The idea of being around a group of fellow autists just.... Sounds nice you know?

Probably down to that thing us humans do where likes attract. You see this phenomenon especially with trans women.

You sit a trans woman down in an empty room, check back an hour later, and you'll find three extra trans women who somehow popped into existence. They just congregate you know? Spontaneous generation!

Silly metaphor aside, interacting with fellow autists just.... Feels nice!

I fricken love doing it. So satisfying!

This is primarily an autism focused question, although allistics please do chime in if you have something interesting to say!

I'm not referring to stuff like Therians or "not feeling human", although those are deeply fascinating topics. No I'm strictly referring to finding the task of imagining the human form (in say "daydream stories") to be unpleasant/uncomfortable.

When I was real young I was REALLY uncomfortable imagining the human form. No problems with animals and weird creatures thought up by toddler me, those didn't make me uncomfortable!

I brought this up with my IRL friend who's also autistic. He also experienced something similar!

Anyone else also do this? I kinda want to just..... Talk about it. It's interesting.

Having another person who you can discuss "something autistic" and they natively understand it is very nice!

So I brought up the bit where I found the process of imagining the human form uncomfortable. And oh my god, he expressed doing the same thing! Maybe that's the reason the both of us gravitated towards anthropomorphic animals. (For me it's the Rats of NIMH, for him it's Warrior Cats).

Although unlike him, I don't really do character customization.

-My Call of Duty Ghosts character is the default supplied female character template but switched to male. Found the female grunts/panting sound effects uncomfortable (that's technically dysphoria isn't it?) so I uh.... "Gave him HRT" lol. I guess that technically makes him transmasc!

Meanwhile I did mess around quite heavily with the Create-a-Class system.

-Reddit's custom alien profile picture thing: Bearded male with a red and yellow color scheme. The mascot's "species" has an actual name, but I don't remember what it's called, and I mean? FUCK Reddit! I don't give enough of a shit to look that trivia up.

-The Nintendo Wii's "Mii" creator: Took the red clothed male template and messed with the mouth.

-Baldur's Gate 3: My sibling enjoys the game and I agreed to play a bit of splitscreen couch campaign co-op.

Now Baldur's Gate 3 has a phenomenally great character creator. You can get really in depth, even going so far as creating explicitly trans bodied characters. Very cool! Learned all this from a video essay or something.

So I went into the character creator, went "generate random", and just..... Went with it lol. Got a female character, which I think I head cannoned as transfem. It was a throwaway character, so who cares?

-Minecraft: Default skin. Granted I used cracked clients as I have a copy of both the PS3 and modern Bedrock versions of the game. I'm not forking more money over! And then the whole thing where you HAVE to have an account to boot the Java version of the game up in it's builtin demo mode. Why do I have to have to have an account just to play the demo? Why? I just want to test how well the game runs on a bit of hardware, but I can't be assed enough to remember what my existing account is- WOW this is getting ranty! Anyway....

If I did have a proper account I'd probably just have the default skin applied lol.

-Not a game, but my many online accounts: It's usually the (possibly CGI) photo of a cat grasping a roll of newspaper which came preloaded with Windows Vista.

That came because my oldest sibling's computer got defacto handed down to me, and she chose those picture. So that one wasn't even really my choice lmfao!

My Youtube alt @StanleytheCat-v8z, which is based off my author self insert character, has a picture of my grandparents' cat. I don't have any photos of THE Stanley the Cat (except for a small clip of video I made back as a kid, but he was far off and not facing the camera, and DVD camcorders have low resolution by modern standards). They're both, however, white tabby cats, so good enough eh?

Currently in a peer group thing. There's a cup of small paint brushes and I uh.... I'm brushing them against my skin.

Some of them are decently soft and..... Pleasurable to touch! (Not in a sexual way of course.)

And then some of them are hard. Picking at them is kinda fun.

The best brushes are those makeup ones for applying powders. Those are DELIGHTFULLY soft!

Oh my god if I have to listen to some god damn case worker come over, tell me how empathy works, and then try gaslighting me into thinking I'm not empathetic (or other analogous scenarios) one more time I'm going to fucking scream.

I've dealt with this sort of crap all my life and I'm getting real sick of it! Life is too short. I want to be someone who's out in the broad world with a mundane job, doing mundane things, having a mundane life, and having mundane problems.

I hate being stuck at home because my mom won't let me do shit. Nope! GOTTA DO ALL THE AUTISM STUFF! "Letting Qwerty live a bog standard fulfilling life without the ableist wing of capitalism constantly bearing down on him? Never heard of him. Is he hot? Bonus points if he's from Facebook's dating feature because asshat men are my kink!"

Snark aside I am in this mental health group center thing where we all essentially have group chats, volunteer at local places, and generally just..... Exist largely in peace. It's really nice being around other people (especially fellow neurodivergents) and I very much enjoy it.

I do not, however, enjoy the condescending and overbearing aspects of capitalism's "ableist wing". And I especially fucking hate my mom's obsession with me going though it. I get value out of the "Group of fellow Neurodivergents™" but I'm getting little to no value out of the constant case workers and.... Whatever the fuck a "BCM" worker is. (I'm sorry Katie, you're a nice person, but if it was up to me you'd be seeing someone who actually needs your work. I'm unfortunately wasting your time.)

I almost got signed up for that fucking..... I don't know what it's called but my high school had this thing where after graduating all of us neurodivergents who went into """"special ed"""" (hint: The classrooms all of us get shoved away into and hidden from everyone else.) would come back for another three years and do..... I don't even know what. Likely the exact same thing we did before graduating, but with no school work and exactly 3.5 employment "program" options.

A few of the people around me got sent into that. Many of them looked absolutely MISERABLE! All I know is that, I'm not the type of person that becomes miserable in these scenarios, I would've lashed out in some manner.

Had "soft" nightmares of sorts where I graduated but still had to go back to school and repeat everything.

Perhaps talking to Oliver about all of this might help. He's a fellow autist and in something of a similar situation. It would probably help me, and perhaps even him, feel a bit better.

And maybe I should also into what my mom is actually doing at my former school as she's largely in the """"special ed"""" portion of the district. She's incredibly bigoted and gets off on the nasty power dynamics in those situations.

Maybe not the best place to place a half shit post advocating for a bit of prepping.... It is technically technology related though!

....Now that I think about it, this all comes off as kinda "sponsored product" like. Oops.

You can get these cheap USB solar panels off sites like AliExpress, TEMU, etc, for fairly cheap. The ones I got output in the ~500mW to 2W range. That's enough to charge a small power bank over the course of a clear day, allowing you to keep your phone somewhat charged for the incoming rolling blackouts and stuff.

The most valuable equipment in a SHTF scenario is your phone!

A few months back TEMU had listings of packs of 2-3 of the small USB panels for.... I think it was ~$10-$15 USD? It was a fairly good bargain tbh. For being bottom of the barrel "junk" with reject solar panel wafers, they're good panels! Wired all four of mine in parallel so if I only plug one USB device in it'll have more current. (To an extent. Photovoltaics have a LOT of electrical engineering going on behind the scenes! They don't behave like batteries!)

TEMU is, however, an incredibly irritating e-commerce platform to use due to the whole platform being "gambling" focused, and the notifications are extremely scummy.

They also have some sort of bizarre issue in their customer database stack as someone's "Jesus loves you" wrist band got my address slapped on their package instead of theirs. Feel bad for them tbh, missing packages SUCK!

No idea if the cheap panel bundle listings are still on there. It has been a few months after all!

AliExpress.... Well, I enjoy how utilitarian their platform is. Second and third largest panels in the photo came off of there and they do the job.

Unless you're putting it inside a car (so using it for its intended purpose) I don't recommend Harbor Freight's 7 watt panel. Mine is succumbing to water ingress and I don't have it permanently installed. I take it back inside whenever it rains! Other then that and being overpriced it's otherwise a nice panel. I have a soft spot for amorphous solar panels!

They're cheap and "nasty". And I really like cheap and nasty "junk"!

Infodump aside, China has useful solar panels for the under ~$20 USD for my "fellow Americans". For everyone outside the United States..... You could probably get the same stuff for about $5-$10 USD in the equivalent of your own currency? Even when "splurging" these things are hilariously cheap.

These things are "cheap insurance" and I do highly recommend people getting at least one of these. Even in countries that are fairly energy independent like the United States I can guarantee rolling blackouts/not being able to pay electric bills will come.

Also not having to plug the phone into the wall to charge it is really fun lol.

A lot of us autists like highly detailed, explicit descriptions, etc. I'm no exception.

When I'm describing something, you better believe I'm going to explicitly declare "minor" details!

Although what I'm curious about now is.... Why this drive for details? Why do a lot of us do this?

I suppose this is analogous to asking "Why does the universe exist?" or "Why do we register colors, and why in that specific order?"

It's one of those philosophical questions targeting the "foundational nature" of things. But hey, I kinda want to know what the answer is! Or atleast have a better understanding of myself.

Due to my mom finding this EXACT model of toy keyboard multiple times at flea markets (and then giving them to me) this early 2000's toy ended up embedding itself in the depths of my mind.

I do know WHO created it! "Hello Modern Toys" or "hmtoys" from Hong Kong/Mainland China.

But how the HELL where people buying these toys? The packaging seems to be lost to the sands of time (or probably land fills, to be more correct) and I still have ZERO clue what retailers stocked these.

Perhaps the hmp139 was sold through junk mail catalogs ("Heartland America"). God, I wish I knew!

Everytime I have to use some python script I fucking groan. God, what a pain in the ass python is...

What if, instead of playing as a soldier in a fps, you play as a military medic? Imagine the creative and gameplay opportunities!