~*~afflatus~*~

from kupferstein, 2018, "evidence of increased ptsd symptoms in autistics exposed to applied behavior analysis"

like, i knew this, but actually looking at someone having done The Math about it is staggering.

Also:

Aaaaaaaand

Also consider:

And!

I've never been able to determine the provenance of this one, but regardless:

"The best time for planning a book is when you’re doing the dishes" - Agatha Christie

Dear Lord they're trying to make lesbian vs bi discourse a thing again

As much trying to ignore it I've noticed that a lot of this discourse is just like, misusing feminist language to imply that bi women are "tainted" from having sex with men, which is a really weird and misogynistic opinion to hold & I think we need to wrap this up like yesterday

It's just so frustrating seeing people say shit like "bi women need to decenter men" while also centering their entire opinion of bi women on their pasts with men. Like, who the fuck even caressss. The ghosts of penis past aren't going haunt your house if you touch a bi girl. You're not special lmao, agreeing with 2016 goldstar lesbian discourse doesn't make you like, enlightened or whatever. Should we throw a party, should we invite purity culture, should we invite transphobia? We should be fingering eachother and making out, not doing... whatever this is.

Reblog to let your followers know that despite your current obsession your previous obsessions still exist and are simply lying dormant until they awaken and strike again

yeah. you all get it.

Please don’t let fandom ruin something you love. Walk away and unfollow the fans and enjoy the thing by yourself, or find a limited circle of people who ignore the discourse, or get your irl friends into the thing and collectively ignore the Internet community, or blacklist from here to the moon if you need to and only ever scroll through your rarepair ship’s tag on AO3. But don’t let fandom distort a show or a movie or a book or a comic you used to love so badly that you can’t enjoy the original anymore. Please. It isn’t worth it.

Now that Twitter's URL has officially changed, lets all join hands and remember that Elon Musk threw away one of the most recognizable, established brands of the past decade due to his personal chuunibyou fascination with the letter X.

People love reblogging this post and saying "well, this is just what happens when an (undiagnosed) autistic person has too much money", as if the reason Musk had bad taste is autism - implying autistics inherently have bad taste - and not that he's the lamest type of chuuni known to man.

"Chuunibyou" of course, being a Japanese slang term (literally meaning "8th Grader Syndrome") for people whose idea of "cool" aligns with what an 8th grade boy would find cool, even though they really should've grown out of that by now.

So, y'know, the type of guy who thinks the letter X on its own is so cool that he keeps trying to use it as a brand. Before twitter, he tried to turn Paypal into X.com. His aerospace company is called Space X. It's embarrassing.

And as an autistic person it's frankly offensive to go "well yeah, that's just what autistic people are like right? Thank goodness most of them don't have the money to do this - or else they would, how cringe".

me when the disability disables me: oh what the fuck? this sucks. what the hell man!

Me when my chronic pain chronically hurts

me when the neurodivergences makes me diverge from other neuros

me when the chronic fatigue fatigues me chronically

The best resolution to a missing persons case ever was that developmentally disabled person who walked off in 1986 saying he "wanted to be a cowboy in Texas", starting a twenty-one year search for him on the assumption he died somewhere in the desert or was murdered, only for everyone to discover that he had spent those decades working as a cowboy on a ranch in Texas. Missing persons investigators rarely consider that maybe they achieved their dreams

He told them where he was going

the thing about CC is that she did plagiarize. she was found guilty of plagiarism and banned from fanfiction dot net! she plagiarized pamela dean, among others, and lied about it repeatedly! it happened! and regardless of whatever else she writes, regardless of whether the publishing industry and her fans trust her not to do it again, regardless of how many times her wikipedia page gets scrubbed clean, that will always have happened! so it is not in fact cruel gossip, but a factually true statement, to say that she plagiarized and i'm not interested in supporting her or giving her the benefit of the doubt because she plagiarized and lied about it repeatedly! fuck!

what really incenses me about cassandra clare — and forgive me for bringing this up again, but i don't think i've articulated this point yet — is not that i believe she is currently plagiarizing. any accusations i've seen about recent work seem to me to be superficial. but even if one could prove that she never plagiarized again once she started publishing, it wouldn't matter to me, because she chose to capitalize on her fandom history. while trying to distance herself from what she did, she made a brand out of the fanfic pen name "cassandra clare" and continues to profit off the reputation and fanbase that she amassed while she was, provably, a plagiarist.

you don't get to do that and bury the things that made you famous. as an individual, as a human being, she is capable of change and any other good qualities you may want to ascribe. but she built her career on lies. professionally, i don't understand why she gets to move on.

the worst part for me--worse than building her career on plagiarism--is that her career was also built on a truly reprehensible level of harassment. she told her followers to help get her unbanned from FFN (as if that would ever happen) and they spent months harassing the site owner and several abuse team members. one of them, after enduring extensive abuse, ended up in the hospital.

this was just the beginning of the harassment, though. CC additionally used her friend heidi, a lawyer, to send cease & desist letters and other forms of legal harassment against ppl. none of it would hold up in court and these sort of things weren't even heidi's area of expertise as a lawyer, but it still happened.

CC was such a terrible serial harasser that people started to leave her alone about the plagiarism stuff after a while because it was just not worth her blowing up your entire spot. not just with her lawyer, but with her minions who harassed targets on her behalf. getting a deluge of harassment is a horrible experience that hurts people, so of course people tried to avoid it.

i hate CC because she hurt lots of people. she did it intentionally, repeatedly, and with singular focus on covering her own ass no matter who she hurt.

she has the career she has now because of her harassment of fandom as much as the plagiarism.

@coruscanttojerusalem this. this is it.

“Sky too big” also gets you on the tops of very tall, sharp mountains, where standing at the top means everything around you except the snow under your feet is blue sky.

Y’all’re joking, but I remember the agoraphobia I had the very first time I spent time in prairie states. There was this terror inside of nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. It went away when I flew back to the East coast.

It was there the 2nd time too, but not quite as strongly.

Even TALKING about it now makes me feel anxious.

Laugh all you want, but when you’re used to driving a few hours and hitting ocean, and an hour and hitting mountains, being surrounded by nothing but flat and Flat and FLAT and knowing that’s all there is for hundreds of miles does things to ya.

Not even slightly joking, though. Flat places give me the horrors. At least when you go up a mountain, you went to see the sky void, and you can hike right back down and hide from it in a nice valley somewhere. Safe little critter under the nice tall trees.

Out in the Flat Places* there’s nowhere to goddam hide from the sky. It’s all nothingness from horizon to horizon, and that nothingness wants to grind you under its boot like an ant, I swear to god.

*Flat Places may vary person by person, but I absolutely am including low hill country because I think it makes it worse. You look at the hills and expect to see mountains but none appears!

I don't know how you cannot love this view.

Donbas steppe

Truly, at no point would I ever say that such a landscape is not beautiful. I’m not dead to the poetry of these scenes.

But, simultaneously (and that’s the crazy part), the sky triggers my threat response.

And I know friends from plains/field/steppe-country who find it stressful to have mountains “looming” over them (their words, never mine).

Them: comforting wide horizons, I could see any threat coming. Me: I am exposed, I will fall into the sky :(

Me: comforting mountains, sheltering me in the valley. Them: these big rocks will fall on me :(

Large Bird Will Get You

As a child of the misty forest, this open place above is terrifying. (I felt afraid all the way through Kansas). But then, a lot of folks fear them the misty forest. Especially at night.

Photo by Ansel Adams

Photo by Nick Strait

For context: I'm from Scotland, and my spouse @mothman-etd is from Minnesota. I grew up surrounded by forests and hills as far as the eye can see.

When we first started dating, I'd usually only travel to see him in the Twin Cities, except one time, one of his coworkers was getting married up in North Dakota, so we made it into a road trip.

I fell asleep in the car like a true passenger princess and woke up to nothing but flatness, but not just any flatness, no. It had been raining, and the plains were filled with water, so for all intents and purposes, it was like waking up in the middle of the fucking ocean with nothing but too much sky above me and absolutely nothing around us but the endless stretch of water and the empty road in front of us.

When I tell you the primal fear that went through me. It was like falling upwards. It was like gravity just didn't exist, and there was no limit to how high my panic could rise. I had to do that stretch of the journey with my chair tipped back so I couldn't see the emptiness. Like a blinkered horse ready to bolt and break all my legs at once in a frenzied panic to escape the Nothingness.

Eventually, we pulled over at a service station, and I can honestly say I've never been so happy to see a roadside Subway in all my life.

“I pity you, I do. Your friends are now your foes. If you do not kill them, they will kill you.”

Bhaal's Legacy

love me a character who values hygiene and cleanliness but must, for plot reasons, inevitably become bloodsoaked

also a big fan of characters who aim to live a lifestyle of comfort and hedonism, but due to the Narrative are forced to go camping

characters who desire nothing more than to stay home & chill but are thrust unwillingly into adventure, my beloved

1) Egg jokes aren't misgendering and they aren't telling someone what their gender is.

2) being compared to trans people is not a bad thing because being trans is not inherently bad, but getting upset at the idea of egg jokes is not your personal experience, it's clearly getting mad that people are getting compared to trans people

3) "people did egg jokes to me and it made me sad :(" sorry to hear that! Your experience is not universal however! Talk about your experiences but when you use them to talk about other people and other friend groups who are fine with it, it's not about your personal experience anymore (some Mario wikis and Chongo blogs fit for this)

4) this dumb discourse has been overwhelmingly used to call transfems terfs, transvestigators, "Christian missionaries," and run them off the site, this factored with the previous poll where tme people overwhelmingly said you're not allowed to tell your friend they might be a trans woman but it's ok to tell your friend they might be a trans man, kinda paints an interesting picture.

5) the discourse keeps getting changed into "don't call strangers eggs" which whatever. No one's walking straight up to a dude on the street and saying theyre an egg. Random bloggers on Tumblr dot com? Sure don't call em eggs I guess.

6) "don't call random people egg!" Kurt Cobain is an egg. Die mad about it lol.

7) "you can't tell people what their gender is" not what egg jokes are but actually yeah you can that's a common thing about trans people who don't realize they're trans yet is you gotta tell em. Yeah not everyone needs that approach but some do. As someone who spent years helping people realize they're trans and find resources, I know this for a fact, I know more about this than random 20 year old bloggers whining on Tumblr. Get over it.

8) "you can't tell people what their gender is" my husband can call me what ever gender he wants so long as its hot when he does it