Bix Dot Blog

Me among the Douglas firs Today began with the death of David Lynch. I’ve mentioned Twin Peaks any number of times here, being the most central of his works in my life. Of what of my blogging that’s been restored so far, the earliest mention relates the night in 1990 that I tried to dream of Bob. Twin Peaks premiered when I was in college. I...

Recently I switched my breakfasts from a simple bowl of oatmeal to a breakfast skillet of frozen hash browns, frozen sausage links, and eggs from a carton. This fairly straightforward decision became something of a minor ordeal third thing every “morning”, after cleaning up and getting dressed, because the frying pan that’s part of my GreenLife...

So, I have talked a lot here about catastrophizing and the fact that I find it a critical flavor of autistic scripting. Underpinning this is the idea that anticipatory anxiety is better than compensatory, because the latter actually can lead inappropriately and disastrously to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It was on my mind this week because...

Former candidate for the position from District 3, Jon Walker (tagline: “He’s Boring”), has been insisting for days on Bluesky that “voters were repeatedly told” that the Mayor would have the tie-breaking vote, period—including in the matter of the Council electing its own President. Yesterday, I addressed what the Charter provides on this count....

Yesterday I got up early, sat my iPad on an articulated arm attached to my nightstand, and watched the first session of Portland City Council under its new form of government with councilors elected from geographical districts. If you read anything about the session, you probably know that it took multiple rounds of voting to elect a Council...

The day before therapy last week, my last session of the year, I’d realized that tracking the books I read, and the movies and television shows I watch, has something of a self-regulatory effect despite the rhythms involved being more irregular than regular. It’s not a way in which I’ve previously thought about this habit. At any rate, culture is...

As I noted back in October, “there are exactly two days every year that like clockwork make me feel the weight of living”: my birthday, and New Year’s Day. For the past two years, at the end of this annual hellscape, I’ve published a sort of round-up offering my picks for what I find to be my best blog posts of the year ending. It’s a way of...

The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost.5 It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we...

For years now in these pages I’ve wondered about trauma absent memory, by which I meant the impact of the sensory envelope of aphantasia upon the laying down of trauma in the brain. It’s of interest to me not just as an aphantasic but as an autistic adult in a world of normativity, and what’s more as someone who was unknowingly autistic in that...

As various parties grapple with Representative Nancy Mace’s bigoted and transphobic campaign against Representative Sarah McBride, as well as McBride’s decision to “accept” Speaker Mike Johnson’s rule banning transgender people from bathrooms matching their gender despite disagreeing with it, I want to focus on something from Representative...

There’s some annoyed chatter on social over Semafor, in an item in their latest newsletter about Jonathan Chait heading to The Atlantic, outing some remarks made in Ed Yong’s private Instagram. The specifics caught my attention because something didn’t seem right. We’re told that health journalist Ed Yong, whose COVID reporting for The Atlantic...

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as...

In the end, after the past week of watching this take and that take, but mostly just avoiding any real bothering with any takes at all, about how the election went the way it did, I’ve settled in the only place that makes any sense to me. Whatever the perceived self-interest of any given Mine Furor voter—be it caste allegiance or aspiration,...

Ashley Fairbanks: Let me share my lifelong dream for the left: taking over fraternal organizations (Moose, Oddfellows, Etc.) They are 501c8s, which is basically impossible to get now. Most of them own property, they often have liquor licenses that are grandfathered in. We could have clubhouses! This morning, via Rob Horning, I saw Henry Farrell...

Apparently my family back east has been arguing late into the night about Israel and Gaza, and I’ll get to the actual point in a minute but I just need to say that this goes in the column against moving out there some day and losing all my independence (you know, the thought that gives me vague and uncomfortable ideations), because holy hell...

As I was catching up on some reading while being subjected to yet another bout of morning insomnia after feeding the cat at eight o’clock, I caught Dave’s list of Democratic mistakes. Take a hard look at what he deems their fourth such. Men’s votes need to be sought and welcomed, specifically. So much has been done to alienate male voters, which...

As I was catching up on some reading while being subjected to yet another bout of morning insomnia after feeding the cat at eight o’clock, I caught Dave’s list of Democratic mistakes. Take a hard look at what he deems their fourth such. Men’s votes need to be sought and welcomed, specifically. So much has been done to alienate male voters, which...

Since I talked about election night and I talked about the day after, and since I’ve (mostly) been limiting my social use to posting photos from the Camp Snap camera of my trip to the zoo, let’s talk a bit about today, although this will have some of those other days, too. Yesterday morning I had a dream that wound its way into my therapy notes...

You don’t need me to tell you what happened: Mine Furor once again has happened here, with a very real possibility that the Republicans, having already taken the Senate, also manage to keep control of the House, in which case in just 75 days a fully fascist government is installed across all three branches of government in the United States....

As evening breaks here in Portland on Election Night, here’s a very short look at how things are going over here for me at the moment, on a day on which I stuck to the usual routine until lunchtime. First, while I had some morning insomnia starting before six o’clock in the morning, I did eventually get back to sleep and overnight the intensity...

If only the day of my birth had fallen in November rather than October, my post of deep, existential despair easily could have doubled as my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival on impact, hosted by Alexandra, for reasons I’d hope are evident at least in retrospect if not entirely obvious at the time. I’ve only ever contributed to a carnival...

There’s lot of things I don’t know about, even as I’ve aspired to broaden the reach of my awareness. I’ve mentioned before how social media (specifically, at the time, Twitter) almost was single-handedly responsible for exposing me to lived experiences not my own, often by expanding the range of authors and books I choose to read fiction and...

This month, the Simons Foundation’s SPARK had autism researcher J. Kiely Law, M.D., MPH answer questions about autism research, and it should come as no surprise that I have something to say about it, especially since the very first question is about the phrase “evidence-based”. Q: The terms “evidence-based medicine and treatment” or...

Last week I outlined some communication problems I’ve been having with my primary care physician. I’ve had this doctor for about a year after my previous one unfortunately left Kaiser Permanente, and I chose them based in large part upon browsing the profiles Kaiser doctors have the opportunity to post online. At any rate, this month I’ve been...

Being a lifelong, born-and-raised Red Sox fan, there’s no reason for me to be paying any attention whatsoever to this year’s World Series, not that I have access to it anyway. That said, being a lifelong, born-and-raised Red Sox fan I am, of course, contractually obligated to be rooting against the New York Yankees. Fortunately, this is made all...

There was a thing going around on social about naming a movie that was released the year you were born. Having decided I’d narrow things down to my actual birth month for the sake of as much temporal accuracy as possible, that meant that I was, and am, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid years old. (Yes, for real I was going on hiatus due to...

Well, I am going back to not blogging for a bit, and stopping all work on the restoration project, because after conforming hundreds and hundreds of internal links to the new (and hopefully forever) permalinks format, it turns out that Weblog.LOL’s handling of dates is fucked up, and even if it got solved despite the service being frozen because...

At some point in the night I awoke from a dream with a single word in my mind. Each and every time waking after this, when I’d normally try to remember any dreams to add later to my notes for therapy, instead I told myself to remember this name: Telemachus. I’m not a woo-woo guy. I don’t believe in divination, by dream or otherwise. I’m quite...

Let’s try something else, in the form of a sort of “heard” directed at another blogger. Misu opens their latest with an observation: Recently I’ve noticed that we have a lot of RCA Victor records. Each time I pull one out I find myself looking at the dog. His name is Nipper, apparently. Indeed, that’s Nipper, and when I was younger my family...

While the day itself saw a long and discursive post about autism, chronic fatigue, sarcoidosis, and death—featuring, among other things, Carl Linnaeus, J. D. Salinger, Heartbreak High, Oregon Zoo, Soul Coughing, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Powers, Shoplifters of the World, and The Bear—having been written the night before it says...

Daily we die; the passage of any hour you choose subtracts a portion of life. You have already died a considerable portion of your death. – Carl Linnaeus In early 2018, I legally changed my name to the one by which I’d been known for decades in all ways but the legal and official, the pronunciation of an abbreviated bastardization of an online...

I’ve been having a number of communications problems in my interactions with my doctors at Kaiser lately, and it’s becoming one of those things where the burden and onus entirely is placed upon me to sort out, and that’s exhausting for the actually autistic and chronically fatigued, to have to be constantly micromanaging things just to make sure...

When I moved to my current Portland neighborhood back in late 2018, I opted to switch my banking to a credit union half a block from my front door. This decision today made what otherwise would have been an exhausting problem into a minor headache. Early this morning, I received two texts and a voicemail purporting to be a declined transaction...

Once upon a time, I spent three years writing a blog called Portland Communique. It was well-regarded, well-read, and one of the few examples of what some called “stand-alone journalism” around at the time. For awhile afterward on my personal blog FURIOUS nads!, I continued to stick my nose into local affairs and elections. I don’t really talk...

Winnie has a lot to say on the matter of endurance as informed by her own experience combined with reading a book on the subject, and I don’t have much to say here but I wanted to think out loud a bit about the idea that “being mentally exhausted impacts our physical performance too”. Even before my presumptive ME/CFS diagnosis (my primary care...

Over on social I’d come across this by Liam Konemann for The Guardian about music clubs and gigs for neurodivergent people, which I read mostly through the lens of having just attended a concert as an autistic person. I don’t really understand anything the article describes as the accommodations for neurodivergence, although I do appreciate the...

Kev is wondering if you ever read your old posts, while both Terence and Roy are tending the “old post” gardens of their blogs. Terence: Sometimes the work is delightful - finding a prescient post from a decade ago. Sometimes it is frustrating - being unable to find a vital-but-long-dead link. And sometimes it is sad - seeing how much or how...

My view at T-Mobile Park One of the last things I posted before quitting the blog in March was a thing about trying to see baseball for the first time in two decades by risking the exertion required to travel to Seattle for a Red Sox game as they played the Mariners in their opening weekend at home. I probably should follow up. (One of the things...

If you’ve been reading this for awhile, you know that part of the reason for registering this particular domain was an intention to restore over twenty years of blogging from across various and different sites, services, and domains. You can gather as much from the posts page. As of this week’s return to a previous service after returning to...

Wikipedia: The musica universalis (literally universal music), also called music of the spheres or harmony of the spheres, is a philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a form of music. The theory, originating in ancient Greece, was a tenet of Pythagoreanism, and was later...

The lack of title quotes should have been your hint that this post is not about The Wire, HBO’s seminal television series from the early 2000s. Rather, this is about Doctor Who, because back in June or July when I no longer was blogging I made a prediction on social media and I needed to get it down here for posterity. before the show returns....

For awhile now, the top item in the “now” list on my homepage has said, “Reading, reading, reading”—with an exhortation to gift me ebooks which links to sending a Kobo gift card, and since someone bought me a $50 such gift back in June I thought I’d mention what that’s gotten me so far. Generally, I borrow my ebooks from Libby/OverDrive and only...

Tonight I pulled the trigger on semi-rebooting the revived blog, moving from Pika back to Weblog.LOL (where it was before it moved back to WordPress before I quit in March), but for the time being only the posts since I resume blogging are here while I finish up the Markdown files for the 1,200-post archive-to-date. That import is some...

So, I wasn’t going to get into this despite getting irritated about it on social, but now there’s a story by Ali Breland writing for The Atlantic with the title,...

At the end of his apologia for the Social Web Foundation, Ben Werdmuller says this of what he terms both the growth fediverse and the movement fediverse: “Each group is approaching the problem in good faith.” The foundation’s very name disputes this contention. Inherent to the foundation’s formulation of itself and of the social web is the...

I’m not interested in getting into Freddie deBoer’s primary contention about people faking disabilities (via Sara Hendren), if only because I had my worst-ever fatigue day yesterday and today had...

Things here likely will remain silent for a bit, as I’ve an absolute ton of work to do to put the blog back on Weblog.LOL after leaving it for WordPress...

The man and a woman lead you around a corner into a sort of tunnel that seems to be made by a bunch of plywood flats leaning up against the...

Some folks have gotten themselves together as something they’re calling the Social Web Foundation, and I’ll cut to the chase: this is an attempt by ActivityPub partisans to rebrand the...

I’ve only just mentioned that I’m pausing the imports but not pausing new posts, but I wanted to note that at this point I’m likely moving off of Pika, although...

Everyone’s talking about Jemima Kelly writing for The Financial Times about how Bluesky is the return of the left/liberal echo chamber because (and I might be paraphrasing just a bit here)...

While I’m going to continue posting here, when there’s a reason for it, I’m holding off on manually importing any more old posts. The best thing about Pika is that...

[Mike Doughty, Sebastian Steinberg, Mark degli Antoni at Crystal Ballroom] It’s a very strange experience, seeing a band at the height of their career and then at a reunion show...

Whenever I bring up memory it inevitably also implicates my aphantasia, but this Musings post reminds me of that other mental process that causes much surprise at how different brains...

Recently I’ve been exploring, once again, options for book tracking that aren’t Goodreads, prompted in part by this very long read about the site. Whenever I do this, it quickly...

At the end of a long and trying day that did not go in any way that especially resembled how I’d hoped it would go, disability access designer Nick Colley...

Just a couple of weeks ago, I referenced what I called my aphantasiac monologue, an attempt to describe how i only can conceive of sounds, much as I only can...

[Cooper, 2013-2024] Earlier this week, Ross Andersen for The Atlantic considered the current state of comparative thanatology, or the question of how similar or dissimilar is the understanding of death from...

The more progressive side of things has done a somewhat decent job educating others about the shaming of other people’s bodies, to the point where body positivity and acceptance is...

For nine months now, I’ve been telling people about what I describe as “an objectively perfect movie”, one I’ve now seen four times since finally streaming it in January. It’d...

It’s happening. Or, one thing is happening. Whether or not the other thing happens along with it is up to you. Tomorrow marks the start of the completely surprising and...

Sometime after midnight on Wednesday morning, I had my first-ever lucid dreaming experience, and then later that morning my second. Each began with a cellphone that had been broken in...

I’ve been having some trouble for a few days now parsing the latest from Jonathan Malesic, intended as some sort of warning against something I missed him writing about before,...

This past Monday, I put Bix Dot Blog on an indefinite and somewhat indeterminate hiatus. That blog is where I’ve not only been posting but also slowly (so very, very...

As an actually-autistic Portlander, I hope that no one drops the ball on this proposal, and that city and county officials withstand the pushback against it. I need this noise...

Hot on the heels of my various posts about wanderlust and past travels, today as I watch a Red Sox exhibition game against the Northeastern Huskies to begin Spring Training,...

There’s a moment in Lost when Desmond is down in an access tunnel beneath the Swan station trying to turn a failsafe key while a recorded voice on a loop...

The sort of existential crisis I’ve been having lately about blogging happens to be coincident with the controversies over Automattic’s various deals to provide data for purchase, sometimes for the...

It started with an offhand mention on Mastodon that I’m tired of my blog design, again and already, then turned into a whole other thing on Bluesky because I do...

I’ll try not to belabor the issue, but obviously I am having some issues when it comes to what I want to be doing with my blogging, as well as...

While prophecies of the end of Usenet or the wider internet never came true, notwithstanding the latest variant that it’s already dead, this blog is coming to a close. Since...

In the Associated Press report on the Harris-Walz campaign accepting the proposed terms for the September debate between Kamala Harris and Mine Furor, most of the interest appears to be...