It’s important to me that everyone understands that if you’ve got an autistic friend who periodically sends you pictures/videos/whatever of your Thing, because they know you’re into it… They love you.
Now don’t get me wrong, It may not necessarily be romantic love, they might not want to run off to a little farm in Montana where you’ll be married forever and raise little sheeps…
But they definitely love you. And they’re so happy when they spot a post about X and go “ooh, my friend likes X! I’ll send it to them!”.
Because they love you and want you to be happy.
Happiness is stored in the 3am discord DM of a link to a Tumblr post of a cute raccoon
I didn’t realise this until adulthood but handmade birthday piñatas are the apex of parental devotion. I spent the week cooking for my ravenous teenage cousins and felt a bit crestfallen at times that I was spending so long making something that was going to disappear within minutes—but with piñatas it’s so much worse, they exist to be savagely maimed. Year after year my father asked his kids what shape they wanted this year’s piñatas to be and he spent weeks painstakingly making them in the basement after work, only to watch a bunch of oversugared bat-wielding kids gleefully destroy them in less than 10 minutes.
I mentioned this to him and he said he remembered researching tarantula anatomy for the giant spider piñata I asked for when I was 4, trying to make the fangs the right shape and to cut the crepe paper into very thin ribbons so the thing would look appropriately fuzzy, and I was like “and I don’t even remember it because I was four!! spending so long building a beautiful object only so your kids will have fun destroying it, knowing they won’t even remember it, is such a selfless endeavour” and he said “my other motivation was that you said you wanted the spider to look real & scary so the kids at your birthday party would be terrified of it and you’d get to scoop up all the candy and I wanted to support your slyness & ambition”
