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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Notes -
Draft invitation to housewarming party
Helpful handout for the house-design contest that will take place during said party
To clarify, construction is not complete—this invitation is just an early draft. (Sorry, you're not invited.)
Such a shame. I wish I had an invite, but if you thought trying to attend Inkhaven was hard, imagine me trying to explain to the American embassy staff that I want to attend the house warming party of an online acquaintance with weapons-grade autism.
I dare say that your autism is so strong it would be ITAR-restricted. Imagine if you resettled in China: they'd have a working space elevator in two weeks, built to code handed down retrocausally by the Singleton at the end of time.
I don't even know man. I think that there's only like a 5% chance that this is satire only matched by that fake Bay Area polycule invite from a month back. The rest of my probability mass is mostly on you playing this straight, with perhaps some degree of self-awareness/attempted humor (which works).
Please share the final form when you're done. I might do a case study on it, or at least a funny essay. And good luck with the actual housewarming, even if it involves inviting your uncool brother.
Also:
Come on, you're exaggerating here.
Writing up an invitation to a housewarming party is not autistic at all! After writing this particular invitation, I actually asked my local decensored LLM to write up an example invitation to a housewarming party, and it looked more or less like what I had written (though obviously much less detailed, since it had no source material to work from). And this document is only two pages long—perfectly acceptable for an invitation. Maybe the digression about insulation in appendix C is slightly autistic, but energy efficiency is important for homeowners.
Enjoyment of designing houses is not autistic at all! Writing up a distillation of concepts in order to help others design their own houses is slightly autistic—but, again, this particular handout is only two pages long (if I adjust the margins), not a gigantic eight-page tome.
"Patient displays dimished insight into condition"
(That's a joke)
I would bet good money on you having Aspergers (or high functioning ASD, as we'd call it these days). This is mostly a gestalt clinical impression on the basis of significant familiarity/fond perplexity. It's not a formal diagnosis. I haven't had the pleasure of meeting you (I am sadly not invited to the party), which is the bare minimum for a formal diagnosis. Or actually, below the bare minimum, because the GMC would disbar me if that was my standard practice.
Man... Where would I even begin to answer that question? That's a serious statement.
A written house warming invite is perfectly fine. The specific format and terminology you've used is... unusual. Please note that I'm not assigning any negative connotations here at all. Never have. It's friendly riffing on the internet with a kernel of truth in it. It is abundantly clear that you are high-functioning and a productive member of society, even after retirement. You should probably get that depression properly checked out, if you haven't already. You clearly know where to find a PHQ-9 form.
To be clear, I don't think any degree of autism, by itself, can get a human being ITAR restricted. Nor do I actually believe you can manage to build a space elevator, at least not with a reasonable budget. Megastructural engineering is probably not your area of expertise as a civil engineer, but then again, you probably know the specs of elevator-planning, and what is a space elevator but a very, very tall elevator?
Okay. I'm burnt out on exam prep right now, so I will take a half-hearted crack at identifying supportive elements from the textual evidence provided:
The autism is that your housewarming invitation opens like a government form, proceeds by FAQ, and invokes 2024 International Fire Code 1004.5 to explain why invitees may bring one pet but no household members. You cite the occupant load factor for "assembly without fixed seats, unconcentrated (tables and chairs)," derives a 14-person cap, concedes the IFC isn't actually applicable to private residences, and then independently re-derives the same number from your floor plan geometry. Three justifications, in order, for the guest cap on a sixteen-person gathering.
A five-level wellness rubric with columns for Willpower, 24/7 headache, Enjoyment of life, and Rough time period, with your current 2-to-3-out-of-5 rating disclosed in a public appendix circulating to your former colleagues and your brother. I am genuinely glad you are not still at 1/5. Late 2025 sounds rough. Your coworkers from the retirement job, though, probably did not show up looking for a quarterly state-of-the-soul report. I mean, I can't rule that out either, maybe all civil engineers are like this?
Capitalized WILL in "Entry WILL be refused to anything beyond that," where "anything" rather than "anyone" is appropriate because pets are grammatically inanimate. The same all-caps treatment on "My plan for the future is to RELAX." Consistent signature style throughout. Your mother parenthetically identified as "the renter of a bedroom in the house" rather than as your mother, because... I genuinely don't know. I am the wrong flavor of neurodiverse for that.
I must reiterate: no negative connotation. I'm saying this with sincere affection and anthropological awe. You are clearly high-functioning, productive, technically competent, conscientious, and capable of producing documents that make normal people look like chimps poking at drywall with a stick. When you ask "what exactly about this is autistic?", you so while standing inside a two-page exhibit titled Invitation to Housewarming Party with appendices A through D.
People like you are probably responsible for 90% of human civilization, especially the boring but important bits. That's also my approximate level of confidence in the autism diagnosis.
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To clarify, (the unredacted version of) this PDF is 99 percent complete. In order to be insured, the house must be inspected by the insurance company after completion—so the only substantive incomplete part is where it says "insurance information pending" under the invitation to take a ladder up to the "flat" roof. (Plus, of course, the date hasn't yet been fixed, and the walkthrough video hasn't yet been made and uploaded.)
It's an "early draft" not in terms of completion, but in terms of time: (1) I haven't yet gotten a new estimated completion date from the contractor, so the worst-case scenario is completion on July 6; and (2) the insurance company says that its inspection probably won't happen until 30 to 60 days after the house is completed and I submit an application.
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What is this?
https://open.substack.com/pub/rawandferal/p/norman-polycule?r=a71by
Funniest thing I've seen all year. That's my honest assessment, I was there from the start, before it was officially disclosed as satire (that was obvious to me, but apparently not to millions of people).
This is phenomenal, thank you.
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