Unfortunately ‘Creepy’ is subjective and poorly defined. It’s a feeling rather than ‘this meets XYZ criteria and therefore is creepy’.

she calls me creepy and to stop stalking her. I explain im not stalking im just being a friend and just enjoy talking inbetween class.

I agree with you that she’s not using ‘stalking’ correctly but I believe this was meant to terminate your platonic relationship. It’s upsetting but that’s likely the point.

random number of text message with photo of me 20 seconds ago at lunch table. panic issues, i message who dis. They reply, you dont need to know stop stalking (girls name). I explain its not stalking if i go up and say hello and talk to them.

This behavior is much more in-line with a correct usage of ‘stalking’. I would assume this escalation was taken as being fair game from your refusal to accept her use as stalking. That’s vexing but likely meant just to highlight their desire to terminate the relationship as that wasn’t clear from her first accusation.

Today, I overheard my mom talking loudly on a video call to my brother and his wife, catching up and sharing their latest news. Apparently her latest news included the fact that I have been diagnosed with ASD.

The way I respond to this is pretty simple; The people around me know I have little need for conversation. I can talk to people and sometimes enjoy it but I can very well not make conversation with people. Disclosing my secrets or misrepresenting my statements is grounds for no further conversation beyond simple practical utility.

In my experience NTs generally assume there’s not a privacy restriction unless explicitly stated. Even if not the explicit statement further grounds the decision to make minimal conversation should they violate your trust in that way.

she also mentioned that I’ve been less conversational lately, which she attributes to my diagnosis and to me no longer wanting to make the effort necessary to talk to neurotypical people

You were recently diagnosed with a second condition that affects your willingness to converse. She already knows you have one and that it’s been significantly affecting you lately. Does she know how autism affects interpersonal interaction? Does she think you’ve developed autism recently? Does she doubt the diagnosis?

I’m also not sure how to move forward with this information in any way without it seeming like I was eavesdropping - which I wasn’t intentionally doing,

I have sensitive hearing and I live in an area where most people don’t have inside voices. If I’m not wearing my headphones or hyperfocusing on something I can hear people trying to be quiet a floor away. I don’t know if you’re the same way but I agree with Cagi, if a conversation was meant to be private it should be conducted where it wouldn’t be overheard. It’d be eavesdropping only if an attempt to do that was made and you had made intentional actions to subvert that effort. Eavesdropping is an intentional act, overhearing is an autonomic act.

but as it is I don’t feel comfortable raising the subject, or noticeably increasing my level of masking (to accomodate her apparent discomfort with me not doing so),

That’s entirely up to you how to deal with it. I try to mask less around people I feel safe around. So far I think it’s going well. Does she scrutinize things that spontaneously start going her way? If not it may just not come up. If so you could be honest about overhearing her or assert that you were trying to think about how she felt about your recent behavior.

I haven’t yet told him, and now I’m worried that he’s going to take it as me no longer socializing with neurotypical family members (even though the arrangement was made before my diagnosis).

You could call him to share the diagnosis and ‘play dumb’ about him already knowing. I don’t know how far just to your brother’s city is but you could offer an alternative get-together for later and explain that last year’s complications have made you want this trip to be simplified.

Capitalism is for sure flawed. I, and most if not all leftists, would argue that it is inherently flawed. Not in small ways either but in the sort of large ways that make it’s continued use unacceptable. Such as essentially every Human need being denied to some people within the system.

Capitalism obsessively distributes by market forces that are fundamentally incapable of caring about universality. So long as any human need is distributed by market forces, especially paired with profit as the driving incentive, it doesn’t matter how large the surplus of it is people will be deprived of it.

I think the concept behind the chaos of anarchy is that the lack of a social contract Well, there’s also the matter that Anarchism and Communism were both relatively recently the targets of the largest and most prolific propaganda machine ever made. US media is incredibly sycophantic toward the government, to the point Russian state media bucks the line more frequently, and has been extremely effective at coloring public opinion on topics the average person knows effectively nothing about, even beyond the USA.

that people without regulation are chaotic in the sense that no matter how much I want to be a “good boss” I always end up being a “fun boss” instead and people only do as much as they think they can get away with doing instead of doing what seems to be the right amount of work for the greater good.

You’re a manager? Part of the issue with motivating workers to work without systemic change is that regardless of your managerial style we live in a system where the primary motivating force is fundamentally a death threat: work or die, likely from exposure or starvation.

Further no matter how good a manager you are they are not receiving the full value of their labor. No company in any capitalist nation employs people at the full value they produce as that would mean net profit for the company from that employee is $0. As the fundamental motivating force for all companies is increasing profit this course of action is effectively impossible as all decision-making at the topmost level is centered around doing the opposite of giving the full value they receive.

Given that workers, from the company’s perspective, are there to do as much as possible for as little as possible in return is it any wonder that so many of them take the inverse perspective? That they are there to do as little as possible for as much as possible in return.

Actually I’m a Marxist. However don’t see much reason in perpetuating the red/black divide. Both groups have the same end-goal in mind, we just want to do the two major steps in reverse order compared to each-other. The end goal is a stateless society without need of currency and without the division of people into different classes. To drastically oversimplify centuries of work to get there we need to do two things:

• Abolish Capitalism
• Abolish Nationalism

Side note: As you may be able to infer from those two steps Anarcho-Capitalism and National Socialism aren’t really from either system, rather they’ve pretty much just stolen the terms for their use rather that denote relatedness to other Anarcho-s or Socialisms.

Communists want to do them in the order I presented, generally by seizing control of the State and using it to destroy capitalism then adopting reforms to slowly make the State pointless. Anarchists want to destroy the State first then get rid of Capitalism.

One big misconception about Anarchism is that it isn’t for chaos and disorder, it’s for the end of unjustified hierarchy. An actual Anarchist experiment would still have social order, rather than be the chaotic social breakdown that is called Anarchism as a means of disinformation. A lot of Anarchist works explain how systems of voluntary cooperation can work and would be helpful to society.

Unfortunately America’s bad urban design is the product of legal corruption, lobbying, on the part of the automotive industry. Good urban design invalidates any need for a car and so the companies that make and sell cars pour billions into ensuring that ours will continue to be horrible. We used to have trains that went everywhere and they were great but again that was all unraveled for the sake of the dead-last worst way to move people in bulk: cars.

• Video Games Mostly those that allow me to tinker or engineer or just optimize from a lot of options available to the player. Minecraft, especially with the Create Mod, is a great example. I can engineer to my heart’s content with it. Space Engineers is one that if feels like I should love it but I have a hard time getting into it.
• Leftist Political Ideologies Mostly Marxism and it’s sub-groups but also Anarcho-Communism as well. This includes the history of attempts at those systems and modern examples. Sometimes this gets frustrating when I encounter an unironic use of a wholly, or almost wholly, false point being brought out again. Unfortunately some of the big names have writing styles so dry they could sap the moisture from the Atlantic.
• World History in general Especially early to mid modern history and ancient history. Military history from any point in time is also pretty enjoyable to me. Sometimes it’s frustrating like learning that a major problem of today was almost wholly caused by one person in the past having a particular preference for X over Y (ex Ford preferring internal combustion for his cars over battery power).
• Urban Design I like learning about what is and isn’t effective in terms of how to build places that work for people. What makes places safer or more dangerous, how to reduce stress through little design tricks, and how places can be a net positive for the wider area they’re in. Also trains on both large and small scale.
• Computer Programming/IT Out of all my interests this is the one I’m perusing as something I could have a job doing. Working with computers strikes a nice balance between rules being clear and exact and being open-ended enough to allow for creative solutions. Also learned I have a strong preference for C++ over Javascript. That may be because I learned C++ first and Javascript is a lot more typing intensive to do simple things.

Honestly, I find it amusing. They take weird as an insult because they’d use it as one meanwhile there’s a notable number of people who self-identify as weird.

I suppose logically I would though I don’t usually use the exact term. More often I’ll state ‘Normalcy is overrated.’ Whomever I’m talking to can think whichever term about me. If they vocalize it and it’s distasteful to me I might redirect to ‘weird’ but I generally don’t feel the need to give them a term… which I guess is weird in it’s own right considering most people would give their preferred term xD

Honestly? Some of those SoBs are ontologically evil but you call them that and they’ll laugh.

One of very few bits of rhetoric that actually phases them is the claim that everyone isn’t, at least secretly, just as evil as they are. That there’s something abnormal about how hateful they are, or in other words that they are weird in being so detestable.

I was diagnosed originally at 3yo with Asperger’s. As mentioned by folkrav this diagnosis is outdated, ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’ isn’t a thing anymore. To the best of my knowledge it’s currently all Autism Spectrum Disorder with numbered levels associated with each diagnosis ranging from 1 to 3.

The old Asperger’s diagnosis is, AFAIK, translatable to Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1.

The actual experience of them? About the same. How much that impacts my life? Less than before.

Because I have greater vocabulary for describing what’s wrong and have greater agency in my life to decide not to experience it I can avoid it better. I’ve also found that drowning some textures with others works;

Ex: melted cheese outside of the context of pizza or as a sauce is not good to me. However adding several other textures helps a lot. So getting a cheese burger when I ordered hambuger is only really a dealbreaker if it was meant to be bun, catchup, & burger. But if I get other ingredients light cheese isn’t unacceptable.

I use Firefox as well so NoScript is available to you for stopping those unwanted popups.

In case you ever have to go back to Autism Speaks’ website, or a similar one;

Try running NoScript browser plugin, or something similar. It shut down the distracting notifications for me.

Don’t know which browser you use but I’ve found that if you put a little effort into it and use one that supports some good plugins you can cut out a lot of the most annoying things on the internet.

Normal is extremely overrated, and so are the opinions of most people. I can’t recall being especially concerned with the opinions of strangers or enemies.

Mostly just mitigate bad-texture and try to work around it. I try to try new things… actually had a problem with not eating for most of my life so now if I don’t know what something’s like I’ll probably try it if it doesn’t have some clear indicator of bad texture.

I also limit caffeine intake as per doctor’s recommendation, replacing it with water for most of the day. Don’t like water but it’s supposed to be healthy.

Yeah… I can barely smell at all. Even normally strong smells like that of the urine of an unfixed male cat aren’t particularly impactful to me. I wouldn’t have even considered the potentiality that ants have a distinctive smell in spite of being aware that they use pheromone trails for navigation.

Seeing posts like this is always a bit frustrating. Autism wasn’t discovered in the 80s or later, descriptions of it predate WWII. Just a matter of people not caring and some governments being actively hostile… both to the research itself and the people.

And something to hold the TV at a reasonable viewing angle from a comfy seated position.

I’ll go a step further, I’m convinced that our current society is exceptionally sick and going along with the current trend is currently causing great harm.

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Edit; reply appeared blank when I made this reply, can see the gif now.

I’m opposed to fitting in. Not disinterested, not unable, I don’t want to “fit in”.

People who want that from their associates should probably just not count me among them.

Felt this one yesterday. Just finished a semester with a great and charismatic professor.

He got us all together for a class photo and I felt I should express my emotions so put on a big smile. Could feel how the muscles weren’t used to doing that.