autistoria

[autistoria]

I took my little brother (autistic, mostly non verbal) out and he was using his voice keyboard to tell me something, and this little boy (maybe 4 or 5?) heard him and asked me "Is he a robot??" I tried to explain to him that no, he isn't a robot, he just communicates differently, but my darling brother was in the background max volume "I am robot I am robot I am robot I am robot"

[autistoria]

as my grass-touching expands in scope, I constantly become more horrified at the mangled remains of what is known as "activism" on social media

the ideas about "activism" that seem popular among left-leaning youth on internet, are just the opposite of what is good to do in real life!

People think they should cut everyone with different views than them out of their lives, when in reality we need to form coalitions with anyone with values we can share. They think that quietly working within the system is stupid and a waste of time, when it's vitally necessary for somebody to be always doing that. They think that it's good to be angry and upset all the time and to lash out and argue with people, when it's very important to maintain internal peacefulness and focus on work that is within your ability to handle

It is most important of all to find older activists to listen to and learn from...

...and it could be hard to find them using the device that constantly hemorrhages all your personal information to the government. For obvious reasons.

[autistoria]

Correction: zero Ricky/Brian content on AO3. I thought I’d read a story years ago but it must have been on a different site. I’ve never really been a fanfic writer but now I feel the need to write some stories to fill that void.

Also Pushing Daisies is pretty great too!

Do me a favour and reblog this with a show you like that was cancelled after only one season. I don't mean shows that were always meant to be miniseries or shows that work perfectly well as a standalone story, or shows that might still get renewed. I mean shows that are and will forever remain unfinished. The more obscure the better.

[autistoria]

The two most perfect high school shows ever:

1. My So-Called Life

2. Freaks and Geeks

Both launched the careers of some extremely famous people, both just such a perfect encapsulation of the alienation of teenage life.

And My So-Called Life also had the groundbreaking queer character or Ricky Vasquez (who by the way I ship with the nerdy next door neighbor character Brian Krakow and I am deeply offended there’s not more Ricky/Brian content on AO3. I like to think Brian coming out would have been a plot line on the show if it hadn’t been cancelled.)

Do me a favour and reblog this with a show you like that was cancelled after only one season. I don't mean shows that were always meant to be miniseries or shows that work perfectly well as a standalone story, or shows that might still get renewed. I mean shows that are and will forever remain unfinished. The more obscure the better.

[autistoria]

There is so much we don't understand. Springtime, out in the meadow. Everybody all over the dandelions--- flies, ants, tiny bees, even tinier bees so minuscule they're like black and jewel-colored particles without a closer look.

Get down on hands and knees--- you start to see the world. The tiny bees, a glittering blue-green color, slide down between the pollen-coated anthers of the dandelions into the crevices of the petals like miners sliding down into narrow shafts. The big bees make it look so simple. For the tiniest bees, a dandelion is a place more than it is a food. The bee's body is sleek like a suit of armor, and solidly shiny blue-green instead of having the distinctive stripes of many other bees.

Can I learn the name of this bee? To see the bee and to know it, you have to look very silly lying on the ground among the dandelions, looking closely at the things too small to be important. It is a mere particle, just a Bug, rather than a stereotypical fluffy yellow and black bee. It is complex and beautiful; its metallic and glittering exoskeleton, its transparent wings, its articulated and sensitive antennae.

"We have to save the bees, they are important," people say, but if we don't look closely, who is to say what is a bee and what isn't? And when we do look closely, isn't everything important?

[autistoria]

Lmao I am mildly addicted to Polytopia, it’s a fun little mobile game when I need something that doesn’t require much thinking. I can’t believe I am playing these assholes’ favorite game

WAIT

I JUST REMEMBERED HEARING AN ELON MUSK QUOTE WHERE HE TALKS ABOUT HOW HE BELIEVES CHESS IS "TOO SIMPLE" OR WHATEVER AND HE SAID HIS FAVORITE GAME WAS A GAME CALLED "POLYTOPIA"

I JUST REMEMBERED THAT IVE PLAYED POLYTOPIA

It being Elon's favorite game (or at least one so important to him that his biographer dedicates a lot of time to it) is.....really really funny.

Basically, imagine Civilization, but as a mobile game. So like if Civilization Revolution was even more dumbed down (that's a Civilization insult. That's devastating. It's devastated right now). For what it's worth, it's not a bad game. On the contrary, from what I could tell in the little bit of time I played it, it's a perfectly competent game with good design. But it's not a deep game by any means. I played through it once, won easily on my first go, then saw that the other playable characters had barely any differences between them.

Like, not to imply you can judge a book by its cover, but here's what it looks like

I came across an article by Dave Karpf discussing this exact thing, and I think it describes it wonderfully

[autistoria]

I hope you get all the rest you need. Even if you spent a quieter day and didn’t feel productive, please allow yourself to rest without guilt or shame for not “earning” it. You don’t have to burn yourself out to prove that you need rest. It’s a very human thing to need sleep, to need a break, to need nourishing, to want to take some personal quiet time. Please allow yourself to rest. Even if it’s “too early” to go to bed, even if you spent all day in bed trying to recover from anything. If your body needs sleep, please allow yourself to have it, there should be no rules as to earning sleep.

[autistoria]

i guess i'm not as despairing as many people about the future of the planet simply because the fact that we're not in way worse shape today suggests the earth is crazy resilient

Reading anything about environmental history is like "and by 1956 the river was so full of uranium and bubonic plague that the only living organism found in it was an single amoeba which died immediately after being documented" and I'm like okay maybe today's problems aren't necessarily uniquely disastrous and unsolvable

[autistoria]

i'm always a bit unsettled by disdain for intellectual or creative labor in leftist spaces. there's this commonly held belief that academics are a bunch of rich old white men, rather than a wide variety of people who are barely getting by. most lecturers in universities are adjuncts living paycheck to paycheck. authors make very little money as a general rule. most researchers are overworked and underpaid. and yet there's still this idea that academics are overcompensated to sit around and smoke cigars together while making shit up

[autistoria]

Most anti phone advice is so inane and regurgitated to me but one thing I’ve been thinking about for days is “social media is okay, but the real danger comes in when you think your phone should be your go to during your limited pockets of leisure” like that’s literally the truest thing ever

[autistoria]

Honestly bizarre that tomatoes get all the flack for “not being a vegetable” because they're technically a fruit when:

A) There are a ton of fruits that get categorised as vegetables. Like this also applies to pumpkins, squashes and cucumbers.

B) The fucking mushrooms are standing there at the back of the crowd in this witch trial, trying to look inconspicuous because they somehow got into the vegetable club with no fucking controversy despite the fact that they're not even plants.

[autistoria]

[autistoria]

Listen to me. Listen very carefully:

They are trying to wear you out.

They are trying to wear you out, and they own most major social media now, along with many major media outlets. The disinformation machine is cranking along. You are going to have to slow the fuck down and read things before you help them wear out other people, too.

So you just saw a post about a real scary bill, hunh? Republicans want to make it a capital offense to pet dogs and repeal The Sky Is Blue Act of 1793, declaring the new official color of the sky to be squant? Damn, that sounds scary.

Let's go look up this fictitious "Make The Sky Squant Again Act" on GovTracker* & on the official legislative tracker on congress.gov!

Well, let's see... GovTracker estimates it has a 1% chance of even getting out of committee and a 0% chance of being enacted, while congress.gov says this bill has 2 cosponsors who have been in the House and combined total of less than a month. The bill doesn't have any actual text, and it was referred to 5 different committees.

That fictitious bill and a hundred others like it are quite literally not worth your time, and more than that, continuing to wring your hands about it and tell other people about the scary scary squant sky bill only does their work for them. It scares people, it makes them spend time and energy on it, and it wears them out. It is a legislative Gish Gallop, meant to throw so many things at people that we can't keep up.

Even calling or messaging your Rep in this case means their staffer has to waste time responding to you and letting you know that Representative Buttzonheads definitely won't support making petting dogs a capital offense, a thing that will never, ever happen regardless.

Staying engaged in this environment is going to require protecting your heart and protecting your energy, yes, but also protecting the energy of others. This is why WWII propaganda posters also included ones taking people to task for spreading panicky rumors and undermining morale.

Do you know why most observant Jews don't eat chicken and dairy together, even though the ban is on red meat and dairy together bc you're not supposed to cook the calf in the milk of its mother?** It's not because we think that chicken might secretly lactate or Just Because. It's because the rabbis decided that if I'm sitting out in public and eating turkey and cheese together, someone might glance at the turkey and mistake it for red meat and think, "oh, well, I know that Spider is a good Jew, there must have been a change, or maybe I can just justify it to myself that if Spider does it, it must be permissible to bend the rules just that much." And I would then be accidentally leading my fellow Jew astray. We are responsible for being even more careful for the sake of others than we are for ourselves.

It's the same principle here. We need to really be careful about the information we are spreading and check things past reading a news site. Is it true? Is it relevant? Is it meaningful? Is the news site one I recognize? Can I find meaningful independent corroboration on another site, which is to say, if I find an article about it on a second site, is it just quoting or rephrasing this site?

Yeah, that is a lot. But that's how we keep them from using us to lead our fellows astray.

*GovTracker is an independent site. They explain their methodology in their About section.

**I cannot say enough how I am not at this time interested in going on a Jewish Side Quest About Dietary Laws on this post. Usually, I love it, but hold off this time, please, y'all. Let's stay on target this once.

[autistoria]

Long day. The size, speed, and chaos of the last 10 days of the second Trump administration has been calculated and intentional. They have a big pile of abhorrent ideas which they’ve selected from the Project 2025 menu, and they’ve decided to front-load their release over the earliest of these first 100 days. Doesn’t matter that many will be struck down in the courts or overturned later. The point is that 1) the disorder and confusion will scatter the dissenters and make it hard for them to focus criticism on any single policy, 2) some of what they’re throwing at the wall will stick and become semi-permanent so long as the next Democratic administration lets it, 3) whether they win or lose, they succeed in weakening the federal government in a way that makes it harder for any future leaders to accomplish anything at all, strengthening the relative political power of the private sector.

They want you demoralized and to feel like it’s hopeless, but it’s only hopeless if you let them convince you it is. Rest well, stay informed, and take care of yourself during the fights ahead. These four years will be a marathon not a race

[autistoria]

HELL YES, look how scared they are at the public's reaction, this is amazing

[autistoria]

Ok this is so true and so insightful!

Also the online community where I have seen this happen the absolute most is knitting Instagram, believe it or not. I haven’t opened my knitting Instagram account in a few years at this point because I just had to step back from all this toxicity.

The conversations about accountability & apologies that we've been having in social justice circles these last few years have basically trained everybody to fawn.

We've been telling people that if they are accused of any wrongdoing or of hurting anybody's feelings, it is their obligation to apologize immediately, and never to hedge, disagree, or to explain their rationale what they've done.

In their apology, we expect them to articulate every single thing that they have done that was damaging in the strongest language possible and to declare outright that they have harmed someone, often multiple groups of people, even if they are not sure of the impact (or could not even possibly be sure).

If a person's apology is anything but immediate and entirely self-excoriating, we accuse the person of downplaying the damage they have done, failing to be accountable, and manipulating others.

In this way, we've made it impossible for a person to ever take their own side lest that be taken itself as a form of wrongdoing. We have trained our fellow social-justice-minded people to believe that if they do anything but worsen the case against themselves, they are being irresponsible.

I say we, in all of this, because I have partaken in all of this rhetoric, made these kinds of criticism, given accused people this type of advice.

And I have followed it myself, often to a damaging effect.

I have taken responsibility for problems in which I truly did not believe I played a part, I've overstated the damage that I've done so as not to risk understating it, I've ascribed malice to my intentions when I knew it wasn't there, I've agreed with people's most negative, bad-faith narratives about conflicts involving me that they were not even present for, offered up information about myself that was not a third party's business in the name of transparency, apologized for things I haven't done -- and in doing all of this, I have denied my loved ones the opportunity to really hear me about what I was going through and my motivations when I was in conflict with them, things that any true friend or close associate would obviously want to hear about if they cared about me.

This aim of giving the perfect apology and taking perfect accountability has been nothing but an isolating force in my life, because it has barred me from openly entering into necessary conflict with people when our needs were incompatible or they had hurt me just as much as I'd hurt them. The fear of being a manipulative, unaccountable DARVO-er has led me to roll onto my back and expose my belly, falling over myself with panicked apologies and the most unflattering information possible cast in the least explicable light, almost outright begging for others to become angrier at me and believing that it was only way I could ever possibly be accepted back.

We've drilled into people that the way to be good and responsible is to allow people to view us as negatively as possible, to even arm others with information that will confirm that point of view, and to never insert our own perspective or needs on the matter at all.

And yeah, there are a lot of shitty people out there who dodge accountability easily because their power ensconces them from any consequences. but the primary problem with that was never that they wrote a shitty notesapp apology that used the unforgivable phrase "I am sorry if you felt XYZ." The real problem was that there was no community that held enough influence to hold them to account, and for their victims there weren't ever adequate supports or protections.

instead of addressing any of that in a remotely systematic way, we have taken to picking apart every accused person's every word and deed for evidence of inner moral failure and created a culture in which we think we can determine a person's safety by how artfully they put words together when they are under threat. and what do you know, plenty of bad faith actors and conflict avoidant cowards and people who just dont understand what they are even being accused of can do that just fine.

[autistoria]

I love this because my son and I just started listening to this podcast (or one with the exact same premise) and it is delightful. (It’s called The Big Fib and it’s funny and fascinating and has a really catchy theme song that reminds me of the 90s-2000s ska bands I used to love in my teen years)

Ok now do NYT columnists