Bless TikTok/ videos/ movies with captions actually, more people should start doing it

i like the idea of zelda and link both being physically altered after the events of totk. zelda being taller and stronger after draconification. her eyes stay wide and bright as well, and she has a wicked set of horns and sharp teeth. she has to be mindful of her sharp claw-like nails while working with children, so she files them down, as well as her horns. her mind tends to blank at inopportune times, and her memories are a little spottier than they were before. link now has a durable prosthetic arm created by the sheikah, but is just as skilled without it. his typical hylian ears are slightly larger and floppier now, and move with emotion. he wears extra sets of earrings in them when he gets the chance. his body is coated in a fine layer of light, wispy hair, which is useful in the colder regions. the rito are certainly fascinated by it, and tease him gently for taking so long to grow his own down. revali would find it funny. his teeth are sharper too, as are his nails, and his hair seems a little lighter than it used to.

ppl will go “i’d notice if society was going to sacrifice a marginalised group of people and if they said that it’s ok that a bunch of people would die then i would stand against it” and then they’ll hear people saying “well only disabled and vulnerable people will die of covid” and go “yes this is normal and ok and fine”

Me, reading a sexy fantasy novel with a disabled MC: hm well this isn’t as good as Joy’s book so I’m going to be CRANKY about it

(It would’ve been sooo easy to slip in an accessibility mention there without breaking the momentum of the scene like Joy did with Vlad moving the pillow away from his mouth and it didn’t happen. Everyone go read Hunger Pangs by Joy Demorra)

So kinda last post for the day before I’ll do my usual random reblogs. I just felt like making another one. This have bit of an actual name at the very least, called “what the point of adding tiny bit of funky? Cuz I wanted to and nothing stop me.” I don’t know what else to call it as.

With a minor nightmare of a random error I left out that I somehow got during process of using the recording feature of the app.

Okay I updated to windows 11 bc my laptop finally got really annoying about it.

And I knew it would be annoying as shit but omg.

Ik I’m primarily a mac person and people have opinions on that but in the last. Two. Days I’ve had both the audio driver (?) not work. I had to restart my laptop bc it wouldn’t play. Audio out of the speakers. An issue I’m very baffled by but whatever. And it just randomly decided to crash. No reason. It booted up p quickly but like. Why. I’m running a single app?

Also. Also. I don’t like the look. They went in with rounded rects here but I’m sorry. It reminds me of chromebook’s os and I hate that. There’s no valid reason for that but it makes me angry on a level I can’t explain

**edit. Sorry bc I forgot to be angry about the whole. Troubleshooting experience with the audio driver.

Bc I did the trouble shoot. It said it needed to restart to update the drivers. I was like great yes restart. And then it just went on with the trouble shoot after a sec. WHY WOULDNT IT JUST RESTART RIGHT THEN. it asked me if I wanted to restart. IF I SAY YES THEN DO IT? Don’t make me manually do it. That makes no sense. And yeah sure if you needed to save things but then why would I have clicked restart before doing that??? So anyways I did the trouble shoot like three times bc I was confused why it didn’t just do the restart. Bc it would continue and tell me it found the issue and so it would make sense that it would fix that once it found it but -

my life is kind of a mess right now

Why is it always the Special Ed faculty that is so socially inept but in a NT way specifically

have to laugh at posts where people go on about all these things you HAVE to do to be considered as living your best life living a REAL life since you knooow those people aren’t taking any covid precautions therefore ensuring that unimaginable numbers of people will never be able to do any of those things again. Ha!

I guess the ONLY upside to having to go back into an office is getting to wear all the outfits I’ve planned and put together on the nights I didn’t go out

Pretty much no impairment is as simple as abled people think it is.

People are taught to believe that disability is a simple “Can’t”. Can’t walk. Can’t talk. Can’t hear. Can’t see. An ability is just excised and no longer exists, if it ever did.

In reality, it’s rarely that simple.

It’s “I can sort of do x thing sometimes, but I get muscle spasms making it very dangerous or impossible to do it reliably or safely”. Or “I can do x thing but it causes me so much pain I will be unable to do anything else for hours or days after doing it”. Or “I can do x thing but I constantly injure myself doing it because of lack of muscle control”. Or “I can do x thing but so badly I functionally can’t do it two inches beyond my face, but now I have a mobile phone I can put up to my face so I can do it in certain very specific circumstances”.

None of these things mean someone isn’t disabled. And if you think it does, then it’s *your* ideas about disability that need to change.

The reason disabled people end up saying “can’t” when the reality is more complex is because people don’t trust our boundaries. They force us to injure ourselves instead of accommodating, or use energy that means we have none left to do *anything* else we need to do for the rest of the day. Or week. Or month.

Abled people need to start trusting disabled people, or you need to shut up, get out of any situation where you have power over us, and provide someone who will. Those are the only options.

The way we are expected to live in a performative hell of the making of more privileged people who then turn around and criticise us for not suffering in the precise way they have decided we should is genuinely nothing but ridiculous.

Just stop.

i talked about it a little bit already but i have things to say about it. for context, i was born with amniotic band syndrome. the amniotic band wrapped around my left wrist in utero and stunted the growth of my hand. i was born with about half a palm, four nubs for fingers, and a twisted half of a thumb. i can open and close my thumb and pinkie joint like a claw.

yesterday at work i had a shift in the room with 5-10 year old kids. i had my left hand hidden in my sleeve (a bad habit of mine). a kid asked if he could see my hand, and even though internally i was debating running into traffic, i said “sure you can” and showed him my hands. he stared for a moment, looking disturbed, and then said “i don’t want to look at that anymore”. that hurt to hear, but i understand that kids are new to the world and he probably didn’t mean it out of malice. i put my hand away again, told him that it was okay, and that i was just born that way.

he then went on to talk about how he knows a kid with a similar hand to mine and called it “ugly”. i told him that wasn’t a very kind thing to say and that he wouldn’t feel good if someone said that to him, and he replied that no one would say that to him—because he has “normal hands”, and he’s glad he does because otherwise he’d be “ugly”. i tried to talk with him for a bit about how everybody is born differently, but he just started talking about a girl he knows with a “messed up face” and pulled on his face to make it look droopy. i went on some more about how it wasn’t very kind to talk about people that way, but the conversation moved on to something else.

i’ve told my supervisors about it and they’re going to have a talk with his mom. what i wanted to say is this: i’m genuinely not upset with the kid. kids are young and naturally curious, and he clearly simply hasn’t been taught about disabled people and kind ways to speak to/about others. which is why i am upset with his parent(s). i know he’s encountered visibly deformed/disabled people before (he said so himself!), yet his parent(s) clearly haven’t had any kind of discussion with him about proper language and behavior. i knew from birth that some people were just different than others, but my parents still made a point to assert to be kind to and accepting of others. i wonder if adults in his life are the type of people to hush him and usher him away when he points out someone in a wheelchair. that kind of thing doesn’t teach politeness. it tells children that disabled people are an Other than can’t be acknowledged or spoken about; which, to a child, means disability must be something bad.

i’m lucky enough that this was a relatively mild incident, and that i’m a grownup with thicker skin. i’m worried about the other kids he mentioned to me. has he been talking to them this way? when i was a kid, i had other kids scream, cry, and run away at the sight of my hand. or follow me around pointing at me and laughing at me. or tell me i couldn’t do something because i was ugly or incapable or whatever. one time a girl at an arcade climbed to the top of the skeeball machine, pointed at me, and screamed at me to put my hand away and wouldn’t stop crying until she couldn’t see me anymore. another time, a kid saw my hand, screamed at the top of her lungs, and ran into my friend’s arms, crying hysterically about how i was scaring her. that second incident made me cry so hard i threw up when i got home. i can kind of laugh it off now, but having people react to me that way as a child is something i’m still getting over. why do you think i have a habit of keeping my hand in my sleeve? it just irritates me to see children that have clearly not been taught basic manners and kindness—their parents Clearly missed something pretty important .

…on one hand, that’s fair.

on the other, kinda feels like a severed limb in the sense I lose my retreat away from potential politics, misogyny, and queerphobia (as well as the solace of people I don’t have to worry about whether they accept me or not, they all just “live” in my phone…hundreds to thousands of miles away…)

With both Ashton’s chronic pain and acquired disabilities and Ashley’s casual mention of her ADHD, I’d just like to say how important and meaningful and how grateful I am to see a cast of successful, beloved folks talking about being disabled & anormative. They don’t owe us nothing talking about stuff like this, but sharing it feels like a warm hug and support and ahhh.

For those of you who don’t know, Matt and Liam and Taliesin have both spoken frankly about depression, and Ashley and Travis and Matt have all shared about being/having ADHD, and Matt has also spoken about Body Dysmorphia and growing up with a stutter, among other things. Dani Carr also has mentioned chronic pain, and Liam has hyperacoustis he mentions on occasion (and also one ear that has a different range of hearing) and Taliesin has TMJ and essential tremor:

Ashton’s pain comes from Taliesin’s experience.

Imogen’s overwhelm comes from Laura’s own processing of sound.

Matt could describe painful spells so well because he knows what it’s like.

Liam’s Quest feels so powerful because it explores real experienced hopelessness in the face of depression.

And obviously not everything has been explained—I’d never want to assume a person has PTSD or body issues or anything else based on character, because at the end of the day well researched and realistic depictions are important no matter who they come from and critical role does that better than anything else I’ve ever seen—we know different characters show different elements of their players. And it’s so refreshing and empowering to see disability included as one of those features, without shame or any attempt to be kept hidden.

Thank you, cast of critical role.

Updated with feedback from notes!

Just thinking about the common experience of late diagnosed disabled people of “the normal amount of pain is none” and how we’re just supposed to know that despite *some* level of pain being OUR normal for our entire lives, even if it’s usually not super bad it’s just always there.

Thinking about how, when I told my mother this, she asked me “So what’s hurt?” Which is very different than “what hurts?”

I looked at her, confused. “Nothing is hurt. I just hurt.”

And she says “But where do you hurt?”

“Well, right now it’s my stomach and my ankles-“

She cuts me off. “So you twisted your ankle?”

“No,” I say. “My ankles just hurt. I’ve been walking today.”

Now it’s her turn to look confused. “Just walking doesn’t make your ankles hurt. You must have sprained them or something.”

But I shake my head. “Nope. This just happens on days when I walk more than a little bit. My ankles hurt first, then my knees by lunch time. And if I don’t take a nap and stay on my feet all day, my hips will be hurting too.”

“Oh.”

Joint pain is my normal. Sometimes, if I barely walk all day, the ache in my ankles is barely noticeable and doesn’t affect my functioning because I’m used to it. If I do what most able-bodied people would consider to be a “normal” amount of walking, almost all of my joints will hurt by supper. If I have to wash dishes or run any errands, I’ll hurt so bad I can’t walk for the rest of the day.

Then there’s the chronic migraine attacks. I used to have them multiple times a week as a child, and no matter how I explained myself, nobody ever understood that they weren’t just headaches. I experienced those too, and frequently, but they were not the same. Thankfully, at the age of eleven, I found an article explaining migraine triggers. I was able to identify a few of my own triggers, and the frequency of my migraine attacks reduced to maybe a couple a month. For a few years I was basically on cloud nine, I’d never experienced such a lack of pain before and it was so freeing. Unfortunately, migraine is a progressive condition, so the attacks have gotten more frequent over the years.

And then there’s the “random” pains. Some mornings I wake up and my stomach hurts. Or my chest. Or my back. These are just things I have to live with, because my body’s connective tissue is… well, for lack of a better word, faulty. And I never knew that other people didn’t experience this, because how could I? We never talked about it. Sometimes I’d hear people complain about back aches and just assume they were like mine. Of course, I knew that injuring yourself could cause muscle aches, obviously. But I just assumed that *most* of the time, other peoples bodies hurt like mine did. I didn’t realize that humans aren’t supposed to “just hurt” without a connected incident.

And when I try to explain this to able bodied people, their response is always the same. “Well, everyone’s back hurts sometimes.” “Everybody gets headaches sometimes.” “You’re not special just because you’re too lazy to walk. I still go to work when I don’t feel good.” And no matter how many times I try to say that No, you don’t get it, I *always* hurt, they still brush me off and dismiss me.