The Lunasea Lab

"Pride is a Protest"

Two officers pulled up very quietly in a squad car while I had my back turned. They did not announce their arrival. When I noticed them approaching me by the sound of their footsteps, I was frightened and reached for my phone to record them. They thought I was going for a weapon and one reached for his pistol. I put my hands up.

They illegally detained me and took my ID to run a background check. The one who had started to draw his gun on me asked me if I’d had any thoughts of hurting myself or others.

My background check came up clean. They released me and told me I wasn’t doing anything illegal. I went to my car and bawled my eyes out, thinking about how I’d almost died for the crime of “weird behavior.”

It's the question I'm getting most often. This was just up on Twitter:

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Signs of Autism Burnout

Nonchalance/flat mood

Low attention span

Exhaustion

Scared to make commitments

Irritability

Overwhelming & / or underwhelmed

Special interest unappealing

Low capacity for socializing

Unshakable and constant anxiety

Absolutely. They are what we call pictures. In this case, images taken from a longer set of moving pictures we call an animated film. This series of animated films is called Arthur.

In the original version, the frames are projected many times a second, and due to a phenomena known as the persistence of vision, appear to us to be moving.

Then he says, “I mean, the problem isn’t the gender thing. The problem is four words: she, her, he, and him. We got rid of stewardess and turned it into flight attendant. It doesn’t matter if the flight attendant is a man or woman, so we got rid of it. We just need to get rid of those. I don’t need to know.”

“You don’t need to know… people’s gender?”

“No. I don’t care, I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to remember it.”

The next day he was called into a meeting where he was insulted and grilled about “ruining the party” and “stealing his co-workers’ joy”, which caused him to have another panic attack and start doing coping behaviours like hugging himself, at which point his employers decided he must be angry and was going to turn violent. They then suspended him for days and later told him he’d been fired.

So yeah, it’s not over an “unwanted birthday party”, it’s over employers repeatedly failing to accommodate someone’s disability, trying to frame them as the villain for having accessibility needs, and firing them for not conforming to some stupid office politics.

Of course you do, they’re fantastic. They come in two models, one with tan head stripes and one with white head stripes. But the gene that controls stripe color also has a bunch of other effects! It’s a supergene!

To briefly sum up a grueling amount of fieldwork by people who were probably not getting paid nearly enough, basically the tan-stripes are nurturers and the white-stripes are fighters, across both males and females. White-stripes chase away intruders more, tan-stripes bring more food to the nest. Tan-stripe females bring more bugs to their chicks than white-stripes, white-stripe females are more aggressive and sing more.

There is a reason Jordan Peterson picked lobsters, not sparrows, to get all MRA about, because the sparrow ladies are ALL about the tan-striped males. Sexy nurturing tan-stripe males are immediately grabbed up by the more aggressive white-stripe females (who are also dead sexy if you’re a sparrow.) Then the remaining birds pair off, so you get tan and white couples reproducing in virtually all cases—nurturing male with aggressive female, hyper-aggressive male with hyper-nurturing female.*

And this is good!** Because it turns out that they can have a tough time if they don’t mate across stripes—white x white sparrows often come out undersized if they come out at all. There was some cool recent genetic sequencing and one particular chromosome is way funky, inverted, and scrambled in the white-stripes. So now every white-stripe has a funky chromosome and a normal one, and every tan-stripe has two normal ones.***

This is all really unique and means that white-throated sparrows effectively have four sexes, because they now only reproduce with a member of the opposite stripe and sex chromosome, and their offspring may be any one of the four sexes. The stripes have essentially become a second sex chromosome.

The geneticists involved think the funky chromosome probably showed up as a weird import from somebody gettin’ jiggy with another sparrow species. Presumably this created a hypersexy female whose white head stripes brought all the boys to the yard, and very unusually, that bred true.

Is that cool or what?!

*No word on whether there is a resulting sparrow tradwife media genre.

**Leaving aside the impact on the emotional health of the non-sexy sparrows.

I don’t owe you anything. Not conversation, not politeness, not my nakedness, not my truth, not my body, not one fucking iota of me.

I don’t owe you anything. Not conversation, not politeness, not my nakedness, not my truth, not my body, not one fucking iota of me.