They look like springtails to me. I use springtails and isopods in my gecko’s terrarium as a clean up crew.

The isopods eat the poop while the springtails eat any mold that would grow in moist conditions. I do have plants in there too so all that bug poop goes right back into the soil to be reused.

They can’t survive outside of a moist environment for long and will simply dry out. I have no idea how harmful they are to plants alone but at least you don’t have to worry about mold.

Emotional intelligence has always been a sort of hidden magnet in my life that’s pulled me towards people who had the emotional capacity to treat people like people instead of treating people based off any first impressions or preconceived labels.

The people who I remember and hold closest in my memories have been people who understood that I’m my own unique person, with my own experiences that shaped me, with my own way of solving problems, and my own way of learning from those experiences. They were able to assist and guide me in a more human and understandable way. It felt more positive and encouraging. I learned so much more from people with a stronger sense of emotional intelligence in comparison to people who lack emotional intelligence.

Unfortunately, with what I believe to be a global mental health crisis brought on by the arrival of a global pandemic, it’s been obvious to me that there has been a critical lack of education in any form of emotional intelligence. Thinking back on my own education, there was more a focus on employable math and science skills, language with a heavy historical perspective, history with a heavily propagandized perspective and obedience within a narrow and confined learning structure. The only class that taught me any sort of life skills was the lowest level math class I had the option to take. The math class only “stupid” kids took.

After the initial uncertainty wore off and reality set in with the global pandemic, those who lacked the emotional intelligence to look within began to lash out at everyone around them. To them, the world turned against them as they were expected to be empathetic towards other people. It’s been difficult to process and deal with such a critical lack of emotional intelligence on such a large scale.

Those who are filled with hate for themselves and the world around them have far more energy than those with a better sense of their own emotional intelligence. Those who are filled with hate are burning out everyone else around them.

I think now more than ever, there needs to be more emotional intelligence education for both young and old. It will be very difficult to help ourselves move forward if we aren’t being empathic towards each other and the world around us.

I’m aware what I’ve said isn’t very specific to autism but it’s a topic that was made much more clearer to me after figuring out I have autism and understanding how it’s affected my life.

As with many travelers in Australia, we both had work/holiday visa’s that allowed us to stay in Australia for 1-2 years. This wonderful comment was thrown at me within the first week of arriving at a hostel in Sydney.

Fortunately they left a month or two later but I still avoided them when they did still live there.

Amazing. Layers of ignorance for an already dumb thing to say.

I’m a person of colour who has a white step parent and has grown up in Canada in a fairly mixed area.

My family history would have started in India but my parents were born in South America and migrated up to North America (both Canada and the US) where my sister and I were born. I grew up “white.” My voice, appearance and behaviour are “white.” I was born and raised Canadian. I’m far from proud of this country where I have spent my life but I will identify myself as a Canadian. My family history had been thoroughly white washed and erased.

I say all this because for all this history I have behind me, it means nothing to most people.

The majority of Indian people here will look at me one way until I speak and then promptly ignore me because I’m not “Indian.”

West Indian people want to be my best friend until they find out I’ve never visited any West Indian country. Then I’ll be treated as an idiot for not embracing a culture I have no real knowledge of and have not been immersed in.

Then there are the white people… No matter how white I act, I will never be “white” enough. I’ll always be the colour of my skin. I could look, act and behave as awful as a white cop and still not be on the same level.

In fact, I have a “friend” who is a cop. He’s not really my friend, more of an acquaintance I’ve known for 10+ years through another more decent friend. This guy is just fucking awful and every molecule in his body is racist and vile. He looks at me, arms full of tattoos and tells me I’d be a perfect “UC.” Undercover Cop. My only value to him is to be used to incriminate fellow people of colour. I’m just not a person or anything close to equal. Always something less.

I’ve never really had a place where I felt I belonged while growing up. Hated for being me from multiple angles for reasons beyond my control while doing nothing harmful to anyone. There are good people out there who treat me as a person first but they are few and far between.

Another quick story, I once had a Dutch guy in Australia tell me that his last name Hoffmeister means “House Master.” You know, from the times when they used to own slaves. Thanks for telling me that to my face, you absolute weirdo.

Judging from the stories of autistic women who are in my life, as well as stories I’ve read online, there seems to also be the issue of being heard or taken seriously when attempting to get diagnosed or treated. This is on top of societal or gendered expectations which makes masking that much more of a challenge to maintain.

One of my closest friends had to stop seeing their therapist because she would leave her sessions crying and was only able to improve her mental health by refusing to visit that therapist again. Another really close friend had a doctor that kept prescribing the same medication to her even after stating multiple times at multiple visits that the medication was causing her suicidal thoughts.

In comparison, as a male myself, I was able to walk in, tell them why I thought I had ADHD and later autism and was able to walk about with prescriptions or a plan of action within the same visit.

I do think the the video spoke broadly enough that it could be informative about autism in general and could have added a bit more context to align the title with the video content.

A long time ago I came across a game that was part of a 1mb challenge. It’s called A New Zero. I played it quite a lot, just flying around and dive bombing boats was entertaining enough for me.

I was impressed with 1mb but 13kb and 96kb is pretty amazing. I really enjoy seeing stuff like this.

Many people get annoyed that I often give vague answers. If I over explain myself, they’ll twist my words into a new meaning. I’m confused :D

I’ve had stocks in a couple forms over my lifetime and after a while, both times I have pulled all my money out.

The first time was shortly after the 2008 crash. All those reassuring words my investing manager person told me were simply sweet nothings. I decided that taking the hit of losing half my money was a life lesson and used the remaining half to go travel and live a life for myself. That investing manager later went on to have a covid party out of defiance for masking requirements, caught covid and died. Felt good knowing my stranger-danger alarms were working even if I didn’t understand my decisions fully at the time.

The second time I simply put my money into a low risk, government stock option for a few years. After watching global leaders fumble the handling of a global pandemic, I lost faith my own government to have my best interest in mind. I pulled my money out again.

I personally feel super uncomfortable allowing other people to make money off my money that I am risking. Even if it is low risk. It make me feel exploited.

Ultimately, I decided I don’t need my money to work for me because I don’t even want to work. I hate the concept of money. To me, money just disconnects us from community and nature.

If you are curious to how I live, it’s with very little. I spent a number of years of my life living out of a 34 liter sized backpack. Living minimally while making sure what I owned had meaning, purpose or intention transfered over to when I finally started settling into a certain location.

I wouldn’t mind if societies also made some compromises for me too. Currently it feels like I’m making all the compromises to fit in but made to feel like it’s never enough.

Feels like I’m trying to fix an awful relationship by doing all the hard work myself. I’m tired.

I think I meant gardening instead of farming in my first comment. I’m drawing comparisons from the majority of my life in the suburbs. I have strong feelings about industrial farming that I’m not interested in going into at the moment.

I do believe it’s important for us to learn how to rejuvenate our land as a step towards a sustainable future which is why I’m interested in learning and sharing such things. Food is quite important to our lives.

Not being able to till or use synthetic fertilisers makes it a lot harder to scale up production.

This is exactly why I believe we need to start relearning soil health care among many other things. This is why we need to bring food back locally into everyone’s yard’s and parks. This is why we need this knowledge now to help future generations.

It’s hard to imagine another way of living life but we’ll never know if we don’t collectively try.

I’ve personally drawn a lot of inspiration from Australian indigenous peoples and their approach to land management which is why I feel so strongly about learning soil health.

I’ve only had a year experience with growing crops but learned a lot about how important “living soil” is from having a bioactive terrarium.

Bioactive refers to making an active ecosystem with plants, insects and even microfauna. In mine I had plants, isopods (land shrimp) and springtails. The isopods break down fruits, veggies, poop and decaying matter like fallen leaves. The springtails eat fungi and mold that forms from constant moisture. The plants thrive off the nutritious bug poop.

Learning about this cycle was important to me understanding that creating a garden means creating a home for all the insect and microfauna first, the resulting crops were the tasty bonus.

Clover is amazing for ground cover. The roots will help losen soil. Along with underground insects, this helps create air pockets in the soil for all plant roots to breath. It helps prevent moisture loss, keeping enough moisture for roots to gather nutrients with less watering. The roots also act as a home for bacteria, fungi and anything considered microfauna really. The flowers attract pollinators which is so important for both crops and local pollinator populations. It may also bring nitrogen into the soil providing food for other plants or crops. I’m recalling most of this from memory so there may be outdated or slightly misremembered info but that was my take away from my initial research into healthy, living soil.

My first year of crops grew amazingly and I hope for more of that. This year I’m adding walking planks and a few large stones to my garden. Between the clover ground cover, stones and wood, that should give even more protection for my tiny insect\microfauna friends. I even went as far as to add a layer of fallen leaves over the soil to help protect it during the winter.

I can never look at “traditional” western farming practices the same again. Soil health is just not given the attention it truly needs.

It’s much easier to understand that shorter, milder winters means you can make people be even more productive. Now winter can’t slow down that road widening project.

No car.

I’m “content” where I am now. I understand you want to help in some way but sometimes listening to someone vent helps more than any advice anyone can give.

People like to talk. People like being heard. People like being understood. Being too proactive can easily get in the way of listening sometimes.

I need to be involved locally and physically. My ADHD and impatience with the increasingly complicated technology we use today just doesn’t vibe together anymore. A brutal lesson I learned after my trade school courses I was attending went to an online format.

Lemmy’s userbase is just too small and my physical location is a bit too remote to organize anything. I have an alternate lemmy account at another server where I can connect with like-minded people online but that’s as much as I can get out of Lemmy until it’s userbase becomes significant.

I still search for events happening it the big city but time and distance is a factor I have to take in to consideration.

I’m completely disinterested in working for another faceless, soulless entity which only focuses on wealth accumulation. I’m also disinterested in meaningless jobs that do nothing to help make the world a better place for the people that come after me.

At this point, I believe that the only way forward is direct action against unjust hierarchy and those who enforce it. As each day passes, I become more firm in that belief.

If I ever come across people who share the same views as me, I would gladly join them. That would give me the meaning and purpose to move forward that a standard job could never provide.

Until money becomes an issue and I’m forced to work to survive, I’d much rather spend my time around my parents and closest friends.

I do recognize that I am super fortunate to be in such a position, the painful majority of the world must work just to barely exist. I feel awful everytime I have to participate in society and enable the misery machine.

I’ve always been quite minimalistic so saving money has been very easy for me. After getting fired from my last job over speaking out against the abusive management, I haven’t returned to any work. I’ve also moved back home with my parents to not only save money but also take care of them as they get older and work on a relationship that never really was a relationship in the past (I found out in adulthood that I’m ADHD/Autistic).

It’s been some time since I had been abruptly fired from my job and the lawyers regarding that situation have come and gone from my life. Now I’m limbo. I have enough saved money for at least a year, maybe two. My parents have been gently pushing me to find work.

I just don’t want to work. Not anymore. All that’s left are jobs at soulless corporations which suck all individuality, creativity and happiness out of you. I don’t want to deal with people anymore. I barely want to leave the house knowing I have to share the roads with angry people aggressively driving their murder trucks.

I’m not very motivated to find a job at the never ending end of the world. I’m not sure how I can explain this to my parents who act as if the future is stable even when the news they consume everyday tells a story of a world unravelling.

The only thing I could do which would bring meaning to my current life situation is to join a group that focused on meaningful change for the future. Unfortunately, I live in a rural town that designed itself to have soulless suburbs and populated it with old folks who are completely out of touch with reality.

I’ve been to Gay pride parades, gay bars and gay clubs. The gayest experience I’ve had in my life was working in the trades with straight men doing everything they can to prove their masculinity at all costs.

These men will use women as mere possessive objects in order to prove to their masculinity towards other men. By oversexualizing all women while at the same time belittling all that their partner does. As if women were merely currency for respect among men.

They hated gays and trans people so much that they would spend an extremely uncomfortable amount of time telling you how much they were “disgusted” by these people.

They hated on any man who who did not possess physical masculine traits. Those traits that they hated? Not being muscular. Not being tall. Not being fat (what???). Having longer hair.

But the gayest thing these guys refused to do was stand up for themselves against unjust authority. They would spend the most all their free time explicitly telling you how much they hate their boss. How stupid their boss is. How much of an asshole their boss is. How they would kick their bosses ass. Just talk an absolute big game.

Then the boss would come around the corner and you’d never see a bunch of grown ass men tuck their dicks between their legs faster than these guys. Their voices raise up a couple pitches and suddenly they are acting as subservient as how they believe their wives should be.

It’s in this unspoken idea of respect for Men in Authority that you see the “gayest” trait in these toxic men. But not in a good gay way. A toxic gay trait that comes from a deep place built on oppression and repression of ones self. Where respect from your fellow man at all costs is the most valuable thing they crave. Where respect from your boss holds even higher value. Where respect from men in higher positions is held at even higher value.

All they care about is to be noticed by other men. That’s kinda gay dude.

The cost of all this effort to gain respect from exclusively other men is their dignity. And they are more than willing to give up their dignity to be noticed by men in positions of authority.

To these guys, questioning or standing up to authority is gay. Standing up for yourself is gay. Demanding to be treated with dignity is gay. They will be the first ones to kick you down for disrespecting authority.

I’ve walked into a club bathroom and saw two guys giving another guy a blowjob. That’s still not as gay as watching “straight” acting men grovel at the feet of boss in any trades.

Ick…