• 1 Post
  • 129 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 12th, 2024

help-circle










  • I can read UPC, UPC-8, ISBN, and EAN bar codes. Tear the numbers off the bottom of the bar code, hand me the lines, and I will tell you the numbers you tore off.

    I used to work the midnight shift at a call center back in the late 90s. It was incredibly boring because we weren’t allowed to browse the internet when no calls were coming in (which was most of the time, got maybe five calls total per night). So I picked up a copy of Yahoo! Internet Life, a now-defunct technology-centered magazine. This issue had a how-to section for wacky shit like that, so I committed it to memory because wtf else was there to do?






  • The Air Force once injected an unsolved, 1000-year-old mathematical puzzle written in another language into the game Prometheus, and an unemployed college dropout genius who lived with his mom solved it, got recruited to participate in a highly classified mission to the planet P4X-351 where he, a crew of Air Force officers and personnel, and a few civilian scientists ended up being forced to evacuate due to an impending planet-wide explosion (as well as an aerial assault by a band of space pirates) by jumping through a stable wormhole whose terminus was aboard the starship Destiny - an abandoned scientific vessel launched one million years prior by a species known as The Ancients who had planned to use it to travel to the center of the known universe.


  • Cognitive empathy is the ability to put oneself mentally in another person’s situation and try to understand how they might be feeling (as opposed to emotional empathy in which one experiences those emotions with another person and truly understanding how they feel).

    Where I (also ASD Level 1) have long struggled is with emotional empathy. At age 15, I told my mom that I didn’t know if I loved her. I understand now that this was a symptom of my autism, that I didn’t understand a variety of emotions, apart from excitement about hyperfixation and annoyance at most of the rest of the world for moving and think so slowly relative to me.

    And, yes, cognitive empathy was also lacking when I was younger. I did have difficulty imagining what other people’s life experiences were like, mainly because I was…well…young and inexperienced, not necessarily because I was autistic.

    What I take issue with is the blanket statement that autistic people lack cognitive empathy because it is a sweeping generalization that doesn’t allow for nuance. The implication in your statement is that we’re born without it and never possess it, and that simply isn’t true. It isn’t difficult for autistic people can learn cognitive empathy and other sorts of emotional intelligence.



  • Lol, no. Every autistic person I know, myself included, is engaged in anti-racism, consent culture, body-positivity, and other forms of harm reduction. You’re understanding of autistic people is flawed. We don’t lack cognitive empathy, and we don’t have a difficult time reading other people’s emotions. What we struggle with is when people mask their emotions, when they put up an emotional wall, rely heavily on sarcasm, or any other technique that shields them from authenticity. When people are open and vulnerable with us, we are capable of great empathy.