Hi, I’m named after a Pleistocene-era geographical feature. Never met anyone who had that era as their autism flavor, though. I don’t even really have it myself; geology was a special interest of mine as a kid and I like learning about how different Earth was at different times in the past, but it was never focused on any specific time period. The Pleistocene just happened to be when the glaciers sculpted the land I live in.

I stumbled into it by accident. A game I played was running a Twitch promotion so I started watching this random furry vtuber; she was hilarious so I ended up coming back for more streams and eventually joined her Discord server. Now it’s 4 years later and I have a ton of autistic gay animal friends (several irl), a much healthier outlook on life, and a prescription for estradiol. It’s great.

If you want more general advice, I suggest figuring out what flavor of autism you have and then looking for ways to interact with people who share that interest. It seems you don’t have the gaming autism but maybe there’s a way to connect with people who like the things that you are into.

Is Newsom doing things right now that are supportive of those rights? Yes.

Are you aware that you are posting this to Blahaj Zone?

I am going to vote against fascism. If the Democratic party insists on choosing a candidate who agrees with Republican efforts to genocide me, then I am going to vote against their fascist too. And don’t come looking for me to whine about it after; by the time the Niemoller poem gets to you I’ll be long gone already.

My in-person community was toxic and abusive, and I didn’t even realize it until I found a warm, accepting, and much healthier online community to compare with. “Retreating” was a survival need. I’m glad your offline community isn’t harmful to you but don’t assume that is the case for everyone.

I’m also part of one of those small artistic cultures you mentioned and it evolved and thrived way more with the arrival of the internet than it ever did in the days of small in-person gatherings and physical-only publishing. Art is furthered by cultural contact and mutual exchange of ideas, not isolation.

Now, you do have a point that there is a problem with homogeneity and stagnation these days, but the real cause of it is late-stage capitalism. The harder it is for the average person to make a living, the more they are forced to focus all of their energy on making money. For an artist, that means not having any time for masterpieces or experimental projects because Fast and Marketable is the only way to make rent. Arts and culture are starving because a small number of billionaires are sucking up all the financial nutrients (and then passing censorship laws to cut down anything that still manages to grow, until the only things left are as boring and mundane as they are.)

My Aberrant Mind Sorceress had been making frequent use of her telepathy ability to communicate silently and to keep in touch with allies that went scouting away from the party. Then she opened something she was told not to and ended up with a piece of Nyarlathotep living in her mind. When she later used her telepathy on the Monk, the DM ruled that it allowed the outer god to enter his head as well. Now we had a permanent three-way group chat that neither I nor the Monk could leave, whose moderator frequently posted literal nightmare fuel, and the rest of the party was suddenly very insistent that I only communicate with them verbally from now on.

One time I tried using my telepathy on an enemy. His head exploded. Gnarly was very unhappy about me adding people to the chat without permission and suggested that I not do it again.

So the same Netflix that has started using environment-poisoning AI to make visual effects “cheaper” is now making a Captain Planet reboot.

The original show actually had an episode similar to this. The kids had done a lot of work but the problem didn’t seem to be getting any smaller, and they were starting to feel demoralized. Then the villains stepped in to offer a devil’s bargain: A set of gloves which were individually much more powerful than any of the rings but could only be worn if the rings were removed.

No rings means no Captain Planet, but now each of the kids was as strong as he is. They didn’t need him anymore. They didn’t even need each other anymore. And they definitely didn’t need to keep cleaning up pollution when they could just destroy the factories instead. It wasn’t long before they split up and began engaging in eco-terrorism throughout their respective territories, creating lots of chaos for the villains to capitalize on.

I forget exactly how the episode ended. I think the heart kid refused the glove and went on a journey to get the band back together, and something happened where they needed to summon Captain Planet and they were forced to give up the gloves. There was probably some message about how violence looks like an easy solution but it just makes things worse, and progress isn’t always obvious, and if we all just work together we’ll get there eventually.

But then there was another episode where a bunch of scientists created a simulation of Earth to predict how the environment would turn out and it all ended in nuclear war, total ecological collapse, and mass extinction with nothing more optimistic than a “Maybe we’ll figure it out before it’s too late. Maybe.”

You might like the novel Singularity Sky. It’s about a planet, artificially maintained at a 19th-century tech level by its authoritarian government, which is suddenly visited by a post-scarcity civilization. Cellphones begin to rain from the sky all over the planet and whoever picks one up is given an offer: Tell us a story and we’ll give you anything you desire. One person asks for a self-replicating replicator with a fully stocked blueprint library and it ends up being extremely disruptive in many of the ways you’re imagining.

Must have been nice. I was an “essential” worker so I spent the entire time busting my ass in the middle of a packed grocery store, terrified of being assaulted by some angry dicknosed moron and bringing their lethal infection home to my elderly parents. I started having panic reactions to seeing unmasked faces, even those of close family members I was living with. Meanwhile, I kept hearing all these people talk about being paid twice my wages to sit at home and learn new skills like I had always wished I could afford to do.

And what did I get for all of my hard work? A fancy pin from my employer with a letter patting themselves on the back for protecting us. They didn’t protect us at all! They actively defied the mask mandate and told us it was our own fault if customers threatened or attacked us for wearing one!

I’ve always felt more comfortable around animals than people, so of course I would be drawn to animal and animal-like characters in media. (And there are a lot of them when you’re a kid!) It didn’t become anything of note until my teen years, however.

One day I was flipping channels on the TV when I came across a documentary about foxes. It was meant for children, but the information was new to me and I found myself watching to the end. A day or two later I was watching something on Cartoon Network when the main character suddenly held up a fox as a prop for a joke. The next day I noticed a random picture of a fox somewhere, and then it was like foxes were suddenly everywhere.

And yet, despite foxes being such a common animal with great importance in folklore and popular culture, I realized that I knew almost nothing about them. This felt like a problem that I needed to solve. I read everything I could about the creatures, both in my father’s old encyclopedias and later on the internet when I got access to it, and the more I learned the more I started to identify with them. As a socially-awkward teenage nerd I really resonated with the idea of these small, solitary creatures struggling to get by on intelligence alone, without all the easy advantages given to their larger canine relatives. Now I began to imagine myself as a fox, and would often spend the last moments before sleep imagining the adventures of this other me. This idea of an “inner me that is a fox” would become a useful tool for exploring my identity.

While I consider this the start of my furriness, it would be many years before I actually joined the furry fandom. There was a lot of misinformation on the early internet that kept me away, and I won’t repeat it here but I’m sure many of you know what I’m talking about. Then one day a friend of mine shamelessly held a brony birthday party and I decided that if he could embrace his weird interests so openly then I could at least admit mine to myself. I started lurking on r/furry, realized they were actually cool people, and was shocked to learn that the weird little fox people in my head are something other people have and that they’re called “fursonas”.

This sounds similar to the user tagging feature in Reddit Enhancement Suite, which I believe is done client-side. I’ve found it useful for lots of reasons and having it built-in might allow for even more functionality. Another similar feature I’ve seen elsewhere is the ability to add private (only visible to you) notes to profile pages.