Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
“Warren’s policy would fully cancel
loans in about three-quarters of households with student debt,
according to an estimate provided to the campaign by Arizona State
University assistant professor Raphael Charron-Chenier and Brandeis
University law professor Thomas Shapiro.”
Let’s talk about the astounding similarities between cats and autistic people, and how we should make them the official autism mascot instead of that godawful puzzle piece
Oh man, now you’ve got me going!
Firstly, cats stim. They purr, swish their tails and knead their paws against pillows, blankets, and other soft things. Many cats actively seek out sensory experiences, like listening to birds singing, lying in a sunbeam, rolling against the grass, etc.
Cats have sensory sensitivities— many of them dislike walking on certain flooring, touching certain textures, and certain smells or sounds may make them anxious. Their fur is very sensitive, they can sense the lightest touch, or speck of lint, or dust and their skin will quiver until they can lick or rub it off. When they become overstimulated cats retreat into a small, dark place to recover.
Cats love routine. Many cats know the exact time that their owners wake up in the morning and will wake them. A cat with a routine is a happy cat— they love to have their meals or soft food on a schedule and will learn their owner’s schedule. Cats will become anxious when the schedule is disrupted or if their owner doesn’t follow their usual routine.
In the same vein cats are very wary and/or anxious when it comes to the introduction of new things or people into their environment. Cats require time and patience to get used to anything or anyone newly introduced. Cats also feel anxious when existing furniture is rearranged or when a new smell (like an air freshener) is introduced into the home.
Cats often have “special interests”, a particular activity or thing that they love and can spend hours enjoying. It could be playing with a particular toy, chewing on something, listening to the radio, or watching the clothes in the washing machine. My cat Kitty has a certain ball that she fixates on and will happily enjoy and obsess over for hours.
Finally, cats have a very distinct and subtle body language. The difference is particularly evident when compared with the exuberant, unsubtle dog. The slightest twitch of a tail or turn of the ears, the frequency and timing of blinks, and the positioning of the tail in relation to the body are all little movements that can express much. To the untrained eye it may appear as if a cat is bored, aloof, or unaware of its surroundings. But once you learn to recognize cat body language and understand cat communication, you’ll be amazed at the depth of emotion and how expressive your cat really is.
Yes, I think that cats have a lot in common with autistic people. And that’s wonderful!
also can I add to this:
cats like to show their affection just by sharing the same space. a cat will generally want to be in the same space as you, even if you’re not really interacting and are half way across the room. still hanging out!
they don’t always want to be touched, and can be easily overstimulated by physical affection.
they don’t like to make eye contact.
their body language is often misinterpreted- and then they are blamed for it, or have negative motivations ascribed to it. a cat following you around is stalking you instead of wanting to hang out. a cat that doesn’t want to make eye contact with you is ignoring you instead of being polite. a cat that lashes out because it’s over stimulated, or you ignored their body language telling you to leave them alone is suddenly an asshole who hurt you for no reason.
I had this book as a child and I’m glad to see the comparison is so widely recognized too
I KEEP SAYING ALL CATS ARE AUTISTIC IM SO HAPPY THIS POST EXISTS PLEASE SOMEONE ARTISTIC MAKE A CAT WITH THE NEURODIVERGENT SYMBOL ON IT FOR AUTISM MASCOT :D
Her name is hope, her breed is highlander and she’s precious.
imagine a rosario vampire kind of setting, where a human winds up at a monster school. except the monsters all know they’re a human. maybe they’re part of a new “monster/human friendly relations” project. everyone is pretty cautious about causing an incident, so they’re treading lightly around the human. but the human doesn’t even bat an eye at the strange stuff that goes on, so the monster kids gradually become more relaxed around them.
here’s the thing. the human doesn’t actually realize they’re at a monster school. they’re basically the living embodiment of “staying in their lane”. they see strange monster things happening and they’re like “huh. well that’s none of my business” and just go about their day
so the monsters think the human knows what’s up and doesn’t care. the human thinks they’re at a weird but ultimately normal human school. then the human sees something so explicit that they can’t help but connect the dots, like a werewolf transforming right in front of them. the human screams, the werewolf yelps, everyone else starts screaming too. there’s lots of confusion all around.
eventually they all figure out what happened. then the human’s friends start quizzing them on how the hell they never noticed.
“the werewolves literally walk around with their ears and tails out.” “I thought they were just furries okay?!”
“but the vampires drink blood at lunch! only blood! they don’t eat!” “listen, even goths can be insecure about their weight. it’s not my business if they want to go on a weird tomato juice diet.” “I guess that explains why you hugged Travis and told him he was beautiful the way he is that one time.”
“there are fairies in our math class. they have wings.” “*shrug* theater kids are weird.”
“Ynolk'ku is the offspring of an eldritch abomination. the whispers of the dead follow xem wherever xe go. are you saying you never heard that?” “I figured it was just really loud creepy music playing from xer headphones.”
“centaurs. harpies. nagas.” “okay I know I already said furries, but really committed furries.”
“Cindy is a sasquatch and she’s covered in fur.” “who am I to tell a girl to shave?”
“the dryads wear clothes made out of living plants.” “aesthetic or death.”
Currently working on a feature to make our online store send out digital copies of our albums when you purchase a physical CD version of them. To encourage buying directly from us.
Like a bonus. i.e.: Album One: CD + Free Digital Album = $10.00
This will take a week or so to get implemented properly on all albums and officially advertised on the site.
We will also be selling digital copies of our albums through our store aswell, so if you so choose, you can cut out iTunes or bandcamp or whoever and give 100% of your money directly to us.
We will still offer our albums on all the popular digital distribution sites though, as we all use them and want to give you fine folks all the freedom and possible options to enjoy our tunes. This will just be ANOTHER way to get the albums digitally, straight from our website instead of a 3rd party (…and delivered as 320kpbs MP3s, BEAT THAT iTUNES!).
ALSO… If you’ve placed an order for CDs in the past on our online store, and it was after November 7th 2015, you will get a free digital copy of the albums you’ve purchased. This includes SteamWorld Heist Pre-orders, but not Vice Quadrant Pre-orders.
Any orders before November 7th 2015 will not be eligible for free digital copies, as this is when our online store switched to it’s current storefront from our old one.
Digital copies will arrive immediately via email after you checkout (either with a physical CD purchase or digital) and will also be available in a new section called “My Downloads” under your “My Account” page if you signed up for an SPG Shoppe account.
Please bare with us as we implement these changes. I am working through each album on our store and putting up digital purchases one at a time.
You may get emails and such if you buy an album. The emails are legit.
If you purchase a CD from us during this time but do not get an email, fear not, you will still get your digital copy. It will be emailed to you once all albums are up on our store digitally. This is the same for past purchases made after November 7th 2015. You will receive an email once your digital album is available. I will literally push a big button that will notify all past customers and give them their links and such.
So yeah, trying not to leave anyone out with all this!
Well…as much as is feasible from a technical limitation perspective.
For those of you who bought out CDs before November 7th or years in the past…apologies, but no free digital album. HOWEVER! You can totally still rip your purchased CD to your hard drive and BAM DIGITAL! :P
On one last note… Starting with our appearance in Dallas Texas at A-Kon in a few weeks… If you purchase a CD from our merchandise booth and provide the Walter Workers an email address before they finalize your order (they will ask you), you will get a digital copy of the albums you purchased! And if your email matches your account on our online store, it’ll be thrown into your “My Downloads” section too. So yeah that’s cool.
Anywho…We’ll make a proper official announcement when this is all live and ready-to-go. Just wanted to give you a taste of what’s coming!
The point at which men feel compelled to make a separate, masculine fandom name for themselves, the better to differentiate themselves from other, presumably female fans inhabiting the same space, is the point at which they feel their gender to be not only relevant to their expression of fandom, but so important that it needs its own word, lest we confuse them with women.
The fact that men seem only to be interested in doing this on entering traditionally or predominantly female fandoms says a lot about the logic behind it. Where fans are presumed to be male, there’s no need to assert their maleness with a masculine name; where fans are presumed to be female, however, they strive to differentiate themselves, not only to void the risk of being mistaken for women, but to rebrand the actual property as being for men.
If such men were genuinely interested in disproving gender binaries and the sort of sexist logic that tries to steer their tastes in other directions, as is sometimes claimed, they wouldn’t feel the need to establish that the thing they like has masculine properties, as though they couldn’t or wouldn’t like it otherwise. This isn’t like the oft-ignored female fans of comics and videogames asserting, rightly, that such things are for everyone, which category happens to include them; it’s men expressly stating that an originally or traditionally feminine property isn’t really feminine, the better to make it for men.
Following this logic, female-dominated fandoms are only worth joining if men can make absolutely sure that their support isn’t confused with female support, or their interests with female interests, the better to assert their more selective ownership of the property. Crucially, this move also has the effect of forcing women to either accept the gendering of the fandom and adopt their own, feminine nomenclature - possibly one the men themselves have created, heedless of the fact that it was irrelevant prior to their insistence that it wasn’t, as per the term pegasister - or to refuse the binary and so have the male term become synonymous with the fandom as a whole, as though male interest is the only kind that matters.
tl;dr: If you’re a guy and your first thought on approaching a new fandom is “how do I make a name that describes my interest in this thing while letting everyone know that I’m a dude”, then do us all a favour and stay the fuck out of it.
While English isn’t a gendered language in the sense of having a gendered grammar, like Spanish or German, we nonetheless have many words that possess both masculine and feminine forms, like actor and actress, author and authoress. Often in these instances, the masculine form of a word is synonymous with its neutral, default or original form, in keeping with the fact that feminine variants were later linguistic additions; often made, it must be said, not just because women had started doing a thing they’d previously been prevented from doing, but because men at the time wanted to establish that female efforts at the same pursuits were different (and likely inferior) to their own.
Thus: women aren’t actors, they’re actresses; women aren’t authors, they’re authoresses, and while some of these feminine variants have more linguistic traction than others - we still say actress, but authoress sounds quaint and sexist - it’s noteworthy that there’s no commensurate tradition for making masculine variants of female forms. Nursing, for instance, is assumed to be a traditionally feminine career, but while we sometimes specify ‘male nurse’ as distinct from just ‘nurse’ - this being a rare professional default with a feminine implication - we’ve never gone so far as to make a whole new word for it.
Which is, I suspect, because there are so few historical instances of men moving into female spheres, rather than vice versa, until very, very recently. But now that it’s started to happen, what do we see? A discomfort with the idea of feminine terminology doubling as neutral. Rather than accepting that words like ‘romance’ and ‘eyeliner’ can be applied equally to men, we’re creating masculine variants whose express purpose is to prevent the traditionally feminine terms from becoming universal. Slowly, surely, we’ve been shedding those early feminine -ess words from the language, dropping them as we’ve come to see the lack of utility (and the surfeit of sexism) in unnecessarily distinguishing gender in such instances, thereby reverting to using the traditionally masculine forms as universal. But now that we have the opportunity to do the same with feminine forms, we’re baulking.
What’s most interesting about this, though, is that in both instances, it’s seemingly men creating and sustaining all the separate, unnecessarily gendered terms: first to deny women full membership of historically male professions and groups, and now to prevent themselves, however ineffectually, from being associated with traditionally feminine concepts.
Apparently at my niece’s school the girls have started chanting “underwear” during class anytime they see a boy’s boxers from his pants being too low to protest against the teachers dress coding them for bra straps.
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