Hi, I’m named after a Pleistocene-era geographical feature. Never met anyone who had that era as their autism flavor, though. I don’t even really have it myself; geology was a special interest of mine as a kid and I like learning about how different Earth was at different times in the past, but it was never focused on any specific time period. The Pleistocene just happened to be when the glaciers sculpted the land I live in.

I stumbled into it by accident. A game I played was running a Twitch promotion so I started watching this random furry vtuber; she was hilarious so I ended up coming back for more streams and eventually joined her Discord server. Now it’s 4 years later and I have a ton of autistic gay animal friends (several irl), a much healthier outlook on life, and a prescription for estradiol. It’s great.

If you want more general advice, I suggest figuring out what flavor of autism you have and then looking for ways to interact with people who share that interest. It seems you don’t have the gaming autism but maybe there’s a way to connect with people who like the things that you are into.

I am going to vote against fascism. If the Democratic party insists on choosing a candidate who agrees with Republican efforts to genocide me, then I am going to vote against their fascist too. And don’t come looking for me to whine about it after; by the time the Niemoller poem gets to you I’ll be long gone already.

My in-person community was toxic and abusive, and I didn’t even realize it until I found a warm, accepting, and much healthier online community to compare with. “Retreating” was a survival need. I’m glad your offline community isn’t harmful to you but don’t assume that is the case for everyone.

I’m also part of one of those small artistic cultures you mentioned and it evolved and thrived way more with the arrival of the internet than it ever did in the days of small in-person gatherings and physical-only publishing. Art is furthered by cultural contact and mutual exchange of ideas, not isolation.

Now, you do have a point that there is a problem with homogeneity and stagnation these days, but the real cause of it is late-stage capitalism. The harder it is for the average person to make a living, the more they are forced to focus all of their energy on making money. For an artist, that means not having any time for masterpieces or experimental projects because Fast and Marketable is the only way to make rent. Arts and culture are starving because a small number of billionaires are sucking up all the financial nutrients (and then passing censorship laws to cut down anything that still manages to grow, until the only things left are as boring and mundane as they are.)

My Aberrant Mind Sorceress had been making frequent use of her telepathy ability to communicate silently and to keep in touch with allies that went scouting away from the party. Then she opened something she was told not to and ended up with a piece of Nyarlathotep living in her mind. When she later used her telepathy on the Monk, the DM ruled that it allowed the outer god to enter his head as well. Now we had a permanent three-way group chat that neither I nor the Monk could leave, whose moderator frequently posted literal nightmare fuel, and the rest of the party was suddenly very insistent that I only communicate with them verbally from now on.

One time I tried using my telepathy on an enemy. His head exploded. Gnarly was very unhappy about me adding people to the chat without permission and suggested that I not do it again.

You might like the novel Singularity Sky. It’s about a planet, artificially maintained at a 19th-century tech level by its authoritarian government, which is suddenly visited by a post-scarcity civilization. Cellphones begin to rain from the sky all over the planet and whoever picks one up is given an offer: Tell us a story and we’ll give you anything you desire. One person asks for a self-replicating replicator with a fully stocked blueprint library and it ends up being extremely disruptive in many of the ways you’re imagining.

We have a 196 now?

I’m getting 10-15 second load times in Local, and up to 30 seconds in All. For every page. Even this page took 10 seconds to load.

Edit: Putting Firefox in Troubleshooting Mode made no difference, so it’s not because of anything I did to my browser.

If I’m a plural system do we get to pick 3 for each of us? :)

If it’s one set for everyone, I’m going with Shapeshifting, Healing, and the third kind of depends on how this stuff works.

Shapeshifting I’d take even if I was only allowed one power. I’d finally have a body that fits. Several of them, in fact. Some might even be human. We could swap between us physically, and turning into stuff for a while just sounds fun.

Healing because if I don’t pick it I’m eventually going to regret it. Shapeshifting might already let me fix any damage that isn’t incapacitating or instantly lethal, but that only applies to my own body. I’d want to be able to help others, too.

For the third power… Magic could mean a lot of things, including many on this list. Maybe it’s a “jack of all trades, master of none” kind of deal, which I’d be fine with. A bunch of spells that cover a wide range of situations but aren’t as strong as specializing in a single power.

Teleport is really appealing. Lots I can do with it if I can take people or things with me, or set up something long-range that doesn’t require line of sight. If it also allows me to create permanent portals then we’re really going to have fun.

Or I could take Invulnerability to remove that “incapacitating or instantly lethal” weakness and really lean into being some kind of unstoppable healer. Divine Powers? Depending on what that does, it could replace Healing while also giving a bunch of other benefits. Hell, if it lets me resurrect people too, and I also take Invulnerability, then I’m basically an emergency respawn point for the entire community.

Is this a trick question? You’re you. No amount of bodily alteration will change that. Shapeshifting will, however, allow you to have the most you-like body imaginable.