My father had a workbench drawer marked "Pieces of Wire Too Short to Use."
Mind you, he was an electrician.
Those are for special occasions, like when you're doing electrical work in someone's house who you don't like much and feel like splicing 10 short wires together instead of using a long one.
He also had a drawer labeled "Plastic Shark" that contained one of my old toy sharks.
I had to clean out my uncle's house when he passed away suddenly. Among many other things, this man had a box full of gum wrappers perfectly folded into little triangles. But don't worry, I've been assured he wasn't autistic, he was just a little antisocial and odd.
My grandfather was different, he said "okay" for my diagnosis, read up on it, and when he read that Albert Einstein was suspected to have autism, he thought he had a bloodline of future scientists. Also he had a great trouble with saying "it's enough work for today", and was stubborn enough to work on something 18 hours if it meant it could be done under one day.
The "enough work" problem is the story of my childhood... I have way too many memories of sitting in the garage, or on the driveway, either freezing to death or being eaten alive by mosquitoes, at 2:30 a.m. while trying to hold a light absolutely still in just the right position...
To be fair, I often stay up too late trying to find some bugs in my OpenGL pipeline, so I likely inherited a lot from him.
After reading these comments, I have concluded that everyone's grandpa is autistic.
As someone with two autistic boys people really be stretching on their undiagnosed definitions of autism.
You know how neurodivergence is one category with a lot of different and diverse conditions and spectrums. Neurotypical is that as well. Not all neurotypical people are alike, there's diversity as well.
I mean, I think the count of neurodiverse people on lemmy is likely very high (for various reasons). And since it's highly genetically correlated, likely also the grandparents.
Also if we could diagnose the entire world we would find many people who would fall on the high-functioning side of the spectrum. Many people just go undiagnosed for their entire lives. I bet autism is way more common than the science tells us today.
my grandpa has a collection of those glass caps they use on power towers
after searching for an image the correct term is "glass insulator for power lines" but I think "glass cap for power tower" sounds funner lol
I have a collection of those silica gel packets I find at clothing stores and supermarkets
I once dragged one of those ceramic powerline insulators across two international borders because I found it lying around and liked how it looked. It took up the majority of the space in my backpack, so I had to buy a second backpack and carry it on the front of my chest lol. Apparently the reason they have that odd shape is so that when it's raining, water can't make a continuous trickle between the wire and the pylon
Apparently the reason they have that odd shape is so that when it’s raining, water can’t make a continuous trickle between the wire and the pylon
That and also to increase the distance any charge has to travel across the surface of the insulator.
My grandpa was very smart but seemingly clueless about the world. A lot of people said that he was a 12 year old in an adult body
He couldn't of possibly been Autistic...
One way I look at historic figures for who might and might not been a high functioning autistic individual is to look at how well they may have functioned socially vs. How technical they were.
Take William Bligh for example. He was the captain of the Bounty when the famous mutiny happened. Contrary to popular belief, he wasn't some tyrannical captain who was so monstrous that his crew were pushed beyond human dignity. He actually was milder than most captains and had unusual methods of keeping his crew in shape. For example he ordered his crew to dance on a daily basis. Why? Because for prolonged periods of time there was actually minimal activity needed on the ship, so many sailors would be lazy and get out of shape. By having them dance he was trying to keep them in shape to do their jobs when needed.
It worked and it was practical, but it made everyone hate him. He was a highly socially inept man and the mutiny on the bounty was NOT the only mutiny or rebellion he had to deal with.
But... as a sailor he was brilliant. He really did manage to keep his men healthier than normal, and as a navigator he was probably one of the best to have ever lived. No joke. When the crew set him adrift on a raft with the few loyal members with him. He navigated across the open pacific without a map and nonexistent tools, working only by memory and the stars that he had memorized and managed to make a trek of thousands of kilometers to the nearest safe port.
That kind of obsession on detail is not something that comes without being somewhat on the spectrum.
It was a longboat, not a raft, and he had a sextant and almanac so he could look up rise and set times for stars. He lacked charts.
It was a remarkable feat
When I think of Autistic people from history I think of Buster Keaton. Buster Keaton was known for his stone cold appearance and there is a lot of evidence that he was Autistic. I also wonder if some of the "witches" in the witch trails were actually just Autistic women.
There are also a plenty of other "might be Autistic" historical figures but it is rather hard to actually make any conclusions especially when you start going back centuries. Everyone from Ada Lovelace to Leonardo da Vinci to Alan Turning. I honesty think there could be a link between Autism and major breakthroughs.
One person I have never really been sure about is Hildegard of Bingen. There isn't a lot to go one but she seemed very dedicated to a few things so maybe.
high functioning autistic
I don't want to seam pedantic. Levels in autism is profoundly discriminatory.
Ok, but it is no secret that there are people with autism that have severe difficulties with basically every task, while there are autistic people who can live their lives with manageable symptoms, and then there are autistic people who have talents neurotypical people can only dream of. I would not call them levels, but there must be a system to discern between those groups, and if it isn't one that is quick and easy, it will probably not be used by the large majority of people. I know that Asperger's is not ok anymore to use, but every other system will have to discern the 3 different groups, or am I mistaken?
*couldn't have
*couldn't've
Autism has always been here. But instead of labeling someone as autistic and trying to improve understanding and communication, people were like, "That's a weird dude."
Or worse yet, they were interned on an institution all their lives or were killed by police during a misunderstanding.
real conversation:
"back when I was a kid autism didn't exist like you guys!"
"Ma... you're autistic..."
Is it Autism or just well organized?
If you're well organized your autistic, if not, you are ADHD. If you fall in the middle, you are both.
I know I'm old man shouting at clouds but it seems like social media is completely focused on classifying. It seems silly. It's like Meyers Briggs personality tests.
The big problem with ADHD is that every human will experience the symptoms at some point in life.
Every ADHD meme is relatable to pretty much everyone, but they don't understand what it is for those symptoms to basically be your whole existence.
The adhd gives you superpowers memes always makes me want to strangle someone.
Yeah it gives me superpowers like once every few months where for a day or 5 I get a ridiculous amount of work done. The rest of my existence is miserable and I hate myself for not just my lack of work productivity but also how hard it is to get myself to exercise, brush teeth, or just get out of bed. And not a single healthy routine sticks. Only the unhealthy ones. Why is it so easy to pick up smoking again but so hard to do anything that's good for me?
It is beyond exhausting. Nobody takes my serious neurological disorder seriously. I'm nearly thirty and only now I'm starting to get the medical help I would have needed 20, 25 years ago. To think what could have been breaks my heart.
Can confirm. Everything on top of my desk has a specific spot and orientation but anything additional, like important papers placed onto it will disappear from the physical nature of reality and my memory in a very short yet unknown amount of time
I am certified both. Also this is why the term neurodiversity is so much better. Overlap is quite common.
One doesn't require the other, but let's be honest they often travel in the same car
In undergrad I once went back to my dorm room and eagerly showed my roommate the video of Grace Hopper illustrating how long lengths of time are (https://youtu.be/9eyFDBPk4Yw). A little while later, he was talking about this scene and how he likes the writing, because engineers are often much more excited by something seemingly mundane, such as the various lengths of wire needed for a project, than "this is my spaceship."
Anyway, I tell him, completely seriously and with no sense of irony, "yeah, but why would anyone care about lengths of wire?"
He yelled back, "You literally came in here to show me a video about lengths of wire."
I'm too lazy to keep things organized, does that get me out of autism?
I think that upgrades your autism to audhd.
Nah, it just means the ADHD that often accompanied Autism is fight full force.
God damnit. Now I'm an autistic grandpa.
My grandfather had similar collections. Of anything potentially useful.
I don’t believe in his case it was primarily due to neurodivergence but rather a depression-era childhood.
Could he afford a weed whacker? Yes, but he made one from an old vacuum, even in the 80s/90s. And so on.
Their lives started in poverty and they killed Nazis and we dishonour them horribly when they are barely cold. Especially America who is going to inflict both on everyone again.
Amateur. Back in the 90s i collected odds and ends because I wanted to exactly be like a Sierra online adventure game protagonist.
Also I collected coins. But I guess that was not eccentric enough to be an autistic thing?
I was eccentric when I was seven years old. They had meetings about me.
Was diagnosed with ASD around 50 years.
My grandfather has a collection of construction engines models perfectly aligned on shelves in the veranda.
I'm all for ragging on the boomers for the shitstorm of cruelty, greed, and ignorance they've made.
But this is just another era's assorted cables drawer. You might need to rig something 🤷
Having not seen the subtitle, I thought at first that this was a drawer full of rods and belts and whatever else they used to beat the autism out of kids, back in the day.
Does buckets of old nails count? Which are also next to my buckets of old screws.
I do a lot of renovating and construction, some on contract but mostly for myself, and I save so much stuff from my work ... screws, nails, nuts, bolts, washers, wire, scrap wood, scarp plywood, glass, metal, roof tile, rubber products, plastic products, unique rocks, concrete block
I'm indigenous Canadian and I grew up poor in the 80s and I was raised by parents who were born in the wilderness in the 1940s. For a while I saw my grandparents who saw everything new as wondrous and special .... my grandmother saved every plastic bag that was still good and had only been used once. My grandfather collected scrap wood of anything and cobbled them together to build boxes, utensils or just build a hunting shack. I got my habits from my dad who worked every single day and just collected stuff on his way saving everything in case he needed it .... 50% of the it made sense and he did indeed use stuff he had kept around, the other 50% meant he just kept a forever pile of stuff that rusted and deteriorated in the yard.
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