My only problem with the concept of "gender is a spectrum" is I'm afraid that means the US government will put the FCC in charge of it.

This is. . . a great idea? I'd have to have a W prefix b/c I live east of the Mississippi but I'm OK with that.

The new gender binary: when the FCC takes over allocating the gender spectrum, would they assign you a callsign beginning with W or K?

I once saw a TV station change from W to K! The local NBC affiliate snagged WUSA, and then a larger thing said "wait that's a really good callsign, let's steal it" and made them pick a new one, but because they're basically ON the river, they were able to get permission to pick K, and became KARE.

I support our trans TV stations!

That's not even the only TV station in Minneapolis to have done that, either! Channel 23 was once known as KTMA (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame), later became KMWB after affiliating with the WB network, and now has the call letters WUCW.

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

An actual World Heritage Post

how does this post not have a million notes but anyone online can quote it

one week until ten years of Spiders Georg

happy ten years of Spiders Georg!

Literally what did autistic people do before the computer

We spent a lot of time trying to invent the computer

An old post from elmindreda, which gave me some major “aha!” moments when I first ran across it.

(No, any of a variety of problems with speech is not necessarily coming from Purposely Being Difficult, and/or Worrying Psych Symptoms. Shocking idea 😒)

With the state of my health sucking a lot of energy, I’ve been running into increasing troubles with communicative speech for a while now. I was reminded to hunt this down again, and thought I might as well share it.

It’s very common to divide autistic people into a ‘speaking’ and a ‘non-speaking’ group, and also to assume that the ability to speak implies the ability to communicate with speech. Those people who do so quite naturally place me into the ‘speaking’ group, since I’m most of the time able to produce understandable words, almost always strung together into sentences.

However, there’s a large grey area between being fully able to use speech to communicate and not having access to language at all, and it’s not linear either…

Since I haven’t seen a lot of descriptions of what it’s actually like to lose speech, or to be able to speak but not be able to use that ability to communicate (and those I’ve seen always seem to be missing things), I will attempt to describe some of the different ways I experience those things. Just keep in mind that there are a lot of other possible ways, too.

Reblogging because I had completely forgotten about this blog post, and it gave me major "aha" moments as well when I first saw it. (I even commented on the original post at the time, saying as much!)

It’s neural net Halloween costume time

People use neural networks for translating languages, recommending movies, delivering ads, and more, but this here is one of my favorite applications: utter surrealism.

Last year I trained a neural network on 4,500 Halloween costumes that you readers helped me collect. This year, I teamed up with the New York Times to train a different neural network on over 7,100 costumes. Jessia Ma illustrated lots of the costumes, even the ones that make NO SENSE and they are all SO GOOD.

Please please go look at the rest of them. You will be so glad you did.

And yes, there will be ill-advised sexy costumes.

Thank you, everyone who contributed a costume! You can still contribute to the dataset (maybe I’ll revisit it next year) by filling out this form.

Want even more Halloween costumes? Costumes like Dr. Poop and Ms. Frizzle’s Robot? The answer is yes. Sign up here to get them, plus optionally more bonus material every time I post.

Reblog if you believe phone call anxiety is real and it isn’t childish bad behavior.

Trying to prove a point to this job helper.

Phone calls can be harder on your anxiety bc you cant pick up on the other persons behavioral cues as you talk with them

^^^^

After 10+ years of psychotherapy, almost all of my social anxiety triggers are now at a manageable level—even academic public speaking, which was my #1 worst trigger for most of my life—except for my phone anxiety. It’s literally the one and only thing I’ve never been able to significantly improve.

I have to talk the whole conversation through with my friends beforehand.

I have to get explicit confirmation from my friends that “yes, you really need to ring that person right now”.

I have to write scripts.

I have to take anti-anxiety meds, or get drunk.

I only ever ring someone as the very last resort, when all other methods are unavailable.

I hyperventilate and cry afterwards.

I’m also a 28-year-old scientist with three degrees and a teaching position. I’m normally a logical (albeit emotional) person. But anxiety is not logical.

Anxiety is due to inability to correctly perceive threats—more specifically, due to both increased expectation and increased frequency of false recognition of threats in response to neutral stimuli (this is called “pessimistic bias”). Social anxiety simply means that this inability to correctly perceive threats is specific to social interactions, rather than generalised to all aspects of life. (For example, a resting facial expression or lack of verbal acknowledgement is more likely to be perceived as anger, disgust or rejection by a socially anxious person than a neurotypical person. But a socially anxious person is not particularly more likely to worry throughout the day that they’ve left their stove on.)

Therefore, socially anxious people learn to cope with this bias by becoming hypervigilant to social cues such as posture, hand gestures, nodding, eye contact, eyebrow position, mouth tightness, tone of voice, talking speed etc., and then using all the available information to attempt to be logical and “talk down the anxiety”. We also learn to be high self-monitors, which means that we closely observe our audience and constantly (subconsciously) monitor their responses in order to ensure that they accept us and deem us “appropriate”.

But non-verbal social cues aren’t available during phone calls!

There isn’t any body language to read, or eyes to look into. You can’t monitor your audience for approval. They don’t follow the script you prepared. All you have is their voice, which is usually masked (everyone seems to have a “phone voice”, “customer service voice” or “professional voice”) and distorted by the phone and is therefore useless. All of a sudden you’re back to relying on a single neutral stimulus, and the pessimistic bias kicks in, and you start to panic because you’re not getting constant feedback.

It’s a Recognised Psychological Thing™.

Phone anxiety (actually, phone phobia) is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated phobias in the world. Social anxiety—of which phone phobia is an extremely prevalent trigger—is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated anxiety disorders in the world.

It’s most definitely real, most definitely not “childish”, and you’re not alone.

also, if you have any degree of sensory processing disorder, difficulty processing language, or hearing problems – which aren’t limited to just ‘volume too quiet’ but also include things like being unable to pick out speech from background noise, or distinguish phonemes when someone has an accent or talks too fast – then voice calls are legitimately REALLY DIFFICULT.

it’s like trying to read semaphore in a snowstorm while having an allergy attack.

yes, that is hard.

no, it’s not just you.

no, you’re not making it up for attention, being a baby, or lazy.

voice calls are simply not as good as text.

the fact that most businesses will not communicate via text is a combination of inertia and ableism, not a sign that everyone but you loves voice calls and you’re a weirdo. frankly most people kinda hate them unless it’s a loved one whose voice you want to hear.

Auditory processing is a major part of phone anxiety for me.

I’ve dealt with more calls than I’d like where, even after asking someone to repeat themselves, I just could not catch what they were saying. It got to be frustrating for both me and the other person as I kept asking for repetition and struggling to understand. And it’s totally luck of the draw if I’m calling anywhere new, or answering a call from an unknown number, so the anxiety skyrockets in both of those cases. (Will the pitch and timbre of their voice be something that I can hear clearly, or something that gets distorted by the phone line? What accent do they have? How fast will they talk?)

My auditory memory is not that great even when I can hear clearly, and it gets even worse when I’m using up mental processing cycles trying to decipher what I’m hearing, so any call that’s really information-heavy is probably going to result in some information getting lost in transmission. And it’s only worse if the information is numeric (like prices, product codes, times, or credit card numbers), because all the contextual cues that I typically use for disambiguating what I’m hearing are not really useful. (“Sorry, was that six fifty or six fifteen?”)

Another problem for me, though slightly less of one, is worrying about being misunderstood by the other person. This is especially true for any call where I would need to give my name and/or address, because it feels like every time I try to give this information over the phone, it gets misspelled or mistranscribed in new and interesting ways.

And then there are the times my brain just glitches out and I end up saying something completely different than what I meant to. This happens to me in person too (like the time I meant to order chocolate chip cheesecake ice cream and said “cookies and cream”), but it feels like I’m even more prone to this kind of mistake over the phone. (Probably because I’m using so much more in the way of mental resources to follow the conversation, I guess?)

I’m suddenly seeing a lot of reblogged posts this morning where each subsequent reblog appends a single empty paragraph under the reblogger’s name, but the issue doesn’t seem to be reproducible on desktop. Did @staff bork the mobile app again?

I’m currently seeing this on desktop but not on mobile, because Tumblr can never manage to break things consistently when they do break things.

that autistic trans/enby feel when sensory issues prevent you from doing your desired gender expression

This is one of the main reasons I keep going with shorter ‘masculine’ hairstyles despite really wanting to experiment more with that aspect of gender presentation. If my hair gets too thick/long, I’m constantly fidgeting with it because it feels annoying on my head.