Catrys

Narrative game designer & roleplayer. I am normal and can be trusted with dynamite.

[Catrys @dracatrys]

“It’s hard to believe I’m walking through the ruins of Moonrise Towers, because I’m not, that’s in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, miles away and fucking dangerous.”

[valentine @valawakened]

I once heard someone say, “Healthy relationships aren’t conflict-free, they’re repair-rich,” and that sentence permanently altered my brain chemistry.

[𝓻𝓪𝓼𝓹𝓫𝓮𝓻𝓻𝔂 𝓲𝓼 𝓹𝓪𝓷 @hushatlas]

“I don't like children” and “I will protect all children” are, in fact, two views you can simultaneously hold

[sammm ☆ @onlysammms]

and for the lady, perhaps a long-term loving relationship that makes her feel safe enough to be vulnerable and doesn't turn into a lesson

[M.E🪻 @Emmys]

There are so many worlds we don’t even know about

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

You’re standing on a planet with molten lava at its core. Trees are turning sunlight into air you can breathe. Your heart is beating without you asking it to. There’s a moon in the sky and bugs that glow. This whole thing is absurdly beautiful. Don’t forget to notice it.

[☿ @mercurialsarah]

grief and sorrow permanently alter your brain chemistry which is responsible for interpreting our reality

[Asa @xAsamoahx]

I hate being around people who mistake my childlike wonder as naivety or weakness. I am simply a war general who loves to giggle.

[໊ @soysabil]

ah yes, the three genders: the broken, the beaten, and the damned

[Libriscent @libriscent]

When you start to realize you’ve been punished your whole life for being autistic

[blue @bluewmist]

I cannot emphasize this enough as a practical life skill: learn how to say no to authority figures. Learn how to tell them that nothing they can do to you will change your mind. Disappoint your parents. You have to live your own life.

[dan @Dansplainer]

baby ducks are seriously on their pikmin shit when they all follow their mother in a row

[s س 🦢 @soIesque]

in a perfect world I would be able to get degrees in perfumery, fashion design, the culinary arts, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music, photography, cinema, jewellery-making, ballet, language studies, anthropology, and archaeology all at once

[🪻...𝕔𝕠𝕠𝕝 𝕤𝕝𝕚𝕔𝕜 𝕕𝕚𝕔𝕜 @gwauu]

the fucked up thing about makeup is that you have to keep learning new tech otherwise you will get temporally locked into doing specific things thats why i got aunts in their 60's that are still doing top n bottom black waterlines

[rat valiant @birdwatchbud]

Guy who doesn't know he needs a CPAP: yea some people naturally need 16 hours of sleep per day...in cave times, we were spiritual leaders. and the whole clan would ask us to recount our constant insane nightmares when they came back in from hunting or gathering to learn new omens

[Priyav K Kaneria @_diginova]

this guy just put the most banger slide on the screen

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Within 10 seconds of meeting an autistic person, strangers rate them as awkward and lose interest in getting to know them. Show those same strangers only a written transcript of what was said, with no audio or video, and the bias completely disappears.

That finding came from a 2017 study at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by psychologist Noah Sasson and published in Scientific Reports. The bias came entirely from how autistic people sounded and looked.

For 40 years before that, scientists had been treating autism as a brain that couldn’t read other people. Diagnostic manuals listed it as a “social communication deficit.” When communication broke down, the autistic person was the broken link.

That whole frame has been coming apart over the last decade. The replacement is called the double empathy problem. Damian Milton, an autistic researcher, named it in a 2012 paper. When autistic and non-autistic people don’t understand each other, Milton argued, both sides are missing something. Autistic people don’t always read non-autistic people right, and the reverse is just as true. The breakdown belongs to both sides.

Catherine Crompton at the University of Edinburgh tested this with a telephone game in 2020. She lined up 72 adults in three kinds of groups: all autistic, all non-autistic, or mixed. The first person in the chain heard a story, then passed it down to person 2, then person 3, all the way to person 8.

The all-autistic groups passed the story along just as accurately as the all-non-autistic groups. The mixed groups lost the most details. People in the mixed groups also rated each other as feeling less connected.

In 2025, Crompton ran the whole thing again across Edinburgh, Nottingham, and UT Dallas with 311 participants. Nature Human Behaviour published the result. Same outcome.

Brett Heasman at the London School of Economics looked at families in 2018. He found that autistic people could usually guess what their non-autistic relatives thought of them, even when they disagreed. The non-autistic relatives, meanwhile, kept overestimating how self-absorbed their autistic family members were. The relatives were the ones missing things.

About 5.4 million American adults are on the autism spectrum. For most of their lives, the official story said their wiring was broken. The newer evidence puts the breakdown in a different place: between two brains trying to understand each other.