Autistic Happiness

Ours is the first age where autistic children can be happy.

It's because we have Google and youtube. Google is good -- it searches, and if you've got a special interest a search engine is part of what you need.

Youtube goes a little further. For certain we have the train videos posted by all the sainted spotters who have made the more mad son contented, stimulated and entertained from a nice safe indoor seat. That's very good. We have the Thomas videos -- very naughty, very welcome -- which have come back into his life now he's starting to get a glimmering of relationships and consequences. It goes further than that.

This picture shows why. It's the logo you'll find in the front of a lot of Thomas tapes from the eighties and nineties. Others are Strand and VCi. So it's no surprise I grabbed it off a youtube post.

What is a surprise is that this isn't the opening frames of a pirate post. It's from VCI Backwards, one of dozens of posts composed from these publisher's logos. No content, just the logos and jingles, forward, backwards, foreign variants, compilation sand the Dear knows what else.

And they're popular! VCI Backwards shows 31,000 viewings. My thesis is that the vast majority of those viewings is from ASD boys who have found whatever spark of interest lies in collection and comparison of these snippets.

Certainly Ravy D's a fan. He won't know to post fan art so I'm doing it for him: this is his interpretation -- perhaps tribute is a truer word -- of The Video Collection.

The original was created in Windows Paint as a 1.7MB BMP. This extract -- a 6KB GIF -- includes all the non-white content and was prepared in Irfanview.