Like Doofenschmirtz Evil Incorporated

If you wanna know the state of Yugioh TCG collecting in the wake of Overframes in the core game…

The situation is so funny man

Hello there. Guess how much money I made last year? $28. I’m an investment banking analyst at a boutique firm, in M&A. I have my undergrad from the University of Chicago, one of the top schools in the country. With bonuses, sometimes I make even more. Are you jealous of that? Most people on Tumblr are usually jobless or they decided to major in the humanities and are poor.

Love watching dwarf fortress vids and seeing ppl tell their own wild stories in the comments

That post about death note being "everyone's first anime" (untrue statement) made me curious and now I want to gather data for science

I understand that there is discussion of masking by autistic people that is much more honest and in-depth, but so much of the stuff I see sort of leans on the assumption that masking is something one chooses to do in order to appear "normal"

OK OK OK, someone in the tags said that they don't know the degree to which they are masking, bc they don't know what is normal/expected and therefore have no way of knowing how much they're altering themselves to fit into that expectation (thank you for articulating that!!) and I think that clarified a lot for me about my problems with the framing of masking.

I also see people framing even the most basic social skills (things like "tolerating mild discomfort" and "avoiding offensive phrasing of desires") as masking. At a certain point I think we have to be aware that there is a degree of curtailing one's personal self expression inherent in existing within a society, and that autistic people are not the only people who have to be aware of societal norms and contort selves to exist within them as part of experiencing that society. The difference is of course in the degree of contortion required to fit neatly into the society, not the phenomenon of having to contort in the first place.

Trauma in the strict sense is not required for a young human being to suffer the loss of essence, the sense of oneness with all that is. Infants come into the world fully present and alive to every possibility, but they soon begin to shut down parts of themselves that their environment is unable to recognize or accept with love. As a consequence of that defensive shutdown, says the psychologist and spiritual teacher A.H. Almaas, one or more essential qualities such as love, joy, strength, courage or confidence may be suppressed. In its place, we experience a hole, a sense of empty deficiency. "People don't know that the hole, the sense of deficiency, is a symptom of a loss of something deeper, the loss of essence, which can be regained. They think the hole, the deficiency, is how they really are at the deepest level and that there is nothing beyond it. They think something is wrong with them, something is basically wrong." Such thoughts are not necessarily conscious but may take the form of unconscious beliefs. In either case, we develop behaviour patterns and emotional coping mechanisms to cover up the emptiness, mistakenly believing that the resulting traits represent our true "personality." Indeed, what we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.

The Myth of Normal is a must-read. He doesn't talk about autism directly, but the book is all about how trauma responses that helped us survive childhood (which is what masking is) end up causing all sorts of issues in adulthood.

"People who believe in gods, spirits or a conscious universe are falling prey to a litany of common cognitive fallacies. Here's a book where I clearly outline how easy it is to misunderstand probability, intent and determination, and to reach these conclusions. Let me explain just how easy it is to mistakenly believe in concepts of magic or a conscious force in an unconscious world, and show how it is wrong. This book will be a worldwide bestseller that will get me, a famous biologist, recognised the world over by non-biologists, and will define the sort of person I am seen as forevermore."