Blood Circle

The survivors are loosing the trial and Dwight pulls out this bad boy

Imagine presenting yourself as a Definitive Voice about Trans people and not knowing that basic fact about testosterone

I have absolutely no issues understanding metaphors or idioms. When someone says their heart is on their sleeve they mean they’re emotionally expressive and openly display their feelings, not that they have a chunk of cardiac tissue on their shirt. I very rarely have issues with sarcasm. I sometimes have issues telling when someone who’s said something mean is about to say “just kidding”, but tbh I think that’s more on them than me.

BUT

My grandmother asked me “Do you know when the trash was taken out last?” and I said “I think Eliot took it out yesterday” and a few hours later she yelled at me for “not taking out the trash when I asked you to” and I was like???? You didn’t ask me????

I dread filling out forms and am crap at filling out diagnostic tests or personality quizzes because there are always questions I don’t know the exact answers to (how am I supposed to know what day I got dental surgery seven years ago?) or don’t understand exactly what they’re asking or the wording’s unclear and they could mean this or the wording says this but I’m pretty sure what they actually meant was that and should I answer what they said or what they meant, and how does everyone else just whip through the form? Does everyone else remember the day they got dental surgery seven years ago? Does everyone else somehow understand all these questions?

I get tangled up by bureaucracy because the rules on the website say that for this you need that and for that you need the other and for the other you need something else for which you need the first thing, and I go in circles for hours or days or weeks or months or years because their stated rules say there is no way to get what I need, and when I talk to somebody else they’re like “just call them?” and I’m like “how could that help? the rules say that what I’m trying to do is impossible”

Suffering through bureaucracy is universal, yes.

Being rendered routinely nonfunctional by bureaucracy specifically because one to a completely unquestioning degree believes that rules are accurately stated and does not understand they’re intended to have unspoken wiggle room and exceptions and be interpreted by the people administrating them is a much more narrow and non-universal issue.

The phone call being recommended here is not to get a quick summary of the rules so I don’t have to read them - I’ve read them all! I’ve spent dozens of hours on it, per task! (And would rather do that than call someone on a phone.)

The problem isn’t that I need to call in order to get information on what the rules are, and that’s not why I’m being advised to call. I’m being told to call in order to bypass and dismiss the rules. In order to have a sympathetic person say “oh yeah we don’t really need that, they never actually check” despite the fact that the rules which I have studied exhaustively say that they do. To have someone say “eh, I can email my boss and she’ll probably let you get away with substituting X for the Y you’re supposed to have”. To say “oh we write down that that’s required but it’s more that it’s faster to process stuff if you have it”.

The problem isn’t that I feel less capable because I don’t know things to a T. The problem is that I DO know things to a T. (Often better than the bureaucrats I end up talking to - I’ve learned to have the relevant regulations etc pulled up on my phone or printed out if I know I actually am on the right side of the rules so I can point to the fact that yes, this is what I’m supposed to be doing, they are the ones doing it incorrectly.)

The problem isn’t that I need somebody to tell me the rules - that would be a perfectly ordinary non-autistic issue. The problem is that I believe and trust and accept as immutable the rules that I know (to a T), which is an autistic issue.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Since 2017, I have only done stuff that I thought was interesting or useful regardless of whether it pays, because we have more than enough money, and despite what billionaires might tell you, there is literally no difference between "more than enough" and "much more than enough."

So I no longer work for money. But in retirement one must keep busy, which is why I have taken on an unpaid gig as the social media intern for a coffee and tea business that donates 100% of its profit to charity.