Hi, I’m sorry that I didn’t see this post earlier. I’m autistic, and I have sensory processing issues, but not synesthesia.

The single biggest problem architecture causes for me is noise. Public spaces are inevitably noisy. But if the acoustics of the room are poor, then no one can hear themselves over anyone else, and everyone starts trying to talk over the room… which gets crazy pretty quickly. Independent restaurants in older buildings are the worst. Hollow plaster walls + 45 degree corners for the ceiling in some spots + a rowdy Italian family nearby with that one lady that laughs at the top of her lungs = sensory hellhole.

Extend that 10x to stadium concerts. The audio engineers crank things up so much that the sound waves bounce around until you get something like feedback from the room itself, it all just turns into a white noise assault on your eardrums and I’ve straight-up left concerts because of it.

Nothing is ever “quiet” for me, really. Actually, I lost it recently when a beginner guided meditation focused super hard on being aware of everything around you- that’s my experience all the time and I wish I could filter things out like most people!

Shopping: Florescent lights suck. They don’t bother me too much specifically, but they’re a major pain point for a lot of autistic people. Personally it’s just the constant traffic and unwritten “waiting for that one person to stop staring at the canned sauces shuffle”.

Museums are amaaaazing. I love museums. The Boston Museum of Science is one of my favorite places. Now that I think about it, my favorite designed spaces are all either very large and spacious or very small (in the way that historical homes tended to have more small, private rooms). Anything in-between gets… like, there’s enough room for stuff, and just barely room for quite a few people, and they end up even more crowded and chaotic than either of those two extremes, somehow.

Somebody calls my request for respectful language and symbolism “political correctness.” Although this respect exists barely anywhere, it is portrayed as enforced, and therefore something that must be rebelled against.

This seriously frustrates me so much. People actively resist respecting someone’s wishes in as basic of a way as language and then they have the gall to suggest that by pointing out that there’s a problem, you’re the one causing problems.

they will be limited in their exposure to different viewpoints - unless that particular newspaper is really good at challenging its readers and not just giving them what they think they want.

This is why I’m a big fan of Allsides. They seem genuinely dedicated to aggregating as wide a range of takes on current events as they can, which is really helpful for sniffing out BS. Honestly it’s mostly made me think there’s less BS than a lot of people think, so long as you can read past leading language.

The biggest, obvious one to me is news. Say what you will about mainstream media but some great investigative journalism still happens, and these companies are in an awkward position where no one wants to pay and everyone uses adblockers.

When I’m not living paycheck to paycheck I want to support Standard Ebooks (they’re doing a great job of showing how to make ebooks that don’t suck, check out their style guide) and maybe Neocities.

The more I think about how Medium works, the more I think it makes sense? While they could have done the typical thing where the people hosting content there pay for their share of the servers, by doing it in reverse the individual monthly cost can be lower (casting a wider net) and the people writing for them can actually get paid a bit for doing so.

I’m thinking about throwing some money at Obsidian, too, since I practically live in that app.

^On an unrelated note, how am I the first person to leave a comment?^

Lemmy absolutely does federate with Mastodon servers, what are you on about? I’ve seen people posting here from Mastodon accounts, using hash tags and @s in their post, and having the posts show up as posts they’ve made on their Mastodon instance as well.

What I don’t get is, I don’t see how that’s a reason to be concerned about Lemmy when the whole point is that there’s no central control over instances, which literally anyone can spin up, and instances can communicate / ban each other as they please. It’s impossible for the politics of the creators to have any real effect on the software, by design. I feel like people aren’t grasping how this all works. If you’re concerned about their politics, just don’t use instances that align with those politics, even spin up your own if you’re really worried about it.

GrapheneOS is a heavily security-focused fork of Android with no Google anything in it by default. Ironically the developers have chosen to support the Google Pixel specifically.

My solution: Buy a Pixel, use GrapheneOS, good for five years.