That previous post was not vagueing in the direction of anyone who would be reading it, BTW. Not my style.
Day: November 12, 2017
i wonder if anyone notices that i only wear like three pairs of pants
I evidently still can’t talk about it much, and am not sure if I even should. But, my own recent unplanned mental health break was also prompted by getting triggered all to hell. In that case, by something someone I trusted about as far as I’m likely to said to me, when I was already close to the edge.
(And they had reason to know that–also that I do have a nasty combo of PTSD and OCD running in certain directions. With a history of that getting weaponized, for pretty much exponential triggering value there.)
No idea if it was at intentionally hurtful at all, and I’m not sure it matters that much in the end. Some different looking results from what someone else has been going through, but it wasn’t good.
And I’m not sure if it was a great idea to come back yet (if at all), with the way this site can be. Really feeling that right now.
Not sure how to wrap this up. Other than that I am very sorry anyone has been needing to deal with that kind of situation. As much as it seems to happen.
Trigger warning: Suicidal ideation, abuse and autistic self injurious behaviors are mentioned with permission from the injured party.
@butterflyinthewell is going through a breakdown that began on Nov 6 2017. Other than update the look of her blog and tweak it she has not been using Tumblr. She has not been hospitalized although it came very close to that.
I have been speaking to her via email to ensure she is safe. On Nov 7, she admitted to having several violent self injurious episodes in one day that left deep contusions on her legs.
Another episode happened late at night on Nov 8 with the same results and a worsening of the injuries already present. She still finds walking and changing position very painful.
Her situation was very close to life threatening early on Nov 9. She expressed an extreme fear of going to Hell and disappointing God for having such dreadful thoughts in the first place. I talked to her until almost four in the morning until her ideation had passed, and I talked her into showing me what led to her breakdown.
She was very adamant that she doesn’t want the other party blamed or attacked and she does not wish blame or hatred on the other person either.
In the most limited description I can give you, she had an altercation with her emotional abuser, and a conversation she had in messenger immediately afterward unintentionally reinforced what her abuser had just said. Someone took issue with how she used the word traitor, and called her immature when she clarified her opinion and expressed her personal offense to the other person being dismissive of her offline activism.
Cyndi is developmentally delayed as well as autistic. She said I can say that. I think people can deduce why being called immature is especially hurtful to her.
Immature has been used to bully and abuse her for her entire life. It is used as a shut down and dismissal insult to silence her. The word used on her in a serious manner is insulting her entirety because it is an aspect of her that she can’t change no matter how she adjusts her words or tone to suit an audience. It hurts her like the dreaded R word.
Seeing that thrown at her so carelessly was soul crushing. She crashed. She describes it as a meltdown that has been going on nonstop since she read the words on her screen on Nov 6.
I already messaged the other person myself to inform them of what happened, and I ask that you not harass or mob them if they come forward in response to this. I wish the other person no ill will. Their part in this situation was the unwitting pebble leading to an avalanche. Unfortunately, damage is still damage whether it is intentional or not.
I asked Cyndi if she wanted me to say anything in the #actuallyautistic tags she uses in case anyone is worried, so that is why I am here. I am autistic myself, so I promise I am not invading.
She has not given me a timeframe for when she will return. She overhauled the look of her blog after I suggested she do something to help herself feel accomplished. I think it saved her life.
She asked me not to post until she was certain she wasn’t a danger to herself anymore, as she didn’t want to cause anyone any unnecessary worry. This post is a sign that she is finally safe despite still being in an extreme state of emotion and fatigue. Her exact words: “I have to lay down after doing anything that isn’t part of my daily routines.”
This situation should serve as a reminder to always consider what is happening to the person behind the screen.
Edit because I already got one hateful anon:
“She is still posting every day, stfu.” – Anon
Her queue is running once a day and posts from a roleplay character side blog are running on a schedule.
People honestly are cruel. She fixed her blog to post nice things while she is away, and all people want to do is try to discredit her when she is not present to defend herself. Disgusting.
@shadowkat678 @girlprime @gothicbot @medinajayecabaret @a-modern-major-general @konstargirl-blog1 @supericelight @clatterbane @failure-to-adult
It looks like Tumblr is more about popularity than topic relevance. How frustrating. I am tagging people that I see fairly consistently in the notes of Cyndi’s posts because I want to make sure my post is read.
I wish to add that she is taking this break because she is afraid to scare people or incite aggression with her lack of a word filter. She is terrified to continue the cycle of abuse from her abuser and believes near total isolation is the only way to protect other people. I tried to encourage her to come back. She said the mere sight of this website incites rage attacks, and she thinks she is protecting everyone else by not coming on.
Again, I want to stress that the immediate danger appears to be over.
support nonverbal autistic people 💞
support hyperverbal autistic people 💞
support autistic people who can talk “"normally”“ 💞
support autistic people who can technically speak but have a lot of trouble with wording 💞
support selectively nonverbal autistic people 💞
support autistic people who are nonverbal sometimes 💞
support autistic people 💞💞
Support hyperverbal nonverbal autistic people.
Support “verbal” autistic people who have way more trouble with language than many “nonverbal” autistic people (who may excel at language but just be unable to use speech).
Support complex understandings of autistic and other neurodivergent people’s connections to language. Avoid oversimplifying. Avoid assuming that if something’s counterintuitive or you’ve never seen it before or don’t understand, then it can’t be real.
i’m just a bitch with bad posture and an irregular sleeping schedule
Why Sign-Language Gloves Don’t Help Deaf People
The problems with all of those sign language translation gloves that keep getting media hype. Excerpt:
[A]ll the sign-language translation gloves invented so far misconstrue the nature of ASL (and other sign languages) by focusing on what the hands do. Key parts of the grammar of ASL include “raised or lowered eyebrows, a shift in the orientation of the signer’s torso, or a movement of the mouth,” reads the letter. “Even perfectly functioning gloves would not have access to facial expressions.” ASL consists of thousands of signs presented in sophisticated ways that have, so far, confounded reliable machine recognition. One challenge for machines is the complexity of ASL and other sign languages. Signs don’t appear like clearly delineated beads on a string; they bleed into one another in a process that linguists call “coarticulation” (where, for instance, a hand shape in one sign anticipates the shape or location of the following sign; this happens in words in spoken languages, too, where sounds can take on characteristics of adjacent ones). Another problem is the lack of large data sets of people signing that can be used to train machine-learning algorithms.
And while signers do use the American Manual Alphabet, it plays a narrow role within ASL. Signers use it “to maintain a contrast of two types of vocabulary—the everyday, familiar, and intimate vocabulary of signs, and the distant, foreign, and scientific vocabulary of words of English origin,” wrote Carol Padden and Darline Clark Gunsauls, who heads Deaf studies at Ohlone College, in a paper on the subject.
[…]
Also, though the gloves are often presented as devices to improve accessibility for the Deaf, it’s the signers, not the hearing people, who must wear the gloves, carry the computers, or modify their rate of signing. “This is a manifestation of audist beliefs,” the UW letter states, “the idea that the Deaf person must expend the effort to accommodate to the standards of communication of the hearing person.”
That sentiment is widely echoed. “ASL gloves are mainly created/designed to serve hearing people,” said Rachel Kolb, a Rhodes Scholar and Ph.D. student at Emory University who has been deaf from birth. “The concept of the gloves is to render ASL intelligible to hearing people who don’t know how to sign, but this misses and utterly overlooks so many of the communication difficulties and frustrations that Deaf people can already face.”
[…]
That’s not to say that Deaf people don’t have futuristic fantasies that involve technology. For example, Kolb says a dominant fantasy among her friends is for glasses that would auto-caption everything that hearing people say. Several teams of researchers are working on algorithms to make signing videos on YouTube searchable. Even more thorough, higher-quality captioning and better interpreting services would improve the lives of many.
I dreamt that I was invited to this zoo to get a behind-the-scenes peek at the newest baby animal they had acquired. When I arrived, however, it wasn’t a baby animal at all, but a human girl around seven years old.
“What the hell is this?” I demanded. “Is this a joke?”
“Just wait,” said my companion.The “girl” turned out to be a hyperrealistic robot. She moved, sounded, and spoke just like a real person, but they hadn’t been able to program a complex emotional range into her. She was sullen, sarcastic, and exceptionally rude. Her makers were frustrated that she didn’t seem to be developing correctly and their attempts at reprogramming her had failed or resulted in unexpected glitches. She greeted me by yanking on my hair until I yelped in pain.
“Why am I here?” I asked. I wasn’t a programmer, computer engineer, or child psychologist – I was a fish and wildlife officer.
“Well, you’re good with kids, and we just thought she might connect better with someone like herself. Someone who’s coping better.” When he saw my confusion, he leaned over and whispered a word into my ear, and I suddenly remembered that I was also a robot.
I spent several weeks with the girl, just hanging out and talking about being both a person and a robot, and how they were not mutually exclusive. She was fully aware that she was a machine and didn’t see any reason why she should pretend otherwise and perform acceptable human behaviors. She saw me as a sellout and a disgrace and enjoyed pinching me just to see me squirm in artificial pain. Whenever I’d express something about valuing my emotions because happiness and love are positive experiences worth developing, she’d just laugh derisively and insult me.
With no change in her development after several months, her makers started experimenting with me. They’d disable me, remove parts, and deactivate me to see how I worked, snip wires and reconnect them, purposefully scare or upset me to explore my emotional complexity, and threaten to wipe my memories.
The fact that I was a robot kept slipping in and out of my awareness, so much of the time, I thought I was actually dying.
And then the girl decided to rescue me by straight-up murdering everyone in the room. She took my hand, led me outside, and informed me that we were now robo-fugitives who must survive in the wild. I walked hand-in-hand into the woods with my angry robot daughter.
On an “I am autistic” level, I identify deeply with both you and your angry robot daughter.
If this were a book or movie, I think you could absolutely say that it was a heavyhanded metaphor for neurodivergence.
Since it’s a dream, though, I can’t claim any literary devices or deeper meaning beyond “I looked at a painting of a dying android immediately before I went to sleep”.
you drempt this? like in one night?
yeah but I also dreamt that Tumblr User @sexhaver‘s legal name was Sex Haver the same night so it’s really hit-or-miss in this here subconscious
this husky is mad because he wants to take a bath but isn’t allowed to
let my poor baby take his bath
If y’all really knew. If y’all really knew what utter drama queens huskies are this wouldn’t surprise you at all.
This is my life.
Literally my husky is the same way. He’s only a few months and he’ll cry to go back outside after being in the house two seconds.
I once ran out of my house in my pajamas at 2 in the fucking morning because I heard a dog screaming like it had been hit by a car. As I’m pelting towards the road barefoot I see an open garage with two people standing there and a husky in the back of a truck. I slowed down and asked them if that noise had been their dog.
Heavily embarrassed they admitted that it was. The reason for the godawful tortured sound the dog had made?
“We took his running harness off.”
And that was the moment I vowed to never own a husky.
I frequently pet sit for a friend’s husky, who is completely normal and unremarkable for her kind with one crucial exception.
She is dumb as soup.
(You didn’t hear that from me: her owner thinks she’s a genius, bless him.)
Anyway, my dog Tribble thinks Arya the husky is one of her very own adopted babies, so she stays with us fairly often. Reasons I have heard this dog dissolve into a screaming, wailing meltdown include:
- I followed my buddy up a mildly steep hill and now she’s gone and I can’t figure out how to get down
- That one cat won’t be friends with me even though all the others will
- I hopped up on the sofa and the hardwood floor next to it is much more confusing than the laminate I have lived on since I was two months old and I don’t know how to get down
- I’m mildly bored and my buddy yelled at me when I tried to bite her neck for the zillionth time
- I want to play with that potted plant but you said I couldn’t
- I’m overcome with joy because you took me on a walk to the hardware store
- I want that biscuit but I forgot what sit means and now I’m frustrated
- I haven’t seen you in two weeks and I forgot you weren’t dead and I’m overjoyed
- You are not petting me enough
- You are not petting me at all
- I got lost four times in five minutes on the off leash trail and now you won’t let me off again for a while
- There’s a brush and I need it
- You made eye contact with me and didn’t immediately drop everything to pet me
She’s a very good dog, and she’s a sweet dog who is never offended by anything, but the screaming has singlehandedly ensued I will never, ever, ever own a husky. I like having functioning ears too much.
To be fair, you and your friend may both be right: huskies, like border-collies, are just intelligent enough to develop Exciting Cognitive Neuroses, much like a toddler, which frankly dumber dogs will skip because they don’t actually have quite enough extra cognitive space to think up ways to be utterly fucking ridiculous.
I kind of suspect this is going on here in part because of the dog being so very specifically upset that the one cat won’t be friends, despite all the other cats being friends, and also the overcome-with-joy bits: you’ll notice they’re very similar to what makes toddlers randomly cry for no reason.
Where a bulldog doesn’t care about the difference between laminate and hardwood, a husky is just smart enough to get VERY CONCERNED ABOUT HOW THESE ARE SUBTLY DIFFERENT AND POSSIBLY IT MEANS THAT GETTING DOWN WILL BE A TOTALLY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE AAAAAUGH! and get hysterically anxious about it.
“Smarter”, in animals as in humans, does not actually always mean “more sensible.” XD
this is jack and he’s got a mullet
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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