Alex C

#actuallyautistic @ActuallyAutistic@autistics.life
#pda

If I may, I'd like to push back on retro-acronyming "Pathological Demand Avoidance" as "Persistent Drive for Autonomy".

To me, that retcon misses the key point and is too positive (even pollyannish) -- for me PDA is an active repulsive force, pushing me away from things that I *want* to do *for myself* and if they're too demandy, I just can't. That's not a drive for autonomy; it's a drive *away* from autonomy.

In fact, if others ask nicely, and I've got the time and the spoons, I *love* their non-autonomous demands: they help me focus and feel useful and productive.

Maybe "Paradoxical Demand Avoidance" would avoid the vaguely-demeaning clinical adjective "pathological", but that other phrase is too euphemistic for me to embrace. Paradoxes are puzzling, but not demeaning: they are mysteries that don’t make sense on the surface, but once you dig deeper, you can see past their apparent self-contradiction.

I used pi to bake my pie! The bottom crust was a bit too small, so it didn’t quite reach the lip of the pan in all spots. So I decided to use some spare dough to roll out a noodle to stretch around the edge, to give my lattice something to grip onto. But how long should the noodle be? Well, it’s a nine-inch pan, and π is the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter, so 9π =~28”.

It’s #baking now.

Have you noticed that the term "entitled", in becoming an insult, has now reversed its meaning from a decade or two ago?
It used to be, oh, you're entitled to this thing, meaning you actually deserve it.
Now you call someone entitled because you think they *don't* deserve it. Because they're *acting* entitled to something they haven't earned.
How about that?
Isn't it weird how #language works?

pie test zero phase one complete

everything’s cooling now; #baking commences in T minus 1 hour or so

i'm trying (really) to start writing again. I was blogging in the 90s before it was called that, starting with a personal mailing list, moving onto the nascent WWW

(sadly i lost my "Almanac" archive from that era, maybe it's on a hard drive somewhere)

lately I'm struggling to code up a POSSE system so I can (eventually) give someone a single URL to follow to download my brain in textual format, as it was in times of yore