one of my favorite tidbits about speedrunning that comes up every time the games done quick marathons come around is how Wind Waker speedruns are about five hours long because of the giant wall in Hyrule that actually forces the runner to play the game because they’ve been throwing shit at this wall for over a decade and still can’t figure out a way past it. the wall in hyrule is entirely unglitchable and the only way past it is to play the game properly. the speedrun would be like one hour if they could get past this wall but nope, it’s five hours. fuck the wall.
and the comedy of this situation is exponentially amplified the more you know about skips and glitches in speedruns in general
as examples of how broken WW is elsewhere, you can clip through walls and go out of bounds to skip entire dungeon sequences pretty much anywhere with a ledge, use the Wind Waker to enter a state where you ignore physics and swim at 5000 miles an hour, and even fly infinitely into the sky after dying like some kind of helium zombie. do you know how many games could be broken wide open by an infinite height trick? TTYD would shave off 3 or 4 hours.
but this fucking barrier around Hyrule Castle, against all odds, is just completely insurmountable with any of this. Ganondorf is literally the most successful and powerful villain in gaming history and this Super Extendo Fuck You Shield™ is a shining testament to it
Some frames from first 25 pages of “7 sons: Jaikarn” comics I’m working on now. I begin to write and concept it in 2015, and for now this project takes almost all my free time. So when I’m not drawing “Demonslayer”, I draw this ahah. And also sleep sometimes.
To other autistic people, how different was your life before finding out you were autistic?
I can’t remember not knowing. My first memory involving other people communicating to me had to do with being told I was officially and scientifically bad, would always be bad, and couldn’t expect my parents to love me. That’s how it was presented to me.
i’ve always known and its hung over my entire life like a skeleton in my closet for years. there was SO MUCH denial on my end. it really was the last 3-4 years of my life that i ‘truly’ accepted it, and even with that its incredibly faulty and a lot to unlearn (i used to be anti-dx, i picked way more fights on tumblr. i was also really mentally ill when i accepted that part because it wasn’t as ‘ugly’ and i also had no choice? why do i share personal beef with strangers?). ive always felt like an outsider to people. i also feel like an outsider to other autistic people. i feel like my own island sometimes. tumblr really helped with that feeling in a way (not that this site is perfect or also doesn’t breed bad things as well. but not more than any other social media web site)
My life prior to my diagnosis was… A Mess™. I battled with a lot of self-esteem issues. I hated myself so much that I thought I’d be better of dead for a lot of time. I had periods during which I self-harmed daily. I was always tired, stressed and completely convinced of my own worthlessness. I suffered from a real bad eating disorder.
Now I know that at least 70% of this was due to me suppressing my autistic traits, sprinkled with an extra large portion of internalized ableism. I’ve changed a lot since then. I don’t hate myself anymore. I don’t self-harm anymore. I only sometimes think about suicide when a day has been really draining and I’m in negative spoon territory.
My diagnosis has turned my entire life around for the better. Yes, in the beginning, it was really difficult. It was hard to adjust to it (probably because seeing myself as the autistic person I always have been required a lot of changes in my perspective and routines, in a way). I’m still not yet done with figuring everything out, but I think that’s impossible anyway.
I always knew that I was autistic. But actually having a word to describe me, a word to describe my experiences and differences… A word which allowed me insight into resources that had a direct positive impact on my life… It’s almost like I was “born again” on the day of my diagnosis.
Oof. So many feels. @aut-of-space really gets it right with the, “I don’t hate myself any more.”
That’s huge.
Before my diagnosis, before I even suspected I was autistic, I struggled and I blamed myself. I not only accepted that everyone was right, I believed that they were right – everything was my fault.
Society likes to gaslight us by making us blame ourselves for everything. It’s one of the most insidious things in our society. They tell us, and we believe and we tell ourselves, that if only we could try a little harder. If only we stop worrying. That everyone has those issues. And that its not just you.
They want to us to believe that our experience is identical to theirs and that any deviations, any differences, are because we did something wrong. Only that’s not how it works.
And having that gone… Suddenly the world makes sense to me. Not in that I understand allistics or anything, but I do understand myself. And acceptance followed understanding.
Society still tries to gaslight me all the time. But now I know it for what it is, and that makes it hella easier to avoid. Usually.
(Beware: this is a really long and personal text, so prepare for a lot of subjectivity and personal experiences)
Not knowing about autism as an undiagnosed autistic person also comes with thinking that you’re a bad person because if you’re normal… why can’t you do things that are normal? Why do you struggle where others don’t? Or rather:
Why do you struggle so much more intensely with things that other people struggle with as well?
Why are you so much worse at keeping your shit together, so to speak?
In all those years, I came to believe that everyone was actually struggling as much as I was, just like candidlyautistic stated above.
I thought that life was hell for everyone, not only for me. I thought that everyone got overly anxious around people, that everyone struggled to see a sense in their existence, that everyone had a brain that would chase multiple trains of thought at once and never once shut the fuck up.
I came to believe that my flaw wasn’t how I felt but how I dealt with it. I thought I was weak and pathetic and all those other things that people told me I was because I just thought that everyone else was better at sucking it up and keeping their shit together than I was.
I bought into the whole “everyone feels like that”-narrative so much that I thought I was worthless not because of my experiences but because I thought that everyone could deal with it except for me.
Knowing it’s actually not the case – that everyone else just didn’t understand what I was talking about all along – was relieving…
Yes, nt’s might struggle with stuff like that, too sometimes. And they probably didn’t even mean bad when they invalidated me like that all those years. I just think when I talked about my experiences, I wasn’t talking about “sometimes” but about “on a daily basis” and because I didn’t really add that, they just… Didn’t understand.
Of course everyone gets stressed out. Of course everyone has a day during which they need to cry because the stress is too much… They just didn’t get, probably, that almost each day is like that for me, while it’s only like, I don’t know, four times a year for them.
Additionally, this has led to me downplaying my own issues… I didn’t take my problems and feelings seriously. Because I was just weak and pathetic and needed to get my shit together, right?
It took me my diagnosis and another whole year to realize that it is in fact NOT NORMAL to think about jumping in front of the train you should actually take home because you’re so stressed even though you don’t want to die at all. It’s just that everything is so stressful that your mind actually pleads for a break that it won’t ever get.
It took me my diagnosis to realize that it’s not normal to ask yourself why existing is hard and painful on a daily basis.
That it isn’t normal to wonder if the people who say they like you actually do or just tell you a lie on a daily basis because “how can you know???”. That it isn’t normal to ask yourself if people still like you if they didn’t tell you that for a while because you’re overly aware that nothing lasts forever and everything can change any second…
And that it’s not normal to not really have an idea of who you are as a person because that question is too complex. Because you don’t know what people mean by that and what actually defines you as a person. Because you are hyperaware of the fact that each living being and even more yourself is a living contradiction. Because you don’t know of your interest define you as a person, or your favorite color… If it’s the things you live or hate, if it’s how others see you or how yourself see you and that you don’t even know how you see yourself because there’s nothing but “??????” inside of your brain.
There is so much that I know now about my struggles in comparison to others. So much that differs from my view to theirs.
And knowing that all of it is valid… And also knowing that it’s actually abuse that no one actually believed in what I said…
It’s just a lot. But it’s a really “good” lot, in a way.
I believe myself again. I learned how to talk about my feelings again.
Hell, I even suppressed my ability to cry for YEARS because I internalized all of this abuse so much that I thought I didn’t deserve to cry, that crying was a sign of my weakness, my inability to deal with “normal stuff”… And now, I can cry again. And it honestly just feels so good.
I can be myself.
It’s like there always was some kind of… Metaphorical weight on my chest. Both because of the years of (maybe unconscious) gaslighting and because I put myself under a lot of pressure… And now it’s gone. I can “breathe” for the first time in my life. And who knew that “breathing” would actually feel this god damn awesome?
Knowing about all this is EXTREMELY liberating.
Which is why talking about autism is so important to me. If I can contribute to other people being liberated in that same way, if I can even maybe have a larger impact and maybe even contribute enough to help that knowing about autism, identifing autistic people and not invalidating them becomes normal…
Our experiences are exceptionally similar. I swear I could have written this about myself.
And I don’t mean like attractive cute, I mean like baby otter cute. What if the stumble upon us and go “ohhhhh my god!!! Oh my god!!!! I’m dying this is- look at it! Look at them!!! Oh my god!!!”
We usually imagine having to come up with some Devils trade or unholy arrangement to get tech and trade with aliens, but the instant they see us the aliens immediately set out into conservation efforts. They’re like “their habitat is becoming harsh and unlivable for them! We have to save them!” And everyone just puts a picture of us next to this information and they all agree “Look at them! We have to save them!!” We become like the panda mascots of intergalactic conservation efforts.
Simultaneously, our main export is just streams, videos, holograms, and photos of us. Aliens lose their composure completely over videos of us sneezing or yawning or eating pop tarts or playing video games or taking care of our kids.
There are lines of aliens who would LOVE to have a human in their home or on their ship. It’s a little condescending (we’re not sure if we’re guests or well treated exotic pets) but still a good opportunity, and any human who wants can go to space at any time basically for free or even for profit, and the aliens will go out of their way to give you anything you ask for.
There are obvious downsides. We struggle to be taken seriously. While it’s usually shut down pretty quickly, every once in a while some alien group sees the demand for us and tries to start an illegal trade. But at the same time, it’s neat that somewhere out there is an alien (or usually a LOT of aliens) that would love you unconditionally, find every flaw and idiosyncrasy endearing, be worried about you and do anything they could to make you safe and happy. They work hard to make our planet and our personal lives better and don’t ask for anything in return. They just do it because they decided we are important and worth saving just for existing. It’s an odd relationship, and we’re not always sure what to make of it, but honestly it goes a lot better than we worried alien contact would.
I’m down to be a spoiled pampered alien pet.
It would be a lot easier to get “fixed.”
We’re all a bit confused by the cute human memes, which are usually just pictures of some random human with a phrase in alien cuneiform next to it, but which many of the aliens think are hysterical. Photos of the Lincoln Memorial are particularly popular for this for some reason, and it’s a little unsettling to see the alien spaceships with pictures of Lincoln plastered across their forcefields, saying “g+gnor’gax!” and the humor just doesn’t translate at all.
I mean, it’s not bad, exactly. Just…odd. And fortunately alien music is mostly outside our hearing range, so the sad commercials with the interstellar equivalent of Sarah McLachlan broadcasting over them, explaining how the humans are suffering at this time of rotation just look like a rather puzzling montage of normal people. It’s just the aliens get so sad when they see it and their temporal glands leak and it’s…well, a little messy.
I love the idea that we are SIMULTANEOUSLY batshit-bonkers space orcs and the alien equivalent of Red Pandas or kittens.
Like, “Oh they’re adorable!” “Yes, but for the love of zornax, don’t let one bite you! My pod-cousin lost a hand that way!” “Do you think they evolved this way to surivive the terrifying fauna on their world?” “I saw a holovid of one riding one of the so-called “moose” one time!”
#wait #we’re big cats #giant murder cuteness
Oh my god that’s exactly it! 😀
But imagine that last bit as two different groups. Okay, so to one species of alien we’re adorable, right? And to another we’re orcs. Imagine the conflict of those two cultures. Team Orc is talking to Team Cuddles about how useful we are on dangerous field missions and Team Cuddles LOSES THEIR SHIT.
“You sent my cuddle-fwumpkin WHERE?!? to do WHAT!?!”
“They’re uniquely qualified to explore dangerous territories that are uninhabitable to most lifeforms … ”
“I don’t caaaaaare! Hfjfjfj HD bf!!!”
Like, foreign policy issued specifically for the proper utilization of human laborers. How would human cultures engage differently in these circumstances? Like, in the US would people look down on the humans that hang out with Team Cuddles as looking for alien handouts? Would they be blamed when Team Orc humans don’t get taken seriously on expeditions?
Ok but imagine how the aliens would react to the idea of the “mom friend”. Like the crew is losing their mind over the fact their human is reckless, doing so many dangerous things that would have killed any other race but of course it’s fine because it’s a human and those things are so hard to kill anyway.
The only planet that is a danger to a human is the one it came from.
So when the human-Kat comes into the control room with that adorable hopeful face a lot of the crew members are instantly on guard. The last time Human-Kat had that expression they almost lost Xe’rex to the waves of that one planet that Human-Kat just had to “Surf”.
“Can my friend Lola come meet us for the 34-OJ mission? She’s right in our pathway to that new planet? Please?” Huamn-Kat says and though they want nothing more then to say no, the crew of 626- Launch can’t say anything else other then yes. They know how humans react when left alone for too long. Humans claim that their greatest criminals are placed in “solitary confinement” as punishment which goes very far to show how much bonds affect their life spans.
Human-Kat needs human interaction to stay alive and sane (or as sane as humans can be)
So the crew agrees to have Friend-Lola on the voyage, slightly terrified of having two humans. But when the new human arrives it is not what they expected.
“Kat, have you finished your paperwork? Come on man, you know it’s due in like a day. Get on it.”
“Whoa dude, I love you ok. But no. You are not going to go surfing down there. It’s for your own good.”
“Girl you got the promotion?! Yes! Ok Ok! We need to celebrate with girls night in!”
“Hey I have some tissues in my bag somewhere hold on. There ya go.”
“Look at this game I picked up on RE-vr’. It’s just like Cards against Humanity but space!”
“Go. To. Sleep. Kat.”
“Remember that pact we made in high school? The one where I would stop you from doing something that will get you arrested or killed? Yeah well I’m calling it into action and saying that you do not lick anything on a unknown planet!“
This Human…holds common sense? That is possible for that race?!
After Friend-Lola leaves they ask Human-Kat about this and she merely laughs while swiping through photographs she had taken with the other human.
“Well Lola is the mom friend.”
And the crew of 626-Luanch are so confused because they have already seen photos of Human-Kat’s birth givers and they look nothing alike not to mention Human-Kat already has a Mom. Do humans have more then one “Mom”?
“Oh you know a mom friend is the one friend in a group that keeps everyone else from dying.” Human-Kat jokes.
But the crew is amazed. They have learn the reason humanity haven’t killed itself off. They send a message to every out post in the area.
If xe have a human on-board make sure that they are accompanied by a Mom Friend. These are the humans in charge of keeping other humans alive and well-behaved.
“Wanted: one human crew member, category ‘Mom Friend.’ Must be prepared to care for approximately six adult humans. And the pay rate is – Hell, I can do that! I can totally be a Mom Friend. How hard can it be? Why are you giving me that look?”
So I have this theory, after hearing a lot about false equivalence coming up in discussions about female portrayal in comic books. Every time women talk about being sexually objectified, there’s always at least one dude who shows up to whine “BUT MENZ ARE OBJECTIFIED TOO, LOOK HOW UNREALISTICALLY MUSCLEY THEY ARE!” Attempting to point out the difference between a power fantasy and a sexual fantasy – to say nothing of pointing out that both fantasies are portrayed by men, for men – is typically useless. The two are firmly conflated and no amount of actual logic will penetrate.
I figure it all ties back into some of same concepts that underwrite “fake” geek girls, friendzoning, rape apology, and other things of that ilk: namely, that men think the sexual fantasy is a power fantasy.
When creating a powerful woman, men seem to have this automatic jump to making said powerful woman a sex object, because they truly think sexiness is powerful. For them, that’s what female power is: power over men. This is behind all the guys howling that sexy geek girl cosplayers are “preying” on male nerds; this is behind all the men who say women deserve rape for what they wear; this is behind all those “friendzoned” guys who insist they can’t possibly break off the “friendship” themselves because they’re helpless before the objects of their affection. It allows them to disclaim their actions as coerced, shunt away responsibility, and blame women when things don’t go as they like. They “couldn’t resist” the power of attraction.
In comics, men both don’t understand that their male power fantasies aren’t sexy for women (horrendously muscled, bodybuilder physique is NOT typically a sexual ideal), and don’t understand why women don’t derive power fantasy from the sex appeal of the female heroes. “Look,” they’re saying, “you are portrayed as powerful, and men are portrayed as sexy!” This also slots in with the idea that women are only in anything ever because of men – that their desire to attract men is one of the principal driving forces of their existence. That, therefore, the power to attract men should be important to them in a “strong” female character.
I’ve thought about this too much today and it’s goddamn depressing. It’s the same bullshit which says a woman’s only power, her only worth, is in her physical attractiveness, that women are only powerful in relation to men. I don’t really think I can safely contemplate it more right now.
Guh. Need kittens.
MOAR.
(New ILU)
Sorry to reblog myself but okay there’s more. I had to go back to work after I posted this earlier and there’s nothing to do at work but think (monotonous job is monotonous) and even though it’s depressing I couldn’t think about anything else once I got started. /storyofmylife
So inherent in all of the above is the basic concept that men are sexy because they are powerful, and women are powerful because they are sexy. This is predicated on the notion that men have power stemming from something about them as people, whereas women have power stemming from how much they deserve the attention of men. Men not only provide power to women, but they do so by losing power themselves. You guys, maybe this is why men think power is a zero sum game: because they think that women only have power when they are overpowering men with their sexy sexiness.
Fake geek girls, specifically, have an element of dominance issue to them. Look at those hot girls, swanning into fandom, taking away not only attention and material goods (limited fandom resources, such as collector’s editions and etc., has been discussed elsewhere) but also stealing their very wills from them. Better put those girls in their place, because otherwise they’ll be the ones with the power, on account of they have mammaries, and unlike those chicks in comic books they’re not safe paper-and-ink mammaries created solely to be ogled!
Also, since this is all about false equivalence, may I go on a tangent here and talk about realism? Because comics, at least American comics, portray physical dimensions/characteristics for men that are outrageous and close to impossible. Professional bodybuilders can do it but it looks freaking unnatural. No reasonable person expects all men to actually go out and try to become that. However, the way women look in comics is still the way most men, including many who consider themselves quite reasonable, expect women to look. Male superheroes are escapism for men, so they can be as unrealistic as they need to be; female superheroes are also escapism for men, so there’s a limit on how unrealistic they can be. Although niches exist for all kinds of physical-dimension fetishes, women in comics are idealizations of what the men reading/writing those comics would want to have sex with, and so they’re kept pretty close to society’s ideal beauty standards (which, while unrealistic also, are not considered to be such by most men). Let me put it this way: a drawing of a crowded street in which you replace all the men with bodybuilders would look bizarre and ridiculous; a drawing of a crowded street in which you replace all the women with models or even well-dressed porn stars wouldn’t make most people bat an eye, except maybe to wonder what city it is or to make appreciative comments. Women are supposed to look like that, says society. Not just a few, exceptional women – all women, at least if they want to be worth anything.
The above paragraph exists to punctuate this point: when women complain about how they’re drawn in comics, it’s not about realism. The body dimensions of male superheroes are metaphorical representations of their power over whatever they’re up against, whereas the body dimensions of female superheroes are meant to be literal depictions of their power over men.
IDK. This post has wiped me out today and I think I’m done with saddening feminist musings for a little while. Still need kittens and now possibly also schnapps.
Can’t believe I discovered this post just now. It was literally written before I started this blog!
What a nice writeup on false equivalence! Puts the subject of power politics in portrayals of gender we discussed here more eloquently than I ever managed. Possibly my favorite part is:
“So inherent in all of the above is the basic concept that men are sexy because they are powerful, and women are powerful because they are sexy. This is predicated on the notion that men have power stemming from something about them as people, whereas women have power stemming from how much they deserve the attention of men.”
When you enter the chantry in Redcliffe and Dorian says “Good. You’re finally here.” – It made me wonder if he was secretly watching my Inquisitor the entire time they were in Redcliffe before heading into the chantry.
When I read this confession, this picture of Dorian poofed into my head and I had to draw it down.
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