See this way of thinking has actually landed me in a pretty bad place with my mental health.

“I’m in charge of my own emotions” is not something an autistic person with rigid lines of thinking should internalise, but I did.

As a result I never gave myself permission to feel negative emotions, because who wants to feel negative about anything if they don’t have to?

It seemed so smart and healthy, just be happy, that’s what everyone always says about the easy fix to mental health. It was easy too, regardless what was happening around me, if I pictured myself feeling happy, I’d feel happy.

I’m in my 30s and regularly mistake sensations with other sensations (am I tired or do I need to pee? They both cause a headache) and also I think all my negative emotions are skipping my brain entirely and coming out my arse in the form of IBS.

I can’t picture myself feeling sad to experience sad because I …don’t remember what sad feels like.

I remember what vomiting feels like, because that’s how my body has reacted to “sad” recently.

This, if anything it might clarify a few confusing exchanges we’ve had in the past, and it will certainly help me be a better friend in the the future.

If I already know you, I know you, I’m choosing to be friends with you because of how you treat me and how you treat others when we hang out together. If I had any problems with that, I wouldn’t be friends long enough to hear you tell me about your NPD diagnosis.

Now that said, I’ve had friends tell me about a diagnosis and it shouldn’t change anything, but now that the diagnosis is out in the open they want it to change things and I can’t offer that to the friendship, such as compromising on my own boundaries (eg: I had a friend who after explaining their condition asked me to provide tone indicators for everything I say, but I have alexithymia so that was really difficult for me to do and I couldn’t adjust my behaviour to meet the new expectations of the friendship, so we faded out of each other’s lives, they told people I stopped being friends with them because of their anxiety disorder… No it’s because I couldn’t meet the changed expectations of the friendship, describing my emotions every minute is hard for me and I choose not to be friends with people who require me to do that for their comfort)

People’s work preferences are their own, these guys are having fun, good for them.

I always maintained I can’t work from home, I was forced to teach via zoom during lock downs and even now my job is hybrid, I teach in person in a shared classroom but I don’t have an office, I do all my prep and notes from home. Only I don’t. My productivity genuinely dropped when I lost my office.

Then I house sat for a friend who had a home office and I realised I can work from home, just not my home, because it’s not set up for work and my head space in my home can’t flip to that “productive mode”.

So now I go to the local library, which is better than my house but still not as good as an office because it’s still distracting.

But it depends on the type of work, I prefer lesson planning alone in quiet peace, I get so much done, but when we’re developing community events I love being in our open staff room with laptops out, some of us sitting on the floor, others standing and just shooting ideas around, we always get so much done.

But I’ve worked in other centres where that level of collaboration and communication wasn’t there - we didn’t have the right mix of personality types, and a workplace like my current staffroom would be chaos and nothing would get done.

I’m Australian and was always told the cover letter was unnecessary, especially if your CV has a bio.

The cover letter was for additional information not covered by the resume - name dropping the manager at the company you know who inspired you to apply, explaining why it appears your changing industries, justifying “overqualifications”, mentioning a personal hobby that’s relevant to the industry and isn’t technical work experience.

Basically the things you plan to bring up in the interview to wow them, you can introduce them while introducing yourself in a cover letter.

But if your resume lines up with the position description, you don’t need a cover letter.

Basically I was told a cover letter is necessary when you’re a burnt out nurse or teacher applying to be a cashier at kmart to avoid having your resume immediately thrown out.

That said. I’ve literally never written one, even as a serial industry hopper. If there’s no email address to send my resume too, then the system is too auto for a cover letter and they don’t want to read it anyway, if there is an email address, just include a few lines of a short cover letter in the body text of the email before attaching your resume.

In Australia cigarettes are sold behind the counter, all packets are identical brown with plain white text with the brand. You can’t smoke them in public, and they’re one of the highest taxed products (a 25 pack will easily cost you $50)

And yet we still have a major smoking problem here.

Mostly because of black market fags, $20 illegal import packs, and “vape wars”. It’s shocking when a tabbaconist shop doesn’t get fire bombed by a competing shop.

That said, the tax revenue is nice, if people wanna smoke the rest of the community may as well get something out of it.

Tax the birdie.

This, when I’ve got a new program or a program has updated I take my time to familiarise myself with it, it takes me more than five minutes because I’m visually impaired and have a learning disability, but it doesn’t take that long and I have fun exploring the program without pressure.

But when a program updates the UI the morning I start work and I realise I’ve got 5 minutes to figure out where everything has moved? It’s overwhelming and unfortunately I have a “freeze” response to stress and it took me years of therapy to push through that gut instinct to freeze up and just stare at it feeling like it’s too much and I can’t.

That said, I do still really struggle to find the button mid-meeting. I can vamp, but I can’t vamp while properly searching my screen because with my visual impairment that takes too much concentration, so the result is “okay I’m going to share my screen, but my UI has updated so everyone go refresh your coffees while I hunt down the screen share button” and some helpful person will try to explain where the button is, not understanding that my screen doesn’t look like there’s because I have adaptive software making things larger.

Though a few times I’ve logged a ticket to IT saying “I’m sorry, I know the issues exists between keyboard and chair on this one, I can’t for the life of me find the print button” and they’ll remote into my machine and say “oh, that’s because you’re enlarged font has pushed half your toolbar off the screen entirely. You’re missing a bunch of features” and suddenly it made sense why I felt like my co-workers were more efficient in these programs. Unfortunately they couldn’t fix it so I still have to work around only being able to see half the screen of this program they suggested “returning everything to the original aspect ratio and getting better glasses”

My boss seems to think our little 2 man IT department can fix Adobe’s bad adaptive UI.

Yes and no, applying for accommodations is as fun and easy as pulling out your own teeth with a rubber chicken.

It took months to get the paperwork organised and the conversations started around accommodations I needed for my disability, I realised halfway through I had to simplify what I was asking for and just deal with some less than accessible issues because the process of applying for disability accommodations was not accessible and I was getting rejected for simple requests like “can I reserve a seat in the front row because I can’t get up the stairs, and I can’t get there early because I need to take the service elevator to get to the lecture hall, so I’m always waiting on the security guard”

My teachers knew I had a physical disability and had mobility accommodations, some of them knew that the condition I had also caused a degree of sensory disability, but I had nothing formal on the paperwork about my hearing and vision loss because I was able to self manage with my existing tools.

I didn’t need my teachers to do anything differently so I didn’t see the point in delaying my education and putting myself through the bureaucratic stress of applying for visual accommodations when I didn’t need them to be provided to me from the university itself.

Obviously if I’d gotten a result of “you cheated” I’d immediately get that paperwork in to prove I didn’t cheat, my voice over reader just gave me the ChatGPT instructions and I didn’t realise it wasn’t part of the assignment… But that could take 3-4 months to finalise the accommodation process once I become aware that there is a genuine need to have that paperwork in place.

He’s also not a racist!

And if my yeasty poison goes bad, I’ll just pour it over some poisonous leaves, I love salad.

Don’t forget to season it with minerals you chipped off a rock in a dried out lake bed.

This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can’t stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.

But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.

Self driving cars will kill people, they’ll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.

So do cars driven by humans.

Human driven cars kill a lot of people.

Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can’t truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don’t expect that of the humanity driven cars.

This is a common misconception with “charity shops” in the UK and “opportunity (op) shops” in Australia.

The assumption is that the charity/opportunity is for people doing it tough to be able to buy cheap clothes and home goods.

But the “charity” is because many shops like this are partner retailers of larger charity organisations, eg: the “profit” from Salvos stores helps indirectly fund Salvation Army Housing and food relief programs.

The opportunity comes from who they hire, if you’re disabled or elderly, these shops are more likely to hire you than other retail providers.

But of course, a large number of charity and op shops abuse their staff as much as Amazon and Walmart do. Wage theft and unethical labour practices galore

I managed to go all of 22-28 never once being carded for anything.

When I hit 30 I started getting carded for things I’d never been carded for before, even the milk bar I’d bought smokes at for 10 years, same guy and his son running it, suddenly started carding me.

That’s how I learned the ID that I’d been carrying around for 10-11 years since getting my photo ID in highschool was functionally useless, because hardly anywhere would accept it as legal ID despite it being legal ID.

I had to keep the website for the government list of ID boolmarkef so I could show doubtful cashiers that my ID was indeed federally accepted, legal and valid ID.

I went to try and get a different type of ID last year which is how it found out that despite being born in my country to a citizen of my country, and having my birth recorded and receiving my birth certificate. Somehow I’m not actually a citizen of my own country and I can’t get a passport…so I’m trying to navigate that system but that’s extra fun and confusing because I have neurodevelopmental issues and no one to help me understand what I need to to do.

I just want to be able to buy alcohol as a person in their 30s, without having to jump through impossible hoops to prove that I’m not not 17.

I’ve got smile lines and the beginnings of crows feet, I am weathered! Why am it getting carded now

Pretty sure I still catch myself smiling over the girl in highschool 18 years ago that said she was jealous because I had really long and pretty eyelashes.

Wow, that kind of blows my mind to think about, cleaning is often the longest part of preparing and eating food for me. I hate doing it and I will choose what I’m cooking and how to cook it based on the dishes in prepared food to wash up.

My partner once asked why the carrots I cook are always chipped in a rustic style …because I’m not dirtying a chipping board for a carrot, I fruit ninja that shit.

But I’ve come to find the cleaning up therapeutic, it makes me feel like the process is over, it’s a sense of completion and a job well done.

That said, it’s only therapeutics when it’s my dishes, and I’ve got a clean kitchen. If I’m working around, or expected to deal with someone else’s dishes, I’m having a protein shake for dinner, because I will lose my temper at inanimate object trying to cook in someone else’s mess or having to do 2-3 loads of dishes so I can eat 1 meal.

It helps that I’d had several previous surgeries, so I’d had practice at keeping my cool. Plus my surgeon was in discussion with me for months with multiple consultations to really understand the issue, I don’t think I could have possibly been in safer hands.

Regional Australia. I know they’re common in new builds, but not the kind of landlord special flips I’ve lived in obviously 😂.

Well either it’s 1 in 10,0000 in my country, or the department of health, my surgeon and GP are all missing a zero… which isn’t more likely because there’s no way our risk would be that much higher than the UK, and the NHS public health resources is 100,000.

Well then it’s definitely a deal breaker 😂

(Are dishwashers that common in the states? I’ve lived in 16 houses and never had one, when friends get them installed it’s a celebration, they’re dishwasher owning kind of people now, fancy)

Depending on what you’re treating, 50% sounds pretty good.

I remember when I went for my last surgery and I was signing all the consent forms, my doctor was emphasising the 17% chance of this known lifelong complication, and the increased 4% chance of general anaesthesia fatality (compared to 1 in 10,000 for general public).

My mum was freaking out because when she had the same surgery she’d been seen much earlier in the disease process, she wasn’t expecting such a “high” risk of complications in my care.

But all I was hearing is that there’s an over 80% chance it will be a success. Considering how limited and painful my life was by the thing we were treating, it was all no brainier, I liked those odds. Plus my condition is diagnosed 1 in 100,000 people, so how much data could my surgeon really have on the rate of risk, the sample size would be laughable.

Still the best decision of my life, my surgeon rolled his skilled dice, I had zero complications (other than slow wound healing but we expected and prepared for that). I threw my crutches in the trash 2 years later, and ran for the first time in my life at 27 years old after being told at 6 years old that I’d be a full time wheelchair user by 30.

Unfortunately the models are have trained on biased data.

I’ve run some of my own photos through various “lens” style description generators as an experiment and knowing the full context of the image makes the generated description more hilarious.

Sometimes the model tries to extrapolate context, for example it will randomly decide to describe an older woman as a “mother” if there is also a child in the photo. Even if a human eye could tell you from context it’s more likely a teacher and a student, but there’s a lot a human can do that a bot can’t, including having common sense to use appropriate language when describing people.

Image descriptions will always be flawed because the focus of the image is always filtered through the description writer. It’s impossible to remove all bias. For example, because of who I am as a person, it would never occur to me to even look at someone’s eyes in a portrait, let alone write what colour they are in the image description. But for someone else, eyes may be super important to them, they always notice eyes, even subconsciously, so they make sure to note the eyes in their description.