Month: April 2024

Before I go celebrate my niece’s birthday, I thought I would write my A to Z post. Today is my day five, so letter E.
E is for one of my favorite words, epic!
Why “epic?” I say it all the time, mostly when it comes to food. I also say that fun things like skydiving are epic! I couldn’t find a modern definition, besides a very questionable source, so instead of a definition I’ll link to a Stack Exchange article. [https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26182/is-the-word-epic-being-used-correctly-these-days]

First, yeah I missed my A to Z post yesterday. I had Botox for my Migrains, and as I result I was asleep most of the day. I’ll be posting today, tomorrow, and Sunday to catch up. That being said, today is letter D. for me.
D is for Diabetes insipidus, and Doctors, which I happen to interact with a lot of.
I’ll explain Diabetes insipidus. It’s like water diabetes. Wikipedia says the following, which I happen to agree with, and experience myself, as someone who has the condition:
}Excessive urination and extreme thirst and increased fluid intake (especially for cold water and sometimes ice or ice water) are typical for DI.”
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes_insipidus]
I was diagnosed at 13, after a hosptial stay. To this day I can’t go on really long trips without large amounts of water.
Speaking of that, my other letter D thing was to talk about my Doctors. I have four of them now. No, I don’t always follow orders lol. I mostly have four because of the strange US requirement that everyone have a GP, or primary. If I didn’t have to have her once a year, I wouldn’t have four.
The newest one is conducting a whole bunch of tests on me on April 22nd. It’s been long suspected by my parents and teachers back in the 90s that I’m autistic. This was back in the 90s though. When I had the test back then, it was more of an interview, conducted in school, by a vision specialist.
When I went to have my hearing for denial of services, I saught to put an evaluation in as evidence, but could not get the appointment in time. I received an appointment for an evaluation on the 22nd of this month. I told the state, that I would provide records to them.
It’s only as a result of nearly 7 years of research of treatment tactics and techniques of autistic children, that I have come to realize that the suspicians of my parents and teachers may in fact have been true at the time. I disagreed with them back in the 90s, and up until around 2022 or so, I would say I still disagreed.

C is for church, and Chad Daybell.
Ok, there’s a reason why I switched these around lol. I’m going to church tonight for Bible study, so I thought I would write about my church. Chad Daybell is a case I’m currently following, the Husband of Lori Vallow.
I attend a FourSquare church here in my local area. I have since 2007. For about the first 8 months of me going to the church, quite a few people wanted to pray for my healing. I can’t say it hasn’t happened after that, just not constantly, every Sunday. Recently, well since 2022, I faced issues getting rides to church functions. Thankfully, I was able to work that issue out, a couple weeks ago, but the small group I’m in probably won’t be around much longer. It’s the Pastor, and his wife’s home group. I’m going to Bible study on Wednesday nights, but it’s a timed one, and will end at the beginning of June.
Our church used to have a bus, but we stopped when we didn’t have enough people to provide rides to. Apparently I’m the only one that needs consistent church transportation on a regular basis. I doubt I’m actually the only one now though. We’re having a women’s dinner coming up Friday. I’m glad, because we’ve just started holding ladies events a few months ago.
C is also for Chad Daybell.
Chad Daybell is Lori Vallow’s husband. Vallow was convicted last year of the 1st degree murder of her children, and conspiracy to commit the murder of Chad’s former wife, Tammi Daybell. Daybell’s trial has started this week.
Originally these cases were to be joined, but then the judge granted Daybell’s defence attorney’s motion to sever.
[https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/crime/article272671803.html]
Judge Boyce also changed his mind, and allowed the entire proceeding to be live streamed, after not allowing this for Lori’s trial. [https://www.ksl.com/article/50803417/judge-will-allow-livestreaming-of-chad-daybells-trial-rules-on-other-motions]
The short explanation, is because Judge John Judge in the kohberger case allowed court controled live streaming. Judge Boyce did the same thing. Media cameras are not allowed, and it will all be controled by the court.
[https://lawandcrime.com/live-trials/idaho-four/it-is-the-intense-focus-idaho-murders-judge-issues-key-ruling-on-livestream-of-bryan-kohbergers-trial-cites-lori-vallow-case-to-take-control-over-what-is-being-videoed/]

B is for blindness and social media in 2024. I was going to write about a couple other things, but I think I need to address this. I’ve come across a whole lot of antidisability retoric lately in the fediverse. I’m not just talking about a post or two. I’m talking about someone advocating euthanasia. Well what it was, was someone sharing someone’s opinions advocating euthanasia.
I was summarily blocked by a person while trying to confront them on their anti-disability views. Tip, to the person who blocked me others, I reach nowhere near left, or left-leaning status. I’m a registered Libertarian. I can’t support Trump, because of his surveillance state stances, and stances, or lack-there-of, on Assange and Snowden.
I’m also:
1. pro 2nd amendment.
2. prolife, but not just when it comes to abortion.
3. Pro 1st amendment, and free speech. However, when you use public forums to insult a whole group of people you don’t like, en masse, over and over again, I think you yourself need to correct your errors in thinking. In other words, some things are parents taught us are good. If you can’t say anything nice is one.
4. I’m against open borders, sanctuary cities, or any immigration policies a lot of LP members are for.
5. As I said earlier, I”m anti-surveillance. I think PATRIOT and FISA need to be repealed, and thrown into the ocean. I would go a bit further though, I would end the agencies that are doing these things.
6. I’m anti-war. Obviously if someone comes over here, and starts killing us, that’s a different story, but I’m against foreign wars. There would be a few exceptions.
7. I’m a biblical Christian. In other words, I oppose torture, locking people away, unless they comitted a crime, and killing them, unless they’ve committed a certain set of crimes.
Of course, you might say it’s all who I’m following. However not really. People on the left do not like people on the right because they say that we’re intollerant. I have to say that this is true, especially of late.
People on the right do not like people on the left, because of the recent anti-freespeech practices they have taken toward us. It’s a valid concern. However the reasons are because a lot of conservatives refuse to update their thinking. When you use words from the 1970s and 1980s, it makes you look like you’re doing it to be stupid on purpose, you just don’t care, or you don’t like the group of people your attacking.
Yes, language can update over time, without getting into newspeak. It has done that. We all know that words from the 1800s don’t mean the same things anymore.
A couple months ago, someone who will remain anonymous here, wrote a post saying they were leaving social media. They gave some what I thought were interesting reasons at the time. However what they said in the end was that social media is a good idea on paper, but people ruin it. Unfortunately I’m unable to find it, and I didn’t save it to my bookmarking service which is rare for me. It also said that it has become a cult mentality. They were especially talking about the Fediverse.
Well, the way I see it, there are two sides in the Fediverse. There’s leftism, and conservatism. Nothing in between. There is an instance for libertarians, but I’ve only seen and/or followed one account posting from it.
Anyway, this post got really long, I just needed to address what I’ve seen happening lately. I suppose it wasn’t about my blindness persee, and I’m sorry about that. Maybe I’ll do another 31 questions series at some point.

Today is the first day of the April A to Z challenge. I picked two things for A.
A is for Adeventure. Some already know this about me, and some don’t. I’m definitely a thrillseeker. I enjoy jumping out of airplanes, ziplining, bungee jumping, parasailing, and things like that. I always say that I enjoy the flying sensation.
I do have skydiving videos on Youtube. I’ll try to paste them here in a pastebin, because linking to seven short clips that did not get put into a playlist, because Youtube’s playlist feature is a bit iffy with screen readers, or at least it was last August, it did not provide for ordering features.
OK not Pastebin, because it was being strange, but another service I actually had to register for to get the thing to stay up. [https://controlc.com/8750fce3]]
The second thing i picked for the letter A was my X username, Antipentrap. It actually comes out of Lavabit, of course. It means what it says, basically. Pen-trap is short for pen register, trap and trace.
Quoting from Wikipedia. }The term pen register originally referred to a device for recording telegraph signals on a strip of paper. Samuel F. B. Morse’s 1840 telegraph patent described such a register as consisting of a lever holding an armature on one end, opposite an electromagnet, with a fountain pen, pencil or other marking instrument on the other end, and a clockwork mechanism to advance a paper recording tape under the marker.[2]
The term telegraph register came to be a generic term for such a recording device in the later 19th century.[3] Where the record was made in ink with a pen, the term pen register emerged. By the end of the 19th century, pen registers were widely used to record pulsed electrical signals in many contexts. For example, one fire-alarm system used a “double pen-register”,.] and another used a “single or multiple pen register”..
As pulse dialing came into use for telephone exchanges, pen registers had obvious applications as diagnostic instruments for recording sequences of telephone dial pulses. In the United States, the clockwork-powered Bunnell pen register remained in use into the 1960s.
After the introduction of tone dialing, any instrument that could be used to record the numbers dialed from a telephone came to be defined as a pen register. Title 18 of the United States Code defines a pen register as:
a device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information transmitted by an instrument or facility from which a wire or electronic communication is transmitted, provided, however, that such information shall not include the contents of any communication, but such term does not include any device or process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing, for communications services provided by such provider or any device or process used by a provider or customer of a wire communication service for cost accounting or other like purposes in the ordinary course of its business
This is the current definition of a pen register, as amended by passage of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act. The original statutory definition of a pen register was created in 1984 as part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which defined a “Pen Register” as:
A device which records or decodes electronic or other impulses which identify the numbers called or otherwise transmitted on the telephone line to which such device is dedicated.
A pen register is similar to a trap and trace device. A trap and trace device would show what numbers had called a specific telephone, i.e., all incoming phone numbers. A pen register rather would show what numbers a phone had called, i.e. all outgoing phone numbers. The two terms are often used in concert, especially in the context of Internet communications. They are often jointly referred to as “Pen Register or Trap and Trace devices” to reflect the fact that the same program will probably do both functions in the modern era, and the distinction is not that important. The term “pen register” is often used to describe both pen registers and trap and trace devices.”
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register]
I wasn’t going to use both terms in my X username, so I just combined them, which we do in today’s legal orders, anyway, for the most part. If you’ve ever seen an order written for a pen register, or trap and trace device, it’s usually written as pen-trap. I guess it can be written with a space, for instance, as in this article, [https://www.eff.org/issues/pen-trap] However, that’s the first time I’ve seen it written this way. They are also written separately, but the distinction is not important these days, as the Wikipedia article said, the devices do the same things in the 21st century.