Offensive language. Real offensive language, I mean.

In the constant back and forth about the use of so-called “person first” language (that is, “person with autism” or the like), a dangerous gambit or concession emerges. The “person first” camp, with all of their smugness and self-entitled ignorance of the implications, like to tell us that it is up to what the individual prefers. This seems perfectly reasonable at first, in spite of how some of them attempt to use this as a platform from which to bully us into adopting it. But just like “person with blackness” or “person with Hebrew” or “person with Chineseness”, to cite just a few potential examples, are unacceptable and not a matter of preference, neither is “person with autism”. I do not care what you have to say for yourselves, “person first”ers. I could be the only autistic individual in the world who feels this way about your separationistic language. That would only mean I am right, and everyone else is wrong.

Wanting a divorce. A consequence of bad social policy that nobody likes to talk about.

“You know, Charles, I used to think it was going to be you and me against the world,” Mystique says. “But no matter how bad the world gets, you don’t want to be against it, do you? You want to be a part of it.” Take out a few words here and there (primarily from the start), and you have the essence of what I sent in a text message to my mother whilst I was unable to sleep a handful of nights ago.

Mists Of Pandaria went live. Hoo… rah…

I will tell you this much right off the bat, in case you have not already noticed it or this is your first visit here (in which case, welcome): I am not a fan of Blizzard Entertainment or the stories they put into their products. I have found that the Horde’s leaders mainly consist of dickheads with whom Blizzard play a game of seeing how much obnoxious, arrogant shit they can get away with whilst maintaining slavish devotion from fanboys. I am finding the current implementations of the game so irritating in so many ways that I am starting to feel that Dave Kosak should be fired. So with that frame of reference, let us explore my opinions of the latest World Of Warcraft expansion, Mists Of Pandaria.

Goals. What ones should the autism civil rights movement have?

I think if one looks at the situation quite literally, the autistic civil rights movement as it presently exists and occurs has a bit of a problem. In contrast to the enemy, which is very well-organised and well-directed, the autism civil rights movement is basically a lot of different groups of people meandering about without a clearly defined purpose or even a sense of a decision-making process.

The process of character construction, a reflection

When I create a character for use in my own work, merely starting the process begins a lot of asking of questions. Probably the first and foremost question when writing any story is “how important is this character going to be to the story?”. In the cases of characters like Linula and Ruby Amelda, the answer is exceedingly obvious. They are the entire basis for the story, and in one case, the story is going to be seen almost entirely through her eyes. The first of the stories in which Linula and Ruby appear is in part a meditation on the fact that the things that make us different (one is from an abusive, self-righteous asshole family, the other a loving successful commercialist family) are just as important, if not more so, than the things that make us the same. So constructing these two characters is a painstaking process in which many questions have to be asked and answered.