#HA! YOU ACTIVATED MY AUTISM TRAP CARD

[suolainensilakka]

favorite kingdom hearts characters. for science

WELL, gently taps the current pinned post of this blog, that one's a freebie ^__^

Anyway. BOY ranking them all is really hard bc so many characters in the series have permanently set up camp in my head by now and arent particularly inclined to leave any time soon, but if I had to list off just a couple examples that have caused me the most brain damage so far, itd be:

- Terra, hands down my number 1 most specialest guy in the whole world. Instantly became enamored with him from the moment I first set eyes on him and then proceeded to have all of my ribs carefully and meticulously pulled out of my chest one by one throughout the entirety of bbs and the entire rest of the series after that. Its so dire man I literally cannot look at any images of him now without physically having to hold myself back from making a long strangled whine Out Loud With My Mouth every time

- the entire Wayfinder Trio as a collective unit + Vanitas also tbh. Terra's obviously my Primary Favorite but the wayfinders as a whole also make my heart hurt so fucking bad man. My partner and I choose to interpret them all as siblings bc it leads to some exceptionally delicious and painful rs dynamics to explore imo and something abt it just makes The Miseries hit that much harder in ways that have literally had me writhing on the couch with a thousand yard stare rapidly cycling through the five stages of grief on loop. I'm also counting Vanitas as part of the unit bc he's just so closely tied to Ven in my brain that separating them (lol.) feels Wrong (lmao.), and. God. Vanitas might just be one of THE most tragic characters in literally any media I've experienced and I say this without a single hint of irony. The current total wordcount of the rps that I've written abt the wayfinders with my partner so far has probably shot past 50k by now. Why am I hurds

- Kairi. I was originally mostly ambivalent/neutrally intrigued abt her but kept getting increasingly more pissed abt her treatment and constant sidelining by the writing to the point where I got to kh3/mom and something in me snapped entirely, and from that moment onwards I decided to love her entirely out of spite. She instantly shot up to become one of my favorites after that and if I think abt her meta and story potential for longer than five minutes at a time I start frothing at the mouth

- Sora, naturally. I have so so so so many thoughts on this little darling boy that could easily double the wordcount of this ask just by themselves but the most important thing to mention here in lieu of that, for now, is that he's is the One (1) and ONLY child ive ever seen, whether real or fictional, that has made me experience emotions anywhere Close to resembling baby fever. I want to dribble him like a basketball but also gently pinch his cheek affectionately and also spoil him silly like a grandma seeing her beloved grandson again for the first time in months

- Xigbar. This fucko is the one I'm the most mad about ending up liking as much as I do, not because hes a bad character, absolutely far from it I fucking ADORE this terrible bodyhopping little cunt, but because it happened by complete accident after I realized he shares a lot of (surface) similarities with my favorite blorbo from another entirely unrelated franchise and I then got mad about realizing I have a very easily clockable Type (which I've affectionately dubbed the Guys That Suck category. I have more too obv but its the funniest one I have). He's also infuriatingly fun to write. Get me OUT of here

- Xemnas, Terranort and Ansem SoD. Everyone in the Nort Collective counts tbh but those three are the ones I lose sleep over the most, particularly the first two; Xemnas bc he makes me feel an unfathomably deep and haunting sense of grief (brought on by me finishing bbs and then realizing days later the exact way his creation connects to Terra's story and hearing the sound of fucking glass shattering at the back of my head instantly), and Terranort bc I'm fucking terrified of him and he also makes me want to eat gravel whenever I think abt him in context with him interacting with the rest of the wayfinders. He's also really fun to write and this fact Upsets Me. Ansem's listed bc you can never go wrong with the ol reliable mad scientist. The rest of the norts I would probably also be a lot more insane over once I actually get off my damn ass and start picking through the mobile games but that's an endeavor for Future Salty (i am very excited and terrified)

- the Lingering Will. I'm counting it as a separate entity from Terra and the rest of the Terra Collective on a technicality bc (LOUD TELEVISION STATIC AS I GESTURE FRANTICALLY AND FURIOUSLY @ THE JUMBLED BALL OF YARN LABELED "my thoughts on the physical and psychological effects of being a guy who got his soul and entire being shattered into like five million distinct pieces for over 10 Whole Entire Years" THAT I HAVE NOT EXPLAINED THE ENTIRETY OF TO A SINGLE OTHER SOUL ON EARTH) but. Eah. This fucking haunted hunk of metal has been eating holes through my brain tissue ever since I first saw the kh2 secret superboss and I'm distraught over it every single day of my life. This thing is like a weird bug to me. Do you understand. (tearign up) Do you get me. Do I have to pull out the Lingering Will/The Hollow Knight venn diagram

And as for the other fuckos haunting my cranium on the daily I can only mention a couple other honorary picks that honestly could also very well have made it to the main list if not for the fact that this post is already long enough as it is, and these following characters are therefore mostly delegated to Sleeper Agent Blorbos who I don't think about QUITE as often as the ones listed above but whenever I Do I get just as distraught and ailed over them. Anyway, shoutout to the entire Seasalt Trio, Demyx, Riku, Repliku, Naminé and Saïx and probably many others I'm forgetting rn bc it is currently 2 am and I'm running on approximately 5-6 hours of sleep and a prayer 👍 god bless and amen

[leafy-m]

Because I'm autistic and because I love Witch Hat Atelier Kitchen, I page-by-page compared the recent Kodansha USA English release of volume 1 to its Japanese and fan-translated counterparts.

If you've read the official English translation, you may have noticed that some of the big Orufrey moments are.... a bit underwhelming, word-wise. You may have even noticed that the word "wine" is suspiciously missing from the final chapter's WillowGrape Wine recipe, in which wine is kind of an important and obvious factor in it! And you would be correct!

While most of this manga volume is pretty accurate to the original text, there is absolutely a concentrated effort to tone down the more tender Orufrey moments, as well as minimize the alcoholic nature of the final chapter's recipe and related contraptions.

And that's frustrating!

The entire draw of this manga spin-off is seeing these gay witch dads take care of each other and their four daughters in an idyllic countryside setting while also making yummy food that you the reader can try make too. Why is Kodansha USA trying to no-homo these gays?? (Is this a reflection of how bad things are in the USA now?) And while you might say, "But Jade! Qifrey and Olruggio are not actually dating in canon!" — and I would agree with you! But there is nothing straight about these mens' behavior in this comic, and if Qifrey is going to look in Olruggio's direction while tenderly saying his name in Nearly Every Chapter, I expect to read that in English, dammit!

So I'm activating my autism trap card and presenting ya'll with a thorough comparison of every mistranslated and omitted Orufrey or wine moment, complete with discussion and screenshots from the Japanese, fan-translated, and USA English versions. This post is ridiculously long and maxed Tumblr's 30-image limit so chapter 10's discussion is actually in a reblog (sob sob), so I'm putting it all under a cut (you're welcome), and you can be sure that I'll be doing this again if need be for the translated volumes releasing next year.

For now? Let's go.

CHAPTER 1: pg 10

Japanese: フフ...

Fan translated: Heh heh

English version: Ahh...

This is a small moment, but it's important because it's foreshadowing. Qifrey is "airing out" the kitchen, but what he's really doing is sending those delicious smells into Olruggio's room. He's trying to lure him into the kitchen! And that little フフ/heh heh panel is evidence that he's up to something. If you've noticed in the main series, whenever Qifrey is doing something shady or it has a double-meaning, the 'camera angle' focuses on this side of his face with the dark lens.

But the English version obfuscates this by changing フフ to "Ahh..." like, 'isn't that better,' even though it keeps the ellipsis thought bubble indicating that something is up. Why the mixed messaging?

CHAPTER 1: pg 13

Japanese: オルーギオ!

Fan translated: Orugio!

English version: Excellent!

This is the first of many moments where Qifrey will directly say Olruggio's name, and yet the English version will translate it to something else, or drop it entirely. And no, "there wasn't enough room" is not a valid excuse for most of these. Especially when Olruggio's name can (and often is) shortened to Olly.

Look at Olruggio's little smirk at making Qifrey beam happily like that. My God. Kodansha USA/translator Stephen Kohler, why would you take this from us.

CHAPTER 1: pg 14

Japanese: 二人共 今日も一日　お疲れ様でした!

Fan translated: These two people are together tonight. Another day's work well done, you two!

English version: Here's to another long day... ...and a well-earned break!

The omnipresent narrator from the beginning of the chapter is back, and clearly highlighting that 'these two people' are together tonight. And yet the English version removes all that. It may be redundant since we can see they're together in the illustration, but the whole page has that type of text redundancy, like focusing on 'eating that first bite,' or how 'a laugh bubbles up' with Qifrey. And combined with all of the other later omissions, this becomes an obvious trend of targeting these specific types of moments.

Update: Thanks to Farlynthordens for additional insight on this Japanese phrase!:

二人共: (the) two of you [the "tomo" implies the narrator is talking "to" them rather than "about" them] futari-tomo means in a literal sense "(you) two people who are together", but in terms of actual usage/definition it's just identifying a specific pair of people who the speaker is talking to.

今日も一日お疲れ様でした: the rest of this can't really be separated. this whole phrase is meant to be like "good work for all the things you did over the course of this whole day". the fan translation seems to have not understood that the two text blocks were meant to be all one sentence. so if you put this all together, it's like "Good work for everything today, guys!"

Knowing this, I'll still keep it as part of the list because it does omit addressing the two of them in the English version, which follows that trend of minimizing these moments between them. But thank you for the clarity! 💕

CHAPTER 2: pg 28

Japanese:　料理も魔法器も相手のことを一番に考えるのは　君の美德だね　半分ずつだ オルーギオ

Fan translated: Whether you're cooking or performing magic, you always think of others before yourself. It just goes to show your good character. We'll share it, Olruggio.

English version: I've always admired that about you. Whether in your work of in the kitchen... ...You always think of others' needs before your own. All right. Let's split it, then.

The English version has two mistranslations here. I'll start at the top. In it, Qifrey is observing how Olruggio puts others first, and then compliments how it shows his good character. The 'good character' bit is changed to "I've always admired that about you," which at first I thought was sweet! Points for Kohler. But now that I really look at it, there is still some shady translating happening here.

In writing and communicating, what is said last has the most importance. This is how people "bury the lede," by hiding important information in the early part of a speech or amid other sentences, and then distracting them with other stuff.

In that English version top panel, even though Qifrey is complimenting Olruggio, by having it be said first it makes the second speech bubble (and therefore Olruggio's flustered response) be about Qifrey remarking on Olruggio's own behavior, rather than Qifrey's nice compliment about his character. Which changes the meaning of what's going on here. Olly is not flustering because he puts others first, he's flustering because Qifrey is saying something really nice about him, right to his face!

And then of course, in the bottom panel, Qifrey saying Olruggio's name is once again removed.

And I have to say, this bothers me not just because of autistic AcCUraCY! needs, but because he is very specifically saying his name. They are the only people in the room, it's very clear who Qifrey is addressing, and yet here he is once again, putting that man's name in his mouth.

It is intentional.

It is heartfelt.

STOP REMOVING IT!

CHAPTER 3: pg 36 and 37

Japanese: (Olruggio): キーフリー それいらないならこっちに..してくれ (Qifrey): オルーギオ　ひとつおねがい!

Fan translated: (Olruggio): Qifrey, if you won't be needing those, send them my way. (Qifrey): One pot please, Olruggio!

English version: (Olruggio): Mind if I grab those breadcrumbs from ya? I'm gonna use 'em as a binder for the patties. (Qifrey): Could you bring that pot over here for me?

This is a sweet segment because it shows how well Qifrey and Olruggio work in tandem in the kitchen. As someone who has repeatedly failed at working harmonically with others while making food, them being in sync in the kitchen is more fantastical than the actual magic.

And once again, Olruggio and Qifrey saying each other's names are removed. The Olruggio panel translation is also a bit misleading because (as you can see in the larger fan-translated photo), it's Qifrey who is controlling that wind spell! Olruggio is not "grabbing" the breadcrumbs from him, it's Qifrey who is sending them to him. It also lends to the back-and-forth of these moments because as soon as Olly's done with that pot, he gives it to Qifrey to use.

CHAPTER 3: pg 41

Japanese: ありがとうオルーギオ　行ってきます

Fan translated: Thank you, Olruggio. We'll see you later.

English version: Thank you, my friend. We'll be on our way now.

We're now at the part of the manga where Qifrey saying Olruggio's name is changed to "my friend" in the English version. Which is a phrase I'll admit I have some Daevabad baggage with, so idk, is this some platonic ray-beaming or is it code for tender feelings for that person you like but aren't ready to date yet because of trauma and societal complications? Is Stephen Kohler a Daevabad fan? So many unknowns. Still counting it as a wrong though.

CHAPTER 4: pg 56

Japanese: (Olruggio): ま... 眩しくて眠れやしない (Qifrey): がんばれ! オルーギオ

Fan translated: (Olruggio): Really... I can't sleep with all this shimmering... (Qifrey): Do your best! Olruggio.

English version: (Olruggio): Hmph. How's a man supposed to get some sleep with this thing sparklin' away over here? (Qifrey): Keep at it... ...my friend.

Qifrey literally made a bouquet of rose-shaped tarts for Olruggio to cheer up his room, so of course the English translation needs to tamp down that gayness by unnecessarily bringing up Olruggio's manhood when he complains about not being able to sleep from the tarts' sparkling. Even though this chapter's cover image is of Olruggio sitting in a field of flowers, pondering quietly as he holds one in his hand. Maybe later chapters will have Olruggio edited so he's sitting 5 feet away from Qifrey.

And again, Qifrey saying Olruggio's name in the bottom panel is changed to "my friend" in the English version.

CHAPTER 6: pg 95

Japanese: いい出来だろ? 家事の分担が大変だなんて思ってたら こんなものは作れねえぜ

Fan translated: Turned out pretty good, right? If I really thought sharing the housework was a pain, then I couldn't make something like this.

English version: Whaddya think? Not bad, huh? Sorry for leavin' you stuck with all the chores these last few days. I figure this is the least I can do.

Of all the mistranslations, this one bothers me the most. Olruggio is a wonderful malewife! He is constantly trying to help Qifrey out with the Atelier chores, in Kitchen and the main series. And yet the English translation changes the entire context of what these panels are saying.

The right panel is Olruggio proud of how good the soup tastes (it's even in a fancy bread bowl!), and yet the English translation downplays it by saying, 'Not bad, huh?'

Then the left panel, with it's sparkly background and close-up on Olly's face, goes further into how if he thought helping out with the housework was a pain, he wouldn't be capable of making stuff like this. Which is an understated way of saying that Qifrey can rely on him for things like this. (and he says it more outright in other chapters/the main series) But instead the English version is treating this soup like it's an apology for not helping out more. It's also really stupid because Olruggio was not making the soup as 'the least he could do' for Qifrey — he made it because he was hungry and wanted to eat it now! He literally admits this a few pages back!

Olruggio is not someone trying to do the bare minimum, he's someone trying to tell his control-freak of a friend that he wants to share in helping out. And the English version disappointingly misrepresents that here.

CHAPTER 10! Has several issues both Orufrey and wine related, and has several comparison segments. But because I maxed out Tumblr's 30-image limit, I can't include it here and so have to post it in a reblog. UGH. 😔

(Here is the link to the Chapter 10 comparison/discussion!)

In the meantime, image credits! The Japanese scans are from Comic-Days.com, the fan scanlations are thanks to Don't Quit Your Day Job, Robot Garden Scans, Brimhats/Nyaruhodou, and Kirbypoyopoyo, and the English version photos are from my own copy. And thank you AskeFinns for help with reading Chapter 2's kanji 💖

If chapters weren't mentioned, it's because I didn't notice anything significant enough to comment on. But if you know of something I missed, do let me know! And thanks for reading this far!

[aspd-culture]

I think the House pfp makes me like you a lot more, lol. /srs

We love our very problematic but extremely, sometimes painfully, unflinchingly honest and mostly accurate portrayal of (SPOILERSSSSSS) canon ASPD. Tbh, one of the few accurate portrayals I've seen and the only one that doesn't cover it up with "but he's a good person" or "but they learn to love and change their ways and no longer are like that yay they're cured" or pair the representation with a side of demonization. Special interest infodump below:

We know House does bad things, but in light of that, the show forces you to stare in the face the questions: What does it mean to be a bad person? If it's your intentions, do your bad actions not matter? If it's your actions, do your intentions not matter? Does the effort not to hurt people in spite of your pain and trauma and maladaptive worldview not matter, no matter how hard you try, if you fail? How many failures is considered "being human" and how many makes it "being a bad human"? Does a good or bad person even exist with how fluid and nuanced life and human nature is? Can you, as a fellow flawed human, define a good or bad person and if so what gives you the right? The show demands you look at this man with low empathy and learn to feel for him whether you like it or not. And so many prosocials completely misunderstand the show and paint him as the antagonist when the entire point of the show is (imo) to humanize the people you shove into the "bad" box. Also hhhh I hate the people who say "House is autistic that's why he acts like this!" Nope nope nope he is literally diagnosed with ASPD. Do I think he's got autism too? Possibly, but I think he may understand social cues, body language, subtext, etc too well for it to be that. I would personally guess ASPD+ADHD+MDD. One of his major specialties is dissecting the social boundaries not because the doesn't understand them, but to show the blind spots they leave, the disservice they do us. He knows what he does is against the norm, he knows he doesn't speak like the people around him and he knows how to do it right. He just *doesn't* because he finds value in removing that and finds no value in others' opinions on him. He knows he is seen as terrible and does not care to change it, not because (imo) he was not accepted as a person but because he was traumatized against people as a whole. See also, MIA and unknown father, questionable mother, shitty stepfather, and all the things he hints at but does not tell us outright. House is a lot of things, but socially unaware is not one of them, and whilst there are autistic people like that who are prosocial, I think the show addressed this clearly in the early episode of the autistic (they used the n*zi term but I will not) child who gives him the PSP or gameboy or whichever it was. House sees some of himself in that child, but it is clearly addressed that it's not quite right - that House relates but does not seem to click properly with being autistic. However, in the "soci*path" patient episode, House heavily struggles to separate himself from her, and finds himself repeatedly coming up empty on reasons they aren't the same. In fact, when he finds out it is reversible, it seems to me like he is simultaneously glad to have figured out the puzzle - and maybe to save her from his suffering - and distressed and jealous that she gets to get out of this. She will get to meet people who did not know her that way and be like them and feel like them and feel like one of them. Unlike in the autism episode, the characters around him seem to believe he has it as well. If he is autistic, he has ASPD as well - diagnosed in fact.

It's such a damn good show.

You did not ask for my (as restrained as possible) infodump about House, MD but you activated my special interest trap card.

[autisticempathydaemon]

5 + 1 Headcanons~!

Hehehehehe I was hoping and praying that someone would be foolish enough to tag me in this, and @zozo-01 and @ejunkiet activated my trap card lol thank you my darlings~

1. Alexis (and the Solaire Clan)

For some reason, I have had lots of thoughts about what kind of pets the Solaires like. Will is obviously a cat dude; we all love Bob Ross the cat. Sam is a dog kind of guy, because that makes it super funny he's dating a werewolf. Vincent seems like he'd like small, cuddly, fluffy animals like rabbits or hamsters to match his playful energy. In the isolated house Will gave her, on the edge of Solaire property, Alexis has a rescued parrot, because she can sympathize with a songbird that's been isolated from the rest of its flock. This is influenced by the my hc Alexis used to be a sonal energetic, wild parrots do actually fly about certain parts of Southern California, and Alexis would choose a pet with a long life span.

2. Love

My Love's name is Ariel! My thought process was that ETS, knowing that they wanted Love to go into the Meridian and that the only creatures who can directly interact with it are d(a)emons, would follow along with the d(a)emon naming convention. So Ariel is named after a star, albeit the artificial kind- an actual, British-American satellite that was launched in 1962.

3. Christian

Each and every one of you will have to drag surfer boy Christian out of my cold dead hands okay this is, like, one of the tenets of my heart Erik hasn't ripped out while it still beats From what I understand, both California and Australia are big on surfing, and I think the opportunity to make him an attractive, douchey, thinks-he's-hot-shit surfer dude was too good to pass up.

4. Cutie

Cutie is autistic and comes from a long family line of Telepaths. Cutie's relationship with telepathy, the way they use it, and their difficulty with not doing so reminds me a lot of my own struggle with autism and dating someone from a different cultural background than me. It's obvious their disregard for boundaries stems not from maliciousness or neglect but, I think, from a lifetime of communication issues that they've never needed to learn how to cope with properly.

5. Ollie

I've claimed Ollie for the asexuals, and anyone that tells me otherwise will be lovingly but harshly bitten (obviously /j)

+1. Enneagrams

This will probably be expanded into a full post sometime in the future (blame @romirola for enabling me), but I'll put down some of the tentative Types I've got down for the boys. Damien: thought we was a Type Six, I'm actually more convinced he's a One now. Sam: oh, the dictionary definition of a Type Eight. Geordi: Type Two but a healthy, developed Two. The work has been put in there. Lasko: Type Nine, specifically 9w1. Is that also my type? Who the fuck wants to know? /lh David: I thought, no brainer, that'd he'd be a Six but Type Three is very compelling. Asher: I'm not sure, but Asher is giving me 9w8 vibes which surprises me; I never thought I'd put him and Lasko so close on the circle, but it eats at me all the same.

Tagging: @dominimoonbeam @bratty-telepath @k9rage @horrorscoupes @angelnoodlesoup @gingerbreadmonsters @bicyclepainting @just-call-me-angel and you! If you want!

[lafortis]

i'm a bit of a lights novice. are most of the lights you use LEDs? are incandescents still kicking around? is there some other tech in the lights world i don't know about?

this is actually a great question! the answer is, mostly LEDs but it depends! and now you've activated my trap card (low-level lights autism) and under the read more will be a more in-depth answer

from the pre-history of lights until, say, the late 2000s, every light pretty much had a high-intesnity discharge lamp in em, specifically (at least in america) starting with this guy:

basically, true "incandescents" only ever existed on big stages for performances in the form of PAR Cans,

and only for lower wattages, cus they're just inefficient and suck, basically. most PAR Cans are still tungsten halide or better, because they gotta be bright, and afaik there's never been a moving head incandescent, because things like heat and brightness are ever an more compounding concern in moving fixtures because every ounce of cooling is more weight on the motors.

so basically, if we consider high-intensity discharge lamps (more broadly shortened to "tungsten discharge" in the industry because all the electrodes are tungsten and who honestly cares what gas is in there anyway) to be the industry's definition of a "conventional" or "incandescent", then yeah, they're still used to this day, because while LEDs have been being broadly adopted since, say, 2007, it's only very recently that they've begun to truly compare with tungsten on every level.

until the last 5 or 10 years, it was still the case that if you wanted anything that needed to be really goddamn bright (for example, a blinder, which is what it sounds like, or a strobe, which needs to be as bright as possible because you're only seeing it for whatever percentage of a second at a time, or a skylight, which is for killing passing pilots and everyone on board), you'd still be using tungsten discharge, because they were the best and most efficient way to get THAT bright. they're still often referenced as a comparison point in new marketing for lumens/watt and maximum luminous output, and lots of modern fixtures have a tungsten emulation mode, which changes the way the LED dimmer/colour temperature responds as it dims up or down, to emulate the way that tungsten behaves (because we all just miss it so much, i guess).

basically, to give you a (slightly tilted) idea of the splay of lamp types throughout the industry, here's Robe's (pronounced Roh-bee, because they're misanthropic Czechs who just want to make us suffer) product lineup as of April 2024:

don't ask about the laser light source, those are new and very very cool and very very cutting edge. the digital source is basically just a moving projector, which is also very very cool but not what we're talking about here

but basically, "white source LED" is what I would think of as the "standard" model of moving head that's "not an LED" fixture, which is to say, there's only one LED (or one LED engine, i.e. multiple LEDs on a single board to get more brightness), and it's being used just like how a convetional lamp would be used, that is to say being used as a light source and nothing else.

multispectral LEDs are basically the same thing, but with the ability to control the colour temperature (i.e. how "white" the white is vs how "natural" it looks) with near-scientific precision, as compared to something like an RGB led, which will never really get you a good 5600K, it'll just be kinda piss yellow, or a white LED, which is just white and has to rely on colour filters put on top of it to filter out the light (which is fine but you only get a couple of those and they're never the ones you want). this is mostly for film or theatre applications, especially film, where the exact colour temperature of the light source is pretty much the number one concern.

multisource LEDs are basically a big fuckoff array of LEDs that can be controlled individually to make fun big stuff, e.g. the Robe Tarrantula

basically these exist on a sliding scale from "i can do some things to some of these LEDs in banks of 3, 5 etc" to "this might as well be pixel mappable," or in some cases actually is (flashing lights CW for this video, it's literally the product showcase for a strobe light, i tried to timestamp to not go directly to any flashing parts but nonetheless):

most often these are "wash" lights, i.e. lights with much bigger heads to fit much bigger and wider lenses, since it's utilizing many more lower power LEDs, and you need space for all those to fit.

finally, the discharge lamp section, while small, is mighty; the Robe Pointe series is one of the most common, most beloved high-end fixtures in the industry today. they're apparently mercury halide, not tungsten, so hey, the fuck do i know, but yeah. they're similar in a lot of ways to their white LED source compatriots, but i think brighter for the same price point (of course, the prices aren't actually on their website; at this price manufacturers are generally all b2b), and kinda just sexier in certain ways. i think. idk, i'm in the price point where i'm not super experienced with these fixtures lol, but that's my understanding

HENNYWAISE, there ya go :3

[orowyrm]

#1: I love finding someone with a unique/rare ship or headcannon.

#2: the interaction with Sigma and Sombra, where Sigma is saying Moira is going to run some tests on him, how do you think Ramattra would respond to hearing that?

#3 do they have any nick names for each other?

AW TEEHEE THANKYOU!!! its been a while since ive had the motivation to like, draw or write anything for em but rest assured im thinking about them so so so much... youve activated my autism trap card though i have an INSANE amount of convoluted opinions on the nature of character dynamics between sigma and sombra as well as sigma and moira and im taking this opportunity to babble about it. sorry in advance.

as for the interaction, personally im of the opinion that said 'tests' are literallly.... just tests. as in like, yknow, bloodwork, scans to make sure the implants and augments he has are actually working to redirect excess pressure and kinetic energy from his vital organs when using his abilities ... ive talked about how i think that sorta stuff works more in this post but tldr is that a lot of the tech and equipment hes using is of his own design and VERY experimental, hes pretty much flying blind here so he kind of has to make changes as he goes and so it's kinda important that his health and safety are taken into account. and he also has a bit of a uhhh. demonstrable history of disregarding his own safety for the sake of his research. it would kind of make sense that theyd be going out of their way to make sure someone stays on him about actually doing the damn tests and keeping track of the results. it just so happens that he's really averse to letting just anyone Examine (tm) him because of. yknow. the everything. and moira happens to fit the bill of being A. someone he feels he can trust to not take things too far (whether or not he's making a good choice here is up for debate, but i think he could do worse) and B. actually have a degree of knowing what she's doing. i definitely think that the only reason she's bothering at least initially is her own curiosity about everything he's got going on, but he also does just really feel like the type to jsut kind of naturally be very endearing . ive said before that a lot of their interactions read as playful to me, at least on his end - he DEFINITELY sounds like he's messing with her on purpose. i think he does genuinely regard her as a friend, and for the most part, he's probably right - even if she's a bit cranky about it. i have a LOT of thoughts about their relationship too honestly probably far too many to cram into this one post LMFAO i think about the dynamic a lot. im a moira apologist idc i think that she is capable of being nice sometimes. just because shes kind of a cunt sometimes doesnt mean shes needlessly cruel, like not only do i feel like messing with his head and experimenting on him given his history would be kinda kicking him while he's down. but ALSO, i feel like she's smart enough to know that making him an enemy would be a baaaad idea. he can literally explode people with his mind. she knows better than to give him any reason to be genuinely mad at her, and i do think he would absolutely NOT tolerate any kind of treatment like that ever again unless it was on his terms and he had the power to just leave if it got to be too much. even as it is, i think the entire process is a bit of a sore spot for him and not exactly something he's thrilled about, hence his hesitation in that interaction - not because it's happening against his will so much as he's regarding it the same way i think about having to go get blood drawn. it's not fun, but it's gotta happen somehow.

all that to say, i think upon overhearing discussion of said 'tests' without further context mattra would NOT be happy about it, likely getting defensive the same way sombra does. he'd probably be a lot harder to dissuade than she is tbh, i dont know if he'd really take moira's word for it that there's nothing underhanded going on here unless sig told him so himself, and even then it would still put his hackles up. he's probably very nosy about it for a very long time. just to be safe.

as far as nicknames/pet names go, in my mind theyre both very... awkward about these kinda things i guess if that makes sense? emotional vulnerability comes easily for NEITHER of them, between sig still recovering from decades of isolation and mattra just naturally being very guarded and bitter (for good reason!) and not used to outwardly expressing his care for others, especially not for some random human who seems to have decided that they're friends. to me, their dynamic is very much one of tentativeness and battling with distrust and insecurity. i think it would take a very, very long time to get there, and even longer to actually be able to casually say stuff like that without wanting to explode and die on the spot. i do think sig is a bit more outwardly affectionate than mattra, but even then, a lot of it is kinda tempered by the fact that he's just very forward with everyone about everything at this point - he's kind of desperate for positive connections with others that he can hold onto, so he's reached a point where it doesn't take much to get him to consider someone a friend and he's not exactly hiding it anymore. oh, i dropped something and you picked it up before i had a chance to? sick, we are now besties and i would kill for you.

i think that sort of attitude would catch ramattra off guard and he'd not really know how to react to any of it. sig could call him anything at this point, but if it's in an affectionate tone he WILL bluescreen about it. ramattra.exe has encountered an error and must restart

i do really like sig's valentines voiceline, so i might just roll with 'starlight' even if it's a bit cheesy... hell, now that i think about it, i think he'd do that specifically BECAUSE it's cheesy and will probably elicit an eye-roll or a 'stop that'. he seems to enjoy pushing people's buttons. maybe bothering his friends is his love language idk

[caestusvulpes]

@bvshfulninja asked:

What plot points would change due to the inclusion of your character in canon? And what role would your character play in the story? Are they a major player, or a one scene wonder? (For her JoJo Verse!)

YOU HAVE ACTIVATED MY AUTISM TRAP CARD.

It just so happens i'm currently writing an extensive part 2 rewrite with 2 rp groups right now, one containing my pals aeth, den, dreamy, and kris, and the other containing max, rani, river, and sci!

hikari is a support character to joseph that simultaneously has her own shit to work through, ie. juggling with her humanity, training hard to become strong enough to defeat labrie, ect. Her presence and former vampirism is enough to actually divert straizo, on his way through new england to make his attempt on joseph's life, and have them connect and make a tentative deal while joseph instead goes to mexico of his own accord to retrieve speedwagon's ( alleged ) remains.

the rewrite exists to give characters fights and scenes and growth that the plot and pacing couldn't allow. There was an entire MONTH that was spent between caesar and joseph-- caesar is alive for seven episodes, i must remind you, and dies halfway through the part. Wtf went on there!! Also it gives suzie q and lisa lisa more time to be badass, and showcases some other awesome ocs ( khalia being dreamy's oc who i adore, and astrid being sci's equally amazing oc im chewing her ).

but yeah part 2 has always been my favorite part and has had crazy potential i wish it lived up to ykwim...

[pixeljade]

*steals your autism and becomes more powerful

Ha! Double Ha! My autism is rigged, and your theft of it has activated my TRAP CARD! now you must listen to my infodump for the next seven hours

[sithbian]

OMG FOR THE AUTISM ASKS 12, 42, 50: give me ur best infodump. hand it over.

u activated my trap card [ask meme]

12. Do you headcanon any characters as autistic? If you want, tell us why you headcanon them as autistic.

I headcanon so many characters as autistic, but I'm only going to do two. First, Rey from TFA (I don't remember the other two movies enough to bother with them), mainly bc I really relate to her aversion of being touched without her permission and I feel like her biggest interest is starships so of course she knows everything about them and their parts. The other is Leia--as soon as I read Princess of Alderaan, I immediately thought she was. She has a hard time socializing and knowing what's okay to talk about, social cues, etc. There's other things I'm blanking.

42. Tell us something about your special interest.

right so, it's entomology that i'm super into. and im just going to do a single fact since ur question 50 is just to infodump about it. there's a family of beetles (histeridae) that is referred to as clown beetles (there's also a clown weevil). they have short elytra.

50. Free question. Ask anything you want! Any topic at all! [aka; best infodump]

i'm just gonna infodump about my favorite insects in my collection or what i want to have bc theyre my absolute favorites (since entomology is a big thing with a lot of stuff in it).

so, my favorite moth is spilosoma lubricipeda, the white ermine moth. its a day-flying moth, characterized by its orange abdomen and white wings with black dots. they are poisonous. they have long antennae branches. and theyre found in europe and asia (they have a few sibling species in china) my favorite type of bee is the blue carpenter bee (xylocopa caerula). theyre like, the prettiest color of blue and theyre less aggressive compared to other carpenter bees (and their wings have a pinkish iridescence to them). theyre from southeast asia. this is getting really long so im not gonna go on a big ramble for the others but the two beetles i really like are the javan fiddle beetle and the japanese rhinoceros beetle (i want to get tattoos of both of them). other notable moths are the polyphemes moth, luna moth, and atlas moth.

[ask-the-ais-anything]

I feel like this won't reach Guzma or Maxie for Plot Reasons, but I am Autistic and You Triggered my Trap Card/Special Interest.

On the time machine... You guys don't need to hack it to do that. The easiest way to force a computer to overheat is with physical forces, not digital. Dust and fur clogs fans, direct sunlight and other sources of external heat will negate and dry up cooling measures... And that's not exactly something that can really be accounted for, unlike digital security methods. Fans require intake and outtake vents, and clearly if it's using a liquid coolant, it's either already long dry if it's having this issue, or it's not up to snuff for what it's cooling. Heck, if you can find the intake vents, and manage to block them without anyone noticing...

Or, if the "little radiation freak" ((side note, oh my gods I was WONDERING if that was from Uranium! I need to play that at some point... So no I have no idea what that thing can do I am just Guessing via Design Clues)) has any actual ability to make radiation uhhh... Well, ripping atoms to shreds will mess up electronics just as well as living beings, if not moreso considering the lack of self-repairing ability! Really not sure why they thought that one would be helpful here... Or maybe their knowledge is just no match for the power of Autism and Special Interests, who knows. Also try to keep as much distance and physical barriers between you and it at all times, just in case. Also helpful if it decides to just straight-up maul you considering it's clear desire for the death of everything around it! Double safety measure! Hooray! Again... Why did they bring that thing?

I’m pretty sure in the context of Uranium, curie isn’t radioactive, but it’s not like we see her (active) after the game ends so…

[anxiously-scared]

Hi im a rando that saw your tags on a post (about the reporting native bird feathers from witch etsy) where I saw you wanted to know more since they're "just picking the feathers up" and unfortunately, you've activated my autism trap card, so get prepared for some lighthearted explanation and commentary :3

So! I dont know if you're in the US, but I'm basing all of this off of US laws since most witch etsy shops are also based here (or the UK, but I don't know as much about those laws). In the US, almost all birds are protected under either the MBTA (Migratory Bird Treaty Act) or the Raptor Act. Both acts are essentially legal protection against bird poaching outside of specific game seasons using certain weapons. Birds that are not protected are 1. Farm fowl you own (such as chickens, ducks, etc), 2. Farm fowl you can prove were Farm fowl (such as ducks and turkeys specifically), and 3. Invasive birds (such as European starlings, sparrows, and more). Basically every other bird in the states is considered either migratory, or a raptor, and is therefore federally protected from any type of poaching

The reason these protections were implemented was a lot to do with 1800s bird hunting, which got just... so completely out of whack. Do yourself a favor and look up "punt guns", as they're massive cannon-sized boat mounted shotguns that could take out an entire flock of ducks in one shot, and enable hunters to spend the entire rest of their day bagging up to around 200 ducks from, again, just *one* shot. Due to this, ducks, turkeys, quail, pheasants, and other bird game absolutely plummeted to near extinction, even including regular "pest" birds like crows struggled through poaching eras. This is also a huge part of why dodos went extinct.

These acts don't just protect these birds from regular poaching though, because that would be too simple (and most bird poachers don't think they're doing anything wrong or anything that matters, so they don't care about just lying) you see, the #1 excuse game wardens get when they ask about illegal killing is "I found it like that", which when you're talking about, say, finding someone with owl talons or eagle feathers, is probably the biggest attempt at a "get out of jail free" card possible. Sure it's plausible, but there's always too big of a risk that the person is lying and is potentially poaching a species that only has less than 50 in the wild left just for some cool bird talons (like condors, bald eagles, some types of owls, etc). To resolve that issue, these acts have it down as a felony *per piece of bird*. As in, per individual Feather, per Talon, per Beak, etc. Picking a bird feather off the ground in the US can absolutely be a felony if you don't know what kind of bird it is, and you have decades and decades of shitty entitled bird poachers, even to this day, to blame for restrictions being as high as they are.

So if you find some etsy witch who isn't native selling non invasive wild bird feathers in the US, you can 100% report them to fish and wildlife and land them with multiple felonies for raptor and migratory bird poaching. If you also want more info on why the post specifies "white witch", feel free to check out resources about Native American tribes and their privileges for hunting and using native birds such as eagles for cultural reasons. Certain native american tribes have specific permits for hunting birds because of the cultural+community benefits as well as their way of using the full bird without *just* taking a stupid claw trophy and throwing away the rest of the bird

In short, it's actually not even cruel to report them, and in fact it's the morally correct thing to do, because only native americans from certain communities have the right to do so (speaking of, it's also fun to report white etsy shops that sell "native jewelry", because that's also a crime, just make sure they're actually not native before you do that)

a big thank you to all of you for telling me this!!! im very sorry if you sent this at an earlier time and i didnt respond, i only use tumblr on mobile and whether it shows me that i got an ask is literally luck based for me

anyways these were all very great answers, i def understand the post this was abt now!!

and to the first one dw abt rambling, i may not be stationed in the us but it was still interesting to hear (you can absolutely send me more asks abt it if you want to ramble more)

thank all of you once again!!

[outpost-31]

what would araneri have on his pokemon team'

SLAMS MY FIST DOWN ON THE COUNTER. YOU ACTIVATED MY AUTISM TRAP CARD

sorry everybody that sent me an ask this took me like an hour to answer I went so in-depth

(this is so ok to reblog and please do. the autism)

araneri is very proud. he's not somebody who'd only have 1 or 2 pokemon; he'd have a full team, a powerful one at that. both because of his ego and reputation, but also because it provides him with the strength he's so proud of

he'd have a team as elegant as him i believe. likely made up of mostly poison and psychic type, because of how he is in canon. + HoF and it's power and it causing severe sepsis. maybe even dark types, alot of them would match his ego. these are my thoughts:

Lucario, Malamar, Meowstic (M), Absol, Dragalge, and Toxel

- All very elegant or proud pokemon, or at the least intimidating. Likely those that he'd choose on his own

- AND very strong pokemon. strong as fuck, actually

- Funny enough, alot of them match or compliment his aesthetic. Several are purple, red, white and gold... And those that aren't are a shade of blue that contrasts those very well

- of course your team doesn't NEED to match you aesthetically, but hes a bit extra we know this

- they'd likely be named after nu metal bands/albums

AS FOR REASONS WHY

☆

LUCARIO. this is the one I have the most on

- Would act as his head of the team. Or, basically, his House of Flies

- A prideful, POWERFUL pokemon, one with a strong sense of justice

while they only trust trainers with righteous hearts, Araneri is a natural-born stand user. this Lucario would've been with him his entire life. regardless of everything, it'd love him either way.

prideful, and incredibly loyal to and protective of their trainers.. hey, doesn't that sound familiar? much like HoF. additionally, it's very solitary, which is very good with Araneri's behavior in general

+ it can read moods and sense energy, and even speak telepathically . in a way, a parallel to how HoF summons itself to protect Araneri the second it senses he's upset, and cannot speak, but still communicates with him

- in mega-evolution, it's fighting style is just as ruthless and cruel as araneri's canonically

- lucario was based off anubis. who judges the hearts of the dead based off their actions.. hmm....

☆

As for the rest. I believe its self-explanatory from screenshots/wikipedia quotes

" Dragalge is a territorial Pokémon that will spit poison at whatever trespasses on its territory. Its poison is strong enough to melt the hulls of metal tankers. As a result, it is said that ships sailing through the seas where it lives never return. It hunts by hiding itself in seaweed and then ambushing prey with a spray of poisonous liquid "

" Toxel has a poison sac which it uses to store its poison and secretes the same poison through its skin. By manipulating the chemical makeup of this poison, it can produce electricity. Toxel relays the electric poison through its skin. While the voltage produced by this electrified poison is weak, it can cause a tingling paralysis if touched. "

I went so in-depth with these I can explain so hard okay

also you may ask " why is toxel there if it isn't elegant? actually it's typing is pretty far from the others. " .. I'd like to think. akira gave it to him

[the-resurrection-3d]

I wrote the "feel like I shouldn't like it" comment! I do agree with you about the character dynamics, I just am inclined to subject them to less extreme depths of pain. I wouldn't write about mutilation fantasies, for example. What I meant by that comment is that it would be very easy for me to find that kind of material too much to bear, but you don't lose track of the emotional elements in the pain or warp the characters just so they can suffer more deeply as darker works sometimes do.

(hit the character limit) But I also think you are onto something about not knowing how to use darkness. My first fic is very fluffy because I wanted it to be, but I realized that I wouldn't mind exploring some of the darker elements, especially the dysfunction of the Paguro family. Even in my fluffy story I kept rubbing up against that issue. My work would never be like yours, and that's ok, but it's good to enjoy other approaches to help define my own. Plus, your stories are just good to read!

Thank you again for the clarification! And like I said, that wasn't meant to be any kind of shade towards you. Sorry this took me for-fuckin’-ever to get to-- I wanna emphasize again how much I appreciate getting this kind of thoughtful engagement in my inbox, even if I take a while to respond.

First, it’s always funny to me when people call my stuff extreme because you’re not wrong, I’m just fucked in the head, lol. I’ve been dealing with extremely violent intrusive thoughts for so long that this kind of gore no longer phases me. Though I have been pushing myself out of my comfort zone a lot more with this fandom— actually naming the incestuous intrusive thoughts the way I did in “I was an island” is something I’ve struggled with for years, and even then, I thought for sure people would give me shit for it. (The grooming fic, meanwhile, really makes me feel like I’ve gone insane, even though it will probably never be published in a complete form.) 

Moving on, though, I have just… so many thoughts on the use of darkness in fic it’s hard to know where to start. When I said that this morning, I was specifically thinking of several instances where younger writers have asked me for advice on how to avoid “romanticizing” things like mental illness and trauma in their writing-- and like I said, I get it. I do! But it’s frustrating that this disgust towards work that “romanticizes” “bad things” pervades fandom spaces, yet has no real definition beyond “if it has explicit sex, it’s trash.” (I know I’m using a lot of scare quotes around “romanticize,” so I wanna say that that’s not because I think it’s an inherently useless word, just that fandom has made it one.)

This ties in, I think, not only to something my writing partner for the Grooming Saga said this morning, but to various points I’ve seen brought up by researchers in my pedagogical studies (and my thesis in this class is on the intersection of creative writing and compositional pedagogies so you’ve just activated my fucking autism trap card). Similar to the ao3 comment I was originally responding to in my initial post, my friend felt unsatisfied with a lot of the fandom’s Alberto angst output because it felt, as they put it, “too vague.” There are various reasons for this, the first of which is that writing, even in a school setting, is seen as a reflection of the self. In creative settings like fanfic, this has taken on a moral aspect to it— to be accused of “romanticizing” trauma or mental illness not only means your story is bad, but suggests your story is literally damaging to culture, and how can that not reflect poorly on you as a person? 

But even moving beyond that, a lot of people are afraid of being too specific, too “dark,” because they fear rejection— a lot of young writers need to be given “permission” by other texts to break out of their own ideas of how stories “should” be told, which is how you end up >being me in an undergraduate writing class reading Homesick for Another World because, as my professor outright said, “Some students need to be given permission to go darker.”

It reminded me of this article a colleague brought up in our pedagogy class, wherein the author found that students’ anxieties towards writing ended up making them turn in papers with the same vague generalizations and clichés in lieu of the actual analysis she’d been looking for. Here’s a study she cites that I think is really useful for giving some more language and empirical backing to things I’m sure we’ve all already seen:

Thorne and McLean collected written accounts of traumatic events along with "telling-narratives," stories in which subjects described contexts for the stories' narration, including how the stories were told and how they were received. Researchers identified three positions within the telling contexts: [1] the John Wayne [JW], where the teller presents a self that is tough and well able to handle the situation; [2] the Florence Nightingale [FN], where the teller describes a self that is aware and responsive to the needs of others; and [3] the Vulnerable, where the teller focuses on his or her own "fear, sadness, and/or helplessness" (175). Findings indicated that

audiences were more willing to accept traumatic positions of toughness or concern for the feelings of others than positions of raw vulnerability—unmitigated fear or sadness. Based on their greater likelihood of being accepted by audiences, we speculate that for this sample of European-American college students, John Wayne and Florence Nightingale positions constituted culturally dominant narratives and Vulnerable positions did not. . . . A number of informants commented that listeners do not know how to respond to feelings of fear and sadness, suggesting that there is no general script for managing vulnerability in this sample of late adolescents. (181-82)

In other words, some late adolescents bring to their composing process an internalized expectation that stepping outside dominant cultural scripts for relating distressing events will result in a lack of audience response or even in audience withdrawal.* 

In academic and life-writing, as these researchers have found, people retreat to discursive models that are not only already familiar to them to alleviate stress, but that they think best fits with what their audience wants to read. In creative writing, breaking through the impulse towards vagueness and cliché is all the harder because what do you replace it with? How can you begin to tailor these feelings towards a particular character if you haven’t even fully articulated your own feelings to yourself? 

Also your comment about “warp[ing] the characters just so they can suffer more deeply as darker works sometimes do”... don’t fucking get me started, lmao. If you want to know more of my thoughts on that, we can talk about it in a different post or you can read my unfinished bitter Eraserhead baby of a fic, “but I am home.” I have so much to say about how this attitude of suffering being inherently meaningful has haunted my writing over the last couple of years, and how I hope I’m avoiding it in my more angst-heavy fics (except for the grooming fic which is awful and why I’m glad no one is gonna get to read it), but ultimately it’s not a standard I hold anyone’s fanfiction to but my own. 

I hope the writing goes well! I definitely feel ya on rubbing up against the angst potential even in fluff— people ask all the time why someone would write fucked up content about a kid’s show/movie, but honestly, the fact of the matter is that a lot of kid’s media has fucked up shit in it that they’re not very good at addressing (if they do at all). Anybody remember that time Yin Yang Yo! made a visual gag out of an 11-year-old boy being kidnapped and severely beaten for an unspecified amount of time until he completely changed his personality to the point of being unrecognizable and all his dialogue sounding like a Christian Youth counselor’s script? That wasn’t my favorite joke in the episode but it was pretty alright I guess. 

Alright, I swear I’m done rambling now. Thanks again for the ask c: And good luck on your writing! Godspeed, brother! 

(The study being cited is Avril Thome and Kate McLea’s "Telling Traumatic Events in Adolescence: A Study of Master Narrative Positioning” from Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives, but the actual article I read was “Fear, Teaching Composition, and Students’ Discursive Choices: Re-thinking Connections Between Emotions and College Student Writing” by Sally Chandler for Composition Studies volume 35.) 

[ganymedesclock]

Who do you think is more unknowable and eldritch: The Radiance or The Pale King?

With respect, I’m about to hijack this question, but you’ve activated my trap card. (I will drop a follow-up post that is actually Hollow Knight meta, though, since you are asking for that)

To be a bit less flippant about it: I have a lot of emotions about unknowable and eldritch. Overwhelmingly they tangle together with my feelings on normal.

I don’t think that these are useful terms to use the way that we often use them.

Let’s take a bit of a history walk.

The concept of the eldritch is often conflated very closely with the concept of the lovecraftian horror- established, of course, by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Lovecraft illustrated in lavish detail the idea of things that are literally unknowable- that to try and hold them in our mind, to try and make sense of them, will destroy us. And that these things will inevitably encroach, move closer into us, and we will end, we will be ended and destroyed because these things will come into our minds, into our lives, and tear them apart for the irreconcilability.

This is what a lovecraftian horror means: it is something that we cannot reconcile with ourselves in any way.

Here is the important, vital thing about Howard Phillips Lovecraft:

He was a horribly racist man.

This is vital.

Because here’s the thing that I resent about a lovecraftian horror: it is not horror. We hear about “incomprehensible eldritch beings” all the time in games and stories.

How do they act?

They are almost invariably hostile. They come after you. They’re here to destroy you.

This is not horror.

This is a reassurance.

Because we are put in the position of someone who destroys that incomprehensible being. We are definitely never put in a position where our lack of context hampers us. They are incomprehensible because they do not need to be comprehended. We don’t have to think about them. We don’t have to think about their feelings or ever try to understand because they don’t need to be understood. And, yet, we understand enough to say for sure that they are bad. They are bad, but we don’t understand how to talk to them. We don’t understand how they’re thinking. But we know they’re bad.

In this way, Lovecraft has designed a beautiful, perfect system of the world specifically for bigots. Because if you are bigoted, you are forced eventually to reconcile with the fact that your models of humanity are ignorant. That people, shockingly, remain people, no matter their background, spoken language, genetics, physiology, disability, or neurodivergence. That if I forced a white man from New York onto a deserted island with his only company being an aborigines man from Australia, without any spoken language between them and few experiences in common, unless one of them actively ended the situation with violence, they would come to understand each other, and have qualities in common.

Incomprehensible eldritch horror does not exist. It is rooted in a feigned weakness of the human mind, that was dreamed, in part, by a white bigot who was terrified of anything unlike him, and terrified especially that he would see ignorance and selfishness in the pedestal he created to elevate himself and others he thought of as worthy peers above all other kinds of human being.

Here is the reason this matters to me so much: I am not, in fact, an eldritch monster wearing skin. But we don’t have a lot of those running around. We do, however, have neurodivergent human beings. I’m one of them.

From an early age, I was told that my brain is strange. That I do not think like normal people. That my thinking is disordered. This seemed strange to me. My brain does not hurt. I am not filled with suffering. Some things are hard for me. But there are things hard for everyone.

But, I was told, many times, over and over again, my brain is not normal. I am not a normal human. I need to look at the normal humans, the real humans, and study them, and understand them, and become like them. Any time something seemed hard or frustrating it was proof I had to try harder to become a real human.

In a sense, I lived Lovecraft’s horror story. I was, from my own perspective, a lone mote of humanity cast adrift in an alien world, a world I could not understand, a world that was upsetting and strange and hurt me.

I was not, however, broken to pieces by it. Nor was I filled with hatred or repulsion for the strange creatures I saw. I observed and I came to understand. When they were happy, I wanted to be happy too. Being the only normal person was lonely. I envied the way they slipped sinuously through barriers that stalked me. I wondered if I, too, could have those features, could build approximations, could emulate them, could seem like them. Now that I have grown, I am praised by my alien peers, for how much like them I seem. That I am so good at speaking the way they expect me to speak. That I thrive in this environment.

Now, if you’re following, you may have taken pause at the fact that I call myself the normal one here. After all, I’m neurodivergent! Neurodivergent isn’t normal. Autistic people like me aren’t normal. People like you are normal!

That’s the kicker, though.

Normal is not real, and this, this is the inherent failure of cordoning off characters as incomprehensible.

Because every single character is normal. Everybody on the planet is normal.

Developmentally, psychologically, “normal” is a set of blinders we put on. Because when our early primordial ancestors walked into the same meadow they usually came to, they were beset by a maelstrom of sensory information. And they have only so much energy, so much effort to look and listen and smell and feel. They cannot see, in full excruciating detail, the same buttercup that has been there every day they have come to this meadow. They cannot ruminate deep on the color yellow, the shape of the petals, until it has hewn itself deep in their mind.

They cannot, because that patch of orange at the edge of the meadow was not there yesterday. And it is not in the same place as it was an hour ago.

Our brains recognize patterns. They do this to keep us safe and help us navigate the universe at all. In that sense, there is no holiness to normal. Normal is not ever guaranteed to be good for us. Normal is just the thing that our brain filters out, does not look very hard at unless we consciously fight that reflex. It is the background against which we contrast unknown. 

I am normal. My autism is normal. If I had been raised on some kind of colony of exclusively autistic people, and you showed me a neurotypical person, I would have laughed at them. What a silly weird bizarre person! Why are they STARING like that? Why don’t they shake or flap or rock when they’re happy? Are they afraid of emotions, so they lock ramrod straight like that? This poor soul, you know, I took them to the fabric store and they didn’t touch anything, didn’t feel all the lovely textures and patterns. Could you give this creature a bouquet? Do they know how to appreciate any of their senses? A pitiful beast! Someone teach them how to be normal!

Normal becomes a rub. It becomes a sticking point, however, because we chose to live together, and we made rules, and in these rules, we betrayed our hand, our sense of normal.

The truth is if I abandoned Howard Phillips Lovecraft on a deserted island with Cthulu, I really sincerely believe that he would get over his mind-breaking wretched horror. He would find, to his shock and revulsion, that perhaps the first time he looks upon this creature’s visage it hurts. But the tenth time, or twelfth time, or twentieth time, it is merely a face.

Normal is a structure assembled by our minds for convenience and we act as if it is a god, when in reality it is merely a tool and one we can slap off the table and send clattering to the floor as if it is a doll we no longer want to play with.

Because my entire life, I have been told that I have a monster’s brain, a disordered brain, a brain twisted in a curious shape that harms my ability to understand others.

In my life I have met and imagined countless people, countless creatures, some very wildly different from me in priorities and behavior.

I have never in my life met an incomprehensible creature. But I have met plenty of things that I thought were incomprehensible- until I spent any time with them at all.

I have followed and spoken to and heard the stories of schizophrenic people. They were, surprisingly, not monsters.

I work with babies. They are not monsters either.

I have never met an incomprehensible monster. And every time I think I may have, I have been wrong, and I have needed to try harder.

So, to me, to call something truly alien in a sense that we can’t know what’s going on in their head, I remember that “lovecraftian” carries the name of a racist, inextricably embedded in its etymology.