Fundamentally, what we need is leadership. But we break with the chorus of most #OpenScience initiatives here and emphasize very strongly that this leadership must come from funders and institutions.

We researchers can support the battle, but we cannot lead the charge. Funders hold the cards.

6/n

It's true! Lying to parents about the future of their children sets them up to be exploited and fills them with fear for, often, no good reason. Humanizing #actuallyautistic adults and showing the range of lives we actually live while making those lives better for everyone defuses that fear instead.

sorry, we're pretending *ross douchethat* knows dick shit about feminism now?

woooooooooow

I was pretty sure that we absolutely could not put flying fox fellatio on the poster, but at spouse's exhortation I pinged coauthors, who were DELIGHTED.

anyway the image made it front and center in both poster and subsequent paper, and I will never be able to think of bats without smiling about it

when I was making a poster on same-sex sexual behavior for Evolution 2019, my partner kept telling me to go hunting for more images of cuter vertebrate species. I found an awesome reference for Bonin flying fox... and then could not find any images of live bats not actively engaging in fellatio.

ohhhhh I don't like that. bad vibes for workplace culture, that.

I think it's this very human impulse to want to think, if only I KNEW about this category of human I fit within I would have been truer to myself!

And, well... in my experience, if the consequences to sharing parts of yourself are that harsh--and they were--you just learn to compartmentalize more.

I am also always like... what do you think would have happened differently if you were diagnosed? Childhood diagnosis and self knowledge didn't give me a magic pathway to success; it just gave me different hangups, because diagnosis has never automatically meant supports for autistic people.

To be fair, kooks like Wakefield weren't exactly the indie artists and downtown shopfronts "Keep Austin Weird" is intended to describe, and the right-wing loons aren't precisely *rare* in Texas outside Austin itself. But yeah.

Wakefield's been living in Austin and stirring shit for what, fifteen years? IIRC he was all buddy buddy with Alex Jones for a long time.

We have zero plans to put AI in LibreOffice, of course. Our focus is privacy and letting you control your data. Some users want AI features and they can get them via optional extensions made by the community – but we won't put it in the app itself.

big ifs obviously but it certainly wouldn't be the first time predators were caught eavesdropping on prey or even iirc the first time predators were caught eavesdropping on prey using an active sensory system like this--I'm pretty sure catfish have been documented hunting ghost knife fish this way.

....oh man. the rats can probably hear the echolocation calls quite well, come to think of it. (I mean, this guy looks to me like he's listening intently.) It would make total sense if the echolocation calls made bats a target as well as giving them the ability to hunt their own prey!