Notices by J. R. DePriest :verified_trans: :donor: :Moopsy: :EA DATA. SF: (jrdepriest@infosec.exchange)

@kaia this is the only "Trump Derangement Syndrome" I'll get behind: emulating his "look".

The entire world is burning and I feel powerless.

But my wife had neurosurgery a week and a half ago to remove a tumor, she got to go home the next day because she did so well, and the initial biopsy says it's not cancerous.
So, I can still smile and be happy about something.

I hope you all have something, too.

:neocat_hug:

Autistic Star Trek TNG fans: did you find yourself studying Data for tips on how to act like a normal human, or was that just me?

#ActuallyAutistic #StarTrek #TNG #DataHadEmotionsAllAlong

GOG are doubling down on game preservation, and making it easier to see which games run well on modern PCs | Rock Paper Shotgun

GOG harkening back to "Good Old Games".
It's a great way to differentiate themselves on top of "no DRM".

Maybe someday someone will be able to get some lawyer to find the paperwork for who owns "No One Lives Forever" so it can be updated and preserved.
None of my current laptops even have a CD-ROM drive to read my disks and the hacks to get them running still leave them at an ancient, tiny resolution.

@youronlyone @StevenSaus @autistics @actuallyautistic

I honestly don't know. I have theories, but they are just theories.
I'd love to see some research on it.

I had another idea though.
Write your stories the way you want to write them then work with an editor to cut out bits until it's neurotypical.
I have a tendency to overdescribe and to do a lot of telling instead of showing.
I can write something that way and have a kind editor to guide me into cutting, elaborating, or changing how it was written.

You just start building on your base. I typically re-edit a story at least twice based on feedback and re-reads with a critical eye.

"Look at him," I said, noting his ragged breathing, pronounced limp, and complete inability to look at us. "He's almost finished."

vs.

I studied his condition. Trouble getting enough air. Leg dragging behind him. He seems to be ignoring us even as we are loudly gaining on his position.
"Look at him," I tell my companion. "he's almost finished.

vs.

The depth of the tracks, the trough on the left, I wasn't surprised his leg was dragging. We could hear his gasps before we saw him, buried under muttered curses. He wasn't trying to hide and neither were we. But he just kept going, jerking step after jerking step, just pulling that useless leg behind. He didn't even turn around.
It was obvious.
I shake my head, almost feeling pity.
"Look at him," I whisper to my fellow tracker, not taking eyes off our stumbling prey.
"He's almost finished."

@youronlyone @autistics @actuallyautistic

If you've read many books and watched TV or movies over the years, you can learn how to emulate what is expected. With that said, it can be difficult to avoid coming across as cliché.
There aren't any specific books or movies I could recommend. I've read hundreds of books and seen thousands of movies and TV shows. I made a point to study how "normal" people do things because, for a long time, I wanted to be like that.
The trick is learning to take the essence of various scenes and blend them together so it doesn't read like a rehash.
Often, that involves a great deal of practice and having neurotypical readers give you their opinions as you are creating it.

I also think about my neurotypical family and friends that I grew up with and try to ask "what would they do?" and play that story out. If I know them well enough or have enough experience with being present for their reactions to things, I can write about it honestly.

My wife is more ADHD than autistic (although is a little bit autistic) and I rely on her to help steer my writing and provide suggestions. She's also an excellent editor.

The other option is to just write more autistic characters and hope you find your audience.

I do a little bit of both but I have no real audience to speak of so perhaps my advice isn't that great.
I love to write and I love to write from other points of view when I can even if I cannot truly understand them.

@StevenSaus @youronlyone @autistics @actuallyautistic

Considering how popular movies that are just "rehashes" seem to be, it makes sense.
They want what reminds them of the way something else made them feel.

This is a long one folks, but I'm on my Vyvanse and I wanted to talk about what it meant to me realizing I wasn't neurotypical as a 40 year old person.

Discovering I was neurodivergent as an adult, as a middle-aged adult, has been eye-opening.
First, I learned that I was never the lazy, stupid, not-trying-hard-enough, can't sit still, "stop moving!", "why are you humming?", etc person I was always told I was.
I was able to look back and see that the world was hostile to people like me and that it wasn't my fault and that, contrary to what I had been told, I wasn't broken.
I was just different.
I could see myself and my life through kinder eyes and stop repeating the abuse that I experiences from people trying to push me to be "normal".
I could silence the voices in my head telling me how worthless I am.
I could understand "why" I was the way I was and why it wasn't something I could simply change away if I had enough will power.

Anyone who is late diagnosed can relate to that.
You are not alone.
You are not defective.
You are just different.

And, yes, it made me acutely aware of all the internalized ableism I had toward neorudivergence. I thought I was broken and wrong and needed to try harder. I thought everybody was supposed to be normal, neurotypical.

What I didn't expect and never realized is that I was using those same harsh, unrealistic guidelines to judge others. I was being an asshole bitch to other neurodivergent people.
I felt like I was doing them a favor by pointing out their faults because that's what had always been done to me.
I thought that was the right way to relate to them.
I didn't see them as kindred people to join hands with but as broken people who hadn't been pushed hard enough to get get better like I did, that hadn't learned all the masking techniques I had learned, that didn't push themselves into meltdowns trying to be "normal". And I blamed them for it.
Because I had always blamed myself for my life, and so had everyone else.
My problems were my fault so their problems had to be theirs.

I was part of the problem and I didn't notice until I received a diagnosis. I didn't notice until I understood that being the way I am is not an error or a problem to be solved and that the world of neurotypical folks is unusually cruel to people who think differently or who don't value the arbitrary rules of culture.

I see my friends, my family, my co-workers all in a different light now. I recognize their neurodivergence and, instead of seeing it as a flaw or weakness, I just see it as a difference. Better, it is a difference that I have been taught how to accommodate by the neurodivergent community at large and by mental health professionals helping me.
For the guy at work who is clearly an undiagnosed autistic, I make sure I spell out everything explicitly when I send an email or a message so there are as few ambiguities as possible. For the folks with ADHD, I do not take their inability to stay on task as a personal attack.
I'm trying to give them the kindness and compassion that I always appreciated even before I was diagnosed. I want them to see that they are not broken or wrong or backwards. They are valued human beings and they have their own strengths that a neurotypical person would never be able to reach.
That autistic guy makes some of the most thorough documentation you'll see and, if you want someone to tell you how to do things by the book, he's the one.
For the various ADHD folks, I know when I have something novel and new, I can rely on them to jump in and give me fast feedback and opinions.

So, finding out you are neurodivergent doesn't just help you see yourself and your past in a new light; it helps you see everyone in your life in a new way.
That's why it's important to know.

#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #ADHD #Neurodivergent

Hey this sums it up really well.

@jeffowski

Ranting about genAI.

When you are not skilled in a certain thing, you likely have no idea what it takes to be "good" at it.
As a layman, you scarcely even know what questions to ask. And if your interest is only passing or surface level, you won't bother with the introspection necessary to see the depth. The surface is all it will be to you.
When you watch a master, they make it look easy, therefore it must be easy for everyone.
They think, "anybody could do that".
They believe in the American Dream, that talent and perseverance are rewarded with wealth. If you are not well-known, you are not worth it.

I think this is fueling the overreliance on genAI.

Who cares if it was fed the life's work of every writer and artist who ever lived with no recognition or compensation? They should have better protected and monetized their work. The genAI is doing what people do, what any person could do. It's combining and synthesizing, it's creating derivative works. Just like a person.
Do they think any person could sit down and study millions of written words and create something new that shares the same voice, any voice you choose? Do they think they could do it "if they had time".
How much time?
Years? Decades?
If they wanted to, right?
But they just want the output and the freedom to reject it or accept it without consequence, without having "wasted" their own time.

"How did you learn to write like that?" I might be asked.
"I've been writing creatively since I could write," I'd say. "Poems, stories, letters, essays, journals, whatever I could find.
"I never stopped reading books as I grew up.
"I kept writing when nobody else cared, nobody else read what I wrote.
"Even when it wasn't very good, I kept writing.
"Especially when it wasn't very good.
"It all matters. It all teaches me something."

"Oh, I thought you went to school for it."
And I am dismissed as less than. My work, meaningless.
"I could have done that," they think. "I could have done that but I had better things to do with my time and energy."

And that dismissive thought gives them permission to use genAI. Living their lives for something "better" than sitting around actually writing all the time gives them permission because they are "better" than me. They didn't waste time like I did. I should have just been a good writer from the start. It should have been obvious I was a master from the beginning.
I wasted so much time becoming mediocre instead of finding my true talents.
They won't make that mistake.
They will craft elegant prompts for the genAI and it will create something beautiful for them. It will prove that my choices were wrong and theirs were right.

That the genAI would have nothing to regurgitate without millions of people like me, writing and writing and writing, does not matter.
We were all fools and should have known a machine would one day take our works and improve upon them.

It is a lie they tell themselves even as the AI models are already dying from eating their own shit. They are collapsing under the weight of their own spurious garbage because they cannot create. It is illusion, artifice.
A comforting fiction.
To them, it removes the artist from the equation, democratizing creation.
No longer reserved for those with skill.

It is unsustainable. It is already failing.
But it is backed by wealth, by the people who truly despise relying on humans for talent, because humans have wants, needs, desires. Opinions. A human can say "no" or ask for more money or ask for time off to spend with family. A human needs to sleep.
They will ride this steam powered platinum train all the way down, until it derails and bursts into toxic flames, and then blame us for being fooled.

GenAI, the way it is being sold to us today, is a dead end. They know. They know it's devastating to the environment. They know it devalues actual human creativity. They know it churns out lies and fabrications. They know it's being used for massive disinformation campaigns, to build phishing platforms, social networking bots, to inflate news stories, to flood publishers with worthless submissions.
But, today, it makes money.
Today, it makes a prompt engineer feel like an artist.

The people who create should be more important than their creations. The value is in the person who knows how to hold a pen and write or draw, in the artist who paints, the sculptor.
Without creators, we stop growing. We stop seeing ourselves in new ways.
We stagnate and become insular. We look backwards.
We lose our own humanity.

@ryanc

What if your password is:
They said I had to use a passphrase now?

#WhenIDream

This morning I had one of those "back in high school, but I don't have any books or a schedule" dreams.
I went into a random classroom that I thought had been my French class.
I sat at an empty desk.
The teacher was out of the room and one of the students was sitting at her desk as "in charge".
I started using telekinesis to move things on the desk. Just a tiny bit. I made something jump. I made the ice cubes in a glass climb up the side.
I was so good at it, I didn't even have to look at the things to make them move.
The movements were subtle enough that they weren't even sure they were happening.
I thought about flipping the lights on and off.
Instead, I stood up and levitated in front of the classroom, floating in front of everybody.
I told them all this was a dream, but none of them believed me.
I made a gesture and the desks parted to each side so that there was a clear path down the middle to a back table.
I shot fire out of my hands and caught the table on fire.
I then quickly flew over to the fire and proceeded to call water from my hands to put the fires out. I told them fire in dreams has a tendency to spread really fast.

Nobody believed it was a dream.
Nobody really questioned why I had mystical abilities, but nobody joined me, either.
I wanted the whole class to start doing stuff. I wanted to see what they would do with the knowledge that they could do anything.
Turns out, they'd just sit at their desks and wait for the teacher to get back.

That happens often in my dreams.
Nobody else in the dream ever believes them when I tell them it's a dream even when I'm obviously doing impossible things.
My subconscious lacks imagination sometimes.

@kaia

wanted to be her

@jeffowski
Even Bernie would have been a compromise but Trump is a disaster, just the worst nuclear disaster trainwreck.

@jeffowski

Our two-party system sucks real bad, but I'm going to vote for fucking Biden because I'm a transgender woman taking care of a disabled woman and if Trump or the current crop of Christofascist Republicans obtain full power, both of us will be subject to the full might of the US government.

I have a very "shot in the dark" ask about my favorite Tarot card deck.

Have you heard of the Mage The Ascension Tarot?
I bought a deck in 1995 when it came out. I still have it and it is my favorite deck. It's been my deck of choice since I bought it. I even preferred it over my Rider-Waite-Smith deck and, when I went through my hyper-Christian blow-back phase, it's the one deck I couldn't bring myself to toss out.

Bad news: I damaged two of the cards while doing a reading. I dropped them and tried to catch them with my legs which creased them down the middle. They are now both unusable in readings because they stand out.

I am aware that you can order reprints from places like DriveThruRPG but those are slightly different cards on different cardstock. The original designs were lost in a fire, I think, so these are more like scanned reprints.

Does anyone, anywhere have the original deck or just the two cards I damaged and would be willing to sell them to me?

I only included a photo of the back of one of the cards since the crease is the same on both of them.

I know it's a bit silly to be so enamored of a novelty deck like this, but I played a lot of World of Darkness mostly Vampire and Mage with a bit of Werewolf. I had the book for Changeling and the supplement for Mummy, but we didn't play them much. A friend of mine had Wraith but we never got into that at all.
I still have all my books downstairs actually, mostly 1st editions save for Vampire which is 2nd edition now.

#MageTheAscension #MageTheAscensionTarot #OWOD #OldWorldOfDarkness #WorldOfDarkness #WhiteWolf #VampireTheMasquerade #Tarot #Pagan #Divination

@afeinman
$250 was the cheapest I saw last time I looked.
Nostalgia is a helluva drug.

@pettter
The Stock Market was a mistake.

@dgar

@AnarchoNinaWrites
That's either ignorance or dog whistling for trans misogyny. It's just close enough to the line to be plausibly deniable but still "put us in our place".
Kind of the same thing nazis and racists do all the fucking time. It's almost like all people are trash and have biases they need to fucking check before slapping someone else around. As someone else posted "check that beam in your eye before barking about the speck in mine, asshole". I think that's how it was in the Bible, anyway.