Ugh - don’t get me started. The other argument I hear is that “pro-fic isn’t tagged”, which is a lie. Tagging is the equivalent of a blurb on the back of a paperback, which is always more than just a summary. Most mass-market is categorized both in a physical store (so you know that you’re buying horror when you pick up a book from the horror section, erotica from the erotica section, etc), and even more relevant, many books have some kind of content warning. Way back in the wayback (the ‘80s and ‘90s), there was a crime fiction author - Andrew Vachess - whose stories were almost exclusively focuses around child death - insisted that his books have a warning on the back cover or the inside cover, about the disturbing and graphic content. Not because he held his readers in contempt for being snowflakes, but because he understood how traumatizing his stories were, and he didn’t want to hurt people. Why can’t untagging fanfic writers get that basic principle? Because they are assholes.

*raises eyebrows* Admittedly, this post is about fanfic, which generally I don’t write. But I’ve had similar requests to tag posts, which I usually do not because… communication hard, this space is mine, and y'all aren’t required to read anything in my space. The curatorial work of anticipating tags that might or might not be useful for potential readers is not imaginary just because you think that labor is vital, and you don’t actually get to judge how people allocate their resources.

When you ask people to do a thing, even if it seems very easy and not at all a potential barrier for you, it’s always worth considering what the ongoing cost of that work is. I don’t, for example, tag posts on my personal blog. This is my policy despite the fact that I do sincerely believe that tags are a net good, that I emphatically try to include content warnings in my coursework via the syllabus, and that I believe very strongly in allowing people to pace and control their own exposure to traumatic things.

I don’t tag on my personal blog because I have found through extensive experience that if I try to accommodate everyone I can possibly imagine who might need a warning–or even who asks for a specific one–I have to reroute so much of my cognitive processing through the same filters that I use as an autistic person to mask that I overload and lose my ability to communicate at all. I have found, through grim experience, that those simple little “five-second” requests can add up to a significant enough additive burden that I wind up effectively unable to participate at all.

Requesting warnings on content curation is asking for disability accommodation: I need to know whether this content includes my triggers before I can decide whether to consume it. That’s not an unreasonable need, and it is genuinely something that should be accomodated as is possible. But there are complications in the context of disability that make things complicated, so I’m going to describe two concepts that absolutely factor into the responses that individual randoms on the internet, like me, might make to requests for accommodation.

The first is that disability work we have a concept that is enshrined, among other places, in the ADA called “undue burden.” Essentially this means that with great power comes great responsibility: institutions, individuals, and organizations are expected to create accommodations to allow access for all according to the resources and abilities that those institutions, individuals, and organization possess. At the same time, if stuff requires you to engage with it in order to live your life, that stuff has a much higher burden of accessibility than stuff that is purely optional to engage with.

This is my way of saying “commercial media has way bigger resources than your average person writing for free does, AND they are asking more out of you the consumer before you begin to consume the output; therefore they have a much higher burden of accessibility for content curation.” It is also my way of saying: sometimes, spaces without resources to accommodate, say, all possible triggers and content labels that a person might possibly need say instead: you must be this capable of curating your own experience to enter. And that, too, is valid.

The other concept I’m going to lay out here is that of conflicting access needs. Sometimes, you have two people who are both equally disabled who need incompatible things out of a space. Sometimes, the need to be able to not anticipate the social needs of other people in the space without fucking up conflicts with the need to know what is happening before one engages at all times. Now, often we can resolve conflicting access needs in the microcosm by talking earnestly with one another about what we really need out of the situation and seeing if there is room for compromise. However, in the aggregate, often all that can be done with conflicting needs is separating spaces and signposting them so that people can self select out of conflicting needs: this space is set aside for people who need to have warnings on content, and that one is set aside for people who need to free themselves of paralysis related to not correctly anticipating all possible relevant warnings.

On the AO3, we label stories for the first group with some very common triggers, although of course assessments of whether those things are really present or not can sometimes vary. That’s one of the things we have to all try to approach in good faith. We label stories for the second group of people “choose not to warn,” so that those authors can also participate.

When people make a choice about how to conduct themselves on the internet in opt in social spaces, often they are acting according to their own accessibility needs rather than rejecting the needs of others. You actually can’t tell from a casual glance what the resources and needs of any given person are; they are entitled not to share that information.

It is, uh, not disability activism to make blanket statements about the basic level of effort input all people in an opt in social space must make to participate regardless of their circumstances, resources, and abilities. To put it extremely mildly.

I suspect it’s very possible that OP’s initial reaction to this would be “but I didn’t MEAN THAT -” for which I have some sympathy: digging around a bit, I have some suspicion that they’re dealing primarily with a specific set of people, the loudest of whom are kinda dicks. 

However. 

The same level of effort that OP is presenting as negligible and Required based on An Understanding Of How Tumblr Works (Which Everyone Clearly Shares The Same Understanding, Right?) … .

 … also applies to understanding (and assuming!) that a post like this is likely to rapidly get beyond an audience that understands the immediate context, and thus blanket statements of absolutes are going to start hitting really poorly and make you sound kinda like a dick. 

Because that’s a very normal, very predictable part of tumblr discourse, too. 

So if it’s reasonable to assume that everyone knows how A Specific Corner of Tumblr Ficdom (which is never universal) uses tags, and accepts/understands their Norms, and if you do not do so you are an asshole, then it’s also reasonable to assume that everyone knows that broadly worded posts will rapidly get out of initial audience, and blindside and hurt people beyond it, and if you do not account for this you are also an asshole! 

 … or, we could not assume either of those things, and while still encouraging community norms that are as thoughtful as possible, enter these conversations with some basic charity and awareness of competing needs and that sometimes these things are difficult. 

Spoon Theory & “Appropriation”

So since Tumblr decided to drop this the first time that I posted it, here’s a briefer version of this:

I’ve been seeing it go ‘round the internets that ‘using the spoon theory when you are not disabled is appropriation.’

Lemme be the first person to say that a) that is not a universally-held view in the spoonie community b) we don’t have any universally-held views, c) I actually think that view is actively harmful and d) I’m not interested in arguing about it, just please stop saying “this is so.”

This is not so. You are not the gatekeeper to who can or cannot use a word. Unless you are the writer of the original spoon theory essay, you cannot say who can and cannot use that phrase.

Now, on to why I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

1) As neologisms become more common, they become more useful. If an able-bodied friend says “I’m running low on people spoons, can we skip the next thing?” I say “sweet, yes, I was feeling the same thing, let’s go home and watch TV.” Those able-bodied people are speaking my language, and they understand what I mean when I say spoons, and that’s because they’ve taken the time to figure out what that phrase means and how it works and how to use it. HOO-FUCKING-RAY.

2) Using “appropriation” in relation to a word that is younger than my middle dog is, uh, not good, y’all. Appropriation is for white people wearing dreadlocks and girls at Coachella wearing bindis and fucking Chief Illiniwek and the Redskins. Appropriation is for Whole Foods putting peanuts in collard greens and white girls with no training or appreciation painting their hands with random hearts and flowers in henna and buying cheap-ass turquoise jewelry made in China rather than getting it from Native artists. 

Spoonie culture is a baby culture. (Note: this does not apply to all disabled culture, for example D/deaf culture is pretty long-lived.) We should maybe just chill the fuck out before we start yelling appropriation! because yes our problems are many but people using spoon theory to describe how tired they are is not one of them. 

3) AND THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART: By saying “able-bodied people should not use this,” you are setting yourself and other visibly or openly disabled persons as gatekeepers for the use of this term. You are saying: “you better be out about your disability or you can’t use it, because we’re gonna drag you/call you out about it.”

No one - not you, not me, not anybody else - gets to check anybody’s Cripple Card ™, unless it’s the police literally checking to see if I have my wallet card for my disability placard with me. No one does. No one gets to say “nah, you’ve only got anxiety, you’re not disabled enough.” No one gets to say “you have to disclose your disability or you do not get to use this term.”

Because that’s basically what the upshot of this is: unless you are openly out as disabled, you will not be able to use this term without fear of repercussion – and this site especially is fucking heartlessly beastly sometimes. We eat our own, especially in this baby community of spoonies where we should take best care of each other. 

So, tl;dr: please stop saying ‘this is appropriative’ like we had some spoonie meeting and decided on it, because we didn’t; use of a term makes it more accessible; appropriation as a term doesn’t actually belong to us, we should kinda stay in our lanes here; and please think through what it means when you say ‘no one able-bodied should use this.’ It means you’re saying you feel like you get to determine who can use a term, therefore who is disabled enough, therefore you’re gonna be checking Cripple Cards™ at the door.

No you’re not. 

(Yes, I realize some disabled persons feel Cripple is a slur. I use it as a word of pride. I will not star it out. If it offends you, I’m sorry for the hurt that causes you, but I will not stop using it.)

I’m going to highlight one part of this:  “…you are setting yourself and other visibly or openly disabled persons as gatekeepers for the use of this term.“  This is doubly problematic because not all visibly disabled people are spoonies. 

Look, I’m disabled: visibly, openly, proudly.  I’m paraplegic and I use a wheelchair, so my disability is not something I could hide even if I wanted to. What I’m not, however, is a spoonie, when we describe “spoonie“ as “someone with a chronic illness or disability that regularly impacts their energy levels and/or ability to get things done“.  I use a wheelchair, yes, but I have no problems whatever with energy or getting stuff done (aside from just generally being lazy).

So when people try to gatekeep this terminology and say that only disabled people can use it (which, as stated above, really means only visibly or openly disabled people can use it), what I hear is:  “Hey!  You there, in the wheelchair!  I’ve decided that you are Disabled Enough to use the spoon theory.  I know nothing about you or your disability, but you look crippled so I have decided that I know what you can and cannot do.“

So when you try to play gatekeeper for this, what you’re really doing is giving the rest of us bingo on the “ableist shit” scorecard.  You’re telling us that:

Long story short:  as a visibly disabled person who is not a spoonie, I am not okay with being designated some kind of judge of who is and isn’t disabled, and I’m frankly offended that people think they get to put me in that position by proclaiming that certain words are only for “”real”” disabled people. 

I have some fucking magical followers, y'all. Read all this.

For those who might not be aware, Spoon Theory was invented by a woman named Christine Miserandino as a way of explaining what it was like to have Lupus. So using it to actively exclude people with invisible illnesses/disabilities on the grounds they aren’t disabled enough? Pretty much goes against Spoon Theory’s entire purpose.   

I am not openly disabled, but “gotta wash my spoons” has been an amazingly useful shorthand for “I’m starting to feel like I’m reaching a stress trigger point, I’m going to do self-care right now and I’ll catch up with you when I can” without having to either go into detail or explain the entire backstory to people who are curious about PTSD at exactly the time I’m not capable of doing so.

So yeah, let’s get it further out into the mainstream use, and make it respectable and immediately understood.  Help more people, not fewer.

Spoon theory being spread and used more also helps people who thought they were completely healthy because they don’t LOOK sick realize that they actually are not completely healthy and something may be wrong. If you have to start counting spoons to interact with people and do day to day chores you start to realize hey… maybe there’s something wrong…

This is a freaking blessed thread 

Washing my spoons is a term I am using now. Thank you.

What is your opinion about giving your players permanent scars/disabilities?

Or if you’re a player, receiving them?

For me, I tend to stray away from forcing my players into something they don’t have control over. I know a lot of people get attached to their characters and hate when they dont get a say in what happens to them.

On the other hand, I think it’s an awesome story mechanic and I’d love to implement it into my future games. If the party is cool with it, of course.

I prefer to have a discussion with my players beforehand of what they are willing to physically allow their characters to go through. As a disabled person I don’t want my autonomy taken away from me even in a game. I understand that there are risks as a character going into deadly situations and things can happen, but it feels disrespectful, and almost outright malicious to force your players to have to have their characters endure something that could leave a permanent disfiguration, or a physical change that alters their character.

I know some people who like to give their characters certain disfigurations or physical disabilities or scars because it’s something that they’ve gone through, and they understand how this works, or we have a long discussion about how a physical disability will impact their play, I had a player at one point who had a blind character and we had to discuss how they were affected by certain spells and not affected by other spells. and we made unique situations to fit this character’s specific skill set and how we tied and them being blind as a part of their being.

I know plenty of people who played tabletop RPGs as a way to escape what they deal with in real life, because there are certain things that impact their daily being that make it difficult to do things that they would like to do and playing things like Dungeons and Dragons, and Pathfinder, allow them to project as a character in a different manner than they would in real life. But I’ve also had players who like the challenge of giving their characters something to struggle with. Because they identify with that struggle.

It is important to have a conversation about this because the disability whether mental or physical,will have a permanent impact on how certain things affect this character and open up unique opportunities within the world that they are playing in. As always, autonomy to your players is important, as is giving them the right to have representation. I found personally, it is quite fun to play characters with certain mental and physical disabilities that reflect my own because I like to give fantasy representation to something that you don’t see very often. Such as fibromyalgia, and I always work with the DM to make sure that these things can be implemented in the world without having too much of a negative effect on gameplay itself. You don’t want it to impact your play in a negative manner and make the game unfun for you.

had the sweetest moment this weekend with my 18-month-old baby cousin. my aunt and uncle were kicking a tennis ball back and forth and encouraging him to play. I was, as always, silently watching from my wheelchair (I’m not much for athletics anyway lol). he pointed at me while my aunt was holding him. she put him down and my uncle kicked the ball to him. instead of kicking it right back like earlier in the day, he picked up the ball and carried it to me, placing it down very emphatically in front of me. I was worried and anxious that he’d get frustrated when I didn’t kick the ball and become upset because I “refused” to kick it and he obviously wouldn’t understand why. I looked at him for a split second apologetically, expecting him to start fussing or cry when I wouldn’t do what I thought he was asking. but suddenly, he just got behind the ball so that he was in front of me and kicked the ball to my uncle on my behalf.

I teared up. he wasn’t demanding I kick the ball - he was putting it down dramatically to make sure I’d be watching and so I’d know he was helping me with my “turn.” at 18 months old, he not only noticed I was being excluded on his own, but actively brainstormed ways to include me with zero prompting from adults. It was the sweetest and most empathetic gesture towards me in months. I love him so much. my heart is melting.

i’m still smiling about this :) even the tiniest children are way more perceptive than people give them credit for! 

On Writing Disabled Characters as Antagonists

Many of you will know by now that, as a queer Deaf writer, I’m a huge advocate of positive representation for all disabled and othered characters. Something I haven’t touched on as much is my belief that you can only give truly positive representation by placing disabled/othered characters in all roles, even the traditionally negative ones. @itisariddle asked me a question relating to this matter this morning, and I realised that it’s the perfect topic for a new “On Writing” post.

Art, wait! I can’t show a disabled character as bad!

With all of the discourse on tumblr, and the rising need for political correctness, the thought of showing disabled/othered characters as anything but saints is terrifying. This vein of thought, however well meant, is almost as bad as toxic representation itself. It leads to some very 2D characters, and far more focus on the disability than necessary.

While having a disability usually means close ties to a community, culture, or even language, disabled characters are still people. When you look at what people are like in general - removing any other factors - you find that we’re a very complex lot, capable of swinging between good, bad and everything else in between. Having a disability doesn’t negate human nature, and so it stands to reason that for every hundred understanding, community-minded disabled people, there are going to be a few who are nasty, outright bullies.

Having attended a pre-school programme for disabled children, I can tell you now, there were plenty of children in there who had the capability to be spiteful. A few of them followed me up through school (joys of a small town), and they continued to be people you didn’t want to be around. Their personalities didn’t care that they were Deaf, or visually impaired, or had auditory processing disorders - they developed regardless, and this reality should carry over into fiction.

But that isn’t to say you can villify a disabled community.

There are a few tropes that are definitely bad, even toxic, representation, and oftentimes people use them without realising. I did it too. Here are the top three that I notice the most, so that you can identify and avoid or correct them:

Justification (or “anything for a cure”)

The most harmful part of this trope is the idea that a character does awful things in order to be “normal”. Again, as with many similar tropes, it’s well intentioned - often a commentary by abled authors who want to make a statement on the way that society pressures minority/othered groups - but achieves the opposite effect. Many disabled/othered communities consider whatever they have as a blessing, and only use medical intervention insofar as to make their lives manageable, and overcome obstacles, combined with their own resilience. Making a disabled character a villain in their search for a cure is toxic and plain cheap. It doesn’t represent our real-life views at all.

Zero to Hero (or “nobody liked me so I took this power and now I’m evil”)

My first issue with this trope is similar to the one above: it cuts out the culture and/or community around the disability. While it is true that being “different” is isolating (higher rates of depression and anxiety are common), it’s also true that there is a huge community-oriented attitude amongst disabled people. Pretending otherwise is exploiting a disability for tragic purposes, which is bad.

My second big issue is the insinuation that having a disability is a weakness. If you’re abled, or deal with internalised ableism (which I think loads of us do) we might not see it at first glance, but looking over the trope again from the tragic exploitation angle, you realise that the character is shown as the outsider. Think of it in terms of the sheep who lags behind the herd, and so becomes easy prey for the wolf.

Thirdly, the insinuation that disabled people are incapable of having love, genuine relationships, friends, or being happy in general, and so have to do terrible things. All round, this trope is almost the one that irks me the most.

Vengeance (or “the disabled teen-angst Macbeth”)

A lot of the issues with this one are the same as with the Zero to Hero trope, but it takes the spot as the trope I hate the most because it’s such a flagrant exploitation of struggles with mental health, disabilities and other issues. Again, it’s the idea that disabled people are incapable of experiencing happiness, except it’s less of an insinuation and more of a blaring, bright red marker stain.

All of these tropes strip away any characterisation and focus solely on the disability. You could probably replace one of these trope-driven characters with an evil AI hearing aid, which would be way more interesting, and the story would still be the same.

Think person first, and then weave the disability into their character afterwards. It’s kind of a given, I think, but many writers disregard this entirely. A character is a character, and a person is a person, and any character should be created like that. Think about hobbies, flaws, nuances, likes, dislikes, goals, passions - and treat the disability like an integrated layer, so to speak. Do your research into the community, its beliefs, preferences, and struggles faced, but keep all of it mixed in with the characterisation as a whole.

To Avoid Harm, Keep the Balance

Balancing is a really important part of positive representation. If you’re going to have an evil PoC character, have a good one; if you’re going to have an incredibly skilled disabled athelete, have an abled one, too; gay villain, gay hero; evil woman, good woman.

My favourite example of balancing from recent media is Hela and Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok (I finally got to watch it yesterday, and I’m still smitten with everything about it). Valkyrie is fully-fleshed out and morally questionable, but in the end she’s a good person; Hela, on the other hand, is evil - but her evilness has nothing to do with her being a woman, just as a disabled antagonist’s antagonism should be nothing to do with their disability. Instead, Hela wants the throne because she believes it is her birthright and is unable to see the error of her ways.

The key point in the balancing is that they’re both very powerful female figures in a male-dominated film franchise, and by having these two characters - both of whom are flawed, complex and flesh-out - positive representation has been given all round. The bad in Hela accentuates the good in Valkyrie, and at the end, the protag walks away on the good side while the antag gets annhilated in a big, fiery ball of smoke, leaving no doubt in the mind of the audience which of the two women is the better representation.

In Summary:

Avoid the whole “imperfect body = imperfect morals” crap

Thank you for reading, and I hope that this helps! If you have any questions about this, or want to discuss an aspect/make suggestions, don’t be afraid to drop an ask in my inbox. All writing advice is subject to opinion, and I’m open to other’s views on topics like these, as long as you are respectful and reasonable.

This has been another installment of my “On Writing” series: an ongoing series of long(ish) advice posts on all sorts of writing and craft-related topics. Stay tuned for more, and if you have questions on anything else in the meantime, drop me an ask! ʕ•ᴥ•ʔﾉ♡

i have a friend who is colorblind.

i have another friend with synesthesia where she sees colors when she listens to music

my colorbind friend has always wanted to see color and because my friend with synesthesia and my colorblind friend have the same taste in music, she describes color to my colorblind friend by relating it back to music

like “the sky is duke ellington’s satin doll”

and it is the purest thing this is what pure friendship is

Talk fantasy prosthetics to me.

An elf maiden dances on feet of living wood sung into shape, planted in soil and watered when she takes them off. Every year she plants the old ones and sings a new pair. (Incidentally, the pair of peach saplings from three years ago have produced an excellent crop- She makes preserves from them, and despite the inevitable jokes about “toe-jam”, they are appreciated.)

A dwarf king has a metal fist, all tiny gears and fine wires, kept wound by a mischievous mine-spirit bound to the spring as punishment- the more it struggles, the tighter the spring. 

An orc chieftaness is regularly asked for the story of how she earned the name Wyrmthrottler- she boasts of how she strangled the dragon that ate her arm, and had her shaman make a new arm from its bones, with its fangs as the fingers.

A necromancer simply re-attached his old leg bones- Sacrificing a few mice each day keeps it going.

A pirate captain lost her arm to a shark attack: a passing selkie saved her, and gave her tattoos of kraken blood. Now she has an arm made of salt-water, that grows and wanes with the tides, and swings a cutlass as well as the original. (She doesn’t sail as far these days though: she doesn’t want her wife to worry.)

A wandering swordsman was broken at the waist- his ancestral armour allows him to walk again, as long as he keeps it polished, and burns incense to the ancestors regularly.

A high priestess has an eye made from a crystal ball- to predict the future, all she has to do is wink.

A bard was struck deaf by illness- he struck a deal with the god of music. Now he wears hearing-trumpets made from his old pipes, and dedicates his every song to the god of music- the better he plays, the better his hearing. (It is said his music could make statues weep, and he can hear a mouse fart at 60 paces.)

A princess has the arm of a golem, enchanted clay with mystic words carved in- her music tutor despairs of how her harp playing has become even worse, but her calligraphy tutor is ecstatic over her handwriting.

A goblin pickpocket has an arm made of whatever he steals- no-one feels his fingers, and even if they did, they couldn’t find their possessions amongst all the rest.  

A witch has eyes made from shadow and starlight, given to her in a game with a demon. Nobody dares to ask what she wagered- they aren’t even sure she won.

A warg was born deaf and blind- his people learned of his power when the nearest birds started staring at them, and dogs pricked up their ears as he walked past.

*cracks fingers*

A Viking who lost his leg in a sea battle fashioned a peg leg from an oar for his longboat. Now a captain in his own right, he feels the motion of the water as though he were one with his vessel, and hasn’t been thrown to the deck by a wave since.

A girl from the Far East, who had her feet clubbed as a small child, in a family effort to increase her dowry, receives a mysterious pair of jade boots shaped like dragon claws. Blessed by the spirits of the wind, she is now a palace dancer by day, and a deadly martial artist by night!

A Native American was told by Coyote during his vision quest to pull out his teeth and replace them with lacquered wood studs. His village cast him out for being a fool. Now he lives in his own palace of wood with everything he needs, for all he has to do is ask the trees.

A young Dryad suffers a grievous injury when a logger cuts off one of her branches. Now the locals know to stay away from the tree with a skeletal arm.

A sailor befriends a small colony of mermaids, and they all talk about their poor sister, born without tail fins. One day, they bring her up to meet their new friend. It isn’t long before he gifts her a pair of intricately carved wooden ones, light and sturdy, sealed against the saltwater and painted like the waves.

A Lich takes pity on the crippled victims of a plague near his old home town. He dismantles his skeletal army for new limbs that will obey whomever he gives them to.

A Fire Elemental and a Water Elemental put aside their ancient differences and cooperate to power a walking iron lung for a kind and just ruler. His reign lasts for another three decades.

A girl raised on the streets of Persia to become a thief has her back broken by a runaway cart. A kind prince takes her in, and has his court wizards enchant magical silk clothes that do her moving for her. Now, she is quiet as a shadow at midnight, and boasts a larger collection of burgled trinkets than any other thief in the kingdom.

A Dwarven Shield-Maiden loses her arms in service of her king. In repayment, he enchants powerful stone golem arms for her. Now she travels the land, seeking a man who can defeat her in battle to marry. She has been single for many years.

A dying gnome father prays to his machine god to let him live long enough to meet his grandchildren. Bestowing upon him an enchanted heart made of the finest gold, the deity requests that he live long and take wonderful care of his large, happy family as repayment.

A pixie and her pet dragonfly are wounded in a hornet attack. Her wings are shredded, and her faithful friend is fatally poisoned. When she awakes in her own bed again, the fairy queen is smiling down on her, and she has the most elegant four wings of her kind.

A local puppet maker, famed for his realistic wooden faces, is kidnapped in the night by what the townsfolk call ‘evil spirits.’ Years later, they find him living like a king in a castle guarded by Dullahans, who all have beautifully carved wooden heads.

First post for so many things. First post to get an immediate follow. First post to inspire a response.

A fearless warrior who wades through battle as the berserkers of old, the secret of his ferocity is a balm given to him by a shaman making his skin as tough as steel, and just as insensate to the pain he lives through each day with fibromyalgia.

Each day a craftsman dons a pair of bejeweled kaleidoscopic spectacles. His sightless eyes see every detail of the delicate gems he cuts, careful to save every rough shaving for the fae who crafted the wonders that give him sight.  

The Inn’s common room is packed, every seat filled with a person held in rapt attention to the bard on stage. The haunting voice of the wind in the leaves of a forest, or rushing over the highest peaks spells out the tale of dashing courage, and purest love, brought to the audience from a miniature whirlwind on the dashing bard’s shoulder. The tiny wind elemental continues to translate for the speechless bard, so long as his lips remain playing through the delicate pipes that accompany every verse of the song.

Shadows glide over the burn scars of this barkeep, obscuring them or casting them in sinister relief as the barkeep prefers for the comfort or displeasure of patrons. So long as the lights remain low, and he offers a pint of his finest ale to the stars each night.

An odd village is known for the peculiar green splotches across their skin. Not all village members have them, but all of them keep windowsill planter boxes of exotic wildflowers, and are fiercely protective of the woods nearby. If it hadn’t been for the druid of those woods the village would have been nothing but the hovel of the would be lepers they had once been.

A sorcerer grins ruefully as she weaves the enchantment for another finger, pulling on the lightning from a nearby storm to replace the digit that was lost with softly crackling electricity. Satisfied she wiggles all her fingers, one of flame, and one of smooth ice beside the ones that still remain unharmed from her experiments.

A Master Dwarven smith forgoes her bellows after losing her hand to an apprentice smiths blunder. Replaced with one of formed magma, she merely has to will the heat forward and can shape her craft more more finely than she ever could with a bellows.

Disney could learn a thing or two from this ‘Ariel’ model who uses a wheelchair. Watch the full story here.

Goose was one of my first pets to photograph, he belongs to the Aldie Vet Clinic’s office assistant.  She adopted Goose when someone left him at the clinic because of his special needs.  She was able care for him and give him a new home.  When Goose arrived at my studio, his Momma let him down and he began sniffing around the space for about 10 minutes.  Once he had everything mapped out, we were ready to work.  It was really amazing to see him walk around the studio using his mental picture, and if you didn’t know any better, you would have no idea he couldn’t see!!!  In just 10 minutes, he had everything so perfectly figured out, that he could even walk up and jump up on the bed, knowing precisely where it was!!  He never bumped into anything and was very very very friendly.  He had a smile on his face the whole time, it was an amazing experience for me :)

Visit Suzanne’s website Paw Paw Pretty to see her wonderful pet photography.

(via Paw Paw Pretty Photography)

Kitty with no eyes doesn’t know he’s supposed to see. Kitty with no eyes is perfectly normal. 

Love this

Goose is perfectly normal.

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I just want The Winter Soldier to have a friend.

the importance of representation in media

I think I reblogged this before but…who cares.  Here it is again!

Can we bring this version of the show back? Please?

God, I can’t even with this show. Setting aside how AMAZING Peggy is in every freaking way, Agent Sousa here is a shining example of exactly what I want for disability representation, and this moment just fucking crystallized it for me. Between this and the angst/harassment from the able bodied agents earlier, Sousa’s attitude is so perfectly realistic and balanced in ways we so rarely see in media: he doesn’t hate his broken body & what his life is now with a disability, nor does he swan about like a happy-go-lucky piece of personified inspiration porn to show that the disabled ~can do anything!!!11~ He just… is. His life is different and more difficult because of his disability, but it’s still his life. People are bigoted and horrible to him because of it, but he can joke about it with those he considers friends. He’s only had a few little scenes so far, but in just these first two episodes the show has already managed to grasp some really important & really subtle realities of disabled life, and I am so freaking excited to watch where they take his character next.

In addition to the dialogue and the plotty stuff, note that his missing leg is not fetishized. Sure, they show him hobbling along, but the camera doesn’t linger, and we don’t take on an objectifying gaze (probably because our gaze is through Peggy, who has had enough objectifying gazes to last a lifetime, thank you very much). This is a delicate balance, particularly for a noir-ish piece (which tends toward pessimism, existential uncertainty, and fears of emasculation [and disability always equals emasculation because it implies a castration]). So far I’m impressed. DO NOT DISAPPOINT ME, MARVEL.

I also love that they chose to introduce him sitting down. Because it forced watchers to form an impression of him as an individual, as a person and then only after the viewer has seen this man in full conversation do they then ADD to that the understanding of the undercurrents by simply having him stand up.

writing trauma & survival: a Marvel primer

After several months of reading and writing in Marvel fandom, I decided that I wanted to write a primer on trauma from the perspective of being a trauma survivor and coming from a disability studies background. You might be interested in the stuff in here if you’re writing about Bucky post-CATWS, Sam’s counseling practice, or the experiences of any number of Marvel characters. I’m drawing on a variety of articles, zines, and books, all of which are available to read online or download.

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This seems really awesome. :D Funny, informative, and, from what I’ve learned, pretty on the money.

Can this please just be mandatory viewing material for people?  This is really basic shit.

(OMG THE DOOR THING.  THE DOOR THING.)

And the guide dog thing. Every time I go out with my blind friend, EVERY time, people constantly ask if they can pet her dog. Or they just go ahead and do it. Some people try to slip the dog food. It’s rare when people AREN’T ignorant about guide dog etiquette.

As my friend has explained to me, a guide dog is a blind person’s eyes. You wouldn’t cover a sighted person’s eyes when they’re walking. Why would you distract a blind person’s dog?

secondhand embarrassment KILLS ME but this was still v sweet!!! also i understand that sometimes “treat people you would wanted to be treated” can be hard, because it’s difficult to know what you’d prefer with a disability, since you haven’t experienced it! you may think having everyone pay extra attention to you and help you with everything sounds great, but that definitely might not be how you felt if you did actually had a disability. the best possible thing you can do in those situations is to just be natural, use common sense, and ask reasonable questions. there’s no need to bombard them (“what happened? can you see at all? do you have any feeling in your legs?”) since that can be overwhelming, nosy, and rude, but it will be better for both parties if you keep it simple (“do you need help with that?” “do you want me to get the door, or are you good?” <— reasonable, kind, respectful!). everybody deserves agency :)

Kenguru is a tiny electric hatchback for wheelchair users By Ellis Hamburger, theverge.com

Ken­gu­ru’s elec­tric car has no seats, and you drive it by putting your hands on motorcycle-style han­dle­bars. It’s built for wheel­chair users, who can roll right through the rear hatch of the car into the dri­ver’s area. The Austin-based…

THIS IS SO COOL.

This article is from last year, but I’m posting it now because today is the 2014 Day of Mourning for disabled people murdered by their parents and caretakers. And [massive trigger warning for violence and abuse] here is the list of the dead.

#headcanon that when stark restarts shield#and brings nick back in#he sets up nick’s computer access so it follows his good eye#and whatever pops does so in front of him#wherever he’s looking#and also takes into account any depth perception issues due to only having the one eye#and tony just does it because he sort of makes for easier user access because he imagines no one else gets as much done as he does#he does the same thing for bruce’s computer access at the tower#doing research and eliminating triggers and flashing things from the interface#and generally subtly eliminating stress-inducing material#i just really like my headcanon that tony knows his friends have disabilities and works to accommodate them#and also sometimes he sends pepper in to give bruce a hug#because bruce needs hugs#and pepper is very good at them

^This. Tony Stark would be the world’s best advocate of universal design. He’d be a star in prosthetics (isn’t that what the armor is?). He’d write software to help people with aphasia find their words. He’d make screen readers actual workable technology. 

Not because he feels sorry for us, not just because he identifies with us, but because it’s a problem that he can solve. And he can solve these things easily, and he just doesn’t get why the rest of the world doesn’t do it, too.

Can this be a real thing? Like an actual real computer? Because I need that. A lot. Specifically the one for people with one good eye. That moves with you and takes into account depth perception issues.