dashboard in the morning simulator

mutual 1: i need to quit my job

mutual 2: i need to quit my job

mutual 3: i need to quit my job

mutual 4: i need to quit my job

mutual 5: i need to quit my job

mutual 6: i need to quit my job

mutual 7: i need to quit my job

mutual 8: i need to quit my job

people will agree w posts about how we need to protect vulnerable people all day until they find out that it sometimes means they'll be mildly inconvenienced

this is about wearing masks to protect immunocompromised people by the way. if you don't wear one you are abandoning the vulnerable and risking other people's lives.

also, if you've stopped masking it's never too late to start again! it will make a difference, it will help others.

you cannot consider yourself a leftist or punk or whatever if you can't do the bare minimum for your disabled siblings and comrades

good to know ur support of disabled people is conditional on whether or not we ask soooooooooo niceys for you to care if we live or die 👍

Proper boundaries

A lot of people in the notes are misunderstanding this. This isn’t saying it’s wrong to TELL someone not to do something that hurts you.

The point of wording it in this way is to place the power back in your own hands. If you simply tell someone “don’t contact me during this time” or “don’t make fun of me for these sensitive subjects” they are not guaranteed to listen to you. And yes, they’re the asshole in that situation, but knowing that doesn’t help you if they’re still violating your bounds. There’s nothing you can do about that with the “not boundary” examples. Knowing what YOU’LL do to protect your peace of mind is more important. It’s not about threatening them with a consequence, it’s about setting an expectation so that you feel comfortable taking an action that best suits your needs if they aren’t inclined to try to suit your needs themselves.

You deserve to have people take your needs seriously, but if they don’t, it’s unfair to yourself for there to be nothing else you can do. Don’t leave your happiness in their hands and hope they listen. Your wellbeing needs to be in YOUR control ultimately, and setting boundaries in this way guarantees that it is, because you’re effectively saying if you won’t adhere to what I’m comfortable with, I’ll do it FOR you, regardless of whether it makes you happy with me or not.

[image description: twitter thread from Olivia Vizachero, thelessstressedlawyer

Here are some examples of boundaries that aren’t actual boundaries.

Not A Boundary: “You can’t email me on the weekends.” A Proper Boundary: “If you email me on the weekend, I will not respond until Monday.”

Not A Boundary: “You can’t talk to me like that.” A Proper Boundary: “If you talk to me like that, I will hang up the phone.”

Not A Boundary: “You need to respect my time.” A Proper Boundary: “I will end the meeting at the scheduled time.”

Not A Boundary: “You need to be more considerate and thoughtful.” A Proper Boundary: “I would like you to do these specific things for me and if you don’t, that’s okay, but I will not invest more time [into] this relationship.”

Not A Boundary: “You need to show up on time.” A Proper Boundary: “If you are late, we will not wait for you.”

Not A Boundary: “You need to give me less work.” A Proper Boundary: “I will not work more than 50 hours a week.”

Not A Boundary: “You need to do a better job.” A Proper Boundary: “If you don’t make these three specific improvements by the end of the quarter, I will give you a negative review.”

Boundaries are not mandates for other people to follow. Boundaries are not demands. Boundaries are not expectations. Boundaries are not ultimatums. Boundaries are not idle threats. Here’s what a boundary is…

It’s a particular course of action YOU take to take care of yourself when a particular set of circumstances arises. That’s it. It’s about what YOU do. Not about what THEY do. Ever.

end image description]

God I miss the days when you could show up to a stranger’s farm and he’d say “What’s your name, boy?” and you’d take off your hat and hold it to your chest to better let him see your face and reply “Why I ain’t got none, sir, on account of my mammy passed on before she could give me one” and he’d tell you he’s real damn sorry to hear that and ask what he can do you for and you’d tell him that you can’t read nor even write neither but you’re mighty good with horses and can mend them fallen fence posts what you saw on your way in and won’t ask for nothing much more than a hot meal and a warm barn to sleep in and he’d keep his wife and daughters inside but send his boy who ain’t got married yet even though his mama tells him he needs a woman out with a lantern and some stew at night and the two of you’d get to talkin and he’d throw you his flask to take a swig from and watch you drinkin from it while he leant against the door frame and when he finally got called back on up to the house again he’d take a sip from it too real slow-like like it weren’t the whiskey what he were tryna savour

can we get a shoutout to trans girls who don't wear makeup

i don't need to just keep practicing I don't need to just learn to contour or whatever the fuck else I'm 100% happy being bare-faced and the only times i ever felt compelled to do makeup was for other people's benefit!

watch the mfs with zero reading comprehension get ahold of this and act like I'm personally attacking them for wearing makeup

adding on trans girls who don’t shave their face or armpits or legs, or have short hair, or do any of the things that are seen as “saying Fuck You to the patriarchy” when cis women do it but for Some Reason when trans women do it they’re “not trying hard enough to pass.” do whatever you want with your meat suit and related adornments forever.

Happy 420 🖖

stolen from NoContextTrek on twitter

yk how hard it is for me to not correct misinformation on posts about sports on this website full of people who don't watch sports

women in soccer are not scoring more goals than the men's game on average because they are better at striking the ball, its because specialised goalkeeper training costs money and only recently have most teams started hiring gk coaches. ellie roebuck is among the first generation of english gks to have had a gk coach since she joined an academy.

both chess and motor racing are actually formally unsegregated, only one woman (judit polgar) has been ranked within the top 10 for chess players ever and she was raised by her psychologist father with her sisters as a chess prodigy. lella lombardi is the only woman to score any points in formula 1, ever. the creation of women's leagues is not entirely down to women being better than men and men being afraid, like stop lying and doing the athletes in these sports a disservice, they face significant barriers in access to sponsorship, training and misogyny from peers and fans to get there. you could bother with reading some scholarship on all of this or you could lie on the internet and count it as a win for feminism. like its fine to be disinterested in sports.

and not every sport is boxing for fucks sake. weight classes introduce extremely disordered eating regimes when athletes try to cut and drop into a lower class last minute bc of the advantages of training at higher weight class (getting to eat more food.) sorry but i would prefer that people about to play several hours of tennis do not starve themselves in the leadup to the game.

the sooner you understand that the right trying to 'protect women's sports' is not actually abt protecting anyone, the sooner you will understand that assimilation into the modern machine that is elite sports should never be the aim for women or men, cis or trans.

because no one in commercial sports is protected at all. we take children as young as usually 6, isolate them from their peers in age, construct notions of success for them that are debilitating to most people's sense of self worth, give coaches and parents license to abuse under the guise of training, valorise athletes who play through pain, encourage disordered eating, do not offer financial education and leave them prey to fraud, have no safety nets or pain management support for those whose injuries end their careers and/or leave them with lifelong chronic pain.

This is actually something I was thinking about is that rent can not exceed 1/3 of monthly minimum wage income.

So let's say state is on federal Minimum wage which is about 1100 a month so in that state no matter what rent on any place could not exceed 370 dollars.

Even if minimum wage was 15 dollars (about 2400 a month) max rent could be 800

So if landlord want more money they would have to fight bosses and state legislature to get it.

Like average Pennsylvania rent is 1400 and in this world if landlord wanted to charge that the would have to get minimum wage raised to 26 dollars an hour.

To bosses and landlords:

Hozier & his favourite books | Hugendubel Booketlist

I drew the gang,

my horrible hybrid of all of them

That's what Eevee looks like halfway through evolving into Jolteon

Hozier On Radio X

I think bringing up "it/its" pronouns is a good test for people who claim to be "trans allies" because it so easily weeds out the people who are only doing it superficially. I've seen so many people who will post "Punch your local TERF #transrightsarehumanrights" and then turn around and be like "If someone says they go by 'it/its' pronouns it's actually good to misgender them because they're just teenager trenders"

you can't claim to support trans people and then qualify it with "but only the people I deem 'real' trans people"

"the prefrontal cortex doesn't fully form until yr 25!!" y do u wish to take more agency away from teens and young adults. y do u refer to phrenology to inform yr worldview. I'm about to undevelop yr prefrontal cortex with a baseball bat if u don't shut the fuck up

for the ppl who keep saying this is an objective fact, from the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions:

it's pop science. it's pseudoscience. it's phrenology. it's not real. it's being used as an excuse to call older people pedophiles and take away the rights of younger people. shut the fuck up.

i have become radicalized as a pawpaw agent, pollinate a flower or two on your local tree!

More isolated, further north = less likely to be self-pollinated. You need different genetics around and enough awake pollinators to make sure you get fall fruit, so lend a helping hand

ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to be a nervous young man

There's this perception on here among neurodivergent people that neurotypical social behaviour is all fake and arbitrary. That it's a cruel, baseless game played to "weed out" ND people or to cause pain and complicate things on purpose.

This is wrong. All of those social rules and nuances ARE communication. Sorry if this is rude but it's not the NTs' fault if things don't gel- the gap goes both ways. Just because communication doesn't make sense to you, doesn't mean it's random or purposeless. Remember this post?

Every interaction in an NT conversation has purpose, and communicates something, and I don't understand why nobody ever explains this to ND people. There's information on basic stuff like facial expressions, but never what any of it actually means.

Small talk about the weather isn't about the weather. It's about how nice it is to be around the people you're talking to, or feeling out their understanding of the world, or just saying that you're both present and people and you're being people together. It's not literal. The words are, but the broad scope isn't.

A conversation is not just an exchange of words, it's an exchange of acknowledgement, attention, and emotional understanding. Of course it confuses people when their part in that exchange is met with flat affect or unembelished words. It's like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection.

I get that you're "sorry if this is rude" but this post is still putting the entire onus of making up for the communication gap on ND people. It's like seeing someone struggling with English, maybe needing an interpreter, and telling them to just learn the language. That's why autism is considered a disability. Because it's prohibitively difficult or simply not possible to "just get" it.

We get told literally every day, all day, that *we* are the rude ones, have intentions assumed, etc., because we didn't pick up on a social cue that we simply never could. Imagine going though your life colorblind and being expected to just *try harder* to study colors to read low-contrast signs instead of just *having high contrast signs*.

*That* is why it's on NT people to make up more of the communication gap. Because we are already told, constantly, all the time, to just buck up and fix ourselves. And when we make fun of some of the things that are used to belittle us, things that it's *literally part of a disability to not get the way NT people do*, or ask people to maybe consider for one moment why we don't or can't reciprocate "appropriately," people come back with shit like this, telling us we didn't do enough. That we're mean or inhuman for not smiling enough or not making eye contact or not having the right answer to "what did you do over the weekend?"

But when *we* use social cues, or even explicitly say what we want from someone? Nobody ever listens. Nobody learns autistic social cues, and tells allistics that they're unnatural for not understanding that someone infodumping to them is indicative of trust and affection, or that when they ask you a question it's because they *really, genuinely* care about your actual answer, not just because they feel obligated to by a social script that you're trying to intuit, or, you know, that sometimes they bitch and moan about NTs and their social scripts as a way to let off steam from being expected to follow them all day, every day, without full access to understanding them. Nobody except other autistics.

Other human beings are not mirrors for you to oggle your own reflection in. We are not failures as humans for not filling that role properly.

#NT people wanna pretend we're victimizing them sooooo bad#Fully missing the mark on the parts that many of us actually have an issue with#Because it's not just us not getting them it's also them not getting us#But they just don't wanna do that effort and keep putting it on us instead while comparing us to objects

Prev tags for posterity. And now to the OP. Please understand I am using the hypothetical, generic "you", not talking about you personally but about the attitudes that I have to deal with. I don't know whether you are neurodivergent, or your exact situation, just giving some perspective because I know that many, many neurotypical people believe the same things.

Is it nice, though? Like, I get that this is the purpose of small talk, and sometimes I'm happy to engage in it. I don't speak for all autistic people (and we should be careful to avoid conflating all neurodivergence with autism) but the problem for me is that a significant portion of the small talk I have to engage in is either entirely for the benefit of a neurotypical person because Having A Conversation makes them feel good, but for me it's work, or neither party in the interaction actually wants to be around the other and have a conversation but we are mutually required by social convention to pretend to enjoy it even if it makes the interaction take longer.

The problem is that it is not nice to be around you if you try to force a "human connection" that is not pleasant for me, that actively drains my energy, and you either ignore my signals of discomfort or notice that I'm uncomfortable with this interaction but decide that what would really make me feel better is you asking me what I do on the weekends, and I hate that I am then obligated to either perform fake enjoyment of this or risk you getting offended if I tell you you're making things harder for me.

You know what else is often a "yes we're both present and being people together, it's nice being around you" gesture? Smiling. But, we've all seen the articles pointing out how obnoxious it is for women especially to get told to smile by random strangers or acquaintances, that it's infuriating when someone feels entitled to tell someone to perform emotional labor for them, and that sometimes you don't feel safe saying no because there's a risk of them becoming hostile if you refuse? That's how the cultural expectations around a lot of these rituals feel.

(and yes, I am aware strangers trying to make small talk in inappropriate environments is annoying to many/most NT people as well)

Also yeah, like the previous reblog said, it's not like as an autistic person you can generally expect the effort you put into participating in social rituals that feel good to neurotypical people to make others happy to be reciprocated. Like, making small talk about the weather or some other random bullshit as a way to feel connected to the person you're talking to is not inherently different from trying to connect to someone by infodumping, but those aren't treated the same way.

And this is the other crux of the problem. I don't think NT people consciously, intentionally do this, but how it feels in practice is that rituals like small talk are a shibboleth, a test of whether you're "being a person" correctly that I can be ostracized for failing, and in practice the cumulative effect of all these little rituals is weeding out neurodivergent people who don't have the skill or the energy to mask well enough (and these can also suck for people trying to navigate cultures that have different standards of etiquette for how to handle these interactions, as I think some of the notes have mentioned).

This is what I mean when I say so many of these rituals are fake bullshit: yes it's real communication, but you're asking questions you don't actually want an answer to and really it's a test of whether I'll tell you what you want to hear. That metaphor was really apt: you don't want to see me, you want to see your reflection, and when you don't see it, you stop seeing me as a person.

And not only is this language bordering on dehumanizing, but with all due respect: the fact that neurotypicals can complain about this with a straight face is a textbook example of abled people seeing it as a profound injustice that they have to occasionally briefly experience a disabled person's daily reality. Forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to your discomfort at having to interact with people whose natural way of communicating is foreign, difficult, and maybe a little unnerving: how the fuck do you think we feel? I do not have the privilege of being able to feel entitled to "see my reflection" in every person I interact with, and yes I have gotten used to understanding or at least being able to bullshit my way through neurotypical social conventions (both because of volume of interactions and because I am forced to to survive), but still: I have to live with this all the time, and society expects me to not only just shut up and deal with it but to devote a large amount of my mental resources to shielding you from having to experience it once, because society values your discomfort over mine.

Let's put it another way. Imagine if many aspects of your daily life that are necessary for survival required you to use a computer system that demanded a capcha response at random intervals to do just about anything. And it's often pain in the ass capchas, like word ones where the letters are so distorted it's hard to tell what they are without squinting at them for a while, or "select the squares with cars in them" ones where there are tons of squares with just a sliver and you have to guess if it wants you to count those or not. Sometimes you get a blue or gold dress puzzle. Sometimes you solve it correctly but the algorithm decides to fail you anyway because it decides the way you move your mouse is too robotic.

You have been locked out of accounts for failing these before. You have had job applications rejected because the capcha you had to solve before the interview thought you were a spambot, and didn't even tell you you failed until after the fact. Even if you get really good at consistently solving capchas, it would still be a pain in the ass. Now imagine most of the world doesn't see why this is a problem for you, and when you complain about it they just tell you the purpose of capchas and give you tips on how to solve them better.

That metaphor was really apt: you don't want to see me, you want to see your reflection, and when you don't see it, you stop seeing me as a person.

this speaks to me on a molecular level