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itsautismlads.bsky.social
It's Autism, lads.
@itsautismlads.bsky.social
70 followers 9 following 130 posts
Scenic depictions of quirky lads
Not speculating, just relating
🌈♾🌈♾🌈♾🌈♾🌈♾ #ActuallyAutistic
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itsautismlads.bsky.social
The part where Bob Dylan's so painfully out of place at the We Are The World recording session that he can't sing and no one knows how to help until Stevie Wonder busts out a Dylan impression so blistering it revives his artistic spirit.
Bob Dylan singing into a studio mic at the 1985 recording of 'We Are the World', from the 2024 documentary 'The Greatest Night in Pop'. Caption: [mumbling] 🎵 ... our own lives 🎵 Bob Dylan and Quincy Jones crowded around Stevie Wonder who is playing piano and singing. Caption: [impersonating Dylan] 🎵 ... There's a choice we're makin' 🎵 Moments after previous screenshot of Bob Dylan, Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder. Bob Dylan is bent over, laughing, hugging Stevie. Caption: [Dylan laughing] Bob Dylan back at the studio mic, singing, glowing with confidence. Caption: [confidently] 🎵 There's a choice we're makin' 🎵
February 1, 2024 at 3:15 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
Researchers: "Any link between Autism and gender nonconformity is PURELY ANECDOTAL"

Also researchers: "Our sample of Autistic volunteers was 25% GNC and also one person just wrote 'Autistic' with a capital 'A' in the gender box"

👑👑👑👑👑👑👑
Screenshot of data table titled, 'Table 1. Interviewee characteristics' 3 columns titled, Demographic Information, Sample Size (M or n), and Standard Deviation or Percentage. Top 2 rows show an average age of 44.3, and average age at autism diagnosis of 37.3 Bottom 4 rows show gender of participants: Women (including trans women): 11 or 46% Men (including trans man): 7 or 29% Non-binary: 7 or 17% Other: 2 or 8% The 'Other' group has a supertext 'A', denoting a footnote. Screenshot of footnote 'A'. Highlighted text beneath prior table: "Gender was self-described as 'Autistic' by one participant, and 'demi-girl' by another.
January 21, 2024 at 12:30 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
They DID find a significant reduction in NDIS participants’ hospital visits/stays, they DID count cost of this care, but didn't estimate the BENEFIT.

Harm reduction benefits just don't exist???

Economists like this are divorced from reality and it makes me sick that we take their BS seriously.
8/
Excerpt from section 5.4.1 of the CIE report, titled 'Mortality' Black title text in a pale blue box, subheading the page: We have not found evidence of reduced mortality, although it is difficult to properly control for degenerative effects that contribute to time trends. We do observe higher mortality in calendar year 2022, which we have attributed to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
January 4, 2024 at 3:56 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
What other limitations are at play?

It’s gauche to read a ‘limitations’ section and dunk on researchers, but sometimes they’re really, really egregiously incompetent. 

For example, they DIDN’T BOTHER ESTIMATING REDUCED STRAIN ON THE HEALTH SYSTEM??? DURING A PANDEMIC???????
7/
Excerpt from page 16 of CIE report: – Figure 1 shows a notional component of ‘unmeasured benefits’. Some areas without benefits estimated (as opposed to areas measured but benefits are not found) are: – Improvement in physical quality of life (to the extent not captured in self-rated health) – Reduction in potentially avoidable hospitalisations and deaths (separate to overall mortality and hospital use). – Reductions in extended hospital stays. – Improvements in relationships that go beyond life satisfaction measures. For example, reduced rate of separation for parents of children with disability typically confers benefits. – Improvement in justice sector and child protection outcomes. – Reductions in maltreatment in disability care scenarios. – Benefits from improved access to school. – Benefits from improved post-school education. – Community benefits from more inclusive societies. Figure 1 from CIE report, titled 'Costs and benefits of the NDIS in 2022-23 Y axis unit is millions $AUD, from 0 to 40,000 X axis is split between cost and cost breakdown: Gross NDIS cost: 35,000 Consisting of Legacy schemes: about 17,000 or so Substitution: 2,000 or so The Net Benefit column is separate. It's partially blue, marking measured benefits of 8,000 or so. The rest of the bar is a grey to transparent gradient, vaguely extending the blue bar up to 15,000 or so.
January 4, 2024 at 3:50 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
How does CIE justify zero HEALTH OUTCOMES benefit?

They don’t.

They analysed self-reported ‘health satisfaction scores’ and found they declined over, again, a paltry 6 years. 

The NDIS supports people with degenerative disabilities. Is the NDIS supposed to fucking cure people???
5/
Figure 5.9 from CIE report, titled: Modelled impactof time-in-Scheme on self-rated health. Bar graph. X axis is 'Change to health score by year 3', ranging from -0.2 to +0.05 Y axis is a list of disabilities: ABI Autism Cerebral Palsy Hearing Intellectual M.S. Other Neurological Other Physical Other Psychosocial Spinal Stroke Visual & other sens. Aside from autism, all disabilities sit between -0.05 and -0.15, negative outcomes. Figure 5.8 from CIE report, titled: Average heath satisfaction scores for people in their first quarter in Scheme and by age. Two line graphs. Left line graph: Time trend, rating at entry. Y axis is 'Average health satisfaction score. 1 = Poor, 5 = Excellent X axis is Time, March 2017 to March 2023 The line trends steadily downwards from around 2.8 in March 2017, down to around 2.1 in March 2023 Right line graph: Trend by age Same Y axis X axis is ages, 15 to 65 The line trends downwards from 3, age 15, to around 2.1, age 65.
January 4, 2024 at 3:42 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
How does CIE justify $0 mortality benefit?

They don’t. 

Their data is limited to a paltry 6 years and they have no control group of unsupported disabled people to meaningfully compare outcomes with

So they analysed this meaningless squiggle and found no benefit like the ghouls they are.
4/
Figure 5.6 from CIE, title: Relative mortality by duration in Scheme for calendar years 2021 and 2022. Baseline mortality set to Scheme average in 2019. X axis is 0-6, in years. Y axis is 0 - 200, where 100 = average mortality in calendar year 2019. The graph wiggles up and down, remaining above the base line of 100. It peaks at 180 for 0.5 years in scheme, is mostly flat from 1-5 years, then bumps up somewhat for 5-6 years in scheme.
January 4, 2024 at 3:36 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
Here’s the thinktank’s headline: We’re spending billions and it’s spiralling out of control!!!!

What return are we getting on these billions??? 

According to The CIE, $0 in mortality improvements or improved health. They’ve slapped that big fat zero right at the top to make it extra damning. 2/
Bar graph from CIE report showing NDIS expenditure increasing over time, from 6,000 million in 2008-2009, to 9,000 million in 2015-2016. The costs are projected to reach 17,000 million by 2022-23. Breakdown of NDIS benefits according to CIE. From page 12 of linked report. 5 Columns: Household and Govt market benefits, total market benefit, non-market benefits, grand total. Unit is millions $AUD. Mortality improvements: $0 Improved health: $0 Reduced hospital use: $625 Participant life satisfaction: $4,255 Carer life satisfaction: $2,259 Too many minor line items to summarise, but grand total is $7,568
January 4, 2024 at 3:30 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
Australia's randomly revoking Autistic people's drivers licences and there's currently a global lisdexamphetamine shortage ruining lives rn but let's pillory this 20y/o ADHD girl for misinterpreting her traits on tiktok
December 11, 2023 at 3:27 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
Me: André 3000's Autistic

Everybody: wtf you cant say that

Me: Oh, sorry, he's just socially anxious, clinically hypersensitive, spends 95% of his time alone, feels inexplicably alien and after avoiding 10 years of fanbase demands for new raps he just dropped a new-age ambient flute album.
Andre 3000 interview excerpt: During the conversation, André also shared that he was diagnosed with social anxiety and hypersensitivity disorder a few years ago, which has had an impact on his psyche. “There have been times where I’ve prayed to a God that I didn’t even know existed, like, ‘I’d rather you take this away from me,” he revealed. “All of this, if I could just feel normal. Take the voice career, all that shit, you can have it. If I can feel normal,'” he added. “But it don’t work like that.” Andre 3000 interview excerpt: “In my own self, I'm trying to figure out where I sit. I don't even know what I am,” he said. “Maybe I'm nothing. Maybe my history is kind of handicapping in a way.” With that being said, André hasn’t lost his love for music yet; he’s just trying to figure how to create again on his own terms. “I'm just trying to find out what makes me feel the best right now,” he said. What makes me feel the best is when I do these random kinds of instrumental things. They make me feel the most rebellious."
December 4, 2023 at 7:45 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
reupload with alt text 🤠
Quote from Jung's childhood friend Albert Oeri: "I suppose I saw Jung for the first time in my life when we were still very small boys. My parents were visiting his, and they wanted their little sons to play together. But it was no use. Carl sat in the middle of a room, busying himself with a little game of ninepins and not taking the least notice of me. Why do I even remember this encounter after some fifty-five years? Probably because I had iust never run across such an asocial monster. I was brought up in an exuberantly crowded nursery, where you either played together or got beaten up, but either way you constantly associated with people; he was all by himself - his sister had not yet been born at that time." In the cemetery nearby, the sexton would dig a hole - heaps of brown, upturned earth. Black, solemn men in long frock coats with unusually tall hats and shiny black boots would bring a black box. I was told that someone was being buried in this hole in the ground. Certain persons who had been around previously would suddenly no longer be there. Then I would hear that they had been buried, and that Lord Jesus had taken them to himself. My mother had taught me a prayer which I had to say every evening. I gladly did so. .. Spread out thy wings, Lord Jesus mild, And take to thee thy chick, thy child. But now I was hearing that Lord Jesus "took" other people to himself as well, and that this "taking" was the same as putting them in a hole in the ground... I began to distrust Lord Jesus. He lost the aspect of a big, comforting, benevolent bird and became associated with the gloomy black men in frock coats, tops hats, and shiny black boots who busied themselves with the black box. Outer life in the form of school shaped him further, adding to the gap between what the child was and what he tried to be to fit in with society. Jung designated his outer adapting personality as No. 1, his essential inner nature as No. 2. This interplay of opposites is played out in every individual to some degree, and in Jung to a more marked and conscious extent. Alone, he could sit contentedly on a stone and contemplate in wonder whether it was he or he was it. Or he could light fires with his schoolfriends and feel the flames were of secret significance. But, increasingly, the contact with his country playmates produced other effects.
December 2, 2023 at 6:08 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
Jokes aside this is a nice little study.

348 people were surveyed and asked how well they feel they can infer others' thoughts/feelings depending on neurotype.

More data backing up Double Empathy (and positive Autistic identity) and another nail in the coffin of deficit-based models of Autism!
December 2, 2023 at 2:20 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
How? Because in 1984, Jonathan Demmes made one of the goofiest and most joyfully neurodivergent films of all time, Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense.

Look at the sheer power of what’s possible with a body composed of 99% Autism and only 1% bones. Demmes gets it - Autistics move Autistically.
5/🧵
December 1, 2023 at 3:32 PM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
By contrast: 2001's Hannibal flopped.

Unrestricted, Lecter loses the skin-crawling intrigue he evokes in Lambs.

Imho, Ridley Scott failed to harness Lecter as an Autistic-coded character. 

Autistic movement is, well, goofy as hell- unlike Scott, Lambs’ director Jonathan Demmes knew this...
4/🧵
A negative review for Hannibal (2001) from Rotten Tomatoes. Highlighted portion: "Lecter has become more camp than terrifying." Review from David Ansen, Newsweek Excerpt from another Hannibal review. Highlighted: "A free-range Hannibal turns out to be much less dramatic than a cooped-up one."
December 1, 2023 at 3:30 PM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
1991’s Silence of the Lambs is 1hr 56mins long. Hopkins is only onscreen for 16 minutes and it still won him a Best Actor Oscar.

Everything about Lecter is contained, caged and masked. His refined stillness and posture drives the film's uncanny tension- what's happening behind those eyes???
2/🧵
December 1, 2023 at 3:18 PM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
What is 'Pathological Demand Avoidance'?

What's pathological about disrupting a system that's abusing you?

Excerpt from Revolutionary Suicide (1973) - Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party
"Of all the unpleasant things that happened to me in elementary school, I remember two... I had disciplinary problems from the beginning, plenty of them, but often they were not my fault. For instance, in the fifth grade at Lafayette Elementary School (I was eleven) I had an old white lady for a teacher. I have forgotten her name, but not her stern, disapproving face. Thinking once that I was not paying attention, she called me to the front of the room and pointedly told the class that I was misbehaving because I was stupid. She would show them just how stupid I was. Handing me a piece of chalk, she told me to write the word “business” on the blackboard. Now, I knew how to spell the word; I had written it many times before, and I knew I was not stupid. However, when I walked to the board and tried to write, I froze, unable to form even the first letter. Inside I knew she was wrong, but how could I prove it to her? I resolved the situation by walking out of the room without a word." This happened to me time and again, growing worse with repetition. When I was asked to read aloud in class or spell a word, my mind went black and cold. Everybody thought I was dumb, I suppose, but I knew it was the lock inside my head. I had lost the key. Even now, when I read to a group of people, I am likely to stumble. "The only teacher with whom I never had trouble was Mrs. McLaren, who taught me sixth grade at Santa Fe Elementary School. She had also taught my brother Melvin several years earlier, and since he was a model student, Mrs. McLaren expected a lot of me. I felt, in turn, a responsibility to live up to Melvin’s reputation. Mrs. McLaren never raised her voice. She was a tranquil person, at ease and peaceful, no matter what was happening. Nobody wanted to start a fight with her. She was the exception to the rule."
November 10, 2023 at 4:50 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
"I have an old soul. At high school at fifteen, my schoolmates called me the Patriarch Abraham. That's very important, an old soul. We always retain traces of an existence which is not earthly, a state of abundance where we know everything" - Carl Jung's Autistic ass
Black and white image of Carl Jung, age 80, wearing his glasses and smoking a pipe. "I have an old soul. At high school at fifteen, my schoolmates called me the Patriarch Abraham. That's very important, an old soul. We always retain traces of an existence which is not earthly, a state of abundance where we know everything" Page 60 of Wounded Healer of the Soul
November 6, 2023 at 11:26 PM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
The New Yorker's review is a parade of textbook violent rhetoric.

In her struggle to grasp the popularity of a popular ND protagonist, the reviewer diagnoses Murata's hero with all of Japan's societal ills and every brand of mental illness.

It's, again, a masterclass in Othering.
"Or is horror the more accurate genre? Keiko's ability to anticipate shoppers' desires-and to efface herself- -seems at once uncanny and depraved, implying a lack of soul. She believes that she can "hear the store's voice telling what it wanted, how it wanted to be. I understood it perfectly." What might read as "competence porn," the rare kind that focusses on menial, hourly labor, here feels more like a portrait of candy-colored subservience, or even self-immolation. In Keiko's case, a strange and alienating job suits a strange and alienated person. "I am one of those cogs, going round and round," she chirps. "I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning." "One eerie achievement of [the book] is that the reader is never entirely sure how to think about Keiko. Is she monstrous? Brave and eccentric? For all the creepiness of her cheerful obedience to the manual, she is, at least, choosing a different kind of conformity than the rest of society, which insists that she marry and pursue a conventional career path. Writing in the Times, Motoko Rich suggested that Keiko embodies a demographic anxiety in Japan, which has been experiencing falling marriage rates and low birth rates for years. Articles have fretted over celibacy syndrome: an aversion, among Japanese young people, to sex and romance. The past decade has also seen a rise in hikikomori, men who withdraw from the public sphere and retreat into their homes, where they play video games, sleep, or stare at the ceiling. Keiko's self-renunciations reveal the book to be a kind of grim post-capitalist reverie: she is an anti-Bartleby, abandoning any shred of identity outside of her work."
November 5, 2023 at 7:33 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
Convenience Store Woman is a brilliant book. It's also very Autistic, but never expressly so. Unless you count the 'quirky' on the front cover 🙃

The critical response to this book is a masterclass in how the media:

1. Obsesses over ordinary Autistic expression,
2. While denying our existence
🧵
Book cover of Sayaka Murata's Convience Store Woman. A plastic soy-sauce fish on a sky blue background. 'Irresistibly quirky' - Guardian, Books of the Year 'Hilarious... I couldn't put it down' - Elif Batuman 'As intoxicating as a sake mojito' - Vogue 'Exhilaratingly weird and funny' - Sally Rooney
November 5, 2023 at 7:17 AM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
OK it's 2.30am and I really could've structured all of that more mindfully but here we are.

If you're ND and curious about rhetoricity and being a weirder and/or queerer spicybrain - these books are where I've clumsily yoinked those ideas. I very very recommend love u lots goodnight
October 29, 2023 at 3:32 PM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
I'm sick to death of the scrutiny and irrational denial that ND-coded stories face.

Our stories exist. Our joy doesn't trivialise our pain. Our shared struggles and extreme diversity are NOT mutually exclusive and I'm so, so sick of the gatekeeping.

Okie dokes that's enough from me bless u thank u
October 29, 2023 at 3:18 PM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
How do you respond to mumblecore-hating critics who demand all films have a point all the time?

One route is to go super edgy and high-stakes.

Another is comedy- Slacker, stoner, fish-out-of-water.

Another route is to lean in: Have your main character go to Paris and literally do fuck all there 🧵
October 29, 2023 at 3:00 PM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
This is the double bind of Autistic representation in film.

ND folk live in these (so-called) non-rhetorical moments. Rehearsing conversations, running late/early, stammering, stimming, echolalia, stereotypy, meerkatting...

Filmmakers that explore these moments are subjected to intense scrutiny 🧵
October 29, 2023 at 2:40 PM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
In film, rhetoricity is extremely important. A movie script isn't a recreation of conversations between people - it's a finely tuned document in which every word must only be included if it directly serves the story.

Critics hate movies that break this rule without very, VERY good reason.
October 29, 2023 at 2:29 PM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
This movie is packed with moments I thought were unique to me - it made me feel so much less alone and more okay with being a lil weirdo.

I assumed this would matter to people, but for years I couldn't find any meaty discussion about how this film matters as a piece of representation! 🧵
October 29, 2023 at 2:07 PM
itsautismlads.bsky.social
Frances Ha: Autism and Rhetoric (🧵)

When I first saw Frances Ha (2012) I was 20 and it floored me.

Here's a protagonist who's out of step with her peers, she's constantly tired, has sensory issues, is asexual but totally romantic, and the movie isn't sad-porn about angst and inadequacy!!!
October 29, 2023 at 1:48 PM