CounterInsurgentGeeks

leavethecoffin-open:

This is what Autism looks like.
I’m optimistic, funny, and I guess I’m smart. I’m no different from a person who isn’t within the Spectrum. I am a writer of a few short stories, a huge fan of manga, graphic novels and comedy films.
I was diagnosed as a young child (I’m gonna say younger than 5). I had a huge obsession with dinosaurs, carrying paintbrushes and pencils around almost all the time. I was given an in-class helper during primary school, who was absolutely wonderful and didn’t treat me like this hopeless sad-sack case who was ‘special’. When I left for high school, things had gotten extremely difficult. People made fun of me for so many different things, being ‘that weird kid’ in particular.
I’m now surrounded by an absolutely amazing group of friends, who like me for being that weird kid. When so many people - including one of my in-class helpers in high school - told me I should do things which ‘aren’t to challenging’, I ignored them. I’m now about to start the second year of my Sociology and Criminology degree.
I’m not a lost cause. I’m not an example to be made.
I’m a human being.

This is what Autism looks like.

I’m optimistic, funny, and I guess I’m smart. I’m no different from a person who isn’t within the Spectrum. I am a writer of a few short stories, a huge fan of manga, graphic novels and comedy films.

I was diagnosed as a young child (I’m gonna say younger than 5). I had a huge obsession with dinosaurs, carrying paintbrushes and pencils around almost all the time. I was given an in-class helper during primary school, who was absolutely wonderful and didn’t treat me like this hopeless sad-sack case who was ‘special’. When I left for high school, things had gotten extremely difficult. People made fun of me for so many different things, being ‘that weird kid’ in particular.

I’m now surrounded by an absolutely amazing group of friends, who like me for being that weird kid. When so many people - including one of my in-class helpers in high school - told me I should do things which ‘aren’t to challenging’, I ignored them. I’m now about to start the second year of my Sociology and Criminology degree.

I’m not a lost cause. I’m not an example to be made.

I’m a human being.

Autistic Kitten: personal/asd »

churchofindustry:

i’m 46 years old. it has only been over the past year that anyone ever suggested i might have aspergers/autism. i have been in and out of the public mental health system since i was 20 years old. i have seen a lot of “professionals” and none of them ever mentioned asd. my…

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

“

—	Julian Barnes (via artistsdontwearpants)

mayhap:

Wow. The whole thing.
zizekianrevolution:

Astra Taylor on the Unschooled life

School acclimates children to boredom so that as adults they can work long hours at jobs they will more than likely to describe as uneventful, mind-numbing, soul-destroying in other words as boring. But school also inculcates children into boredom as an attitude, a habit, a way of being in the world, boredom is more than a consequence of bad curriculum or poor teaching style its actually an ethos one that lingers on into adult life.

theatlantic:

Freakonomics Teaches Us the Right Way to Bribe Kids

A brand new study by Steven D. Levitt (of Freakonomics fame), John A. List, Susanne Neckermann, and Sally Sadoff finds that Chicago students in low-performing schools did better on tests when they were promised money or trophies for their good grades. But it wasn’t as simple as writing a bunch of checks and and waiting for the A’s to pour in. How much money and how you present the rewards makes all the differences.

Without instant money and rewards, many students in these Chicago schools had put forth “low effort on the standardized tests that we study,” the authors write. Why didn’t the students care about good grades? It’s all about the timing of our rewards.

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

arielnietzsche:

I also got “How to read Lacan” by Zizek from the library, and all I am seeing is a comparison to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Iraq to how Lacan is actually Georg Lukács and how Richard II is actually Leibniz. It also talks about Hirsi Ali and how she’s actually an Islamic fundamentalist and I don’t know if I am daydreaming anymore or I should sleep and study.

autistickitten:

xxreaperchildxx reblogged your post: When I was tested for Autism, I was asked a lot of different questions, and normally I hate self-tests, but these questions were essentially the same things I was asked. I don’t mean that people who get high scores on this test DEFINITELY have an ASD, but it is a good place to start:

I just took this test and I got 40 omg

If it makes you feel any better, I got a 48.

Russians called these last years of Brezhnev the years of stagnation. And I sort of wonder whether we are at the same stage now—our own years of stagnation, with an elite desperately trying to shore up a technocratic, economic system with an increasing number of contradictions, while no one can imagine an alternative. In response to that inability to see anything else, everything, including a lot of modern culture—music, TV, and avant-garde art—is being used to shore up the present, reconfigure the past to somehow give a foundation to the present that can’t imagine another kind of future. No one can see their way past the sort of financial version of the free market, and the culture reflects that. I do think we’re in the years of stagnation.

“

—	Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Adam Curtis (via helge)

ilovecharts:

Yeah, Geeks!

BBC - Podcasts - My Own Shakespeare »

shakespearean:

My Own Shakespeare invites public figures to talk about the piece of Shakespeare that inspires them most.The short programmes will be broadcast across Radio 3 and Radio 4 in May 2012 and be available to download afterwards.