Asperger Syndrome Dreamwidth Community

A little while ago I got Stable cortical body maps before and after amputation via an NIH press release; today it was *Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia in people with chronic disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis...

... which dovetails neatly with the bits I just got out of The Painful Truth (Monty Lyman) about the bidirectional relationship between insomnia and pain, where each worsens the other but insomnia worsens pain more. (It's bedtime, so I'm not going to pick the book back up to get you those onward references just now.) With n = 5232, and their conditions including "cancer, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and stroke", "CBT-I was associated with significantly improved outcomes" (for insomnia severity, and moderately improved outcomes for sleep efficiency and sleep onset latency).

What'll be next? WHO KNOWS.

During the last week, I have completely ruined my online tracking data. I couldn't even guess what data algorithms now conclude about me from my behavior. I've watched video material from the far right and left, trying to make some sense of what's going on during these turbulent times. I've searched text that is problematic.

Most of what's out there is awful, low-data, conspiracy-related, emotionally-manipulative triviality. There are a few rare nuggets of appreciated perspectives, from sources that I never would have visited, absent our current point in history. In that vein, I wanted to record a handful of things that I was glad I watched, despite how uncomfortable some of it is. There was:

• insightful observation from a professional USA-trained sniper (1 (contains some blood in still-frame images) and 2 (follow-up with some corrections)),
• moving comments from black pastors (1 and 2), and one of those videos includes a pastor saying they were called by the federal government to ask what they would say during their first sermon after the shooting,
• which connects too obviously to the disturbing warnings about coordination and manipulation that this historian explains happened with churches and other institutions in the past,
• potential manipulation on the ABC news network of judicial video covering the accused assassin (watch 5 minutes starting here),
• very powerful words from a black woman, Joy Reid, offered here by an old white guy, which is important because sometimes words from an ally can pierce mental resistance against issues presented by whichever minority uses the same words, and
• uplifting encouragement here from a journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

I'm sure that I've never heard the phrase "spicy whites" before, but I think I kind of like it. I wouldn't have heard it during the last week either, except that I was deliberately exploring outside my usual territory and arrived someplace new where I heard Joy Reid speaking.

Part of the danger of my most recent adventure is that I would get suckered by false information... and I was. I found a particular YouTube video very moving and politically significant. While I was writing this post, I tried to source the supposed speech quotations. I eventually realized that the whole thing was fictional. No such speech. Inspiration crushed with the false attribution. I dislike this modern age of digital falsehoods.

[... sorry about the template, I hit return in the title field and IT POSTED. details to appear shortly. :-p]

Reading. ( Ann Leckie, Monty Lyman, Ronald Melzack & Patrick D. Wall )

Writing. ... I have actually put some more notes into The Document.

So many lost property e-mails. (And at some point I'm going to need to start replying to them, too.)

Watching. On YouTube: True Facts: Bats, The Science Of The Hunt. NSFW. Definitely... An Experience.

Cooking. ... yeah no I managed to make veg spag bol on Friday but otherwise we've mostly just been feeling faintly sorry for ourselves. Okay, no, that's not quite true, I did also achieve baked potato on Wednesday.

Eating. Misc takeaway from The Field (leftover Sunday night curry for dinner on Tuesday; leftover vegetable fried rice + Szechuan tofu for breakfast on same...). I remain mildly resentful that the Wagamama menu still does not contain any of My Favourites.

Growing. The second attempt at pineapple has NEW LEAVES. The second attempt at lemongrass is maybe Going? And other than that I have no idea because I have spectacularly failed to make it to the plot this week.

Observing. BATS. A variety of excellent dahlias and passion flowers on a Trip To Town (post office, pharmacy).

This YouTube video reveals a very interesting discovery about our population living near the southeastern (and northeastern) coastlines of the USA. In maps of the USA, the southeastern states almost always feature heavily in the least-well-off areas of the nation. There were (and still are) good reasons to blame their socioeconomic policies for that big discrepancy. Researchers, however, have found a climate connection that was on nobody's radar as a possibility.

These researchers from University of California, Berkeley, tried for 5 years to find a flaw in their research, because the results were so surprising. After each and every hurricane that reaches these areas, there is a persisting health deficit that lingers in the area, even amongst people who were not born at the time of the hurricane. This deficit persists years afterward, peaking about 6 years (68.6 months) after the initial landfall event. It is cumulative with additional hurricanes that may arrive later, so more hurricanes means even more excess total deaths later. These less-visible indirect deaths eventually affect 300X more people than the direct deaths caused by the hurricane itself. The reasons for these excess deaths? State and local governments have reduced capacities after each storm, individuals have less spare money after repurchasing and rebuilding after each storm, and stress is always bad for health, regardless of circumstance.

It's a fascinating 14 minutes, if you can spare the time to watch the whole video. Here's the Nature article, if you prefer text and graphs.

... and doesn't quite make it.

On page 187 (of 218), we finally get this paragraph:

At this point we need to return to a crucial caveat. In most cases of persistent pain, whatever caused the initial injury has healed. Pain is now the primary disease. But there are a number of cases where there is continual damage that triggers nociceptive fibres; chronic inflammatory diseases are good examples. It is also important to point out that not every case of back pain is our brain's overreaction. A small -- but important -- minority of cases are caused by serious conditions -- cancer, some infections, spinal fractures and the nerve-compressing cauda equina syndrome -- but these can usually be ruled out by doctors, who will be on the lookout for 'red flag' symptoms. However, in the majority of cases of persistent pain (and over 90% of cases of back pain), there is no longer any identifiable tissue damage; our brain has become hypersensitive.

In a book that otherwise dedicates a lot of time to talking about gender and racial inequalities in healthcare access, including a solid half-paragraph on how common and how painful endometriosis (a chronic inflammatory condition!) is, the bit where "well this only applies to most people..." gets breezed past is certainly causing me more feelings. And yet it's still the closest anything I've read so far actually gets to engaging with the fact that the rest of us exist, so... no get-out-of-writing-essays-free card for me here, alas.

(The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, mostly pretty good and definitely got me to think constructively about a few things -- like the merits of classical vs contemporary Pilates for my specific usecase via discussion of knitting -- and introduced me to some more, like open-label placebos and "safe threats" and the impact of paracetamol on empathy. It's incomplete, but not disrecommended.)

A little while ago the toddler's household told me that you could turn the top of a pineapple into a whole entire pineapple plant (with the caveat that at least 60% of the time it goes mouldy). My first attempt at this had got as far as growing a whole entire root network but then suffered a Tragic Incident from which it never recovered; the second had been sat around with partially-browned but no-longer-becoming-more-browned and definitely-still-partially-green leaves for Quite Some Time. I had more or less hit the point of "... is this actually doing anything? at all?" and then upon my return from the most recent round of Adventures I rotated it in service of watering it, to discover...

... that it's growing a WHOLE NEW SET OF LEAVES. Look at it go! I am very excited!

(My understanding is that if I manage to keep it alive that long it'll take somewhere in the region of 3 years to fruit, and then in the fashion of all bromeliads will die having produced said single fruit. Happily this is about the rate at which we eat fresh pineapple...)

Here's a quick Public Service Announcement for anyone who lives in the city of Minneapolis. Check online for your utility bill. Minneapolis changed their billing system, and old autopay settings are no longer functioning.

Apparently they've been emailing me to pay my bill recently, but those emails go to a Yahoo account. Yahoo changed their email interface a while back, and it's awful. I have a difficult time finding things that formerly were easy to find. Tonight, I got an automated phone call about paying my bills. Good thing. I checked online, and I discovered I needed to set it up all over again for autopay... and pay my accumulating bill.

So... go check your account.
https://ub.minneapolismn.gov/iwr/

True, it's not MoodyMonday, but it's in the same vein, and it's getting harder to compartmentalize the various atrocities on the news these days

Last week, Brian Kilmeade of Fox News recommended killing homeless people. Media likes quoting the phrase "involuntary lethal injection", but the true meaning was just a few words later when Kilmeade finished with, "just kill them".

This week, I don't think it's making national news, but Minneapolis had 2 more mass shootings. At 2 different homeless camps. I just watched this news channel's story about it. Not once did I notice anyone mention Kilmeade. According to the story, these shootings are clearly the fault of homeless people and their sympathizers. As far as I know, nobody knows the shooters' motivations, because we don't know who shot all of those people. Kilmeade, though, clearly moved that Overton window and shifted expectations. Stochastic terrorism is a term that I keep seeing reasons to mention.

Have spent most of the day asleep.

1. Attempt #2 at pineapple-from-trimmed-top has NEW LEAVES.
2. I am also fairly sure that attempt #2 at lemongrass is taller than it was when we set off on our terrible adventures about ten days ago.
3. Actual bed. Favourite mattress.
4. I got to make someone's entire day by sending an "... I think I have your object" e-mail.
5. Leftovers for dinner: curry from the crew party on Sunday night. Didn't have to think about food. Extremely grateful for this fact.

There are far too many relevant topics for Moody Monday, and there is far too little time to actually delve into them.

Here's the abridged version of most of the important things in my brain during this past week.

Click here to read the 7 items...

• Charlie Kirk's apparent political assassination:
  A whole lot of people are putting words into other people's mouths. Here are the things that Charlie Kirk said (free archive copy), that political leaders said, and that actual progressive commentators said. In that last video, skip to the 12-minute mark to hear what I hope is wise advice for how to responsibly prepare your mind to watch violent war footage, if you choose to do so. I haven't watched the snuff video. I have enough exposure to violence where I'm at, thanks.
• The USA President's health and ego:
  So, Trump disappeared for a week, which is highly unusual, then returns with a droopy half-face (at least temporarily), looking exactly like he had some kind of stroke. Then during his speech against the "radical left", Trump publishes a video where his hands and fingers glitch visually. According to this review of it, that video was not AI generated, merely badly edited. Both the editing (at all) and the quality (poorly done) are bothersome concepts in this context. Separately, there's a detail that is nagging at my brain. According to this story, the accused killer was caught at 10pm Thursday night. But what was the very first mention to the public of this apprehension? I cannot find a solid answer. It seems (without solid proof) that news was deliberately withheld from the USA public until Trump could go on Fox News on Friday morning and claim he was told about it just "5 minutes before I walked in." Oh, pleasant coincidence? Only after his statement, from what I can find, did other press conferences happen that morning. I want to be wrong about this obscure detail of timing, because that level of national manipulation for Trump's personal benefit is just... unconscionable. Why was the USA kept ignorant overnight on what is obviously an issue of national importance... until Trump gets to play the role of important political strongman revealing such significant news in person to Fox & Friends? We got news about Luigi Mangione seemingly every hour for days. Please, prove me wrong on this issue.
• The ongoing USA civil war:
  I've mentioned stochastic terrorism on this blog several times in recent years. I think we will not properly address violence in the USA until we get a national legal definition of stochastic terrorism, so it can be objectively identified and punished in court. It will need to clarify what is not protected by the 1st Amendment. Likewise, I've said before that we need clarified what is not protected by the 2nd Amendment. Towards a solution for that problem, I think more states need state defense forces which cannot be controlled by the federal government. (Florida also started one recently.) Why? I think that federal law should require that all citizens be active members of those state forces, or members of federal military units, before they're allowed military weapons. Not everyone (and literally their children too) should have them. Make actual military units (which any citizen can potentially join) responsible for the use of their weapons. I think that culpability would put a quick end to idiots taking weapons whenever they want and firing them whenever they want. Possession of any military weapon without a military unit's explicit orders would be a punishable offense. That still leaves handguns (and 3D-printed ones) out there for potential misuse, but we have to start somewhere. It will require new constitutional amendments to make those changes. We should've started that process after Columbine. Until adoption of these (and other) new amendments, so-called blue states could financially starve and delay fascist government by pursuing economic secession.
• Ukraine:
  I agree with this vlogger who says that Russia is sending drones into NATO countries, not because Putin thinks NATO will react. Putin knows NATO will not react. Instead, Putin does it because triggering worries in those populations might convince them to hoard their defense supplies instead of sending them to Ukraine. That's actually a shrewd military plan. I hope the NATO countries don't succumb to it.
• Climate change:
  We're supposed to be in the midst of a La Niña year, but temperatures didn't really cool off globally. In addition, we're learning that very unusual breaks are happening in air and water and species migration patterns. We've got 1 more year expected of this La Niña, then 2027 (or late 2026) should shift back to El Niño, when things start heating up again. The last El Niño set some bad global records, but we'll start next time from another high point.
• Privacy:
  I've tried explaining before that the only privacy that matters is what happens inside your own brain. We keep getting better at decoding brainwaves. We need a guarantee of absolute, inviolable (under any imagined emergency circumstance) privacy within our own bodies, and it needs to be encoded directly into the national constitution as a new amendment. Urgently. I think maybe I'm prepared for technological telepathy, but I'm increasingly sure that the rest of humanity is not capable of resisting the allure of knowing what other people think... or enduring the consequence of actually knowing those thoughts.
• UFOs:
  I still feel a bit of embarrassment (I think it is) at my mention of supposedly-trustworthy news 2 years ago about an archaeological find in Peru, which turned out to be false. So I've been more guarded than usual on any UFO news. There was new testimony at the U.S. Congress last week. Apparently-reputable people testified where there are very real legal consequences, so I'm trusting one particular story as accurate first-person information. Like this video (MSN.com) of an Air Force veteran describing what sounds very much like stealth technology. A practical invisibility screen that can be turned on and off at will, not just difficult-to-radar surfaces. There's a longer video here (YouTube) of the Congressional testimony with even more footage of another flying craft. That UFO takes a missile hit, survives, appears to start tumbling, yet it and shrapnel pieces near it keep flying on the same trajectory, not falling down at all. That is not aerodynamic propulsion. That is something new. Given how easily our tools (including AI tools) can generate false text, images, speech, and video, it's important to stay skeptical, especially if somebody's selling something. I don't know what's going on, but I'm certain that my government is lying to the public and to Congress, which is supposed to have regulatory oversight of the military forces of the USA.

Strange times. So much distracting drama.

It has been nearly a quarter-century since progressive U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash in northern Minnesota, but his influence still affects Minnesota politics today. I've even used his phrase "We all do better when we all do better" in conversation at work myself. Paul Wellstone originally used it in 1999 during a speech to the Sheet Metal Workers Union.

This song is very "situational" and not relevant for most situations, but it's a nice counterpoint to tomorrow's post for Moody Monday.

The lyrics are simple and short, about that married couple's death. It begins with these words.

October morning, little plane on the forest floor,
Up on the TV between a rerun and another war.
Here in a hotel, trying to make some sense of this.
Two thousand miles from my family in Minneapolis.

Hey Senator, I wanna say,
All the things you fought for did not die here today.
Hey Senator, I'm gonna do
All the things I can to live my life more like you lived.

So... that's the theme song for today.

Reading. Tiny bits of Solutions and Other Problems and The Painful Truth.

Listening. More Hidden Almanac.

Exploring. Chester, including Chester Zoo!

Eating. Almost all of my favourite field foods, including raspberry and lemon curd toasties, noodle pots with the addition of the prepped salad bits (spinach! red onion!), the giant lemon and sugar crepes, and flapjack. ("Almost" because the cake options CHANGED.)

Observing. The Milky Way. Something that might have been some kind of satellite or might have been some kind of shooting star. CHESTER ZOO, etc. At least one field bat.

I use the same name everywhere so I am beatrice_otter on AO3. Treats are awesome.

I would rather get a story you were happy with than "well, she said she liked x, so I guess I have to do x even though I don't like x and/or am not inspired that way." This letter is long with lots of suggestions and preferences if you find it helpful, but feel free to ignore it if it is not helpful. I'm fairly easy to please; I've been doing ficathons for over a decade and am usually very happy with my gifts.

The most important thing for me in a fic is that the characters are well-written and recognizably themselves. Even when I don't like a character, I don't go in for character-bashing. If nothing else, if the rest of this letter is too much or my kinks don't fit yours, just concentrate on writing a story with everyone in character and good spelling and grammar and I will almost certainly love what you come up with.

I have an embarrassment squick, which makes humor kind of hit-or-miss sometimes. The kind of humor where someone does something embarrassing and the audience is laughing at them makes me uncomfortable. On the other hand, the kind of humor where the audience is laughing with the characters I really enjoy.

General Likes and Dislikes

other things to keep in mind:

• I like stuff that takes side characters and puts them center-stage, especially when the characters and/or actors are marginalized. I enjoy seeing them come to life.
• I don't like it when marginalized characters get relegated to the sidekick/supporting/helper role so that it can be All About The White Dude.
• I like it when female characters are more than just the Strong Female Character(tm) or The Nurturer.
• I like fluff
• I like angst with a happy ending
• I like stories that make me think about things in a new way.
• I like to know that culture matters to people, and to see how different cultures interact and where the clashes are.
• I like unreliable narrators.
• I like acknowledgment that different people can have different points of view without either of them being wrong.
• I like stories that engage with problematic aspects of the source, and which deal with privilege in one way or another instead of sweeping it under the rug.
• Worldbuilding is my jam, I am pretty much always up for explorations of why the world is the way it is. I love hearing about the economics, the politics, the religion, the clothing, the history, the folklore, all of that kind of stuff. And I want to know why it matters--how is all this cultural background stuff affecting the characters, the plot, everything. You don't have to do deep worldbuilding, but I'll enjoy it if you do.
• I don't like it when plots hinge on characters being selectively stupid, or selectively unable to communicate. Like, if they are stupid or a himbo or whatever in general, or have problems communicating in general, that's fine! Or if they canonically have a blind spot in that area, again, it's fine. But if it's just "the only way I can think of for this plot to work is if the character spontaneously and temporarily loses half their intelligence and competence," then I'm going to spend the rest of the fic wondering why the character didn't just ____?
• I like AUs, but not complete setting AUs (i.e. no highschool or college or coffee shop AUs, and especially not mundane AUs--nothing where you keep characters but drop most of the worldbuilding). I like fork-in-the-road type AUs, where one thing is different and the changes all result from that one thing, and you explore what might have been if such-and-such happened.
• I like the concept of sedoretu marriages.
• I like historical AUs, but only when the author actually knows the history period in question and does thoughtful worldbuilding to meld actual culture of the time with the canon.
• Crackfic is really hit and miss for me, sometimes I love it and sometimes I can't stand it. Basically, if it's the characters we know and love in a ludicrous situation, that's great. If they're OOC or parodied in order to make something funny ... it's not funny to me.

I like plotty, gen stories, and plotty stories in general. I don't care for explicit sex, particularly when it's just thrown in for teh porn. I'm asexual; a lot of the time I don't even bother to read the sex scenes. Romance is awesome (as long as both are in character and the romantic plot doesn't hinge on one or both of them being an idiot). I love it when friendship is held up as important and not secondary to romantic relationships and blood ties.

Please no incest or darkfic. I define "darkfic" as stuff where there's a lot of suffering and no hope even at the end and all the characters are terrible. Angst with a happy ending is fine, I enjoy it, but there's gotta be a payoff. Even an ambiguous ending is fine! But there has to be some note of grace or redemption or hope somewhere, it can't just be "people are awful and the world sucks, the end." I define incest as siblings and/or parents, cousins don't count.

I love outsider perspectives and academic takes on things. In-universe meta (newspaper articles, academic monographs--especially with the sort of snarky feuding common in actual real-world academia, social media feeds in current day or future worlds) is awesome.

Also, I'm picky about European historical clothing details. You don't have to talk about it at all! In fact, if you don't know much about historical clothing, I would prefer if you didn't mention it at all. My pet peeve is corsets: no, they weren't a restrictive tool of the patriarchy, no, they didn't interfere with most women's daily lives, no, most women weren't wearing them so tight they couldn't breathe.

I like religion but I'm picky about it. Basically, Christianity is deeply weird compared to most other religions, and a lot of people whose only experience with religion is living in a culturally-Christian nation assume that what they know about Christianity is some sort of universal principle of What Religion Is Like, and that's just not the case. For example, in Christianity what you believe is more important than what you do. This is not to say we Christians don't teach and practice Christian ethics or have rituals we are very attached to, but rather that if you don't believe in Jesus Christ, it doesn't matter what rituals you participate in or what ethical things you do, you are not a Christian (although you may be a "cultural Christian"). Every Christian group has at least a minimal core theology that members must affirm, but participation in ritual is far less rigidly a requirement. Most other religions rank what you do (both ethically and ritually) as more important than what you believe, and it is often quite possible to be a member in good standing if you participate in the practices and rituals even if you believe none of the teachings. Anyway, point is, if you are doing worldbuilding for a fantasy or SF or otherwise non-Christian religion ... unless it is explicitly a Christian-analogue, it should be different from Christianity. Question your assumptions and see where that leads you, and I will be fascinated and thrilled.

( Fandom for Robots )

( Peter Wimsey )

( Rivers of London )

( DS9 )

( TOS )

( TNG )

( Oh, My General )

( Thrawn Trilogy )

( Goblin Emperor )

I'm watching more YouTube (free) lately, because I cancelled subscriptions to all of my major online channels. I realized that I wasn't finding enjoyable things to watch perpetually on them, beyond whatever titles enticed me originally to subscribe. So Disney and HBO/Max were gone. For months, I had been unable to stream Viki from my phone to my television, and I just wasn't watching the many Boy Love dramas on the webpage as a workaround, so Viki was gone. Which left YouTube, where I still am not a paying subscriber... yet.

This 7-minute video is chock full of interesting details about chickens. Specifically, about chicken eyes. Chickens have tetrachromatic vision (including ultraviolet), double cone photoreceptors (sensitive to movement and polarization), double fovea (areas of high visual acuity, one for close-up and one for distant vision), 300-degree field of view, and independently controlled eyeballs. Their big downside? Terrible low-light vision due to fewer rods than humans.

Here's a 7-minute YouTube video from a homesteader (and self-described conservative), talking about the science of chicken eyes. Science and observation is a good thing to see and to encourage, so I was happy to add my view and my Like to a video on a channel I wouldn't normally watch.

Chickens are much more interesting than I knew.