Someday your hands will be old and wrinkled, the skin spotted and bunching over your knuckles. And a child will watch you make something. It's a simple task, you'll have done it a thousand times before. But to that child, the smooth, confident way your hands move will seem like impossible magic. You have to keep living.

prev these tags have me crying. this is absolutely what it's all about

everyone will become a girl with glasses. *everyone*

sniles so sneetly. made a video list :>

The real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language — and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representor. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven, with a great many other things besides the "truth" which is itself a representation. … Thus each individual contribution first causes changes within the field and then promotes a new stability, in the way that on a surface covered with twenty compasses the introduction of a twenty-first will cause all the others to quiver, then to settle into a new accommodating configuration.

— Edward W. Said, from Orientalism (1978.)

everything just really comes down to how I wasn't a person for most of my life. by which I mean I did not consider myself a person. it made such a profound impact on the way I navigated the world & yet standing on the other side of it I could hardly explain it to you

"trauma informed care" within a system that regularly flexes its ability to take away your autonomy + mandates that people "report" on your experiences to police/social workers/'crisis' is oxymoronic at best, insidious at worst. there is no "trauma informed way" to send an officer to someone's home to take them to a hospital against their will.

no amount of shifting around language or changing job titles (Advocate or Crisis Worker or Mental Health Support Team Member!) or being ~nicer~ when you detain someone against their will for emotional distress changes the fact that it is a violent act. even if you think it's necessary. even if you can't imagine a better way. it is traumatizing; it is violence; it harms people.

I wish people would understand that not everything is for everyone to get. you will be left out of some conversations, a lot of art will not apply to you, you will not like things that people you like enjoy, and just because you cannot add to the topic of discussion or relate does not mean that it is not valued or worthwhile. the internet has coddled people to such a concerning extent that everyone feels like they need to vocally disagree with something just because they don’t get it. Knowing something, and genuinely getting it are not the same. NOT EVERYTHING IS FOR YOUUUUU

I saw some snippet of a callout post for an autistic trans woman where they list social faux pas she committed, and I think we allistic people should all feel 100x more ashamed of not telling people in the moment how we feel about what they're doing. I think its extremely evil and cruel to not only lie to an autistic person and blame them for it but also to feel justified shaming them for your behavior. And it's currently the social norm to do that

Everytime we as allistic people sit and force a smile or sigh and act subtly grumpy or otherwise lie to an autistic person's face about how we feel about what they did it is in fact Our Fault that we are enduring whatever the autistic person is daring to try and share with us. You can literally say something out loud directly. The literal structure of our social existence will always traumatize autistic people unless you can give a fuck enough to consider it isn't their fault that you didn't communicate with them

Even I couldn't understand this until my wife was in tears because I had internalized the idea that it was her fault that people were uncomfortable in a conversation where no one told her they were uncomfortable and blamed her for it. Allistic people punish autistic people for so many Percieved slights, or even decide together afterward what exactly the slight was and then make their collective judgment behind the autistic persons back. Not only do we get the benefit of communicating nonverbally through obtuse social cues the autistic person can't parce, we then get to say that we weren't going behind their back because we all did those social cues they are too disabled to understand Right in front of them. No, what you did was choose to suppress your feelings and then reap the social benefits of being in on the discomfort.

Tumblr app should have a tinder esque feature where it shows you the blogs in a 3 mile radius. No it shouldnt

fandom this fandom that i think art-making just commonly involves scavenging and it is insane that major swathes of culture are legally owned by intellectual landlords

what ao3’s “ok as long as it’s free” model relies upon and perpetuates is that modern fandom participation is a practice of conspicuous leisure, signaling a difference between the leisure class and the working class via economically unproductive activities.

i think this is why i get a headache seeing fandom positioned as this morally righteous counterculture. it’s just not. putting effort into fanfic is not actually at odds with an ideology that positions you as a temporarily embarrassed anne rice who might eventually crack down on fan works for your future properties; your liberal politics are actually totally coherent as long as you adhere to the sanctity of intellectual property on any side.

IP exists to enforce class hierarchies and to foreclose on the possibility of proletarian art in conversation with a bourgeois culture that can only define itself by draining the working class like a vampire. like i do think there are ways to suck back (lol) and it starts by actually wondering why you think a creation is degraded by resembling something that is owned. what compels you to comply with this distinction by hiding away on ao3 even when your activities are legal?

there is no soul of an artist that distinguishes them from some 'non-artist' category of person that could simply never comprehend what it is like. anyone can make art. you should know this by now. from ratatouille

I feel like people extend the benefit of the doubt to ableism way too often. The people saying shit like "you're privileged for having a wheelchair" are 99.9999% people who can walk, not the odd person who is trapped in bed 100% of the time without any kind of wheelchair. Or like "you're privileged for having a carer" is more than likely someone who doesn't require care assistance and isn't literally rotting (as in infected pressure sores) away.

It's nearly ALWAYS someone who can get by without, who thinks that people who REQUIRE these services can too.

Like, please don't pop into our comments and go "well, what if this person is part of the .00000001% of people who are dying without the care you have, then it IS a privilege!"

Because I can guarantee you they are not.

I've talked to people who DO require a wheelchair and don't have access to them, quite a few actually, they're almost always wanting to commiserate rather than calling us privileged because a lot of us who require wheelchairs and DO have them know how much it sucks to not have the support you need.

Sometimes, they're asking for help trying to figure out something to bridge the gap between when you require a support and when you actually get it because they need to survive that time period.

They're not going "You are so privileged for getting the bare minimum to survive!" They're going "how do I access the bare minimum to survive?"

Yeah, can confirm. I feel like I can very much speak on this, too.

I was the absurdly unlikely case of someone who can't sit, can't transfer, can't bear any weight at all, and definitely cannot walk, literally 100% bedridden (toileting included, no exceptions, not even for #2)... and didn't have a wheelchair for 11 months.

I have a wheelchair now but when I didn't I still congratulated my friends on getting their new chairs or aides. I still saw my fellow disabled folks as my people the whole time and would not have managed without their peer support and community knowledge.

This reminds me, the people who kept me somewhat sane the last time my chair broke and helped me manage my anxiety and frustration were 100% people who have required wheelchairs and didn't have them or had them and dealt with breakage too. I love my peers!!

Yes!!! Exactly. Same hat on all of the above. I love my peers and the disabled community are my people. The greatest part about this is that my people span all the borders - we're everywhere and there's so many of us. I'll never run out of new friends to make because there'll always be more of us and we're all in need of peers and strength in numbers.

reverse joker that’s just a regular working class guy who’s angry at everybody around him but then he starts wearing clown makeup and realizes he can spread laughter and joy and everybody loves him so much Joker Joker Joker they say and they have a big clown parade and everybody’s so happy that they end all wars abolish all borders and everybody in the world becomes a clown united under the global clown nation and life is an endless party of happiness and smiles and transgender clown sex (balloon is penis?

(also feel free in the tags to clarify Why you made the choice you made!! :0c)