i love logging onto tumblr and seeing every single person i follow freaking out over this site self destructing. feels like a homestuck update

Animal Reviews!

Source: facebook.com

Abel and I spent a day at the beach!

So, I might be working on a game...

sketch page for TrashiestPanda on twitter!

It’s been a while tumblr!! I’m so busy lately but I stopped by to shower some love on Sorry To Bother You! Boots Riley is a dope Oakland based director who made an amazingly weird movie that you allll should check out! Go watch it, tell all your friends, and watch it again!!

Are you sick of families being torn apart at the border? Wanna DO something about it? Join Daron Nefcy, Alex Hirsch, and me for a charity livestream June 26! We’ll draw YOUR CARTOON REQUESTS to raise money for RAICES!

Soup-serving robot fail. [video]

Simone Giertz, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Shitty Robots.” She intentionally engineers terrible robots just for fun.

everything this woman makes is goddamn fantastic

my mom is 61 and her bf is a huge nerd and he’s teaching her to play magic the gathering and he had her watch avatar the last airbender with him and his ringtone is terra’s theme from final fantasy 6 and he paints pictures of sephiroth. my mom’s bf is nerdier than i’ll ever be.

and she does all these pinterest crafts and now she makes little bejeweled vials of healing potions for him and his buddies. my little geek heart can’t handle all this.

edit: just picture a 60-something woman with a VERY thick minnesotan accent saying “mike is having me watch the naruto”

just fyi my mom is now 62 and they finished watching “the naruto”

if i had told my 13-year-old self that this is what my mom’s hallway would look like when i was 30 i wouldn’t have believed me

how come we’re always forced to choose between kids and a job??? i dont want either

As the Nightmare King’s armies approach Central City, Helvetica is thrust into the spotlight. Does she have what it takes to save the day?

This concludes the third and final act for Helvetica. It’s a story I’d like to continue: one my friend and I have built into a realized world with warring immortals, lost technology, mime assassins, looping time bubbles, and the deepest of lore.

GO LOOK AT THIS THING

Guys… G U Y S

Here’s some dragons I’ve done, can you tell I’ve been watching HTTYD stuff lately???

there’s a myth that teachers work seven hours a day, nine months a year. there’s this joke: name three reasons to become a teacher - june, july, august. 

if you’re worth your salt, you know better. you know the day usually is at least nine hours long, if not twelve (thanks, staff meeting that ran late again), you know that you spend your summers locked in small rooms learning and re-learning the smallest tactic that might help your students; endlessly on Pintrest because oh my gosh, isn’t that just the best idea for a sensory table. or a new name board. or this would really help them understand the activity; yes it’s going to cost me but gosh, isn’t it lovely. you know that being a teacher also sometimes means being a parent, kind of, and being a jailer, kind of, and being a hardass, kind of, and being the kindest person in their life. you know sometimes your role is “you gave me the hope i needed to keep studying” and sometimes it’s “you showed me i needed to work harder.”  being a teacher is watching the entire series of my little pony just because it’s what’s cool with the kids and you think you could make a curriculum from it and it’s also deliberately pretending you don’t understand cultural references just because it makes kids squirm. it’s giving “a little extra” all the time, every day, a little extra points for that one student who needs it, a little extra hug, a little extra thought, and time, and emotional labor, and heart, and heart, and heart.

the interesting thing about being both a student and teacher at certain points in my life means that i came face-to-face with the idea i was going to lay down my life for a student before i’d even hit 21. at 19, taking lessons on how to distract a shooter should-it-ever-occur; a cop looked me in the face. “are you ready?” he asked. “will you die for them?” he had a gun on his hip. i hadn’t even met my class yet.

sometimes, i don’t match perfectly with my students. i mean, you always like them, a little, even if they drive you nuts, but some kids just won’t click with you. it’s kind of a hard thing to learn; you assume it’s because of you, and your failure to become some movie-star teacher who touches the life of every bill and sally. but the truth is, kids got stuff going on at home and in their bodies and in their friends and they don’t always have time or energy to be patient and listen or whatever you need from them. but you try, you know. and then you’re asked. hey, this kid that won’t listen, that hits other kids, that uses slurs. you’ll die for him, right? you’ll give up that big beautiful future you got, that family that loves you, that home and that slice of cake. you’ll give up that summer cruise you’ve saved up for since july and your brother’s wedding. for this kid? 

i do have, like. a gauge about things. sometimes, and i mean this truly and deeply, i am simply not paid enough for certain nonsense. no, no, who cares i’m not paid enough for crayons or markers or books or literally half the supplies i have in my classroom (i’ll find a way, in my budget, to provide, always, every time, no matter what it takes out of my mouth). usually it’s inter-community drama or parents who are somehow standing in the way of their student’s education or administration yet again slashing an important lesson/curriculum/whatever-they-get-their-hands-on. i’m not paid enough for a lot of things, but i still do them. i’m not paid enough to make your children extra food or be sure they get their vitamins. i’m certainly not paid enough to die for them.

often the argument “just bring a gun” comes up. how silly to anyone who has worked with children. there’s safety risks, huge safety risks, and then there’s anything in a classroom. if you think something is safe, it is not. kids will find a way to hurt themselves on nothing but an empty floor if you give them the time. i wonder if this what they tell police officers who were shot in the line of duty - well, it sucks but you should have had some type of superhuman reflex and simply not been shot. after all, you had a gun. this personal gun somehow cancels out the bigger automatic gun. two wrongs make a right. my personal gun would somehow empower me in such a way that i could not only predict the movements of a shooter but also have the aim, calm, and consideration to shoot him before he shot me. my teaching degree did not come with a CIA training course. i have bad vision. i know, faithfully, in the pit of my stomach, where the tiny terrors are that, should i even have a gun, i would not shoot it. i wonder, always. what would that look like. the police don’t know who is the hero when they break down doors. and, should i die in that classroom, my death will have a whisper: don’t politicize it. let it, the others say, remain meaningless.

sometimes a cop will look at you and ask, are you ready? are you willing? are you comfortable knowing that this humble job, this often-thankless, often-joyful job: it has a policy expecting you to face a man armed to the teeth. and die for each child in that classroom, even the child who drives you nuts, even when you aren’t paid enough, even when you’re giving up your family and your love, even when people will blame you for not having a gun. and you know, somehow, the minute you step into a classroom. you know the minute you see them. it rings in your chest like a second heartbeat: yes, yes, yes, i would gladly do it, i would die twice if i was allowed to do it, if i could save one, if i could save any, yes, of course, unhesitatingly. because you love them, even when you hate your job, and you love them in a way that means you know would stretch out your body at 19 years old and give it up, because, somehow, you understand “protect and serve” in the core of your bones, in the grit of you, that these children are yours, are an extension of your twelve-hour days and hungry belly and endless working, and that the love you have will make that choice effortless, easy, a promise you make even if nobody ever asks for it.

okay. 

three days ago, my second graders came in from the cold when i got the first question. a tug on my sleeve. “miss raquel?” her eyes are dry. she’s just thinking. “when a shooter comes, are we ready?”

and i realized: we’re asking them to die, too.

roger that

“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”

We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”

Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.

Or, backing up FURTHER

and lots of people think this very likely,

“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”

The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.

To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science)  indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.

Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.

Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.

I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.

But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.

I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.

“…disability exists in the context of the environment.”

Reblog for disability commentary.

That last paragraph is absolutely important.

@contacting-u

I love her sm tbh.

She did that!!!!!!!

iconique

Yellow Diamond, everyone