Democrats Cannot Win The Republican Game

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 disagre … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 19 hours ago

Does ’Semafor’ Know That Gossip Is Polarization?

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. We’re told that … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 3 days ago

‘Through The Brain A Thousand Times’

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 rou … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 8 days ago

Fuck The Unenlightened Self-Interest Of Trump Voters

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. Whatever the perceived self-interest of a … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 days ago

It’s Raining (On) Men?

Ashley Fairbanks: Let me share my lifelong dream for the left: taking over fraternal organizations (Moose, Oddfellows, Etc.) They are 501c8s, which is basically impossible to get now. Most of them own property, they often have liquor licenses that are grandfathered in. We could h … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 days ago

Intended Consequences

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 … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 13 days ago

From Blogosphere To Manosphere?

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. Men’s votes need to be sought and welcomed, … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 14 days ago

Dave Winer: From Blogosphere To Manosphere?

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. Men’s votes need to be sought and welcomed, … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 14 days ago

The Day After The Day After

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. Yester … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 14 days ago

Hope And Despair

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 installe … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 15 days ago

Election Night By Design

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. First, while I had some morning insomnia starting before six o’clock in the morni … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 16 days ago

On Impact: The Big Win

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 ent … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 19 days ago

Never Meant

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 expand … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 20 days ago

Leaving Out The Important Questions On Autism Research

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”. … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 21 days ago

Doctoring The Transcript

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 … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 22 days ago

Yankees Suck

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 … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 22 days ago

‘For A Moment There I Thought We Were In Trouble’

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 Sunda … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 23 days ago

Back On Hiatus Due To Technical Clusterfuck Beyond My Control, And I’m Just So Fucking Tired Of Everything

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, … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 24 days ago

Fighting From Afar

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. I’m not a woo-woo guy. … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 25 days ago

Our Blogger’s Voice

Let’s try something else, in the form of a sort of “heard” directed at another blogger. Misu opens their latest with an observation: Recently I’ve noticed that we have a lot of RCA Victor records. Each time I pull one out I find myself looking at the dog. His name is Nipper, appa … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 26 days ago

Some Other Ways In Which My Birthday Sucked Shit

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 W … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 27 days ago

Some Other Ways In Which My Birthday Sucked Shit

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 W … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 27 days ago

Today’s Considerable Portion

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. – Carl Linnaeus In early 2018, I legally changed my name to the one by which I’d been known for decades in all ways but the legal and official … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 28 days ago

Script Doctoring

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 fatigu … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Bank Local

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. Early this morning, I received … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

A Political Dispatch From The Thumb

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 st … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

How We Endure

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 … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

You Aren’t Neurodiverse

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. I don’t really understand anything the article describes as th … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Let’s Go To The Old Posts Home

Kev is wondering if you ever read your old posts, while both Terence and Roy are tending the “old post” gardens of their blogs. Terence: Sometimes the work is delightful - finding a prescient post from a decade ago. Sometimes it is frustrating - being unable to find a vital-but-l … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

I Saw Baseball

My view at T-Mobile Park 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 open … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Back To Blogging Means Back To Restoring Blogging

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. As … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

The Music Of The Spheres

Wikipedia: The musica universalis (literally universal music), also called music of the spheres or harmony of the spheres, is a philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a form of music. The theory, originati … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

The Return Of The Wire

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 n … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

What A Kobo Gift Card Gets Me

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 … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

And Back Again To Weblog (LOL)

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 file … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Stop Calling It ‘Race Science’

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. It’s no … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Stop Calling It ‘Race Science’

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. It’s no … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

You Can’t Own The Social Web

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. Inherent to the fo … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

You Can’t Own The Social Web

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. Inherent to the fo … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Patience and Understanding

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 … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Patience and Understanding

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 … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Moving The Blog From Pika (Back) To Weblog.LOL

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. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing problematic a … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Moving The Blog From Pika (Back) To Weblog.LOL

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. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing problematic a … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Meet Your Muppet Archetypes

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. It’s dark but then you can see light up ahead. It seems warm and inviting. The … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Meet Your Muppet Archetypes

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. It’s dark but then you can see light up ahead. It seems warm and inviting. The … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Holy Hell, The Social Web Did Not Begin In 2008

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 … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Holy Hell, The Social Web Did Not Begin In 2008

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 … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 1 month ago

Link Me Like One Of Your French URLs

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. What … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 2 months ago