*Goes on to explain in excruciating detail his special area of interest and keeps going on and on long after the lady has clearly lost interest and isn’t listening anymore. She tries to walk away, but he chases after her and continues without skipping a beat. She asked for this. She will get all of it.
insert trumpet boy meme…
…intersecting with an autist’s area of special interest
Not everyone’s horror. I’m hot for that.
Seriously, please list things in totality.
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
PLUTO
Cold dead hands. Cold. Dead. Hands!
PLUTO
DID IT CLEAR ITS ORBIT?!?
I say again, did… Pluto… CLEAR… ITS… ORBIT?
Wait, doesn’t Pluto cross Neptune’s orbit? Has Neptune cleared its orbit?
This MF puts Pluto at the end of a list! How disrespectful!
Pluto
Eris
Haumea
Makemake
Quaoar
Sedna
Orcus
Gonggong
The Sun, a spectral class G2V main-sequence star
The inner Solar System and the terrestrial planets
Mercury
Mercury-crossing minor planets
Venus
Venus-crossing minor planets
524522 Zoozve, Venus' quasi-satellite
Earth
Moon
Near-Earth asteroids (including 99942 Apophis)
Earth trojan (2010 TK7)
Earth-crosser asteroids
Earth's quasi-satellites
433 Eros
Mars
Deimos
Phobos
Mars trojans
Mars-crossing minor planets
Asteroids in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
Ceres, a dwarf planet
Pallas
Vesta
Hygiea
Asteroids number in the hundreds of thousands. For longer lists, see list of exceptional asteroids, list of asteroids, or list of Solar System objects by size.
Asteroid moons
A number of smaller groups distinct from the asteroid belt
The outer Solar System with the giant planets, their satellites, trojan asteroids and some minor planets
Jupiter
Rings of Jupiter
Complete list of Jupiter's natural satellites
Galilean moons
Io
Europa
Ganymede
Callisto
Jupiter trojans
Jupiter-crossing minor planets
Saturn
Rings of Saturn
Complete list of Saturn's natural satellites
Mimas
Enceladus
Tethys (trojans: Telesto and Calypso)
Dione (trojans: Helene and Polydeuces)
Rhea
Rings of Rhea
Titan
Hyperion
Iapetus
Phoebe
Shepherd moons
Saturn-crossing minor planets
Uranus
Rings of Uranus
Complete list of Uranus's natural satellites
Miranda
Ariel
Umbriel
Titania
Oberon
Uranus trojan (2011 QF99)
Uranus-crossing minor planets
Neptune
Rings of Neptune
Complete list of Neptune's natural satellites
Proteus
Triton
Nereid
Neptune trojans
Neptune-crossing minor planets
Non-trojan minor planets
Centaurs
Damocloids
Trans-Neptunian objects (beyond the orbit of Neptune)
Kuiper-belt objects (KBOs)
Plutinos
Orcus, a dwarf planet
Vanth
Pluto, a dwarf planet
Complete list of Pluto's natural satellites
Charon
Twotinos
Cubewanos (classical objects)
Haumea, a dwarf planet
Namaka
Hiʻiaka
Quaoar, a dwarf planet
Weywot
Makemake, a dwarf planet
(307261) 2002 MS4
120347 Salacia
20000 Varuna
Scattered-disc objects
Gonggong, a dwarf planet
Xiangliu
Eris, a dwarf planet
Dysnomia
(84522) 2002 TC302
(87269) 2000 OO67
V774104
Detached objects
2004 XR190
2012 VP113 (possibly inner Oort cloud)
Sedna, a dwarf planet (possibly inner Oort cloud)
Oort cloud (hypothetical)
Hills cloud/inner Oort cloud
Outer Oort cloud
“and you didn’t look like a total bitch, Karen, but clearly we all contain multitudes”
So does being autistic mean you have amazing memory
My son. It’s tanks. He’s 12 and can go on for hours about them, rattling off their armor thickness (in mm), caliber of their guns, horsepower of their engines, declination and traverse speeds of their turrets, etc. I took him to a tank museum one time, and no shit a quarter mile from the museum he sees the tank out front and he goes: “That’s a Sherman M4A4!!” Ten minutes later we’re parked and walking up to the museum, I look at the tiny info placard, M4A4, think to myself: “What the fuck.”
He’s 12 and can go on for hours about them, rattling off their armor thickness (in mm), caliber of their guns, horsepower of their engines, declination and traverse speeds of their turrets, etc.
On first skim of this comment I thought these were details about trains and I was very concerned about how weaponized trains had become.
Does he play World of Tanks? Lol
(Note: it’s a popular online free to play game)
I forget my own fucking birthday but let me wax poetically about extinct Australian megafauna for a few hours.
Though it’s episodic memory, if you ask me to give you a fun fact, let alone name a species just off the cuff, my mind goes blank. I don’t know anything about anything.
But give me a minute to set myself the mental stage and start rambling about how as a kid I was obsessed with this old faux taxidermy at the Melbourne museum because it was like a derpy wombat horse. One time my mum took me to a kids activity workshop where we got to pretend we were digging up fossils and analysing them… did you know Australias geologic layering contains every single rock type that exists in on earth. Lots of Australian fossils are found in soft limestone. Hang on, dippy don! That’s what I named the derpy wombat at the museum. It was a Diprotodon, a herbivorous marsupial who died out about 40,000 years ago. The cave in NSW where they found a bunch of specimens was 400 million year old limestone but Dippy only entered the record ~2 million years ago, so it suggests they burrowed, which makes sense when you look at their closest living relative, the wombat, though Diprotodon and the family it belongs to is a dead end on the evolutionary tree.
But yeah, you can’t always rely on where you find the bones to date the specimens which is why carbon and uranium dating really changed our understanding of Australian history.
Speaking of locations of fossils, diprotodon is one of the only known Australian marsupials to seasonally migrate, so their range was huge! So were they! 2m tall, 3m long and easily 2500kg heavy, and have two giant protruding teeth (hence their name Diprotodon, Greek for “two protruding teeth”, Di=two, pro to/protrude, don/dontics like orthodontics …I also like etymology) and lived in the marshlands. European archaeologists thought they were originally skeletons of some kind of hippopotamus, but several mobs of indigenous Australians had/have oral histories around diprotodon. the last living dipro’s died out after the first Australian peoples inhabited the land. Which is why there is an association between dippy and bunyip (an Australian cryptid/aboriginal mythology) a giant melevolent monster who haunts billabongs.
They indigenous Australians are often blamed for the extinction of a lot of megafauna, there was a theory of overhunting for the many years, but to date no diprotodon fossils have been found with evidence of human butchery, but we do have evidence that people would move bones around for some reason.
Anyway…
It’s like a trance, and it’s really hard to stop once you start, but you can’t just pick up into it, something has to trigger the memory to surface, like seeing a certain train go past to remember specific train facts, or in my case thinking about where you I was and who I was with when I first learned some of the best facts about my thing.
Though I have AuDHD so not sure if the episodic memory is my autism or my ADHD, it feels like ADHD because the thoughts are so bouncy when they come, but it also feels like like autism because it’s anxiously obsessive in a fun way inside my brain once they journey starts.
Also maybe remembering cool megafauna facts is why I forget things I should remember like what house number I live at or what year I was born (genuinely forgot these things, had to go to the front of my house to check, and do maths because I could remember my mums birthday and how old she was when she had me, but not my own birthday or age … Autism and memory is fucking weird)
I forget my own fucking birthday but let me wax poetically about extinct Australian megafauna for a few hours.
Don’t forget remembering your childhood gaffes in perfect detail.
But give me a minute to set myself the mental stage and start rambling about how as a kid I was obsessed with this old faux taxidermy at the Melbourne museum because it was like a derpy wombat horse
Have you stopped by recently? Although not mammalian megafauna, they’ve rather expanded on the saurian section.
It’s like a trance, and it’s really hard to stop once you start, but you can’t just pick up into it, something has to trigger the memory to surface, like seeing a certain train go past to remember specific train facts, or in my case thinking about where you I was and who I was with when I first learned some of the best facts about my thing.
At least for me personally, it doesn’t work so well if I’m quizzed on the spot about it, but I do have an ongoing portion of my brain that constantly cycles through the interest, to the point where it will start leaking into everything else, or I pick up on it like a gun to an MRI machine.
Though I have AuDHD so not sure if the episodic memory is my autism or my ADHD, it feels like ADHD because the thoughts are so bouncy when they come, but it also feels like like autism because it’s anxiously obsessive in a fun way inside my brain once they journey starts.
Bit of both? But it doesn’t help that things like depression and anxiety can also affect memory, both of which can be comorbid with either.
Yep! My brain works similarly. I essentially set bookmarks in stories for specific information. Although it can backfire when I answer without considering where I am or who I’m talking to first, which is why I’ll occasionally say horrifying, arrogant or otherwise tone-deaf stories without realizing it beforehand.
“Sorry that story involved a graphic injury and/or abusive situation, that was just the required-context paragraph for any story in that folder in my brain. It’s worked in similar social settings before, like with my therapist or with the school guidance counselor right after it happened, so I didn’t realize it wasnt appropriate in this job interview.”
“For the third time, please leave.”
“They all have similarly vague ‘clinical’ vibes though, right? You can see how I got confused.”
Depends on the flavour of autism, I guess. My partner’s autistic and can remember some things pretty well, but struggles a lot with others.
I have a cousin who’s on the spectrum; I’m pretty sure he knows more about Japanese automobiles than he knows about his own children.