#a good stim with visual results i suppose

[i-have-questions-but-no-answers]

Just finished making a kandi mask for my absolutely smashing bro who happens to be a scene dork :b!!! In short I have a lot of time and they’re oddly soothing to make

#i really do be out here stress creating huh #also im gearing up to clean my whole ass house #which is a lot #but hey #i have nothing but time rn since i must be home from college #and since my classes seem like theyll be easy enough to manage online rn #thus im making kandi #honestly idk why its just really soothing #somethjng about just moving my hands and making a thing is nice #similar vibe to sketching or crochet for me #a good stim with visual results i suppose #also i adore my brother and support his aesthetics #i may not be scene but i support the vibes #idk most kandi culture in general seems pretty chill #but also i dont know all that much about it #anyways night!! sleep well to anyone who sees this

[lord-of-fidgets]

Shockwave x Autistic S/O ( Transformers Prime )

( Disclaimer: I am autistic myself but don’t speak for any other autistic person. So there may be things you don’t relate to if you’re also autistic. That’s perfectly fine and I hope you can still enjoy. Also, any ableism in the comments will be blocked/removed. Transformers is one of my special interests.) 

(( Allistics don’t derail )) 

    🧪You know how difficult reading people can be. But when you first met Shockwave, an important detail about his way of communicating stuck out to you - his antennae move subtly and provide a way of expressing emotion/thoughts. This is adorable to you and provides a hint to tell what he’s feeling. 

   🧪You find making “eye contact” with him suprisingly easier when compared to making eye contact with other humans. Shockwave doesn’t care in the sense it’s not required for him to have you make eye contact. In fact, he’s not quite sure why some humans are so adamant about something that has nothing to do with effective listening like they seem to think. He’d never force you to make eye contact. 

   🧪He can empathize with hyperfixation. He’s been known to stay within his lab for days ( or longer ), focusing on whatever interesting projects or experiments have captured his attention. And you’ve been known to do the same; down to frogetting to take care of yourself. “Y/n, have you ( insert basic human need here ), yet? You haven’t moved for some time...” Please - he worries over you. 

   🧪Along these same lines, he’d give reminders. But not as subtly as Soundwave might. Upon learning what you need to live and feel comfortable, he’d be wary you’d forget to take care of yourself if he wasn’t around. He’d point blank ask you and run down the list to make sure you’ve taken care of yourself. If you take medication, he’s doubly careful to make sure you take it when and how you’re supposed to. 

  🧪 Honestly, good luck leaving his lab - or his sight, period. Not that he thinks you incapable of taking care of yourself, but now that he’s here, let him help. He worries even if not vocally. He takes extreme care of his experiments, how much more he looks after you - his Sparkmate!

  🧪 Info-dumping is welcomed! Shockwave takes great interest in what interests you. He’d ask you detailed questions about your Special Interests and commit what you say to memory. You could never bore this patient Decepticon Scientist. You also listen to him as he explains his work to you , and ask him questions.This becomes a favorite pass-time; sometimes you both loose track of time. The vehicons standing guard outside have been known to wonder if you’ve both somehow expired since it’s been some time since they’ve seen either of you emerge. 

 🧪 Watching Shockwave’s methodical work is soothing and at times also provides a visual stim. There are times when a content silence settles over both of you and you two just exist in quiet harmony. The soft beeps and bubbles of his laboratory provide calming white noise. His movements and parts of the experiments act as visual stims. Sometimes he let’s you handle fun substances he’s certain won’t cause harm or sensory problems. Or show you fun science tricks - although an occasional mishap has resulted in a few hilarious memories. 

   🧪When you both - finally - decide to power down, he keeps you cradled on his chest. Sometimes under his hand, tented carefully over you - or sometimes inside the small, cozy place within his chest cavity. The whirl of his spark is soothing and becomes one of your favorite sounds that calms you down when upset or lulls you to sleep. He will often wake before you and lay there until you wake up. This takes discipline, for his active mind wants to test the idea he just had but because he cares for you, he waits. You don’t sleep enough and you have a hard time falling and staying asleep often. 

  🧪When he finds out from you that you’re autistic, at first he isn’t sure what that is, and asks for clarification. You explain it to him and he makes a mental note to do more research later. You wait for the typical remarks you usually face when disclosing that you’re autistic. There is none. Instead he gently scoops you up, places you on his shoulder, and you two go back to your work routine. Occasionally he may ask questions about it. Shockwave doesn’t give two barrings about what others may think or say unless it negatively effects you. Then he gets involved. 

 🧪Upon learning the basics,and always clarifiying what he has learned with you, he asks more questions. “what is your preference for when you are overwhelmed? Should I not touch you or should I relocate you somewhere else? I read experiences are diverse among autistic humans and decided it would be best to ask you for your personal preference.” He’ll ask about your stims, what overwhelms you, what he can do to help to prevent stressful situations, and what to do to assist when things do end up causing a meltdown or shutdown, etc. 

    🧪 If you are non-verbal, semi-verbal, or experience times when you cannot speak in general Shockwave doesn’t mind. His only focus would to be to make sure it wasn’t caused by him, something in the lab, or another Decepticon, or something else. If you’re too overwhelmed to speak, even on a device such as your phone or tablet, that’s fine as well. He’d ask simple yes or no questions - just enough to find out what he can do if it’s because of an overwhelming situation - or because you just don’t have enough spoons to talk currently. 

  🧪Your first meltdown caught him off-guard, which was, as everyone was aware, difficult to do. He stopped everything he was doing to help you. Primus help whatever bot didn’t leave when he said to do so - not that he’d have to raise his voice or anything, because he intimidates them enough without having to. 

  🧪Expect the occasional drive in his vehicle mode. You’d both go far away from any sign of another human or bot. Sometimes you’d ask him to talk -about what it doesn’t matter - just so you could fall asleep in the seat. He isn’t used to all this talking but he finds it easier to do with you. You listen patiently and take interest in his ideas. You act as a sounding board for those ideas and any question you ask is always welcomed - even if to him the answer is “obvious”, he’d never look down on you for not knowing that particular thing. 

    🧪Shockwave is patient and protective. If he hears someone was or is being ableistic towards you, the situation would be addressed, swiftly. Sometimes this spawns that quiet rage he’s been known to show if pushed too far. In this state- good luck stopping him. Logic - what’s the logic in letting someone insignificant insult you? Eventually he calms down. He’s careful to not show such intensity around you, however, he wouldn’t want to distress you. You’re his weak point. 

   (( This may not be the best but I’m trying. I may do a part two for this as well, or add more to this one later. Thank you for reading. )) 

#actuallyautistic #actually autistic #actually neurodivergent #autistic #transformers prime #shockwave #autistic reader #autistic writer

[accessibleaesthetics]

[Gif Description: Graphic that reads, in all caps, “My Tumblr Year in Review”. The text is surrounded by yellow doodles of various things that shift slightly, as well as colored drawings of the like, post, comment, reblog, message, and tag feature. The background color is a gradient of purple to blue to green diagonally. /end Gif Description

I know I already did this once before, but given how eventful it's been here since, I'm doing it again.

60 posts created (4%)

1412 posts reblogged (96%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 23.5 posts.

I added 417 tags in 2021

#aesthetics - 195 posts

#stim - 57 posts

#reference - 28 posts

#long post - 27 posts

#resources - 24 posts

#asmr - 23 posts

#flashing tw - 18 posts

#christmas - 18 posts

#poetry - 18 posts

#soundscape - 9 posts

Longest Tag: 112 characters

#not a big fan of this tweet but i figure i'll put a description without commentary here first before i add to it '

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

Unlike other forms of media, gaming isn’t necessarily about giving every user as equal an experience as possible, because people don’t all play games the same way. But then that begs the question: how do you create fun and challenging games for the player without sacrificing accessibility in the process?

I think it comes down to each developer looking at every aspect of their game and asking what the objective is.

Take a puzzle as an example. Puzzles in games are naturally going to take some players a lot longer than others to complete; one person might get past a block sliding puzzle in 5 minutes because they’re just really good at working out that sort of thing. Another player might take 15-30 minutes to complete that same puzzle because they’re not as good at it, and keep working themselves into a corner. And that’s fine, that’s how it’s supposed to work!

What you need to ask yourself as a developer is how you want people to be struggling with your puzzle. If you’re looking to potentially make the player frustrated, what do you want that to look like? What is your primary objective?

Was your objective to have players struggle for 15-30 minutes trying to get through your puzzle because they can’t figure out the correct order of steps to slide all the blocks into where they need to be? Sure, why not. But there might be several other reasons it took that second player 15-20 minutes that you did not intend for. It could be because:

They had to make a lot of guesses because the audio cues that provided key information for the puzzle had no visual indicators, and the player can’t hear those cues.

They made a lot of mistakes about which block had to go where because you color-coded the location of the puzzle pieces, and the user is colorblind.

They had to stop to break every couple minutes because the only way to move the blocks is pressing and holding a button, which causes that user extreme pain to do continuously for more than a very brief time. 

They had to look away from the screen every time the blocks moved since motion blur can’t be turned off, and they’d rather miss some critical information during that animation than give themselves a migraine watching it. 

If your intention is to make solving the puzzle satisfying for the player, all four of those alternative situations are even less ideal, because they’re not going to make it fun or satisfying to complete the puzzle. 

But what if it’s not supposed to be fun or satisfying? What if the objective is to make the player feel helpless?

Again, you have to go back to your specific objectives with each obstacle. Was the objective to make the player feel helpless because no matter what choice they made, it still resulted in failure? Maybe. But was the objective to make the player feel helpless because they had to get up and find someone to read your inaccessible text to them every few minutes? Probably not.

It’s also worth asking yourself if every puzzle or battle you make is absolutely crucial to the story and/or experience of the game. Making some segments skippable isn’t always a bad thing (though that shouldn’t be a substitution for making them accessible). 

92 notes • Posted 2021-04-10 19:23:38 GMT

#4

See the full post (which includes the rest of the images and the full image description)

186 notes • Posted 2021-06-25 02:21:36 GMT

#3

[Image Description: Anakin and Padme meme. Anakin says “I made some new content.” Smiling Padme says “and it’s accessible, right?” Anakin stares silently at her. Padme asks the same question again, no longer smiling. End Image Description.]

218 notes • Posted 2021-07-11 05:29:04 GMT

#2

[Image Description: Bugs Bunny in a Tuxedo meme reading “I wish all people who add addendums to my image and video descriptions to include details that I missed a very pleasant evening.” End Image Description.]

244 notes • Posted 2021-04-03 17:27:29 GMT

#1

Gentle reminder that your work-arounds for these tag issues should not include replacing letters with numbers or other symbols that will make the words illegible to screen reader users.

6883 notes • Posted 2021-12-27 00:23:46 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #extended post

[scriptautistic]

I hope I'm not spamming your ask box😔! But I have more questions because you guys are such a good blog. So my autistic character Parker eventually gets hooked on Heroin after dealing with a lot of stress. So Heroin makes you "chill out" I suppose you could say, but how would that work if he were to stim and his stim took a lot of energy? Would he be able to perform his stim? Sorry if that was complicated XD. Thank you!

I actually have a source for real-life information that might help you with this situation. It comes from an autistic person I know very well and trust completely, so I have faith that it’s accurate.

Heroin generally makes people feel very relaxed. It’s a strong sedative. When an autistic person is sedated, they often lose the need to stim completely (or at the very least it’s greatly reduced). The same effect can come from something like diazepam (Valium). However, none of this means the person can’t move. It just generally means they don’t feel like moving. That includes stimming.

However, Heroin also has other effects. It can cause nausea. It also makes your skin (often your face or arms) turn red and itchy (hence the stereotype of the junkie constantly scratching themselves). This is at odds with the feeling of relaxation.

Every drug affects every person differently, whether allistic or autistic. However, this person tried heroin exactly once and never had the slightest desire to ever try it again. Their description of the experience is that they felt very, very relaxed, then they threw up, then their face was super itchy for what felt like hours, which was really annoying. As far as they were aware, they did not stim during this time, didn’t feel the need. But they are confused as to how anyone could get addicted to it.

That’s not to say autistic people can’t get addicted to heroin. Surely they can. But it may be less likely (note: this is speculation on my part, based only on my few personal experiences, and probably varies greatly from person to person). And as to your question about stims, it’s likely that they simply won’t stim, or will stim differently, when using this drug.

An interesting side note regarding addiction in general: When I was 18 I tried to start smoking. Everyone around me smoked, smokers at work got special accommodations (they could go outside for smoke breaks a certain number of times per day, while non-smokers were forbidden - unfair!), and I was just feeling rebellious and wanted to try it. I had 3-5 cigarettes per day for a year and I never got addicted, as far as I could tell. I never even enjoyed it. It always made me cough and gave me a stomach ache. Maybe I was just sensitive to the smoke, or maybe I was allergic, I don’t know. But after I year, I simply stopped. As far as I was aware, I suffered no ill effects from “quitting”.

Looking back, I probably did suffer ill effects. However, due to alexithymia, I may not have recognized how quitting was making me feel. I also may not have registered cravings for a cigarette, or linked any ill effects (like irritability, for example) with the lack of nicotine. I may have felt nothing beyond “I don’t feel good today”. In any case, the though “I need a cigarette” never entered my mind. This is a rare occasion where alexithymia can really be a positive thing, and is something useful to keep in mind when writing an autistic character with an addiction. 

Obviously none of this is to say that autistic people can’t be addicted to things like cigarettes or heroin, or that autistic people never go through withdrawal or suffer ill effects from quitting, but there is that possibility when writing your character.

Hope this is helpful. Happy writing!

-Mod Aira

I have a few things to add to what Aira said.

First of all I do not fully agree with her “autistic people are less likely to become addicted to substances” theory. Some source seem to suggest the opposite ; according to them autistic people would be more likely to start abusing drugs as some sort of self-medication for social problems and resulting feelings of anxiety or depression. Moreover, our body, while it can be a bit more/less sensitive than an allistic’s, works about the same way. There is no reason we would not get addicted to addictive substances, at least physically. It is true that alexythymia can play a role in recognizing this addiction.

As for the stimming thing, you might ask yourself “does my character stim when he is relaxed? If so, how does he stim?” And then you can extrapolate this answer to opioid-induced relaxment, while keeping it mind that it will be more intense. Common “relaxed” stims include rocking and visual and auditory stims (looking at pretty lights or listening to a song on repeat for example).

The side-effects of heroin which Aira talked about can, if they are annoying enough, be another cause for stimming. These side-effects tend to become less intense as the person gets accustomed to the substance, so this will probably apply only the first few time your character uses heroin.

Then he will probably also develop stims to help balance out the unpleasantness of withdrawal, which often comes with a lot of agitation. In autistic people, mental agitation often comes with physical agitation and very rapid, “frantic” stimming.

-Mod Cat

#ask #drugs #drugs cw #heroin #addiction #alexithymia #peka-iz-krov #mod aira #mod cat #substance use cw

[tropesarenotbad]

Hey thanks for your reply to my post! I suppose my questions are, why would parents do this? And like, how did you find out you were autistic? And like, did they treat you weirdly growing up, keeping this secret from you? Also, would it be ok to write about one of my characters finding out her parents kept her autism a secret from her? I am determined to do a lot of research on it and like, present it in a respectful way. Is there something I could read to get a better understanding? Thank you!

Okay, this got… long, and more than a little stark. Under a cut!

Tons and tons and tons of #Parental abuse in here

Backstory: I underwent a psychiatric evaluation when I was 9, which resulted in multiple diagnoses— including dysgraphia, no short term visual memory, an encyclopedic long term memory, and an “atypical learning profile.” The last is the thing I discovered was either atypical autism or pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. PDDNOS is now considered autism spectrum. Do keep in mind my age of diagnosis as a reason why stuff was fudged more than it was kept a secret.

1- Why would parents do this.

My mom had this belief that every part of yourself could change so long as you didn’t identify with it. Aka, it was a “cure” technique. So long as I didn’t label myself as “autistic”, then I wouldn’t stay autistic. She’s told me not to call myself various mental illnesses because if I don’t have them but say I do, I’ll develop them.

She actually did tell me I had something that impacted how I learned, but she called it an “atypical learning profile” instead of anything on the autism spectrum disorder.

This is, as far as I can tell, a more unique thing. I grew up in a cult, so name a new age BS thing out there and I’ve either heard of it or lived through it. 

2- How did I find out

A string of happenstance. My mom kind of hinted that she found my dad autistic, for how cold he was (yep my introduction was that good old “loveless” stereotype), then my first ex was diagnosed as autistic while we were together and the two of us thought wildly similarly. As I was going through what I could possibly have, I was talking to another autistic person (who would, ironically, become my second ex) who said that “atypical” only showed up for deaf and autistic, and I wasn’t deaf.

I devoured every diagnostic criteria I could for the next few years, and was like 80% sure until another one of my friends was doing his own research on autism and came across how holistic doctors treat autism with antifungals, believing autism is a “candida imbalance” that can be cured that way. I have been treated for candida extensively my whole life, with everything increasing drastically after I was diagnosed and when I was on autistic burnout. She also believed my dad and my grandmother— the two people you can trace my autism through, because they are so obviously autistic— had candida imbalances.

Other realizations in there included my mom was abusive, and I had an eating disorder (which is actually super common in undiagnosed autistic femmes. 20% of femme anorexics are undiagnosed autistic). Both of these factored into me realizing I had likely been lied to about my diagnosis. 

I really want to find my psych records so I can see what they actually say. 

3- Did they treat me weirdly, keeping the secret

It was a secret in plain sight, is the thing. So the answer is both yes and no.

I didn’t have the experience of “I had no idea I even had anything”, because they were relatively blunt that I had something. But they weren’t honest about what that thing was, so a lot of the things my mom held in super high regard (like, me reading “improve your relationship” self help books) didn’t make sense unless you looked at them in the light she was trying to make me pass.

I basically underwent conversion therapy, amplified by how I was homeschooled so I had no escape from my parents. Every method you can name to try and get me NT (diet, anti-fungals, self help books, dozens of different education programs). The older I got, once I had successfully passed, they started taking away my accomodations so I could get used to “the real world”, which is what royally fucked me up. 

I was supposed to have “figured out” a whole whacking bunch of nuance around social cues, and there was this figurative growth chart. If I “regressed” back down to “childish behaviours” (aka, autistic behaviours, like meltdowns, or shut downs, or stimming) then I was neglected until I behaved “properly” again.

I got tons of horror stories about what would happen if I failed to control my symptoms— “hired on hard skills, fired on soft skills”, “you’ll never get a job if you twirl your hair in front of an interviewer”, “nobody’s going to teach you the basics so figure them out”, that type of thing. I got them over years and years.

4- Okay to write

Sure. I mean, I wouldn’t make it a protagonist, and I wouldn’t make it a story about the ramifications that come with it (the whole “write about characters who experience x but don’t write stories about characters who experience x.” Ie- if you’re straight, don’t write a story about being thrown out by homophobic parents. You’ll miss stuff), but if you want some realistic background additions for “people who’ve had major secrets kept from them”, by all means.

5- Is there something to read for added sources

Sadly I don’t know of any. I’d ask a blog like autisticliving or autistickitten for follower stories.

#Rosey's rambles #Actually autistic #Parental abuse