u/shinycherrybass

i’ve heard multiple reports of people having terrible experiences with the security at kremwerk - random cover prices based on nothing, overcharging cards, rudeness. does anyone know what’s really happening? are these people telling the truth? why has bouncer quality suddenly taken a nosedive?

So I have an e-trike right now. It’s a lovely trike (eskute t300, if you’re curious), but it has a huge limitation - it can’t go on the bus. This severely limits my range. I can’t balance on a bike (disability) so an e-bike is out of the question, but I can scooter. As such, I’ve decided to consider an e-scooter for bus trips.

I’m ISO a small, preferably foldable e-scooter, the lighter the better. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or special, just needs to be able to get me places. Does anyone have recommendations for something like this?

so, content warning, i’m gonna talk about pee here.

i’ve always had issues with my proprioception and body signals, but they were horrible as a child. several doctors insisted this was just part of cerebral palsy, only for a scan to finally reveal my spinal cord was tethered at age 8 after years of my mom’s begging. they untethered it and things got a lot better, but unfortunately at the end of the day i still had all the usual cerebral palsy body signaling symptoms to deal with. this includes, of course, when my body senses that I need to pee.

i don’t have accidents anymore, but i am woken up quite literally every night between two and five AM to go pee. most nights i don’t even physically feel like i have to pee, my brain just wakes me up and won’t let me go back to sleep until i put two and two together.

the medical response to this is essentially “sorry. don’t drink water before bed.” there’s no way to fix it if that doesn’t work. it’s not even considered a medical issue unless it’s at least twice a night, apparently? never mind that it screws up my sleep horribly, i suppose.

having cerebral palsy is so frustrating. i live a mostly normal life, and then i deal with a series of inconveniences and annoyances like this. and obviously i’m grateful it’s not worse, but god i wish i could sleep through the night.

just a vent.

it really sucks spending my whole life trying and failing to make friends. i don’t know what i’m doing wrong other than existing while autistic. i’m kind and empathetic and keep online friendships just fine, but something about me in the real world makes people uncomfortable. even most other autistic people shy away from me. maybe if i knew what it was i could change it, but i can’t figure out what it is. i’ve talked about it with several therapists and they can’t figure it out either - i don’t have some glaring issue i’m missing here due to lack of self reflection. i’ve been in therapy since like age 8 to work on making myself a functional, likable human being, and though i’ve made massive amounts of progress on the functional aspect, somehow 13 years later i’m still not socially good enough for others.

you can’t imagine how absolutely soul draining it is to not have any irl friends unless you’ve experienced it. my 21st was this week and the most enthusiastic in person birthday wish i got was from the employees at dutch bros. my parents, who i love dearly, have tried their hardest to help me celebrate, but the hole in my 21st birthday experience left by my friendless-ness is very, very noticeable. i’m grateful for them, obviously, but i can’t help but wish i had friends to go to a bar with or something.

i hope this year will be better to me. i hope this is the year that one of my attempts to make a friend finally succeeds.

I have chronic tachycardia and need to be careful about how much caffeine I consume. I’m also, however, severely ADHD, and have found a small amount of caffeine to be very helpful lately as a little boost to get through the day (I can’t take prescription stimulants because of the tachycardia).

I’m an annoyingly picky eater and really don’t like coffee or fizzy drinks, so I’ve been cutting 200 mg caffeine pills in half to get 100 mg doses of caffeine, but even that’s a little much. I just need 50-75 mg - that seems to be the sweet spot. However, I can’t seem to find any easy way to get a dose of caffeine this small. It seems like every product starts at 100 mg and the product trend seems to be to cram as much caffeine into anything caffeinated at all. I like the convenience of pills but have had no luck finding lower doses.

Has anyone had any luck finding some way to get smaller amounts of caffeine?

if you have a bike/trike that isn’t quick release, please please please check that the nuts that hold your front tire in place aren’t loose. I just absolutely ate shit when I hit a curb and managed to pop off my tire because the nuts were loose, likely due to road vibration. I was lucky to have been going slow and in a safe place when it happened.

Nuts can become loose over time just from vibration on the road. Please check yours to make sure you don’t end up like I did or worse.

i want to have patience for old people. i really do. but there is a line between being old and being unaware/unwilling to participate in the world around you. today i went to the apple store, and while i was waiting my turn i had to listen to this old man who had locked himself out of his phone. his wife made the appointment for him (“he never learned how to use the internet”, she explained) and explained the problem to the tech for him. the tech explained to the two of them that she couldn’t unlock the phone without his apple ID.

“we don’t have one of those,” the man said. “i don’t use those password things.” the tech tried to explain what she meant. “no, no,” he insisted. “i just have my email and that’s it.”

the tech tried to explain that the email *was* likely his apple ID. “oh, well, I can’t get into that. it’s in my phone.” well, if you know your password- “I just told you I don’t use passwords. it’s all in my phone. now unlock my phone.”

turns out if you can’t get into an apple account, the only way to unlock the phone is by wiping it. the two of them insisted the tech must be lying, and the man went into a tirade about how he needs his phone data because that’s where everything is, including his retirement accounts.

the poor tech is near tears at this point. “sir, unless you can give me your apple ID-“

“my email is in my phone! unlock my phone!”

the wife speaks up for the first time in ten minutes. “can we speak to your boss, please?”

it takes her (male) manager another ten or so minutes to explain to the two of them the exact same things the tech told them. it turns out this man had everything - his bank accounts, his emails, his contacts, all of his passwords - solely in an UNLOCKED iphone he had managed to put a passcode on and lock himself out of. he had essentially managed to lock himself out of every piece of important data he owned. they don’t own a computer. everything was in that phone.

i wanted to scream. you had your entire life in an UNLOCKED iPhone? are you fucking kidding me??? no backups anywhere? old people’s tech illiteracy has always bothered me, but this is beyond illiteracy. i don’t even have a word for it. the fact that these kind of people are still alive is astounding. how many lead paint chips have these two consumed???

I keep hearing people talk about our great President Vehicular Michaelis and this thing called “Star Wars”? I tried searching it up on Dropout but all I got was an animated “parody” series that’s too old to have any of my favorite cast members in it, so I won’t be watching it. Is our president taking jobs outside Dropout for Game Changer or something? I can’t imagine a Dropout cast member doing work outside Dropout for any other reason. What’s going on?

Recently, my OT offered to try ultrasound massage therapy for my spastic, painful shoulder muscles. Very little actually helps for these muscles, but I figured it was worth a shot.

It’s a tiny machine that fits in the shelf of a rolling cart. We do 5-10 minutes of the ultrasound wand - you can’t even feel the waves, by the way - followed by a few minutes of soft cupping. And it works. It aches for like 15 minutes and then it feels significantly better for days afterwards.

If you have particularly tight, painful spots in your muscles from CP, you should really talk to your PT/OT about trying ultrasound therapy. It can be a little hard to find someone who knows how, but if you’re like me and have insurance that won’t cover massage therapy, or find that regular massage isn’t doing much, this is an excellent option to try. My chronic pain is significantly reduced and I feel the need to spread the word to the rest of you, because this isn’t a particularly well known practice and might be a missing puzzle piece for you. Try it!

if you are my sibling, kindly please ignore this post, thank you 💕

so, quick context: I’m 20. I’ve spent the last few years since graduation in part time community college and working. this fall, I was supposed to go into a specialized associates program at another community college, but they essentially ghosted me, and now the plans I’ve made for the next two years of my life have essentially collapsed.

In the aftermath of all this, my mom suggested that maybe I should consider actual university. I’ve been absolutely restless to progress in life, and I have money saved for college to use. It’s been an idea I’ve toyed with for a long while, but I had set it aside for this associates program. With the program not a choice anymore, I’ve decided maybe university isn’t a bad idea. I toured a few schools and had some meetings, and settled on Fairhaven at WWU.

The issue: WWU has already had their fall enrollment deadlines. If I was to go, I would join in the winter. This is scary to me. I’m very autistic and already struggle greatly with making friends. If I enter winter term, everyone else has already been there for a term and made friends and settled in. I’m worried people will already be in their friend groups, and I’ll be a social outcast. Not to mention academics - am I going to have a messed up class schedule by joining in the winter? I’m already two years late to university. Should I just tough it out and wait until next fall to avoid messing everything up, or is it okay to join everyone in winter?

it’s been a full week since july 4th and i am still hearing at least a few booms every. damn. night. fireworks are barely tolerable on the 4th - if you are still setting off any loud devices at night at this point, you are now well within “just being a dickwad” territory. put down the explosives and go to bed. please. for fucks sake. your neighbors are sick of it.

At some point in the last few years, I seem to have developed a near-constant level of mental fatigue. Most of the time my body feels fine, but mentally most days it feels like there’s a physical wall in my brain preventing me from doing things. It’s worse on some days than others, especially if I’m stressed or slept bad. I can still work and all those things, but it takes a very large amount of effort. It’s like executive dysfunction times a hundred.

I don’t know if it’s the depression or the ADHD or something else, but I do know that when I trialed short-acting ritalin it went away fully for potentially the first time since high school. Unfortunately, it also made me tachycardic for the first two hours, which kind of cuts into the little time I get. I’m trialing other stimulants now, but until I find one that works I’ll probably spend a good chunk of my summer break in bed. I just rarely have the motivation or mental energy to do anything, often even things I enjoy. I’m on four different medications for my mental health. I hate to add another, but wtf else am I meant to do at this point? I just want to have the energy most other people have.

I’ve never been able to make friends. I was bullied relentlessly my entire childhood and the only real “friends” I ever made were the other kids in my high school theatre classes, and I was always on the very edge of their circle, rarely invited to hang out unless someone remembered I existed.

I’m 20 now. I have a few online friends, through shared fandoms. I have 4 “close” friends- these are quite literally the only people I actually talk to regularly in my life who aren’t my parents. One of them has been isolating for months now because of mental health stuff, and I see them online once in a blue moon these days - they weren’t online very often in the first place. One of them, who I’ve known since 2021, has a full-time job and a (kind of?) partner these days, so they’re mostly too busy for fandom or me. The other two are engaged to each other, and tend to spend a lot more time talking to each other than they do to anyone else.

Watching them all fade from my life for their real lives is a day I knew would come, but it’s really painful. It happens to every online friend I’ve ever had - they find someone or something more interesting than me, or they switch fandoms, or whatever, and I stop hearing from them.

They move on to their real life people, and I lay in my bedroom alone staring at an empty discord server.

I’ve tried to make IRL friends, I really have. However, even to other autistics, there seems to be something intrinsically Wrong about me that repels people. I don’t know what it is. No therapist I go to can figure it out either. I’m kind and honest and I try not to be overeager, because I know it creeps people out. I try and I try and I try and I’m left with nothing. None of my high school friends talk to me, either. For the first time in a year and a half, I feel truly, totally alone again. I lay in bed and do nothing and receive zero notifications.

Y’know what I’m doing for my 21st birthday? I’m doing a weekend in the city with my parents. And I fucking love my parents, obviously, and I’m excited, but do you know how sad* *that sounds when I say it out loud? No, I’m not going out with friends and drinking for my birthday. I’m going to go see live improv. With my parents.

My mom’s been pushing me to consider going off to school instead of staying home at the community college. I think she hopes that I might finally find real life friends there. After 15-odd years of failure to do so, though, I’m starting to think I might be a lost cause. Maybe I’m just doomed to fleeting friendships on the internet forever.

I displayed pretty severe anorexic behaviors for a year or two at the tail end of high school. I wasn’t originally skinny or ever underweight, though, so I was never diagnosed as anorexic or even had people noticing the red flags. In fact, everyone praised me for losing so much weight and looking skinnier.

I recovered, eventually, all by myself. I don’t talk to anyone about it because of the stigma. I gained the weight back and watched the way people treated me decline as my tummy returned. I now hover on the edge of “normal” and “overweight” at about >!24.5!< bmi. I still hate the shape of my body, but I eat. I listen to content about body positivity from traditionally attractive women and pretend I accept myself, because that’s what recovered people are “supposed” to do.

I want to lose some weight again, healthily and safely this time. Being skinny was the best I’ve ever felt in my body. I want to like myself, and I can’t like myself like this. All I want is to safely lose maybe >!20!< pounds to feel less heavy and sluggish - not make myself a skeleton.

However, I’ve recently found out that if you have a history of ED, people will act like you can never try to lose weight ever again. If you tell people you want to lose weight, people will tell you that you’re “not recovered enough” and that you shouldn’t try to lose weight safely because it’s dangerous for “someone like you”. I ask for help navigating weight loss with an ED history and the only advice I get is “don’t” - that I need to be happy in my body as is, even if it feels impossible to love.

Y’know who does offer to help me? The GLP-1 “microdosing” industry. The unhealthy diets. The people peddling extreme calorie deficits. All these ways to lose weight I know I shouldn’t touch. They don’t care if you’re disordered, as long as you pay them.

When I go to the healthy people, the only advice I get is “don’t do that”.

Do you see the problem here?

The unhealthy ways to lose weight want you no matter what. The healthy people only want you if you’re not one of those dirty eating disorder people. Your choices for losing weight when you’ve had a past ED are relapse into something unhealthy, or try desperately to figure out how to do it safely with zero outside support.

One of those is a lot more tempting than the other.

I (20) am decently intelligent, but very autistic/ADHD. My brain does not thrive on traditional structure. I have survived at my community college and gathered a little over 40 credits with mostly As and Bs, but I struggle with the rigid structure, lack of feedback, and non-interactiveness of it all.

I’m not 100% sure what I want to do yet, but I know I want it to involve helping children. I’m considering Special Ed ECE or becoming a Child Life Specialist, but nothing’s concrete yet. For now, I’m aiming for a degree in education with a focus on ECE.

As I’ve considered applying to a 4 year school, I’m mostly looking at two popular “alternative” colleges in my state of Washington - Evergreen State College in Olympia, and Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies in Bellingham. They’re both pretty similar - they offer interdisciplinary studies and “build your own degree” programs as well as traditional majors, a 1:20-ish ratio in classes, seminar style courses that combine multiple topics at once, and a focus on social justice and related topics. They also offer professor evaluation as opposed to letter grades, which offers that feedback I’ve been searching for.

Fairhaven is attached to Western Washington University, which allows me the opportunity to pursue any major they offer (of which there are so many!) and have the benefits of a large university. My younger sibling goes to WWU, but it’s a big school, so I’m not too worried about us being siblings becoming a “thing”. Eventually, though, I would have to transfer into traditional classes at other colleges in the university to get my major. I also worry about finding community and friends - people like me - in such a large school.

Evergreen State is a smaller school, but offers something that really interests me - a structure where instead of several 4 credit courses, you take one 12-16 credit course each semester. This means only one course to handle at a time, which means no juggling courses. I’ve always struggled with juggling multiple classes at once, so this is very appealing. The student body and staff also seem to be a lot like me - weirdos and oddballs that thrive on something entirely different from the standard.

Both colleges have similar tuition rates, so that’s not really a factor in my decision.

If you’ve gone/are going to/have worked at/know anything about either of these schools, I would love to know your thoughts and opinions on them. They both have their pros and cons for me, and I’m curious what others think.

I’m 5’2, transmasculine, and annoyingly curvy and pear shaped. I’ve been on low dose T for almost a year, but I don’t even try to pass anymore, because no matter how much effort I put in I know now that I’ll always be perceived as a girl. I used to try to pass. I bound every day and wore baggy clothes and a hat, tried all the tips and tricks from the internet. It never worked even once. I was putting in effort for an illusion everyone could see right through.

It drove me to anorexic behavior. Maybe, I thought, if I lost enough, my thighs might get a little thinner, my hips might have a little less padding. Unfortunately I eventually discovered that weight loss couldn’t change the width of my hip bones or the ratio of my thighs to my torso, and while I felt better in my body, it didn’t change how people saw my gender. I started the long road to recovery.

I am just shaped like this. I will never pass, no matter how much weight I lose. I’m back to my old weight now, and to be honest some days I still really miss being skinnier. People were nicer. I was desirable, for once. Even if I was a girl, I was at least a curvy, skinny girl who didn’t feel embarrassed to wear crop tops. I’ve gone back to hiding in my baggy clothes. People who have the body shape to pass are so ridiculously lucky.