dpnash

dpnash , 13 days ago

@LehtoriTuomo @actuallyautistic Nope, not here. I played a lot of old-school (8-bit max) video games in the 80s, a few of which were first-person-shooter-very-light-and-low-res*, but by the time Doom came out 10-ish years later I had long since given up on the genre. As much for the "too much is going on all at the same time" as for any simulated-violence concerns.

Easily 90+% of all video games and computer games I've played since then are turn-based, again, because the "too much is going on all at the same time" in other styles was seriously Not Fun Anymore.

• example: Battlezone, from 1981 or so. Very much a first-person shooter, and yet downright sedate compared to almost anything of that type released after about 1990.

dpnash , 13 days ago

@LehtoriTuomo @actuallyautistic "More than just running around and killing shit" was, honestly, a huge part of the appeal of the classic game Adventure for Atari. You know, the one where you are SpongeBob SquareKnight and the dragons looked like ducks. You did have to run around with your (very pixelated) sword and fight the dragon-ducks, but there was an actual open world (tiny, by today's standards, but utterly unlike anything else before the original Nintendo console) that was at least a much fun to explore as any of the actual game mechanics.

Adventure was one of maybe 2 or 3 Atari 2600 games I was still playing regularly when the console and controllers began to die in the late 1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_(1980_video_game)

dpnash , 18 days ago

@cybervegan @loops @actuallyautistic @actuallyadhd @neurodiversity @autisticadvocacy Them: "Everyone's a little bit autistic"
Me: "Did you have a parent who told you that you were a little bit incapable of loving them or a little bit unable to have healthy social relationships?"

dpnash , 14 days ago

@cybervegan @loops @actuallyautistic @actuallyadhd @neurodiversity @autisticadvocacy For some additional context:

This isn't just stuff #ActuallyAutistic people hear as kids (although there's plenty of messed-up shit that happens in childhood as well).

I experienced the first of these (minus the "a little bit", of course) when I was 39, and the second when I was 44. I had a severely messed-up family that did a strikingly good job of hiding how they really felt about aspects of my being ... until they knew that revealing them would be devastating.

dpnash , 17 days ago

@Mux @Dremmwel @pa @PatternChaser @actuallyautistic This is a topic that has hit pretty hard for me personally. I absolutely agree that a lot of talk about "curing" or "treating" autism is blatantly eugenicist and needs to be pushed back against, hard.

At the same time, I have enough specific lived experience to relate rather strongly to autistic people who want at least some aspects of their neurotype to change, possibly dramatically, if it were possible.

To make a long story short, I have three categories of #ActuallyAutistic experience: (1) things I can do anywhere from reasonably well to very well indeed, without accommodations. Maybe not as well without accommodations as non-autistic people, but well enough. (2) Things I can't do well (or sometimes at all) without reasonable accommodations, but which I can do reasonably well (or better) with accommodations. (3) Things I can't do, at all, regardless of accommodations.

Category 1, as you can imagine, either isn't problematic or is only about as problematic as the sorts of not-ideal circumstances everyone faces sometimes.
Category 2 is only problematic when not accommodated.
Category 3 is problematic all the fscking time.

I think it is absolutely fair to put the category 3 aspects into a bin of "would consider -- not require, but definitely consider -- some level of medical intervention if it were available." I'm not particularly interested in touching the first 2 categories. But since all of categories 1 through 3 are #ActuallyAutistic (or at least neurodivergent, in some way), it's not as though I'd be "curing" or "treating" my autism. Instead, it'd be sanding off some of the worst rough edges that are making my life unpleasant in ways I otherwise can't easily avoid.

dpnash , 17 days ago

@pa @Mux @Dremmwel @PatternChaser @actuallyautistic Yeeaaaah, that's totally different and not at all anything I would ever contemplate. Yikes.

dpnash , 17 days ago

@Susan60 @Mux @Dremmwel @pa @PatternChaser @actuallyautistic I just thought of another way of approaching it that might be a bit more concrete.

My category 1 is roughly aspects that don't affect functioning in a significant way. People might think you're weird, but so what. You can still do what you want and need to do, it's just different.

Personal example: hyperfocus.

My category 2 is roughly aspects that likely don't count as "disability" in the medical model, but likely do count as "disability" in the social model. That is, things that require accommodation in order for you to have a desirable level of functionality.

Personal example: monotropism at work. I don't currently request an accommodation, but I have gravitated towards lines of work where multitasking is either not expected, or people are understanding when I say things like "I need more time; please slow down" or "I have to take these one at a time, but feel free to tell me which one is most important to do first."

My category 3 is roughly aspects that likely count as "disability" even in the medical model and are significantly harder to accommodate than Category 2 ones, at least in the place and culture you live in currently (there may not even be a meaningful accommodation).

Personal example: lack of (or very strange) proprioception and other motor senses to an extent that some physical activities are very difficult or even not possible. (Many other activities are just fine. Some activities can switch abruptly from "fine" to "no fine" without warning. It's not always obvious which ones will be bad, or even if they will be bad. Lots of fun.)

dpnash , 27 days ago

@theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic Here's one concrete example:

I've spent some time on here discussing how (non-autistic) people in the US tend to ask for something by not actually asking, or communicate an expectation without actually mentioning an expectation, and instead say something that's a suggestion, or ask an unrelated question, or even just offhandedly mention something else that's kind of, sort of, related to the thing they want you or expect you to do.

If you are trying to be halfway decent and conscientious in your relationships with other people, you don't want to damage a relationship or not help meet other people's legitimate needs through a misunderstanding. There are lots and lots of times it's completely reasonable for someone to expect something to be done a certain way, or to ask for help with something, or to say that a specific task really does need to get done soon if it's going to be done right.

But you, #ActuallyAutistic person, don't have the magic decoder ring that reliably differentiates suggestions-as-suggestions from suggestions-as-expectations (etc.).

So what happens, if you want to be even minimally conscientious?

Exactly. All suggestions/unrelated questions/offhanded mentions ... have to be treated as probable requests or even outright demands, because you don't want to miss a legitimate one.

The emotional and mental labor involved with doing that is enormous. At a minimum, you can develop a default tendency to drop your needs and desires in favor of other peoples', because there seem to be so many more of them.

What I am trying to do more consciously now is to ask for direct clarification (e.g. "is this something that is nice to have done if I am not already busy, or is it something that genuinely needs to be done now?"). My ideal state would be for people to be more direct up front, but this is an acceptable middle ground when that option isn't available.

dpnash , 27 days ago

@theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic This is another example of the double-empathy problem: non-autistic people (again, specifically US context, but you can probably find similar examples world-wide) think they're being polite by "softening" the request or expectation by avoiding the words that actually say "request" or "expectation". But what actually happens comes across as very impolite instead: you've not only not told me what you actually want, you're making me try to figure out for you what you want, and make it my problem when I don't get it right.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@masukomi @ScriptFanix @dweebish @actuallyautistic Yeah, in the US, we've got a pretty binary distinction for how people respond to someone who has a gun:

White, clean-cut, could plausibly be a Trumpist or at least a Republican, acts "normal" (other than having 6 AR-15s strapped to their back and enough ammo to fend off 5 national armies at once): You're great! No problem. Exercise those Second Amendment rights! Nobody can tell you what to do, especially in a crowded area with people who don't like you!

Everybody else: AAAAAAH GUN GUN GUN THEY'RE GOING TO SHOOT ME RIGHT NOW I'D BETTER SHOOT THEM FIRST

Autistic people are in category "Everybody else", because of the "acts normal" clause in the "Who's allowed to own guns in the US without repercussions" criteria.

(This is also why I don't think a newly fash US govt is going to touch the Second Amendment: US fascists love guns and love marching around in public with them, and so are fine with continuing to let the private sector keep more guns in fash hands rather than passing any laws that might have that effect.)

dpnash , 1 month ago

@twan @actuallyautistic > "pre-performance rituals help to alleviate our stress in part by simply forcing us [emphasis added] to focus on something else..."

That, right there, is the problem.

It's one thing to choose a (pre-work, for example) "ritual" that gets you, as an individual person, prepped for some task.

It's something else entirely to be dragged into something that any reasonably observant person can see will not be a one-size-fits-all experience.

I may, in fact, get more stressed out by being dragged into some task that is not relevant to what I am trying to accomplish and taking time and energy away from the thing I am trying to accomplish.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@pathfinder @HaelusNovak @DavidNielsen @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic As they say, if you've encountered one autistic person, you've encountered one autistic person.

My own experiences with identity-first vs. person-first language are a bit different -- regulars here know I had some bad experiences as a kid/young adult long ago with a then-uncommon possible diagnosis as "autistic" -- but there's another example where thinking of "autism" as a "something I am" doesn't feel entirely comfortable.

There are parts of my "autistic" self that feel like a "how I am and how I interact with the world" aspect like the one @pathfinder mentioned -- ones that would change me fundamentally as a person if I didn't have. These include being strongly monotropic and having intense special interests. These aspects normally don't give me much grief even when they conflict with how the rest of the world works, and they've given me less grief over time as I've gotten to be more aware of how they work and why.

There are parts of my "autistic" self that do not feel like this, and feel much more like changing them genuinely could make me feel significantly better. My tendency to walk into doorframes unless I can see them clearly, go too quickly from "it's not budging" to "dammit, totally broke it", and not being able to do some common activities safely while almost everyone else around me is doing them -- all because I am missing significant proprioceptive senses or their integration with the rest of me -- is an example. These reliably do cause me more grief in ways that don't parallel other "autistic" aspects of my life.

At a minimum, aspects like this feel far less like a "who I am" and more like something where "fixing" it actually makes some sense, in the same way that "fixing" a bone or joint injury would, or "fixing" (more accurately "treating", but it still leads to much better quality of life) Type 1 diabetes with insulin. That's not to say that any of this is, or is even likely to be, "fixable" in some sense, but I do understand the desire.

In some ways, I think this is because this second type of "autistic" aspects is genuinely more disabling for me, at least in the social-model sense, with fewer options for accommodation, than many of the first type. But even there, I experience an enormous difference of internal (physical and emotional) reaction to these two different "flavors" of autistic experience that I'm not convinced is just the result of the rest of society being insufficiently accommodating.

Does this mean that I support organizations that want to "cure" autism or autistic people? Good God, absolutely not. They almost always have blatant eugenicist bullshit under the hood. But I can understand the existence of autistic people who see autism, or at least part of it, as a "something I have" rather than a "something I am" phenomenon.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic For describing myself personally, I am mostly fine with all of them except "ASD" (unless talking specifically about an actual medical Dx).

I think "on the spectrum" is a bit dated, but I also understand why non-autistic people still use it if they aren't familiar with the #ActuallyAutistic community, and it doesn't offend me when they use it.

I am largely indifferent to "has/with autism" vs. "autistic", and though I mostly use the latter nowadays, there was a long time in my life where I wouldn't have. I realize I am in a fairly small minority here.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@pathfinder @HaelusNovak @DavidNielsen @JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic Yeah, I can see that distinction and it makes a lot of sense on some levels.

I guess in my case the difference between my first and second types of "autistic" experience is the first type feels to me like "brain is working fine, just very differently from most people's" and the second feels like "brain is working demonstrably not fine, or connection between brain and body is not fine, much more like a physical injury or an illness has damaged something, even if there is no such injury in reality".

Really crude analogy: the first case feels to me like having an FM radio in a world of mostly AM broadcasts. The radio works fine, it just doesn't work on the same wavelengths as most people's (quite literally), and the only day-to-day problem is making sure I can find some FM broadcasts on a regular basis. If I can, I'm happy. The second case feels like having an FM radio where half the days, the tuner doesn't work, or the speaker's sound reproduction is crap, or the antenna keeps breaking and has to be taped back onto the case before the radio functions at all. In that case it doesn't matter if there are FM radio broadcasts going on; I need vastly different, and in many cases, harder to get, methods to get them.

It's remarkably dissonant to me to describe these as the same category of personal radio experience, to be put into a big bin called "FM-Radioism."

I could consider both of these types of autistic experience to be a core part of myself, and in a sense that is true, but the second category is absolutely something I would consider "fixing" if I didn't have it and then acquired it. The first category is not. And putting them in the same core "bin" called "autism" and calling that whole thing "part of my core" ... I have zero quarrel with anyone who does feel that way, but it's not something that I feel.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@catswhocode @actuallyautistic Bad as the stigma around being "autistic" may seem now, it was almost unfathomably worse in the 1980s and 1990s and even into the 2000s.

I had a possible (it's still unclear how definite) diagnosis of "autism" as a kid in the early 1980s. That was enough to really screw up my family's assessment of what I could and couldn't do (though they successfully kept it hidden for a long time), and once I learned what people thought "autism" meant in the 1980s, I self-DXed, for a very long time, as "I don't know what this is but it definitely isn't 'autism'."

This wouldn't change until 2019, when I got an official ASD diagnosis by the standards of that time, which were quite different from the 1980s ones. Even then, the 40+ year history I had of "autistic" being an identity label chosen for me, not by me, and without regard for my own well-being, meant the term was emotionally fraught for a while afterward. It's still not entirely neutral-sounding to me, even 5 years later.

As for my own parents, I think there's about a 50-50 chance my dad is autistic by 2020s standards (there's enough there to raise the possibility, but not enough to feel definitive). I don't think my mom was. If she were, she'd have to have been either phenomenally self-unaware or phenomenally self-loathing, since she was one of the worst offenders in my family on the "assessment of what I could and couldn't do" front, for a long time.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@Tarrenvane @catswhocode @actuallyautistic I had the chance to do things like this (of course, based on what I've said, I wouldn't have called it "being autistic", just "being myself"), but taking it would have just marginalized me worse, and so I didn't. And I check a lot of the usual social-privilege boxes (e.g., I'm white, male, and from a financially comfortable family). I can scarcely imagine how badly this might have further marginalized people in other demographic groups.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@KitOz @actuallyautistic

> Are you autistic, or are you a house cat?

I’m pretty sure there are two basically acceptably correct answers to this question:

1. yes.
2. meow.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@hosford42 @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence Not exactly a job description, so feel free to ignore if this seems too tangential.

Instead, something from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Like a lot of these sorts of ideas, it has some good points, some bad points, and a bunch in the middle. One of the worst ones for #ActuallyAutistic people: the simple (and very wrong, for many of said #ActuallyAutistic people) statement that “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” Manifesto authors: you’re in a line of work with a disproportionately large number of ND people, and you unironically came up with that advice?

(And of course, like all such Manifestos and Guidelines and Calls to Action, corporate management treats this like a checklist, not a topic for open discussion for fit or relevance to a given organization. Have fun stuffing everyone into a one-size-fits-all-poorly experience!)

dpnash , 1 month ago

@fishidwardrobe @hosford42 @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence Ok, fair. Not part of the Manifesto proper. So instead of the Manifesto being horked from an #ActuallyAutistic perspective, it’s “merely” at least one of the 12 principles behind it that is: https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@hosford42 @wakame @fishidwardrobe @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence

Yeah, one of the biggest failures of the implementation of “agile” software development is treating the Agile Manifesto and related ideas as a process to follow … quite rigidly … even though (as a number of people here, and surely elsewhere) have pointed out, that sort of thing is something the Manifesto says “don’t do”. And also that the suggested practices (short standup meetings, regular demos, regular in-person communications) often lead to a rigid framework that is scarcely different from the old waterfall approach except in time frame — a cascade of mandated two-or three-week blocks instead of the cascade of big multi-month blocks for waterfall.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@jcmrva @hosford42 @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence We have one meeting series at work where it's expected (but not actually strongly enforced) that people have cameras on for the whole thing.

Of course, everyone starts off with them on, and by about 15 minutes in, about 1/3 of people have quietly turned them off. Nobody seems to notice.

A couple of months ago, I changed my camera background 3 times during one of these meetings. Nobody seemed to notice.

In the next meeting after that, I set the background back to a clear room view, but changed the camera tilt angle slightly (again, 3 times) during the course of the meeting, so that the room orientation was, theoretically anyway, noticeably different each time. Nobody seemed to notice.

It's almost like, as other people have suggested, that few if any people actually pay much attention to who's on camera and what they're doing.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@hosford42 @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence > * Multitasking

My wife, who studied neuroscience extensively as part of her Ph. D. studies, puts it very simply: "people don't multitask." If there is any additional nuance possible there, it'd probably be along the lines of "people don't multitask anywhere near as well as they think they do."

> Bachelor's degree or better

Bachelor's degree or comparable experience (which in some areas -- regrettably, fewer every year -- is possible on your own without formal training) would be a lot more reasonable.

I got a job as a web developer when my "bachelor's degree or better" career (chemistry, got as far as a Ph. D. before things started to go sideways) started to deteriorate badly. However, this was in 1999 when it was a lot easier to get a job in a field like that as an autodidact. (My employer was beyond ecstatic to find someone who actually knew how to make web servers remember what people entered into web page forms.)

dpnash , 1 month ago

@foolishowl @shannonpersists @skye @wakame @yacc143 @pteryx @hosford42 @EVDHmn @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence This is such a teachable moment! All you need is a safe solar filter (those of you waiting for the eclipse in April here in much of the US: hang onto those eclipse glasses. They’re perfect for this sort of thing.) and a couple of big sunspots that you can see in the filtered view without magnification from a telescope. Watch them over the course of a few days. They will move. With some care and a little math, you can even calculate a decent estimate of the rotation speed.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@yacc143 @foolishowl @shannonpersists @skye @wakame @pteryx @hosford42 @EVDHmn @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence Excellent question which has multiple lines of thought + evidence to answer.

Even clouds on Earth are basically moving at much the same speed as the solid ground below: you get cloud velocities (with respect to the ground) of a few to a few tens of km/hr, exceptionally a few hundred km/hr, but the Earth’s surface is rotating at over 1600 km/hr. If all you could see of Earth from space were its clouds, you’d get a rotation period of pretty close to 24 hours no matter which cloud patterns you picked.

When you get to big fluid balls like Jupiter and the Sun, it gets a bit more nebulous because the rotation speed could change significantly with depth (someone’s already mentioned helioseismology as a way to get information on those details). But even there, friction between the various fluid regions means it tends to vary somewhat slowly with depth. From the standpoint of an ordinary observer on Earth, just noticing the outermost layer of a big fluid ball is moving is significant: you’ve got at least a fairly large portion of the big fluid ball spinning at or close to the rate of observed physical details on the surface.

dpnash , 1 month ago

@yacc143 @foolishowl @shannonpersists @skye @wakame @pteryx @hosford42 @EVDHmn @actuallyautistic @neurodivergence Once you get really deep inside a Sun-sized object, then you can easily have something that’s moving very differently from the more surface regions. But past a point, this gets into more of a philosophical question: not so much “is the Sun spinning” but “how much and how fast are different parts spinning, if at all?” That the visible portion of the Sun is rotating is straightforwardly answered by the simple observations I described before.

dpnash , 2 months ago

@theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic Yep. A few times at least. 23rd wedding anniversary is coming up in a couple months.

dpnash , 2 months ago

@nddev @theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic It’s also been just over 14 years since my family became a #Polyfidelitous triple.

Which caused my (solidly lefty, educated, not at all religious) family of origin to go totally apeshit — since I was and am #ActuallyAutistic, I couldn’t possibly want this, and my wife must be manipulating me into it.

(taps “23rd anniversary” sign again—in another few years my marriage will have outlasted my parents’ marriage, thank you very much)

Ableism is a ridiculously powerful drug.

dpnash , 2 months ago

@theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic I was 16 in late 1986, more than two years before Rain Man came out, so any reference to "autism" would've not only been unhelpful, it most likely would have marginalized me even worse.

So, I'll go with this:

I've got good news and bad news. Bad news first. What you're experiencing now, and in particular what you're experiencing as a result of who you really are, isn't going to go away entirely. It's going to be lifelong and you're going to spend a lot of time and energy dealing with it.

The good news is: there will be many things you don't know you can do (yet) that you will end up doing just fine. There will be people who think they know you, both now and later, who won't understand. You will find people who do understand, and you will know it when it happens.

dpnash , 2 months ago

@nddev @AnAutieAtUni @actuallyautistic I'm in the fairly small minority of #ActuallyAutistic people who don't have a strong preference for the "identity-first" ("I am..." instead of "I have..."), for two reasons:

1. I feel I "have" things like brown hair, green eyes, and migraines without feeling like any of these are a disease or a defect in any way, or that they are somehow a separable aspect of my body, mind, or identity. They are as much a part of who I am as autism is. (OK, "migraines" are pushing that "not a disease/disorder" a teeny bit, but even disregarding that, an identity label for them doesn't add anything for me.)

2. I have at least a suspected or provisional diagnostic history of "autism" back to 1980, and possibly as far back as the early 1970s. At that time, and for many years afterward, "X is autistic" was far worse than "X has autism". The latter was at least potentially sympathetic while the former was almost always a rejection of even the idea that X might be worthy of decent, humane treatment. "Is autistic" was indeed an identity label, but one chosen for me (and with extremely pejorative connotations and denotations), not by me.

This wouldn't really change (outside a subset of the autistic community) until about 10 years ago, and even with a more definitive diagnosis in 2019 it would be several years before the term "autistic" was not intensely emotionally fraught.

dpnash , 2 months ago

@nddev @AnAutieAtUni @actuallyautistic It's very atypical, I'll grant.

I did a quick poll (highly unscientific) of #ActuallyAutistic people on Mastodon a few months ago, asking them when the first time someone (anyone who was in a position to know) suspected they were "autistic" (or a related historical term like Asperger's syndrome). Mine (1980) was the furthest back by quite a margin. I think the next-closest was mid-1990s.

So sometimes I feel a little out of place in this group, but fortunately not in a bad way.

dpnash , 3 months ago

@Dremmwel @actuallyautistic I remember some other #ActuallyAutistic person, identifying as cis male “officially”, once saying that a better description of their gender identity was “gendermeh”. That seems pretty apt here.

I chose “binary” because I don’t have a disconnect between my own sense of self and the (binary) gender I was assigned at birth (male), but there are large components of gender roles and expectations for said gender that have made no sense, to me, ever. They’ve ranged from “WTF is this even a thing? Why does anybody care about this at all?” to “No, to hell with this role/expectation, it’s completely toxic and hurtful.”

dpnash , 3 months ago

@Dremmwel @actuallyautistic It's been interesting to read all the replies. Here's another wrinkle to it all that I've observed over time:

I (AMAB and cis) have rather different reactions to the words "male" vs. "masculine" in discussions like this.

"Male" is pretty neutral. It mostly feels descriptive of physiology commonly found in AMAB people, or related aspects of my life, that for me at least (obviously this is not going to be the case for everyone) happen to not generally be problematic. OK, I've got a certain body layout that coincides with about half the population. OK, fine.

"Masculine" ... hoo boy, that's a whole different story. It's fine when describing things like a hairstyle, but when it describes what sorts of behavior or thought patterns are "expected" of or "normal for" AMAB people in my culture (generic American)? It brings up all sorts of unpleasant thoughts about misogyny, verbal and/or physically aggressive behavior, and similar things I don't want to be associated with.

dpnash , 3 months ago

@hauchvonstaub @undefined_variable @actuallyautistic

> I used to mainly play rogue likes for years, every game is a restart and there is never much progress to be lost.

Dang, the genre must have changed a bit over the years. I’m old enough to have played the game that gave its name to the category, as well as some of the really old-school descendants like Angband. Holy moley, those old roguelikes could take weeks or even months on a single character, and since death is final in the genre, I sometimes had the opposite experience (“too easy to get too vested in one character’s progress”).

dpnash , 3 months ago

@Susan60 @CuriousMagpie @nddev @pathfinder @PossiblyAutistic @actuallyautistic Probably from "let's [just] be friends" as a stereotyped polite rejection of romantic/sexual advances.

(Not that it makes the concept make any more sense, mind you. Friends are great, especially ones you've made after getting to know someone a bit better than usual.)

dpnash , 3 months ago

@LeelaTorres @actuallyautistic Yeah, I think there is. Seems to work kind of like gaydar, but unfortunately, I haven't got as clever a name for it as "gaydar".

I used to call it ASD-ic, after the old British name for sonar, but ASD is not generally how #ActuallyAutistic people prefer to refer to themselves, so I haven't done that in a long time.

dpnash , 3 months ago

@autism101 @actuallyautistic “Can’t have healthy/meaningful social relationships.”

Got that from my own family of origin.

I’ve been estranged from them for almost 15 years, with that belief being one major reason.

dpnash , 4 months ago

@pathfinder @FrightenedRat @adelinej @obrerx @actuallyautistic "Disorder" has pejorative connotations it really shouldn't have, but does anyway. Not ideal.

"Disability", on the other hand, I think fits for a lot of us #ActuallyAutistic people, even with similar pejorative connotations. At least under the social model of disability, a lot of us would be better able to do everyday things if there were more accommodation of our specific differences.

dpnash , 4 months ago

@theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic Failure to execute a task is not the same as failure to understand the task, or to care about the task, or to recognize the importance of the task.

"Task" is very broad here; it includes things such as speaking when it's expected (or even needed), being able to focus or concentrate under stress, and many others.

dpnash , 4 months ago

@miaoue @melindrea @Tarrenvane @theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic I knew other people (for the most part) didn't share my (specifically #ActuallyAutistic) struggles.

But that was in part because I had at least a qualified/provisional diagnosis of "autism" from the early 80s, and that was enough for most people who knew me, including my family of origin, to make a lot of really bad choices about (and for) me, which just added to the background of socially-acceptable ableism through at least the early 2010s.

dpnash , 4 months ago

@dpflug @Susan60 @SteveClough @DoubleTreble @PixysJourney @Tim_McTuffty @pathfinder @actuallyautistic @foolishowl

I sometimes get the 13-step variant of that, which looks like this:

…8. get filter from cupboard
9. get coffee beans from cupboard
(brain has rolled 1d14 and chosen this step for deletion)
11. measure coffee
12. put coffee in filter
13. close coffee maker
14. turn coffee maker on

(wait. wasn’t there supposed to be a filter in there?)

This can then produce either “screw it, I don’t want it any more” or a new 15-step variant:

0. sigh deeply and clean up mess
1. take pot from coffee maker
2. turn on sink…

dpnash , 4 months ago

@JeremyMallin @actuallyautistic > How do you overcome a lifetime of that?

Slowly. With a lot of missteps. I wasn't able to really get started until about 5-10 years ago when #ActuallyAutistic stopped meaning "totally broken" to just about everybody else.

dpnash , 4 months ago

@croissant @PacificNic @rybson @adelinej I am going to offer myself as one of the few #ActuallyAutistic people who doesn’t strongly feel this way (I.e. preferring identity-first language):

1. I personally don’t feel much of a difference between saying, for example, “I have green eyes” vs. “I am green-eyed.” Green eye color is as much a part of what makes me “me” as autism is. (Of course, anyone who does have a strong preference one way or the other should have that preference be honored.)
2. I am old enough, and have a diagnostic history going far enough back, to remember a time when “X has autism” at least sometimes meant something like “maybe we can help X in some way” (even if the “help” was rather patronizing and didn’t really do any good) whereas “X is autistic” meant “bah, X is hopelessly broken; don’t bother trying to make things better for them.” It was an identity label generally chosen for autistic people, not by them, as a way of explicitly devaluing and delegitimizing their own selves and experiences. Trying to claim it as my own (back then) would have just led to further marginalization with no tangible upside.

I’m very glad that case 2 is happening less often now than it was 20+ years ago and that for many people asserting an “autistic” identity has a tangible upside.

dpnash , 5 months ago

@dave @actuallyautistic >What are your thoughts on physical activity?

Deeply, deeply mixed.

On the one hand, I have been fortunate to have generally good health through most of my life and I've been able to stay physically active and reasonably energetic even in middle age with exercise in forms like hiking, swimming, indoor rowing, and similar activities ...

... activities where I can do the same basic motion over and over again, without having to worry about it changing suddenly...

...because, on the other hand, I got the charming kind of dyspraxia that makes any physical activity requiring precision or adapting to sudden, rapid changes of focus, including pretty much every sport known to humanity but also things like social dancing, damn near impossible to do with any sort of skill.

dpnash , 5 months ago

@eo @actuallyautistic Here’s one: Failure to execute a task is one, or more of, (a) failure to understand the task; (b) failure to recognize the importance or relevance of the task; (c) failure to care about or to want the task to be done and done well.

dpnash , 5 months ago

@CivilityFan @oolivero45 @actuallyautistic I read this book a while back and though I generally enjoyed it, I would caution that since it was written in 2003, its portrayal of #ActuallyAutistic people is rather stereotyped compared to now, and many autistic people will not be quite like the portrayal here. Some will be very different indeed.

dpnash , 6 months ago

@Tim_McTuffty @pathfinder @theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic >‘make me a man’

Oof. That's terrible. My family had their issues but traditional masculinity, mercifully, was not one of them, and they at least didn't give me grief about my very-much-not-very-traditionally-masculine approach to things as a kid/teen.

dpnash , 6 months ago

@nddev @Tim_McTuffty @pathfinder @theautisticcoach @actuallyautistic

Capsule summary of how I feel about gender and gender presentation/identity (perspective: late 20th/early 21st C USA; some of this might translate to other Western European-derived cultures, but…also, maybe not.)

• Both “traditional”/“conventional” masculinity and femininity here (USA) have persistent good aspects and bad aspects , and the persistent presence of bad aspects makes me want to reject both in favor of “can we just focus on the good points of both, please, and not gender-ify them”.
• “[traditional] gender role reversal” is very much the norm in my household. I do a lot of the vacuuming, cooking, and cat care. My wife is the one who communicates intelligently with power tools.
• My own gender expression is fairly generically male, but this is best described as “convenient default, weakly held”. It’s convenient for dress, grooming, some social interactions, and a few other things like that, but not something that feels core to my identity.
• I find the connotations of the word “male” to be more-or-less neutral in most contexts, but those of “masculine” to be anywhere from fairly neutral (when describing dress or appearance) to quite negative indeed (when describing behaviors and beliefs), and it’s not a term I’m entirely comfortable using to describe myself.

dpnash , 12 days ago

@youronlyone @actuallyautistic @actuallyautistics @autistics I’ve gotten old enough I don’t encounter this as often as I used to, but…yep. When I was 46 went to a coworker’s birthday party and told someone there about how my kids were growing up and one of them was finishing up his second year of college. He was trying to figure out how that was possible, because he thought I was about 35 instead.