Project Spectrum

Project Spectrum was created to give people with autism the opportunity to express their creativity and develop a life skill using Google SketchUp 3D modeling software.

This video shows 3D models created by 4 children on the autism spectrum. Three of the models are of the child’s dream house. All are very interesting! Some of the children made paper sketches before trying SketchUp. Narration explains the children’s experience with the software compared to their experience with the paper sketches.

I wish there was something like this around when I was a kid! I wonder if it could be used to create 3D mind maps. I have found it helpful on occasion to use mind mapping software to translate the multi-planed thoughts in my head into the pictures and shapes of a mind map, and then have the software convert them to an outline of words that can be used in a way that I imagine is how “regular” people just use them automatically. Adding a 3rd dimension to a mind map would definitely make it more intuitive to use, as thoughts could be placed where they belong, rather than using lines that are too long to show a distance that would better be described by showing the thought’s proximity in space to the other thoughts.

Of course this kind of software will not benefit everyone on the autistic spectrum, but it is nice to know that a special effort is being made to give these children a new way to express themselves, especially one that is visual and 3 dimensional, AND teaches them a marketable skill in a growing industry.

For more information, go to http://sketchup.google.com/spectrum.html.

Bee in Aspieland

In February 2006, Karen and I made a comic. Then we got sidetracked for three years. K took the original pictures and I made them into comics in Photoshop. We wrote the story together. This morning we filled in the remaining text and put the images in order.

Update: A few people have requested that I put the full size images all on one page for easier viewing on smaller monitors and printing. Click here to view them.

Click on the thumbnails to see larger images. To see images at full size, click on the full size icon (top right of large image).

This is the story of Bee in Aspieland… [nggallery id=2]

This comic is dedicated to Shiki.

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A Special Needs Girl with a Special Need to Kick Some Ass

Chocolate, from Magnet Releasing, is a martial arts film from Thailand coming to theaters on Feb. 6th, 2009, and DVD Feb. 10th.

Directed by Prachya Pinkaew, this sweet, action-packed martial-arts drama features the debut of young female fighter Jeeja Yanin Vismitananda as Zen, an autistic savant who learns to kick heads by watching Bruce Lee and Tony Jaa movies.

Zen’s father, a Japanese gangster, has been driven out of the country by a rival Thai gang, so her mother has been forced to raise her alone. When her mother becomes sick, Zen goes on a candy-fueled rampage to collect debts from the corrupt gangsters that owe money to her mom.

Thanks to Rina for the link :D

Shutdown

I was reading an article called “Shutdown: A Specific Type of Meltdown” written by Gavin Bollard this morning. Shutdown is a pretty hard thing to put into words, but he did a pretty good job of it.

Technically, there aren’t too many differences between meltdowns and shutdowns. Both are extreme reactions to everyday stimuli. … While a meltdown could be described as rage against a situation, a [shutdown] tends to be more of a retreat.

Shutdown and meltdown have always had the same meaning in my mind, the only difference being one of intensity. Gavin describes them as two separate things. I can kind of see the difference when described like that. When I was younger, I used to have both meltdowns and shutdowns. I don’t think I have meltdowns anymore. I could be wrong about that. I still have shutdowns.

There are things that affect the frequency of having shutdowns. Medicine has a pretty huge effect. If the meds are working okay, it happens much less often. Stress always makes it much more likely to happen. If my head gets loud enough, there is close to a 100% chance that I will shutdown.

For me, a shutdown is very scary. My distance from the world and everyone in it is greatly increased. Often I can not speak at all. I can hear, but the delay is longer than usual. It hurts in a way I can not describe. Almost equal parts pain and numbness. I’m not even sure that makes sense, but it is accurate. Emergency medicine can stop it, but it makes me very groggy, even into the next day. I hate that.

Gavin wrote of having “what if” and “if only” types of thoughts when shutdown. I do not have these thoughts or any others. Sometimes it is because the screaming is too loud. Sometimes because I have no ability to put words together into thoughts. I think I would like to coin the term “wordled” to describe that particular situation. Or maybe that is copyright infringement.

It is interesting to read how other people experience these types of things. When they happen to me ‘out in the wild’, I find myself in a position where I need to escape as quickly as possible, but can not communicate that need to anyone. It makes for some awkward situations and sometimes leaves people wondering what is wrong with me or thinking I am an unfriendly freak.

Unlike meltdowns, where it’s best to leave the aspie alone but in a safe place, it’s generally ok to talk in a soothing voice during a shutdown.

I agree with Gavin about the “cure”, but I wish there was a better one. For me, shutdown is often a matter of overstimulation. There is a filter that people seem to have that separates sights and sounds and colors and words and smells and textures and motions and other supposedly inconsequential stimuli. Mine does not work right. It makes the world a whole different place. Sometimes that is a good thing. But not today.

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Words Crashing Inside My Head

I was having some trouble thinking earlier and ended up looking at the wordle pix again to quiet my brain. The one below caught my eye because it is a picture of what was going on in my head. It is a pretty accurate illustration of what I mean when I say (or write) that “the words crash inside of my head”. (Click the image to enlarge) [singlepic=13,450,248,,center] The reason it is hard for me to think and read sometimes is because I don’t think in straight lines. I think in grids. Hard to explain. Some people call it thinking in pictures. For me, the pictures are more like 3D wireframe models that can be viewed from every angle and direction, including from the inside out. Nothing at all resembling a straight line like a sentence does. When I can’t see the grid and try to think in words, they do not form sentences in my head. They are individual units floating around and crashing into each other without ever making any sense. It is annoying, but I feel kind of lucky that usually the words stay together and are not further divided into individual letters or individual shapes that make up the letters. Looking at the pix and/or writing this appears to have had its intended effect. I better get back to work now before it wears off!

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Strange Dreams

Frida Kahloseriously strange night. started last night. nightmares. a string of them but i don’t remember most. the last one woke me up and it was horrible. don’t remember most of it just the end. too horrible to write about. wish i could stop thinking about it. at least buster is okay. buster’s our littlest cat for those out of the k&l crazy cat lady loop.

woke up disoriented. me and k went to the sfmoma to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit. it was great of course, but definitely did not help with my grasp of reality. started feeling weird again this evening. hard to tell what is real. i hate that. it scares me. feels like a current of electricity is moving through me. not high voltage like sometimes when i can’t stop moving. lower like a fizzle. everything seems kind of surreal. get confused. playing boggle w/k helped for a little while. haven’t played that in a long time. it was under the bed. watched eureka on tv. strange episode. space time continuum mind mess kind of stuff. strange day to have such extra strange media on. spent a short time in azeroth as well.

so, back to the dream. it freaks me completely out and i wake up. k wakes up and i tell her not to remind me that i had a bad dream if i forgot when i woke up for real. i usually forget. couldn’t forget this one. actually, forgot most of it. just remember the end. maybe stuck in my mind forever. might write about it if i thought it would help, but i don’t think it will and i think it would get stuck in someone else’s mind and that would be very bad.

after boggle tried to read. or maybe that was before, but fiction is also another bad place to be when you are not completely at grips with your grip on reality. no idea if that made any sense. don’t care. just writing to come back. couldn’t sleep. this is night 2 for those following along at home. not last night of the bad dream. had bad dreams anyway, but not as bad. just weird. electricity. freezing but it is not freezing here. was having trouble breathing earlier. not real trouble. the kind like before. real, but not really real. what? see what i mean? finally had to get up. sleep was not happening. hopefully it will eventually come.

wasn’t sure what to do. should i write? apparently so since that is the first thing i started doing. thought about playing but not really the best time to enter yet another world. thought about turning on im to see if maybe tc is awake. still might do that. would be nice to say hi. i think i will do that now. adium. i love adium. just as i suspected. hi tc.

sometimes writing helps find reality again. always a good thing. i think. when i get like this sometimes i have flashbacks to being a kid when this kind of thing used to happen. way more often than it does now. didn’t scare me like it does now. didn’t even know it was a problem. maybe it wasn’t. but now i’m not so sure. as suspected, writing is helping and i believe that I am back in the present moment of the present universe. thank goodness for that. electricity not gone yet. that part might be hormonal. funny how total randomness can occur at the same time each month. but it is not time to think about the actual randomness or non-randomness of randomly non-random things. seriously, this is what i am writing AFTER i have come back to reality? oy.

im-ing w/tc now. that is helping. thanks tc :)

tc is going to make an alt on my server, the scryers. that makes me happy. i will meet her there and show her around.

an offsite backup just started. mozy. so many automatic backups i can’t even keep track. i sure do hope they work when i need them. usually they do. almost always i can save something from time machine or daily clone. there have been a few times going in the way back archive machine that have saved my butt with client files.

wordpress 2.6 saves post revisions. have used it a bunch of times already.

backup is done. in game with tc.

that was fun. tc started a little druid and we leveled her to 2. nice to hang w/tc. feel better now. strangely enough going to azeroth landed me back in oakland.

Tawn and Teruna dancing in the road

Tawn and Teruna dancing in the road.

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Learning is Hard

'D' is also for Defiled
Creative Commons License photo credit: flickrich

It is almost a year since the last Harry Potter book was released and equally as long that I have been trying to read it. I am about half way through. I know it is a long book, but at this rate, it will take me 2 years to read it. I am okay with that, only I have also not been able to read technical books, which are usually much easier. The timing is very bad because I am taking classes now.

Recap of uncooperative brain cycle: I get too busy, my brain shuts down, I end up not being able to do anything, things get bad, I stop doing so many things, I feel better, I start doing more things. I get too busy. Repeat. Forever.

When I started feeling better after cat scratch fever, things were great. Felt better than I have in longer than I can remember. Meds are working ok, I am not weak and tired, I can work, I can do karate, leave the house, etc. Great time to take classes! Only problem is that I can not read. Crap.

School has been very hard. Some of the assignments are easy because it is stuff I already know (PHP, MySQL, JavaScript) and use every day, but some of it is brand new. In order to learn the new things, I have to do a lot of reading. This is very bad.

I have been able to learn some of the new information by watching screencasts. I LOVE screencasts! Screencasts are videos of someone’s computer screen with audio explaining what they are doing. These are magical for me.

I have never been able to learn things in the traditional ways — lectures and textbooks. Either I have sucked information in without even trying or I learned by trial, error, and/or repetition. Luckily, sucking in information worked until my second year of college. College is when I learned exactly how impossible it is for me to learn in a traditional setting.

Some reasons for the impossibility of learning are:

  1. Can not sit still for the entire length of a class. Will fidget with increasing intensity until I have to leave the room.
  2. Can not concentrate on what is being said. Words turn into gibberish. White noise behind the clamor inside my brain. This makes note taking impossible as well.
  3. Can not read required reading. Can occasionally get enough information from pictures, diagrams, examples, and captions to get by.
  4. Get overwhelmed when too much is going on. Taking more than one class, taking classes and working, being in crowded classrooms, etc.

I do not know what to do now. I am taking two classes and loving them, but I am not sure I will be able to finish them because I can not read and am having a hard time thinking in general. Too many things are going on. I have lots of work to do and we have a steady stream of visitors all summer. My work is not getting done as quickly as it should because of school. Often, I end up trying to do either thing and end up not being able to think well enough to do anything.

At least there is no reading required for karate! That has been just as fun as ever :)

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Thinking About Autism

Amanda at Ballastexistenz has written an excellent post for Blogging Against Disablism Day describing what it is like to be autistic and taking a look at the trend of accusing people of using autism as an excuse for having poor social skills, among other things.

The post goes on to talk about techniques used by autistic people to appear “normal” and includes a video that explains how it can take all day to boil a pot of water. If a picture is worth a thousand words, that video is worth a million.

One interesting thought, which I had never heard before, is that some people might choose to be non-conformist as an attempt to mask involuntary weirdness.

There can also be attempts to mask involuntary weirdness by appearing to be voluntarily weird. Since chosen non-conformity can in some circles have higher social status than involuntary non-conformity, and since it can lead to an internal sense of being in control of one’s own weirdness, even though of course the person isn’t really.

I have always been non-conformist. For the most part it has been because I have never fit in with the “normal” people and could never figure out their completely illogical rules and bizarre system of prioritizing things.

misfit: photo by SpoungeworthyIn the place where I grew up, fitting in was essential to being treated like a human being. If you looked or acted differently, you could be assured that people would treat you badly, if not to your face, then behind your back. If you were a child who was different, you were doomed to a miserable life of physical and mental abuse where people’s idea of how to help you was to make you look and act like everyone else.

In high school, I became a “burnout”. We were a bunch of misfits who hung out in parking lots and did a lot of drugs. It was the first time I ever felt like part of a group, like I fit in. I wonder if this is the kind of chosen non-conformity that Amanda is talking about.

From that point on, my friends were always part of some nonconformist group or other. The focus changed from drugs to music to peace and love to politics to computers, but the feeling of not being alone and not “having” to fit in have played a large role in my periodic decisions to stay alive and keep trying rather than giving up and killing myself.

The autism community has taken ‘fitting in’ to a whole new level for me. It is not like other groups where I share the focus of interest, but am still kind of clueless about how people’s minds work outside of that focus. It is the opposite. It is an incredibly diverse group of people with all kinds of interests that I may or may not share, a group of people that make sense to me because I can understand how they think and how their minds might take them from fact A to conclusion B.

I think that autism is a whole different way of seeing the world. Whether it is good or bad should not be a question. It affects many people’s lives to a degree where they need help and assistance with basic daily tasks, and other people’s lives in a way where they contribute things to the world that would never exist without them. Some people fall into both of those groups or any point in between. unrulyasides has an interesting post about the idea of automatically classifying autism as a disability.

I don’t really have a point to all of this right now. Reading things written by people whose brains work similarly to mine gets me thinking in a way that other things don’t. It is not that other things do not make me think. Tons of things make me think! The difference is that these things do not need to be translated into a framework that I can understand before they are processed. An entire level of energy expenditure is removed. It is nice. Still, it gets me rambling.

Creative Commons Licensephoto credit: Spoungeworthy

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4 Good Things

My brain has not been cooperating lately, but thankfully it seems to be taking a turn for the better these past couple of days.

Yesterday was the first day I was feeling good enough to get out of the house since Saturday, not including short trips to the BART station. Went to the library in the morning and helped my friend D move stuff in the afternoon. Amazing how a little fresh air can make everything better. The good company didn’t hurt either :)

When my brain is not working, it is very hard to get out of the house because I can not organize and implement the steps needed in order to leave the house. Things that should be happening automatically do not. Instead, it becomes a complex, often insurmountable task.

Steps needed to leave the house:

  1. Remember that you are going to leave the house
  2. Stop what you are doing
  3. Get ready to leave
    • Put on jacket, gloves, etc.
    • Bring anything that is needed, i.e. backpack, library card
  4. Don’t get sidetracked
  5. Don’t start working again because you forgot you were going out
  6. Think about destination or at least what direction to head out in
  7. Don’t answer the phone because your client has a “quick question”.
  8. If you do answer the phone, read the email, etc., do not think “This is easy. I will do it real fast before I leave.” because that will place you back at step 1.
  9. Don’t get sidetracked
  10. Say goodbye to cats and walk out the door

Speaking of being sidetracked, I almost forgot the 4 good things.

Good thing #1: K, aka Nikkyo, dings 70!
Nikkyo dings 70!
Congratulations K! We can finally quest together for real. Woo hoo :)

Good thing #2:
Renaeden’s repost of The Top Ten Terrific Traits of Autistic People.

Thanks Renaeden!

Good thing #3: FaceBook In Reality
Got a link to this in an email this morning. Cracked me up.

Good thing #4
Did I mention that I got out of the house yesterday? Old news by now. Good thing #4 is that I am going again out as soon as I complete the 10 steps listed above :D

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Freak

Locked in my room. Loud in my head. Friends outside. I hear them laughing but I can not join them. I tried. Very bad. So hard to separate their voices. K, Lorena, Tess. It is Tess’ birthday. Happy bday Tess.

Makes me tired. I can feel every speck of dust in the air. Hear it. Sometimes see it. Like a million tiny lightening bolts, each giving me a tiny little sting. Freak.

Why can’t I just have fun like normal people?

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