From Alaska To Bajor In Search Of Identity

Like many other people my age, I’ve been rewatching Northern Exposure ever since the digital release a few months back more recently was followed by Amazon picking up the streaming rights. Yesterday, it was the episode “Crime and Punishment”. Karma catches up with Chris for a Wes … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

The Forgotten Trip

Late last month and early this month, I got a bit morose about the idea that I’ll never be able to travel again, a thing that’s also all wrapped up in the aphantasia and SDAM which preclude me from being to re-live old travels. As if to emphasize all of this, yesterday my Timehop … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

The Forgotten Trip

Late last month and early this month, I got a bit morose about the idea that I’ll never be able to travel again, a thing that’s also all wrapped up in the aphantasia and SDAM which preclude me from being to re-live old travels. As if to emphasize all of this, yesterday my Timehop … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

They Pull Me Back In

First the disclosure: I’ve read neither the Mike Masnick post nor the Jaron Lanier and Allison Stanger article that prompted it, so I’m not actually here to respond directly to either of these things. It’s just that 47 U.S. Code § 230 is being discussed again, and I wanted very b … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

They Pull Me Back In

First the disclosure: I’ve read neither the Mike Masnick post nor the Jaron Lanier and Allison Stanger article that prompted it, so I’m not actually here to respond directly to either of these things. It’s just that 47 U.S. Code § 230 is being discussed again, and I wanted very b … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

Walking And Talking

One problem with only having had the refurbished Apple Watch since last August is that I don’t really know how long I’ve been keeping up with the daily walk for exercise, let alone how to calculate the longer period going back into the early pandemic that then got intermittently … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

Walking And Talking

One problem with only having had the refurbished Apple Watch since last August is that I don’t really know how long I’ve been keeping up with the daily walk for exercise, let alone how to calculate the longer period going back into the early pandemic that then got intermittently … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

The Heresy Of The Status Quo

There’s a thing I was going to add to my post about self-censorship yesterday that I never got around to: the dust-up over Threads saying that it will not algorithmically recommend to users so-called “political” posts from people they don’t already follow, in the way that it does … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

The Heresy Of The Status Quo

There’s a thing I was going to add to my post about self-censorship yesterday that I never got around to: the dust-up over Threads saying that it will not algorithmically recommend to users so-called “political” posts from people they don’t already follow, in the way that it does … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

My Aphantasiac Monologue

Whenever I bring up memory it inevitably also implicates my aphantasia, but this Musings post reminds me of that other mental process that causes much surprise at how different brains work: the so-called “internal monologue”. | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

On Shadowbanning Yourself

There’s a little discussion going on today amongst bloggers I either follow on Mastodon or who are in my local feed. The topic is self-censorship, and because I don’t tend to engage in it myself, I’ve a few things to say because I knew in advance where the discussion would end up … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

On Shadowbanning Yourself

There’s a little discussion going on today amongst bloggers I either follow on Mastodon or who are in my local feed. The topic is self-censorship, and because I don’t tend to engage in it myself, I’ve a few things to say because I knew in advance where the discussion would end up … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

Tell Me: How Do You Experience Memory?

Over the past week and a half here, I’ve written three posts relating numerous experiences from my past. In therapy today, I wondered how a random third-party would feel after reading those posts if I told them I have some degree of severely deficient autobiographical memory. | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

What Can I But Enumerate Old Themes?

So, as mentioned, I’ve been making a custom theme using Underscores that would ape the look and feel I achieved under Blogstream but without all the unnecessary jankiness the latter theme had under the hood. As of tonight, you are looking at the result. There are, however, some c … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

What Are We Talkin’ Bout?

There’s been much ballyhoo about Tracy Chapman appearing at the Grammys to perform her hit “Fast Car” with Luke Combs. As I said on Mastodon, I feel like people simultaneously are making both too much and too little of it. Does it matter that it was a bit of a unifying experience … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

The Relationship Between Form And Theme

Over the course of my aborted college career, I couldn’t seem to write a normal paper. For a sociology class where we’d read about social drama and had to write a paper on it, I realized that I’d recently been involved in an incident on campus whose narrative perfectly fit the st … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

Lessons From A Japanese Girlfriend

Last night I dreamt that I was on what appeared to be a vacation with my Japanese girlfriend to her parents’ home in Japan. To be clear, I do not have nor have I ever had a Japanese girlfriend, nor have I ever been to Japan. All I recall was tidying up some of my stuff that had f … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

Once More Unto The eReader Breach, Dear Friends, Once More

Back in the summer of 2022, after several years of a Kobo Clara HD as my eReader of choice, I’d made the switch back to a Kindle Paperwhite. I’m not going to bother rehashing the reasons, as you can read about them in a more general post about simplifying and one about this speci … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

On Digital Relationships: Once Upon A Time, I Was A Voxer

Manu is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival on digital relationships, and I wasn’t going to try contributing to this until reading his own entry and realizing that it might be worth talking about how my first digital relationships also were analogue ones. Here’s just a little … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

On Digital Relationships: Once Upon A Time, I Was A Voxer

Manu is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival on digital relationships, and I wasn’t going to try contributing to this until reading his own entry and realizing that it might be worth talking about how my first digital relationships also were analogue ones. Here’s just a little … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

Travels With

At the leading edge of this particular depression, I posted about an impotent wanderlust and tried to remember what traveling I’d done in the past. There’s some things missing in that litany, and I wanted to try finding what I could amongst the memory deficiencies. | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

The Proper Diagnosis

Before heading to bed I read this Adrienne LaFrance piece for The Atlantic about techno-authoritarianism, and maybe it’s only because I recently read Clara E. Mattei’s The Capital Order but 3,000 seems like an awful lot of words not to include a critique of capitalism, which is t … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

Thanks, I Hate It

In the back of my mind after the past several days of course I knew it was possible but I was trying very hard not to think about it. The mood dive has hit, and all I can see right now is how completely shit is my future, because a tiny bit of it starts next month with my energy … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

Journalism Is An Act Of Power

Robert Kingett last week wrote about the need for less objective journalism, and there’s just a couple bits I wanted to pull here, mostly about the idea that, yes, journalism is a thumb on the scales of power but so-called objective journalism is pressing on the wrong side. | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

It’s Okay Sometimes To Hate Being Actually Autistic

This morning I had to get up early in order to catch a medical transpo service to the Pulmonary Function Lab for a now-routine, annual or so, lung function test. When I’d finally remembered late last week to call to schedule the ride, I didn’t also schedule the return trip, becau … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

Sleepwalking In Place

I’m around halfway through The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, and last night I slid into an hour and a half of insomnia because I started thinking about traveling. I’d started feeling a minor pang of wanderlust, itself complicated by two things. | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 9 months ago

On Disabled Autonomy

So, there’s a couple of things that got left out of my epic, long post about being denied adequate disability accommodations by both Safeway and the State of Oregon, or maybe one thing that got left out and one thing I wanted to elaborate. | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

Leaving Behind The Last Vestiges Of Gutenberg

It’s no secret that I do not especially enjoy the WordPress block editor, otherwise known by the last name of the originator of printing with movable type, and for awhile now I’ve had it completely disabled. My themes of late, then, have been non-block ones, and using the Jetpack … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

What Does ‘Full And Equal Enjoyment’ Mean, Exactly?

When last we spoke of it, my long-running public accommodations complaint against Safeway for disabling the mute function on their self-checkout kiosks had been “administratively closed” by the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries, an action taken sometimes when the bureau is over … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

I Said, ‘No Comment’

Less than a month after opening up comments and pings here, I’ve turned them all off again. I want to stress that this isn’t because of any particular comment or ping, nor is it about spam management. I’ve entered something of a flail and that usually bodes well for making a bunc … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

Flagging Motivation

For most of the past week or so, I’ve been preoccupied first with moving from TV Time to Trakt for tracking my television viewing (the former having apparently done away with public user profiles); then on once again rebooting my homepage, bringing it back to omg.lol from Carrd; … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

ActivityPub Is To The IndieWeb As A.I. Is To Silicon Valley?

Well before I even got out of bed this morning, I became enmeshed in a Mastodon discussion between the author of the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress and a longstanding expert in designing for community, and it’s worth summarizing here the major point made by the latter. | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

Samefoods Can Change

There’s this autistic (and maybe elsewise) idea of samefood, wherein one of our robust defaults is to do just what it says: eat the same food all the time. That doesn’t always or necessarily mean that these tastes never change, however. | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

Hotlinking To Save The Internet

Over on Mastodon, Robb’s been playing with 88x31s like we used to have on our sites and blogs in the old days, and in the process it raised something called hotlinking, otherwise known as inline linking, and that in turn brought to mind an early web story I don’t think I’ve ever … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

Blog Comments Are Not Social Media

Matthias Ott, riffing on a conversation between Matt Mullenweg (of whom, of course, I’ve heard) and Tim Ferriss (who seems precisely like the sort of ridiculous Silicon Valley influencer type about whom I’m glad I’ve never heard anything), has some thoughts about blog comments. A … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

Old, Older, Oldest

Chris at the new year has been adding old posts to his blog, inspiring Robb to do the same. The former’s earliest post in this process dates to May of 2002, while the latter found one from July of 2009. My interest here should be obvious, as this site is destined eventually to ho … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

A Brief Look At My 2023 In Books

I’m still using Goodreads for book tracking, primarily because I only follow authors and that’s how I get a fair number of my recommendations: the books enjoyed by authors I enjoy. Last year, I set my challenge at 50 books, and in the end I read 64, although this is misleading fo … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

Radical Acts Of Autistic Empathy

“Forget resolutions; let’s focus on being good people and helping others,” says Musings from a Tangled Mind. “Random acts of kindness, like holding the door open for someone or letting someone merge in traffic […] or being an ally where needed are the real currency of the soul.” | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

The Year For Blogging To Pump Up The Volume

In 1990, New Line Cinema released a box office failure starring Christian Slater as a teenage pirate radio DJ who inspires a surge of others to take to the air and find their voice. Come and gone nearly three years to the month before I first got online, Pump Up the Volume noneth … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

My Best Blog Posts Of 2023

This time last December, I wrote up my picks for my top ten blog posts here for the year ending. I’d written 75 posts that year. I’ve written 322 this year—more than I can process into another “top ten”. However, I did some browsing and have come up with what I consider my two be … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

The Personal And The Political

Mike Haynes asked about names, specifically what made bloggers “choose to use your real name or not”, while Robert happenstantially mentioned not really “posting a great deal of personal information”, and I thought about what I posted almost a year ago about my name and its statu … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

The Flaw In Webmention

One of my trepidations about turning on not just webmentions themselves but also their display on posts is that I don’t actually like likes as a concept, despite once upon a time mentioning how useful they are if and when I’m cognitively overwhelmed but want to send some sort of … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

Accidental Thoughts On Austerity

I don’t really do more general link posts here, figuring it’s just as easy for someone to subscribe to the RSS feed of my Linklog folder on Instapaper, but there are three disparate and unconnected things I read this week that I do feel like highlighting. | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

We’ve Got Some Issues

If you’ve spotted the widget in the sidebar, you already know the gist of what I’m getting into here. Since the switch to Shoreditch, a number of outstanding issues have lingered even as I’ve settled one or two. It’s worth goign into a little more details on each of those that re … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 10 months ago

Comments And Pings And Mentions, Oh My

This will be highly experimental and I reserve the right to retreat behind the wall again at any given moment and without notice, but I’ve begun preparatory work to open up all of comments, pings, and webmentions here beginning with the start of the new year. | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 11 months ago

Being Autistic Is Physiological

Sometimes I think about things that should be self-evident, and certainly are to me, that I wonder whether or not they are sufficiently self-evident to other people, especially those who are not themselves actually autistic. This happened again today, while I was at my regular br … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 11 months ago

Checkbox: Start Fresh

Despite the time of year, the title here shouldn’t suggest that this is some sort of New Year’s resolutions post. Rather, it’s about some of the latest design tweaks I’ve made since switching the blog over to the Shoreditch theme so that I could stop having to edit theme files an … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 11 months ago

Costello Department, Miss Reference Speaking

If you’re the sort of person who, like me, recently finished Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine, or perhaps Joanne McNeil’s Wrong Way, or even Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s A Murder at the End of the World, and are looking for a movie to watch at Christmas, I’d point you i … | Continue reading


@bix.blog | 11 months ago