I’m not one for going out of my way to make lists of things that are good, probably in part because they always feel performative although that could be the lingering smell of the era of social media (in)authenticity and wellness woo-woo. | Continue reading
One of the things I’ve been wanting to get around to is describing the recent changes I’ve made to how I deal with blogs, news, and newsletters. This is something that I switch up now and then, trying to find the right overall process for me. Tracy just responded to Alex Sirac on … | Continue reading
Ben reminisces about LiveJournal and writing posts and hosting discussion threads that “could be shared with the whole world, just with your friends, or with a subset”. It’s a part of the internet that never was part of my internet. | Continue reading
I’m currently siting in my living room having a trauma response. Last week I marked the second birthday Willow never got to have, and tonight Meru’s bout of atypical crying while walking around the apartment her her tail down nearly sent me immediately into a sobbing fit. Right t … | Continue reading
When a new animated Star Trek show first was announced, I was intrigued. When it turned out that Lower Decks was a comedy, I was skeptical. When I first tried it, I was in a bad sensory space and the bright colors and rapid-patter dialogue was too much for me. | Continue reading
There are a couple of days back-loaded into the end of the year that tend to throw me down the mood hole: New Year’s, because it’s a social demarcation of transition and the passage of time, and then today, October 25, the day I was born. | Continue reading
Nicola Griffith, writing for Literary Hub, warns authors to be wary of how they deploy empathy, taking care not to weaponize it needlessly. Alan Jacobs, on the other hand, cautions against that advice. Or, so he says. | Continue reading
Dan Shipper over at Every reposted an old interview with Robert Sapolsky, the guy in the news for his new book about the nonexistence of free will, about stress. For reasons you’ll understand if you read me regularly enough, I was struck by the strategies suggested to reduce it. | Continue reading
Time to do some follow-up thinking out loud about my earlier post on blogs and digital gardens because, as happens with blogosphere-like (gardenosphere-like?) things happen, there’s been some additional chatter around and about. | Continue reading
Apparently the last time I checked in here about the new and exciting back problems I’ve been having was Monday, when I lamented that while Sunday’s walk clear across downtown Portland went without a hitch, Monday’s evening walk in my neighborhood did not. For more reasons than o … | Continue reading
Last night I dropped myself down a blog-browsing rabbit hole, including adding the discovery feeds of Write.as and Bear Blog to my feed reader, and somewhere on the way I ran into Joel Hooks having some thoughts on what works for him and what doesn’t when it comes to writing onli … | Continue reading
Romello Goodman, writing in the latest Logic(s), talks code and scale through a professional history with online obituaries and guestbooks, and hits at what happens when the systems in we find ourselves living grow too large to any longer be fully human. | Continue reading
This morning while lounging in bed because I managed to wrench my back, already lately plagued by aches and pains, I took to something I was going to do last night but didn’t want to stay up late.… | Continue reading
For current events reasons, today I thought I’d go take a look at traffic to Mark Twain’s The War Prayer, which I’ve maintained continuously since late in 2001, for then-current events reasons. Typically, in “down times”, the site gets somewhere between fifteen to twenty views ea … | Continue reading
Today would have been Willow’s fourteenth birthday, had not a combination of degenerative illness and my autism cut short her life before she turned thirteen. Likely this explains why she’s been popping up in my dreams, including twice last night. | Continue reading
Nick Heer, while noting that Jason Kottke is adding comments with all the benefits and travails that entails, also notes that since the fall of Twitter there’s been an uptick in email from his readers. | Continue reading
After worrying about the prospect of my world shrinking due to the mysterious increase in back aches and pains especially when out for a walk, something reality only continued to reinforce, the story then got weirder this past weekend. | Continue reading
I’m trying to clear out something of a growing backlog of prospective blog posts, and rather than belabor this one (not that it would have come close to my discursive post on mediocrity) I’m just going to lay out the relevant links serially. | Continue reading
There’s a stack of things I mean to blog building up in my notes file for such things, but Manu had to go and blog about shoes which means I’m constitutionally required to take advantage of the opportunity do the same. Shoes will never not be a hassle and a half. | Continue reading
Earlier this year, after basically two decades of searching, I finally had an internal backlinks solution thanks to an arduous process involving ChatGPT. It solved one of my two longstanding needs when it came to blogging. | Continue reading
Late in 2021, I responded if not with exuberance then with acquiescence to the proposed “profound autism” label, an opinion I’ve referenced more than once. As of this post, I renounce and reject that position. | Continue reading
Earlier this week, I detailed how a trip to the zoo was cut short by the “aches, pains, and tweaks” I’ve increasingly been experiencing in my back, and the psychological hit I took as a result. There’s already some need to follow up. | Continue reading
There’s been a slowly-growing list of links in the notes file I keep to remind myself of blog posts I want to write but with which I haven’t yet quite come to terms. This is one of those posts, and I’m not entirely certain I’ve figured how to bring it all together. | Continue reading
Earlier this year, I juxtaposed some articles on using A.I. and fMRI to recreate people’s thoughts and on the reported detection of conscious activity during death. I’d wondered just how far away we were from the movie Brainstorm. | Continue reading
Mandy Brown’s thoughts on writers and talkers—which, weirdly, I only seem to have mentioned it before in a post about my Social Security debacle—came to mind again recently. In this case, it was Jake LaCaze posting about introverts. | Continue reading
Whiona last month wrote an interesting post about web design and ableism from the standpoint of websites that refuse to offer any real sort of mobile experience whatsoever. Mostly I just wanted to point you her way in case this isn’t a perspective you’ve run into before. | Continue reading
If you’re thinking of doing any Bixday shopping this year, now would be a good time. The newest iteration of the Beats Studio Pro is on sale for just $179 during Prime Big Deal Days, but that means this price ends Tuesday. (This is not a promotional or Amazon Affiliates post.) | Continue reading
I’m not sure if it’s seasonal or somehow otherwise cyclical but suddenly in recent days I once again was running into talk of aphantasia everywhere I turned. I’d first discovered the condition in early 2020, likely on MetaFilter, and shortly thereafter the corollary severely defi … | Continue reading
If you’ve been reading along, you know that I keep talking about blog anniversaries, because a lot of them have been happening lately and because long-term blogging obviously is on my mind given the restoration project here. | Continue reading
My homepage for awhile now has indicated that my public transit trips all the way across town and back in order to visit the zoo are “increasingly infrequent due to resource levels”. Today, I challenged my body to make the trip, and it didn’t go especially well. | Continue reading
Last month, I laid out in some detail over the course of three posts the latest experience I was having of the Social Security Administration in the ongoing post-diagnosis process of trying to obtain disability benefits before my familial financial support eventually dies someday … | Continue reading
Almost a full month ago, I wrote about the camera I need, something I’ve thought a lot about since getting the refurbished Apple Watch. I even designed it, sort of. | Continue reading
Two years ago today, after catastrophizing over the possibilities, I savaged the most recent novel by Richard Powers, saying that it seemed an “argument that being autistic is a bit like being artificial: dropped down halfway and so not worth the living”. | Continue reading
I’ve spent the better part of the week working to develop a custom “classic” WordPress theme that would strip things down along with disabling Gutenberg and it’s HTML bloat. | Continue reading
Just a brief note that things might or might not go quiet here for a bit because I read this Kev Quirk post about moving to Kirby, and I’m spending some time looking into it. | Continue reading
Yesterday, I finished a memoir by an astronomer and astrobiologist. It’s interesting and engaging but as sometimes happens in science memoir eventually the subject of religion comes up, and this is where I get frustrated. | Continue reading
While I’ve no interest in having comments here, I do like knowing if someone’s blogged something I wrote, so I sat down once again to look into putting webmentions back in place on the blog. | Continue reading
Apply here the usual disclaimers that I’m not engaging in armchair diagnosis. Someone can have what could be seen as autistic traits without themselves being actually autistic. I just find parallels interesting. | Continue reading
Ben Werdmuller is wondering how the age of the internet affects parenting and I’ve nothing to say on that point. I once nannied for a friend’s kid and the most screen-time I remember him getting was repeatedly watching Mary Poppins or Yellow Submarine. On the television set. | Continue reading
Ben Werdmuller takes the opportunity of Tracy Durnell’s blogging anniversary to make some remarks about identity which, it won’t surprise readers here to learn, are of interest to me. | Continue reading
There are a few things I wanted to come back to follow up on last week’s double whammy Social Security situation that left me somewhat psychologically gasping for air, because they’re important to understand. | Continue reading
If you’re watching my list of recently read blogs, you might get a preview of something I’m going to blog here. Often, it’s entirely an accidental result of reading several things in close succession which turn into something connected in my head. | Continue reading
Toward the end of 2022, my coffeeshop allegiance shifted to a place that appeared from the mists of the former See See Motor Coffee in downtown St. Johns: Wonderwood Springs, brainchild of local whimsy-artist Mike Bennett. | Continue reading
It’s difficult to remember a time in Portland when getting almost hit by a car when I had the pedestrian right of way wasn’t a fairly regular thing. Certainly at least since moving to St. Johns it happens at least weekly. | Continue reading
Yesterday and today, I’ve been trying to find out from the Social Security Administration whatever happened with the Request for Reconsideration I’d filed back in March to a non-medical denial of my disability application before I’d even progressed beyond the initial, introductor … | Continue reading
This past February, I finally sat down to take another stab at filing for disability benefits. I’d originally done so, and been denied, back in 2018 after my vocational rehabilitation job placement spectacularly blew up in my psychological face. | Continue reading
First, they were thwarted by a global pandemic. Then, they had safety concerns. This weekend, for the first time since 2019, the Portland Polish Festival rematerialized in North Portland. | Continue reading
This week has brought with it a series of aches, pains, and other symptoms that in some cases might be and in one case is related to my daily, evening walks. For the time being, I’ve been seeing them as an artifact of nearing or reaching my resource limits. | Continue reading