My first biology professor had an ‘inadequacy drawer’ full of things to remind him he wasn’t, in fact, the dumbest and laziest person to ever exist. It was mostly Darwin, notably these two bits:
‘But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.’
‘I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids and today I hate them worse than everything.’
funkylittlegoblin
“I am at work on the second vol. of the Cirripedia, of which creatures I am wonderfully tired: I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.”
-Charles Darwin on a letter to his cousin
Charles Darwin: unexpected depression hero.
I knew about “I am very poorly and very stupid and hate everybody and everything,” but not the others.
“I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees” is A Mood.
My favorite Darwinism: “I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects”. Hits me right at the center of my hyperfixated soul.
I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before
“The work has been turning out badly for me this morning and I am sick at heart and oh my God how I do hate species & varieties”
Forgetting the sea — detail from 'Cold Shore'
My longhouse is perfectly constructed. Every morning when I wake up in bed at the far end of my longhouse, I say my syllable. Then I spend all day sitting in bed. By sunset my syllable has traveled to the other end of my longhouse and back, and as it smacks me in the head, I fall asleep. My longhouse is perfectly constructed.
dwergaz
The memory of her sustains him. Andreth and Aegnor.
gender and sexuality is a fickle thing. sometimes two gay cisgender men will be dating for decades and one of them will turn out to be a transgender woman. a lot of times that won't work out but sometimes it will. her partner may still choose to identify as gay. She might even identify as gay, and they continue to be happily in love. Queer politics isn't going to get any better if you don't accept that situations like that happen every day.
Their love doesn't get any less queer (as in dissimilar to 'the norm') just because they're """"""technically hetero""""""" now
It actually gets MORE queer, and we need to, we must, and we should celebrate and appreciate that regardless of whether that's the choice we would have made for ourselves
Lady Yennefer and her daughter Cirilla
The Sons of Elrond
I've had bad artblock for a minute now, but I worked through it? Elladan is in blue on the left and Elrohir in green on the right.
This is Opal, a Giant Pacific Octopus at the Bellingham Marine Life Centre. She was saved from a dinner plate and is being housed in a 3,000 gallon system while they’re waiting to release her back at her capture site. Apparently her favourite enrichment item is a baby toy ball ❤️
Opals temporary caretaker has a TikTok too, and she’s said that Opal was initially caught for being a “nuisance” to local shrimpers. She’s very lucky she got saved!
Here’s a screenshot of her playing with her baby toy.
@birb-bian Most cephalopods (including all octopuses) are venomous, but most of them aren’t fatally venomous to humans! So people who are experienced and cautious can handle them, especially if they’re familiar with aggression/fear behaviours that might preclude a bite
They also typically inject venom via the beak, so avoiding the mouth area tends to also be a good idea
Friendly reminder for any other people on the autism spectrum:
It's not recommended to offer to kill someone's dad, especially if you're talking to a stranger
may I please have more context?
Sometimes dads are terrible and should die, and you can console people by offering to rid them of this troublesome parent, but you should be friends with the person before making the offer
how the fuck are we supposed to make friends if not through gestures of patricide?
Unknown. I'll provide updates if I ever figure it out
Every person need to be taught disability history
Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.
Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”
Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.
Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.
Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.
Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”
Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.
Teach about us.
Oh! Oh! I got one! Meet Edward V. Roberts-
Ed Roberts was one of the founding minds behind the Independent Living movement. Roberts was born in 1939, and contracted polio at age 14, two years before the vaccine that ended the polio epidemic came out (vaccinate your kids). Polio left Roberts almost completely paralyzed, with only the use of two fingers and a few toes. At night, he had to sleep in an iron lung, and he would often rest there during the day as well. Other times of the day, he breathed by using his face and neck muscles to force air in and out of his lungs.
Despite this being the fifties, Roberts' mother insisted that her son continue schooling. Her support helped him face his fear of being stared at and ridiculed at school, going from thinking of himself as a "hopeless cripple" to seeing himself as a "star." When his high school tried to deny him his diploma because he had never completed driver's ed, Roberts and his mother fought the school and won.
This marked the beginning of his career as an activist.
Roberts had to fight the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation for support to attend college, because his counselor thought he was too severely disabled to ever work or live independently. Roberts did go to school, however, first attending the College of San Marino. He was then accepted to UC Berkeley, but when the school learned that he was disabled, they tried to backtrack. "We've tried cripples before, and it didn't work," one dean famously said. The school tried to argue the dorms couldn't accommodate his iron lung, so Roberts was instead housed in an empty wing of the school's Cowell Hospital.
Roberts' admittance paved the way for other disabled students who were also housed in the new Cowell Dorm. The group called themselves "The Rolling Quads," and together they fought and advocated for better disability support, more ramps and accessible architecture like curb cut outs, founded the first formally recognized student-led disability services program in the country, and even managed to successfully oust a rehabilitation counselor who had threatened two of the Quads with expulsion for their protests.
After graduation from his master's, he served a number of other roles- he taught political science at a number of different colleges over the years, served on the board for the Center for Independent Living, confounded the World Institute on Disability with Judith E. Heumann and Joan Leon, and continued to advocate for better disability services and infrastructure at his alma mater of UC Berkeley.
Roberts also took part in and helped organize sit ins to force the federal government to enforce section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which stated that people with disabilities should not be excluded from activities, denied the right to receive benefits, or be discriminated against, from any program that uses federal financial assistance, solely because of their disability. The sit-in occupied the offices of the Carter Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare building in San Francisco and lasted 28 days. The protestors were supported by local gay rights organizations and the Black Panthers. Roberts and other activists spoke, and their arguments were so compelling that members of the department of health joined the sit in. Reagan was forced to acknowledge and implement the policies and rules that section 504 required. This national recognition helped to pave the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
Roberts died of cardiac arrest in 1995 at the age of 54, leaving behind a proud legacy of advocacy and activism. Not bad for a "hopeless cripple" whose rehab counselor thought he was too disabled to ever work.
Here is a great online course for disability history!!
“Black Panthers saved the 504 sit-in.” – Corbett O’Toole, participant in the 1977 504 protest in San Francisco
”Along with all fair and good-thinking people, The Black Panther Party gives its full support to Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and calls for President Carter and HEW Secretary Califano to sign guidelines for its implementation as negotiated and agreed to on January 21 of this year. The issue here is human rights – rights of meaningful employment, of education, of basic human survival – of an oppressed minority, the disabled and handicapped.
Further, we deplore the treatment accorded to the occupants of the fourth floor and join with them in full solidarity.” – Black Panther Party media release on the protest, from website Disability Social History (click thru to see pictures of BPP news about the success of the protest!)
According to disability rights activist Corbett O’Toole, these advocates “showed us what being an ally could be. We would never have succeeded without them. They are a critical part of disability history and yet their story is almost never told.”
They were running a soup kitchen for their black community in East Oakland and they showed up every single night and brought us dinner. The FBI [guarding the building entrance] was like, “What the hell are you doing?” They answered, “Listen, we’re the Panthers. You want to starve these people out, fine, we’ll go tell the media that that’s what you’re doing, and we’ll show up with our guns to match your guns and we’ll talk about who’s going to talk to who about the food. Otherwise, just let us feed these people and we won’t give you any trouble” – and that’s basically what they did.
Please read up on the Black Panthers' involvement in the 504 movement, they were integral to the occupation lasting as long as it did and were INCREDIBLY ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS! They are more than a footnote in that part of disability history, and I want more people to know this part of their legacy!
Read about Bradley Lomax (and his aid and fellow organizer Chuck Johnson, who I've struggled finding sources on outside of articles on Mr. Lomax :( ) here and here! Together the two were integral in bringing Black Panther Party organizing and activism to the disability rights movement!
I wish there were more information on Mr. Johnson, as his work is dear to my heart as someone who also requires caregiving. ;3; <3 Considering how little information there even was available online for Mr. Lomax just ten years ago I am hoping we get more coverage of Mr. Johnson's contributions to this important part of disability history sooner rather than later. I do not want his activism ignored!
Do not let the full richness of our history be whitewashed! The Black Panthers kept the protestors fed, they HEAVILY publicized the protests in their paper The Black Panther and agitated on the protest and protestors behalf, and paid organizers' way to Washington to pressure the HEW secretary to actually sign the damn act. In turn, the Panthers did this because the Oakland ILC did outreach to them, and helped Mr. Lomax with transportation. This is solidarity buried under focus on the white organizers. Please please please cherish it. Keep it close to your heart, read about it, celebrate it, share it!
Obviously there were more Panthers who helped but I have already lost the first draft of this and I'm starting to fade -- here's two more detailed sources to read for more, and I highly recommend you do!
it’s really great when you can hyperfixate on your own story. however it’s not great when you decide to hyperfixate on your fictional city’s infrastructure instead of. you know. writing.
adding this under “comments that could either be a compliment or a sick burn”
does tumblr know about tim misny??? like has the level of tim misny awareness that exists in northeast ohio broken containment and become known online yet???
ok so tim misny is a personal injury lawyer here in ohio.
that’s him. you do not have to remember his face from this image because you’re gonna see it a lot in this post. so mainly i think we all kinda honed in on tim misny because of his slogan
he’s gonna make them pay. he’s gonna get you that money but also it’s a little threatening like he’s gonna fully fuck his legal opponent’s shit up. this sprung tons of local memes. then there were the billboards which were normal at first.
but here’s the thing; we already know what misny does. he makes them pay. so it turns into just saying “you know what i do” which is funny enough if you don’t at all have the context.
but this is not where the absurdity caps out, my friends. no. this is what it has evolved to and they. are. everywhere.
that’s right. no text. just the judging eyes of tim misny, glaring through our skin and into our souls. there is no god. there is no devil. there is just tim misny and he’s gonna make them pay.
Error: They Know what He does.