I found that attention to which fabrics I wear and which I use for bedding helps a bit.

The options for clothes include light breathable “tech” fabrics (usually polyester in a trenchcoat - with a special weave or blend - unless you get into the expensive end of the spectrum), light wool, rayon (viscose, lyocell/tencel, “bamboo”), and linen if you can stand the texture.

For bedding, rayon if you can find it and linen.

The secret with wool, rayon, and linen is that they can absorb/contain vastly more water before they feel damp to the touch!

I would argue that the lack of vision and the insular development culture of Mastodon combined with it claiming most of the users in microblogging fedi has done more to stunt ActivityPub than any other factor.

I mean, sure, you can chase MAU numbers all you want (please don’t). The reality is that people are too lazy, busy, or overwhelmed to invest even two minutes’ thought/effort (for many people those are the same thing) into trying alternatives. And that’s okay - it’s going to have to be, because it’s not going to change. And if it did, then that type of person would be all up in your federated network.

Personally, if 25 million normies joined microblogging fedi, I’d probably leave. I like microblogging fedi small & weird. The vibe on Bluesky is rancid as fuck and that’s where a lot of the normies went when Twitter got rebranded as a Nazi bar. Anyway, microblogging fedi is thriving based on the metric I care about, namely interesting conversations and interesting stuff to look at and people engaging with my project accounts.

But if you want to talk the whys and wherefores - the Mastodon “dev process” is the single biggest impediment to Mastodon being, you know, good. And that’s a direct outgrowth of the mentality of the people who run it. Could I elaborate? Maybe. But (regardless of what my account info says) I’ve been on fedi more than 10 years, and I’ll just say, you’ll have to look into that yourself. Mastodon is not good software, and it’s not going to become good software. And many if not most of the other microblogging fedi platform apps are just not trying to have mass appeal. It’s not a goal of those projects. If you want it to be, you’ll probably have to fork one or build one from scratch.

I hear there are similar issues with Lemmy and with Piefed. Personally, I’m posting from a Lemmy account, but I’ll be taking a much closer look at Piefed when I get my shit together to set up my own node. I don’t know if Piefed is trying for mass appeal or not, but even if the devs are, the federated nature of the threadiverse is by definition going to make it conceptually a bit harder to engage with, because there is necessarily going to be 15 communities for every topic, and that’s by design and working as intended. Federated social media was never going to be as “easy” to use as centralized megacorp social media, and will never be, and that’s by design, and that’s okay. It’s going to have to be, or you’ll need to switch to a centralized model.

@UnfinishedProjects@piefed.zip See this thread, you need to get Cloudflare sorted on your federation endpoints.

One possible reason: the unique sensation when a 3-star song I’ve been listening to for a decade suddenly “pops” and becomes a fave is like nothing else

I got around this by developing smart playlists which rotate in stuff I like based on tags and then filtered by how recently the songs were heard or skipped.

However, this requires a truly autistic dedication to not only maintaining a local music collection, but tagging the shit out of it, and developing complex queries (in Quod Libet) to make smart playlists for all manner of different moods & hankerings.

If you are a computer-touchy autist with a local music collection though, Quod Libet might just be the tool for you. I do abuse playlists as tags because the UX is better in a lot of ways.

this is how I made it thru college

I’m mostly able to disconnect which is scary, even tho I make a point to share info about the situation. People have to know what is happening.

masking isn’t something that I can “stop” doing, it generalized and became permanent at age 12.

I have been quite fairly described by more than one shrink as having blunted affect, which describes my level of displayed emotion, not how strongly I feel it.

so, I can only “unmask” to some degree around … well, he’s dead. so nobody.

any thought on a Signal group?

what’s crazy is when I was in DBT I met somebody actually diagnosed with ASD who shares a lot of the same auditory sensitivities I have, but like… way worse. and with misophonia and such. the sensitivity scale goes way higher than most humans will ever understand.

are you being distracted by their quiet but active activities or something?

correct, I got the “no perceptual filter for anything happening inside the house,” “can never stop masking unless alone” autism combined with being homeless and thus crashing on a couch with no door I can close

every month, I need to fill the same prescriptions I’ve had for between 10 and 20 years.

every month, one or more persons whose job it is to get those pills into my hands without interruption, fucks it up.

as a result, the stash of critical medication which I jealously hoard as a hedge against this exact problem (as well as natural disasters, etc) grows smaller. I now have about 7 days remaining. I will rapidly become sick and then completely nonfunctional if I miss my meds for even a day.

it’s now crystal clear that the American health care system is not designed to help me with this problem, and that it has no intention of ever doing so.

thank you for doing the work to offer these services :)

oh, you also got the “can never, ever, ever ‘tune out’ any type of speech sound” autism? it’s currently destroying my life and has been doing so for nearly a decade btw 🥲

Melatonin is a clock-setting hormone, not a sleep aid, and most of the supplements on the (US) market have waaaaay too high a dose. I get excellent results from 150ug (0.15mg) taken 4 hours before bedtime at the same time every night, and I suffered from delayed sleep phase syndrome for decades before figuring this out.

Dumping an entire bathtub full of melatonin (relatively speaking) into one’s brain leads to more problems than it solves, and it’s not even a very good sleep aid on top of that. Because its actual function is as a clock-setting molecule.

Industry also causes air pollution and plenty of it. It’s more visually segregated in developed countries. But as an example, have you ever explored the Pakistani factory video genre on Youtube?

I also know not everybody will be fine and be able to cope better if left alone. I will, but it was a long damn journey to get to where I’m able to say that with confidence. If you’re somebody who needs to be alone but won’t be fine if you are, I see you too.

Sony’s current cheap models are a lot better than the XM3s. I know that pressure sensation, I’d given up on all noise canceling headphones because I hate it, but tried a pair of (cheap!) Sony WH-CH720N and that sensation is 98% reduced, it only appears a little if there’s a ton of bass noise in the environment. But even then, it’s not nearly as bad as most other (older) NC headphones I’ve tried.

Aka “musicians earplugs” … which can be premade, or if you actually want the best fidelity, custom molded to fit your actual ear canal! Had a gf who was a post-punk musician once, she absolutely swore by her custom pair.