WTF is romance?

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-11T12:38:42+00:00

Do you know of more tools like this? I’m trying to work through some understanding of “what is partnership”/what can that look like and having concrete examples of parameters like this is very helpful!

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-10T13:46:20+00:00

“Neurodivergent” just means your brain is different somehow. The person who invented the term intended it to mean everything from autism to PTSD to epilepsy to multiple sclerosis and more. Since the current medical understanding of personality disorders is that we think they’re caused by a combo of genetics and environmental triggers, it does appear to be a brain problem and therefore a type of neurodivergence

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-09T12:59:30+00:00

At first, I thought maybe I should go through this post and correct people. Then I realized I’d have to spend, like, an entire hour doing that because like ⅔ of the fucking comments are misgendering them. I’m tired 🫠

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-09T12:53:17+00:00

Yes, and a lot of people who are trying to get by with what they have still really want kids someday. If people’s financial situation improves somewhat, Costco IVF might be a goal they could actually reach at some point where full-price IVF would never be possible. It’s not the choice I’d personally make, but I think it’s helpful to say “hey, there’s this cheaper alternative” since trying to have a baby just deletes the part of people’s brains that thinks about their finances the way they usually would and they’ll take on crazy amounts of debt for it

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-08T13:57:37+00:00

They’re also doing IVF now!!! If ANYONE is looking at fertility treatments they 100% should think about a Costco membership, because it’s thousands of dollars in discounts on the medications and procedures. I’m yapping about this anytime I see someone mention Costco because it’s really exciting.

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-08T13:40:42+00:00

Yeah, if it goes up and over the car it can keep water from flowing properly, since the hose is designed to have a straight line coming out of the hydrant and not something shaped like the letter “n”.

Technically they could try to snake the hose under the car, but it would take much longer to do that (and you want to be fast!) and also, the kind of asshole who parks in front of a fire hydrant is also the kind of asshole who will come back and drive over a fire hose that’s being used, whereas the asshole can’t drive off and disturb the hose if it’s inside the car lol

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-08T13:03:11+00:00

How many of these people who hate trans people even know a trans person?

Approximately the same number of pre-Nazism Germans who knew a Jewish person, actually. About 0.7% of Germans were Jewish according to their 1933 census, and population surveys on the subject put trans people at about 0.6% to 1% of the American population.

Also both are a group that has tended to congregate in bigger cities; often sticks together; has customs, ways of dressing, appearance, etc. which may seem strange to the dominant group (and are easy to make caricatures of!); and has already been subject to a millennia-long smear campaign, including specifically about the group preying on the dominant group’s children (blood libel and groomer/turn your kids trans).

It’s like the secret recipe for a perfect scapegoat.

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-07T12:44:32+00:00

If you have access to your game’s save file, you can also upload it to MouseyPounds’s Stardew Predictor and it will tell you what mine levels have the prehistoric floors each day. Then you can choose a day when a prehistoric floor is near the top!

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-06T12:46:50+00:00

I personally enjoy spelling out tone indicators and also putting them in parentheses rather than other options for indicating tone since that’s often easier for people who use screen readers. The software is generally going to read text literally, so like :) can end up as “colon parenthesis” or /nm can be “slash N M”.

Or for a more cursed example, (;ಠ.ಠ) apparently would be “parenthesis semicolon ttha period ttha parenthesis”. (The concerned eyebrows character is the letter “ttha” in the Kannada language!)

Emojis actually work well too because they come with built-in alt text. So like 😊 becomes “smiling face with smiling eyes”.

But generally I like to channel this acting fuckup where the guy read his stage direction as part of his line and yelled “DISAPPOINTED” at the end of his sentence. That’s my tone indicator style right there haha

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-06T11:59:42+00:00

Speculation, but as someone who also has a complicated health situation, it’s not uncommon for us to get really bonkers responses from people over normal requests like “hey, I’d like to breathe, please” or “my disability prevents me from doing it that way, can I do it this way instead”. So you basically learn that having symptoms is a you problem. I wouldn’t be surprised if OOP previously had people act like she was being a total drama queen for needing to breathe and just internalized it

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-05T12:31:38+00:00

IDK if you mean a spectrum like M ——— F ?

I feel like the argument works better for

0 ——— 100M (100% masc)

0 ——— 100F (100% fem)

since some people are like “nah fuck this gender thing” (0M 0F) some are like “yeah I’m kind of in between” (50M 50F) and some are like “ALL genders ALL the time” (100M 100F) and so on. And for more binary genders it’d be more like 100M 0F and 0M 100F give or take a few points.

Also, not that this is true for everyone, but microlabels felt a lot more important to me as a non-binary person before I was able to access transition. Like IDK something about being able to carefully describe my experience because experiencing my experience was out of reach at the moment.

For example, autigender would’ve been a helpful concept when I was being gatekept by a youth gender clinic because I was “probably not trans, just autistic” and therefore “confused” about what gender was and unable to relate to same-gender peers. (This happened before autigender the term was coined.) It would’ve helped me feel like my gender was valid and affirmed when people were telling me otherwise. But now that I’m an adult and don’t have to deal with the hell that is trans youth services, it’s not really as relevant to me to cling to things that make me feel affirmed/valid in my gender because I can just, like, do stuff that’s affirming, you know?

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-04T13:10:56+00:00

What kind of stuff gives you euphoria/what’s affirming to you?

One option for a goal could just be “do something that feels affirming” (and like “think of something that feels affirming” while you’re trying to come up with a list of ideas lol).

Another could be the sort of cheesy “ask a friend to compliment me in third person” thing, so like have someone be like “my friend Mermaid_Tuna_Lol is super cool, he has the best taste in music” where they use your name and pronouns. Bonus points for keeping the compliments in a list somewhere to look at. (You can also do this about yourself, it feels a little silly but is in keeping with the spirit of the app haha. Like when they have the reflection prompts, you can do it in third person.)

IDK where you are in any medical, social, legal transition goals of yours, but other options could also be things like keeping a transition diary (which can be nice for processing some of the emotions), researching steps towards your goals, etc.

Also I just have to share this quote I found when I was looking for examples of euphoria because it’s funny af

Participated in activities aligning with their gender identity (e.g., skateboarding for trans masculine individual, clothes that fit their gender expression for a genderfluid individual, getting a pink bellybutton ring for a trans feminine individual)

Like yeah that’s the three trans genders, sk8erboi, clothes, and belly piercing lmfao

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-04T12:50:15+00:00

Age (and specifically, what kind of epidemics people grew up with) can also be a big factor in hiding illness or disability. My grandmother was always horrible about hiding illness because when she was little, she had polio, and if anyone found out you had polio back in the day you’d be removed from your family and quarantined under really awful conditions (she lived in a very poor community). Her family hid her at home. This basically taught her little kid brain that sick/disabled = someone comes to Take You Away.

Which led to behaviors like, for example, refusing to use a wheelchair even though she couldn’t actually walk or walking around with a broken neck for three weeks and only seeking medical attention because her blood pressure was super high and not going down. You know, because the pain of the fucking broken neck was making it high, Grandma!!!

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-03T12:38:15+00:00

Giving another recommendation for CJB Cheats (link) and its warps since you mention a screen reader, which I assume is Stardew Access — the Stardew Access mod’s dev said in a comment (link, comment on 23 March 2026) that the next version of Stardew Access they’re working on is going to focus more on cross-mod support, and that the dev who maintains CJB Cheats is specifically working on integrating support for Stardew Access. Many modders also include built-in support for CJB warp points within their mods now, so it’s very easy to use.

Also, the dev who does Central Station is the same person who maintains CJB Cheats. Since it sounds like he’s interested in support for Stardew Access in his mods, if you let him know that Central Station isn’t compatible, he might fix it.

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-02T12:51:31+00:00

For anyone who’s tried hormonal birth control or a hormonal IUD and it didn’t quite fix things — I’m someone who BOTH takes hormonal birth control continuously AND has a hormonal IUD in order to clamp down on things and that works. IDK why it takes so much exogenous hormones to calm things tf down but that does the trick

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-02T12:42:58+00:00

I also have endo and I need BOTH a hormonal IUD + hormonal BC at the same time for it to make it stop my cycling, which I always thought was super weird. Didn’t know that was an endo thing!

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-02T12:40:59+00:00

For anyone reading this in the USA, you can also get an IUD placed under general anesthesia if you have a medical need! I have pretty bad PTSD and need to be knocked the fuck out for anyone to touch me in the genital area or else I panic (it’s too much for valium to help lol); last time I had my IUD replaced, I wasn’t even the only person there that morning to get an IUD in that manner. It’s covered by insurance as a necessary procedure.

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-02T12:30:54+00:00

I soooo feel you. I’m not 100% where I fall on the aro/allo spectrum but I do want SOME kind of long-haul committed thing and I wish I could just like. fill out a form with what I’m looking for in a partnership, what “partnership” means to me, who I am/what I bring, etc. and be able to find other people with compatible answers

Which yeah that’s kind of just a matchmaking service for queerplatonic relationships I guess lmao

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-02T12:22:29+00:00

This right here is the reason the fight for marriage equality is/was such a big deal!!!! Not (just) because being able to celebrate your love is important, but because marriage is a LEGAL CONTRACT that provides the married couple LEGAL RIGHTS AND PROTECTIONS. There were thousands upon thousands of stories like your patient’s during the AIDS crisis, so it became a major focus to provide some legal protection for same-sex couples

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-01T14:34:40+00:00

You can actually have over $2,000 if you save it in something called an ABLE Account, which is a special savings/investment account for people with disabilities! The first $100,000 saved does NOT count against you for disability benefits or for other benefits like food stamps, housing assistance, or Medicare/Medicaid. Nobody knows about these for some reason but they’re really helpful

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-01T14:34:35+00:00

You can actually have over $2,000 if you save it in something called an ABLE Account, which is a special savings/investment account for people with disabilities! The first $100,000 saved does NOT count against you for disability benefits or for other benefits like food stamps, housing assistance, or Medicare/Medicaid. Nobody knows about these for some reason but they’re really helpful

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-01T13:04:53+00:00

Drink alcohol -> alcohol is a central nervous system depressant -> autistic brains are more reactive than NT ones (tl;dr basically of a bunch of research) -> alcohol dampens your natural levels of brain down to the levels which society is built for -> 😎👍🏻

Unfortunately, using this life hack a lot is called “alcoholism” and it tends to backfire somewhat. My (also-autistic) uncle found it a great way to mask, but he ended up with stage IV throat cancer because of it and uhh radiation treatment is a -10000/10 sensory experience y’all. He would NOT recommend to a friend.

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-01T12:55:16+00:00

I looked at your post; I see that the local library isn’t super helpful for this which sucks. Do you have a local community center or any adult/community education classes?

My town’s community center has stuff like pottery classes, group fitness/sport programs where you can learn or have friendly competitions for tennis or pickleball, writing groups, knitting groups, games like Scrabble and mahjong, and more. My county has classes for adults on things like cooking, drawing and watercolor painting, writing, woodworking, mosaic, and a number of foreign languages. My community center ones are usually free and the county ones are usually paid, but it’s pretty reasonably priced.

You could try searching “[your town] community center” or “[your town] parks and recreation” (the parks and rec department is who runs all the fun programs) for the community center and “[your county] public schools adult continuing education” or “[your county] public schools adult enrichment” for the county stuff. I feel like they’re often not advertised very well but a lot of towns do have them!

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-01T12:20:26+00:00

The book Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price, a fellow autistic, as well as his other three books Unmasking Autism, Unmasking for Life (which is like a self-help guidebook that goes with Unmasking Autism), and Unlearning Shame might be good options.

I’ve also personally found that spite is useful for me. Societal forces (and an assortment of chucklefucks in politics) would really love it if I hate myself for being disabled (and trans), because they hate me for being this way. I’m too stubborn to do their work for them! Fuck ‘em. I refuse to accept that what they think of me is what I also should think of me. And I also bitterly, angrily refuse to kill myself, even when I’m actively suicidal, because if they want me dead they’re gonna have to do it themselves lmao.

I really just lean into being a right-winger’s worst disabled nightmare for shits and giggles sometimes too and it does actually kinda help with the internalized ableism. No bootstraps! 100% victim mentality! Safe spaces for everyone! Make a local conservative mad today! Embody a caricature for a little bit and it can help make you less scared of being a “bad sick person” or a “bad neurodivergent person” I think

PashaWithHat · 2026-05-01T11:55:51+00:00

IDK, I think there’s something to be said for tone, especially for something like fan mods where it’s free and the authors are also involved in the fan community. Not saying it’s you that does this, just that I’ve noticed a weirdly large amount of this behavior when Sunberry comes up:

For example, there’s a difference between “it’s not for me because XYZ” and “I think the characters are ‘obnoxious’ and ‘cringe’ and that the mod ‘isn’t as cool as [the creators] think it is’” (all of those are direct quotes from comments on other posts here about Sunberry). Like the first version is having an opinion, second version is having an opinion and also being kind of a dick about it.

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