idk how to explain this but when higher support needs autistics complain about not having autism representation that represents them, and lower support needs autistics come in talking about "autistic-coded" characters, it kinda feels like a slap in the face.
like, i'm glad you feel represented by "autistic-coded" characters, but like... i want representation for level 2 and 3 autistics, low masking autistics, autistics who need caregivers, autistics who use aac (and not just high tech aac), multiply disabled autistics, autistics who have severe meltdowns, intellectually disabled autistics, autistics who need visible disability aids, autistics who need to be heavily accommodated or helped by others, etc etc etc.
it's okay to like autistic-coded characters, lower support needs characters, etc. i love those characters too! that kind of representation is also important! but i also think it would just be really nice and healing to see myself and my higher support needs autistic friends represented in media outside of just like, kids shows.
the first malware deliberately including mentions of "forbidden content" like biological and nuclear weapons in it's code to throw of AI agents analyzing it has been spotted
^ The Javascript comment block at the start of a file containing malicious code.
Does anyone know the artist for this one? The signature is visible, but I canât make it out. Hereâs another photo where itâs a little more readable, if that helps.
irritating as fuck when people get mad at Black people existing in premodern historical fiction/fantasy media. like first of all, you're racist. and second of all, you are acting as though Black people didn't exist in premodern Europe which is simply false. especially when we're talking about the Mediterranean, like what the fuck do you people think is along the southern half of the Mediterranean Ocean?? everyone's on boats, there are GOING to be interactions with Black people in Northern Africa, and there are GOING to be Black people in Mediterranean Europe. stop being stupid. your imagined homogeneous white European past is not historical reality, get over it you massive losers
she was dead silent on the drive home, but that was okay. sometimes, after band practice, she was just out of words. it was a short drive to her house. the only part where it actually felt weird was after i pulled up her parentâs driveway.Â
after that, the silence stretched so far it smeared and left a weird residue. she kept looking at the car door like she wanted to leave, so i looked at the door too, then she looked at me, and i looked at her, and my first thought was that she was going to tell me that the door was stuck. i was used to that car always doing some damn thing. it was the car me and all my siblings had learned to drive in, and it was really beat to hell. there were dents all over the body, which weâd unsuccessfully tried fixing up with spackle. it had looked nice for maybe a week, but then the sun wrecked it - the spackle cracked up like the mud on the bottom of a dry riverbed and turned a sort of off yellow-white that made the car looked like it had been molded out of chicken shit. it also had a bullet hole it through the cabin that whistled like a toothless old man whenever the car went above 40, so loud it could drown out the radio, and a cabin that smelled so strongly of bugspray that even the arizona summer we drove everywhere we could with the windows down.
(if you have kids one day, you will maybe, possibly, begin to understand how much i loved that car.)
anyway, i was thinking about what else could possibly be wrong with the chickenshitmobile, and she just kept looking at me, and then i wondered if there was something on my face, and she just kept looking at me, and then the penny dropped and i realized she was trying to work up the nerve to break up with me.Â
now, iâd seen her work up the nerve to do things like this before â it could take quite a while. and knowing it was about to happen made the waiting immediately unbearable.Â
so i said hey.Â
and she looked at me, very startled, and said hey back real small. like sheâd been caught. and in a way, i suppose she had.Â
and i said itâs okay. you can just say it. iâll be okay.
iâm always okay.Â
and she said: iâm really sorry.Â
i loved her, you know? it was highschool, but teenagers are capable of love. the way people love changes over time just as much as the way they stand, or the way they talk, but things donât stop existing just because they're different. opposite really â a thing only stops changing when it's fully gone.
and i said, nothing to be sorry for, and i meant it. she looked a little relived, and i was happy to give her that peace. then she left. i watched her make it through the front door, because that was just habit at that point, and then i sat there a while afterwards, checking how i felt. and the answer was not good, but good enough to make it home. good enough to limp on.Â
so i put my car in reverse, took my last look goodbye, and immediately backed into her neighborâs car.Â
crunch.Â
air bags didn't go off, which was good. i left a decent dent in the bumper of the other car. genuinely couldnât tell if i did anything to my car â anything wrong with it just kind of blended together into the general ecosystem of hand mottled, sun cracked, chickenshit spackle.Â
i checked my glove box, and my car insurance info was, of course, out of date. my phone was dead too. as a teenager, my phone was less my lifeline to my friends, and more my tether to my parents, so i wasnât particularly conscious of keeping it charged. both my fault.
i sat there a few minutes, trying to think of the best way to handle things, and there was only one answer i could think of, and i hated that answer, so i spent a few more minutes trying and failing to think of a better one, and then a few more coming to peace with what had to be done.Â
then i went back to knock on my now exâs front door.Â
her dad opened, which i was very relieved over, even if he seemed less than thrilled. he looked me over, and in a firm, but slightly apologetic way said: she does not want to see you right now.Â
(i think he assumed i was going to try and talk her out of the break up?)
and i said not here for her. i just backed into your neighborâs car, and i need to call my dad, but my phoneâs dead. could i borrow yours?
and he looked at me, then back at his neighbors car, which sure enough was dented, then he looked at the chickenshitmobile, and if there was something wrong with it, it just kind of blended into the general Wrongness of the car, then back to me, and i could see him imagining the last ten minutes from my pov: getting broken up with, backing into a car, having to walk up to your exes door and borrow a phone, calling my dad to tell him that i just reversed into someone. Â
and his expression shifted from stern and apologetic to truly sad, which felt more kind that i deserved. things only got here because i kept fucking up - forgot to look behind me, forgot to replace the insurance forms, forgot to charge my phone. it was my mess, but his sympathy meant the world to me. i probably wouldâve cried if he said sorry, or patted me on the back or called me sport, but instead he said
stay out here â iâll bring you a phone.
and then he left. Â
i found a nice spot on the lawn in the shade under a sycamore, then settled into his grass.i was trying not to freak out, and was doing an okay job. he came out a minute or so later, not just with a phone, but a juicebox and a jar of green olives, which really threw a wrench in the whole try not to cry thing. soon as i saw those, a few tears squoze out. i was still hoping i could pass them off as Manly Tears but then he told me that heâd gotten the olives a few weeks before and had been meaning to hand them off to me, and that this was his last chance for that. then i made a sound like a horse drowning in a bog, and he patted my back pretty rough, four solid thumps, like he wasn't sure if i was crying or choking on an olive, and was trying to cover both bases at once.
then he went back inside, and i made a few more bog horse noises while finishing off the rest of the entire jar of green olives, and then i called my dad.
he was about ten minutes away that day, and luckily was home. he drove over, and we went to the neighborâs house, and from there things actually went quite nice. the neighbor was a retired man who actually said he could fix the dent himself, no need for insurance. he said he appreciated that i didn't just drive off, and i said i was really sorry about his car, and he said he was really sorry about my car, and then he gestured to the chickenshitmobile and i laughed because it really was a disaster on wheels.
then we left.
i thought we were going to head straight home, but instead we went to a gas station, and we both got several slim jims that we folded into thick enough coils that we could put them on a hotdog bun because the growing up mormon equivalent of having a sad brewski with your dad is just choosing to make bad decisions sober. then he took me to the canals and we watched the sun turn all orange and pink, and he looked over at me and said:
brains are good at remembering bad days. so you gotta make sure that a bad day has a good part in it, so you can remember that too. remember that when you have a kid. try to do a good job on days like that - they're going to be a big part of how they remember you.
and then he gave me a big hug and said he was never going to eat another slim jim again.
---
the year after that i went to college, which kicked my butt in new and exciting ways. and on a lot of those bad days, after a test that went sour, or a faux paus that was particularly embarrassing, or some other hardship of my new adult life, iâd stop by the gas station and pick up leathery, half jerkied hotdog before heading to the canals to watch the sun set. iâd take a bite and imagine my dad next to me, grimacing through the slim-jim wad, asking what good thing i was going use that time to remember.Â
Hey everyone. There's a new youtube feature that rolled out just yesterday that's raising some privacy concerns.
People in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, and Singapore can now share videos and chat with friends directly within the YouTube app. The update bring
This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.
If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.
This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.
To turn this off:
Go to your youtube app settings
Go to Privacy
Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"
Trimming the source id (the stuff after the '?' in links) will also prevent this from happening.
People get made fun of for being scared of aging but it comes from the very real fear of being discarded by society thatâs why i always say the goal is not to never become old or disabled the future comes for us all the goal is better social policy
Because I was now a man, I could not speak about what it was like to be a woman. Because I had been a woman, I could never really speak about what it was like to be a man. Do the math: I could not speak. It was a double erasure, a double bind, in which every experience I had was false, and so nothing I said was credible. I could no longer derive authority from my experiences before transition, and shouldnât even cite them â I had never âreallyâ been a woman, so those things hadnât happened â but those experiences could always be weaponized against me to prove I wasnât âreallyâ the man I claimed to be.
They call it erasure, when this happens. I wasnât prepared for how literal the term was. Every day, I could feel myself disappear.
â Eraserhead: On writer's block and being a gender traitor by Jude Doyle
There are many good paragraphs but this stuck out the most:
"If âmanâ and âwomanâ are opposed and mutually exclusive categories, if men can only ever be predators and women can only ever be prey, then trans men canât exist. We are logically impossible under the terms of the current system. You either âtreat us like menâ by voiding out half our lives, or you write us back into womanhood by denying our male identities. I knew all that, at least in theory, but when I came out, I actually saw my life story disappearing into other peopleâs blind spots. I watched myself become unthinkable in real time."
Also these:
"This wasnât about accountability. This was people tactically forgetting my entire life,including incidents from my life they had personally witnessed or been involved in, so that they could shame me for transitioning. It was bad for me to be a man; if I was a man, I was a bad man, I was all the worst things men are. I was hulking, I was threatening, I was predatory, I was violent."
"I was treated as both genders, but only the most monstrous stereotype of each one."
Because that is exactly it. Anti-transmasculinity is being both erased and vilified, and then gaslit out of speaking about those experiences by the people who are erasing and vilifying you.
"The idea that I had always occupied a privileged position within patriarchy was, frankly, untrue; nor did it seem to me that a trans person was any less gender-marginalized than your average cis woman. What privilege I had was conditional, and these books were no guide. Men who wanted to âforge a positive masculinityâ (and everyone was very clear that I needed one of those) were encouraged to get in touch with their âfeminine sides.â Maybe that was healthy for cis guys, but I had been forced to do feminine things, and present in feminine ways, for the entirety of my young life. Whatever liberation I had achieved came from giving myself permission to stop."
As did the ending:
"When I write these days, I try to remind myself that whatever Iâm afraid of saying is already true, and denial will not change it. I remind myself that the wrong people benefit from my silence, and will use it to write a version of my life I canât recognize, or just write me out of the world. There is no established story or role for me; I belong to a category the world is still learning to imagine. I cannot account for the world as other people imagine it. I cannot give you every manâs story, every trans manâs story, every trans personâs story; I don't know them. What I do know is that every new story helps map the territory. All I can do for you, from where I'm standing, is tell you how things are."Â
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