Inadequacy alongside almost-but-not-quite-autistic people

Anyone else know what I mean by this?

I generally make friends with socially awkward nerds who initially accept me as I seem to be like them on the surface. Eventually though the differences emerge.

I like to play video games alone, and tend to play a small number of them for ridiculous numbers of hours each. "Normal" nerds like to play through new games all the time, and then want to talk about them at length, or be part of the fandom around them, or they want to be logged into Discord talking to other people while playing them.

When I was a young child and didn't have a computer, I would read books (though my slow reading speed meant this could be stressful). But since then, I only like to play video games, and not consume other forms of media such as books, TV shows and movies, because I vastly prefer the interactive experience of video games. Non-autistic nerds find this strange, and I am always left out of conversations when they are discussing the latest TV shows (which is pretty much all the time since streaming services became so popular).

I also don't really like any music other than music from the few video games I play, and nostalgic pop music. This alienates me from the non-autistic nerds who have earphones in all the time and go to rock gigs and festivals.

Sometimes, I don't even want to play video games, and just want to "sperg" over some obscure topic like bus routes or weather forecasting for a while, sometimes even for months at a time.

I have Asperger's and generally function OK socially (alcohol helps a lot, and I quite enjoy pub environments), but the differences I mention above really hold me back in conversation, and I rarely get any of the pop culture references that people constantly make. So I end up feeling isolated even when I am around other nerds who have superficially accepted me, and I end up developing feelings of inadequacy compared to them and jealousy towards their superior ability to connect with one another. I can feel quite obsessed and depressed by this problem at times. It feels like I am so close to being as good as these people and having their quality of life and social relationships, if only I didn't have the big A in my head.

What makes my feelings worse is knowing that it would sometimes be possible to force myself to consume media in the manner that the non-autistics do, and indeed I did do this once for a period of months when I first went to university so that I could make some friends (that was a long time ago, I'm in my mid-thirties now), but it was absolutely exhausting to do that, exhausting in a way that only other autistic people would be able to understand!

Can anybody here relate to what I've written? Does anyone have anything that they do that helps them to deal with this?