Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Thankfully, the wiseacres at The Squeaky Wheel continue to publish Onion-level satire about disability life and times:

• How Does This Fatigued Woman Do It All? Narcotics!
  
  sample

  Herst’s only regret is that she didn’t turn to narcotics sooner. “I tried prayer for a long time. Jesus never answered, but Miami Maddy did. Now that I take Rippers, I’m thriving in my personal life and getting stellar evaluations at my job. My officemate, Kyle, can even slack off.”
• ‘But You Don’t Look Sick!’ New Study Reveals Most of Body on Inside
  
  inside is where it’s at

  Chao said more research is still needed to fully understand how bodies work, noting that “science and medicine are always evolving, and we clearly don’t know everything.” She also emphasized the need for more advanced diagnostic tools and medical professionals with adequate training on more types of bodies in order to determine what in the fresh hell is actually going on inside them.
• DSM-6 Spoilers Leak Online
  
  among the spoilers

  2. AUTISM WILL BE MORE FLESHED OUT: The reveal that autism is actually part of a four-team ensemble called the ASD blew readers away in the DSM-5! In the upcoming entry, we will finally understand autism’s backstory, including it’s family lineage, childhood best friends, and defining character moments.

Kenyan photographer and writer Marcus Olang’ vividly explains that most English speakers learn the language as an entry requirement for global community. Print only:

I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

There’s a growing community (cult?) of self-proclaimed AI detectives, who have designed and detailed what they consider tells, and armed their followers with a checklist of robotic tells. Does a piece of text use words like ‘furthermore’, ‘moreover’, ‘consequently’, ‘otherwise’ or ‘thusly’? Does it build its arguments using perfectly parallel structures, such as the classic “It is not only X, but also Y”? Does it arrange its key points into neat, logical triplets for maximum rhetorical impact?

To these detectives of digital inauthenticity, I say: Friend, welcome to a typical Tuesday in a Kenyan classroom, boardroom, or intra-office Teams chat. The very things you identify as the fingerprints of the machine are, in fact, the fossil records of our education.permalink

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Fansplaining, the long-running podcast/newsletter has rebooted as "a weekly media outlet devoted to savvy writing about fans and fan culture." They publish everything in parallel text and audio versions.

Cultural critic and native bilingual Soila Kenya dives deep and wide in her exploration of

The Elation and Anxiety of Reading Fic in Your Native Tongue

This phenomenon—a latent discomfort with reading fanfic in a non-English language—spiked my curiosity. It’s a sentiment that’s been echoed across the internet for ages from people across the world that speak all kinds of different languages. In my view, this discomfort with reading non-English fic (or even writing fic in a language like Swahili) is an issue of language-informed colonization, more specifically internalized racism that is created and unfolds in very specific ways that start from childhood.

That racism in publishing results in own-language writing being limited to "issue" works, featuring the most painful elements of African experience.

[O]n my hunt for Swahili fanfiction, I found a White Collar fanfic called “Dreaming in Kiswahili” in which one of the characters has dreams about the first time he fell sick with malaria while living in Tanzania and speaks Swahili in those dream sequences with the locals. On reading the notes section more, it wasn’t surprising to find that the author was an ex-pat who lived in Tanzania for a few years and included in her notes the real-life impact of malaria. Despite this being true, and probably coming from a good place, it speaks directly to this native language perception problem in fiction. It's hard to enjoy media when your local experiences are almost always associated with suffering. When I click on a fanfic, I do not want to be reminded about the cruel world around me, but instead escape into a fantasy. In my experience, my native languages have been tied so much to these suffering narratives that I’ve been Pavlov’d into cringing back from them when I seek entertainment. I require the emotional distance that English provides in order to immerse myself in the story.

I’ve been wearing glasses for 65 years, and I’ve tried many shapes, styles, and colors. Inside the cut are two pics, with a wrinkled white woman with short hair, crumpled ears, crooked smile, and magnifying lens in metal glasses. I'd appreciate it if you'd answer this anonymous poll to let me know which style you think works best:

( Looking and polling )

It’s been three weeks since Shadow’s freedom day, after eight weeks of crate rest to ensure no stray heartworms clogged up his blood supply.

I’d hoped that on 15 April he’d spurt out the back door and explore every blade of grass and clump of dirt in our back yard. Instead, he’s deliberately lowering his DEFCON level in response to gentle encouragement and constant treats.

Recent achievements:

• Leaving his crate and curling up in his own bed at the foot of ours. (He loves his crate; we only close the door when we leave him in the house)
• Responding to my Shadow, come! by moving to me and sitting within easy reach of my treat-filled fingers.
• Walking on our nearby bike path, which offers humans of all ages, other dogs, bicycles, ebikes, emotos, skateboards, power scooters — in general a hell of a lot of stimulation.
• Walking briskly without stopping to sniff, attached to my powerchair (MyGuy transfers the connection from his lead to mine after we’ve left the house, because the ramp exit is super narrow.)
• Permitting me to scratch his butt while MyGuy fondles his ears.
• Meeting two of the gentler neighborhod dogs — just nose to nose; hasn’t done the full tip-to-tail sniff
• Very politely greeting visitors, sniffing their fingers and returning to his crate.

Slow but steady, in the correct direction.

My favorite Apple-oriented publication celebrates 36 years and 1800 issues this month. Their well-moderated forum talk.tidbits.com provides excellent tech support for thorny issues. This week I learned about a super-cool article for us old graphic geeks:

How a poster that morphed Hokusai’s Great Wave into The Wave of the Future, showing its original woodblock changing into bitmaps then raytracing was actually created by hand, because in 1981 it would have been too expensive to do it digitally.

Short update on our new dog Shadow, who’s getting really really bored. He’s starting to move quickly around corners — there’s an energetic pup in there who has been healing all this time. Hasn’t tried zooming yet, and we’ll be screwed if he takes off inside. I hope that if he has the urge to zoom it’s proof he’s well.

He came with an (ugly) collar, and MyGuy found a very spiffy hot red collar with retroflective threads, a sliding D-ring that can be opposite where the tags depend, and white reflector. But because he’s so wary of things happening on top of him, we’ve needed to making snapping on the leash less traumatic.

Today I’ve gone through this routine four times:

• get a handful of treats, shake the container
• call his name
• treat 1 when I can reach my hand to his mouth
• pull back my hand and come! plus kiss-kiss to get him closer, with a treat for each stop along the way.
• when I can readily reach the D-ring, I snap on the leash and dispense 2 treats
• I rotate the collar around his neck clockwise and counter-clockwise a few times.
• another treat
• unsnap the lead
• 2 more treats
• speak all done! & ASLsign FINISH

MyGuy’s leash always leads somewhere very high-value: today he's been taken around the block twice and for three backyard excursions.

Eleven days left until FREEDOM where he can run in the back yard.

We were delighted by Shadow’s response to his first visitors last night. We kept him crated until they’d seated themselves ready to watch the first two eps of Slings & Arrows. He made not a peep when they arrived nor during our typically uproarious dinner. Once we let him out of the crate, he observed them closely. One guest had recently enjoyed a hot-and-sour sauce on her egg roll. She invited him closer and he licked her hands! He permitted the other to pet his back. He curled up in his bed (immediately below the TV) and peacefully admired the assembled multitude.

Early this AM MyGuy placed one of Shadow’s beds on my side of our bed. Around 6AM he tip tip tap tipped into the bedroom and curled up in it, keeping me company for 45 minutes.

He was in the breezeway with MyGuy 20 minutes ago, having just come back from his evening constitutional. Just as his lead was unhooked, the leonine March wind blew open the door to the backyard. Shadow was out like a shot. MyGuy called him back, but he kept backing up. At last, MyGuy leaned on the garage holding the door open, and Shadow scooted right back in to the breezeway.

The wisdom around rescues is a rule of 3: 3 days to decompress, 3 weeks to learn routines, and 3 months to feel fully at home. We’re on track.

(Got to get some Shadow icons!)

While he was quite surprised to walk out for his morning on-leash ablutions into heavy snow above his knees, he's really starting to relax.

This morning I reached down to stroke his back and he didn't flinch.

Just now I was resting on the floor by his bed, petting his back. I started to scritch the scruff of his neck, and he relaxed even more, his dark eyes shining up at MyGuy behind the camera. (I'm reclining on my tripled-up exercise pad just behind him, shockingly without glasses.)

( Read more... )

Only 28 days of enforced rest to go!

A dozen days ago we brought home Shadow from Underdog Pet Rescue (where we found Bella ten years ago).

Shadow’s had a hard life: not only was he abandoned by his family to live in the street, he got heartworm. Underdog has been treating him, and we have to continue to enforce rest for another 5 weeks. We must walk him on leash even for quick potty trips in the back yard.

He's a skinny minnie — around 40 pounds. He's got super-sleek short shiny black fur — unlike our previous dogs, he's single-coated. He's got maybe 47 white hairs at various spots around his body. There’s a clumpy stripe of white on his chest, but he hasn’t felt comfortable enough to show us his belly yet. Between his ears he’s got the wide head of a pitty, but his nose is long and thin.

We're looking forward to buoying Shadow with the love he needs, and grateful that retirement offers the time. For the first few days his muscles were always tense, and when we moved a hand anywhere within ten feet he'd flinch. He's beginning to unclench, and we've even seen his tail wag a couple times. While we're all bored without romping and long walks, it's a good time to shower him with stinky treats for learning his name and beginning to trust us. He walks pretty well on lead and already knows leave it, ignoring a treat sitting in the middle of my flat palm 6 inches from his nose.

His triangular ears have floppy tips — the left one is always down. His back has two shaved bare squares where the vets injected the second and third doses of arsenic to kill the heartworm parasites. His soulful eyes were so tight in the first week we saw nothing but deep brown iris. Today when Shadow and I were hiding from The Evil Vacuum Cleaner in my bedroom, I finally saw some white in his gaze.

( click for pics )

HGModernism, aka Hendry, offers a soothing yet informative 30 minutes on the theme

I found even rarer bird facts

( or stream it here )

Hendry shows illustrations and video of the birds under discussion, sitting in a well-appointed room with fascinating wallpaper, all while holding a tea cup that's as big as a plant pot. They appear to have four white devil horns thanks to the impressive antler mounted behind Hendry’s head.

Hendry is clearly a firm believer in factual content: corrections appear in the first comment; citations are in the description as well as all the links in a Github Gist. They have 28 other YT videos on divers topics plus more on Patreon.

Access

• Accurate captions, except from 9:20 to 10:23, where Hendry sped up audio to get full value after splashing out $10 for the research paper defining the correct Latin gender nomenclature — Strigops habroptilus — NZ kākāpō.
• The first link here and the listed video on YouTube go to the version where there’s an operatic music bed during the research paper recitation. My “stream here” is the no-music edition Hendry provides for “for my fellow auditory processing disorder strugglers”
• No image descriptions
• No flashing lights but lots of picture-in-picture video of birds.

via “We’re Here,” John & Hank Green’s good-news-and-links for Nerdfighteria every Friday