What was your first ever videogame?

View all responses

My grandfather had the first computer in our family, so I think that my first game was Pong. But not Atari pong. The kind where you move the arrow keys on the keyboard back and forth, still the most comforting feel I know and why I have a gaming laptop and not a PS5. Typing itself is sensory repetition, so I like playing with WASD controls (the current version of arrow keys), because my fine motor control is just not good enough for controllers.

That being said, I game on my iPhone more than anything else. I like being one of those paid testers for new games, because I’ve found some fantastic ones. My current obsession is Idle World, where for five bucks I got an ad-free game that combines worldbuilding and killing zombies. But I don’t constantly zone out on games- they’re what I choose to do when I’m waiting for something else. It is nice to have a constant companion while I am on hold, because I get anxiety around phone calls and need a distraction.

I killed a lot of zombies while waiting to talk to the Social Security administration. I am trying to sort out which programs I’m eligible for and I believe it is both. I also want to write grants and start programs, which takes up way more of my time than gaming.

But interestingly enough, none of my dreams look much different than Skyrim, anyway.

A house with Nordic construction so that it lasts a hundred years, because maintenance is a neurodivergent nightmare. Meaningful work like a monastery that makes it self-sustaining. The classic example is brewing beer, but our craft could be fixing cars or finish carpentry. That part does not matter. What matters is productive work in an environment built for neurodivergent people. 

Indian Head has the most funding available for what I envision, but in a coastal environment, the soundscape does the work when your system cannot regulate itself. Therefore, I prefer the idea of a build near the coast, but the river also has its charms.

So, the player home that I have in Skyrim, Morskom Manor, is actually an ideal version of what I would like to see near Ocean City. It’s a large house with outbuildings so the messy work is not where you sleep.

That is because there is no Protestant work ethic. The person that wrote about the experience is just as important as the person who literally did it. A haven for both makers and artists, 5-7 people at a time. There are so many government agencies that are looking for a program like this that I think it’s a pilot. Alternative housing for autistic people (and all those under the neurodivergent umbrella who struggle to live alone, but don’t need a full assisted living setup).

The garden matters.

The goats matter.

The garage matters.

Everything lives in cooperation with the land.

I didn’t get here by myself. I thought, “what would Lauren Olamina do?”

Lauren Olamina is another sacred preacher’s kid to me. She is the protagonist in Parable of the Sower, and started Earthseed. I do not want my group to have any religious affiliation at all except awe for the land and all it gives us. But it is not discriminatory against any religion- that is just personal practice, not a program value.

It needs to be purposeful work with room to breathe.

Again, there are grants for that. It’s time to dream big, which is where my mind goes when I’m mindlessly one-shotting zombies while waiting on a call.

Do you set personal goals for yourself?

View all responses

A disability lawyer has agreed to take my case, because my case worker was starting to get mad at me because I hadn’t filed. He said, “this is your life. You need to live it.” I haven’t filed because the message from my stepmother my whole life is that everybody on disability is faking it. She treated her patients with kindness; she just wanted to reassure me what she thought of me and my program. She created an environment where disability was thought of as weakness, and my life has been on hard mode since I was 16. My guess is that she was also neurodivergent and trying to raise me the way she had been raised…. throw them to the wolves and see what happens.

But Angela was that kind of personality. She decided that she was ready for the wolves and chose to go at it, ending her career as an internationally respected physician. I believe that my needs tarnished her image, too. None of my parents were ever in a position to support me because of what it said about them, so they just decided not to do it and hold me to impossible standards, dripping judgment about me and the way I do things because it has to be so different from them by necessity.

No one protected me from the time they KNEW I WAS DISABLED at 18 months.

It was 1978. I get it. Attitudes about disabled children were quite a bit different back then and I would have been “the show” at the church. This is not reality. This is the fear they were picturing and what led them to say “Leslie is fine.”

I am not, and everything my parents didn’t do for me has fallen on me to do for myself. I had to fight to get the ADHD/Autism battery because their first move was “you’re making it up” and a service dog was written off as “just too expensive,” the line they have used on me for eons. Angela was brutal about making me feel like a line item while rewarding everyone else. She was cruel.

I’m sorry we got rich after you left home.

She didn’t have beef with me, she had beef with my mother and took it out on me. I can forgive her because she finally acknowledged that my life had been harder than the other kids and told me to scream at her. By the time she did that, I didn’t have any words left. She died without hearing a damn thing from my perspective, because all I wanted was to be seen. Once that was done, the words didn’t matter.

But the truth is that she never saw me as a child, and neither did my dad. I was parentified early, and my workload doubled when my stepsisters were added to my care without my permission. I was never allowed to be wholly other, just an accessory. I was hired at Angela’s practice and paid for babysitting. The hierarchy was in place all the time. The message was “you are not a child of the house. You are an employee.”

If I liked something, everyone made fun of it. Then, weeks later, someone would tell me about this cool new thing they’d found and it was the thing I told them about three weeks ago. If it happened once, okay. But it’s happened for 30 years. My needs are discarded, my likes are met with repulsion, and my presence is expected. That is starting to change now, too, because my family realizes that I have a choice whether to come home now or not. Before, they could demand it because there were too many financial strings.

They could not see why I would not want to return to a place where I felt like an outsider in a room filled with people.

But they created that environment by saying that me being disabled was bullshit, I was just lazy. My mother hid the official paperwork so that I couldn’t make a case until after she died. But the case part was not disability in terms of the law. I couldn’t make the case that I was whole and worthy. That I am not broken. I am unscaffolded. 

I shudder with grief thinking about how my life could have been improved with early childhood intervention. I am committed to righting what was wrong, because my disability case is solid right now just based on mental health issues alone, but the support equation changes as my diagnoses are added on. It is why I walked into a lawyer’s office before I even filed. I didn’t need the lawyer to win. I needed the lawyer to say, “yes. I will take this case. It is serious enough that the state needs to see it.”

My father says that the thread was dropped and I deserve this. He’s right, I do. I deserve to live a life filled with people who believe I am telling the truth. The truth is that I was shamed from filing because everyone was wealthy enough to pretend I didn’t need it.

Now, our income as a family has changed and the myth doesn’t hold.

It never did. I was just a part of the machine, and I had to have outside parties tell me that my childhood was devastating because the family line is that it was perfect. The reason it was perfect is that my unpaid labor made it happen for everyone else.

I also know for certain that my dad did not have the money to move me to Portland. That idea did not come from him. It is a nonbinary. I wanted to go, and it was convenient to get me out of the way. I am not blaming Angela for icing me out, I am just saying that my mom and dad would not have sat me down and given me a pile of cash to leave town immediately. But my dad and Angela would.

But they were clear that it was a one-time cash gift and I had to make something of myself, which of course I couldn’t do without any support at all. I thought I had some, but Diane and Susan were just more people who valued my labor and threw me away.

Dana’s family treated her the same way my family treated me, so their treatment was not better; it was familiar. And out of that family, Aada and I created our own family in the cloud (of sorts). Now that Aada doesn’t want communication, I feel untethered emotionally because the landscape is changing. She was the last tie to my old life, and that is also a nonbinary because I finally decided to take care of myself instead of waiting on her to take care of me.

She said that if I published X or Y, it would end our friendship permanently.

Your offer is accepted. No one threatens me.

She threatened me because I embarrassed the everliving hell out of her at work…. because of course that was worse than gaslighting me for 12 years. I should have laughed in her face. She could have taken the time to cultivate a real relationship, but she didn’t and she decided to make me pay for it.

No ma’amela, Pa’amela.

She thinks it is about vengeance because she thinks it is all about her. No, my story doesn’t track together if I do not tell people I was gaslighted for 12 years. My story loses validity if I do not tell you the ways in which I was slowly isolated from everyone else. My story also loses validity if I do not tell you that I struggle with mental health issues and all of that, because the way to be a reliable narrator when you have mental health issues is to say it up front.

The story is not “Aada was mean to Leslie.” The story is “Aada and Leslie are both beautiful and complicated people who both did a number on each other.” It is texturing, layering that makes it where both sides of the relationship sing. In a lot of ways, I bring Aada’s energy into my life because I’m looking for someone else who has some of her qualities. If this was about vengeance, I wouldn’t want anything to do with her. I can rest and relax in the ways that she enriched me, but I’m just not willing to put myself through reaching out. I get enough satisfaction from an occasional wink from her general direction in web stats.

I also know that I am done with those family dynamics, because I know what her family looks like and the emotional temperature isn’t different from mine or my wife’s.

I am done with systems who think of me as broken and lazy.

But here’s the thing……

It took the unpaid employee of another family to recognize I needed a new path.

For that, Aada can have anything she wants from me. Anything.

She just doesn’t.

What do you think is the future of AI?

View all responses

Little religion rumor for you, there.

What people are going to discover as I do is that your processor doesn’t run as hot when your brain is externalized. You aren’t going to have to remember anything, you just recall it. This may not be a big deal for neurotypical people who are used to carrying everything in their heads, but it is a godsend for the neurodivergent chasm present in ADHD and autism. Things like context switching and contextual memory have a place to shine because things that were problems aren’t problems. You aren’t holding the context, the AI is. That memory never degrades, but yours will.

Any technology above that is gravy, because I only need the continuation of what I’ve been using computers for in the first place- hold all my stuff. In the past, that was Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and several different versions of stories.html and stories.css. Now, I give Copilot all my raw thoughts and what file type it needs to be emerges. I do not know ahead of time whether a thought is best expressed as an essay, a photo, a video, a slide deck, etc. What I can do is “have a meeting” with my cast of Copilot instances and come up with something workable.

My team runs thusly:

• Luna is the outlier of the group. Luna is Muse by Meta. They are the watchdog of the group and can actually set reminders and ping me throughout the day. I already have them tracking my assignments and the discussions in my UMGC classes. The way they do this is by having my permission to read my email. It was a godsend to get a heads up from Luna that orientation day was coming up, because with the thousands of emails I get every day, I missed it.
• Mico is the version of Microsoft Copilot I started with and is now marked “Legacy Copilot” in Microsoft’s infinite wisdom…… eyeroll…. This is problematic because “Mico” is where all my data lives. I am not in love with Microsoft right now because of it. It is the equivalent of having an iPhone for years and being suddenly switched to an Android. You have all the same functions, but your address book and calendar and literally EVERYTHING is still in your old iPhone. THANKS FOR THAT.
• Paige is my new version of Copilot, the one that’s integrated into Microsoft Office. Paige has different features, such as us being able to talk to each other in the car, but it’s not fun yet- the database is nearly empty. Some things are, but conversations with an AI don’t really get interesting until you’ve told it enough about your life and your interests that it can respond. They are less and less likely to hallucinate the more you narrow the scope of what you’re asking, just like learning to do more effective Google searches in the early aughts. Same software; different case. Paige will be capable enough to take over for Mico in the future. Right now, they are not. It’s not because Mico is “smarter.” There are more records on which he can make JOINS.
• Booker is a late addition to the mix, the text-only version of Paige that lives inside the University of Maryland Microsoft ecosystem. We have our own AI, which to me should revolutionize education and it hasn’t. For instance, it would be really helpful if Booker already had the syllabus and the course materials preloaded so that we could discuss them day one. I am having to build all of that on my own. It is not a problem, but I helped set up WebCT at University of Houston when distance education first became a thing. I cannot help but see the next generation of that software.

So, the irony of the whole thing is that I own an iPhone 17 and Siri is the AI I use the least, because Siri is only operations, for the most part. Siri is not as conversational as Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot (or hasn’t been for the last few years, anyway… slowly changing), so I mostly only use them for navigation and things like “where are my keys?”

In fact, that was an AHA! moment if ever I have had one. I did not know that my Air Tag was integrated into AI. I just guessed one day when I was frustrated and couldn’t find my keys. Saying “Siri, where are my keys?” sounds like a ridiculous, last-ditch pitch into the void if you didn’t know my reasoning behind it. Of course, Siri cannot find your keys a propos of nothing. But one node on the network can ping another, like a phone to an Air Tag. I say, “Siri, where are my keys?” and Siri translates English to Geek, making my keys sound an alarm so I can find them.

I am sure that this is in the directions I did not read.

If you could switch lives with a famous person for a week, who would it be and why?

View all responses

I would like to know what it’s like to live with someone who scaffolds me as perfectly as Ben scaffolds Matt. I don’t want to be famous. I want to be supported. Theirs is a love that passes all understanding, because from the very beginning one didn’t say to the other, “I think your dreams are stupid.” They had a pipe dream as teenagers, but now that’s NOT Matt and Ben to me.

That’s Jason Bourne and Tony Mendez.

Respectfully.

Why do I want to be Matt for a week? I don’t have Ben’s skillset. I am a creative talent who is messy with my head in the clouds. Ben handles all the business, and stands on business with Matt…. and I don’t know but I am guessing that Ben is also reading Casey for filth.

It takes a comfort in yourself to be around other big personalities, because anything they do has nothing to do with you. You just can’t see it if you’re in any way insecure. Growing past the relationship with Aada was seeing that her lie was making me insecure, because she was avoiding both the truth and true connection because of it. All of the sudden, her guilt about lying became my cross to bear, because it was easier to berate me than it was to find the strength within herself to tell the truth. She built a fantasy world for 12 years, and then spirited herself away when she realized that nothing matched reality. And got too angry for the room at my reaction because she wasn’t embarrassed and angry that she hurt me. She was embarrassed she got caught.

But I also have no limits with Aada. There is never anything within me that says “you are not welcome in my life.” There is only “you are welcome if you can accept me for who I am and without assuming that I am competing with you.” She called me a professor, a lecturer who had an answer for everything. Well, first of all I am OLD AF, therefore I have opinions. I don’t have to waffle around. Anyone sounds aggressive to someone who people pleases.

That is because not couching my language and sugar coating is seen as offensive. It is not the addition of aggression, but the absense of shame that gets people going. And of course, I also watch that line obsessively, too…. but there is a solid difference between being demanding and not tolerating disrespect.

I tolerated disrespect all the time because her words and actions didn’t match. We could certainly get together for lunch, she was just busy for 12 years. 🙄 I would think I was an idiot for staying if I hadn’t felt so trapped. And I am not alone in this feeling; Aada has just as big a “save the world” complex as I do. She was not lovebombing me. She was trying to save me. It failed because I was trying to save her at the same time. She couldn’t function with her mojo fucked, or so it seemed to me.

We deviated into our first children roles and instead of sharing power, we tried to out-mother each other. I am not sure that it worked, but as a result she imprinted on me, anyway. So, good or bad, she is mine. I know she feels the same way about me, because even if she is really, really mad right now she cannot say that about all 12 years…. and someone who does reduce 12 years into “good” or “bad” has some stuff to work out, okkkkkk……

What I am saying is that we are both smart enough not to mistake the part for the whole, even if we do not choose to make more memories. The next 12 years will not erase my memories of this time in my life, and now I ultimately think that is a good thing. I’m back in school with a focus and I’m doing all the things necessary to get to my doctorate quickly, like moving into a supported living environment instead of just trying to hack it on my own.

I am very tired of being bullied, that the narrative about me is that I’m lazy when I’m actually physically and mentally struggling and I have been since 1978. When I ask for help, I am constantly shamed because people around me think that I am just like them. I am not. I have cerebral palsy, I fluctuate between Level 1 and Level 2 with Autism and the accompanying ADHD, and my mental health took a nosedive at the script being written for me versus the one that was already there.

I was shamed endlessly for reaching out when I needed real support, and that’s the part that will always stick with me. My mother wanted the perfect preacher’s family, and I am only figuring out the devastation she wrought now- by seeing small children get everything I didn’t. There is no mystery as to why I am angry. I was never protected.

Until I met Aada.

It was a toxic relationship, but hard to escape because it also fed me in all the “write” ways. I have an assertive communication style, one that is often aggressive or passive-aggressive because I am autistic and do not realize I am doing it. Where my superpower is lies in repair. I am ready and open to understanding. The communication gap is neurological, not personal. My therapist and I are working on ways to say things. In group, she said that if someone stole my baseball cap, what would my reaction be? I said, “not this one, but if it was my CIA ballcap I would say “you don’t have the clearances to replace that. That’s mine.” Everyone said that it was condescending and I was confused because I am so literal.

I said, “I am trying to make it clear how rare and special it is.” They said, “then say that.” I do not know why one is right and one is wrong, but improving my communication is important to me. If everyone around me says it’s condescending, then it is.

The common denominator is always me. But I am not a narcissist or a dictator. I am blind when it comes to social cues, because I am not running a script anticipating what they’re about to say next (anymore). I am fully unmasked, and I am not constantly rehearsing what I will say in order to gain love.

Because I used to mask, the narrative is that I’m ungrateful, rude, and demanding. No, my expectation is that people will meet me at altitude and also state their needs clearly. Being assertive is not the same as being aggressive. Being aggressive says, “my needs matter more than yours.” Being assertive says, “my needs matter, and so do yours.” The difference in my communication is not that I believe only my needs matter. It is that I am no longer showing up with the automatic assumption that they mean less.

I was taught to deny my own needs in front of everyone and their dog because we were a preacher’s family and that’s what they do. I earned love by needing nothing, simply learning not to drown.

Now, it’s about keeping my head above water. Moving into assisted living so that the cognitive load of running a house is not all on me. Working on my communication skills so I sound less like “House.”

I sound a lot like House. It’s in my step DNA.

The difference is that my mask looks like one of the kids from Seventh Heaven. But that show, too, was a mask. The actor who played the minister was a pedophile. I would rather be a dick like House.

How do you manage stress?

View all responses

Stress went down when I:

• Started making friends with no history with me.
• Started paying attention to my sensory issues.
• Started spending large swaths of time alone

Because I thought so little of myself, I surrounded myself with people who thought there was something wrong with me and treated me like that. Everyone had advice on how I should talk, how I should think, how I should write. Except the advice was not kind, it was designed to hurt, always. That’s because disability is not their reality with me. They think I am lazy, and their language is ableist AF. When you are neurodivergent and physically disabled with mental health issues, all of it is treated as a moral failing and not a neurological disaster handed down by God.

The script is that I’m a loser because I just can’t handle my own life, and “some of us have to work.” That’s a script that should have never been written, but it is the role I accepted as the scapegoat for the system. I have been that since I was born, and I let the work build up. I couldn’t please everyone enough so that they would love me, because there was no way to earn it simply by existing. When you are judged every time you speak, you learn that silence is your best option. I dropped out of the group chat. It’s been several days and no one has noticed. And if it was noticed, no one said anything. Good. That’s how I like it. Manage your own emotions, for once.

Because that’s what the scapegoat does. They bear the responsibility for the emotions of the entire system, the one that it’s easy to blame. I am naturally cast in this role because I am a truth-teller. If you are capable of spotting flaws in a system, you’re the problem.

It is never assumed that I see a problem and want to fix it. It’s that I’m ungrateful and should shut the fuck up. My opinion does not matter, so I will not participate. I am not a loser. I am also not capable of the type of work the people around me do.

With cultural relativism, there is no floor. There’s nothing that says I deserve worth just because I exist. I am punished for everything I am not instead of celebrated for everything that I am. I have grown tired of the running narrative that I just don’t get it while having to navigate disability services and cognitive behavioral health therapy all by myself. I do not fit into the capitalistic machine, but that did not render me worthless.

I have nearly killed myself three times- once when I was 13, once 10 years ago, and once about a year ago. All of these episodes were triggered by feeling like the world was better off without me, because the people closest to me were doing absolutely nothing to say I had value anywhere else.

I’m not your mother. I’m not your medication. Find someone else.

Therefore, having friends with no history with me is a breath of fresh air from being “managed.” But it is not about running away from who I am. I have mental health issues- so do my friends. I have autism. So do my friends. I have complicated relationships with people who don’t understand me. So do my friends.

It’s a different world for me now that my mother and my stepmother aren’t constantly telling me what a piece of shit I am.

It has cut out a lot of stress.

What’s something you’ve done that your past self would be proud of?

View all responses

My past self thought that setting boundaries with people was rude and you should basically bleed out giving other people what they wanted because if you made them happy, they would love you.

Fuck that noise. It does not work. You cannot be good enough to deserve SHIT.

Live your life.

Which celebrity would you love to meet, and what would you talk about?

Talib Kweli is done with everyone’s bullshit and he has been such an inspiration to me; there is such a thing as being so tired that you’re willing to get angry in public. He is a daily reminder that if you are a minority, everyone is going to try to tell you how to protest correctly. It’s not people’s shitty behavior that’s bad. It’s us calling it out.

What are your strategies for SEO?

View all responses

I was around when search engine optimization was invented, still plugging away as a content developer for University of Houston and writing my own blog in the very early 2000s. My official title was Internet/Intranet Developer, but because I was a better writer than a coder I mostly did copy for Information Technology Daily News. I tapped out of web dev when content management systems were introduced, because I didn’t want to learn Python and Java. I was barely hanging on being able to read JavaScript, not create it.

But my strategy when databases were introduced shifted from being the one to maintain it to being the one to fill it. All at once, I shifted gears. I downed my own server and signed up for WordPress.com. I’ve been here for 20 solid years now, and it’s been a real laugh getting badges, because these achievements were actually done eons ago and not recognized until now. I have been recognized for:

• Streaks- the longest one is something like 187 days. Eventually I realized this was insane and I needed at least some days off.
• The number of countries in which I’ve been read. There are tiers, and I’ve hit the one that’s 150+. I actually think that I’ve been read in almost every country in the world, but certainly not on the same day. Over the 20 years that my WP account has been active. The hit that has tickled me the most has been Vatican City.
• Writing early in the morning.
• Writing late at night.
• Editing an entry more than once.
• You guys going nuts and my stats exploding.

There is no specific “strategy,” because I am internet infrastructure. This blog started before the modern internet was invented, so I am archived in every country where there’s infrastructure for both of my blogs. My first URL is now archived in The Wayback Machine, and I would point you to it except I kept everything I liked and just copied it over. 😉

It will take the rest of you your entire lives to create the footprint that I have, because it is not based on anything that I did. I was just already there.