Having a group is only half the battle, the other half is getting that group together when one person works odd hours, another has chronic illness with lots of medical appointments, and a third has a bitch of a commute during the week so often can’t get home in time.

For years we had games every Friday and Sunday, all it takes is a couple of people changing jobs to completely disrupt that setup.

Watching it at 1.5 speed helped immensely.

Sure they do, NTs do a lot of stim activities, the difference is that they don’t need to stim in order to remain calm and centred, they can just do it because it’s fun.

I had lessons from various people every summer for the first few years after I turned 17 (age you can start learning on public roads in the UK). I’d get to “test standard” each time on the mechanics of it, but navigating other drivers was too much so I never actually took a test, and never intend to.

I’m now in my 30s and have structured my life around not having a car. My house is on a 24-hour bus route into town where I work, and walking distance to most amenities. My husband does have a car, so he can drive us places that aren’t on public transit routes (such as our parents’ houses) but the vast majority of the time I’m doing my own thing while he’s at his job an hour’s drive away.

I don’t even seem to have a special interest. It’s like I’m doing autism wrong.

No idea whether it’s their reason, but anecdotally I’ve found it has a few benefits. If coordinated properly it’s significantly easier to train new(er) staff, it improves cross-organisational understanding to overhear other departments’ conversations either at desks or in break rooms, and it stops people becoming isolated pockets of knowledge and culture because they only ever see or interact with the same one or two people.

This is why I concluded that I can’t live in shared housing. Thankfully my social phobia isn’t triggered by living with a partner or I’d be fucked as far as affording housing.

I don’t have any useful advice or way to help, but you’re not a burden and you’re not the only one to feel this way. Sorry if that’s not exactly comforting.

My instinctive response is that it’s a terrible idea. While having no expectation to mask is great, it seems to me that gathering a group of people who generally struggle to take care of themselves and their environment and who have very low tolerance for certain environmental stimuli and a deep need for other environmental stimuli is a recipe for chaos.

I attend a local autistic adults zoom group every other week, and it’s great for support and understanding, but if I had to be in the same room as one of the other members their stims would give me a meltdown. I over-empathise emotionally, an autistic friend has almost no emotional empathy, as a result some of our interactions do not go as intended. Multiply these kinds of issues with having to effectively live with eachother and I just don’t see it going well.

Given the context of the article, the alternative suggestion isn’t “set up your own server” but “use software that doesn’t require a server”, which sidesteps most of that list.

That may be your experience, my partner and I use it co-op on every game that has it and watch each other play singleplayer, so it’s almost never out of the dock. I imagine many families with multiple kids and not enough budget to get everyone their own would do the same.

Because the number of people who won’t buy it because of the LCD screen is smaller than the number of additional people who will buy it if it’s $X cheaper at launch.

I’m so glad you’re feeling validated, it’s so miserable to be adrift in thoughts of “what’s wrong with me”!

Stimming is one of those things that everyone does to an extent, since it’s basically just “doing things that feel nice”. The difference for neurodivergent folks is that it helps us emotionally regulate in a way that neurotypical folks don’t need, so we tend to do it a lot more often (or feel extra stressed/anxious/irritable).

This is what smartphones are for. Take picture of clothing item. Take picture of clothing item tag. Save pictures in a “clothes” folder that is synced and/or backed up elsewhere and reference them as needed.

I don’t know. “Functional rebalancing” would be more accurate, but kind of clunky. I can’t think of anything more pithy.

I don’t seem to be able to reply to WookieMunster so I’ll say here:

I don’t get the hype over OLED screens, honestly. The difference isn’t enough for me to care, and it’ll be plugged into a TV most of the time anyway. It’s only a downgrade in that one area and only if you have an OLED Switch, whereas I don’t have any kind of Switch and couldn’t tell you which model my husband’s (the one I’ve played) is.

“Skill regression” is such an awful term. It would be like taking a severe workaholic who is getting stress ulcers, having them develop a proper work-life balance, and calling that “productivity regression”.

Honestly I’d be very surprised to see an online autism community with a majority of people professionally diagnosed, even more surprised if the majority were diagnosed as children. Even setting aside how underdiagnosed large sections of the autistic population are, the people who need to seek support and validation that they belong to a community are much more likely to be those who didn’t have the right language or support as a child.

I’ll maybe believe a release date when it’s actually announced,. Maybe. Though I already know I’m buying the Switch successor if it’s backwards compatible with Switch games, so it would be nice if this article turned out to be true.

This has turned out to be a huge wall of text, sorry.

Most autistic communities recognise that an official diagnosis is hard to get and not always helpful/necessary, so while it’s wise not to say as much out in the rest of the world, it’s completely valid to self-identify within an autistic space.

Feeling like you’re faking the whole thing is so normal. I didn’t have a self-identification journey before being diagnosed as an adult, and for the first two years after that diagnosis still felt like I wasn’t actually autistic and the assessors made a mistake, or not autistic enough to “count” and give myself accommodation. It comes from a lifetime of learning that your experiences are “wrong”, that you “can’t trust” your own interpretations of the world around you, that you could do anything a neurotypical person can do if you just try. We late-identified are raised to doubt ourselves. It’s often no one’s fault, but it still takes a lot of unlearning.

What you do now is start regularly checking in with your senses. Are you feeling tense because you’ve been ignoring a too-bright light or an irritating noise or an uncomfortable piece of clothing? Removing those kinds of subconscious distractions is a huge relief, whether that’s with headphones, earplugs, sunglasses, baseball hats, whatever works. Are you hungry/thirsty/sitting in a really uncomfortable way and haven’t realised it? Solve those needs.

Then look into stimming. Physical or mental actions that you feel an urge to do and find calming. They don’t have to be “weird” or socially unacceptable - spinning a pen, fiddling with a paperclip, chewing gum, twisting bracelets/wristbands/rings, squeezing a stress ball, wearing clothing that puts pressure in certain places (e.g. I wear dresses with a waist belt for pressure on my abdomen) are all possible stims. Even if it sounds completely unnecessary, try a bunch of thing and see what makes you feel safe and calm.

Chances are that if you’re autistic you’ll have a lot more mental energy after discovering your sensory sensitivities and stims, because it’s not all going into trying to ignore all the discomforts.

The social side is less straightforward, and to be honest I’ve not figured it out yet. People say masking is damaging and should be avoided at all costs, but those costs can be significant. I’ve tried to go the route of not masking stims (having found subtle ones that work) and unapologetically wearing sunglasses indoors, but still put on the mask when it comes to communication, tone of voice, facial expressions and the like. Because my aim is to be understood, not to take a stand for all autism-kind, and the relief of meeting my sensory needs frees up a lot of the mental energy for it. Maybe that’s the wrong approach, but it’s the one that poses the least risk to my comfort.

Would definitely recommend, it’s proper co-op (in the sense of both players having the same game experience, not the sense of needing to actually cooperate). I’m terrible at platformers so I find it challenging, an actually competent player would probably find it generally easy.