I was thinking this morning about the dialogue around AI like ChatGPT making human writing completely irrelevant. In a few years, computers will be able to create text that is indistinguishable from human-created text; some would argue that they already can. I was also thinking about the dialogue around AI Art programs like Stable Diffusion,…
Category: Essays
On “Aspie Supremacy”
A topic I’ve been seeing a lot recently in the Autism community is what is being derogatorily called “Aspie Supremacy”. This perspective suggests that autism is evolutionarily superior to allism in general and Neurotypicality specifically. It appears to be called “Aspie Supremacy” because it centers Autistics with low support needs (who have historically been called…
On Learned Helplessness
(These are initial thoughts as I process through this concept.) I was prompted to start thinking deeply about learned helplessness by this tweet and its follow-ups: https://twitter.com/heymrsbond/status/1603757493171232768 (Source: “What is Learned Helplessness?”, Medical News Today) At the same time, though, I recognized a lot of this in my own behavior, as well as the behavior…
Is the Club Q shooter nonbinary? It doesn’t matter.
The person who allegedly killed five people at a gay bar the night before Trans Day of Remembrance has announced through their lawyers that they identify as nonbinary and use they/them pronouns. It would be easy to conclude that the alleged murderer is cynically trying to avoid Hate Crime laws by falsely claiming to be…
A Trip to the Ocularist
I have a prosthetic eye. The last one I got was about twenty years ago, so I decided it was time for a new one. This is a write-up about my experience while it’s still fresh, and also to answer many of the questions I get. (Weak narrative structure here, this is somewhat stream-of-consciousness.) Popular…
Sheldon Cooper and Me
While I believe it has never been explicitly stated on either “The Big Bang Theory” (BBT) or “Young Sheldon” (YS), it seems pretty clear that the character of Sheldon Cooper is intended to be autistic. He represents one of the common stereotype sets of an autist: Annoyingly obsessive about some topics, lacking in overt empathy…
The Raccoon in the Trashcan
Sunday: My two brothers and I had a long, deliberate talk about childhood traumas. This is the first such conversation I remember having, at least in person, with both of them together. My older brother lives in northern Saskatchewan and visits every few years. My younger brother lives about an hour south of me. Saturday,…
The first of August, 2022 (2)
I have long had this discomfort having conversations, especially about emotional topics. It feels like I’m playing out a script: I speak, you speak, I speak, and I can see the galleys of dialogue that we’ve been working our way through. As if the point of conversation is not to connect with another, but rather…
The first of August, 2022 (1)
It would be nice if the people who live in my head would pay rent from time to time. The first people who moved into my psyche were my parents. They have separate rooms in the cellar, well entrenched there in apartments that most of the other residents aren’t even aware are there. There’s no…
(Don’t) Call Me on the Telephone
I have long avoided phone calls. If I have to call someone else, I usually need to work myself up. And when the phone rings, I either let it go to voicemail or (much less often) answer with an anxious aggression. I have generally attributed this avoidance to PTSD: After I moved out of my…