cosplay.
Once when posting about genrefication I wondered where I’d be shelved given that an NYPL quiz about Dewey placed me in 636: Pets & farm animals. Kimberly Hirsh mentioned at the time that fiction tends to be genrefied more than nonfiction, so today I was super-curious about a post about genrefying nonfiction in some Wisconsin libraries. I was struck by this kicker.
The fatigue that came with life under the Mirtazapine Regime seems to be lessening but it’s paid a visit post-breakfast and I want to both relax in the bedroom instead of the living room and be able to watch Netflix while working on the laptop. Luckily, I found a Safari extension that enables macOS’ picture-in-picture feature for Netflix videos.
I come to you, wide-eyed, and with the joy of learning something new. You know that feeling. It’s almost like a teen-spring crush. It’s thrilling, exciting, full of awkward moments, triumphs, and failures. I have that annoying energy and “whywhywhy” of a toddler. You are an established community with well-worn hats. Many of you have seen it all, and have seen people like me come and go. People like me haven’t yet proven our mettle, and some of you may be wary of sharing your precious good energy. I get you. I do. I’m a more seasoned person in sewing communities, and while I love nothing more than to bring new people to the fold, it can be exhausting, and at times even soul-crushing.
Did some more CSS tinkering (mostly around the navigation menu and the search box), and made a custom sitemap.xml template because I’d forgotten to turn off my replies to others being published to a section of my blog, and they were in theory getting indexed because of that. So, I finally changed that setting in my account and removed any replies URLs from appearing in my sitemap.
This thread is powerful because it invites us to imagine being haunted by this weird rat-like boy your whole fucking life, watching on in horror as he actually comes somehow close to forcing the world into alignment with his wildest West Wing fantasies. But it also serves a more specific critical purpose: it gets to the heart of Mayor Pete’s weirdness. Indeed, Buttigieg is perhaps the weirdest politician to emerge in U.S. politics since Donald Trump. Stilted and curiously empty, he is a man without qualities whose politics fall somewhere between the vague and the underwhelming and the obviously, callously brutal; whose motivations seem to be set back somehow at a remove from our own. Whose campaign platitudes often have the slightly otherworldly sense of something generated by an AI; who can “win” the Iowa caucus just by proclaiming that he has. Given everything, it is perhaps unsurprising just how much speculation there has been that Buttigieg is in the CIA.
People trying to argue “context” for these Bloomberg remarks don’t seem to notice that even in-context they are pretty problematic. For one thing, no: he isn’t “quoting someone else”. He starts to quote a hypothetical person in “the middle of the country”—itself a well-defined dog whistle—but then switches the structure of his remark to an observation. In that observation, he refers to transgender people disparagingly, and even if he still means to be using “someone else’s” derogatory language, he does not actually offer an aside that the language is derogatory or inappropriate. This, too, is a dog-whistly attempt not to alienate people who don’t find the language derogatory but simply (and incorrectly) factual. What’s more, he then makes the argument that “most people” just care about things like health care, education, and safety. Again, this construction of “most people” is the same dog-whistle as “real Americans”. These “social issues” like transgender equality, he says, have “little relevance to people who are trying to live in a world that’s changing because of technology”—as if transgender people aren’t in fact included among people trying to live in a world that’s changing because of technology. This is the context which supposedly saves these remarks?
This should maybe just be another addendum to the last post, but: I sure am existentially tired of getting all of five minutes breathing-room to appreciate (if not necessarily enjoy) successfully tackling some necessary but exceedingly difficult thing before this one family member always, inevitably, inescapably threatens me over the things I haven’t yet accomplished. This is a fucking toxic way to live.
Now that a family member is making conservatorship noises at me because the flow of my management of medical, psychological, and social services needs isn’t happening at the “right” pace, let me be clear: if there’s one way to turn me into someone experiencing suicidal ideation, it’d probably be to take away what little control and self-determination I have, because at that point I’d no longer see a point. So maybe they should take a moment to walk this one back.
By the terms of this study of success in autistic adults, I should be living independently, be working, and have multiple friendships. Instead, while I am living independently I am not supporting myself, and I do not have a job; arguably I do have multiple friendships albeit neither deep nor close ones.
Dragging, like I am every day right now, but also because I pushed myself past the point of any sense of wisdom to go buy laundry detergent and ant-barrier spray, take out the compost and recycling, and then vacuum up all the cat hair. So now I’m pushing my budget to have a Margherita (fresh basil, fresh mozzarella cheese, olive oil, parmesan cheese, red sauce, tomatoes) delivered from Pizza Nostra.
Dan Barrett’s newsletter tips me to the imminent I Am Not Okay With This, from basically the same folks who brought us The End of the F*ing World, which I still need to finish, and now probably will get to soon. Not Okay is going onto my watch list and drops at the end of the month. The very last moment of the trailer is sort of a minor treasure in itself.
I don’t think that I thought that “social was a panacea”, and I don’t mean by that to say that I thought better than Colin Walker; I mean in fact that I doubt I really thought about it at all at the time. When social media (as opposed to the slightly-earlier iteration that was “merely” social networking) was taking off, I mostly was out of my blogging phase (and so my thinking-about-the-web phase) and well into my fandom phase. (In fact, although I wasn’t using it myself until 2008, I think my first knowledge of Twitter came from fans using it during the Writers Guild of America strike in 2007.) As I think back at it all now, I think that transitionary period from social networking to social media is the point at which activity on the internet truly began its shift from activities of place to those simply of space. It’s that sense of placeness in what we choose to do here that I think is at the heart of that which some folks are trying to revive.
If this general tiredness and fatigue is going to be a persistent feature of life under the Mirtazapine Regime, two things are guaranteed: my housework is not going to get done even more than it doesn’t get done already, and my emotional fuse is going to run very short. When my resources get low, I yell a lot at things that are not cooperating (e.g. a box of trash bags, a coffee scoop, or a broom) and my rate of yelling has increased noticably since the Regime began at bedtime on Wednesday. I’m still waiting on word back from my primary care physician on what to expect in this regard, but one has to wonder about the comparative trade-off of decreasing one’s anxiety while increasing one’s enervation and general volatility.
The other day when I reposted an old thing about Inception, it linked the old blog where it had originally appeared, and today I remembered how much I liked the color I used in that site’s very-minimalist scheme (I’d also used it in an earlier incarnation of a single-topic blog where I discussed the progress of Joss Whedon’s script for Goners or its lack thereof), and so today I changed the --main-accent variable in my blog’s CSS to #006868, which Colorbook refers to simply as “dark green” but always seemed to me more of a gray-green.
It’s true that I’m primarily reading Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City looking for interesting observations about urban planning and cities that might have analogues when it comes to online communities, but along the way I am learning about some fascinating projects in the former realm. For instance, the work of Alejandro Aravena to build half of a good house rather than a whole bad house. In essence, rather than taking the available $X and building a small house that will never really fulfill a family’s needs, you build half of a larger, better house which comes with an empty space into which the family themselves can expand as they see fit and when they can afford to do so.
The road to this place started in the 1950s, as a small group of Republicans who hated FDR’s New Deal insisted that any government intervention in the economy to make sure the haves did not dominate the have-nots was “socialism.” As voters kept siding with government activism, these leaders became convinced we did not know what was good for us and began to suppress the vote and gerrymander our congressional districts so they could stay in power. They turned to racism and sexism to rally white male voters who liked programs that expanded opportunity until they became associated with people of color and women.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Doctor Who, Batwoman, Supergirl, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, 9-1-1: Lone Star, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Masked Singer, The Magicians, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Bold Type, Briarpatch, Hunters, and Seven Worlds, One Planet. I’m continuing season four of The Blacklist, and have started watching Diablero.
I’m in my second year living in St. Johns and twenty-third year living in Portland. I’m in my fifty-first year of being alive and my fourth year as a diagnosed autistic. I’m in my third year of trying to figure out my health and my second year of trying to find a psychoconsultant both knowledgeable about adult autism and covered by my insurance. I’m in my first real year of a return to blogging. I’m early in my first year of my first-ever experience taking medication for anxiety. I’m in my nth year of not feeling like much more than a failure and a fuckup.
Next, take it one step further and add captions to everything. You’ll find it helps with mumbling actors and unfamiliar accents, you’ll enjoy catching side remarks in your favorite shows that you never noticed before, and you’ll discover the hidden joys of surprisingly creative and humorous audio descriptions. Most importantly, you can crunch away on snacks as loudly as you want without fear of missing anything.
Asleep by midnight, up at 8:00am to feed the cats then back to bed to snooze the alarm until 10:00am. Out to breakfast at 10:30am, not seated until closer to 11:00am, back home by just before noon. By around 1:00pm, back into bed until after 4:00pm. This has been your bulletin from Day Three deep within the Mirtazapine Regime.
Andrew Weissmann was just on The Rachel Maddow Show arguing that the dissolution of the rule of law under Attorney General Barr isn’t a Democratic or Republican matter, because, effectively, members of both parties have in the past when it comes to the rule of law operated in good faith and with fairness. Which is all well and good, but it ignores the demonstrable fact that the present-day Republican Party has wholesale bought into the Trumpism under which Barr is operating. Weissmann’s attempt to “neither-side” this is just the flipside of the nonsense that is both-sidesism. It very much is a political and partisan matter right now, and that’s entirely the fault of the Republican Party for abandoning even any semblance of good faith and fairness, and all Weissmann is doing is giving them an out they not only haven’t earned but one on which they’ve decidedly turned their backs.
Because the public is listening to what’s going on, and I don’t think people like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted. I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road and we have those type of statements being made that are conceivably even if not influencing the ultimate decision, I think there are a lot of people on the outside who perceive that there is undo inappropriate pressure being brought to bear. And I just would hope that – it’s just, it’s very disturbing that we’re in the mess that we’re in in that regard. Because I think having been a part of the prosecution for a long time and respecting the role that prosecutors play in the system I just think the integrity of the process is being unduly undermined by inappropriate comments and actions on the part of people at the top of our government. I think it’s very unfortunate. And I think as a government and as a society we’re going to pay a price at some point for this.
In the mirtazapine side effects lottery I won “drowsiness” and “fatigue”. Which I guess is better than “nausea” and “rash”? I just had a security guard ask me if I was okay, because I was leaning, standing-up, against the building abutting the MAX station, with my head down. It doesn’t appear to be worse this morning than yesterday morning, which I was concerned about because I was still dragging last night when I had to take that day’s pill.
It would help if I knew whether I’ve been drained all day because of the mirtazapine or because starting the mirtazapine happened to coincide with having a low-energy day, which I do have. It seems weird to think that I could be taking tonight’s pill while still feeling the drowsiness or fatigue from last night’s. We’ll see what my doctor says, when they get back to me.
So I was in bed until 11:30am, pulled myself up and out for cheap bar breakfast, came back after for sitting on the couch with the laptop, had to go back to sleep at 2:30pm, and then about two hours later woke up weak and shaky because I’d been sleeping instead of having a second meal for the day. I’m now awake but too out of it yet to be able to get up and find and consume some sort of food. How much of this is stuff I sometimes experience anyway and how much of this is the drowsiness and fatigue of the mirtazapine?
I’ve turned all of my Goodreads shelves other than the to-consider one into lists on my Bookshop page, minus books only available as ebooks (that’s coming to Bookshop soon, supposedly). Bookshop will be replacing the current in-house sales links on IndieBound, and purchasing through my page or any of my individual book links gives me an affiliates cut, and puts money into a pool of funds that gets divied up amongst independent bookstores.
I don’t anymore like the layout of my Reading category posts. I was going to just do the same format as image posts, using just a single image of the book I’ve started, but then it displays on my Now page, too, because I’m not sure how to display .Content in Hugo absent whatever images the content might contain.
I’m not sure whether to be more angry with Jeremy Christian’s defense for putting on the stand two psychologists to attest to his being autistic, or with Aimee Green of The Oregonian for referring to Christian as “an atypical case of autism” because in the words of one of the psychologists “if you have the idea that autistics are in their own little world and they don’t want to come out, he’s 180 degrees the opposite of that”.
Last night before going to sleep, I finished Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day (a Charlie Jane Anders recommendation), and weirdly it’s a bit akin to Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock, at least in that I wept for the end. If you’ve read the book and seen the movie, you know why I make the loose linkage there, and I stand by my earlier instruction.
My biggest takeaway from Noah Kulwin’s look at Acronym (the company behind the Shadow app that helped break the Iowa caucuses) for The Outline is that founder Tara McGowan’s philosophy—she told Axios, “The space was ripe for disruption and innovation. Yet with the ethos of taking great risks means that we can make great mistakes.”—is the same “move fast and break things” which is wrecking everything around us, and surely is too dangerous to import into the systems of our democracy.
My mirtazapine is on its way, but how do I tamp down the anxiety of waiting for it, and then the anxiety of taking it for the first time. This will be my first experience of any sort of anxiety or depression medication, and I know this is an every day occurrence for plenty of other people but I’m already having distracting, overthinking thoughts about it.
I still read Whitney Fishburn’s newsletter even though I can’t quite figure out what she means by “herd immunity to anxiety and depression” and don’t really get what she’s doing, but today she described what she took from an edition of Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter, which is that the proto-fascists who led us to Trump have successfully spent the last several decades “crafting the narrative that it’s AMERICA we have to preserve, not democracy”, and, honestly, this might be the most concise synopsis I’ve ever read of how we got to where we are today.
Is there a write-up somewhere of Bookshop as compared to IndieBound? Are independent bookstores embracing Bookshop or are they pointing at IndieBound and going, “Um, hello?” What’s the rationale behind a site not run by the American Booksellers Association versus one that is? It’s not entirely clear to me from reading the former’s About page and the latter’s FAQ page. Is it just the matter of Bookshop letting users sert up their own shops and recommendation lists? Bookshop’s orders are fulfilled through Ingram; who fulfills IndieBound orders? I’ve a vague recollection of finding a book on Bookshop that wasn’t showing up on IndieBound, but I can’t remember what it was, or if it was just user error.
It’s certaintly true, as Elle Loughran writes, that “we should encourage more qualitative, open-ended research that seeks input from autistic people and establishes a firmer basis for future studies”. Why, then, does she only focus on work that doesn’t reflect this, and not direct readers to research and researchers (e.g.) that do? That’s a real missed opportunity to expose Spectrum readers to exactly the sorts of work and the sorts of researchers Loughran says should be a priority.
The good news: Byways Cafe indeed is having a popup at Sisters Gourmet Deli. The bad news: it’s on a Sunday when all of Portland’s brunch spots already are super-crowded. Why isn’t this happening on an off-day (by which I mean a slow day, not a day off) at Sisters Gourmet, so that it’s not effectively a competition between their regulars and the jostling Byways refugees? That would be more consistent with the venue’s “community over competition” branding for these popups. This scheduling likely keeps me away from the event.
There was just an ant crawling across the left lens of my eyeglasses and I swear to god if this apartment has an ant problem like it did last spring—and it’s only February right now—I am not sure I’m going to be able to avoid the shutdown I only just barely skirted last year when it hit. I’ll have to get a jump-start on spraying outside all my windows and doors, what with all these sunny days in the 50s we’ve been having.
Good news out of the local Academic Autism Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education (AASPIRE), which has been awarded a new research project grant from National Institutes of Health (NIH). According to Christina Nicolaidis the “goal is to develop a set of accessible instruments to measure the outcomes that are most important to autistic adults and then test them in a large prospective cohort”.
One thing about the February weather here leaning towards high-40s to mid-50s: when combined with the fact that I’ve brought the pocketable Olympus XZ-1 back into my photography rotation, I’ve been more inclined to go on walks. This would-be habit would be especially useful when my just-prescribed Mirtazapine shows up, as it apparently comes with weight gain, which I’ve already been dealing with anyway, as evidenced by still only currently owning a single pair of pants that “fit” me, in that they are just a bit too big rather than unwearably too small.
Wow, okay. Apparently there was a Ride to Care data breach back in mid-November when someone stole a GridWorks laptop, which they didn’t tell Health Share of Oregon about until the third week of January, nine weeks later. Health Share, to its credit, then took only two weeks to inform its members. (Well, three, in that their letter is dated February 3 but arrived today, a week later.) These things always come with free monitoring services; has anyone ever actually signed up for those after a breach?
Note: This morning on Twitter, Netflix asked, “Is Cobb still dreaming at the end of Inception?” My answer—“Of Tells and Totems”—was written ten years ago on my then-blog (Twitchy, Unreliable-Looking), but had fallen offline. I’m reposting it here because it’s still one of my all-time favorite bits of my own blogging.
Something I wish the Kaiser Permanente app had: a sort of ongoing health diary/journal/log feature, so that as you notice things you can make a note of them and they automatically become a part of the information available to your doctor. It wouldn’t notify them; in fact the entire idea would be to lessen the urge or need to constantly contact your doctor about things, but create a record of observations that would be available the next time you do talk to your doctor. It’s just not a viable approach to expect me to make notes for myself and then try to get to them all in a doctor’s appointment. It should be built-in to any healthcare app offered by your provider.
I’ve been skimming some posts and article about aphantasia since learning about it, and I’ve mostly been curious about how it might or might not feed into the executive function issues that come with being actually-autistic. Art Kavanagh’s thoughts on executive function and motivation and productivity were sort of helpful.
What I really need is not a third-party Twitter client that reproduces most of the native features even while adding additional ones, but a client that only shows me my timeline, my mentions, lets me post, and lets me reply. That’s it. No retweets, no likes, no telling me someone’s liked or retweeted something of mine. Better yet: someone make a Micro.blog client that also has this stripped-down, limited Twitter functionality.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Doctor Who, 9-1-1: Lone Star, Black Lightning, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Masked Singer, The Magicians, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Bold Type, and Seven Worlds, One Planet. I’ve already watched this week’s Briarpatch as it’s available on-demand. I won’t be continuing with Locke & Key if the third episode isn’t an improvement. I’ve begun season four of The Blacklist.
So, I was browsing that original thread about visualizing an apple (which mentioning yesterday yielded a reference to aphantasia), and other people, too, started discussing that earlier discussion about having or not having an internal narrative, but they were discussing whether or not their internal voice sounded like themselves and now I’m confounded again. Your internal voices actually sound like anything? I don’t actually hear a voice, it’s more like the conception of speaking, much like I can’t visualize an apple only conceive of one. The running narrative in my head is a silent voice. There are words, but no sounds, but the words are spoken.
First I learn that there are people without an internal narrative and now I learn there are people who literally visualize things when they close their eyes. Which ones of us are the freaks? How can the ways in which we experience the innerspace of our brains be so dramatically, drastically different from one another? It makes me realize that technically a line from my bio is more metaphor than description: “If the events of one’s life were pictures and the emotions were sounds, his memories would play as silent movies.” Literally speaking, this isn’t true: my memories don’t have pictures, either. Just the formless conception of incidents and events.
I think that Matt Baer conflates the ease, speed, and ubiquity of text communication with its relative informational or emotional payloads and comprehensibility. The idea that we might have let ourselves slip into a social world where, as he sees it, “velocity” reigns isn’t the same as the idea that the forms themselves—including their accompanying linguistic ones—somehow are deficient of meaning. This reaction to Baer’s post likely emerges in part from having only just recently read Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet and Joanne McNeil’s Lurking, each of which has its own things to say on such matters.
Inscriptions found at ancient Kourion in Cyprus in the 1930s give precise instructions on how cursing was to be done. A tablet hexing a person very much alive had to be put in the tomb of the fresh corpse of a person who died prematurely – having failed to complete the “normal” life cycle, such as a child or an unmarried person; or a person who died by violence, like murder victims or war casualties, Stroszeck says. As their souls were believed to be “unquiet,” they could carry messages between the underworld and the mortal sphere.
Still reeling from how much better was the Fox pilot for Locke & Key from 2011 than the first episode of the Netflix show from 2020, and not because it hews more closely to the first volume of the comic. It’s just… stronger, more focused, simpler, more elegant. For sure it’s creepier. Tonally, the Friedman version ran a bit toward The Shining. I don’t know what tone Cuse’s version is seeking. I’ll try another couple of episodes but the original is going to hover over my viewing experience.
Well, I was trying to leave myself the option of getting downtown tomorrow to take pictures at Umbrella, so of course as I was prepping the kitchen for breakfast in the morning I spilled the contents of the used coffee filter into the coffee maker and it’s already almost midnight and really there’s nothing to be done about it, so we’ll see how a likely coffee-free waking up goes, I guess. Never bother trying to make it easier on yourself, it just blows up in your face.
I’m starting in on Netflix’s Locke & Key (I never did manage to finish reading the comics, though I think they are available from the library via Hoopla) and got to wondering if anyone ever managed to get the original 2011 📺 pilot from Josh Friedman back online and thanks to someone on Reddit the answer is yes, on Dropbox.
On the one hand, the defunct Fencing Center Salle Trois Armes (and not, excuse me, the “North Portland Fencing Club”, apparently) will be a great coffeeshop location, what with that southern exposure. On the other hand, if the previous Two Stroke location is any indication, this will make four coffeeshops within a two-block radius in downtown St. Johns with a lack of interest in soft, comfortable seating. I’m in desperate need of more coffeeshops run in more of a librarian spirit than a bartender one. Although, now that I think of it, there are probably more bars in Portland these days with lounge seating than coffeeshops. Whatever happened to the nice place to have a latte and a book?
The heart of Market Street in San Francisco now is car-free, mostly: “Only buses, streetcars, traditional taxis, ambulances, and freight drop-offs are still allowed.” There are potential lessons from Europe (via Mark Isero) for other ways American cities could reduce traffic, including multimodal streets, congestion pricing, “limited traffic” zones, eliminating street parking, expanding transit, and “reclaiming” public spaces.
I’d thought I was through the worst of it but then The Blacklist throws at me first perhaps the most ridiculous wedding episode in the history of 📺 and then Tom playing DJ at the nightclub where Liz is giving birth. Season three has really turned out to be a crapper, but it’s almost over. Please tell me season four is better.
So, the Politico profile of Rachel Bitecofer doesn’t do much to help you understand who’s right on whether the issue in elections is “swing voters” or instead is the matter of whose voters are successfully “activated”, but I admit that the latter smells more right to me than the former. I admit that this might be influenced by the fact that I do see the former as part of the worldview of, in Bitecofer’s words, the “Chuck Todd theory of American politics”.
Not sure if I’m going to make the switch, but I’m going to spend the weekend, I think, with the blog theme changed to the partial rework of Marfa that I’ve been puttering around with lately. Really, in some ways what I’m playing with is backing away from several of the template hacks and/or shortcodes I’ve been using, because it all was starting to be more complicated than my brain needs things to be right now.
Heidi Klum, white woman, whose response to Gabrielle Union’s complaints of racism at America’s Got Talent was to explain that “she didn’t experience the same thing” and that “everyone treats you with the utmost respect” says those facts have “nothing to do with what color I am”, and I can’t even with this.
Kendi, over the span of an enlightening and often infuriating book, brings this point home in many ways: racist policies have to be combatted with antiracist policies. It is not enough, nor is it possible to be neutral; there is no “not racist” in a society that is inherently unjust, and that we have to actively combat that injustice through policy.
While you’re all writing Mitt Romney hagiography, I’ll just note that he (1) asked us to credit everyone’s “good faith” when his party, all the more under Trump, acts without it as a matter of course, and (2) stated that this decision was a difficult one when for anyone with a sense of political morality it should not have been (see point 1). Neither of these things are to his credit. Stop being chumps and suckers.
Just now I had a major albeit comparatively brief bout of looking around at everything, my apartment, my wardrobe, my website, and thinking everything was wrong and it all needed to be different and I swear that I literally felt the electromagnetic field generated by my brain twist itself into knots which led to my arms twisting themselves into knots clutched against my chest and now my entire body feels like it needs to be both shaken and stretched until the sensation of that supercedes the sensation of the other.
After watching last night two hours of Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, the word “gothic” keep ringing in my ears. It wouldn’t stop. His address was a perversion of morality, an inversion of common sense and a glorification of pettiness and barbarism. Making it all the more gothic and horrible was the press corps pretending it was none of these things. Afterward, CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell said: “This was a speech unlike any other I have witnessed from President Donald Trump—the reality TV president took on the state of the union, a master showman at his best.”
This was going to wait until tomorrow after the acquittal, but I’ve deleted Twitter from my phone, unfollowed all news-type people, deleted my autism and news lists, and will be reading my timeline via Feedbin. Should I feel the need to tweet something, the extra steps of having to open the site in Safari instead might interrupt the thought. We’ll see. I didn’t even watch the State of the Union but felt like I was having a nervous breakdown anyway. The feeling I have is a lot like the one I had in 2015 when no one was taking Trump’s candidacy seriously while I already was making Sinclair Lewis references.
Today is supposed to be grocery day because SNAP reloaded but after waking up and having breakfast I can’t really even move from the couch. Honestly I think it’s psychic hangover from yesterday’s visit to the site of the nonprofit I quit a year ago, which went fine, per se, but took its toll just from the existential baggage of it.
You haven’t said if we’re meant to interpret this piece as dystopian, but I can’t help but assume that we are (it owes a serious debt to “The Lottery,” yes?) and as such, you really need to clarify who gets to be in the room and how and why and, conversely, who doesn’t (or can’t) and whether this is by law or tradition or circumstance or whatever. Because, honestly, as the work currently stands, the stakes and the chorus seem… disproportionate.
In the history of memes, the familiar story is one of harmless images accruing sinister meanings that turn them into weapons—the most famous example being Pepe the Frog, an innocuous web-comic character that was co-opted by various extremist groups leading up to the 2016 election. But Doomer Girl shows how the reverse can happen too: A cruel idea gets whittled down and recirculated without context, because its origin is less interesting than the creative possibilities.
Andy McIlwain’s hopes for Instagram “swinging back to something more real” will be in vain if Adam Mosseri doesn’t allow for a vanilla chronological feed. Viewing lives out of order isn’t “real”. Not seeing the hours of a local business, attraction, or event until they’ve closed for the day isn’t “real”. Realness isn’t just something solely determined by how people use a platform. It also depends upon how a platform allows users to experience it.
I also had the incredible and unexpected honor of seeing A Memory Called Empire named the best science fiction novel on the American Library Association’s Reference and User Services Association’s 2020 Reading List. I didn’t even know this was a thing a person could win, and I’m hugely delighted, and very thankful to all the librarians. Having a book I wrote in a library — any library — is one of those strange and special parts of authoring that feels utterly surreal; having a whole lot of librarians recommend one’s book is even better.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Kitten Bowl, Puppy Bowl, Doctor Who, The Masked Singer (which somehow is back already?), 9-1-1: Lone Star, Black Lightning, Nancy Drew, The Magicians, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Bold Type, Briarpatch, Locke & Key, and Seven Worlds One Planet. (Star Trek: Picard, which continues this week, is on-hold for me until I can buy a CBS All Access binge month.) I might be starting in on Night on Earth. I’m continuing with season three of The Blacklist.
So here I am, reading the galley of Anne Charnock’s Bridge 108 from NetGalley and I’m recognizing characters but I knew it’s set in the same world as another of her books so I didn’t think much of it but then specific things started feeling really, really familiar, so I do some digging and sure enough it’s apparently just The Enclave, which I already read three years ago, retitled, repackaged, and republished. I could have been reading something else.
Trying to set my personal ground rules for Micro.blog’s February photoblogging challenge (or, to me, FotoFebruary), and I almost decided to use an antonym of each day’s prompt, but thought better of it. Briefly, I pondered doing the Randonaut thing and letting myself be directed to a random location where I’d then have to find a prompt-responsive photo to take. In the end, I’m keeping my sanity by keeping it simple. Every challenge photo will be from the XZ-1, I will seek to ignore the prompts until the day before each one, and each photo will be taken on the day of its prompt.
Trying to get myself into the right state of mind for Micro.blog’s photoblogging challenge, which for lack of a better phrase I’m dubbing FotoFebruary so that I can add a category for the posts the way I did for Microblogvember. Unlike that challenge, all the prompts have been posted in advance, but I’m going to try not to think about them too much until each day, or the day before. Also, I subscribed to Jason Burk’s calendar so that hopefully I don’t forget a day.
It might be a need to shake something up in this politically and existentially depressing moment, or it might just be not having enough energy for the DSLR and lenses, but today I’m going to try a zoo trip with the old Olympus XZ-1 instead. It’s charging at the moment, and I think it will be done in time.
Will I be watching the coronation of King Donald I, today? No, I will be at Oregon Zoo. That is, if I can tamp down this existential hangover from yesterday. I can feel, from the inside, the expression of resignation my face is making this morning, like it’s not worth the effort or energy to move even facial muscles.
Theoretically, everything I want to do in order to handle different numbers of images in a post is detailed or explained either here or there but for the life of me I’ve reached the limit of being able to follow even the story of the code, and for all my not being a programmer (yes, I know CSS isn’t programming, per se; I’m making a point), everything I’ve ever been able to accomplish is because I’ve been able to follow the story of the code and work from there to enough understanding to get a particular thing done. Not this time, it seems. I’m almost completely lost. This, too, is why I am at sea.
Somewhat at sea. The inevitable rent-increase notification after the property on which I live was sold a few months back arrived today in the mail. Republicans are about to in effect codify that the President (as long as he’s Republican) can do whatever he likes in the service of his own reelection. Design stuff I was trying to figure out last night for the blog has reached a point just shy of where I need it to be but I don’t understand how to do anything more. Here insert any number of items from the long litany of things that are neither in place nor progressing. Sinking into myself, whoever that even is.
But he came around to the idea of the sanctuary, in part as he saw the potential for tourism. He began working with conservationists from the World Wildlife Fund and scientists from around the world. He created a Twitter account where he posted videos of himself in a cloud of monarchs, encouraging visitors to witness the magic. He posted the last one hours before he disappeared.
For what it’s worth, that sort-of-weird forthcoming new social media platform Voice posted a slide deck they presented to the Securities and Exchange Commission, of all things, which details how they think they will be different, including their use of “tokens” users spend to increase the “voice” of other users.
I want to highlight this systematic demand that women shut up because it’s the entire problem, isn’t it? I know some people spoke from a place of distress and anger (none of us is perfect on the internet, and especially when tragedy hits, emotions go raw). But others spoke from a deeper sense of entitlement to have pubic spaces and conversations cater to their comfort, and evinced a raw rage when women stepped out of our appointed place as quiet caretakers, deferential to others’ desires. “Shut up, bitch” isn’t disagreement. It’s telling on yourself.
I’m going to need to get back to reading comics, or at least those I can borrow from the library via Hoopla and read on the Fire HD. Since I no longer use my Paperwhite for ebooks (having switched to Kobo for that), I’ve had Amazon move my “without special offers” upgrade from the Paperwhite to the Fire, so that I don’t have to deal with ads on the device if I’m going to be using it more often as I start going through my comics backlog. I still wish there were a decent comics-tracking app; I don’t want to mix my comics into my ebooks by using Goodreads. I can never quite remember where I left off, and Hoopla never seems to quite fully record my history. It was suggested to me that I use Hoopla favorites to mark where I’ve left off on something, and that seems like maybe a viable workaround.
Well, okay, I’m hellishly curious to see how Hollywood adapts Memetic, but even more curious if they will move on to adapt the even more batshit Cognetic if it’s successful. Which reminds me that I need to read the third story, Eugenic. Maybe I’ll re-read the first two, too. Fortunately, all three are available to borrow from the library via Hoopla.
I gather that Fast Company is a content farm, given this press release for a mathematician’s new book, masquerading as an article that doesn’t actually do anything to inform anyone about what likely would be a fascinating debate between traffic engineers, urban planners, and mathematicians. This subject should be treated like the escalator traffic debate which arises now and then.
Hayes and Marshall are a political junkie’s political junkie, but even they shrink away from engagement when lies pile up faster than fact-checkers can keep pace. Why aren’t we talking more often about how a malicious system of lies makes us feel? Who benefits when even political junkies turn away from things making them feel insane?
After this morning I’ve just remembered another internet project from my early days: the Internet Emergency Broadcast Network. In the wake of the Communications Decency Act, folks from the Center for Democracy and Technology (probably Jonah Seiger), Voters Telecommunications Watch (probably Shabbir Safdar), and (I think?) Wired or maybe HotWired, and I posited that the IEBN would provide an image URL for people to inline on their own websites. The image itself would have changed based upon current governmental actions regarding the internet and actions people could take. I don’t think anything ever actually came of it, but I remember at least one meeting South of Market to discuss it.
This experiment I’ve been running of reading my Twitter feed via Feedbin has been pretty interesting, and even on my laptop I’ve basically been staying out of Twitter proper until I wanted to reply to someone or retweet something, do a quick browse of the two lists I use for autism tweets and news tweets (Feedbin used to let you read lists, too, but that appears no longer to be true), or see if I have any mentions. It feels a little disjointed to do Twitter this way, but I don’t know how much of that is inherent and how much of that is adjustment.
Last night’s Doctor Who was the most at-sea I’ve been during an episode of the series in a very long time, and it was pretty great 📺 because of it. (Note: I will not be running spoilers though rot13, so reader beware.) After the ads telling us that if we’d thought the return of the Master was something just wait until this episode, I was pretty sure while watching that the appearance of Captain Jack Harkness was merely the setup for something else. With the introduction of Jo Martin as the Doctor I’m hoping that Chibnall doesn’t turn around and reveal that something else is happening here (Twitter chatter’s been talking a bit about the Valeyard). There’d be such power in a retcon that effectively announced that there’s always been so much more to the Doctor than we’ve seen, and that, on the meta-story level, it was only our own narrative incompetence and incompleteness and intolerance that restricted our viewpoint. Naturally enough, elements of fandom are being ugly, with nonsense coming in from the edges—whether it’s fanbros complaining about social justice warriors again or others using this episode as an excuse to attack Jodie Whittaker. As the man said, Doctor Who if it’s about anything is about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism, and neither of those two factions have anything to do with Doctor Who. Which brings me back to my hope that Chibnall isn’t just fucking with us here, because that itself would be something of a cynical move. The idea that the Doctor might have been a black woman, perhaps even originally, before ever being a series of white men, is profound, and later turning it into a fakeout would be just as profoundly disappointing.
Why are the Senate Republicans putting their political lives on the line for a president so ready to betray them? I don’t know. Perhaps the Republicans don’t either. For their own sake, they’d better figure it out. The drip-drip-drip of bad news will continue through Election Day. It’s shrewd to fear a party leader threatening to put your head on a pike. At what point, however, does avoiding such a fate end up causing it?
I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I still like about the way Medium organizes itself is that a user’s profile includes tabs for everything that user does on the site: posts, claps, highlights, responses. I wish this sort of thing were native to the entire web. In the meantime, on Micro.blog we now can publicly display our responses to other users there, right on our own blogs, and I’ll be deciding how I want to do that here.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Doctor Who, Batwoman, Supergirl, 9-1-1: Lone Star, Black Lightning, the Arrow series finale, Nancy Drew, The Magicians, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Star Trek: Picard, the series finale of The Good Place, The Bold Type, the Evil season finale, and Seven Worlds One Planet. I’ve also started on season three of The Blacklist.
Well, I just solved part of my pants mystery: I didn’t outgrow the 36-waist, I outgrew a 34-waist, which explains why I thought I needed to buy a 40-waist but then those turned out to be too big. So, what I need is either a 36 or a 38. Annoyingly, it appears that Prime Wardrobe won’t let me order two of each size, so that I can keep two of whichever works. I’d have to send one back, then order a replacement. It might make more sense to order directly from Wrangler, although the Amazon-sold version and the Wrangler-sold version of these Wranglers are not actually the same. Why does this have to be so complicated, and why can’t Wrangler just sell the same fucking pants on every retailer.
“Minimum viable social actions,” suggests Colin Walker, “may give an initial, instant dopamine hit but are ultimately worthless.” Walker’s responding in part to the Rebecca Toh comments on comments I mentioned yesterday, and getting at what I’ve described in the past as the choice between indication and interaction, and as an artifact of the context we too often lose due to the increasing frictionlessness of “sociality” on the internet. It’s why I suddenly realized I didn’t want RSS readers to become more like social media experiences. Also, in my head, I still want highlights instead of bare likes; recommends instead of naked retweets.
Today’s experiment: only reading my Twitter feed via Feedbin when I’m away from the laptop. I’ve moved the iOS app off the dock and into a folder. I’d already done away with Twitter notifications anyway so I won’t be missing those. It’s not necessarily so much that I’m looking to do this permanently; more I just want to experience this different way of reading Twitter for a bit.
Given that knowledge gap, some psychologists have been sounding alarms for years. In the late 1990s, the psychologist Stanley Sue expressed concern that his field paid too little attention to the experiences of non-white ethnic groups. A 2008 study, which found that the research in six major psychology journals only rarely examined people outside the West, wryly proposed that a top journal rename itself the “Journal of the Personality and Social Psychology of American Undergraduate Introductory Psychology Students.”
I’ve changed my mind: I no longer want RSS readers from which you can reply to blog posts via webmention. It completely violates my contention that social media has too little friction; it’s not a flaw an indieweb blogosphere software ecosystem should replicate. One should have to visit the blog or reply on one’s own.
It turns out that the answer is that The Good Place: The Podcast this week did not at all address the fact that the solution to the obstacle in this week’s episode of The Good Place was fhvpvqr. I’ve a nagging feeling that it’s because the writers have an explanation coming, but the writers having knowledge simply can’t explain or excuse the characters never having the discussion, when once upon a time they assuredly would have. This is going to gnaw at me forever. Maybe as much as the fact that even victims of slavery were being sent to The Bad Place for the last five-hundred years but no one on the show ever made a point of noting that when debating the broken points system.
One design element of the Kindle which is missing on the Kobo is that very slight rough texture Amazon gives the display of at least the original Kindle and the first few Paperwhites. (I don’t know if newer models that went flush with the bezel maintained this.) The idea was to speak to the touch of paper and I miss the experiential gesture.
So, the big takeaway is that, yes, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo really is a pompeous ass, but what I really want to know is: did Bangladeshis wake up this morning wondering why they’ve been dragged into this? I feel like surely BuzzFeed must have someone checking through Bangladeshi twitter for reactions.
The past couple of weeks turn out to be such a mental blur that I haven’t been able to listen to this week’s edition of The Good Place: The Podcast to see if they discuss that the solution to this week’s episode of the series was fhvpvqr because apparently I never listened to last week’s podcast, so that’s how I’m winding down my Friday night.
About 72% agreed that the trial “should allow witnesses with firsthand knowledge of the impeachment charges to testify,” including 84% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans. And 70% of the public, including 80% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans, said senators should “act as impartial jurors” during the trial.
It’s not a common experience for me during The Good Place but I’ve some pretty mixed feelings about tonight’s episode of “the smartest, dumbest show on 📺”, because the solution Team Cockroach conceived was fhvpvqr (yes, I am using rot13 for spoilers), and that should have sparked at least a brief philosophical lesson from Chidi about the moral implications. No one ever even actually admitted that was their solution. In the early days of the show, it definitely would have had that discussion, or at least a historical tour of what different philosophers thought about it, and I’m a bit confused—and now that I write this I guess also at least a little miffed—that the show’s forgotten that it once stuck its face right into those thorny questions. Now that the decision’s made, I can’t especially see themselves devoting any time to that moral issue after the fact when they’ve only got the one episode left in the series. So, I guess that’s it, then. I’m curious now to see whether or not the panel on tomorrow morning’s edition of The Good Place: The Podcast digs into it at all.
According to some social justice cartographers, when you map the locations of historical racist housing covenants and lay them atop a map of modern Minneapolis you clearly see that “areas of the city where racial covenants were widely used tend to be predominantly white today”. What’s more, “a pattern quickly jumped out: the density of covenants in neighborhoods surrounding city parks, forming a ‘racial cordon’ of white neighborhoods around these public resources”.
It’s taken me hours, but I’ve found a way to solve a needwant regarding my blog design. Due to the way Micro.blog creates the Archive and Photos pages, there are no Hugo template variables available to distinguish them from the “home” page, and I’ve been wanting to hide the avatar/title header from those pages. After much googling and hair-pulling, I’ve been able to do what I want using JavaScript to create custom id selectors on the body tags of just those pages, and then use that selector to hide that header via CSS. (This will fail, of course, for people browsing without JavaScript turned on, but it sucks to be them, I guess?) As such, I’ll shortly be switching the blog over to the new theme code. It’s the same design as what I’ve been using for the past week or so, but the code is cleaned up and less cluttered, and thanks to this JavaScript trick, I no longer need to do a bunch of extra templating to make my own Archive or Photos pages.
Knitting belongs in public as much as it does in the home. Public spaces should be platforms for human expression and interaction, places where passions and ideas can be exchanged, and where we can be inspired by each other’s creativity and individuality. There’s power in the way we inhabit public space. The way we move through it, make use of it—fill it with our selves, our objects, our activities—shapes the overall identity of that space. When I walk through my local park on weekends I see joggers and muscly bodies on the outdoor gym equipment; every day when I get off the train I see groups of Vietnamese men playing checkers on the public tables near the station; and every year I, along with hundreds of thousands of others, make the trek out to the east coast to see the Sculptures by the Sea exhibition. These unrelated activities and events result in communities that are more active, diverse, and creative.
Thankfully, there is a way on NetGalley to expain your reasons if you decline to give feedback on a title. I do all of my longform reading on E Ink readers (as it turns out, I realize now, in part for sensory reasons), and due to the combination of margins and crop-marks whitespace in the galley proof, I’ll be unable to read Terry Smith’s Whitelash and will be putting it into my OverDrive queue instead.
Last year, the team behind Highly (one of many attempts over the years to create a “highlights layer” for the internet) moved to Twitter to help with “the public conversation”. Highlights (one of the best parts of how Medium works) should be part of Webmention, divorced from any third-party tool which inevitably fails and then (per email this morning) deletes all your highlights.
Warren Ellis muses, “What would Twitter look like if everyone had private accounts?” He gets the flaws, of course, but he’s also not wrong that “not every social occasion is a street party [for] all-comers”. The problem isn’t so much public-versus-private accounts as Twitter’s lack of tools for user-driven community building. The test-balloon of being able to control the extent of conversation on one’s own tweets at least partially considers this, but one of the things we lost in the cultural gold rush to social media was the primacy of intentional and circumscribed communities.
In cities like Portland, some areas are referred to as “heat islands,” areas where development has exacerbated the effects of high temperatures. Now, a new study from Portland State University is showing, for the first time, that areas prone to excessive heat are disproportionately populated by low-income communities and people of color due to racist housing policies that stretch back more than a century.
Because of my autism, I cannot readily change my behavior anyway. For example, I find it impossible to ‘code switch,’ or change the tone of my voice and mannerisms to fit in with different people. One white female supervisor complained that I should learn to change my demeanor with different people. I understood what she meant, but I am socially, emotionally and logically detached from that type of directive to conform.
It’s an Impeachment Trial Day miracle! After just over a year in this mother-in-law cottage, I’ve discovered that the blinds on my front door, which are “secured” into place at the bottom, in fact can be disengaged at that spot and raised. Mostly this is important because for awhile now I’ve wished I could make a kind of 🐈 ledge at the middle height of the door (perhaps one that hangs from the top of the door itself) so they had another window facing in a new direction for them.
Since I’m sure you’ve all been awaiting an update on PantsGate: while my collection of Wrangler cargo pants all are a 36 waist, and while when trying to button them they insist upon a four-inch gap, the pair of 40 waist pants I bought are too big. So, some combination of pants-shrinkage and me-fattening conspired to make me think I now needed a 40 when I probably at most need a 38. Two hot-water washes and highest-setting dries have done just about all the shrinking of the 40 waist that’s going to happen.
“If you’ve met an autistic person,” the saying goes, “you’ve met one autistic person.” Yet it’s impossible, I find, not to constantly compare myself to other late-diagnosed autistics. Rhi Lloyd-Williams recently took stock of life since a diagnosis which came about a year before I received mine in late 2016.
Well, this is pretty maddening. Per template debugging, by using printf “%#v” ., I can get my blog pages to output “a list of all the variables scoped to the current context”. I wanted to see if there were any variables tied specifically to the photos/ and archive/ pages that I could use to generate CSS selectors in order to customize those pages individually. Sure enough, there’s a Path:"photos" or a Path:"archive", depending. (These are variables set in config.json.) However, for the life of me I simply cannot figure out how to reference that variable in an if eq template tag in order to do what I need to do. Clearly, the variable is obtained by the debugger, but how do I grab it for template tag purposes? Not a single clue. I’ve tried everything that’s occured to me.
On July 30, 1967, less than a year before a bullet from a white supremacist assassin’s rifle would end his life, Dr. King came to County Hall in Charleston, S.C., for a speaking engagement. The visit occurred during the “Long Hot Summer of 1967,” as race-related riots broke out in cities across America, including Plainfield, N.J., Minneapolis, Minn. Detroit, and Milwaukee, just to name a few. King was in Charleston to talk about his Poor People’s Campaign, specifically about the “Freedom Budget,” an economic agenda he thought could solve poverty in America. The “practical, step-by-step plan for wiping out poverty” called for a basic universal income, housing, education reform and a jobs plan. King insisted the revolutionary idea could wipe out widespread poverty in 10 years and many people still believe this radical plan is the final straw which resulted in his death.
After answering some questions on Slack for John Philpin and Matt Langford about bits of Hugo code I’m using and then watching the latter’s work customizing Marfa, I’ve made some design changes here as well. Next up: organizing my customizations more cleanly by methodically going through template and CSS files from the beginning. I started by pumping Marfa’s default CSS file through Code Beautifier to make it easier for my brain to find and understand things. I’ll be making a copy of Marfa and editing theme files directly rather than using the custom CSS workflow. For the moment, the new design is functioning smoothly enough that I’m not going to pressure myself into rushing through this re-organization effort, but it needs to be done, because my customzations are an unholy mess. I’m sort of hoping that some other stuff might find solutions in the meantime, so by the time I’m ready to deploy the re-organized theme customizations, answers to these outstanding bits of consternation can get folded in, too.
Steve MacDouell describes the three things he’s learned about people from the “third place” that is his local coffee shop: they want to linger in places where they can be seen, heard, and known; long for places where contextual ideas—for the common good of the neighbourhood—can be inspired; and are attached to the places that they experience with all of their senses.
It looks like maybe we aren’t misunderstanding Dave Winer after all, as he’s freely admitting to “rethinking” RSS. Per his earlier posts on this, what’s really happening is that Winer has copped to being a newsletterer, not a blogger; it’s just that he writes his daily email newsletter out in the open as he goes. I’m a bit baffled about some of what he says, though, since there’s nothing about RSS or JSON feeds that require all of one’s blog posts to be title-description-body. It’s also a bit weird to suggest that rss wasn’t right for tweets, given that much early blogging in fact was short posts that, of course, also appeared in one’s RSS feed. (It was, you know, microblogging, which is what Twitter does, or, at least, did.) In fact, there’s a small group of indieweb people who are using feed readers such as Feedbin to read Twitter accounts rather than reading them via, you know, Twitter. That said, there’s nothing wrong, per se, with re-exploring blogs as a form or RSS as a delivery mechanism. I just don’t quite understand what’s prompting this particular bit of relitigation.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Doctor Who, 9-1-1: Lone Star, Batwoman, Supergirl, Black Lightning, Arrow, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, The Magicians, Nancy Drew, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Good Place, The Bold Type, and Seven Worlds One Planet (which started Saturday but I forgot). I’m also continuing with The Blacklist, where I’m about to start season three. Picard premieres this week but I can only budget for CBS All Access by doing 🖖 binge months.
After around a year of trying to obtain it, I finally am reading the report from the “consultive exam” I had to undergo through Disability Determination Services as part of my Social Security benefits claim. Right off the bat, the guy commits a basic factual error, stating that I was moving to “John’s Landing” when I was moving to St. Johns. So, this will be an interesting read, I guess?
The internet still allows for great innovation and connection today, but it’s just not the same. Social networks like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter constitute “the internet” for many people, but they are not. They are only a pale version of what was and what could have been. The social-network-internet of today is best understood when you hold in your mind the image of a faceless person scrolling down a screen endlessly for all of eternity, but yet for whom satisfaction never comes.
In the later wake of Twitter’s announcement of conversation controls, meteorologists expressed concern about disinformation and misinformation during severe weather events, while others technically laud the idea but call it ten years past due. Shuja Haider, meanwhile, somehow manages to write an entire piece about the death of “the ratio” without ever once even attempting to engage the argument that allowing users to control their own conversations on Twitter will be a boon to the abused and harassed.
This morning felt disappointingly resource-free. Disappointingly because I haven’t been on my weekly mental health trip across town to Oregon Zoo since the week before last. The weather looked to be one of those “could go either way” circumstances in terms of the comfort of temperature. In the end, I gave my best guess at layering, went for a breakfast sandwich, and have headed zoo-ward. This might end up like my last visit, where I only made it two hours. Resources have been generally thin all week, including Wednesday’s inexplicable near-total crash. We’ll see.
James Parker thinks middle age is great because “[y]ou’re through the disorientation period” and “through the angst and the panic attacks”. David Blanchflower claims that its misery peaks at 47-years-old. All I know is that my autism diagnosis hit when I was 46 and my midlife misery, be it related or not, is going strong at 50—complete with disorientation, angst, and panic attacks.
I’m continuing to work on my Goodreads profile, having just added some new shelves: on-kobo and from-netgalley. At some point I will add to this an on-kindle shelf. In addition to the open-read titles I grabbed, NetGalley just approved me for Anne Charnock’s Bridge 108, but I’m waiting on requests for Lurking by Joanne McNeil and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia after having been turned down for Beneath The Rising by Premee Mohamed.
If I were a Senate Republican, I’d worry most about the House Democrats. After releasing two rounds of Parnas documents, the chairs of the impeachment committees issued what could be interpreted as a threat. “There cannot be a full and fair trial in the Senate without the documents that President Trump is refusing to provide to Congress,” they wrote. Put another way: call for new evidence or we’ll do it for you.
Every candidate has flaws. Every candidate is human. These are people running for president of the United States, people who believe they and they alone are best suited to lead the free world. They are narcissists to a one. They are human, and they are power-seeking, and that means they will all have moments of venality, vanity and arrogance. To a one, they will make mistakes. To a one, they will sometimes do the wrong thing. Which is why, to a one, they are not beyond critique. If you haven’t been disappointed at least once by your favorite among them, and if you aren’t prepared to be disappointed again, you either aren’t paying attention or you’re in a cult of personality.
In the end, I was pleased with the 📺 version of “Crisis on Infinite Earths”. I’m sure I could think of a thousand things from the original that I wish had found their way in, but Berlanti et al had to do their own thing in the context of the Arrowverse, and for me it almost entirely played well and paid off. Maybe the only thing I needed to see by the finale (and they provided it) was a proper and hopeful closure for the Christopher Reeve rendition of Superman as incarnated by Brandon Routh, who we’d last seen doing his best to live a life in the shadow of the deaths, well, of basically everyone close to him. Admittedly, I wish they’d used the Spectre a little more dramatically—that’s where I’d wanted to see a giant Anti-Monitor: battling a giant Spectre at the dawn of time. The one thing to read in the aftermath is Variety’s report on just how the one, particular, super-secret cameo came together at the last possible minute.
Signed up on NetGalley and pulled down a couple of things already: Whitelash by Terry Smith, and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu. Not sure I will be able to read the former as it’s a PDF instead of an ePub; it’s tricky on a Kobo device to read a proof-style document, what with the small text and huge margins. I’m not starting in on either book anyway until I finish my current reads. The process did also finally prompt me to understand how to add DRM’d 📚 to the Kobo via Digital Editions.
“I’d love to see more experimentation and investment in technology that doesn’t have a product monetizable outcome,” says Danielle Robinson, director of Code for Science & Society, a nonprofit that supports the development of open-source technology built in the public interest. Kazemi ran Friend Camp and wrote the accompanying guide during his year as a Mozilla Open Web Fellow, and Code for Science & Society was his host organization. Robinson became an early user of Friend Camp, which she compares to “pre-Friendster” internet communities like Makeoutclub, started in 1999, as well as certain aspects of the moms’ Facebook groups she joined after having her first kid. “Those groups were great when they were like 200 people, and quickly turned into terrible cesspools when they grew to 600 people and up,” she says of the latter. “Friend Camp reminds me of the best, most supportive part of those interactions, and that early internet experience of connecting with people.”
Recently a physical education teacher posted to Twitter a photo of the new “safe spot” she’d created for students to self-regulate. She’d made it out of a garbage can. You can imagine the blowback, although the teacher themselves was flummoxed by it. Today when I heard that the Trump administration is issuing new “guidance” on prayer in public schools, I imagined what people would do if a teacher posted a photo of the new “prayer spot” they’d created for students who need to pray, and it was made out of a garbage can. There’d have been an unholy shitstorm and righteous furor. But, sure, go ahead and stick your neurodivergent kids in the trash.
Drownings may increase during unusually warm weather because more people go swimming. Deaths from traffic accidents may increase because higher temperatures tend to result in greater overall road traffic (at least in North America), erosion of driving skills, and increased alcohol consumption. And it’s possible that increased time spent outside combined with greater irritability in warm temperatures could increase confrontations and therefore injuries from assault, while the increase in suicides could have its roots in a possible increase in emotional distress among young people associated with high temperatures.
Wonder of wonders, today there already was voicemail from the contact at SSA saying that in fact they have sent my primary care physician a copy of that “consultive exam” I’ve been trying for over a year to get my hands on. He didn’t say when they did that; it would have to have been fairly recently. So recently that my doctor wouldn’t have gotten it yet, else she’d have mentioned it to me. I’ve asked her about it before I go follow up with him about it, if I have to do so. But, I’m now theoretically this close to finally seeing what precisely in the report from that two-hour, paint-by-numbers, plug-and-play office visit assessment session yielded a lack of eligibility.
Colin Walker noticed that increased commitment to writing increased desire to tinker. I’ve had a similar experience, although as I said I don’t actually or especially enjoy the tinkering, as it frequently results in much aggravation and frustration before any solution to what I’m trying to do arises (if one arises at all). One thing I’ve noticed about tinkering on Micro.blog is that the built-in community on its social side helps when it comes to tinkering, whether you’re seeking answers ot have an answer for someone else.
I understand why it didn’t, and I don’t mean it should have made any specific reference to any specific thing, but I wish the section of Autism: A New Introduction to Psychological Theory and Current Debate which discussed “evidence-based” theories or treatments had mentioned the degree to which researcher assumptions shape what “evidence” supposedly means, e.g., among other things, that one study that assumed a priori that “recovery” from autism was possible (and then, of course, defined “recovery” simply as the absence of certain specified outward behaviors).
Three of the four most-nominated movies—The Irishman, Joker, and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood—are stories about white men who feel culturally imperiled. The fourth, 1917, is about white men who are literally imperiled. It is no accident that those movies have arrived at this particular cultural moment, and while Academy voters don’t necessarily have to eat whatever the industry is feeding them, they usually don’t look too far afield for alternatives, and this year, what the industry was not feeding them was Black Panther or BlacKkKlansman.
Well, it’s happened, and while this partially might be too much information, I guess I’ve got to buy a couple of pairs of fat pants until and unless I manage to lose this weight, else I’m just going to keep squeezing my bladder into muscle spasms. My button is a good four inches from where it should be, which is why I no longer even button it, and just keep hoping my belt will keep things from getting publicly out of control.
At some point last month, Disability Determination Services here in Oregon informed me that they didn’t actually keep the report from my two-hour “consultive exam” which Social Security used to deny I was disabled, and gave me the name of a person at the Social Security Administration to whom they’d forwarded my request. Promptly, I recycled the letter without making note of the name. Yesterday I emailed the Department of Human Services ombuds address about it, and lo and behold this morning I’d already received a reply with the name and contact information I’d recycled. So, let’s see how long it takes to get my own medical record out of the SSA.
So, I ordered food and litter from Chewy in order to start the tracking experiment on usage, so I can figure out a more or less fixed budget on routine 🐈 costs, and because I was having litter delivered instead of having to carry it, I ordered a big pail of not lightweight litter, and the weirdest thing is happening. Since adopting a second cat a couple years ago, I switched to having two litter boxes. Neither 🐱 claimed a particular box; it just made it more likely that there’d be a box at all times each felt was usable. Since this recent switch to the non-lightweight litter, neither cat has bothered to use anything but the nearer of the two boxes. Even after I switched their positions, no one’s used the box that is just beyond the closest one. I can’t explain it, except perhaps as a result of the heavier litter being better, as far as they are concerned, and so neither one feels they need to use the “other” box.
Timothy Chambers reminds me of the history of FOAF (“Friend Of A Friend”) era, if it can be called that. I’m reasonably certain that I had a FOAF file once upon a time, likely back in my self-hosted Moveable Type-using golden-age-of-blogging days, and just as reasonably sure that I used FOAF-a-Matic to generate it.
This week on 📺 I’m watching Doctor Who, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow (the conclusion of the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover), the season premiere of The Magicians (finally), Nancy Drew, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Good Place, and Evil. I’m also back to my first time for The Blacklist, mostly as something to have on in the semi-background.
Thanks in part to having recently bought a sleep mask, I successfully murdered half the day by getting back to sleep and managed to sleep until 12:45pm. I got all my morning chores and pills and sprays done within fifteen minutes, and now the time before the next sleep is dramatically reduced, and between here and there is a Doctor Who. I will have to leave the house for a small grocery run in case snow actually happens in the next few days, though.
My big plan after last night was to sleep as long as possible this morning so as to avoid being a person so of course once I abided by the alarm to feed the cats I can’t get back to sleep and I’m stuck awake and aimless and angry and I really just need to be asleep even if the last dream I had was about not being able to sufficiently get my own ass wiped while standing in a booth that only had an ill-fitting curtain to prevent anyone from seeing me.
One last time I tried the Goodreads Librarians Quiz, even though the time limit sends me down an anxiety spiral, and this time it had at least one question on it that had no correct answer to select. What irritates me, ultimately, is that if I were actually doing Goodreads Librarian work, I could take an entire hour, if I needed to, to make sure I understood how to make a particular edit correctly. To become a Librarian, however, you have to correctly answer something like twenty questions in half-an-hour. Which superficially sounds fine but in reality disadvantages anyone whose cognition freezes up under that kind of temporal pressure.
While I agree with Erin Bulluss and Abby Sesterka that “a diagnosis of autism in adulthood can change self-concept for the better”, it also can do this to a much lesser degree than they describe. It’s true that I’ve said that my midlife diagnosis changed some thinking about my having been a failure and a fuck-up for several decades, but it’s also true that I’ve said that post-diagnosis I’ve come to feel that in a sense I’m a failure and a fuck-up even at being actually-autistic, in that had I greater support needs it would be too obvious for me to be denied that support, else had I fewer support needs I might be able to manage on my own. Instead, I appear to have landed right in the mediocre middle that appears to be a dead angle to many of the venues and avenues of support. Much of their description of being autistic matches my own, for example, yet they also “both work in areas that are high pressure, emotionally and cognitively demanding, and involve frequent and inflexible deadlines”—emphasis on the “both work”. Whatever level of supports Bulluss and Sesterka require, it doesn’t appear to be such that it prevents or precludes economic self-sufficiency. Which is a perfectly legitimate way to be actually-autistic, of course, and neither they nor anyone else needs my say-so on that. It’s just that there seem to be plenty of people describing their lives as autistic people who nonetheless are managing, and not so much people noticing that there also are those of us out here who are reasonable intelligent, reasonably competent people who nonetheless, despite now having started their sixth decade, have never been economically self-sufficient in their entire lives. Would having known I was autistic the entire time have changed my employment fortunes? (See the “missed opportunities” bit in this piece on a so-called “lost generation” of autistics.) There’s no way to tell, although there’s no question in my mind that I now can peg the dismal fate of every single job I’ve ever had to being autistic without knowing it. Except for my most recent one, a job placement through Vocational Rehabilitation which therefore included accommodations, that nonetheless blew up in my face and resulted in shutdowns and sobbing fits such as I’d never before experienced in my life. As near as anyone paying close enough attention to tell can tell, I seem to be too autistic to support myself and yet at the same time not autistic enough to receive financial supports instead. My midlife marks the moment I went from being a failure and a fuck-up, through an autism diagnosis that said I wasn’t, into… feeling like I’m a failure and a fuck-up as an autistic person. So how’s your Saturday night going?
The disability community often criticizes the term “special needs” (it’s coming up a lot lately because Andrew Yang uses it, typically when he asks if anyone in his audience knows someone who is autistic but never seems to ask if anyone in his audience is autistic), rightfully pointing out that it’s not so much that the needs themselves really differ in kind from the needs anyone else has, but that some people require more support than others in order to have those needs met, and so therefore the term is quite (ahem) needlessly othering. One thing I haven’t come across that occurred to me today, although it’s probably out there, is that the term also devalues those it excludes, in that it reinforces the idea that everyone else’s needs are effectively plug-and-play and more or less simply satisfied by consumerism and commodification. The term “special needs” essentially dehumanizes and depersonalizes everyone.
So I’m back on watching The Blacklist for the first time because there’s nothing on 📺 and I’m not interested in my streaming queues, and what’s with Lizzie in the S1 finale taking notes on legal pads using giant three-inch letters and maybe all of two words per page. Do they teach that at Quantico?
For the life of me I cannot grasp how McIlwain can in the first part of his post type the words “thought leadership content” and “movement-first content” and “pontificatorials that business folks drop as LinkedIn Pulse articles” and somehow then in the second part tie these things to “a return of original voice and style and stream-of-consciousness blogging that made the early web such a delight”.
Things I have recently learned: you can give Meru, 🐈 number one, liquid antibiotics pretty quickly once you get past the trepidation and anxiety of that first time, and she will still come sleep in your lap after. Also, the first thing she will do later on when you smother a piece of chicken in probiotics is voraciously lick off all the probiotic, and then eat the chicken.
CJ Eller is talking about context again (it’s come up here before ), in this case specifically about public highlights and bookmarks. I should note that once upon a time, many bloggers—myself included—used Delicious to bookmark interesting links and then automatically posted weekly (I think?) blog posts of the links we’d gathered over that past week.
Historically, I kept a private Amazon wishlist of 📚 that at some point looked interesting and might someday move to my actual list of titles to buy or borrow. This week I’ve been spending time methodically culling it onto my new to-consider list on Goodreads, which as I take a break to post this stands at 114 titles. There are still possibly hundreds of titles to work my way through. I should note that I “only” manage to read 30-60 books a year, so I simply won’t get to the vast majority of the books on this list, but it’s useful for seeing what sorts of things manage at least catch my attention.
I think I am overthinking a regular treadmill schedule and just need to lock in something simple and small and seldom, like a set time just once a week. It’s difficult to switch gears from all the inertial distractions that exist at home to go set myself up on the damned thing and focus. Before I moved from Lents to St. Johns the plan had been to get the cheap monthly membership at the Planet Fitness that had opened up just two blocks from my apartment, so I’d not be surrounded by distractions. Then I moved just after they opened. I keep trying to set a schedule but then get tripped up by thoughts of, “Well, that won’t be often enough to do any good.” Except that getting inertially distracted is doing even less good.
John Stoehr highlights that The Wall Steet Journal reported Trump’s other abuse of national security in a political quid pro quo: “Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said.”
Joanne McNeil predicts a potential “return to blogs” in 2020: “I’d expect new blogs to step in the same ambiguous territory as newsletters have — a venue for material where not everyone is looking, but privacy is neither airtight nor expected.” And now I’m looking forward to McNeil’s forthcoming 📖, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, which I immediately added to my to-get list on Goodreads.
After geting trapped in pre-telephone appointment about anxiety anxiety and then post-telephone appointment about anxiety anxierty, and at the risk of just walking into a whole other arena of and for anxiety (and at the certain risk of budgetary anxiety), I got dressed and took myself to where I have bar breakfast for bar lunch, and then immediately upon returning home, since the Chewy delivery had arrived, dumped the litter, cleaned the litter boxes, swept and mopped the floor of the litter area, then refreshed the litter, and now I can’t tell if I still have anxiety symptoms or am just exhausted, tired, wiped, and sad-feeling, which I think isn’t necessarily so much sad as a manifestation of the exhausted, tired, and wiped.
Here’s some blogging nostalgia for you. While using the Wayback Machine to find my local coverage of Iraq war protests in 2003, I noticed in my sidebar from the time a Meta section which linked to several ways to find blogs related to or referencing mine: Blogdex, Daypop, Ecosystem, GeoURL, Technorati, and Waypath. One of them (Technorati) you still see indieweb bloggers talk about, but the others? I’d forgotten all about them until now.
I’m switching back to Feedbin for awhile in my ongoing comparison between it and NetNewsWire. Something about the former seems smoother and quicker as a UI experience. I did drop email newsletters from Feedbin as it’s pretty terrible at them, in that it scrapes the newsletter content to try make it look like an RSS item, with very spotty and inconsistent success. I went back to Stoop for newsletters.
If there’s one thing that annoys me the most about Meru, 🐈 number one, is that she’s routinely uninterested in things until and unless Willow, 🐱 number two, is interested in them. This most commonly comes in the form of never wanting to curl up on the blanket that’s next to me on the couch until Willow decides she does. And it’s very clear that even if Meru isn’t making a specific move directly to oust Willow from the blanket, any move she makes to try to also get onto the blanket—well, she knows it’s going to have the indirect effect of making Willow ticked off enough to leave. I’d be perfectly happy—ecstatic, even—for the two of them to both sleep on the blanket at the same time even if completely ignoring each other, but the chances of that happening still are too low to be recognized as a number. I don’t want to get mad at Meru, and I don’t, although I will gently nudge her away—but even that I hate because I feel like it’s teaching her that being next to Willow is bad. I just want them to feel free to ignore each other in proximity instead of Meru feeling like she’s got to cause a problem or Willow feeling like she can’t be there if Meru joins her.
If there are any longtime readers here (such that a return to blogging that only goes back to 2018 can be considered to have a longtime anything) know that I have trouble with articles about burnout because, as an actually-autistic person who’s experienced that particular type of it, I’m not fond of when people make burnout into a sort of millennial lifestyle choice or act of rebellion.
A politics of happiness may sound frivolous, and it is if you think of “happiness” as simply feeling good (especially since “feeling good” is also not an experience we tend to associate with the federal government). But happiness as shorthand for a good life, which is how a great many philosophers and theorists from Aristotle to Abraham Maslow (of that famous hierarchy of needs) have conceived of it for centuries, is a different animal. Happiness isn’t just an immediate and viscerally gratifying experience, although experiencing indulgence is key to a happy life. Happiness is the ability to pursue meaning, knowledge and experience; to enjoy connection, inquiry and pleasure. It is, quite simply, the point. If we aren’t trying to live happy lives—moral, social, full lives—what are we all doing here?
I am beginning to wonder what, if anything, I might have unconsciously thought as a child about being actually-autistic. Not in those terms, of course, since diagnosis wouldn’t come for decades, but one of my clearest elementary school memories is telling people I wasn’t from here: I was from Saturn; I’d even made a Saturnian alphabet. What did I secretly, even from myself, suspect about my own 🧠?
So, I failed the god damned Goodreads Librarian quiz again, for the second night in a row. My 🧠 simply doesn’t work right under a time gun, even when it’s an entire thirty minutes. I don’t know why the quiz has to have a fucking clock running. I really do not want to post to a discussion thread, “Can someone add covers to these ten ebook editions of 📚 no one ever bothered to add until I did it?”
The world is too much today, apparently. For dinner, after thinking about nuclear missiles and listening to all of U2’s War, I first had some bread and cheese, then had too many lightly-salted potato chips, then now it’s snickerdoodles and coffee. If it helps anyone, I did have an actual breakfast and an actual lunch.
The common conception of the swing voter is one who shifts between voting Republican and voting Democrat. These center-right or center-left voters are typically white and older. Meanwhile, people of color and young people, and especially young people of color, are more likely than white people and older people to swing between voting Democrat and not voting (or voting third party). These are America’s other swing voters. Othered because they are typically young and not-white. Othered because they are hardly recognized at the table of political agency. Othered because they are primarily recognized at the table of political shame when they don’t vote. Othered because Americans refuse to recognize how voter suppression and depression affect their agency. Quietly, though, they are voicing their agency, declaring the Democratic Party irresponsible for the candidate choices it makes, swinging, and deciding elections.
“Backchannels accommodate neurological pluralism,” writes Ryan Boren, “while fostering the serendipity of networks.” Serendpity, indeed, as also today Paul Bausch linked Basecamp’s guide for internal communications. When I read Basecamp saying things like “writing solidifies, chat dissolves”, “the expectation of immediate response is toxic”, “communication shouldn’t require schedule synchronization”, “time is on your side, rushing makes conversations worse”, and “communication is lossy, especially verbal communication”—well, let’s just say that I’m reminded that for all intents and purposes I’ve suggested that email as a psychotherapeutic channel might “accommodate neurological pluralism”. By all means, let’s “bring the backchannel forward”.
Anyone know a way to convert an exported .xml from a Blogger site into something Micro.blog would understand? I’m starting to give serious consideration to buying a second blog here to host old content from as many of my prior blogging incarnations as I can find, but it will require converting from Blogger and from Moveable Type (if I can even find my old MT exports/backups somewhere).
There’s a thing called “tagmoji” on Micro.blog—to help with discovery—that I basically haven’t been using because I don’t especially like the way it looks when prepended or appended to my posts. That said, I’ve started using some of those emoji (as well as some proposed ones) just to give some visual variety when browsing my blog, but only as stand-ins for actual in-sentence words. They generally won’t get picked up by Discover, though, because they won’t necessarily be in the first 280 characters of my posts.
There’s a weird experiment of sorts happening over on Write.as which CJ Eller calls “silent mentions”, but I’m not entire sure I get it. As near as I can tell, it’s just people posting to the same hashtag. It might not be a reply, as such, at all? There’s no new functionality here, per se, it doesn’t look like; it seems to be a user-generated social-hack of designating a hashtag on your own post and hoping no one else uses it for anything else?
I’m about to buy both 🐈 food and litter, and I need this time around to track how long each lasts and how often the re-up happens, because if I can switch to a regular Chewy delivery that will help in a few different ways. Right now, though, I have no idea how much I’m technically spending every month on this, because I always forget to pay attention to it. This is complicated by my cats’ new veterinarian suggesting that with both cats now technically being considered seniors, I should be adding wet food to their diet; I don’t see any way to do that without increasing costs, which isn’t an option. So, first step: determine what I’m paying every month as it is.
This morning, not having much in me, I walked to a cheap bar breakfast I hadn’t done in awhile. The walk itself was an anxiety spike. I did manage to find a reasonably-cornerish table more or less as far from the stereo speakers as I could get, and was able to calmly sit to eat and read. That sense of an extra compressing force upon my chest returned once home, however. I am not having much luck getting feedback from actually-autistic people on any anxiety medications they’ve taken, in advance of a Thursday phone appointment with my primary care provider to discuss that issue.
Feeling—and this is a weird hybrid not-quite-physical but not-quite-mental sensation in that it’s “in” my head but “feels” like it’s the body—as if I have another body maybe a centimeter beneath my skin that wants to stretch all its muscles beyond what my skin permits. I don’t mean that I literally believe there is another body inside my body; I’m not having some sort of break here. It’s just the closest I can come to describing this.
For a while, I thought the answer to this question was simple: nerds ruined everything. They carried a teenage sense of grievance into adulthood and nobody stopped them and now here we are. In pop culture they gave us people who go to the mat for blockbusters and in politics they gave us the kind of technocrat who just stands around with his hand raised, waiting for the American people to call on him. However, looking at the broader scope of the problem, I can no longer really subscribe to this theory. To nerds I offer a qualified apology: I still don’t like you, but I have to admit, it’s not your fault.
Question: is the reason people care about editing tweets instead of just deleting and re-posting that they don’t want to lose existing engagement numbers, and if so isn’t the real answer to get rid of engagement numbers. If it’s breaking the chain of interaction, then how about being able to delete and re-draft a tweet in a way that replaces the original with some “this tweet has been deleted and re-drafted” language, with the re-drafted tweet posted as an immediate reply to the original one? The direct chain would still be broken, but anyone looking back from a reply would get to the deletion message and its “attached” replacement. I feel like I typically see people concerned more about their likes and retweets, though.
I’m currently having a pretty strong freakout over the fact that in the last five minutes I’ve with certainty seen words I’ve typed that then turned out to be completely different words, while also scrolling back and forth eight times through a list of terms to find one I knew was there without seeing it until the ninth scroll. My 🧠 is not functioning right now. This among many reasons is why I need the fucking categories lists on Micro.blog to be alphabetical everywhere.
For the hell of it I want to say one more thing about disruption versus serendipity: if I’m sitting at my local breakfast place, by myself, reading a book, and someone were to walk up, sit down, and start talking to me, that’s disruption. If in the same circumstances I unexpectedly ran into someone I know and had a brief chat before heading our separate ways (or, perhaps in your case, joining each other for breakfast), that’s serendipity. Disruption is a terrible term to want to apply to any concept of neighborliness or community.
In over the transom this weekend from Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders is a discussion of anxiety as it relates to treatment of autistic patients. It’s limited, if only because it revolves around talking only to eight people, and all eight of them only practitioners, and I think I only have a few quick things to note.
Three years ago today I filed my court papers to change my name to Bix, the name by which for all intents and purposes other than those legal I’d been going by for two decades, the reduction of an online handle which had replaced my original—from slowdog to baby-X to the diminutive bx to the pronunciation bix to the leetspeak b!X (specifically The One True b!X) to the legalized Bix.
I’m into season two in my full rewatch of The OA and I keep seeing Brad Pitt’s name in the credits and, really, even he couldn’t convince Netflix to keep it going? It was bad enough that 📺 powerhouse Shonda Rhimes (who has her own Netflix deal) being a fan didn’t matter, but even a Pitt connection wasn’t enough? Yes, I’m still mad, and still not over it.
Steve MacDouell posted a list of three neighborly things he’s setting as goals for 2020, and I just wanted to make a language comment. I hate the term disruption. What he’s talking about, really, with his second goal—become more disruptable—is being open to serendipity. Disruption as a term has become bogged down in the techbro compulsion to ruin everything in order to make more money. I don’t want people disrupting me or my life. I’m open, although probably to lesser degrees than most other people, to serendipity. Disruption is rude. Serendipity is welcome.
I walked the two blocks down for breakfast and despite Saturday apparently being much less frenetic than Sunday and so less of a drain on me, as soon as I got home afterward I joined the cat who had never left bed and passed out for nearly three hours. I briefly woke about halfway through that time and could barely think about even lifting my arms. Somehow I still have to walk to the grocery store else there’s no decent breakfast for tomorrow.
Yesterday’s truncated trip to the zoo due to extremely low, rapidly-depleting resources leaves me with the decision this morning of what will take fewer of what few resources have replenished during a thrice-interrupted sleep: breakfast out which spends money of which there’s never much to begin with, or breakfast in which requires a coherent brain that won’t cause an accident or something.
“[I]t should be about identifying what is causing distress collaboratively with the person,” writes Sonny Hallett, “and addressing that with an acknowledgement of the broader context in which they exist.” This is certainly true. What’s causing much of my distress, however, is that despite a ruinous decades-long job history which now is clearly explained by my then-undiagnosed autism and so lack of accommodation or mitigation and a recent post-diagnosis job placement through Vocational Rehabilitation which despite accommodation and mitigation nonetheless wrecked me, I am not considered disabled enough to qualify for financial supports beyond SNAP benefits, and so once I’m finished draining my family finances dry, I will have nothing. Who, tell me, is going to address that?
So, this research from Orbit Media (via Andy McIlwain) should actually be read as a list of all the things we should ignore if we truly want to revive the blogosphere. The average length of time to write a blog post should not be three hours. It’s fine, of course, to take three hours to write a blog post, but on average? No. But the thing that really made me just want to sit around and headdesk for an hour or two is the figure labelled, “The least common blogging tactics are the most effective.” For one thing, fuck tactics. What we need from the indieweb is to rescue blogging from the marketing industry. Include more than ten photos per post? Write more than a dozen headlines? Research keywords? Collaborate with influencers on every post? What a hellscape. To paraphrase Bono for some reason: “This is a form the marketing industry stole from the bloggers. We’re stealing it back.” Just fucking blog.
Two days after announcing his resignation for health reasons, Commissioner Nick Fish died of abdominal cancer. I’m not interested in hagiography here, as I didn’t know Fish personally and it’s been over a decade since I’d had interaction professionally, but I did go and dig up this Portland Communique post from an East Portland campaign event in 2004 which if nothing else shows that the one thing you never could have said about Nick Fish is that he wasn’t capable of, or interested in, lengthy, detailed conversations with Portlanders about Portland.
At least two wake-ups overnight that robbed sleep. Already tired this morning, the thudding, thunking construction next door hammered away at what few resources I had to start the day. Still attempting to do this week’s zoo trip but had to leave the DSLR at home because even that much more weight was too much to contemplate. My brain is so fried that I forgot to order my breakfast sandwich over hard and so couldn’t finish it. By all rights I should stay home, but I need my zoo visit. This could all go very, very wrong today.
Woke up several times after 4:00am with difficulty falling back to sleep. Then after carrying a cat to and from the vet (maybe a ten-minute walk each way?), I tried to sit and read at home but instead hard crashed in the living room for almost three hours. Now I’m additionally slow and weak because I haven’t eaten since breakfast.
Speaking of health stuff: tomorrow (after I take the first of my two cats to the new local vet in the neighborhood for a general checkup and any shots that might be outstanding), I call to schedule my followup gallbladder ultrasound. Meanwhile, I nudged my primary care physician on my request for the followup CT scan which I want in advance of any potential lymph node biopsy. Then I need to pick a date to go into Nurse Treatment and get the first of my two shingles vaccine shots. Also, I want to know my blood type (I used to know, decades ago) and apparently the only way to get that is to donate blood, so I need to find a time to schedule that, too.
As soon as I’m done with The Uninhabitable Earth, I’ll be embarking upon a run of autism-related nonfiction books. My local Multnomah County Library finally obtained on OverDrive the ebooks of Autism: A New Introduction to Psychological Theory and Current Debate by Sue Fletcher-Watson and Francesca Happé, and Trauma, Stigma, and Autism: Developing Resilience and Loosening the Grip of Shame by Gordon Gates; and I downloaded the ePub of Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline edited by Steven K. Kapp.
One thing I have noticed about this current run of autistic burnout is that everything is noticeably worse: my anxiety is worse, my reflux is worse, my sleep is worse, my sinuses are worse, the twinge of potential gout flare (so far avoided) is worse, and I’ve got some bladder spasming that might or might not simply be related to the fit of my pants getting worse. It is not a fun dynamic.
Bizarrely, it is nearly the mid-50s in Portland today, with lots of blue skies passing overhead, and so I credit myself for walking Lombard to see what if anything was open today, thereby finding breakfast that wasn’t at the bar. Back at home, my cats are fairly intent on my having opened up several windows to let the apartment air out before the weather inevitably turns again. Later, maybe: out for a latte (there’s at least one coffee shop actually open). Later still, for sure: the season premiere of Doctor Who.
I live in St. Johns, Oregon, since November 2018, where I’ve started my fifty-first year of being alive. I’m in my fourth year as a diagnosed autistic and no closer to feeling like anything other than a failure and a fuck-up. I don’t know what’s going on with my health, and I don’t especially look forward to finding out. This blog continues to be a going concern, for better or worse, for whatever it’s worth. I’ve still not found a psychoconsultant both knowledgeable about adult autism and covered by my insurance. I’m finally selling print-on-demand t-shirts to express your quiet disgruntlement (and other things).
I realized the other day the degree to which my adult pre-diagnosis social interactions were occasioned by alcohol and I wonder what role alcohol plays in masking/camouflaging for an undiagnosed autistic, and for the suppression of comorbid social anxiety. I’m thinking about it again now because I am reading this paper on late-diagnosed midlife autistics and how social “interaction retained a performance quality”, and it made me wonder about how alcohol makes socially-performative circumstances quote-unquote easier. Looking at the last decade (my diagnosis wasn’t until 2016, though), there’s a fair bit of tracking between my decreasing social activity and my increasing disinterest in drinking.
Well, this ends ridiculously. I just got my blog’s dark theme working—having sat down prepared to have to go through line after line of CSS methodically and laboriously—and it turns out that apparently all I needed was @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { html { filter: invert(100%); } body { filter: invert(0%); } img { filter: invert(100%); } } and it simply inverts the color scheme and I no longer have to even think about it. It’s not perfect, but it’s functional and easy enough on the eyes.
“It’s important to note, though,” writes Sara Meyer, “that in ABA, ‘best’ means most efficient at changing the behaviour, not ‘best’ in terms of the long range well-being of the client.” Remember this when ABA proponents proclaim that it’s the only “evidence-based” treatment for autism. The evidence is only of a change in behavior, not of any alleged recovery, which isn’t a thing. Also keep this in mind when it comes to general psychotherapeutic support for autistic adults, since most therapists, counsellors, and social workers sense of autism likely is defined by those industries’ general acceptance of ABA as the leading treatment for children. Which doesn’t mean they think ABA is for adults, too, but often will mean not tailoring treatment for autistic brains.
Why is it like this? We took this beautiful thing with so much promise and trashed it. Why are WE like this? Because we as people are terrible at grasping web scale in our minds. People cannot scale up like machines. We can’t possibly think through all of the consequences of creating behemoth sites and systems that impact billions of people. No one has so far, and no one will in the future.
I’ve been trying to find a metaphor for the idea that if, as some research suggests, autistic brains have more persistent connections in the face of stimuli, and how that might help account for how environmental and sensory stimuli impacts autistic people, and I think I found it: compound interest. When affected by stimuli, the allistic brain at most must deal with simple impacts based upon the principal stimulus, whereas the autistic brain must deal with compound impacts based upon not just the principal stimulus but the stimulus accruing due to those persistent connections.
Watching this week: Wednesday: Doctor Who. That’s… it. I’ve apparently no motivation to finish up She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Glitch; or to get to the latest of The End of the F*ing World, The Man in the High Castle, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I’m once again self-care rewatching Girlboss, though I’ll have finished that on Sunday.
If we’re going to build a new web, and a new internet, that respects our privacy and security, that doesn’t amplify abuse and harassment and misinformation, we’re going to need to imagine models of experiences and communities that could provide a better alternative. There’s not going to be a “Facebook killer”. But there could simply be lots of other sites, that focus on a different, more constructive and generative, set of goals. The good news is, we don’t have to imagine what that more human, more expressive, more valuable web could look like. We just have to pay attention to the fact that we visit it every day.
“And more often than not,” observed Elizabeth Davis, “white people see racism as an issue of manners more than anything else.” Her remark was prompted by a recent debacle within the Romance Writers of America but almost immediately it struck me again just days later as white people like Judy Woodruff and Joe Scarborough reacted to the death of Don Imus, conveniently ignoring his racism because, after all, he’d been good to them.
Shea is a particularly prominent example of how views we write off as “fringe” are not quite so on the right. There’s a knee-jerk media tendency to “both sides” this issue, pointing out that there are leftist extremists, too. But the difference is that no extremist on the left sits in elected office — the most “extreme” people we have are a handful of mostly-young and mostly-female politicians who want the American healthcare system to look a little more like Denmark. Even the lefties on the pages of magazines like Jacobin who swear their allegiance to Bernie Sanders pretty much just want to tax billionaires into millionaire status, not fling the nation into armed militia warfare (and any who do certainly don’t have the ear of the Democratic Party).
“This is why algorithmic time is so disorienting and why it bends your mind,” writes Katherine Miller (via Alan Jacobs). “[W]e operate inside a technological experience that moves forward and back, and pulls you with it.” As good an explanation as any I could come up with for why I’m struggling with Instagram now that the algorithm is pushing hard into my feed; it bends my mind to the breaking point. It’s akin to being unstuck in time(lines) like some social media Billy Pilgrim, dragged back and forth against my will. My particular autistic (and anxious, and OCD) brain needs predictability and control. It currently literally hurts to look at my Instagram feed. Adam Mosseri once told Wired, “We will make decisions that hurt the business if they’re good for people’s well-being and health.” If he truly intends “to reduce anxiety” on the platform, brains like mine require a chronological feed.
I’m not especially reassured by the fact that the FCC thinks NOAA is just selfishly and spuriously suggesting that 5G is going to wreak havoc on weather forecasting and anyway, god damn it, there’s $2 trillion to be made, meterologists! It’s not like accurate weather predictions are going to become increasingly important due to some sort of climate crisis or anything.
Watch out: 2019 is sneaking in some last kicks to the crotch before it’s done. Overdrive, the leading provider of ebooks to public libraries, is being sold by Rakuten to the investment firm which “bought and bankrupted” Toys R Us. Just this month I switched from Kindle to Kobo, and one of the motivating factors was the native integration between Kobo and Overdrive thanks to Rakuten owning them both. But is Kobo next?
Just over a year and a half ago, I noted that Instagram hates me. Recently, on my original Medium post, I got yelled at for saying Instagram was “out to get us”. I didn’t say that, of course, and the real point is that impact trumps intent—and the impact is that Instagram’s algorithm hurts my brain. Imagine one morning feeding the cats and doing the dishes, only to return to the kitchen an hour and half later to find one of the cat food bowls is back on the counter and half the dishes somehow are unwashed. This, in part, is what the Instagram algorithm is like for me. To a large degree one of the ways in which I mitigate the problematic aspects of being autistic is through predictability and control. Social media algorithms thwart that. I’m sure someone, somewhere, will roll their eyes at this, but it’s plain as day to me: chronological social feeds should be considered a disability accommodation. I may, in fact, have just used Instagram’s “report a problem” link to formally request an exemption from the algorithmic feed on this basis. It’s shouting into the abyss, but at least the shout is on-the-record.
It’s a pet peeve I can’t shake: audiobooks are not reading. They are perfectly valid and every bit as valuable, but literally they are not reading, they are listening. I feel like whatever readers did to try to make listeners feel inferior has resulted in pushback that rather than being oriented toward defending listening to books in and of itself has oriented toward bastardizing the words we have for experiencing books, which seems a weird approach when what’s at issue, after all, is the love of the things that words can make. You’ve no more “read” a book by listening to a recording of it than you’ve done so by listening to someone read it aloud to you in person; they are reading, you are listening. Reading is an unmediated act between writer and reader; listening is not, as it passes through someone in between. No one who’s been to the theater for Hamlet can say they read Hamlet; they’ve seen it. The words we use for these distinct mental experiences should reflect that there’s a difference. Don’t redefine reading books. Vigorously defend listening to them.
Jay Rosen brutally savages Chuck Todd, except that I’m not sure it’s right to call it brutal when it’s so correct and so called-for. Rosen obliterates Todd’s self-professed claims to a mere naïveté, labelling it instead “malpractice”, “willful blindness”, and “lack of imagination”. Look for Todd now to position himself as an expert on Republican disinformation (despite, as Rosen points out, using instead the non-synonymous term “misinformation”), and just as the press falls for the grift of people like Conway, Schmidt, and Wilson they will fall for—and reward—Todd’s new grift, too. Because that’s how this all works.
Random updates: My insane prescription sinus congestion regimen mght finally be taking hold; we’ll see. I successfully left the apartment to sit for a latte and a book before Affogato closed for the day. Last night I ran up to Kung Food to grab some Pea Pod Pork for dinner which means leftovers tonight. After a brainfart on my part screwed me out of $5-off on Kobo, they gave me $5 credit. Today is a binge of Lost in Space season two and then my annual rewatch of Desk Set.
This morning after being awake from 4:00am to 6:00am again being unable to breathe through my nose sufficiently, I then had to get up at 8:00am not just to feed the cats but to have a telephone appointment with my primary care physician, most of which about said ceasless congestion and part of which about the uptick in my anxiety over the last month or so. The latter led to me feeling cornered—entirely by internal pressure not external—into agreeing to a 10:30am telephone appointment with one of my primary care clinic’s psychoconsultants, despite still having no clarity from either my medical plan or my insurance provider on what kind of resource they are (I’ve only been told, over and over and over, what kind of recourse they aren’t). It was a waste of time, and a perfect example of why I specifically need to find people who have even a little understanding of adult autism. It was a plug-and-play conversation. Oh, you anxiety has been spiking lately? Here’s the checklist of things we tell people about anxiety. Well, no, some of those things might be applicable to me but some of them might not, as my brain literally is put together differently than the brains of the people you all made that plug-and-play checklist for. Have you tried calling these places? I can refer you. Well, yes, literally those are all of the very first places I contacted a year and a half ago; none of them work and I’ve had no luck for a year and a half of searching. I tried explaining things like “autistic burnout”, I tried explaining the research suggesting autistic brains hold onto stimuli longer than other brains, and I even mentioned how I think many psychoconsultants (I don’t use that word with them) roll their eyes when we talk about these things, and it sure felt like when I said that I’d caught her rolling her eyes. I left this conversation feeling worse than I did going into it, and I’m sure she has no idea because the easiest way out of a conversation with someone who isn’t equipped to help you is to “mask” and play nice, so I did.
If, on the other hand, we take the kind of long view I’m proposing, instead of seeing Facebook and surveillance capitalism as the culmination of the internet’s short history, we can view them instead as an early experiment that is in the course of failing (or at least of having its parameters changed). From this point of view, it’s easier to see the web of the 2000s, not as a developmental stage that has now been surpassed, but rather as a set of possibilities which still have plenty of potential to be realized. Maybe it’s possible to go back after all.
The good: finally slept through the night without waking due to being unable to breathe enough through my nose for the first time in ages, but it did take 10-15 minutes of working with nasal saline and three different prescription sprays. The bad: this morning after making and eating breakfast, washing up, getting dressed, and tying my shoes, my back hurt, my shoulders ached, and I was out of breath. Then the coffeeshop didn’t tell me they were out of almond milk until after they’d rung me up and the bus was coming too soon for me to run to somewhere else and so my commute to the zoo was latte-free. Then at the zoo I realized it might have been a mistake not to have added a long layer under my pants. And of course I’m having trouble sufficiently breathing through my nose because I just didn’t have the energy this morning for another 10-15 minute session with saline and sprays.
Guvf jubyr gvzr V gubhtug punatvat gur jbeyq jnf fbzrguvat lbh qvq. Na npg lbh cresbezrq. Fbzrguvat lbh sbhtug sbe. V qba’g xabj vs gung’f gehr nalzber. Jung vs punatvat gur jbeyq vf whfg nobhg orvat urer? Ol fubjvat hc ab znggre ubj znal gvzrf jr trg gbyq jr qba’g orybat? Ol fgnlvat gehr rira jura jr’er funzrq vagb orvat snyfr? Ol oryvrivat va bhefryirf rira jura jr’er gbyq jr’er gbb qvssrerag? Naq vs jr nyy uryq bagb gung, vs jr ershfrq gb ohqtr naq snyy va yvar, vs jr fgbbq bhe tebhaq sbe ybat rabhtu, znlor gur jbeyq pna’g uryc ohg punatr nebhaq hf.
This week’s television: Sunday: Patriot Act with Hasan Minaj, Mr. Robot; Tuesday: Lost in Space (which I’m likely to binge this week). I’m still trying to finish up She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Glitch; and still need to get to the latest of The End of the F*ing World, The Man in the High Castle, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I’ve resumed my The Magicians rewatch since last season finally hit Netflix.
Photo posts on my blog are going to break for a bit, as the range .Params.photos code I needed to work right now works right. What am I doing? I’m changing the Hugo code for my photo posts so that I can upload photos on the go using Sunlit but still have my posts publish using the figure and figcaption code I like to have in place.
Current reads: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch (on the Kindle); and Supernova Era by Liu Cixin (on the Kobo). I read the short Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon just before starting Supernova Era. Because Internet is borrowed from the Multnomah County Library through OverDrive. I’ve read 58 books so far this year.
Some initial thoughts about testing out the Kobo Clara HD. It’s noticably smaller and lighter than the Paperwhite, although the actual screen size is the same. The narrower bezels don’t seem to be an issue for holding the device, in part because of its lighter weight. Sideloading the Kindle books I converted to kepub format worked, as did adding the Bookerly font I read in on the Paperwhite. Unlike the Paperwhite, Kobo had one aesthetic feature I’ve always wanted: the cover of your current read is the sleep screen. The built-in OverDrive seems pretty flawless; as soon as I logged into my OverDrive account, my current library borrows came down. Actual usage, obviously, I’ll see over the weekend. I did buy for both devices one cheap book that I want to read, so I’ll be able to do kind of a direct comparison.
Apparently you can’t create a private shelf on Goodreads; in fact, their “workaround” is to create an entire private group just for yourself and use its shelves for this. As I investigate the degree to which I can wean myself off of Amazon (yes, I know Goodreads is owed by them), I’m trying to find a replacement for the private wishlist of books I’m thinking about but haven’t decided on, and I guess Goodreads can’t help me with that unless I want to jump through all the group-creation nonsense.
Famous author J.K. Rowling today spoiled her new book, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists and Where to Find Them, by revealing you can find them right there on her own Twitter account. Judging by the comparative engagement numbers (replies, retweets, likes), I’m wondering to where all the non-TERF Harry Potter fans disappeared.
Yet focusing solely on Section 230’s role in enabling abuse on the internet misses other ways it affects women and other marginalized groups. Despite the provision’s role in making it harder to hold platforms accountable for revenge porn, it also allows companies to moderate the content on their platforms without fear of legal reprisal should they fall short — which they inevitably do. Some fear that repealing or amending it might actually make things worse for women, queer people, and other marginalized folks who rely on the internet for promotion, organization, and community.
“[O]ne potential outcome of [potentially traumatic events],” according to a study in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, “is the development of trauma and stressor-related symptoms such as avoidance of stimuli associated with the event, severe anxiety reactions triggered by stimuli related to the event, or nightmares.”
The point here is that Trumpism did not replace conservatism. The former rose from the latter. The GOP saw Democrats as illegitimate Americans long before Trump. The GOP did not abandon its principle either. As I said, the principles animating Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham are the same ones that animated Johns Calhoun and George Wallace . The point here is that Wilson, Schmidt and Conway played a rose in that rise. It’s hard not to laugh a little at their attempt to sound, um, liberal. The Republicans, they wrote, “daily undermine the proposition we as a people have a responsibility and an obligation to continually bend the arc of history toward justice.”
But smart, capable Times reporters, corrupted by an editorial regime that prevents them from acknowledging those elemental truths, over the last few days put forth such epically, historically bad examples of pox-on-both-your-houses, boring-what-else-is-new, and self-contradictory political coverage that press critics on social media – including several former Times editors — were appropriately united in despair.
I’ll be honest. “It is impossible to see who’s popular and attracting a lot of people,” is the complaint of someone who was never going to be happy here, and whose priorities were never going to align with the design decisions and social philosophy of Micro.blog. That’s fine, of course, but to present the criticism as if it’s an obvious no-brainer that popularity indicators are an inherent good instead of just one values decision among many potential choices says something profound about the trap social media led us all into. Not all social media—and maybe no social media—should be about who is popular or getting popular or from which popular people can I grab attention.
So, what the hell happened today, exactly? What happened was that I left my neighborhood in order to hit the soon-gone Byways Cafe again, and within minutes of setting foot on the the bus I was back in that low-level but constant startle-alert state. The one from the other day. The one that apparently yielded that on-hold feeling the next day (yesterday). By the time I’d ordered lunch, it wasn’t so low-level anymore, and my day became a competition between my plan to be at Byways as close to closing time as possible to try to take the photos I want, and an anxiety attack I was trying to survive as I sat there at the counter that was making me uninterested in the food in front of me. As evident from the photo, at one point I’d had to go outside for awhile, and even once back inside I spent half an hour orbiting a potential sobbing fit. It should be noted, as I did on Twitter at the time, that I remain without a psychoconsultant because I’ve been searching for a year and a half for someone covered by my insurance who gets adult autism. My look-ahead suggests tomorrow won’t be any better, given the stress of waiting to see if my annual renewal for SNAP benefits is accepted or if I don’t get to eat next year. On a day that I’d hoped to spend doing nothing but marking the anniversary of adopting a second cat on the assigned birthday of the first. I’m not allowed, you see, to have even a single pleasant day.
It was almost a year after diagnosis, I think, before I picked up a $20 pair of shooting earmuffs to cut down on the sound of the world around me when out and about. To this day, I’ve not tried out a pair of actual noise-canceling headphones, but this has me wondering if I’m missing out on something I actually need or if in fact I’m fine with what I have. It’s not lost on me that there’s a large cost differential between a $20 pair of shooting muffs and a piece of electronics that costs $100, $200, $300, or more, depending.
Thanks to Ryan Boren’s post on sensory flooding, now I know about the so-called “roundabout hypothesis” which helps explain a bit about autistic brains (and why some forms of “helping” an autistic person don’t actually help us at all). It pairs well with this Cohen Edenfield thread (yes, I know I just complained about threads; there always are exceptions) about masking, feedback loops, and system crashes.
Assuming Disney doesn’t want the takeaway from this trilogy to be that the galaxy is doomed to cycles of destruction and despair, The Rise of Skywalker’s climax can’t mirror the end of Return of the Jedi. If Rey lures Kylo back from the dark side, Kylo kills the Emperor (again), and the credits roll, we won’t have any assurance that the galaxy won’t descend into darkness again a few decades later. For thousands of years, the Jedi have stuck to the light side, periodically lost members to the dark side, and fought wars that ravaged worlds and crippled governments. Their strict light/dark dichotomy hasn’t served them well. Maybe there’s a middle path; after all, only Sith deal in absolutes. Rey, Kylo, or a combination of both will have to break the Star Wars wheel.
Paul Bausch: “My alternate headline for this: Twitter CEO makes the case that Mastodon has a superior architecture for social media; forms group to invent it.” Bausch also links to Eugen Rochko’s full comments on the matter, which didn’t make the Verge piece about Bluesky: “Twitter adopting ActivityPub would also be incredible validation of everything we’ve been working towards and lead to more platforms joining the decentralized social web.”
Eisenstein described much of this in her writings. Her larger point is that the world was never the same again. As she explained to me, we no longer register the impact of the printing press because we have no easy way to retrieve the ambient sensation of “before,” just as we can’t retrieve, and can barely imagine, what life was like when only scattered licks of flame could pierce the darkness of night. At first glance, printing seems like just a more efficient way of doing what people were doing anyway: making words and images available to others. But it was a revolution—many revolutions, really, most of them unforeseeable. Consider what it meant to own books personally and read them silently, rather than having to hear words read aloud: No one knew what you were up to in the privacy of your home. Writers and publishers wanted some degree of ownership—hence the new concepts of copyright and intellectual property. More books and rising literacy created an eyeglass industry, which in turn brought advances in lens-making, which ultimately made possible the telescope and spelled the end of biblical cosmology. The printing press transformed religion, science, politics; it put information, misinformation, and power in the hands of more people than ever before; it created a celebrity culture as poets and polemicists vied for fame; and it loosened the restraints of authority and hierarchy, setting groups against one another. This shattered the status quo in ways that proved liberating but also lethal: If the printing press deserves some of the credit for democracy and the Enlightenment, it also deserves some of the blame for chaos and slaughter. As Edward Snowden observes in his new book, Permanent Record: “Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath.”
According to my Threadless dashboard, the four “express your quiet disgruntlement.” line of shirts that are selling so far are: meh., bah., bleh., and ugh. If you browse around you’ll find I’ve added the initial “(and other things.)” lineup of actually autistic., everyday antifascist., and mediocre white guy. shirts.
It’s not like I’ve been setting out to read science-fiction books that evoke neurodiversity since my autism diagnosis, and yet An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (as noted by Heather Truett); A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (on sale at $2.99 again, by the way); and now The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes nonetheless all do.
This week’s television: Sunday: Patriot Act with Hasan Minaj, Mr. Robot; Wednesday: The Masked Singer, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. I’ve started in on the latest (and final) season of Runaways, after which I will start in on the latest of The Expanse. I’m still trying to finish up She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Glitch, and Raising Dion; and still need to get to the latest of The End of the F*ing World, The Man in the High Castle, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Your experience of the internet and the language therein is shaped by who you were and who else was around at the time you joined. How much tech savvy was required to participate in conversations? Were you going online because your friends were already there, or to meet new people? Were you entering a community with established norms, or one where things were still in flux? And did you learn these norms implicitly, through immersion, or through an explicit rulebook? Your answers to these and similar questions have a big effect on what your variety of internet language looks like. In a world where, to use the expression of technologist Jenny Sundén, you’re writing yourself into existence, how you write is who you are.
With the morning’s unformed thoughts, I’m trying to get at the transition from multiple communities with their own cultures and norms to monolithic platforms with terms of service legalese, in a sense, I guess. While, for example, any given Mastodon instance has its own codes of conduct, you can’t form cohesive communities across, between, and amongst Mastodon instances. (Not to focus on Mastodon, because that’s not my point; it’s just an easy illustration because it’s both singular and plural: one platform but multiple, separate servers.) I want to see the marriage of social and/or blogging platforms to Usenet-style distributed communities. More than that, I want people to be able to participate in (meaning not just read but post) whatever, say, the modern equivalent might be to alt.tv.twin-peaks whether they are doing it from mastodon.social, friend.camp, micro.blog, or purely from a feed-reader.
Next weekend I’ll be test-driving a Kobo to compare it to my Paperwhite, as part of exploring just how far I can remove myself from Amazon. The biggest drawback for me of a potential switch would be the loss of my Goodreads highlights, which are generated directly from the highlights I make on the Kindle itself. There’s no equivalent feature on the Kobo; its highlights, I guess, are just stuck on the device, and only within each book? I’d also miss the public wishlist feature which allowed other people to buy me things to read. The biggest draw for me is built-in borrowing from the public library from OverDrive, right on the device; I’d think half or more of my reading comes from the library. I’m also looking forward to seeing how the “comfort” lights work when I’m reading in bed at night.
Current reads on the Paperwhite: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch; and The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes. Both are borrowed from the Multnomah County Library through OverDrive. I’ve read 56 books so far this year. You can read my highlights over on Goodreads.
Blogs were unruly spaces. There were internecine fights. There were so many times when I saw my own little, narrow worldview challenged and sometimes exploded (that often felt very bad, even as it was very necessary). There were so, so many times when I made absolutely wretched and humiliating public mistakes. There were so many different claims to feminism, so many ways in which traditional hierarchies of race and place and class were replicated despite good intentions, in part out of ignorance, in part out of neglect, in part out of hubris. There was harassment, usually but not always from men, some of which follows me to this day, some of which I carry with me in lasting damage to my mental health, very little of which was ever resolved. There was also community in a way that simply hasn’t been replicated by Twitter or by feminist writing on more mainstream websites. That meant solidarity, and it meant pushback. It meant lightbulb moments and it meant conflict.
“[R]oad safety advocates have long complained that media outlets tend to blame pedestrians and cyclists who are hit by cars,” writes Richard Florida. “A paper published earlier this year in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board offers proof that they’re right.” Just one more reason why I hope it’s true, as suggested by Brooks Rainwater, that more car-free streets are coming to our cities.
Max Masnick touts a great find: CiteAs, a tool to generate a properly-formatted citation “for diverse research products, from software and datasets to preprints and articles”. This will be much faster for adding things to How To Avoid Providing Mediocre Support than searching, clicking, cutting, and pasting via Google Scholar.
A new approach to understanding social cognition in autistic and non-autistic people is gaining empirical support. Research is showing that difficulties in social interaction between autistic and non-autistic people are two way, evidencing a ‘double empathy problem’ (Milton 2012). For example, non-autistic people have difficulty interpreting the behaviour and intentions of autistic people (Sheppard et al. 2016), which can also lead non-autistic people to rate autistic people less favourably (Alkhaldi et al. 2019). Hence, future interventions could focus on helping non-autistic people to more effectively interact with autistic people. Reducing emphasis and pressure for autistic people and those with high autistic traits to camouflage their ‘true self’ could even help prevent risk of developing mental health problems, suicidal thoughts and suicidal behaviours (Mitchell et al. 2019), and create a more useful and accurate understanding of autism that values the unique social and communication style of autistic people (Jaswal and Aktar 2018).
Intermittently, I’ve been checking what people have been tweeting at Bluesky. Tonight I spotted people promoting Voice, which touts itself as “social as it should be”. I don’t really understand it. They’re constructing some sort of token system whereby as their posts are “liked” by other users posters accumulate the ability to “buy” further audience by cashing in those tokens. (In essence, the userbase itself becomes the “algorithm” which rewards posters, who then can use their tokens to push their “voice” even further?) They also claim they’ll be verifying the identities of anyone who wants to post rather than just read; it’s unclear how. When it comes to moderation, they simply declare support for “free speech” and say they’ll abide by applicable laws. Basically, all the pesky community-building stuff they’ll just figure out later on. As near as I can tell, they believe that simply requiring identity verification will solve most problems?
Yes, design is political. Because design is labor, and your labor is political. Where you choose to expend your labor is a political act. Whom you choose to expend it for is a political act. Whom we omit from those solutions is a political act. Finally, how we choose to leverage our collective power is the biggest political act we can take. If we choose to work collectively, we have a ton of power. If we continue to behave like servants, we’re not just letting ourselves down, we’re letting down everyone whose lives we swore to improve.
Last night was something a nightmare and I don’t mean the dream where Robocop was a door-to-door salesman who came to my office and showed how by attaching a compressor hose to a metal can of peanuts he could crush it to make instant peanut butter. Somewhere around 4:30am I awoke to being completely congested and was awake for almost four hours, until I used three different nasal sprays, two prescribed and one over-the-counter and a Breathe Right strip and eventually was able to fall asleep until after noon. While awake, though, the effects of sleep deprivation were so deep that I was all guttural screams in my bedroom; I legitimately felt like I was going insane.
I was mathematically curious how much it would cost to move from Kindle to Kobo, combining device plus ebooks waiting to be read that I’d have to buy again. Noted for future reference: currently it’d be $99 for reader, $111 for books. Although technically not true, because I wouldn’t have to buy those books again; just read them on the Kindle until I’m through them all. So, really, just the device cost. I wanted to estimate the crazypants version of switching, and note it for possible someday later use. One drawback would be that Kobo still, all these years after launch, does not have a public wishlist so people can buy you books.
Here’s a cool thing about not being self-sufficient and being unable to support myself: I’m at risk of being evicted because reportedly my December rent never happened. In honor of my current massive anxiety attack I now will sit in my apartment in the dark and not turn on the heat because if life is determined to be this relentlessly miserable at me I might as well lean into it.
“Temporary projects change people’s expectations for what they are allowed to do there and what’s possible,” Roberts says. “Representation is really powerful, and it’s something that Mabel and I talked a lot about with Marching On: The way that young black people are represented, the way that people in public space are represented—it evokes possibilities of liberation expression that might feel otherwise forbidden or discouraged. Even with when the [Columbus] City Hall installation comes down, you have all the people who will say: ‘We used to play there, I wonder if we should do that again?’”
Not to go all-Bluesky-all-day here (and this would be a good place for Micro.blog to have some sort of live-blogging or “reply to self to update post” feature), but I suddenly remembered something David Gasca said to me in September that I wrote about at the time. In the wake of an epic Arielle Pardes thread from Twitter, Gasca asked what people would “build to improve conversations on Twitter” and the gist of my response was that “Twitter arguably at this point is just too big” and there needed to be a way to foster smaller, self-formed communities. Gasca’s response was one word: “Totally.” There’s no one-to-one correlation here but I find this an interesting moment, in that the Bluesky initiative—which at least makes noises about distributed social—must already have been percolating at the time.
Dying to hear what indieweb folks think of the new Jack Dorsey plan to “develop an open and decentralized standard for social media” with “Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard”. Dorsey claims the effort intends “not only to develop a decentralized standard for social media, but to also build open community around it, inclusive of companies & organizations, researchers, civil society leaders”. Is this Twitter embracing the indieweb, or coopting, or something else?
Today we see something very different and far more sinister. Nihilistic forces are dismantling policies to protect our air, water, and climate. And they seek to discredit the pillars of our democracy: voting rights and fair elections, the rule of law, the free press, the separation of powers, the belief in science, and the concept of truth itself.
Compare and contrast the Thomas Frazier idea of understanding the atypical gaze of actually-autistic people—determined a priori by Frazier to be the source of the problem—purely in order to direct treatment to change it with the findings of a newly-published study which, according to one of its authors, “suggest that social interaction difficulties in autism are not an absolute or inherent characteristic of the individual” and that “social quality is a relational characteristic and dependent on the fit between the person & the social environment”.
Notwithstanding the comparison, I think there’s a glaring difference between recency and temporality on the web. Recency doesn’t rule out context, whereas temporality certainly seems to. Temporality feeds into the death of the link, in the sense that a transient form like social media simply doesn’t provide much time for at most a single link. Recency doesn’t itself preclude the construction of a contextual web in the way that temporality does, so I’m not convinced that the blog broke the web. The problem with static homepages is that people are not static. They are fine as snapshots but mostly useless as ongoing thought. People lives their lives as processes, not as end-products, and even if someone were adding things to their homepage over time, the easiest way for an interested party to learn about it would be if the homepage were publishing additions to a feed—in which case the interested party would still be experiencing that person through a recency experience. People thinking out loud through chronological blog posts isn’t the problem; the problem is that poor-text, single-link social media formats disallow the contextual web.
“With Webmention,” writes Aaron Parecki, “we’re explicitly focusing on enabling the kind of rich interactions people do on social media instead.” According to the webmention draft, such an interaction “can be an RSVP to an event, an indication that someone ‘likes’ another post, a ‘bookmark’ of another post, and many others”. Had I my druthers, the indieweb would pull away from likes and move toward highlights, an argument I’ve made many times before, positing that interaction trumps indication, providing context. I think indieweb tools (and the “personal-website-verse”)—as an alternative to social media, and a move toward that “better internet”—should be about building, pushing, and reinforcing the contextual web.
“An increase in a person’s tendency to look at social information, for instance,” argues Thomas Frazier, “could indicate that a treatment is working.” In other words, the fact that actually-autistic people have an “atypical gaze” and “do not make the type of eye contact others generally expect” is seen by researchers and doctors as a flaw. It also equates the typical gaze with “social information” rather than considering the possibility that autistic people are attuned to or engaged in other sorts of “social information”, which would make the flaw a shared one in the social space between between typical and atypical brains. No, instead just assume that atypical means wrong, and structure the idea of treatment around changing them to be “normal” rather than changing “normal” to include them.
It’s pointless to tell the Trump War Room that Thanos was utterly and completely defeated. They know that. It doesn’t matter, because this tweet is the Fascist Party openly and casually joking about being fascist, knowing full well that the same folks who in 2015 eye-rollingly dismissed concerns that Trump could ever happen here at all will dismiss this latest as nothing to take literally or seriously. When they are this comfortable comparing themselves to a fictional fascist, be worried.
“Cork floors soften footsteps; shutters modulate sunlight and views; extra-wide hallways ease transitions by providing more room for [you] to move,” writes Rebecca Horne; “and ‘escape spaces’ offer [you] respite from overwhelming experiences or interactions.” Horne is describing two schools, one in urban New York and one in rural New Jersey, intended to be suitable and inviting for autistic people with sensory sensitivities, but it sounds to me like an environment almost anyone would prefer. So why aren’t we building places and spaces to these sorts of specifications as a matter of course?
So I mentioned this in passing yesterday when I finally remembered to note the existence of Civic Signals, but I wanted to come back to that professor studying the “unwritten code” of riding the bus. The key to Amy Hanser’s thesis is that such a compact public place “forces us to negotiate space with one another”. Because the question of analogues is always on my mind when it comes to place and space, I do wonder to what degree it’s possible to force us into that same negotiation when online. I also wonder, now that I’m thinking about it, whether or not Hanser or anyone else has compared and contrasted similar-but-different compact public places, e.g. the train and the plane. I’d think one fundamental difference is that for many people the public bus is a daily experience “where we are in close proximity, visible to others and stuck with each other for a while, a place where we can be together without having to be alike” on a regular basis. That sort of thing doesn’t especially translate to online life; we don’t tend to have regular yet transient places.
This week’s television: Sunday: Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, Supegirl (the start of “Crisis on Infinite Earths”!), Mr. Robot; Monday: Batwoman, Black Lightning, Making It; Tuesday: The Flash, The Masked Singer, Making It; Wednesday: The Masked Singer, Nancy Drew, Making It; Thursday: Evil; Friday: The Expanse. My Battlestar Galactica rewatch is into season four now, and I’m still only halfway through the current season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. I’m still hoping soon to finish season three of Glitch and season one of Raising Dion, and to start in on season two of The End of the F*ing World, season four of The Man in the High Castle, and season three of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Yes, I’ll be starting The Expanse when it drops on Friday despite my backlog of other shows. Runaways season three, which also drops Friday, will have to wait for the next time I grab a month of Hulu.
As idealistic as this vision of the Web might seem these days, it isn’t that far out of reach. Much of what’s needed, especially the publishing part, is already there. It’s also not as if our sites weren’t already connected in one way or another. Yet much of the discussions and establishment of connections, of that social glue that holds our community together – besides community events in real life, of course –, mostly happens on social media platforms at the moment. But: this is a choice. If we would make the conscious decision to find better ways to connect our personal sites and to enable more social interaction again, and if we would then persistently work on this idea, then we could, bit by bit, influence the development of Web technologies into this direction. What we would end up with is not only a bunch of personal websites but a whole interconnected personal-website-verse.
After importing my WordPress posts I’ve discovered a weird behavior that’s not appearing consistently across all those posts: in some, markdown italics are not rendering, because the empty space before the opening asterisk is being read as some other sort of invisible character which effectively “escapes” the asterisk, preventing the italics from rendering. I’ve no idea how this was introduced, no idea what, exactly, the invisible character is, and no way of searching for the posts where this is happening so that I can correct them all.
“What I really want to know,” [I wrote](I really want to know is if there’s a conference—or even just a gang blog—devoted to talking about those ways we talk about online space and offline space, and what lessons can be learned from each to apply to the other), “is if there’s a conference—or even just a gang blog—devoted to talking about those ways we talk about online space and offline space, and what lessons can be learned from each to apply to the other.” Lo and behold, Civic Signals.
All day today my body’s felt weak and my brain discoordinated. On the walk back from today’s anxiety outing my head felt like I’d been hyperventilating but I’ve no idea if I’d actually been. Yesterday and today I’ve had issues with physical multitasking; I’d turn from the fridge to the sink but forget I was holding something and hit the fridge door with it almost knocking it out of my own hand and spilling something all over the floor. Literally in the moment of turning my body would forget what else was happening, what else it was doing. The gears are not meshing. The works are stopped up.
Currently reading: The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thompson; and Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch. The latter is borrowed from the Multnomah County Library through OverDrive. So far this year, I’ve somehow read 55 books instead of my usual and expected thirty-or-so. You can read my highlights over on Goodreads, which update when I remember to turn off airplane mode on the Kindle.
Earlier this week, I somehow stumbled upon Jenna Jameson slinging antivax stuff and tagging it with a hashtag about believing women when they come forward with stories about abuse, harassment, and assault. It turns out it’s likely an outgrowth of antivaxxers on Instagram “hijacking sexual assault and abortion rights hashtags to spread their message” as a way to get around some platforms’ crackdown on antivax propaganda. Worse yet, antivaxxers now are adopting anti-choice tactics and harassing doctors and confronting patients in person. It’s nearly 2020 and this batshit nonsense apparently is only going to ramp up into worse.
The tech investor Marc Andreessen once said that in the future, there will be two types of people: “people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” It was a prescient prediction, but not in the way Andreessen meant it. He imagined a society in which computer programmers would rule over the analog masses. What’s happening instead is something much less revolutionary: The programmers simply built the machines that let big corporations, powerful politicians and savvy media manipulators tell other people what to do, and they are letting rich people pay to turn those machines off.
Clearly I am not sufficiently recovered from whatever the fuck yesterday was (or the day before that), as within moments of ordering my cheap bar breakfast—well, no, ahead of that, really, I was descending into an anxiety attack, but I guess I was trying to power through it because I wanted to get out of the house. I only ate half my food, leaving almost all of the scrambled eggs because anxiety increases or agitates my sensory sensitivities and while I love eggs they often are the first things to go in this state of mind; the… mouthfeel(?) becomes vomitous. I was in and out of the bar in less than an hour. I wasn’t even there long enough for a second cup of coffee.
Remind me the next time I need to get or replace my eyeglasses that rather than one set of mirrorshades and one set of regular glasses, what I need is the mirrorshades and one set of transitions, so that on the rare occasion I need, for example, to go to the grocery store at night, I can both see in the dark on the walk there yet also not be sensorily barraged by the lights at the store.
Despite yesterday, I’d had intentions for today. Or, at least, intentions for having cheap bar breakfast in the neighborhood. Then I woke up like this and kept going back to sleep, not to leave bed until 11:00am. While I managed to make a proper breakfast at home, after watching two episodes of Battlestar Galactica I went back to bed, where I slept until 5:00pm, awaking with an excruicating, mind-splitting headache from a dream where people I knew had just randomly showed up at my apartment and tried to turn on all the lights I’d turned off and make me smoke pot and wouldn’t leave and I was only getting more and more angry. By an hour later, the headache mostly subsided after two Excedrin, three hunks of cold chicken breast, and a can of seltzer. Today’s only potential upside is that Health Share of Oregon seems to be indicating to me that since my primary care physician at Kaiser is located in a “patient-centered primary care home” I should be able to access “low-level” mental health care—which appears to mean occasional, not ongoing/longterm, care. It wouldn’t solve my larger failure to find a psychoconsultant through Health Share but it might solve more nearterm issues like potentially needing a new letter to release me from work requirements under my SNAP benefits. Much like with actions and apologies, (your own) intent often matters far less to one’s day than (your own brain’s) impact. The impact of my brain today yielded a clusterfuck.
It’s difficult not to read the world around me as saying that if I were at least just a little bit worse maybe there’s a chance for the disability financial supports that I actually already need right now. The world should not be designed to urge me to get worse. I’m not a suicidal ideation guy. I’m not a self-harm guy. But fucking Christ, would it help if I were? Are you saying my only path forward is first to go further down?
“Mapping has been the tool of empires and governments for 500 years,” Dalton told MapLab, pointing to the days of Columbus and other Western explorers who used geographic tools to colonize civilizations around the globe. “What happens when maps get into hands of people who’ve been victims of cartographic sleights of hand?”
Robert Henderson seems to think that cancel culture is a tool of successful “social strivers […] to move up by taking others down”. That is not my understanding of cancel culture, even if you account for the fact that Henderson appears to be describing calling-out not, specifically, the canceling variant.
Somehow I missed Om Malik’s subtle funk: “This is mostly because, like most men in their early 50s, I have been struggling to reconcile the past, the present, and the future.” It was Colin Walker’s angsty anomie that resurfaced it. While I know, intellectually, that it’s bad form to engage in competitive funk, I can’t help but read about Malik’s in particular and want to shout, “Try adding a midlife autism diagnosis which retconned your entire life.” Malik, at least, is self-sufficient and supporting himself, not to mention engaging in therapeutic photography of far-off places like Iceland. Not only do I have to suffer whatever it is we suffer in midlife, but the autism’s recton of my past, as well as not just a lack of self-sufficiency but a lack of any belief that my prospects for it will change. Walker I somewhat can identify with more, yet I can’t simply let go of the fact that, well, he’s employed and at least relative to me, thriving—whatever his experience from the inside where it actually counts to any individual human being. Even with how far lost my life is, I recognize that even I’ve got privilege to burn, but clearly I’m not a sufficiently advanced person to be at the point where I can read posts like Malik’s and Walker’s and not scream, “Yeah, but at least you’re not me!”
Kimberly Hirsh helpfully explains some truths about chronic illness and I just wanted to throw in a couple of things when it comes to spoons. I’m glad that Hirsh notes that the number of available spoons is an important issue left unaddressed in the original spoon theory; it’s something I’ve brought up, too. It’s important to add that for some physical, mental, or developmental disabilities certain tasks which societal norms might see as unitary might in fact be experienced as multiple tasks, further complicating the question of having sufficient spoons. Task-switching itself therefore can be exceedingly difficult and even has its own explanatory metaphor—splines theory—which I’ve discussed before.
It’s important to note that this isn’t a recent phenomenon. It’s been going on ever since computers, and more specifically computer networking, began entering the corporate world. Joan Greenbaum, in her book Windows on the Workplace, talks about how even before the internet, computer networking let companies relocate “back-office” functions offsite and, eventually, offshore. Mainstream commentators are likely to put the emphasis on communication when describing this phenomenon. The very terms that are used to describe these developments—telecommunications, information and communications technology (ICT)—reflect that emphasis. But as good cyberneticians, we know that communication is also always about control. And when we situate the rise of networked digital technologies within the broader history of capitalism, it becomes clear that control—specifically, control of the labor process—is where our emphasis should be.
Okay, well, I pulled the trigger on importing This Mediocre Life posts and I don’t think anything has gone horrendously wrong. Mostly what this means is all of my autism writing from April 2018 onward (which originally I’d posted to Medium) now is here. Most posts are not properly categorized, since we can’t do that here yet, but my autism ones should be. I do have some local clean-up still to do, in that I have posts here that link to posts at their original TML locations. If anyone stumbles across such a link, let me know and I will update it to its new bix.blog URL.
I spend a lot of time in the book trying to hone in on exactly what I mean when I talk about generosity. It’s a fraught subject. As I argue at some length, the requirement to be generous is not evenly distributed in our culture — whether by that I mean to point to the academy or to the contemporary US more broadly — and so where I exhort us toward greater generosity, the primary object of my “us” is people like me: centered rather than marginalized, over-represented rather than under-served, comfortably secure rather than precarious. Empowered.
Katie Rose Pryal tells a story illustrating the difficulties she and her son have with surprises, with a preface about Christmas. I’ve discussed this before. As I had it, “gifts are better than presents”, in that, to my mind, presents are presentational and involve not just uncertainty and surprise but social performance.
Dino Bansigan has some results from experiments related to blog publicity and analytics, and it’s interesting that once analytics were hidden, there was less worrying about readership drops. I’ve been running without analytics for about a month and a half now, and, honestly, I don’t miss them, even though mostly I still feel as if I’m whispering into a vacuum.
Here’s a good thing: BBC America has put all of last season’s Doctor Who online, just weeks after I lamented not being able to do a rewatch. I’d actually forgotten how much I’d enjoyed the “reboot” in tone and aesthetic, and Whittaker is a joy, and the ridiculously-mad glory of the frog-end of episode nine is one of my favorite Who moments ever now. It’s almost time to see how the Chibnall era does in its sophomore outing and I’m ready for it.
This week’s television: Sunday: Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, Batwoman, Watchmen (thanks to a weekend of free HBO on Xfinity), Supegirl, Mr. Robot; Monday: 911, Black Lightning, Making It; Tuesday: The Flash, Arrow, Making It; Wednesday: The Masked Singer, Nancy Drew, Making It; Thursday: Evil, Making It. My Battlestar Galactica rewatch has reached the middle of season three, and I’m halfway through the current season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. I’m still hoping soon to finish season three of Glitch and season one of Raising Dion, and to start in on season two of The End of the F*ing World, season four of The Man in the High Castle, and season three of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which drops this Friday.
“This imperative to avoid being – even appearing – unhappy has led to a culture that rewards a performative happiness,” writes Cody Delistraty, “in which people curate public-facing lives, via Instagram and its kin, composed of a string of ‘peak experiences’ – and nothing else.” I’ve mostly avoided this sort of “happiness influencer” artifice in my follows, but I do sometimes wonder (not to keep coming back to this) how many Aspie Supremacists or Autism Exceptionalists are engaged in this sort of performative positivity—or, even if it’s not performative in the sense of fictive but just in the sense of deliberately curated, whether they ever really think about how such performances impact others who not only don’t feel superior or exceptional but feel downtrodden and unsuccessful.
“Simply getting older is probably the best cure for anxiety,” CJ Chilvers declares. “You learn how to deal with triggers better.” Then again, if your diagnoses came in midlife, and part of what anecdotally happens with late-diagnosed autistics is that several psychological dams that have been holding back for decades suddenly let loose, Chilvers’ model, if true, will take until I’m in my eighties.
“I absolutely believe that you can design interfaces that create more safe spaces to interact,” says Erika Hall as quoted by Annalee Newitz, “in the same way we know how to design streets that are safer.” I’m going to need to make a category here for this, because I’ve talked about the relationship between how we talk about online space and how we talk about offline space, but I’ve no convenient way to find all those posts. (I imagine most of them are buried within Community somewhere.) What I really want to know is if there’s a conference—or even just a gang blog—devoted to talking about those ways we talk about online space and offline space, and what lessons can be learned from each to apply to the other.
This has been one of those days where it feels like someone has turned up the earth’s gravity to eleven. I didn’t leave bed until 10:30am, only then to return at 2:00pm. It wasn’t due to fatigue, but a sort of cerebral malaise (to quote Cradle Will Rock); less that I needed to be asleep than that there were no reasons to remain awake. Now it’s evening and I haven’t eaten since breakfast and I’m not entirely sure why I can’t just go right back to bed.
“We are reaching out to you about your treatment request,” emailed a mental health practice in response to my inquiry, in which as usual I detailed my troubles finding someone versed in—or comfortable with applying themselves to—adult autism who is covered by my insurance. “One of our clinicians would like to offer you an appointment.” So I guess I need to spend the weekend girding myself for making a telephone call.
Matt Baer pens an ode to the checkout line, and while the connection he feels to how “this tiny little comment from a real-live person … would yank me out of my head” is a valid and very human thing, and while he’s right about how the increasing shift toward self-checkout turns us into “a worker, a cashier, a bag boy, an Instacart-er and Uber Food driver”, it’s important to remember the other human perspective of those who often need that machine and need not to “look into another person’s eyes” or “strike up a small conversation”. To be fair, Baer doesn’t come out and argue for the elimination of self-checkout but he does urge us to “use technology to augment our humanity, rather than replace it”. That only raises the issue of whose humanity? (Side note: once upon a time you couldn’t even shop for yourself.) Baer is wrong to label what he feels about checkout lines as “romanticism”; it’s surely more of a humanism. A fully-formed humanism would do two things when it comes to checkout lines: respect workers and the right to work, and respect all customers—those who need the personal touch and those who need to do it themselves.
I can’t speak to CJ Chilvers’ argument for music as anxiety cure, but I can say that music has helped get me through the oncoming fatigue or autistic overwhelm/risk of shutdown which frequently descends around about the time I still need to public transit my way home from across town. It’s especially useful if I voicelessly mouth the lyrics (which I suppose arguably is a mild stim) and occassionally useful if I also rock back and forth in my seat to the rhythm (which definitely is a stim). What’s interesting about this is that my comorbid anxiety diagnosis centers upon “social/performance distress”, which encompasses that claustrophobic sensation of feeling like you are on public display, and yet when silently singing on the bus while, sometimes sharply, rocking back and forth, I don’t think about it.
With this week’s television finishing up on Tuesday, the rest of the week consists of my annual Pangsgiving rewatch of WKRP in Cincinnati’s “Turkeys Away”, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Pangs”, and The West Wing’s “Shibboleth” and “The Indians In the Lobby”. Through the weekend I’ll be continuing to rewatch Battlestar Galactica and slowly making my way through current season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. I’ve had to add a rewatch of the most recent Doctor Who season because it went back up in full on BBC America, and then I will catch up on Watchmen this weekend because Xfinity has free HBO at the moment. Still on-hold: season three of Glitch and season one of Raising Dion, and season two of The End of the F*ing World and season four of The Man in the High Castle.
Last week, leading up to the Democratic primary debate on MSNBC, a libertarian think tank ran an ad with all the hallmarks of a suburban scramble to Thanksgiving dinner—until the punchline: Instead of driving, the whole family rode scooters while hauling turkeys and pies to grandma’s house, triggered by the price of gas under the Green New Deal. In the commercial’s telling, this was a dystopian future. But couldn’t this be a future people actually want? This year, the overwhelming majority of the 55 million people traveling more than 50 miles for the holiday will be traveling by car, facing bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Autism Twitter is a lifelong condition often characterized by: an inability to notice one’s own bullshit; a pathological need to find oneself exceptional; a compulsion to inform others of your superiority; an inexplicable failure to notice one’s own hypocrisy; an excessive tendency to not let it be. There is no known cure.
That feel when after a long, perilous day hauling across town to visit your favorite breakfast place that’s closing, and to pick up tomorrow’s Thanksgiving dinner, and to be beaten down by public transit, you get home too exhausted to make lunch and then remember Kung Food up the street, realize you can afford to go, and sit drinking tea while awaiting the pea pod pork.
“Blogging was always about community; reading and commenting on each others’ posts,” jots Pratik. “We say that we should write for ourselves as if no one is reading but it sure helps to know that someone is reading you out there.” For my part, I don’t think one should write “as if no one is reading” so much as one should write for oneself and leave the rest to serendipity. It’s a seemingly-minor but actually-crucial difference in perspective. That said, Dino Bansigan wishes “close friends to also be writing journals or writing on their own blogs” rather than “living their online lives inside the walled gardens of Facebook and Instagram”. Which, fair enough.
When I point out that Colin Walker’s description of eye contact is classically autistic I don’t mean that as an armchair diagnosis. I bring it up because I take issue with the language deeming eye contact “right” and “polite”. It isn’t; it’s merely typical. The key to understanding is in another word Walker uses: sovereignty. What’s right, what’s polite, is respecting that not everyone’s brain functions typically. Eye contact isn’t required for communication. Empathy is required for communication.
Despite the setup Forge uses, no one ever actually suspected that rich people were happier because of their purchases, but for precisely the reasons the cited study supposedly “reveals”. To wit: rich people aren’t stressed, you know, about survival. You know why rich people use their leisure time for “active activities (praying, socializing, maintaining close relationships, exercise, hobbies, and volunteering) as opposed to passive ones (watching TV, napping and resting, relaxing, and doing nothing)”? Say it with me: because they aren’t exhausted from the stress of just trying to survive.
We’ve begun the descent into the season where I can’t leave my neighborhood or even sometimes my apartment because it’s too cold for me, and if I dress for the weather I get roasted alive by the nonsensical public transit thermostats which are set for comfortable home-living and not for people going in and out of buses all day. Since my diagnosis, I’ve discovered that my long-standing sensitivities to heat and to cold likely are a sensory/stimulus issue as part of being autistic. Any day now, I’m going to have to start the countdown to no more trips to the zoo until Springtime.
When you’re a late-diagnosed autistic (in my case, midlife), the retcon of your life can include newly-realized explanations for things that you do. These things don’t have to be major. For me, I discovered that I engage in echolalia, but primarily when I am watching television. (I don’t think I do it in conversation?) I’d never even heard the term before, until stumbling across it from one actually-autistic person or another. Not only will I find myself echoing lines or dialogue, or entire exchanges, sometimes I will repeat them over and over, trying different variations of delivery. Sometimes while the show continues, and sometimes I’ll feel compelled to hit “pause”, do it until I feel satisfied, then resume the show. To be honest, I’m not sure I ever even consciously noticed the behavior until learning about echolalia. Now I know that it’s been there all along, as far back as I can remember.
The dumb thing is, the only reason Ukraine would have to interfere in the 2016 election (which they didn’t; it was Russia) is to stop Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States and advancing Russian interests in Ukraine. So, even if it were true (it isn’t), it’d be factually bad for Trump. Which makes it all the weirder that Republican senators like Graham and Kennedy are openly complicit with the selfsame Russian intelligence operation to spread the “Ukraine did it” disinformation, on whose existence and nature and intent we now know senators just recently were briefed. Not only do these senators know it’s untrue, they know it’s a Russian intelligence operation. And yet.
“[G]ig employers claim that since their business models are ‘new’ and ‘innovative,’ traditional labour regulations shouldn’t apply,” writes Jim Stanford (via Paris Marx)—who then proceeds to show that “working on demand”, “piece work compensation”, “supplying their own equipment”, and “paying the intermediary” are all very old ideas indeed. Which might explain why, as Ryan Hayes does (also via Marx), “worker-owned apps are already providing real alternatives to dismal working conditions in the global gig economy”.
I don’t want to talk about CJ Chilvers’ thoughts on automation, I want to talk about CJ Chilvers blockquoting of Kurt Vonnegut about why he goes out to buy a single envelope rather than order a box of them to have at home, because it mostly expresses the reasons why I go out to have a latte and read a book rather than do those things at home. Especially the bit about there being dogs. I don’t have dogs, I have cats, because I’d be a terrible dog-owner, and other people’s dogs are the only dogs I ever get to see and/or pet, and, really, I would spend more time with other people if I never actually had to interact with them and only had to interact with their dogs.
There’s a followup today to an earlier Aspergian post which argued pretty persuasively that Applied Behavior Analysis is more inhumane than dog training. This time around, Carol Millman (who has “a degree in Psychology, a diploma in animal health technology, and a diagnosis of autism” and “specializes in training assistance dogs”) takes apart—demolishes, really—a response by a pair of ABA practitioners.
This week’s television: Sunday: Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, Mr. Robot; Monday: 911, Black Lightning; Tuesday: The Flash, Arrow (which I’d dropped awhile ago but picked up this season because of “Crisis on Infinite Earths”); Thursday: It’s time for my annual Pangsgiving rewatch of WKRP’s “Turkeys Away”, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Pangs”, and The West Wing’s “Shibboleth” and “The Indians In the Lobby”. I’m also re-watching Battlestar Galactica and slowly making my way through current season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. I’m hoping soon to finish season three of Glitch and season one of Raising Dion, and start in on season two of The End of the F*ing World and season four of The Man in the High Castle.
People of color need their own spaces. Black people need their own spaces. We need places in which we can gather and be free from the mainstream stereotypes and marginalization that permeate every other societal space we occupy. We need spaces where we can be our authentic selves without white people’s judgment and insecurity muzzling that expression. We need spaces where we can simply be—where we can get off the treadmill of making white people comfortable and finally realize just how tired we are.
Laura Andrews asked if anyone else has had difficulties with relationships specifically related to being autistic, and while I haven’t spent much time on this (because I’ve been perfectly content to be “alone” for two decades now), I’ve thought a little at least about how being unknowingly autistic impacted my relationships, and I don’t think there’s any question at all that when you combine the comorbid social anxiety, the inability to mentally and emotionally multitask, and the cognitive and behavioral rigidity, you get the relationships I’ve had. It’s interesting to me that Andrews mentions the “significant amount of time (and alcohol) for me to feel comfortable”, because most of my few relationships (and probably all of my also-few dalliances) tended to orbit social get-togethers or the barfly life. Relationships are socially-performative, and that performance (which doesn’t in and of itself mean fiction) often either is made easier or has its difficulties masked by drinking. To be clear: because I was unknowingly autistic until I was forty-six, I’ve no way to know whether my relationships would have been the same had I known I was autistic. (Andrews herself had difficulties with the impacts of undiagnosed autism) But it’s pretty clear to me that being autistic without the opportunity to consciously navigate it inevitably made relationships into trainwrecks.
I’m not sure if photography is an anxiety killer, per se, but there’s little question that shooting with the DSLR is attention-narrowing and stimuli-filtering in ways which suit my autistic brain. When I had a more serious hobby, I’ve no doubt that these aspects of the mental and physical act of photography are how I could survive shooting amongst the crowds of marches and protests or comic book convention show floors. My autism and comorbid anxiety diagnoses mean that I suffer from feeling like I am on display in public or social arenas. The focus (no pun) from engaging in photography in a sense makes you feel invisible. You’re not really aware of other people—and out of sight is out of mind—so, internally, it’s as if they aren’t aware of you either.
Currently reading: The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett (this one is taking me awhile); and The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thompson. (The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz I can only describe as SJWs versus MRAs in the wiki of time.) Swarm is borrowed from the Multnomah County Library through OverDrive, but Timeline I bought with Bix Day money. So far this year, I’ve somehow read 54 books instead of my usual and expected thirty-or-so. You can read my highlights over on Goodreads, which should be up to date at this point.
I’ve noticed this before but for some reason only now took notice of it. Over on Medium, when viewing responses the default is to show only “in-network” responses, by which I assume they mean only responses posted by users you follow. To see more, you have to click to “show out-of-network responses”.
Autistic people we consulted thought that most of the existing items of the WHOQOL questionnaires were important. From the discussions, we found 13 themes that were identified as particularly relevant to QoL, including being positive about one’s autistic identity, other people’s (lack of) knowledge of autism, sensory issues, mental health difficulties, the nature of friendships, and supporting other people as carers or volunteers.
I’d never seen Om Malik’s lament of “content” until he referenced it the other day, and it refreshed my memory of its gap regarding the spacetime between old-school blogging and social media. That is, the era of sites like Slashdot and Digg where upvoting and downvoting became a thing, and then became a thing to game. It’s the conceptual bridge between the dispersed, chattering blogosphere and the consolidated gamification of microblogging and status updates by Facebook and Twitter.
Here’s the fucked-up psychological issue with being broke (setting aside that I’m only broke right now because I had to waste $25 on an SD card because I was halfway to the zoo before I realized I didn’t have one and the bus route in question runs infrequently, and so psychologically I’m also just fucking mad and frustrated at that): my autistic brain has difficulty with a lack of control. When there’s no money, I’ve no control over what I can or can’t do for the day, and my options or lack thereof often might not match what my brain wants, or even needs, to be doing in order to remain calm and steady. So mentally I just sort of fold in on myself, because when I’m denied control, nerves fray, and any new jostle could set me off.
Since my budget for the rest of the month is $7/day and I can’t go anywhere or do anything, I slept until 12:30pm. Since the local Safeway doesn’t sell the only oil that seems to not ruin my ceramic pans in anything but giant $14 jugs, I’ll be having a bowl of cereal. Since I don’t know what the dimensions of the original “meh.” t-shirt design were, I can’t work on the store and it’s been pulled entirely offline. Is there a reason I bothered to get up even at 12:30pm?
There are things sitting in my feed-reader and my newsletters app that my brain would and could blog about if it weren’t so flat and broken lately, and it’s making me sad and angry that I’ll never get to any of it, because other things will just pile up on top of them that, if this keeps up, I also will never get to, and I’ll just keep getting sadder and angier about it. Maybe none of this is a character failing but the experience sure plays out from the inside as a failure.
I’m still not sure what the previous shaking was, but my current shaking is due to having to subject myself to a telephone call to figure out a prescription insurance issue. The call itself went perfectly fine, and the pharmacy technician knew exactly what was happening and why and explained it clearly. None of that matters to my brain; I’m mildly traumatized by the debilitating-feeling experience anyway. People keep trying to tell me it isn’t being autistic that’s the disability it’s navigating the neurotypical world around me that’s the disability, but when it comes to the damage inflicted upon my psyche by a telephone call, that’s splitting hairs. What’s worse is that when surviving moments like this, I can’t even reward myself because that nearly always requires money, and that just sends me down a whole other rabbit hole of mental unhealth.
There’s a new study in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders of anxiety in autistic adults that indicates anxiety diagnoses in 20.1% of us as compared to just 8.7% of neurotypicals. The authors suggest possible explanations for this discrepancy drawn from both the social and medical models of disability.
Late last month I was thinking about Dunbar’s number because I’m reading The Human Swarm by Mark W. Moffett, and since I think a lot about social media I decided that someone should start a new social site where you can only follow 150 people. (Ideally it would located at dun.bar, which appears to be a costly “premium” domain.) You’d also be able to browse a feed of the people followed by the people you follow, but if you wanted to actually, directly follow someone and you were already at the 150-user cap, you’d have to drop someone first. (As it is, on Twitter my follows are barely above 170.) I legitimately can’t tell if I’m serious, half-serious, or joking.
Some recent blog posts on blogging that have been showing up in my feed reader: Om Malik on “how to blog to today”, which I’m not even sure what he and Dave Winer are getting at, exactly; Dino Bansigan on “figuring out” the self-versus-public audience; and Colin Walker on having “an ongoing converstion” with himself.
This morning I got myself up, made breakfast, got myself out the door, grabbed Clif bars at the store and a latte at the coffee shop, and caught the bus to the zoo hoping then to catch their latest red panda addition. On the way, I realized that while I’d remembered to charge the battery for the Nikon, remembered to put it in the camera, remembered to take both lenses with me, I’d forgotten to put either SD card in. There was $25 down the toilet to buy one on the way, when for me $25 might as well be $100 or $1,000. Did I manage in fact to catch the zoo’s new red panda? Yes, I did. Was it worth the $25? It likely was worth the three-hour stakeout, but was it worth the $25? I guess we will see. And then the day had one last wrench: a total transit clusterfuck because some woman downtown had a gun. Fuck money. Fuck guns. Fuck fatigue. I’m so tired and put off that I’m thinking the best choice would be not to look at the photos tonight, to save them for tomorrow, for sanity’s sake, just in case I’m wrong about the shots I think I got, because I’m already close to a meltdown and, honestly, even good news on that front could push me over the edge. I need flatness.
If the universe is “still just a start-up” as Doc Searls says, and “the forms of life we know on Earth are just early prototypes of what’s to come”, I have questions. For instance, “How long until the bubble bursts?” Or maybe, “Is the rise of AI a disruptive innovation to evolution?” Or even, “Does humanity itself need to form a union?”
“I am not advocating that we should return to an Internet 1.0 or pre-internet world. I do not wish that the internet’s capabilities had stalled,” writes J. E. LaCaze. “I just want to recapture the sense of community that I fell in love with 20+ years ago.” My community 20+ years ago was kind of fucked up, and I made any number of ridiculously bad decisions as part of it. That said, just the other day I was noticing that one aspect of those internet BBS days I’ve never quite replaced is having a singular, and, yes, more insular group of people to “hang out with” online, rather than absolutely everything occurring either out in public on social media or in the “privacy of home” on one’s blog.
Note: With several so-called “gimmick” episodes so far this season on Mr. Robot, including the silent episode two weeks ago and stage-play episode last night (they aren’t really gimmicks, per se, as you’ll see below), I thought I’d repost here something I’d originally written on July 22, 2016, on Medium and since taken down.
Once upon a time, I disassembled a study by Lisa Sherman in which she claimed to find evidence for autism “recovery”. It did so primarily by deciding a priori not just that recovery from autism was possible at all but that any potential explanations for signals of such recovery which contradicted this recovery narrative would be excluded out of hand.
It’s interesting that Colin Walker has removed his blogroll “so that the words [take] centre stage”, as I only just recently removed my Links page (technically a blogroll and a… newsletter-roll?), too. Mostly, I think, because inevitably it would have become one more piece of cognitive clutter for me, and at some point its maintenance, or lack thereof, would have started to push beneath my psychic fingernails.
Hollywood producer Harvey Frand died on Thursday, July 23, 2009 in Los Angeles. He was said to be “the man behind the curtain” for the Battlestar Galactica revival, which had ended just four months earlier. The following night at House of Blues San Diego, what was meant “merely” as the second of three performances of the BSG Orchestra led by series composer Bear McCreary became instead an impromptu, and semi-public, wake. Edward James Olmos himself, as the evening’s host, delivered the news of Frand’s death, and his importance to the show, to the audience—eventually leading the house in a rousing, celebratory chorus of, “So say we all!”—and the show was transformed into more than just another performance. If you’ve ever had the opportunity, as a Galactica fan, to see the BSG Orchestra live, you know how powerful an experience it can be in and of itself. But being invited, even welcomed, to join McCreary, the musicians, Olmos, and the other cast and crew present for the show in a celebration not just of the show and its music but of one of the forces who’d made it all happen, this was something altogether else. It was, for me, my favorite pop culture fandom memory, and not only because an already-amazing show carried this new, deeper, undercurrent. The indelible image for me will always be that while the rest of the cast mostly remained upstairs in the VIP section, Olmos was down on the floor with the rest of us, hanging out in the cordoned-off sound booth, often with his head down, letting the music hit him, wash over him, from across the room. Sometimes—and here is the truly indelible image—playing air guitar. But it wasn’t just that, the image isn’t just about that. People left him alone. He wasn’t swarmed or swamped by fans. He wasn’t under the constant assault of being pestered or chatted-up. He was there for the music, there for the show, and there, as it happened, for Frand. And everyone let that be. This show on the night of Friday, July 24, 2009, is my favorite fandom moment because it combined all of the things that fandom can get right: its passion, its meaning, its care, and its respect. I doubt anyone present left unaware, or was left unawares, of the privilege of being in that room, albeit in a transitory and circumstantial sense, as one, united crew. Fandom, maybe, could be like this a little more often without needing tragedy to prompt it.
I’ve only ever found one news app for my phone that was worth a damn, and we’re coming up on the third anniversary of it being murdered in its virtual crib. What made the Breaking app different was its curation by a staff who weren’t restricted to reporting by its parent company (NBC News) and who therefore were given room to really excel during, well, breaking news events. There’s never been another app like it, and no matter how many other news apps I try, none ever lasts more than a couple of days. The co-founder of Breaking is out there with something of a reboot but it’s only for companies, nonprofits, and NGOs. I’d have paid a monthly fee for Breaking without a second thought. I still would for a properly-staffed spiritual successor. I’d find make a hole in my very limited budget for it.
Last year, when I must have been going a rewatch, I argued that of all the characters on The Good Place Jason Mendoza had the highest degree of emotional intelligence. Even when he was alive, he was the only one of Team Cockroach truly to have earnest and authentic friendships. Eleanor was too trashbag, Tahani too conceited, and Chidi too anxious. Jason might not know at any given moment what’s going on, but he almost always knows how the people around him feel about it. He’s the most empathetic of them all, but if it’s ever acknowledged it’s only implicitly, only tacitly, and buried somewhere beneath or behind the teasing of his general cluelessness. Easily, then, my favorite part of “The Funeral to End All Funerals” was Janet’s eulogy for him. “Jason was the very first person to ask me about my feelings,” she says. “I hadn’t had any yet, but it made me want to go get some.” So, thanks, The Good Place, for someone finally, openly, sticking up for what truly makes Jason Mendoza.
This week’s television: Sunday: Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, Batwoman, Supergirl, Mr. Robot; Monday: Black Lightning; Tuesday: The Flash; Wednesday: The Masked Singer, Nancy Drew; Full Frontal with Samantha Bee; Thursday: The Good Place, Evil. I’m also slowly making my way through current season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and re-watching Battlestar Galactica. I’m hoping soon to finish season three of Glitch and season one of Raising Dion, and start in on season two of The End of the F*ing World and season four of The Man in the High Castle.
Eerily like a Nextdoor thread come to life, today a flyer got taped to my front door agitating against a planned local homeless shelter under the city’s auspices. Browsing the actual inevitable Nextdoor thread about the flyer, I’ve now learned that there’s also an active conspiracy theory insinuating that the project’s previous neighborhood rigged the board elections for our neighborhood association in order to guarantee the camp would get moved from their neighborhood to ours. How does anyone ever get anything of real value out of this? Nextdoor was the worst great idea. It’s like TheFacebook but for ranking other people’s humanity instead of their hotness.
I’m not sure if it’s real or perception but I feel like at some point The Good Place: The Podcast somewhat devolved into endless recapping of seemingly every single line of dialogue, interspersed with a few lines of commentary. Has it been like this from the beginning and it’s just that I’ve grown tired of that approach? I feel like they’d just need to briefly describe each scene and then maybe have each guest say something about it from their perspective. Listening to Jackson recite basically all the lines while laughing appreciatively is a weird schtick and I wish I could recall if it’s new or has merely grown stale. I’m deeply into hearing the various creatives, from all levels, discuss the show. I’m less into just listening to someone repeat lines and laugh, like co-workers who think they’re funny reciting everything from last weekend’s Saturday Night Live as if they are performing the material themselves for an audience who didn’t also actually watch it.
For the life of me I do not recall how this Thomas Chatterton Williams tweet found its way into my feed, but it led me to Teresa M. Bejan, which led me to wonder whether or not I wanted to read her book, Mere Civility. It was tough locating a sense of what her stance on civility (or even its functional definition) was, exactly, but I think I’ve started to get an idea thanks to her “A Reply to My Readers”, which she published in The Review of Politics last year.
When the operative question for political candidates apparently isn’t, “Have you ever given money to a stripper?” but instead, “Will you be taking contributions from strippers?”, you know you live in Portland, where it’s long been asserted that we have “one strip club for every 11,826 residents” due to full nudity having been declared an activity protected by the First Amendment. In my life, I’ve been taken to precisely two strip clubs—both, yes, here in Portland—and while they both were remarkably uncomfortable experiences, at least the club where the dancers were in charge didn’t include performers with vacant, glassy, trapped-animal, drug-addled stares.
It’s a long way off in the scheme of things, if only because I still don’t know what the Disability Determination Services consultive exam indicated to result in my being deemed not disabled for Social Security purposes (all the proper channels for requesting my own records so far have been radio silent), but finally tonight I sat down and did something I’ve been meaning to do since that particularly-maddening ordeal began.
“The first generation of developmentally disabled adults who grew up at home, not in an institution,” writes Dan Goldberg, “are now middle-aged and facing a health care system that’s largely unprepared to take care of them as their baby boomer parents age out of that role.” So if someone like me, who has reached middle age without remaining at home (although I boomeranged at least once, and I think it must have been twice?) or being in an institution but nonetheless have remained dependent upon draining the not-inexhaustable family dime, can’t somehow figure out becoming self-sufficient, any potential avenues for resources and support are about to get prioritized to this other population in an even worse situation. Cool.
Need a lift? Here’s something you don’t see every day. The owner of a new chocolate shop has his storefront targeted by an art-activist pointing out colonialist implications of its branding. His response? “It’s not the community’s job to understand what my motivations are or the meaning this has for me,” he told the press. “It’s my job to care about the concerns of the community.” And he’s removed and is reworking his business’ branding.
Colin Walker describes his anxiety as “a feeling I can only liken to claustrophobia”, a term I use frequently in just this manner. One thing to know about anxiety is that it doesn’t always require “busy, crowded environments”; I can be at an empty transit stop, or even alone at home, and that claustrophobic feeling sets in. Your mileage, or Walker’s, may vary.
I’m pretty committed to Evil at this point. The third episode made me question my interest through the first two, but the fourth is sort of the Rorschach test: if that one gets you, you’re probably in. Its depiction of demonic visitations is original and engaging and weird, and Michael Emerson is in it, which usually is a sign to stick around. It’s not without weak points: tonight’s 8chan bit was clumsy in execution if not intent, and apparently the Vatican doesn’t recognize sigils when it sees them? I do still wish someone would do an end-time eschatology series that wasn’t wrapped in Christian theology but I’m also not entirely convinced Evil isn’t in fact that show, but on a very slow burn to that reveal.
I used to listen to music. Technically I still do, but not like I used to. These days mostly it’s to get through public transit commutes when fatigue hits or overwhelm looms or shutdown threatens. Sometimes I remember an artist I listened to in the past but haven’t for years or decades. The latest: Brenda Kahn, whose Goldfish Don’t Talk Back and Epiphany in Brooklyn are the albums I knew, and owned, and are what I’ve been listening to again lately. (I don’t remember which tour I would have seen her for, I think somewhere in Albany, NY.) I’m afraid to listen to anything she’s recorded since then, which is typical when I rediscover music that was around for previous incarnation of me.
Despite the effectively-constant enervation, I am attempting my weekly trip to the Oregon Zoo. I’m not even there yet, still transiting, and I’m already starting to fade inside and out. Maybe the worst thing about burnout is the frequent risk that even the things you do for self-care might on balance come with too high a price in exchange for the try.
“A diagnosis is a personal thing and there’s no one way to react to anything in this world, but for me, it changed everything,” says Rhi. “It confirmed that I am not faulty, it confirmed that I am just fine the way I am.” I’m glad someone out there feels that way as a late-diagnosed actually-autistic person. I don’t. I did, a bit, for awhile, in the near-term aftermath. Nonetheless, I still can’t support myself, and having been unable to find a mental health practitioner I’ll probably have my food support taken away next year, because there’s no one to confirm that, yes, I really still cannot try again to work after the last attempt felt like being psychologically mugged, even though it was over a year ago now, and even without the stress of trying again I’m nonetheless in another autistic burnout. So, no, I still feel faulty. I still feel as if I very much am not just fine the way I am. I’m tired, and I’m effectively of no use, and I’m just sort of flat inside because of it.
The rough thing about burnout is that while you can engage with and enjoy things, if you do the pendulum swing after is much more severe-feeling than usual. After the endorphins rush of the great, great reveal on tonight’s episode of The Masked Singer, I had a pretty dramatic concentration crash while watching Nancy Drew, and felt like someone had just forced me out of bed at four in the morning.
In fact, I found that paper I wanted; the PDF was available via ResearchGate. Its authors flat-out state, “It may be assumed that individuals with ASD experience unique sources of stress that are potentially traumatic, compared to the general population.” They suggest potential underlying mechanisms might be similiar, in that both conditions include issues with functional connectivity and dysregulation in various parts of the brain. It occured to me only this morning that the idea of autistic PTSD—by which I don’t mean merely experiencing PTSD while autistic but PTSD caused by being autistic—in fact might factor into the entire, mostly-unresearched question of autistic burnout.
For awhile now I’ve been fascinated by research suggesting “sustained connectivity” in autistic brains, and that sustained connectivity being correlated with “symptom severity” (although, strangely, only in “social impairment” and not in “cognitive function”). What I’m wondering is if there’s any research out there on how “sustained connectivity” in autistic brains possibly relates to the question of autism as a kind of trauma upon the autistic brain? I did find one paper suggesting “shared underlying mechanisms” between autism and PTSD but as I haven’t been able to find a copy of the paper itself I don’t know if anything like “sustained connectivity” plays a part in its analysis of mechanisms. I’ve talked at length about these questions before and maybe because I appear to be relapsing into my post-diagnosis autistic burnout I am thinking about them again.
The best thing about “You Can’t Go Home Again”, other than Starbuck figuring out how to fly the Cylon raider being the most bad-ass thing in the entire series (possibly excepting the atmospheric rescue jump in “Exodus”), is that as Apollo escorts her back to the ship, both ships waggle—calling back to the original Battlestar Galactica series’ episode, “The Hand of God”.
Does it make more sense to talk about an autistic person’s individual spectrum than to talk about someone being “on the spectrum”? Is “on the spectrum” a term that actually just confounds the issue? (Certainly it tends to lead to neurotypicals pulling out the nonsense, “Well, really, we’re all somewhere on the spectrum.”) My favorite post-diagnosis metaphor I ran across was that of a soundboard: every autistic person’s mix of autistic features and intensities is different. “Spectrum” in a sense should read like “fingerprint”, like the spectrographic fingerprints of the elements and compound in distant stars.
Feeling buried and no sooner do I post about being busy with a thing than that very thing becomes overwhelming and my brain starts to feel like one giant executive function traffic jam and I have to stop working on it and I take a moment to look at my RSS reader and my newsletter reader and everything everywhere is piling up and I feel like I’m suffocating under the weight of it all but if I just mark everything as “read” and forget about it I will feel like I’ve failed not only myself but this blog and just writing this all out in one giant run-on sentence is spiking my anxiety response and I feel like I am backed into a corner on everything and honestly I just want to delete it all and turn my back on everything I am doing because really what’s the point of it if days and moments like this happen where reading things and writing things just seems like too much for me to handle and I think I am having some serious mental paralysis issues right now.
For whatever mental reason, I have wanted to avoid “link dump” posts here, but I might have to do one later, as I am too distracted right now by trying to assemble a one-pager website of journal articles relevant to late-diagnosed adult autism t omake available as a reference for my medical, mental health, and social services practitioners, both actual and prospective, and haven’t really had time for anything else.
Carter Moore says he wants to forget culture but what he’s describing isn’t culture, it’s rampant, unchecked-by-self consumerism. An inability to refrain from buying another pair of sneakers because “people whose respect you crave [look] down at your feet and [give] a nod of respect or even a quiet compliment” isn’t about culture, it’s about a kind of addiction and it’s about status. It’s, really, idolatry Moore is grappling with there, isn’t it?
Doc Searls is souring on the web. Having once viewed blogging as “sending email that’s ‘cc:world’”, he now views the web as a “whiteboard”. What’s interesting to me is that any lost traces of my own past selves were lost solely because I ended a project, or let a domain lapse, without putting its posts up in some sort of public archive. The whiteboard of my own blog-life is purely of my own making.
My eyes haven’t seen anything but the Portland area for more than six years. No, I don’t count Estacada or Corvallis. The last time I was anywhere else was Seattle in 2013 (San Diego in 2012, Los Angeles and Orlando in 2011); that and every trip before it, like the rest of my life, unsustainably relied on someone else’s dime. I don’t even have any particular other-place in mind. I just don’t like the creeping resignation that I never again ever will see anywhere else until the darkness and nothing I’ll see when someday I die.
We know this is true: Women who exhibit anger in the workplace are seen as less professional and less competent. They are accorded lower status and lower pay. For men, it’s the opposite: Angry men are accorded higher status than sad men. And when it comes to anger, observers are more likely to assume a woman is angry because of her temperament or personality. Men are assumed to be angry because of some external factor — their anger is righteous and reactive, not a sign of personal instability or emotionality.
There are probably some really good arguments against being irritated by adopting and adapting autistic tricks to address so-called “digital overload”, but I’m irritated anyway. I’m irritated, too, at not being able to articulate either those arguments or the reasons I’m irritated to begin with. I just don’t have the brain for it today. Or, really, this week. The brain should be an ocean but lately mine is a shallow lake.
This Halloween was a bit of a wake-up call for me. It reminded me that great communities don’t just happen, but that they are created and designed. If the physical design of our neighbourhood actively acts against the creation of community, we all need to work extra hard to connect with the people around us. It’s something I’ll be devoting a lot of time to in the year to come, and something I’ll most likely be sharing a lot about in the next few months.
Liberals and Never Trump conservatives regularly castigate congressional Republicans for their cowardice. And certainly, some percentage of GOP politicians are abetting Trump’s malfeasance for craven, careerist reasons. But it’s the ones who are doing so out of moral conviction who should truly concern us. Understanding pro-Trump conservatives as a pack of spineless opportunists putting short-term political expediency above their highest ideals is almost certainly too optimistic. In a hyperpolarized political system — and in the face of demographic and ideological headwinds — many conservatives simply see little reason to value the maintenance of democratic norms above the preservation of their movement’s power.
All these blogs having twentieth anniversaries lately is making me a bit depressed. There’s no question that for many people, myself included, social media interrupted blogging, and I’m coming to hate this about myself. I wish I could re-assemble what blogging I did do, in various contexts, over these two decades. It’s likely all gone down the memory hole along with my inconsistent sense of self, or would take some serious hackery not just to find downloaded archives scattered across multiple hard drives but to recreate them in some sort of publicly-readable format. I wish that I had been one, single person over the course of my life, whose life could be revisited at all, through two decades of blogging. “[L]ooking back on the posts later to reflect on where you’ve been,” muses Manton Reece, “is part of why blogging is still so special.” I can’t decide if it’s too bad that I can’t, or if I’m being saved from a deeper kind of depression from being faced with a person, or rather with many persons, who never seemed to solidify into a self.
But maybe something worth thinking about is what if there isn’t really any significant movement from the rough confines of the 1:9:90 model? Or what if there are inadvertent attempts to mine and squeeze that 1% more and more and more until the majority of us are in the lurking/consumption side? Will it really only be a few years until we get one tweet a year, and it’s from Disney, about their MCU slate, and all we can do is RT or Like it?
With that in mind, I plan to move my Game Log posts, from my gaming journal into this one. Playing video games is a big part of who I am. In fact, I even wrote down “gamer” as part of this site’s description. And yet I rarely get to talk about video games on this online journal. Why is that? It was because I was preventing myself from doing so, because I thought the people following my online journal would not be interested in those kinds of posts. There I go again, caring about the audience.
We should know better. Generation Z, which includes my own daughter, is going to face problems boomers refuse to concede are problems at all. Generation X should understand this well. We have been living under the shadow of the boomer generation our entire lives. So much so in fact that many people forget we even exist. And there’s another thing we understand. Most boomers don’t get it. Never will. Many Gen Xers get it. We have for a long time. Let’s not make common cause with the wrong side.
Currently reading: The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett; and The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz. (A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine was terrific and you should read it.) Swarm is borrowed from the Multnomah County Library through OverDrive, but Memory was so good I bought it while I was somewhere in the middle, and I bought Future with Bix Day money. So far, I’ve somehow read 53 books this year. You can read my highlights over on Goodreads, which should be up to date at this point.
We know that any “Green New Deal” proposing economic and environmental reforms must address housing. If we have any hope of lowering our emissions, we’ll need reforms like these. The lowest-energy, lowest-cost housing—“four floors and corner stores,” as the writer Laura Loe puts it—is simply illegal today in too many important places. Nobody, private or public, is allowed to build it.
Outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Bloomberg, and the Atlantic were apparently oblivious to the fact that they were amplifying claims crafted by Koch-funded groups designed to undermine market competition, the concept of urban transport as a public good, and the legitimacy of any form of regulatory authority. The regular repetition of the company’s narrative by seemingly independent, elite outlets concealed its manufactured, top-down origins, and established it as accepted public opinion not requiring further debate.
Uber apparently forgot to tell (via Digg Editions) its autonomous vehicles anything about jaywalking (via Andy Baio). Baio also points out that the crime of jaywalking was invented by automakers as part of a “forgotten 1920s campaign led by auto groups and manufacturers that redefined who owned the city streets” which until then had been considered a public space.
Saying Silicon Valley doesn’t have a political ideology — which in America is a bit like saying Silicon Valley hasn’t nailed its flag to either the blue party or the red party — is so demonstrably false. Thompson acknowledges that the Valley has a “strain of libertarianism and optimism”, as if Wired doesn’t have a history of supporting Barlow’s manifesto and declaration of independence for Cyberspace. I mean, is a manifesto not a political ideology? The Valley - that amorphous, stereotypical collection of companies largely funded by venture capital and now capable of buying entire supply chains out and behaving as if they’d like to remake the financial markets in their own image - demonstrably does have a political ideology and it’s clearly one that’s quite tied to “making lots of money” and things like believing in meritocracies and technocracies. A political ideology is not whether you say you support the blue party or the red party, it is something that can be discerned, at the very least, from both the daily actions and the actions in aggregate of any particular actor.
Dan Cohen’s latest edition of Humane Ingenuity, on ebooks, includes a twenty-year-old quote from Sven Birkerts asserting that “the turning of real pages […] helps to create immersion in a way that thumb clicks never can”, and I just can’t even with such nonsense. There’s a difference between the comfort and habit of the familiar and an objective experience. Arguably—easily, in fact—barely having to move a muscle to turn a “page” is more immersive than manipulating a physical book.
“Having a billion dollars,” posits Tom Whyman, “makes one far less connected to the ordinary flow of human wants and pains and needs than any transhumanist modification ever could.” Whyman deconstructs the surge of Billionaire Discourse that’s leading billionaires who fear the potential ascendancy of Elizabeth Warren to ahistorically claim that “America was founded on free enterprise; freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable” despite, you know, America actually being founded by white businessmen on the backs of enslaved black people—and requiring analogous, if not synonymous, sacrificial lambs ever since.
While the onslaught of media coverage during presidential elections can make many Americans think voting only happens every four years on that Tuesday in November, each year, a bundle of federal, state and local elections happen concurrently, usually on a federally-sanctioned “Election Day,” this year, that day is Tuesday, November 5th. But critical elections—such as for mayor, council member, clerk, and more—happen all year, every year, often with little fanfare.
The scale and scope of the MCU’s story feels unprecedented. Yet its main innovation is not narrative - it’s that it’s told via film, rather than voice, or text, and that it’s readily understood as fiction, not history. But if the rise of cinematic universes reflects our fundamental desire for the epic form, why did they ever go away?
For whom do you blog, and how? Derek Sivers has decided only to blog when he thinks it’s worth a reader’s time, in part because “[c]oming up with a daily post was becoming a full-time job”. Dino Bansigan, meanwhile, is unlisting his blog from the public feed on Write.as to see if his readership drops, and if he will care if it does.
Last week’s promo for last night’s Mr. Robot called it an episode like no other, and while that’s true the idea that Derek Lawrence could claim it was “something that only Mr. Robot could pull off” when Buffy did it twenty years ago next month is such serious sycofancy (yes, that’s my portmanteau of “sycophancy” and “fan”) that Entertainment Weekly should be ashamed to have published it. While the episode was very good, I wish more attention were going to the previous one, which as a sort of Mr. Robot by way of the Coen Brothers easily was one of the best episodes in the show’s run.
“Are there any circumstances in which autism could be considered, not merely an acceptable difference, but a superpower?” asks Joanne Limburg in The Guardian. (Limburg received a diagnosis in midlife, as I did.). No, there are not. There are trade-offs for every “benefit” I’ve ever found in being autistic, and if I could wave a magic wand and be rid of it, I very well might.
I am trying figure out from this review by Christopher Cheung (via Parix Marx, again) what might be in Leslie Kern’s Feminist City: A Field Guide that wasn’t also in Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (which I previously mentioned, oddly, in the context of autism and anxiety), but maybe that will become clearer before it comes out next year.
All through Manu Saadia’s look at Blade Runner as (mostly) the end of utopian visions in science-fiction (via Paris Marx), I kept thinking of The Martian, which while not utopian certainly is hopeful, albeit in an ad hoc rather than systemic way. Although, then again, it’s also not about cities, which only now occurs to me as I write this.
Regime cleavages, by contrast, focus the electorate’s attention on the political system as a whole. Instead of seeking office to change the laws to obtain preferred policies, politicians who oppose the democratic order ignore the laws when necessary to achieve their political goals, and their supporters stand by or even endorse those means to their desired ends. Today, when Trump refuses to comply with the House impeachment inquiry, he makes plain his indifference to the Constitution and to the separation of powers. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell argues that impeachment overturns an election result, he is doing the same. In the minds of Trump, his allies and, increasingly, his supporters, it’s not just Democrats but American democracy that is the obstacle.
While casually dismissing the idea that there were pre-web blogs “in the form of people’s home directories”, I did wonder about possible proto-blogging in those days. Hans Gerwitz suggested use of the .plan files accessible via the finger protocol “as a sort of microblog”, and now I wonder if indeed that’s what Jared Pereira was on about to begin with. Even the linked Wikipedia entry says, “Often this file (maintained by the user) contains … useful information about the user’s current activities, similar to micro-blogging.” Just because I don’t remember seeing it used this way (mostly I remember .plan files used similarly to .sig files in email) doesn’t mean it wasn’t.
I’m finally getting to season four of Veronica Mars, and I wasn’t really paying attention when it released so I don’t know whether or not I’m “supposed” to enjoy it, but I am, and really just the first scene between the Marses made my life a notch or two better. One surprise is that somehow I’m actually giving a cuss about Logan Echolls, a character I’ve always basically disliked and an actor who in more recent years I find kind of freakish to look at. It’s jumping the gun, and wishful thinking, but any potential season five really is my hold-out hope for seeing Terriers characters again, because those two shows easily could exist in the same universe, and the San Diego-ish settings of both would allow for it.
While we’re busy building libraries with obvious accessibility fails, Helsinki built one across from parliament (via Paris Marx, again) that in addition to 100,000 books offers “a space for meetings, free events, and informal gatherings, with a cafe, theater”, has access to “3-D printers and power tools, sewing machines and music rooms and makerspaces”, and even lets you “borrow season tickets for the Helsinki’s popular professional basketball games”.
“By emphasizing the technical innovations (and obsessive dedication to them) as more important than the political and economic contexts in which they were germinated,” writes Ingrid Burrington for The New Republic, “the graybeards of internet history and PR machines of the tech industry perpetuate the illusion that technology magically exists outside of politics, rather than existing in a constant dialogue with it.” Honestly, when I read this quote in the latest Radical Urbanist from Paris Marx, I’d been hoping for a deep dive into “how we misremember the internet’s origins” but that sentence in Burrington’s very short article is about as meaty as it gets.
There are a lot of important observations in this Om Malik post about the “gig economy” on how freelancers get screwed and delineating the times and situations in which we should reserve our ire for the companies and not the workers who represent those companies in our face-to-face interactions with them. For the life of me, though, I can’t understand why he says, “We rarely blame the driver when we have a bad ride with Uber.” Who else would we blame in that circumstance? There are lots of reasons to dislike and disdain Uber, but the company doesn’t create any given ride experience.
I forgot that The Martian was airing on TV again last night. I’ve mentioned before that “I am implicitly compelled to watch whenever I run across it”. Thing is, before I’d rented the extended edition last month, I’d checked for upcoming airings, and set last night’s to record. I’m experiencing something of a crash in my mood today, as I import yesterday’s photos into Lightroom and find that either I’m not feeling them, or I’ve no feeling today to give them, so my having thought ahead might mean today’s another self-care viewing of The Martian.
With the total skidmark of the fiftieth annual Bix Day and its entire birthmonth now behind me on the calendar, this morning I grabbed a breakfast sandwich from Chop and a latte from St. Johns Coffee Roasters, headed to the Oregon Zoo with the 35mm on the Nikon, and after four hours there even managed to hop off the bus on the way home for a brief photowalk along the Willamette River in the Pearl District.
The “polarization” framework is profoundly misleading because it suggests that the two parties are like magnets repelling each other with identical force and velocity. But the real story is that while Democrats have moved modestly to the left on some issues, most of the divisions in the country are the result of Republicans becoming both more fascistic and completely untethered to reality.
Will Oremus highlights a problem with Twitter’s forthcoming ban on political ads: defining “political”. Oremus points out that issue ads about climate change likely run afoul of the new policy, but an oil company would not. This despite being able to make a valid argument that advertisements by and for the fossil fuel industry in the early 21st century necessarily themselves are politcal in nature. One of many open questions, then, is whether banning only “political” ads favors the status quo and the powers-that-be and disfavors challenges to them—something similarly raised by Noah Kulwin when it comes to political candidates, where, says Kulwin, “social media advertising is most critical for political challengers — not incumbents”.
Avocado politics is the parallel phenomenon of the right: Green on the outside, but brown(shirt) on the inside. Just as watermelon politics repackaged the political wish list of the left on the basis of the environmental crisis, so avocado politics reiterates the policy agenda of the far right, but now justified on the basis of the environmental crisis. Far from forcing the right to embrace the left’s prescriptions for anthropogenic global warming, our climate crisis may provide a powerful new set of justifications for the far-right policy program.
For, I guess, psychological or cognitive capacity reasons, I don’t really cook anymore. Most of my meals depend on their instantness (e.g. Minute Rice) or their easy availability (e.g. store-bought clamshells of veggies or shredded chicken). Today’s flavor find: rice, tri-color bell peppers, canned corn, chili pepper shredded chicken, and sweet-and-sour sauce.
The test, which all stems from the concept of how easily kids can find the front door to a house on Halloween and then move on to the next one, has been useful in getting a broader range of people thinking about how suburban house design relates to more livable, walkable streets. It helps make the case for building houses with rear garages instead of front, often off a lane, and having true front doors. Once the garage is moved, the door can be moved closer to the sidewalk. The lack of driveway curb cuts allow for street trees, uninterrupted sidewalks, on-street parking, and slower speeds for residential traffic, illustrating the ripple effects that suburban-style garages can have on the public realm, walkability, and yes, trick-or-treating.
In continuing sneaker saga news, the Converse and New Balance pairs both are a no-go. I do like the Adidas but either despite appearances I still have gout inflammation in that toe on my left foot or that foot is naturally larger than my right, because when I try the Adidas over my thicker, winter socks, it’s too tight a squeeze on the left. I’m not entirely sure what to do about this. Do I move up a half-size?
I’m skeptical of this open blogchain with which CJ Eller is playing. I feel like blogchains work better if structured and organized between or among their participants, otherwise it’s not longer a back-and-forth but a kind of free-for-all. Perhaps I’m just mentally stuck on “blogchain” meaning the former, and wish there were a different term for the latter? The blogchain concept really does just strike me as a cross-blog Brain Tennis, with discussion being batted “over the net” (see what I did there). Tom Critchlow, in a multi-blogchain post (his own, and Eller’s), raises the potential alternative of aggregators, and I think there’s no question that whatever else blogging takes on these days the indieweb blogosophere definitely needs to figure out its own Bloglines and Technorati.
I had such a hard time with the first season of Runaways, and then season two (I’m doing a month of Hulu to catch up on some stuff) comes along and delivers something like its fantastic fifth episode. (Although it’s vaguely ridiculous that a carload of super-powered teenagers somehow cruises around town unnoticed in a Rolls-Royce.) Even the parental storylines aren’t aggravating me. Last season the show couldn’t bring me to care about anything that was happening, but this season has so much going on. I’ll be prepped and ready for next season, which also is the last chance to see Tandy and Tyrone after their own Cloak & Dagger was cancelled over on Freeform.
“Assassins and stalkers,” Twelve Azalea said. “Just what I needed. If I was a more judicious sort of man, Ambassador, I would not only call the Sunlit but imply that you’d blackmailed me into committing … oh, there’s got to be a crime for stealing from the dead. Is there a crime for that, Reed?” “Plagiarism,” said Three Seagrass, “but it’d be a stretch in the courts.”
To characterize the earliest societies we can draw on evidence from hunter-gatherers of recent centuries and the archaeological record. The vast countries that now cause hearts to swell with pride would have been unfathomable to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We will explore what made this transformation possible, leading to societies that continue to discriminate against outsiders even though they have become so numerous that most members are unknown to each other. The casual anonymity that characterizes contemporary human societies may seem unremarkable, but it is a big deal. The seemingly trivial act of entering a café full of strangers without a care in the world is one of our species’ most underappreciated accomplishments, and it separates humankind from most other vertebrates with societies. The fact that the animals of those species must be able to recognize each individual in their society is a constraint most scientists have overlooked, but it explains why no lions or prairie dogs will ever erect cross-continental kingdoms. Being comfortable around unfamiliar members of our society gave humans advantages from the get-go and made nations possible.
“Those of us who live on metaphorically & literally higher ground in the rising climate crisis,” warns Michael Andersen (a senior researcher at Sightline Institute) in response to new research, “must organize immediately in every way to welcome more people soon.” When this inevitably happens, your neighborhood’s racist Nextdoor threads really will be quite the sight to behold.
I’d barely started reading The Friendly Orange Glow last year when I suggested it could be pitched to a television network as “a real-life Halt and Catch Fire”, about a genius bunch of semi-outsiders ahead of their time who weren’t the “winners” and so (mostly) no one remembers them. Thinking about it again this week, I’d pitch it as a kind of anthology show, with each season telling a different part of the “untold story of the PLATO system”, allowing the writers to avoid narrative pressures to include characters from season to season other than the ones who actually threaded in and out of the story over the longer timeframe. I want to see dramatized the reaction to finding that the system is being used to discuss impeaching Nixon. I want to see the high schoolers. I want to see “the Doomsday Machine sequence” which “nearly had me in tears”. I’m still waiting, television writers. So is Brian Dear.
Nonetheless, so the new diktat went, issued by men refusing to understand the websites they spent millions of dollars acquiring. On Tuesday, the staffers responded by only posting non-sports stories. They trafficked normally, of course, but corporate retribution followed a few hours later when deputy editor Barry Petchesky was fired for, in his words, “not sticking to sports.” Petchesky, who’d worked there for a decade, and kept the site running as the search for a new editor-in-chief continued — because who would want to work for people like Spanfeller and Maidment, or for a staff already trained to sniff out a patsy? — produced thousands upon thousands of blogs (and more) for Deadspin. Firing a highly productive, widely beloved, well-tenured employee as petty revenge sounds stupid, but I guess I’m not smart enough to be the CEO of G/O Media.
CJ Eller is wondering about solutions on the social level rather than the software level and while it reminds me of students chatting via Google Docs, it also makes me wonder about physically-built analogues to the idea. Squatting? Adaptive reuse? Pop-up public places? I’m not sure these are directly analogous, but the first and third at least seem to be fixes at the social layer.
Dino Bansigan discovers for himself not only that “almost every post on a person’s blog […] is personal commentary” but goes on to realize only the very heart of blogging: “It might be the case that personal commentary on a subject, is what makes a post valuable.” This is true even for the humble linklog (or linkblog); curating what to share itself is an act of personal commentary on what you find important enough to mention. (Apparently back in 2012 there was something of a debate over linkblogs.) Blogging always was supposed to be about what you see, whether you’re looking inward or outward, not about trying to determine what some reader-person might find valuable. This always was the psychological danger and risk of blogging: the potential value-added was you.
“Context is sometimes difficult to detect online,” writes J. E. LaCaze. “And context is an important part of determining which identity to call upon at any moment.” I’ve talked before about how on the web we build context through the use of hyperlinks, and how Twitter-style platforms perhaps make that more difficult with the lack of true inline hyperlinks and needing to break up longer, more comprehensive thoughts into threads of 280-character pieces. Now I wonder if the move away from personal websites and blogs to discrete social media silos (status updates over here, photos over there, longform who knows where) also makes it more difficult to establish context for identity. Then again, I can’t even find a consistent context for identity over the entire fifty years of my own life.
You might remember TPL as the library which came under fire for allowing Neo-Nazis to rent one of their community rooms. As a result of the intense criticism they received for this, they updated their room rental policies. One would have thought that this might have included not renting rooms to people denying the humanity of other TPL patrons and staff. I was happy to be able to talk at length, during the Q&A after my talk, about why I thought TPL made the wrong choice. It’s hard when intellectual freedom and social justice positions aren’t in alignment, but if forced to choose, I don’t have to think twice about which I’d rather have.
I’ve somewhat come to dislike discussions of autistic sensory processing, because I feel like they tend not to adequately convey to the neurotypical that at issue really is a broader, deeper, and more general idea of stimulus processing, of which sensory inputs are only a part. Our own, internal thoughts and feelings, for example, also can act as additional stimulus pressures. Anxieties over large crowds, or over unexpected or surprise circumstances also can act as additional stimulus pressures. The “sensory” framing is too narrow, and as such miscommunicates to the neurotypical both the degree and kind of strain we can be under.
If it’s not clear already, then it must be said: Facebook is a right-wing company, hostage to conservative ideas about speech and economics, its fortunes tied to its allies in Republican politics, including the president, whose campaign spends millions on Facebook ads. Offering support to some of the worst figures in American political life, Facebook is as nihilistic as an oil company and just as willing to dump its pollution on all of us. That it has come to so thoroughly dominate our public sphere is a tragic indictment of American civic life and American techno-capitalism, which has confused the pitiless surveillance of today’s internet with utopian empowerment.
It’s true I’ve thirteen years on Lindy West but you know what I was doing when Saved by the Bell was on? Sleeping two successive weekends in Lafayette Park across from the White House to protest the first Gulf War. You know what I was doing when Clueless came out? Trying to stop the Communications Decency Act.
But it’s not just his age itself. It’s his tendency to misspeak, his inartful debating style, and — most of all — his status as a creature from another time in the Democratic Party, when the politics of race and crime and gender were unrecognizably different. It’s not just that the Joe Biden of yesteryear sometimes peeks out from behind the No. 1 Obama Stan costume. It’s that the Joe Biden of today is expected to hold his former self accountable to the new standards set by a culture that’s prepared to reject him. And though he’s the party Establishment’s obvious exemplar, he can’t seem to raise any money — spending more in the last quarter than he brought in and moving into the homestretch with less than $9 million in the bank (roughly a third of what Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders has on hand). For political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.
As the shit-streak of the fiftieth birthmonth winds down, existential rejection pursues right to the end. How good is the food at John Street Cafe, two blocks from my apartment? Enough that I had to ignore my usual redline of quitting a restaurant because they forgot to serve me. In my twenty years in Portland, I’ve quit three restaurants for that reason; they only get one strike. I had to hobble my way up to the back to confront the John Street staff about it, and then try to avoid having a complete sobbing breakdown back at my table. My fifty-first year is starting out terrific so far, picking up exactly where my fiftieth left off.
Toxic masculinity, like toxic racism, also prematurely kills men of all races, whenever we think it is unmanly to seek preventative care, unmanly to eat plant-based food, unmanly to admit we are stressed, unmanly to express we are hurting, unmanly to see a doctor—manly to take the pain and die like a man. Black men who have or who are pressured to have a traditional masculine role of provider may be experiencing more stress-related health issues, because they are more likely than white men to face problems in the job market. Now that I think about it, Dad’s health deteriorated when he was stressed from mistreatment on the job. So stressed, he resigned. He retired from his job but could not retire from racism.
Stumbling around the web today I came across this Sacha Judd piece on still believing in heroes (which, to be clear, is predominantly about online community; you should read that and then come back) which quotes an old Laurie Voss thread about whether or not “humans are capable of handling a global internet”. Voss concedes Dunbar’s number (“a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships”) but notes that human also happen quite readily to live in cities.
Random thoughts on once again rewatching Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, this time as a fiftieth birthday self-care, emotional-survival gambit: if we were tagging ourselves as scenes, I am Young Neil getting the lyrics to “Garbage Truck” wrong; Chris Evans and Brandon Routh play schmucks well, need to do so more often, and perhaps need to do so together; I’d say that this is an underrated Brie Larson performance but I don’t actually know how her performance is rated; the film probably should have won some editing awards, or even all the editing awards; Knives Chau turns out also to be Jenny Chey somehow; I probably never before noticed that Bill Hader is the Voice, because until recently I don’t think I even knew who Bill Hader was.
As a builder of the web dating back to 1998 and a blogger dating back to 2002 I’m forced to conclude that as of this moment there are no viable, meaningful alternatives for the less technical, “average” users of the internet. . In recent days we’ve seen the sale of Tumblr to Automatic, the makers of WordPress. Many hold out hope that this might develop into something meaningful for the open web and perhaps it will. I’m far from being an expert and am not an active part of the open or Indy web communities. But the sense that I have is that ultimately the solution is growing the plurality of “open” options for users as creators and consumers. Perhaps, if viewed as an ecosystem, the outlook might be more hopeful? That is, after all, the original ideal is it not? Open and wide access to the web to everyone? There will be no one answer, no one challenger to the gravity wells created by big social media entities.
In any sane, stable universe, today would have, should have, been cancelled. The morning’s initial indications that, after Tuesday’s debilitating gout flare nonetheless not preventing Wednesday’s usual breakfast out in the neighborhood, nor preventing Thursday’s birthweek trip to Byways Cafe deeper into town, Friday’s plan to attempt a birthday trip to the Oregon Zoo perhaps was doable after all. But of course, you can’t tempt fate. By the time the day’s seeming failure to capture any usable photos with the new lens was beginning to sink in, I’d managed to slip on a band of rain-slick cement at the zoo and came down hard directly on the gout-stricken toe. Limping up the path out and to transit in the rain, I managed to make my bus but only then to promptly get stuck waiting for a passing freight train, just as the inevitable daily fatigue dropped like a hammer onto my already-deeply-descended mood. In this very moment I’m still trying to prevent that conspiracy of body and mind from causing me to vomit. So ends the day marking my fiftieth year, in both painful bang and pathetic whimper.
It’s a valiant try, The Saturday Evening Post’s Rich Karlgaard (via Digg Editions), but I’m no late bloomer “who fulfils their potential later than expected”, finding “their supreme destiny on their own schedule”. I’m a slacker who is a mediocre failure all the way into midlife, with no signs of stopping. (Nice autism slurs in your article, though. Fuck both you and Ken Fisher.)
Elizabeth Warren also has a long list of policy stances and proposals. The difference, though, is that she makes no claim to all of them coming exclusively out of her own head. She makes clear that she researchers and relies on experts, and that her presidency would entail pulling the smartest people in any given issue into a room together. She sees policy as a complicated process, best when it’s evidence-based and detailed, necessarily existing in a complex landscape of other policies and realities, and adjusting when necessary. Yang sees it the way tech entrepreneurs approach much of life: As a space for the truly brilliant to hack. He clearly considers himself one of the truly brilliant. He seems to believe that experience doesn’t matter — that he’s smarter than those who have worked their way up the rungs to learn about civil service (and actually serve), and so his own solutions, plucked from the top of his head, will work better.
What began as a conversation about selective cross-posting on Micro.blog somewhere along the line became a conversation about community norms and an understandable nostalgia for the old Usenet-era rule of thumb that you “read the room” (or, often, the FAQ) before posting—a switcharoo that nags because, for the life of me, I don’t know how these supposed Micro.blog community norms are meant to be discovered, which mostly leaves me the impression that they don’t exist in the sense that’s being offered.
Today’s legal arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals in favor of a total and blanket presidential immunity have a wider goal, or at least a potential implication which the President’s lawyers certainly must themselves see, than just protecting the President himself. It would be a very short hop for them later to argue that in fact anyone acting under the President’s authority also is protected by that same now-theoretical immunity umbrella. At that point, it is the President’s followers, then legally considered to be the embodiment of presidential will, who openly will be shooting people on 5th Avenue. Or, at the very least, re-enacting the Brooks Brothers Riot in the halls of Congress.
Eight months ago I quit working for a well-known nonprofit herd of goats. There were many reasons for it, but yesterday I learned the colleague whose conflict was among them is gone. (I’d reflexively started to ask why, but then realized it’s neither any of my business nor do I actually care.) I’m not interested in going back to the organization even were that an option (or even in knowing anything other than what they post publicly to social media), but this does open the door to being able to visit, which I’ve not done since I quit. I’m not really sure yet if I want to, because the clean break has been far, far better for me than any sort of “complicated break-up” would have been, and until I have an internal answer to whether it would make my mental stability better or worse, I’ll not be jumping to upend my routine.
“When the benefits of strong communities are lost,” she said, “it takes a long time to recreate a community that has the social structure to benefit the individual, and we have done these [redevelopment] projects so many times, and displaced people so many times, that they can’t reorganize. And so what we have created at the level of community in the United States is a lot of individuals running around, but not in strong communities. And that’s pretty much across the board.”
When Herzog calls Chatwin “the internet,” the explicit surface-level context is that his writing served to link certain otherwise disparate and unconnected things, that it in some sense served to unify the world. This might be true, especially given the globalist expanse of Chatwin’s fiction. But it’s also a bit trite image; after all, the internet hardly serves only to unite but also to divide. As Dril knows, the internet is an often needlessly confrontational place, where telling someone to “log off” often only serves to make their opinions worse. Chatwin’s nomadism preaches wandering as a way not only of seeing the world, but of outpacing ourselves. By contrast the internet is something that exists in the phones we take with us everywhere; social media is a bubble we can never escape, a space we are always forced somehow to be attached to.
I can hobble. As long as I don’t flex my left foot, really, I can hobble. I wouldn’t try to wear a proper shoe (so, slip-on loafer), but I can hobble enough for my usual Wednesday breakfast at John Street Cafe, just two blocks away. Even if it kills the rest of my day, and I’m keeping myself from seeing it as any kind of predictor or indictator of what I’ll be able to handle over the next two days. But, for now, I can hobble.
I’ve spent most of my professional life outside of the elite institutions that have shaped design culture in the United States. I grew up in a working-class home in rural Arkansas and studied landscape at the state university, before drifting into politics, joining the Obama administration and then the organized opposition to Trump. It’s never been obvious to me that landscape architecture belongs at the center of today’s social movements, and it troubles me that so many colleagues make that claim, effectively erasing the work of community organizers and activists, not to mention the tangible support from allies in fields like sociology, law, and science who work for systemic change. Like the other design professions, landscape architecture as practiced today is a largely apolitical affair, organized around relationships with clients and projects, mainly serving the interests of an economic elite. We may yearn to impart systems-level change, but we are working on discrete sites, with incrementalist tools, within structures that produce injustice. Before we ask the world to view design as an urgent necessity, we must look at those sites, tools, and structures and remake our disciplines to be more useful, in the moment, for the movements and ideals we aspire to serve.
A long list of “Invisible Rules” for men and women on Page 13 paints a bleak portrait of contrasting communication styles. It says that women often “speak briefly” and “often ramble and miss the point” in meetings. By comparison, a man will “speak at length ― because he really believes in his idea.” Women don’t interrupt effectively like men. Women “wait their turn (that never comes) and raise their hands.”
The term “Mem.” is shorthand for memorandum, a note serving as a means to prompt one’s memory. Coincidentally enough, Wikitionary quotes Dracula as the sole example of the abbreviation. No wonder that it is marked as “now rare.” But while the shorthand might have fallen out of favor, the function of the memorandum has not. We just call it a “blog.”
It didn’t make sense to me, the reveal at the end of “402 Payment Required”, last week’s episode of Mr. Robot. This was fine, and surely intended, to whatever extent. This is serial storytelling, after all, which requires serial patience (or, from Whiterose’s point of view in tonight’s episode, is that serial surrender?), so of course even this week’s “403 Forbidden” left it entirely unaddressed.
It turns out that The Martian, which I am implicitly compelled to watch whenever I run across it on television, has an extended edition; I rented it for mental health self-care purposes last night. (For a good time, watch me weep when Watney finds Pathfinder; it happened when I’d read the book, too.) I didn’t notice anything that would have been better off left in, although I appreciated getting to see Park and Kapoor’s realization that Watney had decided to use what might have been his last days alive to complete the crew’s original mission. I probably should just own this movie, but there’s something to be said for the random serendipity of stumbling upon an airing.
What I remember most about Market Street in San Francisco when I lived there nearly twenty-five years ago was that it was not very clean. I don’t really remember what traffic was like, although I remember how bad was the “bunching” of buses (a nightmare transit scenario which then seemed to follow me to Portland). San Francisco just approved making Market Street car-free starting next year, and for all of how much Portland likes to think of itself as a town of urban planners, I can’t imagine any city administration here ever having the courage to make anything in this town car-free.
While I’m waiting for someone to answer Martin Scorsese’s declaration that Marvel movies aren’t “cinema” by asking him if the streaming Netflix movie he was promoting when he said that is “cinema”, Francis Ford Coppola reminds me (via Dan Barrett) that I’m perfectly free never to watch another movie from either of them ever again.
Which brings me to my final point: Are the Republicans starting to see for the first time that everything Trump’s critics have been saying about him, including that he’s a puppet president in league with the enemy, is devastatingly true—that dude gonna err on Russia’s side every damn time; or are the Republicans crafting a clever story about a president in rapidly declining mental health, so they will have a reason, one beyond their control, for turning against him? After all, all roads do seem to lead to Putin.
Imagine you are out for your local bar breakfast, and not long after you settle in you realize that out of the nine people sitting on either side of you, six of them are watching videos on their phones, each having turned up the volume to hear over the general din of customer conversations and whatever music is playing on the stereo.
I expected “exhausted” today. I expected “tired”. I did not expect “angry”. But the same family member who long since was told to stop deputizing themselves to stick their nose into my life, to stop speaking for me, did it again. It’s fucking infantilizing on a good day, but on an exhausting day during a psychological tripwire of a month, it’s maddening and dangerous and it almost broke me in half.
Charles Schmidt, writing for Nature (via Om Malik), reports that as “thousands of unwell people pour details of their symptoms and, perhaps unknowingly, locations into search engines and social media […] such data could be used to monitor flu outbreaks as they happen and to make accurate predictions about its spread.” Reminder: barring medical reasons disallowing you, get your damned flu shot.
Indeed, city critics should write about everything: their subject is a nexus of subjects. Ada Louise Huxtable concerned herself with not just her official beat of architecture at the New York Times and later the Wall Street Journal, but also development economics and the policy of land use and transportation; the ultra-opinionated Ian Nairn savaged postwar Britain’s uninspired buildings and even less inspired city planning; the New Yorker’s architecture critic Mumford wrote about highways, housing and planning, but also literature, technology and politics. And longtime writer on the built environment Karrie Jacobs points out that most writers on cities currently “either focus on urban problems or urban pleasures,” whereas “in truth, the problems and the pleasures have a symbiotic relationship,” which any critic worthy of the title understands.
The underlying layer consists of “open protocols,” which were “defined and maintained by academic researchers and international-standards bodies, owned by no one.” Websites and emails still operate on these protocols; they are a commons. The World Wide Web, on which you are probably reading these words, is a platform so ubiquitous it has become invisible, synonymous with The Internet writ large. There is no CEO of email. But above this layer is “a second layer of web-based services — Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter — that largely came to power in the following decade.” Today, instead of a central public sphere, the internet is dominated by competing feudal states.
Discussing “getting to done”, Leah Cunningham defines outputs as “the things we build” and outcomes as “the difference that our things make” and mostly I find myself wondering how that fits into my favorite Oxford English Dictionary definition of “slack” as being “the length of time in critical path analysis by which a particular event can be delayed without delaying the completion of the overall objective” and how by this definition in my life as a whole I am a slacker who has yet even to determine the overall objective.
Daniel Fienberg looks askance at all the women in refrigerators this fall television season, whether missing mom, lost Lenore, or general disposable woman: “[O]f the 15 new broadcast shows that premiered since the Emmys, five gain heat from the funeral pyre for a dead female character never actually introduced as ‘living’ within the show”.
Despite having just rolled my eyes at The Cluetrain Manifesto (which even I’d signed back when I’d been describing myself as a “guerilla techno-fetishist”), one of their 95 thesis still rings true: “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.” They remain the heart of the web, although not necessarily the heart of the current social web.
Currently reading: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine; and The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett. Both books are borrowed from the Multnomah County Library through OverDrive. (Somehow, I’ve read 52 books so far this year.) I’m still keeping the Kindle off of wifi in order to hang onto books past their scheduled return, so my highlights over on Goodreads remain somewhat out of date.
David Byrne (not that one) writing for Reasons to Be Cheerful explores different strategies for reducing urban car use: banning cars from city centers; partial and incremental bans; and congestion pricing. Where such things are working, says Byrne, there is “less pollution, less congestion, less danger and less heat”.
Because the truth is that phrenology has never really been discredited. Granted people don’t typically go around measuring the bumps on people’s skulls any more, although who knows how the Quillette lads are currently planning to find genetically optimal brides. But when phrenology was first debunked, its foundational assumptions did not simply go away. Rather, they were dispersed across other disciplines. Actual bumpology might have been a scientific non-starter, but phrenology was nevertheless deeply influential on the development of modern anthropology, criminology, and evolutionary biology — as well as eugenics. The phrenological account of the mind continued to be influential, throughout the Victorian era, in popular psychiatry. It is in these assumptions that the contemporary heritage of phrenology consists.
But the praise is not without harm. The idea that these qualities point to something deeper, something mystic, is far from new: It often takes on the form of the “disability superpower,” a classic cliché of “blind seers” and the like that goes back to Greek mythology and beyond. The most spectacularly silly recent example that comes to mind is in The Predator, the 2018 take on the dreadlocked aliens in which an autistic kid is being hunted by the predators because Asperger’s is “the next step in human evolution.” You don’t have to look far for more instances—they’re everywhere.
‘There a huge amount of whether you want to describe it as hostility, unconscious bias or racism. Not just in the countryside, but in the environmental field. There’s a very condescending and controlling attitude that this is a white space,’ says Collier. ‘They might be gracious enough to share it with us but they’re the gatekeeper. It’s very difficult to operate as a black-led organisation because you’re always met in a very infantilised way, that you’re a child to their adult. People won’t always acknowledge you or see you as an equal operating as a skilled professional in the field.’
Zombieland: Double Tap drops this weekend, and I honestly and sincerely hope it apes the terrific original and not Amazon’s objectively terrible television pilot from six years ago. At the time, I’d described it as “akin to watching the cast of Seinfeld trying to navigate the zombie apocalypse”, in that nearly all of the humor came nihilistically and needlessly at the expense of other survivors. Truly an ugly and artless piece of work, Rhett Reese whined afterwards that we’d “successfully hated it out of existence”. I’d argue instead that the writers somehow managed to do that themselves by producing something that simply wasn’t Zombieland. Something that in many ways appeared to hate Zombieland. (This is all the more peculiar given that apparently they’d originally conceived the idea as a TV series, then instead made a movie, and then tried to go back to make a TV series after all. Was the original series pitch as horrendous as the post-movie pilot they’d eventually go on to produce?) What I’ll need is at least one review which compares and contrasts Double Tap to the pilot. If it carries the spirit of the former, I’m in; if of the latter, it will be my Zombieland kill of the week.
Om Malik wants you to know that the life of a global jetsetter actually is some sort of technology dystopia, but the thing I want to take issue with is the idea that all humans “desire to … get ahead”. I’m not sure most humans have any real conception, let alone goal, of getting ahead. I think most humans just would like, somehow, to manage to be self-sufficient. Arguably, thinking that, well, hey, doesn’t everyone want to get ahead is part of the very mindset that got us all into this mess to begin with.
While I am not going to write about Joker again, since I’m still spotting people on Twitter accepting at face value Todd Phillips’ problematic premise regarding mental illness and violence, I am going to pass along this National Health Law Program piece about how “the vast majority of individuals with mental health diagnoses are not violent, and mental health diagnoses are not useful predictors of future violence”. Anything and everything which “exploits deeply-rooted but erroneous stereotypes and fears of people with mental health conditions” deserves only public ridicule.
“When we think of information technology we forget about postal systems, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and television,” writes Edgerton. “When we celebrate on-line shopping, the mail order catalogue goes missing.” To read, for instance, that the film The Net boldly anticipated online pizza delivery decades ahead of its arrival7 ignores the question of how much of an advance it is: Using an electronic communication medium to order a real-time, customizable pizza has been going on since the 1960s. And when I took a subway to a café to write this article and electronically transmit it to a distant editor, I was doing something I could have done in New York City in the 1920s, using that same subway, the Roosevelt Brothers coffee shop, and the telegram, albeit less efficiently. (Whether all that efficiency has helped me personally, or just made me work more for declining wages, is an open question). We expect more change than actually happens in the future because we imagine our lives have changed more than they actually have.
So where does that leave us? I am struck by a comment Jon Udell once made – context is a service that we provide to others. Perhaps that is the form our libraries take on the web. Not of 10th century manuscripts but of contexts of thought. So a blog I consistently read is from an individual’s unique context – how she is, what she is thinking, what she is reading, and who she is interacting with. That context then sits aside other contexts. Soon enough I have amassed a library of context. And when I blog, the many contexts of others I have been reflecting on shows through in the context I share.
I find Mark Bessoudo’s argument that “a plant-based diet is anti-human: it is a denial of the fact that we are creatures embedded within a complex (and messy) social and environmental ecosystem” pretty weird, in that there are all sorts of ways in which humans are creatures embedded in a wider ecological and evolutionary system that we nonetheless eschew or resist as a “higher” animals. Which isn’t to say that I’ve an opinion one way or the other on whether or not a plant-based diet somehow is “higher” (and, full disclosure, I very much myself am an omnivore). It’s only to say that unlike many or most other animals, we are a creature capable of choice. Exercising that choice, then, in any regard or capacity, is very much, although this term is as dumb as the other, pro-human.
Currently reading: The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner (yes, still; it’s taking me awhile); and A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Both books are borrowed from the Multnomah County Library through OverDrive. As always, you can browse my highlights over on Goodreads, although that hasn’t been updated in awhile because I’ve been keeping the Kindle off wifi in order to hang onto books past their return date.
Public safety protects the public—a collectivity worth shielding. It is a shared effort that begets a shared benefit. Some technological innovations, such as automobiles with lane-departure warnings or automatic emergency braking, help owners of the equipment along with those who surround them. But tech in the sense of Silicon Valley Big Tech has subtly rewritten our conception of the public. The industry has undoubtedly improved people’s individual, private lives—that’s the business model. But it has not necessarily benefited their communal ones. The vision of the future that firms such as Uber, Amazon, and Facebook have grown rich selling is a decidedly individualist one: Get a ride just for you, wherever you are, via Uber. Receive almost any product tomorrow, without leaving home, from Amazon. Hear from only the people and groups you choose on Facebook. Technology products can improve health and safety, but largely at the personal level: carrying a cellphone for emergencies, or wearing a fitness tracker to motivate regular exercise. Solving one’s own problems can de-escalate interest in solving communal ones. This libertarian individualism also grips the big-tech companies themselves, which pursue their private aspirations no matter the public cost.
Jeremy Gordon becomes just the latest critic whose list of Joker controversies—“whether the film will serve as an incel rallying cry, require in-theater security, run the table at the Oscars, set up a future confrontation with Robert Pattinson, merit justified comparisons to Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy, enhance or destroy Joaquin Phoenix’s reputation as a serious actor”—completely fails to mention the only issue anyone whose opinion matters to me (including myself) actually cared about: its misuse of mental illness as an excuse and explanation for mass violence. That so few people find that aspect problematic literally is the problematic.
My tired and activity-addled brain just can’t handle longform right now, so I admit that so far I’ve only skimmed this John Seabrook piece for The New Yorker (via Mark Isero) about a machine learning to write, specifically to read the passages that said machine wrote after analyzing the magazine’s archives.
Dave Winer once got tone-deafness in the political context completely wrong, and I thought about this today because someone at Twitter was complaining about governments in the Bay Area being unable to provide basic services, and we’ve already established that the tech industry’s newfound awareness of problems in the Bay Area hasn’t really come with the self-awareness of its own culpability. Bay Area tech folks complaining about the Bay Area “clusterfuck” that their own industry—their own company, even—caused and only wondering if maybe what’s needed is a “new political party”? This is what we mean by tone-deaf.
My primary care physician replied to my having looped her in on my decision to put on indefinite hold my lymph biopsy by asking if I thought I’d be able to think of January. All I could do was explain that right now I can’t think really or plan past the next day, and attached this photo as an illustration of how October is going for me so far.
The event recognizes that to meet the challenges of the future (climate change, widening inequality, an atrophied public realm), architecture can no longer serve the traditional development apparatus that, in many cases, has been complicit in these fissures. In its search for a new social contract, it’s investigating other creative mediums, design traditions, narratives, and communities. In Chicago, these are found in unexpected places with unexpected pairings.
Brian Merchant is all kinds of right when he calls “on background” journalism a scourge, identifying it as “a toxic arrangement” which “shields” the company or government in question from accountability. I appreciate the cited instances in which The Verge’s Nilay Pate refused to use a statement from YouTube because they refused to be on the record and Gizmodo’s Tom McKay ignored YouTube’s attempt to preemptively label a statement “on background” without McKay having agreed to it. At least once when I was writing Portland Communique, I had someone retroactively try to declare a conversation to be off the record. They were unsuccessful. Being off the record or on background isn’t something a source can just declare by fiat at any time. Certainly more reporters need to learn to forego publishing comments, especially from company or government sources under scrutiny or embroiled in controversy, if those officials won’t speak on the record. It’s one thing to allow sources who are outing misbehavior or malfeasance to be protected. It’s something else to allow yourself as a reporter to be used to promulgate unaccountable spin.
Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. (And while some inventions may indeed be the result of mishaps, the decision of a company to patent, produce, and market those inventions is not.) Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered.
Why is Melissa Lemieux of Newsweek referring to three plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Portland as “counterfascist”, let alone as “self-described counterfascist” in the article’s meta tags? Just as a counterprotest doesn’t mean “against protest”, but “a protest opposing another protest”, counterfascist would mean “a fascist opposing another fascist”. The word here is antifascist, and it’s neither dirty nor a slur. It’s a perfectly good word describing a perfectly good thing to be: against fascism, and neither Lemieux nor the protesters should avoid using it.
There still is a part of me that believes that what Whiterose showed to Angela was proof that while their world is real to them, it’s only a fiction to us (something Elliot instinctively understands, hence us being his “friend”), and fictions can be rewritten to be better—something which would appeal to Angela given her mother’s death at the hands of Evil Corp. It’s going to be particularly disjointed for a show to spend so much time playing with the narrative nature of reality (Elliot talking to us, the severe framing of shots, the sit-com dream, an entire sequence shot from above an office set with the ceilings removed) only to not have it mean something to the narrative itself. I’ve suggested before, in a post no longer online, that perhaps it’s simply meant to be a kind of Brechtian alienation, and I’m still willing to accept that, but if Mr. Robot’s intention had been to admit overtly its fictionality, I do wonder whether they’d stick to that plan given the end of the second season of The OA, although that would be a pretty severe thing to have to change. It’s also possible, given the fiction of my first forty-six years of life, that I’m simply as drawn to the idea of being able to force a rewrite as was Angela herself.
It was just the other day that Hanlon’s razor—”Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”—came up, so my brain was primed to notice (in Daniel Harvey’s must-read email on racist algorithms) a reference to Grey’s law—”Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”—which really is a pretty core concept to grasp in our era of the non-apology apology.
The psychodiagnostic evaluation paperwork which three years ago established me as autistic was given to me in mid-November, but was dated just one day before my forty-seventh birthday. It’s taken me nearly three years of both acceptance and struggle to find that I am a heretic: were I able to wave a magic wand over the past fifty years and erase my undiagnosed autism, I would do it. Arguably, many other things would be erased along with it, including Portland Communique, Can’t Stop the Serenity, and perhaps even The Belmont Goats (at least as we know it). Then again, each and every one of these things left me with nothing. I’m a middle-aged man who not only is not successful, but in fact is—by any measure relevant to someone about to turn fifty—a failure. Were I to erase the autism I didn’t know I had from my life story, who would I be? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be this.
Many early social-media entrepreneurs went to college to study computer science or business, receiving a respect for free-speech principles via cultural osmosis. Others didn’t finish college at all. One of the few who has read widely in the humanities is Chris Hughes, who was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard before becoming one of Facebook’s first employees. “There was a strong sense back then—certainly you heard it from Mark and the people around him—that wiring the world was good in and of itself,” Hughes said recently. “There was a widespread belief in the inevitable forward march of history. I don’t know that that came from books, or from anywhere in particular—I think it was just understood.” Most people in Silicon Valley wanted to “change the world.” They didn’t bother specifying that they wanted to change it for the better—that part was implied, and, besides, it was supposed to happen more or less automatically. “I remember a ton of conversations in which the introduction of our tools was compared to the advent of the hammer, or the light bulb,” Hughes went on. “We could have compared it to a weapon, too, I suppose, but nobody did.”
In the world according to Dershowitz, he is a victim. But how can he be a victim when he has the power and the money and the platform. Media outlets cover his every tweet. He has a book which will be out on November 19, proclaiming his innocence and blaming instead the #MeToo movement for his trials. And I am covering this story now because a powerful man called me about his powerful friend. How many stories are made like this? A cycle of media and power, we listen because he yells. He yells because we listen. And whoever gets to shout the loudest is the winner.
Serena Chen is worried about becoming a writer in an age of content and capital that “compels people to obsess over volume and consistency and audience retention”. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in a sense, is worried about not becoming a writer due to a “sense of not-quite measuring up to some standard that I’m not even conscious of having set”. Back when I was really writing, during the three years of Portland Communique, I never considered myself a writer, because, I guess, I wasn’t making a living at it, and couldn’t (and still can’t) write for other people or under other people’s direction. What is a writer? Whose definition counts? Who sets the terms?
When do we browse, when we do surf, when do we curate? We will browse bookstores and libraries. We might even browse grocery stores, although typically we’ve curated at least a mental list beforehand. (Then again, we’ll do that for bookstores and libraries, too.) Do people surf the web anymore, or has social media–itself a list of sources or people we’ve curated for ourselves–done away with that? Back in blogging’s heyday when we fired up our RSS readers, what was that? Curation, to be sure, but often it turned out to be our curated lists of other people’s curated browsing. What is it we do here, these days, anyway?
Writing recently in The Guardian, Ellen E Jones stated that the award-winning television series Fleabag (BBC) was ‘a work of undeniable genius. But it is for posh girls.’ The series’ creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, replied that ‘to criticise a story on the basis of where the author had come from, or how privileged the author is, undermines the story. It’s not like my privilege created Fleabag.’ This exchange was the latest debate to illuminate issues of class inequality on and in British television.
Sometimes I can’t brain sufficiently for any of the shows I want to watch, so I try to find something new that I don’t have to engage with too much. Tonight I tried out Another Life from Netflix, and maybe someone can let me know if it gets any less tiresome after the first episode? It’s a bit cheap and a bit nonsensical in terms of character behavior. The alien ship at the beginning is a great design concept I’ve never seen before, so naturally they then almost immediately do away with it. Superman from Supergirl makes for a great asshole, though. I will say that the entire Eine kleine Nachtmusik thing amuses me to no end, because once upon a time when I was maybe twelve and in Lyon, a French kid and I had an entire “conversation” about our respective digital watches without knowing each other’s language; his played “The Yellow Rose of Texas” while mine played, yes, Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
Every rare now and then I wonder what my late father would have said or thought about my autism diagnosis, which didn’t come until almost a decade after he was gone. I don’t think it would have been like the psychological pummeling I took overnight from the dream in which he sprung a major surprise on me, I complained that he can’t do that to me because I need advance notice in order to adjust, he angrily said I really needed help with this autism thing, and I said maybe the help I needed was for people to just listen to me when I explain how to help. But who knows. Either way, I woke this morning feeling pretty roundly defeated.
“Treat other people as you would like to be treated.” The Golden Rule is a backwards way to treat other people, and it harms us. It harmed me. I don’t want another autistic child or adult to be harmed because of this ridiculous rule on how to treat others. Treat others with compassion. Do not treat them as an extension of yourself.
Steve MacDouell, who I last linked regarding micro-neighborliness, today is defending public spaces. His observation that “unlike other spaces, public spaces are not partial to people with money to spend” makes me think about “pop-up public places” (what I termed “inviting windows theory”), while his suggestion that “when our senses are fully utilized, like they are in well-designed public spaces …, we start to find ourselves more attached to our local context” makes me think about this Nicky Davidoff piece about what smartphones might be doing to our mental maps of where we live.
I don’t hate this part of the job. In fact, I like it. I ask to call up the letter writers who hate me. I think a lot about my cheery voice, “Hello, this is Lyz Lenz calling from the Gazette” and how it must feel to have the person you hate so much that you’d write a letter, a hand-written letter, and spend money on a stamp, to mail it to a newspaper, in hopes that someone will publish it so everyone can know, how it feels to have that person call you on the phone. To say, “hi, how are you, we are gonna publish your letter!”
The removal of the bike lane seen as a real affront to the cycling community, so a group of “do it yourselfers” went out in the night to try to re-stripe the bike lane. They were apprehended by the Shomrim, the informal police force that works for the Hasidic community, who held these do it yourself bike lane painters until the NYPD arrived. Douglas describes it as a situation where a kind of DIY police force took action against DIY activists — exposing the rifts in the community and showing the limits of informal urbanism.
An entire article on the Mandela Effect yet somehow Riz Verk: doesn’t mention that in the referenced episode of The X-Files the effect included the name of the effect itself, as some characters knew it as the Mengele Effect; incompletely references the Kazaam/Shazaam issue by neglecting to mention that the latter starred Sinbad, not Shaq; and doesn’t mention at all that Mr. Robot appears to take place in the timeline where Shazaam existed.
It’s worth noting that the more the Democrats follow the path of bringing politics back to normal, the more this president and his allies follow the path of inflaming politics, which is to say the path of flat-out fascism in some cases. Some of Trump’s authoritarian followers are goading him into declaring some kind of “civil war” if the Democrats press on. It’s worth noting, too, that Trump is in kinship with what was called “brownshirts” in 20th-century parlance but more accurately called “magahats” today. The El Paso massacre clearly illustrated that violence, bloodshed and murder are political options for Americans seeing democracy as a threat to their “way of life.”
By casting genuine political movements emerging from the real, lived experiences of millions of people as mere demographic difference, Brooks again obscures power relations by making both sides in struggles for social and economic justice appear parochial and cut off from what is supposedly “real” about life. White supremacists are motivated by misguided notions of racial superiority, but so too, apparently, is anyone who opposes them. Yet the obfuscation does not happen by equivocation alone. Brooks evidently takes a swipe at the Times’ massively successful 1619 Project when he criticizes progressives, who believe “that the founding [of the U.S.] was 1619, not 1776,” and “were willing to step on procedural liberalism in order to get radical change.” What does coalition look like between people of color and anti-racist whites? It looks like current movements to take down Confederate monuments, end mass incarceration, and raise the federal minimum wage. These are divisive issues, though, and so appear as “warfare” against the defenseless beating heart of authentic society: “procedural liberalism.”
On the matter of references, my “highlights” posts now include a “via” in the citation if I found the link in question through a third-party rather than, say, a source’s own website or newsletter or social feed; the places where I find some of these links might be of as much interest as the links themselves, and also fair is fair.
Fulton Mall’s success offers clues as to why only two dozen of 200 pedestrian malls remain from the boom a half century ago. The future of the pedestrian mall is not in trying to save downtown merchants by bringing new shoppers in, but in improving the experience for the shoppers who are already there. To start with, this means not disdaining the people spending money, especially when downtown stores historically served a broad racial and economic spectrum.
It’s very confusing that this Journal of Communication study (via Tim Chambers) on the effect of Twitter’s expansion from 140 characters to 280 claims both that the change “increased the prevalence of less uncivil, more formal and more constructive messages” and “decrease[d] … the empathy and respectfulness of messages”. How do conversations simultaneously become both more civil and yet less respectful?
It’s interesting that a study four years ago which found that most healthcare professionals “don’t have the training needed to care for adults with autism” was a survey of Kaiser Permanente “doctors, nurses and social workers”, given that my current primary care physician at Kaiser today in 2019 has been very responsive and without prompting used the term “neurodiverse” in my first office visit. That said, yes, there still are some Kaiser personnel who are not up to speed.
I feel like this advice from Derek Sivers makes sense in conversation but not, say, when writing, which makes it all the weirder that he specifically cites being annoyed when books do it. We reference sources because Sivers’ suggestion that “if I hear an idea, have considered it, and integrated it into my beliefs, it’s mine” might be true to a degree but not to the degree that you can give the impression that it just sort of popped into your own head one day. It’s one thing that we naturally absorb ideas and incorporate them into how we view the world around us without realizing. It’s entirely another thing to be consciously aware of one’s sources and just sort of decide they don’t matter unless someone asks.
Let’s stand back and look at what’s going on. The problem is the absence of an infrastructure that gives bikers, pedestrians, and even delivery trucks what they need so they don’t go to war against each other for the rat-infested crumbs of asphalt the city has them fighting over. Cyclists need protected lanes and prioritized lights all over the city. Give that to them and they won’t swarm the sidewalks, they won’t drive the wrong way all the time, and they won’t go through intersections when they shouldn’t. Give pedestrians the wide and safe sidewalks they need, the benches their weary legs desire, the trees that make shade in the summer, and calm streets in which the majority of space is devoted to the majority of people who are not in private cars. This has been proven to work — it’s not a risky leap, it’s been ridiculously successful in cities across the world, particularly in Europe.
“When I hear that someone over the age of 80 has taken his last breath,” writes J. E. LaCaze, “I usually respond with something along the lines of, That’s a good run.” Meanwhile, when I hear that anyone of any age beyond my own has taken their last breath, I usually respond with something along the lines of, “Oh god, oh god, we’re all going to die.”
Sometimes I accidentally stumble into topics that I don’t realize until later I’ve been revisiting over time without noticing. Today’s post about micro-neighborliness said that “just as the built physical environment can limit or inspire the ways in which we interact with other people, so, too, the built virtual environment” and it turns out, if you’ll allow the phrasing, that I’ve walked through this neighborhood before.
In the about page which has followed me around from site to site over the years, I say that because I view cynicism just as a kind of frustrated optimism, I believe the small, everyday courtesies matter. Think about things like thanking a bus driver when you disembark, or holding a door for the person coming up behind you, or even just the exchange of have-a-good-days when you grab your morning latte.
Narrative medicine might be understood then, as an acknowledgment that, as with our writing projects, a doctor’s relationship with their patient should be open to rephrasing, to a changing of the basic language used in order to describe the expressed symptoms of the body, and the priorities and preferences of the patient in terms of their treatment. Narrative medicine accepts that a patient’s efforts to get better “cannot be fragmented away from the deepest parts of their lives,” including the stories they tell “in medical interviews, late-night emergency telephone calls, or the wordless rituals of the physical exam.”
Bear in mind that Trump himself linked Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe to the “favor” Trump asked of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (i.e., to “investigate” Joe Biden and his son). Also bear in mind that the whistleblower complaint illustrates just how far the highest-profile people in Trump’s circle have been willing to go to help him whitewash the fact that Vladimir Putin sabotaged Hillary Clinton. As someone on Twitter said: “Trump, Barr, Giuliani, Hannity & others with him have been all along pushing the Russian script about election interference. They are actively conspiring to do this even after the Mueller saga [has] ended.”
Todd Phillips is out there blaming “the far left” and outrage culture for criticisms of Joker (and also being generally a smug, pretentious dick with statements like “look at this as a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film”), and this means here I go back to talking about this fucking movie.
Tyler Elliot Bettilyon gives a decent overview of Section 230 (it’s taken me days to find a way to read this since it’s behind the Medium paywall) but the only real recommendation for how to solve abuse on the web seems to be to ape laws in other countries requiring the takedown of certain kinds of offensive or problematic speech.
As I check out the premiere of Evil, I wonder if there’s ever been a television show about demonic possession that didn’t involve the Catholic Church, especially as represented by a lead character. Shouldn’t this premise be more interesting than that by now? Aren’t there more unique and compelling ways to tell these stories?
The critics of cancel culture are plainly threatened not by a new and uniquely powerful kind of public criticism but by a new set of critics: young progressives, including many minorities and women who, largely through social media, have obtained a seat at the table where matters of justice and etiquette are debated and are banging it loudly to make up for lost time. The fact that jabs against cancel culture are typically jabs leftward, even as conservatives work diligently to cancel academics, activists, and companies they disfavor in both tweets and legislation, underscores this.
This is as a huge victory for countless supporters across the league who risked suspensions and fines for fighting the ban. This serves as another reminder that consistent anti-fascist working-class solidarity rooted in our cultural spaces can have huge impacts. Supporters established cultural anti-fascist zones, and when facing pressure from both corporate overhead as well as street-thugs, they banded together across rivalries to prove the sanctity of their spaces and keep them as such. Anti-fascists and anti-racists of many varieties would do well to learn from this struggle.
Some people do not possess the particular skillset required to effectively conduct a live interview. It’s why, when I was writing Portland Communique, I didn’t do them. I know that I could not keep up with or keep track of all that’s required. Later, I realized that much of this was due to my then-undiagnosed autism and my inability to cognitively multitask exactly in the sorts of ways one must do so in order to interview someone.
And just like that, as so many have been arguing for months, official impeachment inquiries can move the poll numbers significantly, as they did during Watergate, with two polls this week already showing movement toward impeachment support. It will be interesting to see how polls change again with the release of the whistleblower complaint itsef.
Richard MacManus has some thoughts on the rise of audiobooks and podcasts and I was just going to say that while he says he doesn’t think “written books will ever be replaced by audiobooks, because some types of books are clearly more suited to printed words”, to this day I can’t comprehend the appeal of audiobooks at all, for some reason, which is not to disparage anyone for whom that appeal exists.
Trump didn’t orchestrate this all on his own. All of this shit didn’t just magically happen. America was waiting to become this. The table was already set. All Trump did was give Republicans a permission slip to fully unleash their conservative id, which was always rotten in its bones. That id is entrenched everywhere now: in business, in law enforcement, in certain newsrooms, and especially in judicial appointees who will hang around long after Trump finally chokes to death on a Whopper. It was the brainchild of a corrupt GOP operating efficiently in whatever America was before Trump proved fertile ground for that plan to come to fruition. This isn’t a fucking anomaly. It’s not a fad. It’s easy to think of Trumpism as such because the man himself is so absurd and his everyday musings and doings are so repulsive and freakish. But there’s a reason Trump now holds the GOP under his little thumb. He is an unpopular president, but among his base he is frighteningly popular, so much so that I have to sit here and genuinely worry about whether or not he’ll willingly leave office once his tenure ends, and what his people will do if he actually does so. He will have protégés. Many of them. He already does.
While exploring the history of street trees, I came upon a law passed by the United States Congress on April 6, 1870, authorizing the city of Washington, D.C., to set aside up to 50 per- cent of the width of a street for the creation of “parks for trees and walks.” At that time, the Senate debated about the proper layout of the street, whether to have “the parking on either side of the street and the roadway in the cen- ter” or to have the “parking” in the center of the street. According to the 41st Congress, the proper way to park in cities was on the side of the streets with the roadway running down the center. Of course, in 1870 the members of the Senate were discussing the parking of trees and smaller plants, not automobiles. The first parking system was an early street tree system where parking defined the planting of trees, grasses, and flowers along the side of roadways and the creation of sidewalks for pedestrians.
You’ll want to watch the video of an octopus changing colors while dreaming (via Digg), which alerted me to the upcoming “Octopus: Making Contact” episode of Nature on PBS, which presumably is not about Old Night but definitely worth having just set my DVR to record it in case I forget between now and next week.
After collaborative discussions with its fans, supporter groups, and clubs, Major League Soccer, the Independent Supporters Council, the 107 Independent Supporters Trust / Timbers Army, Emerald City Supporters, and Gorilla FC jointly announce the formation of a working group by MLS to review the League’s Fan Code of Conduct to ensure clarity and consistency in advance of the 2020 season. This working group will include representatives from the League office and clubs and work collaboratively with leaders of club supporter groups and a cross-section of diversity and inclusion experts. As part of this decision to update the Fan Code of Conduct for 2020, MLS has suspended the prohibition on the Iron Front imagery at matches for the balance of the 2019 season and MLS Cup Playoffs while the working group conducts its analysis.
You might have received email from Vailey Oehlke, director of libraries for Multnomah County Library, asking you to sign a petition from #eBooksForAll, a campaign of the American Library Association, about MacMillan’s forthcoming two-month delay on releasing ebooks to libraries, and you should do so. “Macmillan says that libraries undercut their profits by allowing readers free access to materials that they would otherwise purchase,” she writes. “This is simply not true. In fact, libraries often pay four times the amount for e-books as consumers do.”
Patrick Rhone shares someone’s Tumblr thoughts on posting, politics, and disagreement, in which a reader throws up their hands because they “regret that of late you have turned a social and cultural forum into a political one”. The thing is, the blog’s usual topics–“clothes, art, music, literature”–hardly are inherently apolitical. They might not often be partisan but they very much exist in a political context and communicate political things.
Frank Chimero’s observations on “small and vague positivity vs. big and specific negativity” (via Khaled Abou Alfa) are spot-on in a way I’m surprised I haven’t run into before, and in a way that makes you wish we’d been discussing things this way the entire time. It’s a very stark illustration of the exact ways in which the engagement metrics of mainstream social media increase both the volume and visibility of negative feedback at the expense of positive feedback.
The problem, of course, is that mainstream social media platforms are designed precisely to create very specific externally-reinforced “habit loops”, ones that arguably come with significant drawbacks. Blogging, in my experience, comes with its own habit loops but they tend to be either internally-reinforced or the external reinforcement comes over a longer term than it does on social media platforms which move too fast due to a lack of friction. It’s basically irrelevant that Cal Newport “frets” (my word) that “the IndieWeb will not succeed in replacing existing social-media platforms at their current scale” because scale, a kind of quantity, hardly is as relevant a metric as quality, including simply the quality of one’s own experience.
But we’re not going to be able to rethink those fundamental stories, interactions, platforms, or business models if the same people and perspectives are leading the conversation. We’re not going to solve the problems that rich white Californian tech bros have heaped on us all without having more different designers and technologists in the mix. Inclusive design means working with people of diverse backgrounds. Different races, genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, religious beliefs, ages, ability, neuro-divergence, class, and more. And designing experiences for them all too.
The fatigue, exhaustion, and malaise tends to hit most days between three and four in the afternoon, so of course today’s office visit to have a nurse go over post-op information for the forthcoming, unscheduled lymph node biopsy was scheduled for 3:00pm. It takes me at least ninety minutes to get from St. Johns to Clackamas on public transit and all of its sensory onslaught. Naturally, then, by the time I got to Kaiser, I was close to being prone on the floor, my resources spent. The need to focus on what the nurse was explaining to me helped a bit, if only out of the necessity, but after all of half an hour it’s back to transit for another ninety minute commute back home. Today is not an especially great day, I guess is what I’m saying.
It is within Democrats' power to hold Trump officials in contempt and detain them as they testify before Congress until the whistleblower materials they’ve subpoenaed are delivered. They can pledge to freeze the director of national intelligence and attorney general office budgets until their officials cooperate fully with House investigations. They can refer Giuliani and Trump to the Justice Department for criminal investigation and haul FBI Director Christopher Wray up to the Hill under the expectation that he’d disclose whether he’d opened such an investigation. They could subpoena Giuliani himself, and hold him in contempt if he refuses to appear or answer questions about his conversations with the Ukrainians. These and other steps might pry the materials loose, or corner Trump into pardoning Giuliani, which would itself be an impeachable offense.
Squirrels are what Keith Tarvin, a biologist at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio who led the study, calls “public information exploiters,” meaning they often take cues from other prey animals nearby. They’re not the only ones that do this. Early animal behavior studies have shown that birds, mammals, and even fish and lizards can recognize the alarm signals of other species that share similar geographic locations and predators. Within the bird family, a nuthatch may tune into the high-pitched call of a chick-a-dee, which might also be paying attention to the panicked tweet of a tufted titmice.
My .blog domain should come through this week, but I’m hitting some snags on migrating from Write.as to Micro.blog in that there is no direct route to getting the former’s export file imported into the latter and all my most-recent tests have failed. It’s bad enough that I am going to have to sit down to add categories to all my posts after getting them imported, because Micro.blog doesn’t yet import categories or tags, but if I can’t even get my Write.as posts moved over at all, what’s the point.
Completely missing from this Joe Pinsker piece (via Om Malik) on what makes people into readers is the idea of letting your kid read what they want. You know how I learned to read for my own enjoyment and so learned that reading is enjoyable? Comic books. Which is not to say that comic books are the gateway to reading for every kid, just to say that the idea of letting your kid follow their own reading lodestar is a weird idea to ignore in a piece about what makes readers, especially when the opportunity to discuss it is right there in the part about “motivation”.
Over the course of 2015, I’d finally gotten around to watching The Legend of Korra as each book began dropping on Prime Video. By early November, I’d finished Book Three, with the fourth nowhere to be found. Within two years, the first three books were dropped from Prime, the fourth never having arrived at all. Recently, I discovered all four books were available on something called NickHits, which had a 7-day trial as a Prime Video channel. Having finally gotten to finish the series, I can confirm what’s no secret to everyone who watched it when it aired: it’s one of the best shows of the 2010s, and, really, one of the few mostly perfect shows ever. If I thought I could get it done in the remaining four days of my trial, I’d just go back and do a full series rewatch, but as that would require one entire book per day, I guess that’s for some other time. For now, I guess I continue to the comics thanks to Hoopla Digital.
Despite all the harm off-street parking requirements cause, they are almost an established religion in city planning. Without a theory or data to support them, planners set parking requirements for hundreds of land uses in hundreds of cities—the ten thousand commandments of planning for parking. Planners have adopted a veneer of professional language to justify the practice, but planning for parking is learned only on the job and it is more a political activity than a professional skill.
Well, now I know that your basic influencer “rented two rooms in an old house, smoked two packs a day, and wore baggy clothes… except on Instagram, where she lived in a van, cooked her own, healthy, meals, and wore the kind of clothes that left little to imagination” and took pictures of food “made inedible with glue, wire, hair spray and other tricks to spice up its looks”. Always listen to Leslie Knope even if she’s paraphrased bastardized.
We simply don’t know if anything qualifies anymore as a “game changer.” For crying out loud, the Russians helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton! Robert Mueller spent two years investigating. He came up with 10 different ways Trump broke the law. Yet the Republican Party said all that was jim-dandy. So tell me: Why wouldn’t the president ask for foreign help a second time, and why would the second time change anything?
In response to Tobias Van Schneider’s love letter to personal websites, in which he is right that they are the “place where we can express, on our terms, who we are and what we offer” but a bit annoying in how he focuses on how it’s about presenting your work to the world, Eric L. Barnes correctly observes that “social media keeps winning because it’s easy and we are all lazy”, except that if there’s one thing I’ve learned from being diagnosed as autistic it’s that sometimes what conventional wisdom would have as laziness in fact is a kind of cognitive inertia (in the mental health realm, often the result of executive function issues), and it’s why as we try to motivate people to find their own opportunities to switch gears back to things like blogging, we need to push social media platforms to introduce friction.
David O’Hara’s thoughts on whether an artificial intelligence could have a mystical experience (be it real or imagined) is sort of the plot of Battlestar Galactica. The question of whether or not AI in fact could perceive something real through its consciousness that we cannot through ours sort of makes me wish that idea had been a part of The Thing Itself, which spent a lot of time on the question of how much of reality we might be incapable of seeing.
While I don’t entirely disagree that psychotherapy could use some disruption, any such disruption should be prompted by and focused on addressing, say, that idea that methods and approaches designed for neurotypical minds aren’t necessarily apt, appropriate, or effective for the realities of a neurodiverse population. Forgive me if I don’t much trust any such disruption instead being driven by technologists “who long ago fused their sense of self-worth to their work, and who are emotionally adrift now that the industry is under assault” feeling sad and unfulfilled about having spent their lives carelessly disrupting other sectors and segments of society.
Manton Reece is right. Matt Mullenweg wanting WordPress “to become the operating system for the open web” with “every website, whether it’s e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress” is basically the opposite of a web that “can go back to being more open”. No matter how much better a Mullenweg might be than a Dorsey or a Zuckerberg, the indieweb goal of “a diversity of approaches & implementations” is how we get to an open web that’s open in actuality and not just rhetoric.
Netflix’s upcoming Criminal had me with the premise that, in the words of Matt Zoller Seitz (via Dan Barrett), “the action is focused on a single floor of a police station, with the interrogation room as the focal point, creating an effect somewhat like the legendary Homicide: Life on the Street episode ‘Three Men and Adena’, which spent an hour on a single questioning”.
Of all academic disciplines, evolutionary psychology has the most to do with pussy. In the last half of the 20th century, biologists and psychologists working in the related fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology claimed that natural selection could explain much, perhaps most, of the complexities of human behavior, from a male preference for polygamy to why women wear high heels. In scientific articles and popular books like The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, and The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, evolutionary psychologists claimed natural selection could explain vast swathes of human behavior. Male adultery, gendered differences in achievement, and sexual violence were among the phenomena described as the product of genes shaped by our evolutionary origins. It makes sense that Epstein was enamored with this area of science, the proponents of which are overwhelmingly white men, and we mustn’t overlook those mens' complicity in the billionaire’s abhorrent world.
I’d already made plans to attend this Saturday’s sneak peek of the St. Johns Museum but I only just noticed thanks to St. Johns Boosters that there’s going to be a presentation by Dan Haneckow on The Great Light Way, the series of illuminated archways that once adorned more than several intersections along SW Third in downtown Portland and if you followed me at all during my Portland Communique days, you already know that I’m so here for it.
I struggle a lot with what it means to be a part of music fandom and stan culture more broadly during this cultural moment. Celebrities are often viewed as more than just idols—they’re valorized as both representatives and defenders of marginalized identities, and pop culture is framed as a springboard to broader social and political consciousness. But on Twitter, constant consumption—and belligerence—are often the easiest and most high-profile ways to prove your devotion.
How do we attain justice when we are deciding to throw up our hands and wait for the president to “self-impeach?” These women know that, while Pelosi’s wealth and Whiteness can act as her shield against Trump’s most egregious executive orders and policy maneuvers, they and their constituents don’t have that luxury nor do they have the time. When asked what, if anything, the Speaker was going to do about the recent allegations of rape made by author E. Jean Carroll against the president, her response was “what can Congress do?” This is not only outrageous but unacceptable.
Earlier this evening, David Gasca, product manager at Twitter, announced that next week is “hack week” at the company. “What would you build,” he asked, “to improve conversations on Twitter?” I’ve been following Gasca, and a number of other Twitter employees, ever since Arielle Pardes' epic thread from a wide-ranging conversation at Twitter last month.
Richard MacManus, of ReadWriteWeb fame, has an interesting analysis of email newsletter subscribers that gets into the question of whether or not people are willing to pony up for paid subscriptions, and if so to what are those willing customers subscribing, exactly. He talks a bit about the idea of “subscription fatigue” and as I’ve wondered before if “you could subscribe to all of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Medium for $17/month” why would you instead spend more than that to subscribe, for example, to just five SubStack newsletters? You’ve got to have a lot of casual cash sitting around to subscribe to anything more than a couple.
U.S. Forest Service fire lookout Philip Connors is right that “[e]very culture should have a couple of outsiders bringing a message from outside of the dominant culture” but I’m not sure an old white guy sitting atop a tower in a forest is really outside the dominant culture. That said, Nathan Rott’s profile of Connors (via Digg) is a nice little look at the vocation and the ways in which it’s being impacted by new technology. Once upon a time, long ago, I think after reading some Kerouac book (probably The Dharma Bums), I briefly flirted with following in his footsteps, but I don’t think I would have managed very well.
Socialists of the kind Chait and Goldberg imagine existing in the Democratic Party, which is to say Stalinists or Maoists (for God’s sake!), do not believe in the democratic process. They do not respect republican principles. They do not value representative government, majority rule, individual freedom, civil rights or all the many things Americans take for granted as natural and good. In other words, socialists of the kind Chait and Goldberg imagine existing don’t exist—not in the Democratic Party.
Why am I unsurprised that Dave Winer is defending both Shane Gillis and Richard Stallman despite the former’s racist “comedy” and the latter’s Jeffrey Epstein apologia? Winer himself has this weird history where despite how much credit he’s gotten for his work, there’s always this ugly undercurrent where he suggests that he hasn’t gotten his due, and threaded throughout is a self-righteous sense that people who criticize him are being unfair and they should just be thankful for all he’s done, or at least keep quiet when he’s being some sort of a dick out of respect for the good he’s done. He believes, in other words, that there’s some set of allowances that accrue from doing good works that are meant to give you a free pass for the bad that you do. What I don’t get is that this attitude makes sense of his defense of Stallman (although, you know, not really, because rape apologist), but it hardly applies to Gillis, who just was out there making racist remarks on podcasts.
Preparations are underway for my move from Write.as to Micro.blog. I’ve been going back and forth, mentally, for the entire time, and having finally gotten to tinker with customizations over there, it’s going to happen. It could still be a couple of weeks out, as I’ve got some work to do regarding importing my Write.as posts over there, and also because while the process finally is underway for my getting ahold of a reserved three-character .blog domain, that’s going to take a week or so to get finalized. That said, I’ll be keeping my eye on the public reader feed here, since there are some interesting people coming through Write.as.
“Limited urban street and sidewalk space play a role as well,” writes David Zipper of antipathy toward “e-scooters”, and setting aside opposition by car people I think this actually might be the primary motivator. City sidewalks are becoming increasingly crowded even as cities move too slowly to give either more room or more consideration to giving over more space to transit modes other than the automobile. Pedestrians, bicycles, skateboards, bike-rental docks, and now scooters both in use and haphazardly parked suddenly all must share what limited sidewalk space there is, while cars continue their near-monopoly on city streets. Whenever infrastructure week finally arrives, let’s expand sidewalk space before we add any more transit modes.
I won’t try to answer this in his “braintrust” thread, since I’ll respect the fact that he blocked me on Twitter, but Winer definitely should push back against a reporter rewriting his quotes. I’ve had this happen but only learned of it in the finished, published piece. I’ve no idea if it’s “standard practice” but it’s certainly more common than it ought to be. They’re literally not quotes if the reporter has rewritten them, and if you can’t trust a reporter to only quote what was actually said, what else might they have “massaged” in their reporting? I know there’s an argument that if you clear the rewrites with the source first they become quotes, but, personally, I believe that practice should be disclosed in the piece itself.
Currently reading: A Spectral Hue by Craig Laurance Gidney; and The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner, having finished How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi which was more autobiographical than expected, but it certainly works. As always, you can browse my highlights over on Goodreads.
On September 8, 2019, Austrian’s largest public art installation to date opened to the public. Titled FOR FOREST – The Unending Attraction of Nature, the artwork transforms the Wörthersee Football Stadium in Klagenfurt into a native central European forest. Designed by Swiss curator Klaus Littmann and inspired by a dystopian drawing by Austrian artist and architect Max Peintner, the installation advocates for pressing contemporary issues such as climate change and deforestation. Through the structural containment of this massive forest, it suggests that nature may someday only be found in specially designated spaces, as animals are today in zoos.
In a weird bit of coincidence, Warren Ellis republished an item in which he describes dystopia as “one of those parts of speculative fiction that function as early-warning systems for bad sociocultural weather” on the same day that Danah Boyd published her speech to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in which she urged the industry to “stop designing the technologies envisioned in dystopian novels” and “heed the warnings of artists, not race head-on into their nightmares”.
“One of the things about being an early adopter to the social web means that people noticed you, back when there were fewer people to notice,” writes Sameer Vasta. “Having a blog twenty years ago meant people read what I wrote, and wanted me to write more.” He says this in the context of “being okay with fading slowly into the blur of the background”, something with which I’ve struggled maybe more than he has. I’m not one of those who “say their lives peaked in high school, or in college” but I’m also not convinced “life gets better as the years go on”. Life just seems to be life, I don’t seem to have anything to contribute the way I once did, that admittedly bothers me, and meanwhile I swear that my body began slowly failing piece by piece about three years ago. This all, I guess, is an example of one’s mileage may vary.
There are things I’ve meant to post but I’ve been lost in the wilds of Micro.blog again, and this time my various testings and tinkerings might have led to a final decision on where this blog will end up. I’ve gotten a lot figured out over there in both custom CSS and Hugo templating, and it’s becoming more and more likely that I’ll be moving there from here on Write.as.
Let’s talk about what’s going to happen in the library. Large systems with a single copy of a popular new release are going to have some explaining to do as their holds queues, which many libraries try to keep to single digits per item, stretch into years before they’re allowed to purchase additional copies of the title. Libraries will have to choose, as the Upper Arlington Public Library has tried to do, between explaining the arcane system of per-publisher ebook purchasing to their patrons, or just quietly accepting that they can’t serve their users' needs. Some users may purchase a new release out of frustration with hold queues, but many, especially those without the means to buy their own books, will go without. Will patrons connect this inconvenience with the publisher, the author, or the library?
Patreon is overkill, and Cash App no longer works on the web, so now you can hit me up on Buy Me a Coffee. (I know most people use Ko-fi but I find the design on Buy Me a Coffee both simpler and more soothing.) Coffee is set at $5, with one-time and monthly options, and I pay all the fees. That’s an extra charge on my end, but makes it straightforward for you. Full disclosure: your coffee money might not go to coffee. Of course, you can always buy me a book instead.
So here we are… I’m receiving this award, named after Barlow less than a week after Joi resigned from an institution that nearly destroyed me after he socialized with and took money from a known pedophile. Let me be clear — this is deeply destabilizing for me. I am here today in-no-small-part because I benefited from the generosity of men who tolerated and, in effect, enabled unethical, immoral, and criminal men. And because of that privilege, I managed to keep moving forward even as the collateral damage of patriarchy stifled the voices of so many others around me. I am angry and sad, horrified and disturbed because I know all too well that this world is not meritocratic. I am also complicit in helping uphold these systems.
Apparently I was wrong in predicting that in response to Andrew Yang’s announcement of his “freedom dividend” raffle gambit during tonight’s Democratic debate, Beto O’Rourke would counter by auctioning off three Jesus Christs, six Shits, two Fucks, and for the first time one deadwoodesque Cocksucker.
Finally, I have remembered why the idea of blogchains sounded so familiar to me. Once upon a time in the mid-1990s, HotWired (and then Wired, I guess) had a feature called Brain Tennis, in which “[e]very two weeks we serve a controversial topic to two opposing experts and let them battle it out”. (There’s some crazy stuff in the archives.) Around a decade later, or a little less, I planned to resurrect steal the idea for a thing I was going to do on Portland Communique called “Blog Tennis”, in which over the course of a week or two opposing political candidates would debate through alternating blog posts. (Thanks to Toxic for reminding me of the right damned name for the original HotWired thing.) I’d thought the idea of uninterrupted answers combined with the ability for candidates to hyperlink sources and resources was a great, new idea. It never happened because I couldn’t convince the candidates (this was during the Sam Adams/Nick Fish race, I think) that it was worth the necessary commitment of time and effort.
Everyone has a bit of “Tumblr teen” in them, self-reflexively announcing their social positions as a buffer against the now-cartoonish refrain to “check your privilege.” But while plenty of white people will flag their own whiteness, eagerly so in some cases, these admissions are curiously conditional. When the news broke that several high-profile parents were implicated in a conspiracy to illegally finesse their children into prestigious universities, publications (from Refinery29 to the Atlantic to Vox to, somewhat ironically, U.S. News and World Report) took care to name the collaboration of class and race that enabled such entitlement. On these particular bad actors, my Twitter feed was mostly on the same page. However, once people began reporting their own stories of educational fortitude, the material value of whiteness was suddenly less germane to the conversation. Unlike the children of celebrities, the people I followed implied, they had worked hard and earned it wholesale. It seemed the whiteness of celebrity children worked according to the rule, while everyone else’s whiteness was the exception. The gap between knowing and naming, let alone reckoning, remains vast.
For the time being, I’ve got a search solution on Glitch thanks to CJ Eller. It works sufficiently well for me to mention it, and it’s now linked on the Archives page. Eventually, once I’m moved over to my custom domain, it will be linked in the navigation bar. Now it’s super-easy for you to find all those Joker posts you’ve been meaning to read, or re-read.
But a copyright loophole means that up to 75 percent of books published between 1923 to 1964 are secretly in the public domain, meaning they are free to read and copy. The problem is determining which books these are, due to archaic copyright registration systems and convoluted and shifting copyright law.
For the life of me I can’t remember where I came across it, and apparently I forgot to make a note of it, but there’s all sorts of great stuff in this epic post about the indieweb and fandom spaces. You don’t have to care about fandom, specifically, to find this worth your time if you care at all about the past, present, and future states of online community.
Several times a week, I find myself asking what we’re up to in “First they came…”. The most-recent population targeted had been the mentally ill, threatened with institutionalization and electronic surveillance, but now the Trump administration is planning to round-up the homeless in California and relocate them to, well, a concentration camp.
Not sure whether I saw it in the CityLab, Digg, or the Guardian's Cityscape newsletters, but this week I learned about an eye-opening idea from a New York Times article about jaywalking and autonomous vehicles: “One solution, suggested by an automotive industry official, is gates at each corner, which would periodically open to allow pedestrians to cross.” If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about how people looking at “disruption” view the world around them, I don’t know what would.
On this day at 12:34:34 in the afternoon my blogging moved to what would come to be named for the words of 6-year-old Gabrielle Thornton, who asked her glued-to-the-television parents, “What planet is that?”. Days later, I made a terrible gallows-humor Match Game joke. By the end of the month, I had a request for “when the killing in my name begins”, which in large part is responsible for why to this day I maintain a cruft- and advertising-free copy of Mark Twain’s The War Prayer which still gets a lot of traffic from educators.
In school I probably resisted properly learning any formal constraints for various kinds of writing, but over the decades since I’ve more or less mastered one form: the letter to the editor. In this case The Oregonian version of what I’d posted here about the Oregon AFL-CIO’s push to limit use of self-checkout at grocery stores. One other thing I’ve mastered: not reading the comments on it.
In time, however, the site began to espouse the worst of the internet—Urban Dictionary became something much uglier than perhaps what Peckham set out to create. It transformed into a harbor for hate speech. By allowing anyone to post definitions (users can up or down vote their favorite ones) Peckham opened the door for the most insidious among us. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism currently serve as the basis for some of the most popular definitions on the site. One of the site’s definitions for sexism details it as “a way of life like welfare for black people. now stop bitching and get back to the kitchen.” Under Lady Gaga, one top entry describes her as the embodiment of “a very bad joke played on all of us by Tim Burton.” For LeBron James, it reads: “To bail out on your team when times get tough.”
Over in Micro.blog’s “discover” feed (parenthetically, I’m again wondering if I should be over there instead of here on Write.as) I found these pretty great thoughts by Ton Zijlstra on technology, scaling, and community, in which he laments technologists “talking about how to create a community for their tech to help it scale”.
Reading this CityLab interview with Aaron Greiner of CultureHouse about “physically occupying vacant storefronts and turning them into pop-up public places” with the direct assistance of property owners (or, in the words of CultureHouse itself, “facilitating the creation of public social infrastructure through the transformation of unused spaces into vibrant places to work, play, and foster connections”), I kept thinking of the debunked “broken windows theory” and how this is sort of its more effective inverse: a sort of “inviting windows theory”.
One of the issues Brendan Schlagel is encountering in his “networked communities” blogchain with Tom Critchlow is that approaches to "positive gatekeeping” likely won’t be the same across different types of communities. The sorts of communities that evolve, or are fostered, in and around blogs are not the same sorts of communities that arise in and around social media platforms.
That there are critics at the Toronto International Film Festival calling Joker an "exploration” of or a "commentary” on mental illness scares the shit out of me. Let me remind you that people struggling with mental illness are far more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violent crime, and these critics calling a movie linking mental illness to violent crime an “exploration” of or “commentary” on mental illness do so at a moment when the Trump administration is considering putting the mentally ill under electronic surveillance. Thanks at least to Alissa Wilkinson for saying that “[t]he notion that Arthur’s villainy essentially stems from his untended mental illness is troubling”.
Put into action, the “third culture” is a safe haven for breathless bullshit, a place where the ultra-rich might fantasize about, say, administering a eugenics scheme in New Mexico with the semen of a convicted serial sexual predator. Whether or not “third culture” progenitors like the Media Lab actually go forward with such an insane idea is beside the point, as they’re just happy to help cash a check. What the Lab actually produces is something much dumber and more banal. It looks something like a conference about food sponsored by the pork lobby, during which soup company executives tell a moderator from the Times (where Joichi Ito, until this week, held a corporate directorship) that it’s an awful shame how many people in the world go hungry.
Today was my surgical consult in advance of needing to biopsy a lymph node because the CT scan earlier this year for my bladder stones and diverticulum showed enlarged lymph nodes. Mostly, either it will be lymph nodes in the vicinity of my bladder having been activated because of the inflammation, et cetera, in and around the diverticulum, or it will cancer. It feels like my doctors lean toward the former, but, obviously, we don’t go by leanings we go by evidence.
Safe to say that I much prefer Barcelona’s definition of a “superblock”, where you essentially curtail vehicular traffic on an existing grid of streets, to Portland’s definition, where you merely have to provide a certain amount of pedestrian access through any new massive, multi-block development project. It looks like our neighbor to the north is considering giving Barcelona’s version a try.
Colin Walker has thought quite a bit more than me about being middle-aged. Mostly, I think I just feel like it means I’m already dying, and since the first half of my life amounted to nothing the second half is sure to as well, although I imagine that perspective could be due to the midlife autism diagnosis followed by things like bladder surgery and tomorrow’s appointment to decide which lymph nodes on which we’re going to be doing biopsies.
As near as I can tell, this position by Dave Winer mostly just exposes his complete lack of understanding of abuse on social media platforms. Users block other users in large part as a barrier to abuse. This is an over-simplification, but blocking abusive users, trolls, or bots not only protects the blocking user but often serves also to protect other users because it keeps the abusers, trolls, and bots from being able to reply to the original user’s tweets, and therefore keeps them out of the discussion. I can’t think of any other situation where someone would be “[b]locking people from reading things posted publicly”, so it seems like Winer really has just not kept up with how abuse works in the age of social media.
Meanwhile, here in Portland, the front office of the Portland Timbers looked at Abram Goldman-Armstrong, the antifascist owner of a local pub which was in the not-to-distant past targeted for violence by Proud Boys and their fellow fascist travelers, and decided to ban him for flying the Iron Front at Providence Park. As pointed out by Zakir Khan, “[T]he Timbers were built by fans like Abe from Cider Riot allowing them to use their likeness in the Timbers original marketing campaign in 2011.” Not unrelated: if you still need proof that Andy Ngo is a fascist propagandist who stans nazis (up to and including doing nothing while the above-mentioned violent assault was planned right in front of him, other than smile about it), witness him referring to the antifascist movement from actual Nazi-era Germany from which the Iron Front comes merely as a “German paramilitary group”.
Here in the U.S., we have children in concentration camps, pregnant migrants being drugged to stop their contractions and sent back, federal agencies lying to protect a president’s weather forecasts, and the military going out of its way to stay at the president’s foreign hotels when refueling, but Alex Billington of First Showing wants you to know that the real "draconian form of authoritarian control” is the "extremely dangerous and harmful” embargoes under which he and other international film critics must suffer.
Paul Bausch likes Micro.blog’s "discover" feed for its lack of engagement numbers or solicitations. Possibly worth noting as well is that it’s human-curated, not algorithmic. Write.as' public feed is neither algorithmic nor human-curated, an aspect I continue to think will at some point bite the platform in the ass. As to Bausch’s general point, not that this will be a surprise, this is the way things need to go now. While I do very much want both incoming and outgoing webmention support here, I’ve no real interest in any other forms of engagement, although I do still think trying to truly standardize highlights/annotations as an alternative to likes/favorites is worth pursuing. Combine all of this with Pouya Tafti’s thoughts on the return of “polling” instead of “push”, and there’s clearly a chance to put more focus on interaction over indication, expression over excitation.
Lawrence Lessig is a very good writer if we are discussing the ability to write long, discursive apologias for Joi Ito taking Jeffrey Epstein’s money, wrapped in a superficial gauze of responsibility-taking that we clearly cannot take seriously. The piece is terrible, terrible, and not just on the matter at hand but also in its weirdly-irrelevant asides like when he suddenly appears to suggest that “erasing the names of 18th-century racists” is futile because there weren’t “any leaders in America in the 18th century who were not racists in our 21st-century sense”. Lessig makes some after-the-fact noises about the anonymity Ito granted Epstein perhaps being the only way one could take money from a pedophile, since at least the donation couldn’t be used to launder Epstein’s reputation, but at most only with regret partially admits to the complications that could arise–and even then the complications with which he’s concerned appear to be the threat to MIT’s reputation. There appears to be no moral calculus involved here at all, despite glancing off the issue of morality in his four-part description of different types of potential donors. If you signed that statement of support for Joi Ito, you are suspect. Your judgment is suspect. That the donations were meant to be anonymous does nothing to launder the immorality of taking them. No amount of hand-waving about how hard it is to fund universities can erase that.
To Matthew Stewart, a researcher and designer at the University of Westminster, co-living led by developers cannot be a radical alternative because it lacks the social intent of collective living. He points to bolder suggestions proposed by modernists almost a century ago to address the interwar housing shortage, such as the work of Karel Teige, a Czech theorist whose 1932 book The Minimum Dwelling proposed restructuring living space around community and collective domestic labour.
Not for nothing, but if after Joi Ito’s confession to an “error in judgment” you went ahead and signed this statement of support (for fuck’s sake, was that the Peter Gabriel?), you’ve got some questionable judgment of your own. It doesn’t matter if after the New Yorker revelation that Ito is a lying sack of shit you suddenly wanted your signature struck-through (although partial credit for being willing not to have your signature simply memory-hole’d). Your judgment failed either in supporting him to begin with even after it was clear he’d knowingly maintained ties to Epstein at all, or in not being smart enough to hold your tongue until you knew whether or not another, worse, shoe was going to drop. Being on that list should be considered a red flag, regardless of what you said or did once Ronan Farrow reported just how bad it was.
The response to the death of Alec Holowka throws this double standard into razor-sharp relief. The harassment of Quinn and others has nothing to do with concern for Holowka and his family and everything to do with making examples of women and queer people who dare to speak out. The message is clear: Men’s mental health matters more than women’s. Men’s suffering and self-loathing is treated as a public concern, because men are permitted to be real people whose inner lives and dreams matter. Who cares, then, how many women they destroy along the way?
“There must be a underlying reason,” responds Colin Walker, “why someone writes a blog rather than senselessly throwing the literary equivalent of faeces at social networks.” Length, context, and an internal compulsion that would bring more psychic discomfort to ignore than it would bring to pursue. The fact is, whether perceived as an over-simplification or not, I’ve no grand design here, no grand purpose. I write any given blog post so that my brain doesn’t hurt because I didn’t write it, and often even then my brain hurts anyway. Simon Woods is right, in the big picture, that if you want not just context but clarity, you probably should blog, but being “part of a possibly public discussion” would be, in the thing that Walker and I agree on, just a bonus. Aaron Davis might want to tie it to Clive Thompson’s notion of blogging as thinking out loud and “accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge”, but that just returns us to my not wasting cognitive or emotional energy on impact. My blogging is purely personal, if publicly performative.
Jill Filipovic wants to talk about Marianne Williamson and, no, I hear you, I don’t want to talk about Marianne Williamson anymore, either, but she does it mostly to point out, quite correctly, that there’s not much daylight between Williamson’s “woo-woo” and much of the public spiritualism our actual mainstream religions are allowed, if not actually expected, if not actually invited, to inject into our politics.
The work intimacy coordinators do is complex and multifaceted. It requires a few skill sets that don’t necessarily always coincide in a single professional—including choreography, contract negotiation, and emotional intelligence. Ita O’Brien, who has worked as an actor, dancer, movement director, massage therapist, and, now, an intimacy coordinator on productions including Netflix’s Sex Education, began advocating for the merits of this job a few years ago. “I was saying then, ‘My hope and my intention is that, say, in five years’ time, that productions will not dream of doing sex scenes without an intimacy coordinator,” she told V.F. during a recent phone interview. “It’s so amazing to see how quickly the industry has shifted and changed.” She and Rodis have never met in person, but Skype frequently, she said, as they work to help productions across the globe embrace intimacy coordinators.
Can a movie about a sad, pathetic, mediocre white man who turns to cruelty and violence because he is mentally ill really be “not political”? Finding excuses for the cruelty and violence of sad, pathetic, mediocre white men sure seems like it has political implications, notwithstanding director Todd Phillips' ridiculous belief that movies only “mirror” society and never mold it. (Even that idea in and of itself is a political one, and only someone embedded in American society’s idea of whiteness as a non-political default really could get away with claiming otherwise.) I’m also not clear on what Phillips' means when he says that the movie is “about the lack of empathy that we are seeing in the world” or that Arthur Fleck just “made a few bad decisions along the way”. Is he really saying that a lack of empathy for Fleck is responsible for what he becomes? That the cruelty and violence of so many fragile white men is society’s fault for not having enough empathy for their sense of entitlement being frustrated by a world that’s growing up?
I’m going to be stuck and irritated for awhile on the fact that Om Malik references Yancey Strickler’s “dark forest of the internet” theory, because as I’ve noted before Strickler himself gets the “dark forest” metaphor, drawn from the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Liu Cixin, completely wrong, so when Malik says it’s about how “we have started to retreat to smaller, private places” he is only echoing Strickler’s broken metaphor.
Tim Chambers links an article by Marcus Wermuth about “active listening” and while I can’t judge the worth of the advice it’s hard for me not to note how many of the tasks required for active listening often are unsurmountable hurdles for my actually-autistic, monotropic inability to multitask during socially-performative, real-time, face-to-face conversations. “[F]ully concentrating on the other person, trying to understand not just the words being said but also the emotion behind them, responding appropriately and then also remembering what was said”, all at the same time? It’s almost never going to happen, and, not for nothing, this precisely is one reason, but only one of several reasons, why traditional psychotherapeutic methods can be so problematic for me.
Andy Sylvester, building a daily writing habit (via Colin Devroe), mentions having expressly to make blogging a priority. No issues with that here, as evidenced by my desire for Write.as to have a way for me to not send my posts to the public feed, so that I don’t feel like I’m spamming it all the time.
Will Oremus for some reason agrees with Twitter itself that one of Twitter’s “problems” was that the chronological timeline made users not follow many people, and that following as many people as possible apparently is an important metric. It might be an important one for Twitter, but should it be considered an important one for users themselves? I don’t see how. Really, this post is just one long apologia for the algorithmic timeline.
Today I blogged in truly old-school fashion: I sent The Oregonian a letter to the editor, slightly redrafted from my post about the Oregon AFL-CIO ballot push to limit use of self-checkout, which ignores the needs of people with invisible disabilities even while using the visibly-disabled as a shield.
But the issue wasn’t so much that Ngo had finally been “exposed” as a right-wing provocateur as opposed to a journalist. It was that he’d managed to successfully convince so many ostensibly reasonable people otherwise, despite significant evidence to the contrary — and, in so doing, did some serious damage in the process.
“A message doesn’t have to be long but it should have meaning and be passed on with passion,” writes Colin Walker (via Manton Reece), pondering bloggers as apostles, evangelists, or missionaries. “Too many words are wasted on the internet, shared just for the sake of sharing when they should be ‘sent out’ with a purpose.”
I’ve talked about how I just can’t worry about whether or not I am being read (not that I can do this at all perfectly or consistently), but CJ Eller makes the point that what we can worry about, and maybe what we should worry about, is whether or not, and how, we are reading others. Tom Critchlow, meanwhile, suggests that blogging can be a digital form of “sidewalk life” (riffing off Nadia Eghbal), as opposed to the busy highways of social media platforms. I think the point, really, is that the developing tools of an indieweb ecosystem should provide for conversation for those who seek it, just not at the expense of those who seek protection from the toxicity of those busy highways.
Why erode, undermine, and compromise the meaning, value and ideal of citizenship when it’s only going to affect a few? For that matter, why attack other normal things, like free speech and a free press? My suggestion is that we try to understand what the Republican Party has become. Normal politics no longer works for it. It must do something else if it wants to prevail in the 21st century. It’s no longer committed to liberal democracy and individual liberty. Instead, it has become a collectivist ethno-nationalist enterprise, which is to say Republican politics is now fascist politics.
Literally I only use Goodreads to track what I’m reading, host my highlights, and follow authors. For reasons of cognitive overload, not site design, I stopped having a friends list there ages ago. I don’t even get recommendations from Goodreads, because it recommends based upon ratings, not readings, and I don’t rate things anywhere because, again, cognitive overload. There’s no question, though, as Angela Lashbrook details, that much of Goodreads is abandonware. Off-topic: we still need a decent Goodreads-style app specifically for comic books.
So I made my pitch for a Joker movie that potentially would be truly daring or dangerous in a way the one that got made is just pretending to be, but get a load of how the character is offered up in the Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass graphic novel (via Claire Napier) and imagine how much braver and biting that rendition is, and notice how, in more ways than one, it shows up the movie for in fact being just more of the status quo.
But the grind of non-places on the less advantaged populace is rarely improved to any great extent. For them, a whole lifetime in non-places often awaits — living within rows upon rows of low-rent, prefab, identical condos/housing projects; working in regimented spaces, waiting for assistance in teeming government services waiting rooms. At the farthest end of that spectrum: The non-place of prisons, and now, tragically, the non-place of detention camps. For economically oppressed people, everything is the DMV.
Carrying a gun in public has been coded as a white privilege. Advertisers have literally used words like “restoring your manly privilege” as a way of selling assault weapons to white men. In colonial America, landowners could carry guns, and they bestowed that right on to poor whites in order to quell uprisings from “Negroes” and Indians. John Brown’s raid was about weapons. Scholars have written about how the Ku Klux Klan was aimed at disarming African Americans. When African Americans started to carry guns in public – think about Malcolm X during the civil rights era – all of a sudden, the second amendment didn’t apply in many white Americans' minds. When Huey Newton and the Black Panthers tried to arm themselves, everyone suddenly said, “We need gun control.”
Whenever I read a researcher or academic talk about “improving attention and social communication and reducing repetitive behavior” in actually-autistic people, I take it to mean “conforming autistic behavior to neurotypical standards” and I wish that there were more editorial pushback asking such writers to justify their position, or their assumption, that this naturally must be the standard by which we always must judge success.
Survival of the fittest, which is what social Darwinism is, is surely what motivated the administration’s recent decision to deport immigrants, some of them children, with cancer and other life-threatening diseases. (About a thousand people a year are given “deferred action” as a form of humanitarian relief.) It doesn’t matter that they’ll suffer after leaving. What matters is that they don’t belong here. If they die as a result, well, so be it. As Fox News' Tucker Carlson once said, in a different context: “You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country—it means killing people.”
“More and more,” writes Dave Winer, “I use Twitter to write the first drafts of posts that I then write more fully here on my blog.” You’re not the only one, Dave. For me, I think it’s because when something sets me off, I tend to react to it as I’m thinking about it, in real-time; I can’t wait until later. So I “get it off my chest” on Twitter, and then massage that into something for the blog later on.
Lost in my ongoing crisis of existence, I didn’t notice that there are some pretty close thematic connections between yesterday’s Kathleen Fitzgerald and Brendan Schlagel links, in that Fitzpatrick is examining if even the IndieWeb is pushing to counteract “a deeper failure of sociality”, while Schlagel is engaged in an experimental “blogchain” conversation with Tim Critchlow “exploring possibilities for conversation space, community networks, open writing ecosystems, working in public, [and] the greater blogsphere present and future”. I hope they are all reading each other.
The project has as its working title We Have Never Been Social: Rethinking the Internet. It revisits the history of the Internet’s development and, in particular, the rise of the social media structures that have come to dominate so much of our experience of networked communication, arguing that a significant part of what has led us to the mess we find ourselves in today […] is a desperately flawed model of sociality, one that is in fact not just un-social but anti-social. These structures allow us to talk to one another and to form connections with those who share our interests and concerns, for sure, but they are predicated on a hyperindividualism that is not just contrary to but actually corrosive of the kinds of deliberation necessary to a productive public life.
If ever I worried about any of Brendan Schlagel’s three "flavors of epistemic uncertainty for the blogger” (via Tom Critchlow)—uncertainty of purpose, uncertainty of effort, and uncertainty of reception–I would never get anything posted, especially given my ongoing existential crisis of apparently perhaps not even registering any sort of noticeable presence in the world.
The new policy was announced on July 11, 2017. Called “limitation of parking spaces in the city construction code,” it reoriented the city’s previous approach by 180 degrees. Before, developers were required to include a minimum number of parking spaces in any new development, a vestige of an era when cars were ascendant and planners were fixated on allocating an abundance of space for them. Now, the city has flipped that illogical policy upside down, setting a maximum on the number of parking spaces that can be built in new developments.
My disappointment in learning that Pattie’s Home Plate Cafe soon will be closing up shop for good didn’t last long, as today on a very busy Labor Day, despite my asking permission to grab a booth that hadn’t yet been cleared off from the previous customer and explaining that I saw it was busy and I wasn’t in any rush, I then proceeded to sit ignored for more than half an hour, during the last half of which two parties who came in after me had their orders taken. Lesson learned: don’t bother thinking of other people’s needs, since they will just forget you exist anyway. Having now stormed out, leaving behind my untouched coffee, really they could just shut down tomorrow. All it would mean is that rather than losing the only place I can afford both to eat out and then also linger with the laptop without taking up too much space in a month, I’d lose it tomorrow. Which, for all intents and purposes I have, because now I can’t go back anyway, and also this literally is the one red line I insist restaurants not cross, and I’ve quit two restaurants in the past over exactly this issue. Even I know that I can’t just stay home all the time, and I don’t want to stay home all the time, but between effectively being told today that I don’t exist and the only place I can afford shutting down, I don’t know what, exactly, I’m supposed to do. All I know is that I went from being, for once, well-rested because somehow I managed to sleep until almost noon, to hungry, to hungry and anxious, to hungry and anxious and angry, to angry and depressed. And somehow I have to get through the entire day still ahead.
While I get what Kathleen Fitzpatrick was going for here, mostly what I see is people discussing these shootings as white supremacist terrorism or violent white supremacy, not merely “white supremacy”. We surely can’t not call it white supremacist just because other “lesser” things are white supremacist, too. Even more surely, we can’t be afraid to call it white supremacist just because more mainstream Republican white supremacists (or white nationalists) might try to raise that usage as a shield against accusations aimed at them. We can’t avoid calling things what they are just because other guilty parties might try to corrupt the public’s understanding.
Sorry, I’m not yet quite done with Joker. In my first post I went off a bit about the irresponsibility of making a movie which reinforces the false belief of a link between mental illness and violence, especially “[g]iven the moment we are in where the President of the United States, the National Rifle Association, and the Republican Party are trying to scapegoat the mentally ill”.
Fast Company wants you to think that China’s weird and draconian social credit system is coming to the U.S. just because companies like Uber and Airbnb have ways of rating customers based upon their behavior. But being banned from Uber and Airbnb is not going to result in “bans on leaving the country, using public transportation, checking into hotels, hiring for high-visibility jobs, or acceptance of children to private schools”, or being registered on a public blacklist. It’s perhaps true, and surely concerning, that “[a]n increasing number of societal ‘privileges’ … are either controlled by technology companies or affected by how we use technology services”, but it’s a stretch to compare that to China’s all-encompassing, terrifying, and effectively centralized realization of the points system from The Good Place.
Jessica Kiang reports that after the Venice screening of Joker, director Todd Phillips “asserted his belief that while movies mirror society, they do not mold it”. But since in society the mentally ill are not the cause of violence, and are in fact more likely to be the victims of it, his movie is but a funhouse mirror distorting society, not merely reflecting it. If his movie reinforces that dangerously stigmatizing idea, it will in fact be helping to mold society, for the worse.
On the other hand, perhaps Atlas' physical fade from the ledgers of cartographic relevance is fitting. Atlas has always set the precedent for navigability, as it should: one intersection, two highways, straight lines all forming a nearly perfect “X” here near the navel of the United States. Like a train porter, it wills everyone away in all four cardinal directions. West out of Atlas holds the promise of the Mississippi River, north out of Atlas will get you to an interstate, south takes you to my hometown, and east takes you up out of what used to be the river’s basin and into endless flat plains. Like an atlas you can hold, it presents itself as mere possibility, all the way up to the margins.
Mark Hughes misconstrues, I think, the concerns over whether or not something about Joker is toxic. Or, at least, he doesn’t seem to recognize that there are different kinds of concerns about this, not all of them about whether the film somehow glamorizes the character. That he chooses only that concern to address is revealing, because, honestly, it’s an age-old pop cultural debate, and the lowest-hanging fruit.
“People from the blogging world of the 00s are now in positions of great prestige, wealth and authority,” writes Dave Winer, and then there’s those of us on SNAP and Medicaid and depleting their family’s financial resources as we painfully try to pivot from a lifetime of employment trouble due to Autism Spectrum Disorder that went undiagnosed until our forties.
Trump is reviving an earlier, more white-supremacist era of American imperialism, one that cost countless lives, led to a horrific global conflict, and almost undid itself. He and his crew are doing that because, deep down, they are dedicated to conquest for its own sake—because of how it makes them feel, and the personal profits they think can be gained.
The Trump administration this month decided it would no longer protect from deportation adults and children who have come to this country seeking life-saving medical treatment. About a thousand people a year are given “deferred action” as a form of humanitarian relief. Well, that relief is gone, and indeed, the administrations’s decision to end it is, if you ask me, the moral equivalent of murder.
This week saw an Ask MetaFilter thread about “old-school bloggers” who still are active, and today old-school blogger Paul Bausch (who used to run a fantastic directory of Oregon weblogs) scraped all the links for easy browsing, adding: “The personal web is a beautiful thing and it’s still out there.” To quote David Weinberger in a similar conversation, “It’s time to unroll the Blog Rolls again.”
Brendan O’Connor’s look at “the antifascist question” for The Baffler is full of lots of good stuff but it’s also more than a little bit weird that O’Connor goes out of his way more than once to credit the Proud Boys for their “unusual discipline”, apparently having “acted strategically” in their “newfound ability to act as an organized collective” yet only glancingly mentions the “broad coalition of left-wing organizations, unions, and some liberal NGOs”.
However, if the dynamic of autistic burnout really is related to spending more resources coping than one has, I’m not sure the real leverage in avoiding burnout resides with the autistic person alone. Especially because a number of the strategies people have to avoid or recover from burnout involve being able to act more autistic, being accepted as autistic, and getting support and accommodations–all things that require the cooperation of others. So we need to also be looking at ways to make neurodivergence more accepted and less stigmatizing, as well as ways for services to become more inclusive of supporting autistic people who appear to be “functioning well.” Knowing you’re on the spectrum, alone, isn’t, in my opinion, going to fix this.
Democracy allows you to test those ideas in the public forum. If you want to submit your beliefs to the American people and get their reaction, please be my guest. Keep this in mind, though. Thousands and thousands of young Americans already voted with their lives to ensure that this same message of intolerance, death, and destruction would not prevail - you can count their ballots by visiting any American cemetery in North Africa, Italy, France, or Belgium and tallying the white headstones. You can also recite the many names of civil rights advocates who bled and died in opposing supporters of those same ideologies of hatred. Their voices may be distant, but they can still be heard.
And I’m done. Not with blogging, but with engaging Inquiry any further. I knew it was a risk, since I’ve written before (as early as June about the disturbing degree to which they see other human beings as “lesser”, but since we’ve reached the point where my honest acknowledgement that there are real and dangerous imbalances both in power and in threat that are systemic and institutional has been oh-so-blithely called, with predictable inevitability, “virtue signaling” (the modern-day variant of the equally illegitimate term “politically correct”), I am, as I said with my first words, done. As noted by Baltsar Gracian (via Tim Chambers), “You cannot treat with the ruined.”
As opposed to the groups who went far into America’s interior to settle isolated communes, these were, in a paradoxical-sounding phrase, practical utopians. Staying close to the city let them try out new ways of living with a financial lifeline and emergency exit. Now, at a time when—it could reasonably be argued—the future of the country hangs on what suburbs do over the next 20 or 30 years, their history shows that bold social and architectural experimentation is not alien to suburbia. In fact, it’s a suburban tradition.
Modern Atlanta may bear little resemblance to the cities of past millennia, but its current residents share something fundamental with urbanites of the distant past: The average one-way commute time in American metropolitan areas today is about 26 minutes. That figure varies from city to city, and from person to person: Some places have significant numbers of workers who enjoy or endure particularly short or long commutes; some people are willing to travel for much longer than 30 minutes. But the endurance of the Marchetti Constant has profound implications for urban life. It means that the average speed of our transportation technologies does more than anything to shape the physical structure of our cities.
Currently reading: The Survival of Molly Southbourne, a short by Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater; and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which I jumped to the head of the line on my nonfiction pile. That means I’ve finished up Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, and Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. As always, you can browse my highlights over on Goodreads.
Following up on my post about (in the words of Mark Bessoudo) “the effect that the built environment has on our brains” and the ways in which our inner “cognitive machinery” interfaces with and is impacted by that environment, and how that can speak to many of the issues of the neurodiverse, comes news about new universal design guidelines“for neighborhoods, streets, parks and plazas, playgrounds, and gardens” released by the American Society for Landscape Architecture.
Emperial Young is on a hunger strike to convince Netflix to save The OA—and to “[protest] the capitalist forces that killed the show, general lack of societal support resources, and to raise awareness about properly teaching AI”? Her protest consists offive movements and prompted one of the show’s stars to plead, “[D]on’t harm yourself to honor a story that celebrates how we can help each other to undo harm.” But is this just part of the hoax?
Not that you need validation from a straight, middle-aged, mediocre white guy, Mara Cavanaugh, but your concerns about Mastodon ring true, especially this: “It feels like when you get on the fediverse, you must have an opinion on all these things. And if you don’t people are not going to care about what you have to say because you are uninformed.” You say that it isn’t a “groupthink machine” but in many ways it is, and there are very decidedly some firmly-established insular cliques.
However, this isn’t even the worst way that autism has been twisted to explain or excuse bigotry or cruelty. In 2017, James Damore made claims that it was due to him being autistic that he wrote and published a 10-page document arguing that men should be working in the tech industry more than women. In the same year, media sources claimed that Stephen Paddock, the man responsible for the Las Vegas shooting that claimed 58 lives, may have been autistic. Other studies have examined Elliot Rodger, the white man behind the Isla Vista murders and the publishing of a 140-page long, sexist and racist manifesto, linking his autism to his violence. There is a real danger to using autism to explain away white male violence.
“Maybe archive.org is the permanent version of the web,” muses Dave Winer. “And then of course the next question is why not just publish originally to archive.org?” Interestingly, Micro.blog used to have a feature which automatically saved your posts to the Archive for you. Ironically, both the feature and the blog post announcing it appear to be gone now, the latter linked here thanks only to the Internet Archive.
Not for nothing, but while Bret Stephens would never mass shoot anyone, flagging David Karpf’s university provost over a tweet no one had even seen (and which he had to ego-surf just to find) nonetheless sits comfortably on the lower end of the selfsame spectrum of toxic masculinity, within which a fragile male does something to insist that other people respect the real or imagined authority to which they feel they are entitled.
CJ Eller takes issue with an old Doc Searls metaphor of blogging as “rolling snowballs downhill”, and honestly it’s a metaphor I don’t especially understand, since eventually a snowball becomes so massive that it will, as Eller says, “hurtle down the hill”, so I’m not sure what Doc was getting at with this.
More and more skateboarders are arguing for the wider benefits of mixed-use public spaces. Michael Barker, a New York skater and architect, advocates soft-edged spaces “seamlessly integrated into the life of a city” (as opposed to the “hard edges” of traditional skateparks), to help address the loss of the urban commons. This can help include the local community in the design of public spaces—as urban planner Jeff Hanson advocates in Calgary, Canada. And in Toronto, Ariel Stagni mediates between interest groups to make multi-use spaces increasingly normal, and change politicians’ perceptions of skateboarders.
Over on Micro.blog (where I almost went instead of Write.as, and still might someday, depending on the comparative development trajectories), Walter Tyree wondered about the lack of “likes” over there, and asked about getting some sort of quick-reply emoji action to say, “I saw your post, it made me feel some feelings that were positive”.
Take the concentration of tech into Big Tech: the theorists who insisted that unfettered markets and doctrinal selfishness would produce competitive and vibrant markets find themselves scrambling to explain the conversion of the internet from a crazy bazaar into five big services filled with screenshots from the other four. They field all manner of unconvincing explanations for this phenomenon, like “first-mover advantage” or “network effects,” because they can’t say, “Dismantling antitrust enforcement gave rise to a new wave of trusts on a scale not seen since the robber-barons.”
It’s a sad truth that most of our lives are pretty boring, geographically speaking. Live in one place long enough and you will develop routines, walking the same streets and patronizing the same coffee shops and generally making it easy for a simulation, should one exist, to anticipate where you will be at any given time. Randonauts hope to use this tedium to their advantage, by introducing unpredictability. They argue that by devising methods that force us to diverge from our daily routines and instead send us to truly random locations we’d otherwise never think twice about, it just might be possible to cross over into somebody else’s reality. “New information and causality can pull you out of the filter-bubble and change your life,” writes The Fatum Project, the online team responsible for the technological and philosophical framework of the movement. Even if you don’t buy into the dense thicket of theoretical quantum physics underpinning the logic of it all, going on a Randonaut-style adventure can be a lovely way to spend an afternoon.
Toward the end of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey there is a discussion of life in the Anthropocene under the threat of the climate crisis that features a paragraph which surprised me for reasons unrelated to any of the Anthropocene, climate crisis, or even the actual subject of that paragraph.
Most of us are familiar with the story of the Democratic Leadership Council and its successful push to bring the party to “the center” in order to reclaim voters in thrall to Ronald Reagan. This was a fizzy period in Washington in which wonks debated terms like “centrism” and “third way” that would later become widely accepted “truths.”Some say this was a low point for liberalism, and there is something to be said for that. This was, after all, a period in which Clinton went out of his way to prove to white voters that the Democrats were not a black party. (Case in point, welfare reform).
“You’ve likely read me whining about the relative absence of bloggers referring to each other in these parts,” notes Inquiry. “But while typing the above bit expressing my tmo-presence-happiness, it suddenly hit me that such commenting potentially constitutes a sort of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ in blogging contexts?”
“The final season of Mr. Robot starts airing Oct 6,” writes Dan Barrett. “This means that if you’re planning on rewatching the show in the lead-up to the new season, you’re advised to start now.” Way ahead of you, there, Dan: I started my full Mr. Robot rewatch on Amazon immediately upon finishing my full Humans rewatch, and I’m just about to finish up the first season. What am I waiting for in its fourth and final? I’m waiting to see which character other than Elliot Alderson is going to break the fourth wall.
There are so many terrific bits in this Slate interview with David Karpf, the professor of media and public affairs on whom New York Times columnist Bret Stephens called the manager, but the best might be when Karpf describes his reaction as, “Oh my God, this guy’s never heard of the Streisand effect. What an idiot.” There’s also some great stuff (also in the interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education) not just about Karpf acknowledging his own privilege compared to the abuse other people receive but discussing the privileged power dynamics Stephens was trying to leverage, enforce, and wave in Karpf’s face.
While I get where Dave is coming from, I can’t imagine you could call yourself a news operation if you’re running around flatly stating, “For example, it’s obvious that Trump is a Russian oligarch.” He’d have better luck starting an opinion site called Occam’s Raiser. Neither “Trump is a Russian oligarch” nor “[Mitch McConnell] is owned by Moscow” is reportorial. It’s characterization and commentary.
Likely the best thing that happened today was that Alex Zielinski reported for Portland Mercury that fascist propagandist and provocateur Andy Ngo had witnessed preparations by Patriot Prayer to commit premeditated criminal acts of violence against antifa and did nothing (other than laugh about it), and within hours of the Mercury report Ngo lost his job at the nonsense website Quillette.
After months of gaffes on the 2020 campaign trail prompting even his brain surgeon to chime in and defend his mind, Biden made a pointed comment about the state of his brain over the weekend. “I want to be clear, I’m not going nuts,” Biden said during a campaign rally in New Hampshire—a comment that surely extended beyond the confusion he was trying to clear up at the time, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Thomas O’Leary says, “I was on a WordPress blog w/ 350K visits a month and making $150 per week.” Back when I was doing the widely-read Portland Communique, which ran from 2002 to 2005, I never made anything like that from reader contributions. There was no advertising on Communique, except, I think, for a brief period attempting to roll-my-own. It’s the only blogging effort of mine that should have been “monetizable” but never got there.
Since the tweet that led me there used the phrase “mediocre men”, I was hoping that this Harvard Business Review article on incompetent men becoming leaders would show me precisely how I’ve utterly failed to capitalize on my own mediocrity quite so profoundly. What I did learn was that the article itself is written by a man who works for something called the “ManpowerGroup”, and I just can’t even.
Blogs are journals, not sites. They are written, not built. The best ones have a heart that beats daily or faster. The writing itself is more conversational than homiletic (which is how I’m behaving here, in a print publication with a monthly heartbeat). That means its authors are speaking, and not just “creating content”. They speak to readers and other bloggers who speak back, through e-mails, comments or on blogs of their own. That means what each blogger says is often incomplete and provisional. Like all forms of life, blogging remains unfinished for the duration. (Site content, on the other hand, is finished at any one time, then replaced with other finished content.)
Here’s another problem with the context-free instant indication of social media engagement through likes and retweets: unless you’re liking or retweeting something posted by someone you know, you could be boosting something by an abuser, asshole, or racist. Who’s going to spend five minutes checking out a user’s history first? This sort of thing sometimes gets attention when the issue is misinformation, or even disinformation, but not so much when the issue is the overall character of the poster you don’t know. So, again, it comes down to social media needing more friction, and fewer tools designed to be innately “now”.
It seems perfectly consistent to me that someone who disdains caring and supports suffering would disagree with the contention that absolute power corrupts because “that’s only true if you aren’t capable of wielding and respecting that power” and, really, if it did corrupt “we wouldn’t have people like Elon Musk”.
Geoffrey Cain’s deconstruction of fascism for The New Republic is frustrating because he argues that circumstances today are more merely fascistic than outright fascism but the only thing from his own elemental lists that he seems to think is missing are paramilitary militias roaming the streets beating up leftists.
Dave Winer wants an E-ZPass for news sites (why the hell is it E-ZPass rather than EZ-Pass?) to make navigating multiple paywalls easier: “Collect the money if I decide to read a New Yorker or LA Times piece, even though I have’t got a subscription with either.” It’s an interesting idea that identifies one problem with the needs of both writers and readers to make sure good writing is paid for, similar to my earlier concerns that things like individual paid email newsletters (which wasn’t yet a business seem unsustainable absent some way to cross-pollinate, because who’s going to subscribe to five different email newsletters for $25/month when you frequently can get all of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Medium for less than that, especially when many of those newsletters thesmelves might be commentary sparked by Times or Post stories?
“People are coming into urban areas and they cannot be stopped,” says Chandana Mitra, an associate professor of geosciences at Auburn University, who studies the impact of heat on cities. Mitra has experienced the impact of climate change in her hometown of Kolkata, India, and is now observing it in Auburn, Alabama, and nearby Birmingham. “Everyone aspires to be in an urban area and there is chaos.”
Lots of corporations (mostly Google) have competed with Facebook for the social media colonies, and their attempts aren’t missed; but Facebook’s monopoly also beat out the divey-er venues and communal spaces which elevated their members to five minutes of fame and triple platinum albums without sponcon. Their obituaries tell us what we already know–that your feed could look a lot more interesting, more avant-garde, joyous, local, intimate, kinky, weird, and hilarious–and yes, scarier and even more hateful than it does now–thanks to varying degrees of censorship, cross-platform embeds, aesthetic customization, technopanic, and algorithm-free zones. It’s not to say that without Facebook, the whole internet would be more like a local farmer’s market or a punk venue or an art gallery or comedy club or a Narnia fanfic club, just that those places are harder to find these days.
For the last eight months, though, Twitter has largely checked out, according to some council members. In a year that has seen the company embark on a major redesign, Holmes said Twitter hasn’t solicited much advice from the very experts it asked for help. Nor was the Trust and Safety Council consulted when the company rethought a much-hyped policy on dehumanizing speech—ultimately limiting the rule just to religious groups, when the original scope had been much wider. The council has only had one scheduled call with Twitter all year, which took place recently and had no senior employees participating. “We were disappointed,” Holmes added.
A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart. They know what they know, and they don’t need to know anything else.
The reality is that there’s no actual connection between the Dayton shooter and antifascist organizing, other than the possibility that the shooter went to a protest and expressed progressive views on Twitter—something millions of people have done since Trump’s election. At the same time, the El Paso shooter left a 2,300-word manifesto that clearly outlined his goals and motivations, which were expressly white nationalist, while the Dayton shooter offered no formal insights into his motivation. The best clue as to what fueled the latter’s rage may end up being the lyrics from his “pornogrind” band, which were laced with misogynist venom and align with the ideology of the Men’s Rights and “Incel” communities.
In a sense I want to go back to the early 90s, when blogging was still a twinkle in the eye, an intuition that if we created easy ways to publish, people would do it. The power of tech is that it becomes invisible and the message of the writer, the artist comes to the front. I see the combination of art, tech and protest being a powerful thing. We’ve been here before.
Not a soccer person? Not even a sports person? You should read Abe Asher’s dispatch from last night’s Timbers game and its 33-minute protest against Major League Soccer’s ban on the Iron Front anyway. I’m not a big reader of sports reporting, either, but this sort of coverage of not just sports but context, to my understanding, is how the best of it is done.
Nate worries about not noticing the absence of a “first-rate friend” because large social networks bury us in “third-tier friends”, and wonders if the answer simply is smaller social media (although I do wonder if any platform has toyed with algorithms which prompt you to see what’s up with someone who hasn’t posted in awhile).
I’d never heard of the “land value tax”, in which the land itself is taxed at a high rate while buildings are taxed at a much lower rate or not at all, until this J. Brian Charles piece for Governing, and why the hell aren’t we all doing this? Tax lands that are lying fallow and unproductive, while lessening the burden on properties that are producing societal value in other ways, e.g. by attracting business, or providing housing and neighborhood amenities.
For what it’s worth, CJ Eller, you, of course, can follow my blog wherever it ends up; just fire up ye olde RSS reader. As for where it will be moving, I’m still torn, although as I talked about last night on Twitter, it’s not clear to me whether I’m actually conflicted or simply restless. That said, if Matt would implement date stamps on posts, which remains an absolutely baffling bit of neglect given that WriteFreely/Write.as URLs also don’t use a date-inclusive format, so there’s literally zero way for a reader to know when a directly-linked post was written, I’d be less inclined to listen to restlessness for the time being.
The only way in which “in hating on influencers” am I “hating on ourselves” is in the acknowledgment that I, too, am utterly mediocre but haven’t yet figured out a way to monetize that at the expense of fools. To quote the Leslie Knope paraphase I coined: “You’re ridiculous, and influencers is nothing.”
Ward added, “I’ve been in many a protest. I’ve been in some amazing community mobilizations against bigotry. I’ve not in my 30 years seen such an organic alignment, that was so celebratory, as Saturday. People felt empowered and not disempowered. And the fact that Joey Gibson and Joe Biggs are spending Monday working so hard to convince media and their followers that they were successful tells me how much they’re scrambling. They’ve never had to scramble to declare a win before. They ran out of gas in Portland. And I think it’s significant and I think other cities should take note of it.”
As I wait to see if Knock Knock WHOIS There is going to let me register a reserved domain for my (triumphant?) return to blogging like it’s 1999, I’ve been doing due diligence again on IndieWeb blogging platforms. The presumption is that I’ll simply move from my aborted Write House instance of the WriteFreely platform over to Write.as itself, but I’m spending some time checking up on the current state of Micro.blog. In the process somehow I ran into this fascinating thread about second-person versus third-person responses from one blogger to another.
So what’s behind the “historic” defense? “Neighborhood change can be frightening to longtime residents,” CityLab’s Laura Bliss writes. But saying “I find change scary” isn’t likely to get you very far in city halls. Instead, pleading the cause of historic preservation can become a way for residents to oppose things like new bus lanes or housing, without having to resort to self-serving arguments for protecting parking spots or cherished views. Ultimately, people too often invoke history to defend a very narrow interpretation of it: their own recent memory of a place.
The actual psychic toll on our mental health is crippling. The lost sleep, the grinding anxiety, the escalating fears don’t just represent squandered time. They start to chip away at your health and at your soul. The healthy response would be to tune it out altogether, but since actual people are actually suffering the brutal consequences, we cannot. And so here we are back in the narcissist’s loop, fueling his need to be at the center because, well, there he is at the center.
“Oregon has a history of white supremacy. We were born from a—as a white homeland. That’s how Oregon got started. And so, we have our own homegrown white supremacists. But when we have people on a national stage encouraging people to come and create violence in our community, that’s when the community must stand up and make sure that we draw a line in the sand and say no way. Again, the difference this time between some of the other protests we had is that there were clear lines of command, who was in charge, who was making decisions about who would move where, and there were also enough law enforcement and community members who were willing to deescalate situations as they arose. And that was one of the things that, really, I was thrilled about. And so, it is unhelpful to have the president or anybody else encouraging people, mislabeling antifa as the problem, when the problem is really white supremacists trying to take over our streets.”
Trump shouldn’t be living rent-free in progressives’ heads any more than he should be living rent free in the White House. When there’s so much work to be done, cooking up schemes to “drive Trump crazy” doesn’t seem like a great use of energy. What will we do with a Trump that has been driven “crazy” (to use the kind of mental-illness-stigmatizing language that he’s into)? Will we be able to tell? Will that protect immigrants? Raise wages? Save the environment? Give people health care? Secure reproductive rights? Register voters? Stop fascism, racism, misogyny? Build out the field teams that will help a Democratic campaign actually win?
The coalition’s goal of inclusion, combined with the strategies commonly associated with “antifa,” gave the groups a unique toolkit that allowed the coalition to build bridges and increase the number of participants. The success of this method could be a game changer for communities looking to deal with similar far-right threats.
This breakdown isn’t included in the poll results as released (and I don’t have access to The Wall Street Journal story) but according to John Harwood only 24% of Republicans, 27% of non-college white men, and 37% of rural residents are worried “that the United States will experience another mass shooting or attack by white nationalists, targeting people based on their color or country of origin”.
While searching for why Lilly Wachowski isn’t involved in The Matrix Repetitious or whatever it’s going to be called, I remembered that she also wasn’t involved in the end of Sense8, and somehow I ended up finding this Naveen Andrews interview in which he calls Sense8 “something that’s totally unique, and is a direct ‘fuck you’ to what seems to be happening all over the world now, in terms of fascism”, and I just needed to note that here for both posterity and general relevancy.
A useful example was given to us in June when a group of 30 “gender-critical” (read: anti-trans) academics, led by the philosopher Kathleen Stock, published an open letter in The Times about how having to respect the pronouns of their trans students and colleagues was somehow compromising their freedom of thought; they were then met by a petition, signed by more than 5,000 university professionals, forcefully decrying their bigotry. It is relevant, when considering an issue like this, to consider both the arguments and rhetorical tone of anti-trans philosophers in relation to their willingness (as Stock’s open letter makes clear) to treat certain of the people they will most likely encounter every day at work almost as test subjects for their own abstract thought to ride roughshod over; in relation to the fact that one of the names attached to Stock’s letter was that of Stuart Waiton, a lecturer at Abertay University who also was a candidate for the far-right Brexit party in Scotland. Transphobic philosophers often want to insist on the “merely” philosophical nature of their inquiry—but for the minority groups their thought most affects, its political force cannot remotely be avoided.
FogCam’s 25-year run has meant that it outlasted another of the web’s earliest webcams. Cambridge University’s coffee pot cam came online a year earlier in 1993, after one scientist who worked at the university wanted a way to check the status of a coffee pot remotely, rather than risk turning up and discovering it empty. “It didn’t vary very much,” the scientist, Quentin Stafford-Fraser, told BBC News back in 2012, “It was either an empty coffee pot, or a full one, or in more exciting moments, maybe a half-full coffee pot and then you’d have to try and guess if it was going up or down.”
I wish I understood enough about the science to consider the connection between “too little inhibitory activity” in our autistic brains (“Autistic people’s brains switch between the images more slowly than those of neurotypical people do, the study found.”) and “hypervigilance” and the persistence of stimuli in the autistic brain, because there disparate studies sure seem to be chasing different heads of the same hydra.
Why Portland? The city presents a unique mix of past and present white nationalism; policing that enables the far right; weak political leaders; and a legacy of antifascist organizing. Combined, these elements allow the far right to stage violent spectacles with few legal consequences against their ideological enemies — antifa, liberals, so-called PC culture, cities — while using social media to glorify the violence as a recruiting tool and proof of their racial and masculine virility.
The next step is to embed smart technologies in the urban environment to collect information about how well a place is performing against human metrics and, more ambitiously, enable it to reconfigure itself to perform better. That might mean dialling down visual stimuli such as advertising or street clutter if the inhabitants are exhibiting signs of stress, adding opportunities for play when children are likely to be present, or stimulating social interactions among older people.
Popular Mobilization (or PopMob), a coalition of leftist groups that organized the counterprotest, distributed flyers in Portland this week that stated: “If you oppose racism, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and the xenophobic, ultranationalist ideologies of the far right (and our current administration), you are an EVERYDAY ANTIFASCIST.”
Unbeknownst to me until tonight, there is a coffee place in my neighborhood that’s open into the evening: Affogato. For the nine and a half months I’ve lived in St. Johns, I could have been getting the hell out of my apartment in the evenings if restless to have a latte and read a book and had no idea.
Captain America was a recruiting poster, battling against the real Nazi super-villains while Superman was still fighting cheap gunsels, strike breakers, greedy landlords and Lex Luthor – and America was still equivocating about entering the conflict at all. No wonder Simon and Kirby’s comic book became an enormous hit, selling close to a million copies a month throughout the war. But not everyone was a fan in 1941 – according to Simon, the German American Bund and America Firsters bombarded the publisher’s offices with hate mail and obscene phone calls that screamed “Death to the Jews!” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a real-life superhero, called to reassure him, saying: “The city of New York will see that no harm comes to you.”
“And that brings up a question,” writes CJ Eller, “is there a need for notifications?” These exist, of course, and have for a very long time, in the form of trackback (and later pingback), and these days the attention and work seems to be going into webmention. As for whether or not technology is better than serendipity, that’s always going to be subjective.
In a OneZero piece that highlights the hateful through-line “that’s been hanging around since the days of Waco, that found its home on Breitbart, that was mainstreamed by the Tea Party movement, and that was weaponized during Gamergate”, Colin Horgan makes a revealing rhetorical connection between GamerGate and the right’s push to bastardize Section 230 that hadn’t occurred to me: “For Trump, it’s all about ethics in content moderation.”
There’s something in one of Nate’s Thoughts that speaks to the idea of introducing friction into social media, especially the sort which produces context in a way that, e.g., reflexive hitting a like button (or obsessively checking one’s likes count) doesn’t: “Context is something to be built and protected.”
There is too much television. Outside of whatever I’m watching live during the week (e.g., tonight, Killjoys), my Netflix backlog is beginning to pile up with Leila and Street Food, which I’ve started, new seasons of Glow and Mindhunter, new international shows Green Frontier and Better Than Us, and I’m now two seasons behind on She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.
Beto O’Rourke apparently thinks it will pass legal muster to “require large internet platforms to adopt terms of service to ban hateful activities” and “remove legal immunity from lawsuits for large social media platforms that fail” to do so. There’s no indication as to who or what determines which platforms qualify as “large”, nor any mention of who or what determines which platforms have failed to adopt the prescribed terms of service and therefore which companies have their Section 230 immunity stripped away.
Not sure where to begin. The parents of the Dayton shooter published two obituaries: one for the shooter, which doesn’t mention the shooting and praises him as a “funny, articulate and intelligent man”, and one of the shooter’s brother, whom he shot and killed, but using his deadname instead of Jordan Cofer.
Natasha Stovall’s beautiful, difficult, and leisurely stroll through whiteness flirts a little too often with psychopathologizing racism for my comfort, but all of its other discomforts should be willingly endured, much in the way you’ve hopefully endured the discomforts of White Fragility and So You Want to Talk About Race.
Over the transom from Write.as development today comes news of Submit.as, a workflow for accepting writing submissions to your Write.as blog, and I am reminded of CJ Eller’s discussion of letters-to-the-editor as an alternative to blog comments, and I’m here for it. Or, rather, I will be there for it once the folks who run the .blog TLD accept my request to register a “reserved” domain name so I then can move this blog over to Write.as proper. (Yes, I’m pretty sure that move is happening.)
Over the past three years, I’ve been researching our conceptualizations of free speech — why we afford it to Nazis, how its been influenced by billionaires, and how it can exist in a system in which some people have immense power and influence, and most people have almost none. We tend to think of the internet as a separate entity from the real world, but of course the two are inextricably linked. The internet has come to mirror our economic and political atmosphere writ large: dominated by a few people who are largely unaccountable to the masses, filled with disinformation, surveillance, and a consumerism that breeds complacency and overconsumption.
Joe Biden’s allies admit he’s not prepared to be President of the United States. This is the only possible conclusion to draw from their suggestion that he scale back his public events and campaign activities in order to “limit the verbal flubs”. Here’s the thing: they are not verbal flubs, they are mental ones.
Just days before the event, Twitter’s Trending Topics sidebar—intended to surface the most interesting conversations on the platform—had become flooded with conspiracy theories about the death of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. A month earlier, the president of the United States had used the platform to share the idea that four members of Congress, all women of color, should “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” For too long, the platform has been a breeding ground for the kind of anti-immigration rhetoric that likely contributes to hate crimes and to the American epidemic of mass shootings. If Twitter is a party, then it’s a party where the punch is spiked with PCP and the carbon monoxide alarm won’t stop blaring, because all the guests are slowly succumbing to toxic fumes.
This cannot, cannot, always be on me alone. That I can do everything right, take every precaution to protect myself, short of just never leaving my room (and then I would doubtless be told that I was “letting my diagnosis limit me” or “using it as an excuse”), and still wind up hurt, sick, melting down, my ability to function for the rest of the day or the week ruined, not because of my [SLAM] autism, but because you don’t [SLAM] have any stakes in being more fucking careful about how you go stomping through the world. It cannot just be my fault for existing and, like, daring to think I might be able to do something wild like go out for coffee before work without destroying myself.
This morning, I was unprepared for the degree to which my body and brain were going to say, “No.” to today, but then I guess that’s usually how this sort of thing happens. (See “brain foam”.) Which is why it’s so difficult for trying to plan normal life things, like, say, ever returning to Vocational Rehabilitation to see if working even is a possibility anymore. Still on hold with my primary care physician is an investigation into my fatigue issues, and given how today went it’s a bit weird that Merriam-Webster posted about the word this afternoon.
I’m not sure about the weird rhetoric that ditching the “like” button “could help bring us back together”, but Darren Loucaides gets into the issues involved in removing the standard public metrics of social media platforms, chief among those issues that if you’re an advertising-driven site, metrics help drive your revenue. I’m less interested in the dopamine and oxytocin addiction than I am in the difference between indication and interaction in our social media behavior, and removing, well, the indicators is part of that, but I think it needs to go hand-in-hand with finding and implementing additional tools for interaction.
CJ Eller reveals to me the existence of “blogchains” and mostly I am wondering why they’re called chains instead of, say, threads, since we already understand what Twitter threads are, and this is basically that except for blogs, with the added business of a sort of embedded table-of-contents on each post because blog posts in a series don’t tend to be immediately successive like tweets in a Twitter thread, instead being posted only now and then, over time.
Normal people, working inside the normal American system, fight hard for something. They see an objective—say, tax cuts or a new law protecting the quality of drinking water—and they work toward that end. White evangelical Christians do not fight for things. They fight against things. I’m not talking about fighting against, for instance, tax increases. I’m talking about fighting against a human being’s right to be what that human being wants to be in this life. White evangelical Christians fight against that right, because they deny that some human beings are as human as they are.
“Efforts to expand the definition of ‘public charge’ through welfare and immigration reforms of the mid-1990s laid the groundwork for the current Trump policies,” writes Alonso-Yoder, “but so too did the original 19th century statutes limiting migrations of poor people. When examined together, these immigration policies on public charge bear striking similarities to the racist rhetoric which peaked in the 1990s surrounding Black families’ use of public benefits.”
There’s an interview with Matt Mullenweg over at The Verge about Automattic’s acquisition of Tumblr, and it’s chock full of nostalgia and hopefulness for the open web and how Tumblr can fit into that—everything from being able to follow non-Tumblr sites via RSS (a feature I didn’t know they once had), to potentially making Tumblr open source.
The premiere of The Terror: Infamy was better than the five episodes I made it through of The Terror last year, primarily because I couldn’t have cared less about anyone in The Terror but already am interested in the characters of Infamy. In the first season I’d taken to gimmicks like desaturating my television to watch in black-and-white because all I wanted was to learn more about that season’s “terror” but absent any characters worth wondering or worrying about, the “what’s happening” of it simply moved too slowly to sustain any interest.
We remember the Tea Party as principled rogues committed to the rule of law, rugged individualism, limited government and fiscal responsibility. But we remember these characteristics because that’s what Tea Party apologists said when they rationalized its goals to the Washington press corps and the public. Its real agenda was abundantly clear to anyone who was not white and to social scientists who took the trouble to understand properly what it wanted to achieve. Rule of law, rugged individualism, limited government and fiscal responsibility—these were means to an end, but those who characterized them as ends unto themselves were delusional, lying or both.
Earlier this month, as part of discussing friction online, I posted about friction offline and the suggestion by Richard Sennett that “you move through a space and you dwell in a place”. Now, through Kimberly Hirsh, I learn about Yi-Fu Tuan who “suggests that place is security and space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other”, which seems roughly consistent with “dwelling” versus “moving”. Unfortunately, that book is not available for Kindle, although Richard Sennett’s is, and I’ve added it to my wishlist and requested Multnomah County Library license it on Overdrive.
Yet I can’t help but carry my own disquiet. It comes and goes, but it never fully disappears. It tags along to the movies, and the Stop & Shop where I buy groceries. It’s there when I think about my nephew, who starts kindergarten in September. It’s here now on a stormy afternoon as I sit and write at that library. It’s a specter that has crept into every conceivable public place I visit or think about, and it has irrevocably changed how I see them. The openness means there’s nowhere to hide. The unpredictability that was a joy now seems like a liability. I spend more and more time thinking about the regularity with which these spaces have become stages for ghastly, mass-scale tragedies.
In my long-running and long-winded bio, I argue that “the small, every day courtesies matter”, and now there’s research to back that up. That said, while I believe in the strength of “that brief acknowledgment, that brief glance” to improve the flow of any given day, the fact is that I do “prefer the solitude of, say, reading a book” to striking up a casual conversation.
More neptunian distance from The New York Times comes in this Vanity Fair piece in which an editor says that the “feeling from the top” is that the newspaper is “not gonna be a part of the resistance”. This makes sense in normal political times, but when the issue is the creeping fascism of the governing political party, every damned newspaper in the republic should be part of the resistance. That doesn’t mean you abandon the elements (or principles) of journalism. In fact it means that you need to apply those elements more fiercely than ever.
Arguably, the thing to shun when writing a blog post is writing a blog post like this blog post, but I especially dislike Lesko’s last point. Blogging does not require setting drafts aside for hours or even days. Blogging always was meant to be more casual art than professional craft, although obviously it has plenty of room for both. For sure, I’ve sometimes got posts in draft for a bit, but typically it’s either because they’re not much more than notes or because I feel like I’ve been posting too frequently and some things can wait. Mostly, though, in the early days anyway, blogging was about not needing to abide by more traditional gatekeeping processes.
What is the slow web? At it’s core it’s the idea that we shouldn’t fill our mind with junk and we should connect with those around us. Social media is fast food for the mind. Consuming it feels in the moment, but when you look back you’re not left with anything memorable. Moreover, because of the lack of nuance afforded by platforms, such as Twitter, it encourages behavior based on dopamine and adrenaline impulses.
Fashioning an ouroboros of unaccountability (as astutely spotted by Adam Jentleson), The New York Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet today privately told staffers that, in the words of The Daily Beast, “the paper shouldn’t allow itself to be edited by Twitter outrage”, after just last week having publicly told Lizzie O’Leary that the newspaper didn’t need a public editor precisely because there’s no “shortage of ways to criticize” or “ways to call us to account”… thanks to social media.
Dmitriy Andreychenko told local authorities that he “wanted to know if that Walmart honored the Second Amendment.” That’s not what he was testing. He was testing whether white people would continue to tolerate open displays of sadism; whether they would continue to rationalize what should never have been rationalized; and whether they still believe that violence-as-pleasure would not reach even them.
This seems like a big deal for the web. Automattic, the folks behind WordPress, just bought Tumblr from Verizon. On the one hand, consolidation of blogging and social sites is not terrific. On the other hand, Tumblr’s been kicked from itself to Yahoo! to Verizon over the years, and Automattic likely can bring some long-term stability to the platform. Yes, I know, we’re supposed to be all about the IndieWeb now, but, still.
One of my regular Substack newsletter reads has opened up paid subscriptions and it’s made me think about something I think is an innate flaw in Substack’s paid newsletters model. Were I to want to pick up paid memberships, say, in my five most-read Substack subscriptions it would probably run me at least a combined $25/month.
We might need new political terminology. Or maybe it already exists and just isn’t used. Once again, this time in a Nature editorial, the argument is made that such-and-such subject matter or so-and-so group of people “must rise above politics.” Except that politics is how we determine policy, and how we funnel the ongoing conflict over our values into collective and redistributive action.
Like I said. You aren’t going to find “small moments of shared humanity” with someone who simply doesn’t like sharing the internet with humanity and feels that they wouldn’t have to suffer so “had really smart people not made careers of lowering the bar of entry”. For those who don’t recall, said poster literally at one point lamented that people who don’t know any HTML are allowed to participate in online conversations.
To some, this conjures up dystopian visions of a privacy-less future. But it also echoes something that happened more than one hundred years ago, when many young people were flooding into U.S. cities. Scholar Jeanne Catherine Lawrence describes how philanthropist Ina Robertson created boardinghouses branded as “Eleanor Clubs” for young working women.
Twitter says it suspended 166,513 accounts for promoting terrorism between July and December 2018. When asked for clarification on what constitutes “promotion of terrorism” and what kind of groups would fall under this banner, Twitter pointed to its “Terrorism and violent extremism policy,” which makes no mention of white nationalism, specifically.
But most of all, if you allowed yourself to be swept away by The OA’s strange, gently bonkers poetry, you were rewarded with an increasingly rare sort of hopefulness. Comparisons are often made between The OA and Twin Peaks — another absolutely unhinged show I adore about time, space, and blonde women trapped in interdimensional rooms — but Twin Peaks wasn’t a hopeful show. Twin Peaks held a mirror to humanity’s darkest, most nefarious impulses; it ended with its main characters trapped eternally in the wrong dimension, howling infernally. Conversely, The OA was a show about believing in impossible things (and I don’t mean psychic octopi and brain flowers). The OA was one of the only contemporary shows I’ve ever seen that leaned on the notion — as creator-writer-star Brit Marling put it in her mournful post-cancellation Instagram post — “that the collective is stronger than the individual,” that “there is no hero,” that “humans [are] one species among many and not necessarily the wisest or the most evolved.” It was one of the only shows to grapple directly and beautifully with things like toxic masculinity, American gun violence, PTSD and trauma, the pitfalls of capitalism, impossible ethical quandaries — all this on top of coming up with that freakin’ octopus and staffing one of the most diverse casts and crews in TV history.
The inability for even me to find old posts here due to WriteFreely’s lack of pagination on hashtag pages, lack of native search, and the incompleteness of search results via Google or DuckDuckGo is becoming a real problem. The only work-around I can think of is to download and search a local archive and then manually call up the given URLs. That’s ridiculous and maddening.
I hate to tell you, CJ, but you very much are “writing into the void here” when you respond to that particular poster, given that they believe that most people are “lesser” and those people being present on the internet at all due to “lowering the bar of access” is the equivalent of “war”. You might be right that “small moments of shared humanity can be nurtured” but you won’t succeed at that talking with them.
It’s good that the press is talking about misogyny as it pertains to mass shootings in the U.S., but I can’t help but feel like we need to move beyond that term, especially since it doesn’t appear to apply to the motivations of the El Paso shooter, but the broader concept of toxic masculinity easily applies both to him and the Dayton shooter (and, for that matter, the Gilroy shooter). As rare as it is to see people openly discussing “a hatred of women”, it feels like a comparatively safe move on their part, versus tackling the more comprehensive issue of, well, traditionally masculine attitudes and behavior.
Unable to engage or focus, I found myself absently and endlessly scrolling up and down on this blog. I imagine it might have been a sort of virtual analogue to rocking back and forth. It did prompt me to resume my intermittent and continually-frustrated search for a local psychotherapist who grasps adult autism and is covered by my insurance.
But the media’s desire to erase the shooter and his ideology ended up erasing his victims and their community, too. While the news media successfully portrayed this shooting as part of a national epidemic of mass killings, we failed to accurately convey how this one was different. The visceral emotions of the Latinos I spoke with should have been—and should still be—front and center.
Whatever new stuff I am watching on television, I always also have some sort of rewatch going. Right now I am rewatching Humans, which easily can be seen as a sort of thematic sequel to Battlestar Galactica. You could consider the “evolution of robots” opening titles of the later series to pick up right where the final “evolution of robots” sequence of the earlier series leaves off.
Awhile back, I read an interview with archaeologist Jeremy Sabloff about archaeology learning “how to look beyond the temples and palaces” of the 1% and instead to look at the 99% below them, and I’d love to know if there’s a book on that subject, showing just how this shift came about and how it changed our understanding of various long-gone cultures.
Two years ago, British Columbia suffered one of the worst wildfires in the Canadian province’s history, which consumed 1.2 million hectares and displaced 65,000 people. The 2017 blaze was so intense that scientists are using it to model the climate conditions that might be created in the fallout of nuclear war, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.
One of my early-warning signs when watching a television show is finding myself almost unconsciously rewriting dialogue. This happened not long into the first episode of Wu Assassins on Netflix. Another sign for me is if one character accuses another of having a small penis as a way to insult them. This also happened not long into the first episode of Wu Assassins. Nonetheless, I finished the first and started in on the second episode of Wu Assassins, and I should have trusted my early judgment. Halfway into the second episode of Wu Assassins, a black thug shows up and immediately threatens to rape the white female co-lead in the ass. What I’m saying is don’t bother with Wu Assassins. It’s garbage. Wu Assassins on Netflix is garbage.
I found this Kimberly Hirsh memo on the evolution of academic thinking about the various features of so-called “affinity spaces” interesting, especially the different ways such spaces can think about things like skill levels, depths of interest, participation routes, and consumption versus creation. Affinity spaces aren’t limited to the online arena but that’s surely most of my own experience of such spaces.
It seemed to McMillan as if he was working in virgin territory, designing places for kids with a seriousness of purpose he hadn’t seen before. Watching children use his equipment, often in ways he could never have anticipated, made him more and more certain: play wasn’t a frivolous distraction from learning, but something essential to childhood and indeed humanity. The line-up-and-go-on-an-iron-ride model of the theme park was defunct. The key was to build things that sparked interaction, between kids and the equipment, but especially between the kids themselves. According to his design philosophy, each park wasn’t just a place to jump on a shockingly large air mattress. It was “a place where a child can ask questions of what it means to be human”.
Ayman Mohyeldin just conducted on MSNBC an entire conversation with Tony Romm and Clint Watts about today’s White House meeting with tech companies to address online extremism without once mentioning the draft White House executive order to protect online extremism, although they did mention the recent White House social media summit of online extremists.
Somehow in all the general wow and flutter, I missed that back in April Nancy Pelosi also threatened Section 230, deriding it as “gift” to internet companies that merely established a “privilege”, and threatening that it “could be removed”. Section 230 was not gift to internet companies, it was written as a gift to internet users since it would authorize and empower websites to engage in community management without fear of legal reprisal.
That young, white Trumpist who “drove 10 hours to El Paso from Houston to make his statement of support for President Trump” by brandishing a gun outside an immigrant community center reportedly is heading to Portland for next weekend’s Proud Boys event, which is expected to be countered by “the Spectacle”.
It doesn’t get much cable news coverage, but toxic masculinity lurks behind both of last weekend’s mass shootings, and now (well, two days ago, actually, although the mainstream press doesn’t seem to have picked up on it) we learn that the Dayton shooter’s first victim was not, as reported by the press, his sister, but in fact his trans brother. That a young man who’d once assembled rape and kill lists first shot his trans brother only reinforces that the underlying problem here is America’s problematic and damaging sense of what a man is “supposed” to be, made lethal by the easy access to guns.
Daniel Jalkut says that in your forties “you feel more competent, and empowered than you’ve ever been, yet also more despondent”. My recollection, as I stare down the barrel of the fifty coming my way in October, is that I’ve had bursts of competency eventually smothered by the pressure, very little in the way of empowerment, and an increasing despondency as certainty grows that the second half of my life looks pretty dire.
This effort to criminalize dissent doesn’t appear to bother those in the Democratic Party who are happy to use the labor and sacrifice of anti-fascist activists in Charlottesville as launching points for new chapters in their political careers. Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden launched his 2020 bid with the words Charlottesville, Virginia, strong invectives against President Donald Trump, and a video of anti–Unite the Right protesters being assaulted by torch-swinging white supremacists. Those of us who were there that night, though, did not face down the angry mob to send a message to Trump, but because we know—we have always known—that white supremacy is violent, hateful, murderous, and outrageously common. We faced down the angry mob because we never believed that neo-Nazis would abide by the “honor code.” And too often, we have had to do the jobs of protecting our community that those in power, like McAuliffe, couldn’t or wouldn’t.
We’re going to tax your mega churches so bad Joel Olsteen will need to get a job at Chik Fil A to pay his light bill. Speaking of Chik Fil A, we’re buying all those and giving them to any LGBTQ person your sick cult leaders tortured with conversion therapy. Have fun with the new menu you bigoted fucks. Try the McPence. It’s a boiled unseasoned chicken breast that you have to eat in the closet with your mother.
When you engage in surprise raids, round up hundreds of people, leave their children crying in parking lots, then almost immediately release half of the people you rounded up, there is no point except sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. This is state-sponsored terrorism. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a terrorist organization.
Sunday night, I began a free week of HBO through Amazon expressly to binge Years and Years, which so much of my Twitter feed had been watching as it aired. I’m not sure why I decided to watch a dystopian drama as my escapism after a weekend of mass shootings, but there you go. It wasn’t until a couple of episodes in that I noticed it was a Russell T. Davies show, which, given the even more brutal dystopia that was the wretched Torchwood: Miracle Day I guess makes sense. Mostly my takeaway is that Lydia West, who in her first television role plays Bethany Bisme-Lyons, should be cast in everything.
How very convenient for Trump that on the same day he’s duty-bound to go make presidential noises in El Paso in the wake of its white nationalist mass shooting (setting aside that he made those noises badly and unconvincingly), ICE stages massive raids in Mississippi against the very people both Trump and the El Paso shooter wrongly believe to be “invaders”, leaving children crying in the streets, effectively winking at his white nationalist base that nothing will change. How very convenient.
I’ve had the privilege of growing up in a tradition that didn’t believe in the myths and the legends because we had to bear the brunt of them. Either we’re going to change, Nicolle, or we’re going to do this again, and again, and babies are going to have to grow up without mothers, and fathers, uncles, and aunts, friends, while we’re trying to convince white folk to finally leave behind a history that will maybe, maybe, or embrace a history that might set them free from being white. Finally. Finally.
In the wake of another mass shooting by a white nationalist whose language apes that of the President of the United States, the White House is preparing an executive order targeting 47 U.S. Code § 230’s protections for moderating online content. I’m expressly tying these things together because it’s already been established that social media companies have resisted clamping down too hard on white nationalist content “because the collateral accounts that are impacted can … be Republican politicians”.
After Barack Obama’s victory, Republicans suddenly talked less about conservative economic orthodoxy—i.e., being anti-Big Government—and more about who deserves what. Even as they denied the racist roots on their thinking, Tea Party Republicans declared that entitlements were, wrote Reuters’ Chrystia Freeland, for “the deserving, hard-working citizen” as opposed to the “unauthorized, foreign freeloader.”
That’s what makes this bigger than a question of sloppy reporting. The Times’ error is the type of error made by powerful people who understand politics as a game played by two competing but symmetrical teams, who hardly dare imagine anything could come along that would truly threaten that status quo. That approach is not up to the challenge of the rise of a fundamentally illiberal, violent faction in America headed by a fundamentally racist, authoritarian president of the United States.
It’s probably time for another health update. Next month is the consult to discuss the lymph node questions mentioned in the last update and decide which ones to biopsy and what exactly those procedures will look like. That also will be the time for lab work to follow-up the “elevated decreased kidney function” found in the last round of tests.
This evening’s unbidden nostalgia led me to remember another bit of history: Rebecca Blood’s ten tips for blogging, as well as her weblog ethics, which I referenced in the site policies on Portland Communique. In my current return to blogging, I mostly still follow these ideas. Her seminal The Weblog Handbook remains available for Kindle.
Randomly thought of Cyborganic today, although I only ever had at most a kind of tangential interaction, mostly through Spacebar, I think, but I did attend a single Thursday Night Dinner after I moved to San Francisco. I know that I had a crush on someone I now don’t remember, but who certainly was out of my league. Inexplicably, there’s no Wikipedia page about the community but I did stumble onto “Utopian Socialities in an Entrepreneurial World: Cyborganic 1994-2003” by Jenny Cool, in case you’re asking yourself, “What the hell is a Cyborganic?”
Much of the press and the political establishment sees Trump’s racism as something he injected into a fundamentally good system, rather than some existent force he merely tapped into—either because they prefer to see it this way, or because they are morally or financially invested in believing in America’s essential innocence. That’s the only way to make sense, to take just one example, of CNN’s Chris Cillizza’s comically blinkered announcement on Twitter after the entire Republican Party lined up to defend the president’s conduct: “Every day, I am struck by how radically the GOP has changed from 2015 to today.” You see, pundits like Cillizza had believed that the Tea Party goons in tricornered hats were mad about the debt-to-GDP ratio, even though those goons actually spent most of their time shrieking about sharia law.
“Mitch McConnell,” I wrote, “will find some way to spin it.” Sure enough, his campaign has boys-will-be-boys’d photos of teenagers choking and groping a cardboard cutout of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This sort of blithe dismissal of toxic masculinity is the hidden breeding ground for incidents like this weekend’s mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio. Not all young men who behave like these Team Mitch high schoolers will go on to compile rape and kill lists as did the Dayton shooter, but pretending their behavior is no big deal affects the placement of teenage America’s Overton window when it comes to the objectification and disparagement of women.
If we don’t make it clear that toxic masculinity and our ongoing, routine dismissal of it (which is how police in Ohio somehow with a straight face can say there’s nothing in the shooter’s history to have precluded him from purchasing a gun despite, you know, having once assembled both kill and rape lists in high school) is responsible for the Dayton shooting, the Republican attempt to both-sides it will work.
Yet on the other hand, leaving the earth feels like the last thing we should be doing. Our planet is in crisis. We’re in the middle of a mass extinction event. There is increasing social and political polarisation and division. It’s hard to feel the same awe and excitement seeing another SpaceX rocket land successfully, when the waters are — metaphorically and literally — rising.
George Conway is a resistance grifter. Neither he nor Kellyanne Conway in reality care about the places they’ve staked out on opposite ends of the Trump spectrum. It’s a third-rate Carville/Matalin grift, and everybody knows it, even—or especially—the media figures who routinely quote George Conway’s tweets and then shake their heads as they play up the marriage as some sort of entertaining romantic/political conundrum. The couple is engaged in a lol-nothing-matters hussle in the middle of a grave national existential crisis. It’s the height of political nihilism, and every one of you who participates in it, including by elevating it to a level of worth taking seriously, is complicit.
Speaking this morning about these mass shootings, President Trump said that mass shootings are carried out by “mentally ill monsters” and claimed that in order to prevent them, we must “reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure these people not only get treatment but, when necessary, involuntary confinement.” These remarks are a blatant attempt to target and scapegoat people with disabilities in order to distract from the active role our President himself has played in inciting anti-immigrant sentiment and white supremacist violence. ASAN calls on policymakers and the American public not to be taken in by this dangerous rhetoric, but to insist on real, meaningful change.
Currently reading: Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, which is a bit weird to be reading right now because I only just recently read Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet by Will Hunt; and Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose Signal to Noise I enjoyed. You can browse my highlighted passages from these books, although it takes a bit of scrolling.
Mitch McConnell, et al, will find some way to spin it, but be very clear on this: these Team Mitch boys are displaying a variant of the selfsame toxic masculinity that erupted this weekend in Dayton and, via radicalization into white nationalism, El Paso. We need to tackle outright white nationalism, and we need to tackle guns, but even “just” toxic masculinity on its own, armed or not, generates an environment of threat.
I watched the video recording of the rally in Panama City shortly after reading the El Paso killer’s so-called manifesto. It is a document littered with phrases and rhetorical devices injected into mainstream discourse by the president and his supporters—talk of a “Hispanic invasion,” accusations that Democrats support “open borders,” and the like. As Trump faces the possibility that he will lose the presidency next year, he may become more enraged, and more willing to deploy the rhetoric of violence as a way to keep his followers properly motivated. The Panama City speech was an important moment in Trump’s ongoing effort to make the American presidency a vehicle in the cause of marginalizing and frightening racial minorities; the killings are a possible (and predictable) consequence of such rhetoric.
Netflix is home to two of the boldest things American television has tried, and while I thank them for giving it a go (and while I enjoy many of these international partnership series they’ve been producing lately), if they are getting out of the “unique vision” business, that’s a shame. I’m not sure there’s really anyone else filling that niche.
They themselves warn about this argument, although only vaguely and in passing, but be very, very wary of pushing the “imagine if these had been radical Islamic terrorists” comparison made by The New York Times editorial board, because it carries the danger of imposing upon ourselves more of the draconian (or, at the very least, misguided) measures enacted in the wake of 9/11. The lesson to take is that policy action is necessary, but we need to be vigilant about what kind of action.
This anti-outsider vibe and the erasure of the rightful owners of the land our city occupies are reminiscent of the blatant, glistening white supremacy I grew up around in Australia. In Portland, it’s cool to be pro-immigrant but hate people moving here. It’s hip to protest a border wall but definitely not want more people visiting the Gorge than already are. We all know cultural appropriation isn’t cool, but we will twerk around our white friends. We brag about our tolerance or liberalism while simultaneously shaming a Thai restaurant for its “tacky” (read: traditional) décor and rewarding the same cuisine packaged in the white upper-class aesthetics of hardwoods and Mason jar light fixtures. Portland is built upon and continues its legacy of exclusion, classism, and racism, thinly cloaked by declarations of good intention and the mantra of “I’m a nice person.”
Nothing endangers American public space in 2019 as much as mass shootings, says Yale sociologist Vida Bajc, who studies public space and security. In each of the four shootings, fundamental modes of our shared existence — eating, socializing, shopping, partying — gave way to blood, death, panic, and necessitated the response of a militarized police force.
Along with that D.C.-area soccer player stopping to call for gun control, I forgot to mention that what also needs to continue is the sort of anger on display this weekend by Tim Ryan, Beto O’Rourke and Beto O’Rourke. As reminded by someone I follow on Twitter, we’ve kind of needed a Network moment for awhile now, and I think that it’s time to drop the pretense that this sort of thing is inappropriate. It might be indecorous, it might be uncivil, but sometimes the inappropriate maybe is the only thing that’s appropriate.
But just as important, all of us have to send a clarion call and behave with the values of tolerance and diversity that should be the hallmark of our democracy. We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people. Such language isn’t new – it’s been at the root of most human tragedy throughout history, here in America and around the world. It is at the root of slavery and Jim Crow, the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. It has no place in our politics and our public life. And it’s time for the overwhelming majority of Americans of goodwill, of every race and faith and political party, to say as much – clearly and unequivocally.
My primary fandoms have all been week-by-week TV fandoms: Sailor Moon when it aired as an afternoon show in the 90s, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls (yes, Wonderfalls!), The Inside (I’m here for Tim Minear’s most obscure work), Veronica Mars, 30 Rock, New Girl. The intensity of my participation in fandom for each of these varies, but other than a brief flirtation with Star Wars fic in high school because Sonja was doing it, and some heavy time spent reading Harry Potter fic and playing in related RPs, weekly television is my medium of choice.
Don’t let them distract you. The perpetrators of this weekend’s two mass shootings might have held diametrically opposed party political views, but they shared two things: toxic masculinity and access to guns. White supremacy is not an inevitable destination for toxic masculinity but the latter is an ingredient of the former, and only one end of the American political spectrum is carrying on with the same rhetoric that grooms and radicalizes toxic (usually white) men into the violence of white nationalism.
White supremacy is a far bigger and more pervasive pathology than a single party, or even the entire electoral system. White liberal racism is a thing too, as is left racism, and both are destructive. But in the face of this wave of terror, there are some basic facts we need to state clearly: This violence has been abetted most specifically by the Republican Party. Its perpetrators are feeding on Trump’s unmistakably fascist, racist rhetoric, which in turn draws profligately from the same racist conspiracy theories and memes that populate the far-right boards where the killers plan.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has been an asshole for awhile, but because he’s tended to restrict his Twitter antics to tamping down fan enthusiasm for pop culture properties it’s mostly been just profoundly annoying. But could he really not stop himself from “well, actually”-ing public reaction to another mass shooting?
If we find violence motivated by hate unimaginable from sane people, it is only because we have forgotten the majority of human history. Short of retroactively diagnosing large swaths of past humanity with mental illness, it is difficult to justify the idea that hate requires mental pathology. Some do seek such a retroactive diagnosis, but such an approach seems to define mental illness down to simply mean “people who do abhorrent things”. The Nazis were not mentally ill. The KKK is not mentally ill. The campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq and in countless other places throughout history were not motivated by mental illness. To believe otherwise hurts those who actually do experience mental illness – and it leaves us unprepared to fight evil, because we refuse to believe it actually exists.
So this is who we are now. We go to bed still rattled from the day’s mass shooting, and we wake to the new day’s mass shooting. And to another day of the faith without works of the Republican Party doling out their thoughts and prayers while gun control legislation founders in the Senate. Politicize it. Politicize it all.
The day after the White House suspends a reporter because he offended one of Trump’s white nationalist guests at a social media summit a few weeks ago, a white nationalist gunman kills more than a dozen people in El Paso. These are threads in a single, ugly tapestry being woven with an increasing ferocity.
As a disabled person, this kind of unscientific thinking is a red-flag. There is a certain type of person you meet when you are visibly disabled or disclose an invisible illness. This person, usually abled, wants to help you “get well soon” — even if you have a chronic, incurable disease. They offer unsolicited health and wellness tips ranging from going vegan to trying “alkaline water.” And while these people may be well-meaning, the overall effect of their unwanted advice is to situate the blame for our chronic, incurable diseases on the people suffering from them. The implication is that if you just tried harder you could get well. This is extremely toxic for disabled people, and yet we encounter it all the time.
“Big news organizations often seem to editorially privilege the difficulties and even the feelings of Midwestern whites,” writes Greg Sargent. “I can’t cite a study that proves this. But you see it constantly.” He highlights the asymmetry of how the press views your basic white diner patron or factory worker as the go-to perspective to get on everything.
This profile by Elizabeth Flock of India’s so-called “Green Gang” in The California Sunday Magazine—”thousands of low-caste women have banded together to become vigilantes”–is legit remarkable, but I was not entirely prepared for the somewhat compromising turn it takes near the end. Hopefully when Angoori Dahariya’s story is optioned for the inevitable movie they don’t manage to cast Scarlet Johansson.
They believe cities are taking advantage of them, because the Republican Party has for decades been telling them we are real Americans while they who live in urban centers are atheist, criminal, lazy, parasitic, or even diseased. Meanwhile, “real Americans” are pure, hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying and virtuous. “We” are the makers in other words. “They” are the takers. The more very smart people seek an empirical basis for fictive fascist thinking, the more they actually legitimize fascist politics.
Immoral or criminal autistic people need to stop blaming their autism for their immoral or criminal acts. Just as Nick Starr-Street didn’t harass black women because of his autism, Jason Berlin didn’t rape a woman because of his autism. Of lesser import but still important, however, is that autistic people need to stop talking about an allegedly strong sense of right and wrong that somehow emerges from being autistic.
CJ Eller draws a line from Jorn Barger to Vannevar Bush (or would that be from Vannevar Bush to Jorn Barger?) and, really, I find it interesting that twenty years on, new blogging is talking about old blogging, and at some point I am either going to be suffering from a kind of web whiplash (weblash?) or just start feeling like I’m on some sort of Billy Pilgrimage.
At this stage of human history, stars have lost their critical role of orienteering signposts and human humility reminder. They are almost invisible to urban dwellers. There is an aesthetic vacuum up there. Since the human race does not like to leave blank spaces, some started to think that we can pimp our starless sky with twinkling satellites, fake shooting stars and pieces of art. How will the sky look in 30 years from now? To which extent will we be aware of the artificiality of the night landscape? Will it matter, if we can get some magic twinkling in our life?
Politicians and pundits need to get over the idea that the middle will save us. White supremacist terrorism is going largely unchecked, states are trying to make abortion punishable by prison time, and we are running large-scale baby jails and concentration camps on the border. There’s no such thing as moderates anymore — only those who can tolerate these injustices, and those who can’t.
It’s been awhile since I had a good “who the fuck is writing this timeline” moment, but this jaw-dropper of a New York Times piece that no one asked for or ever would ask for likely qualifies as an all-time winner. Revealed by the Times is that Jeffrey Epstein apparently had something of a transhumanist eugenics bent that included a desire to seed the world by impregnating women at a New Mexico facility. I’m left pleading to the sky for an answer to why all these evil men with which we have found ourselves surrounded seem to be a combination of James Bond villain, Wile E. Coyote, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Everyone’s going to write about the eugenics (or maybe the penis-freezing!), so what I wanted to note was a uniquely-batshit revelation elsewhere in the article.
These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions.When does silence become complicity? What will it take for us all to say, with one voice, that we have had enough? The question is less about the president’s sense of decency, but of ours.
It’s a madness, alas, we must take literally and seriously. If we continue to look for a reason why the president attacked Baltimore, we are distracting ourselves from what’s going on. Trump is not attacking one set of policies in order to justify another set of policies. There is no motive. There is no cause and effect. He’s attacking the very thinking that goes into policy-making. In other words, he’s attacking our minds until we stop thinking altogether and all that’s left is him and the power he wields.
There are two things I wish were the takeaways from last night’s debate but won’t be, because neither of them fit into the usual narratives: Buttigieg’s admonition against campaigning based upon what the Republicans will say, and Williamson’s (yes, look, I know, and I’ll get to it) trenchant analysis of race in America.
Sarah Kurchak has a good response to critics of Hannah Gadsby, especially the weird idea that Gadbsy somehow might be invoking autism as a kind of criticism shield. It’s an especially strange critique, to be sure, not just given that autistic people often are judged simply for being autistic, but given that Gadsby herself doesn’t even think autism is a disability, having once nonsensically intoned, “It’s not autism that makes it difficult to live with autism.”
‘I have this plan,’ Merlin [Sheldrake] says, ‘that for each formal scientific paper I ever publish I will also write its dark twin, its underground mirror-piece – the true story of how the data for that cool, tidy hypothesis-evidence-proof paper actually got acquired. I want to write about the happenstance and the shaved bumblebees and the pissing monkeys and the drunken conversations and the fuck-ups that actually bring science into being. This is the frothy, mad network that underlies and interconnects all scientific knowledge – but about which we so rarely say anything.’
Now, there is growing recognition that buildings not only need to be designed to be functional and aesthetically pleasing, but acoustically satisfying as well – leading some architects and engineers to rethink how spaces are shaped and the materials they are made from.Scientific research suggests they are wise to do so. Noisy work and home settings have been proven to annoy people, and noise annoyance itself has been linked to depression and anxiety. Furthermore, issues concentrating in the workplace due to office noise and intermittent noise has been found to significantly reduce human performance.
“Did you know that fewer than 1% of people on Twitter produce most of the Tweets that break our rules against abuse?” asks a new sitewide message making its way (and making a plea to “support a culture of respect on Twitter”) into users’ feeds today. “Please take a look at our rules to know what is and isn’t allowed.” Everything about this message is wrong, except perhaps that statistic, which I’ve no way of checking. It’s worth noting, however, that if Twitter’s self-reported numbers are to be believed, this still is three million people running around abusing others. It’s not clear to me just who is the audience for this message. Those three million people, or any new users like them, are not going to be dissuaded from abuse by it. In fact, it often seems like it’s the Twitter moderation team itself that needs to read the site’s rules, as violators routinely managed to go unpunished. But what I really want to call out here is the notion that “respect” should be the goal of community standards of conduct. Respect is a thing with asymmetrical impact favoring the privileged and the powerful. Respect is kin to “civility”. Respect is used by Twitter nazis to tone-police their targets into being silenced by moderators. Respect is weaponized to game the enforcement of rules in a way which encourages abusers and discourages victims. With all due respect, Twitter, this new message strategy regarding abuse in your community is a piece of shit.
I don’t have bladder cancer, according to the biopsies. Hilariously, and ironically given my thing about the use of messaging, I missed a message from my urologist last Thursday during my hazy surgery recovery daze telling me this. I could have been relaxing on the cancer thing for the past five days, but no.
One of the disadvantages so far to not finding a therapist covered by my insurance who understands autism, let alone adult autism, that has become achingly clear over the past couple of weeks: my anxiety remains completely unconfronted by medication. Just last Friday, I suffered an epic anxiety attack at the urologist’s office that easily lasted at least half an hour. (One that, not-so-incidentally, would have been visibly obvious to anyone that passed by, including all of the doctors, nurses, and other staff who never asked if I was okay.) I was, at least, given something prior to my surgery last Monday, as I lay prone on a hospital bed and naked except for that flimsy gown. Today, I’m having one I’d say is “moderate” as I await a telephone appointment with my urologist to get the lay of the medical land, as it were. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. Low levels of anxiety I can often walk back through some rudimentary breathing exercises, but cross the threshold into a more intense attack, and I am left at sea.
Todd McCarthy, the 69-year-old film critic at The Hollywood Reporter who dismissed critics of the casting of Tilda Swinton in Dr. Strange as “politically correct … alarmists” and disparaged Diego Luna in Rogue One as not being “a strong and vigorous male lead” today decided to complete a sort of trifecta by confessing the “throbbing” he felt while watching… Dora and the Lost City of Gold.
For awhile now I’ve been interested in how trauma gets laid down in the brain, because I’ve wondered if the way sensory and other stimuli hit the autistic brain carries a risk of causing trauma, especially with research suggesting persistent connections in such brains. I’ve wondered if such connections effectively mean that, for example, ongoing environmental stimuli don’t give the autistic brain time to recover from moment to moment, creating a kind of mounting pressure. In comes a story on Spectrum today about sensory overload and hypervigilance which seems to support pretty much exactly this idea.
As a member of the Oregon Trail generation, I came of age alongside the Web. I had access to much of it a little earlier than my peers, because my dad’s work provided home access for him. As an adolescent, I had this sort of constant feeling of the immense potential of my life ahead of me and of the Web, and as a young adult I really leaned into that, blogging starting in 2001. It’s not a big leap from me to this rando kid on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “I Robot, You Jane” who says, “The only reality is virtual. If you’re not jacked in, you’re not alive.” I feel this visceral connection to the Web that I have a hard time putting in words.
Compensation might be an adaptive trajectory that can be differentiated from other trajectories in psychiatry, such as resilience, in which a negative outcome is avoided, behaviourally, cognitively, and neurologically, despite exposure to risk. Instead, autistic compensators, despite apparent lack of observable autistic behaviour, continue being autistic at the neurocognitive level. Importantly, compensation can generate challenges in diagnosing and supporting these individuals. Because autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed by behaviour alone, compensators might not receive a diagnosis and support until later in life, if at all. This issue is thought to be particularly acute in females, who are less likely than males to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder despite similar underlying autistic characteristics. Even for people with a diagnosis, a neurotypical appearance due to compensation might result in support needs being underestimated in educational and workplace settings. Additionally, compensation is thought to contribute to poor mental health in autism. Compensatory attempts are taxing, need to be sustained over time, and are often unsuccessful, resulting in a cost to wellbeing.
“Well then, my final ‘reason’ for not supporting social justice is a really simple one,” admits Nils Grønkjær, “and that is I think that suffering is actually a somewhat healthy and fundamental part of being a living being.” This after earlier in the post admitting “the concept of social justice has no personal appeal to me” because “I want for almost nothing in life. I’m not lonely, I’m not poor and most of all I’m not bored with my life.”
Trump does not need a Soviet Politburo. He does not need a Nazi Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda. He does not need an army of Russian saboteurs. He doesn’t even need House Republicans repeating conspiracy theories. All this president needs to make war on the truth, break the law, profane the US Constitution and undermine the will of the people is a press corps as aggressively anti-moral as ours.
It’s not clear whether Pelosi even thinks people actually believe this line of reasoning. She just doesn’t seem to think it’s her job to convince them. Voters handed Democrats a meaningful avenue for holding the executive branch accountable in 2018, but Pelosi seems to have no interest in the hard work of doing that, except inasmuch as it means Democratic Party elites will issue public statements condemning the president’s actions, and effectively fundraise off of those public statements. As far as she’s concerned, her assurance that she’s in some distant fashion righting the wrongs of Trumpism by hoarding her own symbolic political power should be action enough for now.
The authoritarianism of indifference. That’s what [Free Speech Absolutists] are implementing: an infinite acceptance of toxic speech and malicious ideas, built on the accusation that any criticism or attempt at gatekeeping is a slippery slope toward mass censorship. To make it worse, FSA’s focus is toward a handful of issues, all conveniently targeted by far-left activists and groups. It reeks of reactionism. FSA’s and their sympathizers argue they should be able to discuss race IQ “science,” refuse using a person’s preferred pronouns, and mingle with racists and vitriolic conspiracy theorists with no consequences. Absolute freedom, with absolutely no concern for others.
I haven’t posted anything today because the day began at 5:30am not for the Mueller hearing as planned but for dealing with the urine on my bedroom floor because apparently I had not locked the drain spout on the catheter bag during its previous emptying. Fortunately for convenience’s sake I’ve been hanging the bag inside a small waste paper basket, so most of the urine actually was just pooled at the bottom of that. But since I didn’t notice the problem until I went to pull the bag out of the basket, a fair amount of urine had been splashed onto the floor as well.
Not for nothing, but I think Joe Biden should read this Jane Coaston piece asking the right to imagine for a moment that the left has been correct, all along, on race and on the right’s problem with race, because what she’s describing, in fact, is the “time before Trump” back to which Biden says he wants to take us, and the fact that he doesn’t comprehend this is hugely problematic.
While I don’t think the retweet is some sort of smoking gun for what’s wrong with social media, I do think there’s a strong argument for discussing how to build more friction–and more context–into actions we can take on social media platforms. I’m not sure what form that takes, but I do think that push-button reactions don’t communicate much except as analytics data.
It’s not that tricky. Conservative intellectuals have always been, in one way or another, in agreement with overt white supremacists. They just had the good sense of understanding the social liability of being openly racist in Washington, where such “impolitic gestures” might cost them a fellowship or coveted inches in the legitimate press. Moreover, conservatives have been at least OK, one way or another, with state intervention as long as the beneficiaries were the right ones. Conservative Democrats greenlit the New Deal’s expansion provided it excluded black people.
It’s the day after my bladder surgery, and as much as I talked about it beforehand, I don’t really want to talk about it much here. It’s been more suited to short in-the-moment bursts on Twitter than something comprehensive and thought out. Suffice it to say that, so far, the catheter has been more annoyance than burden. We will see how I feel about its removal on Friday, for which I have to be awake.
CJ Eller is talking about friction again, although without using the word. This time it’s about the different cognitive impacts of differing ways to “copy” information. “I wonder,” they ask, “whether the gulf between copying and comprehension is salvageable.” If such a gulf exists, I’d suggest some of it can be bridged by what CJ Eller is doing, and what I am doing: blogging. One thing I’ve noticed lately is that if I save links to blog about rather than links to “read later” (and they are right when they ask how often it seems like we are saving links to forget to read), I end up not only reading more of them but also creating a record of having done so.
It isn’t that Facebook or Twitter aren’t communities but that social media companies self-promotionally call them communities while actually treating them merely as userbases. Social media platforms are, and contain, communities—sometimes singular and solitary, sometimes cross-pollinating and overlapping, sometimes fleeting and ephemeral. How what’s treated by the company at issue as just a userbase itself makes use of the platform often is more about the users than the makers. I’d have less of a problem with the companies themselves referring to their users as a community, or communities, if they ever considered them that in any way other than rhetorically.
To appreciate the charms of small structures, it is useful to remind ourselves that we primarily interact with architecture from a ground level rather than the god’s-eye view employed in films and renderings. The architecture of day-to-day urban life is driven by utility and merges so integrally into our tasks that we barely notice it as architecture. There have been visionary architects who have recognized and celebrated the underrated nobility of everyday life, and there are some superlative little wonders scattered around our cities.
But more frustrating than pure semantics is that liberalism’s most ardent defenders tend to credit the liberal order for victories won beyond the means of properly liberal politics. More often than not, the march toward justice in liberal societies has been fueled by illegal strikes, civil disobedience, riots, and, at times, the threat of violence—not merely winning arguments in the “public square.” If we always played by liberalism’s rules, abiding by its preference for legal and parliamentary procedure over open revolt, the progressive victories now attributed to liberalism’s natural egalitarian tendencies would never have been achieved.
As the English writer and academic Mark Fisher tells us in Ghosts of My Life, in the 21st century we exist in “a general condition: in which life continues, but time has somehow stopped.” The “general trajectory” of the future has disappeared—and, with it, culture “has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present.” Popular culture exists in a constant stasis of anachronism and “formal nostalgia”, with the music of artists like Adele exemplifying a general “classic” tone which—in terms of its sonic signifiers—could be temporally placed anywhere from around 1950 on. “Or it could be,” Fisher goes on to hint, “that there is no present to grasp and articulate any more.” Without the general trajectory of the future, we have lost the ability to understand what it would mean to be present anywhere—we have only the past.
Getting mad at McConnell for hypocrisy is like getting mad at your cat for not understanding English. He does not hold values higher than power, so expecting him to respond to charges of hypocrisy is like expecting your cat to talk. The proper response therefore is to stop giving McConnell, Trump or the Republicans the benefit of the doubt. Expect them to sabotage democracy. Democracy threatens them.
It would be nice if the Beltway press corps for the love of god or whatever would stop aiding and abetting Ivanka Trump’s repeated efforts at rehabilitating her reputation in real-time. Until and unless the story is that she’s renounced her father and his supposed fortune, everything else is just image laundering, which she is free to engage in but reporters have no professional reason to help her out, and every professional reason to rebuff.
This is the sort of thing that actually makes me glad I don’t blog on Write.as, because I know I’d pick fights with people like this who blame “wokeness” for Donald Trump rather than blaming bigotry. Here’s the thing, though: this performative display of having roommates and a wife of a different race than their own itself is white fragility in action. You only go out of your way to bring these sorts of things up in order to use them as a shield.
A lot of people believe that a racist action happens because a person (who is racist in every single encounter) gets up in the morning and says, “I sure do have an irrational hate of X race. How can I be more racist toward that group every day and every way?” And, when that person engages in a racist action, s/he says, “I am doing this to you purely because you are X race.” Thus, as long as someone isn’t deliberately hostile, or their hostility isn’t irrational, or they don’t explicitly mention race, they didn’t do something racist.
As of this writing, hours after the fact, Trump’s basking in the violent cries of “Send her back!” directed at Representative Ilhan Omar has yet to yield any response from Speaker Pelosi, Leader Hoyer, or the Democratic National committee, although the latter’s “war room” was watching the rally, and Hoyer had time to tweet about emoji.
Tipping further entrenched a unique and often racialized class structure in service jobs, in which workers must please both customer and employer to earn anything at all. A journalist quoted in Kerry Segrave’s 2009 book, Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities, wrote in 1902 that he was embarrassed to offer a tip to a white man. “Negroes take tips, of course; one expects that of them—it is a token of their inferiority,” he wrote. “Tips go with servility, and no man who is a voter in this country is in the least justified in being in service.”
Trying to scare white people is an effective political strategy, but it is also an effective ratings and traffic strategy. Trump’s ability to manipulate the media through provocation and controversy has been effective precisely because covering those provocations and controversies provides news outlets with the ears and eyeballs they crave. Trump considers the media “the enemy of the people” only when it successfully undermines his falsehoods; at all other times, it is a force multiplier, obeying his attempts to shift topics of conversation from substantive policy matters to racial scaremongering. The tenets of objectivity by which American journalists largely abide hold that reporters may not pass judgment on the morality of certain political tactics, only on their effectiveness. It’s a principle that unintentionally rewards immorality by turning questions of right and wrong into debates over whether a particular tactic will help win an election.
Sometime between seasons four and five of Portlandia, after a two-year stint abroad, I moved from the Kingdom of Morocco to the City of Roses. I settled first in rural Oregon. A year later I settled in Portland proper. And a couple enlightening years after that, I settled for the natural beauty and the promise of this place despite its glaring shortcomings.I’m talking about its lack of racial diversity and its history of racial prohibition. Its integration and then systematic marginalization of communities of color. And its circumstances today as one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country, or the way I see it, one of the fastest growing cradles for whiteness.
Normally I would find a good pull quote and just post this as a link, but I expressly want to call attention to “Me and Monotropism” by Fergus Murray, because I think the “focus on some key features of autism as seen from the inside” (emphasis mine) is key to convincing more people to look at autism through this lens of monotropism. Especially important to my mind is the reframing of “executive dysfunction” as “autistic inertia”.
The press has been covering this as tit for tat. One side hits. The other hits back. On it goes, leaving citizens to wonder what’s what. Or worse: leaving us to wonder if all they want to do in Washington is fight and not get anything done. The news has been lots of heat but no light. Result: journalistic malpractice and a bewildered citizenry.It doesn’t have to be this way. Journalists can but don’t act morally. I do not mean moralizing. I mean assessing information methodically and coming to a reasonable conclusion about its meaning—then relaying that information, and meaning, so we all of us are better informed citizens. In other words, acting like grown-up journalists.
And I fear that we are collectively making a big mistake. To strip away honest words about a phenomenon like this seems to me an abdication of our post. To turn explicit racism in a demagogic presidential candidate into merely railing against immigration feels like the kind of malpractice that, in historical retrospect, often is seen as culpable for dark and gruesome things.
The convention adopted “high crimes and misdemeanors” with little discussion. Most of the framers knew the phrase well. Since 1386, the English parliament had used “high crimes and misdemeanors” as one of the grounds to impeach officials of the crown. Officials accused of “high crimes and misdemeanors” were accused of offenses as varied as misappropriating government funds, appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting cases, not spending money allocated by Parliament, promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates, threatening a grand jury, disobeying an order from Parliament, arresting a man to keep him from running for Parliament, losing a ship by neglecting to moor it, helping “suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament,” granting warrants without cause, and bribery. Some of these charges were crimes. Others were not. The one common denominator in all these accusations was that the official had somehow abused the power of his office and was unfit to serve.
BuzzFeed has some pretty peculiar journalistic standards. Earlier today this story included a flat, declaratory statement by its author: “The federal act’s protections are contingent on these companies acting neutrally.” The federal act in question being 47 U.S. Code § 230, establishing “protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material”.
For years I resisted getting a professional evaluation of whether or not I was actually autistic because the family member that had been suggesting it can exhibit sort of a projected hypochondria (e.g. any sniffle means I should go to the doctor because it might be pneumonia), but in the end they were right on the autism count.
What is maddening to me is that we already have a party in an overt panic over demographic change and it’s the Republican Party, and we don’t need the Democrats engaging in some sort of Lite version through centrism or civility or whatever it is House Democrats have been up to this week (although I guess it obviously hasn’t been “civility”).
As human beings, we live by emotions and thoughts. We exchange them when we are in the same place at the same time, talking to each other, looking into each other’s eyes, brushing against each other’s skin. We are nourished by this network of encounters and exchanges. But, in reality, we do not need to be in the same place and time to have such exchanges. Thoughts and emotions that create bonds of attachment between us have no difficulty in crossing seas and decades, sometimes even centuries, tied to thin sheets of paper or dancing between the microchips of a computer. We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.
It should be noted, when Mike Pence says that people in America’s concentration camps have “access to hygiene”, that when trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act the Republican Party often touted its own support for “access to healthcare”, but it was pretty well established when looking at their ideas that providing “access to healthcare” shouldn’t have been read to mean providing healthcare.
So many interesting things you can do on Write.as that you simply can’t do on a hosted WriteFreely site, like this creative method of receiving “letters to the editor” by giving readers the address for posting-by-email to a private blog that you check for comments to address or engage. I wish I knew what the timeframe was for including existing Write.as features and functions on WriteFreely.host sites.
The second issue is the prolonged placement of children in institutional settings. Obviously, the two are linked in this particular situation. From the perspective of what we know about children’s health and well-being, what we know about trauma, abrupt separation is one area where we have a lot of research and a lot of evidence about its consequences. But prolonged institutionalization is a separate area in which we have an equally deep research base and knowledge about how damaging that kind of setting is for kids. We are dealing with two very well-studied, serious assaults on the health and well-being of children.
There’s no good reason to do this. The families who are going to get broken up aren’t any better or worse than those who will watch this happen, or the millions of others who will look away. The people who are going to get rounded up and thrown into concentration camps won’t be collected because they’ve hurt anyone else. And even if some truly bad apples get caught up in the dragnet, it isn’t as if justice will be served: Mass expulsion is widely considered a crime against international law itself.
I don’t know which office or department has been leaving voicemails last night and today, but even on a good autistic-brain-day, it takes me awhile to get to voicemails I don’t know what they are about ahead of time, and the entire past week (up to and including Thursday’s “oh, nope, sorry you don’t have a proper recovery helper set up” debacle) has been too much mental stress and strain as it is.
And the first ethical hacker was René Carmille, the comptroller general of the French Army, who headed up the French census before the Germans invaded. The Germans instructed Carmille to input census data into IBM machines and have it analyzed to produce a full list of Jews living in France. Carmille and his team had a different idea. They hacked the punch card machines so that data could not be entered for the column that specified religion. His sabotage worked until 1944, when the Nazis discovered the plot. Carmille was tortured and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, and he died shortly thereafter.
Tomorrow’s surgery has been thrown into question by a new-to-me set of requirements for the person who will be driving me home and babysitting me afterward. This morning’s scheduling email from Kaiser Permanente suddenly revealed that they expect my helper to be onsite during the surgery, something I did not arrange because it wasn’t previously mentioned, and in fact my current helper isn’t even available under later in the afternoon.
And what do these shows have in common? White guys. Specifically, white guy showrunners. Before we proceed, let’s clarify: The problem is not white guys, per se. It’s that even when “woke” white creators attempt to wade into the waters of feminism, it only goes deep enough to explore issues as they relate to white women, because often that’s all they know. Audiences deserve shows that explore the issue through decentralizing a single point-of-view, i.e. white women. And if you think that hiring a couple women for the writer’s room grants you the keys to the kingdom of the entire feminine experience, you are sorely mistaken.
Someone today seemed surprised that I wasn’t automatically conceding their contention that people should feel guilty for being on Twitter. (This came up on Mastodon during today’s Twitter outage.) If I felt guilty about inhabiting every online or offline space that is compromised I would have to go live on the Moon.
Offline, our lives are hemmed in by institutions that force us to engage System 2, even when we are disinclined to. Children are taught to wait their turn before talking; grown-ups are frequently required to wait before marrying, divorcing, buying a gun. No matter how sure they may feel, scientists face peer review, lawyers face adversarial proceedings, and so forth. Also, back in the day, before instanticity, technology itself slowed us down. Printing and distributing words required several distinct stages and often multiple people; even a trip to the mailbox or a wait for the mail carrier afforded time for second thoughts. Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, and Winston Churchill were among the many public figures who wrote what Lincoln called “hot letters,” splenetic missives that vented anger but were never mailed. (Usually. One of Truman’s rants escaped and threatened a Washington Post writer with a black eye.)
It’s no secret that American public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car—for instance, by building a massive network of urban and interstate highways at public expense. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency on the automobile. To begin with, mundane road regulations embed automobile supremacy into federal, state, and local law. But inequities in traffic regulation are only the beginning. Land-use law, criminal law, torts, insurance, vehicle safety regulations, even the tax code—all these sources of law provide rewards to cooperate with what has become the dominant transport mode, and punishment for those who defy it.
The Republican Party was not always so sadistic, but elements of sadism were always present even when the party was still committed, in word and deed, to the demands of liberal democracy. (You could say William Buckley’s long career was an effort to suppress the GOP’s sadism or at least make it look respectable.) The party’s democratic commitments started to unravel during the 1990s and finally blew apart after the country elected its first black president. Conservatism detached from democracy is fascism, and that’s precisely the Republican Party we now have.
Things are still quite a ways away from Write House accepting its first invite-only members. In truth, I might have gotten things underway a bit early, given the alpha state of WriteFreely and the number of things that should be in place before bringing other people on board. However, you’ve got options if in the meantime you’d like just to support my own return to more routine blogging.
“What we like contributes to the picture of who we are,” writes Kimberly Hirsh about constructing identity online, “but what we want people to know we like does even more so, I think.” I don’t have anything insightful to say about this at the moment except that I wanted to wonder whether this outward-facing curation has anything to do with the how and the why of some people thinking that online is not real life even though we outwardly curate ourselves offline, too. Also, it made me think about my observation that I don’t have a stable or constant sense of self, and I wish some outside omniscience could look back over my life and see how both my sense of self and my outwardly-curated identity varied over time, and to what degree they did so in sync or at odds with one another.
Speaking of management, I remain somewhat disappointed that my pet theory for the identity of Management on the cancelled Counterpart turned out not to be correct. I don’t think I ever posted it, but my idea was that Management would turn out to be the only people who were not duplicated when the universe was split in two. Presumably the people present at the schism’s epicenter, I imagined how interesting the dynamics both of power and of identity might be amongst a group of people responsible for doubling the universe, especially as it concerned the metaphysical yet pragmatic question of which was the “real” world and which was the copy. Would the members of Management take different sides, or would Management as a whole try for some sort of neutrality? Would they think of themselves as belonging to one world or to the other, to both worlds or to neither? Maybe this is a good premise for an entirely different show: the lives of people who accidentally remake the world and whether they will help or hinder those worlds from tearing themselves, or each other, apart.
This is the suffocatingly grim reality: Even after the peeling off of a layer of the political media’s most prominent interlocutors during #MeToo—including Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Bill O’Reilly and Matt Lauer —television coverage of the 2020 election is still being led by men who have sketchy histories around gender and power. Even after a midterm season in which women—many of them women of color, some of them very progressive—won elections in historic numbers; even in the midst of a presidential crisis during which poor, black, brown, and immigrant communities have been made more vulnerable than ever, and have been brought closer to the center—finally—of left political engagement and activism; even given all of this, so many of the voices interpreting the events around us still belong to the guys who’ve been clumsily telling us what to think about politics for ages.
Even on their own terms, the civility police had missed the point. At that point, when the evidence was clear that this bill would hurt people (and was overwhelmingly rejected by public consensus) and the Senate Republicans were looking to pass it anyway (whether to achieve tax cuts, deliver a political promise to the hard right, or placate Donald Trump) there was no space for civil debate. People in power were simply trying to do an indefensible thing. Elizabeth Warren was using the language that people use to describe indefensible actions, and she was using it clearly and accurately. But certain types of political minds were more offended by her description of these actions than by the actions themselves. In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” Politicians mask descriptions of their atrocities in vague or meaningless language to obscure them. In civility-policed discourse, something similar is at play. The language that can plainly describe terrible things is declared out of bounds, so, in response to an atrocity, you’re faced with either normalizing it or stepping out of line to name it.
Having recently watched Jinn and more recently watched the second season of Dark, my ongoing tour of international Netflix shows continues this weekend with Leila, the first episode of which is sort of a mix of The Handmaid’s Tale and Orange Is the New Black but with more every day moments of routine sadistic debasement.
Kaiser Pemanente waited until one week out from my bladder surgery and biopsies to tell me that whoever I arrange to bring me in the morning needs to stay there all day and be the one who takes me back home in the afternoon, thereby scuttling the current lead options for my transportation and babysitting needs that day. Now I have seven days to find a solution that doesn’t involve mental and emotional stresses that I simply cannot manage on top of the physical and psychological ones of, you know, the surgery and recovery themselves.
Until reading this Jonathan M. Katz piece yesterday, I guess that I hadn’t seen the actual reasons for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reportedly becoming visibly angry at border agents during her recent tours of America’s concentration camps. It wasn’t even in the distance. She was two feet in front of me, and there was this glass perimeter in front of them. And that’s when all hell broke loose. Because I pointed at her as she was holding the phone in front of everybody: the entire congressional delegation, the acting director, all of their supervisors. And I said, “Look at her. She’s taking a selfie right after everything that was just released this morning. Which you all just indicated you’re aware of.” And I was like, “Look at her. She’s taking a selfie right now.”
I wish that when I’d posted about mistaking Seattle’s “breathing rooms” as safe places to go when you’re trying to avoid a mental health crisis that I’d yet read the Sarah Holder piece on open-plan offices adding “pods” for privacy, although I’m loathe to link it because in the early going it quotes a little too much Dilbert, and any Dilbert is too much Dilbert.
Most people most of the time would note, at the very least, that choosing between one’s God and one’s child is unfair. Others might say God sabotaged Abraham. Other might question Abraham’s mental health. But to the “Christians” we’re talking about, this is not a dilemma. The answer is simple and clear. God is the ultimate authority. No questioning. No negotiating. If you’re wondering, yes, the Almighty here is a fascist and in every way the diametric opposite of the loving merciful God of the Gospels. The “Christians” we’re talking about do not look on the faces of migrant children and see undue harm and suffering. They see people getting what they had coming to them.
Multiple things can be true at the same time. In this instance, it’s true that more people wearing backpacks need to be conscious of how much more room their bodies take up because of them, and, yes, there are situations in which, if you can, you should remove them. However, it’s also true that Michael Callahan is an asshole. One good thing to come out of this nonsense, however, is Ernie Smith’s history of backpacks over on Tedium.
So, it turns out that in its current state, WriteFreely, the platform Write House runs on, doesn’t paginate hashtag pages, which means currently each of my various archives (including the date archives which currently are just made from hashtags) only go back ten posts. The only way to find anything older than that is to browse my front page through the “Older”/“Newer” pagination links at the bottom, methodically one by one. It’s either a bug or a temporary oversight. Sorry for any inconvenience, although I can’t imagine very many people are coming here to find older posts just yet.
Tonight I burned through the last three episodes in season two of Dark, so that tomorrow I can binge season three of Stranger Things while our fascist-in-chief is off publicly masturbating to tanks on the National Mall, although with any luck thunderstorms will make his martial madness a sadder affair than his inauguration. Dark is maybe the densest thicket of time travel storytelling television’s ever done (like, if you had any trouble following the later seasons of Lost, maybe don’t try Dark), and I don’t quite understand how they’re going to work in this season finale’s setup for the show’s third and last season, but I’m game.
Let’s be clear: this is a public admission that he knowingly views these conditions as a deterrent, and that amounts to a confession to committing crimes against humanity, and that is grounds for immediate impeachment. It’s long past time for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to decide who they want to be when the history books are written.
At Ursula, however, the children Sevier examined—like the panting 2-year-old—were “totally fearful, but then entirely subdued,” she told me. She could read the fear in their faces, but they were perfectly submissive to her authority. “I can only explain it by trauma, because that is such an unusual behavior,” she said. Sevier had brought along Mickey Mouse toys to break the ice, and the kids seem to enjoy playing with them. Yet none resisted, she said, when she took them away at the end of the exam. “At some point,” Sevier mused, “you’re broken and you stop fighting.”
Other than the free loaf of bread here and there, the only thing of value I got out of playing some collect-and-win game at the local Safeway was a Shutterfly discount on a 20”x30” print. Due to arrive while I am in post-op recovery at home after surgery next Friday is a print of this, which I’ll still have to find the money to frame at some point.
There’s a bunch of stuff I wanted to write about, or at least link, but today almost entirely is about the 90-minute commute to a nurse consult about catheter care and other post-operative recovery information, the nurse consult about catheter care and other post-operative recovery information, the 90-minute commute back from the nurse consult about catheter care and other post-operative recovery information, and the state of my mental health during and after all of this.
That last post, it turns out, does not do justice to how angry I’ve suddenly become tonight. There was no time, earlier, as I was off on my weekly mental health trip to the zoo, and I do tend to treat that as a protected environment for self-care. But within minutes of putting up that last post, I inflicted an increasingly-hostile rant upon my Twitter followers.
It’s all well and good, and necessary, that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus went on a barnstorming tour of some of America’s concentration camps, but combine what the delegation found even with authorities on their “best” behavior with the massive ProPublica scoop about racist and dehumanizing border agent attitudes in a private Facebook group and I can’t help but feel like the only thing commensurate with and proportional to the degree of cruelty and the extent of inhumanity is for all 280 congressional Democrats to travel en masse to one of these camps. Small delegations are important, and good, and need to keep happening, but I feel like if this isn’t a thing for a party to “go big” on, then nothing is. Not because it’s partisan, but because true politics is driven by morality, and the immorality—or is it amorality?–of what’s happening is simply too immense for, well, politics as usual.
I keep forgetting that the platform behind Write House is not even beta software, it’s alpha software, and it only just today hit version 0.10. For my purposes here as I slowly (not a critique, just a description) watch WriteFreely come together for an eventual invite-only launch of my instance here, the only relevant change in the new version is I’m able to redirect visitors from the base URL to this site’s “About” page, since the regular landing page is irrelevant until Write House actually opens up.
From the post-modern conservative position, what they believe has no bearing on their rhetoric or argument, which is from the position that truth – objective, material truth – does not exist. Whoever wins the argument decides that the color of the sky or the existence of oppression, regardless of what is happening in reality. Reality, to the post-modern conservative, has no bearing on truth.
If you listen to pundits, Democrats remain a party of “coastal elites” who act like the rest of the country doesn’t exist. (And this is setting aside that what they mean is they feel Democrats don’t talk enough about “real Americans”, by which they mean middle-American white people.) CityLab, however, mapped the Democratic debates and the geography discussed over the two nights is anything but purely coastal.
Alex Zielinski of Portland Mercury last night posted a write-up of what she’d found out about the Portland Police Bureau’s dangerous “cementshake” tweet. It’s based on the same info Katie Shepherd got from the Bureau, although Zielinski more explicitly draws a straight line to the on-site report from a police lieutenant in fact being the only information they received.
Apparently some English towns are installing “chat benches” (really, signs on existing benches, it looks like) for people in the mood to talk to other people. I’d be fine with this happening elsewhere if it was also then implicitly understood that if I’m sitting anywhere else, leave me the fuck alone.
I’m not going to call them “principled conservatives,” as the Washington Post’s Max Boot and others have insisted, because so much of what these pundits do is contrary to any ordinary definition of “principled.” As for “conservative,” truthfully, I’m not sure what that word means anymore, except perhaps for a kind of authoritarianism-lite.
In animals this is often fatal, because their cells and systems are highly specialised and inflexible. Think of animal biology as an intricate machine in which each cell and organ has a place and purpose, and all parts must work and cooperate for the individual to survive. A human cannot manage without a brain, heart or lungs.
Over the last several months, I’ve been getting back to subscribing to things via RSS feeds in Feedly, and getting into subscribing to things via email in Stoop. Ideally, I’d want to be able to do both of these things in a single app. Add “read it later” bookmarking for random things I find on my own (which I’ve only just discovered I can do in Feedly), and maybe even podcast support (although I only listen to two and currently I just do that through Apple’s native app), and I feel like I’d spend more time seeing what other people have to say about things. There should be a combined inbox of every item from every type of subscription, separate inboxes for each type of subscription, and individual archive boxes for each subscription.
Katie Shepherd has been continuing to push today and gotten a bit more out of the Portland Police Bureau. We’ve gone from “quick-drying cement” in their tweet yesterday afternoon, to a “substance … similar to a quick drying cement” in their press release half an hour later, to “a cup which appeared to have material on it consistent with quick drying cement” in a statement to Shepherd twenty-four hours later.
And so as June comes to a close and the year is halfway done, I seem already to have completed my Goodreads challenge of reading 35 books for the year. This was the same goal I’d set for 2018 and 2017, when I read 37 and 36 books, respectively, by the end of December. While I’ve read an increased number of short stories or novellas this year, I don’t see how that could account for all of it. Not really sure what happened.
News outlets serving as little more than third-party publicists is a longstanding pet peeve of mine, so you’d be unsurprised at my annoyance with Portland Mercury’s story on the new Portland Indie Con for not even referencing in passing originally having invited, and then having to disinvite comics creator and editor Brandon Graham. You don’t have to belabor it, but do you sort of have to mention it.
“The discussion in this race today,” Joe Biden told the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, “shouldn’t be about the past. We should be talking about how to do better. How we can move forward.” This in a speech defending his track record, even, I guess, on busing. So while that quote says “in this race” it just as easily could have said “on race”, and what Biden doesn’t seem to understand is that you literally cannot have a discussion on race in America today without discussing the past—especially when your present isn’t too hot, either.
Rachel Maddow on Friday night had a weirdly contrived premise that every Democratic candidate had at least one moment that went well enough for them to be able to build on. I think there’s a difference between having a good moment in the moment and having a moment that “did themselves some good”, so the framing here was frustrating.
There is no evidence that immigration spreads disease. One recent study in The Lancet found that immigration makes arrival countries healthier. Another review of European studies found that the “risk of transmission” of diseases from refugees and asylum seekers to local populations “is very low”—in fact, that what little risk exists is borne almost entirely by the refugees themselves, on account of being forced to live in squalid conditions.
Twitter today was buzzing about automatic faucet sensors (and, apparently, soap dispensers) not seeing black people, reminding me of previous stories about the Kinect not seeing black people and about HP webcams not seeing black people. Each of these stories (some since reportedly debunked) at the time inevitably reminded me of “Racial Sensitivity”, the fourth episode of season one of the late, great Better Off Ted, about Veridian Dynamics’ new companywide motion detectors.
That feeling when you find yourself in a mid-surgery argument in the operating room over what procedures you did or did not agree to but then you hear booms from outside and realize the bombs finally have started dropping and look outside the window to see mushroom clouds blooming and you wake up in the dark of night, hyperventilating.
Warren basically did what she had to, although it’s inexplicable that the moderators gave her question after question during the first half only to all but ignore her for the second. It will be down to whether or not her closing statement reminded everyone of who the moderators let people see during the first half.
Mostly unnoticed until today: the management of The Edition apartments in Hyattsville, Maryland, posted a public statement about resident Nick Starr-Street’s harassment of black women, and he’s in trouble: “In no way does the staff at The Edition condone the actions of the resident in question, and we are taking swift corrective measures to address the issue.”
This brings us to the larger problem of city rankings in general, issues that reflects the problems of technocracy itself. By using data as a driver, such rankings present themselves as dispassionate and impartial, as if they are simply removing the lid on a machine to reveal objectively how the engine beneath is functioning. They nonetheless represent a worldview taken from a highly specific angle, one that is full of scarcely acknowledged assumptions about who the imaginary citizen they address is.
And yet, there’s a counterexample that should inspire hope for anyone whose content has been ganked for the lulz. Another cartoonist, KC Green, similarly saw one of his characters meme-ified for political purposes. The figure was initially named Question Hound but has since been dubbed the This Is Fine Dog. Across social media, we see him sitting in a burning room with a dumb smile on his face, musing to himself, “This is fine.” It’s a simple, potent image that captures the tenor of our chaotic times and the reactions of those who refuse to accept awful reality, and it’s been used far and wide. What makes Green’s story different from those of folks like Furie is that he has, astoundingly enough, been able to harness the meme’s success for profit and greater recognition, and is surprisingly renowned as its creator. He says the trick is vigilance, luck, and not being afraid to steal from your thieves.
If you’re reading this (and haven’t already responded because you saw this call on Twitter and Mastodon), please consider taking this one-question survey about how you get here. Blogs powered by WriteFreely have very minimal stats—and none for RSS use—and I’d like to get a sense of how people are notified of new posts.
It looks like The Three-Body Problem might be headed for the small screen in China, and I hope that it’s a better adaptation than was the movie of The Wandering Earth, which was fun—in a “the Chinese film industry scoff at Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay” kind of way–but essentially had nothing whatsoever to do with the short story. I’m definitely more on board for this trilogy being a series instead of a film, which it seems they tried already and shelved.
Somewhere at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum they have on display a rendition of “First they came…”, a calling-out of “the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergy … following the Nazis’ rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets”. Somehow, the museum also opposes any suggestion that any other past or present situation can be analogous to what happened in Germany. As pointed out on Twitter, some of their own programs seem not to follow this new company line. If only the Holocaust itself can be referred to by the rallying cry, there’s no point ever again in saying, “Never again.”
When he first saw Yankee Trump, my neighbor on the train literally said “I feel attacked,” and it’s the unspoken subtext in a lot of other Trump supporter sightings. It does not take a lot of imagination to know that if someone comes up scapegoating you and encouraging followers who do it even more forcefully, you’ll feel less safe when you see people supporting him and getting away with it. When it comes to public acceptability of Trump support, it basically is that simple. There’s no way to support the guy who does these things and not contribute to that aura of fear.
Yes, I did indeed, as promised, finish Last Day by Domenica Ruta so that I would not have dropped two fiction reads in a row. Verdict: don’t bother. On the upside, it means I’ve been able to start in on P. Djèlí Clark’s The Black God’s Drums. Also, because I’ve not mentioned it in awhile, you can follow me on Goodreads to see what I’ve been reading, or, you know, buy me my next book.
Five months after a data breach at the Oregon Department of Human Services, they finally notified me by mail that my information was accessed. In the process, while they managed to mail my current address, they addressed the notification to my birth name, which was legally changed an entire year before the data breach. What’s more, they got the middle initial wrong.
Robbi Bishop-Taylor has provided a kind of answer in this unique, lovely map of the contiguous U.S. cast in sunset shadows on the Solstice (aka June 20). Bishop-Taylor, a geospatial-science PhD candidate at Australia’s University of New South Wales, used NASA data and a hill-shading algorithm to simulate sunset at a “consistent azimuth of 300 degrees from north and an altitude of 1.5 degrees above the horizon,” he says via Reddit DM. The map “effectively shows what the shadows would be like at each point in the map if the sun was 1.5 degrees above the horizon at that specific place!”
While cities have always done a good job of helping numerical minorities achieve a density sufficiently big to sustain a business (for example, a gay bar) or even a movement (think organized labor in major industrial cities), politically conservative suburbs and rural places have always faced a paradox: the built environment is made to support the individual family structure and is deeply isolating by design, which makes it harder to organize socially or politically. But social media is a good-enough stand-in for urban density, providing a means to form the early connections necessary for starting longer-term relationships. Platforms like YouTube, and talk radio before it, let anti-social conservatives who don’t want to live next to other people connect online and later in person for marches, rallies, and meetings.
We Jews do not own this term. But in fact, I would argue it is imperative that we Jews use this term whenever these dreadful facilities are imposed on groups of people other than ourselves. History has shown us that the concentration of humanity into forced detention invariably leads entire societies to exceedingly dark places. This practice did not begin with Nazi policies against European Jewry—nor did it end there.
Yesterday my primary care health provider called to set up four different appointments related to the bladder surgery coming up in three weeks: a pre-operative telephone appointment with my urologist tomorrow, an office appointment with the nurse in a week and a half to go through catheter care and other post-operative information, an office appointment four days after surgery to remove the catheter, and a post-operative appointment with my urologist three days after that.
Reading this ode to Universal’s aborted “Dark Universe”, I feel like the premise of making a cinematic universe out of the studio’s classic movie monsters wasn’t the problem. The problem was the argument that it should be a franchise of action movies, when instead these should have been individual horror movie reinventions, linked by connecting threads ultimately leading us somewhere. The failure of imagination here was one of genre.
But anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary – it just helps people cope. In fact, it could also be making things worse. Instead of encouraging radical action, mindfulness says the causes of suffering are disproportionately inside us, not in the political and economic frameworks that shape how we live. And yet mindfulness zealots believe that paying closer attention to the present moment without passing judgment has the revolutionary power to transform the whole world. It’s magical thinking on steroids.
I’ve been thinking about the idea of “creeping normality” that I mentioned earlier and the ways in which it could account for how some autistics can go decades without knowing they are autistic due to a process beginning in childhood of being slowly cooked by society’s background radiation of conformity into quietly engaging in a lifetime of masking without realizing.
It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you that w.tf, the best-ever domain, has vanished into history. The top-level domain’s registry now says, “The domain name ‘w.tf’ is not eligible for registration because it … is composed of an insufficient number of characters.” Wayback is forever, but it’s not the same.
Trump’s concentration camps are leading edge of a pattern of belief and behavior unfolding in plain sight. The comparison to atrocities of the 20th Century—whether the first U.S. concentration camps in the Philippines, the Soviet gulags, or even the Nazi concentration camps that after nearly a decade of slowly worsening crimes made the Holocaust possible—is obvious for a reason. Which is terrifying.
I’m pretty sure this is some sort of mindfulness newsletter that I’d otherwise find annoying but, not for nothing, “creeping normality”, or “landscape amnesia”, is as good as any description of the political dynamic of the long pre-Trump status quo to which Joe Biden wants to return and as a result of which most everyone deluded themselves into believing “it can’t happen here” in the first place.
That research I mentioned mapping a Cretaceous-era shoreline to certain American election results, that I referenced in a piece using quotes from Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History to show that geologic privilege accounts for the success of Western civilization? It actually shows up later in Origins. I should have known, because of course it does.
Liberals tend to believe that everyone has the right to the public square no matter how reprehensible a person’s views are. In trying to tolerate the intolerant, American liberals tend to believe they are being good liberals and by extension good Americans. The marketplace of ideas, they believe, will sort out the whole truth in time. But the reverse is the case. What they are really doing, in a context of fascism politics, is helping fascists exploit liberal principles to undermine and replace democracy.
I find it interesting that a bit of research suggests a connection between autism and mitochondria, given that there’s also been a bit of research suggesting a connection between chronic fatigue syndrome and mitochondria. Many autistic people I’ve run into online also seem to have CFS, and given my ongoing fatigue, pain, and intermittent dysphasia, investigating that is next up on my medical to-do list after dealing with the bladder stones or, you know, possible cancer.
If you are experiencing a sense of déjà vu that we are debating the term “concentration camp”, that’s because exactly one year ago we were having this exact same discussion. It’s a strong indicator of just how badly we have failed to protect immigrants that despite our “never again” protestations every time this comes up, apparently we don’t even realize that we’re having this debate again.
The fortunes of functional families began to shift in the mid-1960s as fears of the family in crisis swept the nation. The rising New Right dovetailed with a generation of politicized post-war homeowners, both of which saw formal-family zoning as a vindication of their values. For social conservatives, formal-family zoning could help stave off the decline in nuclear family formation, and for homeowners, it could protect their property values against their perception that having abnormal neighbors might drive prices down.
So this Abraham Riesman piece on Vulture about the rise and fall of Marvel shows on Netflix does mention other networks but somehow fails completely to reference Cloak & Dagger over on Freeform, which quietly has been going about its business as the best Marvel show on television for two seasons in a row.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t baby it. Never have. I solved the sleeve problem by wearing the jacket out in rain storm after rain storm, without protecting the leather, and pushing the sleeves up, then letting it dry, until they fit perfectly, with a permanent ripple to them so they are now exactly the right length.
Despite an early chapter’s reference to a possibly-autistic character’s “oblivious grotesqueries”, I’ve decided not to drop Last Day and just do my best to solider through until the end. Sarah Moss, it turns out, is not the only character with some fairly ugly observations of that kind, and the entire International Space Station thread strains credulity, but since it’s moving relatively quickly I’m going to err on the side of not already leaving another book unfinished.
The upside of being down at the heels, at least in Wonderland’s case, is that rents have tumbled enough that small businesses now make up most of the mall’s shops. Perhaps because the mall also doubles as a convention space, one that hosts geeky gatherings like Monster Con and Morphinominal Expo, many of these shops cater to various fandoms, making Wonderland of the Americas an unexpected hub of San Antonio’s geek culture, a pedestrian-friendly space dense with desirable destinations unlike so much else of the city. There’s the store that sells Funkos, and only Funkos. There’s the shop that sells wrestling memorabilia, and the one where you can buy a dress patterned with art from EC Comics. And there’s Gotham Newsstand, a comic shop managed by a Trinity University alumnus.
I don’t know what the hell The Art of Manliness website is, exactly, but Dino’s Journal led me to their excerpt “from Arthur Murray’s Popularity Book, originally published in 1944”, which is an article by one Gelett Burgess on so-called “vocational friendship”, and weirdly I feel like you could convert it into an argument for how to think about neurodiversity?
Black Americans did not abandon liberal democracy because of slavery, Jim Crow, and the systematic destruction of whatever wealth they managed to accumulate; instead they took up arms in two world wars to defend it. Japanese Americans did not reject liberal democracy because of internment or the racist humiliation of Asian exclusion; they risked life and limb to preserve it. Latinos did not abandon liberal democracy because of “Operation Wetback,” or Proposition 187, or because of a man who won a presidential election on the strength of his hostility toward Latino immigrants. Gay, lesbian, and trans Americans did not abandon liberal democracy over decades of discrimination and abandonment in the face of an epidemic. This is, in part, because doing so would be tantamount to giving the state permission to destroy them, a thought so foreign to these defenders of the supposedly endangered religious right that the possibility has not even occurred to them. But it is also because of a peculiar irony of American history: The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.
Western archivy operates from implicit and explicit assumptions of futurity, which become precarious in light of the temporal and scalar distortions which scholars of memory studies have theorized as a critical existential challenge of the Anthropocene. The Society of American Archivist’s (SAA) Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology predicates a record’s worth on its potential for future use. SAA’s Core Values Statement and Code of Ethicsreiterates that “archivists thus preserve materials for the benefit of the future more than for the concerns of the past.” Similarly, the Association of Canadian Archivist’s (ACA) Code of Ethics and Professional Conductidentifies no higher goal than to “[make] records available and [protect] them for future use.” The interests of future users shape core practices of appraisal, preservation, description, and access.
Over the past few days I’ve spent some time tweaking the CSS here to get away from the default WriteFreely style, and I should give some credit for various bits of inspiration to Micro.blog, Substack, and Svbtle, each of whom, in different ways, informed how I thought about past minimalist approaches I’ve taken, extending all the way back to blogging’s golden age.
The ridiculous thing about the story I told the other day is that the incident described is a manifestation of something I’d previously established: that when faced with a stressful bit of socially performative communication, I defer to the other—even if it means agreeing to something that will be even more stressful, or even damaging.
Over on Twitter, author Anne Ursu noted that her son’s summer reading teacher “doesn’t let students choose what they read because ‘they’d just read graphic novels and fantasy’”, which prompted the expected sort of incredulous replies and stories about comics as not only valuable in themselves but as gateways to other reading.
When we talk about “not pathologizing autism,” we don’t mean “pretending autistic people don’t have impairments.” But we also don’t assume that neurological and behavioral differences are always problems. For example, there’s nothing inherently wrong with disliking social activities. Not wanting to socialize is different from wanting to participate and being unable to. Both are possibilities for autistic people. One requires acceptance, the other requires assistance. Sadly, I have yet to meet a therapist who doesn’t treat the two as equivalent and in equal need of correction.
Poor adaptive skills without adequate supports may explain the dismal higher-education and employment rates among autistic adults. This is particularly true for those without intellectual disabilities, who may be presumed capable of attending college or pursuing competitive employment without a need for significant supports. In fact, however, these individuals often have significant impairments in basic day-to-day functions.
This morning while reading an article on civilians trying to find support for their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (I don’t have PTSD, but have an interest in how trauma gets laid down in the brain), I followed a link to “Where is the Evidence for ‘Evidence-Based’ Therapy?” by Jonathan Shedler, adapted from remarks he gave at a conference several years ago.
To make commenting more human, it needs to become conversation rather than commentary. Someone talking at you through a television or lonely comment on a blog isn’t natural and human; a conversation is. If you want to talk to an author, you should be able to do that directly—no public side is needed. Then, if your conversation turns out to be of interest or use to more people, you should be able to make it public, where it can stand as a work in itself.
Last month, a study dropped (Google cache because U.K. Ed Chat has since deleted their article) in Journal of Child Neurology brazenly entitled, “When an Early Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder Resolves, What Remains?”
Suddenly folks are steaming over a newly-posted synopsis of the live-action adaptation of Akira, with Screen Rant, ComicBook, CBR, Heroic Hollywood, and Bleeding Cool all stoking the fires of fandom ire over a description published in Production Weekly.
#ActuallyAutistic folks on Twitter love to “explode myths” about autism, and they’re pretty good at it. They explode myths about communication, about empathy, about romance. If there’s a myth out there about autistic people, it’s regularly and routinely exploded.
Last week, someone on Twitter asked their followers what lines have stuck with them or even become part of their personal philosophies.
This morning, Spectrum announced that a piece by Lauren Gravitz from last September had won second place in the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. That piece? “At the Intersection of Autism and Trauma”, a look at the links between autism spectrum disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
One of my big issues these days is whether or not forms of psychotherapy designed for the typical necessarily work for the atypical. It popped up again this week in a Spectrum piece on OCD and autism.
Five weeks ago after an epic autistic meltdown that then a colleague disparagingly reduced to “venting”, I took an unplanned and unceremonious sabbatical from the nonprofit I helped form back in 2014 as part of “rescuing” a herd of fourteen urban goats from being split up into their original pairings and sold off.
This week has not, in general, been going well for the All in a Row team, with a producer complaining that they had a roll-out planned for Laurence but a “leak” ruined everything, the play’s official account complaining that it’s just that critics don’t understand theater, and the artist who conceived of the original incarnation of Laurence spotted laughing at him being referred to as “a sad little modern chimney sweep”.
This by necessity is less about scientific reality than about observing interesting patterns. I can’t speak to causation or, really, even any true correlation. It’s just that recently and quite randomly I had a string of thoughts I wanted to set down here.
I wanted to come back to a bit from a study I talked about before because as much as I’d love to find psychotherapeutic support from someone who already is versed not just in autism but late-diagnosed adult autism, in many ways I would love it if a therapist asked me to educate them.
I do not know the degree to which I can come back. In the meantime I’ve kept the books updated and filed/paid our annual state and federal filings. It’s clear to me that I feel like I’ve burned out on any vocation or avocation I’ve ever done that required working close-quarters with other people over a period of time. Or, burned out on that part of it, anyway. In retrospect (decades not just months), I do wonder to what degree any work that involves close interpersonal coordination was putting way more pressure on me than I understood, and that post-diagnosis I should have been managing the balances better, whatever that might have entailed. But between navigating social comms, performance distress, literal neurological trouble getting off whatever track I’m on, and meltdowns I have no internal control over under high-pressure circumstances, every day close involvement clearly isn’t sustainable.
Since starting an unplanned sabbatical from my nonprofit in the middle of January, I’ve not had a mental health day as low as any of the recent days beforehand.
In the latest newsletter by Anne Helen Petersen, she appears to draw a link between burnout and a lack of “solitude”.
It’s tough for me not to read every new piece about millennial burnout through the lens of the original one that referred to being bored with every day mundane tasks as “burnout”, which I know is terrible because not every other article is being that fatuous about the matter.
After reading a Seattle Times report on Clark County declaring an emergency over measles cases appearing in the Portland area, I dug into my Kaiser Permanente records because I had a recollection of getting tested in the recent past for immunity to measles, mumps, and rubella, probably during the last measles scare.
I swore that I would not subject myself to the new Rolling Stone interview with Jack Dorsey (the writer of the piece took my tweet as an insult to him, told me to “fuck off”, and then blocked me), but I did anyway.
A major thread of autism advocacy is the social model of disability. There do seem to be many aspects of being autistic that are limiting not because of any inherent flaw, per se, but because of a mismatch between the wiring of an autistic brain and the social and cultural structures of the society in which that brain operates.
It doesn’t matter whether you subscribe to a medical model of disability or a social one when it comes to autism. Either way, I am disabled. The easiest way to understand why, and how, is to talk about talking on the telephone.
“I’m assuming,” wrote a family member, “that you have the desire to change your life.” This in the wake of me pointing out that by the necessary rules of surviving in society, I appear to be worthless.
The thing about how even one of the good days can almost break you is that when you have a good day like that, the next day is basically shot to hell, too.
Sobbing breakdowns, or the narrow averting of them, aren’t just something that happens on a bad day. This is one of the things I’m not sure people understand about the autistic brain.
Out this week is a new study published in Autism: The International Journal of Research & Practice, which, according to the press release, “demonstrates that there is an urgent need for tailored treatment pathways in mental health services for autistic people”. The group’s research, conducted in the United Kingdom, was “designed in partnership with autistic people, has strong implications for services, and [the] need for an autism specific mental health pathway”.
When I wrote about trying to standardize some terminology when discussing my autism with my therapist (or, now, ex-therapist), I left out one experience because I couldn’t remember the word, and if I’d sat around wracking my brain for it I never would have written anything at all.
I once wrote, “I don’t seem to have the same degree of sensory issues as do other people writing about their autism.” I wrote this early on in my writing about being autistic and while I understand why I said it, and believed it, at the time, and while it’s true that I think I have fewer sensory issues than do many other autistics, it’s also true that I’ve since learned that it understates things a bit.
What I mean here is that the process of psychotherapy as generally understood and undertaken often seems itself to be a collection of stressors that only make me feel worse. Certainly, that’s been my most recent experience.
I’ve always got at least one rewatch going amongst all the current television I follow, and these days it’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—still the best Trek series, and Benjamin Sisko is still the best commander/captain. It’s more relaxed than my typical rewatches in that I’m comfortable skipping an episode here and there (somewhere in season two there’s inexplicably two Quark episodes in a row?), something I’m usually loathe to do.
I just rediscovered the study ”‘Putting on My Best Normal’: Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions” in an app that lets you highlight on the web. I do not appear to have highlighted the entire thing, but it seems a close call. Here are some of the passages that really are popping out at me right now.
If there is one new-to-me thing about autism that I want everyone to consider, it is monotropism. If there are six things that I want everyone to know about monotropism, they are these six things from Fergus Murray.
So, okay, great. Now when actually autistic people try to talk about autistic burnout, we will be dismissed as trying to hop onto a millennial brandwagon. All because BuzzFeed decided that millennials are “the burnout generation”.
According to the year-end wrap-up provided by Goodreads, in 2018 I read 12,290 pages across 37 books (I had a reading challenge goal of 35), from the 93 pages of The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander to the 598 pages of The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear.
After two weeks of not being entirely clear why I was seeing a psychoconsultant again beyond the idea that it’s what I’m “supposed” to be doing, today we did something of a pivot after my thoughts about being nitroglycerin and my attempt to define and distinguish reactions from responses.
By the time today that I’d gotten up far too early for me, had what little breakfast I had time to make, stopped to get coffee only to find the coffeeshop wasn’t opening until ten minutes before the only bus I could take to my psychoconsult was due to arrive, waited half a block away from jackhammering for them to open, suffered through being on public transit, slow-walked from the bus to my appointment, got through my appointment, suffered through more public transit, got to my breakfast spot, ate, suffered through more public transit, and got to the zoo for what’s supposed to be my weekly mental health trip, I already was exhausted.
Something I am not sure anyone in my family ever understood is that I did not enjoy the performative aspects of Christmas or birthdays. I can’t imagine I ever mentioned it, because enjoying Christmas and birthdays is what people did.
“Oregon Zoo otter known for slam dunking and self-pleasuring,” headlined The Oregonian, ”dies at age 20.”
One thing about being a midlife-diagnosed autistic is that people get caught up in the occasional post-mortem of the pre-diagnosis decades, especially the childhood years.
“If you didn’t know you were autistic,” I was asked today, “and were (as you are) strung out with the herd move issues, worried about money, and dealing with sleep and muscle pain issues, would this situation have affected you the same awful way? Would you have been able to deal with it better?”
Buried and mostly unaddressed in “An Expert Discussion on Autism and Empathy” from the forthcoming journal Autism in Adulthood, Dr. Christina Nicolaidis posed what for me is a crucial question.
I was intrigued yesterday by someone elsewhere asking if younger autistics were more comfortable talking to older adults than to people their own age, as well as one person’s suggestion that discomfort interacting with people one’s own age when younger might be due to the “direct comparison” that can occur and prompt masking.
Someone on Twitter asked fellow autistics whether or not they feel they overreact. It got me thinking about that word, and who or what decides what kind of reactions allegedly are “too much”.
I’d meant only to come back to Medium to talk about one way in which I think we end up with late-diagnosed actually autistic adults, but while browsing the autism tag (which they seem finally to have purged of all the t-shirt and pirated ebook spam) ended up learning something new.
Recently, I had to go for a new psychodiagnostic evaluation by an Oregon Department of Human Services contractor as part of the state’s disability determination services for Social Security benefits purposes. I’d mostly been avoiding thinking too much about being autistic because there are too many other things that need to be done right now.
I’m not suicidal (I have my days where if the world ended I might not do more than shrug, but I’ve no interest in hastening the event), but buried in the Discussion section of a new study on suicide among autistic adults is a look at camouflaging that concerns me.
There are two ways to get Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits, more or less.
When you are actually-autistic but late-diagnosed, you think a lot about whether or not you’ve been stimming for all those decades, or were suppressing your stimming because it didn’t match (as I’ve discussed before) society’s background radiation of conformity.
Completed and submitted my combined Social Security Disability Insurance/Supplemental Security Income application online, although I still have to go into a Social Security office to submit additional material, because heaven forbid they let you upload PDFs to your actual application.
It was a bad sign. Immediately upon leaving my apartment to go host visiting hours at The Belmont Goats, the brightness and heat of the afternoon sun of the ongoing heatwave was like suddenly being slapped across the face. I’d already announced we would be open. There was no turning back.
In addition to this Medium experiment (from which I’d been somewhat absent until the last couple of weeks), awhile back I tried a related one on Tumblr, where there’s an entirely different autistic community. It didn’t last long, and I wiped the few things I had posted or reblogged.
One continuing obstacle for me is the question of trying to look back over four decades to see if I can find signs of being autistic, or signs of how no one ever noticed that I was. It didn’t help when exactly the wrong person bluntly questioned my contention that I never knew there were diagnosable reasons behind difficulties I’ve had.
There’s not really any form of communication that I enjoy, per se. I suppose that I’m most comfortable with the sort of mass, meandering aimlessness of my Twitter feed, but that doesn’t exactly translate into utilitarian conversations such as those in the workplace, or, really, those involved in finding work to begin with.
I’ve been getting down in the dumps a bit lately, wondering why so many autistic people seem to think that being autistic comes with some set of “superpowers” when I feel like no one ever provided me with that particular handbook. I even bailed on a brief experiment in following autistic people on Tumblr because of it. It probably also partly explains my general absence here on Medium.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Today was not a good day. Today was the third time in a little less than a year that someone I’d turned to for help waved dismissively at some past or present part of my diagnostic story.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about that whole thing where autistic people are said to be lacking in empathy. It’s not something I’ve spent much time on, but here on Medium, at least, there’s a fair amount of pushback against this idea from actually-autistic people. I’ve pushed back against it myself.
I received the following Montessori evaluation in June 1974. I received my autism diagnosis in October 2016. How do they relate? I don’t know, really, but I wanted to share it here.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Last month, I posted a comparison of how my daily average moods were working out between March, the final month at my six-month job placement which I left due to the psychological damage it was doing, and April, my first post-job month. Today I add the full month of May to the mix.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
I find fascinating the suggestion that introversion might have some relation to autism because before my diagnosis the elements of introversion resonated with me, and I found it a useful tool to manage certain social stresses, both in terms of how I dealt with them internally and how I justified my reactions to the world and to other people. Introversion was my only toolkit.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
I was thinking today about a couple things I’ve posted as responses to other people, and how they actually might connect in such a way as my response to the one actually ends up explaining my somewhat intense reaction to the other.
More accurately, I learned of autistic burnout last week, but set it aside for this week as something to read up on. It turns out to be useful new knowledge as lately I’ve been thinking a lot about life post-diagnosis as compared to life pre-diagnosis.
Now that I’m a month into my experiment in using Medium as part of my mental health regimen, I thought I’d take a moment to explain, among other things, why I’m not following you.
This week began in stress. It began with difficulty. “Today,” I wrote on Twitter on Monday while linking something I’d posted here, “is hard.” This post is long. You won’t read it. That doesn’t matter; I needed to write it.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Not more than a few minutes after waking up this morning, there were messages from a local talk radio station wanting me to come on before 9:00am to talk about relocating The Belmont Goats. I ignored them, and only responded later on when I was actually up and about.
I’m completely drained by this weekend, which has not been my typical weekend.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Back in 2016, when Instagram announced it was Facebooking itself by abandoning the simple chronological feed and instituting an algorithm, they proclaimed that the move would “show the moments we believe you will care about the most”.
Mid-month, I posted an early comparison of how my daily average moods were working out between March, the final month at my six-month job placement which I left due to the psychological damage it was doing, and April, my first post-job month.
Coming out of a Sunday afternoon crash, I suddenly for the first time wondered if there were any links between autism and fatigue. I think that I mostly had just assumed that if my diagnosis had any bearing at all on my routine fatigue it would be as an aspect of my anxiety. But then, I finally asked myself, why does it hit even on days when my anxiety levels are not particularly high?
For a week and a half now, since not long after beginning to use Medium as a place to learn about and express my own thoughts about my autism diagnosis, I’ve been plagued by a technical issue that seemingly manages to poke just about every button I have that in any way relates to rigidity or a lack of control: the Highlights tab keeps disappearing from my profile.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
I don’t seem to have the same degree of sensory issues as do other people writing about their autism, but I felt the need to mention that this bathroom pushed nearly every wrongful sensory button. The curved floor, the tiny and perpetually-repeated tiles, the lighting, and the infinitely-regressing smoky mirrors all combined to make me feel like the room was constantly in motion. Leaving this bathroom was like walking off a ferry (I seriously cannot ride ferries) and needing to get one’s legs back. It’s quite possibly the single most nightmarish room I have ever been in.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Toward the end of February, five months into a job placement via Vocational Rehabilitation that had so degraded my mental state that for the first time in my life I was suffering what my psychotherapist deemed “depressive episodes” (excepting two minor incidents more than twenty years ago), I started tracking my mood several times a day in an app called Daylio.
My weekly roundup of responses I have posted to other people’s posts here on Medium, for those who don’t feel like scrolling through the Responses tab on my profile.
Last month, two women were targeted for racist and Islamophobic harassment on Portland’s light rail system, resulting in the stabbing deaths of two of the three men who came to their defense. The attacks themselves also led to a loud public outpouring of support for both the targets and those who intervened.
And then David Lynch, just before the halfway point of the 18-part Twin Peaks: The Return, but not for a full fifteen minutes into Part 8, suddenly gives us the origin story, the most mysterious thing about which being that he imbued it with an actual penetrability.
Note: What follows was written in August 1993 as the introduction to a long and rambling collection of thoughts, theories, and symbologies which in November 1993 became my first contribution to the Internet when I uploaded it to the Twin Peaks archive, then residing on an FTP server in Australia.
Note: The original version of this post appeared elsewhere on June 9, 2015. This edit is published here on the premiere weekend of the series’ second season.
For some reason I decided to run a Twitter search to see how often Dan Slott, the writer of the previously-mentioned Amazing Spider-Man #700 and vocal defender of Secret Empire, has told readers with comments, complaints, or questions about a story in progress to “wait and see” how it ends. I had to limit myself just to the ones from this week.
I am mostly out of the comics-reading world these days, but a fair bit of my Twitter feed remains comics folks specifically or pop culture folk more generally. Lately, I’ve been watching the resurgent controversy that is Nick Spencer’s ongoing Secret Empire story for Marvel about Captain America’s true nature as a fascist.
Having finally gone off to see Inception in an actual movie theater, it’s time for some stray, but hopefully coherent, thoughts, all of which will be after the jump if you’re reading this on the front page. If you click through to the rest, or read past this opening paragraph, you risk contaminating your own experience of the movie if you’ve not yet seen it. This is your only warning.
Rejoice, for the band which nearly gave me an aneurysm when I first encountered them is returning to Portland on April 14 for a show at Dante’s.
So a canvasser for Defending Oregon was methodically dialing apartments on the call box at the door to my apartment building at the tail end of a long day.
From somewhere outside the bookstore came the repeated and incessant cries of what sounded for all the world like a cat in some great deal of distress or discomfort.
Last weekend, one of the earlier bands on a bill headlined by The High Violets pretty nearly gave me an aneurysm.
While there have been many books which I have read but once, there has only ever been one book which, upon its completion, I knew I would never read again.
It’s not entirely unusual to hear some shouting altercation outside in my parking lot, usually somehow related to the neighbors who have some affiliation (patient-wise) with the Cascadia facility across the street. For example, earlier this afternoon, the female neighbor was sitting on the stairs, praying loudly for guidance from God, while a solitary red balloon (leftover from the downstairs neighbor kid’s birthday party) fluttered and bounded around the pavement.
Despite living in Portland for 5 1/2 years, and San Francisco for 14 months prior to that, I had never managed to actually catch these cities’ respective mass Santa excursions. Until this year. Until December 14th.
Time has been very fluid over the past couple of years. Honestly, I can no longer accurately place just when it was. The passage of time, and particular moments that set down within the flow, are more emotional than temporal.
See navigation on the left. Thanks to Adobe’s “Create a PDF” service, I am now making available an 8.5x14” one-sheet PDF of THE WAR PRAYER, suitable for printing and posting. You will need Adobe’s Acrobat Reader to view and print this document. The PDF contains only the text of the story itself – no extraneous credits or logos or nonsense.
Astute readers will know I saw this on Slashdot. USA Today is reporting that a federal judge has ruled that so-called “deep hyperlinking” is not in and of itself unfair competition – the claim of Ticketmaster, which filed the lawsuit in question against another website for linking into Ticketmaster’s own.
Displaying the infinite wisdom possessed by network television, NBC has cancelled the great Freaks and Geeks. See the story on Ain’t It Cool News. Best part of the letter to the fans: “But we still have five great episodes that you haven’t seen that we’re desperately trying to get shown somewhere so you can see them and if we can’t, we’ll drop some tapes into the unofficial tape distribution system and let you see them that way.”
It’s Flag Season in the U.S. Congress once again. As early as tomorrow, the Senate may be voting to amend the Constitution (specifically, to amend the Bill of Rights – even more specifically, to amend the First Amendment) to protect a piece of red, white, and blue cloth. Thanks to the ACLU, however, you can send a free fax to your Senators telling them to oppose this effort. You can also find more information at People For the American Way’s flag amendment website. See also this curious story about the possibility that the Senate will try to outlaw flag desecration through a mere statute.
Deserving of it or not, we will categorize the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decision to not award the Best Song Oscar to “Blame Canada” (from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, the bravest movie Hollywood has produced in years) as an act of moral cowardice, though at least they let “fart” and “that bitch Anne Murray too” past the censors (although not “but now when he sees me he tells me to fuck myself”, which instead was performed as “but now when he sees me he tells me to gasp myself”). What’s more, if they were going to pick one of the more-or-less interchangeable songs, it should have been the one by Aimee Mann, not the one by Phil Collins.
The Global Effort to Eradicate Know-nothings is activating its Irregulars to engage in an important grassroots campaign in the ongoing Culture Wars. Each of you is to buy a copy of Jon Katz’s new book, Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho (or check your local bookstore). Read it. And then make everyone you know (non-negotiable: everyone) buy it and read it for themselves. Do not loan out your copies. Make them purchase their own (the existence of the sales is important). This is the book. Katz has always been the Voice between geek culture and the outside world (and is, of course, the Patron Saint of GEEK Force), but most people don’t want to read pontifications. This is a story, a true one, of two kids (mainly one, Jesse) who, as the title says, rode the Internet out of Idaho. It’s the weapon we haven’t had in the ongoing Culture Wars for too long. And you will for the rest of your life remember having gotten to be part of Jesse’s life through this book. This is not a request. This is an order from GEEK Force HQ.
