Todd, I love you but once again you are getting carried away with the excitement of having a daughter just like when Andi was pregnant; it makes you oblivious to other people’s feelings. I agree with the other commentors that its a good thing Grandma knows about children.
He has a hard time reading people. It’s where he goes from super dad to well meaning amateur. He showed it with Andi in the flashbacks. And he’s showing it here. The dude came in loaded for bear, but dude sucks at basic psychology. Well, that’s what a supportive family is for. Shore up his weaknesses.
I wonder if that’s why he’s usually pretty good with Selkie — she’s usually very open about her opinions and mood, plus if he’s not distracted, he knows to pay attention because she’s not human…
I suspect she’s trying to be the “good girl.” She sees that Todd is so excited to have Amanda that she doesn’t want to ruin everything. So she suffers in silence, getting angrier just so that her dad can have his dream.
Did you switched back to pigtails for Amanda to show us that she is back to being an antagonist while long hair was used for when we were supposed to see her in a sympathetic light?
If it’s not a visual cue for us, any plans on going back to long hair for her and non-troll doll hair for Andi?
I gotta ask; it’s been a long time and I tend to forget if certain things have been brought up or not: Is Todd GENUINELY not aware that Selkie and Amanda have a history of let’s charitably describe it as “rivalry”?
Todd knows they don’t get along. He knows Amanda picks on Selkie. He knows Selkie doesn’t like Amanda.
However, Amanda can act secretively when she wishes too. Her propensity to get in physical fights isn’t something she’s been able to hide from people, but saying nasty things or being quickly and furtively mean under people’s nose are also skills she has.
Todd also only has, to date, slightly less than a month of experience handling two kids at once. Amanda also isn’t there all of the time, she visits then leaves. He hasn’t developed the “eyes in the back of his head” to catch what goes on when his back is turned yet.
Yeah, I’m gonna go with “oblivious idiot” here. A well-meaning oblivious idiot, but… we’ve seen in the past that Todd sure can be blind to non-verbal cues.
@djaevlenselv: He’s aware of the history. He’s just… not connecting the dots. He wants them to be getting along fine, so he’s ignoring the fact that they never did, blithely assuming that of course the people around him all (automagically) feel the way he wants them to feel.
Ah sibling secret fights. Sometimes with pillows, golf equipment. or even random things from the floor. Just as long as you swore over the cat that mom didn’t find out it was free-for-all if you weren’t crippled.
Dave, is Todd supposed to be slightly autistic? A lot of the things that people are pointing out (very excited and eager, but clueless about picking up on people’s feelings) are things that tend to be characteristic of high-functioning autism. I could see it going either way, either for him to just get carried away a lot, or for him to be autistic, but it made me wonder.
No, not autism, just being naive. Common sense isn’t common to everyone you know. The reason he’s not picking up the clues here is the same reason he wasn’t aware of Andi’s true feeling when they were teenagers; he was too happy to notice the small warning signs that people not on an emotional high would pick up.
Or hes simply seeing what he wants to see (not noticing small clues in a subliminal fashion) PLUS Amanda is apparently very good at making sure the things she does are when people aren’t witnessing it. Plus Selkie may have tried enough times to get Amanda in trouble and people didn’t believe her/she couldn’t prove it so she’s not even going to try, ESPECIALLY since she feels (with good reason IMO) that Todd likes Amanda better now.
I dont know if you know or not but please dont use functioning labels for autism. They arent accurate and more often than not they are used to hurt actual autistic people like me. (Its a spectrum that can vary day by day.)As an autistic person I want to point out Todd does not display very many autistic tendencies at all. Nothing about sensory issues, nothing about processing issues, nothing about social skill issues, nothing about balance and coordination issues, You need to have some of those things to be autistic. There is more to it but that is the stuff people notice right away. Plus we have never seen him stim once and every autistic person stims in some way.
Hes excited and happy right now and its been shown many times that he gets wrapped up in what he wants when he is excited. That is something that can happen to any person not just those with developmental delays.
This is a valid point. I didn’t know the spectrum could vary for the same person (although I probably could have figured if out if it had occurred to me to think about it).
It could be argued that Todd’s not picking up on what’s happening around him is a lack of social skills, but you’re right that he doesn’t really fit the rest of the description.
I will bow to your superior knowledge of autistic signs. My only experience has been that similar personality traits in other people have been described around me as being “autistic tendencies.” I appear to have either taken that too far, or the wrong way, or possibly both. Thank you for pointing all of that out. Sorry I put you to the trouble. 🙂
It is not always easy for people who are child abuse survivors to pick up on visual cues. They have trouble making eye-to-face contact from a young age and often have been taught to “swallow” their anger or negative feelings or they face punishment. For this reason, they tend to have trouble reading people in some situations–especially ones where the people are very close to them.
Yeah, while there are people who are generally able to fake being NT (neurotypical) for long periods of time, even under some stress, there are also people who, when in a low-stress environment, are brilliant, extroverted, and verbally adept — but when stress hits, revert to the “stereotypical” stims (hand-flapping, as a self-calming tool), want to hide under a table, and cannot make mouth-noises anymore.
(I’m mostly quoting the one in my life for some of those terms. I’ve also seen her go from one extreme to the other in a matter of minutes.)
There are also people who are non-verbal, because — and here I’m sort of working by feel — the act of talking produces much the same mental “feeling” that we would have if we had to go rummaging around, bare-handed, in a pile of dog poop. Or were encouraged to pet our own spleens. Given access to technological means of communication that do not rely on mouth-noises, many of these people deemed “low-functioning” are in reality also erudite and **** smart. (People complain about how Kids These Days have their noses in their phones all the time? Yeah, well, for some people, their phones are where they can communicate with other people most freely.)
The various manifestations of autism are, well, varied! (And then you get more complicated with the various issues which can be “co-morbid” (medical term for “hang out with”) autism, which can include anxiety, depression, executive function disorder, and, sadly, mental impairments. But none of these are 100% tied to it — though situational anxiety and depression for external reasons often show up, because there are a lot of neurotypicals out there who are on my list should I ever turn into a velociraptor.)
Anyway, to agree with what was said: Todd doesn’t strike me as likely to be on the spectrum. His obliviousness is portrayed as very much in a single area of his life (family/romantic relationships, not interactions in general), he doesn’t seem to have any tendency towards obsessions (neither the stereotypical monofocus originally attributed to Asperger’s, nor serial obsessions (akin to marathonning through a webcomic’s archive), nor even a tendency to really get going when you happen to get onto a topic he loves), he doesn’t seem to have sensory issues (e.g., foods he just can’t deal with, or fabrics), he doesn’t seem to show much in the way of non-culturally-approved emotions for a decent guy (e.g., he doesn’t cry at sappy commercials*), etc. I don’t even see him doing the subtle sort of stimming like playing with a pen or other “fidget.”
(PS: if/when looking for more information, my activist autistic kid will death-glare at me if I don’t warn you away from Autism Speaks, which has made a lot of money promoting the idea that the only “really autistic” people are ones with extreme mental impairments, that eugenics should be used to “find a cure,” and that any autistic who can advocate for themselves in writing isn’t really autistic enough to speak for autistics. …Look for the #ActuallyAutistic tag on Twitter.)
Here ends the public service announcement, and hopefully my kid will not death-glare at me for any of it.
Wait, eugenics should be used for anything? After WW2, I thought we all agreed that eugenics should not be used to breed pets let alone do whatever it can be used for on people. That……your kid is ten times smarter than that entire group put together because your kid can read the writing on the wall better than they can. Sheesh, I sometimes hate calling myself a super villain sometimes because I don’t want to be lumped in with the loser squad.
They don’t come out and say eugenics, but… Well, there are a lot of autistic people (who generally, though not always, strongly dislike “person with autism” as a label*) who have been very eloquent about why they dislike Autism Speaks, and that one comes up. So, well, yeah.
No one is going to out right say they support using Eugenics because of that Nazi connection. That’s basically saying you support turning people into human guinea pigs for entertainment and junk science.
It’s up to us and the people most affected by these nitwits to work together and keep an eye on the nitwits trying to get power and tell them to knock it off, but a lot more aggressively and help out those that can’t help themselves.
They finally gave up on it in the last couple years, but it took them almost a decade and millions of dollars of results saying “No link” to give up because there’s a dead horse being beaten.
Anyone with a brain should know that Vaccines don’t cause autism. Bad luck causes Autism. I don’t know enough knowledge to go into further causes than mere happenstance. Autistic people need compassion and understanding. Too many people just use fricking bias and agenda instead. It’s really unfortunate. Autistic people should never be used as a gambling chip.
Dr. House: “Idiopathic”, from the Latin, meaning we’re idiots ’cause we can’t figure out what’s causing it.
That’s the quote your “bad luck” bit made me think of 🙂
Yeah, who knows what causes it, but there’s a cause even if we can’t figure it out.
However, the little bit of info I’ve gotten on Autism recently has convinced me that Autistic people offer something to the world that non-Autistic people cannot offer, and that because of that, it is not an ailment that needs to be wiped out the way, say, blindness ought to be wiped out so no one is ever born blind again.
It was interesting to wrap my head around that idea. But it makes sense.
From what I’ve researched, genetics causes autism. Too many copies, or too few, of a selection of genes (which is why it’s a spectrum, with various other stuff hanging out together). Personal experience suggests that’s the case, too; my kid is the one with the diagnosis, but kid and her dad share many traits. And she has a lot he doesn’t.
They used to be antivaxxers, yeah; I think there was some stuff about someone on their board of directors being an antivaxxer? (I am low on sleep and it’s nearly midnight; cannot brain right now.) They at least pay lip-service to pro-vax these days, as GallowsNoose says.
Thank you so much for bringing up AS
As is a very harmful organization that promotes that all Autistic people are burdens. They do not allow any works on their site written by actual autistic people. They perpetuate the stereotype that only little boys have autism. They only use 8% of their charitable funds on helping family with autistic children with most of the emphasis on family members not the autistic child. They actively sympathize with parents who murder their autistic children.
They had a video going around where a mother talks about how much a burden her autistic daughter was and how she wished she would die right infront of said child.
They promote harmful and abusive therapies and institutions that still use shock therapy.
They are a hate group over anything else and for a long time they did support the antivax movement until they were sued.
I personally move from what could be considered “high functioning” to “low functioning” through out the day sometimes.
The saddest thing of all though is seeing people clamor for a cure when its impossible.
You cant rewrite a brain.
Autisim is a developmental delayment and it controls how your brain grows and develops. If it was ever possible to change how a persons mind works completely you would have a very different person. You would have to rewire every neuron in your mind.
But if you could do it why start with people who arent hurting anyone? Instead of pedophiles for example?
(Eye contact is very frustrating for most autistic people as well..ugh.)
Also you dont need to take my words for it, a quick google search can prove everything I brought up! 😀 I just dont have the spoons to look up all this stuff and link it right now.
“Autisim is a developmental delayment and it controls how your brain grows and develops.”
*nod* I think one speculation is that it slows down the development of certain areas — which would kind of make sense, because the younger people are, usually the faster they can learn stuff. (Most people learn the basics of a complex language by the time they’re toddlers!) ((This is based on the principles of iahp.org — my mom used the “Teach your baby to read” stuff on me, and I can’t remember not reading. I used it on my kid. Ditto for her ability to read, which is huge.))
Thing is, if the brain is developing more slowly in certain areas, sometimes those areas are potentially beneficial. If there’s no intellectual disability/delay added to the mix, then the ability to learn like a much younger kid means a much larger window of schlorping in facts.
Finding ways to ameliorate the co-morbid conditions… yeah, okay, that’d be great. But take away the chance to learn things? No, no, no. Get away from that, Autism $peaks! Grrrrr.
Some neat data comes out of MRI studies: Y’know the map of the brain, words here, vision there, etc? That map is “blurrier” for autistics. When doing a math problem or whatever, the main activation is in the same area, but less powerful, but adjacent areas also participate.
It’s interesting to correlate with the stereotypical things autistics are bad at being things humans normally have “hardware acceleration” for, and the stereotypical things autistics are good at being general-intelligence things. Are we closer to a “pure” trainable neural net? If so, then the idea of wiping out autism is actually backwards…
(Also, a “pure” trainable neural net takes longer to train than one pre-optimized for a task, which fits nicely with it presenting as delays.)
While we’ve seen him be a great dad to Selkie before finding out who Amanda was, this obliviousness is totally in character for Todd. Marie seems to be pretty aware of it, too.
I’m really hoping Todd asks Selki whats going on or if Amanda and her have been fighting and she replies along the lines of “Whys should I tells you, all you say is that we HAVE to get along since we are sisters.” I’m still kinda horrified at how much abuse Selki is being asked to just forget about let from before let alone Amanda’s general unpleasantness towards her day to day now. I’ve been there as a kid with cousins and it wasn’t till the kid drew blood did the adults ever say anything beyond “stop fighting both of you” and “you have to get along your family.” 3 stitches and a broken bike later and I didn’t have to see them again till 4 years later and they made a point not to leave us alone together.
Actually, I hope Mari comes and visits Selkie and talks to her then approaches Todd with her. Get two voices in his ears telling him what’s wrong. To have both generations making it clear that Selkie feels pushed away might have an even more powerful effect, a voice from the past and a voice from the future.
OOOOHHH! the”Ghost of Abuses Past” and the “Ghost of Abuses Present”… i really hope Todd doesn’t HAVE TO see the “Ghost of Future Abuses” before making a positive change… hmmm… with Mom being the Past, and Selkie the Present… who’s YOUR guess for the “Ghost of Future Abuses”??
A part of me wants to say Andi in a gimp suit. But no, that would put a disturbing image in everyone’s head, so no. Maybe a future antagonist? I mean Pixar does it.
WOW! All this conversation on autism strikes me as really really great. I have a very high functioning autistic son, and as a previous poster noted can happen, he was VERY determined and able to “pull it together” for long periods of time. He WANTS to succeed (duh!). This was actually a problem, as I had a great deal of difficulty getting him diagnosed. Around here, there’s an 8 year old cutoff for aid, and he was seven before a psychologist FINALLY said “there is NO WAY it is autism, BUT something big IS going on. So, let’s go ahead and test him.” Wanna guess what the tests irrefutably showed? 3 weeks before he was 8. No one from state would cooperate with me, to allow me to even TRY for assistance. He’s 9 now, and his areas of challenge just keep acting like a loadstone. I need to plunge back in and try and “go the long road” to getting him autism specific help. Here’s the kicker – I’ve learned that I wasn’t just a stubborn, stupid, underachieving willful little b*tch growing up. MY challenges with facing people, certain stressors, socially inappropriate physical “soothers”, etc? Guess who is most probably ALSO spectrum? Along with her daddy and many aunts and uncles and etc? No choice. I have a 5 year old daughter as well, their dad went “loolally” and can’t function (I’m begging him to get tested!) The family that still talks to me and or is living (Mom died young) is unable to even understand that he CAN help, much less that I better get help. I’ve gotta dive back in.
Scares me, actually. I am the only stable point my kids have had, and when I start cracking, they are left only with each other. Not letting that happen, getting my son the BEST this public school system has to offer him (AND SUCCEEDING!) Not loosing my daughter in all of the hub-bub over their dad and her brother, getting HER a good school, and staying loving, consistent, stable (well…. trying to). Those have taken everything in me. You know, it was SUPPOSED to be *daughter’s* turn, once his school was stable? Pull 4-6 hours a week to helping HER flourish? Crud.
Thank you thank you for the heads up about “autism speaks”. I had checked it out casually in the past, and I’m disappointed I didn’t pick up that it was such a messed up thing. And, thanks again for all the great postings. I’ll reread them many times, probably, gearing myself towards a direction that feels “ouchie”. 😉
If you’ve got a diagnosis, you can get the school to do an IEP if it’s a public school in America. This is no cure-all, but it is VERY useful, and while the paras (assistants) need to be watched like hawks because a lot of them are authoritarians, the other special ed people have been generally good to great.
(Also, avoid the “behavior modification” stuff that links rewards/punishments to behaving “neurotypically.” It’s useful to know how to activate “hyper mode” and be ultra-rational and fake being NT to the NTs, but trying to do that all the time is very hard on a lot of people on the spectrum, and the training to do it can be actively damaging, on the order of PTSD for some. (And in my experience, the autistic mind comes with a huge dose of memory. Unfortunately, while this learning-ability can be great for math or a language, it also means that horrible things get remembered; my kid can get triggered on things that happened years ago. Usually at night when she needs to get to sleep, but can’t because she’s suddenly processing some crap or other that maybe she didn’t even think to tell me about at the time.
But stuff like crying when under stress… that’s not for attention, and punishing a kid for it won’t help. Giving them tools to self-soothe may help, but in-school detention? Nope, nope, nope. Don’t do it. It doesn’t work.)
…Trying to think of a way to give you contact information without totally blowing my cover here. ;D (Could Dave send you my email, I wonder? He ought to be able to access everyone’s email… right?)
OH. WOW. YOU. !!ROCK!!
Dave, just did a quick search of email, and I’m wondering if I should check spam folder? But, if you need my ok, you HAVE it! AND my gratitude, to both you AND “A.Beth”.
Also, my permission is given to send my email info to A.Beth
Thank you again!!
🙂
=-O
You haven’t missed it, I was waiting to hear from you before sending anything. Didn’t want to use your email without hearing from you first; I try to respect contact boundaries, and it could be a dummy email account for all I know (some people use fake emails for comment boards to avoid spam in their real email)
Sending you A.Beth’s info now! It’ll come from dave AT selkiecomic DOT com.
Oh thank goodness Grandma is on the case! Maybe Selkie should go live with THEM!
Huzzah! Leave it to Grams to know what to look out for.
Todd, I love you but once again you are getting carried away with the excitement of having a daughter just like when Andi was pregnant; it makes you oblivious to other people’s feelings. I agree with the other commentors that its a good thing Grandma knows about children.
He has a hard time reading people. It’s where he goes from super dad to well meaning amateur. He showed it with Andi in the flashbacks. And he’s showing it here. The dude came in loaded for bear, but dude sucks at basic psychology. Well, that’s what a supportive family is for. Shore up his weaknesses.
I wonder if that’s why he’s usually pretty good with Selkie — she’s usually very open about her opinions and mood, plus if he’s not distracted, he knows to pay attention because she’s not human…
I’m surprised she hasn’t actually said anything, she’s never been too timid to not speak her mind.
I suspect she’s trying to be the “good girl.” She sees that Todd is so excited to have Amanda that she doesn’t want to ruin everything. So she suffers in silence, getting angrier just so that her dad can have his dream.
This ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Oh Todd… naive Todd. Either he’s really dense or Amanda and Selkie haven’t really been getting into spats all that much. I’m hoping it’s the latter.
I would like to think Todd isn’t that dense.
Even without color grandma’s face is priceless it shows that instant headache that comes from situations like that
Hi Dave, I got a question.
Did you switched back to pigtails for Amanda to show us that she is back to being an antagonist while long hair was used for when we were supposed to see her in a sympathetic light?
If it’s not a visual cue for us, any plans on going back to long hair for her and non-troll doll hair for Andi?
I actually have plans for Andi’s hair, but as to the question of Amanda’s… well, lets just say she could use some more lessons on “loosening up”.
So who is it that likes the nuclear Christmas cookies?
Or is Sydney Scoville coming to visit?
that’s the stove starting up, it’s the little “poof” when the gas ignites.
I thought about a stove burner, but the little ring of smoke above it?
My stove don’t do that.
But exceedingly hot food quite often has flames and smoke, in cartoons.
I think that “ring of smoke” will turn out to be a roughly-sketched frying pan.
Dear lord, imagine Sydney teaching Amanda new swears to use. The world would never be the same again.
Be careful Todd the term “one for the ages” can be used for good or bad!
I gotta ask; it’s been a long time and I tend to forget if certain things have been brought up or not: Is Todd GENUINELY not aware that Selkie and Amanda have a history of let’s charitably describe it as “rivalry”?
I seem to remember a line similar to “… and by the way, they *hate* each other.”
Todd knows they don’t get along. He knows Amanda picks on Selkie. He knows Selkie doesn’t like Amanda.
However, Amanda can act secretively when she wishes too. Her propensity to get in physical fights isn’t something she’s been able to hide from people, but saying nasty things or being quickly and furtively mean under people’s nose are also skills she has.
Todd also only has, to date, slightly less than a month of experience handling two kids at once. Amanda also isn’t there all of the time, she visits then leaves. He hasn’t developed the “eyes in the back of his head” to catch what goes on when his back is turned yet.
I usually like Todd but if he thinks Selkie is “fine” with Amanda he’s an oblivious idiot. Grandma to the rescue!
Todd, you had a brother and sister of your own. Don’t you remember what it was like?!?!
Maybe they actually got along.
Judging by his mother’s comment I wouldn’t think so.
Yeah, I’m gonna go with “oblivious idiot” here. A well-meaning oblivious idiot, but… we’ve seen in the past that Todd sure can be blind to non-verbal cues.
@djaevlenselv: He’s aware of the history. He’s just… not connecting the dots. He wants them to be getting along fine, so he’s ignoring the fact that they never did, blithely assuming that of course the people around him all (automagically) feel the way he wants them to feel.
Ah sibling secret fights. Sometimes with pillows, golf equipment. or even random things from the floor. Just as long as you swore over the cat that mom didn’t find out it was free-for-all if you weren’t crippled.
Dave, is Todd supposed to be slightly autistic? A lot of the things that people are pointing out (very excited and eager, but clueless about picking up on people’s feelings) are things that tend to be characteristic of high-functioning autism. I could see it going either way, either for him to just get carried away a lot, or for him to be autistic, but it made me wonder.
No, not autism, just being naive. Common sense isn’t common to everyone you know. The reason he’s not picking up the clues here is the same reason he wasn’t aware of Andi’s true feeling when they were teenagers; he was too happy to notice the small warning signs that people not on an emotional high would pick up.
Or hes simply seeing what he wants to see (not noticing small clues in a subliminal fashion) PLUS Amanda is apparently very good at making sure the things she does are when people aren’t witnessing it. Plus Selkie may have tried enough times to get Amanda in trouble and people didn’t believe her/she couldn’t prove it so she’s not even going to try, ESPECIALLY since she feels (with good reason IMO) that Todd likes Amanda better now.
I dont know if you know or not but please dont use functioning labels for autism. They arent accurate and more often than not they are used to hurt actual autistic people like me. (Its a spectrum that can vary day by day.)As an autistic person I want to point out Todd does not display very many autistic tendencies at all. Nothing about sensory issues, nothing about processing issues, nothing about social skill issues, nothing about balance and coordination issues, You need to have some of those things to be autistic. There is more to it but that is the stuff people notice right away. Plus we have never seen him stim once and every autistic person stims in some way.
Hes excited and happy right now and its been shown many times that he gets wrapped up in what he wants when he is excited. That is something that can happen to any person not just those with developmental delays.
This is a valid point. I didn’t know the spectrum could vary for the same person (although I probably could have figured if out if it had occurred to me to think about it).
It could be argued that Todd’s not picking up on what’s happening around him is a lack of social skills, but you’re right that he doesn’t really fit the rest of the description.
I will bow to your superior knowledge of autistic signs. My only experience has been that similar personality traits in other people have been described around me as being “autistic tendencies.” I appear to have either taken that too far, or the wrong way, or possibly both. Thank you for pointing all of that out. Sorry I put you to the trouble. 🙂
It is not always easy for people who are child abuse survivors to pick up on visual cues. They have trouble making eye-to-face contact from a young age and often have been taught to “swallow” their anger or negative feelings or they face punishment. For this reason, they tend to have trouble reading people in some situations–especially ones where the people are very close to them.
Yeah, while there are people who are generally able to fake being NT (neurotypical) for long periods of time, even under some stress, there are also people who, when in a low-stress environment, are brilliant, extroverted, and verbally adept — but when stress hits, revert to the “stereotypical” stims (hand-flapping, as a self-calming tool), want to hide under a table, and cannot make mouth-noises anymore.
(I’m mostly quoting the one in my life for some of those terms. I’ve also seen her go from one extreme to the other in a matter of minutes.)
There are also people who are non-verbal, because — and here I’m sort of working by feel — the act of talking produces much the same mental “feeling” that we would have if we had to go rummaging around, bare-handed, in a pile of dog poop. Or were encouraged to pet our own spleens. Given access to technological means of communication that do not rely on mouth-noises, many of these people deemed “low-functioning” are in reality also erudite and **** smart. (People complain about how Kids These Days have their noses in their phones all the time? Yeah, well, for some people, their phones are where they can communicate with other people most freely.)
The various manifestations of autism are, well, varied! (And then you get more complicated with the various issues which can be “co-morbid” (medical term for “hang out with”) autism, which can include anxiety, depression, executive function disorder, and, sadly, mental impairments. But none of these are 100% tied to it — though situational anxiety and depression for external reasons often show up, because there are a lot of neurotypicals out there who are on my list should I ever turn into a velociraptor.)
Anyway, to agree with what was said: Todd doesn’t strike me as likely to be on the spectrum. His obliviousness is portrayed as very much in a single area of his life (family/romantic relationships, not interactions in general), he doesn’t seem to have any tendency towards obsessions (neither the stereotypical monofocus originally attributed to Asperger’s, nor serial obsessions (akin to marathonning through a webcomic’s archive), nor even a tendency to really get going when you happen to get onto a topic he loves), he doesn’t seem to have sensory issues (e.g., foods he just can’t deal with, or fabrics), he doesn’t seem to show much in the way of non-culturally-approved emotions for a decent guy (e.g., he doesn’t cry at sappy commercials*), etc. I don’t even see him doing the subtle sort of stimming like playing with a pen or other “fidget.”
(*Reader, I married him. 😉
(PS: if/when looking for more information, my activist autistic kid will death-glare at me if I don’t warn you away from Autism Speaks, which has made a lot of money promoting the idea that the only “really autistic” people are ones with extreme mental impairments, that eugenics should be used to “find a cure,” and that any autistic who can advocate for themselves in writing isn’t really autistic enough to speak for autistics. …Look for the #ActuallyAutistic tag on Twitter.)
Here ends the public service announcement, and hopefully my kid will not death-glare at me for any of it.
Wait, eugenics should be used for anything? After WW2, I thought we all agreed that eugenics should not be used to breed pets let alone do whatever it can be used for on people. That……your kid is ten times smarter than that entire group put together because your kid can read the writing on the wall better than they can. Sheesh, I sometimes hate calling myself a super villain sometimes because I don’t want to be lumped in with the loser squad.
They don’t come out and say eugenics, but… Well, there are a lot of autistic people (who generally, though not always, strongly dislike “person with autism” as a label*) who have been very eloquent about why they dislike Autism Speaks, and that one comes up. So, well, yeah.
No one is going to out right say they support using Eugenics because of that Nazi connection. That’s basically saying you support turning people into human guinea pigs for entertainment and junk science.
It’s up to us and the people most affected by these nitwits to work together and keep an eye on the nitwits trying to get power and tell them to knock it off, but a lot more aggressively and help out those that can’t help themselves.
Aren’t they also heavily in bed with the antivax idiots?
Just looked at their website. Their official statement on the issue is provax. So we have that.
They finally gave up on it in the last couple years, but it took them almost a decade and millions of dollars of results saying “No link” to give up because there’s a dead horse being beaten.
Anyone with a brain should know that Vaccines don’t cause autism. Bad luck causes Autism. I don’t know enough knowledge to go into further causes than mere happenstance. Autistic people need compassion and understanding. Too many people just use fricking bias and agenda instead. It’s really unfortunate. Autistic people should never be used as a gambling chip.
Dr. House: “Idiopathic”, from the Latin, meaning we’re idiots ’cause we can’t figure out what’s causing it.
That’s the quote your “bad luck” bit made me think of 🙂
Yeah, who knows what causes it, but there’s a cause even if we can’t figure it out.
However, the little bit of info I’ve gotten on Autism recently has convinced me that Autistic people offer something to the world that non-Autistic people cannot offer, and that because of that, it is not an ailment that needs to be wiped out the way, say, blindness ought to be wiped out so no one is ever born blind again.
It was interesting to wrap my head around that idea. But it makes sense.
From what I’ve researched, genetics causes autism. Too many copies, or too few, of a selection of genes (which is why it’s a spectrum, with various other stuff hanging out together). Personal experience suggests that’s the case, too; my kid is the one with the diagnosis, but kid and her dad share many traits. And she has a lot he doesn’t.
They used to be antivaxxers, yeah; I think there was some stuff about someone on their board of directors being an antivaxxer? (I am low on sleep and it’s nearly midnight; cannot brain right now.) They at least pay lip-service to pro-vax these days, as GallowsNoose says.
Thank you so much for bringing up AS
As is a very harmful organization that promotes that all Autistic people are burdens. They do not allow any works on their site written by actual autistic people. They perpetuate the stereotype that only little boys have autism. They only use 8% of their charitable funds on helping family with autistic children with most of the emphasis on family members not the autistic child. They actively sympathize with parents who murder their autistic children.
They had a video going around where a mother talks about how much a burden her autistic daughter was and how she wished she would die right infront of said child.
They promote harmful and abusive therapies and institutions that still use shock therapy.
They are a hate group over anything else and for a long time they did support the antivax movement until they were sued.
I personally move from what could be considered “high functioning” to “low functioning” through out the day sometimes.
The saddest thing of all though is seeing people clamor for a cure when its impossible.
You cant rewrite a brain.
Autisim is a developmental delayment and it controls how your brain grows and develops. If it was ever possible to change how a persons mind works completely you would have a very different person. You would have to rewire every neuron in your mind.
But if you could do it why start with people who arent hurting anyone? Instead of pedophiles for example?
(Eye contact is very frustrating for most autistic people as well..ugh.)
Also you dont need to take my words for it, a quick google search can prove everything I brought up! 😀 I just dont have the spoons to look up all this stuff and link it right now.
( hello fellow spoon-theory user! 😀 )
“Autisim is a developmental delayment and it controls how your brain grows and develops.”
*nod* I think one speculation is that it slows down the development of certain areas — which would kind of make sense, because the younger people are, usually the faster they can learn stuff. (Most people learn the basics of a complex language by the time they’re toddlers!) ((This is based on the principles of iahp.org — my mom used the “Teach your baby to read” stuff on me, and I can’t remember not reading. I used it on my kid. Ditto for her ability to read, which is huge.))
Thing is, if the brain is developing more slowly in certain areas, sometimes those areas are potentially beneficial. If there’s no intellectual disability/delay added to the mix, then the ability to learn like a much younger kid means a much larger window of schlorping in facts.
Finding ways to ameliorate the co-morbid conditions… yeah, okay, that’d be great. But take away the chance to learn things? No, no, no. Get away from that, Autism $peaks! Grrrrr.
Some neat data comes out of MRI studies: Y’know the map of the brain, words here, vision there, etc? That map is “blurrier” for autistics. When doing a math problem or whatever, the main activation is in the same area, but less powerful, but adjacent areas also participate.
It’s interesting to correlate with the stereotypical things autistics are bad at being things humans normally have “hardware acceleration” for, and the stereotypical things autistics are good at being general-intelligence things. Are we closer to a “pure” trainable neural net? If so, then the idea of wiping out autism is actually backwards…
(Also, a “pure” trainable neural net takes longer to train than one pre-optimized for a task, which fits nicely with it presenting as delays.)
Thank you thank you friend!
While we’ve seen him be a great dad to Selkie before finding out who Amanda was, this obliviousness is totally in character for Todd. Marie seems to be pretty aware of it, too.
I’m really hoping Todd asks Selki whats going on or if Amanda and her have been fighting and she replies along the lines of “Whys should I tells you, all you say is that we HAVE to get along since we are sisters.” I’m still kinda horrified at how much abuse Selki is being asked to just forget about let from before let alone Amanda’s general unpleasantness towards her day to day now. I’ve been there as a kid with cousins and it wasn’t till the kid drew blood did the adults ever say anything beyond “stop fighting both of you” and “you have to get along your family.” 3 stitches and a broken bike later and I didn’t have to see them again till 4 years later and they made a point not to leave us alone together.
Actually, I hope Mari comes and visits Selkie and talks to her then approaches Todd with her. Get two voices in his ears telling him what’s wrong. To have both generations making it clear that Selkie feels pushed away might have an even more powerful effect, a voice from the past and a voice from the future.
OOOOHHH! the”Ghost of Abuses Past” and the “Ghost of Abuses Present”… i really hope Todd doesn’t HAVE TO see the “Ghost of Future Abuses” before making a positive change… hmmm… with Mom being the Past, and Selkie the Present… who’s YOUR guess for the “Ghost of Future Abuses”??
A part of me wants to say Andi in a gimp suit. But no, that would put a disturbing image in everyone’s head, so no. Maybe a future antagonist? I mean Pixar does it.
WOW! All this conversation on autism strikes me as really really great. I have a very high functioning autistic son, and as a previous poster noted can happen, he was VERY determined and able to “pull it together” for long periods of time. He WANTS to succeed (duh!). This was actually a problem, as I had a great deal of difficulty getting him diagnosed. Around here, there’s an 8 year old cutoff for aid, and he was seven before a psychologist FINALLY said “there is NO WAY it is autism, BUT something big IS going on. So, let’s go ahead and test him.” Wanna guess what the tests irrefutably showed? 3 weeks before he was 8. No one from state would cooperate with me, to allow me to even TRY for assistance. He’s 9 now, and his areas of challenge just keep acting like a loadstone. I need to plunge back in and try and “go the long road” to getting him autism specific help. Here’s the kicker – I’ve learned that I wasn’t just a stubborn, stupid, underachieving willful little b*tch growing up. MY challenges with facing people, certain stressors, socially inappropriate physical “soothers”, etc? Guess who is most probably ALSO spectrum? Along with her daddy and many aunts and uncles and etc? No choice. I have a 5 year old daughter as well, their dad went “loolally” and can’t function (I’m begging him to get tested!) The family that still talks to me and or is living (Mom died young) is unable to even understand that he CAN help, much less that I better get help. I’ve gotta dive back in.
Scares me, actually. I am the only stable point my kids have had, and when I start cracking, they are left only with each other. Not letting that happen, getting my son the BEST this public school system has to offer him (AND SUCCEEDING!) Not loosing my daughter in all of the hub-bub over their dad and her brother, getting HER a good school, and staying loving, consistent, stable (well…. trying to). Those have taken everything in me. You know, it was SUPPOSED to be *daughter’s* turn, once his school was stable? Pull 4-6 hours a week to helping HER flourish? Crud.
Thank you thank you for the heads up about “autism speaks”. I had checked it out casually in the past, and I’m disappointed I didn’t pick up that it was such a messed up thing. And, thanks again for all the great postings. I’ll reread them many times, probably, gearing myself towards a direction that feels “ouchie”. 😉
If you’ve got a diagnosis, you can get the school to do an IEP if it’s a public school in America. This is no cure-all, but it is VERY useful, and while the paras (assistants) need to be watched like hawks because a lot of them are authoritarians, the other special ed people have been generally good to great.
(Also, avoid the “behavior modification” stuff that links rewards/punishments to behaving “neurotypically.” It’s useful to know how to activate “hyper mode” and be ultra-rational and fake being NT to the NTs, but trying to do that all the time is very hard on a lot of people on the spectrum, and the training to do it can be actively damaging, on the order of PTSD for some. (And in my experience, the autistic mind comes with a huge dose of memory. Unfortunately, while this learning-ability can be great for math or a language, it also means that horrible things get remembered; my kid can get triggered on things that happened years ago. Usually at night when she needs to get to sleep, but can’t because she’s suddenly processing some crap or other that maybe she didn’t even think to tell me about at the time.
But stuff like crying when under stress… that’s not for attention, and punishing a kid for it won’t help. Giving them tools to self-soothe may help, but in-school detention? Nope, nope, nope. Don’t do it. It doesn’t work.)
…Trying to think of a way to give you contact information without totally blowing my cover here. ;D (Could Dave send you my email, I wonder? He ought to be able to access everyone’s email… right?)
I can see the email address people use to sign in for comments, yes. I can send it out if both parties are okay with doing so.
I’m fine if you send mine to Keep on keepin’ on, who can do whatever they want with it. Thanks! You’re awesome!
OH. WOW. YOU. !!ROCK!!
Dave, just did a quick search of email, and I’m wondering if I should check spam folder? But, if you need my ok, you HAVE it! AND my gratitude, to both you AND “A.Beth”.
Also, my permission is given to send my email info to A.Beth
Thank you again!!
🙂
=-O
You haven’t missed it, I was waiting to hear from you before sending anything. Didn’t want to use your email without hearing from you first; I try to respect contact boundaries, and it could be a dummy email account for all I know (some people use fake emails for comment boards to avoid spam in their real email)
Sending you A.Beth’s info now! It’ll come from dave AT selkiecomic DOT com.
leave it to Grams to make an well fit Game of Thrones reference!