My yesterday went more smoothly once I decided not to ignore my pile of RSS and newsletter subscriptions, but to triage and post interesting things all in one go, and then move on with my day. So, here’s what the morning brings. Evangeline Lilly is...| Bix dot Blog
There currently are 4346 posts across 16 sources in the 25 years since I started blogging in March 2000. Further restoration in progress.| Bix dot Blog
Manu posted an update to the matter of not having given any concrete examples in his personal analysis of the idea of the “two sides” to an issue. It’s not directly in conversation with my response, instead being a followup to a conversation he’d had with Leon, but it’s certainly applicable. In it, he explains why he avoids such specifics. The reason why I almost always use made-up examples in my blog posts is because the example itself is not important. It’s just a tool to illust...| Bix dot Blog
The long and the short of it is that while next week (autistic burnout willing) I’ll contact the disability law firm to set up my actual application appointment (or to tell them when I plan to do so), at best they will manage to wrestle SSI out of the Social Security Administration. As confirmed in a small amount of detail to me yesterday, I will never be able to get SSDI. This, then, is the final nail in my future financial coffin. In truth, I gave up on the idea of SSDI after my last atte...| Bix dot Blog
Back during the rising tide of criticism against the CEO and CTO of Bluesky for not taking seriously the threat of Jesse Singal’s transphobia just because he hadn’t don’t anything overtly transphobic on Bluesky itself (this was the thing where Graber dismissively shouted “WAFFLES!” at someone), and then summarily banning longtime poster Łink, I’d started a hashag to track Graber’s apparent crusade against critics: #FarfallaVendetta. It was purely happenstance that I ended up wi...| Bix dot Blog
I’ve never learned to drive, mostly because of what I now retroactively know is a combination of my autism spectrum disorder and developmental coordination disorder, the particular intersecting and interacting constellations of which in my specific case meaning that were I behind the wheel I’d almost certainly injure, maim, or kill either myself or others, or more likely some combination of the two. At some point I remember receiving not a driving lesson, per se, but being taken on a driv...| Bix dot Blog
Over the years here, I’ve referenced Alan Jacobs a fair number of times. Sometimes it’s to agree with something fairly anodyne and innocuous (like for blogs to really be a thing they require not just writers but readers), but often to talk about how his lamentations over so-called cancel culture and the like are horseshit. Yesterday, he penned a letter to say that he won’t protest Mine Furor’s proposed authoritarian compact for institutions of higher education until and unless those o...| Bix dot Blog
The other day Manu had some personal analysis on the idea of the “two sides” to any given issue, especially in the context of social media, and I was having trouble figuring out what was nagging me about it until another blogger weighed in with some observations that helped clarify the question for me. Unfortunately, I can’t link you these observations because at some point after publication they completely rewrote the post into a completely different set of observations, with no trace ...| Bix dot Blog
I’m not one typically to run with whatever happens to be the thing of the day or the current main character over on Bluesky, but since I found myself opining on Sally Jenkins’ nonsensical touting of Caitlin Flanagan’s hagiography of her friend Bari Weiss for The Atlantic, I might as well sully my blog with it, too. (The Atlantic often has had some of the best science and nature writing out there and I hate that it just as often has to share space with this kind of claptrap.) Jenkins cal...| Bix dot Blog
Last week, shortly after I noted that the hits kept coming, and that I did not need any more weight, I mentioned on my statuslog that I was exempting the coming week (the one ending right now) from anything difficult, because just the everyday had sent me hurtling into autistic burnout (and certainly this nonsense didn’t help), and the following week was going to present something of a minefield. Alas, the Notice of Infraction from county animal services because I hadn’t renewed Meru’s ...| Bix dot Blog
In the wake of making a “surprise” visit to Portland in order to report back to Mine Furor about our supposedly war-ravaged city which in reality has been enjoying the past couple weeks of nice, autumn weather which enabled things like a successful Portland Marathon, ICE Barbie called local elected officials “pansies”. This after earlier having her attention called to a man in a chicken outfit by a right-wing podcaster and saying that he “could do better”. (Confession: I’d origi...| Bix dot Blog
In an addendum to my post about Bluesky CEO Jay Graber’s pathetic and unfeeling attitude toward the hurt felt by trans users from the continued presence on the site of Jesse Singal, and the unforced error of micro.blog founder Manton Reece’s praise of Graber and...| Bix dot Blog
“You did not start blogging to blog about blogging,” suggests Laura. She later adds, “This kind of navel-gazing blogging-about-blogging writing is self-help flavored to me, and self-help writing is so scammy and unpleasant.” For me, this depends upon what kind of meta-blogging is happening. It’s...| Bix dot Blog
There is a sequence near the very end of the official “making of” featurette in the Superman digital release which shows David Corenswet interrupting the filming of his climactic confrontation with Lex Luthor because he’s not understanding why director James Gunn wants him to play...| Bix dot Blog
Ijeoma Oluo: You are racist because you were born and bred in a racist, white supremacist society. White Supremacy is, as I’ve said earlier, insidious by design. The racism required to uphold White Supremacy is woven into every area of our lives. There is no...| Bix dot Blog
Today by necessity began with an early Ride to Car trip to Sunnyside Medical Center in Clackamas, about as “all the way on the other aide of town” as you can get from St. Johns. My driver this time happened to be of the “take...| Bix dot Blog
Back in the Fall of 2021, I’d discovered through a research paper that without planning it my therapist and I had stumbled into what I call “unmindful self-compassion” as a way to mitigate potential after-effects of some autism pathologies. (It’s something I recently brought up...| Bix dot Blog
Last week, someone on Twitter asked their followers what lines have stuck with them or even become part of their personal philosophies. I came up with two right off the top of my head: “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it,...| Bix dot Blog
Just over six years ago, I wrote about what I called the single most devastating line I have ever heard uttered in a movie, when Kayla Day—her head down with shame, at a backyard fire she wanted in order to burn a box of her...| Bix dot Blog
By the time I had to put dinner on the stove this evening, I was thinking a lot about what’s maybe the best line in the late, lamented television show Terriers, when Gretchen tells her interfering and uninformed ex-husband Hank, “You’re the live grenade in...| Bix dot Blog
Somewhat to be expected when you repopulate your RSS reader with blogs after months of abstaining from attention paid to the blogosphere, as the links come in you end up reading a lot of blog posts about blogging, because whatever else this, that, or the...| Bix dot Blog
Over time and in meddling with my feed reader I sometimes lose feeds and later accidentally rediscover them. So it is with Art Kavanagh, whose writings on aphantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory were most of what I read after originally running into the former...| Bix dot Blog
The first thing that struck me about this research on gender was the person who supplied her gender as “meh”, because I once toyed with listing my pronouns as “meh/meh” but I was afraid people would misconstrue it as a pointed, wrongheaded criticism of providing...| Bix dot Blog
Your final look at The Finger It’s 2003 and you’re coming up on the end of your first full year of “stand-alone journalism”, doing independent reporting and commentary on Portland entirely by blog. You’re visiting an independent bookstore run out of a church in...| Bix dot Blog
The question of celebrating aside (it’s the primary discourse on Bluesky right now, as both Jay and the service’s safety team warn against “glorifying violence or harm”), you certainly don’t need to give a single fucking shit that Charlie Kirk is dead. As noted pretty...| Bix dot Blog
We’ve done this a least twice in the last few months over on Bluesky, and it seems the part of the blogosphere within my six degrees of separation is taking its turn: what do we do about things getting flagged as having been written by...| Bix dot Blog
Over the past few days, Rachel Kwon, Manuel Moreale, and Kev Quirk all weighed in with some thoughts on editing posts after they’ve been published. Kwon: […] i want the challenge of committing to publishing something, putting it out there, and leaving it be. that’s...| Bix dot Blog
Leon (not a content marketer) dropped me a line to mention he’d had some thoughts about my public conniption over content marketers editing—or wholesale changing, it seems, in some cases—old posts on the websites they manage through one blogging CMS or another. It put to...| Bix dot Blog
My new, every day dinner My therapist and I think sometime last year was the only other time I experienced what we’ve taken to calling food exhaustion, this latest bout having cropped up sometime during the month of July. It threw my entire daily...| Bix dot Blog
While browsing, I think, the #Blogging hashtag on social media, I ran across someone explaining why you should be updating old blog posts, and against my better judgment I’m going to push back on this from a couple of different angles. It’s worth noting that...| Bix dot Blog