Slow Dot Dog
This is the internet homepage of Bix Frankonis
The unsupported use case of a disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon—now with global pandemic, climate crisis, incipient fascism, and uphill battle for disability.
My most recent status
My biography and identity
I was born on October 25 in upstate New York, use he/him pronouns primarily by default, have lived in St. Johns, Oregon, and environs for twenty-six years, and have been online since a dialup gopher server in 1993; and I am a straight, celibate, aromantic, agnostic, autistic, introverted, antifascist, aspirationally antiracist, middle-aged, cisgender white guy of Italian, Lithuanian, and Polish descent.
How I am impaired or disabled
I’m impaired by autism spectrum, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, sensory processing, persistent adjustment,and developmental coordination disorders; rejection sensitive dysphoria; pathological demand avoidance; aphantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory; an unspecified, undiagnosed windedness and fatigue; and something my therapist and I refer to as “complex chronic stress”, which in some sense is akin to viewing daily life given the above through the lens of conservation of resources theory and arguably equates to the persistent adjustment disorder.
What’s been happening lately
Managed to get my Covid shot scheduled and also select a new primary care physician; keeping up the daily exercise walk and enjoying the data I now get from having a refurbished smartwatch; restored the experimental RSS feed here on the homepage but you might get duplicates for a while as I sort things out; got reminded that when I’d migrated the blog, the feeds changed file names, so I’ve set up some redirects; struggling psychologically to overcome Social Security having simply trashed my application without notice; back at work on the blog restoration project; being selfish and strategic with my Bluesky time, and dropped out of several subreddits; for the second time in ten years I recently quit the same nonprofit, this time due to ethical disagreements; stalled on putting that WW2-era shipyard workers zine and my research on it back online; my doctors still can’t explain my persistent low white blood cell counts or my fatigue or even whether they are related; needing to decide when to schedule robotic bladder surgery; realizing that my coping capacity has degenerated; and still being struck repeatedly by the ugly irony that of recent years 2020 for me was the easiest.
Books I've been reading
I’m reading Siren Queen by Nghi Vo for fiction and Against Technoableism by Ashley Shew for nonfiction; recently finished No One Will Comes Back For Us by Premee Mohamed and Life on Other Planets by Aomawa Shields; in the queue for fiction is maybe Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess if the publisher fixes the justification bug in the Kindle edition; and in nonfiction The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green, then whatever library hold drops first; or you can buy me books and impact my choices
Television I'm watching
This week I’m watching Ahsoka, Invasion, Star Trek: Lower Decks, and The Changeling; bingeing Maniac; rewatching (of all things) Remington Steele and House, although that one would be part rewatch part first watch; still making my way through The Clone Wars; and still pausing the weekly Grimm rewatch because the podcast is on a break; I’m supporting the writers strike and the actors strike; and you should watch Mrs. Davis, Beef, and Hot Skull, three very different shows but among the best of the year.
Movies I've seen recently
Most recently I’ve seen Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, The Martian (rewatch), We Bought a Zoo (rewatch), Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine, Nimona, They Cloned Tyrone, Inception (rewatch), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (rewatch), Cradle Will Rock (rewatch), and The Martian (rewatch); and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; my plan to make my way chronologically through my watchlist has stalled out; and I’m not going to theaters anymore because my sensory threshold no longer can handle it.
Music I've been listening to
My rotation of late has included A Northern Chorus, An Horse, Billie Eilish, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Excellent Skeleton, The Fallout (Original Motion Picture Soundrack), Ghost of Vroom, The Helio Sequence, Kleo (Music From The Netflix Series), Metric, Spacemen 3, Throwing Muses, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs; and I use LoFi Girl playlists to write, to read, and to get to sleep.
Podcasts I'll often put on
I’ve been listening regularly to Wait, Wait… Don't Tell Me, Science, Quickly, Quanta Science Podcast, and The Joy of Why; intermittently to Audio Research News, Spectrum Stories, and Synaptic; pausing The Grimmcast because it’s on a break, and hoping for more 1800 Seconds on Autism, Gates McFadden InvestiGates, and Star Trek: The Pod Directive.
Articles and blogs I've read
I’ve been saving news articles and blog posts every morning to read over the course of the week, often falling way behind and getting down on myself about it; you can browse the linklog and the bloglog on Instapaper; and you can read my current top recommendation: D.L. Mayfield on how conversion therapy is all around us.
The team I’ve been following
It’s baseball season, which means as a born-and-raised, life-long if sometimes-lapsed Red Sox fan, and thanks to free MLB.TV, I’m watching games almost every day and experiencing even more than the usual frustration; I can’t imagine that when they hired Chaim Bloom he outlined this as year four of his plan.
What I've been eating
My diet these days consists of cold cereal for breakfast, except for a weekly brunch out; turkey, provolone, olive oil mayo or spicy brown mustard, and iceberg lettuce on sourdough for lunch; brown rice, diced chiQin, broccoli, sweet corn, and Old Bay seasoning for dinner; a cup of coffee and a shortbread cookie for dessert; iced coffee and a small salad after my walk; apple oatmeal crumble bars between meals; and an Arnold Palmer and Cheez-It crackers for a snack.
My current cat and history
I grew up with a “mellow yellow”, domestic shorthair named Saffron; in college I’d briefly lived with and then misplaced two black-and-white, domestic shorthairs named Peter and Petruchio; for my first seventeen years in Portland I lived with a stunted, grey-and-white domestic shorthair named Scully; since late 2014, I’ve lived with a gray-and-white, domestic shorthair named Meru (for the protagonist in Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT), who thinks my singing is the sound of distress and on Friday afternoons insists that I pay attention to her instead of my therapist; and last year I lost to degenerative illness a dilute calico, domestic shorthair named Willow.
Where I spend my time
It’s exceedingly rare that I leave the vicinity of downtown St. Johns, frequenting its various coffee shops or my regular brunch spot, excepting a doctor’s appointment or an increasingly infrequent due to resource levels trip across town to visit to the zoo.
Things I've done and made
You might or might not know me from such former projects as a pioneering internet petition against government censorship; a worthwhile cybercafe failure; hosting a cruft-free edition of a Mark Twain short for two decades; several years of celebrated stand-alone journalism; the founding of a successful, annual fan-based fundraising campaign; the surprise uncovering of and research into a long-forgotten World War II shipyard workers zine; organizing video contest submissions for the DVD of a trailblazing web series; or project managing a resident herd of urban goats for five years; but not from my childhood dream of becoming an outer-space moving van driver.
What people have said
Rolling Stone emphasized my “long black eyelashes”, “face that sees very little sun”, and “quick wit”; Mike Doughty said that Soul Coughing was “playing it all” for me; Bruce Sterling referred to me as a “punk”; a Portland public relations professional called me a “sissy”; and a now-disgraced pop culture icon told people not to worship false versions of me and might have called me “twitchy, unreliable-looking”.
Things I try to believe in
I believe that “if nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do”; that cynicism is but frustrated optimism, resulting only from first believing that people are capable of better and then all too often being proved wrong; that this is why even small, everyday courtesies are important; and that we should be building capacity, equity, mercy, and solidarity.
How this homepage is made
Updated by hand in Markdown and served to you over the web by Carrd. Domain named for my Belly-inspired, mid-90s, first-ever internet handle. Random quotes inspired by one of my earliest websites. Status pane has an Atom feed. Other panes have an experimental RSS feed. Rules: no fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis. All rights reserved.