neurospicy i like this word! 😀

(and i somehow do not dislike it that it takes me ages to choose a fitting emoji ... every 🤔 single 🙄 time 😅)

Now this makes me look into it ... 🤔 I appreciate you expressing your current state of being and full-of-thought-ness. No worries, not monstrous but human with some gravity. May your needs be fulfilled, wherever you are.

only allow this to happen if the surrounding area also hasn’t been interacted by anyone else (maybe like a 5x5 around the pixel) to be undone by the eraser

What's the reasoning for this? One of my use cases would have been that I had started to draw something then realised that someone else was drawing next to me, so I'd wish I could have a way to quickly move my thing out of the way. Another one was with a collaboration on a template and in the end trying some adjustments because the template was unsharp. Which was essentially overdrawing other people's pixels just to see how it looks, then perhaps reverting some of those.

I'm not OP, and I learned about AS only through this community but didn't investigate further (different continent). So I can only speculate: there's a lot of revenue to be made from therapy and pharma if you find a new niche. A fundamentally wrong popular bias, reinforced by pouring massive money into advertising helps that a lot.

To me it also smacks a lot like a part of that post-humanism psy-op. Some (influential) people really want to have "Brave New World" become reality (or "Gattaca"?) -- the "perfect" human machine; engineered and gated; divergence is a flaw. The rest goes happily with the narrative. There was someone posting their dismay about an interview with a person they previously liked, maybe already a year ago. The person in the interview was speaking of how autism should get removed from the gene pool ...

Exactly, I wanted to see the Down-ish looking person is displayed but was too lazy to first look at the most obvious place, or recognise my ambiguity. Sorry to disturb.
And yes there are eugenicist agitators posing as experts. Makes it sort of mandatory to work against.

Can you give a link? Don't mind, I found it out (it's the AS website itself).

An extended undo functionality would have been handy sometimes. Like, having an eraser that would revert any pixel I have placed myself (and that is still visible) to what it was before while adding one to my pixel store until that is filled. That way I would be able to move or correct things without having to wait (possibly twice as long) for the counter.

Thank you!
(Have a player that can zoom in. It's quite some fun at places.)

One doesn't have to be Marxist to recognise such things. I just thought that you phrased it well.
e: I also made a suggestion to ban flags in favour of the art and the spirit, in the "improvements" thread, and expected similar arguments.

LOL I failed to recognise at first that it could also be interpreted as bacteria causing autism. It could also be that because of a characteristic genetic programming, intestine cells produce a compound which specific microorganisms thrive in. In such a case, I wouldn't be surprised if someone also found such microbial indicators in saliva or on the skin.

Just what DuckDuckGo turned up with, I didn't know her before: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-23/tash-peterson-controversial-vegan-activist-perth-melbourne/101214758

May I quote you if necessary? 😀

Taking the risk to make myself unpopular but here is a wish from the heart.

Discourage/ban all nationalism. Especially flags.

Reasons:
Nation-states and country borders are a fairly recent invention in history. In this time and age, it's quite counter-intuitive to still keep identifying oneself with (or get emotionally attached to) such divisive concepts that have been devised by those who govern. Especially in a game like this where collaboration is encouraged regardless of anyone's location or belief, we should not get counter-productive over flags and the politics associated with them, or get to argue wether flags represent government entities or the people (they are usually owned by the former, just to say).

Further, I find flags (and also logos) are just so utterly uncreative things to draw. To me, it just shows how societies are still immature; false attachment to the divisive and competitive concepts they were raised to believe in, to the benefit of those who profit from divisiveness and competitiveness. Therefore, please consider a ban on all flags and instead encourage "real" artwork (especially original one).

e: For those who still want to display some honorary mention of their ethnicity/people/heritage, there is likely plenty of symbolism available which may suit their case much better than a symbol of nationalism.

Thank you, very clear! I suggest to add one pixel every 30 seconds, plain and simple. If a modifier to this timer is required for reasons, that could be based on the number of pixels placed during the past x minutes or so.

From what I read, this was an abuse of regulations, since they could not legally stop her from (peacefully but annoyingly) protesting at places like restaurants

It came to me today that I should play the devil's advocate. Everyone who comments seems to like this, therefore there has to be someone to take the job of un-hypeing it. So this is just a different POV ... because I can.

It's a kind of social experiment which could be fun for some. The idea is to try to make a drawing with very limited resources (a single pixel per message, perhaps a few hundred pixels over a couple of days), and concurrently with hundreds/thousands of participants.

The outcome is less an artwork than it is a work of art that shows the (dire) state of collective creativity and imaginative capabilities of people who have been "rised" in dominance-hierarchic, competition-centric, societies: imagine one of these squatted houses where the walls quickly get filled with tags and political messages. While they in theory could have collectively put on an artwork that really speaks, they'd rather endulge in "us vs. them" group think, competing for the space and overdrawing each others messages.
-- Thus, in a "canvas" action, those who can captivate the minds of the masses, and those who have the proficiency to have armies of machines fight for them, will win the most space. People will say this is fun but it's rather the same as in politics. The outcome is perhaps pretty or hilarious in some details but it's mostly logos and flags and symbolism, flat colours and two-dimensional cartoon caracters. So rather boring; rarely one will see a detail where one would say, "wow, someone really did put some thought and skill into this".

Regarding me, I could imagine taking part in a project to create a bot that would facilitate collective decision making (about division of labour among drawing project participants and on-the-fly decisions about how to interact with neighbouring bits -- stop at boundary, colour-mix, or overdraw -- and drawing of colour-dithered, possibly three-dimensional, pre-planned graphic design (or algorithmic graphics), while at the same time automating the tedious sending of draw commands from many locations (it's the most inefficient way one could do it but who cares in times of HD video streaming).
... Another fun idea that just pops into my mind, would be programming a "game of life" automaton which respects pixels that are already occupied, or overdraws them then re-draws them in their original colour. It could be made to completely vanish until closure time. :-D

that's all so 2-D ...

I started with medidating, deep relaxation. Laying flat works best for me. Discovered I can listen to the silence between the words. Then I was able to stretch out that silence until the words were so distant that they were mere reverberation. If there is a movie as well, that can be faded out. Later I learned a more daytime-compatible technique that is a bit hard to explain and could individually differently (opening the crown chakra).

In case it really ets your energy, and if you have access to it, consider talking to a therapist. You might be suffering from sommething like PTSD, depresseion or burn-out (in connection with autism), and those are really disorders that can be treated.

Wish you well!

While I already knew the channel, I didn't see this particular one before.

What gets me most is actually the comments, and all the replies to the comments. I strongly suggest everyone to read at least the top ones and part of the hundreds of replies. Top one shown to me is this; may I cite respectfully, by @lisedenmark:

To me - autistic diagnosed 3 years ago at 54 - masking is not only about hiding my weaknesses; it's also about hiding my strengths because they are not always well received. Deep critical thinking, eternal curiosity and precision are skills often respected in theory - but in practice: not so much. This really complicates matters even more...

... And then, try to read the overall vibe in those conversations. What is apparent? -- Well first and obviously, they are almost all written by people who have been labeled or consider themselves "autistic" or ND. Second, a large part of it is (heartbreakingly) empathetic!

edit: I have this hypothesis that masking their authenticity in order to fit in with ther respective social group is the normal way also in NT people. The difference being, that to them it comes naturally and effortlessly to wear a mask (read: self-protecting persona), while for NDs it is exhausting and may lead to a sense of self-denial. Consider also the difficulty with the perceived need of constant dishonesty/lying which is a part of camouflaging.
Any thoughts or questions?

Yes, it's known that humans have individually different sets of smell (and taste) receptors. So it wouldn't surprise me that some people would be able to smell ant trail/nest pheromones and the like. I'd guess it has less to do with formic acid though, as they do not regularly release that (it's used mainly for defense). Some people may be really triggered by the smell of certain flowers while most people would barely notice them. I my self recently developed a sensitivity to some certain chemical that appears to be in many cleaning agents, and it's very disturbing to find that disgusting smell in so many public places, dishwashing detergents, hair shampoos.

This phenomenon comes apparent a lot with foods and spices. My great example is coriander (cilantro): half of the people like the herb but for the rest it has a soapy taste so much that any food that contains coriander leaves is spoilt for them. Coriander seeds however, do not contain that specific compound. I'm one who can't stand the herb but very much likes the seeds as a spice.

Related and very interesting is also, is individually different bouquets of mating pheromones which are also present in humans (but perception is mostly subliminary). Those are connected to individual genetic sets of the immune system, a place where genetic variability and mixing is of great advantage. We choose our partners by (being able to) smell, more than we are aware of.

Infodump? ... Infodump.

Impressive work. Thanks for taking your time.

Idea could be intresting but execution is very pathologizing. If they only could stop this.

Yesterday, i learned about AURORA. She should not be missing here. Check out her magnificent voice and deeply emotional music.

This song, A Different Kind of Human (Youtube) (Invidious) talks about the sense of not belonging on this planet and it's a dream about being taken home.

About Aurora herself, if she would fit any diversity categoriy is of course solely her business to not care about :-) (Youtube) (Invidious). She performs with plenty of whole-body gesturing which reminds me of Sinéad O'Connor.

In any case, i for sure would love to dance with her, yeah! (Invidious)

At least it has gathered that the sky on Mars ought to be reddish...

I try everything I can, music, animation, art, programming, even Sports yet no one understands me!

Language!
Seriously, what i found out is that (kind of) everyone "speaks a different language". Unforunately, most people are not aware of this, so the burden is on those who do get aware, to communicate in a language that the other one understands. Autistic people tend to use and understand languages differently, in characteristic ways. More formulaic or more complex, for example -- thus a difficulty arises in translating their idea, say into somewhat more culturally-associative or sequetial/one-dimensional language.

In other words, i think that i understand you! 🥲
The list of things you tried to express in, those can all be taken as different languages, all with their own complexity and levels of formulaity, suitable for communicating different things. I mean for example, that music and arts can be good for displaying emotions and impressions, among other things. Even Sports can convey a lot of practical philosophy.

So, for me it gets interesting when someone says that they are "not understood" but their list of languages they considered to convey their idea does not include verbal language. That is not a fault. Many people and by far not only ND ones don't do well in verbal expression. Some of the most proficient exerts are very good at expressing their ideas in math, but ask them to explain all that in plain language or talk about the philosophical implications and they will fail.

Perhaps you are asking for help with coming toward a "translation", or perhaps it is about finding a suitable way to express. Or perhaps you are asking for someone who could resonate with your way of expression; someone who is able to communicate in your way.

My first question back to/for you may be, could you explain it in words, in what ways is your use of those means of expression you mentioned different/divergent from the way others use them? -- Or is it so that you "failed" in those disciplines at expressing your idea (trying to imitate rather than innovate)? (Did you ever think about it?)
There are ways to going by example also online. One place for such things could indeed be the Matrix chat.

The way in which you use a language or an art differently matters! If only few people understand you then you are doing something out of the ordinary. It might be unfitting in your social environment but it might as well be something novel.

Here is an example from me. When I play my drum then I can tell a story. You bet there is rarely a 4/4 beat in that playing, and it's not just any drum but it's melodic. Rarely there is someone who would inquire about the playing but rather about the drum ... because the technical seems to be talked about more easily than the dramatic, idk. And rarely there is someone who could follow, as the way is intuitive; I never play the exact same thing twice.

I'd also ask you how old you are. It's because more lifetime brings more experience and less lifetime brings less expectation. ... I'm a fourty-eight year old boy who sometimes has something coming through in an odd rhythm on his very own kind of drum, and who sometimes writes multidimensionally, and who makes a distinction between "I" and "i". And something that i am actually quite bad at but anyway -- i'm coming to a conclusion that it's better to seek the right people to communicate with, than trying to make everyone understand. Trying to explain all that in words might fill books, so it might be more easy to find someone who can understand and follow the drum.

You are using storytelling to convey a concept of a challenge, with different approaches where neither is suitable for everyone. A few easy to follow paragraphs that i enjoyed reading. You did well. (no ADD here)

One thought: as this is about serialising multi-dimensional information -- did you ever think of drawing up such relations, as a mental helper scaffolding?

Someone was just bringing in an example of a situation that is difficult for them and which repeatedly upsets them. Remembering all that might make them present their upsettedness, which may be welcome for a deeper understanding and further processing toward clarity on both sides. No need to mirror that. :-)

edit: Maybe i should tell about this afterthought here; it's a perspective that might be unknown to many here. I might still be off because of empathetic limits presented by the text-only medium, and I'm only a messenger who will be speaking an unknown language so don't hit on me ... :-)
Through the shamanic lens: This looks like an example of a "self-fulfilling prophecy", in the way of calling in the presence of a spirit (spiritual entity) by telling the story of having encountered that entity before. So, @CarlsIII@kbin.social in its essence told a story of how they repeatedly meet a spirit which seeks to take their energy by telling them they were doing things not as expected, with the implicate impression that something would be "wrong" with them not having understood some unspoken message, while CarlsIII was just doing things the way CarlsIII would find them fitting. Others probably have read the story and could relate to it or feel with it, thus amplifying the inadvertent call. ... Lo and behold, exactly such a spirit shows up. All it takes is someone who is susceptible to it and ready to serve for a demonstration. Invocations like this are common. Maybe this can help build awareness.

Such things can also be a domineering strategy.

Like other commenters, I also think that most neurodivergent people understand this very well. Their problem arises where they understand it even much further, like seeing the implications of such normalities. For example, that this must be one of the sources of so many misunderstandings between different cultures (and subcultures!). I can not just assume that everyone I meet speaks the same social language that I grew up in.

And is it not rude to assume that everyone's mind works in the same way ... or that others would camouflage in a die-cut way as someone they are not truely; is it not kind of intellectually flat to assume self-similarity, given that this is so obviously not the case -- I mean divergent or not, everyone is just so engraved by their past experience that we have no true idea what mental process is going on inside another person unless we get to know them more closely.

e: or put in different words, what to do if the intangible feelings and emotions communicated by someone just don't match their verbal message? Or worse, what to do when we cearly see someones cognitive dissonance but we are expected to somehow follow that (it's an illness and following through would be self-denial)?

May read: The Double Empathy Problem;
more on affective vs. cognitive empathy: Lost in Translation: The Social Language Theory of Neurodivergence (part 1); (part 2)

I tried to make a TLDR

Thank you!

I like to think of it in this way. They have a mathematical model of a thing which works by supposing the thing is in two states at once as long as its true state has not been determined. That just means that it is actually irrelevant what state a thing is/was in, or if the thing even exists/existed (!), as long as it didn't interact with anything (or is being observed which implies an interaction).

Does the moon exist when you turn your back at it and close your eyes? --> It might not, and it would not make a difference if it didn't.

I'm learning. Do you? This implies it takes time. Glad we can end this breathtaking conversation with a win-win.
I truely have no intention to beat anyone in the domineering game. I'm being snarky, tho.

Late reply but for those who read this later: careful when wanting to know what is "the norm". It's social ideals, mostly. (And if it were statistics, where would we draw the line and why ... homosexual ... disorder?) -- Yet luckily, "disorder" means illness, while a non-valueing statistical out of the ordinary would rather be called "divergent".

Relevant quote from the article:

Whilst [neurodivergent] traits were celebrated in the modernist era, they increasingly began to show up as problems in the Britain during the 1980s – meaning that something had changed in British social normativity. Interestingly, according to critical psychiatrist Sam Timimi and colleagues, this largely happened in light of the rise of the neo-liberal market system, and in particular the services economy. In particular, this economic shift began to alter the notion of the ideal male: rather than being fixed in focus and obsessive, men increasingly now had to forever shift into new roles and to constantly sell one’s “self” in order to fit in. Members of the workforce, in other words, now had to become increasingly agile, flexed, narcissistic, and hyper-social in order to succeed and be valued – and this economic drive became reflected in social normativity at all levels of society.

I shall leave my own impression from the articles i read in the past days, in the direction of de-pathologisation.

• It finally got me to know some about the "expert" criteria and method of assessment, and it's just as i imagined. Luckily, i'm not alone in seeing that not only as clearly failing the clients and professionalism just the same, but in seeing the process of pathologising in itself as potentially harmful. The beliefs we surround ourselves become all too easily our absolute reality. I've been in a self-assessment process for years. That being completely disregarded just to get officialy labeled "dysfunctional", can only be wholeheartedly rejected.
  Quote from the DSM-5 article: “All of the following should be understood as a speculative story from a dominant cultural group about a minority cultural group presented with deep bias and without any attempt to understand how that minority cultural group perceives their differences.” -- Thanks.
• I'll have to make a better distinction between "autism" and "neurodiversity". That will serve to make peace with all those who take benefit from the dysfunctional label. It will also enable me to be in peace with the paradigm of this forum, that certainty about being autistic would require said pathologising assessment.
• That said, i can identify with how people like Janae Elisabeth describe nerodiversity in such a way that it makes me fairly confident in describing myself as neurodivergent. There may be a great variability in traits and their strenghts from person to person, and i might fall on the lower end. One guy with an "Asperger's" diagnosis once told me that he'd think i was "more autistic than he is". Well, who cares.
• ... But i care! I'm still not sure what to call my mental states which i formerly called "autistic". I learned that it might just be something which also appears in autism -- an active form of shutdown. I can actually use such a state to shut out all external influence, so that i can concentrate on one thing without my mind getting into useless chatter because of the distractions from whatever spirit enters my field. -- It is otoh certainly a trauma avoidance reaction, and it's difficult to get out of it.

I'd like to see more people acting like belonging to a real community. That is, mutual support/defense when we see a need, or jumping into an argument if we see there might be a misunderstanding we can help to clear. Real bad actors may be rare but the general misunderstanding is a frequent companion. Especially when something is upsetting, the feeling of being left alone with it can potentially draw energy for days to come.

An educating excerpt from an article i'm just reading:

There is an important distinction between arguing to “win” and dialogue to learn from each other. For nurturing the mutual trust needed for de-powered collaboration at human scale, it is helpful to distinguish five basic categories of beliefs:

1. Beliefs based on scientific theories backed by empirical evidence that we are intimately familiar with. Only a small minority of our beliefs fall into this category.
2. Beliefs based on scientific theories backed by empirical evidence that we are not intimately familiar with. If we are educated, a sizeable minority of our beliefs fall into this category.
3. Beliefs based on personal experiences and observations. For those who identify as Autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category.
4. Beliefs that represent explicit social agreements between specific people regarding communication and collaboration. For those who identify as Autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category, especially agreements with family, friends, and colleagues.
5. Beliefs based on what we have been encouraged to believe by parents, teachers, and friends, … and politicians and advertisers, etc. For those who do not identify as Autistic, the majority of beliefs held fall into this category.

All categories of beliefs are associated with some level of uncertainty regarding the validity and applicability to a specific context at hand. When people argue to “win”, they mostly rely on beliefs in category 5 (opinions). Such arguments are about dominance, they are not open and honest dialogues.

(Healing from Autistic Trauma by Jorn Bettin)
... So, next time someone tells us that all "opinions" ought to be valued the same ... ;-)

But why adapt to it in such a way? Isn't it fucking rude to force someone to lie about their emotional state while remaining ignorant about how they are truely doing? I started to try and find short tacky answers also for the less favourable states, at leaast with people i meet regularly: "... somewhat difficult day", "Oh, I'm exhausted" ... "but I see/hope that you are doing well? / but you look tired, too?" -- That might be a surprisingly easy attempt to a little non-smalltalk conversation, if they have the time.

Feels nice 🙂
... one more thought ... if there are many who complain about it, the ones who are happy about it should also raise their opinions.

Interesting, what does it mean ... do they just turn off the speakers or are people asked to be quiet, too?

I think that heavy moderation (moderators stepping in with warnings, locks, bans) should be a last resort. I wish for more soft moderation in that the regular subscribers could a job to really act as a kind of community they claim to be have been falsely labeled. Most such ill-informed opinions could be countered by pointing to previously made posts which contain some relevant links, for example.