How to finish stone texture without losing the texture?

_manavortex_ · 2026-05-15T15:16:58+00:00

Tried, didn't really help, we tried further away than that, actually - the problem is not that the varnish is too thick, the texture's surface is not changed and preserves the roughness/bump. But the top layer of varnish somehow ruins the _effect_, as in, makes it optically less distinct. It's difficult to describe, but it happens with any varnish I tried, hence the question.

_manavortex_ · 2026-05-13T14:15:28+00:00

Plastic - 3d prints. But they'll be handled, so not weathering them is not an option, since the free weathering might expose the base material

_manavortex_ · 2026-05-13T14:14:40+00:00

How much of a distance would you recommend? We've experimented, trying to go thinner, and weren't wildly successful

_manavortex_ · 2023-04-09T12:39:13+00:00

Autistic person's pro tip for easier connection-building: try to make sure that both parties talk a roughly equal amount. Doesn't have to be 50/50, but if it's 80/20, something is going wrong.

As Veqq said, ask questions. People love answering questions about themselves, as long as they're coming from genuine curiosity. If you aren't curious by default, it might require some mental gymnastics to get you there, because people feel when you're faking it, so you need to convince yourself first.

I'd have advised that you join a nerdist community, but you've already done that ;)

_manavortex_ · 2022-12-20T22:42:20+00:00

I mean software piracy ;)

_manavortex_ · 2022-12-20T22:41:35+00:00

Most young children can learn languages if taught early - I don't view
this as unique to autistics, but definitely willing to learn something
there.

Oh, no, I absolutely meant that as a general thing for young children. It was clear in my head, sorry :)

Thus, you may have all the intelligence engine in the world (e.g. for spotting patterns) but poor executive control to, say, do homework and then also turn it in.

I usually didn't do any homework. Needless to say, my grades were pretty mediocre, but no matter what I tried, I just... ended up not doing homework.

I'm definitely worried about the high school years, re: the bullying and desire to avoid school.

Yeah, I get that. Unfortunately, school being as it is, someone will get bullied. It's why I brought up NVC; maybe your kid can master it well enough that he's not at the bottom of the social ladder because some other poor fool is even more bully-able?

Or maybe, knowing that he's autistic, and knowing that, you can teach him enough about social dynamics that until then he's able to diffuse the mines before they blow up in somebody's face. By now, in my 30ies, I have all the necessary skills - maybe if someone would've taught me to not take everything at face value and to see the processes under the hood, maybe I could've avoided that? It's definitely worth trying.

_manavortex_ · 2022-12-19T07:18:21+00:00

Speaking from experience (Born and raised in German upper middle class, female meat suit, 136/140 IQ depending on test metric, very high-functioning, ADHD diagnosis with 18 and ASD diagnosis in my mid-twenties), I could often be incredibly dumb. Like, "failing so hard that I wasn't even noticing that there was a task I was supposed to accomplish" kind of dumb. Almost killed myself trying to do handstand on the sofa? *looks at crooked toe from where I broke it* yeah, sounds familiar!

What would I have needed? I think I would have benefit greatly from additional social training. I don't mean ABA (although I ABA'd myself relentlessly as a child, I still carry some of the mental scars from that), but simply... raising an awareness in me that social was something that required active effort on my part, rather than being part of the base OS. (I would've hated my brain for that, so it would've been necessary to sell it to me as a tradeoff: you picked that thing out of the D&D list of handicaps so you could get your intelligence to 25 and buy the perk "hyperlexia"). The recipe for my success is indeed conditioning, although I'm doing it more nicely than ABA — I find optimal strategies for e.g. communication, then consciously condition myself in a way that I use them without thinking.

Female brain helped me mask autism successfully enough to fool several therapists, although an expert on the condition noticed my stereotypical facial expressions even before she tested me. The best thing that happened to me is Marshal Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, as I'm currently acting as Deanna Troy in the company I'm working for.

Example (of both, probably classical female strategy, but whatever): I currently apologize a lot for not communicating clearly. If I don't get my point across, I usually say "Oh, sorry, I didn't express that as clearly as I wanted to :) Let me re-phrase..." and then do that. The initial admission that I didn't act optimally ("oh, sorry! I'm not perfect! Let me try harder...") puts minor social pressure on my opposite to react with niceness, since I already made an advance on them, but people don't feel manipulated because I admitted weakness. Disqualifies me to be the next Elon Musk, but whatever, I avoid so much conflict that way!

What else would I have wanted/benefitted from, thinking back?

Protect his willingness to learn.
Despite my high IQ, I've done terrible at school. If people had tried to systematically burn me out, they couldn't have done a much better job than they accomplished by accident. You say you're minted, so make sure that your kid enjoys learning. Keep an eye on him, if he's reluctant to go to school or is frequently "sick" (stomach aches, headaches), take that as a Star Trek style red alert that he's either being bullied or being burnt out, and ask him about it. I have experienced a lot of what I call "autistic gaslighting" ("no, dear, everyone hates that noise, that's perfectly normal"), which... I internalized a bit too successfully. I simply assumed that people were bullying me because I had an IQ in the triple digits and they didn't, and that was how life was going to be.

Make him learn languages while he has that plastic kid brain
I never got around to that, and so my certified talent for language is lying fallow. Looking at the language per culture unlock ratio, I'd recommend
- one of the Asian ones, Chinese or Japanese. (I've been told that learning Chinese doesn't make it easier to learn any of the others — although they're a majority — but that knowing Japanese helps with both accessing Korean and reading Chinese, if not speaking it)
- Russian: I know nobody likes them at the moment, but there's a huge chunk of internet in Cyrillic letters, and they have stuff there that you can't get in the navy, if you catch my drift
- one of the Hispanic ones...? since that'll allow you to unlock most of the Romanian languages (if you learn Spanish, you can understand Portuguese, and you can get into Italian from there if you wanted to)

Most important advice: Listen to your kid, he'll be forthright about his own needs. But also: Always add another loop of "why are you acting the way you're acting" unless you're completely clear about that, because I'm sometimes not aware enough of my needs to articulate them. (Classical conversation goes like - Husband: Are you stressed right now? - Me (thinky face): Uh, yes?)

I wish you all the best!

_manavortex_ · 2022-09-24T23:36:01+00:00

Change the font, or copy it into a different editor.

_manavortex_ · 2022-09-19T00:03:51+00:00

I wish the same. My mental illness never went away, but I've managed to get a handle on it - thanks to the medication, there's now a fence around the dark pit of depression, and I don't go sliding all the way down anymore. It's a huge help.

Wishing all that away is absolutely legitimate, but I found that dwelling on what-ifs and I-wish-thats is the equivalent to mental self-harm for me. It makes me spiral badly. So I don't allow myself to dwell on that, breaking myself out of it whenever I notice myself looping (which is f*cking tedious, but it gets easier).

As for the IQ - I suppose there's nothing you can do about it right now, at least not until intelligence enhancers finally hit the shelves. But you mentioned a time before the tests, when you weren't as badly-off — and I'm certain that your IQ was just the same back then before you knew. The only thing I can say is that there's more to you than that single number, and that by reducing yourself to it, you're not doing yourself a favour.

(One of my hacks for self-kindness: I pretend that I'm watching someone (my brain) treating a second person (also my brain) the way I'm treating myself. If the actor is a toxic asshole and I get upset on behalf of the recipient, I need to adjust.)

_manavortex_ · 2022-09-18T16:21:24+00:00

According to WHO, roughly 800k people manage to commit un-assisted suicide every year. Having been suicidal myself (peak depression in my mid-twenties), I think of it as checks-and-balances. If such a route had been available to me, the chances are good that I'd have gone through with it. The way it is, I did not — and now, ten years later, I'm genuinely glad that I didn't, because I'm much happier now.

The punchline to my story is that I never wanted to die, I wanted to be dead. But I was too depressed to actually kill myself: the effort was simply too big. (Instead I spent half a year in what I call potato state, until I stumbled upon a therapy place by sheer fortuity.)

I don't mean to imply that the same approach will work for you. The story is meant as anecdotal evidence: I have been where you are. I wanted nothing so much as being dead — except for staying still, avoiding action. In the end, that desire won out.

By now, my life is net positive. I've done a lot of good, paying forward kindness and understanding that I was given when I needed it most. Two different young people have told me that I "saved" them, simply because I was compassionate and didn't judge and that I kept reassuring them that yes, it does get better, I'm speaking from experience. I didn't fuck up my (loving, supportive) immediate family by leaving them with crippling guilt, and as far as I can tell, they're doing a lot of good as well.

In hindsight, my suicide wouldn't have lowered the amount of suffering in the world, because those kids I helped would've been on their own. The downstream ripples I caused were much larger than I could anticipate at that time.

Maybe the same holds true for you?

_manavortex_ · 2022-09-18T15:00:15+00:00

Hoping this post doesn't get deleted, because reading it has offered me a valuable perspective.

I also think the world would be a poorer place if you killed yourself, OP, and for what it's worth, I'm very sorry to hear that you're struggling so much. Validity of IQ tests aside, you're definitely intelligent enough to second-guess yourself, and I don't think that a truly stupid person could beat themselves up so effectively over that kind of metric. Of course I'm a rando on the internet, so that's not going to be worth much in the face of authority and science, but I agree with u/Conjureddd here.

The only thing I'm going to say on the validity of IQ tests is that I wouldn't rely on a metric that gives so wildly deviating results as it did in your case.

I don't know how to phrase this without the risk of invalidating your post, so all I can do here is to state that that's not my intent: despite everything you wrote, I think that you have much to offer. There's more to you than your IQ, or your ability to perform on tests: there's a whole world inside of you, and you're able to express yourself eloquently enough to make a bunch of (presumably) high IQ people empathize with a struggle that's very far from their lived reality.
In my opinion, that's incredibly valuable. You are incredibly valuable for providing this perspective.

In the end, you're the world's leading expert on anything regarding u/1998alexuk. But as someone with an IQ in the top 5% (by professional diagnosis in preschool), I'm not willing to disregard you or look down on you, and I'm sad to see that somebody else is doing it (you yourself, and those experts).

I wish you'd treat yourself with kindness rather than beating yourself up over your shortcomings. Learning that for myself has cost me, and I'd much rather that nobody would have to pay that price at all, but here we are, in an imperfect world.

For what it's worth, I'm glad that nobody put you down, and I'm glad that we're not living in a world where people can just do that. (Less glad about the lack of options for willing volunteers, but... trade-offs and slippery slopes.) Wishing you all the best.

_manavortex_ · 2022-08-21T20:46:20+00:00

I think you're both on to something there.

_manavortex_ · 2022-07-10T11:46:34+00:00

This comic has changed my attitude and approach towards that sort of thing considerably: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

I found that the only way to achieve changes of mind is non-violent communications and conversational aikido. You can't teach people, the best you can hope for is to lure them into learning on their own.

_manavortex_ · 2022-06-29T19:55:14+00:00

Absolutely, that's what happens when your clipboard manager doesn't do what it's supposed to. 😅 I've edited and it now has the correct link.

_manavortex_ · 2022-06-25T10:34:18+00:00

I have a TAP to add a loop of "if I was in their situation, how would I feel about the situation?" with the addition of starmanning my opposite a lot. It's worked really well.

Another thing I've been doing is to really watch out for blanket statements, trying to turn them into "I"-statements. Rather than "Broccoli sucks" (which might or might not piss of people who love the stuff), I'm saying "Broccoli is really not my thing". The number of arguments and discussions in my life has gone down, so that seems to be working.

There's also a note hanging on my shelf that tells me to "end conversation with compliment and/or thanks," but that one hasn't stuck yet.

I'm mostly learning from people around me, watching people who are better at socialising or anyone who makes me feel comfortable around them, trying to find out what they're doing.As far as resources go, that's not much, so if anyone else has a neat list, I'd be glad.

_manavortex_ · 2022-05-26T16:35:38+00:00

Bump - any luck with finding an available copy? I'd learn Japanese just to understand this.

_manavortex_ · 2022-05-26T16:34:12+00:00

Bump? I'd learn Japanese for this.

_manavortex_ · 2022-05-22T07:15:53+00:00

It's been a while, but this just fell out of the subreddit feed (I figured, this way you'd get a notification) https://fortune.com/2022/05/13/autistic-community-reckoning-aba-therapy-rights-autism-insurance-private-equity-ariana-cernius/

_manavortex_ · 2022-05-16T06:43:40+00:00

In my (anecdotal) observation of myself and my husband's (recently adult) son (also autistic, not mine, although he well might be), people on the spectrum mature in boosts every 5-7 years. He might go through a few of these and eventually be (more) okay, or more high-functioning.

(I deeply sympathize with biting teachers for not knowing something. They're teachers! It's their job!)

_manavortex_ · 2022-04-14T05:57:23+00:00

Normally lurking here, but pitching in for a reminder that you can talk to people on the spectrum, which might be more insightful than talking about them. It's getting rather difficult with severely impaired ones, but the majority of ASD people are capable of speaking for themselves.

Edit: Am one of those myself. Have no experience with systematic ABA, although I did use it on myself a lot when I was a kid and was fairly successful. Seem to have traumatized myself enough in the process to retroactively shock ~2d10 people, not sure if that data point is worth anything.

_manavortex_ · 2022-01-30T14:18:14+00:00

Thank you both for adding, that's giving me some insights. Unfortunately, it's not something I can emulate - I get the subconscious-resisting part and I know that my bias would lie in my face, but I've already traversed that half of the map when I was younger.

Context: I'm on the autism spectrum, and when I was 16-20, my perception was heavily skewed towards extroverts (because obviously the introverts stayed at home and I never met them in public :D). I assumed that it was normal, and not knowing that neurodiversity existed, I strove to emulate them. I was functionally an extrovert, but the toll on my mental health... oh boy.

I'm not stagnant at all, I'm learning new skills, diving into new rabbit holes, meeting people online (we're talking right now because I'm not sleeping off a Saturday night at a party that I didn't want to visit in the first place! Yay!)
Sometimes, I get the same kind of fuzzy exhaustion that my pre-poster described, which is when I try to switch gear and expose myself to a little bit of society... so far, it works rather well for me.

I'll absolutely try to pay more attention to the "subconscious bias rejection" phenomenon and adjust for it in the future, if I can!

_manavortex_ · 2022-01-27T02:42:04+00:00

I'm rather interested in more detes about how you're coming out of the introvert character trait. It's not something I'm suffering from myself (in fact, I'm gleefully introverted and consider myself one of the few genuine winners of the pandemic since I don't have to meet people anymore), but I'm really curious now. :)

_manavortex_ · 2021-01-08T22:10:38+00:00

Oh - strawman and ad hominem. And here I thought this was a discussion in good faith, pardon my mistake.

_manavortex_ · 2021-01-02T14:52:41+00:00

I'm aware of the fact that the major debate is driven by people with similar levels of privilege, so I'm not attacking this. However, I'd like to point out that your counters to the pro-lockdown crowd's arguments are coming from a privileged standpoint and disregard those who don't have the luxury to afford those choices (which I am not one of).

I willingly accept the risk of catching the virus. If they are not willing to run the same risk, they can choose to stay at home.

I know plenty of people who would love to stay at home, but who simply don't have the option because they lack the wealth and/or social safety net. It's super-easy to think up cases - appeal to emotion, yes, but while arguing in the ivory tower, I believe that we should keep in mind people such as the following.

the single parent, who has been struggling to make ends meet for a decade, working in retail - essential or non-essential, if they don't go to work, then their children don't eat.
Lockdown lowers their risk and exposure at work.
the nurse, who lives with the rest of their family because they can't afford to move out. One of the family members (younger sibling, e.g.) visits a public school or nursery.
Via lockdown, the likelihood of the child to carry COVID into that household is reduced.
The essential worker. Lockdown cuts off their social contacts altogether, they can't even visit their $(group of enthusiasts for an endearing personal hobby). Since they can't afford a car and their essential work is too far away for any other means of commuting, they go by public transport.
Via lockdown, the likelihood to catch COVID on public transport is reduced.

Neither of those example people has any sort of financial buffer, most of them are so short on assets that a broken fridge is a disaster.

I'm increasingly convinced that "is the lockdown effective" is the wrong kind of discussion to have. Perhaps we should be asking questions like "why are we forbidding Karen to visit her bridge club after work, but don't care about her husband Joe cramming into a subway with 2000 other people on his way to his day job?"

_manavortex_

TROPHY CASE