Notices by Autistic Innovator (ashleyspencer@autistics.life)

@hellomiakoda @Austin Suppose that could be so. Has there been a love connection on Mastodon with others?

@Austin You won’t find that here. The culture of Mastodon doesn’t do the match making kind of thing. Dating apps to find people local to you will be your best option.

@MisuseCase @bmacDonald94 Makes me wonder if all the other food dyes cause cancer too. Food dye is in almost everything. The candy industry will be wrecked if more food dyes get banned. It's also really f'd up that cancer treatment also makes them big money, so they're making money off this food dye giving people cancer while also making money off expensive cancer treatments. Messed up! If they did it with one dye, there's probably a lot of other things causing illnesses.

After 35 years of the FDA knowing Red Food dye 3 causes cancer, the FDA is finally banning it because it causes cancer. Apparently the FDA banned the dye from cosmetics 35 years ago, but approved it for use in food. Makes me wonder what else they know causes cancer and let into our food supply.

I’ve been babying Sam a lot ever since he started having teeth issues (will take him to get his teeth cleaned next month). He’s enjoying the babying and probably hasn’t had this much positive attention in his whole life. :blob_cat_heart: He will have an especially good time on Christmas when they get presents, new wet food, and lots of attention. I’m very much looking forward to my 2 days off and giving the kitties a good Christmas. Especially Sam who has gone from badly abused to loved and safe. He deserves a wonderful Christmas. :blob_cat_melt_love:

I feel like stores cannot be trusted this Black Friday and cyber Monday weekends now. So many of them lie about their prices and inflate their before sale price just to make them look like same price is the sale price. That’s how stores lose customer trust, and without customer trust stores go out of business. It’s likely to not be the biggest shopping weekend for stores this year because of the lying.

My last several orders have been for inventory items, so that’s good. It does make me feel a little better packing so many orders this morning. Every time someone orders the Fidget Cube Spinner my heart sinks because I really want to bulk buy them, but it’s just so expensive at the quantity I need. Maybe after the holidays I’ll have the funds. Good news is I’ve already sold enough to cover costs on 1/4 of the inventory items I bought, so that’s definitely a good thing. Getting there.

I’m simultaneously bored, unable to make myself do anything even fun stuff, and now just sitting on the couch like a lump. I want to do all the things, yet I do nothing at all.

#ADHD
#AuDHD

Silly meme that made me laugh :blob_cat_giggle:

Just read that the major credit card lenders combined made $105 billion just from credit card interest last year. They raised interest rates on everyone and profited an additional $25 billion in the first quarter of 2024. Ridiculous. Predators! Making record profits off a shit economy.

Last night I was watching Psych and a cat attacked a bad guy in the show and made angry cat noises. My cat Sam came running into the bedroom yelling ready to fight off the cat that was attacking me. He checked on me very concerned to make sure I was safe. Once he saw it was just the TV he was like okay bye and left.

I’ve been paying probably too much attention to what is going on with the hurricane aftermath. I’m very much a give me unbiased facts information about anything.

Many people who are in North Carolina have been recording videos on TikTok and Instagram saying what it’s really like. Those are the only people I believe and listen to because it’s factual. They say how bad it is, how FEMA won’t let them help the people who live in the mountains and says FEMA says they need permits to fly helicopters to help people. People who flew up to the mountains anyways got arrested by FEMA. Even their local police is telling FEMA they will arrest anyone preventing in rescue and providing aid. SpaceX engineers say FEMA is seizing the Starlink devices they are delivering and setting up and is trying to ground their helicopters so they can’t provide aid.

They’ve got mountain goats carrying supplies, horses, mules, people are climbing up mountains trying to sneak past FEMA. Multiple videos from people have said everyone they know got denied the $750 assistance. It’s all so sad. So many of the people say they feel like the government hates them. It’s like full on hunger games over there.

Dolly Parton donated $1 million of her own money and all her businesses will donate another $1 million through her charity to help with aid for the states affected, so that’s some positive news.

If I had money to donate I would, but just bought so much inventory. I’m physically disabled so I can’t help.

One of the people in the mountains finally got service and posted online. They said it’s an organization called The Cajun Navy that has been the biggest help. They’re a search and rescue and disaster recovery organization. They’ve been bringing supplies to the mountains in North Carolina. From what they said online the government hasn’t helped them but it was volunteers with the Cajun Navy who did the most. It’s wonderful that there’s an organization like that.

I get questions sometimes from people wanting to use The Autistic Innovator name on their own business. Either open a sector in another country and ship them inventory and they run the business for me there, or people who want to launch new products for neurodivergent people and want to pay me to put The Autistic Innovator brand name on their products. It’s really rather strange. I feel like at some point I need to trademark The Autistic Innovator as a brand to keep the name safe.

I have 2 more storage shelves sets and really need the space to store inventory because I’m running out of room with just one set of shelves, so I contacted a children’s charity in my city to see if they would like the 60+ product sample plushies I have in my office. I wanted to keep some of them, but kids will enjoy them and I can always buy it again if I want one for personal use.

Attention https://autistics.life:

Per request, our character limit has been raised from 2,000 to 10,000 characters.

Have fun with the longer limits! :blob_cat_heart:

This used to be my glass of water. Sam drank from it and continues to drink until it’s empty, and then goes back to the empty glass like refill it please, so I do. 2 days later guess this is where he drinks water now. Taking after Dinah who will only drink water out of a cocktail glass on the granite kitchen countertop.

#CatsOfMastodon

I finally updated our instance description. Forgot about it and haven’t changed it in a long time. It said stuff about how my store for autistic adults pays for it, and that is no longer true since my store is for autistic & neurodivergent adults now (still pays for it though).

Updated it to say despite the autistic name, whether someone identifies as autistic, neurodivergent, ADHD, AuDHD all are welcome here, even if they are a non-autistic neurodivergent.

One of the first things I felt bad about was that my autistic instance name also excluded people, but despite the name, I want to welcome neurodivergent people too.

With the 2,000 character limit we now have, it gives me the ability to be more welcoming. :RedHearts: :blob_cat_heart:

I don't usually make these posts, but thought I'd share the news.

I have an instance called autistics.life. It's a mastodon server for autistic and neurodivergent people.

We have a wholesome autistic/neurodivergent vibe, and we just upgraded to a 10,000 character limit.

My business pays for the hosting and it's a stable income. I'll never ask you for money to keep the server online, so it's free for you to use.

Domain registration was recently renewed for an additional 3 years. December will be 2 years this instance has been online. The host has also been in business since 2013 (11 years). It's a stable server and not going anywhere.

Check out the about page if you want to:

https://autistics.life/about

#ActuallyAutistic
#neurodivergent
#ADHD
#AuDHD
@actuallyautistic

This damn Russian bot has been trying to create fraudulent orders with stolen credit cards multiple times every day and Shopify blocks it 100% of the time. The bot used to not sign up for my email list, but all of a sudden now it is. Most of the time it used fake emails, but sometimes they'd use a real one and that person would mark me as spam.

So now my store's email is blacklisted by Comcast and I had to appeal, all because of that Russian bot.

Made a lot of changes to my opt-in process to keep the bot from continuing to put me on blacklists.