mellowwizardwhispers

[mellowwizardwhispers]

I have. The myelin sheath in the nerves to my legs has been degrading due to an inherited disease for over 2 decades, started using a cane at 19. My prognosis is random, but Mom and Grandpa lost all use of everything below the waist. I began using AFOs (ankle braces) in the last few years when enough fibers to my lower legs stopped getting enough signal for any workout to improve that area, and while hip muscles could force my legs to walk in a way that works, the chronic strain from that was a repetitive strain injury *from* *walking* (with my cane). We will ignore the mild RSI in my shoulders from the constant use of the cane. Or that, back when I wasn’t trapped in my house for a year and a half (chronic illnesses left me bedridden between being fully vaxxed and Delta surging locally) I had constant, severe shoulder pain from using my manual wheelchair to grocery shop (which was better than the pain before my grandmother bought me a cheap but appropriately sized… I am 4’11”… wheelchair. Before that I used Grandpa’s old one and my size came from the other side of the family)

Hey all! Recently gotten into a debate with someone about why it’s not a particularly lovely idea to make jokes about “those attention seekers” that use crutches or joint supports...

Can you do me a favour and like or reblog this if you have ever had rude comments made to you (as a disabled person) about your supports/mobility aids that has made you feel uncomfortable or self conscious?

Trying to prove a point that “well we only say it about the actual attention seekers!” absolutely does not work as you have no way of knowing why someone needs an aid.

[mellowwizardwhispers]

I have taken life drawing classes. I am also, ironically, faceblind. Meaning that when my brain cobbles together a set of parameters that will allow me to greet someone on the street, it’s their ponytail, combined with those scuffed white sneakers and a statistical probability they’ll be wearing a loose un-buttoned shirt over a tee shirt, weights determined by weather. And how they move. So the people that I stared at for several class periods like... only had 1 of those and when they moved I was probably getting my workspace set or reset so... yeah.

How do I draw portraits? When they teach drawing the face they teach how to copy angles by angling your pencil, and compare the length or width of this shadow to another point (traditionally base of nose). That’s supposed to eventually be how you check when something is wrong but you can’t see it in all the bits you’ve done. Luckily they didn’t ever say that, so despite not being able to call up a single face (I can recognize close family and dear friends, couldn’t describe any to a sketch artist even if I have drawn them repeatedly) I kept going. The left side of the subject’s face was a mystery, but I knew that one shadow was as far away from the eye as the left nostril was wide and that was the width of my index finger.

“you’re an art model does that mean you’re NAKED?” “yeah” “whoa….those lucky artists ;)”

…buddy.

[mellowwizardwhispers]

I luuuh this

[mellowwizardwhispers]

[ID: Tweet by Mick @Flakes1979 showing a child in a wheelchair on a sidewalk, unable to continue because a van has parked up on the sidewalk leaving only about a 1’ gap between the van and the hedge. Text reads “Society for disabled people summed up in one picture: not even thought of. 😟😡👨🏻‍🦽”

Facebook comment by Jake Gibson “Have you asked [them] to move? Are they parked there for work purposes would they be blocking the road? Should they of left more space yes. Do they realize they have done it probably not. Talking to people helps resolve issues like this. Just some thoughts.”] (His terrible punctuation has been corrected in this ID so screen readers can parse it.)

Yes because a disabled child who cannot even get down the sidewalk should have to go door to door up and down a street - doors he probably cannot even reach due to the fact the sidewalk is obstructed and a lot of houses have steps leading to the front door - just to get some random person to move their van so that child can get where they’re going without having to risk their life in the road. Something any abled person can do with no effort.

Also if you have never tried asking one of these assholes to move, 9/10 of these people will rain verbal abuse down on you and refuse to move their vehicle. Particularly in England which is known for its hate crimes against the disabled and has been cited multiple times by the UN for their subhuman treatment of their disabled population. And that’s if a disabled adult asks them to move their vehicle. Imagine expecting a child to suffer through this.

If this person gave a single flying fuck about disabled people - something they clearly do not any more than you do Jake the Ableist - they would not have parked their damn van on the sidewalk to begin with. But god forbid we not risk the lives of disabled people to make life marginally more convenient for any random abled who wants to park their van somewhere it doesn’t belong because “they might be working” and “it might block the road” otherwise.

Anyway fuck ableds and fuck Jake Gibson particularly. I hope you get run over by a bus.

[mellowwizardwhispers]

[Text of a tweet from Alex Haagaard (they/them), 23:21 27 Jan 2021:

Chronic pain is like malware.

You may not notice that you have it but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to fuck up your memory and slow your system down.]

[mellowwizardwhispers]

What were you by age 25? I dont trust wikipedia when I can ask the Man himself, and you're the only Big Known Person who feels Friend enough to ask this. Additional question, what should one be by 25 you think, in this era of "quick quick quick, be everything right now or else the world will leave you" ?

I was, aged 25, a broke and unknown freelance journalist with two small children, who had published three, perhaps four short stories. My first two books (non-fiction) had come out and vanished. I had just had the idea for The Graveyard Book but I knew I wasn’t a good enough writer to do it justice. I was hungry. I’d written two comics short stories to try and teach myself how to write comics, but wasn’t sure what to do next.

What should you be by 25? You should be storing up life experiences, getting fired from jobs, getting your heart broken, living on noodles, all of that. But I suspect the depths of worry and misery that one gets merely by existing currently will probably do just as well.

[mellowwizardwhispers]

Habits, Tics, Stims, Compulsions, and Behaviors

You are tapping your foot. Someone asks you to stop. You do. You feel no ill effects aside from maybe disappointment at having to stop. You tap your foot often. This is a habit.

You are tapping your foot, whether you want to or not. Someone asks you to stop. You can’t. If you try to it feels like holding in a sneeze and the pressure builds up. It might come out in a different, even less controllable action. This is a tic.

You are tapping your foot. Someone asks you to stop. You do, but immediately feel worse physically or emotionally. It was a way for you to express yourself and how you feel. You may feel pressure. This is a stim.

You are tapping your foot. Someone asks you to stop. You can’t, because if you do something bad will happen, possibly some specific bad thing. You know it’s irrational, but not doing it gives you anxiety. This is a compulsion.

You are tapping your foot. Someone asks you to stop. You can’t, because if you do this specific bad thing will happen. It is not irrational to you, although it is to others. This is an erratic/disorganized behavior.

[mellowwizardwhispers]

[mellowwizardwhispers]

I suffer from the second kind mentioned here. I felt a need to make this because even people I’ve known for years and who knows about my condition still get angry at me when I can’t hear what they say in noisy areas.

[mellowwizardwhispers]

“Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.”

— Terry Pratchett, “Let There Be Dragons” (A Slip of the Keyboard)

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Reminder that Stonewall wasn’t about marriage equality. Stonewall was about police brutality. It was about systemic abuse and subordination. Stonewall was spearheaded by black trans women. As we celebrate Pride 2020, within the context of the Black Lives Matter riots, it’s imperative that we remember that.

Riots in protest of police brutality are the reason that we have more rights today. Do not forget your roots.

You can’t celebrate Pride while simultaneously condemning the Black Lives Matter riots and protests that are happening right now. Know your history.

[mellowwizardwhispers]

so imagine you’re making ratatouille and you don’t like tomatoes. you don’t like the taste, the texture, the putting them in the water and the peeling them - eugh! so you say to yourself “lookit, this whole dish is nothing but vegetables, so what does it matter if i leave the tomatoes out?” a seemingly innocuous decision on the surface, but 2 hours or whatever later when you’re done cooking, you open the oven to find a complete mess! just a pot full of baked vegetables, none of them congealed or somehow unified. what happened to your beloved ratatouille? so you take to google and find that actually the tomatoes are an essential ingredient of ratatouille, as they form a “sauce” of a certain kind that makes the whole thing work. and so a seemingly innocent decision has destroyed the very foundation of the established order with disturbing ramifications towards the whole. in this essay i will examine how martin luther’s 95 theses lead to protestants being more boring than catholics

[mellowwizardwhispers]

I can listen to the ones that are people reading droning stories, or even the thesaurus startng at M, as I lie with my eyes closed and do nothing else. However, the fact that I need to turn on a podcast meant to put you to sleep, or PBSKids, or something else that is a bit of stimulation that requires no thought in order to go to sleep when tired may be evidence of ADHD. Harder to fall asleep while jiggling your leg. And that takes decades of “do the progressive relaxation stuff until you are still. Or maybe barely tensing and releasing your hand repetitively...”

Otherwise (as I don’t drive) I am gardening, cleaning, sewing, grooming the dog, knitting, cooking, playing non-word puzzle games (Sudoku or whatever), exercising... and it’s always sped up. The nonfiction texts are just sped up less

I have ADHD so I’m immune to podcast

[mellowwizardwhispers]

Lovecraft, I say as a degree carrying historian, gets a pass modern writers don’t. He was a product of a family rife with mental illness living and writing in the time that led up to the Holocaust. He died in 1937 when eugenics was still, well, a (really awful) idea that had not been tested.

I read him as an example of “what can humans be thinking that would allow them to forcibly sterilize the disabled and other minorities, see groups rounded up off the street with no outcry, fight interracial marriage....” because at least the “yeah they only think they are merely foreign or whatever but aliens are involved” makes it slightly less depressing than reading many others who express their superiority.

His father was committed to a mental institution for 5 years before he died, so the “I am from a genetic stock that is changing me” stories have another ring. Did his mother’s family speak of bad blood in the boy’s hearing? When he was removed from school due to “near breakdowns” as a teen what was listed as the cause? Did they blame his inferior father? His mother repeatedly claimed to a friend that he, as a child, was too ugly to be seen.

His science reading could not yet firmly argue the points he played with. Which are awful. I am not defending the work from that. I read him, as an adult who has studied history, psychology, sociology, genetics (I have an inherited physical disability, am Autistic, etc) and more, to look into the mind of someone whose mind was frozen at about the point eugenics became, well, actively killing people. His known work spans about 2 decades at a time when “what the heck were people thinking” is important.

There were, in short, less arguments one could give HP about why his references to de-evolved or less refined humans were bad than why no one chooses to be a servant class. I don’t recommend the books for the young/impressionable but he was playing with ideas firmly in the public mind, and seemed unsure of his own superiority. He was the one who found himself polluted. Probably thought his whiteness protected him from being more polluted, don’t get me wrong, but still.

hey do you think you could expand a bit on separating the art from the artist? clearly you’ve done it with jk rowling but what are your thoughts on it as a general idea?

okay, but you’re not going to like the answer.

here’s the truth: you can’t separate the art from the artist. not entirely. HP Lovecraft was an incredibly talented, but much more incredibly racist man. It would nice to say you don’t agree with his views but you can enjoy his works without that leaking in but…. well, I’m afraid that would be misunderstanding his books entirely.

Consider, for a second, that Lovecraft’s works were horror stories about extradimensional alien monsters having mutant children with humans, they were about invasions from distant monsters, they were about the purity of quaint European towns being tainted. Consider how this may have all been inflicted by the fact that he just simply despised anybody who wasn’t white. Consider how is opinions on “mixing the races” might fight into this; consider why being unable to maintain the “purity” of white Europe was the scariest thing of all to him.

This extends to Rowling too.

I would love to say we can just acknowledge that she is an awful, racist, antisemitic, transphobic person and then say “but at least her books are good,” because, well, they are, aren’t they? I would say so, for sure. But to suggest that one can separate her from them is…. ridiculous.

Consider why an antisemitic woman wrote about a species of goblins who live among us, but who for the most part keep to themselvesand are maybe a little bit oppressed by the institution, but also hold all the cards, all the money, run the banks.

Consider why a racist woman would write about a species of slaves who loved being enslaved, who enjoyed working for no pay, and cleaning up after humans, with the only small caveat of that they didn’t want to be beaten. Imagine that only the most radical of their species wanted to be free, and he still spent the rest of his life working for no pay and helping out a little white boy and his friends wherever he could. Consider why the only person in the story who thought they should be free, that they should have rights, was treated as an overzealous joke, who was acting against the wishes of those slaves who really LOVE being enslaved. Consider that Rowling went on to say that she kind of considers that girl to be black, now.

Consider why JK Rowling, an open and proud transphobe, wrote Rita Skeeter as having a large square jaw, thick “manly” hands, and dressing incredibly gaudily with the most obvious fake nails and fake teeth and fake hair and fake everything. Consider why a woman who tweets about how trans women are “foxes pretending to be hens to get in the hen house” might write this Rita Skeeter to then illegally transform her body in order to spy on children.

Harry Potter is full of Rowling’s bigotry, start to finish. Not even tangentially, like, “oh the goblins are bad, Rita Skeeter is bad, the house elves are bad, but most of it’s good!” because the deeper you dig and the longer you think the more you realise the entire story is based on her prejudices.

Harry Potter pretends to be an aracial story about found family, but if that were true, why are Harry’s distant ancestors important to who he is today even in the seventh book? Why does Harry have to live with his cousin and aunt and uncle? Because magic inherently prefers blood ties. Whilst Rowling was writing a story that seemed to say, “your heritage is not that important and doesn’t make you better than others” she was still writing a story about a boy who got all of his money through his bloodline, who was protected by living with his bloodline, no matter how evil, who was uniquely able to stop Voldemort because his bloodline passed down the invisibility cloak for generations and generations. Any step Harry takes he is compared to his perfect parents who were exactly like him — he looks just like his father, but he has his mother’s eyes, you know! — consider WHY a woman who is racist might’ve written a story like this. A story that on its surface, condemns a blood caste, but still in every step it takes, validates the idea that blood is thicker than water, and your geneological origin is what makes you special.

You can enjoy Harry Pottwr, of course you can. There are fantastic parts. I love a small group of teenagers deciding to become anarchies rebels and train to fight against fascism in secret. I love the murder mystery plots, I love how the series tells kids that it’s a good thing to be brave, and a good thing to fight injustice, and a good thing to challenge the government. But I cannot separate it from its author because it is such a product of its author. All of the structures of the world, the way things work in the universe, and drenched in Rowling’s beliefs, her bigotries. Of course they are: she made them.

Again. This doesn’t mean you cannot enjoy it. But I think we are past the day where we can pretend that disavowing a bigoted author is enough, and that that somehow separates the text from its bigotry. I think we are past the day where we can pretend that Harry Potter isn’t a deeply, inherently bigoted piece of media. Even the bits we love. I think we are beyond the day where we can truthfully pretend to separate it from her, because she is present through all of it. We MUST recognise its flaws. We MUST admit that she is in every part of it.

[mellowwizardwhispers]

rick riordan off the shits

[mellowwizardwhispers]

I’m 4’11” and 115 lbs, and have been the first for over 2 decades. My disability is caused by a dominant gene that my late grandfather had and my 74 year old mother has. My grandma bought me my wheelchair. I had used a hand-me-down, first Mom’s first and then Grandpa’s next to last. But my size comes from Dad’s side of the family. (Mom had childhood onset, her dad middle aged. They had different misdiagnoses, indeed Grandpa never heard the correct one).

Everyone in the close connection understood that the new chair was going to make things easier when I am out (I use a cane at home). I didn’t know how much the smaller scaled chair would ease my arm load because I had never been able to use one. But it being lighter was clear.

I’ve had it nearly 10 years now, and Grandma died a while back. Other than not being able to go anywhere I’d use it, it’s still freedom to me.

Disabled person: “I got a new wheelchair! Woot!”

Another disabled person: “YASS! Freedom!!!”

Abled person: “That just makes me so sad.”