This comic was a frikking epic to put together. Like my FB page for more! And share it to your FB buddies!

Exactly man….

[image: image: a comic with taking the format of a broken sentence with people underneath with speech bubbles, etc. First part says “desperate people.” 

One person, has “only 6 months no newstart,” another has “high student debt,” another has “arts program cut,” another has “high med fees,” and another has “40 job apps per month.” 

The next part says “make ideal workers.” Under that is a boss saying to them all, in order: “work for cheap?” “for pizza?” “down a mine?” “far for family?” and “sell us your land if we create jobs?” They all despondently reply “okay.” 

The next part says “and distracted citizens.” They all say in order: “climate change? I gotta pay my rent!” “Disability rights? I gotta find a job!” “Land rights? I need to feed my kids!” “Refugees? I’ve got medical bills to pay!” “Long-term problems? I got short-term problems!” 

Two bosses are smoking cigarettes. One says: “shame how tough this budget is, Joe.” The other replies: “yeah…shame…”]

What Is Selective Mutism?

selective mutism can definitely be a result of trauma or abuse though ???

If the person’s mutism is brought about as a result of abuse or trauma it is usually classed as elective mutism which is a slightly different condition :)

I thought elective mutism was just the former name for selective mutism?

It appears both you and the OP are correct. Elective mutism is no longer recognized by most clinicians. When it was recognized, it was defined as the refusal to speak in all situations rather than the inability to speak in some situations. That’s a pretty dangerous distinction, if you ask me.

Image description: woven background with faded spirograph Text: The murder of an Autistic child, of any child, will never be about lack of services. Pretending it is may be easier to swallow than acknowledging what it is really about. Each and every time. Lack of love. Lack of humanity. Lack of respect for the sanctity of all human life. There is ALWAYS another choice. And lack of services does not override the individual responsibility to make ANY other choice.

Not only that (and I was the first to ever say this) but it’s holding us hostage.  It’s pointing a gun to the head of every autistic person, especially those of us who get or need services, and saying “We will kill them if you don’t give them services.”

Additionally, according to Dick Sobsey Ed.D.„ an expert on the abuse and murder of people with developmental disabilities, they did some research and found that when murders of disabled people are portrayed in the media as understandable for any reason, then the murder rate goes up.  Period.  That in itself should tell anyone who doesn’t want children murdered, that they’d better find some other way to press for services.  Unless they don’t care if some children (and adults, because it happens to us too, including those of us already getting services, whose parents can’t bear the thought of us living away from them) get murdered along the way, in which case… seems fine to them anyway, if not those of us who might actually get murdered or lose friends to murder or care that people get murdered.

This Man With Severe Cerebral Palsy Created Mind-Blowing Art Using Just A Typewriter

Last year, 22-time Emmy award-winning reporter John Stofflet posted this news video he created for KING-TV in 2004, featuring Paul Smith and his artistic talents.

See the full video to see more of Smith’s artworks and to learn more about his inspiring story go here. 

The Tokyo Protest Post has Revived...

Very cool. Thanks, everyone. The main updates are as follows: -Protests are still being held, especially in Tokyo. -For a couple of protests they found a guy with a bulldozer to head the march which was nuts and awesome (“bulldoze the facists!” I believe was the purpose) -Japanese troops are now training for ACTIVE combat with US servicemen (they always did training before with US military but always for support tactics and search and rescue type stuff- never active combat). -Shinzo Abe copypasted his Hiroshima bombing memorial speech from *last year’s speech* and basically only changed the date which really hurt his image and gave the protestors more ammo to use. -Shinzo Abe decided to bring a handful of women into his cabinet but a couple of them had early been associated with the Japanese Neo-Nazi Party (I know- go figure) and had taken pictures with their leader which has caused a lot of backlash- protestors are now also officially combatting Japan-wide hate speech and are using this instance as a platform talking point, lamenting the fact that Abe basically back-handed those who wanted a more gender-equal government by hiring shady people for the jobs. -Protestors have been met with counter-protestors, i.e. the neo-nazi supporters or people who hate Koreans living in the country, etc., and the protestors have taken photos of the police protecting those people while hindering the anti-war/hate speech supporters. Basically, in true fashion, while the voices have been loud, I’m not sure it’s had a substantial effect on Japanese politics so far. HOWEVER, more and more people are TALKING about the consequences of active warfare for Japan- especially in the school system since the idea is that it is the children who will have to fight for Abe’s ambitions and this has struck a chord. That is at least one bit of progress. Thanks again to everyone for passing the post around, as all that stuff is still being totally ignored by the media here in Japan. (original post about the protests can be found here.)

A week or so ago I was reading a journal article* about a study on autistic adults’ “quality of life” that pointed out that earlier such studies made the mistake of assuming that autistic people wanted the same things as non-autistic people, and that it was better measure of “quality of life” to take into account whether or not autistic people were satisfied with their lives, regardless of whether their lives fit into some kind of “normal” pattern. I remember thinking, “Yeah, good point” — but as I continued to read, it started to occur to me, “But wait a minute, just because someone isn’t satisfied with their life (and who the hell is even satisfied with their life, anyway), that doesn’t mean their life has low quality.” I thought about my own life. I’m generally unsatisfied. I’m generally not a happy person. But do I think my life has low quality? No! Even if my life were a miserable tragedy-fest — which it isn’t — I still think I’d be bothered by the suggestion that I had low quality of life.

I don’t think life has some kind of specific “quality” that can be measured. And I think it’s just such a disgusting, disturbing concept, “quality of life.” It’s also a dangerous concept. People use “but they have such a low quality of life!” as reason for why a disabled person shouldn’t have access to life-saving surgery. Even if a disabled person was mostly unhappy and unsatisfied with their life, even if they hated their disability — the mere fact that they would *want* to have life-saving surgery should tell you that they think their life is worth living. So let’s just get away from this “quality of life” crap, shall we?

*Didn’t save the link to it, sorry.

Yes to all of that.

And it’s not like happiness is necessarily the thing we should all be striving for anyway.

I would rather strive for things like helping other people.  I am a fairly happy person at this point in my life, and that is a nice thing.  And being too unhappy is a bad thing, obviously to be avoided where possible.  But I’m not sure happiness should be how we are measuring lives.

Also a friend of mine said that if you actually want to be truly happy, you actually have to stop caring about your own individual happiness and start caring more about others.  Which sounds paradoxical, but I bet it’s true.  But caring more about others seems like a good idea in general.  Not to the point that you harm yourself (except in specific situations), but just because it’s a good thing to do.

Apparently, fat is so scary it would be better I die of this cancer

I’ve just gotten back from my first visit with an oncologist, Dr. Cheung  Wong (who is, regrettably, the head of gynecological oncology at Fletcher Allen, a position for which he is unqualified by reason of having his head up his ass).

I have first stage endometrial cancer. I know standard operating procedure for it is a radical hysterectomy, which is usually the only treatment needed. I’m, overall, a very healthy 57 year old. My blood pressure was, today, a typical 110/70. My arteries were imaged a few months ago, and to quote the doctor, were “wide open”. After 1 minor stroke probably connected to a basilar migraine I wore a heart monitor for a month, with no abnormal readings whatsoever. My A1c tests are great, ditto for an echocardiogram I’ve had, and the same goes for the stress test I have a few years ago. I’m good to go for surgery, right?

Ahh, but for two things: I’m in a wheelchair, and I’m a fat woman.

The moment Dr. Wong walked in the room, he expressed great interest in my wheelchair. No, not whether the model made crisp turns and handle well on rough pavement — whether I could actually get out of the wheelchair. I can, a litlle bit — I have arthritis, not paralysis — and I explained what I was able to do, all the while puzzling over what any of this had to do with cancer treatment. He appeared unsatisfied with my response when I said I could walk the length of the exam room (with a lot of pain), but not take a walk up and down the hallways.

Noting again to myself that he was an oncologist, not a gym teacher, I still wondered what the fuck any of this had to do with endometrial cancer.

Then he got to the matter at hand. There were four possible approaches, he said. Doing nothing, which he didn’t recommend (good, because I have plans for a nice long life). Radiation treatment, which he said could be almost as effective as surgery (I don’t do “almost”, especially not since I’ve been severely overexposed to radiation as a kid and as a result have twice the risk for things like ovarian cancer, which would get in the way of my plans for a nice long life), and then there was surgery, which —- and now we cut to the chase

he did not recommend because, being as I was fat, it was just too risky.

(Like, um, leaving cancer in place isn’t a bit of a risk, too???)

He didn’t add “and you’re a gimp to boot” though I now had no problem filling in that part. I’ve been asked fewer questions about my mobility  by rheumatologists and orthopedists than I was this afternoon by him.So I asked him what this putative risks were. My heart, he explained. And one of the meds I was taking. Except for the point that my heart has been tested every which way and comes out stronger than most 57 year old hearts, and the part about how I can just discontinue the med a week before surgery just like everyone else who takes that med does before surgery, I’m totally buying this pathetic excuse for reason.

Then we get into the, umm, fat of the argument. It’s the fat. The tissue could compress the lungs in the laparascopic surgery position (this may make some sense here) and he didn’t even know if he had surgical instruments long enough to perform the surgery lapascopically. And — with a pause suggesting he thought this should worry me greatly — if they have  to do it conventionally, I’d have a scar lengthwise across my abdomen.

Yes, I, a person with a neck to ass scar on my flip side, should be so frightened by a surgical scar on the abdomen that I’d prefer instead to take my chances with second and third line cancer treatments over the one method that almost always yields a cure.

That, or perhaps he was really saying that disabled people and fat people don’t deserve equality of health care. And especially not a disabled fat woman (three strikes and your out, or dead, or something like that). Somewhere in this conversation he even used the phrase “quality of life” which disability activists have long understood to mean “excuses to arrange your death.”

The National Cancer Institute has run a cohort study of us twisted sisters (girls/women with severe scoliosis) who were exposed to the kinds of x-rays I had had as a child, at the very time the ovaries and breasts are beginning to develop. It turns out we have — unsurprisingly — a lot more reproductive cancers. Zapping my ovaries with yet more radiation presents an actual hazard of ovarian cancer, a cancer that is difficult to detect and seriously deadly. He of course thought it would be a very good idea indeed if, instead of surgery, I had radiation treatment.

He tried to tell me that in this great and wondrous modern age, they could carefully target the radiation. And I’m sure if I hadn’t known that this great and wondrous age was occurring in the very same universe that I learned about when I majored in physics and mathematics, I might believe that. But, being as I did major in physics and mathematics, and I was quite sure that this great and wondrous age had no mechanism to create a perfect classical vaccuum between the radiation and my uterus, I knew that any radiation beam in the real world does not have a neat and clean edge. When radiation hits air molecules, stray parts of me, etc, probably a stray bit of the quantum foam every now and then, and even the table I would lie on, there is  scattering. Think of what a flashlight beam looks like, and you understand the problem (this isn’t an analogy, by the way: it’s more like precisely the same behavior, but at lower energies). The ovaries next door would always pick up a radiation dose — the kind of “incidental” dose that, were it to have been recorded on my film badge back in my cyclotron days, would have had me immediately sent to a doctor by my employer, and banned from radiation work for a good long while.

Think about it: if scattered radiation wasn’t an issue, why do radiotherapists wear (and hide behind) shielding?

I agreed nonetheless to talk to the radiotherapy department (though I did not agree to forget the laws of nature in this universe). I also agreed to talk to anesthesiology (maybe I’m a glutton for hearing how a relatively routine hysterectomy to end a cancer is deadly to me, but how, if I were asking for the considerably more risky and invasive gastric bypass surgery, I’d be good to go —though it’s possible the anesthesiologist has more sense than that). And I have a referral for a second opinion at Dartmouth Hitchcock, which is a much better hospital than Fletcher Allen, though regrettably it is still a part of the same social universe that generates disability and fat hatred.

(P.S. — any assholes who think that now is an appropriate time to tell me that my problem is that I’m lazy and undisciplined and ugly and need to lose weight, because, of course, you are very concerned about the health I apparently am destroying by eating ten big macs a day*, I want to know why your deep concern for me, a stranger, does not extend to my becoming cancer-free?)

(* My neighbor reads this. That snark was for her. She knows what I eat, and it sure ain’t ten big macs a day. Or year. Or decade. Fat haters who don’t know anything at all about me always know so very much about how to improve my life by doing exactly what I’ve already been doing for years without weight loss.

Question: what is the first thing you run into when you walk into my kitchen? Answer: My short barbell.

So shove it up yours in advance, bigots).

This is life and death, people.  Next I’ll reblog contact information for the hospital.

parenting tip: talk to your kids about mental illness. tell them they might have a hard time. tell them they can ask for therapy and medication. tell them they aren’t alone. tell them if your family has a history of mental illnesses and which ones. just fucking talk to your kids and be there for them.

This would push through so many barriers

Tell your kids about disability, too. My dad KNOWS about mental illness. He went online and “educated” himself with shit from like Nami.org, before I was officially diagnosed. He has not ever accepted that I’m disabled and his denial has endangered my life.

Also teach your kids about choice.

Teach your kids that the psychiatric system and programs coming from it can be dangerous, especially if you’re severely mentally ill and not getting better from the treatments.

(i.e. you’re not what I used to call the “three-day depressives”, who never saw how bad the institution was because they’d come in for three days, get put on medication, feel fine, leave, and never come back, and would talk about how wonderful the place was while I was tied down in the next room being tortured for staff amusement)

I was severely psychiatrically disabled (although I still maintain there was no diagnosis that fit what was going on, so I just got a lot of random diagnoses ranging from psychosis to adjustment disorder… but I was definitely not one of the more valued types of mentally ill people) and I got treated like crap by a system that couldn’t fix me.  They blamed me.  It was awful.

And they need to know that the system is not their last hope.

I know someone who almost decided to do a school shooting, in the seventies.  Why?  She’d been horribly depressed, suicidal even.  They put her in a psych ward where she was tortured to the point she still has the physical scars on her body.  (Which is not about bad apples, it’s about an environment that creates abusive people even if they weren’t to begin with.)  And to her, the psych ward had been presented as her last resort, the last hope that she had of leading a happier life.  When that didn’t work, she was willing to commit suicide and take out as many people that she blamed for her problems (bullies, teachers, etc.) as she could.  Luckily she was stopped by her conscience in time, but not until after she’d acquired a gun and made plans.

And that is just one of the most extreme examples of what I’ve heard happening when the psych system is presented as your only hope.  In my case, I had no homocidal tendencies, but I did try to kill myself many times because the psych system didn’t remove my urge to kill myself no matter how much therapy I got, how many meds I got, it just got worse.

Kids need to be taught there are other choices.  They don’t have to take meds.  They don’t have to see a shrink.  They don’t have to go inpatient.  There are risks to doing all of those things, and kids need to be taught that, too.  They don’t need to be taught the shiny utopian view of the psych system with magical powers to make us all better.

And I hate NAMI with a passion, and have ever since I first heard of it.  It was my first experience with an organization about a group of people, run only by family members and professionals of that group of people, and treating actual psychiatrically disabled people like shit when they weren’t tokenizing them in some way.  I know some psychiatrically disabled people who work within NAMI trying to change it, and I wish them luck, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope.  I really hate NAMI.  NAMI is not a good source of information about anything at all.

And they think calling them “brain disorders” or “neurobiological disorders” or “NBDs” for short, will actually fix anything.  Ha!  I remember NAMI touting a book called  ”Don’t Call Me Crazy”.  One of my favorite books is “Call Me Crazy” by Irit Shimrat, who is (by the labels of the psych system) schizophrenic and has been very active in the mad pride and ex-patient movement.  And she’s one of the people who uses crazy, mad, lunatic, and insane as descriptions of her experience because she feels they capture them better than a clinical label.  Her book was amazing to me when I read it.

Teach your kid self-advocacy; it's not activism, it's standing up for yourself and your choices. That's why on my website I insist on not calling myself a self-advocate. Self-advocacy is personal, it's what I do for myself, and honestly, sometimes I gotta drag in a case worker or a friend. Sometimes my friends are advocates for each other. But we all know when I say "no" and "yes", that's what goes. If a shrink starts to argue with me about my diagnosis, which is annoying as hell cause I got inch-thick paperwork and I really don't think I have to be bringing it each time I get a new shrink to prove my dx; but if they argue with me, they don't get a second visit, never mind if I don't just walk out on them. Well, that's assuming I'll see a shrink. I haven't seen one in about four years.

do purple and green go together?? ah i don’t give a shit

they do now

Literally my math teacher abandoned today’s lesson because some kid brought his kitten to school i don’t even know

Coincidentally, the cat’s unintentional dissolution of the math learning environment can be modeled by a graph!

cat owners are only somewhat immune to their own cats on that graph... only somewhat....

i’ve gotten more crap for my autism than for being queer. more bullying, more shit talk, more exclusion, more dehumanizing — and WAY more trouble with employment and housing. ableism is a bigger problem than homophobia. surprising? that’s because people aren’t talking about it!

violence against disabled people is unbelievably common. i don’t want to start comparing it numerically with violence against women and racial minorities, because that might imply i don’t take the latter seriously. don’t get me wrong; those hate crimes are super awful and we need to make them stop. however i need to say this: my dash was 80% ferguson for at least a week after mike brown was shot, but i see at least a couple stories every month about autistics being murdered by their caregivers, by their schools, by police who interpereted a nonverbal shutdown as resistance, and these stories seldom get more than 100 notes.

please, folks, i know you care about people, i know you care about me, and i know you care about justice. please pay more attention to ableism. this is a huge civil rights issue.

i don’t mean the dumb sjw thing where people star out words like ‘crazy’ or call ‘ablesim’ on shit that is not ableism, btw. i definitely don’t mean the thing where my reclamatory usage of ‘sperglord’ and the like sets the whole parrot tree screeching. i mean stuff like sheltered workshops where it’s legal to pay disabled people less than a dollar an hour. i mean accessibility, i mean acceptance. i mean the thing where the discussion about autsim is led by a hate group that wants to eliminate our existence. i mean stop the violence.

In addition to the many autistic people who have been murdered by caregivers (and then, even scarier, the general public says that’s so sad, they might have done the same thing if they were that poor, overworked mother…), there is the pervasive problem of disabled people being discriminated against by the medical establishment.

Doctors routinely underestimate quality of life of disabled people and advise them—on the basis of inconvenience, not on the basis of any physical pain they might be feeling—to end their lives (see http://www.notdeadyet.org/ for an advocacy group devoted to protecting disabled people from coercive assisted suicide, such as doctors in some jurisdictions being allowed to suggest suicide without having to mention the existence of accommodations for a person’s conditions). In the US, in places where this is legal at all the doctor has to make a good-faith prediction that the person would die within six months anyway, but there are countries in Europe that are less restrictive in this regard, or that have no such restriction at all.  (Belgium allows euthanasia even in non-terminal patients, and euthanasia—as opposed to assisted suicide—doesn’t even require the patient to be conscious or otherwise capable of giving consent as long as they have consented at some point in the past. Keep in mind that most people who want to attempt suicide change their mind at the slightest hindrance, intervention, or change in situation or mood—and that many people, upon becoming suddenly disabled, are briefly suicidal but almost all of them get over it after a month or two when they’ve had time to adjust—so if this sort of thing is to be even remotely ethical it has to involve consent at the moment before death.)  Furthermore, there are tons of cases of families and friends pressuring disabled people into suicide.  This can range from them saying they’d kill themselves if they were in the disabled person’s situation (despite there being several research studies saying that abled people, including doctors, vastly underestimate quality of life of disabled people, compared to what the disabled people themselves report feeling) to outright telling the disabled person they’re a burden.

 The medical establishment also routinely obstructs treatment of disabled people.  If a person is disabled they are unlikely to be able to get an organ transplant, for example—even if it’s for an unrelated condition—because they are considered low priority patients (see, e.g., http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/30/health/disabled-transplants/ especially the parts about studies of hospitals in general).  And in some cases doctors will outright refuse even more basic medical care for disabled people, who then have to actually sue to get the life-saving care they need.  The doctors base this, again, on their assessment of the disabled person’s quality of life, not on the disabled person’s own assessment.

I can’t add everything I’d want to say right now because I’m exhausted and stressed.  But I deal with multiple oppressions on a regular basis, and it always amazes me that people who are otherwise committed to social justice always seem to rank ableism so low on the scale of Bad Things.  Because ableism is the thing that keeps almost killing me.  Not that other isms haven’t almost killed me, but ableism is the one that does so with the most consistency and forcefulness.  And yet I’ve actually heard people say things like “Does ableism even really count?” and “Disabled people are just trying to jump on the oppression bandwagon and imitate people of color and act like they’re all oppressed and stuff, but they’re really not” and other things along those lines.  Not to mention the thing where ableism is tacked on as an afterthought, and it’s always a list of words not to say.  As if it’s the words that are trying to kill us.

I deal, regularly, with ableism, homophobia, transphobia, sizeism, classism, and sexism.  And while all of these things can be literally deadly serious, somehow it’s ableism and classism that are the most dangerous to me on an ongoing basis.  (And if I were a person of color I’m certain racism would be up there with them.)  And that’s something I hear pretty consistently from people who face multiple oppressions, that even when ableism isn’t the worst, it’s always up there among the worst on a personal level for that person.  I will never say that any particular oppression is always the worst for everyone, because that’s not how oppression works.  Each person experiences oppression differently because of where we’re situated in society.  But pretty consistently ableism, classism, and racism come up as the worst for an awful lot of people dealing with multiple oppressions, and yet somehow people who don’t actually have to face significant ableism, always forget ableism, or even belittle it.

I imagine there are disabled people who don’t face super-significant ableism, but when we do… it’s bad.  Like really bad.  Like I don’t know why I’m still alive, bad.  I literally don’t know how I’ve survived the ableism that’s been thrown at me throughout my life, I’ve had so many opportunities to die of it and I have managed to live so far.  But to some people, ableism is just a list of words not to say.  And that astounds me.  

For me, ableism is being told I shouldn’t get a feeding tube because it’d be better to die of aspiration pneumonia or starvation than it would be to eat through a plastic tube in my side.  Ableism is having people not work as hard to save my life as they would a nondisabled cis person with money (and yes I think ableism, classism, and transphobia tend to meld together in my life at times, they’re not neatly separable… being poor and somewhat gender-ambiguous-looking and developmentally disabled meld together in people’s minds to make me into a thing, an unperson).  Ableism is being so weak that I’m lying in my own shit while people argue about whether I should be “allowed” to shit the bed, because if you let a developmentally disabled person shit the bed they might not ever want to use a toilet again — while nobody worried at all about why I was suddenly shitting the bed after years of never ever doing so, and nobody thought maybe I belonged in the ICU, or anything like that.  (My doctor today says I absolutely belonged in the ICU.  Unfortunately he wasn’t on duty when this was happening.)

(Yes, I bring that story up a lot, because I still have trouble believing that in the middle of an adrenal and/or myasthenia crisis, while I was lying in the hospital with pneumonia and too weak to roll myself over in bed, they were most worried about whether I’d get used to not using toilets.  Oh and also they were massively bothered by the sound of me throwing up continuously for hours, they really didn’t like it, so they evacuated my room and shut the door and stopped answering my call bell so they wouldn’t have to hear it.  Or see me getting so weak from using those muscles over and over that I was starting to have trouble breathing.  Luckily I had a visitor, a friend’s caregiver, who had been a patient in that hospital before, whose response to all that was to throw my door open every time they shut it, and scream at the top of her lungs, “If you kill her, I will have every lawyer in town in this place!”  Suddenly I got transferred to another ward and got a lot better care.  Unfortunately I don’t remember a lot of details because by that point I was severely delirious.  All I remember was her yelling that — and then my body disintegrating and flying out the window, or something else that didn’t really happen.  I heard the full story much later.)

For me, ableism is every day, life and death, without fail.  It’s not some kind of afterthought tacked onto the “real” oppressions.  And it’s not a list of words.  I mean yes there are ableist words, but there are classist words too, and yet people seem to be fully capable of comprehending that classism isn’t just a list of slurs and quasi-slurs and not-even-slurs-at-all.  They don’t seem capable of comprehending that about ableism so easily. 

Another big thing that no one ever points out, we can’t fight back either.

Disabled people as a group are defined by inability to do something, usually something decently important for functioning. A lot of us have issues with movement so we can’t really march, we have issues communicating to it’s hard to spread our messages, we have a harder time handling stress so arguments can lead to making ourselves sick, we have issues with stamina so we wear ourselves down quick.

Generally on tumblr people you see most groups want allies out of their movement entirely, but even if the reasons why are obvious, we do not always have the luxury of speaking for ourselves. We need the help.

Then the allies who are speaking for disabled people a lot of the time are doctors, caregivers, parents etc. who often have selfish motivations that can be more harm than good for us, and when bad allies talk over us we often get drowned out.

Activism is very hard. Both physically and mentally and when you are already literally going in with a handicap it’s even harder. But I rarely see people outside the immediate bubble of being disabled or close to people who are give a fuck.

People with chronic health problems should have a “get out of minor seasonal illnesses free” card.

Nobody tells Harry anything by loleia

Dude, I would have so much rage if I were Harry. People call him a little shit and stuff, but really—look at all the crap that happens cos people wont just TELL him shit. Like ohhh it’s part of the heroe’s journey for you to work it out on your own.

Temporary tattoos could make electronic telepathy and telekinesis possible

Temporary electronic tattoos could soon help people fly drones with only thought and talk seemingly telepathically without speech over smartphones, researchers say. Electrical engineer Todd Coleman at the University of California at San Diego is devising noninvasive means of controlling machines via the mind, techniques virtually everyone might be able to use.

Commanding machines using the brain is no longer the stuff of science fiction. In recent years, brain implants have enabled people to control robotics using only their minds, raising the prospect that one day patients could overcome disabilities using bionic limbs or mechanical exoskeletons.

But brain implants are invasive technologies, probably of use only to people in medical need of them. Instead, Coleman and his team are developing wireless flexible electronics one can apply on the forehead just like temporary tattoos to read brain activity.

"We want something we can use in the coffee shop to have fun," Coleman says.

The devices are less than 100 microns thick, the average diameter of a human hair. They consist of circuitry embedded in a layer or rubbery polyester that allow them to stretch, bend and wrinkle. They are barely visible when placed on skin, making them easy to conceal from others.

The devices can detect electrical signals linked with brain waves, and incorporate solar cells for power and antennas that allow them to communicate wirelessly or receive energy. Other elements can be added as well, like thermal sensors to monitor skin temperature and light detectors to analyze blood oxygen levels.

Using the electronic tattoos, Coleman and his colleagues have found they can detect brain signals reflective of mental states, such as recognition of familiar images. One application they are now pursuing is monitoring premature babies to detect the onset of seizures that can lead to epilepsy or brain development problems. The devices are now being commercialized for use as consumer, digital health, medical device, and industrial and defense products by startup MC10 in Cambridge, Mass.

READ MORE

SO READY FOR SOME SICK SCIFI LIKE THIS

youneedacat for practical reasons 

all would-be gallifreyans (why?! would we want to be, they are so screwed up, like more than humans! which is a lot) on my wall…

"I’m sick of how bisexuality is erased in LGBT spaces. I get really nervous before any LGBT event, especially Pride. I feel incredibly sad and hopeless when gay and lesbian people call me insulting names. If gay and lesbian people don’t understand me – Continue reading Prejudice at Pride at Empathize This

This just punched me in the heart.

It’s hard to admit that this happens in our community, but it definitely does. Speaking out is the only way it will stop. 

i just don’t think i’ve ever seen so many happy drunk monks before??

Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere, p. 193-194

This is part of my collection of quotes about what happens when autistic people get together and speak our own languages with each other.  I have a binder somewhere with lots more of these quotes.  I wish I knew where they all were, because this is something very important.  Things like this happen all the time when autistic people — who click well with each other — meet for the first time and magic happens.

Also I played all these games when I was a kid too, and didn’t know they were an autistic thing.

**hushed whisper** buttons