As I was looking through some old posts and cleaning up some of what I consider to be the worst previously unnoticed mistakes in them, I noticed that the raw URLs of my posts (as opposed to the Shortlinks) were in some cases insanely long. Anyone who was there to witness when I posted a pair of posts about how awesome RoboCop and by extension its director, Paul Verhoeven, were, knows what I mean here.
Now, this makes me especially grateful for the Shortlink feature that WordPress system offers. With it, I can get a link to the post in question that is about as long as your average curebie penis. This is especially handy when I am trying to share the posts and make sure that people in the intangible and often nebulous audience can pass the posts around with as much ease as is possible.
But the thing is, as simple as making an independent news and “media” source like this can be made through automation and programmings, there are limitations to this. In one good scene during the breakdown of society in Stephen King‘s epic The Stand, a disc jockey locks himself in his studio and starts taking calls, talking to listeners about how badly the institutions of society have been breaking down in the wake of the plague. The relevant part of this scene is that the disc jockey asks his audience to be patient, as he is doing all of the related things such as working the ‘phone system on his own.
That is basically the point of this little writing today. This is literally a one-man show. There are a few reasons for this. One is that in order to work with other people effectively, I have to be completely comfortable with them, and we have to be capable of working out a manner in which clashes or disputes are resolved. This is obviously a tough ask when one of the participants is psychologically battle-scarred and generally disposed to feeling mean. So the idea that a second author, leave alone someone trusted with the level of editorial power that I have taken for myself, can be found is a big stretch.
Another problem is that in the absence of true “mastery” over all of the controls, sharing them with another author is a risky move indeed. And the non-transparency of the manner in which the WordPress system is controlled makes it difficult to even imagine ever learning the controls to the point where I feel comfortable allowing collaboration.
Another complication is that I clearly want to send a very specific message both to my audience and hopefully anyone they talk to after reading my work. That message is that whatever else it makes me, being autistic does not make me less of a Human being, it does not make me whatever stereotype one’s mind finds most comfortable, and it does not make me any less prone to putting up a fight on my own behalf. Allowing people to share the load in this publication obviously makes for a difficult proposition if they do not grok what inspires this message.
So there is quite clearly going to be a cavalcade of errors and minor stuff-ups that in some cases can go unnoticed for months after the fact. And I do not mind telling my audience that when errors of spelling, communication, wording, or formatting occur, seeing them after the fact sends me into a tailspin. I simply have to get into the editing tool, correct them, and post the new version with those corrections, even when the error-ridden version has been in circulation for months. Call this odd, stupid, or whatever to your heart’s content, but it has been an inherent characteristic since before I even knew what a school was. The desire to always go back, refine, correct, and fix until I am completely satisfied that what is presented to others is the best, most internally-sound version drives me like a sports car.
Do not get me wrong, I am not George Lucas. I can put the pen down and say “okay, this is as good as it is ever going to get on my watch, I will let it out to thrive on its own”. Once something is out to the public and has worked for a certain time, I am not going to come back and chop it up because I have changed during the time between whenever now is and the time when I first released it. The integrity of the content may therefore change in very small, incremental amounts (a bit like the manner in which films are restored to clean out film scratches and bits of dirt). But the content itself, I believe, should be preserved at all costs.
In publicity for his first and so far only directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive, Stephen King states that when you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. That is true to a certain degree. When you are the person who knows best how to do something, it is very true. However, history is replete with examples of people who, when faced with the urgent need to delegate responsibility, arrogantly believed that nobody could do a better job than they. The Allied command staff in World War II thanked Odin every day for the fact that Adolf Hitler was just such a person.
But the autistic acceptance, civil rights, or related movements all suffer from one serious problem. Whatever form or euphemism or title you go with, there seems to be a mainstream movement consisting entirely of passives that expects everyone else to just hush up and go along for the ride. As I have outlined in previous posts, this situation would be fine if I did not have a persistent and very real fear that the passivity squad was going to sell me down the river at the first opportunity. I simply have no trust in those people to properly represent my interests, and given that multiple Presidents, Prime Ministers, and more besides have now been in office whilst children of my neurotype are still being murdered without consequence, I wonder where the passives get off in blaming me for it.
I obviously feel quite a lot of words coming to mind all the time. Truth be told, I do not believe that any author of any stripe finds writing fiction anywhere near as easy as writing non-fiction. When one finds a non-fiction subject to write about that is to their liking, the ability to write cold, hard facts makes the process flow freely like air through lungs. The main variable in that process is simply finding the right conjunctions of words in order to make the subject sufficiently interesting. That is why many professional authors will tell wanna-bes that reading is just as important as writing when learning how to write. It is also why I have said several times to normalistic idiots who see every little piece of work being exactly the same as a good thing that I do not write as much for an audience as I write for me. Good writers or musicians always do to some degree. Because when you stop making the works or pieces for yourself, and obsess day and night about what others might think or believe, your end product ends up worse as a result.
So yes, for the time being, and probably for the foreseaable or even distant future, this journal remains a solo effort. That means that not only will there be some erroneous decisions made, they can all be blamed upon me. Unlike some people out there, I like to be as responsible for the words and actions associated with my name as I should be. And thus, with this journal, the pyramid of responsibility is pretty much a singular level with me right at the top. Sure, the audience can be considered right at the bottom in a little pool at the foundation, with nothing betwixt the two levels, but this is all fairly academic.
My writings in the past about how the autism civil rights movement needs to reorganise, even become more Mafia-like, and the post about what we will do if we get our wish and Autism Speaks stops existing tomorrow, reflect one fundamental flaw in said movement. We ourselves have very little concept that we are a society on our own, and that we need a system to bridge the gaps between all points of view or feeling. Because if all that reaches the mainstream audience is a passive satire along the longs of what I like to deride as Big Stereotype Theory, or Geeks Who Have Never Bitten A Chicken’s Head Off Culture, then we will all suffer for it.
I do not mind suffering for my own lousy decisions, or DNA in the case of things like my skin cancers. But I feel that not only should I not ask anyone else to do the same, others should not ask me to suffer for their lousy decisions, either.
I Still Find It So Hard... 