Journal

Friday we had a visit from a couple of 11 year old girls and their mum to see the rabbits. I realised I haven’t been in the company of 11 year old girls for quite a while and they’re quite odd, giggling and whispering to each other. But they were also lovely and kind to the rabbits and that’s what counts. Hopefully I impressed on them that rabbits are not easy pets so they won’t be straight down the breeding centre (aka pet shop).

After that I went to destroy an arm chair that Fi’s sister can’t get out of the house. It took taking the hinges off the front door to get it in and they’ve decided it’s not worth it, so I offered to take it apart with my tools, a process not unlike skinning and boning a corpse. It should have been a low-effort job but I did get a little invested and probably overdid it. But it was fun! I miss being able to just let go, and later I paid the price.

Saturday has been a rest day, after Friday’s misadventures. The previous night’s crash didn’t continue but I did have some very weird stress dreams that went all over the place, so something was not right and I’ve been resting and watching the tinnitus.

Otherwise I’ve mostly been going through my old blog posts having found some Wordpress exports from around 2008 to 2015 which I can process using this script into readable Markdown files. It continues to be a strange experience. If I had an “imperial phase” it was probably around those years when I was mostly brimming with confidence and doing loads of things. Some of them I’m still proud of, some of them not so much, but that’s how it goes.

I’m looking to bring these posts, along with the original blog from 2000 to 2008, back as part of moving the 72 Pete blog to a new system and I’m struggling with whether to bring everything back wholesale or whether to treat them as archival curiosities. I think they have value as a testament to how I’ve learned to write over the years but I wouldn’t stand by a lot of them, because I’ve learned and gotten better at all that thinking and writing stuff.

But I’m also fascinated by it, cringe and all. I’d forgotten so much of the minutiae, let alone the order it all happened in, and here it is, a map of my past.

Much to ponder…

ADHD and autism at risk of over-diagnosis, says government review

via Tim Clare who has things to say about this. I particularly like his take on seeing autism & ADHD as modern monsters in the philosophical sense.

It reminds me of the chapter in Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger where connects the vaccines-cause-autism conspiracy to Lorna Wing’s research on depictions of autism in Celtic mythology.

The legend goes like this: Fairies would snatch healthy human babies and young children from their beds and secret them away to the fairy realm. In their place would be the magical changelings, who were identical doubles of the kidnapped children, only with physical deformities or behavioral “trickster” challenges, like having a withdrawn, otherworldly affect.

Back to Tim Clare:

The monster ought not to be here, but it is here, therefore it is not the monster which is wrong, but our model of the world. That’s profoundly destabilising. The monster & my old way of thinking cannot co-exist. This is the threat of the neuroweird.

Many people - politicians, doctors, parents - see the neurodiversity movement & feel the threat it poses to their worldview. If some minds are different, if some of us are fucked by the school system as it stands - totally shamed & brutalised by its inadequacy - that requires radical change.

I also came across this jpeg of text (I know…) which sparked a continuation of this thought around the neurodiverse merely being and expression of the old ways. There’s this notion that “the weird” used to be the normal ways of the world and that to fight against it was to battle the fates, something that would usually end in tears. Since the enlightenment this has switched so that “the weird” now means aberrations to the norm. Except this normal is a construct of modernity and some of us struggle to make our slowly evolving brains work within it, because we’re weird.

Or something. I wrote about this at some length in 2024.

• See also Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock which I remember being on bookshelves through my childhood. I wonder if it’s worth reading now?

Linkage

• Chasing a plane across the Moon ‌(11:46) — A delightful short documentary about an obsession with filming the moon which turned into an obsession with filming a jet plane in front of the moon.
• Next year, YouTube will allow testing different versions of the same video — As someone who links to thinks expecting people who follow the links to see the same thing I saw, this is kinda disturbing. But then I guess people edit stuff all the time, so nothing is fixed. And also, given the nature of human perception and memory, can we ever be said to have the same experience of media in the first place?
• The strange world of… Steve Reich — The Quietus marks his 90th with a introductory listening list. I’m also grateful for drawing my attention to Reich Remixed, a 90s album of mixes by the likes of Coldcut and Howie B which I’m kinda surprised I didn’t come across at the time, though I probably wasn’t looking in the right direction.