Askanautistic: When does “blunt” become “too blunt”?

One other #actuallyautistic I’ve been following is Penelope Trunk’s. She mainly gives advices on matters such as job search, relationship, life hacks, and the like.

The advice she has is extremely blunt and down-to-earth. She mainly describes facts (or, at least, supposed facts) and tells realistic ways to deal with such facts. Both are most likely not politically correct, to say the least.

I agree with this approach, generally speaking, because most advice blogs/articles are a bit too idealistic and they sound like they say something readers want to be told rather than what they need to be told. At the same time, I have read a few reviews saying that the advice is terrible, basically for the same reason. I am confused.

How does one distinguish between “realistic” and “overly blunt”?

3 months ago by happilyclueless  #actuallyautistic #askanautistic #advice  3 notes  View comments 
“Nothing is Right” by Michael Scott Monje jr. - book review [Picture: e-reader with book cover, plus a stim toy] I have been reading Michael’s blog for a while, and I was very happy when, a while back, he made available his novel “Nothing is Right” to download for free on Amazon. In this post, he wrote that the book will be again available for free next Sunday and Monday (Jan 27th/28th), and I encourage you to grab the chance, because the book is really worth reading. Coincidentally, I finished the book last night. [[MORE]] It was both a great read and a rather short one. It tells about the first school year of Clay Dillon, an very intelligent but socially awkward boy whose parents are not really supportive. As the (omniscent) narrator describes in lifelike detail the feelings and thoughts of the characters, we come to realize that Clay is, in fact, autistic, like his younger brother and, possibly, his closest friends.   This book is not the autobiography of the author, since all the facts are of his invention, but it does draw on his experience as autistic person. Clay’s feelings and thought are (sometimes painfully) authentic, and more often than not they go beyond the “typical” ones we find in other portrayals of autistic people. Some of those feelings are undoubtedly “just Clay’s”, but they are nonetheless entertwined with his condition. In many of them I really saw myself. For instance, He could feel Shawna being wrong, and that made it hard to concentrate. and He had no idea why they did this, but it was obvious that he was always the butt of the joke, he just had no idea what the joke was. In other ones I did not, because Clay is a boy who lived a story very different from mine own. The way his school and corsework was organized, his family history, and his social context, looked all quite foreign to me. Maybe a bit too much - I found quite hard to believe that certain things described in the book could actually happen. I would recommend this book to those who are curious about what goes on in the mind of an autistic kid who passes well as “normal”, and is interested in knowing how much the environment in which an autistic kid lives influences his self-esteem and well-being (and likewise, how much damage bad parenting can do).

“Nothing is Right” by Michael Scott Monje jr. - book review

[Picture: e-reader with book cover, plus a stim toy]

I have been reading Michael’s blog for a while, and I was very happy when, a while back, he made available his novel “Nothing is Right” to download for free on Amazon. In this post, he wrote that the book will be again available for free next Sunday and Monday (Jan 27th/28th), and I encourage you to grab the chance, because the book is really worth reading. Coincidentally, I finished the book last night.

Read More

3 months ago by happilyclueless  #book review #actuallyautistic #autism #lit #Nothing is Right  6 notes  View comments 

Liebster Blog Award

Musings of an Aspie nominated me for the “Liebster blog award”. It is some kind of social thing/chain that happens among bloggers and helps promoting not-so-known blogs, so I’ll gladly take the challenge. 

Liebster Award

The Liebster Award rules are:

  1. Give 11 random facts about me.
  2. Answer the 11 questions that Musings of an Aspie gave me.
  3. Make 11 new questions for the people I tag to answer.
  4. Tag 11 blogs that are new or have less than 200 followers.


I will do the fourth task first, because afterwards I’ll put the “read more” thing. I will tag 11 Tumblr followers because they are more likely to read this (I don’t know if their blogs are new or have less than 200 followers). The other parts will follow.

[4] 11 blogs I tag

  1. http://alienanthropologist.tumblr.com
  2. http://aspernaut.tumblr.com/
  3. http://aspie-fawn.tumblr.com/
  4. http://curlyhair-mountainair.tumblr.com/
  5. http://deceivinglynormal.tumblr.com
  6. http://flappingphysicist.tumblr.com/
  7. http://goldenplated.tumblr.com/
  8. http://nancybelden.tumblr.com/
  9. http://schnibbledibble.tumblr.com/
  10. http://theabsentuniverse.tumblr.com
  11. http://themiddlechild.tumblr.com/

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3 months ago by happilyclueless  #blog award  1 note  View comments 

The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism: Why Did Amy S.F. Lutz Attack the Neurodiversity Movement?

I have been trying the whole weekend to explain how I don’t understand why so many parents of autistic children do not support the concept of neurodiversity. I haven’t been able to put it into decent writing, so I will just share this post by Shannon Rosa, because the ideas are basically the same. 

3 months ago by happilyclueless  #The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism #neurodiversity #autism #actuallyautistic  5 notes  View comments 

Aspie, unknowingly | Mindblindedness, crushes and being a pre-teen

In one of the last Parenthood episodes, we saw Max having “the talk” about girls and hormones with his dad. Max probably has alexithymia, which is why his parents are worried about how to talk to him about the emotional side of puberty. I asked myself why, though - such a rational kid would have taken it seriously. In important matters, it’s an advantage to be serious.

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4 months ago by happilyclueless  #aspie unknowingly #parenthood #puberty #preteen #undiagnosed aspie #crushes #actuallyautistic  1 note  View comments 

Aspie viewpoints | Knowledge, intellectual property, and bullying

Before today, I didn’t know about Aaron Swartz. I didn’t know he was one of the coders behind the RSS system and the activists behind the failure of SOPA. Today I read in the news that he took his own life, and he was more or less as old as I am.

A year ago, I did not know anything about the hacker culture, about hacktivism, but I did know that something was not working in the way intellectual property was enforced. Intellectual property is important, sure - without it you might not innovate because you can’t get enough return in useful time. However, there is a point beyond which enforcement doesn’t make sense anymore. Being fined for distributing your own work to your students for free doesn’t make sense (that’s what can happen with the publishing industry). Also blocking fan-made not profit-making videos on Youtube doesn’t make sense. It is something that does not create value in the long run, and maybe not even in the short run. Even more important, much (if not all) scientific knowledge has much more value-creating potential when freely shared than when protected.

Now I want to give in to the stereotype for a moment and say that, as Aspie, I can’t but sympathize for this geek genius who succumbed to bullying. Because it was bullying. How on Earth can a person be charged with 35 years of jail plus a million Dollars in fines, if not as exemplary punishment? People get away with less for murder, and JSTOR from which he had downloaded the articles didn’t even want to press charges. But in this case the bully was a judiciary/legislative system that had tried to pass censorship bills, and bullies want exemplary punishments. Even if this means depriving the world of a great mind for downloading a bunch of journal articles (for the common good, even - not even to make money out of it). 

I don’t know how to feel about this. Sad? Angry? I just know enough about law to know for sure that this is not the way it should have been applied. Law shouldn’t allow exemplary punishments. Jail is supposed to prevent violent crimes and the like. This was not the way law is supposed the society it is sworn to serve. It was a bully, instead. It doesn’t make sense.

Read the Anonymous tribute to Aaron Swartz here (on Techcrunch)

4 months ago by happilyclueless  #Aaron Swartz #bullying #law #actuallyautistic #intellectual property #aspie viewpoints  6 notes  View comments 

Answer to a Quora question: How is sarcasm perceived by a person who does not understand it?

Sarcasm = saying the contrary of what is meant, with a bitter/negative connotation.

In my opinion, sarcasm must be “intuitively perceived”, in order to be understood- not the other way round. A person that needs to reason upon a statement to evaluate whether it is sarcastic, probably won’t understand it in useful time.

I say so because I mostly take spoken words at face value, and don’t intuitively perceive sarcasm (and many jokes that are not puns) “on the spot” - unless the tone of voice is greatly exaggerated, or I know the topic/the person extremely well.

If during a conversation I realize that something is “wrong” with what the person is saying, I mostly attribute it to my own ignorance. When I am sure that something was meant to be sarcastic, it is usually too late - either I am told it was sarcasm, or I reflect upon the conversation once it’s ended (even years after!).

4 months ago by happilyclueless  #actuallyautistic #quora #sarcasm   View comments 
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