Yeah, I cannot sugar-coat it: It was shit, and it will be similar at the workplace (albeit with more mature NTs, which does help), but it get’s easier when you have “your” people to socialize with outside of these society-enforced group interactions.

Being in my mid-forties I have concluded that it is far more rewarding to find fellow non-NTs to spend time with, because they understand the pain that is NTs and their usually unreflected reliance on their gut-feeling (which happens to tell them that we are “other”). In school I hung out at a Star Trek Fan meetup, later it became the Chaos Computer Club and Mensa; All of these were full of delightfully inclusive fellow freaks. Find your people instead of trying to please those who merely happen to be around.

“Othering” is, apparently, a core human behaviour. Dividing people into in-group and out-group and then proceeding to verbally increase the separation as much as they can. Humans are really not far from relatively isolating tribal groups of less than Dunbar’s limit size. Essentially they can only really know a small group, can only trust who they know, and try to keep safe from untrustworthy humans by clearly marking them as outsiders every chance they get.

We just happen to strike them as fundamentally different immediately and that makes it easy to consider us “other”, so we jump to the top of the list.

Look into “Assassination Politics” by Jim Bell ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell

IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound and not driven by buzzword-development.

Because, as usual, the actual info is hard to find: They looked at Bitwarden, LastPass, Dashlane, and 1Password (see https://zkae.io/)

As a user of https://www.passwordstore.org/ (GnuPG+Git, and I use a https://www.nitrokey.com/ and self-host the repo via https://forgejo.org/) I feel:

a) Overlooked b) Vindicated c) Quite safe

;-)

Usenet (and still there), mailing lists (hooray for any that use schleuder), a bit of IRC (though I was never one for quick fire & forget statements, today I’m good with Signal/Molly/Gurk and XMPP; Matrix never appealed to me), lot’s of Forums (mostly related to my favourite games at the times), some twitter (though I was never really comfortable with the hustle to gain more visibility through large follower numbers), switched over to identi.ca (and eventually many different ActivityPub servers, currently one Akkoma and one Lemmy; not interested in PixelFed, though it helps I dislike the dev’s attitude; PeerTube could be interesting as a consumer, but the UX still feels atrocious; I tend to leave my name/handle behind when switching, I’ll inform some people important to me, but I am quite happy not having to maintain friendships and a reputation, gotta do that in meatspace, and I find it taxing even there). Lurked 4chan a couple years, but was never comfortable engaging, too much “fake” being a horrible person. Was relatively active on reddit, but ever since the redesign I felt it was too cumbersome to use (yes, old., I know, but who wants to rely on a legacy version being available?), plus their corporate decisions were pissing me off more and more (Yeah, I’m a pretty stout software freedom person, down to using libreboot & canoeboot, though I no longer wish to associate myself with the FSF, given their tone-deaf handling of the whole RMS situation), so, yeah, eventually lemmy. I’m more quiet than I used to be, getting older, I suppose, but I was also never that into anything “social” in the first place (I’m an Aspie, who’d have thunk?), so I mostly lurk and only post when I feel I can actually contribute something meaningful.

We certainly like to think that we like thinking; Whether we actually do is a matter of debate.

AFAIK Just the way it turned out (and then was applied to more and more things). Others write top to bottom or even left to right on odd lines and right to left on even ones (boustrophedon, “as the ox plows”).

printables, thingiverse, but mostly I make stuff myself with openscad (I do mostly technical/functional stuff)

Ouch, LFS of all things… That’s harsh.