All of my bitterness and cynicism in my previous post is actually, now that I sit down and think about it, motivated by concern. For you, for our community, for all of us. I’ve gotten to a point where I have nothing left to fight with; I can only use the privilege that comes with my specific level of social function and direction of hyperfocus to hide (as much as possible) and pass as a slightly-weird member of NT culture.

As worried as I am that you and others will come to the same fate, I’m also glad that there are still people with some fight in them, who love talking about the community and trying to spread their knowledge with those outside of it. You’re doing a good thing. I just worry about you while you’re doing it, and I’m not hopeful that it will help in the long run.

But I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong.

We are literally “in peril” either way.

Yes, you’re right.

How about NT have some personal fucking growth and acknowledge that they have not given half a shit about how much ND people have contributed to society while being shat on CONSTANTLY for being socially different.

Great idea. Will never happen. Not in a million giggity years. It’s like saying the best way to stop mountain lion attacks is to teach mountain lions to not attack.

Treating NTs and the society they built like they are all rational actors who give a fuck is the most dangerous, naive, and stupid thing I ever did in my life. We must treat them like impersonal, implacable forces of nature that cannot be educated or reasoned with, only prepared for so that we can mitigate their inevitable destructive effects on our lives.

I spent most of my life trying to “inform” the NT-society hurricane about how much it hurts me. It’s pointless. Give up, spend your energy and your focus on figuring out how to protect yourself from them. The results on your everyday life will be far better.

So if someone is not familiar with your social rituals then they are not to be trusted?

Yes. This is the basis of pretty much all Western human interaction, from the observations and data I have collected over the last 30+ years. It is the root of all inter-group conflicts in the country, from the lofty halls of politics to the “that group’s not really a metal band!” subreddit pettiness.

Humans are ritualistic and their interactions are so rigid as to be almost mechanistic, when you get down to the base of them. Every person isn’t so much a unique individual as they are a unique combination of common parts, and their communication ceremonies reflect that.

Because someone who doesn’t want to shake hands because it is taboo in their culture is the same thing as someone refusing to check the flaps before takeoff.

Yes. That is exactly correct. If you don’t do the ritual right (or right enough, within a margin of specification), you will not be trusted.

Does it make rational sense from the perspective of a sapient being capable of examining their own actions? Fuck no. But that’s the world we live in. We refuse to learn it and adapt to it at our peril.

other than the knowledge of and conformity to social rituals.

That’s exactly the point.

What is the benefit of screening people through social rituals?

You know instantly who’s part of your culture. Whether or not they are a part of your sub-group within that culture. Whether or not they are capable of interacting with strangers in a way that isn’t frightening or disturbing (try asking a guy on meth “So, how about this weather?”).

If you respond to a social ritual with hostility, that tells the other person exactly what they want to know about you. They know to avoid you, that you are not “friendly”, meaning that you are not a person who can be trusted with other, more important/complex social rituals.

You’re seriously asking “What’s the point of testing the flaps when the plane is on the ground? It’s not flying. What do I need to know about the flaps when we’re not flying? It’s just me and the plane lying to each other?”

It doesn’t weed out anything but honest people.

That’s like saying a pre-flight check doesn’t throw up errors on anything anything but honest machines. But, more to the point, you’re right, in the sense that the people on either tail end of the “good/bad people” bell curve aren’t going to be precisely detected by a simple test of inclusion/exclusion criteria. The ~60% of people in the middle will be. That’s why it’s a screening tool, not an in-depth socio-psychological exam.

As long as your honesty comes closer to filling the socially expected role than, say, a man who’s high on meth or a Qanon conspiracist who thinks “how are you?” is a sex-trafficker code, you’re probably ok.

I agree. That’s exactly what I do. Memorize two or three different socially acceptable answers to each of the half-dozen or so most common “human vibe check” questions.

Because that’s exactly what they are. They’re human vibe checks. It’s not about finding out how you’re really feeling, or what you honestly think of the weather. It’s about being a quick way to sort out who is capable of of functioning in a social capacity and who isn’t, without putting in a lot of time and effort doing an in-depth screening.

“Small talk” is culturally designed to weed out 70-80% of those people who are likely to be dangerous, unstable, or unreliable, allowing us to know who we need to pay close attention to in our environment and who we probably don’t. It’s not a question of “lying” or “telling the truth”, it’s a question of “can you perform your socially expected role in this cultural ritual?”.

Saying “I’m fine, how are you?” is no more “lying” than doing a safety check on an airplane you’re about to fly is (because you don’t actually need to engage the flaps right now, being on the ground and all). It’s just about checking to make sure the right lights come on and the right motors engage. If a person can’t even answer a question they’ve had decades to prepare for, and can’t engage, even to a minimum acceptable degree, in a small social ceremony they’ve watched thousands of times and had hundreds of opportunities to practice themselves, that’s a bad sign. That’s like trying to engage the flaps and hearing some weird grinding noise and getting a red blinking light on the console.

It’s important to note here that I have a bit of an advantage in this arena over a lot of the rest of the community. One of my deepest autistic hyperfocus areas has been observing, experimenting, and collecting data on human interpersonal communications, specifically linguistic communication. It’s all very ritualistic, at its base, and it’s easy for me to create, memorize, and practice the scripts for performing those rituals in different contexts. And when I fuck one up, I can go back through and memorize another script so if that same conversation every comes up in the future (and it will, because there are only so many rituals!), I won’t fuck it up again (to the same degree).

I’ve got a friend who’s otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it’s a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight (“It’s been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!”), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that’s just around the corner.

Also, he’s incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.

I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I’m pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he’d self-harm out of fear of the future.

I honestly think he’s just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It’s scary, so it can’t be true.

Yes, motherfuckers, I do demand that all of my morals and beliefs be as close to 100% internally consistent as possible, and yes, I actually believe them all the time. Who are these assholes saying hypocrisy and amoral selfishness are fucking good things?

POV: You have no idea what POV means.

I was planning a long road trip that I could have done all at once, but decided to break into two days with a hotel stay somewhere near the middle. I was on a bit of a budget, so when I found a room for ~$60, I was thrilled.

When I got there, the shower handle was plumbed backwards (so the “Cold” direction was hot), the first towel on the rack had brown splatters that were very clearly old blood stains, and while I was showering a big roach wandered up onto the lip of the shower like “S’up, bro,” then meandered off like he did this sort of thing every day.

The bed was about as cushy as a gym floor mat, the pillows were bricks, and when I sat down on the desk chair to put on my shoes, the whole thing just about collapsed under me.

The review I left said: “The best $10 hotel room that $60 can buy,” and since then I just make all my road trips in one go if I can’t afford to spend at least $100 for a hotel room.

The way you’ve phrased the question, it sounds like you’re asking if we do it on the regular, like stepping on the scale or trying on old pants. Like it’s something we keep track off as a part of our routine.

In which case, no. I do not measure my penis.

I have measured my penis, once or maybe twice, back during the period of time I could reasonably expect it to still be working on attaining its final dimensions. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be perfectly average.

The question “Have you ever measured your penis?” will get you entirely different results than the question “Do you [‘do’ as in currently, in a continuing manner] measure your penis?”

Glass is half full!

…because the top half boiled off…

It’s going to be a science-based 100% dragon MMO.

Who is downvoting a puppy, and why?

One of the biggest hurdles I had was learning to play Saturn games on a modern controller; the Saturn controller had 6 face buttons lined up in two rows of three, while all the controllers out today copy the xbox/playstation setup of 4 face buttons in a diamond configuration. It was a real pain to remap the controls for some games.

Okay but why didn’t they have a usable option before killing off the stuff people use?

They didn’t fucking think about it. It literally never occurred to them to consider all the third-party work that went into being able to make their site actually usable. They just assumed that, obviously, the official app is fine, and people would just “adjust”.

The conversation they had with the mods of r/blind was a complete joke. It just never once occurred to anyone that people with accessibility needs use Reddit at all.

The following is a dramatization

“Who in your company has accessibility certifications, and which ones?”
“… uh… well, of course we do…[texting their boss what the fuck is an accessibility certification???] I just… [ding! A what? TF is that?]… am not allowed to answer that… … right now…”

“When was the last time you had a third-party accessibility audit, and who performed it?”
“…oh, we… totally… had an accessibility audit, just… like… you know, just recently! And it was performed by… uh… [texting Who the fuck does accessibility audits???]… uh, you know, that big company, from Canada… you’ve probably never met them… [ding! What audits? The fuck are those? I don’t fucking know!] I’m just… not allowed to say right now.”

Wow. You’re really sensitive to external stimuli, huh? Even just hearing someone cough disrupts your entire workflow? You know that’s not typical, right?

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

Got to the one where I had to include an emoji. I know I can get them on desktop, but I wasn’t willing to learn how tonight.

I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.