Underneath my yellow skin

Gender and society in general, part six

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Let’s talk more about gender as it affects how I act in society. In my post yesterday, I wrote about how the label ‘agender’ seems to freak out some people even more than being trans. It surprises me, even though it shouldn’t. Anyone who wants out of the societal norms is looked upon with suspicion.

You would think I would have learned after the negative reac9tions I received to being bi and to not wanting children, but I’m a slow learner. Plus, each big issue only happened every five years or so, so it wasn’t as if I had constant reminders of how out of the norm I was on the big issues.

By the time I reached thirty, I knew better than to talk my mad shit in casual company. As I accrued more and more weirdo traits (not wanting to get married, not wanting to be in a longterm monogamous relationship (being ENM), and not wanting to live with anyone, for example), I kept it to myself. Oh, let’s not forget Taiji weapons and now Bagua. I’m specifying weapons because Taiji in and of itself isn’t that strange. Well, at least the Westernized vision of it. It’s pretty funny, though, that the one movement that is always featured in any movie/TV show which Taiji in it is my least-favorite movement.

It’s called Cloud Hands (more like Moving hands like clouds, but Cloud Hands is the shortened verison), and it pretty easy to do it in a basic fashion. In other words, you can look like a master fairly quickly with this one miracle posture, er….

Of course, if you want to do it well, it takes longer to truly master. That’s a given, and not really the point of this post.

One of the reason I don’t talk about certain things is because I know that I have it easier than other people do. At the same time, being ignored/invisible/denied existence is a special kind of hell on its own. And I do have to deal with bullshit even if it’s not life-and-death bullshit.

So now the newest thing is being agender. If I was thirty years younger, I probably would have reluctantly embraced nonbinary. It’s not really me, though. It’s still a gender, which is not what I want. I am not interested in gender, much as I am not interested in religion. When I was thinking about religion and my (non) relationship to it, I really didn’t like atheist for several reasons. One, I did not have that kind of confidence that there was nothing bigger out there. I mean, to me, it was more ridiculous to believe the Big Bang Theory came out of nowhere. You mean to tell me there was absolutely nothing and then BAM! We get the earth? (Yes, I know there are more steps in there, but no matter what steps exist, it’s still unbelievable to me that it came out of nothing.)


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Talking my mad shit, part five

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As good as I am at reading social cues, there are a few areas in which I falter. One, it’s harder to do it online than in person. That makes sense because you can’t read tone online as easily as you can in the real world.Two, I have such a hard time with dry senses of humor, and that does not always come across online. The driest of dry senses of humor, I mean.

I will be honest. I went to bed after writing the first few sentences above, so I’m not entirely sure what I was leading to with that intro. I have things to say, though, so we might as well dive into it.

I’ve noticed that when I’m tired, my ability to read a room drops considerably. That’s not strange, of course, because sleep is so important. I’ve been having a hard time with it lately (more so than usual, I mean), which is impacting my ability to think. It also makes me more irritable than usual.

I realized some time ago that it’s so tiring to have to mask all the time. I didn’t realize it was masking at the time, but I knew I couldn’t show my real face. I am so finely calibrated to reading a room, it upsets me greatly when I get it wrong. It’s like, “I put in all that effort, and it’s still not enough.” There’s this idea of the double empathy problem, which I’ve only heard about in the last few years. In a nutshell, it points out that just as autistic people have an ’empathy problem’ for allistic people, so do allistic people have an empathy problem for autistic people. In other words,  it’s a two-way street. The article I linked above mentions that if autistic people have an empathy problem for allistic people (which is debatable*), then the same can be said about allistic and their lack of empathy for autistic people.

I will admit that I get salty when people in the majority admonish people in the minority to realize something about the majority world that is incredibly obvious, as if we would not be excruciatingly aware of it. For example, I was in a post about gender, and I mentioned something about being agender. It was just an aside and nothing wild–just that I was agender and I did not use gendered pronouns or something to that extent. A  cis het woman I had previously noted as being a bit weird about agender (but not about trans people) before went on this long rant about agender and trans people that was truly unhinged.

This was in a post about a trangender customer support rep being misgendered, by the way. The woman who responded to me (though not directly, interestingly enough), let’s call her Lucille just because, went on a long screed about how being a woman was deeply important to her. Fine. I’m not out here trying to dictate how others feel about their gender. If she had left it at that, I would have noted that it wasn’t relative to the topic, but whatever.

Then she went on to say that if she met someone with the standard hallmarks of a gender, then she would address them as that gender. Uh. I knew from previous comments by her that she wasn’t stereotypically feminine herself. In this rant, she went on to say that, but then insisted that she would use hallmarks like long hair to label a person a certain gender. What? She went on to say that she would be upset by being misgendered when she just said she would do the same thing to someone else for the opposite reason (the hair thing specifically).


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Speaking out tactfully, part four

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I want to talk more about knowing when to speak up and how. It’s something that many neurodivergent people struggle with. I have less issues with it than most because I was taught at a very young age that what other people thought/felt was more important than what I thought/felt. In other words, I was always tailoring myself to other people. There was a time in my thirties whwen I swung to the other extreme and said my opinion much more than I really needed to. Even to this day, if I get a hair up my ass about something, I will defend it to the death. Even if it’s better for me to back off. Even if it’s such a small thing in the big picture, that I would be better off stepping down. In fact, sometimes, I think it’s when something is small potatoes that I find it easier to let loose.

I get mad at myself when I lose control over my temper over some silly little thing. In the past, I had a very tight rein on my temper and it took a lot to make me lose it. After my medical crisis, though, I lose it much more easily. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with my stroke, but I can’t say for sure.

I envy people who just talk fearlessly. Who have no misgivings about saying whatever is on their mind. I’m not sayng it’s a good thing overall as filters exist for a reason. Also, oftentimes, what they say is shit. But since they say it with such confidence, it’s taken as fact. There have been many studies that show how far you can get with just a clipbord and a confident demeanor. Alarmingly so, actually. Therre are many reasons for it, but the bottom line is that it works.

That was not what this post was about, though, so I’ll set it aside.

When I was in my twenties, I tried to hard to contort myself to fit in with other people. To an embarrassing degree. Taiji has helped me correct that to a certain extent, but I’m still way too much of a people pleaser. It’s one reason I like being on my own most of the time. That’s when I can just relax and be me.

Back to speaking out. In the last post, I talked about how it’s better not to go full bore when you’re with people you don’t know well. The problem is that many people  aren’t aware of their surroundings and/or don’t have a very high EQ. The latter is something that appears common for neurodivergent people, but it can happen to anyone. I mean, it’s more of an issue with neurodivergent people, but there are plenty of neurotypical people who have low EQ as well.

It’s hard to say how difficultI would find it if I hadn’t been trained to put others first since I was a kid. It’s so second nature to me by now, sadly. But I’m working on finding the middle between always thinknig about others and only thinking about myself. I’m not sure where that line is, but I try to stay on the right side of it.

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When is it worth it to speak out, part three

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I want to talk more about bumping up against the line in a crowd. What line? The line of what is socially acceptable and what isn’t. Here is my post from yesterday in which I talked about a guy who used all the classic derailing tactics when he was called out on his bullshit after making a gross comment (not. a. joke) out of nowhere.

There were several things wrong with what he did, starting with the initial comment. Here’s the thing, though. That could have been forgiven (though, to be honest, Bob, the name I gave this guy, was on many people’s last nerve), but when he doubled down and turned it on how everyone else was just an uptight prude, and likened himself to a comedian being…pilloried for something or the other–that’s when he completely lost many people in the channel. It was unhinged, quite frankly, and I didn’t want to give enough brain cells to understand it.

In addition, he said we were all uptight, which made me roll my eyes so hard, I almost sprained them. I am the filthiest person in the Discord, though I keep twenty percent of it to myself. Hm…..Maybe twenty-five percent. Thirty? Something like that.

Again, what he said wasn’t funny. It wasn’t even dirty in the way he was implying with the prude comment. That was another mistake he made–thinking that making a comment tangential to a sexual predator was the same as making an edgy sexual joke.

Here’s another issue I have in deciding whether to talk about something or not. If I can’t even think about how to bring up the issue, I just let it go. In this case, it would have been trying to tell him why he was wrong. Not just the comment, but the whole context, and the fact that he so badly read the room. And that he threw a tantrum over being told (again, quite gently) that had stepped over the line.

Another factor in whether I speak up or not is if other people do. If they do, then I don’t feel as pressured to say something. In this case, several people immediately clapped back at him. Hard. Hard as in many people doing it at the same time. Not hard as in being mean. They were frank and open, but not mean.

I have not seen that reaction in person many times. I mean, the classic DARVO action by Bob. But, as I mentioned, this guy was always online and surrounded himself with likeminded people. That was another defense of his, by the way. That it was fine with his friends. Or was the other guy who I mentioned in the first post? I think this guy tried to use a similiar tweet situation (tangentially similar) to justify what he’d done.

It’s astounding to me how many people just keep digging that hole. Someone says that something hurt them, and at the very least you just stay silent. I would not apologize if I truly didn’t think I said something wrong, but I also wouldn’t keep pushing it. Not for something I claimed was a joke.


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Finding the line, part two

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The failure mode of clever is asshole – John Scalzi

This is a quote that has gotten some mileage online and for good reason. John Scalzi wrote a whole post about this back in 2010. I’m sure it was in reaction to something that happened, but that part doesn’t matter. It’s been a wihle since I’ve read the whole post, but that quote has always stuck in my head. Plus, people use it a lot online (and usually in the correct way). I reread the post when I decided to head this post with it, and it’s definitely not “apropos of nothing in particular” as he says at the start of the post. That is neither here nor there, though, because it’s still relevant.

Now, he used it specifically for people who were DMing someone for the first time (or something similar), but it works in a broader sense, too. if you’re in a group that isn’t your tight group of friends who know you really well, the stakes are really high (socially) to make a risque/crude/gross comment. Not a joke, though it’s often phrased that way (afterwards, in defense).

Here’s my first post in which I talk about a situation that happened in the Discord I’m in. A person whom I’m calling…Bob. That’s the name I gave him. He made a comment that he said was a joke (but it wasn’t), then furiously doubled down when others called him on it.

I got to it late and was very tired. I don’t like getting into frays, so I have to decide if it’s important enough for me to say something. It takes a lot of energy for me to debate things especially as I automatically think my way of thinking is wrong*. I’m not a good debater, and I can end up feeling frustrated at the end of things if I haven’t changed the other person’s mind.

One thing that plays into my decision whether or not to debate is if I think I have any chance on changing someone’s mind. I know it’s futile to think that way because most people reading will never comment, but might think about what I have to say. But in general, I evaluate whether the person I’m responding to is worth it.

On the other hand, sometimes a topic is important enough to talk about it whether I think I can change anyone’s mind or not. That happened recently in which I read comment after comment that irritated me on a specific subject. It went on and on with a health amount of “kids today” underlying the whole argument. And, “I’m one of the good ones”, too. Both of these are lines that really stick in my craw.


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Knowing the line before you trip over it

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In the Discord I’m in, there have been two instances of guys (relevant) tripping over the invisible line of what is and isn’t (silently) acceptable in the Discord. I’ll call them John and Bob. I want to talk about it because it’s part of how people are instinctively supposed to know the line when it comes to jokes in any given group. And the penalty can be harsh when people get it wrong.

The first person had never posted before and went right to two channels and posted a long post about some fan fic he had written that was, ah, shall we say NSFW. I did not read them because of the explanation he had given before posting the link (was NOT touching that with a ten-foot pole). He posted it in two places, which were the right channels for it if it were simply something he had written. But, given what it was and his long-winded explanation (including other examples), it was very much not a good first impression.

When called on it, he defended himself by saying that it was similar to the grot the content creators exchanged with each other on the regular. I’ll let that sit there for a minute while I exlpain the other much more complicated situation.

The second guy, Bob, has been around for a while. He doesn’t post very often, but when he does, he manages to piss someone off almost every time. One time, it was me when it was right after the American election, and he was acting as if he were a political savant when the truth was that he didn’t even live in this country. I’m not saying people outside the country  can’t comment on the election, but they certainly don’t know what it’s like for an American, especially for a triple minority like me. He himself is a racial minority, but in a different country. One that is pretty directly affected by its relactionship with America, but still, not an American. Plus, he was negating my lived experience as said triple minority American. Which, not cool at all.

I’m saying this because I want it to be clear that he’s said some pretty insensitive things during the time he’s been on the server. He tends to show up once a week or so and just say something inflammatory. He’s not doing it on purpose (in other words, not malicios), but he’s definitely ruffled many feathers. He’s autistic (he’s said it himself; I’m not diagnosing him), and he definitely cannot read a room.

Today, he crossed a line in a similar way to the guy above. He made a really gross ‘joke’ that really wasn’t a joke and offended several people. The joke (which I’m not going to repeat) falls in the category of ‘say that among friends you really know well’. When people told him he had crossed the line, he doubled down. He compared it to something one of the content creators we follow would say on the show, which is similar to what John said when he made his faux pas as well.


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My gripes, big and small, with Elden Ring (part two)

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Let me preface this by saying Elden Ring (From Soft) is my favorite video game of all time. By a hair. My second favorite? Dark Souls III, also by FromSoft. In fact, I’ve gone back and forth several times as to which game is actually my favorite. I finally landed on Elden Ring, but that doesn’t mean it won’t veer back to DS III.

I’m saying this because I’m going to be very critical of Elden Ring, and I wannt it to be clear that it’s from love. Well, also frustration, but mostly love. I want them to be better, that’s all. Here’s my post from yesterday in which I talked about the frustration I had with fulfilling a small side quest, one that frustrated me several times when I’ve done it in the past.

I want to talk about a bigger issue with this game–and it’s an issue that happens in many of the From games. That issue is that a large portion or all of the second half is not good. Let me explain. In doing so, I’ll be spoiling some of the second half of the game, including a major area. I’ll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but I need to talk about specifics.

*SPOILERS*

About a hundred hours into the game (I’m slow), I made it to the halfway point. Of course, I didn’t know it was halfway, and I thought it was more like two-thirds of the way there. Honestly, it should have been because the next area was my least favorite in the whole game. Hm. I can talk about it without naming it, I guess. It’s a meaningful area in the game as it’s talked about before I even reach it. An NPC talks about it, and it’s mentioned in at least one item.

This area is easily the worst in the game. Not even a later optional area that is harder and more frustrating is as bad as this area. Someone noted that there is not one single new enemy in this rather vast area, and they’re right. All the enemies are from earlier in the game, although some of them might be reskinned. And, yes, one type of enemy is from this area, but one shows up much earlier in a gaol as the boss of that jail. Yes, he’s much easier then, but it’s the same enemy.

This area (and the optional area that branches off from it) are the snowy areas, which makes me sad because I love snow. But why is it usually a bad sign in a game? Because devs love to make visibility limited or nonexistent in said area. It happened in Dark Souls II in what is almost universally agreed upon as the worst area in the game–and it’s in the last DLC. It happened in this game and this area as well. There’s a section where the wind is constantly blowing and you can’t see anything. It’s the only area of the game I don’t know at all becuase I was constantly hooning it through that area. It’s not fun. It’s not cute. It’s not exciting. It just…is. It feels, dare I say it, cheap.


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Things in Elden Ring that annoy me, big and small

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I’ve been playing Elden Ring (FromSoft) again with one of the two new classes (Idus Knight), the one that was billed as the flexible build class. Not that exactly, but that’s how I thought of it in my mind. I wanted to do a dexish build, but I ended up basically reverting to my faith-based character. I kept my reverse-blade knife this whole time (about a third of the way into the game–well closer to half), but I think it’s reached the end of its usefulness. I’ve been mostly using miracles, anyway, as is my wont.

Have you heard the good news of my favorite utility miracle, the Lightning Spear? It takes relatively little FP (Focus Points), is quick to throw (though you can charge it if you want), and it works well on most enemies. I have it in my first slot on all my characters (if I have the Faith to use it–which is 17. That’s relatively low. Idus Knight starts with 11 Faith, so it’s not hard to get to 17.

There’s a great basic miracle called Flame Cleanse Me that cures scarlet rot and poison, and alleviates the build up of both. What I didn’t know until I looked it up just now was that it also removes  frostbite. It only takes 12 faith so there’s no reason not to get it. Also, I only learned recently that it does 15 fire damage to yourself when you cast it. That’s negligent, though, and well worth it. I always get this incantation–always. It helps so much with certain areas *cough cough* Caelid, arguably the worst area in the game *cough cough*.

That’s not what I want to write about though. Before I continue, I will be spoiling optional areas, optional NPC quests, and other things related to both.

*SPOILER*

Let’s talk Ranni’s questline. More to the point, the area you access late into her questline. I want to talk about it because there’s a rise in it that is so damn annoying to get into. Rises are where sorcerors keep their best spells and memory stones. Memory stones are spell slots, essentially. Which, by the way, is so much better than leveling up attunement for slots. In Dark Souls III, it took an increasing amount of souls to get a level, and you needed certain amounts of levels to get another attunement slot. I usually had five slots because they cost so damn much. In Elden Ring, you get 10 spell slots by the end of the game (and a talisman that gives you an extra two). That’s double the slots without using any runes. Well, you have to buy at least one of the memory slots (and you start with two). And, of course, you have to increase your Mind in order to get more FP. Each spell/incantation costs FP to cast as does summoning most of your spirit ashes.

Ahem. Back to the rise. Chelona’s Rise. In order to get break the seal, you have to ‘kill’ three wise beasts. It’s three giant ghost turtles. One is right next to the rise. Another is far away and you’ll never find it on your own (though there are turtles leading up to it, as there are to all three turtles). The third…ughhhhhh. This is the one that irritates me. It’s in the air next to a spirit spring (a stream of air that Torrent, your spirit steed, jumps into and shoots straight up in the air), and you’re supposed to jump up and hit it on the way down. It’s supposed to be pretty automatic.


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The problem with content creation

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“90% of everything is crud.” – Sturgeon’s Law

Theodore Sturgeon was a sci-fi writer who had his first sci-fi fiction story published in 1939. In the early fifties, he first stated what eventually became Sturgeon’s Law. Tired of being told that 90% of sci-fi was crud, he retorted that it was true of all genres, but it was only sci-fi that specifically got called out for being crud. He pointed out that when people talked about mysteries, they mentioned the elite writers (which is funny because when I got into reading mysteries in the nineties/aughts, it was definitely considered lesser than literary fiction and lumped in with sci-fi).

It’s been adapted into “90% of everything is crap”, whereas I say, “90% of everything is shit”. In addition, I’ve upped it to 99%, although I will generously concede that it might be closer to 95%. The point is that true art is a very small percent and everything else is shit.

I would point out that there is even more effluvia these days simply because it’s so easy to put things on the internet. That makes me hold firm to my idea that 99% of everything is shit. In fact, I would probably up it to 99.9%. Just because anyone can, it doesn’t mean that anyone should.

It’s daunting to even find anything remotely consumable on any given subject. I’m not talking art, by the way; I’m just looknig for good content. So, the top 10%–not five or less. I put “autistic” in YouTube, and the first fifty or so videos are by white men and women. In fact, one of them is one of the videos I saw by a white man talking about masking for autistic woman–and did not have a female guest in his video. He thought wearing a wig and talking in a higher voice would be enough. Which….yeah. That’s not it, my dude.

There’s a lot of videos on autistic people with ADHD, which I’m pretty sure is not me. The Asian woman I’ve mentioned in a previous post (the last post? Not sure. Time. What even is it?) is not in the first fifty or so videos. I put Asian American in the search box, and the Asian American woman I mentioned is the second hit. And there are many videos with the gender pretty split between the two binary genders.

I found one person who was queer, nonbinary trans, autistic, and Korean American. I am including one of their videos below because in it, they talk about representation in media, intersecitonality, and the hope that one day, they will have plentty of mediocre media that reflects themselves to choose from.

I’ve made that joke, by the way. That the day when I can be a mediocre person of color and not be called a detriment to my race or other signifier.

When I was getting my masters in Writing & Consciousness (do not ask. I don’t want to talk about it), my advisor and I had a fight over one of my stories. Oh, that was my project for the program. We had to write…I don’t exactly remember what, but it was something like 50-100 pages of short stories, all around a theme.


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The root of all…evil?

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It’s not money. I’l/l give you hint. It has something to do with my “bed”, the “night”, and cloosing my eyes. (I sleep on my couch, and I sleep in the morning, thus the quotes around bed and night.) It’s sleep–or rather, the lack of sleep. Before I continue, here’s my post from yesterday in which I talk at length about how I’m even doing autism wrong. And how I view things so differently than normies.

Every time I manage to get eight hours and only waking up once, I’m astounded at how great I feel the next day. Well, great depends on me not being too sleep-deprived to begin with–which isn’t guaranteed. In fact, I would say that I’m usually sleep-deprived*, and it’s not getting any better.

It’s so frustrating because on the surface, it seems like it would be so easy. Just fucking go to bed at a reasonable time. How hard is that? And because my sleep is so off, I could definitely ease into it by going to bed one hour earlier every night. Or if I can’t do that, then one hour later to do the cycle the other way around.

I could take a bath/shower an hour before bed. (No scented anything, though. Because ughhhhhh I’m allergic to everything.) Warm herbal tea; warm milk; warm anything before bed. Exercise, reading, and more. None of it has worked. I’ve even napped before sleeping (not recommended. It just makes me madder at myself because if I’m endlessly nodding off, then I should just go the fuck to bed).

It’s so frustrating. I’ll nod off for ten minutes while watching a video. I’ll rewind to the point where I had nodded off to watch it again. And I’ll promptly doze off again. This will happen four or five times in a row before I finally stay awake. Why don’t I just sleep the first time I nod off? If I could stagger off to bed (couch) before falling asleep, then I could actually sleep for a good long time.

This, apparently, is part of being autistic–having difficulties with sleep, I mean. Another one that I find frustrating is the inability to read tone very well. I have a bleak/dark/sarcastic sense of humor, and I have a hard time reading a dry sense of humar. And tone in words. And with different countries having different senses of humor, I can’t always read tone correctly. My brother has a very dry sense of humor, and while I know thim well enough to get maybe 75% of his jokes, there are times when I’m completely at sea.


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