Ann Memmott last month wrote a useful post essentially debunking autism “levels” as not especially responsive to the lived experiences of autistic people at the very least because autism writ large and autistic lives individually are naturally heterogeneous when viewed through su … | Continue reading
As of this morning, I’ve now encountered my fifth Kindle edition where the Enhanced Typesetting isn’t just enabling the left justification option, which it’s designed to do, but seemingly also somehow disabling Kindle’s default full justification option. At least one publisher ha … | Continue reading
For these final two weeks of the year I’ve been giving the Apple Journal app a test-run. I’ve not previously used any kind of journal app, although for more than a year, I think, I’ve jotted daily bullet points in Apple Notes that I use as a guide for therapy every Friday afterno … | Continue reading
So, there’s no way to do this except with a very short post, despite trying very hard to avoid anything close to microblogging here, but I have three things to say about Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind. | Continue reading
For the record, not long after I posted about my dryer, I did once again wedge something between the back panel and the wall, but it didn’t make much difference. If I wanted to warm up my clothes for the day or my bedclothes at night, I had to stand there with one hand against th … | Continue reading
My therapist and I last week, although I can’t recall how we got onto it although probably it was our discussion of resilience, talked briefly about two seemingly discrepant ways in which my autistic brain approaches and handles circumstances in which my answers basically seem to … | Continue reading
Today is the shelter-assigned birthday of Meru, who today in 2014 was taken in by Multnomah County as a stray. By their estimate, she was born in 2006 which would make her an (assigned) seventeen. In 2017 when she was eleven, I got her Willow for her birthday, who then went on to … | Continue reading
This morning I encountered a confounding problem wherein I clicked the link to a post that appears in today’s On This Day and got the content of a different post, notwithstanding the post’s content being correct on the backend. Despite having just woken up, I quickly traced the i … | Continue reading
Well, as I suggested on Friday, I did decide to disable the Webmention plugin, and then later decided maybe I’d put it back, but between these two times I’d done something else indeterminate that made them not work anyway. | Continue reading
After a rocky week or two behind the scenes that I was not doing a very good job of either seeing them as rocky or once seen understanding why, I’ve made a couple of changes to my blogging life. One of which should be fairly evident because you’re looking at it, but the other is … | Continue reading
Five years ago, just after moving in, the dryer on the old, decrepit Frigidaire stacked unit started emitting a raucous rattle, almost like something either was stuck between the drum and the housing, or some part of the drum was rhythmically striking something jutting slightly i … | Continue reading
On the heels of thinking aloud about the diagnostic language gap, it probably makes a little bit of sense for me to get into the potential changes to the U.S. Census that could result in a vast undercount of disabled Americans, as described by Betsy Ladyzhets of newly-launched Th … | Continue reading
While I’ve long since stopped microblogging here in favor of doing so in more ephemeral venues, I’ve a need to get this on the record. After spotting Matt Haughey ponder attending a showing of *Wonka* dressed as Paul Atreides, it seemed to me there was only one reply. | Continue reading
As you might surmise from my post about blogrolls where I mention not having posted to that “default apps” meme, I don’t really do blog memes. However, after seeing Tracy list her WordPress plugins, following the lead of Nick and of Jan Boddez, and then seeing Alex follow on, I f … | Continue reading
Another adventure in midlife adulting. Is it even still midlife when you’re 54? Last year my top sheet tore, almost certainly because my cat claws her way to get under the blanket and eventually weakened it enough so that normal movement ripped it wide open. | Continue reading
Back in August, I’d mentioned that I’ve been trying to get Safeway to reactivate the mute function on the self-checkout kiosks, because the incessant narrating chatter is a final sensory nightmare when grocery shopping already is a stressful activity as it is. Over a year and a h … | Continue reading
We’re now fully enmeshed in the time of year where my metabolic imperative is to fatten up, and I’m trying very hard to not replace my rice bowl with a pasta bowl and my cold cereal with a toasted bagel and cream cheese because I don’t live in a cave and spend my days on the tund … | Continue reading
Folks are starting to respond to Robin Rendle’s declaration “that we are a poem and not software”, and that perhaps the personal sites and blogs we make for the web ought to reflect this. | Continue reading
First came RSS Club from Dave Rupert wherein bloggers commit to some number of their posts being made available only through RSS. Definitionally this has varied from posts that literally only appear in RSS feeds to posts that technically still get publicly published to the blog b … | Continue reading
Briefly this past October, because of Kev, I spent some time looking into Kirby as a potential replacement for WordPress, because at this point that CMS is bloated and my solutions to thinks often pretty janky. It didn’t take long browsing the Kirby documentation for a legit anxi … | Continue reading
Elisa had some things to say about cheese while Radim had some things to say about watches, and together they’ve put me in mind of a story about a trip I took to France. | Continue reading
There are some subjects you should leave alone if you’ve already addressed them. There are some wells to which you should not return, leaving well enough alone. Alas, these are where one’s pet peeves are to be found, and so I must confront Ruben’s suggestion that you can read an … | Continue reading
Rachel examines her midlife crisis in contrast to the straight, white, and male version that’s become the sort of normative American default idea of what a midlife crisis looks like. | Continue reading
That online restlessness that might not even be rooted in anything online, per yesterday, burrowed its way into spurring some more tinkering with the blog theme today. In the end, my changes were not quite as dramatic as they might have been but nonetheless will be noticeable. | Continue reading
In the early days much if not most blogging was microblogging, and then Twitter effectively took over that niche. I’ve been off that site for some time, and I’ve played several different times with Mastodon, and lately I’ve been spending time playing with Bluesky. | Continue reading
It’s happenstance and coincidence, but as I’ve again recently been speaking of blog anniversaries, I should note that today is the twenty-second such of my mother following me into the early blogosphere as it stood in November of 2001. | Continue reading
Annie, another blogger who accidentally got lost in a cleanup of my feed reader a little while back, wrote up something of a concise guide to types of blog posts and, as near as I can tell, I’m pretty sure that out of the twelve listed types my posts regularly fall into five of t … | Continue reading
Saturday marked five years since Oregon’s disability determination process, during my first failed Social Security application in the wake of the disastrous and dysregulating Vocational Rehabilitation job placement, diagnosed me with Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Anxiety and Dep … | Continue reading
While the bright sun is an autistic sensory issue for me, once we’re firmly into autumn and the temperatures start hitting 50°F, I do need clear skies to be comfortable, and this afternoon that’s what Portland at just the right time to hit up one of the two neighborhood coffeesho … | Continue reading
It only just suddenly occurred to me this morning while thinking about my blog restoration project where my first webpage must have been located, and although it would have pre-dated the Wayback Machine and so is lost to time I went on a little search journey to see if it were po … | Continue reading
One week ago my back went out although it only kept me squatting on my kitchen floor for several minutes. What confounded me was that I’d becoming fairly convinced that my new aches and pains were the result of my shoes pretty dramatically being worn out. | Continue reading
Just the mere thought of trying to assemble a list of my default apps gives me mild anxiety not worth the confronting. However, I’ve slowly but methodically been browsing that compiled list of participants looking for bloggers to follow. Which brings me to the subject of blogroll … | Continue reading
It’s no secret that I like reading posts about blog anniversaries, in part because of my project to restore two decades of blogging here into a single, unified place. There seem to have been many such posts recently, but Ruben’s might be the most unique. | Continue reading
At the end of a serious bit of incisive self-reflection about tensions between intellect and psychology, Winnie expressed some passing concern with where the post ends up. | Continue reading
It’s never a good sign for me to start feeling squirrely about my blog design. Partly because it’s a gargantuan task should I decide on a complete overhaul, and partly because this squirreliness often comes when I’m feeling especially disjointed or dejected about life in general. | Continue reading
I’m not going to belabor this one, because in truth were I still also microblogging here, this might be a short, untitled post, and I’m not yet ready to revisit that idea. That said, I didn’t want to let Dave Karpf’s thoughts on what elections are for pass by without highlighting … | Continue reading
There’s a long list of blog posts I’ve wanted to get to, some more so than others, but events keep intervening and I don’t have the energy or motivation for them. Instead, here’s a look at what seems to be going wrong with my brain. | Continue reading
Every morning when I wake up, the first thing that does in the weekly notes file I use to structure my weekly therapy session is whether or not it was a night of intense dreams, and if so, and if I can remember them, what the dreams were. Often in the night, when I wake to go to … | Continue reading
So, it was looking increasingly like my back aches and pains were the fault of needing new shoes, because after getting new shoes things seemed to be on the upswing, with my daily walks accompanied by less and less of the aches and pains. | Continue reading
I’d like someone with more patience and fortitude than I have to take a close look at this recent study about autistic midlife and tell me if my initial, cursory response to it seems valid, because the thing that nags at me about it is that not once does the paper reference or us … | Continue reading
While saving various links to a notes file over the past week or so, what was percolating in the back of my mind was something along the lines of my roundabout on mediocrity, not least because this, too, is about whole-personhood and its thwarting. Instead, as the title suggests, … | Continue reading
So, I did manage to haul myself out of bed at an ungodly-for-me hour to hop public transit all the way across town to the zoo for Nora and Amelia Gray’s (observed) birthdays, and exhausted myself into the ground taking nearly 800 photos with the D5300. | Continue reading
Over at Bear Blog, I ran into Connie offering up a breakdown of what they’d do if they had no job, and I have to say that the agenda looks hellaciously exhausting. Was I ever capable of doing so much in a single day? I’ve no job and I can’t do half that. | Continue reading
Back in December of 2021, I’d made an appointment to go donate blood, something I’d not done since college. In part because I still don’t know my blood type, although I’ve a vague recollection from three decades ago that it was O-Positive. | Continue reading
Lauren Schenkman, writing for Spectrum, interviewed researcher Mirko Uljarević on the “restricted and repetitive behaviors” component of the current, mainstream view of autism pathology. Uljarević suggests that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual “may erroneously lump together … | Continue reading
Last week, David Pierce for The Verge suggested that the future of the social internet is Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, a mainstay of the IndieWeb community, and an idea that exhausts me utterly just to think on. | Continue reading
If ever you’ve taken a mental health diagnostic or research survey, it’s possible you’ve encountered a question here or there that stymied you a bit. I’ve mentioned this before in regards to empathy. It’s something tiramisú notes having encountered with regard to loneliness. | Continue reading
Mighil, I think, conflates two different things in this advice for presenting yourself online. The advice cites social media specifically but I want to broaden the scope a bit as I argue that it’s a mistake to correlate or equate the idea of being authentic and that of being uniq … | Continue reading