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It's such an amazing feeling when someone picks up on something in your writing that you 100% intended but didn't think people would notice. Like, YES!! My writing properly conveyed the thing it was supposed to!!! You are so awesome for noticing that!!! I am so awesome for writing that!!! I feel so good about my story now!!!!

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i think maybe we could spend less time thinking about things that make us angry and more time thinking about other stuff

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i will never understand the emphasis society places on romantic relationships. why is the ideal future always portrayed as living with your significant other in a happy, committed, romantic relationship? why is there a whole holiday dedicated towards romantic love? i've heard so many people i know say that they're so lonely because they aren't in a romantic relationship, and i can't help but wonder how are they lonely with so many friends around them? so many things have become romanticized to the point where people no longer think it's socially acceptable to do them with friends. maybe people would feel less lonely then if it was normal to hold hands with people, to give them your sweaters, to lay together on the couch while watching a show. human connection is so so so important. i will never understand how is it that in a world full of love, we only seem to idolize one part of it.

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doin some gesture practice and sketched a quick isa

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bro i LOVE indigenous fusion music i love it when indigenous people take traditional practices and language and apply them in new cool ways i love the slow decay and decolonisation of the modern music industry

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This can’t just be me, right?

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...oh. that. Explains. A lot of things about the mess I'm making of my life right now, yes.

I realized the other day that the reason I didn't watch much TV as a teenager (and why I'm only now catching up on late aughts/early teens media that I missed), is because I literally didn't understand how to use our TV. My parents got a new system, and it had three remotes with a Venn diagram of functions. If someone left the TV on an unfamiliar mode, I didn't know how to get back to where I wanted to be, so I just stopped watching TV on my own altogether.

I explained all this to my therapist, because I didn't know if this was more related to my then-unnoticed autism, or to my relationship with my parents at the time (we had issues less/unrelated to neurodivergency). She told me something interesting.

In children's autism assessments, a common test is to give them a straightforward task that they cannot reasonably perform, like opening an overtight jar. The "real" test is to see, when they realize that they cannot do it on their own, if they approach a caregiver for help. Children that do not seek help are more likely to be autistic than those that do.

This aligns with the compulsory independence I've noticed to be common in autistic adults, particularly articulated by those with lower support needs and/or who were evaluated later in life. It just genuinely does not occur to us to ask for help, to the point that we abandon many tasks that we could easily perform with minor assistance. I had assumed it was due to a shared common social trauma (ie bad experiences with asking for help in the past), but the fact that this trait is a childhood test metric hints at something deeper.

My therapist told me that the extremely pathologizing main theory is that this has something to do with theory of mind, that is doesn't occur to us that other people may have skills that we do not. I can't speak for my early childhood self, or for all autistic people, but I don't buy this. Even if I'm aware that someone else has knowledge that I do not (as with my parents understanding of our TV), asking for help still doesn't present itself as an option. Why?

My best guess, using only myself as a model, is due to the static wall of a communication barrier. I struggle a lot to make myself understood, to articulate the thing in my brain well enough that it will appear identically (or at least close enough) in somebody else's brain. I need to be actively aware of myself and my audience. I need to know the correct words, the correct sentence structure, and a close-enough tone, cadence, and body language. I need draft scripts to react to possible responses, because if I get caught too off guard, I may need several minutes to construct an appropriate response. In simple day-to-day interactions, I can get by okay. In a few very specific situations, I can excel. When given the opportunity, I can write more clearly than I am ever capable of speaking.

When I'm in a situation where I need help, I don't have many of my components of communication. I don't always know what my audience knows. I don't have sufficient vocabulary to explain what I need. I don't know what information is relevant to convey, and the order in which I should convey it. I don't often understand the degree of help I need, so I can come across inappropriately urgent or overly relaxed. I have no ability to preplan scripts because I don't even know the basic plot of the situation.

I can stumble though with one or two deficiencies, but if I'm missing too much, me and the potential helper become mutually unintelligible. I have learned the limits of what I can expect from myself, and it is conceptualized as a real and physical barrier. I am not a runner, so running a 5k tomorrow does not present itself as an option to me. In the same way, if I have subconscious knowledge that an interaction is beyond my capability, it does not present itself as an option to me. It's the minimum communication requirements that prevent me from asking for help, not anything to do with the concept of help itself.

Maybe. This is the theory of one person. I'm curious if anyone else vibes with this at all.

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Happy theatrical release day for Wicked! I was able to watch it last night and I bawled my eyes out. I have waited so long for a film adaptation and I loved the performances from the cast. I put the soundtrack on the next day and I am STILL crying. So anyway, I thought I'd share some interior art from the two Little Golden Books I illustrated. I am so chuffed to see the books being promoted so much especially since this is a musical that is so near and dear to my heart 💚🩷

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nevarra dragonage you have to stop. your necromancers are too hot. your gothic aesthetic is too fire. your relationship with spirits too nuanced. your mages are too politically ambitious and powerful. your monarch is too undead. your bitch is too bad. they'll call an exalted march on you nevarra.

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popular YouTube channels are great and informative until they make a video about a topic you're informed on and then the house of cards comes crashing down as you realize how utterly wrong they are about most things

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I don’t think I can emphasize enough just how much Elementary understood the core of Sherlock Holmes’ character, and the kind of cases and people he is drawn to, right from the very first episode.

The pilot opens with a wealthy woman’s murder. The prime suspect is a man who is a patient of the woman’s husband, a doctor, for help with his mental disorder. The man is desperately trying to avoid any triggers that may cause him to become violent, as he has been in the past. The doctor decides to use this man as a tool to kill his wife to collect her life insurance. He manipulates both his patient and his wife, alters the man’s medications, and ignores the man’s pleas for help, in order to set a scenario that is guaranteed to trigger the man’s violence - resulting in his wife’s death and later his patient’s.

When Sherlock pieces this together, he confronts the doctor, which leads to this:

And that’s what drives Sherlock to confront the doctor directly. There’s no smugness in being right, or for figuring out who the murderer was and how he did it. Sherlock realizes that this man’s patient was just another victim - someone who desperately wanted and sought help, only to be mistreated. Sherlock Holmes in this adaptation cares so deeply about people, especially those who are denied help when they need it most, and we learn all of this from the very first case.

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LGBTQ+, ACT UP protests in New York City, late 1980s to 1990s

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Richard Siken… Richard Fucking Siken. You asked RICHARD SIKEN if his poems were inspired by BUDDIE. Gay men do not exist in people’s heads except as props huh?

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I maybe went on a Twitter rant today.

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Tweet by Heather Hogan:

Straight friend: Will you sensitivity read my book for my lesbian best friend character?

Me, two weeks later: The lesbian best friend is absolutely perfect. Here's 16 pages of notes detailing the incorrect things you said about Star Trek.

5:32 PM on 2/25/24

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i hope shein gets shut down i hope ai projects get shut down i hope billionaires go bankrupt i hope public transportation expands fast i am so tired of the world’s bs