Edited on 10 and 11 December 2022, after having learned new things about autism

Someone – how on earth would I know exactly who because I don’t have a live video feed to these folks in which I can observe how they’re hacking into my equipment – has disabled my internet access again. I tether. There’s no cable here and when I moved in, there were no phone connections either. A new line had to be connected from a nearby phone pole (through the air, yes, which is still pretty common in England even in densely populated areas). I had adsl for a while.

I also found a ton of gaming videos on that phone, possibly a leftover from my previous immediate downstairs neighbor (who probably still had access to that phone). Hard to tell. Keep reading.

I’m posting this from another, newer phone (with a lot less memory, however) that also has already experienced some interference.

(These locals also seem to think that when I don’t let on, it means that I’m really dense. If they are active in one phone, however, it makes it less likely that they will go hunt for the presence of another phone.)

Someone had also been picking my locks again quite often in recent days (leaving signs behind of their presence, yes, such as a candy bar left in a bag, a black smear left in an odd spot on my bathtub, and the emptying of my little CoQ10 bottle).

From my viewpoint, it spells: “We do not consider you human, Angelina. We have nothing but contempt for you. So we step on you. We want to crush you as if you are a cockroach.”

And from my viewpoint, it appears to be about the upset, fear and immense powerlessness that it causes.

Or “he”. Whoever.

Weird stuff goes on all the time; I don’t often post about it any longer because I think that it would just encourage more of the weird stuff. I have had text messages from someone calling me “Rosie” and who claims to be living near St James Hospital and who started texting me after I made a Freecycle post. Those text messages are from someone else (but I am not revealing any more).

After the Freecycle post that I made before that one, I received a bunch of text messages too, including “sorry for the upheave” after both my computers were disabled completely as punishment for having written a a full page with digital stuff that’s been going on since I moved to Portsmouth. That was in April 2022 and lasted about a month; then they worked for a short while, only to stop working again for about a week after which they were both enabled again. I’ve even had a text message from “the home visiting team”, by the way. That is what I responded to with anger and after that, my internet access was disabled. In 2009 or 2010, at my previous address, something similar happened after I wrote something online about what was happening. (I managed to get a traceroute showing the diversion.) My laptop was not affected at the time. (I suspect that “laptop” stands for sex, by the way; there was a time when I got lots of messages “mum, I need a laptop”. My laptop was left in peace.)

To remedy this current internet access problem, I played around with my, yes, four phones. (Resetting, for starters.)

I am currently going online – I tether – with a new SIM card and new PAYG credit and a phone that may also stop going online when I let it do what it wants to do and that I currently cannot switch off because it also tells me that I have only one more attempt left to get its SIM pin code right. (Not the default code.)

I currently seem to be going online from the timezone GMT+2. I am not using a VPN. I’ve previously noticed and posted that I often went online from Glasgow, Edinburgh, Devon etc. while I was at my desk here in Portsmouth and was not using a VPN.

WHAT IS HAPPENING IS NOT POSSIBLE WITHOUT MY PROFOUND OTHERIZATION BY OTHERS.

Let me explain, specifically. There are people in Portsmouth who know what is going on, but who feel that it is much more fun to watch me struggle and who may believe that they are “protecting” one of their own, but it has nothing to do with wanting to protect that person’s privacy and everything with the fact that I am a stranger. This local recalcitrance doesn’t benefit anyone.

However, there is local involvement of local non-autistic people in all of this and that obscures the picture. There is even one local person who knows one of the people involved fairly well but who denied every having heard of him when I asked him about it and he continues to keep his silence.

I am pretty sure now that I am (often) dealing with someone who is autistic.

(Keep in mind that NPD and autism can come across similarly but the behaviors have different motivations behind them.)

Autism has two sides, the way non-autistic people view and experience it and the way that autistic people view and experience it.

I am starting to understand autism as highly sensory-driven and it can include a strong wish to interact with objects and people in a “haptic” way. Other people are often almost like objects too, to autistic people.

Here we have this “boundary” issue again. I used to think that autistic people didn’t have a strong ego, perhaps, but it is probably much more the case that they see themselves as separate but at the same time as part of a larger whole.

I think that other people are seen as separate but that there is a strong drive to explore, to press buttons, so to speak, also of people.

I think that this can lead to sensory overload, particularly if the incoming sensory signals are not deliberately produced by the autistic individual (ticking clocks, lights and music in supermarkets).

I also think that so-called high-functioning autistic people can filter the sensory signals that come in and can adjust those filters and that sometimes too much and at other times not enough is filtered out.

There can be utter confusion – and anger – when another person reacts very differently than expected.

Watch this video below of kids dragging a stick along a fence.

Other humans are not like fences. That is part of the communication mismatch between autistic people and non-autistic people.

Notice also that the interaction with the fence requires “violating” its boundaries. No permission is asked.

In that sense, maybe the boundaries of other humans are seen by autistic people but are not seen as something to steer clear of but as something to interact with, in a highly egocentric, non-judgemental way.

This is also, perhaps, why autistic people sometimes need protection in the non-autistic world, because they can get dragged into criminal activities by others.

(Maybe boundaries are also experienced as potentially fluid? Soft?)

So, to an autistic person, my front door is likely not seen as something to steer clear of, but as something to interact with, and so are any new locks that I install.

The response from me is the goal. Leave a candy bar in a bag? That’s “nice”. Leave a black smear on the bath tub? To see what I will do with it.

Cutting off my internet access was the result of “killing” something in IT terms, by the way. (This was in response to an annoyed response from me. Ping pong?)

Leaving the gaming videos on my phone may also have been done just to observe my response. I had been getting a lot of “unused files” popups. (Ha ha. What else is new?)

Back in 2009 or 2010, when I still had a proper business website, which I was hosting in the Netherlands, I found a file sitting on my server one day that was not mine. No harm done, just odd.

I’ve later had my computer stop working because the operating system’s space on the hard disk was filling up with videos of thighs (likely mine, taken with my phone when I was sitting at my desk, tethering, holding the phone on my lap; hot weather, bare thighs).

It’s also for example happened to me that both my computers suddenly went haywire. One was beeping like crazy and constantly rebooting itself, the other one’s screen was going nuts and doing some other stuff and my printer also suddenly started spewing blank pages. After I shot off an e-mail to a friend in the States, from my phone, about what was happening and how childish it was, the whole circus stopped abruptly and everything went back to normal.

When I still often uploaded videos to YouTube, I’ve found text added to the captions, such as “you” and “foreign, go foreign”. It took me a while to see that this likely referred to the fact that autistic people have two personas, one for use at home and a different one for the outside world (in which they mask their autistic traits).

I’ve just heard that Donna Williams (see the neurodiversity page) referred to “doubles” and that she even buried one of those doubles in a ceremony. (Haven’t read any of her books yet, though.)

Now we’re getting somewhere because this theme of “doubles” has played from the beginning.

Non-autistic people adjust their behavior too but it happens far more automatically. It is also at least partly and possibly entirely for different reasons. When non-autistic people talk to babies, children or relatives, they apply language differently and behave differently than when for example they are giving a talk at a conference or are in the middle of a job interview. This is something that autistic people don’t seem to understand (but I don’t know many autistic people).

Language (and other ways in which we interact with others) is a very different thing for them. Spoken and written language, that’s like a metal fence of which they expect the bars to sound the same when they drag a stick along the fence. (It is not even their language but something that was cooked up by other humans before they were born.)

When my autistic friend in the Netherlands started signing her e-mails with “with kind regards”, which she did at her place of work, I felt hurt because it was way too formal to use between friends and it came across as if she wanted to push me away. This happened before it started dawning on me that she is autistic.

She must have seen this very differently. The bars on the fence always sound the same. When they sound differently, the fence is broken. The high C on a musical instrument always sounds like a high C. If it sounds like a different note, something is wrong.

In England, “with the utmost respect” apparently means “I think you’re an idiot”. This must certainly completely escape autistic people. Would an average Dutch, French or German person know this?

I’m not autistic. I became utterly confused when a local shop owner who I was having a conversation with suddenly started exclaiming and repeating “Don’t worry about it”. It was clear that the conversation was over, but the way that happened made me very angry. When I googled “Don’t worry about it”, I learned that it means (or can mean) “Piss off!” in England. Blimey!

(I later read an article in a local newspaper that included this particular guy; he’s probably one of those souls who believes that everyone is out to get him. I still have no idea what set him off during our conversation; it doesn’t matter.)

There is a lot of that kind of non-direct talk in England and England must be a very challenging place, language-wise, for autistic people.

(England’s relatively slow pace, however, may compensate for that.)