I uh. Have no idea if this fulfills what you need, exactly, it’s about a very specific facet of autism, but I’ve read this book and found it helpful for grounding how to navigate, self-care especially:
Unmasking Autism by Devon Price

I knew a lot of the information already, having built a lot of similar systems myself, but I feel it helped me feel less completely free-floating, based entirely in my own life theory with no contemporaries. I did learn some new things, as well, especially about wider context, safety, and how the stereotypes don’t serve any of us all that well.

It is… a bit of a narrow focus, I don’t know that it would give much information to those who aren’t high-masking, I don’t know that it would do much for someone who absolutely has to mask for safety. But if you struggle with high-masking and think there are probably at least some areas one could learn to let go, it is a decent reference. (Such as the case of me, who struggles with masking even in spaces I am completely alone, and suffering greatly because I have a lot of trouble letting go of what I “should be doing,” and ending up perpetuating unwitting and unwilling violence against myself. Still working on that.)

I hope this might be helpful information, even if it was not precisely what you were looking for.

To add to your statement, irritability is also a very common expression of bipolar.

I have autism and bipolar 1.

Autism does not have pills.
Circumstances of your birth have no causation to autism. Neither to circumstances of your life. All sorts of people have autism from all walks of life.

A reason to research and understand one’s own autism is to recognize what in your life overwhelms you, and how to structure your life in a way that is comfortable and functional to you, without a judgemental neurotypical lens. To embrace who you are, rather than try to force yourself to be something you are not.

You can seek a diagnosis if you wish, but I can’t tell you if it’d give you what you’re looking for.

I learned about my conditions through following various mental health communities for years and seeing what had commonalities with me through the fun lens of dank memes. I also learned a lot about medications, warning signs in therapists, and I learned what mental health conditions I don’t have. Can’t say if that’d work for everyone, either, but I did learn a lot more from the communities directly rather than reading the clinical book definitions.

Two things can be true.

I’m allergic to polyester and most anything made of plastic. I get painful open sores, and hideously itchy. It is difficult to find clothes at best.
Plastic is snuck in more shit than you’d think. Often unlabelled. More than one pair of pants/shorts I’ve had to ditch/edit because the pockets were polyester or nylon in a “100% cotton” garment. Drawstrings are bad for this, too. And waistbands.

Seems to be weirdly common to be adverse to plastic-based fabrics in autistic communities.

I most often wear:

cotton/linen/canvas/denim
rayon/bamboo (plant based, do need to be a bit careful because people fake it, very loose “swishy” fabric)
hemp
real leather (“vegan leather” is literally plastic and i will fight people greenwashing calling it “vegan” and not the awful pleather it is.) (very difficult to find coats without nylon linings though.)

i’m fairly sure the point (whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not) of having politics moved there is because there is no political topic that could be discussed properly there. it makes for good, distracting noise.

it makes for a lack of meaningful critique, or for that critique to be instantly buried in bad actors. noise is a shield. noise is easily dismissable.

monetized social media, in general, is made to be clickbait, to feed negative emotions because that’s what gets people addicted to outrage, it steers people towards thinking less and reacting more. nuanced discussion and thoughtful spaces are drowned out and cast aside for the loudest and most obnoxious players. this is appealing for someone trying to uphold the status quo or push society towards hate.

i don’t think it’s a coincidence that politicians have moved there, that spaces have become so polarized and negatively charged, and that the most prime example of both of these happenings is xwitter. everything is connected in this big, terrible, and vaguely randomly evolved system. i do think evolution is the best word for it. what lives, survives to propagate. it doesn’t matter how healthy it is. the result is this blind, meandering, gargantuan worm, following the scent of blood, feeding on the worst of it all.

xwitter is easy and, notably, if you’re a powerful white man, you can build your base with no accountability. it exists in this space where it’s the most serious news source that almost no one takes that seriously. of course it’s appealing.

i like my AMD ATI Radeon RX 5600. after I figured out it has a tiny tiny TINY hidden physical overclock switch they don’t ever mention for some godforsaken reason (which is put “on” by default, also for some godforsaken reason) to turn off, it’s the most stable graphics card i’ve ever used.
…i just recommend turning off the tiny evil hidden crash switch of doom.

amd in general is pretty chill on linux for a large portion of people.

This was during that brief period where it wasn’t really in vogue to hate minorities that openly, ha.

I legit knew a repub irl that baldly admitted to thinking like this.

(Old family friend, used to be the adults’ way of saying they were accepting of other political beliefs. “You can make friends/marriages across the aisle work, if you’re just patient and tolerant” kind of self-aggrandizement. Cue the guy bullying his liberal wife into voting repub for years and eventually ditching her on a whim after controlling her entire life… at this point even my “tolerant” family was fed up with him and had been sticking around only to keep the wife company, and her poor kids.)

One minor example (of many) of what appeared to be hypocrisy on the surface:
Railing against the welfare system, nonstop unprompted for years, and then when he lost his job he sat on it for as long as possible before he was forced to find a job. It wasn’t that he was struggling to find a job, he didn’t even attempt to try until the deadline was pending. He was proud of “abusing the system.”

I wouldn’t even criticize him for it if he hadn’t spent years talking about how people who ever used welfare were lazy and selfish. But he was the laziest and most selfish person I have ever spent any meaningful amount of time with. He’s a big reason I don’t tolerate entertaining republicans.

If that man had a rule he could bend or break, even if it hurt others, maybe especially if it hurt others, he would and feel no regret or remorse. He thought it was mostly amusing to torment people. His kids especially. And his dog.

He’s not the only republican I’ve met that thinks like him. Just the most careless. Said too many quiet parts out loud.

It’s not hypocrisy to him. You’re absolutely right, it’s just them telling on themselves as to what to expect from them if they have the space to. Any leniency in the systems exist to be abused, and too often many of them are too happy to.

I heard some advice a while back that was along the lines of, “stop apologizing and start thanking,” and I feel like it’s positively impacted how I phrase things.

Instead of asking forgiveness and moving the conversation into them feeling they have to defend their values on the spot, showing gratitude for their understanding actually makes people feel more valued. “Thank you for your patience” is an entirely different vibe than “sorry I didn’t get back to you” and puts much less burden on them. It shows you care about their time without making the focus about your failings and whether or not they agree they are failings.

It’s subtle, but I find it’s made a huge difference for me.

I also agree with others, in my experience apologies should be reserved for regret and actual feelings of penitence. It’s actually a very strong value of mine nowadays, and it certainly makes me much healthier.

Just some thoughts about what I’ve learned about this particular situation, it’s up to you how valid you think they are.

for someone totally new?
i guess it depends on what you mean by “addicting,” so i’ll try to put in “potential hours” as a reference. regardless i think all of these are quite fun and consuming for me for a while.

The Binding of Isaac Rebirth.
its difficulty sort of “scales” with how well you do in your runs: if you never beat mom, the next boss, the next boss etc, it’ll stay “easier” for as long as that takes. (and if it gets too hard when you start beating stuff, you can always wipe your save and start over, or start a new save, hah!)
the control scheme is extremely simple and it’s fine to not be completely perfect at it if you’re just going for basic runs and okay with relying more on “lucking” into victory. you really don’t have to take on mega-satan or whatever.
up to you if the horror-to-horror-adjacent visuals appeal or not. you do also have to be okay with the idea of dying, it’s a roguelike.
you can play this for literally thousands of hours.

Slime Rancher 1.
just a fun time shlorping up slimes. very low stakes and silly and cute. meant to be pretty accessible. if you’re brand new i could see it taking up some time, and it’s a good way to learn “video game logic.” i’ve spent 80 hours in SR1, playtimes can be a bit varied.

Plants vs Zombies (the original GOTY edition, and definitely not the ad-ridden mobile port)
old 2000’s popcap games in general were onboarding for many a gamer back in the day. i’ve spent 60 hours of it on steam, no idea how much back in the 2000’s. playtimes overall can be a bit all over the map on this one.

Garden Paws,
if you like cutesy and the idea of gathering stuff for villagers, with farming / animal raising mechanics. it’s slightly jank but it’s very endearing. no fail condition. (it’s somewhat similar to stardew valley with some differences!) this can be played almost infinitely, if you really like the loop, decorating, or have a few people to play with. playtimes tend to be 40-200 hours roughly.

Wobbledogs,
if you like the idea of raising cute pets with a genome and don’t mind the very subtle horror/bizarre aspects (they can die, eat each other’s bodies, and they pupate like caterpillars lol.) pretty sandbox game, and you can turn death off if you want. (or “clone” dogs you want to keep with the export/import tool in the menu.) this is a newer one for me so i’ve only put in 35 hours, but i fully intend to go back and try for some Huge Dogs TM. average seems about 20 hours but you can spend a lot if you like raising weirdo pets.

my cat didn’t learn to unhook her claws until she lived with other cats and could see how they did it. was cute how much she learned from living around them for a while

“get indie gaming” and nitrorad on youtube sometimes. occasional random youtubes that use games as a step to talk about psychology or societal issues.

steam recommendations. “new” section of steam. searching “necromancer” and “villain protagonist” on steam obsessively every few months.
one of my steam friends is also into weird indies so i look at the shit she wishlists.

checking out my huge itch bundles. (they do bundles of like, a hundred games at a time, and i like playing baby’s first games ha.) sometimes just browsing itch, they have a lot of sick queer games and books.
checking out humble bundles.

Rain World! It has “endings” but the fact that it’s sort of got a strange nature simulator / documentary vibe can kind of make it like a very difficult terrarium (that you’re also living in) at times. The endings are also very much not required and can be totally ignored lmao.

I love exploring and befriending critters and just the movement system is like nothing else. Creatures living their lives totally independent from me is such a cool aspect I haven’t seen done anywhere else quite on the same level. Just the emotions system of the scavs alone is so interesting to learn about! I love how it looks! I love how it taught me that failure doesn’t matter and enjoying the journey can be beautiful. I love how you are at your most powerful when you are “most weak” (losing all of your, we’ll call it “health” means death is completely consequence-free, and you can just experiment and scout freely and it’s so fun to me.) You sort of make your own stories as you go along and I think it’s neat.

Also I love bugs and insects. It’s got a lot of 'em.

I use listal.com

It’s not exactly a game collector site and it’s kind of flooded with softcore porn and creeps, but no one bothers me doing my own thing, either. I can track movies, shows, and games there and I like how it’s setup, and I can make as many lists as I want. Easy for me to add stuff, too.

You can also track books there but I use other sites for that (librarything primarily, atm.)

I’ve thought about making my own list-software to my specifications but that’s definitely a pipe dream atm. I love making lists.

I had far more issues on windows than I ever have on mint.

When I had issues on windows, which i would run into multiple times a week, the “fixes” would be hacky, slapped-together nonsense that don’t even make sense on paper. I had to change almost every program manually to run as administrator. Installing old games was a nightmare and didn’t always work properly, even with compatibility modes. New drivers would break stuff. Trying to learn anything new was a rabbit hole that took countless hours and then I only learned the fix for that one specific use-case, and not anything… overarching. System updates were so intrusive, installing crap I didn’t want or removed manually, I disabled them completely. It was slow and boot took forever. Ending system processes via task manager didn’t always work and the system would freeze often when something went wrong. Often uninstalling programs was messy and left shit all over in the system registry and files and you would have to defrag and system clean once it started getting bloated.

When my windows install finally broke completely just trying to get shit to work the way I wanted, I bailed.

Transitioning to mint was certainly a learning experience.

Reorganizing your workflow will always be more upfront work, but I found I took to the changes fairly quickly. I found the file structure the most odd, but I became very used to it and very much prefer it over how hard it is to find stuff spread scattershot in windows files. It had a lot of little quality of life things that I really appreciate, mounting and unmounting external drives felt better, way more stuff worked out of the box, old games were not a nightmare to get working because they’re had longstanding fixes for years that actually make sense. Solutions, in general, make way more sense to me, and I actually get a sense that I understand why they function. My boot time is very fast and I’ve never broken my system (I came close once doing something incredibly stupid and very niche, but I just timeshifted back and voila, fixed.)

Fixes or changes for preference tend to “stick” for me, like when I swapped to pipewire myself it’s been very smooth sailing. I can pick and choose updates or ignore packages that don’t work. There was an issue with kernels for a while that significantly increased my boot times; I just postponed that update for a few versions until one of the newer ones worked. I find I can get down similar rabbit holes to learn some stuff, but it both feels more like “lasting” solutions (and I learn more about how to do other stuff) as well as just more fun. Documentation is a lot better with users who know what they’re doing instead of the guesswork “well I dunno but this might have worked for me, I tried 20 fixes so it’s probably one of these!” I would run into on windows troubleshooting…

I think my favourite part of linux is a lot of things I wanted solutions to, for years, usually have at least one person out there with a similar issue that wrote a small program that just does it. Does it well. For free. I spent so much time digging for really basic stuff like a sound equalizer that wasn’t garbage, bloatware, full of trackers, or ransomware! I don’t have to spend hours trying to find a stinkin’ RGB controller that isn’t awful because the choices available are just better! I don’t have to spend weeks comparing and contrasting antivirus-es and hate all of them in the end!

I find mint extremely stable and have no urge to swap nor return to windows. I find it much more stable for my use-case. I really like it, actually, and I appreciate how a lot of it is set up. Been using it daily for 4 years.

I loathed windows the entire time I used it, and had been side-eyeing linux for quite a while before committing. I don’t know if I’m a “normal” use-case, probably not. Possibly it is best to take my experience as, “if you keep hitting walls often in windows that frustrate the hell out of you, linux might be a decent choice for you, and might “feel easier.”” Both have their own quirks and own troubleshooting, I just prefer the ones on mint and they make more sense to me. (And take me far less time.)

Affinity absolutely does not work on linux easily, or well. Some people have gotten a barely-functioning app working in bottles, and reportedly some have gotten it “mostly” working through wine, but it is through a convoluted process that will be beyond many newer linux users and prone to errors. (And you have to dig through 100 pages of the affinity forum to try to figure it out.)

It doesn’t support hardware acceleration and seems to tend to be glitchy and crash often.
Which… is still a vastly better state than the last time I checked, at least, ha. But that’s been progress over the course of 4 years.

I think this page is the best bet for even trying: https://codeberg.org/Wanesty/affinity-wine-docs

It’s legitimately the only thing I miss from windows. I might try again with this installer when I have the energy… sigh hahah

sorry if the Incredibly Late reply is bad, but i saw this today and these are the people in the picture if you still want to know:

double trouble (she-ra and princesses of power)
najimi osana (komi can’t communicate)
crona (soul eater)
raine whispers (owl house)
a somewhat spoilery character to explain (steven universe)

i can’t tell who the red jpeg’d blob in the middle is supposed to be if anybody though lol

It was close for me between ONI and Darkest Dungeon, but I’ve basically “solved” DD to the point where I need 120 (I counted) constantly rotating mods to even have anything to challenge me… I’m not sure I’d ever “finish” ONI! I feel like i’ve barely scratched the surface, and i’ve put in hundreds of hours. (I love them both, though.)

That it’s cute and has so many little random thoughtful details like how the hatch eggs are as big as the hatches (ouch) definitely helps too.

Honestly, I’d be pretty sad with zero city-builders. And Rain World is non-negotiable, hahah.

Rain World!!!
Second place is hard to do though! Oxygen Not Included, I guess?