cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2441630

Definitely check this out.

I'm interested in their repository of data for Autistic people.

Thoughts on the interview?

Listen to it for an hour while you're doing other things.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2438415

Check it out.

Highly recommended podcast, though a bit liberal.

Hosts are well-worth it and have their radical moments.

@[email protected]

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2355483

There's really four parts, but give it a read-through.

who else has the forbidding and incomputable Pile of Mail 💀

mood: currently opening mail 1 week to 4 months old because I know there's a $7 check in it somewhere that'll pay for gas money for my friend to drag my ass around town and to the pot shop

I'm crossposting this widely because every single person with a noise sensitivity who previously tried noise-canceling headphones and found them not useful should know: it might be time to give the technology another shot.

This is a plug for a product. I'm not getting paid for it. I'm actually broke and couchsurfing and unable to work (until now maybe????) due to noise sensitivity, so if this info changes your life, I will put my tip jar in my profile after I post this :)

The story

I got a pair of Sony WH-CH720N for Christmas this year.

I had noise-canceling headphones on my wish list, but very low down, as previously I'd tried a couple pairs, including the expensive and highly-rated Bose QC III, and found them very lacking.

My experience with older headphones: the noise canceling was pretty good, but they caused a pressure sensation on my ears which I can only describe as like having a piece of meat behind saran wrap pressed against my eardrum. They also used to be a lot heavi

What is this??? I know some of you have experienced it, because on very rare occasion it's come up in the past on other autism discussion groups I've been a part of. Sometimes somebody will make a post about burnout and say something like "the knowledge just fell out of my head" when talking about trying to work/think about complex topics while burnt out.

In my case, once I get too burnt out from overstimulation or nonstop social exposure, I get cognitive effects that last for days or weeks afterwards. In some sense, I get "dumber." But this isn't that, exactly, though I'm sure it's related.

Background, and an example: I do web & software development for work. I also live in a place which is a poor fit for my sensitivities, so I've been in chronic burnout for years, and I'm pushed further into acute high-intensity (as in, I become "lower functioning") burnout a few times a year.

I find that once I pass a certain point in burnout, I get to the point where I need to do a complex task,

This study is unique in considering difficulty initiating tasks of any type in real life settings, and by gathering qualitative data directly from autistic people. Four face-to-face and 2 online (text) focus groups were conducted with 32 autistic adults (19 female, 8 male, and 5 other), aged 23–64 who were able to express their internal experiences in words.

[...] Participants described difficulty starting, stopping and changing activities that was not within their conscious control. While difficulty with planning was common, a subset of participants described a profound impairment in initiating even simple actions more suggestive of a movement disorder. Prompting and compatible activity in the environment promoted action, while mental health difficulties and stress exacerbated difficulties. Inertia had pervasive effects on participants’ day-to-day activities and wellbeing.

As someone facing homelessness myself due to issues beyond my control, I just wanted people to know they're not alone.

These conditions are real, and people's misunderstanding - and willful refusal to understand - wrecks lives.

I hope you can get to a safe place where you can exist in your own skin in peace.

I suspect this probably varies across the entire population to some degree, but for me it feels like my senses and my mind aren't fully "bound together" properly when I wake up, and it takes a while of being conscious, QUIETLY, for them to come together and be functioning right. This process takes far longer if I'm in a state of serious/chronic burnout, up to several hours.

If I skip it and jump directly into activity, things usually stabilize quicker, but in a crappy muddled way, and much of my day can be off, I feel dumber, forget things, lower threshold for confusion/distress from random events, etc.

I've been lurking/participating in forums for people on the spectrum long enough that I see "issues with being perceived" type posts pop up every so often. This is relieving to me because I have issues like that, and they are difficult for anyone who doesn't experience them to understand. So it's nice not to feel alone in that way.

I have noticed a definite pattern after months of reading every one of these posts I came across. I think there are two forms of "my desire not to be perceived is causing me distress / avoidance / ineffective behavior" and would like people's thoughts on this.

1. Some people fear being perceived, or have a great deal of what they very clearly understand as anxiety around being perceived. I have a little of this going on but it's by far the lesser portion of my issues being perceived.*
2. Other people seem to have much more trouble with the cognitive load of being perceived. This is the much bigger problem for me. Once another human being is in

I encourage anyone who wants to see more traffic, and has the resources to do so, to create a throwaway account and confess some personal shit on here!! chances are if you do, somebody else out there will end up feeling less alone. that's exactly what I'm doing 😃

before realizing I'm on the spectrum I've been to some support groups for other conditions as well as going thru DBT, and one thing I realized is that sometimes it's cool to have a space to just put your stuff on the table, and everybody else has done so to some extent as well, and you can approach each other as human beings with less pretense because they already know your stuff unlike everyone in "real life" who you're trying to impress.

anyway. try it out! and then ghost the account in a few days/weeks/months, or don't.

but we all know adults on the spectrum have basically no resources. getting some traffic going here could turn this into one.

Self-determination Theory (SDT) is… — a model, a macro theory, of human motivation.

Interesting article (granted with perhaps a bit of academic idealism) with a number of interesting links branching off.

Time to dust this one off again:

Let's say your husband or wife has a friend who will be coming to your city for two weeks on business. This friend writes to you and your spouse, asking if you can put him up while he's in town. Has this person committed a gross violation of etiquette? Whether you answer yes or no may speak to whether you're an Asker or a Guesser--the two personality types described in a three-year-old Web comment that has lately taken on a second life as a full-on blog meme.

(not my blog, just came across it)

Normally I tend to write massive walls of text, but it's Tuesday morning, I just woke up, and the drunks I live with - my friends, who give me this place to stay, as I ended up here after losing my home due to autistic burnout - are already partying. And I'm just so fucking sick of it. The nonstop chaos. Adults in their 30s, 40s, and even their parents in their 60s and 70s acting like idiot frat boys. The inability to maintain a sleep cycle, or ever know who the fuck will be in the house. Not knowing if the bathroom was suddenly "cleaned" at 2am due to a puke scene like something out of The Exorcist, or whether it was just because some drunk got a wild hair and decided to remove all the towels in the middle of the night.

There is so much more, of course, including the usual NT bullshit of blaming me for my problems when in reality, I know what I need to do in order to be healthy, and I'm consistently blocked from it by people who have devoted their lives to substance abuse.

The wor