Tim Clare

12 Oct 2024

Intro post to pin to profile: I'm an author & podcaster. I've written 2 gothic Fantasy novels, The Honours & The Ice House, a book on the science of anxiety & panic called Coward, & a book on how boardgames make us human, The Game Changers. I make a podcast for writers called Death of 1000 Cuts.

It's only a few days until my two month season of wearing a festive jumper every day begins. Last year, for the first time in years, I was too sad to start on Nov 1st. It felt pointless (I mean, it is, but it felt pointless in the bad way). This year, I am looking forward to it. I feel very grateful

The tile-laying genre is ballooning

Successive fads in autism etiology often get popular because they act as comforting myths for nonautistic people. So Asperger & Kanner identify these kids with 'childhood schizophrenia' & it seems random & terrifying then Bettelheim picks up on a line from Kanner & says it's the mothers. They did it

I think of myself as a tediously pedantic skeptical materialist who believes in little but the slow, corrigible aporia of the scientific method, but I have often found myself in pits so wretched I would have *flung* myself at the first charlatan who told me a hyperbaric chamber would cure my AuDHD.

Leeches, exorcism, acupuncture, hypnosis, entreaties to my ancestors - if some confident guru had offered me one as a surefire way out I would have gnawed through a wall of pig arses to reach them

I should say I have some sympathy for many of the people attracted to various explanations over the years, up to & including Indigo Children. Psychology & medicine are confusing. Brains are weird. I want explanations that make intuitive human sense too. I love stories.

We still do it with autism & ADHD, we do it with anxiety & depression - we glom onto stories, & journalists with neither the background to assess the plausibility of claims nor, often, the inclination to spoil a good story, amplify movements & help quacks exploit the vulnerable.

It's not bad parenting. It's exposure to industrial pollutants. Mercury. Food additives. Mold. It's not your fault, it's the evil companies', but it's still preventable. Someone is to blame.

'Overdiagnosis', fetal testosterone levels, maternal age... all of these stories are ones typically pounced on by nonautistic people to cope with their own emotions around a child or loved one's diagnosis. The function they serve is more about emotional satisfaction than accurate description.

I recognise these kids from the concentration camps. They are traumatised. They are locked in a private hell. This is all to do with cold, incompetent mothering & poor breastfeeding. We can cure autism if we can only undo the harm their mothers caused them.

@senetmagazine.bsky.social

So now it's not random, it's 'refrigerator mothers'. You can spare your children this fate if only you don't mess them up through your actions. But the sense of control - this only happens to bad people - came at the price of blame & stigma. So an alternative theory emerges.

Tim Clare reposted

Jacob Bysshe Landrum

@byssh3.bsky.social

16h

My officemate and I had a very bad case of the Dontwannas this afternoon, so I made an Oware board with tape and beans. She trounced me in the first game (I only got 2), but I had a commanding win in the second match.

Tim Clare reposted

Senet magazine

17h

Tonight we have been mostly marching on Kyoto (via trick-taking) in the 10th Anniversary edition of Joraku.

I am trying to make my new book be about wonder & horror & neurodivergence, but it keeps wanting to add Revolution as the secret theme

Did a lot of driving today & feel shattered. But I got to thinking back to how I was doing exactly a year ago (very bad), & how I'm still here, & I'm ok, & it made me feel very very lucky. There's a kind of glowing sacredness to the low key & uneventful when I recognise the absence of catastrophe.

Yesterday I mentioned to someone the old boardgame Eddie Cantor's "Tell It To The Judge", & his face still jump-scares me every time I look at the board. The game is about getting to the club without acquiring speeding tickets & the caricature is unintentionally sinister.

Freud's concept of condensation argued that a single dream image could stand in for multiple things. Jung, similarly, wrote that the symbolic is always plural, overdetermined - if you can reduce it to single interpretation, it's not a symbol, it's a sign. Games, to me, are a culture's dreams.

The stories they tell are semantically rich, suggestive, polyvocal & often contradictory. They tut & gossip about society's scandalous decline in morals while playing footsie with you under the table. They chat with ancestors & open portals into the future. They are little embassy spaces.

This is two years before Monopoly hits the US market. Where does is sit in the history of roll & move Goose-style morality games? You certainly get punished for breaking the law, but do images like this reflect a solemn respect for the legal system? Or are they framed as humourless scolds?

I devoted over a page of The Game Changers to breaking down some of the cultural allusions in the Meowth V-Max card. You don't need to know them to enjoy it, but my point was these game pieces are far from hermeneutically shallow. Whether or not they're art is not, to me, a very fruitful question.

I used to lose myself in games like this, just poring over them. My dad played games with me a lot - it wasn't like I was denied people to play with - but my interest outstripped the availability of players: something which is still true today, to be honest. It's a very gnarly cultural artifact.

Think about how many layers of context one needs to appreciate & decode what this game is doing & how it might have been received: the place of the automobile in society (the game was first released in 1933), who Eddie Cantor was, what attitude & posture the caricatures suggest, where games were at.

youtu.beGetting a Ticket~Eddie Cantor in a 1930 Paramount comedy shortYouTube video by Nitrate Era Gems

Cantor's relevance to the theme isn't immediately obvious but it may have been inspired by this short - 'Getting A Ticket' - he did a couple of years prior. I begrudgingly admit the opening gag, while inevitable, is quite funny: youtu.be/hvaSnMgZEKw?...

As a child I spent ages studying the board & components. There are lots of little details, tokens & cards. I have played it but it's one of those interbellum designs where games had got fiddlier (& cheaper) without necessarily being more fun or interesting.

podcasts.apple.comIncrease their surface areaPodcast Episode · But Why Vikings? · 23 October · 55min

Can anyone recommend a good longform podcast or podcast series? I have a long drive tomorrow & would love to listen to a deep dive into something or a good nonfiction story. Not interested in a talky or comedy podcast this time, thanks.

Tim Clare reposted

Iain McAllister

@giantbrain.co.uk

In the latest episode of "But Why Vikings?" @ava.foxfort.net and I dive deep into how to be a better player around the RPG table. Thanks to @trvshane.bsky.social for the question. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/i...

@louiestowell.bsky.social

I love how simultaneously portentous & childlike this passage is. It's a great example of how horror & wonder flow into one another, how really, like they're like left & right, interdependent, impossible without their balancing concept.

Tim Clare reposted

Louie Stowell

Amid all the various horrors of ai in publishing, I am pouring one out for the agents who are being flooded with AI submissions. My worry about that is partly that we'll get MORE nepotism, as people might be more tempted to trust their networks in the face of the deluge.

There is a very thin line between poet & conspiracy theorist. Linking seemingly unrelated objects because the words sound alike, or because they have shared properties. Ever noticed how the sun is like a gold coin bro. The sun is money. You ever glimpsed the hidden pattern that binds all things bro.

I have said before that I'm an etymological conspiracist. I like tracing back the lineage of words & split off branches & pretending those former or divergent meanings are nested inside the target word, like missions for a Manchurian candidate.

Seeing images from folks at Essen, I wish you all a happy & exciting time but gosh I am glad I am home this year. I've still got post viral fatigue & shortness of breath, & I know I'd last about 5 minutes. It is cool & colourful & I love games & also I am glad to sit this one out.

Ok so admittedly if I were there I expect the power of special interests would be propelling me through those halls like some kind of wildman but the post-con crash would be epochal

podcasts.apple.comIncrease their surface areaPodcast Episode · But Why Vikings? · 23 October · 55min

The latest episode of But Why Vikings? is up. @giantbrain.co.uk & @ava.foxfort.net do a deep dive on what makes a good ttrpg player. (the answer is funny voices *scrunches face up* 'oh ello guvnor, oim a dirty little goblin I am') podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/i...

IT LIVES

Dan Jolin@danjolin.bsky.social

Hey, @timclare.bsky.social - look what I bought!

My handpuppet Poo-Poo the Tiger has spent a month & a half wedged in my youngest's window because every time I take him down, within 2 hours a magpie starts relentlessly attacking the glass. He is our only protector.

READING THE MIND IN THE EYES What emotion is this person feeling? • Estrangement • Procrastination • Brilliance • Punctuality

Theo Kuechel@theokl.bsky.social

Quite, thousands of scholars have never been able to agree on this one!

Watching an amazing conspiracy TikTok live where the person just argued that Santa Claus is named after the claustrum in the brain, which sends neurotransmitters 'down the chimney' (the spine) & it's all a secret allegory for consciousness. Zero notes. Pure art.

Now he's saying 'AI' actually means 'a eye', i.e. 'one eye'. It's banger after banger

In the neurodivergent community, this is our equivalent of 'Deckard is a replicant'

Ed Sinclair@edsinclair.bsky.social

I still think it’s pretty likely that SBC is autistic.