Pets are cuter when they are little (or more about my involuntary holiday).

Again, the names, locations, and quotes relating to where I spent the latter half of February are fudged in order to protect identities. Since they have a policy of there being no photographic equipment being allowed on the ward to protect the privacy of the patients, I have to respect that.

During X-Men: First Class, one of the many accusing-sounding things that Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) says to Professor X (James McAvoy) is that she guesses pets are always cuter when they are little. That, in a nutshell, sums up the reality for autistic or mentally ill adults in today’s “enlightened” society. They spend literally billions of dollars advertising initiatives to “help” the children or adolescents. Sometimes they even throw a dollar or two in the direction of those services or initiatives. And when the initiatives that were too ignorant or cash-strapped to use the right approach inevitably fail, it is the children and adolescents they were supposed to serve, who end up bearing the real cost. As the failure progresses and those children or adolescents become adults, the costs mount. And in cases of severe failure, such as the failure to properly diagnose an individual before their twenty-fifth birthday, the costs borne by the patient become so high that it makes the value of life very difficult to see.

What “you” look like to me, in a civil rights model sense.

(An important note: This article was written before the school shootings and the autism strawmanning the curebies used it for took place. At the time this was written, I hated passives enough that I would throw them in a bonfire with the normies. As a result of those events, I am unsure whether I hate passives less than normies or curebies now. Go figure.)

I will admit right now, I am well aware that my superiority-based view of how the battle for our civil rights should be enforced can be rather alienating, even where others of my kind are concerned. But after the so-called 2012 Congressional hearings on autism, I have a question that not only would I like to ask what I not-so-nicely call passives, but one that I feel they should be asking themselves.

Can you blame me?

So yeah, why all the posts about films and music lately? It is like this…

I will make no secret of this fact. What I choose to write about at any given moment is a highly unpredictable and quirky thing. One day, I might decide I want to write about a film I have just seen and been half blown-away by. The next, I might decide to write about how stupid the powers that be in the film and television industries appear. But here is the thing: I am like a computer up to a point. What comes out of me is a reflection of what is put into me.

So I was reading other people’s journals once again

I make no secret of this. I read other people’s online journals. I read them a lot at times. Not because I want to research “the competition” or because the “everything online” crowd says that is what I have to do. No. The main reason is because in spite of how difficult certain neurological quirks that have never been investigated make it, I like to read. I have learned more, especially as a child, by reading well-written writings than from thousands of hours of teacher effort. But the primary reason I read online journals is pretty funny: they are my primary source of news concerning the struggle to make the world at large understand that we, the autistic, are people, too.

Lance Henriksen has done more to represent the autistic than Suzanne Wright ever will

In many writings, I have gone on about actors, films, or bits of music that represent the autistic, especially autistic adults, than efforts that are deliberately promoted as such. Part of this, I will admit, has to do with resentment. Josh Hartnett was once quoted as claiming that the reason his then-recent film Mozart And The Whale was met with such complete indifference at the box orifice was because someone out there did not want “the cause” getting out in the open. Given that the film is basically a lot of exaggeration of one type and promotion of the idea that the autistic remain children forever, Hartnett has, much like Anthony Kiedis or Julia Roberts before him, become one of a list of public figures I will get on a Queensland bus in order to avoid hearing from.

Symbols, flags, and meanings… one of many musings

Not too long ago, I posted an entry that divided its time semi-equally between the injustice of a vigilantist idea of justice and my agreement with another author about how much the puzzle piece symbol sucks. This, to my pleasant surprise, brought about a visit from its author and some commentary about the symbol issue. In my own reply (I am compulsive about replying to everything, with some exceptions), I promised that I would explore symbols and their meanings a little bit further in a future entry. Or rather, I thanked him for giving me that idea, because to be brutally honest, when you churn out three or four entries a day at peak times, your stock of new ideas does sometimes run a tiny bit dry.

Well, two things I feel a need to speak about now

Before I say anything else, I want to make something clear to the reading public out there. Whilst most, if not all, of my posts have been written with the offline journal writing program called Qumana, I have started to find it a most unsatisfactory editor for my purposes. This is not to say that I do not recommend it to people who are looking for a cheap (ie free) editor for their posts, but several problems with the interface have made me decide to look elsewhere. Even for a solution that I must pay money for. Probably the straw that broke my proverbial camel’s back is that on the iMac that I use for all my computing needs, the almost-universal keyboard combination to move back and forth in text on a word by word basis is to hold down the Alt/Option key and press the left or right arrow keys. But for reasons best known to its programmers, Qumana seems to feel that users should hold down the Command key and use the left and right arrow keys to achieve the same effect. This inconsistency with the standard (and yes, I know how that sounds coming from me) has caused me confusion not only when attempting to use Qumana, but also when trying to carry out tasks in other programs. The Command key usually has all of the most powerful and important keyboard commands of the OS X user interface associated with it. Save, Load, Cut, Copy, Paste, and most importantly of all, the Quit command. In OS X, quitting most programs involves holding down Command and pressing Q. When migrating over from Windoze, this can present some confusion at first, but now that I have gotten used to it, I have to say that it is a far better system for closing programs. Qumana threatened to create confusion in that, so I am going to phase it out.