Having a group is only half the battle, the other half is getting that group together when one person works odd hours, another has chronic illness with lots of medical appointments, and a third has a bitch of a commute during the week so often can’t get home in time.

For years we had games every Friday and Sunday, all it takes is a couple of people changing jobs to completely disrupt that setup.

Watching it at 1.5 speed helped immensely.

Sure they do, NTs do a lot of stim activities, the difference is that they don’t need to stim in order to remain calm and centred, they can just do it because it’s fun.

Yes, putting an electrical appliance in the bathroom is weirder than putting an appliance that requires both power and plumbing in the room that always has both power and plumbing.

I also buy second-hand whenever possible, and try to fix things instead of replace them, and for the stuff I’m buying it’s usually more expensive, not less. Especially when big stores offer free delivery on just about everything while your average ebay user obviously doesn’t.

Recent example: I got a shoulder strap for a clutch bag and the clasp on the strap broke. It was only missing a tiny spring, so I found a tiny spring online and repaired it. The strap cost £5. The spring to fix it cost £6 including postage. But it worked!

I had lessons from various people every summer for the first few years after I turned 17 (age you can start learning on public roads in the UK). I’d get to “test standard” each time on the mechanics of it, but navigating other drivers was too much so I never actually took a test, and never intend to.

I’m now in my 30s and have structured my life around not having a car. My house is on a 24-hour bus route into town where I work, and walking distance to most amenities. My husband does have a car, so he can drive us places that aren’t on public transit routes (such as our parents’ houses) but the vast majority of the time I’m doing my own thing while he’s at his job an hour’s drive away.

I don’t even seem to have a special interest. It’s like I’m doing autism wrong.

Suddenly that music video makes sense

No idea whether it’s their reason, but anecdotally I’ve found it has a few benefits. If coordinated properly it’s significantly easier to train new(er) staff, it improves cross-organisational understanding to overhear other departments’ conversations either at desks or in break rooms, and it stops people becoming isolated pockets of knowledge and culture because they only ever see or interact with the same one or two people.

This is why I concluded that I can’t live in shared housing. Thankfully my social phobia isn’t triggered by living with a partner or I’d be fucked as far as affording housing.

I don’t have any useful advice or way to help, but you’re not a burden and you’re not the only one to feel this way. Sorry if that’s not exactly comforting.

My instinctive response is that it’s a terrible idea. While having no expectation to mask is great, it seems to me that gathering a group of people who generally struggle to take care of themselves and their environment and who have very low tolerance for certain environmental stimuli and a deep need for other environmental stimuli is a recipe for chaos.

I attend a local autistic adults zoom group every other week, and it’s great for support and understanding, but if I had to be in the same room as one of the other members their stims would give me a meltdown. I over-empathise emotionally, an autistic friend has almost no emotional empathy, as a result some of our interactions do not go as intended.

That point about how sensory processing issues can affect your health is so on point, I had no idea how much of my general anxiety was caused just by the world being too loud and bright. Earplugs and sunglasses worked instantly where 5 different medications failed to do anything.

We broke the Anima system in half with overpowered characters. Not that it holds together very well normally. One mage character boosting the tank’s strength high enough to lift a mountain and creating him a giant tungsten lump, another mage opening a portal directly above a bad guy’s tower, apply tungsten to tower at great speed. No more tower. The GM was too amused to be mad that we wrecked his whole plan. We used the same trick to launch a necronomicon into the sun (or near enough). Also so many magically created artefacts, creation mages are just bullshit. But I got away with it because I made some for everyone.

I’m so glad you’re feeling validated, it’s so miserable to be adrift in thoughts of “what’s wrong with me”!

Stimming is one of those things that everyone does to an extent, since it’s basically just “doing things that feel nice”. The difference for neurodivergent folks is that it helps us emotionally regulate in a way that neurotypical folks don’t need, so we tend to do it a lot more often (or feel extra stressed/anxious/irritable).

This is what smartphones are for. Take picture of clothing item. Take picture of clothing item tag. Save pictures in a “clothes” folder that is synced and/or backed up elsewhere and reference them as needed.

I don’t know. “Functional rebalancing” would be more accurate, but kind of clunky. I can’t think of anything more pithy.

I don’t seem to be able to reply to WookieMunster so I’ll say here:

I don’t get the hype over OLED screens, honestly. The difference isn’t enough for me to care, and it’ll be plugged into a TV most of the time anyway. It’s only a downgrade in that one area and only if you have an OLED Switch, whereas I don’t have any kind of Switch and couldn’t tell you which model my husband’s (the one I’ve played) is.

“Skill regression” is such an awful term. It would be like taking a severe workaholic who is getting stress ulcers, having them develop a proper work-life balance, and calling that “productivity regression”.

Honestly I’d be very surprised to see an online autism community with a majority of people professionally diagnosed, even more surprised if the majority were diagnosed as children. Even setting aside how underdiagnosed large sections of the autistic population are, the people who need to seek support and validation that they belong to a community are much more likely to be those who didn’t have the right language or support as a child.

I’ll maybe believe a release date when it’s actually announced,. Maybe. Though I already know I’m buying the Switch successor if it’s backwards compatible with Switch games, so it would be nice if this article turned out to be true.