Avatar

a-blog-abt-stuff

@g0d-0f-cha0s

ADHD + Autism, any pronouns, non binary, demi and bi Bugs and frogs are cool, I have a pet lizard :)

There was a blonde who found herself sitting next to a Lawyer on an airplane. The lawyer just kept bugging the blonde wanting her to play a game of intelligence. Finally, the lawyer offered her 10 to 1 odds, and said every time the blonde could not answer one of his questions, she owed him $5, but every time he could not answer hers, he’d give her $50.00. The lawyer figured he could not lose, and the blonde reluctantly accepted.

The lawyer first asked, “What is the distance between the Earth and the nearest star?”

Without saying a word the blonde handed him $5. then the blonde asked, “What goes up a hill with 3 legs and comes back down the hill with 4 legs?”

Well, the lawyer looked puzzled. He took several hours, looking up everything he could on his laptop and even placing numerous air-to-ground phone calls trying to find the answer. Finally, angry and frustrated, he gave up and paid the blonde $50.00

The blonde put the $50 into her purse without comment, but the lawyer insisted, “What is the answer to your question?”

Without saying a word, the blonde handed him $5.

What makes us human is the Nintendo 3DS

DONT FORGET TO DOWNLOAD ANY GAMES ON THEIR THEY WILL SHUT DOWN THE ESHOP MARCH 27TH AND YOU CAN NO LONGER ACCESS THEM AFTER THAT

Avatar

dont actually panic u can do a super easy no prerequisites hack to any 3ds at any time and then use free software to get any 3ds game or otherwise download-only content ever! so you dont need to worry abt losing out, actually the future is more open than ever before!! 3ds make us human!!!!!

I wasn't thinking I'd need to blaze this, Tumblr, but I need your help with gathering resources for questions to be answered during a family crisis.

Recently, I publicly came out as transgender and my sisters are having a rough time trying to process it. For context, the three of us (all in our 30s) were raised Catholic and I started coming to terms with my being transgender in 2007, only wholly accepting the label in 2019. I had been in the closet wrt family with the sole exception of my father. I wasn't sure why, but I was most comfortable telling him that I was struggling with my gender identity.

I found out why in 2021 when I realized he was ordering and wearing clothing and accessories from the women's section and had pierced ears and regularly got French manicures.

My own coming out may have unintentionally helped kick start a crisis for my sisters, and my brother-in-law informed me that my sisters suspect that our dad is also transgender.

My brother-in-law has already voiced support as well as an apology in advance if he gets my pronouns wrong (I already assured him that I'd rather be patient than mean). He also communicated with me that I had the support of my father and my sisters, but that they weren't sure how to process all of this on an emotional level.

This is where y'all come in.

I'm looking for books and articles and podcasts that would best help cisgender adult allies understand the struggles of being transgender, ways that cis folks can help, and especially how to come to terms with having a transgender family member.

I appreciate any help I can get and I cede the floor to my fellow chaos gremlins that haunt this site.

I know comments have been limited, but I really think the OP could also look on YouTube in leftist video essay land. There are heaps on this topic if you know where to look.

PhilosophyTube's video on her journey is really good, for example, she not only reaches out to other trans people but she somehow manages to put things in terms and analogies that work to help cisgender people understand. Though, it's more effective if you've already seen some of her videos before the coming out one and then maybe another after. Not only is the coming out video brilliant and makes me cry every single damn time I watch it, you can see a marked difference in her behaviour before and after. She's sombre, muted beforehand but after it she's embracing her joy and gender euphoria... while still making brilliant videos about interesting topics.

I've been told by number of people who "didn't understand" that once they saw the positive impact in a trans person's life, they understood enough to get over whatever their issue was, because ultimately if you see someone you love being depressed and suicidal before transition, and then incredibly happy with a peace they never had before, then the issue is less about understanding completely what being trans means, and far more about loving that person and wanting them to live a happy life even if how they get there is confusing and unfamiliar.

vampireapologist-archive-deacti

ppl are so annoying “you can’t paint ur bedroom pink you’re an adult” i did not spend my entire life waiting to grow up and control my life to paint my bedroom beige

Avatar

I had a sales woman in furniture store try and tell me not to buy a hot bubblegum pink loveseat because she wanted me to “think about the future”

Bitch, I am thinking about the future. I already got a hot bubblegum pink couch at home and now I need a loveseat to go with it.

when I first bought my house, I announced my decision to paint my bedroom purple. I had wanted a purple bedroom for thirty damn years, you fucking bet I was gonna have one now. My friends decided, for some reason, that I meant what one of them referred to as “14 year old girl purple” (through what’s wrong with the colors a 14 year old girl chooses, I don’t know, even if they’re not what I want as an adult). They didn’t believe me until they saw the color on the actual wall, even thought they helped me pick out paints. My mother, meanwhile, decided to get worried that if I painted my bedroom a “dark purple”, it would be “depressing”. As if, with an entire house to live in, I would spend all my time in the bedroom, which I wanted to be dark because I would be sleeping in there. In the damn dark.

I had like one, maybe two friends who were all like FUCK YEAH YOU PAINT IT WHATEVER COLOR YOU WANT, PURPLE BEDROOMS ARE AWESOME.

But when they actualy saw the finished bedroom, every single one of them was like, “Oh yeah, that’s really pretty.” (Well, the ones who supported me from the beginning were more like WOOHOO.)

And the moral of the story is: Fuck ‘em, please yourself. Either they’ll come around, or you can safely ignore every question of taste they opine about for the rest of time.

This applies to other adulting activities, too. When I was a kid, I decided that I wanted to have a wedding cake made of doughnuts. When I got older, I figured that I would be “mature” about it and get a traditional cake, which the older adults approved of. Now that I’m 25 and facing the possibility of actual marriage in the near future, I’m just like “marriage is a social construct but it comes with tax & insurance benefits, so just give me that goddamn doughnut cake.” If they don’t like it then they don’t have to come to my wedding.

Avatar
undanewneon

I would like you all to view my office. I’m thirty and my rainbow room is awesome, people can fight me

Avatar

I’m thirty and my first big furniture purchase was a custom coffin shaped coffee table that opens up and is lined with purple crushed velvet. I would have loved it at 13 and I love it now. Growing up doesn’t mean you have to abandon what makes you happy.

GROWING UP DOESN’T MEAN YOU HAVE TO ABANDON WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY.

the infantilization of color and decoration in the home is so bizarre to me- and such a new phenomenon

the world over, our ancestors painted their homes bright or deep or rich colors for centuries. they brought beautiful textiles into their living spaces, and made their utilitarian objects ornamented, or colorful, or shaped like whimsical things. in all cultures, at all class levels and ages, to the best of their ability. and we’re just supposed to throw away centuries of the basic human desire for beauty and visual interest because some asshole decided like 40 years ago that anything beyond a Pop of Color and an IKEA fake plant was “childish?”

fuck that

Red States are broken. Firearm mortality, poverty, education, life expectancy, infant mortality, health care.

Republicans policies are the worst. We have the data.

Blue States do not have these same problems.

Avatar

Honestly, as much as I hate to say it, we need to take this person's message to heart. We need to stop trying to make Republikkkans care about other people. They're never going to. It's not going to happen. We need to make them realize that they're hurting themselves, too. As much as I wish saying, "You need to start caring about other people," was effective, we need to pivot to, "Yeah, this is gonna benefit people you hate, but it's gonna benefit YOU, too."

Avatar

Uh…

Source: twitter.com

i just wanna say that even if you have degenerative diseases, life can still get better with age. i don't know how long i have left and i just seem to keep getting sicker, but im steadier and happier and more secure in myself than ever.

i started my 20s healthy and my 30s deathly ill and i'm much happier now. i wouldn't even trade health for everything else i've gained since.

contrary to the popular misconception, health isn't everything or even the most important thing. it's good to have! but you can make a happy life as a sick person, in whatever time you have

Avatar

fun fact if your breasts¹ are somewhere between a 36C-36D² then they weight³ about the same as your brain⁴

if you're above a D-cup⁵ you've probably got more boob than brain⁶

1. Both breasts combined. 2. UK and US bras are the same at this cup size. 3. Sourced from this blog post; a different source was found but excluded as it didn't account for band size. If you have a better referenced source let me know. 4. An adult human brain weighs ~1.3kg (2.8lb). 5. A 36D cup, or sister size (40B, 38C, 34E, 32F, etc) 6. Both breasts combined. A single 36G/H cup breast is about brain-sized.

i see y’all with your “steven goes to work at the mystery shack” headcanons and i’ve just gotta say… he would absolutely be the sketchiest person in gravity falls

the 2nd gravity falls summer (bc you know there would be more than one) the mystery is ‘what the fuck is wrong with this traumatized pink teenager’ instead of ‘who is the author of the journals’ 

with such great hits as 

  • mabel (upon seeing steven’s gem): you’re PERMANENTLY BEDAZZLED?????
  • dipper: ugh gideon’s the worst
  • steven: oh yeah I hate it when your friends try to kill you, but you just gotta wait it out and be patient with them and they’ll come around to you eventually
  • dipper: what. the fuck.
  • the kids repainting the sign when mabel drops her paintbrush to the ground by accident, cue steven being like ‘np i’ll get it’ and walking straight off the edge of the roof 
  • mabel: i hate that picture of me, 4th grade’s the worst
  • steven: haha yeah…grades…those exist… i definitely didn’t look exactly the same from ages 8 to 14 for complicated shapeshifting reasons
  • “our grunkle stan is kind of a sketchy guy” “oh no way most of my family are war criminals”
  • steven: *breaks a cup* aw shit *licks it and it seals back together* 
  • dipper: *furiously taking notes*
  • theres no possible way that steven “haven’t you noticed I’m a star” universe doesn’t come over to mabel’s slumber parties w/ candy and grenda and casually mention his girlfriend who a. is literally a knight in shining armor, b. has taken down multiple genocidal dictators thousands of times her size, not to mention c. mastering the art of swordfighting when she was twelve and d. saving his life and the lives of all the beach city residents on a regular basis
  • dipper: *trying to reach something on a high shelf*
  • steven: oh here you go *shapeshifts his arm to grab it and bring it down*
  • dipper: ??????thanks??
  • playing w/ waddles and nonchalantly saying something about missing his own large, pink pet, a magical lion that can teleport and that he has ridden into battle multiple times
  • (at suzy’s diner) steven: don’t worry, i’ll get the bill 
  • various pines: thanks man
  • steven: it’s cool, my dad’s a millionaire
  • dipper:

it’s honestly the funniest fucking thing to imagine steven outright not even PRETENDING to hide any of the unusual parts of himself, but dipper still acting as if it’s all some giant conspiracy he’s going to crack by the end of summer.

mabel: “dipper, stop being such a dummy-dumb, he literally TOLD us that he’s half gem on his mother’s side!”

dipper, chewing furiously on his pen: “yeah, but what does that MEAN???”

@novantinuum@thepringlesofblood​ u are visionaries 

@novantinuum​

@thepringlesofblood​ u

are visionaries

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Could somebody be a paramedic if they were missing a forearm?

Avatar

Y’know, sometimes a question comes along that exposes your biases. I’m really, really glad you asked me this.

My initial instinct was to say no. There are a lot of tasks as a paramedic that require very specific motions that are sensitive to pressure: drawing medications, spreading the skin to start IVs. There’s strength required–we do a LOT of lifting, and you need to be able to “feel” that lift.

So my first thought was, “not in the field”. There are admin tasks (working in an EMS pharmacy, equipment coordinator, supervisor, dispatcher) that came to mind as being a good fit for someone with the disability you describe, but field work….?

(By the way, I know a number of medics with leg prostheses; these are relatively common and very easy to work with. I’m all in favor of disabled medics. I just didn’t think the job was physically doable with this kind of disability.)

Then I asked. I went into an EMS group and asked some people from all across the country. And the answers I got surprised me.

They were mostly along the lines of “oh totally, there’s one in Pittsburgh, she kicks ass” or “my old partner had a prosthetic forearm and hand, she could medic circles around the rest of her class”. One instructor said they had a student with just such a prosthesis, and wasn’t sure how to teach; the student said “just let me figure it out”, and by the end of the night they were doing very sensitive skills better than their classmates.

Because of that group I know of at least a half-dozen medics here in the US with forearm and hand prostheses.

So yes. You can totally have a character with one forearm, who works as a paramedic for a living.

Thanks again for sending this in. It broadened my worldview.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

Avatar

THANK YOU, from the disability community, for doing the actual research and not just relying on your first assumptions and stereotypes.

Organization of nurses with disabilities: http://nond.org/

Association of medical professionals who are deaf or hard of hearing: https://amphl.org/

When I was growing up, I was around people who were mostly pretty good at staying positive about my range of career options as a deaf person and who encouraged me to dream big. But one of the few things I was told that I likely couldn’t do would be to be a doctor. This is because they weren’t sure how to work around the “need” to listen to certain things through a stethoscope. No, it didn’t have a real impact on my career-related decision making because I didn’t really have an interest in the medical professions anyway, my interests took me in other directions. But it was one of the few limits that some people put on my vision, and even though it didn’t have a practical impact on me I still felt the constraint a bit – just the idea that something random like a stethoscope could potentially shut me out from an entire field.

Now flash forward to when I’m in my 20s, back when I was interviewing people and writing articles for a university staff/faculty publication and alumni outreach magazine. And one day I find myself interviewing a deaf EMT for an article I was writing on deaf women working in various professions related to the various sciences. And this deaf EMT had a specialized stethoscope designed to be SO LOUD that even I, a severely to profoundly deaf person, could actually hear a beating heart or the sound of nerves working! And that was with putting the buds for the stethoscope directly into my ears, which meant that I actually took out my hearing aids in order to listen instead of having to figure out how to get headphones to directly funnel sound into the eeny tiny microphone in my hearing aid.  The kind of headphones designed with buds going directly into the ear just DO NOT WORK FOR THAT, period full stop. And most things designed for hearing people DO NOT WORK for deaf people because they only use the little bitty baby amplification that hearing people use to protect their incredibly fragile ears that start to hurt at just about the point I’m starting to be able to hear that there even IS a sound to be heard. Hearing people run in terror from the kind of BIG LOUD amplification that us deaf people need. (Unless they are the kind of rock music fans who think all good music ends with actual, noticeable hearing loss at the end of the concert.) And on top of that, most things designed for hearing people naturally don’t compensate for the fact that I hear low pitch sounds MUCH better than high pitch sounds. Meaning, I can actually hear low pitch sounds if they are amplified loud enough, but for high pitch sounds – well, the first 32 years of my life they basically didn’t exist in my life, for the past 14 or 15 years the only reason I can hear high pitch sounds is because these days, with the advent of digital (not just analog) hearing aids, it’s now possible to have hearing aids that take high pitch sounds and process them so they sound like low pitch sounds. So this is what water sounds like! When it’s processed so that it’s actually something I can hear.  But somehow this stethoscope–invented when (most? or all?) of us deaf folks were still wearing analog hearing aids–managed to be loud enough for me.

Until the deaf woman EMT loaned me her stethoscope for a minute and explained it to me, I didn’t even know that you could actually hear the nerves working, not just the heart or breath in the lungs! And never imagined actually hearing it myself

And the deaf EMT told me that, for deaf people who really can’t hear anything at all even with that LOUD stethoscope, there are other machines to pick up basically the same information that you can get through a stethoscope. And she also pointed out that’s a fairly small part of being a doctor or EMT, anyway. You don’t have to be able to use a stethoscope to join the medical professions.

And … somehow, even though I had never personally actually wanted to be a doctor anyway, and still don’t want to, and still don’t miss having tried it, it was still so awesome realizing that this one last barrier that had been put on my old childhood imagination could just fade away.

People need to know.

PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.

That people with disabilities can do all kinds of things

THAT people with disabilities ARE ALREADY DOING all kinds of things.

Because … on one hand, yes, there are a FEW things that people with certain disabilities actually can’t do. They do not yet have driverless cars on the open market for everyone to buy, so until that’s ready, blind people still can’t do jobs that by definition have to involve driving (like taxi cab driver, bus or truck driver, etc). And deaf people can’t be phone operators. And although deaf people could translate between written languages, and although there are certified deaf interpreters who translate between signed languages (yeah that’s an actual thing), people who are really deaf (and not just a little hard of hearing) can’t interpret between spoken languages on the phone. 

But most of the things that people THINK are impossible for people with disabilities to do?  Can be worked around with the right technologies, devices, software, adaptations, and a little resourcefulness and creativity. 

More people need to be like @scriptmedic, meaning they need to do the work to actually research the options and find out what is already being done. And they need to talk with people who have the actual disability to see what ideas they have. Because we often have a lot of these ideas, and we often see some of our supposedly more “innovative” ideas as being actually rather boring and ordinary because we’ve been doing them since before our memories even start. Just by example – As far as I can tell, from the bits I know (I’ve only known a few adults without hands at all well), many babies born without arms seem to just naturally do all kinds of things with their feet instead, because that’s what they have to explore the world with. It seems like a “gee whiz” creative answer for people who haven’t needed to adapt to life without arms, but isn’t so innovative from the perspective of an adult who has been doing all kinds of stuff with their feet literally since infancy. As a deaf person who has been using writing as a tool of communication since, like, age 7 or something, it baffles me when I still occasionally meet hearing adults who seem to find the idea remarkable. And all that is before you even get to the stuff where we have to actually work to come up with a solution, by drawing upon more sophisticated adult experience, knowledge of available technologies, and opportunity to talk with other adults with similar disabilities who are working to solve things too. We usually have a lot, a lot of practice working to come up with solutions for things we haven’t tried before, so we are often likely to see solutions that everyone else misses–and not just for disability related accommodations.

People with disabilities don’t want to set themselves up to fail any more than anyone else. So if they seem to believe there’s a way for them to do it, you should give them a chance to show you, or explain what they’ve already been doing in the past, or explain what they’ve seen other people with the same disability do, or explain what ideas they have that they would like a chance to try out. Don’t just assume and then stop trying. Talk to us.

This. All of this.

Are you looking at creating a disabled character? Then you need to think not about what they can or can’t do, but about how they might approach the same task with different tools at their disposal.

Don’t say “X can’t do Y or Z”. First, ask, “what is actually NEEDED to do Y? What’s the process? How could I adapt it?”

I’ll be the first to say that medicine is an ableist community. We are. We almost have to be, because the whole point of medicine is to reduce disability and disease. We assume total health is the baseline, that other states are “abnormal” and to be corrected.

And sometimes that leads to misunderstandings. Misconceptions. False assertions.

And I’m going to tell you this, because I think @andreashettle would like to know this: I am, functionally speaking, a person with “normal” hearing. (I have a very slight amount of loss from working under sirens for a decade, but functionally I do just fine).

But you know what? I’ve never heard the sound of nerves. Never. I didn’t even realize that that is a sound you can hear.

So you, with your deaf ears, just taught me something about a tool I use every. single. day. of. my. life. About a sound I’ve never heard, with my “normal” ears and my “normal” stethoscope. (Okay, it’s a pretty kick-ass stethoscope, lezzbehonest rightnow.)

And for the love of all that is holy, I want to see these characters in fiction. Deaf doctors, one-handed medics, bilateral amputees running circles around other characters just to prove that they can.

I apologize for my misconception, for assuming that disability meant “can’t”. It’s a cultural part of medicine that I dislike. But now that I know it’s a thing I want to see it everywhere.

But if you’re going to do it… do the godsdamned research. Have respect for those who live with disabilities. Write better. Write real.

And above all? Write respectfully.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

Experience being disabled is a very relevant thing.

If you’ve got a task that you don’t think you’d be able to do one armed, think about it like this: do you think you could do it one armed if you had 10 years to figure it out?

Most adults who were born disabled have 20+ years of experience figuring out how to do shit while disabled.

That’s a very real expertise, and it’s relevant to other situations as well.

The expertise and experience of disabled people is such an important factor. So many people without a disability think of it like: “what if I suddenly lost an arm, or lost my sight (or just closed my eyes); how would I do X?” And if they can’t think of a way (usually fairly quickly), assume it can’t be done.

There is so much about accomodations and adaptive technology and just plain skills that abled people generally don’t even know that they (we) don’t know. It’s a whole other universe of possibility.

So I'm copying this from another post because I think it really should be on its own.

A lot of people I think don't... get TMA/TME (transmisogyny affected/exempt). Its all just transphobia right?

The explicit thing the term was coined for was describing how AMAB trans people (referred to as MTF and the spectrum) receives far, far more attention than AFAB trans people (referred to as FTM and the spectrum) from cis society, and how that affects trans women specifically.

When I was young, very young, I watched Shrek 2. There is a scene where a character who is ostensibly a boy is revealed to be wearing panties, by force. This is treated as a joke. For reasons I don't know at the time, I find the scene deeply upsetting.

I grow older, and learn more about trans people. I am exposed to trans womanhood that is not a joke, and in the course of a year come to accept that I am a trans woman. It feels like I am alive for the first time; getting to be called a girl, "she", wearing girl's shirts and growing my hair long. Genuinely, I thought of myself as basically a walking corpse pre-transition, and that feeling is gone.

But all the while, those jokes from when I was a child are still in my head. And here's the thing- its not just Shrek. There were jokes about trannies and men in dresses at school growing up. So many cartoon shows and movies make a punchline out of the idea that a man would look ugly in a dress, or that a boy character would be shamed for wearing a dress. Or that a puppet wearing panties, secretly, is something funny. Think about a culture where that kind of a joke is so normal it makes its way into like, half of all kid's shows. Think about growing up in that culture.

I don't know how to explain to you that the thing that makes me feel like a living person, the thing that makes me happier than I've ever been, is something that people know of, that people think is wrong, and that I have known that, through jokes and through art and through the people around me, for as long as I have known anything.

I have known I was a trans woman for five years, and I have not worn a pair of panties.

And, to be clear, this is just a single leg of the lumbering cultural behemoth that is transmisogyny. There's the fact we earn a full 10% less than TME trans people, the fact callouts and the resulting harassment and ostracisation and death threats disproportionately affects trans women on this website, the fact that like it or not TERFs primary target is trans women... it's so much and I am simply begging you to open your eyes and pay attention.