A Second Note Prompted By Something Else, But Is A Wider Issue I See People Missing A Lot: 

I don't care what your perception of the female body has been warped into by the media and advertising prevalent in culture. eat some goddamn carbs

imma have a lil rant now

“you can’t say crippled it’s a slur” fuck off with that stigmatizing bullshit! i know what crippled means.

when i was going to the gym in my wheelchair, that wasn’t crippled. when i was fiercely sweating my way through agonizing medical procedures, that wasn’t crippled. when i was laughing through my tears because my spine was so on fire it was funny, that wasn’t crippled.

the days when that meant i couldn’t DO anything? THAT was crippled. it happened, i got through it, i’m proud. i don’t need some officious little shit telling me i can’t use the most apt term to describe the event of my disability keeping me from acting. crippling pain is crippling. crippling executive dysfunction is crippling. don’t try to force me to minimize my experience just because you’re uncomfortable with the english language.

say it until it loses all meaning if you have to. cripple cripple cripple. it starts to sound like an english beverage involving nutmeg and whiskey. mmm, hot cripple.

CoVID-19 Trauma Resources

HEY GUYS

Know how I talk about trauma and how it works (and how to mediate it and avoid it) and so on a lot?

The Neurosequential Network is putting together webinars and talks and resources about that here.

Thus far there’s a recording of the live meeting they did yesterday, a link to an episode on The Trauma Therapist Podcast on the issue, and to Peace of Mind Foundation’s facebook discussion, but much more is planned.

That said even these are amazing resources as they are. This can be particularly useful if there are children in your life, but it’s honestly useful period.

(This is the network behind the symposium I was stupidly excited about going to; sadly it’s been postponed until next year, but the network started putting this stuff together immediately.)

It kind of bugs me that Tumblr has seized upon “taking everything literally” as the Defining Neurodivergent Experience™ – not only because it’s actually pretty uncommon, but also because it’s erasing an enormous variety of other frequent communication style issues, including but not limited to:

Having your brain stubbornly seize upon the first interpretation that happens to pop into your head as the Only Possible Interpretation, regardless of whether it’s literal or figurative  

Easily identifying several possible interpretations of a statement, but having absolutely no ability to parse for context and identify which of those interpretations is most plausible  

Being confronted with a statement that has Implications, then getting thrown for a loop when it turns out that the speaker wasn’t considering any of that and really did just mean it literally  

Perfectly understanding a statement’s intended meaning, but getting annoyed with the speaker anyway because they didn’t phrase it Correctly, seriously, are you the only person here who gives a shit about the goddamn Rules?

EDSers- do lidocaine patches work for you? Should the area that you have it on be numb to touch? (I don’t think it’s doing anything, pain is the same and isn’t numb at all but idk if it’s normal or an eds thing?)

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Hey y'all. Here's something for you.

would you be willing to explain the medieval vs. rennaisance stuff you were mentioning in "the middle ages got murdered" or point me to the tags you use for talking about such things? ty.

SURE. :D 

So here’s the thing: what we call “the Renaissance” was a very self-consciously constructed concept invented by a guy called Francesco Petracco (aka Petrarch) because he was totally defensive about the place of Italy in the era he was alive in (aka “a totally disreputable mess of constant warfare, weird alliances, sadistic fuckhead rulers, and so on, with bits of it being passed between mainland European empires and/or the pope and/or both willy nilly, with everyone else kind of ignoring it”) because this was an ignoble and horrible fate for The Heirs of Rome. 

He endeavoured to Subtly (ie not at all subtly) get himself crowned as a poet of outstanding virtue via laurel wreath (aka what we’d now call “the poet laureate”, although the position wasn’t formalized at that time although the symbolism was well known) in a big Ceremony and announced that Learning and Art and Wisdom would restore the world (aka Rome, aka the Empire rightly controlled by Rome) to a good and moral place of goodness, unlike all this horrible shit that had been happening lately. 

He impressed a GREAT many people with this, and more or less from then on the official story of history is that with Petrarch in the mid-14th century (aka the mid-1300s) there was a Renaissance that saved us from the Dark and/or Middle Ages, where we got back alllll the True Wisdom of Antiquity and became civilized thoughtful people instead of superstitious peasants. 

The problem with this is, of course, that it is a giant pile of flaming bullshit. 

Keep reading

jaggedwolf said: can’t say this and not link/say which one it is

the original “turing test” paper is so beautiful.  more beautiful, i imagine, than most expect going in—he’s got this underlying warm humanism and gentle humor throughout.  (it’s present even in his more technical papers, but it shines here)

and the section that slays me each time is this:

“It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school without the other children making excessive fun of it […]”

like.  this is the original “turing test” paper.  this is the first dude to formally conceptualize the whole “~*~what if computers learn to think, how could we tell~*~” thing.  which, in subsequent SF invocations, is used mostly in spooky or paranoid contexts: the Voigt-Kampff test of Blade Runner, the preemptive rushes to constrain that budding will in I, Robot and others, and in modern worries over AGI.  and i like those stories!  they’re interesting and cool and eerie!

but

but

the original guy was not scared or unsettled or spooked by the prospect of new minds.  this dude’s primary concern, when facing the dawn of artificial intelligence, was instead: “what if we teach computers to think and then the other kids on the playground bully the computer, that would be so mean :(((”

i love that, so much.  i love people so much, sighs into hands

what the fuck was wrong with people that Labyrinth was originally a flop. How could they take any aspect of it so for granted. How could they fucking do that to Jim Henson. Newspapers were calling it boring and even ugly. I want to go back in time and beat their asses.