Let us begin with Sumana Harihareswara on the need to have both detailed changelogs of changes in your software, and also release notes that provide higher-level and more human-friendly summaries of the changes between releases of the software. I feel like this could also be applied to many other things that go through revisions in such a way that people feel confident about the changes. I don't see it very often, for examples, in Terms of Service revisions, which tend to have vague things about what's actually changing in their human-friendly summaries, and then expect you to understand dense legal language to see the detailed material. Which mostly leaves consumers in the position of shrugging and saying "they've probably just made it possible to take my firstborn child, but I still need to use their products." This is not ideal, as they say, and it runs into trouble when you actually do have a dispute or need to exercise rights with regard to a service or company and find out that you have, in fact, signed away your first born child to the company and also agreed to binding arbitration where your first born child will be the only one allowed to speak on your behalf until they are old enough that they might be able to make a cogent argument.
The thought of having everything organized promises the possibility of being happier, but there's a lot more to being happy than being tidy. And for some people and their neurotype, a thing that is out of sight becomes a thing that is out of mind, and unless those storage containers are extremely well labeled and their systems rigorously adhered-to, things will probably get worse instead of better by putting them in containers and storing them in places.
Major League Baseball has entered the playoff section of the year, and the team that I am a partisan for made it in with a spectacular run in the later part of the season to catch a qualifier with two more games to have been played. Which they promptly lost to a team that had a record number of losses for the year (and whose record was the worst of all time when my team clinched their postseason spot.) They then proceeded to win their first two playoff games, giving them the opportunity to go best-of-five with their division leaders in the next round. Which is exciting, at the very least, to see more baseball being played, but there's also the fact that most major sports leagues in the United States, even if their laborers are represented by a union, are still owned and controlled mostly by billionaires. While some of those owners might be considered better than others, there are also those who deliberately pursue the profit over the possibility of a good team and then threaten or follow-through on taking the team elsewhere when they don't get to feed at the public trough for as much as they want for new stadia or additional perks for themselves, the ones that deliberately drive away their fans with price increases and sub-par product so they can manufacture the conditions to move, and who have ripped a team away from the community around it in search of those greater profits and benefits. Even with the "better" owners, there's still always the understanding that the sports team is a business and should be profitable, and those owners are more than happy to try and soak as much wealth up for themselves. The kind of people who would say making four million dollars less in profit than last year as "losing" four million dollars that year. Some sports leagues forbid private ownership, or have several competitive teams owned by the cities they play in, and it's often a better experience for both the partisans and the city to reap and reinvest the profits in the community. The NFL is sufficiently afraid of the idea of public ownership that they've forbidden any other club other than the Green Bay Packers from operating in such a manner, because the Packer backers have proven that you can get the cheeseheads to put up their own cheese and make a competitive and profitable team. I feel like many cities and their partisans would very much want the opportunity to wrest their team away from the billionaire owners and have a say, even if it is only a small one, in the running of their sports team through funding it. And in leagues where teams sometimes end up being owned by "the league," having public ownership as an option would certainly make them attractive to places looking to reap those profits.
Of course, I'm the kind of person that thinks that perhaps the lowest-ranked team in any given league's divisions should be offered up to their city to see if the public can run it better than the owner can. Something to potentially convince those billionaires that those profits they make are better put to use improving the team and the players, rather than just being part of their own obscene wealth. But I'm also the kind of person that thinks a billionaire is a policy failure, and an entity whose wealth has already reached an excess point and can be safely redistributed until they are underneath the cap.
Pete Rose, a man who might have made it back to baseball from the scandal of his gambling on games (what with how much all sports are flogging betting on them now) but for the other scandal involving an underage girl, is dead at 83 years of age.
Kris Kristofferson, songwriter, eventual artist and actor, joins the talent writers of the afterlife at 88 years of age.
J.D. Vance and Tim Walz had a debate, one perhaps notable for its ability to actually talk about substantive issues, but that also provided plenty of meme fodder, given that J.D. Vance did an awful lot of evasion, side-eyeing, and outright lying (and then complaining about being corrected on his lies, because he thought the rules he had agreed to would give him the ability to lie with impunity.)
( And more inside )
Last for tonight, a Captain Awkward letter that approaches a situation from the perspective of "what do you need to make a possible social situation enjoyable for you" rather than the letter-writer's frame of "How do I avoid ruining my friendships because I'm neurospicy and my friends want to put me in situations I know will be stressful?" There's a lot of resonance in there about trying to unlearn the part of your brain that has been socialized to believe that because you are the consistent issue in all of the stressful things that have happened, you are the problem and inflict yourself on others. The part that's been quoted most at me so far from the people who have linked the letter is this:
and that's an entire mood by itself, including echoes of my first supervisor, the one that I can now recognize had no actual solutions for the neurodivergent worker that had just been hired other than "mask harder, be neurotypical" and who I did my best to try and build systems in place that would help me do just that so I would stop getting in trouble for being neurodivergent (and then try harder when those systems inevitably had hiccups, failures, and situations they weren't actually designed to handle.) But I also want to highlight a later piece, because I think that's equally as important a thing to consider as "how much of what is being expected of you is 'don't you dare let that mask slip for a moment.' "
I'm glad the letter-writer is getting this good advice, and it's out there for others to have as well, hopefully at a younger age where it can do more long-term good. Because I certainly could have used it much earlier in my life, when I was coming into myself as an independent adult and running face-first into difficulties that I hadn't had to deal with before. Where I might have been doing the job that was advertised on paper, but getting evaluated on all the things that are not explicitly put into the job description because they assume everyone has the capacity to remember something told to them after six other things that required concentration to handle. Because, as the Captain notes:
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meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
The thought of having everything organized promises the possibility of being happier, but there's a lot more to being happy than being tidy. And for some people and their neurotype, a thing that is out of sight becomes a thing that is out of mind, and unless those storage containers are extremely well labeled and their systems rigorously adhered-to, things will probably get worse instead of better by putting them in containers and storing them in places.
Major League Baseball has entered the playoff section of the year, and the team that I am a partisan for made it in with a spectacular run in the later part of the season to catch a qualifier with two more games to have been played. Which they promptly lost to a team that had a record number of losses for the year (and whose record was the worst of all time when my team clinched their postseason spot.) They then proceeded to win their first two playoff games, giving them the opportunity to go best-of-five with their division leaders in the next round. Which is exciting, at the very least, to see more baseball being played, but there's also the fact that most major sports leagues in the United States, even if their laborers are represented by a union, are still owned and controlled mostly by billionaires. While some of those owners might be considered better than others, there are also those who deliberately pursue the profit over the possibility of a good team and then threaten or follow-through on taking the team elsewhere when they don't get to feed at the public trough for as much as they want for new stadia or additional perks for themselves, the ones that deliberately drive away their fans with price increases and sub-par product so they can manufacture the conditions to move, and who have ripped a team away from the community around it in search of those greater profits and benefits. Even with the "better" owners, there's still always the understanding that the sports team is a business and should be profitable, and those owners are more than happy to try and soak as much wealth up for themselves. The kind of people who would say making four million dollars less in profit than last year as "losing" four million dollars that year. Some sports leagues forbid private ownership, or have several competitive teams owned by the cities they play in, and it's often a better experience for both the partisans and the city to reap and reinvest the profits in the community. The NFL is sufficiently afraid of the idea of public ownership that they've forbidden any other club other than the Green Bay Packers from operating in such a manner, because the Packer backers have proven that you can get the cheeseheads to put up their own cheese and make a competitive and profitable team. I feel like many cities and their partisans would very much want the opportunity to wrest their team away from the billionaire owners and have a say, even if it is only a small one, in the running of their sports team through funding it. And in leagues where teams sometimes end up being owned by "the league," having public ownership as an option would certainly make them attractive to places looking to reap those profits.
Of course, I'm the kind of person that thinks that perhaps the lowest-ranked team in any given league's divisions should be offered up to their city to see if the public can run it better than the owner can. Something to potentially convince those billionaires that those profits they make are better put to use improving the team and the players, rather than just being part of their own obscene wealth. But I'm also the kind of person that thinks a billionaire is a policy failure, and an entity whose wealth has already reached an excess point and can be safely redistributed until they are underneath the cap.
Pete Rose, a man who might have made it back to baseball from the scandal of his gambling on games (what with how much all sports are flogging betting on them now) but for the other scandal involving an underage girl, is dead at 83 years of age.
Kris Kristofferson, songwriter, eventual artist and actor, joins the talent writers of the afterlife at 88 years of age.
J.D. Vance and Tim Walz had a debate, one perhaps notable for its ability to actually talk about substantive issues, but that also provided plenty of meme fodder, given that J.D. Vance did an awful lot of evasion, side-eyeing, and outright lying (and then complaining about being corrected on his lies, because he thought the rules he had agreed to would give him the ability to lie with impunity.)
( And more inside )
Last for tonight, a Captain Awkward letter that approaches a situation from the perspective of "what do you need to make a possible social situation enjoyable for you" rather than the letter-writer's frame of "How do I avoid ruining my friendships because I'm neurospicy and my friends want to put me in situations I know will be stressful?" There's a lot of resonance in there about trying to unlearn the part of your brain that has been socialized to believe that because you are the consistent issue in all of the stressful things that have happened, you are the problem and inflict yourself on others. The part that's been quoted most at me so far from the people who have linked the letter is this:
Neurotypical folks and/or people who mostly conceive ADHD in terms of how much people with the disorder annoy and disrupt others (which unfortunately includes most of the people responsible for diagnosing it and treating it when I was a kid) tend to see problems like the ones I just described as opportunities for people with ADHD to shore up our skills and internal processes until we can better guarantee that we’ll perform to others’ standards. “Just take deep breaths and focus!” “Just lay out all your cooking materials ahead of time and take your time to do each step one-by-one!” “Just don’t let other people get to you so much!” “Come on, it’s easy, you got this!”
(Pro-tip: If you ever want to clock whether a given piece of advice about social skills or whatever translates to “mask better so that no one will be able to tell you aren’t neurotypical,” putting the word “just” in front of something you already know doesn’t work for you is a pretty reliable indicator. “Just be yourself!” “Just make a to-do list and check things off one-by-one as you go!” Cool, why don’t I “just” learn to levitate while we’re at it. It’s not that the advice never works for anyone, it just doesn’t work within your specific context. But if you actually point that out, you’re being “difficult,” because it’s easier for them to comprehend a world where you don’t get it than it is to imagine one where what works for them doesn’t work for everyone.)
and that's an entire mood by itself, including echoes of my first supervisor, the one that I can now recognize had no actual solutions for the neurodivergent worker that had just been hired other than "mask harder, be neurotypical" and who I did my best to try and build systems in place that would help me do just that so I would stop getting in trouble for being neurodivergent (and then try harder when those systems inevitably had hiccups, failures, and situations they weren't actually designed to handle.) But I also want to highlight a later piece, because I think that's equally as important a thing to consider as "how much of what is being expected of you is 'don't you dare let that mask slip for a moment.' "
But when I read something like this:Especially with the earlier admission that the most likely way that these people relate to each other is through Minnesota Nice (or other Midwestern Nice) that doesn't actually talk about things that are upsetting, except in indirect ways that expect someone who is already going to be bad at picking up cues to pick up cues. It sounds like the letter-writer also needs direct communicators, which will be awkward for people who have been socialized that all needs and discomforts are to be communicated in as oblique and face-saving manners as possible, but makes things work so much better for everyone when you can actually state a need and have something happen about it. (It's also possible that the friend group is engaging in a Geek Social fallacy or two and really needs to make some decisions about whether or not they want to keep putting people who are incompatible with each other together on social events.)To complicate it further, one of the friends likely coming along is the one I’m least close with in this group, and who tends to have the least patience for my neurodivergent shenanigans.
…I gotta wonder about the company. Is this “AITA if I inflict my chaotic self on these poor innocent bystanders” or is this “This so-called friend makes my shoulders go up around my ears, and I don’t trust the others to have my back or be anything but fake-nice about it?” You know these people, so you tell me.
I'm glad the letter-writer is getting this good advice, and it's out there for others to have as well, hopefully at a younger age where it can do more long-term good. Because I certainly could have used it much earlier in my life, when I was coming into myself as an independent adult and running face-first into difficulties that I hadn't had to deal with before. Where I might have been doing the job that was advertised on paper, but getting evaluated on all the things that are not explicitly put into the job description because they assume everyone has the capacity to remember something told to them after six other things that required concentration to handle. Because, as the Captain notes:
Pushing yourself past your limits out of fear of disappointing or inconveniencing others won’t make anything that you struggle with easier. Internalized ableism and living in fear of other people’s judgment can actually hurt you.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
