You’re on Lemmy, so I’m assuming you’re of a geeky mentality. If so, a local hackspace/hackerspace/makerspace would be a good bet.

On paper, my local one is a communal collection of tools we can all use. In practice however, it’s an excellent social group for fellow weirdos. We just also have some really fun toys to use, when we need them.

https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

It’s not fully inclusive of all of them, but a good starting point.

Human empathy is actually a highly effective hunting technique!

Just ran across this, and thought back to your post.

https://youtube.com/shorts/tEcQSnd-3DY

This is why dad’s often don’t bond properly until around 6 months (when the baby can properly play).

Its part of iterative improvement. The resonance causes the beam to spread out, which both makes getting results harder and losing more particles in route. The resonance is caused by the magnets used being imperfect.

The point of the article is they have created a model that predicts these resonances accurately. This will be of limited benefit to them, though it will help clean up some data. The big advantage for future constructions is by knowing how the field becomes imperfect, measures can be taken to correct for it. This will make future particle accelerators better. The same problem will occur in larger fusion reactors. By studying this now, they can be improved before they are even built.

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is a huge difference!”

That’s ok, not everyone gets that hit. A significant number of people (I want to say around 20%) don’t have the nerve connecting their pheromone receptors to their brain. It sounds like you are in that group.

The bond will still form, it will just be later, and based on interactions, rather than hormonal. It’ll be worth it eventually. Just focus on being a good dad, even if it’s just by rote. It’ll come.

Believe it or not, that’s not an uncommon feeling. Evolutionary wise, there’s no particular reason for the dad to bond with the baby. It’s completely dependent on mum. What we get is often a spillover for the drive to get mum to bond.

I was lucky and had that bond kick in quite quickly, but it’s ok if it doesn’t. Likely it will kick in around 6 months, as the baby becomes more “interesting”. Until then, be a good husband.

It’s also worth noting that you are entering peak “emergency mode”. Right now the baby is completely dependent on you. It hasn’t settled down into a routine, and you are running low on sleep. They combine to utterly screw with your head.

The mentality that got me through that zone was this: mum looks after the baby, I look after mum. I made sure she had regular meals. That she had time for a shower. That she could have a coherent night sleep.

Something that might help is to sniff your baby’s head. Babies put off powerful pheromones, designed to reinforce the bonds. Unfortunately, not everyone has active pheromone receptors. If you do though, that smell is like crack cocaine.

In short, you’re doing well. Baby is safe and cared for, and you’re doing your share of that work. Anything else is a bonus.

A mixed group would be better. It shuts down a lot of propaganda spins. It needs to be hard to spin as anything other than patriots Vs fascists (particularly not black Vs white).

For those that struggle, the android app “alarm clock Xtreme” is excellent. You can set tasks you have to do before snoozing. Both maths questions and having to scan a barcode or tag are options.

Combined with the “sonic bomb” alarm clock, it’s an extremely effective combination. (For both you and all your neighbours within a few 100m)

This works 98% of the time. When it doesn’t, oh boy! You’re in for an “interesting” conversation!

Use at your own risk!

The term “neurodiverse” (or as a friend calls it “neurospicy”) came about because of this. It turns out that ASD blurs into a lot of other “conditions”. They also tend to blur into each other.

Rather than deal with explaining the details of how your weird, neurodiverse is used to indicate your weird, but not broken. E.g. high functioning autism isn’t naturally a disorder. Instead it makes you better at some things, but worse at others. Unfortunately, one of those happens to be social skills.

Neurodiverse people tend to have a lot more in common than average. It’s both from social conditioning, and commonality of interests. We also often find “normal” to be uninteresting, if not boring. We seem to naturally gather and seek out like minded people. It also runs in families. This makes it seem that it’s disproportionately common. We’re not actually that common, we just tend to just concentrate into a few areas.

ASD etc have there uses, but as clinical terms, for problem management. It’s annoying when it’s overused in media, as a catch all term.