(1/4) I don't really consider myself old per se, but I'll be 50 in a year and a half so I'm not exactly young either. There are so many things that have changed since I was a kid. I see so many ways in which life is better but also so many ways in which today's kids in public school have been robbed. There are classes I had that no longer exist in the US public school system anymore like wood shop or home economics.
@monkeyninja This trend away from trades and skills, in preference to Tech Bro IPO and standardized testing as a measure of success, has had some tremendous impacts on society and the economy. And in #neurodifferent circles there are opportunities for success lost when youth don’t have avenues for success that aren’t part of #ableist hegemony. Bring back skills and trades!! We need them! @actuallyautistic@actuallyadhd
A couple of months ago, I read something on here that quite literally changed my life. It sent me on an unexpected journey of self-discovery that continues to this day. When you’re 54, you don’t expect too many surprises about who you are. But when I read a thread on here about being autistic, something just clicked. So I went down the rabbit hole, read a bunch of articles, did some self-evaluations, and came to the inescapable conclusion that I am autistic. #actuallyautistic
> a protocol needs to achieve two things: it needs to prevent the accumulation of power imbalances between parties … and it needs to make it easy for users to cooperate in building the the rules they want for how the protocol's operation affects them … the success of decentralisation and … of a democratic digital world rides not only on liberation but also on organising.
@poVoq Agreed. It got me thinking. But feels almost entirely ideological, conflating social media (e.g. Twitter, Reddit) with “the digital world”.
Saying git is a “failed attempt at decentralisation” just because GitHub is popular misses that GitHub is less critical infrastructure than it would be if we only had CVS or Subversion.
I’m encouraged by incremental, practical decentralisation efforts outside of social media. It’s slow, kinda boring but it’s real and happening today.
For those with #MECFS, do you find yourself struggling with #Depression and/or #Anxiety since becoming ill, especially if it seems different from depression and/or anxiety that you experienced prior to becoming ill? If so, how are you managing your depression/anxiety? Have medications helped? Are you using non-medication approaches that work? @mecfs
@flowerpot@mecfs@actuallyautistic This hit hard, which is probably my sign that it’s accurate. Feeling bad about feeling bad is definitely a trap for me, and it could make a difference to work on reframing my thoughts about this. Back to self-compassion and self-acceptance—which might be the core issue. Maybe I’ll create some 5 minute reprieve coupons and put them where I’ll see them throughout the day. My partner would probably love to be able to hand me one when I spiral. Thank you.
(I hope I'm tagging the real Neil Gaiman and not an imitator... We gotta get him off mastodon.social if he is; half the smaller instances have already defederated from @mastodon.social for not having sufficient moderation 😅)
has anybody ever received a #medical#diagnosis where the #doctor told you that your illness will likely cause a significant reduction in your #lifespan? Not that you are dying, but that you likely will not live to be an old person? How did you deal with this news? How do you handle that?
@dsmith@cogsci@cognition@neuroscience Absolutely right, yes. Active ongoing auto-perception triggering pattern completion. I've actually been thinking a lot about this cognitive process recently, particularly in terms of mnemotechniques used by the bards of old to facilitate both learning and retelling of epics. E.g. the first pair in a rhyme propels recollection forward via pattern completion, etc.
Besides semantic and acoustic factors, prosody can also play a role. Like most classroom Ts, I sometimes confused the names of students when I had a lot on my mind (not a memory issue -- it's excellent). I noticed I was much more likely to confuse names with the same # of syllables. While Mitterand is one more syllable than Macron, it rolls out in fluent speech like a 2-syllable word.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s #shortstory “The Bottle Imp” was first published (in English) #OTD, 8 Feb 1891, in the New York Herald. It was originally published in #Samoan translation as “O le Fagu Aitu” in the missionary magazine O le sulu Samoa (The Samoan Torch)
@elonjet these stats always kind of trigger me. so much pollution, so much wasted resources, so much money just to get from A to B as quick as possible. oh boy..