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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   1751 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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"Am I German or Autistic?"

http://german.millermanschool.com/

(I am neither German nor autistic, but it's good to confirm, through a psychometrically validated instrument that I'm a regular dude. Uh, I don't remember my results but I think it was 38% German and like 10% autistic?)

I got 49% German and 24% autistic.

I have a lot of German ancestry on both sides (and I'm Swiss (Basel) on my mom's side which is like luxury German.) I also have a ton of engineers among all my uncles and one of them seems sort of autistic but might just be "German." I don't know. I usually mildly dislike Germans and Austrians who I have met in my life, who I tend to interpret at pedantic in a way that reminds me of my mother. An Irishman I once met in Greece described Germans as "corny" and I have always thought, yes, that's the word for Germans ever since. I prefer the parts of my family who are Scots Irish because they don't tend to ground their nonsense in the self righteous superiority of my more Germanic descended relatives and embrace more openly the messiness of unknowability which the German wants only to stamp out. Of course I am making most of this up from my attempts at picking out cultural traits from my travels and cross matching with my family tree. I am descended from Mayflower pilgrims on one side and the most recent immigration I'm descended from was the Basler in the 1840s on the other so trying to unwind current day traits from my mangy puddle of Americanized Euro genetics is imprecise at best.

I find it fascinating the degree to which "narcissism" and "autism" traits overlap. One of my best friends' ex boyfriends is a programmer and I can't tell if he's autistic or a narcissist. I have never been close or even spent much time with anyone who has openly told me they are autistic or even "on the spectrum." I have met in passing strange loud children whose caretakers have told me these children are "autistic." I suspect autism is a side effect of being raised in bizarre urban or suburban environments which are at once overstimulating in their social excess and understimulating in their artificiality and distance from nature. Was it Tao Lin who claimed that at current rates, everyone in America will be on the autism spectrum in 100 years or something like that? I don't know. Sometimes when I'm in East Asia I believe that everyone around me is autistic. I don't mean that in an offensive way at all as I love East Asia and spend as much time as I can there but the efficiency that even grocery checkout ladies operate frankly reads as autistic to me compared to everybody else.

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