Okami

Also playing Factorio.

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.

That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies.

You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.

You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."

• Hub, Secondhand Lions (2003)

The ball was a colorless wireframe. Color wasn’t necessary for the scenario.

The person was genderless. Gender wasn’t necessary for the scenario. They looked like a wire frame skeleton of a person.

The ball was roughly the size and density of the smallest size bowling ball.

Table surface was circular wireframe with four legs. Material wasn’t filled in as I wasn’t trying to model for friction.

My imagination doesn’t tend to fill in unnecessary details. Too much wasted processing power. I also don’t really envision things. Like, I don’t “see” them in my head. I feel out the shapes and weights and other physical properties relevant to the scenario and let my intuitive understanding of physics roll the scenario forward.

Like, I know the ball rolled until it fell off the table, it fell some distance, then bounced off the floor three or four times with a sharp crack, as I filled in that the floor was concrete as soon as I needed to know how it would bounce, and the sound it would make filled in naturally from there.

I genuinely don’t know whether how I think qualifies as aphantasia. I don’t really imagine visual stimuli, but my imagination is very thorough for sound and feel.

It took me a long time to appreciate eggs growing up, too. Used to only be able to eat them scrambled. Fried eggs and boiled eggs would make me nauseous. I hated the taste and texture of a runny yolk.

It wasn’t until my mid 20s that someone finally made me eggs over easy and taught me that you’re not supposed to just eat the yolk straight, but treat it as a sauce to complement the flavor of the other food on your plate. It was a revelation.

I still don’t like sunny side up or boiled eggs, and I still don’t like the texture of runny yolk on its own, but I love me some over-easy or over-medium eggs on a burger or over bacon, sausage, hash browns, waffles, or pancakes. Let that shit spread everywhere to mask the texture and maximize the flavor.

Never would have thought of that on my own. I wouldn’t mix foods growing up, and I still don’t when left to my own devices.

I’m not a super picky eater, but there are some foods I won’t touch.

Pickles, kimchi, and beets taste awful. Cottage cheese is a sensory nightmare. I don’t think I’ll ever attempt oysters again.

I hate how prevalent pickles are in American restaurants. Seems like I have to ask for no pickles in every new place, and half the time they’ll have pickles anyway, or they’ll include pickles in dishes that have no business including pickles and I wouldn’t think to ask for them to be excluded. If I pick them off I can still taste the pickle juices, and it ruins the food. The sandwich and burger places think they’re so fancy for including a pickle spear in the plating, and it’s a crapshoot whether they keep it isolated off to the side or drape it across the food where it can contaminate everything. Miserable.

Pickled jalapeños, lettuce, and mustard are on thin ice.

I don’t like ranch dressing or ketchup, but I’ll only grumble a bit if I find them in my food.

I’ll try anything once, and I do go back to foods I hate every now and then to see if my tastes change. I used to have a hard aversion to seltzer water, sour cream, and hoppy beers like IPAs, but I’ve come around on them. I have a much better appreciation now for bitter and sour flavors than I did as a kid.

Still. Fuck pickles.

I default to my subscribed feed, which only shows the communities I’m interested in, and when I finish browsing that for the day I switch over to the All feed so I can find new communities to subscribe to and block communities to filter out the ones I’ll never be interested in.

It just released late last year, and it is one of the finest puzzle games I’ve ever played. It took me around fifty hours to get the ending, and I’ve got a folder full of notes and screenshots from putting together puzzles.

Go in blind if you can, and do your best to avoid spoilers if you need to look up any puzzle solutions. This game has more depth than Outer Wilds.

Throw Void Stranger on that list. It’s a fantastic Sokoban.

I would flip my gender to female and ensure that my hair would match my Dad’s hair color. Fix my chronic pain and IBS if I can, assuming those are genetic. Fix my singing voice. I ended up the shortest of my siblings, so double down on that and drop a few more inches off my height. I’m 5’8" now, so 5’ even to 5’4" seem nice. My grandma’s that height, so the code is in there somewhere.

Edit: I completely missed the latter half of the OP.

I haven’t done much experimentation. I know caffeine calms me down and helps “grease the wheels” in getting my brain to function. Alcohol helps ease my social anxiety and helps me relax and unmask around my close friends.

I haven’t found any diet that specifically eases autism symptoms, but meal-prepping when I do have energy does help for the times when I don’t.

Original off-topic post below./edit

When I’m not trying to lose weight I just cut sugary drinks out of my diet. My biggest rule is that if I go to the fridge for any reason I must pour myself a tall glass of water and drink that before I get to enjoy whatever snack/drink/meal I went to the fridge for. I don’t drink enough water of my own accord, and this helps offset that.

I live alone, so I don’t buy any food I don’t have a plan to eat. I can’t stand food just sitting uneaten. The recipes I’ve come up with for meals require simple fractions of products I know I can get at the store, so I can, for example, buy exactly enough ingredients to make my favorite stir fry recipe four times and have nothing left over.

When I do try to lose weight, I’ve found the keto diet has been most effective for me to actually stick to it and enjoy it. Even when I’m not strictly keto, I still stick to keto snacks and drinks, and just let carbs be in my meals. I have very little self-control around snacks that are in my house, but I have plenty of self-control at the store, so I just don’t buy unhealthy snacks to have at home. Left to my own devices I can and will eat Girl Scout cookies by the sleeve and drink a 2-Liter of soda in one sitting. When my friends visit for board games and leave their snacks here they will be gone within 24 hours. The recent popularity of seltzer waters like La Croix have been a godsend for sating my soda addiction, since I can get the mouthfeel of soda without the carbs or the carcinogens in “diet” soda.

Farming? Really? Man of your talents?

I like the smell of ammonia. I use ammonia based cleaners almost exclusively. Bleach smells like nothing to me, like if TV static was a smell.

I dislike strong perfumes, and I hated doing laundry for a long time and would put it off as long as I could before my grandma introduced me to scentless detergent. I don’t use scented dryer sheets either. I shouldn’t be able to smell my clothes after a wash. It’s gag-inducing.

You guessed correctly.

I was pulling an all-nighter reading fan fiction serials while drinking Kraken mixed with Orange Juice and had also eaten a whole frozen pizza around midnight. I was not ok. The incident happened around 3am.

First time I’d ever vomited while drunk. I know my limits better now.

My Laptop will be 15 years old this year.

It was running Vista when I bought it, then upgraded to Win 7, and now runs whatever flavor of Linux I feel like installing.

Battery is shot. Screen connection is iffy, but works if you wiggle it. Several keys stopped working after I accidentally threw up on it, but I can use an onscreen keyboard for those.

Still runs fine. She’s a trooper.

How much time have you spent being single?

Most of my life. I’ve had two serious relationships and one complicated one, none lasting more than six months. My last relationship ended in late 2019, so it’s been 4.5 years. I’m 33 this year, and have been single for about 31 years total.

If you’re currently single: is it by choice or circumstance?

Bit of both. I choose not to invest my time, money, and energy into pursuing a relationship, but sometimes that choice feels forced because I don’t have enough time, money, or energy to spare for pursuing a relationship. If it happens, it happens, but I’m not proactive about it because I’m focusing on work and my hobbies. If I ever find myself financially stable without working full time I might have time to actively pursue a relationship, but that’s not in the cards right now for my autistic ass. I spend almost all my free time recovering so I can go back to work.

I joined a LARP community and I go to board game and DnD meetups specifically to meet people and keep my social muscles healthy. Hopefully I’ll find a partner in those circles someday, but no luck so far. The unfortunate reality is that every girl I meet is already in a relationship. I have made a lot of friends, so mission accomplished as far as that goes, but the folks who say that joining hobby groups and hanging out with people who share your interests is the best way to find a partner are full of shit.

Finally, both of my serious relationships ended on good terms because my partner felt I did not communicate enough with them, while I felt the amount of communication they were expecting was too much for me to maintain, which made the relationship a source of stress and anxiety for me. We broke it off, and I’m still good friends with one of them. This is a problem with me that I’m not sure how to fix, and it’s very much not conducive to a healthy relationship. I hope I can find a partner who’s comfortable with that some day, but it’s made me leery of jumping into new relationships.

Do you / did you enjoy single life?

No, but I don’t enjoy dating life, either. Life in general is an unending stream of demands, and I never get enough time to stop, breath, and reset. That’s true while I’m single, and it was true while I was dating.

What are / were the pros and cons?

Pros:

• My living space is my own. Everything stays exactly where I left it, and I can decorate as I please.
• I eat when and what I want. I can cook or eat out as I choose. Meals don’t need to be a production, and if I want to stock up and eat the same thing for weeks on end there’s no one to complain about it.
• My time is my own. I can schedule things whenever and I don’t need to coordinate calendars. If I need to travel for work I can drop everything and just go.
• No fucking kids. My niece, nephew, and soon to be 2nd nephew are plenty.

Cons:

• I’m so lonely. So very lonely.
• Porn addiction. I have a high sex drive, no healthy outlet for it, and it’s an easy dopamine hit for stress and anxiety relief.
• Financial stress. I’m barely getting by on a single income.
• Constantly questioning my identity. I think I’m some flavor of aromantic sex-positive asexual, and I suspect I’m bi and/or trans, but I’ve got no partner to explore my own gender and sexuality with. It’s hard to tell how much is real and how much is my mind spinning off the rails with nothing to latch on to.

Is / was partnership a goal of yours?

Yes. I’d like to settle down with a fellow introvert so we can be alone together.

My phone only goes off silent on the rare occasions I’ve been asked to be on call for an emergency project at work.

So like three times in the last ten years.

I remember having the Batman Forever and Batman Knightfall audio books on cassette back when I was a kid.

I listened to them so many times the voice and cadence of the narrator is permanently burned into my subconscious. I still quote them from time to time without really thinking about it.

The price.

Bought a used '96 Mazda Protégé off a coworker for $700. Ran it into the ground. Scrapped it for $300 when I could finally afford a better car. Definitely got my money’s worth.

I got to learn what driving without power steering felt like after the compressor locked up and the drive belt shredded. Ended up replacing it with a smaller belt just for the power steering since I couldn’t afford to replace the A/C. Drove with the windows down for a few months. Good times.

Yes. I check the organ donor box when I renew my driver’s license. If I’m in an accident then I don’t need 'em anymore. Let someone else use 'em.

He come to save!