Antigravity Zebra

Light Falloff

This artwork is a tribute to nostalgia— a gentle reflection of a time and place that shaped a golden childhood.

This old building holds the soul of simpler days, where laughter echoed through cozy rooms and the scent of home-cooked meals drifted from the kitchen. It was a world filled with video games, board games, and birthday candles glowing with joy.

Homework felt like a shared adventure, not a chore, and the hum of the TV, with its clunky antenna, was the soundtrack of peaceful evenings.

Neighbors were more like extended family, and safety was so deeply felt that locked doors were almost an afterthought—only discovered to be broken the day we were leaving town.

If you leave you instantly cook due to the radiation and leave a glowing corpse. If you stay, there are no health problems because of fey stuff causing physics shenanigans. Want to wait it out? The half-life of uranium-235 is approximately 704 million years.

In fact, I love wordplay of all kinds. Teenage me was fascinated to learn all the types of figurative language there are in poetry and literature.

But paperwork and questionnaires are hard, because there's so much they don't state clearly. Or they don't leave room for enough nuance.

"List all the jobs you've had, with start and end dates." What if I don't remember the exact day or month? Is the year enough?

"Have you been suffering from blurred vision?" Well, if I take off my glasses the whole world is blurred, but I'm fairly sure that's not what the intake form at the optometrist is asking.

Or the infamous (and infuriatingly stereotypical) "Would you rather go to a library or a party?" What sort of party? Where? Who's there? I work at a library. Am I currently at the library for work or pleasure? Does it have a good collection?

i got stumped on the census one year because it asked me to respond by July 31st and to tell them how many people lived in my house on August 15th.

this was, clearly, impossible. i can't tell you how many people past-tense did something on a future date. it doesn't even make sense.

Not that some autistic people don't have a hard time parsing figurative language, but it's annoying when people act like the be-all and end-all of "literal minded" is just an Amelia Bedelia-like inability to understand idioms and proverbs.

It also seems to me that most people instinctively know what rules are in what category. How they know this, I have no idea. A few things I have figured out by context and sometimes painful experience, but it feels like the neurotypicals have this knowledge automatically.

In fact, I love wordplay of all kinds. Teenage me was fascinated to learn all the types of figurative language there are in poetry and literature.

But paperwork and questionnaires are hard, because there's so much they don't state clearly. Or they don't leave room for enough nuance.

"List all the jobs you've had, with start and end dates." What if I don't remember the exact day or month? Is the year enough?

"Have you been suffering from blurred vision?" Well, if I take off my glasses the whole world is blurred, but I'm fairly sure that's not what the intake form at the optometrist is asking.

Or the infamous (and infuriatingly stereotypical) "Would you rather go to a library or a party?" What sort of party? Where? Who's there? I work at a library. Am I currently at the library for work or pleasure? Does it have a good collection?

I once got flummoxed on a job application for working in a movie for the longest time because the stupid question that asked "which is more correct: 'there are many ways to do a task.' or 'there is only one correct way to get something done.'?" The job would have involved taking people's tickets, guiding them to their theatre, and cleaning up afterwards. I REALLY needed this job then, and wanted to get in, so I had to puzzle out what the questionnaire was looking for - a good & dutiful rule-follower, or a personable & easygoing people person. I can see why a theatre chain could value either trait in hiring, but there was utterly NO way to determine which one would be desired.

"Just answer which one YOU think is best", I was told. How the hell should I know? I'm not the one who'd designed the sorting algorithm!