Re: Any tips for dealing with lonelyness?
Epistemic status: based on personal experience, specific to highschool-like environments; probably mostly wrong.
Some points that might help.
1. I've heard it said that people like talking about themselves, and while that's not true in the vast majority of the cases, it is certainly true enough. Try to figure out how to let people open up. Let, specifically, not make-you want to balance encouraging someone to talk and listening to them. The goal is building trust, so you'll have to talk about yourself, too, but be careful of context. You shouldn't go off-topic enough for the other person not to sympathize, at least until you're good friends. This takes a while though, and the next point helps facilitate the process.
2. You've talked about how people don't use linux/play pokemon/listen to video game music, etc, which makes it hard to talk about things. But this is same from the other person's prospective. You don't watch movies or listen to pop music or follow the most recent instagram memes, so they don't have anything to talk about with you either. And yes, this is a catch-22, but when other people realize they do not share your interests, they have the choice of talking to many, many other people that do. You do not have this luxury. As such, it is useful to have at least a passing knowledge of the general interests that other people share, just so you have something to talk about. Not necessarily random memes and things, but music and movies and shows and so on are useful for small talk. And you want to do small talk because that eventually leads to better familiarity. It's the shared interests thing; eventually you can introduce people to what you actually like and they can do the same, but popular things are good as a starting point to scope out each other.
3. This might be a little more contentious, but...you want to figure out how to change your initial assessment for the people who don't know you. I did this by being really good at academics. You can do it by being good at anything that's normal-adjacent. Helps if it's a performance-like activity, but it doesn't have to be; the goal is to be known as "Stasp who's a really good <thing> and also blind" rather than "Stasp, the blind person". Should this matter? no. Does it? yes.
To explicitly state: this will not get you close friendships. I think it's really hard to do close friendships in high school, specifically with the kinds of interests you have, because people like sticking to their own groups and there isn't really a linux-using, pokemon-playing group for instance. But what this does let you is figure out how to interact with a lot of people at least to a rudimentary degree, and if you do that with enough people you'll find one or two people who you can relate to.
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