My Ransom Note Spoof

I was reading the Disability Studies Quarterly articles that I'm supposed to have read before the ASAN Autism Campus Inclusion thing started (I'm typing this from DC, already there, since I wound up finishing the readings on the plane. Yes, the one that inspired this post was one of the ones read on the plane.)

Reading about the "Ransom Notes" campaign of 2007 and the Disability community/Autistic community response to it, I saw that one mother wrote a bit of a spoof of the ransom note used for autism in the ill-written campaign. So, six years late, I made my own version:

Dear Autism,

You don't have me. I don't have you. You are a part of me. An important part, but not the only one. I will make sure to use the useful parts of you, and I will work with or around the harder parts.

Oh, and you're coming with me on the fight for our rights.

This is only the beginning.

Alyssa

Now I'm going to talk about it.
Autism having me would be kind of silly. Autism is a label that we apply to certain kinds of different brains, and a label having a person just seems silly to me.
Me having autism? Well, I'll use "has autism" in jokes on occasion, like "I have autism and I'm not afraid to use it!" or "I have ALL the autism and you can't have any," but I am very strongly (capitalized) identity-first (and sometimes identity-only) for how I refer to myself. No, really. Calling me a person with autism because you don't know my preference just gets you politely corrected and I'm not even annoyed. Kind of annoyed if you correct someone else because you think they're messing up by calling me autistic, but I'll still be pretty polite. Correct me on what I call myself, though, especially if you keep trying after I tell you that I am well aware of person-first language and choose not to use it, and you are only entitled to as much respect as you're giving me: That's zero, by the way.
As for useful parts, I am hyperlexic/hypergraphic, and I have really good pattern recognition. All your four leaf clovers are found by me. Well, not all, but I find enough that I can and do sell four leaf clover bookmarks and such. I'll probably get them offered in the etsy store crowdsourcing Autreat trips for Autistic people once the store exists.
The harder parts are things like sensory issues, not always being capable of oral speech (but mostly other people being bad about it, since I have text to speech on my laptop,) difficulty with open-ended questions that can be meltdown-inducing at times, some trouble figuring out where I am in space, things like that.
Rights is things like self-determination, being able to get organ transplants, being able to demand and actually get access to public places, and just general not being discriminated against.
And of course, this is only the beginning. Later stuff includes writing an Autistic musical. I already have a decent number of ideas, and I'm fleshing out some of the characters a bit. Rights are important, and we need culture too, with the space to develop it.

Reflections on... Hexagons

A friend suggested I try a new thing. All of my Because Patterns designs are based on squares for their symmetry are mostly square in shape (I've got a couple that are rectangles, but mostly it's squares... or infinite tessellations where the repeating bit is a square.)

And then we watched a video about hexaflexagons. And the person decorated her hexaflexagons, so my friend, awesome (and ausome!) as he is, suggested that I make a hexagonal pattern. 

Which means triangle paper.

Well, triangle dot paper.
Equilateral triangle dot paper. Which you can never make perfect because sqrt(3)/2 is irrational and printers work with whole numbers of pixels, but that's OK because we can get as close as we want, right?

Right.

But if we get too close, the ratios are huge and the best resolution the printer can get isn't infinite. 

We can still get good enough. The printer I have access to in the engineering computer center prints photos at 600 dots per inch. You can get pretty close with 600 dots per inch, even with having the triangle sides only be a quarter of an inch. 150 dots per (horizontal/vertical) triangle side.

And a pixel isn't a point. It's a box. We can find which box the exact point belongs in and color that pixel dark. And it will be good enough.

And I had all this philosophizing before I did the logical thing. I Googled triangle dot paper. Lo and behold, the same site I use to make my square dot paper does triangles too. So I made a pdf and printed a couple copies to play with.
And I made a hexagonal pattern!

Draw ALL The Patterns!

I'm tired. I'm plugging for Because Patterns today, it's a thing that I do and it's art stuff and it's cool and I make stuff.

I've got an Autism Acceptance album, and every day I'm adding another way that I drew an Autistic person flapping. This will go past the end of April, it goes until I'm out of ideas and then I add the old ones colored in. By then maybe I've got some more ideas!
So far, these are the pictures in it:

  

There will be more.

And I'm running a giveaway, too, using an Autism Acceptance design.

It's this design:

All entering requires is answering what autism acceptance means to you. There aren't a lot of entries right now, not a lot of people voting either. I'd like to see that change, please?

Oh, and I totally do stuff that isn't autism-related, too.
Like this, it's meant to be a trim at the edge of a skirt or something.

Starting to work with designs that will tessellate to cover the plane, too. Here and here are the two I've got up so far.

And I made a CafePress, a Facebook shop, and a Spoonflower, though I can't sell anything from the Spoonflower yet since I haven't proofed the fabric.