The pictures question wasn’t about “comparing two pictures”: pictures were presented only one by one and I was supposed to find “what was wrong”.

My dad coming should be just a one-time thing, he lives hundreds of kilometers away and wouldn’t make the trip just for fun. But yeah, writing it down is definitely something I’m doing (thanks for reminding me, I would have forgotten…)

Thank you! I guess I’ll still mask anyway because, well, I can’t picture myself not masking at all when interacting with a stranger, and even less if my father is present. Also this shouldn’t be my last appointment so hopefully I’ll have other occasions.

Thanks for your account! Mine won’t be remote, and I don’t have any animal at home (except some spiders but they are too cute to eat my cords).

This. Except I’m not limited to authority figures and that’s sometimes very hard to handle. Like if a friend wants to invite me on monday but I already have something planned with another friend that same day I sometimes feel like giving the real reason would make them jealous. Yes, I know I shouldn’t do this, and I’m working on it, but it’s not easy. It’s especially hard when the real reason is something like “spending time with you in particular is very stressful for me and I can’t handle it”.

Not a specialist in physics but I still think I can help with some of this.

About plank length/time: this isn’t the “smallest length/time that exists”, it’s just a limit under which we know our commonly used model for distance and time stops making sense. To help you understand this, think about something such as temperature: you probably have an intuition about it (unless of course you are like me and your perception of temperature is completely screwed up), you can feel that some things are cold and some other are hot, and you are probably able to imagine what would it be like to have something “hotter than this” or “colder than that”. From that you can imagine temperature as a property of matter. Now take a blob of gaz (one that is, let’s say, at 20°C). Cut it in half: both of the two halves will be at 20°C. Cut it again: still. Imagine an ideal cutting tool, one that lets you cut extremely thinly without adding heat. When you reach chunks of sizes around a few molecules, this notion of temperature stops making sense: temperature simply only makes sense for stuff that is composed of enough small elements that we can’t consider each of them individually. To say it differently, if we were able to know precisely the state of all the molecules in a room, then the notion of “temperature of the room” would stop making sense. Distance and time are somehow like that: they work fine for most of the stuff we encounter in our everyday life, but we also know they are not a perfect description of the details of what happens.

The taste of several specific things (cheese that “turned bad”, garlic that isn’t perfectly fresh), high-pitched sounds, and a few more I don’t have in mind.

A few of those items are only redflags if done in a specific way. For example about “non-reciprocal”: if you are in a wheelchair and your partner is arachnophobic, it makes sense that you are the only one who takes care about dealing with spiders while your partner is the only one who helps you move around. I recommend that you start consulting this kind of list only when something starts to “not feel right”, otherwise you’ll poison all your relations before they even start (because there is no such thing as a perfect relationship). Still I’m no relationship expert, so take my advice for what it’s worth.

I have something that may or may not be related: some stuff just makes me physically faint. It’s never sudden, I see it coming and if I manage to get away from the trigger, lay down and wait it goes away, but if I can’t do it quick enough I know it can be dangerous. Among the triggers are intense pain (like burning your stomach by swallowing something too hot) but also conversations about “real” body horror (a movie is fine, but somebody telling me about how their plan to get an operation often isn’t, back in middle school I remember fainting as the teacher was talking about some health risk).

I guess I’m in between then.

Not speaking for all of them but sometimes just feeling good about yourself is enough. You can even tell them how you appreciate their efforts (assuming you do)

Reddit wasn’t even always like that: I’d say it progressively went downhill during the last decade. Design choices were progressively made to tailor the most toxic users.

My local roleplaying game club. I’d bet half of them, despite not acknowledging it, are considerably deep on the spectrum. Funny bit: My aesthetic ideals clash with those of one of the guys there: he likes things to be well-ordered in neat piles and I like non-patterns. Doesn’t stop us from being good friends.

Not diagnosed (yet) but my reason is mostly so that I can get some money if I am recognized as handicaped. It’s not that much: I’d still be considered as poor by most metrics, but I’d take it.

On the waiting line for a diagnosis (I should call them btw), unemployed despite having diplomas. Those last days I am facing a weird puzzle: I have to get analyzed at the lab, which is open from 7:30 to 11 am, and need to be exactly 12h fasting at that moment, but my daily routine involves a big meal at midnight and skipping it would make me well over the 12h fasting duration (and being hungry isn’t very fun as you may know). I think I will manage it somehow but currently that’s a bummer.

Better: a gal I like a lot is visiting this weekend and it’s going to be great. She is one of the only people with whom I am able not to mask.

Also that’s a great season for mushrooms. Got a full basket of chicken of the woods last week and still have some left.

I do care. I totally get how you can be charismatic in school despite being autistic, that is perhaps the biggest misconception. I personally think if I had no morals and just wanted to make money my best bet would be running some kind of cult (but that would be wrong ofc).

I am a native French speaker who had a phase with an interest toward grammar, so I probably can help you with it if you are learning this language. Also I am quite good at explaining maths to kids or teens, even those with difficulties. It gets harder with adults.

You’re welcome!

One of those traumatic experiences was directly linked to the environment and is perhaps more similar to the one in the video. It was at the school’s restaurant: picture a room with 60 children aged 2 to 11 and handled by a pair of ladies who shout a lot and are overall not very good with children (aka: one of the worst place ever).

One day we were asking wether we wanted the entry dish or not. I decided to try it, as I was taught to always try new foods before saying I don’t like them and I was the only one who said so. That dish was honestly atrocious (I can handle most foods, even by non-autistic standards, but this was vile in all the ways school food can be) and I was supposed to finish my plate before the next dish could be served. All the other 59 kids, plus the two ladies, were waiting for me to finish that stuff. I don’t remember what happened next and perhaps it’s for the best.

I don’t really connect with this. My experience with that kind of situations would be me focusing on one specific aspect of the party and ignore everything else. Like I would spend all the time trying to fold the napkins into interesting shapes, or feeding grass to some slug I just caught and wonder why it doesn’t seem to like it.

I wasn’t diagnosed and yet when I look back at it I had the chance to be surrounded by decent adults who were happy about me being me. There have been bad situations of course (that I am still a bit traumatized by) but I can count them on my fingers. Most are related to my dad having his own issues (I hope he will find the help he needs but the more time passes the less hope I have).

The diag criteria are an ad hoc thing that only exists so that the society has a systematic way of deciding wether a given individual is autistic or not. Someone who just barely misses the criteria to be positevely diagnosed could very well have a lot in common with those who meet slightly more criteria.

Think of it like the administrative criteria to be considered “poor” in a given country: it helps to decide who can benefit from financial help and such, or to have statistics on how fair is the ressource distribution through the time, but it doesn’t mean that your life will switch the very moment your income crosses the limit.