#Year of Learning

[pageadaytale]

BOOK REVIEW - Unmasking Autism: The Power of Embracing our Hidden Neurodiversity by Dr Devon Price

My third book this year was an eye-opening treatise on living with masked autism, trying to present as neurotypical when you're not, and the difficulties one can face as a result. I've often ended up feeling burnt out, exhausted, unable to do anything after even short periods of work, and reading Unmasking Autism brought a lot of familiar feelings to the surface that I had forgotten.

Too often we forget that the world is not made for us - the grind of daily 9-5, social obligations full of unwritten rules, and tedious tasks which seem utterly pointless, all serve to drain the energy of neurodivergent folk. For myself, I've struggled to hold down jobs and work without experiencing severe burnout as a result of my undiagnosed mental conditions. This book has finally explained why.

Dr Devon Price is an austistic social psychologist, and he's put his career to excellent use to construct a field guide to living with autism from the inside out. Too often, mental health conditions are diagnosed and researched from outside, with the scientist's demand for a dispassionate eye; Dr Price proves that lived experience can be invaluable to expanding our understanding of mental health, as he takes us through the history of autism research and explores the lived experiences of autistic individuals who have lived for many decades without a diagnosis. He calls out autism as currently viewed as a rich, white, male disorder, a problem codified by the eugenicist researchers who originally named it, and explores the condition in greater depth and scope, examining how it manifests in women and people of colour. He also looks at society as a whole, how it is structured to exclude those with autism and other disabilities, and points out how we can change all this to better support and encourage autistic people.

Overall this was an eye-opening book. It was greatly detailed and there were points where I found myself pausing in the realisation that Dr Price was expounding on a topic I had struggled with for much of my life. It has the problem that is quickly becoming familiar - that the chapters are too long to comfortably read in one sitting, and it feels as though Dr Price would try to find too many examples to demonstrate a topic at times. But for an examination of masking as an autistic person, and a guide to autism from someone who understands it with their whole life, it's a unique and long-overdue book.

[ghostdeals]

No bcus the implications of the Saja Boys are so funny like??? Jinu is the only one we've seen has a confirmed music background so did he have to research, train, style, and manage the group by himself???? Did he also have to come up with the concepts and the marketing or is there like a demon thats rlly good at photoshop? Or if its all Jinu that means he had to teach himself fucking adobe after effects and how to use tiktok. Also how did he even research how to make a boy group was he in the trenches of BTS comment sections??? God the more I think about the Saja Boys the funnier it gets

[doccywhomst]

[stardella]

Kind of a dancing cactus Cosmo au? Sounds lame

[cyborgrhodey]

THE BANANAS ARE GAY

THESE BANANAS

THE BANANAS IN PAJAMAS ARE GAY

BELATED HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYONE

[nicecrumbart]

Keep thinking about that one scene in secret life

[thatonedudeinthecorner]

His ass does not pay attention enough to know all of their genders. Toph wears baggy clothes, he squinted at her and went “yeah that’s a boy. Or boy adjacent. Probably.” and moved on. Ally???

[taraxippos]

One of my all time biggest pet peeves with historical(ish) fantasy is when the writer constructs a religion with a clear bias that it's stupid and false and therefore only the Stupid People and/or commoners believe in it and all the smart/elite main characters are like, quasi-atheists or otherwise just routinely flout established religious conventions of orthodoxy and/or orthopraxy because they're Too Smart for it or etc.

It's usually an extension of assumptions that people in the past were just less intelligent than in the contemporary, just being like "I know that the sun is a star millions of miles away that the earth orbits, but this ancient religion describes it as a chariot flying through the sky" and not really bothering to learn the context and just (consciously or subconsciously) settling on 'that's a crazy thing to think and was probably believed in because they were Stupid'.

And that whole attitude pisses me off so much. People were as 'smart' 10,000 years ago as they are today. These beliefs aren't just desperate, random flailing to explain phenomena that could not directly be accounted for either, it's not like people just looked at the sun and went "Uhhh I don't know what the fuck that thing is, actually. I guess it might be a chariot or a boat or something?? Yeah let's go with that." and based entire religious practices on this. Every well-established belief system exists within broader contexts of cultural values/subjective perceptions of reality/knowledge systems/etc, and exist as part of a historical continuum of religious practices that came before. Even when not Materially Correct, they have context and internal logic, they're not always dead literal with zero levels of allegory, and they're never a result of stupidity.

[cherry-mash]

something my coworker's 3 year old did the other day, glorious ( ' ')b

next

[lotus-pear]

11/20

[pageadaytale]

BOOK REVIEW - Brick by Brick: How We Build a World Without Prisons by Cradle Community

This is a difficult book to write about.

It difficult because I'm writing about topics I've barely learned about. Brick by Brick is by Cradle Community, a collective of organisers whose goal is to educate about prison abolition and transformative justice. And whilst the book is emotionally affecting and presents clear arguments, it really only feels like a first step to understanding and implementing a system of justice free of prisons.

Which it's meant to be! Brick by Brick presents the arguments for prison abolition, and it does it in a wholly effective way, using emotional stories to tug at the heartstrings and giving you the vocabulary and talking points to argue against the status quo. But it doesn't have the data to back it up. Without hard evidence, it's a lot of anecdotal evidence designed to appeal to the reader's emotions.

It presents a lot of facts which are, on the face of it, difficult to argue with: that prisons are places of isolation and punishment which rarely, if ever, give those inside the tools to reform and reintegrate, at best using them as a source of cheap labour. This doesn't touch on the legacy of imperialism inherent in the British prison system, or the close ties between immigration and the justice system, or that police who commit crimes are often protected by their colleagues closing ranks and thus don't see the justice that they purport to uphold. This is all discussed within the first half of the book, along with myriad other ways in which the criminal justice system fails the people it is supposed to protect, and fails the people it incarcerates too. Frankly, I think my first issue with the book is that it spends a lot of time saying why prisons are bad. I understand - it gives us talking points for every facet of the argument, from the racial (the lengthy history people of colour's disproportionate persecution at the hands of the justice system, compared to relatively lighter or even non-existent sentences for white people) to the environmental (that prisons are often built on waste ground which is not safe for those living or working there, and little thought is put into them by the builders of proper ventilation, clean water, or prisoner health in general). But it also doesn't help the problem feel any more surmountable - prisons are not permanent structures, much though they feel that way, but they feel as permanent as capitalism and the two-party system.

The latter half of the book - parts 3 to 5 - are all about how we look at and begin to build a world without prisons. It should come as no surprise that it's all fairly similar: the ultimate solution is community-building and grassroots organisation, acting together to fight the construction of new prisons, to provide security of food and shelter for people, and to protest against the state violence the puts people in prison in the first place. It's such a simple step, and an admirable one, but it's one I struggle with as a person who has difficulty speaking to new people and making friends (perhaps I'll pick up a book about it). And - to heap another criticism upon the pile - the community initiatives Brick by Brick highlights are, for the most part, based in London or the South of England, with little focus on the North or initiatives in the wider UK (with one environmental group highlighted in Scotland). It's understandable to some extent - many of these prisons and justice systems have headquarters centralised in London - but it's also disheartening as someone who lives in the north that there is little focus on activism and solidarity outside of the Capital.

But as far as prison abolition goes, Brick by Brick is a good start. Whilst I wouldn't recommend it in a vacuum, with other resources and some research to find local anti-prison initiatives it's a solid starting point which provides a breadth of talking points to get you arguing for abolition. I'd recommend it for it's "suggested reading" page, which provides enough resources on transformative justice to back up the anecdotes in the book. Overall, whilst I might be down on it for being more propagandistic than evidence-based, as I'd hoped, as an introductory text it's a good place to begin, and it gives you enough material to look for activist groups and read up further on transformative justice in your own time.

[reasonsforhope]

"For most people, a rat is at best an unwelcome guest, and at worst, the target of immediate extermination. But in a field clinic in Tanzania, rats are colleagues—heroes even.

Far from a trash bin-dwelling NYC street rat, the African giant pouched rat is docile, intelligent, easier to train than some dogs, and for East Africans, the performer of lifesaving tuberculosis diagnoses every day.

400,000 new cases of tuberculosis (TB) were estimated to have been prevented by these rats, whose sense of smell would make a bloodhound take notice. As [TB is] the number-one killer among infectious diseases worldwide, many of those 400,000 can be translated into lives saved.

“Not only are we saving people’s lives, but we’re also changing these perspectives and raising awareness and appreciation for something as lowly as a rat,” said Cindy Fast, a behavioral neuroscientist who coaches the rodents for the nonprofit APOPO.

“Because our rats are our colleagues, and we really do see them as heroes.”

APOPO uses giant pouched rats to sniff out traces of TB in the saliva of patients. In parts of Tanzania, a saliva smear test under a microscope by a human may only be 20-40% effective at detecting TB.

By contrast, a giant pouched rat like Ms. Carolina, a now-retired service rat who worked for APOPO for 7 years, raised the rates of detection on TB samples by 40% in the clinic where she worked.

Pictured: An APOPO employee with one of their trained rats

It would take 4 days for scientists to analyze the number of samples that Carolina could screen in 20 minutes. For that reason, when Carolina retired last November, a party was thrown at the clinic in her honor, and she was given a cake.

TB is sometimes thought of as a thing of the past—a disease for which doctors used to prescribe “dry air,” leading a modern sense of humor to muse at the antiquated, pre-antibiotic medical advice.

But it remains the number-one cause of death globally from a single infectious pathogen, and Tefera Agizew, a physician and APOPO’s head of tuberculosis, told National Geographic that once people see what the nonprofit’s rodents can do to slow the spread, they “fall in love with them.”

3,000 times in her career did Carolina detect one of the six volatile compounds that can be used to identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and she got a hero’s send-off to a special compound to live out the rest of her days with her closet friend and sniffer colleague Gilbert, in a shaded enclosure dubbed “Rat Florida.”

“We’ve made special little rat-friendly carrot cakes with little peanuts and things on it that the rat would enjoy,” Fast said. “Then we all stand around and we clap, and we give three cheers, hip hip hooray for the hero, and celebrate together. It’s really a touching moment.”

APOPO has made headlines for its use of these rats in other lifesaving tasks as well: landmine clearance.

One of the world’s great underreported scourges (a lot like TB, coincidentally) is landmine contamination. There are 110 million landmines or unexploded bombs in the ground right now in about 67 countries, covering thousands of square miles in potential danger. Thousands of civilians are killed or injured by these weapons every year.

GNN reported on APOPO’s demining efforts using pouched rats back in 2020. One rat named Magawa alone identified 39 landmines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance across an area the size of 20 football fields.

If at the start of this story you didn’t like rats, maybe Magawa and Carolina will have changed your mind."

-via Good News Network, March 31, 2025

[thefearofcod]

look. here’s the thing. If you have a relative or family friend or some such who does a craft/hobby/skill that you’ve “always wanted to learn” you should ask them about it. Your grandma does embroidery and you want to learn? Sit down one day, or call her, or write a letter, or something, and say “I am interested in learning this craft.” There’s basically zero chance that Uncle Francis is gonna refuse to teach you about his model ships. Grandma is THRILLED to show you her quilting. Ms Barbara from the church bake sale WILL teach you how to make the fudge that made her second husband propose.

your friends and contemporaries are also a tremendous resource, and you should ask them too! But there’s just no replacement for the expertise of someone who has been knitting for sixty years. Part of this, also, is that older crafters can often give you materials to help you start, and your broke millennial friends usually can’t. My mom has more wool than she will ever use in her life, and she knows it. When one of my friends wanted to start knitting, my mom just gave her this gorgeous silver handspun yarn she’d made but wasn’t attached to. Yarn like that is expensive! Handspun yarn from someone who has been spinning for thirty years doesn’t often happen to beginners! And starting with good materials is better than starting with bad, because it helps you develop taste and a sense of quality more quickly.

Experienced crafters are often able to help you avoid learning bad or damaging habits—as a teenager, my sewing teacher spent a lot of time teaching me how to do things so that I didn’t get repetitive stress injuries (like she did). They’re going to be able to lend you books, send you ancient angelfire html pages with the most exacting instructions on earth, show you the good places to get crafting supplies that aren’t am*zon.

But you have to ask. Do not wait until these people are dead, and then say “I wish I knew.” You have to do it now, while you can.

[bumbleboa]

a year ago I drew this fanart for @cal-writes train AU (fic found HERE) and it has been my favorite piece of fanart of last year. So today I wanted to do a redraw, but instead of drawing the same piece again, I drew a prequel to the events in the last piece!

[rapidhighway]

the thing that caused me so much grief last night but now i feel better about it fdnghgdfggd