Underneath my yellow skin

Special interests vs. hyperfixations, part three

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I was talking to my friend, A, about sepecial interests versus hyyperfixations because of my puzzlement over which is which. She was saying that it wasn’t that clear cut for many autistic people, specially those who are not cis boys. It’s a point I’ve read about before, how male hobbies were considered more acceptable as hyperfixations/special interests than female hobbies. This is true. Think about typical nerdy hobbies (board games, video games, etc.), and they are considered acceptable special interests. Fashion, makeup, clothing? Not so much.

Then, you have to split it up even more. Bear with me.

Let’s take video games. There are acceptable games for hardcore gamers and nonacceptable games. Casual games are, of course, not considered real games to the hardcore brogamers. If  you can’t tell, I roll my eyes hard at that subset of gamers because they are tedious at best and toxic at worst.

FromSoft went from being niche to being cool within the space of a decade. No matter where they fell on that spectrum, though, they were considered the gold bar of hard games. You were a real gamer if you played them–unless, of course, you didn’t play them in the correct* way.

I don’t play the games for the difficulty. I know how that sounds, but it’s true. I like the incredible worlds, environments, and level design. I put up with the difficulty because I enjoy everything else so much. I used to buy into the “you’re not a true From fan if you summon” bullshit, but not any longer. I’m on the “it’s a fucking game. Whatever makes it fun for you, go for it” bandwagon, and I have been for the entirety of Elden Ring.

If people want to solo the games, that’s their business. If it’s fun for them, so be it. I just hate that it’s considered the gold standard way to play the games by the self-appointed gatekeepers–at least it had been for Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. It lesesned with each game, in general, even as it intensified in certain sectors. I remember when  I first played Dark Souls, it was several years after it came out. I bought into the insistence that if you didn’t solo all the bosses, you were shit. I ran headlong into a wall in the form of the Black Dragon Kalameet in the DLC. In addition, there were no summons for that boss, anyway. I can understand why. It’s a tedious fight with some bullshit attacks. It’s very much not a fun fight because Kalameet has so much goodamn health and way too much hyperarmor.

Anyway. In desperation, I went to look up tips for fighting Kalameet. I immediately found the toxicity of the FromSoft forums that persisted no matter the game. 1. Any build you do is wrong. No matter what build the original poster (OP) said they were using, there was at least one asshole who insisted on pushing his own build as the only way to beat the boss. 2. Git gud. I quickly grew to hate reading that phrase. Not only is it dismissive, it’s so fucking meaningless. I mean, that’s why people are asking for advice, damn it! Because they want to ‘git gud’, though they probably wouldn’t phrase it that way.


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Kvow when to walk away; know when to run, part two

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It’s funny. When I have a hyperfixation, it’s intense for the amount of time I’m into it, then it completely disappears. Whereas a special interest lasts forever (so far), but it waxes and wanes over time. I think  I have a hard time thinking that the latter applies to me because while I get obsessed with myy hyperfixations, I don’t with my special interests. Well, not to the same degree. And not depending on what it is.

My biggest special interest is martial arts weapons. Just the whole category. It’s the most important thing in my life. I just read the definition of special interest, and  Idon’t think I have anything that qualifies. It’s supposed to be an obsession that drives you to be the absolute expert in that category. It defines your identity and it it’s an integral part of you. While martial arts weapons certainly is a building block of my identity and an integral part of me, I cannot say that I’m obsessed with them. Again, I practice them every day, teach myself a new one on the daily, and watch videos of different weapon forms. However, I do not consider myself an expert nor do I have any interest in becoming one. I just enjoy them for the sake of doing them. My teacher says i’m a master because I’m teaching myself, but I don’t feel like a master.

I like that I can keep my interest in the weapons high, but not all-consuming. I have a harder time regulating my inteerst in certain video games. I can play some of them in a sensible manner, but others are more likely to get me all tripped up. When Elden Ring came out, I ate, breathed, and slept the game. I played for hours and forgot anything else existed. Now, four-plus years later, I can play it casually and not let it consume me. It’s still my chill-out game that I play when I want to relax.

It’s funny because I’ve started over a dozen playthroughs of the game. I’ve finished it at least five times and probably more like seven or eight. I’m now at the point where I lose interest because the second half of the game is not as good as the firstt (it’s the same with all the From games,  really). And I’m just now discovering some of the more powerful pyros. It’s funny because I’m all about the pyros. In this game, though, there are so many good incantations that I slept on the fire ones. The ranged options are the best in this game by far.

I mean, it doesn’t really matter if it’s an obsession, a special interest, or a hobby (my passion for martial arts weapons). In the end, all that really matters is that I enjoy learning/teaching myself weapon forms. It just bothers me, and I would like to settle it in my mind.

I would also like to be able to get solid sleep. That has nothing to do with me being autistic or not, but, wow, the struggle is real. I just woke up f rom a nap after not being able to sleep much last night–for no reason. Not that I need a reason not to be able to sleep–it happens more often than not.


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Rabbit holes, obsessions, and when to leave them

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Before I get into the topic of this post, I’m riding the blue wave that is happening across the country tonight. It’s the midterms, and Dems are flipping seats left and right. The (Republican) governor of Texas conceded to his Democratic opponent–who is a Latina. Gina Hinojosa. Greg Abbott had been governor since 2015–and it’s quite the shock that a Democrat won. Same in Georgia, except the winner was a black woman. Keisha Lance Bottoms. And, closer to home, Peggy Flanagon is the first Native American woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate, and I’m proud that I got to vote for her. I have more mixed emotions about our new governor, Amy Klobuchar, but it’s exciting to me that four out my five representatives (governor, US senator, US representative, MN rep, and MN Senator) wil be women. It also tickles me that Amy Klobuchar might be able to directly appoint her replacement once she becomes governor (she’s a US senator, currently).

As I read all the results about an hour ago, i let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. There had been rumblings that we would have a blue wave, but I didn’t dare to hope. Things were so bleak and terrible, I half-believed that tthere would be shenangians and the Republicans would steal everything.

Instead, the Dems have taken back the House and the Senate. Several key seats have flipped. As I noted above, the South has risen, and it’s become blue! Or at least purple with blue happening in key positions.

Now, on the one hand, this isn’t unusual when the current administration is doing a shitty job or the economy is tanking (or there’s a pandemic) for the opposing party to win key seats. However, what is unusual is who won these seats. There are a lot of ‘first ever’, and they are mostly women of color.

This reminds me of when the entire Saint Paul Congress-elect in 2024 were women. They still are. Six out of the seven are women of color, and they are all under forty. Now, the St. Paul mayor is a Hmong woman, KeohlyHer (started this year), and she’s the first female and the first Asian American mayor of Saint Paul. They all worked hard to do this, and it was historic.

I have hope for the first time in a long time. Normally, I would steel my heart against it, but I’m just riding it out this time. We fucking deserve it after the hellscape of the last two years, and I’m savoring every  minute. If it causes the orange-haired blowhard to have a meltdown, even better. I mean, he has one on the daily, anyway, so might as well get something out of it.

I am so pleased with the results for tonight. Of course I voted. It’s the least I can do. MN has one of the highest voter turnouts in the country (ranked first three times in the last decade, and usually in the top five), which makes me proud. My guess is that it’s in part because you can sign up to vote on election day at your polling station as long as you’re able to confirm your local address. It can be as easy as having a local registered voter confirming your address. Or a bill with your local address. Or a photo ID like a MN license. It’s so easy, and we want people to vote. Ahem.


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Following the breadcrumbs down the rabbit hole

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I’m tired. That’s not what this post is about, but it’s very true. I got a decent amount of sleep last night, and I’m feeling better than I have in the past few days. Sleep really does make a difference–who knew? (Once again, everyfuckingbody!) I have never felt better in my life than the few months after my medical crisis because of the eight hours ofsleep I got a night for months after. It was terrific, I’ll be honest. Yes, my body was beat up and broken from what it went through, but my god. Going to bed at ten p.m. and getting up at six a.m. for several months was glorious.

Ahem.

Back to the point of my post. I want to talk about how easy it is to go down a rabbit hole when it comes to surfing the net. Let’s take YouTube. The way the home page is laid out, there are dozens of videos visible. And, you can scroll down to infinity if you want. Of course, the algorithms will show you videos based on what you’ve watched, so you can have interesting content for dozens of hours. If you say no to certain videos, you just hone your algorithm to give you more of what you want.

Which is not a bad thing, per se, but it means that for those of us who can get hyperfocused on things, it’s not great. By the way, I just learned that in the aautism/ADHD community, there’s a difference between hyperfixations and special interests. The former are obsessions that last from a few weeks to a month or two. The latter are hobbies that consume you for years. It explained so much for me personally.

Some hyperfixations I’ve had in the past: black diamond rings (not real diamonds, obviously); jigsaw puzzles; cute boxers; stuffed pigs. The last might have been more of a special interest because it lasted quite some itme, but I wasn’t constantly obsessed with it. It’s just that I was born in the year of the pig, and I felt an affinity to them. I also had a hyperfixation with kids books, mainly ones I read when I was a kid.

On the other hand, my special interests have lasted for years. At least two of them. Those would be video games (mostly FromSoft games and indie games) and Taiji weapons. That’s a subset of my interest in Taiji in general, but I’m all about the weapons. I don’t know if I would lump in my interest in Bagua in with my interest in Taiji, but they are at least adjacent to each other.

I probably would put them together in the category of internal martial arts because they are in the same category. However, they are very different to each other. On the third hard, my interest in the weapons for each is similar. Si  nce I’m done teaching myself the Bagua  Knives Form, I have my eye on a Double-Headed Spear Form (Bagua) to teach to myself next. But not until next year. I’m being very conservative about how often I teach myself new weapon forms because my teacher warned me not to just add them thoughtlessly. Her point was that it was better to learn one slowly and well before moving onto the next than to just learn them as quickly as possible.

I’m weird in that I don’t necessarily bury myself in my obessesions. Meaning, I practice every day, and it was getting to be too much for me (doing four or five weapon forms a day), so I pared it down two or three a day. That’s much more manageable, and it made me fall in love with the weapons again. I also do forty-five minutes of warmups/stretches and solo forms. This means a total of about an hour and fifteen minutes–which is much better.


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Can we please just stop it?

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Daylight saving time ended tonight. By the way, the name of it really annoys me. In my brain, it should be Daylight savings time. ‘Savings’ and ‘Time’ should be capitalized, too, but that is neither here nor there. For some reason, I thought it was next weekend, not this. Probably because it felt weird to have it the day after Halloween. which, by the way, is my favorite holiday–even if I don’t acutally celebrate it. Look, it’s complicated. And it’s not what this post is about.

When I realized that tonight was when Daylight Saving Time ended,  my annual gripe about said tradition surged once again. We have artificial lig9ht now. We don’t need to follow the whims of the natural world.

I don’t care which one is chosen,  by the way, but for the love of all the gods, please pick one. I understand why people on either side of the divide want it their way whereas I don’t care. Just fucking choose one. It feels so quaint to

Different day and a different note: I’m so tired. And I think I may be coming down with something. It’s so hard to tell what is something that could be life-threatening and what isn’t. It’s harder because of my past medical crisis, which means that, understandably, I’m on edge. I tend to be like, “If it’s still like this ______ (this time, being tomorrow as tomorrow is Monday), I’ll call my doctor.

This is reasonable in general, but not if it’s an emergency. Which I don’t know how to gauge. First of all, I’m always exhausted. I’m running on a permanent sleep shortage, so that’s not a good way to figure out if I’m really sick or not. When I remember what it was like right before my medical crisis, it wasn’t this. I could not move and was completely fatigued.

I just took a nap, and I feel better. Still don’t feel great, but better than before. It reminds me of how sleep deprived I really am and how  I could sleep for days. I don’t like to take naps because they just make me more tired. Also, it’s me falling asleep, waking up, falling asleep, waking up, etc. Usually, I have a video going, so it’s also me going back to the beginning of the video and then falling asleep again.

When I had my medical crisis, one of the few upsides was how much sleep I got–and how good it was. Granted, I was drugged to the gills, which helped. I got a solid eight hours a night for months, and I never felt better in my life. Who knew sleep was so important and did so much good for the body? Everyone, that’s who. It’s just a question of being able to get that sleep.

Related, I’m going through menopause. Or I would say I’ve been through it. But the symptoms I felt from it are what I’m feeling now. Some compressions on my shoulders and chest (not heart), tingles on my face, and cold flashes. Yes, because I’m such a contrarian, I had cold flashes in addition to hot flashes–and much more of the former than the latter. As someone who doesn’t get cold, it was an interesting experience. Not going to lie, I wasn’t pleased by it. Cold is my sanctuary, and I did not like it being used against me. It wasn’t as bad as the hot flashes, though.

Given my past medical crisis, it’s not hard to fear that it was happening again.


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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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