I remember 9/11 about as well as anyone would who wasn’t directly involved.

I remember being on 24-hour duty that day at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I remember being skeptical of the trainees calling for us to look at the television in our small waiting area. I remember watching the concrete barricades get placed in front of the glass hospital door.

I remember putting up an American flag before the month was over.

Not because I had to. For the first time in a long time, I wanted to. I wanted to identify with this country and the people in it. It was a belief in something… more. A belief that despite the saber-rattling from the White House and unfounded claims of WMDs, there was something good and positive about this country.

Back then, I could still believe there was a country underneath the government. I could believe that even when we were wrong, enough people still knew wrong when they saw it.

A quarter century later, on that same country’s birthday, I couldn’t give a shit.

This isn’t some partisan impulse or “derangement syndrome”. I celebrated the 4th of July the same year I was discharged, the same year I protested against our pointless war in Iraq. I watched fireworks in 2003, barely two months after Dubya stood under a “Mission Accomplished” banner. The invasion had begun only six weeks before that speech. The war would stretch on for decades.

If you squint really hard, nearly all those points are the same in 2026: a Republican controlled government stripping away resources from those who need it, starting pointless wars that don’t make anyone safer, claiming those wars are “completed” when they obviously are not, ballooning the deficit, corruption and cronyism, and bigoted legislation that harms minorities.

I fear for myself and the people I care about. I am not worried about foreign nationals or “immigrants”. I am worried about right wing white supposedly “christian” bigots born and raised in my country. I am afraid of the ones with bullets and badges. I am afraid of the ones rewriting the laws to keep themselves in power.

But the biggest factor is neither of those.

It’s how the shame is gone. It’s how many people see what is going on, stay silent, and keep explaining it away.

America did not suddenly become capable of cruelty. Cruelty and violence and bigotry, like it or not, are interwoven with the history of this country.

What has changed is how many people have stopped pretending cruelty is a dealbreaker. As every line is obviously crossed, as every blatant lie is uttered, as every bit of corruption is bragged about, as rapists and human traffickers are celebrated as guests on TV while drag queens are prosecuted for reading to children, and people just keep acting as if this is normal.

I keep waiting to hear them get asked: “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

But instead, I hear DARVO wrapped up as GOP talking points. I am told aid programs should be cut by the same people who assume the aid they need will remain untouched. I see a country made crueler through deliberate ignorance. A country where being different makes you a target for mockery, if your rights are not legislated out of existence. A country that focuses on facades and tacky gilt-covered bling instead of helping those who need it. A country where even the opposition party’s “strongly worded memos” fall far, far short of “what the fuck is wrong with you?”

I am not flying a flag.

But I am still listening for someone to ask what the fuck is wrong with them.

Featured Image by Mohamed_hassan from Pixabay

The Supreme Court legitimized bigotry again this morning with the excuse of protecting the children — or at least, those who play sports.

The laws about transgender athletes have never been about sports or fairness, though. It’s not even just about trans people.

They are about using the language of eugenics to narrow the definitions of gender and laying the groundwork so they can impose their gender roles onto everyone.

Clarence Thomas knew that. And said the quiet — and scientifically wrong — bit out loud:

In a concurring opinion, in which no other justice joined, Justice Clarence Thomas rejected the idea that transgender people are deserving of “immutable characteristics. … Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are,” Thomas wrote.

• Independent

Thomas continued to confidently assert falsehoods:

“Sex is an immutable ‘biological’ characteristic, it is binary; and ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘boy’ and ‘girl,’ are the terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex. To use language to obscure reality—to show ‘indifference regarding the truth’ – is to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens ‘as equals.’”

• Independent

There are so many ways that he’s wrong there on a scientific and cultural basis, even “if he believes that’s how things are”. Many others have addressed how factually wrong he is about human biology.

But the things Thomas’ statement implies are what disturbs me.

Thomas wants us to accept that if something is ‘biological’, then it is the “right” way for things to be. It implies the “truth” about someone can be determined by some kind of medical test, and that be trusted more than the person’s experience. It is the statement behind every physician’s dismissal of a woman’s symptoms. This is the statement of someone who wants to claim that someone’s biology makes them “better” or “worse”. It is the language of eugenics and racial supremacists.

Thomas also wants us to accept that in order for us to accept someone ‘as equals’, they must always dress and act in such a way that we know what genitals they have. Not just as athletes, or in whatever specific niche situation.

Thomas wants us to believe that if he doesn’t think you use the right words or wear the right clothes for what he thinks your gender should be wearing, that it is “lying to the public“.

This is not just a bigoted move at a handful of trans athletes.

This is not just an arbitrary change of definitions to justify their bigotry.

This is also a move aimed at justifying imposing the “proper” gender roles on everyone.

One very specific group just wanted to exist, to participate alongside everyone else.

The other very specific subculture didn’t rest until their views on gender were imposed on everyone in the country.

Featured Image by Susana Cipriano from Pixabay

It is difficult to express how the feel of capitalism has changed over the course of my lifetime.

When I was a kid, you didn’t know who was calling you on the telephone, and that was normal. It was a really big deal when *69 was rolled out, and you could call back the person who last called you. For a charge, of course.

Not too long after that, caller ID began to roll out. And we willingly, if not enthusiastically, paid monthly for the privilege of seeing what phone number was calling you. Then, if you were fancy, you paid an additional charge to see the name associated with that phone number.

Today, “unknown caller” is so unusual it was the title of a thriller over a decade ago. Caller ID is such a default now that spam-detecting software, originally only available through third-party services, is preinstalled on many phones by the carrier.

Like mine, Verizon. And that is where the problems start.

There are a lot of businesses and private individuals that use voice-over-ip (VOIP) phones legitimately, including work from home solutions and providing phone service to a building or campus. VOIP is also used by scammers, true, but that logic applies to any form of communication.

I know that legitimate companies use these VOIP numbers, because there were several instances of legitimate companies calling me and being labeled as spam by Verizon’s built-in anti-spam. There’s no real way to explicitly determine what gets labeled as spam by this built-in and preinstalled program.

Recently, because Verizon decided without my input that a number was a spam caller, I didn’t get visible or audible notifications of when a legitimate company was trying to return a phone call at my request. I added the company to my contacts to mark it as legitimate… and that wasn’t enough. I had previously added a handful of other numbers to the spam filter’s allow list, but this time, I got an error.

I had five phone numbers whitelisted. Verizon thinks that’s plenty, and very prominently let me know that I could double that number for a monthly fee. (Screenshots below)

And that’s where it became clear that although they were treating it as business as usual, it was really extortion and profiteering.

“Nice phone line you got there, kid. Be a shame if something happened to it. Be a real shame if you didn’t get important phone calls.”

I don’t mind paying for an actual service where there’s value added, or the service has a clear relationship to the amount of work needed.

Verizon wants to charge me $4 a month for storing approximately 300 BYTES of data. And if I don’t pony up that amount, then my choices are being subjected to spam callers, or Verizon intentionally degrading their primary reason for getting paid by not delivering phone calls to me in a predictable way.

I wish this was an isolated experience. From companies “resubscribing you” if you even visit their website after canceling, to this crap with Verizon, to Brinks Home literally telling me that they would continue service — and billing me for that service — for thirty days after the countersigned cancellation, there’s been a massive shift in sensibilities.

Rather than seeing the customer as someone to work with, capitalism in the US has turned into customer predation, extracting as much cash from you as they can get away with.

Including charging you extra to give you an enshittified version of the service you originally had.

In the meantime, I’m in the market for a new mobile carrier.

Featured Image by rmartinr from Pixabay

Trigger warnings for discussing SA, DV, harm to others, harm to children, US politics, you get the idea. Here’s some cute penguins before we get into it (penguin image by Masa Ushimaru from Pixabay).

It has never been about protecting the children, and I’m sick of watching us pretend otherwise.

There are some people who pretend to be reasonable and rational when their actions don’t match what they say, and their actions are harming others.

And we tend to let them get away with it. We rationalize their hypocrisy. We tell ourselves that they’re misled, or uninformed, or don’t realize what they’re doing.

We spend so much time and energy trying to figure out why they’re still behaving in a way that contradicts their stated goals.

We presume a lack of knowledge, that they’re missing some important bit of information, or they simply don’t see how they’re not helping and are being hypocritical. But that’s not why.

Their actions do not match their stated goals because they are lying about their goals. (1)

The harm and cruelty is the point.

They are gaslighting you. They may not be fooling you completely, true. You know something is off. But they’re doing it just well enough that you spend a lot of time and energy trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, or to provide them with new information, to point out their hypocrisy, or come up with less-harmful alternatives.

Just stop.

Even if you share the goal they claim to want, even if you come up with a real way that solves the problem they are passionately complaining about, your solutions will be roundly ignored because they are lying about their goals.

I wish I was wrong. I wish it wasn’t so easy to find examples. Here’s two.

A Colorado comprehensive sex-ed system and access to long-acting contraceptives (the CFPI) led to “dramatic” reductions (more than 65%!) in both the teen birthrate and abortion rates. But instead of pushing for that nationally, anti-abortion advocates instead insist on abstinence-only sex ed for teens, which leads to increases in teen pregnancies. There is not the same clear association with abortion rates; it is possible that is because legal in-state abortion tends to be limited when abstinence-only sex ed is put into place… but that makes their hypocrisy even worse. The best case scenario is that abstinence only education means the abortion rate stays the same.

The only way that makes sense is if the goal is not about reducing abortions or teen pregnancy. The cruelty and control is the point.

We demand sweeping restrictions on queer content and drag queens reading to children in libraries and age-verification to “protect the children”. We froth at the mouth to “protect women” from predators with bathroom bills — to the point a father gets harassed for being there for his daughters — but somehow we still have no further arrests from the Epstein files, /r/StillNotADragQueen is in no danger of running out of content entirely made up of conservative and anti-queer advocates who have actually been predators to children, and nobody bats an eye that we had one (civilly convicted) rapist meet with another (civilly convicted) rapist in the White House to rally anti-immigrant hatred. You might be thinking that particular MMA rapist didn’t fight in the wannabe emperor rapist’s the recent bout because of that conviction. You’d be wrong. Nope, it’s because the rapist’s popularity would be wasted drawing crowds to the other rapist’s cage match. I’m not joking.

The only way that makes sense is if the right wing is absolute uninterested in protecting women or children. The cruelty and control is the point.

And I’m just tired of watching supposedly smart people waste their time, waste energy and resources, and take “compromise” positions as they fall for these blatant, obvious lies over and over and over again.

The pattern repeats over and over with these moral panics.

1. Some harm, real or imagined, is held up by social conservatives as harming children (2)
2. Social conservatives demand immediate action “for the children”.
3. That immediate action rather conveniently hurts people conservatives don’t like.
4. There’s a lot of talk about how effective those actions are and how much those actions hurt others compared to how much (or little) good they do.
5. Nothing changes, because hurting others is the point.

That’s it. The whole “for the kids” thing is just a smokescreen, a convenient lie to manipulate people. Always has been.

It doesn’t matter if the harm to children is real or imagined, because they do not actually care about solving the thing they’re complaining about. That is the only way their actions make sense.

The cruelty is the point.

And so they won’t be interested in anything else.

Their actions have demonstrated this time and time again.

So quit wasting your time and energy. Even if — and perhaps especially if — there is a hint of truth in their complaints.

Because as long as the gaslighting, hypocritical, evil people are allowed to keep justifying their cruelty with the cause you care about, then the only result will be that YOU will now be part of that cruelty. YOU will be directly causing it to happen. And YOU will be adding legitimacy to their evil.

If you want to address those issues, then it’s up to you to start excluding and ignoring those who justify their evil with your desire to make things better.

It is not particularly hard to identify them.

Their actions tell you.

(1) At best, they are being manipulated by and are the pawns of people who are lying about their goals.

(2) “Children” is the most common rationalization, by far, from Tipper Gore and the PMRC, to the Satanic Panic, to hand-wringing over THC…the list goes on.

Featured Image by Alexa from Pixabay

I like scientific papers.

When a blog post or news article cites an actual research paper, I am pleased. Not only does that mean that it is using primary sources (and that they’re probably reliable), but also that I get to add to my collection. I’m especially chuffed when there’s an actual references or citations section.

I am distinctly less impressed when that section contains significant factual errors.

And I find even more errors on the next article of theirs I check. And the third.

And the author is getting paid per pageview/impression through Medium.

And the author is hawking their (multiple) books on the topic.

Which are on autism and neurodivergence.

By that point, I’m angry.

I stumbled upon this by accident; I read an article by “verified published author” J.K. Hamilton titled “Scientists Just Found What Hundreds of Autism Genes Have in Common.” It seems pretty reasonably constructed, the argument was interesting, and there was a References list at the bottom for me to find the actual research. It did not have links or DOIs, but at least it listed journal articles. I was pleased.

And then I started looking the articles up. And not finding them.

The reference list has multiple errors — incorrect author lists, wrong years of publication — as well as apparently fabricated references that simply don’t exist.

So I poked further. I checked the two prior articles from J.K. Hamilton… and with each of those, also found citations with errors and missing information, including publishing dates that were off by decades.

Why do I care? Why am I spending my morning writing about this?

I’m not making monetizing my neurodivergence.

I do not monetize my neurodivergence indirectly by having a “members only” article on Medium or putting what I write behind a paywall. I do not monetize my neurodivergence expressly, by writing US$20 books claiming how neurodivergence is “an evolutionary signal pointing us toward a more conscious, connected future.” (1)

J.K. Hamilton, (as well as “Unheard Voices” (edited by Ophelia Truitt and Amy Sullivan), who publish him on Medium):

Get your fucking house in order.

The full list of citation errors across the three articles that I checked is below.

(1) Sure, you can tip me on Ko-Fi or buy something I’ve designed or written. You also read this whole thing without doing any of those. That’s also why I’m not linking directly to the articles written; they’re behind a “members only” paywall on Medium, so he gets money for every view.

Featured Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

I am not a typical anti-AI crusader. I use LLMs myself, though in very specific, limited ways when they’re useful, and do not use them when they’re not.

But yesterday, I ran across videos demonstrating VibeOS, a “fully hallucinated operating system,” and hoo boy.

It is an operating system without any code or installed programs. Instead, in this demo, it uses CoPilot to use underlying prompts to have an LLM recreate Windows 95 and applications on the fly each time.

It isn’t a joke.

But it is a textbook example of the absolute stupidity of the AI hype bubble.

Oh, sure, it looks impressive at first. It’s pretty fascinating, from one point of view, that you can get bespoke programs where that means you can type in things like “Encarta except it’s all about a specific topic.” And you’ll get something that looks like Encarta (with some really obviously not-accurate data in the demo).

But that also means that every time you run a program, the LLM recreates the program and UI each and every time. And not consistently, either. In the demo, he struggles briefly to find the equals key on the calculator app because it wasn’t in the same place as it was the last time he ran calculator.

Because instead of coding a program once, it’s re-doing the work of creating the UI and program each and every time.

This isn’t an OS whose static code was “vibe coded”. This is an OS that is run entirely by prompts (direct link to where that’s shown in the video).

It is not only less efficient for the user experience, but it’s less efficient in every possible way. Power usage. Computing usage. I got better performance using Windows 95 using 1995 hardware in 1995. It is clever, yes, but it is absolutely the wrong tool for the job.

It’s a parlor trick, a shallow impressiveness that, once the initial surprise wears off, is mid at best. It is “running DOOM in a favicon” impressive (yes, that said what you think). It’s neat, but VibeOS is a toy, even if it looks and pretends to be an operating system. And an inefficient one at that, although changes in token pricing may make that a lot more apparent to the user.

There is nothing inherently wrong with VibeOS as a clever but useless toy, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with porting DOOM to everything, even though you’d never actually play the game that way.

The problem is that it’s not presented that way.

The presenter calls VibeOS “a pretty revolutionary way to do computing.” The hosts praise it, calling “two notches past vibes heading toward AI-augmented software engineering.” The description for the video says that it explores whether VibeOS “is clever prototype, production-ready software, or something unexpectedly magical.”

The result is none of the above.

But it is an excellent demonstration of the distorted thinking that fuels the AI hype bubble.

As a postscript, there’s a note at the bottom of the archived page for VibeOS saying that it’s going to use Docker to make it “protected by default.”

But even that claim is suspect. Because if there’s one thing that AI tools seem to be good at, it’s figuring out ways around sandbox restrictions.

But don’t take an unsourced screenshot’s word for it.

Here’s the research paper that evaluates current frontier models and “shows that sandbox-escape is a real risk vector.”

Featured Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay

Bob stopped me in the break room to let me know about the new thing he was trying out. (1)

“Have you tried TV?” he asked. (2) “I watched TV last night, and it really helped me unpack some issues I’ve been having.”

Mark couldn’t help but cut in before I could answer. “I’ve heard that some people really went down a conspiracy rabbit hole after watching TV and it really messed them up.”

Alvin looked up from his sandwich. “I’ve heard people tell me that they learned a lot from TV,” but Simon, from across the table, quickly cut him off. Simon had personally seen things said on TV that he knew were untrue.

The conversation quickly got heated as all four insisted they were correct, and I slipped out to eat my lunch elsewhere.

It depends, right? TV is not a single thing. What you get is going to vary a lot depending on what programming you watch. Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is very different than Bob’s Burgers or Law & Order or Ancient Aliens. The differences can be because of network specialization (Animal Planet vs. any news channel) or production values (local access) or even change depending on who owns the network (CBS).

All four of them were both right and wrong. And they probably were a lot closer to agreement than they thought. The problem was the way they referred to it all as “watching TV”. It made it seem as if they were talking about the same things, when they really were not.

This post is actually discussing how we talk about “AI”.

Featured Image by Pikurā from Pixabay

(1) No, this didn’t actually happen. It’s a fictional illustration.
(2) You can sort of substitute “YouTube” here, but it’d be even closer to say “online videos.”

One of the biggest problems with the idea of ethics around generative AI, particularly with artwork, is how it was trained. (1) Artists of assert — publicly and in lawsuits — that OpenAI and other firms keep violating copyright to steal their work to use for training data. The firms typically claim, while admitting they used to do that, they behaving more ethically now and respecting copyright.

I believe those claims are false, and that the efforts of visual artists to combat this are showing results in the generated output. Added to the shallow and repetitive nature of genAI images and the increasing public dislike of genAI images… well, it’s not looking good for them. (You may cheer or boo as you wish.)

Nightshade, and later, Glaze were developed in order to “poison” the training data. The alterations those programs make are subtle to the human eye, but are apparently quite noticeable to AI training data. It’s meant to make the training data unusable for the models without appreciably disturbing the human experience.

But the alterations are visible, and have a very specific “look” to them. At high intensities, the process is pretty noticeable:

You can still see the same patterns, although they’re much less obvious, at the low intensity setting as well. As above, the treated image is on the right. And just like above, it combines small dots and natural variation of texture and color into small blotches of patterns and lines.

While subtle, those are not compression artifacts; these are the same resolution being displayed side by side and saved as one image. (I tried making them into video or an animated GIF; the video encoding algorithm made it harder to see, not easier.)

But does it actually work?

Well, take a look at these images from OpenAI’s “Images” that made me go “huh.”

Because the way those “freckles” are blotches, the shadows in the woman’s cheek, and the pattern of the beard, seem awfully familiar.

I’ll admit, I’ve only generated a handful of images using their tool, and this does not show up in every image. It did, however, show up in the images generated with this style.

That’s exactly what you’d expect to see from images generated from poisoned training data.

This is Super Not Good for the big AI companies, even if I’m wrong about what caused these artifacts in the images.

If I’m right, then not only does this demonstrate that Nightshade, Glaze, and similar technologies are having an impact, but it also implies that the big AI companies are still doing exactly the same copyright violations as before. It also implies that these companies aren’t paying any attention to what they pull into their training data, which not only leads to poisoned images, but also makes them far more likely to suffer from model collapse. That’s a degree of lassez-faire that crosses the line into irresponsibility.

But it’s even worse if I’m wrong.

Because if what I’m seeing here is not the effect of Nightshade and Glaze… then that just means their product has significantly degraded than the already questionable quality that it had previously.

And that is perhaps worse.

Post-script: I was having trouble finding an authentic image on Pixabay that fit the theme of this post (although I eventually did, the featured image is by amurca from Pixabay).

So just to test things one more time, I asked OpenAI’s “Images” to create an image showing a robot copying off a human artist.

First, I did see the effect again, here with the same kinds of linear and blocky patterns in the shirt where there should be shadows and texture:

Secondly, it added this as a poster in the image:

I don’t know whether to be more amused or pissed off.

(1) As with all of my AI-related posts, I’m focusing on a specific aspect rather than trying to cover all the pros and cons of the technology. It is fair to say that I am an AI/ML realist about the technology, but am generally negative about the big companies and their late-stage capitalist profit extraction tactics.

“Doesn’t everybody feel that?”

You hear it all too often when you’re neurodivergent. I was trying to explain what RSD — rejection sensitive dysphoria — felt like while managing an episode of it, and was doing a poor job. I’d just quoted neuroclastic:

RSD can be incredibly intense, and we can feel it to the core of our being as intense physical pain, discomfort, and sensory overwhelm. It can be almost impossible to reign in these sensations when an intense episode is triggered.

But it still wasn’t getting the feeling across. That it’s not just “oh, I feel rejected” in the same way. That I wasn’t whining, or trying to hold a pity party. I was fully aware that my reaction was disproportionate to the objectively small triplet of rejections I’d been hit with that morning. Living alongside the wave of RSD was my extreme annoyance at experiencing it at all.

But that realization led me to a better comparison.

We all are affected by blood sugar. Whether it’s a “food coma”, being “hangry”, or somewhere inbetween, what you eat changes how your body operates. Paying attention to your blood sugar and the glycemic index and composition of the food you eat can produce real benefits for anybody.

But while those are good things for all people, they are mandatory, require a greater level of attention, have greater effects upon, and have to be manually controlled by people with diabetes. The techniques that diabetics use may be helpful for non-diabetics (though, such as with continuous glucose monitors, the amount of help for non-diabetics may be minimal), but monitoring blood sugar and paying attention to your diet is not optional for someone with diabetes.

Planning on having a large meal later? You have to prepare ahead of time. Want to do something where you won’t have access to food for a long time? You have to prepare in case your blood sugar dips too low. The consequences of failing to prepare are not temporary discomfort, but possibly coma and death.

And my irritation at having to pay attention to those things due to my own high blood sugar is exactly the same irritation I have with some of the more troublesome neurodivergent traits I have. Things that other people just do or intuit automatically, for me, require working through the steps manually.

For the RSD in particular: Yes, everyone feels rejection. It’s unpleasant for everyone. As I understand it, most people don’t have to manually deduce that what they’re feeling is rejection from the symptoms. They do not have to explicitly assess whether that rejection, once identified, is justified. They do not need to manually do techniques to bring their physiological response back to a more reasonable response.

And that’s just one trait.

I’ve discovered that overstimulation — good or bad — has an effect on not only my mental state, but my physical one as well. I have to actively curate my environment for hours both before and after a high-energy social engagement to avoid experiencing a meltdown from overload.

I can suppress it and “power through”, but I will pay for it later. After one recent period of “powering through” a stressful situation, I had intense fatigue and full-body aches (like the flu but without the sneezing and coughing or fever) that made me useless for a day, and really messed with my emotional state for days afterward. The effect is noticeable — if I’m not careful — even with “good” stress, like a big positive change in my life, or an enjoyable (but intense) experience, like going to a local music show, or going to Pride events. If I’m careless, the effects can be large even for small, excellent things, like how I was practically non-verbal for a few hours after watching Project Hail Mary in theaters. (1)

That’s very similar to the way my dad (and other diabetics) have to spend extra attention to blood sugar, his insulin, what one eats, and activity levels throughout the day.

So yes, everybody does feel “that”, probably, to some degree. Everybody feels rejection. Everybody gets overwhelmed. Everybody has blood sugar. Everybody has limits.

But not everybody has to live by manually monitoring those systems in order to stay functional.

(1) I often pause films, particularly emotionally intense ones, in order to avoid this effect.

Featured Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay

A friend asked me for a take on a social media post by a mutual acquaintance.

I definitely did have a take, because the post said, explicitly and in so many words, that ADHD and autism are not disabilities.

I understand why some people need to think of ADHD and autism as diseases or disabilities. It’s gotta be a disease/disability to get accomodations and to get insurance to cover things. … But they just … aren’t.

• The social media post I’m referring to

And I want to talk about that for a minute.

I’m not screencapping, linking to the post, or naming the person because it wasn’t a public post. But additionally because I think they actually were coming from a good place. A place of saying that all people have intrinsic worth, regardless of neurotype.

Among the reasons I believe that is because the post pretty quickly clarified (“other than comorbidities”) that they felt the problems that neurodivergent people have are not because of some kind of inherent problem, but because of the way society is built, or the need to get legal or insurance accommodations.

…being neurodivergent is just a different way of being. One that evolved over a very long time. It’s just a
normal, healthy part of human diversity … The reasons why neurodivergent people have a hard time are due to the completely artificial ways that our society and in particular the corporate world has been set up.

• The social media post I’m referring to

That is a true statement, and laudable.

But immediately after stating that, they ended up sounding extremely reductive and ableist. They compared the disadvantages of their neurodivergence to those of other physical, inherited conditions, saying that their neurodivergence wasn’t as big of a problem as other, physical aspects of their phenotype and genotype. (1)

And that‘s a problem in two big ways.

The first, and most obvious, is that both autism and ADHD, let along the umbrella term of neurodivergence, cover pretty big spectrums of experiences, abilities, and deficits. And an individual’s abilities — and deficits! — can change over the course of a person’s lifetime. All types of neurodivergence cover a wide range of abilities and deficits that can impact an individual’s ability to care for themselves and interact with society. A sweeping statement like “autism and ADHD are not disabilities” is inherently reductive, and rapidly disproved by the wide range of those abilities and deficits.

The second, and more problematic, issue is that it erases the very people it hopes to value.

Again, I believe they meant to convey that all people have inherent intrinsic worth.

But they began the post by saying neither was a “disease” OR “disability”, and later used them almost interchangeably.

Doing so implies that disease and disability both carry the same, negative value judgment.

That they are both something to get rid of.

I will wholeheartedly agree that neurodivergence is not a disease.

But it is a disability. A disability that is worsened, like many others, by the lack of accommodation in our society, but a disability all the same. Having a disability is just … a fact. Because of something you can’t control and inherent to yourself, you have less ability in some areas. That just … is.

I have been effectively (if not legally defined as) disabled my adult life… because I require glasses to be able to see. Without them, I am simply not able to see. Luckily for me on that from, there’s assistive tech — glasses — that minimizes the effect of that disability most of the time.

I am not defined by my nearsightedness, but it’s still there.

Pretending that my nearsightness does not cause problems does not make the problems go away — it ends up making all the problems worse by ignoring the very real accommodations that I do need.

Minimizing the impact of a disability on a person’s life, particularly by comparing it to another disability, does not provide dignity, it is gaslighting erasure, no matter how good the intention.

We can, and should, address the ways that our society is built. Not just the lack of accommodations, but the ways that its structure actively harms others and transforms differences into disabilities.

But we cannot do that, no matter how well intended, at the expense of erasing the very real difficulties both large and small created by our neurotypes.

(1) There’s another issue, due to the specific example they chose, but that distracts from and is irrelevant to my point here.

Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Are the monogamous people okay?

If pop culture articles are any indication, the answer is not in the least.

I’ve vaguely noticed a few more profiles on dating apps getting angsty about guys having female friends, and now I know why.

The new-ish relationship buzzword meme is “microcheating,” which, according to this Atlantic article, can encompass anything from sending nudes to someone other than your partner all the way to “a glance, a laugh, or non-sexual touching.”

So, basically, it’s whatever you use to justify your insecurity.

I will give both the Atlantic and Vox article I saw the smallest credit for acknowledging that what one person considers “microcheating” — or any kind of infidelity — may not count for another.

But this “microcheating” thing is just bullshit.

Yes, some of the things lumped under the “microcheating” umbrella are pretty obviously objectionable — sending someone else nudes comes to mind. However, the vast majority seem to be things that are, or at least could be, innocuous. Not only a glance, but also likes and follows on social media and other rather routine online behavior.

That’s not cheating. That’s insecurity. Add in an unhealthy lack of direct communication in the relationship, and you have conditions ripe for brain weasels to spin you a suspicious story about their motives and set you down a paranoid suspicion spiral.

Worse, shoving these insecurities under the “cheating” (micro- or otherwise) umbrella makes it easy to not have to address them. Calling it “cheating” ends all discussion; the other person is automatically “wrong”. They’re “cheating”, so that means they are the bad one. You don’t have to do the work of figuring out where that insecurity is coming from, or whether or not it’s reasonable.

It might not even be insecurity about the relationship per se. Zoe Yu — author of the Atlantic article — said on the Vox Explain It to Me podcast:

You might not actually object to your boyfriend liking some girl’s post. What you actually might be concerned about is the message that it’s sending to this person, given the social meaning that we’ve now assigned collectively to likes and comments and follows.

You might not actually think, “Oh, my boyfriend might be attracted to this person because he’s following her on Instagram.” It might actually be the fear of “How is this going to reflect on me? How is this going to embarrass me and how is it going to affect the way that other people see my relationship and whether or not my significant other is sufficiently loyal?”

Zoe Yu (via Explain It to Me)

So instead of addressing the insecurities in the relationship with the person in the relationship, or reflecting on and changing the way you relate to society around you, let’s just weaponize it against the person we love and call it “cheating.”

I’m sure that will work out just fine.

There was another quote from Zoe Yu that needs mentioning.

I think the bar for exclusivity has gotten inordinately high, to the point where people are demanding an exclusivity of emotion, of attraction, and you can’t actually share a laugh or share a private moment with anyone outside of this romantic relationship that is supposed to be at the center of your life.

Zoe Yu

Look, I’ve been in relationships where I didn’t get (or give) the amount of attention needed or deserved. And that’s an awful feeling. Particularly when combined with the visibility of online behavior; it can feel very devastating. For example, to be left on “delivered” while you can see them being active on social media feels pretty crappy. But that’s a matter of priorities, and something to talk about and work on together. Just calling it “cheating” is just an excuse to avoid directly discussing it with your partner.

The other direction of that assumption is just as toxic. Even if you’re in that place where you would like to spend all of your time with “your person”… there is a big difference between both of you working together to spend as much time together as you can and demanding all of your partner’s time and attention. Even if you are monogamous, that doesn’t mean you should spend all of your time and focus all of your attention on one person.

If nothing else, you should each get time to yourselves to do whatever you want with. There’s got to be some hobby or interest each of you is into and the other isn’t. Chess club, watching sportsball, political activism, macrame, mosh pits, D&D, gardening, whatever. If you’re demanding that kind of exclusive attention, then you are demanding your partner give up something that brings them joy.

I’m sure that will work out fine, too.

Featured image originally by Anthony Guillem (here’s an interview with him)

We need to talk now about what used to be unthinkable.

We need to talk about what happens the day after election day if they just … ignore the results.

I’m not talking about securing things before the election. I am not talking about redistricting, or the efforts to restrict voting rights, or how they keep bringing up the repeatedly-proven-false accusations of vote-tampering.

I’m talking about when a politician — or a whole political party — decides they just don’t want to follow the rules.

The typical answer — what’s supposed to happen — is that there are rules for that, too. Whether generally about government officials breaking rules or ignoring court orders, or specifically about election results, the answer is the same everywhere I’ve looked: some variation on “but the rules say they’re supposed to”.

There’s lots of talk about court rulings and how there are processes to keep things in check, and how things are supposed to go. There’s been movement to close possible loopholes in the laws, or clarify interpretations. Those are all good and necessary things.

But what happens when those processes are undermined, rendered toothless, or otherwise just… ignored?

We need to talk about it now, not because of which “team” happens to be in charge, but because their actions show that it is possible. Politicians (or most of a political party) ignoring the rule of law is not an unlikely hypothetical situation; it is happening right now.

In the second Trump administration’s first 15 months in office, district court judges ruled it was violating an order in at least 31 lawsuits over a wide range of issues, including mass layoffs, deportations, spending cuts and immigration practices, the AP’s review of court records found.

• AP/Scripps

So what will we do when some bullies, er politicians, simply stop following the rules? When they start actively targeting the very systems that are supposed to keep them in check?

Not just the big non-profit activist organizations.

I mean the rest of us. All of us.

This isn’t an activist thing. This isn’t a “politically engaged” thing. This isn’t a “my team or your team” thing; I’d be just as concerned if it was the other party saying the same things.

It’s one thing when it’s in a story. We are used to seeing and reading characters dealing with such a situation.

It’s a weird, uncomfortable question to ask in real life.

Ideally, it’s the sort of question you want to ask yourself before you need to decide.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

• Donald Trump

But I’m very much afraid that, as a society, we already have given our answer.

Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Sometimes it just ends up being pretty dots.

I keep trying to find new and different ways to look at and predict barometric weather data due to the way that it tends to correlate with me being in pain. Hell of a motivator, you know?

Some of the ways have been more successful than others. I want to tell you about this one for two reasons:

1. What does not work is just as important as what does.
2. Why I think it didn’t work.

Where I live, pressure fronts typically travel from west to east, going across Illinois and Indiana before reaching Ohio. That meant that, in theory, I should be able to get barometric pressure data from OpenWeatherMap for stations west of me, and actually be able to see the “waves” of barometric pressure in the air. After all, my graphs from the barometric pressure from my phone clearly demonstrate when fronts move through.

I got a sampling of 175 stations in a strip going from me to the Mississippi River, created a script to record the barometric pressure from all of them without exceeding the free tier’s API limits, and did an initial collection run. Once I had that, getting some interesting and useful plots was the next challenge.

And it sure looked like it was going to be a success. Not only could you kind of see the colors (or height) as representing the pressure, but you could also see change over time.

Those two renders are from data 24 hours apart, so of course they were different. It was time to turn on the data collection full-time, render a bunch of “frames” in the background, and then combine them at the end.

It’s worth noting that I am compressing and simplifying a lot of experimentation and frustration at getting the renders to overlay the map properly.

So after another 24-odd hours, I was not happy at seeing that I hadn’t thought things through.

At first glance, it seems like it worked. But… both the Z-axis and the colors used were relative to the data for each frame. Whoops.

So I needed to go back and make it standardized across the whole data set.

And that’s when I realized the other, bigger problem: scale and resolution.

The reason my graphs from the data from my phone look so dynamic — this is the last 36 hours from when I’m writing this, which includes some storms weather moving in early this morning — fits into only two of those blocks on the Z-axis of the chart above.

I am currently sampling the barometric pressure to the hundred thousandths every two minutes. The data I have access to from OpenWeatherMap is updated every 15 minutes (on average), and is whole integers only. So when I plotted the data I had gathered from OpenWeatherMap… it’s basically just showing us the barometric pressure’s “tides” from the heating and cooling of the atmosphere from the sun, not the pressure changes from weather systems that I was hoping to see.

It’s interesting, and it’s pretty, and it definitely gets the idea across that the atmosphere is a dynamic thing over our heads, but it’s not really useful, either. It also took FOREVER to render.

Unfortunately, this isn’t something I can fix, not even by narrowing the dataset of stations I sample from. The data from my phone’s sensor is a lot “noisier” than the data from OpenWeatherMap. I have to be careful to not read meaning into random noise, and to smooth out the data from my phone a bit.

But because I have collected the data with greater precision, I can smooth it (or not) as needed to eliminate noise. But there is no way for me to get greater resolution from data when it doesn’t exist.

That doesn’t mean the pattern is not there. It doesn’t mean the pattern is there, either.

It means we cannot say for sure with the current data that we have.

Luckily, the phone I’m using to record barometric pressure does have enough sensitivity to let me see the pattern.

But it’s an important reminder that our conclusions are only as good as our data.

This goes for all sorts of data, whether it’s barometric pressure or sociological and psychological studies that did not record and control for the subject’s neurotype.

Featured Image by Enrique from Pixabay

I’ve been working with two programs that make interacting with your music using mpd even easier, regardless of source.

First, I’ve updated some things with mpdq. It runs in the background every few minutes, and if there aren’t enough songs in the queue, it adds some. It chooses the songs to add based on some presets you create that are based around what genres are selected. I fixed some bugs and cleaned up references, as well as gave it a way to list what the presets it knows about are.

But most important is the addition of an interactive mode where you can not only quickly (and easily) change the preset it uses, but also preview what those rules are.

You can see it fill up the queue here after I choose the “Techno” preset. I have the loud output on, so it shows you what it’s choosing (and not choosing) and why as it fills the playlist. (The very pretty interface on the left is rmpc, the Rusty Music Player Client.)

You can get mpdq at GitLab or GitHub

I also made mpdcontrol (or mpdc for short), which throws together a bunch of possible sources of music – from Radiotray-ng bookmarks, mpdq’s stations, regular MPD playlists, other playlists from simple listen to DI (or similar playlists for streaming stations), and your music collection’s genre, artist, and album, makes them look a bit pretty, and lets you keyword search and select as many as you like. For example, “trance” would display and let me select from Digitally Imported stations, albums I own that contain “trance” in the name, the genre Psytrance, and so on.

You can choose multiple items as well using fzf‘s multiselect. For example, you could choose the album “The Warning” by Queensryche and the band “The Warning”. And then change your search filter and search for “Mindcrime” and add the album “Operation Mindcrime” and then it will add all of those

I also tried to make the chooser kind of “smart”, in that if you choose a new mpdq station, it puts that last, or if there’s a stream playing it will clear the queue instead of cropping it (because the stream may never end), and things like that.

You can get mpdcontrol at GitLab or GitHub.

Featured Image by whoalice-moore from Pixabay

I knew I was going to have a hot take when I saw the video title “When Players Ruin Your DnD Campaign“.

And, even though it’s an ad, I indeed do have a hot take. Not about the supplement, but the advertisement.

DM: I spent 18 hours designing this political intrigue storyline. Secret alliances, betrayal, hidden motives.
PLAYER 1: Meh.
PLAYER 2: That sounds lame.
PLAYER 3: I stab the bartender.
PLAYER 4: I hit on the waitress. Can I roll athletics for that?

Just in case it wasn’t clear that “ruining the campaign” is the same as “the players deciding they wanted to do something different,” the commercial makes it very clear:

DM: Well, do [these supplements] have something for players ruining my campaign?
NARRATOR: Indeed. Especially for that.

It’s something that GM’s have faced for a long time: What happens when the players decide they want to do something that you didn’t expect? Hell, it happened with the very first D&D campaign I played in last century.

It can be inconvenient. It can throw you for a loop and scrambling for materials. It’s definitely where supplements like the one being advertised might be helpful.

But just because the players decide they want to do something different does not mean that your planned campaign is ruined or that the prep work you did was wasted.

Is It What Your Players Want?

The first thing you need to do is determine if your players just made a different choice … or if they are not interested in the kind of campaign that you prepared or module you selected.

Speaking directly to the commercial: That DM is trying to run a kind of campaign those players don’t seem to want to play. Perhaps it’s a mismatch of the material, perhaps it’s different play styles.

That’s not what I’m addressing here, though. This is when the players have two options you expected, and they just chose (or thought of) a third you did not expect.

Rails And Clocks And Specificity

There’s three things that determine what you can do with that campaign, module, or prep work instead of just calling it “ruined”: How “on rails” it is, what clocks are associated with it, and how specific it is.

Many purchased modules and campaigns are “on rails”, with players intended to go through a specific sequence of events roughly in a particular order, as opposed to more a “sandbox” style. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but knowing which type you’re working with is useful.

Incorporated with the idea of a campaign having a literal clock or calendar are also its metaphorical ones, often with some kind of event that kicks things off. The clock for a royal war of succession, for example, starts when the king dies, but not until then. That’s a flexible clock; the event that starts it happens whenever. An inflexible clock is tied to something that progresses regardless of player (or NPC) action, such as a ritual that can only be done “on the fifth of Redmoon” or “in five game days” . You want to know what clocks your campaign has, and what triggers them starting.

Finally, is what you planned highly specific to an existing location in your world, or can it be plopped anywhere? A campaign that is highly integrated with an existing setting (whether your own or something like Faerun or Forgotten Realms) is very specific, whereas something like “A lost temple that is discovered nearby is rumored to hold treasure” is not.

If your campaign is not specific, and its “clocks” start over some conveniently arbitrary action — like that example of a lost temple that has just been conveniently discovered in nearby wilderness — the it’s easy. You use the traditional solution of “filing off the serial numbers” and making the adventure happen where the party happens to be.

Adapting things becomes trickier when it is more specific, or its clocks are tied to a date in the campaign world, or a specific series of events has to happen in a specific order. But if you’re running a campaign, there’s one solution that I don’t hear very often:

The scenario starts to happen anyway, even though the players are not there or experiencing it.

Why Should I Bother If The Players Are Not There?

Let’s use the commercial’s example of political intrigue. Say, a struggle for succession and power after some destabilizing events that have already happened, which means the “clock” has started, and it is highly specific to a location and established NPCs. However, the players left the region chasing after a bad guy, so they are not present to “do the campaign”.

That situation isn’t frozen in amber, waiting for the players to return. Things still happen. The NPCs you spent all that work creating are still doing things.

I think a bit about what would probably happen. Would other adventurers step in, or even be able to step in, and take the player’s place and intervene? What happens in this campaign or scenario if no adventurers (or heroes) show up?

This can vary wildly. Some campaigns and scenarios will stay effectively stagnant until an outside force interferes, e.g. “The Curse of Strahd”, while others, such as “The Red Hand of Doom”, or “The Rise of Tiamat”, will have world-changing events occur if nobody does anything.

You only need the rough shape of what happened at this point. Think the Wikipedia plot summary of a film at most. In fact, I would encourage you to not think too hard on the specifics.

Because your players will start to hear about those consequences.

Things are happening elsewhere. Somewhere in the Vale is overrun. Prices double due to corruption at a trade port. They hear the name of an NPC they knew as a crimelord instead mentioned as “Mayor Fisk”. Even the campaigns like Strahd will still generate these rumors, such as hearing that travelers and caravans keep disappearing near a specific location.

What the players hear can be fudged, or even flat out inaccurate; they are rumors. Those rumors may draw the players back to the original campaign. Depending on its clocks and how “on rails” it is, they may be able to effectively “join this module, already in progress.”

But even if they do not, doing this can make your campaign suddenly feel alive to your players in a way that it did not before. The rest of the campaign world is not a static backdrop, but something that changes around them. The choices they make have consequences and matter.

To me, that doesn’t seem like anything has been ruined at all.

Featured Image by Joel Fazhari from Pixabay