#autistic april

[the-autistic-agoraphobe]

I would like to thank everyone who participated in Autistic April as I believe it was successful. I intend on doing it next year with more prompts. If you have any suggestions for prompts for next year please comment them below.

Image Description:

There is black text on a rainbow background. The black text says "Thank you for making Autistic April a success". Underneath the text is a cartoon picture of a cat wearing blue headphones and sunglasses. The cat is ginger and white and has three ginger stripes going across its back. End Description.

[magentasnail]

hey guys new diagnosis just dropped: EVIL AUTISM

[thetisming]

every month is autism month if youre autistic

[djarin]

look. as someone who’s autistic and horrible at social interactions, there is nothing more glorious than the boop. everyone should have access to a boop at all times.

[thatkoiboi]

I like to call them the Banana Pancakes duo because April is yellow like a banana and Donnie's shell looks like a pancake

also just because i have no idea what their duo name is

[atticollateral]

squealing about this boop function. I literally made a sound akin to a squeaky toy. it brings me much joy. the cat paws. the animation. oh. oh. joy. i've never felt such joy in my life. in the same vein,

cat fun facts! (cat pics at the end)

Cat whiskers are immensely sensitive, about as sensitive as human fingertips! Cats use their whiskers to feel things around them and their face. Cats can actually get a type of information overload, called whisker fatigue, from their whiskers touching too many things/being touched too often, which is why it is recommended to use wide, flatter feeding + water dishes for your cats, and to avoid touching their whiskers unnecessarily.

Cat Paws have 3 types of Beans (paw pads)! Digital, Metacarpal and Carpal pads. The metacarpal pad is located in the center of the paw, the digital pads are located upon their main four toes, and the carpal pad is located on the staff of the cat's paws/legs (often referred to as their thumbs!) They also have what is called a "dew claw", located on the inner side of the front paws (which is more like a thumb if you ask me.) Cats also usually have 18 toes, but many cats have more than just 18. (usually when dew claws are present on the back paws)

Cat Paw Pads are also absorbent of shock and sound, and can feel texture, pressure and temperature! It's important to make sure your fluffy friend's paw pads aren't overgrown with fur, as this can affect their grip and effectiveness. (Most cats can do this themselves via grooming, but some cats can't!)

Cat's Ears have 36 muscles in the outer ear! (while we humans only have 6). They can rotate up to a full 180 degrees, helping cats pinpoint the location of sounds. Cats can amplify sound waves between 2,000 and 6,000 hertz, and can hear sounds up to 62 kHz, which is 1.6 octaves above humans, and 1 octave above that of a dog. Cats are wonderful creatures! We're very lucky to have them as our companions. If you have a fluffy friend, give 'em a lil pat for me, for being such an amazing creature. And, as a treat, here are some of my fluffy friends. (1 and 2) The late Ms. Mojo Catface, (grey cat in 3,4,5,6) Mr. Spyro Needlepaw and (black cat in 3,5,7) Kitka Meowski, The Russian Queen of Day Drinking Vodka.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[mitamicah]

*boops you* >:3

Yes, this is what I see everytime the little paws comes up on my screen x'D

[nemmet]

🩵🌻 another year, another happy (belated) autism acceptance month to my favourite autistic character!! he’s off in search of his next niche hyperfixation :)

[falmerbrook]

Happy Autism Month to these two specifically

[misiahasahardname]

did i ever post this

because

uh

yeah

[the-autistic-agoraphobe]

Autistic April Day 28: Relatable Autism Memes

Image Descriptions:

1: Drake is a black man in his twenties with short hair and a beard. He is wearing an orange puffer jacket. There are two photos of Drake. Both photos are labelled as "some Autistic People" in the first photo Drake appears to be cringing and he has his hand shielding his face. The is cringing at text that says "Giving eye contact to people". In the second photo Drake looks really happy and is gesture towards text that says "Giving eye contact to cats".

2: This is a photo of Grumpy Cat who is a black and white cat with blue eyes who looks really grumpy. The caption says "when you are enjoying being alone and a person who you don't feel comfortable unmasking in front of enters the room." Grumpy cats says "Great!! Now I have to pretend to be Neurotypcal Karen!!"

3:There are a list of prompts for each day of the month for Autistic April. The top and bottom of the image is light purple and the middle part of the image is white with black text on it. The black text says "Autistic April 2024 Prompts: 1: Special interests 2: How you found out you were Autistic 3: your favourite stim 4: alternative forms of communication 5: your favourite fidget toys 6: textures you hate 7: safe foods 8: other disabilities you have 9: LBGTQI+ 10: childhood special interests11: comfort items 12: your favourite Autistic celebrities or characters13: unmasking 14: sensory aids 15: misdiagnosis 16: Autism friendly places 17: Disability support you have received 18: animals 19: favourite thing about being Autistic 20: echolalia 21: idenity first or Person first language 22: the spoon theory

23: colours that represent Autism (not blue) 24: Autistic owned small businesses 25: meltdowns and/or shutdowns 26: Your clothing prefences 27: Self care 28: Relatable Autism memes 29: Accessibility 30: routines" There is an infinity symbol that is half red and half gold on the top right corner of the white section. End Description.

[that1notetaker]

Part 1 of Ace! April + Best friend Dynamics - Next? Some context: April isn't very confident about being around people in canon. She's weird and badass, and while we love that, she thinks she's got to 'be normal' to be liked, and make friends. It reminded me of the Ace Experience, and how that'd add another layer to the slow acceptance that is herself. Enter Donnie.

[infiniteglitterfall]

OMG, COULD EVERYONE PLEASE STOP IMMEDIATELY BELIEVING AND REPEATING DISINFORMATION?!

Sorry, I just. Was just on Twitter, and I snapped.

I literally haven't seen one true statement about Israel on social media in MONTHS.

It's gotten to the point that I'm seriously considering starting a sideblog fact-checking all of it.

PLEASE STOP BEING GARFIELD I AM BEGGING ALL OF YOU

BE NERMAL FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

I've written at least one really long post about fact-checking things before. I have another saved as a draft somewhere.

But all you really have to do at this point is GO LOOK AT AN ACTUAL NEWS SOURCE.

What do I mean by an Actual News Source?

An actual news source will tell you where it's getting its information.

Basically: Wikipedia rules apply at all times. Citation. Fucking. Needed.

Except with news articles, I don't mean a detailed footnote.

I mean, if they say, "Rosco Flubberish reported seeing a pig fly across Whatever Place. 'It was a flying pig,' he said," they're fine.

If they say, "Sources close to the President reported that the Department of Farmland Creatures launched a pig into the air this afternoon," they're fine.

If they say, "There have also been reports that pigs flew," they are purely making shit up.

Just check CNN or something. CNN checks their shit, and they're very quick on the draw.

NBC has been very reliable too, in my experience. So have ABC, Newsweek, the Jerusalem Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, the AP, PBS, the Washington Post, and Reuters.

You can break through most paywalls by putting archive.is or 12ft.io before the https:// of the URL. Or just go to either of those sites and paste the URL in the box.

Nobody is perfect. I've seen some articles from all of the above that were accurate, but left things out that I personally thought were important.

Journalists are humans, humans fuck up.

(Also, NONE OF THIS APPLIES TO OPINION PIECES ON ANY TOPIC. Opinion pieces are exactly that: opinions. They don't seem to be fact-checked anywhere, as far as I can tell. They range from super-accurate and informative to complete nonsense.)

(Surprisingly unreliable sources in my experience: Democracy Now, Jacobin, Workers World Party. The latter two act like news sites but are basically running nothing but opinion pieces; Democracy Now can do important deep dives, but I've also seen news coverage from it that was wildly misinformed in that same way.

On the flip side, Slate and the Atlantic are largely opinion -- the Atlantic more than Slate, maybe -- but they often have really well-researched analysis of political situations. Ditto Teen Vogue, and sometimes Vox.)

You don't have to read CNN or the NYT or whateverfor fun. You don't have to make it one of your news sources.

Just. Do a quick check on Google News before you assume anything is true, and then run it through a bullshit filter as described above.

You are being actively lied to, all the time. So am I. We all are.

And people will believe and repeat literally anything that sounds about right.

That's just human nature.

That is WHY none of us are immune to propaganda.

if you want my personal shortlist of Bad Sources, as in Sources That Consistently Publish Absolute Falsehoods:

Any and all state-owned or state-controlled media. For example:

Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari government, and so are a bunch of other news sites.

Mehr News, the Tehran Times, Al-Quds TV, and Al-Alam are owned by the dictatorship of Iran.

Oops. Looks like every form of broadcast Iranian news media is owned by the dictatorship of Iran, which has a monopoly.

Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, Palestinian News and Info Agency, and Al-Hayat Al-Jadida are owned by the government of Palestine (the Palestinian Authority)

Al-Aqsa TV and Felesteen are owned by Hamas.

TASS / Russia News Agency, Russia Today, and a fuckton of others are owned by the Russian government.

State Media Monitor seems to do a pretty great job of tracking and listing these things. Check out your own country there!

I specifically listed those ones because some of them (especially Al Jazeera, Mehr News, and TASS) are sites I've seen come up frequently on Tumblr, or in my attempts to fact-check what people are saying here and on Twitter. The rest are just more examples from the same governments.

Al Jazeera deserves special notice because it's become a very popular leftist news source. Believe me, I used to read it all the time too.

It can be reliable and accurate sometimes. But:

It consistently tweets things that are unsourced, never appear anywhere else, and that would be big news you'd expect it to follow up on if they were true. It seems to be following a strategy of "tweet every rumor you hear in case it's true, so you can get the scoop."

It also does this with its liveblogs of the war. And ALL its coverage of the war at this point is liveblogs. So things that are verifiably true will run right next to things that are complete hearsay, but are too long to just tweet.

This is especially dangerous because as far as I can tell, Al Jazeera doesn't delete anything that turns out to be false.

I've also seen regular news articles in Al Jazeera, on multiple topics, that veer from Absolutely True Statements to Wildly Exaggerated Numbers and Speculation. Stuff you wouldn't expect a source on, like statistics or descriptions. And there's no way to tell the difference unless you already know a topic really well, or are fact-checking them while you read.

One especially terrible example, from Gazan activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib:

Al Jazeera has never posted or published a correction.

Alkhatib has also blamed it for destabilizing the region, although he's exaggerating about it being Hamas's official propaganda outlet:

TL;DR: If you see a Tumblr post making any kind of factual news statement without a link, at this point you need to assume it is absolutely not true. And either scroll on past, or go check Google News.

If there IS a link, you need to click through to see what it's from and what it actually says.

(Honestly, you need to do that with Wikipedia too. I've repeatedly clicked through on citations that absolutely did not say what the article implied they did.)

And pro tip: on mobile, you can just smack a button to sort Google's news results by most recent, and it helps A LOT. There's gotta be a way to do the same on desktop, but if there is, it's not immediately visible, which sucks.

[transrevolutions]

happy autism month. remember that if I see anyone promoting A$ blue puzzle piece bullshit I'm gonna vaporize you on sight with my Autism Blast. fellow autistics feel free to do the same with your various autistic weapons of mass destruction.

[thatkoiboi]

Sleepovers with April are the best! ...and normally accidental-

omg also i binge read dandy's "i may be invisible, but i still look good" and the reference is random but i needed it cause it was funny in the fic and references are my data collection-