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.
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 🤷
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 think collecting those was a bit of a thing in the 60s and 70s, I’ve run across multiple older folks who did. Pretty sure it eventually crossed with the “turn random shit into lamps” fad in the 70s because that seems to have become a fairly popular thing to do with them.
I love those things
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.
“Silica gel packets?”
Ohhhh, you mean the DO NOT EAT bags!
DO NOT EAT
You’re not my supervisor!
Oooh, like shoe flavor packets?
…where does he keep them? Make sure you wash your hands after touching them!
Wait are they lead? My grandparents have some on the window sill
The dad of a friend of mine does collect those, and ceramic ones. As an employee of the city, he got permission to open a local museum of insulators in a bulding owned by the city.
Those packets are real nice sprinkled on bread rolls btw, also great in most kinds of stir fry / pan fry.
You should know if you have any of those real puffy pink ones, they’re particularly good.
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.
It can be both you know
Autistic people tend to do well in tough times. We are pretty resourceful and can make it though.
God damnit. Now I’m an autistic grandpa.
Which is ironic considering everyone in my extended family knows damned well grandad was autistic af and he’s where half the bloody family got it from.
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.
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.
“Puts some hair on your chest”
Me chest hairless at 40. What a lie.
Everybody knows that you need to chew some black root for that.
The fuck. Does no one else have a wire drawer. It’s where I keep all my different wires. Display cable, HDMI, VGA, USB A B C, PS/2, 24v, Cat 6.
What do people do when stuff stops working or they need to connect something.
Those aren’t any of what you just said though. I have a drawer of wires everything you mentioned, outside of VGA because why? But I do not save or sort random electric wires.
I have a cable tumbleweed
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.
Certainly, and as I (suspect) to have AuDHD (ADHD diagnosed).
This combination is really difficult to see/diagnose, as these conditions somewhat cancel each other out. It took me a very hyperfocused deep-dive into all kinds of papers, to slowly come to that conclusion, that ADHD doesn’t explain my behavior alone. AFAIK this is in some regard an active research-area (how correlated are these conditions, are they even the same underlying condition?).
(I think) few psychiatrists really have a deep insight into that (and thus are accurately diagnosing these).
What are the reasons for all us neurodivergent people coming on here?
I would say foremost: strong opinions and idealism (very much correlated to ASD and ADHD) E.g. about the fucked up state of centralized social media controlled by right-wing billionaires.
Always when I talk to other people I don’t suspect to be neurodivergent, they just don’t really care about it, convenience is the driving factor.
Pretty sure the first dude to collect dead bugs and put them on corkboards with pins probably was on the spectrum. Also geologists. I can’t think of any other reason a person would be super into rocks.
Jesus Christ Marie, they’re not rocks. They’re minerals!!
If you didn’t have to mine them out of something and just picked them off the ground, they are pickerals (= rocks).
I was about to write two paragraphs about how awesome minerals are and then reflected on the thought that I may be on the spectrum.
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.
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.
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 had a Velcro wallet full of supplies like uhh… some bits of thread, some zip ties, twist ties, rubber bands, stuff like that. I never did anything with that crap. I was a strange one.
You were a protagonist of a 90s adventure game! You carried all manner of weird things to solve moon logic puzzles!
