Just a heads up — “Young African American men” or “African American youths” might be a little more precise. I don’t think one would often say “young whites” or “young Asian Americans”. Just a kind of person centered language — just a friendly word to the wise. Not trying to call you out or anything — just something that caught my eye. I apologize for any offense or discomfort in mentioning it.
Yumi
Meanwhile, I think one would say “young Asian Americans,” or what I think the white version would be, “young white Americans.” I think your way works, too, I just don’t know that it’s better. (Though it might be for African American specifically? I definitely say and hear Black more, which would need a noun after it in a way that “American” can cover.)
That’s honestly like the perfect movie to watch behind her mom’s back. Damn, uhh, she’d have watched it 10 years ago I’d guess? So sliding comic time would take 10 years to get to that point
??? This is gonna be a difficult thing for Joyce to sort out internally, isn’t it?
Whatever Joyce decides to do with this, I really hope her friends respect her wishes and how she chooses to identify.
I will surely respect everyone’s right to identify with any label, traits or descriptors they want, be it “autism” or anything else! ?
I’m really glad this word gives so many of you a sense of empowerment or understanding. But yet, I feel a little left out myself. ?
I guess one part of it is because I have yet to get the opportunity to really understand all of you!
If you so choose, I would like you to write below me what your autism or other neurodivergence is like, and things about it you feel are unique to your own!
My curiosity is peaked, along with a few other things. ? ? ?
Or you could just tell me your favorite comfort foods. ?
A sandwich made from ground beef in a moderately spicy sauce with the ground beef not formed into a patty before browning, and then simmered in the sauce. I would call it good, but then my wife says I call a lot of foods good that aren’t actually good to anyone but me, like Mrs. Tobin’s codballs in onion creme sauce, which were made from salt cod which I’m told smelled like rotten fish. And also natto, the stinky cheese of beans.
my official diagnosis is ADHD and I am mostly comfortable with it—putting a name to my collective struggles and idiosyncrasies has so far helped more than hindered. the most fitting way I’ve found to describe myself, though, is “feral gremlin.”
I also like to describe my neurodivergence as a clown car joyride in which my brain has the steering wheel 100% of the time and I’m in the front passenger seat just flailing helplessly while the clowns party behind us. This is where medication helps: it enables me to put a hand on the steering wheel and work together with my brain some of the time. Because I’m a feral gremlin, however, sometimes I just have to guide my brain to a safe, deserted road where it can let loose and have a good time.
I call this chaotic, rule-and-routine-free downtime Gremlin Time.
Oh yeah, and two things I say a lot: “forgetting things is basically my brand, so…” and, referring to my picky eating: “yeah, I have the palate of a five-year-old!”
can’t believe I forgot to mention my Most Favoritest comfort food: eggplant!! it’ll make me happy whichever way it’s prepared, it’s pretty versatile, but roasted with tomato slices is the best of the bunch!
Laura
Yummers! Eggplant parm is such a comfort food for me. ;-9
The mind is not the helmsman of the ship.
The mind is Odysseus:
crossing the sirens,
lashed to the mast,
screaming with the pain of wanting.
His crew toiled on,
wax in their ears,
hearing nothing.
Tossed on a neurochemical sea.
Yes! YESSS!! I want to see you all like this, I want to see the beauty, the diverse colors and energies of us neurodivergents laid out all pretty like this! ?
I like NG. Reminds me of NRG (“energy”).
I had a friend once who called himself GPZ. (“Guinea Pig Zero.”) Not a friend anymore, but the name is still good.
Are your capital letters an abbreviation for something, NG?
Don’t quite remember, I think it stands for lots of things?
Something like Neurodivergent Genderfluid Parasite Zero? Don’t know really.
Also NG is a homophone of “Engie”, the name of a engineer girl from a gaming comic I read, so it also ties in with my STEM interests!
Also just looks real cool as graffiti!
Laura
The graffiti alone is a wonderful reason to pick a nickname. I have a nickname myself I picked for the same reason. (I can’t reveal it — I’ve gotten too close already to revealing my secret identity… 😉
SAME AHHHH I’ve been having a great time reading this wonderful thread but I was meaning to go to bed earlyish AHHHHHH
autogatos
I had 3 hours of play time in FFXIV before servers went down for maintenance and…I spent all of it on here. I don’t know how this was 3 hours, I thought it’d maybe been ONE at most.
RIP living on ADHD Standard Time.
Savail
ADHD Standard Time. I love this.
Laura
Right now I’m living on OCD standard time, attempting to finish my work… 8-}
ADHD standard time BTDT burned the shirt factory. And several nearby towns.
autogatos
Music is absolutely crucial to my ability to focus as well (or a show on in the background that I’ve seen a million times). Stuff like Riverdance, trans music, Lindsey Stirling…good depth and high energy music is perfect for when I REALLY need to focus on work: https://youtu.be/49tpIMDy9BE
Laura
Oops! Comment got posted in the wrong place.
Love the music, autogatos! Thank you for the rec!
I’ve always been a voracious reader, and had trouble imagining that there are people who actually don’t enjoy it and do it for fun. I know a lot of words that I’ve never actually heard pronounced.
Even with (or because of) my large vocabulary, I sometimes find it hard (especially lately) to pick exactly the right word – so I’ve taken to a shotgun/saturation/bracketing approach, like so. (Also, lots of parentheticals.)
Geez is this a common ND thing? Because I do this A LOT. For me I think it’s anxiety over being misunderstood/being unclear (see there I go).
I’d blame it on just having spent too much time on social media where misinterpretation is so common you get used to overexplaining yourself, but I used to do it in English papers too before Twitter even existed. My teacher would circle a paragraph and write “You just said the same thing 3 different ways. This paragraph can be one sentence.”
I don’t know if it’s common, but it’s a trait I share. I think the large vocabulary combined with aphasia from the brain damage I got from the wreck, plus the PTSD from my life, all contribute to this.
Hey you know, I think it would actually be very much better for the whole of humans on the multicultural frontier if we ALL took the shotgun/saturation/bracketing approach, given how much the same word can very much mean different things, and discerning their meanings across different cultures and contexts can get REALLY tricky.
Hey, I notice is very much like the communication equivalent of geolocation, where we use sets words/concepts like circles/ranges to hone in on what we want to express to others from different cultural contexts!!!!!
While I have never been properly Diagnosed with Autism itself, as the majority of my family doesn’t “believe” in that or many other mental illnesses or at the very least doesn’t think they are serious, but I do show a ton of signs of being a high functioning autistic person, or at least being somewhere on that spectrum. I have a VERY narrow set of interests, I have several ticks that Im constantly doing and if I don’t do them I get stressed out, I have a hard time with my own emotions and knowing what im feeling a lot of the time so I just got good at pretending the emotions, I prefer to be on my own most of the time, I don’t like physical contact from 95% of people and really don’t like the palms of my hands touching other people for some reason (handshakes are a nightmare when I have to do them), my sleeping patterns are majorly messed up, I almost always speak formally and using slang feels weird (something I have heard is a sign), I have strong Preferences when it comes to some foods and clothes and some clothes like Jeans make me super annoyed and stressed when im wearing them (not sure if I worded that right), I suck at understanding Sarcasm, my brain is filled with millions of small facts from the hundreds of books I read when I was younger, etc….
Since my family would probably disown me if I went and got diagnosed, as they would say im “just trying to get attention”, idk if I should go get the diagnosis or not… but the fact I show so many signs kinda scares me a little but at the same time it would explain so much…
Switchchrist24, that’s horrible! I’m so sorry you have to put up with that, you deserve so much better!
That stripe I have as a neurodivergent, those million small facts from the books I read when I was younger, I feel them coming to me less and less, just lots of melancholy these days, and i hate it, I fear I’ve lost the spark!!!! ???
Please, spill some of those small facts from the book you read right here! If only for some vicarious enjoyment!
Switchchris24
A lot of those small facts are stuff Dina has already mentioned in this comic, I was a huge Dino nerd myself growing up (Jurassic park disappointed me so much), now I work at a movie theater and have to hold myself back from giving out actual dino facts as people flood in to see the new Jurassic World movie this weekend, since those facts tear about that movie.
I also loved Animals growing up and would make Animal Reports for fun that I would take into school and the teacher would let me present them to the class during homeroom.
One of the facts I tend to tell people out of habit when talking about animals is that Butterflies drink blood, and there is a species of them that actively looks for corpses to drink out of.
Koala’s are the most stubborn animal on the planet, as their only food they eat can’t be fully digested and offers so little nutrients that they barely have energy to move, their babies get their nutrients by eatting the Digested food of the parent.
Lemur’s have a Female Dominant Society, so King Julian in the Madagascar is not at all accurate, they would have a Queen if anything. Also interestingly enough, they are the only primates besides humans that can have Blue Eyes.
??? Thanks for sharing this, good feelings from learning this.
A blood drinking butterfly? Ooo! Do tell more! An alien parasite myself, that really sounds like my kind of animal ?
Also, if it’s any consolation, I’m actually making a game right now that features the DOA cast AND dinosaurs I want to make as scientifically accurate as possible!
Switchchris24
All Butterflies will drink blood (as well as Poop and Tears) if given the option, they love it. There is a Moth that will actively “bite” you and drink your blood called the Vampire Moth.
thakoru
Sort of conversely to the butterfly thing, most mosquitoes actually primarily drink nectar and the like – only females are adapted to drink blood, and only do so in order to store up energy for egg-laying.
Just to be fair, anything that lives and breaths and migrates a lot will also spread disease, and moving a lot is necessary for a lot of species to even LIVE to begin with,
and oh well, evolution of all lifeforms and their ecosystems on earth, the product of 4.5 billion years worth of happy accidents, can really only do so much “right” in the eyes of you humans
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
thakoru
Only a handful of mosquito species (about 12 out of 200 in the US) carry diseases that are dangerous to humans. All the others are, at worst, nuisances.
Masumi
You. I like you.
Those are some sweet animal facts. Half of which were already on my own collection, the other half is now.
Serious thought/question – I wonder how much benefit there really is in getting diagnosed for autism. At least for the ones of us who have already found a fitting niche to exist in. Like, I have always assumed I’m autistic – it just explains a whole lot of things about how I think, and about how most people don’t quite have the same experiences as me. But I’ve never tried to get diagnosed, because I want to keep checking the ‘no’ on the ‘have you everbeen diagnosed with any mental conditions’ question on applications. (and yes, that was there, and I don’t think there are any laws against using that against you, where I live…). But anyway, it’s not an illness in the ‘you need treatment’ sense. Sure, everyone has to figure out how to best live their lives, and understanding you own brain workings is important for that. But does a diagnosis really help with that?
Sorry, just some thinking or loud.
425 thoughts on “Autism”
Ana Chronistic
you ever tried to be funny every day
like, do a daily joke comic, or similar, just… come up with some laughs on the regular?
but some days it just doesn’t work
like, no spoons or the comedy well is just dry
and like
absolutely definitely not gonna get laughs about stuff that 1. you don’t know enough about to joke about and 2. is way easy to get taken the wrong way
so you just bunt
and instead
like
ask
“I wonder when the Comic Book Time sliding calendar will make it such that Joyce would have snuck behind her mom’s back to watch Turning Red”
or something
idk
prolly better just to take a nap
Ryan
Out of spoons manifests in many ways.
Quite relate.
Sending cutlery.
jeffepp
I’ve been spoonless for about two years.
The demand for spoons is inflating.
Yeah.
Deathjavu
Fortunately, Willis has you covered on the “being funny every day” front, for the next several months at least.
crow
Every day?
Even when Becky’s dad kidnapped her with a gun?
Francoinblanco
Toedad xdxdxd
Needfuldoer
Now he’s Toedead.
Casi
Insert gif of a group of young african americans celebrating their peer who stands there triumphant for the excellent joke they just made.
Laura
Just a heads up — “Young African American men” or “African American youths” might be a little more precise. I don’t think one would often say “young whites” or “young Asian Americans”. Just a kind of person centered language — just a friendly word to the wise. Not trying to call you out or anything — just something that caught my eye. I apologize for any offense or discomfort in mentioning it.
Yumi
Meanwhile, I think one would say “young Asian Americans,” or what I think the white version would be, “young white Americans.” I think your way works, too, I just don’t know that it’s better. (Though it might be for African American specifically? I definitely say and hear Black more, which would need a noun after it in a way that “American” can cover.)
Laura
Huh. Good point, Yumi. Thanks!
…Sorry, maybe I’m just being too hyperfocused of a language nerd!
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3470
annarchy
Funny?
Deathjavu
Sometimes it’s sad clown funny, but yeah, generally speaking, there’s usually a chuckle to be had.
DojimaKojima
Probably 7-9 years from now, we’re already at the point where Joyce would have needed to see Frozen behind her mom’s back.
Kazuma Taichi
That’s honestly like the perfect movie to watch behind her mom’s back. Damn, uhh, she’d have watched it 10 years ago I’d guess? So sliding comic time would take 10 years to get to that point
The Wellerman
??? This is gonna be a difficult thing for Joyce to sort out internally, isn’t it?
Whatever Joyce decides to do with this, I really hope her friends respect her wishes and how she chooses to identify.
I will surely respect everyone’s right to identify with any label, traits or descriptors they want, be it “autism” or anything else! ?
I’m really glad this word gives so many of you a sense of empowerment or understanding. But yet, I feel a little left out myself. ?
I guess one part of it is because I have yet to get the opportunity to really understand all of you!
If you so choose, I would like you to write below me what your autism or other neurodivergence is like, and things about it you feel are unique to your own!
My curiosity is peaked, along with a few other things. ? ? ?
Or you could just tell me your favorite comfort foods. ?
jackiedu46k
I think the map to my brain was written on a paper airplane and tossed into a fan that doesnt got the cap on
True Survivor
I like mac and cheese with sloppy joes.
Arian
In my dialect, a sloppy joe is a type of pullover. Like a sweatshirt. On the assumption that you don’t eat pullovers, what are sloppy joes to you?
Needfuldoer
A heavily sauced loose meat sandwich.
Opus the Poet
A sandwich made from ground beef in a moderately spicy sauce with the ground beef not formed into a patty before browning, and then simmered in the sauce. I would call it good, but then my wife says I call a lot of foods good that aren’t actually good to anyone but me, like Mrs. Tobin’s codballs in onion creme sauce, which were made from salt cod which I’m told smelled like rotten fish. And also natto, the stinky cheese of beans.
FaerwenOfValenwood
my official diagnosis is ADHD and I am mostly comfortable with it—putting a name to my collective struggles and idiosyncrasies has so far helped more than hindered. the most fitting way I’ve found to describe myself, though, is “feral gremlin.”
I also like to describe my neurodivergence as a clown car joyride in which my brain has the steering wheel 100% of the time and I’m in the front passenger seat just flailing helplessly while the clowns party behind us. This is where medication helps: it enables me to put a hand on the steering wheel and work together with my brain some of the time. Because I’m a feral gremlin, however, sometimes I just have to guide my brain to a safe, deserted road where it can let loose and have a good time.
I call this chaotic, rule-and-routine-free downtime Gremlin Time.
Oh yeah, and two things I say a lot: “forgetting things is basically my brand, so…” and, referring to my picky eating: “yeah, I have the palate of a five-year-old!”
The Wellerman
Very pleased to meet you, Feral Gremlin! ?
FaerwenOfValenwood
Heyyy ? *finger guns*
can’t believe I forgot to mention my Most Favoritest comfort food: eggplant!! it’ll make me happy whichever way it’s prepared, it’s pretty versatile, but roasted with tomato slices is the best of the bunch!
Laura
Yummers! Eggplant parm is such a comfort food for me. ;-9
Laura
The mind is not the helmsman of the ship.
The mind is Odysseus:
crossing the sirens,
lashed to the mast,
screaming with the pain of wanting.
His crew toiled on,
wax in their ears,
hearing nothing.
Tossed on a neurochemical sea.
Laura
Huh. Maybe “dopamine sea” would read better. More precise, and a bit of a rhyme. Work in progress.
FaerwenOfValenwood
oooh, love this
Laura
Thank you! 🙂
…Says the little splash in my dopamine sea. ;-D
The Wellerman
Simply beautiful Laura!!!!
Yes! YESSS!! I want to see you all like this, I want to see the beauty, the diverse colors and energies of us neurodivergents laid out all pretty like this! ?
Laura
Thank you, The Wellerman. (For some reason, I keep wanting to call you “Welly” (See: https://twitter.com/damnyouwillis/status/1324005661080981505/photo/1)
I’m a total dopamine junkie. Part of why I have to be careful about not spending too much time in this forum. I can lose hours without knowing it.
The Wellerman
Awe thanks ?
“Welly”, hee hee ?
I also go by NGPZ, or NG
Laura
I like NG. Reminds me of NRG (“energy”).
I had a friend once who called himself GPZ. (“Guinea Pig Zero.”) Not a friend anymore, but the name is still good.
Are your capital letters an abbreviation for something, NG?
The Wellerman
Don’t quite remember, I think it stands for lots of things?
Something like Neurodivergent Genderfluid Parasite Zero? Don’t know really.
Also NG is a homophone of “Engie”, the name of a engineer girl from a gaming comic I read, so it also ties in with my STEM interests!
Also just looks real cool as graffiti!
Laura
The graffiti alone is a wonderful reason to pick a nickname. I have a nickname myself I picked for the same reason. (I can’t reveal it — I’ve gotten too close already to revealing my secret identity… 😉
Thanks for sharing this piece of yourself, NG.
Laura
Kelly Welly brings me happiness:
https://www.instagram.com/fishdonteven/?hl=en
Laura
Get too hooked and I have to “pull a Scully” on myself:
title = “‘Not everything is about you, Mulder.'”> Not everything is about me.
Laura
Love it love it love it, Autogatos! Thank you!
Deathjavu
“lose hours without knowing it”
*checks clock*
…fuck.
FaerwenOfValenwood
SAME AHHHH I’ve been having a great time reading this wonderful thread but I was meaning to go to bed earlyish AHHHHHH
autogatos
I had 3 hours of play time in FFXIV before servers went down for maintenance and…I spent all of it on here. I don’t know how this was 3 hours, I thought it’d maybe been ONE at most.
RIP living on ADHD Standard Time.
Savail
ADHD Standard Time. I love this.
Laura
Right now I’m living on OCD standard time, attempting to finish my work… 8-}
Playing dopamine music for comfort. It really helps me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M143iRrbgw
Opus the Poet
ADHD standard time BTDT burned the shirt factory. And several nearby towns.
autogatos
Music is absolutely crucial to my ability to focus as well (or a show on in the background that I’ve seen a million times). Stuff like Riverdance, trans music, Lindsey Stirling…good depth and high energy music is perfect for when I REALLY need to focus on work: https://youtu.be/49tpIMDy9BE
Laura
Oops! Comment got posted in the wrong place.
Love the music, autogatos! Thank you for the rec!
Opus the Poet
Excellent! Good use of imagery and allegory.
Laura
Thank you, Opus! 😀
Are you named for Opus the penguin in Bloom County? Or is it more like an “Opus of work”?
Joe Moose
This is quite beautiful.
Laura
Thank you, Joe Moose. I appreciate you.
joe
Wow this is incredible. Thank you
Laura
That is so sweet of you to say, joe. That warms my heart. Thank you so much for being kind to me.
Omskivar
Does that make Charybdis hyper-focus? Since it’s a huge dopamine whirlpool and you get sucked in (*ba-dum-tss*)?
Laura
*Scurries off to look up Charybdis.*
Yes. Correct. ;-D
Seodra
Ok, so that’s gorgeous bit of phrasing. Wow.
Laura
Thank you so much for making the time to read it and say so, Seodra. It’s special, for me, when a peer reads my work. I am grateful to you for it.
I cleaned up the phrasing just a touch, in case anyone wants the final product:
Odysseus
The mind is not the helmsman of the ship.
The mind is Odysseus
crossing the Sirens.
Lashed to the mast.
Screaming the pain of wanting.
His crew toils on.
Wax in their ears.
Hearing nothing.
Tossed on a dopamine sea.
The Wellerman
????
Beautiful, Laura. Thank you for sharing this, contributing this art, this beautiful reflection of yourself to the Neurodivergence Mosaic.
*plays “The Sea” by Tomas Dvorak on hacked muzak*
Laura
Thank you, NG!
“It isn’t the storm that makes the ocean dangerous.”
https://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=911
StClair
I’ve always been a voracious reader, and had trouble imagining that there are people who actually don’t enjoy it and do it for fun. I know a lot of words that I’ve never actually heard pronounced.
Even with (or because of) my large vocabulary, I sometimes find it hard (especially lately) to pick exactly the right word – so I’ve taken to a shotgun/saturation/bracketing approach, like so. (Also, lots of parentheticals.)
autogatos
Geez is this a common ND thing? Because I do this A LOT. For me I think it’s anxiety over being misunderstood/being unclear (see there I go).
I’d blame it on just having spent too much time on social media where misinterpretation is so common you get used to overexplaining yourself, but I used to do it in English papers too before Twitter even existed. My teacher would circle a paragraph and write “You just said the same thing 3 different ways. This paragraph can be one sentence.”
Opus the Poet
I don’t know if it’s common, but it’s a trait I share. I think the large vocabulary combined with aphasia from the brain damage I got from the wreck, plus the PTSD from my life, all contribute to this.
Annamal
Soooo many parentheses! I don’t know if it’s an ND thing or not but it’s definitely something i have 🙂
The Wellerman
Hey you know, I think it would actually be very much better for the whole of humans on the multicultural frontier if we ALL took the shotgun/saturation/bracketing approach, given how much the same word can very much mean different things, and discerning their meanings across different cultures and contexts can get REALLY tricky.
Hey, I notice is very much like the communication equivalent of geolocation, where we use sets words/concepts like circles/ranges to hone in on what we want to express to others from different cultural contexts!!!!!
??️ ?
BRILLIANT!!!! THANK YOU StClair!!!!!
?? ?? ??
*plays “Adirectional” by Fourth Grade Nothing on hacked muzak
Switchchris24
While I have never been properly Diagnosed with Autism itself, as the majority of my family doesn’t “believe” in that or many other mental illnesses or at the very least doesn’t think they are serious, but I do show a ton of signs of being a high functioning autistic person, or at least being somewhere on that spectrum. I have a VERY narrow set of interests, I have several ticks that Im constantly doing and if I don’t do them I get stressed out, I have a hard time with my own emotions and knowing what im feeling a lot of the time so I just got good at pretending the emotions, I prefer to be on my own most of the time, I don’t like physical contact from 95% of people and really don’t like the palms of my hands touching other people for some reason (handshakes are a nightmare when I have to do them), my sleeping patterns are majorly messed up, I almost always speak formally and using slang feels weird (something I have heard is a sign), I have strong Preferences when it comes to some foods and clothes and some clothes like Jeans make me super annoyed and stressed when im wearing them (not sure if I worded that right), I suck at understanding Sarcasm, my brain is filled with millions of small facts from the hundreds of books I read when I was younger, etc….
Since my family would probably disown me if I went and got diagnosed, as they would say im “just trying to get attention”, idk if I should go get the diagnosis or not… but the fact I show so many signs kinda scares me a little but at the same time it would explain so much…
Laura
Safe journeys and happy trails!
The Wellerman
??????
Switchchrist24, that’s horrible! I’m so sorry you have to put up with that, you deserve so much better!
That stripe I have as a neurodivergent, those million small facts from the books I read when I was younger, I feel them coming to me less and less, just lots of melancholy these days, and i hate it, I fear I’ve lost the spark!!!! ???
Please, spill some of those small facts from the book you read right here! If only for some vicarious enjoyment!
Switchchris24
A lot of those small facts are stuff Dina has already mentioned in this comic, I was a huge Dino nerd myself growing up (Jurassic park disappointed me so much), now I work at a movie theater and have to hold myself back from giving out actual dino facts as people flood in to see the new Jurassic World movie this weekend, since those facts tear about that movie.
I also loved Animals growing up and would make Animal Reports for fun that I would take into school and the teacher would let me present them to the class during homeroom.
One of the facts I tend to tell people out of habit when talking about animals is that Butterflies drink blood, and there is a species of them that actively looks for corpses to drink out of.
Koala’s are the most stubborn animal on the planet, as their only food they eat can’t be fully digested and offers so little nutrients that they barely have energy to move, their babies get their nutrients by eatting the Digested food of the parent.
Lemur’s have a Female Dominant Society, so King Julian in the Madagascar is not at all accurate, they would have a Queen if anything. Also interestingly enough, they are the only primates besides humans that can have Blue Eyes.
The Wellerman
??? Thanks for sharing this, good feelings from learning this.
A blood drinking butterfly? Ooo! Do tell more! An alien parasite myself, that really sounds like my kind of animal ?
Also, if it’s any consolation, I’m actually making a game right now that features the DOA cast AND dinosaurs I want to make as scientifically accurate as possible!
Switchchris24
All Butterflies will drink blood (as well as Poop and Tears) if given the option, they love it. There is a Moth that will actively “bite” you and drink your blood called the Vampire Moth.
thakoru
Sort of conversely to the butterfly thing, most mosquitoes actually primarily drink nectar and the like – only females are adapted to drink blood, and only do so in order to store up energy for egg-laying.
Switchchris24
Indeed, sadly they also spread a ton of diseases.
The Wellerman
Just to be fair, anything that lives and breaths and migrates a lot will also spread disease, and moving a lot is necessary for a lot of species to even LIVE to begin with,
and oh well, evolution of all lifeforms and their ecosystems on earth, the product of 4.5 billion years worth of happy accidents, can really only do so much “right” in the eyes of you humans
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
thakoru
Only a handful of mosquito species (about 12 out of 200 in the US) carry diseases that are dangerous to humans. All the others are, at worst, nuisances.
Masumi
You. I like you.
Those are some sweet animal facts. Half of which were already on my own collection, the other half is now.
Serious thought/question – I wonder how much benefit there really is in getting diagnosed for autism. At least for the ones of us who have already found a fitting niche to exist in. Like, I have always assumed I’m autistic – it just explains a whole lot of things about how I think, and about how most people don’t quite have the same experiences as me. But I’ve never tried to get diagnosed, because I want to keep checking the ‘no’ on the ‘have you everbeen diagnosed with any mental conditions’ question on applications. (and yes, that was there, and I don’t think there are any laws against using that against you, where I live…). But anyway, it’s not an illness in the ‘you need treatment’ sense. Sure, everyone has to figure out how to best live their lives, and understanding you own brain workings is important for that. But does a diagnosis really help with that?
Sorry, just some thinking or loud.