It’s not so bad once you’ve got your teeth into the problem

assuming you can code, that is

I usually use the name of the drug when there are multiple brands with trade names for it, or when there are trade-name drugs that use multiple formulations with different ingredients.

For example, famotodine is the active agent in Pepcid and Zantac. Omeprazole is sold as Prilosec and Losec. Acetaminophen is in Tylenol, Tempra, and Panadol

When I want Pseudoephedrine and not phenylephrine, they’re both branded under the trade name ‘Sudafed’ but only one of them really works for sinus pressure.

When I want Dextromethorphan or Guaifenesin (active ingredients in Robitussin) there are lots of other brands (Nyquil, dayquil, etc) that deliver them and knowing which drug is which and what part they do means I can pick which one to use if I don’t want the other one’s shitty side effects.

I met my wife while I was shrooming That was 23 years ago We’re still together

"We’re tracking you for your privacy 🙄

Most of the things in the list above are just circumstances where misunderstandings arise and it’s not uncommon for autistic self-care (like withdrawing, not paying attention, etc) to be mistaken for disrespect.

When I was a kid, these misunderstandings sometimes led to me getting beat up. Now that I’m a larger-than-average adult man, the bullying and schoolyard nonsense doesn’t happen but the misunderstandings and ensuing anger can take the form of grievances that have a way of turning into career-limiting drama. It’ still bullying, it’s just done the way adults bully.

These are all deeply frustrating, circumstantially stupid, and they all arise from an ignorant mistake in which me being inattentive or low on social energy or just having a hard time turns into them ‘feeling disrespected’.

It can be exhausting when people take offense when none was honestly on offer- and the resulting dominance nonsense that sometimes ensues when they’re petty about it has me a little convinced that too many adult people out there really don’t distinguish between respect and submission to their weird dominance games

The important part is to increase awareness that Autism is a disability and to ask for tolerance understanding and accommodation.

I try to help.

If we’re using the language of disability, ‘understanding and accommodation’ seems to afford its subjects a degree of dignity. We tend not to ask for ‘tolerance’ on behalf of the disabled, after all.

Sorry if this seems stupid.

It’s not stupid. It’s where I was for a while (I’m in my 50s now) figuring a d/x would tell me what I probably already knew but would also carry a bit of a stigma with it. Like you, I’d learned to adapt, but the thing I didn’t see for myself was how hard I’d been working to hide that there was anything to adapt to.

At my wife’s urging, I sought an evaluation and in retrospect I’m very glad I did. The results came back mostly telling me things I already knew (I’m super-smart in specific ways, distinctly average in particular ways) but the thing I didn’t see coming was that a d/x would put my marriage in the context of my Autism, and that means my wife gives me grace she didn’t before when it comes to my hyperfocus and attention deficits, for when I need to leave social situations because I’m out of my social-energy budget, stuff like that.

Things that used to annoy or embarrass my wife (that when a social situation became too much for me I’d ghost, that I’d struggle in circumstances where unfairness feels intolerable, etc.) now show up to her as me responsibly doing self-care, or as me living my values as my identity- and instead of bending herself to fixing those broken parts of me, she understands that these are just me doing my best job of peopling in the face of how my brain works. Long story short, being understood in this light gets me better understood, I’ll never regret it. Not feeling like I’m an imposter with broken parts that must be hidden is sooooo good.

After recognizing the value of this dynamic in my marriage (and in my relationships with my wife’s friends) I made it a project to recreate it in my workplace- and it happens that as my co-workers re-contextualized my foibles and eccentricities into that light, it became a lot easier for me to ask the kinds of questions I’ve long not asked for fear of looking dumb- and they’re more than happy to answer and so much has gotten so much easier. Not feeling like I have to mask is a great big relief.

Along the way, freeing myself up in the contexts of my marriage and in my career, I’ve found ways to be a better parent as well as be a husband and co-worker. It’s as if masking doesn’t work.

Of course, like any good denizen of the spectrum™, I’ve made unpacking my own neurodiversity into a special interest. It explains soooo much. (there’s too much to pithily explain, I’ll spare you the info dumping in this thread)

Perhaps non-intuitively, recognizing all the ways I’ve been living life the hard way (masking, avoiding social interactions I’ve been thirsty to participate in for fear of being too weird) brings quite a bit of grief with it- why did I do all that the hard way when it’s easier not to? Processing all of that is quite a bit of work, but it’s oh so liberating.

There’s so much.

• My sports- all of them are things I got into and hard- They became my special interests. I’d get so deeply into whitewater kayaking that eventually I would paddle with professionals and other experts, become an instructor and influencer myself- and then, move on to other so-called ‘extreme’ sports like backcountry skiing and rock climbing- and today, competitive cycling.

• My ability to disappear into writing code for hours without awareness of time elapsing.

• That I’ve figured out I need a place to retreat to in social situations when I’m out of social energy, but didn’t understand that was a thing for neuro-spicy folk. When attending social occasions with my wife, we’ve figured out it’s best to take 2 cars so I can bail on the scene when doing that becomes a matter of self-care.

• The experience, when trying to explain my experiences, of my brain opening multiple browser-tabs as mental placeholders for tangents the conversation has taken or might take

• The experience of understanding an idea or dynamic in terms that aren’t language-bound (like it might have a shape, or play out as a dialectic, or have tensors representing oppositional vectors in its space), then having to translate it into language regular people find accessible

• The constant concern about being misunderstood because it seems to happen so often

• The white-hot sense of justice and how not living up to my own standards can be intolerable

Isn’t that in the Torah?

Yes, it’s in Exodus. Exodus is part of the Torah, as well as the Old Testament, along with Leviticus. The Torah is the first 5 books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy)

Leviticus (11:9-12) is where shellfish are banned, mixed seed or fabrics (19:19) It is where modern Christians cherry-pick their justifications on being anti-LGBTQ. (Lev. 18:22, 20:13)

Point is, they cherry-pick from the Old Testament when it suits them, and if you look at the rest of the rules in the books they reference that they ignore (e.g. tattoos, touching pig skin, eating pork, shellfish, etc. etc. ) it’s totally fair game to point out the rules they ignore in the same books as the ones they cite.

Living in the North, my grandparents never discussed beating the shit out of civil rights protesters. Nor did they spout overtly racist things.

TBH when I hear someone say that about their parents (they didn't say racist shit out loud) I take that to mean: they didn't say that sort of stuff out loud.

I just think about that as a sort of Schrodinger's Racism- there's an unknown distribution of super-shitty racists out there in Yankeedom too, but they're neither racist nor non-racist until they open their mouths about it in un-coded ways. That it's more covert there than it is in other places doesn't really tell us if it's more or less prevalent, it could just be telling us that in Yankeedom the racists feel ever-so-slightly more inhibited about being out loud about it.

Now you have ruined three lives forever

Yeah this is the point where I'm really glad other people having kids is not his decision to make. I'm high-functioning enough to pass for neurotypical, but my sense of injustice at this is amped beyond deep-fat-fry, on to 'hot as the sun at its core'

Those sunrays had it coming

I recently hiked up to the Muir Snowfield on Rainier (aka Tahoma) in Washington State; I'd been there in August and September of prior years but this time it was shocking to see how much of the snowfield was just gone; I was looking at bare glacier, complete with crevasses, when in years past that was usually still covered by several meters of snow.

Usually in September the weather will be noticeably cooler, and usually above 10k feet it's freezing- but on the day of my visit it was t-shirt weather above the cloud deck and the usual quiet was instead the sound of water running under the ice.

This is not a Swiss thing, it's an everywhere thing

What about the Monitor improvements?

Support for more than 3 monitors, for one. Also, support for multi-mon over remote

Well, yeah.

It’s not the powerless that made things how they are, it’s the powerful that shape the world.

It’s also worth noting that when you’re powerful but don’t have the votes it takes to do a thing you want, the shortest path to getting those votes is unifying people around being mad at some sort of scapegoat.

This is why fascism looks the way it does

• it emerges from a democracy in some sort of crisis

• it’s always that elites (a voting minority of powerful interests) need political support

• the way they always get it is by focusing anger on a scapegoat, with promises to punish them

This is probably what you can expect when the subject matter is as fraught as anything-mental-health can be, and when what passes for clinical experts willing and able to share information on it are so rare as to be unicorns, plus many of them are working from outdated DSM criteria anyhow.

I was clinically diagnosed during the pandemic, then turned unpacking my own experience of autism into a new special interest (lol of course I would do that). I specifically follow quite a few accounts on tiktok belonging to health care practitioners and researchers, and I regard what they have to say in that light, while I also follow lots of ‘hey-I-self-diagnosed-now-let’s-talk-about-it’ accounts and consider what they have to say in that light.

I’m left with the impression that the researchers and practitioners are in an exciting, evolving field in which the subject matter is less-well-known than we might all like, and that the lay autistic folk sharing their experiences are doing it because frankly, the experts weren’t filling that need and what do high-masking/hyperverbal autistic folk do when we know a thing or two? We infodump, that’s what we do. (like this. you’re reading it now. sorry, not-sorry)

Are we always right? Heavens, no.

But, is the bar low to begin with? Oh, yes. Yes, it is. For example, while these tiktokers are sharing what they think (maybe it’s wrong, or DSM-inaccurate, etc.) there are also charlatans out there waving autism around like it’s a boogeyman your children get if they receive vaccinations, when there’s no evidence to support claims like that.

Y’know, I had a love/hate relationship to twitter in the before-elon times.

On the one hand, it was a strange, toxic brew of hellish nonsense and porn On the other hand, there was a critical mass of engaged experts on lots of subjects, weighing in on current events in near-real-time.

It was like having the history faculty of several colleges on hand when historical questions came up, but in order to get their takes on anything you’d have to wade through trolls and bots and fascist sycophants to get there.

I’m a sucker for learning things and I’ll put up with a lot for the pleasure of feeding my brain but by the time Elon took the reigns the signal:noise ratios had gone too far negative to be worth it.

Y’know, I wanted one until I learned anything about Tesla as a company or about Elon, and then I decided it’s vaporware and will probably never be delivered for reasons that are stupid. Looking from the outside but with experience shipping big software releases, this smells a lot like what you get when you think of QC not as an engineering discipline, but as a cost to be minimized.

Yeah. If that keeps money in small towns and going into small businesses vs. big-box chain stores, it’s well-spent. Especially if it means your transport fuel dollar isn’t funding fossil energy(?)

At the moment, Michigan sources about 2/3rds of its electrical power from coal or natural gas but wind and nuclear are a growing piece of that. Where I live, in WA, most of our electricity is Hydro (and it’s cheap, at ~10¢/kWh). Also, fueling up on electricity (even in MI, where electricity is ~19 ¢/kWh) was pretty cheap compared to gasoline.

I think if we don’t put those in local, small-town small-business lots everywhere it’ll be bad for small businesses, small towns, and in marginal ways, for the environment.

Rented a Tesla this summer for a trip with my family- where I was in Michigan, the nearest superchargers were in the lot at Meijers (a regional supermarket chain), which made sense for Meijers (there’s already a big lot there, already infra, it’s a place you can tie fueling up with getting groceries) but it meant I had to drive half an hour to shop instead of going to the local market.

My thought is that they should be planting superchargers (or their functional equivalent) in every store or restaurant parking lot because when the only place to get a charge is in the next county over, that’s directing EV drivers there and not local

Yeah, it’ll cost something to build out infra to support that much power but honestly the US grid needs the upgrades anyhow- and if anything, electricity is relatively cheap compared to buying gas