/reader

Simple way: Overriding VS Code theme color tokens

By default my Github Light theme makes this a bold dark blue color. I didn’t want to roll my own theme though to scratch this niche itch, so I dug in and found out you can override single tokens in VS Code. Handy. The documentation is a bit opaque but here’s what you need to do:

// settings.json
"editor.tokenColorCustomizations": {
  "textMateRules": [
    {
      "scope": "variable.language.this",
      "settings": {
        "foreground": "#b0b0b0"
      }
    }
  ]
},

Now my this looks like this…

It’s a calming sensation for me to have repetitive noise dimmed. I liked it so much I dimmed comments to match as well. I may even dim TypeScript because sometimes I wish I could hide the syntax, but keep the squiggles.

Over the top way: Replace this with a custom glyph

Changing colors is cool… but what if you could go one step further and replace this with an icon? What would an icon for this even look like?

I asked the ShopTalk Discord and got some interesting ideas like the “☝️” emoji, which I think is funny in an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt sort of way. Andrew Walpole took it to the next level and designed a custom glyph:

Alan Smith then figured out how to use Glyphs Mini to add a custom ligature to an open source coding font. Andrew riffed on Alan’s work and exported a custom version of Fira Code with his custom glyph as a ligature. The last step was to install the font update my VS Code settings:

  "editor.fontFamily": "'Fira Code Ligged', monospace",
  "editor.fontLigatures": true

Now my code looks incredibly futuristic…

Abusing typefaces to remove the repetitiveness of programming languages is fun. After seeing the icon in situ, the idea might be a smidge too wild for me due to reduced legibility. While I don’t use the custom glyph on the daily, this experiment does spark a deep desire in me to create a bunch of custom glyphs for common keywords so I can make JavaScript an entirely rune-based programming language.

Custom ligatures with CSS?

A wild idea, but it would be neat if you could create your own custom ligatures in CSS to avoid the need to re-bake custom fonts each time you have a niche typographic need. Here’s a pseudo-syntax of how that might work:

@font-face "Dave Hijinks" {
  match: "this.";
  replace: "☝️.";
}

@font-face "Cloud2Butts" {
  match: "cloud", "AI";
  replace: "butt", url(fart.svg);
}

body {
  font-face: "Dave Hijinks", "Cloud2Butt", sans-serif;
}

Anyways, it’s a thought. Not a serious proposal. This was a fun rabbit hole to travel down with some friends.

The pan itself literally is irreplaceable, having been discontinued shortly after I bought my set maybe eight years ago and replaced in the set by a pan with squared off sides rather than the outward curve of mine, but they don’t sell that as a single item anyway even if I were interested.

Last week I started to think about replacing the pan, but there was a problem: having a matching set of cookware is one of those small ways in which I maintain a consistent environment, part of having robust defaults that simplify my cognitive and sensory environment. Every little bit of sameness creates sort of the opposite of a death by a thousand cuts, conserving my resources for other more unmanageable things when they arise.

So, to replace the pan, I had to spend a few days figuring out if there were ways to cognitively reconceptualize the idea of having a single pan that did not match the rest of my cookware. In the end, I landed on one thought: since breakfast is the only meal for which I need this pan, maybe that’s a sufficient mental handhold to allow me to accept the mismatch. After buying a cheap Good Cook ceramic pan at Safeway, I was treated to a couple of unexpected additional handholds: the Bakelite handle is designed to look like light-colored wood, consistent with the furniture “reboot” I did a few years ago; and the blue of the outside of the pan is strikingly similar to my Dansk Mesa Sky Blue dinnerware.

We talked a bit about this in therapy last Friday, because it felt like something of a sequel to my most recent thoughts about catastrophizing, in the sense that we were dealing with one of the tools my autistic brain uses to make my cognitive and sensory surroundings more manageable. When it comes to catastrophizing, my position all along has been that it’s only, per se, pathological when it becomes dysregulating rather than regulating.

Over the weekend, this New Yorker piece on the food-caching of birds popped up on social, with Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism’s fascination at “the idea that the legitimate autistic need for consistency “may result from genes that diminish forgetting.”. I’m still reading the piece but it’s worth noting the relevant portions here.

A condition called highly superior autobiographical memory (H.S.A.M.) approximates what Borges imagined. In 2006, researchers described a woman named Jill Price, who could recall in detail what had happened to her on any day after her tenth birthday, more or less. Price described having a “split screen” in her head, one playing the present and the other playing the past. “It is non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting,” she told researchers. Happy memories were pleasant, but others led to phobias (of bird droppings, for instance). The researchers reported that Price, although her general intelligence was not below the average range, had “significant deficits in executive functions involving abstraction, self-generated organization and mental control.”

Human memory, it seems, was never meant to be perfect and permanent. In a book titled “Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering,” the Columbia neurologist Scott A. Small suggests that the behavioral inflexibility seen in autism may result from genes that diminish forgetting. In a review paper, “The Many Faces of Forgetting: Toward a Constructive View of Forgetting in Everyday Life,” the psychologists Jonathan Fawcett and Justin Hulbert list other documented benefits of forgetting: creativity, self-reinvention, mental clarity, big-idea thinking, forgiveness, the updating of knowledge, and the reduction of post-traumatic stress. During sleep, they note, the brain prunes its neural connections. (Machine-learning researchers use similar tactics to push artificial neural networks away from the data on which they’ve trained and toward more useful generalizations.) “Some researchers have gone so far as to claim that forgetting is the ‘default mode’ of the brain,” Fawcett and Hulbert write.

I’m not sure I’m sold on any sort of direct link between “genes that diminish forgetting” and “the behavioral inflexibility seen in autism”, but what does interest me in the above is the idea that it hints at an inverse relationship between a need for sameness and executive dysfunction. There’s some suggestion that autistic brains don’t “habituate” to stimuli (hence the sensorium dysphoria/intense world) which is why we self-generate predictability and sameness in order to both tone down the world and create specific signals for us to lock onto.

Having an inordinately vivid or inordinately detailed memory, then, perhaps becomes a kind of internally intense world interfering with cognitive flexibility? Is it the increased memory function itself that reduces flexibility or something the brain is doing in order to manage and withstand that function?

(I’m not even going to think about how, then, one incorporates aphantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory, the antithesis of Jill Price’s HSAM, into all of this, except to say that I think that HSAM potentially would be a nightmare for an autistic person, as it would just create more noise.)

All of which are unfully-formed thoughts, and ones I suspect have some internal inconsistencies, but this seemed as good a place as any to put them.

In the case of replacing the pan, what had happened was that a set of tools for regulation—the robust defaults of predictability and sameness—had become dysregulating because of the frustration and stress I was experiencing at the start of every single day due to the pan no longer providing either easy cooking or easy cleaning.

This need for predictability and sameness is among the things which are pathologized in and of themselves under the normative view of autism. I’ve talked before about how I view sensory stress as the actual underlying condition, which we autistics manage through the evolved adaptation of the monotropic tendency.

Reducing or eliminating restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) is a cornerstone of research into “autism interventions”, despite the lived experience of many autistic people being that these RRBs are what help keep the intense world at bay. The focus, rather, should be on the question of which behaviors are self-regulatory in nature, and which are self-dysregulating, and how to manage the conundrum when the former becomes the latter.

For me, it was the realization that my self-regulatory need for sameness was resulting in this one specific instance and circumstance in a daily dose of dysregulation right at the start of my day, which is one of the worst times to become dysregulated. The benefit of maintaining a specific RRB became outweighed by its cost, and sufficiently enough for me to be able to consciously override the RRB.

What matters here is that all of this occurred within the context of having the agency and autonomy both to engage in self-regulating RRBs and to step back and make an adjustment when one became dysregulating instead. What matters is that I remain at the center of my own autistic life.

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I’m not particularly interested in actually doing it. You have to record a video with a bunch of rules and crap. But I heard about it years ago and the general challenge idea stuck in my head.

My gym recently did a “Supermax” event where we, over the course of two hours, found our max on six different lifts. The first three happen to be bench, squat, and deadlift. I got:

Bench    = 265 lbs
Squat    = 375 lbs
Deadlift = 365 lbs

So: 1,005 lbs! Made it!