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[babyspacebatclone]

That’s the pain scale I use now for my knees/arthritis.

1 is “no pain,” which is a unicorn nowadays.

5 is “I’ve started moving in a way to compensate this.”

10 is “there is no movement possible.”

That puts 7 at “My ability to move is now noticeably compromised for longer than 1 second,” and when I start actually worrying about stuff.

7 on the sensory scale is “I am grimacing and/or teeth grinding,” with similar reactions.

(I was commenting to my mother recently, a retired nurse, that “Most people start getting worried around a 5, right?” and she’s like “Yeah, babies.” 😂)

How do you know you feel pain? Weird question but... when people say autistic people feel pain when hearing certain sounds, I can't relate. I can experience agony, maybe other bad sensations, but not physical pain. However, sometimes I would rather feel physical pain than what I feel when hearing certain noises. Is that what people call "feeling pain from a sound"?

I struggle with describing pain because if it's not strong pain, it's just a bad sensation, but how strong does it need to be to be called pain? Idk

This one is going to vary from person to person, because sensory profiles differ. And pain is subjective. What I feel as excruciating may be just normal pain to someone else, and vice versa.

Also, "bad sensation" is a form of pain.

Pain scales are pretty rubbish most of the time, but this gets the idea across.

There is also TYPES of pain. Physical, emotional, mental etc.

When I hear a loud noise but I'm prepared for it (eg going into the shops) it's more of a slowly eroding discomfort that can become a headache.

When I hear a loud noise and it's unexpected (eg a motorcycle coming by) it does cause a very sharp headache feeling inside my head. I liken it to a nail being wedged into my brain.

Food is my least sensory issue. I usually feel no unpleasant sensations.

However, when I'm in sensory overwhelm, I can't stand the taste of anything but my safe foods, and if I'm not careful even those risk becoming unsafe.

So, the scale or description of "pain" is very subjective and all are valid in this case.

[babyspacebatclone]

First of all, definite agreement that sensory issues are a spectrum and you may only notice extremities in specific senses.

Sound is the worst for me, I really have to be overwhelmed to notice sight or touch.

I also definitely have the “Please start the physical torture, I can handle that more than my brain vibrating in my skull another moment” sensations.

The main point I want to make that I learned recently (like, at 44 of 45) is that specific sound frequencies really do cause physical pain, and it varies from person to person.

It’s, well, exactly this. Specific harmonics can make a person’s eardrum and/or ear canals vibrate, which when intense enough is obviously painful.

Now, if you’ve never experienced resonance pain that is an awesome thing and I hope you never do, it’s definitely -100 out of 10 do not recommend.

If you think you’re getting the “nail in the brain” experience, however, it might be this? As given above I’m still trying to work out my own resonances myself.

My big statement is if your brain is uncomfortable, that’s pain, no matter if it’s happening because physical nerves were triggered elsewhere in the body or it’s the interactions of information within the brain going haywire.

If you think your brain is oscillating like that glass above, it’s pain, don’t let the “but would someone else call it pain?” distract you.

Because the shattering is real, whether it comes from a baseball bat or an opera singer.

How do you know you feel pain? Weird question but... when people say autistic people feel pain when hearing certain sounds, I can't relate. I can experience agony, maybe other bad sensations, but not physical pain. However, sometimes I would rather feel physical pain than what I feel when hearing certain noises. Is that what people call "feeling pain from a sound"?

I struggle with describing pain because if it's not strong pain, it's just a bad sensation, but how strong does it need to be to be called pain? Idk

This one is going to vary from person to person, because sensory profiles differ. And pain is subjective. What I feel as excruciating may be just normal pain to someone else, and vice versa.

Also, "bad sensation" is a form of pain.

Pain scales are pretty rubbish most of the time, but this gets the idea across.

There is also TYPES of pain. Physical, emotional, mental etc.

When I hear a loud noise but I'm prepared for it (eg going into the shops) it's more of a slowly eroding discomfort that can become a headache.

When I hear a loud noise and it's unexpected (eg a motorcycle coming by) it does cause a very sharp headache feeling inside my head. I liken it to a nail being wedged into my brain.

Food is my least sensory issue. I usually feel no unpleasant sensations.

However, when I'm in sensory overwhelm, I can't stand the taste of anything but my safe foods, and if I'm not careful even those risk becoming unsafe.

So, the scale or description of "pain" is very subjective and all are valid in this case.

[babyspacebatclone]

Don’t know why, feel like sharing a glimmer with you guys randomly.

I work at a daycare, and one of our older kids has learned how to recognize the Hot Wheels logo.

And they’ll go through our matchbox-style cars and proudly ask for confirmation that they found a Hot Wheels one.

Yes, it’s a bit tedious for us adults, but it’s inspired the other preschoolers to look for the distinctive swish.

And it’s literally early literacy, recognizing that a specific image holds symbolic meaning independent of its literal appearance.

It’s just… I’m in charge of developing people learning to understand the world. They find things I’m bored by novel and exciting. And I’m privy to that by proxy, as long as I don’t allow myself to get jaded to it.

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*literally is crying after making a phone call about setting up a tour for a new apartment*

All I want to know is which of the raccoons masquerading as a person-shaped object in clothes is responsible for this???

*spins the wheel of disabilities*

Game Show Voice: Is it….!?

The Autism!!!

The ADHD!!!

The Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria!!!(specifically)

The Anxiety!!!

The Clinical Depression!!!

The mystery raccoon hiding in the middle I haven’t identified yet!!!!

It’s just, I’m 45 years old, I keep thinking I have a handle on this and every time it hits me like a sack of wet raccoons.

[babyspacebatclone]

I want a classic stage magician show.

Where the headliners are the magician assistants.

Like, you’ve got three beautiful limber ladies, and all the advertising focuses on them - names included.

Because “We’re the ones doing all the work, after all!”

(in tricks requiring more hands than 4 people visible to the audience, Chippendale-garbed guys fill in, whom the “assistants” fawn over.)

And one of the jokes is that the generic stage magician is actually played by multiple blandly attractive men, close enough in appearance you don’t notice they keep being switched out every other trick because all the focus is on the “assistants.”

Up until the finale, where the transporting magician trick “accidentally” shows all the magicians flubbing their timing and being visible at once, “spoiling” the illusion.

Until the “assistants” make them all vanish and do the final bows.

You know who you’re really here to see!

(image of the original Masked Magician and assistants)

[babyspacebatclone]

*plotting out points for the MC of an original story*

So, her plan if she has to step up and fulfill her role as Hero against a doomsday plot is “Money, connections, and overpowered equipment.”

…..

So, hey.

Are you legally allowed to have a Batman Build on a character if they aren’t a traumatized mess???

Asking for a character of mine.

[babyspacebatclone]

A quick write up under the cut to demonstrate some of the lore building and how the RPG mechanics work in this setting I’m developing.

In-universe, this is the MC writing a draft for training her future protege. I’m trying to balance out the “as you know” aspects of the magic system while being able to verbalize what the characters find mundane.

Note: Things in [*emphasized brackets*] are rough draft elements that will be replaced once I figure out what goes there.

The most important thing to remember when dealing with other people’s Skills is that the numbers aren’t real.

It may sound stupid to harp on the first thing you learn when you start Focusing, but trust me, you forget that basic fact. You get so used to thinking in terms of measured growth and discrete levels to make sense of everything that you start acting like they matter.

Your Level count will never be the same as another person’s Level count. Well, unless you decide to follow one of the structured Mage Pathes, but even then, that only matters for people who use that measure system.

And yes, not everyone measures time the same; wait until you get the chance to talk with an Elven Sage. You want precision on a scale both too fast and stretching on for an eon compared to anything a Human would think of?

On that note, I’m definitely not taking you into Elven territory until [*set goal that indicates readiness*]. I’m not going to do that to you.

But getting back to Levels. Especially among Humans and non-Mages, the numbers aren’t real. They’re just to give you an idea of how much Experience someone has put into a Skill or Attribute.

Even if someone knows you’re the Hero and can see their Attributes, don’t use numbers until they tell you what they think they are.

Remember: Their Skills are their own perception of their Experience. Their words, their divisions, their property. Their own definition of their very self.

Even if they’re following an established Path, their Attributes will always be their interpretation of what that Path means.

We’re already intruding into one of the most personal parts of a person’s being by being able to see their Experience. That’s one of the burdens and responsibilities of being a Hero.

You never have the right to dictate what that essence is.

I’ve been working in my head on a storyline for a Cozy Lit RPG episodic series (short stories or, preferably, webcomic type).

Key word Cozy, in the “low stakes, low drama” sense.

The Mc is the hero of legend for their generation - in a world that hasn’t had a major catastrophe in almost two centuries, and she wants to keep it that way.

While also documenting everything she can about her world’s magic system and peoples for the next hero to be born, because she feels otherwise woefully unsuitable for being a mentor worthy of the recent hero tradition.

She’s a traveling merchant, and her primary skills are Appraisal, Strength, Knock Out (because to her exhaustion she will summon every bandit in a 10 mile radius) and Wisdom. Oh, and Luck, but that’s one of the standard Hero Perks in this setting (literally).

Anyone interested in me rambling a bit about what I’ve workshopped so far on the world setting? (warning: I suck at names, so I’m going to need to come up with placeholders if this happens…)

[babyspacebatclone]

I’ve been working in my head on a storyline for a Cozy Lit RPG episodic series (short stories or, preferably, webcomic type).

Key word Cozy, in the “low stakes, low drama” sense.

The Mc is the hero of legend for their generation - in a world that hasn’t had a major catastrophe in almost two centuries, and she wants to keep it that way.

While also documenting everything she can about her world’s magic system and peoples for the next hero to be born, because she feels otherwise woefully unsuitable for being a mentor worthy of the recent hero tradition.

She’s a traveling merchant, and her primary skills are Appraisal, Strength, Knock Out (because to her exhaustion she will summon every bandit in a 10 mile radius) and Wisdom. Oh, and Luck, but that’s one of the standard Hero Perks in this setting (literally).

Anyone interested in me rambling a bit about what I’ve workshopped so far on the world setting? (warning: I suck at names, so I’m going to need to come up with placeholders if this happens…)

[babyspacebatclone]

You know what I want?

I’m nearsighted with astigmatism.

I want a headset that lets me stargaze again. 😢

It doesn’t need to be 3d, no parallax, a simple attached joystick that lets me smoothly change the view across the half inverted globe and a few buttons so I can switch modes.

A skybox developed with realworld data that lets you set the time and location.

Simulations of aurora borealis/australis , and sun rises/sets.

Make the night sky free from light pollution accessible to everyone again. 😭

[babyspacebatclone]

Posting this late to get it out of my system.

Anyone else happy to have their mammaries, but struggle with admitting they’ve gone up a cup size? 😭

Seriously, it took me 2 years to pull myself from a 40ish D to a 40F.

And now thar

And now that I just read up on sister sizes, my next bra is probably going to be a 38G. (and I need to get it online, absolutely no store around here goes that high)

You have to understand.

I was the youngest girl in the class and a late bloomer.

It took until college to accept my boobs were “above average.”

Despite my mom outright telling me when I was 16 I could “be on Baywatch” (I get the genes from here, it was more her suddenly realizing they’d manifested)

I pull the same nonsense with my shoes, I have a very wide toe box and have a bizarre obsession with trying to fit into the smallest number size despite, you know, it not meaning anything??????

(I’m definitely buying the next size up when these runners die, my toes are clawing, why do I do this to myself???)

Anyway, I have a hard time wrapping my head around some of the people listed in TV Tropes “Most Common Superpower” list, but apparently I have an excuse.

[babyspacebatclone]

You know what I want?

I’m nearsighted with astigmatism.

I want a headset that lets me stargaze again. 😢

It doesn’t need to be 3d, no parallax, a simple attached joystick that lets me smoothly change the view across the half inverted globe and a few buttons so I can switch modes.

A skybox developed with realworld data that lets you set the time and location.

Simulations of aurora borealis/australis , and sun rises/sets.

Make the night sky free from light pollution accessible to everyone again. 😭

[babyspacebatclone]

So, it took a while for me to stop feeling guilty or - “not mature” over giving up cooking for myself (44 AuDHD adult who works mostly full time and lives alone).

The Executive Functioning Disorder just can’t keep things in order enough to actually use non-processed food before it spoils unless I specifically buy things for a salad on the day I’m going to make it.

Turns out this puts me in the same group as the majority of people living in English cities in the 1300s.

Heck, Pompeii had fast food stands in 70 AD.

Being responsible for sustenance is a job, and thank you Max Miller for reminding me that many people throughout history did not have the resources to manage that on top if everything else.

[babyspacebatclone]

There were multiple discussed, and even working, versions of the original introduction to Cinderella, including scenes where we see the titular character with her mother, grieving the loss of her father, and Lady Tremaine making the acquaintance of her new stepdaughter. Ultimately, Walt opted for the final version above for a few reasons. First, Walt felt there should be a spoken narrator and he specifically wanted the voice to be that of a woman's (Betty Lou Gerson was cast, who would later go on to be Cruella De Vil). Second, he wisely knew that this film would deal with Cinderella as an adult character and how she continued to fight against the abuse that was inflicted upon her and would, ultimately, triumph over her perpetrators. He felt spending too much time on the background of that struggle would detract from the setup of how we first meet her and the action resulting from how she navigates her circumstances in the present. Lastly, the narration serves to explicitly state that Cinderella was "abused, humiliated, and finally forced to become a servant in her own house." There isn't room for someone to interpret that the abuse "was not that bad," or that she should've "tried to just leave," or any of the other weak criticisms people have for this film and abuse victims at large. We are told Cinderella is forced into this situation with no way out in the only home she's ever known from the time she is a small child, it is canonically stated that she is abused, and we see that she's grown up in this toxic family structure, being grossly mistreated by Lady Tremaine, Anastasia, and Drizella. This sets her up as the heroine- while her stepsisters perpetuate the cycle of abuse, she puts an end to it through building community where she can, never losing sight of herself, and continuing to keep hope alive. This prevents her from giving up, and ultimately leads to her salvation as her repeated attempts to leave her abusive household to attend the ball and be seen as a person in the eyes of her society finally become successful.

CINDERELLA (1950) — Dir. Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, & Clyde Geronimi

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Anyone else here a “method writer”?

Like, before you can write anything for a character, you meed to spend an hour thinking about their backstory so you know how they’ll react?????

Ironically (maybe), I have to do this the least for my OCs; I have an idea of their childhoods etc., this is the personality they have after that, fleshing out backstory is easy because everything from there will be consistent.

Just open up a a scene in my head, and watch the characters as they go through it naturally.

Fan fiction, however? Even - especially!!! - the fluffy stuff I just do in my head as a distraction?

I keep having to stop, consider the characters’ childhoods (since that rarely gets explored in shows), try to figure out situations that would be consistent with the eventual canon personality, then start up the scene again with this new information and see how they react.

Sometimes I feel like a marionette operator, but the strings are on the scene: No, the character wouldn’t do that, so the scene can’t proceed with that outcome, time to shift things around until the character will do something else consistent with their personality but moves the plot in the right direction…. Let’s try a metaphorical millimeter in this direction….

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For @ladydreamgirl :

I actually personally don’t have much of a formalized “Shit Kit” for my Irritable Bowel Syndrome, as much as a set of procedures and an Autistically obsessive need to stockpile supplies in case of emergencies. But here’s what I recommend starting with:

A pair of spare pants wherever you can squirrel them safely away outside your house. Trunk of your car, drawer of a work desk. Make them something like jeans or black slacks, something perceived as “neutral” so you can replace on an outfit without drawing too much attention.

Extra underwear in your everyday carry bag (purse, etc.).

A plastic bag to carry the soiled clothes home relatively discreetly and hygienically (grocery bag is perfect). Two helps with clean up.

A pack of wet wipes is easy to bring around, store in a car, and useful to quickly clean surfaces. Use the second plastic bag to contain the wet wipes.

Hand sanitizer and tissues aren’t as good at cleanup, but functional alternatives if available.

I like having a towel in my car, in case something happens and I can quickly put it on the seat to get home. If you’re afraid you’re not going to make it home in time, but getting home fast is preferable to finding a gas station, it’s easier to clean up.

Also, don’t feel ashamed about buying Depends and other adult incontinence products if you need them!

They’re primarily designed for urine, but function to protect clothing from an initial leak long enough to allow you to excuse yourself to a bathroom.

If you’re in a situation where you’re worried about an attack but are “trapped” for a long time (meetings, family meals out, etc.), it can buy you the discretion to slip out and deal with things with minimal mess.

Panty liners properly positioned can also minimize staining from “wet farts” if you find yourself prone to those. Modern products are thin and portable, so easy to bring a spare even in a pocket.

I hope some of this helps. Sometimes, just knowing other people experience these issues and make the same precautions can help reduce the stigma of needing to carry around these things.

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Shoutout to any Autistic peeps whose intrusive thoughts sometimes trigger your Echolalia/Palilalia* and you’re left shouting “Fuck you, Fuck you, Fuck you!!” to yourself as quietly as possible so you don’t freak out the normies.

You, and I, are not alone.

* Palialia: a verbal tic where the speaker repeats syllables, words, or phrases involuntarily; the self-focused version of Echolalia, which is repetition of syllables or words from others

(also, acknowledgement to the awkward sensation of starting to shout something and forcing yourself to mutter under your breath instead, -1 star experience, do not recommend)