In case anyone finds it helpful because mobility aids are horrifically expensive and inaccessible…

And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…

Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.

He also is working on cheap, open source, accessible designs for beach chairs, off road chairs, motorized attachments (think smart drive), and so on. Plus he skateboards in his wheelchair. Cool dude, helpful info, pass it on.

It's incredibly sad people have to resort to this, but it's a damn good resource. Use it. Spread awareness. Maybe one day people with physical disabilities won't need DIYs like this. But until then, reblog and share.

"A recent court ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights marks the first time an international judicial body has decided that indigenous peoples living in “voluntary isolation” have a right to do so, and that governments must act to ensure that right.

The ruling comes off the back of 20 years of activism challenging the Ecuadorian government’s encroachment on indigenous lands for oil drilling, and this, as well as other extractive activities like logging, were ruled to be intolerably disruptive to three groups living in voluntary isolation in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

International treaties protecting the rights of indigenous peoples have long been ratified at both the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS), but a case specifically determining whether a group living in voluntary isolation, which used to be called “uncontacted,” were guaranteed protection to allow them to continue doing so has never been ruled on.

While the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2009 and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2013 introduced guidelines and recommendations that included a right to choose self-isolation, neither were put into writing under international law, nor included in any treaty amendments.

As such, the Costa Rica-based court’s decision that nation-states, in this case Ecuador, must follow a “precautionary principle” when making decisions about future oil operations that may impede a group’s ability to live in self-isolation.

“This principle means that, even in the absence of scientific certainty regarding oil exploration and exploitation projects’ impacts on this territory, effective measures must be adopted to prevent serious or irreversible damage, which in this case would be the contact of these isolated populations,” said the court opinion, written in Spanish, and translated by Inside Climate News.

The three groups in question are the Tagaeri, Taromenane, and Dugakaeri, who are part of the overall Waorani peoples since they share cultural traditions and language.

Testimony was heard from a community leader of the Waorani, Penti Baihua, and two young women who at the ages of 2 and 6 were survivors of violent encroachment by oil workers who killed members of the girls’ group, forcibly introduced them to modernity, and displaced them to different parts of the Amazon.

In the current case, the court ruled that a protected area the size of Delaware that was established in the early 2000s to guarantee indigenous Waorani (and others) rights was created in such a way as to leave oil exploration areas outside protection, despite being the ancestral home of Baihua and his people.

A 6-mile deep buffer zone surrounding the heart of the Tagaeri, Taromenane, and Dugakaeri’s territory called the “Intangible Zone,” has been repeatedly penetrated by extractive industries, which have built roads and other “colonial” infrastructure.

The court ruled that Ecuador must honor the results of a 2023 referendum, in which voters chose to stop oil operations in that region indefinitely.

The court used the term “living in voluntary isolation” to reflect that fact that there are no unconctacted tribes on Earth, but perhaps as many as 200 who have seen evidence of modernity, and received minimal contact—perhaps from a related tribe that doesn’t live in isolation—and chose to remain without any interaction with the modern world either out of fear or self-interest."

-via March 28, 2025

i do think we need to start treating spraying harmless "weeds" in your lawn as utterly absurd princess and the pea level of obsession with needing the world to revolve around your every whim, like.

Okay a flower grew out of the ground outside and you can't cope with it. Do you need to sleep on thirty feather beds as well

in my meeting with one of the people who is over grounds on my college campus i was told that when the college stopped spraying weeds, they would actually get calls from people. complaining about the dandelions

and I was sitting here like okay this is why I shouldn't be in a public facing job because i would be the rudest motherfucker imaginable about that.

what, are you some kind of spoiled child monarch who drinks out of a golden sippy cup? Do you have a retinue of servants at home to dispose of anything and everything that you might arbitrarily dislike? have you considered leading a life where you might encounter something that could be described as a real problem? do you call the weatherman to complain when it rains?

I honestly can't even imagine what must happen inside the kind of person that would do that. "Hello I have an urgent problem, you see, I visited your campus recently and there was a flower." "yes?" "I didn't like the flower." "Uh huh..."

What a sad way to live, honestly, that the sight of a little flower could ruin your day so much you have to call someone to complain.

Dehumanizing bigots is bad, not because I want to be nice to them, but because they are human beings and they serve as a reminder that anyone is capable of evil ideation and action. Violent bigots are not fundamentally different beings from you. They are human beings, who have developed a reactionary and destructive belief system due to their circumstances combined with their biases. In a different timeline, that could've been you. Anyone can be radicalized. Nobody is immune to propaganda, not even the person reading this.

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[image id: a picture from the Big Bear Bald Eagle Live Nest camera, the parent bald eagle is sitting on her nest in a tree with both the nest and herself covered in snow. dated March 13 2025. end id]

Really hate the sentiment popular amongst younger US progressives that the older generations “let us down.” The baby boomers didn’t “sell out” in any meaningful capacity; a lot of them tried really hard to revolt, and we are living in a world largely shaped by the people who put down those revolutionary movements. Rather than saying that we were let down, we should be looking at how exactly the revolutionary movements of past generations failed, so that we can build effectively on their legacy.

an important thing to understand about the baby boomers who are alive today is they are the ones who survived. think about the number of people who died from aids because of govt inaction. the number of people who were jailed, sometimes for decades (leonard peltier spent 48 years in jail). the number of people who were killed or scared into conformity by violence at protests (kent state shootings, for example). you're looking at a cross section of the baby boomer generation, and that is the cross section who made it to 2025 unscathed.

I generally agree with that post going around about how you should let kids fuck around and find out with physical play but it carries this weighty implication that if you don’t develop kinesthetics at an early age you’ll never develop them at all, which is a very discouraging way to talk about the real possibilities of adult life

I went from being a clumsy kid totally convinced that sports were a thing other people did to one of the most gracile people in any room because I picked up martial arts at 24 and never stopped. Ive learned judo from an eighty year old. The systemic issues stopping children in parkless car-centric dumpster suburbs from developing a relationship with their body also affect adults, but even as you recognize this, for the love of god please don’t believe that growing up means you *must* inevitably recrudesce into your worst habits

I've said it before: Your talents are not established in your teens and locked in for life. Just because something was difficult for you as a kid doesn't mean it will be difficult for you as an adult.

As you grow, you gain new skills even without doing any relevant practice, among them patience and the ability to keep trying through failures, both essential to mastering difficult things. As an adult you also have more agency to choose a form of learning that fits you and to refuse teachers that patronize you.

I wanted to learn sewing as a young teen and absolutely sucked. I tried it again as an adult and thrived. Because I had chill instructional youtube videos instead of the constant observation of parents, I had real motivation knowing all the super queer outfits I wanted to make, and I had real self esteem, which made it might easier to undo another bad seam and try again, and again, and again.

okay actually I'm going to make a separate post about this because too many people ignore it on all my other posts. When referring to Aboriginal peoples (First Nations peoples of so-called Australia), you ALWAYS capitalise the A because we are a PEOPLE, proper noun. SECONDLY, "aboriginies" "abo" and any use of a phrase ending in "caste" ie part-caste, half-caste, etc ARE SLURS. DO NOT USE THEM. If you see other Aboriginal peoples using these words, it's ours to reclaim and not permission for you to use. Finally, Aboriginal people are Black and refer to ourselves as such, regardless of blood quantum. That is a fact, non-negotiable for 100s of years. It's not complicated. When in doubt just call us First Nations, or Aboriginal people (with a capital A) because that's who we are. Again, please respect Aboriginal peoples.