F for Forgetfulness

I will be uploading all my demotivational posters tomorrow. And maybe something extra. :P


For this year's prelims, I did quite badly for some of my subjects, despite my earlier claims to "pwn Mikana". Now, procrastination definitely has a major part in it. Very major. I have to address it. But I have already talked about this before, so as not to bore you with the same emo shit every day, I'll talk about the other problem that hinders my academic progress (and most other projects I lay my cock on).

I remember forgetting about a whole lot of things in the hours leading up to the science practical exam last Friday, forgetting to study, forgetting my notes, and the rest - well I forgot. I also forgot to bring in my calculator and so could not calculate my gradient (my readings were way off anyway). So, literally, I got an F for forgetting. Frak.


The other day I was compelled to look up autism on Wikipedia. It's a condition commonly mixed up with Asperger's Syndrome (AS) as their symptoms and effects can be very similar. Autism used to be thought of as a kind of mental retardation. Some even thought the uncommunicative and unusual characteristics of autists were a sign that the devil was at work. Today, people are actually arguing for "autist pride", trying to get people to accept autists as just "another kind of person", much like the gay pride movement.

My parents at one point worried that I was autistic. Something interesting I managed to remember from my kindergarten years. They sent me to a psychiatrist. Indeed, I displayed (and still display) some characteristics of autism:
Reportedly unsociable/unfriendly - TOFU can remember a handful of names, but I can only remember one.
Unresponsive/reticent - My old carers at the kindergarten vouched for this.
Short temper/tendency to become violent more easily than others - Got into frequent fights from kindergarten through secondary one.
Poor speaking skills - Stuttering, definitely didn't have natural flair for talking.
Desire for "sameness" - Very difficult to separate me from my parents back then, or to try new food, or go new places. I spent my trip to Beijing wincing at the sun and preferred the familiar comfort of the hotel's air-conditioner.
Inability to move past/fixation with regular things - I used to watch the absolutely boring commercials. All of them. Every day. And every other cartoon in English. Every day.

Arranging/preferring things in regular patterns can be a sign of autistic thinking.

The difficulty of integrating into society seems to be the clincher in diagnoses, if the number of times that symptom is referenced in the Wikipedia article is anything to go by. The psychiatrist was very friendly, and got me to open up to her. So after a few sessions I was pronounced non-autistic.

Though I still agree with that diagnosis (many other things happened that ran contrary to autistic behaviour), it's interesting to note how many other similarities I have with autists that have cropped up since kindergarten:
Avoidance of eye contact
Took anticipatory "stances"
Autism is commonly confused with retardation. I have to admit that I frequently do display signs of acute retardation.
Stereotypy, or making useless movements. When I alight from a bus I put my wallet on my head. I like walking in circles. I play air guitar and put noiseless earphones in my ears even when my mind is on anything but music. Some of you may be familar with my habit of holding out limp arms in front of myself when walking around.
For [autists], the quality of friendships, not the number of friends, predicts how lonely they are. True for me to some extent.
... autistic groups performed worse than controls at complex language tasks such as figurative language, comprehension and inference. I was pro back when English was all about punctuation errors and cloze passages. Now I'm shit at Comprehension. On the other hand, I'm good in Lit (though my teacher hinted I didn't do too well in the last exam).


One more symptom, which I'm sure does not apply to me, is that an alarming percentage of autists, about 50%, turn out to be autistic savants. That is, possessing shitty communication skills but extremely epic in memory work, and mathematics. It's also interesting to note that some autistics have gone against the norm and become artists, critics, politicians even, I think.

Autistics, although being weak in imagination and social intuition (they can't associate happiness with smiles, and they don't pick up easily on other people's feelings), and other flaws such as becoming easily obssessive and lonely. Autistics are less likely to have a circle of friends, and more likely to have a few persons they have an intense attachment to.


I've been really fascinated with autism. I went to a forum for autistics for a while, even. I'm seriously thinking about giving the autistic sniper a large role in my planned GunZ machinima. Though autists are generally bad at teamwork (communication hurdles) and on-the-spot problem solving (attachment to ritual and sameness), it's really interesting to think about an sniper who instead of letting his spotter partner do wind calculations and such for him, the sniper does all the calculation and shooting by himself, because he is so good at maths and so in tune with the environment he can do without a scope.

A US Army sniper+spotter dyad

He just memorizes exactly how this much wind, this much angle of elevation, this much torque will affect his trajectory and he can calculate all that in the blink of an eye. His spotter will be there to do battle evaluation and direct him around, picking targets and such. The autistic sniper will depend heavily on his spotter, since he's crap at thinking out of the box. Would be interesting to explore such a relationship, the sniper's attachment and overdependence on his spotter, whether his spotter sees his sniper buddy as stupid or a real equal, etc. Combine that with how in the GunZ universe half the combatants can fly all over the walls. Aerial sniping + autistic savant = Potential epic.

Mikanaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Ladies and gentlemen, we have just went from demotivational posters to my exams to forgetfulness to autism to combat sniping to GunZ to Mikana.