#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.

[doccywhomst]

[werewolf-transgenderism]

keep seeing undergrads on social media saying “oh if a prof has a strict no-AI academic integrity policy that’s a red flag for me because that means they don’t know how to design assignments” like sorry girl but that just sounds like you’ve got a case of sour grapes about not being allowed to cheat with the plagiarism machine that doesn’t know how to evaluate sources and kills the environment! I have a strict no-AI policy because if you use AI to write your essays for a writing course it’s literally plagiarism because you didn’t write it and you’re not learning any of the things the course teaches if you just plug a prompt into the plagiarism generator that kills the environment, hope this helps!

[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

[gideonisms]

I LOVE being alive so I can be mediocre at SO many different hobbies

[akashicrecord]

no offense but if your friend is trying out a new hobby be fucking nice to them

[prolibytherium]

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.

[stuckinapril]

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but please don’t break promises you make to yourself just because it’s you the promise is being made to. You told yourself you’d go on a walk tomorrow morning? Do it. You said you’d get more consistent with your skincare routine? Make it happen. You promised yourself you would work on establishing boundaries regardless of who’s on the other side of them? Follow through with that. Don’t wake up the next day and go “well I don’t HAVE to do this” “it wouldn’t hurt to postpone this” “this isn’t a big deal” because it literally is. Every promise broken is another nail in the coffin of your self-actualization. It’s another major roadblock to developing healthy self-love and self-respect. Weigh promises you’ve made to yourself the same way you would weigh promises you’ve made to others.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

HOT, SINGLE, UNSTUDIED SPONGES. 3000 NAUTICAL MILES AWAY. Come sail the distance and read Tiger Tiger!

[hattersarts]

drew some book!husbands. they feel like they've taken more traits from each other than the show.

[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.

[bioshzrd]

this random ass guy who’s entire bit is that he can move like this is the only good wesker fan ever

[spicyraeman]

maybe this'll stay a wip or maybe it won't, either way what's more fun than learning that ur bandmate can't hold her drink than by finding her sitting in a dark corner mid way through the afterparty

[bizarrelittlemew]

i can't wait to be 30+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 40+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 50+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 60+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 70+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 80+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 90+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to look back on my life and know that i loved things deeply and passionately and was inspired to create and was part of communities with incredible people from all over the world brought together by the stories that touched us

[glowsticcc]

how many languages do you know?

(i’m counting languages where you took one class for a semester if you retained any of it congrats you are a little multilingual)

(reblog for bigger sample size!)