Terms & legal notices

1. Using this site

This website (“ARM”) is the personal and professional site of Alejandro Ruelas-Mora, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. By using it, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the site. These terms work together with the Privacy Policy.

2. Educational content, not professional advice

Writing about psychology, neuropsychology, research methods, and statistics is shared to inform and to start conversations. It reflects ongoing graduate training and research, it may be incomplete or change as evidence develops, and it is not a diagnosis, a treatment recommendation, or a substitute for care from a licensed professional who knows your situation. Reading this site or emailing me does not create a therapist–client, clinician–patient, or other professional relationship.

3. Clinical services and emergencies

No therapy, neuropsychological assessment, or other clinical service is offered through this website. Future clinical services are to be determined, and any that are offered later will follow the licensing, supervision, and informed consent requirements that apply at that time. Please do not use email to describe symptoms or ask for clinical guidance.

If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the United States, or call 911. Outside the United States, call your local emergency number, such as 112 in the European Union.

4. Curanderismo and food as medicine

Curanderismo is a living tradition carried by Indigenous and Mexican communities. What I share about limpias, plant medicine, and food as medicine is offered with respect, for cultural and educational purposes. It does not replace medical care. I am not a licensed physician, and these traditional services are complementary to licensed health care and are not licensed by the State of California. Talk with a qualified health professional before changing your diet, trying an herb or remedy, or stopping any medication, and pay close attention to allergies and interactions.

Traditional knowledge belongs to the communities that have kept it. Please do not extract, rebrand, or sell it.

5. Website design services

Emails about a website, including the “Looking for a website?” and “Start a website project” buttons, start a conversation. They do not create a contract, and nothing on this site is a binding offer. Each project is governed by a separate written agreement that sets out its scope, fees, schedule, ownership of the finished work, and any hosting or maintenance terms. If that agreement conflicts with these terms, the agreement controls. The prices on the home page ($2,000 per website and maintenance from $20 a month, both on a sliding scale) describe typical packages; your agreement sets the final price and payment schedule. Hosting, database and domain providers serve and bill you under their own terms, and payments through Venmo or Zelle are also subject to theirs. “Buy me a cup of coffee” payments are voluntary gifts: they are not payment for any service, create no obligation, and are not tax-deductible donations.

Client work appears in the portfolio with the client’s permission. Names, logos, and trademarks of clients, institutions, and platforms belong to their owners, and showing them does not imply endorsement.

6. Ownership and reuse

Unless noted otherwise, the design, code, writing, photographs, illustrations, animations, and data visualizations on this site are © 2026 Alejandro Ruelas-Mora, all rights reserved. You are welcome to link to any page and to quote short excerpts with credit and a link back. Copying the site’s design, code, or content, in whole or in substantial part, or reusing it commercially, needs my written permission.

Materials that belong to others are listed in the credits below and remain subject to their own licenses.

Copyright concerns

If you believe something on this site uses your work without permission, email eastbaywebs@gmail.com with a description of the work, the page where it appears, your contact information, and a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized and that the information you provide is accurate. I will review it promptly and remove or credit the material as appropriate.

7. Acceptable use

Please do not:

• use the site for anything unlawful, or to harass, impersonate, or harm anyone;
• try to break, overload, probe, or get around the site’s security;
• scrape, mirror, or republish the site’s content in bulk, including to build datasets or train machine-learning models, without permission;
• send spam, malware, or unsolicited advertising to the addresses listed here.

8. Accessibility

I aim for this site to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at level AA. The site reads fully without JavaScript, respects your device’s reduced-motion setting, includes a “Pause motion” control that it remembers, and describes its visual scenes in text for screen readers. If something gets in your way, please email eastbaywebs@gmail.com and tell me which page and what happened. I will do my best to fix it and to get you the information in another way in the meantime. The full accessibility statement explains how the site is built and tested.

9. Disclaimers

The site and everything on it are provided “as is” and “as available.” To the fullest extent the law allows, I make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. I do not promise that the site will always be available or free of errors. Links to other websites are provided for convenience, and I am not responsible for their content or practices.

10. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, I will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, profits, or goodwill, arising from your use of, or inability to use, this site or its content. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, and if you live where such limits are not allowed, they apply only as far as your local law permits.

11. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California and applicable United States federal law, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute will be handled in the state or federal courts located in California, unless the law where you live gives you the right to bring a claim in your local courts. I would much rather talk first, so please email me if something goes wrong.

12. Credits and licenses

Typefaces

Roboto (© 2011 The Roboto Project Authors), Fraunces (© 2018 The Fraunces Project Authors; only the digits used by the dawn clock are served), and IBM Plex Mono (© 2017 IBM Corp., Reserved Font Name “Plex”) are used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and served from this site.

Brain surface

The rotating cortex in the Mind section is built from points sampled on a surface I derived from the MNI ICBM 152 nonlinear symmetric 2009a gray- and white-matter templates of the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre, Montreal Neurological Institute. The template’s license asks that this notice appear with all copies:

Copyright (C) 1993–2004 Louis Collins, McConnell Brain Imaging Centre, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University. Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies. The authors and McGill University make no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided “as is” without express or implied warranty. The authors are not responsible for any data loss, equipment damage, property loss, or injury to subjects or patients resulting from the use or misuse of this software package.

References: V. S. Fonov, A. C. Evans, K. Botteron, C. R. Almli, R. C. McKinstry, D. L. Collins, and the Brain Development Cooperative Group, “Unbiased average age-appropriate atlases for pediatric studies,” NeuroImage 54(1), 2011, doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.07.033. V. S. Fonov, A. C. Evans, R. C. McKinstry, C. R. Almli, and D. L. Collins, “Unbiased nonlinear average age-appropriate brain templates from birth to adulthood,” NeuroImage 47 (Suppl. 1), S102, 2009, doi:10.1016/S1053-8119(09)70884-5.

Footage and photographs

The footage of the Golden Gate at dawn, the Marin Headlands, the shoreline, the monarch butterfly, and the black cats comes from the free stock libraries Pexels and Pixabay and is used under their licenses, edited and retimed for this site. Other photographs are my own or are used with permission.

Line drawings of the Golden Gate, Griffith Observatory and the Coronado Bridge

The drawings of the Golden Gate with the San Francisco skyline and its fog, of Griffith Observatory before the downtown Los Angeles skyline, and of the San Diego–Coronado Bridge before downtown San Diego are my own line drawings. They were composed with stock clips and photographs from Pexels as references, and the hills around the observatory take their shape from a clip of Griffith Park. None of those clips or photographs is published on this site.

Griffith Observatory is a facility of the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by the City or the observatory.

The Golden Gate Bridge is operated by the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, and the San Diego–Coronado Bridge by the California Department of Transportation. They appear here as landmarks; this site is not affiliated with or endorsed by either.

Digitally composited media

The flying monarch and the cat sequence are digital composites made from that real footage. The butterfly was lifted from its background, and its flight and a few hidden details, such as parts of a wing, were filled in digitally. The cat sequence joins clips of several black cats, softens the edges of each scene, and is drawn in your browser through a fine grain of text characters. They are illustrations, not documentary records.

Land

This site’s home page includes an acknowledgment of the Ramaytush Ohlone and Coast Miwok peoples, on whose homelands the Golden Gate stands.

13. Changes and contact

I may update these terms from time to time. The date at the top shows the latest version, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms. If any part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies. Not enforcing a term right away does not waive it.

Questions and website projects: eastbaywebs@gmail.com. Research collaborations: aruelas-mora@paloaltou.edu.