Writing and Stuff from Isaac Z. Schlueter
This is my recipe for steak. Enjoy. Time # A few days of prep where the steak sits in the fridge. Then a few hours where it sits on the counter. Then like 5-10 minutes of actual cooking. Ingredients # A very thick extremely marbled ribeye. This technique can be adapted to other highly-marbled/medium-toughness cuts of meat, such as certain porkchops, but if it's not very marbled (like filet…
From r/AutisticAdults , my reply got too long and reddit's server kept not wanting to let me post it, so I'm writing it here. Wrestling with some thoughts, and wanting to hear some opinions. I put a banana inside myself this morning, nothing dirty, I just ate it. The reason I phrased it weirdly is that I realized I've been making a mistake in my thought process involving that banana and many other…
Part of a series on the Occult Grammar of Communication Part 1: What is Occult Grammar? Part 2: Allistic Communication Part 3: Autistic Communication Part 4: Conflict Between Neurotypes The Double Empathy Problem describes the way that two people of different neurotypes are likely to misunderstand one another. It highlights the observable truth that autistic people do not, in fact, "lack empathy",…
Part of a series on the Occult Grammar of Communication Part 1: What is Occult Grammar? Part 2: Allistic Communication Part 3: Autistic Communication Part 4: Conflict Between Neurotypes In Part 1 , I discussed the nature of occult grammars, and how they invisibly affect communication both in composition and interpretation of communication acts, as well as determining which things count as…
Part of a series on the Occult Grammar of Communication Part 1: What is Occult Grammar? Part 2: Allistic Communication Part 3: Autistic Communication Part 4: Conflict Between Neurotypes As discussed in part 1 , an "Occult Grammar" is a set of rules that govern the language game , yet which remain hidden to participants in that communication. Thus, occult grammar isn't a set of rules that need…
Part of a series on the Occult Grammar of Communication Part 1: What is Occult Grammar? Part 2: Allistic Communication Part 3: Autistic Communication Part 4: Conflict Between Neurotypes All communication, in order to be communication, is governed by rules that determine the ways in which utterances (that is, any and all speech acts and their constituent parts, whether verbal or non-verbal) are…
And so to start with... # As the meaningless universe expands from the hot beginning of all things towards the cold infinite nothing, there are Four Aspects of the Mind of God, and Four Divine Forces spring forth from them. The Four Aspects are: Charge, Length, Time, and Mass. The Four Forces are: Strong, Weak, Electromagnetism, and Gravity. It is this last that Gravitationists worship, Our Lady…
This is an autism spectrum pride flag that I designed and am offering to the community for anyone to use in any way they desire. If you use it somewhere online, credit and/or a link back to this post would be lovely, if that makes sense, but is not required. That is, it's released under a CC0 license . I'm getting it tattooed on my shoulder in a few weeks. I've made the image available as an SVG,…
Mikeal Rogers died on the morning of Monday, 2025-06-09, after enduring 7 months of treatment for aggressive colorectal cancer. I'm so inescapably sad. Last year, Mikeal set up a git repository and had asked people to share memories, ways in which they've been impacted positively. This is what I wrote . Just Everything Over The Last 15 Years # Fuck. Where even to begin. I suppose I'll begin at the…
How to get an autism diagnosis 1 Be me. Get misdiagnosed as ADHD at age 10. Get prescribed Ritalin, lose all semblance of sleep order and circadian rhythm. Revolt and stop taking the drugs at age 14. Learn about autism at age 27. "Wait, isn't that just like, normal, though?" Learn that everyone isn't normal like me. Most people are different! Study autism for 10 years. Become somewhat convinced…
In psychology, "Set Point Theory" is the idea that humans have a given set-point of hedonic pleasure/suffering that we are always drawn to throughout out lives. This results in the concept of a "Hedonic Treadmill" , where no matter how much pleasure we may add to our lives, we will always feel about the same level of happiness. It's hopeless! Or is it? Manipulating the Hedonistat # I imagine it…
immaculately imperceptibly impossibly softly hairs of forehead silk rest warm on closed satin eyelid sleep breath sweet musk soft warm vapor waves on rough black sand beach cheek sun invades with welcome warmth unwelcome wakefulness resisted, burrowing hands with no expression rest on smooth expanse of flesh ignore the beating heart beneath languorous left-over libido, last night's lust lactic…
Run my software on your brain and I Will live rent-free inside your mind where we can run together through your every dream Keep that faithful replica, my voice (along with all the others making noise) telling you all day how great you are Let my homunculous run wild in the light of your affection and attention, Creating needs for me to satisfy Let's not control, or own, or colonize. That work is…
MARCELINE: At least they'll find our skeletons entwined together! BONNIBEL: I don't have a skeleton, but that's pretty romantic! No exaggeration, this story is a better model of healthy nuanced relationship dynamics than anything I have ever seen in fiction. Certainly better than most kids will ever pick up from the actual adults in their life. I'm so thankful that the franchise got to a point…
There was a big honeysuckle bush dividing our backyard from our neighbors in the house in Connecticut where my family lived, from 1985 until my parents finally sold it in 15 years later, a few years into their divorce. It was a long unkempt monster of a bush, growing and spilling over the buried remains of a fence, until it replaced and became the fence, long before our tenure as residents. As it…
Run my software on your brain and I'll live rent-free inside your mind where we can run together through your dreams Keep that faithful replica my voice along with all your others telling you all day how great you are Let my homunculous run wild in the light of your attention and I will satisfy the need that he creates Don't give me grand gestures (anyone can do that) I want the little signs that…
This post is an exploration of a half-baked theory . Consider it as an optional thought technology, which you may choose to employ or not as it proves useful. I have found this to be a worthwhile mental tool in navigating the neurotypical/allistic world as an autistic person. Whether it is "true" or "valid" or has strong predictive power is less important. Content warnings, this post mentions (in…
smart passionate about mud really into math obsessed with bread rude really into trains really into JavaScript really into Pokémon insensitive hypersensitive very focused easily distracted single-minded an idiot a knowitall brutally honest inconsiderate temperamental introverted set in their ways lazy a workaholic not a fan of flourescent lighting bothered by polyester a picky eater a nerd good at…
I am about 80% sure I did not initially come up with this concept. As I remember it, the idea of jealousy in particular being a "feelings box" was something I originally heard at an open relationship discussion group some time around mid-2009. But it's come up 3 times in the last few weeks in various conversations, and I haven't been able to find any sources online other than my own tweets. It's…
Wes Todd asked me: reminding myself of tap ’s api, can you sell me on why people like a test runner to have built in assertions? I answered and he said it should be a blog post, and I obviously agreed. So here's the infodump that is even more verbose than the one he got in slack. A lot of it is down to subjective taste, and like a lot of subjective stuff, you kind of have to give yourself time to…
This was an email I wrote a few years ago in response to someone asking how they can get started in open source, if they're already a professional software developer. Someone else just asked a similar question, so rather than copy-paste from my sent messages, I'm copy-pasting onto my blog. If you already work as a software developer, there's a very good chance you're interacting with open source…
We saw this coming. You saw, and commented on the emptiness that your departure would create, the space for future lives to fill. "Death is a part of life" or so they say, but you knew better, knew that the end is just the end Now you're gone, not to a better place, not "to" at all, but out of time and space, and those parts of you that death cannot erase fall short. You're gone. I lost you first…
(An Atheist’s Farewell) By Jim Schlueter, February 12, 2023 How do we approach the falling night When we know there is no dawn in sight For all the flowers have bloomed The leaves all blown and trees stripped bare And soon all that we know will be no more At the closing of this door How do we greet this season of our lives Which will never show us another spring We reached our end, and now we sing…
(And often the correct choice.) Original context: @copyconstruct What engineers mean by “technical debt” Poor code quality leading to a brittle codebase bad or little to no testing leading to bugs spaghetti code due to rapid feature bloat What CEOs hear: person making 6 figures failing to due their job yet demanding even more resources @ElleArmageddon IDK who needs to hear this, but: This is not…
1474049345792069636 You run a marathon up a mountain. You have books. You're ready! When you get to the top, you are led by a trickster spirit through every one of your hidden demons. The trickster spirit makes you fall in love with it, then shits on your head. This happens every day, and all night. 1474049348132507649 As the days continue, the spirit compels you to walk tightropes over fields of…
There are a lot of strong feelings about programming style. It's fashionable to either have a very strong opinion about any of them, or shrug and wisely proclaim that it doesn't matter, as long as some other arbitrary requirement is met (consistency, test coverage, performance, etc.) I prefer to try on these opinions like a jacket. Wear them out for a day, then take them off again in the evening.…
"Isaac" used to be a very uncommon first name in the USA for anyone who wasn't Jewish or Mormon, and my last name is a particular anglicized spelling of a fairly uncommon German name. (I have distant cousins who came over and got a different anglicized spelling.) I grew up never ever hearing my name unless someone was talking to me, so never got desensitized to it in the way that someone named…
I'm leaving GitHub! After 12 years of working on npm, from an idea to a side project to a startup and that startup's acquisition at GitHub , I'm moving on to a new challenge. The last few years at GitHub have been great. It's an awesome company filled with great people, doing interesting things in the developer space, and I'm honored to have been a part of it for a while. But it's also a bigger…
If you are a package manager, it's important to be able to perform a reproducible build . That is, the same contents should result in the same artifact, always. One of the biggest challenges to this is that files have timestamps indicating when they were changed, created, modified, and so on. While one could argue that changing the ctime or mtime of a file is a "change" to the contents, git (like…
The door slams loud on the mountain tonight Not a slammed door to be seen A kingdom of slamming doors And it looks like slamming doors The door is slamming like this slamming door inside Couldn't slam the door, heaven knows I've tried Don't let them in, just slam the door Be the slammed door, you always slam the door Slam doors, don't feel, just slam the door Well, slam the door Slam the door,…
I recently was prompted to answer "Do you believe in god?" I checked "no", of course, but that's not really a complete answer. If we expand the definition of "God" to be "all that exists and all the laws governing all of existence", as many do, then yeah, of course I believe in that. And that's usually what I mean when I say "God". The only part of God that can hear your prayers is the part in…
The end of an era. I am sad that there won't be a Sept 21 video next year, but also so very thankful that Demi Adejuyigbe created these for the last 6 years.
It's kind of ironic that this song about time moving slowly went so viral once it was bumped up to double speed by Yano 3000. This song is so good. I found you at the window again Looking out, watching the leaves falling in And it was something like a dream Wow, so perfect, couldn't talk to me Time moves slow When you're all alone And the time moves slow When you're out on your own And the time…
There are more real numbers between any two real numbers than there are natural numbers. For any pair of real numbers x and y , assign each natural number to a real number equal to x + (y - x) * p , where p is formed by concatenating the natural numbers from the assignment index to infinity. 1: x + (y-x) * 0.123456789101112131415161718192021... 2: x + (y-x) *…
Please get vaccinated.
736435480636465152 Someday, I want to sit down and write the 100 page volume of gushing critical analysis that @tmbg’s album "Flood" deserves. 736435849403867137 In every song, there is always Yet Another Level: in lyrical poetry, in production, in musical arrangement, and in thematic sarcasm. 736436440205123585 It’s tempting on first listen to hear it as a pleasantly upbeat twee pop album But…
npmjs tl;dr -- Good news! npm, Inc., is being purchased by GitHub. The public registry remains public, free, and as available as ever. npm as you know it continues, and in fact, there is good reason to believe that it'll only get better. I'm still going to be working on npm (but with the luxury of more resources and less stress). I'm really excited about the stuff we're going to do. It is…
Recently, I happened across weird line in read-package-tree while reading through the code to see where I might get started implementing Workspaces for the npm CLI. At the time, I was so deep in the flow of reading code and tracing flows through various parts of the system, it didn't strike me how important it was. I just thought "oh, that's obviously wrong" and fixed it without a second thought.…
One common question from people using npm to publish, especially on CI systems, is how best to automate the process, especially when dealing with multiple branches. For a while now, I've been using a pattern that takes almost all of the human interaction out of it, since I tend to mess stuff up when I type it with my fingers. This works well for automatic publishes from CI or when publishing…
I had the opportunity to chat with Adam Stacoviak recently about the journey of creating npm and turning that into npm, Inc., 4 and a half years as CEO, and the transition to my new role as Chief Product Officer. Along the way, we touched on some of the long dark teatimes of the soul one goes through when contemplating handing your company over to a new leader, after pouring your heart into it for…
wow.
npmjs I'm going to tell you a story. There are no villains in this story. Just smart people doing their best, and unfortunately working at cross-purposes through no fault of their own. The names and places have been changed, but it is a true story. I've heard this story a lot over the years in my role at npm. Once Upon A Time... # Way back in the late 1900s, the once-successful ACME Corporation…
Time is an illusion that helps things make sense So we are always living in the present tense It seems unforgiving when a good thing ends But you and I will always be back then You and I will always be back then You and I will always be back then You and I will always be back then Singing: Will happen, happening, happened Will happen, happening, happened And will happen again and again Cause you…
Slight update on the port of this site to Gatsby . I published the tumblr-esque media handling bits as a standalone plugin. It's now available on npm . If you try it out, please let me know ! I'd love to see if anyone else finds it useful.
Last month, Tumblr announced that they'd no longer be allowing "Adult Content" on their platform. I found this distressing, not because I depend on Tumblr for pornography, but because it was clear that a hamfisted approach to automating the deletion of adult content would not go good. I downloaded my blog content using a script I found , and started looking around for the best thing to port my…
(via Understanding Your Partner’s Attachment Style: An Interview with Stan Tatkin ) A great conversation about attachment styles. Awareness is power.
Headphones required.
gadotsdiana : Wonder Woman (2017) dir. Patty Jenkins
tha-boy : literally