This by @pluralistic is excellent 👇
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
And it reminds me how, now, Google Search is mostly a thing of the past for me - DuckDuckGo does the job for pretty much all I need, and it's insanely specific then I have to revert to Google - but then the chances of it being a scam are I suppose lower?
Pluralistic: This is your brain on fraud apologetics (24 Feb 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
@SarahMackAttack What I love most about Japan is interacting with the older generation of women. Brush up on how to discuss the temperature and the weather (think Eliza Doolittle at Prof. Higgins’ mother’s party) and you’ll be primed and ready.
My advice is to focus on body language even more than spoken language for this first trip, soften your gestures whilst keeping your joy and enthusiasm strong.
You’ll be communicating more with non verbal language than you might realise.
@sodamnqueer I feel the same and become tearful with even greater gratitude understanding how crucial those friendships have been.
And with that understanding there is the realisation of our own powers, how valuable our own support can be, what a difference we ourselves can make when we look out and “see”, reach out and touch and assure others of their worth. Alas, it’s all too easy to overlook and doubt our own capacities, it’s hard for an empty cup to runneth over.
My belief is that autism is closer to being our default, the base from which children get snipped at and progressively mutilated as they are developed into human bonsai trees. Some pruning is inevitable, and there can be kindness in preparing kids for the climate in which they’ll have to live, but the patience, observation, wisdom, kindness and the humility needed to be guided by a child’s underlying needs and nature is not a given in too many parents (or those who want to be parents.) 4/4
Discovering that I’m autistic, that my husband is, that my daughter is, that my father is, probably my father’s father also, was an awakening, the “spiritual” part is that the awakening has made me aware that the way of thinking that resists words is part of its own shared common experience, an experience that precedes being human. 3/4
I’m good with words, but they’re never enough, I feel like Peter Pan trying to attach his shadow with a bar of soap (and trying Wendy’s way, of using a needle and thread, gets gory). I think with patterns.
Retropiphanies tend towards steering you to think of childhood, and childhood is an ideal point from which to see the pattern structures, or at least they are when we can revisit with hindsight. Yet, looking back, you realise that children are usually peripheral in these patterns. 2/4
Am still trying to land on the right combination of words to allow my thoughts/feelings about this to be communicable, but the “awakening”, the realisation that the way I experience life is understood or at least shared by others, and not just humans, has been very powerful and extends backwards. Every memory of everything I’ve ever learned or that has happened to me is being tweaked and recalibrated. It’s a process given a name “retropiphany”, except it comes in multiples. 1 /4
You know this time at parties when most people left, it's late and the conversations moved from the different levels of smalltalk to more personal topics, honest and with more depth? I often didn't make it to this point, because I have been exhausted much earlier.
Since I share my thoughts and feelings with the
#ActuallyAutistic community online, I experience a level of even more depth and honesty every day. And for the first time of my life I relate to so much of it. It happens so often that I read something and can't believe that there are other people who think this way, that I am not an alien, not the only person in the world with this thoughts and feelings.
Thank you so much ❤️
@actuallyautistic@KaCi @actuallyautistic ❤️ Goodness, yes! Best part about parties usually came from staying over and those cherished conversations whilst helping to clear up the next morning, and then having breakfast. Thank you for that retropiphany - now I see why.
When you really know a subject (and trust me, I really knew Brexit, and I am beginning to really know railways), you soon realise that the vast, vast majority of mainstream media coverage about the topic is somewhere between poor and downright misleading
It's not an explicit effort to trick people, just a news and communication cycle where those in the industry cannot any longer properly do their fact-checking jobs
Jon Worth
KaCi 