Hi, I’m named after a Pleistocene-era geographical feature. Never met anyone who had that era as their autism flavor, though. I don’t even really have it myself; geology was a special interest of mine as a kid and I like learning about how different Earth was at different times in the past, but it was never focused on any specific time period. The Pleistocene just happened to be when the glaciers sculpted the land I live in.

I stumbled into it by accident. A game I played was running a Twitch promotion so I started watching this random furry vtuber; she was hilarious so I ended up coming back for more streams and eventually joined her Discord server. Now it’s 4 years later and I have a ton of autistic gay animal friends (several irl), a much healthier outlook on life, and a prescription for estradiol. It’s great.

If you want more general advice, I suggest figuring out what flavor of autism you have and then looking for ways to interact with people who share that interest. It seems you don’t have the gaming autism but maybe there’s a way to connect with people who like the things that you are into.

Is Newsom doing things right now that are supportive of those rights? Yes.

Are you aware that you are posting this to Blahaj Zone?

I am going to vote against fascism. If the Democratic party insists on choosing a candidate who agrees with Republican efforts to genocide me, then I am going to vote against their fascist too. And don’t come looking for me to whine about it after; by the time the Niemoller poem gets to you I’ll be long gone already.

My in-person community was toxic and abusive, and I didn’t even realize it until I found a warm, accepting, and much healthier online community to compare with. “Retreating” was a survival need. I’m glad your offline community isn’t harmful to you but don’t assume that is the case for everyone.

I’m also part of one of those small artistic cultures you mentioned and it evolved and thrived way more with the arrival of the internet than it ever did in the days of small in-person gatherings and physical-only publishing. Art is furthered by cultural contact and mutual exchange of ideas, not isolation.

Now, you do have a point that there is a problem with homogeneity and stagnation these days, but the real cause of it is late-stage capitalism. The harder it is for the average person to make a living, the more they are forced to focus all of their energy on making money. For an artist, that means not having any time for masterpieces or experimental projects because Fast and Marketable is the only way to make rent. Arts and culture are starving because a small number of billionaires are sucking up all the financial nutrients (and then passing censorship laws to cut down anything that still manages to grow, until the only things left are as boring and mundane as they are.)

My Aberrant Mind Sorceress had been making frequent use of her telepathy ability to communicate silently and to keep in touch with allies that went scouting away from the party. Then she opened something she was told not to and ended up with a piece of Nyarlathotep living in her mind. When she later used her telepathy on the Monk, the DM ruled that it allowed the outer god to enter his head as well. Now we had a permanent three-way group chat that neither I nor the Monk could leave, whose moderator frequently posted literal nightmare fuel, and the rest of the party was suddenly very insistent that I only communicate with them verbally from now on.

One time I tried using my telepathy on an enemy. His head exploded. Gnarly was very unhappy about me adding people to the chat without permission and suggested that I not do it again.

So the same Netflix that has started using environment-poisoning AI to make visual effects “cheaper” is now making a Captain Planet reboot.

The original show actually had an episode similar to this. The kids had done a lot of work but the problem didn’t seem to be getting any smaller, and they were starting to feel demoralized. Then the villains stepped in to offer a devil’s bargain: A set of gloves which were individually much more powerful than any of the rings but could only be worn if the rings were removed.

No rings means no Captain Planet, but now each of the kids was as strong as he is. They didn’t need him anymore. They didn’t even need each other anymore. And they definitely didn’t need to keep cleaning up pollution when they could just destroy the factories instead. It wasn’t long before they split up and began engaging in eco-terrorism throughout their respective territories, creating lots of chaos for the villains to capitalize on.

I forget exactly how the episode ended. I think the heart kid refused the glove and went on a journey to get the band back together, and something happened where they needed to summon Captain Planet and they were forced to give up the gloves. There was probably some message about how violence looks like an easy solution but it just makes things worse, and progress isn’t always obvious, and if we all just work together we’ll get there eventually.

But then there was another episode where a bunch of scientists created a simulation of Earth to predict how the environment would turn out and it all ended in nuclear war, total ecological collapse, and mass extinction with nothing more optimistic than a “Maybe we’ll figure it out before it’s too late. Maybe.”

You might like the novel Singularity Sky. It’s about a planet, artificially maintained at a 19th-century tech level by its authoritarian government, which is suddenly visited by a post-scarcity civilization. Cellphones begin to rain from the sky all over the planet and whoever picks one up is given an offer: Tell us a story and we’ll give you anything you desire. One person asks for a self-replicating replicator with a fully stocked blueprint library and it ends up being extremely disruptive in many of the ways you’re imagining.

We have a 196 now?

If I’m a plural system do we get to pick 3 for each of us? :)

If it’s one set for everyone, I’m going with Shapeshifting, Healing, and the third kind of depends on how this stuff works.

Shapeshifting I’d take even if I was only allowed one power. I’d finally have a body that fits. Several of them, in fact. Some might even be human. We could swap between us physically, and turning into stuff for a while just sounds fun.

Healing because if I don’t pick it I’m eventually going to regret it. Shapeshifting might already let me fix any damage that isn’t incapacitating or instantly lethal, but that only applies to my own body. I’d want to be able to help others, too.

For the third power… Magic could mean a lot of things, including many on this list. Maybe it’s a “jack of all trades, master of none” kind of deal, which I’d be fine with. A bunch of spells that cover a wide range of situations but aren’t as strong as specializing in a single power.

Teleport is really appealing. Lots I can do with it if I can take people or things with me, or set up something long-range that doesn’t require line of sight. If it also allows me to create permanent portals then we’re really going to have fun.

Or I could take Invulnerability to remove that “incapacitating or instantly lethal” weakness and really lean into being some kind of unstoppable healer. Divine Powers? Depending on what that does, it could replace Healing while also giving a bunch of other benefits. Hell, if it lets me resurrect people too, and I also take Invulnerability, then I’m basically an emergency respawn point for the entire community.

Is this a trick question? You’re you. No amount of bodily alteration will change that. Shapeshifting will, however, allow you to have the most you-like body imaginable.

From the article:

“Should we be supporting Independent candidates who are prepared to take on both parties?”

[Sanders’s question] was also influenced by the campaign of former union leader Dan Osborn, who ran this fall as a working-class independent in the deep-red state of Nebraska.

Against an entrenched Republican incumbent, and without big money backing or party support, Osborn shocked pundits by winning 47 percent of the vote.

Bernie Sanders: I think that what Dan Osborn did should be looked at as a model for the future. He took on both political parties. He took on the corporate world. He ran as a strong trade unionist. Without party support, getting heavily outspent, he got through to working-class people all over Nebraska.

It sounds like you can still get pretty far by just addressing the actual concerns of the working class and offering real solutions to problems. Still an uphill battle, definitely, but maybe not an insurmountable climb.

This was already explained to you earlier in the thread. “Male” and “female” are, biologically speaking, not distinct and mutually exclusive categories in humans. This is the case naturally, and the terms become even less useful once you account for those who modify parts of their biology, whether by surgery or by artificially triggering natural biological processes, to bring those parts into congruence with other parts of their biology.

“Biological male” is a slur. It has no basis in science. It’s a term coined by bigots to misgender trans people with sciencey-sounding words so their abuse looks reasonable at a glance, in much the same way that proponents of Scientific Racism use pseudoscience in an attempt to legitimize white supremacy.

Also the term is referring to their original status pre-hormonal or other gender affirming care so no.

We already have a far less problematic set of terms for that: Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB) and Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB). “Biological male” is a scientifically misleading phrase that bigots invented to slander trans people and it should not be used by anyone.

Just as some AMAB (Assigned Male At Birth) men want to look more masculine and will work out at the gym or take testosterone supplements, some AMAB men are femboys and may temporarily take feminizing HRT to look less masculine.

Both are trying to change their bodies to better fit their gender identity, and femboy is clearly a different identity from gym bro, but they are both male gender identities.

The same reason anyone would be: because their current body doesn’t match their gender identity and they want to change that. This person just happened to start inside the same arbitrary social category as their destination.

I’m aware that Purgatory isn’t scriptural, and the community I was raised in believed a lot of stuff that wasn’t found in the Bible. (It’s one of the reasons I left.)

The point I was trying to make there is not “What is Heaven according to scripture?” I was speculating what heaven would need to be for me to consider it a paradise. And the answer I came to is that no place can be a paradise as long as I’m in it. Not because I think I’m a bad person, but because I have so much trauma and other mental baggage that I would be bringing with me. I would be too suspicious of a place with nothing bad in it to be able to enjoy it. I would unintentionally hurt those around me because of the pain I’m in. And those people would hurt me, and each other, because how many people actually manage to reach a state of complete emotional health before they die? No one is ready for paradise.

There would need to be a place and a time for healing the traumas of life before we could enter any kind of heaven. For this I borrowed the name Purgatory, because it seems to me a similar concept. And maybe the person who emerged from such a place would be so different that you couldn’t really say they were me anymore, but I think I’m okay with that. I don’t want to stay the person I am now; I want to become something better.

I guess that doesn’t have much to do with your original point about people not understanding eternity, other than being in agreement that it wouldn’t be a fun thing for humanity as we know it.

I made .iso files and mounted them in virtual drives to do the same thing. I could have used cracks but I didn’t want a virus and I still had the delusion that doing things “fairly” actually meant anything.