The way most autism literature describes "literal interpretation" is often not at all similar to how I experience it. Teenage me even thought I couldn't be autistic because I've always been able to learn metaphors easily.
In fact, I love wordplay of all kinds. Teenage me was fascinated to learn all the types of figurative language there are in poetry and literature.
But paperwork and questionnaires are hard, because there's so much they don't state clearly. Or they don't leave room for enough nuance.
"List all the jobs you've had, with start and end dates." What if I don't remember the exact day or month? Is the year enough?
"Have you been suffering from blurred vision?" Well, if I take off my glasses the whole world is blurred, but I'm fairly sure that's not what the intake form at the optometrist is asking.
Or the infamous (and infuriatingly stereotypical) "Would you rather go to a library or a party?" What sort of party? Where? Who's there? I work at a library. Am I currently at the library for work or pleasure? Does it have a good collection?
It's not common figures of speech that confound me. It's ambiguity, in situations that aren't supposed to be ambiguous.
Komodo dragons, the world’s largest species of lizard, have iron-tipped teeth that help them to rip their prey apart, according to new research. The metal is concentrated in the cutting edge and tips of their curved, serrated teeth, staining them orange, scientists wrote in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Komodo dragons are native to Indonesia and weigh around 80 kilograms (176 pounds) on average. They eat almost any kind of meat and are known as deadly predators...
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/24/science/komodo-dragons-iron-teeth-scli-intl/index.html
Images: (Top) Hossam and his daughter Diana (Middle) Map of the evacuation notice given to about 80% of Khan Yunis residents (Bottom) A close up map of the evacuation area. Hossam's family is in square #111.
@naimq
Story written by @rumiandroses
when yr laying in bed and your brain starts releasing long lost archival footage
congratulations! your reincarnation status has been upgraded from COCKROACH to SEAGULL
I think on the broader scale of things, Spinning Top represents everything that the ancients left behind. The echoes we meet that didn't have a particular attachment to the area we find them in usually talk about selfish things like their status, the things they owned, or how much they mattered - or in the case of Two Sprouts, Twelve Brackets, how little everything else mattered in comparison. There was some grandiose idea of legacy, as evident by the iterators being a "great gift" to the lesser lifeforms, or the fact that they left behind their literal memories in the form of data pearls. Who were the pearls for? They were for the people who left them behind, who wished, even if subconsciously, for their lives to have had meaning. Spinning Top wasn't just left behind, but they were tormented by the idea that their life, or even their death, didn't have any meaning.