#which is the whole *thing* that Wikipedia *is*

[cripplecharacters]

Hey! Thanks so much for all your work — seeing your answers has helped me be a lot more conscious of ableism in media. I have a question about a character I’m writing.

The story is a climate fiction story set in the fairly near future, and the origins of their disability is traced back to water pollution. The effects of the disability are that they are in a scooter.

One of the things you say all the time that I really appreciate is when writing disabled characters make sure they have a specific disability which characteristics you can research — but I’m not totally sure how to research disabilities connected to pollution? I am thinking the character’s disability will be connected with lung issues, which then connect with certain types of muscular atrophy, hence the wheelchair. But this is kind of just guesswork based on some inconclusive googling and what I know of pollution-related health conditions.

Any thoughts or tips?

Thanks!

Hi!

I think that a disability related to pollution is a very interesting premise! I myself have a family member who has a congenital disability due to radiation pollution (Chernobyl), it's nice to see it represented :-)

Some things to consider that could help you with further research;

Were they born with it or is it progressive? Some pollution conditions, like Minamata Disease, could be both but the symptoms can vary between them. E.g. it wouldn't make sense to give your character microcephaly if they became disabled at 23, but it would if it's congenital.

If possible, try to pinpoint what specifically is causing the water pollution. Heavy metals? Radiation? Chemical spill? There are a lot of incredibly specific pollution conditions. If you can think of it, it probably already happened. This can be research of the incredibly boring variety, but once you find something that works "enough" it will make things easier going forward.

Examples: heavy metals will often cause neurological problems (including ataxia), radiation will cause extremely high rates of various (blood and thyroid, for example) cancers even decades after the exposure, chemical spills can cause almost anything.

If you're going for lung issues, I would research Pneumoconiosis. Apologies for the link to Wikipedia, but it leads to a ton of different subtypes that you could be useful to look into. It talks about dust pollution, but generally if it's in the air then it's going to be in the water very soon too.

Using a scooter can be helpful for an incredibly wide range of conditions, including COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) which is a common symptom of various pollution diseases.

Establishing the exact cause will also help you with worldbuilding - if the chemical polluting has a 90% fatality rate, it will be very different from one with <1%. If there's radiation, are unaffected people going through health anxiety due to the obvious cancer risk? Are local animals going extinct, how is the vegetation changing?

For water pollution specifically, think of how it affects the whole community - is rainwater safe to drink, are there ways to clean it, are there any fish to eat? Etc.!

I would also research the conditions that you might not necessarily think about, like bacterial or fungal ones. Here's a page on water-based diseases and their effects, as well as potential causes.

This is a very hard to exhaust topic as there's probably a million ways to pollute water, but I tried my best! I wish you good luck with writing! I think it's important to bring attention to these kinds of things.

I hope this helps! :-)

mod Sasza

[mummer]

just saw asteroid city last night, pls explain the proposed significance of the kiss!!

answering this publicly hope thats ok! cant do a readmore im on mobile *****asteroid city spoilers below beware*****

i dont remember anyones names so this is gonna sound partly unhinged. okay so the edward norton playwright and jason schwartzman actor (not character, in the black and white parts) are lovers right. tbh i thought this was kind of a gag and forgot about it. but later we find out that the playwright died 6 months into the production. i didnt make the connection that THAT’s why the actor-jason has to suddenly leave the stage and freaks out backstage about how he’s not sure he’s Doing it right. hes not talking about acting!! because he himself is literally grieving his lover while he’s playing a character who’s grieving his wife written by his lover so obviously it’s too much!!! actor-jason is trying to find meaning in his death through his writing but there isnt any meaning in death [gerris drinkwater voice] which is what the play is trying to say anyway. he doesnt think he’s performing grief right even in his own life!!! (and tbh it’s the 50s so he wouldnt be able to perform grief publicly anyway!!!!) the play starts with a car accident… anyone would search for some hidden meaning there, some sign…. so when he talks to margot robbie outside it’s not really about finding the CHARACTER’s motivations it’s about the actor himself being able to process the playwright’s death! and adrien brody director was probably also dealing with that too (him and norton seemed to be good buddies) so the whole “sleeping backstage” thing gets a bit sadder maybe? maybe everyone else got this in the theatre and im just stupid lol but crazy making stuff to me!!! the whole story is about sublimated gay grief that cannot be expressed?!?!

the tweet that caught me onto this was here which posits that the playwright’s death was a suicide but i think that’s pretty stupid and unnecessary because the whole thing about the play asteroid city is that death is random and meaningless. im pretty sure that’s what the alien represents— a shocking and absurd event that isnt outright evil or menacing, not something anyone can predict or make sense of, it’s just a thing that happens to you out of nowhere, it doesnt mean anything. he’s a little black figure, he’s death! giving and taking! aagh

[markscherz]

I clicked on that wikipedia link you posted for H. fleischmanni and was surprised to see that the section talking about the frog’s natural predators was titled “enemies” instead of “predators.” The word “enemies,” at least to me, seems strange in this context because it seems to anthropomorphize the frogs, which as far as I’m aware is something zoologists try to avoid doing with animals. Is there a scientific reason for “enemies” to be used here, as opposed to “predators”?

Regrettably, a huge number of problems of this kind have been built into Wikipedia by the Wikipedia Education Foundation-supported courses. Students carry out an 'assignment' that involves a dramatic expansion to a given wikipedia page based on any literature they can find. That revised page is then subjected to 'peer review' by their classmates. But because they are unfamiliar with (1) the literature, (2) the contents of other wikipedia pages, and (3) how wikipedia actually works, the resulting pages are often full of misinformation, redundancies, and weird formulations.

You have accurately identified one such idiosyncrasy. 'Enemies' was a very common formulation for 'predators' in the 1800s and early 1900s, but we have largely left it behind, for precisely the reason you say, and hence it sounds jarring to our ears. In this case it is a minor problem (you should have seen how the Paroedura masobe page looked before I cleaned it up), but irksome nonetheless.

[chiropteracupola]

I stretch and strain with all my might Drift off into the velvety arms of the night Kick and claw and scratch and bite... Choked out, choked out, choked out!

[a sharpe, requested by @rubeau]

[crow-in-springtime]

Every time I think I’m normal about Twin Peaks someone will bring it up and I will quickly realize I am not, in fact, normal about it

[daisyachain]

The nature of time is that (culturally) Christian Euro/Anglo colonial consumers (hereafter white ‘people’) fetishize the idea of being ‘close to nature’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ and latch on to the idea that there are groups of people in the world who are somehow bestial or who have some kind of special powers from holding animist beliefs/beliefs that acknowledge the body as opposed to the Christian belief that the body is a kind of useless appendage to a person. We see this across decades from the 19thC to today in the racist fetishization of indigenous people across the globe, particularly residents of the Americas, Australasia, and southern/eastern Africa.

White consumers use a warped conception of other cultures to live out the fantasies that the Christian soul/body stuff engenders. You keep getting told that your emotions and physical sensations are the devil’s work? You want to get in touch with those physical sensations, but you don’t want it to interfere with your worldview? Simply project them on to a convenient group of people with slightly different conventions from you. Imagine how cool it would be to be 100% physical sensation (especially those pesky violent and/or sexual urges) and no mental burden, then unleash that in a way that causes millions of deaths worldwide via the dehumanization of entire nations of people just trying to live their lives. White consumers love a Proud Warrior Race Guy.

Flash forward to the 2010s, it’s generally considered impolite to spread the same propaganda that justified the genocide and dispossession of many different groups of people. However white culture hasn’t changed that much and normal human activities still need to be explained away to maintain the veneer of white intellectualism that has been used to justify white violence for years and years. You can’t just stomp around and clap your hands and dance badly, you’ve got to project it somewhere else.

But wait! There’s a community of people considered ‘tribal’ and ‘savage’, considered violent and bestial, who were never colonized! It’s…the Norse. Fetishizing early medieval North Sea raiders can’t be cultural appropriation, see, they’re white! It’s not offensive to replace an entire culture with white (male) ideas of what’s cool if that culture is totally unassociated with colonizer stereotypes and is in fact a culture of colonizers!

And that’s my theory on why there are so many Norse-inspired folk bands/video games/tv shows/memes/literally anything in the 2010s. VSaga not counted because that manga has been running since 2003 and is actually well-researched and comes out of a culture with a similar but distinct tradition of racism. The Euro storytelling tendencies of needing some kind of violent avatar have taken on ye anciente Norseman now that people care a little bit about the gallons of blood used to sketch other ethnic stereotypes. Done and dusted. Except the other side is that the fetishization of early medieval Norse culture is literally just white supremacist 101 and a lot of artists don’t step around that nearly as carefully as they should

[byzantine-suggestions]

Theodora's wikipedia page is a good example of when wikipedia is not an exceptionally reliable source

[camgoloud]

who else up feeling the soul-numbing empty hopelessness for absolutely no reason this friday night

[youraveragecatastrophe]

[Image description : the “You’re crying from home alone/the old man got to me” meme. The text has been edited to read “You’re crying from the wikipedia page for Georges Bizet?” “The fact that he died young thinking his magnum opus Carmen was a failure even though today it’s one of the most played and beloved operas in the world got to me.” “All right.” /End description]

so i got very emotional about a long dead composer today

[hanzajesthanza]

reading other short stories and novels and essays and interviews from sapkowski is so satisfying because not only are these fun to read in of themselves but when my mind returns to the witcher i am like

[exigencelost]

i hope brennan lee mulligan gets cyberbullied just a little for having never heard the phrase no pasarán

[unproduciblesmackdown]

similar to the greentext stuff - i was visiting with my neighbors and their grandkids were around, and I said to this eight year old, "Hey, you wanna know something cool? I was playing the game when the Endermen came out." and his eyes went wide, like this kid looked like i told him i landed on the moon. His grandma thought it was really funny, and she said she has no idea what i'm talking about, but her grandbabies do, and that's incredible to her.

oh that's fun lmao, when minecraft & that update's existed for more than your whole life, and yknow being that young and like Next Year fr is this huge time scale away, a couple of years is a quarter of your life thus far and like maybe nigh half of the part of your life you actually have longterm memories for....i was checking out this dev's blog's archives about a:tdd's release in 2010 & in one entry they compared the implicitly Roughly concurrent release of Minecraft and i was like hey whoah. forever primarily being a game i've Heard Of more than any more direct exposure so i had no precise sense of [before minecraft release] [after minecraft release] Year 0 there but it's like for sure back in thee day when minecraft was a new thing, huh

[cogitrot]

I was really excited for a Tomb Colonist ES.

Whelp.

[k1rishiki]

every once in a while i find myself daydreaming about what it'll be like when i'm a successful and widely celebrated illustrator/author/game dev/whatever the fuck it is this week. which is a completely normal thing to do btw. the thing is though, at the point in time the daydream is at, i've always already produced every miscellaneous project which is bouncing around in my head, so now i need something new for daydream me to be working on/promoting. slightly less normal thing to do but alright. the thing about daydream me is that the fame has gotten to his head, everything he touches is looked upon as gold, so the new games/whatever he's putting out are basically what i would put out if i was too conceited to know what kill your darlings means, and are a parody of what i would come up with. that's the part where this thought exercise (read: indulgent fantasy) takes a turn into insane person territory. the problem with this is that a decent percent of the time i get so attached to daydream me's conceited little projects that i miss the point where they're meant to be a literal parody of how my mind works and they become actual serious things i want to make some day.

[snickerdoodlles]

*pinches nose bridge* even if there wasn’t 6 degrees of separation between AO3 and generative AI, has anyone in this tag even considered that if it was possible for individuals to fuck up generative AI or their training datasets just by writing a/b/o fic, then fascists, bigots, or even just internet trolls could and would fuck it up worse with hate speech

[theinnermeyoullneverknow]

Today on "yeah I'm definitely a heretic" :