“muscle tension”, for most of my life i though relaxed and calm were the same thing. then covid hit and i never had to go out. all verbal communication was done via scheduled zoom and i could immediately drop my facial expression. then i finally understood what if fealt like to have my muscles relax without being high as fuck. i love that my kid has become verbal, it’s great for him. but damn do i miss going days without saying or hearing a spoken word.

some people don’t like personalizations. this is the first account in at least 10 yrs i picked a username for. normally it’s just the string a password generator spit out. this time, i guess i figured after surving 18 months on world before deleting the account and moving. i could put 5 seconds into picking a name, since i’ll likely be on lemmy until it dies. at some point in the next year i may add the word ‘no’ to my bio but thats an excessive amount of personalization for me.

my son is in a great communication and interaction program with dedicated space inside the school. lots of sensory adaptive tools and quiet areas. theres awareness that some of the kids just dont care about being praised, but making the content contextually relavent and assuming they have the self awareness to decide does work. though praise definitely works with my son. had a lot of really interesting discussions with his teacher. i may very well have had a wildy different experiance if that space had existed 30 years ago. at the time all that i wanted was to do self paced remote classes where i could submit everything via computer. which by highschool was an option. but at that time the only goal was me in a gen-ed classroom with my behavior adjusted to make everyone else around me comfotable. allowing me to do what would work for me was seen as failure by everyone making decisions.

for the tactile part specifically. e-readers, stone paper for writing and terraslate if i need printed materials. have significantly improved my life.

not like i have a hundred of them on my phone from last season or anything… heres some highlights, with the quality cranked down because lemmy is weak.

serenity rose:

pink sun:

purple sun:

soprano purple and a bee:

coral and a bee:

copper:

the second for sure. once a year there’d be that teacher who’d try to connect and it always went the same way. they’d assume i was feeling insecure about my ability and statements like “i hate touching this paper” or “grades are meaningless nonsense” were part of that. they needle me until i said fine and did a weeks worth of class material in one sitting. then they go “oh see this is amazing you’d be a straight A student if you applied yourself”. meanwhile my stress level is at an 11 from all the tactile sensery hell. and from that point on i’d just ditch their class.

Osteospermum. Some company named one of their color selections ‘serenity rose magic daisies’. serenty rose is one of my favorite comics and comic charaters. so next thing i know i’m the sarah anderson frogs comic with a few dozen Osteospermums in my garden every year and 7 varieties potted indoors for propogation.

sometimes the void just needs yelling at. vent away.

work for a state wide university managing endpoints. if we exclude all the servers and iot stuff and just look at end user laptops in an effort to expand the use of linuxs, it comes down to support cost. we primarily offer win or apple as a choice with about a 60/40 split. theres a small specilized linux service for researchers outside the central service thats does most things as manual set ups by use case. I’ve pitched offering managed linux as a service a few times. i’ll keep doing it, but. it requires staff with knowledge in remote management of dynamically active device. who also understand the tools for supporting linux endpoints under any compliance req the spaces has. all of those tools are far more manual than the win/apple stuff. its hard enough to hire engineers for the apple side. you’ll have to grow your own, it’s just too specialized. all your documentation and training then need to be updated for a 3rd unique platform. its probably a 3yr undertaking at a few hundred grand per year in staffing to stand up. absolutely doable but it needs high level support in an org to do.

ok that was way better than paying attention to my zoom meeting. this is now canon for me. as i assume the pope intended when he drew the anime mascot.

it’s quartly planning week at work. which means four days of being fully active and engaged human. gonna be exhausting. but instead of complaining about that, i’d like to address the truth about japanese jesus you’re apparently withholding from us!?

three i think, with one making an attempt recently. got a sister who appears to get it but we’re not really close. two friends. one who’s kid got diagnosed a couple years after mine, then got herself diagnosed. the other recently went from “haha yeah im totally weird enough to be autistic haha” to “well shit”. after a conversation we had where a whole bunch of experiances she’s had dismissed by others, were also things i experiance. and my ex appears to be making an honest effort recently in an ateempt to connect with our son. fewer lazy cliche phrases, more pauses and thoughtful interactions from her to him. thats been really nice to see.

feral with each other

gonna be stuck in my head all day now. definitely stealing this one.

if you wanted a bot to kick off these daily posts so you don’t have to rememeber every day. that’d be ok. news bots seem to just be about generating lots of shallow content. this place has been rebounding well enough since you took over that we don’t need a bot as filler.

it’s not so much an autism specific thing but it is definitely a “you will behave in this exact way or else” thing. i recall in the 90s being sent to the office, having my parents called and routinely guilted. for using ‘the cross thumb’ in this image with the paper horizontal while writing. and a few other on here while drawing. then i got out of school and was told there isnt one way to hold a pencil and i may never stop being angry about this.

came here to suggest journaling as well. and if you’ve already had a good experiance with it, all the better. during my divorce, the only other person i felt connected with offered to “help fix me” if i’d just give them a pass on all my established boundries. i declined and we parted ways. filled at least two books that year but it gave me a place to talk outside my head. it was enough to get me to each next day. that gave me time to let connections with other people develop on terms i was comfortable with.

debain, with xfce if i need a desktop. mostly because i started on xubuntu. started learning sysadmin stuff when all i could afford was a potato with salvaged computer components shoved in it. xfce considered that excessively over powered. ended up loving the way i set up my xfce env, and probably wont change it much over the next 20yrs because theres no need. so when cononical got extra gross it was easy to just move to debian and carry on with my life.

the empty walls with only the few things i needed was my default. then i was married to a trash goblin for awhile. so now i’ve got artwork up and plants everywhere. but every single thing has a place it belongs and every surface is clear. completely empty spaces feel weird now but it cant be chaos piles ever again.

halfway through responding i talked myself out of my own opinion on this. language changes and i think “on the spectrum” is coming to the end of it’s usefulness. it was helpful for a time but now i only use it at work in the context of “i’m just grasping for language that will make you understand how to communicate with me”.

On the spectrum is a helpful middle ground when exploring the topic though. And it was a very helpful middle ground when every discussion of autism seemed to devolve into clinical diagnosis vs awareness that the medical system in most countries is a dumpster fire. getting my son diagnosed took very little effort. when i looked into it for myself 6 yrs ago, the clinician was helpfully blunt with “look unless you need accomodations dont put yourself through this yet. theres one person in this state who can diagnose in adults and it’s a 2 yr wait list to start the 1 yr $1200 out of pocket process”.

a friend got her offical diagnosis about 6 months ago and the process has by her description, improved and shortened significantly. so i may explore that again. at this point outside work i just use autist/autism, but at work i still use spectrum. I do agree the language is aging out of broad usefullness, but i don’t believe it’s something i’ll be bothered by for a long while still. i get your frustration with it. I think we’re in that be kind and let people use the language they’re comfortable with period for the spectrum. it may die off or it may become elder millenials term for ourselves as aspie has for some genxers who grew up before the spectrum entered the dms5.