Nitch’s Niche

Welcome to Jekyll!

2022-10-11T12:14:17+00:00

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

Jekyll requires blog post files to be named according to the following format:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.MARKUP

Where YEAR is a four-digit number, MONTH and DAY are both two-digit numbers, and MARKUP is the file extension representing the format used in the file. After that, include the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll Talk.

Discovering my Autism

2022-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

My Autism Journey

I initially started writing this a couple hours ago. But I went into background about my birth, then about being bullied a large chunk of my life. And while many Autistic people were bullied or teased in school, and the bullying is a big part of our lives while in school, it really doesn’t speak directly about my Autism. Autism is the kind of thing that can’t be 100% nailed down pathologically or diagnostically. There are no genetic markers to look for. There are no chromosomal or DNA tests to do. The only person who can talk about how our brains work is us. A doctor can’t say “These test show specifically that you’re Autistic.” The tests that are out can just show how our behavior and thought processes match with other people who are Autistic. Many children are diagnosed when they’re little. There’s a skepticism out that says if you aren’t diagnosed when you’re a child, then you must not be autistic. There are many people, however, who for one reason or another are not diagnosed until later in life if at all. I fall into that category.

All my life growing up, I was sort of an “odd duck.” I knew my head worked differently than other kids my own age. I didn’t make many friends. I didn’t play the same way aas them or with the same things. I didn’t know to socialize with them. I usually just waited for them to invite me into their circles, which didn’t happen. I was a music fan from, essentially the time I was born. The way I like to word it is that I have a photographic memory, but with popular music. Instead of playing with kids at the playground, my early memories are grooving to “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul when I was 2. And then there was dancing to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” when I was 4. Music has always been such an ethereal and emotional (near spiritual) environment for me. While most people might have music on the background and maybe bounce their heads to it, it actually lives and breathes with me; it has personality. So the music became my friends.

Socializing just didn’t happen with me. I had my little universe at home. My mom and dad and I, and there was my sister Linda. With my parents an extra generation older than me (I was adopted by my grandparents, essentially), my sister was like a surrogate mother to me until she went into the Air Force. When she came home on leave, she would teach my mom the latest disco dances from back East. I remember her teaching my mom “the hustle” while playing Earth Wind and Fire. And then there was the Halloween when Linda took me Trick-or-Treating in South Tacoma. For hours that evening, we hit all the local business close to home. Then by the time we got home, I was tired and went to bed. When I woke in the morning, my candy was gone. I’ve been interrogating Linda occasionally since then, but she still has no idea what happened to that candy. Uh huh, sure.

I didn’t ever have many friends. I would have occasional friends, though. There was my friend Todd. He was 2 years younger than me and lived down the road a ways. I learned in school that since everyone teased me, even my friends would tease too. So I figured that that was something that everyone put up with. Maybe I received a little more of it than most, but I would have to put up with teasing from my friends or be even more alone. My friend Todd, once, when I was about 15 tried to shove what he said was a used condom in my mouth. I never stuck up for myself, but I did fight him off enough to keep it from going in my mouth. He told me later that it was just a finger bandage from his friend Lars. I don’t remember him doing anything as bad as that, though.

The Internet was a blessing. I had gained some interests over the years. I was somewhat interested in History, music and games. The Internet opened up a world to me to explore these things. And say what you will about the accuracy or reliability of Wikipedia, but my info thirst was satiated. To this day, I still consume whole swaths of Wikipedia about different subjects. I could also use the Internet to collect and listen to all the music I loved growing up, as well as introduce myself that I didn’t have exposure to in my tiny little podunk town.

I also found a new way to socialize. Around 2000, I started chatting online. I was a regular in the Yahoo “Chat Central” chatrooms and made many friends there. There are some friends that I still talk to today. I no longer had to be ashamed of my behaviors, or my socializing skills, or my looks or whatever. It was the first area I felt I could really be myself. Of course I knew that online relationships weren’t quite the same as in person relationships. But that kind of a reality was much more substantial than the near zero I felt I had gotten in “the real world.”

Introduction to this site

2022-10-05T21:44:06+00:00

Introduction to this site

So, there are many reasons for me to start this site. I may not even make this publish, so at the very least it’s a way for my brain to masturbate for a change. To quote the Beastie Boys, “My noggin is hoggin’ all kinds of thoughts.” For months, I’ve had a ton of thoughts that I want to share and this seems like an appropriate way to do it.

Some make ask why I don’t use Facebook or Twitter (since I use both of these) to get my thoughts out. Facebook could be fine except for a couple reasons. probably over 2/3 of the people I have on Facebook are family. I come from a very religious upbringing in a mostly religious family. Some of the things I want to talk about aren’t exactly religion family. I’m planning on going into subjects like atheism, autism, sex, etc that I can’t realisitally share with family. Of course, this will be in addition to conventional topics such as music, computers, maybe video games. But I don’t want to have to only partially share what’s in my head. It’s very limiting and I don’t want to be limited any more.

Another limitation of Facebook is even more extreme on Twitter…post length. I started using Twitter to have a space away from my family where I could explore these types of topics in peace, However, I’m not able to have longer posts to get my thoughts across. You can do multiple paragraphs in Facebook, but it’s really not built for documents and essays. And Twitter, hoo boy! I think the limit there is about 45 characters each. I wouldn’t even get a paragraph out before I have to keep replying myself. Mental masturbation, sure. But at some point you’re just telling yourself the same joke over an over and it stops being funny. “Longer, longer, faster, faster.” Um, yeah, sure. Ya know, I’ll just be over here eating some cheetos. Even if telling yourself the same joke works once or twice, you’re still going to already know the punchline hence it won’t stay funny for long.

So, in the coming posts, expect some things about my home media network and archive and the technical steps in managing that. I’ll probably have some posts about learing Jekyll and GitHub Pages. I’ll talk about neurodiversity, in particular, Autism. I’m toying with the idea of starting an email signup for friends I let access this, but really, to what end? Forcing people to do it would be shitty, and how do I gatekeep to shield this from my family for the above reasons? Maybe instead of an email sign up, maybe use a commenting system like disqus. That sounds more likely. We shall see.

Lemme post this now so I have something.

Nitch

My journey through being bullied

2020-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

My Bullying Journey (pt 1)

The early years

So, explaining how I got “here” might take a lot of backstory. Even before writing this, I was paring things down in my head to try to filter out the unnecessary bits. I may need to do more paring down as time goes on.

I was born April 26, 1970 in Oakland, CA. When I was 3 months old, my birth mom called her father Gordy and his new wife Betty to say she could no longer take care of the baby. Betty flew to Oakland and brought him back to Washington. By the time of my first birthday, Gordy and Betty had adopted me.

That’s the Cliff’s Notes version of my birth. There are a ton of other details, but I just wanted to show that I’m adopted, but I’m still blood related to my (adopted) Dad’s side of the family. So, if I go trying to trace my genetics, I can only go so far. From here on out, when I say “mom” or “dad,” I’ll be referring to Betty and Gordy. If I have to refer to the other, I’ll say “birth mom.”

School

In school, I had the most difficulty. I was already well-versed in the ability to avoid social groups. And my behavior didn’t help matters any. I remember one time in the 2nd grade, the teacher was telling the class about the Statue of Liberty. I started daydreaming and was imagining the statue standing firm and bold, the abstract themes of “beacon of hope and freedom” and all that. Lost in thought, I rolled my papers into a cone and held it high in my hand as if I were the Statue of Liberty. In the real world, my teacher thought I was raising my hand to ask a question. I had to admit that no, I was just daydreaming. I could be wrong, but it seemed the bullying I later endured seemed to stem from that act.

But yes, the bullying then started. If there had been a division of people who just ignored me, and people who just outright disliked me, later everyone just belonged to the same group. It seemed like nearly everyone teased me, harrassed or bullied me, physically abused me, or supported those who did. There was a dwindling percentage who just ignored the situation. It eventually got to a point where even the people who were mostly kind and friendly to me would tease me. So I couldn’t use teasing as a delimiter to separate the good from the bad. Even the good teased me, so there was something within me that just begged for the teasing. I mean, I didn’t fight back. Maybe everyone has to put up with a bit of teasing. In, I think the 9th grade, my best friend Todd tried shoving what he said was a used condom in my mouth. Of course I didn’t fight back. He later said it was a finger bandage his friend Lars had used. And this was my best friend. Don’t get me wrong, I knew at the time that a friend shouldn’t be doing this, but when all you have to choose from are people who do this or worse, you just accept for anyone who wants to be in your life.

My bullying was so bad that my mom spent many days in the principal’s office to try to work on it with the school. At one point, my mom wanted to put me in the local private Christian school. I wanted any other solution than that for many reasons. I’ve always been a very skeptical person, and I’m now an atheist because of it. I knew that that wasn’t the type of environment for me. Also, I didn’t think just switching schools was going to solve it. If I was bullied in the public school, I was sure I’d be bullied in the private school. However…

In 4th grade, I didn’t go to school in my hometown. My dad was a truck driver and was gone from Sunday evening to Friday evening. For one year, my mom and I moved in with my sister Linda and her husband Brian. It was nice to live with my sister and my nephews. And one of the kids in my little cul-de-sac neighborhood was Carol, a friend of mine (one of the good ones) from my hometown. You know, honestly, I don’t think I ever experienced any bullying or teasing while there. I actually played with friends in my neighborhood!