0olong - Tumblr blog

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If it sounds like the composer is trying to blast you with the orchestra until you're as deaf as he is, it's Beethoven.

If it sounds like the composer might be a vampire, it's Bach.

If it sounds like the composer is trying to set the violins on fire, it's Vivaldi.

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chipped

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Diverse vs. divergent

This is something I see people tripping up on sometimes, in a gender context and also in a neurotype context, so since the Gender Census research is primarily language-focused I thought posting it here might be quite on-topic.

"Diverse" is an adjective that describes a group as containing variation within it. Something that is diverse has [the inherent quality of] "diversity" (noun). It cannot describe an individual.

"Divergent" is an adjective that describes someone or something within a larger group as being different from the "norm". Something or someone that is divergent has [the behavioural quality of] "divergence" (noun).

So:

A person cannot be diverse, but they can be divergent.

A group of people/things that are diverse can contain very common examples as well as very uncommon examples relative to that whole group.

An individual person can e.g. have diverse interests, and in that situation the group that is diverse is the interests, not the person. Some of those diverse interests may be common, and some may be divergent.

A group of people can be diverse, and they can also be divergent as a subgroup of a larger group.

This applies to words/terms that end in "-diverse" and "-divergent".

So, for neurotype contexts:

A normal population is neurodiverse, and contains within it neurodivergent individuals and neurotypical individuals.

An individual person cannot be neurodiverse. They would be described as neurodivergent.

"The neurodiverse community" could refer to the entire human race, which would include both common and uncommon neurotypes, including all neurotypical people.

"The neurodivergent community" is correct, and refers to the subgroup of individuals whose neurotypes are less common and differ significantly from "the norm".

The neurodivergent community is itself diverse, and even neurodiverse, containing its own more and less common neurotypes relative to the neurodivergent subgroup as a whole.

And for gender contexts:

A normal population is gender-diverse, and contains within it gender-divergent individuals and cisgender and binary individuals.

An individual person cannot be "gender-diverse". They would be described as gender-divergent. (Or perhaps this is where people would usually say "gender non-conforming"?)

"The gender-diverse community" could refer to the entire human race, which would include both common and uncommon genders, including all cisgender and binary people.

"The gender-divergent community" is grammatically correct, and refers to the subgroup of individuals whose genders (or lack thereof) are less common and differ significantly from the more common human experiences of gender.

The gender-divergent community is itself diverse, and even gender-diverse, containing its own more and less common genders (or lack thereof) relative to the gender-divergent subgroup as a whole.

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Happy Pride 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Bisexual, asexual, intersex, non-binary, trans, and Queer in every color

It’s #Pride month! I usually am much more vocal and celebratory, but I lost a friend last week. Arabella Proffer, artist, awesome human, was a huge supporter (+member) of the #LGBTQIA community. We used to talk about how we #bi folks often overlooked if we have cis male partners. So today, just raising up #bisexual #asexual and generally all those under the Queer umbrella of goodness.

Here is Arabella dressed as feminist icon Furiosa (wearing my clothes because of course I randomly have all that stuff plus a wrist guard). I’m Trinity from the Matrix, transgender coming out movie extraordinaire. I did not, at that time, have a black cat suit. That has since been remedied. Arabella and I had so much fun; she threw the best parties, had the best sense of humor… wrote and published a photography book about weird Cleveland bathrooms…

So hug you queer friends today, and celebrate pride ❤️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

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Flowerpunk Bestiary - Sabre-Toothed Swan.

Starting off the Flowerpunk bestiary with probably one of my favourite creatures to design, the sabre-toothed swan.

The sabre-toothed swan is a truly frightful beast. Feared even by the nocturnaphrax and the vorkuu, the sabre-toothed swan is known for its savage nature and is often referred to as the bully of Darkling Forest.

Standing up to 30 feet in height, you do not want to pick a fight with one of these. Their claws are extremely sharp, particularly the claw on the lifted toe used for slashing anyone that gets too close, and their wings beat strong enough to knock you over. They have a bite force of about 5,000 PSI and are known for swallowing prey whole. Their diet consists mostly of water creatures, including kelpies. Those enormous dagger-like teeth are used for latching onto particularly energetic prey.

They have been known to exist in flocks, but the flocks typically don't exceed 10 members. It isn't uncommon to see lone pairs or even a swan that has existed by itself for a long time.

These creatures communicate both through vocalisation and body language. The majority of their vocalisations come from the pseudo-gills on their necks, which are specialised sound-producing organs. The majority of sounds produced are too low-frequency for human ears to pick up. They also communicate by chattering their jaw, which is often mistaken for rapid gunfire.

Their most famous sounds are their hellish screaming-honks, which with the help of their pseudo-gills can reach a deafening 130 decibels.

Breeding season takes place between April-May and the mothers typically lay 7 eggs, much like their smaller counterparts. However, the cygnets will remain with the mother well into adulthood and often don't migrate far from their original home. It is believed that the behaviour of these creatures has changed drastically as their species has become increasingly threatened. Family bonds are very strong and while swans will relentlessly bully other species, it is rare for them to fight amongst themselves. The parents are fiercely protective over their young and will batter anything that gets too close.

Surprisingly, cygnets are much more docile than the adults and may even imprint on you. The swans are capable of befriending humans on extremely rare occasions, usually if a human directly benefits the survival of their cygnets.

Cryptobiologists have also discovered that these creatures, much like all mega-fauna capable of flight, have unique magic-producing ganglia distributed throughout their bodies. These "Mana-Ganglia" are what allow the creatures to fly, or even exist at all. However, flight is extremely rare and only takes place during migrating seasons, if at all.

On a final note, it is still up for debate what hidden form these creatures are capable of transforming into and cryptobiologists still argue over whether it is the nearby Willow trees found by freshwater bodies or boulders. The oldest sabre-toothed swan on record transformed itself into a stone bridge as its disguise, the final form it eventually died in which still stands in its original location to this day.

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#WeirdPride

Owltober Day 13: What's Your TOH quote to Live by?

"Us Weirdos Have to Stick Together". This. Quote. Means. So. Much to me. I don't really fit in with my family and while my Parents try to understand They never will with somethings, So I never really had a lot of friends.

Then I made my Tumblr Account and I finally found a place where people were interested in my weird little theories and observations, people weren't going to tell me I was radical or illogical and I have had more fun since I made this account then in long time.

To every Weirdo (Affectionate) who liked, reblogged my posts or even followed me I have a big thank you to all of you, Thank You so much, You made me feel welcome when my own home often felt empty and frustrating. Thank you

And for my followers, Big shout out to @ivy-lore , @novelist-becca , @susie-dreemurr , @cartoonsofthecosmos, @gaywitch821, @proshipper-on-ship, @kingsnewmother, @chaosthedemon, @tenshiktama, @artdoer93, @riddlemethiswhatislife, @vieralandis, @blitzoimps-blog, @mylifeisprocrastination, @coldnessdiary (I can't find the blog but still), @luckytigershark, @danielsgr (Same with this one), @dshinterests10, @leakypipes, @analiceharu23, @bisexual-governmentspy, and @uraniumdealer. Thank all of you for following me and making many of my days when I was feeling down.

(Some of these blogs are mature so be aware, They are still great blogs to check out if your comfortable though)

Thank you for sticking with this weirdo in a way, It means a whole lot more than you will ever know.

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Ok so today I was on the bus with another trans guy and we were talking about how hard it is to get testosterone. The waiting lists, the price, all the doctors you have to go to, that kind of stuff. Except, we were calling it ’T’, like you do when you’re both closeted and in public.

Then suddenly the elderly lady sitting behind us was like ‘young men, either I’m going crazy or you both have never heard of supermarkets, they have shelves full of tea there! Do you need directions to one?’

To which my buddy starts to explain, because why not. ‘Well you see, we’re both trans, and… ’

The lady didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. ‘Oh no, I don’t mind that at all! Now do you want to know how to get to a place that sells tea? I’m actually heading there right now!’

We let her take us to the supermarket. We let her show us, excitedly, where the tea was. We both bought loads.

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Okay, I'm a data nerd. But this is so interesting?!

She starts out by looking at whether YouTube intense promotion of short-form content is harming long-form content, and ends up looking at how AI models amplify cultural biases.

In one of her examples, Amazon had to stop using AI recruitment software because it was filtering out women. They had to tell it to stop removing resumes with the word "women's" in them.

But even after they did that, the software was filtering out tons of women by doing things like selecting for more "aggressive" language like "executed on" instead of, idk, "helped."

Which is exactly how humans act. In my experience, when people are trying to unlearn bias, the first thing they do is go, "okay, so when I see that someone was president of the women's hockey team or something, I tend to dismiss them, but they could be good! I should try to look at them, instead of immediately dismissing candidates who are women! That makes sense, I can do that!"

And then they don't realize that they can also look at identical resumes, one with a "man's" name and one with a "woman's" name, and come away being more impressed by the "man's" resume.

So then they start having HR remove the names from all resumes. But they don't extrapolate from all this and think about whether the interviewer might also be biased. They don't think about how many different ways you can describe the same exact tasks at the same exact job, and how some of them sound way better.

They don't think about how, the more marginalized someone is, the less access they have to information about what language to use. And the more likely they are to have been "trained," by the way people treat them, to minimize their own skills and achievements.

They don't think about why certain words sound polished to them, and whether that's actually reflecting how good the person using that language will be at their job.

In this How To Cook That video, she talks about the fact that they're training that type of software on, say, ten years of hiring data, and that inherently means it's going to learn the biases reflected in that data... and that what AI models do is EXAGGERATE what they've learned.

Her example is that if you do a Google image search for "doctor," 90% of them will be men, even though in real life only 63% are men.

This is all fascinating to me because this is why representation matters. This is such an extreme, obvious example of why representation matters. OUR brains look at everything around us and learn who the world says is good at what.

We learn what a construction worker looks like, what a general practitioner doctor looks like, what a pediatrician looks like, what a teacher looks like.

We look at the people in our lives and in the media we consume and the ambient media we live through. And we learn what people who matter in our particular society look like.

We learn what a believable, trustworthy person looks like. The kind of person who can be the faux-generic-human talking to you about or illustrating a product.

Unless we also actively learn that other kinds of people matter equally, are equally trustworthy and believable... we don't.

And that affects EVERYTHING.

Also, this seems very easy to undo -- for AI, at least.

Like, instead of giving it a dataset of all the pictures of doctors humans have put out there, they could find people who actively prefer diverse, interesting groups of examples. And give the dataset to a bunch of them, first, to produce something for AI to learn from.

Harvard has a whole slew of really good tests for bias, although I would love to see more. (Note: they say things like "gay - straight, " but it's not testing how you feel about straight people. It's testing whether you have negative associations about gay people, and it uses straight people as a kind of baseline.)

There must be a way for image-recognition AI software to take these tests and reveal how biased a given model is, so it can be tweaked.

A lot of people would probably object that you're biasing the model intentionally if you do that. But we know the models are biased. We know we all have cultural biases. (I mean. Most people know that, I think.)

Anyway, this is already known in the field. There are plenty of studies about the biases in different AI programs, and the biases humans have.

That means we're already choosing to bias models intentionally. Both by knowingly giving them our biases, and by knowing they'll make our biases even bigger. And we already know this has a negative impact on people's lives.

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general relativity for babies

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I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

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Do you ever find that there's something you know you need to write, and you know roughly what needs to be in it, so you start writing it, but it takes months and months to finish because even though you know it all fits together, you don't quite know HOW it all fits together?

Anyway, that's what writing this was like. There's still so much more to say about magic and weird/neurodivergent people, but I wanted this to be concise, and I just about managed to make it so!

I hope you enjoy it. Please let me know if it resonates.

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Women Often Mistaken For Men In Public Restrooms

Marchers in Pride parade on Capitol Hill, Seattle, June 27, 1993

This photo of the 1993 Pride parade shows a group of women, some wearing t-shirts printed with “I’m not a BOY,” carrying a banner reading “Women often mistaken for men in public restrooms.”

📷 MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Photograph Collection, 2000.107.19930627.4.5

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This is beautiful, and I relate to nearly all of it.

Autism Symbol Dragon.

This is the autism symbol as a dragon. I did this to represent the influence my autism has on my art. This is a public domain drawing and anyone can use it for any reason.

I really like the infinity autism symbol over all others, especially the Godawful puzzle piece. It really encapsulates the diversity of our community and how unique every autistic individual is. But I wanted to do a little spin on it by turning it into a dragon to add some extra meaning. A dragon to me is the symbol of the imagination itself, since dragons are so diverse in of themselves and can look like or represent anything. But as well as imagination, I think the dragon also represent resilience and a ferocious passion.

My webcomic is absolutely full of different types of dragon. Here are just a few examples:

(Can you tell dragons are one of my special interests?)

I was diagnosed at about 3 and I've had a very mixed relationship with being autistic until recently. There was a time when I really hated having to bear the label of “autistic” and tried for years to erase that part of me because of the stigma. Being an artist allowed me to get away with being a bit weird because I could chalk it up to just being "an eccentric artist," but there was also the side of me that needed extra accommodations and help, the less glamorous side. I would often push myself to be as neurotypical as I could in these areas and I developed a debilitating fear of becoming a burden on others, to the point where it started damaging my mental health. Eventually, I developed panic attacks due to overworking myself (and struggles with accepting myself as queer), autistic shutdowns became more frequent and this lead to further humiliation and a further disgust towards my autism.

It wasn't until I became a freelancer a few years ago that I realised how much damage trying to hold myself to neurotypical standards was having on me. While being able to work remotely was a dream since it meant not having to deal with the sensory nightmare that is using the local bus service, it also meant I experienced autistic burnout more frequently. Then I came across the autistic community on Twitter, where I started to discover so much about myself and how my brain works.

I also made a lot of incredible friends through this and even had the courage to publicly come out as queer. Now I fully embrace being autistic, even the parts that society deems “unacceptable” like stimming and not making eye contact. I am happy in who I am and no longer see myself as a burden.

Sadly, there is often a discussion about whether autism should be cured or not, a discussion that should absolutely not be happening because autism is not a disease. If you "cured" my autism, you would also remove my art. My art and my autism are inseparable and one does not exist without the other. Autism has given me the ability to think outside the box and traits like my monotropism allow me to hyperfocus on a project until its completion. Having spoken to many autistic creatives throughout my life, a good chunk of our struggles do not come from being autistic itself, rather society’s refusal to accept or accommodate us. Many of us could achieve great things and truly innovate society, but there are too many systemic barriers in the way preventing us from doing so, and no amount of “hard work” or “conquering our disability” (fuck inspiration porn, seriously) can change that because individualistic solutions do not fix systemic problems. Simple solutions such as disability benefits that actually properly cover our living costs, a higher wage for carers of disabled people and proper work accommodations (including the option for remote work) would mean the world of difference for us.

Now personally, I am a bit more radical in my thinking and I believe the current system of Neoliberal Capitalism needs to be done away with entirely because ableism is built into Capitalism itself. This is what has drawn me to ideas such as anarchism and the Solarpunk movement. In particular, I try to live by the "12 principles of Permaculture" to the best of my ability. I think "Embrace Diversity" and "Produce No Waste" can be applied to living as a disabled person, since disabled people are often seen as a waste product under this system and embracing our differences means we are not wasted.

For those of you who have followed me for a while, you may have noticed that my art, like me, is weird. I love to embrace the weird and the quirky. My creatures are whimsical and bizarre. My characters all tend to be quirky outsiders. I have always been drawn to surrealism and absurdism, the work of Salvador Dali in particular really caught my attention.

Art has always been a safe way for me to explore the unusual and alien, and it has been a voice for me when speaking words fail. I use it to explore the things that frighten me and to help process a chaotic world. As weird as my art is, I think the weirdness and absurdity is a reflection of how weird and absurd our modern world is and how little sense it makes to me anymore.

There are often themes of environmentalism and the profound beauty of nature, influenced heavily by growing up in an area of natural beauty. Furthermore, the theme of "empathy for monsters" is a personal favourite. Maybe the reason why there are so many weird, twisted and grotesque monsters and creatures with tragic backstories in my webcomic universe is because I see myself in them - just weird little off-putting things that want compassion and to be understood.

As I have grown as a person, so has my art. The more I learn about my autism, the more I can open up and the better I can express myself.

On a final note, if you would like to support me and the work I do, please consider donating a Ko-Fi. It would really help me push towards my goal of finally launching my webcomic, plus it would also allow me to talk more about important topics surrounding disability, sustainable living and art/creature stuff.

Happy new year, everyone! And especially to all of my autistic and neurodivergent comrades out there.

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If you want some idea of how much autistic people struggle to understand allistic people when they don’t say exactly what they mean, take a cooking recipe and replace all units of measure with “enough but not too much”. For example:

enough but not too much white sugar

enough but not too much butter

enough but not too many eggs

enough but not too much vanilla extract

enough but not too much flour

enough but not too much baking powder

enough but not too much milk

preheat oven to hot enough but not too hot

bake for long enough but not too long

Even someone who’s experienced with cooking would probably struggle to follow that recipe. Now imagine if they had no experience cooking and had no idea what these ingredients are.

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There must be a way to turn off "random person posted for the first time in a while" notifications in the Tumblr app, right?

...right?