You're just a lowly Cheddar Monk / Always running out of tricks

also two weeks ago I had an original post crack four-digit-notes-count for the first time ever (yes the leverage one)

and now i want to see who’s booping me so I think i’m just gonna give up on trying to backread notifications for the entire month of march.

[edit September 2024: I am sometimes checking notifications now but May Lapse Again]

Get bonked idiot

there's the fact that this is all taking place in the car of an older guy who goes on dates with middle schoolers, and a car symbolizes all the things that appear to be Cool and Adult to a child, and yet which also aren't real adult markers to an actual adult. A car is also a dangerous item that can hurt you if you aren't careful—say, by hopping over the windshield because it looks cool.

But the bigger part of the story is that Ikuhara just fucking loves cars and uses them for symbolism all the time lmao. He grew up during the "Supercar boom" of the 1970's when flashy import cars (mainly from Europe to be clear) and related toys and merch for the kids became a big thing - partially kicked off by the manga Circuit no Ohkami, if you want the weeb connection.

He has an interview somewhere...uh...okay I think it is this one, from Animage mid-airing, where he essentially nails down the car as "toys for adults". The kind of thing that seems mature, is associated with money and sophistication, but is also just techie nerds playing with objects as opposed to dealing with reality. These are the kind of cultural reflections he is most going for in Utena.

I haven't seen him mentioning American movies or cultural influences specifically? So I don't think it is a direct nod. But as a second-order influence, the supercar boom, the glitzy Japanese 80's dramas of hot men in flashy cars wooing girls, all of that stuff is pulling from western media. And Ikuhara was say a David Lynch fan, he watched Twin Peaks like everyone did, he saw media with American teen date tropes and car culture. He knew this stuff inherently.

Three, Amena and one of Murderbot’s drones at the beach

MB: Three, why are you wearing sunglasses? Just use your bright light filters.

Three: Query: Define cool.

Copying from "morituri" led you astray because the verb morior is deponent and therefore weird. The future active participle of torreō is "tostūri" (inflected plural and masculine to match "moritūri" -- it's the standard 1st/2nd declension -us/-a/-um adjective paradigm (and since I'm copying from a source that keeps the macrons its worth noting that "moritūrus" has one)).

it was close enough for Whittaker's Words to figure out which verb you meant though!

Also i enjoy the semantic range Wiktionary gives for torrēo:

There was some reasonable nitpicking from @centrally-unplanned and a few others when I posted this American Affairs article about the Navy, but I still think its basic premise stands:

This theory of war is not intellectually bankrupt? If you do win overwhelmingly, you can "simply" bomb the enemy's industrial capacity away once you obtain military superiority, and modern bombardment capacities to do that are pretty high. But A: even our basic capacity for ordinance/ammunition production is struggling, B: that is an incredibly rosy prediction for the course of any conflict, and C: really isn't how modern conflicts go? If the US is in a conflict with China over Taiwan and we find ourselves carpet-bombing Chongqing, that is not a conflict over Taiwan; that is World War 3. Most conflicts today seem to occur in boxes of restraint to ensure they don't tip into nuclear MAD or destroy the world economy, and those boxes are absolutely going to leave some shipyards untouched and permit a "round 2". We don't really have a plan that?

Ofc if you were a serious military planner in the US with power and agency, you would be pushing hard to alleviate this problem via A: friendshoring military-related production to allies to build a robust, economically cost-effective production network, and B: going all-in on immigration to boost US total productive capacity and maybe even allow for the economics of more truly domestic industrial investments to pencil out without needing to force rich Americans into lower-paying jobs. But that kind of serious military planning is also a capacity we no longer have, so. Yeah.

Here is a passage I find particularly striking, even if it's purely anecdotal:

I was having trouble putting my finger on what exactly seemed off until I got to this part:

Most “masked” autistics still show obvious, visible signs of autism that are either just slightly muted or channelled into a less obvious and more socially acceptable form. I could be accurately described as a high-masking autistic, but anyone who knows what autism looks like will immediately clock me.

And I thought,

"Wait, why would you think that masking would make it harder to detect autism?"

What I had assumed the term meant was...

Okay I keep trying to come up with the perfect analogy because I find that allistic people have an incredible amount of difficulty reasoning about what it would be like to have serious deficits in social understanding, so here's another attempt:

I'm writing in English, so I imagine most of my readers have only the vaguest knowledge of what a Japanese tea ceremony entails beyond "fancy" and "tea". If you do know a ton about tea ceremonies pretend I'm talking about, I don't know, initiation into an undocumented Etruscan mystery religion.

Suppose that suddenly you are informed that you have to attend a tea ceremony tonight.

And suppose that, for whatever reason, attending this ceremony and doing well at it was incredibly important for your career, your social circle, and your romantic prospects. Your success in all those realms depends heavily on how well you do at the tea ceremony tonight.

So you ask the friend who brought you the invitation what you do at a tea ceremony, and he says,

"Uh, it's not like there's some script that you follow, it's just etiquette and politeness."

But he does tell you that asking direct questions of your host about what you should do is offputting and inappropriate.

What would you do in a situation like that?

Well, if there are a lot of people you might stay towards the back out of sight of the host.

You might watch what other people did and copy them as closely as you could.

You might try to make sure that any specific tasks for guests were assigned to somebody else rather than you.

And I don't think you would adopt those strategies because they would make you look like an expert in tea ceremonies;

I think you would adopt strategies along those lines because what the fuck else could you possibly do in that situation?

Until now I have assumed that this is what people meant by "masking"; strategies such as avoidance, ceding decision making to other people, and rote copying are things that I adopted quite early on in life, not out of some attempt to stop people from noticing I had autism, but from a desire to minimize negative attention.

I had thought that the analogy was like, If I draw a crude smiley-face in crayon on a paper plate and wear it as a mask, maybe I'm not trying to fool you into thinking that it's my real face, maybe I'm just trying to keep you from seeing what my real face looks like.

To go back to the tea ceremony analogy, maybe another person there was raised by a master of the tea ceremony, knows all the subtle ins and outs, but just thinks it's morally stupid that so much success depends on this arbitrary ceremony. If it was important to success he might go along with the tea ceremony anyway, and you could also, I suppose, call this "masking" as well, but it seems to me that it is only similar to the coping strategies I outlined above in a very broad way.

1. Rote copying is definitely masking, in fact it's arguably the archetypal masking behavior. I don't think avoidance is a masking behavior so much as a behavior to avoid having to mask, but wouldn't be that surprised if someone disagreed.

2. Obviously you are trying to cover up the fact that you are autistic/don't know how to perform a tea ceremony. Compare to the unmasked behavior: someone who starts in the same place but who doesn't particularly care about seeming like they already know what they're doing would just ask "I have never done this before, what are you doing and why?" Or maybe they would do something so obviously un-tea-ceremony-like that nobody would think they are trying to perform a tea ceremony.

There's this kind of conscious copying for social stuff. But then there's things like the fact that for ages before I knew what was going on my sensory fatigue would seem to "present" as headaches or physical fatigue, and I myself wasn't consciously aware of what was going on, but this also does have the effect of making it less obvious that I'm autistic, and when I worked it out and started addressing it as the thing it was, things became in various ways easier - people have called that kind of thing "masking", too

Or the thing where, compared to undiagnosed academic prodigy spergs of the other assigned sex that I knew, I was far less frequently allowed to be antisocial and was forced to genuinely acquire (not fake!) social skills to a greater degree* - some people call this masking too?

*as an adult I don't experience myself as having social differences resulting from autism, only cognitive and sensory. I have no idea whether this has anything to do with how I was raised vs my assigned-male peers.

And then there's pushing through in ways that risk burnout - borrowing spoons from tomorrow. Some people call this masking too, and that idea seems to be key to the connection people imagine between masking and burnout.

Anyway I get really pissed off when I talk about having good social skills (for instance, it's one of my comparative advantages in the workplace) and people put on Supportive faces and talk about how some people are great at masking. No you idiots, this is the real me!

It so happens that on the evening this thread about masking blew up, I was with some theater people, one of whom seems to be in his early 20's and makes my aspie-dar go off incessantly in all of our interactions even though I don't know whether he has an autism diagnosis or considers himself autistic. His passion for theater is most visible in his voice acting; in fact, I hear him speaking in various accents both onstage and off more than I've heard him in his natural (American) accent. And that evening, he was telling me the following: "You've never heard me use my most natural speaking voice, which is a 'flat narrator voice'. [He demonstrates it during part of this monologue.] It bothers everybody because it sounds so monotonous and depressing, and it makes people assume I have depression (and I don't have depression!). So instead I use this lively 'happy voice' all the time so that I don't put people off."

And, without thinking of the currently rapidly developing thread on masking that had begun in my Tumblr world, I bit my tongue but almost said out loud something like, "Yeah, in other words, masking."

I never thought too deeply about what masking means because when it's brought up I never see signs of a coherent, agreed-upon definition, and unlike some concepts which I have to choose how to recognize for reasons of etiquette and having a social/political view, I haven't found that I really need to understand what people mean when they refer to masking. But I guess by default I always assumed it meant something like what my acquaintance describes: modifying one's own outward behavior to assimilate to what's expected in most social spaces so as not to put other people off.

About 90% of the time I've seen masking brought up, it's in the context of discussing how girls/women have been under-diagnosed with autism "because girls mask more", and although at one point I tried to do research on this, half an hour's Googling revealed no more than vague statements amounting to "girls are under-diagnosed because they mask more". (This was inspired by my then-girlfriend first telling me about how she -- to me a very obviously allistic person -- had once tried to get diagnosed with autism because she'd "always felt different" and knew that girls are under-diagnosed, so she did a lot of research. I asked her to relate to me what she'd learned from all that research, and her answer was, "I don't know, just that girls mask more" without discussing what masking means. This was part of a conversation about whether another woman I knew might have autism, and I decided to likewise do research albeit nothing very thorough, and like my then-girlfriend only ever saw "girls mask more" with no further explanations or references to papers.)

I've always interpreted "girls mask more" as coming from the notion that girls are socialized with more pressure to conform and assimilate more (and also be less loud and space-taking), and while this form of sexism is very sinister in itself and produces an unfair burden on girls, with extremely low epistemic confidence I've entertained a reading of this as suggesting that learning to mask well is an advantageous strength and that autistic girls grow up to be "less disabled/disadvantaged" in some sense than autistic boys do. So apart from the great downsides of being less likely to get diagnosed, I haven't entirely embraced the idea that there's completely one-sided male privilege within the autistic community. (After I'd already had that -- again very half-baked and extremely un-confident -- thought, an autistic male YouTuber that I've followed for most of the past decade, who believes both his mom and his wife are likely also autistic and appears to be an advocate for better diagnoses of autism in girls/women, around a year ago similarly described autistic women on the whole as "less disabled" [EDIT BEFORE POSTING: just re-watched and he doesn't say that as I "remembered" he did, although the phrasing he used in repeatedly describing women as "excellent at masking" even at the expense getting exhausted does, to my mind, sort of imply it]!)

it's never too late! i've definitely been at recitals where ppl who started in their 30s (or 40s, or 50s, or...) performed & played better than i did, lol. highly recommend finding a teacher if you can; there's lots who specifically focus on adult learners & can teach you the ropes.