pointytilly

[pointytilly]

When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.

But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.

As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.

The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork.  In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.

That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.

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A brief comparison, found cleaning out my drafts:

Narcissists are the patent trolls of emotional response.

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Mid-fic notes from things I never finished

SHe trusts him not to steal biscuits...but not to not murder people. Nice.

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Running in the 90s But It Keeps Getting Faster On Drums! by The8BitDrummer on YouTube

This is probably one of my favorite covers/versions/playing-along-withs of a song ever. Both for the kazoo in the slow bits, and the I MAY HAVE MADE A MISTAKE–

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[Google search results beginning with: "Including results for translate. Search only for trans?"]

Today’s Gender of the day is: Search only for Trans

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[Viridi screenshot in the apartment environment with the little snail scooting past a huge red Aeonium, among other things succulent]

go snail friend

go

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Discussion of a super-mysterious art thief in GetBackers. They're shown as a shadowy figure with floating paintings behind them, and described with "His real name, his nationality, his gender? Everything about him is a mystery."

Translations, this is why singular they is your friend. USE THE SINGULAR THEY.

(Mystery art thief turned out to be a lady, too.)

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[Scared guy, working late alone in the office and very tired, agitatedly pours himself a cup of coffee. He’s been hearing and seeing happenings perhaps ghostly in his perhaps-story perhaps-reenactment segment of “Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction”, and is currently trying to convince himself that “Coffee, coffee, [I] just need some coffee”. Meanwhile, the captions have rendered “some coffee” as “seem coffee”.]

—accurate descriptions of my brain state, typo in the captions and all.

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[An Amazon listing for one of those little stone animals one finds in gift shops and the like, in this case an opalite cat. The details below the image include a mention to “check the descriptions for actual size before bidding” (presumably, the seller reused something from an eBay listing), but more bafflingly, the first descriptive bullet point consists of simply “NO”.]

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chronic pain

bad days: *can’t do anything but stare blankly at netflix and be aware of how bad my pain is

good days: I have to do all the dishes at once!! chronic pain who? wow life is GREAT 

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[A survey attention/are you a human check-type question, asking me to finish the line "Twinkle, twinkle, little...". The options are blender, cell phone, graph, pen, and star.]

Blender. It's definitely blender.

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Ruminations are not descriptions of reality, but rather shadow creatures which crawl into the empty shells of unpleasant feelings

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[Some large, green, and wheeled luggage given away as a prize on an old game show. The (often, sigh) insufficiently-edited captions, clearly not cleaned up from an initial transcription by someone allowed to check them against the video to help with context or word selection, describe it with:

“And from Ventura, a jumbo wheeled (indistinct)”]

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[Screenshot of a prompt/notice in the game Cats and Sharks, showing a red bicolor cat--one of the mostly white sorts of bicolors where most of the color is on the head and tail. It's wearing a suitably bright red collar, but more adorably one of its red fur patches is heart-shaped. Aaah.]

The game informs the reader: “A Heart pattern cat has become your friend.”]

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I don’t want to be treated just like everyone else.

I want to be given the respect and the opportunities everyone else is given, even when that means treating me differently.

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[Scully says: Mulder, no work. You have to go back to bed.] I can't remember what episode or even context this is from; it's really old, from now-dead first tablet, which explains part of the screen having been covered by things really old Android bar thing that I cropped out. But it needed posting anyway, because.

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[Root Explorer hiccuping in some odd fashion and displaying all my opened tabs as the root folder. ROOT ROOT ROOT ROOT ROOT etc.] ...Root Explorer, you okay there?