Zoe @ekg@librem.one

When I was six, I asked for a pair of roller skates for Christmas. On Christmas morning, I opened my present to find a single roller skate.

I knew my parents didn’t have a lot of money, so I was still grateful and determined to make it work and I thanked my mom and dad and went outside to play with my roller skate.

I proceeded to “skate” along the curb with the roller skate on my right foot and my sneaker on my left foot and I was honestly having a blast when my mom came outside.

Mom: Uhhh…what are you doing?
Me: I’m roller skating, mom!
Mom: Yeah, but why are you only wearing one of your roller skates?
Me: There are TWO skates?!?

It turns out my mom wrapped the roller skates separately to give me more presents to open, but the other roller skate got buried in the Christmas morning shuffle and nobody noticed because I didn’t say anything about only receiving one roller skate.

Today marks ten years since I lost my mom and, every so often, I remember that day because it was so very her, doing whatever she could with what she had, even if it meant wrapping presents separately to make me feel like I had more.

If your mom is still around, hold her tightly. If she’s gone, remember the good times fondly.

"A sugar replacement called erythritol – used to add bulk or sweeten stevia, monkfruit and keto reduced-sugar products – has been linked to blood clotting, stroke, heart attack and death, according to a new study."

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/27/health/zero-calorie-sweetener-heart-attack-stroke-wellness/index.html

Today on the first day of Women’s History Month I learned that after no fault divorce was finally legalized in 1970, female suicide rates dropped 20%🤯

The "strong 1950s family unit" that the GOP is nostalgic about ignores record high female suicide, suffocating domestic violence, & zero female financial autonomy.

But maybe that's GOP's goal all along?🤔
#WHM2023

"We can absolutely convert offices to housing. We can do even more if we shorten timelines, simplify the process, and streamline approval. There's no reason we should leave floors and buildings empty indefinitely while the need for new housing is so massive and urgent."

Matt Haney

This hits a little close to the mark...

#hobbies

This is an unconventional but interesting usage of Mesa in X-Plane:

https://developer.x-plane.com/2023/02/addressing-plugin-flickering/

Really cool to see what Zink is enabling.

It seems like the majority of medically-recognised #Autistic traits are not autistic traits per se.

They are trauma responses common in autistic people.

I'm "more interested in things than people?" Maybe "things" don't turn hostile on me for unexplained reasons.

I'm dogmatically insistent that nobody can understand my mind but me? Maybe my entire childhood was spent resisting adults telling me they knew my mind better than I did.

This is also why "autistic traits" can seem contradictory. Both "talks about their interests all the time even in inappropriate settings" and "never talks about their interests" can be part of a diagnosis.

Because the latter is a trauma response to having the former shut down.

Is there an untraumatised autistic person?

I actually don't think so. So the map of what autism looks like to clinicians is shaped by our trauma.

And this probably compounds their impression that we're somehow defective, which in turn compounds the attitudes used to break us.

I just wanna be seen as a person.

kept typoing "ls" as "lsd" so i fixed it

This tracks. OpenAI used underpaid gig workers in Kenya to make ChatGPT function as advertised. And they forced those workers to look at and classify abusive content all day. So weird how the new miracle tech turned out to be the old capitalist abuse of labor trick.
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/