Aspies For Freedom

I loved the book - now a film is coming, and the trailers make it look awesome.

There is a very good website about the film, and it has a section where you can make your own Dæmon. I thought that the questions were a bit Aspie-Quiz-like, but there are only twenty of them!

What is yours?

You can view mine, a Snow Leopard called Albus, on MySpace

Ooops, pressed the wrong button again!

The Golden Compass Movie Website

I'm quite upset with the film - they stripped the religious themes out of it and cut off the last 3 chapters of the book. I suspect that the ending they do use will enable them to give an excuse not to do the sequels (in which there is no story without the religious themes).

I got a black she-cat named Hermestra.

It says I'm confident, spontaneous, proud, passive and clever.

http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/?510599

We have the UK version. In fact, in the same edition as your picture. Actually, since my last post, we have just lent the trilogy to a friend of the boys.

We now all have Dæmons:

My husband:


Me:


Sonic Boom:


White_Shadow_Ninja:

Oh, have you seen it already? I thought it wasn't coming out until Friday.

I presume this'll work...my Daemons some Tiger one..   Suidan: "shy, dependable, modest, assertive and proud"

And what kind of creature? Do tell.....

And I'm glad Flardox got a gibbon - I was wondering out looud with my twins whether anyone would get an ape or a monkey!

Emmy, the curiosity is driving me insane! Please, what kind of creature is Eamon? A bird? Mammal? Dragon? Help!

Regarding reading speed, what I get is a bit different than what's been described.

I read books extremely fast.  If I try to read slowly I can't.

If I want to comprehend what I read, though, I usually have to read the book several times over.  So by the time I'm done reading the thing somewhere between ten and a hundred times, I've done it much slower (if you count "read until you consciously understand it") than most people.

However, a weird thing happens even if I read something really fast and put it down and never read it again and don't remember anything from the book.

Well, a weird three things:

1.  Knowledge from the book/article/whatever starts seeping into the knowledge I draw from when I write other things.

2.  Entire phrases or sentences from the book/article/whatever can start popping up in my writing.

I find this both embarrassing and difficult:  I remember writing something once where several sentences and phrases were exactly from what Jim Sinclair wrote once, and I can't read it anymore without feeling tangible embarrassment to the point I start wincing.  I mean, when I do this, the ideas and (if relevant) experiences are my own, but the phrases my brain throws at them can be from somewhere I'd never guess.  I perpetually understand the fear and embarrassment Helen Keller felt her entire life after she accidentally reproduced an entire book from memory.

This also means that if I want to cite my sources (which I try to be pretty meticulous about when writing formally), I have to skim through every book and article I can find that an idea or phrase might have come from in order to cite it properly.  I remember writing something once where I knew a phrase had come from somewhere, but I wasn't sure where, so I actually said after it, "If anyone knows where this is from, please tell me so I can credit my source."  Unfortunately nobody's ever contacted me, but I swear I didn't create the phrase.  

I also remember having trouble at one point, because I knew the knowledge I had came from one of about thirty books that I'd checked out of a library that is very difficult for me to get to, and that has a number-limit of books that can be checked out at once.  I also didn't remember the names of the books.  Someone wanted me to cite it, and they wanted me to cite it immediately.  The more I told them I didn't know, the more they started making fun of me and telling me I really hadn't ever read it and was just making it up.  I told them to just give me time, that I was autistic, that I had an unusual way of processing information and I could not just give them the information they wanted immediately without a lot of work, and they told me I was just making excuses and that if I wanted to be treated as equally human I needed to go by the same rules as everyone else (which apparently doesn't mean, "I'll do this, but a long time later, I can't possibly know this right now, I read all the books just before speaking at a conference and then returned all of them, I'm way too overloaded to get into this right now, I can barely write to you at all" -- they meanwhile were sort of sitting around publicly making fun of me and getting other people to do so, and to pressure me to tell them right now or else admit that I'd never read this, neither of which I could do because one was impossible and the other was a lie).

At any rate, with that person, I did eventually produce multiple cites (the bit of knowledge in question... someone had said that everyone would rather their children be autistic than "retarded", and I said I'd read a number of people in a number of books saying the opposite, including some scholarly books where people had interviewed parents).  I had to go back and find most of the library books.  Then I had to read each one and write down the page number the information was on.  (And it's difficult to the point of pain for me to scan for one piece of information like that, so that in itself slows things down.  I can remember what part of the page many pieces of information were on, but not what part of the book.)  Then I had to go through and compile all the quotes.

I ended up putting all the quotations together, or, well, most of them, because I didn't find them all.  I found many references to that and similar things (such as autism being the worst possible diagnosis of any kind, which by default means it's worse than being diagnosed with an intellectual disability -- I included those along with specific comparisons).  I put the entire thing up and said something on the order of "I really meant it when I said I read this, I was not making it up."

I never received an apology from the person who accused me of making it up (the person has instead only become nastier and nastier to me over time).  Which is typical of bullies, I notice:  They accuse me of something, I prove them wrong (sometimes wrong and then some), and then they either accuse the proof of being wrong (at which point the whole process begins over again), or sort of slither away and grow nastier rather than apologizing, because the whole thing to them is social oneupmanship.

3.  I occasionally end up with a full conscious understanding of a book I've read only once, but only a long time after the fact of reading it.

The problem with all of this is that the entire process is beneath my conscious understanding.  Consciously, I don't (except very rarely) know what happened in a book, nor the words from the book, until I've read it a whole lot of times.

The advantage of this is that I can read the same book over and over and while it imprints in my conscious memory a little more each time, there are always things I didn't consciously remember.  So I enjoy rereading more than most people do.

Oh, and the reason I more rapidly than usual knew what went on in that huge bunch of books I read is sort of interesting too regarding this.  It's the same reason I understand something better the more times I read it.  The sentiments I described were repeated many, many times in these books, so I knew they were somewhere in them because it repeated so much that I could remember it.

And one of these days I'll figure out my daemon.

I took the test three times, I kept getting the stupid mouse one. Everyone got cool sounding ones... and I got the mouse... oh boy.. and it's name is Laefe.

My daemon is a female chimpanzee called Eutropia.  

According to my profile I'm solitary, shy, modest,  humble and fickle.  Though fickle is not true for me.    

There shouldn't be ?s in my previous post.