Differences

(This is in no way endorsing one method over another. Just an observation of differences. Especially since there are some foods that just should not touch, ever. It all depends on the foods.)

Other autistics: "These foods must not EVER touch each other!"
Me: "These vegetables are bland as heck. Gonna grab a glob of mashed taters and gravy and dunk it on the veggies to pick them up so the bland is overpowered by the taters and gravy. Then I'll do something similar to the Salisbury steak and potatoes, but not because the meat tastes bad. Just because I feel like it."

Other autistics: "I must eat the same thing for every single meal!"
Me: "I can eat the same thing for most meals, and I enjoy doing so; but I have to give them slight variations, and I have to have at least one meal per day that's something else or I'll get tired of the samefood to the point where I can't eat it at all for several months or even years. This is probably also a form of taking control / self defiance, because if I just eat the same exact thing all the time, I get angry at my past self for thinking this was a good idea."

Other autistics: "I must take the ice from the tray in this specific pattern: from the back to the front, left side to right side."
Me: "I must take the ice from the tray in the most arbitrary way possible, because occasionally doing things chaotically is a stim for me, and an act of defiance against my own usual tendency towards persnicketyness, which for some reason I derive a small amount of joy from doing."
Also me: "I must eat this sandwich in a specific pattern: right corner first, making sure part of the bite goes under the point at which the bread's top crust touches the side crust; then left corner, done in the same way; then the right side again, then the left, until there is a point in the middle; then eat the middle. Repeat until there's not enough sandwich to do so, then revert to chaos."
Also also me: "This is a TUNA SALAD (or chicken salad or egg salad) sandwich, and so I must first remove the crusts from the bread. Eat the sandwich from then as above, until all that's left is crust. Then fold crusts, spoon tuna salad onto the crusts, and eat the result. Repeat until all crusts have been devoured."

What I want

I want to contact Michael Reeves and commission a robot that can autonomously go around town scanning people's faces, and when it detects an unmasked face, it shoots a mask onto their face and screams "WEAR A MASK, PLAGUE RAT!" at top volume from a pair of loudspeakers built into it.

It's so fucked up.

( Transcript under the cut )

My response:

Also parents these days are so afraid of strangers kidnapping their kids that they won't let them play outside. Which is absurd, because statistically they're FAR more likely to be kidnapped by a family member than by a stranger. Same goes for child molestation.

I probably sound like a boomer, but in my day my parents let me wander around all over the neighborhood. My one rule was I was to either stay within shouting distance or come back by dinnertime. My ADHD ass couldn't follow that rule since I couldn't remember the rule in the heat of the moment and also still can't keep track of time, so Mom and Dad would go from shouting to using a bicycle horn. If that didn't work, Dad would get in the car and look for me. I think the fact I never really got in trouble for that added to my unlikliness to follow those particular rules. (Most that ever happened was Dad was highly annoyed about having to put pants and shoes on.)

All of that was preamble to the following: If someone from the future went back and told kid me that in 15 years mobile phones would be so cheap that even homeless people could buy one with spare change, I would have been so jealous of future kids as I imagined they could go anywhere they wanted and have their mom call them to say "Hey, dinner is in 20 minutes, start hiking your ass home," on a device that had a built in clock as well.

Instead, kids had their freedoms restricted to an insane degree. Which, now I think of it, is just a microcosm of the macrocosm, as the country shuffles ever closer to permanent fascism enabled by big tech companies spying on everyone.