The Autistic Yogi Reflects on PC Gaming with Large Hands

I would never have thought I have large hands in comparison to the average joe or jane, but I have come to realize that I do.

For roughly a year I have used a mmo style gaming mouse on my comp which is the Redragon m908, which has a more ergonomic shape. I bought it on a super sale and when starting to use it I fell in love till recently when I started a stint of playing Overwatch on the PC.

Things that stand out:

1. My hands dimensions - 190mm(mid finger tip to bottom of palm) by 85mm (knuckle to knuckle)
2. Width of mouse - the m908 is one of the widest mice on the market at 92mm at the base, where I would likely prefer to have 100mm (roughly where my pinky tip sits and taper in ward from there. Finding something larger than the m908 is not proving fruitful.
3. Roll (6 degrees of freedom) - the roll of typical mice assume that the user has pronation in the forwarm that will allow comfortable mouse use at a 180 degree pronation. That is to say a flat palm/fingers to the surface. We see ergonomic flat designs that have contour for the palm, but the right/left and scroll wheel mouse in the vast majority sit flat where they would lend to more ergonomics with a slight tilt allowing the wrist/forearm to have a slight supinated angle rather than the 90degree in tall mice.
4. Yaw (6 degrees of freedom) - the yaw of the vast majority of mice assumes a straight ahead profile so the length focuses straight down a centre profile of the mouse wheel and right/left buttons which can force a ulnar deviation of the user which could become tiresome over time during long play/use sessions. Addressing this by getting away from the assumption the scroll wheel should be the centre straight ahead profile and possible work to the users advantage by angling it slightly so that centre is not straight ahead but slightly turned to the left for right hand users and to the right for left hand users (talking majority rather than the exceptions) so that the ulnar deviation is neutralized for a good portion of users.
5. 
   
6. MORE TO COME

The Autistic Yogi Reflects on Toxic Masculinity

A few days ago Gillette came out with an ad that called out the men of the world to do better in their dealings with society. This both caused a plethora of praise and rage directed at the company.
In watching the commentary unfold on Facebook it became apparent that there are many many people who have convoluted ideas as to what toxic masculinity is.

I once again have to touch base on Psychological Centration, to take one salient aspect of a thing and make it all about that one thing. What are some of the centrations done on the ad?:

1. That it shames white men specifically because of the ratio of skin colors on the men in the video.
2. That is shames all men.
3. That all masculinity is toxic.


This video in my perception was about the positive and good side of masculinity. For me the most powerful moment in the video is when a man is about to catcall a woman that is walking by and another man that seems to be his friend holds him back from moving forward and says 'Bro, not cool not cool' And the most powerful part that is spoken of Gillette is the statement "Because we, we believe in the best in men." 

The major points I take from the video;
1. That the objectification of all is on its way out.
2. Inclusiveness is on its way in.
3. Reaffirmation that it takes a whole community to raise up a responsible citizen.
4. Sometimes all it takes is a single person's actions to destroy or to mend.
5. Outdated blind acceptance of particle issues are no longer working or valid excuses for poor behavior.
6. That we ought to stand up for what is right.
7. That part of masculinity at large has been and continues to have a toxic affect.
8. That a much bigger part of masculinity is about integrity, accountability, and trying our best to do what is right in each situation.

It's not a call to perfection, but rather a call to admit imperfection and to help one another achieve a greater future. One that recognizes the competency of a person on the basis of the competency and not on gender.

We can do better than we have because the time is ripe for the conversations to be had that will cut deep into the heart of our person in an attempt to remove those parts of us that are failing each other and ourselves. Instant gratification is not a masculine concept, it's a human frailty that needs to be dealt with.

The Autistic Yogi Reflects on Rumor Crafters and Adult Bullies...

Just before 10 years of age we moved from a larger community to a smaller community. It became quickly apparent that my sister and I were outliers and not welcome by our peers except for a few magnificent peers. She and I put up with for years being the target of bullies and the rumors they would create to incite other children to act on hate towards us. She had it the worst, those rumors spread like wildfire not just in our community but in communities hundreds of kilometres away. While those communities couldn't target those rumors specifically to us we knew who they were talking about when we heard them (during sports events that took us to surrounding communities).
The damage was tragic in an already hurting family.

When we finally were able to leave that community it seemed as though dealing with that calibre of bullies was over with and I chalked it up to children just being mean but now over 20 years later I know that bullies are not just a schoolyard phenomena but are very much a human condition that does not know the boundaries of age or culture. It can infect families, friend groups, and communities at large and now the social media world allows for another form of this adult bullying and it is passed off as freedom of speech. It is toxic and harmful and while most social media sites attempt to regulate and remove the most obvious of online bullying they still allow enough to creep through under the guise of freedom of speech.

The worst form of bullying in my perception is that which comes from family and friends when people distort the truth with severe embellishments so that their form of hate looks justified is a bully tactic. It is such a hard thing to face when one family member is justifying their position with bold and outright embellishments or outright lies that have no root in the truth. Forbid that you have any stain on your name already from history because it will just lead to a rooting into that justified bullying and rumor crafting. That is a well crafted rumor.

The bullying doesn't just deteriorate the target but deteriorates those that would give ear to the bully and have no desire to fact check but to listen deeply and accept as truth those rumors because of friendship, and that that friend tells another friend and so on until a whole part of the community now is led to believe in a rumor. It is much easier to escape inside a larger community but not so in a smaller one. And it destroys lives, families, friendships.

Before you throw a fiery dart take a pause and consider if its worth it beyond your own selfish desire to retaliate, otherwise you may not be better than the bully and have become a bully yourself.

How do we deal with these issues is something beyond me....

The Autistic Yogi Reflects on Love and its Challenge...

Love.

What a profound and confusing feeling.

How mythologies have shaped our view of love and for many, that has made the feeling intangible, even mystical. Escaping so many, it becomes a view as a sensation for things. Like loving coffee, sleep, cars, or any other object or thing.

Love seems to convey a consistent feeling about a person, place or thing, a sensation that hardly changes, and if it does change, it is but a mere moment in the movement of time.

Love produces the most immense actions and without a sense of its depths and capacity, it can incite people to act on what appears to be anything but love.

How many people unable to escape the clutches of love have felt the tinge of insanity and a cascading rage move through them, only to realize those actions work counter to love and set up a feeling of unworthiness and self-hatred. Such feelings lead people to act contrary to their good nature and is the foundation for such sayings as 'The road to hell is pathed in good deeds'.

The biggest challenge that love faces in the human race is that of adult psychological centration. The human mind is limited in its capacity to intake and output information so it will consistently fall short and if a person is not careful it can rob them of their sensibility and lead them to act on a limited centrated point of view.

Love combined with adult psychological centration is the leading cause of faulty points of view and condemnation where it does not belong. The saying 'love is blind' is born from the experience of acting on love that has been narrowly viewed and acted upon in that narrow viewpoint. Without the capacity to pause in the moment and deeply question whether psychological centration is happening than we are likely to act in a manner that a 2 or 3-year-old would act, and when we put those types of actions into an adult body there is a destructive force, a lack of good decisions based on knowledge and an abundance of decisions made irrationally and spontaneously like a rattlesnake biting a branch of a tree that moves from the wind. Maybe even like throwing gasoline on a fire in an attempt to dose it.

When there is an attempt to walk with another in love it can be the most fantastic of feelings yet can lead to one of the most terrible feelings we could possibly experience.

The Autistic Yogi Reflects on Psychological Centration...

Psychological Centration

“In psychology, centration is the tendency to focus on one salient aspect of a situation and neglect other, possibly relevant aspects. Introduced by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget through his cognitive-developmental stage theory, centration is a behaviour often demonstrated in the preoperational stage” Wikipedia

The aspect of centration in our adult lives from the basic citizen up to the highest levels of government is very real. While mostly harmless it can be extremely harmful and makes many many people make decisions based on a faulty premise.

The place that some of the most harmful centration is caused is in the doctor's office, including psychiatrists and psychologists. The problem can differ from practitioner to practitioner, usually depending on years of practice and experience and acknowledgment of personal centration and the degree to openness to new ideas that may make better sense than previously held ideas.

The experienced practitioner that has not acknowledged their own centration is likely to base opinions about their clients on memory of other clients and take things out of context concerning those clients and what previous professionals have written into the clients file, if the practitioner believes that they are extremely capable of discerning the psychological aspects and reasons for experience and action of their clients they are very likely to base their opinion on one salient aspect of that client's life, which is absolutely not helpful and can lead to dangerous arrangements for the clients mental and physical well being and to further entrench that professional in their personal centration.

The new practitioner that has not had much experience in practice and has not looked specifically at their personal centration is likely to commit centration on the aspect of either the books they learned their practice from or from their mentors.

Our senses limit us in how much information we can take in at any given moment. Trying to understand another human being and from what motivation they act is limited by purely inward senses and aspects. Namely memory and we attempt to couple that with what we are hearing and seeing about the particular individual in front of the practitioner.

Through 25+ years of being a client in the mental health system, it is my consistent experience that practitioners are given to judging books by the cover and neither have the willingness nor desire to actually read the contents from within. This is not across the board but is to a very high degree the mentality that permeates our highest professionals. Rare is the person who in practice attempts to see the whole picture before casting judgment and giving a sentence of how to deal with that judgment.

Centration seems to compel us humans to mistrust one another to a high degree. Centration is the leading cause to all forms of segregation, be it racism, ableism, sexism, xenophobia, etc.

Centration is the leading cause to individuals being so easily swayed by propaganda.  When someone holds a belief, especially in the area of what their government ought to be doing for them or their community at large it is really easy to produce a small portion of information that they would believe to be true because of the centration they have on a given topic, this is the way of propaganda and the easiest way to set people at odds.

Centration is the easiest way to cause cognitive dissonance. And it is a human desire to get away from what caused cognitive dissonance so its easier to conform to psychological centration.

The Autistic Yogi Reflects on Welfare and the Universal Living Wage...

How many people have you encountered in your life that you thought that you would never want to work with? How many co-workers have you had that you wish you had never had to deal with?

We all have bad days and get on each other's nerves, but this is not what I am pointing to. I am talking about those people who are consistently an aggravation in the workplace. Those individuals that at the end of the day have cost the company/organization more in expenses than they can recoup through that individual's efforts even though they are adequately trained or have the knowledge to do their job. 

Not all those individuals work because they want to, but because there is no other choice, they are living in a system that has failed them or at the very least is not designed for them. There should be money for every person on this planet to meet the basic necessities of life and having a bit extra so they can indulge in at least a base form of entertainment.

Defining Entertainment

What is entertainment? Entertainment is whatever an individual finds captivating or interesting at the time. Having enough monetary surplus beyond the absolute necessities of life would allow each person, regardless of capacity to have the opportunity to experience joy while they are here on the planet. With something like the connectivity of the internet and more and more individuals gaining access to the worldwide resource of communication and knowledge increases our capacity to share in these communities of entertainment.

Some people find math entertaining, some playing sports, some watching sports, some find words entertaining either in spelling or tracking its history, some find crafting and art entertaining, either viewing it or making it or using it in some way.  Some people find dance or work entertaining. None of us get to dictate what another finds entertaining. But there does need to be some guidelines to work within so that we don't lose an individual to the depths of unlawful debauchery, theft, murder, etc. There needs to be the capacity to indulge in lawful entertainment that is not dictated by the community at large but is established on the fact of what is good and bad and neutral.

Conformity needs to end
We live in a culture and society that attempts to conform every individual to what the masses seemingly are like and tends to be based on assumptions of logic and come from generations of convincing the brain matter of those specific cultures that their perceptions and views are valid and completely accurate. But they are not and have a great tendency to be influenced by religious, business, and political propaganda.

Attempting to conserve what is perceived as the heirlooms of cultural thought can and is extremely destructive and leads otherwise good people to exercise thoughts that are very harmful.  Example, "Spanking is fine because my parents spanked me and I turned out alright."   This form of fallacy permeates humanity and takes anecdotal or misquoted or poorly conducted research out of context to the whole of reality. Fact is that spanking a child is more likely to create maladjustment (not in all circumstances but has a marked increase in violent tendencies once the individual is an adult.)

Capacity as leader and filter
Conformity says that each person must contribute equally in order to have anything at all. This is pure rubbish thought because we know factually that not all individuals are equal in capacity and or contribution. We have many who contribute far less then what they are able for various reasons and those that contribute far more than they ought to be for various reasons. The system is harmful inherently and only appeals to those that would turn a blind eye to the needy, or those born into lesser circumstances.

What is the progression of humanity?

As we gain more and more insights into the nature of humanity and all things, the easier it is going to be for us to set up environments that are conducive for each person to contribute in a meaningful way to the progression of humanity.

Progression currently is in the form of inventing a thing that earns a patent or creates a company in order to make an individual or group of individuals rich by making something marketable. This is not progression and is simply masked form of greed and hate. Greed because it appeals to the love for money, and hate for it creating pleasure in being greater than someone else.

Progression is advancing not just ourselves, community, or nation, but is advancing our species and being able to survive any calamity no matter how small or great and to encourage the experience of humanity in a lawful manner.   

I believe a good start to the view of what is human progression is in the Kardashev Scale. It is the scale that is used by SETI in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The question had to be asked when we set up this program 'What is it that we are looking for to confirm other intelligent life in the universe?'. Which comes down to how a species utilizes energy. We don't even measure up to a level 1 civilization yet.

In order to achieve a level 1 civilization, we must be able to fully utilize the energy that our sun directs towards our earth. We must not have the largest reliance on fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) and must be able to rely on the energy of the spitting atom, be that from our sun or from our own nuclear or fission/fusion technologies. Throughout the universe, we know that suns exist, but we do not, however, know that there are fossil fuels that can be easily accessed or even the fuel to power specific nuclear technologies.  We must be able to utilize not just the solar rays that reach the surface of the earth, but literally any solar ray that reaches our atmosphere. We must surpass the concept that solar power is only useful when the sun shines because it is always shining 100% of the time and the only way it will not is for a catastrophic event of solar system wide magnitude.

At its simplest human progression is how we utilize energy and for what ends. Can we get to a system that if your ends are lawful that you will be able to have all the energy you need supplied to get to those ends?
Do we value human creativity and the process of going through the learning of the individuals own process or do we demand that process to conform to tradition and capatilist prosperity?

Change of direction of my blog

It's been a year since I posted. And some aspects of my life have changed drastically and some have stayed the same.

None the less I want to change the direction of my blog so that its not just about the journey of yoga practice that I am on, rather to make it a charting of my different thoughts. Especially the ones that I have come back to over and over.

1. Welfare or Universal living wages and why its likely the best course of action for our human progression and best for the economy as a whole.
2. Psychology in practice from the point of view of a client/consumer of the psychological resources in my community, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
3. Mythology and the religiosity of humans. How narrative has influenced core thoughts of human nature through time.
4. Propaganda and the Social Media network. How easy it is to influence the masses through the new form of communication.
5. Autistic Narrow interests through my lens and experience: Story Telling, Chainmaille armor and jewelry, Yoga, Human movement, Rope, Sexuality. 
6. Suicide
7. This list will expand.
   

I hope to do more contributions to this blog throughout this next while to get out my thoughts that I have developed over a lifetime and continue to do so before it's too late.