sapient [they/them]

Also needing to do lots of things like shopping + washing + other stuff at once is stressful because prioritising is frustrating and it can be overwhelming >.<

Yes.

When I have something i’m thinking about or want to work on, other things - including stuff like feeding myself properly (as I have to cook at least somewhat for economic reasons) - are interruptions and very frustrating. I like my drive to do things I care about and have special interest in but it can lead to self neglect :p

If I didn’t have such a large appetite, or got something affordable i could prepare and eat that was actually nutritious and filling in a couple minutes, it would be much less annoying ^..

Its not just making food, but that’s a major one.

Some of it is probably personal preference too. I really like cinnamon, which might influence why i like it particularly much in tomato sauce ^.

Typically for tomato sauce I like it quite umami, so I add things like peppers (the fruit/veg and black pepper), soya sauce, salt, MSG, etc., as well as mixed “italian” (i doubt it actually is, but it’s sold as that, and I have limited spice cupboard space) herb and spice mixes (usually with stuff like parsley, basil, etc. in it), as well as sage, thyme, garlic powder, with amounts depending on what I want ^.

Probably the only time I wouldn’t add cinnamon is if I was using the tonato sauce as a component of a curry, but a lot of that is because it would get diluted out and I don’t think cinnamon goes so well with some curry flavours.

Ehh, liquid smoke is def a lot better for you that actually smoking things, because there is a filtration step that removes a lot of the worse Volatile Organic Compounds that make smoke carcinogenic.

You’re probably right it’s not fantastic though ;p

And damn, idk what i’d do if onions made me ill… I use them in so much. Though i’ve found some ways of making them do make me feel ill , just i rarely make them that way so.

I haven’t. Once I get more kidney beans, i’ll experiment with it ;p

I like to cook pasta in MSG-water sometimes. I also tend to use wholemeal pasta, which I think is important (the wholemeal aspect) ^.. MSG works best for me when I use it with things that already have a decent depth of flavour and/or variety of ingredients ;3. It doesnt work so well if your food doesnt have enough flavour.

Other cool ingredients:

• liquid smoke (works really well in a lot of things including vegetarian chilis, but especially i’ve found its good in lentil soups when you also have mint e.g lentil and pea soup, lentil, potato, onion soup, etc. ^.) - look for the industrial stuff, its like £5 per bottle but you only need 1 or 2 drops for litres of sauce and it will last you months, kinda like MSG. Add it near the end so you don’t evaporate away lots of the flavour, too.
• yeast extract - this shit is delicious in tomato sauces and stews and chili, even if in the uk we typically have it on toast ;p, adds a meaty, mushroomy flavour
• cinnamon - works amazing in tomato sauces, it sounds weird as fuck but tomato sauce without it tastes like its missing something to me now, its so fundamental to any tomato sauce i make ;3
• bonus: yeast extract + mustard makes a really really cheesy flavour in various sauces, and its completely dairy free. I

Sorry for the extra delayed response. The more in-depth comments take me a bit to process. Not only that, I also had a thorough response typed out that I accidentally lost when I clicked on something. 🤦

Dw :) i get that. And that is super annoying when it happens.

I’m happy for you! I’m working on getting there. I’ve been keeping notes of my experiences with people to become more aware of my interactions with them over longer time spans and my associated emotions.

Now that’s certainly an interesting idea. Generally for me I’m quite hypersensitive to if someone makes me feel like shit often (in particular, I will remember certain types of Red Flag events or behaviour forever, like they are burned into my memory), so I have less of an issue with needing to do this.

I’ve not considered doing that as a general thing though, even if I do spend time analysing my own thought patterns while with other people so I do do that a bit by simple coincidence ^.

I wasn’t aware I was autistic until early this year. Beforehand, I just thought I was broken or a shit human in social situations. Still, I experience the same thing, except that when I would ask for time alone or to for someone to stop overwhelming me and they didn’t stop, I would lose my cool and become directly insulting by pointing out their lack of respect, consideration, and boundaries. I wouldn’t do it with the intention to insult them, but I would not hold back on what I saw as purposeful behaviors to trigger my reaction. Now, I’ve been doing much better at keeping people like that out of my life. Finding out I am autistic has been one of the most helpful points of my life.

People who actually respect your own needs and boundaries rather than just ignoring them are great :)

For me I find the most important thing is finding people who understand sensory overload. As long there isn’t more than one conversation going on around me (too many people talking at once is very stressful), the main thing for me is overload from light/noise/smell/heat (especially heat) etc.

When its with aother autistic people (or neurotypical people who actually try to get it) I usually find conversations the opposite of overloading as long as I’ve not reached a threshold of general sensory overload or stress and emotional frustration from poor coordination/planning/predictability/cohesion in terms of what to do or where to go.

Often for me it can be more just being physically around other people who I feel comfortable with even if I feel too exhausted or overloaded to talk/do language ^., for me I will endure quite bad sensory overload to be around people I like even if I don’t talk very much/become much less verbal… though that’s more sensory overload, but other types that are rarer for me, like emotional overload, are a bit different.

But yeah for sure being around people who don’t set off these kinds of things and don’t ignore things like overload is great (it’s one of the things I find other autistic people are good about when socialising with… if you say you’re experiencing sensory overload they often will understand, and I have found that they can sometimes tell when I am experiencing that and vice-versa ;p, and ask if I am doing ok etc.)

I haven’t gotten anywhere near building that social circle, but it’s motivating to know that it’s possible.

Yes, it is great :)

Yes! Not only have I stopped trying to mask, I’m finding it hard to mask now that I’ve taken off the mask. It’s weird, but I really like it.

Yeah, I know other people who’ve done this. I could never mask effectively but trying to do so made me feel… empty. In a horrible way. I couldn’t re-mask or re-try-to-mask to any significant degree now even if I wanted to (and the way it feels… nope. Even just the minor scripts I still use sometimes feel wrong and un-genuine and dissociatey a lot).

Deconstructing the mask - or the poor attenpt at one, in my case - has been amazing for my mental health at least. It’s good, for me, to feel like myself.

I think that’s really cool 😎 I bet you’re an interesting person that can hold meaningful and insightful conversations.

I enjoy doing it, and thanks ;p. The main thing is I like to understand why I believe and feel and act like what I do, make my own views more consistent.

I do have lots of strong philosophical and political viewpoints because of it though, it can cause some fun and spicy conversations sometimes ;3

One of the suggestions we received from the community was to develop a wiki-style page for our community. While the mods have started working on a glossary, we can’t gotten anywhere near building a wiki. If you’re interested, maybe you can helps out out with a wiki. We can create a shared Google Docs (or other system that’s FOSS) to build one. It’s completely fine if you don’t want to. We get it. It’s a lot of work.

I don’t mind contributing to a wiki, though I’m not in a position to create one from scratch rn (I have already got a lot of projects, some FOSS stuff, technology stuff, etc.) but if you want technical advice and information on how to set something up I can compile information and take questions, I just wouldn’t be able to actually administrate it.

If you want FOSS collab tools, https://cryptpad.fr/ is pretty decent last I checked.

Promoting anarchist ideas! The horror! (/s)

It refers to Applied Behavioural Analysis.

ABA is abuse and very commonly recommended to autistic people (or more often, forced on autistic kids by parents).

I’ve had this experience so much, that I learned to stop sharing about myself. It’s so frustrating to try to relate, then the person looks at me like I’m self-centered and careless about their situation when I’m engaging so hard in their report that I’m feeling it.

Damnn. I mean you might have gathered but I am personally very much at the point where if I get close with people they’re generally going to be accepting of this stuff (or more commonly they end up also being autistic lol ;p). If not, well, tough luck for them.

Yes! I used to be confused as to who I was because I never really identified with either end of the introvert-extrovert spectrum. I didn’t like being completely alone and function better with people in the area sometimes, but I found people exhausting and I would often look forward to alone time. It was pretty confusing. Now that I know I’m autistic and learning about autistic brains, I’m realizing that I need to really be careful of whom I’m around and the sensory setting.

I at least have had good luck on this front. I wrote another comment about how I experience sensory overload - I can usually put up with smaller amounts, as long as I recharge later, but too much and my exhaustion and irritation rises until nonresponsiveness, but its a bit more complex than that. Socialising I can’t get enough of when it’s with people who at least won’t nitpick - and preferrably will actively understand - the way I express myself ^.

I am glad you have found the particular kind of liberation that comes from discovering that there are people who you can feel comfortable or understood with even if they can sometimes be rare ;p (though in my experience personally that set of people ends up self filtering and self expanding over time once you start seeking out people who are accepting of autistic traits or can understand them directly, and you stop trying to forcefully repress them)

I think you make really good points and appreciate you taking the time to respond so thoroughly and with conviction. It was helpful to understand your perspective, and I even saved your comment. I also think that the world could benefit from hearing your ideas. Imagine if we could link a page/site of your perspective under the helpful resources rather than what have now. Have you ever considered making a blog, writing essays, or creating a wiki-style page on autism? If you’re interested in doing so, I would be happy to help and we can potentially integrate it to [email protected] somehow.

Thanks, I’m glad it was helpful, though I’m not like… a big expert or something. I do however spend a disproportionate amount of time analysing my own philosophy and thought processes.

I do technically have a blog, but I haven’t updated it in ages (many months) and it’s more general-purpose. Some philosophy (usually transhumanism/anarchism/urbanism/trans-rights adjacent but it kinda relates to neurodiversity sometimes), some politics/tech, some code and infra stuff ^.^. It does have tagging though and there should be a neurodiversity tag on it, and all the tags have RSS feeds which you might be able to do something with - I have a thing I want to write about at somepoint soonish on some neurodiversity and philosophy stuff as well, but I have been busy with other projects… like always ;p

It’s at https://sapients-site.netlify.app, as well as on neocities (and I want to set up a tor hidden service at some point… urls are too fragile. Maybe even something with i2p idk, though neocities has already got ipfs covered).

Thanks ^.

I have a very shitty notebook this is likely to be very useful for ;p

It might be because I live in the UK.

The internet I use is permanently stuck in “use phone carrier as backup” mode and we don’t have ipv6 because of that.

Data for me also seems stuck in ipv4.

Yes, somewhat. The problem is places still suck at adopting it, especially phone carriers, and most people are primarily connected via their phones and a lot of people even use that infrastructure as a replacement for broadband as well.

VeilID might be something you find interesting. It’s designed to solve exactly this problem by enabling most nodes to NATsmash with help for p2p stuff, and also provides a general and very strong privacy framework including torlike routing ^.

It was only unveiled at defcon this year though so the team behind it (Cult Of The Dead Cow) are trying to put docs in place ;p

Its completely written in rust, easily embeddable, has good content locality and is probably the cleanest, most performant, and most easily integrated into projects architecture for stuff like this that I’ve seen, as a programmer who’s into this space and familiar with things like i2p, tor, etc. I really hope this one takes off, and the quality of it means I really think it could (at least once they throw the docs together ;p)

How does this compare to zswap. For me, if you still want a swap device on a real disk, this might be better? Idk >.<

Edit: arch has zswap enabled by default https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zswap - someone below says it is better if you have zswap when you already have a swap device :)

Well, generally speaking I find the double empathy problem wikipedia page a helpful resource here. She mentions it in the article you linked, but then carries on with the framing of poor theory of mind, which she connects to “lack of cognitive empathy” >.<

My view and comprehension of the definition is that theory of mind is related to understanding that people have different internal self-perceptions. In this article, she conflates it with the ability to understand all of those internal states (this is cognitive empathy) in neurotypical people via reading things from their facial expressions etc. (Though acknowledges that autistic people have cognitive empathy for other autistic people).

The problem is that understanding that other people have their own perspective (theory of mind), and being able to read it off them (cognitive empathy), is absolutely and vitally distinct. In particular, lacking the former essentially means you view people as automatons to be used and abused or at least not even considered (there are situations where people do not consider others, but these are often associated with strong emotion, sensory overload, or desparation, and this isn’t unique to autistic people. ^.).

Claiming that autistic people lack the first gives people an excuse to mistreat us or deprive us of agency, and it’s also just incorrect. As documented in the page I linked above, most of the experiments claiming to provide evidence for this are either unreplicable or completely useless because they are totally unreciprocal (details in the link even though i’m tempted to list them out ;p) (e.g. they often use metrics to detect Theory-of-Mind behaviour or empathy that are designed for neurotypical children, on autistic children for things like responsiveness and emotions)

Secondly, she kind of has the implicit assumption in this article that we are flawed for not reading things from eye contact and similar things, and that learning to put up with that and read things that way is something we must do to be happy or empathetic :/, I’ve not found this to be the case, my cognitive empathy for neurotypical people comes primarily from visualising myself in their position while trying to consider their circumstances, or just asking about their emotional state, and I don’t think this is wrong or inferior like her article that you linked kind of implies. I care about other people even if I can’toften read their emotions well (at least if they’re neurotypical).

To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s a bad idea to learn eye reading if you want to, but that kind of stuff is also exhausting and dehumanising and just ruins conversations and makes them stressful in my experience >.<, if you can actually spare the energy to constantly read this stuff while also listening to actual words . I also can’t really “mask”, which might be a factor in this, cus this kind of stuff causes massive amounts of stress and anxiety and dissociation and depression for me, and it doesn’t even work anyway.

Doing the whole “making facial expressions to have neurotypical people see you have emotions” stuff - which is the reverse end of the trying to read neurotypical facial expressions - is just miserable and fake to me, not that I can do it anyhow but even trying just adds a layer of exhaustion and stress and anxiety and dissociation to conversations. I don’t want to do it and I don’t think I should be expected to put on a show just to get others to consider my emotions, or just make them happy at my own expense.

Perhaps neurotypical people should learn how autistic people express internal states (infodumping, stimming, contextualising w.r.t special interests, etc.) or how we do conversations either verbally or textually (e.g. I often relay support or ideas or thoughts about something to someone by talking about something similar that happened to me, but my experience is that a lot of neurotypical people take this as trying to overtake the converasation or be self centred or whatever <.<). Or something like this ;p

Basically, she acknowledges the double empathy problem exists but then goes back to framing it as theory of mind deficits (which are distinct from empathy in my understanding, whereas she conflates them), even if there is a token acknowledgement that a lot of neurotypical folks have lack of cognitive empathy (which she conflates with theory of mind) w.r.t. autistic people.

Maybe it’s because I’ve in the past few months been more and more in social groups with a decent sized proportion of autistic people that I feel this, but not having people expect you to adhere to neurotypical social protocol (which I can’t do reliably and it causes massive dissociation and stress for me to try) has been extremely liberating ^. - i’ve realised that i’m not actually an introvert either, just found trying to navigate more neurotypical social norms/scripts/body language/magic-bullshit-emotional-sidechannels cripplingly exhausting, un-genuine, and anxiety inducing. Unpacking my very poor attempts at masking has helped immensely as well ;p

Apart from buying into the unscientific and dehumanising idea that autistic people lack theory of mind, this has some good signs to look out for, even if I disagree with a lot of the framing of autism here.

And it’s a good thing. Fuck proprietary software 😎

Awesome!

Gotta figure a way to avoid the specific versions but I’m glad they relented ^.