October 1, 2014 by Janika Banks - 2 Comments

The Nerdist Wayfarer

(This update follows 4 previous posts called The Nerdist Way 10-3-12, Team Nerd 11-1-12, The Nerdist Wimp 1-1-13, and The Nerdist Score- ‘aspie spoonie Lexx fan on a mission’ assessment 10-31-13.)

Chris Hardwick published The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) on 11-1-11. I remember him talking about it, I remember being first in line for it at my local library and still having to wait for 3 months for interlibrary loan, and I remember finally being able to read it. I couldn’t renew it because so many other people had it on hold at the libary, so I played the musical book game, getting back in line on hold every time I turned it in. A year later I finally had a little extra money and bought two copies, one for myself and one for my daughter and her husband.

I asked to be referred to a psychologist in 2007 specifically to work on public interaction after failing dismally at maintaining what could have been a very lucrative public friendship. He diagnosed me with Asperger’s and depression and assessed my GAF score at 51-60, wondering how I’d been able to get a college degree and actually hold jobs. He didn’t think my social anxiety was as severe as I thought it was, despite my having shut down all social media and ignoring the internet for an entire year. I’m also not a phone person, and he worked pretty hard with me on staying in touch with family. During all this time he watched me plunge through complete disability and helped me focus on a holistic approach to my physical and mental health during a pretty miserable couple of years. In 2011 a doctor finally diagnosed me with diabetes (on top of my already severe fibromyalgia and lupus flare ups), and once I figured out that what I was eating kept me from healing, I figured out how to turned my life around and have been getting healthier.

One vital thing further changed my outlook for my future- yep, the Nerdist book. It’s hard to figure out a direction when you can’t even do the things you enjoy for distraction, but Chris outlined his path out of his abyss, and I basically followed it. I’d read self help books before, not one of them worked at all. Chris has a completely new and fresh perspective on how not only to survive but to thrive, no matter how bad the problem is. My own problems include a very glitchy brain, so when he said my kind of people are geniuses spinning wheels and what we need is direction, I was all over that book.

I’m one of those smarty pants that tested in the top 3 percentile in high school, got over 30 on my ACT, and dumbfounded professors with my GRE scores going into grad school, but I also experienced epic brain fail between a couple of nasty viral infections and regular autoimmune flare ups, continual high pain levels coupled with handfuls of meds, and diabetes making it all worse. My brain fog was so bad that it became part of my complete disability. Using my brain on the internet became akin to crawling like a worm on the ground trying to get somewhere. Trying to keep any kind of direction going in my life besides not screwing my day up going to an appointment on the wrong day was pretty dismal. I had no direction at all, couldn’t see a way forward, and felt so utterly useless that I don’t know how I even lived. My psychologist told me perhaps my Asperger’s cushioned me against the possibilities of suicide, alcoholism, and divorce, because most women my age become wrapped up in those three biggies, even without overwhelming chronic illness egging it on, but I was nowhere near being a happy camper. I was the glum soul writing lengthy posts on why happiness doesn’t exist.

Then he watched Chris Hardwick’s book change my life.

My psychologist ‘turned me loose’ several months ago. He thinks I’m doing so well that I don’t even need to check in. My psychiatrist has told me he’s cool with me not being on any kind of head meds. I’ve worked very hard to survive depression without meds, and I have to say it’s not easy convincing a psychiatrist, so that was a big win. My doctor is thrilled that I’m off the xanax and vicodin other doctors had me on for years. I was just as addicted as any Hollywood actor flushing their life down a toilet, but I had an excuse, right? Wrong. I decided I’d rather not go down a toilet and disappear. My neurologist says I’m still healing from years ago trigeminal damage during a nasty car wreck and I will keep healing as long as I control my diabetes. My physical therapists have got me mobilized, not just up walking around but doing full spinal core strength, which has been very challenging, but you know what? It’s awesome being able to shop for my own groceries. It’s wonderful not needing help in and out of a shower. It’s marvelous being able to control my pain levels with movement.

Because I took Chris Hardwick’s book very seriously (follow my story in the posts I linked at the top of this post), I am also rebuilding my ‘web empire’. This hasn’t been easy, either. I’ve been taking very tiny steps, but since Chris coached me how to set goals and then list out the steps to reach those goals, I have been able to build what looks like a lot of work. I have been able to find purpose and joy in what I’m doing, and now I consider this my ‘job’. I work every day, I love my work, and one day my work might even pay off, but for now, I’m very satisfied that over the last two years I have come out of a wretched black hole of hopelessness and spread my wings. I no longer feel like a dismal failure face planting on the couch every day. I no longer feel sad and angry.

It’s been two years since I wrote my first post about how The Nerdist Way has helped me change my wreck of a life into a more enjoyable day by day experience that I feel good about. I can’t recommend this book enough, especially if you feel stuck and don’t know what to do next. If you have trepidations about any part of that book, please read back through my series about it, and be patient with yourself. I know exactly how hard it is, and I’m here to tell you it’s all worth it. You don’t have to croak off alone curled up on a couch because you’re hitting dead ends with doctors and jobs and despair. If you need more convincing, check out my other blogs and follow me, not just surviving depression and chronic illness, but thriving.

Spaz– my spoonie blog

PinkyGuerrero– my personal blog

Lexxperience– my fandom blog

Surveypalooza– my distraction blog

Aspienado– my aspie/work blog

DuckLordsOfTheSith– my pet chickens blog

And you can always find me on facebook and twitter.

And very definitely click this pic to get the book.

September 30, 2014 by Janika Banks - 0 comments

Team Nerd

Originally posted 11-1-12 and moved here for mobile viewing.

I am determined more than ever to enjoy my burrito. I hit a brick wall full face on this last week and slid like a bug down a windshield. I had been coasting on this new ‘energy’ I’ve been having ever since I made up my determination to suck it up and get into physical therapy and then migrate upstairs to the fitness center over the last couple of months. My pain level was coming down a bit, I was actually moving around doing real things with my life, and all the words you think are for other people were starting to filter their way into my mind- sweet, awesome, this is cool. (And getting nearly 500 views on my post The Nerdist Way is blowing me away, too.)

But you know how it is, what goes up must come down, and all it took was a spectacular autumn peak like we haven’t seen in years, and the allergies and benadryl turned into getting dehydrated again, and that spiked my fibro spasms till all the muscles across my back and butt felt like live snakes got loose under my skin, and that made it harder to drive and walk and work out…

I’m not back to square one, thank goodness, but I’m definitely back in the wimp corner. I made it into the fitness center yesterday after missing about 10 days (time to pay, that’ll get a person going), and decided I could handle a workout if I just dial it back a bit, like when I was so wimpy getting started with the physical therapy at the end of August. To my surprise, I didn’t have to dial back much at *all*. Just kept it real slow and easy and actually pulled a 20 minute workout with severe fibromyalgia, which I could never have done in the past, but it’s like Chris says in his book, just keeping up the routine, however wimpy, gave me muscle memory that apparently I am able to fall back on and not be as big a loser as I felt like I’d be. I was able to keep my workload and weights up where I had them, I just moved s-l-o-w-l-y so my muscles wouldn’t freak out and had plenty of time to keep up with the activity. And you know what? I left feeling better than when I walked in. Worn out, but certainly not worse. (I guess I ultimately owe Trainer Tom a great big thanx for that.)

That was so inspiring that I decided it’s time to seriously tackle part 3 of Chris Hardwick’s book- The Nerdist Way– *TIME*. As in time management. The first time I read through the book (many months ago), I couldn’t handle that part. If Chris had started his book with that section, I would never have made it, but he was a genius and small stepped me to gradual successes in other areas first, so I really do feel more mentally and physically prepared. I was inspired by part one to take my favorite stuff seriously and not see it as a waste of time, like so many people have told me all through my life. I was inspired by part two to get my poor mangled body into physical therapy for some real one on one with a professional who actually cares whether I feel gross and if I’m moving around correctly. It feels good to have someone pay a little attention to you when life sucks, you know? So I’m taking myself seriously, I’m getting out of the house, now I have this time management stuff I’m ready to look at.

I have Asperger’s, I do not have a real sense of time. While I was in college and holding jobs, I had structure and I loved it. When I have a plan laid out, I know how to fill in the free time with other stuff I need to do. But when I finally ground to a halt and couldn’t work and my brain fell out (which I’ve briefly touched on at spaz: blinking in the light), that structure was gone and time became a void. I realized as days and months went by that I need a Plan, and even more, I have to make a daily plan every single morning. You would think adapting to this over several years would become a habit, but when you deal with as much physical and mental loss as I have (and even less, it really doesn’t take much), depression swoops in and finishes you off. People who have never had anxiety and depression don’t have a *clue*. But Chris does, and now I’m getting back on a track I never dreamed I’d see again, because that man is blessed with words. I won’t repeat a lot of them , but I certainly can’t complain at all.

I know it is REALLY really hard when life sux. I once wrote a post about how I logically deduced that suicide wouldn’t actually relieve me of any pain and anguish Synchronicity, Suicide, and The Eyes, and then I pulled it into protected posting while I went through the very worst of it because I really didn’t see how I could live through everything I was dealing with. I’m making it public again, because this is important. Chris’s words were important enough to help me change my life, and I believe the rest of us have that same power. It’s important to TALK, to share, to use the words we have for other people to hang onto when life sux for them, too.

So here’s the hard part for me now, and I think it is for some of you, too. Time. I have written reams of stuff about time, I’m a cosmology nut obsessed with time travel paradoxes (and working on a story! ), but in my own life, the paradox is that I can barely feel time passing at all. I’m one of those people who not only looks up and wonders where the last 8 hours just went, but also shows up to appointments on the wrong day, and Scott has actually had to correct me (he’s gentle and kind, bless him) about what is coming on tv any given night, because I so easily mash Tuesday and Thursday together and it’s really Wednesday. Or I’ll ask when the Vikes are playing and Scott will remind me it’s not Sunday. I really am lost without a class or work schedule structuring me through days, weeks, and months. One of my biggest challenges through the brain fog (that really is a medical term) has been following a calendar every day, and sometimes I’m off by a week or two and don’t discover till after I’ve screwed up my whole day. Other people blow this off when I bring it up, saying everyone does that, but this is a very serious problem for me. Do you know anyone else who suddenly panics about missing the fourth of July and forgetting all about shooting off the fireworks, but the 4th is really still two weeks away? I’ve done that two years in a row. Just lately I let my driver’s license expire because I couldn’t get it straight in my head which actual day of the week was my birthday, even though I posted about it on Xanga ON my birthday. And, as always, Scott takes me under his wing and gets me back on track.

But guess what- setting up a schedule for physical therapy and then the fitness center seems to be breaking through all that. I have structure now! And I’m realizing I can set up this structure for myself by setting up goals through the fitness center, mapping out my whole month, and then filling up the free time with other things I want to get done. It’s been incredible, except that, yeah, I hit the wall lately and slid like a bug yada yada.

Yeah, so I’m reading part 3 in The Nerdist Way these last couple of weeks and realizing Hey, I’m kinda getting this stuff… can I apply it to my own life? Might be tricky. The first thing I did, thank you Chris, was use my natural inclinations to compartmentalize my email into several accounts I already had set up and wasn’t using, and I can’t tell you how much this has already destressed me. Spam and junk that I can’t seem to get turned off all go to one place (seems like every new app I try with Facebook and Twitter suddenly sends more my way), and doing business online goes to another. I won’t rewrite his book, but I’ll add that I know just even doing that much looks like a mountain of work to some of you, because it sure did to me. And then the other sections on finances and stuff, I mean, yeah, I’m a nerd, I *get* that the process will work, but the sheer brain fog I have to get through was so daunting that I had to put the book down, multiple times. But you know what? It’s sinking in, line by line, week by week, and I’m actually doing it, bit by bit, and I’m THRILLED with the results. I truly am.

Get this- 4 months ago I was practically nonexistent on the internet. I had wiped out nearly everything I ever created, including my Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace accounts, most of my Xanga accounts, half my Photobucket (I still can’t bear to think of the screams coming from Lexx fans around the world), and I barely logged on once a week even to email my own family. Where am I now? Lexx is coming back up, I have all new accounts all over the place, I’m not only able to keep track but I’m also producing material like crazy with brain fog and getting way more traffic than I ever expected or projected in only 4 months, and everyone around me is dizzy. We’re ALL wondering how I’m doing it! TIME MANAGEMENT! Go Chris, you ~rock~! I started using some of those cool spirals I bought (your suggestion!) to keep lists of what I was getting done so I could see that every day I really was getting real work done. Even if all I do is fix a broken link, that is real work that I accomplished. Even if all I do is write down an idea I have for something later, that is real work that I accomplished. It’s getting to where every time a little thought hits my brain, a few cells go Oh, that would only take a couple of minutes, let’s go do that. I feel like I drag through my days doing tiny little things that don’t mean much, but then I step back and look at the whole thing, like a post I wrote or a website I built or photos I got loaded into Photobucket, and I go wow, I really did get a LOT done. I feel like I muddle through my day, but it’s more of a directioned muddling now, a sort of listed and inventoried muddling, and I’ve gotta tell you, I’m blowing my psychologist away. Five years with the guy, and he is watching Chris Hardwick change my life. I may not be able to sit or stand an hour straight on a job or function mentally well enough to follow directions, but I am still a very useful person doing what I love most on the internet.

My very favorite part of the Time section is “Become an Evil Genius”. >=) heh heh. Oh, that Chris, we had brain sex right there, and it was really good for me. ”Granted, some can be a pain in the ass- what with their carelessly snuffing out innocent lives in the selfish pursuit of their desires and all- but when you dissect their mental DNA, you find an EXCELLENT time manager that is willing to stop at nothing to achieve greatness.” My personal skill set includes a severe sleep disorder. I have done meds and sleep hygiene and all that crap, but in the end, why not just get up and piddle around on the computer? I can sleep later! (I never do.) But instead of wasting all those wee hours popping awake at the crack of dawn on London time, why not just obsess over code wrangling? Which I *love*. Let other fans make the art manipulations, let other bloggers go on about politics and relationships, I’m busy mangling one of my blogs with html I swiped out of someone’s source code, and omg I really did screw up the internal frames and tables on my blog andIcan’tfixit aaaahhhhh… I get my little thrills going.

Depression totally wasn’t letting me do that, so Chris has somehow helped me break through the depression, too. My psychologist says it’s because I have something to focus on and keep me busy now, which, again, circles back around to Chris. He says it’s cool if I’m an evil genius.

Apologies, I got rambly, and some of you who stuck through this far are grumbling for me and Chris to get a room by now, but seriously, it’s still working. About the time I think I’m sinking back to having only half a burrito left (love you too, Jonah Ray!), even when I feel stalled out, I notice I’m still going forward in a progressive kind of way, even if I have to get the magnifying glass out to measure micrometers. (Yes, I know, I’d really need a microscope.) I can only imagine where I’ll be in another 4 months if I can keep this believing in myself momentum up!

This story continues at The Nerdist Wimp.

Click pic to see the book!

December 7, 2013 by Janika Banks - 2 Comments

wonky, worms, and the Borg

I’ve got this weird thing in my head where I ‘wake up’ to realizations months and sometimes even years after things happen. I’m not sure if this is what makes time passing wonky for me or if it’s the other way around. On one level I’m with it, I know what’s going on, on another level I’m not aware of myself at all being in the now and then later when I have memories I have to sort them out like a puzzle figuring out the time order they came in, and on another level still (and this is where it comes months and years later) I suddenly ‘get’ the big picture from a third person viewpoint. So basically I can coexist with a factoid that everyone takes for granted (and really doesn’t care about), realize it’s a thing way later even though I was involved all along, and then suddenly even wayer laterer get this thunderclap how I must have looked knowing something and not knowing it at the same time.

I’m obsessed with the Schrodinger’s cat dilemma and the photo slit experiment. I don’t think existence has to be perceived even if it purportedly must be observed. I’m not sure perceiving is enough in the “I think therefore I am” equation. Everything around us is pretty solid ‘am’ without too much thought leaking around. It’s like saying “I’m aware of my existence, therefore I exist.” Worms accomplish that every day, they just don’t have words for it, unless maybe they do but they’re not sharing a vast wealth of planet knowledge with us. The problem with the cat is no one assumes it will fight to get out of the box and knock the geiger counter around in the process, possibly setting off a false reading or even disabling it, and when we finally open the box we get a tangle of cat in our faces and stagger about clutching our bloody eyeballs.

It’s bothering me that even though I can download my entire twitter history, address links are not yet available for individual mobile tweets, at least on my phone, so even though I can find the very first time I tweeted with a particular person out of 46,600 tweets, I can’t open that tweet and I can’t pull it up on a twitter search even with precise word combinations because it’s too old and I can’t scroll back that far through the actual history on my laptop without bogging down to the point where it can’t load any more because the script stops running. Why do I want that, you ask. Because if I could open that tweet I could see the rest of the conversation around it, I say. Why is that so important, you ask. Because I have a weird wonky time tangled memory and it’s nice to be able to see what actually happened and the order it happened in, I say. Why do you even care, you say. Because after a lifetime of aspie disconnection it’s nice to finally be able to plug emotional bonds into the correct holes in my head, I say. Seeing something in print is more solid to me than just remembering something, like reinforcement. I feel lost when something seems vague and blurry in my head because I wasn’t paying the right kind of attention in the first place to make notes the same way other people do in face to face and phone conversations.

I’m an after the fact person. I’ve been tweeting with several groups of people for a long time and it’s just now hitting me they seem to know me and my idiosyncrasies much better than I do theirs because it took me so many months in the first place to establish which avatar goes with whose name (and both changing every little bit throws me off), where they live and which kids and pets are theirs if they have any, the different jobs they have, the things they like. I’m loving every minute of it, actually, wish my whole life had been twitter so it would have made more sense. I have an awesome memory for something I’ve seen in print and have irritated people for years quoting something they wrote ages ago in blogs or forums and they either have no recollection or aren’t remembering it properly, but I really suck at real time conversations because the words don’t come through my eyes. Sometimes I feel like a photon, like I’ve been in two (or more) different places for one event, and it takes awhile for memories of events to sift down into something I can associate into a timeline.

I wasn’t aware until my 30’s that this is a cognitive deficit I live with, and wasn’t aware until ten years later that it’s considered such a devastating brain problem that people who work with brain trauma victims and psychological assessment can’t believe I was able to hold jobs and make it through college. I work very hard at social mapping, and lately twitter is a huge part of being more successful with it. I can’t even imagine going back to a life without twitter. Social media is a godsend for me. I feel like I understand the attraction the Borg queen offered, being able to finally plug in and be accepted on a level I’ve never experienced before, and hear the world sing its song in my head. Through my eyeballs. But really and truly in my head once those brain implants get here.

November 8, 2013 by Janika Banks - 0 comments

brain sex, robot style

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 is my favorite. I’ll never forget the first time I heard my favorite line- “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”

I could care less about romantic love. Scott says something is wrong with me and I’m ruined, but I can’t stop giggling when frogs pop into my mind in the middle of it. I think, for me, the real connection is a brain thing. Personally, I believe the roots of true love start between parent and child, and that whole alteration thing is about accepting each other for who we are and not feeling compulsed to fix or change each other to suit our own whims. Still, this sonnet sparks a little deep thought (I’m not using it in context as discussed at Shakespeare’s Sonnets).

Going forward, strong caution on this post. Maybe I should have titled it Sexual Synesthesia and Asperger’s or something, but I think the title I’ve got is catchier. I’m putting this post out there as a ‘forewarned is forearmed’ before I get super serious and put this stuff into one of the books I’m working on. This book in particular will look at the darker side of growing up with Asperger’s, although there is plenty of cute to go around as well, like in aspie lovin’, which I think fits perfectly with Sonnet 116.

I describe the synesthesia I live with at Synesthesia. I’ve written about my sexuality sysnesthesia in the following posts, so I’ll leave that up to readers to play catch up, because I think it’s redundant to say it all again. I’ve read them so I’m going to skip down to the next paragraph.

sex is wrong, or coming out of the pandimensional closet

Lexx and psychological health, perhaps

Twitter friends have been having fun joking with me about whether I am a robot (it’s the world’s greatest pickup line, & the robot name variations on Pinky keep growing- Pinky 5, Pink-E, Pink3PO), little knowing the depths of chaos theory I’ve investigated and what that portends for artificial intelligence. I keep saying I’m not a big fan of robots, but over the last few days it’s become apparent that I’m actually quite familiar with a plethora of scifi robot characters, including androids, cyborgs, and synthetics. My most favoritist robot is the Electric Monk from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. I’ve also touched a little on brain studies in a number of classes, and although I’m no expert, I’m probably more familiar with the human brain than most people I meet. From physical and psychological development to the philosophies of self and existence and all the weird fiction I can get in between, I seem to have had a fixation on brain stuff most of my life.

A couple of the neatest things I like about brains is the inherent propensity for symbology and mapping. Even simple brains must associate recognizing something in the outer environment as a memory of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in relation to what the organism feels compelled get done in its life, and by the time brains reach the size of walnuts there is already extensive social mapping. Humans are so brainy that symbols take on multilayers of meaning and context, allowing us to enjoy things like sarcasm, while mapping grows so complex that humans literally invent more things to map just to keep mapping, resulting in a gaming industry that is currently rocking the planet.

I’m uniquely interested in these kinds of things because, while I am in no way mentally deficit, I am socially deficit and have spent my life putting extra time into figuring other people out and how I fit into their viewpoints. The kinds of thoughts I have are not the kinds of thoughts people around me generally have, and general consensus is that my kinds of thoughts occur because something is inherently wrong with me to begin with. None of us knew for years that I skirt the fringe of autism, although my poor mother suspected long before it was fashionable for definitions to stretch out and allow little things like the word ‘verbal’, because I really don’t shut up, and it’s usually not long before most people find me very annoying.

One of my favorite fiction authors for retrospective thought on thought itself is Douglas Adams. Like the Grebulon ship, there seems to be a hole where my central mission module belongs. If you’re the sort of brainiac who loves brain melt puzzle thinking and you haven’t heard of these things, click those links right now. I’ll wait for you.

I’ve often said I feel like I should be able to plug into other people like R2D2 plugs into a wall socket to get information. I’ve had to go out of my way to learn the social dance etiquettes that most people pick up on automatically while they’re still children. I tend to prefer function over form, which makes me obnoxiously rude sometimes, the way people in Star Trek might think Vulcans are rude, but it’s cool because I tend to think of them back the way Vulcans think about humans, so we’re even. All the same, it’s a relief to me when I find ways to expedite interactive processes because having to route around all the extra words of ‘how was your day’ without lapsing into literal interpretation kind of wears me out. Once I finally realized I don’t have to actually diagnostically report in, life got a little easier.

The internet is a godsend for me. It is exactly what I want when I interact. Words go straight into my head without the social cues, and oddly, I actually get the social stuff just fine like this, although other people still inject emotion into the content I share and that mystifies me. I’m starting to get the hang of subtext, but I find it disturbing that other people don’t find it disturbing how prevalent subtext really is. What is the point of language and symbolic exchange if words are rife with unspoken words and don’t exactly mean what they look like they say? But, again, once I realized that it’s more like playing a game, things got a little easier. All the same, even though information exchange on the internet is blissful for me, if that’s all it is then it’s kind of sad. I do, after all, need human contact, so I am learning to say ‘Hello, how was your day’ on a keyboard. Irony and I are bedfellows.

Brain sex is a phrase I coined a few years ago to describe to myself the thrill I get connecting to other people and their ideas and enthusiasm on the internet. I don’t necessarily need to play the comment-on-each-other’s-blogs game, but it’s fun to run into stimulating ideas coming out of other brains. I kind of feel like this is Borg Basic or something. The internet started out being an extension of our brains, but now our brains have become extensions of the internet. Whatever is going on, I like it. Twitter especially is a mental polyamorist’s dream come true (and therein lies the scandal in using the world’s greatest pickup line, perhaps).

Brain sex is only a metaphor, you say. Ah, but I experience real chemical changes or chemical reinforcements when I play on twitter, I say. I think we all do. Talking to each other is titillating to the point where stronger bonds are made in 140 characters or less than are made in chat rooms and forums, which in their day made stronger bonds than between people living next door to each other. Twitter has become a living thing, a self organizing system efficiently channeling like thinkers together.

The thrill for a brain gamer like me is the quantity one can get into a thought that is restricted to a tiny configuration. Word construction rules fly out the door in favor of packing space, and people who get really good at it can actually receive twitter awards. Knowing a few word tricks can get a person’s twitter content picked up by internet publications, and it’s been all the rage on other media to follow hashtag feeds on twitter as a way of sampling what a general population is thinking about this or that. But again, it’s the connection to actual people in real time that brings the satisfaction. I like feeling like I’m part of the world, maybe special enough to be part of a twitter gang.

But it’s not often I run into someone who can stop me dead in my tracks with four words, certainly no one had ever done it before on the internet until about 5 days ago on twitter. I have no idea what any of it means outside of my own head, but I think I have found someone who can brain game with me without having to fake it. I could be wrong, but it sure felt like brain sex to me.

I’ve been torn the last few days, but if I’m going to play the subtext game, I think I’m going with “Yes, I am a robot.” If you’ve come this far and missed it, I’m talking about the Asperger’s. Kinda took the question literally, but since it was my first time being the recipient of the world’s greatest pickup line, I had to work my way through the logic loops and construct loop counters when I couldn’t find my way out of the maze. I’m a really advanced robot.

October 23, 2013 by Janika Banks - 0 comments

SnarkAlecs, Syfy, and Twitter, oh my

I have never fit into a group in my whole life. I’m the sore thumb sticking out in every get together, club, class, and forum. Even when I think I’m being subtle I glow like neon. Sooner or later I suck at being friends, too, as lightly detailed in my Fun Myspace Survey on my Bluejacky blog (the Menudo part to the End of the World part), but I’m too busy being busy to wallow longer than two minutes at a time in weepy black depressions. My tagline on Bluejacky since 2008 has been “I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me. -Rudyard Kipling”.

Twitter changed all that. I was working on my plan to reconstruct my internet empire from my old evil villain days (I now accept that a few people found me a profoundly annoying boat rocker), quietly tweeting to a seemingly unnoticing world and politely swapping links with a few other scifi webmasters last winter when I suddenly found myself being swooped on by a little twitter gang telling me “good morning” and “happy hump day” and “TGIF” and many other yappy little niceties through the week, week after week after week….

The other webmasters’ sites in case you’re interested-
SF Series and Movies
Nerd Movie
SyFyDesigns

Insert context here- The reason I suck at being friends is because I have Asperger’s and I’ve spent most of my life not getting what the social dance in conversations is all about until recently, so I couldn’t imagine why in the world this little gang persistently kept tweeting hello to me. I pulled one aside to ask why, he said “Because it’s nice.” Ok, so it wasn’t anything weird or suspicious, but just people being nice to me out of the blue for no reason I could discern, which flummoxed me. (The unspoken ‘gossip’ in the survey link above runs pretty deep, I felt used and jaded like never before in my life, all because I obsessively built a fan site to a scifi TV show). About two months into it I finally got the hang of the happy hello yap, but it took another two months to keep their names straight, along with where they live in the world, if they have kids and pets, and the sorts of things they find interesting. We’re talking a little group of 6 people with a few extended contacts. Yes, I suck that badly at being friends. I’m better at telling identical white chickens apart than I am remembering this person has a cat and that person lives up north. But after what happened in 2007, I decided this was my chance to try again, and if it doesn’t work out this time that’s it, I’m done trying to have friends.

I noticed over several more weeks as I adapted to more and more bits of random personal information tweeting at me in sudden flurries of howdies that our common theme seemed to be particular TV shows. Call me slow, but it finally dawned on me that every one of us had a thing for the Syfy channel, or what fills in for that in some other countries, like the Space channel. I myself followed Sliders from NBC to Syfy in the late 90’s, then followed Stargate SG-1 and Lexx from Showtime back to Syfy, and I’ve hung in through schedule changes ever since. No one else in my family outside my marriage cares for scifi, and coming from the extremely religious family history that I did, that made me a black sheep. My dad was very concerned that I watched TV shows challenging my faith, actually chock full of false gods like Q, Ra, and Thor. If anything, I found my faith in humanity and pursuing right over wrong strengthened by shows like Star Wars and Star Trek more than sitting in church ever did. Unfortunately, growing up aspie and more intensely isolated than most kids (my dad is a Mennonite), and then rarely running into adults who watched these things, I had no one to talk to for decades. I have quietly cherished memories of the original Lost in Space series from my childhood like some people might cherish memories of family holidays. I see now how remarkably sad I was that I would never be able to talk to my parents like Will and Penny could talk to their parents. I guess it was kind of like The Brady Bunch, except with spaceships, aliens, a robot, and a mad scientist. Interestingly, I ‘got’ the social stuff just fine when it was embedded into scifi stuff, but as an aspie I can’t stand shows focusing only on relationships. The clincher for me is the problem solving that the group does together for the sake of survival, or for science. Love stories and parenting sitcoms and crime shows bore me silly.

So yeah, after decades of never being consistently socialized with or validated by people who were supposed to love me, I found it confusing and then amusing and then very comforting that a gang of scifi watchers wanted to say hi to me nearly every day for going on nine months now.

One of the people in my little gang was not only a content writer for a TV show and movie review global website family but is also part of another twitter gang called the SnarkAlecs, who like to live tweet what they’re watching on TV, mostly based around Syfy original movies but also including new shows on Syfy and other networks. The SnarkAlecs ‘boss‘ and his own little gang put together a weekly podcast show for radio talking about the TV shows they watch, and create their own Snarktistics such as ratings for movie of the week, coming in mostly from live tweet watch parties. What’s impressive is that the SnarkAlecs pull in some cool guests from Syfy movies and other podcast and music projects, and now they are branching into spinoffs called Dylan Knows and Snarkaholics. Like me, they create because they love this stuff and pay out of pocket to do it, like I do with my blogs, so I think it’s safe to say I’ve found some kindred spirits. I’ve started a SnarkAlecs pinterest board if you’re interested in seeing these guys, and the pins link to the shows for easy access. (I’m a groupie.)

I went through some pretty rough stuff at the end of summer, not least of which was my blog host of nine years suddenly pulling up roots to move to new servers for a ‘relaunch’ and building an all new blog hosting site with all the old archives. You’ve never been through internet hell like your blog host ripping your blogs up right before a book launch you had planned for an entire year based heavily on two of your blogs and it taking not just weeks but months to get everything back into a readable format with navigation. Which I’m still waiting on. If I had been free floating on my own through all that and had never been picked up by my twitter gang and then sucked joyfully into the SnarkAlecs, I think I would have just folded up shop and said forget it. The depression has been incredible. I watched people freaking out earlier this week because Facebook was glitchy for a few hours, imagine your host site being mangled for a couple of MONTHS and your content being shredded. Yeah, *that*. Suddenly everything I’d been linking and building a launch platform over was just gone *poof* and then when it came back it looked like a third grader made it and the navigation was still *poof*, and over the last 7 weeks is finally coming back enough to be able to read a little, but now it’s not making much sense because my wholeness was obliterated. You can’t survive like that on the internet any more. Everything is real time dependent if you are tying together your social media. For great chunks of it to disappear is devastating.

The joke is actually on me, I originally made all my stuff go *poof* a few years ago and then decided to resurrect it, so the irony is not lost on me at all. I did the unthinkable | GrandFortuna’s League of 20,000 Planets

A lot of flak goes to people who can’t stop texting through dinner dates or who are so addicted to facebook that they go into depressions when their computers go down, and since I had spent several years using social media to distract myself from my own depressions through building fan sites and blogging, I decided to shut it all down and take a break. I had no public interaction whatsoever for about a year. It was glorious. I figured out who I really am and what I really want are what I’ve been all along- being a public figure using social media to create things I enjoy as a way to relax and escape my own doldrums. But this time I have a plan and goals and a timetable, and it’s way more fun than it was the first time around. As before, I wasn’t on the internet to find friends, but to amuse myself and others as a distraction from whatever miseries our lives pile on us, because that’s what fandoms are all about- escapism. Except this time the key is to be a real person without a mask. That’s a scary thing in fandoms. I’ve been stalked a few times to the point of someone bringing a gun into my house (pre-Lexx), so this decision wasn’t made lightly. If I’m going to interact with fans, I’m going to be a real person, not an avatar, not a mysterious webmaster, not one icon for this activity and another icon for that. My whole entire real self is here now, my personas gathered into purpose, and you know what? It’s a relief! I’m so tired of playing the fan behind the mask game. If haters want a piece of me, I’m right here, and I don’t care any more.

I made that decision about 15 months ago. I made a new twitter account and slowly started linking my various medias. My plan’s timetable had 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month projections, like so much traffic here or there by a certain date. I studied other successful media personalities and worked hard at creating new content to support a more professional writing career.

What I didn’t expect was friends. I wasn’t back to make friends. My history with friendship is dismal. I now understand that it’s my fault, because my glaring social deficit sooner or later tries people’s souls like chaff in the fire. Once I realized this, sadly not soon enough for the 2007 debacle, I worked on communication problems with a psychologist for several years and practiced on my poor family, with some pretty good results. Not all our problems are solved, but I no longer burn bridges over communication problems. I also practice the social niceties dance every day so that my new skills remain fresh and rooted in positive habit. I still have the same old personal feelings about it all, but now I choose which carries more weight- the necessity of airing my trivial grievances versus the good feeling I get that some people actually enjoy seeing me enter a room.

I enjoy being a loner, but I really like the feeling that I’m part of the world, too. This is important.

I’m part of the SyFySnarkAlecs twitter list now. I’ve got a built in group of friends who like the same TV shows I like, and I can check that list any time and see what everyone’s up to. The very best part of that list, for me, is watching parents proactively and very positively raise their kids with full blown scifi in their houses, something I never had and only dreamed of. It’s real, and I get to see it. *feels*

Before I got on twitter I never group watched a scifi show (movie theaters don’t count). How many of us have looked on longingly during Friends and Seinfeld and The Big Bang Theory wishing we had a solid group of people to come back to every little bit? I discovered live hashtag tweeting after I got my first iphone last Thanksgiving (black Friday sale!) and had an awesome time watching the Superbowl blackout happen live, and watching the Triple Crown races with other fans on twitter in real time. That’s the thing- real time. You can hang out with people from all over the world watching the same live events and seeing what they’re saying. I discovered the joyful camaraderie of watching witty people joking together and found myself literally laughing out loud just checking my phone, a sort of fun I haven’t felt in a long time.