Going to be a pain to wind it around till the year matches up!

I'm required to advocate for all furry writing exploits! Write the thing!

True, yeah. My bad. Just sorta grinds you into dust when you expect things to stop getting worse and they *don't*.

Yeah, we'd have that to cling to. Shit I don't even know who to vote for next time.

I think a lot of us weren't *allowed* to know, systemically. Like what Wes is no doubt planning to do, if you don't know you have autism and nobody tells you, you can't advocate for yourself, you can't find community with other people, so you never get to know, even if everyone else does.

I am Unsubtly Autistic. Every therapist I've spoken to, first appointment 5 minutes in goes "are you autistic?". My mum tried to downplay how autistic I was, I think out of fear that giving me MMR would have been a mistake. But before she passed she accepted that yeah, I'm autistic as hell.

I grew up in the shadow of the MMR vaccine scandal, so I was half-diagosed ("autistic tendencies" is what they went for) in a way that doesn't help anyone at all, and so nobody has any idea if I have it or not and I *certainly* don't get support for it.

Mmmhmm! Plot logic shattered in an instant, apparently. There were some other pieces of feedback which boiled down to "why isn't this 1970's period detective story behaving like a 1930's period detective story?", but that was the big one.

I was told by a proofreader that my story was unrealistic and inaccurate because a plot point was drugs being snuggled from Canada to the US, and they objected to that because "drugs only come from Mexico."

Safe to say... not a proofread I put much stock in...

The whole "all gays have HIV" homophobia is fairly run-of-the-mill. But French terriers? Are they.... effeminate dogs? Is owning a French terrier emasculating? No idea. The person saying it is an older person so maybe it's an ancient homophobia that's lesser spotted now. Still weird as hell.