That's all. Thanks.

I have just, once again, read "I have no mouth and I must scream". This might be the third or fourth time. I don't really know how many times I've read it, but I never seem to remember it later, even though I try. It just doesn't make much of an impression on me. Most of his short stories are like that; I remember the one about the dog, mostly because I learned beforehand that he hated women and that story makes that quite clear but also because I like dogs and think the ending is quite a reasonable decision for the protagonist to make. Awkward to agree with that asshole, of course.

So "I have no mouth but I must scream" - ok, I just don't think it's great. It's apparently memorable to lots of people, but I feel like that's mostly because it's about torture which most people don't get a lot of fictional exposure to, and about AI, and AI is a hot topic right now.

I might find the torture unremarkable because I read far worse as a kid reading my first communion present from my aunt. "The lives of the saints and the martyrs". I learned a LOT about torture from my Catholic childhood. I reckon kids today on the rotten side of the Internet see more graphic stuff, but I doubt it's actually worse than what was written in that little navy blue book with the gilt edges. His depiction was weirdly tame? I guess. It just didn't strike me as being quite the worst thing that could happen to a person.

Anyways. I'll try and remember this time so I don't end up re-reading the damn thing again, but I swear that's exactly what I thought last time too.

I think the part I like is that it posits- what if autism were simultaneously painful but valuable? Useful? Even a little Heroic? Without forcing social acceptance, without making the autistic person magically able to navigate the world easily.

It's wrong on every level about reality, but most movies are anyways so that's normal for movieland.

I dunno, I liked it. It's simple and nice. What if your pain were useful for something?