I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called “The Heirachy of Cool”. Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever…

But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy… But because that hierarchy is infallible it’s predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.

… Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence…

Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.

“The Cat Who Walked through Walls” by Robert Heinlein…

Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth’s moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.

Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like… A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving…

Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for… reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?

First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.

Honestly don’t know about the specifics to verify or checked the sources but on first blush it feels pretty correct.

My mental situation is such that I have a very strong memory recall and approach learning pretty voraciously. Around topics I enjoy I build a sort of mental map to compare and recall things creating a sort of landscape of understanding over a wide range of topics. I pick up a lot of fabrication based tasks quickly in part because I’ve realized that my imagination renders things in full three dimensions allowing me to imagine builds in stages and troubleshoot at the concept stage… which as I have come to understand it isn’t ubiquitous for most people and is tied into the form of dyslexia I have.

All in all though it’s a pretty isolating experience being this way. I chose a career that is non academic and a lot of people at some point or another imply that it’s a “waste” of my mind. Some people react to me as a threat, as though I am judging them or showing off or lying about my interests or must be exaggerating the things I demonstrate some small mastery over. Listening to those who have known me over a long period of time describe me to other people is often sobering. While it’s often flattering the impression is that I am sort of a sort of wonderous jack of all trades eccentric who operates on a different scale of time than other people.

To experience it from my perspective though, I have a sense generally of the line where most people are likely to absorb or remember things and know from people’s reactions exactly how much of a weirdo I come across as when I step past that boundry. Neurodivergance is a neutral term, it just boils down to “a different brain”. The more different one is generally the harder it is for other people to intuit your needs. My experience with teachers in school is that I could understand as a child that the system of reporting progress required me to do things that I found intolerable so that essentially the system could report metrics back to measure things in a systemic way. But that system wasn’t serving me what would have been personally tolerable by actually challenging me and also didn’t particularly care about me as a person. I figured out that most of that scorecard was meaningless while I was beholden to the system. A number of teachers realized I was imbibing the lessons I just wasn’t playing the game and their reactions to that were often pretty sympathetic.

On the next episode of “historical figures who were gay as fuck”… Leonardo Da Vinci.

Dunno what to tell yeh mate, it’s about as oldif not older than Furry culture. Weeki Watchee springs started a whole thing with their Mermaid shows and the subculture basically took off from like the early 60’s… And was probably about as horny as a lot of other subcultures that started around the same time.

Uh… I hate to tell you this but people absolutely dress as mermaids and do conventions… There’s a whole home industry of people who make custom silicon tails.

https://aquamermaid.com/blogs/news/mermaid-convention?srsltid=AfmBOoofN82kC8kQ_774E8rKcE1-Mi9CBZXEfvIqLckEK1cq7bXWHFum

https://www.themernation.com/silicone-tail

Nope, different nerd culture entirely. Seriously, they have their own conventions, instead of fursuits they do custom silicone tails and train to swim in them, have contests and pagents and things. There’s basically no overlap between the two communities. Scaleys are folk in the fursuit community who do dragon and lizard personas.

I have odd connections. Being in the film industry I have friends through props depts who do furry cons and one of my coworkers does underwater photography for people in the Mermaid subculture.