Autistic in NYC

Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.

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Archive of updates to Autistic in NYC, early 2021

Below are old updates that used to appear on the front page.

Below are updates that were made in early 2021. (Below the table of contents is a link to older updates.)

For older updates to this website, see Archive of updates from 2020.

When will we meet in-person again? Maybe a picnic in August?

June 29, 2021:  As of today, 50.6% of New York City residents have been fully vaccinated, according to COVID-19 Vaccines data page on the New York City oficial website. That's about 8% more since a month ago. So we probably can't meet in-person until September at the very earliest, at least for an indoors meeting, and even that is doubtful at this point. But outdoors is safer than indoors, so perhaps we can have a picnic sometime in August?

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Online chat meetings (text-based) during June 2021

May 26, 2021:  During June, the below-listed online text-based chat meetings will be led by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group. To view the meeting details (including a link to our chatroom), you must first join our Meetup.com group (and be logged in to Meetup.com) if you have not done so already.

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Meeting in-person again? Not yet, alas!

May 26, 2021:  As of today, less than 42% of New York City residents have been fully vaccinated, according to COVID-19 Vaccines data page on the New York City oficial website. So we probably can't meet in-person until August at the very earliest.

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Online chat meetings (text-based) during May 2021

April 30, 2021:  During May, the below-listed online text-based chat meetings will be led by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group. To view the meeting details (including a link to our chatroom), you must first join our Meetup.com group (and be logged in to Meetup.com) if you have not done so already.

If you are planning to attend any of these chat meetings, please RSVP on the relevant linked Meetup.com page.

If you are interested in helping to start another hobby-oriented social group or career-oriented group, please let us know.

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New group (Autism Politics) and re-named group (General Societal/Political)

April 30, 2021:  A new group, the Autism Politics Discussion Group, has been created as a place to discuss controversial autism-related matters, about which debates are discouraged in the support groups, career-oriented groups, and hobby-oriented social groups led by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group..

The Societal/Political Discussion Group, which held its first chat meeting last night, has been re-named the General Societal/Political Discussion Group. It will be the place to discuss political and social issues not specific to autism or the autistic community.

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Constructive criticism tutorial list added

April 20, 2021:  I've added a list of tutorials on giving and receiving constructive criticism in the section of this website on Autistic-friendly social skills vs. blending in with NT's. At some point in the future I'll be adding lists of on various conflict resolution skills.

At the next topic-focussed discussion meeting of the Queens disccusion group, on Tuesday, May 11, the topic will be "responding gracefully to criticism."

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Assertiveness tutorial list added

April 19, 2021:  I've added a list of tutorials on assertiveness in the section of this website on Autistic-friendly social skills vs. blending in with NT's.

I also created this Wrong Planet thread as a place to post comments about the tutorials.

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New group: Societal/Political Discussion Group

April 19, 2021:  A new group, the Societal/Political Discussion Group, has been created as a place to have the political discussions that are discouraged in support groups, career-oriented groups, and hobby-oriented social groups led by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group. The new group's first meeting (via text-based chat) will be on Thursday, April 29, at 7:00 PM.

Along with the group itself, a new group category has been created on this website: "Societal" groups.

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Miscellaneous updates

April 6, 2021:  Some improvements to this site:

  1. An About page has been added to the Wordpress blog.

  2. Meeting announcements have been added at the tops of each of the group pages on this site. (These will likely be a pain to maintain! At some point I should automate them somehow.)

  3. Some visual improvements have been made to the smartphone version of this site, as discussed on Wrong Planet here.

  4. I finally decided, reluctantly, to get a Twitter account, which has been added to the Contact page.

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Various group meetings during April 2021

April 2, 2021:  During the remainder of April, the below-listed online chat meetings (text-based) will be led by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group. To view the meeting details (including a link to our chatroom), you must first join our Meetup.com group (and be logged in to Meetup.com) if you have not done so already.

If you are planning to attend any of these chat meetings, please RSVP on the relevant Meetup.com page.

If you are interested in helping to start other hobby-oriented social groups or career-oriented groups, please let us know.

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Amateur Meteorology Club:  tutorials page added

March 7, 2021:  A list of tutorials has been added to the Amateur Meteorology Club's section of this website, including information on how to become a volunteer weather spotter for the National Weather Service.

The Amateur Meteorology Club is the first of what will eventually be, we hope, many hobby-oriented social groups led by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.

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Autistic Peer Leadership Group

March 4, 2021:  Tonight is the first meeting of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.

To this website, I've added a list of tutorials on how to lead/facilitate a group.

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Active listening tutorial list added

February 12, 2021:  I've added a list of tutorials on active listening in the section of this website on Autistic-friendly social skills vs. blending in with NT's. At some point in the future I'll be adding lists of tutorials on assertiveness, giving and receiving constructive criticism, and various conflict resolution skills.

Active listening will be the topic of the Queens group meeting on Tuesday, March 9. (There will also be an earlier Queens group meeting on Tuesday, March 2, which will be a general support group meeting.)

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Queens discussion group updates

February 09, 2021:  As of this month, the Queens discussion group now has two types of meetings per month: (1) a general support group meeting, on the first Tuesday of each month, and (2) a topic-focussed discussion meeting, on the second Tuesday of each month. Today's discussion meeting will be on the topic of assertiveness.

Today I added a long overdue page of Rules and guidelines. Over the past week, I've also updated various other pages pertaining to the Queens discussion group, to make it a more accurate description of how we've actually been running our meetings these days and how we'll be doing things for the remainder of lockdown.

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New groups

February 09, 2021:  Over the past few weeks, pages have been added for the three new groups mentioned below:

The first meeting of the Amateur Meteorology Club, the first of our hoped-for Hobby-oriented social groups, was held on Monday, January 18, and its second meeting will be held on Monday, February 15.

The first meeting of Autistic Techies of the NYC Area, the first of our hoped-for Career-oriented groups, will be held on Monday, February 22.

The first meeting of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group (APLeG) will be held on Thursday, March 4.

The Local groups section of this website has been reorganized to have a new sub-section just for Autistic peer-led groups led by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group (APLeG), including all the above-mentioned groups plus the Queens discussion group (for which there now is no longer a top-level menu item, but there's now a link to it in the "Featured pages" area).

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Online harassment

Some horrible ongoing instances of online harassment have recently been brought to my attention. The targets include five autistic women, most (but not all) of whom are also minor public figures, either in the autistic community itself or elsewhere.

I haven't yet decided exactly what all I am going to do about it, but I see this as a big danger to our community. For starters, I've added a page of Warnings about online harassment.

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Hobby-oriented social groups

January 18, 2021:  If you would like to suggest -- or help start -- a little group involving some hobby of yours, please post about it on this Meetup message board (after first logging in and then joining the Meetup site of the Queens discussion group, if you have not done so already).

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General update

January 18, 2021:  My life these past eight months has been quite frantic, with a lot of distractions. I haven't yet managed to finish creating that new chatroom, nor have I created the contact form I mentioned back in April. But I've been holding Queens discussion group chat meetings regularly via Zulip.

Today we will be holding the first meeting of the amateur meteorology club, also using the same Zulip chatroom. Today I also did a little reorganization of this website and added a new section about our hopefully forthcoming hobby-oriented social groups (of which the amateur meteorology club is the first).

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